- Charpak, Georges et Richard L. Garwin.
Feux follets et champignons nucléaires.
Paris: Odile Jacob, [1997] 2000.
ISBN 978-2-7381-0857-9.
-
Georges Charpak won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992, and was the last
person, as of this writing, to have won an unshared Physics Nobel.
Richard Garwin is a quintessential “defence intellectual”:
he studied under Fermi, did the detailed design of
Ivy Mike, the first
thermonuclear bomb, has been a member of
Jason and adviser on issues of nuclear arms control
and disarmament for decades, and has been a passionate advocate
against ballistic missile defence and for reducing the number of
nuclear warheads and the state of alert of strategic nuclear forces.
In this book the authors, who do not agree on everything and
take the liberty to break out from the main text on several
occasions to present their individual viewpoints, assess the
state of nuclear energy—civil and military—at the
turn of the century and try to chart a reasonable path into
the future which is consistent with the aspirations of people
in developing countries, the needs of a burgeoning population,
and the necessity of protecting the environment
both from potential risks from nuclear technology but also
the consequences of not employing it as a source of energy.
(Even taking Chernobyl into account, the total radiation
emitted by coal-fired power plants is far greater than that
of all nuclear stations combined: coal contains thorium, and when it is
burned, it escapes in flue gases or is captured and disposed of
in landfills. And that's not even mentioning the carbon dioxide
emitted by burning fossil fuels.)
The reader of this book will learn a great deal about the details
of nuclear energy: perhaps more than some will have the patience
to endure. I made it through, and now I really understand, for the
first time, why light water reactors have a negative thermal coefficient:
as the core gets hotter, the U-238 atoms are increasingly agitated by
the heat, and consequently are more likely due to Doppler shift
to fall into one of the resonances where their neutron absorption is
dramatically enhanced.
Charpak and Garwin are in complete agreement that civil nuclear power
should be the primary source of new electrical generation capacity
until and unless something better (such as fusion) comes along. They
differ strongly on the issue of fuel cycle and waste management: Charpak
argues for the French approach of reprocessing spent fuel, extracting
the bred plutonium, and burning it in power reactors in the form
of mixed oxide (MOX)
fuel. Garwin argues for the U.S. approach of a once-through fuel cycle,
with used fuel buried, its plutonium energy content discarded in the interest
of “economy”. Charpak points out that the French approach drastically
reduces the volume of nuclear waste to be buried, and observes that France
does not have a Nevada in which to bury it.
Both authors concur that breeder reactors will eventually have a rôle
to play in nuclear power generation. Not only do breeders multiply the
energy which can be recovered from natural uranium by a factor of fifty,
they can be used to “burn up” many of the radioactive waste
products of conventional light water reactors. Several next-generation
reactor concepts are discussed, including Carlo Rubbia's
energy amplifier,
in which the core is inherently subcritical, and designs for more conventional
reactors which are inherently safe in the event of loss of control feedback
or cooling. They conclude, however, that further technology maturation is
required before breeders enter into full production use and that, in
retrospect,
Superphénix
was premature.
The last third of the book is devoted to nuclear weapons and the
prospects for reducing the inventory of declared nuclear powers,
increasing stability, and preventing proliferation. There is, as
you would expect from Garwin, a great deal of bashing the
concept of ballistic missile defence (“It can't possibly work,
and if it did it would be bad”). This is quite dated, as many
of the arguments and the lengthy reprinted article date from the mid
1980s when the threat was a massive “war-gasm” salvo launch
of thousands of ICBMs from the Soviet Union, not one or two missiles
from a rogue despot who's feeling
“ronery”.
The authors quite reasonably argue that current nuclear force levels
are absurd, and that an arsenal about the size of France's (on the
order of 500 warheads) should suffice for any conceivable deterrent
purpose. They dance around the option of eliminating nuclear arms
entirely, and conclude that such a goal is probably unachievable in a
world in which such a posture would create an incentive for a rogue
state to acquire even one or two weapons. They suggest a small
deterrent force operated by an international authority—good luck
with that!
This is a thoughtful book which encourages rational people to
think for themselves about the energy choices facing humanity in the
coming decades. It counters emotional appeals and scare trigger words
with the best antidote: numbers. Numbers which demonstrate, for example,
that the inherent radiation of atoms in the human body (mostly
C-14 and K-40) and the variation in
natural background radiation from one place to another on Earth
is vastly greater than the dose received from all kinds of nuclear
technology. The Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents are examined
in detail, and the lessons learnt for safely operating nuclear power
stations are explored. I found the sections on nuclear weapons weaker
and substantially more dated. Although the book was originally published
well after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the perspective is still
very much that of superpower confrontation, not the risk of proliferation
to rogue states and terrorist groups. Certainly, responsibly disposing
of the excess fissile material produced by the superpowers in their
grotesquely hypertrophied arsenals (ideally by burning it up in civil power
reactors, as opposed to insanely dumping it into a hole in the ground
to remain a risk for hundreds of thousands of years, as some
“green” advocates urge) is an important way to reduce the
risks of proliferation, but events subsequent to the publication of this
book have shown that states are capable of mounting their own indigenous
nuclear weapons programs under the eyes of international inspectors.
Will an “international community” which is incapable of
stopping such clandestine weapons programs have any deterrent
credibility even if armed with its own nuclear-tipped missiles?
An English translation of this book, entitled
Megawatts and Megatons, is
available.
September 2009 