The true price of nuclear power

Maple leaf

Several times this blog has discussed whether climate change is making nuclear power a more acceptable option (1, 2, 3). One element of the debate that bears consideration is the legacy of contamination at sites that form part of the nuclear fuel cycle: from uranium mines to post-reactor fuel processing facilities. The Rocky Flats Plant in the United States is an especially sobering example.

Insiders at the plant started “tipping” the FBI about the unsafe conditions sometime in 1988. Late that year the FBI started clandestinely flying light aircraft over the area and noticed that the incinerator was apparently being used late into the night. After several months of collecting evidence both from workers and by direct measurement, they informed the DOE on June 6, 1989 that they wanted to meet about a potential terrorist threat. When the DOE officers arrived, they were served with papers. Simultaneously, the FBI raided the facilities and ordered everyone out. They found numerous violations of federal anti-pollution laws including massive contamination of water and soil, though none of the original charges that led to the raid were substantiated.

In 1992, Rockwell was charged with minor environmental crimes and paid an $18.5 million fine.

Accidents and contamination have been a feature of facilities handling nuclear materials worldwide. Of course, this does not suffice to show that nuclear energy is a bad option. Coal mines certainly produce more than their share of industrial accidents and environmental contamination.

The trickiest thing, when it comes to evaluating the viability of nuclear power, is disentangling exactly what sort of governmental subsidies do, have, and will exist. These subsidies are both direct (paid straight to operators) and more indirect (soft loans for construction, funding for research and development). They also include guarantees that the nuclear industry is only responsible for a set amount of money in the result of a catastrophic accident, as well as the implicit cost that any contamination that corporations cannot be legally forced to correct after the fact will either fester or be fixed at taxpayer expense. Plenty of sources claim to have a comprehensive reckoning of these costs and risks, but the various analyses seem to be both contradictory and self-serving.

Before states make comprehensive plans to embrace or reject nuclear power as a climate change mitigation option, some kind of extensive, comprehensive, and impartial study of the caliber of the Stern Review would be wise.

Sputnik at 50

Bridge on the Rideau Canal

Even the Google logo has been altered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1: the first artificial satellite. As someone who spends a very considerable amount of time thinking about how things are going to be in 2050 and 2100, it is remarkable to reflect upon both how different the world is from that of 1957 and how similar it is. The big changes that occurred have often been in areas that few if any people would have anticipated the importance of back then. Areas of great enthusiasm, such as nuclear power and space exploration, have only progressed incrementally since the 1950s and 60s.

I mentioned one Sputnik-related irony in a paper published back in 2005:

At the end of August, 1955, the Central Committee of the Communist Party approved the Soviet satellite program that would lead to Sputnik and authorized the construction of the Baikonour Cosmodrome. This facility, the largest of three Soviet launch sites that would eventually built, was the launching place of Sputnik I (and subsequent Sputniks), and the launch site for all Soviet manned missions…

This former stretch of Kazakhstani desert was also, fatefully, the place to which Nikifor Nikitin was exiled by the Czar in1830 for “making seditious speeches about flying to the moon.” He might have taken cold comfort in the fact that in 1955, the Central Committee gave control of the site to the new Soviet ‘Permanent Commission for Interplanetary Travel.’

For all the drama, it remains unclear to me that manned spaceflight serves any useful scientific or practical purpose at this point in time (see previous). In that sense, perhaps Sputnik – rather than John Glenn – was the true template for humanity’s future involvement in space: an 83.6kg ball of metal with a radio transmitter.

PS. My thesis mentions one somewhat surprising connection between Sputnik and climatic science:

A fortuitous bit of funding produced one of the most famous graphs in the climate change literature: the one tracking CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Examining it closely, a gap can be seen in 1957, where David Keeling’s funding for the project ran out. The Soviet launch of Sputnik I on 4 October 1957 led to a marked concern in the United States that American science and technology had fallen behind. One result of the subsequent surge in funding was the resumption of the CO2 recording program, which continues to the present day.

This graph is the jagged, upward-sloping line that Al Gore devotes so much attention to near the beginning of An Inconvenient Truth.

Shake Hands with the Devil

There isn’t really any appropriate way to talk about a film like Shake Hands with the Devil (2007), given the way in which it is a recasting of a historical episode such as the Rwandan genocide. I suppose one can direct blame, as a response: at the great powers, at the United Nations, at Belgium, at the belligerents, at the genocidaires. Appropriate as that may be, the sheer appalling character of what was undertaken by human beings makes me wonder whether it would have been better if nothing in the universe had ever awoken to cognition, if all the atoms in all the rocks and stars had just interacted dumbly from the unfathomable origin of space and time to the entropic silence that will be the end of it.

One thing that is demonstrated by the experience of watching is the power of film as a medium; having read Dallaire’s book and even seen him speak, the horror was never conveyed with anything approaching the same visceral quality. In response, you can’t help but wonder what we really ought to be doing in Afghanistan now, or in Darfur.

Dr. Strangelove in a nuclear bunker

Marc Gurstein rides the bomb

After today’s orientation, I went with some friends to see Dr. Strangelove in the Diefenbunker – the infamous Canadian nuclear shelter, built to protect top Canadian military and civilian leadership in the event of nuclear war. Diefenbunker is actually a general term for shelters of the type: the one near Ottawa is called CFS Carp. Apparently, there is also one in Nanaimo, B.C. One odd thing is that the shelter has a multi-room suite for the Governor General. Presumably, Canada would not have much need for a local representative of the Queen, after the actual Queen’s entire realm is reduced to a burnt, radioactive plain.

Tonight’s film was followed up by Pho with three fellow employees of the federal government. It was all a distinct social step forward, and Ashley Thorvaldson deserves credit for organizing the expedition.

You can read about the Cold War movies events on the website of the Diefenbunker Museum.

The folly of Apollo redux

In an earlier post, I discussed the wastefulness of manned spaceflight. In particular, plans to return to the Moon or go to Mars cannot be justified in any sensible cost-benefit analysis. The cost is high, and the main benefit seems to be national prestige. Human spaceflight is essentially defended in a circular way: we need to undertake it so that we can learn how human beings function in space.

A post on Gristmill captures it well:

Let me be clear. There is a 0 percent chance that this Moon base or anything like it will ever be built, for the following reason: the moon missions in the ’60s and early ’70s cost something like $100 billion in today’s dollars. There is no way that setting up a semipermanent lunar base will be anything other than many times more expensive. That would put the total cost at one to a few trillion dollars.

Assuming that this taxpayer money needs to be lavished on big aerospace firms like Lockheed anyhow, it would be much better spent on satellites for the study of our planet (Some comprehensive temperature data for Antarctica, perhaps? Some RADAR analysis of the Greenland icecap? Some salaries for people studying climatic feedbacks?) or on robotic missions to objects of interest in the solar system.

Hired guns

I heard a lot fair amount about mercenaries when I was at Oxford, but this is the most interesting thing to happen in relation to them in decades. The degree to which war has been privatized would probably shock Eisenhower.

What remains to be seen is the degree to which the United States will respect the sovereignty of the democratic government that all the entire second Iraq war was meant to create.

Chernobyl gets a new hat

At the same time as enthusiasm is growing for the use of nuclear fission as a non-greenhouse gas emitting energy source, the crumbling concrete tomb around the Chernobyl reactor is to be encased in steel, at an approximate cost of $1.4 billion. The doomed reactor will be covered by “a giant arch-shaped structure out of steel, 190 metres (623 feet) wide and 200m long.” Of course, it is only a matter of time before the new carapace will need to be replaced, in turn.

The Chernobyl disaster occurred back in 1986. Despite causing widespread contamination, about 95% of the radioactive material initially present remains within the site of the reactor complex. A motorcycle-riding photographer named Elena has put some haunting photos of the abandoned area on her website.

Just yesterday, Dr. Patrick Moore (co-founder of Greenpeace) urged the more widespread use of fission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As ever, there are three big problems with nuclear fission: waste that will be dangerous for a span longer than the existence of civilization thus far, the possibility of catastrophic accidents, and the connection between civilian nuclear capability and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It is certainly becoming less clear-cut that nuclear is a worse option than the alternatives. For one thing, new reactor designs like the South African pebble bed promise to reduce the chances of accidents. On the proliferation side, there is talk of fuel supplier countries taking back spent rods, as protection against their plutonium being extracted and used for bombs. Of course, that just worsens the nuclear waste situation. The fact that it is all sitting in ‘temporary’ reactor ponds and that no state has constructed a permanent geological storage facility for radioactive waste should continue to give us pause.

Big rocks in space

Chateau Laurier stairs

September 26th is the next full moon. That night, I recommend getting hold of a pair of field glasses and having a look at our closest significant stellar neighbour. In particular, note the large impact crater near the moon’s south pole. The Tycho Brahe crater was determined to be about 100 million years old, on the basis of samples collected by the Apollo 17 mission. While such craters soon fall victim to erosion from air and water on Earth, they are well preserved on the airless moon.

Such craters are not just of geological interest. They testify to the reality of impacts from comets and asteroids. A sufficiently large such strike could have devastating effects for humanity. In 2029, we will get a reminder of how close some objects are to hitting us, when the 99942 Apophis asteroid will pass so close to the Earth that it will be between communications satellites in geostationary orbits and us. For a while, this asteroid topped the Torino impact hazard scale. NASA estimates that the impact of Apophis would be equivalent to the explosion of 880 megatonnes of TNT: about 58,000 times the yield of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

There is a small but real chance that the close pass of Apophis will alter its course such that it hits us on its next pass, in 2036. In response, a spaceflight subsidiary of EADS called Astrium is proposing a mission to learn more about the asteroid, study its composition, and investigate options for deflecting its orbit, if necessary.

In one sense, we are lucky with Apophis. It was discovered back in 2004 and has since had its orbit accurately tracked. A comet, by contrast, is essentially invisible until proximity to the sun causes it to melt and produce a tail. It is entirely possible that such an object could strike the Earth with little or no warning whatsoever.

Quantum computers and cryptography

Public key cryptography is probably the most significant cryptographic advance since the discovery of the monoalphabetic substitution cipher thousands of years ago. In short, it provides an elegant solution to the problem of key distribution. Normally, two people wishing to exchange encrypted messages must exchange both the message and the key to decrypt it. Sending both over an insecure connection is obviously unsafe and, if you have a safe connection, there is little need for encryption. Based on some fancy math, public key encryption systems let Person A encrypt messages for Person B using only information that Person B can make publicly available (a public key, like mine).

Now, quantum computers running Shor’s algorithm threaten to ruin the party. Two groups claim to have achieved some success. If they manage the trick, the consequences will be very significant, and not just for PGP-using privacy junkies. Public key encryption is also the basis for all the ‘https’ websites where we so happily shop with credit cards. If a fellow in a van outside can sniff the traffic from your wireless network and later decrypt it, buying stuff from eBay and Amazon suddenly becomes a lot less appealing.

Thankfully, quantum computers continue to prove very difficult to build. Of course, some well-funded and sophisticated organization may have been quietly using them for years. After all, the critical WWII codebreaking word at Bletchley Park was only made known publicly 30 years after the war.

For those who want to learn more, I very much recommend Simon Singh’s The Code Book.

Peering into metal with muons

When cosmic rays collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, they produce particles called muons. About 10,000 of these strike every square metre of the earth’s surface each minute. These particles are able to penetrate several tens of metres through most materials, but are scattered to an unusual extent by atoms that include large numbers of protons in their nuclei. Since this includes uranium and plutonium, muons could have valuable security applications.

Muon tomography is a form of imaging that can be used to pick out fissile materials, even when they are embedded in dense masses. For instance, a tunnel sized scanner could examine entire semi trucks or shipping containers in a short time. Such tunnels would be lined with gas-filled tubes, each containing a thin wire capable of detecting muons on the basis of a characteristic ionization trail. It is estimated that scans would take 20-60 seconds, and less time for vehicles and objects of a known configuration.

Muons have also been used in more peaceful applications: such as looking for undiscovered chambers in the Pyramids of Giza and examining the interior of Mount Asama Yama, in Japan.