CleanTechnica

There is a growing recognition that a world based on ever increasing consumption of fossil fuels is a world of constrained human development. Some people think that is a good thing, I tend toward the view that people have a lot of room for improvement and growth. We could use a new basis on which to build the devices that we will use to provide choices for our personal environment, to take us places where we want to go, and to make the goods that enable us to survive no matter what the weather brings.

My contention is that such a discovery has already been made, and that there is a growing recognition of the potential for that basis to expand the boundaries of our growth, creativity and development. The uranium oxide fuel pellet – that tiny black cylinder shown in the photo next to one of my favorite coffee mugs – is made of material with incredible potential compared to the fossil fuels that supply the heat that we use for the vast majority of our controllable power. I like to think of these tiny pellets as equivalent to early stage transistors at the time when most of the system controllers, radios, televisions, and computers in the world depended on magnetic amplifiers or vacuum tubes.

For many of today’s youths, it is difficult to imagine a world without fantastic electrical gadgets that can store photos, play music, display moving pictures, make incredibly rapid computations, and even ensure that the morning cup of coffee is ready on time. None of those devices, however, would be possible if a few researchers in the 1940s and 1950s had not worked tirelessly to develop the transistor. That is the basic invention that allowed people like Gordon Moore to imagine a world of devices with rapidly expanding capabilities that seem limited only by human ingenuity and creativity.

After engineers and scientists had figured out the basic properties of the materials needed to produce transistors, there was still a lot of work left to do – in fact, that work continues today as legions of technicians, software coders, engineers, and scientists work to improve and refine transistors and the devices that use them while an even greater body of people thinks up new things to do with the devices and new ways to introduce them to larger markets.

As I compose this post, I am sitting in a home office full of creative products enabled by semiconductor based transistors. Without exaggeration, I would estimate that there are tens of millions of transistors within my immediate view that includes several digital cameras, a desktop computer, a laptop, printer, remote controlled fan, an analog to digital film converter, a cordless telephone, several iPods, a mobile telephone, a few obsolete computers, a wireless base station, and a cable modem. (Yes, I am a gadget geek and a pack rat. All of us have weaknesses.)

Getting back to that uranium oxide fuel pellet – actually the one that I have is actually a facsimile of a fuel pellet – the reason that I compare it to a transistor is that it packs thousands of times more power than the materials that it can replace. Even though our current early generation nuclear plants only use about 4-5% of the ultimate potential energy stored in the pellet, these tiny bits of high temperature material produce the energy equivalent of 149 gallons of fuel oil.

My current automobile is a VW Jetta TDI – turbo diesel injected – sedan that has a 12.7 gallon fuel tank and can travel about 580 miles on a single fill-up. I get terribly excited about the idea that one day, using physical principles that I already know and understand, I may be able to travel across the US two times (nearly 7,000 miles) and consume only the energy that will fit inside a pellet that is smaller than the tip of my finger.

I know this is possible – I have already spent a number of years on a 9,000 ton vessel powered by the same material and it managed to travel the world’s oceans for more than 14 years on a quantity of fuel that would fit beneath my office desk.

Oh yeah – you have all been conditioned to ask, “what about the waste?” That is the really good news. I chose to put the fuel pellet next to my coffee cup for a reason. That coffee cup is large enough to hold the remains that would be left over if I received all the energy I needed to live a full American lifestyle for my entire life. What I think is even more amazing is that a large portion of those remains would consist of rare materials with unique physical and chemical properties. In other words, they just might have value for creative people in future generations that need them to solve a problem that we have not yet even recognized as needing a solution.

One more thing – the phrase on the coffee cup is also important. It is one of my mantras since I have been trying my best to raise awareness of the revolutionary nature of atomic fission since about 1993.

Photo credits: Coffee cup and fuel pellet – by Rod Adams taken June 12, 2008. USS Von Steuben, SSBN 632 US Government file photo.

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Another European Country With Plans for New Nuclear Power
Vietnam Continues to Advance Towards Nuclear Power
Teutonic tectonic shift on nuclear energy
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