We did a special report of Nuclear Energy last Sunday. I spoke to MIT’s professor emeritus of nuclear engineering Michael Driscoll. Nuclear energy as you know is a sticky issue — there are pluses and minuses. To hear what critics of nuclear energy have to say you can click here for Praful Bidwai’s piece and here to read an interview with Aslihan Tumer of Greenpeace. For now, here’s the interview with Professor Driscoll…

Is nuclear energy back in favour around the world?
There is much more interest in nuclear energy than ever before. I think it is because people are down to the last resort. We have problems with oil prices and its supply. Coal emits greenhouse gases. And there aren’t too many other options of that scale.

Is safety no longer a major concern?
The safety in producing nuclear energy has improved. Think of aviation where DC3 airplanes were designed around the time nuclear reactors first came up. And look at the improvements in today’s Boeing. Engineers have similarly made incremental improvements and the reactors being constructed today have more safety mechanisms built into them.

You also have to remember that people did not get hurt in the Three Mile Island incident. So you have to decide whether you want to go ahead with coal plants and end up cremating the entire planet or go for a more climate-friendly energy source.

How friendly is it to our environment?
Nuclear energy is clearly green. There was a study in Europe where people looked at the entire lifecycle of producing nuclear energy. The findings indicated that the CO2 emissions of nuclear energy are comparable to those of wind power. It is only fair that anything that does not emit carbon should be awarded carbon credits.

But isn’t radioactive waste is still a concern?
Waste disposal is still an area of concern, but it is more a political than a scientific problem. In the US, we are in a pretty awkward position. Some geologists have approved various designs of waste repositories. But getting political approval is particularly difficult. I think countries like Sweden and France have done a far better job of communicating these things to people. We, in the US, have done it poorly.

Is it not better to go for alternative energy?
It is hard to compare nuclear energy with alternative energy sources like wind or solar. Wind is intermittent and requires storage of electricity. A nuclear power plant’s base load capacity — the amount of power a plant can continuously produce — averages 90 per cent over a period of one year, whereas wind averages 30 per cent.

The nice thing about wind is that the turbines can start operating within a year. But once you get to 20 per cent of your grid capacity, you start having stability problems. Still, in a way, wind and nuclear energy complement each other. We have to do everything possible.

What is the future of nuclear energy?
Going forward, nuclear energy has great potential. New battery technologies that use nuclear energy can be developed. These can be used in hybrid cars. Senator McCain is offering $300 million for developing a battery based on nuclear power. But in the US we still don’t have a sufficient sense of urgency.

“They gather tusks like mushrooms,” says Aleksei Tikhonov, director, St. Petersburg’s Zoological museum on Russian ivory hunters who are getting a boost as global warming softens the Siberian permafrost and exposes previously hidden woolly-mammoth skeletons (via Newsweek).

The quote sure brings up a funny mental image of people running around in icy sludge gathering precious ivory. The issue though is far from jocular.

There are other “business opportunities” that are coming up thanks to global warming. Oil exploration companies are rushing to the Arctics where the ice has melted eager to drill some more oil. Let ‘em bloody ice melt some more — we’ll be there to drill the oil!

Celebrated author and one of the two godfathers of sci-fi novels, Arthur C Clarke passed away on 19th March 2008. Click here to read my article in DNA

The Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org) is an attempt to document each and every one of the 1.8 million known species (and millions of other specie that are yet to be discovered) online.

According to the website’s developers, “Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike.”

The attempt according to this NYT article is not a new one — scientists have tried and given up in the past due to the sheer magnitude of the task. However, as the website’s FAQ section points out “mash-up technology and wiki-style editing and accumulation of content, have only demonstrated their effectiveness on a large scale in the last year or two.”

The wiki editing seems important to me since it will allow scientists worldwide to collaborate.  Still, it will take a while (anywhere between 3-5 years) for the website to be fully populated. Once done, this will be the one-stop guide to living organisms on Planet Earth.  For now this one is a work in progress.

Anthony Watts has created a top 10 list of science predictions that have gone wrong. I heard some of those before…. but some were truly startling. Here’s my fav:

“That virus is a pussycat”

– Dr. Peter Duesberg, molecular-biology professor at U.C. Berkeley, on HIV, 1988

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