Frankly ... Posthuman  Rethink about Nuclear Energy

A wasted decade of environmental protection, then climate emergency as the word of the year and now nuclear power plants as the solution of all things, asks Liwen Qin. 

It is time to rethink about our options and solutions to fight the climate change. The latest assessment issued by UN said that greenhouse gas emissions are still rising dangerously. Oxford Dictionaries has declared “climate emergency” the word of the year for 2019. Scientists and entrepreneurs have been trying to look for more effective and feasible measures to slow down the global warming. Developing safer nuclear technology is possibly one of them.

Why haven’t other alternative energies saved the planet yet? Because they have several drawbacks: they rely on uncontrollable weather conditions; the energy production is not as efficient as it should be; the production, transportation and maintenance of the equipment are creating new pollutions and carbon emissions; last but not least, they are still too costly to be widely applied in many countries.

Failures instead of successes

In the wasted decade of environmental protection, many attempts have also been made to control the environmental cost of burning fossil fuels, but they have failed. Coal alone still kills at least 800,000 people a year, and devastating oil spills on the seas still happen regularly around the world.

Due to the notorious accidents in the history of nuclear energy at Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011), there is understandable mistrust and resistance to nuclear power in many countries. Because of the mounting public pressure, governments have not been investing in fundamentally improving nuclear power plants for nearly a quarter of a century, despite thousands of new research initiatives resulting in new ideas. Most of the current nuclear power plants are not designed to be run by computers. The Chernobyl power plant was designed in the late 1940’s, and those in the US today were designed in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

A good starting point

In the past decade, Tera Power, a company founded by Bill Gates has been trying to design safer nuclear power plants. To begin with, they adopted the idea of inventor Lowell Wood: instead of using enriched uranium, use depleted uranium, which cannot be used for nuclear bombs. This is good starting point, because the 700 metric tons of nuclear waste from the old nuclear power plants in the world could then be reused to create energy.

Additionally, complicated computer simulation can help to minimize human error in operation. Liquid metal, whose boiling point is much higher than water, is used to cool down the reactor so that the reactor can stop in time in case of system failure.

Further alternatives in sight

There are other ways to make safer nuclear power plants, if we listen to the scientists. In a recent paper done by a research team after 30 – 40 years of collaboration, Francesco D’Auria (University of Pisa, Italy), Nenad Debrecin (University of Zagreb, Croatia) and Horst Glaeser (Global Research for Safety, Germany) propose a new safety barrier to be implemented in large Light Water Reactors. This barrier is expected to reduce the probability of core melting to that of a large meteorite hitting the site.

Unfortunately, the efforts made by Tera Power to start a pilot project in China was balked by the US-China trade war. China was the only country both willing and able to do it. Now it is unclear whether the project can be carried elsewhere. In the meantime, let’s hope that humans find a way to dispose nuclear waste outside the earth, and solve the final concern over the use of nuclear energy.
 

 

December 2019