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Creaating nuclear power efficiently today requires uranium, something that is very limited on this planet. (snip) ..if Fukashima has not occurred, we would be currently looking at a global uranium shortage in the next 5 years..

It would be a great deal less limited if the US wasn't so intent on throwing the baby out with the bathwater:

"The materials potentially available for recycling (but locked up in stored used fuel) could conceivably run the US reactor fleet of about 100 GWe for almost 30 years with no new uranium input."

(source: World Nuclear Association)

China is desperate. If they go with coal exclusively, they will be unable to dig it out of the ground quickly enough to feed their power plants. Here is a quote from World Nuclear Organization: "nearly half the country's rail capacity is used in transporting coal." At the same time there is a limit to how much "traditional" pollution even the Chinese will accept.

The Chinese build wind power, but some of it unfortunately takes a long time (years) to actually get grid connected because of poor planning. Wind resources in China are quite poorly placed compared to where the power demand is.

Nuclear in China has a lot of advantages that it does not have in many other places. Lots of cheap investment money, cheap labour, favourable regulations, no problems with NIMBY'ism, probably low insurance costs, probably ties to the military.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is anti-nuclear.

Read about the plans for new nuclear reactors worldwide.

Over 60 power reactors are currently being constructed in 14 countries including China, South Korea and Russia.

Mainland China has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 28 under construction, and more about to start construction. Additional reactors are planned, including some of the world's most advanced, to give a five- or six-fold increase in nuclear capacity to at least 58 GWe by 2020, then possibly 200 GWe by 2030, and 400 GWe by 2050.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is anti-nuclear.

Read about the plans for new nuclear reactors worldwide.

Over 60 power reactors are currently being constructed in 14 countries including China, South Korea and Russia.

Mainland China has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 28 under construction, and more about to start construction. Additional reactors are planned, including some of the world's most advanced, to give a five- or six-fold increase in nuclear capacity to at least 58 GWe by 2020, then possibly 200 GWe by 2030, and 400 GWe by 2050.

In mid April [2012], after a series of high-level meetings, the Japanese government approved the restart of Kansai Electric's Ohi 3 & 4 reactors, and urged the Fukui governor and the Ohi mayor to endorse this decision. They restarted in July. Without the twin 1180 MWe units, significant electricity shortages would have been likely in summer peak periods.

(source)

Moreover:

Japan's idled nuclear reactors will gradually be restarted under the newly-elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as the units receive the all-clear from the country's Nuclear Regulation Authority, the Nikkei reported.

(source)

Japanese LNG prices went up from ~$13/MBTU just before the Fukushima event to ~$18/MBTU in July 2012 (source) just before the 2 reactors restarted, and is at $16.66 today

So as nice as it would be to have more nuclear energy; the window of opportunity is gone.

China has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 28 under construction, and more about to start construction.

Chinese nuclear capacity will be 58 GWe by 2020, 200 GWe by 2030, and 400 GWe by 2050.

China has been able to close 71 GWe of small inefficient coal burning power plants since 2006, cutting annual coal consumption by about 82 million tonnes and annual carbon dioxide emissions by some 165 million tonnes.

What waste?

Here are a few hits from the 1st page of a Google search...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Introduction/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle-Overview/#.UVsb1FeOCF8
http://www.nei.org/keyissues/nuclearwastedisposal/recyclingusednuclearfuel/
http://inhabitat.com/china-finds-way-to-reuse-nuclear-fuel-60-times-longer/
http://larouchepac.com/node/14720

Pellets, as manufactured, are _very_ smooth. This is a decent overview I just found from Google: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Conversion-Enrichment-and-Fabrication/Fuel-Fabrication/#.UVmkjas5yZc

They start life as powder and then are packed in a way that makes them smooth.

However, just as in any kind of manufacturing: defects happen. A working reactor will have over a million pellets in it. Somewhere in there one is going to be misshapen.

Some of what we can do is run a ton of statistically guided calculations to understand what kind of safety and design margins need to be in place to keep problems from occurring. We can also look at modifying the design of the pellets to insure safer operation. Both of these things are very difficult (and costly) to do experimentally.

My lab (INL) does a lot of experimental fuel work... but we use these detailed simulations to guide the experiments so we can use our money more wisely. It literally takes years to develop a new fuel form, manufacture it, cook it in an experimental reactor, let it cool down, slice it open and see what happened. Using these detailed simulations we can do a lot of that "virtually" to help them decide on experimental parameters so that at the end of that whole sequence they have a bunch of _very_ good experimental results instead of half of them just being failures...

Also, we do actually have a bunch of detailed experimental results to compare our simulations to. Even with this fidelity of modeling we are still not able to perfectly capture what happens in all of those experiments. Even more detailed models (like the multiscale one in the video) need to be developed to be able to truly predict all the complex phenomena that goes on in nuclear fuel.

There is still a LOT more work to do...

"Current estimates are that if we had a "uranium economy" where any sort of significant amount of power came from fission, is that there's enough fuel for about 12 years. Seriously, look it up."

Okay.

The current uranium reserves are enough for 80 years at current rates (~5 million tonnes total, and ~68000 tonnes per year), and that's not accounting for any future discoveries of significant deposits or using lower-grade deposits, which would greatly expand that supply if there was demand for it (i.e. if energy costs continue to climb as cheap fossil fuels get harder to supply). It doesn't account for use of breeder reactors or reprocessing of spent fuel, which would expand that supply by orders of magnitude. It also doesn't account for reprocessing weapons grade uranium. And if talking about CANDU reactors, they have much more diverse fuel possibilities than conventional ones. It's fair to say that the supply of uranium is a heck of a lot more secure in terms of future supply than, say, oil.

And of course uranium has been a proxy for oil. So is every other energy supply. I don't have to look that one up. What's your point?

Wind power is great, assuming you have base load supplied by something else and you've built up plenty of overcapacity to deal with days when the wind is calm. Natural gas is as much a finite resource as uranium is, but we're going through the supply a lot faster. Natural gas prices are low at the moment, but they aren't going to stay that way. What then? Solar PV? Not much use in Ontario in the winter with significantly fewer daylight hours. And people complain rather bitterly about ever more wind farms in their neighborhoods.

It's pretty clear that a mix of energy supplies are needed, and I don't see any reason why nuclear shouldn't be a *part* of that mix.

1. France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
2. France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this.

Now get off my lawn.

Back in the 1990s this was developed at Los Alamos and a few other accelerator centers. it's not new or unique to belgium.
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/ATW.html

http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1999/venneri.htm

We actually have plans for 24 new nuclear plants in the US that were submitted in 2007: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html However, the fate of these is not certain due not only to Fukushima but economic and political reasons.

So does Japan. For an overview http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf122_heavy_manufacturing_of_power_plants.html (scroll down a page to see the table)

I suppose it depends on the design, but a smaller reactor can be built so that if it loses cooling it just shuts down (i.e. the reaction stops), not melts down. I remember reading about this a long time ago, about how we could have reactors in neighborhoods with no problems. Oh wait, here we go:

"Most [small reactors] are also designed for a high level of passive or inherent safety in the event of malfunction. A 2010 report by a special committee convened by the American Nuclear Society showed that many safety provisions necessary, or at least prudent, in large reactors are not necessary in the small designs forthcoming."

From http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf33.html.

The assumption was a supply accessible to us humans with present or near term technology. On earth helium is actually in very short supply. Uranium on the other hand is relatively abundant. It might be one of the most common elements in the universe but that helium is staring at us from the other side of the fence.

According to Worldnuclear.org, the price for the new seawalls and tsunami/quake countermeasures at Hamaoka NPS, more or less similar in size to Fukushima Daiichi, is US$1.7 Billion. That would have been chump change to TEPCO, the largest utility in Japan.

What pisses me off the most is the people who wring their hands and say we should end Nuclear Power based on a first generation commercial design 20 years past it's design life in the most seismically active place in the world on the coast of the country that has such bad Tsunamis that they actually got the world to use their language in naming it. At the same time there have been near zero coverage of the tens of thousands of people and billions of dollars in property destroyed by the quake and Tsunami.

blah blah, hand waving, unable accept the situation that the operator didn't operate the plant to design specification. Everything you need to know is here

This is all a result of preventing the industry from advancing. Imagine if we were stuck with first generation airplanes? Sure there were accidents as the technology developed and many were killed on the planes and on the ground. But the only way to get better is to do it. We could be sitting here with near limitless energy and zero CO2 emissions if breeders were pursued.

Yep, same old story, power too cheap to meter, could shoulda woulda but didn't have the materials technology to support a burner program that even works. Insert standard argument about the insanity of a plutonium economy.

Insert your retort of Carter did this Carter did that

Insert my response that RayGun dismantled all of Caters legal constructs and the Nuclear Industry itself couldn't find financial backing blah blah - been there done that,, nothing new here move along.

Don't come back unless you have an workable answer to reactor containment vessel embrittlement - oh you don't know what that is do you.

Current nuclear is cost competitive. It is not science fiction. Please educate yourself.

It ought to work well as a scarecrow, too.

I also didn't say — or imply — anything which you attribute to me. The simple fact is that other sources of energy — ridiculously and absurdly, even solar — have more deaths per TWh than nuclear. It's a simple fact.

If we're serious about addressing the world's energy needs while moving away from fossil fuels, nuclear MUST be a part of the discussion, because it's not all going to be wind farms, hydro, and solar panels.

It's about energy density. But be my guest and keep vilifying nuclear in the face of the evidence. And speaking of "dense", in case you don't get it, this doesn't mean there shouldn't be safety and oversight. It means we should look at the true risks of nuclear vs. the long term risks from other energy sources, particularly fossil fuels...not only in terms of deaths (which, compared to other energy sources, are minimal), but the risk from unstable geopolitical situations, wars for resources, and so on.

It's not like we're going crazy building new plants in the US; we just approved the first new nuclear plant in three decades. That's ridiculous. Meanwhile, China has at least 25 reactors under construction, with many more planned...

The construction cost of the pair of AP1000 works out to $6.36 per watt (ish)... the only way to get a cost that high is if the plant never actually goes online. In reality, the plant will operate for 40-60 years. The world nuclear association has a reasonable writeup of the actual costs of current reactors, and the estimated costs of new ones. It's looking like it'll be around 10 cents per killowatt.

Then, towards the end, he will surprise you by a bunch of unsophisticated statements like nuclear has no foreign imports requirements for Japan (even though it has both Uranium import and waste export requirements).

Idou, I find people who value "sophistication" over accuracy and correctness, to be rather tiresome. As to the imports, it's worth noting that vastly less infrastructure is needed to import and export (and the exporting part is optional!) nuclear plant fuel than fossil fuel or electricity infrastructure. In a strategic sense, there is far less risk from blockades and trade wars than with other means of importing energy.

Strategically, exporting used fuel rods is a far less urgent problem. They can always pile them up somewhere for a few decades (or as I mentioned before, get fuel rod reprocessing to work), if there are obstacles.

Or that there are no credible alternatives to nuclear, even when nuclear only accounts for like just 13% world electrical power production after 50 years.

What holds collectively doesn't necessarily hold for a small part. Googling around, I see that Japan has almost 30% of its power generation in nuclear power. That same linked chart shows that there's more than a third in additional generation capacity currently planned or under construction. So you're off by over a factor of two. I wonder why you even bothered to make this ingenuous, but easily defeated argument.

Now, replacing 30% of your country's electricity producing infrastructure is a bit complicated, especially given the desire to make it as independent of importation as possible. Let's look at those global statistics and see what the world uses which Japan could replace its nuclear power with.

First, the world generates two thirds (67%) of its power from fossil fuels, most from coal (40%) and most of the rest from natural gas (21%). Either one is dependent on imports. So right away we see the huge flaw with treating Japan like the rest of the world.

The last big item is hydroelectric power. I imagine there is some hydro power left in Japan, but I doubt it'll cover the gap. Note at this point, that fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydroelectric make up 97% of the world's generating capability. The logic that claims Japan can abandon nuclear power because the world only has 13% of its power generation in nuclear, ignores that virtually all of the rest of the power generated is by means that have serious risks for Japan (import risks from fossil fuels) or are already probably fairly well developed (hydro power).

Note that aside from hydro, renewables barely register. They make up a considerable portion of some European countries's power generation, but not the world in general. Solar and wind use a lot of real estate, a particular problem in Japan, and are intermittent power sources. If one wants to replace a base load (always on) power source like nuclear, you need either batteries or a reciprocating power source, that can be started and stopped quickly, like hydro or natural gas.

Geothermal power is a decent base load power source (it does have a non-renewable portion that depletes over time), but to get a lot of it, you need to drill pretty deep and pretty extensively or have the luck of being on a huge heat source like Iceland or Yellowstone.

So once again, I don't see ithe power sources that will replace nuclear power in Japan.

Then he will pop up again weeks later as if the thread never took place. It is a big time sink . . . you have been warned . . .

As opposed to you? In my defense, nothing happened to warrant a change of opinion.

1. Current uranium-based reactors are more affordable than thorium reactors.

2. The path for licensing a thorium-based reactor in the US is exceedingly uncertain.

While a thorium-based fuel cycle may be a good idea, it's just not going to be done by any commercial enterprise today. The costs and risks are too high. When staring at a $5B initial investment cost, any electrical utility is going to favor the known route ... which, frankly, could just as easily mean building 10 natural-gas fired plants instead of 1 big nuke.

India, however, is going full-bore on a thorium-based fuel cycle, and has already built a few reactors that are capable of accepting thorium. Copied shamelessly from world-nuclear.org:

India's plans for thorium cycle

With huge resources of easily-accessible thorium and relatively little uranium, India has made utilization of thorium for large-scale energy production a major goal in its nuclear power programme, utilising a three-stage concept:

Pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWRs) fuelled by natural uranium, plus light water reactors, producing plutonium.

Fast breeder reactors (FBRs) using plutonium-based fuel to breed U-233 from thorium. The blanket around the core will have uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium (particularly Pu-239) is produced as well as the U-233. Advanced heavy water reactors (AHWRs) burn the U-233 and this plutonium with thorium, getting about 75% of their power from the thorium. The used fuel will then be reprocessed to recover fissile materials for recycling.

This Indian programme has moved from aiming to be sustained simply with thorium to one 'driven' with the addition of further fissile plutonium from the FBR fleet, to give greater efficiency. In 2009, despite the relaxation of trade restrictions on uranium, India reaffirmed its intention to proceed with developing the thorium cycle.

A 500 MWe prototype FBR under construction in Kalpakkam is designed to produce plutonium to enable AHWRs to breed U-233 from thorium. India is focusing and prioritizing the construction and commissioning of its sodium-cooled fast reactor fleet in which it will breed the required plutonium. This will take another 15 â" 20 years and so it will still be some time before India is using thorium energy to a significant extent.

This is a well-known consideration when using bodies of water for cooling, and I'd be surprised if the environmental impact review for this project failed to do the calculations and address this issue. It's part of the discussion here. Some power plants even need to decrease their output power when outdoor temperatures rise in order to comply with regulations on how much heat they can dump into their sources of cooling water.

Except situation B, as shown by the nuclear industry, is a lot less than even .001%. We've gotten a LOT of reactor years, with a total of 3 major incidents.

TMI - radiation release was pretty much confined to the plant, and what escaped was short lived(and likely less horrible than living a similar distance from a coal plant, even at the worst point). No identified deaths.
Chernobyl - Really bad. Still a limited number of deaths, and built in ways that would never have passed muster in most of the rest of the world, much less the USA, Europe, etc... No containment dome, positive void coeffecient, carbon moderation rods, etc...
Fukushima - a first generation nuclear plant, within a year of decommissioning anyways, taken out by a Tsunami. Some land is currently off limits due to radiation concerns, but on the whole the danger is far less than all the other crud released by the wave. To date, known casualties at the plant are restricted to what could have happened at any other industrial facility when hit by an earthquake and giant wave of water. In addition, it's been noted that more modern plants wouldn't suffer many of the same failures, as said failures had been figured and and countermeasures designed and implemented. Things like a somewhat higher/differently designed seawall, not putting the generators in the basement, and proper hydrogen diffusers/burnoff devices.

Risk management - I'd rather take the .02% chance* of being affected by a nuclear accident than sacrifice a pretty much guaranteed 1% of my life. Of course, I have above average math ability.

On subsidies - did you read up on Price-Anderson and find out such things that the US Governemnt hasn't ever had to pay out under it's terms? Realize that the US Government tends to stick it's nose(and finances) into ANY disaster of that magnitude? That, even being generous for counting P-A as a subsidy(insurance schemes like this being fairly discretional on how you value them on the basis of your assumptions).

*14k reactor years of civil operation, 3 major accidents, .02% chance of major accident per reactor year. Death toll is harder to calc, considering the accidental deaths are like 50 for Chernobyl, and 0 for TMI and Fukishima**. Still, let's use the 350k evacuated from Fukushima as a standard. That's a .014% chance of dying IN Chernobyl (50/350k), and much lower odds if you consider (50/(350K*14K)). .000001% chance of dying if you live right next to a nuclear reactor from a major accident involving it, per year, by my calculation. Of course, that doesn't take into account that most of the 50 deaths, specifically the 35 initial ones, were all plant workers or emergency responders.
**I'll admit to not counting deaths that could have happened in pretty much any industry - you can get killed in a steam explosion as easily, if not more easily, in a coal plant as you can a nuclear. Meanwhile, finding a few thousand deaths by coal isn't hard at all. Heck, it's more an annual figure of the death toll, and that's today, not going back to the begennings of the industry. Just about everything is safer today - why can't we build some safe nuke plants, get the actively killing coal plants shut down, and then move on to the older, more dangerous(and less efficient) nuke plants, just to be safe?

Nearly all of it. THink of it this way: UK has 18-25% of their electricity nukes (basically, 18 reactors). Now, not a big deal, it is about the same as America. What is interesting is that they have accumulated all that fuel since 1967 (average appears to be 35 years). And that is less than 5% burned. So, if UK, puts in these reactors, then they will be able to burn the rest of the fuel. How long will it take? Over a 100 years depending on how many reactors they put in.

Note that this is simply GE's IFR and here is the info on IFR.

Basically, if UK or America builds these, it will be cheaper than storing them. In addition, it will likely be safer.
And yes, I know that you want a QUANTATIVE number, but not really needed. Think instead in terms of how much and how long. If they build new reactors to cover ALL OF THEIR ENERGY NEEDS, they can run them for 100 years with just this waste fuel. What is missing is that the reactors are not cheap.

Solar thermal is a great option for reducing your demand from the grid, but cannot economically handle the heavy demands.

That is completely and utterly wrong. Solar thermal is actually ideal for meeting peek demand because the molten salt used to store and transport heat is better than 90% efficient. It is easier to adjust the output than it is with nuclear.

Geothermal has huge potential, but the technology to make it viable in all areas has not been demonstrated on an industrial level. Hydro is a great source of power but only so many dams can be build. Wave and tidal power have cost, regulatory, and technological issues still.

According to "Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power" Japan has more than enough natural resources to shut down all its reactors, which is in fact what they are looking to do long term. Fukushima was entirely avoidable. They have 324 GW of achievable potential in the form of onshore and offshore wind turbines (222 GW), geothermal power plants (70 GW), additional hydroelectric capacity (26.5 GW), solar energy (4.8 GW) and agricultural residue (1.1 GW).

It is a shame they don't have room for solar thermal, but as you can see they don't actually need it to achieve their goal.

Natural gas is viable, but the price is so volatile that it could quickly become unaffordable, especially if huge demands were suddenly placed on supply. Besides gas is not as green as some of the other sources.

Actually we have plenty of our own so are in control of the cost and the supply, or at least should be. On the other hand we don't mine coal any more. That was why I mentioned it as an alternative to coal.

I cannot speak so to the 90 year clean up project on the UK reactors, but this is an anomaly. Plants have been cleaned up and decommissioned in less time. In the US all plants have a decommission fund that covers those costs.

In the US the NRC requires decommissioning within 60 years of shutdown, but they only require entombment on-site where as we want to have the land cleared. Entombment means there is going to be waste there indefinitely until someone decides to do a proper clean up. You can tell they are doing it on the cheap as their cost estimate is $300m, where as ours is several billion Pounds (double digit billion dollars).

Canada is looking at 90 years for waste processing from nuclear sites too, which like the UK ends with burial and entombment.

One subsidy that keeps getting hung over nuclear is insurance. The truth is, nuclear utilities have insurance that covers pretty much anything that could happen short of Fukushima/Chernobyl disasters.

In the UK the limit is £140m, where as Fukushima has already run up billions in costs. The tax payer is liable for anything beyond that £140m. Canada's limit is $75 million. The US has a 10 billion insurance pot, which sounds impressive until you realise that the long term cost of the Fukushima accident is likely to be at least $100 billion, with some estimates as high as $250 billion.

Remember that it isn't just the cost of clean up, you have to compensate all the businesses that lost out, re-house people, pay them benefits while they have no work, house them while to decontaminate, spend money monitoring radiation levels to ensure consumer confidence in food grown in the area etc. The economy as a whole has suffered from power shortages reducing output from factories while nuclear reactors remain offline. The cost of all that is also pulling money away from other government funded projects and causing inflation and deepening debt as they have to borrow and print money to pay for it.

I say "they" but of course I mean the tax payer, the ordinary citizen. Even without accidents it is still by far the most expensive form of large scale electricity generation.

The only alternative is coal. Nucular and coal is all there is. And coal is worse. Coal ash has more radioactive emissions than nucular plants, and arsenic and landslides too. There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.

In Europe I believe the backup plan is buying more natural gas from Russia.

Normal, as the majority of uranium comes from Kazakhstan.

Utilizing solar power for the plant-tending machinery sounds like a good idea, at first... then you realize that plants themselves are solar powered, and therefore every square meter you are devoting to powering the machinery is a reduction of the potential plant-matter production. A possible semi-alternative might be to make the roofs of all homes into solar arrays, thus providing shelter and power simultaneously - of course, the occupants of those dwellings may not want to give up the electricity this would generate.

LFTR-based energy solutions come immediately to mind as a cheap, plentiful, and safe solution to our power needs.

Thorium is fairly plentiful, is produced as a "waste" by-product of conventional mineral-extraction processes, and the US has a stockpile of it large enough to run the entire country (and then some) for nearly a decade. The process of extracting energy from it results in an incredibly small mass of waste, orders of magnitude less than our current plants produce.

To top it all off, it's impossible for a LFTR plant to "melt down", and the startup/shutdown process takes a matter of hours, rather than weeks or months. As a matter of fact, there was a research group who made a reactor in the 50s who simply turned it off for the weekend on Friday, then turned it on again on Monday - they just shut it down for two days, then brought it back up.

As another indication of safety, the US government funded a research group in the 1950s who very nearly put a thorium reactor in an airplane. They stopped not because of safety concerns, but because fission-powered aircraft were not as cheap and expendable as the newly-developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology as a delivery system. Missiles don't require a crew to ride them into enemy airspace.

Speaking of the military aspects of cheap power, one interesting "benefit" of LFTR technology is that weapons-grade fissionable material is not a waste product of the process. This may have something to do with the huge number of fast-breeder nuclear reactors in the US; their main product (other than energy) is weapons-grade plutonium.

Yet another indicator of safety: This is a pdf from the Thorium Energy Alliance that has, on its front page, a picture of enough thorium to satisfy a person's lifetime energy needs being held in a bare hand. You see, thorium isn't nearly as "radioactive" as other nuclear materials - it's not fissile, it's merely fertile.

If the US isn't careful, they're going to lose any ability to utilize this technology; Both China and India are working on thorium-based reactors currently, with China's expressed goal being to monopolize the IP rights - yet another reason to abolish the current Intellectual Property system?

More information on thorium and thorium-based technologies can be found here.

You are making the assumption that nuclear power plants would nut be profitable under free market conditions.

Admittedly I'm just working from currently available information. There has never been an economically viable terrestrial nuclear fission plant - every single one has required government subsidies, taxpayer-subsidized protection from risk, government-assured forced sales of power to citizens who would have preferred to buy power from non-nuclear sources, etc. etc. etc.

In a market that allowed competition, there would be non-nuclear options. It has been abundantly demonstrated that when non-nuclear options are available, people prefer them. This would drive the selling price of nuclear power down, not up, which would make them even less economically viable than they are now.

You further make the assumptions that materials inside of nuclear power plants are not valuable, and would not make up the cost of decommissioning, and likely turn a profit.

Hmmm. Well, yes, I am assuming that waste will not be freely sold to the highest bidder, since it would be highly potent war materiel. You do have a point there; it depends on exactly how free you want your free market to be. If you allow the sale of dirty bombs and their precursors, then yes large amounts of high level waste are extremely valuable and their sale would reduce decommissioning costs dramatically. Otherwise, not so much; existing research reactors can already produce all the nuclear materials we need (for medicine, detectors, etc.) inexpensively.

But you are right on about everything else. We can't do anything with fascism. We have to ditch this fascist economics system or we will all be doomed.

See, this is where Ron Paul and Denis Kucinich can have a meeting of minds (I like 'em both, personally) despite their extreme differences.

You seem to indicate a preference for socialist policy, but your assumptions for such policies are unsound. We could, of course, find out fairly quickly if they are true or not by at least temporarily lifting the ban on new nuclear plant development and nixing all subsidies on the industry.

There is no such ban. One was recently built near me, in fact, and this page says there are 20 more in the works. The US government has been offering extremely attractive subsidies since 2005 to offset public distaste for nuclear power. The fact that people do not want them does not matter; our government continues to privatize profit and socialize risks by forcing the US taxpayer to not only subsidize these plants but also to buy the power they produce. In a free market, there would be no need for nuclear power; biogas would drive it off the market by being more desirable to informed consumers (and also cheaper, in the long run).

But I think I know why the banksters and their allies love nuclear power. Nuclear power can't be distributed among the people like other forms of electricity generation, and while you can't really get away with using the military to protect the profits of coal-burning power plants, you can definitely have your government lackeys send soldiers with M16s to guard centralized nuke plants. Nuclear plants are a huge military liability that no general in his right mind would want on friendly soil, but so what? The military is controlled by civilian politicians who are easily bought. Nuclear power is yet another way for entrenched powers to stay entrenched without ever having to be smarter, faster, stronger, or in any other way better than their competition.

Nonetheless, this is where you and I meet, philosophically. We have differing solutions in mind but we're both willing to get rid of subsidies to private industry (I'm also willing to push cost externalities back on to commerce and industry by force) and see what happens. It won't be worse than leaving the banksters in charge!

You should do more research on nuclear plants. When you reduce power too much, reaction poisons build up. To increase power again safely, you just have to wait for the xenon to decay. As you might guess from the subject of the link, trying to ignore that is a bad idea.

You might be surprised to learn that we have quite a few 30 year old power plants here, and they're not going away any time soon. Of course, any plant can reduce it's yield as long as you don't mind spending money to produce waste heat. It's not necessarily a matter of capability, it's a matter of economic operation. It's cheaper if you don't have to make a base load plant act like a load following plant. If you're not too picky, a hammer and a rock are interchangeable.

As for France, they handle off-peak through a combination of exporting the surplus, throttling their hydro power, and throttling the reactors that are early enough in their fuel cycle to tolerate it.

I can agree that the categories may not be as sharply defined today as they once were, but they clearly still exist. Even you speak of base loads and peak loads, and using hydro storage to level peak off. Life would be simpler if all plants could just arbitrarily load follow and if efficiency didn't suffer for it, but clearly they can't. Nobody builds a hydro storage plant just for fun, they built it because they needed to level the apparent load to base plants. It was cheaper than the on-going losses of forcing a base load plant to behave like a load follower.

New plants have zero exhaust except for CO2 ... and even that will be stored away in a few years.

Emphasis added, because we have to cut CO2 emissions as fast as we can. Carbon sequestration isn't guaranteed to be available in a few years, or guaranteed to be as cheap or as safe as nuclear (we'd basically be creating new potential "killer lakes"). Meanwhile nuclear plants, while not perfect, are much safer than coal plants, and only emit a few percent of the CO2 from equivalent coal plants.

Many attempts to make Thorium-based reactors have been tried, but none have been successful enough to make it to production. I could see a Thorium reactor in 10-20 years, but there is no way that it would fit in a car.

The article makes it clear this group is quite convinced that it will work. They say they expect to get a vehicle on the road within 2 years. The whole issue of feasibility comes down to the following line from the article:

A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.

I can not imagine a 500 lb nuclear reactor. The reactor will need containment vessels for fuel and spent fuel. It will require large amounts of water for cooling. It will require control rods. And, most importantly, it will require a turbine. Each of those components will be close to a ton. The idea that it could all be less than 500 lbs is just silly.

I hope nobody invests any money in this. It isn't real.

It could be too late. The article says they have 40 employees already. I really can't imagine how he has gotten this much grant money or private investors.

Actual web site of promoter. Even worse car-related web site of promoter. He's been plugging this since 2009 or so.

Laser-induced fission is quite feasible, and requires far less energy input than laser-induced fusion. Laser fission of thorium has been done on a small scale as a lab experiment. Thorium reactors have been built, with modest success.

A pure thorium reactor won't achieve criticality, because thorium has no isotopes that fission on their own. The fuel has to have uranium or plutonium mixed in to start the nuclear reaction. The laser concept seems to be to use a laser to get things going.

There's been some interest in accelerator-pumped thorium fission. It's been tried in Japan, but that group hasn't reached breakeven. It's a plausible concept, but so far nobody has been able to figure out a way to make it work.

Incidentally, this is not a "clean" process. It generates radioactive by-products where the accelerator beam hits the thorium, in addition to the usual nuclear reactor fission products. A car-sized version is a fantasy.

As for the cost, the average US nuclear power plant puts out very close to one gigawatt, and costs on the order of 6-9 billion dollars to build and another 30 billion in expenses over its lifetime. This tower has an estimated construction cost of 750 million dollars, and although I can't find any estimates of the maintenance cost, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "a hell of a lot less than completely rebuilding it every 3 years of its spec'd lifetime".

Average nuclear reactor output in the U.S. is around 950 MW. Nuclear plants have a capacity factor of a bit more than 90%. So your 950 MW reactor will put out an average 855 MW.

As I calculated in a post above, capacity factor for this tower should be about 28%, for an average 56 MW generation. You'd need a bit more than 15 of these towers to equal the power output of one 950 MW nuclear reactor. If this tower costs $750 million, and you need to build 15.3 of them to equal a nuclear plant, you're at $11.5 billion construction costs vs the $6-$9 billion you cited for nuclear.

Actually a 1 GW nuclear reactor should only cost $1-$5 billion. The $6-$9 billion cost figure is after you include financing - that is, interest on the loans. If you included financing on $11.5 billion for your 15.3 solar towers, you'd be up around $15-$21 billion. So MWh for MWh, these towers are considerably more expensive to construct than a nuclear reactor.

Also, your $30 billion operating costs is wildly off. A nuclear reactor generating 855 MW puts out about 7.5 million MWh in a year. Wholesale electricity prices are around $40-$100 per MWh. So the reactor generates about $300-$750 million worth of electricity in a year. If its expenses over 40 years are $30 billion, that's $750 million per year in expenses. The power companies would be losing money operating the reactors, and they would be falling over themselves trying to shut them down.

Cost to generate nuclear power in the U.S is about $48-$73 per MWh depending on whether you use a 5% or 10% discount rate. So the nuclear plant's operational costs are about $360-$550 million per year. Amortized over the 15.3 towers, that would be equivalent to each tower having an operational budget of $24-$36 million per year.

An international task force is developing six nuclear reactor technologies for deployment between 2020 and 2030. Four are fast neutron reactors.
All of these operate at higher temperatures than today's reactors. In particular, four are designated for hydrogen production.

Don't we have a crapload of unused base load power in this world which we could use for hydrogen production?

Not for the same price per kWH. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html . Nuclear generation is almost the same cost as wind and solar, and can be used at our convenience rather than whenever its windy or when the suns out. Keep in mind wind and solar energy sources need to have their energy stored when the energy is generated. The peak generation time for the power is always out of sync with the peak energy use time for the energy consumer. Right now you can use batteries, which hurt the environment through their production and disposal, or you need to come up with some other method. Right now a company in Montana is suggesting using wind/solar energy to pump water up a mountain to a holding pool then releasing it back down the mountain during peak energy use times. The problem with this is it damages the wilderness they put it in. A nuclear plant can be put almost anywhere, like in the middle of an uninhabited desert. This is true especially the new ones that use sodium as coolant and recycle 99 percent of their radioactive waste in a breeder reactor. You know, the ones the environmental nut-jobs and nuclear fear-mongers wont allow to be built in spite of bitching about how bad all our other energy sources are while offering no other feasible solutions.

India:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_India

China:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-05/26/content_12580470.htm

China is starting to suffer brownouts due to policy to limit coal. China is using 50% of world coal production.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html

I will disagree with EIA about coal in China. There is currently a new policy that says no more new coal power plants unless they replace old coal plants. New coal plants have to be more efficient too (eg. combined cycle, or coal gassification). China will also run out of its coal reserves within 30 years at current extraction rates.

China cannot grow coal because lack of the resource - they are become one of the largest importers of coal. This is expecting to cause brownouts this summer,

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/energy-shortages-spreading-rationing-in.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/us-china-power-price-idUSTRE74T1TG20110530

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43219200

I ask not to argue, but to have something to slap in the faces of all the treehuggers...

You can say I am a treehugger - a nuclear treehugger ;) I view fossil based energy sources as vastly more damaging than nuclear. I would prefer that fusion be available, but alas, you have to do with what you have. Renewables are OK but there is a problem when you have 8 billion people and each one wants to have their energy (transport, heat, air conditioning, food, etc).

Energy independence is paramount and if nuclear is the only option for base-load non-CO2 emitting energy source, then I have no choice but welcome nuclear.

Frankly, I don't know what the "green" crowd (anti-everything crowd these days - can't call them rational anymore) wants. In Germany now they are protesting that they don't want the power lines to move power from north to south because they look ugly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13257804
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,757658,00.html

India:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_India

China:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-05/26/content_12580470.htm

China is starting to suffer brownouts due to policy to limit coal. China is using 50% of world coal production.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html

I will disagree with EIA about coal in China. There is currently a new policy that says no more new coal power plants unless they replace old coal plants. New coal plants have to be more efficient too (eg. combined cycle, or coal gassification). China will also run out of its coal reserves within 30 years at current extraction rates.

China cannot grow coal because lack of the resource - they are become one of the largest importers of coal. This is expecting to cause brownouts this summer,

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/energy-shortages-spreading-rationing-in.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/us-china-power-price-idUSTRE74T1TG20110530

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43219200

I ask not to argue, but to have something to slap in the faces of all the treehuggers...

You can say I am a treehugger - a nuclear treehugger ;) I view fossil based energy sources as vastly more damaging than nuclear. I would prefer that fusion be available, but alas, you have to do with what you have. Renewables are OK but there is a problem when you have 8 billion people and each one wants to have their energy (transport, heat, air conditioning, food, etc).

Energy independence is paramount and if nuclear is the only option for base-load non-CO2 emitting energy source, then I have no choice but welcome nuclear.

Frankly, I don't know what the "green" crowd (anti-everything crowd these days - can't call them rational anymore) wants. In Germany now they are protesting that they don't want the power lines to move power from north to south because they look ugly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13257804
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,757658,00.html

Actually, France is net-importing energy

[citation needed]
France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this.

Also wiki
France is also the world's largest net exporter of electric power, exporting 18% of its total production

First thing I will say is that despite the criticisms of many "pro-nuclear" folk protesting that newer reactor facilities be built, the reactors themselves performed to specification. They scrammed, shutdown and survived the quake. What they did not survive was the negligence of the operator despite the BDIs known and circulated by GE and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

According to the Seismic design criteria for Nuclear facilities, S and B class facilities (those that contain radionuclides (S) or attached to pressure vessels that contain radionuclides (B) ) should not be affected by the loss of a C class facility (a support facility like a backup generator). The actual quake measured around 140Gal at Fukushima but the plant was designed to tolerate 600Gal (S class). As evidenced the C class facilities were not as the power lines were severed in the quake, and B class facilities (the pumps) were inundated by the tsunami. To quote World Nuclear Association(note that ALL reactor manufacturers and TEPCO are members of this organisation)

In March 2008 Tepco upgraded its estimates of likely Design Basis Earthquake Ground Motion Ss for Fukushima to 600 Gal, and other operators have adopted the same figure. (The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Taiheiyou-Oki earthquake in March 2011 did not exceed this at Fukushima.) In October 2008 Tepco accepted 1000 Gal (1.02g) DBGM as the new Ss design basis for Kashiwazaki Kariwa, following the July 2007 earthquake there.

Through two known Basis Design Issues (BDI or DBI if you want to be pedantic) it is demonstrated that a loss of electricity to the plant is the key factor for the loss of cooling for the reactor and the failure of the seals holding water in the spent fuel pools.

The first Basis Design Issue of the General Electric MK 1 reactor revealed comes from the tests of the reactor prototype by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Brunswick in the 1970's. Testers of the reactor prototype at Brunswick discovered that the reactor would leak when the internal pressure reached 70psi (they are operated at 65psi approx). Quite obviously this is the primary source of hydrogen that led to the explosion at Fukushima as this design has proven itself vulnerable to this kind of failure. The vessel is an "S" class facility.

The second is that a General Electric Nuclear reactor of that design requires a constant supply of power due to the nature of the refueling gate pairs that separate the reactor head from the spent fuel containment pool. I understand that, due to the nature of the seals on the gates, they need to be constantly powered to prevent a loss of coolant. Each pool has a volume of 1300 tons of water, they are 12 meters deep and there is 850 tons of water above the spent fuel in each (except for Fukushima reactor 1 spent fuel pool which is smaller by 400 tons). The failure mode for a loss of coolant event in those spent fuel pools was *exactly* in line with what would happen if plutonium in those spent fuel pools was exposed, hydrogen was produced and, subsequently, an explosion occurred. Without those spent fuel containment pools leaking there should have been several *months* to do something (60 Million calories per hour heating capacity in the spent fuel rods in reactor 1 spent fuel pool, 400Mcal/h in reactor 2 spent fuel pool, 200 Mcal/h in reactor 3 and 1600 Mcal/h in reactor 4)

This clearly proves that the backup power systems were absolutely essential to maintain the safe operation of the Mk1 GE reactor, yet at Fukushima they were not engineered to the same survivability criteria of the reactor for a known Basis Design Issue in *direct* contravention of the Seismic Design criteria for Reactor plants.

Along with the known basis design issues for a GE Mk 1 reactor (pressure vessel limits of 70psi, cooling pool seals require constant power) this is a clear cut case of criminal negligence at Fukushima. The importance of which, internationally, ca

http://www.energy.alberta.ca/Electricity/1591.asp

Excerpt: The operational staffing level of a nuclear power reactor is well-established. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) reports that the average nuclear plant in the U.S. creates 400–700 direct full-time positions for a 1000-MW nuclear plant, and about the same number of induced positions (NEI, 2008)in the local economy. Another study (in support of the U.S. Nuclear Power 2010 Program) collected best-estimate data for the next-generation plants beginning to come online, and estimated that the requirements would be in excess of 700 employees per reactor.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) has undertaken a similar assessment of the 17 CANDU reactors operating in Canada. The direct workforce employed at the reactors is 16,137, or 949 per reactor, which is somewhat higher than is expected for the advanced CANDU reactors.(Timilsina, 2008)

And this link: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf49a_Nuclear_Power_in_Canada.html
Says that Canada's "18 reactors" (I suspect the two sources differ on the meaning of "reactor" as in "reactor vessel" vs "nuclear plant", because we haven't built a new one lately) have 12,679 MW of capacity, NET.

16,137 / 12, 679 = 1.28 employees per Megawatt.

I suspect that, however, includes ALL the employees of the plant, not just operators and maintainers (add clerical, training, and the inescapable empty-suits).

And in any event, it's trivial. A full-time position is at most 2000 hours/year, let's pay them a nice high average of $90,000. The net megawatt is 8760 hours per year, at $30 each if you're selling from the generator at a below-coal 3 cents/kWh: $262,800. Staff costs would be one-third, or 1.3 cts/kWh.

Your big problem with nuclear is paying off the mortgage on the $4M-$8M of capital costs you put in on that megawatt of capacity. Nuclear would like it to be $2M and sometimes claims that, but $8M is unfortunately closer to recent estimates. That takes a good $400,000/year to pay off, so you need to charge nearly a nickel per kWh just to pay that. Then you need a few more cents to pay for the salaries, and the fuel and other operating costs. Presto, you're charging a good 7 cts/kWh, nearly twice as much as coal or even gas.

The devastating facts about this particular solar project are that the sustained plant output is only half the max. That means this plant isn't costing under $7/watt to build, but over $13. The mortgage per megawatt is $650,000, or 7.4 cts/KWh. That's an economic death sentence even if those 0.8 employees worked for minimum wage.

By "economic death sentence" I mean "if you have to compete with coal and they don't have to pay the externalized costs they inflict on the environment", which they basically don't at the moment, and have the political power to keep from doing so for at least a while yet. (Never mind global warming, they should have to pay heavily for all that mercury in the air and the 20,000 deaths/year from particulates...but they don't).

But, hell, it's early days yet. They'll get cheaper with practice and mass production, if they can crank it up. And in the American southwest, there will be windfall profits on power at noon in the summer when all the air conditioners are on and the plant is cranking the full 110 MW.

Good point. this device claims 30 keV minimum gamma energy, so it would see the 60 keV ray. FWIW, that unit claims minimum alpha energy of 4 MeV, so it'd see the alphas, too.

Interesting quote from here:

Am-241 emits low energy gamma rays of 60 keV. The Am-241 gamma dose constant of 3.14 x 10-9 Sv m2 h-1 Ci-1 gives an annual dose at one metre of 27 Sv/yr for an average household smoke detector - around 100 times lower than the dose from natural background radiation.

Could you really detect that above background?

... but the Chinese are actively doing it - as seen here in 2007.
Sometimes we to just shut up and do it else we'll have deja vu like solar energy or nuclear power

... but the Chinese are actively doing it - as seen here in 2007.
Sometimes we to just shut up and do it else we'll have deja vu like solar energy or nuclear power

The Saud's are running out oil anyhow. They need to start planning for how *they* will power their nation when the oil production drops to 50% of what it used to be.

There's a reason that the UAE is planning a $20Bn nuclear plant. Saudi Arabia is part of a coalition of States working with UAE on that plant, and I believe the idea is that they'll build a large plant in UAE, then Saudi Arabia and other nearby nations can buy power from that plant, sent via transmission lines.

However, while solar isn't a great option in places like Germany or the Northern and Eastern United States, it could provide lots of power in places like the Arabian Peninsula, or the U.S. Southwest.

Technology is definitely making progress towards better solar cells. The big problems now are storage and reducing transmission losses, so you can store enough surplus power during the day for use at night and cloudy days (which, for the Arabian peninsula, isn't going to be many days a year, at least), and don't lose too much power during transmission.

They have no concept at all to handle a major failure mode in one of their reactors, none at all.

For every disaster you plan for, there's always the chance of another one that makes the one you prepared for look like a tiny mishap.

That's right, which is why, when dealing with potential catastrophes, you not only should plan for significant events even if they have a very low probability, you also have to plan properly for what to do after failure occurs despite your best plans to prevent it.

And why do they have no plan? Well... because we can't plan for everything. We *did* have a plan for an earthquake. Then nature fucked us with a bigger one. We did know the risks of tsunamis -- but nobody thought of the possibility of a big one following a record quake.

That is incorrect. They considered the possibility of a big quake followed by a big tsunami, and settled on designing to handle the equivalent of about a 6.5 quake directly under the site and about a 6 meter tsunami. Even though they knew about quakes above 8.0 and tsunamis above 15 meters in the region, they discounted those possibilities because of their low probability. You need to consider not only the probability of something happening in a particular instance, but the consequences if that does happen, since possibilities will inevitably occur somewhere, sometime.

In France for instance, nuclear plants are designed to withstand an earthquake twice as strong as the 1000-year event calculated for each site.

After an advisory group issued nonbinding recommendations in 2002, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant owner and Japan’s biggest utility, raised its maximum projected tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi to between 17.7 and 18.7 feet — considerably higher than the 13-foot-high bluff [on which the plant sits]. Yet the company appeared to respond only by raising the level of an electric pump near the coast by 8 inches,

In March 2008 Tepco upgraded its estimates of likely Design Basis Earthquake Ground Motion Ss for Fukushima to 600 Gal, and other operators have adopted the same figure. (The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Taiheiyou-Oki earthquake in March 2011 did not exceed this at Fukushima.) In October 2008 Tepco accepted 1000 Gal (1.02g) DBGM as the new Ss design basis for Kashiwazaki Kariwa, following the July 2007 earthquake there.

and

In March 2011 eleven operating nuclear power plants shut down automatically during the major earthquake. Three of these subsequently caused an INES Level 5 Accident due to loss of power leading to loss of cooling.

Anyone who has seen the video of the plant post-earthquake and tsunami would note that the plant to survived the initial two disasters intact but failed nonetheless. It's well publicised that the explosions that destroyed the reactor buildings were from a hydrogen build up but not why there was a hydrogen build up and where that much hydrogen came from.

A reactor is a machine with design issues, refered to as Basis Design Issue or Design Basis Issues, that are mitigated by safety systems and procedures implemented to reduce the risk of these design issues becoming the vector for a disaster. The General Electric and Hitachi Reactors had two BDIs that had to be mitigated by safety systems.

The first Basis Design Issue of the General Electric reactor comes from the tests of the reactor prototype by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Brunswick in the 1970's. During the test the reactor was to be pressurised to 72psi, yet it only reached 70psi no matter how much more it was pressurised. This indicated that the reactor was leaking gas. Thus as the moderator in the reactor vessel got lower hydrogen gas was produced and leaked when the internal pressure reached 70psi. This was the first source of hydrogen.

The second BDI revolves around the spent fuel cooling pools. Due to the nature of the refueling gate pairs that separate the reactor head from the spent fuel containment. The design of the seals on the gates require them to be constantly powered to prevent a loss of coolant. There is a pool volume of 1300 tons of water and they are 12 meters deep. There is 850 tons of water above the spent fuel in each except for reactor 1 spent fuel pool which is smaller by 400 tons. There is 60 Million calories per hour heating capacity in the spent fuel rods in reactor 1 spent fuel pool, 400Mcal/h in reactor 2 spent fuel pool, 200 Mcal/h in reactor 3 and 1600 Mcal/h in reactor 4. Had those spent fuel containment pools not leaked there should have been several *months* to do something. However it seems the scenario that unfolded was *exactly* in line with what would happened if plutonium in those spent fuel pools was exposed, hydrogen was produced and conditions for a serious explosion were in place.

What is known is that to mitigate these two risks an availability of a constant supply of electricity is a requirement for a reactor facility. So why wasn't it? As is known the reason is that the tsunami took out the back-up power and the cooling pumps for the reactor. This, I believe, is the first piece of evidence for negligence on the part of TEPCO.

The [pdf warning] Regulatory Guide for Reviewing Seismic Design of Nuclear Power Reactor Facilities categorises react

It was. There were a number of errors on your part.

Whilst I'm sure you made a convincing argument in your imagination, I invite you to point out any error I make as I welcome the opportunity to evolve my understanding. I have not had time to point out all of the errors in your post and have instead responded to key errors of fact in your "arguments".

There are several "corners to turn" with Fukushima, getting the reactors under control, stopping the spent fuel spontaneously combusting, eliminate the emission of airborne fallout, stop the radionuclide contamination of the ocean. These are *all* immediate concerns, they are all real and present dangers, they are all corners that need to be turned.

March 24. Bet you that's the date when all these problems started getting better.

Whilst I hope you are right, the only reason you can make that claim is because ordinary plant workers and fire fighters made and are making extraordinary sacrifices to bring the situation under control. Even then stabilising the situation doesn't mean it will get better just not as bad as a full blown loss of containment event. You simply would not have been able to make that claim if the outcome had relied on TEPCO's procedures. So 'better' in this case simply means the best of a bad situation.

However I note that it was after your specified date that it was confirmed that the reactor was melting down and as of 7th of April they stopped roughly 160,000 tons of radionuclide laden water per day leaking into the Pacific. This may not mean much to the Pacific but I bet you that this disaster will have long term effects on Japan's fishing industry. I bet you it will cost Billions to control and 10's of Billions of dollars to resolve and, as I described previously, many decades to clean up.

I bet you that TEPCO's criminal negligence is exposed.

Fukushima shows that the Nuclear Industry FAILED to apply itself to learning the lessons of safety from Chernobyl.

I have disproved this assertion soundly in the last few posts,

You have done no such thing. Using your words your entire argument revolves around;

• the magnitude and occurrence of earthquakes
• the fact that the reactor tolerated an earthquake that was 10% beyond it's design for specification
• that "you can't implement safety systems to mitigate every conceivable hazard"
• that "what safety systems Fukushima implemented did indeed work to mitigate the harm of a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami"

You are wrong about the facts of the earthquake being beyond the design basis for the reactor. The World Nuclear Association confirms that;

In March 2008 Tepco upgraded its estimates of likely Design Basis Earthquake Ground Motion Ss for Fukushima to 600 Gal, and other operators have adopted the same figure. (The magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Taiheiyou-Oki earthquake in March 2011 did not exceed this at Fukushima.) In October 2008 Tepco accepted 1000 Gal (1.02g) DBGM as the new Ss design basis for Kashiwazaki Kariwa, following the July 2007 earthquake there.

So the evidence assessed and reported by the stakeholders demonstrates that YOU ARE WRONG regarding the so called "facts" you have presented. You will note that ALL reactor manufacturers and TEPCO are members of this organisation.

I surmised that the most likely sources of hydrogen build up in reactor building came from two places;

One came from the lack of water in the spent fuel pools and the second from reactor itself. I provided you with the data on the heat capacity contained by the spent fuel in the cooling pools, the consequences of de-powering the cooling pool seals and discussed the tests of the reactor prototypes t

Correct. Plutonium is not only less toxic than dimethyl mercury; it is less toxic than ordinary caffeine. Less toxic than arsenic or cyanide. Much less toxic than botulinus toxin or anthrax spores or ricin. The claim that one atom of plutonium would have any meaningful effect is simply laughable.

During the Manhattan Project, 26 individuals ingested plutonium, each in amounts greater than what is supposed today to be a lethal dose. By 1987, 4 of them had died - however, 10 of 26 random subjects who were adults during WW II would be expected to have died. Only 1 of the 4 died of cancer - 2 or 3 would be expected to have randomly died from cancer.

Ralph Nader's statement that plutonium is "the most toxic substance known to mankind" is only one example of the hideously incorrect and damaging false claims he has spread.

http://atomicinsights.com/1995/05/how-deadly-plutonium.html
http://www.ead.anl.gov/pub/doc/plutonium.pdf
http://russp.org/BLC-3.html
Google Books: Case Studies in Environmental Science
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf15.html

"Do you understand what that means? The insurance industry, the industry that calculates risk, has calculated the risks of nuclear power and they want nothing to do with it. It is, according to the experts, too risky to insure. Maybe you are okay funding some fat cat CEO by covering the potential risk while letting him take home the profit, but I am not."

no.
just no.

[citation]
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html

" It is commonly asserted that nuclear power stations are not covered by insurance, and that insurance companies don't want to know about them either for first-party insurance of the plant itself or third-party liability for accidents. This is incorrect, and the misconception was addressed as follows in 2006 by a broker who had been responsible for a nuclear insurance pool: "it is wrong [to believe] that insurers will not touch nuclear power stations. In fact, wherever they are available to private sector insurers, Western-designed nuclear installations are sought-after business because of their high engineering and risk management standards. This has been the case for fifty years." He elaborated: "My comment refers very much to the world scene and is not contentious. Apart from Three Mile Island, the claim experience has been very good. Chernobyl was not insured. Significantly, because Chernobyl was of a design that would not have been an acceptable risk at the time, notably the lack of a containment structure, the accident had no impact on premium rates for Western plants.

"The structure of insurance of nuclear installations is different from ordinary industrial risks. It involves international conventions, national legislation channeling liability to the operators, and pooling of insurance capacity in more than twenty countries. The national nuclear insurance pool approach was particularly developed in the UK in 1956 as a way of marshalling insurance capacity for the possibility of [serious accidents]. Other national pools that followed were modeled on the UK pool - now known as Nuclear Risk Insurers Limited, and based in London.""

"Do you have some kind of citation for that? I'm pretty sure they do not."

Look up the Price Anderson Act.
Plant operators have to have both their own insurance.
This gives them an incentive to be safe as they get a lower price if they have a better safety record.

If the limit is reached on that due to an accident then the second layer comes in, all plant operators have to pay into that and if there's an accident then it doesn't matter which of them was a fault they all pay into it.

It's similar to car insurance in come countries: if you are hurt by someone who is not insured or your costs run over the top of the limit on the policy of the person who hit you then the government covers the remaining cost as the insurer of last resort.

The USA takes a somewhat different approach, and having pioneered the concept is not party to any international nuclear liability convention, except for the CSC, which has yet to come into force. The Price Anderson Act - the world's first comprehensive nuclear liability law - has since 1957 been central to addressing the question of liability for nuclear accident. It now provides $12.5 billion in cover without cost to the public or government and without fault needing to be proven. It covers power reactors, research reactors, enrichment plants, waste repositories and all other nuclear facilities.

It was renewed for 20 years in mid 2005, with strong bipartisan support, and requires individual operators to be responsible for two layers of insurance cover. The first layer is where each nuclear site is required to purchase US$ 375 million liability cover (as of 2011) which is provided by a private insurance pool, American Nuclear Insurers (ANI). This is financial liability, not legal liability as in European liability conventions.

The second layer or seconda