Realistic Energy Independence

On the twenty year anniversary of the nuclear plant disaster at Chernobyl, Ukraine, at the time part of the old Soviet Union, here is some important information. William Sweet (author of a book worrying about global warming) in the NY Times:

And yet, though it went unnoticed at the time and has been inadequately appreciated since, Chernobyl also cast into relief the positive features of the reactors used in the United States and most other advanced industrial countries.

The reactor at Chernobyl belonged to a class that was especially vulnerable to runaway reactions. When operating at low power, if such reactors lost water, their reactivity could suddenly take off and very rapidly reach a threshold beyond which they could only explode. Making matters worse, surprisingly little more pressure than normal in the machine's water channels would lift its lid, snapping the vital control rods and fuel channels that entered the reactor's core.

On the night of April 25, 1986, poorly trained and supervised plant operators conducted an ill-conceived experiment, putting the machine into the very state in which reactivity was most likely to spike. Within a fraction of a second, the reactor went from being barely on to power levels many times higher than the maximum intended.

This kind of accident cannot happen in the so-called light water reactors used in the United States and most of Western Europe and Asia. In these reactors, the water functions not only as a coolant but as a "moderator": self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions cannot take place in its absence. This is a very useful passive safety feature. If coolant runs low, there is still a danger of a core meltdown, because the fuel retains heat; but the reactor will have automatically and immediately turned itself off.

Sweet goes on to say that since that time, incentives, technology and management have improved:

The utility industry has responded to deregulation by reorganizing itself. And as it happens, companies have emerged that specialize in managing nuclear power plants. Although their record is somewhat mixed (Exelon, for example, stands accused of having carelessly let tritium, a radioactive isotope, leak from three Illinois reactors), on the whole the performance of nuclear power plants has improved substantially.

In 1986, the average American nuclear plant produced electricity barely 57 percent of the time. In 2004, the average plant was running productively more than 90 percent of the time.

(Update on the Exelon story here, but this is also important to note:"None of the spills, according to government oversight agencies, poses a health threat. But by all accounts, they did damage Exelon's credibility." Tritium until now had not rated much attention from the NRC.)
Earlier posts here and here.

Any realistic discussion of energy independence must include nuclear power.

And in the meantime, the market is working to increase supply as high oil prices are fueling interest in looking for oil in Illinois!