Nuclear Gumballs (not really--the title's just to get your attention)

Popular Mechanics is having another look at nuclear energy. A few days ago, I sent you to a debate about the efficacy and desirability of nuclear power, also at PM, but this article, by Alex Hutchinson, isn't debating anything, not what could happen, nor whether it should happen. Rather, he's looking at what is happening. Hutchinson examines the next generations of nuclear plants about to be constructed in the U.S., and the myriad ways they improve upon previous models. Some of the advances he describes are light years away from the form we've all come to associate with nuclear power: tall towers, water cooled, radioactive steam, melt-down fears--you know, the whole China Syndrome thing.

Some of the impetus for moving forward with nuclear alternatives here in the States come from technological advances, and some from government incentives to produce alternative energy, both as a replacement for fossil fuels, and as a supplement to meet growing energy demands. We all know that oil, and to a certain extent natural gas, are environmentally damaging, increasingly costly, and diplomatically and politically constraining. As part of the quest for a comprehensive solution, there have been some advances in national energy policy over the last few years that have led to more funding for nuclear options:

In the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress approved up to $2.95 billion in incentives for new nuclear plants, and set aside another $1.25 billion for an experimental reactor to be built here in the Idaho desert. The reactor will be the centerpiece of a modern-day Manhattan Project, with scientists from around the world working together to revolutionize the production of nuclear power.

Hutchinson looks at the consequences of the Congressional action:

Thanks to the 2005 congressional incentives, a dozen utilities around the country have once again started the lengthy process of applying to build nuclear plants. If all goes smoothly, they could produce power by the middle of the next decade. These reactors would be Generation III and III+ designs--evolutionary improvements on today's Generation II reactors, which use water in some form as both a coolant and a moderator. But, according to the DOE, what is really needed are even safer, cheaper reactors that produce less waste and use fuel that's not easily adapted for weapons production. To develop this kind of reactor, 10 countries, including the United States, joined forces in 2000 to launch the Generation IV International Forum. A committee of 100-plus scientists from participating countries evaluated more than 100 designs; after two years, they picked the six best.

So, scientists around the globe are working on third and fourth generation nuclear designs. Hutchinson's article implies that we will be seeing the results of their work within ten years or so. Each of the better ides brings something valuable to the table. The concepts take various approaches to the nuclear question, with different advantages accompanying each design, but they all share some improvements over existing nuclear plants. The new designs are safer, quicker and easier to build, more cost effective, and more promising in terms of waste disposal than their predecessors. Nuclear energy is also a cleaner alternative than several of the other currently feasible options. As an extra bonus, according to Hutchinson, some of the new designs also have the benefit of producing hydrogen, refining shale oil, or desalinating water as side effects. The hydrogen has promise as an automobile fuel without the environmental drawbacks inherent to oil-based fuels. (In my own personal International Competition of Alternative Fuels, contestants get extra points for positive side effects.)

You should read the whole article for a more complete picture, and a closer look at the various design options. The pebble bed gumball machine is a personal favorite of mine. (Just read the PM piece. You'll see what I mean.) I keep wondering where this is all leading, whether in 20 years we'll be able to recognize the scientific, political, and international relations landscape. Is a potential revolutionary change in the energy frontier (and thus the international relations frontier, from my perspective), as close as this article at Popular Mechanics makes it sound? I certainly hope so.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Nuclear, Or Not? You Decide

Hey, there's an interesting bit of debate about nuclear energy at Popular Mechanics, between Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the co- founders of Greenpeace, and Anna Aurilio, the Legislative Director of the US Public Interest Research Group. I've known for a while, but was surprised at the time I learned, that the co-founder of Greenpeace has actually come around to being a nuclear energy advocate. He takes the pro-nuclear position in this discussion, while Ms. Aurilio takes the con. The debate points between them are interesting, covering cost, waste, safety, alternatives and the prevention of spent fuel finding its way into nuclear weapons. Dr. Moore even very briefly addresses water shortage issues which could be eased with nuclear technology.

I recognize that it was the intent of the editors of Popular Mechanics to present a fair opportunity for both sides to give their arguments, and it was not their aim to declare a winner in this debate. I'm sure they weren't setting out to support the concept of nuclear power. However, I think they could have, had they so chosen, using the same elements the article already contains. PM could have framed this into a pro-nuclear point-counterpoint, by placing Ms. Aurilio's portion of the debate at the beginning. Dr. Moore answers many of her objections in his portion of the article, especially as regards safety, which both of them address. Neither of them go into their arguments in great depth, but he holds his ground better than she does, in my "non-scientistic" opinion.

Dr. Moore makes the argument that nuclear energy should be developed in tandem to other alternative fuels. I agree. We ought to be exploiting every option that we can possibly implement feasibly and safely. I think some of Ms. Aurilio's points are weakened by putting nuclear energy in competition with other environmentally-friendly energy options, such as wind and solar. She seems to want to replace existing nuclear power, which, according to Dr. Moore produces 20 percent of our nation's electricity, with what she thinks are greener alternative choices, rather than replacing the greenhouse-gas-producing, terrorist- supporting fossil fuel options with solar, wind, and nuclear. Not to mention all the other energy options we can possibly explore that don't involve sending money to terrorist supporting states, and adding to potential greenhouse gas issues. The co-founder of Greenpeace thinks of nuclear energy as clean and safe, for Pete's sake. The more relevant comparison to be made at this point is nuclear versus oil and coal, since these are the predominant sources of power in the U.S. today. On the safety front, Ms. Aurilio is also less than persuasive. She limits her discussion of security and accident prevention to current safeguards, i.e. those safeguards which were put into nuclear facilities currently operating in America, but built over thirty years ago. Nuclear technology has come a long way since Three Mile Island. I'm with Dr. Moore.

Hat tip: Instapundit

Nuclear Reactions

I've been following mental rabbit trails today. I read a couple of articles at TCS Daily, one about global warming alarmism and greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes, and the other about energy constraints in America, in the face of recent heat waves, that are being met with pleas for conservation rather than policies aimed at generating more energy. The two articles seemed inextricably linked to me. The fears of global warming and other environmental consequences are really a complicating factor in the search for the cheap, abundant energy solutions that developed nations already need and developing nations are growing to need more and more. (The same environmental consequences apply to underdeveloped countries as well, but since their situations are complicated by their limited financial resources and lack of infrastructure, let's stick to talking about the more technologically advanced nations, shall we? After all, if you count China and India as at least rapidly up-and-coming, these are the countries most to blame for the carbon emissions which some scientists fear will upset the climate balance of our planet.) Every form of energy currently available to man comes with some environmental cost. Were there no environmental constraints, petroleum, natural gas, bio-fuels, coal, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear energy would all be competing unfettered for their place in the power pantheon. As it is, they're all still players, but regulation determines more and more how affordable and plentiful they are.

Regulations aren't all bad. I like clean air. I'm sure you like to breathe too. There's a story in my husband's family about a particular time when he was a small child, three or four years old. He lived with his parents in Riverside, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. This was in the late sixties, before low emission vehicles were a Californian passion. While on a family vacation, they came up north, to western Washington State. Legend has it (and from my understanding this is a pretty accurate legend) that upon looking up at the open sky, my cute and adorable husband innocently inquired, "Mommy, what's that blue stuff?" Living in the Los Angeles basin of the sixties, he had not known the sky was supposed to be blue. Like I said, regulations aren't all bad, even if some of them do go overboard.

Given that none of us want to breath toxic fumes, nor kill off all the Salmon, nor experience a Chernobyl-style meltdown, what are our energy options? Is conservation the only ecologically and morally acceptable alternative? Are we simply supposed to get used to a little more heat in summer, and chill in winter, as we adjust our thermostats to avoid further straining power grids already pushed to the limit? Are we all going to be ultimately driven to turn in our driver's licenses for bus passes? Is the energy gobbling technology that makes our lives more comfortable going to become less and less supportable as more of the world's populations can afford it? Are we out of options? (I think that is the most questions I have ever asked in a single paragraph.)

All these questions prompted me to do a little searching online for clean power alternatives. One thing I kept coming back to was nuclear power. Nuclear power doesn't have the best reputation in the States, or in Russia either, for that matter. No one wants to see a nuclear disaster, and most of us are pretty aware of the problem of nuclear waste. Nor are the sane among us really keen on the idea of the by-products of nuclear processes being used to create weapons of mass destruction for proliferation among the terrorist set. (I do not count anyone in power in Iran as sane.) However, there have been a lot of advances in nuclear technology since the rather memorable accidents that have shaped our views of nuclear power's potential for providing our daily energy needs.

One such advance is the development of the pebble bed reactor. I remember reading some time back about pebble bed nuclear technology. I can't remember where, but I do recall being impressed with the great improvements in safety that have been achieved over the last two decades. Since I don't know where to find the piece I originally read, I'll send you to the Wikipedia entry about pebble bed reactors. It's a good place to start if you find the topic interesting. Other concepts developed over the years continue to work the fringes of making nuclear power more palatable to Americans. I've read, for example, about ways to eliminate the danger from nuclear waste. One such notion being a scheme to bury nuclear waste deep in the earth where things are pretty much radioactive anyway. I have no link, but a Google search ought to provide you with a wealth of information. I've never really seen a foolproof answer about how to keep nuclear by-products from falling into to hands of the power hungry. In any case, I've seen a lot of approaches to nuclear power that address one problem or another of the list I mentioned above, but what if there were a way to address them all at once?

What I read about today, was a new approach to nuclear that just may deal with all those issues that currently keep it from appealing to those of us who don't want a meltdown, waste with an intolerably long radioactive half-life, or a by-product that can be turned into Earth-destroying bombs. It even eliminates some of the waste we already have lying around. Tim Dean, writing in Cosmos, examines the potential of the thorium reactor:

What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.

Thorium is also much more abundant here on Earth than uranium, and according to the blog Advanced Nanotechnology, there's even a plentiful supply on the Moon. (The post at AN also informs me that thorium reactors could provide energy that's five times cheaper than that from natural gas.) Sound intriguing? Dean's article is long, but I'm not going to try to synopsize it. If the topic interests you enough to have read this far, maybe you'll find it worth the time to read the rest of Dean's piece. If not, maybe it will merely comfort you to know that strides are being made all the time to come up with viable, environmentally sustainable, affordable energy sources. I hope that Americans don't turn their backs on a potentially clean power source just because it bears the dreaded name of nuclear. We do need power. I don't want to return to the days of my husband's youth, when a kid could live in LA and not know the sky was supposed to be blue, but I don't want to return to a world without air conditioning and convenient travel, either--and I definitely don't want to give up my laptop. Perish the thought. Perhaps, if scientists continue to investigate every avenue, and we retain (or acquire) an open mind about the "n" word, we won't have to choose.