Above images from Nuclear Energy Waste--Making Mountains Out of Mole Hills The YouTube video, The Nuclear Waste Problem was published on November 21, and went viral with about half a million hits in a few days. I learned of its existence when it was presented to me as irrefutable evidence for why nuclear can't be part of the climate change solution. Technically, it's quite well done. The graphics and music are appealing. The transcript is about two and a half pages long, single spaced. Unfortunately, the narrative found in that transcript is remarkably inaccurate. If the graphics and music are lipstick, the narrative would be the pig.
Among the four words one least wants to hear are “Hanford
nuclear reservation emergency.”
Really? Isn’t that a rather sensationalist, not to mention,
disingenuous remark? How will assorted pieces of irradiated junk buried
in the ground as a result of cold war nuclear weapons production harm anybody
not standing in close proximity to it?
At one time, the site had nine nuclear reactors.
Those were devices to produce weapon’s grade plutonium, not
to be confused with commercial nuclear power stations. The University of
Washington had a nuclear reactor for many years as many large universities
still do. A nuclear reactor is not a nuclear bomb or a nuclear power station. The
reactor is only the source of heat for nuclear power stations.
But don’t look for a major surge in U.S. nuclear power
anytime soon.
There will be quite a surge as the power stations now under
construction are completed. At this point in your article you segue from a
problem with waste at a military super fund site into commercial electricity
production. You have conflated the two for readers who now see using nuclear
fission as a heat source for a power station as the equivalent of making
material for nuclear weapons. That’s disingenuous and irresponsible in this age
of the internet and man-made climate change
Part of the problem was revealed in last week’s Hanford
incident.
Actually, waste storage isn’t part of the problem with the
building of nuclear power stations. No nuclear power station has been closed because a long term storage facility isn’t available yet.
Inside the collapsed tunnel was radioactive waste buried
inside rail cars, no doubt some of it from Hanford’s reactors. The same issue
applies to modern commercial reactors. They haven’t released carbon into the
atmosphere, but they have left 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel in the United
States alone.
Except used fuel from commercial nuclear power stations isn't buried in train cars a few feet underground. The commercial nuclear power station located on the reservation has
nothing to do with the military waste stored there. Long term storage
facilities for used nuclear power station fuel are being built by other
countries and two have already been built here but are not used for storage of
that fuel yet thanks mostly to antinuclear lobbyists. You phrase the amount in
a manner that makes it sound huge. Spent nuclear fuel is very heavy but takes
up very little space. See Figure 1 below to get a feel for that:
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.
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).
My previous articles on nuclear energy dealt with the scientifically
established, statistically irrefutable fact that modern nuclear power stations
are one of the safest forms of energy at our disposal:
Spent nuclear fuel—solid metal cylindrical pellets
High-level waste—goop with the consistency of honey (primarily from cold-war weapons production)
Transuranic waste—mixture of solid debris and goop (primarily from cold-war weapons production)
Low-level waste—contaminated protective shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipment and tools, luminous dials, medical tubes, swabs, injection needles, syringes …
To recap, items 2 and 3 have little or nothing to do with nuclear power stations and most high-level waste was created before 1970 which has since cooled down to become transuranic waste.
The United States actually already has a deep geologic repository called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (which needs renamed because it is no longer a pilot plant) that is now accepting waste.
Many think it would be unwise to put used nuclear fuel into a repository you can’t retrieve it from because it could be a source of fuel for other types of reactors, like the BN-800 fast reactor that went into commercial operation in Russia last year. That reactor is being used in a “burner” fuel configuration to consume stockpiles of plutonium from decommissioned warheads but it could also be used as a “breeder” reactor. Breeder reactors could create enough fuel to power civilization for many centuries from used fuel.
A much wiser idea for storage of our used nuclear fuel, which presently is sitting in parking lots at nuclear power stations in nearly impervious bomb shelters for fuel rods (commonly known as dry casks) would be to put all of these casks into a single secure parking lot just in case we need what is inside them to help save the world from climate change.
These casks are good for about 160 years, so there’s no big hurry on that count. And the cost to build and run this secure parking lot could be paid for with just the interest on the money already put into the Nuclear Waste Fund by nuclear power stations.
Thanks to anti-nuclear groups, the Department of Energy has paid roughly $4.5 billion in damages to various utilities for failing to create a permanent repository for used fuel with the money in that waste fund.
The largely successful effort by antinuclear groups to prevent the creation of permanent storage may be what saves us in the end because it has kept that future supply of zero carbon energy available. Not sure which law that falls under, Murphy’s Law or the Law of Unintended Consequences.
In addition, according to James Conca, this delaying action has made Yucca Mountain largely irrelevant. Most high-level waste has cooled enough to go into the existing Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and our used nuclear fuel really should be kept readily available for future use in an interim storage area.
Please note that most of the above information was gleaned from articles by an expert on the subject, James Conca, writing for Forbes.
Engineers love graphs but the general public, not accustomed
to seeing them every day, tend to ignore them. There have been many attempts to
convey without graphs how little waste is produced. In the documentary Pandora's
Promise, they showed a football stadium that would contain all spent fuel used in
the United States since the invention of nuclear energy. But to some people,
this seems like a lot of waste. Images of Coke cans or a hand holding a
vitrified glass disc of waste as examples of how much waste would be generated
to provide an American with a lifetime of electricity fail because it requires
the reader to trust whatever numbers were used to make this claim.
Which is why I created the graphic below. No trust required.
All you need are your eyes. And anyone is free to borrow this graphic to help reverse the decades of misinformation created by antinuclear energy groups.
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:
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.
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..."
"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."
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?
Self-described as an organization of "citizens and scientists for environmental solutions," their chosen name almost demands respect--a union of scientists who are concerned. But they don't hide the fact that they are not all scientists, so, in theory only two of them have to be scientists to keep the name legitimate, and in any case nobody knows exactly what a scientist is.
The fact that other scientists often disagree with their positions (as scientists always do) is problematic as well.
Are they always right? That can't be possible.
Does every member of UCS agree with every other member on every topic (are they really united)? Well, of course not.
Is their work peer-reviewed and published in science journals? No [Most of] it is not. [Most of] their research is as subject to subconscious bias as anything else. [Update: See comment from UCS press secretary, Aaron Huertas in the comments and this link for official stance on Nuclear.]
Once you take a scientist out of his or her lab, they are no wiser or more knowledgeable than anyone else. Ask a nuclear physicist to paint your portrait or rebuild your brakes and watch what happens.
It is the scientific method that makes science work, not so much scientists.
I like the UCS because they do a good job of sifting the chaff from the wheat. You still have to take their positions with at least a small grain of salt because there is still some chaff left.
Their position on biofuels has changed considerably as research has rolled in over the years. I am qualified to critique that subject and their positions on it are for the most part accurate but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Their positions on nuclear energy tend to be heavily biased, and there are plenty of very high ranking physicists and scientists who disagree with them.
Here is a UCS response to a claim that the reprocessing of nuclear waste reduces waste.
I'm not qualified to refute the physics but this raised my right eyebrow precipitously, while simultaneously lowering my left one.
Why do most other first world nuclear powers melt their long-lived waste into handy dandy blocks of glass if not to reduce its volume, make it easier to handle, transport, and store?
You never know with the French, but it seemed unlikely to me that they process their waste to "increase" their disposal problems. Which led me to wonder why fuel is reprocessed in the first place. I found the answer here:
Over the last 50 years the principal reason for reprocessing used fuel has been to recover unused uranium and plutonium in the used fuel elements and thereby close the fuel cycle, gaining some 25% more energy from the original uranium in the process and thus contributing to energy security. A secondary reason is to reduce the volume of material to be disposed of as high-level waste to about one fifth. In addition, the level of radioactivity in the waste from reprocessing is much smaller and after about 100 years falls much more rapidly than in used fuel itself.
Rather, waste management is made very much easier. The decree that Yucca Mountain must isolate the waste for more than 10,000 years is due primarily to the presence of long-lived transuranic elements. Appropriate reprocessing will allow those troublemakers to be consumed in fast reactors, leaving only the real waste—the fission products—to be disposed of, and their radioactive toxicity fall below that of the original uranium ore after less than 500 years. Effective waste management becomes a slam dunk.
The UCS downplayed the fact that by creating more of the short-lived, less problematic stuff, reprocessing reduces the amount of the much more problematic long-lived stuff.
Information about the technical and economic viability of renewable energy is also growing. At some point the UCS is going to have to soften its stance on nuclear energy. As a student of human nature I suspect that will not happen without a power struggle inside the UCS because people are swayed less by strong rational argument than they are by strong emotions.
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