| Subject: An example of how the solution already exists to all our problems |
Author:
Eric Chen
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Date Posted: 04:05:29 12/21/04 Tue
This is an example of what Conversations With God [http://www.cwg.org] philosophy has mentioned - "before you have asked, I have answered". The solutions to the world's problems are already in front of us. We simply have not noticed them.
Nuclear reactors need not be big, expensive and mean buildings that might release clouds of poisonous gases. In fact, one of the pioneers of atomic power has proposed a design radically different, cheaper and safer. Chernobyl would never have happened and we might even have nuclear plants in every city, if this design was adopted in 1945 instead of 2000.
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Excepts from:
Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html?pg=1&topic=china&topic_set=
Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.
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Zhang Zuoyi, the project's 42-year-old director, explains why. The key trick is a phenomenon known as Doppler broadening - the hotter atoms get, the more they spread apart, making it harder for an incoming neutron to strike a nucleus. In the dense core of a conventional reactor, the effect is marginal. But HTR-10's carefully designed geometry, low fuel density, and small size make for a very different story. In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure, instead of skyrocketing into a bad movie plot, the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius - comfortably below the balls' 2,000-plus-degree melting point - and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.
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Today's nuclear power plants are the fruits of a decision tree rooted in the earliest days of the atomic age. In 1943, a Manhattan Project team led by Enrico Fermi sustained the first man-made nuclear chain reaction in a pile of uranium blocks at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Lab. A chemist named Farrington Daniels joined the effort a short time later. But Daniels wasn't interested in bombs. His focus was on a notion that had been circulating among physicists since the late 1930s: harnessing atomic power for cheap, clean electricity. He proposed a reactor containing enriched uranium "pebbles" - a term borrowed from chemistry - and using gaseous helium to transfer energy to a generator.
The Daniels pile, as the concept was called, was taken seriously enough that Oak Ridge National Laboratory commissioned Monsanto to design a working version in 1945. Before it could be built, though, a bright Annapolis graduate named Hyman Rickover "sailed in with the Navy," as Daniels later put it, and the competing idea of building a rod-fueled, water-cooled reactor to power submarines. With US Navy money backing the new design, the pebble bed fell by the wayside, and Daniels returned to the University of Wisconsin. By the time of his death in 1972, he was known as a pioneer of - irony alert - solar power. Indeed, the International Solar Energy Society's biennial award bears his name.
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