Congratulations on stirring up much of the nuclear industry.

Your note could have been written about most technology, not nuclear. Substitute “jet aircraft” “i-pod” “internet” “Toyota prius” or “electricity” for nuclear and your article would still work. A lot of white males were involved in most of the technologies that we use daily and take for granted.

You are not suggesting that society should somehow avoid technologies that they do not understand and that had white males involved, but your logic could be extended to this.

Just as most people do not understand the details of nuclear power, they do nto understand the details of the AC electricity network or the inner workings of their i-phone. And do not assume that you can hand craft a wind turbine or a photovoltaic panel using only natural wood, rocks and fibers.

I encourage you to act on this – a life without technology would be pretty challenging. After a year or so, you could return to our technology-assisted modern society and write a blog on your experience.

For me, the breaking point was when I realized that if you’re against nuclear, you
are favoring coal, whether you want to or not. Coal plants emit hazardous fossil fuel waste.
Coal waste is more than a million times as much by weight as nuclear waste, and it does not
decrease in hazard over time, because stable heavy metals do not decay. Ever.

Coal plant pollution directly causes about 1.2% of all the morbidity in the U.S., and
almost 14% (!) of the morbidity in China. This is just pollution, not counting
mining accidents, dust explosions, etc. The accidents are about a million times larger
in loss of life than nuclear because of the vast difference in the weight of the required fuel.

Dams are the most dangerous energy projects in existence, by far. A coal plant is a
better neighbor.

Solar and wind power are sad. The numbers don’t work. They are just not credible power sources.
The normal lie is to “forget” that neither the sun nor wind are available all the time, and
then “forget” the cost of energy storage and transport. I did my own numbers, and got
very, very large costs (about 8x of a nuclear or coal KWh) even for the best
technologies with favorable estimates (e.g. concentrating solar power in Mojave, wind power
in the american midwest, pumped power storage). CSP destroys desert ecologies. Wind power
isn’t so bad in the plains (it doesn;t kill birds), but in the mountain ridgelines, the roads
destroy fragile alpine biomes.

I think the big corporate interests are almost universally against nuclear plants.
Railroads have lucrative bulk shipping contracts for coal. The coal mines have
unions, as well as owners. Don’t get me started on U.S. foreign lobbyist laws (nonexistent)
and foreign oil interests. All these groups are universally opposed to nuclear.

It was rational public policy in the 1980s to eliminate foreign oil from our economy.
It was draining public and private budgets even then. Why has nothing changed? Who
benefits? I tell you, it’s not the nuclear industry, which starved in that period.

What’s more, if you follow the green antinuclear money, it leads to foundations. If
you follow the foundations’ money, if they have open books (many -don’t-), it tends
to come from large fossil fuel companies, or individuals that own them. The research
isn’t that hard. There are rating services on the web for nonprofits, and they
process the foundations’ mandatory public records and post them on the web.
The research is -so- inflammatory that it’s hard to believe. I really encourage
people to research it.

I don’t think the centralization debate is as overblown as you seem to fear, it just is relevant to a different set of issues. As far as “saving the planet” goes, it may not matter whether it’s panels on my roof or mirrors out in the desert, but it’s a lot of land either way. So do we umbrella every parking lot, bigbox roof, AND the wetlands just off the local highway, or do we supplant the Joshua tree as the dominant outspurt of the Mojave soil? Expect green nimbyism either way.

Which is a big part of why I innately like nuclear. Nice compact footprint. Leave some land for the flutterbyes. As a slacker smartass I of course have no authority whatsoever to decide what is going to work in the end, but neither do I think does Mr. Congresscritter with his padded law degree. Europe passes a biofuel mandate whose chain of events suggest it was specifically intended to kill all orangutans, a race far more noble and intelligent than their obviously jealous usurpers. And yet, I can also see what you’re saying about how profitability only comes after scalability, and how that situation lends itself to… government involvement. All very complicated. Fun to argue about.

“It requires faith that the engineers and executives who build and run nuclear plants will do the right thing — and if some unexpected thing goes wrong, they’ll tell us about it, even if it hurts their profits or reputations.”

But in fact with nuclear power it is easy for a member of the public to tell if even the tiniest amount of radiation has escaped the plant. A geiger counter is cheap and easy to use. A group of concerned citizens do not need to rely on faith, they can monitor the situation themselves.

Compare this to monitoring a coal plant’s emissions. Detecting the lead , arsenic, and mercury levels requires a chemistry lab and expensive equipment. Compared to monitoring the structural integrity of a hydro dam or whether there are stress fractures in a windmill tower…..gosh, I don’t even know how one would do that as a citizen.

With relatively simple and well understood engineering steps, a few handfuls of energy from a small group of people can be combined into a heat producing unit that can then be used to produce electrical power, light, fresh water, motive power, and useful heat. Though the initial group of people who figured out how to get useful power out of the physical phenomenon were mostly large, established corporations with a history of cozy relationships with large governmental organizations, that is simply an accident of history.

Dominance by large organizations is not the fault of the basic technology and it is not something that is written in stone. Because of the nature of the corporations who first figured out the phenomenon, they chose to employ it in ever larger machines. They specialize in complex projects and figured out that encouraging people to think that the only way to use fission was in big machines would give them a competitive advantage.

Someone earlier mentioned Moore’s law, which specifically recognized that the nature of semi-conductor materials would allow well understood engineering techniques to make ever smaller transistors. As Gordon Moore formulated it, that feature enabled a doubling about every 18 months of the number of chips that could fit onto a unit of surface area. Though it was invented in the labs at AT&T and IBM, that physical nature of semiconductors was not destined to remain inside their corporate boundaries and dominated by the people who ran those companies – who also happened to be mostly the white males who dominated the 1950s vintage corporations.

There are a number of start-up companies and divisions in larger corporations who are working hard to package fission into smaller machinery. Their machines are not yet ready for the commercial market, but they are making progress toward something that is analogous to the mini-computers that first broke through the IBM dominated mainframe concept of computers. Those mini-computers (DEC VAX and others like it) were what turned computers from something that only the very largest companies could afford to install and manage into something accessible to a much broader audience. Eventually mini-computer users drove the size even farther down the scale to make the machines accessible to all of us.

I believe that an analogous path is possible for fission based machines.

My view of fission was inspired by my close personal relationship with a relatively small fission based machine that provided all of the propulsion, electricity and heat that a group of 150 people needed to cruise around underwater for months at a time. I served as Chief Engineer Officer for about 40 months. I established a relationship with the plant that would be familiar to car buffs, train engineers or other ship engineers. I never ceased to be amazed by the fact that the heat source in that plant was small enough to fit under a moderate office desk, but it contained enough fuel to last for 15 years. These days, we build submarines with fuel supplies that last for the life of the ship!

I was also fascinated when I learned the details about a far smaller version of my friendly atomic engine that drove a tiny research submarine. I figured out then that I wanted one for my own backyard.

One final comment – I strongly believe that one of the reasons that nuclear energy is so scary to people is that they have been carefully taught to be afraid by people who have a very strong financial interest in spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about their competition. Think back to that first image that I described – a handful of nuclear fuel has as much energy as 30 tanker trucks full of oil. If your company is one of those major multinational corporations whose speciality is finding, extracting, refining, transporting and marketing oil, how would you feel if you saw an upstart energy source that could make all of that massive capital investment obsolete? Instead of building a fleet of trucks, a competitor could do the same job with a tiny investment.

One way to keep your market – if you are an oil company that has an annual revenue that is twice as large as the US Navy’s budget – is to instill fear about that competitive source that causes the erection of layer upon layer of bureaucratic rules and cost increasing infrastructure.

My bottom line is that people who have no power currently are the ones who have the most to gain from learning more about fission and its potential and by encouraging people like Kirk Sorensen to keep progressing in their efforts to break atomic power out of the hands of the people who currently control it. Currently powerless people should not play into the hands of a far larger and more powerful industry – the people who sell coal, oil and natural gas – by working to lock up the atom from being used by anyone. The better path is to set us all free to develop amazing atomic devices that take advantage of Atom’s Law, not to shoot future society in the foot by working to eliminate the use, not the existence, of an important 20th century discovery.

We should not let carefully taught fear to dominate the conversation.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc.

My question is, is there an explanation or strategy that will work besides studies and track record? What should nuclear proponents say?

Better transparency? Does the Nuclear Energy Institute sponsoring a race car help ? :) One person mentioned plant tours. I currently work at a nuclear plant that has an excellent visitor center outside the security perimeter. Bus loads of people come periodically for tours. It is my impression that most of the U.S. sites have visitor’s centers. Tours of the plant inside the security perimeter can be arranged, but it does require some diligence due to security concerns. To be honest, I’m not sure what there is to see that would really interest people; lots of security, pipes, big machinery, the control room, pumps, valves, a bunch of old white guys with gray hair, etc.

One theory I have, having not been alive at the time but from talking to people and reading, I am under the impression that historically many engineers and scientists were arrogant about the technology. A great example of this is from an interview of a woman who lived near the Three Mile Island plant at the time of the event. The woman has a very good point, if I were her I would be inclined to not support nuclear power either:

Q: Were officials patronizing to you?
A: Yes. I went to a meeting early on, after the accident. And I was asking some questions, and the people in authority at the meeting said to me, “You know, if you would only go home and bake your cookies and take care of your children, like we know you’re doing, we will take care of the technical stuff.” Well, if they were taking care of the technical stuff, I don’t think we’d have an accident.

Finally, when you say “Nuclear power, by its nature, has to be centralized and well-guarded, so we don’t know everything that’s going on at the nation’s atomic facilities.” I agree that they should well-guarded, but really there is nothing that an interested and diligent member of the public cannot find out about a nuclear plant except key access points due to safety and proprietary/trade secret information as in any other industry. The actual nuclear physics and engineering is all very much out in the public domain, particularly in textbooks, trade journals, and the website of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission http://www.nrc.gov.

I have to question two of the assumptions/premises in your article.

You say that the industry is very secretive, and that “the public doesn’t know what’s going on” inside the plants. I think this is one of those common wisdoms that (when examined) doesn’t have any real basis. How much do we know/hear about what goes on in any other types of industrial facilities? Nothing, frankly. In fact, my view is just the opposite. The nuclear industry is one of the most OPEN industries there is. It’s under a microscope.

When anything at all happens in a nuclear plant, no matter how minor, there is a news story (local, or often even national) about it. Most of these things are problems/occurrences that routinely occur at any kind of large industrial facility. Similar occurences at other facilities (that involve equal or even greater hazards to the workers or the public) are NEVER reported on, or even released to the public.

My explanation for this is two-fold. One; the media finds these minor things to be interesting only if they occur at a nuclear plant. The other reason is that nuclear plant operators have been so cowed (brow-beaten) by govt. and the media that they feel (or perhaps are, by various laws) compelled to report even the most trivial things to the authorities, for fear of being accused of covering something up.

The TRUTH is that the industry is more open and less secretive than other industries, and that we know more about what goes on in nuclear plants than most other facilities. That said, it may be true that the PERCEPTION is that the industry is secretive. Explaining that, and figuring out what to do about it, is a more complicated matter…..

Your other premise is that nuclear “concentrates” and scales up energy production, putting it in the hands of a few corporate entities. The implication is that this is far less true for renewables. Once again, this isn’t true, with the exception of rooftop solar. All other renewable schemes are large scale utility projects that are far away from population centers and require the same big ugly transmission lines. The same old large players (utilities and plant/equipment vendors, etc…) are still controlling these new renewable sources. Nothing is different in that respect. Again, why so many self-described “environmentalists” seem to think that large-scale wind farms or solar thermal facilities are better in this (concentration of power) regard is a mystery.

It’s that same history, though, which gives me hope that better, cheaper reactors may be developed.

Re: picking winners. I’m not actually advocating the government going huge with its support of nuclear for the reason you cited. I can see how something like that might be called for, however, if the technological alternatives aren’t improving and/or climate change and/or oil reserves start to look worse than anticipated sooner than anticipated. In which case, I think it’d be the only way to reduce the costs and build times.

As for which technologies have the scale to matter… I think it’s probably true that solar and nuclear are the clear winners there. (Enhanced geothermal is one of those areas that has received so little exploration that it’s hard to know what to think about it. If you can create artificial reservoirs of steam over hot rocks, you’re really on to something. It strikes me as likely, though, given the risks involved there, that you’d need a government roll out of EG, too.)

But within solar, there are a lot of different options. Solar thermal alone has tons of questions associated with it, although we know that it works: which kind? power tower, trough, something new? what kind of mirrors, what kind of towers? hybrid with natural gas? molten salt storage? air cooled or water cooled? etc etc. PV has even more questions, particularly because it’s riding the wave of materials innovation. But even there, it’s unclear whether the ultimate winning business model will be centralized or decentralized… Which matters a lot (too much?) to some kinds of technology thinkers.

Some types of solar planning will stop being thought of as solar, but become bigger parts of efficiency/conservation to improve our shit housing stock. It almost happened at the end of WWII and if there’d been any kind of FHA incentive to take solar energy capture into account, you’d have had Levittowns built like 1975 communes, complete with huge south facing windows with overhangs and all that. There was a solar home prefab company with commercial models as far back as 1945.

Then, in some places, like the US, wind does have the scale to matter for our energy system. Maybe it won’t scale to the world, but it could have a major impact here.

I get why people bag on solar for its performance during the 80s. People pinned way too many social hopes on solar and tried to live out a variety of dreams through a technology still in its infancy. Their aversion to scale is just crazy. How else does something compete against already scaled systems? I can understand wanting to use different collective action models, but at some point, you gotta get big.

BUT, I actually don’t think that solar has gotten nearly the shot that people think it has. Energy system development takes lots of time. (Look at the development time for coal power here in the US. It wasn’t even the dominant manufacturing energy input until 1870.) Solar photovoltaics had a very, very long way to go, just like early fiber optics, but the latter received all kinds of support that solar did not. Solar, in fact, was actively hindered by utility policies. Net metering wasn’t even standard until well into the 1990s.

Solar funding has never approached the levels of nuclear or the tax breaks handed to oil companies. And it’s been far, far more inconsistent, going up and down on both the annual and political cycles.

The government has always supported energy technologies, and I get that. I don’t fault them for trying to lower the cost of electricity and car driving. The advocates of doing so beat out the alternatives at the time. And, I think that up through about 1970, the deal was working well for almost everyone (Cf, Technological Change in the Electric Utility Indusry, a great, nuanced book). In any case, the country was growing and many were sharing in that growth. Moar power actually meant moar power for everyone. To make that happen, though, took huge government intervention (TVA, Columbia Basin hydro, etc).

Beyond the absolute funding levels, the way that solar funding has been handled is just ridiculous, short-sighted, and a waste to all involved. Let’s take what happened to Luz International, which made almost all the solar electricity in the world in the 20th century. First, the legislation that enabled them to exist (PURPA) was pretty decent. It guaranteed them a market for their electricity, BUT it limited their size to 30 (and then 80) megawatts. Because they used traditional turbines, this really hurt their efficiency and cost. Second, their Federal tax credits were renewed every year. They had to get things built by December 31, or their investors lost out. This was very dumb. Third, after plant after plant had succeeded, they’d brought their costs down from 24 to 8 c/kwh. In 91 (or 90?), the government extended the tax credit for 9 months. Now, they ahd to build a powerplant in 9 frigging months! They rushed and had all kinds of cost overruns because of it. So, entering ‘92 they were weak, but they managed to put together the investor group to build another plant. Then, the state of California pulled their property tax break for solar because it was serving a single company (Luz). Their success came back to hurt them. Without that, a business that had been living on the edge finally broke.

The sad thing here is that many people think that cost breakthroughs happen before scale, but most of the time, things get to scale and then the cost starts to come down as you figure out how to squeeze out inefficiency and expense. (If you go listen to a cellulosic ethanol company talk, they almost don’t talk about their fancy science… The key cost drivers are systemic: how to run the plant, where to store the feedstock, straight up boring process engineering.) When Luz died, the opportunity to do all that stuff died with them. Luckily, the knowledge stuck around and most of the big solar thermal companies have some Luz (or SEGS, as their plants were called) lineage.

The property tax exemption, btw, maybe would have cost the state $1 million. The best change solar had in the 20th century died for want of that measly pile of cash. Imagine if military-backed projects were held to that kind of standard.

More generally, this dialogue has made me realize that the green TECH mindset is not as well known as I had assumed. Here in the Bay, it’s everywhere. The people behind it are very different from earlier alt energy people. They come from a world steeped in Moore’s Law and they believe that technologies get better when people really want them to. They believe in scale. To me, their arrival in the green world is the “breakthrough” that so many solar advocates have been looking for. I think they will build the kinds of institutions that can drive down the price — and other, softer adoption barriers — of these technologies.

Oh, and the only Mechista I support is Gustavo Arellano (http://bit.ly/4weNJT).

Whats is funny is he actually despises blacks who complain about unfairness in hiring etc. He has no patience for minorities who do not pursue their education a then claim “victim” status later in life. He has said this to me a few times when this issue has come up in idle conversation.

The POSS pass fail line for nuclear plant operator jobs is about 15% higher score than non-nuclear positions. May not seem like much but I think it crosses a critical line and screens out a lot of people. That line is set by the NRC and is a national standard.