On Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 12:12:15AM -0500, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
>
> What stumbles occured with nuclear power? Even counting Chernobyl (more
> a result of socialism than nuclear technology) and the two bombs dropped
> on Japan there are still fewer people killed by nuclear technology in
> its entire history than are killed every year by the pollution of coal
> burning technology, and coal burning plants put more radioactive
> materials into the environment every day than the entire US nuclear
> industry has released in its history.
Remember "electricity too cheap to meter"? Possibly not, as that was
rhetoric used in the UK to promote nuclear power in the 1950's.
Nuclear electricity was grossly oversold because when the second
generation reactors were being introduced -- the first post-military
generation -- they were installed without any thought about decomissioning
costs. In some cases (e.g. the USSR) they were installed without
any disaster planning -- as witness the RBMK reactors built with no
containment vessels. (If Chernobyl had been equipped with a western-style
containment vessel, the accident would have caused no consequences worse
than Three Mile Island.)
To make matters worse, civilian reactors were based on military designs;
for example, the PWRs used in the west were originally based on scaled-up
naval propulsion reactors. This means essentially we have lightweight
high performance reactors, not reactors optimized for (a) safety, (b)
economical operation, and (c) easy decommissioning. (I'm inclined to
ascribe this to the fact that most nuclear developments were government-
led from the start, except that without government intervention it's hard
to conceive of a commercial entity building the damn things in the first
place.)
The upshot is that nuclear reactors today are a bit like space launchers
-- hyper-evolved military spin-offs, expensive, powerful, but unreliable
and not really suitable for low-cost, safe, civilian use. The problem
with this picture is that there is no nuclear equivalent of ROTON or
Beal or Kistler on the horizon; because nuclear technology has strategic
military implications, no government is going to let some bunch of
eccentric whacko technology entrepreneurs reinvent it in a cheap, fast,
and out-of-control format that can prove its merit on the open market.
> While some countries are shutting
> down their nuclear plants, they are increasing output at their coal
> plants, and are buring lower quality coal than ever before.
Or natural gas. In the UK, coal plants are being shut down and switched
to methane-burning turbined at remarkable speed. Meanwhile, the nuclear
industry is moribund. The real exceptions are France and Japan, which
for reasons of state policy are building potloads of nuclear reactors.
By 2020, a much higher proportion of the UK's electricity will be nuclear
than is the case today -- and it will be imported from France.
-- Charlie
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