Don't mention the Nuclear Option to Greens

The greens feed on fear, scares and have an agenda to wreck economies, at least that is the Australian outcomes of the fearful scaremongering to prevent anything working. Mention nuclear and they just about faint, the blood rains from their faces, brains go into mortal lockdown and common sense or any semblance of coherent conversation ends and a scattergun rant erupts.
Seems that the mere mention conjures up images of devils and accusations of environmental vandals.
I simply prefer that whatever emissions that we cause are the cleanest for the environment and that whatever energy that were need for daily life be produced at the lowest clean environmental cost.
On that basis I look for the day that we eventually replace those energy sources with the best range of nuclear devices under the safest controls. Even better if we can reduce the size and complexity of those nuclear generators that it becomes viable to give them to poorer economies as a form of peaceful aid so they can develop basic clean cooking, bathing, heating/cooling to lift their people out of poverty.
This may mean continuing to burn/consume cheap fossil fuels while these small safe reliable reactors are developed in a way that the by products cannot be used for military purposes and several of the modern reactor proposals seem to be viable in that respect.
We already remove most of the particulate and chemical mix from the emissions in the developed world and it seems a no brainer to ensure the energy needs of the human race are supplied and new sources of energy harnessed for the true benefit of mankind AND the planet we inhabit.
But try explaining this to a greenie you will draw a blank every time, its not in the Great Green songbook of agenda!

fenbeagleblog says:
August 9, 2014 at 6:02 am
Well the main reason in the UK Eric is the current proposal is the most expensive nuclear power station in the world. And with strike prices at £90 kw/h it’s barely cheaper than onshore wind at £95 kw/h.
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I think comparing kw/h between energy sources can be mis-leading.
In 2012, the average nuclear power plant in the United States generated about 11.8 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh). A 1.8-MW turbine can produce about 5 million kWh a year using an average wind speed of 12mph. I know where I live we do not manage 12 MPH windspeeds annually, but lets use that number. It would take about 2,400 wind turbines to equal one nucluer plant in annual output, again assuming 12mph average wind. Can’t imagine the logistics of a 2,400 wind turbine farm nor the impact to the environment.
And then there is the issue that the wind don’t always blow, so power output from wind is not 24/7 as nucleur power would be, requiring further mitigation and expense or a change to our lifestyles.

I’m reminded of a great book by Petr Beckmann called The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear. As a counter example, for all of John Daly’s great work with documenting a lack of sea level change and fighting consensus climatology, he was quite rabidly against nuclear power.

Birkenstock liberals are not about solutions – they are about the unrestricted show of caring for the down-trodden in all walks of life except for white males who are fair game. The only way to care in their world is by way of government programs that ensure the down-trodden will remain so thus satisfying the “unrestricted” requirement. There’s nothing happier than a caring liberal with a good cause to bray about and a good tax lawyer to ensure someone else pays for the programs.

Never letting a crisis go to waste, means not fixing it either.

The waste issue was always there. However, I recall a conversation I had a while ago with someone for the life of me I cannot recall who (senior moment). The issue of containment is pretty much settled. In the UK we’ve tested the steel encased concrete surrounded waste vessels by colliding them with trains moving at 100mph, or there abouts, & they survive. The conversation moved on to storage & or disposal. What was proposed was to fill a tanker with the waste, & the ship be fitted with doors open to the sea, obviously such that the vessel remains seaworthy. The ship is then taken to the nearest subduction zone & the waste guided down to it. In theory once subsumed into the Earth’s crust it would never be seen again! I thought it had merit although it would horrify the Greens despite informing them of the origins of the original material being disposed of!

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 9, 2014 at 6:11 am
First post from Roger Sowell directing us to the ~24 part series of posts on his blog where he explains how nuclear energy is too expensive without government help and is too dangerous and always has been and always will be despite the technology advances as the extreme risk and cost is inherent, will be showing up in:
3..
2..
1..
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KD,
It took him 18 minutes. Do you have any picks for the Lotto next week?
Richard

From Roger Sowell on August 9, 2014 at 6:29 am:

In addition, Professor Derek Abbott asserts that nuclear power is simply not possible as a long-term solution for electrical energy. (…)

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the world-class geniuses behind the famous “Five Seconds to Midnight” Doomsday Clock:

THE ENERGY ISSUE
05/30/2013 – 16:18
Limits to growth: Can nuclear power supply the world’s needs?
Derek Abbott
(…) One particular resource limitation that has not been clearly articulated in the nuclear debate thus far is the availability of the relatively scarce metals used in the construction of the reactor vessel and core. While this scarcity is not of immediate concern, it would present a hard limit to the ultimate expansion of nuclear power. This limit appears to be a harder one than the supply of uranium fuel. An increased demand for rare metals—such as hafnium, beryllium, zirconium, and niobium, for example—would also increase their price volatility and limit their rate of uptake in nuclear power stations. Metals used in the nuclear vessel eventually become radioactive and, on decommissioning, those with long half-lives cannot be recycled on timescales useful to human civilization. Thus, a large-scale expansion of nuclear power would reduce “elemental diversity” by depleting the world’s supply of some elements and making them unavailable to future generations.

Limits to Growth, the famous “Club of Rome” publication useful for justifying the incidental extermination of 13 out of every 14 people on Earth? Good reference to start with.
Welcome once again to the “reserves misunderstood as resources” discussion, with the addition of metals that are byproducts of looking for other metals. From Forbes, by Tim Worstall on 1/24/2013 @ur momisugly 11:16AM:

It’s 2013: Let’s Check Those New Scientist Claims About Running Out Of Terbium And Hafnium
…
With hafnium this problem is even worse. Their misunderstanding of metals and metals extraction that is. On this chart they seem to have global reserves of hafnium at 1,124 tonnes. Which is a number that had me howling with laughter when I saw it. This is simply nonsense.
Here are the USGS numbers for hafnium. You will note that there are no statistics for world production of hafnium. And most certainly none for either reserves or resources. That is, there are no reserves. But you will see this:

Typically, zirconium and hafnium are contained in zircon at a ratio of about 50 to 1.

Ah, OK: 2% of zircon is hafnium. So, what are the reserves of zircon then? 52 million tonnes: meaning that there’s about 1 million tonnes of hafnium out there. That’s reserves recall: not resources. This is the stuff that has been measured, weighed and drilled.
So how can we have these people insisting that reserves are only 1,124 tonnes? Quite simply, because they are ignorant of how the market for this metal works.
Hafnium and zirconium are chemically very similar indeed. So much so that we usually don’t bother to refine the 2% of Hf out of the Zr. The only time we do care is for the nuclear industry: Hf is opaque to neutrons, Zr transparent. Thus when we make the zirconium to make reactors out of we have to extract the Hf. And this is where the world’s supply comes from. It’s waste from the nuclear industry. This is where we get the few hundred tonnes a year of Hf that we actually use from. The other 25,000 tonnes a year that’s in the zircon we don’t bother to extract and we just let it get used with the zirconium/zirconia for non-nuclear uses.
…

This Derek Abbott fellow that Roger Sowell trusts sounds like a really smart guy, for someone aligned with anti-nuclear Malthusians.
To mention it, even though (from first link) “Derek Abbott is a professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia”, I haven’t found any direct relation to Tony Abbott, current Australian PM.

Roger Sowell,
I have a question regarding your post: What is your position? Do you favor coal, oil, and natural gas while we have it cheaper than nuclear? Or do you prefer wind and solar at its high cost? Just seeking clarification, thanks.