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Hi all, I just wrote this 3000 word article for a Christian magazine but it has to be cut back to 1000 words. I'm going to be so ruthless with it, I thought I would post the original here for you all to enjoy. (I changed some referencing to hyperlinks for this post).
Why I changed my mind on nuclear power
1. THE ENERGY AND CLIMATE CRISIS
Over a decade ago I wrote about the threat of peak oil, and how the modern world was gradually burning through all the light, sweet crude: all the so called “cheap oil”. The geological picture has not changed, despite today’s extremely low prices. Prices should really be around $70 a barrel but Saudi Arabia is overproducing in a price war on North American shale-oil. They’re trying to bankrupt oil alternatives that have only become viable because of the worldwide peak in cheap oil. The explosion in even dirtier tar sands and shale oil is a disaster for the climate. They emit far more CO2 per barrel, and are of far greater concern than peak oil itself. Bill McKibben’s documentary “Do the Math” (free online) outlines how important it is that we leave 80% of the fossil fuels in the ground. We cannot even burn all the alternative oils, let alone all the coal. Meanwhile, NOAA already called 2015 as the hottest year on record by far. The climate situation is dire. We cannot solve peak oil by becoming addicted to even dirtier fossil fuels. We need abundant clean energy, and we need it now.
2. THE ENERGY EASTER BUNNY
Yet what is the answer? All of the concerns I had about renewable energy a decade ago remain valid today. Solar, wind and wave power are still intermittent and unreliable. They only work at 30% capacity, and many shut down overnight. These problems remain intractable despite the many glowing renewable reports that hit the headlines every few months. The problem is their presupposition. Groups like “Beyond Zero Emissions” assume that we can and must move from fossil fuels to 100% renewables, and that nuclear power is simply not an option. But the scientific peer-review process does not employ fans of a theory to prove that theory: it’s the exact opposite. A truly objective and scientific peer-review throws every rational objection they can at a theory to see what survives. Climate science has survived this attack, answering every objection time and again. But renewable plans have not. Concerned scientists poke huge holes through these plans, debunking the work of Amory Lovins and Mark Diesendorf and all the other big names in renewables. The problem is the storage. Scientists model the behaviour of wind and solar and show that they simply cannot get us through the night, or through seasonal variations like winter. The storage costs would bankrupt any nation that tried. Lovins replies by asserting that we don’t need baseload electricity overnight because demand drops, yet ignores the NREL recommendation that America charge nearly half their cars on overnight electricity. (p10: goo.gl/P7Uvbq ) Weaning off oil and onto electricity for electric vehicles is the kind of bold infrastructure move that could see the evening peak in electricity demand smooth into generally higher demand 24/7. That, of course, requires baseload electricity.
There are many other expensive solutions proposed, like vastly overpriced solar-thermal power plants, smart-appliances, smart-grids, continent-spanning super-grids, overbuilding wind and solar farms, etc. But why spend billions upgrading to a super-smart super-sized super-grid when we could build reliable nuclear power and plug it straight into today’s normal grid? Actually modelling this stuff is way above my social sciences paygrade. I’m just reporting what the experts say. If you want to analyse the arguments, try bravenewclimate.com and thebreakthrough.org to name a few. In summary, renewables are so inadequate that the world’s most famous climatologist, Dr James Hansen, has said: "Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy." goo.gl/HX4NLP
Instead, Eco-modernists like Dr Hansen recommend we rush-build 115 nuclear reactors a year! The eco-modernists are so enthusiastic about nuclear power because there’s a quiet revolution in nuclear design that most of us have missed. But to understand some of the advances, we’re going to have to understand some of the basics. When I finally understood the big picture, I was forced to change my mind.
3. A SNAPSHOT OF NUCLEAR FUEL
In natural uranium only 1% is fissile uranium-235 that ready to split. The other 99% is fertile uranium-238 — not yet ready to split. During the Manhattan Project, scientists learned to feed neutrons to fertile uranium-238 until the uranium gobbled them up and changed, becoming Plutonium-239 that is fissile. In other words, like pigs being fattened for slaughter, fertile atoms must be fed neutrons until they become fissile. Then they’re ready to go.
4. A SNAPSHOT OF NUCLEAR WASTE
What we call nuclear ‘waste’ is actually a mix of transuranics and fission products. Transuranics are radioactive elements heavier than uranium (aka actinides). Fission products make up about 4% of the waste, and are the fissioned or broken atoms, the true waste from a nuclear plant. But most of what we call ‘waste’ is the transuranics, large atoms buzzing with radioactive energy that remain radioactive for 100,000 years. This is the exciting bit. They’re fertile! If you feed transuranics another neutron (or 2 or 3, depending on the transuranic) they become fissile! In other words, transuranic waste can become fuel. Indeed, today’s Light Water Reactors use less than 1% of the energy available in uranium. Most of today’s so called ‘nuclear waste’ is actually unused fuel! The ‘Eco-modernists’ recommend we burn transuranics, turning a 100,000-year storage problem into today’s energy solution. The United Kingdom’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Dr David Mackay, calculated that the UK has enough nuclear waste to run her for 500 years. Dr James Hansen promotes the book “Prescription for the Planet” by his eco-modernist friend Tom Blees. Blees says America has enough to run her for a thousand years. That makes nuclear waste a $30 trillion dollar asset! Get Blees free book at goo.gl/PUjKbW
5. BUT HOW DOES IT WORK?
Basically, they separate out the fertile transuranics from the fission products and stick them in a new fuel rod. Now think of fertile transuranics as wet firewood. You don’t place wet logs in the middle of the fire or you’ll put it out. Instead you place the wet logs around the edge of the fire until they catch enough heat and dry out. In the same way they place fertile transuranic rods around the edge of the nuclear fire (the fissioning core) until they catch enough neutrons and become fissile. This new fuel is eventually made ready for the reactor core. This works on both natural uranium-238 and the transuranics from nuclear waste and nuclear bombs.
Reactors like this are called breeder reactors, because they can ‘breed’ more fuel than the reactor itself uses. Indeed they breed enough fuel to run themselves and then start up another breeder reactor, but this can take about 10 years. This is the ‘doubling time’ of a breeder program. Doubling every 10 years means it will take 40 years for one reactor to multiply to 16. Breeding fuel from waste takes time. We have more than enough nuclear waste, but it’s going to take a while to get at it. This is not fast enough for the kind of radical climate action we need today. So we will also need to fast track today’s normal once-through reactors like the AP1000 and mine uranium the old fashioned way, so uranium miners have a job for at least the next generation. Then in the distant future, when we finally run out of nuclear waste to burn, natural uranium-238 can be placed in the breeder rods around the edge of the reactor to ‘catch the fire’ and breed more fuel.
6. DEALING WITH THE REAL WASTE
The tiny amount of fission products generated by a breeder reactor can actually be stored on site until that plant is eventually shut down after 60 or 80 years. The fission products are then melted with glass to form a ceramic that is stored for just 500 years. This is child’s play compared to storing transuranics for 100,000 years, and Tom Blees describes a number of safe disposal methods in his book.
7. HOW MUCH URANIUM IS THERE?
If we assume that nuclear power runs everything, from mining and smelting metals to running our cities, heating our homes, charging electric cars (or is that recycling boron pellets for our boron cars; again see Tom Blees book), and even manufacturing synthetic jet-fuels, then we have 50,000 years of uranium and thorium reserves. If we haven’t discovered fusion by then, we can turn to uranium from seawater. Over geological time our continents move and grind together, and erosion washes new uranium particles down into the ocean. With today’s technology it only costs about $600 for a kilogram of uranium — that’s a golf ball sized lump that can run your entire life. Uranium is ‘renewable’ as the ocean is constantly topped up. It would last longer than the earth! We will not run out. (Google the “plutonium economy”).
8. WHERE ARE THESE BREEDER REACTORS?
The world has over 400 breeder “reactor-years” (reactors multiplied by years of operation). The American “Experimental Breeder Reactor 2” (EBR2) is the most famous solid-fuel prototype breeder. It’s the world’s first “Integral Fast Reactor” (IFR), which basically means it reprocessed the fuel on-site and places it back in the reactor, without the risks of moving nuclear waste off site for treatment. The EBR2 was a success story that ran for 30 years and showed that the physics works. It also ran safety tests. They cut all the power to the reactor, and it automatically shut itself down. It survived a Fukushima power outage. Had Fukushima used IFR’s, we would not know the name Fukushima!
Russia also loves Fast Reactors, and used the “BN-350” to both desalinate seawater into freshwater and provide power for the local city in Kazakhstan. The Soviet “BN-600” still works and Japan paid a billion dollars for the technical specs. Russia recently opened the industrial strength “BN-800”, and right now is building the even larger “BN-1200”.
India is building one, and the French had the massive 1200MW “Superphenix” until anti-nuclear activists shot RPG's onto the site and anti-nuclear activism shut it down.
China has simply too many programs to document them all here. They are putting the “supercritical-water-reactor” up on the assembly line, and it is due to make nuclear power cheaper than coal as early as 2022. They are also pouring big money into my favourite reactor, the “Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor” or LFTR (pronounced “Lifter”). The LFTR cannot melt down — it is already a liquid! Indeed, this reactor requires power to keep the fluids up in the reactor core, otherwise gravity takes over and the fuel drains away to the cooling tank. The LFTR is based on the American “Molten Salt Reactor” program of the 1960’s, and my favourite photo of the MSR has Alvin Weinberg showing President JFK and the First Lady Jackie Kennedy around the site. For political reasons President Nixon later dumped the MSR program and pushed the money into fast breeder research, promoting jobs in politically sensitive seats. If only Nixon had funded both, we might have both IFR’s and LFTR’s by now and avoided climate change in the first place. YouTube “Thorium Remix 2011” for a 2-hour documentary by LFTR engineer, Kirk Sorenson. (Grab your favourite drink and watch it in half hour blocks. I had to watch it 3 times before I really understood it).
9. WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR BOMBS?
Some people worry about transuranics breeding through the plutonium stage. What if the plutonium is siphoned off for bombs? At Argonne National Laboratory, they use pyroprocessing, and it grabs all the transuranics together. It does not separate out bomb-grade plutonium — it cannot. That requires radically different plutonium sorting kit, something any government inspector would immediately recognise. The pyroprocessing plant is so radioactive technicians don’t even go in there. It’s all enclosed with glove boxes and robotic arms. You can’t walk in there and grab a little waste for your briefcase as not only would the alarms go off, you would start to dissolve on the way home.
Whatever we think about The Bomb, we want to solve climate change. Many of the biggest carbon emitters already have The Bomb. That horse has bolted. It’s a military and political issue, and does not have to involve nuclear power. Instead, reprocessing waste creates a market for eating old bombs! Old warheads are expensive to maintain, and Russia sold America old bomb-grade material that could have made about 16,000 bombs. These supplied 10% of America’s electricity for 20 years! (Google “Megatons to Megawatts”). Sadly, President Bill Clinton shut down the EBR2 program due to fears of proliferation. Someone didn’t understand pyroprocessing. But the EBR2 research did not go to waste. GE used the EBR2 to develop plans for their “PRISM” breeder, ready to come off the assembly line in the first nation that will buy it.
10. NUCLEAR POWER IS SAFE
The World Health Organisation has estimated that coal kills 2.6 million people a year as toxic particulates get into our lungs. But WHO’s nuclear authority has modelled that Chernobyl’s radiation release might eventually kill a maximum of 4000 people.
Coal is a bloodbath in comparison. As George Monbiot says: “Coal kills more people when it goes right than nuclear power does when it goes wrong. In fact coal kills more people every week than nuclear power has in the entire history of its deployment.” goo.gl/MhlPSC
Google the “Death per terawatt” chart. Far from being a terrifying bogeyman, nuclear power has provided so much energy so safely, that we should be thankful for its admirable safety record. Hansen calculates that it has already saved 1.8 million lives by displacing coal. goo.gl/jwKUbb
Coal is actually very expensive. Forbes has concluded that according to public health data, coal adds 10% to our health bills. “These additional health costs begin to rival the total energy costs on an annual basis for the U.S.” goo.gl/pVLQjO In other words, the retail price of coal-fired electricity is only half the cost. Coal barons outsource the other half to our health departments and tip their hats to government for picking up the tab. On this basis, nuclear power is already cheaper than the true cost of coal, and vastly safer.
But what relieved me the most was reading about improvements in passive safety systems. Today’s reactors need power to work, not cool. Without power, they just shut down. Automatically. Every time. So if the external cooling pumps are destroyed by a tidal wave or terrorist attack, the laws of physics take over. It’s all about the new metal coolants that leak away excess heat, even if all the pumps have shut down in some freak scenario. Even better, in a power failure the liquid fuel of the LFTR just drains away. Gravity works every time. Banning nuclear power because of Chernobyl or Fukushima is like banning modern aviation because of the Hindenburg.
Now, what if something absolutely freakish and unpredictable did happen, and there is a leak? How bad is radiation anyway? Surprise! Most of Chernobyl and Fukushima could be resettled today. Charles Sturt University’s Radiation Safety committee says many parts of the world are naturally far hotter than either Chernobyl or Fukushima, at over 50 milliSieverts a year, or 4000 milliSieverts over an 80-year lifespan, and yet experience no health impacts. goo.gl/drv3pq
Yet Chernobyl’s infamous Strictly Controlled Zones (SCZ’s) only gave 50 milliSieverts over 20 years, or 2.5milliSieverts a year! goo.gl/ahT7I4 It’s a similar story in Fukushima, where UNSCEAR estimate that had people stayed they would have received a lifetime dose of about 150mSv. goo.gl/e10vt6
Compare that to the 4000mSv nature kicks off over 80 years in some regions! Slightly increased levels of radiation may actually be good for us. Google “Radiation hormesis” for more. We live on a radioactive planet, eat radioactive food (especially bananas), and are radioactive ourselves. We hit our spouses with an x-ray each year just by sleeping next to them! Sadly, governments appear to be running evacuation policies on paranoid memes rather than accurate scientific data. It makes me sad. More people have already died from Fukushima’s evacuee related depression and suicide than would ever have died from the slight increase in radiation. Yet when Japan’s government increased their allowable exposures from 1mSv per year to 20 mSv a year, anti nuclear activists presented the government as being in cahoots with nuclear corporations rather than just responding to better epidemiological evidence.
Nearly 200 years ago, Joseph Fourier discovered CO2 traps heat. Today our planet is running a fever. We face a climate crisis that is a clear and present danger, and only gaining momentum. It will exacerbate any issue you care about, multiplying famines and war and refugees tenfold. Crop failures and natural disasters will even start to punch holes in western economies — hurting national accounts, shrinking the budgets for education and health and pensions. Climate change will leave nothing untouched, and this just the next few decades. The worst-case scenarios are the stuff of nightmares.
My fear is that the Cold War has emotionally programmed us against anything to do with the words ‘nuclear’ or ‘radiation’, and that most of us react with fear of the older technologies, without understanding the breeder revolution. We need safe, abundant, affordable power that can be delivered on demand, not just when the weather feels like it. Nuclear power is the answer. It also won’t hurt us that Australia just happens to be the Saudi Arabia of uranium!
In closing, 1 Timothy 4:4 (NIV) states, “For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” I hope this essay helps you to be thankful for atoms that split, and the amazing potential nuclear power has to provide everyone on earth with a modern lifestyle until the Lord returns. Amen!
Why I changed my mind on nuclear power
1. THE ENERGY AND CLIMATE CRISIS
Over a decade ago I wrote about the threat of peak oil, and how the modern world was gradually burning through all the light, sweet crude: all the so called “cheap oil”. The geological picture has not changed, despite today’s extremely low prices. Prices should really be around $70 a barrel but Saudi Arabia is overproducing in a price war on North American shale-oil. They’re trying to bankrupt oil alternatives that have only become viable because of the worldwide peak in cheap oil. The explosion in even dirtier tar sands and shale oil is a disaster for the climate. They emit far more CO2 per barrel, and are of far greater concern than peak oil itself. Bill McKibben’s documentary “Do the Math” (free online) outlines how important it is that we leave 80% of the fossil fuels in the ground. We cannot even burn all the alternative oils, let alone all the coal. Meanwhile, NOAA already called 2015 as the hottest year on record by far. The climate situation is dire. We cannot solve peak oil by becoming addicted to even dirtier fossil fuels. We need abundant clean energy, and we need it now.
2. THE ENERGY EASTER BUNNY
Yet what is the answer? All of the concerns I had about renewable energy a decade ago remain valid today. Solar, wind and wave power are still intermittent and unreliable. They only work at 30% capacity, and many shut down overnight. These problems remain intractable despite the many glowing renewable reports that hit the headlines every few months. The problem is their presupposition. Groups like “Beyond Zero Emissions” assume that we can and must move from fossil fuels to 100% renewables, and that nuclear power is simply not an option. But the scientific peer-review process does not employ fans of a theory to prove that theory: it’s the exact opposite. A truly objective and scientific peer-review throws every rational objection they can at a theory to see what survives. Climate science has survived this attack, answering every objection time and again. But renewable plans have not. Concerned scientists poke huge holes through these plans, debunking the work of Amory Lovins and Mark Diesendorf and all the other big names in renewables. The problem is the storage. Scientists model the behaviour of wind and solar and show that they simply cannot get us through the night, or through seasonal variations like winter. The storage costs would bankrupt any nation that tried. Lovins replies by asserting that we don’t need baseload electricity overnight because demand drops, yet ignores the NREL recommendation that America charge nearly half their cars on overnight electricity. (p10: goo.gl/P7Uvbq ) Weaning off oil and onto electricity for electric vehicles is the kind of bold infrastructure move that could see the evening peak in electricity demand smooth into generally higher demand 24/7. That, of course, requires baseload electricity.
There are many other expensive solutions proposed, like vastly overpriced solar-thermal power plants, smart-appliances, smart-grids, continent-spanning super-grids, overbuilding wind and solar farms, etc. But why spend billions upgrading to a super-smart super-sized super-grid when we could build reliable nuclear power and plug it straight into today’s normal grid? Actually modelling this stuff is way above my social sciences paygrade. I’m just reporting what the experts say. If you want to analyse the arguments, try bravenewclimate.com and thebreakthrough.org to name a few. In summary, renewables are so inadequate that the world’s most famous climatologist, Dr James Hansen, has said: "Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy." goo.gl/HX4NLP
Instead, Eco-modernists like Dr Hansen recommend we rush-build 115 nuclear reactors a year! The eco-modernists are so enthusiastic about nuclear power because there’s a quiet revolution in nuclear design that most of us have missed. But to understand some of the advances, we’re going to have to understand some of the basics. When I finally understood the big picture, I was forced to change my mind.
3. A SNAPSHOT OF NUCLEAR FUEL
In natural uranium only 1% is fissile uranium-235 that ready to split. The other 99% is fertile uranium-238 — not yet ready to split. During the Manhattan Project, scientists learned to feed neutrons to fertile uranium-238 until the uranium gobbled them up and changed, becoming Plutonium-239 that is fissile. In other words, like pigs being fattened for slaughter, fertile atoms must be fed neutrons until they become fissile. Then they’re ready to go.
4. A SNAPSHOT OF NUCLEAR WASTE
What we call nuclear ‘waste’ is actually a mix of transuranics and fission products. Transuranics are radioactive elements heavier than uranium (aka actinides). Fission products make up about 4% of the waste, and are the fissioned or broken atoms, the true waste from a nuclear plant. But most of what we call ‘waste’ is the transuranics, large atoms buzzing with radioactive energy that remain radioactive for 100,000 years. This is the exciting bit. They’re fertile! If you feed transuranics another neutron (or 2 or 3, depending on the transuranic) they become fissile! In other words, transuranic waste can become fuel. Indeed, today’s Light Water Reactors use less than 1% of the energy available in uranium. Most of today’s so called ‘nuclear waste’ is actually unused fuel! The ‘Eco-modernists’ recommend we burn transuranics, turning a 100,000-year storage problem into today’s energy solution. The United Kingdom’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Dr David Mackay, calculated that the UK has enough nuclear waste to run her for 500 years. Dr James Hansen promotes the book “Prescription for the Planet” by his eco-modernist friend Tom Blees. Blees says America has enough to run her for a thousand years. That makes nuclear waste a $30 trillion dollar asset! Get Blees free book at goo.gl/PUjKbW
5. BUT HOW DOES IT WORK?
Basically, they separate out the fertile transuranics from the fission products and stick them in a new fuel rod. Now think of fertile transuranics as wet firewood. You don’t place wet logs in the middle of the fire or you’ll put it out. Instead you place the wet logs around the edge of the fire until they catch enough heat and dry out. In the same way they place fertile transuranic rods around the edge of the nuclear fire (the fissioning core) until they catch enough neutrons and become fissile. This new fuel is eventually made ready for the reactor core. This works on both natural uranium-238 and the transuranics from nuclear waste and nuclear bombs.
Reactors like this are called breeder reactors, because they can ‘breed’ more fuel than the reactor itself uses. Indeed they breed enough fuel to run themselves and then start up another breeder reactor, but this can take about 10 years. This is the ‘doubling time’ of a breeder program. Doubling every 10 years means it will take 40 years for one reactor to multiply to 16. Breeding fuel from waste takes time. We have more than enough nuclear waste, but it’s going to take a while to get at it. This is not fast enough for the kind of radical climate action we need today. So we will also need to fast track today’s normal once-through reactors like the AP1000 and mine uranium the old fashioned way, so uranium miners have a job for at least the next generation. Then in the distant future, when we finally run out of nuclear waste to burn, natural uranium-238 can be placed in the breeder rods around the edge of the reactor to ‘catch the fire’ and breed more fuel.
6. DEALING WITH THE REAL WASTE
The tiny amount of fission products generated by a breeder reactor can actually be stored on site until that plant is eventually shut down after 60 or 80 years. The fission products are then melted with glass to form a ceramic that is stored for just 500 years. This is child’s play compared to storing transuranics for 100,000 years, and Tom Blees describes a number of safe disposal methods in his book.
7. HOW MUCH URANIUM IS THERE?
If we assume that nuclear power runs everything, from mining and smelting metals to running our cities, heating our homes, charging electric cars (or is that recycling boron pellets for our boron cars; again see Tom Blees book), and even manufacturing synthetic jet-fuels, then we have 50,000 years of uranium and thorium reserves. If we haven’t discovered fusion by then, we can turn to uranium from seawater. Over geological time our continents move and grind together, and erosion washes new uranium particles down into the ocean. With today’s technology it only costs about $600 for a kilogram of uranium — that’s a golf ball sized lump that can run your entire life. Uranium is ‘renewable’ as the ocean is constantly topped up. It would last longer than the earth! We will not run out. (Google the “plutonium economy”).
8. WHERE ARE THESE BREEDER REACTORS?
The world has over 400 breeder “reactor-years” (reactors multiplied by years of operation). The American “Experimental Breeder Reactor 2” (EBR2) is the most famous solid-fuel prototype breeder. It’s the world’s first “Integral Fast Reactor” (IFR), which basically means it reprocessed the fuel on-site and places it back in the reactor, without the risks of moving nuclear waste off site for treatment. The EBR2 was a success story that ran for 30 years and showed that the physics works. It also ran safety tests. They cut all the power to the reactor, and it automatically shut itself down. It survived a Fukushima power outage. Had Fukushima used IFR’s, we would not know the name Fukushima!
Russia also loves Fast Reactors, and used the “BN-350” to both desalinate seawater into freshwater and provide power for the local city in Kazakhstan. The Soviet “BN-600” still works and Japan paid a billion dollars for the technical specs. Russia recently opened the industrial strength “BN-800”, and right now is building the even larger “BN-1200”.
India is building one, and the French had the massive 1200MW “Superphenix” until anti-nuclear activists shot RPG's onto the site and anti-nuclear activism shut it down.
China has simply too many programs to document them all here. They are putting the “supercritical-water-reactor” up on the assembly line, and it is due to make nuclear power cheaper than coal as early as 2022. They are also pouring big money into my favourite reactor, the “Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor” or LFTR (pronounced “Lifter”). The LFTR cannot melt down — it is already a liquid! Indeed, this reactor requires power to keep the fluids up in the reactor core, otherwise gravity takes over and the fuel drains away to the cooling tank. The LFTR is based on the American “Molten Salt Reactor” program of the 1960’s, and my favourite photo of the MSR has Alvin Weinberg showing President JFK and the First Lady Jackie Kennedy around the site. For political reasons President Nixon later dumped the MSR program and pushed the money into fast breeder research, promoting jobs in politically sensitive seats. If only Nixon had funded both, we might have both IFR’s and LFTR’s by now and avoided climate change in the first place. YouTube “Thorium Remix 2011” for a 2-hour documentary by LFTR engineer, Kirk Sorenson. (Grab your favourite drink and watch it in half hour blocks. I had to watch it 3 times before I really understood it).
9. WHAT ABOUT NUCLEAR BOMBS?
Some people worry about transuranics breeding through the plutonium stage. What if the plutonium is siphoned off for bombs? At Argonne National Laboratory, they use pyroprocessing, and it grabs all the transuranics together. It does not separate out bomb-grade plutonium — it cannot. That requires radically different plutonium sorting kit, something any government inspector would immediately recognise. The pyroprocessing plant is so radioactive technicians don’t even go in there. It’s all enclosed with glove boxes and robotic arms. You can’t walk in there and grab a little waste for your briefcase as not only would the alarms go off, you would start to dissolve on the way home.
Whatever we think about The Bomb, we want to solve climate change. Many of the biggest carbon emitters already have The Bomb. That horse has bolted. It’s a military and political issue, and does not have to involve nuclear power. Instead, reprocessing waste creates a market for eating old bombs! Old warheads are expensive to maintain, and Russia sold America old bomb-grade material that could have made about 16,000 bombs. These supplied 10% of America’s electricity for 20 years! (Google “Megatons to Megawatts”). Sadly, President Bill Clinton shut down the EBR2 program due to fears of proliferation. Someone didn’t understand pyroprocessing. But the EBR2 research did not go to waste. GE used the EBR2 to develop plans for their “PRISM” breeder, ready to come off the assembly line in the first nation that will buy it.
10. NUCLEAR POWER IS SAFE
The World Health Organisation has estimated that coal kills 2.6 million people a year as toxic particulates get into our lungs. But WHO’s nuclear authority has modelled that Chernobyl’s radiation release might eventually kill a maximum of 4000 people.
Coal is a bloodbath in comparison. As George Monbiot says: “Coal kills more people when it goes right than nuclear power does when it goes wrong. In fact coal kills more people every week than nuclear power has in the entire history of its deployment.” goo.gl/MhlPSC
Google the “Death per terawatt” chart. Far from being a terrifying bogeyman, nuclear power has provided so much energy so safely, that we should be thankful for its admirable safety record. Hansen calculates that it has already saved 1.8 million lives by displacing coal. goo.gl/jwKUbb
Coal is actually very expensive. Forbes has concluded that according to public health data, coal adds 10% to our health bills. “These additional health costs begin to rival the total energy costs on an annual basis for the U.S.” goo.gl/pVLQjO In other words, the retail price of coal-fired electricity is only half the cost. Coal barons outsource the other half to our health departments and tip their hats to government for picking up the tab. On this basis, nuclear power is already cheaper than the true cost of coal, and vastly safer.
But what relieved me the most was reading about improvements in passive safety systems. Today’s reactors need power to work, not cool. Without power, they just shut down. Automatically. Every time. So if the external cooling pumps are destroyed by a tidal wave or terrorist attack, the laws of physics take over. It’s all about the new metal coolants that leak away excess heat, even if all the pumps have shut down in some freak scenario. Even better, in a power failure the liquid fuel of the LFTR just drains away. Gravity works every time. Banning nuclear power because of Chernobyl or Fukushima is like banning modern aviation because of the Hindenburg.
Now, what if something absolutely freakish and unpredictable did happen, and there is a leak? How bad is radiation anyway? Surprise! Most of Chernobyl and Fukushima could be resettled today. Charles Sturt University’s Radiation Safety committee says many parts of the world are naturally far hotter than either Chernobyl or Fukushima, at over 50 milliSieverts a year, or 4000 milliSieverts over an 80-year lifespan, and yet experience no health impacts. goo.gl/drv3pq
Yet Chernobyl’s infamous Strictly Controlled Zones (SCZ’s) only gave 50 milliSieverts over 20 years, or 2.5milliSieverts a year! goo.gl/ahT7I4 It’s a similar story in Fukushima, where UNSCEAR estimate that had people stayed they would have received a lifetime dose of about 150mSv. goo.gl/e10vt6
Compare that to the 4000mSv nature kicks off over 80 years in some regions! Slightly increased levels of radiation may actually be good for us. Google “Radiation hormesis” for more. We live on a radioactive planet, eat radioactive food (especially bananas), and are radioactive ourselves. We hit our spouses with an x-ray each year just by sleeping next to them! Sadly, governments appear to be running evacuation policies on paranoid memes rather than accurate scientific data. It makes me sad. More people have already died from Fukushima’s evacuee related depression and suicide than would ever have died from the slight increase in radiation. Yet when Japan’s government increased their allowable exposures from 1mSv per year to 20 mSv a year, anti nuclear activists presented the government as being in cahoots with nuclear corporations rather than just responding to better epidemiological evidence.
Nearly 200 years ago, Joseph Fourier discovered CO2 traps heat. Today our planet is running a fever. We face a climate crisis that is a clear and present danger, and only gaining momentum. It will exacerbate any issue you care about, multiplying famines and war and refugees tenfold. Crop failures and natural disasters will even start to punch holes in western economies — hurting national accounts, shrinking the budgets for education and health and pensions. Climate change will leave nothing untouched, and this just the next few decades. The worst-case scenarios are the stuff of nightmares.
My fear is that the Cold War has emotionally programmed us against anything to do with the words ‘nuclear’ or ‘radiation’, and that most of us react with fear of the older technologies, without understanding the breeder revolution. We need safe, abundant, affordable power that can be delivered on demand, not just when the weather feels like it. Nuclear power is the answer. It also won’t hurt us that Australia just happens to be the Saudi Arabia of uranium!
In closing, 1 Timothy 4:4 (NIV) states, “For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” I hope this essay helps you to be thankful for atoms that split, and the amazing potential nuclear power has to provide everyone on earth with a modern lifestyle until the Lord returns. Amen!
