The Bailout Goes Nuclear
Who's going to pay for new reactors? You are!
Unistar Nuclear Energy, which in 2007 became the first company in nearly 30 years to apply to build a new reactor in the US, bills itself as "the business model for a new generation of nuclear energy facilities." If that's so, taxpayers should be mighty concerned.
In addition to its proposed flagship plant in the tiny Chesapeake Bay town of Lusby, Maryland, UniStar plans to build three more reactors in Missouri, New York, and Pennsylvania. But while UniStar estimates that these projects will cost up to $38 billion, the company, a joint venture between a French nuclear firm and US-based Constellation Energy, had only about $575 million in assets and capital as of early 2009. Its plans to jump-start a nuclear revival hinge on getting the government to underwrite the enterprise, via federally backed loans. As UniStar's president and CEO George Vanderheyden warned in 2007, "Without the federal loan guarantees, this whole thing will come to a stop."
Most of the industry is banking on a similar strategy—and in the climate legislation staggering through Congress, it just may have found the vehicle. Key Senate Democrats have signaled that they are willing to use nuclear subsidies as a bargaining chip to overcome Republican opposition. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry's main lobby, is pushing for at least $100 billion in federal loan guarantees—a dicey proposition given that the Congressional Budget Office has determined that the risk of default would be "well above 50 percent." This raises the question: Will the cost of passing a climate bill be a massive, taxpayer-funded nuclear bailout?
The public has rescued the industry once before. The last batch of reactors built in the US during the 1970s and '80s was plagued by a series of boondoggles, one of the most infamous being Long Island's Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, which took 20 years to build and cost $6 billion—more than 80 times the original estimate—but was never put into commercial operation. Similar debacles pushed utilities into bankruptcy, triggered the largest municipal bond default in US history, and helped cause a sixfold increase in wholesale electricity prices. The total cost to the public, in rate hikes and taxpayer bailouts, was more than $300 billion (in 2006 dollars), according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Since that time, the industry says it has solved its cost problem, partly by engineering reactors that are simpler and less expensive to build. But the first two next-generation reactors, which are under construction in Finland and France, have been bogged down in multibillion-dollar cost overruns. Meanwhile, the projected cost of building new nuclear plants in the US is soaring: As recently as 2005, the NEI claimed new reactors could be constructed for roughly $2 billion. Newer estimates, including one by Moody's, the credit ratings agency, put the cost as high as $12 billion. That would make nuclear power more expensive on a watt-for-watt basis than most large-scale renewable energy sources, including wind, biomass, and hydropower.
No wonder the industry has found it impossible to secure private-sector financing for the 28 reactors that are currently in the pipeline across the nation. Investors "will not accept the economic risk of building new reactors," says Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who is now a professor at Vermont Law School. "There will be no nuclear renaissance beyond what the government is willing to underwrite."
No one understands this better than the industry itself, which is lobbying for a Senate bill to create a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) within the Department of Energy (DOE) that would have the authority to award a virtually unlimited number of loan guarantees—without congressional review. "It's a nuclear slush fund," says Michele Boyd, director of Physicians for Social Responsibility's safe energy program, "though the way the bill is written, even many Senate staffers don't know it." The legislation, which is likely to be folded into the climate bill, was sponsored by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and crafted with the help of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Both lawmakers are top recipients of the nuclear industry's campaign largesse. Under the policy, companies would have to pay an as yet unspecified subsidy fee in order to get loan guarantees, but these payments are all but certain to be dwarfed by the cost of defaults. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, if 100 new plants are built, as key Republican lawmakers have called for, the price of bad loans could total at least $360 billion—and that's assuming zero cost overruns.
The ceda provision builds on the work of Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who until his retirement in January 2009 was the Senate's most tireless nuclear crusader. During his reign as chairman of the energy committee from 2003 to 2007, he packed the committee staff with former nuclear-power lobbyists—a clique dubbed "the glow-in-the-dark crew" by some of their Senate colleagues—who shepherded through Congress the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Among other things, the bill provided $13 billion in nuclear subsidies and federal loan guarantees to cover 80 percent of the costs of building low-carbon nuclear technologies, including new reactors.
For any other industry, this would have been an enormous victory. But for nuclear, even these generous subsidies weren't enough. In July 2007, six of the nation's largest financial firms—including Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman Sachs, companies hardly averse to risky investments—informed the DOE in a letter that nuclear projects would not find financing because they were too chancy. Unless, of course, the agency (which had interpreted the new law to mean 80 percent of project debt) would rewrite the rules so that 100 percent of the debt was covered—foisting almost all of the risk on taxpayers.
By the end of 2007, the nuclear lobby had succeeded in getting the DOE to make exactly these changes. But to the industry's dismay, Congress has so far given the DOE authority to distribute $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power facilities. That's less than half what UniStar hopes to spend on its four plants, not to mention the needs of the industry at large. So the industry began pushing to increase the funding and simultaneously exempt the program from congressional oversight.
Part of NEI's strategy for getting the feds to hand out loan guarantees more freely has been to win over Democrats—who have traditionally been less friendly to nuclear power—by enlisting the help of organized labor. In mid-2008, the group added Michael Mathis and Charles Harple, previously top in-house lobbyists for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to its K Street bench. NEI also forged an alliance with the AFL-CIO. At NEI's annual conference in 2008, Mark Ayers, the AFL-CIO's president of Building and Construction Trades, said that in exchange for the industry's commitment to use union labor, his organization would work to "persuade the new majority in Congress about the need for extending and increasing the loan guarantee program."
The industry's efforts began to pay off this fall, as nuclear subsidies emerged as the key to wooing Republican votes for a Senate climate bill—votes necessary to offset defections from coal-state Democrats. Since October, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), one of the climate bill's sponsors, has been holding closed-door meetings with Republicans to craft nuclear language. "You listen to the rhetoric around this place and there is no one who will say a disparaging word about nuclear," says a senior Democractic Senate staffer close to the climate bill talks. "They have enough political muscle and enough support across the aisle that I think they will get all the loan guarantees they need."
Comments
Not a bad article...
The author does a fair job in reporting on this issue. However, there is much between the lines to understand.
For instance, Shoreham Plant went operational and was ready to provide power to the NYC area. The only reason the project was abandoned was because some local municipalities within the stations "emergency planning zone" would not cooperate with emergency drills. As a result, the NRC would not grant a final operating license because the utility could not validate their emergency plan. Other examples exist where antinuclear power activists used delaying tactics to raise the price of the plants by lengthening the construction time from five to 20 years in some cases. The bottom line is the activists themelves are responsible for raising costs to the consumers and creating construction uncertainty. This has resulted in much more CO2 being pushed into the atmosphere. Ironic, eh?
As far as subsidies, wind and solar would not be even considered without massive subsidies. The author makes the point that the construction costs on a per kilowatt basis for nuclear are now nearly as high as "alternative" sources, such as wind and solar. That's a great point. Now factor in this: the nuclear power plant will generate at 100% power 94% of the time. Wind works about 20% of the time and solar even less...about 7%. That means even if all sources cost the same to build on a per rated kilowatt basis, nuclear will put out five times as much as wind and 12 times as much as solar...so nuclear is still a bargain...and it's there 24/7.
Do you like your power there 24/7?
what?!?
again the red herring of subsidies for wind and solar. nice talking point. to bad reality gets in the way.
define massive subsidies please. the nuke industry has gotten 10 times the amount of taxpayer subsidies as those other energy types. for decades, that nuclear subsidy has been 2–5¢/kWh. and in 2005, desperate for plant orders, the nuclear industry lobbied Domenici and got those U.S. subsidies raised to ~5–9¢/kWh. the PTC for wind is 1.5¢/kWh. who is getting the massive subsidy? and that cost ignores the financial impact of Price Anderson, which completely socializes risk.
24/7 power? really? Of all 132 U.S. nuclear plants built (50% of the 253 originally ordered by the way, the others shut down by cost overruns, safety concerns and other technology related issues), 21% were permanently and prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems, while another 27% have completely failed for a year or more at least once. 24/7? really? and reliably operating nuclear plants must shut down, on average, for 45 days every 17 months for refueling and maintenance. and that ignores the industry-generated 8% failure rate that also causes shut downs.
activists raising costs? really? The latest U.S. nuclear plant proposed is estimated to cost $12–16 billion. that is not from activists. those are technology and construction costs. of the original 132 plants, completion costs on average were 200% more than projected costs. Moody's and Standard & Poor’s have estimated construction costs at between $6000 and $10,000 per KW. it is specious at best, and intentionally ignorant at worst to associate those costs with "activists". if only they had that power. components come from other countries. the dollar is weak. private capital markets arent investing in new nuclear plants, because it does not make financial sense.
back to watching Beck for you.
Don't need Beck... I lived it
I have lived the nuclear power industry for 30 years. I went through plant construction and the cost escalations. If you were not around or a free-thinking adult in 1965, here is what was going on.
Electric use follows GDP. In the 1960s and early 1970s electric use growth rates were around 6% a year. Using the well-known "law of 72", divide 72 by the interest rate (or growth rate in this case) and you find out how long it takes to double your money. This means electrical consumption was pegged to double in 12 years.
Electric utilities are required by law to provide power using the best sources possible. The lowest cost reliable option in the 1960s and 1970s was nuclear. State public utility commissions would not let utilities build anything else for base load generation. With construction times around six years, utilities lined up to meet expected demand. As a result, hundreds of orders were made, far outstripping the expertise to build and operate the plants, so some were cancelled just because there weren't enough workers.
In the late 1970s, several things happened to cripple the industry. One was TMI which resulted in needed industry improvements and "back fits." Others included the above mentioned activists that used legal maneuvers to slow down the permitting process. The real killer however was Jimmy Carter.
What? Lil Jimmy, the former nuclear Navy officer? Yes. On his watch, inflation became rampant. Costs of everything escalated. I got a 12.5% pay increase in 1980 and that was less than the cost of living increase! So take that nuclear power plant that originally cost $500M and start delaying it. Using the law of 72, at 15% annual inflation, now it takes only five years to double in costs. Through in some back fits and legal delays, and the costs did skyrocket. And not just the material and labor costs... but the cost of borrowing money soared... Washington Public Power Supply was paying 15.7% on municipal bonds! Of course they went bankrupt and only completed one of seven planned plants.
The second thing Jimmy did was cancel a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility for political reasons. The technology was and still is there. But Jimmy didn't want other countries reprocessing commercial nuclear fuel and potentially diverting some of the Plutonium into weapons programs. So in his mind, if he cancelled the US plant slated to take all the commercial nuclear fuel for reprocessing, all evil intentioned bad guys in the world would have some kind of epiphany, see the error of their ways, and cry to Jimmy for forgiveness. When are libs going to learn that bad guys don't play fairly and care little about our values... but that is another topic for another day.
So... high inflation rates, high cost of borrowing money, a second OPEC oil embargo (1979), and all of a sudden, GDP goes to less than 1%. So now a utility doesn't need all that generation anymore... it will take 72 years to double! Many cut and run. However, I will tell you this... many utilities in the country that saw it through is very glad they did and wish they had more nuclear generation. Currently nuclear provides 20% of the annual US electrical generation needs with a strong safety record. No one has ever died from a radiation related incident at a US commercial nuclear power plant. In addition, contrary to fictional beliefs, a commercial nuclear power plant cannot explode like an atomic bomb. The uranium used for fuel is about 4% U-235. Bombs require over 90% U-235.
Now to address your numbers... we can argue all day about these numbers, many of which I have seen often repeated and found false or as you say... red herrings. Price Anderson Act is nothing more than an insurance rider. It only comes into play IF a nuclear power plant's insurance does not cover public damages. Since there have been no public damages, a claim has never been made.
Nuclear power plants must shut down for refueling as you said - but the time frame is 18 months for some, 24 months for others. Refueling outages can run anywhere from 18 days to 45 days. The industry average is around 25 days. In between, these plants run at 100% power 24/7. Do the math... it works out to 94% to 96% capacity factor, which is the industry average.
Some plants have had extended shutdowns to address mechanical issues...not unlike any industrial facility. Some plants were closed by their owners to reduce their financial exposure. However, nuclear power plants are being built again in the US and more are on the way.
Again... wind farms average 20% capacity factor...solar about 7%. That means to get an equivalent amount of power, one must build five times the capacity for wind and 13 times the capacity for solar. Of course, even if you build more capacity in an area... if the wind ain't blowing here, it probably ain't blowing five miles away, either.
How about footprint? Interested in how much land you have to cover up or involve? 40 acres per wind farm tower to prevent "wind shadowing." Even if you can mount a 2 MWe wind turbine on each pole, that means 1500 turbines would be needed to equal one modern day two-unit nuclear power plant. 40 acres x 1500 = 60,000 acres or 94 square miles. Contrast that to about 300 acres for a nuclear power plant... unless a cooling lake is built, then add about two acres per MW, or about 6300 acres total. Solar is even more ridiculous... but then what the heck do we care...it's only desert. The land tortoises and other endangered critters won’t mind losing their habitat. And those birds of prey that get shredded by the wind turbine blades or the bats whose brains are sucked out by the air pressure decreases around the blades won’t mind either.
There are no perfect solutions... we must educate ourselves and look at the options... then decide.
I guess being a "lib" I can't understand anything
I was more or less with you trying to see both sides until this little gem, "When are libs going to learn that bad guys don't play fairly and care little about our values." Well, I guess as a "lib" I'm just too dumb to understand your wise invective that it's all good and evil but I can't get it. Seriously, people tune out when you call names. Look how you reacted to the "Beck" reference.
Eric...you aren't dumb
But...remember history. Placating and trying to be a role model means very little to the Hitlers, Maos, etc. Remember a guy name Neville Chamberlain and "peace in our times"? Talking niceynice to atollahs does not work.
Carter's premise was if we (the US) don't reprocess commercial nuclear fuel, then non-nuclear weapons countries wont do that with their reprocessing plants. Very naive. At that very time I was working at a government facility working at maximum production of weapons grade PU-239. We never intended to divert any commercial fuel to our weapons programs because we already had dedicated federal reactors making all the plutonium we needed!
Didn't mean to use such a broad brush, Eric. My apologies.
Three Mile Island
Hello Barry - I appreciate your expertise and the fact you mentioned TMI. Do you know who paid for the clean up of Three Mile Island and how much that clean up cost?
Depends whose counting...
Most agree total cleanup costs were just over $1B.
Who paid for the cleanup? From my research I can best guess at the following:
1. Each plant must buy insurance that is now capped at $300M per plant per event.
2. Each nuclear power plant in the US would have to pony up an equal share of money to cover expenses above that $300M to a total of around $10B.
3. Rate payers can be assessed increased rates to pay for a plant event.
4. Utility stock holders can pay for increased expenses through reductions in their dividends.
All of the above are parts of a law that has been in place since the 1950s called the Price-Anderson Act, which stipulates these means to pay for nuclear related events. Only the base amounts have changed over time. This Congressional Act also covers nuclear related facilities and contractors apart from nuclear power plants.
In the case of TMI, the best I can find is an insurance payout from the utility's own insurance company of around $140M. Since that did not exceed the $200M threshold that was in place at the time, other nuclear power plants did not have to contribute. The other $860M would have come from company profits (dividends to stockholders) and rate payers of that utility.
If you have more specific data I would appreciate reading about it.
The TMI cleanup may have been expensive ...
but was not difficult. Also, the other TMI reactor was kept idle for a number of years, and this would have gained the government fossil fuel revenues that probably were sufficient to pay for all that needed to be done. This included taking the reactor vessel, with the melted and refrozen contents, to, if I recall correctly, the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho. There it was determined that the steel bottle had stood up much better than had been expected. Plants had been designed to contain a melted core even if the vessel gave way like a wet-bottomed paper grocery bag, if anyone remembers those, but it didn't. Nowhere close.
The fossil fuel tax revenue consideration is very important. Natural gas royalties are said to be one-sixth to one-eighth of the total price. Comparing recent prices, we see that government gets on the order of 70 cents per million BTU when it shepherds the people into getting their electricity from natgas rather than uranium, whose total price at the mine gate is 20 cents per million BTU.
Gassily, Mother Jones portrays nuclear developers' need for loan guarantees as a need for subsidy, but really it is needed to ensure that government doesn't greedily eye the billions of millions of BTU a natgas plant might burn, and the hundreds of megabucks they might get -- perhaps many hundreds of them, if natural gas prices rise -- if they derail nuclear developments as they did in the 70s and 80s. If they have been forced to guarantee nuclear construction loans, their gas winnings must be paid to the projects' creditors, and this eco-betrayal becomes unprofitable.
When it *is* profitable, people may die when gas pipelines spring leaks, as in New Mexico in 2000, but recall, nuclear plants have resident government regulators, but no such regulators are assigned to walk daily alongside gas pipelines.
('How fire can be domesticated': http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/ )
Dangerous and Immoral
Barry must live in some sort of alternate universe where Jimmy Carter was opposed to nukes and everything radioactive is good. I live in Toledo, Ohio in the shadow of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant which just a few years ago came within 1/16th of an inch of exploding and melting down. It would have wiped out Ohio, Lake Erie, and a large chunk of Canada for good measure.
Seems there was a slight problem with leaking boric acid. It had eaten all the way through the steel reactor shell frame, the concrete reactor shell, and was most of the way through the thin, stainless steel inner lining.. Inside the reactor core, water is pressurized to 40 atmospheres. Technically that means big, nasty radioactive explosions if the inner lining breaks. The company that ran the reactor had successfully lobbied the government to delay its scheduled maintenance so that they could make more money--a typical industry tactic. Even so, it was only through dumb luck that they found the hole in the reactor head by dropping a piece of the control rod mechanism that then fell into it!!!
Most Americans don't know about this because the same corporations that own the nuke plants also own the media outlets. Plus there's lots of nuclear "experts" like Barry who somehow never mention the fact that nukes have the potential to turn our country into a radioactive wasteland, especially if someone were to say...I don't know... crash a jet liner into one of our old plants whose concrete has been weakened by neutron bombardment!!!!
But even without another accident, the wastes alone are a disaster.
Let's have a discussion...
Joe
Thanks for responding and giving me a chance to offer you some facts.
First, I am quite aware of the DB debacle, both from the technical standpoint as well as the managerial. I was asked by the Chief Nuclear Officer to evaluate the management team about six months after the plant was shut down. The culture there did not meet my or the industry’s expectations. Wholesale change outs were made. All supervisors and managers in the nuclear industry (US commercial nuclear power plants) were required to attend training on the DB scenario and must revisit that lesson every two years to remind ourselves of what overconfidence and production over safety can mean. So I agree with you that DB was a bad thing.
Secondly, I need to state you are totally incorrect regarding “explosion.” IF the wall of the reactor vessel gave way, water and steam would pour into the large cement dome around the reactor – it’s called the containment building. Nuclear power plant containment buildings are designed to withstand the energy release from the worst case accident, the shearing of a 30” main reactor pipe. In this case, the corroded hole was 4” in diameter, so the water release would have been much lower and well within design limits…much like the TMI event where no “explosion” occurred. The water would drain to the floor of containment and into sumps where pumps would recirculate the water back into the reactor. This phase could continue indefinitely, but typical emergency procedures would lead operators to cool the water down from 600 degrees F to around 100 degrees F where recovery actions would commence.
No explosions. No mass extinctions. No uninhabitable lands.
I do not know of any newspapers owned by utilities. If you know of one, please let me know.
Tests have been done regarding jets crashing into containments. Again, You Tube has a video of a F4 jet slamming into a wall replicating a containment wall. Check it out. These buildings were designed to take a direct hit from a Boeing 727. After you see the video, you will understand that aluminum does little to reinforced concrete. By the way, containments do not suffer neutron embitterment. The water and steel in the reactor vessel capture most of the neutrons. Neutron embitterment is monitored to ensure the reactor pressure vessel maintains its strength…so no worries on the containment, Joe. Someone has misled you there.
Lastly, wastes. High level wastes are stored at each nuclear power plant…and have been since they started operating. The Federal Government “owns” the fuel and the responsibility to dispose of it per a 1982 Congressional law. Each nuclear utility must charge the rate payers a fee to pay for that disposal. The money goes into a governmental “trust fund” that was supposed to open up a facility to take all commercial used fuel in 1992. Political wrangling, not technical issues, have delayed that from occurring. France, Japan, Sweden, Finland, England, etc… all seemed to have solved this issue…but not us.
Finally, I appreciate your zeal and emotion, but issues such as this that are complicated need analysis with fact and objectivity. However, I understand how you feel. A wise man once said “a person under 40 that is not a liberal has no heart; a person over 40 that is not a conservative has no brain.” I know you are expressing from your heart.
Further Barry Fantasy
Wow Barry, where do I begin?
First of all a little lesson in engineering. If you shear off a nice big, 30" diameter pipe, you get a gush of water. If you punch a four inch diameter hole in a reactor under 40 atmospheres of pressure you get a supersonic jet of highly corrosive, highly radioactive steam. It would have cut through control rod mechanisms like a knife. No control rods, no control. Eventually something would go boom. Remember the hydrogen bubble at TMI--the one that nuclear engineers had predicted could not form?
Second, the management styles and pressures that led to the Davis Besse near meltdown are present today all throughout the nuclear industry. Just this past August, the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant suffered a cooling tower collapse because it was generating beyond rated capacity in order to make more money.
Third, if neutron bombardment doesn't affect the reactor buildings, then why does the whole building eventually become radioactive and need to be decommissioned? Decomissioning means being treated as nuclear waste, broken up, trucked away and buried somewhere to expose future generations to radioactivity. Neutrons are extraordinarily hard to catch and no man made system does it perfectly.
Finally, it wasn't the aluminum planes that did the catastrophic damage on 9/11, it was the thousands of gallons of airplane fuel that started the fire that melted the girders that brought down the towers. That's why it took hours for them to collapse. Concrete also does not do well when exposed to high temperatures. I once saw the aftermath of a Sherwin-Williams paint warehouse that burned to the ground. The thick concrete slab that had been the foundation was cracked and broken into hundreds of pieces. A 747 holds a lot more fuel than an F4.
Actually, there is one more thing. Although you haven't shared your last name, so we have no way of knowing if your self-proclaimed credentials are real, you have clearly stated that you work for the nuclear industry. Therefore you have a personal profit motive to get us to buy into nuclear power. As far back as the Greeks, intelligent people have known that it's usually wise to look at the arguments of people who stand to profit from convincing you of something with skepticism. I oppose nuclear power and have done so for more than 30 years, not because I profit from it, but because I want to protect our descendants from the horrible effects of radioactive pollution. Cancer, birth defects, and genetic damage for the people, animals, and plants of this earth for the next 20,000 years is too high a price to pay for electricity.
Where to begin? How about getting an education...
Joe, you have now proven yourself to be close minded, unteachable, and doomed to silly arguments to defend emotionally biased positions.
Regarding my motivations... I am near retirement so the future of nuclear power in this country will be of no value to me other than that of a consumer and person concerned about proper choices.
Your have chosen ignorance, not because you don't agree with me, but because you refuse to consider others' views.
Barry and Joe
I appreciate your back and forth which for the most part was respectful. Barry, I wish you would have directly addressed the arguments made in Joe's last comment rather than allowing your frustration, possibly to the tone of his comments, lead you to an ad hominem retort. I really wish those from both sides particularly those with knowledge on the subject could respectfully make factual arguments without insulting one another.
I have no special knowledge of this issue. I respect there are those with differing opinions on this complex and potentially dangerous subject. In the end, as a pragmatic person when I weigh cost, benefit, and risk. I must err on the side of caution. The last thing we can be Pollyanna-ish about is the potential for disaster. First we must have in place the technology to deal with the waste and potential disasters, then perhaps the exorbitant cost might be worth considering. But, by then hopefully we won't need to rely on old technologies.
Additionally, coming from southern California - I don't know what or where that 7% solar figure came from but it can't be accurate for the sunny areas. And for us solar generates peak energy at times of peak demand.
Response to AP
AP... Thanks for the coaching. I was frustrated. I offered Joe links to his seemingly one place of reference, Wiki. Ignoring that, he continued with the multitude of "accidents" theme and does not address any of my statements other than to, without specific reference, spout more innuendo.
There have been terrible accidents involving nuclear energy... SL-1 comes to mind. That was a US Army owned test reactor in Idaho that killed all three operators. There have been several deaths in this country at labs due to excessive radiation exposure. However, many studies done regarding cancer rates, etc., from the aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the workers at Hanford, WA, communities surrounding power plants, etc all prove that low risk of low levels of radiation…the truth is out there but we still have people spouting half-truths.
For example, saying Davis Bessie could or almost did explode is an absolute falsehood.
stand by the fact that Joe will not address my specific examples as I have done his. Out of respect for you and others that do wish to learn, I will address in a non-frustrating manner Joe’s latest set of exaggerations. Feel free to ask for clarification or source documents.
Joe says: “First of all a little lesson in engineering. If you shear off a nice big, 30" diameter pipe, you get a gush of water. If you punch a four inch diameter hole in a reactor under 40 atmospheres of pressure you get a supersonic jet of highly corrosive, highly radioactive steam. It would have cut through control rod mechanisms like a knife. No control rods, no control. Eventually something would go boom. Remember the hydrogen bubble at TMI--the one that nuclear engineers had predicted could not form?”
Reactor coolant water is neither corrosive (short term) nor highly radioactive. Some hydraulic erosion could occur due to the high pressure differential across the four inch opening which would actually make the event easier to control. Larger breaks, based on sophisticated full-scope simulators used to train the operators, simplify the depressurization and recirculation phases of event recovery. Next, the control rods would NOT be affected. Control rods sit at the top of the reactor vessel and are held in place by electromagnets. If power to them fails or is interrupted by the reactor shutdown switch opening, gravity takes it from there and all the control rods fall into the reactor. Water leaking from the external shell of the reactor vessel would have no impact on rods falling into the reactor and stopping the chain reaction. Next, where does the hydrogen come from? The largest source of hydrogen in a postulated accident comes from the autocatalytic reaction of zirconium metal which is in the casing for the uranium fuel pellets. Fuel casing metal above 2200 degrees F will actually burn without oxygen, creating hydrogen gas in the process. To achieve 2200 degrees F, all cooling water flow must be lost and there are multiple sources of independently powered pumping systems to provide water to the reactor core. At TMI, the operators foolishly turned off pumps when they misinterpreted their indications…they thought the fuel was covered with water and being cooled when in fact it was not. Post analysis of TMI tells us the core would have been better off if the operators had stood back from the panels and never touched a thing. We have learned a lot from that event, including better human factored indications and training. Back to the hydrogen issue. If there is a big hole in the vessel, particularly the head region, how would the gas accumulate? So all that Joe conjectures in the above paragraph is incorrect.
Joe says: “Second, the management styles and pressures that led to the Davis Besse near meltdown are present today all throughout the nuclear industry. Just this past August, the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant suffered a cooling tower collapse because it was generating beyond rated capacity in order to make more money.”
Another falsehood. The management behaviors at DB were inappropriate. Production was valued as number one. Indications of a problem had existed for years and were ignored. The regulator accepted the utility’s findings. Industry peers missed it, too. Again, we have learned from that and as noted earlier, all nuclear managers and supervisors must retrain on this event every two years to ensure we do not repeat those behaviors. Our evaluators look for those specific behaviors during normal inspections and analysis of our plant operating data. To say there was a “near meltdown” is both inaccurate and inflammatory. For the reasons why, see my earlier posts and above for technical basis.
The last sentence from Joe is a real laugher, showing how little he knows of plant operations. In addition, the collapse was August 2007, not this past August, which would be the year 2009. Let me explain what this cooling tower is for and then offer a reference from his favorite source.
All plants that use steam turbines to generate electricity must condense the steam after it goes through the turbines back into water. A closed cooling system runs through 1000s of tubes below the turbines to cool the steam and condense it. In this process, the circulating water leaves the turbine area warmer than it came in and is either dumped back into its source, like a lake, river, or ocean, or it is sent to a “cooling tower” to remove heat before it is pumped back into the turbine’s “condenser” region. Whether coal or nuclear or oil, if there is steam, there is this type of system. This system is NOT part of the nuclear process.
If you Wiki Vermont Yankee you will see the following regarding this very event:
“The spilled cooling water was part of the non-radioactive circulating water system which draws from the Connecticut River. The collapse was an industrial safety event and did not threaten the integrity of the reactor or release any radiation into the environment.”
The cause was not trying to run the reactor in an overpower condition… that would have absolutely ZERO impact on the circulating water system even if you tried that! Again from Wiki:
“The cause of the collapse was found to be corrosion / rotting of lumber due to carbon steel bolts. Also dry rot was found in some beams. A beam failed and caused the cell to sag which caused the main pipe to begin leaking water.”
Now, because the plant lost some of the circulating cooling water capacity, the plant could not operate at 100% power because it could no longer condense 100% steam flow. Make sense?
Joe says: “Third, if neutron bombardment doesn't affect the reactor buildings, then why does the whole building eventually become radioactive and need to be decommissioned? Decomissioning means being treated as nuclear waste, broken up, trucked away and buried somewhere to expose future generations to radioactivity. Neutrons are extraordinarily hard to catch and no man made system does it perfectly.”
I stated before that neutron embrittlement is not a containment building concern. Neutrons can eventually weaken steel in the reactor vessel and even the concrete foundations that surround the vessel. Engineers use special features to minimize embrittlement and materials are sampled to ensure their predictions are on target. Since all the neutrons are captured by the concrete immediately surrounding the reactor, the containment walls see almost zero neutrons. Decommissioning is a process as Joe stated, but not because the containment walls are ready to crumble. Most often the plant owner makes a business decision regarding costs of upgrades versus buying the power on the open market. However, most of the equipment and material is very low level waste… along the lines of nuclear medicine waste that has no serious health effects and can be safely buried at monitored waste sites. The hotter items are the reactor vessel and steam generators. We have developed means to even reduce their levels of radiation. Several plants have been decommissioned safely and with no impact on the public, either short or long term. As far as catching neutrons…water and any material with lots of hydrogen atoms, like styrofoam or oil, works very well. We use water flowing between the reactor core and the sides of the reaactor vessel, plus older fuel assemblies on the peirimeter of the core to minimize neutron capture by the vessel or surrounding concrete.
Joe says: “Finally, it wasn't the aluminum planes that did the catastrophic damage on 9/11, it was the thousands of gallons of airplane fuel that started the fire that melted the girders that brought down the towers. That's why it took hours for them to collapse. A 747 holds a lot more fuel than an F4.”
I’ll give Joe that one. The fuel would burn at very high temperatures as the plane lay in a crumbled heap. According to Wiki… Jet fuel burns at 287 degrees C in open air. Concrete, according to Wiki, “Due to its low thermal conductivity, a layer of concrete is frequently used for fireproofing of steel structures. However, concrete itself may be damaged by fire. Up to about 300 °C, the concrete undergoes normal thermal expansion. Above that temperature, shrinkage occurs due to water loss; however, the aggregate continues expanding, which causes internal stresses. Up to about 500 °C, the major structural changes are carbonation and coarsening of pores.”
So it would seem that 287 degrees C is less than the 300 degrees C where normal processes are in effect. Looks like concrete is good up to 500 degrees C, almost twice the temp of burning JP-4.
Joe says: “Actually, there is one more thing. Although you haven't shared your last name, so we have no way of knowing if your self-proclaimed credentials are real, you have clearly stated that you work for the nuclear industry. Therefore you have a personal profit motive to get us to buy into nuclear power. As far back as the Greeks, intelligent people have known that it's usually wise to look at the arguments of people who stand to profit from convincing you of something with skepticism. I oppose nuclear power and have done so for more than 30 years, not because I profit from it, but because I want to protect our descendants from the horrible effects of radioactive pollution. Cancer, birth defects, and genetic damage for the people, animals, and plants of this earth for the next 20,000 years is too high a price to pay for electricity.”
I will not give my last name, however, an intellegent person could discern from my posts that I do know something about nuclear power. I have studied both the history of nuclear research and its impacts. It is true my livelihood is nuclear power. But as a scientist and person who in the past actually marched, carried signs, and demonstrated to save pristine valleys from being flooded to make electricity (my pre-nuke days, btw), I find that nuclear power is a well-engineered and safe solution to providing reliable 24/7 electricity.
Regarding protecting our descendants, I am there. However, claims of birth defects and such are totally unproven and without basis. This is rhetoric trumped up by activists to keep themselves in business and Joe has apparently bought into this.
If you want to quote Greeks and talk about profiting… check out guidestar.com. All non-profits must make public their annual "990" tax forms which state income, assets, and salaries of the principals involved. There are some people out there making a fortune off claims like the above. If I really wanted to make some money, I would start a carbon offset non-profit. Check out Carbonfund.org if you want to see a real growth business that really does very little other than collect peoples’ donations and asuage their guilt… guilt piled upon them by activists. Just go to Guidestar.com, search for your favorite non-profit, and you can read their public 990 forms.
The 7% is capacity factor. If a generator rated at 100 megawatts means that is the maximum instantaneous power output. Capacity factor is a measure of the amount of time the generator actually produces that rating. So for example, due to refueling outages every 18 to 24 months, the industry average capacity for nuclear power plants is around 94%. Wind is about 20%. Solar is 7%...meaning, if you have a 100 megawatt solar generator, it produces 100 megawatts only 7% of the 24 hour day... or 50% power 14% of the day, etc.
Nuclear Falsehoods
Something to keep in mind as one is evaluating the arguments in this debate is that the nuclear power industry has a long history of lying and hiding information about things like accidents and contamination.
The first time I experienced this personally was back in 1980 at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I attended a symposium that included presentations from both nuclear power advocates and those opposed to nukes. The concluding presentation was supposed to have been a debate between an environmentalist and a representative of the nuclear industry. The pro-nuclear presenter started out with the statement, "We have now found a solution to the nuclear waste problem." The environmentalist was shocked and pressed him for details, but he said he couldn't go into any specifics at that time. Finally, someone from the audience piped up and said, "Look, it's obvious that he's lying!" That ended the debate, and thirty years later it's clear that he was lying.
I honestly thought the Vermont-Yankee accident happened this past August because I only managed to find out about it this past September. But, Barry's response to my mentioning it actually proves my point. Somehow because it was caused "only" by dry rot and corrosion, he thinks it wasn't serious. But my point is that a culture exists in the nuclear power industry today that cuts corners and neglects maintenance and safety in order to make more money. That's precisely what letting your cooling towers rot means.
For a more recent example, Davis-Besse was again shut down for a month this past summer. According to the Toledo Blade, "a pipe carrying coolant water broke." I have not been able to find out if this pipe was carrying radioactive water from the primary loop, or non-radioactive water from the secondary loop, but either way it's further evidence that Barry's world of careful maintenance and constant testing is, to a dangerous degree, fantasy.
I based my scenario of control rod failure on a conversation I had with a retired engineer who helped build Davis-Besse. He was able to be honest with me because he is no longer getting a paycheck from the nuclear industry. I trust his guess as to what would happen more than Barry's. After all, if you have ever watched a fire hose tear apart a tree or a wall, imagine something with many times that pressure pointed at a control rod. Who's to say that it wouldn't break or at least bend enough so that it couldn't be inserted into the reactor?
However, despite Barry's many insults to me personally, I feel sympathy for him. He, like many Americans was sold on a nuclear Utopia decades ago. He was told that we could generate, cheap, clean, safe power in unlimited amounts. In fact, we were promised electricity so cheap we wouldn't even need to meter it, just pay a small fee every month. Instead, nuclear power has turned out to be the most expensive, most dangerous, and dirtiest form of energy known to man. The difference is that after: Three Mile Island; Chernyoble; huge rate increases from cost over runs and; other experiences most Americans have come to realize that nukes are a dead end. Barry can't.
Notice that in his response above he didn't deny that neutrons get past the shielding and eventually make the buildings, furniture, and everything else radioactive. He just says that the degree of radiation is too slight to worry about. Well, 100 years of scientific study have shown that there is no "safe" level of radiation. Even very low levels cause increases in cancer and birth defects. Besides, it's not that slight. As plants get older, workers have to do shorter and shorter shifts to avoid getting more than the "allowable" dose of radiation.
The most dangerous and dirty radioactive element produced in nuke plants is Plutonium. Five grams of Plutonium (about the mass of a nickle) puts out enough radioactivity to kill 20 million people. That's why it's named after the god of the dead. Now Barry might tell you that you can hold a pellet of Plutonium in your hand and it won't hurt you. But he and I both know that it's a very simple matter to change that pellet into a deadly weapon. Plutonium stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years. There are many, many other radioactive isotopes that get produced, however, and many of them are routinely released into the air as part of regular plant operations. Many scientists believe that's why there's increase childhood leukemia around nuclear power plants.
Anonymous's response to Barry above does a good job of describing the expensiveness of nukes. I would just add that there are taxpayer subsidies at every step in the nuclear cycle, from prospecting for Uranium, to mining, to enrichment, to transportation, to taking "ownership" of the wastes, at every point the nuclear industry feeds off of our tax money to survive.
The numbers Barry quoted from Wikipedia about cement and heat are very reassuring,, but in the real world things don't always follow the book. For example, vortexes and air flow can cause parts of a burning fuel slick to burn much hotter than others. Also, cement which has been weakened both by neutron bombardment and the impact of a multi-ton airliner may act differently from what wiki says.
What frustrates me the most, and why I stayed up until 2:30 in the AM typing this response is that for the past 30 years, the federal government has literally spent hundreds of millions of dollars employing an army of guys like Barry to convince us that nukes are good. If we had even spent that much money on wind turbines, we would be well on the way to a truly sustainable energy policy. Instead we have wasted trillions of dollars on nukes.
I am a Utopian, too. But my Utopia is entirely practical. The November 2009 issue of Scientific American lays out a clear, well researched and easily doable plan for us to become totally powered by renewables (meaning NO NUKES!) by 2030.
Barry's red herring about wind and solar operating below rated capacity is a lot of malarky and he knows it. When planners predict how much power a wind farm or solar installation will generate, they take into account the times when there's not enough wind or sun. No one has ever claimed that a 2 Megawatt turbine will be generating 2 Megawatts all the time. But we can make very accurate predictions about how much power will be produced over the course of a year, or even a month. I've done it myself. It's a simple mattter of applying the generation curve to the measured wind speeds. Any engineer worth his salt should be able to do it, and either Barry's not an engineer or he's trying to mislead us.
I am not an engineer. But, as Barry has correctly guessed I am passionate about protecting us from the evils of radioactive pollution. I'm starting to nod off now. Tomorrow I have to get up and go to work running forklifts and operating huge grinders. I apologize for any incoherence above.
Try try again...
Joe
That was actually a very well written response. Thanks. I will address each issue with little expectation of changing your views, but perhaps others will find merit – if they believe me, because after all, I am part of the nuclear industry and “the nuclear power industry has a long history of lying.”
Regarding your conclusion that one person at a public meeting could not satisfy the “environmentalist’s” demand for details equals lying… here are some details for you on nuclear waste. There are in fact several solutions and they have been in place for some time. As noted elsewhere, a reprocessing facility was ready to accept commercial nuclear fuel in the late 1970’s but Carter nixed it. The links below identify a number means to handle nuclear waste. Detractors will point out that nuclear waste remains toxic for thousands of years… as do heavy metals like mercury. Storage systems now in place can effectively and safely provide that long term storage.
French reprocessing: http://www.industrie.gouv.fr/energie/anglais/pdf/fiche.pdf http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.html
Japanese reprocessing: http://www.japannuclear.com/files/Japan%20Nuclear%20Fuel%20Cycle%20Program%20(February%202003).pdf
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Japan/index.html
Finland reprocessing:
http://www.energia.fi/fi/julkaisut/hyvatietaa-sarja/nuclear%20waste%20ma...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1998/gautrot.htm
This last one is a good primer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste
Vitrification inparticular
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/12/971210063125.htm
Regarding Vermont Yankee – like any factory, building, structure, component, piece, or part… they can all fail. If the failure could result in a serious event, stronger engineering controls are employed. For example, hospitals could lose off site power so they install emergency generators. Hydraulic failure to a Boeing 737’s control surfaces is unacceptable, so Boeing installs redundant and independent hydraulic lines. However, the same Boeing 737 does not have redundant bun warmers since loss of that component is not as serious. The mechanical failure of a cooling tower component is about like losing the bun warmer. Inconvenient, but not a safety issue. However, even components in safety systems can and do fail. That is why they design in redundancies when needed.
The article from the Toledo Blast is not specific enough to tell what kind of pipe broke or what impact that could have. I did an industry event search via two sources we use to document such things and found nothing noteworthy.
Back again to the Davis Besse event… I think I said in a previous posting that IF the control rod drive housing did fail, it would most likely result in the rapid high pressure water/steam stream hydraulically enlarging the four inch hole…and that would be a good thing because it would depressurize the reactor coolant system faster, allowing medium and low head safety injection pumps to force more cooling water into the reactor. Small breaks in a reactor coolant system can actually be more troublesome than a large break. Also… let’s say that one control rod could not insert… depending on reactor type, there can be anywhere from 64 to 100 control rods. The entire control rod system is actually designed to have one control not insert and still provide adequate shutdown margin. Remember the discussion above about engineering in safety margin by redundancy? This is a perfect example! Reactor designers have been required to design their systems for one control rod not inserting.
Joe…my only insult to you was you not being objective enough to check my specific references out and respond to them vs. repeating the same worn out anti-nuke slogans. Your most recent post was as I said, well thought out and written.
Regarding “most Americans have come to realize that nukes are a dead end” is incorrect. Every public opinion poll out there says the majority actually favor continuing to include nuclear power in the mix. Your slogan again is tired and worn…not unlike what I hear regarding the Obamacare debate…Harry Reid saying “most Americans want this health care package” when every opinion poll out there shows the majority of Americans against it. I just don’t get how people can say such things with a straight face other than they must really believe what they are saying.
100 years of radiation study have NOT shown what Joe claims. Every study done on radiation workers by reliable organizations shows no increase in cancer rates… and definitely there is no reliable evidence that childhood leukemia rates are higher around a nuclear power plant. More worn out slogans. I can provide you 10 references from real scientists… not people making things up… to prove the above.
Regarding Plutonium… I agree it is very lethal. It is not friendly stuff. It is not to be handled in any form. I have handled fuel assemblies that have not yet been in the reactor. There is no danger from them since the fuel pellets are well encapsulated and not radioactive…yet. Once the fuel bundles go in the reactor and they come out after three cycles…a cycle being 18 to 24 months… they could kill you at 100 feet. That is why they are kept under water in pools, waiting for long term disposal.
Most of the subsidies quoted by anti-nukes stem from government research. Other than that, the industry pretty much pays its own way…including fees paid to the NRC, a government agency. Here is a parallel example…think of the many benefits we got from the space program…Velcro for one. I guess we could say all the Velcro makers enjoy government subsidies, too.
Regarding wind/solar… my analysis is not a red herring…and talk about government subsidies! The issue, Joe, is that you build and pay for a 2 MW wind turbine that then only works 20% of the time. I can predict when it will work and wont work, but I am still paying for 80% of the time it does not produce! To equal a nuclear power plant’s output, you must build almost five times the capacity! A thousand megawatt wind farm does not equal a 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant. The farm operates 20% of the time – the nuclear power plant operates 94% of the time. So the real cost per megawatt of construction and operation is way in the favor of nuclear power. I can do the math for you sometime if you like.
Any more questions?
Investors don't trust the government - that's why guarantees
I've been building nuclear power plants for 35 years now in four continents and am active today on a new plant in Texas.
The bulk of the cost problems of the first fleet of reactors were the result of unstable government. Certainly there was a great deal of technical advancement at the time but the core problem was changing government regulations. Political pushback from people who were dedicated to NO nukes no matter the cost to others or the need for clean power further complicated the construction process. It was economic warfare that continues to today. This article is one example of how it is being fought by the Left.
What the nuclear industry needs to obtain financing is indemnification against government actions once the license to construct is issued. Investors have seen billions of dollars of potentially productive assets rendered valueless at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen.
The loan guarantees for new reactors would cover not the technical or market risks but only the risks from government. The article misleads on that point, as on many others.
However, like all government programs, abuses can happen. My personal favorite is the $2 billion loan guarantee to a unit of the French government for a enrichment plant in Idaho. There is already one new enrichment under construction and it didn't need a guarantee. The technical and licensing risk for an enrichment plant is very low. In effect, the US taxpayer is being asked to underwrite a for-profit enterprise of the French government on US soil for no good reason.
Mother Jones magazine could do some real service to Americans if they would look for the real crooks rather than just making up stuff.
Joseph Somsel
San Jose, California
Barry and Joseph
I commend you for your measured, well-reasoned, referenced responses to both the author and Joe DeMare. While I am involved in the solar industry as an installer of residential systems, I am not delusioned into thinking an intermittent, weather-dependent source of energy can ever compete for base-load, on-demand electric energy as provided by nuclear, coal and gas/oil.
The lack of cost-efficient storage of excess energy production is only one of the Achilles' heels of wind and solar systems. Look at the Bonneville Power agency in Washington wind production charts just in the past month to see what life would be like relying on intermittent power.
I encourage other readers to visit these sites for additional analysis and comparisons of energy systems:
www.bravenewclimate.com - read the TCASE series found on the left margin
www.coal2nuclear.com - excellent analysis of replacing coal-fired plants
www.energyfromthorium.com - Thorium is more plentiful than U
Follow their link to other excellent sources and draw your conclusions from the facts. While many of the blogs are pro-AGW, look beyond that for the computations that support the nuclear power plant option.
When anti-nukes write articles
This article is fraught with deception and half-truths!
Quote: "Newer estimates, including one by Moody's, the credit ratings agency, put the cost as high as $12 billion. That would make nuclear power more expensive on a watt-for-watt basis than most large-scale renewable energy sources, including wind, biomass, and hydropower."
Not true!
Even if a new reactor really did cost $12 billion, that is still only 1.5 cents/kw-hr over the lifetime of the plant. Factor in O&M at another 2 cents/kw-hr and the nuclear plant still comes in FAR better than renewables. About the only technologies that can compete on a cost basis with nuclear are hydro and coal. Problem is, we're running out of places to build dams and coal has other problems - the least of which is carbon emissions.
There's not enough space or time to list and rebut all of the half-truths and fear-mongering in this article. I only hope your readers can see through the anti-rhetoric and find the truth.
The smoking gun
Ahh.. the tireless anti-environmentalist, conservative bloggers. They relentlessly "sanitize" Wikipedia, and even in this comment section of Mother Jones, they are perfectly happy to overwhelm discussions of serious issues with their name calling,; half-truths; and the sheer brute force of repetition, repetition, and more repetition.
One of the main purposes of this kind of attack, of course, it to prevent progressives and environmentalists from agreeing and cohering over even the most basic issues. If you're a progressive like AP who has no special knowledge of nukes, it neutralizes you because the natural human response to such forceful rhetoric is to say, "Gee.. if they feel that strongly about it, maybe it's true."
Don't be fooled. Most of these pro-nukers have financial ties back to the nuclear industry, or belong to groups that are ultimately funded by the big energy companies. Nukes are dirty, dangerous and expensive. That's why the rest of the world is switching to wind and solar, and leaving the U.S. clutching it's outmoded nuclear technology and failing economically. Parts of Germany and Denmark now get more than half of their electricity from wind power. It's practical, it's here, and all the lies and assertions to the contrary, it's our best hope for a clean energy future.
I just wanted to mention a few new and interesting facts about nuclear power. Joseph Mangano, just published a study in the International Journal of Health that proves that thyroid cancers doubled in Pennsylvania counties that started nuclear power plants. This is because nuclear plants regularly release radioactive iodine into the air as part of normal operations. This radioactive iodine causes thyroid cancer. A similar study for Indian Point in New York had similar results. So, if you know someone who has had thyroid cancer and they live within 30 miles of a nuke plant, there's about a 50% chance that they got cancer from nuclear power.
Also, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant has had a leak of radioactive tritium. A trench was found to have 2 MILLION picocuries of radiation, 20,000 times the "allowable" limit. There's a great deal of evidence to show that the plant owners and operators have been deliberately lying about their plant to regulators for years. Tritium can cause many different kinds of cancer, mutation, and birth defects.
A study for the European Union parliment found that about 400,000 people have died prematurely from radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.
Make no mistake. Nuclear power has been killing people since its inception. Up until now, the industry has hidden, like a coward who turns out the lights and starts swinging a baseball bat in the darkened room. Up until now, it's been impossible to say that this specific cancer was caused by nuclear pollution while that one wasn't. But Joseph Mangano has finally managed to get a hold of that maniac with the bat. Modern methods of statistical analysis are finally catching up to the nuclear polluters.
President Obama has made a horrible, horrible mistake by trying to commit our country to a nuclear future (oxymoron) in his State of the Union address. Nukes are so fantastically expensive that they will sop up all the money intended for clean energy and leave us with nothing. The new energy bill is actually proposing UNLIMITED loan guarantees for nuclear power plant construction. Gee.. I wonder what would happen if we gave big, multinational corporations the ability to borrow an INFINITE amount of money? Oh, that's right, THEY WOULD BANKRUPT US!!!
I would really appreciate it if a few people that agreed with me on this issue chimed in once or twice. As you may have guessed, I'm always willing to take on pro-nuclear fanatics, but when it's just one person making the responses, it looks like it's one person going against the crowd. Actually, a majority of Americans still don't want nukes.
Uranium is not the only possibility here. Critics take note!
Nuclear critics should check out what Obama can possibly mean by the next generation of safer, cleaner, cheaper, more efficient nuclear reactors before they make up their minds all things nuclear are bad.
Nuclear critics will have to come up with some new arguments. The old arguments no longer apply when you can burn the waste as fuel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHdRJqi__Z8&feature=related
More News on the Nuke Front
A lot has happened in the last month that people who have followed these comments would probably be interested in.
First of all, to fabco. There are any number of imaginary nuclear plant designs that produce nearly infinite power without any radioactive pollution. Unfortunately, the real plants that Obama is proposing are good old pressurized steam plants that would generate wastes that would kill and maim our descendants for thousands of years.
In Vermont, the good people of Vermont have voted to CLOSE VERMONT-YANKEE!!!! Turns out the management an owners of the nuke plant lied about just about everything. They got caught by determined nuclear activists and one heroic whistle blower and the result is one less nuclear plant. Only 103 more to go!!!!
It turns out that the loan "guarantees" in this article are more than that. The loans will be coming from the Federal Finance Bank--a wholly taxpayer funded arm of the federal government. In other words, our tax dollars will be guaranteeing loans made with our tax dollars. In the event of a default, Southern Energy keeps the money and we keep the debt.
Davis-Besse is down again. Turns out the plant has become so radioactive that workers can only enter it for a few minutes at a time. An attempt to replace the liner (possibly the same one that was damaged in the accident several years ago?) is over time and over budget.
On a more humorous note, check out this video of "Barack" explaining his about face on nuclear power.
The World Pain
Nuclear only makes the world more pain, more drawbacks than benefits
upholstered dining chairs
LOAN OFFER APPLY NOW
Greetings To You.
Welcome to HOUSE OF LOANS PLC as part of its welfare package is offering
a floating loan at 3% interest rate with and without collateral security.This
is to help individuals,Student and companies reach their financial objectives.
* Personal Loan (Unsecured)
* Business Loan (Unsecured)
* Debt Consolidation Loan
* Improve your home
Please, provide us with the following:
Full Name.......
Home Address....
Phone:..........
Mobile..........
Country...........
Occupation:........
Sex:..........
Age:...........
Amount Needed...
Loan Duration:.........
Need For Loan Application......
All replies should be forwarded to
Mr Frank Larry
E-mail:lexingtonloanservice02@hotmail.com
Greetings To You. Welcome to
Greetings To You.
Welcome to HOUSE OF LOANS PLC as part of its welfare package is offering
a floating loan at 3% interest rate with and without collateral security.This
is to help individuals,Student and companies reach their financial objectives.
* Personal Loan (Unsecured)
* Business Loan (Unsecured)
* Debt Consolidation Loan
* Improve your home
Please, provide us with the following:
Full Name.......
Home Address....
Phone:..........
Mobile..........
Country...........
Occupation:........
Sex:..........
Age:...........
Amount Needed...
Loan Duration:.........
Need For Loan Application......
All replies should be forwarded to
Mr Frank Larry
E-mail:lexingtonloanservice02@hotmail.com
Greetings To You. Welcome to
Greetings To You.
Welcome to HOUSE OF LOANS PLC as part of its welfare package is offering
a floating loan at 3% interest rate with and without collateral security.This
is to help individuals,Student and companies reach their financial objectives.
* Personal Loan (Unsecured)
* Business Loan (Unsecured)
* Debt Consolidation Loan
* Improve your home
Please, provide us with the following:
Full Name.......
Home Address....
Phone:..........
Mobile..........
Country...........
Occupation:........
Sex:..........
Age:...........
Amount Needed...
Loan Duration:.........
Need For Loan Application......
All replies should be forwarded to
Mr Frank Larry
E-mail:lexingtonloanservice02@hotmail.com
Post new comment
MoJo Comments: Send Us Your Feedback
We changed our spam software to better filter comments. Should you encounter any issues, please let us know.
