Reunions and Nuclear Power

The title of this post is an interesting mix of thoughts that requires some explanation.

This past weekend I attended my 40th (count 'em) college reunion. I experienced the usual reaction of being surprised at all the "old" people in attendance. Where did they all come from? Reunions - at least at this lofty number - are always a little bittersweet. It was great reliving and laughing about all the good times we had and marvel that we actually survived our college days relatively unscathed.

On the other hand you know that there are only a few more gatherings of this kind to come. In fact at my alma mater - Duke University - they cut it off at 50. I guess they figure at that point the alums are either too senile or too tired to care.

As to the connection with nuclear power at the aforementioned reunion, I got into a "vigorous" discussion with the wife (whom I knew when she was an undergrad) of one of my fraternity brothers about the benefits of nuclear power as a partial solution to the concern about greenhouse gases. (By the way see my previous post re the global warming debate.) She said she was dead set against nuclear power because of the "unsolved" problem of waste disposal. I pointed out to her that contrary to the anti-nuc propaganda, fully developed technologies for the safe disposal of nuclear waste have been around for over 30 years, and the "unsolved" problem was how to get around the NIMBY syndrome and related political issues that prevent these technologies from being used.

I further noted that the anti-nuc movement has a vested interest in keeping the issue open since doing so perpetuates the myth of an "unsolved" problem which in truth they do not want to be "solved."

As a trained nuclear engineer who spent the better part of 25 years operating, building and servicing nuclear power plants I do speak with some authority on this issue. Nevertheless I was completely unable to persuade my opponent even thought she had no technical background or knowledge about the subject.

Like many who are ignorant of nuclear issues her position was based entirely on an emotional reaction to the scaremongering of the anti-nuc movement and the belief that all we need to do is build thousands of wind turbines from North Dakota to Texas. She seemed to be unfazed by the fact that wind turbines are both eye pollutants and voracious killers of migrating birds, not to mention the enormous costs of the transmission and distribution system that would be needed to move all the wind energy to the areas that need it.

My frustration was that here we had an otherwise very bright person who would rather ignore the facts about a subject she didn't understand in favor of a simple rejection of the idea. It was almost like she made decision to be deliberately brain dead on this issue.

This is why in spite of the recent talk about a nuclear renaissance, I am very pessimistic that any more light water nuclear reactors will ever be built in the United States. Europe, China, Japan, South Korea and others will continue to develop and apply this much needed technology and once again the US will be lagging the world largely due to a combination of a head-in-the-sand approach to the technologies and a lack of political will.