There's been a whole lot of talk recently, partly because of the "stimulus" bill, about the need to upgrade our electrical generating and distribution system. From personal experience, I know just how poorly our system is able to cope with the strain - back in August of 2003, New York City (where I was working at the time) experienced a two day blackout which left the entire metro area pretty much at standstill. My father-in-law ended up walking from his midtown office almost to the Bronx before a passing motorist took pity on him and gave him a lift up to Westchester. All of this in the midst of the summer heat, which almost certainly contributed to the breakdown in the first place (too much AC, too little electricity).
From what I've seen of the proposals on how to fix this situation, it looks far too much like "more of the same." Big powerplants, long transmission lines. My feeling is that we should get away from the huge, multi-megawatt plants, located in remote areas, because these then become a single point of failure system. Have one plant drop offline, and the system tries to redistribute power from elsewhere - but because we already have so few plants online, the strain causes some of them to go offline as well. And transformers and lines that are already working at max capacity are suddenly called on to work at 150% or 200% - and fail.
As an engineer, and a computer geek, I think we should take a page from network design, and create a fault-tolerant system. If you think about the early days of computing, we had mainframe computers with multiple dumb terminals connected to them, much like our electric grid is today - single powerplant, multiple users. Today's networks are much more robust - multiple servers, each with redundant backups, users with desktop computers rather than dumb terminals, shared directory structures and the ability to reconfigure the topology on the fly (today's networks don't crash if you plug a new computer in unexpectedly - dynamic addressing ensures that every computer maintains its own identity).
A new power grid would be very similar. Imagine small generating plants, perhaps something like
this, which would directly feed a small group of communities, but also be tied into a larger grid with other powerplants so that if one goes down, power can be intelligently diverted from several other sources to prevent a cascade failure. And if the powerplants were to use
this technology, you could go a full
century before you need to refuel!
Why nuclear? For starters, it doesn't need fossil fuels, which means no pollutants (important if we're going to be plunking these things down all over the country). It is easily packaged in a small footprint with the Hyperion design. And it requires very little in the way of maintenance.
Another option for a small reactor is soemthing like
this, which has the potential to be a relatively inexpensive alternative. Thorium being much more common than uranium, as well as less radioactive, means decreased cost and potentially much safer. The only real drawback to this is the limited track record of liquid flouride reactors.
Either way, until commercial fusion crosses the breakeven point, nuclear fission looks like our best hope for sustainable energy for some time to come.
