Is Nuclear Power Simply Too ‘Brittle’?

[GliderGuider]

This is a question well worth asking. I've always maintained that the greatest risk to a complex enterprise like our globalized industrial civilization is its lack of resilience. A brittle system with many single points of failure is vulnerable to failure cascades that can impact the entire system when small but significant things go wrong. Nuclear power sure looks like one of those, as the Fukushima catastrophe begins to cascade into world's supply chains and potentially the still-shaky world economy.

Is Nuclear Power Simply Too ‘Brittle’?

To be honest, it seems to me that all this focus on “the R-word” {GG: Radiation} misses an essential point about nuclear fission technology at this moment in time. It is incredibly brittle. We have seen on several occasions now that external events or internal human error have fairly quickly cascaded to the point of rendering an extremely expensive resource a complete write-off. We really don’t need the boogeyman of radiation poisoning to see that perhaps some caution and focus on legitimate fault tolerance is in order.

For me, at this moment, there simply is no fission technology, demonstrated at an industrial scale, that is up to the standard we should demand for a system which degrades gracefully when stressed. This does not mean such technology is not possible. But please, while it is (probably) true nuclear power is not the threat that is sometimes claimed, it is also not even slightly close to the maturity we should demand.

These same arguments apply to many areas of our current infrastructure. In the push for quick deployment, and quick profits, we have cut corners in many areas (think deep sea drilling, fracking, interstate transit systems, waste handling, tar sands, the threat of to our electronic and power systems … this could go on…). Over the long term we always pay more for these short term ’solutions’.

We never seem to have the will to do it right … but we are always willing to do it over. It astonishes me what we settle for sometimes.