For anyone visiting from Alternet, the link to the nuclear story Peter Asmus referred to is here. It's in two parts on the Web, and the second half is here.
I'm grateful that he linked to this blog, and I think he wrote a decent piece. But I don't think I wrote a story "touting" nuclear power. I didn't come out against it, either, but there's a lot of gray area between those poles. And because no one has yet produced a waste-eating, meltdown proof, self-regulating nuclear reactor, that gray area is still where I live.
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"No such dry-cask storage for those fuel rods exists"!? Maybe not at San Onofre, but at many other stations it does, for fuel that has been retired five years or more. They are officially considered impermanent, so spent fuel in them at those other stations -- Bruce, in Ontario, is one, I think -- is not considered to have been finally disposed of.
--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet
Posted on December 21, 2005 7:12 PM by G. R. L. Cowan
Eating waste is a big problem and meltdown-proofness is still uncommon, but if by "self-regulating" you mean tending to stay at a set number of megawatts, it's not such a big deal. I see in the first half of your article you refer to this as "a tricky process", requiring operators to intervene if the temperature gets too high. That of course could happen, but the behaviour of the atoms and neutrons themselves does most of the work. Hot neutrons are more likely to be absorbed in 238-U, not likely to fission, and less likely to be absorbed in 235-U, the main fissioner.
(Neutrons that have been colliding for some time with the nuclei of atoms in water or fuel are considered to have a temperature, the same as that of the nuclei they have been bouncing off. That's what I mean by hot neutrons. If the reactor heats up, so do they. The damping effect this has on fission is known as a "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity".
--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron as energy carrier: real-car range, nuclear cachet
Posted on December 21, 2005 7:12 PM by G. R. L. Cowan
IFR meets all three criteria.
Posted on December 24, 2005 10:12 AM by Stewart Peterson