A Political Platform based upon Natural Law: (Part IX) Nuclear Power to the People

I Have a Dream

I have a dream that we will someday have an energy source that is inexpensive, safe, non-polluting, and virtually infinite. There will be more than enough of such energy for all the people of the world.

Guess what? I can wake up now because my dream is a reality. And it is a reality because of nuclear power. How so? Keep reading.

A Clean Environment and a Prosperous Country

In my last post, my main point was that countries that are prosperous have the cleanest environments. And that being a prosperous country is closely related to having inexpensive energy. (Having a good government that protects the life, liberty and property of its citizens is also essential, but that’s another story). Prosperous countries can afford pollution controls. They can afford to do research into more efficient ways of obtaining and providing energy, and they can afford to conserve natural resources.

The wonderful thing now is that because of technological advances, we can have all of the following AND save money:

1) Inexpensive energy, both as electricity and for transportation.

2) Lower prices for almost everything else (because inexpensive energy means the prices of almost everything will go down, and thus will increase our prosperity).

3) Reduced pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.

4) Energy conservation.

5) Be less dependent or even independent on foreign oil.

How can we accomplish this? First, let’s get a historical perspective on energy.

Historical perspective on Energy

From the beginning of recorded history until the end of the 19th century, life for the vast majority of humans was a miserable affair. Here’s what you could expect if you had lived back then: half of your children would die before they made it out of childhood; for those that did make it out of childhood, you’d most likely die before seeing their children; your bathrooms were bedpans and bug-infested outhouses; you rarely bathed; you were illiterate and innumerate; your drinking water was frequently dirty; you were either too hot or too cold or too sick or too hungry. You had no antibiotics, no phone, no air conditioning, no car, and no indoor plumbing. If you wanted to travel further than someplace that was within walking distance, you took a horse, if you could afford one, and a woman with children rarely traveled at all.

On the other hand, today in the developed world, you feel deprived if you don’t have a broadband Internet connection, or, heaven forbid, a cell phone. Avoiding horse manure while traveling is not a problem for you. You don’t personally know anyone in America who is starving, but you know plenty of people who eat more on Thanksgiving Day than George Washington ate in a year. (Present company excluded). The only adult you know who doesn’t own or share a car is Ralph Nader. When you buy a house, your biggest consideration is whether the guest bedroom has its own full bathroom.

What technology lays at the foundation of the prosperity that has afforded us all of the advantages of modern life?

The single most important technological component in the prosperous maintenance of human life is inexpensive, abundant energy.

Inexpensive energy lays at the foundation as to why the average life span in the US has gone from 36 years to 76 years in less than 100 years. It affords us clean water and modern sanitation; homes, hospitals and other buildings that protect us from the vagaries of the weather; indoor lighting, modern medicine and more – all of those things that electricity has helped to provide. Inexpensive energy has also resulted in roads and transportation that even a Ben Franklin would have found inconceivable – just try taking your kids to the library in the winter with just horses.

Current situation

At the time of writing, the price of oil has been hovering at around $70 per barrel, and the price of natural gas has increased three-fold in the last 5 years. The United States is dependent on other countries to meet our energy needs. We currently spend over $300 billion for imported gas and oil. And because we are dependent on foreign oil and gas, we have involved ourselves, militarily and otherwise, in the affairs of nations that control those sources of energy. Arguably, if we had been energy independent, we may well have not gotten into a war with Iraq.

Expensive energy also contributes to poverty. Many people around the world still burn wood for their major source of energy. This is inefficient, and causes a lot of pollution. Also, reducing the number of trees on our planted reduces the ability to absorb carbon dioxide.

Expensive energy also contributes indirectly to pollution. For instance, the cement factories in Texas produce a significant amount of pollutants, including mercury, lead, and sulfur dioxide. Inexpensive energy would make it more affordable for cement factories (and other industries) to invest in technologies that would reduce their emissions.

Finally, expensive energy adds to the production costs of almost everything we make. This not only lowers our standard of living, but it makes our products less competitive than foreign goods. For instance, the recent steep rise in construction costs has been attributed to higher energy prices.

There are a number of well-intentioned people who believe that higher energy costs will benefit us in the long run, since it would “force” us to become more energy efficient, and find more sustainable ways of generating electricity, as well as lessening our dependence on foreign oil. These people are wrong. Higher energy prices will just create more poverty. Neither Bill Gates nor Ross Perot nor Al Gore would be inconvenienced by high energy prices, but you and I would be, and the poor even more so.

What about Solar Energy?

Solar energy will be a good, inexpensive source of energy – eventually. It has a few difficult hurdles to overcome. First, solar energy is not concentrated; a square foot of earth receives only a very small amount of energy. Therefore, to become a major source of energy, huge areas will need to capture it. Second, it is not constant. There is less solar energy when clouds are out and no solar energy at all at night. We need a constant base load of energy, and solar energy cannot provide that now or in the near future. Related to this, if a number of volcanoes went off at the same time, much of the Earth might not see the Sun for months or years. If we were completely dependent on solar energy, this would be a disaster. So no matter how inexpensive and wide spread solar energy becomes, it should not be our only source of energy.

In addition, solar energy, except in a few isolated cases, is still expensive. If we were forced to increase it now, it would create poverty, but we want to do the opposite. The best thing we can do with respect to solar energy is to continue doing research on the best ways to use it, and to give solar a chance to grow and develop into an important and inexpensive, non-polluting energy source.

Why Nuclear Energy is the solution

Nuclear energy is the only current way in which we can provide a constant base load of safe, inexpensive, non-polluting energy. The reasons for these are detailed below.

What is Nuclear Energy, anyway?

Nuclear energy obtained by the fissioning (breaking up) of heavy atomic nuclei, such as uranium and thorium, as a result of a neutron hitting such a nucleus. This fissioning releases very large amounts of energy that can be harnessed by heating water to turn it into steam that turns turbines to create electricity. Each nucleus that fissions gives off neutrons that can then strike another nucleus, so that the process continues.

How safe is Nuclear Energy?

It’s hard to get much safer. Not a single American has died as a result of radiation from a commercial nuclear reactor. Literally, zero Americans have died in over 50 years of commercial nuclear power use.

France gets over 75% of its energy from nuclear power, has the cleanest air in Europe, has the cheapest energy in Europe, exports $8 billion worth of energy to Germany and England, and has shut down its last coal plant in 2004, all because they started using nuclear energy in the 1970s. And it takes them only about 3 years to build a new plant.

To be efficient, they basically use the same plant design for a long time so that they know the plant will be safe, and how to build it inexpensively. They do research into new generation plants, and when they find one they like, they approve it and go with that in the future.

It costs France about 3 to 4 cents to generate a KWH of energy. (I’m paying 11.3 cents per KWH now). No one in France has been killed from nuclear power radiation in over 50 years of use.

What happened to the United States? We got scared. We saw the fictional movie, “The China Syndrome”, about a nuclear accident that almost happened; a partial meltdown did happen at Three Mile Island, but no one was killed or injured; and then we heard about the Chernobyl disaster. This really scared many of us, even though Chernobyl was built by and run by Communists, who hardly ever did anything right. (They did turn out some good ballet dancers). But those scientists who knew the most, and especially nuclear engineers, knew how great nuclear power could be.

Current power plant designs eliminate the possibility of a melt-down, and no design can result in a nuclear explosion. And nuclear plants are designed so that even if a jet were to crash into one, the nuclear fuel would still be contained.

How much energy can we get from Nuclear Power?

Right now nuclear power in the U.S. accounts for about 20% of our electricity and 70% of the power from pollution-free sources.

Kirk Sorenson from NASA said, “Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors gives many options for inherently-safe, proliferation resistant, economic nuclear power that can last for thousands if not millions of years.

“This technology offers real-options for solving long-term issues surrounding spent nuclear fuel.” This is because such reactors can get rid of spent nuclear fuel by extracting energy from it.

How efficient is Nuclear Power?

A single pound of highly-enriched uranium used to power a nuclear submarine is equal to about a million gallons of gasoline.

The nuclear waste created per person-lifetime could fit in the size of a Coke can, and then can be controlled (by storing it), whereas a coal plant produces 130,000 pounds of waste products in addition to 77 tons of CO2 per person-lifetime.

On a large plant scale, a 1 billion watt (giga-watt or GW) coal plant burns 3,000,000 tons of coal a year, but an equivalent nuclear power plant uses only 20 tons of uranium per year.

What about the waste products?

The radioactive waste products from a nuclear plant can be safely dealt with in a number of ways.

Currently, the United States stores its wastes underground in casings that prevent any leakage at the nuclear reactor site. A jet crashing into such a storage facility would not affect the casings. Furthermore, even completely exposed casings that have been hit by trucks, trains and jets (in experiments!) have not been compromised.

Canada's plan is to safely store the wastes for 175 years (but can be retrieved before then if desired). During that 175 years, the overall radioactivity of the used fuel drops to one-billionth of the level from when it removed from the reactor. At that time, the future Canadians can deal with it in some manner that we cannot currently foresee.

President Obama is expected to adopt a similar plan, now that Nevada has rejected Yucca Mountain as a waste repository.

There’s an excellent book called, Whole Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand. He was also the author of The Whole Earth Catalog, written in 1969, which is one of the most famous books in the world. Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to the Internet search engine Google in his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech. Brand is an ecologist and futurist and says he sees everything in terms of a solvable design problem.

Steward Brand said that he had been against nuclear power because of passing on nuclear wastes to future generations. Then in 2002 he went to Yucca Mountain and talked to a group called "Long Now". They told Brand that is was folly to think about having to store the waste for 10,000 years or more since we have no idea what technical advancements will occur. They said we should put it in a safe place and in 50 to 100 years, "we will be taking it out and using it as a valuable energy resource." This is because spent nuclear fuel still has 95% of its energy. We just need to find ways to extract the energy from it in an inexpensive way. (As we’ll see later, with thorium plants coming, it may not take even that long before we can extract energy from current wastes, and leave only short lived wastes that can easily be dealt with).

Surprisingly, nuclear energy has done more to eliminate existing nuclear weapons from the world than any other activity. There’s a joint U.S. – Russian program to convert warheads into fuel, called, “Megatons to Megawatts.” As a result of this, about 10% of the electricity that Americans use comes from Russian missiles and bombs. What an amazing development!

What’s coming up in the near future with Nuclear Power?

Our current nuclear reactors all use uranium as a fuel. The modern ones (called Generation III reactors) are very, very good.

Many people, such as NASA’s James Hansen, are very excited about the up-and-coming Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors. Here's what he has to say about them. They have:

- a practically unlimited supply of fuel (there's more thorium than either lead or tin in the Earth's crust)

- lower construction and operating costs

- super-high fuel efficiency

- greatly reduced waste

- much shorter radioactive life in the waste (a few hundred years)

- create a high temperature that can be used to produce hydrogen from water, or even cheaply desalinate water

- can burn existing nuclear waste (and generate energy from them), and well as burn existing weapons grade uranium and plutonium that we have as a result of the various nuclear weapons reduction treaties

There is even a plan to have a thorium reactor that is buried deep underground, and will generate electricity for 50 years with no maintenance! After that it can just left in the ground in its robust casing that can easily store the small amount or remaining waste until it is no longer radioactive. These would be very inexpensive and safe, and can be used close to wherever they are needed. These would be especially useful in developing countries that do not have an extensive power grid network.

What’s happening now in the United States with respect to Nuclear Power?

Not long ago, NASA's James Hansen, who is very concerned about global warming, wrote an open letter to President Obama. In it he said that how bad coal is and asked for, "urgent R&D on 4th-generation nuclear power with international cooperation. The danger is that the minority of vehement anti-nuclear 'environmentalists' (his quotes) could cause the development of advanced safe nuclear power to be slowed such that utilities are forced to continue coal-burning in order to keep the lights on."

Hansen’s letter may be one reason that President Obama’s proposed budget included increased research on nuclear energy as well as loan guarantees for utilities that build a nuclear power plant.

President Obama just announced (February, 2010) loan guarantees to build the first U.S. nuclear power plants in three decades. There are 13 applications at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC) for new plants. The earliest they could be approved would be late 2011 to 2012, but it's a start. President Obama is strongly pushing for the United States to generate much of its electricity from nuclear power, and he should be loudly applauded for it.

The feds will allow up to a three-year period for hearings, addressing any concerns, etc. This will minimize delays once the NRC has approved the site (which the state must also approve) and the reactor design, which the NRC has already done. For example, Westinghouse's AP1000 reactor has already been approved, and a number of other reactors are in the process of receiving approval. In the past, lawsuits from certain environmental groups have prevented the construction of nuclear power plants, but the hearing process mentioned above will presumably stop these groups from doing this.  Fortunately, many environmental groups whe were previously against nuclear power are now for it.

At least three thorium-related bills are making their way through the Capitol, including the Senate’s Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act, cosponsored by Orrin Hatch of Utah and Harry Reid of Nevada, which would provide $250 million for research at the Department of Energy. “I don’t know of anything more beneficial to the country, as far as environmentally sound power, than nuclear energy powered by thorium,” Hatch says.”

Intellectual Ventures, LLC, which is partially backed by Bill Gates, has a team of 30 scientists and engineers working on concepts for better thorium nuclear reactors, among many other things.

There are about 50 countries that have, or are planning to build nuclear power plants. The number of countries as well as the number of proposed plants is increasing as people become aware of the advantages of generating inexpensive, safe, virtually infinite, non-polluting nuclear energy. And the United States is now, once again, ready to jump back onto the nuclear-energy bandwagon.

Every new large energy plant we build should be nuclear. We can then avoid a “carbon tax” that will just cause poverty.

If you’re interested in some of the technical details about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, there's a video called, "What Fusion Wanted to Be", presented at one of the Google Tech Talks.

What else can the U.S. do with nuclear power to help developing countries?

We could build and help to run nuclear power plants as well as provide the fuel for them, and dispose of any wastes produced. (They would pay us to do this so U.S. taxpayers would not be paying for other’s energy). Then developing countries would also have inexpensive, non-polluting energy, which would assist them in becoming prosperous.

The lesson of Haiti was that it wasn't the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, it was poverty. If we implement the suggestions I've given above, we will do more to increase prosperity and decrease pollution than any carbon tax or any treaty will do. And it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out that prosperous countries rarely, if ever, go to war with each other.

Conclusion

Nuclear power to the people!

Next up

I’ll present a comprehensive environmental policy that will greatly reduce pollution, conserve energy and other natural resources, and save money as well. I have not seen any other policy that will reduce the likelihood of global warming causing harm than the one I’ll present.

Because it will save money, it will be a “no regrets” environmental policy. There will be no regrets because even if global warming does not cause significant problems, we’ll still save money, have less pollution and create more prosperity.

As Mister Spock would say: “Carbon free and prosper.”

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Tim Farage is a Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at The University of Texas at Dallas. You are welcome to comment upon this blog entry and/or to contact him at tfarage@hotmail.com.

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