The Nuclear Option
Page 3 of 3
|
|
|
|
"Ten European governments have come together to get them to stop, saying, 'You're polluting all the way to the Arctic,'" says Arjun Makhijani of the watchdog group Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "But they haven't stopped. They haven't stopped because there's no way for them to stop."
The dumping has grim consequences. In 1997, researchers surveying children and young people who lived near the Normandy Coast town of La Hague where reprocessing takes place found a correlation between beach visits and leukemia risk. Yet Areva continues to argue that its operations have "zero impact" on the environment.
In addition to pollution problems, the reprocessing of nuclear waste isolates plutonium. Currently, France has 80 tons of it socked away, enough to make 10,000 nuclear bombs. "They store it in what looks like 11,000 sugar cans," says Makhijani. "It's a huge security issue." In 1974, India made its first nuclear bomb with plutonium skimmed off reprocessed nuclear waste. For that reason, President Gerald Ford placed a temporary hold on the technology in 1976, a hold President Carter turned into a ban.
Nevertheless, the 2009 federal budget request includes $301.5 million for research into reprocessing technologies. For a nuclear future to flower, industry executives want assurances that the waste problem won't continue to haunt them. "Unless we see a clear path," says Exelon's Craig Nesbit, "we don't believe that we or anyone else should be building new nuclear plants. We don't think it's right to saddle a community with more high-level spent fuel than already exists."
Breeding Reactors
In his 1974 book The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee speculated that by the end of the 20th century, reactors using nuclear fusion—the kind of reaction that powers the sun—would be in operation, "and the energy crisis will cease to be a crisis for many millions of years."
Okay, so that hasn't happened. But what if a nuclear reactor could be invented that was safe, sustainable, and clean, even using plain old fission? What if it could reuse spent fuel until it was no longer dangerous, curtailing the pesky problems of waste, mining, and a finite uranium supply all at once?
These are the questions du jour of research facilities around the world, places like Idaho National Laboratory, which sprawls over 890 square miles of desert land bounded by some of America's most prized national parks. In the 1950s and '60s, it was a bustling facility, drawing the best in young talent from the world's science academies. Now, says nuclear programs director Harold McFarlane, the lab—which has expanded into other fields, such as biotechnology and alternative energy—is back full bore in the nuclear business, bolstered by federal programs to encourage the development of "Generation IV" reactors. (The 2009 budget request includes $70 million for such programs.)
One reactor in the offing, the Next Generation Nuclear Plant, can be cooled with helium instead of water and might be capable of producing industrial hydrogen to power emission-free cars and other power plants. Another, the Advanced Fast Reactor, can burn up the radioactive elements that remain behind in a light-water reactor. Other countries—India, China, South Africa—are working on their own prototypes. "There's also a great deal of interest in designing smaller reactors for developing nations," McFarlane says, "anywhere from 20 megawatts to 600 megawatts, to provide distributed power to outlying areas."
McFarlane has noticed that nuclear engineering has become a hot major in college again. "We're seeing a fantastic increase in undergraduate enrollment," he says. "A lot of universities are reinstating nuclear engineering programs they dropped back in the '80s and '90s."
The Ultimatum
When Tom Alexander recommended nuclear power as a hedge against climate catastrophe 30 years ago, he did so not because it was perfect, but because he thought that with better information its imperfections could be addressed. He was no industry shill; he also blasted the Reagan administration for blowing $10 billion on a badly conceived uranium-enrichment plant, and the government in general, whose "inability to untangle its licensing, fuel, and waste-storage policies has all but destroyed the electrical companies' brief infatuation with nuclear power." As with the early proponents of nuclear power (who in the 1940s staged sit-ins and hunger strikes to call for the "peaceful uses of atomic fission"), Alexander believed that there was a way to apply atomic technology against poverty, environmental collapse, and certain doom.
Alexander died in 2005 at the age of 74, never writing one last story to say he told us so: We shouldn't have built so many coal plants. And just maybe, instead of destroying that "brief infatuation with nuclear power," we should have fixed the nuclear industry instead.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of global mayhem should we fail to cut our carbon emissions in half by midcentury. For nuclear power to make a significant dent in the U.S. carbon footprint, the Colorado-based Keystone Center for Science and Public Policy reported last year, we would have to build five new 1,000 megawatt reactors every year for the next half-century.
"The world we have made as a result of a level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level at which we created them," said Albert Einstein. In other words, we have driven ourselves into a technological quagmire. There is no easy route back, but there may be many paths forward. Nuclear power is expensive, flawed, dangerous, and finicky; it depends on humans to run properly, and when those humans err, the consequences are worse than the worst accident involving any other energy source. If there isn't a way to do it right, let's abandon it—but only because we're secure in the belief that we can replace coal-fired electricity with energy from the wind, the sun, and the earth. When rising seas flood our coasts, the idea of producing electricity from the most terrifying force ever harnessed may not seem so frightening—or expensive—after all.
Carbon Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for US Energy Policy. for Free online!!
http://www.ieer.org/carbonfree/index.html
btw just because there will be radio-isotopes in spent fuel 200K years from now doesn't mean that it will be high level waste. By that point it will be pretty minimal. By a thousand years most of the really nasty stuff will be decayed. Also, there is granite that ticks over at 1000-3000 cpm and that doesn't stop anyone from facing buildings with it.
http://rethinkingnuclarpower.googlepages.com.
While I cannot claim to have any answers, I do remember as a kid being shipped off to one of those summer camps in the woodsy remoteness of Maine to learn to rock climb, and paddle white water and I guess to offer my parents a break from my rather juvenile delinquent tendencies—I was a rather out of control youth. There were along the shores of Moose Pond at the base of Pleasant Mountain, a great number of rather interesting characters assembled at camp Winona. One individual singled himself out on the very issue you have written about today—his name was Amory Lovins. We used to make fun of Amory's accent, which was back then far more “King's English”, which possessed the old “Pip, Pip and all that rot” sort of a hum to it—today after almost 40 years in the US Amory has acquired the American drawl but he certainly hasn't lost his sharp wit nor his clarity of mind. Nonetheless it was Amory's general message to us kids about our world, our home, Planet Earth that sat in my mind and not merely all the great and useful things we learned in relation to paddling down the great rivers of Maine and beyond (3 of which are protected by the national rivers act) nor scaling the walls of the Webster Cliffs or Huntington's Ravine. Amory being a Cambridge educated Astrophysicist had the ability to explain to even kids the general make up of the universe, where some nights he would arrange beneath the stars late in the evening an astronomy 101 class for 13 year olds—I have never forgotten my lessons either and still do stare out into the mid winter sky with equal amazement and curiosity to this very day—following the movement of the stars aids the mind and increases ones awareness. Still even back then he was very much involved with environmental issues and a staunch supporter of the Sierra Club and thus he tried to pass on what he knew and what he understood and why he had the opinions he did on to us youngsters. I would hardily recommend any of his numerous books that tend to deal with energy and environmental issues—I recommend “Winning the Oil Endgame” as a starter, since it is at this very instant in time become an issue of such propensity that we are even engaged in war over the Oil Endgame and in such a fashion that unless we alter our path we will find our demise. Amory offers rather enlightening ideas when it comes to energy efficiency and of course pollution as well as an answer to how we can face down this energy demon in a more sustainable way—that is he offers concrete and implementable solutions.
The whole article is an example of what happens when people read only American news.
There is no free lunch in energy. Our civilization uses massive amounts of it, and it cannot be made out of magic fairy dust. Every energy supply source has adverse impacts, including renewable sources, and particularly biomass, which is, outside niche applications, an environmental and humanitarian disaster. If you don’t think so, consider the people who are starving because they cannot afford the spiraling price of food, driven up in part by the world’s rich people - - that includes us who buy fuel with ethanol for our cars, or run them proudly on biodiesel - - burning food for energy. Or consider the Amazon forest as it is converted to monoculture soybean fields for biodiesel, or the wildlife habitat in the United States that is being plowed back into production to grow stuff to burn for energy.
The most benign renewable energy technologies are the non-combustion ones. Any credible and realistic analysis that takes into account the technical problems of scale, deployment logistics, materials bottlenecks, institutional inertia and countervailing forces will reveal that, on the energy supply side, socially and environmentally acceptable (mostly non-combustion) renewable energy will not be deployed quickly enough to, in itself, defend people who are alive right now against the potential for catastrophic climate change that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree is posed by current trends.
While it is easy to make back-of-the-envelope calculations about potential for wind or solar, it is astronomically more difficult to convert that potential into actual power and then get that power to where people use it. Just ask a wind developer trying to site turbines near people who value their country or ocean views. In the set of circumstances that we actually face, nuclear has to be on the table, or an acceptable future may well be off the table.
Many people who sustain anti-nuclear attitudes seem to presume, probably without thinking it through, that the undeniably problematic issues associated with nuclear energy go away if the United States, or some state in the United States, refuses to employ the technology. That presumption is a mistake. Regardless of whether the United States participates in the greenhouse gas advantages associated with expansion of nuclear energy, it will have deal with the technology’s problematic issues because, worldwide, a massive expansion of nuclear is already occurring. Dealing with the problems of waste, reprocessing, and potential proliferation will require strong institutions and international will. That massive challenge has to be shouldered irrespective of whether we also take advantage of nuclear energy’s benefits.
Since we are going to have to deal with the problems anyway, shouldn’t we also get the benefits?
The energy and climate problems, can only be solved, or at least better controlled, by making hard choices that many people might prefer not to have to make. The choice is not between wind, solar, and efficiency on the one side, and nuclear on the other. In the world as-it-is, with its confounding problems and limitations, we will need them all, and in staggering quantities. Given the massive amounts of electricity that nuclear energy can provide - - in our country already-existing nuclear plants, by improving their efficiency, have quietly been delivering more emissions-free electricity than all new renewable energy sources combined - - we should use it, improve it, and expand it, while blinding ourselves to neither its potential, its benefits, its problems or the weighty obligations that go along with it. Nuclear Power? Yes thanks!
Just take a look at this:
www.nrel.gov/analysis/forum/pdfs/2003/summary_03.pdf
http://commonhorizon.blogspot.com/
Thanks,
Gonzalo
1) CFLs destroy our ozone...baned
2) Carbon from petrol is destorying our atmosphere...about to be baned.
and now...
3) Radioactive waste from nuclear.
Why can't we learn?
One responder sites new technology that creates high level wastes that are "only" harmful for hundreds rather than a half million years. There's still decommissioning costs associated with plants and the need for the public to insure against catastrophe, which the manufacturers and operators aren't willing to risk.
Last, conservation in combination with renewable energy, plus population growth and concerted effort to plant greenery to reduce CO2 seems a lot less complicated and realistic.
Nuff said.
Meanwhile, why not take the regressive subsidies lavished on the oil and nuclear industries and plow them all into solar and wind? With concerted effort, we can slash the demand single-family homes and a range of small businesses place on the grid, alleviating the increase in demand on the large power plants, hence alleviating the need to build more large power plants of any stripe.
The US will most likely not be an early adopter of whatever nuclear technology proves its mettle due to inbuilt skepticism, but India, Russia and others will do the research and development regardless. We can all benefit.
It's already clear that nuclear plants can and do operate safely. They have done so for many years now, especially when what I consider "recent" (say, the fall of the Berlin Wall) is regarded as ancient history by some of my younger colleagues. In normal operation - no small consideration - nuclear power plants harm no-one. In failure: Three Mile Island was an example of good design overcoming bad operational action, finally harming no-one. Chernobyl was an example of suicidal operational decisions combined with poor design and construction, killing about 60 so far. The Banqiao dam failure, for comparison, killed 26,000 immediately and about another 145,000 in subsequent famines and epidemics. Now that's the worst single-event industrial disaster I know about, and it's still less than the annual global toll from coal pollution.
Nuclear waste, or used fuel, is a tricky problem but the scale of the problem is small. All US nuclear power waste has been safely held on-site for 30 years, plus or minus, which is a claim you'd find hard to make about other industries. That's not much from a quite remarkable amount of electricity generated. When a decision on disposal is finally made by government, the waste will still be safe.
Nuclear terrorism is much discussed but it's a bit like being scared of the dark - if you actually think it through, there's really not a lot to be scared of. Waste is hard to get at, hard to handle, almost impossible to conceal, and far more difficult to do damage with than other far cheaper and easier methods. Terrorists generally don't do hard (complex) stuff. And nuclear plants are very, very hard targets. EPRI showed that a containment building survives even a really well-aimed airliner.
And let's just clear up "too cheap to meter" - it was not a promise. It was a hope for the far future, maybe fission, maybe fusion, maybe something else. But judge for yourselves: here's the whole sentence that Lewis Strauss, from government not industry, uttered in 1954:
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electricity too cheap to meter, -- will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, -- will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger at great speeds, -- and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."
The entire nuclear cycle is toxic, and has mainly occurred on Native American lands in the SW U.S. Mining, milling, manufacturing, exploding/testing, dumping.
The Navajo Nation President recently reiterated the Nation's stance of NO uranium mining. The Grand Canyon is also another target for mining uranium!
The Native Americans continue to live with the deadly legacy of nuclear radiation contamination from past mining activities. Friends of mine have died because of the contamination of their lands.
Al Gore has always promoted nuclear (although quietly) - follow the money, and say No to nuclear energy.
Nuclear power plants open a source of nuclear waste that can then be used to create nuclear weapons and the so-called depleted uranium is used to coat missiles and bullets enabling them to go through metal and brick like it's butter. When it explodes, the particulets are airborne making them ingestible and inhalable, and carcinegenic. Nuclear contamination is one of those things that just keeps on 'giving' - it's toxic to our DNA. Look into the deformed children being born to our Vets as well as people in Middle East. It's rampant, and devastating.
There are ecologically sound alternatives such as wind, solar, wave, and geothermal - natural energy solutions are available. These technologies are underfunded and even suppressed.
Consider the future Seven Generations as we explore alternatives to coal, oil, hydro and nuclear.
There has been research into the radioactivity of coal stations since the 1960's, but a useful primer can be found in Scientific American here:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id =coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Consider the problems which have plagued the Paducah Kentucky enrichment plant. The cleanup of the immediate area polluted by this plant is being conducted by the DOE (taxpayers money) and can be expected to continue well into the next decade.
Only eight hundred and twenty-three million dollars has been spent so far but according to the US General Accounting Office this cleanup could wind up costing the taxpayer over one and a half billion dollars.(http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04457.pdf)
Further cleanup and decommissioning (also the taxpayers responsibility) is expected to cost another five billion dollars. Oh yeah, this report was presented to Congress several years ago so don't forget to add inflation into the mix.
I don't believe nuclear energy and coal afford an either or scenario. We can and should find better solutions to the problems at hand.
Our plant was reliable - it was our sole source of propulsion, electricity, fresh water, and new oxygen (manufactured by electrolysis from water) inside a sealed environment (submarine).
It was reasonably simple to operate - I was just 27 years old (with about 4 years of intensive experience) when assigned the responsibility of managing the engineering department. I had 40 trained people, only 5 of whom were college graduates and not one with a nuclear engineering degree. We had all gone through a rather extensive training program, but none of us would qualify as rocket scientists. We knew what we were doing and cared a great deal about doing it well.
Our fuel source contained a mass of uranium that was just slightly more than my own body mass, yet it lasted for 14 years and kept the ship operating for 2/3 of each of those years. When the operating period was over, the left over used fuel could fit underneath my current office desk. Not bad for something that powered a 9000 ton vessel for 14 years. Just imagine how much soot, NOx, SOx, and CO2 an equivalent diesel engine would have produced. Come to think of it, there is no such thing as an equivalent diesel engine, they cannot operate for more than a few seconds without outside air and without spewing their waste material for all of the world to share.
Many people point to the stance of the Navahos as indictment of nuclear power, but they fail to scratch the surface to find out that the coal industry pays the Navahos about $600 million per year to host one of the largest and dirtiest coal fired power plants in the entire country. How many Native Americans have died in mining for coal compared to those that MAY have gotten sick from uranium mining at a time in our history when we had less stringent requirements for ventilation and other safety aspects of uranium mining?
Someone also mentioned Amory Lovins, and put him up on a pedestal, but it is important to understand that he has spent almost forty years suggesting that fossil fuels are a better alternative than fission. He also freely claims to have worked for Big Oil for more than 30 years. Interesting - since nuclear fission is the ONLY alternative energy source that has ever captured markets from oil, coal, or gas.
I also find it very interesting how wind and solar are sold as nice, friendly individually controlled power sources, but the major names in those business are quite familiar - GE, Siemens, BP, Chevron, FPL. Why should taxpayers give money to BP to help it develop new solar cells - don't they have plenty in their own R&D budget?
Energy conversations often devolve into discussions about how, with conservation, we could make do with "what we have already", but the people making those arguments do not seem to understand how much effort and capital is invested every year in extracting more coal, oil and gas from the Earth in order to keep those existing machines running. Uranium and thorium offer an incredible improvement in energy density - ultimately they can produce about 2-3 MILLION times as much heat per unit mass as fossil fuels. It is an opportunity that needs to seized now, while we still have enough excess energy and human ingenuity to invest in the next big thing.
Just extracting the ore from the ground is dangerous to any kind of life!
I used to live in Belgian Congo where the Ore was extracted and I know for a fact that the miners did not get to live very long and the mounds of dust resulting from the extraction was and still is dangerous for many thousands of miles.
Here in Utah, it is the native Americans who work in the mines and they have very short lives as well.
I have yet to see any documentaries about this!
Why is the Public not informed about this?
We do have the technology for free, yes free energy and it has existed for a very long time, but of course it would not benefit the big multinationals and all the members of our present selected government.
Man is inherently stupid!
Perhaps you are not aware that the US essentially stopped uranium mining in the early 1990s when the price got so low that it was no longer worth the trouble. Some mines are being restarted, but the only ones in the US that are currently operating use a technology called In Situ Leaching that requires very few miners and none that are exposed to any dust.
1) Thorium. Thorium breeds to fissionable uranium, and there's more than 10x more thorium than uranium.
2) Burn-up. Current reactor designs are horribly inefficient, burning up only a fraction of the fuel, leaving a huge remainder of problematic high-level waste. More modern designs (dating back to 1945!) not mentioned here (fast-flux, et al) burn up much more radioactivity and leave much less waste.
3) Containment. Using water as a heat transfer medium is nearly criminal because waste in water inevitably joins the biosphere. Designs using helium or nitrogen as the heat transfer medium, running turbines directly, make it much more difficult to carry waste out of containment in the event of a leak. Colorado's Fort St. Vrain reactor is one such.
4) Reprocessing metal and metal-oxide fuel offers opportunities for mishap and mischief. Instead, designs like the pebble-bed (again, WW2 vintage) trap pebbles of fuel in billiard-ball-sized multi-layer capsules that you couldn't crush if you ran a locomotive over them. Pebbles can be removed through a hopper in the bottom of the reactor vessel, remotely inspected for burn-up-fraction, and sent back into the vessel if their fuel doesn't need reprocessing... much easier than awkward fuel rods. It's also a fast flux design, burning up much more fuel (including plutonium) than water-cooled designs.
Congress has been lying down of the job of demanding adherence to non-proliferation and non-proliferating countries should be compensated as originally stipulated in the rules. But
nuclear power should only be considered as a stopgap until there is enough power
from the completely renewable resources.
Also power from reactors should be allocated to priorities such as producing windmills and solar reactors.
if the half life really is 30,000 yrs for the waste that's only 10 times as long as we've had written language.
use solar and wind to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. put the hydrogen in a propane tank to power a generator when the sun don't shine. convert the car to run on it too. house to house now
Please share the source of your assertion that nuclear is more expensive than "renewables" like wind and solar energy. The initial cost of the plant is only one part of the equation; the amount of power that can be produced is just as important.
The water consumption for many nuclear plants is near zero - the plants located near large bodies of water without cooling towers simply change the temperature as it goes through the steam plant condensers. That action is identical to that used in all other thermal steam plants, no matter what the fuel source.
The "waste issue" is the best part of the pro-nuclear story. We control all of the waste coming out of nuclear plants - the deadly waste that comes out of fossil fuel plants is - by necessity and design - simply dumped into our common atmosphere. If you do not consider that waste to be deadly, try running your car in a sealed garage for a few minutes.
I was in the Naval Nuclear Power Program in the 80's. "five new 1,000 megawatt reactors every year", a 1,000 megawatt reactor is not very powerful and would lead your reader to believe that it is an impossible task. This tends to leave me believing that you have a non-technical background and should not be speaking about this subject.
To those who love clean air and water, nuclear power is the only solution for longterm energy efficiency.
Also please remember how unsophisticated computers where at the time of Three Mile Island. Most of the systems associated with plants built in the 70's had no computer systems. So I could imagine that safety has improved exponentially since that time.
I think we should get Electric Boat and Westinghouse to make the plants that are being put into Submarines to be sold to individual cities. A small submarine plant could be located in a small water source and provide enough power to lower electric bills and reduce pollution.
For all those people who are against nuclear power and have do not have a Nuclear Physics degree you should leave these things to experts. You don't know what you are talking about. You are just like faith healers that don't believe in doctors. If all the Nuclear Physicist tell you its safe and you don't believe them, what should that tell you?
So wake UP and stop listening to crackpots.
There are very few liability problems with solar and wind - the PV manufacturing process has to be clean, but that's the only issue. There is no accumulation of hot waste - for example, Indian Point has thousands of hot fuel rods loaded with plutonium and radioactive strontium and cesium sitting in water. Processing and disposing of all that waste will cost a lot - into the billions, certainly.
The best policy option is to first eliminate the Price-Anderson Nuclear Accident Indemnity Act so that the nuclear industry will be faced with looking at the true cost of running their business. As Exelon noted, no one will invest in nuclear without that.
We should also pass laws and regulations banning new coal plant construction and mandating the phasing out of existing coal power plants.
To replace all those jobs and energy (coal and nuclear provide fewer jobs that the florist industry does, you know), we'll need massive investment in wind, solar, electricity storage systems and organic, fossil fuel-free agriculture.
Sunlight and wind are the real long-term solutions to the energy supply question. We already have all the technology we need to do this - so why aren't reporters and politicians talking about it?
As a UK taxpayer, I'm paying £73 billion (about $150 billion) and rising for the cleanup of old UK power stations, having already bailed out the private company running the newer ones. And I'm now expected to pony up for the disposal of more nuclear waste, probably the bulk of any future cleanup, and of course insurance. Of course this does not include anything else the nuclear industry can get away with, even though they have never made even close to a commercial return on the money invested in the UK. The French head of EDF (80% owned by the French state) says that if money is put into renewables, then thats bad for nuclear, which suggests that nuclear thinks that non-carbon generaion will be a zero-sum game, with them as the winners.
Nuclear is a techno-fix; a distraction from the real solutions, which are energy efficency, devolved generation, capture of waste energy and the use of renewables on a large scale. Lovins, Patterson and Carsten have all spoken about these solutions - they are out there.
I'm not anti-nuclear because of doctrine, I'm anti-nuclear because it will waste time and cost me a large amount of money.
one of the great killers of humanity is
poverty...
the risks of nuclear power are tiny by comparison...
I know the only way to sell magazines, real or virtual, is to point fingers and incite panic. But let's stick to reality. We've got a constitutional crisis, we torture people, our military is turning satellites inward upon the citizens, and our people will abandon *any* liberty if someone squeaks "for the children" at them.
Maybe it's time to quit beating Gore's worn out, light on facts drumset.
Looked at how the commerce clause is interpreted lately?
The sun is still in the sky, the wind is still blowing, so let's look toward nature to help us with solutions--not esoteric physics! Please, let's look up at that sun. How much power there is in that precious, magnificent orb!
Let's harness that wind. Think of how many KW of power these windmills can produce without serious consequences!
Let's look to nature to help us....
PS: Re-use, recycle, re-purpose!
Contrary to what the article says, the choice between an energy source that routinely and steadily kills people and one that hypothetically has a tiny chance of killing people (but never has, in the West), is not a "conundrum" at all. The choice is clear.
Coal plants cause 25,000 deaths, every year, in the US alone (hundreds of thousands worldwide). TMI killed zero people and had no health impact. In fact, over their entire ~40-year history, US nuclear plants have had no measurable public health impact (nor deaths). This impeccible, unparallelled safety record for a heavy industry is all that needs to be said
concerning the effectiveness of NRC (one of the most, if not the most stringent regulatory bodies there is).
Credible estimates for Chernobyl range from 100 to ~10,000 eventual deaths (i.e., from ~0.1% to
Credible estimates for Chernobyl range from 100 to ~10,000 eventual deaths (i.e., from ~0.1% to
The simple fact is we are behind the curve and you should trust science. It amazes me that intelligent liberals can fall back on cold war fears to justify their opposition to nuclear power.
You are much more likely to get cancer eating banana's,living in a brick, using your cell phone or getting a sunburn than from nuclear power.
Lets talk about X-rays. Everyday people go to the doctor and are exposed to radiation that is more detrimental than any exposure you could receive working at a nuclear power plant. They understand the risk and choose to take it. The benefits far out way the risks.
Please trust science and scientist. I would consider most people liberal who oppose nuclear power. They should not be reactionary but they are. It is very confusing.
Jimmy Carter, a man I admire, was a Naval Nuclear Engineer. He is no fool. Trust science and inform yourself.
Lewis ... well, I'd like 5500 words for rebuttal.
Credible estimates for Chernobyl range from 100 to ~10,000 eventual deaths (i.e., from ~0.1% to ~2-5% of the ANNUAL death toll from fossil fuel plants). The maximum conievable consequence of a Western plant accident are far smaller than Chernobyl. Even the (anti-nuclear) Union of Concerned Scientists acknowledges that it would require several absolute worst-case meltdown accidents occurring every year in the US for nuclear's health/environmental impacts to match those of coal.
On top of all this, there is the fact that nuclear emits negligible CO2, whereas fossil power plants are the largest single source. It is clear that nuclear's overal public health and environmental impacts are tiny compared to those of fossil fuels. Formal scientific studies of the external costs of energy sources agree. The most rigorous and recent such study, the European Commission's ExternE project, concludes that nuclear's total external costs are a fraction of a cent/kW-hr (similar to renewable sources) whereas the external costs for coal and oil are more than an order of magnitude higher (4-8 cents).
I don't think it's necessary to invoke hormesis to make the case for nuclear power, and I think some will find it so hard to accept that you will lose credibility with them. Also, it's not what the official reports (e.g., UNSCEAR) say.
Yes, a huge string of "accidents" that have killed...... noone. Meanwhile, fossil fuel plants are killing ~25,000 people every single year and are the leading single cause of global warming.
Renewables can't meet all our energy needs, and nuclear, not fossil fuels, simply must be our second (back up) choice.
And while it is true that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, cut that's an incredibly simplistic misstatement. There are batteries and numerous other existing energy storage systems. How do you think Coast Guard buoys, space satellites, offshore drilling platforms and off-the-grid houses get their power?
Furthermore, all nuclear power plants require large amounts of cooling water - or some other means of cooling - to prevent the reactor core from overheating and melting down. During summer heat waves in France, they had massive power outages because the river water got too warm and they had to shut down the power plants. Temperatures are only going to increase due to our ongoing global warming.
Wind and sunlight have no such disadvantages.
"I don't believe "any" further nuclear work of any kind should proceed until there is a proven waste depository,..."
This thinking, shared by many, is flawed and must be addressed.
First of all, even if we stopped all further study, buried all our nuclear waste in Yucca Mtn., and left it there forever, the total (short and long term) risk/impact on public health and the environment, per kW-hr generated, would still be orders of magnitude less for nuclear than for fossil fuels. The toxic slugde alone from coal plants (almost a million times the volume, and carelessly buried) represents a greater very-long-term risk than nuclear waste, even before global warming is considered.
And over the short term of course, we are talking about 25,000 deaths per year versus no impact. The reason why we're still waiting to bury it is that people are holding out for even more perfect solutions (that and raw political stonewalling by Nevada).
Secondly, we know, with virtual certainty, that we will eventually come up with a way to process and eliminate the waste. Probably after a few decades, but certainly after 100-200 years. So, we don't really have to guarantee complete containment for 10,000 (or a million) years. 500 years would do, and this is easy (there is no chance of any leakage for at least 1000 years).
The upshot is that we KNOW that nuclear waste will never have any impact on public health or the environment. We can easily contain it until we come up with a method of elimination, period. (If you're worried about this "burden" on future generations, contributing only 0.1 cents/kW-hr to a trust fund will provide more than enough money, in the distant future, to pay for the job.)
So why not wait (decades or more) until this nuclear waste elimination technology (I discuss above) is developed before building more nuclear plants? Sounds like the responsible thing to do, right? Wrong.
Given that renewables can not, right now, meet all or even most of our future energy needs, not building nuclear plants right now means building more (and/or continuing to run) fossil plants (mainly coal). Basically, we have two choices concerning what we do in the interim, until this "perfect" nuclear waste solution is developed (or some other perfect energy source is developed, for that matter). They are:
1) We can burn fossil fuels in the interim, thereby killing tens/hundreds of thousands of people every year in the short term, and (over the longer term) radically altering the planet's climate, and burying mountains of toxic sludge.
2) Or, we can use nuclear power, place the resulting tiny volume of waste into secure storage (w/ no leakage) and wait until the "perfect" waste processing elimination technology is developed. (It's easy to store/contain nuclear waste for decades/centuries, with no leakage and no impact on the environment, we've been doing this for decades.)
The first choice involves massive, irreprable harm to public health and the environment during the interim period, whereas the second (nuclear) choice involves no harm at all over the interim. The choice couldn't be more clear.
We need to meet as much of our energy needs as practically and economically possible with conservation and renewable sources, but the rest needs to come from nuclear, not fossil fuels. Instead of requiring a "solution" to the nuclear waste "problem" before building more nuclear plants, what we really need is a law banning any new fossil plants that do not contain/sequester all their emissions/wastes. It is fossil fuels that have the "waste problem". Given the limitations of renewables, we're going to need one of them (fossil or nuclear), and the choice is clear.
The public has shown no willingness to pay such a huge cost; not even to avoid major environmental problems like those associated with fossil fuels, let alone to avoid much smaller issues like those associated with nuclear. As shown by scientific external cost studies (ExternE), nuclear's external costs are tiny (a fraction of a cent/kW-hr, similar to those of renewables, which, yes, also have external costs). Given this, paying a huge economic cost to avoid nuclear is not justified.
It is not difficult to design nuclear plants that do not need a large natural water supply (we have a huge plant in the desert, near Phoenix).
As for the European heat wave, nuclear power production was reduced by 7% at most (to ~93% of rated capacity), over the course of the event. Meanwhile, wind power production over the affected region was only a few percent of rated capacity, over the course of the heat wave. Heat waves are associated with a stagnant, high-pressure dome, and very little wind. The fact that it generally provides the most power when we need it the least is one of wind's biggest problems.
If we can use massive energy storage to help renewables with their (much more serious) intermittentcy problems, why couldn't we use the same technology to help nuclear power through the occasional heat wave? Of all the arguments for renewables versus nuclear, reliability is the least valid.
Am I to understand that nuclear being possibly (very occassionally) affected a little bit by weather is being used as a reason to literally rely on the weather itself (sun and wind) to provide our power? Nuclear might have to reduce power slightly during very rare heat waves? How does solar's power output fare whenever it's.....cloudy?! Or wind, during the common occurance of still air?
Solar and wind are inherently and fundamentally much less predictable and reliable than nuclear. They are more affected by weather/climate events. This fact is illsutrated by their annual capacity factors (~25% for both wind and solar). This compares to a capacity factor (% "uptime") of ~90% for nuclear.
CANDU-specific features and advantages
Use of natural uranium as a fuel
* CANDU is the most efficient of all reactors in using uranium: it uses about 15% less uranium than a pressurized water reactor for each megawatt of electricity produced
* Use of natural uranium widens the source of supply and makes fuel fabrication easier. Most countries can manufacture the relatively inexpensive fuel
* There is no need for uranium enrichment facility
* Fuel reprocessing is not needed, so costs, facilities and waste disposal associated with reprocessing are avoided
* CANDU reactors can be fuelled with a number of other low-fissile content fuels, including spent fuel from light water reactors. This reduces dependency on uranium in the event of future supply shortages and price increases
Use of heavy water as a moderator
* Heavy water (deuterium oxide) is highly efficient because of its low neutron absorption and affords the highest neutron economy of all commercial reactor systems. As a result chain reaction in the reactor is possible with natural uranium fuel
* Heavy water used in CANDU reactors is readily available. It can be produced locally, using proven technology. Heavy water lasts beyond the life of the plant and can be re-used
CANDU reactor core design
* Reactor core comprising small diameter fuel channels rather that one large pressure vessel
* Allows on-power refueling - extremely high capability factors are possible
* The moveable fuel bundles in the pressure tubes allow maximum burn-up of all the fuel in the reactor core
* Extends life expectancy of the reactor because major core components like fuel channels are accessible for repairs when needed.
There remains, of course, the problem of waste disposal but far too little consideration has been given to salt formation sequestering. For example, the salina formation in the Michigan basin contains salt layers several hundred metres thick that have been stable for hundreds of millions of years, These strata might be ideal for sequestering waste.
Other things that require discussion and, perhaps, more work include capital costs and decommissioning cost but we should not be making judgment based only on old technology and designs with nuclear power any more than we should judge air transport based on consideration of blimp design!
This ultracheapness is due to hyperabundance. Thus, just about everyone here has stood on rock in which fission energy accessible to today's reactors was as abundant as tar combustion energy is in the tarsands. If all concentrated ores vanished, today's reactors would lose only a little of their output in powering country rock extraction operations to fuel themselves.
However, driven by prices that briefly spiked to $3.50 per barrel-of-oil-equivalent (BOE), prospectors have been finding concentrated deposits of uranium in the last two years at a rate near 110 million BOE per day -- ten times the rate of use. So the price has been knocked back down below $2/BOE.
Very limited uranium supplies would be a valid argument against heavy investment in nuclear, if it were true. But the fact is that long-term uranium supply is simply not an issue, and nobody is really concerned about it.
If this were a real concern, people wouldn't be willing to spend billions on new nuclear plants that are expected to last 60-100 years. In any event, this wouldn't be a reason for anyone to campaign against nuclear, as the problem (if true) would kind of take care of itself. An issue like that is one that we can leave it up to industry to worry about.
The fact is, we have enough uranium to last for centuries, even with major nuclear growth, and even assuming no reprocessing or breeding. With breeding, the fuel supply is effectively infinite (millions of years). And a century will be more than enough time to develop practical, economic breeder technology (or something like fusion, for that matter).
The only reason that peak oil/gas is a real concern is that we have not found any major new deposits over the last few decades, despite massive efforts (perhaps trillions of dollars). Despite all these efforts, the discovery rate has fallen well short of the consumption rate, resulting in declining reserves. With gas & oil, there is real evidence that we've actually already found most of it.
Things are starkly different for uranium. We have barely started looking for it, and have made a negligible effort/expense so far. The cost (per unit of energy yield) of discovering uranium is 300 times less than what it costs to discover oil. As Mr. Cowan says above, ever since the price of uranium became significant (again), we've been discovering significant new veins almost every week.
Back in the 1920s, when the amount of effort we had made to look for oil was similar to the amount of effort we've made so far to look for uranium today, the official estimate for the world's oil endowment (i.e., total amount of discovered oil) was only about ~1% of the oil we've discovered since. There is no reason to believe it will be any different for uranium. Current "official" reserves for uranium are likely to be only a few percent, at most, of the amount of high-grade uranium ore that is actually out there, and will be discovered.
Whereas there is probably enough high-grade ore to last for 100-200 years, even if we go through that we can turn to lower grade ores. Since the ore cost is only ~2% of the cost of nuclear power, we can afford a much higher ore cost. As the allowable ore grade (uranium concentration) is reduced, the amount of usable uranium exponentiates.
Anyway, I talk more about this at:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html
and a uranium expert talks about it at:
http://216.94.150.122/investor_rela tions/speeches/speech_text.php?spid=49
I've operated a Naval nuclear reactor, as have some other posters here. Unless one has spent years immersed in the subject, all one can do is repeat the opinions they have been taught - often by people who have pre-judged the technology before they learned anything about it.
In a nutshell, nuclear energy can be very good, or it can be very, very bad. There exist designs which are safer, cleaner and more efficient than others. These designs are not being used because they are more expensive to implement. The same can be said of coal - except that coal can NEVER be as clean nor as efficient as nuclear is now. Another reason we are not using these cleaner technologies is because they don't produce plutonium, the sale of which, to the military, subsidizes nuclear energy today.
So far in our history of nuclear energy, we have allowed the military to decide which reactor designs we would build. And for this reason, we have seen only the bad, and the very bad nuclear energy solutions.
Nuclear energy can also be very good. If you want the good kind, you'll have to keep profit and the military out of it. If I were building a nuclear plant, It would be the greenest possible, at any cost. I'd look for subsidies from environmental groups, electricity users, and I'd also attempt to sell carbon credits to the coal plants. Good luck with that, right? Well, one can hope, can't he?
As long as it's permissible and cheaper to pollute and burn fossil fuels, people will keep doing that. And until the Sierra Club and Greenpeace start selling electricity, we will have no other choice but to buy dirty energy solutions.
That's false, of course. The British built dual-purpose reactors, the Magnox ones, but as is usual with dual purpose designs, both were compromised.
As far as I know, those Magnox reactors never actually provided any explosive material for Britain's nuclear bombs.
American reactors are descended from submarine powerplants, which were and are an uncompromised power-only design. Oil and gas advocates make much of the theoretical possibility that their plutonium might, in a pinch, be bomb-usable, but the construction of special-purpose plutonium production reactors has always been so much easier than the construction of power reactors that no such pinch appears ever to have been felt.
Many years ago I was part of the first eco-movement. As I matured and started doing my own thinking, I tested what my leaders were telling me. I realized that since people want simple answers to complex questions, the loud voices offered such, even if their validity was suspect.
Choices on power generation are in fact limited. It is very nice to think of a day when all our power comes from the sun or wind or some other idealistic source. The fact is, you and I want electricity…we want it now and whenever we flip the switch. Even some of us old “hippies” who said we were going to live off the land in our teepees now realize the foolishness of that thought.
Growing up in the Northwest, I was and still am very upset with the damming of rivers and loss of natural fish and game habitat. I also disliked the idea of burning coal and the millions of tons of pollutants each plant puts out on an annual basis - and this was long before the still unproven idea of "global warming" surfaced. So I stepped back and looked at an energy source that requires a very small footprint (compared to a very large reservoir), whose "leftovers" are minimal and self-contained, and whose capacity to produce large base-load amounts of electricity meets our needs. As a result, I have worked in the nuclear power industry for nearly 30 years.
If you were interested, I could explain in intricate detail the operations, safety features, and environmental impacts of the nuclear power cycle from dirt to waste. I could also provide data to address the many fears expressed in these posts and in so doing, provide you information upon which to make a rational decision. For example, did you know that a nuclear power plant and its fuel cannot blow up like a nuclear bomb? Did you know that in the last 20 years over 300 people have died in grain elevator explosions – but you still eat bread? Did you know that you get more radiation taking a flight across country than I have gotten in a year at my power plant?
The problem is people want a simple answer to a complex question. Do you have the time and desire to hear the complex answer to the complex question?
No material from US commercial nuclear power plants has ever been used to make nuclear weapons. The DOE has always gotten all of its weapons plutonium from special reactors on DOE reservations (such as the Hanford-N reactor). Since we are now reducing, rather than increasing our nuclear weapons stockpile, we have not been producing any weapons plutonium at all for some time now (I think).
In fact, for the last 15 years or so, the reverse has been true. We've been using our fleet of commercial nuclear power plants to destroy weapons materials, which are being taken out of warheads that are being decommissioned as a result of the arms reduction treaties.
For the last 15 years or so, about half of the nuclear power generation in the US (10% of total power generation) has been created from uranium taken from decommissioned warheads (after being blended down to reactor grade (5% U-235) from weapons grade (90% U-235)). In the near future, US nuclear power plants will also be used to destroy the plutonium that is being removed from those warheads.
The program is called "Megatons to Megawatts". It is the ultimate example of "swords to plowshares" (as well as "atoms for peace", perhaps).
Until then, I support "clean" coal, wind, solar, and geothermal. Oh, one more thing: lightning. Why aren't there more active efforts to begin harnessing it, even if it is only used to begin a fusion reaction?
I stand corrected. One more false bit of info I will never again pass on. My apologies.
Re fusion: A fusion reactor would be great in almost every way. Unfortunately, mankind does not possess the technology for a large scale controlled fusion reaction. It could be another hundred years before we do.
"The largest current experiment is the Joint European Torus [JET]. In 1997, JET produced a peak of 16.1 MW of fusion power (65% of input power), with fusion power of over 10 MW sustained for over 0.5 sec. In June 2005, the construction of the experimental reactor ITER, designed to produce several times more fusion power than the power put into the plasma over many minutes, was announced. " -Wikepidia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
I appreciate your concerns which are shared by many.
"Why am I opposed to nuclear? In summary, it requires enormous amounts of water - a critical resource in scarce supply. The costs are astronomically higher than the costs of investing in renewable and efficiency technology, the epic waste issue, terrorist targeting, ok this could take a while...but you get the picture."
At the risk of being too lengthy, facts and expert pr