I will try and restrain my baser impulses and keep myself from stalking you for perceived slights and bad grammar, Una. 
-XT
I suppose so. But I don’t think that Richard Parker was kidding about one Chernobyl a year being acceptable. How the clean up, which runs over 100 billion is supposed to be affordable every year BBC News | MONITORING | Neighbours count cost of Chernobyl disaster is supposed to be absorbed by the public or industry is really an eye opener. How this is an acceptable cost I don’t know. When faced with the annoyance of throwing up thousands of windmills and their cost, there is no comparison.
My point was that even under a ridiculously skewed analysis, coal doesn’t come close to competing with nuclear power. As I acknowledge in the post and you’ve ignored, “[t]he only reasonable debate is over whether there are technologies on the horizon that we should be pouring money into instead of spending money figuring out how to dispose of nuclear waste.” You seem to think wind power is that technology. Bully. But don’t demonize nuclear power. It is by a factor of ten the safest power generation technology that we know can power entire countries.
I’ll trash talk nuclear power if it pleases me to do so. I guess I’m pleased that you were being hyperbolic about a Chernobyl a year being acceptable. It isn’t. At thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars per accident, it would not be acceptable to me even if you didn’t count the thousands of years storage cost that the nuke owners foist onto unborn generations.
I think that wind and solar, both essentially harnessing the fusion power of the sun and gravity (here on earth and the sun) are more than ample. They provide plenty of jobs and the wind is always blowing somewhere and the sun is always shining somewhere. Yes, they too are ugly, but I wants me my electricity. And I’m more than willing to live hear a huge wind farm. And I do.
I don’t think we’re communicating here, Second Stone. Do you agree that nuclear power is exponentially safer and better for the environment than the existing fossil fuel technologies?
100 billion a year is still only about 20 dollars per person on the planet per year.
Are you folks capable of any mathmatical analysis at all?
And I dont think ANY person thinks we would even remotely get a Wormwood per year. It was an absurd exageration to show even a horribly bad result is STILL tolerable. And IF that is true, the reality would be much more than tolerable.
(Heh. I almost thought about bringing this angle up before)
Okay, if one Chernobyl a year isn’t considered acceptable, how often would a Chernobyl be acceptible?
I mean, seriously, say we reinvested in nuclear power generation to the point that we cut greenhouse gas emissions 95%, and in exchange we get a Chernobyl-level disaster every two centuries. That’d be worth it, compared to disasterous global climate change, right? After that, it’s simple cost-benefit analysis.
Maybe they plan to dance around in a circle singing kumbaya long enough until the moral purity starts making the lights and heat work. :smack:
Why doesn’t the US re purpose fuel like the French? They seem to do a better job with nuclear power than us, why is that?
First off, there’s no economic reason in the US to make reprocessing a necessity. I’m not 100% certain, but I believe that France has access to only limited amounts of fissionables, and so has that extra incentive to reprocess fuel.
Secondly, while the term reprocessing is pretty clean seeming, what it comes down to is first cleaning off the fuel elements, which are often coated in radioactive CRUD*, sufficient to be significant health hazard in itself, then taking the fuel elements mechanically preparing them for processing, and then refining that material. Which generates a rather large volume of highly radioactive material as waste to get the good stuff separated out. What’s worse, as I mentioned up thread, a number of the refining processes involved Uranium (and I believe Plutonium) also make use of really, really nasty acids. Hydroflouric, and others. Which are then contaminated, and have to be stored or dealt with some other way, as well.
If you want a quick and dirty look at what sorts of waste materials come out of reprocessing, take a quick look at the crap they’re trying to deal with the Hanford site clean up effort. I don’t know that the wastes at the Hanford site are going to be what a modern reprocessing facility would produce, but it seems a good starting point.
Finally, even the so-called low level radioactive materials here, the CRUD I mentioned, in particular, has terrorist applications. One of the principle isotopes in CRUD is Cobalt-60. A relatively short-lived isotope (On the order of five years), but with a monster energy release when it decays. It’s high enough energy that it’s very hard to shield against, and it decays quickly enough that a little of the isotope will produce a lot of radiation. While I was in the Navy’s Nuclear Power program we had a rule of thumb: A Curie point source of Co-60 would put out a REM/hr dose at one meter’s distance. Now, consider that a Curie is the amount of a given isotope that will support 3.7 x 10^10 decays per second, or 3.7 x 10^10 Becquerels, and compare that to the definition of a mole: 6.23 x 10^23 molecules, and you can see that one can get quite a few Curies from a 60 gram mole of Co-60. Take 100 grams of that CRUD I was talking about, put it into a small bomb, and then blow that up in the center of a city, and the radiation hazard would be such that it would have to be cleaned up.
None of these problems are insurmountable, IMNSHO, but they are all very real, and would need to be addressed. In the US, given our limited reliance on nuclear power, our current stockpiles of fissionables, and the political climate, it’s not unreasonable to simply decide to not reprocess fuel.
*corrosion and wear products carried through the reactor core, and subsequently activated there by the neutron flux. First noticed at the Chalk River facility and originaly known as “Chalk River Unknown Deposits.”
Is it that people won’t sell to them, or they don’t want to buy? IOW, why wouldn’t uranium-producing countries sell to France?
Regards,
Shodan
You’re right, Shodan, I have no reason to believe that no Uranium producing country would sell to France. I was trying to say that I believe France to have limited access to domestic supplies of fissionables. i.e. Yeah, I think it’s that they don’t want to buy.
That makes sense. Thanks.
Regards,
Shodan
Must be a shock to the Australians dieing of skin cancer.
Nobody falls off the roof and breaks their neck tinkering with their rooftop nuke.
I heard this explanation in Naval Nuclear Power School, too, and I always thought it sounded like a folk etymology (i.e. an urban legend).
This cite appears to agree with me. The word evidently dates back to Middle English in the14th century.
FWIW, I don’t believe that a scram has anything to do with an “axe man,” either. While the word was not applied to the shutdown of a nuclear power plant until they were invented, the word itself already existed.
I suspect that attributing the origins of both of these words to supposed acronyms is similar to other supposed acronyms as discussed here in Snopes.
Well, I do have my reservations towards nuclear power – we’ve never been especially good at planning for the future, so having to devise a safe way to store nuclear waste for thousands of years seems at best a challenge to our abilities, and a possible bane on our future. That said, it might be the case that any downsides are entirely acceptable in a serious, objective risks/benefits analysis. There’s also a concern of nuclear reactors essentially enabling the construction of nuclear weapons.
However, even these concerns are somewhat alleviated by a new plant design, the so-called travelling wave reactor. The basic idea is to have a fuel stock that is ‘run through’ by a wave of nuclear reaction, which progresses around a few cm each year, so you’d only have to refuel it every hundred years or so; however, the best part is that it doesn’t need enriched uranium to operate (safe for a very thin ‘primer’ to get things going), since the wave does its own breeding, transmuting the (non-fissile depleted) uranium(238) in front of it into plutonium(239), which then undergoes fission to provide energy. This accomplishes mainly two things – eliminate the necessity for large-scale enrichment, which also limits the potential for nuclear weapons proliferation, and considerably limit the necessary maintenance on the fuel cycle as a whole, since since the reactor basically does its own reprocessing and refueling.
It may not be the ultima ratio of energy generation, and you’d still have to deal with the nuclear waste that is produced, but, in the face of the current economical situation and the looming spectres of climate change and depletion of resources, I don’t think that in the intermediate term at least it is viable to disregard this possibility.
Robby, I don’t believe that the word crud dates to the Chalk River project.
Nor do I believe that the word scram was invented by the Fermi people.
I do find it believable that people faced with unanticipated, and problematic, radioactive grit building up on close tolerance surfaces would find the most illustrative acronym they could back into a descriptive phrase possible. It’s one reason I make a distinction between CRUD, which is radioactive, and crud, which probably isn’t.
I have found other sites linking the acronym CRUD to the Chalk River facility. I haven’t seen a smoking gun, but I do believe it reasonable to suspect the acronym was developed there.
I’m a little less willing to take SCRAM at face value, though the story is fun. But I have no logical reason to support my view.
The Snopes article you linked does point out that acronyms are a 20th century phenomenon. I have no trouble at all disbelieving the folk etymologies for fuck, shit, and others claim to go back to medieval times. But that’s more because I started out thinking they were BS. With both SCRAM and CRUD, we’re not talking about words that were coined because of their initials, simply older words that were adapted by people who had already become enamored of acronyms such as RADAR and SONAR. And who had named a weapon system after a Rube Goldberg musical instrument: The Bazooka.
After all, we’re talking about the same branch of engineering and science that uses both barns and shakes as units.
For that matter, it was about ten years later that the first designation of the signal that would later be described as the first pulsar, was originally called LGM-1, for Little Green Man.
So, in short, I’m afraid that I have to disagree with you about the origin of CRUD, as it applies to nuclear power. And to remain unconvinced by both stories with respect to SCRAM, again as a term used in nuclear power.
Folks need to go read comment #4 by pronuke on the website hosting the article on the traveling wave reactor. Good stats that give you a real feel for nuclear waste vs coal or oil.
I apologize for misattributing those beliefs to you. FWIW, at nuke school, I was told unequivocally that both terms originated from Chalk River and the Chicago nuclear pile, respectively. I thought it sounded like a bunch of B.S., but I sure as heck wasn’t going to argue with my instructor. :dubious:
When I was in the Navy, I never saw crud, even the radioactive type, capitalized like an acronym. Also, I’ve never seen any definitive citation for the Chalk River etymology. It all looks like the same UL circulating around.
I agree completely with everything you have said here.
I have to be honest–I don’t know how either of these terms came to be associated with the nuclear industry. I just think the acronym theory I heard in nuke school sounded like a bunch of B.S. After all, both alleged terms, “Chalk River Unidentified Deposits,” and “Safety Control Rope Axe Man” both sound about as likely as “To Insure Promptness.”
Even wikipedia asserts that scram, at least, is likely a backronym. (And the entry for [Chalk River Unidentified Deposits](for "Chalk River Laboratories - Wikipedia) has been deleted and redirected.)
No worries.
Given where you’re coming from, I certainly understand why you would jump on what you thought I was saying, with both feet.