The nuclear energy industry is sitting at the nexus of old and new technologies and systems. The industry needs to make significant changes or risk becoming irrelevant to the quest of mitigating the impact of climate change. Meeting the goal of launching 30 plants per year, however, does not require new technological advancements.
Speaking of the Bulletin, here’s an article which doesn’t outright reject atomic power. In fact, it presents a reasonable picture of the current situation, & provides some sensible suggestions for progress.
While building 30 new nuclear plants per year is an ambitious goal, the nuclear industry achieved this level of capacity expansion during the heydays of nuclear power in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In fact, a hundred or more ought to be possible if the right approach is taken. For instance, CANDU reactors do not involve the same difficulty of fabrication as LWRs with their enormous pressure vessels, & they do not require enrichment plants for fuel fabrication. Also, they can run off recycled uranium, a by-product of recovering plutonium for the operation of fast-breeder reactors.
Leonard Weiss describes the legislative process by which the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978 (NNPA), the most comprehensive nuclear nonproliferation law created since the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, came to be enacted. The act would have looked very different, the author notes, but for an unusual parliamentary maneuver engineered by a few congressional staffers on the day of its passage.
The “Non-Proliferation Act” was a landmark, to be sure. It represented a definitive break with President Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” vision of abundant nuclear energy for global prosperity, & with the policy (widely urged by experts) of increasing use of nuclear energy in wealthy countries in order to spare fossil fuels for developing countries, committing the USA instead to a policy of “coal at home, renewables abroad”. It also repudiated the “grand bargain” of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, under which the benefits of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy were to be set against the advantages which might come from nuclear armament.
The economic, environmental, political, & human consequences of this Act are hard to calculate. Is it any surprise that its creation was marked by chicanery?
It's so comforting to know that in our time of negative sensationalism and thinly veiled editorials about who to vote for, some newspapers still know what readers actually want to see on the front page. #thebulletin #pokemongo #whatatimetobealive #oregon #what
