Two Critical Nuclear Questions
There are two questions that must be answered before any progress on nuclear energy can proceed. “Who and why would anyone build a reactor that is intrinsically dangerous and only conditionally safe when an unconditionally safe reactor is obvious?” and “Who and why would anyone build a reactor that can only utilize 1% of the Uranium mined to fuel it when it is known how to build a 100% fuel-efficient reactor?”
The mere fact that the entire nuclear industry worldwide is based on intrinsically dangerous reactors, reactors that will only contain massive quantities of seriously dangerous material under ideal conditions, as long as they suffer no significant damage, says everything you need to know about who made these decisions. They exempted reactor design from risk due to earthquake or war on the claim that it was an inherent limitation of nuclear energy and that statement is simply not true.
Somehow, all reactors encapsulate nuclear fuel in fuel rods that are placed within a super expensive high-pressure tank and then cooled with a circulating coolant. The basis for this design, it is claimed, is that by segregating the fuel into 80,000 individual fuel rods, the hazard of any one rod leaking is minimized. However, the truth is that by placing all the rods in a big tank, they will all fail together in a Loss-of-Coolant event. By requiring the use of fuel rods, every reactor in the world today is a boil of Chernobyl-potential desolation as all that is required to cause mass collateral damage to a civilian population is to strike such a reactor with an artillery shell or conventional bomb and if not, then an earthquake or human error will do. Additionally, the ultimate power generation capability of fuel-rod reactors is inhibited a hundredfold and their costs are magnified a hundredfold. If the truth be told, placing fuel in rods negates almost perfectly, any advantage nuclear energy might offer the world.
To truly appreciate the gravity of these questions and these issues, all one need do is examine what a perfect, as in perfectly safe reactor looks like. A perfect reactor is as simple as a tank of fluid and as perfect as the Sun. Simply salting a tank of Lead (Pb) with Uranium (U) metal dust will create a reactor that is completely devoid of any potential to release catastrophic quantities of hazardous material into the environment and capable of nearly unlimited power generation for nearly the cost of Pb. Even if such a reactor were bombed, any hazardous material would be entrained in liquid Pb which would then become solid Pb. It would simply be impossible to disperse the hazardous material into the environment.
Our world stands at the threshold of the future where decisions are being made as to how we power a fossil-fuel-free future. All attention is focused on passive energy sources that will not only require ridiculous levels of investment, but even more ridiculous levels of maintenance. It is almost a certainty that future electricity will no longer be a necessity but a luxury. And still, there does not appear to be more than one person on the planet looking askance at the insanity that is the nuclear industry. Unless others are willing to admit that intrinsically dangerous and 1% efficient reactor designs demand skepticism, future generations of working-class slaves will be burdened with a never-ending yoke of maintaining an endless landscape of renewable energy detritus.