Nuclear power, Fukishima, and incompetence

Back in the 1980’s, America’s elites were running scared of Japan. It was stated that Japan would be the #1 economy in the world by the end of the 20th century, that America needed to learn from the Japanese, yada yada yada. Yet in the 1990’s, Japan’s economy stumbled. And in the 2000’s, Japan’s vaunted reputation for quality took multiple hits as coverups of faults in Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Toyota vehicles came to light.

So what happened? Well, what happened was that the Japanophiles were looking at the strengths of Japan’s society, but not at its weaknesses. And the biggest weakness is that Japan is a consensus-based shame-based society where nobody will make hard decisions because they will bring shame upon the decision-maker or cause a disruption of social harmony within the company or within society as a whole. As a result, when Japan faced a depression caused by a collapse in housing and land prices in the 1990’s, they were unable to make the hard decision to close down the bankrupt banks and fund new ones or to provide a massive bailout restoring the solvency of the bankrupt banks. Instead, they
pretended they still had a credible banking system because admitting their banks were
bankrupt would have brought shame upon various decision-makers in their society,
thereby cutting off credit to large parts of the Japanese economy. And credit is the
lynchstone of capitalism. Credit is what allows capitalism to be the most nimble system for creating goods and services ever invented, because credit is what allows a company to swiftly adjust to changing consumer needs by paying for the capital equipment needed to meet those needs with the future sales thus generated. Without
a functional banking system, you must wait and slowly accumulate capital to make that capital investment. Japan’s banks basically ceased to exist from an economic point of view in the 1990s, pulling one of those legs off the three-legged stool of capitalism, and as a result their economy went sideways — and has stayed sideways.

The fact that Japan is a shame-based society that values social harmony above all else especially is problematic when you have managers who are drunk, incompetent, or both. And there are such managers scattered all through Japanese industry. And Japan’s nuclear industry appears especially prone to that. TEPCO (the utility which owns the Fukishima power plant) has in particular a long and sordid history of mismanagement including submitting fraudulent inspection data to the Japanese government and covering up previous nuclear accidents. Unfortunately the problem is that if a boss is drunk and incompetent, said boss will remain in power pretty much forever, because firing him would be an admission that you made a mistake hiring him and thus bring shame upon you. And there’s far too many of these roadblocks to competence scattered in halls of TEPCO…

So, is the result going to be another Chernobyl? Well… no. There were no safety features at Chernobyl. It didn’t even have a reactor containment vessel, and it was a graphite-moderated reactor, where the graphite would burst into flames if you poured water onto the reactor fuel to cool it down. Completely different design from an old-school boiling-water reactor like Three Mile Island or Fukushima.

Indeed, Fukushima is almost identical in design to Three Mile Island, and almost identical in its operation — i.e., incompetence rules. TEPCO in fact had its operating license yanked for several years in the early ‘oughts for submitting fraudulent inspection reports to Japan’s nuclear regulator. It’s the flip side of the problems caused by America’s “at will” employment system… in Japan, if you have a job, it’s pretty much for life even if you’re incompetent and drunk all the time. And if you happen to be the manager of a nuclear power plant and incompetent and drunk all the time… well. You still have a job for life. Because to fire you would bring shame upon your manager for hiring someone who is drunk and incompetence, and shame-based societies like Japan just can’t deal with that.

That said, there *ARE* designs that will automatically shut down if they lose cooling, like pebble bed reactors. What we should be doing is replacing all these old boiling water reactors (which were designed by the military to power friggin’ NUCLEAR SUBMARINES, not generate electricity, and they’re inherently designed to be compact enough to fit in submarines, not safe) with reactors that are far, far safer. To shut down a pebble bed reactor in an emergency, for example, you *stop* cooling it — energetic particles then become too energetic to stay in the fuel pellets and stop causing fission, there by preventing the reactor from melting down. This is just one example of reactors which have passive safety systems, which most of today’s reactors do NOT have, instead relying upon pumps and other such active devices (devices that require external energy to operate) to prevent them from melting down.

As for “alternate energy”: Energy density. I’ve talked about this before. But you basically cannot maintain technological society with the energy density possible with solar, wind, and geothermal power. And I *LIKE* technological society. Amongst other things, it makes this blog possible… as well as making alternate energy possible. Without technological society, you can’t have solar panels or efficient distribution of electricity from wind or geothermal power. Just doesn’t work. Wind, solar, and geothermal will be important in the future, but simply will not provide sufficient energy to maintain the kind of technological society needed to create and maintain such an infrastructure. We’ll need some kind of more energy-dense power source for that… and right now, unless you want to continue contributing to global warming by burning more hydrocarbons, nuclear power seems to be “it”.

— Badtux the Energy Penguin

Read Full Post »

For smaller communities that want to glow in the dark…

The Hyperion Nuclear Power Generation Unit. This appears to be a small nuclear heat source that can be used to drive steam turbines. It uses a different fuel as compared to normal nuclear reactors so it’s impossible for it to melt down, it self-damps (stops moderating neutrons, i.e., stops the reaction) when it gets above a certain temperature.

I’ve already noted that with oil and gas running out and the transition to a hydrogen infrastructure we’re going to need not only a replacement for fuel oil and natural gas for home heating, but also a lot of energy to “crack” water into its hydrogen/oxygen components to use as fuel — more energy than can be provided by wind and solar. There simply isn’t enough energy density available in wind and solar to power a modern economy. Just ask Germany. They tried. They failed. Instead, Germany is now covered by a black cloud from coal-powered plants that are all that keeps Germany from sitting in the dark. Meanwhile, the skys are clear in France, where over 90% of their electricity comes from nuclear power. So for the near term, nuclear fission is “it” as an energy source for powering a modern economy. And as these small reactors prove, it *is* possible to create safe nuclear reactors.

The sad thing is that these new safe nuclear reactors are going to get installed in Eastern Europe long before they’re installed here in America. The moron radical environmentalists would rather we all sit in the dark freezing, because sitting in the dark freezing is more “environmentally sound”. Bah. Ideology wins over pragmatism once again. Environmentalism is yet another one of those “isms” like capitalism, socialism, and communism, all of which have some useful ideas, but when you turn them into an ideology what you get is poison.

— Badtux the Nuclear Penguin

Read Full Post »

The End is Near

Bush Administration makes deal to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia. While some commentators make hasty conclusions about Saudi Arabia wanting to develop nuclear weapons, there is a much, much simpler explanation: The end is near.

The problem is that Saudi Arabia’s oil fields are on their last legs, and what little oil hasn’t been pumped yet has to be sold in order to finance whatever is going to replace oil as Saudi Arabia’s energy source. While much of Saudi Arabia is desert and thus well suited for solar power, the problem is that deserts lack, well, water (duh!). So Saudi Arabia has been building desalination plants in order to provide water for their growing and thirsty population. And desalination plants require a *lot* of energy — paving all of Saudi Arabia with solar panels would provide enough energy to maybe desalinate enough water for a million people. And in case you haven’t noticed, Saudi Arabia has a population of over TWENTY-SEVEN MILLION PEOPLE. All of whom require water in order to live.

So clearly solar lacks the energy density to provide for Saudi Arabia’s water needs. Given that, the Saudis have few options for replacing their current gas-fired power plants as the natural gas runs out (which is already happening — the Saudis are pumping salt water at full speed into their oil reservoirs in order to increase the pressure in order to force the remaining oil to the surface, which means that the natural gas pressure which used to be providing that force is now *gone*). Saudi Arabia has no coal, so that isn’t going to do the job. So nuclear energy is the logical next step for them — and indeed they’ve been talking for years about building a gigantic nuclear desalination plant. And if it is a light water reactor properly designed and properly monitored by the IAEA (so that rods cannot be short-cycled — you must short-cycle rods in order to extract Pu-239 for bombs, otherwise it picks up more neutrons and becomes isotopes not usable for bombs), it is not a particularly large proliferation threat.

All of these arguments also apply to Iran, of course. But oooh, I forget, Eye-ran EEEEvilll. Saudi Arabia GOOOOOOOD. Even though women are slaves in Saudi Arabia who aren’t allowed any advanced education and aren’t even allowed to fuckin’ *drive*, while 50% of Iranian university enrollment is women as are 40% of their doctors. Tells ya just how much our ruling elite values women’s rights… first they overthrew the only regime in the region which guaranteed full rights to women (Saddam’s secular Baathist regime), and then they target the regime that is the next-most-congenial place for women in the region? Pathetic. Simply pathetic.

– Badtux the Energy Penguin

Read Full Post »

Energy density, global warming, and nuclear power

Now, as you know, I’m derisive of the tighty-righties and their hatred of science, especially their hatred of the science of biology and the science of climatology (both of which have made discoveries that conflict with their small-minded interpretation of their holy scriptures). But I have lately come across yet another group of people who hate science because it conflicts with their small-minded interpretation of their holy scriptures, though the science they hate is physics. Tightie righties, meet loonie greenies. Different religion, same ****.

The fact of the matter is that technological civilization is pretty much the only way we’re going to prevent a massive die-off of the human race in the near future, because the human race has pretty much used up all the easily-accessible resources that can be exploited without a technological civilization. There are no more nodules of high-quality iron ore lying around on the ground ready to be smelted with charcoal and beat into plowshares. And a technological civilization requires a high energy density to maintain, an energy density that is not attainable with current solar or biofuels technologies. I don’t know how many of you have any manufacturing experience. In my last job, I designed the manufacturing processes used to manufacture our product, which was a server similar to the one that this blog is maintained on. Every single one of those servers rolling off our assembly line represents a massive energy investment as parts and resources from around the world are collected into one place and assembled into a final form.

Technological artifacts such as the computer you are reading this on cannot be made as a “cottage industry”. The world is long past that point. No single nation has the resources, skills, or know-how to maintain technological civilization all by itself. Your computer has parts or resources in it from Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the United States, the Phillipines, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, Brazil, Israel, Saudi Arabia, … and all these pieces were gathered together using massive amounts of energy to transport them from point A to point B. The last nation to try doing all of this all by itself ended up collapsing in disgrace (see: Former Soviet Union). A modern technological civilization simply is too complex and requires too many resources both human and physical for it to be maintained by a limited number of people in a limited number of places. And keeping this technological civilization going requires huge amounts of energy, an energy density far higher than what is available via current technologies from solar and other “renewable” resources (all of which boil down to solar, BTW). We need high-density energy sources to keep technological civilization going. And right now, that gives us two choices: Hydrocarbons (i.e., stored solar energy, causing issues with global warming and with rapid depletion approaching), or nuclear fission (waste disposal issues, health issues dealing with mining and refining of uranium ores, issues with radiation leakage in the vicinity of the reactor).

So now I hear loonie greenies grumbling, “technological civilization is over-rated,” as they chortle about how their storage batteries and solar panels power their home (both of which are products of technological civilization — see the microchips in the battery management unit?) and talk about “sustainable” lifestyles (sustainable only because technological civilization has provided them with the resources to sustain those lifestyles). The collapse of technological civilization, if and when it happens, will have consequences that are similar in scale to the consequences of the collapse of Roman civilization in the 5th century AD. Within the course of 100 years the city of Rome went from being a city of over 1,000,000 people to being a heavily armed camp of maybe 50,000 survivors huddled in the ruins of the city. It was not until 1931 that Rome ever again had more than a million people. Today we are all Rome, because technological civilization is far more interconnected than Roman civilization ever was. If we look at the effects of the collapse of technological civilization upon the world’s population, you can figure that the world’s population would plummet from 6,600,000,000 to around 330,000,000. That’s a lot of dead bodies (6,270,000,000 dead bodies, in case you’re counting). And the result would be a permanent Dark Ages where the survivors live short and miserable and hungry lives, since, as I previously noted, all the resources necessary for the creation of a pre-technological civilization such as easily-accessed nodules of iron have long since been exhausted.

Technological civilization substitutes energy and technology for those pre-technological resources, and theoretically, if provided with dense enough energy sources, is sustainable for pretty much forever since technological civilization is capable of using energy to reclaim resources that otherwise are unusable waste. The “dense enough energy sources” part, though, is the killer. Thus far technological civilization has relied upon fossil fuels. This is not sustainable, both because of the damage that it is doing to the world’s climate and because fossil fuels will not last forever. We cannot cover sufficient area of the world with solar panels, biofuel plantings, and wind turbines to replace the fossil fuels because that would have its own environmental consequences (even if we planted every inch of arable land in the Americas with soybeans we wouldn’t have enough soy oil to maintain sufficient transportational infrastructures to keep technological civilization going in the Americas, not to mention the environmental consequences of turning topsoil into diesel fuel), not to mention the fact that solar and wind are good “peaking” sources of power but lack sufficient reliability and are geographically ill suited for providing “baseline” power for much of the world’s population. At the moment, the only replacement we have for the fossil fuels that has the required energy density is nuclear fission feeding a “hydrogen economy” to meet the transport needs. As the loonie greenies will be swift to tell you, nuclear power has its issues. On the other hand, it will not bankrupt the world (France gets 3/4ths of their power from nuclear fission and thus far I haven’t noticed them bankrupted by it), it will not result in the entire world being sterile eunochs (while Frenchmen seem to be uninterested in reproducing nowdays, their North African slave class that they keep in bondage and refuse to give citizenship to seem to have no such reproductive problems), and at least for the short term, until nanotechnology and warm superconductors come along to allow transporting solar power more easily and allow constructing solar panels without the current massive infusions of energy required, it’s the only technology we have that’ll replace the fossil fuels with sufficient energy density to maintain technological civilization.

Of course, if you want to kill 6.3 billion people, merely outlaw nuclear power world-wide and wait. It won’t take long. 100 years, tops. That’s a *lot* of dead bodies, folks. Makes me glad I will never have grandchildren to be subjected to such a world. Lack of suitable female penguins up here in the warm Northlands isn’t the only reason this penguin has not reproduced…

— Badtux the Energy Penguin

Read Full Post »