Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

Atomic Engines for Peace – Circa 1946

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Atomic Engines for Peace

(Picture is a link to 1.5 MB PDF)

Yesterday, two different readers of Atomic Insights shared gifts of knowledge with me. One of those gifts was a book titled “Power Plant Cost Escalation” published in the same year that I graduated from college; digesting that will take a few days. The other, however, was something that was so cool that I just had to share it with as many people as possible as quickly as I could manage.

In 1993, I founded a tiny company called Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. with the (admittedly grandiose) idea that I would help to save the world – and make a ton of money – by developing small atomic power plants that could push ships, supply power to remote areas, and perhaps even propel locomotives. For a variety of reasons, that company never achieved any kind of commercial success; we never completed a machine and never sold any of our designs.

Until yesterday, however, I never knew that we were pursuing an idea that had been conceived with great optimism in 1946, the year my father left the Navy and the year before he started college on the GI bill. If you click on the picture, it will take you to a pretty detailed description of the kinds of technology that remain possible using atomic fission. It even mentions the basic concept technology on which I wanted to build Adams Engines in the following passage:

Some possible methods of using heat are shown in the illustrations. The hot water could be used to heat boilers which then feed steam turbines which in turn drive electric generators. Or air could be heated and, in expanding, drive a low pressure hot-air turbine. Or the heat could be used directly for drying processes or for room heating, or in short, in any way in which heat can be used.
(Mechanix Illustrated, March 1946 pg 46-47)

Note: Adams Engines actually use nitrogen (N2) gas instead of air, but the concept is almost exactly the same. After all, air is 80% N2.

That passage should inspire all of those people who recognize that one of the biggest challenges facing our world today is charting a course that will allow modern society to flourish without burning as much coal, oil and gas as we do today. Though it is a bit of a simplification, nearly every bit of each of those fuels consumed every day is burned to produce heat, which is the same product that is produced in a fission based energy system. Fossil fuels and nuclear fuels are competitive alternatives in creating a fungible and widely used product. Using more fission leads to using less combustion.

It does not matter why you think we need to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. If your motivation is a cleaner environment, you should recognize that burning fossil fuels produces a lot of residue, some of which is poisonous and some of which is just plain dirty. If your motivation is the recognition that spending many hundreds of billions of dollars every year is putting a lot of money into the hands of some unsavory people, you should recognize that slowing the flow of money is worth some effort.

If you think that the world needs to avoid the conflicts associated with limitations on fossil fuel supplies, you should recognize that using less fossil fuel by replacing some use with atomic fission based heat will lead to more peace because abundant resources are not worth fighting about. Finally, if your motivation is to think about future generations, you should recognize that one of the best legacies that any generation can provide for the next is to develop new knowledge and new technology that can be later improved.

Of course, if you insist that we must keep burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because your livelihood depends on continued growth in that industry, you and I are simply going to have to disagree and – figuratively, of course – duke it out.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Rod – not related specifically to this post, but I thought I’d give you a heads-up. If you haven’t seen it yet, you soon will: MSNBC (and probably others) are running a story of a state of emergency at a Japanese Nuclear Plant in the wake of an Earthquake and Tsunami.
    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42025882/ns/world_news-asiapacific/
    It’s not clear from the article that any radioactivity has been released, or that this is a major problem in terms of a large safety crisis, but be prepared for all the anti-nukes to latch on to this and milk every bit of panic they can out of the situation. Might want to start finding out the facts of the situation, such as are available, and be prepared to answer the panic with reality.

      • I’ve been thinking about this, and if the nuclear reactors come through this without any big problems (there will, of course, be ‘problems’ of the sort to be expected due to an event like this, but not necessarily ‘big problems’ beyond what the design can handle), this can server as a real example of the safety of nuclear reactors – this is pretty much a record earthquake, nearly a worst-case scenario, and if japan’s nuclear reactors come though this relatively ‘ok’, to me that’s a resounding endorsement for the safety of nuclear power.

      • @Jeff. Exactly the same could be (and has been) said about Three Mile Island; A worst case situation resulted in damage to the reactor but no deaths, no injuries, and no damage to the environment. This incident will incorrectly be used the same way TMI was.

    • I thought that was a GE BWR? What “special coolant” do they need the US Air Force to haul in? Our emergency plan allows the use of city water and even fire water if need be.

  2. When the Earth moves without warning….or did it warn us? Along the west coast continental plate margin is a warm pool at depth which is the remnant of the last time the upper Earth mantle shifted. The Earth has flattened in times past in response to water melt and migration to the equatorial belt. Well, once again the Earth is moving in strange ways in Iceland and Japan and soon the west coast of the US. Modular nuclear whether fission or fusion that is portable will soon become important in preserving life in remote places. Dealing with volcanic ash and lava flows and earthquakes is one thing but the Ice Sheets are, over extended time periods, a killer. Cuddle up to a warm reactor? Any port in a storm eh? Well, it may come to that and I for one prefer a sexy little warm machine that I have talked to Rod about for a couple of months.

  3. Rod – thanks for the Mechanics Illustrated story. That one was published before I was born, but it takes me back to growing up with MI and Popular Science.
    On the Japanese tsunami story – where’s the news on possible hydro issues, dam failures, fossil fuel power plant shutdowns, or fossil fuel pipeline and distribution issues, if any? It’s the ‘nuclear exceptionalism’ principle all over again. ‘Nuclear’ in a headline grabs attention; it sells viewer eyeballs in print, on television, and on the web.
    I haven’t searched for news of any other energy related problems, but I’m sure there are some.

      • Wow! That didn’t take Mr. Wasserman very long now did it? No words of encouragement for the operators in Japan, no sympathies for the victims…no, he went right for that attack. Then he breaks out a link to an overlay of Chernobyl fallout on the US (I assume that’s what it was, I didn’t waste my time looking) and as usual makes no statement about how US plants are fundamentally different than Chernobyl. Before I had no respect for him as a writer, now I have no respect for him as a human being.

      • “Before I had no respect for him as a writer, now I have no respect for him as a human being.”
        A lifetime of heavy drug use will do that to you. Wasserman is the Charlie Sheen of energy policy.

    • The problem with today’s nuclear power plants is that they have been retrofitted with so many safety devices/features that, although safe in the micro sense, they are no longer safe in the macro sense. The slightest quiver of the earth sends a signal to shut to down the reactor. That reactor trip overloads the grid and those plants that made it through the quiver trip off line from overload – and the whole grid goes black. Then there is no power to perform an orderly cool down. I know of no comprehensive analysis or study that looks at the total effect of the various safety features on the typical NPP. The prevailing philosophy is “If it is shut down – it is safer!” New “safety” features are added simply because the NRC require them and no analysis is performed to determine the total impact.
      How would you like a feature that shutdown the engine in your car, automatically – without warning (until it happened) while you were driving 70 MPH on Interstate 77 in West Virginia? That is the situation in many NPPs. An airplane with 1/10th the “safety features” required for a NPP could not get off of the ground! The probability that you or your children will suffer any form of harm from an airplane is many orders of magnitude greater than that of a NPP, even if you live next door.

  4. To dispell doubt about the morphology of a flatter Earth refer to data sets from the GRACE satellite. Next look up hot spots in the upper mantel. It is not hard to see that the techtonic margins and subduction zones account for a rather static Earth morphology. Add a changing shape due to ice melt and mass distributions complicated by a center of mass for the Earth/Moon system bashing the upper viscous mantle around and then keep the results to your self. If you don’t some REMAX agent may terminate your blog input. That having been said, modular reactors or other yet to be realized fusion steam machines seems to be a good thing to consider as mother nature tries to do retroactive abortion on us.

    • “a good thing to consider as mother nature tries to do retroactive abortion on us.”
      Forget to take your meds today, Michael?