safe nuclear power?

[jrtom]

Wired article: Let A Thousand Reactors Bloom

This is sufficiently cool in theory that I wish I knew enough engineering and physics to figure out what the catch is (I assume by policy that there almost always is one, even though it may be minor).

Anyone?

Comments

it's good to be skeptical...

[amnesiadust.livejournal.com]

What, did I say "panacea"? It's certainly nothing of the sort. I don't mean to claim that there are, in fact, no problems to be solved regarding the safety of fission reactors. However, I am optimistic about the possibilities of finding technological solutions to those problems, if scientists are allowed to research them.
Your good point about the half-lives of stuff is noted. The relevant questions are:

1. how exactly does the amount of waste stored at a site translate into additional background radiation?


2. what kinds of background radiation pose health hazards?


3. how do you separate radiation-induced decline in health from other factors?

I don't really know the answers to any of these questions. It seems that (1) is probably the most easily answered, since the various decay products (electrons, neutrons, alpha particles, and gamma rays) can be worked out experimentally, although the decay chains are often problematic. The answer to (2) may in part be worked out by this. Perhaps some insight into (3) can be gained, e.g., by long-term studies of populations living around various sites where nuclear waste is stored. That could probably be looked up.

Regarding "Expert John Doe", here's Rich Muller's original essay to which I was referring. Mostly it's rhetorical, so you can ignore about 80% of it, but he does go through a few numbers. (mostly for jrtom's benefit) Mainly he compares stuff to the level of radioactivity present in uranium ore -- although it has been pointed out that it isn't just the level of radioactivity (i.e., number of decays per unit time) but also the character of the radiation coming out.

In any case, I think the ideal situation is to store as little waste as possible, and reprocess as much as possible. If highly dangerous stuff can be broken down into other stuff which is less dangerous, and you can get energy out of the process, that would be fantastic (and would presumably be a coup for non-proliferation efforts). If no real feasible way to do this can be found, well, we're no worse off than we are already. It sounded as though some of the ANL-W reactors worked on this. (Is ANL-W the same as the DOE facility you mentioned?)

If I seemed unusually interested I think it's because I know little about nuclear power and had never heard of these new reactor designs. It was encouraging to see that other people besides the Chinese had been thinking about them. It would be nice to know what kind of progress is currently being made by American researchers on this subject.

Nevertheless, in the long term fission isn't going to be an acceptable solution either, regardless of whether we solve the safety problems or not; uranium is just another kind of stuff to dig out of the ground, really. If we're on track to go through all our natural reserves of coal and petroleum in something like 300 years, and we then turn to nuclear power, who's to say that our reserves of uranium will last much longer if people continue to consume at the present rate? It's certainly worthwhile to look into... but the point as I see it would be to buy the human race a little more time to investigate truly renewable sources of energy, and get our culture to the point where we're only using as much energy as these sources provide.