![Ansel%20Adams,%201984[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/ansel20adams2019841.jpg?quality=83)
Go back and re-watch Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth from 2006 and you’ll find that he never once voices the word “nuclear” although there is a long visual scene of a nuclear warhead exploding and the subsequent mushroom cloud filling the screen. Early AGW enthusiasts never seemed to acknowledge that if fossil fuels were the problem, nuclear power would be the solution that would work.
But now it seems environmentalists are being told that nuclear power is not so bad after all. The current movie, Pandora’s Promise (http://pandoraspromise.com/), has as its major theme that nuclear power and radiation are not so scary, really. This is of course true, reiterating arguments that pro-nuclear advocates have been making for 70 years.
The selling point is that nuclear power will not lead to global climate change. Another webpage from the Breakthrough Institute is entitled Liberals and Progressives for Nuclear (http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/liberals-and-progressives-for-nuclear/). Quoting such luminaries as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, it argues for the coming “Atomic Age,” again, because of the “urgency of climate change.” Even Al Gore (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/02/notes-from-a-mole-in-al-gores-climate-leadership-training/) seems to be slyly acknowledging nuclear’s possible role.
As a long-suffering nuclear engineer, I have to ask (in a conservative webzine, American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/nuclear_powers_new_friends.html), is it in nuclear power’s best interest to make public alliance with the climate change crowd? I say no, citing the growing awareness of the “tells” on display, i. e. signs of fraud, we see documented here on WUWT and elsewhere. “Lie down with the dogs and get up with fleas” is my warning. Of course, any rational environmentalist SHOULD embrace nuclear just on its relative conventional pollutant profile and would be welcome to say kind words about nuclear – just don‘t ask that the support be reciprocated.
Yet, others in the nuclear power community disagree (http://yesvy.blogspot.com/2013/08/progressives-for-nuclear-progress.html#.Uf7Ly23pySr) (and here (http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/)) and embrace our new Best Friends Forever (BFFs). Many are sincere believers in climate change themselves, as I had been until I read the 2001 IPCC technical reports. Others just seemed hopeful that we might no longer be the pariahs of polite (PC) company.
Yet, my simple question is, should nuclear reactor manufacturers like Toshiba, General Electric, Areva, Bill Gates, Hitachi, Rosatom, etc publicly advertise that their products can help prevent climate change? Besides the expectation of further public trust deterioration for climate change, one has to look at the companies that would buy a nuclear power reactor. Almost without exception, they also have substantial fossil fuel powered generation assets.
Plus, environmentalists, like revolutionaries, have a habit of changing their minds as to who was good and who was bad. Probably the most infamous event was when Ansel Adams resigned from the board of directors of the Sierra Club over his support of nuclear power (http://www.anseladams.com/ansel-adams-the-role-of-the-artist-in-the-environmental-movement/).
The Sierra Club had been generally pro-nuclear although they could oppose specific plants on specific grounds, like the Bodega Bay nuke to be build about 400 yards from the surface trace of the San Andreas fault in the bay‘s headlands. To this day, the foundation diggings are called “the hole in the Head.” But a tide of anti-nuclear feeling swept over the organization and Adams gave up his seat on the board in 1971 due to the ill will and back biting.
My take-away lesson is political winds change, and so do the policies of environmental groups. I’d rather nuclear power not get involved.
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Dear Policy Critic,
Germany may have decided in 2011 or so to shut all its nuclear power plants down by 2022. That was, no doubt, given that Fantasy Science controlled the political agenda to a significant degree, a political move by Chancellor Merkel. She almost certainly understands how safe and reliable nuclear power is.
Things change. As I said above, for now, coal is cheaper. Nuclear power will be back on line as soon as the political climate is cleared of the CAGW pollution (and that is rapidly taking place — hurrah!). I’m going to guess that by 2014, nuclear power will be back on the table for Germany. Mothballed reactors can be re-started. And, I firmly believe, they will be. Germans may be stubborn, but, once they see the truth, they do not hesitate to act on it. I think the average German is already getting the picture.
Let’s meet here in January, 2014, and see if I was right! (I’ll buy you a sack of sugar to sweeten you up if I lose, and if I win, you can buy me some non-rose-colored glasses to wear — deal?) #[:)]
Your ally in the battle for Truth in Science,
Janice
Not to mention China, India and who are seriously developing Thorium fuel reactors which give Fission Technology Reactors a whole new clean future AND Fusion is inching closer to reality; France went Nuclear in the seventies and apparently is in the top 3 ‘cleanest’ countries in Europe CO2 emmissions wise with over 60 generating stations, sadly the present (and last ) administrations are kowtowing to Brussels and the Euro ecolunatics despite this and building offshore wind farms on the Atlantic coast AND land farms are springing up; I am sure this folly will be realized,but as usual far too late but at least over here the prices of electricity are low compared to Germany and the U.K. I also believe that the Nuclear industry should not get involved with any of it’s ancient detractors, these political advocates are more treacherous than quick sand!
“weather patterns from the past can no longer be used to predict the future”!!
7 Aug: ABC Australia: with AFP: Climate report warns extreme weather events are now the norm
The American Meteorological Society has released its annual snapshot of the world’s climate, which concludes disastrous weather events like Hurricane Sandy in the US and droughts and floods in Australia, Africa and South America will become more frequent…
Last year was a record-breaking year for the world’s climate, with new extremes for sea levels, temperatures, snow coverage and ice melts.
Arctic ice levels reached record lows in 2012, and the polar region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, however on a positive note at the other end of the world, Antarctica’s climate remained relatively stable and sea ice cover reached a record maximum…
Some 384 scientists from 54 countries contributed to the report, covering all aspects of the planet, from the depths of the oceans to the stratosphere…
‘Planet as whole becoming warmer place’
“The findings are striking,” Kathryn Sullivan, acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told AFP.
“Our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place.”
Michael Mann, a leading US climatologist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the research, added: “It’s hard to read the report and not be led to the conclusion that the task of reducing carbon emissions is now more urgent than ever.”…
Scientists say the data should be of concern to people living in coastal areas and that weather patterns from the past can no longer be used to predict the future.
The peer-reviewed report did not go into the causes for the trends but experts said it should serve as a guide for policymakers as they prepare for the effects of rising seas and warming weather on communities and infrastructure…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-07/climate-report-warns-extreme-weather-events-are-now-norm/4869646
hilarious:
5 Aug: ABC America: 6 Surprising Facts About Global Warming
http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/surprising-facts-global-warming/story?id=19873572#6
1/2 of your annual radiation exposure comes from medical x-rays. the other half from naturally occurring radon gas. None of which gets much coverage in the press. The stuff you hear about in the press is so small in percentage terms as to not exist. One might as well worry about the difference between 1 and two flies on the back of a horse.
Human beings and life in general have evolved to survive and repair radiation damage within limits. The idea that all radiation at any dose is harmful is nonsense. If that were truly the case, then medical X-rays should be shut down long before nuclear power plants. Basements and well sealed houses should have been outlawed decades ago.
pat;
7 Aug: ABC Australia: with AFP: Climate report warns extreme weather events are now the norm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well that’s pretty interesting pat. Do you suppose someone forgot to tell the United Nations IPCC AR5 WG1 committee? Because in their draft report they said that extreme weather events are expected to diminish between now and 2100. Droughts and floods predicted to be the same. But hey, that’s only the official literature of the “consensus” scientists. Heh. Do try and catch up with the current literature from both sides. I bother to read it, you should do the same for your own sake, please don’t just take my word for it.
jimmi_the_dalek says:
Joseph Somsel:“Nuclear power has an impeccable safety record”
Fairly safe perhaps, safer than some other fuels possibly. But “impeccable”, no way. Exaggeration does not help.
===
That is not just exaggeration, it is to knowingly to make an untrue statement, aka a lie.
Lying is a great way to start an article criticising others. Guaranteed to boost the credibility of your arguments.
Check out the international campaign to ban uranium mining and nuclear power that morphed out of the Ban the Bomb movement in the 1950s and then used the environmental movement as the Trojan horse.
http://www.the-rathouse.com/2011/Grover-Power.html
That put in place the infrastructure to support climate alarmism in the 1990s.
Yeah, I was in university when some idiot physicists decided to run an experiment that exceeded the safety limits of the Chernobyl reactor, and shut down the safety systems to do it. The crass arrogant stupidity… words fail me. But I remember also the rumours that went around campus, one of which was that if the reactor melted down, it would cause all the other reactors in the world to melt down also. No matter how one tried to explain the absolute impossibility of such a thing, people believed it in droves. The less background in physics they had, the more certain they were, though much to my shock and dismay, even engineering and physics students got caught up in the hysteria to some extent. I’ve understood clearly since then the challenges associated with selling nuclear power to the public.
That said, I agree with the author that jumping on the green bandwagon is the wrong thing to do. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is just trading short term gain for long term pain. History happens in slow motion, but the edifice of CAGW is slowly crumbling. When the collapse comes, anyone hanging onto it, nuclear power included, goes with it.
Dear Greg (re: 10:29PM),
You mistakenly (I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt) attribute The Dalek’s criticism (in his 9:18PM post) to the article’s author. I, however, am the one who said that nuclear power’s safety record was “impeccable.”
Janice
*********************
@ur momisugly David, (didn’t see your 9:24PM post until just now)
Since The Dalek apparently never read my post at 9:30 directed to him and since I would like to ask the same question of you, I re-post it here:
Chernobyl and Fukashima would not qualify under my question’s parameters. What safety leaks in the U.S. are you talking about? If you would, please answer my question above. Thanks!
Agenda 21 is evil — Nuclear power is good.
You can add Ansel Adams’ good friend and Sierra Club president David Brower to the list. I had the good fortune to have a nice chat with David’s son and writer Kenneth Brower (Winemaker’s Marsh) when he visited the Sierra Nevada Field Campus. I somewhat sheepishly told him that I had become more accepting of nuclear power as long as the wastes were kept out of the water, and that I preferred nuclear to energy sources derived craping the surface where all wildlife existed, such wood and biofuels. He said his father originally felt the exact same way and it was really the reason he and Ansel were driven from the Sierra Club. Over the years however Brower became increasingly anti-technology on all levels.
Sincere appologies to Joseph Somsel: for false attribution of “impeccable” comment which came from Janice Moore
A different theory of the new-found respect for nuclear power: Nuclear power is unfortunately, while as safe as ever, back on its heels due to the new economics of power in the wake of natural gas fracking and low-price natgas. At $3-4 mmcf it has hurt coal companies, helped reduce US CO2 emissions, and it has put the nuclear power plant ‘renaissance’ on hold. It’s also sucked the wind out the sails of windpower, and put solar into a shadier spot.
Who hates fracking? Not many people, but environmentalists seem to. So they cling to ‘why not try this instead’ rather than accepting that natural gas is here for a while. (And its CO2 emissions.)
So these guys with Breakthrough studied this and actually see natural gas as a ‘problem’ in impeding their hobby horse of ‘clean energy’ (nuclear and CO2-free renewables):
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/Gas_Boom_Challenges_Renewables_Nuclear.pdf
Now, it may simply be that 40 years of safe nuclear power is waking some folks up to reality, and since Breakthrough as an organization seems to be pro-technology, ie pro-clean-energy tech, it makes sense to be pro-nuclear power.
As for this in the breakthrough.org website – “In the words of President Obama, nuclear energy must be extracted from the partisan debates that have impeded US progress on multiple levels” – that must be unintentional humor. Thanks to the basest form of political posturing and pandering (ie palying to an early primary state’s voters), Obama threw away our $20 billion investment in the Yucca Mtn nuclear repository and in the process imperiled the future of nuclear power by leaving it with no permanent repository for nuclear waste. That decision is the most negative thing to happen to the US nuclear industry since 3 mile island.
That is partially correct but omits key pieces of information. First of all, at the time that site was selected, the notion of continental drift was not completely accepted science. They had no idea they were building those things right next to a thrust fault in a subduction zone because at the time the site was selected there was no such thing as a subduction zone. Secondly, the plant was designed for such a short lifetime that it was assumed that there would not be a tsunami high enough to breach the sea wall. There had been one in the past but it was thousands of years ago. Thirdly, had the quake waited three weeks, we wouldn’t be talking about Fukushima at all. The entire event of all three of the lower units (the upper plants, 5 and 6 survived the tsunami without incident. Those were the plants planned AFTER we had a better understanding of the geology) was a cascade failure resulting from the hydrogen explosion of Unit 1. The primary issue with Unit 1 wasn’t the cooling pumps, really, it was vent valves. The vent valves were designed to be operated electrically. There was no manual mechanism for venting. By the time they were able to get the vents open (using batteries from their own cars in the parking lots), it was too late, a considerable amount of hydrogen had already built up in the unit. When they vented it, it eventually exploded. You can’t keep pumping water into the unit without venting steam else the pressure builds to the point where you can no longer pump water in. The idea was to pump in water, let it boil, vent replace the vented steam with more water and continue the cycle. When Unit 1 exploded, it cut cables, pipes and hoses to units 2 and 3. Until that point, 2 and 3 were actually in fairly good shape. Units 2 and 3 were slightly newer than Unit 1 and were a bit easier to manage until that explosion, then after that point they were flying all three of them “blind”.
Fulushima Di-Ni units had steam turbine pumps so they could use their own decay heat to power pumps to circulate cooling water. Those units were on the opposite side of town, suffered the same quake and tsunami as Di-Ichi but did not require generators to run the pumps. Di-Ichi Unit 1 was a GE BWR-3 Mk I while units 2-5 were BWR-4 Mk I units. Unit 6 is a BWR-5 Mk II. Units 5 and 6 are still serviceable and are located on higher ground than units 1-4. Fukushima Di-Ni are all BWR-5 plants. Unit 1 is a Mk II and units 2-4 are Mk IIa
One of the better sources of information that I have found is this article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/24-hours-at-fukushima/0
If environmentalists want to start backing nuclear because they are afraid of climate change, I’d let them do it. Actually, it’s bloody time they started doing it! However, I’d hate it if anyone in the nuclear industry got in the bed with them. The nuclear industry can say that nuclear power is very good at reducing air pollution. And if the amount of co2 in the needs to be reduced, nuclear is very good at that too.
I’d absolutely hate it if the nuclear industry adopts CAGW and starts to scare people about co2. That would definitely make people trust them less.
Hey, Greg, good for you. Just for the record, my 10:42PM comment which is still in mo-dera-tion as I write this (I used the word e-v-il — ooops), was NOT the impetus for Greg’s above apology. He had not read my 10:42 comment at 10:46 (nor at 10:57, either!).
Janice
“davidmhoffer says:
August 6, 2013 at 10:37 pm”
The plant was a poor design and had very specific and rigid operating procedures the operators had to follow. Not only was their test risky, to actually enable the test to take place some of the safety systems had to be disabled. They were already on a losing wicket before they started!
Back in the 1950s when Britain led the world in new nuclear reactors the news was all about cheap and effectively unlimited electrical energy for as long as one could imagine.
That is when the scare stories began.
The concept of so much energy so cheaply was anathema to authoritarians so they insisted on trying to protect the fossil fuel industry against the new competitor in order to keep control of restricted energy supplies. They cared nothing about the deaths and damage to health amongst the workers of the mining industry and the more general adverse effects of smoky environments everywhere.
At that time the authoritarians had control of the mining industry through the unions and gradually they generated more and more fear of nuclear energy sources.
Still, the free democracies prospered even with the necessary energy coming from fossil fuels and over time natural gas and oil gained dominance with the mines becoming less necessary in any event.
So then the authoritarians found an excuse to turn against fossil fuels in general.
Meanwhile Britain had lost its nuclear expertise and fear held back development elsewhere.
Imagine what could have been with successful development of the UK nuclear industry if it had been properly maintained and steadily improved over the past 60 years.
So now we still have vast reserves of fossil fuels with peak oil deferred indefinitely and vast potential for unlimited energy from very safe and productive modern nuclear reactors with modern technology and safety systems.
The authoritarians now say we must use environmentally damaging, resource depleting, ugly, expensive and inefficient forms of ‘renewable’ energy just so that they can keep control.
Intelligence and logic is not a strong point when up against a hidden (but increasingly obvious) ideological and authoritarian agenda.
For them, the motive is to keep the masses poor and subservient. One cannot have the lower orders being allowed to move about too much. Cheap energy from whatever source is the last thing they want to see since it enriches everyone and not just their elitist clique.
“davidmhoffer says:
August 6, 2013 at 10:37 pm”
Ah I see you already mentioned safety systems being disabled. Sorry to repeat what you said.
I did find out recently that the “Russian Woodpecker” is located in the same city and is in the exclusion zone. Some say the nuclear plant was sabotaged because of the radio transmitter. At the time, the brother of a friend of mine in the UK was a Royal Navy Radio Operator (I am told they can tune in to any signal) in the Baltic Sea I think it was. He said that there was a significant increase in “chatter” on the airwaves after the plant exploded.
Also, I would consider folks read an article from the December 2005 issue of Scientific American. We are being exceptionally stupid in our decision to bury nuclear waste. It can be recycled. First pass through a reactor uses only about 5% of the available energy of the fuel. Proper processing can result in LESS nuclear proliferation, extension of uranium resources, and eliminating the need to ship highly radioactive materials around. A reprocessing plant on site would mean only natural uranium is brought into the site. The waste from this process is only 10% of the volume of current nuclear waste and decays to safe levels in only a few hundred years rather than tens of thousands of years with current waste.
Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste
http://www.gemarsh.com/wp-content/uploads/SciAm-Dec05.pdf
Meant “ask folks to consider reading”. Sheesh.
Nowhere in the world is nuclear power subsidised per unit of production. In some countries however it is taxed because production costs are so low.
From http://world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Energy-Subsidies-and-External-Costs/#.Uf_F0Kz_Tfk
As of 16 January 2013, the IAEA report there are 439 nuclear power reactors in operation[1] operating in 31 countries.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080303234143/http://www.uic.com.au/reactors.htm
Roll on Thorium!!
“crosspatch says:
August 6, 2013 at 11:44 pm”
There is a lot of hype about transport safety issues while transporting fissile material and waste. And as usual, Greenpeace wins the day with unfounded alarmist claims! The locomotive in this clip is (I think) a “Peak” class 45, 133 imperial tons with 3 10 ton cars behind it.
davidmhoffer says:
August 6, 2013 at 10:37 pm (Edit)
—————————————————
I totally agree that we should not hitch the nuclear wagon to the climate change train. Remember the absurdly stupid folk who argued that the Large Hadron Collider should be stopped because it would create a black hole that would destroy Earth. The centre of gravity of mankind is firmly in the stupid zone.
Too many people think that nuclear power electricity generation is the same as nuclear bombs. They think this because a compliant media has told them to think this. The same media that carries the warmist agenda, the anti fracking message and the supposedly positive aspects of socialism/ Marxism.
Douglas Adams would call them the B-Ark people, and they are the majority.
“The Candu reactor is proving to be the future of thorium power, as research has found that it can use thorium as a fuel with only minor modifications”. Do a search on Candu reactor and thorium.