"Nuclear Free Alberta"

The BBQ Pit
1

The debate around nuclear power in Alberta is heating up, and it’s bringing the anti-nuke morons out of the woodwork in droves. Here is NuclearFreeAlberta.ca weighing in on the matter:

Translation: CANDU reactors, like all other industrial facilities, have maintenance plans. Part of the maintenance is to inspect high-pressure tubing and replace it if signs of corrosion are found.

This is like saying, “Cars are unsafe! Already, millions of car tires have been found with worn treads, and have had to be replaced to keep the cars from crashing!”

Of course, they don’t mention that the new design produces less than half the waste of current designs, has more passive safety systems, uses less heavy water, and needs 30% less fuel. But it’s NEW! We’d be GUINEA PIGS! Because of course, engineering is a black art and scary.

It’s been eliminated because it has been replaced with other safety systems.

More scare tactics:

And if you hold your head in H20, you will be dead within minutes. That’s why we don’t hold our heads underwater for very long or stand next to spent fuel as it is being removed from the plant. No mention is made, of course, of how quickly the radioactivity degrades - heat generated by the radioactivity drops by 90% immediately after being removed from the reactor, down to 1% in a day, and down to .1% within a year.

Right - All the waste from Ontario’s EIGHTEEN nuclear plants is carried away by magical pixies and no longer exists. As for remaining dangerous for thousands of years. CANDU fuel from the advanced reactor would degrade back to the radiation level of the original Uranium ore within about 150 years. They don’t mention that.

This is close to being a lie. Reprocessing the fuel removes the actinides, plutonium, and other long-lived dangerous elements, making the resulting waste much safer. It also reduces the amount of fuel the reactor needs. In any event, the ACR reactor doesn’t need to reprocesses the fuel if we don’t want to do it.

Right. Just as we incur the risk of being obliterated by a rock from space. In other words, it’s a meaningless sentence unless you quantify the risk. It’s hard to quantify though, because there has NEVER been a nuclear waste transportation accident in Canada or the U.S. that resulted in permanent contamination of anything or any injuries or radiation exposure to the public. NEVER. 30,000 people in the U.S. and 3,000 in Canada die every year in auto accidents, but no one has ever been killed or even injured by nuclear waste transportation. Yet the BIG SCARY warning on the web site would make you think it’s a really dangerous activity.

They seem to think this is a bad thing. I couldn’t figure this out, until I did some research and found that there’s a whole paranoia/conspiracy theory about GEORGE BUSH planning to ship all of America’s nuclear waste to Canada. Bush is evil. Therefore, nuclear power is evil. Therefore, the nuclear plant in Alberta is evil. Or something like that.

in fact, I wouldn’t even mind if we burned American waste. Aside from NIMBYism, if you really want to help the planet, and not just protect your own tribe, being able to process waste from the same continent into a form that’s much less dangerous, and reduce the need to mine new ores in the process, seems like an environmentally friendly plan. Except that every good Canadian environmentalist knows that Americans are teh devil.

Unmentioned is the fact that this water is being used ANYWAY for steam in the oil sands where the reactor would be used. One of the reasons a nuclear reactor makes good sense is because it can share some of these resources, making it more efficient. And frankly, I suspect that this statistic is bullshit anyway.

Nice. The anti-nuke crowd opposes it, and that is presented as evidence that it’s dangerous.

And they go on. Greenpeace is getting in on the act. They’re going to whip up a frenzy in Alberta with scare tactics and lies, and snarl this development in so much red tape that it will never happen. Already, the government is saying that they’ll probably need a 10-15 year evaluation program to approve the project, when they originally wanted it online in 2017.

Understand what this reactor is for - currently, oil from tar sands has a CO2 footprint about 50% larger than middle-east oil, because it takes energy to extract the oil from the sands - energy we currently get from natural gas. This is perhaps the most perfect application for a nuclear plant in the world - it’s in a remotely isolated area. The area needs a dense power source, and the power is all consumed locally. The area currently uses a very dirty power source, and there are NO other alternatives.

The greens in Alberta blather on about solar and wind. We already produce a LOT of wind power in Southern Alberta where it makes sense. But there’s no way you drive the tar sands projects with solar or wind. But of course, they also want these projects shut down. This is not going to happen. Period. So rather than accept that reality and work towards the most reasonable, most environmentally sound way of extracting that oil, they’d rather scream and kick and shut down a clean power source and force Alberta to continue pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.

In one interview, a GreenPeace spokesman even had the nerve (or lack of brain cells) to say that the nuclear plant should be shut down and that we need to focus on the real problem of Global Warming. The contradiction in that statement is apparently too much for his few functioning neurons to process.

2

Try telling these idiots that, given the peril of Global Warming, the risks of nuclear power simply have to be accepted. Duck behind something to avoid the head explosion shrapnel.

3

D’you have a cite for that? Not that I doubt you, but I’m interested. Previous figures I’ve read for the decay of reactor waste to leave only actinides ran from 600-1000 years, still perfectly manageable but 150 years is much better! Of course the CANDU is a unique system anyway…

As to the rest of it, I’m afraid the environmentalist movement is way too invested in the idea of their being in a battle between good and evil, with them on the good side. To be fair, there’s been more than a grain of truth in that view in some cases. Illegal logging and dumping, the Japanese practice of “scientific” whaling…

The problem is, they’ve developed an ideology. It’s dogmatic: from their point of view it’s not possible for them to be wrong! And you know what they say about reasoning people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. Any evidence you offer will be rejected as evil propaganda, because it comes from the evil side.

4

About six or seven years ago, now, a defunct nuclear plant in Southern California had reported that they had administratively lost a section of spent fuel that had been cut from a fuel cell for testing. (The smart money is that the silly thing is in the containment pool, it’s just that the plant cannot prove that it is there.)

It was absolutely hilarious seeing the quotes provided by a spokesperson from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Oddly enough he was trying to explain why they weren’t screaming for heads. His argument was that since the plant had been shut down for several years, much of the radioactivity in the section would have died down, making it less of a threat to be unaccountable.

:dubious:
I’ve pretty much stopped listening to anti-nuke fanatics. It’s just not worth the headache.

5

They didn’t even mention that every CANDU reactor can be turned into a nuclear bomb with one signal from the Prime Minister.

But I’ve said too much…

Yeah, I have a friend who is a high mucky-muck in Transalta Utilities, and her take on AGW and energy sources is basically that people don’t want what’s actually good for them, and nobody seems to have an interest in properly educating people.

6

Is this even true? (The “You’d die within seconds” part, I mean.) How dangerous IS a spent fuel rod when it’s removed from a nuclear reactor?

7

I may be wrong, but I think it’s the heat (which is, after all, a form of radiation).

8

I’m cooking my food with radiation? OH NO!!!

9

Well, I can’t say that spent fuel is that dangerous. robby and I have been discussing acute incapacitating doses from rad sources in the thread about the 2008 version of The Andromeda Strain, here. (Look for post #55, it begins the nitty-gritty talk about rad exposure stuff.)

Now, if they changed their statement to “You’ll receive a dose that could be fatal within a few seconds, if you stood next to a spent fuel cell,” I’d have no trouble with that statement. I’m not sure it’s accurate, but I’d be able to believe that one could get an LD50 dose in that time frame at one meter from an unshielded fuel cell.
There are, quick and dirty here, three big factors and couple minor ones that are important when talking about radiation exposure.

[ul][li]Time - the longer you’re exposed the more of a dose you’ll get, and the more dose you get the more damaging it is, in general. [/li][li]Distance - the closer you are to a source, the more dose you’ll get. [/li][li]Shielding - If there’s something between you and the source, that’s going to be absorbing some of the energy from the source before it reaches you. [/ul][/li]
For the minor ones:[ul][li]affected organ[*]type and energy of the radiation being emitted. Some kinds of radiation penetrate a lot further than others. Others penetrate so much that they’re much less of a concern. [/ul][/li]
For this example, we’re talking pretty close - one meter and no shielding. Not quite worst case scenario, but not good. But the time we’re talking about is just a few seconds. Per the cite robby gave in the linked thread, dogs could survive for 100 minutes after being hit with 20,000 rads of gamma radiation. That’s a huge dose. And the dogs weren’t killed in seconds. So we’d need to UP that dose to kill someone in seconds.

I just don’t see it happening.

Which isn’t to say that a fuel cell couldn’t kill you - it just wouldn’t be instantaneous, nor would it be just a few seconds exposure.

Now, I have to ask, just how the Hell can anyone think of finding a section of fuel cell without any shielding around it?
smiling bandit, I disagree - I think that if you’re feeling heat effects you’re so far screwed that the temperature changes are the least of your problems. Cooling for spent fuel is important, but that’s as a chronic condition, not an acute problem. Forex - I don’t believe that storage pools for spent fuel have any requirement for circulating water, which I would expect if the fuel were still generating that much heat.

10

I wish I hadn’t read this thread. So frustrating!

Part of me wishes I could create some alternate universe to put these douches in, put them in power and then see them eat their words without harming the rest of us. Gah!

Why are people so mind-numbingly ignorant?

11

I think that (being a native Albertan and knowing the mindset) some of this foolishness comes from that old-country thinking that permeates the province. “Well, we produce the oil, let’s just use it! What’s wrong with that? We’ve been doing it like that for a long time, why change?” that sort of thing.

Also, Greenpeace can fuck off.

12

And how about that nuclear fusion? Do you know what else uses nuclear fusion? The SUN! Do you REALLY want Alberta to be a giant ball of plasma!? HUH, PUNK!?

On second thought, anyone wanna see if we can get greenpeace worked up about the dangers of Hydrogen Hydroxide/Dihydrogen Monoxide?

13

Actually, I think you’re right. I must have juxtaposed the 150 number in my head with something else, 'cause as soon as I saw your message I realized you were right. I was reading an article on alternative fuel cycles for CANDU and other reactors, and the number must have come from there. The Candu has multiple types of fuel it can burn in different ways, and each of them produces a different amount of waste. But I don’t think the waste changes much in composition, other than perhaps a Thorium cycle.

Anyway, we’ll use your number of 600-1000 years until I can find a cite. In any event, this is a far cry from the ‘tens of thousands of years’ NuclearFreeAlberta keeps saying.

14

I’ll look for it in the evening tommorow , but there was research done on bombarding the spent rods with a higher (read different) level of radiation. So that if something that has a half life of ten thousand years , bombarding it with an alpha level of radiation would effectively make it much more radioactive, but the half life would have been a few tens of years.

Declan

15

So build a nuclear desalination plant.

16

The short answer is, almost certainly not. You may well collapse within seconds and have a long unpleasant death, though.

The real answer is we can’t really be sure, due to a lack of data. The big player here is neutron radiation, and there aren’t too many studies on exposure to it. (Though I’m betting there’s plenty of classified data, due to the neutron bomb.) Spent fuel rods in water give off a lovely blue glow, due to Cerenkov radiation. That’s from all the neutrons streaming through the water faster than lightspeed in water. (Alpha and beta are stopped by the rod casing, and gamma isn’t a particle.) Neutrons are attenuated quite efficiently by water, but pass through metals with ease. Gamma is the other way around - it goes through water fairly easily, but is attenuated by metals.

Absorbed dose is measured in rads or grays, and is an absolute measure of delivered energy per unit mass. (E.g. A gray is one joule of radiation energy per kg.) But there’s a problem. Different types of radiation are worse than others, for the same delivered energy.

Because of this, an equivalent absorbed dose is measured in rems or Sieverts, weighted for the biological effect of the radiation. If you absorb 1 rad of gamma, you’ll take a hit of 1 rem. If you absorb 1 rad of alpha, you’ll take a hit of 20 rem because for the same energy aborbed, alpha is about 20 times more damaging to you than gamma. Neutrons are generally considered to be about 10 times more damaging than gamma, but it really depends on their energy, see table 1004(b).2. (Note that intermediate energies are the most damaging!)

Now, robby’s cite from the Andromeda Strain thread exposed dogs to gamma from Cobalt 60 or “pulsed reactor radiations”. Unfortunately you only get the abstract from the link, so we don’t get the composition of reactor radiations. The reactor may have had a neutron “window”, so the dogs also were exposed to neutrons, or it may not. Either way, fission neutrons are not really representative of bare fuel rod radiation.

According to this paper, only six exposures to high levels of neutron have been reported in the scientific literature. It details the treatment and fate of one of the Japanese workers who accidentally created a criticality in a precipitation tank in 1999. He was exposed to 540 rads of neutron and 850-1300 rads of gamma. He lost consciousness for 1 minute and vomited within 10 minutes. (Of course, he may have simply fainted, which would be quite understandable.) Compare that to the 20000 rads of gamma in the other study, which took 100 minutes to “incapacitate” the dogs. He didn’t actually die for 82 days, although he received a lot of care and bone marrow transplants. But even this incident isn’t representative of bare fuel rod radiation - fission neutrons will have a different energy spectrum, and the tank was full of water and surrounded by a cooling water jacket.

17

I hear ya…I’ve lived long enough to see that you don’t have to be a white-haired Bible thumper to be a hateful, wild-eyed reactionary. :frowning:

Hell, and to channel my inner Dr. Strangelove for a moment: say that worst comes to worst, and we have another Chernobyl ever 40 years or so (which, y’know, all things considered, is somewhat less than likely). Well, how many people actually died, or were maimed, because of what happened? How much permanent enviromental damage occured—did a lot of species go extinct? Did it burn off the ice caps?

I’m just saying, if we have to choose between an enviromental disaster that costs lives and property, and one that would destroy more lives, property, and cause climatic change that would reduce the habitability of the planet…it’s simple reasoning. Choose the plan that leaves a smaller pile of bodies.

18

I would have thought the father of the Gaia hypothesis saying that nuclear energy is the only hope to halt global warming would have shut some of these pin-heads up, but nooooooo.

19

Knee-jerk anti-nuclear stands are stupid. But a couple of the claims Sam is ridiculing aren’t as ridiculous as has been suggested.

Those tubes with the scale forming in them aren’t supposed to be consumable equipment, like tires. There have actually been problems with the complicated piping that carries the water in the ‘hot’ loop on CANDU, and AECL has been putting a lot of effort into trying to figure out why it’s happening.

Well, actually, the big plan was to take it out of the reactors, sit it in some pools of water for a few years to cool down and let the radiation subside, and then move it to permanent storage, probably deep burial in the precambrian shield. But out of NIMBY and genuine uncertainty (the interment would be a multi-thousand year thing and that’s not easy) have resulted in an indefinite hold on the deep burial plan (as of 2 years ago when I last studied this), and so none of the waste had been permanently disposed of. They just keep building new pools next to Pickering.

Of course, even if the waste is less radioactive than uranium ore, you don’t want to drink water that filtered through uranium ore. According to the final study of Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (available as a PDF linked from this page),

They then refer to an appendix which says:

And indeed, that figure seems to show the curves coming down after about 10^6 years.

I’ll admit, I didn’t think it was that long. But even if it were an order of magnitude shorter, a hundred thousand years is longer by far than civilization has been around, and is basically asking for an ice age or two. In short, a long time even for a card-carrying Clock of the Long Now fan, and we really need to clear up whether it’s 150 years or 1,000,000 or what, or we’re all making decisions based on bad info.

See, now this is the part that gets me. Nuclear power is really cool. You get steam from something that’s going to emit heat anyway, and it’s clever and modern and doesn’t emit harmful gases. The CANDU system is really quite safe, and overall pretty elegant and versatile (aside from the piping, which is a nightmare). But the waste is a problem. There are probably ways to deal with it, but it’s not a trivial thing.

The tar sands, meanwhile, are ridiculous. It’s messy, expensive and environmentally problematic to extract the stuff, and it’s not elegant. Pumping that tarry mix of sand and bitumen around is a toxic hassle, and they go through pumps like cars go through oil filters. And for what? The oil is going to run out anyway. Not next year, but not so many yeas away. This big messy, expensive operation isn’t a long-term solution to anything, it’s an exit-in-a-blaze-of-glory for the oil-based economy. The provincial government and the oil companies are making loads of cash on it now, but it’ll be gone eventually.

So you’ve got two choices:

  1. Extract all the oil and gas. Use some of the gas to generate steam to inject into the sand to get the oil. Sell everything else for big bucks. Burn it all and make CO[sub]2[/sub]. Result, a pile of GHGs and a messy expanse of tailings ponds in northern Alberta for nothing to grow in and ducks to suffocate on.

  2. Extract all the oil and gas. Use a nuclear plant to generate the steam to inject into the sand to get the oil. Sell all the oil and gas for big bucks (but pay for a nuclear plant). Burn it all and make CO[sub]2[/sub]. Result, a pile of GHGs, a messy expanse of tailings ponds, and a bonus of high-level radioactive waste.

I don’t see why option 2 is better. Sure, you have more oil and gas available to burn in cars and furnaces, but the GHG count released is pretty well the same. It won’t keep us from running out of oil or gas, it’ll just delay that by a bit. What it will do is make more oil and gas available for sale, which I guess is lucrative. Maybe it makes more money, but I don’t see that it makes a lot more sense.

But yeah, the oilsands project is inefficient, and they burn a load of fossil fuels to extract the fossil fuels. And it’d be great to have another source of energy that was nice and clean and didn’t make nasty GHGs (or nuclear waste). And knee-jerk dismissal of nuclear power is stupid. If we’re going to be an advanced, industrial civilization, we need reliable, powerful sources of energy. Oil and gas are a done for soon enough, and they’re messy. Nuclear holds some promise, if we can make the fuel last for a good long while, and figure out what to do with the waste.

20

Maintenance plans aren’t just for ‘consumable’ equipment. They are inspection plans designed to discover components that are degrading and need replacement - like these tubes. A good analogy would be the annual inspections of aircraft. A wing spar isn’t supposed to corrode, but sometimes it does, so you inspect it every year to make sure any unforseen issues don’t become safety hazards.

My problem with NuclearFreeAlberta is that they are presenting this as a risk, rather than as a cost. They’re basically saying, “The tubes could corrode, and cause a radiation leak! We’ve been lucky so far.” They’re just trying to inject more fear and uncertainty iinto the debate. If they wanted to be honest, they could simply say, “The true costs of CANDU have some variation - for example, no one expected to have to replace these tubes so often. So don’t count on nuclear power being as cheap as you think it is.” That’s at least a fair argument.

On-site cooling of spent fuel is part of the plan of every reactor. You need to store the stuff onsite for a few years until it’s cool enough to move. The point is, there are reactors all through Ontario, many near communities. The Darlington reactor is right in a municipality, and only 70 km from Toronto. NuclearFreeAlberta has said that no community is willing to store this waste. In fact, there is a new storage facility being built at the Municipality of Kincardine, and the city voted to allow the storage of waste to take place there.

Very true. But then, there are all kinds of other toxic chemicals created in various industrial practices that are dangerous and don’t receive the kind of attention nuclear waste does. Long term storage of toxic chemicals is done using the same techniques advocated for nuclear waste - vitrification, storage in steel-encased concrete tubes, etc.

No, it’s not trivial. It’s a difficult engineering problem. But it’s one with known parameters and known ways to achieve the goals we’re looking for. But frankly, worrying about what the waste will do in 50,000 years seems to be to be a bit of a stretch. We don’t even know if the human race will exist then. 500 years from now humanity will be so technically advanced and will have changed so much we wouldn’t even recognize it. If we can find a geological repository that is completely safe for at least a thousand years, that’s good enough for me.

The thing is, that oil is getting extracted, regardless of how ridiculous it is, unless a cheaper source of energy is discovered. This is the thing the environmentalists won’t accept - the economic forces behind tar sands development are so powerful that development and extraction will continue until it no longer makes financial sense to do so. Period. You can wish that they were never discovered, but they were. The entire Northern Alberta economy is restructuring around them. As time goes on, and more and more money is invested in them, they will become increasingly difficult to slow down, and impossible to kill.

If the site consumes its own recoverable oil to power the steam, you have a point. But if they pipe in natural gas from Saskatchewan or elsewhere, you don’t. In that case, the choices look more like this:

  1. Extract 300 billion barrels of oil from the sands, using natural gas, and producing 80kg of CO2 for each barrel.

  2. Extract 300 billion barrels of oil from the sands, using nuclear, and saving 80kg of CO2 per barrel of emitted CO2.

I believe the natural gas from the project is going to come mainly from the NWT through the Mackenzie pipeline. Thus there is a net inflow of natural gas to the project, which could be eliminated with nuclear power.

If your larger point is that all the oil and natural gas on the planet is getting consumed anyway, so we might as well burn it in the tar sands than in our homes, then you also might have a reasonable point. But you could make the same argument in reverse - conservation is silly, because we’re going to burn all the stuff up anyway, so we might as well party hard until it’s gone - it won’t make a difference. And there’s even some truth to that. You could even argue that conservation is counterproductive because the only effect it will have is to reduce demand which will keep prices a little lower and prevent the development of alternative energy.

On the other hand, if the peak oil alarmists are right, and we’re on the downward slope of supply and prices are about to skyrocket to the point where they wreck our economy, then conservation is valuable, and that includes conserving the natural gas that would otherwise go into the tar sands.