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[vanesch]

And as an example of the previous recklessness of the nuclear industry there is over a ton of radioactive plutonium at the bottom of the Irish Sea dumped there by the reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Spread evenly over the planet that is enough plutonium to extinguish all life on Earth.

You might be surprised but a rational nuclear waste management would simply be to dilute it in the oceans. The world ocean is about 1.3 10^9 cubic kilometers or 1.3 10^9 10^(3x4) liters = 1.3 10^21 liters. You have to know that 1 year's worth of waste from a 1GWe plant (about 25 tons of enriched fuel that went through the cycle) has an activity of about (less than) 10^18 Bq after 10 years cooling (see the calculator on http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfca.html for instance, but I know that the order of magnitude is about correct).
So if we dump this evenly in the oceans, this means that 1 year's worth of working of a powerplant gives rise to about 1 milli-Bq increase in the activity of 1 liter of seawater. The natural activity of seawater is about 40 Bq/liter. So if you'd dump the waste of the existing 400 nuclear reactors during 100 years in the oceans, you'd just double its (very low) natural radioactivity - and it is not even true, because after 100 years, the activity has decreased by a factor of more than 10.

But nobody is thinking of dumping all used fuel in the oceans. It is just that it wouldn't be dramatic. This puts things in perspective.

 

[Art]

Again Vanesch that is an oversimplification. It would be true if the dumped fuel dispersed homogenously in the oceans but experience from Sellafield, who are never slow to take risks to test a theory no matter how dubious or dangerous, showed that the radiation gathered in clumps due to different densities and it's take up by plant organisms from whence it enters the food chain.

 

[Art]

That sounds like a conspiracy theory unless you have proof that dosages are higher than what is stated by IAEA ect.

I already provided information and sources relating to safety issues for Uranium mining in Africa.

As I also siad, most uranium is mined in western countries and what they do in 3rd world countries does not matter since it doesn't tell anything about the safety of nuclear power.

Seems your info is less than complete. 15% of the EUs uranium supply comes from Niger alone.

Here is what the IAEA has to say about chernobyl. 28 confirmed deaths, 4000 possible extra fatal cancer cases. Far from 100 000.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

Whereas the British Medical Journal says something very different. Wonder who's right but not so much that I'd like to risk my life on the outcome.

Well civilian western nuclear waste has been stored for around 60 years without injuring one single civilian. Id say that is pretty damn good waste management. Compared that to how many dies from fossile fuel waste every single day. Even if there was a large waste accident it still would not change the fact that nuclear power kills far less people than any other major energy source. Do you argue that point?

'I might be bad but the other guys worse' does not make for a compelling argument. If you disagree then try it during your annual review sometime at work and see how far it gets you.

Did you read the piece I provided about the state of the storage tanks holding nuclear waste? 60 years is nothing. This stuff needs to be safely stored for at least hundreds of years.

and what is the dosage received from the Strontium 90? The fact that we have strontium 90 in our bodies does NOT mean we are getting harmed by it.

Maybe, maybe not although leukemia rates have risen quite sharply which could be a coincidence or then again?? Regardless as I said my main point was to show the potential mobility and pervasiveness of nuclear pollution. Personally I object to having my bones contaminated with a radioactive material just so boys can play with their toys.

And how high is the population dosage because of this waste? 0.1mSv to the most exposed population group! Compare that to the natural radiation dosage that ranges from 2mSv to several hundrads of mSv.

You are missing that the only significant quantity is the dosage that the population is exposed to. Talking about how many tons or how many Bq's there is is totaly irrelevant.

Cars are incredibly safe too right up until the moment they crash then you go from healthy to dead instantly as will happen in a nuclear accident. Meanwhile the radioactive material dumped in the Irish sea continues to accumulate in pockets. Who knows when these pockets will become large enough to cause problems? It's an experiment still in progress so no conclusions can be drawn other than the original dispersal hypothesis has proved wrong.

There is enough gasolin in a car to kill plenty of people if they ingest it. Should we ban all cars because of that simple fact?

No but we should ban it from being dumped in the sea.

How many people can the chlorine used by the indsutry each day kill? Should we can all chlorine use?

No but we should ban it from being dumped in the sea.

LD50 for plutonium is higher than for nicotine! Yet smoking hasnt killed the entire world population.

Eh?? Smoking has killed millions if not billions of people. Where are you going with that argument?

 

[Azael]

I already provided information and sources relating to safety issues for Uranium mining in Africa.

And I said that its irelevant, what they do in those countries is not relevant to how safely mining can be and is done in australia and canda.

Seems your info is less than complete. 15% of the EUs uranium supply comes from Niger alone..

Canada produce 25%, Australia 18% and Russia 8%. I should have said developed countries, not western.

Whereas the British Medical Journal says something very different. Wonder who's right but not so much that I'd like to risk my life on the outcome...

You gave me a quote without any link or reference to what issue of the BMJ. So Il go with IAEA. IAEA is simply the most reliable source when it comes to chernobyl.

'I might be bad but the other guys worse' does not make for a compelling argument. If you disagree then try it during your annual review sometime at work and see how far it gets you.

That there are worse options is the entire point. A energy source doesn't have to be perfect to be preferable, it just has to be better than the other options. Nuclear energy is so superior to fossile fuels from a health and environment perspective that its ridicilous.

Nuclear power is as safe as release as little CO2 and polutants as wind and hydro. Se for instance vattenfalls LCA.
http://www.vattenfall.se/www/vf_se/vf_se/Gemeinsame_Inhalte/DOCUMENT/196015vatt/815691omxv/819778milj/P0282332.pdf

If you think nuclear is unacceptable what else is there? There is no other baseload energy source that has less of a environmental impact than nuclear power except maby hydro but that has no expansion potential.

Did you read the piece I provided about the state of the storage tanks holding nuclear waste? 60 years is nothing. This stuff needs to be safely stored for at least hundreds of years..

I see no reason to read a unverifiable quote from a unknown source. Give me a link or a reference and I will read it.

You never answered my question on what is wrong with yucca mountain or KBS-3. If you think we can't handle the waste for thousands of years then you obviously think those two methods are flawed. So in what way are they flawed?

Maybe, maybe not although leukemia rates have risen quite sharply which could be a coincidence or then again?? Regardless as I said my main point was to show the potential mobility and pervasiveness of nuclear pollution. Personally I object to having my bones contaminated with a radioactive material just so boys can play with their toys.

well the number of telegraph stations has gone down, maby leukemia rates and telegraph station abudance is inversely related? If we don't care about mechanism then we can invent all kind of statistical relations.

For a radionuclide to be harmfull it has to give the exposed person a dosage high enough to do harm. Its doesn't matter if its strontium, plutonium, radon or whatever. It doesn't matter if its naturaly occurring or man made. There are plenty of natural radionuclides in the environment. The dosage to the population from the environment is orders of magnitude above the dosage from nuclear power. You are "contaminated" from the moment you are created in the womb.

I strongly object btw to having my air polluted by coal and biomass power plants when there is a cleaner option. I object to having my lungs ruined because of peoples fear of nuclear power.

Cars are incredibly safe too right up until the moment they crash then you go from healthy to dead instantly as will happen in a nuclear accident.

That WONT happen in a nuclear accident. How many dropped dead from TMI? You seem to have a totaly unrealistic picture of what will happen if something goes wrong in a western reactor. What do you believe can happen?

Meanwhile the radioactive material dumped in the Irish sea continues to accumulate in pockets. Who knows when these pockets will become large enough to cause problems? It's an experiment still in process so no conclusions can be drawn other than the original dispersal hypothesis has proved wrong.

And yet all that accumulated waste only gives the most exposed group a yearly dosage of 0.1mSv. So what is so horrible about it? Such a small dosage can not cause any health problems. If it could the people living in areas with yearly background radiation over 100mSv would die at alarming rates. People working with radionuclides and beeing exposed to a few extra mSv every year would drop dead at alarming rates. But they dont.

Sellafield should clean up no doubt, simply because its possible to do so. But the current discharge from sellafield is not a health hazard.

Eh?? Smoking has killed millions if not billions of people. Where are you going with that argument?

Im simply relating the toxicity. Plutonium is closely monitored and virtualy no one is exposed to measurable levels of plutonium, nicotine is released without any regard for safety. Yet nicotine is more toxic! Worrying about plutonium leakage is a complete waste of time because it is such a tiny risk compared to all other everday risk like inhaling fossil fuel waste. Literally everytime you pass by a smoker you are exposed to a risk larger than the risk you are exposed to from a lifetime of living in a country with nuclear power.


Lets get to the bottom line here. Do you agree or disagree that chernobyl the worst nuclear accident ever, worse than anything that is even physicaly possible in a modern reactor, has far less of a health and environmental impact than fossil energy during regular operation?

 

[Art]

During normal operation yes I do agree. I thought I had made it plain I think nuclear reactors in general are very safe these days it's more the ancilliary operations I'd be concerned about. I'll spell out my concerns for you;

1) Management and disposal of uranium mine waste - including Australia http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:_kSJ0a_I0TwJ:www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/waste/frenchpaper.pdf+uranium+ore+mining+waste&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4

2) Movement and transport of nuclear products

3) Disposal of waste - Although countries such as Britain and the US have looked at geographic sequestration neither have actually done anything yet and so a decision on this should precede any expansion of the industry.

4) A full costing of nuclear energy for comparison against green energies which must include full decommissioning costs, ore extraction and mine clean up charges, transport and security charges, fuel waste disposal charges as well as the actual energy production cost.

5) Health impact - I'd like to see a scientific consensus on just how much radiation exposure is safe. The figures you quoted are all well and good but ignore the fact that different radioactive materials affect the human body in different ways and accumulate in very specific parts of the body and so a small overall dose could become a very large local dose if concentrated in one small area such as radioactive iodine's affinity for the thyroid gland.

I'm not totally against nuclear energy I just don't think there has been enough information made available to make a definitive decision on whether it is the right way to go.

 

[vanesch]

During normal operation yes I do agree. I thought I had made it plain I think nuclear reactors in general are very safe these days it's more the ancilliary operations I'd be concerned about. I'll spell out my concerns for you;

1) Management and disposal of uranium mine waste - including Australia http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:_kSJ0a_I0TwJ:www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/waste/frenchpaper.pdf+uranium+ore+mining+waste&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4


2) Movement and transport of nuclear products

You are right that these are the two "most polluting" parts of the entire nuclear industry ; in fact most of the pollution that comes from that industry can be attributed to this. However, there are two remarks: these FEW mines (there are much less uranium mines than there are coal mines and petrol holes) still pollute FAR LESS than the equivalent amount of extracted energy by fossile mining ; and also, the uranium mining will probably diminish and even stop once gen IV reactors will be generalized, as these will essentially work on the 99% of remaining energy that is still present in the current "waste" and we'll have a closed fuel cycle. Try to imagine this: with the current "waste" we can extract still 50-100 times the energy we've already extracted from it, without new uranium.

3) Disposal of waste - Although countries such as Britain and the US have looked at geographic sequestration neither have actually done anything yet and so a decision on this should precede any expansion of the industry.

The technological and scientific case for this is clear. The amount of geological studies is quite big and encouraging, but one lacks the political courage to do so. Also, there is no hurry. The "cooler" the materials are when they will be burried, the better: one preconizes a surface cooling period of 50 years - this has to do with the heat generation which drops quickly during the first 50 years, and a lower heat generation allows for a more dense packing of the waste packages in the repository (which can handle only a certain amount of heat per volume as this heat has to be evacuated through thermal conduction: one wants the temperature to be limited in order not to have a transformation of the materials).

4) A full costing of nuclear energy for comparison against green energies which must include full decommissioning costs, ore extraction and mine clean up charges, transport and security charges, fuel waste disposal charges as well as the actual energy production cost.

This is in fact already the case: in France part of the electricity price serves to build up a fund to dismantle old plants and for waste management. Compare this to the CO2 ejection which is not taken into account in fossile fuel burning. Plants are being dismounted, it is not such a terrible thing as anti-nuclears are trying to make believe. It generates essentially very low level waste which can be cleared after 30 years or something. The waste management in a repository is not more costly than a deep mining activity. The erroneous opinion exists that we are building up an enormous passive of huge costs for the future, but this is simply not true.

Concerning green energies, you simply have to realize that in the current state of technology, *there do not exist green technologies* that can replace entirely fossile fuel burning apart from nuclear. There's a difference between doing 10-20% production, and doing 85% production. No known green technology has ever shown to be able to provide a country for 85% with its energy and allow for growth. The closest comes Denmark, with 20% wind energy and a lot of problems.

The growth rate of renewables is indeed spectacular, but that's because they come from almost 0. If I start up my business, and today I make 20 Euro, and tomorrow I make 40 Euro, I have a growth rate of 100% a day! Microsoft can't compete with me on that!

So forget all this green talk: the only workable large scale alternative to fossile fuels is nuclear for the moment. Maybe this will change one day, but as of now, no such technology exists. It isn't perfect, but it is so much better in ecological matters than fossile, that it is an outright anti-ecological stance to refrain from replacing fossile by nuclear.

5) Health impact - I'd like to see a scientific consensus on just how much radiation exposure is safe. The figures you quoted are all well and good but ignore the fact that different radioactive materials affect the human body in different ways and accumulate in very specific parts of the body and so a small overall dose could become a very large local dose if concentrated in one small area such as radioactive iodine's affinity for the thyroid gland.

This is in fact well-studied, and of course when talking about activities one should also specify from which sources. The thing you talk about is called radiotoxicity, and is specific to each different nuclide (and does take into account what you express: different target organs etc...). All this is taken into account with correction factors (the difference between physical dose, expressed in Gray, and "human health impact" dose, expressed in Sievert, with exactly those coefficients between them).

I'm not totally against nuclear energy I just don't think there has been enough information made available to make a definitive decision on whether it is the right way to go.

All this information is available in fact. There are books on all these matters. The problem is that hysterical reaction of the people concerning all things nuclear, aided in their visions by anti-nuclear lobby groups.

 

[Azael]

I can't add much to Vanesch excelent post. Just mention that in sweden as in france the full cost of decomisioning and waste storage is payed for by taxes on the companies owning the nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is acctualy the only energy source that takes full economic responsibility for its waste. If the same burden was put on coal and oil they would become uneconomic in a instance.

Nuclear power is the most heavily taxed energy source in sweden and nuclear electricity production costs is still only about one quarter or one third of the production cost for wind. This despite wind beeing favored in sweden because of our large hydro capacity. That means there is no need to build backup for wind since the hydro acts as backup. Wind can not compete against nuclear without heavy government support like in sweden and germany. Especialy not if the cost of building a backup is factored into the price of wind.

I don't mind that support though, more renewables is a good thing. But nuclear is the only thing that can realisticly replace coal on a large scale.

 

[Azael]

This is btw a reasonably near future method of extracting uranium with virtualy zero environmental impact and it will also give a practicaly unlimited supply.
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/4_5.html

 

[Art]

This is btw a reasonably near future method of extracting uranium with virtualy zero environmental impact and it will also give a practicaly unlimited supply.
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/4_5.html

It sounds good if it can be made commercially viable.