• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
  • Podcast
  • Archives
  • Links

Atomic Insights

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

Guest Columns

Nature and Nuclear Power, the hills and valleys will be thankful and every creature rejoice!

January 27, 2019 By Guest Author 19 Comments

By Wade Allison

Emeritus Professor of Physics at Keble College, Oxford 

A canary, alive and singing in the coal mine, gave miners confidence that the air was safe to breathe. But today our problem is not carbon monoxide in a mine but carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. The Industrial Revolution was built on fossil fuel, its high energy density and reliability. Now, faced with climate change, we should give it up! But what should we use instead? And where is the guidance, as unequivocal as that of the canary, that should give everybody confidence in its safety?

It is a curious reaction to suppose that our problems can be solved by going back to pre-industrial-revolution sources like wood, wind and water. These were weak and unreliable then, and remain so. To harvest enough energy today their plants have to be built on a huge scale and the environmental damage they do is plain for all to see. How can vast flooded rivers, hillsides and meadows plastered with solar panels and the destruction of virgin forest be described as “green”? But the unreliability of “renewables” is an even greater failure and one that will not be bridged by an advance in energy storage on the scale needed. Secondary energy sources such as hydrogen or batteries are not “pre-charged” and have to be filled from a primary energy source.

The only other available pre-filled source known to physical science is nuclear. Fission using uranium or thorium has an energy density a million times that of coal, so little fuel is needed and little waste generated. As a result power plants can be made compact and robust with a negligible impact on the environment.

The only snag has been that nuclear frightens people, delaying construction and deterring investors. But does the evidence justify their concern? In the light of the official radiation safety regulations many tens of thousands were expected to die from the Chernobyl accident. The surrounding area was expected to be uninhabitable for a very long time and was left deserted except for wild animals roaming at will in the radioactive environment. Like a canary left in a gas-filled mine many were expected to die. But over the years many reports have told that the area has become a wildlife park in all but name. Pictures taken by BBC, National Geographic and others show animals thriving unmolested by humans.

So what went wrong? Do the animals know something that we don’t? “But they know nothing!” Dr Watson might say, to which Sherlock Holmes might reply “Quite so. But may be something that we think we know is not in fact the case.”

That radioactivity and its radiation are relatively harmless was confirmed by the human casualty figures from radiation at Chernobyl. Instead of thousands the list comprises 28 early firefighters and 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer. The story was repeated at Fukushima. Of course the tsunami was very exciting – that kind of news sells – and I watched in fascinated horror like everybody else. But the nuclear accident was quite different. Although it was labeled a disaster in the highest category, nobody at all was affected by the radiation. Just as at Chernobyl the serious damage was social and economic. In particular, alarmed authorities in Japan, Germany, USA and around the world turned off nuclear power stations and burnt fossil fuels instead. This disaster continues at the expense of the environment.

The popular worry about nuclear technology is simply mistaken. It is about a thousand times safer than regulations suggest. Many benefit from the use of quite high doses of radiation in clinical medicine as pioneered by Marie Curie to diagnose and cure cancer. The draconian regulations were introduced to appease popular concerns about radiation, inflamed by the nuclear arms race at the time of the cold war. How that happened is another story. Today it is important that young people learn the truth about nuclear science and what it can do to benefit the economy and the environment. 

The only realistic mitigation of climate change is the deployment of nuclear power on a grand scale. Running steadily it can provide waste heat and, at times of reduced demand, make hydrogen for chemicals, transport and domestic gas. We cannot do it? Of course we can! We should build modular power stations on a production-line basis, as US shipyards built Liberty ships in WWII. Many designs for such modular power stations are already in competition to come to market. Those investors who choose nuclear will be running the new industrial revolution. Better still, the curse of the renewables will be lifted from the fish in the rivers, the birds in the air and the grass in the meadows. 

25 January 2019

Wade Allison, MA DPhil wade.allison@physics.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Physics and Fellow of Keble College, University of Oxford, UK 
Hon. Sec.  Supporters Of Nuclear Energy (SONE) http://www.radiationandreason.comhttps://www.nuclear4life.com
“Nuclear is for Life” 2015 “Radiation and Reason” 2009 
“Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging”  2006 OUP

Filed Under: Guest Columns, Alternative energy, Atomic Advocacy, Climate change, Editorials

Who will be ThorCon’s EPC contractor?

September 27, 2017 By Guest Author 17 Comments

By Jack Devanney

ThorConIsle cooling pond, fission power module, secondary heat exchanger cell, steam generator cell, turbine hall, switchgear hall.
ThorConIsle cooling pond, fission power module, secondary heat exchanger cell, steam generator cell, turbine hall, switchgear hall.

Engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractors have led recent nuclear plant projects into disasters. Deca-billion dollar cost overruns. Schedules doubling. Some projects being cancelled after squandering billions of dollars. Giant corporations facing bankruptcy. This raises the obvious question: if Westinghouse can’t build a standard nuclear power plant, how in the world will a start up like ThorCon International deliver a nuclear power plant unlike any that has been built before?

Part of the answer is the technology. ThorCon’s power conversion side, the turbine hall and switchgear, are nearly off-the-shelf coal plant equipment. A low pressure fission reactor can be built with conventional metal bending technology. Most importantly, ThorCons will be entirely manufactured in assembly line fashion by a large shipyard, using already developed skills.

Engineering All the big Korean and Japanese yards have basic design and detailed design functions. Basic design takes a potential project far enough to do accurate costing so the yard can bid the job and be confident that it has a good handle on the resources required. At this point, the ship is delineated by about 50 drawings.

After they sign a contract, detailed design takes over. Detailed design not only does the working drawings, but just as important the production scheduling down to per shift detail. This includes scheduling each sub-block and block lift by crane. The weight and center of gravity of each lift is calculated and the lifting lugs are part of the design. Even any scaffolding which will be required in final erection is part of each block design, and installed at the block level. Detailed design and production scheduling cannot be separated.

The yards also have a well tuned monitoring and adjustment process to allow them to quickly respond to hiccups in the production process.

Procurement The shipyards divide purchased material into BFE (Builder Furnished Equipment) and OFE (Owner Furnished Equipment). For a standard ship, there is little or no OFE. Often it is little more than the ship’s stationary and the Owner’s flag. The yard takes responsibility for bidding and buying just about everything from an approved Makers List, which is part of the contract. The yard purchasers are Walmart-like in their ability to play vendors off against each other. The yards are big on-going customers whom no vendor can afford to alienate. And once the contract is signed, every dollar saved goes into the yard’s pocket.

In the case of specialized projects such as a drill ship, the owner may purchase and provide significant portions of the equipment. In the case of the first drill ships, the drilling rig itself was owner furnished. Initially, in ThorCon’s case, OFE may include the Can containing the reactor vessel, moderating graphite, circulating pump, and primary heat exchanger, along with portions of the offgas system. After the yard obtains experience and familiarity with these components, they will become BFE as the drill rigs have.

Construction Construction is the easy part. All the yards have a network of sub-contractors that they use for specialized jobs, and occasionally to level off market ups and downs. But the great bulk of the work is done by the yard itself by a permanent work force, most of whom began their career at the yard and expect to finish it there. They have already received extensive training at yard expense and in most cases worked with the same team for years. No undisciplined boomers need apply. No untrained and undependable locals either.

The Korean yard unions are interesting. They are tough, smart and very disciplined. They know exactly how much money the yard is making and every five years they make sure that they obtain a sizable portion of any gains in productivity. If they don’t, they are perfectly prepared to strike. If they do, the yard is completely shutdown. You do not want to be a scab trying to cross a Korean union picket line. But once the 5 year contract is signed, they live up to it. If a Korean yard worker is not carrying his load, he will hear from both his boss and his union steward. The union wants the yard to make money because they know that will strengthen their hand at the next contract negotiations. The overall effect is that the yards’ labor productivity is more than an order of magnitude higher than on-site construction.

Summary ThorConIsle will rely on the yard for detailed design outside the Can, production scheduling, and much of the equipment purchasing functions. The shipyard will be ThorCon’s EPC contractor.

Two 500 MWe ThorConIsle power plants, illustrating Can exchange to service ship.
Two 500 MWe ThorConIsle power plants, illustrating Can exchange to service ship.

Jack Devanney is the Chairman of ThorCon International. Jack was a professor of ocean engineering at MIT, who turned to designing the world’s largest (at the time) supertankers, then to this liquid fission power plant planned for Indonesia, using the same block technology. ThorConIsleTM will be constructed by a shipyard on a hull, towed to a shallow water site, then settled to the seabed and powered up.


Atomic Insights does not run ads and does not hide behind a paywall. Generous readers like you help to defray costs and provide sustaining income.

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Business of atomic energy, Guest Columns, Liquid Fuel Reactors, New Nuclear, Thorium Reactors

Nuclear’s Fork in the Road

August 19, 2017 By Guest Author

By Jim Little Would you be willing to continue investing in an established business with flat revenues, increasing costs while competing against an agile field of competitors who enjoy a market advantage of lower costs, quicker deployment schedules and the support of government subsidies and favorable public opinion? Should you stay the course and focus […]

Filed Under: Business of atomic energy, Guest Columns, Jim Little, Nuclear Performance

Clean and Doable Liquid Fission (LF) Energy Roadmap for Powering Our World

March 21, 2017 By Guest Author

By: Robert Hargraves and Chris Uhlik Introduction This essay responds to an article by Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson et al, 
100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World. Their controversial WWS roadmap has several interesting features and benefits. Coal, natural gas, and petroleum energy […]

Filed Under: Climate change, Guest Columns, Liquid Fuel Reactors, Small Nuclear Power Plants, Thorium, Thorium Reactors

Don’t Nuke the Climate – A Response to NIRS from Rauli Partanen and Janne M. Korhonen

December 29, 2015 By Guest Author 52 Comments

By Rauli Partanen and Janne M. Korhonen Earlier this year, we wrote a piece called “A most unwise campaign.” Writing as independent researchers, members of the Finnish Ecomodernist Society, and in association with non-profit organization Energy4Humanity, we criticized some of the claims prominently made in support of one of the staples of established anti-nuclear activism: […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Climate change, Guest Columns, Unreliables

Saving the environment from Environmentalism Part II

September 21, 2015 By Guest Author 54 Comments

by Paul Lorenzini Part II: Rethinking Environmentalism Today’s environmentalism is premised on two fundamental ideologies: first, solutions must “harmonize with nature” and second, nuclear power must be opposed at all costs. In the first part of this discussion I addressed the conflicts raised by constraining environmentalism in this way and how those constraints are working […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, Guest Columns, Lorenzini

Saving the Environment from Environmentalism

September 14, 2015 By Guest Author 97 Comments

By Paul Lorenzini Part I. Must we destroy the environment to save it? When Jonathan Franzen wrote a provocative piece in The New Yorker earlier this year, “Climate Capture”, Chris Clarke, an influential environmental blogger in California, described it as having “walked up to a hornet’s nest and hit it with a baseball bat.”[1] Franzen […]

Filed Under: Alternative energy, Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, Guest Columns, Lorenzini, Politics of Nuclear Energy

The Left Needs to Reconsider its Automatic Position Against Nuclear Energy

August 7, 2015 By Guest Author

by BILL SACKS and GREG MEYERSON As leftists who have studied the issue of nuclear energy for years, we want to reply to Robert Hunziker’s “Real Story” titled What’s Really Going on at Fukushima? (CounterPunch, June 15, 2015). It’s time for much of the left to reconsider a long-standing opposition to nuclear energy that often […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Atomic politics, Guest Columns, Health Effects, hormesis

Fukushima is not contaminating Pacific

September 25, 2014 By Guest Author

By Les Corrice It is widely reported that hundreds of tons of highly contaminated Fukushima Daiichi groundwater pours into the Pacific Ocean every day. But, an objective look at the evidence tells a completely different story. It’s long-past time for the Tokyo Electric Company (Tepco) and the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) to broadcast the truth […]

Filed Under: Accidents, Contamination, Guest Columns, International nuclear

The Godzilla Movie and the Parallel with Fukushima

June 8, 2014 By Guest Author

By Les Corrice I’ve seen every Godzilla movie ever made. I was an adolescent when the first one hit America, and I immediately fell in love with monster movies…a passion I have held to this day. Needless to say, when the latest Godzilla movie hit the big screen a few weeks ago, I was there. […]

Filed Under: Accidents, Atomic politics, Guest Columns, International nuclear, Natural disasters, Politics of Nuclear Energy

Critical Analysis of Mousseau Fukushima Presentation

March 22, 2014 By Guest Author

no. of birds vs. radiation field from Mousseau

Editor’s Note: On March 11, 2013, Dr. Timothy Mousseau gave a presentation at the Helen Caldicott sponsored symposium on the Medical and Ecological Consequences of Fukushima. This analysis by Dr. Patrick Walden, was posted as a TRIUMF wiki soon after that event and is republished here with his permission. Dr. Walden is a retired nuclear […]

Filed Under: Accidents, Antinuclear activist, Guest Columns

Open letter to antinuclear groups claiming to be “environmental”

February 10, 2014 By Guest Author

US GigaWatt Hours Delivered per Life Lost (2003-2012)

Dr. Alexander Cannara is an environmental activist who has been writing letters to antinuclear groups. He gave me permission to republish one of his missives here. The views expressed are his, but they deserve to reach a larger audience. By Dr. Alexander Cannara Date: 19 Sept. 2013 Subject: An open letter to groups I’ll no […]

Filed Under: Atomic Advocacy, Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, Guest Columns

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 5
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Search Atomic Insights

The Atomic Show

Atomic Insights

Follow Atomic Insights

Recent Posts

Atomic Show #288 – Per Peterson, CNO, Kairos Power

Kenneth Pitzer blamed AEC advisors for slow power reactor development

Why did the US Atomic Energy Commission kill Daniels Pile in 1947?

How did an oil shale investor hamstring his atomic energy competition? (Ancient but impactful smoking gun)

Improved atomic energy offers a pathway that Princeton’s Net Zero America failed to acknowledge

  • Home
  • About Atomic Insights
  • Atomic Show
  • Contact
  • Links

Search Atomic Insights

Archives

Copyright © 2021 · Atomic Insights

Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy