Sunday, March 20, 2011

Note About Nuclear power.....

For years,I've read and had some understanding about nuclear power, defended it and believed, as I still do, that it offers the best signpost to a great future.
 
I regard electricity as one of mankind's great achievements, saving people from the menial, painful drudgery that marks daily existence without it. Visiting Africa numerous times, I'd see men and women walking miles, many miles, barefoot across the savanna, looking for a few pieces of wood to burn for cooking and hot water.
 
Electricity, I've believed for these four decades, is assured for thousands of years through nuclear. With advanced breeder reactors and with the energy stored in weapons plutonium, it comes close to perpetual motion: So much energy from so little fuel.
 
The alternative choice is to burn up the earth, fossil fuel by fossil fuel, until we are searching, like the people of the African savanna, for something that is left to burn.
 
Wind and solar are defined by their geography and limited by their scattered nature. Their place at the table is assured but not dominant. Industrial societies need large, centralized energy sources.
 
Yet a nuclear tragedy of almost immeasurable proportions is unfolding in Japan. The sum of all the fears about nuclear is being realized. 
 
Do disasters, like the Japanese nuclear one, really kill technologies? Mostly, obsolescence does that; but their demise can be accelerated by a last huge mishap.
 
Conversely, Titanic's sinking in 1912 didn't put an end to ocean liners: They got safer. Throughout the 19th century boilers were constantly blowing up, not the least on the stern-wheelers plying the Mississippi. Boats kept working and the technology -- primarily safety valves -- got better. Bad technologies are replaced by safer ones; and good ones with flaws were improved upon.
 
That is the history of boats, cars, planes and, yes, resoundingly yes, of nuclear power.
 
The story of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site is a story of success and failure. They were designed 40 years ago to meet what in advanced design is known as a "maximum" credible accident. That was, in that location, an earthquake of a magnitude which had never occurred there. Excluded from this calculation of credible -- i.e. it could happen -- was the tsunami.
 
That exceeded the imagination of catastrophe to that point in time. Within the credible design envelope, the plants performed flawlessly. They shut down; the emergency cooling pumps started up in fractions of a second; and when they failed, batteries took over. The problem was the tsunami destroyed the diesel generators, and the whole sequence of disaster began.
 
The opponents of nuclear power -- and they have been pathological in opposition for more than 40 years -- have their footwear on and are ready to dance on the grave of nuclear. They might want to unlace and take a seat: Nuclear power does not have an alternative about to retire it.
 
Big demand for new energy (ideally carbon-free energy) around the globe, and especially in India and China, can't be satiated without nuclear. Abundance of natural gas in the United States already has reduced the demand for new nuclear to four or five reactors. The world we be settled in a while....

--Umesh Shanmugam(Purely my view)

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