Nature and Nuclear Power, the hills and valleys will be thankful and every creature rejoice!
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
I hope that they’re built better than that! The Liberty Ships had only a five-year design life.
Brian,
That may be true, but some of those ships remained in service for decades. “Design life” can be extended with conscientious operations, planned maintenance, repairs/replacements and improvements/alterations. It’s not a hard and fast limit.
Liberty ship made it back for the 50th anniversary of DDay 1994. But yes, I agree, they should be well made. Production line construction should not exclude that.
The Liberty ships were a copy of a standard pre-war general cargo
ship. There was no such thing as “design life” in those days.
The ships were expected to last indefinitely if they were properly
maintained. The design was far more conservative than
ships built today. Pre-WWII ships regularly had 50 year service
lives, usually end by obsolescence.
A handful of Liberty ships experienced brittle failure in an unusual
combination of warm air and cold water. This was eventually
traced to the notch toughness of the steel and rectified
by decreasing the sulfur content. This problem had probably
been going on since steel ships were first built, but
needed a very large sample of ships to allow it to be identified.
I dunno, a 10 or 20 year design life for things like the NuScale cans might be an advantage. By specifying them as wear items to be replaced regularly, you don’t have to worry about details like neutron embrittlement and fine corrosion for the full life of the plant. All you have to do is make them easy to swap out and take away for remanufacture or recycling. The balance of plant can be treated like any normal industrial asset.
If they can ever get these things built in the first place, they will be first generation. Technology today increases at an exponential pace. After their 20 year lifespan they can be replaced by something much improved. I grew up with vacuum tubes. Two generations later, people hardly know what they are.
Thanks for the essay from Wade Allison. He published “Radation and Reason” a decade ago. He told us then that without nuclear energy, the future for mankind looks bleak.
Another essay deserving of exposure is: “Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet”. By Joshua S. Goldstein and Staffan A Qvist published in the Wall Street Journal. January 12-13,2019. This essay is adapted from the authors’ new book, “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest
Can Follow,” published by Public Affairs.
A thank you to Dr. Wade Allison!
By the way I also published “Nuclear Is For Life” in 2015
And both your books are well-worth the price! Thanks Wade!
All fine, but the real reason to go nuclear is to fulfill mankind’s extraterrestrial imperative. Part of that is providing a sufficient quantity and quality of manpower to seriously pursue fusion for power and rocket propulsion. Fusion may begin with fission-assisted fusion microexplosions employing the Nernst effect, as proposed by Friedwardt Winterberg.(http://www.znaturforsch.com/aa/v61a/s61a0559.pdf).
Forget about climate change. Let’s seize control of the climate, with indoor agriculture and the conquest of space! And let’s not wait for a big asteroid or comet to demolish us, or the Yellowstone Park super-volcano to erupt. The “science” behind the AGW scare is no better than that behind the mass-media estimates of cancers and other illnesses resulting from Chernobyl, and it has the same source: British imperial geopolitics, always obsessed with keeping the human herd under control!
@Richard
Though I read a lot of SciFi when I was growing up, I never developed any real interest in space travel. Life on Earth is more my speed. If you look through Atomic Insights archives, you will also find that I am not very interested in fusion as a power source. It’s too darned difficult. It also doesn’t have any compelling advantages over fission, especially if you don’t happen to have the massive gravity of a star available.
I just listened to a series of interviews on Titans of Nuclear where the guests were all fusion scientists. They’re quite excited by their chosen field, but they are also all the kind of people who enjoy working on very difficult problems for years with only dim hopes of success – as long as someone else funds their investigations.
I first started reading about nuclear power sometime around 1973 when my dad was working construction at the McGuire Nuclear plant near Charlotte, NC. I distinctly remember reading the fusion power plants were going to replace fission power plants in about 30 years. And I just read an article over the weekend that speculated that fusion power plants could be providing the bulk of our energy needs in about 30 years. For more that 40 years, fusion power plants have been “just 30 years away.”
Unfortunately, we can’t wait that long. Fission power plants are a safe, well understood technology and are capable of providing for our current and future energy needs now. Should we keep researching fusion power? Sure. Should we wait for fusion to be practical before we do anything. Absolutely not.
@Rod
“It also doesn’t have any compelling advantages over fission”
Well, for one thing, no decay heat. that’s a huge difference, it means you don’t need an emergency cooling system, aux feedwater system, RHR system… Less non-productive equipment to design, procure, build, maintain, operate, and suffer regulatory “help” with.
Of course there’s all sorts of other systems you need for fusion that dont appear in a fission plant. But they aren’t regulatory compliance only systems. So they could be designed in a rational, economic manner.
Nuclear fission alone will allow us to develop the economy and the minds of the people to the level needed to master fusion and space. That’s not science fiction. And mankind will go extinct billions of years before all life on earth is destroyed if we don’t develop the capabilities to deflect asteroids and comets and survive super-volcanoes. Besides, a future in which people are forever bound to the earth is not politically acceptable. Who is going to enforce birth control?
For rocket propulsion, fusion offers very compelling advantages over fission because it has no minimum critical mass, allowing truly “micro” microexplosions, and because of the simplicity of the fusion products, especially aneutronic fusion of helium-3. Of course, it is difficult, but we haven’t really tried. We’ve invested a mean pittance in fusion research so far, compared to what we spend on jihadis and nazis to kill or exile competent heads of state, as in Libya and Ukraine, and continue to spend on Ukraine to keep the nazis in power. And our whole economy is still based mostly on fossil fuels, with a large slice of that wasted on “green energy”. Imagine what we could do if we went full throttle with breeder reactors, stopped pretending that the U.K. is our best ally, and Russia and China our enemies.
Forgot to mention that with nuclear fusion far higher temperature industrial process heat is achieved, allowing more efficient production of electricity and the mining of garbage by turning it into plasma. The same technology that enables us to contain the fusion plasma will allow us to handle the plasma made of garbage. While it might be possible to run a fission power plant with similar containment and temperatures, the complexity of the fission products and of maintaining criticality (without going super-critical) at fission fuel plasma temperatures is a needless challenge.
We often hear about the animals doing just fine within Chernobyl exclusion zone, but I’m curious why the “babushkas” are rarely mentioned? Any insights or opinions would be appreciated. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/science/babushkas-of-chernobyl-finds-life-thriving-in-scarred-land.html
Just ordered “Nuclear Is For Life”. Thanks, Wade
I began my physics student career at Cambridge in 1959. Among other great men of science I was taught by Otto Frisch who wrote this spoof article in 1955 in honour of Niels Bohr. Written as for the year 4955 it reports on a proposal to replace nuclear power plants by coal fired ones. I recall that in the 1950s this was thought very funny. Today it has a more serious side.https://www.mpoweruk.com/coal.htm