Nuclear Idiot

And Rebecca Solnit is not afraid to show it. Let me count the ways.

Are nukes unsafe? Nukes are so unsafe that the Navy gladly puts them in the most valuable ships.

Are they too time-consuming to build? France hasn't found that to be a problem. And like anything else you get better with practice and the skills fade without practice.

Would nuclear power keep our infrastructure intact and allow consumption to continue? Uh, yeah. Perhaps one should consider the economic and social costs of some grand and great dislocation? That sounds like a much better idea don't you think?

Not happy with a nuke plant in your backyard? I happen to have one in mine and I rather like it. I have plenty of electricity and it doesn't come at the price of spewing CO2 and worse into the atmosphere for us all to enjoy in the form of climate change. Maybe you would prefer to work in a coal mine run by the likes of Robert Murray.

Now that the most recent energy bill has passed I think that gates are about to be opened on nuclear power investment. And you can't really get much mileage on the Three Mile Island thing. It was a clear demonstration that the safety systems worked on even a plant of that vintage. The new plants currently and soon-to-be under construction will be much more robust in that regard.

Now lets talk about mining. Whatever evils there are with uranium mining you can find them in much greater quantities in coal mining, oil and gas drilling, and other sorts of mineral extraction. There is one significant difference. The energy density in uranium is so much higher than these other things the net effects of the relative evils are much lower. And you can only burn coal, oil, and gas once. With uranium you can not only produce more fuel than you consume, you can with repeated recycling consume it at a nuclear level instead of chemical level. And the more you recycle it, the less long-lived waste you have.

Rebecca then moves on to enrichment costs. The old gaseous diffusion plants is Kentucky are energy hogs. But even then the amount of electricity produced by the enriched uranium eclipsed the amount consumed. The next generation of plants will use gas centrifuge technology that reduces the power consumption by a factor of 20. Under development is a third method of enrichment, laser isotopic separation. The capital cost of a laser enrichment plant is a fifth of that for a gas centrifuge plant and the operating costs are comparable to perhaps 50% of a gas centrifuge plant. That's all to the good.

In terms recycling, Rebecca goes for the big distortion. She calls Sellafield the biggest experiment in reprocessing but ignores the years of successful reprocessing experience across the channel at La Hague where fuel from French, German, Dutch, Japanese, and Belgian plants is reprocessed.

It takes lots of fossil fuel to build buildings, homes, and roads as well as nuclear power plants but I don't think Rebecca wants us to stop such major economic activity. Or maybe so.

Right now it takes a long time to build a plant because our systems are out of practice. As practice is gained the cycle time as with most processes has nowhere to go but down.

Eventually Rebecca just loses her contact with reality completely. "murderously filthy, imparting long-lasting contamination on an epic scale" Give me a break! Rebecca may not know what to do with spent fuel but fortunately there are better minds that have the know-how to turn it into nice, clean power.

I'm all for alternative energy efforts. I'm for spending tax dollars to develop these fledgling technologies. There may be many better ways to produce energy and to use it more wisely. Let's go after them. I'm for using alternative energy wherever possible. Diversity is the key to resiliency and independence.

But running screaming down the hall about nuclear energy is just not helpful at all.