Slashdot Mirror

Nuclear plants, when running normally, do not kill 28,000 birds a year

No, they kill hundreds of thousands. Which is at least a fraction of the millions killed by coal - and the hundreds of millions killed by glass windows, let alone cats.

most nuclear plants will never have an accident at all, much less one that harms the environment

True. Unfortunately, the few that do cause economic damage costing hundreds of billions.

Solar isn't perfect, but it's got a long way to go before it gets worse than our current alternatives.

Dudes, Maryland's "'Renewable' Waste to Energy" program has you both beat.

Maryland continues to generate electricity by burning waste products, including municipal solid waste, wood waste, and a byproduct of the paper-making process called “black liquor.” These sources are all currently included in the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, or RPS which means they can receive subsidies that are underwritten by Maryland rate-payers. Trash-burning is called “waste to energy” or WTE, whereas black liquor and wood waste both fall under the category of “biomass.” The biomass can come from any state in the same electricity grid as Maryland, while the trash incineration can only come from Maryland, according to the RPS law.

The Energy Recovery Council cites 85 incinerators, operating in 23 states, disposing approximately 30 million tons of municipal solid waste each year and recovering from household waste approximately 15 million megawatt hours of energy per year.[52] However, waste incinerators frequently burn non-household items like tires and the insides of automobiles, and almost any type of incineration releases particulates and toxic chemicals into the air.

A 2008 report from the British Society of Ecological Medicine catalogued the health threats from incineration: incinerators burn materials that result in toxic ash; they release dioxins, particularly at the time of start-up and shut-down, when emissions are not subject to standard monitoring; they emit ultra-fine particulates implicated in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular mortality.[53] A 2013 study of birth outcomes in Italy found that “maternal exposure to incinerator emissions, even at very low levels, was associated with preterm delivery.” [54]

A 2011 study by the Environmental Integrity Project found that trash incinerators produce more pollution per kilowatt hour of energy generated than each of Maryland’s four largest coal-power plants, and these emissions include toxic pollutants such as mercury and lead. The report also found that waste-to-energy facilities are expensive to construct and provide fewer jobs and economic benefits than options such as recycling and source reduction.[55] Additional community concerns are the increase in truck traffic to haul in waste and the proper disposal of incinerated ash.

Maryland hosts three trash incinerators (in Montgomery County, Baltimore City, and Harford), as well as a sewage sludge incinerator in Upper Marlboro, tire incineration in the Harford trash incinerator and in cement kilns in Hagerstown and Union Bridge. The nation’s largest medical waste incinerator is in southeast Baltimore.

In addition to trash incineration, the burning of wood waste and black liquor also poses health problems. Between 2006 and 2012, black liquor and wood waste accounted for 50% of the subsidies given under Maryland’s RPS. Most go to out of state paper mills, resulting in no economic benefits for Marylanders and perpetuating health and environmental damage in Maryland and other states. Air pollution and carbon emissions from these dirty biomass sources travel across state borders; they generate nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide both of which are linked to an array of adverse respiratory effects such as exacerbation of asthma.

[52]US Department of Energy. “Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Perspective on Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas from the United States.” May 2014.
[53]Energy Recovery Council. Fact Sheet: Waste-to-Energy and State Renewable Statues. 2013.
[54]Thompson, Jeremy, and Dr. Honor Anthony. “The Health Effects of Waste Incinerators.” Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine 15.2-3 (2005): 115-56. British Society for Ecological Medicine.
[55]Candela, S., A. Ranzi, L. Bonvicini, F. Baldacchini, P. Marzaroli, A. Evangelista, F. Luberto, E. Carretta, P. Angelini, A. Freni Sterrantino, S. Broccoli, M. Cordioli, C. Ancona, and F. Forastiere. “Air Pollution from Incinerators and Reproductive Outcomes.” Epidemiology 24.6 (2013): 863-70.

Nuclear power: 500MW is considered a "small/compact" nuclear plant, costing about $1.5 billion with a footprint of a few acres with a lifetime of approx. 40 years.

A nuke plant will cost far more than what you are claiming. Costs currently are running between $5000-8000/KW. And that is just to build it - you didn't consider operating costs at all which are far more substantial for a nuke plant than a solar one. The waste disposal alone is a huge cost that doesn't exist with solar.

Why the hell are people investing in solar? The economics make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Really? You can't figure this out? Solar has no failure modes that can render a location uninhabitable. Solar has no serious fuel waste disposal problem. Solar has no weapon proliferation risk. Solar is insurable by private companies rather than nation states. Solar doesn't require getting fuel from elsewhere. Frankly solar has quite a lot to recommend it over nuclear in many (though not all) cases. Nuclear has its advantages but let's not pretend that it doesn't have some very substantial drawbacks.

It appears that 1500 ppb is an insane level.

From here

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is absorbed in both large and small airways. Very high concentrations (>200 ppm) are very dangerous, causing lung injury, fatal pulmonary edema, and bronchopneumonia.

(high levels of NO will convert to nitrogen dioxide in a short period)

The legal limit for air quality over a long period is 53 ppb, and 100 pbb over shorter periods. Children show an increase in asthma even at these levels.

NOx is a serious pollutant. It is a cause of acid rain, asthma, bronchitis and cancer.

12billion?
You are kidding? But your stance on radiation panic clearly shows you are an idiot, and not kidding.

Read this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

Or this: http://www.psr.org/environment...

And try some of the links provided in the article ...

Nuclear has by far the lowest [environmental impact], but for the same reason that many environmentalists are still opposing the Keystone pipeline despite the reality of more incidents of environmental damage from the alternative (inefficient rail shipping with nearly 100x the rate of environmental exposure), it's all about emotion for many in the movement, not about what's truly, measurably better for the planet.

Yes, the total economic loss due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, estimated at $240-500 billion, is nothing but emotion.

The total cost of resettlement, cleanup, and paying medical claims due to Chernobyl is estimated by Belarus at $235 billion.

A hypothetical nuclear disaster in France similar to Fukushima is estimated to cost $580 billion. Other estimates run much higher.

Ah, Rush Limbaugh's famous "Greenies made nuclear power unsafe" meme. A darling here on slashdot, despite so many annoying facts that tend to discredit it.

In the Real World ®, American Greens are the most ineffective political movement since the vegetarians. They have accomplished pretty much nothing since Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. The real actors are the majority of hard-headed average Americans (who are hardly "green", but who are sensible enough to know they don't want or need nuclear power) and the simple realities of market economics.

The cold hard truth is that no private entity has ever made an economically viable terrestrial nuclear fission power plant. Ever. Only socialist and totalitarian regimes can do it, because they can effectively ignore insurance costs, which the USA shouldn't (and although the Price-Andersen subsidies do exactly that, US plants still aren't cost-effective). In a truly free and fair market it would cost far more money for construction, insurance, and decommissioning than an operator could ever possibly recoup. Even the ultra-right wing Cato Institute admits this!

But terrestrial fission power plants are a masturbatory fantasy akin to Steampunkery, only with less whimsical charm. A fever dream of a world that never was, full of steam engines and glowing rocks. They are an obsolete and unnecessary technology fetishized by aficionados, who often seem to be quite willing to give up any form of representative government or free market if only they can have their beloved nuke plants. No tax burden is too high! Because it's not a reasoned argument for them, it's an obsession. So blaming the failings of their fellow travelers on their opposition fits their mindset perfectly - it couldn't possibly be the fault of the nuclear operators that they purposely built the cheapest, least safe designs allowed by law! It must have been those devil-greens! It's their fault!

Saw Edwin Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists several times on the TV after the disaster. He used it as an opportunity to call attention to regulation and safety procedures for reactors in the United States. He said current evacuation procedures for evacuation zones for nuclear reactors were insufficient. Physicians for Social Responsibility have a useful map for checking your proximity to a nuclear reactor http://www.psr.org/resources/evacuation-zone-nuclear-reactors.html From their site, "Current NRC regulations stipulate a 10 mile evacuation zone around nuclear plants. This is clearly insufficient and 50 miles has been recommended." They also note that 1/3 of all Americans live within 50 miles of a reactor.

All good questions. Some investigations are yielding some some answers.

"Bottom-dwelling fish in the Fukushima area show radioactivity levels above the limit of 100 becquerels per kilogram set by the Japanese government. Greenlings, for example, have been found to have levels as high as 25,000 becquerels per kilogram." That's more than just a little excess.

In concrete terms, losses to the fishing industry exceeding a billion dollars are mentioned, with "many fisheries" still closed as of November 2012.

Was the evacuation necessary? Well, it's the government's decision to make, and they made it. Some 4,500 square miles – an area almost the size of Connecticut – was found to have radiation levels that exceeded Japan’s allowable exposure rate of 1 mSV (millisievert) per year. 310 square miles were declared "permanent" exclusion zones. Estimates of the lost economic value of these losses range from $250 to 500 billion.

That's kind of crazy.

http://www.psr.org/news-events/press-releases/coal-pollution-damages-human-health.html

Coal pollution negatively affects lungs, heart, and nervous system of the human body. That matters. What you are proposing is akin to saying that the police shouldn't investigate any robberies at all, because there are murders to solve.

[The] attitude of the lab to the bunker-buster program was that it was quite positive because it was such a large project that fits into the mission of the lab. The lab wanted the project.

No argument there; from the Physicians for Social Responsibility Activist Update:

former Congresswoman Elisabeth Furse (D-OR) sponsored legislation banning development of nuclear weapons with an explosive yield of less than 5 kilotons in 1993....

Stephen Younger, a senior staffer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been arguing publicly that a more flexible, usable nuclear arsenal will be needed to meet threats including terrorism with weapons of mass destruction in the coming century.

See, the problem is, mini-nukes are illegal. The Regents of the University of California tend to appoint people to their labs who are accountable to the law. Since Spencer Abraham couldn't get Browne and Salgado to look the other way and go ahead on the project under wraps, he called them to the carpet on $141,000 worth of barbeque grills. That 's nothing! "As of March 31, 2002, approximately 8,000 Air Force cardholders had over $5 million in delinquent debt" on the travel cards, the GAO said.

The kinds of abuses described in the allegations happen all the time, especially in the military, but you don't see any Joint Chiefs of Staff "mutually agreeing" on their resignations for it.

The real problem, from the Bush point of view, is the overwhelming propensity of Californian voters to insist on following the law instead of developing new "bunker buster" mini-nukes. Bush wants these new weapons, now more than ever, and to get them he needs a National Labs administration willing to look the other way.

I said it was negligible. Now I'll back it up with numbers.

First, we need a number for CO2 output from the SRBs. This is hard since we don't know what exactly the makeup is of this 14% of the fuel that could be carbon-bearing. Let's assume that at the end, an amount of CO2 equal to 14% of the fuel weight gets created. That gives us 1100000*0.14 = 154000lbs of CO2. Now, according to http://www.psr.org/news-apr99.htm, one gallon of gasoline gives us 26 pounds of CO2. So, 154000/26 = 5923 gallons of gasoline burned. Assume your SUV gets 14 miles to the gallon, and you have an SRB output of 423 miles' worth of SUV CO2. Don't forget to multiply by two, since there's two SRB's per shuttle, and we get 846 miles.

Compare 846 miles with "many millions of SUV-equivalent miles". I think I can confidently state that you're utterly, dead wrong.

Yeah, I sure would like to know more about DU in weapons tech. - if you feel like posting more about it, you've got my vote.
I am familar, however, with some of the basics - uranium is primarially an Alpha ray emitter. These are basically harmless - a sheet of paper can stop them. Of course, decay can produce Beta and Gamma radiation. The fact that the "real" danger from, as you rightly point out, depleted uranium only arises when you're talking about inhalation of dust-like particles (for whatever that 'fact' means- according to the media today and yesterday in Ireland, Britain and France the 'facts' about DU seemed to change from station-to-station hour-to-hour) has not escaped me.
The thing that I find deplorable -if true- is the way that such matter can effectively and easily poison a water/food supply. I assume this could happen because of the radioactivity of the matter produced by a DU weapon's strike. However, details were sketchy on the TV reports.
I've looked up the subject of DU on the internet - again lots of controversy but with the anti-DU voice being the loudest.
Try http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm. I must state, I am very wary of a site like iacenter.org, but sites such as this (http://www.rama-usa.org/ducdi.htm) hold much more sway as they seem less politically motivated. Another site, this time an American veteran's, is here, and a very comprehensive site is here.
For my money, the better site is http://www.psr.org/duissuebrief.html.

Mind you, just to add my voice to the mass of anecdotal evidence out there: I've been around a variety of dangerous chemicals and elements. I've had fun with everything from quick silver(liquid mercury to the modern man) to a variety of radioactive isotopes(calm down- it was within the confines of a university 8). I am well aware that there is unecessary panic by those without a good knowledge of the related chemistry and/or physics. However, I am still very uneasy about certain things I have had direct contact and just because I've experienced no side-effects, it doesn't mean everyone else will escape side-affects after sharing the same experience as myself.

8)