#resource substitution

[man-and-atom]

It should never be forgotten that energy is the one and only fundamental physical resource. With energy, all material things are possible. Without it, none are.

Sir Alan Cottrell FRS, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and sometime chief scientific adviser to HM Government, speaking at the opening of the “Atoms for Energy” exhibition in Birmingham, 1981 November. Sir Alan went on to say :

Here in Birmingham at the centre of a great industrial area huge amounts of iron, aluminium, glass, copper and other materials are worked up daily into all kinds of manufactured goods. What happens in these processes? The atoms themselves are not changed. Just as many iron, aluminium, copper and other atoms come out of a factory as go in. All that we do is move them about, mix them up and sort them out into various patterns and shapes. And the one thing that is absolutely essential for doing all this, and which is used up in the process, is the high quality energy that comes out of electricity lines, gas pipes, and coal and oil bunkers. Given enough energy, as well as the time and scientific and industrial skills to use it effectively, we can extract all our required minerals and turn them into metals and manufactured goods ; we can turn oil and gas into plastics, purify water, recycle scrap metals, and even turn carbon compounds into protein foods. High quality energy is truly the lifeblood of modern society.

(Printed in ATOM 303, 1982 January. See the full issue here.)

[man-and-atom]

Singapore takes nuclear safety research to the next level

The new multi-million dollar research building at NUS will house about 100 researchers. Read more at straitstimes.com.

Anyone who can make something of this piece is welcome to.

In one scenario highlighted by the Energy Market Authority in its 2050 committee report, nuclear energy could supply about 10 per cent of Singapore’s energy needs by 2050. This could potentially form a larger proportion of Singapore’s energy mix post-2050, once nuclear tech has been proven viable, said Prof Chung.

Electricity currently accounts for about 30% of Singapore’s energy consumption. Supplying two-thirds of that from fission within five years or so would seem to be entirely practicable, when we look at examples from Pickering to Barakah. It is difficult to see how the “viability” of atomic power there needs any proving which hasn’t been accomplished, for instance, by Finland, which has about the same population and also depends heavily on fuel imports.

In addition, newer nuclear power-plant designs like SMRs are being developed, and they have the potential to be much safer than many of the traditional power plants in operation today.

Claims that small modular reactors will be safer than existing nuclear generating units, like claims that extensive new research on atomic power safety is needed, are uselessly vague and even misleading without some illumination of just what deficiencies in safety are to be alleviated. What information is available seems to leave little doubt that fission is far and away the safest means of supplying energy on an industrial scale.

While severe nuclear accidents are few and far between, nuclear power has earned itself a bad reputation after disasters such as those in Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Must we reiterate that the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami killed twenty thousand people? It is hard to understand why the damage to the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi is painted as the main story of that terrible day, except perhaps that it happened so much more slowly. The real “nuclear disaster” was the large-scale, long-lasting evacuation imposed, even though releases of radioactive materials from the stricken reactors were too small to justify (according to international standards) more than a “shelter in place” order.

We can certainly understand that the citizens of Singapore, with its small land area, would not want to risk losing any of that to something like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, but the Pickering accident of 1983 is proof positive that there are well-established power reactor designs available now that pose no such danger, and can be located without fear even in the environs of the largest cities.

[man-and-atom]

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

An NPR and PBS Frontline investigation reveals how the oil and gas industry used the promise of recycling to sell more plastic, even when they knew it would never work on a large scale.

The key quote from this article?

“There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

A key environmental concept is that of external costs, which do not show up in the ordinary economic analysis. The future costs of resource depletion, and the costs associated with the accumulation of wastes, are hardly ever reflected in the cost of delivering a product, but that means only that they do not fall on the producer ― not that they do not fall upon society! When a proper consideration is made of these un-accounted-for costs, decisions can be very different.

When it comes to plastics, the key thing to understand is that there is considerable difficulty in taking a discarded plastic object, and rendering it back into clean pellets of the kind bought by the factory which made it in the first place. There are fillers and pigments to contend with, for instance, and the plastic molecules themselves break down to some extent.

A less attractive, but straightforward and reliable, route is to break down the chemical structure entirely, perhaps by a modification of the Fischer-Tropsch process, and effectively turn the plastic back into crude oil. This can then serve once again as feedstock for the chemical industries. Although metallized plastics, PVC, and Teflon complicate the picture somewhat, this kind of process could also be applied to discarded tires, even food waste and paper.

There are two factors which can improve the economics of this approach. The obvious one is making a proper allowance for the value of really disposing of the waste, rather than just hiding it out of sight. The other is the isolation which it could provide from the sometimes violent fluctuations of the oil markets.

We might mention that one very effective way to break down plastics is by exposing them to the intense neutron radiation in an operating nuclear fission reactor. Specially-constructed reactors would be required to make use of this effect. Although it might become the preferred option for treating certain kinds of toxic wastes, we do not expect it to be widely adopted for general purposes.

[man-and-atom]

An early-1980s advertisement from British Nuclear Fuels Limited reminds us that uranium (and the same goes for thorium), unlike other resources used for energy (including land), isn’t much in demand for other purposes.