Diatribes of Jay: Dog-Day Wish: A New Manhattan Project for <i>Safe</i> Nuclear Energy

For a review of Pete Buttigieg’s good qualities and his prospects for vice-president, click here. For a brief review of the second and anticlimactic Detroit debate, click here. For a morning-after view of the first Dem Detroit Debate, click here. For initial reaction to the first Detroit debate, including criticism of CNN, click here. For a discussion of how the US can arrest its decline by rebuilding its labor unions online, click here. For suggestions how to fix, not trash, America by adjusting corporate law, click here. For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here. For brief analysis of the House’s censure of the President, click here. For reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here. For an analysis of reparations for the descendants of slaves, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Our wartime Manhattan Project, which invented nuclear weapons, did so in an impossibly short time. The physicist Enrico Fermi had demonstrated a sustained neutron chain reaction in uranium on December 2, 1942. That experiment merely suggested that an atomic bomb was possible. The Manhattan Project detonated the first-ever atomic explosion, code-named “Trinity,” on July 16, 1945.

So the duration of the Project, from demonstration of mere possible feasibility to success, was two years and 7.5 months. The Soviet Union took four years, even though it stole our plans through espionage. Other nuclear nations, such as India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, appear to have taken a decade or more, even with the general trail already blazed.

In this impossibly short period of time, the Project also produced enough fissionable material for three bombs (the test bomb and the two dropped on Japan). It did this at two separate sites, Hanford WA for plutonium, and Oak Ridge TN for enriched uranium. At one point, I have read, the production of enriched uranium at Oak Ridge, by itself, commandeered about ten percent of all electricity used in the United States.

The Manhattan Project was undoubtedly human history’s most stunning crash project for developing advanced technology from bare theory, poorly understood. It recruited the best minds and hands in the entire nation—physicists, chemists, metallurgists, radiation experts, machinists, electricians, and technicians. It built premises, factories, laboratories, testing grounds and workers’ communities from scratch.

Nothing in our species’ history so far has come close, even the decade-long push to put a man on the Moon before the end of the sixties. Under the ultimate command of the military (albeit with civilian governance for many scientists), the Project commandeered the land and material resources of our entire nation, while it was mired in war. It did all this in secrecy. Everyone who worked on the Project, except for a few of the most senior physicists, was kept in a strict “silo,” which confined their knowledge to what each needed to know to do a narrowly defined job.

The motivation for this fierce effort was fear. In his 1939 letter to FDR, Albert Einstein had reported German experiments in splitting uranium atoms and had questioned whether the Nazis might develop a bomb first. The fear of nuclear weapons in Hitler’s hands jump-started our nationwide crash project.

For evolutionary reasons, fear is our strongest emotion. But now we have legitimate fear of an even greater catastrophe: frying our entire planet before we can wean our species from fossil fuels. If we had safe nuclear power, we could solve that problem far more easily than with renewables alone. So why don’t we have a Manhattan-type project to develop safe nuclear electric plants?

Our Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was the Manhattan Project’s epicenter. What it’s doing now seems to fit well with a crash project to develop safe nuclear energy.

The Laboratory no longer makes weapons. Instead, it helps make them secure, safe and reliable, thereby preserving our nuclear deterrent.

Since the 1960s international treaties have prohibited testing nuclear weapons in the air, in outer space and under water because they produce radioactive pollution. Underground testing is still “legal,” but it’s expensive, not hard to detect, and geopolitically unpalatable because it scares people and weakens arms-control treaties. Often it releases radioactive stuff into the atmosphere, too. So Los Alamos and apparently other nuclear powers’ weapons developers have learned to “test” nuclear weapons, virtually and non-destructively, using software.

That appears to be Los Alamos’ primary job today. With the aid of our nation’s most brilliant minds, it has developed supercomputers and software that can “model” the turbulent, disorderly and blindingly fast processes in and around nuclear weapons when exploded. It uses these “virtual” testing techniques to see how the aging of materials and systems affects our weapons’ performance and reliability. It also does advanced experiments with both radioactive and conventional materials to verify its virtual “experiments” in the laboratory.

With heavy-duty computers and software capable of analyzing and predicting every facet of a nuclear blast, wouldn’t designing safe nuclear reactors be a piece of cake? Their processes occur at much lower temperatures and much more slowly than nuclear blasts.

Already there are two promising approaches to making reactors safer. The first is making the “guts” of the reactor meltdown-proof by designing the fissionable core to fall apart into pieces of sub-critical mass when the reactor overheats.

In an essay written seven years ago, I suggested a simple mechanical design that might do the trick. It needs no complex electronics or even reliable electrical power. It relies only on gravity and the melting points of metals to slow or stop a runaway chain reaction.

Since I’m not now and never have been a nuclear physicist, this simple design might not work, for reasons involving details of neutron fluxes and chain reactions beyond my understanding. But similar, more sophisticated designs might work. And with software capable of examining the details of nuclear explosions and even supernovae, proving or disproving the value of these designs ought to be virtual, cheap and easy.

A second promising approach is an entirely different reactor concept: Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs). These designs reportedly have six solid advantages over today’s uranium and plutonium reactors. First, they are virtually meltdown-proof: when the reactor core gets too hot, the fuel expands and reduces the intensity of the chain reaction automatically, without any external intervention. Second, the Earth has enough thorium available for mining to fuel these reactors for a millennium. Third, while in operation, these reactors produce much less radioactivity than conventional uranium or plutonium reactors. Fourth, their spent fuel and by-products are much less dangerous to people, in part because of much shorter half-lives. Fifth, these reactors are scalable; they can be made building-sized, as well as city-sized. In theory, they can even be air cooled, allowing nuclear reactors to be sited away from rivers, lakes and seas. Finally, these reactors appear to produce no fissionable material suitable for nuclear weapons.

According to posts by nuclear engineers on the Internet, these designs were tested during Cold War and apparently worked. The military abandoned them because they didn’t produce fissionable material suitable for bombs—a key objective of all nuclear work during the Cold War.

And therein lies the rub. Today’s “conventional” nuclear reactors use designs originally developed during the Cold War. Then a principal—if not the primary—objective was to produce fissionable material for weapons (mainly plutonium). Safety was not a big concern: although meltdowns had been predicted in theory, none had occurred in practice until Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. (The Cold War ended in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s collapse.) We also didn’t know then nearly as much as we do today about the devastating effects of nuclear radiation on the human body.

Today, these design objectives are precisely reversed. We don’t want reactors to produce fissionable material for bombs. If we can design reactors that avoid weapons proliferation, we can help third-world countries solve their energy problems without frying our planet and without creating new nuclear-weapons states. As for safety, with Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima behind us, it’s by far a more important goal than it was when today’s reactors were designed.

Yet today work on safety in nuclear reactors is dead in the water, at least in the West. The reasons are political and commercial, not scientific or technical.

After the disastrous meltdown at Fukushima, both the Japanese and the Germans decided to phase out nuclear power. Their two cultures enjoy universal respect for high-quality, reliable engineering. So their decisions to abandon nuclear power had a chilling effect on the nuclear industry worldwide. Besides the perceived risk, the vast expense of new “conventional” city-sized nuclear plants has caused at least one American power company to abandon two conventional nuclear plants even while they were already under construction.

This situation presents a classic call for government action. The private sector is afraid to act. It won’t invest in new plants of conventional design, nor will it sponsor risky research on uncertain new concepts. So the government must do that research.

Meanwhile, France continues to produce 75% of its electricity from nuclear plants, as it has for years. It has never had a serious nuclear accident. And France earns €3 billion annually by exporting nuclear power. Yet France, too, is apparently spooked by the risk of current nuclear-plant designs; it plans to reduce its nuclear proportion to 50% by 2035.

All this is not just sad, but a bit irrational. Our entire species has spooked itself with outmoded and dangerous designs without having tried anything different. We don’t know how hard it would be to make conventional designs safer by meltdown-proofing them, and we have not fully developed or tested intrinsically safer concepts like LFTRs. Our species doesn’t know what’s possible because we’ve never tried.

Los Alamos apparently has the software, expertise and skill to try out some of these designs virtually and at low cost. It has the know-how, the personnel, and an illustrious history of success. The private sector has none of these things. So why not task LANL with a new Manhattan Project to help save our planet and give us up to a millennium of safe, carbon-free energy?

Links to Popular Recent Posts

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For a morning-after view of the Dems’ first Detroit debate, click here.
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Diatribes of Jay

05 August 2019

Dog-Day Wish: A New Manhattan Project for Safe Nuclear Energy

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