Slashdot Mirror
USA to Pass Science Crown to China
instantgames writes "According to a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research, rapid development of a science and technology base by populous Asian countries soon may threaten the economic position of the United States. Not only is the U.S. losing ground in high technology exports, but its very capacity to develop new technologies is declining rapidly with respect to the rest of the world. According to Richard Freeman, the paper's author, the sheer population of Asian countries may allow them to train more scientists and engineers than the U.S. while devoting a smaller share of their economy to science and technology." From the article: "The phenomenal growth of China's industrial base has been widely publicized, but Freeman focuses on what is perhaps the more important long-term indicator of a nation's prosperity - its re-investment in science and technology education.
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Still, some economists argue that China isn't growing nearly as quickly as it could. How could that be?
One probable cause is that infrastructure for research and development has a long way to go in many developing Asian countries, especially China. Having some history behind your scientific community has its benefits. Thats why, even with our moral and ethical hurdles in the way, we're still winning the "great stem cell race." For now.
(enjoy the plugs for great articles in my favorite magazine)
tcd004
Look, there are five big issues with nuclear power:
1. The waste is toxic, and not biodegradable, so it remains toxic for longer than the lifespan of any historical civilization.
2. The waste can be used to build nuclear weapons.
3. Reactors can melt down.
4. Reactors can accidentally emit radioactive material into the atmosphere.
5. Reactors wear out, and when they are no longer usable, the entire reactor is itself toxic waste, and remains that way for longer than the life of any known civilization. Tearing down the reactor inevitably releases this waste into the environment - the groundwater, the soil, and the atmosphere.
It's quite possible that all of these problems can be solved. It's also true that in some cases, coal power is worse than nuclear. For example, fly ash from coal contains a certain number of parts per million of uranium, radium and thorium, depending on where it was mined.
But let's be clear. Pebble bed solves the meltdown problem. That's all it solves. It doesn't solve the waste problem.
Theory is that breeder reactors might solve the waste problem - in fact, what they allow you to do is extract about 75 times more energy from the same uranium, which is very cool indeed, and what's left is much less radioactive than what you started with (but it's still radioactive).
Unfortunately, the best example we have of a fast breeder reactor is the Superphenix reactor in France. This was shut down in 1997 because it began to fail in exciting ways, prematurely, particularly due to problems in the liquid sodium (!) cooling system. So this technology, unlike pebble bed reactors, isn't as stable as one would wish.
So we've completely addressed problem (3), and there's the possibility that problems (1) and (2) may be partially addressed by breeder reactor technology at some future time. But they aren't completely addressed even in the future, and aren't addressed at all in the present. Plus, we're still left with the other two problems, which are quite significant.
So you do the math. What's the cost/benefit analysis for coal? For solar? For nuclear? For wind? For some combination of these? If you think the answer is easy, you probably haven't actually done the math.
I think the reason for the wide disparity of opinions on this topic is that (a) people value different things differently, and (b) nobody is really even talking about the same thing.
For example, when someone talks about recycling nuclear fuel with breeder reactors, they're speaking hypothetically, even if they don't know it, because the technology isn't yet mature enough to be able to say that it's actually usable in practice. All current practical experiments have thus far yielded failure, although some have been more successful than others, and we do know that the basic idea does work.
Likewise when someone talks about getting energy from kites, it's also hypothetical, because nobody's actually doing it in production yet. Once again, there have been trials, and we do know that the basic idea does work, but we do not yet know if it can be used in practice, en masse.
Both things are interesting, but when you're discussing energy policy decisions, neither thing is presently relevant, and neither will be until they have demonstrated success in production.
Likewise, for some people, the value of generation techniques that produce no first-order pollution byproducts (i.e., combustion byproducts or fission byproducts) is more attractive than techniques that do produce these byproducts. It's important that we not let ourselves be fooled by the lack of first-order byproducts when the second-order byproducts overwhelm the first-order byproducts (e.g., the debate about the net energy cost to build a solar panel).
But assuming that we are taking these factors into account, it's still possible that even if the generation cost of, for example, solar, in dollars, were more than the generation cost of, for example, nuclear, it might still be better to build solar, because we are not counting certain externalities which, while they don't cost in dollars, do still matter.