The nuclear option.....

[poltr1]

With all the fuss about carbon emissions, and discussion about alternative sources for energy, there's been talk about going back to nuclear power as a primary source for electricity.


I'm not sure that's a good idea at this point. While I have some rudimentary knowledge of the process of nuclear fission, there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

How is uranium mined and where does it come from? What safeguards would be necessary in order for the material to be handled safely, and not fall into the wrong hands? Do we have better technology to contain and control the fission reaction process? And most importantly -- what do we do with the spent fuel rods? That's my biggest gripe about fission reactors: the waste products that are created by the process.

The French have relied on nuclear power for years. What to they know that we don't know?

It's been years since I last heard about tokamak reactors and nuclear fusion. Has this information since become classified?

I'm well aware of the "no nukes" movement, and many of you subscribe to it. I'm also aware of the risks and what can go wrong: Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. The reactor in Japan whose name I forget that was recently damaged by an earthquake.

There was a great picture of a banner in my college psychology textbook. It was a skull and skeletal arm holding an electric toothbrush near the jaw. The caption: "Can nuclear power give you whiter teeth? You bet your life!"

I'm taking the scientist's approach to nuclear power. I want to keep an open mind and not be swayed by emotion. I'm not completely convinced that nuclear power is such a bad idea. I'm hopeful, but at the same time, I'm skeptical.

Comments

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

"How is uranium mined and where does it come from? What safeguards would be necessary in order for the material to be handled safely, and not fall into the wrong hands?"

Fissionables refined to the level used in nuclear power generation aren't a threat in the way you seem to be suggesting (nuclear weapons proliferation). I suppose they could be used to make a "dirty bomb" (conventional explosives used to disseminate radioactive material), but the threat from those is more psychological than actual damage potential.

"I'm also aware of the risks and what can go wrong: Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. The reactor in Japan whose name I forget that was recently damaged by an earthquake."

The only one that actually caused significant harm to anyone (Chernobyl) was the result of gross neglect of safety on a level that simply isn't found in any nuclear power plant in the developed world.

[poltr1]

You are correct. There is a huge difference between uranium ore, reactor-grade uranium (low concentration of U-235), and weapons-grade uranium (high concentration of U-235).

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Recoverable uranium is of course a limited resource, and using it the way the US nuclear industry does, it wouldn't last very long if the world ramped up nuclear power in a big way. France is the only country that's really set up for long-term large scale use: they reprocess the "spent" fuel from their reactors, rather than treating it as waste. Quite a lot of the U-235 in fuel rods is still there when they come out of the reactor (maybe as much as 90%?). Reprocessing also gets most of the longer-lived, more dangerous isotopes out of the waste stream, so what France has to actually dispose of is less nasty than we have in addition to there being less of it. (So why don't we reprocess our waste? Because reprocessing is seen as being much closer to building weapons than enriching natural uranium to power-reactor levels. I'm not entirely sure if this is rational -- part of what's recovered in reprocessing is plutonium, but I don't know how much Pu is produced in a power reactor.)

I've gone through this argument over and over with someone I know in a different online forum. He believes that nuclear power is so bad we should avoid it completely. I believe burning fossil fuel is so bad we should embrace any and every technology that lets us use less fossil fuel. He argues that nuclear power is so expensive, in the US model, that it doesn't make sense. If you look at the current numbers for how much the plants we have now have cost (including the costs borne by the government), he's certainly right. I am convinced that if we could approach the problems sensibly, without being shut down by NIMBYs, irrational fear of everything nuclear, and the existing players' unwillingness to consider a new approach when they already have an approach that brings them big bucks, we could develop a nuclear power industry that would let us phase out coal faster than we possibly could with renewables alone. But those are some mighty big ifs; I'm not so sure that we could get past them.

In any event, our first priority really should be seriously encouraging solar, wind, and biomass power, and developing effective storage mechanisms to cover the intermittent nature of solar and wind.

As for fusion, practical fusion power has been 20 years away for about 50 years. Partly this is because people have been overoptimistic ever since they thought of the idea of fusion power. At this point, we at least think we know how to do it, but the problem is that it has to run on such a large scale that nobody's built a setup nearly large enough. If we'd spent all the money that's gone to the war in Iraq on building a tokamak 10 times as big as the biggest to date, it might actually generate a useful amount of power, or we might just have found more problems and reasons why it has to be even bigger and more complex. My gut feeling is that it's still worth trying on fusion power research, but until we have a gigawatt fusion reactor on the grid, we shouldn't be including it in our plans for how we're going to power civilization.

[poltr1]

I agree that there is a lot of hysteria surrounding nuclear power. As someone who has both a background and a keen interest in science, I don't want to give in to the will (and shrill voice) of the anti-nuclear activists without giving it the scientific once-over.

I'd also love to see the development of renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and hydroelectric. How can we harness river water to drive turbines without sacrificing the navigatability of the waterways?