Duffy to announce nuclear reactor on the moon

[thucythucy]

117. Hi NNadir, I'm always glad to see you here.

I've been meaning for a while now to ask your thoughts on something, and figure now is as good a time as any.

What I'm about to describe is my principle worry about building lots of nuclear reactors here on earth.

I think that many of the technical issues that folks raise in opposition, for instance the issue of spent fuel and other waste have--at least on paper--technical solutions available to us today. There are problems of course, but we have the technology in place to deal with these issues, providing the funding and politcal will is there as needed.

It's the political/social/human issues, the ones I'm about to describe, that worry me, and which seem to me less amenable to solution.

I'm thinking, for instance, of what's happening now in Ukraine. We had Russian troops digging trenches inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone, thus re-exposing dangerous materials. But even worse, in terms of potential danger, has been the threat to the Zaporizhzhia Power Station, the largest in Europe and one of the 10 largest plants in the world. For a while the plant was caught between warring armies, and as I recall there were concerns that a stray shell or drone might hit the plant, either by accident or deliberately. And it wasn't even necessary for such a strike to put the plant and the region around it at risk, since there was a period when the plant was understaffed--perhaps dangerously so--because many workers didn't relish the idea of commuting through a war zone to get to work. At least this was how this was described in the press.

And the idea of a deliberate attack on a power station isn't all that far fetched. Evidently the Russians fired a drone at the containment arch that now covers Chernobyl, punching a good size and thus compromising the air pressure system that keeps air from escaping in the event of a wider breach or accident of some kind.

You might say that we can try to build reactors only in regions of relative political and social stability. But how can we guarantee such stability for the time frames this would entail--decades or more, probably far more? Back in the 1970s and '80s, when these power stations were built, most everyone assumed the USSR was among the most stable regimes on the planet. And yet here we are.

I can't think of a single region on earth that has been politically and socially stable for the length of time needed here, aside from Antarctica.

Granted, any major piece of infrastructure is vulnerable to the ravages of war. Films of post-war Europe certainly bring that point home. But the effects of a nuclear plant being bombed or rocketed are so severe that even a single instance would be catastrophic. The only other example I can think of that would be at all comparable to blasting a nuclear plant would be smashing a major dam. The British did this to the Ruhr dams during WWII, which caused major flooding and killed perhaps thousands of people. But disastrous as that was, the cleanup was a fairly straight-forward affair, and those regions that were flooded now appear to be entirely unscathed. I don't know if that would be at all the case in the event of a similar attack upon even a smaller nuclear power plant.

I wonder: what are your thoughts on this? A while back you posted about proposals to build plants across Africa, which raised this issue for me, but even before that I'd been mulling this over as a concern.

Are my worries about this unfounded? Is there a way to construct plants so that they would be invulnerable to any surrounding upheaval--civil war or war between nations such as between Iran and Iraq, intense civil unrest such as we've seen in recent decades in Yugoslavia or Rwanda? And even if the physical plant could be made secure in all circumstances, how do we ensure safe levels of staffing for the life of any plant, so we don't see problems such as what we've seen in Ukraine?

A long winded post, I know. But for me this is the one huge stumbling block I see to building the number of facilities needed to replace carbon based forms of energy. All the other issues, like I said, seem solvable, at least on a technical level. But humanity is so unstable, human beings so often destructive, and the potential for even one major plant to cause widespread and long lasting damage should it fall victim to that sort of human depravity, I have difficulty seeing how we can guarantee with any degree of certainty that such an event could never happen.

Is this something that has been considered by engineers such as yourself? Are there any fixes for this that you know of?

Thanks for reading through all this. I'm very much looking forward to your reply and the possibility that my worries in this regard might be put to rest.

Best wishes--