Brad Plumer of Vox on Wilderness and Costa Rica's Renewables

I think both of Brad's articles are excellent. I'm just adding comment and although some of it may come off sounding anti-renewables, let me just state for the record that I'm "not anti-renewables." No, seriously, I'm fine with rooftop solar, properly sited wind farms, and I think we should keep most existing hydroelectric. Nuclear certainly can't do it all.

We’ve wiped out 10% of Earth’s wilderness in the last two decades

Money quote:

A new study in Current Biology reports that Earth has lost 10 percent of its wilderness since the early 1990s —an area twice the size of Alaska. "The amount of wilderness loss in just two decades is staggering and very saddening," said lead author James Watson of the University of Queensland.

A wilderness area is, by definition, free of human industry (roads, agriculture, mining, etc) which includes the the sight of power stations on distant ridge lines and hilltops as well as the forest cleared to provide corridors for the power lines that lead from them.

The loss of wilderness is only part of the story. As was mentioned in Plumer's article, you can't recreate intact ecosystems once you destroy them, including those that are not part of a wilderness area. A case in point is the Ivanpah solar thermal power station that usurped intact desert tortoise habitat , and never mind that it may also be incinerating up to 6,000 birds a year.

Kudos to Plumer for including a link to a report from the Breakthrough Institute about using technology and innovation to shrink our environmental footprint (GMO-free organic gardening, grass-fed beef, wood stoves, and the 100 mile diet are not in the game plan).

First Annual Clean Energy Forum at the Columbia (nuclear power) Generating Station

Photo Credit Utilities Service Alliance

I was recently invited to attend the first annual Clean Energy Forum, hosted by Energy Northwest in Richland, Washington, which included a tour of the Columbia Generating station.

The Tour

We were greeted at the security gate by three polite security guards who inspected the bus and checked our photo IDs against a list. This level of security isn't unique to nuclear power stations. You would have to go through a similar procedure to take a tour of Hoover dam. We also had to leave our cell phones on the bus (which would also be the case should you ever get the chance to take the highly recommended Boeing, Everett factory tour).

Next, we had to pass through metal detectors very similar to the ones I had to walk through at the airport. Between the airports and tour, I passed through metal detectors four different times on this trip.

We were given radiation dose badges (to document that exposure levels were well-below any amount that could possibly affect health).

We saw the control room mock-up where crews are trained to staff the real control room. They ran through a simulated core shutdown from an earthquake (including a shaking floor and emergency lighting), which took only a few seconds to complete. It looked complex but I doubt that there were many more gauges, lights, and switches in that control room than you would find in a 747 cockpit (between 365 and 970 of them, depending on model). Because a control room does not have to fly, the gauges and switches were quite large and widely spaced in comparison.

 Photo of 747 Cockpit National Air and Space Museum

Terrorists, Nuclear Powerplants, and Snakes

Cross-posted from Energy Trends Insider

Nicholas Kristof wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times a few weeks ago titled: "Terrorists, bathtubs, and snakes."

It was about how our evolved abilities to assess risk (which worked great when we were hunter-gatherers) can fail us pretty miserably in the modern industrial world--a point that has been made over and over again by lesser known writers over the last decade about the safety of nuclear powerplants. From the article:

"In short, our brains are perfectly evolved for the Pleistocene, but are not as well suited for the risks we face today. If only climate change caused sharp increases in snake populations, then we’d be on top of the problem! ...Yet even if our brains sometimes mislead us, they also crown us with the capacity to recognize our flaws and rectify mistakes. So maybe we can adjust for our weaknesses in risk assessment — so that we confront the possible destruction of our planet as if it were every bit as ominous and urgent a threat as, say, a passing garter snake."

Not that it matters, but I strongly suspect that a fear of snakes is largely a learned behavior. In my experience, if you hand a garter snake to a toddler, she will treat it pretty much like anything else and try to chew on it. You can be taught to fear garter snakes just as easily as you can be taught to fear nuclear powerplants, or not, neither of which is an ominous and urgent threat.

The Nuclear Energy Denier

 Cross-posted from Consumer Energy Report

I was rebutting a comment I found under a CER News Desk article titled: Utility Head: Japan Can’t Afford Renewable Energy, Needs Nuclear when I realized I had generated enough material for an article. Here is a similar article titled Green energy to hit Germans' bills.

What labels would you choose for yourself?

1. Renewable Energy Advocate
2. Nuclear Energy Advocate
3. Renewable Energy Denier
4. Nuclear Energy Denier

I would choose labels 1 and 2. I used the term "denier" in my title only to make a point. I don't know who first applied the term "denier" to global warming skeptics but I have never used the term quite simply because it is hateful. I've also seen the terms "green energy denier" and "Chernobyl denier" used (see Radioactive Wolves!).

Global warming skeptics are not in any way analogous to the nut jobs who deny the Holocaust or the AIDS epidemic as the term is meant to insinuate. From Wikitionary:

Person who denies something.

Holocaust denier (see Wikipedia:Holocaust denial)

Global warming denier (see Wikipedia:Global warming denial)

AIDS denier (see Wikipedia:AIDS denial)

The renewables verses nuclear debate is as disingenuous as it is nonsensical. They are not mutually exclusive. They both replace fossil fuel as a source of carbon emissions. Renewables should be viewed as an alternative to fossil fuels, not nuclear.

Read The Nuclear Enhanced Renewable Grid (NERG) and Reframing Nuclear Power as an Ally of Renewable Energy.

As usual, environmental journalist George Monbiot is ahead of the curve on this issue. In a letter he penned to David Cameron earlier this year countering the letter sent to him "by four former directors of Friends of the Earth" Monbiot says:

"For nuclear and renewables, as the Climate Change Committee has rightly pointed out in numerous reports, this is not an either-or choice; we need increasing deployments of both in the UK’s energy mix in the future (see appendix 1). Thirdly, the 12 March letter focuses significantly on economics, in short, arguing that nuclear is too expensive. We would point out that even if this were true, the writers themselves would have helped make it so by devoting decades to campaigning against the technology during their tenures at Friends of the Earth. In addition, if anyone has yet invented an inexpensive low-carbon energy source, we have yet to hear about it – Friends of the Earth today campaigns vociferously in favour of the retention of the solar feed-in-tariff, which delivers perhaps the most expensive, unreliable and socially regressive electricity ever deployed anywhere. Once again, we would refer you to the Climate Change Committee, which found that nuclear was potentially the cheapest of all low-carbon options available by 2030 (appendix 2)."

Although not a single talking point in the following comment I address is novel (few thoughts are), and not a single footnote to a source was proffered, the comment serves a larger purpose by providing me an opportunity to express some critical thought. I don't want the commenter to feel singled out and welcome him to continue to participate, but I would also like to suggest that he take the time to provide links to sources so the audience knows who the originators of the talking points are and so they can assess the quality of the sources of the information he passes along. I know of one site that does not allow unsourced comment. I don't think this is necessarily a good idea because it has a tendency to spill over into censorship.They do this in an attempt keep the comment field from becoming a come-one-come-all liar's club (although most people are inadvertently passing along information they don't realize--or care--is bunk).

George Harvey said:  

"According to the US Department of Energy in 2011, based on data taken in 2010, hydro, wind, biomass, and geothermal are all less expensive than nuclear..."

Which, if true, is at odds with the 2011 Department of Energy Quadrennial Technology Review that promotes the use of small modular reactors:

"The United States has traditionally taken a leading position in crafting the international civilian nuclear technology “rules-of-the-road” and has helped develop a sound technology base to implement and enforce those rules. With a current global deployment of 442 civilian nuclear power reactors and an additional 65 reactors currently in some stage of construction, civilian nuclear energy sits at the nexus of energy, climate, and security."

George continues:

"...even when costs to the consumer associated with waste and Price/Anderson insurance coverage are not included in the equation."

Those costs are already reflected in your very reasonable and competitively priced nuclear energy utility bill as an almost imperceptible surcharge.

"This challenges the concept of baseload power; when the wind is not blowing in one part of the country, it will be blowing in another."

If that were true they would have replaced their idled nuclear with wind instead of fossil fuels.

"...the questions that remain [about energy storage} are matters of fine-tuning... These things combine with the other challenges to the concept of baseload power to show it is actually mythology, a bogeyman created by those who can profit by it."

That is absurd. Baseload power isn't the result of backroom conspiracy theories. It's the inevitable result of a market seeking lowest cost solutions. Most renewable energy today is baseload. Read Dirty, Baseload, Centralized, Renewable Energy and A Baseload Free Power System.

Storage is rarely used quite simply because it is prohibitively expensive. For example, building a reservoir and pumping water into it can easily cost more than the stored energy is worth. Ditto for any number of other power storage schemes, like making hydrogen, or methane. And in cases where it can be economical, it can be used to improve the fficiency of any number of power sources, like nuclear for example, which could then provide peak power as well as baseload.

"The costs of nuclear that have not been faced yet, such as waste management, are without question apallingly high."

I find that claim to be very questionable. The nuclear industry has for many decades been required  to pay into a fund to deal with waste storage, which like their insurance, is already reflected in your very reasonable and competitively priced nuclear energy utility bill as an almost imperceptible surcharge. Never mind the fact that nuclear energy generates so little waste that to date is is all be stored on site in their own parking lots after half a century of power generation. From Wikipedia:

"With $32 billion received from power companies to fund the project, and $12 billion spent to study and build it, the federal government had $27 billion left, including interest."

George continues:

"Unlike nuclear power, renewable power has the upside of diminishing costs as greater investment is made..."

Nuclear has the same potential--as the aforementioned DOE report promoting the small modular reactor attests. Nuclear power plants often operate for more than half of a century. Obviously (conspiracy theories aside) they are cost effective or you would see higher electric bills when power is nuclear generated. Wind turbines as well as solar have much shorter lifespans. Read Nuclear Energy is Not a Mature Industry.

"Per unit of power produced, renewable power employs five or six times as many workers, while reducing costs to the consumer."

Stan, another renewable energy advocate nuclear energy denier, says to George Harvey:

"I’m really sorry buddy, but that is baloney, and then straight onto a bold faced lie."

True or not, the number of jobs created is irrelevant. What matters is economic efficiency. For example, a hypothetical power source that reduced energy costs by half, yet provided no jobs, is vastly superior to a hypothetical energy source that produced lots of jobs that had to be funded by increased energy costs.
George continues:

"Production may be locally owned, and profits stay local."

This is a moot argument. "Local" is relative. Universe, galaxy, solar system, planet, country, state, city, neighborhood, home. Most utilities are at the state level. They send power across state lines in the name of economic efficiency. Many are at the city level or even lower. The University of Washington has a natural gas power plant adjacent to our local bike trail right here in Seattle. You don't get much local than that, assuming that local ownership is always a good thing, which it isn't.

 "Renewable power can be a personal goal, the object of a cooperative or community."

 A well for your water can be seen as a personal goal, but it is usually better to use your "community" water system. Ditto for a septic system verses your "community" waste treatment system. For economic reasons, most people prefer to have a simple water line and sewer line, as well as a power line coming to their home, rather than deal with the time and costs of maintenance issues that come with owning a well, septic system, or a power plant on their roof.

"On the other hand, it can also be a good investment for big business, and can make more money than nuclear; notice the increased investments in renewables, and the lack of investments in nuclear by big business."

Certainly there are instances where renewables are cost effective, like Hoover dam. Investments in renewables like wind and solar are in large part thanks to the huge subsidy per unit energy they have been receiving. I'm eligible for $30,000 in subsidies if I put solar on my house. Read
Do Government Subsidies Ever Pay Off?

"Notice that the CEOs of two major businesses in the nuclear power business have said they see no future for it"

Notice that many more CEOs of  major businesses in the nuclear power business have said they see a big future for it.

"As renewable power has achieved grid parity, nuclear power has become obsolete."

If solar and wind were really at grid parity there would be no debate about letting their subsidies lapse. Nuclear is anything but obsolete, and is undergoing major technological growth.

"There is only one reason anyone can claim to be able to afford it, which is that is really handy for making bombs."

One might think, that because nuclear weapons came first, that it would not take a quantum intellectual leap to at least suspect that you don't need a nuclear power plant to make bombs. And sure enough, some nuclear powers didn't go to the trouble. They built small reactors instead, which produce no electricity, to make weapons grade material. Read Helen Caldicott--Nuclear Power Plants are Bomb Factories?

Nuclear Energy is Not a Mature Industry

Article originally appeared at Consumer Energy Report

Senator Bernie Sanders is using Grist Magazine to lobby against government assistance for nuclear energy on the grounds that it's a mature industry. I might agree with him if it really were a mature industry and if renewables really could carry the day without it. But it isn't, and renewables can't. Always irritates me to watch ignorant politicians screw with my children's' futures. As sometimes happens with my long-winded comments, the one I left over there got large enough to convert into a post over here.

Senator Sanders may have good intentions, but what's new? We don't need any more roads to hell paved by those. He's just another member of the generation that has been systematically misinformed by "the end justifies the means" anti-nuclear lobby and our sensationalist for profit lay media.

An earlier article on Grist recently (and inadvertently) demonstrated with a simple graph that the most optimistic estimates for renewable energy do not come close to meeting our energy needs, all cost issues aside.

Do government subsidies ever pay off? The poster child for government subsidies that have paid off royally would have to be those for nuclear energy. There are presently about 60 nuclear power plants under construction around the world. Just off the press:

Westinghouse Electric Company and Ameren Missouri have entered into an agreement to respond collaboratively to the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for developing and licensing the Westinghouse Small Modular Reactor (SMR).

Bernie and/or his co-writer said:

Whether you support nuclear energy or not, we should all be able to agree that with record debt, we cannot afford to continue to subsidize this mature industry and its multi-billion-dollar corporations. If the nuclear industry believes so fervently in its technology, then nuclear companies and Wall Street investors can put their money where the mouth is. Let them finance, insure, and pay for nuclear plants themselves.

I can't think of a more promising technology to subsidize. With all of the new nuclear technology coming down the road, you can't seriously call this a mature industry. Where's the legislation to end government mandated consumption of food-based corn ethanol (moonshine) which may quietly be starving hundreds of thousands to death annually?

Nuclear may be expensive up front, but it certainly has proven to pay off over time. I'm a big fan of renewables, but they are going to need a lot of help from nuclear, and never mind that renewables receive even greater subsidies and are even more expensive than nuclear per unit energy, not that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Nuclear energy has been around for about half of a century. Aircraft technology has been around for about a century. By Senator Sander’s reasoning, a Sopwith Camel is the equivalent of an F-22 Raptor. There would be no F-22 raptor without government funding.

Helen Caldicott--Nuclear Power Plants are Bomb Factories?

This is a screenshot from a televised debate between George Monbiot and Helen Caldicott. I will be linking to parts of that video throughout this article, which I originally started writing to critique an opinion piece by Caldicott that appeared in the New York Times.

If you plan to read any further, read Monbiot's article about this debate and the article he wrote about Caldicott that kicked this debate off.

Click here to enter four minutes into the video when Monbiot is finally allowed to speak.

Click here to see her make the following quotes:

"George, you must listen to me. I'm a pediatrician, I'm a physician, highly trained, I was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School [for one year]. I'm not boasting but I'm a very good doctor. I came in second in my school of medicine. I don't say things that are inaccurate otherwise I would be deregistered ...doctors can't lie."

This is a type of logical fallacy known as a fallacious appeal to authority, or appeal to inappropriate authority. From Wikipedia:

"... arguments from authority are commonly used in a fallacious manner ...This occurs when an inference relies on individuals or groups without relevant expertise or knowledge[3] (e.g. when a doctor of medicine untrained in economics, opines about the state of the economy, many people still will give his opinions on the subject more credence than the opinions of a person of less, or of less imposing, education)."

Note that Caldicott walked away from her career as a pediatrician over thirty years ago to become an anti-nuclear activist. Coincidentally, my wife of 26 years happens to be a practicing pediatrician.

More from the video:

"George, there is no debate about this."

Not true.

"...there is no debate about this."

Not true.

"I talk to doctors all the time in medical schools, in hospitals, in grand rounds, we all understand it, there is no debate."

See fallacious appeal to authority above, and not true.

On the pro-nuclear power side you have NASA climatologist, Jim Hansen, author of Storms of My Grandchildren who (putting his money where his mouth is) has been arrested for protesting outside of a coal-fired power plant. His book makes a strong case for nuclear power.

There is George Monbiot, environmental journalist and author of Heat (reprinted in 2009).

Or James Lovelock, formulator of the Gaia hypothesis.

How about Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog fame?

Steve Kirsch (who received the National Caring Award from the Caring Institute in Washington DC, which celebrates those special individuals who, in transcending self, devote their lives in service to others, especially the disadvantaged, the poor, the disabled and the dying) and on and on.

"The New York Academy of Sciences Report on Chernobyl is absolutely devastating."

There is no "New York Academy of Sciences Report" on Chernobyl. I'll let Monbiot explain:

...a book which claims that 985,000 people have died as a result of the disaster(14). Translated from Russian and published by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, this is the only document which looks scientific and appears to support the wild claims made by greens about Chernobyl.

A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).

Its publication seems to have arisen from a confusion about whether the Annals was a book publisher or a scientific journal. The academy has given me this statement: “In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer-reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else.”(17)

In a nutshell, it is a collection of junk science found on the internet and other assorted places that was translated into English and bound into a book that you can buy on Amazon for only $239.00, reduced to $142.37.You Save: $96.63!

It was published by the book publishing arm of the New York Academy of Sciences-- but not endorsed by it:

"...The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences issue “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment”, therefore, does not present new, unpublished work, nor is it a work commissioned by the New York Academy of Sciences. The expressed views of the authors, or by advocacy groups or individuals with specific opinions about the Annals Chernobyl volume, are their own. Although the New York Academy of Sciences believes it has a responsibility to provide open forums for discussion of scientific questions, the Academy has no intent to influence legislation by providing such forums..."

The publisher's description:

"...Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,” Volume 1181 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, published online in November 2009, was authored by Alexey V. Yablokov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexey V. Nesterenko, of the Institute of Radiation Safety (Belarus), and the late Prof. Vassily B. Nesterenko, former director of the Belarussian Nuclear Center. With a foreword by the Chairman of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, Dimitro M. Grodzinsky, the 327-page volume is an English translation of a 2007 publication by the same authors. The earlier volume, “Chernobyl,” published in Russian, presented an analysis of the scientific literature, including more than 1,000 titles and more than 5,000 printed and Internet publications mainly in Slavic languages, on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster...."

And last time I looked it had two reviews on Amazon.com. A five star by someone who admits they didn't read it and a one star that only says:

"...This book recycles myths, lies, and fallacies from the events that occurred at Chernobyl. Don't waste your money on it. The National Academy of Science does not support this book, and has stated that it contains no new material...."

I begin the parsing of Caldicott's opinion piece in the NYT below:

"An atomic bomb requires a fraction of that amount for fuel, and plutonium remains radioactive for 250,000 years. Therefore every country with a nuclear power plant also has a bomb factory with unlimited potential.The nuclear power industry sets an unforgivable precedent by exporting nuclear technology — bomb factories — to dozens of non-nuclear nations."

World's First Nuclear Reactor

This photo was taken by a tourist (at a museum) of the actual decommissioned nuclear reactor that was used to make plutonium for the first atomic bombs using technology available well over half a century ago--long before the first nuclear power plants were built.

Several countries that don't have nuclear power plants managed to make bombs by constructing "research reactors" similar to the one pictured here.

Nuclear proliferation should be stopped, but you can't stop it by refusing to license new nuclear power plants, especially if those power plants are located in countries that already have nuclear weapons. The reactor in this picture was small, air-cooled, and produced no electricity whatsoever.

It takes tremendous technical capacity to create weapons grade material from nuclear waste and to manufacture the parts for a nuclear weapon. A power plant that uses nuclear energy to generate electricity is no more a "bomb factory" than my garage is.

The nuclear power industry has been resurrected over the past decade by a lobbying campaign that has left many people believing it to be a clean, green, emission-free alternative to fossil fuels.

The decades-old arguments cobbled together by the anti-nuclear lobby are finally unraveling thanks to people finding the truth via the internet, not because of increased "lobbying." Times, they are changing.

Not to mention, compared to any fossil fuel, nuclear energy is without doubt a clean, green (whatever exactly that means) emission free (comparable to solar in lifecycle emissions) source of energy.

These beliefs pose an extraordinary threat to global public health...

Beliefs? Here are some facts. Three thousand Americans die from food poisoning annually. Do we stop eating? Airline accidents have killed twenty thousand people in this decade. Are airlines dangerous? Forty thousand Americans die annually in car accidents. Where is the movement to eliminate cars? A recent study has estimated that close to 200,000 of the world's poorest children suffer nutrition related premature deaths thanks to corn ethanol policy. How many have died this "century" from nuclear power plant accidents?

...and encourage a major financial drain on national economies and taxpayers.

There is no such financial drain on taxpayers. Nuclear generated electricity pays for itself over its lifetime, producing low emissions electricity at very competitive rates. It's one of those rare cases where past government subsidies have paid off royally. I find it bizarre that a former pediatrician goes to so much trouble to protect people from an energy technology that has not killed anyone in a quarter of a century when 40,000 drivers die on our highways each year and a report released last year estimated that biofuels policies which have helped to increase the cost of basic food staples for the poorest may be killing upwards of 200,000 children annually from malnutrition related illnesses.

From a paper published in the spring 2011 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons--the official journal of the AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons):

Research by the World Bank indicates that the increase in biofuels production over 2004 levels would push more than 35 million additional people into absolute poverty in 2010 in developing countries. Using statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Indur Goklany estimates that this would lead to at least 192,000 excess deaths per year, plus disease resulting in the loss of 6.7 million disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) per year.

Read Nuclear Reactors May Kill 192,000 Annually! Oh, wait, I meant corn ethanol reactors.

The commitment to nuclear power as an environmentally safe energy source has also stifled the mass development of alternative ...

It would be great if nuclear energy really had such potential to stifle competing energy sources because fossil fuels sure need to be stifled by something. Odd that nuclear only has the power to stifle solar and wind, but not coal or natural gas ; )

Read Reframing Nuclear Power as an Ally of Renewable Energy
and Dirty, Baseload, Centralized, Renewable Energy

...technologies that are far cheaper, safer and almost emission free — the future for global energy.

I'm a big fan of solar. I have solar panels, but raise your hand if you can afford to replace all of your electricity use by putting solar panels on your roof and if you think you can afford to do so, why haven't you? Add to that cost, your share of the cost of some kind of continental super grid that would allow renewables to scale beyond a maximum of about 30% of our total electric energy production.

When the Fukushima Daiichi reactors suffered meltdowns in March, literally in the backyard of an unsuspecting public, the stark reality that the risks of nuclear power far outweigh any benefits should have become clear to the world. As the old quip states, “Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water.”

Ah, no, not literally, there are no reactors in backyards, and how could anyone in Fukushima possibly have been unsuspecting with the lay press having a feeding frenzy over these reactors, which killed nobody, while practically ignoring the 20,000 killed by the quake?

The stark reality is that even after being slammed with a magnitude 9 quake and 30 foot high tsunami, these half-century old reactors caused no fatalities. There is no evidence at all that the risks of nuclear energy outweigh any benefits. And boiling water to make steam to power turbines that spin generators is how 90 percent of all electricity is generated.

Instead, the nuclear industry has used the disaster to increase its already extensive lobbying efforts.

I know of no major industry that does not lobby, so, how would this make the nuclear lobby different from say, the corn ethanol or wind energy lobby?

A few nations vowed to phase out nuclear energy after the disaster.

At gargantuan expense to their taxpayers and by greatly increasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere. From the George Monbiot:

As a result of shutting down its nuclear programme in response to green demands, Germany will produce an extra 300m tonnes of carbon dioxide between now and 2020. That's almost as much as all the European savings resulting from the energy efficiency directive. Other countries are now heading the same way. These decisions are the result of an almost medievel misrepresentation of science and technology. For while the greens are right about most things, our views on nuclear power have been shaped by weapons-grade woo.

Not to mention, there would be a lot more carbon in the atmosphere were it not for nuclear power plants, and I strongly suspect that most of these announced phase outs will quietly just not happen.

But many others have remained steadfast in their commitment.

Actually, we are seeing large numbers of people (like me) who had bought the anti-nuclear arguments but are now changing their minds. We are going to need this technology to stand any chance of reducing global warming for our children's futures.

That has left millions of innocent people unaware that they — all of us — may face a medical catastrophe beyond all proportions in the wake of Fukushima and through the continued widespread use of nuclear energy.

Fukushima is being cleaned up. The danger has passed.

The world was warned of the dangers of nuclear accidents 25 years ago, when Chernobyl exploded and lofted radioactive poisons into the atmosphere.

The Chernobyl power plant remained fully staffed and continued to produce power for nearly 14 years after the one reactor was destroyed. It also created Europe's largest wildlife preserve.

The government estimated that it will spend at least $13 billion to clean up contamination.

$13 billion represents only about 5 percent of the total cost of this natural disaster on the rest of the country. As for the claim that there are dangerous hotspots, well, you should know by now to take everything this woman says with a huge grain of salt.

In one of the few studies on human contamination in the months following the accident, over half of the more than 1,000 children whose thyroids were monitored in Fukushima City were found to be contaminated with iodine 131 — condemning many to thyroid cancer years from now.

Translation: some small percentage of roughly 500 children (half of 1000) "may" develop a highly treatable thyroid cancer in the future. They will have to take supplemental thyroid medications after having their thyroid glands removed, as is the case with my neighbor and sister who have dysfunctional thyroids that have nothing to do with Chernobyl or Fukushima. It is probable that none of them will ever develop thyroid cancer.

Children are innately sensitive to the carcinogenic effects of radiation, fetuses even more so. Like Chernobyl, the accident at Fukushima is of global proportions. Unusual levels of radiation have been discovered in British Columbia, along the West Coast and East Coast of the United States and in Europe, and heavy contamination has been found in oceanic waters.

It's true that kids are more sensitive, but it is not true that they are being exposed to dangerous levels, so take the rest of that paragraph with a big grain of salt like all of the others. Oceans quickly disperse radiation to harmless levels.

Fukushima is classified as a grade 7 accident on the International Atomic Energy Agency scale — denoting “widespread health and environmental effects.” That is the same severity as Chernobyl, the only other grade 7 accident in history, but there is no higher number on the agency’s scale.

Fukushima was obviously not nearly as destructive as Chernobyl, which was not nearly as destructive as Caldicott wants you to believe.

Nuclear power has always been the nefarious Trojan horse for the weapons industry, and effective publicity campaigns are a hallmark of both industries. The concept of nuclear electricity was conceived in the early 1950s as a way to make the public more comfortable with the U.S. development of nuclear weapons. “The atomic bomb will be accepted far more readily if at the same time atomic energy is being used for constructive ends,” a consultant to the Defense Department Psychological Strategy Board, Stefan Possony, suggested. The phrase “Atoms for Peace” was popularized by President Dwight Eisenhower in the early 1950s.

Here comes her ubiquitous conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, mixed in with some conspiracy theories and a few choice quotes from the fifties. The government wanted to quell public fears stemming from the erroneous conflation of nuclear bombs with nuclear energy, a false conflation Caldicott tries to enhance with every opportunity.

Nuclear power quietly, cleanly, and affordably, generates twenty percent of the electricity for the planet's most energy hungry country. Our green house gas contributions from electricity generation for the last half century would have been 20 percent higher without it. The rest comes almost entirely from fossil fuels.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are one and the same technology.

That's absurd, but even if it were true, it would be irrelevant. One device makes low emission, affordable electricity for decades on end, the other is a bomb.

A 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor generates 600 pounds or so of plutonium per year

Sounds like a lot until you realize how much power a 1,000 megawatt power plant produces. Oh, and 600 lbs of plutonium takes up about as much space as your car's spare tire.

Why is nuclear power still viable, after we’ve witnessed catastrophic accidents, enormous financial outlays, weapons proliferation and nuclear-waste induced epidemics of cancers and genetic disease for generations to come?

That's easy. Nuclear power is still viable because of its economics, as well as its health and safety records when compared to any fossil fuel. It is producing gargantuan amounts of affordable, low emission electric power all around the world.

Nuclear power plants are not responsible for weapons proliferation and there are no nuclear waste induced epidemics of cancers and genetic disease.

Catastrophic accidents? 40,000 people are killed on our roads annually. Where is the anti-car lobby?

Simply put, many government and other officials believe the nuclear industry mantra: safe, clean and green. And the public is not educated on the issue.

Thanks to three decades of Caldicott spreading misinformation, the public has been badly misinformed. The real education is now starting to take place thanks to the internet.

True green, clean, nearly emission-free solutions exist for providing energy. They lie in a combination of conservation and renewable energy sources, mainly wind, solar and geothermal, hydropower plants, and biomass from algae. A smart-grid could integrate consuming and producing devices, allowing flexible operation of household appliances. The problem of intermittent power can be solved by storing energy using available technologies.

Sounds wonderful but there is no way we can replace more than a fraction of our electricity use with renewables. Betting our children's futures on an untested hypothesis is not a smart thing to do. We have been generating electricity with nuclear power longer than most readers of Caldicott's fabrications have been alive.

Millions of jobs can be created by replacing nuclear power with nationally integrated, renewable energy systems.

The building of modern modular nuclear power plants integrated into a new grid would also create millions of jobs. Renewable energy alone can't do the job. Caldicott's argument has a big missing link.

In the U.S. alone, the project could be paid for by the $180 billion currently allocated for nuclear weapons programs over the next decade.

Nuclear weapons programs have had nothing to do with nuclear generated electricity for half of a century. I'd be happy to see that money turned over to nuclear energy programs.

There would be no need for new weapons if the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals — 95 percent of the estimated 20,500 nuclear weapons globally — were abolished.

Nuclear weapons have nothing to do with nuclear generated electricity.

Nuclear advocates often paint those who oppose them as Luddites who are afraid of, or don’t understand, technology, or as hysterics who exaggerate the dangers of nuclear power.

I would be happy with that sentence if you replace the word "paint" with the word "expose."

One might recall the sustained attack over many decades by the tobacco industry upon the medical profession, a profession that revealed the grave health dangers induced by smoking.

There was no such attack on the medical profession.

"Smoking, broadly speaking, only kills the smoker. Nuclear power bequeaths morbidity and mortality — epidemics of disease — to all future generations."

No it doesn't. Second hand smoke is also dangerous and nuclear power DOES NOT "bequeath morbidity and mortality — epidemics of disease — to all future generations." Hundreds if not thousands of peer-reviewed studies have failed to support that ridiculous statement. We've had a quarter century since Chernobyl, which is more than enough time to statistically detect higher levels of morbidity caused by radiation.

The millions of lives lost to smoking in the era before the health risks of cigarettes were widely exposed will be minuscule compared to the medical catastrophe we face through the continued use of nuclear power.

Blatantly not true

Let’s use this extraordinary moment to convince governments and others to move toward a nuclear-free world. Let’s prove that informed democracies will behave in a responsible fashion.

Instead, let me propose that we use the internet to expose the nut jobs who managed to gain such notoriety using our sensationalist profit-driven print version of the lay press (like the New York Times that published her opinion piece)--a technology about to go the way of the horse and buggy, thank God. And good luck trying to get democracies to behave in a responsible manner.

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The Nuclear Enhanced Renewable Grid (NERG)

Photo by Worklife Siemens

Replace the letter D with the letter G in the word NERD.

Following on the heels of this report in the New York Times:

California Licenses World’s Biggest Solar Thermal Plant

...was this interesting article by an honest solar power enthusiast saying that solar thermal power plants in sunny places need a lot of water. His solution? Get innovative. What those innovations might be, he couldn't say.

For example, a typical parabolic trough plant with wet cooling uses approximately 800 gallons/MWh, comprised of 780 gallons for evaporation and water make-up and 20 gallons for mirror washing. Change to dry cooling – at the expense of increased capital costs and decreased efficiency – and a facility still requires approximately 80 gallons/MWh for make-up and mirror washing. For a 100 MW facility operating 14 hours per day (i.e. producing 1,400 MWh per day), that’s over one million gallons of water per day; change to dry cooling and that 100 MW facility still consumes more than 100,000 gallons of water per day.

How about a small variable output distributed energy nuclear power plant that provides desalinated water for the solar power plant while it is sunny and sends power to the grid in place of the solar arrays when it isn't sunny?

From an article in the Washington Post about mini reactors:

When nuclear scientists talk about the size of a reactor, they're talking about maximum electrical output, not square footage. The world's largest reactors generate 1,455 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 1.5 million households. A program being run by the Department of Energy is focusing on models that would produce about 300 megawatts, enough for Knoxville, Tenn., according to Dan Ingersoll of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They may go even smaller, producing 50-megawatt reactors that could power small towns or even individual work sites, such as mines, that may be located far from the main energy grid.

Think locally

There are virtues to local reactors. If a reactor powers only one community, it can be built close to the end users. Between 4 and 10 percent of the electricity produced by U.S. power plants vanishes as it travels through power lines on its way to users. Building smaller plants and putting them closer to population centers could cut that figure significantly.

And doing so can save on construction costs as well. "It's getting very difficult and very expensive to lay new transmission lines," says Ingersoll. "This offers the possibility of providing isolated communities with power."

Survey results that followed the above article.

When you think about it, a small, local, low carbon source of energy would meet three out of the four requirements demanded of many environmentally minded individuals and groups. The only one missing is renewable.

Ironically, corn ethanol is listed as a renewable source of energy by our government when two-thirds of the energy in a gallon of it is derived from fossil fuels. In a sense, nuclear is almost as renewable as corn ethanol.

According to a recent report from MIT:

The estimate of enough uranium to run 10 times as many reactors for 100 years was given by Charles W. Forsberg, the executive director of the study. While the price of uranium might be driven up by 50 percent, uranium represents only 2 to 4 percent of the price of electricity from a reactor, he said, so a 50 percent increase would mean only another 1 or 2 percent increase in the price of electricity.

Wind<---Nuclear--->Solar

The old arguments against nuclear are rapidly unraveling.

1) The fuel issue is a non-issue, at least for the foreseeable future.

2) The proliferation issue has nothing to do with nuclear power in countries that already have nuclear weapons. If Iran refuses to let nuclear powers process their fuel for them for free, then those nuclear powers are going to have to make a decision. That decision has nothing to do with the fact that there are nuclear power plants in our country.

3) The waste issue is not nearly as large as we have been led to believe. Putting it into perspective, nuclear power plants are still storing right in their own parking lots every ounce of nuclear waste they have ever generated, awaiting the arrival of a federal repository of some kind. How much waste could there possibly be?

Other nations, like France, recycle their waste, reducing the volume ten fold and mix what remains in with molten glass (vitrifying it) to create cylinders of glass than are much easier and safer to move and store.

4) Chernobyl, the poster child for everything that could go wrong continued to produce electricity for 14 years after the incident. Dozens of people died in the immediate aftermath but other than thyroid cancers (with a 90 plus cure rate) in children in the path of the fallout, higher rates of cancer have never been detected. The dead zone quickly reverted to one of Europe's largest wildlife preserves and there were no deformed babies as a result of that disaster.

Modern nuclear power plants do not cause cancer.

5) Nuclear is more expensive than coal and natural gas. Well guess what? So is solar and wind. The whole may be cheaper than the sum of its parts.

6) We have been building bomb proof bunkers since WWI. Building a bomb proof nuclear facility is a piece of cake.

7) Ditto for earthquake proof structures.

Time to open our minds?

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Reframing Nuclear Power as an Ally of Renewable Energy

Photo courtesy of, ah, Bitchcakes via Flickr

Alec Baldwin weighs in, but which is better, coal or nuclear?

The official response to that question by most environmental organizations is to say "neither."

Neither? Are they privy to a secret consensus finding backed up by multiple, detailed, peer-reviewed, scientific studies which have demonstrated that when all negative and positive aspects of both methods of generating power are assessed they prove to be equally environmentally destructive in the aggregate?

Of course not. I'm being facetious. "Neither" isn't an answer; it's a dodge.

Let me start by presenting my environmental credentials so you can begin the subliminal mental process of stereotyping me and anticipating my bias. I have written many hundreds of articles over the years on environmental issues. I ride a nano-phosphate lithium-ion electric bicycle of my own design. I also own a Prius (Update 10/23/2011 ...and a Nissan Leaf). My neighborhood has one of the highest walkability scores in the country. I am a big proponent of solar power and will soon own a photovoltaic powered solar hot water system. I own eleven acres of forest property adjacent to a state forest that I am allowing to return to old growth. I wear sandals, with socks. I am also an experienced mechanical engineer.

OK, so now you have me pegged as some kind of bastardized chimera, a cross between a gear-head, flood-pants wearing, technology freak and a vegan, dreadlocked, tree hugger, which come to think of it may be closer to the truth than I want to believe ...

I also want to suggest at the start that this is mostly a thought exercise, not something to get bent out of shape over. I have little confidence that our political system (a reflection of we the people of the United States) has whatever it takes to reduce GHG emissions to the levels needed in the time frame allocated. We should already be converting coal power plants over to natural gas as an interim step to replace them entirely with carbon neutral sources. We are more than likely fooling ourselves.

According to the University of Wyoming education department:

The typical coal train is 100 to 110 cars long-a mile of coal! Each hopper car holds 100 tons of coal which lasts only 20 minutes fueling a power plant. Bigger surface mines may load two or three Unit Trains of coal a day. Currently, eighty trains leave Wyoming every day. In 1999 we shipped out 25,882 trains. That's 25,882 miles of coal-more than the circumference of the earth.

And here is a photo I lifted from their website:



Take all the time you need to understand the following colorful chart (click here to see all of it):



It's from a study commissioned by the Word Wildlife Fund. The researchers were asked to see if we could reduce our GHG emissions to the necessary levels in the allocated time frame without increasing use of nuclear power. Note that they did not get rid of nuclear power.

They managed to pull it off but just barely. They admitted that one of the solutions--pumping billions of tons of CO2 captured from burned fossil fuels underground--may not work. Giant bubbles of odorless, colorless, CO2 finding their way back to the surface to suffocate whole cities in the night would not be a good thing.

Their conclusion? We can do this if the entire world hits the ground running in the next four years and maximizes industrial output to create low carbon energy sources (sound of crickets chirping...).

Use your imagination to expand that thin purple band that represents nuclear power to make it as wide as the widest band shown. At the same time, decrease the width of all of the other bands by about four percent. What you will have is a scenario that is hardly impacted at all by greatly increasing nuclear power. My conclusion? We are "probably" hosed regardless.

Staring at that graph you should also be impressed, or maybe stunned, by how much has to be accomplished in such a short time.

Another problem with this analysis is that they also assume that the intermittent and highly diffused nature of wind and solar can be compensated for with more technology called a smart super-grid, which is at this time, an untested hypothesis.

I am fairly confident that to make renewables our main source of energy, we will still need some other power sources to help it (called baseline, provided today by coal and nuclear) as well as some power plants that can rapidly increase output when needed (called peaking power plants and today they are usually natural gas fired). I'll explain why later.

I am not about to argue that we should generate all of our power with conventional nuclear. I'm saying it would be much wiser to accept some additional conventional nuclear in the mix as needed to help bring more renewables on line (help defeat the real enemy--coal) while increasing R&D funding for designs that can reduce the impacts of existing problems, like limits on uranium fuel supply, waste, and safety. Instead of lumping nuclear with coal to make it look bad, we should be more realistic and honest by lumping it with zero carbon sources like wind and solar.

In an article called Miniature nuclear reactors might be a safe, efficient source of power, The Washington post describes how small reactors could be distributed and chained together as needed to power a given town or city, avoiding the loses associated with sending power long distances over power lines. Although the article didn't mention it, one could see how small reactors could also be strategically placed to make renewable energy more reliable and less expensive. A poll following that article shows that eighty percent of readers would favor nuclear power. Public opinion is shifting.

Nuclear power plants today are used for baseline power. However, some designs, like the Canadian CANDU reactors are capable of being used for peak power--more on this later.

Time frames and climate change aside, humanity needs to move away from fossil fuels because the supplies will all eventually peak and decline, making them more expensive and disruptive to economies long before they run out entirely. We heat our structures and fuel transport mostly with natural gas and oil. We are counting on electricity to take over most of those duties as well.

Without environmental groups there would be far fewer environmental safeguards, including nuclear ones. Environmentalism is a good thing but we don't always get it right. Growing plants to fuel our cars sure sounded like a great idea five years ago until we realized it was increasing the price of grains, helping to push the number of chronically malnourished to over a billion souls for the first time in all of human history. Not to mention researchers have proven what common sense would suggest, that to grow more plants you have to clear ecosystem carbon sinks, making crop-based biofuels gallon for gallon as bad or worse than fossil fuels although for slightly different reasons.

Some major (and a lot of minor) environmentalists are beginning to question the party line that nuclear is the devil incarnate. Understand, to belong to any given group you must, by definition, adhere to that group's belief system. It is not a matter of cowardice, its a simple matter of self-preservation and the classic group think dynamic called peer pressure. We know a lot more now than we did thirty years ago and many of the legitimate arguments used against nuclear in the past have lost some of their punch.

That freedom from the peer pressure may explain why a number of highly visible but independent environmental types (typically not immersed inside or strongly affiliated with--and therefore constrained by--a group) have begun publicly suggesting that nuclear power isn't such a bad thing after all: George Monbiot, Steward Brand, James Hansen, Steve Kirsch, and at least one highly visible environmental organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Maybe we should stop with the knee-jerk hysterics every time nuclear power enters the discussion. It hurts our image. It reinforces the stereotype held by many that environmentalists are irrational, uncompromising, innumerates (the same stereotype often used to describe conservatives). That stance is starting to drive a wedge between other environmentalists who have less incentive to carry the anti-nuke banner. Yes, sometimes things we have clung to as absolute truths turn out to be bullshit. Happens all the time now that we have the internet.

On the other hand, there are also some independent (not beholden to a particular group) intellectual giants who still think nuclear power is the devil incarnate, which finally brings us to actor and 30-Rock (one of the best sitcoms ever produced IMHO) star Alec Baldwin.

The Huffington Post, one of the best on-line publications in existence, is no different from any other on-line publication in that (not being constrained by the physical size of a piece of paper) it will print pretty much anything any celebrity figure or any other prominent figure for that matter, wants to write. That's life in America. Articles are filtered less by quality of content than by who wrote them, regardless of qualifications or content. This tends to be true for books as well because profitability is directly proportional to celebrity status, regardless of what is in the book.

I am not going to parse the article here other than to say it's your classic anti-nuclear diatribe, including the standard conflation of nuclear power with nuclear weapons. In his next article he will:

" ...comment on last Saturday's broadcast of Weekend Edition on NPR and how Scott Simon appallingly allowed Stewart Brand to burble on and on with his outrageous pablum about "the new safe and clean nuclear power."

Here is an NPR interview with Alec on a different subject, which I suspect will go down in history.

From an environmental perspective it's not even close, especially in light of climate change. There's no contest. Nuclear power beats coal running away. Some of the old-guard environmentalists have gotten busy cobbling together new arguments against nuclear based on its economics in an attempt to bolster the flagging three-decade-old talking points.

The overarching fatal flaw in the argument that nuclear isn't cost competitive is that wind and solar are also not cost competitive. In both cases fossil fuels win the economic argument while losing the environmental one. As an aside, this explains in a nutshell the importance of getting a price on carbon.

The goal with renewable energy is to get the costs down in the future with mass production. However, a standardized and mass-produced design would also bring the cost of nuclear down as well, making the economic argument against nuclear as ephemeral as the one against renewables.

Also making the rounds is an answer to the question of "which is worse" that might be better defined as "a refusal to engage in debate disguised as an answer." It goes something like this:

"It’s a false dichotomy that lends legitimacy to a false scenario in which we as a region, country, or world are forced to chose coal or nukes and have no access to developing other energy sources. It is a worst-case, stuck-in-the-corner, fake match-up."

The coal vs. nuclear comparison is no more of a false dichotomy than coal vs. renewables. You can just as easily say that the match-up between coal and renewables is fake. It's an untested hypothesis that we can build a national super-grid capable of sending power from wherever the wind is blowing or the sun is shining to the far corners of the country without help from a 100% reliable form of (carbon free) backup power. In addition to the unknown technical feasibility, the cost of that super-grid is an unknown.

We know nuclear works. Nuclear would be a powerful ally of renewables in the battle against big coal. Nuclear could provide the stability needed by a national renewable smart energy grid. The power plants could be modular standardized designs to reduce cost and have less power output than the average plants of today, and strategically placed in areas of the mostly renewable grid to maintain stability.

Nuclear energy is not by any means a worst case scenario. It is a proven, safe, reliable way to generate energy. Sometimes you just have to use some common sense. Twenty percent of our power is coming from profitably run, safe, nuclear power plants that are just sitting there humming along 24 hours a day seven days a week. Japan, Germany, and Finland get almost a third of their power from them, Sweden and Switzerland almost half, and France gets about 75 percent.

All of the high-level waste that America's nuclear plants have generated since they started operating is just sitting in their parking lots waiting for our inept politicians to make a decision. There are several technically feasible options for dealing with that waste and quite obviously there is not that much of it or it could not all still be stored on site after decades of operation.

The main reason we don't have more nuclear power plants is because one-of-a-kind custom-designed reactors are no longer cost competitive with coal or natural gas, but as pointed out earlier, neither are renewables and unless you have a full array of photovoltaic and hot water panels installed on your roof providing you with all the electricity, hot water, and heat that you need (you have not put your money where your mouth is) your defense is already in trouble.

If nuclear power were cheaper than coal there would be no coal plants. You might not be able to say the same about renewables (regardless of cost) because nobody knows if a super grid could really give us the reliable supply needed.

The environmental camp splits into two main groups when it comes to solar. The distributed energy camp who think we should stick all of our solar panels on rooftops, and the concentrated solar power crowd who think we need large centralized power plants where the sun shines and a large sophisticated new grid to get it where it needs to go.

One of the warmest and fuzziest ideas found in some environmental camps is that we could finally stick it to the man by doing away with centralized power plants. I may be a big solar enthusiast but I'm also a realist.

Solar will be a mix of distributed and centralized, depending on which works best in a given locale. Solar panels on rooftops will be constrained by several factors. Seventy percent of our housing is built and most of it can't generate much solar because it was never designed with proper sloping, shadow-free roofs. But the biggest impediment to solar on rooftops will come from consumers who, given the choice, would rather have their power come from three wires than have to be responsible for the capital costs and maintenance of a power plant on their roof, especially when they need a new roof. The analogy would be a choice between a municipal sewer system or your own septic system, or possibly a choice between drilling and maintaining your own well and a municipal water supply.

Get up from your computer and go stare at your water heater for a minute. On average they sell for about $300 retail. They will never get much cheaper than that. Hot water heaters have reached their cost minimum. Now visualize a solar hot water system. Imagine the expense and complexity with its collectors, pumps, tanks, heat exchanger, and temperature switches. That system will always cost far more than a simple water heater (in part because it includes two water heater tanks) even after mass production has brought the cost of solar to its minimum. Given the choice, most people will opt for a simple electric water heater knowing full well that in the long run they may pay more in energy costs.

The arguments against nuclear

I knew this article was going to get too long. The nuclear issue is just too complex to put in a nutshell.

Let me start with some clarifications that might cut some strawman counter-arguments off at the knees. Until very recently I have agreed that there was no need to build more nuclear. We have gotten by for the last several decades without building more by using fossil fuels.

In hindsight you have to admit that coal has done tremendous damage in the form of lung disease, mercury poisoning, mine accidents, water pollution, acidified lakes, climate change, destroyed mountain top ecosystems and buried mountain valley ecosystems and on and on it goes. There is an endless stream of train cars loaded with coal arriving at these power plants with other train cars hauling off the burned waste products. Hauling this coal is the biggest profit maker for railroad companies.

Nuclear was held at bay primarily by its cost restraints and there would not have been many more new plants built protests or no protests. Many projects were canceled after construction started thanks to the combination of cost overruns and really stupid energy demand predictions. As I said earlier, if nuclear were cheaper than coal, there would be no coal, protests or no protests.

I repeat, I am not arguing that we should generate all of our power with conventional nuclear. I'm saying it would be much wiser to accept some additional conventional nuclear in the mix as needed to help bring more renewables on line (help defeat the real enemy--coal) while increasing R&D funding for designs that can reduce the impacts of existing problems, like limits on uranium fuel supply, waste, safety, and proliferation.

I suspect that America has already lost the ability to design and build its own affordable nuclear power plants. If we want more of them, we will probably have to buy tried and true designs as well as expertise from others. Lots of engineering firms here would love to be given tax dollars to learn how to build custom designs again for a government with a bottomless ability to borrow money, but that is guaranteed to drive costs into the stratosphere. We always have to guard against pork politics spoiling it for everyone.

Waste

As mentioned earlier, the high-level waste generated by our nuclear power plants since the day they started operating is just sitting there in their own parking lots waiting for our government to make decisions--proof positive that they don't generate large amounts of waste (and that our government is largely incompetent). By law, nuclear power plants have to pay the government a set amount per unit of power generated to fund a permanent waste storage solution. Our government is then supposed to use that money to find that solution. Yucca Mountain ate a pile of that money before being shit-canned. I rest my case. The waste issue is largely political, not so much technical.



Most countries reprocess their used nuclear fuel. The United States plans to simply store used fuel in a place like Yucca mountain (but not Yucca mountain). According to the World Nuclear Association, it is reprocessed mainly to extract the unused fuel left over (about 25%) and to reduce the amount of the more problematic high-level waste that has to be stored (by about four-fifths). Reprocessing tends to increase the amount of low-level waste, which is not as dangerous or long-lived (loses its radioactivity much faster).

Again, according to the WNA, after reprocessing, all of the "high-level" waste generated to provide a typical European with all of her electricity for her entire life could be held in the palm of her hand--make that both hands for an American.

Puget Sound, the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, along with various and sundry rivers, lakes, and aquifers all over this country have been compromised by pollution from agriculture, landfills, industry, and sewage. Our landfills are chock-full of deadly toxins like PCBs and heavy metals that are separated from ground water by a thin layer of clay and a plastic liner. Nuclear waste is put into high-strength metal containers and will one day be sequestered thousands of feet underground far away from aquifers and fault lines in bone-dry caverns and salt mines that have been geologically stable for millions of years.

The guy who suggested shooting waste into space should be made into a saint. We would call him the "Saint of a total lack of any semblance of common sense."

Note that anti-nuclear proponents will invariably talk about waste produced by nuclear weapons manufacturing and the abysmal government track record for dealing with it in the same article they discuss nuclear power. Although the two have little in common, this is done to shine a bad light on nuclear power by association--the same tactic is at play when associating nuclear power with coal.

Most nuclear fuel today actually comes form dismantled nuclear weapons. This is a case of turning swords to ploughshares writ large.

A concerted effort is being made to design some kind of long-lived warning sign to be used at nuclear waste sites to warn future generations that something bad is buried about half-a-mile below their feet.

It has been suggested that hundreds or thousands of years from now, our ancestors are either going to be so technologically advanced that they will be humored by our concerns or they will be hunter-gatherers unable to tunnel thousands of feet down to satisfy their curiosity even though we have pinpointed for them exactly where to dig (more potential candidates for that sainthood). And if I'm wrong and somebody digs that far down in the middle of nowhere to see what is going on, they won't be doing it again. That's one hole that will be back-filled in a hurry.

Proliferation

One idea to prevent people from creating weapons grade nuclear material from their nuclear fuel processing is to have all that done by existing nuclear powers. Iran exposed the idea's weakness by declining the offer. Clearly they want to make a nuclear bomb.

Building a nuclear weapon takes tremendous resources and advanced technology. A rag-tag gang of fundamentalist religionist freaks may be stupid enough to use a nuclear weapon but they are not smart enough to build a nuclear weapon. That takes the resources of a national economy.

Our dearth of new nuclear power plants has had no impact on North Korea or Iran. Solutions to the problem of nuclear proliferation, whatever they are, have little if anything to do with the number of nuclear power plants in America.

Uranium supply

It will one day peak and decline like fossil fuels. The timing of this eventuality would depend on how many nuclear power plants there are.

Another popular argument used against nuclear is to point out that we would have to build about a bazillion of them a day for the next hundred years to meet all of our energy needs.

But that is not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting we use them judiciously as needed to shore up a renewable grid.

In addition, there is truly a reasonable chance that nuclear technologies presently in development will neutralize the uranium supply issue by using other sources, including our own stored waste.

I am aware of the weakness of the "use existing technology as a bridge to future technology" argument. If that technology never arrives you are stuck with what you got. But that does not mean we should not use nuclear to promote the success of renewables. If improved nuclear technology that minimizes existing problems never comes to fruition, at least we will have bought time and produced power that was carbon free all that time.

Cost

I'm going to ask you to use your imagination again. Pretend you are in orbit looking down at the US of A with a special camera that only sees electricity. Through the lightning flashes you see spread out across the country a complex web with glowing blobs that represent power plants.

That is our power grid. It acts like a single circuit board. Some components in a complex circuit board are more expensive than others. A high voltage diode may cost more than a cheap resistor but if you want that circuit board to work more efficiently, you may have to include a few of the more expensive parts to make the overall circuit board less expensive than a design using cheaper parts but requiring a lot more of them.

Nuclear power plants should not be viewed by themselves. They should be viewed as parts in a circuit board that make it more efficient and therefore less expensive overall.

I've talked a lot about cost already but I'll add some thoughts here. I live in Seattle so the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) debacle hit close to home. This analysis looks at why the cost of building a nuclear power plant went ballistic.

As I've pointed out before, renewables are also not cost competitive but the hope is that they will be someday. The Canadian designed CANDU reactor is an example of how you can lower costs by tweaking designs. And we all know that standardization and mass production, coupled with learning curves can have dramatic impacts on costs.

I saw the power of learning curves first hand as lead engineer on the Boeing 777 wing in-spar shear structure (that's a mouthful). One of my duties was to develop a standard procedure to make three dimensional Boolean solid models of these incredibly complex machined parts such that numerically controlled machines could be used to cut them out of blocks of metal.

It took a week to model the first part. By the end of the program it took three hours by simply climbing up a learning curve.

Giant custom designed from scratch nuclear reactors here in America are not cost effective. We may never build another one but that does not mean we won't be able to build standardized modular designs that are not too expensive.

You can document what you paid or were paid but you cannot predict very far into the future what something will cost. Cost is whatever you ended up paying and that is all anything is worth. Cost is a moving target.

Chernobyl in perspective and in hindsight

The closest you will get to the truth can be found in a book called Wormwood Forest by Mary Mycio.

Did you know that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant continued to operate for 14 years after the accident?

A lot of the anti-nuclear fervor seen today stems from the Chernobyl disaster. Shortly after the incident sensationalist photos of deformed children began to circulate (that turned out to have nothing to do with Chernobyl). We were expecting to see mutants emerge from the woods and an epidemic of cancers.

Over 43 thousand people were killed ...in auto accidents in the United States last year. Less than 60 people have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, including nine people from thyroid cancer who were children at the time and in the path of the fallout.

Roughly 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer (which has a cure rate of about 97%) have been detected and treated in people who were children at the time of the disaster.

Studies have not detected higher rates of cancers or birth defects in the population of people who were hired to clean up the radiation.

The "dead zone" has become rich with wildlife including many rare species that have either returned on their own or have been reintroduced: Lynx, Wild Boar, Wolf, Eurasian Brown Bear, European Bison, Przewalski's horse and Eagle Owl.

It turns out that high levels of radiation are far less detrimental to wildlife than high levels of human beings.

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