The world is waking up from a long stupid slumber...

[NNadir]

I've been working to understand, often in complete isolation, the chemistry and physics of the actinides and fission products in used nuclear fuel for decades.

I began to despair that what I learned and what I recognized would ever go mainstream. People were still talking about wastes and dumps.

Thus, Man! I wish I could attend this event in Indianapolis that apparently will discuss one of my long held ideas, one I've espoused for at least 20 years, that was sometimes the subject of abuse by the clowns who brought us here in orgies of fear and ignorance:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 424.40 ppm.

The session I would love to attend is this one.

Nuclear Waste or Valuable Product?

(I am not a member of the ANS, but my son is.)

There are zero - count 'em - zero components in used nuclear fuel that cannot be used to solve major problems. Some of these problems I note can be solved by nothing else at all, and in many cases, by nothing else as well.

We are in a very dark time, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's the warm, magnificent glow of radioactivity.

If I die tomorrow, I can die happy and hopeful for the future.

[mopinko]

1. do you think anyone would be bothering if not for everyone asking those questions, tho?

i’m pretty sure the folks who run this industry would be happily dumping everything in a big hole if we’d let them.
i’m glad to hear this. but ‘in the future’ everything is gonna be fine and dandy sounds a lot like ‘too cheap to meter’.

we shall see.

[Miguelito Loveless]

2. I agree with you on this

but you lose me with your anti-solar posts.

[mopinko]

7. not me. u mean the op?

i have solar on my house and love it.

[Miguelito Loveless]

13. Oops. Sorry

[NNadir]

3. The fossil fuel industry dumps toxic and deadly waste into the atmosphere continuously.

No one gives a shit, except for lip service.

The difference between dangerous fossil fuel waste, about which no one actually gives a shit, and so called "nuclear waste" - a valuable and important resource that is critical to the survival of the planet - is that fossil fuel waste kills people, and used nuclear fuel has a spectacular record of not killing anyone.

I recently returned to my ignore list here, an infuriating idiot who once said, in a defacto sense, it was OK for 7 million people to die each year each year from air pollution because a tunnel at the Hanford nuclear weapons site.

This same functional illiterate badgered me by claiming nuclear waste was "dangerous."

I challenged the moron to show that in the 70 year history of the accumulation of used nuclear fuel as many people as were killed will be killed by air pollution in the next six hours, that would be about 4500 people.

In the annals of selective attention, indifference to the destruction of climate change, indifference to the vast death toll caused by air pollution, about 70 million people every decade, people like to quote the 1954 remark of the right wing red baiter and persecutor of Robert Oppenheimer (in one our history's most disgraceful episodes) Lewis Strauss, the very stupid "too cheap to meter" remark.

I note that the same people can't name any form of energy, including those undergoing a deadly subsidy in the form of the right to indiscriminately kill people and ecosystems by dumping for free, its waste into the planetary atmosphere, in the seas or on land, that is "too cheap to meter."

Frankly, it's just another example of selective attention.

The hatred of the last, best hope of humanity by people who lack even a modicum of a scientific education, who know next to zero about nuclear fuels, nuclear energy other than that they hate it and that it's not "too cheap to meter," is an indication why, as of this morning, we saw a weekly average of 424.40 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere, less than ten years after we first saw readings of 400 ppm, during the week beginning March 16, 2014.

The bizarre belief that we can return to dependence on the weather for energy, an idea that was abandoned in the 19th century for a reason, an idea as reactionary as the red baiter Lewis Strauss "too cheap to meter" fame, is absurd.

I labored for more than 30 years to understand the chemistry and physics of actinides and fission products, again in nearly compete isolation, struggling through difficult primary scientific literature, to come to this moment of joy, to see my vision realized beyond the confines of my mind, and I frankly resent after decades of insipid chanting about "too cheap to meter," at this sublime moment, if you must know.

There is hope for the world, and quoting a right wing sonofabitch making a stupid remark - a right wing sonofabitch who had zero scientific or engineering experience and was Eisenhower's most dubious appointment to work on anything related to nuclear energy - and who was talking about fusion and not fission - a right wing sonofabitch who was in the habit of persecuting some of the greatest scientists who ever lived, will in no way dissuade me from my joy at seeing this scientific symposium being offered.

I've been sloughing off this particular appeal to ignorance for decades.

There is hope, growing hope, that fear and ignorance will not triumph and that intelligence, courage and hard work will.

About those 4500 people who will die in the next six hours, any evidence that the storage of used nuclear fuel over the last 70 years matches the death toll of these six hours...

Feel free to let me know if someone can find them.

Whenever I ask this question, people have declined to get back to me with even a good lie. (The moron I returned to my "ignore list" did a goofy, puerile, Pee-Wee Herman imitation when I asked this question. He, she or they is/are a fool, a deadly fool, a toxic fool, a fool whose ignorance kills people, but a fool all the same.)

Have a nice evening.

[mopinko]

9. hey, i have all the same reservations about renewables as you

we’ll never get out of this w/o cradle to grave accounting on all forms of energy. and everything else.
my beef w nukes isnt just the end game, it’s all that f’ing concrete. and steel. and all the mining. cradle to grave.
i cant argue that there is much not put on the scales. but neither can you.

you’re wrong that no one gives a shit, tho. if that were true, there would be no efforts at all to do better. this is clearly not the case. down to individuals, we’re trying. we’re putting our money where we can. i can put solar on my roof. i cant build a nuke plant.
i have hopes for the next gen.

[NNadir]

28. Um, nuclear energy has the highest energy to mass ratio of any form of energy, by far.

If someone is really, really, really, really concerned about mining, they might do well to access the following scientific paper:

Closing the Infrastructure Gap for Decarbonization: The Case for an Integrated Mineral Supply Agreement Saleem H. Ali, Sophia Kalantzakos, Roderick Eggert, Roland Gauss, Constantine Karayannopoulos, Julie Klinger, Xiaoyu Pu, Kristin Vekasi, and Robert K. Perrons Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (22), 15280-15289

Here's figure 3 from the paper:



The caption:

Figure 3. Materials needed for different forms of power generation. Figure based on data from U.S. Department of Energy Quadrennial Energy Review 2015.

It might also be worthwhile to take a look at this article, not in a scientific journal, but illustrative nonetheless.

Data insight: the cost of a wind turbine has increased by 38% in two years

The reason for this price increase is appalling mass intensity.

I have argued that the uranium already mined, never mind the thorium mined and dumped in lanthanide mine tailings, is sufficient to power the entire world for over 150 years if converted to plutonium using nuclear reactors designed now to last 80 years.

Anyone who has a problem with mining should definitely have a problem with so called "renewable energy," the mass intensity, as the above graphic shows, makes its very name a cruel joke.

[sprinkleeninow]

4. So you are/have been pro-nukular energy, if I understand correctly? 🤔

Whutabout solar?

[NNadir]

5. The solar industry depends on access to dangerous fossil fuels. It's dirty and unsustainable.

[sprinkleeninow]

6. The name Hanford rang a bell. I consulted the google.

"And it continued producing plutonium for weapons for decades after the war, helping to fuel the Cold War nuclear arms race. Today Hanford — home to 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, leaking storage tanks, and contaminated soil — is an environmental disaster and a catastrophe-in-waiting."

Imma ditzy. Please explain the connection of 'solar' needing dependence on fossil fuels.

[jpak]

10. My local small town utility has a 5 MW PV solar array

Last edited Sun Apr 30, 2023, 09:03 PM - Edit history (1)

and 28 MW of low-head hydroelectric capacity - in town.

Just up river is a 72 MW hydroelectric dam that is used for peaking power or to otherwise balance the grid.

Just up the road from there is a 185 MW wind farm.

No dangerous fossil fuels or nucular power needed to supply abundant, reliable and cheap electricity locally.

Percent talk - lol.

[Miguelito Loveless]

15. This poster is quite pro-nuke

But virulently anti-solar. Puzzles me no end. He writes long, long tech articles, which can be informative to folks with time to plow through them.

I have a 20kW array, and have had zero problems for 8 years this Summer.

[jpak]

26. We have done battle on this forum for many many years - I know him well.

[Finishline42]

32. What DQIIIIIIII totally ignores is that the cost of electricity isn't a constant...

His number one decision point is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics followed by nuclear energy has the highest energy to mass ratio of any form of energy.

But the utility companies work on the cost of electricity at a given point in time. Which is why they are buying every Megapack they can get their hands on. Which is why Hydro Storage and HVDC makes sense. Which is why they buy the output from wind and solar farms.

BTW, I am not anti-nuke. I think we should keep every current operational nuke plant going for as long as practical.

But the fact is, we aren't building 85 new nuclear reactors to double the current 19% contribution to our electrical grid that nuclear makes. The reason is simple economics. A new reactor takes 10 years to build (costs with no income) and once operational it takes decades to pay for their costs. And during those at least 3 decades wind, solar and energy storage will continue to get cheaper.

The two reactors in South Carolina were stopped half way thru construction because the ratepayers refused to pay for them and the utility didn't see the demand. That's not going to change anytime soon.

[NNadir]

11. The rhetoric in the google result is rather nonsensical.

Last edited Sun Apr 30, 2023, 06:07 PM - Edit history (1)

A personal remark: Anyone who asks a question rather than reciting an inflexible dogmatic assertion about a topic about which they know very little, is not ditzy. Do not sell yourself short. I appreciate the question.

I recently gave a lecture to a scientific group touching on Hanford, built, in part, around things I learned when writing this (highly technical) post: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels (It contains about 25 references to papers in the primary scientific literature.)

If Hanford is such a "disaster" one should at least be able to explain why Portland, Oregon, just down the river, has the highest life expectancy in the United States, or what environmental outcomes have been caused by radiation released from it. The people who live in Richland, Washington, the home of many of the scientists working at Hanford and at the marvelous Pacific Northwest Laboratory are leading useful productive lives. Where exactly is the death toll? Does every animal that roams in with the confines of the plant die a horrible death. Are the bird kills from radiation anywhere near the bird kills of the average wind industrial park?

I have a rather extensive journal on this website, and I've touched on why solar energy - despite popular enthusiasm for it - is a very dirty and expensive enterprise.

There are many reasons for this. One is the low energy to mass ratio; it takes a huge amount of chemical processing to produce a solar cell, including the energy to reduce silicon (or in other cases, metals) to their elemental state. This is generally undertaken by the use of heat, precisely that unreliable electricity cannot provide.

You will hear from the fools who support this enterprise about "EROI" "energy returned on energy invested." It is true that this is positive for solar junk, but it is not true enough.

A kilogram of plutonium contains about 80 trillion Joules when fully fissioned. This is the equivalent of 2,500 tons of coal, 21 rail cars full, 2,080 m3 crude oil (17,500 barrels, 2,080,000 liters, 730,000 gallons). One can easily understand why the solar industry is not sustainable by simply asking the mass required to produce 80 trillion joules in a single day. (A large nuclear reactor consumes a few kilos of fuel a day.)

The lifetime of solar cells is generally reported to be between 20 to 25 years. This means they all need to be replaced regularly. There's a lot of talk about recycling what they become - electronic waste - but almost no practical low energy industrial infrastructure to do so. It's all soothsaying. We cannot afford to live by reading crystal balls.

Each year, about 45 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere. The majority of this, between 35 to 37 billion metric tons is dangerous fossil fuel waste, but the balance is from land use changes.

Huge stretches of land, some of it pristine wilderness, some of it farmland, are being industrialized to provide industrial parks for solar junk. It all needs to be installed by people carrying huge amounts of mass on trucks, serviced similarly, dismantled and hauled away (if not allowed to rot in place.)

The worst thing about the solar fantasy is its lack of reliability. Solar junk is subject to something called "night" as well as stuff called "snow" and things like "clouds," "dust" and the like. You'll hear a lot to excuse this awful reality from people who hype stuff like batteries and hydrogen and other very, very, very, very bad ideas.

Some of the most important scientific laws - laws not subject to repeal by legislators - are the laws of thermodynamics.

In the link in the OP to the situation at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory data from this morning, is an account of how much money has been squandered on solar and wind this century. The results of this tragic waste of money and resources are in: The atmosphere is degrading faster than ever.

My journal here is filled with related commentary: NNadir's Journal

It can be overly technical, but it details my strong objections to the awful reactionary idea associated with so called "renewable energy." The very name, "renewable energy" is an oxymoron.

Thanks for your question.

[jpak]

12. And it takes an enormous amount of coal-fired electricity to enrich uranium for reactor fuel

The Manhattan Project used a big chunk of TVA's power output to produce "valuable stuff" for the A-bomb.

Have a nice Walpurgis Night - lol.

And the "valuable stuff" in spent reactor will last for centuries.

[Miguelito Loveless]

16. Centuries?

Millenia.

[jpak]

21. Yup

[NNadir]

18. That's nonsense.

[jpak]

19. More percent talk I suppose

Where does all the power that supplies US uranium enrichment plants come from?

Dirty solar energy?

Lol.

[Caribbeans]

22. "The lifetime of solar cells is generally reported to be between 20 to 25 years"

NNadir: The lifetime of solar cells is generally reported to be between 20 to 25 years. This means they all need to be replaced regularly. There's a lot of talk about recycling what they become - electronic waste - but almost no practical low energy industrial infrastructure to do so. It's all soothsaying. We cannot afford to live by reading crystal balls.

Talk about "nonsensical rhetoric".

Most solar panels from reliable companies have guarantees of 85-90% output after 25-30 years. You've been informed of this before, yet apparently choose to ignore, and then continue to mislead others.

The Lifespan of Solar Panels

Solar panels, also known as photovoltaic or PV panels, are made to last more than 25 years. In fact, many solar panels installed as early as the 1980s are still working at expected capacity. Not only are solar panels remarkably reliable, solar panel longevity has increased dramatically over the last 20 years. In addition to decades of effective performance, many solar manufacturers back their products with performance guarantees in their warranties.1

Keep in mind that expected solar panel life expectancy doesn’t mean the panels on your roof will stop producing electricity after a couple of decades. It just means their energy production will decrease by what solar panel manufacturers consider optimal to meet the average American family’s energy needs. https://www.sunrun.com/go-solar-center/solar-articles/how-long-do-solar-panels-really-last

NNadir: The worst thing about the solar fantasy is its lack of reliability. Solar junk is subject to something called "night" as well as stuff called "snow" and things like "clouds," "dust" and the like. You'll hear a lot to excuse this awful reality from people who hype stuff like batteries and hydrogen and other very, very, very, very bad ideas.

You'll hear a lot of endless garbage like this from the NNadir's of the world, who simply cannot understand that hydrogen makes storage of solar and wind energy portable and usable. Would you rather have 30% of something or 100% of nothing?

[NNadir]

24. It might be useful to open a scientific paper rather than continuously producing marketing documents

Since I do read the scientific literature, I'm sure that this marketing document won't mean shit in 25 years when this junk has to be hauled away.

The entire solar fantasy is a ponzi scheme, a slickly marketing one, but a Ponzi scheme all the same.

It's rather like the hydrogen marketing scheme, a money hole that's worthless and just plain stupid.

[jpak]

25. More "percent talk" - that's a No-No ya know

[jpak]

23. I suppose that's why we had a (collapsing - lol) Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty

Too many above-ground nuke tests spewing "valuable stuff" over the local landscape and beyond.

Are the Downwinders idiots too?

PBS had a special on them - the moranic twits - lol.

[sprinkleeninow]

29. I have read and then considered your points. Appreciated. 👊

[NNadir]

31. You're very welcome. Thanks for reading. N/t.

[jpak]

8. Kim Jong-un agrees - lots of "valuable stuff" in spent fuel

Like plutonium

[NNadir]

17. It would be interesting to learn if there are any antinuke idiots who can demonstrate that...

...plutonium, including its use at Nagasaki, has killed in the 80 years since its discovery, as many people as will die in the next month from air pollution.

That would be about 600,000 people.

Here is a widely cited scientific paper on risk and the related death toll:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

It's written by a class of people called "scientists."

If there is any reference to deaths from nuclear wars, plutonium, or anything that paranoids using guilt by association fallacy, a hallmark of an inability to think clearly, I would be pleased to hear about it.

In general, though, I don't expect paranoids to read scientific papers.

Generally they're just goofs.

Nuclear scientists really don't care about these tiresome evocations of nuclear wars. Just as a solar and wind nirvana has not come, is not here, and will not come, having last been observed in the 18th century, nuclear wars are not observed.

Fossil fuel wars are observed, but nuclear wars aren't. I never hear anyone whining about plutonium insipidly giving a shit about banning gasoline because of napalm, which had killed, even by 1945, more people than plutonium ever did.

But so be it.

I'm very happy today because an idea I've explored for a long time being discussed by intelligent, well educated people.

I really don't care what people who don't qualify in this class present as "thinking."

[jpak]

20. Plutonium could potentially solve the human overpopulation problem on the planet - yup

Idiots?

LOL!

[Miguelito Loveless]

14. I agree with you on most of this,

but you lose me with your anti-solar posts.

[Brenda]

27. I think Performance Art should be excluded from this Group. nt

[hunter]

30. So should religion and climate change denial...

I consider most "renewable energy" schemes just another flavor of climate change denial. Solar and wind power are not economically viable without fossil fuel "backup power," especially at the scales required to support all eight billion of us. In practice these schemes will only prolong our dependence on fossil fuels and do nothing, absolutely nothing, to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gasses that get dumped in the atmosphere.

If you figure about half the people in the world should simply suffer and die so you can celebrate your rural solar, wind, and hydropower schemes, well, that's not a religion I want to believe in.

Reality is that the people with the smallest environmental footprints tend to live in densely populated cities, eat mostly vegetarian diets, and don't own cars.

Your solar and wind fantasies are not going to save these people as the world burns, no matter how comfortable your affluent country lifestyle happens to be.

We must quit fossil fuels now.