"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Hi everyone,

A somewhat frivolous title to this blog, quoted from the first season of Monty Python. Unfortunately, it sprung to the mind of the WGG in response to a true tragedy. Over our lifetimes both Barbara and I have had the joyous opportunity to visit Japan and we have both fallen in love with the Japanese people, their culture and, of course, their food.

I also love Japanese technology and their thorough approach to design and planning. Until this week that is.

Putting aside the tragedy of the earthquake, as difficult as that is, and the loss of life, as impossible as that is to do, I think we need to understand the nuclear problem they have and its ramifications for the deployment of similar systems elsewhere.

Let me preface my next comments with an acknowledgement of my strong bias in favour of nuclear electric power generation. In my day an engineering degree was a pretty close approximation of a physics degree and, while not in the business, I would say I have a better view than the layperson of how this technology works and its relative strengths and weaknesses. Further I am also an opponent of giving money to people who want to kill me or of using low efficiency, high pollution technologies for power generation.

So the situation with the generation sites in Japan. What happened? Well, the core of a nuclear reactor generally contains some rods of either processed Uranium or Plutonium of which that atoms shed particles called neutrons and interact with other atoms in the core which generates more neutrons. This is called a chain reaction and it makes a lot of heat and radiation. The heat is used to bring water to the boil and make steam to drive turbines which in turn makes electricity.

What happened in Japan was that when the earthquake hit, by design, the power was cut to the pumps which drive water through the core. Immediately diesel generators kicked in, as was designed for, to keep the pumps going and not let the core overheat. Then, the unexpected happened - nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition - and the Tsunami hit and drowned out the diesel generators. They planned for the quake but not the Tsunami, even though the two go together. The essence of disaster recovery planning is saying "What if it hits the fan and smells really bad?" and that was not what happened here.

So, what does this imply for the nuclear power industry? Well, we can't burn petroleum forever and if the man made causes of climate change are actually irrefutably established, coal isn't good. So, wind? Maybe but the energy density generated is relatively low and it is not particularly reliable. Solar - great but it is enormously difficult to store the energy for when the sun goes down? Tons of other options but first among them is nuclear and the more we invest in it and plan for the real appearance of the Spanish Inquisition, the better we will be at dealing with the avoiding exactly this kind of problem. If we get over our fear we can deal with cost, safety and waste management problems. Kudos the to Japanese for getting it so close to right - unfortunately "close" doesn't quite cut it under some circumstantes. The Spanish Inquisition is like that...

Bit of a piss poor time to talk about this but, we need that technology.

Paul