Editorial: Alexander's advocacy framing energy debate

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander is emerging as the spokesman for the Republican Party's message on energy - and he is thinking big on the subject.

Alexander late last month said he will call on the federal government to permit the construction of 100 nuclear power plants over the next 20 years. The project presents a tremendous challenge, but the Tennessee Republican believes the nation is up to the task. Alexander's advocacy certainly should gear the nation to dealing with the energy issues facing it.

In politics, Alexander's request is defining the difference between the GOP's energy goals and those of the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama. The president and the Democrats, Alexander believes, place too much emphasis on renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, while giving only lip service to nuclear power.

Nuclear power is the only course right now to provide energy independence, good jobs and clean energy, he said. No doubt with an eye to former vice president Al Gore's award-winning "An Inconvenient Truth" about global climate change, Alexander said, "Climate change may be the inconvenient problem, but nuclear power is the inconvenient answer."

Alexander has not made a secret of his skepticism of wind and solar power. Earlier this month, he suggested to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that developers of these "enormous renewable energy projects" post a bond to remove them if they go unused "so that 20 years from now we don't have to come up with 'abandoned windmill' legislation."

His support of nuclear power also takes a page from Arizona Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. McCain called for building 45 new nuclear reactors in the U.S. by 2030, with a long-term goal of 100, doubling the current number of U.S. reactors. Alexander's plan is more ambitious,

There shall continue to be demand for electricity, almost without regard for the intentions of the nascent and now failing obama regime.

We are invested in electricity is some form or another in a way that is just not reducible - for communications, for household operations, for light, heat, and even supply of water and disposal of wastes. Almost all industrial processes can be carried out with some application of the characteristics of electricity.

The sane and sensible way to produce electricty in the quantity needed will necessarily require either the vast expansion of “fossil-fuel” plants, or applying the technology we have now to extract heat energy from a variety of processes, and converting that heat energy into electric power.

Now, there are a number of ways to tweak the distribution of electric power, ranging from developing a “smart grid” to developing more modern transmission systems, including some form of “superconductors” for transmissions over lines, to beaming the energy wirelessly by an electromagnetic wave.

We have evolved the design of nuclear power plants far beyond the earlier designs widely used in the 1960s, and the reclamation of the nuclear “fuel” still to be found in the “spent” rods, that are now just accumulating in various storage sites arund the world, just a catastrophe in waiting if nothing is done to reduce their quantity. Burying them somewhere just seems a bit wasteful, if by careful re-refining of the substance in these fuel rods, they may be regenerated.

For reasons more related to superstition than physics, reprocessing the “spent” fuel rods is prohibited here in the United States, but that is more for control of the presence of plutonium, an intensely radioactive by-product of the atomic reactions in a nuclear power station.

Plutonium is itself a source of energy that may be used to drive s “second-generation” nuclear power plant, and with common-sense safeguards, is a perfectly feasible “fuel” for the generation of nuclear power. The “China-Syndrome” meltdown scenario, while highly melodramatic, is more a figment of some Hollywood screen writer’s imagination than any realistic probability. We stand a greater chance of being smacked by an asteroid than of such a meltdown.

I’ll tell him.

The reactor where I used to work had 156 assemblies at about 1300 lbs each.

Bigger reactors have more. Littler reactors have less.

You wouldn’t want to do that anyway because around 60% of the usable uranium is still in those spent fuel bundles. You just need to reprocess it, if you can get around the NIMBYs and the BANANAs.

If we as a society spent 1/20th of what Lamar Alexander wants for fission, and put it instead into cold fusion, we’d have no reason to spend the remaining 19/20ths $$$ and society would be better off.

The Suppression of Inconvenient Facts in Physics
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2266921/posts?page=1#1

The End of Snide Remarks Against Cold Fusion
Free Republic, Gravitronics.net and Intrade ^ | 6/5/09 | kevmo, et al
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2265914/posts

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