Poll: Support for nuclear energy hits 15 year high

[Statistical]

Slightly dated, the poll was in March 2009 but I know of no newer poll. Hopefully Gallup will release the 2010 version of poll in couple months.

Figured it was relevant considering Obama statements on nuclear energy in the State of the Union.



http://www.gallup.com/poll/117025/support-nuclear-energy-inches-new-high.aspx

[thunder rising]

1. Just NOT IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD! Watch, it's cool as long as it's someplace else.

[Statistical]

3. I'll support one in my state.

The whole not in my neighborhood is kinda a misnomer power generation plants are rarely built inside neighborhoods.

VA has had 4 reactors 2 in North Anna and 2 in Surry. I lived in Surry for a couple years as a kid. I would support a nuclear reactor in my neck of the woods (outside populated areas obviously) assuming the site would pass certification (geology, weather, environment, ecology, etc)

[NNN0LHI]

56. Its not the neighborhood so much as the local wind patterns

NIPSCO, a power company in Indiana was once intent on building a nuclear power plant near the Indiana Dunes State Park. Problem was that if there was ever a radiation leak the prevailing winds would have brought the fallout right across Lake Michigan to a city called Chicago.

People from Chicago tied that plan up in court for so long that it became financially unfeasible to finish the plant. Today, decades later, that half built plant sits rusting away. A real eyesore.

The moral of the story being is that it may not be very important what you want in your neighborhood. It may be more important what people in other states don't want.

Don

[closeupready]

57. That may be a successful blueprint towards thwarting further plans elsewhere.

n/t

[varelse]

Now, that would be an interesting poll question

Somehow, I don't think the results would favor nuclear energy quite as much.
In fact, I'd put all my betting money on NIMBY

upper-income Americans have consistently favored nuclear energy at much higher levels than lower-income respondents. This year, 75% of Americans whose total annual household incomes are at least $75,000 favor using nuclear power to produce electricity in the United States, compared with just 41% of those in households with annual incomes of less than $30,000. Only once in the last eight years has support reached 50% among the low-income group.

[kristopher]

18. What if they were provided this information first...

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because
they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed
to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force
governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand
analytic scrutiny.

And then there is the issue of secrecy and lack of reliable data on the risks associated with nuclear power.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181 Issue Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Pages 31 - 220

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Alexey B. Nesterenko a , Vassily B. Nesterenko a ,† and Alexey V. Yablokov b
a
Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), Minsk, Belarus b Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Address for correspondence: Alexey V. Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospect 33, Office 319, 119071 Moscow,
Russia. Voice: [phone]; fax: [phone]. [e-mail]
†Deceased


ABSTRACT

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were
absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information
collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are
characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former.
Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European


Russia.

Accelerated aging is one of the well-known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or
lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.

This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations.

Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found
in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature
cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination.

Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily
contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by
Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health
consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.
The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and
2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I-131 and Cs-137 radioisotope doses to which
populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre- and
post-Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High
levels of Te-132, Ru-103, Ru-106, and Cs-134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from
Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.

A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups.

From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The
calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several
hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

[varelse]

24. Could set a world record for consensus on a poll?

Just a guess.

[thunder rising]

40. Nukes are never finished within budget and the true cost of operation is never considered

What do you do with the waste? It's like coal plants...they are cheap until the levee breaks and the ash kills a bunch of people and contaminates whole communities.

[ThomThom]

63. yes and tax payers pay the insurance on nuclear power plants

after the nuclear plants useful life the cost will continue forever
there is limited material to run these facilities, less than ten years if we replace all existing power stations
Nuclear power is just a dumb as it always was

[Pavulon]

71. See sharron harris and maguire

both operated for decades by one owner and profitable for the companies that own them.

[spanone]

74. not on my planet.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Where are they going to put the spent fuel rods?

[NYC_SKP]

At present, they're all kept on site at the power plants.

I'd like to see more advanced reactors in the future that would produce far fewer dangerous products, but at present all spent rods are kept on site.

Better this than coal plants that release their toxins to the atmosphere, and thus to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.

[thunder rising]

41. Oh, just like the coal ash ... waiting for a flood to bless whole communities.

[NYC_SKP]

48. Except that, thanks largely to activism, they are not just allowed to sit in piles outdoors

and blow around.

While the nuclear, being a relatively fresh technology, is highly regulated with respect to environmental issues.

Coal, being the relatively much older child, has it's history of carlessness and negligence almost grandfathered in.

Had coal "grown up" in the 60's and 70's, it might be much different.

[MadHound]

49. No, they sit in pools outdoors,

And leak large quantities of radioactive material into the ground and water system.

Take a look at Indian Point 2, leaking 25-50 gallons of radioactive water (from dissolved radioactive waste) since the early nineties and only four hundred feet from the Hudson.

These storage pools for spent rods are simply nightmares waiting to happen, and many of those nightmares are already occurring. The biggest problem that the DOE and NRC are dealing with is constant pool leakage, year in, year out. A few thousand gallons here, a few thousand gallons there, soon we're talking real damage.

[Statistical]

5. Onsite in dry casks like we have been doing for last 50 years.

At least until we certify and open a repository.

Nuclear reactors generate very little waste by volume. Most reactors sites are designed that all spent fuel from reactor can be stored on site. Early reactor sites sometimes lack sufficient space so spent fuel is shipped to dry cask site at another reactor.

Surry nuclear power generation plant in VA accepts spent fuel from other reactors on East coast that don't have sufficient room.

We have been storing waste like this for 5 decades now.


By the way the photo has 8 spent cores. That is roughly the spent fuel for 40 years of emission free power generation. 40 years of coal would be the size of a mountain (literally)

Fuel rods need to cool for about a year in cooling ponds anyways so even if we had a repository they would spent considerable time onsite.

[sandnsea]

7. How would recycling fuel rods work?

How large are the current pools in comparison to those cores? Is there anything at all that looks promising as far as eliminating radioactivity altogether?

[Statistical]

9. Eliminating radioactivity all together? No.

The casks you see hold spent cores, they weigh about 30 tons are represent the fuel used for 4-6 years of power generation. The casks are dry however prior to being casked for long term storage fuel rods cooling down in cooling ponds.

When cores come out of the reactor they are literally hot. Fission has stopped but radioactive isotopes will decay to non radioactive atoms. Some isotopes have very short half lives (hours, months or few years). Shorter the half life the faster it will become inert but the more heat in produces.

Here is one:
You can see the spent fuel rods at the bottom (in a grid) under 30+ feet of protective water (water is good radiation blocker).



So spent fuel rods spend about 10-20 years in giant pools. They look like swimming pools but are 50 ft deep. There they slowly cool down. Then they are casked in those sealed containers.

The thing to remember is spent fuel isn't a single isotope. It is a mixture of dozens of istopes. Most decay to non-radioactive material in less than a year. Some other have halflifes of 30-90 years. Final a small amount have very long half lives (200K+ years).

So there will always be spent waste.

The goal of reprocessing is "spent fuel" is only about 3% fissioned. 97% could be used in another reactor is the long lived isotopes were removed. Another way to look at it is the spent fuel in the casks above could power a reactor for another 30+ years if the remaining uranium (97%) was seperated from fission products.

So waste can be cut by 90% simply by using all the fuel (not just 3%). Then some of that waste (65%) decays to inert within a century. Finally some of the long lived isotopes can be transmuted (that is topic for another post) into a faster decaying isotope. However some long lived isotopes will remain.
The goal would be to reduce the amount of long term waste by 98%. The final 2% is very long lived and would need to be stored in a final storage facility underground.

[jpak]

15. "even if we had a repository" - and who pays for this nonexistent repository?

clue- not the corporations that profited from making all that spent fuel.

Thanks to Ronald Reagan - we the people - own it and have to pay for its disposal.

Yucca Mountain would have cost >$100 billion - most of it funded by taxpayers not nucular plant operators.

Nucular Power - not such a deal

:thumbsdown:

[Statistical]

17. Actually no.

The power plants do pay for that spent fuel.

0.5 cents per kwh. Given that average wholesale nuclear power is about 6% that works out to 8.3% of all revenue from every single nuclear reactor for last 3 decades years.

On edit:
Looks like utilities are upset about the $770 million they paid each year to storage waste and govt just collects the money and does nothing about it.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-US_nuclear_utilities_question_waste_fees-1007094.html

Remember future not just past nuclear fees would also offset cost of Yucca Mountain (or any repository). Also about 1/3 of all waste in the US is from the military. Power utilities shouldn't be on the hook for disposal cost of military nuclear waste.

The govt gladly collected $770 million a year from nuclear power utilities in return for ownerhsip of the waste and ultimate storage. The govt had no problem collecting the money, they just didn't do anything with it.

[PinkoDonkey]

19. At the risk of asking a really stupid question...

Why not just pull a Superman IV and shoot the radioactive waste into the sun?

[Statistical]

21. If it worked it would be great.

What happens if rocket malfunctions and crashes/exploded shortly after liftoff?

[PinkoDonkey]

45. Yes, that would be bad, but...

...are modern rocket designs really that unreliable?

How small a payload would be required such that a potential accident would more or less negligible?

[MadHound]

46. Can you say "Columbia" and "Challenger"?

An atmospheric burst would be catastrophic, exposing millions of people to radioactive fallout.

If you make the payload small enough to make such a catastrophe negligible in effect would mean that the shot would be virtually worthless. It simply wouldn't make economic sense.

[PinkoDonkey]

67. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I don't really appreciate the tone. I'm not advocating anything here, just asking questions on a subject I know little about.

And since when does anything regarding nuclear power make economic sense?

So the radiation involved (in an explosion) would be more like a bomb rather than giving everyone an xray. Got it.

Wasn't Columbia a reentry issue?

[HBravo]

4. Should be followed up with a question

about what to do with the spent rods.:banghead:

[Statistical]

6. Keep them onsite.

Like we have been doing for last 50 years.

Spent fuel rods take up very little space. The photo above is spent fuel for 40 years of power generation. The pad looks like it has room for 20 more years worth of spent cores. The gravel area likely could be expanded to build an identical pad good for another 60 years.

Given nuclear reactors generally only last for 40-60 years it doesn't require that much space to store all fuel used in the LIFETIME of plant onsite.

Eventually a final storage location is needed but we have plenty of time.

There are casks at Surry from 3 decades ago. They just sit there like they have since Carter administration.

[HBravo]

8. Sorry I was slow on getting my post up.

Thank you for the info. One problem I see is security with many more plants. A friend of mine is a game warden and he has to pull a monthly shift monitoring a power plant as there is not enough security in place since 9/11.

[BeFree]

10. We have plenty of time...?

Well lets hope so. For 50 years now this problem has grown everyday, and even after the billions spent trying to find a solution, there isn't one.

How do you safely store something so deadly for 1,000 of years?

Look at it this way: If the Romans had nukes, we'd be dealing with their nuke waste problem today.

Are we really willing to foist this problem on our descendants for just a few minutes of light bulb burning?

[Statistical]

12. Spent billions. More like collect billions.

Power plants transfer ownership of waste to federal govt.

They also pay 0.5 per kwh generated. To date that is $12.7 billion collected by federal govt and earmarked for final storage.

The federal govt hasn't done anything. If we had a final respository like Finland does then that would remove a major "issue" with nuclear power.

"A few minutes of lightbulb burning."
Coal kills and it kills every single day. If all the nuclear was gone tomorrow it would be replaced by coal.

1000 MW coal plant burns 3.2 million (yes million try to visualize that) tons of coal a year. To replace all nuclear power tomorrow would take 470 1000MW coal plants. That is over a billion tons of coal burned every year. In our lifetimes it could exceed 100 billion tons.

Literrally an entire mountain burned up and dumped into the atmosphere.

If you think utilities if forced to drop nuclear will go renewables well that is just a pie in the sky fantasy. First of all what happens when renewables prodcue say 9000 MW but grid demands 10,000MW? We can't store that amount of power. They will burn fossil fuels to make up the difference. Even worse to be ready they will have fossil fuels burning on idle as "spinning spare".

[BeFree]

14. You nailed it!!

We use too much dirty power!!

We are wasting our atmosphere and polluting the ground just for the pleasure of today.

No matter what we use unless it is clean and renewable, its like we are burning the house down to stay warm for one night.

Now, what can we do?

[jpak]

16. We the taxpayers own that spent fuel and the Nuclear Waste Fund will only pay for a fraction of

disposal costs.

Yucca Mountain would have cost >$100 billion.

Can you say Corporate Welfare - and Privatized Profit and Socialized Risk?

yup

:thumbsdown:

[MadHound]

26. And like for the last thirty or so years,

You're having some major problems with hot spent fuel leaking into the surrounding ground, making its way into the water table.

In fact there is a crisis going on within the nuclear industry, what to do with all of that stored spent fuel. The tanks are deteriorating and finding new locations to store spent fuel is becoming difficult.

Your estimates for how much fuel could actually be recycled are off. In reality only about fifty percent of what is termed spent fuel could be recycled, and much of it only as isotopes used for medical and other such industrial purposes.

Likewise your estimates for how quickly a particular material decays are off. Various isotopes will last fifty to a thousand plus years, depending on the material. Also, let's not forget that nuclear waste isn't simply the fuel rods, it consists of everything from paper swipes used in HP work all the way up to the reactor vessel itself. Things like activated, hot aluminum takes hundreds of years to decay.

Meanwhile we don't have a place to permanently store such waste, and there really isn't one on this planet. No matter what method we're talking about we have got to take into consideration that this is for the long haul and no current method we have will stand up to a couple hundred, much less a few thousand years of nature. Do we really want to be giving that sort of gift to our kids and grandkids?

Oh, and let's put your photo in perspective. That is the storage pool for one reactor, there is a storage pool just like that for almost every reactor in the country, and as I said before many are having leakage problems.

Another thing, solar power is now cheaper than nuclear power per watt, and getting cheaper all the time.

Not to mention that we the tax payer are paying for the insurance for these plants, each and every one. There is no private insurance that will put out a policy for a nuclear plant.

So there's no good way to deal with the waste stream. There's no way to eliminate human error (think TMI and Chernobyl, along with a host of other, lesser fuck ups over the years). And nuclear power does not make economic sense.

So why should we double down on such an option when we have better ones available, especially if we spent the development money on them like we do on oil and nukes.

[Statistical]

27. "Spent fuel" is 97% enriched uranium.

Fuel rod goes into reactor = 100% enriched uranium (or MOX)
Fuel rod comes out of the reactor = 97% enriched uranium ( or MOX) plus 3% fission products (a mix of anticides, short term isotopes, medium term isotopes, long term isotopes).

The fuel isn't used up. It is replaced because some of the fisison products are neutrons blockers and they start to absorb neutrons and slow reactor output. At 3% mark even with control rods fully out (maximum reaction) it becomes difficult to sustain fission reaction of sufficient intensity to produce nameplant output (1000 MW).

Nobody cares about reprocessing the fuel for the fission products. Reprocessing is to extract the 97% enriched uranium and build new fuel assemblies with it.

[MadHound]

28. Excuse me, but please stop talking to me like I'm a dummy

I worked at a nuclear plant for a number of years, those nice little casks you're showing off upthread, I know them up close and personal. I know what is done with spent fuel, I know what can be done with spent fuel and just how much is used and wasted.

Furthermore I notice that you didn't address any of the storage problems I brought up, the leaking water, all the non fuel waste, etc. etc. Why's that?

Your numbers are wrong on the amount of fuel that can be recycled because you're going on a one to one ratio, ie you're thinking that if 97% percent of the uranium isn't used up, then we can extract that same amount. It doesn't work like that. As I said earlier much of it is used for medical and industrial purpose. Furthermore there is a lot that is lost simply during the recycling process. Thus your "another 30 years" figure is waaay off. Likewise you figures on decay rates.

And again, let's go over the waste storage, human error and economic problems. Do you have any answer for those?

[Statistical]

29. Your silly

1) UREX can extract about 99.9% of enriched uranium from spent fuel rods. If PUREX method is used to extract plutonium, the uranium yield drops but it still is above 90%. Main advantage of PUREX is plutonium extract for bomb material so given that is no longer a priority the higher yielding UREX could be used. This stuff isn't even new, the technology having been developed I don't know 4 decades ago. So yes the vast majority of nuclear fuel is un-fissioned when it is considered spent and the vast majority of that can be recovered.


2) Nobody gives a flying crap about pulling out some minor anticides in spent nuclear fuel for medical use. Nobody. Anywhere on the planet. The costs, security, energy, and complexity makes it a nonstarter. The only reason to reprocess fuel is to reduce amount of "waste" by removing the non-waste. Even reprocessed fuel is more expensive than making new fuel rods from fresh uranium.

So I am not sure why you are so hung up on this medical use nonsense. If the only benefit of reprocessing was medical isotopes. Nobody I mean nobody would be stupid enough to spend billions of dollars to build reprocessing plants to obtain isotopes that are much easier obtained via other methods.

3) Regarding old casks, leaks etc. This was all suppose to be temproary. The govt and utilties reached and agreement and utilites paid $32 billion over last 30 years into a fund in return the govt took ownership of all nuclear waste.

Yucca mountain was originally going to open in 1998. Now that the govt is done collecting money for something they never intended to build the utilities are suing to have the nuclear waste trust fund funds returned to build new storage facilities.

So am I surprised when utilities were told to store the waste temporarily and those temporary solutions are failing 30 years later? No. Who would be. The govt charged utilities billions and took ownership of that waste and then pretended the problem didn't exist.

[MadHound]

33. Apparently you care about medical use,

You're the one going on and on about it. I'm simply telling you that a good deal of the recycled material in spent fuel rods is used in both medical and industrial purposed. Oh, and it's not just anticides that are used from the rods, but I really don't want to get into laborious detail here, you seem to go nuts when facts are presented to you.

As far as storage goes, yes, much of it was supposed to go to Yucca Mt., but thankfully it was killed. Yucca Mt. sits at the convergence of three faults, has periodic flooding and sits close to the Las Vegas water table. In fact the EPA did a dye test on Yucca Mt., and that dye showed up in LV groundwater within two weeks. There is absolutely no good place to store nuclear waste.

Oh, and some of that waste that was put in pools, it wasn't put there waiting for Yucca Mt., it was simply put there for storage. And again, these pools are leaking, heavily, all around the country. Example, Indian Point 2 has been leaking 25-50 gallons of strontium a day for over fifteen years, only four hundred feet away from the Hudson. And that's just one horror story.

Again, you're still not addressing the other issues, economic and human error.

[FBaggins]

72. 25-50 gallons of strontium leaking every day?

That's incredible...

...if for no other reason than it exceeds the total amount of strontium that the reactor would produce over many hundreds of lifetimes.


No doubt what you meant to say was that it leaks 25-50 gallons of water a day and that the water has trace amounts of strontium. No doubt you also would have gotten around to mentioning that the water doesn't leak into the water table, but into a treatment facility that only releases it after it meets EPA guidelines for contamination.

[zalinda]

11. I have a question

Doesn't it take 10 to 15 years to get one up and running? And from what I've heard the cost is sky high. In the next 5 years couldn't we cover the US with windmills and solar panels and erase the need for a nuclear plant?

zalinda

[Statistical]

13. Japan and China both built Gen3+ plants in 5 years.

So it doesn't have to take 10-15 years if done right.

Second nuclear power plant is 1000MW on average. Wind turbine is 5MW. However wind turbines have a load factor of about 20% and nuclear reactors have load factor of 95%. So it roughly takes 1000 turbines to equal a single reactor.

We have 870 coal plants in the US. Before replacing nuclear lets replace them. It would take about 870,000 wind turbines just to replace all coal in the US. To replace 90% of coal, natural gas, and oil power plants in US would take 2.2 million wind tubrines.

Then what do you do when wind is blowing but not enough. When the grid is demanding 10,000MW on a hot day but wind is producing 9,000.

Wind is great and we should look to rapidly expand wind but nuclear has a part to play.

Baseline power today is provided by coal, natural gas (rarely due to cost), and nuclear.

Nobody is building wind farms to replace low cost baseline power. They are looking to get better ROI and replace load following plants (which charge more for electricity).

[kristopher]

20. Detailed analysis says your conclusions are incorrect

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because
they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed
to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force
governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand
analytic scrutiny.

And then there is the issue of secrecy and lack of reliable data on the risks associated with nuclear power.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181 Issue Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Pages 31 - 220

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Alexey B. Nesterenko a , Vassily B. Nesterenko a ,† and Alexey V. Yablokov b
a
Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), Minsk, Belarus b Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Address for correspondence: Alexey V. Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospect 33, Office 319, 119071 Moscow,
Russia. Voice: [phone]; fax: [phone]. [e-mail]
†Deceased


ABSTRACT

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were
absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information
collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are
characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former.
Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European


Russia.

Accelerated aging is one of the well-known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or
lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.

This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations.

Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found
in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature
cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination.

Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily
contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by
Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health
consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.
The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and
2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I-131 and Cs-137 radioisotope doses to which
populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre- and
post-Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High
levels of Te-132, Ru-103, Ru-106, and Cs-134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from
Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.

A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups.

From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The
calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several
hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

[grahamhgreen]

34. Great info!

[thunder rising]

54. The god of ROI has spoken. In half truths and mixed statistics. They never talk about waste.

[AdHocSolver]

22. Correct! The idea that nuclear power will solve any environmental problems is a cruel fantasy.

Considering that the long lead times to get enough nuclear plants operational to make a dent in coal burning for power generation would be decades, deleterious global climate change would be well on its way to wreaking havoc on our planet.

That means we would have two serious problems: serious climate problems plus hugely expensive power generation with its own set of environmental issues.

Moreover, build the nuclear power plants in low-lying coastal areas, and what do you do when the sea level rises and puts the nuclear plant under six feet of water?

Wind, wave, and solar generation equipment can be built up steadily over time at far lower cost. Benefits can be realized in time intervals of months, rather than decades. As conditions change, wind, wave, and solar generation equipment can be moved around easily and cheaply.

Such dispersed generating equipment can be set up so that any individual equipment failure need not kill the power over wide areas. One centralized nuclear power plant goes down and huge areas of the country could be without power for weeks until the problem were fixed.

[Statistical]

25. nuclear plants go down routinely for fueling without blackouts.

You are aware baseload provides are contractually obligated to provide the baseload 24/7/365. As a result nuclear power generators sign contracts with peaking plants to go online and provide replacement power when they are down for routine maintenance and refueling. They also sign deal to have other plants provide emergency power.

[AdHocSolver]

37. The public pays dearly for all that expensive backup.

What about the rolling blackouts in the northeastern U.S. and parts of Canada?

Concentrated power generation will always be more expensive and more fragile, and will concentrate political and economic power in the grip of a few large corporations.

Distributed power generation is more cost effective, relieves the public of dependence on a few giant corporations ("too large to fail"), and can be upgraded technologically and expanded more easily at lower cost.

The only reason there is a big push for nuclear plants now is to tie up money up front before the public realizes that nuclear generation is in every way, both economically and environmentally, a bad way to go.

[Statistical]

39. You don't think wind & solar will need hot reserves?

Well they will and load factor on wind (0.25) is far worse than nuclear (0.95).

Nuclear has the highest load factor of any form of power.

A load factor is % of usable annual power compared to theoretical power as determined by nameplate.

A 1000MW reactor theoretically could generate 1000 MW * 24 hours a day * 365 days a year = 8.76 TWH

So the usable output / 8.76 TWH determines load factor. With load factor average of 0.954 nuclear reactors in the United States output 95.4% of their theoretical output.

Wind on the other hand due to its variable nature rarely outputs full capacity. A load factor of 0.25 is common for the industry.

So which do you think will require more supplementing with natural gas turbines?

[thunder rising]

42. Funny thing about PV .. .it peaks at the same time as usage. The "experts" do not tell you

that peak usage is midday. They want the entire load available at midnight; hence, 1000s of miles of lighted highway.

[Statistical]

43. Solar does have a very nice availability factor.

It does peak at exact time that demand is the highest.

Even better is a fact that most people don't understand. Not all power costs the same. The last couple hundred megawatts provided by wholesalers may cost 3x, 5x or even 10x (in under-capacity situation) compared to baseline power.

So solar can get a higher price per KWH and those characteristics make it a perfect load follower.

There is no one perfect solution to electrical generation. Solar is well suited to partially replace other high cost peak power producers (spinning reserve natural gas for example).

While you "could" build a grid that is all solar, or all wind, or all nuclear it would be like forcing a square peg into round hole.

The combination of all 3 allows a grid where each provider generates the type of electricity it is best suited for.

Nuclear - baseload
Wind Power - major component of load following
Solar - mid day load following and peaking power
dual cycle natural gas - peaking power, spinning reserves, and demand matching.

[BeFree]

50. Well

If nukes were the answer you'd see bankers lining up to finance the damned things.

But they aren't. 50 years they could be financing nukes, but they aren't. Why not? Because the liabilities and the danger doesn't make financial sense, that's why.

[Statistical]

55. not the liabilities.

$300 million in insurance on nuclear plant only costs a million a year which is negligble cost.

The biggest killer of nuclear power is time.

Nuclear costs are almost completely front loaded. It has a very low marginal rate (cost to produce 1 kwh of power once built) and an extremely high construction cost.

while the plant is being constructed it has no revenue and thus the interest is capitalized and compounds on itself.

Take two scenarios:

$5B plant with 5 years construction and certification time (5 years from concrete pour to first retail electrical generation).
In the 5 years the plant will capitalize $2.34 billion in interest (at 8%). So now the plant needs to "work off" 7.34 billion in construction costs over the life of the plant. Say plant has 50 year lifespan so the utility ammortizes that $7.34 billion over 50 years. The principle and interest is $50 million a month. So the plants profit is wholesale power generated - $50 million - operating costs. Over the life of the plant principle & interest will be $29 billion.


Now lets compare that to 15 year build period.
Same $5B plant however capitalized interest is $10.8 billion meaning total build cost jumps from $7.34B to $15.86B. Even worse the ammortized cost over 50 years is now $10.7 million a month. Over the life of the plant the P&I will be $64B.

So lets say over 50 year lifespan a typical plant grosses $70 billion and has operating cost of $10 billion = $60 billion
Under 5 year build that would be $60B - $29B = $31B profit.
On a 15 year build that would be $60B - $64B = -$4B loss.

Same plant, same power price, same build cost, same operating cost. One is massively profitable and the other is a massive loss of money.

in 1950s the average build time for nuclear reactor was 8.7 years by the mid 60s that had dropped to 5.1 years by the late 70s that had grown to 11.9 years with the longest one being 16.2 years.

The exploding build time is what killed nuclear power. Japan recently built 3 reactors in less than 5 years. China is on track to build 4 reactors in less than 5 years so it can be done. US utilities are worried that govt will change regulations in middle of build process and that will result in costly delays.

Given the track record what the federal govt did to utilities in late 70s I can't say I blame them.

If we can build 4 or 5 new plants on schedule, on budget there is no reason private money won't fund dozens more.

[kristopher]

60. Stop makiing shit up.

Those financial numbers are a total fabrication. If you can't use actual analysis, you don't get to just make it up.

[BeFree]

61. Bwahahaha

On schedule and on budget? You are a dreamer!!

No, son, they can't do it. And the government is not going to ever drop the demands for safety. So, dream on.

The bankers know that they are wasting money on nukes and even though their buddies are pressing them to loan them money they back away.

There are alternatives that are truly clean: nukes are dinosaurs, but you just keep on dreaming about the on time and on budget. Bwahahaha!!

[Statistical]

62. Japan last 2 reactors were on schedule and UNDER budget.

China 4 AP1000s are on schedule and on budget (first one scheduled to go online in 2012).
So apparently the rest of the world can do it and only the US can't.

The reality is people like you are afraid of the loan guarantees for one reason: it might work.

If the next 4 reactors come online way over budget and uneconomical it will be a death blow to the industry however if they DO come online on budget and on time it will be spark of a massive boon in the industry.

Virtually every single utility will anxiously watching the 4 reactors to base their decisions. If the fail they will cancel future plans, if they succeed then they know they can succeed.

If you are 100% positive that nuclear can't be built on time and on budget the best thing to happen would be let them start building under the loan guarantee program. When they fail capitalize on it and nuclear is gone. Within 30 years the last reactor will spin down and we will likely never generate power from nuclear again.

Of course you are afraid to take that chance. It might work.

[kristopher]

47. Capacity factor is an irrelevant metric for judging what power source we should move to

It is a favorite line of bullshit from the Nuclear Energy Institute but it has nothing to do with what the best technology moving forward is.
Here is a simplified explanation of how a renewable grid functions
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

The second of these three papers deals specifically with your claims about capacity factor - they are nothing more than another phrasing of "The Baseload Myth". The first paper is a comprehensive evaluation of the available energy technologies on the metrics that ARE relevant.

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.



******************************************

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181 Issue Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Pages 31 - 220

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Alexey B. Nesterenko a , Vassily B. Nesterenko a ,† and Alexey V. Yablokov b
a
Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), Minsk, Belarus b Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Address for correspondence: Alexey V. Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospect 33, Office 319, 119071 Moscow,
Russia. Voice: [phone]; fax: [phone]. [e-mail]
†Deceased


ABSTRACT

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former.

Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia.

Accelerated aging is one of the well-known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.

This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations.

Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination.

Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.

The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and 2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I-131 and Cs-137 radioisotope doses to which populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre- and post-Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High levels of Te-132, Ru-103, Ru-106, and Cs-134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.

A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups.

From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

[Statistical]

51. Cost the most important metric isn't considered.

Wind is cost effective when it is being highly utilized (as in load following situation).

To build enough capacity such that wind and solar would always (in all situations and at all times) have enough capacity to exceed current demand (which is very volatile) would be prohibitive.

If wind made such a good baseload supplier why isn't current wind farms used for baseload power.

Just because we can do something doesn't mean it makes the most sense.

You kill nuclear and we will build more coal plants. Period. That is what happened in the 70s and that is what will happen in the future.

[kristopher]

59. Two questions - two answers

The cost numbers also work against nuclear - Lovins details the economics of the issue. The delivered cost of power from new nuclear is DOUBLE what it is from solar and about 6X what it is from wind.

new delivered nuclear power costs from
~2× to ~10× more than equivalent firm delivered power from micropower and negawatts—a
gap far too big for any conceivable technical, institutional, or financial improvements to bridge.
This gap is widening, for three reasons:

• nearly all the distributed competitors are trending inexorably cheaper over the long run
through routine improvement and production volume (though in the short term, photovol-
taic prices have temporarily stabilized for photovoltaics and turned up for wind power
due to extraordinarily rapid growth in demand)—while central plants, for fundamental
reasons, have historically tended to become costlier as more are built, contrary to nor-
mal learning-curve assumptions;
• markets are starting to recognize distributed benefits, chiefly in financial economics and
electrical engineering, that will ultimately increase by another tenfold or so the economic
value of distributed resources, but, in a major conservatism, aren’t shown here (except
for recovery of waste heat); and
• negawatts and such potentially potent very-large-scale competitors as photovoltaics ex-
hibit many paths for disruptive technological breakthroughs that can drastically cut cost
and improve performance. Indeed, important new classes of technology are emerging.

After a half-century of refinement, nuclear fission offers no such leapfrog prospects.

I've already given you DETAILED information about wind and baseload - READ IT AND STOP LYING. The upshot is that the entire concept of baseload is bullshit.


Here are a few MORE references.

Nuclear Nonsense
Journal or Magazine Article, 2009
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-10_NuclearNonsense
Stewart Brand’s book, Whole Earth Discipline, features a chapter claiming that new nuclear power plants are
essential and desirable, and that a global “nuclear renaissance” is booming. In this book review, Amory Lovins’
review finds fatal flaws in the chapter’s facts and logic.
Download 63KB



Nuclear Power’s Competitive Landscape
Presentation, 2009
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-15_NuclearPowersCompetitiveLandscape
A hotly debated topic, the present and future state of nuclear power and it’s competitors is the subject of this
presentation by Amory Lovins at RMI2009. This presentation was part of a plenary debate with Robert Rosner
entitled, “Nuclear: Fix or Folly?” The accompanying video of the entire debate is available at http://www.rmi.org
/rmi/Videos.
Download 7862KB

Nuclear Power and Climate Change
Letter, 2007
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/C07-09_NuclearPowerClimateChange
This 2007 e-mail exchange between Steve Berry (University of Chicago), Peter Bradford (former U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commissioner and senior utility regulator), and Amory Lovins illustrates the cases for and against
nuclear power in relation to climate and the environment.
Download 658KB


Nuclear Power: Economic Fundamentals and Potential Role in Climate Change Mitigation
Report or White Paper, 2005
http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/E05-09_NuclearPowerEconomicFundamentals
In this presentation, Amory Lovins provides evidence that low and no-carbon decentralized sources of energy have
eclipsed nuclear power as a climate friendly energy option. He argues that new nuclear power plants are
unfinanceable in the private capital market and that resource efficiency provides a cheaper, more environmentally
viable option.

[SidDithers]

23. K&R...

I also support power generation from nuclear energy.

Sid

[Historic NY]

30. We need a new one on-line in NY to cover the metro area & replace the old one..

in a location that is safer and away from large population center. Indian Point needs to be replaced.

[grahamhgreen]

32. Let's hope the next 9-11 doesn't happen to a nuclear plant.

[Pavulon]

68. There's an app for that..

its called thermonuclear war. I believe OBL commented that he did not want to hit any reactors due to the us "response".

Lets hope they dont hit chemical plants in jersey. Or an number of facilities that can cause mass casualties if struck.

Sounds scaarry though.

[grahamhgreen]

31. Uranium is limited, like coal & oil. Hydro, wind, tidal, solar, biofuels, all better and unlimited.

[Statistical]

35. Thorium is about 5x as abudant as uranium.

Thats good enough for next couple hundred years.

[grahamhgreen]

36. 5x more vs unlimited safe energy, which is better?

[Kalun D]

38. PLUTOnium, God Of The DEAD

Anytime you think you want nuclear power, just look at Chernobyl, 300,000 to 400,000 dead, 150 mile radius uninhabitable for 600 years.

Elena Filatova has done a very good job of documenting the ghost towns around the area, riding through on a motorcycle and taking pics and vids


http://www.elenafilatova.com/

[thunder rising]

52. It only takes on "awh shit" to really kill a bunch of people. So, what's the true cost of nukes?

Handling the deadliest poison on earth .. by a corporation?

[Pavulon]

69. See the US Navy. Just dont outsource it to soviet russia..

We have a very long history of safe operations of reactors in the US civilian and military system.

[madokie]

44. We have a long time problem on our hands folks

and it ain't only co2 either. Two words cover it, Nuclear Waste

There is no plan for a long term way to deal with this little tidbit no matter the arguments that ensues, the fact remains, that in 60 plus years no one has figured out what to do with the leftovers. Which leads me to believe that there is no magic bullet for doing this.

I seen through the follies of nuclear energy years ago. My question to you is why haven't you yet?

[thunder rising]

53. Nuclear Waste? Hell, we can't even deal with coal ash. (this is total agreement)

[snooper2]

58. good....

nt..

[ParkieDem]

64. I'm one of them.

I'd much rather have a nuclear energy plant near my home than a coal-fired power plant.

[MadHound]

65. The thing is we can do without either

We have plenty of green, renewable energy resources that can take up the load.

Besides, why should we go with nuclear when solar and wind are now cheaper and don't have the inherently huge problems of waste and human error?

[laughingliberal]

66. They can favor it all they want. As long as "screw Nevada" stays dead they can produce all they want

All those who favor it and want it produced in their state can keep their spent fucking fuel cells right there.

[Pavulon]

70. Yep, the reactors here are why companies build facilities in RTP

vs california. Electricity here costs a fraction of what it does in california. And the lights stay on.

[laughingliberal]

73. As long as they don't send their garbage to my state, I'm fine with that.

Obama killed the Screw Nevada project today and that's good AFAIC.

[spanone]

75. let everyone who's for it keep the waste in their basements.

[laughingliberal]

76. +1000 nt