Monday 12 February 2007

Pic of the day: Lightning-filled screenshot from the anime Magikano.

Gods of electricity...

I read in the daily business newspaper (Dagens Næringsliv in Norwegian) that some business people are advocating nuclear power plants in Norway. It is now (just barely) technologically feasible to use Thorium instead of Uranium in nuclear power plants. This material has long been ignored for the purpose because it cannot be used to make nuclear weapons... fission is simply too slow. Since the military considerations have been important in most nations that develop nuclear power (just like Iran today), Thorium has not really been considered. There simply is no technology for using it, although the scientific principles seem to allow it.

A positive side of Thorium's lesser enthusiasm for fission is that you don't risk a meltdown, and there is less investment in the subsystems for moderating the chain reaction. It should be safer to have close to human habitation. And therein lies the rub: At the projected energy prices, the Thorium reactor would have to lie close to a heavily populated area to which it can sell hot water as well. I don't see this happening anytime soon. You can tell people "yeah but this is a different type of nuclear plant which doesn't explode" but no one wants it in their backyard. Even though it doesn't explode or melt down, there must be SOMETHING with it, it is nuclear after all! At the very least, surely terrorists will go for it.

On the bright side, Norway has the third richest thorium deposits in the world, so we could cover our electricity needs for 100 000 years. Not that I really believe we will have roughly the same electricity consumption 100 000 years from now...

***

What amused me at first glance was the name of the element they proposed to use. Thorium was surely named long before anyone thought of using it to produce electricity. And yet it is almost just as surely named after the Norse god of lightning and thunder... or in other words, natural electricity!

In real life, of course, it is still God who decides the price of electricity here in Norway, since the vast majority of our electricity comes from hydropower. The rainy fall and winter made my utility bill shrink almost before my eyes: The bill is detailed over time, so I could follow the plummeting price by reading the specification. Nice. But it also puts one of our most important resources partly outside our control. As the last few years have shown us, building big dams does not guarantee that they will be filled. With the global climate being unstable at the best of times, and this not being the best of times, perhaps it might not be such a bad idea to add a certain slice of constant energy production. Then again, perhaps we could look at wave energy instead. I can't imagine any man-made climate change that would put an end to that... That would require divine intervention!

Well, except the coming of an ice age that would freeze the North Sea to part of the northern glacier. Actually that is what might have happened around this time if not for global warming, as our 10 000 year window of interglacial warmth is about to close. Perhaps global warming *is* divine intervention... staving off the Fimbul Winter and Ragnarok for a while yet. Unless, of course, we make our own Ragnarok. But at least thorium seems unlikely to cause that... as far as we know.