End Of Nuclear Power in Sight?
It’s good to see the world of nuclear power showing concern about seismic activity that may endanger their reactors – especially in California, where we’ve been known to have a temblor or two. Elsewhere in the news, Japan is shutting down its last nuke this weekend. Perhaps we really are making the transition from a Type Zero to a Type One civilization, in the parlance of physicist Michio Kaku (the video linked here is quite good).
Japan is, at least temporarily, making a transition away from nuclear power and moving towards using more fossil fuel power, including LNG and coal, of which they have greatly increased their imports. As a result, their emission of greenhouse gasses has increased and they are experiencing trade deficits.
Of course seismic activity is a legitimate concern and should be considered when deciding where to locate power plants. We also should be doing more R & D work so that we can use safer and more economical nuclear technologies.
I think the future of nuclear power is in micro nuclear units — those under 50MW or so, manufactured in an assembly line and used in a distributed format. They are designing nukes now that use thorium instead of uranium and use depleted fuel instead of enriched fuel, which could take care of the nuclear waste problem. They also employ passive instead of active cooling systems, meaning the plant shuts down automatically in a crisis.
Tim,
I think that you are right. However, I doubt that micro nuclear system will replace large systems. It’s my guess that they will coexist.
It seems that most people are unaware that there are myriad ways to design nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, we’ve been stuck with mostly pressurized water reactors and a few boiling water reactors and, for several reasons, I think that that is a mistake; there are better reactor types.
Public opinion is notoriously fickle. For example, at one time, the American public overwhelmingly supported involvement in the Vietnam war and excoriated anyone who opposed it, but now it is hard to find anyone who will admit ever supporting it. Probably as soon as the electrical system becomes unreliable and electricity becomes too expensive, the public will demand nuclear power or anything that works regardless of the consequences. I just hope that we will do the necessary R & D work so that we can implement a better, cheaper, and safer nuclear technology to enable us to phase out gradually our current nuclear technology.
I am reminded of how England delayed the development of automobiles by enacting a law that, in the daytime, required a man to walk on front of any car while waving a red flag and at night required him to wave a red lantern.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_laws