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"LOCA Attack"?

An attack designed to provoke a Loss Of Coolant Accident. An attack on Indian Point was one scenario put forward when assessing a plants vulnerability to a terworist attack. The NRC is not required to release terorism related portions of environmental impact studies.

I like how creative folks can be when making stuff up.

That's how some security works, devise a scenario and then defend against it. Your suggestion a nuclear plant doesn't require assessment from such an attack is naive.

And also conspiracy theories

The cry of totalitarians everywhere.

regarding TMI.

To quote the NRC documentation of the incident A significant release of radiation from the plants auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core. That's coolant is officially recognised contamination.

Its public information what happened, yes there where human errors and design issues,

Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind me staggering around making decisions." - So if they didn't know, how is it you do?

Expert measurements of radioactive iodine in farm animals nearby revealed Nuclear Industry estimates of contamination released to be 'grossly underestimated'. Radioactive iodine, plutonium, strontium, americurium, 172,000 cubic feet of high level radioactive water, large quantities of krypton 85 and later that year 8 million litres of radioactive water containing tritium that were evaporated deliberately were all part of the toxic cocktail that was released.

and yet the entire event never hurt anyone.

Of the states that were higher in the list of cancer averages the ones with similar population density surrounded Pennsylvania, where TMI occurred. New York, with roughly 3 times the population, topped the list, was also in the fall out zone.

The amount of release was so small, you could be right at the effluent point and receive less than a medical x-ray dose.

In reality large amounts of contamination were released beyond Nuclear Industry assurances. The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days*. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured.

But of course, you read somewhere on someone' blog that it was much more and a big cover up and you certainly like that better.

Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused.

Even the nuclear industry doesn't know how much radioactive elements they are releasing normally, it's based on mathematical models. The last *actual* study was done in 1978 when the reactors were in peak operating condition almost forty years ago.

I don't have a citation handy, but as I understand the situation, the rich uranium deposits are very low, resulting in the mining of lower grade deposits, Thus the cost of extracting uranium is going up, on a semi permanent basis.

Then allow me to assist you. From NEA-IAEA, Uranium 2003; Resources, Production and Demand;

Total Identified (formerly Known Conventional) Resources (RAR & Inferred (formerly EAR-I) Resources) in both the under USD 80/kgU (about 3 804 000 tonnes U) and under USD 130/kgU (about 4 743 000 tonnes U) categories increased significantly compared to their 2003 levels, although it is important to note that the bulk of these increases were not the result of new discoveries but were the result of re-evaluations of previously Identified Resources in light of the effects of higher uranium prices on cut-off grades. Identified Resources in the under USD 40/kgU increased by about 13% compared to 2003, mainly due to increases in this category reported by Australia, Brazil and Niger. Total Undiscovered Resources (Prognosticated Resources (formerly EAR-II) & Speculative Resources) in 2005 amounted to about 10 000 000 tonnes U (tU), a slight increase of about 25 000 tU from the total reported in 2003.
At the end of 2004, a total of 440 commercial nuclear reactors were operating with a net generating capacity of about 369 GWe requiring about 67 320 tU. By the year 2025, world nuclear capacity is projected to grow to between about 449 GWe net in the low demand case and 533 GWe net in the high demand case. Accordingly, world reactor- related uranium requirements are projected to rise to between about 82 275 tU and 100 760 tU by 2025.

What this boils down to is there is approximately 21 years (1453000 tU) of soft ore uranium at the worlds current consumption of 67000 tU per year (provided it's found of course). After that point only hard ore sources remain which is where the cost goes up. But the issue is not the cost it's Net Energy Return. You have to process so much rock to get so little uranium and it takes so much energy to get the ore in the first place. 2.4 gigajoules per ton for soft ores and 5.5 gigajoules per ton for hard hard ores. To get a kilogram of uranium you have to process 500 tons of hard ore (almost no soft ore left) - and even that is assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assumes you have a high grade ore. Even then you still have to factor the energetic remediation of the mine tailing.

Then there is the discussion about enrichment, without touching on the energy efficiency of that process, demolishing a decommissioned nuclear reactor has not successfully been performed safely on a large scale yet. Nuclear industry proponents tout the amount of energy that can be extracted from a gram of Uranium but rarely factor the *Net Energy Return* of the Nuclear fuel cycle, associated infrastructure and the long term storage of toxic waste.

The other myth is that carbon dioxide is the major green house gas. Water vapor is the major green house gas...This is relevant because Nuclear power plants

One thing that is not immediately obvious is that greenhouse gas emissions from the Nuclear industry include Chlorinated Fluro-Carbons (CFC114) a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02. Whilst it's equivalent effect is slightly over 8 megatons of C02, more potent is the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer and it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.

the economics of an isolated nuclear power plant looks pretty good, but when you put them in the real world

I think many people are enamoured by the technology and the "idea" of it. It's only when you take a critical and honest view of the entire cycle do you come to the inevitable conclusion that commercial nuclear power is not viable as there is no net energy return.

Does anyone have a link to a study conducted over several weeks/months/years analyzing all the products of this process vs. the processes used now?

http://www.nea.fr/ndd/reports/2002/nea3109.html

But if you don't like Dr. Dittmar's numbers it's not hard to find another estimate which state's there's at least a 100 year supply.

There are engineering details to building a nuclear weapon that aren't well known. But they're not all that deeply hidden, either. A few minutes with Google gets you the basics.

A big, dumb Hiroshima-type implosion bomb made of uranium isn't that hard. Plutonium bombs are tougher to build; more compression is necessary. The later designs have reflectors, tampers, and quite a few layers. Considerable simulation is required to get the design right. Of course, the US and the USSR designed their nuclear arsenals with computers in the 1 MIPS range; today, any laptop has enough CPU power for bomb design. Some older hydrodynamic software for this is available, in FORTRAN. Note the test cases provided, "Detonation example" and "SSTAFF warhead".

A more modern version of that software is available from LLNL. The code was released in 1996 and was upgraded through 2005. There's a torrent available.

Making the components is a pain because many of the materials involved are radioactive, poisonous, flammable metals, or high explosives. Machining uranium is difficult. However, there's a convenient how-to guide, "Machining of Uranium and Uranium Alloys", written by a head machinist at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant and distributed by the U.S. Government. That guide concludes "With proper techniques and safety precautions, uranium and uranium alloys can be safely machined by most shops." Exotic techniques like robotic handling and machining in a liquid bath weren't required. They didn't even use a glove box back then.

Machining plutonium is more difficult. US plants have had troubles with that for decades, and didn't even have a facility that could do it between 1989, when Rocky Flats shut down, and 2002, when Los Alamos started up. But Iran is taking the uranium route, so they don't have to worry about that.

The explosive components have to be made very uniform, to get the uniform compression required. This was a big problem for Los Alamos in the early days, but now that everyone has plastic explosives, it's easier. There's also a problem with the explosion blowing out at the gaps between explosive blocks, but there's a simple trick to fix that. (It's classified in the US, but has leaked out from the USSR side.)

The necessity for krytron detonator switches is overrated. A krytron is a gas-filled tube device from the era of the thyatron. Basically, you need a switch for about 1000 amps at 1KV that turns on in a few nanoseconds. Conveniently, the U.S. Government distributes a design using standard IGBT semiconductors. That's 15 years old; you could probably downsize that design (10" of rack space) today.

Most of the complexity in bomb design appears as bombs are made physically smaller. Truck-bomb sized units are 1940s technology. Smaller warheads require late 1950s technology, and the US did about a hundred full-scale nuclear tests in the 1950s to get that right. Some of that can be replaced with simulation. Eventually, you have to set one off to be confident it will work.

As Ted Taylor (who designed many US bombs) once said, "Everyone (who built an atomic bomb) has succeeded on the first try."

Nuclear power is inherently dangerous, we do not know how to deal with the waste, the nuclear fossil fuel will last only a couple of decades, and huge power plants are as inefficient as it gets because of the long distances electricity is transported. By contrast, distributed generation of electricity as proposed by the article is much more efficient, because it happens very close to the consumer.

There are already passively safe reactor designs available to be built, most of the waste that will ever be produced has already been produced as modern reactors produce far less, and where did you get the idea that there are only a couple of decades of fuel left? More like a hundred years with current technologies and billions of years if breeder reactors are used: http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html

Mod parent up.

Yes, the AP-1000 generates about 1.1GW of electricity. Yes, it's a traditional pressurized water reactor. That's because all the alternatives to pressurized water reactors have in practice turned out to be worse. Gas-cooled reactors have a troublesome record. Pebble-bed reactors tend to have jams in pebble handing.

It's an ongoing frustration with nuclear plant design that the operating temperatures are low, which makes for low efficiency and too much waste heat. But to date, nobody has ever built a gigawatt-sized plant with any of the more exotic technologies. So it makes sense to go forward with the classic approach.

4) Your radiation "release" when the accident began was from the a pressure relief valve on the primary coolant loop - except this was WITHIN the containment vessel. Furthermore, the coolant (water!) only remains radioactive for a short time outside the core. That's why evaporating it was considered safe during cleanup.

Right, so it will only be a problem when they try to demolish the containment building and it's released then, say 10, 20 years from now, and of course your sure that that building is completely sealed, for now.

Triated water remains radioactive for 248 years, so I suppose your right, it's only radioactive for a short time, short enough for it to be radioactive till our great-great-great grand children are born. It's a beta emitter, so I suppose if ovairian tumours, testicular atrophy, shrunken ovaries, decreased brain weight, mental retardation and brain tumours are ok with you then it's safe. I'll save the discussion about what happens when it combines with DNA for another day.

3) All the released elements - how about stating quantities and isotopes? Yes, there was a significant release of krypton but Kr-85 in a beta emitter so presents very little danger outside the body. Also, being a nobel gas, is highly unlikely to combine to form any elements nor does your body naturally update krypton. But it's much more scary to say "oh noes, radioactive release" isn't it? Tritium is more of a concern, but again, quantity? Keep in mind tritium is also naturally occurring and your stated 'findings' are barely above the accepted safe level of 20,000 pCi/L.

Did you actually read what I said? here it is again Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So, pray tell, how the fuck am I supposed to know if the authorities *refused* to take measurements.

Kyrypton-85 is also a gamma emitter so your assertion of how little danger it presents outside the body is pretty weak. It is scary, especially knowing that they are potent carcinogens and that noble gasses, like krypton, decay into more dangerous isotopes. i.e The daughter product is *more* dangerous.

barely above the accepted safe level of 20,000 pCi/L. of *water* not *milk*.

2) Radioactive elements accumulate in the food chain - true. Coal releases radioactive *particles* - bits of things like uranium - into the air. These can accumulate. A nuclear reactor releases heat. A small amount of radiation (less than you get when sun tanning) too, perhaps, but understand that radiation itself does not accumulate in the food chain. Two different things.

Right, so let me get this straight. A coal fired power station, powered by burning fossilised trees, releases radioactive isotopes - true. A nuclear power station, powered by heavily concentrated radioactive elements, release radioactive elements - false.

I think you have been drinking to much Nuclear Industry Kool Aid made with triated water, dood. All reactors leak radioactive effluent, usually via their cooling systems. But even if it comes from mining, enrichment or the power stations themselves, it ends up in the food chain, more and more, e.v.e.r.y.d.a.y.

squawk less than you get from sun tanning squaaaaaaawk.Wow you have swallowed the nuclear industry propaganda hook, line and sinker. Even the nuclear industry doesn't actually know how much radioactive elements they are releasing, it's based on mathematical models. The last *actual* study was done in 1978 when the reactors were in peak operating condition thirty years ago. Is there actually any link to objectivity or even reality in any of your statements? What actual research have you do

• Fort St. Vrain: An HTGR reactor, technically way different from typical power stations now in operation. It only ran for 13 years, almost NEVER at anywhere near it's rated output, because it kept having breakdowns and operational failures. (The short lifespan, and running at extremely low power, prevented the building materials from being irradiated in the way that the building of a "successful" power station would be.) The record of this reactor was a safety nightmare, and it was a financial nightmare for it's Colorado customers. Also, the "cost" of dealing with the high-level waste was hidden via sending it to the National Lab facility in ID (i.e., TAXPAYER subsidy). Here's a reference for some history: http://fsv.homestead.com/FSVHistory.html Note that although they claim to be fully decommissioned, the building is still sitting there, apparently not in use for anything which would expose people for exgtended periods.

• Shoreham: Gadzooks, want to you label this as a success story ??? It cost $6 Billion to build, it completed it's 5% power test successfully, and then it was promptly shut down forever (after less than 1 month). I agree that a nuclear power plant is easy to decommission, if you never actually use it to generate any electric power! But we're hopefully talking about power plants which actually generate electricity, right?

• CTVR Yes, the NRC fact sheet lists it as a decommissioned reactor... but a quick Google shows nothing about this reactor, except a copies of the NRC list. I don't think that this was a Civilian Electrical power station. Possibly, NRC and Military came up with some backroom "let's mark it cleaned up" deal to hide a mess. If you can find a URL for a public utility which operated it, please advise!

• Pathfinder only ran for 13 months http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/decommissioning/com plex/pathfinder.html, and was characterized by the GAO as "a small demonstration plant" (although it's actually listed as way larger than the CVTR toy, see GAO/RCED-99-75 'Nuclear Regulation'). Small output and barely a year of operating time == extremely simple and cheap to clean up. This is another "example" which hardly generated any electrical power at all.

• Douglas Point Per this PDF dated October 2004, http://www.nea.fr/html/rwm/wpdd/canada.pdf "No commercial nuclear power reactors are undergoing active decommissioning in Canada. Three prototype power reactors (NPD, Douglas Point, and Gentilly-1) have been partially decommissioned and put into storage with surveillance mode pending final decommissioning at an undetermined future date." Looks to me like it wasn't a commercial nuclear power station, (just an AECL prototype), and it hasn't yet been decommissioned..

Still... If you've got other candidates which (a) weren't "toy-sized"; and (b) ran for at least 20 years, let's discuss them!

Oh there are plenty of solutions. One is to simply keep the stuff in casks, as we do right now. That is the easiest solution in technical and political terms. Recycling would reduce the waste by 90% and give more energy. Recycling primarily is not used in the USA at the moment because uranium is so cheap, it is easier to mine more than recycling the fuel. But the French manage to do it IIRC and their nuclear electricity is cheap.

Then there are several possible ways to bury the rest using current technology, if for whatever reason you got tired from the casks. Dump it into a subduction zone, inject it into solid rock, inject it into a borehole, etc. The reason this is not done is because the casks work and there seems to be some sort of paranoia about nuclear waste.

Beyond that there is promising research into transmutation of nuclear waste. But since the technology is not in use right at the moment, it can be ignored for now.

Is it kooky to whine that environmentalists are hypocritical by opposing both greenhouse gas emissions and Nuclear energy, when actually the environmentalists who do oppose both are usually into conservation

Conservation is no solution by itself. See what negawatts did to California. No new power plants were built, so electricity had to come off state. So there were brownouts and the price of electricity rocketed. Did people save energy more? Not really. This was wonderfully played around by off state energy companies, like Enron. I cannot heat myself, or run this computer with conservation. I need energy from somewhere. Even if it is food. Energy consumption per capita will increase, it is an historical trend. As China and India beef up their economies it will only make this more painfully obvious. We need power, it must come from someplace. For the safety and prosperity of the human race it must be cheap. Renewables will not be enough to satisfy the demand.

To me, green "kooks" lose the argument the moment they start talking about population control. That may work on a totalitarian state like China, but not in a democracy. To me, anyone who thinks willfully killing their own people provides a solution to any problem is simply out of their mind.

This is BS to quote from "Nuclear Energy and the Kyoto Protocol".

The benefit that nuclear energy brings in terms of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not prohibited by the Kyoto Protocol. The construction of new nuclear power plants will contribute to meeting the targets of those countries that choose to continue with the nuclear option as a domestic energy supply source.

The Kyoto Protocol does, however, incorporate conditions that effectively exclude nuclear energy as an option for implementation under two of the three "flexibility mechanisms" that can be used, in addition to domestic action, by Annex I Parties2 to the UNFCCC to meet their commitments. The three mechanisms are: projects implemented jointly (Article 6), the clean development mechanism (CDM, Article 12), and trading of emission reduction units (Article 17). Restrictions on nuclear energy do not apply to emission trading.

This is not a valid reason for the US not to join this treaty. France for instance relies heavily on nuclear energy to meet the Kyoto requirements. The US could very well do the same if it choses to do so.

Chernobyl was actually somewhat unique. Not only were untrained staff members operating it out-of-spec, but the reactor had a serious design flaw that could lead to power surges:

Description of Chernobyl (scroll down to "positive void coefficient")

The new reactor design mentioned in this article isn't capable of a chernobyl-style explosion, because a malfunction will cause the reactor to shut down instead of power-surge.

"I'm all for alternative energy sources, but nuclear is one source that is too hot too handle."

France produces 78% of their electricity generation from nuclear power. Is it your assertion that the French are "anti-environmentalists"? Eventually coal, petroleum and natural gas supplies will all be exhausted. The only viable alternative to supply the world's energy needs is nuclear.

The minimum size of a nuclear plant is determined by the distance neutrons must travel before being a) thermalized and b) captured. Both of these are many, many orders of magnitude larger than "nanoscopic".

Fine, for enrichment purposes we are talking distances of 30 to 60 cm. Surely the bad guys will never build anything that immense.

If I'm a troll, you're a proliferator.

This is yet another patch on a dike that will one day burst.
Unfortunately the burst will not be visable as it would be with a water dam.

The only fix today, is the one that should have been put in place at the time of the original disaster. Time will not be a friend in fixing this problem, it will only make the fix impossible if the wait is too long.

The entire site needs to be encased in high lead glass.

Yes the lead provides a hazard, but one much lower than radioactive contamination of the water table, and bio-spread by insects and birds.

For more information about chernobyl, you can take a look at this resource.

I agree that fission power *can* be an environmentally sound source of energy production. It certainly can be much less harmful to the environment than hydropower- dams in Washington state have devastated the salmon, and elsewhere have destroyed many habitats. Dams also eventually silt up and become useless. (check out the book Cadillac Desert by Mark Reisner)

It is important however to have heavy regulation by a citizen-responsible branch of the goverment- past regulation has been lax, and energy companies have been very irresponsible (check out the movie China Syndrome- screenplay was written by a nuclear engineer) Also, the cost of waste disposal has to be part of the cost of energy production. Nuclear waste is a huge issue, but I don't think people realize that most nuclear waste comes from weapons production (in the U.S.).

As to the cause of Chernobyl, I think a couple of factors heavily contributed to that disaster: 1) unsafe reactor design- graphite moderator based reactor for both weapons fuel and power production, 2) poor funding- demoralized workforce, poor training, etc (Chernobyl Disaster). The problem with fusion is not that it's not economical, it's that we don't have a working fusion powerplant. What we need (at least in the U.S.) is agressive funding for fusion power. I don't think the oil companies are too keen on this- and currently they seem to have even more influence (i.e. Prez G.W. Bush).

We need to get our sh*t together, come up with a sane way to get value out of the fuel we have piling up

Completed tests indicate that a unit about the size of a bathtub could process a ton of spent fuel in a day.

You might also want to look at this abstract. It suggests, but does not state clearly, that all the trans-uranics (TRU) can be recovered from the salt bath using a liquid metal cathode. If that keeps them out of the waste stream until they've been converted to fission products, so much the better.
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