I just watched an interesting PBS “Nova” presentation on nuclear power generation. I’ve been looking forward to this show, because as you may recall, I used to work for the propaganda division of the nuclear power industry–almost 50 years ago. Specifically, I worked for a non-profit institute that managed public information/education programs for the (private) industry that were administered by the federal government. It was my first job out of college, and my introduction to the curious overlap zone in the Venn diagram where think tanks, private companies, and the Federal government all intersect. I was curious about what sort of new technologies have been introduced into this industry since I got out of touch with it, and how its issues are being presented to the public, and how the societal debate is shaping up.

For starters, I should make clear that I have no fundamental objections to nuclear power generation. I agreed then, as I do today, with the central premise of this program–that nuclear fission will and must play a major role in meeting our civilization’s power needs. Solar cells and wind farms aren’t going to cut it. We need nukes or it is not clear how our civilization can continue much longer. Fossil fuels will eventually run out, and wreck our climate; possibly both. Unless we can develop a viable nuclear fusion technology (which may not even be technically possible) we will run out of energy sooner or later. Fission appears the only way out.

So, what did I learn? Not much, except there has been remarkably little new technology developed in this industry over the last half century. This is a mature technology. The two most promising technological solutions considered in the show, molten sodium metal and molten salt cooled reactors, were already under development when I was active in the field. but there are no obvious breakthroughs. Both were certainly technically feasible, but were inherently unstable and seemed overly complicated but potentially vulnerable to all sorts of problems.

For example, molten sodium in a heat exchanger only centimeters away from superheated water is a potential bomb guaranteed to rupture any containment vessel. They built a submarine based on that principle, but it was too difficult, dangerous and expensive to operate. Remember that experiment in high school chemistry? Drop a speck of solid sodium in room temperature water and you get real fireworks. Make sure you’re wearing your safety glasses. And who knows how the corrosion of metal piping by molten salts will be affected by metals irradiated by a high neutron flux? Its the Engineer’s Dilemma: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean its a good idea.

A few other cooling arrangements and configurations that address some of the problems that occurred at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima seem promising, but they all seem to fail to address the fundamental cause of an accident. That is, accidents are, by definition, unanticipated events. No matter how well you design for the last one, something you didn’t think of will always bite you in the ass next time. Sure, tsunamis should have been factored in to the equation, but it didn’t seem to occur to anybody in Japan, did it? Not even where the word itself was invented.

And of course, the question of nuclear wastes was only brought up obliquely, and the conversation quickly moved on to other, more pleasant topics. That problem hasn’t been addressed in over fifty years, all we get is some vague hand-waving about how the French have supposedly solved the problem. But they don’t say how.

Instead, the show moved from one scrubbed and geeky entrepreneur or researcher or other working on some aspect of the tech that supposedly was the magic bullet that would save our civilization, if only the gummint would just stop hamstringing these smart kids by over-regulation.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to nuclear power, and I do believe its problems are technical problems and they do have technical solutions. It can be done, with an acceptable minimum of risk (an occasional meltdown every decade or so is probably an unavoidable but acceptable price to pay). But its going to cost a lot of money and in the last half century the private sector has been loathe to spend any cash to solve those problems, and government has been unwilling to raise enough tax dollars to do it. We know how to take care of high-level wastes, for example, but we still haven’t done it because it COSTS TOO MUCH. Nuclear power is like health care, doing it right and doing it profitably are not simultaneously feasible. We’re just going to have to subsidize it at public expense because the private sector cannot be trusted to get it right. Maybe if we made the reactor vessels out of Rearden Metal…

As for the tone of the show, it was very reminiscent of my own experience in the industry. They didn’t come right out and lie, every thing they said was true, but the whole narrative was carefully crafted to persuade and convince. It was subtly cherry-picked and slanted, with the usual suspects trotted out to explain why American enterprise hasn’t been able to pull it off. Essentially, the message was,” if you just turn us loose we can lick this thing”. I worked for these people, believe me, I have a rap on high level nuclear wastes that will make you want to rush out and buy stock in it.

If you watch the show, wait for the closing credits, particularly the funding agencies.. Yeah, the Koch brothers figure prominently.