For those who are not concerned about the class details with respect to blogging itself, I don't recommend torturing yourself with this post. If you really want to see how I rate my blogging abilities, then by all means, read on!
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
The end is only the next beginning
The passing of time is always so bittersweet. I am talking of course about the end of the semester. The school year has come and gone, and my senior year is quickly coming to a close. The end of the semester of course means that this class is coming to an end and the blog project that we started back in January is wrapping itself up.
The future of nuclear power, even despite the events of the last few weeks, is very bright. I believe this so much that I think you should listen to this song as you finish reading this post. It has kind of become my adopted theme song... Anyway, to close out the blogging this semester I though it would be appropriate to describe the bright future of nuclear power. If I could only get one message across with this blog, it would be that nuclear power has a very exciting and productive future ahead of it!
Generation IV reactors are going to revolutionize the face of nuclear power within my lifetime. The idea of being a part of this excites me beyond words. When I call a reactor a Generation IV reactor, I mean that is a revolutionary design as opposed to an evolutionary design from the status quo. In other words, the nuclear industry is going to undergo a total face reconstruction within the next 30 years. The common types of reactors we talk about today (light water reactors, canduu reactors, etc...) are all going to be a thing of the past as well as are many of the problems that are associated with them.
Just to get a last little bit of a technical stab before the end of the semester, the new reactors are going to operate at higher temperatures, have a higher efficiency, produce less waste, and are going to be passively safe. And as a kicker, they are going to do this all for cheaper! This is truly a testament to human engineering. Let me explain my claims just a little further.
Generation IV reactors will no longer be based on using water as a moderator. Instead, coolants such as helium gas will be used to cool the reactor. This allows for reactors to be designed for and run at higher operating temperatures. From the basics of thermodynamics, higher operating temperatures allow for higher efficiencies in power output. Keep in mind that nuclear power is already the most efficient form of power production. The higher operating temperatures also lower the risk of meltdown in a reactor. The fuel will be designed to operate at extremely high temperatures, so a loss of coolant would be less harmful to the fuel than it would be for the current light water reactors.
I have talked about passive safety features in previous posts, so I will refrain from beating you over the head again with it here. But the best part is that the new reactors will be cheaper! How is this going to be done? Well you see, the nuclear industry made a mistake in our process for building new reactors. Right now, each reactor has to be individually designed for every new site. There is not much standardization meaning that construction is slow and the permitting process is a real $&@$...but anyway, the process is changing. New reactor designs will be standardized which will allow for faster construction and less problems with the NRC permitting the construction. After all, the construction process is the most expensive part of a nuclear power plant.
Let's not consider the thorium fuel cycle and breeder reactors that we discussed earlier this semester. These too will have their part in solving the energy problems!
There is a ton of cool stuff to talk about when it comes to Generation IV reactors, but I am going to have to leave it to you to do your own research. This site is a good place to start if you are interested. If all goes well, we could be seeing some of this technology coming online within the next 20 years or so. It is an exciting time to be a nuclear engineer!
So enough technical information. The semester is over and we are all tired I am sure. I know that the last few weeks of the semester have been the hardest ones that I have had in my time here at Mines...and that is saying something considering I survived the junior year of being a physics major. I am actually sad to see this semester come to an end. I have learned so much about nuclear power especially and I have had a blast sharing it all with you here!
We have covered a long journey here, covering the nuclear power process all the way from taking the nuclear material out of the ground to putting it back into the ground, and much of what is to be discussed in between. There are many issues to be settled still about nuclear power, but I have full confidence that they can be handled. The future is bright!
In a perfect world, I will continue to post periodically about cool things I learn. That is actually my intention, but I also know that it is almost summer which means there will be many distractions calling. I don't know about you guys, but I plan to see the top of the world from a few different mountains this summer. I hope to see some of you up there! The journey has been awesome, now lets continue to share the information with the other 8 billion people out there that haven't been reading this! Here's to the future...
The future of nuclear power, even despite the events of the last few weeks, is very bright. I believe this so much that I think you should listen to this song as you finish reading this post. It has kind of become my adopted theme song... Anyway, to close out the blogging this semester I though it would be appropriate to describe the bright future of nuclear power. If I could only get one message across with this blog, it would be that nuclear power has a very exciting and productive future ahead of it!Generation IV reactors are going to revolutionize the face of nuclear power within my lifetime. The idea of being a part of this excites me beyond words. When I call a reactor a Generation IV reactor, I mean that is a revolutionary design as opposed to an evolutionary design from the status quo. In other words, the nuclear industry is going to undergo a total face reconstruction within the next 30 years. The common types of reactors we talk about today (light water reactors, canduu reactors, etc...) are all going to be a thing of the past as well as are many of the problems that are associated with them.
Just to get a last little bit of a technical stab before the end of the semester, the new reactors are going to operate at higher temperatures, have a higher efficiency, produce less waste, and are going to be passively safe. And as a kicker, they are going to do this all for cheaper! This is truly a testament to human engineering. Let me explain my claims just a little further.
Generation IV reactors will no longer be based on using water as a moderator. Instead, coolants such as helium gas will be used to cool the reactor. This allows for reactors to be designed for and run at higher operating temperatures. From the basics of thermodynamics, higher operating temperatures allow for higher efficiencies in power output. Keep in mind that nuclear power is already the most efficient form of power production. The higher operating temperatures also lower the risk of meltdown in a reactor. The fuel will be designed to operate at extremely high temperatures, so a loss of coolant would be less harmful to the fuel than it would be for the current light water reactors.
I have talked about passive safety features in previous posts, so I will refrain from beating you over the head again with it here. But the best part is that the new reactors will be cheaper! How is this going to be done? Well you see, the nuclear industry made a mistake in our process for building new reactors. Right now, each reactor has to be individually designed for every new site. There is not much standardization meaning that construction is slow and the permitting process is a real $&@$...but anyway, the process is changing. New reactor designs will be standardized which will allow for faster construction and less problems with the NRC permitting the construction. After all, the construction process is the most expensive part of a nuclear power plant.
Let's not consider the thorium fuel cycle and breeder reactors that we discussed earlier this semester. These too will have their part in solving the energy problems!
There is a ton of cool stuff to talk about when it comes to Generation IV reactors, but I am going to have to leave it to you to do your own research. This site is a good place to start if you are interested. If all goes well, we could be seeing some of this technology coming online within the next 20 years or so. It is an exciting time to be a nuclear engineer!
So enough technical information. The semester is over and we are all tired I am sure. I know that the last few weeks of the semester have been the hardest ones that I have had in my time here at Mines...and that is saying something considering I survived the junior year of being a physics major. I am actually sad to see this semester come to an end. I have learned so much about nuclear power especially and I have had a blast sharing it all with you here!
We have covered a long journey here, covering the nuclear power process all the way from taking the nuclear material out of the ground to putting it back into the ground, and much of what is to be discussed in between. There are many issues to be settled still about nuclear power, but I have full confidence that they can be handled. The future is bright!
In a perfect world, I will continue to post periodically about cool things I learn. That is actually my intention, but I also know that it is almost summer which means there will be many distractions calling. I don't know about you guys, but I plan to see the top of the world from a few different mountains this summer. I hope to see some of you up there! The journey has been awesome, now lets continue to share the information with the other 8 billion people out there that haven't been reading this! Here's to the future...
Waste: not a technical problem but a politcal problem
There are a million things I wanted to talk about this semester, but unfortunately both a limited amount of time and the rise of important events kept me from getting to some of the important issues with nuclear power. To really address the current state of nuclear power in the United States, I still need to address probably the most concerning issue for many people. I will admit, it is a problem that still needs to be solved!
I am of course referring to the storage and disposal issues associated with nuclear waste. In over sixty years of commercial nuclear power in the United States, there has not yet been a solution settled upon. So the question remains..."What the heck do we do with the stuff?" Ok, so I exaggerate a little here. We do have solutions to the problem from an engineering standpoint, but if we have learned anything for this communicating science class over the semester, it has been that science can't escape the human aspect. In other words, the engineering solution will not suffice here given the extreme amount of controversy surrounding something as scary as nuclear waste. Politics provide the key to the success of the waste storage issue in the United States.
First, a little bit of history about the nuclear waste issue in the United States. Back in the 1950's the United States government was a big proponent for this new type of energy. There was a lot of excitement that this was going to be the method of energy production that would solve all the future energy needs. In an effort to help the industry grow, the government took on the responsibility of disposing of all waste. The government didn't want private industry to be slowed in development or deterred by the high costs of dealing with the waste. It was signed into law that the private industry was to store the nuclear fuel on site until the government had built and opened a permanent repository for the waste. The original deadline for opening the repository was back in 1998. Obviously, this didn't happen.
You all have probably heard of a little place in the middle of the Mojave desert called Yucca Mountain. The funny thing is that nobody had ever heard of it until it became the center of a nationwide controversy. This was the start of the "not in my backyard" campaign against nuclear waste. So if this mountain is in the remote parts of the Mojave desert and nobody had ever heard of it before the proposal of this project, then why are so many people against the building of the repository there? To make a long story short, politics...but I am not one to make a long story short.
When the government first took on the responsibility of building a nuclear repository, they had to identify possible locations for the repository. The original agreement was that there were to be two repositories built in the United States, one in the eastern part of the country, and one in the west. Several site locations were chosen around the United States, including sites in Washington state and Texas. I mention these because these three sites - Hanford, Washington, Deaf Smith County, Texas, and Yucca Mountain, Texas - were the original three sites approved for final research by Ronald Reagen in 1985. At this point, the western United States had agreed to host the first pilot repository. This is where the eastern United States kind of forgot about its commitment to build a repository, but no need to cry over spilled milk.
1987 is when the story gets interesting because that is when Congress decided, before the studies of the sites were complete, that Yucca Mountain was proving to be by far the most viable. Congress was trying to quicken the process and save money by jumping straight to what was proving the obvious answer. This would be what we would call the engineering solution, but it didn't fly for obvious connotation reasons. In 1987, Congress decided that only Yucca Mountain would be considered for future study. This quickly became known as the "Screw Nevada Law."
This launched the career of an at the time unknown junior senator from Nevada by the name of Harry Reid. He was adamantly opposed to the project, touting that due process was not followed and that the country only wanted it at Yucca Mountain because there weren't enough people to cause a scene over it. Well, obviously there were enough because Harry Reid soon became one of the most powerful political figures in the United States. Being that Harry Reid made it his career goal to stop the building of Yucca Mountain, I guess it is not surprising that since he became the Senate majority leader, the project was stopped.
Yucca Mountain was officially ended by President Obama when he took office. Ending the project was nothing more than a political favor to Harry Reid for his support during the campaign. With a flick of the pen, 25 years of work and billions of dollars were all killed.
So what now? Well, the recent events at Fukushima have only emphasized the importance of having a safe place to put the spent nuclear fuel when we are done with it. It is probably not the best option to have it stored at the reactor sites. Deep geological storage is a safer and more permanent solution. When President Obama ended the Yucca Mountain project, he established what is known as the Blue Ribbon Commission to look at further solutions to the project.
In the mean time, Yucca Mountain has been constructed. It was within about a year of being able to start accepting waste for storage. From an engineering standpoint, Yucca Mountain is the perfect place to store the waste. It allows us to put it in a place where it will be safe and away from contact with anything that would be harmed by it. There is no water there and the geologic formations that the site is built in are some of the most stable formations in the world. The site would have been the most stable waste repository in the world. While Yucca Mountain just sits there, the United States government continues to be in violation of its agreement to dispose of the waste.
Nuclear power, despite some controversy, will most likely grow to be a larger source of power production in the future. For this to happen safely though, a nuclear repository is necessary. My speculation is that the Yucca Mountain will be revisited in the near future. Politics are adverse right now, but administrations change. The good thing about the United States is that politics change. An administration that does not need the support of Harry Reid might be able to look at the situation more logically.
As of now though, the United States is back at square one when it comes to disposing of the waste. Fukushima made the disposal issue more urgent, so I think we might see a little more action on the part of the government in the near future. Really only time will tell. In the end, the answer is that the waste disposal problem has been solved from an engineering standpoint, but how to implement the solution with respect to the human aspect is causing the difficulty. It can be done though. Since we cut Yucca Mountain, Sweden is now going to open the first deep geological waste repository. Want a little more technical information about how it is being done, I suggest this article. Note that Sweden does not have nearly as stable of a location to put the waste, but they have been able to engineer a site to perform the task. We will be watching them closely over the next few years.
I am of course referring to the storage and disposal issues associated with nuclear waste. In over sixty years of commercial nuclear power in the United States, there has not yet been a solution settled upon. So the question remains..."What the heck do we do with the stuff?" Ok, so I exaggerate a little here. We do have solutions to the problem from an engineering standpoint, but if we have learned anything for this communicating science class over the semester, it has been that science can't escape the human aspect. In other words, the engineering solution will not suffice here given the extreme amount of controversy surrounding something as scary as nuclear waste. Politics provide the key to the success of the waste storage issue in the United States.First, a little bit of history about the nuclear waste issue in the United States. Back in the 1950's the United States government was a big proponent for this new type of energy. There was a lot of excitement that this was going to be the method of energy production that would solve all the future energy needs. In an effort to help the industry grow, the government took on the responsibility of disposing of all waste. The government didn't want private industry to be slowed in development or deterred by the high costs of dealing with the waste. It was signed into law that the private industry was to store the nuclear fuel on site until the government had built and opened a permanent repository for the waste. The original deadline for opening the repository was back in 1998. Obviously, this didn't happen.
You all have probably heard of a little place in the middle of the Mojave desert called Yucca Mountain. The funny thing is that nobody had ever heard of it until it became the center of a nationwide controversy. This was the start of the "not in my backyard" campaign against nuclear waste. So if this mountain is in the remote parts of the Mojave desert and nobody had ever heard of it before the proposal of this project, then why are so many people against the building of the repository there? To make a long story short, politics...but I am not one to make a long story short.
When the government first took on the responsibility of building a nuclear repository, they had to identify possible locations for the repository. The original agreement was that there were to be two repositories built in the United States, one in the eastern part of the country, and one in the west. Several site locations were chosen around the United States, including sites in Washington state and Texas. I mention these because these three sites - Hanford, Washington, Deaf Smith County, Texas, and Yucca Mountain, Texas - were the original three sites approved for final research by Ronald Reagen in 1985. At this point, the western United States had agreed to host the first pilot repository. This is where the eastern United States kind of forgot about its commitment to build a repository, but no need to cry over spilled milk.
1987 is when the story gets interesting because that is when Congress decided, before the studies of the sites were complete, that Yucca Mountain was proving to be by far the most viable. Congress was trying to quicken the process and save money by jumping straight to what was proving the obvious answer. This would be what we would call the engineering solution, but it didn't fly for obvious connotation reasons. In 1987, Congress decided that only Yucca Mountain would be considered for future study. This quickly became known as the "Screw Nevada Law."
This launched the career of an at the time unknown junior senator from Nevada by the name of Harry Reid. He was adamantly opposed to the project, touting that due process was not followed and that the country only wanted it at Yucca Mountain because there weren't enough people to cause a scene over it. Well, obviously there were enough because Harry Reid soon became one of the most powerful political figures in the United States. Being that Harry Reid made it his career goal to stop the building of Yucca Mountain, I guess it is not surprising that since he became the Senate majority leader, the project was stopped.
Yucca Mountain was officially ended by President Obama when he took office. Ending the project was nothing more than a political favor to Harry Reid for his support during the campaign. With a flick of the pen, 25 years of work and billions of dollars were all killed.
So what now? Well, the recent events at Fukushima have only emphasized the importance of having a safe place to put the spent nuclear fuel when we are done with it. It is probably not the best option to have it stored at the reactor sites. Deep geological storage is a safer and more permanent solution. When President Obama ended the Yucca Mountain project, he established what is known as the Blue Ribbon Commission to look at further solutions to the project.
In the mean time, Yucca Mountain has been constructed. It was within about a year of being able to start accepting waste for storage. From an engineering standpoint, Yucca Mountain is the perfect place to store the waste. It allows us to put it in a place where it will be safe and away from contact with anything that would be harmed by it. There is no water there and the geologic formations that the site is built in are some of the most stable formations in the world. The site would have been the most stable waste repository in the world. While Yucca Mountain just sits there, the United States government continues to be in violation of its agreement to dispose of the waste.
Nuclear power, despite some controversy, will most likely grow to be a larger source of power production in the future. For this to happen safely though, a nuclear repository is necessary. My speculation is that the Yucca Mountain will be revisited in the near future. Politics are adverse right now, but administrations change. The good thing about the United States is that politics change. An administration that does not need the support of Harry Reid might be able to look at the situation more logically.
As of now though, the United States is back at square one when it comes to disposing of the waste. Fukushima made the disposal issue more urgent, so I think we might see a little more action on the part of the government in the near future. Really only time will tell. In the end, the answer is that the waste disposal problem has been solved from an engineering standpoint, but how to implement the solution with respect to the human aspect is causing the difficulty. It can be done though. Since we cut Yucca Mountain, Sweden is now going to open the first deep geological waste repository. Want a little more technical information about how it is being done, I suggest this article. Note that Sweden does not have nearly as stable of a location to put the waste, but they have been able to engineer a site to perform the task. We will be watching them closely over the next few years.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Overachieving makes for sleepless nights...but results in cool stop motion video!
This blog has made me totally rethink how to go about trying to explain complicated ideas to people. Thinking back to the beginning of the semester, I have to laugh at how I almost wore it as a badge of honor that I could speak this language known as science. What I learned this semester is that most of the world does not speak, nor do they want to speak this highly complicated and often intimidating language. I know exactly how frustrating it can be when people talk to you in a language you don't speak.
I took violin lessons for 12 years, starting when I was 8 years old. Many of those years were with one of the most inspirational figures I have ever met. Her name was Korina, and she was part of the nationally renown Veronika String Quartet. To make a long story short, the quartet was from Russia, and they were all very Russian. Korina was trained under the disciplined lifestyle that the Soviets were renown for. This needless to say caused some friction with American student because we didn't find it appropriate to practice the instrument 8 hours every day. She was a wonderful teacher none the less. Being from Russia though, her native language was Russian. She was always good at explaining what needed to be done to me in English, but she was also good at switching to Russian when talking to the other quartet members about me. I remain convinced to this day that they made a lot of jokes at my expense that I will never know about... My point is that speaking a different language is often speak around those they don't want to communicate with. Korina wanted to talk about things she didn't want me to hear (probably the truth about how bad I was), but scientists often use their language to speak above the audience. They get a weird kind of kick out of it, which I know because I have done it. Nothing makes a nerd feel better than sounding smarter than somebody else, just like athletes like to show off their abilities on the field. Just like with athletes though, nobody likes a ball hog.
Ok, so now I am on a tangent. The reason that I am bringing this up to you is because the end of the semester is coming near. A couple more posts and this blog project will be complete as far as the class goes. I started out excited at the beginning of the semester. Starting a blog, I though I would have the perfect way to just write out all the basics of nuclear power. That would fix everything as people would read the facts and everybody would be educated on the basics of nuclear power...well as it turns out, when people don't care you aren't going to get them to read anything! I just had a friend ask me to proof read a paper for a class and I couldn't even finish it because I didn't care. It is an absolute truth. Blogging has been an excellent medium for me to get the information I feel important out there so people can see it. I even like to think that some of my posts have been mildly entertaining. The fact that people have to put work into reading the blog post in the first place is very limiting to my ability to communicate.
I was very excited when we were given a chance in another one of my classes to do a public outreach project about nuclear power. I have learned so much in this class about communicating scientific information that I wanted to apply to other mediums. Reading a book called "Don't be Such a Scientists" by Randy Olsen particularly interested me in film. When a friend in the class suggested that we do a stop motion film for the project, a flood of ideas came over us about communicating the basics of nuclear power. I have to admit that this has been the most involved project of my life, but it is by far the school project that I am the most proud of. The video is a little long, but we cover most of the basics about nuclear power in a relatively short period of time. In essence, this video summarizes the technical information that I have tried to give up till now. For those of you following my blog up till this point, I would love to hear if the video is better at conveying information than my writing. Anyway, without any further adieu, I present to you a look at nuclear power in stop motion! Enjoy! Oh, by the way, turn your volume up nice and loud. The levels are a little soft, but the song is awesome!
I took violin lessons for 12 years, starting when I was 8 years old. Many of those years were with one of the most inspirational figures I have ever met. Her name was Korina, and she was part of the nationally renown Veronika String Quartet. To make a long story short, the quartet was from Russia, and they were all very Russian. Korina was trained under the disciplined lifestyle that the Soviets were renown for. This needless to say caused some friction with American student because we didn't find it appropriate to practice the instrument 8 hours every day. She was a wonderful teacher none the less. Being from Russia though, her native language was Russian. She was always good at explaining what needed to be done to me in English, but she was also good at switching to Russian when talking to the other quartet members about me. I remain convinced to this day that they made a lot of jokes at my expense that I will never know about... My point is that speaking a different language is often speak around those they don't want to communicate with. Korina wanted to talk about things she didn't want me to hear (probably the truth about how bad I was), but scientists often use their language to speak above the audience. They get a weird kind of kick out of it, which I know because I have done it. Nothing makes a nerd feel better than sounding smarter than somebody else, just like athletes like to show off their abilities on the field. Just like with athletes though, nobody likes a ball hog.
Ok, so now I am on a tangent. The reason that I am bringing this up to you is because the end of the semester is coming near. A couple more posts and this blog project will be complete as far as the class goes. I started out excited at the beginning of the semester. Starting a blog, I though I would have the perfect way to just write out all the basics of nuclear power. That would fix everything as people would read the facts and everybody would be educated on the basics of nuclear power...well as it turns out, when people don't care you aren't going to get them to read anything! I just had a friend ask me to proof read a paper for a class and I couldn't even finish it because I didn't care. It is an absolute truth. Blogging has been an excellent medium for me to get the information I feel important out there so people can see it. I even like to think that some of my posts have been mildly entertaining. The fact that people have to put work into reading the blog post in the first place is very limiting to my ability to communicate.
I was very excited when we were given a chance in another one of my classes to do a public outreach project about nuclear power. I have learned so much in this class about communicating scientific information that I wanted to apply to other mediums. Reading a book called "Don't be Such a Scientists" by Randy Olsen particularly interested me in film. When a friend in the class suggested that we do a stop motion film for the project, a flood of ideas came over us about communicating the basics of nuclear power. I have to admit that this has been the most involved project of my life, but it is by far the school project that I am the most proud of. The video is a little long, but we cover most of the basics about nuclear power in a relatively short period of time. In essence, this video summarizes the technical information that I have tried to give up till now. For those of you following my blog up till this point, I would love to hear if the video is better at conveying information than my writing. Anyway, without any further adieu, I present to you a look at nuclear power in stop motion! Enjoy! Oh, by the way, turn your volume up nice and loud. The levels are a little soft, but the song is awesome!
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
What I want to do when I grow up...
I mentioned before that I had a really interesting spring break this year as far as nuclear power goes. You all know about Fukushima, but also during this time there were a series of public meetings being held in Pueblo, Colorado about building a nuclear power plant there. This is where I grew up, and being in Pueblo over spring break, I naturally went to all the meetings.
Going to these meetings as someone who has had some education in the nuclear industry was an interesting experience. It was really interesting to hear about all the concerns people from the general public had about the nuclear power plant. Some of the concerns were legitimate issues that needed to be tackled and some of them were issues that had no traction. None the less, this was definitely a good experience when it comes to learning about what nuclear power faces when it comes to the public. These issues were definitely exaggerated by the events simultaneously occurring in Fukushima, but it gave me a good understanding of how the public views nuclear power.
I don't really want to get into that now, but I want to talk about one key issue that was brought up. The issue of transporting nuclear waste held a lot of traction with the local community. People opposed to nuclear power brought in arguments that nuclear waste would be moved through their residential areas and near schools. What if something happened? Oh yes, the dreadful "what if?" the nuclear industry will face until the end of time. Luckily in the transportation section, the nuclear industry has done a lot of thinking about "what if?" scenarios.
In fact, transportation of high level nuclear waste is one of the most engineered types of transportation out there. This is both out of necessity as well as out of public outcry. It is certain though that nuclear waste is special. Unlike with other waste forms, we need to be careful of the geometries in which we move nuclear waste. Under the right conditions, we could actually cause nuclear waste to start inducing a fission chain reaction, which would cause it to heat up. So what is done about this? Well, we know how to make the material go critical, and we know how to stop it from going critical. Thus, we can design waste containers which keep nuclear waste from inducing fission reactions.
Most people are afraid of accidents happening on the road. Nuclear waste is largely transported via truck in the United States. It is true that sometimes trucks do have accidents. Let me just say that the waste containers have been designed for this too. Instead of me telling you though, let me just show you. I recommend that you watch this whole video. I got a really big kick out of it!
This is totally what I want to do when I grow up! Sadly, I think they deemed these kinds of tests too dangerous back in the 1970s, so I never really had a chance. But wrecking a rocket train!? Every kids dream!
Anyway, I think this speaks for itself in saying what kind of damage that nuclear waste transportation flasks can withstand. If there was an accident on the road, you can remain confident that the radioactive material will be safely contained. Take away point...I don't think that the transportation of nuclear waste is a good argument for halting nuclear power in the United States.
Going to these meetings as someone who has had some education in the nuclear industry was an interesting experience. It was really interesting to hear about all the concerns people from the general public had about the nuclear power plant. Some of the concerns were legitimate issues that needed to be tackled and some of them were issues that had no traction. None the less, this was definitely a good experience when it comes to learning about what nuclear power faces when it comes to the public. These issues were definitely exaggerated by the events simultaneously occurring in Fukushima, but it gave me a good understanding of how the public views nuclear power.
I don't really want to get into that now, but I want to talk about one key issue that was brought up. The issue of transporting nuclear waste held a lot of traction with the local community. People opposed to nuclear power brought in arguments that nuclear waste would be moved through their residential areas and near schools. What if something happened? Oh yes, the dreadful "what if?" the nuclear industry will face until the end of time. Luckily in the transportation section, the nuclear industry has done a lot of thinking about "what if?" scenarios.
In fact, transportation of high level nuclear waste is one of the most engineered types of transportation out there. This is both out of necessity as well as out of public outcry. It is certain though that nuclear waste is special. Unlike with other waste forms, we need to be careful of the geometries in which we move nuclear waste. Under the right conditions, we could actually cause nuclear waste to start inducing a fission chain reaction, which would cause it to heat up. So what is done about this? Well, we know how to make the material go critical, and we know how to stop it from going critical. Thus, we can design waste containers which keep nuclear waste from inducing fission reactions.
Most people are afraid of accidents happening on the road. Nuclear waste is largely transported via truck in the United States. It is true that sometimes trucks do have accidents. Let me just say that the waste containers have been designed for this too. Instead of me telling you though, let me just show you. I recommend that you watch this whole video. I got a really big kick out of it!
This is totally what I want to do when I grow up! Sadly, I think they deemed these kinds of tests too dangerous back in the 1970s, so I never really had a chance. But wrecking a rocket train!? Every kids dream!
Anyway, I think this speaks for itself in saying what kind of damage that nuclear waste transportation flasks can withstand. If there was an accident on the road, you can remain confident that the radioactive material will be safely contained. Take away point...I don't think that the transportation of nuclear waste is a good argument for halting nuclear power in the United States.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Earthquake, tsunami, tornado...what's next?
Mother nature has definitely been hard on nuclear power the last few weeks. First a 9.0 magnitude earthquake followed by a 30 foot tsunami cripples the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and now a tornado shuts down a nuclear power plant in Virginia. If you didn't hear about this, you can check it out here. It doesn't seem that the major news networks covered this one too much in depth...not that I am complaining.
Last Saturday, a series of nasty storms went through the south eastern United States. There were reports of several tornadoes from the storm, including one which managed to touch down in the middle of Virginia's Surry nuclear power plant. It didn't hit either of the two reactors at the site, but it did manage to destroy the switchgear for the plant. When I say switchgear, I am talking about those fenced off areas you see next to the road that look like a mad scientist should live there. These are the places where power flow is controlled. They are responsible for directing where power goes as well as for cutting off power when necessary. In other words, when the switchgear was taken out at the Surry nuclear power plant, it cut off the outside power.
It seems that people got a little nervous hearing that Surry had lost external power. I mean, we are still going to the effects of Fukushima Daiichi not being able to restore outside power. There is a major difference though. The backup generators at Surry were not washed away by a tsunami. After the tornado took out the switchgear, the plant lost power and the reactors shut down as designed. The backup generators then came online and kept the reactors cool. This is how the safety systems are supposed to work. There were designed this way.
Some are saying that we were lucky that the tornado didn't hit the reactor buildings themselves. I think this again is just a product of nerves resulting from the recent incident. We must remember that when the reactors were built, they were designed to withstand such natural occurrences. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 30 foot tsunami wasn't really believed to be a possibility. That was a mistake looking back in hindsight. In Virginia though, the risk of tornado is believed to be a possibility. Actually, the containment vessels are designed for much worse than even a tornado, such as an airplane crashing into it. It would have most likely been a less significant nuclear accident had the tornado hit the reactor itself. The switchgear is much more vulnerable, yet we still have safety systems to account for failure there.
Power has been restored to one of the reactors at Surry and the other reactor is expected to have power within another couple days. After power has been fully restored, the plant will assume operating at full power again. The take away message...A tornado hit one of the more vulnerable parts of a nuclear power plant and there was no disaster. The plant shut down for about a week and then will continue to operate as normal. If that is not a testament to the stability of nuclear power, I really don't know what is!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Sprouted grain and nuclear power
I am not going to lie...I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about energy production. I have to blame some of this on my brother. You see, he is also a Mines student. A junior electrical engineering major focusing on power generation. Between that, me going to school for nuclear engineering, and the fact that we live together, I spend a lot of time discussing the issues. The other day though, my brother pointed me to an interesting article on the true economic costs of using coal to produce electricity.
The article was interesting based on its scientific merit alone, but I found it very interesting thanks to an interesting analogy it made. Personally, I had never thought of coal-fired power plants as being like junk food. This I think is the perfect way to describe them though! Junk food is cheap, it tastes good, and makes up a large percentage of the food that most Americans (at least college students) consume. The bad part about junk food is that it is not good for you. It is unhealthy and it most likely will have greater cost down the road in the form of heart attacks and what not.
Coal is cheap and it makes the electricity bill easy for the consumer to withstand. Aka, coal "tastes good" to the normal person. It is also dirty and hard on the environment. It causes thousands of early deaths each year in the United States and the emissions of coal-fired power plants are putting things into the atmosphere that we don't really want there. Using coal is kind of gearing us up for a planetary heart attack just like junk food does to our body.
You see, I have been trying to avert away from the college diet myself, so this analogy is especially interesting. I have recently become a fruitaholic and I have even become that crazy guy in the grocery store reading all the labels. Why you might ask? Well, because I am interested in my general health. Do you see where I am going yet?
The article didn't really finish the analogy you see. While there is junk food, there are also food out there that are good for you. Incidentally, there are also energy forms out there that are good for us. This is where the industry is so interested in going nowadays. Renewable energies are the albeit more expensive forms of energies, but they are the types of energies that are ultimately more healthy for our environment.
Many people use the argument that nuclear power is simply too expensive to implement. Those of you who have been following me for a while know my opinion on this, but right now it is true that nuclear power has a high capitol cost compared to coal-fired power plants. Have you ever gone into a grocer store and bought foods that were healthy for you? Well, when you do you will notice your grocery bill sky rocket. It is a general fact that higher quality products demand a higher cost. For our well being, it is just a price we choose to cope with. To ensure that we are nicer to our environment, we need to be willing to spend more money. There is such a thing as electricity being too cheap when it is promoting the use of unhealthy power producing practices. Junk food is too cheap, and that is why college kids have such unhealthy diets.
Economics still must play a role though. We must choose the method that provides the reasonable benefits we need without being too expensive. Is it always worth buying the most expensive health food when trying to eat healthily? Not really, considering we can gain the same health benefits by eating reasonably healthy. We shouldn't go overboard and put all our resources toward an energy form that will accomplish the same thing as an energy form that has much less over all cost. Solar and wind power are both more expensive than nuclear power in dollar cost as well as in the impact cost. They require huge tracks of land (yes, I said that on purpose) and are not up to optimal efficiency at this point. Nuclear also has issues associated with it as far as waste and safety go. My point? We don't have an energy solution yet. What we do know is that we need to try and change our diet. Our long term health depends upon it.
The article was interesting based on its scientific merit alone, but I found it very interesting thanks to an interesting analogy it made. Personally, I had never thought of coal-fired power plants as being like junk food. This I think is the perfect way to describe them though! Junk food is cheap, it tastes good, and makes up a large percentage of the food that most Americans (at least college students) consume. The bad part about junk food is that it is not good for you. It is unhealthy and it most likely will have greater cost down the road in the form of heart attacks and what not.
Coal is cheap and it makes the electricity bill easy for the consumer to withstand. Aka, coal "tastes good" to the normal person. It is also dirty and hard on the environment. It causes thousands of early deaths each year in the United States and the emissions of coal-fired power plants are putting things into the atmosphere that we don't really want there. Using coal is kind of gearing us up for a planetary heart attack just like junk food does to our body.
You see, I have been trying to avert away from the college diet myself, so this analogy is especially interesting. I have recently become a fruitaholic and I have even become that crazy guy in the grocery store reading all the labels. Why you might ask? Well, because I am interested in my general health. Do you see where I am going yet?
The article didn't really finish the analogy you see. While there is junk food, there are also food out there that are good for you. Incidentally, there are also energy forms out there that are good for us. This is where the industry is so interested in going nowadays. Renewable energies are the albeit more expensive forms of energies, but they are the types of energies that are ultimately more healthy for our environment.
Many people use the argument that nuclear power is simply too expensive to implement. Those of you who have been following me for a while know my opinion on this, but right now it is true that nuclear power has a high capitol cost compared to coal-fired power plants. Have you ever gone into a grocer store and bought foods that were healthy for you? Well, when you do you will notice your grocery bill sky rocket. It is a general fact that higher quality products demand a higher cost. For our well being, it is just a price we choose to cope with. To ensure that we are nicer to our environment, we need to be willing to spend more money. There is such a thing as electricity being too cheap when it is promoting the use of unhealthy power producing practices. Junk food is too cheap, and that is why college kids have such unhealthy diets.
Economics still must play a role though. We must choose the method that provides the reasonable benefits we need without being too expensive. Is it always worth buying the most expensive health food when trying to eat healthily? Not really, considering we can gain the same health benefits by eating reasonably healthy. We shouldn't go overboard and put all our resources toward an energy form that will accomplish the same thing as an energy form that has much less over all cost. Solar and wind power are both more expensive than nuclear power in dollar cost as well as in the impact cost. They require huge tracks of land (yes, I said that on purpose) and are not up to optimal efficiency at this point. Nuclear also has issues associated with it as far as waste and safety go. My point? We don't have an energy solution yet. What we do know is that we need to try and change our diet. Our long term health depends upon it.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
What do Sheldon, zebras, and nuclear power all have in common?
In my last post, I tried to give you a little technical insight into how a nuclear power plant can be made passively safe. These safety systems are not the coolest passive safety systms incorporated into modern day plants though. Some of you had your ear caught by the idea of a nuclear power plant that was stable, even when all cooling systems were removed during operation. This is by far the worst case scenario that a nuclear reactor could face. Designing a reactor that will not allow itself to heat up enough to meltdown despite the loss of all cooling is kind of like genetically breeding a cat to clean its own litterbox and feed itself. It fixes a lot of the problems of having one.
Any reactor that could be built in the United States now has to have what is known as a negative feedback coefficient. I am sure that nuclear engineers refer to this as a NFC to go along with the other 10,000 acronyms that they have...ok, I made that up. Anyway, the negative feedback coefficient means that any kind of power increase in the reactor (which is responsible for the reactor getting hotter) causes the reactor to automatically begin to shut itself down until it obtains the original power level. Old reactors, and many research reactors do not do this. Many of them actually have positive feedback coefficients, meaning that the power level in the reactor increases as a result of a power increase. This is not good when it comes to the safety of a commercial reactor.
So how do we design a reactor to have a negative feedback coefficient? Well, there are several mechanisms that cause negative feedback in the reactor, but I want to talk about my favorite one. It is something known as doppler broadening. Yes, it is related to doppler effect that you all know and love, especially if you watch the Big Bang Theory.
The doppler broadening effect in nuclear engineering has nothing to do with a shift in frequency though. The effect is actually quite complicated as I found out when I wanted to do a presentation on it for an undergraduate nuclear physics class. I wish I knew of another place to point you to learn more about the subject, but all I can point you to is engineering textbooks for more information. Sorry about that! On the other hand, you are about to get a lesson in something that few outside of nuclear engineers know much about. Don't worry, I don't claim to know that much about it either, but I never the less will tell you what I have deciphered.
In nuclear engineering, a quantity known as the microscopic cross section is one of the most important properties for nuclear materials. It is basically telling us the probability of a neutron interacting with our nuclear fuel. For fissile materials, it is this quantity that tells us the liklihood of a fission reaction occuring given a certain neutron. It is kind of like playing darts. The microscopic cross section gives us the probability of hitting the dart board. The bigger the dart board, the more likely I will be to hit it (believe me, I need a big dart board). In other words, the microscopic cross sectin is kind of like the area of the dart board. The bigger the cross section, the more likely a neutron will interact with the fuel.
Nuclear materials have what are known as resonances when it comes to reacting with neutrons. You see, not all the neutrons in a nuclear reactor are the same energy. In fact, there is pretty much a continuous distribution of neutron energies in the reactor core. The microscopic cross section though is energy dependent, meaning that it changes depeding on how much energy the neutrong has (how fast the neutron is moving). The nuclear material is more likely to react with neutrons of some energies than others, meaning that the microscopic cross section is higher for neutrons of certain energies than they are for most. This gives rise to resonances in the cross section that look like the graph. At a certain energy, there is a peak in the cross section.
Fissile material is not the only type of material that reacts with neutrons although. U-238 captures neutrons of certain energies to become Pu-239, which happens to be fissile. My point is that U-238 also has a cross section for neutrons in a reactor, not just U-235. Under operating conditions, the resonant peaks for which U-235 and U-238 react with neutrons occur a different neutron energies. In other words, normally they are not stealing each others neutrons. U-235 has a high affinity for neutrons of one energy, while U-238 reacts with neutrons of another energy. They are like two kids that have their own set of toys. They are off in their own little corners playing their own game. They are not concerned with what the other is doing.
But the story doesn't remain so friendly. You see, as it turns out the microscopic cross section is also temperature dependent. This means that changes in temperature in the reactor affect the cross section, and it does so in a very intriguing way. It causes the resonant peaks, like the one in the picture above, to kind of melt. Thus, at the resonant neutron energy, the cross section actually becomes smaller. This is not what induces the negative feedback though. Here is a picture that depicts what is going on as the temperature in the core increases.
This is the reaction cross section at a resonance peak for three different temperatures. The tallest peak is at the lowest temperature. That thing that is more of a hill than a peak is what the cross section resonance looks like when the temperature gets significantly higher. I already noted that the height of the peak will shrink, and it does. The interesting part though is that the peak gets fatter. It widens to cover more neutrons energies. Hence the term "doppler broadening." As temperature rises, the resonant peaks which describe what energy neutrons the nuclear material will react with becomes wider. This means that as the temperature increases, the nuclear material will actually react with more energies of neutrons. There are now more "fish in the sea" to borrow a popular cliche.
You are probably thinking, "Aaron, you are nuts...this will cause the reactor to increase in power because there will now be more fissions occurring in the fuel!" Well, actually quite the opposite happens. You see, the resonant peaks at which U-238 and U-235 react with neutrons are not that far apart from each other in terms of energy. As the resonant peaks get fatter due to doppler broadening, the resonant peaks of the two materials begin to overlap. Now, they are starting to play with eachother's toys. They are no longer the two kids in opposite corners contently playing with their own toys. Now one has become a bully and has come over to steal the toys from the other kid.
Fortunately for us, remember that U-238 makes up most of the fuel in a reactor. U-238 does not undergo fission when it absorbs a neutron, unlike U-235. Thus, U-238 does not release heat when it captures a neutron. But because it makes up about 97% of the reactor core, it can absorb much more neutrons than the fissile U-235. Thus, when the reactor begins to heat up, the U-238 begins to infringe on the U-235 and begins to stifle the U-235. U-238 absorbs more of the neutrons in the range that the U-235 is reacting with neutrons, meaning that there is less neutrons available for fission reactions. This is directly related to the power of the reactor. Thus, as the temperature of the reactor gets hotter, fission in the reactor actually begins to shut itself down!
This is one part of the negative feedback coefficient in modern reactors. You see what I mean when I say that modern reactors can be inherently safe? We can take advantage of such mechanisms to make reactors inherently safe! I don't know about you, but this just makes me get hot all over! Just kidding...
Any reactor that could be built in the United States now has to have what is known as a negative feedback coefficient. I am sure that nuclear engineers refer to this as a NFC to go along with the other 10,000 acronyms that they have...ok, I made that up. Anyway, the negative feedback coefficient means that any kind of power increase in the reactor (which is responsible for the reactor getting hotter) causes the reactor to automatically begin to shut itself down until it obtains the original power level. Old reactors, and many research reactors do not do this. Many of them actually have positive feedback coefficients, meaning that the power level in the reactor increases as a result of a power increase. This is not good when it comes to the safety of a commercial reactor.
So how do we design a reactor to have a negative feedback coefficient? Well, there are several mechanisms that cause negative feedback in the reactor, but I want to talk about my favorite one. It is something known as doppler broadening. Yes, it is related to doppler effect that you all know and love, especially if you watch the Big Bang Theory.
The doppler broadening effect in nuclear engineering has nothing to do with a shift in frequency though. The effect is actually quite complicated as I found out when I wanted to do a presentation on it for an undergraduate nuclear physics class. I wish I knew of another place to point you to learn more about the subject, but all I can point you to is engineering textbooks for more information. Sorry about that! On the other hand, you are about to get a lesson in something that few outside of nuclear engineers know much about. Don't worry, I don't claim to know that much about it either, but I never the less will tell you what I have deciphered.
In nuclear engineering, a quantity known as the microscopic cross section is one of the most important properties for nuclear materials. It is basically telling us the probability of a neutron interacting with our nuclear fuel. For fissile materials, it is this quantity that tells us the liklihood of a fission reaction occuring given a certain neutron. It is kind of like playing darts. The microscopic cross section gives us the probability of hitting the dart board. The bigger the dart board, the more likely I will be to hit it (believe me, I need a big dart board). In other words, the microscopic cross sectin is kind of like the area of the dart board. The bigger the cross section, the more likely a neutron will interact with the fuel.
Nuclear materials have what are known as resonances when it comes to reacting with neutrons. You see, not all the neutrons in a nuclear reactor are the same energy. In fact, there is pretty much a continuous distribution of neutron energies in the reactor core. The microscopic cross section though is energy dependent, meaning that it changes depeding on how much energy the neutrong has (how fast the neutron is moving). The nuclear material is more likely to react with neutrons of some energies than others, meaning that the microscopic cross section is higher for neutrons of certain energies than they are for most. This gives rise to resonances in the cross section that look like the graph. At a certain energy, there is a peak in the cross section.Fissile material is not the only type of material that reacts with neutrons although. U-238 captures neutrons of certain energies to become Pu-239, which happens to be fissile. My point is that U-238 also has a cross section for neutrons in a reactor, not just U-235. Under operating conditions, the resonant peaks for which U-235 and U-238 react with neutrons occur a different neutron energies. In other words, normally they are not stealing each others neutrons. U-235 has a high affinity for neutrons of one energy, while U-238 reacts with neutrons of another energy. They are like two kids that have their own set of toys. They are off in their own little corners playing their own game. They are not concerned with what the other is doing.
But the story doesn't remain so friendly. You see, as it turns out the microscopic cross section is also temperature dependent. This means that changes in temperature in the reactor affect the cross section, and it does so in a very intriguing way. It causes the resonant peaks, like the one in the picture above, to kind of melt. Thus, at the resonant neutron energy, the cross section actually becomes smaller. This is not what induces the negative feedback though. Here is a picture that depicts what is going on as the temperature in the core increases.
This is the reaction cross section at a resonance peak for three different temperatures. The tallest peak is at the lowest temperature. That thing that is more of a hill than a peak is what the cross section resonance looks like when the temperature gets significantly higher. I already noted that the height of the peak will shrink, and it does. The interesting part though is that the peak gets fatter. It widens to cover more neutrons energies. Hence the term "doppler broadening." As temperature rises, the resonant peaks which describe what energy neutrons the nuclear material will react with becomes wider. This means that as the temperature increases, the nuclear material will actually react with more energies of neutrons. There are now more "fish in the sea" to borrow a popular cliche.
You are probably thinking, "Aaron, you are nuts...this will cause the reactor to increase in power because there will now be more fissions occurring in the fuel!" Well, actually quite the opposite happens. You see, the resonant peaks at which U-238 and U-235 react with neutrons are not that far apart from each other in terms of energy. As the resonant peaks get fatter due to doppler broadening, the resonant peaks of the two materials begin to overlap. Now, they are starting to play with eachother's toys. They are no longer the two kids in opposite corners contently playing with their own toys. Now one has become a bully and has come over to steal the toys from the other kid.
Fortunately for us, remember that U-238 makes up most of the fuel in a reactor. U-238 does not undergo fission when it absorbs a neutron, unlike U-235. Thus, U-238 does not release heat when it captures a neutron. But because it makes up about 97% of the reactor core, it can absorb much more neutrons than the fissile U-235. Thus, when the reactor begins to heat up, the U-238 begins to infringe on the U-235 and begins to stifle the U-235. U-238 absorbs more of the neutrons in the range that the U-235 is reacting with neutrons, meaning that there is less neutrons available for fission reactions. This is directly related to the power of the reactor. Thus, as the temperature of the reactor gets hotter, fission in the reactor actually begins to shut itself down!
This is one part of the negative feedback coefficient in modern reactors. You see what I mean when I say that modern reactors can be inherently safe? We can take advantage of such mechanisms to make reactors inherently safe! I don't know about you, but this just makes me get hot all over! Just kidding...
Monday, April 18, 2011
Safety at the hands of Physics
I have to say that I was really impressed at the response I got to my video. The idea of passively safe nuclear power seems to strike a chord with a lot of people, especially given the current situation in Japan. Knowing that if the Fukushima Diiachi nuclear power plant had been built with modern Generation III technology what we have seen happen over there would not be possible is a very intriguing notion. I have been claiming for the last few weeks that the Fukushima incident couldn't have happened if it was a modern reactor, and I bet by now you are sick of me saying this without giving you proof. So here we go...a little proof.
As it turns out, passive safety systems are both numerous and complex in design. It took me quite a while to pour through texts talking about passive safety systems and decipher whatever code they were using. It seems that nuclear engineers are as keen on using acronyms as the military is, which will be interesting being that I will be a nuclear engineer in the Navy. Anyway, I am going to give you a warning that passive safety systems are extremely complex, often depending on multiple valve systems and thermal properties of materials that can be hard to follow. My eyes are still crossed from reading about them, but I think I have boiled it down to several key ideas. This, and I am blaring the Mumford and Sons right now to get my mind in the right place, which I highly recommend to everyone. Maybe they can help us weave through this just a little to understand the premise, to help us gain the proof we are looking for.
As I mentioned above, there are many types of passive safety. The one I talked about in the video was something known as a negative feedback mechanism. Such mechanisms are designed to stop the reactor from continuing to heat up as it gets hotter. Doppler broadening is one such mechanism. The reactor I talked about in my video used the high heat capacitance of liquid metals to pull heat away from the reactor. These systems are designed to keep the reactor from running away, so that they operate at a safe temperature even when all cooling is lost. They really interesting in themselves, but I will defer taking about these as I want to talk about the type of passive safety currently at hand; the type that would have prevented the disaster at Fukushima.
You probably heard people referring to something called decay heat when they were talking about Fukushima. You see, the decay heat was the cause of the problem when it came to keeping the reactors under control. What is decay heat? Well, after fission takes place, daughter products from the fission reaction are left over. These are just the split halves of the nucleus that underwent fission. The daughter products are often extremely unstable themselves causing them to decay further. Unlike the fissile material in the reactor (the nuclear fuel), the daughter products don't need neutrons around to decay. So even when the reactor is shut down, the daughter products are decaying and releasing heat. This is why the reactor must be cooled even after the reactor has been shutdown. It is this cooling that failed in Fukushima. There were many redundant systems in place to ensure that cooling would always be working, but apparently engineering redundant systems is not enough to insure against the improbable.
This is where passive safety steps into play. So what exactly do I mean when I call something passively safe? I mean that the system does not rely upon outside sources to operate it. It does not need a back up generator or batteries, or even power at all. They rely simply on the never failing laws of physics. And if those fail, we have bigger problems to face than a nuclear power plant if you catch my drift.
There are many types of passive safety systems that are designed to ensure that decay heat is pulled away from the reactor once it has been shutdown. They all work off the same basic ideas though, so I will avoid the metric ton of technical information it would take to fully explain these and talk just about the basic design that they all share (in general). If you really want to read about them though, I say more power to you and point you to this article. For the rest of us, lets just stay here on Earth while discussing this.
The first source that powers passive safety systems is good old gravity itself. Modern light water reactor (most commercial reactors around the world are light water reactors) make use of gravity to deliver water to the reactor if the cooling system fails. Fukushima relies upon pumps to deliver water to the reactor, but once the pumps no longer work, they are just kind of left up a creek without a paddle. When modern systems loose cooling abilities, water can still be delivered by water storage tanks that are placed above the reactors. Modern reactors have to have a water source located above the reactor so that water can gravity feed to keep the core cool. It is kind of like using a water tower to store water. Even when the power goes out, the town will still be supplied water thanks to gravity!
Some reactors used tanks that are pressurized. When a loss of coolant is detected, water automatically is injected into the reactor through valves which open based on pressure differences. When a reactor looses coolant, there is a pressure drop in the reactor vessel which causes the valve to open and water to be delivered to the core. Note that this does not take any "intelligent" input. It relies on physics alone.
So, this is great...we have water delivered to the core, but last time I checked, water can't pull that much heat away from the core if it is just sitting around the core. The water must have the heat removed from it as well. This is done by circulating the water through a device known as a heat exchanger, where the heat in stored in the core water is transferred to a medium that can cool to the atmosphere. This is necessary as we only want limited amounts of water to contact the core, and we want to keep this water contained in a closed loop. We can't just dump the water that has been through core into the cooling ponds. Besides the safety reasons, I get the feeling the NRC just wouldn't like this. Anyway, the problem is that we need to circulate the cooling water through the heat exchanger without the use of outside power. Sound impossible? It's not.
I grew up in a house that had a ranch behind it. There were no houses for miles behind where I grew up. In fact, you couldn't see any houses behind my house when I was young. You could only see Pikes Peak. I freaked me out when I got up early one summer morning and there were all the sudden houses back there in the distance. Did somebody build them overnight? Not exactly... You see, there was a hill somewhere between where I lived and the houses that were back there. Thanks to the hill, you couldn't see the houses most of the time, but on that morning when the air was cool and the sun was strong, the heat from the houses actually appeared to make them rise from out of nowhere. My point: heat rises!
Ok, that was a long winded and perhaps pointless story to just get that across, but I had to do something to break up the monotony. Anyway, heat rises! Passive safety takes advantage of this. It turns out that we can use this fact as well as gravity to circulate the water through the reactor. The hot water or steam rises up through a heat exchanger which cools the water. After cooling, the water uses gravity to return back to the reactor. This is done using several different techniques, but I will spare you explanation of the methods. The cool part is that natural convection and gravity can circulate the water without having to use powered pumps! Nature has allowed us to build a pump that needs no electricity! The only downside to this part of the passive safety system is that a person must manually initiate this process. Physics does not automatically turn this one on for us, but at least we will know that it will always work. It doesn't need those backup generators that have been washed away by the tsunami!
There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether we can safely harness the power of the nucleus. Some tend to view it as we are simply trying to play with the power of God by taking on such endeavors. I think that the safety part of the industry is just an engineering challenge though. We can do it, though we might make a few mistakes along the way. In general though, I think we can build nuclear reactors to be as safe as anything else in this world.
As it turns out, passive safety systems are both numerous and complex in design. It took me quite a while to pour through texts talking about passive safety systems and decipher whatever code they were using. It seems that nuclear engineers are as keen on using acronyms as the military is, which will be interesting being that I will be a nuclear engineer in the Navy. Anyway, I am going to give you a warning that passive safety systems are extremely complex, often depending on multiple valve systems and thermal properties of materials that can be hard to follow. My eyes are still crossed from reading about them, but I think I have boiled it down to several key ideas. This, and I am blaring the Mumford and Sons right now to get my mind in the right place, which I highly recommend to everyone. Maybe they can help us weave through this just a little to understand the premise, to help us gain the proof we are looking for.
As I mentioned above, there are many types of passive safety. The one I talked about in the video was something known as a negative feedback mechanism. Such mechanisms are designed to stop the reactor from continuing to heat up as it gets hotter. Doppler broadening is one such mechanism. The reactor I talked about in my video used the high heat capacitance of liquid metals to pull heat away from the reactor. These systems are designed to keep the reactor from running away, so that they operate at a safe temperature even when all cooling is lost. They really interesting in themselves, but I will defer taking about these as I want to talk about the type of passive safety currently at hand; the type that would have prevented the disaster at Fukushima.
You probably heard people referring to something called decay heat when they were talking about Fukushima. You see, the decay heat was the cause of the problem when it came to keeping the reactors under control. What is decay heat? Well, after fission takes place, daughter products from the fission reaction are left over. These are just the split halves of the nucleus that underwent fission. The daughter products are often extremely unstable themselves causing them to decay further. Unlike the fissile material in the reactor (the nuclear fuel), the daughter products don't need neutrons around to decay. So even when the reactor is shut down, the daughter products are decaying and releasing heat. This is why the reactor must be cooled even after the reactor has been shutdown. It is this cooling that failed in Fukushima. There were many redundant systems in place to ensure that cooling would always be working, but apparently engineering redundant systems is not enough to insure against the improbable.
This is where passive safety steps into play. So what exactly do I mean when I call something passively safe? I mean that the system does not rely upon outside sources to operate it. It does not need a back up generator or batteries, or even power at all. They rely simply on the never failing laws of physics. And if those fail, we have bigger problems to face than a nuclear power plant if you catch my drift.
There are many types of passive safety systems that are designed to ensure that decay heat is pulled away from the reactor once it has been shutdown. They all work off the same basic ideas though, so I will avoid the metric ton of technical information it would take to fully explain these and talk just about the basic design that they all share (in general). If you really want to read about them though, I say more power to you and point you to this article. For the rest of us, lets just stay here on Earth while discussing this.
The first source that powers passive safety systems is good old gravity itself. Modern light water reactor (most commercial reactors around the world are light water reactors) make use of gravity to deliver water to the reactor if the cooling system fails. Fukushima relies upon pumps to deliver water to the reactor, but once the pumps no longer work, they are just kind of left up a creek without a paddle. When modern systems loose cooling abilities, water can still be delivered by water storage tanks that are placed above the reactors. Modern reactors have to have a water source located above the reactor so that water can gravity feed to keep the core cool. It is kind of like using a water tower to store water. Even when the power goes out, the town will still be supplied water thanks to gravity!
Some reactors used tanks that are pressurized. When a loss of coolant is detected, water automatically is injected into the reactor through valves which open based on pressure differences. When a reactor looses coolant, there is a pressure drop in the reactor vessel which causes the valve to open and water to be delivered to the core. Note that this does not take any "intelligent" input. It relies on physics alone.
So, this is great...we have water delivered to the core, but last time I checked, water can't pull that much heat away from the core if it is just sitting around the core. The water must have the heat removed from it as well. This is done by circulating the water through a device known as a heat exchanger, where the heat in stored in the core water is transferred to a medium that can cool to the atmosphere. This is necessary as we only want limited amounts of water to contact the core, and we want to keep this water contained in a closed loop. We can't just dump the water that has been through core into the cooling ponds. Besides the safety reasons, I get the feeling the NRC just wouldn't like this. Anyway, the problem is that we need to circulate the cooling water through the heat exchanger without the use of outside power. Sound impossible? It's not.
I grew up in a house that had a ranch behind it. There were no houses for miles behind where I grew up. In fact, you couldn't see any houses behind my house when I was young. You could only see Pikes Peak. I freaked me out when I got up early one summer morning and there were all the sudden houses back there in the distance. Did somebody build them overnight? Not exactly... You see, there was a hill somewhere between where I lived and the houses that were back there. Thanks to the hill, you couldn't see the houses most of the time, but on that morning when the air was cool and the sun was strong, the heat from the houses actually appeared to make them rise from out of nowhere. My point: heat rises!
Ok, that was a long winded and perhaps pointless story to just get that across, but I had to do something to break up the monotony. Anyway, heat rises! Passive safety takes advantage of this. It turns out that we can use this fact as well as gravity to circulate the water through the reactor. The hot water or steam rises up through a heat exchanger which cools the water. After cooling, the water uses gravity to return back to the reactor. This is done using several different techniques, but I will spare you explanation of the methods. The cool part is that natural convection and gravity can circulate the water without having to use powered pumps! Nature has allowed us to build a pump that needs no electricity! The only downside to this part of the passive safety system is that a person must manually initiate this process. Physics does not automatically turn this one on for us, but at least we will know that it will always work. It doesn't need those backup generators that have been washed away by the tsunami!
There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether we can safely harness the power of the nucleus. Some tend to view it as we are simply trying to play with the power of God by taking on such endeavors. I think that the safety part of the industry is just an engineering challenge though. We can do it, though we might make a few mistakes along the way. In general though, I think we can build nuclear reactors to be as safe as anything else in this world.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Ok, I tried, but I can't hold it any longer
I know that I said I was going to leave Fukushima and discuss other things for a while, but I think it is appropriate to give just a little attention to it due to recent happenings. I know the question in floating around in everybody's head right now is "Is Fukushima another Chernobyl?" Before I get to that though, let me address a few other issues.
I must first do a little pulling of my own foot out of my mouth. Recent reports are indicating that the problems at the Fukushima Diiachi plant seem to have released much more radiation than I ever thought they would. Reading reports about the contamination levels near the plant itself show some areas that have fairly high levels of radiation. It looks as if there will be some areas that some people will not be able to go back to and there will definitely be some areas which will need to be decontaminated before people can live there again. At this point, it is looking like cesium-137 will be the largest factor for contamination as radioiodide (radioactive iodine) will have decayed away within a month or so. I just want to be upfront and say that there is contamination from the incident at Fukushima.
So is this another Chernobyl? Many people, including the media in general, seem to be thinking that the answer to this question has become a definitive yes since the nuclear accident level was raised to a 7, the highest level when it comes to nuclear accidents. Since Chernobyl has been the only nuclear accident to reach this scale in the past, it is logical to assume that Fukushima has become another Chernobyl. In reality though, that is not really how the rating scale works. Though they are both rated a 7 now, they are still in totally different categories.
As the nuclear industry is quickly learning, maybe the current rating system does not have enough resolution to distinguish between such incidents. It is kind of like trying to separate the world into two types of people, say males and females. That doesn't really describe different types of people that well you see. There isn't enough resolution. From the current reports, it looks like the amount of contamination estimated to be released by the nuclear power plant at Fukushima is about 10 times less than what was released during Chernobyl. So why are they both classified the same? Well, the rating system is quantitative, meaning that when a power plant releases so much contamination it is automatically given the corresponding rating. Fukushima has reached that level and is thus given a 7 rating.
We also need to keep in mind that not all emissions of radioactivity are equal. For the rating system, the radioactive emissions are measured in Becquerels, which is a unit of one radioactive event. The higher the amount of Becquerels released, the higher the activity of the contaminated area. Being that this is just a description of the radioactive decays per second, it doesn't really tell about the level of contamination. You see, what has mainly been released due to Fukushima is cesium-137 and iodine-129. The iodine has a fairly short half-life, meaning that most of the iodine-129 released is all ready gone. The cesium has a longer half-life, so the will be dealing with that for a years to come, but it will all be gone within a reasonable time frame. It is also not as big as a threat to human health as some radioactive substances. Chernobyl on the other hand had quite different releases. Because the reactor actually exploded, parts of the reactor core itself was spread all over the countryside as well as into the atmosphere. This includes substances such as uranium-235, uranium-238, and plutonium-239 as well as other fission daughter products such as cobalt-60. These all are much more hazardous to human health than cesium-137 and have much longer half-lives. Though the Fukushima plant's releases are estimated to be about 10% of what was released in Chernobyl, the danger that the releases pose to human health is no where near what was seen by Chernobyl. Can we call the Fukushima incident another Chernobyl? I still don't think so...
And what about the fact that we have not seen any direct deaths from Fukushima? I mean even the worst that the workers have seen is some minor skin burns, which is much different than what was seen at Chernobyl. There were 56 direct deaths from the events at Chernobyl. There have been none from Fukushima. In this way, Chernobyl was a much different animal than Fukushima. Also keep in mind that the Japanese don't have the iodine deficiency in their diets that the Russians did near Chernobyl. Because of this, the thyroids of the Japanese will not absorb the radioactive iodine like the Russian's thyroids did, and therefore they don't have as high of chance for developing cancer.
With the upgrading of the incident rating to 7, many people as well as some of the mass media are led to believe that the situation is getting worse there. This just simply is not true. This rating is based on what has already happened, and probably due to the happenings of the first couple days after the earthquake. The rating system is based on releases and harm to the surrounding area. It is not a measure of the threat level of the current situation. Currently, the reactors are under control and the cleanup process is beginning. There is still concern about one of the spent fuel pools, but there is no longer the threat of a reactor meltdown.
I want to conclude with an interesting phenomenon I am observing. It seems that some people are realizing that a worst case scenario at a nuclear power plant is not as bad as what Hollywood or Greenpeace led them to believe. There will not be any mutant Godzillas attacking Japan and there is no massive death toll from the incident. In fact there is no death toll accompanying what happened there. Does nuclear power have risk associated with it? Of course it does! But the point is that so does everything else we do. Energy is not a clean business, no matter what type you are talking about (and yes that includes solar power). Just maybe the Fukushima incident will show the world that our fears about a nuclear incident are a little bit romanticized. I would even call them exaggerated. But again, people are less afraid of what they have experienced. After all, the world didn't end over the last month.
As a quick aside, I have to partially attribute the explanation I have put together here to discussions that Dr. King and Dr. Kozak have held in my classes. Dr. King is an expert in nuclear energy and Dr. Kozak is an expert in radiation risk and health assessment. Some of what I have mentioned here is a product of their opinions and discussions. I hope that I passed a little of their expertise in the field to you.
I must first do a little pulling of my own foot out of my mouth. Recent reports are indicating that the problems at the Fukushima Diiachi plant seem to have released much more radiation than I ever thought they would. Reading reports about the contamination levels near the plant itself show some areas that have fairly high levels of radiation. It looks as if there will be some areas that some people will not be able to go back to and there will definitely be some areas which will need to be decontaminated before people can live there again. At this point, it is looking like cesium-137 will be the largest factor for contamination as radioiodide (radioactive iodine) will have decayed away within a month or so. I just want to be upfront and say that there is contamination from the incident at Fukushima.
So is this another Chernobyl? Many people, including the media in general, seem to be thinking that the answer to this question has become a definitive yes since the nuclear accident level was raised to a 7, the highest level when it comes to nuclear accidents. Since Chernobyl has been the only nuclear accident to reach this scale in the past, it is logical to assume that Fukushima has become another Chernobyl. In reality though, that is not really how the rating scale works. Though they are both rated a 7 now, they are still in totally different categories.
As the nuclear industry is quickly learning, maybe the current rating system does not have enough resolution to distinguish between such incidents. It is kind of like trying to separate the world into two types of people, say males and females. That doesn't really describe different types of people that well you see. There isn't enough resolution. From the current reports, it looks like the amount of contamination estimated to be released by the nuclear power plant at Fukushima is about 10 times less than what was released during Chernobyl. So why are they both classified the same? Well, the rating system is quantitative, meaning that when a power plant releases so much contamination it is automatically given the corresponding rating. Fukushima has reached that level and is thus given a 7 rating.
We also need to keep in mind that not all emissions of radioactivity are equal. For the rating system, the radioactive emissions are measured in Becquerels, which is a unit of one radioactive event. The higher the amount of Becquerels released, the higher the activity of the contaminated area. Being that this is just a description of the radioactive decays per second, it doesn't really tell about the level of contamination. You see, what has mainly been released due to Fukushima is cesium-137 and iodine-129. The iodine has a fairly short half-life, meaning that most of the iodine-129 released is all ready gone. The cesium has a longer half-life, so the will be dealing with that for a years to come, but it will all be gone within a reasonable time frame. It is also not as big as a threat to human health as some radioactive substances. Chernobyl on the other hand had quite different releases. Because the reactor actually exploded, parts of the reactor core itself was spread all over the countryside as well as into the atmosphere. This includes substances such as uranium-235, uranium-238, and plutonium-239 as well as other fission daughter products such as cobalt-60. These all are much more hazardous to human health than cesium-137 and have much longer half-lives. Though the Fukushima plant's releases are estimated to be about 10% of what was released in Chernobyl, the danger that the releases pose to human health is no where near what was seen by Chernobyl. Can we call the Fukushima incident another Chernobyl? I still don't think so...
And what about the fact that we have not seen any direct deaths from Fukushima? I mean even the worst that the workers have seen is some minor skin burns, which is much different than what was seen at Chernobyl. There were 56 direct deaths from the events at Chernobyl. There have been none from Fukushima. In this way, Chernobyl was a much different animal than Fukushima. Also keep in mind that the Japanese don't have the iodine deficiency in their diets that the Russians did near Chernobyl. Because of this, the thyroids of the Japanese will not absorb the radioactive iodine like the Russian's thyroids did, and therefore they don't have as high of chance for developing cancer.
With the upgrading of the incident rating to 7, many people as well as some of the mass media are led to believe that the situation is getting worse there. This just simply is not true. This rating is based on what has already happened, and probably due to the happenings of the first couple days after the earthquake. The rating system is based on releases and harm to the surrounding area. It is not a measure of the threat level of the current situation. Currently, the reactors are under control and the cleanup process is beginning. There is still concern about one of the spent fuel pools, but there is no longer the threat of a reactor meltdown.
I want to conclude with an interesting phenomenon I am observing. It seems that some people are realizing that a worst case scenario at a nuclear power plant is not as bad as what Hollywood or Greenpeace led them to believe. There will not be any mutant Godzillas attacking Japan and there is no massive death toll from the incident. In fact there is no death toll accompanying what happened there. Does nuclear power have risk associated with it? Of course it does! But the point is that so does everything else we do. Energy is not a clean business, no matter what type you are talking about (and yes that includes solar power). Just maybe the Fukushima incident will show the world that our fears about a nuclear incident are a little bit romanticized. I would even call them exaggerated. But again, people are less afraid of what they have experienced. After all, the world didn't end over the last month.
As a quick aside, I have to partially attribute the explanation I have put together here to discussions that Dr. King and Dr. Kozak have held in my classes. Dr. King is an expert in nuclear energy and Dr. Kozak is an expert in radiation risk and health assessment. Some of what I have mentioned here is a product of their opinions and discussions. I hope that I passed a little of their expertise in the field to you.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Fireside Chat
I have to first apologize for my bad movie making skills, but here I present me, myself, and I in person to try and give a little perspective about safety in the nuclear industry. This is an extremely important concept to understand especially as reports about the Fukushima reactors get worse by the day. I hope not to disappoint any of you who were hoping that some dashingly charming and good looking fellow was behind the stream of rants coming out of this blog. I never pretend to be any of those things! And yes, I know that the blanket is awesome. Before you ask, my mom made it for me.
This is just a quick little trivia piece about what passive safety can do, but the idea is very powerful. Can a nuclear reactor be designed to be inherently safe? Yes it can. The designs for the Generation IV reactors are all inherently safe like the advanced fast reactor in Idaho. Subjected to the worst case scenarios, they will shut down safely and use the laws of physics to keep them cool. How awesome is that! I will get more technical about passive safety systems in the future, but I just wanted you to realize that we can harness the power of the atom and do it safely. Granted, these designs are somewhat different than what is currently in use, but hey, we haven't built a new reactor in more than 30 years. All the more reason to get the industry going again. It will actually be safer for the country if we replace the old reactors with new reactor technology.
This is just a quick little trivia piece about what passive safety can do, but the idea is very powerful. Can a nuclear reactor be designed to be inherently safe? Yes it can. The designs for the Generation IV reactors are all inherently safe like the advanced fast reactor in Idaho. Subjected to the worst case scenarios, they will shut down safely and use the laws of physics to keep them cool. How awesome is that! I will get more technical about passive safety systems in the future, but I just wanted you to realize that we can harness the power of the atom and do it safely. Granted, these designs are somewhat different than what is currently in use, but hey, we haven't built a new reactor in more than 30 years. All the more reason to get the industry going again. It will actually be safer for the country if we replace the old reactors with new reactor technology.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Think Fast!!!
In my last article on the thorium fuel cycle I threw the bait out hoping that you might bite...now it is time for me to sink the hook. I made a lot of statements about how using thorium would lower the risk of proliferation, would reduce the waste issues involved with current reactors, and would even make nuclear power more of a long term energy solution. How would all this come into play simply from changing the fuel we use? Well, I explained some of the basics in the last post, but many of the answers come from a reactor design that was taken off the table almost 30 years ago.
The fast breeder reactors were so exciting that it seems nuclear engineers were getting high over the idea of them back in the early 80s. Let me first say that I wanted to find a cool picture to put with this post...my advice is that you should think before typing "breeding" into Google images. I will spare you guys the cool images this time. Anyway, some of you guys may have heard the term breeder reactor before and wondered what all the buzz was about. You see, the idea of the breeder reactors made power generation of fission based nuclear reactors almost limitless. Why? Because when operating a breeder reactor, you create more fissile material than you use to run the reactor. Not impressed? Well, remember back to my first post on how a nuclear reactor works? It is the fissile material that we need in the fuel so that we get heat out of it. This is the material that will capture neutrons and spontaneously undergo fission. When we take natural uranium out of the ground, less than 1% of it is fissile (actually about 0.71%). When it comes out of the ground, we can't really use it to power a nuclear reactor. Some of the non-fissile U-238 must be removed by refinement so as to raise the percentage of fissile U-235 in the fuel to between 3% and 5%. Phew, tired of numbers yet? My point is that the amount of fissile material we have on Earth is pretty small, and considering that this is what we need to run nuclear reactors, this is kind of a big deal.
Fortunately, this is not a killer blow to the nuclear industry. You see, there are reactions which certain materials can undergo by which they become a fissile isotope. What do I mean? I mean that certain reactions create more fuel for our nuclear reactors. This is going on in every nuclear reactor around the world as we speak. The material is known as fertile, which just means that it can be "bred" to become fissile so that it will undergo fission and power the reactor. Uranium-238 is one of these fertile substances. Like a fissile material, it also has the ability to absorb a neutron. When it absorbs a neutron though, it does not undergo fission but instead transforms into the infamous plutonium-239. This is a fissile isotope and is the isotope well known as the material for nuclear weapons. As you can probably see, we are now starting to run into the problem that they had with breeder reactors back in the 80s, but I will get to that in a second. The plutonium-239 that is produced while the reactor is running is responsible for the fuel being able to last as long as it does in a nuclear reactor.
Unfortunately, current reactors are not very efficient for turning fertile materials into fissile materials. This is a result of modern reactors being what are known as "thermal" reactors. This simply refers to the energy at which the neutrons are causing fission. Today's reactors largely depend on the fact that U-235 has a much higher probability of capturing lower energy neutrons. This is what "thermal" refers to...the neutrons are at low energies meaning that they are moving slower. Thus, we use materials in our reactors that slow down the neutrons so to make most of the neutrons in the reactor to be what are considered slow neutrons.
As it turns out, slower neutrons might be ideal for inducing fission which is great for making heat, but they don't take advantage of the large amounts of fertile material we have in the reactor. You see, we can create more fissile material and thus more fuel if we speed up the neutrons and operate the reactor in what is known as the "fast" range. Yeah, I know, really creative... Anyway, with fast neutrons, the uranium-238 in the fuel has a better chance of capturing a neutron and turning into plutonium-239, which is fissile! Just by operating reactors in the fast regime, we can create more fuel than we burn! Amazed yet? Well you shouldn't be because there is still a bit of a problem with this.
For good reason, people were afraid of operating types of reactors that bred plutonium-239. We are again running into the idea of nuclear proliferation, and here in a very big way. The thermal reactors that we are running today operate off lowly enriched fuel you see. This means that only about 5% of the fuel is fissile. In order for a reactor to run under the fast conditions that I talked about above, they need to have fuel that is enriched so that about 20% of the fuel is fissile. So now we are talking about 20% of the reactor fuel being plutonium-239. How easy do we want to make it for people to get their hands on nuclear weapons material? Not very would be the right answer, so the industry was forced to abandon this idea. Now though, the idea is coming back in a big, big way!
Remember back to that thorium stuff I was talking about at the beginning of all this? Well, it seems to hold the key to making nuclear a long term energy solution. Thorium in its natural state does not actually contain any fissile material at all. That means that we must enrich it, meaning we must add fissile material to it before we can even think about putting the stuff in a nuclear reactor. As it turns out though, the natural isotope of thorium (Th-232) is a fertile material. Now is when your eyebrows should be raising and that smile of complete amazement should be starting to creep across your face. When Th-232 captures a neutron, it becomes uranium-233, which is fissile! And even better, it isn't a weapons material! Hallelujah! We are saved!
The bottom line is that by putting thorium-232 into a breeding type reactor, we would create more fissile material than would be consumed by the reactor. Another method of creating fissile material is by simply created a sort of blanket made of thorium-232 which would just be placed over the reactor. The fast neutrons escaping the operating reactor would be sent into the blanket where they would be captured by the thorium-232 and turned into fissile fuel. Doing this, reactors would basically be able to power themselves indefinitely.
What limits our current power production from our fuel is the amount of fissile material present. Currently, the fuel is being run in the reactors until the amount of fissile material gets too small to keep the chain reaction going. The fertile material is not being used, meaning that we are throwing away more than 95% of the energy left in the fuel when we consider the fuel "spent." Breeder reactors would change this. All the material in the fuel could be caused to undergo fission! This is a powerful idea in the way that it gives us the ability to access virtually limitless energy as thorium is quite abundant in the Earth's crust. About 5 times more abundant than even uranium. This should be more than enough fuel to power us until the time where monkeys give birth to another race smarter than ourselves who can solve the problem of fusion power. I might be missing the concept of evolution here...anybody?
So is the energy crisis solved? Well, not quite. There are several industries which need to be better developed before we are ready to launch into breeder type reactors. First is that we will need to reprocess the fuel as to remove the fission fragments from the fuel. This is just part of the process, but currently reprocessing of nuclear fuel is not allowed in the United States. The tide seems to be changing on that though. I mean with much lower risk of proliferation, there is really no reason not to reprocess the fuel.
The idea of geological storage must also be solved. Currently we don't have a place to put the high level waste, and though the amount of high level waste coming from breeder reactors is much lower than that from our current reactors, there is still waste that we must store. I will talk more about this in the future, but I just want you to see some of the issues that must be confronted before we can really depend on this energy source. Are these challenges worth overcoming? I would argue that if we want a viable energy solution in the near future, we must overcome these challenges. Believe it or not, we are a lot closer than one might think to solving all of these problems. It is largely a matter of politics now, but I am going to venture to guess that nuclear power just might become the first viable renewable energy resource. Nuclear power is going to solve the energy crisis like anybody would want to solve a problem: by breeding! Sorry, couldn't resist. And yes, I said renewable.
The fast breeder reactors were so exciting that it seems nuclear engineers were getting high over the idea of them back in the early 80s. Let me first say that I wanted to find a cool picture to put with this post...my advice is that you should think before typing "breeding" into Google images. I will spare you guys the cool images this time. Anyway, some of you guys may have heard the term breeder reactor before and wondered what all the buzz was about. You see, the idea of the breeder reactors made power generation of fission based nuclear reactors almost limitless. Why? Because when operating a breeder reactor, you create more fissile material than you use to run the reactor. Not impressed? Well, remember back to my first post on how a nuclear reactor works? It is the fissile material that we need in the fuel so that we get heat out of it. This is the material that will capture neutrons and spontaneously undergo fission. When we take natural uranium out of the ground, less than 1% of it is fissile (actually about 0.71%). When it comes out of the ground, we can't really use it to power a nuclear reactor. Some of the non-fissile U-238 must be removed by refinement so as to raise the percentage of fissile U-235 in the fuel to between 3% and 5%. Phew, tired of numbers yet? My point is that the amount of fissile material we have on Earth is pretty small, and considering that this is what we need to run nuclear reactors, this is kind of a big deal.
Fortunately, this is not a killer blow to the nuclear industry. You see, there are reactions which certain materials can undergo by which they become a fissile isotope. What do I mean? I mean that certain reactions create more fuel for our nuclear reactors. This is going on in every nuclear reactor around the world as we speak. The material is known as fertile, which just means that it can be "bred" to become fissile so that it will undergo fission and power the reactor. Uranium-238 is one of these fertile substances. Like a fissile material, it also has the ability to absorb a neutron. When it absorbs a neutron though, it does not undergo fission but instead transforms into the infamous plutonium-239. This is a fissile isotope and is the isotope well known as the material for nuclear weapons. As you can probably see, we are now starting to run into the problem that they had with breeder reactors back in the 80s, but I will get to that in a second. The plutonium-239 that is produced while the reactor is running is responsible for the fuel being able to last as long as it does in a nuclear reactor.
Unfortunately, current reactors are not very efficient for turning fertile materials into fissile materials. This is a result of modern reactors being what are known as "thermal" reactors. This simply refers to the energy at which the neutrons are causing fission. Today's reactors largely depend on the fact that U-235 has a much higher probability of capturing lower energy neutrons. This is what "thermal" refers to...the neutrons are at low energies meaning that they are moving slower. Thus, we use materials in our reactors that slow down the neutrons so to make most of the neutrons in the reactor to be what are considered slow neutrons.
As it turns out, slower neutrons might be ideal for inducing fission which is great for making heat, but they don't take advantage of the large amounts of fertile material we have in the reactor. You see, we can create more fissile material and thus more fuel if we speed up the neutrons and operate the reactor in what is known as the "fast" range. Yeah, I know, really creative... Anyway, with fast neutrons, the uranium-238 in the fuel has a better chance of capturing a neutron and turning into plutonium-239, which is fissile! Just by operating reactors in the fast regime, we can create more fuel than we burn! Amazed yet? Well you shouldn't be because there is still a bit of a problem with this.
For good reason, people were afraid of operating types of reactors that bred plutonium-239. We are again running into the idea of nuclear proliferation, and here in a very big way. The thermal reactors that we are running today operate off lowly enriched fuel you see. This means that only about 5% of the fuel is fissile. In order for a reactor to run under the fast conditions that I talked about above, they need to have fuel that is enriched so that about 20% of the fuel is fissile. So now we are talking about 20% of the reactor fuel being plutonium-239. How easy do we want to make it for people to get their hands on nuclear weapons material? Not very would be the right answer, so the industry was forced to abandon this idea. Now though, the idea is coming back in a big, big way!
Remember back to that thorium stuff I was talking about at the beginning of all this? Well, it seems to hold the key to making nuclear a long term energy solution. Thorium in its natural state does not actually contain any fissile material at all. That means that we must enrich it, meaning we must add fissile material to it before we can even think about putting the stuff in a nuclear reactor. As it turns out though, the natural isotope of thorium (Th-232) is a fertile material. Now is when your eyebrows should be raising and that smile of complete amazement should be starting to creep across your face. When Th-232 captures a neutron, it becomes uranium-233, which is fissile! And even better, it isn't a weapons material! Hallelujah! We are saved!
The bottom line is that by putting thorium-232 into a breeding type reactor, we would create more fissile material than would be consumed by the reactor. Another method of creating fissile material is by simply created a sort of blanket made of thorium-232 which would just be placed over the reactor. The fast neutrons escaping the operating reactor would be sent into the blanket where they would be captured by the thorium-232 and turned into fissile fuel. Doing this, reactors would basically be able to power themselves indefinitely.
What limits our current power production from our fuel is the amount of fissile material present. Currently, the fuel is being run in the reactors until the amount of fissile material gets too small to keep the chain reaction going. The fertile material is not being used, meaning that we are throwing away more than 95% of the energy left in the fuel when we consider the fuel "spent." Breeder reactors would change this. All the material in the fuel could be caused to undergo fission! This is a powerful idea in the way that it gives us the ability to access virtually limitless energy as thorium is quite abundant in the Earth's crust. About 5 times more abundant than even uranium. This should be more than enough fuel to power us until the time where monkeys give birth to another race smarter than ourselves who can solve the problem of fusion power. I might be missing the concept of evolution here...anybody?
So is the energy crisis solved? Well, not quite. There are several industries which need to be better developed before we are ready to launch into breeder type reactors. First is that we will need to reprocess the fuel as to remove the fission fragments from the fuel. This is just part of the process, but currently reprocessing of nuclear fuel is not allowed in the United States. The tide seems to be changing on that though. I mean with much lower risk of proliferation, there is really no reason not to reprocess the fuel.
The idea of geological storage must also be solved. Currently we don't have a place to put the high level waste, and though the amount of high level waste coming from breeder reactors is much lower than that from our current reactors, there is still waste that we must store. I will talk more about this in the future, but I just want you to see some of the issues that must be confronted before we can really depend on this energy source. Are these challenges worth overcoming? I would argue that if we want a viable energy solution in the near future, we must overcome these challenges. Believe it or not, we are a lot closer than one might think to solving all of these problems. It is largely a matter of politics now, but I am going to venture to guess that nuclear power just might become the first viable renewable energy resource. Nuclear power is going to solve the energy crisis like anybody would want to solve a problem: by breeding! Sorry, couldn't resist. And yes, I said renewable.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
What the heck is Thorium?
Quick! When I say uranium, what do you think of? If I say plutonium? Being the psychic that I am, I know that images of yellow radiation triangles are flashing across your mind with flashing lights and alarms going off. Your mind starts flashing danger warnings to you as visions of mushroom clouds start dancing in the back of your head. Am I close? These elements are perceived now as two of the most dangerous elements on Earth, and because of this, it is no mystery as to why people are so adverse to nuclear power. The raw materials themselves which the industry has been built around are the most dangerous things known to man kind!
This isn't really true as you could probably tell from the loud rolling of my eyes seen between the lines of my comments. Why would people be lead to believe such statements? Well, the truth is that the industry did it to itself. You see, the nuclear power industry has always had kind of a free ride as far as development goes. This stems from the world governments having such a large interest in the power of the atom: not in nuclear power per say, but in nuclear weapons. The research needed to be done to learn the fundamentals of nuclear fission reactions was all geared toward weapons research. Much of the nuclear research done to this day is paid for by the department of defense. It is a horrible history and a fact that the industry will be haunted by for a long time, but weapons research is why we have nuclear power.
Because of this, the funds geared toward nuclear research has been spent learning about the materials suitable for weapons production. As you might guess, it is uranium-235, uranium-238, and plutonium-239 that got a lot of the attention. Labs like the one in Los Alamos, New Mexico characterized the fission behaviors of these elements really really well. It would have been illogical for the nuclear industry to ignore the data being handed to them on the performance of such fuels. Thus, the private industry was enticed into designing the civilian reactors around what we knew: U-235, U-238, and Pu-239. The nuclear power industry became a parasite of the weapons program since that is where the funding was going. At this point, the industry was just asking for proliferation issues, but I will get to that later.
Currently, the nuclear power industry faces many challenges which all trace their beginnings back to the weapons legacy of the system. Fortunately for the industry, it turns out that uranium is not the only option for usable fuel cycles in the reactors. In fact, uranium isn't even the best type of fuel for commercial power production! This might be the bit of good news that the nuclear power industry needs to get back over the hump of public skepticism.
It is not a magic bullet to the issues facing nuclear power, but the thorium fuel cycle is the way the the industry will separate itself from its weapons legacy. You see, the weapons program that the government was funding did not care what materials were optimum for power production, but only those that were optimal for building the "big stick" that the country was founding its defense strategies upon. Now though, the ball is in a different court. We aren't so much facing a nuclear holocaust anymore so much as the world becoming a giant human oven. Nuclear power is seen as the forerunner for mitigating the human effects on global warming. What does this mean? Well, I hope that it means that funding will be sent back toward developing a nuclear fuel cycle optimized for power production, but I guess only time will tell.
So what is better about thorium? That is probably the question that is on your mind at this point, or at least it is now since I just made it so. Many of you probably have never even heard of thorium or the thorium fuel cycle which I only know because I had never heard of it before reaching graduate level classes in nuclear engineering. As it turns out, it is a pretty well kept secret and it should definitely not be. If you go back and dust of that old periodic table that you have from the chemistry class you took in high school, you can find thorium two spaces to the left of uranium in that infamous f-block of the table. Yes, there it is, a naturally occurring substance that nobody ever concerned themselves with. This is the element that could be the solution of the world's energy problems for thousands and thousands of years.
The biggest selling point of designing reactors for thorium fuel...the abundance of it here on Earth! In fact, thorium is between 3 and 4 times more common in nature than uranium. If you have been following me for a while, you have heard my rantings on how much uranium we have in reserve. Thorium being this much more abundant means that solar and wind power would not have to be developed for use any time soon. In fact, there is enough thorium now to have powered mankind at current demand since the first man was born out of a monkey. Not that I believe this is how mankind came about, but you get my point. We have a lot of power available with a thorium fuel cycle. Of course, we have enough uranium to power us into the quite distant future as well, so why the heck would we want to spend so much on research to redevelop the technology?
There are many many reasons that thorium is a much better fuel cycle and I hope to address more of them in future posts in more detail, but I am going to hit a few of the basics here. First of all, like I stated above, the thorium cycle will take us away from the ties the industry has to nuclear weapons. This is not only true by taking uranium out of the picture, but also by putting up major barriers to nuclear proliferation. Unlike uranium, thorium contains no natural isotopes which are fissile. By this, I mean that unlike uranium, thorium will not undergo nuclear fission in its natural state. This by itself means that thorium cannot be processed or used to create a weapon.
Thorium is found completely in nature as thorium-232. In a reactor, very very small amounts of material that can be used to create a weapon are generated. Beyond this, many of the fission daughter products which result from nuclear fission in the reactor have very short half lives. This means, in the case of thorium, that what comes out of the reactor is a very strong gamma-ray emitter. This provides two types of protections as far as nuclear proliferation goes. It makes the waste very easy to detect if it were ever to be stolen, and it makes the waste very hard to work with. In order to create a weapon from what comes out of the thorium cycle, one would need special facilities to do it as getting near the waste to process would kill them. All management of the spent fuel is done remotely, including the reprocessing of it for reusing the fuel. Take away message, steeling the fuel and creating weapons from the spent fuel is pretty much impossible eliminating the fears we have of this with the uranium fuel cycle.
Another major benefit is the much shorter lifespan of the waste from the thorium fuel cycle. Like I said above, the half lives of the wastes from the thorium fuel cycle are much much shorter. Instead of looking at half lives on the order of tens of thousands of years, we are looking now at half lives on the order of less than 100 years. The waste storage issues are made much simpler with the thorium cycle, which a much needed boost to nuclear power.
There are many more advantages to the thorium cycle, but I will defer discussing them to a later time because I feel that I have hit you over the head with enough technical information for one day. If you are really curious though and want a technical explanation of the thorium cycle, check out this report. It is long and technical, but it is very informative. I wouldn't read it if I were you though...It is spring time and you should be thinking about going outside at this point instead.
This isn't really true as you could probably tell from the loud rolling of my eyes seen between the lines of my comments. Why would people be lead to believe such statements? Well, the truth is that the industry did it to itself. You see, the nuclear power industry has always had kind of a free ride as far as development goes. This stems from the world governments having such a large interest in the power of the atom: not in nuclear power per say, but in nuclear weapons. The research needed to be done to learn the fundamentals of nuclear fission reactions was all geared toward weapons research. Much of the nuclear research done to this day is paid for by the department of defense. It is a horrible history and a fact that the industry will be haunted by for a long time, but weapons research is why we have nuclear power.
Because of this, the funds geared toward nuclear research has been spent learning about the materials suitable for weapons production. As you might guess, it is uranium-235, uranium-238, and plutonium-239 that got a lot of the attention. Labs like the one in Los Alamos, New Mexico characterized the fission behaviors of these elements really really well. It would have been illogical for the nuclear industry to ignore the data being handed to them on the performance of such fuels. Thus, the private industry was enticed into designing the civilian reactors around what we knew: U-235, U-238, and Pu-239. The nuclear power industry became a parasite of the weapons program since that is where the funding was going. At this point, the industry was just asking for proliferation issues, but I will get to that later.
Currently, the nuclear power industry faces many challenges which all trace their beginnings back to the weapons legacy of the system. Fortunately for the industry, it turns out that uranium is not the only option for usable fuel cycles in the reactors. In fact, uranium isn't even the best type of fuel for commercial power production! This might be the bit of good news that the nuclear power industry needs to get back over the hump of public skepticism.
It is not a magic bullet to the issues facing nuclear power, but the thorium fuel cycle is the way the the industry will separate itself from its weapons legacy. You see, the weapons program that the government was funding did not care what materials were optimum for power production, but only those that were optimal for building the "big stick" that the country was founding its defense strategies upon. Now though, the ball is in a different court. We aren't so much facing a nuclear holocaust anymore so much as the world becoming a giant human oven. Nuclear power is seen as the forerunner for mitigating the human effects on global warming. What does this mean? Well, I hope that it means that funding will be sent back toward developing a nuclear fuel cycle optimized for power production, but I guess only time will tell.
So what is better about thorium? That is probably the question that is on your mind at this point, or at least it is now since I just made it so. Many of you probably have never even heard of thorium or the thorium fuel cycle which I only know because I had never heard of it before reaching graduate level classes in nuclear engineering. As it turns out, it is a pretty well kept secret and it should definitely not be. If you go back and dust of that old periodic table that you have from the chemistry class you took in high school, you can find thorium two spaces to the left of uranium in that infamous f-block of the table. Yes, there it is, a naturally occurring substance that nobody ever concerned themselves with. This is the element that could be the solution of the world's energy problems for thousands and thousands of years.
The biggest selling point of designing reactors for thorium fuel...the abundance of it here on Earth! In fact, thorium is between 3 and 4 times more common in nature than uranium. If you have been following me for a while, you have heard my rantings on how much uranium we have in reserve. Thorium being this much more abundant means that solar and wind power would not have to be developed for use any time soon. In fact, there is enough thorium now to have powered mankind at current demand since the first man was born out of a monkey. Not that I believe this is how mankind came about, but you get my point. We have a lot of power available with a thorium fuel cycle. Of course, we have enough uranium to power us into the quite distant future as well, so why the heck would we want to spend so much on research to redevelop the technology?
There are many many reasons that thorium is a much better fuel cycle and I hope to address more of them in future posts in more detail, but I am going to hit a few of the basics here. First of all, like I stated above, the thorium cycle will take us away from the ties the industry has to nuclear weapons. This is not only true by taking uranium out of the picture, but also by putting up major barriers to nuclear proliferation. Unlike uranium, thorium contains no natural isotopes which are fissile. By this, I mean that unlike uranium, thorium will not undergo nuclear fission in its natural state. This by itself means that thorium cannot be processed or used to create a weapon.
Thorium is found completely in nature as thorium-232. In a reactor, very very small amounts of material that can be used to create a weapon are generated. Beyond this, many of the fission daughter products which result from nuclear fission in the reactor have very short half lives. This means, in the case of thorium, that what comes out of the reactor is a very strong gamma-ray emitter. This provides two types of protections as far as nuclear proliferation goes. It makes the waste very easy to detect if it were ever to be stolen, and it makes the waste very hard to work with. In order to create a weapon from what comes out of the thorium cycle, one would need special facilities to do it as getting near the waste to process would kill them. All management of the spent fuel is done remotely, including the reprocessing of it for reusing the fuel. Take away message, steeling the fuel and creating weapons from the spent fuel is pretty much impossible eliminating the fears we have of this with the uranium fuel cycle.
Another major benefit is the much shorter lifespan of the waste from the thorium fuel cycle. Like I said above, the half lives of the wastes from the thorium fuel cycle are much much shorter. Instead of looking at half lives on the order of tens of thousands of years, we are looking now at half lives on the order of less than 100 years. The waste storage issues are made much simpler with the thorium cycle, which a much needed boost to nuclear power.
There are many more advantages to the thorium cycle, but I will defer discussing them to a later time because I feel that I have hit you over the head with enough technical information for one day. If you are really curious though and want a technical explanation of the thorium cycle, check out this report. It is long and technical, but it is very informative. I wouldn't read it if I were you though...It is spring time and you should be thinking about going outside at this point instead.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Fukushima Update and a Few Final Words on the Issue
Contrary to what intuition might tell you, the reports of the amount of radiation being detected around Fukushima are actually quite calming to those in the industry. It seems that everyone is once again starting to breathe normally instead of seeing my professors walk around with that big vain popping out of their forehead and their eyes slightly bulging. The stress is subsiding, and it is noticeable when looking at how those in the industry are behaving.
There are of course reports of large amounts of radiation being released into the ocean and into the area immediately surrounding the power plant. Some places are reporting levels upwards of 5 million times greater than the regulatory limit. A good article on the situation is given here if you are interested. There is contaminated water all over the sight, and I would venture to guess that some of it is leaking. I mean, if you have been paying attention to how much water they have been dumping over the reactors as well as to the methods they are using to do it, one would be crazy to think that there was not going to be any contaminated water hanging around when all was said and done.
Why would this in any way be relaxing? Well, it is indicating that the worst is over. I would think of it this way: we have started to worry about the secondary issues that a few weeks ago we did not even care about. They knew that there would be left behind material that would be contaminated due to the efforts to cool the reactor, but at the time, it was what had to be done. We gladly went with the efforts because they were what was necessary to get the situation under control. It is kind of like in the movies when the hero has to use force to get the villain under control. At that moment, they aren't worried about the well being of the walls in the house or the furniture in the living room when they are in mortal combat. In the end though, if somebody wants to continue to use the space where the violent rumble took place, it must be eventually cleaned up. They knew that dumping that much water over the reactor like that would make a mess, but it was necessary. Now they need to clean it up.
Like it says in the article above, the releases of contaminated water into the ocean so far have been controlled releases of low level radioactivity. Why would they do this? Well, as the article points out, they are finding some highly contaminated water at the sight. At the moment, it is not known where it came from or if there is more coming. It could be due to a leak in a valve somewhere, maybe the spent fuel storage pools, or even be coming from a breach in the reactor containment vessel itself. The truth is that nobody knows. As an aside, it is now not such a big worry if the containment vessel has been breached since cooling has been restored to the cores. Anyway, the reason the low level waste is being pumped to sea is to make room in the storage tanks to store the contaminated with the higher level of radiation. It is not a dire type situation though, which is signaled by the fact that they are containing it. If the situation was so bad that this stuff was going to leak out and contaminate all the water in the area, they would have already started pumping the highly radioactive water out to sea. In the long run, it is much less dangerous out there than it would be at the Fukushima sight. After all, we aren't going to form a Godzilla from the stuff.
Talking to Dr. King (the nuclear engineering department head here at CSM), he seems to think that the biggest priority still to be attended to is fully restoring the cooling systems to the spent fuel pools. Though he seemed to think that if something was going to happen to the pools, it would have happened there already. This is very calming as it means the worst is confirmed to be done with. To me, it seems that they are now transitioning from disaster containment mode at the sight to starting to worry about cleaning up the sight. For those of us that have been closely following the events, this is the moment where we can finally start to relax.
There were reports as well as plutonium being found in the soil near the power plant. I don't want to dwell here, but let me tell you that it was an extremely small amount. The levels being detected were less than 1 Bq per kilogram of soil. I know, again with the weird units, but let me explain. 1 Bq is an extremely small unit of activity. 1 Bq means that there is one radioactive event going on per second in that kilogram of soil. To be of any concern, we would need to see levels hundreds of thousands of times higher than the levels being detected. The levels being detected are roughly equivalent to filling your nalgene water bottle one one-thousandth of the way with food coloring and trying to use this to color nearly 400,000 Olympic size swimming pools (h/t to Dr. King again for this one). You are more likely to have negative effects from radiation due to somebody peeing in the pool than from the trace amounts of uranium being detected. In other words, we are very good at detecting radiation and sometimes this causes alarm. We can't detect any other types of contaminants with these low of levels.
I have devoted a lot of time over the last few weeks toward educated and learning about what is happening at FukushimaFukushima incident for a while as I think dwelling on it too long just causes me to rant, and nobody wants that. I do encourage any who have questions about what is happening to feel free to ask. I will be happy to tell you what I know and find out what I don't know. For those of you who are really hooked and want to really keep a close watch on the situation there, I reference you again to Dr. King's facebook page on Fukushima. I do have to thank you guys for listening to what I had to say about the situation. It was probably way more therapeutic for me than it was informative for you guys! Time for therapy is over now though, so lets get back and do some more learning. I think it is time for me to support all the statements I have been making the last few weeks, so here we go!
There are of course reports of large amounts of radiation being released into the ocean and into the area immediately surrounding the power plant. Some places are reporting levels upwards of 5 million times greater than the regulatory limit. A good article on the situation is given here if you are interested. There is contaminated water all over the sight, and I would venture to guess that some of it is leaking. I mean, if you have been paying attention to how much water they have been dumping over the reactors as well as to the methods they are using to do it, one would be crazy to think that there was not going to be any contaminated water hanging around when all was said and done.
Why would this in any way be relaxing? Well, it is indicating that the worst is over. I would think of it this way: we have started to worry about the secondary issues that a few weeks ago we did not even care about. They knew that there would be left behind material that would be contaminated due to the efforts to cool the reactor, but at the time, it was what had to be done. We gladly went with the efforts because they were what was necessary to get the situation under control. It is kind of like in the movies when the hero has to use force to get the villain under control. At that moment, they aren't worried about the well being of the walls in the house or the furniture in the living room when they are in mortal combat. In the end though, if somebody wants to continue to use the space where the violent rumble took place, it must be eventually cleaned up. They knew that dumping that much water over the reactor like that would make a mess, but it was necessary. Now they need to clean it up.
Like it says in the article above, the releases of contaminated water into the ocean so far have been controlled releases of low level radioactivity. Why would they do this? Well, as the article points out, they are finding some highly contaminated water at the sight. At the moment, it is not known where it came from or if there is more coming. It could be due to a leak in a valve somewhere, maybe the spent fuel storage pools, or even be coming from a breach in the reactor containment vessel itself. The truth is that nobody knows. As an aside, it is now not such a big worry if the containment vessel has been breached since cooling has been restored to the cores. Anyway, the reason the low level waste is being pumped to sea is to make room in the storage tanks to store the contaminated with the higher level of radiation. It is not a dire type situation though, which is signaled by the fact that they are containing it. If the situation was so bad that this stuff was going to leak out and contaminate all the water in the area, they would have already started pumping the highly radioactive water out to sea. In the long run, it is much less dangerous out there than it would be at the Fukushima sight. After all, we aren't going to form a Godzilla from the stuff.
Talking to Dr. King (the nuclear engineering department head here at CSM), he seems to think that the biggest priority still to be attended to is fully restoring the cooling systems to the spent fuel pools. Though he seemed to think that if something was going to happen to the pools, it would have happened there already. This is very calming as it means the worst is confirmed to be done with. To me, it seems that they are now transitioning from disaster containment mode at the sight to starting to worry about cleaning up the sight. For those of us that have been closely following the events, this is the moment where we can finally start to relax.
There were reports as well as plutonium being found in the soil near the power plant. I don't want to dwell here, but let me tell you that it was an extremely small amount. The levels being detected were less than 1 Bq per kilogram of soil. I know, again with the weird units, but let me explain. 1 Bq is an extremely small unit of activity. 1 Bq means that there is one radioactive event going on per second in that kilogram of soil. To be of any concern, we would need to see levels hundreds of thousands of times higher than the levels being detected. The levels being detected are roughly equivalent to filling your nalgene water bottle one one-thousandth of the way with food coloring and trying to use this to color nearly 400,000 Olympic size swimming pools (h/t to Dr. King again for this one). You are more likely to have negative effects from radiation due to somebody peeing in the pool than from the trace amounts of uranium being detected. In other words, we are very good at detecting radiation and sometimes this causes alarm. We can't detect any other types of contaminants with these low of levels.
I have devoted a lot of time over the last few weeks toward educated and learning about what is happening at FukushimaFukushima incident for a while as I think dwelling on it too long just causes me to rant, and nobody wants that. I do encourage any who have questions about what is happening to feel free to ask. I will be happy to tell you what I know and find out what I don't know. For those of you who are really hooked and want to really keep a close watch on the situation there, I reference you again to Dr. King's facebook page on Fukushima. I do have to thank you guys for listening to what I had to say about the situation. It was probably way more therapeutic for me than it was informative for you guys! Time for therapy is over now though, so lets get back and do some more learning. I think it is time for me to support all the statements I have been making the last few weeks, so here we go!
Sunday, April 3, 2011
A Generation that will be a Gift to Future Generations
Hey guys, sorry for the short break in writing here. Tell you the truth, I had to step away for just a couple days to catch my breath. The constant assault on the nuclear power industry with fear mongering and bad science has just been affronting to the senses to say the least and I am sure that all of us that have been working to get a little perspective out there are being worn to the bone. To be honest, getting through to the mainstream mass media over the past few weeks has been like trying to give a kid a math lesson on Christmas morning...It just isn't going to happen, and at the same time we need to take another approach besides giving a math lesson. Come to find out, normal people don't like math anyway. Who would have thought!?
I have tons of information to share with you all concerning the Fukushima incident, but I am going to choose to delay that for my next few posts. I will just say this though. A lot of what you are hearing on the mainstream nightly news networks is creative information to say the least. The reactors there are pretty much stable at this point because much of the decay heat has done exactly that; it has decayed away. The radiation reports that you are hearing are very alarmist in nature, but again, this just tends back to peoples inherent fear of radiation. I will write more on this in the future to try and substantiate what I have to say, but I am asking you to just take my word for it. The radiation levels are small and pose no danger to those near Fukushima or much less, to those of us in the United States. This won't change any minds of those of you who don't believe this yet, but I do want to reassure those of you who have been hit constantly with the apocalyptic views being put out there. Enough said, so I'll get off my soap box now.
I feel like one of those professors (and you all have had them) that you know is passionate about something, so if you ever want to get him off topic, all you have to do is ask a question about it. What I actually wanted to discuss with you today is the success of the nuclear industry in trying to meet the concerns of the public about nuclear power. On the technical side, the industry has been amazing with its advancements and now the looming release of the Gen IV reactor technology. It is very exciting, but I fear that the nuclear power industry is going to be caught in a never ending chase with the media who is working very hard to escape the physics of the situation and torment the industry anyway. It is a lot like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Don't think of it like a bad coyote chasing an innocent road runner, because we all know that Road Runner is no where near innocent. He keeps coming back to haunt Wile E. Coyote on purpose and we all know it! For instance, how is the earthquake at the Fukushima plant going to haunt the American nuclear power industry? Well, kind of like this:
We just can't catch the media at its game. It seems as though the mass mainstream media is exempt from the science of the situation, but the media will make sure that the nuclear power industry is feeling the repercussions of the events at Fukushima for a long time to come. But again, I digress...
I showed you this to give you a idea of the game that we are playing. I don't mean to say that the ideas of the nuclear are anywhere near as hair brained as that of Wile E. Coyotes, but it is good for showing that the science of the situation is not what defines the winner. The nuclear power industry has the sound science, so how do we win? Well, we have to win the trust of the people which is done by changing the image of nuclear power from something that is sterile and filled with soulless people in white coats and scary masks to an image which is more truthful. An image of an industry which cares more about the well being of people than any other industry in the world. One that is taking into account the fears and concerns of the people to create the safest and most reliable form of power. Yes, I said it. It will be the safest and most reliable form of power generation. And to top it all off, we are also making it cheaper at the same time.
I am talking of course of the generation of reactors that will be a gift to our future generations. The Generation IV reactors are slated to be in commercial operation within the decade, and let me tell you that for someone going into the industry, this is extremely exciting. The problem is that for the normal person, this is still just nuclear power. It is still that dangerous process with byproducts that are deadly for millennium to come. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is just like the cavemen thinking that fire could never be harnessed for cooking their Pterodactyl steaks. Luckily they learned so that we can enjoy our grilled steaks today.
We might be the caveman playing with nuclear power today, but let me tell you that the learning curve has been steep. The next generation of power plants have new safety systems, higher efficiencies, longer lifespans, and lower amounts of waste than anything we have seen in the past. What am I saying? Well, for all those that had so many concerns about the safety of nuclear power and the waste associated with nuclear power, the industry has listened and is coming forward with reactor designs that fix many of the issues. Passive safety systems make meltdowns physically impossible, implementing resources such as gravity to operate. And let me tell you, if gravity fails, we have bigger fish to fry than any meltdowns at a nuclear power plant. Material properties are also being utilized to cause the reactor cores to remain stable and not meltdown. The science is intriguing and beautiful here and I am planning on doing more of a technical post on this later, but for now, just realize that there are ways of making nuclear reactors inherently safe.
The next generation of reactors reduces the waste issue by increasing the efficiency of the fuel use. The Generation IV reactors will be getting upwards of 5 times as much power out of the fuel as the ones we are currently using, and let me tell you, that is amazing. Also, reprocessing techniques have been developed which do not create weapons grade plutonium, meaning that nuclear proliferation will no longer be a concern with nuclear power. By reprocessing, rough about 5% of the fuel that goes in will eventually be waste. The amount of waste will be so tiny that it will be easy to contain and easy to put somewhere where it will no longer be a concern. The waste from a nuclear power plant will be much less of a concern than even the waste that comes from the building of solar panels.
The goal of engineering is to fix the issues, and the nuclear industry has taken advantage of the last four decades to be working on exactly that. But again, the science is not what will win the battle. I have a feeling the industry is going to be playing the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner game for years to come. I just think the industry needs a new strategy. Science just bounces off the media as it turns out.
I have tons of information to share with you all concerning the Fukushima incident, but I am going to choose to delay that for my next few posts. I will just say this though. A lot of what you are hearing on the mainstream nightly news networks is creative information to say the least. The reactors there are pretty much stable at this point because much of the decay heat has done exactly that; it has decayed away. The radiation reports that you are hearing are very alarmist in nature, but again, this just tends back to peoples inherent fear of radiation. I will write more on this in the future to try and substantiate what I have to say, but I am asking you to just take my word for it. The radiation levels are small and pose no danger to those near Fukushima or much less, to those of us in the United States. This won't change any minds of those of you who don't believe this yet, but I do want to reassure those of you who have been hit constantly with the apocalyptic views being put out there. Enough said, so I'll get off my soap box now.
I feel like one of those professors (and you all have had them) that you know is passionate about something, so if you ever want to get him off topic, all you have to do is ask a question about it. What I actually wanted to discuss with you today is the success of the nuclear industry in trying to meet the concerns of the public about nuclear power. On the technical side, the industry has been amazing with its advancements and now the looming release of the Gen IV reactor technology. It is very exciting, but I fear that the nuclear power industry is going to be caught in a never ending chase with the media who is working very hard to escape the physics of the situation and torment the industry anyway. It is a lot like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Don't think of it like a bad coyote chasing an innocent road runner, because we all know that Road Runner is no where near innocent. He keeps coming back to haunt Wile E. Coyote on purpose and we all know it! For instance, how is the earthquake at the Fukushima plant going to haunt the American nuclear power industry? Well, kind of like this:
We just can't catch the media at its game. It seems as though the mass mainstream media is exempt from the science of the situation, but the media will make sure that the nuclear power industry is feeling the repercussions of the events at Fukushima for a long time to come. But again, I digress...
I showed you this to give you a idea of the game that we are playing. I don't mean to say that the ideas of the nuclear are anywhere near as hair brained as that of Wile E. Coyotes, but it is good for showing that the science of the situation is not what defines the winner. The nuclear power industry has the sound science, so how do we win? Well, we have to win the trust of the people which is done by changing the image of nuclear power from something that is sterile and filled with soulless people in white coats and scary masks to an image which is more truthful. An image of an industry which cares more about the well being of people than any other industry in the world. One that is taking into account the fears and concerns of the people to create the safest and most reliable form of power. Yes, I said it. It will be the safest and most reliable form of power generation. And to top it all off, we are also making it cheaper at the same time.
I am talking of course of the generation of reactors that will be a gift to our future generations. The Generation IV reactors are slated to be in commercial operation within the decade, and let me tell you that for someone going into the industry, this is extremely exciting. The problem is that for the normal person, this is still just nuclear power. It is still that dangerous process with byproducts that are deadly for millennium to come. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is just like the cavemen thinking that fire could never be harnessed for cooking their Pterodactyl steaks. Luckily they learned so that we can enjoy our grilled steaks today.
We might be the caveman playing with nuclear power today, but let me tell you that the learning curve has been steep. The next generation of power plants have new safety systems, higher efficiencies, longer lifespans, and lower amounts of waste than anything we have seen in the past. What am I saying? Well, for all those that had so many concerns about the safety of nuclear power and the waste associated with nuclear power, the industry has listened and is coming forward with reactor designs that fix many of the issues. Passive safety systems make meltdowns physically impossible, implementing resources such as gravity to operate. And let me tell you, if gravity fails, we have bigger fish to fry than any meltdowns at a nuclear power plant. Material properties are also being utilized to cause the reactor cores to remain stable and not meltdown. The science is intriguing and beautiful here and I am planning on doing more of a technical post on this later, but for now, just realize that there are ways of making nuclear reactors inherently safe.
The next generation of reactors reduces the waste issue by increasing the efficiency of the fuel use. The Generation IV reactors will be getting upwards of 5 times as much power out of the fuel as the ones we are currently using, and let me tell you, that is amazing. Also, reprocessing techniques have been developed which do not create weapons grade plutonium, meaning that nuclear proliferation will no longer be a concern with nuclear power. By reprocessing, rough about 5% of the fuel that goes in will eventually be waste. The amount of waste will be so tiny that it will be easy to contain and easy to put somewhere where it will no longer be a concern. The waste from a nuclear power plant will be much less of a concern than even the waste that comes from the building of solar panels.
The goal of engineering is to fix the issues, and the nuclear industry has taken advantage of the last four decades to be working on exactly that. But again, the science is not what will win the battle. I have a feeling the industry is going to be playing the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner game for years to come. I just think the industry needs a new strategy. Science just bounces off the media as it turns out.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Hey Look! A Distraction!
I was always one of those kids in the background doing the very thing that my friend was being yelled at for doing by the teacher. I just figured that if the teacher is busy getting after somebody else, then I was home free...and the funny part was that most of the time I was exactly right! While my mom was trying to clean the mud off my brother from him rolling in the mud puddles, I could roll in the puddles all I wanted and not be disturbed!I don't think it is quite fair to say that this is what is going on with the nuclear industry right now in the United States, but hearing of the news from earlier this week, I am getting the same kind of feeling. If you don't know what I am talking about, you should check this article out from the Wall Street Journal. To sum it up though, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC), which is responsible for approving the construction of new nuclear power plants, just approved the environmental studies done for two proposed reactors. What does this mean? For one, I WILL HAVE A JOB! But in more general terms, it means that the nuclear industry is not dying here, as much as some people would like it to.
The reason I bring up me rolling around in the mud (other than just to give you the image of a muddy me) is because it seems that some of the tensions were lifted off of the NRC while the Fukushima event was heavy underway. I know this seems bass ackwards, but it really does make sense. In light of such a terrible disaster in Japan, no one in their right mind would be thinking that the NRC would give a nod of approval to be building more of these things! Just like my mother and my teacher would not believe that someone would do something while someone else was being yelled at for the exact same thing, we did not think that the NRC would take one of the biggest steps it has taken in 30 years toward the renewal of the nuclear power industry. Not at least while one of the industries largest incidents was taking place. I can do nothing but applaud the NRC for the effort, as they have just made a bold statement as to exactly where the United States stands on the issue.
Needless to say, the NRC has turned some heads and there are now some key members of Congress saying that we should hold back and look at other solutions. All I can do to them is stick my tongue out at them and wave as we continue to leave them in the dust. The nuclear industry is out to prove the point that we can provide the most power for the cheapest production cost, and we can do it safely. That is something that 40 year old nuclear technology has been proving in the United States for quite some time, so why not let us play with our new toys (by that I mean our new technology). Let us build the best that the human mind has conceived about nuclear power!
I might be jumping the gun a little soon about this, but it just seems that we still have the right to show that we are Americans and we can prove the impossible. We can harness the power of the atom safely, and we have proven it. We are way better at it now even than we were when we built the first set of successful reactors in this country. I hope you will join me in the sticking out of my tongue and the putting of my thumb on my nose while while wiggling my fingers at those who are saying that it can't be done. We are Americans! Tell us it can't be done and the last thing we will do is let you be right. The nuclear industry is as healthy as ever, if not more now that the world's eyes are upon it.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Get your coffee because this is long, but I wrote it for you
In the swing of things, there is nothing more important than outside feedback. We, as in the members of this class, started out with the mission of getting our message out to people that had not the foggiest idea of what we were talking about. It didn't matter whether they had a technical background, a theater background, and athletic background, or even no background at all...we all wanted to be able to share something with anybody who would even give a sideways glance at what we were talking about.
Well, it might be that I am getting better at sharing technical information in a more digestible way, but I am not always getting the content across. Why? Because I just have not made people care! Being from Mines, the first lesson you learn when trying to hit on women is that if you want them give you a nice smile, roll their eyes, and swivel in their chair back to their girlfriends all in one amazingly smooth motion, just mention a number. I don't care who you are, the world in general does not want to get a math lesson from you. They simply don't care! The idea of mathematically proving a fact to someone before they will ever believe what you are saying is an idea that only resides within the scientific community. The rest of the world only wants to hear what you have to say, they don't want to hear you prove it with data and statistics. Operating under this assumption, I want to give you an idea of why I think that nuclear power is so important...and I want to do this without using a single number or piece of technical information. Let's just see where this takes us.
Trying to explain something from your background to someone who does not operate in the same world as you can prove to be one of the most difficult tasks known to man. I mean, could you imagine having to explain the idea of clock to the most isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle? Try to tell them that when the clock states a certain symbol configuration that they have to engage in the defined activity for that symbol. I mean, this is exactly what we do in our lives. When the clock strikes 8:00 in the morning, we all start working. When the clock says 12:00, we all eat. When the clock says 5:00, we all get in our cars and go home. It is like this little machine is driving everything that we do. At least that is how the indigenous people of the Amazon jungle who have never seen a clock before would interpret this behavior. To them, they work when work needs to be done, they eat when they feel hunger, and they go home when it is suitable. They don't define themselves by a little device telling them when they should do things. Yet, that is the only way that we can keep our society synchronized. It is perhaps the most important organizational tool we have.
Communication is difficult when those we are communicating to don't operate by the same standards as us, and if they don't come from the same background as us. Last week, I was involved in a series of meetings in Pueblo, Colorado where they are trying to get zoning approval for a nuclear power plant to be built. There, I ran into a whole bunch of people who were of a different background than myself, and they were all very angry and vocal, sternly informing me that my type was a danger to their livelihoods. Not only was this a distrust for the nuclear industry, it was also a distrust for science in general, which seems to be a growing movement as of now in the U.S., but this is a different story.
As far as me personally being a danger to them, I could never quite comprehend what they were saying. They acted like I had no concern for human life and most of all, they acted like I was exempt from what I believed in. It was interesting to say the least, but I really have to attribute this to a general misunderstanding.
Somewhere along the way, the scientist and engineer has made himself non-human to the world outside science. Our world is as foreign to the rest of the world as the idea of living by a clock is to the people of the Amazon. We are cold, calculating, and dangerous. I can't say that we have anyone but ourselves to blame for this as I too am guilty of going to parties and spouting off facts and numbers to try and convert someone to my way of thinking. It has not worked yet and the reason is not that people can't understand, but they won't understand! They don't feel that it has anything to do with their humanity.
What my audience does not necessarily know about me is that I am a 22 year old boy that was born and raised in the prairie right outside Pueblo, Colorado. My favorite place to be is outside! Hiking, camping, fishing...you name it, I am a total outdoor nut. My environment is one of the things that I cherish most in life, and I would dare to say that I experience it more than many of the people from Greenpeace that were trying to tell me that I didn't care about the environment. What they don't realize is that I am on their side...at least in theory, but I will get back to that later. I got up this morning with the sun, put on my running shoes and did five miles while enjoying the colors of the sunrise. I then came back just like them and mixed my granola cereal with my Greek yogurt and had a healthy breakfast. I care about my health, and I enjoy nature everyday. Right before sitting down to write this, I went for a walk to gather some thoughts were I came across one of the biggest hawks I had ever seen. Yet, I was the only one on the path that stopped and took time to admire what was sitting there. Nobody else even seemed to care. Yet, I am the nuclear engineer who gives no regard for the environment.
I love life, and I love to live it to the fullest. Being 22 years old, I am in what most would call the reckless stage of my life, saying that I feel invincible and that I have no way to conceive of the value of my life. Well, I would tell them that they are wrong. I have to admit, I love to live life on the edge. Life is about pushing yourself to the limit on 14,000+ foot tall peaks, or finding out what it is like to drive sideways doing donuts in your car, or standing outside and watching the lightning storm go over your house. Do all these things pose risks to your health? Of course they do, but here is a news flash for you: Life is risky, and we are going to die! The risks I take in life might hurt me, set me back in life, or even kill me, but it is the risks in life that give you life! They are where you get the most benefit, even in the stock market.
We are human because we take risks. We have a God given ability to understand the risk associated with what we do, and because of this, we are the only species in the world that deals with things that endanger us. We don't just run away and hide like deer or rabbits, we take danger, learn to harness it and then we use it to our advantage. We are the only species on the planet that harnesses the power of fire. Any of you guys that have dogs, you know that they are not comfortable around fires. Animals have a natural tendency to flea the danger that fire imposes on them, but us humans have learned how to make it work for us. Is it still dangerous? Of course it is! People die in house fires every year, but at the same time life as we know it would not be possible without it.
I suppose you probably see where I am going with by now and I do apologize for the rant getting here. It is obvious that nuclear power poses risk. The dirty secret is that everything poses risk though. If you are afraid of being harmed by the the nearest nuclear power plant, statistically speaking you should also be making a career out of winning the lottery and never go outside out of fear of being hit by lightning and/or meteorite. You should also be wary of the chair you are sitting on because you never know when a screw might fail and you will end up on the floor with a concussion and the base of chair sticking through your leg. This is is more probable than being effected they the release of radiation from a nearby nuclear power plant (especially in the U.S.).
Why is it that people are so afraid? It is a popular media disaster for a reason. Think about it...you have this dramatic event with "meltdowns" and "explosions" and "radiation." It has all the visual dangers as well as the scary element of the unknown. This killer toxic that is invisible, powerful, and undetectable to most. I mean, when painted like that, however inaccurate it may be, it plays on people's fear of the apocalypse. It is a danger that they can't hide from, which makes it the worst kind of danger known to man. It is easy to see why people think that we are playing with a force beyond our control.
But the truth is that we are not. Just like with fire which is enormously dangerous to the human being, we have learned to harness and contain the power of the atom! There have been accidents in the past, but being human, we learn from them. Just an update to those stuck on Chernobyl, WE ARE NOT IN THE 80s ANYMORE! We get smarter. Our phones are not the size and weight of a brick anymore, there are computers in almost every household, we have internet everywhere we go, our cars have all the comforts of home, we can't ever be lost due to satellite navigation...the list goes on and on. We are in an age where technology is advancing faster than ever before. Why would anybody think that we would want to build any more nuclear power plants with the same technology we had back then? I am sorry, but that is just an insult to my field.
In an effort to keep my long story from getting longer, let me finish by just saying that the nuclear industry is on the same side that environmentally conscious person is on. Claims of companies only wanting to build nuclear power plants for the purpose of profit are insane. They have the highest investment cost and risk associated with them out of all types of power generation. This is not because they should necessarily be more expensive than other types of power generation, but largely because of the fears associated with them. They are at risk of having construction shut down at anytime because of fear. They have to build all new roads for the local area and new water reservoirs and many other types infrastructure because of fear. Not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. Fear is what has made nuclear power safe, and without a fear and respect for nuclear power, there would certainly be many more deaths associated with nuclear power. The fear though has made nuclear power the safest and most reliable form of power in the United States. This is a simple fact, though it is argued away by organizations like Greenpeace spouting that the risk it poses makes it unsafe. Its history has clearly proved otherwise, including the Fukushima incident.
I am in nuclear engineering because I believe it is one of the best power sources we can invest in for our future as well as for the future of our environment. Why does Greenpeace oppose nuclear power? Well, they didn't always. Now though, they are being influenced by some other interests. Mainly, the nuclear power industries only rival and the current producer of most of the electricity in the world. Let me describe it this way. Imagine someone makes his living off giving tours of the marshland in the southern parts of Florida. He has a boat and sells his services to local tourists. Also living in these areas though are animals such as Manatees, which are notoriously injured and killed by the boats being used on the marshlands. One day though, there arises a need to drain the area of the marshland that the man gives tours. This is the place where the man has established a thriving business and without it, the man has nothing. So what does the man do? He starts claiming that they can't drain the marshland because it will endanger the Manatees and other life in the marsh. Though the man is not really concerned about the well-being of the animals being that he has been harming them for years, he will use their well being to save what he has established.
This has been the role of Greenpeace over the last decade or so. The coal industry is being threatened by the only source of power that can compete with it, the nuclear power industry. Though the coal industry cannot claim to have cared overwhelmingly for the well being of the people around coal-fired power plants or for the preservation of the environment, they can use Greenpeace to attack the nuclear industry and keep bringing up age old arguments about how dangerous and dirty it is for the future. I must say that this move has been brilliant and has worked remarkably well to date.
So the irony here is who is actually working for the betterment of the future. Greenpeace has claimed to be an organization dedicated to protecting the future of our environment as well as our safety. They though are playing to the needs of the coal industry to help it keep on top. Due to this, people like me, that is to say people going into the nuclear field, have been painted as dangerous and uncaring. Yet, I know that I am going into the field because I know this is where we need to be to do the best thing for the world we live in. I am not a technical expert in nuclear engineering, but at student. All I am doing here is sharing my humble beliefs and I hope that you will take them from one environmentally conscious person to another. Beyond politics, beyond science, and beyond beliefs there are some truths, but truth is always relative which leads us back to politics and belief. Only science holds there to be absolute truths, but this is just another clock to our society. It is totally foreign. All I can do is give you a little of how I see it and maybe, just maybe you learned something about the nuclear industry here. I just hope that I spark a little interest...I as you to open your mind and listen to more than fear. I don't ask you to become technically fluent as that is ridiculous, but I ask that you listen to the opinions of the people trained in the nuclear field. They are the ones that know the most about nuclear power and nobody else. If you see them running, then I suggest you try to keep up, but until then, while they are still working headlong into the challenge of using the worlds most powerful resource, I hope that you might see there is some worth in it.
Well, it might be that I am getting better at sharing technical information in a more digestible way, but I am not always getting the content across. Why? Because I just have not made people care! Being from Mines, the first lesson you learn when trying to hit on women is that if you want them give you a nice smile, roll their eyes, and swivel in their chair back to their girlfriends all in one amazingly smooth motion, just mention a number. I don't care who you are, the world in general does not want to get a math lesson from you. They simply don't care! The idea of mathematically proving a fact to someone before they will ever believe what you are saying is an idea that only resides within the scientific community. The rest of the world only wants to hear what you have to say, they don't want to hear you prove it with data and statistics. Operating under this assumption, I want to give you an idea of why I think that nuclear power is so important...and I want to do this without using a single number or piece of technical information. Let's just see where this takes us.
Trying to explain something from your background to someone who does not operate in the same world as you can prove to be one of the most difficult tasks known to man. I mean, could you imagine having to explain the idea of clock to the most isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle? Try to tell them that when the clock states a certain symbol configuration that they have to engage in the defined activity for that symbol. I mean, this is exactly what we do in our lives. When the clock strikes 8:00 in the morning, we all start working. When the clock says 12:00, we all eat. When the clock says 5:00, we all get in our cars and go home. It is like this little machine is driving everything that we do. At least that is how the indigenous people of the Amazon jungle who have never seen a clock before would interpret this behavior. To them, they work when work needs to be done, they eat when they feel hunger, and they go home when it is suitable. They don't define themselves by a little device telling them when they should do things. Yet, that is the only way that we can keep our society synchronized. It is perhaps the most important organizational tool we have.
Communication is difficult when those we are communicating to don't operate by the same standards as us, and if they don't come from the same background as us. Last week, I was involved in a series of meetings in Pueblo, Colorado where they are trying to get zoning approval for a nuclear power plant to be built. There, I ran into a whole bunch of people who were of a different background than myself, and they were all very angry and vocal, sternly informing me that my type was a danger to their livelihoods. Not only was this a distrust for the nuclear industry, it was also a distrust for science in general, which seems to be a growing movement as of now in the U.S., but this is a different story.
As far as me personally being a danger to them, I could never quite comprehend what they were saying. They acted like I had no concern for human life and most of all, they acted like I was exempt from what I believed in. It was interesting to say the least, but I really have to attribute this to a general misunderstanding.
Somewhere along the way, the scientist and engineer has made himself non-human to the world outside science. Our world is as foreign to the rest of the world as the idea of living by a clock is to the people of the Amazon. We are cold, calculating, and dangerous. I can't say that we have anyone but ourselves to blame for this as I too am guilty of going to parties and spouting off facts and numbers to try and convert someone to my way of thinking. It has not worked yet and the reason is not that people can't understand, but they won't understand! They don't feel that it has anything to do with their humanity.
What my audience does not necessarily know about me is that I am a 22 year old boy that was born and raised in the prairie right outside Pueblo, Colorado. My favorite place to be is outside! Hiking, camping, fishing...you name it, I am a total outdoor nut. My environment is one of the things that I cherish most in life, and I would dare to say that I experience it more than many of the people from Greenpeace that were trying to tell me that I didn't care about the environment. What they don't realize is that I am on their side...at least in theory, but I will get back to that later. I got up this morning with the sun, put on my running shoes and did five miles while enjoying the colors of the sunrise. I then came back just like them and mixed my granola cereal with my Greek yogurt and had a healthy breakfast. I care about my health, and I enjoy nature everyday. Right before sitting down to write this, I went for a walk to gather some thoughts were I came across one of the biggest hawks I had ever seen. Yet, I was the only one on the path that stopped and took time to admire what was sitting there. Nobody else even seemed to care. Yet, I am the nuclear engineer who gives no regard for the environment.
I love life, and I love to live it to the fullest. Being 22 years old, I am in what most would call the reckless stage of my life, saying that I feel invincible and that I have no way to conceive of the value of my life. Well, I would tell them that they are wrong. I have to admit, I love to live life on the edge. Life is about pushing yourself to the limit on 14,000+ foot tall peaks, or finding out what it is like to drive sideways doing donuts in your car, or standing outside and watching the lightning storm go over your house. Do all these things pose risks to your health? Of course they do, but here is a news flash for you: Life is risky, and we are going to die! The risks I take in life might hurt me, set me back in life, or even kill me, but it is the risks in life that give you life! They are where you get the most benefit, even in the stock market.
We are human because we take risks. We have a God given ability to understand the risk associated with what we do, and because of this, we are the only species in the world that deals with things that endanger us. We don't just run away and hide like deer or rabbits, we take danger, learn to harness it and then we use it to our advantage. We are the only species on the planet that harnesses the power of fire. Any of you guys that have dogs, you know that they are not comfortable around fires. Animals have a natural tendency to flea the danger that fire imposes on them, but us humans have learned how to make it work for us. Is it still dangerous? Of course it is! People die in house fires every year, but at the same time life as we know it would not be possible without it.
I suppose you probably see where I am going with by now and I do apologize for the rant getting here. It is obvious that nuclear power poses risk. The dirty secret is that everything poses risk though. If you are afraid of being harmed by the the nearest nuclear power plant, statistically speaking you should also be making a career out of winning the lottery and never go outside out of fear of being hit by lightning and/or meteorite. You should also be wary of the chair you are sitting on because you never know when a screw might fail and you will end up on the floor with a concussion and the base of chair sticking through your leg. This is is more probable than being effected they the release of radiation from a nearby nuclear power plant (especially in the U.S.).
Why is it that people are so afraid? It is a popular media disaster for a reason. Think about it...you have this dramatic event with "meltdowns" and "explosions" and "radiation." It has all the visual dangers as well as the scary element of the unknown. This killer toxic that is invisible, powerful, and undetectable to most. I mean, when painted like that, however inaccurate it may be, it plays on people's fear of the apocalypse. It is a danger that they can't hide from, which makes it the worst kind of danger known to man. It is easy to see why people think that we are playing with a force beyond our control.
But the truth is that we are not. Just like with fire which is enormously dangerous to the human being, we have learned to harness and contain the power of the atom! There have been accidents in the past, but being human, we learn from them. Just an update to those stuck on Chernobyl, WE ARE NOT IN THE 80s ANYMORE! We get smarter. Our phones are not the size and weight of a brick anymore, there are computers in almost every household, we have internet everywhere we go, our cars have all the comforts of home, we can't ever be lost due to satellite navigation...the list goes on and on. We are in an age where technology is advancing faster than ever before. Why would anybody think that we would want to build any more nuclear power plants with the same technology we had back then? I am sorry, but that is just an insult to my field.
In an effort to keep my long story from getting longer, let me finish by just saying that the nuclear industry is on the same side that environmentally conscious person is on. Claims of companies only wanting to build nuclear power plants for the purpose of profit are insane. They have the highest investment cost and risk associated with them out of all types of power generation. This is not because they should necessarily be more expensive than other types of power generation, but largely because of the fears associated with them. They are at risk of having construction shut down at anytime because of fear. They have to build all new roads for the local area and new water reservoirs and many other types infrastructure because of fear. Not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. Fear is what has made nuclear power safe, and without a fear and respect for nuclear power, there would certainly be many more deaths associated with nuclear power. The fear though has made nuclear power the safest and most reliable form of power in the United States. This is a simple fact, though it is argued away by organizations like Greenpeace spouting that the risk it poses makes it unsafe. Its history has clearly proved otherwise, including the Fukushima incident.
I am in nuclear engineering because I believe it is one of the best power sources we can invest in for our future as well as for the future of our environment. Why does Greenpeace oppose nuclear power? Well, they didn't always. Now though, they are being influenced by some other interests. Mainly, the nuclear power industries only rival and the current producer of most of the electricity in the world. Let me describe it this way. Imagine someone makes his living off giving tours of the marshland in the southern parts of Florida. He has a boat and sells his services to local tourists. Also living in these areas though are animals such as Manatees, which are notoriously injured and killed by the boats being used on the marshlands. One day though, there arises a need to drain the area of the marshland that the man gives tours. This is the place where the man has established a thriving business and without it, the man has nothing. So what does the man do? He starts claiming that they can't drain the marshland because it will endanger the Manatees and other life in the marsh. Though the man is not really concerned about the well-being of the animals being that he has been harming them for years, he will use their well being to save what he has established.
This has been the role of Greenpeace over the last decade or so. The coal industry is being threatened by the only source of power that can compete with it, the nuclear power industry. Though the coal industry cannot claim to have cared overwhelmingly for the well being of the people around coal-fired power plants or for the preservation of the environment, they can use Greenpeace to attack the nuclear industry and keep bringing up age old arguments about how dangerous and dirty it is for the future. I must say that this move has been brilliant and has worked remarkably well to date.
So the irony here is who is actually working for the betterment of the future. Greenpeace has claimed to be an organization dedicated to protecting the future of our environment as well as our safety. They though are playing to the needs of the coal industry to help it keep on top. Due to this, people like me, that is to say people going into the nuclear field, have been painted as dangerous and uncaring. Yet, I know that I am going into the field because I know this is where we need to be to do the best thing for the world we live in. I am not a technical expert in nuclear engineering, but at student. All I am doing here is sharing my humble beliefs and I hope that you will take them from one environmentally conscious person to another. Beyond politics, beyond science, and beyond beliefs there are some truths, but truth is always relative which leads us back to politics and belief. Only science holds there to be absolute truths, but this is just another clock to our society. It is totally foreign. All I can do is give you a little of how I see it and maybe, just maybe you learned something about the nuclear industry here. I just hope that I spark a little interest...I as you to open your mind and listen to more than fear. I don't ask you to become technically fluent as that is ridiculous, but I ask that you listen to the opinions of the people trained in the nuclear field. They are the ones that know the most about nuclear power and nobody else. If you see them running, then I suggest you try to keep up, but until then, while they are still working headlong into the challenge of using the worlds most powerful resource, I hope that you might see there is some worth in it.
