282 comments on NY Times Energy Series: Nuclear
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The human species is treading thin ice because it doesn't understand or respect natural limits. It has convinced itself that opposable thumbs annoint us as the crown of creation. The only three words we seem to understand are more, bigger, and faster.
Many enviros have been preaching reduced consumption, reduced population and avoidance of overly-complex and polluting technologies (like "Noo-que-lar" power) for decades -- mostly to an empty house. Now the chickens are about to return to the roost, just as predicted.
When I hear someone blame the environmental community for our current crises, I am reminded of one of my favorite bumper stickers: Plants and animals disappear to make room for your fat ass.
Nothing personal, mind you...
It strikes me that it is more like blaming the anti-war movement for the war.
Except for some influence in Europe, environmentalists have had little to do with the slowdown in nuclear plant construction in recent decades. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did not change the attitudes of environmentalists, but sure put the fear of Satan into a lot of the unread. But like most things, it's mostly about cost and coal and natural gas have been providing electricity at a cost that nuclear has been unable to match, despite an earlier promise of electricity "to cheap to meter". I am reminded of this every month, when as a resident of Ontario I look at a significant premium on my electricity bill that is dedicated to a huge debt that nuclear facilities have imposed on us.
As an anarchist, my main objection to nuclear rests with the repressive political structure it requires: a caste of high priests who hold the knowledge and police/army who maintain security.
That's the problem. Tell someone that they don't need nucler and they use coal instead. The enviros keep thinking that one day they'll say "no nuclear" and the world will hear "don't use air conditioning" and agree. They are still waiting. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and always expect a different result. It is never going to happen. Anti-nuclear is pro-oil and pro-coal, just as passivism on the eve of WWII was pro-facist. If there are only two viable choices (and the world seems hell bent on choosing one of them), then to degrade one is to help the other.
I agree with the grandparent. Thank you green party for being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party and keeping us breathing coal and diesel fumes for well nigh 40 years now. Keep up the good work. And when all the glaciers are melted, then you better believe people will be using their ACs like mad. The world will go nuclear (or solar, or whatever), but it looks like the bashing of new power production techniques guarantees that we'll burn up all the coal and oil first.
You sir don't actually understand natural limits all that well, at leas as they relate to energy. The UN proposes that human population will peak at around 9 billion people and then decline. Lets suppose that it remains at 9 billion people, and each one uses 3KW pretty much continuously. This is fairly close to what the US uses, depending on how you count energy, roughly 3KW (say, between 5 and 2) per person when you add up all the oil, gas, coal, wood, nuclear, hydro, and everything else.
This is (once again, very roughly) 10^11 joules per person, per year. 10 billion people would bring the grand total to 10^21 joules per year for the whole planet. This is actually entirely sustainable. There is more than enough solar, and nuclear could maintain that level far beyond the sort of time horizons we should concern ourselves with now (say, a few thousand years). Beyond that, fusion would render the entire exercise a waste of time, if we manage to get it in the next few thousand years, which I guess we probably will.
There are limits to human growth, but they have NOTHING to do with energy. Food, yes, space, yes, recreational land that isn't paved over, absolutely. Energy, not relevant. We will use all the oil (check), and gas (check), and then either proceed to use solar and nuclear or continue to use all the coal, and then use solar and nuclear. That's pretty much the options, and there's no reason why we will ever be short of energy, given the current state of technology.
Personally, I'd like to just jump the coal step and not completely screw up the planet. It's much harder to do that when the greens are screaming like prissy princesses about nuclear day and night. If you want something to scream about, scream about coal. leave nuclear alone. Maybe one day, in 50 years when all our energy infrastructure is nuclear, then, by all means have this discussion about people living in caves and not using energy. By all means, lets have that discussion then, or even now, but don't spend the days bashing nuclear in order to get there. Bash coal first, nuclear either later or never.
Wow - living in Germany, where the Green party in the later 1990s proposed a 10 dollar a gallon tax on gasoline, I hadn't realized that it was all a Republican plot to get an oilman elected in the U.S.
Or are we talking about the same Green party?
Because the one I know of played a major role in shutting down not only the domestic German nuclear industry, but East Germany's brown coal industry too. They have also been huge supporters of locally based agriculture, a typically Republican ruse. Let's not even begin to explore Green dedication to reducing consumption at all levels, from packaging on up, another typical Republican concern.
Actually, you get all your information about the Green Party and its politics from the American media, I would hazard to guess. Well, in that case, rest assured that it is a Republican ploy to help the Green party as a favor for the Greens helping the Republicans. Sort of like how feminists and fundamentalists are really just big buddies in the end.
And if you are standing on the opposite side of the planet day IS night. As a historical note - the Greens basically became an organized party ca. 1980 - they haven't even been around for 40 years. Of course, the Republicans and the Democrats have. Now that I think about it, maybe the Catholic Church is responsible for abortion, pacifists cause war, and people who live in America have nothing at all to do with the fact that a quarter of the world's fossil fuel consumption takes place in the United States.
Well, for a while there, I thought I would actually have to resist changing my worldview so as to blame environmentalists for McMansions, SUVs, and obesity. But I stopped myself - it really wasn't that hard.
And of course, the world is not in any sense running out of oil, and this peak talk is just crazy - and home prices always go up, too.
Ignoring reality is so much easier than dealing with it.
Partly bought by government money Vattenfall got as compensation for handling over a large share in the nuclear powerplant Ringhals to the utility Sydkraft now German E-on as compensation for our greens forcing a closure of the Sydkraft nuclear powerplant Barsebäck.
I dont like closing nuclear powerplants in Swedens since it is stupid due to environmental, economical and of course peak oil reasons but it gets realy disgusting when tax money used for this stupid idea ends up financing new brown coal powerplants.
I would for environmental and national selfish reasons very much enjoy a sale of these Vattenfall assets in Germany to finance new nuclear powerplants in Sweden. The official line seems to be that Vattenfall must be one of the largest players on the european market or they will otherwise be destroyed or perhaps loose the pee distance competition. My less advanced insights into such things is that well run and profitable trumphs big but I am of course poor and powerless myself and dont know what makes mega corporations successfull.
Well, I live next door to Germany (Luxembourg) and from my balcony I have a nice view of the wind turbines that grace the Saarland's skyline on the other side of the Moselle. So I am reminded every day of the aesthetically less pleasant aspects of implementation of some of the Green Party's policy proposals - but perhaps that's the price we have to pay. Thanks anyhow - rejecting the nuclear option makes the German countryside a more beautiful place, doesn't it?
Their proposal to raise gasoline taxes was certainly a saving grace, but I remember that in the 1980s they seemed to devote about 90% of their energy to demonstrating against nuclear power plants, which for them embodied evil incarnate - and they spent the remaining 10% on data-dredging-based hysterical scare-mongering about the alleged carcinogenic hazards resulting from exposure to miniscule and barely detectable quantities of chemical insecticides. Never in their literature did I come across any reference to relative risk either in connection with nuclear power or in connection with toxicological issues. Perhaps I didn't read enough.
I'm not denying their positive side.
Just saying they were pretty much a mixed bag.
Personally, I never found the few windmills on the Rhine in Karlsruhe a problem - but then, the coal power plant chimney, and the barges carrying coal into the Rhine harbor tend to be much more noticeable.
As for what the German Greens protested against - I would guess their anti-war stance took at least as much of their energy during the 1980s as any environmental concern. (The Greens are not Greenpeace.) Of course, some Greens tend to be hopelessly hysterical romantics, so I am not disagreeing with any personal observations. And living here in Baden is strange - the joke is that people here think Green, but vote Black (CDU) - this may mean that the Greens don't look or act as extreme here as in other parts of Germany, or that many Green concerns about sustainability are just considered normal.
It always interests me to see how the truly radical Greens of that time tend to get reduced to the most politically palatable level of environmentalism, which all major parties in Germany adopted, without discussing other major concerns which remain quite unacceptable to discuss it seems - such as blood for oil being morally wrong.
But then, gaining power does that to idealists. I tend to be a fan of the Greens to the extent they were true outsiders (they aren't anymore), and in the sense they seemed more capable of seeing a larger picture - again, as outsiders they didn't have to worry about insulting any other power blocs.
There are a number of transformational changes that are directly due to them. Waste management, energy conservation, transport, bioclimatic housing, solar and wind energy : these are fields where Germany leads the world.
The Greens didn't invent them, and we can imagine that they would have come anyway, sooner or later (though Germany would probably not have led the world in any of them by then); but they were, in fact, imposed by the Greens through tough political coalition-building, persuasion, compromise and (most of all!) proportional representation, which gave them political clout.
The nuclear issue is a tough one, but shouldn't serve to hide the huge and very positive overall contribution of the German greens.
We should be so lucky in France!
But they are no longer an outsider party, and one of the main reasons for their existence seems to have faded into the background of necessary police actions, or peace keeping, or whatever term works for sending soldiers to do something other than defend a nation from direct attack. The Greens had that debate, and the ones in power did what people in power normally do - exercise that power to remove opposition to what those in power feel is necessary and correct.
Sort of like how Green Rezzo Schlauch now sits on the EnBW board - even though the company is majority owned by EdF, the world's largest commercial operator of nuclear reactors (I believe - the U.S. may have more reactors, but they are owned by various companies).
I'm sure he thinks his reasons for being there having nothing to do with the check he receives, or the cover it gives EnBW to keep selling electricity generated in France using nuclear reactors. But then, he is an innocent politician, not a cynical citizen.
Come on. You claim to be concerned about peak oil, global warming, and sustainability, but you're going to oppose a key element of the solutions on the grounds of visual aesthetics?
Personally, I find them, without exception, beautiful. That may not be entirely unconnected with the fact that I actually care about these issues.
The greens in Germany are not the same as the Greens in PA, for instance, where they are entirely funded and staffed by republicans.
Hell, he got his supporters to donate 40 grand to the green party for the ballot drive. Do you really think he is doing this because he is a warm and fuzzy environmentalist?
If you vote for the green party candidate for senator in PA this Nov. you really need to have your head examined. Rick Santorum is the most vile thing that ever came out of PA and really, really needs to lose his job.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/15167552.htm
The two-party system is really neat!
It's TWICE as democratic as the one-party system!
Yes, and those greens are so competent and smart!!!!!!
They could challenge Hillary from the left, or Lieberman, or Kennedy, or Kerry, and in any of these cases they would have a significant chance of winning. In addition, they'd significantly advance their cause whether they won or not, and not severely hurt their cause if they lost. Do they do so, no, they do not.
Where do they challenge? Well, lets see, there's Pennsylvania, where without their help Santorum has about a 5% chance of survival, with their help perhaps 30%. In either case, the greens have roughly a 0% chance of winning. Sure looks like that'll help the environment, if they save the nastiest of the republicans from his day of reckoning.
Where else, well, they challenged in the presidntial race, and told everyone that a Gore presidency would be the same as a Bush presidency. Does anyone actually believe that? Do they even actually believe that? Two words, willful, ignorance.
Where else, looks like a challenge against Feingold to soften him up and make absolutely sure that we don't ever get a real liberal running for president, good, good.
In all of these cases, they had massive help from republicans. The campaigns are waged with republican money and republican volunteers. It shows, the corruption seeps through. The chief justice of the pennsylvania supreme court called their 2004 ballot petition (if memory serves) "the most horrendous fraud ever perpetrated upon this court.."
Hmm, seems like they're really saving the environment. Good thing we have them around. Without them there would be no Bush, and god only knows where we'd end up. Probably with very little CO2 emissions and vastly less dependency on foreign oil. At the very least we'd be in good financial shape. Good thing we have greens around fighting for the rights of endangered wingnut republicans everywhere.
The two party system isn't perfect, but it surely does far worse with a third spoiler party hell bent on underminig their own ideals.
A primary challenge within the democratic party can work, just look at Lieberman. Basically, the twoparty system works fine without massive election fraud and willful ignorance on the part of the major players. Even with these handicapps it will work itself out eventually anyway. The US isn't the only country to elect a nasty leader, Italy (twice!), and Germany spring to mind. Neither case can really be blamed on the convenient scapegoat, the two party system.
Nice illustration of my thesis.
I have no desire to defend the US greens. In the electoral setup you have, they have little hope of being anything but a spoiler. That's because of the two-party system, which is a travesty of democracy.
Contrast the Green Parties of Germany or New Zealand, where proportional representation gives them an influence, a hugely positive one.
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1409304.ece
Particularly interesting -
'A short circuit at Forsmark caused an immediate shutdown in one of three reactors. At this point cooling must begin at once but only two of four diesel generators began the automatic process of pumping water to carry this out. Höglund said that "only luck" prevented disaster, as all of the generators shared the same construction error.'
'"It is surprising that this happens in Sweden, which has an extremely strict safety system for their nuclear power plants. I have been to Forsmark myself and there is a large difference between safety thinking there and, for example, in Russian plants," Bøhmer said.'
Of course, the people pointing these things out seem to be opposed to nuclear power. I wonder why that is?
Certainly has nothing to do with any facts, I'm sure, it's all more of that Republican ploy to discredit nuclear power to burn more coal since Greens are ignorant ninnies scared of a few more harmless backyard becquerels. And to think the Swedes just missed an opportunity to show just how harmless a nuclear accident really is.
Another link from another utterly biased source -
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,430164,00.html
At some point, the pro-nuclear people just need to prove that mistakes never happen, and we can all rest easy.
A good way to do that is to make sure that such little itsy-bitsy almost meltdowns don't get much attention.
Or build reactors which can't melt down - which is technically possible, by the way. It is just that apparently NO nuclear reactor currently being used commercially to generate electricity is so designed.
Please feel free to contradict that assertion with a list of facilities world wide which do use such designs.
My english summary and impressions of them are:
There were large cooling margins to dry boiling any part of the fuel.
Defence in depth and redundance worked and enough automatic systems started to cool the reactor core to keep the no manual actions required within 30 minutes rule. The idea with this rule is to give time for manual analysis so that operators dont make a problem worse by incorrect actions such as happened during the TMI accident.
But too manny things failed from a single source of failure, an overvoltage from the switchyard short circuit, showing that some "defence in depth" systems to allways have power to run the systems depended on each other in bad ways.
From reading reports nothing seems to have broken down inside the plant as in the magic smoke leaving the electronics. The problems were bad values set for overvoltage protection in UPS equipment, bad design decisions in how to feed power to some components and systems and faulty installation of some components.
I will stay with my earlier impression that the nuclear powerplant were not perfect but good enough to handle these faults. I enjoy the open information while they fix these faults and better the design procedures for plant maintainance and upgrades. It is quite like what has happened before in earlier incidents, a learning experince that will make the plant better and the lessons will be distributed in the industry.
I suppose the imperfections can be quite scary for those who are scared by nuclear power. It will never be perfectly safe, only very very safe and it is important to not depend on an illusion of perfect safety since that gets in the way of the work to make the safety better over time.
The problem with nuclear power essentially remains the problems of dealing with the waste and mistakes - and until you can build a system where no mistakes without catastrophic results occur, I remain a sceptic on nuclear power. And please, a nine minute margin for ruining a significant amount of the Swedish landscape for a significant number of years should not be comforting to you - unless you think that the two generators that started to run the pumps represent very very safe. I certainly wouldn't, and that is based on a very rational understanding that the benefits from running the plant do not compare to the results of a no longer exactly theoretical chain of events leading to the slagged core meeting the wider world.
It was the captain's considered opinion during our discussions that the newer, safer designs are unlikely to be built, at least in the U.S., since the risk of a new, hopefully 'safer' design would seem higher than building reactors of a proven design, even if that proven design has known flaws.
Any design that results in a meltdown after power is lost, measured in seconds, minutes, or hours, is a problem.
I do wish that advocates for nuclear power would, at a minimum, insist that new reactors not be so designed or built that a meltdown in a fueled core is the default setting, so to speak.
As for burning brown coal - yep, you can always tell who is the junior partner in a coalition government. The SPD understands coal miners very well, of course.
If even more things had gone wrong the emergency preassure release filter would have proven adequate or inadequate.
Btw regarding meted cores, melted salt reactors are intresting. It is probably possible to build quite efficient Thorium and Uranium breeders that give high temperatures needed for chemical hydrogen synthesis. Unfortunately I am afraid that I live in too small a country for us to research them on our own. It makes more sense for us to improve the reactors we got and hopefully build a few more, lack of power in a post peak oil world scares me much more then the small risk for nuclear accidents.
If that cant be avoided on a global scare I would very much like to live in a country that has lots of energy to export things that are valuble for the rest of the world to get political leverage to keep this courner of the world calm and the ability build up a good military defence if that is needed.
My minor fear is having living conditions far closer to our ancestors then the current ones. People can both kill and die to avoiding such a fate, I hope they also can work and make sensibe politics.
Deffeyes plotted uranium on a Hubbert curve once (Deffeyes and Macgregor, 1980, Scientific American). According to him we were only on the first 5 % of the curve. And that's without reprocessing, breeding, sea uranium etc.
Forsmark incident
How many died? Answer: zero
Three Mile Island incident
How many died? Answer: zero
Vaiont Hydroelectric Dam failure (Italy, 1963)
How many died? Answer: 2600
Machhu Dam failure (India, 1979)
How many died? Anser: 2000
etc
What would you antinuclear guys do without Chernobyl?
If it hadn't happened, you would have had to invent it.
Or is waste disposal not a problem. I keep hearing the "will figure out something" line. Usually that's said completely innocent of any recognition of the general incompetence of our decision-makers. We've already decided one way to "dispose" of the wastes we have already generated. Makes me wonder what ingenious plans we'll come up with when we have even more.
Consider the problem this way - when you throw something away, where does it go? Few people even consider anything more than getting their trash to the curb or dumpster for pick up by some one else.
That is like complaining about oil and cars due to the existance of tanks.
The local high level waste storage/disposal is in copper cannisters 500 m down in bedrock with a good chance for survining an ice age. About as good schemes are proposed for long term storage of quicksilver, its nice that the nuclear waste research inspires better handling of other kind of wastes. The latest envorinmental news in Swedens is BTW the location of sea dump of quicksilver rich catalytic mass mixed with concrete dumped in the 50:s and 60:s, about 3000 barrels found out of an assumed 20000. :-(
As for waste disposal, not all places in the world will be as careful as your locale. Here in the U.S. we like the idea of dumping it all down a big hole where it can leach out of rusted steel containers into the aquifer. For most places in the world I fear that it will be a matter of "out of sight, out of mind"
I am anti-nuclear for roughly the same reason I am anti blasting mountain tops to get coal - it is just so stupid in terms of short term / long term cost/benefit.
I have no problem, once the waste issue is reasonably solved, with nuclear fission as a way to generate steam to power generators (well, apart from the essentially silly application of 18th and 19th century concepts to generate electricity). Of course, saying the future will solve the waste issue is exactly how the problem is handled now - the future will unavoidably be dealing with it.
And don't forget, the cost for really long term storage (and that includes more than one ice age) hasn't been budgeted, to put it mildly.
Read the article and you'll learn about the financing (it's in the end). :)
Maybe budgeted was the wrong expression (after all, GM and Ford seem to have budgeted money they don't have)- who will be actually spending the money in the future? Promises to spend it are not the same.
And as a note - I heard on the radio earlier that the accident in Sweden war more serious than first considered, according to a government report of the incident. How comforting that the opinion of the former Vattenfall executive with direct experience of both the reactor in question and the nuclear program in general was confirmed - I do hope the latest official incident report is translated by the pro-nuclear side of this debate.
It should be fascinating reading for everyone advocating nuclear power. For those opposed to nuclear power, it is likely to be pretty boring - yet another series of mistakes, leading to a near meltdown. Nothing new in such a report at all. Unlike some people, I do not look forward to winning the debate by listing 100,000 victims of a reactor accident as proof of what I believe, as compared to only a couple of thousand up till now. And let's not be confused - the number of dead coal miners is not somehow a balance.
Actually, I do believe in uranium fission being a bridge technology - but only when it can be handled in a way which doesn't lead directly to potential catastrophe (pebble bed comes to mind, for example). We can both agree that an incident leading to thousands of dead will be a disaster, and part of the damage of that disaster will be a refusal to consider fission as a safe way to generate electricity, as it will be on public display that it isn't true as currently practiced.
And yes, this will mean a lot more dead coal miners. I never said otherwise. And yes, climate change through coal burning will be a greater collective tragedy than any single nuclear accident. This doesn't lead to accepting the idea that today's currently in service nuclear plants are a good way to generate electricity.
You do realize that opposition to nuclear power as currently practiced is based on more than superstition. It can also be based on the hardest tenets of engineering, such as failure chains and the German expression GAU - the largest imaginable accident. And in Germany, that includes things like several hundred tons of very nasty chemicals released into an urban setting from a BASF or Hoechst plant - nuclear is not unique in its potential for accidents leading to mass deaths and destroyed inhabitable land, by any means.
From my article:
"Clab (Central interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel) is where all Swedish spent fuel currently ends up, and this has been the situation since 1985 when Clab was completed.
Clab is located next to Oskarshamn nuclear power plant and houses vast, deep cooling pools blasted from the rock at a depth of 30 metres below the ground.
In these pools the spent nuclear fuel is stored for 30-40 years to cool and let the radioactivity diminish further. After the stay in Clab the radioactivity of the fuel has subsided to about 0,5 % of the levels it had when it was brought fresh out of the reactor.
[...]
Construction [of the deep repository] will begin in 2011 and finish in 2018."
In Sweden it's the nuclear waste fund which is controlled by a board of independent experts and government experts.
I guess it's the same in the US.
His opinion - that a meltdown was near - was not at all confirmed. Quite the opposite. And he was neber a Vattenfall executive, just a guy who had worked on the plant and in is a legal battle with the power plant because they won't hire his consulting company. I bet the "unbiased" media didn't say anything about that.
And the accident is extremely overblown in the media. Things happen. That's why we have numerous safety systems. It's called defence in depth.
This is the latest information from the nuclear power inspectorate: http://www.ski.se/extra/tools/parser/index.cgi?url=/html/parse/index_en.html
To quote the nuclear power inspectorate (translated from Swedish): "The incident in Forsmark was not heading for a meltdown, no emissions to the environment happened and enough safety systems worked. It has been graded as a 2 on the seven-grade [international nuclear accident] scale."
There was never any risk for a meltdown.
I notice that the long term solution is still in the future - which was exactly my point.
As for the unbiased news source - 'Swedish nuclear expert Lars-Olov Högland, who served as chief of construction for Vattenfall until 1986, put it far more dramatically. "It was pure luck that there was not a meltdown," he said. "It was the worst incident since Chernobyl and Harrisburg," a reference to the 1979 meltdown at Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania.' from http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,430458,00.html
I won't argue about sloppy journalism (I have yet to find a perfect source of information), but 'chief of construction at Vattenfall' doesn't quite sound like 'And he was neber a Vattenfall executive, just a guy who had worked on the plant and in is a legal battle with the power plant because they won't hire his consulting company.'
What unbiased sources are you using?
'And the accident is extremely overblown in the media. Things happen. That's why we have numerous safety systems. It's called defence in depth.' And with such a casual attitude, I can tell you live downwind from the plant with your family. As I wrote in regards to BASF or Hoechst, it doesn't have to be a nuclear accident to cause industrial scale problems - and quite honestly, I am sure a number of workers or engineers at BASF or Hoechst also live downind of their workplaces - and up till now, only an alarmist would be concerned about it.
Until it happens, of course.
Again, any plant which is effectively designed with meltdown as the default setting is simply dangerous. And the quote 'and enough safety systems worked' is not exactly comforting. Quite honestly, it would be good to talk with someone who actually works with reactors because if they ever develop such an attitude, you are likely to be facing giant problems.
And a quick comment to Magnus - I simply meant that 10 years is certainly a valid planning framework, but in terms of how the world looks, 10 years is a long time - take 1930 to 1940, for eaxample, or 1980 to 1990 - major shifts occurred beyond the planning scale of either the Weimar Republic or the Soviet's Gosplan. Very major shifts.
As for 'Every incident is a near meltdown if you assume that a number of more things would have failed and additional mistakes made.' that is because of the design flaw with such reactors - they meltdown without intervention. Seeing how close you can come is not a smart game - as the Soviets found out (or if you have the time, check out how Savannah River - a DOE/military facility, admittedly - managed to retire itself after major repairs from another incident - the operators so mishandled the power up of K-Reactor, they slammed the system with 800% more pressure in the pipes than the system was ever designed to handle, is my memory from roughly 13 years ago).
You cannot design error out of a system as long as humans are involved. You live with the risk - and balance the risk with the costs and benefits.
In Sweden the waste is in pools in a bedrock bunker, exept small ammounts stored for a while in pools inside the reactor buildings to cool down before transportation.
No cannisters have been filled with real waste, there have been dozens produced to develop the cannister production and closu
re procedures and test the cannister handling and how the immediate surroundings in a bedrock storage reqacto to a
The requests for permits with detailed calculations, drwaings, environmental impact statements and so on to build the cannister plant, waste canning plant and the bedrock storage will be made during the 2006 to 2009 period and production started in 2018.
You can say that 10 years is beyond any scope of discussion but this is not the first time we build nuclear facilities in Sweden, schedules have been delayed with some years before but so far nothing has become a Yucca mountain.
The cost is recalculated every two years and the funds are set aside on a government account and btw, our government debt is shrinking. The large costs for building the plants and bedrock storage will be made while the current nuclear powerplants are running and providing a fresh cash flow.
Its 50 pages, I cant do that much quality work for free, its stops being fun after a few pages. Perhaps someone else will do it and it will be translated for other NPP:s n other countries.
I can second that this incident seems to be about as bad as the worst previous incident wich also resulted in the staff being important within less then 30 minutes if the incident had been worse. And also that were another kind of design mistake.
The old incident were about steam vented inside the containment ripping loose mineral wool insulation that clogged screens before pumps recirculating cooling water into the reactor core forcing the operators to back wash the screens to get the minerall wool out of the screens. A good example of operators handling a design mistake. Immediately after this incident five reactors with this kind of insulation were closed and not restarted untill it were fixed in such a way that it newer could happen again and a search for other simmilar problems concluded. The insulation were changed to foil insulation and the screens enlarged.
Every incident is a near meltdown if you assume that a number of more things would have failed and additional mistakes made.
The best science says bedrock repository works. And decisions should be based on the best science, no?
Anyway, after the repository is built, some canisters will be put in it for a couple of years as a last experiment to see if it all really works (though lots of experiments of that kind have already been performed at Äspö). If it doesn't work, well, there are other alternatives to test.
Economy, geology and politics should work. At least it's hard to see how they wouldn't. If something doesn't work, we have a hundred years to try again and find a better solution.
No matter if we expand nuclear power or not we will still have waste to take care off.
No. While Science attempts to be objective and definitive, in reality it is neither. Science is a human based endeavor and is limited to human scale observations. What may appear to be the operative norm now, may change at some point because human scale observation lacked scope. To tout a technology that has the capability of killing tens of thousands of years in the future, even if our observations now are correct and certainly if they are not, is criminal, reckless and utterly without moral grounding.
Futher, we should not make decisions solely based on Science because time and again Science fails to ask the crucial question: just because we can, should we?
Natural science is objective. Math is math. And the waste repository can not kill tens of thousands people in the future. But coal is killing millions today.
Wisdom. It should be apparent to anyone who can put aside their fear of losing out on the techno-orgy, that the modern industrialised way of life is unsustainable. The only sane, rational and sustainable future for humankind to survive here on the host is to dramatically reduce per capita per annum calorie consumption. Period. The only sane and rational choice is to wake up to the reality of origins and respect the limits of the host. Period.
Science has been very clever in expanding the material wealth of a portion of the population here, but it is hubris that allows the majority to think that Science can provide. There is only one thing to do, accept the fact that the techno-orgy was fun, but if humanity is to be responsible to those yet unborn, and expects to make it out of this century with an environment and civil structure that will last, it is over and it is time to return to our nascent state.
And the only way to stop that is to go nuclear.
I never said life would be a bed of roses. I've lived off the grid and in less than permanent shelter in a locale that got 80" of snow per annum. It wasn't easy, but it was perhaps the most rewarding/fulfulling time of my life. The point is simple, just because you want something, does not follow that it is possible. Yes, we in the west have created a pleasing milieu for living. However, it is not sustainable. Regardless of how many want it. The end result of any attempt to live the lie that is modern civilisation will be the reduction of life supporting capabilities of the host. You can remain in denial of that for the rest of your life. It will not change the basic structure and limit to that which gave rise to humane life.
There is a way to allow humanity to survive here on the host, but that will only come through correct assessment and adherence to actual needs in supporting life, as opposed to wants in a lifestyle. The choice is all of ours to make...
Certainly, nuclear war can do that nicely by reducing the population.
I am beginning to wonder why everybody is so upset, reducing population is a sure remedy to ressources shortage and there is so many ways we can have that:
- War.
- Starvation.
- Pandemics.
Peak Oil, Climate Change, Economic Melt Down, etc... are only means to an end, why worry?
I mean, look at us, we are all peak oil aware and still have vastly big diffences in what we believe should be done.
Try creating consenus on these issues with every one in the world. Consider how much your neighbours know about peak oil, energy or environment. And especially imagine trying to do that to the teeming masses of people who are clawing themselves out of the 18th century into the 19th, or even the 20th.
They are going to use coal. They know that it's better to live with climate change and have lives that are not completely awful than to live in a pristine world were they continue living in absolute squalor.
I guess the reason you oppose nuclear power is that it gives the hated modern civilization a chance to live on without destroying the environment and hence undermining itself.
When you can prove definitively that mining for the natural resources needed to create the thousands of plants required to just break even on current demand for electricity, when you can prove that humanity has the capability to effectively sequester the waste, when you can prove that the continued production of all the widgets that will use all that energy produced has zero impact on the environment, then you will have grounds to write what you just did. Until then, it is uninformed reactionary dogma...
But that is really beside the point. The point is that the alternative, the only realistic alternative, is the status quo. That's massive coal burning and climate meltdown. And I can prove that is worse than any alternative.
Except maybe the alternative of using neither nuclear or coal and going back to the time when life was nasty, brutish and short, as Hobbes put it.
People will not give up on modern civilization. They will rather destroy the planet. Only nuclear power can currently stop this.
Life is still ""solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The relative comfort that you relish is extracted upon the masses of the earth. They get to revel in more than their fair share of the misery so that you can reside comfortably in your myopic delusion.
People will not give up on modern civilization. They will rather destroy the planet. Only nuclear power can currently stop this.
People do not have to give up on civilisation. There is a middle ground between the stone age and now, and it can be a better life than is had now. It is your inability to accept this alternative that perpetuates the false dichotomy of coal/nuclear or barbarianism. As for nuclear being the only thing that can stop that descent, well, not only is it bunk, it lacks a full understanding that the ultimate impact of supporting the status quo will only lead to collapse. The simple fact is that even if your assertions about the safety, longevity and cleanliness of the power source are correct, it lacks the calculation of what consumption of that energy will entail. In short, it will require devices to consume that energy, whose production is not clean, not apt to be long lived (remember those finite elements that are required to produce) nor are the production processes clean. In addition, you must continue to feed all those consumers without petroleum inputs. Good luck on that last one.....
I do not at all deserve my wealthy, comfortable and well organized society to the poor masses of the earth, but to the hard work and ingenuity of my ancestors. The poor masses of the world are getting better life because they are becoming a part of the global marketplace, because they have political stability and economic growth, because they are getting clean water and electricity.
You talk about a middle ground between today and the stone age. I guess you mean the medieval age. I'd rather not go there.
And I don't see why there would be no petroleum for farming. I'd say that farmers are the last people who'll go without fuel, either due to the price mechanism or due to government intervention.
You are more naive than I feared, my friend. Please, do a little travelling before you start spouting this sort of trilateralist crap.
And I'd advice you to ask someone who travelled to Calcutta in the 70's and went back there today about the differnces. Or China for that matter. I really do.
Oops, didn't know that did you.
You really need to expand your horizons a little. Your assumption that opposition to your glorious technological global capitalist state could only be "post-colonialist pseudo-scientific marxist crap" is amusing. Your clinging to the Horatio Alger day dream is touching. But when it comes right down to it, the size of the global middle class is no larger today than it was 30 years ago (as a % of total population).
If you are all so sure fire certain that India and China are doing so much better, than tell me, please, why the suicide rate in rural india has skyrocketed in the last few years, or why the Chinese gov't admits to over 30,000 political "disturbances" last year alone.
That is a bit short for an answer.
Could you elaborate?
Wrong. The west is where it is because it had no compunction with respect to the rape and pillaging of aboriginal cultures in pursuit of the resources they sat upon after western powers had despoiled Europe and then America. Read some History. That is the legacy of westerners, and no amount of denial will change that.
The poor masses of the world are getting better life because they are becoming a part of the global marketplace, because they have political stability and economic growth, because they are getting clean water and electricity.
It is just this attitude of westerners that they are somehow improving the life of their 'little brown brothers' by introducing capitalist consumption that has added to the complexity and un-sustainability. Life needs are very simple: clean water, clean air, adequate food, adequate shelter and community. Before the west sought to conquer the globe, those needs were abundant. What has made all of them scarce is the west's insatiable appetite for more, more, more.
How long did the aboriginals manage to live in North America without fucking up the landscape? Tens of thousands of years. By all accounts they were quite satisfied with there life. The common perception then as now is that living in their manner was savage. I ask, what is more savage, managing forest, field and wildlife in a manner that provided thousands of years of balance in living without ever approaching mass extinction, or constantly drawing down resources in the pursuit of luxuries to the point that billions of people face starvation, war and death as we ride down the petroleum production curve?
Ask a person who went to Africa 25 years ago if they see any changes there. You might be surprised.
That is, stability and economic reforms. Or really if we look at China, I guess a large part of their growth comes just from avoiding having crazy leaders like Mao and the Emperors and warlords before him. No more Great famine or great leap forward, no more cultural revolution, a lot less dogmatic communism.
Just authoritarian, one could say fascist, crony capitalism. 10 % average growth for the latest 25 years have changed China completely, especially the coastal provinces.
Excellent, do it RIGHT NOW, you are our savior, but don't forget any, ONE miss is enough to screw it ALL!
- mining for the natural resources
- effectively sequester the waste,
- impact [of production of all the widgets] on the environment
On this last one, of course, don't try for "zero" impact, just NON CUMULATIVE impact, i.e. not getting worse and worse as time goes by.Waste: Do it like we do in Sweden. See the article I linked to earlier.
Widgets: Stop using stuff that emit carbon dioxide. I don't do it (except indirectly through buying food (I don't buy much else)) so no else really need to.
If all industrialized countries emitted as little CO2 as Sweden does we would all be in a much better situation. The only CO2 stuff we have left is some oil in industry (which peak oil will remove) and of course all the cars, which PHEV and trains will deal with.
When it comes to other stuff like chemical emissions, have really tough environmental regulation, both on domestically ptroduced goods and on imported stuff.
Waste: Speculative, you have been countered in this very thread.
Widgets: Awwww, shit! One more "dialectician".
I am NOT arguing about carbon dioxide.
I am arguing about GARBAGE DISPOSAL, where do all "obsolete" computers, rusted cars, broken household appliances, toxic chemical wastes, etc, etc... REALLY GO?
When it comes to other stuff like chemical emissions, have really tough environmental regulation,
So much that swedish mothers have, for decades on, not been allowed to breast-feed their babies for fear of poisoning them.
That was news for me, I am only 36 but governmnet PR in Sweden to brestfeed more has been strong for at least 10 years and probably longer. To brestfeed is an advice given to all mothers. Where did you hear or read this incorrect information?
What has been told for decades is to avoid fish from lakes that have noticable levels of quicksilver. The quicksilver comes from old coal burning and old sloppy industrial use of quicksilver for manny purposes.
Yes, not willingly...
They will rather destroy the planet.
No way "people" can do that, they will just destroy SOME life on the planet including their own.
Five millions years from now everything will look fine on the planet.
But I was thinking of the next few hundreds or thousands of years.
So let me rephrase it. They will rather destroy the planet for future human generations than give up on modern civilization.
Really? What would they be? If the geology is unsuitable over geological time frames, we pull out the canisters of contained solid waste and move them.
"Why not pursue technologies that are renewable and less risky - solar, wind, wave, hydropower, geothermal, biomass, etc.?"
They don't have problems?
To put it in perspective, can you guarantee that an engineered hydropower dam will not break for 20,000 years---no matter the climate or earthquakes---in the total absence of human repair or investigation? That's the level of attack that nuclear waste is subjected it to.
Biomass production could easily end up starving half the world, and deplete critical aquifers much much more quickly than nuclear waste could do anything.
Solar doesn't have the energy density or security, and what about all those toxic heavy metals, gallium & arsenic used in all the panels? Can you guarantee that every single person who installs a solar panel will take it to a toxic recycling dump after its lifetime is up, even if this is hundreds of years from now?
You see we have big problems already from other energy sources.
How many people killed injured from nuclear waste from commercial power plants in 2006?
How many people died from asthma in 2006, of which coal may be at least 1% responsible?
Besides, there are potential nuclear fuel cycles and plants called 'actinide burners' which transmute waste so that almost all of the long-lived radioactive elements are gone. This is compatible with the laws of physics and some reasonable engineering computations.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/accres.asp
I'm not suggesting we go 100% biomass, 100% solar, 100% coal, etc. The solution will have to be a blend of different solutions for different areas. Where there's a lot of sun, some solar (including passive water heating) is advisable, where there's a lot of wind, wind energy, etc. As for solar panels, those using heavy metals (as opposed to silicon) need to be more heavily regulated. (The widespread use of lead-acid batteries is probably a much greater problem in this regard.) The potential for heavy metal contamination is one of the reasons I'm lukewarm about solar energy. I would favor wind energy, wherever practical. I'm not advocating coal. In fact, I don't favor coal unless the sulfur, heavy metal contaminates, etc. can be removed. Even then, there's the C02/global warming problem. That's all theory. When you have a working "actinide burner" in operation, then tell me about it.
The high level waste from the Swedish nuclear program is not in liquid form, it is fuel bundels and used reactor core components.
If the storage starts to fail there is either something corroding the copper containers or some immense mechanical force from some where damaging them. Actual dispersal of the solid waste is then a very slow process after a container failure.
Btw the experiment of burying containers with electrical heaters simulating the waste, monitoring them and the surrounding clay and bedrock and then retrieving them is recently concluded.
Uh, no. You look at the repository and see if it is getting wet. You can do this with sensors.
If it gets in the ground, you then scoop up the ground that was contaminated. This doesn't happen very fast. If there is some leakage it is not too late if that leakage has gone a few inches, and yes that could easily be detected. And even so, the consequences could be very small. Nuclear waste is not infinitely dangerous.
A dam collapse, on the other hand.....Just google "dam collapse deaths".
One single dam in 1889 killed 2209. 80 more in Pakistan this year. 1959, hundreds in France. 1926, four hundred in Los Angeles. This is just a sampling from a tiny bit of Googling.
As far as Hanford goes, it was quite literally the first industrial scale nuclear plant ever built, and it was done in a frenzied wartime rush, and it was designed entirely for producing nuclear weapons plutonium and there were no environmental standards.
Nevertheless, dams have been far more lethal.
And well, I wouldn't calml biomass less risky. The emission kill at least ten times as many people as nuclear does, per kWh. This we know today (I still think we should use biomass, living is not possible without risks and tradeoffs). It's not some future risk that might manifest if everything we know about geology and metallurgy turns out to be wrong.
Population growth is interesting. I wrote this earlier today at another forum.
The repository and the materials have been chosen because they imitate nature. We are damn sure how it will behave. We have backups if it don't behave as we believe it will. And we'll have to deal with the stuff no matter what because it exists today. So, what are suppose to do with it now? You got a better idea?
And yes, many people "would rather see us reduce our energy consumption as much as possible rather than go whole hog for nuclear and/or coal."
But believing that's going to happen is incredibly naive. The reality is coal or nuclear.
And if you really believe that the oprtions are only coal or nuclear than you suffer from a lack of imagination.
If some other option start to measue up its time to have a great party to salubrate, we need every energy source we can find.
Alternative energy sources (including coal and oil) are not the only alternatives to an oil based economy.
Are you right that the future is likely to see lots of efforts to implement coal and nuclear? Probably
Will those attempts be successful? I'd bet against it.
I've said this before, but it bares repeating. Peak oil is not a technical problem. It is a social / cultural problem. The results, good or bad, of peak oil will be based on human responses, not on what is technically feasible.
But this toolbox lies mostly idle in some countries and its only partly mobilized in my own country. Getting the work started is a political/cultural problem and getting people lifestyles to work with what can be provided is a social/cultural problem.
The only purely cultural solution is from my point if view to sit and sing kumbayana untill the singers drop dead from dehydration.
Perhaps nerdy societies where politicians listen to technological people can be considered the technological solution. If other societies dont work in a constructive way with these problems I hope you at least die out in a way that dont stink up the place too much, not much can be done for you other then providing good examples.
And the last sentence above can be used by those that dont trust techy solutions, live your solution and provide a cultural example.
Yes, I know this is suggesting things you didn't mean. But that is my point. You don't get to choose these things. If you want to understand what will happen post peak, stop looking at the "technical toolbox" and start looking at how human beings behave.
You may be able to build your insulated island of civilization, but don't ever think that you won't then become a target - and not just of roaming dispossesed refugees, but of the ire of nuclear equipped nation states.
We do agree 100% on the need to live your solution.
People care about their own comfort, nice people also care about other people. I or my state cant make these definitions for people.
What I hope we will have less of in the rich part of the world is inefficient comforts. It seems like USA is soon to be hit by one of histories largest "cluehammers", I hope you make the best of it.
Its not intened to be insulated, its the other way around, its intended to trade with those nuclear equipped nation states and other. Immigration will probably become limited if we dont become masters at integration. The trick is for us to be more valube alive and in good order then nuked by bastardized nations. The same idea as the Swedish foregin policy during WW2 when we basically traded with nazi Germany in exchange for not being invaded. Morally so repulsive that we armed ourselves to the teeth but that process were about finished in 1955 when we had an army that could have repelled an invasion...
Sweden could probably survive by powering down to only hydro, wind and biomass power. But having a lot of nuclear power on top of that provides power to further refine the local natural resources and provide large volumes of goods that are valuble for other countries. And the local population can have a higher standard of living wich is quite popular. We are not ecological saints but we try to at least be smart from time to time and a lot of our environmental problems have already been solved.
And I am also a strong advocate of a sensible strenghtening of the Swedish civilian and military defences, of course done with a long term plan to have the same basic structure for manny decades.
But the main part of my global thinking is that having multiple "icelands of civilization" as you say that compete on being productive in an enviromentally sensible way provides for much more human happiness then recource wars. I want us to compete and mobilize in a way that benefits a large part of the world. I am not arguing for us to become volontary powerdown victims, I dont want it and its not a working suggestion.
A small band of zealots will change nothing.
So, does that small band include you?
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
And more nuclear powerplants on top of that.
That we compared with other countries have good peak oil prepairdness in Sweden is party due to our greens and government trying to do that.
So do I!
So do I!
So do I!
So do I!But most of all I wish no one builds a coal power plant ever again.
It has been slowing for 40 years. Like I wrote at another place in the thread.
I agree fully! Making or society more efficent is moving forward. Going backwards is leaving the modern industrial welfare state and heading for something worse, like an agrarian society or a neoliberal crony capitalism (like certain elements of certain countries on the other side of the pond).Unless the "zealots" are the ones who SURVIVE through hard times.
Sure, black or white, nothing else!
You are spouting a lot of pro-nuclear "arguments", can we have your sources or is it just bogus/hearsay?
Can we also have an estimate of the budget/man hours necessary to collect and compare pro and cons of the "nukular" option versus coal, wind, solar, biomass.
It's an effect of what you mention, not really manhours, but price.
All the below numbers are of course approximate and change due to geographic location, infrastructure, environmental regulation, fuel costs and so on.
Nuclear: 3 cents per kWh. Extremely big fuel supply.
Coal: 2-4 cents per kWh. Very big fuel supply.
Natural gas: 2- really much depending on price of gas. And there isn't enough of it in the long run.
Wind: 4-6 cents per kWh. Big price differnce due to location. Can only supply a maximum of 20 % of total power due to grid instability issues.
Solar: 20-60 cents per kWh (or something like that). Maybe we'll see some wonderful technology breakthrough.
Stirling solar: Maybe as low as 6 cents per kWh.
Biomass: I don't really now, but maybe 4-8 cents per kWh. Limited annual potential. Feedstock should become more expensive due to competiton from cellulosic ethanol and such.
Hydro: Almost 0-3 cents per kWh. Nearly all sites already exploited.
Now, for a western consumer it doesn't matter much if you pay 3 or 6 cents for power costs as grid costs and power taxes can push the cost very much upwards and people can still take it. But people in the developing world can't take it and neither can western energy intensive companies (like paper, steel, aluminum etc) as they compete on a global market.
This means that countries without heavy industry (like Denmark) can build lots of expensive wind mills without wrecking the country's economy. Places like Sweden, where heavy industry is really big, can't. And nor can pretty poor places like China and India.
The vast majority of the world will base it's energy supply on either coal or nuclear just because it's cheap.
How would the electricity system of a non-fossil non-nuclear industrialized nation look like?
Let's take the US. 10 % hydro and a massive wind program on top of that, that's 30 % of demand. And then? There is not enough biomass around and stirling solar is intermittent and expensive so it won't work.
But what if there was a massive currently politcally impossible conservation program first? What if power demand was cut to a third of current levels (the Swedish conservation program only managed to slow demand growth). And on top of this power demand would grow as natural gas heating would be illegal and tranportation would be electrified. Anyway, in spite of these demand increases there would still be so much conservation as the new demand is only a third of the old.
Then hydro would generate 30 % of demand. Wind output would still be limited to 20 % due to grid stability (and so only a third as many windmills would be needed). Then we have 50 % of power demand fixed. But what about the rest?
It'll have to gas be (not much left and on decline in America) coal or nuclear. Today it's coal. It supplies 50 % of all America's electricity. I'd much rather see it be nuclear.
BOTH claims are unsubstanciated.
-
the cost is FAKE because of heavy subsidies hidden in military expenditures, undervalued costs of radioactive waste disposal and obsolete plants decommission.
- the "Extremely big fuel supply" is not ECONOMICALLY usable (see other comments in this thread).
Coal: 2-4 cents per kWh. Very big fuel supply.Excellent solution to get rid of all energy problems by Global warming triggered die-off.
Stirling solar: Maybe as low as 6 cents per kWh.
Thus "may be" competitive with REAL "Nuclear costs"?
And with an unquestionable inexhaustible fuel supply within the "reasonable " time span of, say, 1 BILLION years.
Alas, it is incremental, small units no big plants, no big money, no big government, no big profits, what a pity!
The vast majority of the world will base it's energy supply on either coal or nuclear just because it's cheap.
This is a PREDICTION not a PRESCRIPTION.
Are you a doomer at heart and do you wish for this?
What military expenditures?
The only directly realted military cost I can figure out is the sunk cost of basic research and technology development that were made for developing nuclear weapons. But that add no cost to nuclear powerplants, fuel factories or enrichment plants built today. Its the same way as with wind powerplants, it gives nothing to add the spent research cost to the cost of new windmills.
It is easier to argue that oil cost a lot in miltary expenditures.
The nice thing with this statement is that we probably will know if it is true or not within about 10 years since search for new uranium deposists is being started in a large scale and the development of new mines that probably have somewhat updated technology. This challange will propably result in the issue being investigated.
Its like the current peak oil scare, I think it is serious right now but within 10 years I will know for sure.
If you are right it will take more then 10 years to ramp up the nuclear powerplant building to a level where uranium runs out before the plants are old. This means that your argument is no reason to not floor the accelerator. But it could be an argumnet for developing multiple breeder designs in parallell ASAP.
Don't the military BUY the nuclear equipement and supplies they use?
Quite a BROADENING of the market for the nuclear industry, and as you notice they don't balk at the "sunk cost of basic research and technology development", did they STOP this?
But that add no cost to nuclear powerplants, fuel factories or enrichment plants built today.
EXACTLY, these costs are accounted as MARGINAL costs, not the true prices which will skyrocket if the volume of civilian nuclear increases a lot with respect to military nuclear, PLUS the costs of wastes safety which the military don't give a hoot about.
It is easier to argue that oil cost a lot in miltary expenditures.
Yeah! WTF does this have to do with an argument about the cost of nuclear power generation?
The nice thing with this statement is that we probably will know if it is true or not within about 10 years since search for new uranium deposists is being started in a large scale and the development of new mines that probably have somewhat updated technology.
Thanks for making the argument for me.
How do YOU know that it will be ECONOMICALLY usable?
Nothing questionable about my other points Coal and Stirling solar?
I dont know how much nuclear equipment and supplies the military buys. The production of nuclear powered submarines and carriers have slowed down a lot, my guess would be that this industry is much smaller then replacement parts for running civilian reactors and new powerplants. The nuclear weapon parts are probably done in completely separate factories.
Stop what? And why?
Civilian nuclear is probably already a lot bigger then military nuclear. That several military establishments have mismanaged their nuclear waste is in no way supporting the handling of civilian waste. The Swedish waste handling research has been paid by a small fee on each nuclear kWh sold. I dont know how other countries manages their development of waste handling methods.
If searching for new ore bodies and use of less concentrated ores can fuel a vastly larger fleet of nuclear powerplants, ten times the current one or more, that dont breed fuel from U238 or Thorium is still an open question for me. I dont worry about fueling what we can build in the next decade or two.
I did not read them throughly. I hope stirling solar will work out, every addition helps a little.
Of course, your biases are showing.
You did not deal either with my questioning of the COSTS of "radioactive waste disposal and obsolete plants decommission" .
Could you also give us your estimations for the cost (beside the RISK) of major accidents, see expat comment.
I dont hide my biases. But in this case I did not find the cost statement regarding coal and solar stirling power intresting enough to check or challange the numbers.
I trust the www.ski.se calculations.
A description can be found on:
http://www.ski.se/extra/tools/parser/index.cgi?url=/html/parse/index_en.html&selected=11&mai nurl=/page/5/9.html%3F17951
Scroll down and open the PDF file.
And more inforamtion on:
http://www.karnavfallsfonden.se/Engstart.htm
The fees thisn year are per kWh:
0.006 SEK, $0.00083 for the Oskarshamn nuclear powerplant.
0.007 SEK, $0.00097 for Ringhals
0.012 SEK, $0.00166 for Forsmark (closest to the cost for new powerplants when they are built. )
The first 25 years of fees per reactor is calculated to be enough and then is the fee much lower. This is complicated by the financial incommes from the state bonds and state accounts with intrest.
The fund held 34,800,000,000 SEK at the end of 2005, between 1981 and 2005 were 26,200,000,000 SEK paid to the fund by the nuclear powerplants and the financial incommes were 26,700,000,000 SEK, and 18,200,000,000 SEK were paid for waste handling, research and so on.
Neither of them are quantified, I am no research establishment.
My estimation of the accident risk for a large release of radioactivity from a Swedish nuclear powerplants is that it is neglible but it is anyway prudent to plan for such a releases since I can be wrong, it is good to have civil defence resources and another ex soviet RBMK could burn down while the winds blow our way.
It is even harder to say something wise about the cost.
The initial cost is higher if the radioactivity is released over a city then countryside since a lot more people will have their lives disrupted to handle the fallout with a minimum of health harm to them.
The long term impact is higher for countryside since a town can be washed, repaved and soft surfaces changed out but a farm can not be used for a long time.
It is probably possible to add up the worst case dispruption cost, decontamination cost and medium and long term loss of money flow from farms etc.
However I cant do this job in any meaningfull way, my guess is that it would be adequate if all "western" nuclear powerplants agreed to add a fraction of a cent to each kWh after an accident to cover the money flow needed.
I think it's very odd to add military adventures to the cost of a civilian power source. If we start going that route do we get to add the Holocaust to the cost of coal? After all, coal did indeed fuel the nazi war machine. Better to consider power sources on their merits, independent of what some pointy haired generals did with the technology on their own.
What I can never figure out is why more pro nuclear folks are not so keen to send their own children to work in the uranium mines, for this great patriotic cause...there is more to nuclear than the shiny well lit plant sitting by the river....a lot of "contamination" before the fuel rods ever get in the plant or the first leak ever occurs, know what I mean....
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
You write:
"But to blame enviros as a whole for our converging energy and environmental catastrophes is like blaming the anti-war movement of the 1960s for America's failure in Vietnam.
I do not blame enviros as a whole -- but there is a fair dose of 'cosmeticism' in that political community (to use Catton's term in 'Overshoot'). Environmental and ecological awareness are not quite the same thing.
My point is that environmentalists have lacked a sense of proportion by over-emphasing the hazards of nuclear energy (along with the pseudo-hazards of exposure to 1 part per trillion of dioxin, etc. etc.).
And their success is largely due to the availability of cheap oil. That's the irony.
The posters who say 'don't worry too much about radiation' do very little to ease my concerns. Others say this about GM foods and antibiotic overuse, too, which strike me as similarly ominous hazards. The dangers are invisible and carry the potential of spreading or cascading through biosystems, waterways or genetic developments/mutations which we might not even recognize until widespread damage had occurred (See Mercury & Lead for the prequels to this danger)
Besides this grand promise of 'untold riches' in Uranium supply seems equally overstated, when the access to this material requires more and more energy and processing, while current mining finds less and less pure sources of Uranium Ore..
It just seems way too easy to throw the axes at the people who have stuck their necks out to try to proceed with a real concern for a long future, refusing to dump our unsolved (and pass on our parents' unsolved) long-term hazardous wastes to the generations which will already have enough to try to deal with, without cleaning up after their parents..