![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.
boballab says: @ur momisugly August 7, 2013 at 12:42 am
…..So bottom line: You are more likely in the US to die from radiation poisoning from your doctor that from a nuclear power plant
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, mom suffered radiation poisoning from her doctor at Strong Memorial Hospital/Rochester University. (Think illegal human experiments http://junkscience.com/2011/08/19/epas-lisa-jackson-misinforms-politico/ )
Probably what will happen is that, instead of their admitting that they were wrong about nuclear power, they will “discover Generation 3 and Gen 4 designs that “are so much safer” (they are, but the older plants were plenty safe enough). They may also jump on board the SMR (Small Modular reactor) bandwagon as “the cat’s meow.”
As a plus for those not worried about CO2, nuclear plants don’t emit anything but steam. No fossil fuel plant can make that claim. There are objectionable emissions coming from fossil fuel plants
that AGW skeptics would rather not see..
I’m as pro nuke as anyone can be but I see no evidence for this comment in the Ansel Adams article sited
quote—- “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 article states
quote—“But in 1968 increasing differences within the club on the proper management of club policy and finances, as well as the Diablo Canyon question, led Adams to join with other directors and members in a move to elect a slate of directors opposed to Brower. In the 1969 board election Adams headed the successful anti-Brower slate. Defeated as a board candidate, Brower announced his resignation as executive director.
The Brower fight and the role he felt compelled to play in it were personally painful for Adams . This was probably the most traumatic fight he has ever been involved in. Adams continued as a Sierra Club director until 1971, when he voluntarily retired after 37 years of continuous service on the board.”
Here is a quote I heard years ago from the man who started the People’s Lobby, the first of California’s mass anti-nuclear groups, used to say proudly,
“The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax.”
Actually, nuclear websites like world-nuclear-news.org have for some time been pointing out the non-carbon nature of nuclear power. They recently had a article showing how the loss of nuclear production was making it impossible for Japan to meet their target levels of CO2. But the nuclear industry should simply tell the truth : “our plants produce no emissions. If that’s what you want, then we’ve go the plants you need.” No need to go beyond that. Companies always produce what their customers want, even if their customers are dopes. The customer is always right, even when they’re not.
crosspatch says:
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.
The biggest irony is that in such a setup nuclear would be the closest thing possible to actually “renewable” energy.
“Fairly safe perhaps, safer than some other fuels possibly. But “impeccable”, no way. Exaggeration does not help.”
Vague criticism doesn’t work very well either. Data? But don’t include Comminist-built
reactors.
Nuclear’s biggest problem is natural gas. Besides being low in carbon, it is a very clean burning and inexpensive technology and there are huge amounts of it! It also doesn’t have the meltdown risk, although it does carry the risks of any flammable substance. The big question is: Are AGW and ocean acidification that big of a problem?
I smell a bait and switch. Remember, the Climate Change activists were pushing Natural Gas just a few years ago–until we actually began developing it.
I don’t have data covering every safety issue over the past 60 years, but I am aware of the
safety issues with respect to the two largest nuclear accidents in the non-Communist world :
Three Mile Island and Fukushma . No deaths , no serious injuries, no exposure of the public to
dangerous levels of radiation. And current generation nuclear plants would never have
experienced those accidents in the first place. Solar panel safety ? Anyone want to ballpark
deaths/injuries resulting from 160 million rooftop installations?
My guess is that should another hurricane like Andrew hit South Florida we would see a lot of damage from flying turbine blades and panels. About 100% of wind and solar generation would be completely destroyed and have to be replaced. Andrew damaged one smokestack of one unit at one conventional power plant.
“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” as everyone already knows. Take your allies where you can find them. If you shun potential allies because you disagree with some of their motives, then you act alone.
The article I posted was from nearly 8 years ago when they weren’t nearly so bad as they are now.
What about Thorium reactors? Why do we not hear about this form of nuclear power. It seems to avoid most of the downside of uranium and be much cheper to construct.
Plus, environmentalists, like revolutionaries, have a habit of changing their minds as to who was good and who was bad.
Isn’t that true of everyone? The author of the lead piece today admits to having changed his mind about the danger of increased CO2 — what if he changes his mind again?
The political reality is that without Leftists’ support and cooperation for nuclear power expansion, it won’t be possible to proceed.
To the leftists, sell the fake attributes of zero CO2 emissions/halt global warming/save the world/create new jobs meme, and to the right, sell the real attributes of: clean, safe, cheap, unlimited energy and energy independence.
Both the fake and real attributes will also appeal to different segments of left and right wing voters, so both political parties make out in the deal.
I think it’s imperative that the primary emphasis be put on developing Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) as they are inherently: much cheaper, safer, efficient, produce less nuclear waste with shorter half life’s , operate at single atmospheric pressures, don’t need a water source (use gas turbine generators), cheaper to build, Thorium 16 times more plentiful than Uranium, Thorium requires no special processing, Thorium deposits are everywhere and unlimited, etc.,
Either party could sell a Manhattan-Project LFTR program, with the left selling the economic stimulus/new jobs creation meme, and the right could sell the Sputnik Moment meme of having to catch up with the Chinese who are just a few years away from LFTR deployment that will steal American jobs if we don’t act now…
I know the US can’t actually afford to do a “Manhatten-Project” LFTR program, but since the US is going to collapse anyway from $20 trillion national/state debt and $100~220 trillion (depends on who you talk to) in unfunded liabilities, we may as well spend $70 billion (equal to just one week of current government spending) on a LFTR program while we still can borrow the money to do it, rather than waiting until after the inevitable collapse, when it will be impossible; at least we get cheap, safe, unlimited energy forever out of the deal..
Here’s the thing: Fuel reprocessing was always our fuel cycle strategy. The Carter administration via executive policy decided that we would not do that and would instead bury fuel after a single pass. The notion came from the naive idea that other countries would simply follow our lead. That didn’t happen. France reprocesses, India reprocesses, China is going on a huge reprocessing program. Even Iran was building a fast neutron reactor as early as 2004. Reagan resurrected the program and began work on a test processing facility in, I think, Idaho. The Clinton administration drove a stake through the heart of it by proposing legislation, that passed through Congress, that banned fuel reprocessing except for very specific government purposes. It would take an act of Congress today to start that process up again.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates is investing in China on a series of reactors designed to do just this. Our policy of burial after a single pass is wasteful, stupid, and actually MORE dangerous than reprocessing it. In a fast neutron reactor you can “poison” the P-239 with P-240 and make it nearly impossible for weapons use (because P-240 exhibits spontaneous fission, something you do not want to happen in a warhead but is tolerable in a fuel rod and they are nearly impossible to separate).
Every single member of Congress should read that article (the original one from 2005, not the re-printed one). In fact, every American should read it. It promises cheap abundant power available to all. We could have so much power the electric company would be giving away 100 watt lightbulbs again just to get people to use more of it.
Oh, and nuclear reactors don’t need to be fragile. We make reactors designed to take torpedo strikes and depth charges.
There is no downside to uranium. We don’t need the thorium. You take natural uranium out of the ground or depleted uranium from previous enrichment activity and ship it to the site. The uranium never leaves the site after that. It is processed and “burned” at the same location. Thorium reactors could be used for smaller scale installations such as a metropolitan power utility that wants to produce power for its city but that only becomes necessary as long as we restrict larger scale generation. The only thing making the thorium viable is the restrictions on the conventional reactors with reprocessing. Overall, the thorium fuel cycle is less economical than MOX.
With all the cheer-leading here for nuclear power, I’m still waiting for someone to articulate clearly why we even need nuclear power-plants in the first place, when we’ve got so much coalj and other “fossil fuels”.
The notion that CO2 drives Earth’s climate has been dismissed by all but the most dedicated (to the “Cause”) green zealots. If CO2 does not drive Earth’s climate, it follows that there is nothing to prevent us from burning all the coal we need. And we do have plenty of coal – several hundred years reserves by some estimates, enough to have our cake, and eat it too, despite Gail’s concerns, above:
We have tons of coal, long experience in burning it, and knowledge to remove most of the real pollutants released when coal is burned. But coal has been demonized, and demonization is one of the tricks employed by TPTB to get their way. Control of the MSM allows effective application of this trick.
Meanwhile, as Mk Urbo notes above, over 400 tons of highly radioactive groundwater is flowing daily into the Pacific Ocean, as TEPCO finally acknowledged recently.
In my opinion, the nuclear power industry has been one of the major players behind the CO2 scam from the beginning. Of course, it helps to have favorable media coverage to promote the CO2 scare, and ultimately, by default, the nuclear agenda.
And guess what?
Mr. Huffman and others….
I realize that my link to Wikipedia does not fully support my claim that Adams resigned from the Sierra Club over his support for nuclear power. However, I knew people personally involved in the controversy who said Adams just didn’t want to be involved with leadership in the Club any longer after the dust-up with all its hard feelings. It was a hard fought and bitter contest within the Club. That’s a second-hand, non-documented reference, I realize, and would welcome a more authoritative history. I thought the portrait was a nice hook in any case.
As to Fukushima, the weak link mechanically in the safety response of three of the four reactors was a small steam-driven turbine/pump system in the basement. With the internal flooding, its electrical controls were erratic and difficult to manually override. More recent plants in England, Sweden, China, and Taiwan have a new design/component that could be proven to work underwater and with greater reliability.
US plants underwent a comprehensive evaluation after 9/11/01 that addressed many of the weaknesses later uncovered at Fukushima. Additional backfits are in progress specifically from the lessons learned from Fukushima. Chernobyl suggested fewer improvements on US plants due to the differences in fundamental physics although the Department of Energy did shutdown the one reactor in the country of similar design – it was used for making plutonium and maybe tritium for the weapons program.
As to my main question about reactor vendors’ claims, acknowledgement of no CO2 emissions is accurate but I still would not want the public mind linked. Of course, environmentalists will complain about ANYTHING. I was once castigated at a party by Greenpeace member over the heavy metals releases into the ocean from the plant I worked at. I had to rebut that the heavy metals came from the runoff from the employees parking lot and not the plant itself.
In my opinion, the 1970’s method of each-utility-re-designs-its-own-plant-every-time, and with it the idea that a-single-pair-of-very-big-plants-is-best is a large part of the problem.
True, most nuclear plants were “intended” to be pairs, but the (deliberate) construction delays introduced as a hindrance by the anti-nuke industry – and the construction errors and re-designs introduced by the nuclear industry itself, means most are big single “islands” of only two plants or inefficient small single plants like Point Beach, WI.
Containment design and decay heat removal is much, much easier with smaller plants (under 400 MegaWatts per reactor) than in large 1200 MegaWatt reactors. But, the huge pre-startup and planning and enviro paperwork and plant infrastructure and security and administration and engineering required for ANY size nuclear plant means that the fixed cost/plant cost have to reduced -> which makes big plants the only reasonable ones. Also, when one very large plant goes down, it strains the utility almost to the breaking point for delivery of power: which strain reliability and administration towards restarting, training, QA, etc. The wrong impulse and instinct: shutdowns for refueling and maintenance become “crisis” that happen very very seldom rather than simple regular events that happen continuously with the same crew of plant labor and shutdown labor doing the same job the same way every time every outage.
Better one small plant shutdown regularly out of a group that remains operating, rather than 1 big one coming down that forces the utility to purchase power rather than generating it.
So, construction costs go down by a factor 15% for a second plant identical to the first IF done by the same labor to the same design. the 3rd, 4th, and 5th are even cheaper: look at repeated ship construction “learning curves.”
So, it is better then to have a “star” of five small plants all going to one central very high voltage distribution yard.
The first plant built is a natural gas cogen plant that immediately begins generating power and starts paying for the transformer distribution yard, and supplies the blackout restart ability to the whole group. (Plus each small nuclear plant gets its own emergency generator as well.) Each of the five plants is built right after the previous work finishes: concrete, steel, piping, equipment crews walk from one job to the next. Each plant gets refueled in order while the others remain up: So you average the same power from the island at all times. Plant outage workers and engineers and test crews remain constant. Training is simplified and uniform at the same facility for all five. Refueling/reprocessing is done for all five without – as pointed out above – moving the fuel off site.
During an outage, you lose 300 Meg out of 1500 total, but the 1200 Meg remaining is still available all year.
One spent fuel/waste facility and fuel pool and permanent waste treatment (like vitrification or cask storage until transfer) is needed: not one facility per site as now.
crosspatch says:
August 7, 2013 at 9:03 am
“Every single member of Congress should read that article (the original one from 2005, not the re-printed one). In fact, every American should read it…..”
——————————
And most of all everyone on this thread should read it. I just read it again after 8 years, it is eye opening.
As to thorium I think it should be devolved too, but as you said “there is no down side to uranium”. Waste is just no an issue, with uranium or thorium. Also thorium can be used in a fast neutron reactor as well.
Guten Abend, Strike,
Your English was excellent. We’ll just have to wait and see. I’m still very hopeful, though. I’ll go stock up on sugar. #[:)] Well, on second thought, because you are quite sweet enough, for YOU, I will buy a gift certificate to your favorite online bookstore (since we’ll be calling this in January, 2014 when one needs something happy to do inside the house).
Greetings from Washington State, U.S.A.,
Janice