(Matt Patterson is a smart friend of mine explaining the hows-and-whats of alternative energy so all of the discussion of it on this site isn’t just me saying “gosh, that sounds neat”. In a follow-up to his previous entry, he explained the problem with solar power. Today he explains the future of nuclear power.)

So, where were we?

I had just said that nuclear power could save humanity, and some of you were about to crucify me for saying it. Hell, not that long ago, I would have helped you do the same to someone else.

And that’s fine. It’s fine because it’s right to protest the way that much of the world is currently using and developing nuclear power. Right now, the way the US, in particular, uses Nuclear power is fucking stupid. That doesn’t mean it has to be that way, forever or in all places.

I’m going to ask that everyone, even those who hate nuclear power with a burning rage, set aside all the things they know about nuclear power for a moment, and read with an open mind. I ask this out of a sincere belief that we can only move forward through open dialog that is not ruled by dogmatic belief on either side, and where both good will and skepticism are engaged. Don’t take me at face value. I’ll give you links, you can use the Goog and Wikipedia on your own. If you’re reading this, you’re likely young, intelligent, and interested in the world, and are exactly the kind of person I want to talk about the subject.

So let’s examine nuclear power.

All nuclear power currently producing electricity in the world is based on fission. Fission is the process of taking large, heavy atoms like uranium and splitting them into smaller atoms and a certain amount of energy, usually captured as heat, which is then used to produce steam to generate electrical power. Fission is a natural process that has been going on for ages. There have even been natural nuclear reactors. It’s true that when some atoms fission, they produce long-lived radioactive atoms that are extremely dangerous. However, not all nuclear fuel cycles are created equally, and some are far less dangerous than others. All types of fission do locally produce radiation that must be carefully contained within the reactor housing, but this isn’t all that difficult or even expensive to do.

Most currently operating reactors are variants of the Light Water Reactor type, which are inherently pretty safe, stable, and fairly efficient. This is not to say they are without problems. The main problem associated with the use of current LWR is that they make use of solid fuel rods. Well, you say, Uranium is a metal! What else are they going to use? This is a fair enough point, but there are alternatives, which I’ll address in a while. One of the main problems with the solid fuel cycle is that as fission goes on inside the reactor, the fission products from using up Uranium are stuck inside the fuel rod. This is not necessarily a big deal, but it turns out that many of these fission products are very good at absorbing neutrons. If they are absorbing neutrons, the uranium fuel can’t, which means that the rate of fission steadily falls as these neutron absorbing by-products accumulate in the fuel rods. Eventually enough of them accumulate that the fuel rods need to be removed and replaced with fresh ones. All well and good. You have to put gas in your car too, right? Yes, but in this case, as much as 90% (or more!) of the fissionable uranium in the fuel rod has yet to be used. That’s like filling up your car, driving two or three miles, and then having to dump the rest of your gas and buy more, because a bum pissed in your gas tank.

This, frankly, is a problem. There is an easy solution, though. Just grind up the fuel rod, and chemically separate out the stuff you want from the stuff you don’t, and make new fuel rods, and off you go. This process is fairly straightforward, but due to the nature of the fuel cycle used in Light Water Reactors, handling the fuel rods is very complicated and dangerous because they are highly radioactive, and also many of the elements in them are just straight-up toxic. The other problem is that Light Water Reactors operated with a certain type of fuel cycle produce fissile material that can be used to make nuclear weapons. So, when you process the ’spent’ fuel rods, you can recover bomb-grade fissile materials. And then some unscrupulous chode might sell them to terrorists, instead of sending them back to the reactor to get used to make electricity.

Which is why it’s illegal, in many countries, including the United States of America, to reprocess ’spent’ fuel rods.

In other words, we’re throwing away perfectly good reactor fuel. Reactor fuel which is extremely radioactive, toxic, and which isn’t going to go away for a long, long time. This is completely asinine. The French get most of their power from nuclear power, and reprocess their fuel rods, like intelligent people. They produce a small volume of unusable radioactive waste, which, in a clever system, they turn embed in glass, make into marbles, and bury in lead casks in the bottom of salt mines. Even if the casks break, there is plenty of geologic evidence to suggest that the vitrified waste will stay right where it is (remember that natural nuclear reactor? Same deal.).

We, on the other hand, made it illegal to reprocess defunct fuel rods, and created a massive nuclear waste problem. Like fucking idiots.

There are also much more efficient fuel cycles out there that are safer, produce even smaller volumes of waste, and even better, don’t produce material that can be used to make bombs. More on those in a bit.

What about accidents, you ask?

Well, the worst nuclear accident in US history is Three Mile Island, which on the grand scheme of things, was relatively minor. It was a combination of bad training, bad control room design, and a feeling than an accident was unlikely to occur in the minds of the people running the utility. There was a fairly small amount of radioactive material released into the environment, and the worst case scenarios imagined didn’t happen. If you really want a detailed analysis of what happened there, you can read one here, here, and here. The point of this is Three Mile Island was a fairly minor and totally avoidable accident. It was not Chernobyl. A Chernobyl type accident is essentially impossible in the United States, because all of our reactors have far, far better passive safety systems in place. Chernobyl was badly designed, badly built, and badly managed, and as soon as it happened, all the reactor designers in the rest of the world used it as a good example of what not to do.

Which brings us to another point: Nuclear power, like all else in the world, is not static. Most, if not all of the arguments that are presented against nuclear power represent problems that can be, or already have been solved. Nuclear power plants don’t have to produce massive quantities of highly toxic and difficult to store waste. Not all of them can be used to produce bombs, and not all of them are unsafe, or bad for the environment. There exist proven designs that can’t be used to (or are very inefficient for) produce bomb grade material, that have very high levels of inherent safety, and which produce very little waste.

You might ask, and rightly so, where the hell is this miracle technology? Why I haven’t I heard of it before?

And the simple answer is that once upon a time, the US Department of Energy, under heavy influence from the Department of Defense, choose to stop funding this design, and instead funded Light Water Reactors (in addition to other reactor types) for development. The reason? We needed to be able to build a lot of nuclear weapons, you see. In order to nuke the Russians.

The fuel cycle that got nixed is called Thorium Breeding. Thorium is an abundant, stable, pretty much innocuous material that happens to decay into a fissile variety of Uranium (U233) if you hit it with a neutron. You start with a small quantity of fissile material. It could be Uranium, Plutonium, another country’s nuclear waste, whatever. You use that as your starter charge in you reactor. You use the neutrons produced by the fission of that fuel to convert thorium into uranium, which you then feed into the reactor, using this uranium to breed more uranium, etc. It’s almost like perpetual motion, except it doesn’t violate the laws of physics. Additionally, the thorium fuel cycle produces a very small amount of radioactive waste, which fades to background radiation levels in around 300 years. This is far from the tens of thousands of years that plutonium and other ‘waste’ products produced by current reactors.

It’s pretty difficult to use this fuel cycle in most reactors in service today. But that’s okay, because there are much better reactor types out there. Enter the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. The LFTR is just cool. It is possibly the most inherently safe reactor design so far created. I will provide a brief explanation here, as the link provided will give a far better description of it’s advantages. The key points are that it is very safe. Because it uses a liquid fuel (a molten salt solution at high temperatures) which expands as it heats up, it is very difficult for the reactor to overheat and damage itself. As the fuel begins to overheat, it expands, pushing fuel out of the reactor into various, lower temperature parts of the fuel circulation system, or even into overflow tanks. This reduces the amount of fissile material inside the reactor, slowing fission down, and producing less heat. In this way, the reactor can passively self regulate, even with fuel pumps inactive. The molten fuel can be continuously processed to remove impurities which might slow down fission. Most of these impurities are industrially useful, and not radioactive. A molten salt reactor can be scaled up or down fairly simply, and built nearly anywhere you can dig a deep hole. If there is a loss of containment of reactor fuel, once out of the fuel system, the molten salt will cool into a solid, trapping the majority toxins and radioactive materials in a blob of hardened salt. You can design in many other passive safety features into the reactor, to the point that is effectively impossible for the reactor to have anything like a serious accident.

There is no reason that we could not begin using this technology tomorrow. It’s been tested. Molten salt reactors were built and tested in the 1960s, for fuck’s sake! But they were abandoned, in part because of the desire to build nuclear weapons. The current designs for these types of reactors are more efficient and safer than the ones produced in the 60s. Just think: We could offer the Iranians a win-win situation. Help them build thorium breeding molten salt reactors, and they get civilian power, and we get to feel secure knowing they’ll have a hell of a time building bombs with these reactors. If they turn the offer down, clearly they’re after weapons. We could process all of the ‘nuclear waste’ sitting around this country into valuable fuel, get rid of it forever, and use less coal, oil, and natural gas.

Between intelligently implemented nuclear power and the use of renewables like solar, wind, and biomass, we could pretty rapidly solve our energy problems in this country, and the world over. There’s nothing stopping us from doing so, except a knee-jerk reaction that nuclear power is inherently a bad thing. I used to feel the same way, but then I learned some stuff, and change my mind. Hopefully all of this will, if not have changed your mind, at least allowed you to make a more informed decision about these things, and will lead you to share this knowledge with other people you know, including those who oppose nuclear power, or who are super pro-solar, or whatever. The only way that we can solve these huge problems is by being as smart as we can with the resources we have now.

(and again, in lieu of any useful commentary, I’ll just wrap this up with a link to an mp3 of another version of Fred Kirby’s “Atomic Power”.)

mp3 | Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon, “Atomic Power”

mp3 | Fred Kirby, “Atomic Power”

(“Mr Fusion” picture via this dude’s flickr stream)