"Clean" Nuclear Power ?

Great Debates
41

Those are decent ranges that I have seen as well. The question is, how accurate are they? $100 per ton is absolutely outrageous - when you think of the tons per year that are emitted when powering a city of 500,000 persons, the cost per person is enormous.

Large-scale disposal and handling of used/spent batteries is a larger problem that is swept under the rub in most arguments. As is the emissions from production of these batteries, especially ones which contain any sort of heavy metal. There is no such thing as a zero-emissions manufacturing process. If you make batteries out of mercury, cadmium, lead, antimony, or what have you - there will be emissions.

Anyone know what a mercury allowance is supposed to cost? I do - it’s in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per ton.

Utilities only care about the costs if it puts them in a position of unfair competition in a deregulated market. Otherwise, it just gets passed through to the consumer. If deregulation were to end completely, there is not really much a utility can do - the cost is the cost, and that $100 per ton CO2 cost will move directly to the bottom line, and onto the utility bills. The utility would not care in the least, so long as they could show the regulators that they were being as efficient as possible with all non-tax costs and expenses.

Natural gas is nothing but a quick-fix, and everyone in the industry knows this. It’s a greenhouse-gas emitting quick-fix.

I would have said personally that I am inclined towards coal technology that sets SO2 emissions to 0.1 lbm/MBtu or less, NOx to 0.1 lbm/MBtu or less, and scrubs 90% of heavy metals. Then, focus hard on high-carbon neutrality biomass to co-fire or replace coal (where possible), knowing that this will still only be able to replace coal for about 10% at most, under and ideal scenario. Then, bring safe nuclear back, and in full force. Put taxes on gasoline and energy to fund basic research, open to all, for fuel cells, hydrogen, solar, wind. Give subsidies for things that do reduce energy consumption, such as programmable home thermostats.

And most of all, strongly encourage conservation by the means of a graduated tax on electricity. With all proceeds from the tax being protected by Constitutional Amendment, if neceessary, to be applied to energy research. And an ultimate goal of reducing energy usage by 20% across the Board.

A 20% reduction in households can be done. I have run the numbers for my personal project of 18 months lately, and been shocked to find that I saved more than I thought - I reduced my home energy costs by nearly 65% over 18 months. It would have been very easy for me to only do 20%.

Industries do not have it as easy - it’s hard to get the same level of reduction as you can out of a household. But there are many things that can be done, which are best left for another thread I think.

42

Yes but these types of respiratory disorders only affect a single generation, while radiation poisoning can really mess up the gene pool of subsequent generations in a very horrific way.

This is what makes the prospect of a nuclear accident so terrifying and imho completely justifies the severe standards we hold nuclear power to, even considering the low probability of one occuring.

43

But this is the point exactly. Uranium Ore is not as concentrated and a natural source of background radiation. Things become more volatile upon processing at a plant. Concentration is a big concern. The more concentrated the radiation source, the more dangerous it is. Ore just ain’t that concentrated (that’s what makes it ore).

The mining and processing of uranium ore is protested. Perhaps you don’t hear about it because you haven’t been looking in the right places. Google anyone?

44

Good to see ya, Anthracite. I hope London is treating you well. (Stay out of Covent Garden; I’ve heard they sell garlic there. Or maybe lesbian vampires have different food allergies. :slight_smile: )

It is my impression that nukes are no longer constructed in the US because (a) they are more expensive than existing alternatives and (b) the public opposition would be substantial. It is my impression that if you take away (b), (a) would remain and the plants wouldn’t be built (in the US) anyway. Externalities aside. Comments?

I hope you don’t mind a little tit for tat:

  1. Well, most of the figures I’ve seen are closer to the lower end of the scale. ($3 to $25) I don’t want to rule out the high end though. If it were established that emissions reductions would prevent a few Antarctic glaciers from sliding off their continent or if the Gulf Stream were endangered then the high end may seem reasonable (and nukes would look more attractive).

  2. Environmental reality may be nice or it may be mean. That reality is independent of the burden on the economy.

  3. Batteries: interesting. I wonder whether fuel cells use heavy metals.

I see your point, but I’ll note that higher prices should lead to lower consumption, excess capacity and lower profits over the medium term. OTOH, the regulators may allow correspondingly higher prices…

Also, let’s recall 1) Businesses that consume lots of power will oppose large carbon taxes and
2) Electricity in the US only produces about 1/3 of all CO2 emissions. (Hm. I’m not sure that sounds right.)

Hey, I like quick fixes. Also, there is some scope for greater natural gas extraction. And gas turbines are pretty efficient. Then there are exotic ideas such as extracting natural gas suspended in seawater (?), etc.

Still, my approach would be to set the taxes, eliminate the subsidies and let the chips fall where they may. (Ok, I’ll allow some R&D spending.)

Hm. I’d rather tax the “bad” more directly: i.e. put the tax on the carbon (methane, etc.) emissions. Also, it’s not clear to me that public energy research would necessarily be the best use of the resulting tax revenues.

45

Only to seafoods - I hate nearly all seafood, unless done very, very well. For instance, there is only one place in the World I will eat lobster bisque at - all others, you might as well serve me something out of the loo…

Ewwww…that’s a good one. I don’t have any firm numbers available here, but IIRC while nuclear plants are an expensive capital cost option, their O&M costs are very low - lower than coal even - when one does not consider the externalities. Of course, add on a $25 per ton carbon tax as a differential cost, and maybe it swings things even more in their favor.

I can tell you, without violating confidentiality, that my company does one major, serious, nuclear feasibility study every 3 months or so like clockwork, from all over the World - but about half of the time, in the US. In general, in every case we recommend they pursue plans for approval and licensing, and in every case except 1 of them, they decided that the legal fight against public perception and the environmental lobby is too hard, and they dropped it.

I agree with you there - the problem is, how does one convince the vast lowing herds of technologically illiterate cattle out there that wasting electricity is bad, and that there are costs to be paid? Imagine, as the result of a carbon tax, what happens when everyone’s electric bill in the US doubles. Only doubles, not quintuples or worse. What do you think would be the reaction, politically? Think about the gasoline situation - around KC, when gasoline prices jump 10 cents a gallon, all 4 news channels put it as their lead-in “Breaking news” story, and cast it in the tone of “Can someone please save the children???” Technically and technologically illiterate journalism certainly seems to drive the public, herding the cattle like a bunch of liberal-arts cowboys.

This sort of leads to another potential debate topic - I wonder more and more if deregulation and carbon reductions and energy usage reductions can exist at all together. The more that I think about it, it seems that a deregulated environment in that situation has the potential to be very scary for companies, and they will do the Wrong Things to meet goals, thus making the situation worse (or, at least, not making the situation as good as it might otherwise be).

A problem you might not be considering is that unlike coal, an enormous number of homes and businesses use natural gas for direct heating, and thus power production has to compete with home heating needs - especially in the Winter. Two winters ago, we had a situation with a client of mine, where their power plant was told that due to very low pipeline pressures (resulting from too much residential gas usage in a very cold week) and natural gas supply limitations, the gas-turbines at the plant were going to have to take a reduction in natural gas supply, and thus be derated by about 100 MW total. The problem is that they were running flat-out, trying to provide power for all the people with electric furnaces…so in this case, they had to weigh one against the other (they ended up buying power from a competitor at a differential replacement cost of about $150 a MWhr, which…well, do the math. 100 MW times $150 per MWhr…that’s $15,000 an hour cost that got moved to the bottom line)

Coal, on the other hand, not only has few competitors for it’s disposition, but can be stockpiled on-site, for these sorts of situations.

46

Ok, I’ve worked in a nuclear plant for a local utility for the last 16 years. Some things I can divulge some things I cannot of course for obvious reasons.
We presently operate 4 nuclear plants, numerous fossil and hydo plants. If you take the nuclear waste produced by the one nuclear plant where I work and compare it to the waste shipped by the hospitals located in the county our plant is located in, the ratio is 3 to 1. Our fuel rods are stored on-site. The public would be shocked at how little waste a nuclear plant actually produces.
In answer to Polycarp’s question. Yes, at present time we are receiving shipments of spent rods from another of our plants. When our plant was built, it was actually supposed to be a 4-unit plant. They then decided to take it down to a 2-unit site, and finally, we only completed one unit with an option to add another one. So we basically have 2 spent-fuel pools that are complete, with the option and plans to be able to open another 6. We recently completed and added another pool, which really upset the general population for reasons above and beyond me. The plan was for an original 6 pools, approved by the NRC and all government agencies, yet we completed and opened only 2 originally and now completed the 3rd. There was never any additional danger to the public, the pools were approved long ago with the original plans for the plant. I realize the public probably didn’t consider that.
There will be more nuclear plants, you’ll probably see them going up in the near future. We’ll probably be adding another unit onto the one we presently have. With the deregulation fraud that’s going on in Cali, the public has realized that it’s not the golden road that was first thought. We may still deregulate, but it will be a huge mess, the industrial community will profit greatly, with the residentual customer being the one that absorbs an increase in their utility bill in the end. At first, there will be a huge decrease as the utilities seek out to add customers, but that should only last about a year. Eventually, most people will be paying about double what they pay for their electrial power right now if deregulation continues, and it will because that is the wave of the future.
With deregulation oncoming, utilities have learned to work together, we’ll probably have a couple of other utilities join in the cost of adding other units, more than one company will have to shoulder the cost of building a plant, and that is really a plus because believe me, when you start messing with people’s electricity, they get really pissed. Something about having to do without air-conditioning and TV really gets under their skin. At that point in time they could care less where the electricity comes from as long as their life isn’t interrupted.

47

Thank you very much, Ultress. As you probably gathered, I read a bunch of the stuff from NC-WARN, discounted it to some extent as pushing the issue, but didn’t have the information to form an intelligent opinion. Thanks to your post, I now do. Much appreciated.

Well, we could evacuate Bolivia, Tibet, about half of Peru and Chile, Wyoming, much of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, etc., and ban all brick construction and white paint.

Yes, there are significant radiation-poisoning hazards associated with nuclear power plant disasters. There is a hell of a lot more
“natural” radiation in the environment as it exists today than there would be from even the most horrific modern reactor accident (discounting Chernobyl – the construction of that plant was equivalent to heating your home by throwing sticks of dynamite into an open fireplace!

Black lung was endemic to the coalfields in the 19th Century and early 20th; modern techniques have, as I understand, reduced it. But fossil-fuel plants still produce an inordinate amount of particulates and greenhouse gases, despite best efforts at cleaning things up. (Anthracite can speak with much more authority on that, and I’m not automatically damning all fossil fuel plants, just pointing out that there are some environmental-quality problems associated with even the cleanest of fossil fuel generating plants.)

Bottom line is that we need to develop controlled fusion at an economically acceptable level sometime in the near future – and our bureaucracy seems to think that anything that gets them through the next four years is a fine idea and is nearly totally ignoring the funding of such research.

If I were a stockholder in MobilExxon or some of the other large energy-source corporations, or a major utility, I’d be pushing that company hard to (a) support rather than impeding fusion research, and (b) position themselves to take most advantage of the success in economic fusion generation when it finally comes.

Of course I’d encourage geothermal and tidal power – but at best they can only provide a useful small fraction of our power needs.

48

Greenhouse gases yes; particulates are not typically a problem when the plant equipment is operating well. United States electrostatic precipitator removal efficiencies are typically 99.5% to 99.9% removal, and can be as high as 99.95% removal efficiency (mass basis). It results in a very low level of dust emissions, even when one takes into account the thousands of tons of ash per year which go up a stack.

If you have a wet SO2 scrubber on the plant, coupled with an ESP, then the particulate emission rate can be essentialy “0”.

Unless, of course, you are in Russia and the former Soviet Republics, China, India, or other countries - where removal efficiencies of dust collection equipment are around 75-95%…

49

Thanks to all the posters above for a very informative discussion - I’m leaning more in favor of nuclear based on what I’ve read here. (In fairness, I was not against it before, but did have more concerns about waste…)

I do believe there are more political problems involved than scientific. Not that nuclear power is easy, but it seems as if the technology to make it safe has been developed, and that disposal of waste is not an insurmountabke problem. But our politics (U.S.) does revolve around the election cycle too much, and long-term research and developement do not get enough attention - not just in re nuclear power, but all other energy research.

Solve the political problem, that’s more than half the battle.

50

Not to downplay what happened at Chernobyl, but casualty estimates are largely based on linear extrapolations down to very low levels of radiation.

In other words, the assumption is that if X rems of radiation result in y% of cancers in the next 20 years, then 1/10x radiation will result in 1/10y cancers.

The very low radiation increase then, when spread over a very large population, can still result in a large number of predicted cancer deaths.

The trouble with this is that the human response to radiation is not linear, and in fact there is growing evidence that very low levels of radiation exposure may in fact be beneficial. And while Thyroid cancer in Children was higher than expected, the rates of Leukemia in the general population were way lower than expected. That makes sense from a hormonesis standpoint, because the Thyroid cancers come from concentrations of energetic, short-lived isotopes, while Leukemia is more of a response to general elevated levels of background radiation.

Here’s some interesting reading about Cancer effects from Chernobyl, written by the International Atomic Energy Agency: http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/Periodicals/Bulletin/Bull383/cardis.html

Elsewhere in the article they quantify this:

'liquidators" is their term for the people who actually responded to the emergency and the aftermath cleanup.

And we should remember that the Chernobyl accident was about the worst thing that could possibly happen in a nuclear plant. A substantial portion of the reactor core was literally vaporized and distributed over a large population. That can’t happen in Western reactors because of the containment systems which Chernobyl lacked.

And even so, the disaster was horrible but on the same magnitude of other major industrial accidents, and not nearly as bad as the worst ones. For instance, the Bhopal disaster killed 8,000 people and injured between 20,000 and 50,000. The Qinghai Dam collapse killed about 400 people, thousands of houses, and displaced about 5,000 people.

Nuclear power can be dangerous, but so can any other concentrated form of energy. And even the entire fatality count from Chernobyl probably doesn’t come close to equalling the number of people die every year as a result of other forms of energy production.

Nuclear is still the safest, cleanest way to create energy. We’re nuts to ignore it or actively campaign against it like we have in the past.

51

Damn. I wanted to take a line out there before I saved it. I said Chernobyl was "not nearly as bad’ as the worst major industrial accidents. That’s not true. It ranks as one of the worst industrial accidents ever. But the point remains that a Chernobyl can’t happen in Western reactors, and that even Chernobyl did not kill as many people as die from side-effects of other forms of power generation.

52

Wow. Thanks for the info. How does anti-nuke sentiment abroad compare to the US?

No idea. I speculate that we could bribe the public with an income tax cut.

Also, it would help if the public understood that their big purchases matter more for helping the environment (eg get a fuel efficient car, refriderator- oh and buy a few screw-in flourescent bulbs) than whether they recycle or continually flip their light switches off.

Deregulation is a tricky topic, IMHO. If it wasn’t a little intricate, we wouldn’t have had the California snafu, again IMHO.

53

I am not familiar with those studies. So it is with all due modesty that I inquire, “Have you lost your freaking mind?”

There. I’m better now. [Insert applicable grin]. Seriously, the line I’ve heard is that US regulations assume that there is a threshold below which certain toxins (or radiation) have no effect. And that furthermore that threshold probably doesn’t exist.

It is true that the body has mechanisms for fighting cancer, which might strengthen the threshold argument. Alas, those mechanisms are overloaded for a non-trivial share of the population by various environmental insults, of the natural and non-natural variety.

Finally, let me state my personal taste in these matters. I am sympathetic to a view such as, “Sure nuclear power is dangerous. But so is global warming or large-scale hydroelectric power for that matter.”

What I don’t like hearing is dubious claims such as, “Oh, nuclear waste disposal is almost entirely a political problem. We can use disposal technique X, for example.” Then I dig into disposal technique X and uncover an array of problems.

Ad copy for Flowbark: Big Nuke. Serious Energy for Serious People[sup]TM[/sup]

I glean from Sam’s post, that he would oppose the introduction of pebble bed reactors that lack containment domes. It’s true that meltdowns apparently cannot occur in such systems. But conventional fires can occur, just as they do with other structures.

54

Polycarp: *Bottom line is that we need to develop controlled fusion at an economically acceptable level sometime in the near future *

Yeah, but reality might be mean. We’ve been about 50 years away from a viable fusion system for about 50 years.

I suspect that, one way or another, we’ll squeak by with a variety of energy sources for the next 40-100 years or so.

If I were a stockholder in MobilExxon or some of the other large energy-source corporations, or a major utility, I’d be pushing that company hard to (a) support rather than impeding fusion research, and (b) position themselves to take most advantage of the success in economic fusion generation when it finally comes.

Not me. I’d advise the oil companies to stay the heck out of businesses that they lack expertise in. (Maybe Bechtel (or certain utilities) might have skill in this; I don’t see how Exxon would.) But hey, I’m a big advocate of investing in index funds. :slight_smile:

55

Well, I read that in a paper a couple of years ago. It was called “Radiation Hormonesis”. But I just tried doing a web search, and couldn’t find anything. So I may in fact have to retract that.

It is, however, true the incidence of Leukemia in the Chernobyl area is much lower than was predicted.