Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Molehills into Gigawatts

A recent edition of New Yorks "The City" Journal makes a clean case for going with the densest fuel around. You'll like this:
[Here's] the stunning thing about nuclear power: tiny quantities of raw material can do so much. A bundle of enriched-uranium fuel-rods that could fit into a two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen would power the city for a year: furnaces, espresso machines, subways, streetlights, stock tickers, Times Square, everything—even our cars and taxis, if we could conveniently plug them into the grid. True, you don’t want to stack fuel rods in midtown Manhattan; you don’t in fact want to stack them casually on top of one another anywhere. But in suitable reactors, situated, say, 50 miles from the city on a few hundred acres of suitably fortified and well-guarded real estate, two rooms’ worth of fuel could electrify it all.
If folks want to keep having reliable and affordable power to run the ever expanding list of electronic appliances and thing-a-ma-jigs including larger energy-sucking items like plasma screens and cars, it might be time to reconsider the stance vis-a-vis nuclear plants. Articles like this are a start.

posted by Andy Bochman at 8:23 AM

 

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