Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2006, 02:34:00 AM
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All:
My default bias on nuclear power tends to be strongly negative. I worry about what to do with by-products both for concern over accidents and for concern over the risks of theft; it being a source of unsound countries building nuclear bombs; catastrophes such as Chernoble; and nuclear reactors being targets to terrorist attack-- e.g. what if Flight 93 had its target the reactor at Three Mile Island. One screw-up could screw up a lot of mother earth for a very long time.
I distrust the experts. Here in California, the Diablo Canyon reactor was built on an earthquake fault line. :-o Something like that does not inspire confidence to say the least.
That said, with the strong pressures to move beyond petroleum, the nuclear question is being presented again and of course advocates are proffering what they believe to be solutions to concerns.
Marc
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Monday, November 20, 2006
Barron's
EDITORIAL COMMENTARY
Needed for Nuclear Power
Fuel recycling mitigates waste worries and is key to new plant construction
By WILLIAM R. STRATTON and DONALD F. PETERSON
BETWEEN 1965 AND 1985, the U.S. constructed 110 nuclear electric-power reactors and is now operating 103 atomic plants that provide 20% of the nation's electric-power demand. Their operating record in recent years has been little short of phenomenal. Because of their safety and operating records, their permits or licenses are being extended from 40 to 60 years.
A number of electric utilities are on the verge of submitting applications to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a combined construction and operating license. The proposed reactors will be of an improved and simplified design, pre-approved, more amenable to maintenance and operation than the first-generation reactors designed before 1980. All will be of a size to provide 1,000 to 1,500 megawatts, day and night, wind or no wind, rain or snow. Some studies estimate that more than 1,000 additional power stations of this size will be needed in the next half-century. After reviewing seven comprehensive studies, the World Nuclear Association stated flatly in December 2005 that nuclear power is competitive now.
This is good news. But there is still a problem created 30 years ago when President Jimmy Carter forbade the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, establishing the once-through fuel cycle and effectively killing active development of commercial nuclear power. This wrong-headed decision was prompted by concern about the spread of nuclear weapons. Carter expected that the rest of the world would follow our lead, but no other countries have so limited their application of nuclear technology.
Supply and Storage
Carter's decision did create two other problems, neither foreseen by his administration nor fully solved, even after 30 years. The first is the problem of supply. It may be that insufficient uranium ore exists to fuel the nuclear-power industry for an extended period. The thermal neutron light-water reactor industry is sustained by the uranium-235 isotope -- only 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium. This must be enriched to about 3% U-235 to be suitable for power-plant fuel. Some studies suggest that there are limited quantities of uranium ore, others are more optimistic. The availability of adequate uranium to sustain the once-through cycle is still an open question.
The second and more significant issue is that of storing or disposing of spent fuel. This may be a red herring, but it has a very powerful odor. Many people believe that disposing of spent fuel is a show-stopper.
At the present rate of production, there will be enough spent fuel waiting in 2010 to fill the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada, which has a capacity of 70,000 metric tons. Of course, the squabbling over regulations for storage at Yucca Mountain continues with no license in sight. The previous requirement for 10,000 years of safe storage recently has escalated to millions of years.
If a new surge of power-plant construction is about to begin, the spent-fuel problem must be solved. The rising demand for electricity suggests that the rate of plant construction will surpass that of the 1970s by a large margin -- depending in part on the congressional perception of global warming. New Yucca Mountain-type storage sites will be required, and we will see intense bureaucratic infighting over safety and security needs.
It's not often understood that the protracted times for the safe storage of spent fuel result from the presence of "transuranics" in it, not from the direct products of uranium fission. Transuranics are the isotopes that build up in the fuel when a uranium atom captures one or more neutrons without fission. Some of these decay into different elements: For example, plutonium-241 decays to americium-241, which then, too, can capture neutrons. Several of these isotopes have lifetimes in the thousands and tens of thousands of years. Some generate enough heat to be a problem.
Beyond the not-in-my-back-yard syndrome, transuranics are the reasons for the difficulties with storage in a repository like Yucca Mountain.
Fortunately, solutions to the waste problem are under development in the U.S., France, Great Britain, Russia and Japan. It's overdue, since recycling of fuel and waste was the intent of the pioneering engineers of nuclear power plants back in the 1950s.
A recycling process in use abroad comprises about three chemical steps and permits some separation of uranium, plutonium, other transuranics and fission products. The volumes of contaminated liquid waste is drastically reduced. The plutonium from this process can be used in thermal neutron reactors, but for only another two cycles because the higher isotopes of plutonium stop the fission process.
Another method still being developed is called pyrometallurgical recycling or electro-refining. This removes the fission products from the uranium, plutonium and other transuranics. Waste volume would be small, consisting almost entirely of fission products with much shorter half-lives than transuranics, so the necessary storage times would be reduced from thousands to hundreds of years. The remainder, consisting of plutonium mixed with other transuranics, is an unattractive target for theft but perfectly acceptable as fuel for fast-neutron breeder reactors. Early estimates suggest it is a much less expensive process to separate the several parts of spent fuel.
U.S. nuclear engineers have extensive experience with breeder reactors, which are the necessary final step in this development of modern nuclear-reactor technology using a closed fuel cycle. Among the initial reactors developed after World War II, Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 was the first in the world to generate electricity from nuclear energy; the event took place in Idaho in December 1951. Its successor, called EBR-2, operated successfully for 30 years from the early 1960s, generating more than 60 megawatts of electricity and serving as a test bed for experiments at the same time.
Fast-neutron breeder reactors can use all the transuranics and fission them to generate electricity. These reactors can be designed to produce excess plutonium from U-238 for additional fuel, or burn plutonium to generate electricity. They burn or transmute the troublesome part of the spent fuel, while producing electric power and more plutonium for other fast reactors, or thermal neutron reactors using mixed-oxide fuel.
Prototype Time
Various designs of this reactor concept have been constructed and operated successfully in the U.S. and other countries. Prototype plants have existed in France since 1974, in Russia since 1981, and Japan plans to incorporate the closed fuel cycle with breeder reactors systematically in this century. Both India and China have plans for constructing breeder reactors.
The technology now exists for recycling spent reactor fuel, and fast neutron sodium-cooled reactors have been operated for many years. The critical components of the closed fuel cycle are ready for prototype operations, preferably an integrated demonstration financed by a consortium of electric utilities or the Department of Energy.
This is an expensive but necessary investment for the future. Yucca Mountain storage expense could be reduced to a small fraction of present costs, and mandatory storage time reduced to a few hundred years.
The closed cycle, using enriched uranium for fuel in light-water reactors, recycling of spent fuel through an electrochemical process, and using the recovered plutonium and other transuranics as fuel in a breeder reactor, is complete. It's not a simple process, but it's essential to assure ample energy for the indefinite future. It will be expensive to start, but there are no viable alternatives. The time to expand nuclear-power generation is now.
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WILLIAM R. STRATTON and DONALD F. PETERSON are nuclear scientists, retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory. They are members of the Los Alamos Education Group, a non-profit organization advocating increased use and development of nuclear energy.
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NUKE CHIEF FIRED: Linton Brooks, the chief of the country's nuclear-weapons program,
was fired yesterday because of security breakdowns at the Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory and other facilities.
LBN news
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Although it is the LA Times, this makes sense to me.
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Yucca Mountain on hold
The Obama administration is prudent to put the brakes on the nuclear waste repository in Nevada.
March 19, 2009
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been called many things during his 22-year Senate career, but the name that sticks when the issue of nuclear power comes up is "NIMBY." That's because Reid has fought tirelessly to block construction of a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in his home state. There's a funny thing about his critics, though: Not one of them has ever suggested shipping the country's hazardous radioactive waste to his or her own state or district instead of Nevada.
The usual bleating about Reid's obstructionism and Nevadans' paranoia arose after the release of President Obama's proposed budget, which trims funding for the Yucca Mountain project to the minimum needed to keep the regulatory process involved in its construction alive -- a strong signal that there will be no further work done on the repository during Obama's term in office. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the administration is working on an alternative program that involves multiple interim and long-term waste storage facilities around the country.
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When it comes to highly radioactive nuclear waste, pretty much everybody is a NIMBY. Setting aside the factthat scientists have yet to develop the technology to safely store this waste for the thousands of years it takes to decay, there's the fact that it has to be transported to the disposal site -- mostly by train -- creating the opportunity for spills. Even if the nuclear dump isn't in your backyard, the train tracks might be, and the closer you live to the center of it all, the greater the danger. Little wonder that Nevadans aren't excited by the prospect of a glow-in-the-dark desert.
The depressing thing about Yucca Mountain is that for all its flaws, including the discovery that water flows through the mountain faster than previously thought and thus could contaminate nearby areas, it probably still represents the safest place in the country for a nuclear repository. Not only is seismic activity in the rangeminimal, but the mountain is in a remote and desolate region at the edge of a site used in the 1950s for atomic testing. If we can't dump the waste in a nuclear test zone, where can we? That, in a nutshell, is the problem with nuclear power.
Pro-nuclear activists, whose ranks are growing as the nation looks for non-carbon-emitting sources of energy, needn't fret too much about Obama's proposal, which tables but doesn't end the debate about Yucca Mountain. Yet the move probably would delay some pending applications for construction of nuclear plants, and may even stop some. That's all for the good. Nuclear power is much too risky and expensive to be seen as a reasonable solution to climate change.
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There was a recent segment on cable about the disposal of nuclear waste in salt caverns and how the salt is nearly a perfect way to encircle and keep isolated the waste.
The deep underground caverns (~2,000 feet I think) eventuall get literally encased in the salt which protects against water.
However, it would take 250,000 years for the stuff to decay and no one could say what the risk to future and interim generations would be so far in advance (if the human race is still around by then anyway).
As far as transporting the stuff to these natural salt "containers" that is another homeland defense story.
As for what is going to happen thousands of years from now I won't lose sleep over that.
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http://www.nei.org/keyissues/nuclearwastedisposal/
***NEI: Nuclear Energy Institute Home Member Login Contact Us Search
l
Most used fuel from nuclear power plants is stored in steel-lined concrete pools filled with water, like this one above, or in airtight steel or concrete-and-steel containers.
Used Nuclear Fuel and Low-Level Waste
Used nuclear fuel is a solid material safely stored at nuclear plant sites. This storage is only temporary—one component of an integrated used fuel management system that addresses all facets of storing, recycling and disposal.
Integrated Used Fuel Management
Under an integrated management approach, used nuclear fuel will remain stored at nuclear power plants in the near term. Eventually, the government will recycle it and place the unusable end product in a repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
Storage of Used Nuclear Fuel
Currently, used nuclear fuel is stored at the nation's nuclear power plants in steel-lined, concrete vaults filled with water or in massive, airtight steel or concrete-and-steel canisters.
Recycling Used Nuclear Fuel
The federal government plans to develop advanced recycling technologies to take full advantage of the vast amount of energy in the used fuel and reduce the amount and toxicity of byproducts requiring disposal.
Yucca Mountain
In 2002, Congress approved Yucca Mountain, Nev., a remote desert location, as the site for a centralized deep geologic repository for used nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste.
Transportation
The U.S. Department of Energy will transport used nuclear fuel to the repository by rail and road, inside massive, sealed containers that have undergone safety and durability testing.
Low-Level Radioactive Waste
Low-level waste is a byproduct of the beneficial uses of a wide range of radioactive materials. These include electricity generation, medical diagnosis and treatment, and various other medical processes.
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As a layman trying to think about a highly technical subject I look for things that seem to encapsulate a larger truth. In my case I remember that the Diablo Canyon Reactor was built on an earthquake fault here in CA.
Have you ever lived through any earthquakes? I have and that experts would build a reactor on a fault destroys my faith in them and their process.
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Judging nuclear power IMO must be done in the context of all the alternatives. In the case of supplying the electric grid today, the choice I think is coal or nuclear. The others offer some minor supplement, such as hydro, wind, solar. Traditionally the energy loss on the transmission lines has been about 2/3 (that's why we heat northern homes with natural gas) so the non-cost-effective clean sources become even further from cost-effective on the grid.
The environmental issue of the day is CO2. Carbon dioxide is released in the mining of coal and in the burning of coal or any fossil fuel. I am with the skeptics here on the magnitude of the problem; I have posted that I think our use of fossil fuels adds only 0.00003 degrees C per decade of warming. I'm not alarmed because the number is small and the reliance on fossil fuels is temporary, a blip in earth's history. Still, I think it is better to not emit, and less emission is preferable to more.
Nuclear is the only large source of power that has zero emissions.
Risk is serious but calculated. Look at the safety record. Again must compare with others. Chernobyl I believe doesn't count when evaluating new or existing plants here because we aren't building to their lack of safety standards. Golf carts probably kill more people than nuclear plants. I know the 19mph light rail here has killed more.
The size of the waste problem is of our own making. What we call waste is still a large energy source. France and elsewhere reprocesses the waste down to much smaller amount with a much lower energy level remaining. Our system is based on reprocessing rules from the cold war era, not energy efficiency engineering.
"I remember that the Diablo Canyon Reactor was built on an earthquake fault here in CA. Have you ever lived through any earthquakes? I have and that experts would build a reactor on a fault destroys my faith in them and their process."
I haven't ever lived through an earthquake at all. We suffer with winter here, in exchange for that we are free from hurricanes, earthquakes, drought, wildfires or even the need for air conditioning. Curious what scale earthquakes you have lived through. I think it would be one of the most frightening things possible. Building a power plant on it seems stupid and unnecessary, but living on or near a known fault seems unimaginable to me but we all live with risk and make choices.
Looking up Diablo I find: 'Diablo Canyon is designed to withstand an earthquake of 7.5 on the Richter scale' - I don't know what that means about the remaining risk level.
I see your point about losing trust but the safety record for producing huge amounts of electricity without pollution is unsurpassed.
France uses nuclear to produce about 79% of its electricity, for the US it is about 19%. Looking into the reasons, I found that France lacked oil, gas, coal etc. and got scared during the oil shock of 1973 when they committed to producing energy domestically.
Last night, I heard the glibness tout his visit to a plug-in hybrid car and state (falsely) that they would get up to 150 mpg and then imply that you would come home and sell your leftover energy back to the grid and make some money. Besides that he needs a teleprompter to get his energy facts straight (the 150 assumes energy on the grid is magical and free), I actually like the idea of plug-in hybrids. I wouldn't waste my money on being partly electric until I could plug in. But imagine as he does that we move a major amount of the transportation sector over to the grid. We will need more power plants and they will be coal with emissions or nuclear or else some taxpayer boondoggle because the other sources are not cost effective.
With everything we know now, which energy source(s) should we expand to power our lives and our economy?
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Nice link with a bunch of info about the current state of nuclear power in the US.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/energy_in_brief/nuclear_industry.cfm
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Thank you Guinness for excellent info source on nuclear. It is basically carbon free and totally free of pollution emissions, the 'waste' product is a still usable energy source and the safety record has fewer deaths in this country than Ted Kennedy's car.
The experience at Soviet Chernobyl tells us more about why to avoid Soviet communism than it does about safe nuclear plants. That disaster could not have happened in a US plant built and operated under our standards.
Whether you believe higher CO2 levels have a 1% or a 51% link to climate phenomena, we emit far more CO2 than we would if you used these newer technologies to power our grid. The world's largest industrialized country should not be generating 71% of its electricity by burning fossil fuels in 2009.
When we load part of transportation sector onto the grid with plug-in hybrids and plug-in electrics, the situation would only get worse since it takes most of a decade to get a new nuclear plant online and wind is 5 times and solar is 15 times overpriced and we are not adding any new rivers for hydroelectric.
It is obscene (IMO) that we waste precious domestic natural gas sources on a grid that could be powered far better with nuclear. This waste of natural gas was/is a major reason gas prices have quintupled the cost of heating homes, which is a BIG deal to much of the country. Natural gas (American produced) is also a perfect transportation sector solution if we weren't burning it in bulk needlessly to power the grid, please see http://www.cngnow.com.
If we substitute nuclear for natural gas in electricity and American natural gas in place of foreign oil in transportation, besides solving the CO2 spiral we would also be sending fewer dollars sent to Chavez and the Mullahs. It would be good for the currency, simplify foreign policy and ease the cost of national defense. True?
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If you keep making sense, Doug, we'll have to nominate you to run for office.
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Thanks for the info. For the record, I'm not a big nuclear fan, but rather a fan of cheap, plentiful energy that has a reasonable cost/benefit ratio.
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Any publicly traded stocks that are based on thorium reactors?
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I was shocked to see BO in his SOTU speech call for nuclear power. IIRC the Yucca Mountain option for waste is dead. What is the current Sit Rep on waste disposal?
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So, spell it out for us simple folks-- are you saying we are running out of storage even as we decide to build more?
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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom
Explosive growth has made the People's Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy.
By Spencer Reiss
China is staring at the dark side of double-digit growth. Blackouts roll and factory lights flicker, the grid sucked dry by a decade of breakneck industrialization. Oil and natural gas are running low, and belching power plants are burning through coal faster than creaky old railroads can deliver it. Global warming? The most populous nation on earth ranks number two in the world - at least the Kyoto treaty isn't binding in developing countries. Air pollution? The World Bank says the People's Republic is home to 16 of the planet's 20 worst cities. Wind, solar, biomass - the country is grasping at every energy alternative within reach, even flooding a million people out of their ancestral homes with the world's biggest hydroelectric project. Meanwhile, the government's plan for holding onto power boils down to a car for every bicycle and air-conditioning for a billion-odd potential dissidents.
What's an energy-starved autocracy to do?
Go nuclear.
While the West frets about how to keep its sushi cool, hot tubs warm, and Hummers humming without poisoning the planet, the cold-eyed bureaucrats running the People's Republic of China have launched a nuclear binge right out of That '70s Show. Late last year, China announced plans to build 30 new reactors - enough to generate twice the capacity of the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam - by 2020. And even that won't be enough. The Future of Nuclear Power, a 2003 study by a blue-ribbon commission headed by former CIA director John Deutch, concludes that by 2050 the PRC could require the equivalent of 200 full-scale nuke plants. A team of Chinese scientists advising the Beijing leadership puts the figure even higher: 300 gigawatts of nuclear output, not much less than the 350 gigawatts produced worldwide today.
To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
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Rarick posted: "The fusion process he describes does not release radiation, can put a reactor in the space of a Gas Station and make 100 Mw, if I am understanding this correctly."
My vision or prediction, consistent with that, is that something about the size of a personal backpack and probably fusion-based will someday carry all the energy one person might need for transportation, heating, air conditioning etc. anywhere/everywhere you go - making the memory of fossil fuel use look silly.
I know they have some details to work out on it.
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http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.
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GM
Nice find
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Rarick, Sorry I hadn't seen your question about the background to verify or just a snide remark. Answer for me is neither. Just amateur speculation about what the future will bring. I strongly believe the era of fossil fuels is a blip in time with or without government action to stop it, that move on faster without the government action and that we likely can't truly fathom right now the invention or discovery that will largely replace them. Fusion seems to hold that potential on the smaller decentralized level where fission seems just for large scale reactors requiring power lines everywhere, which seem to me a very 20th century method from the future's perspective.
Meanwhile I favor building more of today's nuclear plants, more clean coal, more oil drilling, far more use of domestic natural gas sources and setting the private sector on a freer course to innovate to the next level without the guidance of government. We won't get where we are going by impoverishing ourselves.
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Please correct me if I am wrong:
We are not building more nuclear plants right now because we choose to not build more. Yet we desperately need energy, and hate oil, coal, etc. Certain government actions are required to get a new plant rolling. Same for waste storage.
Major moves with energy have 8-10 year lead times. What we didn't do 8-10 years ago is killing us now. We are creating enough other lingering problems for the next generation besides no energy or having all our energy coming from elsewhere.
Current nuclear energy technology of the US and other western countries has the best safety record of any energy source on the planet.
Wind and solar provide a drip of energy and require substantial subsidy. You don't power an auto plant or even a wind turbine plant with solar, lol. Eventually you run out of other peoples money, and we did.
Current nuclear technology has zero carbon dioxide emissions, so it is the cheapest, safest and the cleanest.
Obama saying yes to nuclear is like Obama saying yes to off-shore. A head fake for political cover. Like healthcare, certain political actors don't care if they cripple our economy or starve us of resources, like affordable, clean, safe energy. Adults will have to step forward and make tough decisions. If not nuclear, then what, and WHEN?
Result is that in fact we are building plenty of new manufacturing capacity, plenty of new coal plants and plenty of new nuclear plants and adding plenty of new manufacturing jobs, with our money... in China.
Someone who favors this current policy of wait for the unknown and don't build today, please explain to me how this makes sense or which part I have wrong.
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By STEPHANIE SIMON
A Canadian energy company is scouring the globe for investors to finance the first new uranium mill slated to be built in the U.S. in more than 25 years.
Colorado regulators this week approved a crucial radioactive-materials license for the proposed mill, which would crush uranium ore and begin processing it, primarily for use in nuclear power plants.
The license was opposed by some environmental groups while some local residents embraced the proposed mill as a provider of new jobs in the Paradox Valley, a remote rural area of southwest Colorado that has struggled economically.
Energy Fuels Resources Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Toronto-based Energy Fuels Inc., says it needs just one more permit for the Piñon Ridge Mill. But the firm also needs capital—it's looking for about $140 million—before building.
The mill would produce up to 850,000 pounds a year of yellowcake, a coarse, concentrated powder that's a first step toward enriched uranium. That is enough to fuel two 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants for a year, said Gary Steele, a vice president of Energy Fuels.
U.S. mining-industry officials say the mill could help reduce the nation's dependence on foreign fuel. At least 90% of the uranium used in American nuclear power plants is imported.
But the yellowcake produced in Colorado may well end up in China, which is in the midst of a nuclear-power boom, Mr. Steele said. "It will go wherever we have a market for it," he said.
The mill, which would take about a year to build, is expected to employ 75 people—and to spur the creation of scores of additional mining, trucking and support jobs in the Paradox Valley. That promise of jobs has many local residents cheering.
Environmental groups, however, have fought the mill bitterly and pledge to continue their protests. Uranium mining thrived in the region during the 1940s and 1950s, when it was used for nuclear bombs, and in the 1970s, when nuclear power surged in popularity. Not only did both booms go bust, but the mines left a legacy of pollution that persists to this day.
This fall, state regulators found heaps of toxic uranium ore at a shuttered mine in the area. A defunct mill in the area has been designated a federal Superfund site; cleanup of the property was launched in the 1980s but is far from complete.
Energy Fuels says the new mill would be much safer. State regulators agreed.
"Energy Fuels has demonstrated it can build and operate the mill in a manner that is protective of both human health and the environment," said Steve Tarlton, a program manager for the state's Department of Public Health and Environment.
Write to Stephanie Simon at stephanie.simon@wsj.com
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ROBERT A. GUTH
Bill Gates reshaped the computer industry by pumping out new versions of Microsoft Windows software every few years, fixing and fine tuning it as he went along. He's now betting that he can reshape the energy industry with a project akin to shipping Windows once and having it work, bug-free, for 50 years.
Thanks to his role funding and guiding a start-up called TerraPower LLC, where he serves as chairman, Mr. Gates has become a player in a field of inventors whose goal is to make nuclear reactors smaller, cheaper and safer than today's nuclear energy sources. The 30-person company recently completed a basic design for a reactor that theoretically could run untouched for decades on spent nuclear fuel. Now the company is seeking a partner to help build the experimental reactor, and a country willing to host it.
It's a long-term, risky endeavor for Mr. Gates and his fellow investors. The idea will require years to test, billions of dollars (not all from him) and changes in U.S. nuclear regulations if the reactor is to be built here. Current U.S. rules don't even cover the type of technology TerraPower hopes to use.
"A cheaper reactor design that can burn waste and doesn't run into fuel limitations would be a big thing," Mr. Gates says. He adds that in general "capitalism underinvests in innovation," particularly in areas with "long time horizons and where government regulations are unclear."
TerraPower is one of a host of inventors, reactor makers and electric utilities trying to kick-start innovation in a field that hasn't seen a big technological advance in decades. President Barack Obama wants to help, too, designating $853 million for nuclear research, including small-scale reactors, in his proposed 2012 budget.
The type of reactor TerraPower is working on, a traveling-wave reactor, could reduce the need for enrichment and reprocessing of uranium. Executives at the Bellevue, Wash., company say their reactor could even be buried in the ground, where it could run for 100 years.
Green Wood
To understand how a traveling-wave reactor works, think of a wood-burning stove. Today's reactors use dried wood—enriched uranium-235—that burns hot and quickly. A traveling-wave reactor would start with a little bit of dried wood to get a hot flame going, but most of the fuel would be green, or wet, wood—depleted uranium-238. The wet logs wouldn't burn as hot as the dried ones, but they would continue to burn long after the hot flame goes out.
Burning the enriched uranium would shoot neutrons into the depleted uranium making up roughly 90% of the fuel. That process would produce plutonium, which would create energy as it continued to get hit by even more neutrons. It's a slow, controlled reaction that could continue over many years without need of human intervention. And in TerraPower's design, the core of the reactor, where fission takes place, would be small: a cylinder about 10 feet wide and 13 feet long.
Another plus: Large supplies of depleted uranium are available as a byproduct of today's water-cooled reactors. Removing it from those reactors and reprocessing it for reuse is a costly procedure, and a source of worry that radioactive material might fall into the wrong hands. Reducing the need for reprocessing could save money and reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation.
The idea for traveling-wave reactors has been around for decades but was mothballed amid waning U.S. interest in nuclear power. Then came a boost in the 1990s from a research paper by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, including Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and the brain behind Ronald Reagan's Star Wars missile-defense initiative; and an acolyte of Mr. Teller's named Lowell Wood.
Mr. Wood recently found a receptive ear in Nathan Myrhvold, a former Microsoft executive and head of Intellectual Ventures, a patent and invention firm in Bellevue. Mr. Myrhvold is a close friend of Mr. Gates, who is also an investor in Intellectual Ventures. In recent years the three men have done a lot of brainstorming about future technologies, including the traveling-wave reactor.
The reactor idea intrigued Mr. Gates, who was studying energy and climate change at the time. Among the reactor's other potential advantages, Mr. Gates says he was interested in its potential for producing cheap, zero-carbon energy and its ability to turn "what is a waste product into fuel."
Mr. Gates got the project rolling with seed money in the tens of millions of dollars. Venture-capital firms Charles River Ventures and Khosla Ventures invested $35 million last year. Nuclear-industry veteran John Gilleland is TerraPower's chief executive; a network of part-time researchers and scientists around the country offer input.
Looking for a Home
The traveling-wave reactor is still virtual, existing only in software on computers at TerraPower headquarters. Mr. Myrhvold says there is a basic design, not a full blueprint. But it's enough for the next step: building a test version of the reactor. TerraPower is looking for a customer, such as an electric utility, and a country that is willing to house an experimental reactor.
The company has made pitches in France and Japan, Mr. Myrhvold says; both have big nuclear-power industries. He's also made the rounds in Russia, China and India, he says. So far, there have been no takers.
One country he is certain won't be a customer anytime soon is the U.S., which doesn't yet have a certification process for reactors like TerraPower's. It would likely be a decade or more before the reactor could be tested on U.S. soil. "I don't think the U.S. has the willpower or desire to build new kinds of nuclear reactors," Mr. Myrhvold says. "Right now there's a long, drawn-out process."
Policy experts say that's with good cause. "Our regulatory process, while burdensome, is there for a reason, and it does represent the gold standard around the world for nuclear safety," says Paul Genoa, director of policy development at the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington.
Mr. Myrhvold says he hopes the process will speed up and spark innovation to meet the world's growing energy demand. "Let's try 20 ideas," he says. "Maybe five of them work. That's the only way to invent our way out of the pickle we're in."
Mr. Guth is the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. He can be reached at rob.guth@wsj.com.
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Red Alert: Japan Warns of Possible Nuclear Meltdown
March 12, 2011 | 0619 GMT
Japanese officials are cautioning that a nuclear meltdown may occur at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant near the town of Okuma. According to Japan’s Jiji Press, some of the reactor’s nuclear fuel rods were briefly exposed to the air after the reactor’s water levels dropped through evaporation. A fire engine is currently pumping water into the reactor and the water levels are recovering, according to an operator of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which operates the plant. A TEPCO spokesman said the company believes the reactor is not melting down or cracking and that workers are currently attempting to raise the water level.
If a meltdown takes place — essentially the core of the reactor overheating and damaging the fuel rods themselves — it would be the first since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and the Three Mile Island incident in 1979.
The Fukushima Daiichi power plant was shut down automatically on March 11 due to the magnitude 8.9 earthquake that hit Japan. The on-site diesel backup generators also shut down about an hour after the event, leaving the reactors without power and thus without the ability to cool down the core. Japanese officials were operating the cooling system via battery power and were flying in batteries by helicopter to keep the temperature regulated.
An unchecked rise in temperature could cause the core to essentially turn into a molten mass that could burn through the reactor vessel. This may lead to a release of an unchecked amount of radiation into the containment building that surrounds the reactor. This building could be breached if enough pressure builds, or, in this case, if the containment building was already breached through the earlier effects of the earthquake.
At the moment, it would appear that Japanese authorities are still trying to contain the reaction inside the reactor. That indicates that the core has not completely melted and that the reaction has not yet gotten out of hand. However, the situation could quickly become uncontrollable and the added water being pumped into the reactor could rapidly evaporate if the temperatures rise too quickly to be cooled off.
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Woof,
So much for nuclear power... www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42044156/ns/world_news-asiapacific/?gt1=43001
Japan gets about one third of its energy from nuke plants.
P.C.
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As this disaster settles it will be good to re-visit all questions regarding nuclear power. I recall Crafty presciently questioning nuclear with the example that a California plant is built on a fault line.
The Chernoble Ukraine disaster had to do with a Soviet lack of safety, not nuclear safeguards as we know them. I can't understand California's decision either to build on a fault line or to quit building, but buying electricity from Arizona maybe works for them. (It's still nuclear energy.)
When the rubble and grief settles, we still need power, probably all the sources and then some, but maybe a little smarter with the experience gained. Coal has its own problems and tragedies. Deepwater had a disaster. Natural gas has this big new question opened by the NY Times (no replies to my post on that).
The choice of not heating northern homes, or cooling desert or tropical homes or regressing our standard of living in other ways is no solution - inflating out tires in place of opening ANWR? Nuclear has a waste issue and radiation leak risk, but has huge output and is carbon-free. Failing to drill and refine screws up the oil and gasoline markets for everyone and enriches terror and enemy nations, no matter who we buy it from. Even new electric vehicles require the grid up and running to operate. Solar and wind contribute only a small amount and involve shipping products all over the planet - using oil. Ethanol turned into a bad joke, consuming farm land and diesel fuel while driving up food prices. Life is dangerous, complicated and full of risks. Looking forward to serious discussions here.
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I also have fears based on wide spread use of nuclear power. I was a kid when 3 Mile Island occured, and remember Chernobyl well. I live close to a major fault line myself (although well outside of California), and my elected representatives have decided to explore the idea of having a second nuclear power plant in my county. Egad!
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IMHO, nuclear technology has come a long way. The power we need has to come from somewhere. "Green power" is a fantasy. What is needed is a rational cost/benefit analysis for long term energy policy.
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Thanks for the replies on that. BD in particular, I understand those concerns. Of the other alternatives possible today to expand (including doing without), which way do you lean, may I ask?
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Doug,
Did you post the NY Times article with the left's talking points about how fracking was supposed to poison groundwater?
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GM, No, I posted about a 20 link answer including a point by point rebuttal and quotes from regulatory officials in 15 key states saying it has never happened there.
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Thanks for the replies on that. BD in particular, I understand those concerns. Of the other alternatives possible today to expand (including doing without), which way do you lean, may I ask?
Doug, I think that GM is right to point out that power has to come from somewhere and that a fully "green" energy "alternative" is largely a falsehood. There are plusses and minuses with sources of energy. I think that wind energy is probably my choice given the current state of technology and use. Wind farms, many contend, are unsightly. I never did like Senator Kennedy's view on this. Given that I can see the nuclear power plant from at least 20 miles away, I think that is at least as unsightly. And wind farms are a far cry from the impact on the view of coal mine operations or oil production.
The biggest thing that I think we, as a country, need to work on is consumption. I realize this is said all the time, but why the hell we all need separate cars, that are big, and we refuse to walk to work, or turn off a light at home, etc. etc. I just don't understand.
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BD,
The majority of Americans don't live places where public transportation is economically viable. We need cars. I can tell you that as someone that has seen lots of MVAs, including fatals that smart cars aren't.
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BD,
The majority of Americans don't live places where public transportation is economically viable. We need cars. I can tell you that as someone that has seen lots of MVAs, including fatals that smart cars aren't.
However, as people increasing move to urban centers, this becomes less true.
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Until you get close to NYC levels of population density, public transit still isn't economically viable. That vast majority of cities in the US don't even get close to that.
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LA is a major population center, but public transportation simply is not viable here.
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LA lacks the population density.
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re. BD, I am very pleased to have your view in the mix.
Public transportation, I can say that it doesn't work at all where I am or for what I do. If it is largely an urban/regional construct then it should be regionally financed - urban and regionally, not something people across the less populated heartland with their own financial challenges should be paying for. Those systems don't pay for themselves and most wouldn't be built without the 'free' federal money.
Wind energy: I am with BD on that to a point, with major limitations. (I am a big user of wind powered vehicles but not much work gets done when I am sailing.) Wind is about a 2% source of electricity now with heavy subsidies, probably a theoretical 20% source based on the most optimistic political views, one Stanford study said 33% theoretical, but with unrealistic assumptions. (That is electricity only, not all energy needs.) Wind generation reduces by those percentages the total power required from nuclear and coal, but it doesn't reduce the peak production capability required from coal and nuclear;the sweltering hot peak usage days tend not to be windy and trying to store the energy adds unacceptably to the cost. In other words, we still need to build all of it, clean coal, safe nuclear and whatever is coming next or get used to outages. The other main limitation: as the wind proportion of energy increases at 5 times the cost, say goodbye to the rest of manufacturing in this country. We can't compete now on basic labor costs and we won't be competitive on energy costs if we use our affluence to choose more expensive solutions. If we add to that burden an agreement to pay for third world upgrades and mandates, our overhead cost goes up even more.
Consumption: Again I am with you on that as far as it is voluntary rather than coerced. Artificially raising costs and refusing to produce available energy I put in the category of coercion. I posted elsewhere big steps I have taken on usage. A 40 mpg old Honda (oops, just died for now), no home AC for over 15 years, added 2 feet of attic insulation (unsubsidized), put a used 95% furnace in myself 1/3 the size of the old one, partitioned off rooms not in use from heat, and put spiral bulbs in dozens of houses at my expense, etc.
Still it is illegal for me to not drive to work (laws against absentee landlording) and my daughter's activities are something else - and that is with just one kid. Cutting out the optional trips is not always a great thing. I was a no-show last night to meet up with wonderful lifelong friends from 4 corners of a widely spread metro. Saved a drive, but nothing was gained by being a bum on that. Nor from having my daughter visit 4 wonderful grandparents less often - things like that make up our drives - roughly an hour round trip each time no matter who drives it. You won't do that on a bus or a train or a bicycle. The home school question is intriguing and I will guess your kids are younger, but the mass transit school bus doesn't even work for us anymore with all the activities before and after school.
At the start of kid sports we chose the local solution, 'recreational' soccer over 'traveling' soccer and biked the bike trail by our house to a huge park with plenty of kids and games for years. It was a great childhood and neighborhood experience, but not a path to the highest levels in that sport. Now she competes near the highest levels of 2 other sports and the transportation requirements are amazing and non-stop. Same goes for orchestra. We have instruments and music books in our home, but there is no proficiency without teaching and participation which means endless transportation. Free instruction from my sister, a professional viola player, is great but also a serious transportation event no matter where we do it. Can we do without that? Yes. Are we better off if we did? No. I posted in 'music' a classical piece by Holtz recently, left out this personal story: I was introduced to that when my daughter was part of 800 of the best youth musicians from across the state filling Orchestra Hall downtown with those amazing sounds, the stage full plus violins lining the aisles and brass from the balconies. I found out it was my Dad' favorite piece and has touched 4 generations in our family. Imagine the years of drives to lessons and rehearsals for 800 kids to make that amazing performance possible. Could we do without all that? Yes. Are we better off if we do? No. My point is that a free people fully developing and expressing their God given capabilities involves major individual mobility. Living on the edge of a metro on a lake in the land of lakes and not in an apartment is an amazing thing. For one thing, no AC required. No one uptown or downtown on the light rail steps out their door and sail 5 miles on the first tack. (They drive to the lake and use gas powered boats.) Participating and connecting with people from all over in sports, music, politics, is an amazing thing. Staying home is great (assuming it is heated with natural gas :-)) but freedom, affluence, and moving forward on quality of life also require serious levels of energy powered individual mobility IMHO. We aren't out here commuting the same line from the same neighborhoods at the same times to the same job locations, as the mass transit model would suggest.
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According to this website, http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html, which I selected because it was the first one I found (which makes it practically a scientific find :-D), the population density of the LA area ranks 90th in the world. New York is 114.
More over, I am not exactly sure why this came up. I said something about walking to work. I don't consider my legs public transportation. Cars led to people moving away from where they work. This is the reason why people needed more cars and drove farther each day. I made a conscious choice (see that Doug?) to live close to work, rather than farther away.
I did not, and would not, suggest coercive measures for this. But for a country that wants to have energy independence from the rest of the world, this seems like a good way to go.
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http://transportation.i2i.org/category/publications/
Colorado Transit: A Costly Failure
Public transit is often portrayed as a low-cost,
environmentally friendly alternative to auto driving.1
In fact, transit is much more costly than driving, and
requires huge subsidies to attract riders. Moreover,
transit systems in the vast majority of American cities
use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases than
the average car.2
For every dollar collected in fares from transit riders, the
average transit system in America requires more than
$2 from taxpayers for operating subsidies plus more
than $1 for capital improvements and maintenance.3
So it is not surprising that transit systems in Colorado
require large subsidies. What may be surprising is
that most are far less environmentally friendly than a
typical sports utility vehicle.
The Cost of Driving
Before looking at the cost of transit, it is useful for
comparison sake to calculate the cost of and subsidies
to driving. Americans drive for 85 percent of their
travel not because we are somehow addicted to
the automobile but because autos are both more
convenient and less expensive than most of the
alternatives. Unlike transit buses, trains, or airplanes,
automobiles make it possible for people to go where
they want to go when they want to go there.
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis,
Americans spent $950 billion buying, operating, and
maintaining their cars and light trucks (including pick
ups, SUVs, and full-sized vans) in 2008.4 That’s a lot
of money, but those cars and light trucks also carried
us nearly 4.5 trillion passenger miles, for an average
cost of less than 22 cents per passenger mile.5
*SNIP*
The Cost of Transit
By comparison, the national average cost of public
transit is more than 90 cents a passenger mile, more
than 70 cents of which is subsidized by non-transit
users. In Colorado, the costs are a little higher: $1.00
per passenger mile, $0.84 of which is subsidized.12
Most transit agencies do not even pretend to try to
cover their operating costs, much less their capital
costs, with passenger fares. Colorado transit agencies,
for example, spent $419 million operating transit lines
in 2008, but collected only $97 million in fares.
In addition to the annual operating costs, transit
subsidies include the capital costs of buying buses and
other facilities. Capital costs fluctuate tremendously
from year to year as transit agencies receive federal
grants to replace large segments of their bus fleets in
some years and make few capital purchases in other
years.
The Federal Transit Administration has published cost
data for every transit agency from 1992 through 2008,
providing 17 years’ worth of capital cost data.13 After
adjusting for inflation, the average of these 17 years
provides a reasonable approximation of annual capital
costs for bus transit. In the case of Denver’s light-rail
system, actual capital costs of the existing system were
depreciated over 30 years at 7 percent, as directed by
Federal Transit Administration accounting rules.14
Annual capital costs and depreciation add another
$181 million to the cost of running Colorado transit,
meaning taxpayers lost $503 million per year on
transit systems in 7 Colorado cities. This does not
count the transit agency in Berthoud, which did not
submit sufficient information to the Federal Transit
Administration to calculate these numbers.
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http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/08/Meeting-America-s-Energy-and-Environmental-Needs
Solutions for America: Meeting America’s Energy and Environmental Needs
Published on August 17, 2010
THE ISSUE:
America needs an energy policy that promotes environmental sustainability and economic growth. Yet many Members of Congress and the Administration are promoting policies and promulgating regulations that centralize power in Washington—an approach that leads to the high prices, energy shortages, and foreign dependence that politicians use to justify their failed big-government policies. Americans should demand an energy policy that is rooted in the free market, builds on private property rights, and relies on the initiative and entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector. This will not only promote economic growth, but also help Americans to achieve their environmental objectives. Ultimately, it is economic prosperity, not government dictate, that provides the means to protect the environment.
THE FACTS:
* Running Out of Oil? Three decades ago, proven world oil reserves were 645 billion barrels; five years ago, it was 1.28 trillion, and in 2009, it was 1.34 trillion. New, innovative technologies and sound policies to allow access will help to recover that oil and discover more. Unfortunately, the Administration’s policies are keeping much of this resource off-limits, which means higher prices and more dependence.
* Energy Subsidies and Mandates. Solar and wind receive subsidies of over $23/Mwh (megawatt hour) compared with $1.59/Mwh for nuclear, $0.44/Mwh for conventional coal, and $0.25/Mwh for natural gas. This does not include the $27.2 billion allocated in the 2009 “stimulus” bill for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and investment. Congress mandated that renewable fuels be mixed into the gasoline supply and required production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. Energy subsidies and mandates reduce competition, inflate prices, and stifle technological innovation, and Americans have to pay twice for the subsidies: first through higher taxes and second with higher energy prices.
* Access to America’s Natural Resources. The federal government owns and controls 650 million acres of land in the United States, including large portions in the western U.S. For instance, the federal government owns approximately 85% of the land in Nevada, 69% of Alaska, 57% of Utah, and 53% of Oregon. The federal government does not adequately maintain its land, much of which could be put to much more productive use like ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership.
* Affordable Electricity. The science behind global warming is anything but certain, but one thing is certain: The policies to cap carbon dioxide and mandate “clean” energy production are very expensive. The cap and trade bill passed by the House of Representatives would result in 1.9 million fewer jobs in 2012, $9.4 trillion in lost economic growth from 2012–2035, and a 90% increase in the price of electricity by 2035. Proposals for a renewable electricity mandate, which would require 20% of our nation’s electricity (currently at 3%) to come from government-picked renewable sources, are not much better. They would destroy over one million jobs (on net), cut national income (GDP) by $5.2 trillion between 2012 and 2035, and increase electricity prices 36%. Neither policy would have any noticeable environmental impact, but both would result in more government control of the economy and thus more lobbyists flooding the halls of Congress to pursue their special interests.
* Nuclear Power. The U.S. gets 20% of its electricity (and 70% of its emissions-free electricity) from 104 nuclear power plants. Further, at less than two cents per kilowatt hour, nuclear energy is among the least expensive electricity produced in the U.S. and also, with no injuries or deaths as a result of commercial nuclear energy in the U.S., among the safest. Yet due to an onerous regulatory burden and the federal government’s failed strategy to manage nuclear waste, no new plants have been permitted in over three decades.
THE SOLUTIONS:
* Expand Onshore Oil Production into Previously Restricted Areas, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil—16 years of current imports from Saudi Arabia— lie beneath a few thousand acres that can be accessed with minimal environmental impact.
* Open America’s Outer Continental Shelf to Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration. Offshore drilling bans prevent exploration in about 85% of our coastal waters. A reinvigorated offshore and onshore energy program could create 113,000 to 160,000 new jobs by 2030.
* Peel Back All Energy Subsidies. The federal government must stop picking winners and losers in the energy sector. Subsidies create complacency within the industry and reduce the incentive to innovate. In most cases, subsidies either transfer part of the cost for a market-viable investment to the public or divert direct investment away from more efficient projects. They distort the market and cost the many for the benefit of the few. Freeing energy industries from all government subsidies would allow companies to rely on innovation and efficiency, not taxpayer handouts, to remain competitive and allow competition among all energy sources, including renewables.
* Reform the Offshore Oil and Gas Liability Regime. Congress should establish a liability and claims process that fully assigns risk of offshore oil and gas operations, allows for victims to be fully compensated, and protects companies from frivolous lawsuits. Such a regime should include a multi-tiered insurance and liability system that relies on private insurance to cover liability for normal operations and a voluntary insurance pool for liability exceeding $1 billion; an industry-funded organization governed by an independent board to reduce the likelihood of spills by setting and enforcing safety standards at individual sites, collecting safety data, sharing best practices, and working with government regulators; and a pre-positioned industry-funded preparedness and response capability, certified by an independent organization, to deal aggressively and effectively with accidents if they do happen, as well as a more robust and integrated federal oversight and national response.
* Allow the U.S. Department of the Interior to Provide the Appropriate Lease Sales When Possible for Oil Shale. According to the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, a moderate estimate of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation is three times greater than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. The technology to collect and refine oil shale is developing at a rapid pace, and private companies are willing to invest in it. When the private sector demonstrates that oil shale is economically feasible and can be done safely, the DOI should allow commercialization to move forward.
* Amend the Clean Air Act to Exclude Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Purview. The Clean Air Act was never intended to regulate carbon dioxide, yet that is precisely what the EPA is attempting to do. The result would be that schools, farms, restaurants, hospitals, apartment complexes, churches, and anything with a motor—from motor vehicles to lawnmowers, jet skis, and leaf blowers—could be subject to cost-increasing restrictions.
* Introduce Market Principles into Nuclear Waste Management Reform. The federal government’s inability to fulfill its legal obligations under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act has often been cited as a significant obstacle to building additional nuclear power plants. Given nuclear power’s potential to help solve many of the nation’s energy problems, now is the time to break the impasse over managing the nation’s used nuclear fuel.
* Reform the Arduous Permitting Process for New Nuclear Power Plants. The first step is to create a permit schedule that reduces the current four-year timeline to two years for traditional reactors. Second, establishing an alternative licensing pathway for new nuclear technologies could help build the necessary regulatory support on which their commercial success ultimately depends.
* Maintain the Yucca Option. Under any realistic nuclear waste management scenario, there will be a need for long-term geologic storage. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is currently reviewing the Department of Energy’s application for a permit to construct the repository at Yucca Mountain. Congress should fully support this process.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWDCUVhWbXU
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWDCUVhWbXU[/youtube]
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We seem to be wandering a bit from the subject of this thread :-) but we are dogs and we do that sometimes :-D
That said, nuclear needs to take into account the external diseconomies both actual and possible attendant to the technology. Ask Japan, Russia, and Pennsylvania.
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Well, (fingers crossed) Japan seems to have it's nuclear situation contained, if not controlled with minimum impact. Russia' design and safety were typically negligent as expected from Soviet culture. 3 Mile Island seems overhyped to me.
http://pittsburgh.about.com/cs/history/a/tmi.htm
Three Mile Island - 25 Years Later
By Albrecht Powell, About.com Guide
"Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant"
On March 28, 1979, America experienced its worst nuclear accident - a partial meltdown of the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. During the tension-packed week that followed, sketchy reports and conflicting information led to panic, and more than one hundred thousand residents, mostly children and pregnant women, fled the area.
* Early on the morning of March 28, several water-coolant pumps failed on the second reactor at Three Mile Island (TMI-2), causing the reactor to overheat.
* The reactor shut itself down eight seconds later, but the core temperature continued to rise because valves controlling the emergency cooling water were stuck closed.
* Sixteen hours later, the core was finally flooded and its temperature brought under control. By this time, half of the core had melted, and part of it had disintegrated, although it was years before scientists actually discovered that a meltdown had occurred. TMI-2 had only been in operation for 90 days when the accident occured.
* On March 30, later known as "Black Friday," rumors circulated about an uncontrolled release of radiation from the plant and Pennsylvania's governor ordered the evacuation of children and pregnant women living within 5 miles of the plant. Later, it was learned that the release had been planned to ease pressure within the system.
* On April 2, 1979, five days after the meltdown, the crisis at Three Mile Island was officially declared to be over.
* Although TMI-2's containment held and only minimal radioactive material was released, the reactor was heavily contaminated. No one could enter the plant for two years.
* The TMI-2 reactor was eventually entombed in concrete and TMI-1 was restarted in 1986.
Impact of the Three Mile Island Disaster
A combination of equipment failure, human error, and bad luck, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island stunned the nation and permanently changed the nuclear industry in America. Even though it led to no immediate deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community, the TMI accident had a devastating impact on the nuclear power industry - the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not reviewed an application to build a new nuclear power plant in the United States since. It also brought about sweeping changes involving emergency response planning, reactor operator training, human factors engineering, radiation protection, and many other areas of nuclear power plant operations.
Health Effects of Three Mile Island
Various studies on health effects, including a 2002 study conducted by the University of Pittsburgh, have determined the average radiation dose to individuals near Three Mile Island at the time of the meltdown was about 1 millirem - much less than the average, annual, natural background dose for residents of the central Pennsylvania region. Twenty-five years later, there has been no significant rise in cancer deaths among residents living near the Three Mile Island site. A new analysis of health statistics in the region conducted by the Radiation and Public Health Project has, however, found that death rates for infants, children, and the elderly soared in the first two years after the Three Mile Island accident in Dauphin and surrounding counties.
Three Mile Island Today
Today, the TMI-2 reactor is permanently shut down and defueled, with the reactor coolant system drained, the radioactive water decontaminated and evaporated, radioactive waste shipped off-site to an appropropriate disposal site, reactor fuel and core debris shipped off-site to a Department of Energy facility, and the remainder of the site being monitored. The owner says it will keep the facility in long-term, monitored storage until the operating license for the TMI-1 plant expires on April 1, 2014, at which time both plants will be decommissioned.
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I think we can all agree that "areas of seismic activity" shouldn't have nuclear plant built there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/12/japan-ministers-ignored-warnings-nuclear/print
Japan ministers ignored safety warnings over nuclear reactors
Seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko claimed that an accident was likely and that plants have 'fundamental vulnerability'
* Robin McKie, science editor
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 12 March 2011 18.51 GMT
Fukushima nuclear power plant Fukushima's nuclear power plant is among several criticised by scientists as 'vulnerable'. Photograph: Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA
The timing of the near nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi could not have been more appropriate. In only a few weeks the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear plant disaster ever to affect our planet – at Chernobyl in Ukraine. A major core meltdown released a deadly cloud of radioactive material over Europe and gave the name Chernobyl a terrible resonance.
This weekend it is clear that the name Fukushima came perilously close to achieving a similar notoriety. However, the real embarrassment for the Japanese government is not so much the nature of the accident but the fact it was warned long ago about the risks it faced in building nuclear plants in areas of intense seismic activity. Several years ago, the seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko stated, specifically, that such an accident was highly likely to occur. Nuclear power plants in Japan have a "fundamental vulnerability" to major earthquakes, Katsuhiko said in 2007. The government, the power industry and the academic community had seriously underestimated the potential risks posed by major quakes.
Katsuhiko, who is professor of urban safety at Kobe University, has highlighted three incidents at reactors between 2005 and 2007. Atomic plants at Onagawa, Shika and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa were all struck by earthquakes that triggered tremors stronger than those to which the reactor had been designed to survive.
In the case of the incident at the Kushiwazaki reactor in northwestern Japan, a 6.8-scale earthquake on 16 July 2007 set off a fire that blazed for two hours and allowed radioactive water to leak from the plant. However, no action was taken in the wake of any of these incidents despite Katsuhiko's warning at the time that the nation's reactors had "fatal flaws" in their design.
Japan is the world's third largest nuclear power user, with 53 reactors that provide 34.5% of its electricity, and there are plans to increase provision to 50% by 2030. Unfortunately its nuclear industry is bedevilled with controversy In 2002 the president of the country's largest power utility was forced to resign after he and other senior officials were suspected of falsifying plant safety records. Nor is the nature of its reactor planning inducing much comfort.
The trouble is, says Katsuhiko, that Japan began building up its atomic energy system 40 years ago, when seismic activity in the country was comparatively low. This affected the designs of plants which were not built to robust enough standards, the seismologist argues.
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Bigdog, I sincerely hope my ramblings about my own views don't sound like I am attributing to you something you did not write. I never mean to do that.
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GM's point of density is the first criteria for mass transit but there are others. such as whether travel patterns have linear qualities. That is not at all the case in our fully scattered metro.
GM/Denver study: Denver is 50% denser than our metro and far more linear (mountains run along one side of it) and the passenger cost is $1/mile mostly subsidized. That is obscene. One study of our LRT (MSP) suggested we could provide a new, leased Lexus to each person taking the train that didn't otherwise have a private vehicle option and save money over building low speed trains.
Accommodating more travel, not less, in cleaner smaller more efficient private vehicles (with room for your stuff) by free choice looks like the way forward to me. CNG hybrids perhaps if NG is still legal. If a significant part of transportation is going to plug in, then the grid needs to expand capacity accordingly (coal, nuclear, wind) to support that. Plug ins don't work in cold climates (or extremely hot ones). If it isn't a national strategy then it shouldn't be a federal subsidy.
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I recently watched a convoy of trucks, at least 8 of them, delivering one giant wind turbine across central Nebraska. I would argue that the buildout, until fully in place, of going from 0% to 2% to 20% of electricity from wind sources will be a net increase, not a decrease, in demand and use of oil for transportation and electricity (coal, nuclear) for manufacturing.
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Heritage is on the right track. We need progress now on quite a number of fronts. Our economy shouldn't be jostled every time a Mullah or a Muammar has a screw come loose.
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Crafty, IMO hard to accept the need for nuclear without working through the need for abundant energy and the limitations of the alternatives. Only coal offers similar KW capability today for example. Remove nuclear and we get more coal, more mining issues, more CO2 emission, more train loads blocking traffic etc., or get economic meltdown IMO. The likelihood of anything like a 9.1 earthquake where I live or across most of this country (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/us_damage_eq.php) simply isn't measurable. The map may explain why Calif power companies own part of an AZ nuclear plant. Japan is like Calif only worse I suppose. http://www.mapsofworld.com/japan/earthquakes-history.html Still I doubt Japan can or will move entirely away from nuclear after this horrific disaster begins to pass.
I am all ears to hear a better energy mix that works today with nuclear removed.
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GM: "I think we can all agree that "areas of seismic activity" shouldn't have nuclear plant built there." This was the point of my original post. I was talking about my concern with a second power plant that has been considered in an area with a major fault line.
Also, I am about to listen to the YouTube video you posted. Thanks for the link, and for the information on CO and TMI.
Doug: You've not offended me. I just wanted to be clear. I was also a bit more curt than I intended. I was trying to call your attention to the point not "call you out." Incidentally, Heritage does lots of interesting things. I've even sent a student there as intern. She had a great summer, and met, among many others Laura Ingraham and Bob Barr.
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http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/13/news/economy/nuclear_power_plants/index.htm?hpt=T1
Note the magnitude of earthquake the reactors are built to withstand.
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I wonder what the nuclear power plants located near the New Madrid Seismic Zone are rated for? :|
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GM: According to the economist, Robert Michaels, in the video, the wind energy lobby American Wind Energy Association is "right up there" with lobbying efforts of the oil industry. He was wrong:
AWEA gave less the $250,000 in 2009-2010. This was the top contributor in the alternative energy industry (http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E1500)
The top 20 oil contributors ALL gave more than AWEA in the same time frame: http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E01
Also, I couldn't anything on the New Madrid plants' construction strength, except for one local broadcast assuring residents that a local plant was safe.
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Given the vast difference in gov't funding, it sure looks like the AWEA gets much more bang for it's lobbying buck, does it not? What's the overall size of the green industry vs. that of the oil/gas industry?
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080821164605.htm
Earthquakes May Endanger New York More Than Thought; Nuclear Power Plant Seen As Particular Risk
ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2008) — A study by a group of prominent seismologists suggests that a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed. Among other things, they say that the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones.
The paper appears in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America at http://www.bssaonline.org/cgi/reprint/98/4/1696.
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Given the vast difference in gov't funding, it sure looks like the AWEA gets much more bang for it's lobbying buck, does it not? What's the overall size of the green industry vs. that of the oil/gas industry?
I would think that an industry that is smart with its money would appeal to you. Also, I'm not sure the rest of subsidy information in the video is correct. If he was wrong about the lobbying activities, I am not sure why I would trust him with the other half of that information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/04bptax.html
http://www.good.is/post/what-if-solar-were-subsidized-like-oil/
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"I would think that an industry that is smart with its money would appeal to you."
Unfortunately, it's smart at getting our tax money, which is quite different than succeeding in the marketplace.
(http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/megawatthour.jpg)
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2008/07/30/energy-subsidies-study/
American taxpayers footed a $16.6 billion bill for energy subsidies, tax breaks, loan guarantees, and the like in 2007 alone, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That’s more than double the Federal subsidy level from eight years earlier.
In fact, on an energy fuel basis, Congress has increased subsidies for renewable fuels considerably, from 17 percent of total subsidies and support in 1999 to 29 percent in 2007. Conversely, natural gas and petroleum-related subsidies declined from 25 percent to 13 percent during the same period, and coal and nuclear subsidy shares remained roughly constant.
A large portion of the increase in subsidies for renewable fuels is due to ethanol and biofuels production, which represented two-thirds of the renewable subsidies in FY 2007.
For subsidies related to electricity production, EIA data shows that solar energy was subsidized at $24.34 per megawatt hour and wind at $23.37 per megawatt hour for electricity generated in 2007. By contrast, coal received 44 cents, natural gas and petroleum received 25 cents, hydroelectric power 67 cents, and nuclear power $1.59 per megawatt hour.
Renewable lobbies complain that they don’t get their fair share of the subsidy pie, despite the data that suggests otherwise. The industry justifies its requests for larger levels of taxpayer support by arguing that subsidies per unit of energy produced are always higher at the early stage of development, before large scale production can occur. But here’s the problem: wind power has been subsidized for more than a decade. The production tax credit (PTC) for wind, for example, was first introduced as part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992.
The PTC for wind is currently slated to expire on December 31, 2008, if Congress does not extend it before then. However, even with these subsidies, wind represented less than 1 percent of total net electricity generation in the United States in 2007. By contrast, nuclear and natural gas, both representing about 20 percent of net electricity generation in 2007, and coal, representing almost 50 percent, are subsidized less than wind by factors ranging from 15 for nuclear to 93 for natural gas.
The bottom line: traditional fuels continue to be more efficient and cost-effective than renewable fuels, which is why EIA forecasts show them representing 91 percent of energy consumption in 2030.
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Previously, "...nuclear needs to take into account the external diseconomies both actual and possible attendant to the technology. Ask Japan, Russia, and Pennsylvania."
I am curious how Chernobyl Ukraine (a Soviet disaster built with no containment structure), Three Mile Island (no deaths or known health effect?) and Japan (where the tsunami devastation is perhaps headed to the tens of thousands and the nuclear radiation released during cooldown is roughly dental x-ray levels quickly dispersed?) all get cast together. Always open to evidence to the contrary.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576198421680697248.html
Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl
By WILLIAM TUCKER
Even while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe.
Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), a longtime opponent of nuclear power, has warned of "another Chernobyl" and predicted "the same thing could happen here." In response, he has called for an immediate suspension of licensing procedures for the Westinghouse AP1000, a "Generation III" reactor that has been laboring through design review at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for seven years.
Before we respond with such panic, though, it would be useful to review exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it.
The core of a nuclear reactor operates at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the temperature of a coal furnace and only slightly hotter than a kitchen oven. If anything unusual occurs, the control rods immediately drop, shutting off the nuclear reaction. You can't have a "runaway reactor," nor can a reactor explode like a nuclear bomb. A commercial reactor is to a bomb what Vaseline is to napalm. Although both are made from petroleum jelly, only one of them has potentially explosive material.
Once the reactor has shut down, there remains "decay heat" from traces of other radioactive isotopes. This can take more than a week to cool down, and the rods must be continually bathed in cooling waters to keep them from overheating.
On all Generation II reactors—the ones currently in operation—the cooling water is circulated by electric pumps. The new Generation III reactors such as the AP1000 have a simplified "passive" cooling system where the water circulates by natural convection with no pumping required.
If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor—as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami—the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate.
If the coolant continues to evaporate, the water level can fall below the level of the fuel rods, exposing them. This will cause a meltdown, meaning the fuel rods melt to the bottom of the steel pressure vessel.
Early speculation was that in a case like this the fuel might continue melting right through the steel and perhaps even through the concrete containment structure—the so-called China syndrome, where the fuel would melt all the way to China. But Three Mile Island proved this doesn't happen. The melted fuel rods simply aren't hot enough to melt steel or concrete.
The decay heat must still be absorbed, however, and as a last-ditch effort the emergency core cooling system can be activated to flood the entire containment structure with water. This will do considerable damage to the reactor but will prevent any further steam releases. The Japanese have now reportedly done this using seawater in at least two of the troubled reactors. These reactors will never be restarted.
None of this amounts to "another Chernobyl." The Chernobyl reactor had two crucial design flaws. First, it used graphite (carbon) instead of water to "moderate" the neutrons, which makes possible the nuclear reaction. The graphite caught fire in April 1986 and burned for four days. Water does not catch fire.
Second, Chernobyl had no containment structure. When the graphite caught fire, it spouted a plume of radioactive smoke that spread across the globe. A containment structure would have both smothered the fire and contained the radioactivity.
If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing. With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.
What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw.
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The WSJ article contradicts itself:
"Before we respond with such panic, though, it would be useful to review exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it."
Yes,
Well it is too soon to know what is going on and what will happen.
But,
Japanese authorites are less than forthcoming.
One cannot deny that no matter how many times we are told these things are safe another event occurs and we find the truth is not that they are perfectfully safe as sold.
But this is also a premature conclusion:
"What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw."
Lets also not blow it off as already its proven to be no big deal and start off with design 3 - just yet.
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http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/16/going-bananas-over-radiation/
Going bananas over radiation
Posted on February 16, 2011 by Anthony Watts
While doing some reasearch on Thorium, I came across this interesting little fact that I wasn’t familiar with, so I thought I’d pass it along. Many people fear radiation, sometimes the fear is irrational, based on the erroneous concept that we live in a “radiation free lifestyle”. I’ll never forget one time when I showed my geiger counter to a neighbor who was shocked when it started clicking. She was horrified to learn that cosmic rays were in fact zipping right through her body right that very second. I didn’t have the heart to tell her about neutrinos.
But, along the same lines, this little factoid might drive some people “bananas” when they read it. But, it illustrates a fact of life: radiation is everywhere.
From Wikipedia:
A banana equivalent dose is a concept occasionally used by nuclear power proponents[1][2] to place in scale the dangers of radiation by comparing exposures to the radiation generated by a common banana.
Many foods are naturally radioactive, and bananas are particularly so, due to the radioactive potassium-40 they contain. The banana equivalent dose is the radiation exposure received by eating a single banana. Radiation leaks from nuclear plants are often measured in extraordinarily small units (the picocurie, a millionth of a millionth of a curie, is typical). By comparing the exposure from these events to a banana equivalent dose, a more intuitive assessment of the actual risk can sometimes be obtained.
The average radiologic profile of bananas is 3520 picocuries per kg, or roughly 520 picocuries per 150g banana.[3] The equivalent dose for 365 bananas (one per day for a year) is 3.6 millirems (36 μSv).
Bananas are radioactive enough to regularly cause false alarms on radiation sensors used to detect possible illegal smuggling of nuclear material at US ports.[4]
Another way to consider the concept is by comparing the risk from radiation-induced cancer to that from cancer from other sources. For instance, a radiation exposure of 10 mrems (10,000,000,000 picorems) increases your risk of death by about one in one million—the same risk as eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter, or of smoking 1.4 cigarettes.[5]
After the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the NRC detected radioactive iodine in local milk at levels of 20 picocuries/liter,[6] a dose much less than one would receive from ingesting a single banana. Thus a 12 fl oz glass of the slightly radioactive milk would have about 1/75th BED (banana equivalent dose).
Nearly all foods are slightly radioactive. All food sources combined expose a person to around 40 millirems per year on average, or more than 10% of the total dose from all natural and man-made sources.[7]
Some other foods that have above-average levels are potatoes, kidney beans, nuts, and sunflower seeds.[8] Among the most naturally radioactive food known are brazil nuts, with activity levels that can exceed 12,000 picocuries per kg.[9][10]
It has been suggested[11] that since the body homeostatically regulates the amount of potassium it contains, bananas do not cause a higher dose. However, the body takes time to remove excess potassium, time during which a dose is accumulating. In fact, the biological half-life of potassium is longer than it is for tritium,[12][13] a radioactive material sometimes leaked or intentionally vented in small quantities by nuclear plants. Also, bananas cause radiation exposure even when not ingested; for instance, standing next to a crate of bananas causes a measurable dose. Finally, the banana equivalent dose concept is about the prevalence of radiation sources in our food and environment, not about bananas specifically. Some foods (brazil nuts for example) are radioactive because of radium or other isotopes that the body does not keep under homeostatic regulation.[14]
1. ^ http://www.ehs.unr.edu/ehs/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=EgZI00myQRM%3D&tabid=62&mid=615
2. ^ Weston, Luke. (2007-07-25) banana dose « Physical Insights. Enochthered.wordpress.com. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
3. ^ CRC Handbook on Radiation Measurement and Protection, Vol 1 p. 620 Table A.3.7.12, CRC Press, 1978
4. ^ Issue Brief: Radiological and Nuclear Detection Devices. Nti.org. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
5. ^ Radiation and Risk. Physics.isu.edu. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
6. ^ A Brief Review of the Accident at Three Mile Island
7. ^ Radiation. Risks and Realities, US Environmental Protection Agency
8. ^ [1][dead link]
9. ^ Brazil Nuts. Orau.org. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
10. ^ Natural Radioactivity. Physics.isu.edu. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
11. ^ Bananas are radioactive—But they aren’t a good way to explain radiation exposure. Boing Boing. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
12. ^ Rahola, T; Suomela, M (1975). “On biological half-life of potassium in man”. Annals of clinical research 7 (2): 62–5. PMID 1181976.
13. ^ Environmental Health-Risk Assessment for Tritium Releases at the NTLF at LBNL: Chapter 2. Lbl.gov. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
14. ^ Brazil Nuts. Orau.org. Retrieved on 2010-10-19.
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Is Anthony Watts calling the US military a bunch of panicking banana heads?:
***US moves ships out of path of Japan radiation
The Navy says it has moved several US ships away from a troubled Japanese nuclear plant after detecting low-level radiation on 17 helicopter crew members positioned there for relief efforts.
Navy Cmdr Jeff Davis, a spokesman for the US 7th Fleet, said on Monday that the Navy is committed to continuing the operation to help the Japanese after last week's earthquake and tsunami. But he says officials had to figure out how to continue safely after airborne radiation was detected on Sunday by the carrier USS Ronald Reagan and on a helicopter crew returning to the ship from search and rescue operations.
By moving the ships in the carrier group out of the downwind path of the power plant, Davis says the Navy can continue with less risk to Americans participating.
- With inputs from AP***
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Probably reasonable until the extent of the radiation leaks are verified.
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Must say, this catastrophe generated a long deserved conversation here and elsewhere.
CCP, GM, I agree, it is way too early to know the end result. My first instinct was right. Bury my head from news if we can't help, and wait until we know what happened. But that's not the coverage. It is meltdowns, explosions, evacuations and low level radiation announced every hour and on every site with absolutely no explanation of what on earth that means. A dental X-ray? That is hardly a measure as it is something that has changed ten-fold over the years. 1/10th of a CT scan? 0.1 r.e.m? A banana? An MIT scientist describes it as: "drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation." http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100079763/nuclear-power-some-perspective/
The problem with waiting to comment is that in 30 years since Three Mile Island, the conclusion of the studies is lost to our total inability to hold a focus.
I passed by a nuclear plant in Monticello MN today. 28 degrees and sunny with the Richter stuck where it has been every day since the plant was licensed 40 years ago, at 0.00. The forecast tomorrow: Richter 0.00. Not exactly pretty, but the plant powers 500,000 homes with a single reactor. I agree with shutting it down - after 500,000 nuclear opponent households agree to disconnect their homes. No one else will be affected. Power for 500,000 homes is dangerous no matter how you produce and distribute it.
I stand by my preface to that article as a prediction not a foregone conclusion, that the devastation was maybe thousand-fold more from seawater and natural disaster than from nuclear, while the coverage is equal perhaps heavier on the nuclear side. The end is not known, but so far more people died in Ted Kennedy's car - one too many.
That article (Tucker, WSJ) does not have all the facts but he gave the best description of what is happening that I have seen.
After the tragedy and damage passes, what we have had from a scientific and engineering perspective is an amazing test that money could not buy. 9.1 is several hundred times more force than is projected to be the maximum possible at our San Andreas facilities.
The CNN Money link http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/13/news/economy/nuclear_power_plants/index.htm?hpt=T1 at one point answers a question that Crafty posed in 2006 to start this thread: "tests have shown that the country's nuclear plants could withstand an impact from an airliner". What was learned from the tenacity of the truthers doubting that an airliner even hit the Pentagon is that an airliner disintegrates rather quickly and easily on a solid impact.
Once again, someone, anyone, please outline a better energy mix that works today with nuclear removed. How many 'trainloads' of coal to Japan? from where? China? will it take to replace nuclear's projected 50% contribution to electric power?
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I think the Ipad 3 will come with a hand-crank.
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A larger underlying theme here is one of distrust of the "experts" and the business and political interests involved. The simple truth is that, although Chernobyl and TMI can be distinguised from Japan, in all three cases "the experts", business interests, and politicians swore "not to worry".
Here in CA with the Diablo Canyon reactor being built on an earth quake vault, the experts, business interests, and politicians swore "not to worry". Sorry but that strikes me as madness-- and so now I am leery of the reassurances of the experts, business interests, and the politicians.
========================
Japan Faces Prospect of Nuclear Catastrophe as Employees Leave Plant
Japan faced the likelihood of a catastrophic nuclear accident
Tuesday morning, as an explosion at the most crippled of
three reactors at the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Station
damaged its crucial steel containment structure, emergency
workers were withdrawn from the plant, and much larger
emissions of radioactive materials appeared imminent,
according to official statements and industry executives
informed about the developments.
Prime Minsiter Naoto Kan of Japan was preparing to make a
televised address to the nation at 11 a.m. Tokyo time.
The sharp deterioration came after government officials said
the containment structure of the No. 2 reactor, the most
seriously damaged of three reactors at the Daichi plant, had
suffered damage during an explosion shorly after 6 a.m. on
Tuesday.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15nuclear.html?emc=na
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Adding to the gist of my comments in the previous post:
Japan: Radiation Rising and Heading South
March 15, 2011 | 0551 GMT
The nuclear reactor emergency in Japan has deteriorated significantly. Two more explosions occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on March 15. The first occurred at 6:10am local time at reactor No. 2, which had seen nuclear fuel rods exposed for several hours after dropping water levels due to mishaps in the emergency cooling efforts. Within three hours the amount of radiation at the plant rose to 163 times the previously recorded level, according to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Elsewhere radiation levels were said to have reached 400 times the “annual legal limit” at reactor No. 3. Authorities differed on whether the reactor pressure vessel at reactor No. 2 was damaged after the explosion, but said the reactor’s pressure-suppression system may have been damaged possibly allowing a radiation leak. Subsequently, a fire erupted at reactor No. 4 of the Fukushima Daini plant (where cooling systems had also failed) and was subsequently extinguished, but a hydrogen explosion occurred at No. 4 reactor as well, according to Kyodo. Kyodo also reported the government has ordered a no-fly zone 20 kilometers around the reactor, and Prime Minister Naoto Kan has expanded to 30 kilometers the range within which citizens should remain indoors and warned that further leaks are possible.
Reports from Japanese media currently tell of rising radiation levels in the areas south and southwest of the troubled plant due to a change in wind direction toward the southwest. Ibaraki prefecture, immediately south of Fukushima, was reported to have higher than normal levels. Chiba prefecture, to the east of Tokyo and connected to the metropolitan area, saw levels reportedly two to four times above the “normal” level. Utsunomiya, Tochigi prefecture, north of Tokyo, reported radiation at 33 times the normal level measured there. Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo, reported radiation at up to 9 times the normal level. Finally, a higher than normal amount was reported in Tokyo. The government says radiation levels have reached levels hazardous to human health. Wind direction is not easily predictable, constantly shifting, and reports say it could shift west and then back eastward to sea within the next day. Wind direction, temperature, and topography all play a crucial factor in the spread of radioactive materials as well as their diffusion. It is impossible to know how reliable these preliminary readings are but they suggest a dramatic worsening as well as a wider spread than at any time since the emergency began.
The Japanese government has announced a 30 kilometer no-fly zone and is expanding evacuation zones and urging the public within a wider area to remain indoors. The situation at the nuclear facility is uncertain, but clearly deteriorating. Currently, the radiation levels do not appear immediately life-threatening outside the 20km evacuation zone. But if there is a steady northerly wind, the potential for larger-scale evacuations of more populated areas may become a reality. This would present major challenges to the Japanese government. Further, the potential for panic-induced individual evacuations could trigger even greater problems for the government to manage.
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"Here in CA with the Diablo Canyon reactor being built on an earth quake vault, the experts, business interests, and politicians swore "not to worry". Sorry but that strikes me as madness-- and so now I am leery of the reassurances of the experts, business interests, and the politicians."
Even one in NY we are hearing is built on a fault line. I don't know what this means. In general I am for nuclear energy but....
***Nuclear reactor nightmare: Could it happen in the U.S.?
Experts say many reactors in U.S. share same basic design as stricken reactors in Japan
As workers in Japan struggle to limit the release of dangerous radiation from the nation's earthquake-stricken nuclear reactors, some in the U.S. are wondering: Could the same thing happen here?
Some experts say yes.
"We have 23 nuclear reactors that are the same design as the Fukushima plants that have failed," Dr. Ira Helfand, past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and a long-time critic of nuclear power, told CBS News.
A database maintained by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shows that 23 of 104 nuclear plants in the U.S. are boiling water reactors that use GE's Mark 1's radioactivity-containment system, the same system used by the reactors at the troubled reactors at the Fukushima Dia-ichi plant in Japan, MSNBC reported. The reactors are in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.
Calls to GE were referred to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. In an email to CBS News, it confirmed that some plants use the same basic system as the Japanese plants, but added that "specific elements of the safety systems will vary."
According to Dr. Helfand, some of the U.S. plants with containment systems similar to the ones in the Japanese reactors are built on fault lines, including one near New York City.
"The Indian Point reactor just north of New York City is built on a fault capable of generating a magnitude 7 earthquake, but it was only built to withstand a magnitude 3 quake," he said. "If the Indian Point reactor experienced a major meltdown, the entire New York metropolitan area, with 20 million people, would be at risk."
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant on the central California coast, which is within about 60 miles of the San Andreas Fault, and even close to other faults, was built to withstand a 7.5 earthquake, according to owner Pacific Gas and Electric. The company maintains that the faults in the region are not expected to produce any larger quakes.
Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Gregory Jaczko was asked at a press briefing by CBS News White House correspondent Chip Reid whether reactors in the U.S. could withstand a quake similar to the 9.0 event in Japan. He offered a vague response: "At this point what I can say is we have a strong safety program in place to deal with seismic events that are likely to -- to happen at any nuclear facility in this country."
What steps, if any, should be undertaken by people living near a power plant in the U.S.?
"I would want the nuclear facility to be honest with me and tell me if this is the same kind of reactor design as the ones in Japan," Dr. Jerome M. Hauer, former director of emergency management for New York City, told CBS News. "And what are they doing to ensure that the flaws that this earthquake exposed are being dealt with. If anything happens to the plant, how are you going to deal with them?"
In its email to CBS News, the Nuclear Energy Institute said it was premature to draw conclusions from Japan's nuclear crisis about the U.S. nuclear energy program.
"Japan is facing what literally can be considered a 'worst case' disaster and, so far, even the most seriously damaged of its 54 reactors has not released radiation at levels that would harm the public," the email said. "That is a testament to their rugged design and construction, and the effectiveness of their employees and the industry's emergency preparedness planning."
© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc.
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Thank you for the replies. I should remove foot from mouth until this settles, but attempts to discuss this previously never got this far.
I share the distrust of experts, but only for their own limitations, not bad motives. No one is an expert at forecasting a 9.1. That is 10,000 time stronger than anything in history in my part of the country and 100 times stronger than the one that dropped the Bay Bridge in 1989. Not just energy systems and cooling pumps failing, the coastline and storm sewers failed too. This is Pompei or Atlantis scale.
Meanwhile Germany closes 7 plants. Because an earthquake is forecast? No, because an election is coming.
My point is the math of the energy grid equation: a + b + c = d (coal + nuclear + solar and wind = the total).
The contribution of solar and wind is near zero, already heavily subsidized and slow to grow. Coal is undesirable and very hard to increase. The total is VERY closely tied to our standard of living and way of life. The equals sign is non-negotiable, we can't print it and run a deficit. You can't remove b without some combination of changing the other variables in equal amounts, and the contribution of nuclear is enormous.
So we say build no new ones, just use the old ones? But it is the old ones that will pose the most danger. Tomorrows plants that are likely to be the safest ever.
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The media loves to hype bad news, in addition, every so-called expert with an anti-nuclear agenda has crawled out to give the MSM "Worse than Chernobyl" headlines.
IMHO, the earthquake/tsunami fatalities are the big story, and the nuclear the small one, but the MSM has the roles reversed.
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Another variable to consider here is that American nuclear power would be run by Americans, not Japanese. On the whole, I'd rather have the Japanese running things when you absolutely positively don't want to have an inadvertent clusterfcuk. :oops:
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Well, yes.
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I'd eat fugu in Japan, I wouldn't in China.
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Woof,
One thing to consider that much of the media is missing here is that the plants affected in Japan are 40 years old, the technology and building methods that would be used for future plants is much better than back then. Another thing to consider is that these new plants need to come on line sooner so that our older plants can be decommissioned.
P.C.
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" On the whole, I'd rather have the Japanese running things when you absolutely positively don't want to have an inadvertent clusterfcuk"
Well, WE do have Obama... :wink:
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" On the whole, I'd rather have the Japanese running things when you absolutely positively don't want to have an inadvertent clusterfcuk"
Well, WE do have Obama... :wink:
He'll get right on it, after golf, hoops, the bullying summit, Brazil vacation and finishing his March Madness final four picks.
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I am somewhat disappointed in this Stratfor analysis because it betrays an important ignorance of the nuclear plant in question. Obtaining accurate information is the most difficult task these days.
The fuel rods encase the uranium. They are the primary containment. The fact that the rods were exposed does not increase the threat of lethal radiation unless there are breaks in the rods. However, the rods themselves are encased in a containment chamber, the second level of containment. In three of the four reactors at Fukushima Daiichi there are no feared breaks in those containment chambers. This morning, it was feared that there may have been a break in a pipe leading to this containment chamber at Reactor 4. However, subsequent inspection finds this chamber also to be fine.
The cooling chamber reportedly damaged in one reactor is not the same thing as the containment chamber. This chamber is a ring that circulates water within the containment chamber.
There have been discrepancies as to whether the amounts of radiation measured are in micorseiverts or milliseiverts. But take the larger of the two measures and relate these measurements to Fred’s chart that he provided. There has been a reading of 40 milliseiverts for a short time between Reactors #3 and #4. That is the highest reported reading so far.
There is also a third level of containment at these plants, the meltdown floors that remain intact in all 4 reactors. If there were a complete core meltdown, the residue would accumulate on these floors inside the containment chambers. After it cooled, then there would have to be a thorough removal of the residue. However, there is little likelihood of any significant amounts of radiation escaping these units.
Also, the danger of the radiation level depends upon the element(s) causing the radiation. Each different element has a different half life. Some of these half-lives are as short as 5 days. Others are longer. There are no reliable reports as yet identifying the particular elements that comprise the radiation levels measured at different locations.
I am not a nuclear engineer. I have not stayed recently at a Holiday Inn Express. However, I have taken the time to read extensively about the construction of these plants that use nuclear energy to boil water that in turn produces the steam that powers the machines that generate the electricity. So far, no one has been killed from radiation. The explosions are the product of the cooling efforts. The flaw in the emergency procedures involved the back up diesel generators that turned out to be incompatible with the older electrical outlets at these plants (think of trying to insert newer three pronged electrical plugs into older two prong electric outlets).
I am looking for the facts – not opinions as to what might happen. So far, there is a lot of fear and few facts.
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and a response:
From what I have been able to gather in the past few days, of primary concern is the embrittlement of the hot reactor vessels due to contact with seawater during the cooling efforts.
A couple of links that may help with understanding.
This from MIT.
http://mitnse.com/
And this from industry folks. Caveat:Fox/Henhouse...
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/default.aspx
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
In China, the true cost of Britain's clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
(http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/01/28/article-1350811-0CF36063000005DC-625_634x286.jpg)
The lake of toxic waste at Baotou, China, which as been dumped by the rare earth processing plants in the background
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Gm, Wow! :x
We leave our own resources in the ground and our best technologies on hold, buy what we prohibit ourselves to build, leave the filthiest mining to the places with the worst standards, where they don't even allow testing. Ship the apparatus across the ocean and to the installations with fossil fuels, leave the rare earth mess behind, we set it all up here and with a ribbon cutting - and brag about zero emissions. Then we pay 5 fold for the energy, force out the rest of dirty manufacturing - back to wherever standards are the worst and out of our control. Next we push for world government and global taxes to tackle what we just caused. Mandate plastic in place of steel in our cars,mercury into lighting, and Lithium into everything. We drive SUVs to schools clearcut for asphalt parking, plant a tree and then do a bunch of high fives for our contributions to earth day.
The actual China photo today is eerily similar to a fictional one from British rock 35 years ago on the exact same subject:
Crisis! What Crisis?
(http://i603.photobucket.com/albums/tt114/dougmacg/Supertrampcrisis.jpg)
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Doug I am sure this picture is more or less recyled. It looks familiar.
One could just as easily substitute Bamster making March madness picks with a bunch of hoopsters while Japan, the Middle East, our financial insitutions, the budget mess, and everything else is burning down.
I remember someone telling us a supposedly true story about Reggie Jackson getting on an elevator in the WWTC with an old lady in the 1980's. He had a dog with him and at some point on the way down shouted sit! The lady not the dog sat down in the elevator. And Jackson reportedly looked at her incredulous and kind of embarassed and told her he was talking to the dog. Well I told that story to someone who told it to an old timer. The old timer said that is an old story that gets recycled every generation or so. He heard the same story with Jackie Robinson in the 50's.
Well low and behold a few weeks later I am reading the sports section in my local paper and one of the sports writers told this hilarious story about Reggie Jackson! It was the same one I had just heard and soon found out was a crock of crap. I am sure he felt like he had egg on his face when he found it is was all BS.
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GM:
Great stuff, but why is it in this thread?
Doug:
Great summary!
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Crafty,
Earlier in the thread, we were discussing nuclear power and "green" alternatives. Just as we must weigh the costs and problems related to nukes, we must look at the cost as problems related to other means of energy production.
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Guro and GM (in particular), I read a local newspaper account in which the local nuke plant manager says that the plant was built to withstand a 9.0 RS earthquake. That surprises me given that those in California were not built to withstand such a shock. I think that, like Guro, I am a bit sceptical.
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I would be very, very surprised to find that a nuke plant built decades ago in the midwest was designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake.
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And I am NOT surprised to read that a nuke plant built on an earthquake fault on the CA coast is built only to a 7.5 earthquake standard :x :x :cry:
"Lord, what fools these experts be!" (apologies to Willie Shakespeare)
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http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktla-local-radiation-monitors,0,4670867.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ktxl-Fox40NewsAtTen+%28KTXL+-+FOX40+News+at+Ten%29
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http://www.enviroreporter.com/2011/03/enviroreporter-coms-radiation-station/
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Washington Post Editorial today:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/too-soon-to-write-off-nuclear-power/2011/03/16/ABZ64Eh_story.html
Too soon to write off nuclear power
FIRST CAME an earthquake so powerful that it shifted Japan’s largest island, Honshu, eight feet eastward. Thirty minutes later a tsunami washed away thousands of lives. Now, a third disaster threatens as technicians desperately try to keep the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station from releasing radioactive material.
During all of this, the Japanese people have reacted with fortitude. In a rare television appearance, the emperor asked Japanese to “hand in hand, treat each other with compassion and overcome these difficult times.” That seems to be exactly what they are attempting; and the skeleton staff at Fukushima Daiichi is taking on more than its share, only briefly evacuating the site after detecting a radiation spike on Tuesday, then returning to continue cooling the reactors.
Though the reactors are shut down, they are still producing immense quantities of heat. It doesn’t appear that catastrophic levels of radiation have leaked from the plant’s thick containment barriers, but U.S. officials still have few details. The next few days will be critical.
On this side of the Pacific, the crisis has reinvigorated a debate on nuclear safety. Opponents of atomic power say this crisis proves that the risks can never be eliminated. That’s true. There will always be challenges that designers don’t fully anticipate.
Yet Energy Secretary Steven Chu insisted Wednesday that he and President Obama want to retain nuclear energy as an option, and they have good reason to do so. Generating electricity carries risks, no matter how you do it. Burning fossil fuels pumps harmful gases and particulates into the air every day, causing respiratory illness and cancer in thousands. People die in explosions of coal mines, oil drilling rigs and natural gas pipelines. Unlike nuclear energy, burning fossil fuels contributes to the gravest environmental threat of our time — climate change, which is likely to affect not thousands or millions of people, but billions.
Nuclear accidents pose a uniquely frightening danger: the prospect, in a worst case, of large swaths of territory being poisoned and uninhabitable for decades or longer. Mr. Chu and Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko are right to have the government closely examine what happens in Japan and adjust U.S. policy as necessary. But the Fukushima plant is old. New plants would use more sophisticated technology, such as small-scale high-temperature gas reactors that use fuel in forms that shrink the risk of meltdown further still. A proposed nuclear plant in Georgia would not require backup power in order to activate emergency cooling systems.
Events in Japan will affect the “nuclear renaissance” to some extent, no matter what Mr. Chu or anyone else says, and all the more if the damage is not contained. Our thoughts, as ever, are with the Japanese people struggling to cope; beyond that, it is too soon to form broad and absolute judgments on relative risks.
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Nobody is "writing off nuclear power".
But we shouldn't be building them in earthquake zones perhaps.
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WWWOOOFFF!!!
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CCP: "we shouldn't be building them in earthquake zones"
Agreed!
Those people can have coal, or hook up their exercise machines to run the lights and charge the iphones.
If we want power generation further from the population and further from the earthquake zone, plan on using more power to do that. "Energy losses are directly proportional to the square of the current." - James Prescott Joule
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"hook up their exercise machines to run the lights and charge the iphones"
And environmentalist elistist basketball players should give up basketball and take up treadmills to power their batterries. :lol:
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http://dvice.com/archives/2011/03/how-to-make-a-n.php
The word "meltdown" defines our worst fears about nuclear reactors, and with good reason: without complex and redundant cooling systems, reactors can run out of control, generating so much heat that they melt their own fuel, releasing massive amounts of radioactivity in the process. But a new generation of reactors promises to be much safer, even to the point where a meltdown is a physical impossibility.
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Zero radioactive deaths so far, though still too early to conclude anything about the nuclear accident in Japan. The news cycle has changed quickly to Libya and other flashpoints. Earthquake and tsunami fatalities in Japan could be 22,000. Unimaginable from where I sit. Not the worst of all-time natural disasters, but this tragedy will be on the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll
As the number dead and missing went into the tens of thousands, the media story moved quickly to nuclear disaster, where the measurable damage so far actually sounds more like a bad traffic accident:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/18/fukushima_friday/page3.html
"...there has been one confirmed death, but not at the Daiichi plant at all: a worker who was in a crane cab at the separate Fukushima Daini plant (where all reactors are now confirmed to be safely in cold shutdown) was killed when the quake hit. Two more workers, this time at the Daiichi plant, are still listed as missing since the quake and tsunami hit. Six more required medical help following the quake, one suffering two broken legs.
A further 15 non-radiological injuries have resulted from hydrogen explosions at the site, though some of these were minor in nature and the individuals concerned returned to duty shortly after.
As to radiation-related issues, there has been one case of measurable significance. Earlier in the week when workers were still limited to a total dose of 100 millisievert, one individual breached this limit during venting operations and consequently was evacuated to hospital. As noted above, personnel are now permitted to sustain doses of 250 millisievert.
In summary it appears that health consequences from reactor damage will be extremely minimal even for workers at the site. It will now be a surprise if anyone who has not been inside the plant gates this week is affected by the situation at at all – apart from all the people worldwide who have been taking iodide pills or eating salt unnecessarily."
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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/the-other-global-toxic-cloud-chinas-pollution/72722/
The Other Global Toxic Cloud: China's Pollution
Mar 18 2011, 5:12 PM ET By Edward Tenner
As San Franciscans load up on potassium iodide pills against drifting fallout from the Japanese nuclear reactor catastrophe -- unnecessarily, health authorities insist -- the April issue of Discover calls attention to a more serious menace: mercury and other pollutants from Chinese manufacturing and power generation:
Prevailing winds across the Pacific are pushing thousands of tons of other contaminants--including mercury, sulfates, ozone, black carbon, and desert dust--over the ocean each year. Some of this atmospheric junk settles into the cold waters of the North Pacific, but much of it eventually merges
with the global air pollution pool that circumnavigates the planet.
These contaminants are implicated in a long list of health problems, including neurodegenerative disease, cancer, emphysema, and perhaps even pandemics like avian flu. And when wind and weather conditions are right, they reach North America within days. Dust, ozone, and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins, and mercury can be pulled to earth through atmospheric sinks that deposit it across large swaths of land.
Citing the University of Washington atmospheric scientist Dan Jaffe and the Woodrow Wilson Center program director Jennifer Turner, the author, David Kirby, points to two worrying trends. First, while China is taking positive environmental steps, the momentum of its growth threatens to swamp them:
350 million people, equivalent to the entire U.S. population, will be moving to its cities over the next 10 years. China now emits more mercury than the United States, India, and Europe combined. "What's different about China is the scale and speed of pollution and environmental degradation," Turner says. "It's like nothing the world has ever seen."
Second, America contributes to and receives a global pool of mercury and other pollutants:
The EPA has estimated that just one-quarter of U.S. mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants are deposited within the contiguous U.S. The remainder enters the global cycle. Conversely, current estimates are that less than half of all mercury deposition within the United States comes from American sources.
We naturally focus on catastrophic risks like nuclear meltdowns. But we should also be aware that chronic ones, not the fault of a single nation but the consequences of the global economy, may in the long run be even more serious.
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SHIDAO, China — While engineers at Japan’s stricken nuclear power plant struggle to keep its uranium fuel rods from melting down, engineers in China are building a radically different type of reactor that some experts say offers a safer nuclear alternative.
The technology will be used in two reactors here on a peninsula jutting into the Yellow Sea, where the Chinese government is expected to let construction proceed even as the world debates the wisdom of nuclear power.
Rather than using conventional fuel rod assemblies of the sort leaking radiation in Japan, each packed with nearly 400 pounds of uranium, the Chinese reactors will use hundreds of thousands of billiard-ball-size fuel elements, each cloaked in its own protective layer of graphite.
The coating moderates the pace of nuclear reactions and is meant to ensure that if the plant had to be shut down in an emergency, the reaction would slowly stop on its own and not lead to a meltdown.
The reactors will also be cooled by nonexplosive helium gas instead of depending on a steady source of water — a critical problem with the damaged reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant. And unlike those reactors, the Chinese reactors are designed to gradually dissipate heat on their own, even if coolant is lost.
If the new plants here prove viable, China plans to build dozens more of them in coming years.
The technology under construction here, known as a pebble-bed reactor, is not new. Germany, South Africa and the United States have all experimented with it, before abandoning it over technical problems or a lack of financing.
But as in many other areas of alternative energy, including solar panels and wind turbines, China is now taking the lead in actually building the next-generation technology. The government has paid for all of the research and development costs for the two pebble-bed reactors being built here, and will cover 30 percent of the construction costs.
Despite Japan’s crisis, China still plans to build as many as 50 nuclear reactors over the next five years — more than the rest of the world combined. Most of this next wave will be of more conventional designs.
But if the pebble-bed approach works as advertised, and proves cost effective, China hopes it can eventually adopt the technology on a broad scale to make nuclear power safer and more feasible as it deals with the world’s fastest growing economy and the material expectations of its 1.3 billion people.
Western environmentalists are divided on the safety of pebble-bed nuclear technology.
Thomas B. Cochran, the senior scientist on nuclear power for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an American group, said that such reactors would probably be less dangerous than current nuclear plants, and might be better for the environment than coal-fired plants.
“Over all, in terms of design,” he said, “it would appear to be safer, with the following caveat: the safety of any nuclear plant is not just a function of the design but also of the safety culture of the plant.”
The executives overseeing construction of the new Chinese reactors say that engineers are already being trained to oversee the extensively computerized controls for the plant, using a simulator at a test reactor that has been operating for a decade near Beijing, apparently without mishap.
But Greenpeace, the international environmentalist group, opposes pebble-bed nuclear reactors, questioning whether any nuclear technology can be truly safe. Wrapping the uranium fuel in graphite greatly increases the volume of radioactive waste eventually requiring disposal, said Heinz Smital, a Greenpeace nuclear technology specialist in Germany.
But he said the waste is far less radioactive per ton than spent uranium fuel rods — one of the big sources of trouble at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
China is building a repository for high-level nuclear waste, like conventional fuel rods, in the country’s arid west. But the far less radioactive spheres, or pebbles, like those from the Shidao reactors will not require such specialized storage; China plans to store the used pebbles initially at the power plants, and later at lower-level radioactive waste disposal sites near the reactors.
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Whatever fears the rest of the world may have about China’s nuclear ambitions, the environmental cost-benefit analysis contains at least one potential positive: More nukes would let China reduce the heavy reliance on coal and other fossil fuels that now make it the world’s biggest emitter of global-warming gases.
“China epitomizes the stark choices that we face globally in moving away from current forms of coal-based electricity,” said Jonathan Sinton, the top China specialist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “Nuclear is an essential alternative” to coal, he said. “It’s the only one that can provide the same quality of electricity at a similar scale in the medium and long term.”
Chinese leaders have been largely unwilling to engage in the global debate on climate change. But they have made a priority of reducing urban air pollution — which kills thousands of people every year and is largely caused by burning coal — and of improving mine safety. Coal mining accidents killed more than 2,400 people in China last year alone.
China’s biggest electric company, the state-owned Huaneng Group, now aims to prove that the technology can work on a commercial scale by building the two pebble-bed reactors — each capable of meeting the residential power needs of an American city of 75,000 to 100,000 people. The reactors are expected to go into operation in about four years.
The plants’ foundations have already been laid, their steel reinforcing bars pointing skyward, on a desolate landscape dominated by thatch-roofed huts and last season’s cornfields. Chinese safety regulations require that all nuclear plants be located at least 30 miles from the nearest city, in this case Rongcheng, which has a population of one million.
It was only three days after a tsunami swamped Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant that China’s legislature approved its five-year plan calling for dozens of new nuclear reactors. As the severity of that crisis became evident, Beijing said it would “temporarily suspend“ the approval of new nuclear reactors, but would allow construction to proceed at more than two dozen other nuclear projects already under way.
By coincidence, China’s cabinet and its national energy bureau had both given final approval for the pebble-bed reactors here in Shidao in the two weeks before the earthquake, said Xu Yuanhui, the father of China’s pebble-bed nuclear program.
China’s nuclear safety agency has met since the Japanese earthquake and reviewed the Shidao’s project plans and site preparation, and has indicated it will be the next project to receive safety clearance.
“The conclusion is clear that it is all ready to start to pour concrete,” said Dr. Xu, a former Tsinghua University professor who is now the vice general manager of Chinergy, the contractor building the reactors here.
Germany led the initial research into pebble-bed nuclear reactors and built its own research version in the 1960s. That reactor closed after an accident, caused by a jammed fuel pebble that released traces of radiation — coincidentally nine days after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, at a time of greatly increased worry about nuclear safety. Dr. Xu said that China, learning from the German mishap, had designed its reactors to keep the pebbles from jamming.
South Africa tried hard until last summer to build a pebble-bed reactor but ran into serious cost overruns.
In the United States, the federal government and companies have spent heavily on pebble-bed research. But there has been little appetite for actually building new nuclear reactors — of any sort — since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
“The Chinese had a determination to build, to show the technology to work, and a commitment to get it done,” said Andrew Kadak, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology nuclear engineer specializing in pebble-bed reactors. “In the U.S. we didn’t have, and still don’t have, the commitment.”
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Reliability of this source is unknown:
The Doomsday Scenario
By MIKE WHITNEY
Conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant are deteriorating and the doomsday scenario is beginning to unfold. On Sunday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) officials reported that the levels of radiation leaking into seawater at the Unit 2 reactor were 100,000 times above normal, and the airborne radiation measured 4-times higher than government limits. As a result, emergency workers were evacuated from the plant and rushed to safe location. The prospect of a full-core meltdown or an environmental catastrophe of incalculable magnitude now looms larger than ever. The crisis is getting worse.
If spent fuel rods catch fire from lack of coolant, the intense heat will lift radiation plumes high into the atmosphere that will drift around the world. That's the nightmare scenario, clouds of radioactive material showering the planet with lethal toxins for months on end. And, according to the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics of Vienna, that deadly process has already begun. The group told New Scientist that:
"Japan's damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl. ("New Scientist", March 24 ---thanks to Michael Collins "They said it wasn't like Chernobyl and they were wrong")
So, volatile radioactive elements are already being lofted into the jet stream and spread across continents. What's different here is that the quantities are much larger than they were at Chernobyl, thus, the dangers are far greater. According to the same group of scientists "the Fukushima plant has around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site" (while) "the Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes." The troubles at one nuclear facility now pose a direct threat to humans and other species everywhere. Is this what Obama meant when he called nuclear power, "Safe and green?"
This from CNN:
"Authorities in Japan raised the prospect Friday of a likely breach in the all-important containment vessel of the No. 3 reactor at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, a potentially ominous development in the race to prevent a large-scale release of radiation."
And this from the New York Times:
"A senior nuclear executive who insisted on anonymity but has broad contacts in Japan said that there was a long vertical crack running down the side of the reactor vessel itself. The crack runs down below the water level in the reactor and has been leaking fluids and gases, he said....
"There is a definite, definite crack in the vessel — it's up and down and it's large," he said. "The problem with cracks is they do not get smaller." (Thanks to Washington's Blog)
So, there's a breach in the containment vessel and radioactive material is being released into the sea killing fish and marine life and turning the coastal waters into a nuclear wasteland. This is from the Kyodo News:
"Adding to the woes is the increasing level of contamination in the sea near the plant....Radioactive iodine-131 at a concentration 1,850.5 times the legal limit was detected in a seawater sample taken Saturday around 330 meters south of the plant, near a drainage outlet of the four troubled reactors, compared with 1,250.8 times the limit found Friday, the agency said.
Nishiyama told a press conference in the morning that he cannot deny the possibility that radioactive materials are continuing to be released into the sea. He said later that the water found at the basement of the turbine buildings is unlikely to have flowed into the sea, causing contamination." ("Woes deepen over radioactive water at nuke plant", Kyodo News)
Predictably, the media has switched into full "BP Oil Spill-mode", making every effort to minimize the disaster and to soothe the public with half-truths and disinformation. The goal is to conceal the scale of the catastrophe and protect the nuclear industry. It's another case of profits over people. Still, the truth is available for those who are willing to sift through the lies. Radiation has turned up in the Tokyo water supply, imports of milk, vegetable and fruit from four prefectures in the vicinity of Fukushima have been banned, and the evacuation zone around the plant has widened to an 18 mile radius.
Also, monitors have detected tiny radioactive particles which have spread from the reactor site across the Pacific to North America, the Atlantic and Europe...According to Reuters: "It's only a matter of days before it disperses in the entire northern hemisphere," said Andrea Stahl, a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research."
Here's more from Brian Moench, MD:
"Administration spokespeople continuously claim "no threat" from the radiation reaching the US from Japan, just as they did with oil hemorrhaging into the Gulf. Perhaps we should all whistle "Don't worry, be happy" in unison. A thorough review of the science, however, begs a second opinion.
That the radiation is being released 5,000 miles away isn't as comforting as it seems.... Every day, the jet stream carries pollution from Asian smoke stacks and dust from the Gobi Desert to our West Coast, contributing 10 to 60 percent of the total pollution breathed by Californians, depending on the time of year. Mercury is probably the second most toxic substance known after plutonium. Half the mercury in the atmosphere over the entire US originates in China. It, too, is 5,000 miles away. A week after a nuclear weapons test in China, iodine 131 could be detected in the thyroid glands of deer in Colorado, although it could not be detected in the air or in nearby vegetation." (Washington's Blog)
The smoldering Fukushima hulk is a perpetual death machine poisoning everything around it--sea, sky and soil. Here's a clip from the Collin's article:
"...The soil contamination is really high. Soil found 40 kilometers away.... the levels on the soil were very high—in fact, a thousand times iodine, 4,000 times the cesium standard. And we just got a report from the Kyoto Research Reactor Institute, Dr. Tetsuji Imanaka, that said that—he had to look a little bit more into the sampling of the Japanese government, but depending on how the sampling was done, this level of contamination in the soil could be twice the amount that was compulsory evacuation for Chernobyl. Aileen Mioko Smith, March 24 (thanks to Michael Collins "They said it wasn't like Chernobyl and they were wrong")
Twice as high as Chernobyl already, and the disaster is likely to persist for months to come. Things are getting worse, much worse.
The Japanese government has been downplaying the crisis to make it look like they have matters under control, but it's all a sham. They control nothing. The rescue mission has been a flop from the get-go and now things are at a boiling point. The emergency effort has been overtaken by events and now it's a matter of "wait and see". We're approaching zero hour.
So why the cover up? Why is the media trying to soft-peddle the real effects of a nuclear cataclysm? Does the Japanese government really believe they can make things better by tweaking their public relations strategy? They should focus on saving lives and abandon "perception management" altogether. This is from the Union of Concerned Scientists website:
"Our assessment is that the Japanese government is squandering the opportunity to initiate an orderly evacuation from larger areas around the site–especially of sensitive populations, like children and pregnant women. It is potentially wasting valuable time by not undertaking a larger scale evacuation at this time."
The Japanese government is trying to protect the powerful nuclear lobby. The same is true of Obama, who continues to promote nuclear energy even while radiation belches from battered Fukushima. He's not thinking about the public; he's thinking about the deep pocket constituents who fill his campaign coffers.
Japanese workers are putting their lives on the line to regain control of the broken facility, but with little success. The probability of another fire, another monstrous explosion, or a full-core meltdown increases by the day. The Fukushima fiasco is gaining pace putting tens of thousands of people at risk of thyroid cancer, childhood leukemia and other life-threatening ailments.
On Saturday, Japan's prime minister, Naoto Kan, said the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant was ''serious''. That might be the understatement of the century.
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com.
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If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. -- George Washington
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By RICHARD K. LESTER
The accident at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station is still far from resolved. A major public health disaster seems to have been avoided, and the long-term impact on health and safety will be dwarfed by the devastating loss of life caused directly by the huge Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. But the nuclear crisis has badly scared people around the world.
Predictably, longtime antinuclear activists are calling for an end to any further nuclear development. Equally predictably, spokesmen for the industry say the Japanese earthquake was a once-in-a-millennium event and point to the greater safety of newer reactors.
In the U.S., the most urgent need in the wake of the accident is to assess the safety of existing nuclear power plants. Plans to extend the operating life of some 40-year-old reactors for another two decades should be reviewed, and costly upgrades may be required. We must also revisit the longstanding issue of how and where to store spent nuclear fuel. The sensible solution would be to store it in dry concrete casks at one or two central locations. Instead, decades of political dithering have produced only gridlock, so spent fuel remains in increasingly densely-packed storage pools at dozens of sites around the country.
Still, the overall impact of the accident will be fairly small here. The so-called nuclear renaissance wasn't really going anywhere in the U.S. even before the Japanese earthquake. For most utilities, new nuclear plants are simply too big and expensive to contemplate. Only a few such plants would have been built over the next decade. Now some of those may be scrapped.
But that's hardly the end of the story. This year is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the atomic nucleus, and a little over 70 years since nuclear fission was first demonstrated. In historical terms, that puts the field of nuclear engineering today roughly where electrical engineering was in 1900. Consider what followed: the creation of the electric power grid, television and telecommunications, the revolutions in microelectronics and computation, and much more. None of it was anticipated by the electrical engineers of 1900.
Likewise, no one today can foresee the future of nuclear energy technology at the end of the 21st century. All that can be said with confidence now is that the nuclear power plants of the year 2100 will have about as much resemblance to today's workhorse light-water reactors as a modern automobile has to a 1911 Model T.
In the aftermath of Fukushima, some new technologies already in the pipeline look more promising. New fuel "cladding" materials are being developed that don't react with high-temperature steam to produce hydrogen—the cause of the shocking explosions in Japan. Other new plant designs rely on natural heat conduction and convection rather than electric-powered pumps and valves and human intervention to cool the fuel in reactors that have shut down.
Today's most advanced designs go even further toward the goal of "walkaway safety," that is, reactors that can shut themselves down and cool themselves off without electric power or any human intervention at all. Longer-term possibilities include lifetime fueling, which would allow a single charge of fuel to power a reactor for its entire life—making it, in effect, a nuclear battery. Integrated power plant/waste disposal systems are another promising concept. Here, used fuel never leaves the site and is disposed of directly in stable, dry bedrock several kilometers below the earth's surface (more than 10 times as deep as the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility in Nevada.)
Huge gains in computing power already enable far more precise simulations of nuclear-reactor behavior than ever before. Computational advances will also make it possible to design radiation-resistant materials literally atom by atom and, perhaps, specially tailored nanostructures that could store long-lived nuclear waste safely for tens of thousands of years. All of this can be foreseen today, and much greater advances surely lie over the horizon.
The innovators here will not be today's industry leaders or officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but rather the young men and women who for the last decade have been entering university nuclear engineering programs in growing numbers. They see great engineering challenges in designing new nuclear power systems that are safe and economical, and they see an opportunity to help ameliorate the grave threat of climate change. They know that nuclear energy is the only low-carbon energy source that is already generating large amounts of electricity and can meet the world's fast-growing appetite for power.
After the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, many of the brightest nuclear scientists and engineers left the field. The management of existing nuclear reactors improved, but technological innovation was slow and incremental.
We shouldn't allow that experience to be repeated. This is not the time for the nuclear industry to circle the wagons: The need for intellectual vitality, flexibility and creativity has never been greater. An already safe technology must be made demonstrably safer—and less expensive, more secure against the threats of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, and more compatible with the capabilities of electric power systems and the utilities that run them. The advantages of nuclear power in displacing fossil fuels are simply too great to ignore.
Mr. Lester is the head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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http://reason.com/blog/2011/04/06/environmentalist-george-monbio
Reason Magazine
Environmentalist George Monbiot Says Greens Have Been Lying About Nuclear Power
Ronald Bailey | April 6, 2011
Better late than never, I guess. Guardian columnist and fierce environmentalist George Monbiot has called out anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott and her confreres for misleading the world about the alleged dangers of nuclear power. The column speaks for itself:
Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.
I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott. Dr Caldicott is the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. She has received 21 honorary degrees and scores of awards, and was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. Like other greens, I was in awe of her. In the debate she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. So I did what anyone faced with questionable scientific claims should do: I asked for the sources. Caldicott's response has profoundly shaken me.
First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so – all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.
I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink – in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them. (I have posted our correspondence, and my sources, on my website.) I have just read her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.
For the last 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a medieval circus. They now claim 985,000 people have been killed by Chernobyl, and that it will continue to slaughter people for generations to come. These claims are false.
The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear) is the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like the IPCC, it calls on the world's leading scientists to assess thousands of papers and produce an overview. Here is what it says about the impacts of Chernobyl.
Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.
In the rest of the population there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children – arising "almost entirely" from the Soviet Union's failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131. Otherwise "there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure". People living in the countries affected today "need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident".
Caldicott told me that Unscear's work on Chernobyl is "a total cover-up". Though I have pressed her to explain, she has yet to produce a shred of evidence for this contention.
Monbiot concludes:
We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right.
Welcome at long last to the reality-based community, George.
Caveat: I do not favor either nuclear socialism or solar socialism. Let's completely eliminate subsidies to all energy production technologies. Nevertheless, Monbiot's whole column is well worth reading.
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More and more data is coming in from Japan, most of it is bad news except that in this real world, worst case scenario, the deaths outside of the plant I think are still at zero and the health risks outside the plant seem to be smaller than publicized, we will see.
Crafty made a good point about distrusting the engineers. That thought reminds me of driving across the interstate bridge that fell into the Mississippi River a few years ago, a couple of hours before it fell - and driving across it since. There are other routes except those face the same risks. Driving across now brings that same feeling a new or infrequent flier gets sitting aboard a jetliner before takeoff. Logically when you fly, you don't say it is risk-free, you tell yourself this is safer than driving. As you forget about the danger, you hope the mechanics haven't. Nuclear power after the worst of the worst scenarios keeps proving itself cleaner and safer than all the alternatives.
A couple of articles in the news addressing some of the radiation coverage stories since the earthquake:
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/miller11/English
Interesting discussion of the health risks by a Stanford fellow, addressing claims that very low level exposures actually make one more resistant to cancer, while high exposures most certainly cause cancer, he concludes: "stay tuned, learn from the experts, and don’t jump to conclusions.
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Second article (my first citation to the LA Times?) is written by a global warming author. He concludes that each closed nuclear plant adds 11 million tons of CO2 emissions to the atmosphere and closing all of them will add one degree Celsius man made global warming in one century to the two degrees he alleges we would have otherwise. I am skeptical of his math, but coal plants powering cities like Tokyo or the economies of are extremely large scale (and unnecessary?) emitters. There is no easier, safer, larger way to reduce emissions than to expand not contract our reliance on nuclear power. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lynas-nukes-20110410,0,3424093.story
Part of my global warming skepticism comes from my belief that we will innovate and discover our way out of excess emissions with or without excessive regulations in a blip of time in the context of the planet. After this horrific catastrophe, I think we will know how to built a reactor to withstand an earthquake a hundred times more powerful than the one that dropped the Bay Bridge, we will hopefully know not to build them in bad earthquake zones and we will know better from experience how to do an emergency cool down and evacuation if that ever again becomes necessary. That makes the cleanest, safest source far more safe than it was before. OTOH, if our reaction to the tragedy is zero acceptance of radiation risk, then the production of energy will necessarily be for more deadly and the predictions of the alarmists (to the tune of a hundred billion tons of CO2 per century) contain slightly more truth.
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"likelihood of widespread health effects remains low... in terms of becquerels (radioactivity) things are already a lot better than they were."
"does not seem, in public health terms, to have turned out too bad."
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The news cycle moved on and the facts aren't all in. I'm trying to keep following this; there is a lot to be learned. Here are a couple more excerpts from what seems to be a balanced and objective piece in The Economist April 12, 2011 (read it all):
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/japans_nuclear_crisis
[The release at Fukushima]"does not seem, in public health terms, to have turned out too bad."
"Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency estimates that the emission of radioactive iodine and caesium from the Fukushima plant totals, to date, something equivalent to 370 petabecquerels." (one becquerel represents one nuclear decay per second)
"...because of those countermeasures the likelihood of widespread health effects remains low. (It is also worth remembering that in terms of becquerels things are already a lot better than they were, as iodine-131 has a half-life of only eight days. This means that iodine emitted thirty two days ago has by now lost fifteen-sixteenths of its radioactivity.)
"The contaminants that fell on to the land did so mostly but not entirely in nearby places that had already been evacuated."
"the cumulative releases from Fukushima add up to a major release”
"None of this makes Fukushima trivial; it is a grave crisis."
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Now that the nuclear news out of Japan is better, and covered nowhere, we may have to move the topic over to media issues. I waited two days to post, Google News has this story picked up by no one.
The Yomiuri Shimbun (Japanese newspaper - largest circulation in the world) reports:
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110426005027.htm
Radioactive material 'down to 1/100'
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The amount of radioactive material emitted from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant has decreased to about one-hundredth of the level recorded earlier this month, the Cabinet Office's Nuclear Safety Commission has said.
The commission also said Monday the concentration of iodine-131 in seawater sampled near the plant had dropped to below the government-set limit for the first time since surveys started on March 21. However, the panel said high amounts of radioactive material were still being emitted by the plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Co., at about 10 billion becquerels per hour.
"We shouldn't take the figures for granted. We must continue to carefully observe the situation," a commission spokesperson said.
The commission calculates the volume of radioactive material discharged based on radiation measurements taken at several places around the plant. Radioactive emissions on April 5 were estimated at 1 trillion becquerels per hour.
"Radiation dosages around the plant are on a downward trend. Emissions of radioactive material have diminished to about one-hundredth [of levels earlier this month]," the commission told reporters Monday.
(Apr. 27, 2011)
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Disaster Plan Problems Found at U.S. Nuclear Plants
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: May 12, 2011
ROCKVILLE, Md. — Despite repeated assurances that American nuclear plants are better equipped to deal with natural disasters than their counterparts in Japan, regulators said Thursday that recent inspections had found serious problems with some emergency equipment that would have made it unusable in an accident.
N.R.C. employees said the agency had insufficiently weighed two factors found in the crisis at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant.
In addition, the staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that the agency’s current regulations and disaster plans did not give enough consideration to two factors that had greatly contributed to the continuing Fukushima Daiichi crisis in Japan: simultaneous problems at more than one reactor and a natural disaster that disrupts roads, electricity and other infrastructure surrounding a plant.
The briefing was part of a review requested by the commissioners to evaluate the vulnerability of American reactors to severe natural disasters like the ones that hit the Japanese plant in March.
Marty Virgilio, the deputy executive director of the agency, told the five commissioners that inspectors checked a sample of equipment at all 104 reactors and found problems at less than a third of them. The problems included pumps that would not start or, if they did, did not put out the required amount of water; equipment that was supposed to be set aside for emergencies but was being used in other parts of the plants; emergency equipment that would be needed in case of flood stored in places that could be flooded; and insufficient diesel on hand to run backup systems.
Many of the emergency systems were put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Officials said the problems that had been found were addressed immediately but not everything had been inspected. Mr. Virgilio said he expected to have a fuller picture soon.
He said an entire category of new procedures, called “severe accident mitigation guidelines,” had been adopted voluntarily by the nuclear industry and thus was not subject to commission rules.
R. William Borchardt, the commission’s chief staff official, said some of the preparations for severe accidents “don’t have the same kind of regulatory pedigree” as the equipment in the original plant design.
The two-hour briefing given to the five-member commission was an early assessment, 30 days into a 90-day review being conducted by an N.R.C. task force.
Charlie Miller, the staff member leading the effort, said the staff was considering “enhancements” to its disaster plans and procedures. But as laid out by the staff, some of the changes under consideration could be far-reaching.
For example, the N.R.C. now looks at how well a plant’s design can handle a problem at just one reactor, even if there is more than one reactor at the site.
“You have to take a step back and consider what would happen if you had multiple units affected by some ‘beyond design basis’ events,” Mr. Miller said.
Another problem, staff members acknowledged, is that they have never paid much attention to the issues posed by handling an emergency when there is widespread damage to surrounding roads, power systems and communications links. In the past, the commission has explicitly rejected the notion that it should consider such combined events when reviewing a plant’s safety preparations.
Simultaneous with the commission’s meeting, Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, released a report arguing that a variety of other shortcomings existed at nuclear plants, including the frequent failure of emergency diesel generators, which are essential to plant safety if the power grid goes down. He also criticized the commission for not requiring plants to have a backup power source for spent fuel pools while the reactor is shut for maintenance or refueling.
The Fukushima accident has cast new attention on spent fuel pools; the reason the United States government recommended that Americans stay 50 miles from the plant was damage to the spent fuel pool of Fukushima’s Unit 4, a reactor that was shut down before the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Mr. Markey pointed out that in the last eight years, the commission had received 69 reports of inoperable diesel generators at 33 plants, with six of those generators out for more than a month. The diesels provide power for water pumps that allow removal of “decay heat,” the heat that fuel generates even after a reactor shuts down. The Fukushima plants shut down successfully but decay heat wrecked their cores.
The N.R.C. said it was aware of the reports. But on Wednesday, attention was called to that problem by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, an industry group formed after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 to provide peer-to-peer safety reviews. That group said one of the few safety measures that was getting worse was the reliability of diesel generators.
Mr. Markey also complained that the commission had allowed some plant operators to remove equipment that eliminates hydrogen produced by overheating fuel. In addition, there is no requirement for equipment to remove hydrogen in the rooms where spent fuel is stored; the building surrounding Fukushima Unit 4 was destroyed by the explosion of hydrogen that came from the spent fuel pool.
Commission officials said they were reviewing their previous decision to permit very heavy loading of the spent fuel pools. Thinning them out would reduce the amount of heat production that had to be dealt with in case of a severe accident, they said.
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Yes, the horrific earthquake/tsunami experience in Japan gives us an amazing opportunity to check, learn, update and improve the safety of nuclear power. Real information is just starting to come in. Let's keep this debate / discussion alive beyond the crisis. We still need electricity, one way or another.
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"Let's keep this , , , discussion alive beyond the crisis."
Yes!
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"Panicked overreaction isn’t the right response to the partial meltdowns in Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex."
This should go under media issues, anytime the Washington Post agrees with me...
Going anti-nuclear means going hog-wild on fossil fuels, in Japan, in Germany, in the U.S. and anywhere else. Did we not just have a two decade long argument over Greenhouse gases. Maybe CO2 is an extremely minor contributor, but did we not agree that we should use them wisely and sparingly and shift where we can to economical zero emissions alternatives? I guess not.
It is the Green Party that wants us back on fossil fuels??
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/germanys-nuclear-energy-blunder/2011/05/31/AGjjGkGH_story.html
Editorial Board Opinion - Washington Post
Germany’s nuclear energy blunder
By Editorial, Published: June 1
THE INTERNATIONAL Energy Agency reported on Monday that global energy-related carbon emissions last year were the highest ever, and that the world is far off track if it wants to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, after which the results could be very dangerous.
So what does Germany’s government decide to do? Shut down terawatts of low-carbon electric capacity in the middle of Europe. Bowing to misguided political pressure from Germany’s Green Party, Chancellor Angela Merkel endorsed a plan to close all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2022.
German environmentalists cheered, apparently satisfied that the government will be able to scale up renewable energy sources and scale back electricity demand enough to compensate for the loss of the power plants, which produce a quarter of the nation’s electricity. But the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank, points out that renewables would have to generate an incredible 42.4 percent of the country’s electricity in 2020 to displace nuclear. The government could bring that number down some with very aggressive reductions in energy use. But, even then, all that will merely hold the German power industry to its current carbon footprint. The country has an ambitious goal to reduce emissions, which will require yet more drastic reforms to its electricity sector — and all, apparently, over the course of a single decade.
European financial analysts aren’t convinced, estimating that Germany’s move will result in about 400 million tons of extra carbon emissions by 2020, as the country relies more on fossil fuels. Nor is Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, who ominously announced that Germany has put coal-fired power “back on the agenda” — good for his coal-rich nation directly to Germany’s east but terrible for the environment and public health.
Germany is also likely to import more power from its neighbors, regardless of how well it does in ramping up renewables, since sometimes the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. Utilities across Europe may end up burning more coal or natural gas. Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of French nuclear parts manufacturer Areva, predicts that after shunning nuclear, the Germans will end up buying electricity generated in nuclear plants in nations such as France.
Instead of providing a model for greening a post-industrial economy, Germany’s overreaching greens are showing the rest of the world just how difficult it is to contemplate big cuts in carbon emissions without keeping nuclear power on the table. Panicked overreaction isn’t the right response to the partial meltdowns in Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. Instead, countries aiming to provide their citizens with reliable, low-carbon electricity should ask how to minimize inevitable, if small, risks — making their nuclear facilities safer, more reliable and more efficient.
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On May 30 the German government announced the seven nuclear power reactors that had been shut down in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami would never be reopened. In fact, they went on to announce the entire shuttering of the German nuclear fleet by 2022. Germany relies on nuclear power for roughly one-third of its electricity needs and at this point, the closure of the entire nuclear sector opens a four-way power game for the future of the German economy and German loyalties. The German plan is to replace the entirety of the nuclear industry with renewable power. Unfortunate for the Germans this is not cost possible. Nuclear power is less than one-third of wind power and less than one-twentieth the cost of solar power. Replacing one-third of their total power generation within a decade is simply not feasible much less possible. Which brings us to the other three options: the first is France.
France’s entire post-World War II strategy has been about lashing itself to Germany so that Germany can never again threaten it. In the post-Cold War era, the strategy has been refined somewhat in order to make France as essential to German plans as possible. Now unlike Germany, and France’s population is remarkably pro-nuclear and so the French are going to be trying to build as many nuclear power reactors as possible so that they can export electricity to Germany to make up as much of the difference as possible. This has already been happening to a limited degree. In the aftermath of the Fukushima disasters in Japan, French power actors have been running up to the red line in order to supply power to replace those seven nuclear reactors that the Germans took off-line. So the French already have a leg up in this competition.
The second country is Poland. Poland’s concerns are little more complex. While the French are obviously concerned about what happens should Germany get too confident, the Poles are sandwiched between a resurgent Germany and resurgent Russia. There is nowhere for them to turn; economically they can’t compete with either; demographically they can’t compete with either. They need a way to shape the relations of one or both of the states. The Polish advantage, somewhat ironically, is coal — a fuel that has been steadily phased out across Europe over the last 20 years. Poland still gets 90 percent of its electricity from coal and unlike the expensive nuclear power reactors which require several billion euros and five to 10 years to construct, you can put up a coal plant for as little as a few hundred million in a year or two. Poland is actually the country, ironically then, with this old politically incorrect fuel source that actually has a chance of coming to Germany’s rescue in the shortest term for the lowest dollar amount.
The final player in the game is Russia. Russia has been attempting to secure a partnership with the Germans for decades and such a partnership would solve many of Russia’s long-term demographic, economic and military problems. A German-Russian partnership would neutralize Poland, and really, neutralize all of Europe. It would make it very difficult for the Americans put forward any sort of anti-Russian policies in the European sphere of influence as there would simply be no one to carry them out. The United States needs Germany to at least be neutral in its relations with Russia otherwise the Russians have a free hand in all the other theaters, and as powerful as the Americans are, so long as they are involved in the Islamic world they simply can’t counter Russia everywhere. Economically, the Russians see Germany as their strongest trading partner and their largest source of foreign investment. They realize that if they can get their hook into the German soul, their life simply gets easier all around. Their plan is pretty simple. There is something called the Nord Stream pipeline which bypasses all the transit states between the Russians and the Germans that is in the process of final testing right now. It should come online in 2012 and then slowly be ramped up to a full capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. That 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas is enough to replace half of the electricity that nuclear power has recently given Germany. All that has to be done is the construction of additional natural gas-burning power plants in Germany — the fuel is already there.
And so we have a four-part race: first, the Germans, who have a politically attractive plan that is economically unfeasible; second, the French, who have a politically attractive plan that is economically expensive; third, the Poles, who have a politically unattractive plan which is economically dirt cheap; and forth, the Russians, who already have the fuel source in place.
Click for more videos
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43318496/ns/us_news-christian_science_monitor
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More questions than answers still, but some interesting pictures from inside the facility, "the first photojournalist to gain unauthorised access to the power plant" here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/aug/20/fukushima-interactive-guide
What I found most interesting is to take another look at the map, how amazingly close this historic earthquake and tsunami was to a massive, older nuclear facility. Click on the map for the enlargement.
If I am reading my Richter numbers correctly, the recent east coast earthquake (5.9) was 1/1000th the power and strength of the one to hit Fukushima. What the Fukushima disaster has to do exactly with potential new uses for nuclear energy where I live or in Germany, hundreds or thousands of miles from similar fault lines, is something I am unable to fully understand.
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Death toll from earthquake-tsunami: 20364.
http://earthquake-report.com/2011/08/04/japan-tsunami-following-up-the-aftermath-part-16-june/
Deaths directly resulting from the nuclear accident: 5
http://asiancorrespondent.com/53036/the-fukushima-death-toll/
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Time magazine, of all places, is noticing that the risk for those exposed to the Fukushima release of dying from cancer has increased 0.001%.
Meanwhile we hopefully learned: a) how to build to withstand the worst earthquake imaginable, and also b) not to build in a known, worst-imaginable earthquake zones.
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http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2012/03/02/nuked-how-bad-was-fukushima/
"scientists have begun to compile early assessments of the health impacts of Fukushima—and the conclusions are less than catastrophic. Researchers speaking at a conference for the Health Physics Society said that the health threat to Japanese from radiation exposure looks to be extremely low. Even the brave workers who stayed behind at the plant had radiation exposure that was more than 10 times lower than that levels received by the half-million people who helped entomb the Chernobyl reaction more than two decades ago. They estimated that the risk of getting cancer for those exposed would increase 0.002%, and the risk of dying from cancer would rise by 0.001%. “I received more radiation on my transcontinental flights from Tokyo to Washington than I did at the reactor site,” said John Boice, a professor at Vanderbilt University and the incoming president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements."
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“The part of uranium that's fissile—when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two—is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7% . … The concept of the TerraPower reactor is that in the same reactor, you both burn and breed. Instead of making plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium—the 99.3% that you normally don't do anything with—we convert that and we burn it. The 99.3% is cheap as heck, and there's a pile of it sitting in Paducah, Kentucky, that's enough to power the United States for hundreds and hundreds of years.
MR. MURRAY: What's the timetable for this?
MR. GATES: By 2022, if everything goes perfectly, our demo reactor will be in place. And by 2028, assuming everything continues to go perfectly, it will be a design that could be replicated.
MR. MURRAY: How often does everything go perfectly?
MR. GATES: In nuclear? If you ignore 1979 and 1986 and 2011, we've had a good century. No, seriously. Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577299343742435580.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLE_Video_Top
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Long story, well researched, published in Fortune yesterday. Short excerpts:
"how could the accident at Fukushima Daiichi have happened—and how, in particular, could it have happened in Japan, a country once known, not so long ago, for its sheer management and engineering competence?"
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"When the licenses for the Fukushima Daiichi generating stations were granted in 1966 and 1972, they called for the plant to be able to withstand a wave cresting at 3.1 meters in height—a figure based on the size of a tsunami in Chile in 1960."
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"There was no precedent for the magnitude of the quake and tsunami that wreaked havoc at Fukushima Daiichi. But the disaster wasn't unimaginable."
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"As recently as 2008, according to the Japanese government's interim report into the accident released at the end of last year, TEPCO reevaluated the tsunami risks at the plant. New simulations the company ran showed waves could reach as high as 15 meters—chillingly, almost the exact height of the biggest wave that smashed into the coastline on the afternoon of March 11. (a 46 ft. wall of water at hundreds of miles per hour?)
TEPCO didn't believe the simulation was reliable."
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"...they did have redundant power sources in place—the on site diesel generators that also eventually failed after the tsunami struck. (Despite sitting within a few hundred yards of the Pacific ocean, the generators were not designed to withstand flooding.)"
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"we spent ten times more money for PR campaigns than we did for real safety measures. It's a terrible thing."
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"The fact is, we still don't know what's going on inside the reactors."
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/20/fukushima-daiichi/?iid=SF_F_Lead
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I do not know enough to have an opinion, but this does seem interesting,
Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue.
The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends evacuation of a locality whenever the excess radiation dose exceeds .1 rem per year. But that's one-third of what I call the "Denver dose." Applied strictly, the ICRP standard would seem to require the immediate evacuation of Denver.
Physicist Richard Muller discusses the panic over the Fukushima accident and the need to put nuclear risks in perspective with WSJ
A collection of the nuclear panic that has occurred over the years from Hiroshima to the Fukushima nuclear power plant today
It is worth noting that, despite its high radiation levels, Denver generally has a lower cancer rate than the rest of the United States. Some scientists interpret this as evidence that low levels of radiation induce cancer resistance; I think it is more likely that lifestyle differences account for the disparity.
Now consider the most famous victim of the March 2011 tsunami in Japan: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Two workers at the reactor were killed by the tsunami, which is believed to have been 50 feet high at the site.
But over the following weeks and months, the fear grew that the ultimate victims of this damaged nuke would number in the thousands or tens of thousands. The "hot spots" in Japan that frightened many people showed radiation at the level of .1 rem, a number quite small compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver.
More from Richard Muller
Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl
What explains the disparity? Why this enormous difference in what is considered an acceptable level of exposure to radiation?
In hindsight, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the policies enacted in the wake of the disaster in Japan—particularly the long-term evacuation of large areas and the virtual termination of the Japanese nuclear power industry—were expressions of panic. I would go further and suggest that these well-intended measures did far more harm than good, not least in limiting the prospects of a source of energy that is safe, abundant and (as compared with its rivals) relatively benign for the environmental health of our planet.
If you are exposed to a dose of 100 rem or more, you will get sick right away from radiation illness. You know what that's like from people who have had radiation therapy: nausea, loss of hair, a general feeling of weakness. In the Fukushima accident, nobody got a dose this big; workers were restricted in their hours of exposure to try to make sure that none received a dose greater than 25 rem (although some exceeded this level). At a larger dose—250 to 350 rem—the symptoms become life-threatening. Essential enzymes are damaged, and your chance of dying (if untreated) is 50%.
The Saturday Essay
Can Syria's Christians Survive? (8/11/12)
Decoding the Science of Sleep (8/4/12)
Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem (7/28/12)
The Customer as a God (7/21/12)
The Big War Over a Small Fruit (7/14/12)
The Crushing Cost of Care (7/7/12)
The Medication Generation (6/30/12
Nevertheless, even a small number of rem can trigger an eventual cancer. A dose of 25 rem causes no radiation illness, but it gives you a 1% chance of getting cancer—in addition to the 20% chance you already have from "natural" causes. For larger doses, the danger is proportional to the dose, so a 50-rem dose gives you a 2% chance of getting cancer; 75 rem ups that to 3%. The cancer effects of these doses, from 25 to 75 rem, are well established by studies of the excess cancers caused by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. (A recent study of butterflies near Fukushima confirms the well-known fact that radiation leads to mutations in insects and other simple life-forms. Research on those exposed to the atomic bombs shows, however, no similar mutations in higher species such as humans.)
Here's another way to calculate the danger of radiation: If 25 rem gives you a 1% chance of getting cancer, then a dose of 2,500 rem (25 rem times 100) implies that you will get cancer (a 100% chance). We can call this a cancer dose. A dose that high would kill you from radiation illness, but if spread out over 1,000 people, so that everyone received 2.5 rem on average, the 2,500 rem would still induce just one extra cancer. That is, even if shared, the total number of damaged cells would be the same. Rem measures radiation damage, and if there is one cancer's worth of damage, it doesn't matter how many people share that risk.
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In short, if you want to know how many excess cancers there will be, multiply the population by the average dose per person and then divide by 2,500 (the cancer dose described above).
In Fukushima, the area exposed to the greatest radiation—a swath of land some 10 miles wide and 35 miles long—had an estimated first-year dose of more than 2 rem. Some locations recorded doses as high as 22 rem (total exposure before evacuation). Afterward, the levels of radiation dropped quickly; the largest component came from iodine, and its level dropped by 50% every eight days.
How many cancers will such a dose trigger? To calculate an answer, assume that the entire population of that 2-rem-plus region, about 22,000 people, received the highest dose: 22 rem. (This obviously overestimates the danger.) The number of excess cancers expected is the dose (22 rem) multiplied by the population (22,000), divided by 2,500. This equals 194 excess cancers.
Let's compare that to the number of normal cancers in the same group. Even without the accident, the cancer rate is about 20% of the population, or 4,400 cancers. Can the additional 194 be detected? Yes, because many of them will be thyroid cancer, which is normally rare (but treatable). Other kinds of cancer will probably not be observable, because of the natural statistical variation of cancers.
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Sadly, many of those 4,400 who die from "normal" cancer will die believing that their illness was caused by the nuclear reactor. That is human nature; we search for reasons behind our tragedies. Of the roughly 100,000 survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, we can estimate that about 20,000 have died or will die from cancer. But in only about 800 of these cases was the cancer caused by the bombs. We know that by looking at similar cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have experienced an increase in cancer among those exposed, but it is only a small increment of the natural rate. Yet far more than the estimated 800 victims attribute their cancers to the bomb.
What about the outlying regions of Fukushima? The next radiation zone around the reactor had a population of about 40,000 and an average dose of 1.5 rem. This yields a total dose of 60,000 total rem (40,000 times 1.5), making the number of expected extra cancers 24 (60,000 divided by 2,500).
These numbers are tragic, but they are smaller than the impression that people got from much of the news coverage in the wake of the disaster. Thanks to the early evacuation, the total number of deaths from the radioactive release in the Fukushima region will almost certainly be less than my figures above. A more reasonable estimate, using average exposures rather than the maximum ones, is 100 extra cancer deaths. That is bad, to be sure, but that number is minuscule compared with the 15,000 deaths caused by the tsunami.
What about more distant regions? Even a tiny bit of radiation averaged over a huge population could conceivably cause cancer. But we are immersed in "natural" radioactivity from cosmic rays (radiation coming from space) and from the earth (uranium, thorium and naturally radioactive potassium in the ground). These natural levels are typically 0.3 rem per year. We also are exposed to an additional 0.3 rem if we include average medical exposures from X-rays and other medical treatments. Some areas, like Denver, have even higher natural levels.
[image] Photo Illustration The Wall Street Journal; iStockphoto (flag)
Radiation levels in most of the region were quite low compared with the average excess dose that people happily live with in Denver.
The most thoughtful high-number estimate of deaths that will be caused by the Fukushima disaster comes from Richard Garwin, a renowned nuclear expert. He has written that the best estimate for the number of deaths is about 1,500—well above my estimate but still only 10% of the immediate tsunami deaths.
Dr. Garwin uses the same numbers that I use, but he extrapolates forward in time 70 years to the continuing damage that residual radiation could cause, assuming that the radiation cannot be covered, cleaned or washed away, and that the population of Fukushima doesn't change. Moreover, he ignores the sort of argument that I have made about the Denver dose and includes in the calculation the numbers of deaths expected from tiny doses, assuming that even small exposures are proportionately dangerous. (This is an assumption that has also been adopted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.)
I don't dispute Dr. Garwin's number, but I believe it has to be understood in context. If you apply the same approach to Denver, you have to take into account the fact that the Denver dose is delivered every year. Over 70 years, it sums to 0.3 rem times 70, or 21 rem per person. If you multiply that by 600,000 people (the current population of Denver) and divide by the cancer dose of 2,500 rem, you get the expected cancer excess in Denver. That figure is 5,000, over three times higher than Dr. Garwin's number for Fukushima.
Earlier Coverage
In Japan, Relief at Radiation's Low Toll
Japan Restarts Reactor Amid Nuclear Protests
Japan Reactor Struggles With Water
Flaws Found in Japan's Nuclear Disaster Plans
Mental Health of Fukushima Daiichi Workers in Focus
I am uncomfortable with these large numbers of predicted deaths. They are based on a theory that assumes proportionality in the way that radiation increases the likelihood of cancer—a theory that has never been tested, will not be tested in the foreseeable future, and which is known to fail for leukemia.
I can't be sure that the theory is wrong, but I consider these relatively large numbers for Denver and Fukushima to be misleading. Remember that Denver has a lower cancer rate than the rest of the U.S., not a higher one. There is a strong argument for ignoring radiation dangers below the level of the Denver dose. In doing so, we would be ignoring risks that are unobservable and which we routinely ignore (and properly so) in other circumstances.
Even though Dr. Garwin predicts 1,500 eventual deaths from the nuclear accident in Japan, he says the figure is small enough that the long-term evacuation of Fukushima itself would probably cause more harm than good. Evacuation causes disruption to lives that is hard to quantify but very real.
Some people believe that the proportionality assumption about radiation should be made because it gives a "conservative" estimate of possible risks. But beware of that adjective. What is conservative depends on your agenda. Is a conservative estimate one that likely overestimates deaths? If so, then it is likely to lead to more disruption through evacuation and panic. Is that truly conservative?
Another way to overestimate the deaths is to use a much higher value for the induced cancer risk than has been determined by the best scientific studies. I think the most useful estimate is the one I've given: From the radiation so far, perhaps 100 induced cancers. Residents of Fukushima who are concerned that residual radiation will cause additional risk can avoid that by leaving, but they need to recognize that any additional cancers will be statistically unobservable, hidden well below those of natural cancer and the other dangers of modern life.
The tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011 was horrendous. Over 15,000 people were killed by the giant wave itself. The economic consequences of the reactor destruction were massive. The human consequences, in terms of death and evacuation, were also large. But the radiation deaths will likely be a number so small, compared with the tsunami deaths, that they should not be a central consideration in policy decisions.
The reactor at Fukushima wasn't designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake or a 50-foot tsunami. Surrounding land was contaminated, and it will take years to recover. But it is remarkable how small the nuclear damage is compared with that of the earthquake and tsunami. The backup systems of the nuclear reactors in Japan (and in the U.S.) should be bolstered to make sure this never happens again. We should always learn from tragedy. But should the Fukushima accident be used as a reason for putting an end to nuclear power?
Nothing can be made absolutely safe. Must we design nuclear reactors to withstand everything imaginable? What about an asteroid or comet impact? Or a nuclear war? No, of course not; the damage from the asteroid or the war would far exceed the tiny added damage from the radioactivity released by a damaged nuclear power plant.
It is remarkable that so much attention has been given to the radioactive release from Fukushima, considering that the direct death and destruction from the tsunami was enormously greater. Perhaps the reason for the focus on the reactor meltdown is that it is a solvable problem; in contrast, there is no plausible way to protect Japan from 50-foot tsunamis. Do we order a permanent evacuation of the coast to 20 miles inland? Do we try to build a 50-foot-high sea wall all around the eastern coast, including Tokyo Bay?
Looking back more than a year after the event, it is clear that the Fukushima reactor complex, though nowhere close to state-of-the-art, was adequately designed to contain radiation. New reactors can be made even safer, of course, but the bottom line is that Fukushima passed the test.
The great tragedy of the Fukushima accident is that Japan shut down all its nuclear reactors. Even though officials have now turned two back on, the hardships and economic disruptions induced by this policy will be enormous and will dwarf any danger from the reactors themselves.
—Dr. Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. This essay is adapted from his new book, "Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines."
A version of this article appeared August 18, 2012, on page C1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Panic Over Fukushima.
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Addressing the issue of nuclear waste:
"thorium-based nuclear fuel has several advantages over uranium-based fuel, including better waste characteristics, improved proliferation resistance, and abundant raw material supply"
"With plutonium seed in the fuel mix, the reactors would not only generate power, but they would also eliminate dangerous waste left over from other nuclear operations and thus help address the problem of what to do with that waste."
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2012/11/26/thorium-to-be-used-in-a-working-reactor/
Thorium To Be Used In a Working Reactor
November 26, 2012
A Norwegian company led by Alf Bjørseth will start burning thorium fuel in a conventional test reactor owned by Norway’s government with help from U.S.-based nuclear giant Westinghouse.
Bjørseth is now running his private company Scatec AS, and establishing new companies within Scatec based on the latest technologies in the areas of renewable energy and advanced materials, including a thorium fuel effort through a holding company called Thor Corporation.
Thor Corporation owns Thor Energy and also has shares in businesses related to thorium fuel, thorium mining and separation of rare earth elements. Fen Minerals holds the mining rights to the Fen deposits in South Norway, which are rich in thorium and rare earth elements. The third company is Norwegian Separation Technology, a company in the process of developing a novel separation method for rare earth elements.
Natural Thorium Ore. Click image for more info.
The company has completed a 2-year thorium fuel cycle feasibility study which concludes that thorium-based nuclear fuel has several advantages over uranium-based fuel, including better waste characteristics, improved proliferation resistance, and abundant raw material supply.
Thor Energy has established a consortium that will fund and run a 5-year thorium irradiation project to be conducted at the Norwegian government owned Halden Nuclear Reactor. Halden, typically described as a “test reactor,” also provides steam to a nearby paper mill. The move should bring thorium closer to replacing uranium as a possible safer and more effective nuclear power source.
Thor’s chief technology officer Julian Kelly explained Thor Energy will deploy a mix of solid thorium mixed with plutonium – a blend known as “thorium MOX”.
The plan isn’t the one most thorium enthusiasts have been hoping for. Many professionals believe thorium’s advantages are most pronounced in alternative reactor designs such as molten salt reactors and pebble bed reactors, rather than today’s conventional solid-fuel water-cooled reactors.
Some thorium fans have realized it may be best to insert thorium into the energy scene by first putting it to use in reactors that already have regulatory approval.
Halden Heavy Water Reactor Flow Diagram. Click image for the largest view.
Best or not, Thor is testing the thorium fuel in a conventional reactor at Halden cooled by “heavy water”. This is not the same as regular light water reactors built commercially around the world. The cooling is by deuterium or water with an isotope of hydrogen.
With plutonium seed in the fuel mix, the reactors would not only generate power, but they would also eliminate dangerous waste left over from other nuclear operations and thus help address the problem of what to do with that waste.
The consortium reaches pretty far. Thor will fabricate some of its own thorium MOX in partnership with Norway’s Institute for Energy Technology. Britain’s National Nuclear Laboratory – owned by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change – will also provide some, as will the European Commission’s Institute for Transuranium Elements.
Westinghouse is helping to fund the project, as are other of Thor’s industrial partners including Steenkampskraal Thorium Ltd., a South African company that is developing a thorium-fueled pebble bed reactor. Other partners include the Finnish utility Fortum and the French chemicals company Rhodia.
That news ought to cheer all the thorium enthusiasts.
Yet Westinghouse doesn’t like to discuss its thorium activities publicly. It is likely the firm believes working alternatives could undermine the company’s conventional nuclear business. Rumors have it Westinghouse has at least a few thorium-connected and alternative nuclear projects in the works. One is out now and it isn’t a direct competitor as such.
Westinghouse is also known to be the commercial adviser on the U.S. Department of Energy’s collaboration with China on developing a molten-salt cooled reactor. Westinghouse has also helped organize many of the alternative nuclear sessions at the American Nuclear Society convention just held in San Diego California.
This is great news worthy of Norway and her citizens. The element thorium was named by the region’s ancestral God Thor, they have rich deposits, and a great deal of competency and intellectual prowess. The test will very likely work out and that could offer reactor operators an alternative to uranium and ever more plutonium.
It will be fascinating to see the results. The wait will be long though; it takes quite a while to burn through nuclear fuel.
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(from ~7-8 years ago)
Safe Nukes — No, Really!
By Wil McCarthy
One great thing about science fiction is that there are so many cool futures to choose from. You've got your robots future, your biotech future, your hardscrabble colonies out in the planets and asteroids. ... Of course, the real world of yet-to-come probably includes all of these and more; it's as complex a place as the world of today, and never loses the ability to surprise us. One thing all hopeful futures have in common, though, is clean, abundant energy. Without that, some people imagine we could sink back into a pleasant sort ofLittle House on the Prairie world, only with better medical care, longer lifespans and picturesque windmills dotting the landscape. But considering the population growth since 1880 (6.5 billion people now vs. about 1.5 billion then), and the difficulty of growing food without machines and energy-rich fertilizers, we're more likely to descend into a retro-dystopian Road Warrior-ville of bad haircuts and short, violent lives.
But that's a long way off, right? We don't really need to worry about it, right? Even when the oil runs out, the world has abundant supplies of coal, natural gas, crop waste and garbage to cushion us while wind and solar technologies become efficient enough to fill all our needs. Well, hopefully. One thing the world could really use, though, is a clean, efficient source of nuclear power. Fusion—the power source of the sun, which bangs hydrogen atoms together to produce helium and carbon and eventually iron—is by far the best of the alternatives, since it produces huge amounts of energy from tiny amounts of fuel, and leaves almost no waste behind. But we've been working on that for 50 years, with no real progress toward useful energy output. The physics work out just fine—hence sunburn, the H-bomb and lingering questions about cold fusion—but the engineering somehow eludes us. No matter what we do, our fusion reactors take in more power than they put out. C'est la vie.
That leaves fission, the nuclear power that works by breaking big atoms into little ones. These reactions are a lot easier to control, putting their abundant energy within easy grasp. Unfortunately, they produce high-level radioactive waste, which is immediately lethal and lasts for months or years, and also low-level waste, which is slow poison that can last for millennia. By itself this might be a tractable problem—the Earth's interior is a red-hot, radioactive hell, and there's no particular reason why we can't just sink the wastes in "subduction zones" where the movement of tectonic plates will carry them back down into the mantle whence they came. This may not be a politically viable solution, but it's a sensible one that would certainly work.
Alas, there are other problems with fission: meltdown and the Bomb. Uranium-235 breaks down in a chain reaction that feeds on itself, in the same way that fire feeds on itself. And like fire, it can occasionally run out of control if we aren't careful (think Chernobyl). Also, thanks to the same factors that make uranium power plants easier to build than helium ones, uranium bombs are also pretty simple. If you had access to the right materials and instructions, you could just about build one in your garage. And that's a huge problem, which forces governments to keep track of every gram of nuclear material running loose in the world. No one wants to live in a police state, but when the alternative is the sudden vaporization of random cities, strict measures may in fact be the lesser evil.
There's no fuel like a new fuel
This Promethean triple whammy has made nuclear power understandably unpopular in North America, with a popular sentiment that the world is simply better off without it. And that may be. But energy-rich countries like the United States and Canada can afford an opinion like that—at least for now. But with the Kyoto accords forcing Europe and Russia away from fossil fuels, the equation is not quite so simple, and in Third World countries, where ambitions run high and energy resources run low, it isn't even the same equation. Think of places like Nigeria, where a wealth of precious uranium lies waiting in the ground; it's no joke when people come around telling you not to dig it up. What else are you supposed to do for light and heat and money? But the poorest countries are also the least stable, and often the most corrupt. It's a bitter irony indeed, that nuclear power is needed most in the places we trust the least. That's bound to cause resentment all the way around.
But what if nuclear fuel were as common as lead, as nonpolluting as wind, as safe to handle as coal, and as terror-useless as ordinary concrete? Science fiction, you ask? Nope. Just science—soon to be everyday business.
At the bottom of the periodic table, eight steps over from lead and two back from uranium, sits thorium, a heavy metal used in gas lamp mantles and as an additive for alloys, glasses and ceramics. Named for the Norse god Thor (bringer of thunder and lightning), it's mildly toxic and even more mildly radioactive, but considered generally safe. About as safe as lead, anyway, and certainly much less dangerous than sunlight, which after all can cause radiation burns in under an hour and kill an unprotected human in a few days. Thorium is a much more common material than uranium, being found in most rocks and soils throughout the world. It's a component of ordinary granite and concrete, for example, and its slow breakdown is the reason those materials emit small amounts of radon gas, which can slowly build up in our cellars. (Radon is radioactive and contributes to lung cancer, so, on a completely tangential note, it's good to have your basement checked every now and then.)
Anyway, it turns out that if you bombard thorium with low-energy neutrons, it turns into an isotope of uranium which rapidly decays, releasing energy. This is not a chain reaction, so in special power plants called subcritical energy amplifiers, the breakdown can be controlled precisely, in a process that simply can't run away or melt down the way ordinary reactors have been known to. Even better, the decay of thorium produces no weapons-grade materials of any kind. The worst you could do is make a radioactive "dirty bomb" from the reactor waste. But even here you'd run into problems, because thorium waste—while highly radioactive—doesn't last nearly as long as uranium waste. You still want to be careful with it, but it loses the worst of its punch within 10 to 20 years, and after just 500—the blink of an eye, in geological terms—it's as harmless as coal ash.
In fact, energy amplifiers can be used to break down normal reactor waste, and even bomb-grade materials like plutonium, making them more radioactive but much shorter-lived. (If that sounds paradoxical, just remember a simple rule: Isotopes with a short half-life emit more radiation because they break down faster. The ones with long half-lives emit fewer particles. Stable, nonradioactive atoms have infinite half-lives. The hardest wastes to store are actually the ones in the middle, which are radioactive enough to be dangerous but long-lived enough to outlast any reasonable disposal method.) So in one fell swoop, thorium addresses all three of nuclear power's main weaknesses, and offers a number of interesting benefits on the side, including cheap, abundant energy that could easily dwarf the output of uranium and fossil fuels combined. It's like discovering you can heat your house with sand!
Nuclear power to the people
The next question to ask here is why we aren't building thorium-based power plants on every street corner. It's a good question, with no definitive answer. The basic design has been around since 1993, when Italian physicist and Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia published a report at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research. The underlying physics have actually been known for decades, and confirmed by experiments all over the world. A few commercial nuclear plants have even used thorium as an adjunct fuel in standard U-235 reactions. But pro-nuclear countries have little incentive to switch away from uranium, while the anti-nuclear ones have no interest in developing new reactors, and of course poor countries couldn't build an energy amplifier even if they wanted to.
Nestled in the middle, though, are a handful of countries with the courage, cheap labor and freewheeling spirit of the Third World, but the education and capital resources of the First World. India in particular has positioned itself as the next likely superpower, with a capable military, a number of rapidly growing cash industries and a burgeoning appetite for energy of all kinds. No strangers to nuclear power (they got the bomb in '74), the Indians are drawn to its luminous promise and little dissuaded by the problems and accidents of the 20th century. And as luck would have it, they're also sitting on some of the richest deposits of thorium in the world—a coincidence that isn't lost on their scientists.
At the Bhaba Atomic Research Center near Kalpakkam, nuclear eggheads like Anil Kakodkar have been noodling with thorium since 1995, and are currently building a pilot plant to work the bugs out of Carlo Rubbia's design. If all goes well, the reactor should begin producing continuous power by the end of the decade, and should pave the way for nine commercial workhorses due to come online between 2010 and 2020. If the scheme works—and there's no scientific reason why it shouldn't—it could well pave the way for a global migration to fission technology safe enough for urban areas and Third World dictatorships. So, far from ignoring the problem or playing the politics of half-measures, India is positioning itself for the realities of Kyoto and the decline of fossil fuels, and plans to be a leader in 21st century energy technology. I say, more power to 'em!
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Sources used for writing are:
"The Periodic Table in Earth and Sky," 3rd edition, Jenner Scientific LLC, 2005
Wikipedia: ("thorium","Carlo Rubbia","energy amplifier", "overpopulation"): www.wikipedia.org
www.webelements.com ("thorium")
"The Energy Amplifier: Carlo Rubbia's solution to world energy demand": CERN Courier, April/May 1995
"Kalpakkam to get next generation fast reactor", The Hindu 09 March 2003
"A mission at Kalpakkam," Frontline, Volume 17 - Issue 26, Dec. 23, 2000
The Encyclopedia Britannica, 2004 Edition ("thorium," "thorium processing")
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With radiation leak news still coming out of Japan, I wonder how many people know that nuclear power is still the cleanest, safest major source of energy in the world. Zero CO2 emissions, manageable waste issues, better information than ever available as to how to construct safely, and as this thread began - there is no need to build on a fault line or in a tsunami zone. Zero CO2 emissions compares with coal which accounts for nearly half of the world's fossil fuel CO2 emissions.
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Oxford University physicist Wade Allison: "one could drink 12 gallons of contaminated groundwater directly from the Fukushima site right after the accident—before getting a single CT scan's worth of radiation."
Japan and the Fate of Nuclear Power
Radiation phobia prevents a rational response to Fukushima.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. September 10, 2013
Nuclear power might well be a competent civilization's solution to its theoretical carbon-dioxide problem. Now if only humans had a competent civilization.
Japan's government, in its latest solution for the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, will do what it likes doing anyway: spend money on extravagant public works projects. A network of supercooled pipes will freeze the ground around the plant. This presumably will stop groundwater from flowing through the partially melted-down reactors and draining into the Pacific. Water from coolant operations, which are preventing a more serious meltdown, would also remain contained on-site.
Even so, contaminated water would continue to accumulate in rickety tanks. A necessary solution will be emptying this water into the Pacific, after filtering out as many radioactive particles as possible. Unfortunately, not only does Japan's fishing lobby, which like just about any lobby in Japan is entitled to paralyze action, refuse to countenance such a step. It won't even let the plant operator use an existing system to route non-contaminated groundwater past the plant into the sea. Thereby hangs a stalemate that may doom any hope of a nuclear revival in our world.
Japanese Trade Minister Toshimitsu Motegi inspects storage tanks at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, Aug. 26.
As long as Fukushima wastewater contains radioactive elements, particles would end up in fish, causing some number of hypothetical human malignancies according to the questionable theory that radiation is dangerous in direct proportion to dose.
In fact, a considerable body of research holds that increased cancer risk becomes statistically perceptible only at a dose level of 100 millisieverts. This is five times the standard Japan used to order local evacuations, and in many evacuated areas the practical exposure risk was far less than the standard—just a fraction above natural background radiation.
Amazingly, Japan actually cut its allowable food-exposure limits in half in response to the crisis. Oxford University physicist Wade Allison, who has written and spoken widely against exaggerating radiation risks, estimated that one could eat a ton of such slightly contaminated food—or even drink 12 gallons of contaminated groundwater directly from the Fukushima site right after the accident—before getting a single CT scan's worth of radiation.
Alas, Japan is unlikely to abandon its supercaution anytime soon. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has quietly begun restarting a handful of the country's 54 reactors shut down after Fukushima. The last thing he wants is to court public controversy by hinting the government has gone soft on radiation risks.
Now with Tokyo's victory this week to host the 2020 Olympics, expect, if anything, a doubling down on crazy cleanup priorities. Japan won't be accused of trying to give cancer to visiting athletes.
Blame or credit is typically charged to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the country's hypersensitivity. A more relevant culprit may be the well-meaning campaigners against atmospheric bomb testing in the 1950s, who embraced what's known as the Linear, No Threshold hypothesis—the idea that radiation is unhealthy at any level.
Belatedly, an authority on such matters, the U.N.'s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, has tried to lead a climbdown from a dubious risk formula that it once championed. Perhaps trying to rescue nuclear energy to fight global warming, the group last year warned against "multiplying low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population."
Even more annoying to anti-nuke activists, the agency also declared that no radiation-caused illness had appeared even in Fukushima plant workers, some of whom received as much as 600 millisieverts, and none was expected. The result: a deluge of vilification upon the U.N.
The U.S., of course, has nothing to brag about in this regard. Yucca Mountain, the waste repository on which Washington has spent $12 billion, likely has been permanently blocked by Nevada politicians whose imagined heroism on behalf of local voters is the precise corollary of exaggerated radiation risk models. Hooray for Harry Reid, but is this any way to make nuclear policy? (More at the link above)
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Are we really going to just use less energy, or switch back to fossil fuels, bumping up our CO2 emissions, or pay 15 times too much with solar-wind strategies? Nuclear power has by far the safest track record including its setbacks. No one died at 3 Mile Island, Chernoble was a lesson in Soviet failure. Fukushima Daichi was caused a massive earthquake-tsunami, not likely in most locations, and provides the opportunity to build future facilities safer and stronger. Meanwhile we dither on nuclear and bark up the wrong trees on energy policy.
Enviros Suffering Nuclear Meltdown (by Steven Hayward)
I’ve written before here about the documentary film Pandora’s Promise, in which prominent environmentalists have changed their mind about nuclear power. Then a couple weeks ago several prominent climate alarmists, headed by the egregious James Hansen, put out an article advocating a return to nuclear power. Naturally this has upset the retrograde/reactionary environmentalists who are stuck in 1979 and can’t get over Three Mile Island.
Last Thursday CNN decided to broadcast Pandora’s Promise, and pair it with an episode of Crossfire about the topic between the fossilized Ralph Nader and my stylish pal Michael Shellenberger. Michael had called me in advance of the debate, saying he was a bit nervous about debating Nader, but I expressed confidence that he’d wipe the floor. If you have 10 minutes or so to spare, here are two of the Crossfire segments:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/enviros-suffering-nuclear-meltdown.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWaCybrfXQI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbWVfxRG8zA
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How they learned to stop worrying and love nuclear
By KYLE SMITH
Posted: 10:25 PM, June 8, 2013
‘Nobody can look you in the eye and say you shouldn’t be worried” about nuclear energy, says British environmentalist author Mark Lynas in the new documentary “Pandora’s Promise,” which opens Friday.
Lynas is shown putting on a hazmat suit and visiting the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, where three nuclear reactors melted down completely in 2011 after being ravaged by an earthquake and a tsunami. A huge area was evacuated due to the fear of radiation poisoning and cancer.
“There’s no other energy source that can do this,” Lynas says, referring to the fallout. As his radiation detector beeps madly, he says, “I would say I’m having a wobble.”
Who wouldn’t? Nuclear energy isn’t like coal or gas or oil or even wind turbines or solar panels. It’s complicated. To most of us, it’s opaque. And from the lonely bald man in Sector 7G on “The Simpsons” to “The China Syndrome,” the no-nukes movement and many environmental groups, the anti-nuke camp blasts us with the notion that nuclear power plants are going to give us cancer, poison our water, create demon mutant fish and, every so often, melt down catastrophically as thousands, maybe millions, die or are seriously sickened. Most of us simply don’t follow nuclear power closely enough to have an informed opinion about it. So we let the culture do the work for us.
And the culture is unanimous: Nuclear power is scary.
But we love our iPhones, each one of which (when you account for the harvesting of the materials that went into it, its production, the servers that feed it, etc.) uses as much energy as a refrigerator. The rich world keeps consuming more energy, and hundreds of millions in Brazil, India and China are joining the global middle class. Worldwide, energy use is projected to triple, or perhaps quadruple, by the end of the century.
So we keep on burning more coal — not only the leading fuel on the planet but still the fastest-growing one.
New York City filmmaker Robert Stone, like the five experts who are the principal subjects of his documentary, began with the same impeccable environment-first attitude they did. Stone was nominated for an Oscar for his 1988 anti-nukes documentary “Radio Bikini,” about the dire consequences of American bomb testing on the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
Now Stone, who will be debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on nuclear power at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, tomorrow night at 7:30, sheepishly admits that he confused what nuclear bombs do with what nuclear energy does. So many of our ideas about fallout and cancer rates are tied to the former, not the latter.
What the culture doesn’t tell you but “Pandora’s Promise” does is that:
* There is no way to produce energy that’s entirely safe.
* Worldwide, some 3 million people die each year from causes related to fossil-fuel use. The nuclear industry, which causes only a handful of deaths, is far less deadly than even the solar-panel business. The only energy source that is causing fewer annual deaths than nuclear power is wind.
* At Chernobyl, an extremely poorly designed facility made primarily for weapon fuel, hundreds of thousands participated in the cleanup after the 1986 disaster. Yet the UN, the WHO and other international organizations can tie only about 50 deaths directly to the disaster. Perhaps 4,000 lives will be shortened by cancer (a 3% increase) in an area where 5 million people were contaminated by the radiation. At the three neighboring reactors in the same building, people simply went back to work. Villagers returned to their homes nearby.
* All the nuclear waste generated in US history could fit in 10-foot-high barrels covering a single football field. Only about 1% of that material has a scary half-life.
* Next-generation nuclear reactors will be able use recycled nuclear waste for fuel, making nuclear power a renewable resource and massively reducing the amount of waste on Earth. These reactors can also be built so that there will be no danger of overheating.
* The widely advertised fallout disaster after Fukushima never happened. Zero deaths resulted from the plant explosion or the radiation leakage from the accident, though some died in the panicky evacuation of the area.
* Twenty percent of America’s energy is already nuclear. New Jersey and Connecticut get about half their energy from nukes. In Vermont, it’s 75%. In France, 80%.
Stone’s film is very much structured as a sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth,” complete with images of hurricanes and an overheating planet. But the idea that the entire world is going to sign up for a Kyoto-style treaty that massively cuts down on emissions, at a gargantuan price, is “a hallucinatory delusion,” says one environmental activist interviewed in the film, Michael Shellenberger.
But the anti-nuke camp is full of desperate dreamers like the absurd environmentalist Bill McKibben, who envisions turning back the clock on human progress in a world where health, quality of life and longevity are directly related to energy consumption.
He wrote in The Guardian: “We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the West) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin. What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil.”
Sorry, but only a few hippie hipsters want to raise their own chickens and pedal to work, and even they aren’t giving up their iToys. Meanwhile, the peasants of India and China want meat and electricity and cars and hospitals, in the tens of millions. A planet that uses less energy is not an option. And solar and wind, which bring their own well-documented problems (hello, transmission lines) cannot scale up quickly enough to meet the challenge. “I’m honestly quite angry at others who were propagating that myth,” Shellenberger says in the film.
Yet the most obvious zero-emission solution is already here.
Stone’s interviewees are serious people who have thought about these problems and changed their minds about nuclear power. They include, in addition to the highly regarded Brit blogger Mark Lynas, liberal Democrat author Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-garlanded author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”; Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a kind of Abraham Lincoln of the Age of Aquarius; author Gwyneth Cravens, who worked at The New Yorker and Harper’s, and Shellenberger, a green crusader labeled a “hero of the environment” by Time magazine.
All five, after much consideration and weighing of the facts, decided that nuclear is the future.
“I’m against nukes,” says Brand. “But what I’ve been thinking all this time, and what my friends have been thinking all this time, is wrong.” Adds Shellenberger, who allows that the culture made him biased against nuclear power, “You start to wonder: What was I thinking?”
Around the time of the Three Mile Island accident and the coinciding release of the anti-nuclear Jane Fonda-Michael Douglas film “The China Syndrome,” irrational fear of nuclear power became a frenzy.
“We will see more Harrisburgs,” Fonda is seen screaming at a no-nukes rally around that time. “We will see more leaks. We will see an increase of the cancer epidemic.”
In fact, the Harrisburg Three Mile Island mishap, a contained partial meltdown, killed no one, and the American Journal of Epidemiology concluded there was no increase in radiation-linked cancer in the six years following the 1979 “disaster,” which history will more properly label an “incident.”
Stone has great fun explaining, with a Geiger counter in hand, that nature generates background radiation that is all around you at all times. The release of radiation at Three Mile Island was so small that, in the worst-affected neighboring areas, the dose was only about a third of the natural radiation Americans receive.
After the Fukushima meltdown, where the amount of radiation released into the air was about one-fifth that of Chernobyl, George Monbiot, another environmental writer with a huge following, pointed out in The Guardian: “A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.”
“Atomic energy,” Monbiot continues, “has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”
Casual observers, though, think: “Fukushima! Yet another reason to fear nukes!” Even though sifting through the facts produces the opposite reaction.
The Indian Point nuclear plant 30 miles north of Manhattan is facing the strong possibility of being closed down by Gov. Cuomo, who has also extended the now 5-year-old moratorium on harvesting relatively clean natural gas by fracking.
Both of these moves, of course, would have been lustily supported by a Manchurian Candidate whose real purpose was to increase coal usage in the Empire State. Cuomo isn’t going to prevent New York from continuing to consume more energy, and today New York City is about 25% powered by Indian Point nukes. (Do you glow in the dark? Does your goldfish have two heads?)
Germany, which has vowed to ditch nuclear power in an irrational post-Fukushima panic, has massively ramped up its solar usage (to about 5% of the country’s power) but is building huge coal plants to make up the difference. Germany already emits double the greenhouse gases per capita as its clean-fuel neighbor, France.
So France is swearing to cut back massively on nuclear power, too. And the coal industry smiles.
“A madness is taking hold,” Lynas wrote in The Guardian. “More people die each day from coal pollution than have been killed by nuclear power in 50 years of operation, and that is even before factoring in the impact on global warming.”
If there’s one idea in today’s energy discussion that’s head-in-the-sand reactionary, morally obtuse and anti-science, it’s the anti-nuclear position. May “Pandora’s Promise” explode the myths and unleash a mushroom cloud of facts.
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com
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I drove past the closest nuclear plant to us during the Fukushima catastrophe on a clear, still, beautiful, sunny day. This plant has produced over 4 trillion W·hr of electricity annually since 1971, a mind boggling amount, with a stellar safety record - and no harmful emissions. Try producing electricity at that cost and safety record with any other known source - it can't be done. But due to one tsunami in the Pacific, other countries are closing plants and scuttling plans to build new ones.
It is hard to express how safe nuclear energy is while Fukushima is still wrapping up, but the piece Crafty posted does a nice job of putting that disaster in proportion:
"The widely advertised fallout disaster after Fukushima never happened. Zero deaths resulted from the plant explosion or the radiation leakage from the accident, though some died in the panicky evacuation of the area."
Importantly, a new plant can be built to withstand that natural disaster, and most nuclear sites have no real possibility of ever facing such a test.
As stated in the article, people "confuse what nuclear bombs do with what nuclear energy does. So many of our ideas about fallout and cancer rates are tied to the former, not the latter."
Also well presented is the context of nuclear energy, "There is no way to produce energy that’s entirely safe. Worldwide, some 3 million people die each year from causes related to fossil-fuel use."
The magnitude of the show-stopping, nuclear waste issue is much smaller than we are led to believe: "All the nuclear waste generated in US history could fit in 10-foot-high barrels covering a single football field. Only about 1% of that material has a scary half-life." "Next-generation nuclear reactors will be able use recycled nuclear waste for fuel, making nuclear power a renewable resource and massively reducing the amount of waste on Earth."
Given that nuclear power is safer and we need the energy, it comes back to costs and emissions - and nuclear wins. Yet, at the expense of our economy and the environment, we dither instead of building new, state of the art facilities.
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This is NOT a reliable site. Caveat lector!
http://drudgegae.iavian.net/r?hop=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.infowars.com%2Fus-government-orders-14-million-doses-of-potassium-iodide%2F
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/science/earth/nuclear-waste-solution-seen-in-desert-salt-beds.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140210
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The nuclear waste storage problem is one of emotion. I offer this country my garage to store properly containerized waste in exchange for ownership of its future energy potential.
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/decades-after-nuclear-test-u-s-studies-cancer-fallout-1410802085?mod=trending_now_4
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Yucca Mountain Safe to Store Nuclear Waste
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/nuclear-regulatory-commission-yucca-mountain-safe-store-nuclear
Who knew?
http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1072.msg78975#msg78975
Best safety record, even with Daichi, etc. Now we know how to build them tsunami-proof. Zero carbon emission, waste can be safely stored. What is our next excuse to reject our best energy source?
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https://sdipn.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/did-we-almost-lose-new-york/
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https://sdipn.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/did-we-almost-lose-new-york/
Not exactly a unbiased source.
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The right answer to emissions issues is not to put the brakes on our economy or to expand the use of hobby sources like wind and solar unless they can stand on their own two feet without subsidy. Nor does diverting our food supply into ethanol solve anything.
While the elite meet in Paris to talk about false solutions to man's increased contributions to CO2 emissions, a tax to enrich the unproductive and penalize the productive, we might talk here about real solutions.
What has worked so far is to substitute natural gas from fracking for oil and coal for a gain of 30-50%. CNG (natural gas) can also replace diesel and gasoline for shorter range transportation uses.
But the obvious solution to go further with emission reductions is to increase the use of safe nuclear power for generating electricity.
1. Nuclear power has zero CO2 emissions. Also zero CO, zero sulfur emissions etc. into the atmosphere. Do we care about this or NOT?
2. Because of the recently seeing perhaps the worst imaginable scenario with the tsunami, we know how to build them safer and stronger than ever before.
3. And because of data from Daiichi Fukushima, Chernoble, etc. we now know that trace levels of radiation are not harmful as previously thought. There is a threshold where cells can't handle ambient radiation, not a linear relationship.
4. Storage for spent fuels can be made safe or made unnecessary.
There is no need to burn fossil fuels at a power plant except as an emergency backup source.
There is a wsj editorial on this subject today if anyone has access... )
There have been no fatalities linked to short term overexposure to radiation reported due to the Fukushima accident, while approximately 18,500 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-isnt-the-real-risk.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20131031070028/http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/17/world/asia/japan-earthquake---tsunami-fast-facts/
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/02/20/national/post-quake-illnesses-kill-more-in-fukushima-than-2011-disaster#.Vl8hMHarTIW
http://rd.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-03720-7
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Peter Thiel follows on what Dines has about nuclear energy for years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/opinion/the-new-atomic-age-we-need.html?_r=1
======================
From David Gordon:
1. Is India About to Alter the World's Energy Future? http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Is-India-About-to-Alter-the-Worlds-Energy-Future.html
2. Chinese going for broke on thorium nuclear power, and good luck to them http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100026863/china-going-for-broke-on-thorium-nuclear-power-and-good-luck-to-them/
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http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/129913-world-s-first-thorium-reactor-ready-to-be-built-for-cheaper-safer-nuclear-energy
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If 20 fire marshals came around and told us our houses were about to burn down, we’d buy some fire insurance. So when the leading science academies in 20 developed countries, along with several major American corporations and the national security community, all tell us that burning fossil fuels is causing dangerous changes to the climate, we think it’s time for the United States to get serious about clean energy. It also means supporting safely operating nuclear power plants that produce carbon-free electricity.
Already, 60 percent of our carbon-free electricity comes from the 99 nuclear reactors that dot the nation’s map, from Avila Beach, Calif., to Seabrook, N.H. These reactors provide low-cost, reliable electricity for the United States, which uses nearly 20 percent of the world’s electricity. But over the next decade, at least eight of these reactors are scheduled to shut down. That will push up carbon emissions from the American electricity sector by nearly 3 percent, according to the United States Energy Information Administration.
In California, the closing of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2012 contributed to a 24 percent increase in carbon emissions from the electricity sector, according to data from the California Environmental Protection Agency Air Resources Board. Carbon emissions from the electricity sector in New England rose 5 percent in 2015, the first year-to-year increase since 2010, largely because of the closing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station in December 2014, according to ISO New England, the region’s grid operator.
In roughly two decades, the United States could lose about half its reactors. That’s because, by 2038, 50 reactors will be at least 60 years old, and will face having to close, representing nearly half of the nuclear generating capacity in the United States. Without them, or enough new reactors to replace them, it will be much harder to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.
Continue reading the main story
Unfortunately, some of our federal policies to encourage clean energy, such as the Clean Energy Incentive Program within President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, do not explicitly include or incentivize nuclear power. Likewise, some states have chosen to adopt policies, such as renewable portfolio standards, that do not include or incentivize nuclear power.
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At the same time, our energy markets do not currently account for the value of carbon-free power, a failure that puts nuclear power at an unfair and economically inefficient disadvantage to fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.
We come from different political parties, but we agree on the overall goal of leveling the playing field for nuclear power, and the need to find a bipartisan solution to achieve it. This matters because the investments we make today, in new plants and transmission infrastructure, will be around for decades. Every time new fossil energy replaces nuclear, we’re locking ourselves in to a more carbon-heavy energy mix for years to come.
Some states and utilities are working to reduce carbon emissions with the understanding that nuclear power can be part of the solution. In the Southeast, there are four new reactors under construction that will provide 4,470 megawatts of carbon-free electricity — enough for 3.3 million homes. New York established a clean-energy standard in August that might help the state’s reactors stay open, including one that had been announced as closing. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office explained that “maintaining zero-emission nuclear power is a critical element to achieving New York’s ambitious climate goals.” And the private sector is pitching in, too: According to Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz, there are dozens of entrepreneurs focusing on ways to improve and expand the nuclear power industry.
The federal government should support these efforts.
For one thing, we should extend existing reactor licenses from 60 to 80 years, in cases where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says it is safe to do so.
We should also invest more in research to develop advanced nuclear reactors, including small modular reactors and accident-tolerant fuels. Advanced reactor designs may substantially reduce the threat of a meltdown. Many new, modular designs are much smaller than their predecessors, meaning they can be built in factories at lower cost and plugged into the grid as needed.
Some of these new reactor technologies could actually use waste from traditional reactors as fuel, helping to alleviate a major challenge facing the industry. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing framework, developed to support the last generation of reactors, should be updated to encourage and promote new investment in the next wave of advanced nuclear technology. And finally, we need to resolve the stalemate over where to store used nuclear reactor fuel.
If we want to clean the air and reduce carbon emissions to deal with climate change, we need a stronger, not weaker, nuclear energy sector. Congress, federal agencies and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must work with utilities to preserve our existing reactors in the safest possible way, and to develop the next generation of reactors that will provide cheaper, reliable, carbon-free electricity.
Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is a Democrat from Rhode Island.
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603963/mits-nuclear-lab-has-an-unusual-plan-to-jump-start-advanced-reactor-research/
The researchers specifically want to test designs for a small, transportable molten-salt-cooled reactor, intended for off-grid purposes such as generating electricity for remote villages or worksites. Molten-salt reactors, first researched in the 1950s, are a subject of growing interest in the field because of the potential they offer for greater safety and lower costs compared with traditional nuclear power plants.
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http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/01/the-devil-is-in-the-diablo.php
California Public Utilities Commission ratified the plan to shut down California’s last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, even though, as one of the last nuclear power plants built, it could easily be re-licensed for another 20 years. Diablo Canyon produces twice a much electricity as all of California’s solar panels, and PG & E is closing Diablo Canyon largely because of the state political mandate that electric utilities source 50 percent of their power from “renewable” sources by the year 2030, and nuclear power doesn’t count.
------------------------------
Nuclear energy is carbon-free, you idiots.
https://grist.org/article/its-time-to-go-nuclear-in-the-fight-against-climate-change/
The high cost of nuclear is in the construction of the plant. In this case, they already have the plant.
The Green or whatever you call far left climate alarmists are driving carbon emissions up! Germany eliminated nuclear, burns more coal.
http://www.theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/328841/why-germanys-nuclear-phase-out-leading-more-coal-burning
Do they ever acknowledge that nuclear is carbon free and has the best safety record?
They oppose pipelines, resulting in more fossil fuel and damage to result from fossil fuels. And they oppose fracking that allowed much cleaner burner natural gas to replace old coal plants, 40% less carbon emission.
Regarding solar, do they know we need electricity in winter too? Besides much lower sun angles, peak electric usage in winter is AFTER DARK. http://www.bhec.com/content/peak-demand-times
Every post on this forum could fit under cognitive dissonance of the left.
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Oy vey.
May I ask you to please post that on the California thread as well?
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Ken Caldeira
@KenCaldeira
https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/labs/caldeiralab/
If we discovered nuclear power today, we would be working like mad to make it as safe and cheap as possible.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2017/08/03/the-real-climate-consensus-nuclear-power/#64be7dd82ef5
The Real Climate Consensus: Nuclear Power
Scientists across the political spectrum support nuclear power.
“Some 65% of scientists favor building more nuclear power plants..."
A powerful consensus, transcending scientific and political beliefs, supports nuclear power as an effective and affordable means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Perhaps we can overlook our political differences long enough to prioritize removing impediments to nuclear power in America and throughout the world.
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/14/the-real-reason-they-hate-nuclear-is-because-it-means-we-dont-need-renewables/#35d05ac6128f
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Ain't that the Truth!
In fairness though, watching a nuke reactor get built over a earthquake fault here in CA (Diablo Canyon) and the HUGE fustercluck in Japan (hard to think of a country with a better rep for doing high tech things right) understandably gives pause , , ,
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Japanese tsunami:
Casualties: 15,896 deaths, 6,157 injured, 2,537 people missing. Very bad storm.
1 death was directly caused by the nuclear reactor meltdown. Rooftop solar will never match that, nor does it produce any energy after dark, when people like to charge their electric cars.
Diablo I assume has zero deaths so far with room to improve on their choice of location.
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Sorry, but that summary of the Japanese case leaves out all the issues of radiation contamination and its consequences.
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1. True that 1 direct death at the nuclear plant out of 16,000 known tsunami deaths does not tell the whole story.
2. The meltdown was avoidable, preventable by all accounts.
https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable-new-study-finds/
3. Residents of Fukushima and neighbouring areas during the first three months of the accident, ranging from 1 to 5 millisieverts. But such doses are still relatively low – a typical CT scan delivers 15 millisieverts, for example, while it takes 1000 millisieverts to cause radiation sickness.
https://www-newscientist-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.newscientist.com/article/2129988-fukushima-accident-gave-everyone-an-x-rays-worth-of-radiation/amp/?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCCAE%3D#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newscientist.com%2Farticle%2F2129988-fukushima-accident-gave-everyone-an-x-rays-worth-of-radiation%2F
4. The only known, real alternatives to nuclear power, sources that produce energy when the wind and sun are down, are fossil fuels, primarily coal and natural gas, with far worse health and safety records.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40325100/ns/business-us_business/t/w-va-mine-blast-coal-firm-had-worst-safety-record/
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060053892
Also, 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year US electrical production.
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/reconsidering-risks-nuclear-power/.
Coal power plants release more radioactive material per kWh into the environment in the form of coal ash than does waste from a nuclear power plant under standard shielding protocols. Who knew? http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/reconsidering-risks-nuclear-power/
Shut down nuclear and you will use more coal.
5. The safety record of wind and solar is also not better than nuclear, but are widely considered to be acceptable risk levels.
6. The world was not safer before or without nuclear power.
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"2. The meltdown was avoidable, preventable by all accounts.
https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable-new-study-finds/"
I did not know that. Interesting. Nonetheless, what is the inference to be drawn? Might it be that human error will appear even with the relentlessly quality driven Japanese?
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"2. The meltdown was avoidable, preventable by all accounts.
https://news.usc.edu/86362/fukushima-disaster-was-preventable-new-study-finds/"
I did not know that. Interesting. Nonetheless, what is the inference to be drawn? Might it be that human error will appear even with the relentlessly quality driven Japanese?
Right, the nuclear plant shut itself down exactly as it should have. The non-nuclear backup power was what failed. The diesel generators were not protected from water in a tsunami zone. Also solar and wind power were (shockingly) nowhere to be found in a natural disaster, something to consider before we abandon all of our most reliable and powerful sources.
Point 3 of that post is something to verify, consider and discuss:
Residents of Fukushima and neighbouring areas during the first three months of the accident, ranging from 1 to 5 millisieverts. But such doses are still relatively low – a typical CT scan delivers 15 millisieverts, for example, while it takes 1000 millisieverts to cause radiation sickness.
All radiation is scary but people need to know the units, the normal levels and the danger levels. My dad (and his dad) operated old x-ray equipment (in dentistry). Should he have not done that? He died of a cancer that *might* relate to accumulated radiation exposure but how many lives did he save attacking decay and infection everyday and he lived to 90, was youthful skiing, playing tennis practicing dentistry until 89.
Tourists in the Grand Canyon are exposed to radiation: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/20/health/grand-canyon-radiation-museum-trnd/index.html
Uranium and other emitters are naturally occurring members of the element chart. It is very difficult to get an understanding of what level of radiation is worth what risk. Do we quit flying? Do we quit medical imaging and treatments? Do we quit going outdoors and find out the levels can be worse in our own home? In this case, do we quit producing the safest and cleanest known major energy source because of an exposure level and risk level that mathematically rounds to zero? Or like the Green New Deal proposes described below, eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power and freeze to death? I say no. Sufficient, clean, safe and reliable is an essential part of our prosperity.
https://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/radlife
http://www.euradcom.org/top-5-sources-of-radiation-in-everyday-life/
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Patriot Post on Nuclear Power:
https://patriotpost.us/articles/61524-socialist-green-new-deal-rejects-nuclear-energy
As Time magazine “Hero of the Environment” Michael Shellenberger argues, the only truly “green energy” is nuclear power. “When it comes to generating power for billions of people, it turns out that producing solar and wind collectors, and spreading them over large areas, has vastly worse impacts on humans and wildlife alike,” he says.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/61407-93-dollars-trillion-green-new-deal-means-national-bankruptcy
"...the most practical, reliable, efficient, and lowest-cost source for green energy: nuclear power."
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Doug ,
What about concerns of nuclear waste?
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Doug ,
What about concerns of nuclear waste?
Good question.
1. I believe it is a political challenge. The engineering part is settled.
https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/faqs.html
I've offered to store the secured dry casks in my garage in exchange for the money offered to Nevada.
2. There are nuclear technologies that have no waste.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-funding-for-its-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-that-eats-radioactive-waste
https://www.argee.net/DefenseWatch/Nuclear%20Waste%20and%20Breeder%20Reactors.htm
http://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Fast_Breeder_Reactors.htm
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/fast-reactors-provide-sustainable-nuclear-power-thousands-years
3. "Spent' fuel is still radioactive, so it is a potential future energy source with new technologies and efficiency gains.
https://nuclear.gepower.com/
https://www.fastcompany.com/3043099/this-nuclear-reactor-eats-nuclear-waste
4. The waste debate centers around fission. Fusion does not have those problems:
https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612940/the-new-safer-nuclear-reactors-that-might-help-stop-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR2y9V2_94_ZfJhSmU8mWWlcKLQ3G4XBBvb9MasgaQ4wct2gX3dZmlLY8JM
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https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/608712/a-thorium-salt-reactor-has-fired-up-for-the-first-time-in-four-decades/?fbclid=IwAR3tp6VEFn4x_zJCwNll6rsQgUc-OvuBWA92lQSrGQvFFISpfvbAdkckvzM
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https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/608712/a-thorium-salt-reactor-has-fired-up-for-the-first-time-in-four-decades/?fbclid=IwAR3tp6VEFn4x_zJCwNll6rsQgUc-OvuBWA92lQSrGQvFFISpfvbAdkckvzM
From the MIT Tech Review article:
"...should also be able to consume spent nuclear fuel from typical uranium fission reactions.
...
China, meanwhile, is charging ahead with big plans for its nuclear industry, including a heavy bet on thorium-based reactors. The country plans to have the first such power plants hooked up to the grid inside 15 years. If they pull it off, it might just help usher in a safer future for nuclear power."
Safer than our already safest source. Maybe we can convert Crafty to pro-nuclear with a technology leap or two.
Add this development to the Climate Alarmism discussion. Catastrophic alarmists are wrong about the past, wrong about the present, but most importantly, they are wrong about the future. Nuclear potential puts dirty coal to shame. Look at this (2017 article), we have the technology to convert existing nuclear waste into usable energy. In the larger scheme of things, the timeframe that humans are dependent on fossil fuels and soot coming out of smokestacks is nearly over.
France electricity comes 75-80% from nuclear power. They are world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation. (They aim to lower their nuclear proportion and be more dependence on worse sources.) In Norway they produce 99% from hydropower, and gravity is not the only energy contained in water.
The idea that government prohibition of fossil fuels is the only path to remove our dependence on them is to deny the rate of technological innovation that is all around us.
Thorium salt fission has large scale potential. The big breakthrough (IMHO) will be when small scale, nuclear fusion-based perhaps, can produce power locally and not require grid and transmission lines.
https://physicsworld.com/a/physicists-spot-the-signatures-of-nuclear-fusion-in-a-table-top-device/
https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-generate-fusion-power-2040
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"Maybe we can convert Crafty to pro-nuclear"
Could be , , , I've been open to the idea for a while now , , ,
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A burst of radioactive ruthenium-106 detected in the atmosphere across Europe in 2017 has been traced to a Russian nuclear facility, which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy. The leak released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere that the Fukushima disaster did, but this wasn’t high enough to affect human health across Europe. By analyzing monitoring data, researchers have now found clear evidence that the release happened in the Southern Urals – the location of the Mayak facility, which also suffered the third most serious nuclear accident in history in 1957.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2211511-gigantic-mysterious-radiation-leak-traced-to-facility-in-russia/
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Once again, the danger to the environment is the Russian-Soviet system, not the safe, state of the art nuclear power that is possible.
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An excellent summary of what has been readily available to readers in this thread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak 21 Minutes, PLEASE WATCH.
Michael Schellenberg, President and Founder of Environmental Progress
Nuclear produces 4 times less carbon than solar farms.
2016, Germany installed 4% more solar panels and generated 3% less electricity from solar.
- It wasn't very sunny in Germany.
In 2016, Germany installed 11% more wind turbines and generated 2% less electricity.
- It wasn't very windy in Germany that year.
All batteries in California combined have 23 minutes of electrical storage.
Wind and solar require fossil fuels for backup.
German electricity is 2x more expensive than France.
France gets 93% of its electricity from clean energy sources, Germany 46%.
German carbon emissions have been rising since 2009. Germany took offline nuclear.
Economic value of wind and solar DECREASES the more you install. - Leon Hirth
When you install solar and wind you get a lot less clean energy than when you go nuclear.
Natural sources, food and medical all release far more harmful radiation than all nuclear accidents combined.
No radiation related deaths from Fukushima.
(7 million/yr die worldwide from air pollution)
Nuclear power is BY FAR the safest way to make electricity.
"Nuclear power has already saved 1.8 million lives by preventing the burning of fossil fuels." - Climate scientist James Hansen
Of all the energy sources, nuclear is the only one that safely contains all its waste.
Solar contains 300 times more toxic waste than nuclear, toxic heavy metals.
Solar takes 450 times moreland than nuclear.
Wind power requires 400 times more land than nuclear.
German electric emissions 43% without electricity from closed nuclear plants.
If you're going to tackle global warming, nuclear is the onlyu way youcan creat massive amounts of power. - Sting Dec 2016
Most of the charts from the presentation are here:
https://environmentalprogress.org/the-complete-case-for-nuclear
Another look here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w
Comments?
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As if nuclear power hadn't already knocked the socks off of solar, wind, coal, oil and gas already in terms of energy production, emissions and safety, it also shows the most potential for improvement.
Does anybody care about carbon emissions?
While we sit on our hands, subsidizing failure, China will build it.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/china-has-multi-billion-projects-developing-liquid-and-solid-fuel-molten-salt-reactors.html
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Thorium nuclear power explained in 5 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
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MIT Tech Review:
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/608712/a-thorium-salt-reactor-has-fired-up-for-the-first-time-in-four-decades/
A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades
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More:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYxlpeJEKmw
https://www.geek.com/science/first-new-thorium-salt-reactor-in-40-years-comes-online-1713296/
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR): Energy for the Future?
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Solid fuel versus liquid:
https://liquidfluoridethoriumreactor.glerner.com/2012-washington-post-nuclear-power-entrepreneurs-push-thorium-as-a-fuel/
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No long term waste:
https://liquidfluoridethoriumreactor.glerner.com/2012-no-long-term-toxic-waste-storage/
Thorium reactors could also burn the existing uranium waste making false the claim that this waste must be stored 10,000 years.
https://liquidfluoridethoriumreactor.glerner.com/2012-can-use-lftrs-to-consume-nuclear-waste/
https://gizmodo.com/how-to-store-nuclear-waste-for-10-000-years-and-how-no-1658844721
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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission stands in the way. If Trump supports it, the establishment will oppose it, so let's run with what Pres. Obama said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X077bEywqbs
"To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” Barack Obama--State of the Union (1/27/10)
Ready and waiting ...
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https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/laser-nuclear-waste?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2
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https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/laser-nuclear-waste?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2
"Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from "a million years to 30 minutes," says Nobel laureate"
I guess that settles it.
Nuclear already had the best safety record and least waste of all known energy sources.
https://dailycaller.com/2017/07/01/solar-panels-generate-300-times-more-toxic-waste-than-nuclear-reactors/
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To be precise, the article noted many years of research are ahead for the laser concept.
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To be precise, the article noted many years of research are ahead for the laser concept.
No hurry. They have thousands of years to figure it out. )
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kybenSq0KPo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhEdcwXxdE
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Germany scrapped nuclear power and emissions spiked
« Reply #725 on: Today at 07:11:02 AM »
QuoteModifyRemove
https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-powerand-deadly-emissions-spiked/
The math of this is kind of obvious. End carbon free energy production and bad things happen.
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https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/5-big-ideas-for-making-fusion-power-a-reality
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fascinating
Gilder fusion report? :-)
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fascinating
Gilder fusion report? :-)
When we figure out fusion we will have energy we can't imagine now.
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https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-hydrogen-boron-fusion-clean-energy/
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And they work when the sun and the wind go down. Who knew!
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/09/will-americas-return-to-nuclear-power-kill-the-dems-green-new-deal-lets-hope-so/
Will America’s Return To Nuclear Power Kill The Dems’ Green New Deal? Let’s Hope So
September 9, 2020, Issues & Insights
While the media focus on the chaos in American cities and the COVID-19 shutdowns, you might have missed this good news on the energy front: The federal government just approved a new, smaller, safer nuclear power plant design, putting nuclear back on the nation’s menu of energy choices.
It might not seem like much, but until this decade, the last nuclear power plant built in the U.S. was 1977. Today, there are an estimated 96 nuclear power plants producing 20% of all our electricity and half of our non-carbon-based power.
If that sounds impressive, consider this: As recently as the 1990s, we had 116 nuclear plants. Utilities, tired of the non-stop trouble of justifying a perpetual source of clean, CO2-free energy to radical green groups and burdened by enormous regulatory costs, have been decommissioning older plants.
But late last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a new plan for what’s called a “small modular reactor,” or SMR, designed by Portland-based NuScale Power.
Small, yes, but cheaper and safer, too. And it may be an avatar for an avalanche of new nuclear technologies in the works, including thorium and molten-salt reactors that use spent fuel, which will further cut costs and decrease reliance on fossil fuels.
Some of these are well beyond the drafting board stage.
Canada’s Terrestrial Energy has plans to produce 190 megawatts of electricity at a plant in Ontario by 2030. And the price of its energy will be competitive with natural gas, the company says.
TerraPower, with Bill Gates as a founding investor, has designed a sodium-cooled plant that can use spent fuel, depleted uranium, or even unprocessed uranium.
As for NuScale’s SMR, current plans call for Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, a western energy cooperative, to build the SMRs at the Energy Department’s Idaho National Laboratory, a massive 890-square-mile lab and test site.
The first workable model is scheduled to be switched on in 2029. Eleven more reactors would be put into service the following year. Each reactor, according to NuScale Power, can produce roughly 60 megawatts of energy, enough to supply 50,000 homes.
These smaller reactors include self-cooling systems and automatic shutdown features that, along with their reduced size, make the new plants far safer than first-generation nuclear power, and less costly to run. They’re virtually meltdown-proof.
Why focus on nuclear technology?
It’s not cheaper than coal or natural gas or even some renewable sources. At least, not upfront.
But these up-and-coming technologies have the potential to make our energy supply more secure and end blackouts and brownouts, such as those now taking place in California, which has moved to a radical and plainly foolish reliance on unreliable renewable energy.
And over time, new tweaks in the technology will cut costs, especially if the federal government takes its foot off the regulation pedal. Until now, that has been a major impediment, and cost, for nuclear power.
But these new nuclear models do one other very important thing: they make the Democrats’ outrageously costly and non-science based Green New Deal totally unnecessary.
The Green New Deal (GND) proposal put forth in Congress would require utilities to supply “100% of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emissions energy sources.”
What’s left out is that the full cost of such a scheme would be enormous almost beyond reckoning.
The American Action Forum, a respected center-right think tank, estimates costs of as much as $51 trillion to $93 trillion over the next 10 years if the GND is passed. In plainer numbers, that’s about $600,000 per American household.
Liberal economist Noah Smith, a finance professor and columnist for Bloomberg, likewise estimates a $6.6 trillion a year cost for the GND. That’s roughly three times what the U.S. government currently takes in from taxes.
To call the GND economically insane might be an understatement. And yet, an entire American political party and some 600 environmental groups think it’s a great idea. Call it Enviro-Socialism.
The GND does not foresee a nuclear future. We do. Small, technologically advanced nuclear power plants would replace the inefficient, costly, unreliable and wasteful renewable energy schemes at the core of the New Green Deal.
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https://twitter.com/i/status/1302617328140640256
1 minute video on nuclear power, Brazilian model Isabelle Boemeke
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This Thurs night Pres Trump will be asked again about climate change. He should immediately pivot to fracking and especially to nuclear power. Forget the debate about end of the earth, tampered data and flawed models. Build the carbon free energy we need and start the construction now, speaking of second term agenda.
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Labor Unions Fight for Nuclear Power
It’s another classic case of what we call the blues versus the greens. The AFL-CIO is supporting nuclear energy. But where is the climate change lobby when you need them?
We’re speaking about Big Labor’s rebellion against the early retirement of two nuclear plants in – Byron and Dresden, IL – towns located in the outer western suburbs of Chicago. The power company Exelon wants to shut them down, but the Illinois AFL-CIO argues that nuclear power provides 28,000 “high paying jobs” throughout the state. “The two plants boost Illinois’ economy, generate money for local communities and support thousands of families… and pay millions in state taxes annually, benefitting local schools, libraries, parks and public works,” the Illinois union says.
The union’s report also maintains that Exelon’s plan “would cause Illinois consumers and businesses to pay $313 million more annually for electricity, or $3.1 billion more over a decade.” And here’s the kicker: “The Byron and Dresden plants alone prevent more than 20 million metric tons of CO2 each year – like taking nearly 4.5 million cars off the road.”
But the environmental groups are nowhere to be found. Why? Because they hate nuclear power and are financed by the solar and wind industry lobby. They oppose a form of energy that emits NO greenhouse gases. Are there no ends to leftwing hypocrisy?
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[Doug] If the alarmists would quit screaming, maybe we could think clearly and make rational public policy. For the umpteenth time, nuclear is safest and cleanest. Everyone knows it. No one is building it.
Even Bill Gates said so on 60 minutes recently
He brought Anderson Cooper on a tour of nuclear research company
and explained how they using liquid sodium instead of water
to cool down the nuclear rods .
This would be safer and prevent explosions like the one at Chernobyl
https://www.nei.org/news/2021/bill-gates-nuclear-innovation-60-minutes
My point is that even if lib Gates is for it , the yes "everyone" knows it to be true
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/mini-nuclear-reactors-offer-promise-of-cheaper-clean-power-11613055608
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https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-case-for-terrestrial-aka-nuclear-energy/?fbclid=IwAR0NthZirHBoc4ubdCiULq66G20pwaTPAni5MUjCAMnRmO4Xkvmwlaczj4w
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/bill-gates-and-warren-buffet-to-launch-game-changing-nuclear-power-plant-in-wyoming_3842912.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-06-04&mktids=45f0bea289e396d3587938fd13ae3df3&est=pdLLnxTZPO03lLccsunpB%2FJ%2FzMosiDVoC8M9%2BmCgbmBQZ0afwy4AM1Hgr8Pg%2BSvmMBvL
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Funny how the same unavoidable facts and conclusions keep coming up. Nuclear Power is the safest form of energy. Cleanest. Most reliable.
If you truly were liberal, wouldn't you be open minded enough to see that?
Democrats put support of nuclear power in their platform for the first time in 48 years. They won power. Where are the new nuclear plants? Instead they are closing plants ahead of schedule, forcing more fossil fuel use, more emissions. What part of safest and cleanest don't they like?
Anyway, take a look at this video. Watch, learn, share. Only 6 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOzJQJ1yAaM
Starts with examination of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and concludes
Nuclear power is the safest energy source known to man.
Soviet Chernobyl completely avoidable accident had the only deaths ever attributed to nuclear power.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/
Nuclear waste has not killed or injured anyone. Now can be minimized or
eliminated.
France and Germany emissions comparison, amazing difference:
(https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56a45d683b0be33df885def6/1486824199064-NGIF3W7N0JA9YWCM9TE1/image-asset.jpeg?format=1500w)
France's Macron regarding Germany's switch from nuclear to coal, 'They worsened their carbon footprint. It wasn't good for the planet. So I won't do that.' Ouch.
"If California put the money it spent on wind and solar since 2001 into nuclear, it would now produce 100% of its electricity carbon free."
Wait. What?
"If California put the money it spent on wind and solar since 2001 into nuclear power, it would now produce 100% of its electricity carbon free."
That doesn't matter to those who vote or govern in California? Why not??!!
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-to-activate-worlds-first-clean-nuclear-reactor-in-september/ar-AAMulB1?ocid=BingNewsSearch
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This looks to be HUGE.
So much for solar and wind?
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This looks to be HUGE.
So much for solar and wind?
Solar and wind will continue to be funded by money taken at government gunpoint because it makes leftists feel good.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/the-fusion-revolution/
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https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210912-why-china-is-developing-a-game-changing-thorium-fuelled-nuclear-reactor
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https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210912-why-china-is-developing-a-game-changing-thorium-fuelled-nuclear-reactor
Very interesting.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59212983
Rolls-Royce gets funding to develop mini nuclear reactors
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"However, critics say the focus should be on renewable power, not new nuclear."
:roll:
"Friends of the Earth's head of policy, Mike Childs, said government support should be "aimed at developing the UK's substantial renewable resources, such as offshore wind, tidal and solar, and boosting measures to help householders cut energy waste".
:roll:
This criticism does make sense:
"Greenpeace's chief scientist Dr Doug Parr said SMRs were still more expensive than renewable technologies and added there was "still no solution to dispose of the radioactive waste they leave behind and no consensus on where they should be located"
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Critics being a major part of the story is the BBC appeasing their gradually-converting, anti-nuc. audience. Why does a non-polluting business startup have critics - right there on the rolodex of the journalist? This is the BBC spinning a story. Think NPR
"However, critics say the focus should be on renewable power, not new nuclear."
"Renewable"?? Solar and wind are not alternatives to nuclear if you have to heat the homes, power the grid and charge all the vehicles OVERNIGHT.
Lithium batteries are "renewable"? We can't even dispose of old solar panels and wind turbines, how are we going to handle the 100-fold increase of consumable battery capacity that round-the-clock "renewables" require?
We're talking about a mini" power plants that power a million homes: 24-7-365. How many "renewables" does it take to do that, produce at full power, overnight, year-'round? There is no comparison.
"Friends of the Earth's head of policy [What a name!], Mike Childs, said government support should be "aimed at developing the UK's substantial renewable resources, such as offshore wind, tidal and solar, and boosting measures to help householders cut energy waste".
- They are friends of the earth, not friends of the people. Everyone knows "boosting measures to help householders cut energy waste" means DO WITHOUT! That is their alternative to building new, clean power plants. Even doing without doesn't get you there. If you don't fill the pipelines and power the grid, people are going to burn wood or whatever it takes to heat their homes. https://wood-energy.extension.org/what-are-the-air-emissions-of-burning-wood/ Backwards countries are not cleaner.
"Greenpeace's chief scientist Dr Doug Parr said SMRs were still more expensive than renewable technologies and added there was "still no solution to dispose of the radioactive waste they leave behind and no consensus on where they should be located"
- Greenpeace's founder strongly disagrees.
"Greenpeace Founder Makes the Case for Nuclear"
https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Moore_2005.pdf
The waste issue has been resolved. It is safe to store, some processes have no waste, and "waste" by definition is a source of carbon-free power that could be used now or in the future. I doubt Rolls Royce with government backing plans to build plants without addressing the waste issue. Nonetheless, solar and wind waste are both much larger problems for a fraction of the energy production.
Single-use water bottles have more than a trillion times more harmful environmental emissions than a nuclear power plant, [whose emissions are zero].
You can't be serious about climate change and be anti-nuc.
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https://www.ft.com/content/0d0e300c-18da-449f-a545-100ab2dd207e?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9
Famous people caught reading the forum.
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Doug,
Can't see article w/o subscription
Maybe I don't need to see it? Since I already have read your posts about Nuclear power,
the source for this article
:-D
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Doug,
Can't see article w/o subscription
Maybe I don't need to see it? Since I already have read your posts about Nuclear power,
the source for this article
:-D
Yes. What can you say about nuclear power with the very latest safety controls? It's safe. It's clean. It's 100% carbon free. And it powers millions of homes and businesses 24/7/365 at a reasonable cost. Could power a world full of Teslas.
I wonder how many nuclear power plants are in the build back better bill. Let me guess. Zero.
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At least the WSJ gives me credit when I (help) write their articles: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324105204578382572446778866
Oops, this one needs subscription too.
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Nuclear-Fusion Startup Lands $1.8 Billion as Investors Chase Star Power
No one has been able to generate net energy by combining atoms, yet Commonwealth Fusion Systems has attracted Bill Gates and George Soros
Commonwealth Fusion in collaboration with MIT has tested a high-temperature superconducting fusion magnet, a key technology.
By Jennifer Hiller | Photographs by Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal
Updated Dec. 1, 2021 10:03 am ET
Commonwealth Fusion Systems LLC said it has raised more than $1.8 billion in the largest private investment for nuclear fusion yet as startups race to be the first to generate carbon-free energy like the sun.
Big-name investors backing the latest funding round for the Massachusetts-based company include Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and George Soros via his Soros Fund Management LLC. Some of Commonwealth Fusion’s competitors, including Helion Energy Inc., have also recently secured huge funding as investors pile into clean energy technologies amid growing concerns about climate change.
Nuclear fusion has long been the holy grail of the energy world. Fusion is the process of generating energy by melding atoms. Current nuclear power plants create energy through nuclear fission, or splitting atoms. Fusion has the potential to create nearly limitless energy using common elements such as hydrogen, and has the added benefit of generating little to no long-lived nuclear waste.
Experimental equipment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Commonwealth Fusion was spun out of MIT in 2018.
But despite decades of research, no one to date has been able to produce net energy through fusion—or more energy than it takes to create a fusion reaction. Private firms are vying to be the first not only to create net-energy machines, but to commercialize them by delivering electricity to the grid on the scale of a power plant.
“Everything is science fiction until someone does it and then all of a sudden it goes from impossible to inevitable,” said Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018.
The recent infusion of cash into fusion startups eclipses the roughly $1.9 billion in total that was previously announced, according to data tracked by the Fusion Industry Association and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority.
Helion Energy announced in early November that it had raised $500 million, with another $1.7 billion committed that is tied to meeting performance milestones. Canada’s General Fusion this week closed a $130 million fundraising round that was oversubscribed, said Chief Executive Christofer Mowry. New investors included a state pension fund and the hedge fund Segra Capital Management.
“It’s a sign of the industry growing up,” Mr. Mowry said. General Fusion plans to launch a larger fundraising effort next year.
Companies are pursuing different designs for fusion reactors, but most rely on fusion that takes place in plasma, a hot charged gas. In September, Commonwealth Fusion successfully tested the most powerful fusion magnet of its kind on Earth that would hold and compress the plasma.
Part of the test stand that powers the magnet.
An instrumentation-and-control rack.
Mr. Mumgaard said the magnet test and funding round allow it to move to the next big step in its evolution: building a net-energy fusion machine that it plans to demonstrate by 2025. It also plans to begin work on the first commercial fusion power plant that would produce electricity by the early 2030s.
New investors supporting Commonwealth Fusion’s most recent funding round include Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Salesforce.com Inc. Chief Executive Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures and Silicon Valley venture-capital firm DFJ Growth.
Mr. Benioff said he has backed a number of firms he thinks could scale up enough to make an environmental impact. “Commonwealth is a very important company, because if it works, it’ll help the world accelerate its energy transition,” he said.
Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, was an early backer through his Khosla Ventures. He said he had the same reaction to the fusion company as he did to Impossible Foods Inc., the plant-based alternative meat maker, considering both critical for addressing climate change.
“My general view is there’s quite a few things in society that don’t get funded when they should, and frankly, some things in life are just too important to not fund,” Mr. Khosla said. His interest isn’t philanthropic, though; he said he sees an opportunity for a big financial return on fusion.
“If you’re wrong, you lose one times your money. But if you’re right, you make 100 times your money,” Mr. Khosla said. “Financially, it made sense.”
Until someone proves it, though, fusion won’t shake its reputation as a technology that is always around the corner. The world’s largest fusion project is ITER, a $22 billion multinational government-funded project in France. Scientists say the project, which has experienced delays, is on track to create superheated plasma by the end of 2025. Full fusion would come a decade later.
A detail of the top of the magnet.
A side of the magnet's test stand.
There are many skeptics of fusion as a near-term source of electricity. Retired Princeton University research physicist Daniel Jassby, a frequent critic, calls the recent private investment trend a “fusion frenzy” and notes that no one has produced electricity from fusion yet.
“A lot of it is fake it ‘till you make it,” Mr. Jassby said.
Tony Donné, program manager for a 28-country research consortium known as EUROfusion, said he likes the industrial approach of private companies, but thinks getting fusion power to the grid is likely to take 20 to 30 years.
David Kirtley, Helion’s chief executive, said he once counted himself among the skeptics. After studying fusion in graduate school, “I actually said, I quit,” Mr. Kirtley said. “I didn’t see a path where in my lifetime we were going to build a real system and get it out there.”
He pivoted to building spacecraft propulsion systems, but improvements in fields like fiber optics and computing convinced him that there was a path forward for commercial fusion.
This summer, Helion published results confirming it had become the first private firm to heat a fusion plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius, which it called the ideal temperature for a fusion power plant. It also broke ground on a facility in Everett, Wash., where it says it will demonstrate net electricity generation by 2024.
Money is a sticking point in climate-change negotiations around the world. As economists warn that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will cost many more trillions than anticipated, WSJ looks at how the funds could be spent, and who would pay. Illustration: Preston Jessee/WSJ
The company’s recent funding round included commitments from Facebook Inc. co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Sam Altman, the former head of tech incubator Y Combinator.
Adam Stein, a senior nuclear energy analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based research center, said he expects successful demonstrations of net energy this decade by some of the leading private fusion companies. But he also thinks some firms will fail.
“Net positive energy is a long distance away from net positive power, which is a system that can put out more power than it uses, ultimately as electricity on the grid,” Mr. Stein said. “These are still demonstration projects we’re looking at.”
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Index of leading contrary indicators, LA Times lead editorial favors closing the cleanest, safest source of energy on the planet.
Fire up the coal plants then because solar doesn't work at night when your EV fleets are charging.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-12-12/diablo-canyon-nuclear-closure
PS. My understanding is that doesn't produce all it's own electricity, buys nuclear power from APS in AZ.
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From the article:
California is approaching an energy crossroads. In three years, its last nuclear plant will begin to power down and the state will lose its largest single source of emissions-free electricity.
A 2018 law requires state regulators to “avoid any increase in greenhouse gases” as a result of closing the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the Central Coast. But if they don’t move more quickly to replace its electricity with renewable energy from wind, solar and geothermal, the void will almost certainly be filled by burning more natural gas, which increased last year to account for nearly half of California’s in-state electricity generation.
California can’t allow the retirement of Diablo Canyon’s nuclear reactors to prolong its reliance on gas plants or increase planet-warming and health-damaging emissions. But the state’s preparations for shutdown of an around-the-clock power source that supplies more than 8% of California’s in-state electricity generation have not inspired confidence; there have been no assurances that an uptick in carbon emissions will be avoided.
That uncertainty has created an opening for a new push to extend Diablo Canyon’s life. A recently launched campaign, whose supporters include former U.S. Energy secretaries Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz, and fashion model and nuclear influencer Isabelle Boemeke, wants California to abruptly reverse course and keep Diablo Canyon operating for another 10 or even 20 years.
Proponents say this would reduce climate pollution, bolster grid reliability and buy time during a crucial period in the state’s transition toward solar, wind and other renewable energy sources, citing a recent report by Stanford University and MIT scientists that lends support to the idea. The Biden administration has chimed in receptively, with Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm suggesting in a recent interview that California might reconsider closing the facility to avoid losing an always-on source of clean electricity.
But the idea is misguided, and at this point remains largely divorced from reality. The plant’s closure should instead serve as an impetus for California do more to accelerate the shift to renewable energy and set a realistic course to meet the state’s target of getting 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045.
Those floating the idea of keeping Diablo Canyon open seem to ignore many practical considerations, including how to address seismic risks, the ecological harm of using seawater for cooling, and what to do with spent nuclear fuel. The cooling system and earthquake safety upgrades that would be required for the facility to keep operating after 2025 are so extensive they would likely exceed $1 billion, according to the Public Utilities Commission.
Replacing Diablo Canyon responsibly will require faster deployment of wind and solar farms and rooftop panels as well as batteries to store energy for use when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Upgrades to transmission lines are also needed to make more carbon-free energy available.
The Public Utilities Commission took an important step in June, when it approved an order requiring utility companies to bring online a massive amount of new clean electricity resources by 2026 to help fuel demand during extreme heat events and replace generation from old, retiring gas plants and Diablo Canyon. But environmental advocates say the state’s plan moves too slowly and leaves the door open to a rise in fossil fuels to create electricity. That’s what happened in 2012, when California’s greenhouse gas emissions rose by 2%, in part because of increased used of gas plants following the unanticipated closure of the malfunctioning San Onofre nuclear power plant.
This time, regulators have had years to prepare for Diablo’s retirement and should not leave things to chance. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the incoming PUC president he recently named, Alice Reynolds, need to do more to get renewable energy sources operating as quickly as possible, and should carefully track them and impose requirements that they reduce climate pollution. It’s our planet at stake, and California’s leaders must ensure the sunset of nuclear power is not followed by a damaging rise in greenhouse gases.
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(Doug). In real winter you can't heat your car overnight with batteries much less your house. How much Lithium Cobalt would it take. What would that do to the price if the whole world did that at once?
I realize Calif does not have the climate of MN but it will be 32 overnight in Sacramento overnight this week and -45 degrees record cold in the mountains. What could wrong if the grid goes down at the worst possible time, and guess what that Is when it goes down.
http://coolweather.net/statetemperature/california_temperature.htm
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agree with nuclear
here is a 'study ' of the impact of wind turbine farms
on scenic visibility
they can be seen for up 10s of miles away in flat areas:
https://blmwyomingvisual.anl.gov/docs/WindVITD.pdf
Why can we not just plant more trees?
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quote author=ccp
agree with nuclear ...
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Isn't it funny that the lead opinion for closing it acknowledges it's far better too. They admit it's cleaner, carbon-free, ALWAYS ON, forgot to mention safer, far safer.
They point out that Stanford and MIT studies support it, even the Biden administration supports it, not to mention nuclear power supported is in the Democratic National Platform. Isn't that the Bible of climate activism?
These people are deniers of math, science, history and common sense. For example, what happens to an inelastic market when needed supply is cut by 8%? An 8% increase in price? Not even close.
What if the electric ambulance you or your loved one will need in the morning is the one not getting charged with the grid down tonight?
Not that Diablo is well located or up to date. If that is the question, build a new one and do it right. The California we used to know would want to have the best in the world.
If the state's real interest was good regulation of these monopoly providers in the public interest, it would require ALL sources to be "always on".
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https://www.freethink.com/technology/chinas-nuclear-fusion-reactor?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=BigThinkScience&fbclid=IwAR3CQHgr9MtkBXeK56fFa8W3uOiqMaZANsHZaDNiJFhvpx6YCrai6paWk_M
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https://seekingalpha.com/news/3780688-france-shuts-down-nuclear-plants-gas-and-power-prices-shatter-records
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https://nypost.com/2022/01/02/chinas-artificial-sun-burns-five-times-hotter-than-sun/
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Is Nuclear Power Part of the Climate Solution?
Investing in the next generation of nuclear reactors could give the world an important tool for reducing carbon emissions.
By Gernot Wagner
Jan. 7, 2022 10:59 am ET
As the world’s climate continues to warm, more than 50 nations have pledged to achieve “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury. That means producing radically lower levels of these gases in the decades ahead while removing from the atmosphere the equivalent of what we do produce. Coal-burning power plants are on their way out, and clean energy sources like solar and wind are growing rapidly. In the U.S., energy generation from renewable sources, including hydropower and geothermal power, surpassed coal in 2020 and is now second only to gas.
The notable exception in this low-carbon energy boom is nuclear power, which has been stalled for decades. Most reactors now operating were built in the 1970s, and many in the U.S. and Europe are being closed. Worldwide, 450 reactors generate 10% of the total electricity consumed today, down from more than 15% in 2005, thanks to a rapid global build-out of power capacity that has largely left nuclear behind. Nuclear power in the West will start to collapse like coal generation unless aging reactors are replaced with new plants.
Despite longstanding concerns over its safety, nuclear power can play an important role in a low-carbon world.
Despite longstanding concerns over its safety, nuclear power can play an important role in a low-carbon world. A recent study sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Clean Air Task Force concluded that to meet its net-zero pledge by 2045, the state of California will need power that is not only “clean” but “firm”—that is, “electricity sources that don’t depend on the weather.” The same is true around the world, and nuclear offers a relatively stable source of power.
Nuclear plants don’t depend on a steady supply of coal or gas, where disruptions in commodity markets can lead to spikes in electricity prices, as has happened this winter in Europe. Nor do nuclear plants depend on the weather. Solar and wind have a great deal of potential, but to be reliable energy sources on their own, they require advanced batteries and high-tech grid management to balance varying levels of power generation with anticipated spikes in demand. That balancing act is easier and cheaper with the kind of firm power that nuclear can provide.
French President Emmanuel Macron at the presentation of the ‘France 2030’ investment plan, which includes funding for research and development of nuclear power, Paris, Oct. 12, 2021.
PHOTO: LUDOVIC MARIN/POOL PHOTO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The level of carbon emissions generated by nuclear power is on par with solar and wind, especially when considering the complete life cycle of a plant. Both solar and wind produce entirely carbon-free electricity once they are up and running, but they require a significant carbon investment up front. Solar panels rely on metals that need to be mined, and the average wind turbine is now large enough to contain around 200 tons of steel or more. It will eventually be possible to produce this steel without generating carbon emissions, but not yet.
Nuclear power’s biggest environmental challenge is the waste it produces, which requires thousands or tens of thousands of years of safe storage. But there isn’t a lot of it: All of the nuclear waste produced in the U.S. since the 1950s adds up to about 85,000 tons of material. Compare that with the tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide that would have been produced had that electricity come from fossil fuels instead.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the nation’s total nuclear waste would cover a single football field, 10 yards high. By contrast, carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless gas, is typically released into the atmosphere, affecting the climate of the entire globe.
The physical footprint of a nuclear plant is small compared with dams, strip mines and arrays of solar panels. Nuclear might even have large greenhouse-gas advantages compared with “bioenergy,” which can emit a lot of carbon dioxide to produce fuel from organic material, and hydropower, which generates tons of carbon dioxide from the construction of large dams and can release large quantities of methane due to decomposing plant matter in reservoirs.
Last November, the U.S. infrastructure package earmarked $2.5 billion for research and development of new nuclear technologies.
With these advantages in mind, governments around the world have started to give nuclear power another look. In the U.S., the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package signed into law by President Joe Biden in November included $6 billion in subsidies to keep existing nuclear plants running longer and earmarked $2.5 billion for research and development of new nuclear technologies.
In France, as part of a massive push to “reindustrialize,” the government will spend $1.13 billion on nuclear power R&D by 2030. The focus is on developing a new generation of small modular reactors (SMRs) to replace parts of the existing fleet that supplies around 70% of the country’s electricity.
The Netherlands’ new coalition government sees nuclear power as a “complement” to solar, wind and geothermal energy in the country’s low-carbon energy mix. The Dutch are extending the life of one nuclear plant and taking steps to build two new reactors, putting $566 million toward that goal. And just last week, in a controversial move, the European Union proposed classifying nuclear as a “green” energy source for funding purposes, “to facilitate the transition toward a predominantly renewable-based future.”
China, meanwhile, intends to build more than 150 new reactors in the next 15 years and will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest generator of nuclear power within five years. In the past decade China has invested around $470 million in molten-salt reactors, a technology that uses fuel in a liquid state rather than solid rods, reducing the risk of meltdowns. The U.S. experimented with the technology in the 1960s but gave up on it as too expensive. China is now building the first molten-salt reactor that uses thorium as fuel, instead of more radioactive plutonium or uranium. An added advantage is that thorium accumulates as a waste product in China’s growing rare-earth mines, making possible much-needed cost savings for an expensive technology.
A fuel-handling test facility at TerraPower, the nuclear energy company founded by Bill Gates.
PHOTO: TERRAPOWER
Nuclear isn’t the only stable, low-carbon source of electricity that doesn’t entail an enormous physical footprint. Geothermal power, which draws heat from beneath the surface of the earth, meets all three criteria. Hydropower, which uses the flow of water to generate electricity, is stable, though reservoirs often have a large footprint. Dams can serve as natural batteries: Water can be pumped up into a reservoir when the supply of solar and wind power is high and demand is low—as on a sunny, mild Sunday afternoon—and then used to generate power on a still day when the sun isn’t shining and demand for electricity spikes.
These alternatives mean that nuclear power won’t be the answer everywhere. Iceland has been producing low-carbon electricity since long before climate change became a concern and solar and wind power became cheap. The country used to import coal to generate electricity, before expanding its hydropower production beginning in the 1950s. Today, Iceland derives three-quarters of its electricity from hydro and a quarter from geothermal.
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Should nuclear power play a bigger role in the world’s energy future? Join the conversation below.
Other countries have explicitly rejected nuclear power, sometimes at a considerable economic and climate cost. Austria derives 60% of its electricity from hydro plants along the Danube River and in the Alps, and it is well-integrated into the European electricity grid, which derives its stability in part from nuclear plants just across the border. The country built its only nuclear reactor in the 1970s, but in a hard-fought referendum in 1978, Austrians voted against turning on the plant. Instead, Austria built a coal-fired power plant, which became one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the country and a major source of air pollution for over three decades. It was converted to burn gas in 2019.
The most consequential story of a country with second thoughts about nuclear energy is Germany, Europe’s industrial powerhouse. Before 2011, nuclear power accounted for about 25% of Germany’s electricity production. The country had not built a new reactor since the late 1980s, influenced by the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union in 1986, but it planned to operate most of its reactors through the 2030s.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor days after it was destroyed by an accident on April 26, 1986.
PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Then came the Fukushima nuclear accident on March 11, 2011, triggered by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan. Unlike Chernobyl, which caused significant loss of life and long-term health problems—including in children exposed to radiation in utero as far away as Sweden—Fukushima resulted in no loss of life and “no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents” from radiation exposure, according to a 2021 U.N. report. In 2018, one former worker at the Fukushima plant died from cancer possibly linked to radiation, but no such link has been established for residents of surrounding communities, even those close to the reactors.
In the wake of the accident, Japan’s decision to shut down its nuclear plants instead of phasing out coal resulted in increased consumption of fossil fuels, generating air pollution that can be statistically linked to thousands of deaths. These deaths stand in stark contrast to the good safety record of reactors in the West, whose designs and safety regulations make them much safer than old Soviet reactors like the one at Chernobyl.
Fear of nuclear accidents is real and, in part, justified. It is worrisome that nine Chernobyl-style reactors are still operating in Russia, with some modifications. But it’s also important to recognize that regulatory oversight and safety provisions are usually effective. Even the Fukushima accident, or the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, could be considered a success on the safety front: Some safety features failed but others worked, containing the fallout.
A coal-burning power plant near Aachen, Germany, Dec. 28, 2021. After the Fukushima disaster, Germany shut down its nuclear power plants and relied more on coal.
PHOTO: HENNING KAISER/PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY IMAGES
After Fukushima, the U.S. reaffirmed its previously stated commitment to nuclear power, while Germany shut down almost half of its nuclear capacity immediately and accelerated its remaining nuclear phase-out. In 2020 Germany derived around 10% of its electricity from nuclear energy, down from 25% before Fukushima; the country’s last three reactors are scheduled to close this year. As a result, Germany emits more than 8 tons of carbon dioxide per person, compared with less than 5 tons for France, with its large fleet of nuclear plants.
The new German coalition government has moved up the country’s planned exit from coal from 2038 to 2030 as part of its ambitious Energiewende, the transition to clean energy. Even so, the reliance on coal after Fukushima has led to hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide pollution and thousands of deaths from local air pollution.
Nuclear power has also stagnated in the West because of its high cost, which is partly related to safety measures. While solar and wind have been getting cheaper, nuclear power has been getting more expensive. The U.S. is building only two new reactors at the moment, both outside Augusta, Ga., at a combined cost of over $28 billion, roughly double the original projection. France is currently building only one reactor, which will go on line later this year; it has cost $21.5 billion, instead of the originally budgeted $3.9 billion, and is a decade behind schedule. The U.K. has two reactors currently under construction at a total cost of $30 billion, dwarfing the country’s $516 million investment in research and development on small modular reactors.
Bill Gates, seen here in October 2021, founded the nuclear energy company TerraPower in 2006.
PHOTO: LEON NEAL/POOL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
SMRs and other new technologies are the nuclear industry’s big hope. One focus of research is using new fissile materials such as thorium, which is more abundant, produces less waste and has no direct military applications. Other technologies look to using existing nuclear waste as a fuel source. Turning away from massive reactors toward SMRs might, at first, increase costs per unit of energy produced. But it would open financing models unavailable to large reactors, allowing costs to come down, with reactors following a uniform design instead of being designed one by one. Building many small reactors also allows for learning-by-doing, a model actively pursued by China at home and as part of its Belt and Road Initiative abroad.
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None of these new technologies is sure to be economically competitive. Some of the more experimental technologies, like China’s thorium reactors, might yet pay off. TerraPower, a venture founded by Bill Gates, has been working on natrium reactors for over a decade and recently added a molten-salt design to the mix, which could make a real difference if it works out. The point is to try. Like solar and wind, nuclear energy could climb the learning curve and slide down the cost curve with the right financial backing.
Government support for research on nuclear power is no substitute for rapidly developing solar and wind power. Subsidizing the quest for new nuclear technologies is akin to investing in technologies that capture carbon dioxide in smokestacks or directly from the air: They aren’t a replacement for cutting carbon emissions now, but both will be necessary to achieve ambitious net-zero climate goals. The world can’t afford to dismiss the possibilities of new nuclear technologies, or to prematurely shut down existing nuclear plants that operate safely.
Nuclear power comes with risks. So does a warming planet. The high cost of nuclear power today says little about where things might stand in a few decades, when the world should be well on its way to powering its grids with low-carbon technologies alone. For reasons of both energy security and climate change, governments in the West, China and beyond should continue to invest in nuclear research and development.
—Dr. Wagner teaches climate economics at Columbia Business School (on leave from New York University). He writes the Risky Climate column for Bloomberg Green and is the author of “Geoengineering: The Gamble” (Polity Press, 2021).
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the January 8, 2022, print edition as 'Is Nuclear Power Part of the Climate Solution? Nuclear Power in A Greener Future.'
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Part of the solution? It IS the solution. What is the alternative? Waterfalls? Solar charged batteries. Right now Asia has enough total batteries to power itself for 6 seconds. Grow that exponentially and by 2030 it will be 10 minutes of power. Europe has 1 minute of backup battery power. Heat your home with THAT.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/01/dont-bet-on-batteries.php
Every other "solution" just involves being poor and doing without, and still we will burn enough wood and coal, when they take away everything else, to end breathing as we know it.
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Race to cut down on fossil fuels leads some states to nuclear power
BY JENNIFER MCDERMOTT ASSOCIATED PRESS PROVIDENCE, R.I. | As climate change pushes states in the U.S. to dramatically cut their use of fossil fuels, many are coming to the conclusion that solar, wind and other renewable power sources might not be enough to keep the lights on.
Nuclear power is emerging as an answer to fill the gap as states transition away from coal, oil and natural gas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stave off the worst effects of a warming planet.
The renewed interest in nuclear comes as companies, including one started by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are developing smaller, cheaper reactors that could supplement the power grid in communities across the U.S.
Nuclear power comes with its own set of potential problems, especially radioactive waste that can remain dangerous for thousands of years.
But supporters say the risks can be minimized and that the energy source will be essential to stabilize power supplies as the world tries to move away from carbon dioxideemitting fossil fuels.
Tennessee Valley Authority President and CEO Jeff Lyash puts it simply: You can’t significantly reduce carbon emissions without nuclear power.
“At this point in time, I don’t see a path that gets us there without preserving the existing fleet and building new nuclear,” Mr. Lyash said. “And that’s after having maximized the amount of solar we can build in the system.”
The TVA is a federally owned utility that provides electricity to seven states as the nation’s third largest electricity generator.
It’s adding about 10,000 megawatts of solar capacity by 2035 — enough to power nearly 1 million homes annually — but also operates three nuclear plants and plans to test a small reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
By 2050, it hopes to hit its goal of becoming net zero, which means the amount of greenhouse gases produced is no more than the amount removed from the atmosphere.
An Associated Press survey of the energy policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia found that the strong majority — about two-thirds — say nuclear, in one fashion or another, will help take the place of fossil fuels.
The momentum building behind nuclear power could lead to the first expansion of nuclear reactor construction in the U.S. in more than three decades.
Roughly one-third of the states and the District of Columbia responded to the AP’s survey by saying they have no plans to incorporate nuclear power in their green energy goals, instead leaning heavily on renewables.
Energy officials in those states said their goals are achievable because of advances in energy storage using batteries, investments in the grid for high-voltage interstate transmission, energy efficiency efforts to reduce demand and power provided by hydroelectric dams.
The split over nuclear power in U.S. states mirrors a similar debate unfolding in Europe, where countries including Germany are phasing out their reactors while others, such as France, are sticking with the technology or planning to build more plants.
The Biden administration, which has tried to take aggressive steps to reduce greenhouse gases, views nuclear as necessary to help compensate for the decline of carbon-based fuels in the nation’s energy grid.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told the AP that the administration wants to get to zero-carbon electricity, and “that means nuclear, that means hydropower, that means geothermal, that means obviously wind on and offshore, that means solar.”
Ms. Granholm said “We want it all,” during a visit in December to Providence, Rhode Island, to promote an offshore wind project.
The $1 trillion infrastructure package championed by Mr. Biden and signed into law last year will allocate about $2.5 billion for advanced reactor demonstration projects. The Energy Department said studies by Princeton University and the Decarb America Research Initiative show that nuclear is necessary for a carbon-free future.
Nuclear power is emerging as an answer to fill the gap as states transition away from fossil fuels. Some states said they had no plans to use it in their energy goals and will rely on things like wind power
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Hot stuff: California lab hits milestone on road to fusion power
BY SETH BORENSTEIN ASSOCIATED PRESS
With 192 lasers and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun, scientists hit — at least for a fraction of a second — a key milestone on the long road toward nearly pollution-free fusion energy.
Researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California were able to spark a fusion reaction that briefly sustained itself — a major feat because fusion requires such high temperatures and pressures that it easily fizzles out.
The ultimate goal, still years away, is to generate power the way the sun generates heat, by smooshing hydrogen atoms so close to each other that they combine into helium, which releases torrents of energy.
A team of more than 100 scientists published the results of four experiments that achieved what is known as a burning plasma in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
With those results, along with preliminary results announced last August from follow-up experiments, scientists say they are on the threshold of an even bigger advance: ignition. That’s when the fuel can continue to “burn” on its own and produce more energy than what’s needed to spark the initial reaction.
“We’re very close to that next step,” said study lead author Alex Zylstra, an experimental physicist at Livermore.
Nuclear fusion presses together two types of hydrogen found in water molecules. When they fuse, “a small amount [milligrams] of fuel produces enormous amounts of energy and it’s also very ‘clean’ in that it produces no radioactive waste,” said Carolyn Kuranz, a University of Michigan experimental plasma physicist who wasn’t part of the research. “It’s basically limitless, clean energy that can be deployed anywhere.”
Researchers around the world have been working on the technology for decades, trying different approaches. Thirty-five countries are collaborating on a project in Southern France called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor that uses enormous magnets to control the superheated plasma. That is expected to begin operating in 2026.
Earlier experiments in the United States and United Kingdom succeeded in fusing atoms, but achieved no self-heating, said Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who wasn’t part of this study.
But don’t bank on fusion just yet. “The result is scientifically very exciting for us,” said study co-author Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for Lawrence Livermore’s fusion program. “But we’re a long way from useful energy.”
Maybe decades, he said. It’s already taken several years inside a lab that is straight out of “Star Trek” — one of the movies used the lab as background visuals for the Enterprise’s engine room — and many failed attempts to get to this point. One adjustment that helped: Researchers made the fuel capsule about 10% bigger. Now it’s up to the size of a BB.
That capsule fits in a tiny gold metal can that researchers aim 192 lasers at. They heat it to about 100 million degrees, creating about 50% more pressure inside the capsule than what’s inside the center of the sun. These experiments created burning plasmas that lasted just a trillionth of a second, but that was enough to be considered a success, Mr. Zylstra said.
Overall, the four experiments in the Nature study — conducted in November 2020 and February 2021 — produced as much as 0.17 megajoules of energy, That’s far more than previous attempts, but still less than one-tenth of the power used to start the process, Mr. Zylstra said. A megajoule is about enough energy to heat a gallon of water 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
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https://bigthink.com/the-present/laser-nuclear-waste/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR1wGmFOexkv61kHes3cdurVzRluBYY6Ub_Qi6xVXJ9I71Qi_H1mQBm2ofI#Echobox=1653024433-1
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Well worth our time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kahih8RT1k&t=16s
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Good summary of nuclear power
disappointed to hear how complex it is
and there are so many pros and cons
perhaps are next best hope is advancements in fusion
though that won't happen anytime soon...
:|
or better carbon capture......
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As good as the piece is, IMHO it misses:
a) Transmission lines and their costs. Sun and Wind are energy consumers are often in different places.
b) Sun and Wind require storage-- i.e. batteries. Batteries require REEs, which are toxic.
c) Solar panels require REEs, which are toxic.
d) REEs, which are toxic, require mining.
e) Batteries and panels degrade, requiring disposal, which is toxic
f) Requiring solar and batteries helps China, which dominates, achieve economies of scale.
g) Choosing to be dependent on Chinese suppliers and technology for our energy grid is no different than Germany depending on Russian gas.
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https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/08/texas-applies-to-build-molten-salt-nuclear-by-2025.html
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https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/08/texas-applies-to-build-molten-salt-nuclear-by-2025.html
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Further to my post on energy, here is the public perception problem with nuclear in one picture:
(https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/630a587da587e18743653b5f/Nuclear-Power-Generation-1965-to-2021/960x0.png?format=png&width=960)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/08/27/nuclear-power-could-cut-the-worlds-carbon-emissions-in-half/?sh=2f8c741f7738
But... Chernobyl was a Soviet contraption built with no safeguards, and Fukushima was a case of diesel generators failing in a 1000 year tsunami.
We have 65 years of experience with nuclear power. Do we have the ability to eliminate the causes of these two meltdowns? The answer is yes.
BTW, the cattle living outside the Fukushima reactor are well studied and living 10 years beyond pre-meltdown expectations.
https://news.yahoo.com/rancher-guards-irradiated-cattle-near-072047126.html
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28776900/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00128-020-02968-w
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358029/
Given that nothing is zero risk, no power source is cleaner or safer than nuclear, the surface of the earth warmed only 2/10ths of a degree in the last 50 years, not all of that CO2 caused, the question remains, do we want to cut our emissions or not? If so, build nuclear. Start now.
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https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2022/11/17/climate-change-motivates-a-reevaluation-of-nuclear-energy/
Um, "Earth in the Balance" was published more than 30 years ago. We could easily be carbon free by now using technology available then. #Blockheads
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/fusion_confusion.html
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https://www.popsci.com/technology/small-modular-nuclear-reactor-approval/
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A Futuristic Plan to Make Steel With Nuclear Fusion
Helion Energy and Nucor are teaming up to build a power plant at one of Nucor’s U.S. steel mills
By
Jennifer Hiller
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Amrith Ramkumar
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Sept. 27, 2023 7:30 am ET
Part of a Helion Energy prototype for fusion energy reaction experiments. PHOTO: HELION ENERGY/REUTERS
America’s largest steel company is betting nuclear fusion can help it eliminate carbon emissions and power one of the world’s most energy-intensive manufacturing processes.
In a first-of-its-kind partnership between a major industrial company and a fusion startup, Nucor NUE 2.00%increase; green up pointing triangle and Helion Energy plan to develop a 500-megawatt fusion power plant that would be placed at one of Nucor’s U.S. steel mills by 2030, the companies said.
That amount is enough electricity to power a few hundred thousand homes, about as much as a conventional power plant. Nucor is investing $35 million in Helion, which is backed by OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman.
The deal is a bet on fusion, a technology that can seem more science fiction than science and hasn’t yet produced electricity.
The agreement shows how Nucor and many other manufacturers are desperate for clean electricity to make greener products but are limited by a lack of abundant wind and solar power.
The steelmaker Nucor is under pressure to move faster on the adoption of clean energy. PHOTO: TIMOTHY D. EASLEY/AP
Many green steelmaking techniques require immense power, creating a need for energy sources such as fusion that address some of the limitations of today’s renewable and battery technologies.
“We don’t want to sit on the sidelines and wait for all these technologies and hope they get developed,” Leon Topalian, Nucor’s chief executive, said in an interview.
Fusion powers the sun and has the potential to provide vast amounts of carbon-free power if someone can figure out how to harness it on Earth. No company has proved it can get more energy out of fusion than it takes to create it, and most experts think commercial fusion remains decades away.
Money has poured into fusion following a long-awaited breakthrough in December, when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said it had produced more energy from fusion than was delivered through lasers to drive the reaction.
Nucor’s steel goes into the world’s buildings, cars and appliances. In states where Nucor has facilities, it is among the largest electricity consumers.
Customers including General Motors and the heating and cooling equipment maker Trane Technologies are demanding greener steel, pushing Nucor to move faster on clean energy. The company has used recycled material for many years to make cleaner products, but the steel industry needs to address power consumption to meet climate targets and is currently dependent on local utility grids, many of which rely on fossil fuels.
The Nucor fusion plant would be about 10 times the capacity of another facility Helion plans to build to provide fusion-generated electricity by 2028 for Microsoft. The Microsoft deal, believed to be the fusion industry’s first commercial agreement, was announced in May.
Nucor plans to buy power directly from Helion at its steel mill rather than purchasing it from a utility or electricity grid operator. If successful, that approach could provide a blueprint for fusion companies to sign similar deals with power customers. Helion could sell excess power not used by Nucor back to the grid operator, another potential benefit for the developing fusion industry.
“This is moving out of the realm of a federally funded research program and into industrial power development,” said David Kirtley, Helion’s chief executive. “This should be the signal that fusion electricity is coming.”
Helion is building its seventh prototype, which it says will demonstrate electricity generated from fusion next year.
Current nuclear power plants use fission reactions, which split atoms to create a burst of energy. Fusion merges atoms instead.
In August, the Livermore laboratory said it had replicated its breakthrough. While the achievement doesn’t account for the electricity powering the lasers, it helped boost optimism about the decadeslong pursuit of fusion.
In addition to proving fusion can generate electricity, the companies will have to show a fusion plant can provide power directly to a big user and receive regulatory approvals for the project.
State and local regulations will be a factor in deciding where to put the fusion plant, company officials said. Helion is based near Seattle, while Nucor is based in Charlotte, N.C., and has mills across the U.S. The companies will consider local incentives that could buttress federal subsidies.
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Helion has been among the industry’s largest fundraisers, with around $630 million, including the Nucor investment. Altman has invested $375 million in Helion and has said having customers is critical for keeping Helion focused on the realities of business.
Nucor recently invested in the more conventional kind of nuclear power, fission, another carbon-free technology being pursued by startups around the world. Nucor and the fission company NuScale Power are looking at using a small modular reactor to provide power to a steel mill.
The support for nuclear fusion and fission is a blast from the past for Nucor, which was previously called Nuclear Corporation of America in the middle of the 20th century as a nuclear industry services provider before it rebranded and focused on steel.
“Wind and solar aren’t going to be enough,” Topalian said. “We’re going to need to look at how we advance the ball in other areas.”
Write to Jennifer Hiller at jennifer.hiller@wsj.com and Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com
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New Energy and Climate Realities Prompt Europe to Revisit Nuclear Power
Oct 10, 2023 | 21:40 GMT
Climate change, the reduction of Russian natural gas, high electricity prices and safer next-generation nuclear reactors will lead more European countries to invest in new nuclear reactors. But internal EU disagreements over nuclear power, as well as technical and financial hurdles, will complicate those efforts and introduce new challenges for nuclear companies. Italy is becoming the latest European country to offer political support for nuclear power. On Sept. 21, Energy Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin launched the National Platform for Sustainable Nuclear Power to develop guidelines in the next nine months to possibly reintroduce nuclear power to Italy's energy mix. In launching the platform, Fratin pointed out that Italy needed to secure electricity sources that, unlike renewables, can provide a stable supply of power, like nuclear power does, as the country phases out fossil fuels. If Italy builds nuclear reactors, it would most likely only consider small modular reactors or more advanced Gen IV reactors (which are safer but not expected to be commercialized until the 2040s), rather than the Gen III+ reactors being constructed today.
Italy phased out nuclear power in 1990 after a 1987 referendum in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In the late 2000s, Italy sought to revive its nuclear power industry, but this was headed off by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan and another Italian referendum shortly thereafter where over 90% of Italians voted in support of repealing the laws passed by the government to revive nuclear power.
In 2022, both the British and French governments announced new plans to build new nuclear reactors. France will build at least six new reactors, with plans to potentially build eight additional reactors, while the United Kingdom will build up to eight new reactors. In June 2023, the Swedish Riksdag also approved a new energy plan to build ten new reactors.
In February 2023, France also led the creation of a Nuclear Alliance of 16 countries, with Italy being an observer and the United Kingdom as a guest country, designed to promote nuclear power within Europe. The other members are Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Sweden.
Central and Eastern Europe is also becoming an increasingly important area for the development of emerging nuclear technologies in the region, as exemplified by the U.S.-led plan known as ''Project Phoenix,'' which aims to replace coal-fired power plants in countries like Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia with small modular reactors.
On the other hand, Germany shut down its remaining nuclear power plant in April 2023 given that the Green Party is part of the government coalition. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sept. 2 that nuclear power was a ''dead horse'' in Germany, despite calls from both the opposition and members of his coalition government to halt the decommissioning of Germany's nuclear power plants.
Climate change, the war in Ukraine, energy security concerns, new nuclear energy technologies and high energy prices are all contributing to increased European interest in nuclear power. Last year, the outbreak of the Ukraine war and the subsequent EU decision to phase out Russian natural gas entirely by 2027 led to a spike in electricity prices driven by high natural gas prices amid limited supplies. This electricity spike prompted the European Union to temporarily loosen its state aid rules under a Temporary Crisis Framework, which allowed countries to implement subsidies, cash transfers and other mechanisms designed to combat the higher energy price environment. The Continent's push to phase out Russian natural gas following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine — coupled with the European Union's growing ambition to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 under its Fit for 55 Package — means that European governments are under pressure to ensure that their policies simultaneously hit green targets and generate enough electricity from different sources by the end of the decade and at reasonable costs for future electricity. Adding to the challenges is the fact that Europe's ambitious electrification targets for the transportation sector (i.e. to get more electric vehicles on the road) and the heating sector (i.e. to install more electric heat pumps) are expected to help boost European electricity demand by about 20% in 2030 from 2021 levels, according to the International Energy Agency. Nuclear reactors are attractive for two main reasons: 1) they can improve Europe's energy security by offering a stable supply of low-carbon electricity that does not require a constant supply of fuel, unlike coal or natural gas power plants, and 2) unlike renewables like wind and solar (which generate power intermittently), nuclear reactors can operate uninterrupted throughout the day, providing a so-called base load to the electricity grid that helps keep the power grid balanced. Moreover, over the last decade, nuclear power companies have introduced Gen III+ reactors, which are viewed as being far safer than previous generations (like the Gen II reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl). In the future, small modular reactors also offer more promise for safety as they are designed in a way so that they do not really present a risk beyond their premises and aren't at risk of having a nuclear meltdown — making them even more politically attractive.
Over the next few years, there will likely be more pressure on European governments to accelerate the energy transition, which nuclear power can help accomplish, as climate change intensifies and as evidence mounts that global actions to cut emissions are insufficient to achieve the goals outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A technical report released on Sept. 8 ahead of the United Nations COP28 climate conference in November, which will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates, found a large gap between countries' current greenhouse gas emissions and the expected decline in emissions needed to achieve the Paris Agreement's targets.
European environmental and climate activist groups generally oppose the use of both nuclear power and fossil fuels. But as the climate crisis worsens, some activists will likely become more pragmatic about nuclear power, viewing the environmental concerns with nuclear power as a lesser of two evils compared with climate change. Already, on Aug. 29, an activist group that was a part of Greta Thunberg's school climate strikes campaign launched a ''Dear Greenpeace'' campaign to convince the global environmental organization to drop its ''old-fashioned and unscientific'' opposition to nuclear energy, arguing that Greenpeace's anti-nuclear stance supported the fossil fuel industry.
But European countries' nuclear goals, especially the ambitious ones put forth by those like France and Poland, face significant threats from technical and financial hurdles. Recent European and North American nuclear power projects have had limited success. First-of-their-kind Gen III+ reactors developed by nuclear power companies like U.S.-based Westinghouse and France's Framatome have been plagued by cost overruns and lengthy delays. Finland's Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor — the first Gen III+ EPR reactor constructed by Framatome, Germany's Siemens and France's state-owned power giant — finally began normal operations in April 2023, 18 years after construction originally began in 2005, and four years after construction was originally scheduled to be completed in 2019. The cost of the reactor ballooned from 3 billion euros initially to around 11 billion euros. The second EPR reactor being built in France has also suffered a decade-long delay in its commissioning. In the United States, Westinghouse has run into similar issues with its AP1000 reactors, with its first reactor at a power plant in Georgia being commissioned in July 2023 after long delays and cost overruns. Such struggles are significant for Europe, as the AP1000 and EPR will likely comprise the bulk of the designs selected for new reactors on the Continent. EDF, Framatome, Siemens and Westinghouse will likely be able to reduce some of the delays and cost overruns, now that the first-of-their-kind reactors have been built — especially if they can introduce economies of scale to design and build multiple reactors at the same site or in the same country. But their efforts will only go so far without improvements to the structural issues in the West that are also contributing to the high price and lengthy timelines of these projects (including a shortage of nuclear energy experts, high labor costs, and strict regulatory and safety standards).
Compared with Western countries, China and South Korea have been able to more quickly and cheaply build advanced nuclear reactors. But although both Asian countries have eyed the European nuclear market, China's involvement has become politically controversial in countries like the United Kingdom (where the government has pushed China out of multiple nuclear power projects in recent years), while South Korea has yet to prove it can export nuclear technology to Europe and meet higher European environmental and safety standards without increasing costs and timelines.
The risks of cost overruns and delays are even higher in Italy (which is considering rebuilding nuclear reactors) and Poland (which is planning to build its first reactors). This is because neither country has an established workforce with a history of working in the nuclear power industry, nor a proven track record through their respective regulatory environments to make approvals quick and easy to implement.
In Italy and other European countries that are trying to reverse a long-established anti-nuclear stance, the eventual revival of a nuclear program will face even more constraints and will likely take 10-15 years to materialize. Convincing the country's public opinion to change a deep-rooted distrust in nuclear energy, as well as finding sites to build new reactors and store nuclear waste amid local communities' traditional resistance to such infrastructure, will prove to be a long and challenging process.
The sustained push for nuclear power by some EU member states will continue to create disputes within the bloc, which will pose a financial and regulatory risk to countries and companies pursuing nuclear energy opportunities in Europe. Germany — along with fellow EU members Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Portugal, which have long opposed nuclear power — seem unlikely to reverse their anti-nuclear positions. In 2021 and 2022, these five EU countries pushed for nuclear power to be excluded from the EU Taxonomy Regulation for green finance. But while nuclear power was ultimately included in the taxonomy, political spats within the bloc over the controversial energy source have continued. Currently, EU member states are arguing over whether governments should be allowed to offer state-backed, fixed-price power contracts to existing power plants and then take the revenue to subsidize industries. France, as well as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, want to be able to spend those subsidies on existing nuclear facilities. By contrast, Germany and other anti-nuclear states are concerned that such subsidies could undermine their own electricity market's competitiveness vis-a-vis countries with nuclear plants. EU negotiators hope to reach a compromise as a part of a broader reform to the bloc's electricity market by the time EU energy ministers finish their next meeting on Oct. 17. But even if EU members are able to reach an agreement on this particular dispute, the controversy over the subsidy issue nonetheless demonstrates that the debate over nuclear power in the European Union will likely continue to play out as the EU implements energy policy reforms in the coming years, with each major change likely re-opening disagreements over the role of nuclear power. For companies, this creates a degree of uncertainty and introduces political and regulatory risk around policies by pro-nuclear EU member states that are designed to support nuclear power-related investments or lifetime extensions. The technical, financial and regulatory challenges that have recently plagued the construction of new reactors in Europe also magnify some of the political disputes in the European Union surrounding nuclear power because they risk not only adding more delays, but reducing state support for and investor interest in such projects (especially if investors aren't able to label their nuclear investments as sustainable) — both of which are necessary for the construction of nuclear reactors to be economically feasible.
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Strange that it's year four and we still haven't needed a thread for things the Biden administration has gotten right.
But give credit where due:
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4560203-biden-administration-announces-1-5-billion-loan-for-first-reopening-of-a-shuttered-nuclear-plant/
“Nuclear power is our single largest source of carbon free electricity, directly supporting 100,000 jobs across the country and hundreds of thousands more indirectly,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan, in a statement.
- [Doug] Where the hell have you been? It's year four. You should be finishing this project, not starting it.
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The U.S. Needs a Nuclear Energy Makeover
Bipartisan legislation in Congress could make it easier to deploy reactors and reduce waste.
By David T. Stevenson and Robert M. Bauman
March 29, 2024 4:36 pm ET
Bipartisan legislation moving through Congress could solve America’s nuclear-waste problem and make it easier to deploy nuclear reactors, propelling the U.S. toward a clean-energy future.
Nuclear fuel rods, which power reactors, have life spans of only 18 to 24 months. Yet once they’re removed from their reactors and placed into on-site cooling ponds, they still retain more than 90% of their potential energy. The U.S. every year generates some 2,000 metric tons of this spent nuclear fuel and has accumulated more than 80,000 metric tons in the past 50 years.
France derives about 17% of its electricity from recycled nuclear fuel. The U.S. has mistakenly passed on making use of its own. Our current pile of spent fuel rods contains enough energy to power the nation’s electric grid for about 100 years, according to a projection from nuclear researcher Jess Gehin at Idaho National Laboratory, as reported by CNBC.
Enter new small modular nuclear-reactor technology, which could be a game-changer in repurposing nuclear waste. This technology burns spent fuel in fast, high-temperature reactors, while requiring refueling only every nine years or so, lowering power-plant downtime. This approach would substantially reduce the volume of stored waste and the time that waste would have to sit in storage.
Congress is getting wise to the issue. The House on Feb. 28 passed the Atomic Energy Advancement Act, co-sponsored by Reps. Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.) and Diana DeGette (D., Colo.). The bill would expedite the approval process for the next generation of nuclear power plants and change how the U.S. processes nuclear waste. It would also offer a financial incentive for the first licensed project using recycled fuel. The Senate has put forward a similar bill: the Advance Act of 2023, co-sponsored by Sens. Tom Carper (D., Del.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R., W.Va.).
These bills reflect an important reality: Nuclear waste is waste only if we don’t reuse it; otherwise, it’s unspent nuclear fuel with great potential.
According to the Energy Department, the U.S. derives 19% of its base-load electricity from an aging fleet of 92 nuclear reactors, whose service life may extend only another 20 years. In the past 30 years, only two new reactors have come online. Intermittent wind and solar power can’t scale and won’t be able to fill the void when the reactors are spent. Other than expanding fossil-fuel power plants, the only viable alternative is the rapid development of new small modular nuclear reactors.
The House and Senate bills offer special incentives for project developers to install new small modular nuclear-reactor technologies at existing or retired nuclear sites—which have trained personnel and distribution infrastructure for connection to the electric grid—and on brownfield land. We suggest installing these technologies at military bases, which also need microgrids to enhance resiliency and readiness.
The U.S. lags far behind its global competitors in nuclear energy. Along with our aging fleet, we have an aging workforce that will retire soon. We predict that the potential for new reactors will draw a new generation of skilled workers into the industry. The Atomic Energy Advancement Act and the Advance Act are positive but insufficient steps forward. To accelerate development in the next decade, we will need more funding along with a multiyear, multiagency commitment—akin to what it took to put men on the moon.
We suggest that Congress also pass legislation enabling dollars from the existing Nuclear Waste Fund to be repurposed for recycling. The U.S. government ought to prioritize nuclear power using spent fuel, which will prove essential to preserving our way of life, building a clean-energy future and ensuring our future prosperity.
Mr. Stevenson is director of the Caesar Rodney Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. Mr. Bauman is the president and CEO of Trusted Systems Inc.