2024 June

Notes • Quotation Sources

Samples of this number were first distributed to the public at AnimeFest in July 2024.

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Notes

Page 2 — A near–duplicate…: The visible difference between Calder Hall and Chapelcross stations is that the four cooling towers at Calder Hall are clustered, two at each end, while at Chapelcross they are spaced out, one for each reactor. These were the only British nuclear power plants to be accompanied by cooling towers. At all subsequent stations, direct seawater (lake–water at Trawsfynydd) cooling has been employed.; Calder Hall was initially ordered as a two–reactor station, sometimes referred to as Calder A, and a second or B station was added during the course of construction, while Chapelcross was ordered as four units from the beginning, but with the same configuration of two turbine halls set between paired reactors. The principal technical difference between them is that, at Calder Hall, the steam from all eight boilers associated with each reactor pair flows first to a steam receiver and thence to the turbines. In the case of unreliability either on the steam or the nuclear side, this would have improved overall station availability.
Page 3 — Toward a Durable Peace: This is the subtitle of the book Soft Energy Paths by Amory Lovins. A review by Alvin Weinberg, originally published in Energy Policy (1978 March, page 85), is reprinted in Continuing the Nuclear Dialogue (American Nuclear Society, 1985).
Page 5 — Or do we follow the hard path?: Lovins, undoubtedly, does not mean to suggest by soft path that he is leading us to sink into a bog. What he says is, Low–energy futures can (but need not) be normative and pluralistic, whereas high–energy futures are bound to be coercive and to offer less scope for social diversity and individual freedom (Non–Nuclear Futures, p xxi). The grounds for this sweeping assertion are unclear, and it hardly seems to agree with much of human experience.
Page 9 — The pioneers of the field…: When W Bennett Lewis of AECL raised this point, during a discussion session at the 1971 Fourth International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy at Geneva, it caused quite a furore. Alvin Weinberg was especially nonplussed. See volume 11 of the Proceedings, pp 465—467.
Page 9 — Even in the most unfavorable scenario…: As given by RS Pease, FRS, in introductory remarks to a Royal Society discussion meeting held 24–25 May 1989, printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, volume 331, number 1619 ; reprinted as The Fast–Neutron Breeder Fission Reactor, G McHugh and AR Merrick, editors.; For coal waste (ash) as a source of uranium, see our previous number.
Page 13 — A safer place…: We might suppose that the metal–alloy fuel in each fuel assembly of the fast–neutron breeder reactor illustrated in our previous number contains 80 kg of uranium and 20 kg of plutonium. Further suppose the plutonium contained to be suitable for making simple atomic bombs (although it probably is not). The amount of weapons–grade Pu required for such a bomb is understood to be about 6 kg, so such an assembly could potentially make three bombs. Once loaded into the reactor core, it will be much too hot to handle without specialized equipment. Theft of the fuel on the way from the fabrication plant to the reactor, or of the raw material on its way from reprocessing to fabrication, must therefore be prevented at all costs.; All of these reactors, fabrication plants, and reprocessing plants are accordingly located in fuel cycle centers, under close and continuous international supervision, to prevent diversion of weapons–usable material by national governments or criminal groups. The centers themselves may even be owned by multinational consortia or cooperatives. The only material which crosses the site boundary is crude uranium and thorium, spent fuel coming in from converter–reactor power plants (along with research reactors and other minor uses) for reprocessing, and fresh converter fuel going out in the same heavy flasks used for the spent fuel. The incoming items are very unpromising in terms of bomb–making. What of the outgoing? A typical CANDU bundle contains about 30 kg of the heavy elements, in the form of a ceramic (oxide, or potentially carbide for future reactors). Assume that the fissile content is some mixture of ²³³U, ²³⁵U, and plutonium, containing about 5 g Pu per kg. Then a bundle contains about 150 g Pu, and it would be necessary to steal at least 40 bundles to make a bomb. This is the sort of operation that could be easily guarded against, and the work of extracting the dilute plutonium would give time to track down and apprehend any thieves who succeeded.
Page 14—15 : Closing the Plastic Cycle: The main product of the Fischer–Tropsch synthesis is a mixture of largely paraffin (alkane or straight–chain) hydrocarbons, with the general formula C_nH_2n+2. This series starts with methane, CH₄, n=1 ; liquid fuels fall mostly in the range of n=6 to n=20, with lubricating oils and paraffin wax beyond that. (The hydrogen molecule may be considered the special case of n=0.) Polyethylene is an alkane with a value of n typically in the thousands, at which point the +2 has become entirely negligible. Extra steps are required to produce such long–chain molecules, but the basic process is much the same. A different selection of hydrocarbons is produced by the Bergius process of treating coal with hydrogen at high pressure.; The reader may object that the problem of microplastics, which has recently begun to be recognized, is a bigger obstacle to the continued use of plastics than the accumulation of bulk plastic waste, and the approach illustrated does nothing to address this. The value of the flowsheet illustrated does not begin and end with the production of plastics. The Fischer–Tropsch and related processes, with suitable selection of catalysts, modification of operating conditions, and so on, can be used to produce an almost unlimited range of carbon–hydrogen and carbon–hydrogen–oxygen compounds, not just liquid fuels and lubricant oils, but alcohols and even high–quality edible fats. (This last, it will be noted, is effectively the inverse of the use of vegetable oils for fuel, which has caused such environmental damage in Indonesia.) Thus, the plant illustrated would be able to furnish useful, salable products, even in the (highly unlikely) case of a total worldwide ban on plastics production.
Page 16 — It never ceases to amaze…: The Norwegian group Bellona is a case in point. When the Halden research reactor was shut down, they called this a victory for the environment, saying that (among other complaints) the reactor had produced 10 tonnes of spent fuel, out of a total of 17 in the history of nuclear work in Norway. 10 tonnes of uranium oxide occupies a volume of less than one cubic meter. It seems unlikely that this cannot be safely stored in a country with so low as population density as Norway.; At the same time, they endorsed carbon capture and storage as the way to solve the climate puzzle. CO₂ emissions are the greatest threat to our climate. CCS must provide the bridge between our current condition and our destination of a low–carbon society. For several energy–intensive industries, CCS is the only available technology to reduce emissions sufficiently in the foreseeable future. Yet until we roll–out CCS on a large scale, power plants and industrial production facilities, old and new, continue to fill the atmosphere with CO₂. The only solution after you have excluded all those that make sense!; The release of carbon dioxide gas from Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986 is believed to have killed 1746 people. This followed a similar event at Lake Monoun two years earlier, which killed 37 people.
Page 18 — Conventional water reactors…: While the gasification reaction (C in the figure on page 14) is endothermic, absorbing energy in the form of heat, the synthesis reaction (E) is strongly exothermic. As a result, heat may be recovered from the waste gases (3) to assist in raising steam, but the yield of more valuable longer–chain molecules falls, and the yield of methane rises, with increasing temperature. Hence recovered heat cannot be used to superheat the steam to the temperature required by the gasifier. This consideration practically excludes the use of steam raised in a lower–temperature reactor.; For the synthesis of methanol from steam and heavy oil, a steam temperature of 825 °C is typical. The coolant outlet temperatures typical of water–cooled fission reactors are typically 275—325 °C. Sodium–cooled reactors typically produce steam at 500—550 °C. Steam plant does not become much more efficient at higher temperatures, and does get much more costly to build, so high–temperature helium–graphite reactors intended for electricity production have typically been designed for a coolant temperature of around 750 °C. The AVR pebble–bed prototype at Jülich, Germany, ran for extended periods with a coolant gas temperature of 1000 °C, to demonstrate that this was practical and would not cause damage to the fuel. This shows that the HTR is adaptable to the production of modest volumes of super–hot steam for chemical industry processes, as well as large volumes of medium–high temperature steam for power generation.
Page 24 — Combined heat–and–power…: For further discussion of CHP, with special reference to the absorption chiller, see our previous number.

Quotations

Erratum : In some copies, the quotation on p22 from Sir Alan Cottrell is listed as being on p24, while the quotation on p24 from Con Allday is listed as being on p22, and Mr Allday’s name is erroneously given as Conn.

President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech, made before the General Assembly of the United Nations, 8 December 1953, can be heard on the Web site of the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
Sir Fred Hoyle is best known as the astrophysicist who worked out the mechanism of the production of carbon from helium in stars, which is of crucial importance for the Big Bang model of cosmology (although he himself long advocated the rival Steady–State model). With his nephew Geoff, he wrote (in addition to science–fiction novels) Commonsense in Nuclear Energy (1979) and Energy or Extinction? The Case for Nuclear Energy (1981). Not content to indicate ways that anti–nuclear campaigns in Western countries served the interests of the USSR, Sir Fred explicitly accused Friends of the Earth of taking Soviet money. This resulted in a lawsuit and the destruction of many copies of the first printing of the book, although (with the benefit of post–1990 disclosures) it appears to have been quite true.
Mr Booth’s address to the Société Royale is printed in ATOM 134, 1967 December.
Sir Jack is quoted in ATOM 277, 1979 November. The item gives the initial schedule for what was apparently not yet termed the Atoms for Energy exhibition : London (Westminster) 20 September — 4 November 1979, Cardiff 1—15 November, Newcastle 29 November — 13 December, Edinburgh 24 January — 7 February 1980, and Glasgow during March. Additional stops added later began with Aberdeen in May of 1980, and concluded in Birmingham in November of 1981. (Vide infra.)
Sir John’s address to the Institution of Electrical Engineers is printed in ATOM 259, 1978 May.
The review of Lovins by Weinberg is one of several included (vide supra) in Weinberg’s book Continuing the Nuclear Dialogue.
Mr Wolfe’s piece in the International Atomic Energy Agency Bulletin, v24 no4, 1982 December, was adapted from a chapter which he contributed to a book entitled Nuclear Power, Both Sides : The best arguments for and against the most controversial technology, M Kaku and J T Thompson, editors (New York : WW Norton, 1982).
Sir John’s address is printed in ATOM 194, 1972 December. The entire talk is well worth reading. Some idealists argue that the way to improve the quality of life is to renounce technology and all its works and live in primitive simplicity. But realists must accept, I suggest, that improvements in the quality of life depend on, and must be sustained by, increases in economic output. Even quite modest assumptions about world economic growth point to a dependence on energy by the end of the century which can, in my opinion, be met sensibly only by major recourse to nuclear energy. I do not think anyone who has studied the figures for the growth in consumption of fossil fuels and considered the best estimates of world reserves would seriously challenge this assertion.
Mr Lamont is quoted in ATOM 286, 1980 August. He further said, Nuclear waste has aroused as much fear as perhaps any other aspect. Yet we produce many sorts of unpleasant waste in modern society, often nastier and longer–lasting than nuclear waste. For example, we accept that as part of the process of generating electricity from coal we produce substantial quantities of waste. In fact, a large coal–fired plant can produce about 20 lbs of solid waste per second. By comparison, the high–level wastes produced in one year by a nuclear power station, when suitably treated, amount to only a few cubic metres. I think one can reasonably ask why we behave as though nuclear wastes posed a new sort of problem with dangers greater than those we already live with.
Mr Wyatt is quoted in ATOM 286, 1980 August. The topic of his address was public inquiries into nuclear energy in Britain, Canda, Australia, and New Zealand.
Sir Alan is quoted in ATOM 303, 1982 January. Birmingham was the last stop of this traveling exhibition. He further said, It should never be forgotten that energy is the one and only fundamental physical resource. With energy, all material things are possible. Without it, none are. Here in Birmingham at the centre of a great industrial area huge amounts of iron, aluminium, glass, copper and other materials are worked up daily into all kinds of manufactured goods. What happens in these processes? The atoms themselves are not changed. Just as many iron, aluminium, copper and other atoms come out of a factory as go in. All that we do is move them about, mix them up and sort them into various patterns and shapes. And the one thing that is absolutely essential for all this, and which is used up in the process, is the high quality energy that comes out of electricity lines, gas pipes, and coal and oil bunkers. High quality energy is truly the lifeblood of industry and modern society.
Mr Allday is quoted in ATOM 277, 1979 November.
Mr Nickson is quoted in ATOM 285, 1980 July. He further said, I think it is most significant that Mr James Milne, general secretary of the Scottish TUC, opened this same exhibition when it ran in Glasgow last month. There are sadly not many platforms which the CBI and STUC can share confident that they will be speaking with the same enthusiastic voice in positive support. But nuclear energy is certainly one.
Glenn Seaborg, Nobel Laureate in chemistry, educator, administrator, and conservationist, chairman of the 1971 Geneva Conference, and the only person to have a chemical element named for him during his lifetime, scarcely needs introduction. William Corliss is a less familiar name. A physicist (MS, U.Colorado) with experience in industrial research laboratories, he was the author of several public–information booklets in the Understanding the Atom series published by the US Atomic Energy Commission, on topics as diverse as cosmic rays, computers, and nuclear rocket engines.
Their book Man and Atom is the reason we have chosen the name Man and Atom Society. The two hard–headed and exceptionally well–informed scientists explore, in a practical and straightforward manner very accessible to the layman, the uses and relevance of nuclear science and technology in human terms. Particular attention is given to what humanity can accomplish using large–scale energy supply from fission, and how this addresses social needs and goals.

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