August 20, 2025 • 40 mins
Bradley Jay Fills in on NightSide
What is nuclear energy and how does it work? Physicist and astronomer Doug Arion used to assess nuclear sites to see if they could withstand strikes from Russia or any political foe. Doug joined Bradley to discuss the pros and cons of nuclear energy and how it’s changed over the years.
What is nuclear energy and how does it work? Physicist and astronomer Doug Arion used to assess nuclear sites to see if they could withstand strikes from Russia or any political foe. Doug joined Bradley to discuss the pros and cons of nuclear energy and how it’s changed over the years.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ. Coustin's me Radiot.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Try Thanks for being with us. I'm Bradley Jay for
Dan tonight, and our next guest is Doug Arion. He's
been a guest here before. Doug is a physicist, actually
I guess the nuclear physicist, an astronomer, and a hiker
and so much more. But the overall topic we gotta
get to is do you think that maybe you'd like
(00:27):
to see more nuclear power? Nuclear power is a thing
for a while, fell out of favor for for good reason,
but have a dance has been made where nuclear power
is a real, clean, safe power. Fukushima had a problem,
but compared to what happened to it, it fared pretty well.
(00:51):
So we'll find out how that works, maybe what has
changed in the nuclear heating and the domestic nuclear use industry,
and we'll learn how the materials get refined to make weapons.
We'll learn all about that. But also we want to
(01:11):
it's very interesting to hear about Doug and his self
made observatory, and I do want to introduce Doug and
have him talked about that and the telescopes that he
makes out of bowling balls. I'm not kidding you. As
a matter of fact, I did a video with Doug
and I posted it on my social media and it
(01:34):
may also be on the WZ social media of the
observatory that Doug has built and the telescopes that actually
the centerpiece of them is a bowling ball that they
work perfectly. So Doug, thanks for being with us.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
It's great to be with you again. We've always had
a lot of fun with these conversations, and I think
we're going to have some really interesting things to talk
about tonight.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So if any questions for Doug or any observations at
six one, seven, five, four, ten thirty, you may have
some question or something you want to say pop up
during the conversation. Love to have you. So let's let
me paint the picture of where Doug lives. I won't
tell him the exact address. Doug, don't worry. But if
(02:17):
Doug lives in a very dark area, then that's by
design because he wants to look at the stars with
his telescopes. And if we were to visit him, you'd
go probably from here up ninety three through Franconia Nots
and you'd take a right and then you'd get over
into twin mountain. Then you go down a dirt to
go down a long road, and then on dirt road,
(02:40):
and then you'd be in the middle of nowhere, with
no street lights, nothing. You wouldn't be able to see
any other property. And that is where Doug built his
unique home. And along with that he built an observatory.
Kind I want you to describe it, because you are
better at describing it. But it's got a roof that
slides back. He puts your button and slides back, and
(03:03):
he's got an array of telescopes. So talk about the
observatory and the telescopes and what you can actually see
with the telescopes and what you do, because I know
you do a lot of teaching with those telescopes.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah. So I run a program called Mountains of Stars
where we use astronomy to connect people with the environment.
We've been doing this for quite a while, almost fifteen
years now. And one of the great ways to do that,
of course, is to get people looking through telescopes. So
I have a variety of telescopes that I use in programs,
and from my observatory here I can even broadcast over
(03:37):
video through zoom what's actually being seen through the telescopes.
We've done programs for schools all over New England that way.
So to have that capability right here at the house
is really really nice. And so there's a building that
basically looks like a little garage, but the roof actually
is motorized and slides off onto a set of rails
(03:58):
which allows the telescopes to be exposed to the sky.
But otherwise with the roof closed, they're perfectly weatherproof. So
it's a it's a wonderful thing to have. And as
Bradley mentioned, sort of as a professional hobby, I build telescopes.
We actually make the optics. We grind the mirrors. Uh.
And you need something to support the telescope unless you
(04:21):
point it anywhere in the sky. And long ago I
I'm not the first person to do this, but bowling
bowls are wonderful things. They're heavy, they're round, they're smooth,
and you put them on a little cup and you
can point your telescope anywhere. Way to make.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
The big bowling balls, not the small ones.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
But no, no, yeah, full size regular not not not
knocked in bowling, full bowling ball. You drill through them
and you put a shaft through it and not your
telescope on there and away you go. So it's a
fun way to do it. And if you're interested in
astronomy and telescopes, we recommend attending the Stellphane Telescope Makers Convention.
(05:04):
It's held every summer in Springfield, Vermont, right off thinks.
It's seven of I ninety one, so not far from
where many of your listeners live. And people come from
all over the world with the telescopes they've built to
compete them and to try them out against the stories.
You'll see a lot of great inventiveness when you come
to sell.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I've actually really Doug's invitation, I attended and I did
a video which you can also see. I'll post that
of this. Really it's interesting, it's strange, nothing quite like it.
There's a field with all kinds of it's like a
telescope convention. It is a telescope convention. People make their
own telescopes and the field is full of these homemade telescopes,
(05:45):
big ones, small ones, and people sharing a knowledge and
how to make the tube part, how to the ground
the lenses. There are young people, old people. There's a
history to the event though right it's in Springfield, Vermont.
What's the history of the event.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
So, telescope making actually began in this country in Springfield,
Vermont over one hundred years ago, and the club was
founded actually in nineteen twenty three, and since nineteen twenty six,
every year there's been one of these conventions. So next
summer we'll be holding our one hundredth. It will be
actually a century of people coming to both show off
(06:25):
what they've done and learn techniques and share ideas. A
tremendous collection of speakers and workshops. It's a very special
thing and it's amazing that it happened in this tiny
little town in Vermont, but it led to an awful
lot of science and technology in the country. In fact,
I'm producing a documentary film, a full length documentary that
will be premiering next year around the country on this history.
(06:49):
Because people from Stella Fane, from the Springfield telescope Makers,
were responsible for the design of the Jordan's telescope for Palomar,
the Hale telescope for desig finding, optics that helped correct
the Hubble telescope. Remember those optics were deformed, but the
correctors were made actually by one of our members made
that one of our members made optics that went to Pluto,
(07:12):
the spacecraft that went to Pluto, the simulators for the
moon landings were actually built by a Spellar Frame member. So, uh,
it's had a huge impact on the nation beyond just
what seems like, you know, a hobby, actually that that
has had a big impact on science technology for the
(07:33):
United States in the world.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And if you are interested in learning more about this,
spelled st E L l A F A N E
correct dot org dot org. Okay, now more about Doug,
one of the world's most interesting people. Tell them about
your your job when you were testing the nuclear facilities
(07:57):
survivability against attack by far and aggressives like Russia.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah. So when I completed my graduate work, my doctorate
almost fifty years ago, I was recruited to work for
a contracting company that did work for the Department of Defense.
And our job and what I became one of the
sort of the experts in was what we called nucletiavivability testing.
(08:27):
So every US strategic asset, every missile, space system, ground system,
ocean system, everything was designed to withstand nuclear attack. And
this is very important because this is Cold War. Remember,
we are at risk of being attacked and if your
defenses are so good that you know, to quote the
(08:49):
famous song, hit me with your best shot, but we
can continue to be there. That's really the strongest thing
that we could do. So we were responsible for taking
these pieces of equipment underground in tunnels deep in Nevada
and the Nevada Desert, and they would actually be exposed
to an explosion from an actual nuclear weapon.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
And wow, that's that's a different sort of job. Yes,
I blow things up with nuclear devices, which is that's right?
What would what did you find out? By the way,
how how much survivability did we have back in the
Cold War?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
We had survivability. Each system was exposed to as much
radiation as we believed could threaten it. So each system,
each subsystem had a specification, so we allowed certain amounts
of radiation to hit it, and therefore we would expose
it to that level. And we would have cables measuring
(09:55):
the responses. So a satellite would think it was flying,
and you'd measure whether the signals were going back and
forth the way they should. We'd measure the electrical currents
flowing on things. We measured the temperatures that things would
come to how things would be bent or moved, all
the different effects that radiation could produce, and we knew
how much each system could handle. That was specifle, and
(10:20):
we'd measure it to make sure what we got was
less than what it could handle. And that was a
very important part of the US defensive position because those
people who are negotiating in Geneva for treaties and things,
you know, they'd know what level we could survive, right,
So that made it possible to say, Okay, you know,
(10:43):
we know we can allow this much to happen, and
we're going to get through it. So the fact that
we did that work drove off, drove the costs up
for the Soviet Union and was a contributing factor to
their ultimate breakup because they couldn't, you know, throw enough
at them. So it's an important part of history. It's
(11:03):
interesting because those of us who are involved in it
are you know, few and far between now, but that
was a very important bit of national work, you know,
forty years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Great. Now that you know who our guest is, I'm
going to ask you, folks, would you like to see
more nuclear power or are you glad that nuclear power
has fallen out of favor. You know, we have limited
fossil fuels. You got to heat the house somehow, A
lot of power gets used up, A lot of power
gets used up making bitcoin. We're using power like crazy.
(11:40):
At some point are we going to have to use
nuclear power? And are you comfortable with that? I want
to find out from Doug if the technology is better,
if it's safer now, or if it's still unsafe. Also,
we'll talk when it comes to some of the pros
and concept nuclear power. One of them is the nuclear waste.
What do you do with that? And is there really
a danger that that can be stolen and made it
to weapons. We'll even get into how that gets made
(12:03):
into weapons. And I guess since it's stant you know,
it's in textbooks, it's not a secret. We can even
spell out how you make a nuclear how they made
Big Boy and Little Man. I guess that with those
were the names of the first two devices. How do
you actually do that? What does it take to do it?
That's all coming up on WBZ after this.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on wb Boston's news Radio.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Here we go Brady Jay for Dan. Tonight We're with
Doug Arion, a nuclear scientist, and we're going to talk
about perhaps if nuclear power might be an option for
the future. Maybe not. We'll find out, we'll find out
how it works, et cetera. We do want to talk
to Luciano in Pennsylvania. First. Luciano has an observation or
a question for us, Doug Hi, Luciano.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
Yes, Hello, Thank you for taking my call. Considering the
United States and Russia are the most powerful nuclear countries
in the world, neither one can make a mistake because
one bomb, one nuclear bomb can kill how many people
and how many do they have? Both have?
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Right, It's not good, it's not good at all. So
we're going to find out more about how all that works.
To Siano, I don't know if it depends on how
many people are in the space and how big the
bomb is, but I understand your concern and we're going
to learn more about all that. So thanks all right, Doug.
How does how does the nuclear power plant work?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
So the basic premise of all nuclear things is the
fact that there are certain very heavy elements uranium of
plutonium being the most famous, that are intrinsically unstable. So
those atoms break apart, and then the process of breaking apart,
they release energy. So if you put enough of this
materially one place, you can make a lot of heat.
(13:56):
So the beauty of the system is if you put
enough of the appropriate mix of these elements together and
you let them heat up, can heat up water. The
water becomes steam, the steam runs through a turbin the
turbine terms a generator, and wa lah, you have electricity.
So it's fundamentally similar to if you have a coal
burning plant where you burn coal to boil the water,
(14:17):
or a gas plant where you burn gas to boil
the water. Here we use the heat that's generated by
these heavy elements to boil the water and create power.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So the similarity is you have these elements. They're changing
from one thing to another and when they do, they
release heat. And it's the same when you burn something
like coal. You're changing it from one thing to another
and part of that change is given off in heat.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
So it is similar that way, right, except as opposed
to being a chemical reaction in terms of burning, it's
a nuclear reaction, and that the core of the atom
actually splits and becomes element, right, So it's different in
that sense. But the operation of the power plant once
you make the heat is the same, the difference being
(15:03):
that you don't have to burn anything. In order to
do that, you of course have to mine that material.
You have to mine and purify and enrich that uranium.
And it's that process. It's the enrichment process that connects
what happens with fuel for power plants to fuel that
goes into a nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
So the big issue is controlling this chain reaction and
exactly and how do you control it, and what can
go wrong when it comes to the control of it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
So to make this process work, well, you have clumps
or rods of this material, and the radiation that's being
produced by one set of atoms is helping to trigger
other atoms to split. It's called the chain reaction. And
the goal here, of course, is to have enough of
(15:57):
that going on that you're producing heat that's boiling your
water and running your power, but not too much of
it going on, at which point the thing gets extremely
hot and will melt and swallow them elk down. And
that has happened to one degree another. The two most
famous or three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in
(16:17):
what was the Soviet Unions at the time, and So
to control this there are several ways. One dominant way
is you have rods of carbon or another material that
are between the rods of this fuel, and depending on
what the position of those is, you can increase or
decrease the rate that the reactions go on. And so
(16:39):
long as that's working properly, that you have the right controls,
works beautifully. If any of that fails, then you run
into a problem.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
And the same way, have they figured out how to
control it? Have they gotten better at keeping safeguards in place,
or is it still just as dangerous as it was.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Well, the fundamental if you have a failure, is dangerous,
but the systems are extremely robust. I mean, all things considered. Yes,
we've had a couple of these incidents, but they are
relatively few and far between. Now. Fukashima, the issue was
you had an earthquake in a tidal way. It wasn't
a failure of the reactor itself, right, It wasn't that
(17:27):
it was misoperated. It was that it was subject to
the damage from an earthquake and the tsunami. Chernobyl and
Three Mile Island were problems with a control system that
didn't control the amount the rate of the reaction. The
reactions ran away and damaged the reactors and produced excessive
(17:49):
radiation and tremendous damage. So properly used, it's a safe
way to go.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
So there, the damage, the environmental damage down by fie
Kushima wasn't that much, right considering what happened to it,
an earthquake and a tsunami.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yeah, yeah, that that was a tremendous risk to it.
And what happened there was that the cooling system was
damaged and so you were no longer cooling that core
the way it was supposed to be. And that's what
created the issue there, and that was created by you know,
the failure of the power systems due to the earthquake
(18:33):
in the tsunami.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
I guess I'm asking you would you would you like
to see more nuclear power plants? You know all about it?
I would dress what you say.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, I think I think nuclear is a very good way,
uh for generating electricity. And as you mentioned in your
intro a while back, our demand for electricity is skyrocketing.
You know this idea that everything goes electronic, well, electronic fians,
you need electricity, right, data farms, server farms, communicating electronically,
(19:04):
everything being over the web. All of that takes a
lot of juice and you've got to make it somehow. Now,
solar farms, wind farms, I mean, there are lots of
other ways to make power that are very good and
fundamentally better in the long term, but you have to
commit to doing those things. But what you want to
generate a substantial amount of power, nuclear power is the
(19:24):
way to go. Now, what's also happened is there are
technologies that are being developed to make small nuclear reactors.
So you're thinking of power plants, are these big factory
scale things. There are other ways that you can utilize
these things to make power on smaller scales, where you
could put relatively modest nuclear reactors much closer to where
(19:45):
the powers being used. And that's a whole set of
technologies that's being developed. We haven't feeled that any of
those yet. They haven't been licensed to be operated, but
there are technologies, and of course, the less of the
fuel you have around, the less is the risk that
something goes wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
And as I think you alluded to, the transmission cost
would be less because you'd have more of them closer
to the way they're getting where the power is getting used.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
Well, if there are several benefits, that's one. The second
thing is, you know, if you had one major power plant,
just imagine this with a big cable coming out of it,
and something happens from that wiring system, a whole bunch
of area runs out of power. If you have distributed power,
it's much harder for that to happen, right, So it's
(20:33):
a much more robust system, much more likely to continue
to provide power. So smaller reactors and also they can
be you can provide additional power in places where you
need additional power. So you have an area there's lots
of data centers, you can put something there that will
supply the power because that's the area that really needs it.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Right.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
The farms down the road don't need it as much,
but you need it in that one area. So being
able to do things more locally is helpful. So that
there are technologies, there are capabilities of doing things.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Is the question correct that there's a small nuclear reactor
over an MIT somewhere in some building.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Probably? I mean there are research reactors of different kinds
in many places and many and they are used, for example,
breed radioactive elements that you need in medicine. So, uh,
if you have a thyroid problem, one of the ways
to address that is to inject radioactive iodide into your body.
(21:40):
You're like, oh my god, radiation. Well, guess what it
all accumulates in your thyroid. It will kill off tumors
and things in your thyroid without hurting anything else. But
you have to make element right and that can be
made in a reactor. So those are the kinds of things.
So there are research reactors as well besides power reactors.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Coming up after this, we're gonna find out about the
waste that is an issue, and how maybe waste could
be used to make weapons, and how you have to
be careful of that and the process. We'll learn the
process why which that happens. It's an extra relevant because
of recent events in Iran. They got close. We can
(22:20):
talk about how close they did get, what it took
for them to get that close, maybe how how far
set back they have been by the attack on their
their installation. And that's all coming up with Doug Arion
after this on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's News Radio.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Join us, won't you? You can call six one seven
two five four ten thirty and called directly or this
is cool new thing. You might want to try it out.
Somebody tried it tonight and it worked great. The talkback
feature on the iHeartRadio app. So you're listening to this
show night side on the free iHeartRadio app, and while
you're listening, you tap the little red microphone in the
(23:07):
upper right corner of the screen and you speak into
it and you send us that personalized audio message. In
the case of this doc show, it's great because you're
can ask a question which someone did tonight, or you
can make an observation. And I was struck by how
great the sound quality was. It seemed better than most
phone calls. So there's that. We would Doug Arion nuclear
(23:30):
scientists talking about nuclear power and how that relates to
nuclear weapons. We'd get into the nuclear weapons area and
Doug was saying that nuclear power is for the amount
of power that it generates, a relatively safe option, and
I like to think that they have improved the safety
(23:51):
the safety factors on it, and you can do also
do things like having very small reactors so if something
goes wrong, it's not the catastrophe otherwise be But there
is still the problem of the waste, and Doug's going
to talk about that. Now, where does the waste go?
(24:11):
Where do we put it now? And we have to
be careful that no bad actors get it, and if
they do get it, how do they turn it into
weapons grade? And you can take us through all that
and then take us to that facility or those facilities
in Iran, one of which at least one of which
was recently set back some by want a missile. So
(24:34):
start with what we do now with the waste.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Yeah, So the issue here is, you know, as we
described before, the processes, these atoms break down, the nucleari
i break down, that's the energy released. And once an
atom does that, of course it's done, right, We're not
going to get any more energy out of it. So
when you have these rods of fuel, these rods of uranium,
(25:02):
once a significant fraction of it has broken down in decayed,
it's not producing that much heat anymore, but it's still
producing some radio activity. Right, It's not all dead, it's
just a good chunk of it is gone. So we
have to do something with it, and right now we
don't have a lot of good options. So much of
(25:23):
it is stored in tanks or containers, buried either near
power plants or transferred to. A few areas in the
country where we're still storing nuclear waste. There's a major
one in Hanford, Washington, for example, and right now we
(25:45):
unfortunately don't do anything with it. Once it's been declared done,
it's put in one of these storage facilities and it
just sits there. So many years ago, trying to think
when this would be we're looking late eighties, a large
cavern was dug in Yucca Mountain in what was part
(26:08):
of the Nevada Test Site Nella's Air Force Range in
the middle of Nevada, and it was going to be
the Ucca Mountain storage site, and all this nuclear waste
was going to be stored in there. The advantage being
that that is a geologically stable area. There is in
groundwater running through it. There was a low probability that
(26:28):
this waste would contaminate anything. But there was a lot
of political pressure against that, even though the facility had
been built and part of it was about transporting it.
So power plan, pick your favorite state, you know their
fuel is done, that fuel will be put on some
(26:49):
kind of a truck and that truck would drive to Nevada. Well,
the risk is what happens if that truck gets in
a bad accident as a rollover, goes into a ditch.
What are the risks there? And that kind of concern
basically kept Yucker Mountain from being opened. So we're still
storing this waste material, this radioactive waste material insights all
(27:12):
over the country. So that's a major engineering and political
issue as to what you do with it. Now, could
it be further purified? Yeah, And now we're looking at
an economic issue, right, is somebody going to build the
plant produce some of those things it was so off
to transport it. So that's one of the major outstanding
(27:35):
issues about using nuclear power on a larger scale. Now,
if we look at the fuel itself and where it
comes from, we have to recognize that. Firstly, when you
have to mind this material and you have to purify
it so that you have uranium. The big issue is
that uranium actually comes in two flavors. Each of the
(27:58):
flavors as ninety two per protons, which is why it's uranium.
Number of protons defines the element, but it has two
different numbers of neutrons. The one that has a lower number,
creates uranium two thirty five two hundred and thirty five particles,
and the other kind is uranium two thirty eight has
two hundred and thirty eight particles. The two thirty five
(28:20):
is the more radioactive kind and the part that's producing
the energy we really want to use, and the two
thirty eight is the kind that is much more common.
So what you do is you mind a bunch of
this stuff, you purify it to uranium, and now you
have to separate it so you get mostly the two
thirty five. Now, for a power plant, the uranium you
(28:43):
use should have a modest amount of the two thirty
five to produce the amount of energy we need without
being at risk of blowing up. For a weapon, you
want as pure two thirty five as you can get.
So there's a process by taking this that you've mined
and what's called enriching it, that is, separating the two
(29:05):
thirty five and the two thirty eight until you are
dominated by two thirty five to the degree that you want.
So if we look at what was happening that you.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Ran, howe what is it nuts in bolts of how
you separated.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
There are several different ways you could do it, or
that it's done. There are three dominant ways. The one
way is with a centrifuge. So if you've ever had
your blood separated, you know you to test it. It's
swung it around a big machine, and the heavier stuff
ends up nearer the end of the tube and the
lighter stuff up above it. Well, believe it or not,
(29:42):
you can do the same kind of thing on an
industrial scale. You actually vaporize the uranium into some of
the uranium exifluoride, and you spin it around and the
heavier stuff, the two thirty eight, ends up farther down
the tube than the two thirty five, and you separate
some of that and you run it through this multiple
(30:03):
times and each time it becomes more pure. So that
high speed centrifuges of an industrial scale is the dominant way.
This is done in the way it was being done
in Iran. And you might have heard about export controls
on certain kinds of special steel tubing. That's what's used
in these centrifuges, so there's a whole budget about that.
(30:28):
A second way is what's called the gaseous diffusion, where
basically you have screens of tiny holes, and lighter elements
go through those holes faster than bigger elements, and you
keep passing it through over and over and over again.
It's similar to a diffusion process you used to purify
water when you're hiking, a filtering system that lets smaller
(30:50):
things through and stops the bigger things. So if you
run it through multiple times, each time it gets more enriched.
And there's a third way that was done experimentally, I
don't believe it's being used industrially, which is called laser
isotope separation, where you actually illuminate the gas with a
laser that's tuned so that only one of those elements
(31:13):
reacts to it, and then you use magnets to pull
that out. That was developed at Livermore Lab back in
the late seventies as the technology for doing this separation.
Because remember Livermore is in the business of making bombs.
Their goal was to be able to efficiently purify uranium
(31:33):
and also plutonium to make weapons. So if you look
at Iran, what they were doing is they were enriching uranium,
and you're even if you're going to just build power plants,
you have to enrich the uranium and under treaty agreement
with the US, they were allowed to enrich uranium up
(31:53):
to the point of making power plants. The issue is, well,
once you know how to do that, you could run
it to the point that you can make weapons grade, right,
purified enough that you could use another weapon. And that
was the big question. Right here they're doing it in
the middle of a mountain and they're purifying uranium. Exactly
(32:15):
what were they doing is the big question, right And
that's what led to the attack on that mountain, with
the belief that they were actually enriching uranium to weapons
grade so that they could actually make a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
That they is evidence that this is actually going on.
What can they see with their satellites, trucks coming and going.
Excuse me, they seem to have put a good handle
on how close they were. I don't understand how they
would know. Do you know how they would know?
Speaker 3 (32:47):
I don't know the specifics of that, but you would
look at the amount of material that's going in, how
long it's in there. And I don't know what other
intelligence assets were being used to determine what was going on.
From my perspective, and again, this is just me, and
this could be totally wrong. But for from my experience
(33:11):
working in the industry, I would say that if I
had an agreement with you know, the rest of the
world that I was going to be purifying uranium for
power purposes, I would be doing it out of the
open where it was possible for people to see that
I was doing that.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Okay, playing by the rules exactly.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
It's just it just seems odd to me. But again
that that's that's me. I'm not in the intelligence community,
but that's me, and I'm like, this just seems a
little weird to me that they would be doing it
that way. If you know, if you're doing something you're
allowed When you were a kid and you were doing
something you were allowed to do, you didn't hide in
the closet to do it, right, So if you wonder
(33:55):
about that a little bit, and so that that has
something to do with this.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
You know, you had to take a had to interrupt
you for a quick break, and we'll finish up in
the final segment.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Right after this on BZ, You're on Night Side with
Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Radley J for Dan tonight, and we're speaking with Doug
Area nuclear scientists and talking about we already addressed, maybe
we address whether or not nuclear power might be a
great option for the future. We're going to need more power.
One thing I don't understand, actually, Doug, and maybe you
can opine on this is why is it Why is
(34:33):
it not a rule that every commercial building? Why don't
all commercial buildings have to have all solar panels on
the top. Wouldn't that give us enough power to do
everything we need to do.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
There are a lot of different places that that solar
rays wood could should be going. I mean, think about
the medians of all the interstates, and you've already got
power lines along them that you could feed into you know,
all sorts of air that's already been you know, dismantled
for nature, for industry, and yes, the tops of buildings,
you know, think about the tops of all those warehouses
(35:09):
and big box stores, all these surfaces. I mean, that
would be a terrific thing to do, you know, take
advantage of every square foot you've got that already is covered,
you know, I think that would be a tremendous idea.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
The limitations still as far as solar power.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Goes, well, the biggest issue with solar power compared to
say nuclear power. Nuclear power runs rain, you know, pardon
upon rain or shine. Right, you can make power when
you need it, you can make more when you need it,
slow it down when you don't need it. Any form
(35:48):
of solar power, for example, only makes power when the
sunlight's hitting it. So firstly, if you're in places like
where I am up in northern New Hampshire, we don't
get as much sunlight, say as they get in Arizona,
so you have to make power where you can get it.
And you know, we can still make power here, We're
(36:10):
just not going to make a lot of it, but
we can make it certainly make more in other places.
So that's one issue. And the second one is, Okay,
say you went all solar throughout the country, but you
need power at night, what do you do. You need
battery technology. You need some way to store that so
you can utilize it at other times. And batteries are still,
(36:31):
by the way, not very green. We're really destroying Chili
and Bolivia to mine lithium for all those batteries, for
all those electronic things. So there are battery technologies that
we need. We can have nice environmentally friendly high energy
density batteries. That's going to make a lot of things
work really really well. For us.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
This seems impossible, but you never know. I mean, you
can charge your computer without plugging it into anything. Is
there any way you could have big satellite? I know
you don't like satellites because they blocked, because they cause problems,
But could you have a satellite that was always in
the sun generate power somehow get that power to the earth?
(37:15):
Is that crazy?
Speaker 3 (37:16):
There are groups, there are groups that are working on it.
There are a lot of issues with it. The biggest
one is how do you transmit the power? So there's
a group that's been looking at satellites like that, and
then you use microwaves to power the send the power down.
But then you basically in that game, you have a
massive microwave of it. Right. You may have antenna's collecting you,
(37:36):
but if you wander into that intense beam of microwaves,
it's it's very damaging. So there's no free once you
just collected energy space, but you gotta get it down
on the ground.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
And that other I heard about this sort of a kite,
big giant kite string. There'd be a platform up in
space that was getting sent all the time and it
was actually attached by some tether to the Earth. That
is that a doable thing.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
There have been ideas of having cable tethered systems, but
again there's you know, that's a hard thing to put
up there. We've never done that, right, We've never tethered
something up to an orbiting spacecraft. It has to be
up very far in order to be traveling at the
(38:28):
same speed the ground is turning. Otherwise you end up
winding the cable around the planet. Right, So the spacecraft
has to be the right distance away, and then you've
got to power all that energy down that cable. So
it's not a simple problem to solve by any means.
It's not a panacea to go up there and do that.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Are there are things on the horizon that I may
you know quickly that can thirty seconds, Anything on the
horizon that we haven't thought of yet that's brand new
that might be helpful and generating power.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
I I don't really know. I think I think the idea,
as you mentioned before, of really getting solar wherever however
we can, is certainly the greenest of the opportunities we have,
has the least environmental impact. And can you know be
a big part of this new electronic technology future that
(39:26):
we're in.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Perfect, Before we go, tell us how to reach Mountains
Mountains of Stars. Which is your webs your organization.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, we have lots and lots of resources and materials,
interesting content about all of these things. We Mountains of
Stars dot com dot org. It's Mountains of Stars dot org.
And we invite anybody to come check out our site
and all the new information on there. And our Facebook
page is Mountains of Stars, So check us out.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Perfect. Thanks Doug. Now this I'm busy
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ. Coustin's me Radiot.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Try Thanks for being with us. I'm Bradley Jay for
Dan tonight, and our next guest is Doug Arion. He's
been a guest here before. Doug is a physicist, actually
I guess the nuclear physicist, an astronomer, and a hiker
and so much more. But the overall topic we gotta
get to is do you think that maybe you'd like
(00:27):
to see more nuclear power? Nuclear power is a thing
for a while, fell out of favor for for good reason,
but have a dance has been made where nuclear power
is a real, clean, safe power. Fukushima had a problem,
but compared to what happened to it, it fared pretty well.
(00:51):
So we'll find out how that works, maybe what has
changed in the nuclear heating and the domestic nuclear use industry,
and we'll learn how the materials get refined to make weapons.
We'll learn all about that. But also we want to
(01:11):
it's very interesting to hear about Doug and his self
made observatory, and I do want to introduce Doug and
have him talked about that and the telescopes that he
makes out of bowling balls. I'm not kidding you. As
a matter of fact, I did a video with Doug
and I posted it on my social media and it
(01:34):
may also be on the WZ social media of the
observatory that Doug has built and the telescopes that actually
the centerpiece of them is a bowling ball that they
work perfectly. So Doug, thanks for being with us.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
It's great to be with you again. We've always had
a lot of fun with these conversations, and I think
we're going to have some really interesting things to talk
about tonight.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So if any questions for Doug or any observations at
six one, seven, five, four, ten thirty, you may have
some question or something you want to say pop up
during the conversation. Love to have you. So let's let
me paint the picture of where Doug lives. I won't
tell him the exact address. Doug, don't worry. But if
(02:17):
Doug lives in a very dark area, then that's by
design because he wants to look at the stars with
his telescopes. And if we were to visit him, you'd
go probably from here up ninety three through Franconia Nots
and you'd take a right and then you'd get over
into twin mountain. Then you go down a dirt to
go down a long road, and then on dirt road,
(02:40):
and then you'd be in the middle of nowhere, with
no street lights, nothing. You wouldn't be able to see
any other property. And that is where Doug built his
unique home. And along with that he built an observatory.
Kind I want you to describe it, because you are
better at describing it. But it's got a roof that
slides back. He puts your button and slides back, and
(03:03):
he's got an array of telescopes. So talk about the
observatory and the telescopes and what you can actually see
with the telescopes and what you do, because I know
you do a lot of teaching with those telescopes.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah. So I run a program called Mountains of Stars
where we use astronomy to connect people with the environment.
We've been doing this for quite a while, almost fifteen
years now. And one of the great ways to do that,
of course, is to get people looking through telescopes. So
I have a variety of telescopes that I use in programs,
and from my observatory here I can even broadcast over
(03:37):
video through zoom what's actually being seen through the telescopes.
We've done programs for schools all over New England that way.
So to have that capability right here at the house
is really really nice. And so there's a building that
basically looks like a little garage, but the roof actually
is motorized and slides off onto a set of rails
(03:58):
which allows the telescopes to be exposed to the sky.
But otherwise with the roof closed, they're perfectly weatherproof. So
it's a it's a wonderful thing to have. And as
Bradley mentioned, sort of as a professional hobby, I build telescopes.
We actually make the optics. We grind the mirrors. Uh.
And you need something to support the telescope unless you
(04:21):
point it anywhere in the sky. And long ago I
I'm not the first person to do this, but bowling
bowls are wonderful things. They're heavy, they're round, they're smooth,
and you put them on a little cup and you
can point your telescope anywhere. Way to make.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
The big bowling balls, not the small ones.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
But no, no, yeah, full size regular not not not
knocked in bowling, full bowling ball. You drill through them
and you put a shaft through it and not your
telescope on there and away you go. So it's a
fun way to do it. And if you're interested in
astronomy and telescopes, we recommend attending the Stellphane Telescope Makers Convention.
(05:04):
It's held every summer in Springfield, Vermont, right off thinks.
It's seven of I ninety one, so not far from
where many of your listeners live. And people come from
all over the world with the telescopes they've built to
compete them and to try them out against the stories.
You'll see a lot of great inventiveness when you come
to sell.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I've actually really Doug's invitation, I attended and I did
a video which you can also see. I'll post that
of this. Really it's interesting, it's strange, nothing quite like it.
There's a field with all kinds of it's like a
telescope convention. It is a telescope convention. People make their
own telescopes and the field is full of these homemade telescopes,
(05:45):
big ones, small ones, and people sharing a knowledge and
how to make the tube part, how to the ground
the lenses. There are young people, old people. There's a
history to the event though right it's in Springfield, Vermont.
What's the history of the event.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
So, telescope making actually began in this country in Springfield,
Vermont over one hundred years ago, and the club was
founded actually in nineteen twenty three, and since nineteen twenty six,
every year there's been one of these conventions. So next
summer we'll be holding our one hundredth. It will be
actually a century of people coming to both show off
(06:25):
what they've done and learn techniques and share ideas. A
tremendous collection of speakers and workshops. It's a very special
thing and it's amazing that it happened in this tiny
little town in Vermont, but it led to an awful
lot of science and technology in the country. In fact,
I'm producing a documentary film, a full length documentary that
will be premiering next year around the country on this history.
(06:49):
Because people from Stella Fane, from the Springfield telescope Makers,
were responsible for the design of the Jordan's telescope for Palomar,
the Hale telescope for desig finding, optics that helped correct
the Hubble telescope. Remember those optics were deformed, but the
correctors were made actually by one of our members made
that one of our members made optics that went to Pluto,
(07:12):
the spacecraft that went to Pluto, the simulators for the
moon landings were actually built by a Spellar Frame member. So, uh,
it's had a huge impact on the nation beyond just
what seems like, you know, a hobby, actually that that
has had a big impact on science technology for the
(07:33):
United States in the world.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And if you are interested in learning more about this,
spelled st E L l A F A N E
correct dot org dot org. Okay, now more about Doug,
one of the world's most interesting people. Tell them about
your your job when you were testing the nuclear facilities
(07:57):
survivability against attack by far and aggressives like Russia.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Yeah. So when I completed my graduate work, my doctorate
almost fifty years ago, I was recruited to work for
a contracting company that did work for the Department of Defense.
And our job and what I became one of the
sort of the experts in was what we called nucletiavivability testing.
(08:27):
So every US strategic asset, every missile, space system, ground system,
ocean system, everything was designed to withstand nuclear attack. And
this is very important because this is Cold War. Remember,
we are at risk of being attacked and if your
defenses are so good that you know, to quote the
(08:49):
famous song, hit me with your best shot, but we
can continue to be there. That's really the strongest thing
that we could do. So we were responsible for taking
these pieces of equipment underground in tunnels deep in Nevada
and the Nevada Desert, and they would actually be exposed
to an explosion from an actual nuclear weapon.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
And wow, that's that's a different sort of job. Yes,
I blow things up with nuclear devices, which is that's right?
What would what did you find out? By the way,
how how much survivability did we have back in the
Cold War?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
We had survivability. Each system was exposed to as much
radiation as we believed could threaten it. So each system,
each subsystem had a specification, so we allowed certain amounts
of radiation to hit it, and therefore we would expose
it to that level. And we would have cables measuring
(09:55):
the responses. So a satellite would think it was flying,
and you'd measure whether the signals were going back and
forth the way they should. We'd measure the electrical currents
flowing on things. We measured the temperatures that things would
come to how things would be bent or moved, all
the different effects that radiation could produce, and we knew
how much each system could handle. That was specifle, and
(10:20):
we'd measure it to make sure what we got was
less than what it could handle. And that was a
very important part of the US defensive position because those
people who are negotiating in Geneva for treaties and things,
you know, they'd know what level we could survive, right,
So that made it possible to say, Okay, you know,
(10:43):
we know we can allow this much to happen, and
we're going to get through it. So the fact that
we did that work drove off, drove the costs up
for the Soviet Union and was a contributing factor to
their ultimate breakup because they couldn't, you know, throw enough
at them. So it's an important part of history. It's
(11:03):
interesting because those of us who are involved in it
are you know, few and far between now, but that
was a very important bit of national work, you know,
forty years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Great. Now that you know who our guest is, I'm
going to ask you, folks, would you like to see
more nuclear power or are you glad that nuclear power
has fallen out of favor. You know, we have limited
fossil fuels. You got to heat the house somehow, A
lot of power gets used up, A lot of power
gets used up making bitcoin. We're using power like crazy.
(11:40):
At some point are we going to have to use
nuclear power? And are you comfortable with that? I want
to find out from Doug if the technology is better,
if it's safer now, or if it's still unsafe. Also,
we'll talk when it comes to some of the pros
and concept nuclear power. One of them is the nuclear waste.
What do you do with that? And is there really
a danger that that can be stolen and made it
to weapons. We'll even get into how that gets made
(12:03):
into weapons. And I guess since it's stant you know,
it's in textbooks, it's not a secret. We can even
spell out how you make a nuclear how they made
Big Boy and Little Man. I guess that with those
were the names of the first two devices. How do
you actually do that? What does it take to do it?
That's all coming up on WBZ after this.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on wb Boston's news Radio.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Here we go Brady Jay for Dan. Tonight We're with
Doug Arion, a nuclear scientist, and we're going to talk
about perhaps if nuclear power might be an option for
the future. Maybe not. We'll find out, we'll find out
how it works, et cetera. We do want to talk
to Luciano in Pennsylvania. First. Luciano has an observation or
a question for us, Doug Hi, Luciano.
Speaker 4 (12:52):
Yes, Hello, Thank you for taking my call. Considering the
United States and Russia are the most powerful nuclear countries
in the world, neither one can make a mistake because
one bomb, one nuclear bomb can kill how many people
and how many do they have? Both have?
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Right, It's not good, it's not good at all. So
we're going to find out more about how all that works.
To Siano, I don't know if it depends on how
many people are in the space and how big the
bomb is, but I understand your concern and we're going
to learn more about all that. So thanks all right, Doug.
How does how does the nuclear power plant work?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
So the basic premise of all nuclear things is the
fact that there are certain very heavy elements uranium of
plutonium being the most famous, that are intrinsically unstable. So
those atoms break apart, and then the process of breaking apart,
they release energy. So if you put enough of this
materially one place, you can make a lot of heat.
(13:56):
So the beauty of the system is if you put
enough of the appropriate mix of these elements together and
you let them heat up, can heat up water. The
water becomes steam, the steam runs through a turbin the
turbine terms a generator, and wa lah, you have electricity.
So it's fundamentally similar to if you have a coal
burning plant where you burn coal to boil the water,
(14:17):
or a gas plant where you burn gas to boil
the water. Here we use the heat that's generated by
these heavy elements to boil the water and create power.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
So the similarity is you have these elements. They're changing
from one thing to another and when they do, they
release heat. And it's the same when you burn something
like coal. You're changing it from one thing to another
and part of that change is given off in heat.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
So it is similar that way, right, except as opposed
to being a chemical reaction in terms of burning, it's
a nuclear reaction, and that the core of the atom
actually splits and becomes element, right, So it's different in
that sense. But the operation of the power plant once
you make the heat is the same, the difference being
(15:03):
that you don't have to burn anything. In order to
do that, you of course have to mine that material.
You have to mine and purify and enrich that uranium.
And it's that process. It's the enrichment process that connects
what happens with fuel for power plants to fuel that
goes into a nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
So the big issue is controlling this chain reaction and
exactly and how do you control it, and what can
go wrong when it comes to the control of it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
So to make this process work, well, you have clumps
or rods of this material, and the radiation that's being
produced by one set of atoms is helping to trigger
other atoms to split. It's called the chain reaction. And
the goal here, of course, is to have enough of
(15:57):
that going on that you're producing heat that's boiling your
water and running your power, but not too much of
it going on, at which point the thing gets extremely
hot and will melt and swallow them elk down. And
that has happened to one degree another. The two most
famous or three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Chernobyl in
(16:17):
what was the Soviet Unions at the time, and So
to control this there are several ways. One dominant way
is you have rods of carbon or another material that
are between the rods of this fuel, and depending on
what the position of those is, you can increase or
decrease the rate that the reactions go on. And so
(16:39):
long as that's working properly, that you have the right controls,
works beautifully. If any of that fails, then you run
into a problem.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
And the same way, have they figured out how to
control it? Have they gotten better at keeping safeguards in place,
or is it still just as dangerous as it was.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Well, the fundamental if you have a failure, is dangerous,
but the systems are extremely robust. I mean, all things considered. Yes,
we've had a couple of these incidents, but they are
relatively few and far between. Now. Fukashima, the issue was
you had an earthquake in a tidal way. It wasn't
a failure of the reactor itself, right, It wasn't that
(17:27):
it was misoperated. It was that it was subject to
the damage from an earthquake and the tsunami. Chernobyl and
Three Mile Island were problems with a control system that
didn't control the amount the rate of the reaction. The
reactions ran away and damaged the reactors and produced excessive
(17:49):
radiation and tremendous damage. So properly used, it's a safe
way to go.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
So there, the damage, the environmental damage down by fie
Kushima wasn't that much, right considering what happened to it,
an earthquake and a tsunami.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yeah, yeah, that that was a tremendous risk to it.
And what happened there was that the cooling system was
damaged and so you were no longer cooling that core
the way it was supposed to be. And that's what
created the issue there, and that was created by you know,
the failure of the power systems due to the earthquake
(18:33):
in the tsunami.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
I guess I'm asking you would you would you like
to see more nuclear power plants? You know all about it?
I would dress what you say.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, I think I think nuclear is a very good way,
uh for generating electricity. And as you mentioned in your
intro a while back, our demand for electricity is skyrocketing.
You know this idea that everything goes electronic, well, electronic fians,
you need electricity, right, data farms, server farms, communicating electronically,
(19:04):
everything being over the web. All of that takes a
lot of juice and you've got to make it somehow. Now,
solar farms, wind farms, I mean, there are lots of
other ways to make power that are very good and
fundamentally better in the long term, but you have to
commit to doing those things. But what you want to
generate a substantial amount of power, nuclear power is the
(19:24):
way to go. Now, what's also happened is there are
technologies that are being developed to make small nuclear reactors.
So you're thinking of power plants, are these big factory
scale things. There are other ways that you can utilize
these things to make power on smaller scales, where you
could put relatively modest nuclear reactors much closer to where
(19:45):
the powers being used. And that's a whole set of
technologies that's being developed. We haven't feeled that any of
those yet. They haven't been licensed to be operated, but
there are technologies, and of course, the less of the
fuel you have around, the less is the risk that
something goes wrong.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
And as I think you alluded to, the transmission cost
would be less because you'd have more of them closer
to the way they're getting where the power is getting used.
Speaker 3 (20:13):
Well, if there are several benefits, that's one. The second
thing is, you know, if you had one major power plant,
just imagine this with a big cable coming out of it,
and something happens from that wiring system, a whole bunch
of area runs out of power. If you have distributed power,
it's much harder for that to happen, right, So it's
(20:33):
a much more robust system, much more likely to continue
to provide power. So smaller reactors and also they can
be you can provide additional power in places where you
need additional power. So you have an area there's lots
of data centers, you can put something there that will
supply the power because that's the area that really needs it.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Right.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
The farms down the road don't need it as much,
but you need it in that one area. So being
able to do things more locally is helpful. So that
there are technologies, there are capabilities of doing things.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Is the question correct that there's a small nuclear reactor
over an MIT somewhere in some building.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Probably? I mean there are research reactors of different kinds
in many places and many and they are used, for example,
breed radioactive elements that you need in medicine. So, uh,
if you have a thyroid problem, one of the ways
to address that is to inject radioactive iodide into your body.
(21:40):
You're like, oh my god, radiation. Well, guess what it
all accumulates in your thyroid. It will kill off tumors
and things in your thyroid without hurting anything else. But
you have to make element right and that can be
made in a reactor. So those are the kinds of things.
So there are research reactors as well besides power reactors.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Coming up after this, we're gonna find out about the
waste that is an issue, and how maybe waste could
be used to make weapons, and how you have to
be careful of that and the process. We'll learn the
process why which that happens. It's an extra relevant because
of recent events in Iran. They got close. We can
(22:20):
talk about how close they did get, what it took
for them to get that close, maybe how how far
set back they have been by the attack on their
their installation. And that's all coming up with Doug Arion
after this on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's News Radio.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Join us, won't you? You can call six one seven
two five four ten thirty and called directly or this
is cool new thing. You might want to try it out.
Somebody tried it tonight and it worked great. The talkback
feature on the iHeartRadio app. So you're listening to this
show night side on the free iHeartRadio app, and while
you're listening, you tap the little red microphone in the
(23:07):
upper right corner of the screen and you speak into
it and you send us that personalized audio message. In
the case of this doc show, it's great because you're
can ask a question which someone did tonight, or you
can make an observation. And I was struck by how
great the sound quality was. It seemed better than most
phone calls. So there's that. We would Doug Arion nuclear
(23:30):
scientists talking about nuclear power and how that relates to
nuclear weapons. We'd get into the nuclear weapons area and
Doug was saying that nuclear power is for the amount
of power that it generates, a relatively safe option, and
I like to think that they have improved the safety
(23:51):
the safety factors on it, and you can do also
do things like having very small reactors so if something
goes wrong, it's not the catastrophe otherwise be But there
is still the problem of the waste, and Doug's going
to talk about that. Now, where does the waste go?
(24:11):
Where do we put it now? And we have to
be careful that no bad actors get it, and if
they do get it, how do they turn it into
weapons grade? And you can take us through all that
and then take us to that facility or those facilities
in Iran, one of which at least one of which
was recently set back some by want a missile. So
(24:34):
start with what we do now with the waste.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Yeah, So the issue here is, you know, as we
described before, the processes, these atoms break down, the nucleari
i break down, that's the energy released. And once an
atom does that, of course it's done, right, We're not
going to get any more energy out of it. So
when you have these rods of fuel, these rods of uranium,
(25:02):
once a significant fraction of it has broken down in decayed,
it's not producing that much heat anymore, but it's still
producing some radio activity. Right, It's not all dead, it's
just a good chunk of it is gone. So we
have to do something with it, and right now we
don't have a lot of good options. So much of
(25:23):
it is stored in tanks or containers, buried either near
power plants or transferred to. A few areas in the
country where we're still storing nuclear waste. There's a major
one in Hanford, Washington, for example, and right now we
(25:45):
unfortunately don't do anything with it. Once it's been declared done,
it's put in one of these storage facilities and it
just sits there. So many years ago, trying to think
when this would be we're looking late eighties, a large
cavern was dug in Yucca Mountain in what was part
(26:08):
of the Nevada Test Site Nella's Air Force Range in
the middle of Nevada, and it was going to be
the Ucca Mountain storage site, and all this nuclear waste
was going to be stored in there. The advantage being
that that is a geologically stable area. There is in
groundwater running through it. There was a low probability that
(26:28):
this waste would contaminate anything. But there was a lot
of political pressure against that, even though the facility had
been built and part of it was about transporting it.
So power plan, pick your favorite state, you know their
fuel is done, that fuel will be put on some
(26:49):
kind of a truck and that truck would drive to Nevada. Well,
the risk is what happens if that truck gets in
a bad accident as a rollover, goes into a ditch.
What are the risks there? And that kind of concern
basically kept Yucker Mountain from being opened. So we're still
storing this waste material, this radioactive waste material insights all
(27:12):
over the country. So that's a major engineering and political
issue as to what you do with it. Now, could
it be further purified? Yeah, And now we're looking at
an economic issue, right, is somebody going to build the
plant produce some of those things it was so off
to transport it. So that's one of the major outstanding
(27:35):
issues about using nuclear power on a larger scale. Now,
if we look at the fuel itself and where it
comes from, we have to recognize that. Firstly, when you
have to mind this material and you have to purify
it so that you have uranium. The big issue is
that uranium actually comes in two flavors. Each of the
(27:58):
flavors as ninety two per protons, which is why it's uranium.
Number of protons defines the element, but it has two
different numbers of neutrons. The one that has a lower number,
creates uranium two thirty five two hundred and thirty five particles,
and the other kind is uranium two thirty eight has
two hundred and thirty eight particles. The two thirty five
(28:20):
is the more radioactive kind and the part that's producing
the energy we really want to use, and the two
thirty eight is the kind that is much more common.
So what you do is you mind a bunch of
this stuff, you purify it to uranium, and now you
have to separate it so you get mostly the two
thirty five. Now, for a power plant, the uranium you
(28:43):
use should have a modest amount of the two thirty
five to produce the amount of energy we need without
being at risk of blowing up. For a weapon, you
want as pure two thirty five as you can get.
So there's a process by taking this that you've mined
and what's called enriching it, that is, separating the two
(29:05):
thirty five and the two thirty eight until you are
dominated by two thirty five to the degree that you want.
So if we look at what was happening that you.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
Ran, howe what is it nuts in bolts of how
you separated.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
There are several different ways you could do it, or
that it's done. There are three dominant ways. The one
way is with a centrifuge. So if you've ever had
your blood separated, you know you to test it. It's
swung it around a big machine, and the heavier stuff
ends up nearer the end of the tube and the
lighter stuff up above it. Well, believe it or not,
(29:42):
you can do the same kind of thing on an
industrial scale. You actually vaporize the uranium into some of
the uranium exifluoride, and you spin it around and the
heavier stuff, the two thirty eight, ends up farther down
the tube than the two thirty five, and you separate
some of that and you run it through this multiple
(30:03):
times and each time it becomes more pure. So that
high speed centrifuges of an industrial scale is the dominant way.
This is done in the way it was being done
in Iran. And you might have heard about export controls
on certain kinds of special steel tubing. That's what's used
in these centrifuges, so there's a whole budget about that.
(30:28):
A second way is what's called the gaseous diffusion, where
basically you have screens of tiny holes, and lighter elements
go through those holes faster than bigger elements, and you
keep passing it through over and over and over again.
It's similar to a diffusion process you used to purify
water when you're hiking, a filtering system that lets smaller
(30:50):
things through and stops the bigger things. So if you
run it through multiple times, each time it gets more enriched.
And there's a third way that was done experimentally, I
don't believe it's being used industrially, which is called laser
isotope separation, where you actually illuminate the gas with a
laser that's tuned so that only one of those elements
(31:13):
reacts to it, and then you use magnets to pull
that out. That was developed at Livermore Lab back in
the late seventies as the technology for doing this separation.
Because remember Livermore is in the business of making bombs.
Their goal was to be able to efficiently purify uranium
(31:33):
and also plutonium to make weapons. So if you look
at Iran, what they were doing is they were enriching uranium,
and you're even if you're going to just build power plants,
you have to enrich the uranium and under treaty agreement
with the US, they were allowed to enrich uranium up
(31:53):
to the point of making power plants. The issue is, well,
once you know how to do that, you could run
it to the point that you can make weapons grade, right,
purified enough that you could use another weapon. And that
was the big question. Right here they're doing it in
the middle of a mountain and they're purifying uranium. Exactly
(32:15):
what were they doing is the big question, right And
that's what led to the attack on that mountain, with
the belief that they were actually enriching uranium to weapons
grade so that they could actually make a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
That they is evidence that this is actually going on.
What can they see with their satellites, trucks coming and going.
Excuse me, they seem to have put a good handle
on how close they were. I don't understand how they
would know. Do you know how they would know?
Speaker 3 (32:47):
I don't know the specifics of that, but you would
look at the amount of material that's going in, how
long it's in there. And I don't know what other
intelligence assets were being used to determine what was going on.
From my perspective, and again, this is just me, and
this could be totally wrong. But for from my experience
(33:11):
working in the industry, I would say that if I
had an agreement with you know, the rest of the
world that I was going to be purifying uranium for
power purposes, I would be doing it out of the
open where it was possible for people to see that
I was doing that.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Okay, playing by the rules exactly.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
It's just it just seems odd to me. But again
that that's that's me. I'm not in the intelligence community,
but that's me, and I'm like, this just seems a
little weird to me that they would be doing it
that way. If you know, if you're doing something you're
allowed When you were a kid and you were doing
something you were allowed to do, you didn't hide in
the closet to do it, right, So if you wonder
(33:55):
about that a little bit, and so that that has
something to do with this.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
You know, you had to take a had to interrupt
you for a quick break, and we'll finish up in
the final segment.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Right after this on BZ, You're on Night Side with
Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Radley J for Dan tonight, and we're speaking with Doug
Area nuclear scientists and talking about we already addressed, maybe
we address whether or not nuclear power might be a
great option for the future. We're going to need more power.
One thing I don't understand, actually, Doug, and maybe you
can opine on this is why is it Why is
(34:33):
it not a rule that every commercial building? Why don't
all commercial buildings have to have all solar panels on
the top. Wouldn't that give us enough power to do
everything we need to do.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
There are a lot of different places that that solar
rays wood could should be going. I mean, think about
the medians of all the interstates, and you've already got
power lines along them that you could feed into you know,
all sorts of air that's already been you know, dismantled
for nature, for industry, and yes, the tops of buildings,
you know, think about the tops of all those warehouses
(35:09):
and big box stores, all these surfaces. I mean, that
would be a terrific thing to do, you know, take
advantage of every square foot you've got that already is covered,
you know, I think that would be a tremendous idea.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
The limitations still as far as solar power.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Goes, well, the biggest issue with solar power compared to
say nuclear power. Nuclear power runs rain, you know, pardon
upon rain or shine. Right, you can make power when
you need it, you can make more when you need it,
slow it down when you don't need it. Any form
(35:48):
of solar power, for example, only makes power when the
sunlight's hitting it. So firstly, if you're in places like
where I am up in northern New Hampshire, we don't
get as much sunlight, say as they get in Arizona,
so you have to make power where you can get it.
And you know, we can still make power here, We're
(36:10):
just not going to make a lot of it, but
we can make it certainly make more in other places.
So that's one issue. And the second one is, Okay,
say you went all solar throughout the country, but you
need power at night, what do you do. You need
battery technology. You need some way to store that so
you can utilize it at other times. And batteries are still,
(36:31):
by the way, not very green. We're really destroying Chili
and Bolivia to mine lithium for all those batteries, for
all those electronic things. So there are battery technologies that
we need. We can have nice environmentally friendly high energy
density batteries. That's going to make a lot of things
work really really well. For us.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
This seems impossible, but you never know. I mean, you
can charge your computer without plugging it into anything. Is
there any way you could have big satellite? I know
you don't like satellites because they blocked, because they cause problems,
But could you have a satellite that was always in
the sun generate power somehow get that power to the earth?
(37:15):
Is that crazy?
Speaker 3 (37:16):
There are groups, there are groups that are working on it.
There are a lot of issues with it. The biggest
one is how do you transmit the power? So there's
a group that's been looking at satellites like that, and
then you use microwaves to power the send the power down.
But then you basically in that game, you have a
massive microwave of it. Right. You may have antenna's collecting you,
(37:36):
but if you wander into that intense beam of microwaves,
it's it's very damaging. So there's no free once you
just collected energy space, but you gotta get it down
on the ground.
Speaker 2 (37:48):
And that other I heard about this sort of a kite,
big giant kite string. There'd be a platform up in
space that was getting sent all the time and it
was actually attached by some tether to the Earth. That
is that a doable thing.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
There have been ideas of having cable tethered systems, but
again there's you know, that's a hard thing to put
up there. We've never done that, right, We've never tethered
something up to an orbiting spacecraft. It has to be
up very far in order to be traveling at the
(38:28):
same speed the ground is turning. Otherwise you end up
winding the cable around the planet. Right, So the spacecraft
has to be the right distance away, and then you've
got to power all that energy down that cable. So
it's not a simple problem to solve by any means.
It's not a panacea to go up there and do that.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Are there are things on the horizon that I may
you know quickly that can thirty seconds, Anything on the
horizon that we haven't thought of yet that's brand new
that might be helpful and generating power.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
I I don't really know. I think I think the idea,
as you mentioned before, of really getting solar wherever however
we can, is certainly the greenest of the opportunities we have,
has the least environmental impact. And can you know be
a big part of this new electronic technology future that
(39:26):
we're in.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Perfect, Before we go, tell us how to reach Mountains
Mountains of Stars. Which is your webs your organization.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, we have lots and lots of resources and materials,
interesting content about all of these things. We Mountains of
Stars dot com dot org. It's Mountains of Stars dot org.
And we invite anybody to come check out our site
and all the new information on there. And our Facebook
page is Mountains of Stars, So check us out.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Perfect. Thanks Doug. Now this I'm busy
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