Nuclear is Our Future Pro-nuclear activist group

In a flippant moment last August, I commented offhand after only a few seconds’ thought that charging admission was one of the dumbest things you can do.

And, oh boy, was I right.

Regarding the rest of the article, the basic problem is too much irrelevant information about how the EPR works and not enough basic information. I suspect the something along the lines of the following was provided:

Nuclear power is really safe because it has a lot of backup systems. A meltdown really isn’t all that likely in the old reactors, and the EPR is even better. It has more redundant systems, and it was all designed by computer. And there’s a four-foot-thick concrete dome instead of a three-foot-thick one. It will be cheaper this time; trust me. It’s different, you know. We’re Americans (even though the reactor was designed in France)! We can do anything if we set our minds to it! And we’re smart, too. We’re good at this.

This is not what people want or need to know. Unfortunately, Patrick Moore is not reading that editorial. I don’t believe he knows what Joe Six-Pack thinks about nuclear power. I don’t believe he’s assessing the real impact of his talks and fixing the weak points. I didn’t see it, but given that editorial, it seems to me like the whole thing is missing the point. Here’s what people want to know about reactors:

There has been a lot of misinformation about nuclear power, spun by zealous conservatives intent on curtailing development of technology–using liberal language. We pro-nuclear people have dropped the ball on this, by not providing this information in the first place. I’m here today to tell you how it works.
During the Manhattan project, the first simple reactors–canisters of uranium metal inside a block of graphite, with a couple of boron rods to reduce the reaction rate when inserted–morphed into high-powered plutonium-239-production reactors with the addition of water-filled channels for cooling, into which uranium metal rods were placed. The first reactor designers knew that there were simpler ways to build a reactor than this, but other designs produced contaminated plutonium that didn’t work in bombs. Later on, the Soviets stole this design, which they converted into a power plant by using water boiled out of the cooling channels to run a steam engine. This type of reactor–literally a bomb factory–was used at Chernobyl, and the basic problem came from the fact that the water interfered with the block of graphite’s effect on the nuclear reaction. When you remove the water, the reaction actually sped up–and very quickly.
Now, it turns out no other reactor design has that characteristic; it’s a problem unique to weapons-grade plutonium production. But that problem scared the hell out of the reactor designers, since it was present in the first systems they had ever worked with, and they started to approach all future reactors as though they were inherently unsafe. In the 1950s to 1970s, they included dozens of backup systems to reduce the number of unknowns, which they simply could not analyze because they didn’t have enough computing power. They did not know what was going to be necessary and what wasn’t, and ended up including many systems “just in case.” That might sound good, but the problem is that operators and maintenance personnel have to work around the unnecessary systems in order to keep critical ones running.
An American-style nuclear power plant is not mechanically complicated at all. It’s basically a tank of water with uranium rods suspended in it; the complicated part is the physics that goes into determining what the geometry and materials are going to be. If you don’t have that computing power, you can simplify the physics–if you’re willing to accept a small probability of the device overheating, and if you’re willing to install backup cooling systems to prevent that from happening.
Importantly, though, if the water drains out of an American-style nuclear reactor, it doesn’t cause a power spike like it does in a Chernobyl-style one, because the water has the same effect on the nuclear reaction as Chernobyl’s block of graphite–and is the coolant. So if the water coolant drains out, the reaction physically cannot occur; the reactor shuts down without any human intervention. It’s foolproof; an American-style nuclear reactor cannot experience a Chernobyl-style accident. It’s physically impossible.
However, without the water, an American-style nuclear reactor can overheat, and the uranium rods can melt and collect in the bottom of the tank. And if you have enough unnecessary backup systems to hinder maintenance and oversight, you can have a cooling system leak drain the water from the reactor.
That’s Three Mile Island in a nutshell. Unfortunately, 95% of the US population doesn’t know the difference between the Chernobyl bomb factory and the rods-in-a-tank design, which was originally used in submarine engines, and people think that Three Mile Island was a less-severe version of Chernobyl, or that we somehow “just missed” another Chernobyl. It’s not a progression; they’re two entirely different physical phenomena.
And the kicker is that we don’t even have to accept the slight probability of another inconsequential Three-Mile-Island-style overheating accident in order to have nuclear power. Computers are capable of analyzing all the variables in a nuclear reactor, so a modern reactor would use complex physics in place of complex engineering and multiple backup systems. If a reactor can be designed to absorb failures using physics, instead of active backup systems, why bother to include components that you know don’t do anything?
Here we come to the other 800-pound gorilla in the nuclear debate: waste. Both of the reactor types that I’ve mentioned use less than 1% of the uranium available to them, meaning that the split atoms are mixed in with both unused fuel and atoms that were supposed to split but actually got bigger (the latter posing the vast majority of the long-term radiation hazard). To more fully use this material–and get rid of the half-used fuel that poses the most danger–we have a few options. We can directly run it through a more efficient reactor, like Canadian designs that use the rods-in-a-tank approach (except the tank is full of heavy water, not ordinary water), we can remove the split atoms and some of the unused uranium, then run it through again up to twice (as the French and Japanese do), or we can use an entirely different type of reactor that is capable of using it all.
This reactor type is known as an Integral Fast Reactor (or IFR), and is an assembly of uranium rods suspended in a tank of molten sodium. The sodium does not have an effect on the reaction at all, so the reaction is more efficient and can consume literally anything heavier than 89 on the periodic table (uranium is 92). IFRs consume approximately 20% of their fuel at a time instead of 1%; five cycles of removing the split atoms and placing the rest of the fuel back into the reactor completely consumes the fuel, plus the long-lived waste. Unfortunately, there are no operating IFRs in the United States today because of anti-nuclear pressure.
And finally, to cover one of the most pervasive myths about nuclear power, you don’t have to be rich or a genius to safely operate a nuclear power plant. Physics works, whether you want it to or not. A safe reactor is safe, even under massive abuse. Engineers in 1986 tried to cause a meltdown in an IFR prototype, and they couldn’t do it; it wasn’t their personality that made hot metal expand. Osama bin Laden and Homer Simpson could have been at the controls and nothing would have happened.

I know that’s an awful talk, and it’s not very clear and uses too many technical terms and not enough soundbites, but the final product should be something along those lines. Peopl
e are worried about accidents and waste, with proliferation a distant third, not how many jobs a reactor will bring to somewhere else. We’ve got to press it: nuclear power is a good idea in the abstract, just like solar and wind. There’s no risk in reducing risk; nuclear power, especially waste-eating reactors, is better than what we’ve currently got and should thus be used. Anything that does not address the core concerns of the general public is a waste of time and helps bring us closer to the train wreck that we’ve got coming if we don’t shape up as a political movement.

There were a couple of other things that he didn’t do, as well: he picked his audience very, very poorly. You don’t see Al Gore get heckled during his global warming presentation; that’s because he has a network that gets his supporters and neutral people out to the presentations and avoids his opponents: phone trees, word-of-mouth, email, and such. Bringing people to rallies/lectures/talks/presentations is such an unbelievably basic part of organizing that it’s inexcusable for someone as experienced as Moore to screw it up. If you do get a heckler, as a supporter of the speaker in the audience, Jason Salzman suggests starting a chant. I would suggest “no gas, no oil, no coal, no choice;” it applies almost everywhere, and is easy for a lot of people to pick up quickly. I however wouldn’t suggest a Reaganesque response (e.g., “ah, shut up”) on the part of the speaker; you can only get away with that if you’re popular, which we aren’t. We might have to start thinking about ourselves as similar to the women’s suffrage movement in about 1865; we’re unpopular and people might not want to hear what we’re saying, but we’ve got a good case, and we’ve got to keep pressing to the goal. It’s going to take a long time. It might not happen in any of our lifetimes. And it won’t happen unless we start kicking butt. But if we do, the results will be profound, long-lasting, and positive.

Let’s get going.

Filed under Activism, Physics

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Stewart Peterson |