Strata Lucida

Goin' nuke

A Birdhouse entry on pro-nuclear Greens points to an excellent Wired article about new developments in nuclear power technology and politics. It seems prominent environmental thinkers such as James Lovelock and the founder of Greenpeace are starting to think nuclear power might not be such a bad idea after all. The basic idea being that by concentrating your environmental damage in one place -- analogous to the paving of paths in national parks -- you wind up better off in the aggregate. Fossil fuels have enormous social and environmental costs: not only does the huge amount of carbon deposited into the air cause health problems, but the geostrategic politics of fossil fuels force us into untenable positions where we are reliant on, and supportive of, extremely nasty Islamic regimes.

All this reminds me of a high school report I once did on the MHTGR, or Modular High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor. The idea behind MHTGR is to build a small (500-megawatt) reactor with an intrinsically safe design: it's meltdown-proof because of the core design, and immune to Three Mile Island-style radioactive coolant leaks because it's cooled by helium (which doesn't become radioactive). And, being modular, the MHTGR can be mass-produced.

Of course, technology has moved along in the 15 years since I did that little report, and pebble-bed reactors are the latest in safe-by-design nuclear power tech. The pebble-bed looks like a similar concept to the MHTGR, and has been used successfully in Germany. New ones are now being built in China.

If James Lovelock is thinking positively of nuclear power, it seems we may be close to unbranding one of the enviro movement's sacred cows. With more research we should be able to come up with ways to solve the waste storage problem. But if Green opposition stymies nuclear research and development before it can get started, that's unlikely to happen.