Nuclear

[dieseltaylor]

On the basis this is not a Kettler-stoning thread the administrators may allow this thread to proceed.

I thought the current situation is proving an embarrassment to the people who suggested that the tsunami and earthquake had demonstrated how well a nuclear reactor had resisted. I had, with some reluctance, decided that nuclear might be the base-load provider of energy whilst other sources became more economic. However the problems with existing spent fuel and contamination are making me wonder.

The thorium based reactor is yet an unproven design and modern reactors do seem to have more redundancy built in.

Personally I am particularly keen on a hydrogen fuel economy using solar energy to do the work.

safety

http://www.naturalnews.com/031848_Fukushima_cover-up.html

The New Scientist has a catalogue of "problems" with Japanese nuclear reactors. It also has figures showing how few deaths are caused by nuclear incidents compared to coal. Arguably human deaths are not that important compared to poisoning the earth as humans will dies anyway. Contaminating land for generations is a different line of thought. AND quite majorly coal mining employs an awful lot of people - which nuclear does not. Possibly why Obama has agreed to the release of more Federal land in Wyoming for coal extraction

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/03/28/what-caused-the-wyoming-coal-disaster-last-week-ask-warren-buffett-and-president-obama/

[Other Means]

You live in London you're proposing solar power?

Renewables won't provide enough power for the UK, even if we change the whole island to gather the energy, there simply isn't enough of it and it simply isn't reliable.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/20/mackay_on_carbon_free_uk/

The reliability issue will mean we need gas backups, which will mean they will be as cheap as possible because otherwise they're uneconomic, which means they shove out lots and lots of lovely CO2 and we STILL pay through the nose for power.

There hasn't been a spill of radioactive material in Japan that has any health complications. Hell, even Chernobyl only killed 56 people - and that was a million times worse.

I know something about the Japanese reactors that's going to kill tens of thousands though. They're no longer producing power and will not be able to for a while - if public opinion gets too hysterical maybe never. And that's going to mean rolling blackouts in Japan and probably a huge price rise for electricity.

It's spring now. Soon it will be summer. Old people in Tokyo will either have their aircon fail when it's too hot or it will become too expensive for them to run - and this will kill them in their thousands. Tens of thousands over all the country.

And I know how the whole debate is going to turn out. For 20 years there will be no new nuclear power stations built. We'll continue giving dodgy regimes money for petrochemicals and the people living under them - who are now dying for democracy - will continue to suffer for it and hate us because of it.

Then when we realise we're running out of options we'll build them quickly and badly. Instead of steadily ramping up how many we have, learning the lessons of each as we go, we'll produce a load of sub-optimal ones - and all because the media loves stories based on superstition, an unscientific appreciation of the facts and anything that makes mankind look like we're the bad guys.

[Other Means]

This may be relevant to you interests: The double standards of green anti-nuclear opponents by....George Monbiot. Yes, hard green George Monbiot.

[Speedy]

human deaths are not that important compared to poisoning the earth

I suggest travelling to Chernobyl to see how well the Earth handles radiation.

[Other Means]

More good sense from The Register.

[Wicky]

I suggest travelling to Chernobyl to see how well the Earth handles radiation.

Chernobyl Opens for Tourism

Choi reports that tourists are strictly limited to certain areas, avoiding such hot spots as the concrete shelter that seals off the damaged reactor. And visitors may catch glimpses of wildlife. Birds and insects have suffered, but some mamma populations have thrived, probably because of the conspicuous lack of people.

[dieseltaylor]

OM?

Did I say anything about relying on solar power in the UK? Or solely on renewables? I understand the Severn Barrage could manage 5% of the UK's needs.

Does Mr. Mackay consider the importation of power. Not that I have seen in his discussion of solar power which seems to be based on growing crops/algae alone.

Here is a link to a company that sells home hydrogen generation solar kits, it also sells hydrogen engined motorscooters.

http://www.actagroup.it/applications_bike.asp

If petroleum/gas fuels become inordinately expensive is there just a smidgeon of a chance that governments might tax very heavily non-HGV fuel to the point that people shift to electric/hydrogen use?

Now on a global scale there are vast areas of the planet where sunshine is actually quite common where producing liquid hydrogen for shipping to other countries might be an attractive option. Poor countries with poor soils , little water and lots of sunshine who might currently be the ones with plenty of gas and oil infrastructure where going to generate liquid hydrogen might actually be sensible and affordable.

BUT, lets not forget that for many months of the year most houses could use solar energy to heat all their hot water requirements. According to a US site an 8*4 panel in Des Moines would be adequate. I would have preferred an English site however the Energy Trust site provides some unbelievably useless figures such as savings based ona average semi- with 3.4 bedrooms . WTF - I thought people used water not bedrooms using water.

I note your claims on people killed by nuclear [to date] - lets wait a little longer. As for the claim on people likely to die during the Japanese summer I must admit to being shocked - I had no idea how many generations of Japanese have succumbed to heat before the invention of air-con. I thought humans adjusted to climate generally - that is what science shows. Incidentally my plumber who is currently here lived in Japan for 9 yeras and for most of the time had no air-con.

Anyway the flipside of the coin is what can be done to reduce power consumption in the UK. My possible suggestion is that people have an initial power allocation based on residents declared or possibly bedrooms and then over a certain limit punitive rates come into effect. It may be there is a trading situation where those who use little can sell their unused capacity. That may well encourage people to be more careful.

I will look at Mackay further. I have not ruled out nuclear at all but it is my least favoured solution.

[dieseltaylor]

Speedy - perhaps you did not read the underlying paper fully:

However, some places remain too dangerous for resettlement. "People might be allowed to live in the 30-kilometer zone, but I don't expect anyone to live within the 10-kilometer zone, ever," Chumak says. "There's some plutonium there."

Officials there did say I should look out for wildlife in the zone. "A mad wolf attacked six people here recently," Malyshev says.

The disaster's impact on wildlife in the zone remains hotly contested. For instance, radiation biologist Ron Chesser at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and his colleagues suggest the area is thriving with life now that humans have left, finding that the wild boar population there has grown 10 to 15 times than what it was before the accident, and that other fauna are often seen in the area, such as wolves, rabbits, red deer, black storks and moose. Their genetic work suggests that any effects of radiation are subtle enough to not lead to any mutations passed down across generations, with the animals perhaps acclimatizing to any damage by boosting their genetic repair mechanisms. As bad as the radiation is, the effects of humans on the environment might have been worse, Chesser concludes.

On the other hand, biologist Tim Mousseau at the University of South Carolina at Columbia and his colleagues have found that species richness of forest birds was reduced by more than half when comparing sites with normal background levels of radiation to sites with the highest levels in the exclusion zone, and the numbers of bumblebees, grasshoppers, butteries, dragonflies and spiders decreased too. Analysis of more than 7,700 barn swallows in Chernobyl and other areas in Ukraine and Europe suggested ones from in or near the exclusion zone had higher levels of abnormalities such as deformed toes, beaks and eyes or aberrant coloration, and recent work also suggests that birds living in areas with high levels of radiation around Chernobyl have smaller brains.

[Other Means]

Personally I am particularly keen on a hydrogen fuel economy using solar energy to do the work.

I'm keen on Scarlett Johansson, let's see what good it does us. Personally I think hydrogen fuel cells won't be the future transportable energy supply of choice and it's more likely to be carbon nanotubes.

Does Mr. Mackay consider the importation of power.

Yes. Do you consider energy security to be important? I do. Especially as currently we can't store it. And why buy it when we can make it?

According to a US site an 8*4 panel in Des Moines would be adequate.

8*4 what? Foot? = 32sq foot of solar panel. That's quite an expanse of heavy solar panel that can be used "sometimes". What are you going to use the rest of the time? Besides which that's a lot more dangerous than nuclear power.

Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)

Coal – China 278

Coal – USA 15

Oil 36 (36% of world energy)

Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)

Biofuel/Biomass 12

Peat 12

Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)

Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)

Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)

Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)

Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

[dieseltaylor]

Re - Monbiot:

Do not totally disagree with him but ... Nothing on power use reduction then?

And given 5 million people work in the Chinese coal industry is 2300 deaths per year truly shocking? Before we get excited about that we might compare it with the 100,000 dead in Iraq over 10 years. Or the 1.3 m traffic fatalities worldwide each year. It may seem a red herring but the West can be extremely precious about dying when someone wants to make a case.

When it comes to waste/power reduction consider that it was the Koreans and then the Chinese who went for standardising USB chargers for electronic devices. Now given that chargers should become permanent rather than something different every time you bought a device what is the grand saving in landfill, wasted resources , and wasted production cost and power now chargers are reusable.

At some stage I trust battery powered TPMS will be standardised on a universal non-battery system. I am sure that there a hundreds of wasteful practices - street lighting, shop displays at night, dozens of uses. Base power requirements exist for the Grid but is there was substantial benefits like generating hydrogen using the baseload then there would bean alternative fuel for relatively little cost.

[Other Means]

We're comparing the danger of nuclear power. It's far less dangerous than almost every other human activity.

And what, everyone should change the way we live to achieve…what exactly? We can generate power cheaply, cleanly and safely using nuclear power.

Why aren't we?

[dieseltaylor]

"Sometimes"

In the Des Moines site two panels would pretty well cover their annual requirements, and bear in mind that is giving a family of four 60 gallons [uS] per day which I suspect is rather more than most nations would use.

BTW consider "fashion"

In an article called "The Great Unwashed" the New York Times examines a horrifying new trend: not showering. Katherine Ashenburg, the author of a book called The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History says that because we are not farmers, we don't need daily showers. It actually sounds like an interesting book; it details concepts of cleanliness over history and how the ideal has changed, from the Romans who bathed daily to the faithful Catholics who got in troube with the Spanish Inquisition if they were "known to shower."

But Americans generally aren't buying the don't shower/don't wash your hair argument. Market research firm Mintel says 93% of American adults shampoo daily. That's ridiculous. Many hair types would dry up and break right off if they were subjected to shampooing daily. Perhaps it's a typo and 93% of Americans shower each day. That would make sense. But Regina Corso of the Harris Poll says people lie to the pollsters about their personal hygiene, and no one really knows how much Americans shower.

One dermatologist has an intriguing reason for not showering too often:

Of late, researchers have discovered that just as the gut contains good bacteria that help it run more efficiently, so does our skin brim with beneficial germs that we might not want to wash down the drain. "Good bacteria are educating your own skin cells to make your own antibiotics," said Dr. Richard Gallo, chief of the dermatology division at the University of California, San Diego, and "they produce their own antibiotics that kills off bad bacteria."

[Other Means]

TBH d/t, I don't know what you're trying to assert with this Des Moines example. It's a bloke-down-the-pub argument.

Personally I can't wait for septicaemia to be in fashion - lovely.

Meanwhile we've got an ever increasing population who use ever increasing power. On my desk I've got an iPod, a mobile phone, a laptop and a lamp. Now the laptop may use less power than a desktop from the 80s but there's more and more gadgets being used by more and more people - and they're not going to give them up.

Go nuke!

[Bigduke6]

I suggest travelling to Chernobyl to see how well the Earth handles radiation.

Well if that's not a lead in I don't know what is. As it just happens, I just recently was in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, as periodic (get it?) visits to that place fall into my job description.

Yes the area underneath the Sarcophagus is incredibly irradiated, and will be so for some ridiculous time frame like thousands or millions of years, I forget exactly. True if you find moss or mushrooms somewhere you can get a Geiger counter to click right merrily. But it's not like the surface of Venus, the Zone's atmosphere isn't poisonous, and in most locations the radiation levels are the same as 200 km. to the south, opposite where the radioactive cloud blew. I'm told that you get more dangerous radiation lying on a beach in Turkey on a sunny day, than standing next to the Sarcophagus - again, and assuming you don't go inside of it.

There are without question some nasty half-lives on some of the isotopes in there, but as the scientists explained it to me, when thinking about how dangerous it is in the Zone you have to take Mother Nature into account. Basically, and generally speaking, a quarter-century of rain and erosion has washed a great deal of the worst hot elements into the water drainage system, where it has to a substantial extent settled and/or been silted over. I'm told the water itself in most places won't get a peep out of a Geiger counter, although it's a big territory and a lot of swamp, who can say for sure?

A simple indicator of how drainage helps control radiation are the Rad levels on the roads vs. the forest edges on either side of them. It's sort of a given the radiation on the roads is absolutely normal, while on the sides in the forest it can be five time higher and already dangerous in the same way as a tooth X-Ray is dangerous, a short exposure is no big deal but constantly over months or years and you're asking for cancer. Which makes the Zone a fairly safe place to visit, while keeping it basically uninhabitable.

The terrain is forest and fields and most of the time, if you aren't looking at abandoned villages, it's quite pretty. Very thick underbrush, lots of water, waist- and even chest-high grass in the old farm fields.

The scientists (unfortunately, because wouldn't be cool if there were) have found almost no mutants over the years as pretty much whatever the radiation mutated died at birth or shortly thereafter - this is Nature, after all. There is tons of wildlife and since only plant engineers and security and the odd thrill seeker actually goes into the Zone, and of them only a tiny percentage ever leaves the roads, the whole place is pretty much a huge nature refuge. Wolves, foxes, eagles, bison, etc. etc. I heard a rumor that even bears are coming back, they're already in Belarus. There used to be looters going into regularly, but it sort of tailed off after the new century, pretty much everything that could be stolen is long gone now.

The cooling ponds near the Sarcophagus - you know, where the spent fuel rods get parked like at Fukushima - are just filled with goldfish/carp, and big ones, I'm talking the size of your arm some of them. There is always the joke the radiation made them that way, but to hear the biologists explain it, it's just Nature doing its thing, the cooling ponds are big and flat and shallow and open and they're pretty much perfect conditions for bug larvae and whatever else carp like to eat, no natural predators and no humans either, the station crews don't fish for them because you can't eat them, see above on radiation in the sediment.

The problem with repopulating a place like Chernobyl is, I am told, not that the whole place is irradiated and hot, but rather that some spots are and some of the spots move with time, and change in degree, and keeping track of it is a major main and get it wrong and people really and truly could get hurt. Further, the place is really swampy and wet, this is the Pripet Marsh basically, so even if you cleaned up the buildings and the land, there is still the problem of the water table - again, within the realm of human capacity but not cheap or easy.

One of the engineers explained it to me this way "It's not like we couldn't decontaminate the place and repopulate the abandoned villages, it's technically possible. But our country is poor and we have plenty of land outside the Zone that isn't developed, so unless you're trying to prove something there's really no point in trying to make the Zone inhabitable. Doesn't make sense financially."

Another thing to remember is, at any given time something like 1,000 people are in the Zone living there 24/7, they're either engineers or scientists or guards or whatever, and they spend two weeks in and two weeks out. They say it's safe work, but they get paid pretty well by Ukrainian standards.

Having said all that, there are these points, over the last 25 years where the Soviets had put in saplings there are giant thickets of hardwood trees of middle to low height, especially where the villages and towns were abandoned, and since the trees have never been pruned they look really weird, very thick branches all curving upwards, kind of like tridents or spears or something. Doesn't look natural, as "natural" for trees like this in our eyes is either not dense if in nature, or pruned if densely planted.

The other thing is, if you're in the Zone in the dark, except for the plant and the guard posts and so on it's absolutely dark - no real surprise there - but in the dark it's not so easy not to be jumpy. No reason, just unreasoning fear of scary stuff in the dark.

[Bigduke6]

To respond to OM, to me the lesson of Chernobyl is not that nuclear power is inherently dangerous, but rather, anything in the hands of unsupervised technicians who think they know better than anything else, and don't really have to answer for their actions, is incredibly dangerous.

The things the crew did to get the reactor number 4 to go critical pretty much defy logic: They switched off every safety mechanism, then they powered down part of the cooling equipment, then they reduced energy generation almost to zero, and then when they had trouble getting energy generation to rise to a controlled level to conduct a test (it had to do with using free-wheeling turbines to run cooling equipment for a short period of time) the head engineer orders every single control rod pulled from the core, essentially to goose nuclear reaction in the core. Every single one.

Besides the fact all this was absolutely contrary to the official SOPs AND the design specs of the reactor, this guy then overrides subordinates who told - accurately - there was a danger the nuclear reaction might run out of control.

And all of this was being done with a reactor that had no containment vessel at all, there was just the shielding materials to keep the radiation in during normal operation, and the reactor building to keep rain off the reactor. Nothing in the design at all to control a breach or a leak.

And if we're talking design, this kind of reactor used the same steam/water mix for cooling as it did to run the turbines, meaning that the hotter the reactor got, the more water it needed to stay cool, and the less water it had inside of it - in other words, by design was sort of an inherent steam bomb. And of course the control rods were graphite tipped which, as it turned out, will melt under severe heat, which is precisely what they did when the reactor started out of control, and once melted it was impossible to push the rods INTO the reactor, which again allowed the reaction process to accelerate.

I talked to one of the guys who was there, the story is this chief engineer even managed to say something along the lines of "Just chill out, everything's going to be fine, we'll power this thing up and get our tests done and have some tea well before the day shift arrives."

Famous last words. It took about 90 seconds from the order to the first explosion, which blew the roof off the building and shattered the core, and left it open to the sky. So when the second explosion came (steam or graphite fires or low-grade nuke, or maybe a mix, the arguments continue) there was nothing to keep all that super-radioactive dust and smoke from heading north to Sweden.

This is what you get when you allow specialists too much freedom, and buy their arguments that what they do is so complicated oversight by laymen is pointless. Arguably, that is not a danger in a modern nuclear power facility.

[Other Means]

Apparently the reason Chernobyl was so bad was

a) there was no containment vessel (I have not words) and

the used graphite as coolant. Nice, flammable graphite. That's what took radioactivity to 30,000ft.

The meltdown in Three Mile Island melted...an eighth of an inch into the containment vessel.

Also, as a little "ta da", nuclear workers tend to have a lower instance of cancer than non-nuke, even taking into account income etc.

{edit - BD you posted as I was writing.}

A friend of mine works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It was his job to go and inspect a lot of reactors when the iron curtain came down. He said what he mainly found was people who were reasonably well trained but just didn't have the resources. He'd say to them "You know you're running this to the ragged edge" which was met with "We know. What are we supposed to do?".

[__Yossarian0815[jby]]

Graphite is not a coolant but a moderator in nuclear reactors.

That only 56 people were killed in Chernobyl is a soviet propaganda lie.

Let´s see how old the workers at Fukoshima get.

I´m not necessarilly against nuclear power, but as long as the pro side displays shocking ignorance and plays down actual problems that occur and have occured I think it would be better to do without.

[JonS]

There hasn't been a spill of radioactive material in Japan that has any health complications.

Apart from fundamentally being an opinion, these guys would probably disagree with you. I suspect the engineers that have been pulling brutal shifts since the tsunami - and their doctors - would disagree with you too. Not, I hasten to add, because of the shifts themselves but the environment they've been doing them in.

Hell, even Chernobyl only killed 56 people - and that was a million times worse.

That's a remarkably ... apologetic take on the toll.

I know something about the Japanese reactors that's going to kill tens of thousands though. They're no longer producing power and will not be able to for a while - if public opinion gets too hysterical maybe never.

Yes ... and? Externalities eventually come home to roost, somewhere, especially when they're ignored. Were you not aware of this?

[Other Means]

;1242130']Graphite is not a coolant but a moderator in nuclear reactors.

That only 56 people were killed in Chernobyl is a soviet propaganda lie.

Let´s see how old the workers at Fukoshima get.

I´m not necessarilly against nuclear power, but as long as the pro side displays shocking ignorance and plays down actual problems that occur and have occured I think it would be better to do without.

It was used as a coolant as well, I believe. Could be wrong - willing to learn, imagine that.

The 56 number wasn't given by the Soviets.

Book.

Review.

If you read the links I've posted you'll see the workers have got a great chance of zero happening.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

;1242130']

I´m not necessarilly against nuclear power, but as long as the pro side displays shocking ignorance and plays down actual problems that occur and have occured I think it would be better to do without.

Unlike the anti side, which bases it's hysteria so soundly on fact?

It is my firm impression that the anti crowd is typically far more ill informed. That this state of ignorance is also the mainstream opinion is the real shocker.

There are some significant risks to nuke power, sure. But coal/oil is ultimately unsustainable and has shown to be far more dangerous in any case.

And the renewables have so far fallen woefully short in capacity and costs. (In The Netherlands it is joked that windfarms are more dependant on subsidies then wind)

Nuke power is the best of a bad bunch. We certainly have not got the option to get rid of it all together. Alternative techs sufficient for our needs are just too far off. And we best get building new reactors soon because in most countries I know off age is creeping up on the existing ones.

As far as you pooh-pooh-ing the death of people on hot days, I would consider it common knowledge that people pop their clogs during a heatwave on a rate way above normal.

If cooling during the summer is limited in Japan as a result of this incident it is a fair bet that thousands will die in excess of the average. Nevermind if an actual heatwave happens too.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Apart from fundamentally being an opinion, these guys would probably disagree with you. I suspect the engineers that have been pulling brutal shifts since the tsunami - and their doctors - would disagree with you. Not, I hasten to add, because of the shifts themselves but the environment they've been doing them in.

You might have read your own link:

The doses they received are high, but well below the World Health Organization's limit for worker exposure during emergency situations.

Would I like to be exposed to their levels? No. But lets not pretend they are glowing in the dark just yet.

[JonS]

Ah, but I'm not. On the other hand, I'm not being the blind monkey and parotting lines like

There hasn't been a spill of radioactive material in Japan that has any health complications.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Except that excluding radiation burns from wading through RA water that statement is, so far, correct.

There is very little reason to suppose that anything even remotely close to Chernobyl is going on. An event where I take the 56 deaths with as much grains of salt as the tens of thousands that are being bandied about by the anti lobbyists.

[JonS]

Sure; If you exclude the exceptions you can accurately assert anything. Bigduke6 makes a similar argument - if you exclude all the unknown, and changing, locations that are lethal to live in, the exclusion zone around Chernoyl is actually a swell place to live.

I'm at a loss as to how that approach leads to any useful conclusions though :confused:

[Other Means]

What exceptions? The workers standing in radioactive water have been released from hospital as they're fine.