Guest essay by Eric Worrall
University of Sussex and Vienna School of International Studies are concerned that countries with policies which favour nuclear power aren’t making enough effort to reduce CO2 emissions by installing solar power and wind turbines.
University of Sussex Press Release;
Pro-nuclear countries making slower progress on climate targets
With Hinkley Point deal hanging in the balance, study casts fresh doubts over future of nuclear energy in Europe
A strong national commitment to nuclear energy goes hand in hand with weak performance on climate change targets, researchers at the University of Sussex and the Vienna School of International Studies have found.
A new study of European countries, published in the journal Climate Policy, shows that the most progress towards reducing carbon emissions and increasing renewable energy sources – as set out in the EU’s 2020 Strategy – has been made by nations without nuclear energy or with plans to reduce it.
Conversely, pro-nuclear countries have been slower to implement wind, solar and hydropower technologies and to tackle emissions.
While it’s difficult to show a causal link, the researchers say the study casts significant doubts on nuclear energy as the answer to combating climate change.
“By suppressing better ways to meet climate goals, evidence suggests entrenched commitments to nuclear power may actually be counterproductive.”
Professor Andy Stirling, Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the University of Sussex, said: “Looked at on its own, nuclear power is sometimes noisily propounded as an attractive response to climate change. Yet if alternative options are rigorously compared, questions are raised about cost-effectiveness, timeliness, safety and security.
“Looking in detail at historic trends and current patterns in Europe, this paper substantiates further doubts.
“By suppressing better ways to meet climate goals, evidence suggests entrenched commitments to nuclear power may actually be counterproductive.”
The study divides European countries into three, roughly equal in size, distinct groups:
Group 1: no nuclear energy (such as Denmark, Ireland and Norway)
Group 2: existing nuclear commitments but with plans to decommission (eg Germany, Netherlands and Sweden)
Group 3: plans to maintain or expand nuclear capacity (eg Bulgaria, Hungary and the UK)
They found that Group 1 countries had reduced their emissions by an average of six per cent since 2005 and had increased renewable energy sources to 26 per cent.
Group 2 countries, meanwhile, fared even better on emissions reductions, which were down 11 per cent. They grew renewable energy to 19 per cent.
However, Group 3 countries only managed a modest 16 per cent renewables share and emissions on average actually went up (by three per cent).
The UK is a mixed picture. Emissions have been reduced by 16 per cent, bucking the trend of other pro-nuclear countries. However, only five per cent of its energy comes from renewables, which is among the lowest in Europe, pipped only by Luxembourg, Malta and the Netherlands.
The team say that the gigantic investments of time, money and expertise in nuclear power plants, such as the proposed Hinckley Point C in the UK, can create dependency and ‘lock-in’ – a sense of ‘no turning back’ in the nation’s psyche.
Technological innovation then becomes about seeking ‘conservative’ inventions – that is new technologies that preserve the existing system. This is, inevitably, at the expense of more radical technologies, such as wind or solar.
Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Professor of Energy Policy and Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, said: “The analysis shows that nuclear power is not like other energy systems. It has a unique set of risks, political, technical and otherwise, that must be perpetually managed.
“If nothing else, our paper casts doubt on the likelihood of a nuclear renaissance in the near-term, at least in Europe.”
Lead author Andrew Lawrence of the Vienna School of International Relations said: “As the viability of the proposed Hinkley plant is once again cast into doubt by the May government, we should recall that — as is true of nuclear fallout — nuclear power’s inordinate expense and risks extend across national borders and current generations.
“Conversely, cheaper, safer, and more adaptable alternative energy sources are available for all countries.”
Read more: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressrelease/id/36547
The abstract of the study;
Nuclear energy and path dependence in Europe’s ‘Energy union’: coherence or continued divergence?
Since its initial adoption, the EU’s 2020 Strategy – to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, increase the share of renewable energy to at least 20% of consumption, and achieve energy savings of 20% or more by 2020 – has witnessed substantial albeit uneven progress. This article addresses the question of what role nuclear power generation has played, and can or should play in future, towards attaining the EU 2020 Strategy, particularly with reference to decreasing emissions and increasing renewables. It also explores the persistent diversity in energy strategies among member states. To do so, it first surveys the current landscape of nuclear energy use and then presents the interrelated concepts of path dependency, momentum, and lock-in. The article proceeds to examine five factors that help explain national nuclear divergence: technological capacity and consumption; economic cost; security and materiality; national perceptions; and political, ideological and institutional factors. This divergence reveals a more general weakness in the 2020 Strategy’s underlying assumptions. Although energy security – defined as energy availability, reliability, affordability, and sustainability – remains a vital concern for all member states, the 2020 Strategy does not explicitly address questions of political participation, control, and power. The inverse relationship identified here – between intensity of nuclear commitments, and emissions mitigation and uptake of renewable sources – underscores the importance of increasing citizens’ levels of energy policy awareness and participation in policy design.
Read more: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14693062.2016.1179616
Even James Hansen, former NASA GISS director and arguably the originator of the global climate movement, believes nuclear power is an essential component of the path to a low carbon future.
Unless you are lucky enough to have the right geography for large scale hydro, nuclear is the only proven low carbon means of producing reliable biddable baseload power.
To argue that countries which have a strong commitment to nuclear power are not “doing their bit” to reduce CO2 emissions in my opinion is total lunacy.
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Nuclear is too costly, too dangerous. Germany made the right move to get rid of nuclear and go heavy on renewables. Solar PV farm contracts are selling at less than 4 cents, but old already paid for nuclear dies at retail rate of 14 cents (Kewaunee)
I am an expert and have done over 2000 projects, mostly Hawaii. Where is became very obvious that the grid is way more robust and with way more diversity than even this conservative engineer had anticipated. With electric cars plugged in the grid 94% of the time and used to buffer renewable, the need for any additional storage is a decade off.
How much is too costly? I claim that nuclear electricity is the cheapest of all sources. Who is right? Give me the numbers you are using for your allegation.
It is too dangerous? On the contrary. The safest of all sources, where wind is the most dangerous one with the greatest loss of live per unit of electricity produced. Aside from the documented killing of birds and bats. In that sense, your car is more dangerous; Hiroshima and Nagasaki that received irradiation incomparable to anything you might think of have been thriving cities where wasteland was forecast to stay for millennia. Wildlife about Chernobyl is thriving.
You did not read my comment, or you refuse to address the issue of cost.
They shut down Kewaunee selling at 14 cents. Nuclear gets around 5 cents per kWH subsidies.
Solar on PV farms has contracts to supply at 4 cents and less now.
Danger is NOT to the workers, it is to the public and the environment. All plants leak, they submit an annual report on how much. Then the occasional sacrifice zone created by accidents, which by the way, are always covered up until they have to fess up.
Bomb radiation presents mostly a one time attack, in which much of the fission fraction is very short lived I-131, half life of 8 days. Incidentally, the Japanese got off “easy” because the I-131 goes to the thyroid like a magnet and does it most harm there, however since the Japanese eat lots of kelp and are therefore fully loaded in iodine, they didn’t absorb much of the radioactive stuff.
Chernobyl is not thriving. There is wildlife because there are few people, Cesium in the environment has remarkably not gone down even though half life says it should. Insects and Fungi and decomposition of stuff is just not present, not working the way they should. Wolves are much smaller than their healthy breathren, many species of birds no longer exist.
I expect more from readers at WUWT.
Jack,
You do forget the necessary backup for solar and wind. For every MW installed solar and wind you need 1 MW fossil or hydro or nuclear backup. Part of it with very fast ramp up times to compensate for country-wide windfall.
Traditional plants need some 10% backup for in case that a plant unexpectedly shuts down. For wind and sun that is 100%. Until now wind and sun can profit from the existing backup and the grid control by the traditional power plants.
Wind and solar farms have not the slightest obligation to regulate the grid. Their supply has priority, except if overpowering the grid. The 4 ct/kWh is a fixed price, while at the moment that there is much sun and wind the market price is zero or even negative and when needed and pricea are high, there is no sun and wind… Traditional plants bear all the costs for backup and control, while that should be paid by the cause: wind and sun…
Nuclear gets “subsidies”? Maybe in Hawaii, certainly not here in Belgium (~50% nuclear power), where they have to pay extra taxes because the shutdown of the oldest plants was postponed for 10 years. Large solar and wind farms receive “Green Power Certificates”, which are paid by the consumers, with as result a 50% increase in power price…
Forget electric cars as buffer, because of their numbers and capacity. Only hydro may give enough buffer capacity…
Note: about Tsjernobyl, read a recent visit by experts at:
http://kaltduschenmitdoris.ch/images/pdf/Reise%20ins%20Innere.pdf
It is in German, but Google Translate is your friend.
Background radiation at Pripyat at 3-4 km from the reactor: 0.22 microSievert/h, that is less than in many towns on earth. Up to 5 microSievert/h near the reactor building, that is less than in an intercontinental flight…
Sorry, my comment was for stock, not jake…
Seen it before.
It’s 100% 24 carat scientifically illiterate drivel.
Well, if you check out the proposed Hinkley plant in the UK, it gets a 35 year guaranteed price for what it generates, which is at a rate higher than all current generation sources…
that’s too high… (we don’t yet know what the other 3 designs proposed for the UK would cost or the strike price for their output)
Christoffer,
I have read your scenario, which is far too optimistic… During a peak moment in winter a few years ago, just before sunrise, wind was effectively zero in Spain with no sunlight. No output at all of these renewables at maximum demand, that is reality… Even looking at hourly averages can be misleading for wind, as that can fluctuate from full load to zero within 15 minutes countrywide. Coupling the grid over the full US or Europe for far more capacity than today may be of help, but is of no guarantee for reliability, as e.g. most of Europe may be under a blocking high pressure system mid winter with plunging temperatures during days up to a few weeks with zero wind and some 10% of nameplate capacity during a few hours for solar.
Less intervention if you increase solar/wind capacity? You must be joking. Reality is that “conventional” backup needed to get in a few thousand times last year in Germany, while in previous years it was less than 10 times…
Further the price: Even if wind and sun were really competitive, the investments for the 100% backup needed should be paid by the renewables + the investments in local and national/international grid fortifications, as that isn’t needed for conventional power plants. Even the extra gas used by the necessary fast gasturbines to backup fast windfall should be added to the wind output. And to be fair: the real market price should be paid at the moment of delivery…
As a side note:
In Europe, different companies sell their power to clients, where the grid is independently managed. Some companies only deliver “green” power, thus in fact thrive on subsidies, and have priority on the net, while others have a mix and are asked by the grid owner to control frequency and balance and being paid for it. Not enough, as some like in Germany are working at a loss. They have demanded for subsidies too, or they will stop balancing the power…
Christoffer,
I have read your scenario, which is far too optimistic… During a peak moment in winter a few years ago, just before sunrise, wind was effectively zero in Spain with no sunlight. No output at all of these renewables at maximum demand, that is reality… Even looking at hourly averages can be misleading for wind, as that can fluctuate from full load to zero within 15 minutes countrywide. Coupling the grid over the full US or Europe for far more capacity than today may be of help, but is of no guarantee for reliability, as e.g. most of Europe may be under a blocking high pressure system mid winter with plunging temperatures during days up to a few weeks with zero wind and some 10% of nameplate capacity during a few hours for solar.
Less intervention if you increase solar/wind capacity? You must be joking. Reality is that “conventional” fast backup needed to get in a few thousand times last year in Germany, while in previous years it was less than 10 times…
Further the price: Even if wind and sun were really competitive, the investments for the 100% backup needed should be paid by the renewables + the investments in local and national/international grid expansions, as that isn’t needed for conventional power plants. Even the extra gas used by the necessary fast gas turbines to backup fast windfall should be added to the wind output price. And to be fair: the real market price should be paid at the moment of delivery…
As a side note:
In Europe, different companies sell their power to clients, where the grid is independently managed. Some companies only deliver “green” power, thus in fact thrive on subsidies, and have priority on the net, while others have a mix and are asked by the grid owner to control frequency and balance and being paid for it. Not enough, as some like in Germany are working at a loss. They have demanded for subsidies too, or they will stop balancing the power…
Ferd, you do realize that nuclear plants need 100% backup.
They trip out at a moments notice, and the grid needs to have the backup already rolling.
The backup for solar is already there, so you are pretending there is some additional cost.
Solar supplies to the grid when it needs it the most, and solar customers put load on the grid when the grid needs it the most.
Stock,
Conventional power plants need a backup for one unit, that is when one nuclear plant suddenly shuts down (at ~1000 MW) or one fossil plant (800 MW) or STEG plant (at ~500 MW), etc. In our country we have five nuclear plants of about 1000 MW each and two of 430 MW.
Total nuclear capacity near 6000 MW, about 50% of peak use in winter. If one of the large nuclear – or fossil – plants shuts down, you need maximum 1000 MW of fast back-up by the other plants or the fast pumped-storage (~1100 MW) hydro plant at Coo with about 5 hours full capacity storage. Long enough to allow the other plants to come at full capacity. That is all you need in winter at highest demand. Even if a second one goes down, that can be managed by imports from France, which has plenty of nuclear and hydro…
Installed capacity of wind and solar is currently around 25% of all installed power production. If there is no sun at night and no wind (which often occurs at sunset on my wind meter), that has zero output, so you need 25% (partly fast) backup, instead of the less than 10% needed for the shutdown of one nuclear or fossil plant…
I do agree that solar is the less worse option, as that delivers most when demand is highest, but most in summer, when demand is 30% below winter use, while in winter the output is 10% of nameplate capacity due to low sun input and not in peak hours (after sunset…). Solar is anyway far more predictable than wind and changes in solar output are far slower. Wind is simply a mess: unpredictable, locally extreme fast changes in minutes from full capacity to zero and back. Within 15 minutes for a whole country. The 10% pumped hydro + a few small dams still can manage most of the fast changes, together with a few fast gas turbines, but if they go on with more off-shore wind, one day the disaster will strike…
stock:
The backup for solar is already there, so you are pretending there is some additional cost.
Of course the full capacity of power production is already there, because it was installed before the addition of wind and solar. All what wind and sun do is profiteering from the existing installed capacity, which then part of the time is out of work, thus less profitable, but that is not paid for by wind and sun companies…
Even if you should build a total power system from scratch, you need to install everything in double no matter the nameplate capacity of installed wind and sun. Even if you install 300% of peak power use in nameplate capacity from wind and solar, you need 100% peak power back-up by conventional plants + 10% reserve…
“I am an expert…”
Hmmm…
Is that a weak ad hominem?
When trying to discover the reasons for the political class’s fixation on wind and solar, I suggest the old adage – follow the money. In the past ten or twelve years, well over $2 trillion has been spent worldwide on so-called renewable energy, mainly wind and solar (you can check the figures on Bloomberg New Energy Finance). Vast fortunes have been made as a result. With a tsunami of money of this size, there is no end to the numbers of politicians who can be bought, academics who can be persuaded to say the appropriate words, and journalists who can be persuaded to defend the faith.
No matter how expensive or ineffective wind and solar might be, they are going to be here with us until one or more political leaders are prepared to say “enough with this nonsense”.
I betcha you gonna take that incorrect position to the Graves
Griff is a committed [pruned]. Too bad these greens can’t be the first to suffer when there is not enough power. Vote green, accept blackouts first!,
Love all
We in nuclear countries are already suffering from the nuclear waste everywhere. Especially in the United States and Japan.
[riiiiight, like it’s just in the dumpster outside your office. Nonsensical comment. -mod]
,,,Can you back up your claim with proof ?? Of course not ! Have you ever TRIED to verify your silly claim ?? Of course not….which, of course, makes you just another uneducated Troll !
Thanks for your reasoned and rational reply to the points I have posted – and the many citations and pieces of scientific research with which you have backed it up.
Do not the Venona papers show that the anti-nuclear movement is a product of Soviet psy-ops?
As nuclear energy provides power with less carbon dioxide production per Gigawatt-hour than solar or wind turbines, the only rational reason to support solar and wind over nuclear is to line the pockets of solar and wind industry.
Hmmm, Fukushima 3, 4, and 1 all seem very good reasons to be anti-nuclear
stock: “Hmmm, Fukushima 3, 4, and 1 all seem very good reasons to be anti-nuclear”
In fact, hydro power is responsible for several orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear power. Take the Banqiao Dam disaster, for example:
Casualties
According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Or the Sichuan earthquake, perhaps:
BEIJING — Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s geological fault line.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/world/asia/06quake.html?pagewanted=all
Do you consider those two events all seem very good reasons to be anti-hydro?
cat, if the Chinese want to build crappy dams, we can’t do much to stop them. But no, that doesn’t make me anti-hydro.
Also their dam failure does not affect anyone in any other country. As the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents have, and with long lasting effects, and long painful, costly, deaths.
Renewables have made Germany strong. There are more than 2 million solar homes in California. Nuclear is not economical. There is no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste. Millions of tons of it. Each nuclear reactor creates 2 thousand tons of high level nuclear waste annually. They would have to build thousands of nuclear reactors or millions of npps and it would still eat up fossil fuels to dig mill uranium and haul the deadly radionuclide’s everywhere. Nuclear is a lie. Renewables are real technology. Boiling water with plutonium is deadly and stupid. It is not technology. https://nuclear-news.net
https://nuclear-news.net/2016/08/30/nuclears-whopping-climate-lie-theme-for-september-2016/
https://nuclear-news.net/2016/08/31/nuclear-hotseat-271-how-radiation-in-oceans-contaminates-our-food-supply-tim-deere-jones/
https://nuclear-news.net/2016/08/31/nuclear-hotseat-271-how-radiation-in-oceans-contaminates-our-food-supply-tim-deere-jones/
Bollocks.
“There are more than 2 million solar homes in California.”
I maintain that 2 million families have been sc*med. Promising to save money in the future is a very common sc*m.
“There is no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste. ”
There are many ways to store spent fuel. Been doing since WWII.
PV produces more hazardous waste per kwh than nuclear.
“Renewables are real technology. Boiling water with plutonium is deadly and stupid. It is not technology.”
I wonder what engineering degree loveall has? It takes a lot of hard work to become an engineer. There is nothing deadly about fissioning plutonium to boil water to make electricity. It may require more work to understand than the photoelectric effect.
Loveall,
Renewables have made that Denmark (the wind champions) and Germany have by far the highest family power prices in Europe. Not (yet) the industry there, except the fossil fuel power plants, which must regulate the intermittent power delivery from their “green” colleagues…
I don’t know what your source of “knowledge” is about the nuclear industry, but here every nuclear plant of 1000 MW produces about 2 m3 of high radioactive waste/year, encapsulated in glass pearls. You need to store that in a safe place for about 600 years and then it is harmless. That safe place is found in my country at 300 m depth in a very thick clay layer which hasn’t changed over 20 million years. They still are doing duration tests since decades to see if the waste heat is adequately removed and water migration is slow enough.
I know, in the US they don’t recycle used uranium, so the amount of waste there is about 20 times larger. That is 40 m3/year which needs safe storage during 600 years, the remaining uranium is very weak in radiation. Seems that you still are one or a few orders of magnitude off…
Every source of energy needs energy for exploring, refining, building, maintenance,… For nuclear that is not different than for solar panels or wind mills or hydro dams: about 7% of all energy delivered during its lifetime is used as “pre-combustion” energy. That is all.
I have an undergraduate degree in engineering. I have a PhD in Biohemistry. I have worked in nuclear facilities, as have many note anti-nuclear scientists.
Most high level nuclear waste is stored in storage pools long-term, next to nuclear reactors. If the water drains from the fuel pools, many which have existed for the life of the 40, 30, 20 yo and less reactors, they will burn to the equivalent of thousands of nuclear bombs worth of highly poisonous radionuclide’s. Yes, that much cesium137, uranium, americium, strontium 90, plutonium and other highly toxic radionucleides will be released into the air, soil, and water. Some carried for hundreds of miles or thounsands of miles in water.
It has happened at Fukushima. There are no viable safe places to store nuclear waste. The Germans want to shift their salt mine nuclear waste to the united states. Yucca mountain was stopped because it was not deemed geolically safe. Much nuclear waste has been dumped into the sea. The WIPP saltmine nuclear waste dump, in New Mexico caught fire because of the unsafe mix of organic kitty litter. At 2 billion for cleanup costs, and permanent contamination of the area, was it worth it at WIPP?
Vitrification has never worked, as shown at Hanford, which has leaked radionucleides into the Columbia since the 1940s.
The Italian Mafia has shipped Europe’s nuclear water to Somalia and buried it in landfills in southern Italy accounting for numerous cancer clusters there. So many thousands of nasty secrets out there.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is still not safe. There is a lot of cesium 137 there at this time. Unusual be cause it has gone through a half-life, meaning there was much more deadly cesium 137 than was known or admitted too. There was also iodine 131 released and strontium 90. All 6000 scientists called to clean chernobyl are dead from cancer. Yablakov published a paper proving 1 million died from Chernobyl. There are some animals at Chernobyl’s exclusion zone because there are no people. The wolves found are abnormally small.
There has been an average of a major nuclear accident every 5 to seven years since nuclear powers inception. Santa Susana’s 3 nuclear meltdowns by Los Angeles were noted and covered.
Fukushima has three full-blown meltdowns that are still in progress.
Belarus continues to have trouble withe the contamination from Chernobyl. Massive numbers of Children with radionucleide induced heart defects.
Most people are alarmed when they here about the possibility of nuclear waste being transported in their areas.
It is a major preveracation to say that nuclear waste has been safely stored since world war 2.
Loveall,
If you have worked in the nuclear industry – I have done my B.Sc. thesis in nuclear waste recovery of Cs-137 and Sr-90 – you should know that storage of spent fuel and abandoned reactors needs only 30-40 years to have most of the high level radiation reduced to near zero. Uranium and Plutonium have such a low radiation level that you only need a newspaper to protect you from the radiation. But indeed you need to separate it with water or other means to prevent a chain reaction…
Cs137 and Sr90 are the difficult ones: they have a half life time of ~30 years and need about 600 years of safe storage. That is what in Europe is done: separating the 5% waste in spent fuels from uranium and plutonium, which then can be reused as (MOX) fuel in existing plants. That means a lot of reduction in volume, compared to the US where all spent fuel is wasted.
As said elsewhere, one need safe storage for a long period. Salt mines are far less reliable than first thought. Yucca mountain, I don’t know, but have the impression that it was more a political decission not to go on with the project than for technical reasons. In my country they are testing clay layers as safe disposal since the 1980’s and last year they started a project for heating the clay over a decade to see how the remaining heat production of high radioactive waste is distributed. See:
https://www.sckcen.be/en/Technology_future/Radioactive_waste/Geological_disposal
As far as I know, no reactor waste was dumped in the oceans, what was dumped was mainly remains of medical and technical applications and cleanup waste. In general embedded in tar, not easily decomposing. That still is the largest volume of waste now stored on land.
Please read the latest report of Tsjernobyl from a group of experts: the area around the reactor is completely safe. The highest levels found are above moss, as that acts as a sponge for all minerals, including Cs-137. Even that was below levels measured in many towns on earth.
Cancer fatalities from Tsjernobyl? Not countable according to the WHO, which I do trust more on that part than people who simply calculate excess cancers form a straight line relation between radiation dose and cancer rate, while that is simply not true for radiation, even reverses at low doses…
It is possible that many of the cleanup workers died from the extra radiation, but the real figures are hard to obtain from the Russians…
I never heard of heart problems related to radiation. Some source for that?
Retired, Plutonium is one of the most deadly things created. About 6000 pounds were released from Fukushima in the initial blasts, and more is leaching out daily.
But as little as 1 millionth of one gram is enough to kill a human, and a dose of 350 millionths of a gram is a pretty much 100% kill rate within a few years.
So pretending that high hazard is not created by nuclear power, is disingenuous at best.
stock: “Retired, Plutonium is one of the most deadly things created. About 6000 pounds were released from Fukushima in the initial blasts”
More utter nonsense.
You really haven’t a clue, have you?
Yo Cat, indeed the EPA released air test data that detected over the whole Pacific about 200 tons of “excess uranium” in the air days after Fukushima. Roughly 3% to 6% is going to also be Plutonium.
The proof is here.
http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/p/uranium-aerosolized-into-atmosphere.html
Stock,
about 200 tons of “excess uranium” in the air days after Fukushima.
That website is not very reliable, to say the least: the explosions at Fukushima were from hydrogen (which could have been prevented by a better design…), not from a chain reaction. He calculates the total airborne uranium quantity from local measurements on the total volume of air, while a cloud follows narrow wind paths… Further the table for airborne Pu shows zero detectable amounts and U zero to extreme low values.
His story about reindeer in Norway not killed by lightning but resulting from the Chernobyl fallout puts him in the same class as many other conspiracy believers, including you, as I see in the comments…
Moreover, from all places in Norway, the Hardangervidda where the reindeer were killed had one of the lowest rates of fallout from Chernobyl. There was (and is) an advice to eat no/less reindeer meat for many parts of Norway, which is of no use for the Hardangervidda herd, as that are the only wild reindeer in Scandinavia and living in a large nature reserve thus may not be killed and eaten…
See further about the Chernobyl fallout:
http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/25/049/25049596.pdf
which contains an interesting (pre-Fukushima) estimate of fallouts from the nuclear bomb tests and other nuclear accidents. The Nuclear bomb tests did give 10-10,000 times more fallout of different radionucleides than Chernobyl (table 1, page 13)…
BTW, the main contaminants in the Norway fallout, Cs-137 and Cs-134 behaves in the body in a similar way as potassium, thus can be compared to the banana radiation in “banana equivalents”…
“He calculates the total airborne uranium quantity from local measurements on the total volume of air, while a cloud follows narrow wind paths… Further the table for airborne Pu shows zero detectable amounts and U zero to extreme low values.”
That first statement, instead of supporting your argument, refutes your argument. The points measured by the EPA were widespread. Saipan, Guam, Hawaii, Anaheim, San Francisco, Seattle. So I agree…there will be areas of higher “plume” and that would just add to the reality of more excess uranium.
The ND for plutonium is quite obvious. Not detected because “not tested”. It is simplistic reasoning to know that if uranium in the atmosphere went up 26 times higher the week after Fukushima, that where there is smoke there is fire. In spent fuel or a running reactor, and especially in the worst explosion at R3 which was running plutonium enriched MOX fuel….wherever you measure excess uranium, there is going to also be plutonium, whether you measure for it or not.
Stock,
The fact that levels of uranium at different places were varying from day to day between ND (= not detectable, that is not the same as “not measured”) and extreme low amounts, proves that the spread of Pu and U was not homogenious over the full air mass, as was the case for the Chernobyl spread too.
Further, Pu from the fallout of the nuclear bomb tests was 10 PBq, from Chernobyl 0.09 PBq. In Chernobyl the whole reactor itself exploded and much of the kernel graphite burned out, spreading Pu and U over – mostly nearby – areas.
As far as I know, the reactors in Fukushima didn’t explode, but the hydrogen formed by the splitting of water at extreme temperatures and radiation did build up in de building around the reactor and that exploded. Some chain reaction from the leaking containers of spent fuel may have added Pu and U to that, but anyway an order (or orders) of magnitude smaller than at the Chernobyl disaster…
Again such disasters should be prevented with every means, but nobody did expect such an extreme earthquake – which the reactors survived – and the following once in 1,000 years tsunami which killed tenthousands…
Ferd, oh my….you say the reactors at Fukushima survived? Surely you jest.
Extreme low amounts…..really? 26 times what is normally in the air? that is extreme high amounts.
The EPA air tests I reference are 24 to 72 hour bulk collections on air filters, not “varying day to day” as you suggest without any reference or link.
As far as you know about reactors not exploding or fuel pools not burning, I suggest that you do more research because that is in fact, what happened.
Stock,
Please read your own sources more careful:
The disaster happened on March 11.
Measurements on March 15 at Anaheim; 0.000044 pCi/m3 U-234, other Pu and U isotopes ND.
Measurements on March 20 at Anaheim: no U and Pu isotopes detectable.
Measurements on March 19 at Guam: no U and Pu isotopes detectable.
Measurements on March 23 at Guam: 0.0003 pCi/m3 U-234, 0.0002 pCi/m3 U-238
Which shows that the contamination was moving from one place to the next and certainly not homogenous in the total air mass, no matter if the sampling was per day or over a few days.
Further the timeline of Fukushima:
http://www.livescience.com/13294-timeline-events-japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactors.html
Which shows that the explosions were from releasing the increasing pressure in the reactor, which contained a lot of hydrogen and that exploded. The reactors didn’t explode, that is an enormous difference with Chernobyl, where the chain reaction caused 3.000 bar pressure with as result that the reactor lid was launched and part of the kernel itself exploded by the pressure release and the graphite present started to burn…
The reactors at Fukushima survived the earthquake of scale 9 with minimal damage, while oroginally designed to survive an earthquake of scale 7, 100 times less in strength. What was not foreseen was that the tsunami was 10 m high, while the tsunami wall was “only” 6 m high. That killed the cooling water diesel pumps.
The reactors may have been damaged and partly melted away because of lack of cooling, but that has not the same effect as a reactor kernel launched in the air by pressure and fire…
There was a fire in one of the spent fuel storage compartments during a few hours and that may be the main cause of the U/Pu contamination.
26 times what is normally in the air? that is extreme high amounts
26 times near zero still is near zero…
Tests for Pu and Cs in “black matter” in a wide area around the reactors give as conclusion that some 580 mg (milligram!) plutonium may have been released via the air (40,000 times less than at Chernobyl!). Releases via water may have beeen (and still may be) much higher, but that was not (yet) quantified.
It looks like that your estimate of airborne U/PU is many orders of magnitude wrong…
Sorry, but the credibility of your reference is completely shot. they state in their “timeline” that on March 14th
The reactors Units 1, 2 and 3 of the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant were pronounced to be in cold shutdown status, meaning the pressure of the water coolant in the three reactors was around atmospheric level and the temperature was below 100 degrees Celsius. Under these conditions, the reactors were considered to be safely under control. Unit 4 was not yet in a cold shutdown.
March 15:
Then they even fail to mention that Unit 3 blew sky high, followed by Unit 4 going sky high.
Protecting nuclear is like protecting Hillary, its a death wish.
Stock,
The timeline may not be completely right, but that is not important. Important is that your calculated quantities of U and PU released by the Fukushima disaster are certainly many orders of magnitude wrong.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971301173X
Another one about the releases from Fukushima:
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=127297
As that is not the only point where you are wrong in this discussion, like the necessary 100% (not paid for) backup for wind and solar. My impression is that you want to push these unreliable energy sources at any cost and demonish nuclear with whatever wrong argument you can find…
I am only interested in what is affordable with a minimum risk and minimum contamination. If that is nuclear, so be it, if that is coal, so be it. Anyway wind is the worst solution if you don’t have hydro as buffer, solar is more interesting, as that delivers when demand is highest – in summer, but not in winter when you can use it most. Both are way too expensive and hardly reduce CO2 emissions, which need to be reduced is very questionable…
Renewables have provided Germany with the highest household electricity prices in Europe
However, Germans use very efficient appliances and very many of them also have their own solar panels or shares in community renewables, which offsets the cost. German electricity bills are not exceptional…
They also have very efficiently insulated homes… there are in addition there are numbers of passivehaus which are so effectively insulated they need no heating or cooling…
Germans overwhelmingly support their renewable energy programme…
Germany is facing severe problems with grid instability and high energy costs. Germany is simply not well suited for solar at as any 14 year old school child ought to know.
The government is having to heavily subsidise energy costs for business (at expense to the German tax payer) and notwithstanding this subsidy the energy price is so high that many German businesses are becoming uncompetitive and high energy intensive industries are relocating off-shore. A number of well known German petro/chemicals are relocating to the States because of the lower energy costs.
the position with respect to uncompetitiveness would be even worse if it was not for the fact that all its European neighbours have also pursued stupid energy policies which have caused its neighbours also to have high energy costs.
At the end of the day, everyone suffers from this approach and the needless high energy costs that Europe has been saddled with. The only reason that the political class have got away with matters for so long is that they conceal facts and misrepresent the position. If the German public were given the true facts then they would not be behind the renewable programme. In due course they will learn that they have been deceived and once again faith and confidence in the political class will be further eroded.
We can see all across the globe that the public are falling out of love with the political elite and confidence in them is at all times low. This trend will continue as new matters and issues come to light. One of these will be the false cAGW and the creaming of taxes, subsidies and money taken from the public to pay for something devoid of merit. As in all matters, the time will come when there will eventually be payback.
Yo Verney, you say Germany electric going way up in cost? Non sense, it is going down.
http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/2016/07/what-is-solar-doing-to-electric-cost-in.html
Stock,
Again, you forget that wind and sun have full priority in Germany, are heavily subsidized with astronomic feed-in tariffs and thus can sell under the market price. Indeed at the cost of conventional providers which must certify the stability of the net and provide -expensive- backup when there is no wind and sun. These firms work today with a loss and the households in Germany do pay the difference…
A few comments:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-against-the-limits-of-renewables/
https://stopthesethings.com/2016/04/11/germanys-wind-solar-obsession-killing-industry-thousands-of-real-jobs/
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/veroeffentlichungen-pdf-dateien-en/studien-und-konzeptpapiere/recent-facts-about-photovoltaics-in-germany.pdf
From the latter:
The feed-in tariff for roof systems that began operation in May 2016 is up to 12.31 €-cts/kWh for the next twenty years
That is a feed-in tariff of 123.1 euro/MWh or about 3 times the price of atomic power or twice that of coal power or 50% more than gas power… Complete madness…
Richard, Germany has the worlds most stable grid
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electricity-grid-stable-amid-energy-transition
Der Speigel does not paint such a rosy picture.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/instability-in-power-grid-comes-at-high-cost-for-german-industry-a-850419.html
Nor does:
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=grid+stability+germany&d=4529912228152064&mkt=es-ES&setlang=en-US&w=uwWI-MWO33gL90PqLqOBp5EkRcpjeIYH
I do accept that the Germans are spending a lot of money and taking a lot of (costly) steps with a view to ensuring grid stability which steps would not have been necessary had they not embarked down the renewables route.
Richard, you are touting an article from 2012 about Germany’s grid? Seriously? Shame on you
stock,
Germany still has a relative stable grid, because they let their conventional plants running all the time, while dumping the excess total power at the neighbours, be it that solar and higher internal demand are going up and down together (at least in summer, in winter there is hardly any solar production).
The German power installed, production, export and import are really fascinating at:
https://www.energy-charts.de/
Which shows that it is mainly the neighbours together with their own coal and hydro plants which must regulate their net.
“I am an expert and have done over 2000 projects …”
Stock is an expert sc*m artist.
Let me talk about my first commercial nuclear project, Susquehanna Steam Electric Station. It has been making 1200+ MWe of electricity on cold winter nights since 1982. It gets cold there.
Kewaunee is a much smaller plant whose construction was before my time in the commercial industry. It made electricity on cold winter nights for almost 40 years of cold winter nights. The current low cost of natural gas is the economic reason for the plant not running beyond it is design life.
“PV farms has contracts to supply at 4 cents ”
That is something a sc*m artist would say when comparing mild climate PV to places that have cold winter nights.
“they didn’t absorb much of the radioactive stuff”
Because they were not exposed. For the record, PV converts solar radiation to electricity. I have been hurt many time by solar radiation but never by radiation from nuke plants. No one in the US or Japan has been hurt by radiation from nuke plants.
Ah, Retired, you rely on the “you will be in the cold and dark” unless we have nuclear.
That is such an old false argument / lie, I am sick of responding to such nonsense. And eff you for calling me a scam artist.
The money quote in their own words: While it’s difficult to show a causal link, the researchers say the study casts significant doubts on nuclear energy as the answer to combating climate change.
In other words, the facts don’t support our world view but facts be damned, our view is the only correct view. Why the fixation upon a certain solution? Because wind and solar are a solution in search of a problem to solve with a guaranteed profit using tax payer funds. The mark of self serving elites are the demands that everyone pay for their great ideas, no matter how unsustainable they are in the real world. The demand for tax payer funds is the de facto admission the idea/program/solution is unsustainable. It is no surprise that a person who lives off of government grants to study anything such as AGW will advocate for his own well being no matter how detrimental it is to others. The zero sum game is played by a self serving person.
In other news, countries with starving populations are not buying enough champagne or caviar.
Wallowing in a world of nuclear filth and death, for a slice burnt toast, maybe fine for you monsters. it is not for the rest of us.
You ignorant child, by no stretch of imagination do you bedwetters constitute “us”.
60 percent of Americans are against nuclear power. That is a majority.
Nuclear death that causes animal extinctions, cancer, chronic disease, birth defects is murder it is not birth control.
I think you need to revise your medication program.
When a bloke has to resort to personal attacks and ad hominims he has lost any credibility.
Says the troll who just posted “maybe fine for you monsters”.
Hypocrite much, dipstick?
Loveall,
Nobody needs personal attacks to show that you have no credibility at all, as your “arguments” have zero credibility without any underlying figures.
Like:
– How many animals were wiped out by nuclear power plants, including the Tsjernobyl and Fukushima disasters (animals around Tsjernobyl are thriving as never before).
– How many cancers were caused by Tsjernobyl (according to the WHO, too low to be detected in the normal average cancer rates).
– How many more chronic deseases and birth defects around Tsjernobyl or other parts of the world with high fallout (according to the chronicles, some unexplained 6 extra cases of mongoloids in Berlin, with conception in the period that the fallout passed there).
This conversation is ridiculous, a bunch of people saying our technology cant keep up with the economics of the times… Nuke is DEAD, Solar and wind took the field, building GIANT poison machines is just not gonna be a meme that people want to live by anymore.
[and if fusion comes of age, where there are no radioactive waste products of consequence, will you and “people” reject that as well? -mod]
Graham,
Building giant bird and bat killing machines is of course much better than nuclear that has maybe killed a few dozen people over the past 60 year while delivering enormous quantities of reliable power.
I do live less than 5 km from a 3000 MW nuclear plant in the main wind direction. I don’t feel the slightest need to move to the other side of the country, but would protest if they were planning to implant a wind mill in my neighbourhood (which is a rich bat habitat)…
The nuke industry can’t be all that dead, as there are 61 new units under construction at the moment, with 170 more on order or planned. Most are in China, Russia, and India. India has few natural resources, but has lots of Thorium, and they are ahead of all other countries on the road to building fast breeder reactors to use that Thorium.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figures/world-nuclear-power-reactors-and-uranium-requireme.aspx
This is how economical nuclear is. This project required 15 billion in government subsidies.
http://www.mcall.com/business/mc-talen-energy-withdraws-nuclear-plant-application-20160831-story.html
A 122 million dollar boondoggle.
There is no entitity that will insure
Against a nuclear accident so the US congress passed the Price-Anderson act, making the taxpayers pick up the bill of a nuclear accident.
There were major riots and demonstrations in lyanyunggangChina, when the Chinese government announced a nuclear processing facility there. http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/china-protest-08082016125330.html
I doubt the 61 nuclear plants the man said under construction will be completed, as with the talen plant. Billions of government subsidies necessary. No safe place for waste. Infinite liability to taxpayers. Permanent contamination. So goes using uranium and plutonium to boil water.
Hinckley is dead in the water. Just hype and propaganda, which has been the norm of nuclear for 70 years or so.
Thorium is converted to uranium in thorium rectors. More of the uranium to boil water for energy boondoggle. No place to put the waste.
The Who is a captive agency of the International atomic energy agency. They are bound to not report nuclear casualties accurately by charter. So goes the bogus propaganda of nuclear. No leg to stand on without preveracation and propaganda. Let them eat cesium 137, tritium, iodine 131, strontium 90, uranium and plutonium Americium is their motto. All they will look at is the initial gamma flash from a meltdown. Not the the biocummulation of manmade radionuclide’s in living organisms from ongoing contamination and nuclear accidents.
Loveall,
Of course the WHO is paid by the nuclear industry to lie about cancer rates. And Greenpeace and friends know the only truth… Unfortunately for your “knowledge”, there are studies of cancer rates at Misasa, Japan, some 1,000 km from Fukushima, where natural background radiation (from radon) is quite high. Permanent residents of Misasa have half the average cancer rates in two studies and similar rates in one study, compared to the average of Japan. 600,000 visitors per year are coming to Misasa to inhale the steam from the high radon sources for its healing effect:
http://spa-misasa.jp/eng/
BTW, do you eat banana’s? Don’t do that if you are afraid from ingesting radioactive elements: it contains -natural- radioactive potassium in such quantities that containers with banana’s often do give false alarms when scanned…
Loveall:
This project required 15 billion in government subsidies.
Or how you distort the truth: the 15 billion is a loan, not really what one would call a “subsidy”, which is what wind and sun receive and is paid for by the consumers. A loan needs to be paid back over time and until now nuclear plants have paid their loans back with interest and all…
No insurance company in the world can afford the costs of a nuclear disaster, neither of a natural disaster like the Japanese tsunami which destroyed the Fukushima reactors and wiped out complete towns, even if the probability is extremely small. Thus if a country wants to have nuclear, and allows building towns on the coast of tsunami prone seasides, the country is responsible for the damage…
LOL Ferd plays the old classic “Banana lie” about radioactive K40 potassium. Hilarious. That lie debunk is here
http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-banana-debunk.html
Stock,
The article confirms that banana’s are radioactive. So that is not a lie, it is the simple truth. That the body makes that K-40 – or any -stable- potassium isotope is kept in balance is true, but has nothing to do with the fact that K-40 desintegrates with beta-radiation as result. That can (and does) damage DNA, but humans – and all life forms – have a quite good DNA repair mechanism that can cope with that. For radiation as good as for poisons. Until it gets too much or the repair mechanism fails for any reason (including getting older).
Of course, some elements like iodine get concentrated in the thyroid, which makes that one is far more vulnerable for thyroid cancer if exposed to ingestion/inhalation of radioactive iodine, which has lucky a very short half life time. Taking iodine pills when exposed to a nuclear disaster is quite effective to prevent the uptake of the unstable version and thus prevents thyroid cancer…
The point is that exposure to small amounts of radioactive materials are part of life, which doesn’t imply that one shouldn’t reduce the risk of nuclear disasters to an absolute minimum.
Why would they need to? They obviously are not stupid…
Nuclear waste storage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/05/sellafield-safety-concerns-over-staff-shortages-and-nuclear-wast/