Yes, he was. Since the scope of the Japanese disaster is not really yet known that well, I think Cecil declined to go into details on it. At least that’s my impression from talking with him about this.
Except Yucca is supposedly off the table. What we have is decades of nuclear fuel gurgling away in pools being constantly re-racked every time the nuclear industry tells the NRC to change its safety and security regulations regarding how many rods you can cram in per/square foot.
The public isn’t going to feel good about re-racking plutonium until it’s essentially one big nuclear mass waiting for a good earthquake or terrorist dive bomber. They’re going to demand dry casking, and that dry casking is going to have to be very secure. That’s going to be very expensive and the nuclear utilities are going to jack up rates and demand the taxpayers pay for it through govt. subsidies and/or go bankrupt - also forcing the taxpayers to pay for years of decommissioning.
They’re already suing the government to get out of paying into the long-term nuclear waste fund, even though they’re still actively generating 1,000’s of tons of new fuel rods each year that are going to need long-term waste storage.
But that does raise a valid concern, which led to the scuttling of the Yucca Mountain facility.
News of a train derailment is not uncommon–requiring the temporary evacuation of a town while hazmat crews clean up the ensuing chemical spills. Now replace those chemicals with cesium-137. Could such a spill be cleaned up quickly or safely, or would we end up with another large tract of uninhabitable land for a few millennia? Likewise the loss of a major transcontinental rail line?
Assuming there was a means by which the waste could be guaranteed to be delivered 100% safely to Yucca mountain, there’s still the problem that the material will remain very dangerous much longer than the casks into which they’re contained will remain intact. Then you’ll have an enormous quantity of radioactive waste seeping into the water table.
While the waste is not released directly into the atmosphere as with fossil fuels, there is still a significant amount of waste produced with nuclear energy. And much much more would be generated were we to make a concerted effort to replace coal with nuclear. Figuring out what to do with it all remains the biggest challenge, aside from the public perception issues already discussed.
Coal mining is scary to everybody who happens to think that climate change is a problem.
Basically, burning coal produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide. Since you’re taking all this carbon out of the ground and spewing it into the air, well, that’s probably the most major source of air pollution there is. Doesn’t matter how much you clean it, you’re basically taking chunks of carbon out of the ground and burning them.
Since coal produces something like 40% of the world’s energy, this is rather a problem.
Doesn’t have to be. If this nuclear waste is so dangerous and radioactive, well, that’s a good thing. Radioactive substances are sources of energy. We could re-use that waste until it’s spent, with just a little bit of foresight and planning.
Nuclear waste from traditional fission plants contains uranium and plutonium. Reprocessing it to remove those items and then reusing them for more power is a well-tested and proven technology, albeit somewhat expensive and not-economically sound.
But even better, a breeder reactor design can use this sort of waste more or less directly (with only minor processing), leading to a potential increased power generation from the original uranium of up to 60 times or so. Seriously, we can build devices that use this “waste” as fuel, many times over. By the time it’s really spent, it’s so low in radioactivity that you could sprinkle it on your Cheerios.
France does some of this sort of thing right now. Has for decades. They get most of their power this way. The only reason we don’t do it is the NIMBYs made it basically impossible to build any new nuclear power plants. They made it literally so bad that we had a plan to take all this potential fuel and bury it inside a mountain.
I agree this is probably the best solution currently doable. (Hoping that one day, cold fusion will become more than a pipedream) The trouble will be finding a means to garner widespread public acceptance of nuclear power, as an imperfect, but best among all available technologies for mass power generation. Attempts to directly spin the debate generally backfire.
Though I did get an idea after reaiding Cecil’s recent column on wind power: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2984/will-wind-power-change-the-weather Ask people to look at their electric bills and figure out how many kilowatts they use in an average month and their highest usage in the past 12 months. Ignoring natural gas, home heating oil, and/or gasoline it creates a baseline for average and peak power usage they can relate to.
Take those number, divide each by the number of people in the household, then multiply by 2 (To roughly factor in power consumed outside the house and for goods and services consumed) Now multiply the two numbers by 307,000,000 to get the average and peak power needs of the United States based on a rather small sample, but one which most people will likely self identify as average or below average than the rest of the country’s. A refresher course on scientific notation might be useful at this point.
Once they’ve back of the envelope computed the nation’s power needs in terms of terawatts, they can then divide that by the average power generation of a solar panel or windmill to learn how many of either would be needed (ignoring the variability of power generation by these methods for this exercise) and then compute the amount of space all these windmills and/or solar panels would require.
Based on the average cost per windmill/solar panel, the base cost per kilowatt could also be shown. Once people see these numbers, nuclear may not seem as unappealing, particularly if the point of the relatively low number of deaths or serious injuries caused by it could be driven home.
It would also likely get people to recalculate based on saving 20 kilowatts/month or so, which if done across the nation would make a huge difference alone.
Green living: Wind turbines power a Bronx apartment complex
Do you think a nearby nuclear power plant would save this apartment building tens of thousands of dollars a year? No. Tens of thousands of dollars a year would be going straight into some cigar-smoking fat cat’s off-shore bank accounts, instead of actually helping the community in this building, and thereby helping the whole surrounding community.
Power to the people! Literally.
Well, what’s the ROI on a $100k system that saves $10k per year? Unless my math is off, wouldn’t it be 10 years? And what are the maintenance costs?
I’m all for people using stuff like this, if it makes sense. If it’s cost effective. They don’t say what the winds are like, but:
When the winds blow steadily.
Look, wind power can make sense in some places. No one is denying that, levdrakon. Solar can make sense in some places too. And you can’t put a nuclear power plant everywhere (though I’ve seen designs for smaller, closed box neighborhood nuclear systems, if the designs could be approved for deployment). But it’s not going to be more than a niche provider because even setting aside cost, the system works well ‘When the winds blow steadily’…when they don’t, you are screwed.
-XT
They’re not screwed when the wind doesn’t blow. They only generate enough power for their common area needs, which equates to thousands of dollars/month and tens of thousands a year in savings. They’re still hooked up to the grid, so when the wind isn’t blowing, they draw from the grid. When the wind blows, they feed into the grid. That’s what the grid should be for. I don’t know the particular deal this building has worked out with the power company, but the bottom line is they’re saving thousands of dollars a year, and they still enjoy the convenience of grid power.
I’m guessing the power company doesn’t like them very much, and is probably considering ways to jack their rates and make it unaffordable, if it should ever grow into something other than extreme niche. Or, they’ll get legislation passed making it too expensive and complicated for anyone but a large utility (like them) to own and operate. That’s just the conspiracy theorist in me, though.
I’d be interested to see more numbers once it’s been running for awhile.
How quaint we’ve chosen to rely on statistics from the IAEA for Chernobyl casualties and ignore the credible studies which refute theirs.
By its own admission found on the “about us” page on its site, the IAEA was created to:
That report has come under considerable scrutiny:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/mar/25/energy.ukraine
and should be taken with all the skepticism the conversely alarmist reports:
should be viewed with.
I’m curious though at what point Cecil puts on the logical fallacy hat in trying to compare coal miner deaths with children getting thyroid cancer in Belarussia. Coal miners do choose their line of work and, at least in their regions relative to the rest of the blue collar population, are fairly well paid for it.
I don’t think those children or anyone else in the fallout zone downwind of Chernobyl had a say in their exposure.
The IAEA is financed by government contributions, the government officials behind this influenced by the nuclear power corporations. Faith in nuclear power as “clean, cheap and safe” has prevented the development of much safer alternatives like solar, geothermal and tidal generation sources. Before TMI we were told it was safe. Afterwards, it couldn’t happen again. Then Chernobyl, the same. Now Fukushima. It’s always an unforseen issue that we are told later on won’t happen aqain, by an industry whose overseers are all like the fox guarding the henhouse. The criticism of the IAEA report on Chernobyl was widespread, how come we are pretending it is gospel?
Don’t you believe a word of what they, or their shills, say. Look for yourself.
Wild assertions of mass death at Chernobyl- which of course Cecil answered.
You might feel that putting your head in the sand is good science. Others do not.
Most of what we have to go on regarding Chernobyl is at the mercy of the former Soviet Government. Much has been revealed since their demise, obviously ignored by the nuclear industry propagandists at the IAEA.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/apr/25/energy.ukraine?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
Do you really believe only 51 people died from the initial accident? Keep reading:
Okay, they were volunteers, but not everyone was:
Please, tell me how anyone can, with a clear conscience, keep perpetuating this nonsense about 51 people dying from Chernobyl.
Right, it’s expensive and uneconomic. Reprocessing’s big selling point is conserving uranium, but uranium is cheap and plentiful. The price of uranium could skyrocket and it still wouldn’t affect nuclear power prices much. If the price of uranium does go up, it just results in even more uranium reserves becoming economical to exploit. Even with rising uranium prices (if they rise) we’ve probably got 1000 years’ of uranium before the price could climb high enough for breeder reactors to become economic. 1,000 years is plenty of development lead time, even for the nuclear industry.
Right, but again, we don’t need to get 60 times more energy out of it because it’s dirt cheap, and as you say, it’s too expensive.
NIMBYs may have hailed it a victory, but it was genuine proliferation fears that killed reprocessing in the US.
Japan and France have reprocessing, but as far as I know, they haven’t made much progress with breeder technology, even in their relatively amenable climates.
Fast breeder history and status:
These failures can’t be blamed on NIMBYism. Now we have 100’s (1000s?) of tons of weapons-grade plutonium to worry about, because countries like France went ahead with reprocessing before they developed breeders that could use it.
Is Nuclear power safe? No its not. To think that humans with a lifespan of under 100 years are creating time bombs all over the planet that could leave areas uninhabitable for 25 000 years or more is mind boggling.
I understand the advantages, and I also understand that we’re not doing much better with coal (Save the polar bears!). The problem is most of the nuclear power plants in operation (in the US at least) were built in the 70’s and happily produce plutonium (which I understand was desirable to produce nuclear weapons at the time).
I’d like to know why our politicians, our scientists, and our professors are not pushing for upgrades to Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) which, when properly designed, virtually eliminate the risk of meltdown or catastrophic contamination. Thorium MSRs can produce an almost self-sustaining nuclear reaction of which a large amount of the byproduct can be used to refuel the reactor. I’ve linked a paper which praises the safety of these reactors below.
http://energyfromthorium.com/2006/10/27/molten-salt-reactors-safety-options-galore-paper/
Nuclear energy may be comparatively safe, (tongue in cheek: Its difficult to link deaths to radiation exposure because the effects are cumulative) but it could be MUCH safer using already-designed technology which the US has refused to fund. Luckily China has taken the lead on this.
I wish Cecil would have brought some exposure to this technology and its benefits, considering the entire article is about safety.
For more information about Thorium MSRs, I’ve found the blog linked below to be a fantastic resource. Spread the word!
What do you mean by “refused to fund?” The government? Why should it? The nuke industry has had 65 years to show investors what a wise investment it is.
Meanwhile, last year wind company Terra-gen secured $1.2 billion in financing to add 570 megawatts of capacity to its existing Alta Wind Energy Center, bringing the total capacity to 3,000MW. It has also become the largest wind farm in the US.
and,
California’s Alta Wind Energy Center beats deadlines, exceeds expectations
So let’s say 500MW for $1 billion. That’s 1000MW for $2 billion? The nuke industry will offer to sell you 1000MW for 6 or 7 billion, but everyone knows that’s a joke, and you won’t see shit for 10 years and more like $14 billion.
Wind is sounding like quite the deal, and doable.
Do you have a cite for that? I’ve tried to look for stories about hydro dam breaks, but my google-fu apparently isn’t strong enough.
Nuclear power sucks. Coal power sucks more. Boggles my mind that we don’t just ditch them both and use options we know are better.
Because the options that are “better” won’t come remotely close to meeting (for example) the USA’s appetite for electricity.
Of course they will. They’re already slaughtering nuclear in growth and added capacity.
That’s the point, levdrakon. Where do you think the power in the grid comes from? Wind power alone isn’t the solution. It’s a very useful piece to the puzzle, and we need to use more of it. But the grid needs to have other inputs, as neither wind nor solar is reliable enough to provide consistent minimum power levels. Geothermal and hydroelectric can’t provide the volume. That leaves us with fossil fuels and nuclear fission to use as the fundamental core; and of the two, nuclear is most likely the better long-term solution.
I did a little back of the envelope calculation and assuming 12kw wind system will average about 3kw over the course of a year and 25% is very generous estimate, since commercial wind systems, carefully sited to maximize power, average about 20%. That is about 26,300 kwh a year or about $3,000 in electric costs. Make the adjustments for your local rates if you wish. Based on this, it is unlikely that the wind system would even cover the maintenance costs, much less the capital costs of the system, which will probably need to replaced every 20 to 25 years on the average. They also don’t mention what they spend to make the building strong enough to support the wind system.