One technical note. There was an active debate on the "New nukes for the UK" article by a handful of people when it was cut off by the "No new comments may be added" a several days ago.
I agree that comments typically fall off significantly when an article goes to page 2, but sometimes there is still viable, and worthwhile debate.
In the case in point, the ultra# pro-nuke side was stating that nuclear reactors immersed in a pool of 500 C hot sodium was perfectly safe, and that uprating existing nukes by 50% by using doughnut fuel with water flow up the middle (think straws) was technically and economically feasible. And they ascribed all of the reasons for teh past collapse of the nuke building industry to outside factors, while I see it as hari-kari. IMO, the last Rush to Nukes destroyed the demand for new nukes due to internal industrial faults (massive cost over-runs, delays and almost complete plants that were denied operating certificates).
I was wondering what technical constraints required this cut-off of debate and if an exception policy could be instated ?
Thanks,
Alan
# I consider myself pro-nuke, but with a skeptics eye to the possibilities and problems.
As someone that has observed the results of water coming into contact with sodium, the very idea of surrounding a nuclear reactor with a pool of liquid sodium makes me more than a little nervous. Yes, I know that there are all sorts of precautions in place to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. It is the contingencies that were not anticipated that worry me.
Some high-end cars used to use sodium-filled exhaust valves to keep the seats from burning. As exciting as the reaction of sodium and water is, it's still a managable engineering problem.
How do you feel about that sodium azide detonator pointing at your face as you sit in front of your airbag?
An earlier car sent me to hospital (ER visit & discharged same day) when they went off in a "fender bender".
Front airbags are not much better than a properly secured seatbelt.
But we accept 40,000 auto deaths and 100,000s of lafe altering injuries from cars & SUVs every year.
And you're questioning that? You have a problem with a Vietnam War's worth of death and maimings yearly? What are you, some kind of Un-American scum? Honestly, I'm being sarcastic here but it's Un-American to think or talk about this. Just think of the cars as the lions who used to "harvest" humans on the African veldt a million years ago.
LIke many Japanese people used to living in train-based cities, my wife didn't know how to drive until she learned at the age of 31 upon moving to a suburb in the US.
To an adult accustomed to the relative safety of trains, cars seem outrageously perilous. Short of jumping onto the tracks of an oncoming train, it is pretty hard to hurt yourself on a train even if you are stumbling drunk. In a car, however, a few seconds of inattention can mean a quick death or injury. Indeed, it is probably the only thing that most people do, during a day, that has that potential for instant death.
The idea of two multi-ton masses of metal speeding toward each other at up to 55 mph with nothing more than a yellow line of paint on the pavement to separate them does seem incredibly foolish and reckless. (But not wreck-less!)
The idea of two multi-ton masses of metal speeding toward each other at up to 55 mph
Where do you live where people obey the speed limit? Driving at 55 in most places that are not heavily patroled or known speed traps will get you run over. Most stretches of I57 between Chicago and my home you need to do 75 just to keep up with traffic.
I was wondering what technical constraints required this cut-off of debate and if an exception policy could be instated ?
The reason is spam prevention. Spammers like to target threads that are no longer active, and add their blocks of links. No one notices...until you link to it as a reference and find a thousand porn links appended.
If a discussion that is still on-topic and productive has "timed out," feel free to continue it in a new DrumBeat.
Whatever the merits -- safe, clean, available, etc. -- nuclear power was an economic disaster in the Pacific Northwest. Taxpayers and ratepayers have not yet forgotten the hit they took from WPPS in Washington and Trojan near Portland.
Granted, no one died. But plenty of people lied in trying to bring these projects on line-- some of them were abandoned before they were completed-- and all of them are gone now.
It doesn't seem likely that nuclear power could ever be "viable" without massive government subsidies. There are, of course, massive hidden subsidies in our hydrocarbon and hydroelectric infrastructure -- and in any rational world, the subsidies would all be put on a spread sheet and a rational decision made about supporting them for the "public good." But of course, only TOD is "rational." Everything else is homo politicus
The disaster which befell nuclear power was mostly caused elsewhere. To list some of the exogenous causes:
Erroneous projections of near-term electric demand. They had been made during a period of rapid growth, which had not continued.
Rampant inflation. Interest rates peaked over 20% per year. This combined with...
Government regulation of utility financial practices. Utilities had to put the cost on credit instead of paying for it out of revenues.
Government mis-regulation of the nuclear industry in particular. Regulators demanded changes to parts of plants which had already been completed, to list just one egregious practice. This ran up costs and pushed back schedules, adding to the woes caused by #2 and #3.
Courts allowed "environmental" (Luddite) groups to block construction, also driving up costs.
Add to this the paranoia pushed on a scientifically-illiterate public by propagandists claiming that American PWR's, Soviet RMBK's and nuclear weapons are all the same, and the industry couldn't keep up.
Just cutting off water flow thru a nuke waste site is mega death.
That's a misunderstanding that tends to perpetuate carbon monoxide poisonings, each of which has associated with it a few tens of millions of dollars in fossil fuel tax revenue.
When spent fuel is old enough to leave its cooling pools and go into dry casks -- minimum five years, I think -- it no longer requires any cooling water.
Our year-2108 descendants will inherit lands in which, buried a kilometre deep or a little less, are 250 billion watts of radioactivity. This may include, halfway down or a little further, our radioactive legacy to them, now approaching 0.3 billion year-2108 watts, in sturdy containers. The rest will be natural; it's there now.
I've been protesting nukes since TU's Matagorda Plant.
I've neglected in depth studies to concentrate on other matters.
I'll engage you across the board on this, but note that we'll be decommissioning
these plants faster than we can get new ones up and running.
I note you didn't bring up Sellafield and Yucca.
We can start at 1998:
Friends of the Earth: Press Release: BNFL/WESTINGHOUSE DEAL ...
The NII has urged British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), which runs Sellafield, ... including Sellafield (also Yucca Mountain in the US, and a site each in East Asia ... www.foe.co.uk/pubsinfo/infoteam/pressrel/1998/19980624164849.html
Then 2000:
Crisis deepens over British nuclear reprocessing plant
Before the approval of the Yucca site, BNFL had expressed interest in transporting waste materials from the US for storage in Sellafield. ... www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/nuc-a03.shtml - 20k
2004:
[Jan 15, 2004] Irish MEP Nuala Ahern has called for a team of international experts to investigate possible contamination at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Britain. Ms Ahern said yesterday that a study conducted by the British Ministry of Health found higher levels of plutonium in people living close to ...
2007
Sellafield 'not fit' for nuclear waste disposal | Business | The ...
It was last updated at 09:54 on November 02 2007. The government has been warned that it would be "wrong" and possibly illegal to use Sellafield in West ... www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/02/nuclearindustry.greenpolitics - 60k
And yes I did.
(3 Mile Island/Chernobyl did it and cost over runs)
As much as protesters brought VietNam to an end.
(Mutiny in the ranks did it and cost over runs).
I'll stay with Sellafield and Yucca.
" But lingering resentment over cost overruns, concerns over spent fuel storage and fear of terrorist attacks or human error that could cause catastrophic destruction means California's major utilities may have to look outside the state to build a nuclear power plant -- at least initially, Mr. Wan says."
And it seems no one has talked about Matagorda in awhile.
I asked, "The Matagorda nuclear plant? Do you think you made a difference?".
'mcgowanmc' answered,
... yes I did.
Then we agree.
... it seems no one has talked about Matagorda in awhile.
That's what I figured, since I hadn't heard of a Matagorda plant.
We agree you made a difference. Has anyone died, in the region that might have been powered by the plant you stopped, from domestic carbon monoxide poisoning? From natural gas explosion?
That is the sort of difference I believe you have made. Also, government has made a lot of money taxing fossil fuel that might, but for you, have stayed in the ground.
If no-one's talking about the Matagorda plant any more, maybe you should restart the talk. It is not impossible for a traitor to mend, but time is limited.
And dont forget a million tones of radioactive gloves, packaging, pipe lagging, floor sweepings, nose blowings - the sort of stuff piling up at places like Drigg near Sellafield [300 metres from the sea incidentally].
We are going to be diverting enough energy cleaning up non-radioactive landfill.
Name all the people who have died from civilian nuclear waste in the last 10 years.
Just on the death certificate, or is it OK if the life was shorten because of processing material that ended up in in some manner that a civilian paid for the kWh?
If there were any statistical evidence for this, fine.
the fact is that studies have now confirmed that the standards which were set for radioactivity were based on a false premise - that from the amount which would outright kill you straight off, down through a dose which would make you really sick, and then right down to tiny amounts they thought might affect some future generation, there was a straight line function - IOW any dose at all of radiation was harmful.
It is now apparent that we had (rightly) been over-conservative, and that below certain levels it was impossible to show any ill effects - I am not just making that up, that is now standard knowledge for medical treatment, radiation assessment and so on.
This means that you don't need to worry about living in Denver! - no excess deaths are detectable there due to the mile-high location!
It also means that all the talk of so many millions dying, mostly in fact hypothesised for future generations, were in fact based on this mistaken notion.
Don't go eating tritium sandwiches, but most radioactive material is a lot less harmful than mercury, released by the bucketload by the coal industry, and with a half-life of forever!
The discussion is the waste, not radiation. The waste is:
Tailings from the mines
The heavy metals
In short - things not U-235
Iraq, Kosovo and other places have some of 'civilian waste' as fine dust. When some of that dust was a sabot, said sabot did kill someone.....is that dead wo/man to be included in the body count requested?
How much harm has non-nuclear power oriented mine tailings done? Enormously more.
The comparative benefit from nuclear power relative to costs is very high.
In Iraq the deaths from uranium quite pretty insignificant from the deaths from fast moving lead and steel.
"When some of that dust was a sabot, said sabot did kill someone.....is that dead wo/man to be included in the body count requested?"
Sure, once you add up consider the many more thousands killed by petroleum powered bombers as oil deaths.
I.e. "no".
The question is civilian nuclear power, operated in a regulated environment.
Not weaponry designed to kill efficiently.
Is this magical thinking which applies only to things nuclear? That there is a vicious and essentialist spiritual contamination from clearly horrible nuclear weapons and uranium-containing missiles?
So, how many people have died from nuclear waste from civilian power in the last 10 years?
A few hundred to thousand coal miners die in China, the pollution undoubtably kills many, many more. Nuclear power directly replaces coal, or it ought to.
This is like banning vaccinations because there is a tiny chance somebody will get sick from the vaccine instead of the much larger chance of harm from the wild-type disease itself.
People die mining coal every month. People get killed driving cars every month. Thousands of people die each year due to accidental electrocution in the home, falling off ladders, building site accidents etc. Farmers get run over by their own tractors a few times a year.
Pretty much everything is dangerous to some degree.
On the other hand, the French seem to be able to manage to generate most of their power from nuclear reactors without poisoning their population. And there are plenty of reactors operating in the USA, Germany, Switzerland and Japan without problems.
The dangers associated with nuclear power are exagerated for emotional effect.
As for waste, it's waste now. Sometime within the next 200 years we are likely to figure out how to reprocess it to extract the remaining radioactivity for energy. Building a facility that will last 200 years isn't that hard - the Romans could do it.
I really don't see it doing any harm while it sits out in the desert a thousand miles from anyone.
Compared to the current fossil fuel setup, nuclear is a clean option. As an alternative to the anarchy of a poorly managed global powerdown and rapid population decrease, it looks pretty good.
Talk to the tens of thousand of sub-mariners who spent years to careers within 50 yards of an active nuclear power plant. They don't seem to be dying early. And, as their job involves possible Armageddon, any psychiatric effects and we probably wouldn't be here to talk about it. Consider the French countryside. Nuclear power is safe. Realize there is no net increase in radioactivity, rather a concentrating of natural radioactivity and a hastened and harnessed decay to less radioactive elements. Yes, there are problems. No I don't think it can entirely solve PO issues, but until someone gives me a well reasoned argument otherwise I see it as part of the (possibly temporary) solution. Ever hear of miner's black lung disease? I am open to other views but perspective is needed.
One further point, and understand that I am not rabidly pro-nuclear but this occurred to me after I just posted. The net radioactivity of the Earth decreases from nuclear power. U235, or is it 238, decays in a chain reaction through an elaborate decay scheme basically to mostly lead I believe (to bad for the alchemists;) The point is radioactivity from nuclear power cannot somehow (easily) poison the whole world. It is less than what was input as starting material. If it leaks from Yucca Mountain and distributes to an area equal to what it was gathered from it has returned to a natural state. It is only the concentration of radioactive elements that is problematic. If you want to avoid radiation exposure, and this no joke, avoid unnecessary whole body CT scans done with current equipment.
No doubt this is all true. But what is remembered is how much it cost, and the visible bones of dead nuclear plants, commemorate a vast swindle. I'm not really sure safety was the main issue -- I lived in Oregon when all that was going on, and a friend of mine was on the WPPS board. We mostly thought it was just a con game. After all, the really toxic nuclear stuff was /is upriver at Hanford -- and WPPS is small potatoes compared to that.
It was pigs at the trough then, just as now. I'm really surprised anything at all ever gets done constructively. It certainly is easier to tear things apart than to build them.
The Rancho Seco nuclear power plant near Sacramento, California was shut down decades ago because they could never get the plant to produce anywhere near its rated capacity reliably. There are now fields of solar panels on the property that produce electricity cleanly from the sun. While the panels do not produce anywhere hear the output of the nuclear plant when it was operating, it serves as a symbol of what can be done.
That seems to sum it all up right there. The nuclear power plant didn't work perfectly as advertised (over-hyped?), so therefore it makes more sense to do even less with these solar panels. The whole argument with the anti-nuke types is full of this sort of idiocy.
And, ironically, you display your own inability to think logically.
One tech uses horrible poisonous materials that are radioactive for millennia. We have to use extra-special measures to protect us and the rest of the environment from these wastes for thousands of years. Therefore, we want these processes to be as safe as possible, if not perfect. The potential harm is so great from a "minor" slip-up that we must think in terms of perfection.
On the other hand, solar, which is far less dangerous and requires no millennia long interment efforts, does not require such safeguards. If you screw up with solar, you simply get less power.
So, anyone with the thinking power of an eight year old can see that your argument is so flawed as to suggest you have recently suffered a brain injury.
I'm just asking: How much chemical waste gets generated by solar photovoltaics production? It is my impression that the semiconductor industry generates a lot of waste. Yes? No?
Thin film solar cells that are not used for concentrated solar photovoltaic can use small amounts of toxic materials, much smaller than are emitted by coal burning power plants per KWHr. Much smaller.
But crystal silicon concentrated solar photovoltaic emits mostly dirty silica.
Computer chips also use small amounts of toxic material. These have nothing to do with solar power except for some silicon circuits and power frequency controllers and stuff.
Solar photovoltaic is cleaner than the alternatives, even wind. Wind power uses carbon and plastic resin blades that put some organic chemicals into the air.
I would put solar, wind, nuclear, gas, oil, and coal as polluting in about that order. Hydro and geo are situation dependent. Some hydro plants produce essentially no pollution, some produce lots of methane from drowned vegetation. Most geo is clean, some dumps sulfur compounds. Depends on the geothermal field involved.
Here is a link to the EU's estimate of the external costs of different forms of energy - the link gives a discussion, and there is a link to a pdf by the EU itself there - might be a bit boring for some, so I will leave it to fellow geeks to click through! :-) http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/22/202710/47
Boils down to fairly small externalities for most things non-fossil, although use of stuff like copper in, for instance, windmills is not trivial if you are building a lot.
I would gladly take the "horrible poisonous materials" from nuclear reactors, all of it neatly stored at the plant, over the relentless spewing of mercury and radioactivity and CO2 from the coal plants we have, where the harm isn't just potential. And, I'll take having my lights working over not working, thank you, which is what happens when we find out solar can't scale up fast enough.
I took a course at the Armed Forces Radiological Institute (AFRI). Along with building a thermonuclear weapon (just kidding :0) I remember an exercise in calculating the energy content from Uranium 235 present in the coal. The U235 provided about an additional 50% energy content if harvested from the coal and used in a nuclear power plant.
People seldom have a conception of the sheer amount of coal used in a coal burning plant. It is on the order of two long trainloads every day. The corollary to this exercise, as I think about it now, would be the venting of half the radioactivity from a nuclear power plant. If I get the time I will try and recreate the numbers and give some basis for comparing nuclear and coal based power. Nuclear power is not a great solution, coal kills thousands each year and exposes us to far more radioactivity, not to mention possible global warming.
Once we hit Peak Natural Gas (and we already have in North America) and Peak Coal then symbols aren't going to keep our lights on and heat blowing on cold nights.
I'm not interested in symbolism. I'm interested in avoiding a massive deep economic depression. I think we are headed toward such a depression right now. A few hundred more nukes could make that depression far less severe.
One technical note. There was an active debate on the "New nukes for the UK" article by a handful of people when it was cut off by the "No new comments may be added" a several days ago.
I agree that comments typically fall off significantly when an article goes to page 2, but sometimes there is still viable, and worthwhile debate.
In the case in point, the ultra# pro-nuke side was stating that nuclear reactors immersed in a pool of 500 C hot sodium was perfectly safe, and that uprating existing nukes by 50% by using doughnut fuel with water flow up the middle (think straws) was technically and economically feasible. And they ascribed all of the reasons for teh past collapse of the nuke building industry to outside factors, while I see it as hari-kari. IMO, the last Rush to Nukes destroyed the demand for new nukes due to internal industrial faults (massive cost over-runs, delays and almost complete plants that were denied operating certificates).
I was wondering what technical constraints required this cut-off of debate and if an exception policy could be instated ?
Thanks,
Alan
# I consider myself pro-nuke, but with a skeptics eye to the possibilities and problems.
As someone that has observed the results of water coming into contact with sodium, the very idea of surrounding a nuclear reactor with a pool of liquid sodium makes me more than a little nervous. Yes, I know that there are all sorts of precautions in place to prevent just this sort of thing from happening. It is the contingencies that were not anticipated that worry me.
Some high-end cars used to use sodium-filled exhaust valves to keep the seats from burning. As exciting as the reaction of sodium and water is, it's still a managable engineering problem.
How do you feel about that sodium azide detonator pointing at your face as you sit in front of your airbag?
I am glad that my car does not have them.
An earlier car sent me to hospital (ER visit & discharged same day) when they went off in a "fender bender".
Front airbags are not much better than a properly secured seatbelt.
But we accept 40,000 auto deaths and 100,000s of lafe altering injuries from cars & SUVs every year.
Alan
And you're questioning that? You have a problem with a Vietnam War's worth of death and maimings yearly? What are you, some kind of Un-American scum? Honestly, I'm being sarcastic here but it's Un-American to think or talk about this. Just think of the cars as the lions who used to "harvest" humans on the African veldt a million years ago.
Hi fleam,
re: "Just think of the cars as the lions who used to "harvest" humans on the African veldt a million years ago."
I had this same exact thought a while back.
The machine-animals - (they do, after all, require food and care)- can sometimes be deadly.
Some are even designed deliberately to be so.
LIke many Japanese people used to living in train-based cities, my wife didn't know how to drive until she learned at the age of 31 upon moving to a suburb in the US.
To an adult accustomed to the relative safety of trains, cars seem outrageously perilous. Short of jumping onto the tracks of an oncoming train, it is pretty hard to hurt yourself on a train even if you are stumbling drunk. In a car, however, a few seconds of inattention can mean a quick death or injury. Indeed, it is probably the only thing that most people do, during a day, that has that potential for instant death.
The idea of two multi-ton masses of metal speeding toward each other at up to 55 mph with nothing more than a yellow line of paint on the pavement to separate them does seem incredibly foolish and reckless. (But not wreck-less!)
Where do you live where people obey the speed limit? Driving at 55 in most places that are not heavily patroled or known speed traps will get you run over. Most stretches of I57 between Chicago and my home you need to do 75 just to keep up with traffic.
The reason is spam prevention. Spammers like to target threads that are no longer active, and add their blocks of links. No one notices...until you link to it as a reference and find a thousand porn links appended.
If a discussion that is still on-topic and productive has "timed out," feel free to continue it in a new DrumBeat.
And I have seen this elsewhere.
You're doing a great job here, Leanan
8D
Whatever the merits -- safe, clean, available, etc. -- nuclear power was an economic disaster in the Pacific Northwest. Taxpayers and ratepayers have not yet forgotten the hit they took from WPPS in Washington and Trojan near Portland.
Granted, no one died. But plenty of people lied in trying to bring these projects on line-- some of them were abandoned before they were completed-- and all of them are gone now.
It doesn't seem likely that nuclear power could ever be "viable" without massive government subsidies. There are, of course, massive hidden subsidies in our hydrocarbon and hydroelectric infrastructure -- and in any rational world, the subsidies would all be put on a spread sheet and a rational decision made about supporting them for the "public good." But of course, only TOD is "rational." Everything else is homo politicus
The disaster which befell nuclear power was mostly caused elsewhere. To list some of the exogenous causes:
Add to this the paranoia pushed on a scientifically-illiterate public by propagandists claiming that American PWR's, Soviet RMBK's and nuclear weapons are all the same, and the industry couldn't keep up.
See Selafield UK on what all nukes have to look forward to.
And Yucca Mt after you've seen Selafield.
The waste problem will always be with us.
Just cutting off water flow thru a nuke waste site is mega death.
That's a misunderstanding that tends to perpetuate carbon monoxide poisonings, each of which has associated with it a few tens of millions of dollars in fossil fuel tax revenue.
When spent fuel is old enough to leave its cooling pools and go into dry casks -- minimum five years, I think -- it no longer requires any cooling water.
Our year-2108 descendants will inherit lands in which, buried a kilometre deep or a little less, are 250 billion watts of radioactivity. This may include, halfway down or a little further, our radioactive legacy to them, now approaching 0.3 billion year-2108 watts, in sturdy containers. The rest will be natural; it's there now.
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
I've been protesting nukes since TU's Matagorda Plant.
I've neglected in depth studies to concentrate on other matters.
I'll engage you across the board on this, but note that we'll be decommissioning
these plants faster than we can get new ones up and running.
I note you didn't bring up Sellafield and Yucca.
We can start at 1998:
Friends of the Earth: Press Release: BNFL/WESTINGHOUSE DEAL ...
The NII has urged British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), which runs Sellafield, ... including Sellafield (also Yucca Mountain in the US, and a site each in East Asia ...
www.foe.co.uk/pubsinfo/infoteam/pressrel/1998/19980624164849.html
Then 2000:
Crisis deepens over British nuclear reprocessing plant
Before the approval of the Yucca site, BNFL had expressed interest in transporting waste materials from the US for storage in Sellafield. ...
www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/nuc-a03.shtml - 20k
2004:
[Jan 15, 2004] Irish MEP Nuala Ahern has called for a team of international experts to investigate possible contamination at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Britain. Ms Ahern said yesterday that a study conducted by the British Ministry of Health found higher levels of plutonium in people living close to ...
2007
Sellafield 'not fit' for nuclear waste disposal | Business | The ...
It was last updated at 09:54 on November 02 2007. The government has been warned that it would be "wrong" and possibly illegal to use Sellafield in West ...
www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/02/nuclearindustry.greenpolitics - 60k
And do Yucca Mt the same way.
If you so desire.
Sounds like you're changing your ground.
The Matagorda nuclear plant? Do you think you made a difference?
Not at all.
Just establishing my postion/bona fides.
And yes I did.
(3 Mile Island/Chernobyl did it and cost over runs)
As much as protesters brought VietNam to an end.
(Mutiny in the ranks did it and cost over runs).
I'll stay with Sellafield and Yucca.
" But lingering resentment over cost overruns, concerns over spent fuel storage and fear of terrorist attacks or human error that could cause catastrophic destruction means California's major utilities may have to look outside the state to build a nuclear power plant -- at least initially, Mr. Wan says."
And it seems no one has talked about Matagorda in awhile.
I asked, "The Matagorda nuclear plant? Do you think you made a difference?".
'mcgowanmc' answered,
Then we agree.
That's what I figured, since I hadn't heard of a Matagorda plant.
We agree you made a difference. Has anyone died, in the region that might have been powered by the plant you stopped, from domestic carbon monoxide poisoning? From natural gas explosion?
That is the sort of difference I believe you have made. Also, government has made a lot of money taxing fossil fuel that might, but for you, have stayed in the ground.
If no-one's talking about the Matagorda plant any more, maybe you should restart the talk. It is not impossible for a traitor to mend, but time is limited.
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
Senator Reid has done an excellent job delaying Yucca Mountain.
And dont forget a million tones of radioactive gloves, packaging, pipe lagging, floor sweepings, nose blowings - the sort of stuff piling up at places like Drigg near Sellafield [300 metres from the sea incidentally].
We are going to be diverting enough energy cleaning up non-radioactive landfill.
Name all the people who have died from civilian nuclear waste in the last 10 years.
Didn't 160 people or so get fried in one single platform (piper alpha) in the North Sea?
Name all the people who have died from civilian nuclear waste in the last 10 years.
Just on the death certificate, or is it OK if the life was shorten because of processing material that ended up in in some manner that a civilian paid for the kWh?
If there were any statistical evidence for this, fine.
the fact is that studies have now confirmed that the standards which were set for radioactivity were based on a false premise - that from the amount which would outright kill you straight off, down through a dose which would make you really sick, and then right down to tiny amounts they thought might affect some future generation, there was a straight line function - IOW any dose at all of radiation was harmful.
It is now apparent that we had (rightly) been over-conservative, and that below certain levels it was impossible to show any ill effects - I am not just making that up, that is now standard knowledge for medical treatment, radiation assessment and so on.
This means that you don't need to worry about living in Denver! - no excess deaths are detectable there due to the mile-high location!
It also means that all the talk of so many millions dying, mostly in fact hypothesised for future generations, were in fact based on this mistaken notion.
Don't go eating tritium sandwiches, but most radioactive material is a lot less harmful than mercury, released by the bucketload by the coal industry, and with a half-life of forever!
The discussion is the waste, not radiation. The waste is:
Tailings from the mines
The heavy metals
In short - things not U-235
Iraq, Kosovo and other places have some of 'civilian waste' as fine dust. When some of that dust was a sabot, said sabot did kill someone.....is that dead wo/man to be included in the body count requested?
How much harm has non-nuclear power oriented mine tailings done? Enormously more.
The comparative benefit from nuclear power relative to costs is very high.
In Iraq the deaths from uranium quite pretty insignificant from the deaths from fast moving lead and steel.
"When some of that dust was a sabot, said sabot did kill someone.....is that dead wo/man to be included in the body count requested?"
Sure, once you add up consider the many more thousands killed by petroleum powered bombers as oil deaths.
I.e. "no".
The question is civilian nuclear power, operated in a regulated environment.
Not weaponry designed to kill efficiently.
Is this magical thinking which applies only to things nuclear? That there is a vicious and essentialist spiritual contamination from clearly horrible nuclear weapons and uranium-containing missiles?
So, how many people have died from nuclear waste from civilian power in the last 10 years?
A few hundred to thousand coal miners die in China, the pollution undoubtably kills many, many more. Nuclear power directly replaces coal, or it ought to.
This is like banning vaccinations because there is a tiny chance somebody will get sick from the vaccine instead of the much larger chance of harm from the wild-type disease itself.
People die mining coal every month. People get killed driving cars every month. Thousands of people die each year due to accidental electrocution in the home, falling off ladders, building site accidents etc. Farmers get run over by their own tractors a few times a year.
Pretty much everything is dangerous to some degree.
On the other hand, the French seem to be able to manage to generate most of their power from nuclear reactors without poisoning their population. And there are plenty of reactors operating in the USA, Germany, Switzerland and Japan without problems.
The dangers associated with nuclear power are exagerated for emotional effect.
As for waste, it's waste now. Sometime within the next 200 years we are likely to figure out how to reprocess it to extract the remaining radioactivity for energy. Building a facility that will last 200 years isn't that hard - the Romans could do it.
I really don't see it doing any harm while it sits out in the desert a thousand miles from anyone.
Compared to the current fossil fuel setup, nuclear is a clean option. As an alternative to the anarchy of a poorly managed global powerdown and rapid population decrease, it looks pretty good.
Talk to the tens of thousand of sub-mariners who spent years to careers within 50 yards of an active nuclear power plant. They don't seem to be dying early. And, as their job involves possible Armageddon, any psychiatric effects and we probably wouldn't be here to talk about it. Consider the French countryside. Nuclear power is safe. Realize there is no net increase in radioactivity, rather a concentrating of natural radioactivity and a hastened and harnessed decay to less radioactive elements. Yes, there are problems. No I don't think it can entirely solve PO issues, but until someone gives me a well reasoned argument otherwise I see it as part of the (possibly temporary) solution. Ever hear of miner's black lung disease? I am open to other views but perspective is needed.
One further point, and understand that I am not rabidly pro-nuclear but this occurred to me after I just posted. The net radioactivity of the Earth decreases from nuclear power. U235, or is it 238, decays in a chain reaction through an elaborate decay scheme basically to mostly lead I believe (to bad for the alchemists;) The point is radioactivity from nuclear power cannot somehow (easily) poison the whole world. It is less than what was input as starting material. If it leaks from Yucca Mountain and distributes to an area equal to what it was gathered from it has returned to a natural state. It is only the concentration of radioactive elements that is problematic. If you want to avoid radiation exposure, and this no joke, avoid unnecessary whole body CT scans done with current equipment.
No doubt this is all true. But what is remembered is how much it cost, and the visible bones of dead nuclear plants, commemorate a vast swindle. I'm not really sure safety was the main issue -- I lived in Oregon when all that was going on, and a friend of mine was on the WPPS board. We mostly thought it was just a con game. After all, the really toxic nuclear stuff was /is upriver at Hanford -- and WPPS is small potatoes compared to that.
It was pigs at the trough then, just as now. I'm really surprised anything at all ever gets done constructively. It certainly is easier to tear things apart than to build them.
The Rancho Seco nuclear power plant near Sacramento, California was shut down decades ago because they could never get the plant to produce anywhere near its rated capacity reliably. There are now fields of solar panels on the property that produce electricity cleanly from the sun. While the panels do not produce anywhere hear the output of the nuclear plant when it was operating, it serves as a symbol of what can be done.
That seems to sum it all up right there. The nuclear power plant didn't work perfectly as advertised (over-hyped?), so therefore it makes more sense to do even less with these solar panels. The whole argument with the anti-nuke types is full of this sort of idiocy.
To speek,
And, ironically, you display your own inability to think logically.
One tech uses horrible poisonous materials that are radioactive for millennia. We have to use extra-special measures to protect us and the rest of the environment from these wastes for thousands of years. Therefore, we want these processes to be as safe as possible, if not perfect. The potential harm is so great from a "minor" slip-up that we must think in terms of perfection.
On the other hand, solar, which is far less dangerous and requires no millennia long interment efforts, does not require such safeguards. If you screw up with solar, you simply get less power.
So, anyone with the thinking power of an eight year old can see that your argument is so flawed as to suggest you have recently suffered a brain injury.
I'm just asking: How much chemical waste gets generated by solar photovoltaics production? It is my impression that the semiconductor industry generates a lot of waste. Yes? No?
Thin film solar cells that are not used for concentrated solar photovoltaic can use small amounts of toxic materials, much smaller than are emitted by coal burning power plants per KWHr. Much smaller.
But crystal silicon concentrated solar photovoltaic emits mostly dirty silica.
Computer chips also use small amounts of toxic material. These have nothing to do with solar power except for some silicon circuits and power frequency controllers and stuff.
Solar photovoltaic is cleaner than the alternatives, even wind. Wind power uses carbon and plastic resin blades that put some organic chemicals into the air.
I would put solar, wind, nuclear, gas, oil, and coal as polluting in about that order. Hydro and geo are situation dependent. Some hydro plants produce essentially no pollution, some produce lots of methane from drowned vegetation. Most geo is clean, some dumps sulfur compounds. Depends on the geothermal field involved.
Here is a link to the EU's estimate of the external costs of different forms of energy - the link gives a discussion, and there is a link to a pdf by the EU itself there - might be a bit boring for some, so I will leave it to fellow geeks to click through! :-)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/22/202710/47
Boils down to fairly small externalities for most things non-fossil, although use of stuff like copper in, for instance, windmills is not trivial if you are building a lot.
I would gladly take the "horrible poisonous materials" from nuclear reactors, all of it neatly stored at the plant, over the relentless spewing of mercury and radioactivity and CO2 from the coal plants we have, where the harm isn't just potential. And, I'll take having my lights working over not working, thank you, which is what happens when we find out solar can't scale up fast enough.
I would gladly take the "horrible poisonous materials" from nuclear reactors, all of it neatly stored at the plant,
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/02/030214073629.htm
I took a course at the Armed Forces Radiological Institute (AFRI). Along with building a thermonuclear weapon (just kidding :0) I remember an exercise in calculating the energy content from Uranium 235 present in the coal. The U235 provided about an additional 50% energy content if harvested from the coal and used in a nuclear power plant.
People seldom have a conception of the sheer amount of coal used in a coal burning plant. It is on the order of two long trainloads every day. The corollary to this exercise, as I think about it now, would be the venting of half the radioactivity from a nuclear power plant. If I get the time I will try and recreate the numbers and give some basis for comparing nuclear and coal based power. Nuclear power is not a great solution, coal kills thousands each year and exposes us to far more radioactivity, not to mention possible global warming.
HI Z,
re: "If I get the time I will try and recreate the numbers and give some basis for comparing nuclear and coal based power."
This is a great idea. To have a separate article and discussion.
Once we hit Peak Natural Gas (and we already have in North America) and Peak Coal then symbols aren't going to keep our lights on and heat blowing on cold nights.
I'm not interested in symbolism. I'm interested in avoiding a massive deep economic depression. I think we are headed toward such a depression right now. A few hundred more nukes could make that depression far less severe.