Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Every so often, I see another media story about how a new kind of nuclear reactor that avoids all the horrible problems of the ones we have now is being studied, or a startup is looking to build one, or whatever. Don't be afraid of nuclear power, these articles proclaim, there is new, better technology that will resolve all the problems with the bad old reactors. The nuclear technologies I've seen mentioned like this make up a venn diagram of fast neutron reactors, molten salt reactors, and thorium reactors.

And these kinds of stories come from a mix of hucksterism and religion. Just as we have a religion of space enthusiasm (where solar power stations or helium 3 or whatever bullshit technology becomes the rallying cry for the religion's real goal, of having a city on the moon/Mars/in orbit, and having people permanently *Living in Space*), and the religion helps sustain huckster snake oil plutocrats who don't really care about space at all except as a way of siphoning off government subsidies and pumping up stock prices for their space technology companies -- so too we have a religion of Nuclear Power (it's the Future!), and nuclear power technology companies whose plutocrats have snake oil to sell. (PS: my data-free impression is that space enthusiasts vastly outnumber space hucksters, but for nuclear power, the ratio is much more even or perhaps reversed).

Some nuclear power advocates have at least half a leg to stand on (solar and wind are not 24/7/365 power sources, and nuclear power plants *are* a carbon-free way to provide round the clock power regardless of weather). But solar has become SO much cheaper than fossil fuel, let alone nuclear, that it leaves budgetary headroom for adding some kind of power storage to a solar farm and still being less expensive than the alternatives - and solar powered storage (like a lake that you pump full during the day and drain through hydroelectric generators at night) completely avoids all the regulatory and PR hassles of nuclear power.

Other nuclear advocates seem to Want to Believe in nuclear because they are right wing and regard solar as tainted by the leftist eco green conspiracy, or something? IDK.

But after encountering another "the new generation of (insert technical descriptor) nuclear power plants will completely avoid all the problems you've come to expect from nuclear power" article, I decided to try and figure out just how much truth there is to such articles. After picking away at the question for a while, I'm finally typing everything up so my time will not have been completely wasted. The rest of this post comes from reading far, far too many web pages (mostly on wikipedia but also elsewhere) devoted to nuclear power. ( Read more... )

Having read far too much and gone down far too many rabbit holes, I think I can say confidently that 90% of the claims in articles touting the bright future of new! improved! no longer dangerous or scary! nuclear power are hogwash. Things those articles tout nearly always involve making proliferation-enabling technologies routine (no one other than members of the Church of Nukes want this), assume that technologies still on the drawing board will work out as advertised (they never do), and/or gloss over many, many hard to solve problems. Meanwhile, right now, we already have the ability to just use renewables paired with energy storage. We soon won't need nuclear power anymore, yet somehow there are still scads of acolytes of the Nuclear Church who refuse to accept that their God has become irrelevant.

The ice is half an inch thick on the trees. It looks like both the old cedars in the corner of our backyard are bent and broken halfway up. The radio says there's 300,000 people in Toronto without electricity. Our power went off for an hour yesterday evening, then came back. Today it went off again in the early afternoon and has been off now for 8 hours and counting. The radio says power could be out for days, since this isn't a single point of failure but rather thousands of individual fallen trees and downed lines creating a huge patchwork of little blackouts.

So, it's a bit weird. Some streets are fully lit, others totally dark, others lit here and not there. Outside our front door, all the houses are lit, but since we're on the corner, we, along with everyone else on the side street, are without power. Since Morgan's mobility is so severely restricted, we can't really go to one of the city's warming centres, and as it became clear this evening that this could last for days, we started to get very worried.

Fortunately, we thought of asking our neighbours, who do have power, if they would let us borrow some of their electricity. After a bit of mutual incomprehension (they're Italian and have extremely limited english, and I have zero Italian), they called their son, and I explained our request to him, who explained it to them, and they said yes. Such wonderful kind people cannot be thanked enough.

So, currently we have our hundred foot weed wacker power cord plugged into an outlet in their laundry room, strung out their basement window, around to our backdoor and in under the door. We have a little space heater striving to keep the temperature tolerable, a couple of lamps plugged in so we're not totally in the dark, our iPad chargers, and of course, the modem and router. When necessary, I turn off the space heater and plug in the microwave.

Naturally it took an hour online with tech support to get the Internet working again, but (knock wood) it looks like we may be able to survive now without having to call 911 and ask them to find a way to transport Morgan somewhere warm.

Next up, deciding how much of the food in the fridge needs to go on the back porch.