Not buying the anti-nuke diatribe. Just to keep up with growing demand and aging plants, we'd supposedly have to build a similar number of coal plants or whatever. So, that part of the argument is moot.
Posted by Brian Bell at April 11, 2008 07:04 PMdon't let facts interfere with what you're buying. i'll have a post next week on a better alternative.
Posted by Turkana at April 11, 2008 07:05 PMMy general attitude about nuclear is that it's OK as long as it pays for itself. That includes accepting the risk of loans and paying for waste disposal. Of course, it's not cost competitive. Certainly the government shouldn't be subsidizing nuclear to combat climate change, since every dollar so spent would go alot farther subsidizing conservation.
Posted by CA Pol Junkie at April 11, 2008 07:56 PMthat's a fair view, capj. of course, as the nyt article makes clear, the industry itself says it can't survive without the government loan guarantees. in a true free market, it's a dead industry.
Posted by Turkana at April 11, 2008 08:05 PMA growing number of well-respected straight-ahead environmental activists are favoring nuclear power as a tranche of the global warming response. They're not naively dismissable as astroturfed.
Posted by rilkefan at April 11, 2008 08:50 PMrilkefan,
not that many, actually. and many aren't looking at the science.
Posted by Turkana at April 11, 2008 08:54 PMAnother great post, Turkana. I wrote about this here and linked Amory Lovins' piece on why it was deader than dead. (Why does he conclude that? Because the free market believes it's a loser and refuses to put money into it.)
Another problem that you didn't mention which might be even more important is the problem of water and cooling. As I noted here:
Furthermore, nuclear power stations are particularly dependent on water for cooling. In summer 2003, Europe was struck with the worst heat wave in its recorded history. A number of nuclear power stations had to be shut down because river levels fell so much they could no longer cool the plants. But that was precisely when the need for energy was greatest. We know that global warming will only make this problem worse.
Last summmer, Alabama experienced the same type of failure.
Today, people are focused on the link (and trade-off) between energy and food (see biofuel boondoogle), but one challenge that is absolutely insurmountable is how we will effectively use water in our warming world. In many parts of the world, it will be scarcer and more precious than oil or gold.
So why are so many politicians looking to nuclear power and carbon sequestration and biofuels as the solution? Eric Janszen probably put it best: these massive, expensive and complex projects are the next way for the plutocrats (and the pollute-ocrats) to get rich off the pain of the world.
More valuable than campaign rhetoric, however, is legislation. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, a massive bill known to morning commuters for extending daylight savings time, contained provisions guaranteeing loans for alternative-energy businesses, including nuclear-power technology. The bill authorizes $200 million annually for clean-coal initiatives, repeals the current 160-acre cap on coal leases, offers subsidies for wind energy and other alternative-energy producers, and promises $50 million annually, over the life of the bill, for a biomass grant program.
Loan guarantees for “innovative technologies” such as advanced nuclear-reactor designs are also at hand; a kindler, gentler nuclear industry appears to be imminent. The Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act has been extended through 2025; the secretary of energy was ordered to implement the 2001 nuclear power “roadmap,” and $1.25 billion was set aside by the Department of Energy to develop a nuclear reactor that will generate both electricity and hydrogen. The future of transportation may be neither solar- nor ethanol-powered but instead rely on numerous small nuclear power plants generating electricity and, for local transportation, hydrogen. At the state and local levels, related bills have been passed or are under consideration.
Who cares if the world is destroyed in this race to be masters of the universe? As long as someone is getting rich, it seems that nuclear power, "clean coal" and "biofuels" are wonderful things in which our scarce tax dollars should be invested even when they are absolutely guaranteed to make things worse. It is enough to make one sick.
Posted by Mary at April 11, 2008 09:00 PMSorry, Turkana. My dad worked in nukes all his working life, both in the Navy and in private industry. Didja ever hear of the US Navy having nuclear accidents? Um, no. Despite the high number of nuclear reactors in use by the US military, you will be hard pressed to find serious safety concerns. I realize that getting rid of the waste is a big problem. But at the heart of the anti-nuke controversy, I get the sense that people just think it is unsafe technology. It certainly has the potential to be dangerous but when high standards of maintenance, safety and design are rigorously enforced, we can coexist quite well with it. The record of the navy is indicative of this.
Maybe we're not ready to re-explore the option. Maybe the energy companies are justifiably concerned with hysteria generated class-action lawsuite. Maybe there is not presently a place to put waste that would be cost effective (although compared to what we spend in Iraq, %58 Billion sounds like a relative bargain.) But I don't think you can write it off yet, or at least not all of us are quite as willing as others to think the idea is a non-starter. When the oil starts to disappear in earnest, I guarantee you that someone is going to take a second look.
riverdaughter,
i didn't once mention safety concerns. the bulk of the post is about the simple fact that nukes can't solve the energy needs necessary to mitigate global warming, and that the life cycle of nukes is not as emissions free as people seem to believe. the keystone group's finding speaks for itself. the group includes such enviro wackos as ge energy. and getting rid of the waste isn't just a big problem, it's an industry killer. half a trillion dollars- at least- and that's assuming they can even find sites. the facts as outlined in these articles are very clear- nukes are not part of the solution to global warming. there are cleaner alternatives that can be ramped up at least as quickly and that don't have the long term costs and dangers.
Posted by Turkana at April 11, 2008 09:29 PMA director of a nuke plant once told me of the waste disposal problems.
It is not just the ongoing debris, fuel rods, protective clothing and contaminated tools that must be properly disposed of, but the plant itself must eventually be entombed (the structure loses strength over time due to the radioactivity) and guards posted over the area for some 10,000 years. Add that up and nukes are just not cost-effective.
Posted by IntelVet at April 12, 2008 02:57 AMIt's an interesting post, but this:
If that sounds like an impossibly enormous amount of plants to build, that's because it is.
Is an argument from personal incredulity and it's not even as plausible an argument from personal incredulity as I typically see. From a construction and engineering standpoint, it's not particularly a problem.
From a finance issue, there are difficulties because financiers are just 'welfare queens' and want to drive their Cadillacs without possible consequences. ;) But you point that out, though nicer than I would.
Safety issues, here in America, are of little rational concern, though much. Our engineers are a lot better than the Soviets, our safety standards much higher. Even in Three-Mile Island, the actual damages caused to the people at rist came from the stresses caused by the activists shrieking about the dangers than the actual danger.
The real issues come from the energy costs of producing the fuel and the issues surrounding its disposal. There are some (whom I don't necessarily trust) who insist that the cost in fossil fuels to extract, process and dispose of the nuclear fuel exceed the energy we can safely extract from the fuel. I don't know if they're telling the truth or they're ideologues so I leave the issue open in my mind knowing that these particular people are just as likely to lie as the people in the nuclear industry.
And, for the record, the reason nuclear plant development died in America was our lowering emissions standards on coal plants. Which lead to more carbon dioxide emissions which lead to a faster increase in global warming.
Ironic, isn't it?
Anyway, you've got one glowing fallacy in your argument. You've got some one-sided activists, some of whom are just as big as liars as the liars you're castigating. But I'm not sure you have a solid case here.
What I'd suggest is reading the work done by the various European governments and their various commissions. They're very big on balancing the various cost/benefit issues and actually do good work on the issue.
But picking and choosing from activists and astro-turfers to make this case is, well, very Fox News in its approach. Or, maybe, like Lou Dobbs and immigration...
Posted by Moses at April 12, 2008 04:15 AMTurkana,
I see you're still spouting the same dross.
We've already wasted more than ten billion taxpayer dollars on Yucca Mountain
We have told you over the past year that taxpayer dollars are not spent for the nuclear industry's used fuel and you still tell this lie.
When you discuss the alternatives to nuclear in a later post make sure to discuss Princeton's Wedge Theory. In order for wind to avoid one gigaton of carbon each year, the world would have to add 50 times wind's current capacity. If solar were to avoid the same amount of carbon, we would have to add 700 times solar's current capacity. The nuclear industry needs to increase only 3 times its current capacity to avoid one gigaton of carbon. Which sounds easier and more realistic?
If you would like to understand loan guarantees a bit more instead of parroting the media, we've written a three part series here.
I don't know how much you should source Joshua Pearce's study considering the huge error he made in one of his calculations.
Posted by David Bradish at April 12, 2008 06:15 AMLet me also point out that reactor based nuclear energy is by no means the only way to produce power from nuclear material. In fact, it's probably the worst.
Many interesting strategies exist which do not require fission. Part of the storage problem is the heat that is generated, and The Atlantic just published a very interesting article about a guy salvages heat energy for large industrial plants.
Now is not the time to write off anything, especially in big broad strokes. Now is the time to find ways to use what we know and what is available to solve problems now and find strong candidates for investment.
Nuclear, like most other technologies, will have a place in the future clean energy systems. It could well have prominent place there. Giant bombs going off a little at a time in a concrete bunkers however, are probably just about finished.
Posted by Dilapidus at April 12, 2008 08:56 AM.....deer in the headlights while the Chinese choke us with fossil fuel debris just isn't the solution Turk...a quarter ounce pellet of U3O8 equals 20 barrels of oil or a ton of coal....or something as crazy.
Disposal of nuclear waste might kill us....particulate is already killing us.
Posted by Goyo at April 12, 2008 09:00 AMThis is an excellent post, Turkana. I have no idea what drives the denial by some of the respondents on this post. Perhaps they grew up with the comforting stories in Popular Mechanics which promised that nucular energy would make electricity so cheap they wouldn’t even charge for it. And our cars and personal ornithopters would be driven by “nuclear batteries”. It sure sounds exciting!
Unfortunately for the mega corporations who hope to profit vastly from this moribund industry. It simply makes NO economic sense! It also is completely counter-productive to our global warming needs. We can argue how many new nuclear plants need to be built to remove each gigaton of carbon, as compared to COAL plants. It doesn’t matter. We aren’t going to be able to afford EITHER.
James Hanson just last week released a report stating that we are headed for a Guaranteed Disaster if we do not reduce our atmospheric carbon levels to 350 ppb or lower. They are currently around 385 ppb. The link is to a Guardian article. The pdf can be found here. For those of you not sure what a 2 degree increase of global temperatures might mean, here are some scary predictions.
Now I don’t give a rat’s ass if you want to denigrate either Jim Hansen or any of the climate predictions in the book by Mark Lynas. I’m not saying they’re absolutely correct. I will assert that what they are saying is close enough to REAL scientific consensus that we had better pay attention.
The FACTS about the nuclear industry have been clear for a very long time. The last nuclear plant was built in this country in the early seventies because the gimlet-eyed industrialists and bankers could and did run the numbers and said, “Heh! Not with MY money!” As Turkana’s post pointed out, the complete life cycle of a nuclear plant, which if we’re lucky, can run for about 40-60 years, takes enormous energy and expense. To build an entire infrastructure, from mining, grinding the ore, smelting, processing and refining enough dwindling uranium, would take fleets and fleets of super tankers spewing ancient, once-sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.
To clear, construct and later, bury the plants would consume vast amounts of more atmospheric carbon. To quarry and grind cubic kilometers of concrete, ditto. So much for carbon savings. Then there is the cost of CENTURIES of storage, the risk of contamination and yes, even willful use as a weapon. Trillions of dollars!.
FACT: as global warming progresses, as it inexorably will, desertification of vast tracts of Australia, Central Africa, South America and the American Southwest will make the requirements of nuclear cooling literally impossible. You don’t want to see water wars fought over food vs. corporate-owned electricity. The average temperature increase of the effluent water will certainly be impacting already overstressed river flora and fauna.
For so many reasons, the nuclear industry is a vastly STUPID idea! Can anyone come up with a more expensive, dangerous and destructive way to FUCKING BOIL WATER?
moses,
look at who is involved with the keystone group. ge energy are one sided activists? uh huh.
bradish,
i'll take harry reid's assessment over yours. and if we're having so many problems with 1 yucca mountain, good luck finding ten more. and you ignore the keystone group's finding. to dent global warming will require more than tripling current nuke production. we're not talking about simply ramping it up to be able to shut down some coal plants, we're talking about trying to shut down enough fossil fuel use to solve global warming. nukes are not going to do it.
dilapidus,
seems to me the very concept of clean energy eliminates something that requires a half trillion dollars worth of waste storage.
goyo,
you simply ignore the facts in the post. nukes can't be ramped up fast enough and in enough quantity to make a difference, and even if it could be, the waste alone makes it cost prohibitive and flatly absurd. it's not a binary. fossil fuels are bad, yes- that doesn't mean nukes are the answer.
Posted by Turkana at April 12, 2008 12:18 PMFrance gets an incredible amount of their electricity thru nuclear power plants. How have the suceeded and we failed?
People have forgotten how brutal life was before cheap energy. You could have a wood stove in a room and a glass of water on the opposite side of the room would be frozen.
Producing ethanol from grain is insane. Wind and solar simply will not produce enough energy. Nukes will be part of the solution.
Posted by gay veteran at April 12, 2008 01:51 PMIf the world can't triple its nuclear capacity, I highly doubt the world can add 50 times current wind capacity, 700 times current solar capacity and 100 times current biomass capacity to make a dent in reducing emissions. You seem to think this will be a piece of cake. What you haven't learned yet is it will take the advancement of technology from all sources of energy to reduce emissions while continuing to meet our growing demands.
Posted by David Bradish at April 12, 2008 02:54 PMLet's get one thing clear. intelvet is not telling you the whole story on decommissioning nuclear plants. I've been involved in decommissioning TWO nuclear plants and neither one of them has guards around it or was entombed.
Here is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to say:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/decommissioning.html
Basically, all nuclear power plants CAN be dismantled and decontaminated. I suppose there is a chance that you MIGHT want to entomb one (Chernobyl), you don't HAVE to.
Posted by Moon at April 12, 2008 05:43 PMA BIG part of the cost of a new nuclear plant is government regulation, which was a legitimate response to 3-Mile Island. So maybe they could look at those regulations and see if the engineering or the political climate has changed enough to remove some of the regulatory obstacles to plant construction.
I would NOT favor government guaranteed loans. Nuclear power CAN make sense and stand on its own.
Posted by Moon at April 12, 2008 05:56 PMone thing is true: the era of cheap energy is over
Posted by gay veteran at April 12, 2008 07:26 PMI'm encouraged by the responses here in the comments thread to Turk's naivite.
The largest nuclear plant in the US is Palo Verde in Arizona. 3.2 gigawatts supplying power for 4 million homes! Imagine the environmental damage that would be one by replacing that 3.2 gigawatts with coal or natural gas. It would be devastating.
Yet, by rejecting the idea of constructing new nuclear power plants, this forces energy providers to build more coal and natural gas power plants. This runs counter to the goal of reducing CO2 emissions.
On the issue of cooling new plants where there is no water, just look at Palo Verde in Arizona, "According to PNM (part owners of the plant), Palo Verde's cooling towers rely on recycled sewage effluence. 'More than 20 billion gallons of this water are recycled every year' for this purpose."
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/states/statesaz.html
Posted by Muck at April 12, 2008 10:35 PMi am amused that none of you nuke supporters directly addressed the keystone group's finding. bottom line is that you want your nukes, and it doesn't really matter that they can't do a thing to help solve or mitigate global warming. you want your nukes, and you'll use any excuse to rationalize them.
Posted by Turkana at April 13, 2008 12:22 AMTurkana,
What Keystone group finding are you talking about? Is it this statement on page 11:
The NJFF participants agree that to build enough nuclear capacity to achieve the carbon reductions of a Pacala/Socolow wedge (1 GtC/year or 700 net GWe nuclear power; 1,070 total GWe) would require the industry to return immediately to the most rapid period of growth experienced in the past (1981-90) and sustain this rate of growth for 50 years.
I bet you don't even know who Pacala/Socolow are. They are the authors of the Princeton study I referenced earlier in this thread.
According to the Keystone statement above, the world has already demonstrated it could build plants fast enough to make significant carbon reductions. We just need to do it again and for a longer period of time - not impossible.
Posted by David Bradish at April 13, 2008 05:40 AMThere's something that confuses me terribly--there are reactor designs (e.g., Argonne National Laboratory's Integral Fast Reactor; there's an abstract here) which work around a lot of these problems: fuel is reprocessed onsite and can't be diverted, fifty to a hundred times as much energy is extracted from the fuel, the waste (of which there's roughly one ton per gigawatt-year) becomes relatively non-hazardous after two hundred years, and a variety of safety features are inherent to the design. The project was cancelled in the mid-1990s due to (frankly misguided) concerns about proliferation, but a small-scale working plant had already been built at that point.
My question is, why isn't anyone researching or building this sort of thing? Is there something obvious that I'm missing? It seems to address most if not all of the major concerns about nuclear power, but the only plants people talk about building are the sort that have serious problems with diversion of material, with safety, and with insanely long-term waste.
I freely admit that I don't know as much as I should about nuclear power; when there's a seemingly obvious solution that's not being used, it almost always means I'm just missing something. So, I beg your indulgence here--why is industry debating what appears to be a solved problem?
Posted by grendelkhan at April 13, 2008 07:01 AMyes, david,
sustain the most rapid building era for half a century. which would certainly be timely. and then find 10 more yucca mountains. sounds reasonable, david.
Posted by Turkana at April 13, 2008 09:11 AMTurkana,
Enlighten me then with your solution for reducing emissions. So far I haven't heard any of them from you. Be sure to provide numbers, not gibberish.
Posted by David Bradish at April 13, 2008 10:08 AMWell, Turk. All of your concerns and talking points have been addressed and/or refuted by the folks here who have commented. If you're not capable of advancing your intelligence on the issue, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Moon,
You cannot "decontaminate" a plant. The structure will forever be contaminated. You can, however, dilute the structure (concrete or steel, for instance) into another mass (roads, etc.). You are hardly removing the poison.
And, why do you think Chernobyl was entombed? and the tomb itself had to be entombed itself years later?
The director told me this some 20 years ago. After experiences at Hanford, WA, I am certain better techniques have been devised, however, the fact is, nuclear power represents yet another potential for conflict. A physics friend just left Hanford after working on clean-up for five years. He said there are storage tanks that no one has any idea what is in them, some tanks are leaking and pollution from Hanford has been found at Portland. He said one area has fluid that is so toxic that one hand in the fluid for four seconds guarantees death shortly thereafter. If we do nukes, I would like to proceed very cautiously. Hanford, as with most plants, has guards, ostensibly to guard from "terrorists" but, in the main, it is to keep people from hurting themselves.
and David. You imply that the human race could triple its nuclear capacity to eliminate oil use, fifty times for solar and 700 times for wind. Would those be false numbers to compare since current nuke capacity is orders of magnitude greater than current solar, which is at least one order of magnitude greater than current wind, like comparing apples and oranges? What is the cost of tripling nuke capacity vs fifty times solar, would that not be the operative language? I am talking total cost, soup to nuts, here.
I will always wish to have a none-solar and none-wind power source for the inevitable unpredictability of weather but surely we can do better than nuclear in its present form.
Posted by IntelVet at April 13, 2008 03:32 PMNo, You CAN decontaminate a nuclear plant. You remove all contaminated material. It has been done. Other than the core, most plants have no contamination at all. If they did, it would be big trouble.
Chernobyl was a special case in that EVERYTHING became contaminated because of an EXTREME meltdown. That's why I mentioned it specially.
Did you look at the link from the NRC?
Posted by Moon at April 13, 2008 03:43 PMOh, and the guards aren't there to protect people from getting contaminated. The guards are there primarily to keep crazy anti-nuke protesters out.
Radiation Safety Officers are there to keep people safe. I know, that was my job.
Posted by Moon at April 13, 2008 03:45 PMgay veteran, France has never had any kind of major nuclear catastrophe. We had one, combined with a major Hollywood blockbuster that opened 3 days after Three Mile Island (The China Syndrome - Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda) and it caused us to be chickens. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
Even though nobody was in danger from Three Mile Island. True, several levels of protection were breached, but there were still several levels of protection left.
Posted by Moon at April 13, 2008 03:50 PMMoon,
Yes, I did read your link. Like most everything in the last seven years from the government, I have found it to be politicized to the max. I am more concerned now then ever that they have little idea what is going on.
and, it is not just the "core" that gets contaminated, it is all the subsystems associated with the "core" that are also considered contaminated, even unusable.
Radiation safety officers are there to keep the plant safe, not individuals. According to my friends, they are equivalent to USSR "political officers". Not a good sign. Sorry.
Posted by IntelVet at April 13, 2008 07:02 PMmunk,
in the world of organized debate, those "refutations" are referred to as "two ships passing in the night." if that's what you consider advancing intelligence, you're right- we'll agree to disagree.
and to those of you who tout france's nuclear program, yeah- maybe we won't need ten yucca mountains, or even one, if we can get russia to mysteriously disappear our nuclear waste
Posted by at April 13, 2008 08:50 PMIntelVet,
You ask some good questions. Let me make an equal comparison for you. According to the Princeton Wedge theory I discussed above, avoiding one gigaton of CO2 (one wedge) would take 2,000 GW of wind capacity. Avoiding another wedge by solar would also take 2,000 GW of capacity. One wedge from nuclear only takes 1,100 GW of capacity.
The prime reason nuclear is so much lower is because nuclear plants in the world operate 80-90% of the time. Wind farms operate only 30% of the time and solar is a bit lower. If we had to build nearly twice the capacity of wind and solar to match the same avoided emissions from nuclear, then which do you think would cost more?
Posted by David Bradish at April 14, 2008 03:18 AMAs quoted
Using nuclear energy to reduce climate change is like quitting smoking to take up smoking crack!
That is the best quote I've heard in years...nuclear energy is not the solution to climate change; nuclear energy has absolutely nothing to do with the causes of climate change: cars and jets!
NO NUKES
NO COAL
NO KIDDING