Your friend, the atom

Oil's rise to $95 (and the fact that I think we've hit Peak Oil*) has got me thinking again about a long interest of mine, namely energy security and the future of industrial civilization.

This online 1990 book about nuclear power (by an engineering professor) is very interesting, and seems to me to deal ably with most of the common objections to nuclear power:

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/index.html

As a result of perusing the book I've come to the following conclusions: which might not necessarily be true but certainly sound plausible to me)
1. Electricity is a good thing (if you like light, heat, unspoiled food, manufactured goods, cooking, public transit, the Internet, street lighting, etc)
2. Electricity demand can be divided into "base load" (the minimum level that is needed at the least demanding time of day) and "peak load" (when everyone in Toronto comes home on an August evening and turns on their air conditioner).
3. Electricity can be generated by coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro power, wind power, or solar.
4. Hydro is pretty good if you've got rivers (that you don't mind damming). Most places don't have nearly enough of those.
5. Burning coal and natural gas to generate electricity kills thousands of people every year with air pollution and helping to change the planet's climate in unknown but potentially serious ways**. And that's really stupid.
6. The preferred "green" approach is a combination of solar/wind/hydro and conservation. The book doesn't talk about electricity conservation, but there's certainly room for improvement there.
7. HOWEVER, the characteristics (notably, the obvious unreliability) of solar and wind power make it TERRIBLE for base load power generation. (Although the book isn't "anti-solar" by any means and cheerfully lists applications where it is useful). Electricity cannot be stored very well and is best used at the time it is generated (batteries that are big enough to actually run the grid would be colossally expensive). Solar power only works when the sun is shining. Wind power only works when the wind is blowing. What do you do the rest of the time?
8. Therefore, if you want to keep the lights on 24/7, the "green" approach is not going to be enough, and that leaves....
9.... the dreaded nuclear reactor. The author of the book feels that nuclear has gotten an absurdly bad rap on various points:
10. The risk of an accident that releases radioactivity into the atmosphere is EXTREMELY low using any kind of modern Western reactor design with a containment building. (Chernobyl was an obsolete and unsafe reactor design with no passive safety systems and no (!) containment building). Have there been "incidents" at Western nuclear plants? Of course there have (Three Mile Island being the most famous). Have those incidents caused any deaths? No. Compare that to the deaths that we cheerfully accept every year from coal-fired power generation, air travel, automobiles, etc, etc.
11. The danger from sabotage is equally remote. A saboteur could certainly destroy the plant if they knew what buttons to push and had time to work, but in the absense of several tons of high explosive, could do little to damage the three-foot-thick reinforced concrete containment vessel. (A car bomb would do nothing to such a sturdy structure).
12. The main danger from the storage of radioactive waste is that the radioactive material will leach into groundwater. However, material that is encased in solid glass (which is extremely resiliant to water), surrounded by a copper case (ditto), and packed in bentonite clay (expands when exposed to water, forming a watertight seal), then buried in geologically stable formations (like the Canadian Shield or Yucca Mountain), well, that's a much smaller disservice to future generations then letting the lights go out on them, in my opinion.

There seems to be something uniquely "scary" about nuclear power, that shuts off the common sense assessment of benefits and risks that people are able to follow for most other policy debates.


*I'll write more about Peak Oil later, but I'll say this for now:
1. Gasoline is going to get a lot more expensive than it is now, and it's going to stay that way.
2. People who've made investments (ie suburban houses) that depend on the ready availability of cheap gasoline in order to be livable are going to take it right in the neck.

** I'm going to write a post on global warming soon, since I've been doing some thinking about that. Basically, Al Gore made me a believer ;)