A Primer on Nuclear Safety: 1.2.3 Heat, Water and Uranium Dioxide

1.2.3 Hear, Water and Uranium Dioxide

Uranium commonly occurs in an oxide form. The uranium ore in the Oklo natural reactors was U3O8, or yellow cake. Quite obviously yellowcake can serve as a reactor fuel. And there are real advantages to using a uranium oxide compound, rather than pure uranium metal as a reactor fuel. Pure uranium burns. So uranium dioxide, for example, would be a safer fuel form, but it is still undesirable for UO2 to come into contact with water in the presence of heat because of a small potential for corrosion. UO2 melts at something like 2800 C, so it can get very hot without melting. It is a poor thermal conduction, so he inside of uranium dioxide fuel pellets may become very hot during reactor operations. Once the heat heat from UO2 comes in contact with a zirconium cladding it is quickly transfered to the coolant. Because of its poor heat transfer qualities, UO2 fuel pellets are usually small.

UO2 fuel pellets are formed by heating UO2 power until it fuses into a ceramic. Incased in zirconium cladding the UO2 ceramic has a number of desirable properties. It is unlikely to release fission products under all but very unusual circumstances.

Since UO2 is relatively stable from chemical and physical viewpoint something has to go very wrong with a reactor, before it poses a problem. Thus potentially dangerous radioactive materials are locked in a double barrier inside the fuel pellet. The first barrier is the Uranium Dioxide ceramic which locks the FP into a rock like structure. How good is the protection that the UO2 inner fuel pellet provides? Lets go back to the Oklo reactors for a check. The Oklo reactors formed in A rock like formation containing U3O8 ore. That ore was not entirely solid, in fact it had to be water permeable in order for the natural reactor to become critical. What happened to all of those radioactive materials that were produced in the 17 natural reactors? Surprisingly enough they stayed exactly where they were produced 1.7 billion years ago. Geologist checked it all, and came to the conclusion that the radioactive materials produced by the Oklo reactors had move dvery little during the last 1.7 billion years. The radio-active byproducts produced b the Oklo Reactors were the same byproducts produced in modern reactors. They were not moved by the ground water that repeatedly flowed through the OKlo ore body. Nor were they transported by other geological forces. Thus the UO2 pellet is a significant barrier to the release of radiation from a reactor. The zirconium cladding of the pellet forms a second barrier to isotope escape.

Thus very unusual conditions would be required to trigger an escape of radioactive materials from a UO2 fuel pellet.

A note on Naval reactor fuel:  I have been unable to determine the composition or the original  Nautilus reactor fuel formula. The Nautilus was able to travel 66,000 miles with the original core, suggesting a low level or enrichment. Later the range between refulings was extended considerably. It is not clear if the fuel was uranium in metal form, UO2, or a Uranium alloy. Recent naval reactors use a Zirconium-Uranium alloy with the Uranium enriched to 93% U-235.

A Primer on Nuclear Safety: 1.2.2 Heat, Water and Zirconium

1.2.2 Hear, Water and Zirconium

The United Sttes Navy had been buildig sips with boilers when Hyman Rickover arrived in Oak Ridge. They United States Nay is a very proud orgabization, and not the leastcause of its pride was its boiler technology. Hyman Rickover and his team were imerced in the Navy's boiler technology tradition.

Their challenge was to find a way to to transform Weinberg's tiny water moderated e Materials Testing Reactor mock-up into a  reactor powerful enough to power a submarine.

Before I discuss this challenge I need to explain a little more about Wienberg's toy reactor, the Low Intensity Test Reactor, which was what the original mock-up was called when it was converted into a real reactor.  Although the 1.7 billion year old Oklo mine reactors had not been discovered yet, Weinberg and company had designed a reactor that mimicked the major features of the Oklo reactors. Like the OKLO reactors, the Low Intensity Test Reactor contained uranium with a high enough U-235 ratio, that it would go critical in the presence of water. Thus far from being unnatural, Weinberg's little water cooled reactor unwittingly emulated nature. In both the Oklo reactor and Weinberg's toy reactor, water slows stray neutrons down enough to promote a chain reaction with fuel that had only modestly U-235 to U-238 ratios. This slowing down of neutrons is called moderation. Because the toy reactor generated so little heat, it was fueled by aluminum clad uranium metal plates.

So the Rickover's first step was to use a water moderator. The second step was to produce enough power to boil water. That meant that Rickover's reactors had to be more powerful in order to produce much more heat. But here Rickover encountered a potential road block. The uranium used in a reactor had to be kept separate from the water for a number of reasons. One was that the uranium would corrode. Also radioactive fission products could escape from the uranium into the the cooling-moderating water. This was true whether the uranium was in metal form, or if it had been oxidized and baked into a ceramic, and had undesirable consequences. Rickover's ship board reactor clearly required that the Uranium fuel have a cladding and safety was no small consideration.

Aluminum had some good features, and had been the preferred cladding material, but it had a corrosion problem at higher temperatures, and it was was too weak a metal to be be rupture proof in a high performance reactor. Aluninum only maintain strength up to 300°C, and melt at 650°C. This proved safe in Weinbergs toy reactor, but the short comings of aluminum as a fuel cladding were dramatically demonstrated over and over, beginning in 1952 during an accident in the Canadian water cooled NRX reactor ruptured. Due to an operator error, control rods were accidentally lifted. Further errors occurred when operators attempted to shut down the reactor. Shut-off rods failed to fully descend into the reactor core. Reactivity and heat shot up. Aluminum clad fuel elements ruptured. Hydrogen gas was generated, and exploded. The lid of an inner reactor containment dome was blown off, and radioactive materials leaked into the environment. Jimmy Carter, then one of Rickover's boys, participated in the clean up.

Failure of alunium fuel cladding in the Windscale reactor played a major role in the 1957 fire that released a great deal of radioactive material into the environment. An accident with the Canadian NRU reactor in 1958 further illustrated the dangers of aluminum cladding. Several aluminum clad fuel elements inside the reactor over heated and burst, One caught on fire. While being extracted from the reactor it was torn in two. The fragments fell into a pit, and continued to burn. The resulting release of radioactive materials created quite a mess.

Clearly then aluminum cladding would not be up to snuff as fuel cladding for Rickover's reactors.

Alvin Weinberg suggested to Rickover that Zirconium had potential as a reactor fuel cladding. Zirconium is stronger than aluminum, had good heat transfer properties, can tolerate 1,800° C heat and does not corrode in the presence of water and heat. There was one rub. Radiation testing of zirconium samples show them to be a neutron poison. Using zarconium as a reactor fuel element cladding would kill a chain reaction, or so it was thought. But Oak Ridge scientist Herbert Pomerance, Herb to those who cultivated his friendship, traced the problem to hafnium, a chemically similar element that was present as a natural contaminant in zirconium.

Thus if zirconium could be separated from the hafnium, it would give Rickover his safe reactor cladding. The task of industrial sale separation of zirconium from hafnium was given to a group of three Y-12 chemists under Warren Grimes. Grimes asked Lyle Overhoiser to work on the problem, but when Lyle needed some assistance from an analytic chemist, my father, C.J. Barton, Sr., was brought in to help. My father and Lyle had been Lab mates as chemistry graduate students at the University of Virginia, and they worked well together. At that point my father stopped being an analytic chemist, and became an industrial chemist. With the assistance of John W. Ramsey, George Parker, Cyrus Feldman, and many others, they were able to identify a method that could be scaled up to zirconium separation Industrial levels of production. While Rickover was said to be the father of the atomic submarine, Oak Ridge chemists, including my father, broke the prophylactic: for him.

A Note on Alvin Weinberg, Hyman Rickover, and Milton Shaw

Yesterday I wrote about Hyman Rickover's attitude toward reactor safety. It is clear from A. Stanley Thompson's stories that Rickover was determined to silence scientists who were concerned about reactor safety in programs he had some control over. It is not that Rickover had no concern about reactor safety, rather he and his staff hads worked out an approach to reactor safety and believed that they had solved all of the problems. All that was left, in Rickover's mind was an almost fanatical adherence to Rickover's safety system. Rickover was paranoid. Scientist who questioned the Rickover's infallibility on safety, were the enemy in Rickover's book.

I have previously told the story of the Rise and Fall of Milton Shaw, here, here, and here. Shaw's attitude toward nuclear safety appears to be identical to Rickover. It now becomes apparent that Shaw's goals and methods were identical to Rickover's. This would explain Shaw's power. He was Rickover's man, and could be counted on to do what Rickover wanted. while writing my account of Shaw, I was unable to understand why Shaw, a Navy Department functionary, had received his appointment as reactor research boss at the AEC. But it is plausible that Rickover wanted the Shaw in the AEC as Rickover's long arm in control of reactor development. Shaw's great political clout, would have really been Rickover's then. It would also follow then that Rickover was behind Alvin Weinberg's firing as Director of ORNL.

But the nuclear safety controversy that Shaw's heavy handedness had created, was beginning to erode Rickover's power. Rickover had many enemies in the upper ranks of the navy. And some Rickover enemies were looking for an opportunity to clip his wings. Rickover had overreached, and Richard Nixon, already wounded by Watergate, had reached out to contain the festering sore, the nuclear safety mess at the AEC. In December 1973, Rickover received his 4th star. Richard Nixon spoke at a cerimony which marked Rickover's promotion. Nixon while ostensively honoring Ricjover, delivered a very different message:

"I don't mean to suggest by that that he is a man who is without controversy. He speaks his mind. Sometimes he has rivals who disagree with him; sometimes they are right, and he is the first to admit that sometimes he might be wrong."

Rickover must have have been grinding his teeth when Nixon said these words. Rickover lacked the modesty to admit that he might be wrong, and Nixon knew it. Nixon's words must have rankled him, as Nixon also knew they would.

Shaw was an all to faithful servant of Rickover, and by doing his master's bidding, he had begun Rickover's undoing , as well as his own.

A Primer on Nuclear Safety: 1.2.1 Heat, Water and Reactors

1.2 Heat and water
1.2.1 A history

The period of 1944-1945 was a period of intense ferment among the reactor designers at the University of Chicago "Metallurgy Lab". The great World War II reactor projects had passed the design phase. A couple of interesting minor reactor design projects were underway. One at Chalk River in Canada, and from this project was eventually emerge the Canadian CANDU reactor concept. The other project was was a most interesting one. Both Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi were interested in cooling a reactor with a water which contained a mud like uranium fuel in suspention. Thus the amazingly simple core of the only contained water and Uranium fuel in a mud or soup like suspention. The reactor was called the "Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor." It turned out to be one of the safest reactors ever designed, but it also turned out to have some problems that inhibited its development beyond the experimental stage.

Fermi built an Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor called the LOPO (for low power) at Los Alamos during World War II. By that time enriched uranium was beginning to flow from Oak Ridge, and the LOPO appears to have been the first reactor to run with enriched uranium fuel.

We have seen that the first two attempts to build water cooled reactors were not entirely successful. THe Hanford reactors had recognizable safety issues, which precluded the use of the design for civilian power plants in the West, but not the Soviet Union. The Uranium slurry fuel of the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor proved to be less than successful. But Wigner and his group of very bright young men had thought of another approach to water cooling reactors.  The idea as to build a reactor that was structurally similar to the graphite pile reactors, but without the graphite bricks.  Instead water would be used as both a moderator and a coolant.   The designed was quite feasible, with the exception of one technical problem.  

Alvin Weinberg was to be assigned the patent for the Light Water Reactor.  At Oak Ridge Wigner with Weinberg's assistance design of a water cooled and moderated reactor that was to be used for Materials testing.   The development went lead to the creation of a small prototype, the Materials Testing Reactor mock-up to test controls and hydraulic system.  The Mock-up had the capacity to go critical. 

In 1946, as thinking about water cooled reactors was beginning to evolved in Oak Ridge, a maverick Naval officer, Hyman Rickover appeared on the scene. Eugene Wigner had decided to creat in Oak Ridge a sort of informal graduate school for training in the new nuclear technology, and Rickover was selected by the Navy to receive reactor technology. Rickover quickly made himself the man to go to about reactor issues in the Navy, and in 1947 he assigned by the Bureau of Ships with the task of exploring the use of reactors for ship propulsion. In 1949 Rickover was givena second assignment within Division of Reactor Development, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and then assumed control of the Navy's effort as Director of the Naval Reactors Branch in the Bureau of Ships. These dual assignments gave Rickover great power.

Rickover saw early on the potential of the water cooled reactor for ship propulsion. By the late 1940's the U.S. Navy had been using steam powered ships for over 100 years. The Navy prided itself on its technologically advanced boiler technology, a technology which gave U.S. Navy ships unusual cruising range without refueling. A range that helped it to defeat the Japanese Navy and eventually to destroy the Japanese empire. The reactor held the potential for Rickover and the Navy of extending the Navy's reach, at a time when the cold war was heating up.

Rickover needed to convert the water cooled reactor into a generator of steam. Working with Alvin Weinberg and the scientist and engineers of Oak Ridge a design for a pressurized water reactor was developed, and passed on to the Navy's reactor engineering labs, the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory founded in 1946, and the Bettis Lab, founded in 1948. Together these Labs produced the actual designs of the reactors that were to power US Atomic submarines, and were to play a major role in the development of the civilian power reactors.

The first civilian power reactor in the United States was a naval reactor that had been designed for aircraft carrier use, but which the Navy intended to keep on land for research purposes. Rickover arranged to hooked up a generator to the reactor, which was dubbed the Shippingport reactor, and donated it to President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program. The Navy continued to conduct research with the Shippingport reactor until it was decommissioned in 1982.

Most subsequent civilian power reactors were scaled up and modified versions of the Shippingport reactor. The safety problems of civilian power reactors are inherited from their Naval predecessors, and have to be understood in that context.

There is little doubt that Rickover's influence played a pivotal role in the choice to concentrate reactor research on two reactor designs, the Light Water Reactor, and The Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor. Both reactor concepts have safety flaws. But Rickover was more introduced in producing quick results, than in building the safest possible reactors.

A. Stanley Thompson worked for North American Aviation during the 1940s and spent time in Oak Ridge during the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion days. Thompson had a chance to observe Rickover in action during a conflict between Rickover and two officials of North American Aviation. Rickover traveled to the North American headquarters to meet with company officials on a Saturday in 1949. Officials were called in for the meeting, and everyone arrived with the exception of physicist Mark Mills, who was out on a tennis court. When Mills finally arrived, Rickover started chewing him out about a report Mills had written about the potential for chemical explosions in reactors. Rickover launched into a tyrade, and eventually Mills tired of the abuse,

"Sir, I resent your treatment of me. I will no longer stand for it. I'm leaving!" Mills said, and started to walk out.

Rickover also stood smilling, and said, "Mark, I think we now understand one another. You can get back to your tennis game."

After Mills walked our, Rickover commented to us, "Mills is now conditioned on reactor safety."

After the meeting, North American's Chauncey Starr complained to the AEC about Rickover's abuse of Mills.

Thompson continued:

"The next time I saw Rickover was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at a conference on the nuclear propulsion of aircraft hosted by Alvin Weinberg, Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Rickover was there in his self-appointed capacity of keeping himself informed on everything in the nuclear business. Chauncey Starr gave a talk, for which he had been coached by aircraft engineers at North American, on the importance of Mach number, aircraft lift to drag ratio, and engine thrust to weight ratio for the design of an airplane and its nuclear power plant."

"In the evening we were invited to a friendly and welcoming dinner at the home of Marge and Alvin Weinberg with several of the senior members of Weinberg's staff and their wives. After dinner we were seated in a circle in the Weinbergs' living room. For a while, Rickover was directing at Starr on the opposite side of the circle a series of stinging remarks against which Starr was doing what he could to defend himself. The rest of the party had lapsed into a stunned silence. Finally one of the wives remarked, "You know, there's something going on here that I don't understand." Rickover addressed her, "I'll tell you what's going on. This man [pointing to Starr] has been knifing me in the back, and I don't like it." Word must have got back to Rickover that Starr had talked to people at the Atomic Energy Commission about Rickover's visit to North American. On the way down the hill from the Weinbergs' party, I saw Starr and Rickover walking arm-in-arm, and talking in a confidential manner. I assumed that Starr had now been "reconditioned" on interference with Rickover. I was impressed with Rickover's ability to turn on alternating charm and ferocious attacks, as suited his purpose at the moment."

A Primer on Nuclear Safety: 1.1 Heat and Primitive Reactors

Nuclear safety

1.1 Heat and primitive reactors

A nuclear reactor is a structure designed to create the controlled fission of fissionable isotopes. Nuclear fission produces heat. In addition to the heat generated by nuclear fission, the radioactive decay of fission products also produces heat. Thus one of the fundamental challenges of reactor design is the reliable removal of heat from the core of the reactor. Heat must be removed as long as a reactor is critical, that is as long as nuclear chain reactions are taking place. In addition for most reactor designs, heat must be removed from a reactor during the initial period of reactor shutdown.

The removal of heat from a nuclear reactor does not require great sophistication. The 17 natural reactors at Oklo in Gabon, West Africa, had a self-regulating heat-removal system. The system required that subsurface water enter the uranium ore body. Water slows down energetic neutrons, and that promotes the probability of fission reactions. U-235 in the Oklo ore body began to fission and that led to a self-regulating chain reaction. With the chain reaction came heat, and the water began to boil. As the water boiled away, the ore body dried, and the fission process slowed and stopped.

Boiling water is one way to remove heat. Heat escapes in the form of water vapor. The Oklo ore bodies did not melt because the presence of water triggered the fission reactions, the presence of heat made the water in the Oklo reactors boil, the boiling of the water dried the ore bodies, and the removal of water by drying stopped the fission reaction.

This process occurred over and over again for hundreds of thousands of years.

Unlike the Oklo reactors, the first manmade reactor made so little heat that it required essentially no cooling. Fermi's reactor at Stagg Field in Chicago produced about a quarter of a watt of heat and essentially no decay heat.

The isotopes of uranium undergo a natural decay process, and the more fissionable U-235 decays more rapidly than U-238. So, while water could serve as a moderator for a natural uranium ore body reactor 1.7 billion years ago, this has long stopped being the case. But there are two moderators that can be used to achieve criticality with natural uranium. One is a isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. Deuterium is present in water in one part per 6000 water molecules. Although deuterium was of great interest to reactor pioneers, they chose another substance to to moderate the early reactors. That substance was ultra-pure graphite, a form of carbon. Early reactors were large structures built from huge graphite blocks. Holes were drilled in to the graphite blocks, and slugs of uranium, surrounded by aluminum, were inserted into the holes. More holes were drilled into the graphite for cooling air. Air was blown through the cooling holes and extracted the heat. The hot air was literally blown out of the reactor.


Thus there are two simple ways to cool a reactor. One is by blowing air through it. And this was the preferred method for some of the earliest graphite moderated reactors. The second method was the method introduced by that great reactor designer, mother nature, at Oklo. That is the method of circulating water through the reactor, and extracting reactor heat by boiling off the water.

As reactors grew bigger, the advantages of water-cooling became apparent. It had been suggested that the Hanford reactors, designed to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs, should be cooled with helium gas, but Eugene Wigner persuaded everyone that water would work far better. So the Hanford reactors were water-cooled graphite piles.

There is a big safety disadvantage of water-cooling graphite reactors, as Richard Wilson notes:

"Wigner was certainly well aware that there was a positive void coefficient in a water-cooled reactor - boiling of water in a channel would increase the reactivity - and the report has a whole paragraph showing how the water reduced the reactivity constant from 1.10 to 1.07. Inversely, a sudden removal of the water would increase it by 0.03 which is more than the fraction of delayed neutrons which allow control of the reactor. But as laconically noted by Alvin Weinberg later "no one dared to think of the consequences of a complete failure of the cooling".

What no one dared to think of actually happened at a place called Chernobyl, years later. Richard Wilson describes how the Russians some 30 years later still had not "dared to think of the consequences of a complete failure of the cooling" of a water cooled graphite reactor. Those consequences were a profound indictment of the Soviet communist system. For the Chernobyl disaster was the product of numerous systematic failures,that had their root in an ignorance of and disregard for nuclear safety. The Communist officials who had the power to make decisions about reactor design in the Soviet Union were intoxicated by their own ideology, and ultimately failed to understand the dangerous implications of bad decisions about nuclear safety.

A 5 to 7 trillion dollar subsidy to the wind industry?

Yesterday, the Abilene Reporter-News published a guest column by Professor Patricia A. Lapoin of Abilene's McMurry University. The column's title is "There's a price for subsidizing wind energy with taxpayer dollars."

Abilene has good, although not not outstanding wind resources. And wind farms are spring up there. In addition, Abilene is just a Texas hop, skip and jump away from the Texas Panhandle, whose wind resources are considered to be among the best in the country. Thus criticism of wind power, coming from an Abilene source, would tend to go against local interest.

Lapoin, who in addition to teaching Business Administration at McMurry University is the President of P&L Consultants, is an opponent of wind generated electricity for personal reasons. Lapoin lives next to a wind farm in Taylor County, Texas and complains that neighborhood windmills are extremely noisy, are eyesores and generally destroy the the quality of rural life. The huge 421 turbines Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Taylor and Nolan Counties comes within a half mile of her home. "The land in Taylor County is forever damaged," Lapoin says.

In yesterday's Abilene Reporter-News, Lapoin laid out an analysis of the US Department of Energy's most recent wind energy report, "20% Wind Energy by 2030". She reports:

"According to a recent report by the National Renewable Technology Laboratory (DOE), wind energy could account for 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030. To reach this target, wind turbines would have to produce 300,000 MW of power or 1,000,000 MW installed capacity. The 500,000 plus wind turbines would cost the taxpayers between $5-7 trillion."

Lapoin compares land use with wind, and nuclear:

"For a comparable amount of electricity output, a nuclear power plant requires approximately 50 acres of land vs. 80,000 acres of land for wind farms -- 1,600 times the land usage for wind generated power! For the same or less taxpayer money, why not put those taxpayer dollars into more nuclear power plants and protect our natural environment from the thousands of square miles of industrial wind turbines dotting the landscape?"

I did a brief analysis of some of the assumptions that underlay "20% Wind Energy by 2030," and found that estimates for future cost did not acknowledge the realities of materials inflation, and other factors that would affect wind facilities construction costs.

Key assumptions of "20% wind Energy" are highly questionable. For example it is assumed that the cost of wind estimated to be $1,730/kW in 2005 would remain constant until 2010, and then would decreasing 10% by 2030. This is preposterous. The cost of installing windmills rose to something like $1900/KWh in 2007 and the cost of materials is projected to continue the inflationary pattern of this decade. The assumptions about offshore wind are even more preposterous: $2,520/kW in 2005, decreasing 12.5% by 2030. In fact, the cost of offshore wind projects was closer to $5,800 in 2007 and was rapidly ascending. The expectation of a 12.5% drop in the cost of installing off shore wind facilities by 2030 is a pipe dream. The expectation that there would be a capacity factor improvements about 15% on aveover all wind classes between 2005 and 2030, is unrealistic given the European experience, of declining capacity factors with each new windmill facility.

Professor Lapoin's estimates partially rest on what are extremely unrealistic assumptions by the wind industry. Hence her estimate of a 5 to 7 trillion subsidy required to meet the 20% wind penetration by 2030 goal may be if anything conservative. And that 5 to 7 + trillion dollars subsidy will be expended on an energy generation system that still requires fossil fuel back up, and will produce at most only 20% of our current electrical needs. The 20% wind power idea, fails the "economic rationality" rest.

Update 6/9/08: Mike commented yesterday about the lack of detailed analysis in support of Patricia Lapoin's major contentions. I had already begun an attempt to verify Lapoin's numbers before I saw Mike's comment. My calculations were that given Lapoin's assumptions, I could only find an annual subsidy that was over 100 times smaller than Lapoin's 5 to 7 trillion. This does not mean that she simply tossed out a huge number, or that she does not have such an analysis, simply that she her numbers cannot be verified by my "rough and ready" methods. It would be most desirable if Lapoin has such an analysis that she publish it quickly.

The Preamble to Nuclear Green

Introduction: I wrote this post on bartoncii, on November 29, 2007, just a couple of days before I launched "Nuclear Green".  The original post was intern based on a comment I had made on Climate Progress the day before.  It struck me, as I reread the statement today, that it was the launching point for my new blog, Nuclear Green, and illustrated what I can only describe as my revolutionary intentions.

From my comments in Climate Progress (11/28/07)

There are specific concrete steps that need to be taken to insure that [CO2 reduction] goals will be meet. There are at present only three technologies that can at present can provide low cost, low carbon base electrical power. They are geothermal power, solar thermal power, and nuclear power. The first two power sources can only provide power in geographically limited localities. We must adopt a national policy to focus on the production of a large number of nuclear power plants. This means standardizing nuclear plant design, and develing a mass production system to build reactors quickly.

The move to plug in electric cars with 50 to 100 mile battery (or capacitor) range would easily allow the gas millage targets to be meet, Urban trucking can be conducted using battery or capacitors for motive power. Interurban trucking should be eliminated and freight transfered to all electrified rail roads.

We ought to engage in a national debate about the use of aircraft for inter city passenger traffic. High speed electrical passenger trains can move people very quickly between cities, and in many instances passengers would arrive at their destinations more quickly by high speed trains than they would be jet aircraft.

These measures would remove more than half out nation CO2 emission, while causing little disruption in our basic way of life.

There would be plenty of oxen that would be “Gored” by such a plan. The electric power generating companies would be forced to scrap most of their power plants. EXXON and other oil companies would be either forced to go out of business, or find a new non-carbon energy source to sell. Coal companies would be forced to shut their mines. Interstate trucking companies would be forced out of business. Airlines might be forced to stop flying.

At the same time millions of new jobs would be created. We would no longer have the burden of paying Arab potentates for imported oil, the air would be cleaner, and people’s health would be better, because they would no longer be breathin air polluted by the burning of fossil fuels.

. . . while Plug in batteries requite overnight charging, rapidly developing ultracapacitor technology offer the potential that rapidly charging ultracapacitors, with a charge storage capacities that equal those of lithium ion batteries may be on the market within a few years. Capacitors offer many advantages over batteries. They are potentially cheaper to manufacture, and their useful lifetime is far longer than that of batteries.

A 40 to 50 mile range for plug in batteries would cover most urban driving needs, GM plans to introduce the Volt, with a 40 mile plug in range in 2010. The Volt has a small 300 cc gas engine, for battery charging. The disadvantage of pure electric cars is that they are confined by battery range. A 50 mile range would not allow for a roundtrip between Dallas and Fort Wort, a common urban drive in North Texas. A 100 or 130 mile battery range would work however.

The full potential for CO2 savings of plug in hybrids cannot be realized if electricity continues to be generated by burning fossil fuels.

California is free to set what ever target it wishes for renewable energy, but they are not going to get anything like a 20% CO2 reduction by 2011. California assemblyman Chuck DeVore provides an analysis of the steps required to reach California’s energy goals by 2020. (see also) DeVore concludes that without new reactors, it will be impossible for California to reach its energy goals.

DeVore describes the potential:

“Really thinking out of the box, if California were to add eight 1,600-megawatt nuclear reactors, we could zero-out coal, cut our natural gas usage by more than a third, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 27 million metric tons below 1990 levels and see electrical costs rise by less than half of what they would without any new nuclear power plants. This bold plan would allow California to lead the nation in electrifying its transportation system as well as increasing its use of clean, electrically produced hydrogen to power vehicles. It also reduces our dependence on fossil fuels imported from the Middle East.”

DeVore is that rarest of political animals, a Republican with vision.