Two interesting articles about…well…energy for you guys to check out. The first is a fascinating look at the next generation of nuclear power plants (via Andrew) :

In the air-conditioned chill of the visitors’ area, a grad student runs through the basics. Instead of the white-hot fuel rods that fire the heart of a conventional reactor, HTR-10 is powered by 27,000 billiards-sized graphite balls packed with tiny flecks of uranium. Instead of superhot water – intensely corrosive and highly radioactive – the core is bathed in inert helium. The gas can reach much higher temperatures without bursting pipes, which means a third more energy pushing the turbine. No water means no nasty steam, and no billion-dollar pressure dome to contain it in the event of a leak. And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide – designed to last 1 million years – there’s no steaming pool for spent fuel rods. Depleted balls can go straight into lead-lined steel bins in the basement.

Wearing disposable blue paper gowns and booties, the grad student leads the way to a windowless control room that houses three industry-standard PC workstations and the inevitable electronic schematic, all valves, pressure lines, and color-coded readouts. In a conventional reactor’s control room, there would be far more to look at – control panels for emergency core cooling, containment-area sprinklers, pressurized water tanks. None of that is here. The usual layers of what the industry calls engineered safety are superfluous. Suppose a coolant pipe blows, a pressure valve sticks, terrorists knock the top off the reactor vessel, an operator goes postal and yanks the control rods that regulate the nuclear chain reaction – no radioactive nightmare. This reactor is meltdown-proof.

Zhang Zuoyi, the project’s 42-year-old director, explains why. The key trick is a phenomenon known as Doppler broadening – the hotter atoms get, the more they spread apart, making it harder for an incoming neutron to strike a nucleus. In the dense core of a conventional reactor, the effect is marginal. But HTR-10’s carefully designed geometry, low fuel density, and small size make for a very different story. In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure, instead of skyrocketing into a bad movie plot, the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius – comfortably below the balls’ 2,000-plus-degree melting point – and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.

“In a conventional reactor emergency, you have only seconds to make the right decision,” Zhang notes. “With HTR-10, it’s days, even weeks – as much time as we could ever need to fix a problem.”

Since I was too young to be strongly affected by Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, I don’t really share the general public’s dismay at the prospect of building a bunch of nuclear power plants. But I really don’t know enough about it to make an informed decision in either direction. Considering the environmental and (in some ways) national security concerns that are associated with our use of fossil fuels, perhaps it would be a good idea to take a second look at nuclear power.

When it comes to nuclear weapons, however, apparently there’s a new weapon on the horizon that will give us all another reason to duck and cover :

During the Cold War, the Air Force funded numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter. With the knowledge gained, some Air Force insiders are beginning to think seriously about potential military uses — for example, antimatter bombs small enough to hold in one’s hand, and antimatter engines for 24/7 surveillance aircraft.

More cataclysmic possible uses include a new generation of super weapons — either pure antimatter bombs or antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons; the former wouldn’t emit radioactive fallout. Another possibility is antimatter- powered “electromagnetic pulse” weapons that could fry an enemy’s electric power grid and communications networks, leaving him literally in the dark and unable to operate his society and armed forces.
. . .
In 1929, Dirac suggested that the building blocks of atoms — electrons (negatively charged particles) and protons (positively charged particles) — have antimatter counterparts: antielectrons and antiprotons. One fundamental difference between matter and antimatter is that their subatomic building blocks carry opposite electric charges. Thus, while an ordinary electron is negatively charged, an antielectron is positively charged (hence the term positrons, which means “positive electrons”); and while an ordinary proton is positively charged, an antiproton is negative.

The real excitement, though, is this: If electrons or protons collide with their antimatter counterparts, they annihilate each other. In so doing, they unleash more energy than any other known energy source, even thermonuclear bombs.

The energy from colliding positrons and antielectrons “is 10 billion times … that of high explosive,” Edwards explained in his March speech. Moreover, 1 gram of antimatter, about 1/25th of an ounce, would equal “23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.” Thus “positron energy conversion,” as he called it, would be a “revolutionary energy source” of interest to those who wage war.

It almost defies belief, the amount of explosive force available in a speck of antimatter — even a speck that is too small to see. For example: One millionth of a gram of positrons contain as much energy as 37.8 kilograms (83 pounds) of TNT, according to Edwards’ March speech. A simple calculation, then, shows that about 50-millionths of a gram could generate a blast equal to the explosion (roughly 4,000 pounds of TNT, according to the FBI) at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

As the rest of the article states, actually harnessing the positrons is nearly impossible right now. But the fact that our government is working around the clock to devise ways to open Pandora’s other box doesn’t make me feel any better.