Paul wrote:
>All of the scientific problems of nuclear power have been solved. The
>only remaining problems are political and the threat of contractors
>cheating.
The Integral Fast Reactor may or may not be all you say it is. It's
difficult to find information on it that doesn't come from a source with
a financial or other interest in seeing it come about. Assuming it is a
safe, efficient, and economical technology (big assumption), perhaps we
should build a couple to reprocess the waste presently stored at
conventional "dirty" nuclear power plants.
I would guess that IFRs would have to be BIG power plants, on the order
of a couple thousand megawatts. But this brings up a problem, at least
in my mind---centralization of power production.
One big problem with large conventional coal and nuclear plants is that
the "waste" heat is dumped into the surrounding environment, be it air
or water. This is heat that could be used for space heating and other
uses, but the centralized nature of these plants, and the fact that they
are often built away from population centers, means that potential
customers for the waste heat are too far away. The result is that the
average efficiency for coal-fired plants in the U.S. is somewhere around
32%.
Now compare gas-fired combustion turbines, which are usually much
smaller---on the order of 100 mW or so. Because they are smaller and
require no source of cooling water, they can be located in industrial
parks, close to the users of the power. This allows them to sell the
heat that would normally be dumped and achieve efficiencies approaching
90%, in some cases. They are also much cleaner than even the best coal
plants.
Distributed generation, employing gas turbines, fuel cells, PV, wind,
and other forms of energy, also avoids much of the need for huge
transmission lines. It has long been noted that rates for some forms of
cancer, especially childhood leukemia, are higher for people living near
high-voltage transmission lines. Recently, a British researcher came up
with the long-sought mechanism responsible for these observations. It
turns out that electromagnetic fields produced by high-voltage lines
interact with background radon and air pollutants to produce new
cancer-causing substances. My guess is you wouldn't want one of these
monsters coming across your Ledgewood. However, in a future of huge
central generating plants, you may not have a choice.
Centralized power production, nuclear or otherwise, also works against
choice for the individual. Instead of having some control over our
power source, as we would using PV, wind, or any number of other
technologies that lend themselves to small-scale production, we are now
more dependent than ever on big utilities and their cronies in state
regulatory agencies. They'll basically do what they want, regardless of
what you or I would choose. I have difficulty seeing this as the Middle
Way.
Deregulation is coming to the electric power generating and transmission
industry. It will have both its upsides and downsides, but will likely
mean that small efficient plants and other more Earth-friendly
technologies will eventually displace the old inefficient coal and
nuclear dinosaurs. If the IFR is truly efficient, safe, and
economically viable, we should see it come on line in a deregulated
environment, assuming no governmental roadblocks.
Doug Fields
