Two years ago, the Air Force asserted that only 311 nuclear weapons were needed to secure ourselves, and there was an excess of 4,802 weapons. What to do? What to do? Well, we are often reminded of nuclear power’s hippie cousin, the nuclear power plant. And he’s been doing his homework for the past few decades.
Traditional ‘light water reactors’ work by allowing an unstable isotope to cascade down to a stable isotope and collecting the energy in heated water which turns a turbine. Breeder reactors are similar, except they include a design change that allows them to utilise a mix of the rare isotope and the common isotopes. Furthermore, all “waste” is simply re-purified and dumped back into the reactor. A variation known as the Burner reactor was actually designed to consume these final, troublesome elements. These reactors were first envisioned in the 1960s, but the abundance of nuclear material made their further development unnecessary. As a result, many of the reactors we use today are the older, waste-producing models. This leads to another problem; what to do with all of this nuclear waste we have?
The drawbacks. They often lead to the NIMBY mentality that plagues so many essential concepts of society. We’ve seen the headlines about Japanese nuclear reactors collapsing and threatening the hemisphere with their toxic nature. When authorities were unable to get close enough to fix the problem; a downright modern Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. But hey, let’s face some facts. That station was the old light water variety, it was forty years old, it was hit by a 9.1 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami, with the tsunami being the ultimate reason for failure. The backup generators for the cooling stations were fried in the wave. There is nothing in any of these catastrophes that couldn’t have been avoided, and often the technology existed at the time.
I think it’s about time we started connecting some dots. Breeder reactors could use the very pure forms of Uranium, like an appropriately processed core of a nuclear warhead, to get the fire started and then consume all of the waste we have stored up. We both demilitarise our stockpiles and clean up the Earth at the same time.
In fact, that is just what they started doing in a little known program in 1993 known as the ‘Megatons to Megawatts’ program. The goal was to use up the Soviet stockpile of nuclear material by feeding it into our power plants, to great success. Since its start, over 16,000 nukes have been dismantled, diluted, and purchased by the United States, and the resulting electricity powers one in ten American homes and businesses. The program is slated to end in 2013, however, so it is important to see if both nations renew the agreement, or if America decides to tear its own nukes apart in the future.
And the best part about nuclear power, as published in Journal of American Physics in 1983, there is enough Uranium on Earth to power our planet for the next five billion years using Breeder reactors. No more paying for electricity, just the maintenance fees. The energy for processing could come from the reactor itself. No more coal mining, or natural gas fracking, or oil spewing into our landscapes, or excess carbon given off to our atmosphere.
There has even been much progress in what is called ‘cogeneration’ plants. Where the heat coming off of the nuclear reactors is then used to desalinate ocean water, producing drinking water and salt. This is important in areas where drinking water supplies are limited, such as the Middle East and major coastal cities.
Soon, car manufacturers will have improved electric car designs that make it an upgrade from classical gasoline cars. The benchmarks have been set in both energy output and total storage for batteries, and intense research can often brute force some amazing results. When every car is plugged into the houses that are themselves on a grid powered by nuclear power, then gasoline would instantly become unnecessary.
All of this technology exists today, all it would take is someone with enough conviction and authority to recreate America’s energy market. No more nuclear weapons, no more coal, oil, natural gas, gasoline, no more nuclear waste, renewable sources of drinking water, and assured energy independence for all of humanity in perpetuity.