Billions & Billions by Carl Sagan

Author:Carl Sagan [Sagan, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80102-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

If these issues of operational safety, radioactive waste disposal, and weapons diversion were solved, nuclear power plants might be the solution to the fossil fuel problem—or at least an important stopgap, a transitional technology until we find something better. But these conditions have not been satisfied with high confidence, and there does not seem to be a strong prospect that they will. Continuing violations of safety standards by the nuclear power industry, systematic cover-up of those violations, and failures of enforcement by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (driven in part by budgetary restrictions) do not inspire confidence. The burden of proof is on the nuclear power industry. Some nations such as France and Japan have made a major conversion to nuclear energy, despite these worries. Meanwhile, other nations—Sweden, for example—that had previously authorized nuclear power have now decided to phase it out.

Because of widespread public uneasiness about nuclear energy, all U.S. orders for nuclear power plants placed after 1973 have been canceled, and no new plants have been ordered since 1978. Proposals for new storage or burial sites for radioactive wastes are routinely rejected by the communities involved. The witches’ brew accumulates.

There is another kind of nuclear power—not fission, where atomic nuclei are split apart, but fusion, where they are put together. In principle, fusion power plants might run off seawater—a virtually inexhaustible supply—generating no greenhouse gases, posing no dangers of radioactive waste, and wholly uninvolved with uranium and plutonium. But “in principle” doesn’t count. We’re in a hurry. With enormous efforts and very high technology, we are now perhaps at the point where a fusion reactor will barely generate a little more power than it uses up. The prospect for fusion power is a prospect of hypothetical, enormous, expensive, high-technology systems, which even their proponents do not imagine being available on a commercial scale for many decades. We do not have many decades. Early versions are likely to generate stupendous quantities of radioactive waste. And in any case, it’s hard to imagine such systems as the answer for the developing world.

What I’ve talked about in the last paragraph is hot fusion—so called for a good reason: You have to bring materials up to temperatures of millions of degrees or more, as in the interior of the Sun, to make fusion go. There have also been claims for something called cold fusion, which was first announced in 1989. The apparatus sits on a desk; you put in some kinds of hydrogen, some palladium metal, run an electric current, and, it is claimed, out comes more energy than you put in, as well as neutrons and other signs of nuclear reactions. If only this were true, it might be the ideal solution to global warming. Many scientific groups all over the world have looked into cold fusion. If there’s any merit to the claim, the rewards, of course, would be enormous. The overwhelming judgment of the community of physicists worldwide is that cold fusion is an illusion, a mélange of measurement errors, absence of proper control experiments, and a confusion of chemical with nuclear reactions.

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