The environmental movement, and its irrational fear of nuclear energy

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Spiff]
I find it very interesting that the OP, in five paragraphs of text (407 words), never once mentions radioactive waste.

Got denial?
[/QUOTE]

This response typifies the very thing I’m complaining about. The risks involved with radioactive waste are comparatively slight, and entirely manageable. Yet because the word “radioactive” evokes such terror in people, we prefer to continue belching out vast clouds of CO2 while we wait for wind and solar energy to make their incremental difference 20 years from now.

22

If you’re really going to compare the merits of various fuels, it seems to me you need to take into account a lot of different factors, some of which have been addressed already:

Sources of fuel-containing ore, including the possible amount of time the resources may be exploited, and political ramifications of exploiting those resources. For example, oil has gone far past its desirability in terms of the political systems we must interact with in order to gain access. I think we’d much rather negotiate with Australia for their Uranium reserves than yet another backward Middle Eastern country.

Methods of extracting ore, what the hazards of the process are, how much energy is extracted vs. how much energy is expended during extraction, long-term effects on workers, effects of expected and worst-case-scenario accidents, waste products, environmental effects of mine trails and our ability to alleviate those effects, etc.

Methods of transport of ore to refineries, and the effects of wrst-case scenario accidents.

Methods of refinement into fuel Energy put in vs. energy got out, environmental and health effects, ramifications of worst-case scenario accidents, etc.

Method of transport of refined fuel Necessary precautions, worst-case scenario accidents during transport and/or storage, etc.

Methods of producing energy from fuel Power plants, vehicles, etc. our ability, if any, to upgrade efficiency, and the costs associated with it, environmental and health effects of waste products, etc. Ramifications of accidents, etc.

Methods of transporting waste materials to disposal site Necessary precautions, potential hazards, accidents effects, etc.

Methods of waste disposal Possible hazards, any potential recycling, ramification of failure of containment facilities, etc. Spent nuclear fuel could be recycled into plutonium for even further energy production, but as critical mass for plutonium explosion is a little larger than fist-sized, this is politically dangerous.
I don’t know the real values for most of these, but I think this is the proper framework for the debate on the topic, and I rarely see them discussed en masse as they should be.

You can discuss great potential for certain methods, but people don’t seem to like to have to answer the question “What happens at the times when that doesn’t work as planned?”

23

I don’t disagree with your framework, but the carbon issue – because of its importance to our continued planetary health – should trump everything else. And cutting to the chase, we know exactly how much carbon is produced by our current energy-production methods, just as we know exactly how much is produced by nuclear: nearly zero. My point is that if the problem is as urgent as the Greenpeaces of the world say it is, then why don’t they push for the one solution that actually is a solution to the carbon problem.

24

[QUOTE=scotandrsn]
You can discuss great potential for certain methods, but people don’t seem to like to have to answer the question “What happens at the times when that doesn’t work as planned?”
[/QUOTE]

Heck, fossil fuel energy could work exactly as planned and it’d still be several orders of magnitude more polluting than nuclear. Your list of the costs and risks involved in mining, use and disposing of nuclear fuels calls for strict regulations and thoughtful planning, with contingencies for the unexpected. There are problems and they must be addressed but I don’t see the alleged ducking of the question you allude to.

25

[QUOTE=Renob]
It’s not really that tricky. We have come up with an impermeable containment system for it – Yucca Mountain. The containers that hold the waste are pretty much indestructible and don’t leak, and sticking it in the middle of the Nevada desert makes it highly unlikely it will ever be a problem.

Of course, we can also recycle some of it, but the U.S. doesn’t seem to want to go down that path, unfortunately.
[/QUOTE]

The scientists that monitor these storage devices would disagree with you:

“And, because nuclear waste still remains radioactive long after its original users have left the scene, it’s imperative to store it in containers that are not only secure but which also can be monitored reliably. Since even the most resilient waste storage containers corrode over time, deterioration rates must be monitored. Engineers have found a way to accurately monitor the corrosion of nuclear waste storage tanks: measuring their electrochemical noise.”

http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/archives/2001/12/getting_a_read.html?t=archive

26

[QUOTE=Sal Ammoniac]
This response typifies the very thing I’m complaining about.
[/QUOTE]
Um, no.

Your casual dismissal of the real and incredibly hazardous problem of radioactive waste is indicative of the nuclear industry’s desire to ignore the number one reason why nuclear energy can never be, never should be, a viable energy alternative.

Yes, the word “radioactive” evokes terror in people, to use your phrase. To that, I’ll only add, “and rightly so!”

It’s incredibly naïve, with more than a touch of arrogance, to think that mere humans can design and maintain a containment system for 10,000 years. Considering that only a handful of governments have ever maintained continuity for even 500 years, it is absurd to consider a scheme that requires institutional stability for 10,000 years.

See the points that Tastes of Chocolate has raised in his/her post. What safeguards do you propose to handle some of those scenarios? Some of these are very likely to occur, some not … but all with probabilities greater than zero (and which keep growing as time marches along toward 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 years).

Until you decide that you’re happy with this stuff in your own backyard, then this remains a significant problem, the proverbial elephant at the cocktail party that no one wants to talk about. Yeah, what the hell, I don’t live in Nevada!

27

Spiff, which is more dangerous, both short-term and long-term – a certain amount of nuclear waste, or the current state, where each American puts nearly 20 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year?

28

Excluded middle. 'Nuff sed.

29

So propose me a middle that’ll address the problem quickly and comprehensively, given how late in the day we’ve left this.

30

[QUOTE=spazattak]
And as mentioned, there are systems in place to handle it already. Though because the OP didn’t say those exact 2 words doesn’t really seem like any sort of omission. Denial of what exactly?
[/QUOTE]

Nuclear waste is one of the core issues surrounding nuclear power. Ignoring it in
a pro-nuke post/proposal is disingenious at best-the question of what to do with
the waste has to be at the top of the priority/discussion list, and if you propose
a huge new building boom of nuke plants you had darn sure be ready to explain
what you are going to do with all the gunk they will produce. Plus in general I
personally have a major pet peeve with any pundit/columnist/editorial letter
writer who doesn’t even bother to mention or address any of the well-known
and obvious major objections and counterarguments to his proposal.

Is atmospheric carbon more of a short-term threat than nuclear waste is? Certainly.
Should we then pretend that said waste will not have a cost which will undoubtedly
come due some time down the road? Certainly not. Is that cost in the long term
more than offset by the costs in the short term if we don’t promptly address global
warming? That I’m not sure about. But I think that those who raise legitimate
objections against nuclear waste should not have their concerns so lightly
dismissed as the threat to future generations is most certainly real.

31

[QUOTE=Sal Ammoniac]
The environmental movement, and its irrational fear of nuclear energy
[/QUOTE]

How about, Dead people and their “rational” fear of nuclear energy

32

[QUOTE=elucidator]
Excluded middle. 'Nuff sed.
[/QUOTE]

And besides what I said earlier, if you’re going to complain about the fallacy of the excluded middle, who’s to say that nuclear isn’t that middle? There’s nothing all that radical about nuclear energy. Given that with the newer generation of plants, meltdown isn’t an issue, we’re left with radioactive waste as the most significant environmental consequence of nuclear energy. And really, it seems to me to be almost a trifling problem, regardless of the scaremongering on the subject. Besides, you don’t have to store the stuff for a million years, you only have to store it for a few decades until rocket flight is cheap enough that we can shoot it into deep space.

33

[QUOTE=John DiFool]
Nuclear waste is one of the core issues surrounding nuclear power. Ignoring it in
a pro-nuke post/proposal is disingenious at best-the question of what to do with
the waste has to be at the top of the priority/discussion list, and if you propose
a huge new building boom of nuke plants you had darn sure be ready to explain
what you are going to do with all the gunk they will produce. Plus in general I
personally have a major pet peeve with any pundit/columnist/editorial letter
writer who doesn’t even bother to mention or address any of the well-known
and obvious major objections and counterarguments to his proposal.

Is atmospheric carbon more of a short-term threat than nuclear waste is? Certainly.
Should we then pretend that said waste will not have a cost which will undoubtedly
come due some time down the road? Certainly not. Is that cost in the long term
more than offset by the costs in the short term if we don’t promptly address global
warming? That I’m not sure about. But I think that those who raise legitimate
objections against nuclear waste should not have their concerns so lightly
dismissed as the threat to future generations is most certainly real.
[/QUOTE]

John DiFool I would agree with everything in your post with 1 exception. The short term threat is very real also for nuclear waste. As a resident of Washington State it’s hard not to hear about all of the problems at Hanford over the years. But I don’t think it’s a surprise to the scientists that radioactivity is a problem, I think the real problem is the willingness to spend the money to properly maintain current and future disposal sites.

34

[QUOTE=RaftPeople]
How about, Dead people and their “rational” fear of nuclear energy

[/QUOTE]

Oh, for God’s sake! You’re talking about something that is scarcely even relevant here. First off, no one is proposing to store nuclear waste in leaking pits alongside a major river. Second of all, plutonium production in the 1950s is hardly representative of what’s happening with a modern pebble-bed reactor. And third, the increase in cancer mortality from Hanford is trivial compared to the 10,000 deaths attributable to coal-burning plants each year.

This is exactly what I’m talking about – real risks are ignored, while negligible ones are magnified into Godzilla-like proportions.

35

[QUOTE=Sal Ammoniac]
Oh, for God’s sake! You’re talking about something that is scarcely even relevant here. First off, no one is proposing to store nuclear waste in leaking pits alongside a major river. Second of all, plutonium production in the 1950s is hardly representative of what’s happening with a modern pebble-bed reactor. And third, the increase in cancer mortality from Hanford is trivial compared to the 10,000 deaths attributable to coal-burning plants each year.

This is exactly what I’m talking about – real risks are ignored, while negligible ones are magnified into Godzilla-like proportions.
[/QUOTE]

Ok, I’m listening (again, as a resident of Wa State, my information largely centers around the Hanford site).

How is the waste handled in a modern reactor? Why is it such a trivial problem?

36

No one’s ignoring the issue of waste storage/disposal. For those concerned about the containers, I remember seeing a video of a container dropped from about 2 stories and it was still intact - seal and all. They’re supposed to last 10,000+ years. I’m trying to find it now.

37

[QUOTE=RaftPeople]
Ok, I’m listening (again, as a resident of Wa State, my information largely centers around the Hanford site).

How is the waste handled in a modern reactor? Why is it such a trivial problem?
[/QUOTE]

because its nowhere near as dangerous as the stuff they make weapons from for one, and there are now regulations about the storage/disposal of it for another. Understanding has come a long way in the last 60 years.

38

No mention of ‘Greenpeace’ and ‘nuclear’ should go by without pointing out that the former head of Greenpeace, also a former anti-nuke activist, is now firmly on the side of nuclear power, for the reasons mentioned in the OP.

One of things that really annoys me about many environmentalists is their absolute refusal to look at cost/benefit analysis for various options. Nuclear shouldn’t just be looked at in terms of its dangers - it should be looked at in comparison to the dangers of the alternatives. If you really believe that Global Warming is going to threaten all of mankind, flood our coastal cities, cause widespread disaster in Africa, etc., then how can nuclear possibly be seen as any worse?

Most of the fears of nuclear power are grossly overblown. Chernobyl was a design that would never have passed muster in the west, and since then reactor designs have become much safer. Pebble-bed reactors, for example, simply cannot melt down. So bringing up Chernobyl in the context of a modern nuclear debate is nothing more than a scare tactic.

Likewise, fears of nuclear waste are overblown. The fear of leaks is just grossly hyped, as is the belief that there are ‘no good solutions’ to the waste problem. I can give you several - one is what is currently done in many place - the waste is vitrified - turned into glass - poured into steel canisters, and sealed. Glass is extremely stable - if somehow the glass were removed from the cylinder and deposited directly in water, it would take about 1 million years for 10% of it to dissolve. This means that there is no possible disaster scenario in such a storage facility that could cause nuclear waste to ‘leak’ into the water table - Even if the entire repository were somehow flooded, we’d have years and years to clean it up before even trace amounts of waste appeared in the water.

There are other solutions that would work fine - for example, take that steel-encased glass cylinder and drop it in a subduction zone in the deep ocean, to be recycled into the mantle. Another proposal simply mixes the waste with uranium mine tailings until the mixture is back to the same level of radiation as the original ore, at which point it is just returned to the excavated mine. Some of the most dangerous compounds would have to be removed first, but this would eliminate 90% of the volume of the waste we’d have to deal with.

Still another is to re-process the waste in reactors designed to transmute it into safer compounds.

The big problem is that over the past few decades, governments have responded to fears of nuclear power by erecting huge legal barriers to the construction of reactors, the shipping of waste, and the disposal of it. That drives up the cost of nuclear power and forces even more dangerous practices, such as local storage of high-level waste in less-secure facilities around the country.

Time to smarten up, overhaul the legal regime around nuclear, and get on with producing clean, safe power that doesn’t pollute the atmosphere.

39

I agree that it would be wise to go to standardized nuclear power plants with proven design – France and the U.S. Navy submarine program ca attest to its safety record.
BUT

It is absurd to dismiss the nuclear waste storage problem as trivial or as solved. It’s NOT solved. We don’t have afunctioning national nuclear waste depository, and we have plenty of waste that can go in there – most of it is currently sitting in “temporary” cooling pools that have effectively become permanent.

The relevant event isn’t Chernobyl, but the scandalously underreported town of Chelyabinsk, which suffered three “events” that spread the nuclear waste there over a large area, including a chemical (definitely not a nuclear) explosion:

This isn’t fear-mongering. Physicist Zhores Medvedev wrote the book Nuclear Disaster in the Urals to report on this back around 1980, because this event, widely-known in Rissia, was not well-known in the West. It wasn’t really reported on by the major news outlets until about ten years after that.

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1957USSR2.html

http://alsos.wlu.edu/information.aspx?id=684&search=Chelyabinsk,+Russia+

Nuclear waste is NOT a trivial or a resolved issue.

40

[QUOTE=RaftPeople]
Why is it such a trivial problem?
[/QUOTE]

It’s not a trivial problem. It’s not an unmanagable one, either. I don’t understand why this is unclear to anyone.