Author: Milan

Jimmy Carter and the NRX meltdown cleanup

By [President Jimmy] Carter’s own account, his poor opinion of nuclear power originated in personal experience. In 1952 the future president was a US Navy lieutenant with submarine experience stationed at General Electric in Schenectady, New York, training in nuclear engineering under Hyman Rickover. That December, an experimental Canadian 30-megawatt heavy-water moderated, light-water cooled reactor at Chalk River, Ontario, experienced a runaway reaction, surging to 100 megawatts, exploding and partly melting down. It was the world’s first reactor accident, a consequence of a fundamental design flaw of the kind that would destroy a Soviet reactor at Chernobyl three decades later. Since Carter had clearance to work with nuclear reactors, which were still classified as military secrets, he and twenty-two other cleared navy personnel went to Ontario early in 1953 to help dismantle the ruined machine. Because it was radioactive, the calculated maximum exposure time around the damaged structure itself was only ninety seconds. That exposure would be the equivalent of a worker’s defined annual maximum dose of radiation—in those days, 15 rem (roentgen equivalent man). More than a thousand men and two women, most of them Chalk River staff, would participate in the cleanup.

…

Had he known the long-term outcome of the Chalk River radiation exposures, Carter might have felt friendlier to nuclear power. A thirty-year outcome study, published in 1982, found that lab personnel exposed during the reactor cleanup were “on average living a year or so longer than expected by comparison with the general population of Ontario.” None died of leukemia, a classic disease of serious radiation overexposure. Cancer deaths were below comparable averages among the general population.

Rhodes, Richard. Energy: A Human History. Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 316, 317

The origin of ceramic reactor fuel

I’ve noted before the exceptional and enduring influence Hyman Rickover (‘father of the nuclear navy’) has had over the subsequent use of nuclear technology. Richard Rhodes’ energy history provides another example:

At the same time, Rickover made a crucial decision to change the form of the fuel from uranium metal to uranium dioxide, a ceramic. “This was a totally different design concept from the naval reactors,” writes Theodore Rockwell, “and required the development of an entirely new technology on a crash basis.” Rockwell told me that Rickover made the decision, despite the fact that it complicated their work, to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation: it’s straightforward to turn highly enriched uranium metal into a bomb, while uranium dioxide, which has a melting point of 5,189 ˚F (2,865 ˚C) requires technically difficult reprocessing to convert it back into metal.

Rhodes, Richard. Energy: A Human History. Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 286

Examples like this illustrate the phenomenon of path dependence, where at a certain junction in time things could easily go one way or the other, but once the choice has been made it forecloses subsequent reversals. Examples abound in public policy. For instance, probably nobody creating a system from scratch would have used the US health care model of health insurance from employers coupled with the right to refuse coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, yet once the system was in place powerful lobbies also existed to keep it in place. The same could be said about many complexities and inefficiencies in nations’ tax codes, which distort economic activity and waste resources with compliance and monitoring but which are now defended by specialists whose role is to manage the system on behalf of others.

See also: Zircaloy is a problem

The origin of high capacity oil pipelines in America

After finding his quartet of books about the global history of nuclear weapons so valuable and intriguing, when I saw that a used book shop had a recent history of energy by Richard Rhodes I picked it up the next day.

It includes some nice little historical parallels and illustrations. One that I found striking illustrates how recent the oil-fired world which we now take for granted really is. Rhodes describes how “big-inch” pipeline technology was developed in the 1930s in America, allowing pipes of greater diameter than 8″ which would have split with earlier manufacturing techniques, but saw relatively little use due to the great depression. In 1942, the first “Big Inch” pipeline was built from east Texas refineries to the northeast (p. 286), partly to avoid the risk of U-boat attack when shipping oil up the east coast.

In addition to illustrating how America’s mass-scale oil infrastructure is mostly less than one human lifetime old, the Big Inch example demonstrates how long-lasting such infrastructure is once installed. Rhodes points out that Big Inch and its near parallel Little Inch (constructed after February 1943) companion are still operating today (p. 271).

Jenica Atwin leaves the Greens for the Liberals

As every first year Canadian politics class covers ad nauseam , the first past the post electoral system is great for large parties and terrible for small ones. Since you only win MPs by winning a plurality in each electoral district, parties that have a small but significant amount of support spread between many ridings may end up electing almost nobody while the parties that win the largest share of the vote end up with an even larger proportion of the seats and usually all the influence.

The sheer difficulty of electing someone from the Green Party as an MP makes running a bit of a quixotic gesture, with most candidates, staffers, and volunteers aware that their chances of winning are negligible and so the value of participating in the election may be about contributing to the discourse rather than a hope of victory.

With each Green MP so precious and unlikely, it must be especially galling to see Fredericton MP Jenica Atwin cross the floor from the Greens to the Liberals. At least according to the CBC, one reason she chose to make the change is Green Party infighting about the Israel-Palestine dispute. To me, this is suggestive of two things. First, how the agreed portions of a ‘green’ agenda don’t really add up to a complete set of policies, and so green supporters may have to deal with an unusual amount of in-party disagreement about non-environmental matters (and perhaps also on how to solve environmental problems). To me it’s also suggestive of the emphasis on symbolism and moral righteousness or superiority within the progressive left. It’s questionable whether Canada as a whole has any meaningful influence over the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and it’s basically certain that a fringe party with just a few MPs doesn’t. That makes the dispute seem a bit like a high school student council voting on whether to praise or condemn a foreign government; it has considerable scope for generating conflict among those involved in the vote, but no real prospect of making a difference in the world at large.

Bitumen producers’ distant, unlikely, and disingenuous promises

In perhaps the ultimate demonstration that ‘net zero’ promises are a delaying tactic meant to preserve the status quo which favours fossil fuel producers, Canadian bitumen sands giants Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil, MEG Energy, and Suncor Energy have formed “an alliance to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from their operations by 2050.”

When firms that see their futures as continuing to dig up the world’s dirtiest hydrocarbons en masse it becomes clear how ‘ambitious’ promises set in the far future are a tactic to avoid meaningful regulation and lobby for additional subsidies right now. In a world genuinely heading for net zero, there will be no reason to exploit the world’s dirtiest fossil fuels, including coal and the bitumen sands. Furthermore, the idea that ‘net zero’ can apply in this context is fanciful. Using a technology like direct air capture to collect all the emissions associated with extracting, upgrading, and burning oil from the bitumen sands would cost so much that it would undermine any economic rationale for extracting the oil in the first place. Furthermore, the idea that the pollution can just be buried fails to fairly consider the scale at which CO2 would need to be buried. There is simply no comparison between the total amount of carbon pollution we emit and the amount we might plausibly bury given the need for a vast new infrastructure to sequester carbon by the gigatonne, and the fact that this infrastructure would only consume money and energy without producing anything of value except reduced pollution. Rather than keep pounding back whisky in the hope that we can build a machine to clean our blood before we die, we really just need to abolish the practice which is creating these dire risks, namely continued fossil fuel exploitation.

Related: