Tickling the Dragon's Tail

Is nuclear energy the key to saving the planet?

Only Nuclear Energy Can Save the Planet

Nuclear Power Can Save the World

Within the past couple of years, these and other headlines have appeared in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times and even to the widely read environmental publication, High Country News.

According to many of the articles newer designs and materials have made nuclear reactors much safer and therefore safe to use a major power sources. Unfortunately, these claims have not been proven.

I spent nine years as a research physicist and middle management director studying nuclear reactor safety at the National Reactor Testing Station (now Idaho National Laboratory). It was called Special Power Excursion Reactor Tests (SPERT).

We had four reactors of differing designs operated by remote control from a half mile distance. I have the dubious honor of blowing up one of those reactors as a test in 1962. An offshoot of our program was called LOFT, or Loss of Fluid Test, designed to study what happens in a loss of coolant accident – similar to what happened in the Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents.

Both the SPERT and LOFT programs were eventually stifled and killed by one man, a zealous advocate of nuclear power plant development who was head of the division in the Atomic Energy Commission overseeing and funding reactor safety research. Today there is little, if any, meaningful research being conducted on reactor safety, particularly on the highly touted “new designs.” Many advocates point to computer modelling studies as proof of the safety. However, there are too many complex parameters in computer models and the only real study to prove the safety is to push the outside of the envelope on actual reactors.

If computer modelling is so accurate, would we put astronauts on top of a powerful moon rocket relying solely on computer modelling - and not actually physically testing that rocket extensively?

Not likely.

My next book, in progress, will cover my years of nuclear reactor safety studies and the demise of true scientific research in that field. It’s entitled: Tickling the Dragon’s Tail. The title is from a quote by famed physicist Richard Feynman during the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos lab. A risky experiment had been proposed which would create a supercritical burst of fissions by dropping a piece of fissionable uranium 235 through a subcritical mass of the same substance. When the experiment was presented at a meeting, Feynman chuckled, saying “That’s like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” It became known as the Dragon Experiment. Later, two physicists were killed by modified versions of that experiment. Several years later I went to work in that Idaho project that was a descendant of the Dragon Experiment.