Posts from — June 2011
Nuclear Power You Can Trust?
Having been involved in the environmental movement in one way or another since the 1970s, I’ve always been in the “anti-nuclear” camp.
Indeed, I think I was the first person to create an English version of the famous “Atomkraft? Nein Danke” logo – for the cover of an edition of Undercurrents magazine – a magazine that was into renewables (mainly of the DIY variety) before a lot of people. (You can read some copies of it here.)
Of course there are plenty of reasons to be wary of nuclear power – of the current variety at least.
- There’s the question of energy security: Uranium doesn’t come from here, we have to import it, or reprocess other peoples’. So although I gather there might be deposits off the British coast, it doesn’t seem at this point to help decouple us from potential problems with dependence on overseas sources.
- There’s the problem of nuclear waste disposal, though some people (James Lovelock for example) are convinced that this can be done safely and permanently.
- Nuclear power as we currently do it is absurdly inefficient. What you do is you let radioactive decay heat some water and then pass it through turbines. It’s just like a conventional power station, except you heat the water differently. I can imagine the efficiency is significantly less than 50%. Whatever happened to innovative direct conversion technologies like MHD (MagnetoHydroDynamics), where, for example, you can run a plasma back and forth in a magnetic field and pull electricity directly off the plasma, in a kind of fluid dynamo? The Soviets had some pilot plants generating several megawatts. What happened?
- And there’s the risk of disastrous accidents, like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now Fukushima, which can potentially spread significant amounts of irradiated material over a wide area, with potential health effects like increased long-term cancer risk and other problems beyond the direct effects of radiation poisoning.
Counter to the last of these, there’s the fact that remarkably few people have actually been affected by radiation from nuclear power plants. Many, many fewer than have been killed or injured by coal-mining accidents and other fossil-fuel-related disasters. If Germany was as sensitive to risks to life from bacteria as it is from nuclear power, it would have closed down the organic food industry by now. But instead, it’s closing down its nuclear plants, which, as far as I know, have not caused any deaths at all, unlike the contaminated beansprouts.
But of course, it’s never as simple as that.
The fact is that right now we need low-carbon energy sources, and quickly, to combat the threat of anthropogenic (human-created) global warming (AGW). There is no doubt about the threat of AGW, and I’m not going to entertain discussion about it here. Sorry.
Much as I am in favour of renewables, and much as I like the sight of elegant, virtually silent wind turbines dotting the landscape (and I would as happily have some in the field behind my house as James Lovelock would have a nuclear waste storage facility behind his), the fact is that renewables are almost certainly not enough, and we need something more to replace our ageing and horrifyingly destructive carbon-spewing fossil-fuel powered generating stations. Nuclear is the obvious option, so after years of taking an anti-nuclear stance, I am changing my mind. And in doing so find myself aligned with people like George Monbiot and Professor Lovelock.
In my opinion, even if we did no better in the international nuclear power industry than we have done to date, any threat to human life from nuclear power, past, present and future, is as nothing compared to the billions whose lives are threatened by AGW and will be over the 50–100 years ahead.
I will be a little controversial and say that in my personal view (and I am not a nuclear power expert, so may be wrong), the current level of nuclear power technology is much safer than the chain that ends in a conventional fossil-fuel-driven power station. That, to me, is not the question.
Instead, the question is, can we trust anyone to build, maintain and operate nuclear power stations safely?
You could argue that by and large, the answer to that question is yes. Nuclear power as it is practised today is in fact extremely safe compared with fossil-fuel generation. But there is a bit of a knife edge here. Fundamentally, however intrinsically safe the current technology is, the fact is that I do not trust for-profit corporations to do the job properly. I am not even sure I trust governments. They will always be looking to cut corners and save money, time or whatever else, and the result will be a greatly increased risk. Take a look at this:
This is the segment on nuclear power from Adam Curtis’s Pandora’s Box series on some misuses of scientific research. I’m a big fan of Curtis’s work (although I have some issues with his latest series, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace) and I think the above is spot on.
So, I think the technology of current nuclear power is fine in theory, but we are going to screw it up in practice. How can we have our cake and eat it? What we need is a method of nuclear power generation that you can’t screw up [very easily].
The answer just might be hinted at in this article from, of all places The Mail On Sunday, a paper I would never have thought I’d find myself recommending in, er, a month of Sundays. It’s also recommended by the climate-sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation. Talk about strange bedfellows….
The piece is about the “Electron Model of Many Applications”, or EMMA. Here’s the article. Research into this technology is going on in Cheshire and it might just provide the key to one method of using Thorium in a reactor to generate electricity – assuming the UK government continues funding the research properly, which I doubt. Here’s the beginning of the piece:
“Imagine a safe, clean nuclear reactor that used a fuel that was hugely abundant, produced only minute quantities of radioactive waste and was almost impossible to adapt to make weapons. It sounds too good to be true, but this isn’t science fiction. This is what lies in store if we harness the power of a silvery metal found in river sands, soil and granite rock the world over: thorium.
One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium, or 3.5 million tons of coal, and the thorium deposits that have already been identified would meet the entire world’s energy needs for at least 10,000 years. Unlike uranium, it’s easy and cheap to refine, and it’s far less toxic. Happily, it produces energy without producing any carbon dioxide: so an economy that ran on thorium power would have virtually no carbon footprint.
Better still, a thorium reactor would be incapable of having a meltdown, and would generate only 0.6 per cent of the radioactive waste of a conventional nuclear plant. It could even be adapted to ‘burn’ existing, stockpiled uranium waste in its core, thus enormously reducing its radioactive half-life and toxicity.…”
It seems to me that this technology could answer many, if not all, of the environmental concerns about the acceptability of nuclear power. Of course I want to read the full report that is apparently soon to be published, and no technology comes without drawbacks (or unintended consequences for that matter), but preliminary accounts, like the one above, seem to offer promise.
For more on other possible uses of Thorium for power generations, see this Wikipedia article. You’ll see it’s not entirely problem-free – but then nothing is.
*Header image from MensPulpMags.com
June 21, 2011 No Comments
Re-learning basic life skills
I remember clearly one of the first pieces of really useful information I ever got from the World Wide Web.
It was back, probably, in the early-to-mid 1990s, when I was essentially coding HTML by hand, as one had to do. The previous year, I’d completed a demonstration of what a magazine I was working on at the time might look like on the web as a method of international electronic distribution instead of sending PageMaker files to various locations via AppleLink, and the client had liked it. I was interested in finding out how to make it, and other sites, look better.
I stumbled upon the web site of a designer and digital typographer. My memory suggests (though I could be wrong about this) that he was David Siegel, the designer of the Tekton font, who was demonstrating techniques for making your web pages look halfway decent from a design point of view, long before the advent of CSS and other web layout tools. That would make this in 1994 — I designed my first web site the previous year. Siegel went on to write the best-seller Creating Killer Websites.
In those day, the idea of the web was that it carried information, and that information had a structure and hierarchy — different levels of headings, text and so on — and as long as you identified those structural elements accordingly, that was all you did: the viewer decided what the fonts were and what the page actually looked like.
But it’s not web site design I’m talking about today. On one of his pages, I found a really fascinating set of illustrations. They were solely there to show how you could lay them out, but they were on the subject of how to tie your shoelaces.
Now you wouldn’t think there was a lot to learn about tying your shoelaces. It’s a life skill we learn really early. We also, I suspect, learn it essentially the same way. The page noted that the problem with this was that shoelaces, especially those round-section nylon ones, tended to come undone very easily. The diagrams showed a better way, that stopped this from happening. In a nutshell, what you do is instead of going once round and through, you go twice round and through. It’s not necessary to go into any finer details, as you’ll discover in a moment.
I immediately tried this, of course, and it worked! And that’s how I’ve tied my shoelaces ever since. Well, until the other day.
Back in 1994, I really never thought that I would be re-learning how to tie my shoelaces. But I am all in favour of learning new things — even if that means un-learning old things. So at the age of 43 or so, I learned this basic life skill all over again, and used it all the time for the next seven years or so.
The method he described has some issues, I should point out. The big one is that if you are unlucky how you pull an end to undo them, you can end up in a very complex knot that can take a while to untie. This, of course, will happen when you are in a hurry, or in the dark. But the benefit of the technique outweighed the downside.
Then the other day, I was getting to know the shiny black new Boxee Box I acquired. I’ve had Boxee on the little Mac Mini connected to the TV as a media centre type computer for ages but never used it that much. But with the Boxee Box it all becomes much more accessible and, give or take a few bugs which I am sure will get fixed over time, it’s a very impressive piece of kit.
One of the main ways of accessing content with Boxee is Apps, and one of them is for TED Talks. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It’s a non-profit that holds two international conferences a year where some amazing speakers talk about some amazing things — you can learn more about them here. Their slogan is “Ideas worth spreading”. It’s where I first heard about the company Better Place, for example, and their amazingly sensible idea of having swappable electric car batteries so you don’t have to sit around while they charge (you can see the video here).
On the front page of the Boxee TED app is a set of panels promoting a selection of talks. One of them was from Terry Moore and it’s called How To Tie Your Shoes. I wondered immediately if he was showing what I might call “Siegel’s technique”. Well, he’s not. He’s showing you a new way of doing it that also doesn’t come undone — and doesn’t have the risk of knotting. It’s in fact both simpler and better. In essence, instead of going once round anticlockwise, you go once round clockwise, and get a stronger form of the knot (note that if you’re left-handed you may already be doing this). But don’t let me say any more: just watch the video. It’s only 3 minutes.
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There are in fact loads of ways of tying your shoelaces. This web site suggests at least 18 possible knots and also describes the technique discussed above.
June 19, 2011 No Comments