Is Rocketing Nuclear Waste into the Sun a Viable Solution?

[mheslep]

...If the Chinese hadn't invented gunpowder, there'd be no guns. You can't suppress science, so you shouldn't try. Instead, you should try to harness it for good.

Agree one can't suppress individual scientific concepts. But another thought occurs on this subject. I hold it is very possible to suppress the construction of highly complex systems. The know how for such is quite a fragile thing. The US DoD constantly frets that it will lose the ability to execute some old cold war rocket tech, naval sub tech, etc. So even if every scientific principal on subs is publicly available, one can't just look how to build these things up on Wikipedia, even a hypothetical classified version. Creation of highly enriched U. certainly qualifies as a highly complex system.

 

[vanesch]

Lovins proposes:
1. the US can get completely off oil in a couple of decades
2. it can do this without adding any nuclear.
3. Natural gas and CCGT stays in the mix. For the Warmers he throws in reforming the CH4 at the well head and reinserting the CO2 on the spot.

The point is, we can get rid of the natural gas if we keep nuclear. So the end question is: what's better, nuclear or natural gas ? This plan is BTW very similar to some utopic projections of the Green party in the European parliament. In their projections for 2040, they have optimistic estimates of wind, solar, biofuel, and a serious decrease in consumption, and... they increased natural gas consumption by about 50 % to reach 30% of the electricity production. Of course they get rid of nuclear. Well, you have to know that today, Europe has about 30% nuclear. So if they would KEEP nuclear, they'd be entirely fossil-free. Not even seriously expanding it, just keeping it at the current level.
It's always the same: alternatives are *proposed* to replace nuclear, but in practice, it is always fossil fuels. What's best ? Getting rid of nuclear, or getting rid of fossil fuels ?
And the point is, that the proposed solutions are a combination of techniques that haven't even been demonstrated. So in as much as the alternatives don't show satisfaction, that would mean even more natural gas use.
http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/155/155777.a_vision_scenario_for_climate_and_energy@en.pdf

As to the CO2 sequestration, it is funny that people do mind the geological sequestration for about 10000 years of small quantities of nuclear waste (a few tens of thousands of tons), which are materials which have great difficulties to get free, but at the same time, they have no difficulties *imagining* the geological sequestration for hundreds of millions of years of billions of tons of gas!

A serious leak in that CO2 repository, and you will kill everybody in an entire region. Now, or 10 000 years from now, or 5 million years from now. The amount of gas is the same. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos for instance.

A repository that is gas-tight for natural gas isn't necessary for CO2, as CO2 can form carbon acid in contact with water, and dissolve certain kinds of rock.

 

[vanesch]

I read that the average Iranian takes some pride their country's 'peaceful' nuclear program. Also, Iran has violated the NPT a couple times; they are in violation now, so one can hardly argue the NPT stops these states.

Iran will get a nuke sooner or later, if it really wants to, whether or not in Europe or the US, there are power plants or not. And guess what ? They won't use it. Should we refuse a solution to a potentially world-threatening situation (I'm talking about the hypothetical or real climate change projected in 100 years), just because some imagined fears of things that never happened, and that will or won't happen, depending on whether some people really want so or not, but independent of whether power plants are build ?

Tell me, if you have the choice, what's worse:

A) A global temperature increase of 6 degrees in 2100, but more political pressure possible to refrain some from making nukes

B) A global temperature increase of 1 degree in 2100, two Chernobyls, and 5 small (0.5 KT-5KT) nuclear terrorist attacks during the 21th century ?

I'm not saying that B is the consequence of nuclear power. B is the *proposed* horror scheme of anti-nuclear activists.

 

[vanesch]

One positive thing about Lovins' report is that he does recognize that nuclear displaces a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions - Helen Caldicott could learn something there. The anti-nuclear movement seems to be buying the notion that the emissions from the construction of the nuclear plant plus the mining and manufacturing of fuel negate the emissions saved by displacing fossil fuel plants. It is an absurd argument, but it is often used.

Indeed, there's a very simple argument to show how silly this is. 1 kg of natural uranium (yellow cake) costs of the order of $ 100,-. According to the report on which Caldicot bases her masterpiece, currently a nuclear powerplant emits 1/6 of an equivalent oil/coal plant for the same amount of energy, while in the future, this will become 1/1 or even higher, because of the petrol used during the mining.

Well, 1 kg of natural uranium produces, today, about the same amount of energy in a LWR as about 10 000 kg of oil. 1/6 of that is, according to this report, used to mine that 1kg. Well, that's 1600 kg of oil, or about 10 barrils at more than $100,- each.

So our uranium mine uses $1000,- of oil just to get out 1 kg of uranium that it sells for ~$100,-.EDIT: I saw that due to market tensions, the price of 1 kg of uranium peaked last year around $200,-, but that's due to market mechanisms, not because of the cost of the production.
Now, the price is ~$130,- per kg, as shown in http://www.uxc.com/review/uxc_Prices.aspx

 

[mheslep]

Iran will get a nuke sooner or later, if it really wants to, whether or not in Europe or the US, there are power plants or not. And guess what ? They won't use it.

Oh, well that's welcome news. No more worries then.

Should we refuse a solution to a potentially world-threatening situation (I'm talking about the hypothetical or real climate change projected in 100 years), just because some imagined fears of things that never happened, and that will or won't happen, depending on whether some people really want so or not, but independent of whether power plants are build ?

Tell me, if you have the choice, what's worse:

A) A global temperature increase of 6 degrees in 2100, but more political pressure possible to refrain some from making nukes

B) A global temperature increase of 1 degree in 2100, two Chernobyls, and 5 small (0.5 KT-5KT) nuclear terrorist attacks during the 21th century ?

I'm not saying that B is the consequence of nuclear power. B is the *proposed* horror scheme of anti-nuclear activists.

I think these risk assessments are totally off the rails. You have taken for granted that Iran can get nuclear weapons (and if they do its probably in the next 10 years), the world can not stop this, and then Iran will not use them? Add to the consequence of an Iranian bomb that Saudi Arabia and others would be highly encouraged to their own bomb, and Israel would likely ramp up their weapons program. At the same time AWG, of which there's never been any demonstrated prediction by the theory, is to be offered as a counter evil sometime around 2100?

 

[vanesch]

I think these risk assessments are totally off the rails. You have taken for granted that Iran can get nuclear weapons (and if they do its probably in the next 10 years), the world can not stop this, and then Iran will not use them? Add to the consequence of an Iranian bomb that Saudi Arabia and others would be highly encouraged to their own bomb, and Israel would likely ramp up their weapons program.

So ? That's exactly what we've witnessed between China, the USA and the Soviet union for more than 40 years. Of the 60 000 or so warheads produced, not one single has ever been used. It's a terrible waste of resources, I agree.

At the same time AWG, of which there's never been any demonstrated prediction by the theory, is to be offered as a counter evil sometime around 2100?

Without the hypothesis of AGW, there's no problem in burning gas of course. Coal is different, it causes as many death PER YEAR as 5 Hiroshima bombs, or as 50 Chernobyls (official numbers: ~10 000 long-term victims) or 1.2 Chernobyls per year (Green party numbers - 400 000 long-term victims) - namely about 500 000 death a year.

In as much as I'm also skeptical of the scientific lack of doubt concerning AGW, one should nevertheless admit that what's proposed is a plausible scenario - much more so than many surrealistic scenarios used by anti-nuclear activists. I find this plausibility more than enough to be cautious with CO2 exhausts - and moreover, as I stated already a few times, in any case we need to seriously diminish our CO2 exhausts if we are to find out the A in AGW.

So in order to *deny the reasonable possibility* of AGW, you have to be VERY SURE that there is no AGW. For sure, there's no scientific proof of that either.

Question: what probabilities do you assign that Iran uses a nuke in the 21st century, and what probability do you assign that AGW turns out to be correct ?

Question 2: how many victims do you expect from the use of an Iranian nuke, and all responses to that ?

Question 3: how many victims do you expect under the hypothesis of AGW, and a rise in temperature of 6 degrees ?

 

[mheslep]

So ? That's exactly what we've witnessed between China, the USA and the Soviet union for more than 40 years. Of the 60 000 or so warheads produced, not one single has ever been used. It's a terrible waste of resources, I agree.

Well two were used. See the Cuban blockade in the in 60's for how very, very close the world came to nuclear war. Castro and Che Guevarra actually encouraged the idea, the maniacs.

Without the hypothesis of AGW, there's no problem in burning gas of course. Coal is different, it causes as many death PER YEAR as 5 Hiroshima bombs, or as 50 Chernobyls (official numbers: ~10 000 long-term victims) or 1.2 Chernobyls per year (Green party numbers - 400 000 long-term victims) - namely about 500 000 death a year.

Yes coal stinks, ought to be gassified I think.

Question: what probabilities do you assign that Iran uses a nuke in the 21st century, and what probability do you assign that AGW turns out to be correct ?

Question 2: how many victims do you expect from the use of an Iranian nuke, and all responses to that ?

Question 3: how many victims do you expect under the hypothesis of AGW, and a rise in temperature of 6 degrees ?

The problem is larger in scope than just Iran. Other countries would feel the Iranian threat and get on board, as illustrated by Pakistan and India. One of the motivations for Hussein's Iraqi nuclear program was to keep parity w/ Iran. It would be no surprise to see Saudi Arabia start a program in the face of an Iranian bomb, an increased program from Israel, and on and on. As to victims: as I understand it many of the victims forecast by AWG are from large economic displacements. I'm skeptical of that, but if that's the standard, then one could say the victims from even a small nuclear detonation in a Western city would be completely horrific. Blast victims aside, that city is economically done for centuries, and the rest of the economy would be temporarily shutdown. Borders closed. Travel stopped. 911 directly cost $500B in losses, I'd expect a bomb to be 10x that. Then somebody is going to retaliate, somewhere, and possibly "totally obliterate" (per Sen. Clinton) the attacker. You might be looking at millions dead before its over.

 

[baywax]

Well two were used. See the Cuban blockade in the in 60's for how very, very close the world came to nuclear war. Castro and Che Guevarra actually encouraged the idea, the maniacs.

Yes coal stinks, ought to be gassified I think.


The problem is larger in scope than just Iran. Other countries would feel the Iranian threat and get on board, as illustrated by Pakistan and India. One of the motivations for Hussein's Iraqi nuclear program was to keep parity w/ Iran. It would be no surprise to see Saudi Arabia start a program in the face of an Iranian bomb, an increased program from Israel, and on and on. As to victims: as I understand it many of the victims forecast by AWG are from large economic displacements. I'm skeptical of that, but if that's the standard, then one could say the victims from even a small nuclear detonation in a Western city would be completely horrific. Blast victims aside, that city is economically done for centuries, and the rest of the economy would be temporarily shutdown. Borders closed. Travel stopped. 911 directly cost $500B in losses, I'd expect a bomb to be 10x that. Then somebody is going to retaliate, somewhere, and possibly "totally obliterate" (per Sen. Clinton) the attacker. You might be looking at millions dead before its over.

Has this discussion come to the point where its thought to be safe to store nuclear material in a warhead?

 

[vanesch]

The problem is larger in scope than just Iran. Other countries would feel the Iranian threat and get on board, as illustrated by Pakistan and India. One of the motivations for Hussein's Iraqi nuclear program was to keep parity w/ Iran. It would be no surprise to see Saudi Arabia start a program in the face of an Iranian bomb, an increased program from Israel, and on and on. As to victims: as I understand it many of the victims forecast by AWG are from large economic displacements. I'm skeptical of that, but if that's the standard, then one could say the victims from even a small nuclear detonation in a Western city would be completely horrific. Blast victims aside, that city is economically done for centuries, and the rest of the economy would be temporarily shutdown. Borders closed. Travel stopped. 911 directly cost $500B in losses, I'd expect a bomb to be 10x that. Then somebody is going to retaliate, somewhere, and possibly "totally obliterate" (per Sen. Clinton) the attacker. You might be looking at millions dead before its over.

It is because you said that the risk assesment was off. Now, of course, this is coarse guessing, I agree.

What you do is: you multiply the assumed number of victims of a certain outcome by the probability of that outcome.

So, say, probability of Iran making a nuke and using it in the 21th century, and this escalating in a regional nuclear conflict: 20%.
Probability of AGW: 60% (that's "undecided, with a slight bias towards yes: after all, there ARE a lot of suggestions that it happens).

Estimated number of victims of a regional nuclear conflict in the ME: say, 100 million people (a few cities, and then other victims, that's what you'd expect of a few hundred Hiroshima bombs, which caused about 100 000 victims each).

Estimated number of victims of AGW: 1 billion (hunger, devastated areas, conflicts...), say about 10% of world population by then (I would think it reasonable to estimate that the 10% poorest will not survive the burden of AGW).

I'm just spouting these numbers, I know. No references, backups or whatever. Just very crude guestimates.

Expected damage for bomb: 0.2 x 100 million = 20 million expected victims.
Expected damage AGW: 0.6 x 1 billion = 600 million expected victims.

 

[Azael]

Certainly a country can import its enriched material; Russia tried to have the Iranians abandon their program and import from Russia instead. Iran refused. Iran continues with its enrichment program and it still grabs a great deal of political cover by telling the world that its program is for power, and more importantly it can tell its own population the same thing. I read that the average Iranian takes some pride their country's 'peaceful' nuclear program. Also, Iran has violated the NPT a couple times; they are in violation now, so one can hardly argue the NPT stops these states.

And that's why I think the NPT should be modified so that not any country that has signed has the right to build enrichment plants.

That analogy is fairly wide of the target, gas stations and napalm are both down stream from widely distributed sources - the wells. Enrichment requires big technology and big money so its a choke point for nuclear - power or bomb.

Well enrichment isn't neccesarly a choke point for either. You could still run as many CANDU reactors as you want for power, producing weapons grade plutonium could be done in a primitive graphite moderated reactors(like the Hanford B-Reactor) running on natural uranium.

The problem IMO is that if a nation decides they want nukes they can build them no matter what you or I say. The presence of civilian nuclear power plants in or outside the country makes hardly no difference at all. Would Iran stop enrichment if europe and america in unison decided to dismantle their nuclear power plants?

 

[mheslep]

Well enrichment isn't neccesarly a choke point for either. You could still run as many CANDU reactors as you want for power, producing weapons grade plutonium could be done in a primitive graphite moderated reactors(like the Hanford B-Reactor) running on natural uranium.

A Plutonium implosion weapon is a much more difficult thing to design than a U235 device.

The problem IMO is that if a nation decides they want nukes they can build them no matter what you or I say.

I will by no means acquiesce to that, nor I hope will US policy. A nation can not hide the vast infrastructure and power required to enrich. It can be attacked, if the NPT and nothing else works.

The presence of civilian nuclear power plants in or outside the country makes hardly no difference at all. Would Iran stop enrichment if Europe and America in unison decided to dismantle their nuclear power plants?

Its not the reactor per say, its the presence of the enrichment infrastructure that makes a huge difference. I hold that the expertise and equipment required for enrichment has a half life of sorts, so that to stop Iran one would have had to go back a couple decades. If you stop Pakistan and A Q Khan, then yes Iran might be several decades behind where they are now; they might have considered do it yourself enrichment impractical.

Going forward, the world wide cutoff of enrichment tech. might very well stop the next rogue - a Saudi Arabia, an Egypt, a Syria from getting started; and a N. Korea from improving on its duds.

 

[mheslep]

...As to the CO2 sequestration, it is funny that people do mind the geological sequestration for about 10000 years of small quantities of nuclear waste (a few tens of thousands of tons), which are materials which have great difficulties to get free, but at the same time, they have no difficulties *imagining* the geological sequestration for hundreds of millions of years of billions of tons of gas!

A serious leak in that CO2 repository, and you will kill everybody in an entire region. Now, or 10 000 years from now, or 5 million years from now. The amount of gas is the same. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos for instance.

A repository that is gas-tight for natural gas isn't necessary for CO2, as CO2 can form carbon acid in contact with water, and dissolve certain kinds of rock.

I think that's not a fair comparison. Nyos is a crater lake so the CO2 was thus trapped and caused the deaths via suffocation. Though the planned sequestration is of large scale, Oil&Gas companies have been injecting CO2 for years into wells to boost production and I've never heard of suffocation deaths resulting. AFAIK the danger is from a very localized pressure explosion, unless someone chooses a very poor sequestration location.

 

[Azael]

A Plutonium implosion weapon is a much more difficult thing to design than a U235 device.

Yes but producing plutonium is much simpler than enrichening uranium and a plutonium producing reactor can be more easily hidden than a enrichment plant.

I will by no means acquiesce to that, nor I hope will US policy. A nation can not hide the vast infrastructure and power required to enrich. It can be attacked, if the NPT and nothing else works.

Well take sweden as a perfect example. We more or less had all the infrastructur needed in the 60's to make plutonium based nuclear weapons if we wanted to until a descision was made not to build bombs. The swedish nuclear power inspectorate estimates that by 1965 we where 1-2 years away from beeing able to serial produce nuclear weapons(not just build one) if the decision for it had been made.

If a small country like sweden could manage that in the 60's without anyone knowing about it a larger country with more resources can surely do it more easily today. Beliving anything else seems reckless.

Its not the reactor per say, its the presence of the enrichment infrastructure that makes a huge difference. I hold that the expertise and equipment required for enrichment has a half life of sorts, so that to stop Iran one would have had to go back a couple decades. If you stop Pakistan and A Q Khan, then yes Iran might be several decades behind where they are now; they might have considered do it yourself enrichment impractical.

And then perhaps Iran would have decided to produce plutonium instead. How would you stop that?

Going forward, the world wide cutoff of enrichment tech. might very well stop the next rogue - a Saudi Arabia, an Egypt, a Syria from getting started; and a N. Korea from improving on its duds.

Only if you assume enrichment is the one and only way to produce nukes, which it isnt. The only way to handle the problem is politicaly, change the NPT and enforce it fiercly. Right now the NPT is a toothless tiger and that is the main problem, not the existence of civilian nuclear power and the associated technology.

 

[baywax]

In other words, the Soviets wanted to store their nuclear material in the US (in the form of nuclear warheads) and the US wanted to store theirs in the USSR and now the Iranians want to store theirs in Israel while Israel will surely want to do the same. India and Pakistan want to trade nuclear materials, North Korea wants to do so with pretty well everybody and China is probably itching for an excuse to test their nuclear waste deployment system.

 

[russ_watters]

That piece just says Harris was late because of 'delays' and therefore over budget; it does not say the delays were caused be hippie legal challenges though it may well be that they were. Are you just assuming the delay cause or do you have other information?

Yes, that piece didn't actually break down the reason for the long timeline/cost overruns. But it's a pretty well-documented/understood issue. I guess I kinda took it for granted that you knew about it. The thing is, I guess, the Hippies were repsonsible for it, but they wouldn't want to take credit for it because that would imply that their work was a problem, not a solution. In any case, here's an article about it:

Regulatory Ratcheting

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission Office of Regulation, as parts of the United States Government, must be responsive to public concern. Starting in the early 1970s, the public grew concerned about the safety of nuclear power plants: the NRC therefore responded in the only way it could, by tightening regulations and requirements for safety equipment...

In addition to increasing the quantity of materials and labor going into a plant, regulatory ratcheting increased costs by extending the time required for construction. According to the United Engineers estimates, the time from project initiation to ground breaking5 was 16 months in 1967, 32 months in 1972, and 54 months in 1980. These are the periods needed to do initial engineering and design; to develop a safety analysis and an environmental impact analysis supported by field data; to have these analyses reviewed by the NRC staff and its Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards and to work out conflicts with these groups; to subject the analyzed to criticism in public hearings and to respond to that criticism (sometimes with design changes); and finally, to receive a construction permit. The time from ground breaking to operation testing was increased from 42 months in 1967, to 54 months in 1972, to 70 months in 1980.

The increase in total construction time, indicated in Fig. 2, from 7 years in 1971 to 12 years in 1980 roughly doubled the final cost of plants. In addition, the EEDB, corrected for inflation, approximately doubled during that time period. Thus, regulatory ratcheting, quite aside from the effects of inflation, quadrupled the cost of a nuclear power plant. [emphasis added[

http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html

What is worse than the "delays" themselves is that the regulations were a moving target, so it was impossible to pin down a real construction timeline/budget before starting the project. With the hippies doing anything they could (and largely succeeding) to delay/block/bog down nuclear projects via this "concern", the financial risks became too high and too difficult to quantify to be worth trying to deal with.

 

[russ_watters]

On Proliferation:

The President has stated nuclear weapons in rogue hands are a (the?) major threat to the US. My earlier point was commercial nuclear power allows other countries to camouflage weapons programs. I mentioned Pakistan. If one could go back 20 years and stop worldwide any new nuclear power, you stop A. Q. Khan and without him you stop, or help to stop, N. Korea, Libya, and Iranian nuclear programs to which he was an important contributor. -Not that I would have stopped it w/out replacing with something else.
Anyone can put together a U235 bomb. The trick is getting the U235 which takes a country sized apparatus to produce. AFAICT, most of the technology for power grade enrichment and weapons grade is identical. That is why I say I see no good way to separate the two - power and bomb.

Ok, for a start, just so we can agree on something: The US, up until last year, was the world leader in CO2 production. Nuclear power already exists in the US and can fix that problem. What happens outside the US is a completely separate question and utterly irrelevant to whether the US should build 300 more nuclear plants. Do you agree with this? And if so, what this means is that for developed nations (and for a few developing nations), the proliferation issue is also irrelevant. And if I had to guess, the countries for which the proliferation issue is irrelevant cover 95% of the world's power demand.

That's a repeat of vanesch's earlier point that got lost. The point is that the relevance factor of the proliferation issue is very, very low here.

Now, for what other countries are doing with nuclear power: Yes, I would have liked to prevent Pakistan from getting nukes. How would that have been possible and how is that relevant today? Going forrward, why can't we simply insist on enforcement of the NPT? We're doing a good job of preventing Iraq and Iran from getting nukes, for example.

 

[vanesch]

Well take sweden as a perfect example. We more or less had all the infrastructur needed in the 60's to make plutonium based nuclear weapons if we wanted to until a descision was made not to build bombs. The swedish nuclear power inspectorate estimates that by 1965 we where 1-2 years away from beeing able to serial produce nuclear weapons(not just build one) if the decision for it had been made.

If a small country like sweden could manage that in the 60's without anyone knowing about it a larger country with more resources can surely do it more easily today. Beliving anything else seems reckless.

That's also what I think. Several times, people have made the erroneous assumption that by "not using a technology themselves" others wouldn't, either. That's like the Carter policy. In fact, the Carter policy turned out to be counter-productive, because in 4th-generation fast reactors, you don't need enrichment. So if fast reactors wouldn't have been held back, we could now probably close down enrichment all together. But Carter's fear was the Purex process. Too bad, others did it. The Purex process is well-known by now. It's chemistry!

Plutonium weapons are harder to make, even if you have the plutonium. Especially with power-reactor-grade plutonium. But it is not impossible, the US did some experiments that way in the 60ies. But the yield of the weapons is low, and the probability to have a dud is high.

There are other ways to do isotope separation, which do not require factories the size of half a town. There is mass spectrometry. It is slow, for sure. But it requires only a modest installation and after a few years, you can accumulate enough U-235 to make one bomb.

Maybe one day someone will put laser isotope separation to work: in that case, I guess a tabletop equipment will do the thing!

All this has nothing to do with the existence of civil nuclear reactors in other countries.

Only if you assume enrichment is the one and only way to produce nukes, which it isnt. The only way to handle the problem is politicaly, change the NPT and enforce it fiercly. Right now the NPT is a toothless tiger and that is the main problem, not the existence of civilian nuclear power and the associated technology.

I don't even consider other countries having nukes a serious problem. For exactly the same reason as it has been for the last 50 years. The only nukes that have been used was when only 1 country had them, and wasn't affraid or retalliation. Since the Soviets had them, none has been used anymore. It's a good thing that several countries in the ME have nukes (and not just 1).

Of course, terrorists having nukes is a different matter, and this might sooner or later happen. Although this will have a serious impact, it is not the end of the world. And it will be independent of whether other countries use power reactors or not.

Nukes are a physical possibility. They are allowed by the laws of mother nature. One cannot stop others from applying the laws of mother nature. It is silly to stop oneself of solving one's own problems, just based on the idle hope that this will stop others from doing other things with the knowledge.

 

[vanesch]

I think that's not a fair comparison. Nyos is a crater lake so the CO2 was thus trapped and caused the deaths via suffocation. Though the planned sequestration is of large scale, Oil&Gas companies have been injecting CO2 for years into wells to boost production and I've never heard of suffocation deaths resulting. AFAIK the danger is from a very localized pressure explosion, unless someone chooses a very poor sequestration location.

I like the difference in "risk assessment" between the supposed nuclear risks ("agree that it is not totally impossible that one could think that...") and non-nuclear risks ("one did something similar already, and it didn't went wrong then, so why should it ?").

What the example of the lake shows, is that upon a serious CO2 release, you can kill a lot of people - in fact many more so, than if you have a serious release of radioactive waste. If CO2 sequestration is to be somewhat useful, one must put an amount of CO2 away which is of the order of what one injects today in the atmosphere, right ? If we are going to put away only 1% of our current exhausts, no need to bother, right ?

So we are talking about a sequestration of billions of tons of CO2 a year, so over a century, this is hundreds of billions of tons that have been sequestrated. What can guarantee you that a fraction of this (say, 1%) will not be released 10 000 years from now ? (where did we hear such a question already ?) The Nyos lake contained 90 million tons of CO2, and the catastrophic release was less than 2 million tons of CO2. We are talking here about extremely small quantities compared to what we are planning to do.

Again, I'm not saying it is impossible. But the risk involved in CO2 sequestration over long term is way way way bigger than the risk involved in radioactive waste storage. It doesn't go away with time.

So anybody coming up with an argument against nuclear waste disposal (that it is not unthinkable that a fraction of it gets into the biosphere 10 000 years from now and slightly contaminates an aquifer) should respond to the argument that a few million tons of CO2 released suddenly can kill an entire region instantaneously, as was already naturally demonstrated.

The same people who use Chernobyl as an argument that the potentiality exists that a reactor releases a serious fraction of its content (without specifying HOW this is going to come about - just that the potential exists) and that this can be harmful, and hence that we shouldn't build such dangerous devices, should also consider that the potential exists for a CO2 sequestration and that a serious fraction of its content is suddenly released, which can also be harmful (without specifying HOW this is going to come about - just that the potential exists).

This is what comes back over and over: people hold somehow nuclear technology to totally different standards than all other activities.

The same holds for nuclear weapons. The direct use of civil nuclear technology in country A has not much DIRECT incidence on the desire and technological infrastructure of country B to make nuclear weapons: it is very difficult to STEAL the material, it is even more difficult to smuggle it outside without anybody noticing, and it is not going to be very useful. The only link that exists is that the technology used in country A for civil use could be modified in country B to help it make nuclear weapons.

But the same can be said of medical and pharmaceutical research! Technologies to treat virusses to produce certain pharmaceutical materials could also be used to devise extremely dangerous pathogens. Should we ban all pharmaceutical research using virusses then, simply because of the potential danger that in some country, or by some terrorist group, this technology is diverted into making a weapon of mass destruction ?

 

[Phy6explorer]

What about planting huge groups of trees around the CO2 emitting places wouldn't that help?

 

[vanesch]

What about planting huge groups of trees around the CO2 emitting places wouldn't that help?

You can place them anywhere in the world: CO2 is global. The trees don't have to be near the emitting places. Yes, reforestration would be part of the solution. However, once you have a mature forest, there is not much more extra sequestration by it: what is captured by photosynthesis is released by decomposition. It is the growing of a new forest which can capture CO2. So one would have to have a constant rate of setting up new forests to compensate for fossil fuel exhausts. Sooner or later, all habitable land will have to be converted into forests. And after that, this technique won't capture any more CO2 than it emits itself (except for the small part that gets burried in the soil, and might turn into fossil fuels in a few tens of millions of years...).

This is what is usually put in the balance of "ground usage change".

 

[mheslep]

Ok, for a start, just so we can agree on something: The US, up until last year, was the world leader in CO2 production. Nuclear power already exists in the US and can fix that problem. What happens outside the US is a completely separate question and utterly irrelevant to whether the US should build 300 more nuclear plants. Do you agree with this? And if so, what this means is that for developed nations (and for a few developing nations), the proliferation issue is also irrelevant. And if I had to guess, the countries for which the proliferation issue is irrelevant cover 95% of the world's power demand.

That's a repeat of vanesch's earlier point that got lost. The point is that the relevance factor of the proliferation issue is very, very low here.

Yes, agreed, I have no problem with a theoretically isolated US or most any other developed country internally growing its nuclear power capability from the standpoint of non proliferation. The problem is that the US is not isolated nor are theses other countries. The French for instance were building nuclear capability around the the Middle East. And politically, the issue is that becomes intractable to have ~300 nuclear plants, mine Uranium over seas, and then tell the developing rogues they can't have any enrichment capability.

Now, for what other countries are doing with nuclear power: Yes, I would have liked to prevent Pakistan from getting nukes. How would that have been possible and how is that relevant today? Going forrward, why can't we simply insist on enforcement of the NPT? We're doing a good job of preventing Iraq and Iran from getting nukes, for example.

Iran? Looks to me like they're full speed ahead w/ enrichment. Sanctions having little effect.

 

[vanesch]

Iran? Looks to me like they're full speed ahead w/ enrichment. Sanctions having little effect.

http://www.cfr.org/publication/7876/laser_enrichment.html

We should now also stop all laser applications worldwide, given that lasers can be used to enrichment. This has nothing to do with nuclear power, btw.

So, again, it is *futile* to bring down an entire industry, with clear unique advantages, just for the sake of trying to avoid someone making weapons.

You're not going to argue that we now have to have a moratorium on laser technology, and that as such, there will be a "half time of knowledge" for it to disappear, and bring people in a state not to be able anymore to build a laser, right ?

 

[mheslep]

http://www.cfr.org/publication/7876/laser_enrichment.html

Thank you for the link

We should now also stop all laser applications worldwide, given that lasers can be used to enrichment. This has nothing to do with nuclear power, btw.

So, again, it is *futile* to bring down an entire industry, with clear unique advantages, just for the sake of trying to avoid someone making weapons.

You're not going to argue that we now have to have a moratorium on laser technology, and that as such, there will be a "half time of knowledge" for it to disappear, and bring people in a state not to be able anymore to build a laser, right ?

Composition fallacy. Knowledge of laser technology in general does not give one the ability separate useful amounts of isotopes. Laser separation makes my point: knowledge of the physical theory is of little threat, a trained physicist could sit down, read up and grasp the basic theory in an afternoon. The knowledge of how to build out a practical system, that is a large and complex system, apparently can not be gained after 27 years and $2B:

Scientists need tens of kilograms of enriched uranium, more than 100,000 times the amount enriched, to make a weapon,
...
The United States was on the verge of commercialization, when USEC, then known as the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, decided in June 1999 to cancel its atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) program. This came as a surprise considering USEC had spent roughly $100 million on AVLIS since being privatized a year earlier. In total, the U.S. AVLIS program involved 27 years of research and development and an investment of some $2 billion. USEC's cost estimates to make AVLIS ready for commercialization, which soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars, were a major factor in the program's cancellation.

So ship all the lasers you want, no one in Iran is going to start separating enough isotopes to make weapons with the current state of the art. However, sink another couple billion into AVLIS commercialization, work out all the kinks in the current system, start making that particular laser tech widely available, spin up several 1000 engineers around the world on the subject including a few who propose proliferation is irrelevant ala "https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=1717902&postcount=153""; voila, you no doubt will have Iranian laser isotope separation.

 

[mheslep]

...So we are talking about a sequestration of billions of tons of CO2 a year, so over a century, this is hundreds of billions of tons that have been sequestrated. What can guarantee you that a fraction of this (say, 1%) will not be released 10 000 years from now ? (where did we hear such a question already ?) The Nyos lake contained 90 million tons of CO2, and the catastrophic release was less than 2 million tons of CO2. We are talking here about extremely small quantities compared to what we are planning to do.

No plans I know of propose placing all of world wide sequestered CO2 in one hole. As I said above, the idea is to reinsert at the well head, so chemically you simply put back in one mole of CO2 for every mole of CH4 taken out, so 10^4 - 10^5(?) kg per well per year. There's a some danger there but I believe you are way off on the scale. I also believe the concern is more along the lines of a slow leak that simply allows the CO2 to re-agitate the AGW problem sequestration was supposed to prevent. The other issue is cost. So those are the three cons of sequestration: small explosive leak dangers, slow leaks, and cost. Its not comparable in any way to nuclear catastrophes. And I would have to check my geochemistry, but I'm guessing CO2 left underground for 10ky is very much not going to be in the same form as when originally placed there, waiting for a bone head on a back hoe (BHOBH) to blow the cap.

 

[mheslep]

Here's the dance I would like to see stopped. From a quick, lazy Wiki reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan

A Q Khan was educated at Delft in the Netherlands and Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium where he in 1972 received his PhD and

joined the staff of the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. FDO was a subcontractor for URENCO, the uranium enrichment facility at Almelo in the Netherlands, which had been established in 1970 by the United Kingdom, West Germany, and the Netherlands to assure a supply of enriched uranium for the European nuclear reactors. The URENCO facility used Zippe-type centrifuge technology to separate the fissionable isotope uranium-235 out of uranium hexafluoride gas by spinning a mixture of the two isotopes at up to 100,000 revolutions a minute. The technical details of these centrifuge systems are regulated as secret information by export controls because they could be used for the purposes of nuclear proliferation. These technical details along with blue prints of centrifuge were clandestinely 'taken' by A Q Khan and were

Khan did not need to go to Delfts and Leuven to understand the physics of fission and neutron diffusion, he could sit in Karachi and read up; agreed there is no need nor use in attempting to put that back in the bottle. He could not sit in Karachi and dream up a massive enrichment program.

Hence the motivation for my arguments above. Take away the intimate access of Khan or those like him to advanced Western enrichment technology and you have a strong argument that today there would still be no Pakistani bomb, similarly no N. Korean bomb, similarly the Iranian program would be set back or non existent.

 

[Azael]

Hence the motivation for my arguments above. Take away the intimate access of Khan or those like him to advanced Western enrichment technology and you have a strong argument that today there would still be no Pakistani bomb, similarly no N. Korean bomb, similarly the Iranian program would be set back or non existent.

Do you have any reason to assume they would not take the plutonium route to bombs instead if Khan hadnt spread enrichment technology? North koreas bomb was suposedly a plutonium bomb(hence why it fizzled). North koreas magnox reactors are fueled by natural uranium, they did pursue enrichment technology but it doesn't seem like it has played any major part in the weapons program.

Assuming that getting rid of enrichment technology would stop proliferation seems a bit naive and like vanesch pointed out, gas centrifuges and gas diffusion isn't the only ways to enrichment. Some of the uranium for the little boy was produced in caultrons and Iraq was planning on erichening uranium with caultrons.

Considering how accelerator technology is advancing its not entirely unrealistic that spallation sources can in the future be used to produce extremely pure Pu-239 or u-233 for that matter, yet another way to get ahold of weapons grade material that is totaly disconnected from civilian nuclear power.

It all comes down to one thing, a sufficiently determined nation can always find some way to produce weapons grade material. Looks like every nation so far that has tried to get nuclear weapons has succeded.

I also believe the concern is more along the lines of a slow leak that simply allows the CO2 to re-agitate the AGW problem sequestration was supposed to prevent. The other issue is cost. So those are the three cons of sequestration: small explosive leak dangers, slow leaks, and cost. Its not comparable in any way to nuclear catastrophes.

Not even the worst case scenario for a nuclear waste repository failure is much to worry about considering the chemical properties of the actinides. Not much if any will move from the repository even if the canisters fail and leak.

 

[engineroom]

One thing with N proliferation (power or weapons) is that country A might have a nice (read western friendly) stable government today so they are "permitted" to build these facilities however what happens in the future if there was a coup?

I'm not as worried about Iran having N power or even N weapons as I am with the fact that Israel does. I think a small mircle that during the first gulf war when Saddam was launching Skuds at Israel that Israel didn't launch a Nuke back.

Any way back to the original post; The only way to have safe storage of N waste is not bury and forget. Ongoing monitoring of the containment is required. When necessary the containment will need replaced and the N waste repacked. However as the N waste gets older the containment does not need to be as severe but you are talking centries rather than decades I beleive. This is a very long time scale problem. The long term hope is that an affordable technology will be devolped for the safe distruction of the N waste

 

[vanesch]

So ship all the lasers you want, no one in Iran is going to start separating enough isotopes to make weapons with the current state of the art.

That's not what this report says:
http://www.iranwatch.org/privateviews/First Watch/perspex-fwi-Laser.pdf

Visibly shipping powerful copper vapor lasers or NdYag lasers is all they need...

EDIT: also, remember that one single centrifuge or diffusion unit can also only produce "milligrams" of highly enriched material. The point is: once you know how to produce "milligrams" with a bit more than a table top setup, it is no difficulty to produce kilograms when money and ressources are affected. Iran *already* obtained milligrams of enriched uranium with LIS.

The reasons why the AVLIS program was canceled after billions of $ of investment, and at a few hundred million $ of commercial realisation, remain a mystery - I even wonder if they weren't motivated to drop it, exactly because of proliferation issues. But the planned AVLIS plant needed to separate hundreds of tons of uranium at commercially competitive rates. This is a different requirement than to make a few kilogram of material with "unlimited" ressources and no commercial pressure for a weapons program.

 

[vanesch]

No plans I know of propose placing all of world wide sequestered CO2 in one hole.

Nor is one going to put all of the worlds nuclear waste in one hole... But that doesn't increase safety. Instead of having probability p of having a catastrophe with N victims, you now have probability m x p of having a catastrophe of N/ m victims, although that last N/m is not even sure. The average number of victims over long times remains the same, so the associated risk is the same, whether you put everything in one place, or distributed over different places, as long as the number of victims is proportional with the quantity stored. But this last thing is mostly not the case. Usually, the number of victims doesn't rise linearly with the quantity stored. In that case, spreading the waste over different repositories (be it CO2 or nuclear waste) will actually increase the risk.

As I said above, the idea is to reinsert at the well head, so chemically you simply put back in one mole of CO2 for every mole of CH4 taken out, so 10^4 - 10^5(?) kg per well per year.

So this is distributed then over 10^7-10^8 wellheads ? (in order to put away the few billion ton CO2 we have to put away a year globally)

There's a some danger there but I believe you are way off on the scale. I also believe the concern is more along the lines of a slow leak that simply allows the CO2 to re-agitate the AGW problem sequestration was supposed to prevent.

Sure, that's one thing. But concerning nuclear waste, would you be satisfied with the phrase "there is some danger there but I believe you are way off on the scale" ?

What tells you that you can be absolutely sure that 1 million years from now, the stored gas is not going to be released suddenly, when a future civilisation will drill large holes into it ?
(this is the kind of questions that one asks for nuclear waste repositories).

The other issue is cost. So those are the three cons of sequestration: small explosive leak dangers, slow leaks, and cost. Its not comparable in any way to nuclear catastrophes. And I would have to check my geochemistry, but I'm guessing CO2 left underground for 10ky is very much not going to be in the same form as when originally placed there, waiting for a bone head on a back hoe (BHOBH) to blow the cap.

10000 years from now, the nuclear waste is essentially gone - at least its radio-toxicity. The CO2 will still be there, although a part of it might be absorbed by ground water, in which case it becomes carbonic acid, which can dissolve some rock formations (and hence "blow the cap"). After all, that was the idea! If it wouldn't be there anymore, where would it be ? The methane that was there, remained there for millions of years. If the CO2 interacts with the rocky material, that means that it transforms it chemically, and that would mean that it changes the repository. The other thing it can do, is dissolve in ground water, which is not immediately an advantage, because that means it can migrate, accumulate somewhere else, get released...

I only wanted to point out that one holds nuclear stuff, for an irrational reason, to totally different standards as other kinds of materials. One requires a much higher safety proposal (in projected number of victims) than one requires for other technologies, and one uses worst-case scenarios as "proof" against nuclear activities, while one uses "common knowledge" for other activities.

The probability for massive CO2 release by a repository is probably very low. But so is the probability for a massive release by a nuclear reactor or for a waste repository (even much more so, given its finite lifetime). The number of victims in both cases is comparable (so it is not true that the "nuclear catastrophe" would be worse than the CO2 catastrophe - we've been over this already several times, but even a terrible accident like Chernobyl is not any worse than any average industrial catastrophe or even routine activity: 60 direct dead, probably some 10000 victims of polution over the 50 years after it - compare that to the YEARLY 24000 victims in the US alone by coal fired plants).

The kind of risk assessment for nuclear somehow must have a thousand to a million fold higher quality than for other activities, at equal danger (number of victims). Why is this ?

 

[vanesch]

I'm not as worried about Iran having N power or even N weapons as I am with the fact that Israel does. I think a small mircle that during the first gulf war when Saddam was launching Skuds at Israel that Israel didn't launch a Nuke back.

A country having nukes will, IMO, never use them, because of fear of retaliation. The "need for a nuke" is based upon 2 other reasons: self-protection (especially from an enemy having nukes), and "international weight".

The danger of a country giving nukes to a terrorist group is also not to be over-estimated: they will still be responsible for it. So I think the real danger of someone using nukes is pretty small, and will yield in expected yearly number of victims over a century, probably much less than the number of victims we already have from cars and coal-fired powerplants (1.2 million and 500 000 per year, which means about 170 million over a century).

EDIT: that doesn't mean that one shouldn't fight proliferation by all means. But the main way of avoiding proliferation is by international and political pressure: to make the balance of a country flip over to the side where NOT making a nuke is more interesting than making a nuke.

This deviates from nuclear engineering, and goes into political science, but why does Iran want a nuke ? Why did Pakistan want a nuke ? Why does N. Korea want a nuke ? Why did Israel build a nuke ? Mainly for self-protection - and also for regional domination.
Pakistan needed a nuke because its ennemi, India, had made some. Iran needed a nuke to protect itself first from Iraq, and later from a similar invasion as Iraq suffered. It would also help Iran to become a major regional power. N. Korea's dictator needs a nuke to stabilise itself, to get rid from Chinese influence. Israel needed nukes because it is bathing in a region of hostility. In all these cases, nukes are nothing else but some ultimate "nation guarantee". If Iraq would have had nukes, I think the US wouldn't have invaded it.
As to "rogue states", I have a hard time imagining roguer states than the USSR under Stalin, or China under Mao. They had tons of very heavy nukes. Nothing happened.

So in as much as it is a good thing to try to convince nations not to build nukes, one mustn't over-dramatize it either.

I remain convinced that any reasonably develloped country with enough financial means can, if it wants to, build a nuke in the coming decades. Maybe it won't be able to hide its intentions.

Any way back to the original post; The only way to have safe storage of N waste is not bury and forget. Ongoing monitoring of the containment is required.

I don't know where you get that claim from. It would actually be riskier to leave access to the canisters, than to close the access geologically. It will take more than a thousand years (and probably much more so) for the canisters to leak. With reprocessed and vitrified waste, moreover the glass has to dissolve. Really, what can physically be released from a repository is a very very small pollution, mostly hundreds of times below the background radiation. The ultimate containment are not the canisters, but rather the geology. That's a "very big canister".

 

[russ_watters]

You're doing a great job, vanesch, but to amplify one thing:

I only wanted to point out that one holds nuclear stuff, for an irrational reason, to totally different standards as other kinds of materials. One requires a much higher safety proposal (in projected number of victims) than one requires for other technologies, and one uses worst-case scenarios as "proof" against nuclear activities, while one uses "common knowledge" for other activities.

You say "worst-case" for nuclear activities only because there is no stronger word to describe the scenarios posed by "environmentalists". In reality, they are far beyond "worst-case", crossing over into science fiction/fantasy. People believe a China Syndrome or even a Chernobyl represents a "worst-case" scenario for an American reactor, but they don't. Those scenarios are simply not possible. The closest we get to reality for a really bad accident requires something like a meteorite vaporizing a plant (nevermind that an meteorite is just as likely to kill 10,000 people directly by vaporizing a city skyscraper as it is to kill 10,000 people from cancer by vaporizing a nuclear plant).

So while people use a relatively reasonable risk/reward assessment for other activities (coal power kills 20,000 Americans a year, but on the plus side, it enriches the lives of everyone else), they use utterly ficticious scenarios as the standards for nuclear power (such as the Yucca mountains' rediculous 1,000,000 year standard).

 

[mheslep]

...Not even the worst case scenario for a nuclear waste repository failure is much to worry about considering the chemical properties of the actinides. Not much if any will move from the repository even if the canisters fail and leak.

Yes waste is another topic and at least once it gets inside Yucca Id not be that concerned about it.

 

[mheslep]

A country having nukes will, IMO, never use them, because of fear of retaliation. The "need for a nuke" is based upon 2 other reasons: self-protection (especially from an enemy having nukes), and "international weight".

The danger of a country giving nukes to a terrorist group is also not to be over-estimated: they will still be responsible for it. So I think the real danger of someone using nukes is pretty small,

I don't know that and think neither do you. These are handwaving arguments; let's get back to some sources.

Islamic calculus on retaliation:

"Ruling Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani declared Friday that the Muslim world could survive a nuclear exchange with Israel - while accomplishing the goal of obliterating the Jewish state.

[The] application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel - but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world," Hashemi-Rafsanjani said, in quotes picked up by the Iran Press Service.

BTW the Israelis know he's right about the damage to Israel. Israel is only 10mi wide at one point.

and will yield in expected yearly number of victims over a century, probably much less than the number of victims we already have from cars and coal-fired powerplants (1.2 million and 500 000 per year, which means about 170 million over a century).

A bit a of strawman. I don't say that nuclear power is not important, cars aren't helped by nuclear, and I don't say that coal as used is without harm. I'm saying that the dangers from proliferation are being underplayed, not over dramatized, and that therefore renewables and cleaner fossile (gasification/sequestration) is to be preferred over nuclear if / when it is technically possible, even at some finite cost premium.

As for the scope of the threat: I don't believe a nuclear detonation in a developed country otherwise at peace will be limited to blast and fallout victims. Here's some better hand waving: the world as we know it today will stop. People are concerned today about starvation in the thousands caused by elevated corn prices due to economic shifts, and about maybe 3 ft of sea level rise in the next century. Try a nuclear attack. In today's environmental context the attacked city is abandoned and not rebuilt like Hiro/Nagi for 50-100 years if ever. Intl. trade will halt while awaiting retaliation. If it is the US that's hit, US foreign food aid stops. If Three Mi. Island and Chernobyl stopped new plants, imagine what a hostile detonation will do to the industry.

Why does N. Korea want a nuke ? ... Mainly for self-protection - and also for regional domination.

It is because Kim Ill-Song is an unstable megalomaniac and building himself a weapon gets worldwide attention, esp. that of the US.

As to "rogue states", I have a hard time imagining roguer states than the USSR under Stalin, or China under Mao. They had tons of very heavy nukes. Nothing happened.

It is fair to say that fear of retaliation could be partially credited for preventing nuclear war in the 20th century, and perhaps the prevention of another world war. Its not fair to say that this was anything else other than an extremely risky, even a 'MAD' game to play. The US and USSR came very, very close to blowing themselves up in the Cuban Missile crisis. Observing this history and concluding simply the risk is small because 'nothing happened' is dangerous, but unfortunately seems to be part of human nature. See for example RP Feynman on NASA management leading to the Challenger disaster: "http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm" ."

I remain convinced that any reasonably developed country with enough financial means can, if it wants to, build a nuke in the coming decades. Maybe it won't be able to hide its intentions.

The major points of my argument:
- the multidisciplinary and systems engineering required for weapons size enrichment is extremely difficult and expensive. The knowledge required is likewise not simple, it is vast and complex and thus be can restricted with effort.
- it is therefore within the power of developed democratic nations to make the weapons acquisition by rogues 10x, 100x, maybe 1000x harder by a) yes, the use of the NPT and export restrictions, and also by b) phasing out nuclear if and when renewables and clean fossil make it possible.

EDIT: that doesn't mean that one shouldn't fight proliferation by all means. But the main way of avoiding proliferation is by international and political pressure: to make the balance of a country flip over to the side where NOT making a nuke is more interesting than making a nuke

I moved this comment to the bottom so we end in some agreement. Nuclear power is important, it has more than one advantage over fossil fuels. It also brings with it several dangers. IMO, via proliferation, N. power is linked unfortunately to N. weapons.

 

[Azael]

The major points of my argument:
- the multidisciplinary and systems engineering required for weapons size enrichment is extremely difficult and expensive. The knowledge required is likewise not simple, it is vast and complex and thus be can restricted with effort.
- it is therefore within the power of developed democratic nations to make the weapons acquisition by rogues 10x, 100x, maybe 1000x harder by a) yes, the use of the NPT and export restrictions, and also by b) phasing out nuclear if and when renewables and clean fossil make it possible.

Im beginning to feel horribly repetitive. But let's sum up what I have been saying.

There are two paths to nuclear weapons.

1. Very difficult uranium enrichment resulting in material that is easy to make weapons off.

2. Very easy plutonium production resulting in material that is hard to make into a working weapon.

You are focusing completely on 1 and totally ignoring 2 even though India took this path, North Korea tried and sweden was planning on it. If every nation on Earth stopped using light water reactors and erinchment plants path two would still be there wide open for anyone that wants a weapon without needing to smuggle any sensitive technology.

Now can you make a convincing argument that path 2 is inherently orders of magnitude more difficult than path 1? If not then putting a stop to comercial enrichment technology will have zero or extremely small effect on proliferation, it will only change the path taken or encourage countries to find other ways to enrichen uranium. Like iraq and the caultrons.

Also keep in mind that there are plenty of ways to have nuclear power without any need for uranium enrichment(CANDU, fast breeders, thermal thorium breeders), your argument is really against LWR and enrichment, not against nuclear power.

 

[baywax]

Im beginning to feel horribly repetitive. But let's sum up what I have been saying.

There are two paths to nuclear weapons.

1. Very difficult uranium enrichment resulting in material that is easy to make weapons off.

2. Very easy plutonium production resulting in material that is hard to make into a working weapon.

You are focusing completely on 1 and totally ignoring 2 even though India took this path, North Korea tried and sweden was planning on it. If every nation on Earth stopped using light water reactors and erinchment plants path two would still be there wide open for anyone that wants a weapon without needing to smuggle any sensitive technology.

Now can you make a convincing argument that path 2 is inherently orders of magnitude more difficult than path 1? If not then putting a stop to comercial enrichment technology will have zero or extremely small effect on proliferation, it will only change the path taken or encourage countries to find other ways to enrichen uranium. Like iraq and the caultrons.

Also keep in mind that there are plenty of ways to have nuclear power without any need for uranium enrichment(CANDU, fast breeders, thermal thorium breeders), your argument is really against LWR and enrichment, not against nuclear power.

It got a little more difficult to build a nuke or power a nuclear plant today. The Government of British Columbia, friends with Arnold Terminator of California, placed an outright ban on Uranium exploration and extraction in the Canadian province.

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080501.wbrethour0502/BNStory/robColumnsBlogs/home

Edit: PS... I don't know if this is purely politically motivated or if there is sound science behind not wanting to stir up the abundant uranium deposits that are found in the province's agricultural and watershed regions.

 

[Andrew Mason]

However as the N waste gets older the containment does not need to be as severe but you are talking centries rather than decades I beleive. This is a very long time scale problem. The long term hope is that an affordable technology will be devolped for the safe distruction of the N waste

The only technology that could conceivably destroy radioactive waste would be a time machine.

AM

 

[mheslep]

Im beginning to feel horribly repetitive. But let's sum up what I have been saying.

There are two paths to nuclear weapons.

1. Very difficult uranium enrichment resulting in material that is easy to make weapons off.

2. Very easy plutonium production resulting in material that is hard to make into a working weapon.

You are focusing completely on 1 and totally ignoring 2

Thats correct for the moment, one conversation at a time. I know a lot less about Plutonium and about the only thing I know about Pu implosion is that I've read and scene lectures saying its very difficult to do. I am not able to gauge what difficult is. I know Pu can be made from Magnox reactors using natural Uranium, the designs for which were inexplicably unclassified by the UK and then reportedly used by N. Korea.

even though India took this path, North Korea tried and sweden was planning on it. If every nation on Earth stopped using light water reactors and erinchment plants path two would still be there wide open for anyone that wants a weapon without needing to smuggle any sensitive technology.

NK appears to be an example of how the PU path ~fails; Sweden is a responsible democracy that's going to abide by the NPT so I have no problem w/ them. I am not familiar w/ the history of India's Pu bomb. I'm curious how indigenous their bomb was or did they also have AQ Khan _like_ external help. India was also a fairly large and technically advanced country at the time which it comes by in part because its a stable democracy. My priority is to prevent smaller rogue states from getting access to the tech to build a bomb. That is, let's prevent the small groups of thugs who haven't bothered to build a country from going nuclear - like a Mugabe in Zimbawe in 20 yrs, Burma, Cuba, and N. Korea (from having an easier path).

Now can you make a convincing argument that path 2 is inherently orders of magnitude more difficult than path 1? If not then putting a stop to commercial enrichment technology will have zero or extremely small effect on proliferation, it will only change the path taken or encourage countries to find other ways to enrich uranium. Like iraq and the caultrons.

I've seen pictures of one of the Iraqi caultrons. If they're anywhere as incapable and problematic as the ones Berkely / Livermore intended to use during WWII then a caultron would be a great time waster for thugs w/ nuclear ambitions. They're horribly inefficient.

Also keep in mind that there are plenty of ways to have nuclear power without any need for uranium enrichment(CANDU, fast breeders, thermal thorium breeders), your argument is really against LWR and enrichment, not against nuclear power.

If there really is no weapons path from any those three technologies then yes I'm on board. Are they economically viable for power?

 

[mheslep]

That's not what this report says:
http://www.iranwatch.org/privateviews/First Watch/perspex-fwi-Laser.pdf

?? I believe it does. There's nothing in there that says the Iraqis ever generated anything other than milligrams, as I said, and its not clear they even did that.

Visibly shipping powerful copper vapor lasers or NdYag lasers is all they need...

No its not all they need. Many other disciplines are needed in cooperation; the Iran Watch piece mentions several - electron guns, vacuum chambers - and not just as piece parts they have to be integrated in with the system. Then those lasers have to be tuned to 1 part in 10^5 at least. Then that is going to vary w/ even the slightest change in temperature of the lasing material. Then you have criticality issues to deal with as you try to scale up and replicate w/ a pile of U here, another over there. Oak Ridge went through all of this and were on track for a while to kill everybody there until Los Alamos advised them otherwise.

EDIT: also, remember that one single centrifuge or diffusion unit can also only produce "milligrams" of highly enriched material. The point is: once you know how to produce "milligrams" with a bit more than a table top setup, it is no difficulty to produce kilograms when money and ressources are affected.

In no way is LIS a yet a desktop operation. And as a general concept its simply wrong to say small scale production operations can be scaled up with difficulty or at all. There are numerous examples of where scale ups are not just hard but impossible w/ the same physics used to manufacture at small scale. Semiconductors is a good example. One can not build a working 2007 40nm CPU with say 1990 40um technology - there are electrical signal and power issues they even infinite money and resources would not overcome. In the case of gas centrifuges, scaling them up certainly doesn't qualify as 'no difficulty' for some of the above reasons and as evidence by the Oak Ridge story; it too can be impossible without application of other technology.

Iran *already* obtained milligrams of enriched uranium with LIS.

Perhaps they did, its not clear if IAEA says they could have made or they actually did.

 

[Azael]

Thats correct for the moment, one conversation at a time. I know a lot less about Plutonium and about the only thing I know about Pu implosion is that I've read and scene lectures saying its very difficult to do. I am not able to gauge what difficult is. I know Pu can be made from Magnox reactors using natural Uranium, the designs for which were inexplicably unclassified by the UK and then reportedly used by N. Korea..

I would venture to guess that the design was declassified because its very easy to design a crude plutonium producing reactor. You won't prevent any state from producing plutonium by trying to keep reactor designs secret.

How hard it is to make a working bomb only those that design bombs probably know. But so many countries has produced working Pu bombs so its obviously not insurmountable.

NK appears to be an example of how the PU path ~fails; Sweden is a responsible democracy that's going to abide by the NPT so I have no problem w/ them. I am not familiar w/ the history of India's Pu bomb. I'm curious how indigenous their bomb was or did they also have AQ Khan _like_ external help. India was also a fairly large and technically advanced country at the time which it comes by in part because its a stable democracy. My priority is to prevent smaller rogue states from getting access to the tech to build a bomb. That is, let's prevent the small groups of thugs who haven't bothered to build a country from going nuclear - like a Mugabe in Zimbawe in 20 yrs, Burma, Cuba, and N. Korea (from having an easier path)..

I used sweden as a example of a small country that in secret was laying the groundwork for serial production of bombs without anyone knowing about it. Plenty of developing nations today probably has the same resources that sweden had in the 50's and 60's. Preventing spread of enrichment technology won't neccesarly make much of a different even for small countries that want to build weapons. Preventing spread of nuclear power won't make any difference in the ability of small countries to produce plutonium.

I've seen pictures of one of the Iraqi caultrons. If they're anywhere as incapable and problematic as the ones Berkely / Livermore intended to use during WWII then a caultron would be a great time waster for thugs w/ nuclear ambitions. They're horribly inefficient..

This is a quote from FAS(no idea how reliable it is) regarding the caultrons.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/nuke/program.htm

Once the plants at Al Sharqat and Tarmiyah went into operation, Iraq would have been able to produce enough enriched uranium for one bomb a year from each plant. No industrial production had started at the two plants, but both would have been operational in 1992 or 1993.

If there really is no weapons path from any those three technologies then yes I'm on board.

There are always ways to make weapons. You could use any reactor to produce plutonium for weapons. But it would be extremely inefficient and illogical if someone wants weapons grade plutonium to build a expensive and complex power producing reactor when a primitive and cheap reactor can do the job just aswell.

 

[vanesch]

The major points of my argument:
- the multidisciplinary and systems engineering required for weapons size enrichment is extremely difficult and expensive. The knowledge required is likewise not simple, it is vast and complex and thus be can restricted with effort.
- it is therefore within the power of developed democratic nations to make the weapons acquisition by rogues 10x, 100x, maybe 1000x harder by a) yes, the use of the NPT and export restrictions, and also by b) phasing out nuclear if and when renewables and clean fossil make it possible.

I agree that making nuclear weapons is a complicated engineering problem. That's why I think that it is highly unlikely that a terrorist group "makes a nuke in their basement". However, I'm totally convinced that a country with financial means, and with a certain level of development (universities, research labs...) can do it entirely by itself. Western countries don't have the monopoly on inventing nuclear technology. The biggest secret was whether it could be done, but THAT knowledge is out. Most of the basic knowledge is public domain, or is at least "not contained" anymore.
True, a lot of technical details ARE still hidden. But you seem to forget that nuclear weapons were invented in the 40-ies (true, by brilliant people, but who established most of the basic knowledge). Technology, in general, has gone way up since then. We now have laptop computers that have a million fold the capacity of what was available back then.
So the few missing engineering details can be re-invented. This will take time, and this will take an effort, but it can be done. Maybe it will take 20 years of research efforts to re-establish something that is classified. But it can be found back - or the problem can be solved differently. Again, with enough ressources and enough determination, any reasonably develloped country can build a nuke. Independent of whether others use power plants.

What I do grant you is that such research would be more visible when there would be a world-wide ban on any nuclear activity (not just power plants, but also research reactors etc...). Because then ANY nuclear research activity would be suspicious, while now, a country could try to cover up its secret research by civil nuclear research activities. It is about the only reason for which nuclear power phasing out would "help".

However, look at Israel. They don't have nuclear power. They nevertheless developed nukes.

So, it is not clear to me that even if other countries phased out nuclear power, and nuclear technology all together (and how many decades will that take ?), in how much we diminish the probability that some "rogue states" with enough means and determination will succeed in making themselves a few nukes.

Also, by the time that one could hope that renewables ever take over (my guess is that this is more than a century away from us) as mass electricity production, about every country will have nukes, or will have decided not to want them, but it won't be a technological hurdle.

All this means that we would be foregoing to an entire technology, with all its advantages, worldwide, just to eventually (and I'm not convinced of it, but let's take it on) slightly diminish the probability of someone, somewhere, making a weapon, but not eliminating that possibility at all. Is that really such a good deal ?

 

[vanesch]

Islamic calculus on retaliation:
BTW the Israelis know he's right about the damage to Israel. Israel is only 10mi wide at one point.

That's what I mean: a regional nuclear conflict in the ME has an expectation of the number of victims in the same order of the number of victims we accept over a century for car driving and coal fired power plants.

A bit a of strawman. I don't say that nuclear power is not important, cars aren't helped by nuclear, and I don't say that coal as used is without harm.

I think you missed the point I tried to make. I wasn't saying that nuclear power is going to avoid those 170 million victims in the 21st century (which are SURE victims of car traffic and coal fired power plants), I was pointing out that even a regional nuclear exchange in the 21st century would not be a worse kind of catastrophe than the kind of victim levels that society apparently accepts for its living confort.

If apparently we accept, without blinking, to kill 170 million people in the coming century, just for the confort of displacing ourselves and our goods, and for the confort of having electricity, then such numbers are "acceptable risks". Well, a regional nuclear exchange is not of a bigger magnitude, so it can be negociated to be an "acceptable risk" too, if it comes with comparable advantages. If that advantage is "power too cheap to meter" and maybe avoiding a catastrophic climate change at the end of that century, knowing that this only contributes a very little to the probability of our conflict happening or not, then that's an acceptable deal.

I'm saying that the dangers from proliferation are being underplayed, not over dramatized, and that therefore renewables and cleaner fossile (gasification/sequestration) is to be preferred over nuclear if / when it is technically possible, even at some finite cost premium.

I would also prefer renewables, if they could do it. I even would prefer "magic stone" that generates electricity: you put a magic stone on your power meter in the basement, and electricity comes out. Point is, it is entirely unthinkable to generate 80% of worlds electricity needs with these technologies for the next 50 years. And by then, the proliferation issue will not be there anymore, as everybody who wants nukes, will have them.

As for the scope of the threat: I don't believe a nuclear detonation in a developed country otherwise at peace will be limited to blast and fallout victims. Here's some better hand waving: the world as we know it today will stop. People are concerned today about starvation in the thousands caused by elevated corn prices due to economic shifts, and about maybe 3 ft of sea level rise in the next century. Try a nuclear attack. In today's environmental context the attacked city is abandoned and not rebuilt like Hiro/Nagi for 50-100 years if ever. Intl. trade will halt while awaiting retaliation. If it is the US that's hit, US foreign food aid stops. If Three Mi. Island and Chernobyl stopped new plants, imagine what a hostile detonation will do to the industry.

That's because of over-scared people from a little bit of radiation. Indeed, one can't stop uninformed or ill-informed people make wrong choices. Like the 30 km zone around Chernobyl, where the radiation levels are lower than many other places in the world.
People are not dropping dead in Hiroshima today, are they ?

 

[vanesch]

Im beginning to feel horribly repetitive. But let's sum up what I have been saying.

There are two paths to nuclear weapons.

1. Very difficult uranium enrichment resulting in material that is easy to make weapons off.

2. Very easy plutonium production resulting in material that is hard to make into a working weapon.

There is even a third way, and I'm surprised nobody (except India?) ever took it, as far as I know:
very easy U-233 production from thorium in a graphite reactor.

U-233 has the double advantage of an easy bomb (gun-type) and easy separation from thorium (chemistry).

 

[vanesch]

Edit: PS... I don't know if this is purely politically motivated or if there is sound science behind not wanting to stir up the abundant uranium deposits that are found in the province's agricultural and watershed regions.

It is mainly BS. A coal-fired power plant sends several tons of uranium in the environment every year. There are even people who think of using coal burning as a form of uranium mining. The fly ash of a coal-fired plant is almost "good ore"...
So if there is a coal-fired plant in the neighbourhood, the "uranium (and mercury, and ...) is already stirred up".

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

That said, every mining activity has its environmental problems, and it depends on the type of mining that is projected.

 

[Azael]

There is even a third way, and I'm surprised nobody (except India?) ever took it, as far as I know:
very easy U-233 production from thorium in a graphite reactor.

U-233 has the double advantage of an easy bomb (gun-type) and easy separation from thorium (chemistry).

Its probably because its almost impossible to produce u-233 without u-232 contamination and u-232 has a very nasty gamma daughter in its decay chain.
http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/9_1kang.pdf

Didnt the US blow up a few u-233 bombs though?

 

[mheslep]

... Point is, it is entirely unthinkable to generate 80% of worlds electricity needs with these technologies for the next 50 years. ...

Just caught this on 2nd pass. I disagree that its entirely unthinkable. Even with wind power alone its very conceivable: 1.5MW turbine farms now give us 10MW/km^2. US electric capacity is ~1000GW, so 10^5 km^2 (25M acres). That compares to about 20M acres currently in use for US corn ethanol (a mistake).

 

[Azael]

But you need atleast 3000GW installed wind capacity(assuming a optimistic 30+% capacity factor) to supply on avarage 1000GW. Thats not even touching the intermittency issue which would require another 1000GW of reliable non wind capacity that can easily load follow.

So we are rather looking at 100M+ acres of wind farms since they all can't be in optimal locations + the entire current american capacity running on idle to load follow. Thats 2 million wind turbines, you would have to install 800 each week for 50 years to achieve that ignoring lifetime.

As for nuclear it would require 660 EPR size reactors to supply 1000GW or 13-15 built each year for 50 years, the world as a whole started up on avarage 24 reactors/year during the period 1980-1987(peak was 33 started in 1984) so its achivable.

Both scenarios are unrealistic of course, but I find the second far more plausible than the first economicaly.

 

[mheslep]

But you need atleast 3000GW installed wind capacity(assuming a optimistic 30+% capacity factor) to supply on avarage 1000GW.

You're right, I was mistakenly using nameplate instead of capacity.

Thats not even touching the intermittency issue which would require another 1000GW of reliable non wind capacity that can easily load follow.

That is already installed to some degree by way of existing heat cycle power plants. The 3000GW at 30% capacity will of course have peaks, and wind electric peaks can be used to make H2 or some other hydrocarbon to store energy to be later burned in heat cycle plants, or drive existing pump storage (26GW PS installed in the US).

So we are rather looking at 100M+ acres of wind farms

It is still 25M/0.3 = 75M acres for the average power of 3000GW. During the peaks wind would store energy as above.

since they all can't be in optimal locations + the entire current american capacity running on idle to load follow.

The millions of corn ethanol acres (as an example) are already well spread out, most of it in the wind belt.

Thats 2 million wind turbines, you would have to install 800 each week for 50 years to achieve that ignoring lifetime.

Thats underestimating mass production a bit. Given that a single car company like Fiat can easily make 750 cars per day, that in WWII the US made 10,000 ton ships in 40 days at the rate of one per day, then I believe you could up that 800/week by 10X with some effort and do it in 5 years. Certainly 10 years.

Oh, there's already 100GW of hydro+renewables installed in the US so just 900 to go.

 

[mheslep]

Wind also installs at ~$1.7/W. Nuclear has to fight the hippies to get that cost down now, and would have to keep work hard to keep it there w/ a big mining load and a big waste load.

 

[Azael]

Well there is a big difference betwen building a 1,5MW wind power plant and a car, plenty of on site construction needs to be done. But I don't doubt it would be possible if america decided to do it. But the needed rate of constructing new nuclear power has been demonstrated so there is no doubt that it is achivable.

But I don't think neither germany nor denmark has achieved capacity factors close to 30%(might be wrong) so its a bit to optimistic IMO to assume 75M acres or is enough.

The main problem with wind vs nuclear is that wind require a lot more construction material etc, total amount of mined materials for wind is far higher than nuclear. Vattenfall has some interesting statistics
http://www.vattenfall.se/www/vf_se/vf_se/Gemeinsame_Inhalte/DOCUMENT/196015vatt/815691omxv/819778milj/P0282332.pdf
(The high copper consumption for nuclear is because the swedish waste disposal method relies on copper cannisters).

There is also the economic problems, it costs more to produce electricity with wind. A recent report by a swedish research institue shows the following results excluding all taxes and subsidies for new generation capacity(can be found http://www.elforsk.se/rapporter/ShowReport.aspx?DocId=613&Index=D%3a%5cINETPUB%5celforsk4kr9h8d%5cRapporter%5cpdf%5cindex&HitCount=1&hits=aeb2+." but its on swedish)

Wind on land 7.9 cents/kWh
Wind in sea 13,8 cents/kWh
Nuclear 4,5 cents/kWh
Coal with carbon capture 12,1 cent/kWh

The load following will also contribute more to CO2 emissions than a nuclear scenario would since many fossil fuel plants would need to be running continously.

I think as much wind should be built as is feasible and economic. But I doubt we will ever se more than 30% of electricity from wind in any country anywhere. Denmark gets around 20% of electricity from wind, but they could not do it if they didnt import plenty of electricity from sweden, norway and germany.

I have higher hopes for wave power, they don't ruin the view as much either. http://www.el.angstrom.uu.se/forskningsprojekt/Islandsberg_E.html

The entire waste problem can be handled quite easily if the ban on reprocessing is just lifted. Seems like that is anticipated
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/may/06/tva-design-concept-plan-nuclear-waste-reprocessing/

 

[mheslep]

Denmark/Germany - It doesn't surprise me that they're delivering lower than 30% capacity since Denmark in particular deployed very early on the wind technology vs time curve - back when the standard unit was 0.2MW, lower height with more variable wind, etc., which earned the Danes some criticism for hype chasing by other Danes. -Just an observation; I havn't looked into it.

Nuclear Cost:
I like the http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/" with a cost of $14B + $3B transmission, or ~$7/W; no chance of $0.06/kw-hr power coming from Levi at that cost.

Wind Cost:
UK BWEA report, 2005, with 2003 costs.
http://www.bwea.com/pdf/briefings/target-2005-small.pdf
Average onshore: $0.06 / kw-hr
Average offshore: $0.11 / kw-hr

US Dept. of Energy Cost report, 2006:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/pdfs/41435.pdf, page 10.
-Busbar price
-Reduced by/inludes the available US tax breaks - the federal 'PTC' which is $0.015 / kw-hr
-Reduced by/includes 'Renewable Energy Certs', RECs - unknown but only 10% of the 2006 installations got them.
Average: $0.036 / kw-hr over 5.6GW installed, one sigma range $0.023 /kw-hr to $0.049 / kw-hr
With the above caveats worse case should be $0.049+$0.015=$0.064 /kw-hr actual generation cost.

The DOE Wind studies also point out that though the 1.5MW turbines are most commonly installed, a growing chunk are 3MW, and 5MW units are available. These larger units will necessarily make more efficient use of the land. I havnt looked up the actual usage for 3 and 5.