Customer Reviews

Nuclear Renaissance: Technologies and Policies for the Future of Nuclear Power

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Every university library in the UK and USA should have a copy of this; and every college teaching any kind of technology and society qualification.
Bill is not shy of stating his own opinions, but this never has any detrimental effect on the objectivity of the content. He really does not like the accounting distinction between a waste and an asset; particularly where plutonium is concerned, as this makes no difference to what you would actually do with the stuff. He is quite aware that it makes a big difference to the balance sheet of British Energy, but as he says, since this company was effectively destroyed by low electricity prices, it has to be bailed out by the UK government anyway. The term "actinide management" in the American dominated G-IV report also comes in for some criticism as a pointless euphemism for what eveyone knows is fuel reproessing.

Another political issue is that discussions of legacy nuclear waste are separated from discussions of waste from future programmes. Bill ably makes the point that optimising these two issues in isolation is likely to lead to a non-optimal overall programme.

The book is salted with intriguing asides: such as that the oil industries are much better at understanding risk and managing multi-decade projects, whereas todays electricity companies have problems imagining the future only one year ahead. Therefore the logical companies to develop fission reactors in the next 40 years are the existing oil and gas companies, not electricity producers. These companies also have the skills to use nuclear heat for chemical processing and not just electricity production.

There are additional points made that you would not find (certainly not easily) in any original reports: the issue of training and the availability of experienced nuclear engineers in the UK; the difficulty of finding independent nuclear waste disposal experts who have not at some time had a grant or contract from NIREX to study the issues. The "polluter pays" principle may seem obviously attractive, but Bill shows that it has awkward and counter-productive effects within the particular organisational structures we find ourselves inheriting in the UK. Similarly the "intergenerational equity" principle actually leads to exactly the opposite behaviour from that which one might want.

A technology policy point which is better articulated by Bill than anywhere else I have seen is in the view of risk: the public can prefer a techniology which the technical experts regard as not only dangerous, but professionally unethical. The public in many countries prefers risk to be borne by informed volunteers (employees, typically) whereas engineers tend to believe that it is preferable to structure risks so that the overall mininum number of people are affected. Thus many people prefer the option of "partioning and transmuting" fuel wastes to reduce the impact on future generations, even if the extensive new chemical processing required will almost inevitably lead to industrial accidents involving workers at the chemical plant. This is all disussed in the context of detailed expositions of the technologies of nuclear waste burners.

Light is also shed on philosophical distinctions: technical experts are generally logical whereas a sense of "natural order" is more common in environmental campaigners. Thus the two groups can come to opposite conclusions on the question of whether it is legal to dig up and then rebury some ore exactly as it was. Those "motivated by considerations of natural law" might regard it as absurd to criminalise that, whereas a legalistic mindset might take the opposite view.

The book offers a complete guide to all the major fission reactor types in use now and planned for the future, and a complete guide to the nuclear fusion options. This is the bulk of the book, but the technical descriptions are informed throughout by an appreciation of what these design distinctions mean in terms of proliferation risks, electricity grid load-following (or not), and the use of nuclear heat to make hydrogen. If you want ot learn more about the several pebble-bed reactor designs, modular reactors, molten-salt liquid nuclear fuels, reburning fuels without reprocessing, thorium fuel implications for waste management, mixed fission/fusion reactors, reactors cooled by liquid lead or reactors producing 1560 C Helium; then this is the book for you.

What is clear is that a number of different reactor types will be required in the future. If the UK and Russian plutonium stockpiles are to be disposed of, then that requires mixed oxide fuel systems; but if wastes are to be retained and transmuted at some future date using accelerator technologies, then the fuel should ideally be something that can be separated out - but in a way that impedes proliferation. The most proliferation-resistant fuels are also those that increase the volume of high level waste

There are absolutely no simple answers: the 100 tonnes of UK Plutonium is not going away (and with every passing year, more Americium accumulates in it, so increasing the disposal problems). However, with this book I have some confidence that we have in one place all the essentially relevant issues from which workable sets of policies can be constructed.

While in the UK we might prefer to buy our nuclear power in the form of electricity from France, if we are to take climate change seriously, then understanding where nuclear power is being used is an essential part of understanding the world of the 21st century.

Addendum: The book is about technologies world-wide, and policies in the developed world, particularly the background to possible new nuclear build in the USA, UK and the rest of Europe. Nevertheless, as Bill says, there is no need for a renaissance in France, Russia, China, South Africa and India where nuclear fission reactor deployment is continuing and expanding. I would like to know more about those programmes today, but perhaps that is another book.

The editing by the IoP leaves some unevenness: some repetition is expected between sections in what will be for most people a reference book. But to be told three times that the UK will have by 2010 an inventory of 100 tonnes of Plutonium, and that this is two-thirds of the world stockpile, is too much repetition (pages 97, 101 and 102).

The three sections of the book: "The Policy Landscape", "Nuclear Fission Technologies", and "Nuclear Fusion Technologies" are each followed by an extensive list of references.

This book is slightly marred by a somewhat fuzzy Afterword and reuse of identical language when the same information is repeated in different sections leading to a jarring sense of deja vue for one reading it cover-to-cover (As I did).

However it is a wonderful, highly readable, generally excelently observed, world overview/annotated bibliography of nuclear technologies -- providing in one volume valuable perspective, awesome research, and pointers to more definitive treatments for nearly every item discussed.