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Pandora's Promise and the Problem of "Solutionism"
Lasrick writes "Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reviews Pandora's Promise, a new documentary that focuses on environmental activists like Stewart Brand who have gone from vehemently anti-nuclear to vehemently pro-nuclear views. Good points brought up by Benedict that weren't really addressed in the film."
From the article: "The flaw in the film's approach is its zealous advocacy of one solution — one silver bullet — to meet the tremendous challenges of providing for some nine billion people by 2050, while also protecting societies from the ravages of climate disruption. The kind of thinking that led some of these environmentalists to single-mindedly protest nuclear power plants during the 1970s and 1980s leads them to just-as-single-mindedly advocate a push toward nuclear power 40 years later."
Of course they want nuclear power -- they just don't want it here.
The "you can only skip six times an hour" does indeed suck!
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
If that doesn't happen, it will be because solar undercut the price of nuclear without the waste or security problems... in that case, even better!
around 2000 there was a huge push for natural gas. lots of greenie talking heads on TV and ads on TV saying how natural gas was awesome and oil was evil
demand surged, prices surged. people spent lots of money converting from oil heating
we got fracking which the same environmentalists now say is evil along with natural gas which now causes global warming. but it didn't 13 years ago.
Ethanol had the same story a few years later
i would be looking to invest in some nuclear power. these people aren't rooting for the environment, but are leeches looking to make a buck for themselves at the expense of everyone else
The most important thing for us to be spending our money on is trying to avoid that 9 billion, or at least trying not to go beyond it. Universally available (heavily subsidized) contraception is the first place to start. Secondly try to counter those who actually WANT to increase population numbers, like Erdogan & Romney and their respective religions. Once that's done there'll still be plenty of money left to pay for nuclear power.
Ironically, my mind has almost done the same but in reverse. As a sci-fi buff, and futurist, I love the idea, and have since the '70s, but the potential for megadisaster, though incredibly low, is severe if it ever happens.
Maybe the US and Western Europe can do it right, or right-er, anyway, but what about plants popcorning up all over the world? Will they follow the latest and greatest? Especially if it involves nationalism by local politicians to design it themselves.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How about one BIG bullet and multiple smaller ones?
Dark Reflection
Creaating nuclear power efficiently today requires uranium, something that is very limited on this planet.
If Fukashima has not occurred, we would be currently looking at a global uranium shortage in the next 5 years as existing major sources (re-purposing from old warheads) dry up and are not replaced with new mines.
Whenever production of power plants comes back on track, we will once again be facing such a shortage.
As far as I can tell, what's coming out the wrong end of a thorium reactor will be a molten salt soup of toxic, possibly very corrosive, and VERY radioactive materials
As opposed to what comes out of the "wrong end" of any coal-fired plant?
In any case, the above does not sound very pleasant. It sounds expensive and dangerous and potentially hazardous, a lot like how we store spent fuel rods now.
Dangerous *and* potentially hazardous? Well, let's give up and start living in caves then.
There's plenty of info on thorium reactors. Google can help you there. But you're not really interested in anything but spreading FUD. Carry on, then.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
The review doesn't disagree that nuclear is a big part of the solution, it just complains that the authors sweep aside all other considerations and doesn't like their attitude toward anti-nuclear activists. In other words, it wants the anti-nuclear activists to have a voice.
What is disingenuous about Pandora's Promise is the way the new judgment is conveyed. The film mocks groups that continue to protest nuclear power, treating one-time colleagues as extremists and zealots. An audience discussion after a preview at the University of Chicago made it clear I was not the only one who sensed the self-righteous tone of the newly converted in the film's narrative. In the end, by dismissing the protestors and failing to engage them in significant debate about the pros and cons of nuclear energy, the film undermined its own message.
Nobody loves nuclear power, but what else can provide sufficient power to the world without damaging the climate? Burning carbon, including natural gas, will cause a catastrophe. Wind, solar and geothermal can't ramp up fast enough to meet power demand, AFAIK. Only nuclear power provides sufficient energy without causing more climate change.
Chernobyl. Fukushima. Two megadisasters in my lifetime doesn't count as "incredibly low potential" in my book. Though frankly, I am more concerned about the lack of long-term storage facilities for high-level waste. Meltdowns can only happen while the reactor is operating; radioactive waste is a disaster waiting to happen any time in the next 10,000 years.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
What is this, 1950? I'm leaving these old timers behind and hopping on the pro-random-matter-fusion energy plant bandwagon. Yeah, the project is like 3x over budget and congress wants heads to roll but I want my Mr Fusion damn it. Also, I'm pre-pro-antimatter/matter reaction-based energy too. As in it hasn't technically been formally invented yet but I'm still all for it.
Empirically, across a pretty wide range of situations, energy efficiency improvements tend to actually increase rather than decrease net energy usage, an observation known as the Jevons paradox.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Plenty of information, no actual reactors.
Don't count your less radioactive chickens just yet.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And lighting and computer use are just a small fraction of the total power budget.
The elephant in the room is population and the desire for same to adopt higher standards of living (imagine that...) which ALWAYS results in using more energy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If Fukashima has not occurred, we would be currently looking at a global uranium shortage in the next 5 years as existing major sources (re-purposing from old warheads) dry up and are not replaced with new mines.
Whenever production of power plants comes back on track, we will once again be facing such a shortage.
Yes there are limited reserves of uranium like everything else on the planet, but there is a lot more than 5 years... more like 200 according to this article. This is important because it buys us time to get technologies which are actually clean (looking at you, solar energy researchers) up to the speed of our current energy sources. Or find something else
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Best to have a diversified diet. The government needs to do only 2 things: don't subsidize, and make sure every energy form pays for its REAL cost. And that means one motherfucking hefty CO2 tax, and a big piggy bank full of money next to every nuclear plant to pay for dismantling when the time comes.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Doesn't matter if you blame the hippies - the bankers are the ones that are not going to let nuclear happen.
people selling snake oil or people whining about "solutionism".
Since when is a documentary required to promote every possible agenda? I haven't seen the documentary, but I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that it does not ignore nuclear power's downsides, especially considering its focus on previously anti-nuclear environmentalists.
"Solutionism" is a thought terminating cliche, a way to dismiss any solution because it doesn't encompass every possible solution. It's a ploy for people who only know rhetoric and politics to wrestle control of the debate from people who know science and engineering.
Consider the vacuous absurdity of the closing of the article:
No one is under any obligation to please you, the head of an anti-nuclear activist group, which is no stranger to zealotry. If you want other options, make your own documentary to promote them. You can make it "fact-based" too!
I think thorim reactors have a lot of potential. It's frustrating if non-proliferation treaties are in the way because thorium reactors don't produce bomb material. You still have the waste-storage problem, though.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Increasing energy efficiency is STILL a good thing, because it means that the increased use of it comes at a lower cost, raising overall standards ofThe living.
In other words, this is an interesting observation, but completely irrelevant to the question of whether increased efficiencies are something to promote or not. They are only relevant to the question of how "how much energy are we going to need in the future" and to "what kind of policies do we want to pursue if we want to reduce the usage of energy". The answer to the latter is always "use tax".
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
You seem to be saying nuclear power is safe because the risks were known, but nobody did anything about them. I say nuclear power is unsafe, for exactly the same reason.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
We need more like him: Stewart fuckin' Brand.
See also Long Now Foundation.
-kgj
Solutionism?
Seriously?
How deprived of all faculity of thinking must a movement become to come up with the idea of "solutionism" as a critique? There is a problem and people think about solutions. Any solution would, of course, be reason for existential difficulties of the problem. But the problem is the basis of power of said movements. When the problem goes away, so does the power that came with it, when the movement came into existence and so does the only solution the movement sanctioned: complete austerity and refraining from any use of technology and any interaction with nature as much as in any way possible.
"Solutionism" is the latest, most ludicrous and hopefully last, attempt at defending the only solution "environmentalism" ever came up - by denying the adequancy of any solution of their problem whatsoever. Thus perpetuating their claim to power indefinitely - you know, the UNSOLVED PROBLEMS of technology.
Go and rot in hell.
That's true, I'm not saying energy efficiency is bad or anything. But I was responding to the claim that increasing energy efficiency will stop per-capita energy usage from increasing.
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So much money spent chasing different solutions... Billions into solar etc. Why can't we get $200 Million for a 100 megawatt Polywell Fusion plant? It'll either work, or fall on it's ass. Compared to the billions spent on the other pipe dreams a $200 Million dollar yes/no crapshoot seems pretty reasonable to me. The reward is worth it. The risk is pretty minimal. $200 Million that would be wasted in any other area of government.
The summary paints this picture that it's defective motivations that lead people to go from anti nuke to pro nuke. Au contrair. In the 1970s and 1980s it made a lot of sense to be anti-nuke just as it now makes sense to be anti-GMO. Those people did us a huge favor. They forced these industries to account for the unpaid externality costs that they were free ridiing on. The nuke industry was a headlong rush to market paid for with public bonds going into private investors pockets with very little accounting for the costs of downstream waste disposal, the risks of faclities, and under appreciated environmental costs (such as the tennessee rivers being sterilized by excessive heating).
The protestors forced the nuke industry to face a large regulatory and captical risk hurdle to develop new plants. This forced a better accounting even if the actual costs they were including were only proxies for the real costs. IN the mean time the technology has advanced remarkably.
We also have a better grip on the future costs of peower production and an attentiveness to conservation of power that we did no have then. Fracking has come online, renewables are forming a competitive market.
Nuke power now has a good role to play as a major part of a power mix, especially in china where demand is insatiable and the olny alternative is coal.
It makes complete sense to start developing nuclear power under these safe, sober conditions with the externalities properly built into the costs.
thus this is not "soluionism" as a reasoning defect. It's simply good reasoning in both cases. changing your mind as conditions change actually shows these people were not simply hung up on nuclear = evil but rather the nuclear plants of the time in the market of the time were potentially a bad idea.
I'd say GMO and Fracking are at the same level today. There's a gold rush for these with very little accounting for the true external costs (e.g. water aquifer destruction, fugitive methane, and maybe earthquakes, all being uncosted while wars are driving up the price of oil faster than alternatives can replace it. This means market forces now are out of balance and could cause imprudent envirnmental destruction).
But fracking can be done safely eventually but may have to be done away from aquifers and with better technology.
GMO is going to be the next green revolution. But it's fraught with perils. Even the risk of excessive monocropping leading to a potatoe famine like disaster is not absurd. GMO is oversold right nowand is dangerous because of the unkown risk exposure but will be very important later. We need to let a generation of beta testers pass by at very low levels of introduction of GMO before we allow it to spread. By then we will know how to monitor it's hazzards better.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Electricity generating capacity in the US is about 1200 GW -- that powers aircon, heating, street lights, shops, entertainment, sewage treatment plants, data centres etc. for 4% of the world's population.
China has about the same generating capacity as the US but with a population over four times the size of the US. If they reach parity with the US that will require four times as much generating capacity as they've got today and that's without any increase in population (which is going to happen anyway).
Same with India and many other advancing countries, they're needing more and more electricity just to approach the lifestyles, health and welfare standards of the US and other Western nations so they're going to build out more generating capacity. They can burn fossil fuels or they can build nukes to provide the power they need. If you feel CO2 levels are a problem then it's a no-brainer.
You have to admit there is a certain amount of Schadenfreude when watching the environmentalists trying to reconcile the fact that nuclear is the only practical solution to AGW and power needs and their distaste for nuclear.
Did you actually read the article?
I ask, because it says the exact opposite.
And then there's this to consider: http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/grid-parity-new-mexico-style/
when the fracking fluids are coming out in the tap water
An LED light may use less energy than an incandescent but for billions on the planet that LED light will use more energy than nothing. No matter how energy efficient you make a refrigerator it will still use more electricity than the absence of one. Conservation and power efficiency are good but they won't reverse energy consumption. The trend of civilization has been to consume more power.
Nobody, as far as I can tell, has explained how that should work
Wikipedia is your friend. It can explain things, but it's not exactly simple.
The Thorium fuel cycle.
I don't actually know why Thorium reactors didn't catch on. At a glance, I'd say while the fuel is cheap, the process is not, and right now good ol' uranium is a cheaper way to make a megaWatt if you need to. But if uranium ever "runs dry" Thorium is there.
BTW, if anyone gives two shits about it, you should update the simple wikipedia entry on Thorium to help the poor anonymous cowards out there who have a hard time with reading comprehension.
That is exactly what I was talking about. The assumption is that this will continue forever, until we can light the entire world on a few nanowatts but everyone uses petawatts of power each.
Most industrialized nations have reached the point where we can significantly reduce our energy consumption and improve the quality of our lives, and where our populations are no longer growing.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It isnt the "anti-nuclear" or "pro-nuclear" that I have a problem with. It is the "vehemently". Blindly pushing any agenda, even one I mostly support, is going to lead to problems.
I suppose it is too much to ask for people to consider options rationally.
Politics can be defined as "If they are for it, then I am against it!"
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Our sun is nothing more than a very, VERY large radioactive compost pile?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Nuclear power is useful, but as a technology, it's frustrating. The power reactor technology that works is basically a simple water-cooled device with a lot of external plumbing. It's a mediocre approach, but everything else is worse.
Many fancier reactor designs have been tried - sodium cooling, pebble bed, gas cooling, breeders, etc. The track record of alternative designs is very poor. Anything with moving parts inside the reactor, which is a very hostile environment, tends to fail. Sodium cooled systems have sodium fires. Pebble bed reactors have pebble jams. Gas cooled reactors leak. Breeders have trouble with the fuel changing mechanism. Anything that fails inside the reactor means a complete cold shutdown or worse. The failed German pebble bed reactor which had a pebble jam can't even be fully decommissioned.
That's why we're stuck with big, dumb water-cooled reactors.
The survival of technological civilization depends vitally on energy supply. Which means that the omni-obstructionists and the arithmetic deniers are, knowingly or by being duped, enemies of technological civilization. The alternative to technological civilization is getting rid of about six billion people on a very short time span.
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic" -- Stuart Brand, not an arithmetic-denier.
Sandstorms + windstorms are pretty bad for wind generation because they destroy your expensive capital.
Gobi desert is in the middle of nowhere and the populated areas somewhat close by (India/Pakistan) are separated by the Himalaya mountains.
And besides, "solutionism" is a whole lot better than "nihilism" or "nimbyism".
They suck. Every reactor (not just a plant!) has to be a reprocessing plant handling hot, intensely radioactive, corrosive liquids. And if they leak into the chamber, well, nobody can go in to clean them for years/decades. Oops. There will be leaks.
I do not trust utilities with this at all, even if they are generally OK for regular fission reactors. In normal operation the fuel is solid and encased in zirconium steel.
I prefer modular smaller reactors made in an assembly line. Smaller is better because the primary major failure point (meltdown from residual heat) is less likely because of the increased surface area to volume ratio with a smaller core. If unpowered air-cooling always results in safe cold shutdown that's good.
A very large fraction of total stationary energy consumption is heating, ventilation & cooling. With climate change and increasing wealth in hot countries, this demand will increase more.
no Moore's law for HVAC.
| Nothing wrong with LFTRs either,
Sure there is. Every plant is a reprocessing plant for caustic hot intensely radioactive liquids filled with actinides, and nobody has a well-validated engineering design for this.
100% fresh on rottentomatoes. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/into_eternity_2010/ nuclear waste has to be stored safely for 100,000 years.
Can anyone tell me how and end-to-end thorium fuel ecosystem is supposed to work? All of the arguments I hear go like this:
All your questions are answered here, Thorium Remix 2011 . Two hours twenty minutes of fascinating stuff. Essential physics and engineering topics on nuclear energy, a roadmap of current water reactor designs, descriptions of safety features and failures, and a compelling case for developing Thorium-based energy. This presentation is simply amazing!
As far as I can tell, what's coming out the wrong end of a thorium reactor will be a molten salt soup of toxic, possibly very corrosive, and VERY radioactive materials.
Sorensen advocates a two-fluid design for the reactor itself (thorium blanket and fissile fuel loop), the fissile loop (radioactive and temperature-hot) fuel passes through a heat exchanger, passing the heat into a third loop of molten salt ("cooling salt") which carries the heat out of the reactor and through the power plant. This loop is temperature-hot but not radioactive, it heats air or inert gas to drive turbines to make electricity.
So you've got three separate loops of molten glop going round in this plant, two radioactive (blanket, fissile) and one not (cooling). The two radioactive loops are circulating through the reactor and also passing though a 'processing gizmo' inside the containment building adjacent to the reactor, I say gizmo because it will probably be bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a truck.
The thorium blanket loop has a hopper that mixes a pinch of thorium into the glop every now and then (~2.7kg/day, 1 tonne/yr). As it passes through the reactor neutrons from the adjacent fissile loop smack the thorium and it becomes Thorium-233. Which decays later into Protactinium-233. Which decays later into Uranium-233. This process takes ~27+ days so the U-233 the gizmo extracts today from the blanket is the thorium you placed into the blanket ~27+ days ago. The blanket salt glop is hazardously radioactive but (I think, just learning myself) there need only be a couple hundred gallons of it.
The fissile loop is fed U-233 by the gizmo continuously and as it circulates through the reactor this is where the fission is happening. This is where the heat is generated from fission and bled off into the cooling salt (via the heat exchanger). This salt is hazardously radioactive but I think there need only be a few hundred gallons of it.
The gizmo pulls waste products (fissioned and decayed U-233) out of the fissile loop as they are produced. One guesstimate I saw is is ~170kg of waste per year (bigger than a breadbox but but smaller than a piano). By pulling the waste out continuously the gizmo prevents it from becoming some of the the nastier stuff that water reactors produce. This LFTR waste is "safe to touch" in ~300 years. These is no free lunch, and making a safe container (casket, vitrified in glass) and finding a safe enough place to store something for 300 years do-able.
The fissile loop is also where the simple and hideously clever load-following characteristic occurs. Turbine trips, shuts down and heat remains in the cooling salt? Fissile loop gets hotter and expands, reducing the concentration of the fissile material and fission slows down. Start turbines again and cooling salt once again becomes cooler? Fissile loop loses heat and contracts, increasing the concentration of fissile in the core, fission increases. Because this is all happening in well-mixed liquids, imagine the power/heat level of this reactor finding a 'sweet spot' after a conduction delay with no human or computer intervention and keeping itself there. No valves closing or opening, no rods being inserted or extracted by white-knuckled operators. This feature is really cool in the hipster sense.
The cooling salt loop and the tanks which hold it is where the designs become more massive.
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Very interesting, and balanced.
You say no cooling water is needed, but isn't water or a cooling tower needed to efficiently make the steam produced in the final loop run a turbine? I'm not sure I buy this as being different, unless these reactors are much much smaller than conventional nuclear reactors.
Sure there is. Every plant is a reprocessing plant for caustic hot intensely radioactive liquids filled with actinides, and nobody has a well-validated engineering design for this.
In which I attempt to describe the operating environment of LFTR and try to portray the plant as something besides a seething witches' cauldron of death, in this adjacent post.
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isn't water or a cooling tower needed to efficiently make the steam produced in the final loop run a turbine?
To eliminate the need for water, a Closed Cycle Brayton is being proposed, hoping eventually to attain >50% efficiency. I attempt to describe the operating environment of LFTR in this adjacent post.
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Point is there are fuck-all real solutions to the reprocessing problem. THAT is why they've never been taken up. Worse, everyone talks up molten salt thorium reactors and there is EVEN LESS idea about how that would be achieved.
You seem to know all these things, and yet you are not in a happy place. I hope that some day you will find your happy place. You reach down and you flip Thorium over on its back. Thorium lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
Why aren't you helping?
Holden: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down...
Leon: What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: It doesn't make any difference what desert, it's completely hypothetical.
Leon: But, how come I'd be there?
Holden: Maybe you're fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise, Leon. It's crawling toward you...
Leon: Tortoise? What's that?
Holden: [irritated by Leon's interruptions] You know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course!
Holden: Same thing.
~Blade Runner
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And then there's this to consider: http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/grid-parity-new-mexico-style/
That's awesome if true, but I have to ask, why only 50MW if it's so price competitive? Why not scale it out to 5000MW?
I don't understand why this Closed Cycle Brayton will work with a Thorium plant but not with a conventional nuke plant. So it would seem either that a conventional plant will have the advantage of not needing water as well, or it would be cheaper or more efficient to make a Thorium plant use cooling water and thus as likely they will have it.
I don't think the need for external water has anything to do with the fact that a conventional plant has water in the core. That is different water.
I don't understand why this Closed Cycle Brayton will work with a Thorium plant but not with a conventional nuke plant. So it would seem either that [1] a conventional plant will have the advantage of not needing water as well, or it would be cheaper or more efficient to [2] make a Thorium plant use cooling water and thus as likely they will have it.
Very insightful, pointing out the difference between use of water in the reactor and water used for (conductive) cooling. At the moment the word 'conventional' implies the use of solid fuel and a loop of water inside the reactor for moderation and cooling, and the use of phase transition (water to steam then back to water again) to drive turbines.
[1] Brayton would work with a Pebble Bed Reactor where the solid fuel is encased spherical 'pebbles' of graphite moderator and inert gas such as helium is used for cooling. There is no phase change, the helium remains a gas which varies in temperature.
One such experiment was the THTR-300 breeder in Germany, which attempted to leverage the pebble concept into reality and managed to do so from 1985-1988, despite some problems managing the solid fuel. It was not a proving ground for Brayton though, the helium was used to heat water in a Rankine (steam) cycle.
Pebble Bed Reactor designs are also considered to be "walk away safe" despite these problems. The danger of graphite igniting if the reactor is breached and the helium replaced by air seems to be overstated, but there does remain the possibility of ignition if it is reduced to dust (such as in a steam explosion, as happened at Chernobyl) or if it comes into direct contact with the solid fuel at the center of the pebble.
So both 'conventional' rod-and-pellet and Pebble Reactor manufactured pebbles both share one important characteristic --- the necessity of an extremely critical solid-fuel manufacturing process where a failure of workmanship has undesirable results.
But I wonder though as a layman (disclaimer!) if there is at least one major unresolvable problem with the pebble concept --- and that is how could you be confident you could take the reactor below critical in the presence of multiple mechanical failures? As compared to the salt concept where gravity alone drains the fissile salts out of reach of the graphite moderators with sub-criticality greatly assured.
[2] Though your biggest safety win arises from removing all water from within the reactor and its containment building, the power plant itself could employ water to assist in cooling. In coastal areas LFTR waste heat is envisioned to assist in desalinization.
Sorensen discusses the prospect of substituting a Brayton for a 'conventional' Rakine steam reactor here, citing concerns of efficiency and operating temperature where the heat necessary to drive Brayton places 'conventional' solid fuel configurations in jeopardy of melting.
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The Bulletin used to be good, and it used to be really meaningful and respectable back in the day of legends like Bethe, who were passionately interested in working towards a world free of nuclear weapons, but who tempered that passion with pragmatism and political realism, an understanding that nuclear power is not the same thing as nuclear weapons, and a thorough technical literacy in nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Today, though, it has gone disappointingly downhill, and every other thing it publishes seems to be a weak, rhetoric-packed attack on civil nuclear power written by an author who usually has something like a background in political science without experience in nuclear science or engineering.