The Nuclear Option
NEWS: So you're against nuclear power. Do you know why?
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A decade and a year after Enrico Fermi demonstrated the first atomic fission chain reaction, President Dwight D. Eisenhower went before the United Nations General Assembly to avert an apocalypse. Other nations now had in their hands the weapon with which the United States had pulverized two Japanese cities; altruistic scientists and eager investors both had pressured the president to share the technology for peaceful uses. And so Eisenhower had little choice on that December day in 1953 but to announce a new purpose for the force inside the atom: Properly monitored and generously financed, he declared in his "Atoms for Peace" address, fission could be harnessed "to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world."
You could have been forgiven for thinking the president and his advisers had just hatched the notion that month, so full of poetic wonder and portent was that speech. In fact, not only were the Soviets about to power up a five-megawatt reactor, but the Westinghouse Electric Corporation was well on its way to building the country's first commercial atomic power plant. Within five years, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station would begin sending its 60 megawatts of electricity to the city of Pittsburgh.
That was probably about the best atomic power ever looked. For it wasn't long before the electricity touted as "too cheap to meter" proved too pricey for profit: The power that came out of Shippingport cost 10 times the going rate. Though in the coming years many more reactors would be hitched to the nation's grid, Eisenhower's gallant dreams were undone by rising construction costs, high maintenance bills, and risk. The last application for a new nuclear plant was withdrawn in 1978. By the time Three Mile Island nearly melted down in 1979, the United States was through with nuclear-generated electricity.
When President George W. Bush celebrated the Energy Policy Act of 2005 at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland, he may as well have been delivering the 21st-century update of Eisenhower's 1953 manifesto, minus the poetry, and plus some dopey jokes. ("Pass the Mayo," he chirped to Constellation Energy CEO Mayo Shattuck.) This time, however, the marketing slogan was not about peace, but the very future of the planet. "Without these nuclear plants," Bush said, "America would release nearly 700 million metric tons more carbon dioxide into the air each year." Half a century after Shippingport powered up, the U.S. government has once again entwined its long fingers under the heel of the big industry that couldn't.
In his day, Eisenhower shared his vision with a number of vocal pacifists: Redirecting atomic power to electricity, they believed, would at least keep the military occupied with something other than blowing up cities. And Bush shares his vision with some prominent environmentalists: Stewart Brand, for instance, who founded the Whole Earth Catalog and Fred Krupp, the director of the Environmental Defense Fund, who believes that "the challenge of global warming is so urgent we can't afford to take anything off the table."
As far back as 1978, Tom Alexander—an award-winning science writer with a deep knowledge of economics and ecology—urged utilities in the pages of Fortune to resuscitate the already-flagging nuclear industry lest a ramp-up in coal-fired electricity "trigger irreversible changes in the world's climate." The ramp-up happened on schedule; the changes in climate too. Which now makes it very hard to ignore the fact that whatever else nuclear power does to the environment, however many fish it kills or however much waste it leaves in our great-great-great-great-grandchildren's hands, it emits neither soot nor smoke nor mercury, and far less carbon dioxide than the coal that keeps most of our lights on.
Industry has been quick to take advantage of the shifting political climate: Last year, UniStar submitted an application for a new nuclear reactor to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the first to cross the agency's desk since Jimmy Carter was president. Four more followed, and 14 separate companies have notified the agency that they will file applications in the next year. It's hard to imagine any of the current presidential candidates slashing nuclear subsidies once in office. (Senator Barack Obama, for one, represents a state with 11 of the nation's 104 civilian reactors, and his donors include employees of nuclear giant Exelon.)
But can nuclear power really rescue our warming planet? And if you answered quickly, answer this too: Are you for or against because you know the science, or because someone said you should be?
When we talk about nuclear power these days, we talk about environmentalists for nukes, and about people posing as environmentalists for nukes. We talk about Dick Cheney's energy bill defibrillating a faltering industry with $12 billion worth of incentives and tax breaks. We talk about who is for and who is against, and whether we can trust them.
But no one talks about fission. No one talks about the letter Albert Einstein wrote to FDR in 1939, advising the president that "it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium" to produce enormous amounts of power. No one mentions that breathtaking moment on December 2, 1942, when Fermi, on a squash court at the University of Chicago, had an assistant slowly pull a control rod from a pile of uranium and graphite, sustaining a controlled chain reaction for 28 minutes and thus securing atomic power's industrial future.
For the last four years, I have tried to shut out the chatter—the goofy Nuclear Energy Institute ad (girl on a scooter says, "Our generation is demanding lots of electricity...and clean air."), and the warnings of No Nukes godmother Helen Caldicott, who, rightly or wrongly, cannot think of splitting atoms without thinking of weapons. I've tried to focus instead on the awesome force that binds the nucleus and whether it can ever be an appropriate source of civilian energy.
The idea of nuclear power arose more than half a century ago out of the most noble impulses of humanity's brightest minds, scientists who hoped that the destructive force they'd harnessed, the most concentrated source of energy on earth, could also be applied for good. But atomic electricity strayed so far from its promise—corrupted by government's collusion with industry, mismanagement for the sake of profit, and ordinary bureaucratic incompetence—that we seem flummoxed at the thought of ever reclaiming it.
To consider a technology as terrifying as nuclear power requires more than slogans. It requires looking beyond the marketing and activism, into the physics and its consequences. It means thinking about rocks. And waste. And fission.
Hot Rocks, Warm Water
Like so many sources of energy, nuclear power begins with a rock—a brownish chunk of hard dirt, flecked with glittery particles. You can hold uranium in your hand without much trouble: As it decays into other elements—thorium, radium, and eventually lead—it throws off radioactive particles, but most of them can't penetrate your skin. Nor can they sustain a controlled chain reaction in most of the world's nuclear reactors. For that, you need a certain neutron-rich uranium isotope, U-235, which makes up only a tiny portion of raw uranium ore.
Natural uranium comes out of the ground in Canada, Australia, Niger, and several other countries. Uranium is finite, and it's not easy to find—as a consequence of the impending nuclear revival, mines that were once declared unprofitable may open once again, including some in the western United States. This worries people who remember the last uranium boom in the Southwest: From the 1940s through the 1980s, more than 15,000 men, many of them Navajo, worked the mines, often without protection. Many eventually came down with cancer or respiratory diseases. Few were compensated. When the mines closed, piles of uranium tailings were left mouldering along the Colorado River, leaching at least 15,000 gallons of toxic chemicals a day into water destined for taps in Arizona and California.
To be useful as nuclear fuel, uranium ore has to be refined into uranium oxide (the yellowcake of Niger fame) and then enriched—turned into pellets of 4 percent U-235. The sole U.S. plant that enriches uranium for civilian power reactors, located in Paducah, Kentucky, accomplishes this via an energy-hogging process that consumes 15 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. Even so, carbon emissions for the entire nuclear fuel cycle come to no more than 55 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour—roughly even with solar. By 2010, when the U.S. Enrichment Corporation is slated to switch to the more efficient method used in Europe, that number should come down closer to 12 grams per kilowatt-hour—on par with wind.
Nuclear power does have other environmental consequences, drawbacks that have nothing to do with carbon: Aside from radiation (more on that later), a particularly delicate one involves cooling water. "Light water" reactors, used at the majority of the world's nuclear plants (so named because they employ ordinary H2O, as opposed to water made with a heavy hydrogen isotope), use water both to moderate the chain reaction and produce steam to spin turbines—2 billion gallons per day on average. Most of it returns to the adjoining river, lake, or ocean up to 25 degrees warmer, an ecological impact that could significantly interfere with nuclear power's chances as a climate-change solution. Already, wherever a light-water reactor sits near a sensitive body of water, its intake pipes kill fish and its outflow distorts ecosystems to favor warm-water species.
The Cancer Conundrum
Will a nuclear reactor operating under normal conditions give you cancer? It's a question that, surprisingly, still hasn't been conclusively answered. A 1995 Greenpeace study found an increase in breast-cancer mortality among women living near various U.S. and Canadian reactors in the Great Lakes region. Yet peer-reviewed studies by the Ontario Cancer Treatment and Research Foundation as well as the National Cancer Institute show no significant increase in cancer among people living near reactors. An initiative called the Tooth Fairy Project is currently trying to prove that concentrations of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 are higher in baby teeth from children who grow up near nuclear plants. But those tests are not complete, and no one else has turned up persuasive evidence of such a link.
"Without a baseline study, we don't have any credibility" on the cancer issue, longtime Southern California anti-nuclear activist Rochelle Becker once told me. "There are so many things wrong with the nuclear industry that are confirmable that we try to stay away from that."
We do know that nuclear plants routinely release small amounts of radioactive gases, and that those releases expose nearby residents to a small dose of radiation—one that the Health Physics Society, which governs radiation measurements, says will probably not increase their risk of getting cancer. We know that elevated levels of radioactive tritium—which gets into water and is easily ingested—have been found downstream from nuclear facilities, and we know that the scientific consensus holds that no amount of radiation is good for you.
But we also know this: 24,000 Americans per year die of diseases related to emissions from coal-fired power plants, which release sulfur dioxide, smog-forming nitrogen, toxic soot, and mercury—not to mention 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.
It's a devil of a dilemma: One source of always-on "base load" power kills people every day. Another kills people only if something goes terribly wrong. And it could.
Accidents Happen
Early in the morning of March 28, 1979, a combination of malfunctioning equipment and inadequately trained workers led to a loss-of-coolant episode at Three Mile Island Unit 2 near Middletown, Pennsylvania. Had workers not finally arrested the disaster 10 hours after it started, the fuel inside the reactor could have melted completely—the disaster scenario alluded to in the movie The China Syndrome, which had arrived in theaters just a few weeks before. The partial meltdown and subsequent radiation leak was the worst nuclear accident ever on U.S. soil; in its wake, public support for the technology dropped from 70 to 50 percent, where it remains today. Industry proponents claim that no one died as a direct result of the accident, and in 1990, a Columbia University study found no elevated radiation-related cancer risk in the population near the plant. A later study, though, found a tenfold increase in cancer among the people who lived in the path of the radioactive plume.
Because of Three Mile Island, the night crew performing an ill-advised test at the Chernobyl plant on April 26, 1986, might have been prepared for a loss-of-coolant episode. But they didn't know enough about the plant they were tinkering with to have an idea what to do when things went grievously wrong. The reactor exploded, and the fire spewed a massive cloud of radiation across Europe.
There are no reactors as fire-prone as Chernobyl in the United States, and reactor safeguards have been upgraded dramatically since Three Mile Island. Emergency core-cooling systems kick in if other systems fail; operators have been trained to respond promptly when something goes awry. But just because what has already happened may not happen again doesn't mean we should relax: Human error has infinite permutations, and near misses in the last decade have shown just how vulnerable reactors remain.
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