I get mail:
German physicist Peter Heller wrote a passionate plea for a return to science on the nuclear power issue, published in German here: http://www.science-skeptical.de/blog/fukushima/004149/
With Dr. Heller’s permission, I’ve translated it in English. But having gone over the content, I think his plea is worthy of a much wider audience – more than what NTZ can offer. So I send this to you with the kind request that you consider publishing it at WUWT.
Best regards,
P Gosselin
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German physicist Peter Heller makes a passionate plea for a return to science on the nuclear energy issue. He wonders if ignorance and fear will cause us to abandon the legacies of Einstein, Heisenberg and others.
Fukushima
By Dr Peter Heller, http://www.science-skeptical.de
Astronomer, Physicist
There’s no place on earth I would rather be right now than at Fukushima – right in the atomic power plant, at the centre of the event. I say this because I am a physicist and there is no other place that could be more exciting and interesting for a physicist. The same goes for many, if not most physicists and engineers, on the planet.
Already at a young age I knew one day I would study physics. As a boy, I received a telescope for Christmas, and from that point on my view was fixed on the night sky; gazing at star clusters, nebula and galaxies was my favourite preoccupation. It was only later that I learned that these lights and the twinkling in eyepiece were actually the expressions of a chaotic and violent force of nature – the direct conversion of matter into energy during the fusion of an atomic nucleus.
My curiosity carried me, as if on a high, through 10 semesters of study and subsequent graduation. It was a time of discovery that involved the tedious task of understanding. At times I felt exasperation and self doubt with respect to the sheer complexity and breadth of what there was to learn. Yet, there were times of joy whenever the fog lifted and the clarity and beauty of physical descriptions of natural phenomena moved in its place. It was a time that, unfortunately, passed all too quickly and is now some years in the past.
The great minds that accompanied me through my studies were Planck, Sommerfeld, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, and a host of others who, for us physicists, are still very much alive today. They are great thinkers who contributed to unravelling the puzzles of nature and the forces which keep the world together through the most minute structures. I devoured the stories of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner, of Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller – to name a few – and on how they created completely new technologies from theoretical concepts, how the energy stored in the nucleus of an atom could be used for the good of man and how it became possible in a single process to tap into this source of affordable, clean and plentiful energy on a large scale as never seen by man. Electricity illuminates our world, drives our machines, allow us to communicate over great distances, thus making our lives easier and more comfortable. It is a source of energy that staves off poverty and enables prosperity.
Electricity: manufactured by splitting atomic nuclei with neutrons, gained through the direct conversion of mass into energy. It is the principle by which (via the reverse process of fusion) the stars twinkle in the night sky, a principle by which our sun enables life on our planet.
As a physicist it fills me with great joy and pride to see how man is able to rouse this force of nature at the most minute structural level, then amplify, control, and use it for our benefit. As a physicist I have the fundamental understanding of the processes – I can imagine them and describe them. As a physicist I have neither fear of an atomic power plant nor of radioactivity. Ultimately I know that it is a natural phenomenon that is always around us, one we can never escape – and one that we never need to escape. And I know the first as a symbol of man’s capability to steer the forces of nature. As a physicist I have no fear of what nature has to offer. Rather I have respect. And this respect beckons us to seize the chances like those offered by neutrons, which can split nuclei and thus convert matter into energy. Anything else would be ignorance and cowardice.
Dark times in history
There were times in history when ignorance and cowardice overshadowed human life. It was a time when our ancestors were forced to lead a life filled with superstition and fear because it was forbidden to use creativity and fantasy. Religious dogma, like the earth being the centre of the universe, or creationism, forbade people to question. The forbiddance of opening a human body and examining it prevented questions from being answered. Today these medieval rules appear backwards and close-minded. We simply cannot imagine this way of thinking could have any acceptance.
But over the recent days I have grown concerned that we are headed again for such dark times. Hysterical and sensationalist media reporting, paired with a remarkably stark display of ignorance of technical and scientific interrelations, and the attempt by a vast majority of journalists to fan the public’s angst and opposition to nuclear energy – pure witch-burning disguised as modernity.
Freedom of research
So it fills me with sadness and anger on how the work of the above mentioned giants of physics is now being dragged through the mud, how the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century are being redefined and criminalized. The current debate in Germany is also a debate on freedom of research. The stigmatization and ostracism of nuclear energy, the demand for an immediate stop of its use, is also the demand for the end of its research and development. No job possibilities also means no students, which means no faculty, which then means the end of the growth of our knowledge. Stopping nuclear energy is nothing less than rejecting the legacy of Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and all others. It is tantamount to scrapping it, labelling it as dangerous – all in a fit of ignorance. And just as creationists attempt to ban the theory of evolution from the school books, it almost seems as if every factual and neutral explanation in Germany is now in the process of being deleted.
The media suggests a nuclear catastrophe, a mega-meltdown, and that the apocalypse has already begun. It is almost as if the 10,000 deaths in Japan were actually victims of nuclear energy, and not the earthquake or the tsunami. Here again one has to remind us that Fukushima was first hit by an unimaginable 9.0 earthquake and then by a massive 10-meter wave of water just an hour later. As a result, the facility no longer found itself in a highly technological area, but surrounded by a desert of rubble. All around the power plant the infrastructure, residential areas, traffic routes, energy and communication networks are simply no longer there. They were wiped out. Yet, after an entire week, the apocalypse still has not come to pass. Only relatively small amounts of radioactive materials have leaked out and have had only a local impact. If one considers the pure facts exclusively, i.e. only the things we really know, then it exposes the unfounded interpretations of scientific illiterates in the media. One can only arrive to one conclusion: This sorrowful state will remain so.
In truth, this does not show that the ideologically motivated, fear-laden admonitions and warnings were correct. Fukushima illustrates that we are indeed able to control atomic energy. Fukushima shows that we can master it even when natural disasters beyond planning befall us. Still, at Fukushima the conflict between human creativity/competence continues to clamour against the bond energy in atomic nuclei. It’s a struggle that that shows what human intelligence, knowledge gained, passion, boldness, respect, and capability to learn allow us to do. Personally this does not fill me with apprehension, but with hope. Man can meet this challenge not only because he has to, but most of all because he wants to.
Even though I have not practiced physics for some time now, I will never be anything other than a scientist and researcher, and there would be no other place I would rather be than on site at Fukushima. There is no other place at the moment where so much can be learned about atomic energy, which keeps our world together deep inside, and the technical possibilities to benefit from it. Do we have the courage to learn? Do we accept – with respect and confidence – the opportunities we are confronted with? Fukushima will show us possibilities on how to use the direct conversion of matter into energy in a better and safer way, something that Einstein and others could have only dreamed of.
I am a physicist. My wish is to live in a world that is willing to learn and to improve whatever is good. I would only like to live in a world where great strides in physics are viewed with fascination, pride, and hope because they show us the way to a better future. I would only like to live in a world that has the courage for a better world. Any other world for me is unacceptable. Never. That’s why I am going to fight for this world, without ever relenting.
————————————————–
Translated from the German, with the permission of Peter Heller, by Bernd Felsche and Pierre Gosselin. Original text appeared here: http://www.science-skeptical.de/blog/fukushima/004149/
>>kim says: March 20, 2011 at 10:21 am
>>The Endarkenment Beckons.
Especially in the Middle East.
.
Leif Svalgaard says: As I said many times: a theory is a shorthand for a [n overwhelming] body of facts.
If a theory is a shorthand for a body of facts, it is not “nonsense” to say that a theory can be proved. I’m speaking of proof in the empirical sense; it belongs in the same family with “proved guilty,” “proved to be a good method,” etc. If no theory can be proved, the reason must be that the proof would not be empirical, but rather, analytic (as in mathematics or formal logic). That’s no reason at all, because a scientific theory is not an analytic claim, but rather, a claim of real-world fact.
What one considers a ‘fact’ depends on many things and may change over time. E.g. it is a fact [to most people] that the Sun [and the stars and all the rest] rises in the East, traverses the sky, and sets in the West. A shorthand for that could be that all the heavens are rotating about the Earth. Another shorthand is that the Earth is rotating. It is a fact that a Foucault Pendulum [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault_pendulum ] turns during the day. That fact does not follow from the first shorthand, but does from the second. So we consider the latter to be better, as more phenomena are embraced by the same shorthand than before. This has nothing to do with proof, analytical, or other mumbo-jumbo.
Something that most people consider to be a fact is not necessarily a fact. Facts are “out there” in the world, not “in here” in our heads. Most people can be dead wrong. However, it is a fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west (it does not, e.g., rise in the south and set in the north). To call it a non-fact, you have either to misconstrue the statement or to show that the speaker intends it to represent a non-fact (e.g., that the sun goes around the earth).
There’s no mumbo-jumbo here. I’m saying that statements to the effect that a scientific theory can not be proved are wrong. They seem to mean that the theory can not be “absolutely” proved, but this makes the concept of proof either useless or something that only belongs to pure mathematics and pure logic. It is not useless, and it is not something that only belongs etc.
Smoking Frog says:
March 23, 2011 at 5:01 am
If a theory is a shorthand for a body of facts, it is not “nonsense” to say that a theory can be proved.
The problem is that ‘proof’ may be misconstrued be mean the absolute, mathematical type of proof. Most scientists do not think in terms of ‘proof’. The situation is probably best seen when we turn to coin around: ‘an unproven theory’ becomes nonsense if the theory is a shorthand for a body of fact.
On the contrary, he asked you to trust the science, insofar as many of the claimed casualties which science indicates are impossible given the inherent nature of the radiation and radiation exposures that occurred. Take for example the claims of leukemia.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 22, 2011 at 11:06 pm
phlogiston says:
March 22, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Your sole evidence is that “The Chernobyl Ministry of Ukraine” said so, and trust me – that is not scientific evidence of any kind.
You are doing the same, asking people to trust you, literally to trust you, because you say so.
I was pointing out that the claim that the apparent increased incidence in the listed diseases was caused by Chernobyl radiation was very unlikely in the light of the distribution of radiation doses from the accident and the extensive literature on radiation effects in humans and animals. There are world class scientists in the Ukrainian radiation research community, but also there are those willing to play along with popular myths and pseudo-science to exaggerate the catastrophic effects of Chernobyl.
A good book which I read on the Chernobyl accident was “The legacy of Chernobyl” by Zhores Medvedev. An excellent post-mortem of disastrous politically driven human error.
Leif Svalgaard says:
March 21, 2011 at 7:50 pm
Only one crater was produced http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/517291main_Schultz_1_11103_still6-43_800-600-580×435.jpg contrary to EU predictions. And so on. But all of these things could have any number of reasonable explanations.
I beg your pardon? Care to show me the crater in the picture you presented? How can this picture with an x-marks-the-spot be “contrary to Electric Universe predictions”? Why don’t you rely on a NASA image of the manmade crater that was supposed to be formed by the Tempel 1 impact, from the Deep Impact mission? Couldn’t you find one?
First, here’s the gross income from a typical 3rd generation nuke power plant: 1300 MW x 1000 KW/MW x 24 H/day x 365 days/year x .035 $/KWH = $398 million per year. If the utility is able to build the plant on revenue rather than loans, that will pay off the capital cost of a $1.5 billion Chinese AP1000 plant in 4 years, or a US $7 billion AP1000 plant in 18 years. The same Westinghouse AP1000 that costs more in the US primarily because of legal costs (NIMBYs, Greenpeace, etc) and more safety reviews and hardware. These plants will run for at least 40 and likely 60 years before decomissioning. Then, unlike a coal or natural gas plant, the fuel is cheap, so it does make economic sense at .035 $/KWH
Second, (Amino Acids: “But I have to read it to see for myself what will these papers say. About 4 years ago I wanted to know what global warming was for myself. It took me a little time. But now I have a clear picture of it. I’m going to take some time to learn for myself about Chernobyl.”) if you are interested in actual education and not just spreading the “All Radiation is Bad” slogan, here is an excellent summary of the health benefits of high background radiation. http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/nuclear.html?LNT%20Myth It has 53 references, many of which are verifiable.
Zeke the Sneak says:
March 23, 2011 at 12:47 pm
I beg your pardon? Care to show me the crater in the picture you presented? How can this picture with an x-marks-the-spot be “contrary to Electric Universe predictions”?
EU predicted several craters. Only one tiny one was found and it seems to fill in with the ever-present dust:
http://www.nightskyobserver.com/space-missions/nasa-releases-images-of-the-crater-left-by-deep-impactor-on-comet-tempel-1-in-2005/
But all of this is irrelevant as several explanations can be given for everything that happened, EU or not EU. Now, the one assertion that sets EU apart [and is therefore a crucial do-or-die item] is what powers the Sun: external currents or internal fusion. Here EU falls flat on it face. But that you [understandingly] do not want to address.
I am only addressing a statement you made on this thread asserting that the Electric Universe has no successful predictions, and that it was as untestable as “astrology.” The double flash, and the events following NASA’s Deep Impact mission to the comet Tempel 1, were some of the outstanding predictions made, based on a first rate scientific theory.
The image you provided is totally out of focus, and furthermore it is from an entirely different mission, Stardust. Deep Impact shut down into safety mode because of the superabundance of extremely fine dust and the energy of the impact; this system failure was also predicted, incidentally. As it stands, Deep Impact has never provided the dimensions of the crater it was sent to create. And all we get is this blurry Stardust picture many years later. So by your own standards for prediction, NASA was the biggest offender in failed predictions.
To determine if there is more than one crater, we need clear pictures which are not cropped. In this image, you can see that there was an initial flash, and also two incredibly energetic bright plumes on the surface of this comet. Each are potential events which would cause cratering.
Zeke the Sneak says:
March 23, 2011 at 3:55 pm
I am only addressing a statement you made on this thread asserting that the Electric Universe has no successful predictions
You are ignoring that a prediction is only successful if it is unique and cannot be explained in any other way. Predicting that there would be a crater [or more, even though there was only one] is so weak that it does not count as a prediction at all. One could predict that the projectile that slammed into Tempel would not continue past the comet, but be stopped by the comet. You forgot to include that as a successful prediction. Better deal with the real issue: what powers the Sun? which you have studiously avoided [for good reason].
What garbage.
The disaster at Fukushima was “beyond planning”. Come on.
In engineering, if you dont know for sure, you put a ton of fat in the number. But not Japan’s nuclear authorites. Or, you can bet, their pals in our NRC. Instead, some arrogant fools with big degrees thought they knew all about earthquakes and tsunamis. So they pick a value, 18 feet, for the maximum credible” Tsunami. The real Tusnami was twice the size. A question: How incompetent can you get?
The answer: More incompetent. Lots. Their design: During a power failure, vented hydrogen is discharged inside the building. Hydrogen. Inside a building.
So we’ve got 3 blown up reactor buildings, three melted cores, and a plant hanging by a thread, without any power for 10 days.
Zeke the Sneak says:
March 21, 2011 at 1:18 pm
2. Jets on the comet would be moved
The jets actually did not move at all, so this is a failed prediction.
http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0523a/
“the adaptive optics NACO instrument on the Very Large Telescope, showed the same jets that were visible prior to impact, demonstrating that the comet activity survived widely unaffected by the spacecraft crash.”
Political naifs or co-conspirators is a judgement call I’m not willing to make, yet. An obvious 3rd possibility lurks. Whichever, believing figures from the old Soviet republic which wouldn’t even admit that anything had happened until the cloud of radiation was measured in Sweden, and then delayed doing anything for days, including informing even those in the Soviet Union that such a huge nuclear disaster had taken place, and, not taking into account the political savvy of the Soviet Union in its use of propaganda which is well-known now in the West, even if the West was kept ignorant of it during those years, together with not taking on board this method now includes all governments intent on keeping the nuclear use of such plants going, for war, and the Nuclear Industry vested interests generally, when there is evidence of this given, is puzzling.
Until one realises that the whitewashes by such reports as the UN’s are all statistical models and projections and skewed sampling, such as I linked to IAEA and to the new whitewash being designed for 3MI, and from which we have as the classic prototype the Soviet Speak Science as given by Zbigniew Jaworowski:
“The Chernobyl accident was probably the worst possible catastrophe of a nuclear power station. It was the only such catastrophe since the advent of nuclear power 55 years ago. It resulted in a total meltdown of the reactor core, a vast emission of radionuclides, and early deaths of only 32 persons. Its enormous political, economic, social and psychological impact was mainly due to deeply rooted fear of radiation induced by the linear non-threshold hypothesis (LNT assumption. It was a historic event that provided invaluable lessons for nuclear industry and risk philosophy. One of them is demonstration that counted per electricity units produced, early fatatlities amounted to 0.86 deat/GWe-year), and they were 47 times lower than from hydroelectric stations (~40 deaths/GWe-year).” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2889503/
are easily believed as authoritative by those who don’t understand how to lie with statistics; first ignore all the actual data collectible, from the people and the towns and the villages affected and then play with the numbers as does AGWScience until it gets the figure it wants.
So, that’s alright then. We now have the UN’s computer modelling showing a raised death toll number to 50, improved models obviously, so the only real effect we have to consider is not that millions of people were affected genetically from the vast spread of nuclear contamination and really did die in great numbers and suffered a slew of illnesses from affected vital organs and did give birth to defective children, if they were were capable of reproducing at all, but that they all suffered so terribly of radiophobia from “probably the worst possibly nuclear catastrophe”.
Poor dears.
Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
“To take advantage of people’s lack of information and lull them into believing that it is safe there is the biggest crime there can be”, said Valentian Smolnikova, of the the Children of Chernobyl group.
Smolnikova said the radiation effects have been devastating. She said her group’s study of one distrinct in the contamination zone showed cases of congenital anomalies have increased fourfold, the number of cancers have doubled and the number of heart attacks is seven times higher than before the accident.
“Ruslana Wrzesnewskyj doesn’t care about warring statistics; [pro-Nuclear v Greenpeace], she knows what she has seen. When she adopted her daughter from Ukdraine in 1993, the ophanages were crowed with children who had been born with deformities or left by parents who had suddenly died young.
The Toronto realtor was so shaken by what she saw that she founded Help us Help the Children, a project of the Children of Chornobly Canadian Fund that has assisted thousands of orphan victims with summer camps, medicines and scholarships.
“All you have to do is travel through Udraine,” she says. “It’s called the silent killer. It’s a horrible thing to come into a town and see that half of the people in the 40s are dead.””
..
“Travelling around Belarus, it is striking how many people know more than one, sometimes several, friends and relatives who have health problems: school friends with cancer, a grandson or sister with thyroid problems.
Luba Tagai, a nurse sponsored by the Irish charity Chernobyl Children’s Project International at the Vesnovo Children’s Asylum, a few hours’ drive south of Minsk, was eight and living 50 kilometers from Chrnobyl in 1986. She is one of 4,000 children of the town recorded as having thyroid cancer.
Her sister had had the cancer and she regularly gets news of friends falling ill. “There are lots of young people with different cancers, lung, cancer, thyroid glands removed, leukemia. When I was leaving the region there was a new cemetery; now it’s full.”
http://action-ukraine-report.blogspot.com/2006/04/aur688-chornobyl-rescue-ark-stalled.html#a3
Just a few stories of the millions in the global spread of this radiation, how many of your school friends had cancer?
The prediction that there would be an arc discharge flash before the impact, and upon the impact, was a successful Electric Universe predicion. It was also predicted that the energy from the collision of the projectile with the comet would be more energetic than could be explained by a mere mechanical impact, possibly causing a systems failure. That indeed was the case as the sensors were saturated.
NASA did not know that would happen; and where is the clear before and after picture of a manmade crater on the Tempel 1 comet taken by Deep Impact?
NASA was not able to continue because of the sudden huge cloud of extremely fine dust, either. There is one simple, unifying explanation for all of these phenomena: Electrical arcs caused the flashes, and electrical activity caused the fine dust: “It is characteristic of cathode sputtering, a process used industrially to create super-fine deposits or coatings from cathode materials.” And the energy of the blasts which swamped the sensors and generated x-rays are also electrical signatures.
Zeke the Sneak says:
March 21, 2011 at 1:18 pm
“The discharge would initiate a new jets on the nucleus (which will be collimated – filamentary – not sprayed out)
Another failed prediction:
http://www.astro.cornell.edu/~richardson/DIplumeballistics.html
E.g. Figure 18 ff.
Zeke the Sneak says:
March 23, 2011 at 5:45 pm
The prediction that there would be an arc discharge flash before the impact, and upon the impact, was a successful Electric Universe predicion.
There was no ‘arc discharge’, just the ordinary kinetic energy to heat conversion flash.
That indeed was the case as the sensors were saturated.
Sensors did not fail. Saturation happens often because it is hard [and expensive] to cover a wide range of energy.
It was also predicted that the energy from the collision of the projectile with the comet would be more energetic than could be explained by a mere mechanical impact,
No, analysis of the event is completely consistent with mechanical impact:
“In July of 2005, the Deep Impact mission collided a 366 kg impactor with the nucleus of Comet 9P/Tempel 1, at a closing speed of 10.2 km sec^-1. In this work, we develop a first-order, three-dimensional, forward model of the ejecta plume behavior resulting from this cratering event, and then adjust the model parameters to match the flyby-spacecraft observations of the actual ejecta plume, image by image. This modeling exercise indicates Deep Impact to have been a reasonably “well-behaved” oblique impact, in which the impactor-spacecraft apparently struck a small, westward-facing slope of roughly 1/3-1/2 the size of the final crater produced (determined from initial ejecta plume geometry), and possessing an effective strength of not more than Y = 1-10 kPa. The resulting ejecta plume followed well-established scaling relationships for cratering in a medium-to-high porosity target, consistent with a transient crater of not more than 85-140 m diameter, formed in not more than 250-550 sec, for the case of Y = 0 Pa (gravity-dominated cratering); and not less than 22-26 m diameter, formed in not less than 1-3 sec, for the case of Y = 10 kPa (strength-dominated cratering). At Y = 0 Pa, an upper limit to the total ejected mass of 1.8 x 10^7 kg (1.5-2.2 x 10^7 kg) is consistent with measurements made via long-range remote sensing, after taking into account that 80% of this mass would have stayed close to the surface and then landed within 45 minutes of the impact. However, at Y = 10 kPa, a lower limit to the total ejected mass of 2.3 x 10^5 kg (1.5-2.9 x 10^5 kg) is also consistent with these measurements. The expansion rate of the ejecta plume imaged during the look-back phase of observations leads to an estimate of the comet’s mean surface gravity of g = 0.34 mm sec^-2 (0.17-0.90 mm sec^-2), which corresponds to a comet mass of m_t = 4.5 x 10^13 kg (2.3-12.0 x 10^13 kg) and a bulk density of rho_t = 400 kg m^-3 (200-1000 kg m^-3), where the large high-end error is due to uncertainties in the magnitude of coma gas pressure effects on the ejecta particles in flight.”
Again, none of what you desperately put forward are unique to EU and can have no other, obvious and conventional explanation, so do not constitute confirmation of EU. The one major assertion that is a do-or-die thing for the EU is its claim that the Sun is powered by external currents rather than by the established internal fusion. Your silence on this can only be taken as acknowledgement of this colossal failing of EU.
My objectives were to point out the success of Electric Universe predictions, including those made by Wal Thornhill four years before NASA’s Deep Impact mission. I have done so.
It is not my objective to discuss a computer model rendition of the event after the fact. But I thank you for the invitation.
REPLY: It is MY objective to start deleting these off topic intrusions when it starts invading threads where it has subzero relevance. Take is elsewhere. – Anthony
[snip]
@ur momisugly Cherry Pick on March 22, 2011 at 10:51 pm
“The cost figures reported in Europe are much lower. In Olkiluoto’s new site in Finland the construction costs are 3.3 billion euros and estimated cost per MWh is estimated to be 25 euros.”
Actually, the 3.3 Bil Euro is the initial cost estimate. The project has had numerous delays and cost increases. The document at the link provides a good running history. Currently, the power plant is expected to (perhaps) start up in 2013 (4 years late) and cost 5.5 Billion Euro. With almost 3 years to go before startup, and with the history of this plant, it will very likely cost far more than 5.5 billion Euro. I suspect it will be finished for around 6.5 to 7 billion Euro, and not produce power until 2015. If one does the math, and the 1600 MWe output for that plant, the annual interest payment alone for the plant’s construction cost will require 6.1 cents per kWh. (interest at 10 percent per year, based on 5.5 billion Euro at an exchange rate of 1.4 US$ per Euro). As I wrote above, there is no way a nuclear power plant can be built and operated profitably by selling its power at 3.4 cents per kWh. Not even in Finland, where US regulators cannot reach, nor US labor unions, nor US environmental laws, nor US attorneys.
http://www.polsoz.fu-berlin.de/polwiss/forschung/systeme/ffu/veranstaltungen_downloads/10_salzburg/vehmas.pdf
I also saw recently that Turkey had discussions with Russia to provide them a new modern design nuclear power plant in Turkey, and the sales price for power was 15 cents per kWh. That one is still in the discussion stage, I believe, and the cost to construct and thus the sales price of power will increase accordingly. It always does.
Dan in California says:
March 23, 2011 at 2:10 pm
if you are interested in actual education and not just spreading the “All Radiation is Bad” slogan
You come up with the Pavlovian response. In no place did I say that. Please pay more attention before saying such things.
Myrrh
Are you involved in Greenpeace or any other environmentalist group?
@chris haynes on March 23, 2011 at 5:22 pm
Exactly. Spot on.
What we have here in California is a disaster of similar magnitude as at Fukushima, just waiting to happen. The SONGS plant (San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) is right on the coast (literally on the shore) between San Diego and Los Angeles. It was designed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake and a modest tsunami of about 20 feet. They built a seawall to keep out the tsunami.
The link below documents the seismic hazards at SONGS and the nuclear plant located at Diablo Canyon, north of Los Angeles and also on the coast and on a fault. This was prepared in 2008.
An excerpt from page 7:
“SCE [Southern California Edison] has not reassessed the tsunami hazard at SONGS since the plant was designed. Since then, scientists have learned that submarine landslides can generate large local tsunamis. Tsunami run-up maps that are being prepared by the University of Southern California will incorporate expected hazards from such near-to-shore landslides. Currently, it is not possible to determine whether these new maps will result in significantly revised estimates of the tsunami hazard at SONGS. An increase in the estimated maximum tsunami run-up of a few feet could raise significant concerns about the adequacy of the site’s seawall.” [bold added]
And, this on page 8 describes the earthquake severity designed for at each plant:
“The safety-related systems, structures, and components (SSCs) of Diablo Canyon and SONGS are designed to remain safe during earthquakes of magnitudes as large as 7.5 on the Hosgri Fault [near Diablo Canyon] and 7.0 on the South Coast Offshore Fault Zone [near SONGS], respectively. These earthquakes (“safe shutdown earthquakes”) are expected to be the largest magnitude earthquakes that could impact the plants given what is currently known about the geology of local faults. Nevertheless, Diablo Canyon and SONGS would incur some damage in the event earthquakes occurred at or near the plant sites.”
http://energy.ca.gov/2008publications/CEC-100-2008-005/CEC-100-2008-005-F.PDF
Leif Svalgaard says: The problem is that ‘proof’ may be misconstrued be mean the absolute, mathematical type of proof.
It might be, but I think this would be odd. Why would anyone think that absolute, mathematical proof could be had for a claim about the real world, except maybe some few claims in physics, where the difference between the two kinds of proof is less clear.
I think people who say that Darwinism or AGW has not been proven are talking about strong proof, but not the absolute, mathematical kind. I think most people who reply that scientific theories are never proved are using it to dodge the fact that they have no proof to offer. That’s what you get in a debate between an ignorant believer and an ignorant skeptic. (I’m not exonerating the ignorant skeptic – usually he has little or no idea of what would constitute proof. He probably thinks he’d recognize proof if he saw it.)
Most scientists do not think in terms of ‘proof’.
Yes, but I can’t say I understand why. Maybe it’s partly because scientists, more than other people, would think it could be misconstrued to mean absolute, mathematical proof. Maybe it’s partly because they are thinking in terms of recently developed theories, as opposed to things like heliocentrism. Maybe it’s partly because some theories are not susceptible of strong proof.
The situation is probably best seen when we turn to coin around: ‘an unproven theory’ becomes nonsense if the theory is a shorthand for a body of fact.
I’m not sure what to say about that one. A theory is not shorthand in the sense of a mere symbol for the body of facts. I think you mean an alleged general fact from which all the facts in the body would follow logically, and I suppose your problem with “unproven” is that some other general fact could be alleged.
Leif – I meant to write “…, and I suppose your problem with ‘proof’ is that some other general fact could be alleged, but in that case, why do you call ‘unproven’ ‘nonsense’?”
Here’s a decent read about the state of the latest reactor configurations and their safety advantages. They discuss pebble-bed, thorium and other interesting designs:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_14/b4222070137297.htm