Comments on: Energy Update: The Current State of Nuclear Power

By: lenrosen4

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 15:16:03 +0000

Hi Steve,
Thanks for your comment. There is no doubt an attendant risk to any energy industry. We here about the risk to birds and bats with wind power. With solar heating and photovoltaics we are dealing with potential toxicity in some of the materials used. With hydro dams we have population displacement, silting of reservoirs, impacts on fish migration and biodiversity, just to name a few. With geothermal we have concerns about setting off earthquakes or disrupting aquifers, the same kind of comments we hear for fracking.

Nuclear has always been a bit different because we started down the path of nuclear energy power stations by going to mega-sized systems. Remember this evolved from the post-WW2 nuclear navy where atomic reactors were being used in submarines. How we got from small to mega is an interesting story in and of itself, and represents a road we probably didn’t need to take. If we can get back to smaller is better and if we bring in new ways of creating reactor fuel (not rods but mini-balls) and if we develop thorium and molten-salt technologies we can create the nuclear energy industry we should have built, not the one we are living with today.

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By: Steve Papagiannis

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 02:40:13 +0000

The love-hate with nuclear power seems to be increasingly positive coverage. The Fukushima disaster brought back the risk to the equation, but the generation of power without generating CO2 is becoming more compelling. I recall reading many years ago an artical in a journal of risk management that talked about the risks of coal vs nuclear. This was in the 1980’s before the global warming threat was well understood.

In the article it captured the risks from coal generation: deaths from coal mining, deaths from smog, risks in the transport of coal, it went on. These deaths and events were happening continuously, but in small numbers for any specific event. However, the total deaths were staggering for any given year.

It is one of the problems in human psychology, that lots of small events don’t register, but one big event does. So we will live with train derailments of oil, 10’s of thousands of automobile deaths per year.

The new research in fission with thorium and wave reactors is promising, but I don’t know if it will be enough to keep the positive momentum of nuclear energy continuing in the public’s mind.

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