Bodansky imagines a future for nuclear fission
Objections to nuclear power have been based on reactor accidents and waste disposal, also on their connection to nuclear weapons, observed David Bodansky. Yet nuclear power could mitigate energy scarcity and restrain carbon dioxide emissions. How nuclear power might resurge after peaking in 1973 was the subject of the University of Washington physicist's talk on "Nuclear Energy and the Large Environment" at the centennial meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta on 25 March 1999.
The peaking of nuclear power in 1973 was also its termination (in terms of orders in the U.S.), Bodansky noted, and it came after less than twenty years of experience with commercial reactor designs, which he considered to be a very short lifetime for a technology. Reactors have continued to come on-line elsewhere in the world, though, primarily in Asia and in former Soviet republics; Nuclear energy generates 78% of the electricity in France, 17% worldwide.
Bodansky saw the future of nuclear energy geared to that of nonhydro renewables, which are presently generating very little electricity: 1.7% from wood, 0.5% from geothermal, 0.1% from wind, and 0.03% from direct solar. (Arthur Rosenfeld of the U.S. Department of Energy, who spoke after Bodansky, gave the actual wind generating capacity as 1.8 gigawatts and claimed that it would become cost effective by 2004.)
Without nuclear and nonrenewables, we are reliant on our current energy diet of fossil fuels and the consequences of their combustion for global warming. Meanwhile, since the Three Mile Island accident (now twenty years ago) improvements have been made in monitoring U.S. reactors for precursors of accidents, and no problems have turned up. Newer reactors, Bodansky said, benefitting from longer design times than those of the previous generation, should be safer. And carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced greatly by shifting the present 32% of electricity the U.S. presently generates from coal to nuclear.
Bodansky also looked at the future of nuclear energy in the context of Earth's carrying capacity, citing three constraints to population: material, ecological, and aesthetic/philosophical. The first of these is easiest to quantify, usually in terms of food and energy. He attributed a 1679 estimate of 12 billion to microscope inventor Van Leeuwenhoek, not too much larger than Joel Cohen's 10 billion in How Many People Can the Earth Support? Yet both of these are larger than Ehrlich's 2 billion (based on energy) and Pimentel's 1.1 billion (based on solar energy). Bodansky cited the following question raised by Pimentel: "Does human society want 10-12 billion living in poverty and malnourishment or 1-2 billion living in an acceptable lifestyle?"
Although nuclear power is linked to nuclear weapons, Bodansky noted that the availability of nuclear power could inhibit the use of nuclear weapons in a war over energy. But, even with the encouragement of new reactor designs, he acknowledged that a resurgence in use of nuclear power requires progress in solving the waste disposal problem, which he conceded could be held up at Yucca Mountain by the release of radioactive 14CO2. (Although increasing the present 14CO2 in the atmosphere by 0.1% would lead to only 1 mrem/yr additional exposure (to the hundreds of mrem/yr already provided by natural background radiation), this would still imply 5000 deaths per year from a linear model.)
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