Two things came up this weekend, so I confess to getting little else done.
1. TED Talks posted six talks from their conference "Charter for Compassion." The 15-minute talks included comments by a Christian, a Rabbi, a Tensin, an Imam, a Swami, and an atheist. While I haven't watched them all, I found the one by the atheist Robert Wright best for drilling down. He basically talks about the evolutionary basis for compassion, that is, for the Golden Rule, using simplified game theory. The comments on the talk obviously mentioned Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, they were no surprise, but one mentioned George R. Price, an unfamiliar name - so I surfed. Aside from the Wikipedia article, I found a fascinating biography and review of his work in the archives of Lingua Franca which also explains some of the work of William D. Hamilton. Well worth the time to read because he was such an unusual person.
Robert Wright's web site, http://meaningoflife.tv/, is also worth surfing.
2. The other topic that came up somehow led to an article in American Spectator online magazine titled Unscientific American that pillories the article on the November, 2009 cover of Scientific American magazine. One of my favorite activities is blasting that magazine. So the article was garbage, as usual, but one of the comments led me to a Scientific American article in 2005 titled Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste. It reviews the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), a fast breeder reactor developed at Argonne National Laboratory in the 1980s which GE later converted to a commercial design called the Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor (ALMR), and started to build a plant on the Clinch River in Tennessee. It was 80% complete when Jimmy Carter cancelled it in 1979. Later, the Clinton administration cancelled the last couple of years of the Argonne program because "Nobody is clamoring for nuclear power." Ronald Regan briefly revived the Clinch River project in1981, but Congress cancelled it in 1983 because cost overruns would make the plant uncompetitive with oil or coal.
The bottom line is that these reactors not only consume the nuclear waste that existing thermal reactors produce, they also consume the Plutonium and other Actinides in the waste. "A 1,000-megawatt-electric thermal-reactor plant, for example, generates more than 100 tons of spent fuel a year. The annual waste output from a fast reactor with the same electrical capacity, in contrast, is a little more than a single ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics." So, instead of producing products with half-lives of 10,000+ years, ... its radiation would decay to the level of the ore from which it came in several hundred years..." Beyond that, since conventional reactors consume a very small part of the Uranium in their fuel rods, we could face shortages of Uranium within 100 years, about the same time we completely run out of very expensive oil. Fast breeders are 100 times more efficient because they consume 99% of the fuel. And if that's not enough, these reactors are inherently safe. Unlike thermal reactors, they need no mechanical or human intercession if something goes wrong. They shut down on their own. The worst that can happen is a fire after the release of some liquid sodium. No nuclear debris.
As if that's not enough, these plants are designed to purify their own spent fuel rods in house. No transportation off site is required, nor does the re-processed fuel need to be transported back. Only the original fuel need be brought in, the same fuel that we are now planning to store in Yucca Mountain for 10,000+ years!
I'm surprised I had not known about this technology. If we had been working on it for the last 30 years, it would be perfected by now. Instead, the Russians, French, Japanese, Chinese, and South Koreans are way ahead of us.
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