POWER & ENERGY

A veteran of the Manhattan Project argues for the real-world practicality of nuclear power.
By Theodore Rockwell

In a conversation about nuclear power, a friend of mine once asserted that a reactor had the potential to “go off like a bomb.” I told my friend that was simply untrue, and she smiled sweetly and said, “Well, that’s your opinion.”

And no, it was never a matter of opinion. Neither reactors nor casks of spent fuel have the capability of going “prompt critical” like a bomb. The laws of nature prohibit it. And, engineers must make clear that facts of nature are not matters of opinion.

As Josh Billings, the nineteenth century humorist, once wrote: “The trouble with most folks isn’t so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain’t so.”

There are many scary stories about potential nuclear power disasters that restrain people from embracing the nuclear renaissance. In order to calm these unwarranted fears, engineers have designed reactors that are unnecessarily complex and, as a result, far more expensive than they need to be. I suggest that any competent engineers—not just nuclear—can show from their own knowledge that these fears are not valid.
Let’s look at a few of them.

Some people speculate that “nuclear waste” may pose some sort of unprecedented problem. But in practice, nuclear waste does not figure much in the daily business of operating a nuclear power plant. The main bulk of the radioactivity is bound up in the ceramic nuclear fuel elements. Every year or two, fresh fuel is put into the plant, and the “used fuel” is put into a large “swimming pool” for several years, until it has lost 99.99 percent of its radioactivity by natural decay. Then it is usually put into a dry fuel cask, and stood up on a concrete pad in back of the power plant. The U.S. President has stated that it poses no hazard in