I am a huge fan of the environment. I’m not a huge Al Gore fan. Human beings are part of the environment as well, and the default setting of Gore and many other bureaucratic environmentalists seems to be “Do as I say, not as I do, follow my rules, pay new taxes, and generally try to be as much of a peasant as possible.” Ok, it’s not a fair caricature but often climate change policy ends up looking pretty costly to the average Joe. Like me.
But the earth is an incredible place, and I want to see it stay that way. We’re obligated to take care of it. How can these often conflicting priorities of environmental care and comfortable civilization be reconciled?
Science.
If we can screw things up by accident we can surely fix them with intention. Take CO2 emission, for instance. About half of it comes from fossil fueled power plants and petroleum powered cars. Every day automotive technology brings electric vehicles closer to practicality. There’s also cellulosic ethanol and hydrogen as real possibilities to replace fossil fuel as well. Those all require varying amounts of electrical energy to generate though, and replacing gasoline with coal-generated electricity is a limited improvement at best. We need a better solution for electricity generation. Renewables are often mentioned as a possibility, and indeed they are almost certainly part of the solution. But their flaws as large-scale base-load power are well documented and unlikely to be overcome.
You know where I’m going with this. Snap the bonds on an octane molecule and you get about 5eV per molecule. Crack open a uranium nucleus and you get about 200,000,000eV per atom. There’s lots of energy in nuclear power, and in modern reactors meltdowns are effectively impossible.
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about this.
All over the world, nuclear power is making a comeback. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just commissioned eight new reactors, and says there’s “no upper limit” to the number Britain will build in the future. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has challenged her country’s program to phase out 17 nuclear reactors by 2020, saying it will be impossible to deal with climate change without them. China and India are building nuclear power plants; France and Russia, both of whom have embraced the technology, are fiercely competing to sell them the hardware.
And just last month John McCain called for the construction of 45 new reactors by 2030. Barack Obama is less enthusiastic about nuclear energy, but he seems to be moving toward tacit approval.
The article is written in a business newspaper, and so it largely focuses on the business hurdles to setting up reactors in the US. They’re extremely expensive with regard to start-up capital, and few businesses are willing to risk that kind of money when lawsuits might potentially derail the entire project. But why are there so many lawsuits and hurdles in the first place? The answer is decades of unexamined fear, made easy by the fact that cheap coal and oil meant nuclear power could be comfortably kept at arm’s length. The solution to that problem is education. Both business interests and environmentalist groups can find common cause here; a public which is informed enough to make good decisions about nuclear energy is a public that is that much closer to a fossil-fuel-free future.
What’s the benefits? There’s cheap fuel not purchased from terrorist-sponsoring foreign governments. There’s reduced air pollution. There’s lessened global warming. There’s less need for large-scale coal mining. There’s abundant energy for the technological requirements of the future.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give it a shot.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Atomic Green : Science and Technology News // Jul 23, 2008 at 10:06 am
[...] See the rest here: Atomic Green [...]
2 Uncle Al // Jul 23, 2008 at 10:23 am
If stupidity got us into this mess then stupidity can get us out. Always vote with the stupid - how can so many people be wrong? We must be committed to stupid acts committed at others’ expense for only then can somebody else in the tenebrous future receive deserved boons… and not them, either.
The future arises from education, surplus, leisure, and retained earnings. It is governments’ job to prevent all four.
3 Jennifer Ouellette // Jul 23, 2008 at 10:35 am
Count me as one who only grudgingly supports the “nuclear option” as a stopgap measure to curb our appetite for fossil fuels while we find a better long-term solution. Because we’re just replacing the CO2 problem with the problem of nuclear waste. Granted, it’s small compared to CO2 emissions, and we’ve got to do something about CO2 pretty darned soon. But that waste would add up pretty quickly if all our power was nuclear.
I would hope we keep working on other alternatives as well and not repeat the mistakes of the past, i.e., becoming overly reliant on one type of fuel. There’s no easy solution, but by and large, a broad energy portfolio is better that a narrow one.
As for the proposed new plants, I’d be more excited about them if they were closed-cycle (which recycles more of the waste generated); alas, they’re not.
4 CCPhysicist // Jul 23, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I need to blog about this.
The reason for lawsuits is that a private corporation can maximize profits by externalizing costs. That is why regulation and lawsuits are required to alter the behavior of those burning coal without scrubbers or putting sewage in rivers without treatment. (If I was channeling Uncle Al, I would mention bathing in the Ganges at this point.) The public has to have some mechanism for protecting public goods.
The fear of nuclear power is a product of the fear mongering the US and others used during the Cold War as a way of enhancing deterrence. Hard to complain, since it has worked so far, but the fear of all things “nuclear” was enough to require changinig the name of NMR when it is used for MRI.
Nuclear was held back as much by banking as by environmentalists. The instant loss of 1 G$ of capital at TMI due to a few minutes of management stupidity is not a risk lenders want to take. Time and improvements in the systems have changed that view, and reactors are being built whether McCain or Obama want them or not. I know of several that are through the first review phase and moving ahead full speed.
The amount of nuclear waste generated by weapons production is still (AFAIK) greater than that from commercial power. Both can be dealt with (not just buried) far more easily than burying (sequestering) CO2. The solution is an “actinide burner” using high energy neutrons from an accelerator. It is a net energy gain, so it pays for itself. All it takes is will. The technology has been known for over a decade.
5 Nick // Jul 23, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Nuclear waste is definitely the biggest problem not mentioned in this post. Although lots of people claim that waste is the single reason NOT to build new reactors, I have yet to see data on how much waste it produces per year or (as CCPhysicist mentions) what options we have other than “just bury it.”
The first step to public approval is convincing people in the middle (i.e. people who read physics blogs) that it’s a worthwhile endeavor - and no one is doing it! Is that because it’s really not worthwhile?
6 Alex M // Jul 23, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Regarding Nuclear Waste:
I’ve heard that a great deal of the nuclear waste we have in the US could be eliminated if it weren’t illegal to reprocess the waste into more usable fuel.
As far as I know, we’re one of the few countries in which it’s illegal to reprocess nuclear waste.
7 Matt // Jul 23, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Regarding the waste issue, I think that probably warrants its own post. As an executive summary though; there are a lot of good options. Actinide burning and reprocessing are both good as has been pointed out, though reprocessing can be considered a proliferation risk in some cases.
Burial is another option that’s much better than most people thing. Yes, waste is radioactive for thousands of years. But it’s only dangerous high level waste for a couple centuries tops. While you wouldn’t want to eat a pile of waste even after 10,000 years, the risk of contamination in any realistic way is slim at best. By that time it’s pretty much on the order of the radioactivity of the rocks from which it was originally mined. Keep in mind that even the Chernobyl core - which exploded mere decades ago and is still very inadequately contained - is not even currently particularly destructive to the surrounding area. Of course you wouldn’t want to live next to it by any stretch, but animal and plant life is thriving in the exclusion zone. Properly and deliberately buried waste under a mountain is many orders of magnitude safer and cleaner.
8 Ville Lindholm // Jul 23, 2008 at 2:22 pm
It’s funny, in my country (Finland) the government approved one of the first nuclear reactors to be built in years anywhere. This opened up the floodgates and now everybody’s signing up for nuclear again!
I’m not sure if this is pure fact, maybe some other country beat us to the punch, but at least Finnish newspapers boasted about it. It’s not often a small country like Finland gets to lead the way :)
9 CCPhysicist // Jul 24, 2008 at 7:59 am
High level waste (half lives well under a century) is not the problem. That is the stuff that happily decays away in the storage pool and then in dry cask storage in the power plant’s back yard for the next 20 or 30 years and would be gone in a few centuries.
Really long lifetimes are no problem because the uranium itself was radioactive and in the ground to begin with, and long lifetimes translate into low specific activity.
The biggest problem is provided by the actinides, which have half lives on the order of 10,000 years. That is long enough to outlive our current civilization but short enough to be dangerously radioactive.
What goes undiscussed in connection with Yucca Mountain or other alternatives is that the waste *is* currently in your backyard, behind the plant.
10 Jon // Jul 24, 2008 at 10:10 am
This report by the National Academy of Engineering might be useful if you’re interested in the waste storage problem. I’ll quote the relevant part:
Granted, this paper is five years old.
Leave a Comment