Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Scientific American reports increasing interest in using nuclear power to lower US CO2 emissions – but Presidential wannabe Bernie Sanders has vowed to decommission all US nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear Option Could Be Best Bet to Combat Climate Change
To cut CO2 pollution, experts argue for nuclear power.
…
Many analysts are now calling not just to preserve existing nuclear power plants, but to invest in new designs to help fight climate change. “A new round of innovation for nuclear reactors would be quite important,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last month.
Across the United States, nuclear provides 20 percent of all electricity and more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas-free electricity. But some plants have already shut down ahead of schedule, and others may do so, as well, not because of environmental opposition but because of market forces.
“In the United States today, we have some older plants shutting down,” Moniz said. “The pattern is obvious: It’s principally plants in competitive markets faced with very low natural gas prices.”
…
“Nuclear is without a question the most important environmental technology in the 21st century,” said Michael Shellenberger, an advocate for nuclear power and president of Environmental Progress.
He said nuclear is the highest rung on the energy ladder that civilizations climb as they move to denser fuels from biomass, to coal, to oil, to gas and finally to uranium. “From an energy and environmental and development perspective, I want everybody to go up the hierarchy of energy,” Shellenberger said.
Under U.S. EPA’s Clean Power Plan to reduce emissions in the power sector, new nuclear power plants and reactors upgraded to produce more power count toward states’ carbon goals.
…
The renewed interest in nuclear energy has led to startup companies developing “fourth-generation” reactor designs that are walkaway safe, meaning that if left unattended, they safely coast to a halt.
“All three generations of nuclear technology that are out there today require babysitting,” said
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates during a panel last month in Washington, D.C. “The nuclear industry has never designed an inherently safe product.”
…
However, existing reactors are tacking into the wind, in terms of economics and politics. Vermont independent Sen. and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has laid out a plan to decommission every reactor in the United States.
…
Mark Jacobson, an energy researcher at Stanford University who found that it’s feasible for much of the world to run on wind, water and sunlight, acknowledged that nuclear energy has some carbon benefits but said it has an insurmountable drawback of opportunity costs, namely the billions of dollars needed upfront and the decades it takes to plan and build reactors.
“If you’re looking at just one technology in isolation, maybe you don’t care about that opportunity cost,” he said. “But when you’re comparing the two technologies, that becomes relevant. If you have $1 to spend, would you rather spend that on nuclear or wind?”
But the nuclear industry isn’t arguing to be the only option on the table, saying instead that it wants to be an appetizing entree in a buffet of energy options to fight climate change.
“You don’t want to go all in on any one technology,” said NEI’s Keeley. “And NEI is pretty clear about that, too. We see a role for renewables. We see a role for natural gas. We see a role for nuclear.”
The Scientific American article is quite long and wide ranging, in my opinion well worth reading in full.
As a fan of nuclear, I’m happy that nuclear power is getting more traction, though I am concerned the nuclear industry are using the climate “emergency” to promote their product – a strategy which I believe will ultimately backfire.
The hostility presidential wannabe Bernie Sanders expresses towards nuclear power is telling. From my perspective, Bernie Sanders is the kind of green hypocrite who first led me to question the legitimacy of the global warming “emergency”.
Even if nuclear was as risky as greens claim, what is the risk of a few meltdowns, compared to the destruction of the entire biosphere? Hostility to nuclear power doesn’t make sense, if you truly believe the entire world is on the brink of an climate catastrophe.
In my opinion, if socialists like Bernie and Naomi Oreskes cared more about CO2 than social engineering, they would join Scientific American, and scientists like James Hansen, and embrace nuclear power, the only energy technology which has a realistic chance of significantly reducing global CO2 emissions.
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I thought that France has building nuke power plants down to a cookie cutter operation. I think the French get more than half of their electricity from nuclear plants. I have not seen anything about this for a very long time. Does anyone know the current status of nuclear power in France?
They pretty much did but that was 2 decades ago. Worker skill loss and regulatory restrictions leading to overyly complex design has led to massive delays with the new generation of French reactors. Just google “EPR” for the sorry tale.
China is where the new skill set is being developed although they are building many different designs rather than settling on a single one.
Around 80% of Frances electricity is nuclear generated, most of the rest is hydro,. making it the lowest emitting nation per mWh generated in western Europe.
(Nuclear) electricity is Frances 3rd largest export. Without it Italy, Spain, Holland, Belgium and the UK would have a hard time coping
Its latest new generation reactors are complete dogs, and are bedevilled by regulatory overburden and are way over budget and over time in Europe (Flamanville, Olkiluoto), But are in time and in budget in the far least,. Go figure.
Frances Europhile socialist president wants to close all of the nuclear plant down forever. That is the EU stance. The same game is happening in Switzerland, 50/50 nuclear and hydro. Its doesn’t get better than that actually.
Angela Merkel is an ex DDR communist who worked in Agitprop and was allegedly a Stasi informer. Her rise to power has been marked by unexplained revelations about anyone who stood in her way. She runs the EU effectively, now, despite appearances. Her ex chums in the Russian politburo and KBB are now all executives in GazProm. Which supplies much of western Europe with gas.
In November, 1999, the C.D.U. was engulfed by a campaign-finance scandal, with charges of undisclosed cash donations and secret bank accounts. Kohl and his successor as Party chairman, Wolfgang Schäuble, were both implicated, but Kohl was so revered that nobody in the Party dared to criticize him. Merkel, who had risen to secretary-general after the C.D.U.’s electoral defeat, saw opportunity. She telephoned Karl Feldmeyer. “I would like to give some comments to you in your newspaper,” she said.
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/quiet-german)
Germany if course has leapt on renewables with its Energiewiende, closed half its nukes – some illegally – (the court cases rumble on) and will close the rest shortly. Germany is still a worse emitter of CO2 that e,g. Great Britain. Because renewables don’t work it has built new lignite power stations. If there is a fuel more polluting to mine and burn than lignite, I have yet to hear of it.
So of course Europe needs gas. Lots of it, to balance the renewables,. And that comes from Russia…so no nukes in the EU. That’s policy.
Britain may vote to leave the EU on June 23rd.
There is more to this than ecology and energy.
Follow the money and follow the power.
Merkel hates Western Europe about as much as Obama hates Britain. Communism LOST FFS. Or did it?
Because their dislike for nuclear energy far exceeds any commitment to — or concern for, the environment. It has always been that way. I’ve been saying this for years but I usually just get blank stares.
It is unethical to see no clear path to unbounded Energy as anything but an existential threat.
Unfortunately there is an international scam in progress and the scammers are clever, they have seized the moral high-ground because it had been left unoccupied and undefended. Those who praise humanity and progress for its own sake, and would remind others we should never judge ourselves in haste, must have wandered off somewhere.
There is also a scuffle on the Global Warming moral high-ground as the folks who run nuclear power plants are kicked in the face and tossed off the mound. They expected to be welcomed with open arms because nuclear energy will help save the planet from CO2. They did not realize the movement is rife with people whose irrational fear of radiation exceeds any commitment to the environment. Anyone who even mentions nuclear power gets a feral and brutal response. I’ve taken pity on the nuclear industry and have tried to explain the phenomenon but they’re not taking it very well. Like the Amish, our nuclear power industry needs staunch defenders surrounding it. They’re just too polite for their own good.
It’s only a minority faction of the green movement that is strongly anti-nuke. But, for the sake of group solidarity (for maximum political leverage), he other greens keep quiet.
Quoting Mark Jacobson as an expert and describing his work as anything rather than fantasy shows that Scientific American is no longer a credible source of information
Wasn’t Mark Jacobson the guy who concluded that nuclear power was uneconomical because 1) he assumed outrageously high costs for borrowing money to build reactors and 2) he factored the costs of nuclear war into the costs of nuclear power?
In other words, they quoted Mark Jacobson the lying fanatic?
The nuclear industry HAS invented inherently safe reactors – way back in the 1960s – they are called molten salt reactors. But until advances in metallurgy and some bright ideas about new moderating
materials since then, they were impractical and required highy enriched uranium. Transatomic Power and Terrestrial Energy are both near to commercialization of their designs. I’m astounded at he apparent ignorance of this article, if it claims the new 4th reactor technologies will be upfront “expensive.”
They cost far less than current 3rd generation reactors (which are awfully safe as it is). They will produce power more cheaply than any other power generation technology. Period. Without question, molten salt reactors are THE future of energy production.
Bill Gates is the perfect example of how one can become a billionaire without the slightest ability to
think logically. The man whose company has produced an operating system that has had over one million bugs, or errors, many fatal to the PC, is complaining about an industry that has never has never built a reactor that killed anyone, in sixty years of operation. Gates, America’s billionaire village idiot.
” Who will ever need more than 64K of memory “, Bill Gates.
There’s a couple of things I wrote a few years back about exactly these subjects.
In essence I was trying for a complete review of energy generation, put the Late Prof Mackay beat me to it on energy density, so I helped him get his book published. That’s really where you need to start at
http://www.withouthotair.com
That book shows you the size of installation you need to make renewable energy work assuming some kind of storage to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar exists.
I then wrote this:
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf
To address two further issues – intermittency and cost. The final analysis of that, is that ex of fossil fuel, there is only one other viable technology – nuclear, of one sort or another. I am not going to get into a detailed war about which technology, because frankly they all work or could be made to work, and its a matter of development costs and production costs which are largely dominated by regulatory overburden and politics.
Cost of course is somewhat a moveable feast with the likes of subsidy and government interference, but in the end a figure of quality – EROEI – energy return over energy invested is what cost tends to be a proxy for, and is a figure of quality for power generation. Recent studies suggest that is actually less than one for most solar installations, and windmills are only marginally positive, and with storage…well there’s the rub, In order to provide dispatchability, you need storage (or co generation with e.g. hydro or fossil) and then the cost goes even higher and the EROEI even lower.
(I randomly put on a bit of TV – in the UK there is a channel dedicated to the dreary outpourings of government – this was the energy select subcommittee – and there I was startled to hear the minister utter the magic word ‘dispatchable’ . Then I knew that David Mackay, who was scientific advisor to the energy department, had not died in vain, and had managed to educate them about intermittency. Maybe my essay helped. I’d like to think so).
Having concluded that love it or hate it, the only alternative to a return to the Dark Ages was nuclear power, as even if there is plentiful fossil fuel now, at economically extractable prices, it won’t be so for ever. I wrote a speculative piece of – well perhaps science fiction – to address the future of a society that has no access to cheap fossil energy resources. NOT an easy thing to do, because the whole post war society has been shaped by exactly that – access to cheap fossil fuel sources, especially petroleum. The name of the game there was to see how much industrial or post industrial society had to change to accommodate very high priced fossil fuels, (in the limit, you can synthesise hydrocarbon fuels but the price is perhaps 10 times what it is now in relative terms).
That essay is here:
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Beyond_Fossil_Fuels.pdf
What the results of a few years research and cogitation revealed were basically this:
1/. Renewable energy is barely able to meet our energy needs and then only by exploiting huge land areas at fairly insane costs. An ecological disaster in its own right. This is David’s (never stated, but actual) conclusion. David was a committed Green, but a supremely intelligent and honest one.
2/. Intermittent renewable energy (wind wave solar tidal) has the greatest potential for generation, but the lack of dispatchability makes the costs even more insane. There isn’t enough hydro actual or potential in the world to be a battery, and anything else is simply too expensive, and that means EROEI is probably around 1 or less, rendering it completely unviable and unsustainable.
3/. If CO2 reduction is what you want, there are at least 10,000 years of fertile and fissionable material at good extractable values available to generate energy at massively better EROEIs than renewables, that is constant reliable and dispatchable enough. And its cheaper than renewables, despite the massive costs imposed on the nuclear industry by regulatory ratcheting and regulatory overburden. I like to think That David, and to a small extent I, have been instrumental in making Britain almost alone on the Western world, begin to take a look at new nuclear in a serious (though currently very flawed) way.
4/. Even if CO2 reduction proves to be totally unnecessary – and I personally think it is – there are not unlimited supplies of fossil fuel and the more you have to frack it the less the EROEI is. The USA has at least 100 years of coal, and ex of Greenpiss, doesn’t need nuclear the way e.g. Britain, whose viable coal was largely worked out 50 years ago – does. But 100 years of coal and maybe 50 years of frackable gas is not 10,000 years of nuclear fuel. There is no rush to go nuclear, for the USA, but there is pressure, so to speak. A program that keeps some nuclear as a portion of the generation mix is advisable, so it can be ramped up if and when needed.
5/. Looking further into the future, almost everything we do today could be done with nuclear power, with some salient exceptions: Industrial processes that use carbon as a reducing agent (smelting) could use electrolysed water as hydrogen instead, industrial hydrocarbon feedstocks could use synthetic hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide…or alternatives to these products could be used. None of it is as cheap, but it is all do-able if we had access to cheap abundant nuclear power.
6/. The salient exceptions are off grid power – notably small boats, aircraft and road transport. One way to address these is to simply build railways. The UK to France channel tunnel replaces ferry boats effectively. And uses trains. Large vessels can easily be nuclear powered. Electric cars hover on the ragged edge of viability. The bugbear is energy density. There is some scope for improvement but not a lot. Hydrogen is a possibility, but its a horrid fuel to handle. Its advantage is that its easy to make by electrolysis from nuclear electricity. Fully synthetic fuel of a diesel/kerosene like character is possible, but the price is high relative to the electricity used to make it. What I suspected would happen is that all of these would vie for dominance until the most cost effective one emerged in any given niche market.
7/. Social changes would be dominated by the relative costs of transport against the relative costs of no transport: prices of goods would move around: Plastics might become expensive. Wood based products might reappear as economically viable. Work would increasingly be done without moving the people to the work: they stay at home and use a high speed internet to control robotic machines for physical labour, or teleconference for service type jobs.
AS I said, it was all extrapolation towards what is almost science fiction, but even though the essays are rough, bear much improvement and are out of date, I think the debate is worth beginning: Ex of Climate change, which I think is deader in the water than most people on both sides think, there still remains a big question of what energy we run an industrial and post industrial society on, because it needs a LOT of per capita energy to run, and there ain’t much room to reduce it.
Love it or hate it, my analysis concludes that nuclear isn’t an option: Actually its the only option.
We need to be slowly steadily and carefully keeping it going and developing it until the need arises. The USA is likely to lag here, because it doesn’t need nuclear power yet, the way places like Japan, parts of the Far East, parts of Europe, do. Places with high population densities, no oil or coal under and no mountains to speak of.
test my post disappeared censored
yep, there is some strange effects happening with the new wordpress software.
Non-problems of nuclear energy:
1. Not enough plant sites (away from population, near cooling water, etc) – Urban centers are only 3% of world land area. 71% of earth’s surface is water. Plenty of vacant land and water
2. Land area required per plant – Comparable to coal and gas plants. Solar and wind require more area
3. Embrittlement problem (metal bombarded by radiation cannot be recycled, it is forever wasted) – Medieval Japanese blacksmiths can solve this non-problem. Melting the metal and hammering it will rearrange its atomic structure. That’s how they made hard samurai swords
4. Entropy problem – It’s the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It’s unavoidable. The whole universe is ‘wasting away’
5. Nuclear waste disposal – Deep ocean trenches are a good place to keep them. Far and away from people and most of marine life (though there are a few invertebrates down there)
6. Nuclear accident rate problem (more accidents as more reactors are built, and built in third-world countries) – Its 60-year safety record proves it’s the safest of all energy sources
7. Proliferation (of atomic-based weapons) – North Korea and Iran will make atomic bombs whether or not other countries build nuclear plants. Limiting explosives manufacturing will not prevent people from having guns
8. Energy of extraction (mining dilute ores for uranium) – It’s simple economics. If the cost of mining is too high, it is not an ore. It’s true for all mineral resources
9. Uranium resource limits (more costly as cheap sources are exhausted) – Also true for fossil fuels. But fossil fuels and nuclear are still cheaper than renewable energy
10. Seawater extraction for uranium – Abundant resource if it can be economically done
11. Fast Breeder Reactors – We should use them
12. Fusion Reactors – The future of nuclear energy. Let’s develop it as soon as possible
13. Materials Resources (materials of construction, lack of rare alloy metals) – Somehow the use of rare metals such as platinum, gold, lithium, etc. in electronics and cellphones does not prevent their widespread use. Why is it immoral in nuclear industry but not in consumer electronics?
14. Elemental diversity – Amount of nuclear wastes is negligible compared to amounts of mineral resources in the earth’s crust. No element will become extinct because of elemental transmutation in nuclear plants
Elemental diversity – Amount of nuclear wastes is negligible compared to amounts of mineral resources in the earth’s crust. No element will become extinct because of elemental transmutation in nuclear plants
On the contrary, nuclear power takes DANGEROUS LONG TERM RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPES *(U235) and turns them into stable boring lead!
Remember that renewable energy us an inefficient way of making use of a HUGE UNSHIELDED OUT OF CONTROL RUNAWAY NUCLEAR FUSION REACTOR WHOSE RADIATION KILLS TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE EACH YEAR!
Worse still THE EARTH AND EVERYTHING IN IT IS MADE OF LONG-TERM NUCLEAR WASTE FROM HORRIFIC NUCLEAR FUSION EXPLOSIONS AND WILL NEVER EVER DECAY.
Put that in your green pipe, and smoke it!
Oh Noes…What are we going to do! The radiation will kill us all!! It’s worse than we thought!!! The sky is falling!!!! Repent for the end is Nigh!!!!!
Speaking about epic failure, predicting the cost of natural gas to electric utilities.
Leo makes a classic mistake about radioactive material. The longer the half-life, the less radioacitve they are and therefor less dangerous.
U-235 is not radolgical hazard but is toxic as a heavy metal.
You Americans cant recognise satire can you?
The comments below are entirely correct.
That was of course the point.
Southern Company has the newest PWR reactor going online built despite the regulatory environment. They generate power using coal, natural gas, solar and wind hedging their bets against the shifting political environement.
Plant Vogtle is the newest nuclear plant built in the US in the last three decades:
http://www.southerncompany.com/what-doing/energy-innovation/nuclear-energy/photos.cshtml
Company data on nuclear plant operations here
http://www.southerncompany.com/about-us/our-business/southern-nuclear/home.cshtml#
” ….joins the push … ”
I dont think reporting on something
is pushing for something.
Who wrote that? Worrall?
Trying to show a bias when there isnt one.
If a newspaper reports on a car crashing
into a tree, whats the ” push ” there eh?
Oh, so and so newspaper has joined the
push to promote accidents? Damage to people, cars, or trees?
There is certainly a place for nuclear power. Exactly what that is remains to be seen. We would certainly be much further ahead in our use of nuclear if it weren’t for an irrational fear of it fanned by a massive campaign of propaganda and lies for several decades. We certainly don’t need more lies from the anti-carbon camp pushing for it though. What we need is an energy policy based on rationality. We need the big three – coal, gas, and nuclear. We can’t even begin to have a rational energy policy until coal is once again recognized as an important part of the three-legged stool making up our electricity supplies, instead of being killed off as an evil “destroyer of the planet”.
Low bid, utility scale solar will win in the end if all the DOE policy hacks would get out of the way and outlaw rooftop solar subsidy and other diversions. Nuclear is based on a huge lie about where the fixed cost is and who pays it. Wind power is based on a huge lie about who pays for transmission lines to their sites. Natural gas is competitive but based on oversupply conditions for the next 25 years. I doubt you can expect oversupply while retiring old nuclear and coal at the same time.
No, it wont. It takes more energy to build it than it ever pays back.
Too little, too late. They’ve helped rig the game to bar the public and its government vote grabbers from changing course. The local paper yesterday put a front page headline of Exelon closing the nearby nuclear plant in Clinton, Il – with the sub- headline that “Experts say price spikes will be unlikely.” The “expert” was a partisan in favor of closing the plant who cited “jammed transmission lines” due to plentiful power. An actual study estimated the price increase to be 47%. So the state legislature will do nothing because they would have to fix the problem of over subsidizing wind by oversubsidizin nuclear to level the Rube Goldberg playing field. So, increased prices starting at 47%, an unreliable system, and utter dependency on power generation that requires massive subsidy to do a bad job. And more CO2 from all those windmills and their concrete foundations than the nuke. That, and a permanently marred landscape instead of a wooded recreation area on a fraction of the footprint of wind.
What is not to dislike about the anti-competitive, hypocritically anti-environment marriage of big wind, big government and big environment.
The huge cost of conventional nuclear is due to precautionary principle regulation. They could be built for less than one tenth the cost. We choose not to.
Basically yes, but design and contractor over-promises have not helped.
With nuclear power and technology, as the saying goes “you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone”.
There are no green technologies. Everything has an impact from recovery to reclamation.
There are no renewable technologies, only nominally renewable drivers. Everything is consumed or transformed with progressive returns.
There are diverse applications with context-sensitive requirements that can be optimally fulfilled with different technologies.
Looking at the energy requirements of the world today and into the future there are only two realistic non fossil carbon sources. Nuclear and solar. Nuclear could easily provide much more of our electricity than it does now – look at France. There is enough solar energy to power the world from a few hundred square kilometers of desert. Harnessing and distributing that energy is an engineering problem, not a thermodynamic one.
Biofuels are never going to do more than fill a niche because using natural photosynthesis to create biomass, a fraction of which is converted to fuels is horribly inefficient. The land area needed is more than we have. Wind, hydro, tides, waves can all play a part, and possibly reduce the number of nuclear or large solar plants needed globally from 15,000 to 10,000. But the bulk has to come from either fossil fuels, solar or nuclear.
If we seriously want to cut fossil fuels, we must embrace nuclear energy.
…Nuclear ?…Absolutely…Solar, Only if we want to live in the 1,800’s ! ( Are you volunteering to pick up all the Horse Shit ? )
solar is a non starter. EROEI is less than unity, and that before storage is added.
Looking at it from an energy density perspective, solar can do it. There is enough solar energy falling in the Earth to provide all our energy requirements using only a tiny portion of the surface. The rest is engineering and politics. If we spent a trillion dollars on a high voltage DC continent wide grid and something lie molten salt storage we could get all our electricity from solar. In Europe there is a problem because the source of the solar would have to be the Sahara desert, which is not politically stable.
This may not currently be economic compared to fossil fuels, but it could be done. Whereas using wind, tides, biofuels and hydro simply could not provide for all our needs.
“The rest is engineering ….”
Clearly someone is not an engineer. Engineers are a limited resource as are technicians.
Maybe seauce1 will volunteer to explain why he is too lazy to become an engineer but will become a solar panel cleaner living in the desert.
Look up the word ‘impractical’.
Looking at it from an energy density perspective, solar can do it.
T+Yes, looking at it form an energy densitryt perspective so nuclear fusins.
Unfortunately that isnt teh only prespective that is crucially important.
If we spent a trillion dollars on a high voltage DC continent wide grid and something lie molten salt storage we could get all our electricity from solar.
A lot more than that and you still wouldn’t be able to..
The rest is engineering and politics. >
Unfortunately it isn’t.
Current renewable technology relies on burning huge amounts of fossil energy to make and install it. MOre than it actually delivers in the case of solar.
What that means is that s system based on solar energy would never be able to generate enough energy to replace itself when it wore out, and would spend its entire lifetime trying.
In current jargon, solar energy is not sustainable.
Any energy technology has to pass three basic tests.
1/. It must have sufficient energy density that its ecological impact is less than the benefit derived from it.
2/. It must be costed both in cash and in energy terms (and even ecological terms) holistically: That is, necessary adjuncts like storage and/or co-generation and of course O&M costs must be taken into account as well as headline capital costs and fuel costs. If its costs are above a competitive technology by a serious margin, it should not be considered.
3/. IT must ultimately show an EROEI sufficiently large to make it sustainable. At least more than unity,. Otherwise all it represents is a sort of ‘battery’ which takes energy in, and later on gives some, but not all, of it back.
Apart from hydro and waste burning and a bit of geothermal, no so-called ‘renewable’ energy meets these three criteria.
That is a fundamental point I discovered.
No matter on what technical grounds you decide to place a value on energy and the ecosphere, ‘renewable’ energy never represents the best technology to use to meet demand.
I conclude therefore that the reason for its deployment has nothing whatsoever to do with the ecosphere or power generation at all, bit is 100% political.
Or as I prefer to say,
Renewable energy is a cosmetic solution to a problem that doesn’t actually exist anyway
Oh my did Kosta Tspsis DIE? After all, he was their “house” nuclear power expert. A man with a tenured position at Harvard, teaching freshman physics. A many who worked at an accelerator lab at one time, while getting his Phd in “particle physics”. A man for whom NO NUCLEAR POWER PLANT WAS A GOOD ONE except ones that were shut down. I clearly remember an article he wrote on the effects of hitting nuke plants with nuclear weapons. This was during the ’80’s. Brilliant, give the Soviets a list. And tell them how effective it would be. I was working in nuclear power at the time. Fortunately there were some people who had the “chutzpah” to take on the article. While, yes, there could be enhanced contamination from such a strategy, the upshot was this: Tspsis pretty graphs, and dose calculations WERE COMPLETELY MADE UP with no real calculations and backing behind them. When that was revealed, Sci Am steadfastly refused to publish anything that made that point. As noted by other, Sci. Am. a worthless Popinjay of a fraudulent “science” magazine. How about this for Sci America and it’s “experts”: http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/inventors/i/Wrights/library/WrightSiAm1.html 3 years later in the May edition of Sci. America, an extensive article is published. Later in 1908, after BEGGING the Wright Brothers for info, an article was published, almost completely written by Orville Wright. Remember, being a LEFTY LOONIE, an ACADEMIC, a progressive, and an “societal proclaimed expert” means NEVER having to say you are sorry or apologize for being a boob.
Found one other comment here that is a complete “lie” in many ways. The allegation that ANY nuclear reactor produces Plutonium and therefore is a “proliferation” risk. DANG, once you get a LIE like that going, it’s so hard to get rid of it. PROLIFERATION RISK? High flux (and all power reactors inherently ARE high flux devices) produce Pu alright. They produce it with Pu 239, 240 (a nuclear poison) and 241 (a “pre-detonator”, making it impossible to find an explosive to get the Pu critical mass ball together FAST ENOUGH and LONG enough to sustain a viable nuclear “explosion”. The ONLY way to use power reactor Pu is to put it through a gasseous diffusion plant or a centrifugal separation, and get the pure 239 out. THAT WOULD MEAN SO MUCH EFFORT AN MONEY that you’d be FAR better off to build a critical assembly with GRAPHITE and to merely process the Pu 239 out with Water, Sulfuric and Nitric acids, EDTA, kerosene, some glass plumbing, pulsating pumps and 304 SS tray assemblies to cause mixing in a Water/Organic counter-flow separation device. (See Benedict and Pigford, Nuclear Chemical Engineering, (See here: http://accessengineeringlibrary.com/browse/nuclear-chemical-engineering-second-edition, if you wonder why I’m so specific and detailed…its because I want people know I’m not an “academic hoity toit” (as the Climate Wonks, and the Sci Am type), but a low level engineer…who knows how to get things done.)
…Sooooo, your instructing terrorist’s how build a workable bomb ?
Its not as though this isn’t well known by anyone who cares do the research
Oh and of course thorium fuel cycle doesn’t produce plutonium directly , but U233. Nasty to make bombs out of but possible. It does produce Pu239 from that, but that is ultimately what it uses as fuel anyway.
Making a nuclear weapon really requires the resources of an organised state, unless you can steal weapons grade material, but such material is not actually made in large quantities any more.
What is touted as of more concern, is a dirty bomb, but frankly even that is pretty ridiculous. spreading a bit of radioactive material around might result in panic, but very little real effect.
Remember, life on earth hangs in the balance, so we’re going to gamble on technologies that may be 50 years away from large-scale, commercial viability and shun the mature technology with a 50 year safety record.
…That’s just it , Liberal Socialist’s want LESS Human’s on planet Earth !
I’ve got a slogan to help promote nuclear power in this country:
“The solution is not unclear. The solution is nuclear.”
I really like that Mike.
Brilliant!
Reblogged this on Astronomy Topic Of The Day and commented:
Scientific American has always been a reliable source for great science reporting and on-target insight; this story is consistent with that legacy. Nuclear power, aside from being carbon-emissions free, is the only viable alternative to carbon-based energy sources. Modern “Fast Breeder Reactors” for the most part, eliminate the need for nuclear waste disposal. The most common breeding reaction is that of plutonium-239 from non-fissionable uranium-238. The term “fast breeder” refers to the types of configurations which can actually produce more fissionable fuel than they use.
My only exception to this article is the author’s comment
I am concerned the nuclear industry are using the climate “emergency” to promote their product
Climate Change, caused by Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), remains one of the greatest existential threats to life on this planet that humanity has ever faced
Although I support Bernie Sanders and consider him the only real choice for the next President of the United States, he’s wrong on Nuclear Power. In a previous piece, I discuss why science has to be a priority for the next US President.
jake on June 3, 2016 at 6:03 pm
It is true that thermodynamic plants (fossile or nuclear fuel) have a much higher energy output per installed GW than renewable-based plants (solar, wind or even hydraulic) could ever produce.
But… how deep is your knowledge about the nuclear plant industry’s background, jake?
Over 35 years ago a dutch physicist gathered considerable amounts od informations about different primary energy sources for for electricity production, brought them together and compared them in a book published in the Netherlands („Between nuclear energy and coal“).
1. The main lesson of the book was that before comparing the use of nuclear energy for electricity production with other primary energy sources, one first should build coherent balance sheets in the financial, energetic and emission contexts for the process as a whole.
That means to calculate the cumulated costs, energy needs and CO2 emissions produced by
– extracting, refining, enriching, reprocessing, waste disposal and definite storage of all nuclear fuel components;
– construction, maintenance, dismantling, waste disposal and definite storage for all sites involved in all phases of the nuclear chain.
Having done that job you see
– how expensive the chain really is;
– that it consumes over the long term nearly as much energy as it produces (especially the breeder chain);
– that it well emits far less CO2 than coal or gas, but nevertheless more than renewables, when you consider the process in its entireity.
2. Moreover, the waste circuit of that chain is barely incredible.
A traditional nuclear plant with a gigawatt of installed power needs about 30 tons of enriched unranium every year. Together with special steal and zirconium: about 120 tons a year, most of it radioactive enough to impose a long time storage far away from civilization.
One ton of enriched fuel needs 6.5 tons of uranium oxyde; one ton of uranium oxyde requests at mining site not less than 2,000 tons of rough extracted material.
The remaining 1,999 tons plus lots of hard chemicals plus lots of water? That all lies in never processed so called tailings in Africa, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan etc etc.
3. The immediate waste processing future doesn’t look much better: in France, Japan and Great Britain, the nuclear industry has introduced the MOX concept (a mix of plutonium and depleted uranium oxides). Used MOX fuel needs to rest for 60 years instead of 6 before processing for long time storage.
For 4G breeders building plutonium out of depleted uranium by using high energy neutrons, the cost and energy balance is even worse: more (and more dangerous) reprocessing activities, and more complex dismantling due to the high energy neutrons and to the liquid sodium technology.
The thorium is no escape at all: it is fertile but not fissile, and must be therefore be breeded into
Last not least, while so many people really believe that fusion is a clean process compared with fission, this „fact“ has been falsified long time ago. The only feasible fuel approach is the deuterium/tritium mix; and since we lack tritium on Earth (we have approx. 5 kg of it), we must breed it too 🙂 out of lithium (if we can: even for lithium/ion batteries, there might be not enough of it). Moreover, the deuterium/tritium pair produces extremely harsh neutons, what is another problem.
4. So yes, jake: solar plants are costly toys, but offshore wind energy used in Germany for example has inbetween a load factor which reaches 50%; and all these toys produce far less waste than do nuclear plants of any kind.
And yes, jake: nuclear fusion energy will be over the long term the only practicable solution. So we must invest money, thoughts, human power and energy to construct the best possible path to that solution.
the only reply I can make to this is that the book was written 35 years ago, and likely researched for at least a few years before it was published. Do you not think we might have advanced a little in that time?
And considering that there is a good chance, given the time it was written, at the height of the Anti-nuke scare, that the author might have been biased and used worst case scenarios for all his negatives I would take his figures with a grain of salt and double check them.
I’d say if you’re worried that Nuclear does not save as much CO2 as claimed, the easy solution is to build the plant on the few acres needed, and then plant trees on the hundreds of acres that would have been used by a wind farm. I think that would nicely offset the difference.
Sorry, commenter, but I had expected a far more intelligent answer, challenging for example waste amounts as indicated and the costs of their processing.
Your answer is a bit redundant, you simply eluded all problems 🙁
The author of the book is a known denier of settled nuclear science, so we don’t need to respond. 😉
The zillions dollars cost quoted by Abbot is the result of the government, not of technical issues. In my article above I quote 0.5 $/W cost for the Millstone reactor #2 that has been making electricity since 1975 and is licensed for several more years. By contrast, Unit 3 built when DOEnergy was created and got involved, cost 300 % more while having capacity only 20 % higher. It is also still in operation. Unit 1, you might be interested, was shut down permanently for, essentially, improperly filled paperwork. The whole Millstone complex is on the Long Island Sound shore surrounded by towns and frequented beaches.