Green Group discussion

by Adam Higginbotham

I will post some of my comments from reading about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Feel free to contribute anything about Chernobyl or nuclear power.

I have long been fascinated with Russia. Russian dissenters have long been my heroes going all the way back to Alexander Solzhenitsyn up to Pussy Riot and Garry Kasparov. It feels like Russia has an inferiority complex. The government is always trying to look bigger and stronger than they really are. Thus the arms buildups, the Olympic obsession, the meddling. In the case of Chernobyl, it was the cover ups, the refusal to admit mistakes, the effort to make the reactor bigger than anything else no matter how many corners had to be cut.

As Higginbotham said, "Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position, at every stage, relayed the lies upward or compounded them." (15)

Thanks, excellent choice due to the tv series recently.

I will suggest everyone then read:
Wolves Eat Dogs

by Martin Cruz Smith

"Seated at the top of a teetering pyramid of falsehood, poring over reams of figures that had little basis in reality, were the economic mandarins of the State General Planning Committee--Gosplan--in Moscow." (15)

It worries me that Trump and his climate change deniers are setting up something of the same situation here in the US. Facts are not important in this administration. And scientific facts are even less important to the Trumpites.

". . . the plans called for fireproof cables, but when none could be found, the builders simply did the best they could." (20)

"When the ministry of energy in Moscow learned that the roof of the plant's turbine hall had been covered with highly flammable bitumen, they ordered him to replace it. But the flame-retardent material . . . was not even being manufactured in the USSR, so the Ministry granted Brukhanov an exception, and the bitumen remained." (20)

But when they ordered him to build an "olympic-sized swimming pool," he had to "hoodwink the state bank" to build it. He had no choice but to obey the order.

Considering all of these facts, it makes me wonder if Chernobyl is the best way to look at nuclear power. The fault lies more with the communist system and its lack of regulatory power. People always think of communist systems as having too many regulations. In reality, communism has few regulations because it is all about the power at the top, like with Trump.

The goal was to build "increasingly gigantic stations throughout the western territories of the Union. By the end of the century, Moscow intended Chernobyl to be one part of a dense network of atomic power megacomplexes." (20) In spite of "alarming building faults," the work kept on.

I recently read Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (who received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature). I can strongly recommend the book.

Part of the HBO series is based on it. For instance the firefighter's wife and the parts about shooting pets.

If you want to join a group read the "Catching up on Classics"-group
https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
is reading it in December.
The pre-reading discussion is here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Jimmy wrote: ".... As you may know, there was a terrific mini-series on HBO about this book."

How much is the HBO series based on the book?

According to to Wikipedia:

"The miniseries is based in large part on the recollections of Pripyat locals, as told by Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich in her book Voices from Chernobyl.".

No other books are mentioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernob...

You are correct, BlueFlower. The tv series was not based on Higginbotham's book. It was based on the book Voices from Chernobyl. I have edited my first post to eliminate that mistake. Thank you for pointing it out to me.

On pages 62 to 63, the designers saw "no need to prepare for such a calamity" in reference to the worst possible scenarios. All warnings about the dangers were ignored.

Former Chernobyl chief engineer Nikolai Steinberg said that the origins of the disaster lay in a combination of "scientific, technological, socioeconomic, and human factors" unique to the USSR. (347)

The Soviet Union "lacked even rudimentary safety practices." They "relied upon its operators to behave with robotic precision night after night." They were under "constant pressure to beat deadlines." All of this made "disregard for the letter of the regulations almost inevitable." The deceased operators of Control Room Number Four "had brought the reactor into an unstable condition, but only on account of the acute pressure they felt to complete the test on the turbine." (347)

"Some environmentalists argued that humanity could not afford to turn its back on the promise and terrors of the peaceful atom. The global need for electricity was increasing exponentially: humanity was predicted to double the amount of energy it used by 2050. Despite the growing certainty that burning fossil fuels was the cause of devastating climate change--making the stabilization of carbon emissions imperative--coal remained the most widely used source of energy in the world. The fine particulates from fossil fuel plants in the United States killed more than thirteen thousand people a year; worldwide, three million people died annually as a result of air pollution released by coal- and oil-fueled power stations. Even to begin to head off climate change over the coming thirty-five years would have to be clean, yet neither wind, solar, hydroelectric, nor geothermal power--nor any combination of them--had the potential to bridge the gap." (357 to 358)

"And at last, more than seventy years after the technology's inception, engineers were finally developing reactors with design priorities that lay not in making bombs but in generating electricity. In principle, these fourth-generation reactors would be cheaper, safer, smaller, more efficient, and less poisonous than their predecessors and could yet prove to be the technology that saves the world." (358)

There is a "liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR)" developed at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is fueled by "thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. . . . It does not require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground." (358)

"In 2015, Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world's first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. 'The problem of coal has become clear,' the engineering director of the project said. 'Nuclear power provides the only solution.'" (358)

I was selective in my quotes. The question now is, Must we turn to nuclear power as a last resort to get out of the mess of climate change? I would be interested in your responses.

James Lovelock, who created the Gaia concept,
From 2004, and today is still saying that nuclear energy is the only safe source of green power that can meet all the needs of power that we need right now. The damage from nuclear accidents will be far less than the damage caused by the heat from climate change. Can nuclear reactors stand up to the new weather patterns?

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...
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There are no practical commercial designs for the safe thorium reactors ready to be built. The cost of designing and testing practical commercial designs are apparently astronomical. No one wants to spend the money.

The guardian has a good article that tells everything that the advertisement articles are leaving out. There are radioactive products used in the process that have the half lives of tens of thousands of years. None of the articles said if those materials were separate from the thorium itself, which is a far safer material. The thorium has to be jacked up to work as a fuel. It is not used as is.

https://www.theguardian.com/environme...
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The liquid salt is highly corrosive and this by itself is causing design problems. In the case of a flood, releasing hot molten salt out into the flood waters would seem like an impractical solution to turning off a reactor in an emergency situation.

The thorium is hard to handle and has serious problems making it into a fuel. These can be seen from the downsides to using thorium as a nuclear fuel section. Probably where all the cost in the start up bottleneck is coming from.

https://whatisnuclear.com/thorium.html
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2018, the thorium process is not proliferation proof, if that matters.

https://thebulletin.org/2018/08/thori...#
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The thorium use in India is not what the safe reactor articles are talking about. The article has a lot of mumble jumble for ordinary people but it appears to be saying that in India they have succeeded in making uranium and plutonium from thorium and will use it in water reactors?

"In the third stage, using wholly indigenous technology, the country will use advanced heavy-water reactors fueled with U-233 obtained from the irradiation of thorium in PHWRs and fast reactors."

https://www.powermag.com/indian-desig...
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As is always the case, it's not the materials used, but how the materials are used. Personally the talk of downplaying of risk taking is not sufficient to show that the molten salt thorium route is not without problems, some of which could be serious. So far as I can find, the only thorium reactors that have run so far are test models to show that it can be done, but they don't show that it can be done on a large scale commercial basis for a long period of time. The corrosive salt factor might make them "disposable" devices that will have big price tags.

The nuclear industry has been researching the use of mini reactors, the idea being they can be cheaply built in a factory and are easy to install and set up, and would have small size problems if an accident were to happen.

https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2019/...

I appreciate that information, Robert. My knowledge of nuclear power is so limited that I try to remain neutral in most discussions.

I’m with Jimmy I don’t have much knowledge on this subject but I recall seeing that the Gates foundation was working on how to design a safer reactor and they came up with a model for one using liquid metal as a coolant whose melting point is so high that it’s virtually impossible for a accident to happen due to runaway reaction: They were partnering with China who was going to build a reactor based on this design then Trump was elected and he banned all technology transfers and here we are.

"it’s virtually impossible for a accident to happen"
Unlikely, almost impossible, shouldn't happen, the problem is that nuclear reactors leave a big foot print when they have a bad accident. The fuel disposal problem has never been solved. Most of the thorium fuel products are only bad for a couple of hundred years. We haven't had nuclear fuel piling up for longer than 80 years and it is already a big problem.

I don't think much of Gates ideas that stray away from helping people who need help now, which he does a very good job of. He is championing the building of a vast building project on the shore land in Tampa FL, on the Gulf Coast. It is on the corner of Water Street and Channelside Drive. The names sound nice on a salesman brochure but they also indicate that the water is not far away.

Built at sea level in a hurricane zone where the storm surge is only going to get worse. The rate of sea level in the Tampa area has been upgraded to a higher rate than previously thought. It doesn't sound like the best location for the way the future is going, but someone had to build there, someone had to make a profit off the sale of redeveloped land that maybe should have been returned back to the way it was 100 years ago.

It is on The Times Book Review Top 10 book of the year:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/bo...

It is a tremendous effort, and the author is considered an expert on the topic.