Global Warming and Energy Costs: Who Will Bear the Financial Burden?

[Art]

Nuclear power is the way to go. What is the argument against it?

Apart from the possible risk of catastrophic accidents or sabotage there is also the little matter of disposing of the nuclear waste byproducts.
Then there is also the cost. Although the nuclear process is a comparitively cheap method of producing electricity at the front end, the cost of decommissioning obsolete plants at the back end is astronomical, which is why many countries have opted to simply mothball old plants and leave the problem to future generations. Not a very environmentally friendly policy IMHO.

 

[denverdoc]

Only that Drs. Pons and Fleischmann appear to have misinterpreted their results and attemps at magnetic containment etc consume as much or more energy than the reactions release. Fusion remains the way to go and had we dumped the trillion or so that will go into Iraq before all is said and done, we'd likely be closer.

I can't get enthusiastic re fission. That is a stale promise that has never been fulfilled, and likely won't. Of course Iran seems to be on this path, underscoring one of many problems.

 

[russ_watters]

Apart from the possible risk of catastrophic accidents or sabotage there is also the little matter of disposing of the nuclear waste byproducts.

And since neither of those are legitimate issues, nuclear power is the way to go!

The risk of catastrophic accidents is so small as to be virtually nonexistant. With new designs (the pebble bed), it can actually be completely nonexistant.

Waste disposal is a smokescreen thrown up by nefarious environmentalists. It is like getting a fill-up at a gas station, using a gallon and pouring the other 11 gallons of perfectly useable fuel down the drain. If people had known when the environmentalists first banned reprocessing that they were outlawing recycling, they would have laughed. I don't know how the environmentalists were able to fool so many people.

Although the nuclear process is a comparitively cheap method of producing electricity at the front end, the cost of decommissioning obsolete plants at the back end is astronomical, which is why many countries have opted to simply mothball old plants and leave the problem to future generations. Not a very environmentally friendly policy IMHO.

Well, the solution to that is to not shut down power plants, but to update them!

The French have some of the chepest energy in Europe.

 

[russ_watters]

I can't get enthusiastic re fission. That is a stale promise that has never been fulfilled, and likely won't.

I'm not sure I follow: the US has a hundred nuclear plants and they are safe, work well, and produce clean, cheap electricity. What promise hasn't been fulfilled?

Of course Iran seems to be on this path, underscoring one of many problems.

I'm not sure I follow. What problems are associated with Iran using nuclear power that are relevant to whether we use it?

 

[BillJx]

Shawn, we need more environmental rednecks. People have a problem with perception - - that "environmentalism" is a hippie dippie vegan-sandals- silly ponytail issue. Maybe it was. But now that the climatologists tells us we're in a crisis, we need to get past that. I can't blame people for dismissing the environmentalist movement in general. There've been too many distortions and foolish claims, too many idiotic demands made by chanting sign-wavers who don't know what they're talking about, and too much lumping together of unrelated issues.

In my city, there were plans to build a combined-cycle natural gas electrical plant. It was defeated by "environmentalists". Stupid, stupid, stupid. They made frankly dishonest arguments about emissions. Natural gas is the only fossil fuel that gets more than half its energy from hydrogen, and combined cycle plants can use less than half the fuel per KWH than regular thermal plants. Their real objections were more political than environmental. The plant was seen as a move toward privatization of a government-run industry. This is an example of confusing causes and values.

When I meet someone who's a leftist vegetarian environmentalist opposed to the fur trade, against gun ownership and in favor of unrestricted abortion, I'm bored already. I know as much about that person as I care to know. I'd rather see a redneck come to the realization that this is a global emergency of unknown proportions and we've @#$^ got to change the way we're doing things.

Maybe we do need nuclear power in the short term. We can't just stop using energy and it has to come from somewhere. Once global warming hits a critical level, we won't be able to build much of anything, because we won't be able to put out the greenhouse gasses from cement production, materials transport, etc. We have to do our preparations now. And everyone, the long-term environmentalists as well as the rednecks, need to give up their preconcieved ideas if they want to be more help than hindrance.

 

[denverdoc]

I'm not sure I follow: the US has a hundred nuclear plants and they are safe, work well, and produce clean, cheap electricity. What promise hasn't been fulfilled? I'm not sure I follow. What problems are associated with Iran using nuclear power that are relevant to whether we use it?

That the energy so produced would be so abundant and cheap, it wouldn't warrant metering. Its not that expensive, in part due to finding very high yield ores in Canada. And if we could ever figure out a way to transport and bury the waste where NIMBY arguments wouldn't get in the way, that cost could be made fairly minimal as well. I believe that one of the concerns to anti-nuke community is in part to misuse of waste, either in the form of dirty bombs, or making our own reactors a target of sabotage.

Personally, I would much prefer fusion as it is fundamentally cleaner process that neatly sidesteps many of these concerns, however misplaced you might find them.

 

[drankin]

It seems to me that disposing the waste material is not that big of a deal. We have mines that are miles deep underground. If we buried the material in something like one of these mines, by the time the material was ever naturally exposed again, it would be harmless. As far as I'm concerned it is a practically non-issue.

What is a typical yearly quantity of nuclear waste from one of these facilities?

 

[Art]

The French have some of the chepest energy in Europe.

Okay let's take your example of the French.

Err yes they do sell electricity at eur 0.03 / kWh but the French gov't puts aside eur 0.14 / kWh to cover future decommissioning costs. Don't you love socialism and it's subsidies.
Presumably they don't put aside that extra money for kicks so it seems simply upgrading isn't a viable option or I suspect that is what they would be doing as the French have no intentions of phasing out nuclear power. http://www.uic.com.au/nip28.htm

For the UK with it's handful of nuclear plants the gov't estimate for their eventual decommissioning is stg£70 billion.

The problem with reprocessing is you have to get the material to the reprocessing plant and the reprocessed fuel back to the reactor and so countries such as Japan ship these highly hazardous materials as afar afield as England for treatment with all the inherent risks such transport presents not to mention the appalling safety record of the UK reprocessing plant in Cumbria who apart from their numerous accidents think a sound policy to dispose of contaminated water is to simply pump it into the sea . Plus of course reprocessing is by far the biggest contributor to nuclear waste in the entire cycle creating some of the most difficult high and intermediate products to handle along with ~8,000 m3/GWe-yr (cubic meters per Gigawatt electricity-year) of low level waste. That is reprocessing is the biggest producer of nuclear waste if, like the mining companies, you ignore the low level nuclear waste (which btw comprises 95% of the total volume of all radioactive waste) produced when mining the uranium ore along with the consequent pollution of ground and surface water. http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_8/8-3/waste2.html

This blase attitude to low level nuclear waste might explain why the 18% of the US female population who live within 100 miles of a nuclear plant account for 55% of breast cancer fatalities. http://www.serve.com/gvaughn/prairieisland/hilolevel2.html

Note the actual space required to store nuclear waste far exceeds the physical volume of the waste products to prevent heat build up from the radioactive material.

On top of the above there are then the non-nuclear pollutants produced in the nuclear cycle such as hydrofluoric acid, nitric acid, fluorine gas, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chlorine, ammonia, nitrates, zinc and arsenic.

Not quite the cheap and clean energy source you are trying to portray.

 

[drankin]

Well, that doesn't sound so good.

 

[ShawnD]

That the energy so produced would be so abundant and cheap, it wouldn't warrant metering. Its not that expensive, in part due to finding very high yield ores in Canada. And if we could ever figure out a way to transport and bury the waste where NIMBY arguments wouldn't get in the way, that cost could be made fairly minimal as well. I believe that one of the concerns to anti-nuke community is in part to misuse of waste, either in the form of dirty bombs, or making our own reactors a target of sabotage.

Personally, I would much prefer fusion as it is fundamentally cleaner process that neatly sidesteps many of these concerns, however misplaced you might find them.

The problem with cost isn't the parts used as much as it is the labor used. Uranium, thorium, and plutonium are themselves fairly cheap, but you still need guys running the power plant. Suppose your budget was 10 dollars for labor and 10 dollars for coal. If you switch to 5 dollars for uranium, you're still running at a cost of 15 compared to 20, so the price really isn't that much lower than before. 25% cheaper is still something, but it's not exactly cheap enough to just ignore measuring power consumption.

Russ already pointed out that plutonium recycling is illegal due to pressure from environmentalist groups. If we recycled that plutonium by doing what's called "reprocessing", we could drastically reduce the amount of nuclear waste coming from the reactors. Countries like France actually do this, and their waste problem isn't anywhere near as bad as the US. This isn't some kind of thing like where you recycle paper to recover some low number like 10%, this is more like trying to recover 90% of your waste. Nuclear waste, plutonium in particular, is bad stuff and to not recycle it is downright irresponsible.


I recommend everybody watch this guy's lecture of basic atomic bomb and reactor theory. It's an eye opener on how nuclear technology works and why Chernobyl should never happen again. It also hints that while TMI was bad, it would never be as bad as Chernobyl because Americans tend to at least put some thought into their reactors before building them. While melting uranium (TMI) is bad, it's nowhere near as bad as radioactive graphite burning and releasing radioactive smoke.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3893232447213614208&q=physics+10+nukes&hl=en

 

[Ki Man]

I've watched some of the lectures in the series that shawn posted a link to. Prof. Muller of UC berkeleys physics department ahappened to talk about nukes on that lecture.

If you want to get rid of excess nuclear wastes, why is the first option people go for always to immediately shut down the nuclear power plants? there would be far less waste if they alllowed us to recycle the leftover plutonium, thanks to the anti-nuclear activists, we cant. if you want to remove all remaining nuclear wastes, you might as well get rid of hospitals too and all of the x-rays in the country.

I've seen national geographic programs on three mile island and it turns out it was not the reactor itself that caused the emergency, it was a problem in a pipe which caused to misleading sensors and they took water out of the reactor when they should have put more in. Nowadays, we have backup systems for that, and more systems to make sure those systems don't fail.

Also, people who oppose to the giant storage facilities for all of the countries nuclear waste because 'its not safe enough,' where do you think they will keep it until then? that waste has to end up soemwhere, so it ends up in a little concrete building next to the reactor.

watch the video to see the linear hypothesis.

get your facts straight, watch the video

 

[denverdoc]

It seems to me that disposing the waste material is not that big of a deal. We have mines that are miles deep underground. If we buried the material in something like one of these mines, by the time the material was ever naturally exposed again, it would be harmless. As far as I'm concerned it is a practically non-issue.

What is a typical yearly quantity of nuclear waste from one of these facilities?

about 1500kg. If encased in glass, about 10 times that.

 

[drankin]

The problem with cost isn't the parts used as much as it is the labor used. Uranium, thorium, and plutonium are themselves fairly cheap, but you still need guys running the power plant. Suppose your budget was 10 dollars for labor and 10 dollars for coal. If you switch to 5 dollars for uranium, you're still running at a cost of 15 compared to 20, so the price really isn't that much lower than before. 25% cheaper is still something, but it's not exactly cheap enough to just ignore measuring power consumption.

Russ already pointed out that plutonium recycling is illegal due to pressure from environmentalist groups. If we recycled that plutonium by doing what's called "reprocessing", we could drastically reduce the amount of nuclear waste coming from the reactors. Countries like France actually do this, and their waste problem isn't anywhere near as bad as the US. This isn't some kind of thing like where you recycle paper to recover some low number like 10%, this is more like trying to recover 90% of your waste. Nuclear waste, plutonium in particular, is bad stuff and to not recycle it is downright irresponsible.


I recommend everybody watch this guy's lecture of basic atomic bomb and reactor theory. It's an eye opener on how nuclear technology works and why Chernobyl should never happen again. It also hints that while TMI was bad, it would never be as bad as Chernobyl because Americans tend to at least put some thought into their reactors before building them. While melting uranium (TMI) is bad, it's nowhere near as bad as radioactive graphite burning and releasing radioactive smoke.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3893232447213614208&q=physics+10+nukes&hl=en

This was an execellent lecture. Thank you, Shawn. It cuts through a lot of technical and political BS associated with nuclear bombs, power and Sadams WMDs (he really did have a program).

This video reinforces my belief that nuclear reactors are the way to go.

 

[drankin]

about 1500kg. If encased in glass, about 10 times that.

1.5 tons, maybe a little more than your VW van. That is not very much IMO.

 

[Art]

Russ already pointed out that plutonium recycling is illegal due to pressure from environmentalist groups. If we recycled that plutonium by doing what's called "reprocessing", we could drastically reduce the amount of nuclear waste coming from the reactors. Countries like France actually do this, and their waste problem isn't anywhere near as bad as the US. This isn't some kind of thing like where you recycle paper to recover some low number like 10%, this is more like trying to recover 90% of your waste. Nuclear waste, plutonium in particular, is bad stuff and to not recycle it is downright irresponsible.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3893232447213614208&q=physics+10+nukes&hl=en

As I've already pointed out this is totally wrong. Reprocessing creates far, far more waste than it eliminates.

 

[ShawnD]

As I've already pointed out this is totally wrong. Reprocessing creates far, far more waste than it eliminates.

"This type of reactor can be started up on plutonium derived from conventional reactors and operated in closed circuit with its reprocessing plant. Such a reactor, supplied with natural or depleted uranium for its "fertile blanket", can be operated so that http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm than in a conventional reactor."

So let's see, we either deal with the waste coming from 60 tons of uranium, or we can reprocess the waste and deal with the waste coming from 1 ton of uranium. Which would you rather have? 60 tons of used uranium to deal with, or 1 ton of used uranium to deal with?

 

[denverdoc]

I've watched some of the lectures in the series that shawn posted a link to. Prof. Muller of UC berkeleys physics department ahappened to talk about nukes on that lecture.

If you want to get rid of excess nuclear wastes, why is the first option people go for always to immediately shut down the nuclear power plants? there would be far less waste if they alllowed us to recycle the leftover plutonium, thanks to the anti-nuclear activists, we cant. if you want to remove all remaining nuclear wastes, you might as well get rid of hospitals too and all of the x-rays in the country.

.<snip>...

The decision not to reprocess in part may be due to anti-nuclear sentiment but was originally done for reasons far different than any tree huggers objections, to wit, set an example that would hopefully slow or stop proliferation. Others have not followed suit, so this hope of Carter's turned out to be in vain.

 

[Art]

"This type of reactor can be started up on plutonium derived from conventional reactors and operated in closed circuit with its reprocessing plant. Such a reactor, supplied with natural or depleted uranium for its "fertile blanket", can be operated so that http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm than in a conventional reactor."

So let's see, we either deal with the waste coming from 60 tons of uranium, or we can reprocess the waste and deal with the waste coming from 1 ton of uranium. Which would you rather have? 60 tons of used uranium to deal with, or 1 ton of used uranium to deal with?

You aren't grasping this. You appear to think the only radioactive waste products to deal with are the fuel rods? The actual reprocessing process itself creates huge amounts of additional radioactive waste.

For example in the once through process the amount of low level waste produced is 457-624 m3/GWe-yr whereas for each time the fuel is reprocessed the amount of LLW produced is 8016-8037 m3/GWe-yr and as I mentioned previously most of this is released directly into the environment.

After WW2 France and Britain were prepared to accept the environmental hazards associated with reprocessing as they wanted access to spent fuel to obtain material for nuclear bombs but without the cold war pressures which created this need it is unlikely they would have gone down that route.

 

[Art]

I've watched some of the lectures in the series that shawn posted a link to. Prof. Muller of UC berkeleys physics department ahappened to talk about nukes on that lecture.

snip

get your facts straight, watch the video

Although the lectures are excellent when he talks about the physics of nuclear reactions his forays into socio-economic and political arenas are at best naive and at worst a deliberate attempt to mislead.

A few examples;
In an apparent attempt to show how open and honest the nuclear industry is he cites glasnost and suggests it led to the Russians holding their hands up and informing the world about Chernobyl whereas the reality is the Russians kept totally silent on the matter until the following day April 27 when workers at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden (approximately 1100 km from the Chernobyl site) were found to have radioactive particles on their clothes. It was Sweden's search for the source of radioactivity, after they had determined there was no leak at the Swedish plant, which led to the first hint of a serious nuclear problem in the western Soviet Union.

He also adopted a so what attitude to the possibility of a nuclear meltdown and laughed it off as a joke nuclear physicists tell each other. What he failed to detail was the anticipated results if the nuclear fuel along with it's fission products reached the water table. The reason why so many people in Russia risked almost certain death to prevent this happening is because of the explosion this would have caused as the underground water heated, became steam, expanded and exploded sending an enormous plume of nuclear material into the atmosphere.

His comments re Saddam were also blatantly misleading. Prior to the first gulf war it was no secret that Saddam was trying to develop nuclear weapons as witnessed by Israel's bombing of Osirak. After the war the UN destroyed Iraq's enrichment equipment but unless they executed all of Iraq's nuclear scientists then of course these individuals still retained the knowledge they had previously acquired.

 

[drankin]

He also adopted a so what attitude to the possibility of a nuclear meltdown and laughed it off as a joke nuclear physicists tell each other. What he failed to detail was the anticipated results if the nuclear fuel along with it's fission products reached the water table. The reason why so many people in Russia risked almost certain death to prevent this happening is because of the explosion this would have caused as the underground water heated, became steam, expanded and exploded sending an enormous plume of nuclear material into the atmosphere.

I think his point was, it would never get to that "worst case scenario". It is a joke they tell each other because they all know it would never happen.