Email Jim at jim.thompson@ipulpmedia.com

Received a very nice email on 11 Oct 24 that read as follows:

"I've been out of the Paper Industry for 16 years now, but I STILL enjoy reading your column every week.

"You have a refreshing voice in your writing; you say things that are often recognized but aren't always said. It's that unique voice that I enjoy reading very much.

"I also enjoy the fact that you speak from the perspective of Industrial Project Engineering. This is where my professional passion has always resided.

"So, I'm not sure how many of my previous 12 years at Liberty Paper included a subscription to your e-news. But, I do want to take this moment to say THANK YOU for all the years of GOOD READS!

"Keep up the GREAT work!

"Darin Jensen

"Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant"

Besides the opportunity this gave me to share a nice accolade, Darin's signature got me to thinking about nuclear plants. Here in Georgia, Georgia Power has just started up the newest nuclear plant in the United States, Vogtle-2. There is talk of restarting Three Mile Island to power a server farm. I mentioned the need for power for server farms last week. The Three Mile Island accident, 28 March 1979 effectively shut down nuclear plant expansion for many years.

Think how far we have come with controls since 1979. The Apple II+ was introduced in June 1979, 3 months after the Three Mile Island Accident; the IBM PC was still several years away. The Internet was made public on 14 April 1993, 14 years later. Process control has grown by leaps and bounds and now we have Artificial Intelligence (plug--have to mention that Paperitalo Publications is the first pulp and paper trade publication worldwide to regularly use AI).

Then there is the nuclear waste everyone worries about. From the World Nuclear Association:

"Nuclear fuel is very energy dense, so very little of it is required to produce immense amounts of electricity - especially when compared to other energy sources. As a result, a correspondingly small amount of waste is produced. On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person's electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick. Only 5 grams of this is high-level waste - about the same weight as a sheet of paper.

"The generation of electricity from a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year, if the used fuel is recycled. In comparison, a 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power station produces approximately 300,000 tonnes of ash and more than 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, every year."

"Since the dawn of the civil nuclear power industry, nuclear waste has never caused harm to people. The popular misconception is that because certain parts of nuclear waste remain radioactive for billions of years, then the threat must be sustained for that period. However, this is not the case. Whilst remaining weakly radioactive for a few hundred thousand years, the radioactivity from the main component of the waste which could cause health problems will have decayed to safe levels within a few hundred years.

"A key factor in understanding why nuclear waste repositories do not pose a health threat also stems from the fact that the quantity of materials which would be found in the environment in the event of a leak would be very small. The amount of radioactive materials that would enter the environment would make no difference to the natural environment or future humans. After all, the environment we live in, as well as the human body, is naturally radioactive. Radiation is an unavoidable part of life on our planet, and life evolved and is thriving in this radioactive environment, and the doses from a nuclear waste repository would be almost 50 times smaller than the average background radiation."

I predict our grandchildren will be thriving on nuclear energy and using our then obsolete windmills as amusement park rides.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

We are starting to experiment with AI. Give us your feedback, please. Listen to a deep dive of this column here.

________

Other interesting stories: