Atomic power holds the answer
State Rep. JoAnn Osmond's proposal to repeal the moratorium on nuclear plant construction in Illinois is long overdue.
We urgently need a safe, cheap source of electric power that doesn't chew through our planet's supply of fossil fuels or drown us in dangerous wastes. And, we have it. As a matter of fact, I found out during a visit to Argonne National Laboratory that we have had it for years. It's atomic power.
The laboratory has developed and tested a low pressure sodium reactor system that uses the same fuel that ComEd's high pressure water reactors do, and will produce the same electric power. The new reactor system, however, is more efficient, far safer, uses much less fuel, and produces 1/20 of the radioactive waste that our current reactors do.
But, can't atomic reactors blow up or melt down (ala "China Syndrome")? The high pressure water systems that cool our present reactors can leak, and the leaks are serious. And, we all know of the massive contamination that a fire at one Ukrainian reactor without proper safety equipment caused.
However, low pressure sodium reactors have been run safely for extended periods of time with their control rods completely withdrawn. All they did was stabilize at higher (predicted) temperatures.
Sodium is a far more efficient coolant than water, and if the sodium leaks it will form a crystalline salt with whatever it touches and actually patch the leak itself. The new sodium reactors also use far less fuel than our old water cooled reactors because they reprocess and reuse spent fuel on site.
We can melt the waste that the new design reactors do generate (and the waste that we have right now) into blocks of glass the way the Hanford, Wash. plant is doing. Then we can safely ship it by rail to the storage facility that we have already carved out of a salt dome in Nevada. The glass blocks that are buried there under 6 feet of concrete pose as much radiation danger as a sunny day.
Salt domes are ideal for storage because they don't leak. The fact that a water soluble dome exists at all is proof that there is no seepage into our aquifers, and there hasn't been for thousands of years. Also, sodium doesn't stay "hot" very long. Its longest lived radioactive isotope has a half life of five years.
Finally, the waste can't be stolen. The vitrified blocks are just too big and heavy, and the reactor cores and reprocessing areas are too radioactive.
Getting more and more power from low pressure sodium reactors means we can stop the pollution from all the trains that haul the thousands of tons of coal that we burn into more pollution to get electricity. (We will still dig the coal, but we will crack it into gasoline the way that the Germans did in the 1940s.) But, what we won't do is cover Illinois with wind farms, pave Nevada with solar cells, or go back to living in caves the way that some activists suggest.
Denny Driscoll Round Lake