A radical alternative to nuclear reactors

March 15, 2011 by Amara D. Angelica

With deterioration of the nuclear reactor situation in Japan and radiation heading for Tokyo — in one extreme Pentagon scenario, catastrophic meltdowns and megadeaths in Japan, according to a source — many scientists are ramping up the search for alternates to earthquake-vulnerable nuclear power.

“The Japanese Government has dissembled regarding the gravity of the failure of their power plants and the potential for meltdown of their  containment vessels, leading to a catastrophic release of radioactivity were this to happen,” said L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., and Director,  Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles.

“This tragic event proves that complex systems behave unpredictably when subjected to a natural disaster outside the design parameters of the engineers who build them. Thus, this probably marks the end of the nuclear power  industry in the US — and likely in other countries in the world — for  the next century.  These reactors are simply too dangerous to make their risk of failure palatable.”

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has in fact already been developing one possible solution: space solar power (SSP) — beaming energy to Earth from a satellite in orbit. With its Space Solar Power Systems project, JAXA researchers “have started preparation for the world’s first demonstration of 1kW-class wireless power transmission technology, and are aiming for practical use in the 2030s,” says JAXA spokesman Yasuyuki Fukumuro.

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