Why Not Nuclear Power?
Posted by Robert Rapier on August 2, 2007 - 10:30am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: barack obama, hillary clinton, john edwards, nuclear energy [list all tags]
A couple of days ago I was reading the CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential debate transcript. Of course I am always interested to hear what the candidates have to say about energy. There were a lot of good comments, and the usual spattering of dumb comments. But I won't dissect them right now. What got me to thinking were the comments of John Edwards (on Page 2):
EDWARDS: Wind, solar, cellulose-based biofuels are the way we need to go. I do not favor nuclear power. We haven't built a nuclear power plant in decades in this country. There is a reason for that. The reason is it is extremely costly. It takes an enormous amount of time to get one planned, developed and built. And we still don't have a safe way to dispose of the nuclear waste. It is a huge problem for America over the long term.
I also don't believe we should liquefy coal. The last thing we need is another carbon-based fuel in America. We need to find fuels that are in fact renewable, clean, and will allow us to address directly the question that has been raised, which is the issue of global warming, which I believe is a crisis.
Following this, Barack Obama said that he favored including nuclear power in the mix, and Hillary Clinton said she was agnostic about nuclear power. She did play the "oil" card, which is to say that she thinks the solution to our energy problem is to take from oil and then let the government figure out how to spend that money on alternatives.
I have been accused occasionally of having various anti-nuclear views. This is amusing, given that I have never written anything negative about nuclear power. The main reason is that I am not well-versed in the pros and cons. My understanding is that the main pro is that nuclear can provide an abundant source of energy for quite some time. This is also a reason that I favor a transition to an electric infrastructure: We are going to run low on liquid fuels long before we run low on the ability to produce electricity.
As I understand it, the primary negative is still that we don't have a good solution for dealing with nuclear waste. Obviously, we can't just pile up waste indefinitely, and I am not sure how reactors around the world handle this problem. And of course historically there have been the occasional Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, which ensures that nobody is going to want a nuclear reactor in their backyard.
My feeling is that we will desperately need nuclear energy in the not too distant future. But what about the waste problem? How do other countries deal with the waste problem? I presume France, with all of their nuclear reactors, must have a solution that the population is comfortable with.
For an extremely negative view of nuclear power, see the recently published essay by anti-nuclear activist Rebecca Solnit:
CNN also presents a negatively slanted view in a just-published article, but they do discuss the waste issue a bit:
So which viewpoint is closest to the truth? Do the negatives outweigh the negatives of 1). Blackouts; and 2). Global Warming caused by coal-fired plants? Some people may not be aware of it, but all of the top point sources of CO2 emissions are from coal-fired power plants. (I had a list, but can't find it. If someone knows where this information resides, please post the link).
I would like some people knowledgeable in this area to provide some input here. My own view is that we are going to need nuclear power in the mix. But it may take frequent blackouts before the public starts to accept the necessity.
Given a choice between coal and nuclear, I would take nuclear, but the reality is that we are going to pursue every single energy source, in a full blown panic driven effort to bring more energy supplies on line.
Because in the long run, it is not sustainable. How many years have you people been yammering about a peak in a finite resource? What do you think is used to make nuclear reactors?
For all the brain power supposedly in cahoots here, you all fall several standard deviations short in common sense. It should be enough to observe the data flowing in from petroleum related activities for light to have dawned on Marblehead. Shoulda could woulda. Here's the crimp note:
The problem is not our activity, it's our proclivity.
You can wank away at alternatives all you want, but it does nothing to address the fact that humanimal can't seem to suss out the natural limits of the environment that gave rise to its existence. Armory Lovins certainly was on to something when he titled his rant "Natural Capital," but forgot to ask a prudent question:
Just because we can, should we?
The future of humanimal, if your goal is to get us as close to the eventual frying of this world by our star, is not going to be cultivating DVD players from organic carbon strings powered by pebble bed breeders. If we are to see another 10,000 years of "civilization," it is going to be based on low tech, low impact, low consumption and low wants. We need very little to survive: clean air, food, water, shelter from the elements and community. That was all the environment that gave rise to our existence promised when life emerged. It is our inability to be satisfied with that reality that has brought us here.
It is our collective inability to understand the true limits of our host, that continues to drive the supposedly with it to clamor for a continuance of the binge. Fools. Every last one of you. In the end you realize, your continued myopic behavior not only will consume your own life, but the lives of the innocent yet to reach an age where cognizance could be applied toward changing the psychotic behavior exhibited even here. Enjoy the soup. It comes at a heavy cost.....
LOL, thanks for making this clear. The future you just described looks quite like what the humanity had up to the 19th century. Are you applying for a landlord here?
Wretched Excess
I am not sure that rudeness, name calling and profanity are called for. Personally, "wretched excess", I found this comment offensive.
Offensive yes, but also totally inaccurate.
I'm no fan of nuclear power, but if I thought we had a choice between collapse / reversion to a pre-industrial world and using nuclear power to get us through the next 50 years, I'd reluctantly say lets starting building lots of nukes.
Fortunately I don't think that's necessary - we can meet all our current and projected energy needs with a combination of renewables and efficiency measures.
Go and do the sums...
Saildog,
Wretched excess has been a member for 19 hours, yet he criticizes TOD as though he has been a member for years.
The Oil Drm was started in 2005, so on the face of his comment, its a lie.
Its pretty clear that he's either an old troll returning or a new troll, possibly paid. At any rate the best policy is to ignore him, especially since he semms to want to start a flame war..Bob Ebersole
With all due respect I'm more offended from people that tell me what I have to want and what I have to need.
I say enough of self-appointed demiurges.
Yes, when the binky is pulled from an unprepared mouth screams will ensue. Sorry to disturb your slumber but a clue by four is sometimes the only method for bringing about a shift in perceptions. Time is not for dainty conversation over petit-fours. Time is to get serious. The only thing being done here is desperately trying to preserve the halcyon daze. The sooner the collective "in the know" step away from the bong the better. Do the freaking literature review before writing your treatise.
I'm an old troll; and if you think that anyone would pay to have this board disrupted your sense of self importance is way out of whack. Been poking your tender underside since the day you opened your door back on blogspot. Been resource scarcity aware for much longer. Been reading about civilization, energy use and political history even longer. Of course my thesis is going to rupture the committee. It don't toe the line. Then again most real breakthroughs in understanding never have. Get used to it. Of course if you are really sensitive you could try and play whack a troll and ban my MAC. That will be interesting in a lab of 200+ machines...
Wrong. Getting sustainable will require the sobering drying up of use of finite materials. Again, the wizardry of technology is not going to grow off of berry bushes. All the maths show that even at complete utilization of available fixes will not cover even half of what is currently the norm. The way is not through seeking continuity, the way is complete change.
Uh oh, psychopath label, better get out the troll stamp. How convenient that cliche is. Just label anyone who might have a dissenting viewpoint and we can all get back to the delusions. Unfortunately, delusions are not solutions.
If the majority of the posters here are a representative sample, the resounding answer is no. Levin would have us believe that it is perfectly reasonable to think that the way we currently live is done to meet needs. Wrong. The way we currently live is in thrall to desires fed by a completely untenable level of consumption; unless of course your goal is to eradicate most life off the face of the planet.
Sometime in the future, people will be looking to groups like this for answers to what has happened and solutions. What currently passes for reasoned debate is really no more than replacing the whip at the back of the lemming pack for a dog whistle at the front. You are still headed for the cliff. So much for evolution.
Every single individual that continues the lie that what we have become accustomed to can be patched sustainably is another voice of hegemony that will lead to a barren wasteland. Witness Iraq. Do you think wars will end because you put up solar panels? Wars will end when we stop being rapacious. Whatever slew of alternatives you propose will require inputs. Inputs that will not always be available in the quantity desired at the local level. Enter colonialism. We've been doing it for so long people no longer even bother to recognize it.
Just how do you think the shelves are stocked and the lights remain on in la la land? It is because in addition to the slaves we harness from hydrocarbons, we additionally rely upon the deprivation of billions across the globe to refine raw materials into widgets sans ecological impact considerations. Every single one of us is responsible currently for the conditions that exist in the slums and backwaters across the globe because of the lifestyle we are so irrationally attached to. That same lifestyle that we are trying desperately to maintain for the future generations. Bunk. The madness that is the civilized world is a madness that will render future generations impossible.
Go ahead be offended. The offense is actually yours...
Agreed, trolling-for-dollars.
Indeed, wretched-excess has gone on a rant, but in his defense, wisdom on this thread is not high. If we understand that oil is a finite resource, then why can we not understand that other resources, too, are finite. Only when resources are used at a rate less than replenishment is activity sustainable.
And that takes us to the crux: Our civilization uses more energy per day than comes to us from ANY combination of sources. Coal, oil, uranium--these are all drawing on the past to try to EXCEED sustainability. We can do it--indeed we have done it--but only temporarily. Our civilization is absolutely guaranteed to end, and all our quick fixes are just a junky who has run out of heroin mainlining ludes. It is sure to end badly.
Some people take offense at the idea of living like our ancestors. The truth is, we could do worse. Mid paleolithic people had a ten-hour work week, plentiful food (most of the time) and a network of meaningful relationships. Yes, frankly, their life was physically arduous, but humans are designed for that.
Of course, our life is comfortable, but that is not what is at stake. What is at stake is the simple fact that our comfortable way of life is going to end, and the most likely scenerio for its ending--a frantic consumption to exhaustion of available resources--will leave a desertified world with MUCH fewer survival possibilities than were offered to our paleolithic ancestors.
The most likely model for US is Easter Island. It would be very good to avoid doing what they did, but at this moment Easter Island is certainly what we are collectively trying for. It would be a mistake.
Nuclear power of course consumes large quantities of non-nuclear energy in plant construction, and in many peripheral activities. But the heart of the problem is that it is a literal dead end. When we say that the waste disposal is unsolved--after more than fifty years!--why would you understand that it will BE solved the day after tomorrow? Between the known laws of physics and nuclear energy's own history, the odds are that it will not. Ever. By the way, do you understand the effects of elevated radiation on human beings? Cancer is the least. Birth defects and immune disease are the real problems, and they never end. Unlike cockroaches and most other insects, humans just are not designed for the world we are invoking when we consider nuclear power. The outlook for cockroaches is good. The outlook for humans is not--and nothing will reduce our long term prospects more permanently or thoroughly than the nuclear route.
There is an attitude on this thread which just leaves me shaking my head--that we can tell nature what to do. Are you nuts? I can assure you it is the other way around, as we will learn, the easy way or the hard way. We can comply with nature's constraints, or we can die. It's a free choice.
It's a shame that this comment got so high up in the thread, because it is so very much not true.
Human beings can design systems that preserve, restore and regenerate natural capital, while providing services and resources to satisfy human needs. I have personally done so on a small scale, and I can see how it could be done on a large scale, if we choose to do so. All we need to do is accept:
1) That it's a priority, because it's necessary to our survival.
2) That it will slightly diminish short-term returns (in most cases), for the sake of long-term health.
3) That just because we can do something, does not mean we should.
If we could wrap ourselves around those principles, we could design a technological civilization for the ages. Alas, the discussion seems mostly divided between the "there's-no-problem" cornucopians and the "technology-is-fundamentally-unsustainable" doomers. There seems to be very little room left to consider the middle road.
Besides being a Lovins disciple, I guess this would make you a cornucopian as well. From your Live Journal page we come to understand that, beyond your link to the online version of NatCap, "I like technology. A lot. I like the ways it makes my life easier, more effective, more free, and more interesting. I also like the intellectual challenge of creating it, understanding it, and using it. About the only thing I don't like about it, is having to fix it. But I really enjoy figuring out how to design it so that it doesn't need fixing." See here's the thing, have you been able to get all your technology from fully renewable sources? You sure none of them rely on trace elements which are finite in nature? Oh, but don't let that deter your (benighted) enthusiasm.
The original affluent society, see Stone Age Economics by Sahlins, still holds the record for highest cultural EROEI and leisure time. It has been the steady encroachment of technological 'advances' that have required more time of each individual, and increasing reliance upon finite sources of energy, to provide a lifestyle. The early adopters of the sedentary lifestyle also lost their ability to fend against the wilds. Hence their hybrid-domestication of the nomad hunter by providing for his needs in exchange for protection; which is where royalty came from and we have been slaves to them ever since.
Point 1 being priority, score one for the home team. Point 2, that it will slightly diminish is a gross understatement. The only long term health to be had will come at a great decrease in the net amount of per capita energy consumption; barring a rethinking of how many people will live at any given time. History is clear. We went from wood to charcoal to coal to oil to splitting atoms. Unless the Stoernies blow open known physics, there ain't no free lunch on the other side of this feeding frenzy.
Done any math lately? If the latest attempt at solar farming is any indication, it will take the area of Connecticut to power residential use alone in the US. Forget industrial. Not a watt for commercial. Nada for schlepping their carcasses around. How many of these exercises need to be done at the end of the sustainability chapter before the lesson sinks in?
You know what long term was/is? That's the time in which we did not seriously jeopardize the holding capacity of our planet. How long do you seriously think there will be all those nifty metals around to enjoy so that your iPhone can be used to remind you that it's time to turn the compost? Ahhh the life of an engineer.
Aboriginal societies tested the limits of the system long ago. Those that survived came to live within them. Those that did not perished. Too bad about the opposable thumb and incipient desire to overreach. That is why we are here. Hello. We have the capability to manipulate far beyond the sustainable ability of the parent system to provide. Attachment. Bittersweet.
So, have fun. The other side of the century will be the proof in the pudding. Of course only those with a belief system that incorporates an afterlife will get to know the answer. The living will be far less fortunate given the inability of most to deal with reality.
By the way, your point 3? I think that was the main crux of wretched excess' comment. The problem being you are to attached to your technology to see the forest for the trees...
I think you misread my position, badly. But it's understandable, I guess, given the material I've put online. Maybe it's time to revise again.
If I'm a disciple of anyone, it would be much more Bill McDonough than Amory Lovins. To Lovins, solving a problem by design is a matter of engineering out all the waste. To McDonough, it's a matter of reconsidering the problem statement, figuring out what we actually want (e.g. cold beer and hot showers, not refrigerators and water heaters), and then designing a solution that works within the context of existing and potential natural systems. The key is respect for natural systems, and the selective and careful application of technology where it will do the most good.
I do agree that if humanity has a future, it will be based on greatly reduced per-capita energy consumption. That's OK. By conservative estimates, we waste 2/3 of our energy production, and 4/5 of our transportation energy. And those estimates are made within the context of currently prevailing design practice for buildings, generation/transmission assets, and transportation. In point of fact, our waste:service ratio is probably more like 20:1, when you consider that a well-designed building in most climates needs only a very minimal climate control system, for example.
I'm not particularly worried about depletion of non-renewable non-energy resources. Either we will learn to design and live with closed cycles (>90% recovery), in which case it won't be a problem, or we won't, in which case the law of exponential growth dictates that no amount of resources will be enough.
If we build our artifacts from carefully selected technological and biological nutrients, we aren't going to run short of materials. We've got plenty, if we're careful. All that we need then is energy, and that is actually a challenging but tractable problem if we can stop being so toweringly stupid and short-sighted at every turn.
As for my personal love of technology: Yes, I like it. But that doesn't mean I particularly care for the way that it has invaded every nook and cranny of every moment of our lives. I like having the ability to travel to distant destinations at high speed, but I don't want to do it every day. I like being able to communicate instantly with distant loved ones, but I'd much rather see them in person. I like having access to an abundance of food, but I'd much rather grow my own. And I will, and have, made what most people would consider sacrifices in order to live closer to these preferences.
I rely heavily on email and the web, because it facilitates my ability to shape the world in a positive direction, but frankly I'd be just as happy to give up much of that. I just don't feel that I, personally, as a white American male with an expensive education, have the right to go live on a mountain and tend my garden while the world goes to hell around me.
What I hope for in the long run is not millions of years of low tech civilization but mature biotechnology, nanotechnology and subcultures no one yet have dreamed of. So little have been done of what can probably be done but it wont happen overnight and we can not count on it to happen to solve todays problem with magic technology.
Now the game is to preserve and build upon what we already have in technology and culture capable of change and development. And to have a good time doing it while building for the next generation.
Nice points, Green.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Just because we CAN do something, doesn't mean we WILL. Humans are dumber than yeast. Maybe they are inventive, have opposable thumbs and all, but philosophically, they have the wisdom of a starved raccoon. It's amazing to me that more of us aren't found lying on the sides of our own highways.
That's because sitting on the fence means two things:
1. You have to come down to eat.
2. You are an easy target.
3. (I can't count) There isn't much profit in the middle ground unless you are a lawyer who gets paid for not solving problems, or a politician that gets paid by crooks on both sides of the fence.
Doomers like me see the long term problems as the immediate need, because we've tried to see where compromise leads, and it leads to the status quo. Things have to change. One way or another, especially how decisions are made based upon the profit motive alone. The only thing wrong with the busload of lawyers going over the cliff is that it doesn't have their accountants strapped to the roof.
We can argue about the numbers all day, but if the plan to use nuclear is only compared to using coal, then there really isn't any choice. The real question is still this: "What are we using the energy FOR?" All the talk about current consumption, reducing consumption by 'x' percent, and finding sources to 'fulfill the demands of customers' never questions the actual results of what humans are doing. It's one thing to say "we have freedom", or "we will live in harmony with our environment", but you have to ask yourself, and others, "Then what?"
What is the Net Creativity of the human race going to be, when all is said and done? What do we contribute to the universe that makes it a better place for children to grow up in? Are they really growing up, or have we created a perpetual game zone for them to exist like yeast in a petri dish?
If the petri dish is going to be contaminated anyway, then let's just burn it up now and enjoy ourselves, right?
The petri dish has existed for hundreds of millions of years, with many Net Creative species (Perhaps that includes ourselves before our 200 years of industrial toys).
Are you trying to make a better petri dish or just minimize how fast we drain it (coal) or destroy it (nuclear)? To someone who is a cornucopian or windmill salesman, my rants sound anti-technology. I am not. I am against wrongheaded technology or technology being used for the sake of the technology, not for the sake of Net Creativeness. Any technology we adapt should provide more potential(to our grandchildren) usefulness than it uses up in resources. That's a pretty simple theory. See how the things you do add up in your own mind. Rationalize any way you want, because Nature will decide in the end, not us, unless we change.
Last one out of the dish, please turn off the lights (if they still work).
Humans are dumber than yeast. Maybe they are inventive, have opposable thumbs and all, but philosophically, they have the wisdom of a starved raccoon.
It sure seems that way. On the other hand, consider the degree of social evolution we've achieved in the last couple of centuries (e.g. a semblance of racial and sexual equality). We've come a long way, far enough that I can't rule out the possibility that we will be able to meet this new challenge.
In my mind, we are in the process of transitioning from being a pre-tech species to a technological one. As technicus, we are a juvenile species, and we look pretty hopeless. But teenagers tend to be that way, and if we gave up on them, there'd be no future for the species.
What? You see a transition from one type of species to another, more highly developed one within the current human population?
Give me a break! Evolution works with hundreds and thousands of generations, not two or three.
And what part of the human population are you talking about? People like yourself? And what about the other 99.9 percent of people who are oblivious to any understanding of world systems and the oncoming crisis due to lack of or bad education, daily fight for survival, lack of IQ, misinformation by the MSM etc.?
Wake up, man!
Davidyson
I do not think we have progressed in any degree of social evolution. We just have a few more educated people around who have time to consider social issues. Look at some of the writings in biblical times - Jesus (or whoever wrote or said those words) said things that were socially very advanced (and I don't mean manipulative religous messages) - his words seem far more socially advanced than many of the ones people spout today IMHO. Of course some things that were said at the time were also painfully socially retarded, but we make plenty of such statements today too...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I see no shame in it at all. I agree with just about everything he wrote, nor does it diminish what you wrote.
That we are not doing as you wisely think we should is one fact that better supports wretched excess's post than your ready dismissal of it. Until we do as you suggest and do so Big Time we'll be left hanging on the "If we could wrap ourselves around those principles" problem!
Right there is a Big Time problem, as exemplified by most of this nuclear rehash to solve problems that are at root ones of human excess. What's really telling is that your "middle road" concepts are no where on the publicly acceptable radar screen of what we can and should be doing. It's all mostly more of the same stupidity that got us where we are now.
There is no shame at all in pointing this out. Especially with respect to how nuclear power is getting trotted out for another look. What's to see that wasn't there the first time? It stunk then and it stinks now! Chasing after it just goes to prove how totally incapable we are at wrapping ourselves around the sane principles you wrote of to resolve our problems.
It's all about: Grab another mop & bucket, boys! The taps are on and we can't turn them off!
Insane.
"Insane."
Yup.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I should like to correct something, which is:
It's all about: Grab another mop and bucket, boys! The taps are on and we can't think to turn them off!
I took some calculations that Robert and Nick started and polished (well at least sanded) them a little. Getting sustainable is pretty easy and saves money all along the way. Here is the link.
Chris
One of the problems with many nuclear proponents is an almost blind refusal to accept that we are part of a greater set of interrelated systems - not separate from the world. Anyone advocating anything close to current lifestyles is a psychopath.
We like to pretend we are separate from the world, because we've had the cheap energy to set aside normal constraints for a while... but all that ignorance will catch up with us, and if some things do not catch up with us, they will end up affecting our children or their children. Nuclear may stretch our current lifestyles out a bit, while making a few wealthy, but it'll come back and bite us later.
So we can choose. Do we take some responsibility for what we are doing or not? If yes, then ask serious questions:
The available productive area of the earth is 1.9ha per person. How much are we using? What is really sustainable?
We share that area with most other land-based organisms, and some of that area with non-organic resources. Whatever we extract from the earth that will not be replaced in the near (geological) future is a drawdown on mineral (and other) savings that future generations will not have the benefit of (except for the few enduring things we create).
So what level of energy use is sustainable?
What level of fresh water use?
Soil use at rates required to feed 6.5 billion and growing?
Plant and animal husbandry/natural ecosystems?
Mineral use?
Pollution?
Etc...
Why give lip service to sustainability? It will only drag things out... which answers the question - many of us will kid ourselves that we are doing something and just hope to leave it to our grandkids to suffer the worst of it.
And the answer is not in NO technology. Technology will always have its place. I just don't believe nuclear technology is part of the non-lip-service sustainable equation.
Solutions? Ideally, I think it starts with voluntary population reduction, coupled with uncensored education of the problems we are causing, looking at truly sustainable practices, and encouragement by government and citizens to reject our economic, consumer, money obsessed society... how do we do these things? That's the real question?
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
I basically do not care about the global average. For me the relevant question is how the local environment wich I have a chance to influence (Sweden) can be cultivated in a way that gives long term prosperity and makes the world better. We are 9 million here now, we will probably be 10 million in a not so distant future and we can export stuff that maks a small but notisable differense for perhaps a hundred million people or so. When we get more efficient we can do more but we will never save the whole world.
We will probably use at least 10 times the global average of water but that does not matter since we got the rainfall and the best we can do is let it aid us in industrial processes that gives goods that can benefit people. If we add plenty of electricity we can do more with the water we get, the biomass we grow and the plentiful minerals.
I would be content with such ambitions if they were common.
They dont give a fair world in absolute wealth levels but a lot healthier one where the resources will last a lot longer and some will last close to indefinately if technology and efficiency continue to improve.
"I basically do not care about the global average."
That says it all really...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Very terrible of me that I dont want to sacrifice myself and my community/culture for getting closer to global average. I only want to work very hard with being usefull and encouraging stuff that in the long term makes life easier for a large number of people. That wont help everybody but it sure betas beinga doomer or run to the hills as a survivalist or having ideas about working against individual self intrest.
There is nothing in power-down that is against self-interest, except perhaps having a large family and laziness. There is nothing in it that is survivalist or about running for the hills if it is a common societal goal. Living closer to the land, walking, using public transport, being open about the problems we face, having small families, changing our market culture - none of these things are bad, and I believe the overall benefits would far outweigh any perceived "sacrifices".
Why does everyone associate power-down with doom and gloom? That is an uninformed, narrow view, and it if is the best argument you can come up with, it only serves to support the proposition.
If you really want to argue against it, try asking how we go about changing the way people think in order to reach the goals of sustainability. That will be the hard part...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Power down and all that implies is coming. The real questions are: How well we accept and work within such a reality while relinquishing our humanistic arrogance of control over such matters as opposed to fighting against such submission as it occurs.
As Aldo Leopold put it: "The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental health and material well being can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust?"
In short: Nature does not make political compromises with anyone.
In this sense power down is all about living within the means of creation as it is and not as we keep trying to make it. IMO, we've got a ways to go before we get it.
Some people can profit from a panic. Here is an only half in jest accusation that the reason we have loan guarantees for new nuclear power in the Senate Energy Bill is that Bill Richardson is just trying to preserve the southern electricty market for New Mexican solar power. Bait them with nuclear then switch in solar that they could have developed themselves with the taxpayers bailing out the unused nuclear plants.
Chris
You can just about guarantee that many "solutions" will be fueled more by money-making opportunities than anything else. People will delight in kidding themselves that they are making a difference AND getting rich!
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
The difference is that renewable solutions are solutions while depletable solutions are just postponing the actual solution. The renewable sourcing is getting permanently set now. There will be very little oportunity to change the future market because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Oil, gas, coal and nuclear are all, by nature, temporary, and thus broken so they'll get fixed. Renewables are permanent and they won't.
Exxon, Peabody, and Excelon will continue to exist, but as supliers of lubricants, christmas novelties and smoke detector parts respectively. Most of their shareholders will have migrated. Even BP is going to end up with a small market share because they are trying to be incremental in an exponential market. They are trying to balance competing interests rather than committing to what the market can do.
Ruth, if you are reading this, please tell me I'm wrong about BP. We need you.
Chris
Except that nuclear is different than oil, coal and gas in that there is an essentially inexhaustible supply (one trillion tons of recoverable Uranium at high eroei with many times that if you consider Thorium and other fuel cycles). A solution that works for thousands or millions of years should be considered a permanent solution.
Not really, we experience a major disaster every forty years at the current rate of use. That implies a disaster every 10 years if nuclear is going to be a solution rather than just a nuisance. That means removing a circle of radius 20 miles from use for each accident. That exceeds the land surface area of the earth in 60,000 years, a shorter time than the areas can recover.
I also suggest that you are engaging in magical thinking to say that we know about much more than about 85 years of fuel at current use.
OOps, that should have been 600,000 years. Same point though.
You cannot be serious with that first comment. Chernobyl was a serious incident but there have not been others where there has been loss of life or environmental damage. We cannot learn anything in 60,000 years?
There was one period of exploration for Uranium in the 80s and they found about 100 years worth. Since then no one has been looking. You think that is the end of the story?
The issue of how much Uranium exists has been seriously debated here many times. You really should look into some of the previous threads, especially some of the comments by Dezakin. I for one am tired of making the same comments over and over when so many of the nuclear opponents are so impervious to the facts.
The one thing we seem to be unwilling to learn is that people make mistakes. So far, we have avoided sabotage. How much longer? People want whole new kinds of reactors and swear they are safe without any experience except that four of the prototypes had accidents. Do we make the mistake again of believing these people, or do we judge nuclear power on its actual performance? The performance does not match the promises in the least. Electricty is NOT too cheap to meter. Plants in populous regions are NOT operated in a safe manner. Yucca Mountain is NOT operational.
We have made a mistake promoting civilian nuclear power. It is time we admitted it so that the other mistakes that WILL lead to more accidents don't happen.
You may not be aware of critcality incidents that have led to fatalitites in civillian nuclear power but they have occured. Radiation released to the environment has also happened on many occasions. You may want to study this list. It is surely incomplete as there has been quite a lot of coverup going on in the industry. If you do not know these things, why are you complaining about the attention of others to facts?
Without new nuclear power, the probability of a meltdown that blows containment in the next 20 years is greater than 80%. You can do the math yourself from the near misses. Lessons learned do not help this much because these are complex systems and you are only as smart as your last problem, and not necessarily smart enough for your next. The failure modes have not all been excercised or even conceived. If we can't keep simple things like bridges from collapsing despite regular inspections, do you really think that no more serious nuclear accidents will happen ever? The only way to ensure this is to shut the reactors down permanently.
This statement demonstrates you are entirely ignorant of how containment works. The reason why Chernobyl was so bad was the lack of any containment to begin with.
A failure of the emergency core cooling system can lead to containment breach. Failure to avoid a hydrogen build up can lead to containment breach. Pick you system, it can fail.
You are of course incorrect that Chernobyl had no containment. It just did not have enough. There are circumstances under which other containment systems can fail as well. Take a look at what a jury-rigged system defence in depth is, how complex and, most of all, how deeply it has been penetrated in actual accidents and you'll see that another large accident is bound to happen.
Look, pilots and people who work in national security are very heavily screened. Yet we have pilots who crash planes deliberately and spys who betray their country. With all the extra active systems needed to avoid containment breach, why would you ever say that containment alone is adequate? A saboteur can make the active systems inoperative, open the containment deliberately, any number of things. Security drills at plants lead to penetration. We then try to fix the problems with that. Then another method works. Another large accident will happen. It is only a matter of time.
If you are not willing to acknowledge the risks, I would suggest that you keep as far away from the nuclear industry as possible. The most dangerous thing is to assume there is no danger.
You could, but you'd be wrong.
Its like you were incapable of reading resource estimates from 'World Uranium Resources' and skipped towards the end which really only discusses reserves. The IAEA number only uses rich known orebodies (with essentially no exploration for decades.) It doesn't take into account any nontraditional sources such as phosphates, shales or even flyash, nor does it account for reprocessing or double enrichment.
Reprocessing and double enrichment alone multiply the resource base by 4-10 without even opening one new mine.
Reprocessing is a job that few like to take on. The working material is pretty nasty. I would say that non-traditional sources sound quite a lot like the NPC report. You can belive it if you like, but you do not know. We do know of about 85 years of fuel at current use. A plan to replace coal with nuclear power had better be quite clear that the fuel could run out prior to the end of the design lifetime of the plants and include this in the rates that are charged. $0.08/kWh wholesale is about what would be required to account for this risk. Especially since the loans for construction will be guaranteed, this should be a clear requirement to ensure loan repayment.
So what? We have several demonstrated technologies and several industrial scale plants operating allready. Its not a problem that needs to be solved because its done allready. Fortunately uranium is so plentiful we don't actually need to do any reprocessing...
I have confidence in it the same way I'm confident that the world doesn't become very dense hamburger beneath the crust. I can't really know for certain because I haven't taken core samples to make sure there's no hamburger down there. I think your problem is you really don't understand the numbers you're quoting.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeAvailabilityOfUsableUranium
Reasonably assured reserves (or proven reserves) refers to known commercial quantities of Uranium recoverable with current technonology and for the specified price. As well there are estimates of additional and speculative reserves in extensions to well explored deposits or in new depoists that are thought to exist based on well defined geological data. These are necessarily subject to a larger uncertainty, however, the historically low price of uranium over the past ten years has provided a disincentive to exploration.
Between 2003 and 2005 the world uranium reserves for 130$/kg U increased by 50% due to only modest exploration, to currently the '85 years' reserves with 500 years additional reserves. The uncertainty of the additional reserves doesnt mean additional reserves might not exist, but simply assigns probabilities of excess reserves in this price band.
This doesn't include 200 or 300 doller per kg uranium (still quite affordable for competitive nuclear power.) And it doesn't reflect the resource multiplication of modest price increases with simple process steps such as extra enrichment, reprocessing, and DUPIC.
But, look it up yourself. You're being deliberately obstinate. Avaliability of resources isn't ever going to be a problem in nuclear power in any timeframe worth discussing (clear the calender for the next thousand years). If you want to object on security, safety, relative risk, or even cost I respectfully disagree there; But at least there's two sides to those arguments. The resource avaliability canard is just being deliberately ignorant.
Now you are at 500 years at current use. OK. That gives 100 years as a solution to global warming, or less if energy use grows as anticipated, perhaps 50 years with population stabilization at 11 billion. Then you want the price to go up. But it does not matter when the carbon goes into the atmosphere so you are back to coal and have not solved anything. I still want accelerated loan repayment, there are other reasons to think nuclear won't last even 50 years.
I just don't know anyone serious who thinks of nuclear power as anything that should be permanent. It can't be for one thing, and everyone is aware that there are much better alternatives. Everyone would much prefer fusion to fission, for example. Why do you insist that it makes sense to replace one polluting energy source with another? Having a strange love for nuclear power just does not seem like enough to me. It is a facinating jumble of patches placed on splints attached to dohickees, but it is not beautiful or even practical, just very very dirty. Make a mess with neutrons....
The fuel price could triple without anyone seriously noticing any additional cost to nuclear power: Its all wrapped up in capital, not fuel. A simple doubling of price opens up roughly ten times the resources for exploitation.
Its also rather unlikely that fuel price needs to go up to expand resources beyond that. As was mentioned earlier, very little uranium exploration has been done in decades, and technology advances open up new resources at lower price points. DUPIC could be use today for relatively low costs, possibly even competitive today at todays prices (with lag time for setting up the systems.) And all of this is still before simple resource multiplication of doubling the enrichment step. Pyrometalurgical reprocessing methods developed at ANL could be far more economically viable than the aqueous methods currently favored (largely developed for weapons production.)
Its capable of filling a major role in the power production for human civilization for the next several centuries. We may very well have much cheaper solar or wind by then. Hell, Alan could be right and its cheaper today, but I still feel nuclear should be relied on as a demonstrated source of capable baseload power. Future fission power plants will almost certainly be useful in extreme environments and space exploration even if we move on to the next great thing; Unless that next great thing is truely revolutionary. (Say Bussards electrostatic fusion idea isn't all hope following hype)
I simply dont view nuclear power as any more polluting than wind. What it does generate is spent fuel, which I honestly feel is still likely a valuable resource even if we dont use it for nuclear fuel... in a hundred years we could be producing the majority of the worlds rhodium and xenon from nuclear alchemy.
I think what you are saying is that you will only accept a disruptive technology as replacement for nuclear power? In that case, are you willing to be disrupted enough to abandon the base load concept?
I think what he saying is that he would only accept a better technology that obviates the need for nuclear.
Check out this post:
Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
If you have a bit of time google “Rubia reactor”.
Should that be Rubbia?
It should be Rube Goldberg. Using a particle accelerator to supply neutrons to maintain the reaction is not what I would call a good design. It sounds like a clever way to make money disapear.
In the land of the future where we all drive flying cars and particle GeV acceleratores an be made cheap enough to pick up at the local hardware store, its just barely plausible that this will be useful in some fast neutron reactors. It solves a problem that doesn't exist: reactor stability. Careful engineering of the core geometry does this allready to the point where you only have to worry about criticality excursions in fast reactors with tiny delayed neutron components, but here doppler broadening and negative reactivity coefficients reduce the problem to an engineering exercise.
I like Rubbia's idea for a graphite moderated fission rocket, where the fission fragments from the thin film Am242 fuel directly heat the hydrogen reaction mass. The temperature of the H can go very high, tens of thousands of degrees, so the specific impulse is also very high.
555, it's that time...
Nuclear salt water rocket sounds better to me. Of course, designing that is sort of like designing a continuous a-bomb more than an ordinary reactor...
My view is that we should build more nuclear power slowly and safely.
I do NOT want a Canadian Tar Sands type rush to nuke (others here do, see debate on July 30th Drumbeat).
There are a large number of supply issues in restarting an almost moribund industry (a few new nukes internationally + suppliers of maintenance needs). Large forgings are a critical issue, with other nations looking at new nukes as well. But the biggest problem is personnel.
The personnel to manage, engineer, build and regulate new nuclear power construction are few and mostly old in the USA. A limited number of the workers that travel from one refueling outage to the next can be brought into new construction (but not all, or else neophytes will be maintaining our nukes).
The recent restart of Browns Ferry I (down for 24 years after a fire) and the just announced restart on construction of Watts Bar II ($2.5 billion to finish a 60% complete nuke, work stopped in 1985) by TVA are great steps to train a new pool of experienced people at all levels.
A slow ramp-up reaching about 4 new nukes/year going commercial in 2027 seems about right to me.
I simply do believe the construction times and costs quoted by industry boosters for the next generation of nuclear plants.
IMVVHO, we should build secure containment for waste fuel for 500 or so years (not 10,000 years) with the idea that we will reprocess it at some point (for the platinum group metals produced by fission & zirconium if not for uranium). By 300 or so years all fission byproducts should have pretty much decayed and only the transuranics would be left.
Best Hopes for Slow, Safe New Nukes,
Alan
Perhaps the only way the problem of nuclear waste can be solved with the attention and respect it deserves is to require that it be stored in Washington next to the Capitol
Putting the spent fuel in or near Washington D.C. is a great idea. It will show ordinary Americans that the stuff is really not that dangerous. We will likely put our spent fuel within 150 km of our capitol.
We have, by the way, solved the spent fuel issue. If anyone is interested, check out my article here: http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/8/13/184016/739
To bad Edwards is so irrationally anti-nuclear and anti-CTL. I liked his message of redistributing wealth, health insurance and so on.
Best hopes for a radical nuclear rollout.
I wanted to clarify when edit was cut off by a reply:
About 4 new nukes/year in the USA, 6 to 8 new nukes/year in the rest of the world by 2027.
Alan
With the current 104 nuclear plants starting in the 1970s and assuming a 40 year lifetime, a large replacement/decommissioning/recommissioning cycle is in store over the next decade. At 4 nukes/year, we will basically replace the existing 104 plants in the USA in 26 years, past the time the current plants will be needing a substitute, thus, at your rate Allen, we will be running in place at best.
It is interesting to see in the NYT that the nuke industry snuck in the loan guarantees into the Senate version of the Energy bill, and that without the loan guarantees, they threaten that the nukes will not be built.
The nuclear industry already has the largest subsidy already--they are indemnified against any damages caused by a nuclear accidents. The role of the NRC is to police them to insure there will be no accidents. Without this insurance policy, no public reactors would have been built.
You were spot on in your earlier post Robert. The future is solar.
In the summer of 1969, I went to the States for the summer - I was at university in the UK at the time studying civil engineering.
A friend of mine took me to meet a senior manager at Bechtel in San Fransisco at their HQ. This guy showed us around and told us that Bechtel was currently building no fewer than 23 nuclear power stations in the USA!
I mention the above just to let some of you Americans know just how capable your elders were. Nowadays the "easy" option is always taken when confronted by a difficulty of that magnitude - I agree with Kunstler on that. It always seems to be easier to use the military as a first option when confronted by an intractable problem.
I am not a proponent of nuclear reactors - quite the opposite. I just want to make clear that sometime one has to make sacrifices to get what one wants or to avoid chaos and shortages.
When handwaving or preaching, at least try to keep to the facts. The fact is that there is a cap on the liability from nuclear incidents which AFAIK is $30bln. Are you suggesting that any nuclear incident would cost more than $30bln, or that $30bln. is nothing? Can you borrow me this nothing for a while?
LevinK, I wasn't trying to preach, and I admit guilt to not being as precise as possible (It has been a while since I examined the details of Price-Anderson). So, you are right, my use of the word "any" you have so 'boldly' pointed out was not exact.
My post was really to point out that (1) Alan's construction rate is basically replacement, and (2) the nuclear industry wouldn't exist without the government insurance subsidy. If only solar received such support...
My belief that the future is solar is not hard and fast and could change with more and better information. I've come to that conclusion as I've been trying to figure out how to insure myself against our oil predicament, and to do so in a way that doesn't generate other problems. Given the urgency of the situation, I believe that I can't rely on our friends in D.C. to fix it for me and my family.
I can conserve, and I have, but that still keeps me dependent on fossil fuels for such basics as heat, power, and food, and hence, I am still energy insecure by conserving. If the supply line to the Middle East is cut, conservation will revert to the Reagan definition: "Conservation means being hot when it's hot and cold when it's cold." But, by going solar, I can cost-effectively obtain adequate heat, and (less cost effectively) cover a significant fraction of my power usage. The reason I advocate solar is that I'm finding it can do the job for my family's basic needs. In short, practicality. By the end of next year, I should be covered in basic needs (except food) by solar. No need to wait for that government approval for the new reactor.
If you want preaching, read advancednano's posts.
Er, bullshit.
The most critical claims of this by United States Public Interest Research Group as an insurance subsidy rate it at 33 million per reactor per year, roughly the cost of the fuel, and would minimally impact the competitiveness of nuclear power. More realistic assessments of the value place it at roughly 2.3 million per reactor year.
Er, not b.s.
Without indemnity, there would not have been a nuclear industry, and if indemnity were to disappear (not likely), I'd be willing to wager that the nuclear power industry would also disappear. I'm NOT advocating that, btw.
For a good historical discussion, I recommend the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity...
It is clear from the Supreme Court proceedings of the suit challenging the constitutionality of the P-A Act that the industry needed a boost.
In addition, you can look at the NYT online article regarding the need for loan guarantees:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/washington/31nuclear.html
Is this just pigs feeding at the trough, or do they really need them?
Pigs need a trough. The two senators who snuck in the loan guarantees have very high contributions from the electric power industry. With Domenichi they are trying to keep up with Oil and Gas. With Bingaman they come in right after lawyers and doctors.
It is pretty easy to calculate what the government will liable for in the case of a Chernobyl scale disaster say at Indian Point, which has had lots of problems. Take a radius of 20 miles, so an area of 1257 square miles or 800,000 acres. With $300,000 homes on half acre lots that comes to $240 billion. Now, depending on how the wind blows, you might have to cover Manhatten real estate as well. That gets you into much larger numbers. Large enough for the government to default I think.
Your home owners insurance excludes nuclear accidents because the government has assumed the liability. But, you won't be covered if the liability is as large as it could be.
Chris
tards without the gov there would be no nuclear power.
nuclear power will always be within the directed purview and regulation of the government, until people don't want to gain access to nuclear arms, or the need for power is greater than the need for bombs.
The Manhattan project, the single greatest project ever undertaken history, with likely the smartest group of scientists ever assembled in history gave us nuclear fission, fusion, breeder reactors, a bombs, h bombs, radionuclides, space probes, and power plants.
But...but...but...the free market is always the best way to develop new technology...right? Governments should never pick winners!
No way to know this counterfactual unless we had a window into the what-ifs of history. Maybe gov can pick winners, or maybe we lost opportunities letting the gov pick something that wasn't as good as would have come along.
Playing devils advocate here by the way; I dont know where the best line is to draw between government and markets, and my guesses and opinions aren't solid enough for me to argue with conviction more than mildly pro market.
I'm "mildly" pro-market myself, but we appear to live in a world that's so virulently anti-government that no-one will even consider massive-scale government funded and organised projects to help address energy issues.
It's very very hard to see how we would ever have mastered and commercialised nuclear power, or successfully launched payloads into orbit, if science and technology was left entirely to free enterprise with no government funding.
LevinK where did you get the $30Bn number? My understanding is that there is group self-insurance to the tune of $9-10Bln, the current amount in the insurance pool. After that, the liability is all Federal Govt.
Sorry about that, I quoted the number from memory. You are right, it is $10bln.
Many and probably most of the existing nukes are getting life extensions from 40 to 60 years. So retirements will slow down.
The oldest US operating nukes are in the 600 to 900 MW range, The first four new nukes are finishing Watts Bar II (1.2 GW from memory), 2x 1.7 GW and 1x 1.6 GW. Toshiba Westinghouse is bidding a 1.2 GW reactor. So basically two retirement = 1 new reactor.
Nuclear power production will grow in absolute terms and as a percentage of US generation under my proposal. Just not significantly till 2022 or so.
Four new reactors/year, 6.x GW is a significant addition. And I raised that estimate to 5 or 6 new reactors by 2027 based on new information.
Alan
Question though, after 60 years, what happens to the plant?
Is the entire infrastructure useless? How much effort is required to 're-build' it to last another 60 years (compared to the effort of building it initially)?
Since the plant has to meet security standards all thru its life it wont be all rotten after 60 years.
I guess the limit would be set by a realy expensive component such as the reactor vessel in combination with technical development. If making a new vessel and swapping out the old one dont make sense compared with installing the newest design in a completely new plant the plant is history and will be torn down and most of it recycled.
For instance it would not seem to make sense to build a new 600-700 MW BWR reactor vessel with piping and external circulation pumps when the cost for the kit ought to be about the same for a 1400 MW BWR vessel with internal circulation pumps.
The question is more or less if LWR reactor technology is mature and LWR reactors will be more or less of the same design in 2050.
Good question. The NRC and the industry engineers are modest enough to know that they do not yet know all of the effects of aging on the plant. That is why the license renewals are for a limited period of time (that and the fact that is the way the law is written.)
I would expect that when it comes time, there will be careful analysis of the plant condition and the economic aspects of operation. That will determine what happens next, a shutdown or a license renewal and continued operation.
Here is a thought project for those people who are so concerned about nuclear plant decommissioning. What does the coal industry do when a mine or a power plant wears out?
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
What does the coal industry do when ... a power plant wears out ?
They remove any toxics that were not removed during operations (lead paint & asbestos usually, sometimes mercury in instruments). Salvage a few bits & pieces that could be used elsewhere and cut the rest up for salvage. Usually a profit after disposing of wastes.
If the building is near an urban area, it may have an adaptive reuse (such as an art museum). Otherwise usually torn down and turned into a park (cooling pond become a fishing lake, etc.
Alan
Best hopes for bridging the electric capacity gap in the next decade with extension of aging nuclear infrastructure whilst securing funding, govt and public approval for new, larger, and presumably safer nukes.
In the meantime, I'll be tying into the Sun.
...and I go mean Best Hopes.
The problem with large nuclear plants are the same as for large coal plants, when they trip you have to get alot of spinning reserve on line in a hurry. So while very large plants are possible, the reerve issues become more significant.
Now it really doesn't take all that long to fire up 5-7 large turbines (200-300 MWe each), but it's more than just building big plants.
See above. Double posted by "trip" in my router.
Somewhere close to 50% of the 104 operating nuclear plants in the US have already gone through a rather intensive process of inspections and verifications to achieve a 20 year extension on their license. There is every expectation that most of the rest of the plants that are currently operating will also go through this process when the time comes. Some may have special situations that lead to a decision to shut the plant down, but I predict that will be fairly rare.
Many anti-nuclear activists point to the "subsidy" of insurance and load guarantees, but few are able to "show me the money". If you really take a hard look at the flow of money between nuclear power plant operators, nuclear equipment suppliers, and nuclear industry employees, you will find that there is a tremendous amount of money flowing into the coffers of federal, state and local governments and very little flowing out into the industry.
For example - each plant current pays a $4 million annual fee to the NRC for the privilege of being carefully inspected and monitored by the NRC. They also pay the US government 0.1 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated - a total of nearly $800 million from the industry in 2006. Each plant pays an average of more than $20 million in local property taxes and I cannot begin to compute the income taxes paid by the corporations and employees.
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
Of the approximate 104 GW of the current nuclear generating capacity, approximately half of the installed base went online between 1969 and 1980. Most of the remainder went on line between 1981 and 1989, with two additions in 1993 and 1996.
The reactors now basically come in two sizes...big and bigger. However, not SO BIG, that the spinning reserve requirements are enormous. To stay "running in place" with demand growth you basically have to build about 100 new units (at ~1000 MW each, fewer if you go with 1500 MW) over the next 30 years (that averages 3/year but the demand/load growth is nonlinear AND you'll have to have them online much than in the past. A 5-7 year cycle from beginning to full-power license/commissioning is not unreasonable).
To increase the percentage supplied by nuclear by more than just a pittance will take something along the lines of double to triple the rate you anticipate. In the meantime, it still requires a substantial investment in coal and gas fired units or a very dramatic change in the way we do business.
Hi Alan,
I favor reprocessing the nuclear waste now, since the weight and volume of waste is reduced by over an order of magnitude, and the half life of the waste is decreased by about 100 times. In a few thousand years, reprocessed wasted is less radioactive than the original uranium ore.
Your statements assume large unit nuclear power, but small unit plants (100 to 200 MW) has many advantages. Small units can be built prefabricated, so that quality can be controlled at the point of origin, and onsite expertise is less necessary. Small units, due to the surface area to volume factor, are much easier to cool than larger units, so operational and safety systems have a much easier time coping with the heat from the reactor core.
Yeah, but, so what? These aren't anything more than political problems.
Economies of scale seem to indicate otherwise, at least with light water reactors.
I tend to believe most major nuclear power issues have a large political component. People will be impressed when 70,000 tons of high level waste becomes 7,000 tons of high level waste and 63,000 tons of MOX fuel.
Right now nuclear plants have alot of fabrication done onsite, piece work, and expensive. For a plant that is around 100 MW, you can have a factory/assembly line that does a majority of that fabrication offsite. A nuclear power plant factory would provide ecomonies of scale and would speed construction. Also, for many utilities, a 1,000 MW plant would be too large, the scale is wrong for their business, providing a diseconomy of scale.
What is even more important is that the 7,000 tons left would have a halflife of 20-25 years, and in 100 years would be reduced to almost harmless stuff you can put on your desk if you want. No more "millions of years of storage" scaremongering.
I can't help but think that a lot of this is done on purpose. Of course if there was the political will this could be done - but, the truth is that politicos do not want nuclear power. What they want are cheap dividends by exploiting its unpopularity in the public conciousness. They would always get more votes if they have their pictures taken in front of a wind mill than a nuclear site. More than that; until shortages are upon us they will keep beating on the "dead horse" to get their votes. Actually in some countries like Switzerland they "overdid" - they wanted a ban on nuclear power and the voters rejected it... gives you some idea why Switzerland is so much ahead.
IMVVHO, we should build secure containment for waste fuel for 500 or so years (not 10,000 years) with the idea that we will reprocess it at some point...
I don't think you need to be so humble on this point. 75 years ago the neutron was still a theoretical particle, it had never been observed. We now have proposals for "burning" all of the wastes. I would guess true disposal technology -- as opposed to dumping it in a very expensive landfill -- will be available in less than 100 years, and certainly within 500.
I think these are not mutually exclusive. After 500 years of experience managing nuclear waster we will be able to design a better long term waste management strategy. I do like Canada's NWMO's plan because it does specify that we design in the ability to retrieve the waste in case we change our minds or in case of problems.
What should also be specified is that as much as possible the short term (500 year) facility should have a high level of security even in the absense of active management. You now, just in case the short term facility turns into the default long term facility.
The issues with nuclear are more than simply the waste. There is the issue of security that I cannot see being adequately addressed especially in a tumultuous environment that the future might give. There is the cost issue, there is the health issue (we may disagree here but I am convinced that even routine operation of nukes has detrimental health impacts almost as bad as coal when low level internal biological nuclide issues are considered). There is the siamese twin issue with military uses etc. etc.
The other caveat is that there are alternatives that can scale to the same level as nuclear with any where near the same level of commitment and resources pursued. There is no reason for instance that rooftop solar photovoltaic eventually not eliminate the need for daytime peaking power. Easily, 20 - 30% of present demand could be accounted for just by this one technology. I will repeat, for the tropical maritimes, Ocean Thermal is on the cards, wind, high temperature solar thermal, concentrating photovoltaic, efficiency, tidal, biomass to electricity and heat, wave, improved transimssion.
It's not just daytime peak power that is at issue though. Ultimately, the existing gas and other base load generators have to be converted to something else and the likely candidates right now are nuclear and coal. Given the choice for base load, I'll take nuclear, warts and all.
Yes, we do need to drastically expand into solar, wind, etc. But that expansion cannot supply everything we need, at least not yet, so we're going to need something else. And in a world where global warming is a huge issue right alongside peak oil, nuclear simply seems the only certain path (to me) that we can take if we wish to avoid catastrophic disruptions to society. Even Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory and once very opposed to nuclear, recognizes that we cannot solve the global warming problem in the time frame in which it must be solved without going to nuclear.
Is nuclear problem free? Hardly! But when the choice is nuclear versus radical and dangerous climate change, I'll take nukes. In short, nukes are the only thing that is going to get us past peak oil and global warming with most of civilization intact.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
" that expansion cannot supply everything we need, at least not yet, so we're going to need something else. "
The question is, can wind & solar do it as fast as nuclear? I see no reason why not. Wind provided 20% of new generation in 2006, and it's doubling every 2 years. In fact, I think they can do it much faster than nuclear.
By the time wind & solar reach current limits (roughly 20% of market for each, maybe 30% for both), plug-in hybrids will be able to provide the buffering they need to raise those limits.
Wind and solar are intermittent and to the best of my knowledge this problem has not yet been adequately solved. There simply must be a base load generating capacity that is not intermittent the way solar and wind are. Nuclear fits that bill.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
"Wind and solar are intermittent and to the best of my knowledge this problem has not yet been adequately solved. "
Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission, demand management, storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc), and backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate.
Nuclear almost certainly makes sense as a significant part of this mix, and it's likely to help reduce costs and improve system stability, but it isn't essential.
Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission
Requires nonexistant infrastructure at greater cost.
demand management
Requires smart meter infrastructure that largely doesnt exist, and automatic power draws at various price points for things like water pumps and the like. This is one of those obviously great ideas that take forever to implement.
storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc)
Mostly infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. This isn't a nonzero cost.
backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate.
Better natural gas or coal than biomass. Theres no point.
"Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission
Requires nonexistant infrastructure at greater cost."
It's not "nonexistant", but certainly there's a cost there. OTOH, it would probably be a good idea even without renewables, for grid stability and cost minimization through use of least cost generation.
"demand management - Requires smart meter infrastructure that largely doesnt exist, and automatic power draws at various price points for things like water pumps and the like. This is one of those obviously great ideas that take forever to implement."
It's been around in various forms for a long time - it just hasn't been needed in scale. It's tested and practical, and it's starting to grow quickly. For instance, California's PG&E is installing it everywhere. The 2005 energy act requires it to be developed nationally. Check out www.thewattspot.com .
"storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc) - Mostly infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. This isn't a nonzero cost."
But it will exist by the time it's needed, when wind gets above 15% of market share. PHEV's are largely a zero cost to utilities. Sure, there may be costs, but nuclear needs this almost as much as renewables. Check out Ludington, MI's pumped storage: it was developed to allow load following for nuclear.
"backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate. - Better natural gas or coal than biomass. Theres no point."
I agree, it wouldn't be needed for a very, very long time. This is more a theoretical point for those who question whether we could eliminate fossil fuels entirely for generation.
The point here is that solutions to the variability of wind & solar do indeed exit. Are there some costs? Sure, but they're not great, especially if you don't do assume something unrealistic, like a grid using 100% wind, or 100% solar only. A great diversity of supply, including nuclear, would work best.
Downthread advancednano writes "Overall, renewable energy in the United States has increased at a rate of 1,000 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. The nuclear energy figure is 16,203 thousand megawatt-hours per year for nuclear even without building a new plant." This has been through upgrading existing plants. If he's right, nuclear capacity is coming on board at 16 times the rate of renewables, even before the expected nuclear boom.
"If he's right, nuclear capacity is coming on board at 16 times the rate of renewables"
Basically, he's wrong. Wind added in 2006 about 2.5 GW nameplate capacity, about 7 times the figure he quotes, and will add 3.5GW in 2007, 9 times as much. What he's doing is like looking at cell phone growth in the 80's, and concluding that cell phones would never challenge land lines.
Nuclear has added capacity by improving it's capacity factor from about 70% to about 90%. That's a great accomplishment, but it can't go much further due to the time required to refuel.
OTOH, wind can just keep doubling every two years. That will allow it to provide all of the needed new annual generation capacity in just 5-7 years, should we choose to do so - IOW, if regulators, ISO's or utilities don't block it.
Many nukes are also "larger" today. Detailed engineering is improving generation and getting more power out of old plants.
Nothing dramatic for each one, but with 100 nukes out there, it adds up.
Alan
Yes, that's what I was talking about, when I discussed the improvement in the capacity factor.
Well I do not buy your numbers. I am not sure how you convert nameplate capacity to megawatt-hours/per year but I think you need to factor it by about 30%. Even using your numbers nuclear capacity has still been coming on faster than wind.
And I am not sure about how fast wind can be geared up. There are a limited number good locations. Last week I drove by two multi thousand turbine wind farms in California's Riverside county and the Bay Area's Altamont Pass and saw hardly any of the blades turn even a little.
"I am not sure how you convert nameplate capacity to megawatt-hours/per year but I think you need to factor it by about 30%."
I did. Multiply 2.5GW by 30%, and 8,760 hours per year, and you get about 6.6 TW hours.
"Even using your numbers nuclear capacity has still been coming on faster than wind."
Sure, but nuclear's growth can't really accelerate for the next 10 years, while wind really, really can.
"And I am not sure about how fast wind can be geared up. There are a limited number good locations. "
Sure, but we've only used about 1% of them. Take a look at the state inventories at www.awea.org, and keep in mind that many of these state inventories are based on old studies at low heights: larger, higher turbines will take advantage of much better winds. They also don't include much offshore wind: a recent study found that eastcoast offshore wind could power all of the eastern seaboard.
"I drove by two multi thousand turbine wind farms in California's Riverside county and the Bay Area's Altamont Pass and saw hardly any of the blades turn even a little."
There are a lot of 25 year old, very small turbines in California that don't do much. That doesn't tell us much about what wind can do, especially at Altamont, which has an highly unusual bird problem, and many turbines which should be replaced by newer ones, but can't because of the raptor problem.
Actually, I think that the used batteries from plugin hybrids provide about three times more storage than the ones in the cars. This is because a transportation grade battery is going to have plenty of cycles left once it degrades below transportation grade. And, the cycles can be done optimally in a managed power storage environment. Accounting for the shrinkage in the energy use transportation sector that converting to mostly electic transportation will cause, and the increase in electrical generation, my estimate is that we'll end up with about 12 hours of total generation capacity in stationary storage. The mobile storage in the vehicles is bespoken, but might add another hour or two. There is a bit more detail here.
I also argue for a 100% annual growth rate for solar power there.
Of course! Finding such gems makes reading ToD worthwile. I figured on my own out that wehicle-to-grid is dumb since it wears down the batteries and thus has a high cost for the car owner. But I did not follow thru with having a need for expensive energy storage as a second hand market for used wehicle batteries waiting to be recycled. A rack in a warehouse and an electronics box for each battery that lasts a hundred second hand batteries and a further value is created for each manufactured battery.
Yes, I think that this must happen to make electric vehicles competitive. Once the total cost of ownership goes below straight ICE vehicles (which will happen in Europe sooner) it becomes pretty inevitable that the market will switch on a fleet replacement timescale. The California market for stationary storage will make that start happening in Europe on a retooling timescale because gasoline is so much more expensive than electricity there. I would guess that northern offshore wind and spanish solar will pickup the extra generation needed to cover transportation. French nuclear power won't keed up. If peak oilers are correct, world gasoline prices will reach european levels in a few years so that the mainly electric cars will be the most attractive product. There are some interesting battery technologies reaching production scale, but this is not really all that important since the ones in the norwegian car are already just knockoffs from the Tesla. We don't need new technology to jump, we just need a business model that apportions the battery value correctly, and the California stationary storage market makes that possible. That kind of scale at the ouset will bring costs down quicky as well. I'm willing to guess that a southwest dispatchable solar power plant will compete at wholesale with nuclear in ten years, and, being dispatchable, will be much more profitable. If you want to know what's coming, look at which industries need loan guarantees and which don't. Those that don't will make money, the others won't. Once dispatchable solar is the best wholesale deal, I'd guess it will take about 15 years to make it impossible for nuclear power to find customers that can buy their base load model power consistently, and they'll have to go off line to avoid maxing out their cooling. Once this kind of thing happens, their operating cost will be so high that they'll have to close with the loan guarantor ponying up the unpaid portion of the plant. As the interview with Laherrère pointed out, base load models are not compatable with renewable energy. Where the penny drops is in understanding that dispatchable models will cost less. This is completly inevitable when the base load model is dependent on a depletable resorce and the dispatchable model is not. The only question is the timing, and the economies of scale advantage available to renewables but not to depleatables because they have already been taken, together with the nudging we are experiencing from depletion of gas and oil make the time now.
Chris
The idea is probably best in countries with a weak grid and a lack of easily dispatchable hydropower.
The Republic of California does have the Pacific Intertie for hydro but is does seem to want to have a large difference between peak and off peak rates. I think this is owing to generation rather than a problem with grid capacity. This is the "counrty" that wants the batteries. We figure that under time of use rates we can zero out a customers electric bill with a solar power system that only covers 70% or so of the customer's use of electricity. A larger delta between peak and off peak would lead to an even smaller system. Why do utilities want solar under time of use? It is hard to fathom. Perhaps the battery thing is the same?
Let's check. PG&E has these TOU residential rates. The delta is about $0.11/kWh across the tiers. Let's assume that this is flow through that reflects their cost. Let's assume also that the off peak wholesale rate is $0.04/kWh. A battery that operates at 90% efficiency charges 1.1 kWh at $0.044 and discharges 1 kWh at $0.11. So, you break even at a battery cost of $0.066 per kWh cycle. So, for a battery that has 500 transportation cycles and 1500 effective stationary cycles down to say 80% capacity degradation it would need to cost less than $99/kWh capacity (used). Now, the Tesla battery pack has 56 kWh capacity and is sounds like it goes for about $15K, so $270/kWh capacity new. Seems like they could make money this way if $200/kWh capacity is a transportation premium. They may also be just priming the pump expecting lower future costs. They probably only need to make a fraction of a cent per kWh on the deal for it to make sense since they avoid building other capacity at $0.1 /kWh to meet peak. To begin with, using them to meet special situations might make them quite profitable. Avoiding all or most of a $0.4/kWh spot market price would do quite a lot.
"wehicle-to-grid is dumb since it wears down the batteries and thus has a high cost for the car owner"
Only if the battery life is shorter than the vehicle life. If not, as is the case with the new li-ion chemistries, than V2G is worthwhile.
OTOH, the buffering from scheduled charging will be all that is needed for quite a while.
good points - in addition to the waste issue, Edwards pointed out cost and also the length of time it takes to build plants. Given that we haven't built one in the US in a long time, do we have a good handle on those numbers? The industry puts things out that don't look so bad, but they might be a teensy bit biased...
Reddit link:
http://science.reddit.com/info/2bpdx/comments
Regarding waste disposal, about ten years ago I read about an idea to dispose of nuclear waste that made a whole lot of sense to me. The first step is to encase the material in glass orbs or marbles large enough to seal, shield, and protect the material indefinitely. The second step, admittedly controversial, was to randomly deposit the orbs into deep sea canyons. The idea is that the glass orbs will be able to contain the toxic material for tens to hundreds of thousands of years needed for the radioactivity to decrease. By depositing them in deep ocean trenches, they are virtually inaccessible to man, and even if they were accessible, they would be dispersed randomly and in such low density that the cost of finding them and attempting to recover them (and use it for terrorism) would be enormous. This is certainly not a politically feasible solution at this point in time, but it seems to me like it is probably technically feasible. If the alternative is chaos and rising sea levels, in the future this may be deemed an acceptable risk.
Nuclear is not as climate friendly as it seems:
http://www.peakoil.org.au/nuclear.co2.htm
"Proponents of nuclear power always say that one of the big benefits of nuclear power is that it produces no Carbon dioxide (CO2).
This is completely untrue, as a moment's consideration will demonstrate that fossil fuels, especially oil in the form of gasoline and diesel, are essential to every stage of the nuclear cycle, and CO2 is given off whenever these are used."
The same argument can be made for solar cells or windmills. Perhaps we need to have a new unwieldy acronym: EROCE -- Energy Returned On Carbon Emitted. So, what is the EROCE of the various contenders? Is nuclear worse than solar cells and windmills? Probably, but I'll bet nuclear is far better than burning even more coal and that building nuclear might allow us to burn less coal (or have fewer blackouts, take your pick).
This is an interesting area to explore... I'll be writing a (hopefully not unwieldy) series of shorts on EROEI over the next few weeks, and this seems like a good notion to explore...
This quantity is already being used in sustainable biofuels circles. You can see some discussion here.
Not exactly;
An NREL study determined that three representative Solar Panel technologies (Polysilicon, CIS -copper indium diselenide and Cd Te -Cadmium Telluride) will completely recover their embedded energy from manufacture in a range of 2 to 5 years, Including what is called the Balance of System components.. "Balance-Of-System inputs are included in all cases, namely: aluminium for the module frames, steel for the support structure, copper and plastics for the cables and contact boxes, as well as some fuel required for the installation."
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/thin_film/docs/20theuropvscbarcelona4cv114_raugei...
So yes, there are energy inputs, but they are essentially over once the panels are installed. At that point, this energy source is not plagued with Waste Issues, supply lines failing, nested layers of complexity; political, financial, hydraulic and 'unforseen or maybe just unreported eventualities'.. as is the case with Nuclear power. (Remember the missing Plutonium stories .. written off as accounting discrepancies?)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/11/30/BAGGQFVT7J1.DTL
"UC spokesman Chris Harrington said Los Alamos "does an annual inventory of special nuclear materials which is overseen by (the Energy Department). These inventories have been occurring for 20-plus years. Special nuclear materials are carefully tracked to a minute quantity."
The report concludes that at least 661 pounds of plutonium generated at the lab over the last half-century is not accounted for. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945 contained about 13 pounds of plutonium. "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4272691.stm
"But Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Norman Baker said: "If the figures are wrong then this looks like serious incompetence from an industry that deals with highly dangerous resources."
- 'Liberal Democrat Environment Spokesman'?! You kiss your mother with that mouth?
I think, given that this would be a long term strategy, that an important caveat to this point is that none of the construction or operation activities necessitate CO2 emissions. These emissions are more a function of our societal infrastructure and would be phased out if we moved towards an electric economy.
Chemist is absolutely correct.
Further, anyone familiar with underground mining in the United States is already aware that it is done completely without fossil fuels in the mine, using electric machinery. We don't do this with above ground mines but we could. We could move ores via electric transport. We could either hugely reduce the fossil fuel impact of these activities or in most cases, eliminate it entirely.
Just because something is done one way does not mean that it must always be done that way. Once again I point out that the problem is not technology, which exists already to do this. The problem is simply us, the short-sighted decisions we make, and our tendency to focus on now rather than tomorrow. So the question is not can we do this but will we do this.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
I had an article which discusses a lengthy report which analyses the carbon dioxide generated for each power source compared to power generated. This goes through the whole fuel cycle.
Nuclear power is about 10-20 times better for CO2 than coal or natural gas.
Nuclear power is better than photovoltaics for CO2 and three times worse than wind and four times worse than hydroelectric.
For something that is so important to the world and to people here, we should base our decisions on the facts and not what we hope the answer will be.
========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
btw: the link to my article on CO2 comparisons
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/energy-sources-compared-on-life...
The link to the 182 page pdf
http://www.pmc.gov.au/umpner/docs/commissioned/ISA_report.pdf
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com/search/label/energy
I read the article about Thorium reactors and was blown away. I'm an ex employee of the nuclear industry and have been pretty anti-nuc for many years. Considering that coal is the real alternative its hard not to be impressed by some of these new technologies. However 500 years of monitoring waste is still longer than any government has survived yet so cautious optimism is the most I can muster.
There is also the problem that any optimism regarding hugh growth in available electricity encourages the "more growth/ more population/ more junk" mentality.
How about someone writing a TOD essay on all of the new nuclear designs floating around out there?
Yes, I'd really like to read a summary like that too.
Sure, but let's not have it done by an anti-nuclear activist as most of the nuclear stories in TOD have been in the past. We honor the contributions of oil industry people on this site but many seem to think that people that have actual work experience with nuclear are too tainted to contribute.
Not true.
What strikes me is that the nuclear insiders who have posted here have been pretty much anti-nuclear. Which isn't the case for oil industry people.
The nuclear industry has downsized over the years producing a population of former workers. Some are happy and some are not. Some should have never been hired and some just wish they had never been hired.
Of course, anyone can claim to be former insiders although I know that this does not apply to everyone posting against nuclear.
It ain't an easy business to love!
Well, if you know any pro-nuclear insiders who'd be willing to write an article for us, PG's mailbox is always open.
I would say TOD staff is pretty much pro-nuclear. Or at least not rabidly against it. If we haven't posted many articles supporting it, it's not that we hate nuclear, it's that we haven't gotten any.
Is a pro-nuclear "insider" necessary ?
I think the conversation can move to a better level by people at least taking the time to look at the relevant parts of wikipedia. It is not perfect but it is better than most sources. For the question of types of reactors existing and proposed a I have gathered the wikipedia links. An article (even a lengthy one) would be to provide a cliff notes version of this information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Current_technologies
Pressure boiler reactor (about 230 of the 438 in the world)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_Water_Reactor
Boiling water reactors (next most common)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Water_Reactor
Pressurised heavy water reactor (the canadian CANDU)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurised_heavy_water_reactor
The russian RBMK (13 exist but have been modified since Chernobyl)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
Advanced gas cooled reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas_cooled_reactor
Breeder reactors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Breeding vs burnup
Advanced and planned reactors
Generation IV reactors
The molten salt reactor
Nuclear power in general at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
Nuclear reactor technology in general at wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_technology
===============
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
advancednano,
You sure seem definite about some awfully suspect figures. there's sure a lot of definitiveness when I know some of the figures are just B.S.. Nuclear power, hydro wind and solar make no CO2 except in building the plants, dams, turbines and solar cells.
Since they all use differing methods of manufacture powered by varying types of generation depending on part of the world, its impossible to get within more than the general range of the actual carbon cost. In spite of what you think, natural gas has about 5% of the CO2 than coal for equivalent energy for electric generation.
I agree that the world needs the facts. There's just a lot of difference between facts and assertions. And, most of these decisions aren't really our choice. As an example, a big utility might build nuclear as opposed to coal for baseload generation. They're not going to build gas in North America, because of the rising fuel cost, and wind and solar won't do for a baseload. But at any rate, its the decision of the Board and the Corporation's officers, not you or I, and only indirectly by our governments where we might be able to vote in one candidate or another.
Our only real chance of having a little influence is by personal conservation, buying our own solar or wind turbine, or by persuasion. And, how can you persuade anyone with spurious figures, or an arrogant and confrontational style?
Bob Ebersole
So you read the 182 page paper which is the source and you looked at the ranges that they are providing and you see what specific problem with the methodology ? The ranges provided are + or - about 400%. But even taking nuclear at the top of the range it still comes out OK relative to the other options.
I have other sources on the amount of steel and concrete used for wind and coal plants both use more than nuclear plants. So the indirect CO2 falls in nuclear's favor. Although wind comes out ahead because of less mining etc...
Where are your better figures ?
You call my figures spurious. Prove it and provide the accurate figures. I provide links to my sources. If you do not believe them then fine, but anyone can judge the quality based on the original sources. Where is the original source research paper for your unsubstantiated 5% claim ?
========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
That is wrong, natural gas is 55% (or 42% using CCGT) the CO2 emissions of coal for electrical generation.
You would think just knowing basic chemistry and basic math would have helped caught that one.
Coal: Mostly carbon... combusting to CO2
Natural gas: Mostly methane, CH4 to CO2 and H20
Now unless oxidation of hydrogen produces over 20 times the energy of the oxidation of carbon (it doesn't) even before the endothermic decomposition of CH4, theres no way this could work.
"wind and solar won't do for a baseload. "
Actually, they will. They're just not as good for peak, when you need firm capacity.
OTOH, there are solutions for wind & solar variability, as noted elsewhere: Geographic dispersion, long distance transmission, demand management, storage (PHEV's, pumped storage, flow batteries, used PHEV batteries, etc), and backup biomass electrical generation (much, much more efficient than biomass liquid fuels) are perfectly adequate.
It looks like your data on PV is dated. EROEI is about 12.5 assuming a 25 year life, but including recycling brings it towards 25 on a 25 year recycling cycle. On a 100 year cycle (final performance degradation 60%) it approches 66. Your numbers appear to reflect a lower EROEI than 12.5. This could mean that panels were considered which were built using silicon from small batches where the heat management was not so good. Also, current panels are about 19% efficient in production which is higher than in the past.
Another aspect of the solar industry is that, like aluminum, it seeks out low cost electricity. Often this is hydro power. Now, using the hydro power means that someone else is going to use coal, and so going by the energy mix can make sense, the choice of hydro as renewable is sometimes deliberate just on the grounds that bootstrapping is good. If we take EROEI for wind to be 18 then scaling we get about 30 g CO2/kWh at the high end and 6 at the low end, lower even than hydroelectric when panels are milked for power then recycled. Cells with 40% efficiency may be in production in a few years. This should more double all the EROEI numbers because these are required to work with concentrators so that less silicon is involved. As far as I know, no other power source has the potential to achieve this kind of performance.
Chris
"EROEI is about 12.5"
Actually, that's now out of date. Most silicon cells use much less silicon than when those studies were done, and don't forget CIGS, which is 10% of the market & growing more quickly than silicon - it's E-ROI is much, much higher.
Our silicon panels take about 2 years of operation to payback, others may be doing better. As I point out, the calculation depends also on assumptions about duration of use and recycling. We go with silicon because the durability data is solid but you are correct that other technologies are coming along. I'm quite sure you can use a silicon cell for 100 years because their degradation behavior is well understood. I doubt that this will be the case for polymer mounted cells, and there will be less of a gain from recycling. That is not a bad thing. For one thing, most roofs need mainenance after 30 years, so matching that timescale makes a lot of sense.
The company's plan for panels that come off a roof to allow maintenance is to sell them in developing countries that don't have their panel fabrication ramped up yet. That way, new panels go onto a new roofs saving labor in the long run. A 100 year total use may not be out of the question in that situation since the panels can be a foundation for sustainable development which could take a couple of generations. You pretty much need teachers who have taught teachers to get into a virtuous circle.
Chris
It uses the storm/smith study for its data; Its a bullshit hit job. Garbage in, garbage out.
I get particularly annoyed with this claim of "no CO2." Well maybe not directly from the process during operation but there are lots of other things that happen before and after the plant is started. A couple of years ago during a briefing by the DOE I raised a number of very specific issues and pointed questions about the claims made. When the briefer from the DOE asked me if I had nuclear power experience (yes, I do) and where, they told me that they'd get back to me on that (they never have).
Some specific issues that involve large quanties of energy AND produce significant CO2 emissions.
Concrete: a blend of cement and aggregate and the newer GEN III+ designs use much more than any of the previous designs ever did. That requires lots of cement.
The first step in making cement: calcining the limestone feed to drive off the CO2 from CaCO3 (to form CaO + CO2). For every 100 pounds of pure CaCO3, you drive off 44 pounds of CO2 plus the CO2 from the fuel (usually coal) required to get to the calcining temperature and then on up to the "liquid -phase temperature where the Ca, Al, Si, and Fe in the mix react exothermally to form "clinker." Requires about 4.5 million BTU per ton of cement produced (typical, depending upon the kiln arrangement but that's a bit beyond our scope here). Limestone is the largest percentage of the feed to the kiln process.
Steel: lots more steel in the new Gen III+ designs. The conversion of iron oxide (Fe2O3) to Fe through a reduction reaction. For every ton of steel, the reaction produces a minimum of 0.59 tons of CO2. Not to mention the energy requirement to bring the temperatures to the appropriate level (usually supplied by the coke once everything gets going. But it also has to heat up and melt all the impurities of a low grade ore, not to mention the CO2 generated by the fluxing/slagging agent...our good friend limestone).
Note: most of the other metals with the exception of the uranium fuel go through a functionally equivalent refining process.
Fuel: If you had to process the uranium bearing ore in the same manner as you process other metals, you'd likely never do it because the energy requirements would be unbearable. However, chemistry gives us another path where adding fluoride to uranium creates a uranium based "gas."
The gas diffusion plants of yesteryear were (and still are) real energy hogs in the using the differential rate of diffusion between the various radionuclides of UF6. Gas centrifuge plants require about 40% less energy to accomplish the same degree of enrichment. But it still requires a great deal of energy to separate the U235 from the U238. Energy ultimately means CO2
Once a suitable degree of enrichment has been achieved (and the newer designs call for a greater enrichment along with a commensurate longer "burn time" in the reactor core), the UF6 is converted back to it's oxide form and formed into clad "fuel pins" that are placed in rods that are gathered as fuel bundles for insertion into the core. Once the reactor is initially loaded, more uranium must be processed for the eventual removal of groups of expended fuel bundles.
Note that while you design this as almost exclusively electrically based (using some of the power from the reactor to run the purification process), the lower the starting ore percentage, the greater the amount of energy required to enrich the fuel. At some point it requires 100% of the nuclear reactor power output to process the replacement fuel with no net left for anything else. Fuel reprocessing takes a somewhat different route than the UF6 route described above with reduction of energy requirements for the fueling of the reactor.
The nuclear reactor has a rather deep CO2 hole to start with compared to a coal-fired power plant (even IGCC) because of the nature of the equipment design and requirements, but can nominally show less CO2 emissions over the life of the reactor based upon MWh production comparisons. However, as ore grades decline, the energy requirement and the CO2 produced in chasing the fuel enrichment requirements can easily put a reactor design so deep into a "CO2 hole" and energy hole that it can never emerge from. We are probably a few decades away from that point but it might not bode well for the reactors coming on line as we approach that point.
You may have experience in nuclear power, but your numbers for gas diffusion versus gas centrifuge seem way off. According to this Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium
an SWU from diffusion takes about 2,400 KwH, while for the centrifuge, it takes about 60 KwH, a factor of 40 difference. You say a gas centrifuge takes 40% less energy than diffusion for the same enrichment, but this should be more like 98% less energy!! It is like getting 800 miles per gallon instead of 20 miles per gallon. Compared to gaseous diffusion, the gas centrifuge is a much superior process.
An order of magnitude less than wind for the same generating capacity, and wind isn't seen as a big contributer to CO2 emissions from the cement foundations of the turbines. This is trivially inconsequential.
And modern nuclear powerplants use far less steel than wind farms for the same generating capacity; The CO2 emissions from plant construction are trivial.
Well thats a double load of bullshit. Centrifuge plants use about 2% the energy of diffusion plants, not 40%, and the energy can come from, hold it now, other nuclear power plants.
This is before we get to CANDU's which dont actually require enrichment.
Well seeing we recover 300ppm ore with an energy return of over 500, we can extend that all the way down to mining average crust with postive energy return before even going to breeder reactors. Theres financial reasons why we wont do this, but the energy argument just aint so.
Somewhere buried away I have the concrete and steel requirements for a number designs under consideration as well as recently completed (elsewhere in the world).
But off the top of my head, the current Gen III design requires something on the order of 50+ metric tons of steel/MW. The Gen III+ require less than that (somewhere between 40 and 45, but more than the reactors currently sited in the US). Concrete and steel requirements depend upon the manufacturer but even the AP1000 "standard design" has a fairly impressive basemat concrete footprint at 10,000 cubic yards and we haven't even considered the walls, subassemblies, etc. The 1.75-inch thick steel containment dome (~110 ft dia x 215 ft high)isn't exactly a "lightweight"
So, are you saying that 1000 MW of wind power would require at least 100,000 cubic yards of concrete? Interesting.
As for the difference between the gas diffusion and gas centrifuge plants USEC advertises the energy usage rate as being 5% of the comparable gas diffusion plant of the same SWU rating. I don't dispute that. Again, what is overlooked is that those high precision centrifuges don't grow on trees or spontaneously form from a collection of aluminum soft drink cans.
Don't get me wrong and think I'm "against" nuclear power...I'm not. But I also think it's unrealistic to expect that we can simply go one and grow at 2 to 2.5% per year and expect we'll be able to "keep up" no matter what the technology.
I reiterate the recent comment of Duke Power on this issue as they look to increase both their nuclear and coal-fired capacity at a recent climate change meeting: "If you think that we can simply keep growing at this rate, you're dreaming."
I'd really like to find:
1) Steel usage per MW for Gen III and Gen III+ reactor designs. e.g. the AP1000.
2) Concrete usage for the same reactor designs.
3) What other materials get used in large amounts to make nuclear reactors?
This site http://timjervis.blogspot.com/2007/05/co2-pollution-from-nuclear-constru... cites 520000 cubic metres (~= 1.2 million tonnes) of concrete and 67000 tonnes of steel for an average sized (1GW?) plant, unfortunately the source link is broken, but you can check Google's cached version:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:dpPOL8J4B8sJ:www.nei.org/index.asp%3...
I tried comparing this to wind, and it struck me that the big differences are a) the percentage "uptime" of wind vs nuclear (maybe half at best) and b) the estimated lifetime of a wind turbine vs nuclear (again, about half). So even in completely optimal location, with minimal concrete foundation requirements and very high wind reliability, it's hard to see how providing 1000MW of high-availability electricity for 60 years could require less concrete and steel building wind turbines vs nukes.
Nuclear energy is subject to negative visceral reactions by most adults who remember the atmosphere of fear because of the cold war. I still remember vividly being a six year old trained to huddle under my school desk in "duck and cover", neighbors building bomb shelters and my father explaining that a shelter wasn't necessary because in Houston we were surely at ground zero in an attack .
Alan's right about a 500 year standard of waste security being fine, and our probable future reprocessing fuel. But, since the alternative seems to be coal, we need to really speed up the construction of reactors. I'm personally more worried about transportation accidents on the way to Yucca Flats than I am about the safety of storage, and Hansen is very likely right that we've underestimated climate change from CO2.Bob Ebersole
Mr. Rapier, in regards to CO2 emissions, there is some information located here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuclearenvissues.html
There is a table that notes the following:
I could not access the EPA source site above (file not found).
How much CO2 is put off by the concrete in a nuke plant?
IIRC, a lot is put out by the process of creating cement, much more than is created by the energy input into the cement or concrete. Not enough to make nuclear's CO2 output all that high, but noticeable.
In the production of 1 ton of cement clinker: calcination of CaO ~1000 lb/ton of cement
and combustion of coal to provide process heat (at 4.75 MMBTU/ton of cement clinker using a bituminous coal): ~975 lb/ton cement.
Combined CO2 generation rate: ~1975 lb/ton. Adding the CO2 from the calcining of the small amount of MgCO3 to MgO puts you just over 1.1 ton CO2/ton of clinker.
A typical concrete will weigh in at 2 tons/cubic yard and the cement fraction of the concrete will be between 12 and 15% for non-supplemented concretes, 10.5-12.5 % for supplemented.
This works out to roughly 0.275 tons CO2/cubic yard of concrete.
I've followed the nuclear waste issue a bit in Canada. They are heading towards a managed central repository located in the Canadian shield. The Nuclear Waste Management Orgranization's proposal to start developing this central repository was recently accepted by the government. Now they will have to find a community that would be willing to accept this repository.
They key idea I think that has to be accepted in any repository is that it is not a way to get rid of the responsibility for the waste. The nuclear industry will be responsible for the waste for thousands of years. If that requires periodic reprocessing and inspection of the waste they need to budget for that now.
Nuclear waste really isn't any worse of a waste disposal problem than plastic waste or heavy metal waste. In each case we want to be able to limit the dispersal of a substance that will be around for tens of thousands of years.
We not only want to limit the dispersal but in the case of nuclear we also want to make sure that it remains accessible. Why? Because we do not currently recycle nuclear fuel, which we darned well ought to do because that would both reduce the remaining waste and give us significant amounts of additional nuclear fuel as well as other rare elements. Why don't we recycle? Purely for political reasons. Ask Jimmy Carter why we don't recycle as he was the one that mandated that policy.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
There is the potential to recycle all wastes so we should always as much as possible keep it in a valuable concentrated form and accessible.
I see several fundamental problems with nuclear:
1) it has large unit sizes, and long development cycles, so that it can't grow & improve as quickly as wind and solar. Wind & solar are starting at a lower point (20% of new generation capacity in 2006), but they can provide the power we need, and more quickly.
2) it has a number of external costs/subsidies which aren't included in the sticker price. These include all the familiar ones: weapons proliferation, waste storage (which utilities are indeed paying something for, but the costs of which are unknown, because it's paralyzed), and Price-Anderson liability protection. These costs need to be analyzed, perhaps by the NAS, and included in the price, or at least in the cost comparisons used in making public policy. Wind & solar have none of these external costs.
3) uranium supply has been deeply underinvested in for decades. It's not clear how quickly it can ramp up, and at what cost. It's price has jumped very quickly lately: $250/lb uranium, for instance, is not an insignificant cost, as it would add $.01 per KWH. Utilities have long term contracts, so they aren't paying that price yet, but they will eventually.
$250/lb uranium? Looks like less than half of that to me.
Sure. But I've seen investor advisories projecting $250. Will it get there? Who knows. All we know is that due to weapons conversion that 1) current uranium mining is a small % of current consumption and 2) that prices up until very recently were artificially low, and 3) that ramping up production will take a long investment period.
If $125 is sustained, that will add half a penny per KWH, which is significant in the highly competitive world of electrity trading.
My point is that nuclear advocates claim that uranium costs can never be a significant factor in nuclear electricity pricing, and that appears questionable.
Nick,
Those "investment advisers" wouldn't be trying to sell you shares in some penny uranium stock or another? My question is, if the stock is so good, then why aren't they holdin on to all they can get and keeping their mouths shut so they can accumulate more?
Its generally better to watch what people do rather than believe their sales pitch. I'd also like to know their credentials as investment advisers, and track record. If they can't provide them they are no better than the "investment advice" of a casino tout telling you which slot machine is paying off that night.
Bob Ebersole
Nuclear plants do not have to be large units. Small units (100 to 200 MW) can take advantage of techniques like prefabrication so that most of the complex fabrication can occur on a tightly controlled assembly line.
Most nuclear advocates, such as Robert Somsel, seem to feel that economies of scale greatly favor large units.
I know people like Rod Adams are pushing for smaller units. What kind of licensing timeline are we looking at for such new designs?
Waste storage is a noncost. Look up discounting. Weapons proliferation isn't an external cost of domestic nuclear power unless we have technology sharing agreements with countries that desire nuclear weapons (North Korea comes to mind) and so really just is a matter of wise policy than a direct cost of electricity production. Liability protection is essentially a non-cost, all individual power providers can operate as LLCs allready, and somehow this allways comes up for nuclear power but not for hydro or natural gas which have similar liability risks (dam failures and natural gas explosions can cause enormous capital loss)
"Waste storage is a noncost. "
We don't know what longterm storage will cost - no one is doing it yet. I agree that discounting future costs make sense, and perhaps the $.001 per KWH will be enough...but we don't know.
"Weapons proliferation isn't an external cost of domestic nuclear power"
Nuclear is an international industry. The Iraq war, a $1.2T expense, was started to prevent WMD's, mostly nuclear. Was that just an excuse? Was the cost unanticipated? Sure. But proliferation is a mighty scary thing, and can't be ignored, just because PO & GW are more in front of us. It would be awfully nice to have an alternative to nuclear to present to N Korea, Iran, and the dozen other countries that are considering nuclear programs. Investment in nuclear represents lost opportunity costs.
"Liability protection is essentially a non-cost"
Just because it's an essentially random, future cost doesn't make it unreal. Just ask the FDIC people, after the S&L bailout.
"all individual power providers can operate as LLCs allready,"
I don't understand. How does this relate? If Price-Anderson were repealed, would these LLC's still be able to invest in new plants?
" somehow this allways comes up for nuclear power but not for hydro or natural gas"
Hydro & natural gas don't have liability caps, do they?
Dezakin
"all individual power providers an operate as LLCs allready"
A Limited Liability Corporation may protect a utility from the financial consequences of their actions, but that still leaves the question of who pays for an accident. Its obvious the utility's answer is the victims and the public, not the management or investors.
How in the fuck is that supposed to convince me to support nuclear power?
"and somehow this allways(sic) comes up for nuclear power but not for hydro or natural gas which have similar liability risks"
No, they don't. Nuclear accidents have the potential to poison an area for 10,000 years. There has not been a dam collapse since the Johnstown flood, and only a very few natural gas fires at generating plants.
As I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I favor nuclear power as a baseload. But when you lie about the risks or who is assuming the risks you totally loose me.
And its utter BS that storage of wastes is a non-cost. We have onsite storage right now. The plant guards, and the storage areas are current costs.
Bob Ebersole
Its not my job to sell it to you. Its stating the obvious that nuclear power can survive in the market by distributing its risk to the average citizen, just as chemical processing and hydroelectric companies are capable of doing today. Or they could buy insurance, at maybe 5 million per reactor year.
Er, no. Actinide contamination represents a tiny portion of radiological hazard vastly dwarfed by potential contamination by Sr-90 and Cs-137, both of which have roughly 30 year half lives. 300 years and the background radiation is the same as ordinary soil; These aren't very motive and pose little radiological risk. The largest risk is radioactive iodine, which has a half life measured in days, because of its high mobility and high biouptake and its tendancy to migrate to the thyroid gland. Nearly all of the Chernobyl accident fatalities (outside those directly at the plant who suffered acute radiation sickness) were related to iodine contamination, which thankfully poses no threat after several months.
Using that logic, theres never been a fatality from nuclear power plants... Chernobyl doesnt count because its foreign.
There have been... some dam failures since Jonestown.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morvi_dam_burst
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpasset_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Dam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_Dam_failure
Natural gas terminals face enormous risk and potential loss of life, on the order of tens of thousands.
All options have risk, and you have to weigh them. I still think hydro is the best way of generating power even with it having the largest risk portfolio of any energy source.
The plant guards are watching the plant, not the waste, unless you cout the cooling ponds. You cant steal a storage cask, they're too damned heavy and big. You cant damage it, they're too damned durable. Maybe with a whole lot of anti-tank artillery, but even then its doubtful.
The storage space required is very small per reactor year, taking up less than a quarter of the plants parking lot.
Dezakin,
Yes it is your job to sell nuclear power to me, and everyone else on this blog. Otherwise, why are you bothering to post?
You still have not explained why transfering the liability for nuclear plants to the public, while letting the finaceers collect the profit and not assuming the risk is in the public's interest. I certainly don't want any liability.
You stated that Chernobyl shoudn't count against the industry's safety record because it was constructed overseas.Its still an accident killing thousands from cancer.
The dams that you cited as failing were all overseas except a couple over 100 years ago. So, your logic says that nuclear accidents don't count, while 100 year old dam accidents do count. You hypocrisy is duly noted.
Still no gas plant explosions, even though the gas business has been around in a big way for the last 60 years?
I don't want to debate with you any longer, you misrepresent the evidence to support an untenable position, that somehow every human in the US should be liable for the nuclear industry's profits without getting the financial profits.
Bob Ebersole
Bob,
I think that whatever the disaster, if it is big enough, the SOP these days is that liability get charged to Uncle Sam. Isn't Price-Anderson just an explicit statement of what happens anyway? People talk about the S&L blowout in the 80's, but wasn't the bailout something way above and beyond what FDIC was supposed to do? Also, wasn't the net result there the transfer of money (hundreds of billions) from taxpayers to wealthy investors? Like I said, SOP.
Suppose there is a deep, undiscovered fault under Glen Canyon Dam and it lets go with a Mag. 7 earthquake (sort of like what just happened to the nuclear plant in Japan). The inundation might breach Boulder/Hoover, and then we have an "interesting" situation. Lots of little riverside towns get scrubbed off the map, and lots and lots of people in the Southwest no longer have enough electricity or water (and this goes on for years). I don't think there is any insurance for something like this, probably there could not be, unless the government intervened, and I bet something like this event is more likely to happen than a major nuclear accident in the US.
You're arguing against a strawman here. Its not explicitly in the public interest to assume liability. You can argue in favor of Price-Anderson if you want to make incentives for nuclear investment, though I would favor instead simply heavily taxing coal power.
But I wasn't illustrating desirable policy. Its simply an observation that givin the nature of limited liability theres no reason why Price Anderson is necissary for the survival of the nuclear power industry even if it was uninsurable. If you have a problem with this, you need to address how liability for hydroelectric dams and chemical processing companies manage their liability as well.
Are you so deliberately obstinate or is it that you cant recognize sarcasm?
If there hasn't been a dam disaster since the Jonestown flood, then there hasn't been a nuclear power accident ever. If you include Chernobyl as a warning for nuclear power (you should, 5000 lives shortened from iodine poisoning) then you should also consider the far greater danger posed by dams. One several decades ago washed 25000 people away overnight and killed some 145000 over the next several months from famine and disease.
Western dams are mostly safe, and well, western reactors are mostly safe. There are risks to both (and substantially greater risks from dams) and I support both in spite of the risks.
Well, obviously you dont want to debate. You want to construct strawmen. That was never my position.
"givin the nature of limited liability theres no reason why Price Anderson is necissary for the survival of the nuclear power industry even if it was uninsurable. "
Do you feel that Price-Anderson could be repealed? Corporate limited liability hasn't changed since the 50's, so do you feel it was never necessary in the first place? If so, why was it passed?
Sure; There'd probably be unintended consequences. I dont know how liability is managed for hydroelectric dams or natural gas terminals, or other large structures with low risk probability but trillion dollar costs in the event of a failure, but I suspect it wouldn't be the end of the nuclear industry. They'd hate it of course, and I'm not familiar enough with the law or the liability structure of competing power supplies; Who insures coal against frivilous (or legitimate) lawsuits for resulting health problems? So I cant really say I advocate its repeal either.
With some fifty years of experience, modelling liability costs shouldn't be too difficult.
Well it was probably necissary for the nuclear industry to get started. This was fairly new and the risks were not well understood, but everyone knew you could blow up cities with it. I imagine large corporations were unwilling to invest in something potentially risky (or even fund VC) without some sort of legal protection.
I'm not intimately familiar with the law but I think theres more in there than just liability protection also... something that prevents frivolous lawsuits or something along those lines.
Hi Robert,
I am not an expert in nuclear power, though I do have a degree in nuclear physics, and have been interested in the issues since the early 80's. I started out as a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, but early on reconsidered and have felt for a long time that nuclear power is getting a bum rap.
My current thinking on the subject has been formed mostly by the writings of Bernard Cohen.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/
Dr. Cohen is a nuclear physicist with an extensive background in research and is well regarded in the nuclear physics community; he is a former chairman of the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics. He has spent the latter part of his career investigating the environmental effects of radiation. He has written an excellent book in support of nuclear power:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
Cohen presents many strong arguments on issues related to nuclear power. Regarding nuclear waste, his views include:
Three Mile Island exposed the public to miniscule amounts of radiation. A passenger on a transcontinental flight receives a greater dose of additional radiation than a person living near TMI did from the accident. Chernobyl is a worst-case accident, and while 75 people died as a direct result, and overall thousands developed thyroid cancer, the casualties are comparable to those from exposure to fossil fuel power toxins for just one year.
I wouldn't mind a nuclear power plant in my backyard. It is much safer and pleasant to live next to a nuclear plant than to a coal-fired plant, and with cogeneration, I could get inexpensive district heating from the nuclear plant cooling water.
Finally, something Cohen doesn't emphasize, but which I think is important; the risks of low level radiation are probably grossly overestimated, and in fact, most of us may be radiation deficient. Cohen did an extensive study of radon in US homes, and found a negative correlation between radon exposure and lung cancer. While he did an ecological study, which doesn't have the same rigor as a typical epidemiological study, his results and the results of the nuclear shipyard workers study (see John Cameron) disprove the linear no threshold model of radiation exposure used in our radiation exposure standards.
I have always thought it was the orders of magnitude more low level waste that was the problem. Too radioactive for people to be around and there is a lot of it.
an ionizing radiation deficiency? oh, come on now.
Some of us could probably use a little more UV to create vitamin D, but the contention that we could use a little more hard radiation is quite a stretch.
Looking at the question on a large scale, the question to me seems to be whether it's nukes 'instead of' coal or 'in addition to'. Using well-designed nukes to help reduce death and misery while transitioning to a lower-energy lifestyle makes some sense. Using them to maximize the current paradigm for a short while longer makes little, and I'm afraid that's what we'll see.
greenish,
if you glow in the dark you won't need electricity for a reading lamp by your bed. Of course you are radiation deficient.
Bob Ebersole
I've been pretty hard on nukes lately, but I'll take this one on. It's the same effect that causes kids living in pristine environments to get asthma. We need exposure to certain natural dangers so that our body's immune systems learn how to cope with them and how to cope with new exposures to things. We live in a sea of air, filled with viruses, bacteria, and lots of little jiggly things that ionize dna and stimulate our senses. We spend way too much time in the shower and too little time in the dirt. Whether we like to think about it or not, we are not a single organism. Our bodies are simply bags full of various creatures that figured out how to live together under one skin. Our organs, cells, mitochondria, etc. are all vestiges of separate living things, and our digestive system is a rotting chamber of horrors, separated from all the rest by a thin wall through which we absorb the waste products from lots of tiny little creatures.
Dismissing the data of radiation exposure offhand is dismissing billions of years of evolution on a much more radioactive world than we have now.
Well I haven't been all that hard on nukes lately, but REALLY, you think anyone has an ionizing radiation deficiency?
You are perfectly right that kids who are brought up eating a little dirt do better. This has to do with growing up with a healthy immune system.
On the other hand kids growing up in a house with a lot of radon are NOT benefitted. http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/physic.html
Ionizing radiation smashes through cells and creates damage. If you can find any credible link anywhere about its beneficial effects at a low level, I will be very impressed.
So to sum up: dirt good for kids, ionizing radiation not so good for kids.
The EPA uses the results of the BEIR. They base their results on the study of uranium miners, who all received a fairly high dosage of radon over a short period of time. The studies use the Linear No Threshold Model (LNT)to extrapolate to residential exposure (small dosages over 70 years). The studies used by the EPA do not have large enough sample populations to discriminate risk from low levels of radon directly, they have to model to low level risk.
The Cohen study, done after the studies used by the EPA, is an ecological study over a large population of US homes across the country. It shows that the LNT model used by the EPA DOES NOT FIT the data for low dosage radon, and probably grossly overestimates the risk. See:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/%7Eblc/LNT-1995.PDF
So our radiation standards and our "Physician's Guides" from the EPA are fundamentally flawed, they use a model for risk that clearly does not hold in the dosage regime where they make recommendations. Linear models are usually the first best guess in science, for radiation exposure risk, it is time to develop more sophisticated models.
Every second, in every human body, thousands of natural radioactive elements in our bodies decay and create damage. This has been going on since humans have existed, and we, like other organisms, have ways of coping with this damage. It seems to me there is a threshold.
Here is a recent link about fungi that seem to really benefit from radiation:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522210932.htm
Yeah, I already know about the fungi - cool - and I understand that a linear model may not be the perfect fit, no surprise in a nonlinear system.
Still, an ionizing radiation deficiency?
Come ON now.
Why not, damn it? Radiation is a natural phenomen, and if I may suggest billions of people think some of it is healthy by just going out sunbathing.
If there could be deficiency from low exposure to infection agents, why not from radiation?
The long term hazards of fission power are well known, hence the un-insurability of fission power thus needing Price-Anderson.
And the 'need to defend' fission from 'terror' are an expense that I do not see the pro-fission people account for.
Do the negatives outweigh the negatives of 1). Blackouts; and 2). Global Warming caused by coal-fired plants?
Nor do I see the people who argue along these lines address how the model of existence (continuous growth - ever expanding money/consumption) or the limits of things like Phosphorous or other commodities.
Lets say you GET enough fission power to keep the present growth cure going - what then? What will be attempted in 50 years to keep things going?
Compare TMI and Vajont dam. Or even natural gas terminals near large population centers.
Which is more insurable?
Price-Anderson is a boogeyman.
Price-Anderson is a boogeyman.
Under Appeal to authority argument:
"Even nuclear power executives acknowledge that their industry is financially dependent on Price-Anderson to shield nuclear power from free market forces."
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_power_plants/c...
So you have Dezakin - who says 'boggyman' (and has a history or handwaving) or statements made by nuclear power executives and summarized as the above statement by the group Public Citizen.
(And no one has touched the idea of 'Oh look, here's a limit' - if we address this limit of keeping a growing power source - "keep the economy going", how does humanity address the next limits of raw material?)
Edwards is smart. Since Germany has shown that they can grow their economy while oil consumption declines, why not imitate their efforts or surpass them? It would seem that investment in wind and solar is the way to go, along with accepting that suburban sprawl peaked in 2007 and is going down the tubes.The USA should be moving toward dense living arrangements as quickly as possible-only the countries without major suburban development will make it over the hump, IMHO.
so if we copy the Germans then who will be our equivalent France and Eastern Europe ? I guess the goal would be Canada and Mexico.
Germans import France's nuclear power and are trying to get eastern europe to build nuclear reactors so that they can import nuclear electricity from them.
Germans are also looking to get a europe wide grid so that they can get their power from other countries and places.
The Germans are building and refurbing coal plants.
Of course the USA is bigger than Germany and Europe so importing electricity would be tougher and less efficient.
Good luck convincing Canada and Mexico to go along with the copy German hypocracy plan.
You wish that suburbs have peaked. Watch the building of more distributed work centers and other infrastructure reconfiguration tweaks that will allow suburbs to continue to florish.
=========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
I had posted this info (at the tail end of the discussion on peak oil from gail the actuary) which expands upon what Alanofbigeasy says but have modified it for this discussion.
For Robert Rapier, France reprocesses its waste. Nuclear waste is mostly (95-98%) unburned nuclear fuel. Only 0.7-2% of the uranium is used in current once through reactors. Reprocessing sends the fuel through a second time in the form of MOX. France, Russia, Japan and the UK are the main reprocessors of fuel. the US did not reprocess because 1) it was thought to cost a bit more than sticking it in the ground (although with cost overruns on Yucca Mountain this may not be true) 2) Jimmy Carter was concerned about using reprocessing to pull out Plutonium. It is a harder and more expensive way to get your nuclear bomb material.
Molten Salt and other types of nuclear reactors can achieve high burn. Burn up 90+% of the fuel (the actinides) what is left has a half life of 12 years or less. Each of the components of the waste has uses.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com has info on reactor types.
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/
their discussion board has info on reactors and possible waste handling.
For waste handling, store them for a few decades while you build high burn reactors. You will need the high burn reactors to handle existing waste fuel anyway. Using the waste fuel would provide power for 500 years at current usage rate. High burn reactors are breeder reactors lite and can be designed to not have the problems.
The historical choice of water reactors and pressure boilers was because that is what was already made for nuclear submarines and it was for historical political reasons. They always knew even 50 years ago that better nuclear reactors could be made. We need to scale up what we got and finish developing and refining better designs.
========
438 nuclear reactors operating in the world now
http://www.uic.com.au/reactors.htm
32 are under construction now.
completing 4-5 per year 2007-2009
going up to 8 per year 2010-2012
http://www.uic.com.au/nip19.htm
by 2013-2017 the completion rate will be up to 15-30 per year. Without a "crash" program. So the reactors already under construction in the world will be completing at the 8 per year rate that Alanofbigeasy was targeting for 2027.
The historic peak of 24 reactors completed world wide in 1984. The USA completed 12 reactors all by itself in 1974 from an almost standing start in 1969. Only small reactors before then.
Brown Ferry 1 plant started this year in the USA
Watts Bar 2 is going to get completion approval early 2008
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/another-nuclear-plant-for-usa-a...
http://www.uic.com.au/nip58.htm#capacity
As of August 2006 over 110 uprates had been approved, totalling 4845 MWe. A further seven uprates totalling about 750 MWe are pending with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and applications for a total of 1690 MWe are expected by 2011.
Up-powering, plant operating extensions to 60 years instead of 40 years for most current plants will more than offset plant closures. New technology from MIT can allow up-powering to increase power generated by 50% for existing reactors. Donut shaped fuel instead of cylinders and nanoparticles to coolant water to allow for higher operating temperatures.
There are 320 reactors in the world production pipeline.
80 reactors were added to the pipeline since the start of 2007. Expected completion of the 320 reactors in the world pipeline by 2030. More reactors are being added to the pipeline. Most of the action will be in China, Russia, India, Ukraine, S Korea and Japan.
The legislation that makes nuclear power plants in the USA attractive already passed in 2005. Further sweateners are going through now. The US will build those 28 reactors by 2025.
Most US and other existing plants are getting operating extensions from 40 years to 60 years. Do not be surprised if they get refurbished for 80 years of operation.
Coal plants are completed at about two per week worldwide. Coal plants take 3 years to build and are of comparable size to nuclear plants. If the world shifted from coal plants to nuclear plants, we could add 100+ nuclear plants every year.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/07/constructing-lot-of-nuclear-pow...
I compare nuclear, coal and wind in terms of construction material. Coal and wind use more steel and concrete to generate the same power.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/06/solar-cells-with-407-efficiency...
Russia has restarted its fast breeder development program. Japan is a likely buyer of it. China and India are also working on fast breeder.
==Nuclear power has added more power than wind and solar and can continue to do so. The lack of flexibility is wrong.
From 1993 to 2005 in the United States new non-fossil fuel sources of energy added
Wood (biomass): 96 thousand megawatt-hours/per year.
Waste: - 259 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. Negative number.
Geothermal: - 190 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. Negative number.
Solar: (Usually everybody’s favorite): +8
Wind (Another favorite): 1345 thousand megawatt-hours/per year.
Overall, renewable energy in the United States has increased at a rate of 1,000 thousand megawatt-hours/per year. The nuclear energy figure is 16,203 thousand megawatt-hours per year for nuclear even without building a new plant.
So the claim that wind and solar are being added faster has not been the case. With up-powering and nuclear plant life extensions nuclear could still end up adding more power than solar.
From 2009 onwards the majority of new US power will be coal. Of the 11 new coal plants being built in the USA now, none are sequestering their pollution.
There is some social pressure against coal but why not more ? Coal pollution kills more people in a day than nuclear energy ever has (1 million per year, 2000-3000 per day). The coal plants don't always blow up they just keep killing. More people die in the coal mines (5000-10,000 per year). Where is your outrage ? Mountain tops are blown off and 7% of the Appalachian forests are destroyed for coal. all the animals that were then when the mountain tops are destroyed get killed. Then after digging for coal for few decades they push the soil back and stick in some seedlings.
When you get cancer from coal or oil pollution does it hurt more than when you get it from a theoretical radiation leak ? Do you end up more dead or less dead ?
Fossil fuel air pollution hurts children and women and older people more.
=====
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
====
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
"So the claim that wind and solar are being added faster has not been the case. With up-powering and nuclear plant life extensions nuclear could still end up adding more power than solar. "
No one is claiming that wind & solar added more than nuclear through 2005. The claim is that wind & solar can add more than nuclear in the next 10 years, and that is clearly the case. Wind was 20% of new generation in 2006, and it could be 100% in 6 years, and start replacing coal & gas after that. Nuclear can't do that.
If I were energy czar I would ban all new non-sequesting coal plants, emphasize wind & solar, and encourage nuclear to grow slowly & without new subsidies. You might object that wind & solar have subsidies. I agree, and my best suggestion would be to eliminate them, and institute carbon taxes on coal.
Treehugger (wall street journal) and many other sources talk about the wind turbine shortage and shortages of suitable silicon for solar.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/07/world_wide_wind_1.php
If wind can go to 100% of new power in 6 years and start replacing coal and gas then great. I will believe it when I see it. Also, make sure that you are talking the correct calculation not 20% of watts but watt/hours. You must add three times the watts for wind before getting equal watt/hours.
build more nuclear and wind and solar until coal and oil are eliminated. Do not stop building any of the better sources until coal and oil are eliminated. Do not assume that wind and solar can do the job until the job is completed.
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
btw: I know that most people will not take the time to follow the links.
From the link from treehugger
From the wall street journal
http://www.charleston.net/news/2007/jul/15/turbine_shortage_knocks_wind_...
In the U.S., more wind power was installed last year than in any other country in the world: 2,454 megawatts.
However, because wind has 30% operating load factor this is less than the power from one 1GW nuclear reactor. So less power than from the re-activated Browns Ferry 1 Reactor this year. Plus less power per year still than the up-powering of reactors.
Nuclear still adding more than solar. Even if nuclear were to fall to third place, why stop adding it before coal and oil are eliminated ?
=========
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
"the wind turbine shortage and shortages of suitable silicon for solar"
Sure. Wind & solar demand has exploded, and supplies are limited by the speed of manufacturing expansion, which is about 40% per year. That's still doubling every 2 years.
"make sure that you are talking the correct calculation not 20% of watts but watt/hours"
I was.
"build more nuclear and wind and solar until coal and oil are eliminated. Do not stop building any of the better sources until coal and oil are eliminated. "
A good idea. I suspect that we aren't quite ready to do it yet, but I support it. I think it will be hard to retire coal plants before their natural end-of-life, but it would be nice to try.
"Aren't quite ready to do it"...now there's an understatement. Supposedly there are at least 900 new coal plants in the pipe-line worldwide (mostly China, India and around in 70 in the U.S.), probably none of which will have CCS. If they all run for the expected lifetime at max capacity, they will spew out so much CO2 that even if every other country in the world cut their emissions by 50%, we still wouldn't keep CO2 levels under 500 ppm.
I really don't see anyway we're going to be able to avoid dramatic, high-risk and massively expensive "technofix" measures to keep global warming in check. And if they don't work, or backfire, we really are screwed.
First, I had not been following the recent order cycle for foreign nukes and the rate is higher than I expected. This raises the 2027 rate significantly on what can be built on a smooth growth curve.
It also mean that the USA can import more critical parts and reduce bottlenecks with their associated delays.
It also means that the US has a larger poll of engineers to import from (if we can outbid others). Most other nuke labor categories are less likely to be helped by imported labor.
I am willing to raise my guess-estimate of what a safe ramp-up in new nuke construction could reasonably be to 5 or 6 new nukes completed in 2027.
OTOH, your wind vs. nuke data is quite biased !
From 1993 to 2005 in the United States new non-fossil fuel sources of energy added
Wind has exponential growth in both size of individual WTs and installed base. Using 1990s data and even early 200x data is simply invalid and irrelevant for wind.
Just use 2006 and first half of 2007 data (outside your range) to give a better view of the impact that wind is having today.
12,634 MW installed as of 6/30/07.
Nice graph to show wind growth
http://www.awea.org/faq/instcap.html
Per the graph an almost 50% growth in the last 24 months.
And wind by state.
http://www.awea.org/projects/
Best Hopes for more new non-GHG generation,
Alan
Does anyone have figures for the amount of Radioactive particles in Coal -how does that compare with releases from Nuclear plants?
If we burn lots of coal to make electricity to make silicon for solar how much radiation does that release?
Every time we walk out on a sunny day we are blasted by radiation. I think we need to keep the risk in perspective. France generates 70%+ of her Electricity from nuclear and no-one seems to bat an eyelid. The're going to be sitting pretty with their electric TGV and plug in Priuses in 10 years and we will be queueing at the gas pumps...
Nick.
Does anyone have figures for the amount of Radioactive particles in Coal -how does that compare with releases from Nuclear plants?
ASCII and Yee shall receive:
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=coal+radioactivity
Coal loses by several orders of magnitudes.
Even using the average ppm concentration of uranium in the earth's crust, the amount of coal burned lets this amount into the air.
Nuclear reactors however do not let the radioactive materials into the air, unless an accident occurs.
Even including accidents coal still puts more radiation out.
Some coal ash is rich enough in uranium that China is now considering mining it for their power reactors.
Nick -- Don't forget to consider other toxic releases from coal combustion; EPA figures indicate about 48 tons/year of Mercury release from US Coal-burning electrical plants, making them the single largest industrial mercury source in the US and accounting for 40% of total mercury release.
Consider the impact this has on our ability to safely feed ourselves from the ocean...
Mercury Decision: 'Virtually All' Mercury In Ocean Fish Is 'From Natural Sources'
At least, that's one thing 'big-coal' is not responsible for !
Humans dont accumulate mercury, but it is very dangerous for growing nervous sytem: pregant women and young kids shoud avoid eating tunna or swordfish.
"Nick -- Don't forget to consider other toxic releases from coal combustion"
I don't see anyone considering all the "other" toxic relesases from nuclear beyond the high-level end waste. What about ISL chemicals, milling chemicals (including fluorides which are exceedingly more GH intensive than CO2), tailings, radon dust, DU shot at people overseas, controlled releases from plants, etc...?
How many millions have died from poisoning from the nuclear industry?
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2002/DU-Weapons-Pollution31jan03.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/DU-Leuren-Moret21apr03.htm
http://www.downwinders.org/Jim%20Phelps.htm
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/sview/1,3329,250010691,00.html
http://fluoridealert.org/WN-414.htm
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
The mercury pollution caused by humans affects land-based ecosystems and fresh water fish much more than the fish in the ocean.
http://leahy.senate.gov/issues/environment/mercury/hg_prime.html
It is ironic that Vermont, which emits very little mercury, has advisories on mercury-contaminated fresh water fish, due to MidWest mercury emissions that contaminate Vermont watersheds.
An issue that I never see addressed is this: Let's, for the sake of argument, say that nuclear can be made safe if all the procedures followed by the engineers are followed scrupulously. To replace the energy currently supplied by hydrocarbons, or any significant percentage thereof, will require a many fold expansion of the nuclear power base. Nuclear power presumes a highly developed industrial and technological infrastructure.
So nuclear power represents an immense gamble that we will continue to have our present high level infrastructure. If this gamble fails, we have bequeathed our children far, far worse situation than that already bequeathed us by the nuclear industry.
Chernobyl itself is, partially (I know, there are better designs now), an example of what I mean. The SU was in a period of disintegration. Engineers can write procedures, yet even if those procedures are correct, there is no way for engineers to guarantee those procedures will be carried out. There is no way to account for societal decay. And anyone who wants to greatly expand nuclear power without taking account the possibility of societal decay is a -- well, I won't say it.
There is not only an energy crisis, there are other converging issues: some important metals are becoming scarcer, soil is a major issue, water is an issue, and of course global warming is an issue.
These issues are beginning to intertwine and influence each other in a pernicious spiral, just as there was a happy synergy of various factors on the way up the hydrocarbon age hill.
If one looks at the whole picture, there is no truly responsible course but for humanity to scale back and find a way to live in a sustainable way using (mostly) above ground resources. We will be forced to do that eventually in any case. It's simply a matter of how much damage we do to ourselves and our future environement before getting there.
Chernobyl itself is, partially (I know, there are better designs now), an example of what I mean. The SU was in a period of disintegration. Engineers can write procedures, yet even if those procedures are correct, there is no way for engineers to guarantee those procedures will be carried out. There is no way to account for societal decay. And anyone who wants to greatly expand nuclear power without taking account the possibility of societal decay is a -- well, I won't say it.
Clearly by this measure we need to stop all our chemical factories as well?
And demolish (in a controlled way) all our dams too?
If you project forward large scale societal decay, then yes, we really are totally screwed in all sorts of ways.
I think the energy crisis is going to be so bad (and global warming too) that if we DON'T have nukes (as well as as much solar & wind we can, and no damn coal) we're much more likely to fall into that self-sustaining chaos and decay.
Sustained blackouts == riots & collapse.
Sustained coal burning == eco collapse .
Without a highly developed industrial and technological infrastructure, biological hazards (e.g. disease and murderers) will be many orders of magnitude more dangerous problems than nuclear plants.
Yes, of course uncontrolled nuclear plants are dangerous but the service they provide is so critical, compared with so many other things, that we really need them to avoid that general collapse.
Really---I think civilization is fundamentally at risk without large scale replacement and enhancement of non-greenhouse emitting power---and quantitatively it is impossible to achieve in the time we have without substantial nuclear power plants.
If technological society collapses, the most likely proximate dispersal event will be war. Nuclear reactors are a relatively high value targets in a war situation, however that doesn't mean they will be a great source of radiation. What is most likely to happen is that the facilities surrounding the hardened reactor are destroyed and the reactor has to shut down. The nuclear waste stored around the facility is most problematic. I would expect there would be a greater than 50% chance that the nuclear waste would be dispersed somehow in a war situation, either through looting like in post invasion Iraq or directly through intentional bombing of the nuclear waste facilities.
In this postapocolyptic happyland we'll have far more severe problems to occupy our time than radiological dispersal.
Hear, hear.
Wars, however, are much more common the apocolypses. My comments were chiefly targeted at recognizing that the mitigations necessary in order to avoid problems with nuclear material durring an apocolpse are the same mitigating measures you should take to secure the material in the event of war.
I see these all as 'second order' problems stemming from the fact there's too many people. And it's getting worse. What is it - after deaths an additional 200-250 thousand people are added to the planet every day.
People will address everything but the root cause, hence I'm a doomer. The entire current paradigm is based on growth. I see no chance of this changing until it's too late to avoid a crash.
There is often the assertion made that insuring nuclear facilities is an expense that is 'subsidized' by the US govt in the form of Price-Anderson act. Maybe someone could explain to me how this is an expense. Other than the time involved in debating the issue in congress, the cost is non-existent. Only IF there are significant accidents will there be cost. This is like any other 'self-insuring.'
I tend to favor AlanFromBigEasy's point of view. IMO the biggest detriment to the nuclear debate is from the nuke proponents who arrogantly dismiss anyone who brings up the negative issues. These issues need to be dealt with and not dismissed as being insignificant.
Expected cost of all nuclear accidents =
probability of a nuclear accident in any year
x average cost of accident
x number plants
x average life[*] of nuclear plant (in years)
Per plant share of "insurance" cost =
Expected cost of all nuclear accidents / number of plants
Is Per plant share of "insurance" cost >> Price-Anderson limit of liability ?
If yes, insurance cost is subsidized and the expense is not fully accounted for in the operating costs of the nuclear facility.
-- Philip B. / Washington, DC
* - operating life should include the full length of time when the risk of an accident is greater than zero [i.e., from first fuel loading through final mothballing (or longer?)]
energy is subsidized.
So what ?
Compare subsidies on a $/kwh basis and see how things look.
Compare the hypothetical cost risks of nuclear with actual damage and costs of coal and oil.
Coal ($50 billion revenue industry) causing about $160 billion per year in health and business damage. Acid rain reduces the life of many cars and increases repair costs on property. 25% more emergency room visits for asthma and heart attacks. Care for the 30,000 + people in the USA who are sick for years before dieing of cancer and lung and heart disease.
Oil also comes out bad on actual cost and damage borne by society. Japan's motivation for WW2, cut off from oil. Iraq wars one and two. Plus the air pollution deaths, illnesses etc...
solar and wind build it and stop the new coal plants and fossil fuel addition and replace the old coal and natural gas plants and then we can revisit how much nuclear was added in the meantime.
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http://advancednano.blogspot.com
"Only IF there are significant accidents will there be cost. This is like any other 'self-insuring.'"
Sure. The same could have been said about FDIC insurance, before the S&L meltdown.
Liability caps, like other things like loan guarantees, are a significant subsidy. Maybe it's worth it, but it's a real expense.
If its too big a risk for private insurance, why should the government assume the risk? Remember, we all pay taxes and will all have to pay if there is a problem, but only the investors get to keep the profits from a new generating plant. Sounds like another public trough for the corporate hogs.
The other examples of public risk underwriting generally have broad spread benefits. FDIC encourages small savers. Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac lower interest rates for homeowners and make homes affordable for millions of people.
Bob Ebersole
Who insures against dam failures or natural gas terminal explosions?
I'm not aware of any of the above as having happened, but LLoyds of London generally insures against all large, unusual risks. The Johnstown flood was the only dam failure with loss of life, and it was about 130 years ago. And wasn't there a LNG explosion at a terminal in Boston about 60 tears ago? At any rate, the chances of either are vanishingly small.
Bob Ebersole
And there have not been any nuclear accidents in the west that have resulted in any documented loss of life. But coal plant routinely kill tens of thousands of people per year as other have documented in this thread.
'Not any Documented loss of life'
- well, documents are only paper, of course.. paper gets lost, shuffled, buried. But here's a taste of STEP ONE in the process.. and just consider how many places have a similar version of this story..
Uranium Mining and the Laguna People
http://www.greens.org/s-r/10/10-07.html
"The reason nobody opened their mouth was because the bread and butter were placed on the table every weekend. Money is the maker of all evil. It's very sad what we're going through. People are crying out for help. One day, with God's will, that will straighten out..."
"I've lost my mother, a brother who left four children. The youngest one didn't know who his father was. He keeps asking his older brothers, "How did it feel to have our dad around?" It's sad for a child to ask, how would it feel to have your dad to help you with problems, to hug you and to hold you, to tell you, "I love you very much." I still feel sad about it. (Her brother worked 30 years for Anaconda, and she believes he died of undiagnosed stomach cancer, like their mother, who suffered severe stomach pain and wasted away before her death, which was attributed to heart failure. The nearest hospital was in Albuquerque.) "
"The ore was transported by (the) Santa Fe (railroad), to the mill site. No one has had the idea to sweep along the tracks to find out what kind of contamination (is there)—the crusher was on the east side of the village. The wind blows from the east, and we suffered a lot and the smell was really something terrible...we had to go through all this hell; to me it was like during the Vietnam war, how this blasting-you could actually hear the rocks fall back to the surface. There was a lot of cracks (in the houses); the homes have been jarred so much, they're hard to put back together...we were told it didn't have to do with the mine blasting, but some of us Native Americans aren't dumb! We know what technology is, now...it's just a shame how we Indians are crying out for help, yet DOE doesn't understand. I think we need to push."
"Anyway, I sit here, day after day in Paguate, still suffering. I'm proud to be a Native American Indian from Laguna, who was diagnosed with cancer, whose life has been shortened. But I'm going to keep struggling for better tomorrows, & I hope to continue to do what I have to, to be happy and say what I have to."
Mining is historically the dirtiest step, and all these anecdotes could be told in any community anywhere in the world. This isn't necissarily an epidemiological connection.
But, its all about risk assessment; Compare risks.
Will people please stop saying nuclear is safe. 3rd story down, although they are all interesting and relevant to this topic.
http://www.dukeemployees.com/nuclear27.shtml
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Define "safe"! Based on its track record, and compared to alternative forms of power generation of equivalent wattage, it seems pretty safe to me. I didn't used to think so 5 or 10 years ago, mind you, mainly because the abstract threat of a meltdown or nuclear war just seemed far more terrifying than the reality of the death and injury caused all the time by other forms of power generation. Actually, to be honest, it does still seem more terrifying, but at least I accept now that the probability of such an event is sufficiently low that I'd be comfortable living with it, given the alternatives.
Read.
http://www.euradcom.org/2003/execsumm.htm
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Ok, so a) what sort of peer-review process has that study been through and b) where's the comparison to, say, the effects of radiation from coal-based power consumption?
Further, most of that report seems to be based on the effects of fallout from weapons testing, which is just as likely to have occurred whether we have nuclear power stations or not.
Certainly nothing in there changed my view that the risks of living near a nuclear power station are neglible compared to the risks of traffic accidents, or even the risks of the climate change consequences from continuing to release CO2 at current rates.
There's far far simpler and more effective things we could do to reduce the risks of premature death from anthropogenic causes than worry about nuclear power stations.
I've never been in favour of coal.
The ECRR is a radiation risk assessment committee. It was not a study, but a review of data and literature from Europe, mainly in the years following Chernobyl.
This (PDF) http://www.llrc.org/health/subtopic/anoracfinal.pdf sites several sources which all point to the ICRP models being falsified by the evidence, hence the new ECRR model with is in line with the actual numbers. Studies of infant leukemia and the observation of increased minisatellite DNA mutations following Chernobyl, both falsified the ICRP risk models by factors of between 100 and 1000, as did other cancer and health factors. That is why a new model on up-dated biological information was made.
The report encompasses nuclear fall-out, pollution, DU and accidental release. All of which will continue in a world of nuclear power.
There are far simpler and more effective ways of reducing CO2 emissions than nuclear power.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
"There are far simpler and more effective ways of reducing CO2 emissions than nuclear power"
Well that's a more interesting debate to have. I'd agree "more effective - in many locations", or at least "preferable".
"Simpler"...well, that's more debateable. The technology necessary to guarantee sufficient baseload power from renewables is far from perfected, and certainly not commercially viable yet. It's also very location dependent - Australia & NZ, for instance, probably have no pressing need for nuclear due to adequate resources provided by renewables (especially given Australia's low population density). But there are parts of the world with very high population densities, and insufficient reliable supplies of renewable energy. That would be the obvious place to install nuclear (and indeed, generally is the places it is already).
The story that you indicate uses results from the ECRR 2003 recommendations. Those recommendations are based on several generally unaccepted models for radiation exposure. The recommendations would place a limit of 10 mR per person per year from man made sources, where the natural radiation background is already over 200 mR per year and the typical US citizen receives around 80 mR per year from radon.
You mean it is based on models that were not invented by the nuclear industry itself... And not wanting to increase the amount of radiation one recieves beyond the background radiation is bad how? Radon causes a lot of lung cancer in particular - it is a problem in many parts of the US. Your example only serves to strengthen that model.
Think tobacco science. Nuclear science. Backed by industry. Safe.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
All of the accepted models were invented by people outside of the nuclear industry, health physicists. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a linear model, it did take some imagination to come up with the erroneous hot particle model espoused by the ERCC.
You say that radon causes much lung cancer, but such statements are based solely on extrapolations down from high exposure samples, like uranium miners and Hiroshima survivors. It is like setting car insurance rates for normal drivers by observing accident rates for race car drivers.
There is a wide variation in background radiation exposure in the US. People in one state get 600 millirems/year, while others in another state get 200 millirems/year. It is interesting that the people in the 600 millirem/year state, Colorado, have a lower cancer mortality than people in the lower radiation states, like Florida. When something like TMI exposes its neighbors to about 1 millirem additional exposure, it is easy to see this amount is neglegible compared to the 400 millirem/year additional exposure people get when they move from Florida to Colorado.
It is interesting that New Zealand, where you live?, doesn't have nuclear power, yet the cancer mortality rate in New Zealand is higher than for the United States, where we have nuclear power and even had open air nuclear weapons testing.
http://www.nzhis.govt.nz/stats/mortstats.html
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/otheract/gis/gis_atnchs.htm
"It is interesting that New Zealand, where you live?, doesn't have nuclear power, yet the cancer mortality rate in New Zealand is higher than for the United States"
Different populations will always had different cancer rates. It is the change in those rates due to external factors that is important. There have been plenty of studies in Europe after Chernobyl that show that the CHANGE in cancer rates is far above expected given the old radiation risk models.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1867971
The rest of your exposure argument hinges around your first premise, which is where the debate is centred. Does internal exposure (low dose) cause more harm than external. And that is where the old models fail to explain increased rates of cancers. Why is it erroneous?
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Can't say I know how reliable this report is considering some of the sources (TORCH for instance.)
Looks like an attempt to put the cart before the horse. People are often sloppy with epidemiology. This isn't saying that there weren't significant risks beyond the contamination of I-131, but thats the only thing we have reliable causal connection with.
Sure, but thats part of the measurment. I-131 doses are very small but they're very significant because they migrate immediately to the thyroid.
And about half of Americans get cancer and a third die from it, with radiation being a primary cause. I would argue for lower civilian and industry exposure limits.
Medical X-rays have a clear health benefit and are, generally worth the risk of added exposure. But nuclear power ?
I would be happy to never see another BWR reactor built, unless GE can get the radiation down to PWR levels.
And another reason to place nukes *FAR* from population centers.
Would that we could away with shutting down existing nukes in an orderly fashion, but the alternatives of coal & NG are worse.
Alan
Is NG really much worse? My understand was that the state-of-the-art in gas turbine power stations have a life-time carbon intensity little more than most nuclear power stations of equivalent capacity.
You're kidding right? Your dose from the potassium in ten bananas is higher than that. Get your priorities strait. Its time to ban bananas!
I was just finishing a banana when I read that.
Bananas help me meet a biological need (5 fruits & veggies/day). Potassium is lost through sweating (see sauna and New Orleans summers). Any excess potassium is quickly excreted, so I am not at ALL sure that eating bananas increases my radiation load. My body needs just so much potassium and no more.
I live 1 foot above sea level (good) in an area without granite & radon (400' of silt underneath) so I get minimal natural exposure, despite my banana eating habits :-)
If I am short one fruit & veggie after dinner, I walk to Sophie's for a handmade Papaya or Blackberry or Strawberry or Coconut or Plum sorbet. If I am short two fruits & vegetables, well ,,,
Purely for my health of course :-)
OTOH, I do NOT have a biological need for radiation from a BWR (about twice the releases per MWh of PWR from memory). And Waterford III is as close as I want to get even a PWR (actually I would prefer Riverbend, >100 miles away).
NO MORE BOILING WATER REACTORS !
Alan
Alan, some of your posts are credible; You fretting about the radiation dose from BWR versus say, phosphate based fertilizers, No Salt, bananas, or even the very bones in your body signifies a... lack of perspective.
Hi Alan,
The CDC atlas for mortality in the US (1988-1992) give about 500,000 cancer deaths a year out of a total of about 2,100,000 deaths a year, so less than a quarter of those deaths are due to cancer.
The BEIR gives a whole life cancer risk estimate of about 0.8/1,000,000 per millirem of exposure. Given that the average exposure in the US is about 300 millirem/per year, or 15,000 millirem over 50 years, that would give an integrated whole life cancer risk at about 1.2%. This is about 1/40 of the 50% whole life cancer risk that you mention. One part in 40 is not a primary or majority cause, even if you are a former Republican. ;-)
Here is an observation that proponents of a high radiation risk have a difficult time refuting. About 300 millirem per year is the average US exposure, but that average is not uniform. People in the Rocky Mountains get about double the exposure due to prevalence of uranium ores and high altitudes that reduce shielding by the atmosphere. People in the South get less than the average, as they are not proximate to uranium deposits and also live at a low altitude. Despite the difference in radiation exposure, which is much larger than the typical exposures from nuclear power, the rate of cancer death is lower in the Rocky Mountains than in the South! Maybe it is just that the people in the Rockies just know how to live right, but as they are getting a double dose of radiation, and still coming in with a low rate of cancer, this indicates that there are other factors here that are more "primary" than radiation, as far as cancer is concerned.
Here are some links to sources I use:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/otheract/gis/gis_atnchs.htm
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/radon/usagamma.gif
I assume you're talking about the U.S. alone, but the global situation is rather different. http://www.uic.com.au/nip14.htm lists 4000 "immediate fatalities" from 1972-1992 due to hydro power.
According to http://www.uic.com.au/nip14app.htm, 3500 alone killed in India due to two dam failure incidents in 1979 and 1980. Mind you, I have some issue with equating a "dam failure" with "deaths due to hydro power", given that dams have a purpose other than for hydro (I can't even find proof that the dams in question are used for hydroelectric power. However the Vaiont dam disaster in Italy, 1963, killing over 2000, was definitely a case of fatalies due to hydroelectric power generation).
I completely disagree. What happens is that the proponents patiently and convincingly debunk the negative issues that are raised but it seems to have no effect. The anti-nukes just keep using the same discredited sources (e.g. Storm and Smith) and making the same disproved arguments (e.g. we are running out of Uranium). Many observers just sort of split the difference. So the proponents get frustrated and sometimes are intemperate.
But this thread seems to be different. It seems the proponents are being heard.
I've read too many assertions that nuclear waste is 'no problem' with the implication that one can almost sprinkle it on one's breakfast cereal with no ill results. Then there are assertions that Chernobyl caused 'only 30-70' deaths and everything is hunky-dory in that area now because look, all the wildlife is thriving. Even the most cursory search will reveal major problems and excess deaths in the thousands from Chernobyl. These are the kinds of 'arrogant dismissals I'm referring to, and there are plenty of them. I find assertions that there exists thousands of years of easily extracted nuclear fuel to be highly suspect. When someone makes these kinds of suspect assertions, I tend to doubt anything else they say. And I also am very skeptical of the notion that humans can be 'radiation deficient.'
I do appreciate in-depth analysis of nuclear power and the design difficulties. I'm wary of what I consider arm-waving. I'm not anti-nuke, just cautious and very aware that humans are not very good at handling large complex technical systems. Hence the desire to take it slowly and carefully.