The Uniqueness of Nuclear and Why it Makes All the Difference

Few people fully appreciate the uniqueness of nuclear fission as an energy source, and why this uniqueness makes all the difference in establishing an energy policy.  Oh sure, many people have been scared into believing that nuclear power is uniquely dangerous, although we’ve long-since shown that nuclear power stations are safer than any of their competitors.  For its workers and for the public.  Literally.  Decades of safe, reliable operation are available, plus a billion dollars of testing and analysis .  But that’s another post.

The uniqueness of nuclear power is that it outperforms its competitors by orders of magnitude. We’re used to choosing among options that vary a few percent, or maybe a factor of two or four. A nuclear fission fuel is more than seven orders of magnitude more efficient than any non-nuclear process.  That’s seven multiples of ten, or ten million times more efficient.  That number cannot be changed significantly by more research. It involves the fundamental difference between the binding energies of atoms and of molecules. (In real examples, the difference is usually several tens of millions.  I usually use 50 million as the ratio between nuclear and non-nuclear fuels.)

Let’s look at how orders-of-magnitude differences play out in the work-a-day world.

For example, commercial aircraft travel about 500 miles per hour (mph).  That’s an order of magnitude faster than cars or trains, whose cruising speed is about 50 mph.  And nearly two orders of magnitude faster than bicycles at 5-10 mph.  An airline might consider buying aircraft that are, say 20% (100mph) faster or slower.  But not a whole factor of ten. Someone taking a business trip to Los Angeles from New York would have to have a good reason not to fly.  And it’s is even unlikelier s/he’d choose the bike.

In the energy field, this means that any non-nuclear fuel—coal, ethanol, corn-stalks, algae—requires fifty million times as much material to be gathered up, transported, processed, and ultimately to be disposed of, than if nuclear fuel were used to make the same amount of electricity.  (Wind or sunshine are even more dilute, and also unreliable. )

Again, to understand what this means, we have to get actual numbers.  Let’s look at just part of the energy problem, replacing the coal used to make electricity in America.  Coal is mostly all carbon, and therefore is the cheapest, most efficient way to ship carbon.  Yet it still requires half the capacity of our entire national freight rail system to handle it.  How will we transport the same amount of carbon in the form of sugar-cane or switch-grass?  Paul Willems (“The Biofuels Landscape Through the Lens  of Industrial Chemistry,” Science 325, 707, 7 Aug 2009) writes: “Biomass is a bulky solid with relatively high water content. The range over which it can be economically transported to a manufacturing facility is on the order of 40 to 80 km.”

Do we really plan to set up biomass processing plants every 25-50 miles across America’s agricultural heartland?  It seems to me this is a show-stopper.  If we can’t answer this mundane question, then we shouldn’t be making grandiose plans for a 500 million tons per year biomass program.  We could support quite a crowd of researchers for decades that way, but if it’s never going to lead to a practical energy program, we should drop it.  Or if it’s to be justified as a biological research program, then it should be so designed, and not hidden under a false promise.

Comments

[Jason D.]

Would you mind doing a post directly comparing the environmental impact of a coal plant, vs. a nuclear plant?

[Ted Rockwell]

To do a serious analysis is a big job. Let me suggest a good report that may give you what you're looking for:

http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/Coal-Combustion-Waste-CCW1jul93.htm

There is a comment on that page which I think is really weak: The uranium enrichment plants are powered by coal, so we shouldn't build nuclear plants. (so guess what kind of plant is built instead: probably coal!)

Hope this is of interest.

Best wishes,

Ted Rockwell

[Zack M]

If nuclear fuels were ten times as energy dense that might sound pretty good, but when the energy density is over a million times greater, nuclear is truly in a class by itself... especially given nuclear fuels' relative abundance and their capacity to 'breed,' which puts them in a separate category from exhaustible fossil fuels.

[Ralph Buttigieg]

G'day,

My understanding the main use of biomass is to produce liquid fuels for transport- not electricity so I'm not sure you are making a fair comparison.

Methanol and Ethanol can power cars, it much more difficult to do so with uranium. Unless of course we are talking about electric cars but thats another issue.

[DocForesight]

@Zack M - When you consider the efficiency of conversion of energy- in your case, liquid fuels for transport- petroleum from crude oil is significantly more efficient to burn than biomass-converted liquids. Isn't that why fuel blends including biofuels produce less miles per gallon?

Coal-to-liquid fuels make more sense, and I believe have a longer record of success, than biofuels.

And no one is suggesting cars powered by uranium, directly, so that's a strawman argument.

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Is there an alternative nuclear fission fuel other than Thorium and Uranium?

[Ted Rockwell]

No, thorium and uranium are the two nuclear fuels. But they each have several isotopes, some fissionable, some fertile (capable of absorbing and neutron while generating electricity). Uranium is available all over the earth, even in seawater. There is even more thorium on earth, but not as widely located.

The bottom line is, that there is thousands of years of uranium available, even for the once-through cycle, and millions of years with breeding, and there's thorium on top of that.

[Rasmus]

If half of the national rail system capacity goes towards moving coal around, then there is a very powerful environmental argument for switching to nuclear energy. One of the reasons for the decline in passenger rail traffic over the decades was that commercial freight did not want to share the tracks. Hence the abandonment of public rail stations and other infrastructure. If much of coal transportation by rail could be eliminated, this would really support the renaissance of rail travel in the US. Everybody talks about high-speed rail these days but it would be at least as important to support low-speed rail, preferably electric and nuclear-powered.

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Uranium is available all over the earth, even in seawater. There is even more thorium on earth, but not as widely located.