Up and Atom!

If the average transmission lines loses between 4% and 8% of the electricity that passes through it (by generating heat and electromagnetic fields, if you really must know), wouldn’t it make sense to have the power source closer to those who are going to use it? Think of the power savings. Think of the cost of avoiding laying new transmission lines. For some, having a field of spinning wind generators isn’t an attractive alternative, and until batteries are cheap, have no negative impact on the environment when they are disposed of and we can compensate for rain, clouds and, perish the thought, nighttime, solar isn’t quite there yet. So, like what shall we do, you exclaim?! How about a community nuke?! If the biggest reactors generate enough electricity to power 1.5 million homes (or about 1,455 megawatts), why can’t we have smaller ones that generate, say, 300 megawatts, which is enough to power a smaller city (of 300 thousand homes)?

Well if the Department of Energy has anything to say about this new field, they will build those 300 megawatt nuclear reactors all over the U.S., each one “enough for Knoxville, Tenn., according to Dan Ingersoll of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They may go even smaller, producing 50-megawatt reactors that could power small towns or even individual work sites, such as mines, that may be located far from the main energy grid.” Washington Post (September 13^th). Hey, we could save the environment! Wouldn’t that be a blast?! Oooops!

Well, we are slowly destroying our planet, and the United States is still one of the biggest polluters with it release of greenhouse gasses: “More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power.” The above Post article, quoting environmentalist, Patrick Moore. Yeah, but think the Three Mile Island reactor leak in 1979 or the horrific 1986 meltdown in the Russian city of Chernobyl.

Times, they are a-changing, as the Post adds: “Today, supporting nuclear power as a green alternative is quite mainstream. In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama advocated ‘building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants.’ In February, the administration offered to guarantee a loan for construction of the first nuclear plant to be built in the United States since the 1970s. The same month, billionaire Bill Gates gave his backing to the nuclear power renaissance, investing $50 million in TerraPower, a nuclear power research company that is hoping to design a new generation of reactors.” Take a deep breath. Living near a reactor is a whole lot safer than living near one of those toxin-emitting coal-fired electrical plants for sure, but there is still something about living near something that a terrorist could crack and emit fatal amounts of radiation on to Main Street. But even the residue ash from a coal-fired plant emits 100 times the radiation of a comparable nuclear reactor!

Hey, but how do we move nuclear fuel into these plants safely, and more important how do we remove and then dispose of spent fuel rods? It’s a problem; we working on that. But at least the stuff made in most of these reactors isn’t sufficiently refined to be used in a traditional nuclear weapon… but… if you wanted to, you could use a reactor to further refine nuclear fuel... that would be a tad obvious. And since these reactors are whole lot smaller, they may be able to be placed deep underground to make them that much more of a difficult target to hit.

Whatever the problems, there may not be a better solution for quite a while. Scary as this proposition might be, we may just have to get used to the “new nuclear world”: “Hyperion, a New Mexico-based manufacturer, has said it plans to start delivering 25-megawatt reactors, which are about the size of a garden shed and cost around $25 million, in 2013. The first units will probably be installed in Eastern Europe. A few other companies, including Toshiba, are applying to the federal government for the right to build small reactors. And Oak Ridge's Ingersoll targets 2020 as the earliest date a U.S. city might come online.” The Post. I wonder if those New Mexico dudes speak Farsi (the language of Iran)?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am thinking NIMBY too!