The Nuclear Option
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In March 2002, during a scheduled refueling outage at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio, workers discovered that boric acid deposits had gnawed a "pineapple-sized" hole into the six-inch-thick steel cap bolted to the top of the reactor. Had the corrosion gone just a third of an inch deeper, radioactive steam would have flooded the containment dome, and Davis-Besse might have been the next Three Mile Island.
As frightening as the near-accident was the way Davis-Besse owners FirstEnergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission responded: by soft-pedaling procedural flaws and scapegoating plant workers, in particular Andrew Siemaszko, a systems engineer who they claimed had failed to report the corrosion. The NRC has since barred Siemaszko from working in the nuclear industry, and in 2006 he was indicted on five counts of lying to the government and falsifying records. But documents show that Siemaszko repeatedly told his employers the reactor head needed a thorough cleaning. FirstEnergy didn't complete that job because it was taking too long (keeping the reactor idle was costing the company $1 million a day)—and the NRC delayed a scheduled inspection of the reactor at FirstEnergy's request.
Watchdog or Lapdog?
The Davis-Besse incident puts into sharp relief a history of regulatory neglect that goes back for decades. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has counted 47 incidents since 1979 in which the NRC failed to adequately address issues at nuclear power plants—until the troubles got so bad the plants had to be shut down for repairs. In some cases, "the NRC allowed reactors with known safety problems to continue operating for months, sometimes years, without requiring owners to fix the problems."
There's evidence, too, that the commission has tolerated serious lapses in security, even after 9/11. In March 2007, an anonymous whistleblower wrote a letter to the NRC claiming that guards at Exelon's Peach Bottom plant in Pennsylvania were "coming into work exhausted after working excessive overtime" and thus "sleeping on duty at an alarming rate." The NRC ignored the letter until a guard videotaped the naps in progress and WCBS in New York aired the tape. The Project on Government Oversight claims a skilled infiltrator would need just 45 seconds to penetrate the area where Peach Bottom stores its spent fuel.
The corporation that provides those sleepy guards, Wackenhut, has also been accused of cheating on security exercises: One DOE inspector general's report found that in 2003 guards had been tipped off in advance about security drills at a government nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The same year, Wackenhut was fired from Entergy's Indian Point plant in New York after guards there admitted they had been improperly armed and trained.
Critics often point out that the NRC is funded by industry fees; despite his cautious support of nuclear power, Obama declared it "a moribund agency...captive of the industries that it regulates." (NRC spokesman Scott Burnell insists that because those fees come to the NRC through the U.S. Treasury, there's no conflict of interest. "It's not a case where the industry is handing us a check," he says.)
Dave Lochbaum, UCS's nuclear-safety expert, believes the problem at the NRC is a lack of money—and congressional attention. "There have been more hearings on lunches in the White House," he notes, "than on whether the NRC's doing a good job."
The French Connection
Just as there are arguments against public investment in nuclear power, there are arguments for it—and one huge living example. France shifted from oil-burning electric plants to nuclear during the oil crisis of the early '70s, and over the past 20 years it has invested $160 billion in nuclear programs, making the country the largest exporter of nuclear electricity in the European Union. Sixteen percent of the world's nuclear power is generated in France. And where once the French were buying nuclear technology from the United States, now it's the other way round: 6 of the 20 applications expected to be submitted to the NRC before 2010 are for the U.S. Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) designed by the French conglomerate Areva.
Instead of just two coolant loops like the traditional "Generation II" reactor, the EPR has four. If one leaks, another kicks in: No more Three Mile Islands. "The EPR has more defensive depth than reactors created for the U.S. market," acknowledges Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the UCS.
His cautious approval of the EPR is significant: Two years ago, Dan Hirsch of the anti-nuclear group Committee to Bridge the Gap warned me not to make too much of the alleged environmentalist enthusiasm for nuclear power. "All of the people supporting it now supported it before," he argued. "It's not news. But when the Union of Concerned Scientists comes out in favor of nuclear, now that will be news."
That hasn't happened exactly: The UCS remains ambivalent about nuclear power, and its position papers reflect deep worries about the technology. But as far as the UCS is capable of liking a reactor, it likes the EPR.
Lyman stresses that the EPR's improved safety doesn't mean that Areva "is a warm and fuzzy company." It only means it designed the EPR to meet the safety standards of the European Union, which happen to be better than ours. "The NRC's whole presumption is that the current reactors are safe enough," Lyman explains. "The NRC is afraid that if it makes too much fuss about how the new ones are safer than old ones, it will mean that the old ones aren't safe enough.
"An opportunity is being squandered," he adds. "If this renaissance is going to happen, you're going to build a new fleet of reactors to last 60, 80, 100 years. Why not lock in a safer reactor design?"
The $50 Billion Question
In 1960, the price of a brand-new light-water reactor hovered around $68 million, just under what it cost to build a new coal plant at the time. (Actual costs were often higher, but eager manufacturers offered "turnkey" plants at a fixed price, absorbing any overruns.) Having recouped their start-up costs, these older reactors now produce electricity—a fifth of the country's power, all in all—at prices that easily compete with coal. But a new plant will have a harder time breaking even: An Areva reactor may start at $3 or $4 billion, already twice as much as a coal plant, but actual construction costs and interest will probably boost total plant cost to $9 billion.
Which is why not a single one will get built without help from the government, says Craig Nesbit of Chicago-based Exelon. "These are huge capital projects," he says. "The largest capital projects on a private scale you can build. We wouldn't be building them without loan guarantees." Nuclear lobbyists have been asking for $50 billion in such guarantees, which, they point out, are given to other industries, including wind and solar: "There's nothing exotic about it," Nesbit says. Companies also want "production tax credits" for the actual power they generate, on the order of a penny or two per kilowatt, also akin to wind energy. So far, Congress has pledged up to $6 billion worth of production tax credits for new nuclear plants. But in 2007, it capped loan guarantees for plant construction at $18.5 billion—scarcely enough to fund a couple of reactors. "We considered that a win for our side," says anti-nuclear activist Becker.
The industry does get another massive taxpayer-funded benefit, however: Since 1957, plant operators have been protected by the Price-Anderson Act, which limits their liability in a catastrophic accident. The 2005 energy bill updated the act, which required reactor operators to carry insurance policies worth $300 million and contribute $95 million to an accident compensation fund. The rest is covered by taxpayers—not a bad deal, considering that it cost $1 billion to clean up after Three Mile Island.
The debate over whether nuclear power deserves this kind of public investment is second only to the debate over whether reactors can ever be safe. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, long a foe of nuclear power, argues that "about three-quarters of all electricity we use in North America can be saved cheaper than just running a coal or nuclear plant, even if the capital costs of the plant were zero." Lovins has argued for 30 years that redirecting nuclear investments toward energy efficiency, solar, wind, or tiny gas turbines that could be located in every neighborhood would yield carbon-free power much faster, without the federally mandated insurance policy. Nuclear power, he's famously said, "is like cutting butter with a chainsaw."
But wind and solar have still not fully conquered their intermittency issues: Wind power works only when the wind blows; solar panels are no good at night. "Distributed micropower" could make progress fast; efficiency would do even better; and we should look forward to the day when they put the mammoth, centralized energy providers that feed our national grid out of business. But given the current economic structure of our energy market, can any of those things quickly replace coal? And how fast? Barring a president who can infuse us with the political will to roll out a Jimmy Carter-style conservation plan, electricity demand will continue to rise. We may be stuck with our devil of a dilemma.
Wasted Promise
The Atomic Age has left behind many kinds of radioactive garbage, from the rags that mopped up hot spills to the concrete from decommissioned reactors to the liquid residue of plutonium warheads. Some is low-level waste, already tucked away in various locations, from Hanford in southwestern Washington state to Barnwellin South Carolina. The waste fuel from nuclear reactors is high-level stuff that will remain dangerously radioactive for millions of years. In volume it's not that much: All the detritus from a half-century of civilian nuclear power "can fit on a football field piled six meters high," says Harold McFarlane, deputy associate laboratory director for nuclear programs at Idaho National Laboratory. "It grows at about three yards a year [in length]." But we still have no place to put it.
Since Congress in 1987 picked Yucca Mountain as the repository for the country's high-level waste, the state of Nevada has sued several times to block it, mostly on the grounds that the Department of Energy relied on bad science to select the spot: Among other things, an earthquake fault runs under it, and water percolates through the porous volcanic tuff. (When I visited after a wet desert winter in 2005, Yucca—which the feds have always characterized as arid—was positively green.)
The repository's most recent opening date was set for 2017. But that date "is clearly out the window," says Ward Sproat, who directs the Yucca project for the DOE. "Based on what I'm seeing right now it's a two- to three-year slip from that." Others predict that the $11 billion facility won't open at all. Still, the DOE has announced that it will file its long-awaited license application in June. For now, nearly all the nation's spent-fuel assemblies sit at individual reactor sites in water-filled basins about the size of swimming pools but 30 feet deeper, and reinforced with concrete. Most of the pools are close to full and, according to a 2002 report by the National Academy of Sciences, vulnerable to terrorist attack.
If Yucca Mountain ever does open, another perplexing problem emerges: transporting waste from the 200-plus reactors around the country. Trains can come off their rails; sabotage and hijackings happen. According to a map the state of Nevada circulates, only the Dakotas, Montana, and Rhode Island lie outside planned nuclear waste transportation routes.
DOE spokesman Allen Benson, who gives tours of Yucca Mountain to journalists, contends that "we've been shipping nuclear waste around the country since the beginning of the atomic age." Still, the DOE intends to build a dedicated rail line 300 miles into the Nevada desert and instruct residents along its route in how to respond to emergencies. Everyone along the route will know where those trains are going. And what they carry.
Dirty Recycling
So why don't we do like they do in France, where they recycle the fuel from their own 59 reactors, along with some from other countries, into neat little piles of useful radionuclides? By dissolving nuclear waste in acids and separating the isotopes, they can reduce 20 years' waste from a family of four's electricity use to a glasslike nugget the size of a cigarette lighter.
France's eager embrace of nuclear technology has yielded some spectacular benefits. The country, which relies on nuclear for nearly 80 percent of its electricity, emits only two tons of carbon dioxide per person per year, less than half the U.S. load. But its reprocessing operations, as with Britain's notoriously leaky site at Sellafield, have racked up such a roster of problems that in the United States they'd be shut down as gross violators of the Clean Water Act. Every year Areva, the French conglomerate that handles reprocessing, dumps so much radioactive liquid into the Channel that, says Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, "there are certain beaches where the effluent pipe is where you can get a suntan at night.
"I'm not going to say the French are 'no blood, no foul,'" Lochbaum told me, "but they're not quite as concerned about effluents as we are. They tend to believe more in 'the solution to pollution is dilution.'" They are, however, in violation of European Union pollution regulations—largely because the waste contains the dangerous isotope technetium, which so far no one has found a way to remove.
Carbon Free and Nuclear Free: A Roadmap for US Energy Policy. for Free online!!
http://www.ieer.org/carbonfree/index.html
btw just because there will be radio-isotopes in spent fuel 200K years from now doesn't mean that it will be high level waste. By that point it will be pretty minimal. By a thousand years most of the really nasty stuff will be decayed. Also, there is granite that ticks over at 1000-3000 cpm and that doesn't stop anyone from facing buildings with it.
http://rethinkingnuclarpower.googlepages.com.
While I cannot claim to have any answers, I do remember as a kid being shipped off to one of those summer camps in the woodsy remoteness of Maine to learn to rock climb, and paddle white water and I guess to offer my parents a break from my rather juvenile delinquent tendencies—I was a rather out of control youth. There were along the shores of Moose Pond at the base of Pleasant Mountain, a great number of rather interesting characters assembled at camp Winona. One individual singled himself out on the very issue you have written about today—his name was Amory Lovins. We used to make fun of Amory's accent, which was back then far more “King's English”, which possessed the old “Pip, Pip and all that rot” sort of a hum to it—today after almost 40 years in the US Amory has acquired the American drawl but he certainly hasn't lost his sharp wit nor his clarity of mind. Nonetheless it was Amory's general message to us kids about our world, our home, Planet Earth that sat in my mind and not merely all the great and useful things we learned in relation to paddling down the great rivers of Maine and beyond (3 of which are protected by the national rivers act) nor scaling the walls of the Webster Cliffs or Huntington's Ravine. Amory being a Cambridge educated Astrophysicist had the ability to explain to even kids the general make up of the universe, where some nights he would arrange beneath the stars late in the evening an astronomy 101 class for 13 year olds—I have never forgotten my lessons either and still do stare out into the mid winter sky with equal amazement and curiosity to this very day—following the movement of the stars aids the mind and increases ones awareness. Still even back then he was very much involved with environmental issues and a staunch supporter of the Sierra Club and thus he tried to pass on what he knew and what he understood and why he had the opinions he did on to us youngsters. I would hardily recommend any of his numerous books that tend to deal with energy and environmental issues—I recommend “Winning the Oil Endgame” as a starter, since it is at this very instant in time become an issue of such propensity that we are even engaged in war over the Oil Endgame and in such a fashion that unless we alter our path we will find our demise. Amory offers rather enlightening ideas when it comes to energy efficiency and of course pollution as well as an answer to how we can face down this energy demon in a more sustainable way—that is he offers concrete and implementable solutions.
The whole article is an example of what happens when people read only American news.
There is no free lunch in energy. Our civilization uses massive amounts of it, and it cannot be made out of magic fairy dust. Every energy supply source has adverse impacts, including renewable sources, and particularly biomass, which is, outside niche applications, an environmental and humanitarian disaster. If you don’t think so, consider the people who are starving because they cannot afford the spiraling price of food, driven up in part by the world’s rich people - - that includes us who buy fuel with ethanol for our cars, or run them proudly on biodiesel - - burning food for energy. Or consider the Amazon forest as it is converted to monoculture soybean fields for biodiesel, or the wildlife habitat in the United States that is being plowed back into production to grow stuff to burn for energy.
The most benign renewable energy technologies are the non-combustion ones. Any credible and realistic analysis that takes into account the technical problems of scale, deployment logistics, materials bottlenecks, institutional inertia and countervailing forces will reveal that, on the energy supply side, socially and environmentally acceptable (mostly non-combustion) renewable energy will not be deployed quickly enough to, in itself, defend people who are alive right now against the potential for catastrophic climate change that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree is posed by current trends.
While it is easy to make back-of-the-envelope calculations about potential for wind or solar, it is astronomically more difficult to convert that potential into actual power and then get that power to where people use it. Just ask a wind developer trying to site turbines near people who value their country or ocean views. In the set of circumstances that we actually face, nuclear has to be on the table, or an acceptable future may well be off the table.
Many people who sustain anti-nuclear attitudes seem to presume, probably without thinking it through, that the undeniably problematic issues associated with nuclear energy go away if the United States, or some state in the United States, refuses to employ the technology. That presumption is a mistake. Regardless of whether the United States participates in the greenhouse gas advantages associated with expansion of nuclear energy, it will have deal with the technology’s problematic issues because, worldwide, a massive expansion of nuclear is already occurring. Dealing with the problems of waste, reprocessing, and potential proliferation will require strong institutions and international will. That massive challenge has to be shouldered irrespective of whether we also take advantage of nuclear energy’s benefits.
Since we are going to have to deal with the problems anyway, shouldn’t we also get the benefits?
The energy and climate problems, can only be solved, or at least better controlled, by making hard choices that many people might prefer not to have to make. The choice is not between wind, solar, and efficiency on the one side, and nuclear on the other. In the world as-it-is, with its confounding problems and limitations, we will need them all, and in staggering quantities. Given the massive amounts of electricity that nuclear energy can provide - - in our country already-existing nuclear plants, by improving their efficiency, have quietly been delivering more emissions-free electricity than all new renewable energy sources combined - - we should use it, improve it, and expand it, while blinding ourselves to neither its potential, its benefits, its problems or the weighty obligations that go along with it. Nuclear Power? Yes thanks!
Just take a look at this:
www.nrel.gov/analysis/forum/pdfs/2003/summary_03.pdf
http://commonhorizon.blogspot.com/
Thanks,
Gonzalo
1) CFLs destroy our ozone...baned
2) Carbon from petrol is destorying our atmosphere...about to be baned.
and now...
3) Radioactive waste from nuclear.
Why can't we learn?
One responder sites new technology that creates high level wastes that are "only" harmful for hundreds rather than a half million years. There's still decommissioning costs associated with plants and the need for the public to insure against catastrophe, which the manufacturers and operators aren't willing to risk.
Last, conservation in combination with renewable energy, plus population growth and concerted effort to plant greenery to reduce CO2 seems a lot less complicated and realistic.
Nuff said.
Meanwhile, why not take the regressive subsidies lavished on the oil and nuclear industries and plow them all into solar and wind? With concerted effort, we can slash the demand single-family homes and a range of small businesses place on the grid, alleviating the increase in demand on the large power plants, hence alleviating the need to build more large power plants of any stripe.
The US will most likely not be an early adopter of whatever nuclear technology proves its mettle due to inbuilt skepticism, but India, Russia and others will do the research and development regardless. We can all benefit.
It's already clear that nuclear plants can and do operate safely. They have done so for many years now, especially when what I consider "recent" (say, the fall of the Berlin Wall) is regarded as ancient history by some of my younger colleagues. In normal operation - no small consideration - nuclear power plants harm no-one. In failure: Three Mile Island was an example of good design overcoming bad operational action, finally harming no-one. Chernobyl was an example of suicidal operational decisions combined with poor design and construction, killing about 60 so far. The Banqiao dam failure, for comparison, killed 26,000 immediately and about another 145,000 in subsequent famines and epidemics. Now that's the worst single-event industrial disaster I know about, and it's still less than the annual global toll from coal pollution.
Nuclear waste, or used fuel, is a tricky problem but the scale of the problem is small. All US nuclear power waste has been safely held on-site for 30 years, plus or minus, which is a claim you'd find hard to make about other industries. That's not much from a quite remarkable amount of electricity generated. When a decision on disposal is finally made by government, the waste will still be safe.
Nuclear terrorism is much discussed but it's a bit like being scared of the dark - if you actually think it through, there's really not a lot to be scared of. Waste is hard to get at, hard to handle, almost impossible to conceal, and far more difficult to do damage with than other far cheaper and easier methods. Terrorists generally don't do hard (complex) stuff. And nuclear plants are very, very hard targets. EPRI showed that a containment building survives even a really well-aimed airliner.
And let's just clear up "too cheap to meter" - it was not a promise. It was a hope for the far future, maybe fission, maybe fusion, maybe something else. But judge for yourselves: here's the whole sentence that Lewis Strauss, from government not industry, uttered in 1954:
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electricity too cheap to meter, -- will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, -- will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger at great speeds, -- and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."
The entire nuclear cycle is toxic, and has mainly occurred on Native American lands in the SW U.S. Mining, milling, manufacturing, exploding/testing, dumping.
The Navajo Nation President recently reiterated the Nation's stance of NO uranium mining. The Grand Canyon is also another target for mining uranium!
The Native Americans continue to live with the deadly legacy of nuclear radiation contamination from past mining activities. Friends of mine have died because of the contamination of their lands.
Al Gore has always promoted nuclear (although quietly) - follow the money, and say No to nuclear energy.
Nuclear power plants open a source of nuclear waste that can then be used to create nuclear weapons and the so-called depleted uranium is used to coat missiles and bullets enabling them to go through metal and brick like it's butter. When it explodes, the particulets are airborne making them ingestible and inhalable, and carcinegenic. Nuclear contamination is one of those things that just keeps on 'giving' - it's toxic to our DNA. Look into the deformed children being born to our Vets as well as people in Middle East. It's rampant, and devastating.
There are ecologically sound alternatives such as wind, solar, wave, and geothermal - natural energy solutions are available. These technologies are underfunded and even suppressed.
Consider the future Seven Generations as we explore alternatives to coal, oil, hydro and nuclear.
There has been research into the radioactivity of coal stations since the 1960's, but a useful primer can be found in Scientific American here:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id =coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Consider the problems which have plagued the Paducah Kentucky enrichment plant. The cleanup of the immediate area polluted by this plant is being conducted by the DOE (taxpayers money) and can be expected to continue well into the next decade.
Only eight hundred and twenty-three million dollars has been spent so far but according to the US General Accounting Office this cleanup could wind up costing the taxpayer over one and a half billion dollars.(http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04457.pdf)
Further cleanup and decommissioning (also the taxpayers responsibility) is expected to cost another five billion dollars. Oh yeah, this report was presented to Congress several years ago so don't forget to add inflation into the mix.
I don't believe nuclear energy and coal afford an either or scenario. We can and should find better solutions to the problems at hand.
Our plant was reliable - it was our sole source of propulsion, electricity, fresh water, and new oxygen (manufactured by electrolysis from water) inside a sealed environment (submarine).
It was reasonably simple to operate - I was just 27 years old (with about 4 years of intensive experience) when assigned the responsibility of managing the engineering department. I had 40 trained people, only 5 of whom were college graduates and not one with a nuclear engineering degree. We had all gone through a rather extensive training program, but none of us would qualify as rocket scientists. We knew what we were doing and cared a great deal about doing it well.
Our fuel source contained a mass of uranium that was just slightly more than my own body mass, yet it lasted for 14 years and kept the ship operating for 2/3 of each of those years. When the operating period was over, the left over used fuel could fit underneath my current office desk. Not bad for something that powered a 9000 ton vessel for 14 years. Just imagine how much soot, NOx, SOx, and CO2 an equivalent diesel engine would have produced. Come to think of it, there is no such thing as an equivalent diesel engine, they cannot operate for more than a few seconds without outside air and without spewing their waste material for all of the world to share.
Many people point to the stance of the Navahos as indictment of nuclear power, but they fail to scratch the surface to find out that the coal industry pays the Navahos about $600 million per year to host one of the largest and dirtiest coal fired power plants in the entire country. How many Native Americans have died in mining for coal compared to those that MAY have gotten sick from uranium mining at a time in our history when we had less stringent requirements for ventilation and other safety aspects of uranium mining?
Someone also mentioned Amory Lovins, and put him up on a pedestal, but it is important to understand that he has spent almost forty years suggesting that fossil fuels are a better alternative than fission. He also freely claims to have worked for Big Oil for more than 30 years. Interesting - since nuclear fission is the ONLY alternative energy source that has ever captured markets from oil, coal, or gas.
I also find it very interesting how wind and solar are sold as nice, friendly individually controlled power sources, but the major names in those business are quite familiar - GE, Siemens, BP, Chevron, FPL. Why should taxpayers give money to BP to help it develop new solar cells - don't they have plenty in their own R&D budget?
Energy conversations often devolve into discussions about how, with conservation, we could make do with "what we have already", but the people making those arguments do not seem to understand how much effort and capital is invested every year in extracting more coal, oil and gas from the Earth in order to keep those existing machines running. Uranium and thorium offer an incredible improvement in energy density - ultimately they can produce about 2-3 MILLION times as much heat per unit mass as fossil fuels. It is an opportunity that needs to seized now, while we still have enough excess energy and human ingenuity to invest in the next big thing.
Just extracting the ore from the ground is dangerous to any kind of life!
I used to live in Belgian Congo where the Ore was extracted and I know for a fact that the miners did not get to live very long and the mounds of dust resulting from the extraction was and still is dangerous for many thousands of miles.
Here in Utah, it is the native Americans who work in the mines and they have very short lives as well.
I have yet to see any documentaries about this!
Why is the Public not informed about this?
We do have the technology for free, yes free energy and it has existed for a very long time, but of course it would not benefit the big multinationals and all the members of our present selected government.
Man is inherently stupid!
Perhaps you are not aware that the US essentially stopped uranium mining in the early 1990s when the price got so low that it was no longer worth the trouble. Some mines are being restarted, but the only ones in the US that are currently operating use a technology called In Situ Leaching that requires very few miners and none that are exposed to any dust.
1) Thorium. Thorium breeds to fissionable uranium, and there's more than 10x more thorium than uranium.
2) Burn-up. Current reactor designs are horribly inefficient, burning up only a fraction of the fuel, leaving a huge remainder of problematic high-level waste. More modern designs (dating back to 1945!) not mentioned here (fast-flux, et al) burn up much more radioactivity and leave much less waste.
3) Containment. Using water as a heat transfer medium is nearly criminal because waste in water inevitably joins the biosphere. Designs using helium or nitrogen as the heat transfer medium, running turbines directly, make it much more difficult to carry waste out of containment in the event of a leak. Colorado's Fort St. Vrain reactor is one such.
4) Reprocessing metal and metal-oxide fuel offers opportunities for mishap and mischief. Instead, designs like the pebble-bed (again, WW2 vintage) trap pebbles of fuel in billiard-ball-sized multi-layer capsules that you couldn't crush if you ran a locomotive over them. Pebbles can be removed through a hopper in the bottom of the reactor vessel, remotely inspected for burn-up-fraction, and sent back into the vessel if their fuel doesn't need reprocessing... much easier than awkward fuel rods. It's also a fast flux design, burning up much more fuel (including plutonium) than water-cooled designs.
Congress has been lying down of the job of demanding adherence to non-proliferation and non-proliferating countries should be compensated as originally stipulated in the rules. But
nuclear power should only be considered as a stopgap until there is enough power
from the completely renewable resources.
Also power from reactors should be allocated to priorities such as producing windmills and solar reactors.
if the half life really is 30,000 yrs for the waste that's only 10 times as long as we've had written language.
use solar and wind to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. put the hydrogen in a propane tank to power a generator when the sun don't shine. convert the car to run on it too. house to house now
Please share the source of your assertion that nuclear is more expensive than "renewables" like wind and solar energy. The initial cost of the plant is only one part of the equation; the amount of power that can be produced is just as important.
The water consumption for many nuclear plants is near zero - the plants located near large bodies of water without cooling towers simply change the temperature as it goes through the steam plant condensers. That action is identical to that used in all other thermal steam plants, no matter what the fuel source.
The "waste issue" is the best part of the pro-nuclear story. We control all of the waste coming out of nuclear plants - the deadly waste that comes out of fossil fuel plants is - by necessity and design - simply dumped into our common atmosphere. If you do not consider that waste to be deadly, try running your car in a sealed garage for a few minutes.
I was in the Naval Nuclear Power Program in the 80's. "five new 1,000 megawatt reactors every year", a 1,000 megawatt reactor is not very powerful and would lead your reader to believe that it is an impossible task. This tends to leave me believing that you have a non-technical background and should not be speaking about this subject.
To those who love clean air and water, nuclear power is the only solution for longterm energy efficiency.
Also please remember how unsophisticated computers where at the time of Three Mile Island. Most of the systems associated with plants built in the 70's had no computer systems. So I could imagine that safety has improved exponentially since that time.
I think we should get Electric Boat and Westinghouse to make the plants that are being put into Submarines to be sold to individual cities. A small submarine plant could be located in a small water source and provide enough power to lower electric bills and reduce pollution.
For all those people who are against nuclear power and have do not have a Nuclear Physics degree you should leave these things to experts. You don't know what you are talking about. You are just like faith healers that don't believe in doctors. If all the Nuclear Physicist tell you its safe and you don't believe them, what should that tell you?
So wake UP and stop listening to crackpots.
There are very few liability problems with solar and wind - the PV manufacturing process has to be clean, but that's the only issue. There is no accumulation of hot waste - for example, Indian Point has thousands of hot fuel rods loaded with plutonium and radioactive strontium and cesium sitting in water. Processing and disposing of all that waste will cost a lot - into the billions, certainly.
The best policy option is to first eliminate the Price-Anderson Nuclear Accident Indemnity Act so that the nuclear industry will be faced with looking at the true cost of running their business. As Exelon noted, no one will invest in nuclear without that.
We should also pass laws and regulations banning new coal plant construction and mandating the phasing out of existing coal power plants.
To replace all those jobs and energy (coal and nuclear provide fewer jobs that the florist industry does, you know), we'll need massive investment in wind, solar, electricity storage systems and organic, fossil fuel-free agriculture.
Sunlight and wind are the real long-term solutions to the energy supply question. We already have all the technology we need to do this - so why aren't reporters and politicians talking about it?
As a UK taxpayer, I'm paying £73 billion (about $150 billion) and rising for the cleanup of old UK power stations, having already bailed out the private company running the newer ones. And I'm now expected to pony up for the disposal of more nuclear waste, probably the bulk of any future cleanup, and of course insurance. Of course this does not include anything else the nuclear industry can get away with, even though they have never made even close to a commercial return on the money invested in the UK. The French head of EDF (80% owned by the French state) says that if money is put into renewables, then thats bad for nuclear, which suggests that nuclear thinks that non-carbon generaion will be a zero-sum game, with them as the winners.
Nuclear is a techno-fix; a distraction from the real solutions, which are energy efficency, devolved generation, capture of waste energy and the use of renewables on a large scale. Lovins, Patterson and Carsten have all spoken about these solutions - they are out there.
I'm not anti-nuclear because of doctrine, I'm anti-nuclear because it will waste time and cost me a large amount of money.
one of the great killers of humanity is
poverty...
the risks of nuclear power are tiny by comparison...
I know the only way to sell magazines, real or virtual, is to point fingers and incite panic. But let's stick to reality. We've got a constitutional crisis, we torture people, our military is turning satellites inward upon the citizens, and our people will abandon *any* liberty if someone squeaks "for the children" at them.
Maybe it's time to quit beating Gore's worn out, light on facts drumset.
Looked at how the commerce clause is interpreted lately?
The sun is still in the sky, the wind is still blowing, so let's look toward nature to help us with solutions--not esoteric physics! Please, let's look up at that sun. How much power there is in that precious, magnificent orb!
Let's harness that wind. Think of how many KW of power these windmills can produce without serious consequences!
Let's look to nature to help us....
PS: Re-use, recycle, re-purpose!
Contrary to what the article says, the choice between an energy source that routinely and steadily kills people and one that hypothetically has a tiny chance of killing people (but never has, in the West), is not a "conundrum" at all. The choice is clear.
Coal plants cause 25,000 deaths, every year, in the US alone (hundreds of thousands worldwide). TMI killed zero people and had no health impact. In fact, over their entire ~40-year history, US nuclear plants have had no measurable public health impact (nor deaths). This impeccible, unparallelled safety record for a heavy industry is all that needs to be said
concerning the effectiveness of NRC (one of the most, if not the most stringent regulatory bodies there is).
Credible estimates for Chernobyl range from 100 to ~10,000 eventual deaths (i.e., from ~0.1% to
Credible estimates for Chernobyl range from 100 to ~10,000 eventual deaths (i.e., from ~0.1% to
The simple fact is we are behind the curve and you should trust science. It amazes me that intelligent liberals can fall back on cold war fears to justify their opposition to nuclear power.
You are much more likely to get cancer eating banana's,living in a brick, using your cell phone or getting a sunburn than from nuclear power.
Lets talk about X-rays. Everyday people go to the doctor and are exposed to radiation that is more detrimental than any exposure you could receive working at a nuclear power plant. They understand the risk and choose to take it. The benefits far out way the risks.
Please trust science and scientist. I would consider most people liberal who oppose nuclear power. They should not be reactionary but they are. It is very confusing.
Jimmy Carter, a man I admire, was a Naval Nuclear Engineer. He is no fool. Trust science and inform yourself.
Lewis ... well, I'd like 5500 words for rebuttal.
Credible estimates for Chernobyl range from 100 to ~10,000 eventual deaths (i.e., from ~0.1% to ~2-5% of the ANNUAL death toll from fossil fuel plants). The maximum conievable consequence of a Western plant accident are far smaller than Chernobyl. Even the (anti-nuclear) Union of Concerned Scientists acknowledges that it would require several absolute worst-case meltdown accidents occurring every year in the US for nuclear's health/environmental impacts to match those of coal.
On top of all this, there is the fact that nuclear emits negligible CO2, whereas fossil power plants are the largest single source. It is clear that nuclear's overal public health and environmental impacts are tiny compared to those of fossil fuels. Formal scientific studies of the external costs of energy sources agree. The most rigorous and recent such study, the European Commission's ExternE project, concludes that nuclear's total external costs are a fraction of a cent/kW-hr (similar to renewable sources) whereas the external costs for coal and oil are more than an order of magnitude higher (4-8 cents).
I don't think it's necessary to invoke hormesis to make the case for nuclear power, and I think some will find it so hard to accept that you will lose credibility with them. Also, it's not what the official reports (e.g., UNSCEAR) say.
Yes, a huge string of "accidents" that have killed...... noone. Meanwhile, fossil fuel plants are killing ~25,000 people every single year and are the leading single cause of global warming.
Renewables can't meet all our energy needs, and nuclear, not fossil fuels, simply must be our second (back up) choice.
And while it is true that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, cut that's an incredibly simplistic misstatement. There are batteries and numerous other existing energy storage systems. How do you think Coast Guard buoys, space satellites, offshore drilling platforms and off-the-grid houses get their power?
Furthermore, all nuclear power plants require large amounts of cooling water - or some other means of cooling - to prevent the reactor core from overheating and melting down. During summer heat waves in France, they had massive power outages because the river water got too warm and they had to shut down the power plants. Temperatures are only going to increase due to our ongoing global warming.
Wind and sunlight have no such disadvantages.
"I don't believe "any" further nuclear work of any kind should proceed until there is a proven waste depository,..."
This thinking, shared by many, is flawed and must be addressed.
First of all, even if we stopped all further study, buried all our nuclear waste in Yucca Mtn., and left it there forever, the total (short and long term) risk/impact on public health and the environment, per kW-hr generated, would still be orders of magnitude less for nuclear than for fossil fuels. The toxic slugde alone from coal plants (almost a million times the volume, and carelessly buried) represents a greater very-long-term risk than nuclear waste, even before global warming is considered.
And over the short term of course, we are talking about 25,000 deaths per year versus no impact. The reason why we're still waiting to bury it is that people are holding out for even more perfect solutions (that and raw political stonewalling by Nevada).
Secondly, we know, with virtual certainty, that we will eventually come up with a way to process and eliminate the waste. Probably after a few decades, but certainly after 100-200 years. So, we don't really have to guarantee complete containment for 10,000 (or a million) years. 500 years would do, and this is easy (there is no chance of any leakage for at least 1000 years).
The upshot is that we KNOW that nuclear waste will never have any impact on public health or the environment. We can easily contain it until we come up with a method of elimination, period. (If you're worried about this "burden" on future generations, contributing only 0.1 cents/kW-hr to a trust fund will provide more than enough money, in the distant future, to pay for the job.)
So why not wait (decades or more) until this nuclear waste elimination technology (I discuss above) is developed before building more nuclear plants? Sounds like the responsible thing to do, right? Wrong.
Given that renewables can not, right now, meet all or even most of our future energy needs, not building nuclear plants right now means building more (and/or continuing to run) fossil plants (mainly coal). Basically, we have two choices concerning what we do in the interim, until this "perfect" nuclear waste solution is developed (or some other perfect energy source is developed, for that matter). They are:
1) We can burn fossil fuels in the interim, thereby killing tens/hundreds of thousands of people every year in the short term, and (over the longer term) radically altering the planet's climate, and burying mountains of toxic sludge.
2) Or, we can use nuclear power, place the resulting tiny volume of waste into secure storage (w/ no leakage) and wait until the "perfect" waste processing elimination technology is developed. (It's easy to store/contain nuclear waste for decades/centuries, with no leakage and no impact on the environment, we've been doing this for decades.)
The first choice involves massive, irreprable harm to public health and the environment during the interim period, whereas the second (nuclear) choice involves no harm at all over the interim. The choice couldn't be more clear.
We need to meet as much of our energy needs as practically and economically possible with conservation and renewable sources, but the rest needs to come from nuclear, not fossil fuels. Instead of requiring a "solution" to the nuclear waste "problem" before building more nuclear plants, what we really need is a law banning any new fossil plants that do not contain/sequester all their emissions/wastes. It is fossil fuels that have the "waste problem". Given the limitations of renewables, we're going to need one of them (fossil or nuclear), and the choice is clear.
The public has shown no willingness to pay such a huge cost; not even to avoid major environmental problems like those associated with fossil fuels, let alone to avoid much smaller issues like those associated with nuclear. As shown by scientific external cost studies (ExternE), nuclear's external costs are tiny (a fraction of a cent/kW-hr, similar to those of renewables, which, yes, also have external costs). Given this, paying a huge economic cost to avoid nuclear is not justified.
It is not difficult to design nuclear plants that do not need a large natural water supply (we have a huge plant in the desert, near Phoenix).
As for the European heat wave, nuclear power production was reduced by 7% at most (to ~93% of rated capacity), over the course of the event. Meanwhile, wind power production over the affected region was only a few percent of rated capacity, over the course of the heat wave. Heat waves are associated with a stagnant, high-pressure dome, and very little wind. The fact that it generally provides the most power when we need it the least is one of wind's biggest problems.
If we can use massive energy storage to help renewables with their (much more serious) intermittentcy problems, why couldn't we use the same technology to help nuclear power through the occasional heat wave? Of all the arguments for renewables versus nuclear, reliability is the least valid.
Am I to understand that nuclear being possibly (very occassionally) affected a little bit by weather is being used as a reason to literally rely on the weather itself (sun and wind) to provide our power? Nuclear might have to reduce power slightly during very rare heat waves? How does solar's power output fare whenever it's.....cloudy?! Or wind, during the common occurance of still air?
Solar and wind are inherently and fundamentally much less predictable and reliable than nuclear. They are more affected by weather/climate events. This fact is illsutrated by their annual capacity factors (~25% for both wind and solar). This compares to a capacity factor (% "uptime") of ~90% for nuclear.
CANDU-specific features and advantages
Use of natural uranium as a fuel
* CANDU is the most efficient of all reactors in using uranium: it uses about 15% less uranium than a pressurized water reactor for each megawatt of electricity produced
* Use of natural uranium widens the source of supply and makes fuel fabrication easier. Most countries can manufacture the relatively inexpensive fuel
* There is no need for uranium enrichment facility
* Fuel reprocessing is not needed, so costs, facilities and waste disposal associated with reprocessing are avoided
* CANDU reactors can be fuelled with a number of other low-fissile content fuels, including spent fuel from light water reactors. This reduces dependency on uranium in the event of future supply shortages and price increases
Use of heavy water as a moderator
* Heavy water (deuterium oxide) is highly efficient because of its low neutron absorption and affords the highest neutron economy of all commercial reactor systems. As a result chain reaction in the reactor is possible with natural uranium fuel
* Heavy water used in CANDU reactors is readily available. It can be produced locally, using proven technology. Heavy water lasts beyond the life of the plant and can be re-used
CANDU reactor core design
* Reactor core comprising small diameter fuel channels rather that one large pressure vessel
* Allows on-power refueling - extremely high capability factors are possible
* The moveable fuel bundles in the pressure tubes allow maximum burn-up of all the fuel in the reactor core
* Extends life expectancy of the reactor because major core components like fuel channels are accessible for repairs when needed.
There remains, of course, the problem of waste disposal but far too little consideration has been given to salt formation sequestering. For example, the salina formation in the Michigan basin contains salt layers several hundred metres thick that have been stable for hundreds of millions of years, These strata might be ideal for sequestering waste.
Other things that require discussion and, perhaps, more work include capital costs and decommissioning cost but we should not be making judgment based only on old technology and designs with nuclear power any more than we should judge air transport based on consideration of blimp design!
This ultracheapness is due to hyperabundance. Thus, just about everyone here has stood on rock in which fission energy accessible to today's reactors was as abundant as tar combustion energy is in the tarsands. If all concentrated ores vanished, today's reactors would lose only a little of their output in powering country rock extraction operations to fuel themselves.
However, driven by prices that briefly spiked to $3.50 per barrel-of-oil-equivalent (BOE), prospectors have been finding concentrated deposits of uranium in the last two years at a rate near 110 million BOE per day -- ten times the rate of use. So the price has been knocked back down below $2/BOE.
Very limited uranium supplies would be a valid argument against heavy investment in nuclear, if it were true. But the fact is that long-term uranium supply is simply not an issue, and nobody is really concerned about it.
If this were a real concern, people wouldn't be willing to spend billions on new nuclear plants that are expected to last 60-100 years. In any event, this wouldn't be a reason for anyone to campaign against nuclear, as the problem (if true) would kind of take care of itself. An issue like that is one that we can leave it up to industry to worry about.
The fact is, we have enough uranium to last for centuries, even with major nuclear growth, and even assuming no reprocessing or breeding. With breeding, the fuel supply is effectively infinite (millions of years). And a century will be more than enough time to develop practical, economic breeder technology (or something like fusion, for that matter).
The only reason that peak oil/gas is a real concern is that we have not found any major new deposits over the last few decades, despite massive efforts (perhaps trillions of dollars). Despite all these efforts, the discovery rate has fallen well short of the consumption rate, resulting in declining reserves. With gas & oil, there is real evidence that we've actually already found most of it.
Things are starkly different for uranium. We have barely started looking for it, and have made a negligible effort/expense so far. The cost (per unit of energy yield) of discovering uranium is 300 times less than what it costs to discover oil. As Mr. Cowan says above, ever since the price of uranium became significant (again), we've been discovering significant new veins almost every week.
Back in the 1920s, when the amount of effort we had made to look for oil was similar to the amount of effort we've made so far to look for uranium today, the official estimate for the world's oil endowment (i.e., total amount of discovered oil) was only about ~1% of the oil we've discovered since. There is no reason to believe it will be any different for uranium. Current "official" reserves for uranium are likely to be only a few percent, at most, of the amount of high-grade uranium ore that is actually out there, and will be discovered.
Whereas there is probably enough high-grade ore to last for 100-200 years, even if we go through that we can turn to lower grade ores. Since the ore cost is only ~2% of the cost of nuclear power, we can afford a much higher ore cost. As the allowable ore grade (uranium concentration) is reduced, the amount of usable uranium exponentiates.
Anyway, I talk more about this at:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html
and a uranium expert talks about it at:
http://216.94.150.122/investor_rela tions/speeches/speech_text.php?spid=49
I've operated a Naval nuclear reactor, as have some other posters here. Unless one has spent years immersed in the subject, all one can do is repeat the opinions they have been taught - often by people who have pre-judged the technology before they learned anything about it.
In a nutshell, nuclear energy can be very good, or it can be very, very bad. There exist designs which are safer, cleaner and