Generate Huge Amounts of Electricity Forever?

Local view: We can’t power 21st century with 20th-century thinkingSuppose there was a way to generate huge amounts of electricity almost forever with a cheap, plentiful source without making carbon dioxide or hardly any nuclear waste.

By: George Erickson, Duluth News Tribune~

Suppose there was a way to generate huge amounts of electricity almost forever with a cheap, plentiful source without making carbon dioxide or hardly any nuclear waste.

Suppose that this marvel couldn’t explode because it makes nothing flammable, shuts down automatically if something goes wrong, doesn’t need water for cooling, can consume stored nuclear waste, produces 1 percent as much waste as current reactors, has been successfully tested, is super safe and more efficient than fossil fuels, and can bring energy independence from Mideast oil.

This miracle is the Molten-Salt Reactor, or MSR, which ran for 22,000 hours in the 1960s, and its cousin, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR.

Unfortunately, we shelved both reactors, partly because they weren’t suited for making nuclear bombs.

The Chinese now are developing MSRs while we temporize, hampered by an uninformed, fearful public and legislators who don’t know that nuclear power is 4,000 times safer than coal and 900 times safer than oil. No one has died in Western Europe or the Western Hemisphere due to nuclear power. But millions have died from burning fossil fuels.

So what about Three Mile

Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima?

In 1979, a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island due to coolant pump failure and operator error created mildly radioactive gases that were filtered through charcoal and vented. No one was harmed, and radiation exposure was less than what airline passengers receive on a flight across the U.S.

In Chernobyl, during an equipment test, operators ignored computer warnings, disabled safety systems and exposed the reactor core, which released radioactive gases because, contrary to worldwide standards, the reactor had no containment structure. Chernobyl failed due to terrible design and substandard training. Twenty-eight firefighters died. Others were injured. According to a U. N. study, “Chernobyl produced 50 additional deaths over the following 20 years.” A tiny fraction of the deaths were caused by coal and petroleum.

In 1967 in Fukushima, Tepco, the facility’s owner, cut 25 meters off the site’s natural seawall to bring equipment to the building site. That placed reactors 5 meters below the crest of a coming tsunami. The facility ran without issue for 40 years, but after an earthquake severed Fukushima’s connections to the grid, the 18-foot seawall that Tepco had been warned to double was swamped by the tsunami. (The government could have forced Tepco to raise its seawall but didn’t.) Emergency generators in the basements of reactors 1 through 4 flooded, but reactors 5 and 6, which had higher generators, were unaffected. Batteries powered the coolant pumps for eight hours before failing. Without coolant, meltdown occurred. Had a reservoir been built, the reactors could have been cooled by gravity-powered water. Reactors 5 and 6 can still produce power but have not been activated, largely due to anti-nuclear hysteria.

Although nuclear power has been tarred by Fukushima, the failure was caused by corporate penny-pinching, inept oversight, building near the ocean, ignoring seawall height warnings and installing generators in basements. Blaming Fukushima on nuclear power is like blaming the train that derails when its sleepy operator takes a curve posted for

30 mph at 80 mph instead.

Our nuclear plants have fantastic safety records. Now is the time to develop the super safe, hugely efficient MSRs — and power them with thorium. Building MSRs will take five to 10 years and cost billions, but we have no choice — and we actually can afford it. Wind and solar can help, but they can’t provide the rising amounts of base-load power the world will need.

By avoiding nuclear power while burning fossil fuels we are leading our grandchildren ever closer to a sacrificial altar that we built, an altar made of carbon.

George Erickson of Eveleth is a member of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org) and of the Thorium Energy Alliance (thoriumenergyalliance. com). He’s also a past vice president of the American Humanist Association (americanhumanist.org) and the author of four books (see tundracub.com).