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Edited on Wed Apr-13-05 09:00 PM by NNadir
To reiterate my position, I very much believe in strong, independent regulatory bodies. Again, I am Democrat, and as such I believe that regulation, by creating an environment in which "the rule of law," is a permanent presence, makes it easier to do business. In a former time, people in the Western world, in countries where the rule of law was applied, were collectively enriched by the success of business. At the beginning of the twentieth century people's food routinely rotted on hot days. By the end of the twentieth century, most Americans had refrigerator/freezers. This was not accomplished by Vladimir Lenin. It was accomplished by American business. My father, a union laborer with almost no education, actually lived better than Henry VIII.
That said, I would specifically like to address your comments about the NRC in a different light. First of all, however good or bad the NRC is at it's job, the fact remains that it is regulating an industry where people seldom, if ever, die from accidents. Something somewhere is therefore being done right, by whatever mechanism, regulatory or otherwise.
I note that there is a Nuclear Regulatory Commission which oversees, through a series of audits and reporting requirements, all aspects of nuclear operations. These reports are public and are often, as we see here on this website, repeated by Greenpeace types and disseminated in a completely uncomprehending and ignorant way. One hears for instance, about every leak in a weld, every spill of water, every unexpected release of steam, etc, etc ad nauseum. Often completely trivial events become international news. How does this happen? Is it actually the case that nuclear power plant operators, who actually understand the physics of their systems relish the idea of having a scientifically illiterate Greenpeace type lecture them on how irresponsible and dangerous they are?
Now we ask ourselves, is there really a Coal Regulatory Commission? Is the haphazard dumping of millions of tons of waste into the atmosphere, and the cost of millions of lives worldwide in normal operation supposed to be devoid of regulatory oversight solely on the basis of the idea that "everybody does it" and "we're used to it?"
The demand that nuclear power be regulated down to a measurement of the torque on every bolt and the determination of the corrosion of every weld while coal gets a bye is a case, for lack of a better term, "nuclear exceptionalism." At the end of the day, every technological decision has a risk/benefit cost. It does seem to me that people are still thinking that a single life lost by nuclear energy is worth a few million lives lost by other means. Again, nuclear power saves lives. When it starts moving in the direction of costing as many lives as it saves, we will need to re-evaluate it, but I'm not sure that we would serve our culture better by spending more money and more attention to nuclear matters. There are areas that are much cheaper to address for much greater benefit.
Let's turn for a moment to the issue of design life. I am an organic chemist and it has been my privilege to make lots of compounds that never existed before I made them. I once worked on a class of compounds that would have been expected to be decomposed by moisture. We stored them at -20C under nitrogen. There was one flask I forgot about, however, and left sitting on the bench at room temperature for several months before noticing it. It was, in fact unchanged. I now know that almost twenty years later, some of these compounds are still usable.
The designers of nuclear plants in the 1950's and 1960's were similarly asked to estimate the design life of their systems. Being new and untested, they estimated these plants would be viable for forty years. This made their investors at the time happy, and on the other hand, it made nuclear opponents unhappy because, they said (and I know this because I was among them) that nuclear plants have never been demonstrated to have this much of a lifetime. Now, of course, they have.
Many problems in 1950's and 1960's nuclear design have been uncovered of the last decades, alloys that were unexpectedly corroded, or brittle or prone to cracking. Still, for all of these discoveries, only two reactors have failed completely and unexpectedly, both during their first fuel cycle when the people operating them were poorly trained and at best, weakly experienced. Both of these accidents combined have lead to loss of life that when compared to other energy options must, for lack of a better term, be regarded almost as trivial.
The NRC and international nuclear authorities have exhaustively analyzed these accidents and instituted changes in operating procedure and design that have prevented either accident, even in the abysmally designed RBMK's, from ever occurring again. We might quibble with particulars when we place these authorities under a huge inappropriately sized (given the risk) magnifying glass, but the fact is, thus far whatever they have done has worked. We would not be having this conversation at all if any other option, fossil fuels or the much hyped solar energy actually worked. They do not work. Fossil fuels people kill continuously without end, and solar power (with the happy exception of wind power) is too expensive for all but the myopic self satisfied upper middle class.
Two tested and scaled nuclear reactor designs were found to unacceptable, the Magnox type reactor (built in Britain) and, more famously, the graphite moderated reactor of which the RBMK type built at Chernobyl. In spite of Three Mile Island, water moderated and cooled reactors have been validated as a successful design and represent a reason why the environmental abyss did not so clearly arrive until now.
When these reactors were built, materials science was in its infancy. The best computer technology in the world was hardly the equivalent of an ordinary $400 PC. There was no design experience, only design theory. In every case, though, the designs of nuclear plants were the outgrowth of a remarkable and highly successful partnership between government and industry that, in the end, worked. There were misteps and there were errors, but it worked and it is working still. The engineers designed using government information and infrastructure, and their work was evaluated and approved by government technicians who had a close working relationship with industry. In theory we should be able to do better. However, in contrast to the people of the first nuclear age, we have our heads up our asses. We cannot think and we cannot act. We deserve what is coming to us.
As for public consideration of nuclear decisions, I note with increasing despair that our public is completely illiterate. Public participation in public decisions only works when the public is educated and informed. I will bet $50 that you can get 50 times more Americans to tell you what happened on the latest episode of the unreal "reality show" "Survivor" than you can get to explain what plutonium is and what it's properties are. I will bet that you can easily get 80% of Americans to agree with this statement "Nuclear waste is dangerous," though my long experience here and elsewhere has yet to produce a single one among them who can identify a single person who has been killed or injured by the storage of commercial so called "nuclear waste." This is the same crowd that believes that the attack on Iraq was a part of "The War on Terror" and not a part of the "War for Halliburton," the same crowd that sits up at night wide eyed worrying about "nuclear terrorism," in complete indifference to the FACT that the attack on the World Trade Center was an outgrowth of the politics, not of nuclear power, but of OIL. This is NOT a crowd that can or should be trusted with the future. For the record, this crowd, one of the largest assemblages of pathetic idiots ever collected in one country at the same time, is stumbling into a disasterous oblivion.
I hate to be reactionary, but to tell you the truth, the 1950's and early 1960's were in many ways a golden age. In those days practical technical considerations ruled over pat dogma. In those days "partnership" was a practice and not just a marketing term. To be perfectly honest, I am happy their reactors are still working. I trust their intentions, and I trust their insight and creativity. They knew what the fuck they were doing. We don't.
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