ERRORS in rebuttal to "Pandora's Promise"

[PamW]

20. We can address those...

The MIT study chooses "once through" over closed due to cost. That's because they don't assess any cost to having long lived nuclear waste piling up. I think most of the people here, including myself, believe that you need to clean up the waste. The MIT study doesn't include long-term waste as a cost; hence making the open cycle artificially cheap.

Coal is cheap too - if you don't assess any cost to the health and environmental damage.

Taking each in turn.

Cost - one of the things that makes nuclear cost so much is that anti-nuclear opposition. I still can't see how one can be intellectually honest, and oppose nuclear power, and then bleat about the cost when the opposition is a big part of the reason the cost is high.

Look at what a nuclear reactor plant cost BEFORE the anti-nukes got involved in protesting nuclear power plants. The Palisades Plant was built in the late '60s / early '70s before the anti-nuclear movement got started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_Nuclear_Generating_Station

Look at the table at right to see what this STILL OPERATING plant cost to build: $149 Million.

Palisade is still operating, still licensed; so it has ALL the safety features needed of any modern power plant; there's no "chincing" there. What enabled Consumers Power, the original owner to build the plant so cheaply is that it did NOT face opposition. The anti-nuke movement hadn't gotten started; so there were no delays due to lawsuits and the like.

Safety - "inherently safe" reactors like the IFR which rely on "Laws of Physics" for their safety as opposed to "engineered" safeguards can be built. When your shutdown cooling relies on "natural convection" then all you need is the heat source and gravity. Gravity won't fail; not even in an earthquake. If the heat is there and there is a need for forced cooling; that heat provides the motive force.

Waste - as Dr. Till points out; the IFR fuel cycle doesn't produce long lived wastes.

Proliferation - as Dr. Till and Lawrence Livermore point out that the IFR can NOT be used to make weapons.

It's all in Dr. Till's interview with Frontline:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Of course I know you don't believe any of the SCIENCE that enables such a reactor to be built.

Where did you get your University degree in a SCIENTIFIC field that gives you the credentials to dispute the science?

Please tell us where / when; what University and what year you got a SCIENCE degree?

I thought NOT!.

The good thing about science is that it is true, whether or not you believe in it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

PamW