Mother Jones - Comments for "Pro-Nuke? Anti-Nuke? Talk About It With the Experts"

My opinion

Nuclear Energy is great tool in our hands cause we can get a lot of energy without big problems. But we have to make it safety, I think that all of us remember about Chernobil' 86. mechanics homework

They have or are getting Nukes..

The bottom line is this. Those that hate our guts have or are quickly getting nukes. Do you want us all to be sitting ducks? It's like the bully in the playground. If you bow down, that bully beats the heck out of you. The bottom line is American safety along with our allies...Stay armed - just like gun laws. Those states that have concealed carry laws in place have lots less crime. It's just 1 + 1. It's too bad but it's a reality....

Thanks for the great dialogue, this conversation with the experts has concluded. We'll be following up this week with summary posts, so stay
tuned to the Blue Marble!

America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. We should use it for our energy needs instead of imported oil. (Al Gore's history is coal, Gore agreed with George W. Bush to extend and further fund the "Clean Coal" subsidy, for finding ways to clean up the burning of domestic coal, such as "sequestering" the resultant CO2 in sea beds or oil wells) Life is imperfect. Living has its risks. The greatest risk to a person being overweight. We control the hand that puts the food in the mouth. Too many Sierra Club members are food pigs at a time when we are running out of food due to producing too many third world people. On the left coast, we do our part to keep the production of people down, but the third world mind set of popping them out, regardless of the resources to feed them, must be stopped.

Douglas,
I have posted earlier about by own experience with localized generation, e.g. solar in a solar-friendly climate. The facts is that the sun shines on my roof only during the day, when I and my wife are at work, and my kids in school. When we are home, most of the time the sun does NOT shine. So we were dependent on fossil power (backup generators) for 75-80% of our energy need. Existing useable localized storage solutions, or large-scale central ones for that matter, do NOT exist and are not even in the experimental stage. The power grid is NOT the internet. You cannot compare the two. Besides, if large corporations have to sit in the background to provide storage and distribution of power for "localized" generators, what have you gained from localisation? I mean aside from lower efficiency, higher cost and higher overall CO2 output? I'll give you increased awareness. I was aware enough with the size of my propane bills. But increased awareness does not lower CO2 output, cook meals or keep the lights on.
Localized means in practice micro turbines or diesel/gas generators run with fossil fuel. And they are quite less efficient that big-central station ones. Just look at the development in airliners over the last 20 years. How many do you see now that have 4 engines? Most have only 2, but much bigger than in the past. Why? Because, as for most energy generation, smaller number of bigger units are more efficient than larger numbers of smaller units

Well, of course coal plants use a lot of water, and coal mines also tend to produce a lot of heavily polluted water.

Try http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02b.html

"A typical 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant draws about 2.2 billion gallons of water each year from nearby water bodies, such as lakes, rivers, or oceans, to create steam for turning its turbines. This is enough water to support a city of approximately 250,000 people."

The issue for light-water nuclear reactors is that the water has to be cold enough to cool the reactor - a nuclear reactor is far more energy-dense than a coal-fired boiler, and so needs more and colder water or you get a Chernobyl. This is why people are saying that the pebble-bed reactor, with 1/30th the power density, is a far safer nuclear power design.

Another issue is that if heated water is discharged into rivers, it can wipe them out - that is another problem that French reactors face every summer.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/23/business/edf.php

This is why the sensible thing to do is to first bring solar and wind up to the same energy-producing level that nuclear is at now, before building any new nuclear power plants.

At the same time, we will have to be shutting down and phasing out the use of the dirtiest fossil fuels - coal, tar sands, oil shales and heavy sulfur-rich crude oils.

Coal, natural gas, solar thermal, geothermal, and any other thermal plants need cooling water. Everyone who opposes nuclear power is de facto an advocate of coal power; why don't they say anything about the cooling needs of coal plants?

Stewart --

I just saw your comment now, buried in the rest. I don't know if anyone outside of the discussion was/is reading. But there do seem to be enough experts here to solve all of our energy problems.

We all ought to meet up for a tour of Rotterdam.

Judith

Sorenson asked: "Are you worried about the technological "elite" who know how to manufacture solar panels?"

I've got different questions for them, connected with the overall environmental cost of the panels that includes the energy and materials cost of their manufacture and decommissioning.

But as far as I'm aware the worst outcome from a rogue solar panel is it degrades into an expensive roof tile.

A nuclear power station gone wrong can meltdown and send a radioactive plume across a continent.

I think any reasonable person would agree that these are significant differences between the technologies.

Plus, local generation cuts powerline losses and increases human awareness of the need to recognise that energy is finite, and make the due economies. And it's distributed, which avoids single centralised catastrophic failures.
(cf the internet)

And the supply of sunshine is predicted to be good for another 5 billion years or so...

Douglas Carnall wrote,

Even if other forms of environmental pollution are a worse hazard, that isn't really a good argument for nuclear energy if you stop to think about it. Two wrongs don't make a right...

Of course nuclear engineers want to build more nuclear power stations, or they'll be out of a job. The question is: will our future grandchildren be glad we employed them to do so?

Yes, about as glad as we are that a few generations back our ancestors developed steam trains. A "wrong" that is too small to be properly so called, and is alternative to real wrongs, is indeed a right.

I'm better at learning this stuff than teaching it, but think I may be able to improve my last didactic posting. Carnall wrote,

Of couse vitrified waste in a geologically stable location could exist harmless to surface organisms for 1000 years **in theory.** The problem is getting to that point without mishap. As I tried to point out in my second post, there are an awful lot of variables to control along the way.

One of the variables to control is how much waste one tries to keep buried.

Which of two caches of human-made radioactivity contains more: the one with a tonne of uranium-236 or the one with a kilogram of strontium-90? It turns out to be the latter, because a tonne of uranium-236 makes, if I've punched right, just 1.7 watts of radiation, and according to the web 1 kilogram of strontium-90 produces 921 watts.

With this I introduce what I consider the essential measure of nuclear waste's burdensomeness, its radioactivity, measured in units of power.

The pronukosphere is full of well-meaning people who say things like,

I've done the conversion to more homey units. In this case, 15 Curies of Iodine-131 is LESS than 5 MILLIONTHS of an OUNCE!! ...

But ounces of radioisotope doesn't convey anything. Not to you, not to me, not to the man in the street.

Watts are both "homey" and technical: Yucca Mountain's capacity is determined by how many watts of heat its rock can conduct away. Keeping the stuff in dry casks at reactor sites while it ages from 5 years to 50 years, versus whipping it straight from the cooling pool to YM on the fifth anniversary of its retirement, would allow YM to hold three times more fuel rods, for each one, in aging from 5 to 50, loses two-thirds of its wattage. Without changing in mass or volume, it becomes a third as much nuclear waste as it used to be.

The essential thing about 921 watts' worth of strontium-90 is the 921 watts.

A round kilowatt's worth of it would mass 1.086 kilograms, and this mass is relevant only in being rather small, so that it can't produce the thousand watts for very long. In fact it fades away at the rate of 2.35 percent per year.

If you have a waste cache that begins the year with 1,000 watts of strontium-90, and receives none during the year, at its end there will be 976 watts of it.

If you keep on adding 24 watts of strontium-90 to the cache each year, you'll just be making up the loss. You won't be accumulating any radioactivity, just maintaining a steady level. That is what I meant by,

... the amount of radioactivity you have buried tends towards a limit and cannot exceed it; can never quite reach it, in fact.

If you start with nothing in your waste cache, and each year add 24 watts of strontium-90, you will never have a kilowatt of strontium-90, although you'll eventually get close.

So is this --

leftover radioactivity, at the limit that it tends toward ... buried deeper down than 'X' times as much natural radioactivity

-- clear now to anyone to whom formerly it was not? What did I mean by it?

Kirk Sorensen
"if the politicians will get out of the way and let the engineers fix the problem"

Is Technocracy totalitarian?
http://en.technocracynet.eu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11...

Here is a pretty good description of what a society run by engineers would look like:
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=71456

Nice.

It has been mentioned that:

>Everyone's heard about the European heat wave,
>and how some nuclear plants had to reduce power.
>What everyone didn't hear (thanks to the politically
>correct press), is that whereas overall nuclear
>power production over the affected region was down
>only ~7% (i.e., still ~93% of rated power),

and furthermore:

>The release of warm water from the cooling of
>thermal power plants is already regulated to
>protect the ecosystems of the receiving waters.

Some facts about how this played out in France,
in 2003 -- the year where a major heat wave hit
Europe, causing widespread drought and a few tens
of thousands of deaths.

1) During the summer 2003, French nuclear power
plants faced a problem: they were not allowed to
discharge cooling water into already overheated,
drought-depleted rivers. Scaling back power was
not sufficient, and some plants were facing the
prospect of halting entirely their reactors. The
solution: illegal discharges of cooling water --
ranging from a couple of hours to several weeks.

2) How did the government in charge of enforcing
environmental regulations react? By edicting a
temporary suspensions of legal norms regarding
the discharge of cooling water for 7 nuclear
power plants, lasting from the 13th August till
the 30th of September.

3) In 2004, the French government granted a
permanent waiver for those regulations to 3
nuclear power plants.

4) In the following summers, in particular in 2006,
several temporary waivers were again granted to
French nuclear power plants.

It has been mentioned that:

and furthermore:

>The release of warm water from the cooling of
>thermal power plants is already regulated to
>protect the ecosystems of the receiving waters.

Some facts about how this played out in France,
in 2003 -- the year where a major heat wave hit
Europe, causing widespread drought and a few tens
of thousands of deaths.

3) In 2004, the French government granted a
permanent waiver for those regulations to 3
nuclear power plants.

4) In the following summers, in particular in
2006, several additional temporary waivers were
again granted to French nuclear power plants.

Conclusions:
a) The influence of water (river) temperatures
on the functioning of nuclear power plants is
far from negligible.
b) When there is a conflict, generating electricity
trumps the environment.

Something to keep in mind as these heat waves
will become ever more frequent because of a
warming climate.

for the REAL story on US containment systems and their ability to protect us from a major disaster, see the web posting below.
why would any sane society take such a gamble, particularly when, as Al Gore says, nuke power cannot help solve the climate crisis?

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/chernobylcanhappenhere2005.pdf

Mr. Wheeler is an NRC-licensed nuclear reactor operator--I am not.

If all goes well, by Christmas I will be able to say that I have a masters' degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee, however!

SO MUCH FOR THE NONSENSE THAT AMERICAN REACTOR CONTAINMENTS ARE "IMMUNE" TO A CHERNBOYL-SIZED CATASTROPHE.
BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY....IN PARTICULAR WHEN IT COMES TO BELIEVING WHAT THE NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY HAS TO SAY ABOUT ITSELF:

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/chernobylcanhappenhere2005.pdf