What are your opinions about nuclear power?

In My Humble Opinion
101

How can it be mitigated?

What should happen in Japan?

More importantly, what should happen in China?

And, at this point we’re talking past each other. I’ve posted extensively about how bad Fukushima was, including the number of people who are permanently displaced and how bad it could have been. I’ve also repeated states my reasons for not going by the death count.

I’ve stated prior that at Fukushima, the power company wanted to withdraw its work force, which would have made it much worse than Chernobyl.

Find yet one more case of a number of people who die in an oil accident does not address my basic concerns. I’m not going to bother retying all of my concerns as you haven’t addressed them so far and it would be a waste of your and my time to go through this again.

Yes, people die in accidents and no, there is absolutely no equivalence between a fire and whole areas poisoned by radiation.

The nuclear industry has claimed it is incredibly safe. Japan especially, but also that it what many people in the States say as well.

I’ve already stated my comments on spent fuel and why having a solution which isn’t a solution isn’t a solution, if you can parse that.

So, I think it’s fair to say that we are not convincing each other. I’m not particularly bothered because most pro-nuke people do not believe in the danger and I doubt there is anything I can say to get people to even consider our point of view.

So, cheers?

102

Several things:

  1. 80% of the people is a non-existent statistic. If you truly believe that polls are actually representative of what any sizable group thinks, then you probably aren’t that familiar with human sociology. People lie to pollsters and pollsters lie in their polls.

  2. Let’s assume that 80% ( your number) really DO believe that nuclear is a nonstarter. Then what? Do they want to pay vastly greater sums for energy? Do they want to become more energy dependent upon China, Australia, Canada and Russia? Can they count on no other nation holding their economy hostage by curtailing their access to energy?

If I’m not mistaken the US embargo of oil is why Japan went to war with it in the 1940s. That was with a smaller and younger population. Will a nation with an older and much larger population simply forget the past and roll the dice on hydrocarbons and the illusion of alter]native energy meeting their growing needs?

  1. Japan will have to compete with other growing and existing nations for the limited supply of hydrocarbon energy out there. How are they are going to gain a greater percentage of a limited pie with no military might and basically being a client state of the US?

With India and China needing to provide energy for their burgeoning populations, with the US possibly being the primary costumer for ALL of Canada’s hydrocarbon output and with poor relations with Russia (the whole Kurile Island issue has never been adequately resolved even 70 years later) from where is Japan going to get this extra hydrocarbon energy?

Methane hydrates are at least 20-30 years in the future and have expensive and expansive problems of their own.Japan will have to compete with Western Europe for Russian and African hydrocarbons. Natural gas fracking outside of the US has so far been a “bust.” Even if Mexico eventually allows fracking in its northern states (which are currently racked by drug violence) they, like Canada, have a market in the US which could easily absorb all that they produce.

  1. Fresh water - At this point, water hasn’t been a major issue for Japan. However being an island, freshwater supplies could become scarce in months or years, rather than decades, especially with climate change. Hydrocarbons are going to hard pressed to run desalination plants and China probably won’t agree to massive pipelines running their water into Japan for a host of reasons, both historical and practical.
    Sorry…but there was a reason that Japan chose nuclear power in the past. While there has been rampant corruption in the system and some of the designs were clearly not “well-considered” the fact remains that Japan cannot be energy independent without nuclear. Especially in a world which is going to require more energy.

Your arguments seem to be more your opinion than cold calculations based upon the needs of the masses. Which do you think that politicians and business leaders are going to make their decisions based upon?

103

So, no amount of hard evidence will change your position. You’ll continue to talk about the emotional response of 80% of Japanese and fret about what may happen while ignoring what actually does happen, all while glossing over the problems caused by the hydrocarbon power industry.

104

Tokyo, FWIW, I’ve been making all the same arguments as you for years. You simply won’t change certain minds; they are firmly closed.

The good news is the proof is in the pudding. Nuke isn’t safe enough, nor is it “too cheap to meter.” The cost of nuke goes up, and the percentage of nuke power in the world is dropping. A few new plants are being built here and there but the new power they produce is offset by other plants closing. There are no “new” nuke technologies that are going to save anyone’s day with any chance of achieving commercial viability between now and 2050, which basically puts it right up there with fusion in the “probably never” category. Nuke had its chance 60 years ago and it’s pretty much at the end of its development cycle, with nowhere to go but down.

Meanwhile wind power is very much still in development and packing on gigawatts all the time, and has years of future technological improvements and breakthroughs ahead of it. Wind, solar, efficiency and a variety of other alternative energy sources and strategies will get us the power we need.

105

Do you guys believe there is any government that can’t be trusted to manage a nuclear power programs safely? Robert Mugabe? Anyone?

I guessing that yes, you do believe some countries lack the adherence to standards, transparency, public trust and quality of oversight to safely run a nuclear program. So what we are really arguing is of Japan is among those.

106

Nuclear power is the greatest thing since stretch socks, and should have replaced every other method of power generation except, possibly, hydro, decades ago.

107

Do you have any evidence which will support your statement about wind power? In areas where the winds are extremely variable or almost non-existent, how exactly are they supposed to generate power using wind technology? Consistently?

France is generating most of its electricity NOW using nuclear power. That’s a nation the size of Texas using nuclear power safely. How are they not being “commercially viable/”

108

Google “wind power latest news” or something. It’s been gone over many times. Wind is always part of a mix, or “wedge” or whatever you want to call it, so please don’t waste your time arguing from the pov of “wind can’t do it all!”

France benefited from huge subsidies and I guess a certain economy of scale during its initial build out, but that time is over. Nuke power is getting more and more expensive in France and it’s running into more resistance. And before you say France’s air is cleaner or something, also keep in mind they export cheap baseload power and import max-priced peak power from other countries that may well be producing that power with coal or something, so France is simply exporting its air pollution, not saving the world.

One nice thing about France’s over production of baseload power is that they could use it power electric car recharging stations, if they can encourage greater adoption of the technology. Of course, if we wanted to produce a majority of our power with wind, we’d have to build in a lot of excess capacity and we could use that to charge cars too, but I don’t know if that’d turn out to be sufficiently profitable.

109

For anyone interested this mediamatters bit is very well done and even handed.

They are not commercially viable because they produce energy more expensively than many alternatives or combinations of alternatives, even when pricing the carbon, and not counting any cost to using up water in a time a increasing water scarcity. It is neither prohibitively dangerous nor completely safe. Heck of a lot safe than fossil fuel.

They just won’t be built to any significant degree without continued massive subsidies and off-loading of fiscal risk.

In the US at least the next several decades will be a natural gas era with wind, solar, and other renewables in second for new generation capacity. They are just the better values. Coal plants will continue to be a mainstay but the older dirtier plants will get shut down and few new plants will replace them. Maybe there will be enough new nuke to replace the plants that age out, but not much net new.

110

Why am I going to “Google” your claims? If you have them, then present them. It’s not my job to prove your point; it’s yours.And I didn’t make any claims about France’s air; you did. That has little concern for me how “clean” their air is.

France gets most of its electricity from nuclear. What it does with its additional power requirements does nothing to detract from that fact. Those are decision which the utilities and the government in France have made concerning their energy needs and requirements. Each nation would have make it decisions based upon its needs.

I’m a millwright with a strong electrical background. I know of no self-sustaining wind projects going now that can support anything greater than a small town. And even those systems are backups to the regular grid and not the main source of power for an area.

Could wind provide more power in the future?
Perhaps.
Again, that would not work in areas with extremely variable winds or where winds are a relatively rare event. It would also require tens of thousands of wind turbines which would have created using (guess what) dirty energy.And it would require technology which doesn’t exist today.

But…back to the subject at hand: You have yet to prove your own point beyond making pie-in-the-sky claims. Please provide proof for them and show that your opinions are indeed more than that.

111

May people say “oh, I am against the use of nuclear power because it is dangerous etc”. Well, not really. Actually, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to produce electricity.

It is just like a plane. A plane is one of the safest ways to travel (even safer than cars), but when an accident happens, it will be a great disaster. Same with nuclear power

112

nevadaexile,

From my previous mediamatters link.

Even at large degrees of penetration intermittency is a manageable issue. As that link points out wind intermittency is variable across the connected grid and evens out in aggregate, even more so if it is part of a portofolio of renewable sources. In lower levels of penetration it is really a nonissue as natural gas plants have enough reserves to fill in the gaps. Here’s a whole paper on the subject if you want greater detail.

You seem to be imagining that the whole grid is suddenly going to convert to a single source of power generation. How silly. The dirtiest coal plants are going to be retired, maybe 15% of current plants over the next 25 years, which represents about 6% of current power generation, and some increase in demand is expected. Some nuclear plants will be aged out but not all. Nuclear in total is about 20% of current capacity. Most of the replacement and meeting new demand will be more natural gas plants (at least until demand starts outpacing supply). So what you are looking at is whether or not wind (almost as cheap as natural gas at today’s low natural gas costs, especially with a reasonable carbon tax) and solar (as costs continue to drop) can play a role to complement natural gas and thereby keep demand in pace with supply. Could maybe half of that new and replacement power generation capacity, say 15% of total generation, be handled by wind and solar and other renewables in aggregated systems? The answer is clear yes as it already does in some countries (Spain, Portugal, and Denmark for example). And if nuclear can compete on price without perpetual subsidies and risk off-loading and with full transparency of regulation, then let it compete as well, fairly on a level playing field.

113

So, everyone is cool with Robert Mugabe running nuclear plants?

114

Well, not in Canada, no.

115

Precisely.

116

But he can be trusted to run a nuclear power program on Zimbabwe?

117

I don’t think big oil was really going to be affected by nuclear, usually the movers of one are into the other as well. For every TMI, there is always an EXXON Valdez and BP to counter with. Let alone Bhopal for the chemical boys.

Seems to me that the only interest in next generation nuclear was always the US Navy, since it powers the sub fleet and the carriers. For the past thirty years, nuke was always a non starter and it was easier to go with fossil alternatives, and we still have reactors going on 30 to 40 years old, and now coming to the point of decomming.

The last new design I had heard of was, the south african pebble bed reactor, which I am not sure if its vaporware or if there is something to it. For all the things that went wrong with the Japanese reactor, the majority fell on decisions that were made by corperate executives. To the point, where if it was that bad at one of their nuke sites, whats the rest of the country like in terms of safety.

Can their medical people be trusted with epidemics, does their water supply get treated , food safety and that sort of back bone level compliance that govts are supposed to ensure.

One thing I have not heard yet on the board, is neutralizing the nuke waste. That process went like this, the waste currently has a half life of so many years and emits a band of radiation. If that waste is bombarded with Alpha radiation or one of a similar half life, Nuke waste could be neutralized in ten years or so.

So far all we hear about is the Yucca mountain site, which is strictly American. So where is the rest of the world storing its nuke waste.

We (The Japanese we) need to come down on those folks in Japan that made those decisions, like a ton of bricks. As long as average folks have the perception that Homer Simpson is running their local teapot, and Monty Burns is managing it, your never going to have the trust.

Declan

118

Unless there is evidence that he is, like Iran, using it as cover for nuclear weapons research and development, it isn’t really for us to answer. South Africa has one and Zimbabwe does have good uranium reserves.

Not sure if it would be a good match for Africa though … it uses a lot of water and climate change is expected to make water shortages there especially problematic. Zimbabwe is landlocked and already has issues with droughts. But they also are short on electricity.

119

Ok, I have to give up this thread. If people are seriously arguing that any and every world government-- up to and including Zimbabwe-- is capable of running a nuclear power program without corruption and incompetence posing a serious risk, then there is no more room for discussion.

120

Maybe you should try asking serious questions and reading the actual answers given. Zimbabwe has indeed been aiming for a nuclear power plant and there has been talk that China will build it in return for mining rights there. Should we intervene? Why is it my business to decide who runs that country, what gets done there, and who gets trusted there to run things? Maybe African neighbors should care, but honestly I dooubt he could any more harm with corruption on a nuclear plant than what they have already done with mining and deforestation. Not sure why you trust them running hydroelectric plants either.