This post extends from the discussion on Global Warming. Alternative energy sources were being discussed and nuclear came to the forefront of the conversation. Nuclear (fission) technology has matured, we know it works and with the new reactor designs there is a lot less chance of anything going wrong — and there was never much of a chance to begin with.

The worst nuclear accident in the US, unit two at the Three-Mile Island facility, was caused by a very complex combination of design flaws and human error which was just incredibly unlikely. Even so, it did happen, but there were no deaths or even illnesses in the workers or surrounding communities that could be scientifically linked to the accident — and believe me, they looked.

The worst nuclear disaster in world history, reactor four at Chernobyl, was due to in-part to the testing of new safety protocols which poorly planned, poorly communicated even between the reactor staff themselves, and therefore poorly executed. Still, the fatal detail is that this was a graphite-moderated reactor — a design that I do not believe is approved for commercial power generation in the US.  The graphite not only poses different latent safety issues than heavy or light-water reactors, it also poses active safety issues post-accident because it is highly combustible (and saturated with radioactive particles).

The new designs of nuclear reactors GE and others have created are incredibly safe not only because the engineers have had decades to perfect their designs but also because we've had decades of experience running less sophisticated reactors (safely, I might add. Over 100 active in the US) and through them they've learned all the things that could be improved to be made even safer.

Nuclear power only has three major concerns. We've addressed the issue of operational safety, but many people against nuclear power these days are concerned about terrorism. This is a fair point, however nuclear reactors tend to be located in enclosed facilities with tight security. More importantly, blowing up a reactor won't necessarily spread any significant radiation beyond the facility itself. As I mentioned, our reactors (even the old ones) are significantly different from the reactor that melted down at Chernobyl and we've added many new safety features to them over the years.

There are just a ton of fail-safes built into the system that cause the reaction to stop if a serious problem occurs. Granted, nothing is 100%, but realistically it's not really something worth being concerned about. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with flying in an airplane too, but because the benefits are so great we kept pushing forwards until we learned to minimize the risks. After half a century, Nuclear power is there.

The final concern is waste. There are actually two kinds of nuclear waste, the low-radioactivity waste generated during day-to-day functioning of the reactor and the high-radioactivity waste of the spent fuel rods. There is actually a fair amount of nuclear waste to worry about, but most of it is the low-radioactivity waste, which isn't particularly dangerous and will be completely innocuous within a century or so.

Obviously nuclear waste material is still more dangerous than old newspapers, so much care is taken in the site and method of its disposal, but most communities are probably in more danger from illegal dumping of dry-cleaning chemicals (which can eventually make their way into the drinking water) and other hazards they aren't even aware of. To be clear, I'm not suggesting people start running in fear of their local dry cleaner, but rather I'm trying to illustrate that disposal of nuclear waste is extremely well regulated and not something to be concerned with.

In fact, even with the high-radioactivity waste there isn't much to be concerned with. Enormous care is taken to properly store the materials and shield the surrounding environment from them. This is incredibly expensive, but because there is so comparatively little of this type of waste it's only a small expense in the big picture.

There are also concerns about nuclear waste that center around terrorism. These generally center around the possibility of a "dirty bomb", however such a device is almost laughable — not because it couldn't be constructed, but because there wouldn't be much of a point.

In a nutshell, the dirty bomb is a hypothetical device where a conventional explosive is placed inside radioactive waste, thereby spreading it over a wide area when it goes off. The problem with this is that the effects of radioactivity on the human body decrease exponentially with the amount of exposure — both quantity and time.  The highest concentration of radioactive materials would be within the blast radius of the conventional explosive, and anyone inside that blast radius would be killed regardless. Anyone outside of that radius would receive exponentially lower and lower doses of radiation depending on their distance, and since their natural reaction would probably be to run, even that exposure would be limited.

So, while such a device sounds really scary, it involves getting hold of a lot of material that's very difficult to get hold of in order to construct a bomb that could potentially be detected preemptively (by law enforcement agencies equipped to scan for radioactivity, which is no longer uncommon in many US cities) and in the end the result isn't much different from a regular bomb. It just sounds scarier. Again, this isn't something to realistically be concerned about.

Ultimately, there are a lot of scary-sounding things about nuclear energy, but in reality there really is very little to worry about. Personally, I think thin-film solar cells will become extremely economical when mass-produced and I think that's the way new-energy is moving — I don't expect nuclear will be the "way of the future" but if it is, it's important to put all the fears and bad press into perspective. Nuclear isn't perfect, but we've been doing it for a long, long time and we've got a pretty good handle on all of the potential pitfalls.  Even our most serious nuclear accident didn't result in a single death, and we've learned much since then. Nuclear energy should absolutely have a place at the table in any discussion on "clean" energy sources, especially since fuels like ethanol have seats at that table and can be considered far more harmful, both to the environment and the economy.