Sustainable Nuclear Power

Some worthwhile content, mostly abysmal authorship:
I wrote "authorship" above, but perhaps it should be "editorship," since Suppes and Storvick are listed on the title page as "Editors." However, no other authors are acknowledged in the preface nor listed on the first pages of chapters, so I assume the title-page listing simply represents another example of the collapse of corporate-level editing during book production. Academic Press is by no means alone on this! I'm a PhD physicist, so I presumably have a better shot at understanding a book like this than do most of the intended audience, which the back cover lists as "engineers, scientists, and energy professionals." For laypeople, this book is a no-hoper. There's definitely interesting and important material in the book. The authors (editors?) invite the reader to regard the book as a collection of free-standing chapters, so I skipped around and didn't slavishly read everything. The two best parts, substantively, are their discussion about how U.S. transportation could be largely electrified -- no, not through electric trains and buses but via plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) with battery range matched to typical trips -- and their description of how the nuclear fuel cycle could be improved by a large factor, probably 10 to 50 times. I'd say these two topics also constitute the core of the book. Improvement of the nuclear fuel cycle means processing of spent reactor fuel rods to remove the small percentage of fission products that constitute true waste -- the stuff that really needs to be sequestered from the biosphere for hundreds or thousands of centuries. Most of the "spent" fuel rods consist of still-usable uranium 238, uranium 235, and plutonium 239. (The Pu239 results from neutron-bombardment of the U238 and is a more-useful nuclear "fuel" than the starting U238. This is the idea behind the breeder reactor: Speaking simplistically, it makes more fuel than it starts with. But that can't work forever; eventually the U238 supply runs out!) So, to summarize the authors' claims (which I find credible), reprocessing today's nuclear fuel rods turns today's "spent" nuclear fuel into an energy source that would cover **total** U.S. use for some centuries at current rates. Plus there's a huge shrinkage in the amount of truly hazardous nuclear waste that needs "permanent" storage. Plus, this is all available without further uranium mining. The authors' optimism thus seems to have some basis. However, there are a number of questions that seem obvious to me but that go unaddressed. Chief among these is what would the requirements for power-plant cooling water be in a nuclear-electrified economy? (And what would be the effects of the resulting evaporated water on continental meteorology, including the greenhouse effects that nuclear energy is said to obviate -- since water vapor is also a greenhouse gas?) Water is going to be more and more of a problem already, without this burden. (And I expect that sea water won't do ...) I also think the authors may be too glib that safety concerns with nuclear powerplants have been put to rest. Is it really possible to build something that's foolproof -- since (we) fools are so ingenious? Ecologist Garrett Hardin has written eloquently about the safety problem of operating nuclear power plants as a systemic risk -- we want to make things safe, but then how does one keep the operating staff alert and challenged enough to rise to the occasion if they ever have to? Back to book **quality**: The book is replete with painfully amateurish writing and illustrations whose details are, in significant fraction, unlabeled and whose captions are often unhelpful. See, for one example among many, Fig. 11-4.

Largely non tecnical treatment of energy in general:
The book is largeley non technical and devotes a lot of space to economic considerations and non nuclear energy sources. It presents a solid arguement for fuel reprocessing and reactor technology updating to provide an energy source for millenia. Engineers however are not at their best when writing about economics.