What to do about nuclear waste? Burn it to generate electricity!
So, you don’t windmills whish-whishing overhead and you don’t want vast arrays of solar panels covering up the pristine Mojave and you don’t want nuclear waste piling up at power plants or Yucca Mountain (sure it’s dead, right?)?
But you do want electricity to power your plasma-screen TV and to recharge your laptop, BlackBerry, iPhone and Kindle.
Allow me to point to something that’s been around for six decades or so but might be worth tossing into the ongoing debate about our energy future. I bumped into it in a print edition of Scientific American, not available online, but an earlier and lengthier article from January is.
It is the advanced liquid metal reactor or ALMR. Such a reactor would basically use waste from conventional nuclear reactors and use molten sodium instead of water to circulate through its core. The hot sodium would then heat water to drive a turbine.
As the January SciAm article notes, “If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods — namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium. … With this approach, the radioactivity from the generated waste could drop to safe levels in a few hundred years, thereby eliminating the need to segregate waste for tens of thousands of years.”
The Obama administration is spending billions on weatherization that provides a rather small return on investment for a relative few homeowners and workers, billions on subsidizing solar and wind projects that would never produce a profit on their own, but ignores real innovation.
“Business studies have indicated that this technology could be economically competitive with existing nuclear power technologies,” the authors note, without taking into account regulatory red tape and the environmental objections to building anything anywhere for any reason whatsoever.
