Faustian Bargains and the 80 Year Slow Motion Train Wreck

There are moments when abstract concepts become real, and about our survival. We can call these existential moments. I had my existential moment about global warming in 1971 when I heard Jerry Olson talk about the topic at a very informal gathering of people who worked for the ORNL-NSF Environmental Studies Project. Alvin Weinberg had his existential moment about the same subject at about the same time, and with Jerry Olsen initiating him as well. The same year Alvin Weinberg coined the phrase Faustian Bargain to describe the relationship between society and nuclear energy.

Weinberg first used the phrase "faustian bargain in a 1971 speech. In an 1972 Science article "Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Weinberg repeated the content of the 1971 speech. In the article Weinberg wrote,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer -- in the catalytic nuclear burner (breeder reactor) -- an inexhaustable source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. . . .

But the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to. In a way, all of this was anticipated during the old debates over nuclear weapons. . . . . In a sense, we have established a military priesthood which guards against inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, which maintains what a priori seems to be a precarious balance between readiness to go to war and vigilance against human errors that would precipitate war . . .

It seems to me (and in this I repeat some views expressed very well by Atomic Energy Commissioner Wilfred Johnson) that peaceful nuclear energy probably will make demands of the same sort on our society, and possibly of even longer duration.

Weinberg repeated the same message a year later. In the conclusion to his November 1972 Nuclear Safety speech, Weinberg stated,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer - in the breeder reactor - an almost inexhaustible source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. Whereas fossil fuel burners must emit oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and probably will always emit some sulfur dioxide, there is no intrinsic reason why nuclear systems must emit any pollutant - except heat and traces of radioactivity.

Yet Weinberg saw that the benefits of nuclear energy came at a cost,

the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions to which we are quite unaccustomed.

Yet this contention has turned out to be untrue. As I pointed out in a post on this speech, by the time Weinberg delivered it, the molten-salt reactor technology which he had led Oak Ridge scientists in developing was off the table. but that promise has not been forgotten. Yet Weinberg still knew of the unique promise of molten-salt reactor technology.

What exactly was Weinberg getting at with his Faustian Bargain? There are in fact two Faustian Bargains known to literature. The first, found in Marlow's play the Tragic History of Doctor Faistus and Gounod's Opera Faust. In both Faust signs an agreement to obtain the services of Méphistophélès' master Lucifer, during his life, in exchange for the surrender of his soul after death. At the end of the story, Méphistophélès collects on Faust's bargain, dragging him down to hell.

In Marlow's Doctor Faustus, Faustus says,

Si peccasse negamus, fallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas;

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there
is no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, and so
consequently die:
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this, Che sera, sera,
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, and omnipotence,
Is promis'd to the studious artizan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their several provinces;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a demigod:
Here tire, my brains, to gain a deity.

This surely does not express the ambition which Weinberg had in mind in his 1971 speech. The end of that Faust is depicted in Gounod's Opera Faust:

There is another Faust tradition, this one linked to the great German poet, thinker and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In a paper written shortly before his death in 2006, Weinberg made explicit his intent to refer to Goethe's Faust.

In Goethe’s play, Faust is assisted and put up to mischief in his endeavors by the devil. This assistance is arranged over the course of the discussion of a number of contract- like arrangements: In the Prologue, Mephistopheles (the devil) suggests to God an experiment with a virtuous human being named Faust. Mephistopheles claims that it will be easy for him to make Faust forget his striving in return for an easy life on Earth. God, reluctantly, agrees to the experiment, knowing that Mephistopheles will fail in his attempts.

Interestingly, Mephistopheles does not explicitly suggest to God a deal that goes beyond Faust’s death. This would be too irreverent towards his master, even for Mephistopheles. God, on his part, does not enter into a contract with anyone else, this would mean to step down to the level of the contract partner. So this preliminary discussion is not a bet or bargain, but in a sense it is part of the ‘‘Faustian Bargain’’.

In Part I of Goethe’s play, Mephistopheles offers Faust a bargain similar to the one that the bridge builders and other innovators were thought to have accepted. His offer, however, is not the experiment he has discussed with God. Mephistopheles suggests to Faust a bargain, his services here on Earth in return for Faust’s soul . . . .

Faust accepts Mephistopheles’s services, leaving open, however, his fate after his death. Instead he offers to make a bet:

Weinberg points our that Mephistopheles encourages Faust to work for greater Energy and speed. The Goal of Goethe's Faust is clearly that of the 18th century Enlightenment,

The restless striving for more power and success derived from knowledge, energy, and other resources; along with the striving for unattainable perfection in love and virtue; are the main themes of Faust II. This Faustian drive is described as an essential element of human existence. It creates wars and suffering, but it is essentially human in the Faustian sense to live for continuous progress.

In Goethe's play, Faust says,

If e’er upon my couch, stretched at my ease, I’m found, Then may my life that instant cease!
Me canst thou cheat with glozing wile
Till self-reproach away I cast, –
Me with joy’s lure canst thou beguile Let that day be for me the last!
Be this our wager!

Weinberg agrees with the economist, Hans-Christoph Binswanger, that Faust's bargain

is that Mephistopheles helps Faust to overcome time, to become immortal by being part of eternal progress, while Faust promises never to rest and never to pause striving for further progress . . . .

In the end Faust’s soul is not left to the devil. The angels, carrying Faust’s remains up into heaven, sing:
"For he whose strivings never cease, Is ours for his redeeming."

Boito depicts the death of Goethe's Faust.

If Weinberg undersood the Faustian Bargain interns of Goethe's Faust, then what was Weinberg striving for? As I have often pointed out in 1971 Weinberg was striving for three things,

* Nuclear safety

* Control over CO2 emissions, which Weinberg understood threatened the future of humanity

* The Development of Thorium Breeding Molten Salt Reactor technology, which Weinberg believed would fulfill his first two goals

In all three goals, Weinberg faced protagonists, Congressman "Chet" Holifield and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. Not long after he made the "Faustian Bargain Speech, Weinberg was told by Congressman Hollifeld, that it was time for him to go.

I have attempted to explored the background of Weinberg's Firing on Nuclear Green. Alvin Weinberg was involved in a conflict between National Laboratory Scientists, and the leadership of the Washington DC nuclear elite, including Congressman Chet Hollifeld and AEC Reactor Research Director Milton Shaw. In addition to disagreements over the safety of conventional reactors, the conflict for Weinberg involved a radical approach to reactor safety, which would solve many conventional reactor safety concerns. That approach was embodied in the development of the Molten Salt Reactor. Undoubtedly, what Weinberg had learned from Jerry Olsen in 1971, added to his motivation in the struggle for Nuclear Safety and the development of Molten Salt Reactor Breeding technology. Weinberg's Faustian bargain had as its goal the rescue of humanity, from the consequences of a quest for energy.

During the struggle Washington DC elite were telling the scientists, further striving toward nuclear safety is unnecessary. Weinberg was responding, we have made a deal with society and our side of the deal is not yet complete, and indeed it may take a long time and a lot of hard work to complete. The benefit of the deal to society is a low cost abundant supply of energy. The benefit to scientist are twofold, first they get to explore and to know the secrets of nature. Secondly they get the respect of their fellows for benefiting society by striving to fulfill the bargain.

In 2006 Alvin Weinberg explained,

The image has been used and the phrase quoted over and over again, both because the term was well chosen and because, very often, it has been misunderstood.

The two elements of the Faustian Bargain were both present in the early nuclear enterprise: the temptation of the easy, carefree life it offered (electricity too cheap to be metered), and the bargain it struck (continuous striving was promised). The service electricity provides could be used to pursue progress in all kinds of ways, as long as the obligation was kept to look after the nuclear waste (and, for that matter, other fissionable material as well). If the obligation were shirked, it could, in an extreme scenario, mean the end of humankind.

Weinberg added,

The phrase Faustian Bargain was also misunderstood. The same year that Weinberg’s paper appeared in Science (1972), John W. Gofman wrote an article in which he painted a sketch of what was needed, institutionally, to keep nuclear waste safe (Gofman, 1972). Not only was there a need, in Gofman’s view of the Faustian Bargain, for a perpetual institution (like a priesthood) to look after these wastes, but also everyone had to bow to the whims and wishes of this institution. In other popular publications, the Faustian Bargain was presented not as a human condition, but as a devilish complot by one group of humans to enslave the rest.
The term Faustian Bargain has been used during the subsequent years to characterize many ‘technological fixes’ of immediate problems with potential negative long-term consequences.

Fulfilling the Weinberg's Faustian bargain meant solving all of the problems associated with nuclear power, so that nuclear energy could be made available to the masses without any reason for fear. It also meant solving the CO2 emissions problem.

Weinberg's critics, including Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins were afflicted with a paranoid fear of nuclear power. Even though Weinberg held out the possibility of safe, clean, cheap and peaceful nuclear power as the goal of the Faustian bargain, Nader and Lovins weren't ready to buy the vision. Even if Weinberg's vision could be fulfilled, they weren't buying.

Instead Lovins and Nader held out Fustian bargains of their own. Nether seemed to have experienced the deep existential encounter with Global Climate change that Weinberg had, and both had confused visions of its remedy. Lovins envisioned coal as a non-nuclear bridge to soft energy and thus preferable substitute for nuclear power, that would gradually be replaced by soft energy around 2020. Lovins thus was no opponent of coal to generate electrical power in practice. Thus if anyone ever made a Faustian bargain, Amory Lovins did. Armory Lovins, who was warned about what he was doing by Alvin Weinberg, sold his soul for lumps of coal, and now has lost his soul completely and forever. Lovins soft path failed to offer a path to a carbon free existence, and seemingly never will.

Ralph Nader was always more concerned about the fate of coal miners than about what coal was doing to the environment. Nader's Faustian bargain involved the sale of his soul for government regulation of business and industry. Nader triumphed when General Motors and Chrysler nearly went bankrupt, but his Faustian bargain brought him presidential campaigns that lead to failure in his life's ambition. And for his country, Ralph Nader's crusades have not brought a low carbon non-nuclear coal substitute, and I wonder if he really cares.

Many so called environmentalists, including Ralph Nader, Amory Lovins, David Roberts, Mark Z. Jacobson, and Joe Romm simply ignore problems with "Green energy" solutions. In 2007 I had something of a one sided dialogue with David Roberts, via the comment section of the Grist blog. Roberts relentlessly championed the green technological fixs, and was convinced that renewables and efficiency offered all of the solutions, even when other people raised seemingly raeasonable objections. When those renewable fixes did not make sense, Roberts took big leaps of faith, telling us about miraculous solutions to all the renewable technology problems. I learned quite a lot from the discussion with Roberts, but unfortunately Roberts was not willing to learn anything from me.

Roberts pulled out all of the stops on Green objections to nuclear power. I responded to his objections by pointing out both flaws in Roberts statements of facts, and in his reasoning, as well as the advantages offered by molten salt reactors. Roberts responded by raising the question of scalability and I responded by pointing to the potential for mass production of small MSRs which could be built very rapidly and in large numbers in factors. Roberts appearantly had never heard of factories, and did not understand my point.

I knew about Molten Salt Reactors because my father had worked on the development of the technology over a 20 year period of time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Because he was working under contract, neither he nor I stood to gain any money from MSR development. My father had also made a significant contribution to the development of conventional Light Water Reactors.

I did know enough from my father to know that he considered the MSR to be a remarkable reactor that offered many potential advantages over conventional nuclear power plants. He had found working with Molten Salt Reactors difficult and challenging, and he had made significant contributions to the development of MSR technology.

MSR were safe, could, at least in theory, completely eliminate the problem of nuclear waste, would not increase proliferation, and in factories could be built in very large numbers over a short period of time.

There were significant problems with with the Faustian bargain Roberts offered. The United States Government has had efficiency improvement programs for over 30 years, and while these programs have produced small but steady improvements in efficiency, they have not produced the sort of improvements Roberts envisioned. Roberts did not offer good reasons for expecting future rapid improvements in efficiency. Secondly, economist note that big increases in efficiency sometimes produce increased use of energy. In some instances the increase may be greater than the energy saved, while in other instances the increase only partially offsets the energy savings. Thus efficiency gains, although desirable, may not constitute the sort of energy panacea which the Green Faustian bargain claims efficiency to be.

By 2011 the goals of the Green Faustian Bargain are receiving more and more. It has been repeatedly pointed out to Amory Lovins, that the predictions which he made with respect to the soft energy path, have failed to come to pass. In 2011m human energy needs are still wedded to coal, and to other fossil fuels, contrary to Lovins' predictions. Amory Lovins 1976 claim for coal use in the soft path.
Coal use 2001 to 2010, the reality that Amory Lovins refuses to acknowledge.

The 80 year slow motion train wreck

I use the phrase Slow Motion Train Wreck, to describe the inexorable advance of time from the 1971 Spring day when I first heard Jerry Olsen talk about Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Anthropogenic Climate Change. 50% of the time we had to set things aright then has been lost. We seem unwilling to make the commitment to the "Faustian Bargain" our energy
desires requires of us, if we want to survive. We must strive for a post-carbon energy order. If we are unwilling to strive, we will not survive as a civilization.

In a recent Forbes interview with Michael Tobias (MT), University of California-Berkeley Environmental Scientist Dr. John Harte laid out the dangers:

the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), summarizes the results of these calculations and concludes that under “business as usual” trends in fossil fuel consumption, by 2050 the planet will on average have warmed between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit. . . . hat warming is the result of both the direct heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases and certain feedback processes. The latter will increasingly occur in response to the direct warming, causing further warming. As polar and glacial ice melts and snow cover decreases, temperatures will rise as less sunlight is reflected by our planet and more is absorbed by the remaining, darker surfaces. . . . There are many of us in the scientific community who believe that any number of important feedback processes are not being accounted for in the current IPCC projections. For example, from ice core data informing us about temperatures and atmospheric greenhouse gas levels over the past million years, we know that when the planet warms a little from any cause, it responds by releasing from the land and sea to the atmosphere huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. These greenhouse gases contribute to further warming. Because this process is not reflected in current climate projections, we can expect that there will be further emissions from our soils and our oceans. These will create additional warming beyond what IPCC currently projects. . . . The evidence for these additional feedback effects is starting to pour in. Rising methane emissions from warming tundra soils and waters are being observed, and field research shows that warmed temperate ecosystems release additional carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Forest damage from wildfires and bark beetle infestation, both of which are triggered by warming, will also result in the carbon stored in trees flowing to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. By some estimates the additional warming could raise mid-century temperatures by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit.

For most people on Earth, the threat is not get real, and climate change skeptics deny the very possibility that there is any danger to our well being. The Climate change skeptics are offering a Faustian Bargain along Christopher Marlow's lines, "Sell your soul to the temptation to take it easy. Don't pay attention to the voices of scientists that warn of the dangers of climate change". They are willing to sell their souls for any energy headless of what the bargain will cost them. They are assured by Talk radio that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not real, it is a Liberal hoax. Or they are assured by Amory Lovins and Greenpeace that nuclear energy is a deadly illusion that will not rescue us, we will be saved by efficiency and renewable energy.

We have warnings that post-carbon renewable energy plans are doomed to failure, There are enormous problems with solar and wind as a major human energy source. Even if these problems can eventually be overcome by science, it is unlikely that that will occur before 2050 when scientists like Dr. Harte say that we face big and in many respects very unpleasant environmental changes.

But what of the idea that we can save ourselves through efficiency. In 2008 Robert Bryce laid out the case against the efficiency rhetoric. In another article, Bryce was extremely critical of Energy Guru Amory Lovins for his prophecies about the contributions that efficiency can make to solving the carbon problem. Lovins promised a detailed response to Bryce's criticisms, but has never provided that response. Renewable advocates are notorious for not answering their critics.

In a response to a pro-reneables comment, I received on Nuclear Green, I noted,

Anonymous, I do not put great stock in NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory0 studies, because they tend to pass on Renewable Industry propaganda claims as if they were facts, and consistently downplay the bad news in their data. For example, the latest Eastern Interconnect study clearly demonstrated that rising wind penetration would lead to increased electrical costs, but this was not one of the conclusions that was featured in the press release, or in the executive summary. A preliminary finding of the Western interconnect study of wind and solar has been that renewables will primarily displace CCGTs, while leaving coal largely untouched. Thus the carbon mitigation of high penetration wind and solar was much less than would be assumed if we did not have that information, but the NREL study failed to draw the obvious conclusions about the relative carbon mitigation costs of of renewables verses nuclear. I am not impressed by the 30 GWs of German PV. The capacity factor of German PV is likely to be under 10%. That means that the 30 GWs of PV capacity will probably produce under 3 GW years of electricity every year. Displaced generators are likely to be CCGTs, and German cloud conditions will likely requite a large number of OCGTs to be kept spinning. With the looming shutdown of German nuclear plants, the carbon emissions from the operations of of the German electrical system are likely to rise rather than fall. Thus we must consider the opportunity costs of the German FIT. What Germany will have is a hugely expensive electrical system that will almost certainly produce more CO2 than it does now. If PV farms are as cheap to operate as you claim why do they need such huge subsidies?

Thus the Faustian bargain offered by anti-nuclear environmentalists, like Amory Lovins, does not really lead to heaven. Instead it seems to lead straight to an energy hell, with little energy to cope with increasingly challenging environmental conditions.

The situation we face, a disastrous change in climate caused by human-carbon based energy sources, best be described as a slow motion train wreck. From 1971 when I first learned of AGW till 2050, the date which climate scientists say is the cut off point for avoiding, serious, long term consequences, consequences which I call the train wreck, is 80 years. Hence the 80 year slow motion train wreck.

In a review of "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES: The case for an ethical energy strategy" by Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price, published in Energy policy in December, 1976, Alvin Weinberg pointed to a Faustian bargain Lovins was offering his readers and society,

Despite its title, the book is not concerned with non-nuclear futures. The reader of a book so named is entitled to get from the authors a reasoned description of a feasible non-nuclear future. The authors excuse this omission with the assertion (p159), 'To show that a policy is mistaken does not oblige the analyst to have an alternative policy.' But this is inadequate. This is not dealing with a hypothetical issue, but a real one. It is not enough to point out the deficiencies of nuclear energy; one must deal with the situation that would arise if Lovins and price were successful in their onslaught: should the society indeed turn away from nuclear energy, what then?

Here Alvin Weinberg exposes Amory Lovins' Faustian bargain with our society. Weinberg Ferrets out Lovins' fundamental assumption about energy and society,

(p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.

Weinberg raised a problem with Lovins' low-energy, high freedom claim, by pointing to an inevitable tradeoff between energy and time. The more energy we have, Weinberg argued, the more freedom we have to control our time. Weinberg pointed to a truth problem in Lovins' argument

So much of the argument is at the border of Science, or even trans-scientific, that one cannot prove the authors to be wrong, any more than one can prove the nuclear advocates to be wrong.

Weinberg put his finger on the greatest single environmental flaw of Lovins' argument, his failure to identify CO2 emissions from energy as a major environmental issue, and his willingness to accept carbon emitting coal as a substitute for nuclear energy. Weinberg wrote,

the authors regard net energy analysis as a convenient device for casting nuclear power in an unfavorable light, a feat they attempt to accomplish by ignoring significant comparisons, - nuclear and non=nuclear of the same doubling time and relative effects of heat release and CO2 release.

In response to Lovins recommending a coal burning bridge between the period when nuclear power was considered acceptable and the time when all energy would come from renewable resources, Weinberg asked,

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins countered that he

worried about the climate effect of the release of CO2

but that nuclear power would not prevent CO2 emissions from high coal use. Clearly then Lovins offered a Faustian bargain with his anti-nuclear energy scheme. In 2010, long after a process which Lovins forecasted would have begun to shift human society from fossil fuels to renewables, coal use for energy continues to rise. If Lovins worried in 1976 about the climate effects of CO2 emissions, he did not worry sufficiently. Lovins Faustian bargain put society clearly on track for a climate disaster, and in 2010 Lovins still has not figured out how to avoid the disaster without nuclear energy. The Lovins Faustian bargain is still in force, and until we are willing to listen to Alvin Weinberg, we will continue to follow Lovins to perdition.

I offer two serenades for those who do not wish to strive to avoid the train wreck:

ENERGY as an ultimate raw material

This post was written by Alvin Weinberg in 1959 and is a Cross Post from Energy From Thorium. A hat tip to Kirk Sorensen who shares with me an appreciation for Weinberg's vision. This post does not include the Tables that went with Weinberg's original presentation.

ENERGY as an ultimate raw material, or problems of burning the sea and burning the rocks

By Alvin M. Weinberg

Alvin Weinberg is director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The talk on which this article is based was presented before a meeting in New Orleans of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society on April 10, 1959.

My purpose in these remarks is to speculate on the role of energy in the “Asymptotic State of Humanity”—that is, the state toward which we are moving, inexorably, because man’s urge to multiply is limitless whereas his resources are finite. In my talk I draw very heavily from many authors, in particular, Palmer Putnam, Hans Thirring, and above all, Harrison Brown, who has given much ingenious thought to the matters which I discuss. I choose to dwell on energy, first, because as physicists our basic subject of study is energy; and, second, because the character of the asymptotic state of mankind—whether it will be a bare existence or a passably abundant life—will depend centrally on our capturing an inexhaustible energy supply, either by learning how to burn the seas (fusion) or to burn the rocks (fission) or to trap the sun’s energy in a practical way.

That the asymptotic state of humanity depends, for its shape, on energy has been stated perhaps most strikingly by Sir Charles Darwin in his hook, The Next Million Years. Darwin points out that if the human doubling time of about 100 years persists, then in the year 2959 there will be about 2.7 trillion persons on earth, in 3959, 2.7 quadrillion. In fact, at this rate the mass of humanity would equal the mass of the earth by about AD 6500, which is of course absurd. Evidently, one way or another, the population of the earth will stabilize. For my purpose I shall assume a stabilized human population of 7 billion—the figure suggested by Brown, Bonner, and Weir in their much less ambitious, but more factual, The Next Hundred Years. But no matter what asymptotic population one chooses, the demand for energy will continually increase. For, as our natural resources dwindle, as we are forced to extract metals front lower grade ores, or water from the sea, or liquid fuel from carbonates and water, we shall have to pay more and more in energy simply to do what we have been doing, let alone to improve our lot. Eventually, as Harrison Brown has stressed, mankind will have to make do with only four basic raw materials: the sea, the rocks (of average composition since true ores will have been exhausted), the air, and the sun. (If we equate the sun to fire, these are essentially Aristotle’s four elements!) The question really is not whether we shall reach this state—it is merely when we shall reach it.

Professor Brown and his associates have drawn up an energy balance sheet for such an asymptotic society of seven billion people who must eventually subsist on the sea, the rocks, the air, and the sun (Table 1).

The total projected yearly energy consumption is 2000 exajoules of heat (1 EJ = 1018 J); i.e., the equivalent of 70 billion tons of coal per year, or 10 tons per person per year. This is about 18 times the present equivalent energy input of 110 EJ heat; i.e., four billion tons of coal equivalent. At this ultimate rate, the present fossil fuel reserves of perhaps 2400 billion tons would hardly last 35 years. The nuclear component of the yearly energy input, according to Brown’s estimate, amounts to about 45 billion tons of coal equivalent or 1300 EJ.

In this asymptotic state one can visualize the energy economy being divided into three major sectors: sunlight, primary nuclear sources, and energy converters. It is certain that sunlight will be used to produce food and, according to Brown, for much of our space heating. I shall consider later whether it will also become a primary source. The primary nuclear sources (fission and fusion) probably will be centered in great power plants—possibly, on the average, 20 times larger than the largest present-day coal-fired steam plants, since nuclear plants are so much less expensive in large size than in small. These plants would supply energy for direct use. They would also be used to supply energy for conversion to more convenient form, or for chemical reduction. For example, the reduction of iron oxide to metallic iron, which now uses about 1/4 of our coal, can also be done either directly by electrolysis or a little less directly by electrolysis of water and reduction of FeO with the hydrogen which is produced. If the energy cost is $0.005/kW*hr electric, the additional energy charge would amount to only $0.005 per pound of iron. Similar considerations apply to all other metals: they appear in nature in oxidized form, and electricity can be used to reduce the ores to metals.

Energy from the primary source can he used to convert sea water into fresh water at an ultimate energy cost of only 2.7 kJ/liter if the conversion is 100 percent efficient—this would amount to a theoretical minimum cost of only a few cents per 1000 gallons. This theoretical cost may be compared with a recently reported cost of $1.00 per 1000 gallon of water from a new lung tube multiple-effect still. As for converting energy from the primary source into food, sunlight is far cheaper than energy from other sources. However, in the production of nitrates from the air, energy other than sunlight is required and with the intensive agriculture which would be needed to feed seven billion people, one can expect a much increased production of nitrates. Thus, indirectly, our increased food requirements will also increase our energy demand.

The primary energy source can he used to provide small-scale mobile energy—in principle, either by electrical storage system or by chemical storage systems. An example of a simple chemical storage system would be electrolytically-produced hydrogen; this could be used in the production of liquid fuel hydrocarbons from carbonate rocks even after our coal per se is gone. The energy cost is rattier high, but not outside the realm of ultimate feasibility.

We thus see that an asymptotic state of civilization, stabilized at, say, seven billion population, can be based upon the rocks, the seas, the air, and the sun—provided only that we have available a primary energy source and that we have worked out good methods for converting energy into convenient packages. This search for new primary energy sources (and for new energy converters) has become an enormous scientific frontier in which physicists naturally are taking the leading role.

Energy Converters

The new energy converter (among which I classify devices which convert energy, other than mass energy, from one form into a more convenient form) include, among others, the silicon batteries, the thermionic converters, the thermoelectric power producers, and the fuel cells. The first of these, the silicon battery, converts solar energy into electrical energy. It is expensive and bulky, and one can hardly visualize full-scale power plants based on this device. The thermionic converters and the closely related thermoelectric power producer convert heat, obtained from a primary source, directly into electricity. Their advantage in an ultimate power economy is that they would possibly produce electricity more simply than do the conventional power stations; since the efficiencies attainable with them are rather less than are now achieved conventionally, these devices would not extend our energy supply. The fuel cell converts chemical energy directly into electricity—hopefully in small packages. Since chemical energy, in the form for example, of hydrogen and oxygen, can be obtained directly from the primary energy source, one can see fuel cells as one way of ultimately using primary energy for mobile power. However, other less exotic schemes, such as greatly improved storage batteries or production of liquid fuel from energy, carbonate rocks, and water, are possibly a more direct and attractive route toward conveniently using the primary energy source.

I have no doubt that considerable success will be achieved over the years in improving secondary energy converters. But unless we have substantial success with our primary energy sources, the asymptotic state of mankind cannot be nearly as comfortable as is the present world. I shall therefore examine the status of the art of providing an asymptotic primary energy source.

There is, of course, the possibility that the sun’s energy can be used as the primary source. In the projected energy economy it represents 22 percent of the total input, in addition to its use for production of food and wood. But the diluteness of the sun’s energy, and its unpredictability, militates against its use is a primary source in large power stations. The solar energy striking the earth is 1.7 x 1014 kW and to produce all of the energy required in our energy balance would require collectors occupying about 35,000 square miles, assuming an efficiency of collection of 100 percent and of conversion to electricity of 25 percent. Actually the efficiency of collection and conversion to electricity, according to Palmer Putnam, is only about 7 percent, so that the total required area may be as high as 100,000 square miles. This is perhaps not entirely out of the question, though it does seem extremely unwieldy. Thus to quote Putnam, “The direct collection of solar energy on a vast scale by myriads of tracking mirrors, thermocouples, or other devices, its overnight storage, its conversion to transportable electricity, and its delivery at low cost from Arizona to Pittsburgh or from the Sahara to the Midlands appear remote in the light of what we know today.” At the presently estimated capital cost of $1000/kW, the ultimate electrical energy input would cost about four trillion dollars—a large sum, but in the ultimate span of human history not impossible. (World War II was estimated to have to 3.5 trillion dollars.) A more concentrated, long-term energy source based on either the rocks or the seas thus seems to be extremely worthwhile, if not absolutely essential.

Sea Burning and Rock Burning

Where then, do we stand in our efforts to burn the sea and to burn the rocks? First, I consider the availability of the raw materials. In the case of fusion based on deuterium-deuterium (D-D), the raw material is found almost entirely in the sea. Assuming that if the D-D reaction goes, then so will the deuterium-tritium (D-T) and deuterium-helium-3 (D-3He), we have the overall energy and material balance:

3D → 4He + p + n + 21.6 MeV = 350 GJ/g

if D-D and D-T can be made to go, but, because of the higher Coulomb barrier, the temperatures required for D-3He are not achieved, the balance is

5D → 3He + 4He + 2n + p + 24.8 MeV = 24.8 MeV/10u = 240 GJ/g

If only the D-T can be made to go, lithium-6 (7.5% of natural lithium) is also a basic raw material, and the overall balance is:

D + 6Li → 2 4He + 22.3 MeV = 22.3 MeV/8 u = 270 GJ/g

In these reactions, the neutrons, 3He, and tritium produced in the intervening reactions are used up again; they act as catalysts much as the carbon acts as a catalyst in the carbon cycle.

By comparison, the fission reaction is:

235U + n → fission products + 200 MeV = 200 MeV/236 u = 82 GJ/g

The surprising result is that per gram of raw material, fission gives as much as 1/3 to 1/5 the energy of the deuterium-tritium-3He cycle (equations 1 and 2).

The amounts of deuterium, lithium-6, uranium, and thorium contained in the seas and in the earth’s crust, together with their energy content, and the length of time they will last at the asymptotic rate of 40 TW heat, are shown in Table 2. In making this table, I assumed reaction (1) for the deuterium, and reaction (3) for the lithium-6.

Before assuming from Table 2 that either sea burning or rock burning would forever fulfill our energy requirement (the solar system is hardly expected to last longer than 10 billion years), we must ascertain that less energy is required to extract the raw materials deuterium, lithium-6, uranium, and thorium from their asymptotic natural environments than is returned by burning these fuels. In the case of deuterium, the balance is clearly very favorable. Perhaps it is easiest to see in terms of monetary cost of extracting deuterium from water. The present cost of deuterium is about $28/lb of D2O of $0.30/gram of deuterium. If one gram of deuterium is burned, by reaction (2), say, 240 GJ of heat or about 81 GJ of electricity, worth about $100, are produced. The fuel cost of the deuterium on this basis is less than 0.013 mill/kW*hr which is almost, but not quite, negligible.

With respect to uranium and thorium, the situation is also favorable, provided we burn all the uranium and thorium, not just uranium-235. About 1/2 of the uranium and thorium or 3 grams/ton is contained in rather easily leachable portions of the granite, according to Brown and Silver. The energy content of this “easily” recoverable uranium and thorium is equivalent to about 10 tons of coal or 260 GJ heat per ton of granite. The energy required to recover this 3 grams/ton of uranium and thorium is estimated by Brown and Silver to be equivalent to from 25-30 lbs of coal as seen in Table 3.

Brown estimates the asymptotic cost of treating one ton of granite to be from $1.00-2.25—this amounts to about $0.30-0.80 per gram of uranium and thorium or 0.05-0.12 mill/kWh fuel burnup cost, assuming that all of the extractable uranium and thorium can be burned in the process of breeding. The burnup cost is relatively small even if, as suggested by Keith Brown, the asymptotic cost per gram of uranium and thorium is as high as $1.00-3.00 /gram; in that case (assuming the extreme of $3.00/gram) the fuel burnup cost would be 0.5 mill/kwh, which is still very low. The situation is unfavorable if only the uranium-235 is burned; in that case the energy recovery is only 1/300th as much and this would hardly pay for extracting the uranium and thorium.

The total amount of energy “practically” available from uranium and thorium in the rocks is of course a good deal less than that given in Table 2. We ought not to count the part of the crust under the sea nor the material more than 3 km below the surface, nor the granites which carry a very great overburden of sediment. On the other hand, since the energy balance is so favorable, one could mine rocks with even 0.3 gram/ton uranium and thorium and still get some 20 times more energy than is required to extract the fissionable material. One therefore cannot escape the impression that the extractable resource of fissionable material is large enough to sustain humanity for the indefinite future.

Just how large a mining operation would be required to maintain an energy output of 40 TW heat? Since one gram of fissionable material burned each day would maintain a heat rate of one megawatt, the total uranium and thorium burned per day would be about 40 tons. To obtain this amount of fissionable material would require the mining of about 10 million tons of rock per day. This may be compared with the world’s daily production of coal and lignite which in 1953 was 6 million tons. Thus the whole mining operation required to sustain the asymptotic energy economy would be on about the same scale as the mining operation which now sustains our much smaller fossil-fuel-based energy economy.

I know of no studies relating to recovery of low-grade lithium ores. I should suppose that, if anything, lithium would be easier to extract than uranium and thorium, and that the asymptotic fuel cost of lithium, just as the asymptotic fuel cost of uranium and thorium, will always be negligible. However, the total amount of lithium recoverable would probably be of the same order as the total amount of uranium and thorium which is recoverable; if we must rely on the deuterium-lithium cycle, then the amount of lithium would probably limit the total energy recoverable from deuterium. In this case the extraction of lithium from the rocks would involve a mining operation of the same order as the extraction of the residual fissionable materials.
Problems of Sea Burning

The essential point of the foregoing remarks is that either sea burning or rock burning could in principle be made the primary asymptotic energy source for the rest of mankind’s history, and the cost of the energy produced could be at least within striking distance of the range of today’s energy costs for a time which is very long compared to the present span of human history. The advantage of sea burning therefore is not, as is often assumed, that deuterium is the only essentially inexhaustible fuel. The advantages are seen to be rather less fundamental—perhaps most important is that fusion is a relatively cleaner process than fission. The radioactive wastes associated with deuterium reactors ought to be much less troublesome than those associated with uranium reactors. Whether this is a crucial advantage is certainly very difficult to say at present.

Granted that achievement of sea burning would represent a major advance, comparable to the discovery of fission, there remains the question of where we now stand in this quest for a successful deuterium reactor. One approach to sea burning (high-energy molecular injection into a mirror field using the Luce arc for molecular break up and trapping) at the moment seems to have many adherents, possibly because it is the newest, and the full nature of the difficulties is not entirely clear. Suffice to say that a very large DCX-type machine of the general type developed at Oak Ridge (Figures 1 and 2) has been built in the USSR. It is called OGRA. In OGRA, breakup of the molecular ions is by collision with the residual gas, rather than with the Luce arc as in DCX. Smaller devices embodying the DCX principle are being studied in Aldermaston in England and at Saclay in France.

The older approaches—the pinch and the stellarator—both have encountered very serious plasma instabilities which are really not well understood. The hydrodynamic phenomena which have been encountered in these plasmas are suggestive of turbulence. It is known that in passing from the stable laminar to the unstable turbulent regime in ordinary hydrodynamics all transfers (of heat, mass, momentum) increase; conceivably the same could hold true in magneto-hydrodynamics. Some things like turbulent instabilities have been observed in all the pinch and stellarator experiments; the plasma becomes violently unstable whenever one begins to approach plasma densities and temperatures near the interesting range, and, as in ordinary turbulence, the transfer of energy and matter to the walls increases catastrophically. Whether these instabilities are inherent, or are simply the result of the particular way in which the plasmas are produced, is a matter of argument at present.

The extraordinary difficulty of confining the plasma may be judged by considering the pressure in the plasma. At a density of 1015 particles per cubic centimeter and a temperature of 40 keV (400 million Kelvin), which are the ignition conditions for D-D, the plasma pressure Pp = nkT is 60 atmospheres. This is a pressure which is usually held by stout steel walls—what must be done in Sherwood is to hold this pressure by magnetic lines of force! This latter difficulty could perhaps be reduced, as has been suggested by R.F. Post, if it were possible to show a net gain of energy at lower plasma densities. This could be the case if cryogenic cooling of the magnet coils were feasible.

It would lie terribly premature to say that Sherwood—sea-burning—is impossible, especially since the mirror geometry (on which DCX is based) has thus far shown no instability. On the other hand, it would be equally incorrect to assume that mankind’s future energy supply is assured on the basis of what we now know about the problem of sea burning. The fair-sized experimental program being pursued in the US (amounting to about $38 million in the next fiscal year), and the apparently comparable program in the USSR are in my view well-justified; yet it would be a gross error if our effort at sea-burning were to divert us from a full-fledged effort aimed at the much more imminent rock-burning.

Problems of Rock Burning

The problems of rock burning are of an entirely different order than are the problems of sea burning. We certainly have not shown that we can ever burn any fraction of the deuterium; burning uranium-235, on the other hand, is rather a routine process. But, in the asymptotic state, burning uranium-235 is not sufficient. In order to make the extraction of uranium and thorium from granite energetically feasible, we must burn considerably more than the uranium-235. Beyond this, in order to make the ultimate fuel burnup cost even reasonably low, say less than 1 mill/kWh, we must burn not less than about 1/10 of the uranium and thorium which we assume to be available at the previously quoted asymptotic figure of $0.30-0.80/gram—that is, we must burn about 60 times as much uranium-238 and thorium-232 as there is initial uranium-235.

In order to burn more than the initial reservoir, it is necessary to breed: to use the neutrons in excess of those needed to maintain the chain reaction, to convert the fertile uranium-238 into fissionable plutonium-239 or the fertile thorium-232 into fissionable uranium-233. Fundamental to the analysis of such breeder reactor cycles is the breeding ratio and the doubling time: the breeding ratio, BR, is the ratio of new fissionable atoms created per fissionable atom destroyed. The doubling time is the time required to double the inventory of fissionable atoms. If the breeding ratio is less than unity, then the fraction of total fertile material which can be burned is 1/(1-BR). The doubling time is the product

Doubling time = 1/[specific power x (BR – 1)]

and is positive only if the breeding ratio exceeds unity.

From the very long-term point of view which we are adopting here all that is necessary to burn all the uranium and thorium is to achieve a breeding ratio of unity. However, the breeding ratio must refer to all the fissionable material burned in the whole energy system. Since there will undoubtedly always be some nuclear plants which for compactness must forego any breeding, it will be necessary to make up for these plants with plants which produce more fissionable material than they burn. Thus it seems inescapable that the solution to the ultimate energy problem by way of rock-burning depends on reducing to practice the nuclear breeding process: i.e. making practical breeder reactors with reasonably short doubling times—of the order of 10 years.

Fast Breeding and Thermal Breeding

Breeding cycles can in principle be based on either uranium as the raw material or on thorium the raw material. From the asymptotic standpoint, thorium is preferable since it is three times as abundant, and therefore should be three times as cheap as uranium. On the other hand, because of its more favorable geochemistry, uranium in readily workable deposits seems to be three or four times as abundant as thorium and so, in the short run, uranium breeding may be preferable. Serious work on both breeding cycles is now being pursued, and I shall briefly summarize the current status of this work.

In the uranium cycle, the determining nuclear constant η(239Pu) i.e . the number of neutrons produced per neutron absorbed in a plutonium nucleus, is high enough (η ~ 2.9) to give a substantial breeding gain only if the chain reaction is maintained with fast neutrons. The problem in fast neutron breeding is not, “Can a breeding ratio greater than one be achieved?” It is, first, “Can enough power be extracted from the necessarily very compact fast reactor core to allow the holdup of expensive fertile material to be kept within reasonable bounds?” and second, “Can the fuel be burned sufficiently, before requiring reprocessing, to allow the whole cycle to be economical?” Of the two problems, probably the former is ultimately the more difficult. At present the fast breeder EBR-II being built by Argonne National Laboratory is rated at about 300 kWe/ton of natural uranium; this includes both the 238U in the blanket and the natural uranium needed to supply an initial charge of 235U for the core. At the asymptotic price of $0.30-0.80/gram, this amounts to $900-2500/kWe for the installed fuel. At this price fast neutron breeding would begin to be as expensive as solar energy, and evidently great improvements would be needed. The situation is of course much more acute if the higher asymptotic price of $3.00/gram is assumed. At such high inventory costs, solar energy indeed becomes a very serious competitor.

Two factors make the situation much more hopeful, however. First, the rating of 300 kWe/ton is surely much lower than will be ultimately achieved, especially since the fueling of the core will eventually be done with bred 239Pu, not with 235U extracted from natural uranium. Second, and possibly more important, there is probably enough low-cost uranium and thorium available to start the asymptotic energy system at reasonable cost; the very expensive material from the granite would be needed only as make-up for fissionable material which has been burned. As make-up $3.00/gram uranium would add only 0.5 mill/kWh to the cost of electricity. Even at the very low rating of 300 kWe/ton the amount of uranium and thorium required as initial inventory for Brown’s asymptotic nuclear energy system (40 billion kWh) is only about 30 million tons. This may be compared with recent estimated potential reserves of uranium and thorium available at $30-50/lb—20 million tons for uranium and 5 million tons for thorium. The inventory cost, even at $50/lb ($0.10/gram) thus amounts to about $300/kWe, which is a serious cost but certainly nor impossible from the very long-term standpoint. Rather, I consider it remarkable that we see at hand a way, if starting our asymptotic energy system with materials that are even now practically available, and that we can keep the system supplied with fuel for essentially all time by means of a mining operation only somewhat larger than the present coal mining operation of the world!

As for the second problem—high burnup—this is a problem common to all solid fuel reactors, not simply to fast reactors. At present, fuel for fast reactors has to be reprocessed five to ten times before the original load of plutonium is completely burned. Each reprocessing probably would cost $5.00/gram of fissionable material; this would add $25-50 to the cost of burning a gram of plutonium. However, from the very long-term standpoint this may not be as serious as the high inventory charge.

At present the major effort in the fast breeder development is aimed at reducing fuel cycle cost; either by increasing fuel burnup (through the use of better alloys or fluid fuels or oxide fuels), or by simplifying the chemical processing using pyrometallurgical methods, for example. The problem of reducing inventory is at present relatively less urgent since uranium costs about $0.02/gram, not $0.30-0.80/gram; yet we see that, unless we can start our system with relatively cheap ($0.10/gram) uranium, the problem of high inventory will be a formidable one.

The other breeding cycle is based on thorium and uranium-233. Here the value of η at high energy (η ~ 2.5) is not sufficiently greater than its value at thermal energy (η ~ 2.25) to make it advantageous to try to breed at high energy. Moreover, because thermal reactors can tolerate such coolants as D2O very well, and because in principle the fuel can be a liquid, the major problems of the fast reactor (small burnup and relatively low heat rating) are much less severe in the thermal reactor. In spite of their inherently lower breeding ratio, the theoretical doubling times in the thorium-U233 thermal systems are, because of their very high output per kg of fissionable material, about equal to those in the fast uranium-plutonium systems. Moreover, if an output of 1500 kWe/ton of thorium can be achieved, then Brown’s entire asymptotic nuclear system could be initially fueled with only about 7 million tons of thorium, an amount which is very likely available at $0.10/gram of thorium. At this price the inventory charge is only $70/kW. Thus, if thermal breeding in the thorium cycle in systems with low holdup (~1500 kWe/ton) and liquid fuel could be achieved, this system could serve as the asymptotic energy source for mankind.

But, as usual, there are problems. Perhaps the most fundamental is the value of η(233U) at thermal energy. Recent British measurements have placed this all-important number as low as 2.18; since the neutron losses in a homogeneous thorium breeder amount to about 16 percent, such a low value of η would essentially make breeding in the thorium cycle impossible. Because of this alarming turn of events, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other AEC Laboratories have embarked on a major effort to redetermine η(233U) with one percent precision. The experiments to date—mainly manganese bath experiments and large critical experiments in ordinary H2O—suggest strongly that η(233U) at thermal energy exceeds 2.25, and that thermal breeding should therefore be feasible in the thorium-uranium-233 cycle.

Most of the engineering efforts to achieve breeding in the thorium-uranium-233 center around the aqueous homogeneous reactor development at ORNL, although smaller efforts based on fused salts or uranium-bismuth fuels are also under way. In the aqueous homogeneous reactor a solution of UO2SO4 in D2O is circulated through a zirconium core tank so shaped that the solution chain reacts inside the tank but not outside. The tank is surrounded by a blanket which ultimately is to be a slurry of ThO2 in D2O; neutrons leaking out of the zirconium core tank are absorbed in the ThO2 slurry to produce additional 233U (Figure 3). The great advantage of such a system is that because the fuel is in liquid form, the fission products which would poison the reactor and therefore reduce the breeding possibilities can be continuously drawn off; also, there is almost no limit to the extent to which the fuel can be burned, unlike fuel in solid fuel elements which is subject to radiation damage and other deleterious effects. The disadvantage of the system is that UO2SO4 in D2O at 300°C and 2000 psi is intensely corrosive and difficult to handle; and, since the fluid must be circulated to extract heat from it, the entire system (piping, pumps, etc.) becomes extremely radioactive.

Nevertheless, two small reactors embodying this principle have been operated at Oak Ridge: the HRE-1 which produced one megawatt of heat for a short period in 1955, and the HRE-2 which has been operating as an experimental device since late in 1957 at powers up to 6 MW. The HRE-2 was originally a two-region system with fuel separated front the blanket by the zirconium tank. However, in the course of power runs local overheating resulted in a hole in the zirconium tank and the system now operates as a one-region reactor with fuel in core and blanket. The cause of the overheating is still rather obscure, although it seems to be connected with the hydrodynamic design which allowed accumulation of solids, or of a second, uranium-rich liquid phase on the core wall. Experiments at HRE-2 are now proceeding in an attempt to identify the cause of the local heating and to learn how to raise the power densities to the 1500 kWe/ton desired for the long-run systems.

In spite of these difficulties the aqueous thermal breeder seems to be basically feasible and to satisfy all the requirements of an asymptotic fission energy source—high power rating, low inventory, simple fuel cycle, and the ability to breed. But it will be a long and difficult job to iron out the engineering bugs; perhaps a generation will be required to reduce aqueous homogeneous breeders to reliable full-scale practice.
Have We a Responsibility to Future Generations?

It is fair to ask why this generation should have any particular responsibility to generations many many years hence—why should we bother to develop an asymptotic energy source? I think there are several reasons, some practical, others moral, why we should pursue aggressively the ultimate energy source.

First, the practical reason: it is merely that asymptotic breeder reactors could be as economical as any other reactor once they are fully developed. Thus the motivation for pursuing the breeding systems, as compared to other reactor systems, at present has an economic base, even in the current economic framework.

As for the moral reasons, I see at least two. The March 1959 issue of Population Bulletin puts it aptly: the next twenty-five years may see the world’s population rise from 2.5 billion to 4 billion. “…we should do well to ponder the significance of this development in terms of the destiny of our species.

“These next twenty-five years form part of a process which began some 200,000 years ago and which is about to culminate in man’s full possession of the earth.

“The growth of world population during the next twenty-five years, therefore, has an importance which transcends economic and social considerations. It is at the very heart of the problem of our existence.”

It is the lot of our generation to see clearly that the threshold into the asymptotic population state will surely be crossed—in this sense it is our generation or the next which probably will first witness the culmination of man’s history on earth. I suppose each person has his own personal reaction to this knowledge; mine is that I would somehow feel more comfortable if, as a member of the generation which first sees the asymptotic population state approached, I could also leave to future generations the means to live relatively abundantly in this asymptotic state.

Finally, there is the broad political implication of this vision of an asymptotic, energy-abundant world. Should we succeed in supplying energy really cheaply from the rocks, or, with good luck, from the seas, on as vast a scale as I contemplate, then the problem of have-not nations ought to become much less acute than it now is. Much of what countries do internationally nowadays is intended to forestall future actions of neighbors beset with population and raw materials problems. But everyone has granite and air and sea and sun. One would hope that solving the problem of living relatively abundantly with only these raw materials would help to dispel these historic causes for strife among men and that, in the wake of such development, mankind could turn its energies to those peaceful pursuits which are the true expression of the human spirit.

Was Alvin Weinberg a Team Player?

I generally have high regard for Rod Adams work. Rod's blog posts are evidence driven, and Rod almost never jumps the track, but this morning he did in a comment on Nuclear Green. The comment was a response to my recent post on Alvin Weinberg's integrity. Rod wrote

I am not sure why you think Weinberg was so correct about his safety concerns with light water reactors. Certainly they are not "inherently safe" and they require care in design, manufacturing and operation, but the safety record of the machines that caused Weinberg so much worry has been extraordinary all around the world.

Sometimes I think that the real answer to why Weinberg was fired was that he was not a team player and was so sure of his own knowledge that he overlooked the fact that others were just as smart and just as concerned about the welfare of their fellow man.

I cut my nuclear teeth on light water reactors. One of the most intellectually difficult tasks I had every year was coming up with some kind of reasonable scenario for our annually required "reactor accident" drill. My down to earth technicians and I just could not figure out how those thick stainless steel pipes were supposed to suddenly burst open.

These comments were most unfortunate. Rod appears to have made this comment without being aware of a number of Nuclear Green posts that would have better established the relationship of the nuclear safety issues to Weinberg's firing. Since I have offered a number of reasonably well documented posts on Weinberg's firing, Rod seemingly has ignored the available evidence and has not offered other evidence in support of his contentions.

Since my discussion of the evidence regarding the major actors in the Weinberg firing is quite extensive, I will point to relevant posts rather than discuss the evidence at length. First I noted what is arguably the unconstitutional authority which Congressman Chet Holifield exercised over the AEC. Hiring and firing decisions are made by persons with executive authority in an organization, yet Alvin Weinberg was invited to the office of a member of the legislative branch of government to be told that he was hired. Constitutionally, Congressman Holifield had no right to fire Alvin Weinberg. I have tried to point out that the safety nuclear safety conflict that formed part of the back drop of Weinberg's firing was not between and Weinberg and the Holifield clique, it was between the community of National Laboratory scientists. I have tried to lay out the issues that motivated that conflict. In fact Rod Adam's comment sheds some light on the attitude of Milton Shaw who played a major role in the safety conflict. Rod argued,

One of the most intellectually difficult tasks I had every year was coming up with some kind of reasonable scenario for our annually required "reactor accident" drill. My down to earth technicians and I just could not figure out how those thick stainless steel pipes were supposed to suddenly burst open.

Robert Pool described the difference of attitudes between the national laboratory scientific community and ex-Navy reactor developer Milton Shaw,

Milton Shaw, the head of the AEC's Division of Reactor Development and Technology, was convinced that such safety research was reaching the point of diminishing returns. An old Rickover protege, Shaw saw light-water reactors as a mature technology. The key to the safety of commercial power plants, he thought, was the same thing that had worked so well for the navy reactor program: thick books of regulations specifying every detail of the reactors, coupled with careful oversight to make sure the regulations were followed to the letter.

In fact the Three Mile Island accident was to show that the civilian Light Water Reactor had not reached a level of maturity comparable to that of Naval Light Water Reactors which Shaw (and Rod Adams) assumed.

Post Three Mile Island the civilian Light Water Reactor did reach an outstanding level of safety, but at a considerable cost. As I have documented, Alvin Weinberg's conflict with Milton Shaw had to do with an experiment which involved deliberately destroying a reactor in order to find out what happened. The worse case that concerned the scientists was the China syndrome, a core melting through all containment. A reactor was being built in Idaho in order to conduct this experiment. Shaw decided that the reactor was not needed, and stopped further construction. Dozens of National Laboratory scientists objected to the scrapping of what was considered an important nuclear safety experiment, and testified before Congress. Weinberg agreed with them, but did not take his disagreement to the level of Congressional testimony. Eventually the Three Mile Island accident was to substitute for for the Idaho nuclear accident experiment.

Rod tells us,

Sometimes I think that the real answer to why Weinberg was fired was that he was not a team player and was so sure of his own knowledge that he overlooked the fact that others were just as smart and just as concerned about the welfare of their fellow man.

My evidence suggests that Holiway, Ramsey and Shaw failed to exercise proper leadership. Holiway, as I have indicated exercised executive authority over the AEC even though he was not entitled to by the constitution. Ramsey's appointment as an AEC Commissioner had been dictated to the Kennedy Administration by Holifield. Ramsey was in fact a member of Holifield's staff, and after his appointment continued to engage in the subordinate relationship with Holifield, continuing to report to him. Shaw improperly turned decision making about a personnel matter, Weinberg's status as a National Laboratory Director to Holifield.

Considering the misconduct of all of the key players, the alligation that Weinberg was not a team player does not hold true. There is more evidence. The Nixon administration appears to have decided to attack the power of the Hloifield clique. When Ramsey's appointment came up for renewal, he was not reappointed by Nixon. His replacement was Dixie Lee Ray, who was soon appointed AEC Chairman. Ray proceeded to outmannuver Shaw, who was forced to resign. Holifield was shorn of his power and decided to not run for reelection in 1974. Ray, now had a chance to right the wrong done by the Weinberg firing episode, and she did so, by arranging for Weinberg to come to Washing as the first Director of Energy Research. Weinberg's appointment, if I am not mistaken involved directly reporting to the President. Weinberg was not happy with his position, and left it after a year, but this appointment should be taken as evidence that Weinberg was viewed as a team player.

Alvin Weinberg's integrity and vision

This December 2007 post is one of the foundational posts of Nuclear Green. I am reposting it with a few revisions.

Weinberg testifies before "Judge" Louie B. Nitzer, at a 1971 mock trial of technology staged at The Rensselaerville Institute. .

My father, Dr. Charles Julian Barton, Sr., was still living when I originally wrote this post. He was one of the last of his generation of scientists in Oak Ridge. He was recruited in 1948 to do research in Oak Ridge, first at the Y-12 plant, but for most of his Oak Ridge career he worked at X-10, the main location of ORNL. For most of his Oak Ridge career, my father worked under Alvin Weinberg's direction. In particular he worked on the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion and the Molten Salt Reactor Projects. The Lab was very higherarchical, and Weinberg was the big boss.

Oak Ridge is a small place, Alvin Weinberg's son, David Weinberg, attended the same school I did, and we became friends. I visited the Weinberg home on a number of occasions. David was, like me, intelligent and sensitive. It is through my childhood friendship with David that I feel a personal bond with Alvin Weinberg and his work.

Science is based on integrity. Without integrity, there is no truth in science. My father was a man of exceptional integrity, and so was Alvin Weinberg. Weinberg was aware of both the promise and the dangers inherent in the reactor. During the 1960's Weinberg directed a series of tests at ORNL, designed to verify theoretical assumptions made about the safety of light water reactors being pushed by the AEC for the generation of electrical power. The results were disturbing to Weinberg and his staff. The standard design of light water reactors was shown to have serious safety flaws. Weinberg began to warn people within the industry about the problem.

For Weinberg superior safety was one of the most important features of the Molten Salt Reactor design. Weinberg regarded the AEC's commitment to electrical power generation through light water reactors as irrational. Not only were they less safe than other designs, but also they could not be used to breed new fissionable materials, the Molten Salt Reactor could. It was an ideal atomic breeder that could produce more fuel than it consumed. A generation after the controversy, Weinberg's brilliance is fully appreciated, but at the time, Weinberg was a thorn in the side of the AEC establishment. Powerful congressman Chet Holifield had it in for Weinberg because he saw Weinberg's reactors safety concerns as threatening the development of a nuclear power industry, which Holifield viewed himself as nurturing. In retrospective, it was a mistake to build a nuclear power industry on Light Water Reactor technology. Holifield was guiding the nuclear power industry to a disaster, the consequences of which are still with us. A misguided Holifield confronted Weinberg and said, "Alvin, if you are concerned about the safety of reactors, then I think it might be time for you to leave nuclear energy." Holifield was powerful enough to have Weinberg fired from his position as Director of ORNL, but by doing so he demonstrated how out of control his exercise of power over the American Nuclear Establishment had become.

Weinberg's reactor safety concerns were vindicated in 1979 when coolant loss in the Three Mile Island-2 power reactor, lead to a partial core meltdown. Reading the details of the accident would not have comforted Weinberg, even though he had foreseen it. Yet the Three Mile Island accident did not cause the decline of the atomic power industry. Between the year of Weinberg's firing 1973, and the year of the Three Mile Island accident, 1979, 40 planned nuclear power plants were canceled. The First Nuclear age ended with Weinberg's firing in 1973, as he knew.

When I worked at ORNL in 1970 - 1971, the scientists there spoke of Weinberg with great respect. Weinberg was a visionary who believed that cheap sustainable power could improve the lot of the world's poor. He envisioned technological complexes surrounding reactors transforming the lives of third world peoples. Weinberg was no mad scientist; he was an heir of the Enlightenment, whose vision was developed in that tradition. That tradition of vision was of a science based transformation of human life. That vision stretched back to Frances Bacon and Rene Descartes. Hopefully Weinberg was not the last of the technological optimists.

Alexander Zucker, A University of Tennessee Physics professor who knew Weinberg personally and professionally and teaches physics at UT, said,

I would say that what made him unique was his profound concern for the welfare of man. He never stopped thinking about it.

There was also a dark side to Weinberg's vision, the side that acknowledged the danger that technology posed for the Human Race. During the last years of his career, Weinberg focused on the danger posed by the carbon-based economy.

I know this. Alvin Weinberg was one of the few great men who I have had the privilege to encounter. He was a truly gifted scientist, a giant in his generation. He saw both the promise and the dangers of technology. He did not flinch from what he saw, and his integrity was such that he willingly laid his career on the alter of truth. Time after time Weinberg's judgments and his visions have been vindicated. A generation ago Weinberg warned us of the dangers of anthropogenic CO2. I worked at ORNL during 1970-71. It was there for the first time I learned about the CO2/global warming problem. Weinberg's concern about the problem was beginning to spread to other ORNL scientists. In 1977 Weinberg penned a study of the future of the coal economy titled, "Some long-range speculations about coal." Its synopsis read:

Should the world demand for energy increase sixfold within the next 50 years, largely because the underdeveloped countries industrialize, and if half this demand is met by coal, then the estimated world recoverable resource of coal of 4 x 10/sup 12/ metric tons would last at this asymptotic level about 140 years. The carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is then estimated to increase about threefold. These two eventualities may place limits on our ultimate use of coal. The risk of a CO/sub 2/ accumulation inherent in the widespread use of coal is in a sense analogous to the risk of nuclear proliferation: both problems are global, uncertain, and could pose profound challenges to man's future.

I know of the integrity and care of Weinberg and of the scientist who first accepted Weinberg's warning. Only fools and scoundrels would ignore it. I was a witness.

Alvin Weinberg and Eugene Wegner

Faustian Bargains: Weinberg or Lovins?

One of the hazards of coining a memorable expression is wearing it out and continuing to use it after it should have gone out of fashion. Even thinkers as gifted as Alvin Weinberg can develop a mental cramp as far as their own memorable expressions are concerned. Weinberg's phrase "Faustian bargain" is a singular example of the problem. By the early 1970's the Faustian bargain idea had been made obsolete by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory team of reactor scientists, but Weinberg, almost always in the forefront of understanding the implication of new ideas failed to see that the relevance of the Faustian bargain idea was passing as far as nuclear science was concerned. Indeed Weinberg's post-ORNL work was to demonstrate that new Faustian bargains were emerging, bargains which held far more serious consequences than that which people believed they were confronted with by nuclear power.

In the conclusion to his November 1972 Nuclear Safety speech, Weinberg stated,

We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society. On the one hand, we offer - in the breeder reactor - an almost inexhaustible source of energy. Even in the short range, when we use ordinary reactors, we offer energy that is cheaper than energy from fossil fuel. Moreover, this source of energy, when properly handled, is almost nonpolluting. Whereas fossil fuel burners must emit oxides of carbon and nitrogen, and probably will always emit some sulfur dioxide, there is no intrinsic reason why nuclear systems must emit any pollutant - except heat and traces of radioactivity.

Yet Weinberg saw that the benefits of nuclear energy came at a cost,

the price that we demand of society for this magical energy source is both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions to which we are quite unaccustomed.

Yet this contention has turned out to be untrue. As I pointed out in my first post on this speech, by the time Weinberg delivered it, the very molten-salt reactor technology which he had led Oak Ridge scientists in developing had made the Faustian bargain concept of nuclear energy potentially obsolete. This is a unique feature of molten-salt reactor technology. Charles Till and Y.I. Chang of Argonne National Laboratory attempted to replicate the MSBR level of safety with the IFR, but there was still a Faustian bargain aspect to the IFR. Sodium burns while molten fluoride salts do not. It is impossible to remove noble gases from IFR fuel during operation, while it is both possible and highly desirable to do so with a LFTR. The LFTR without xenon removal will not reach a one-to-one conversion ratio, and thus will eventually run out of fuel and shut down. The IFR's neutron economy does not require xenon removal, so the Faustian bargain is still in force.

Both the potential safety of molten salt nuclear technology, and its ability to destroy the most dangerous and long lived constituents of nuclear waste, the actinides including the various isotopes of plutonium. offer ways out of the Faustian bargain. Thus in terms of the classic objections to nuclear energy, which Weinberg articulated, the molten-salt reactor offered solutions to the problem of safe reactor design, and nuclear waste disposal. The "Faustian bargain" proved to not be interminable, and the keys to ending it had been developed before Weinberg left ORNL. IFR technology still involves a Faustian bargain despite the claims of its advocates to the contrary.

The Molten Salt Reactor offered truly amazing features as Uri Gat was later to point out in papers he authored with L.H. Dodds. Given the fact that the MSR established that the nuclear communities bargain with society was not inevitably a Faustian bargain. And indeed, IFR advocates would also state that the same is in fact the case with the IFR.

In a review of "NON-NUCLEAR FUTURES: The case for an ethical energy strategy" by Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price, published in Energy policy in December, 1976, Alvin Weinberg pointed to a Faustian bargain Lovins was offering his readers and society,

Despite its title, the book is not concerned with non-nuclear futures. The reader of a book so named is entitled to get from the authors a reasoned description of a feasible non-nuclear future. The authors excuse this omission with the assertion (p159), 'To show that a policy is mistaken does not oblige the analyst to have an alternative policy.' But this is inadequate. This is not dealing with a hypothetical issue, but a real one. It is not enough to point out the deficiencies of nuclear energy; one must deal with the situation that would arise if Lovins and price were successful in their onslaught: should the society indeed turn away from nuclear energy, what then?

Here Alvin Weinberg exposes Amory Lovins' Faustian bargain with our society. Weinberg Ferrets out Lovins' fundamental assumption about energy and society,

(p xxi), 'Low-energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high-energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom.

Weinberg raised a problem with Lovins' low-energy, high freedom claim, by pointing to an inevitable tradeoff between energy and time. The more energy we have, Weinberg argued, the more freedom we have to control our time. Weinberg pointed to a truth problem in Lovins' argument

So much of the argument is at the border of Science, or even trans-scientific, that one cannot prove the authors to be wrong, any more than one can prove the nuclear advocates to be wrong.

Weinberg put his finger on the greatest single environmental flaw of Lovins' argument, his failure to identify CO2 emissions from energy as a major environmental issue, and his willingness to accept carbon emitting coal as a substitute for nuclear energy. Weinberg wrote,

the authors regard net energy analysis as a convenient device for casting nuclear power in an unfavorable light, a feat they attempt to accomplish by ignoring significant comparisons, - nuclear and non=nuclear of the same doubling time and relative effects of heat release and CO2 release.

In response to Lovins recommending a coal burning bridge between the period when nuclear power was considered acceptable and the time when all energy would come from renewable resources, Weinberg asked,

Can we really ignore CO2 during the coal burning fission free bridge?

Lovins countered that he

worried about the climate effect of the release of CO2

but that nuclear power would not prevent CO2 emissions from high coal use. Clearly then Lovins offered a Faustian bargain with his anti-nuclear energy scheme. In 2010, long after a process which Lovins forecasted would have begun to shift human society from fossil fuels to renewables, coal use for energy continues to rise. If Lovins worried in 1976 about the climate effects of CO2 emissions, he did not worry sufficiently. Lovins Faustian bargain put society clearly on track for a climate disaster, and in 2010 Lovins still has not figured out how to avoid the disaster without nuclear energy. The Lovins Faustian bargain is still in force, and until we are willing to listen to Alvin Weinberg, we will continue to follow Lovins to perdition.

Weinberg on Nuclear Safety

By the middle of 1972 the handwriting was on the wall. Alvin Weinberg had some very powerful enemies, including Congressman Chet Holifield, and AEC administrator Milton Shaw. At the heart of their enmity was a distaste for Weinberg's view on nuclear safety. The official line of the Atomic Energy Establishment was that Light Water Reactor technology was mature and safe. Nuclear scientists who were worried about reactor safety were not sure. 7 years later the Three Mile Island-2 accident was to demonstrate that reactors, although not highly dangerous, were not as safe as they could be. Weinberg championed the cause of nuclear scientists who knew that more nuclear safety research was needed. The establishment, including Holifield and Shaw, found that Weinberg's stance was an unforgivable affront to their power and determined to fire him.

Weinberg's firing followed another incident, the forced censorship of a K.Z. Morgan paper, with a threat that if Morgan presented a notion that certain parties in Washington, Chicago and Arco, Idaho did not like, namely that the the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) was a safer and more acceptable than the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR), Laboratory funding, effecting the livelihood of hundreds of Laboratory employees would be cut. Alvin Weinberg came close to confirming Morgan's story that ORNL had been threatened with a funding loss had Morgan's uncensored paper been presented. This threat could have only been a serious threat if it came from Holifield and Shaw. As it was the staff of ORNL diminished from 5300 to 3600 during the late 1960's and early 1970's as the result of funding decreases including the termination of the Molten Salt Reactor development program.

As it turned out, censoring Morgan did not protect Weinberg, because Chet Holifield disliked Weinberg's stance on nuclear safety. Weinberg was later to be proven right on nuclear safety problems at a place called Three Mile Island.

From the late in the 1960's until the end of December 1972, Weinberg had worked to shift the direction of the laboratory focus away from reactor development and toward environmental issues. He succeeded in creating a major center for the study of carbon in the environment, at a time when so-called environmentalists favored burning CO2 to nuclear energy. Indeed because of Weinberg's intuitive, ORNL moved a generation ahead of Snowmass and almost everywhere else in its thinking about carbon and the environment. In November, 1972 the recently-fired Alvin Weinberg, six weeks away from a year long terminal leave from ORNL, journeyed to Boulder, Colorado to speak to Council for the Advancement of Science Writing about nuclear safety. Weinberg, whose integrity on nuclear safety was unquestionable, took environmentalists to task for their preference for fossil fuels over nuclear power. Weinberg stated,

Nuclear power plants and their subsystems have caused less damage to human health and to the environment, per kilowatt-hour, than have fossil-fueled central power stations. Thus Professor Lester B. Lave of Carnegie-Mellon University points out that from mining alone the damage imposed by coal is twelve-fold greater, per kilowatt-hour, than is that imposed by nuclear energy. (Professor Lave's argument is based on the fact that some 120,000 coal miners today receive about $300 per month compensation as the result of black lung disease.) C. Starr, M. A. Greenfield, and D. F. Hausknecht writing in Nuclear News, Oct. 1972, have compared the radioactivity hazard from nuclear plants with that from oil- or coal-fired plants. Their results show that to reach air quality standards for oxides of sulfur and nitrogen and radioactivity in Los Angeles County one could tolerate 160,000 nuclear plants of 1,000,000-kilowatt capacity, but only 10 oil-fired or 23 natural-gas plants of this size.

Granted that properly operating nuclear power plants and their sub-systems - including mining, transport and chemical reprocessing of used reactor fuel elements, and disposal of radioactive wastes - are benign and have been so demonstrated, are there concerns regarding the possibility that these systems may malfunction and cause hazard to people and to the environment? This is a perfectly legitimate question that deserves serious and thoughtful consideration; and it is this aspect of the matter that I shall address.

A properly operating nuclear power plant and its subsystems is and can remain as innocuous a thermal power plant as man has ever devised. The whole safety issue then centers around the possibility that a nuclear plant or its subsystems may malfunction so grossly as to cause damage to the environment or to people.

Weinberg has laid out the issues. The issue in November 1972 is the same which confronts us, 38 years later. The so-called "Greens" have made a secret alliance with fossil fuel interest that is to the detriment of all life forms on the planet Earth, including its human inhabitants. And no matter how much environmentalists profess to be concerned about the carbon problem, until they give up their anti-nuclear alliance with coal and natural gas interests, the safety of the planet is in jeopardy.

Environmentalists, who seemingly regard lies as a primary tool to further their anti-nuclear arguments, have long insisted that the scientific-technical community had ignored the issue of nuclear safety. Weinberg answered this slur,

At the outset, we must remember that the technical community has always recognized that a nuclear system is potentially a dangerous device.

This statement can be verified by anyone who would care to review the history of nuclear safety discussions and research, by pioneering nuclear scientists, as Weinberg pointed out,

I can assert that nuclear systems per kilowatt-hour have caused much less damage to the biosphere than have other sources of thermal energy, is a tribute to the ingenuity and foresight of the reactor engineer. From the earliest days of nuclear energy we nuclear people have been constantly reminded of this potential danger. (In 1942 one of the first jobs I did for the Manhattan Project was to estimate the hazard caused by minute amounts of radioactive carbon that would be emitted from the early air-cooled graphite reactors; and General Leslie R. Groves insisted that Enrico Fermi move his West Stands critical reactor from the center of Southside Chicago because of the potential hazard.) Being so sensitively attuned to this potential, we have developed techniques and methods for handling these materials safely. The question is, successful as we have been in the past, what can we say about the likelihood of our continuing success in the future when large nuclear energy reactors will dot the landscape everywhere?

Weinberg in 1972 addressed what continue to be nuclear safety concerns of the public:

The whole nuclear power system involves four subsystems:
(1) mining and refining uranium to fuel the reactor;
(2) the reactor itself;
(3) transport and chemical processing of radioactive materials from the reactor; and
(4) waste disposal.

After discussing research on cancer rates of uranium miners, Weinberg concluded,

the number of deaths caused by mining of uranium, per kilowatt-hour, is much less than those from mining of coal, simply because there are so many fewer miners involved per kilowatt-hour.

It should be noted that changes in mining technology during the last 40 years have improved the health and safety of all miners, but this is particularly true of American uranium miners, because uranium mining technology now does not require miners to go underground. Coal miners still die in deep underground mines, and workers at oil and gas extraction facilities still die from natural gas explosions. So if anything there is an even greater safety advantage in uranium mining today than when Weinberg spoke 38 years ago.

Weinberg noted two safety concerns in connection with reactors,

There are two quite different potential hazards from a nuclear reactor.

* First there are the routine effluents - including tritium which is a radioactive form of hydrogen, radioactive fission gases from possible leaking fuel elements, radioactive cobalt from corrosion products, etc.

* Second there is the question of a major, catastrophic accident to a nuclear reactor that might result in an appreciable fraction of the radioactive inventory being released to the environment.

Weinberg noted that the first hazard was itself controversial, but noted that even disregarding the controversy,

the current standards are now so low - 5% of the amount we receive from natural sources - at the reactor site boundary as to make the whole issue a non-issue. [By comparison, the added radiation one gets by sleeping adjacent to one's wife whose body (as does everyone's) contains radioactive potassium, is around 7% of the standard for the reactor site boundary. This is a classic case of balancing benefits versus risks!] And indeed, nuclear power plants are now designed to meet these very stringent requirements, and in fact are doing so; here a technological
fix has completely resolved a controversy.

Weinberg thus points out a reductio ad absurdum of the safety concerns of nuclear critics. It is, Weinberg argues, more dangerous from a radiation safety viewpoint to sleep next to your spouse than to sleep just outside the fence at a reactor site.

We now have reached a point where we should look for Alvin Weinberg's covert comments about his firing, which was a closely-guarded secret at the time. First it should be noted that ORNL had been between 1955 and 1965 a major international center for reactor safety research. A team of reactor chemists under the direction of George W. Parker had examined the circumstances of a potential reactor accident. My father from 1960 to 1965 had been a member of the team, and played a major role in writing a 1967 paper which described the team's work. I have noted elsewhere Milton Shaw's role in shutting down ORNL safety research. However, in their swan song, the ORNL safety researchers noted,

In conclusion, we wish to emphasize that there are many factors affecting the fission product source term and the amount of fission products which actually can escape the containment system of power reactors in reactor accidents. While the amount of fission products evolved from overheated fuel is highly useful information, it is now recognized that the hazard of reactor accidents can be fully evaluated only through sophisticated accident simulation experiments in facilities such as the Containment Research Installation (ORNL), the Containment Systems Experiment (Battelle Northwest), and the Loss-of-Fluid Test (Phillips-Idaho).

This recommendation was important in Weinberg's thinking. And it was a thorn in Milton Shaw's side. The loss of coolant test was the critical issue for Weinberg, because speculation had held that once core meltdown had occurred, nothing could stop the molten mass of core materials from eating its way through the massive steel pressure vessel, the cement floor of the underneath the reactor, and into the earth, all of the way to China. This was the infamous "China Syndrome." The loss of coolant test proposed to sacrifice a built-to-purpose reactor under construction at INL. A loss-of-coolant accident was to be simulated, and the reactor was then allowed to experience core meltdown. The goal of the experiment was to discover if the "China Syndrome" could in fact happen. Weinberg argued that the loss of coolant experiment was rational.

As long as reactors were relatively small we could prove by calculation that even if the coolant system and its back-up failed, the molten fuel could not generate enough heat to melt itself through the containment However, when reactors exceeded a certain size, then it was no longer possible to prove by calculation that an uncooled reactor fuel charge would not melt through its containment vessel. This hypothetical melt-through is referred to as the China Syndrome for obvious reasons. Since we could not prove that a molten fuel puddle wouldn't reach the basement of a power reactor, we also couldn't prove whether it would continue to bore itself deeper into the ground.

Weinberg pointed to the consequences,

Whether or not the China Syndrome is a real possibility is moot. The point is, however, that it is not possible to disprove its existence. Thus, for these very large reactors, it is no longer possible to claim that the containment shell, which for smaller reactors could be relied upon to prevent radioactivity from reaching the public, was sufficient by itself. In consequence, the secondary back-up cooling systems, which originally were designed simply to prevent property loss and awkward clean-up, must now be viewed as the ultimate emergency protection against the China Syndrome and as an integral part of the reactor safety system.

I have already pointed out that it was not Weinberg alone, but the community of Nuclear Scientists which did not accept Milton Shaw's judgment on nuclear safety. As Weinberg pointed out,

Very arduous and sometimes acrimonious [Congressional] hearings related to these criteria were held last year [1971]. During this time every aspect of the operation of the emergency core cooling systems both in pressurized-water reactors and in boiling-water reactors has been thoroughly re-examined. Although they are obviously cumbersome, the hearings have obliged all parties, intervenors, manufacturers, the AEC, safety engineers, to examine in excruciating detail the possible course of events following a loss-of-coolant accident. The criteria that have emerged represent additional conservatism in the design both of light-water reactors and of their emergency core cooling systems.

There is little reason to doubt that Weinberg saw the "China Syndrome" controversy as the backdrop to his firing.

Weinberg then took up the issue of the transportation and chemical reprocessing of nuclear fuel. Weinberg argued that these problems should be addressed together because,

if reactors and chemical plants needed for reprocessing their fuel were built very close to each other (in nuclear parks) the transport problem as a separate safety hazard would largely disappear.

Weinberg knew of one such system, the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor that was being developed at Oak Ridge. Weinberg noted,

As for the chemical fuel reprocessing plants themselves, we at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are studying measures that might be taken to reduce radioactive emissions from such plants as low as those from light-water reactors - around 5% of radiation levels from natural sources at the plant boundaries. We believe that plants with practically zero release are actually quite feasible and would probably add around 0.5 mill per kwh to the cost of nuclear power.

Weinberg also reported that he had testified

before the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee in October 1971, . . .

And his views had, no doubt given pain to Milton Shaw and Chet Holifield,

our present technology and philosophy of siting separates the chemical plants from the reactors, and so we are confronted with the necessity of transporting heavily radioactive materials. To estimate the hazard, let us suppose that by the year 2000, we have 1,000,000 megawatts of nuclear power, of which two-thirds are liquid-metal fast breeders. There will then be 7000 to 12,000 annual shipments of spent fuel from reactors to chemical plants, with an average of 60 to 100 loaded casks in transit at all times. Projected shipments might contain 1.5 tons of core fuel which has decayed for as little as 30 days (in which case each shipment while in transit would generate 300 kilowatts of heat) and 75 million curies of radioactivity. Present casks from light-water reactors might contain material that produces 30 kilowatts of heat and contains seven million curies of radioactivity.

It should be noted that sometime later, reactor researchers at Argonne National Laboratory redesigned the fuel reprocessing system for the LMFBR in order to keep it in the same location as the reactor. Not only did they tastily acknowledge that Weinberg was right, but they also managed to spend a huge amount of money to reinvent the wheel, that is to develop a technology that could do for LMFBR fuel what ORNL was developing technology for with the MSBR, using analogous molten-salt technology.

Finally, Weinberg offered some observations on nuclear waste. Ironically, Weinberg did not realize that ORNL had developed a solution to the nuclear waste problem. My father had in the 1950's investigated the use of plutonium as a Molten Salt Reactor fuel. And the use of Plutonium as a molten salt reactor fuel had been demonstrated during the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. Weinberg acknowledged the problem created by plutonium in used nuclear fuel,

Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,400 years, and wastes containing this nuclide will remain potentially dangerous for 200,000 years.

Ironically, if plutonium and the so-called minor actinides could be burned in a reactor, they would cease to be a part of the nuclear waste problem, the highly-radioactive fission products in nuclear waste would stop being dangerous after 300 years. Thus another solution to the nuclear waste problem was potentially available from Oak Ridge technology, but that had not been worked out yet. That solution could potentially produce a very large amount of new energy. Two decades later, Uri Gat and J.R. Engel of ORNL and H.L. Dodds of the University of Tennessee, were to write,

The MSRs, with their continuous processing and the immediate separation of the residual fuel from the waste, simplify the handling of the waste and contribute to the solution and acceptability of the waste issue.

The on-line processing can significantly reduce the transportation of radioactive shipments. There is no shipping between the reactor and the processing facility. Storage requirements are also reduced as there is no interim storage for either cooldown or preparation for shipment. The waste, having been separated from the fuel, requires no compromise to accommodate the fuel for either criticality or diversion concerns. The waste shipments can be optimized for waste concerns alone. The actinides can be recycled into the fuel for burning and thus eliminated from the waste. While further work is required to fully analyze this possibility, several proposals to burn actinides have been made. The MSRs with on-line processing lend themselves readily to recycling the actinides into the fuel. Eliminating the actinides from shipments and from the waste reduces the very long controlled storage time of the waste to more acceptable and reasonable periods of time

I must first state than nothing Weinberg had to say about alternative solutions to the nuclear waste problem was wrong. It is simply that using plutonium and other actinides from nuclear waste, as nuclear fuel, kills two birds with one stone. Not only does it turn what was considered dangerous waste into energy, but it will allow for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of thorium breeding molten salt reactors (LFTRs) to be started very quickly, since their initial fuel charge could be recovered from used nuclear fuel. Thus the supposedly terrible problem of nuclear waste, actually is part of a workable solution to the problem of post carbon energy.

Alvin Weinberg made important contributions to our understanding of the role of energy in our society, and those contributions have, as of yet not been fully appreciated. He understood both the problems and the potential of nuclear energy. In many respects Alvin Weinberg correctly saw path that society was taking, and gauged its consequences. Although not the first nuclear scientist to recognize the CO2 problem, that honor goes to Edward Teller, once Weinberg understood the carbon problem, he emerged as a leading voice in articulating it during the 1970's.

What Weinberg failed to realize was the extent to which ORNL scientists, under his leadership, had found a way out of "the Faustian bargain" which he frequently referred to as a description of the relationship between the nuclear science community and society. Undoing Weinberg's "Faustian bargain" will thus be a topic for a further post.

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