All of us are aware of environmental pollution. The biggest factor in this increasing pollution is carbon dioxide, which most living creatures breathe out into the atmosphere. It is also produced when we burn solid, liquid, or gaseous fossil fuels.
This can come in the form of cooking at home, restaurants, or hotels. Furthermore, electro-mechanical power is invariably needed for all industries and for electric power generation in almost all conventional thermal power plants; except for U236-fueled atomic reactor-based power plants, where the fatal danger of leaking radiation is a continuously present hazard.
For these reasons, nuclear power plants are still few and far in between, even in technologically advanced countries. In contrast, non-exothermic electric power generation, led by hydro-powered plants, are comparatively fewer, and only where the terrain and the flow of rivers and natural or dammed waterfalls permit its feasibility.
Nowadays, the sources of alternative power are expanding, with roof-mounted solar-voltaic panels becoming predominant. However, it will be many decades before there can be widespread commercial electricity available from this source.
In Bangladesh, except for the Kaptai Dam hydro-electric power plant, almost all our industries and power plants use conventional fuel, which are either coal, furnace oil, or natural gas. To a very limited extent, we have now started using alternative sources like solar panels for residences, houses, and offices, but even that is mostly as an alternative source of emergency, when the traditional power supply is disrupted.
We are now planning to go for a dangerous U236 fueled nuclear power plant. It is the most dangerous process for power generation, where the uranium rods and the spent fuel rods, laced with unsafe and high levels of U236 radiation byproducts, the prime waste of a nuclear power reactor, can lead to wide-spread leakage of fatal radiation. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe is still fresh in many of our memories.
To top it off, we are getting it from Russia, who, till date, has the world’s worst record for radiation leakage among countries that have nuclear power plants, in terms of number of deaths, injuries, and other forms of radiation sickness amongst future generations.
In our everyday life, at homes, offices, and in most industries, we regularly use conventional fuel as the major source of energy, and the resulting carbon dioxide is the major cause for environmental pollution. This we have unfortunately taken more or less for granted.
This is followed closely by the nationwide road, rail, and water transport sectors, which, in a decade or two, if we don’t stop the way it is going now, will lead to a major environmental crisis.
National safety should be a concern, and we should aim to avoid having such a potentially dangerous nuclear power plant. If a nuclear power plant we must have, then we should go for the much safer U238 power plant, which is smaller in size (from 150 to 299MW). These are radiation safe, and are currently running in many countries.
Our expanding transport sector (land, water, and air) is and will remain the next major source of environmental pollution. It is high time that we look towards cleaner options for this sector.
Two interesting options are now being looked into in this respect for future mass transport in the USA. One is maglev (magnetic levitation) technology that is now being seriously studied. These are like conventional trains, except that they hover over the rails based on the principle of magnetic poles repelling each other. Only when it stops and the power is shut off does it rest on the rails.
Some of these trains being tried out are running at over 250km/h, faster than the famed, super high-speed Hikari electric trains in Japan. Maglev trains can run at over 600km/h, which is nearly half the speed of many commercial aircrafts!
Another major concept, now under development, that could eliminate both track friction and atmospheric air resistance, is called “Evacuation Tube Technology” or ETT. In the long run, this concept can be a tremendous breakthrough. It could run in tunnels under the sea, or on trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific routes.
Such trains could well achieve speeds of over 8,000km/h! Imagine a traveler going from Washington to Beijing in around two and a half hours. However, for this mode of transport, we need to use conventional electric power sources, located on land, to maintain the vacuum along the length of the tube in which these trains will run.
However, it is estimated that the power needed to create and maintain this vacuum will hardly be 2% of the electric power needed to run a conventional electric train of similar load capacity and track length. The pollution emitted will even be lower than any passenger jet carrying the same number of people.
One can imagine the inside of an ETT as a luxurious passenger cabin, similar to the interior of a large inter-continental passenger jet, riding smoothly on frictionless “maglev” rails. This is not science fiction; it is based on observation and experimental results carried out on actual small-scale research models.
In reality, once maglev trains are operating, it will be a safe way of traveling, but at far higher speeds and with lower gas emissions. The Hikari trains, introduced in Japan back in the 1960s, also faced scepticism at the time of its inception. Today, however, it is just another express train. It is run automatically, from a central computer set up in Tokyo that controls all the functions of the train.
Let us hope that technology such as the maglev becomes commonplace in the future, or else our country, and the world, will eventually run out of places to go.
