Slashdot Mirror
Environmentalists Coming Around to Nuclear Power?
Heywood J. Blaume writes "In a Washington Post editorial Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, now says he was wrong about opposing nuclear power 30 years ago. In the article he addresses common myths about nuclear power, and puts forth the position that nuclear power is the only feasible, affordable power source that can solve today's growing environmental and energy policy issues. From the article: 'Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.'"
The logic behind using safe forms of nuclear power has been clear for a long, long time. It's nice to see some greens finally start accepting what has been obvious to some of us for 30 or 40 years. Now I'm curious how long it will be before the same people start realizing that they have been duped about global warming -- by the same people who duped us about the "coming Ice Age" and hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s. The same crackpots who have been feeding us false predictions are still being given credibility today. Why people such as Lester Brown and Paul Erlich are given any credibility is beyond logic.
David
and I was wrong about never trying for a first post!
I've always said that nuclear is the way to go... while there are implications in the extreme long term as far as what you do with the wastes, there are no blaring short term problems like running out of coal and oil or spewing waste directly into the air.
...for this "progressive" voice to come around to nuclear power. Heck, if it's good enough for socialist France, why not here in the US?
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
Global warming is not the pending disaster, energy shortage is.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
He was probably right to oppose nuclear power. Certainly we have better technology today to make safer nuclear power. Again, nuclear power will never be completely safe, but neither is wind, hydro, nor coal. Conservation, both thru individual action and thru technology are probably the safest 'forms of power', but they would never be enough.
It is time to bring nuclear power back into the discourse about our energy needs, but I'm not sure it's time to start building plants as fast as we can either...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I've been an environmentalist all my life; planted close to 10,000 trees, maintain habitat for the critters, that sort of thing. No small expense or effort. I consider myself to be more of an environmentalist than some bozo with a "save the (whatever)" pin that only gets angry about things and doesn't actually do anything to improve the situation.
That said, I'm puzzled at the attitude the submitter apparently has, in that he seems to be describing environmentalists, and pro-nuke-power people, as two separate groups. To me, nuke is an obvious choice. If you need no other explaination, see how the anti-nuke people resort to blatant lies and unrealistic comparisons in order to get people to _feel_ that it's bad. The pro-nuke side goes with science so people _think_ about, and _understand_ the issues.
My point, I guess, is that this isn't surprising or new, some guy who left Greenpeace when it diverted from his POV is just saying what so many other environmentalists have known for decades. I'm not sure this is news, other than that whoever this guy is, is saying it.
Excellent...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And I thought we were going to have to wait for colonization of Terminus before everyone agreed that Nuclear power is the best power.
This isn't a new thing, as the article (summary) implies. Moore has had this stance for a while now. Here's a 2004 Wired article on this "Eco-Traitor."
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I think its a good step in the right direction. I think nuclear power doesn have the potential to be a very positive energy source now and to the future. I've always been a little environmentalist, but I never really understood the outcry from others about how evil nuclear is.
The technology may have been iffy in its advent, and even though there is bi-product, try comparing it with oil/coal burning and its quantum leap forward IMHO. I think the bigger -hate- for Nuclear came from the common roots of environmentalists and anti-war crowds. It was just assumed de-facto that nuclear was an ill to this world like land mines and chemical weapons. It -can- have a positive purpose if used correctly.
It doesn't solve the small-scale atonimous energy factory (car) problems, but it could at least cut down on the other energy waste going.
Bye!
and wish we had moved to it in a big way the way France has, but this Moore fellow is an easily discredited shill for industry. He's not the representative we want to advance our cause. Richard Rhodes, James Lovelock, and Bernard Cohen have a hell of a lot better credibility.
Seriously, 30 years to realize that nuclear power is viable, and the other environmentalists still need to figure this out?
This is the kind of thing that makes me keep my distance from most organized environmental groups. Too much political pandering without paying attention to the real situation.
As a side note, how long do you have to wait in between posting? I can't help it if I read fast and have opinions about stories faster than the system will allow me.
So 30 years from now, what new things will we be hearing the environmentalists say they were wrong about? And what price will we have paid for heeding their advice?
Maybe people should use their own judgement, thoughtfully weigh all the facts, and consider the consequences instead of just doing whatever some environmental activists say.
...but he is what they should be.
Patrick Moore was a founder of Green Peace, and he shows up on Penn & Teller Bullshit from time to time.
Although, it's sort of unfair to label him an environmentalist these days... It's not that he's against the environment or anything, just that he has nothing to do with the enivormental movement anymore (he became disenfranchised when he realized the organization he had helped to found became a vehicle for political bashing). So he doesn't really share the views common of modern "environmentalists."
He explains all of this in one of the P&T episodes. I don't remember which one, though.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I'd be more impressed if Moore would admit that he's now serving as a consultant for the mining, logging, and energy industries.
Hell, I'd settle for the Washington Post admitting that they're trying to pull one over its readership.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I seem to recall that something similar to this was brought up a few months ago here at Slashdot and several seemingly very intelligent posters made citations and pointed out that the amount of uranium we have available that can be processed will last for only a very limited timespan and that nuclear perhaps isn't the best way to go.
Of course, there's always the "we'll run out of oil by 1995" theories running around, but the arguments seemed quite compelling. I can't find them again now, but what's the real deal with this? If the whole world went nuclear, would we all be desperate for sources of uranium in fifty years' time?
I used to think Big Macs were the bomb until I ate a Whopper. Whopper's are much better.
Wow. I mean... just... wow. I knew that the anti-nuclear movement had long been losing steam, but to get a Greenpeace founder on board? Wow.
... Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power ... ... What nobody noticed [...] was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did [...] prevent radiation from escaping into the environment ...
... Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric ...
... Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. ...
... And even if a jumbo jet did crash into a reactor and breach the containment, the reactor would not explode. There are many types of facilities that are far more vulnerable, including liquid natural gas plants, chemical plants and numerous political targets. ...
... If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire. The only practical approach to the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is [...] to use diplomacy and, where necessary, force ...
Perhaps even more amazing is that he really does understand the pros and cons. His article spells out in plain language that Nuclear power is not dangerous, and that the chance for nuclear weapons is a small risk to take to reduce the amount of pollution coming from coal plants. To read this, you'd think he was a regular on NuclearSpace.com!
Some excellent sound-bites:
(The emphasis is mine. This is the first time I've ever heard a hard-core environmentalist promote nuclear recycling. It's just incredible!)
Everything he says in his article is basically true. I never thought I'd find myself in 100% agreement with Greenpeace, but at this very moment I can't disagree with anything he's said. Kudos to you, Mr. Moore!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It is absolutely not refutable that change is occuring. What is refuta ble is whether or not it is because of a natural cycle, or because of man-made change.
But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.
Hence the concern. It doesn't matter if we are the root cause or not, we're the only species on the planet with the capability to reduce and possibly reverse the cycle.
Is nuclear waste any better than the CO2 emissions?
Oh, and according to the current projections, how long will the nuclear reserves last?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Not only would more nuke plants cut burning coal, the goal of the article's author, if we were aggressive enough in building plants we just might be able to generate enough energy cleaply enough to consider using some of it to get a hydrogen enonomy going. That breaks our dependency on oil imported from nations that range from neutral, at the most optimistic reading, to violently hostile to our very survival.
No guys, biodeisel isn't the answer. Solar isn't the answer. Wind power is promising but it isn't the answer. As the article points out hydro is already maxxed out. Until fusion becomes viable our only sources of energy are fossil fuels, with their polution and political instability or the big N. I vote for building em as fast as we can safely bring em online.
Democrat delenda est
i'v e changed my position fairly recently too. it was to do with not only how modern practices are not as dangerous and wasteful as i was lead to believe it once was. really it's about the electrification of the rest of the world. think of china and india. What would be the the ecological consequences of the rest of the world also developing their own electrical infrastructure and to just industrialize in general. Fossil fuel is not the way forward for humanity.
Nuclear power will probably get much safer the day America no longer has a president who thinks it's spelled 'nucular'...
These are the folks that are going to impede nuclear power. just look at the news when the Federal Gov. wants to put waste in some hole somewhere. The locals just go apeshit and start massive legal challenges.
I have to say, I'd be one of them. Regardless of how safe the waste storage is, I don't want to be a home owner who lives near a waste storage facility. I'd be afraid that I'd never be able to sell the house.
Was this article written by the nuke PR folks?
So many holes, so little time.....
Unfortunately that's A FOUNDER of greenpeace, not greenpeace itself. Greenpeace itself will continue its crusade against nuclear power, despite the clear environmental benefits nuclear power offers over the current standard of fossil fuels. And the media will continue to present greenpeace as if it speaks for the entire environmental movement.
Greenpeace and PETA are between the two of them doing more damage to environmentalism than anyone else in the entire world except the Bush administration itself.
after all nuclear power has come a ways in the last 30 years.
Is it our savior now? Yep it is. I know that there are people who seem to feel that we should use less power, kumbaya, blah blah,.. but realistically that is NEVER going to happen. We are junkies for the stuff.
Question is how are we going to continue making the energy we need to keep our habit up.
Nuclear is it.
Why now? Because we have reached a point where even if we don't know what to do with the waste, we're going to have to switch to it anyway and hope that we find a solution in the future. We are fast approaching the point of no return regarding global warming (opinions of G.O.P. lackies not withstanding) so if we're going to keep up this consumption then that's our only choice.
Yeh I Know what some of you are thinking, hydrogen! Don't forget that using current technology it takes a tremendous amount of power to make hydrogen. And how are we going to do that? Solar and wind? Getting there, but not there yet.
So is deferring the issue of dealing with waste going to be THAT bad? Well it's a moot point, we have no choice.
And I thought Patrick Moore was the monacled presenter of The Sky at Night!
... need not apply!
-G
www.pixelstatic.com
Tschernobyl? Tschernobyl!!
Fukov!!!!!!!
- Star Wreck
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
It's always funny to hear the greenies make fun of the all-too-Texan quirk of mispronouncing "new-cue-ler" while they make the actually meaningful error of not understanding the actual issues at hand. Too bad this guy's old buddies have so rabidly excommunicated him, but they're just as blind in their faith and their Nukes = Evil mantra as they would suggest that an oil-burning, SUV-driving Texan is in his own world view. Critical thinking, people! (both of you!)
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm not sure he addresses the contention that the whole nuclear power lifecycle, from mining the uranium to decommissioning end-of-life power stations, is a net producer of CO2.
I suspect this is just because we still have fossil fuel-based mining machinery and transport systems, but if we can switch them all to electricity (or hydrogen power derived from electricity) generated from nuclear power then that might squash that objection.
B
The sad thing is it's now news when someone rationally thinks over their position and changes their mind based on reasoning and evidence.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
As an environmentalist, I have always supported nuclear power. However, to suggest that global warming isn't taking place or that it is another "crackpot" idea of the environmentalist movement is simply flat out wrong.
The people who were leading the anti-nuclear movement thirty years ago were not leading scientists and they did not have the equivelent access to information that we do now.
I do not force my views about electrical engineering or molecular physics on everyone, having never stuided these things. Why does everyone feel compelled to contribute to the environmental debate when very, very few have studed environmental science?
From DailyKos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/16/183226/505
Bluntly put, Patrick Moore is a paid consultant for the mining, logging, biotech and energy industries, and putting him out as "ex-Greenpeace" is a lot like calling Scooter Libby an "ex-Hill staffer." Moore is indeed more significantly described as founder of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd -- a firm that, if you are a company in the extraction or other environmentally damaging industries, can "assist in communicating your issues".
It's sad to see Slashdot so easily punked. The liberal blogs chewed up this canard yesterday and spit it out. See http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/16/183226/505
--Dan
Moore is a paid lobbyist who specializes is garnering favorable press for environmentally destructive mining and energy industries. He's not just ex-Greenpeace, he's an ex-environmentalist who parlayed his prior experience working for Greenpeace into working against it. If you are a major polluter, Moore is the go-to guy for whitewashing your corporate image.
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The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It seems like the French already figured it out years before. And now are making money selling the electricity from their many nuclear power plants to others (read "Germany" where the Green Peace hippies managed to stop the building of nuclear power plants years ago). Whas is really that hard to predict that nuclear power can be made safe and will be a better option than becoming addicted to overseas oil? Sure Chernobyl happened (I was pretty close to it too) but they should have just looked at it that and said "let's see what they did wrong and fix and move on". Oh, no, they all freaked out: "OMG! Teh nucular power is teh evil -- must burn more oil and coal!".
So, the only way these people can overcome sensationalist fear is by exposing them to another *new* sensationalist fear? What really irks me is that because of these people, *if* conditions are as they are because of fossil fuels, things will have been made far worse than they ever would have been with Nuclear.
So it took melting icecaps with an eternaly rising summer to finally scare these people away from the nuclear winter hype?
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
I'm coming around to nuclear power, but only because if we don't get with the program, we'll be living in the stone age.
Many people beleive that coal fired electric generation emits more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear plants do. See this article
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
their mistakes in politics, so seeing this admission really made my day recently. I generally consider myself pro-environment, but have taken issue with the environmental movement many times, precisely because of issues like this. Far too often, the environmental movement is based on warm, fuzzy "it feels good/bad" mentality, facts be darned. Nuclear energy is one such issue. GMOs are another. So is their zero-tolerance approach to hazardous chemicals, or opposition to drilling in ANWR. In these cases, environmentalism is little different than a religion.
I am glad to see more of them are starting to base their politics on facts and balance, rather than childish notions of purity and perfection.
Your post is probably the first I've read on /. that I would use mod points to mod down. It is your good fortune (and possibly everyone else's bad) that I don't happen to have any at the moment.
:-)
I guess I'm feeling like I have karma to burn today
Ian Ameline
Nuclear power
The shape of things to come?
Jul 7th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Climate change is helping a revival of the nuclear industry, though its economics still look dodgy
[Image] (Alamy)
THINGS have not gone well for the nuclear industry over the past quarter century or so. First came the Three Mile Island accident in America in 1979, then the disaster at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine in 1986. In Japan, Tokyo Electric Power, the world’s largest private electricity company, shut its 17 nuclear reactors after it was caught falsifying safety records to hide cracks at some of its plants in 2002. And the attacks on September 11th 2001 were a sharp reminder that the risks of nuclear power generation were not only those inherent in the technology.
Nor was safety the only worry: there were financial problems too. British Energy, Britain’s nuclear-energy operator, required successive government bail-outs. Britain also recently finalised a £50 billion ($90 billion) scheme to deal with the nuclear-waste liabilities of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), an inept re-processor of nuclear waste that is itself bust.
But lately, things have brightened for the nuclear industry. In Asia, which never turned against it in the way the West did, the prospects are excellent. China already has nine nuclear reactors, and is planning to commission a further 30. New capacity is being built or considered in India, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Russia has several plants under construction.
Now western governments are increasingly looking anew at nuclear energy. A few weeks ago TVO, a Finnish consortium, started work on the first new nuclear plant to be built on either side of the Atlantic in a decade. Pertti Simola, TVO’s chief executive, proclaims that, “Finland has opened the door to a new nuclear era! Many western countries will come behind us.”
France’s parliament has recently given its approval for a new nuclear plant. Guillaume Dureau of Areva, the world’s largest nuclear supplier, captures the dizzy mood that has overtaken vendors: “We are pretty convinced of a nuclear revival and [we] need to prepare for it. We need to hire 1,000 engineers.”
Despite its earlier doldrums, the nuclear industry is still a sizeable business. In 2004 Areva had sales of €6.6 billion ($8.2 billion). That figure includes mining uranium, designing power plants and reprocessing waste fuel. General Electric’s nuclear division, which designs and builds plants but does not handle fuel or waste, turned over about $1.1 billion last year (its turnover was double that figure if sales of non-nuclear bits of nuclear plants, such as generators and turbines, are included). Westinghouse, an American brand currently owned by BNFL, which recently put it up for sale, had sales of around £1.1 billion ($2 billion).
The main reason for the shift is climate change. As it has risen up the political agenda, so the impetus for a nuclear revival has grown.
More, and more respected, voices have been making the case that nuclear energy is essential if the rate of change is to be slowed. As a result, there is an unlikely alliance between the nuclear industry and many environmentalists, as a growing number of greens have come to believe that nuclear energy is the best way to reduce carbon emissions. Industry lobbyists are finding support from unexpected areas. Keith Parker of the Nuclear Industry Association, a British trade group, points to a recent quote from James Lovelock, a founder of Greenpeace: “Only nuclear power can halt global warming.”
Scientists are also lending their support. Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientist, recently argued that one further generation of nuclear power stations is needed (in Britain at least) to buy time, in ord
Why? The obvious point is that he's a respected environmentalist, and not a bought and paid for lobbyist of the nuclear industry. Many people will listen to him just for who is he. Second, it shows he doesn't live with blinders on. A summary of his article is that many huge problems have been dealt with to the point that dumping coal for uranium is a no brainer. No hysteria, no name-calling, just an intelligent opinion.
/Sorry, mandatory Patrick Moore link
a) Is there any commercial insurance company which will insure a nuclear reactor? Here in Germany all reactors must be insured against meltdown, etc. Since no insurance company will write a police for a reactor, the government steps in and "insures" it. All of our reactors here are insured that way.
b) Is there a place in any western democracy (russia and china probably have less problems in that area) for finally depositing the resulting nuclear waste? A proper finaly resting place for the stuff?
No, now it's Iran's nuclear program!
Argh, it's changed again! Now it's back to global warming!
Now the sky is falling!
Lack of drinkable water!
Now we're getting cancer from ozone depletion!
I don't necessarily disagree with his thinking, but it's worth having some perspective on how "progressive" his voice really is. I saw mention of this editorial on DailyKOS in this article yesterday. Notable quote:
"Moore may indeed have been an early Greenpeace member, in the distant mists, but more recently can be better described as the founder of Greenspirit Enterprises, a consulting organization focused on improving the environmental PR of his mining, logging, biotech and energy industry clients."
I'm not saying he's full of it, but before we say that even environmental progressives are re-thinking nuclear, it might be useful to actually get the thoughts of people still in the progressive environmental movement.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
For christ sakes, do some reading.
Although he once did, this guy hasn't worked for Greenpeace in decades. He is now a paid public relations flack for the lumber, mining and nuclear industries. He uses his "founder of greenpeace" title specifically to hoodwink people like yourself into thinking that he is an envrionmentalist who has "seen the light", all the while conveniently overlooking the fact that he makes a substantial amount of money selling that title to the highest bidder.
I long ago made peace with the science of nuclear power as I found it a bit absurd to retain a strong dislike of it after considering the facts.
That being said, I don't exactly have an abundance of faith when it comes to the idea that The Powers That Be managing the plants and disposal sites take safety procedures to heart as much as they should. We've seen corruption before in the industry and the whole energy sector is infested with money-grabbing executives with little regard for anything other than the stock price and who they can br...lobby effectively to remove the burdens of oversight from their shoulders.
I'm not trying to spread FUD, but simply state that history does not leave me with a lot of confidence in the corporate decision makers or the regulatory bodies that oversee them.
It's a difficult place to be in. The alternatives are either crap, or are permanently 20 years away, but the kind of corruption in the energy sector and government makes me hesitant to be very enthusiastic.
The same will happen with nuclear. Our estimates of nuclear cost are based around our current low demand for nuclear energy. As supply increases dramatically as governments attempt to switch to nuclear due to peak oil, so the cost of nuclear increases. Uranium is also a non-renewable resource faced with the same fate as oil. We will reach peak uranium production and prices will rise dramatically.
THE answer is with renewables which don't face physically-determined production peaks. Yes, we need a *lot* of solar and wind power, but that's what we have to do. And yes, we'll also have to reduce our demand for energy.
If this guy can change so completely after finding proof, what else is he wrong about right now? Maybe whale killing isn't as bad as it's seemed to him either all those years ago . . .
attack the messenger.
Ahhh, the wonders of getting your butt kicked in a debate...
Who is classifying these - Zonk ?
As I understand it there is a lot of power which goes into processing the nuclear rods that are used. A value like 80% of power ultimately produced comes to mind - taken from hydropower as I recall.
If that is in fact true - wouldn't a better power storage device be almost as good?
pebble bed reactors make all the difference
because they are super safe. they don't melt down. no china syndrome, no 3 mile island, no chernobyl, no silkwood. the fuel is packed in glass pebbles. meltdown is not possible by accidental means
explain this to people and their old understanding of nuclear's dangers, based on 1970s era thinking fade away. which is also about the time that nuclear itself faded away, because of the dangers. but in a world of oil-funded islamic extremism and oil-fueled global warming, super-safe pebble bed nuclear energy looks mighty attractive. now all we need to do is wait for popular wisdom and political will to catch up
and with breeder reactors, we can reprocess the nuclear waste from the bygone era of old-style reactors and do away with all of that left-over pollution. imagine that: run new reactors off of a previous generation's waste. old-style reactors only use 10% of available fuel, the rest sits unused and radiocative for tens of thousands of years. with reprocessing, 95% of the fuel can be used, and left over are isotopes with radioactive half lives measured in a century or two, not tens of thousands of years
and don't let anyone tell you there would be a fuel shortage with the nuclear option like with oil. there is no peak uranium like there is peak oil. mainly because we can run nuclear power off of thorium as well as uranium. go look up the numbers on thorium reserves. we'd be fine for centuries. and the reserves are in more geopolitically friendly places
the problem is still psychological for people though. nuclear IS scary. it's the same thing as flying: it's safer than driving, but people prefer to drive than fly, and feel safer driving than flying. even though the reverse is true. why? the illusion of familiarity and control. people stick with what they are comfortable with, even if what they are comfortable with sucks in comparison
for the longest time i've tried to convince my gf to have laser eye treatment for her myopia. it's the best thing i ever did. but she is scared of the procedure. i tell her that she has more chance of getting an infection that will make her blind via contacts than via a laser screw up. but she wouldn't have any of it
and just this month, they found a connection between bausch and lomb's renu, which she uses, and a sudden surge in cases of an eye fungus that blinds people. sure enough, on her very own, she made inquiries as to laser eye treatment last week
so even though nuclear is safer in this world than oil due to hurricane katrina-making global warming and oil-funded 9/11 terrorism, people are more scared of nuclear than oil. they are familiar with oil, and there is an inertia about their reluctance to embrace nuclear
so we're stuck in the inertia now, and we suffer for the inertia of the general public and the politicians. all of the nimby's who wouldn't let these things be built would apparently prefer to ship their children to falluja to protect oil than build a completely safe pebble bed reactor. meanwhile, china is investing heavily in this technology. so while the usa wears itself down fighting islamonazi wackjobs sitting on top of their precious oil, places like china will enjoy air pollution free totally safe pebble bed reactor power
some morons don't understand the science, but know how to yell loudly and chain themselves to train tracks to prevent uranium shipments
and we all suffer for that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is fission less dangerous to the environment than coal? Perhaps. If it were a choice between only between building more coal plants and building fission ones, it's possible that fission might win out. (Though I think it would have to depend of the specifics of the technologies and implementations involved.)
But that's the wrong question.
At best, fission is still a stop-gap: supplies of fissionables are limited, on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less. So is it not more reasonable to divert resources to solving the problem right - with fusion reseach, renewables (i.e., using that big fusion reactor in the sky, including ideas like orbital photovoltaics) and better energy efficiency - than to build fission reactors and pushing the problem onto our great-grandchildren? (Or rather, for us non-breeders, our friends' great-grandchildren?)
The TFA mentions the Iran situation only to gloss over it, but there are massive security concerns with fission technology.
Also TFA is inaccurate in talking about nuclear waste; the problem is not the U and Pu in spent fuel, which can be processed and reused, but thorium, radium, radon, and radioactive lead isotopes.
Is some of the opposition to fission irrational? Yes. But so is some of its support, based on an almost romantic notion of "man harnassing the mighty power of the atom!"
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"Safety", in the sense of plants exploding and releasing radiation like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl was never the issue for me, because despite these two serious incidents, the safety record is quite good. It was always:
1) Where to put the worst nuclear waste, which is both radioactive and toxic, so that it would be safe for thousands of years, and where to put the decommissioned nuclear stations as they mature;
2) Security. You have to be concerned about: A) monitoring for intentional attempts at nuclear weapons diversions in every country that installs a nuclear power station; and B) the possibility of diverting any kind of radiological material to make a "dirty bomb" -- and you have to commit to avoiding these risks potentially for centuries after;
3) Uranium/Thorium supply is finite too. It just puts the energy problem off for a century or two (if nuclear is used more, the resource lasts a shorter time), unless you resort to breeder systems, which generate more waste and offer more opportunities for diversion.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for exploring every energy option available, and nuclear is one that I trust reasonably well in the short term. BUT it still comes at a significant cost and risk beyond the monetary and immediate safety issues. For me, when I look at those other costs, the possibility of mass adoption of hydroelectric, solar, wind and other renewable options doesn't look so bad, even though they are more expensive and have plenty of their own problems. I'd rather conserve than be forced to build more nuclear plants.
Basically, I think nuclear is a cheap shortcut with alot of the bigger costs pushed on the next generation. Your children's children's children are still going to be paying, one way or another, for the cheap kilowatt-hours of power you get out of a nuclear plant today. They'll be paying for the waste storage sites and the security of them for years to come -- and that's assuming any big mistakes aren't made in the disposal attempts.
Basically, I don't regard nuclear as a real, long-term solution, even if it is attractive for the moment, and I'd rather not invest heavily into it when other options are still available.
> Maybe people should use their own judgement, thoughtfully weigh all the
> facts, and consider the consequences instead of just doing whatever some
> environmental activists say.
All good advice, and not only about activists, but about everything in life.
Any one blindly following someone else without researching the facts themselves is little better than a robot.
I'm really hoping he's talking about the new FUSION reactors using pebble-beds.
But I'm not willing to let the government install a uranium reactor in my neighborhood.
Trolls are hardly uncommon on /.--you must be using quite a filter if this is the first you have seen.
Man funced by nuke power industry supports nuke power...
Certainly we have better technology today to make safer nuclear power.
No, we don't. The technology is pretty much the same. There haven't been any new nuclear plants in the past 20 years and they really haven't updated much of the safety systems. There still isn't a long term way of dealing with the tons of radioactive waste being produced. Don't get me wrong, I think Nuclear is the way to go, but I would really like the storage system to be fixed soon.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I never saw this, but I have seen a lot of variation in the "number of years nuclear energy will power us for" figures. I think there are a few different things that get done to the statistics depending on which outcome you want to show.
Probably the biggest is whether you just take today's energy consumption figures and use them for the future, or whether you project the rate of increase of energy into the future, in order to get your numbers. Obviously a source of energy that could power us for 100 years in 1955 might only last 15 today, and might only last 1 in another 40 or 50 years.
The other major issue is whether you pretend that we'll use the uranium intelligently, or we'll keep squandering it in wasteful reactors like we do today. Right now, our nuclear reactors here in the US (and pretty much everywhere else in the world) are the atomic-age equivalents of an open-hearth coal-fired boiler, giant and inefficient. We shovel enriched uranium into them, use it to make some electricity, and out comes waste. It's terrible, and it wastes a non-renewable resource (fissile uranium). Although I don't know exactly how long we'd last doing this, if you told me it was less than a generation or two before we used up all the fissile uranium, I'd believe you. It's a hellacious waste.
If we were using all that uranium in breeder reactors, using it's neutrons to enrich naturally non-fissile uranium into plutonium, then we'd greatly extend the length of time we'd be able to run on atoms as a civilization. I'm not sure exactly how much plutonium you can produce per pound of fissile uranium, but if you compare it to just wasting those neutrons by crashing them into the shielding, it's basically like making free fuel.
Although I generally dislike the French government, I have to give them kudos in this area for being the only government with the balls to continue civilian research in this area, when the US decided to ban it (thanks, President Carter!) and hitch our wagon to the horses of Persian Gulf oil. Ironically, although the excuse for banning fuel reprocessing was because it could be used to create nuclear weapons, it was the breeder reactors used for creating nuclear weapons (and not peaceful energy) that remained in operation, both here and in the Soviet Union.
I'm a pretty big proponent of nuclear technologies, but I seriously wonder whether it's good in the long run (multi-generational outlook here) for us to build nuclear reactors that do nothing but "burn" U-235 and produce waste, rather than waiting until we come to grips with breeder technology and decide to build facilities that encompass the whole nuclear fuel cycle. I have this fear that if we don't do that, our (grand)children will be left fighting over the world's remaining stocks of U-235, wondering why we wasted all of it so quickly, or digging up Yucca Mountain for the U-238 that we so casually threw away.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
There, I've said it, I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
This type of loudmouth, foul based tripe has caused us 30 years of progression as far as our energy. What if by today we all could have small nuclear batteries to give us heat in our homes and runing our transportation?
The oil companies would have/are going to spread as much FUD about it as possible unless it's their energy but we could've had this all along if it weren't for the hippies actually helping the oil companies keep feeding us their product.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
This is a textbook example of an ad hominem attack. If you have anything to say about his actual message, I'd be interested to hear it.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
His comments about global warming are utter lies. It is a verifiable fact that climate change is happening as we speak, for whatever reason.
The problem with nuclear power is that people don't handle risks well that have a very low probability of a catastrophic mistake. The operators of Chernobyl didn't handle the risks appropriately and the operators of most (not all) nuclear plants worldwide have just been very lucky. Managers keep telling us that nuclear power is safe, but we have proof in our gardens that it isn't. We do recognize that nuclear power has some strong arguments in its favor: It's CO2 neutral and it's practically unlimited. The problem is that the combination of human selfishness and shortsightedness with the inherent technological risks creates a significant disaster potential.
Personally I find it bizarre that almost exactly 20 years after Chernobyl, while that "once in a billion years accident" keeps generating new problems, people are supposed to buy into nuclear power again.
There hasn't been a financial incentive for companies to explore for uranium for the last two decades. Prices have been very low - partly because there were no new reactors built, and partly due to a lot of decomissioned (mostly Russian) warheads that were dilluted to power plant specs. Now that prices for uranium have doubled or trippled over the last couple years, there has been a surge in new exploration companies. I'm pretty sure that supplies will last a lot longer than whatever estimates have been made in the past. The same thing applied to oil, we've been running out of oil for 50 years now. Besides, uranium isn't the only source of radioactives - IIRC, breeder reactors producting plutonium can boost reserves by a factor or three.
...isn't the day to day running of the plants. It isn't even 3 mile island/chernoble.
The problem is that WE STILL HAVEN'T WORKED OUT HOW TO DISPOSE OF THE WASTE OR DECOMMISION OBSOLETE PLANTS.
Solve those problems (no, really solve them, don't just say that in X years magic will happen and all the problems will go away) and I'd be in favor of it too.
Patrick Moore is not a modern environmentalist, he is a paid lobbyist for the energy industry.
He consistently presents himself as a "founder of Green Peace"; while he may have been an early member, "founder" is, as far as I can tell, a stretch. It is rather disingenous of him to keep mentioning his now quite distant association with the enviromental movement, without ever mentioning who's paying his salary today.
Mind you, he's welcome to express whatever views he has, and I don't even necessarily disagree about nuclear power. But the news outlets that continue to identify him as "Patric Moore, founder of Greenpeace" instead of "Patrick Moore, Exxon-Mobil shill" need a lesson in journalism.
Greenpeace got too political, so he left to become a lobbyist? Right. He found out what side of the debate paid better.
With all due respect, just because _one_ self-proclaimed environmentalist, ex-anti-nuclear 'activist' now says he was wrong, and nuclear is good, this doesn't suddenly count as a huge weight of evidence against every person who's ever spoken against nuclear.
Some people are quick to forget that it's possible to weigh the benefits of nuclear objectively, and conclude that it is NOT THE BEST OPTION. Sure - there will be opinions that differ, but that doesn't make anyone who is against nuclear power a tree-hugging hippy!
Personally, I think it's curious that humans think we need a SINGLE source of energy. why can't we make as much use of efficiency/wind/solar/hydro as is reasonable/practical/possible and then 'top-up' with nuclear on an as-needs basis? To my mind, that would be a much better solution than just replacing every fossil-fuel power plant with a nuclear substitute.
(As a long time green) my main problem with nuclear power has always been what I used to call the Chernobyl factor: That the bureaucratic culture that thrived in the Soviet Union and unfortanutly is alive and well at FEMA doesn't have the moral or professional responsibilty to be entrusted with the power plants. A 'china syndrome' jumps off and the suits in charge would run around covering their own asses rather than taking care of business.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant"? Arrogant people think nuclear power is perfectly safe. Paranoid people think nuclear power will destroy the planet. Intelligent people see plant designs that are intrinsically safe, but want to know what we're going to do with the waste.
The ONLY solution the industry has right now is "bury it" (Yucca), "make it someone else's problem" (Arizona's) and "hope we're not around if it is a problem"(whoever is on the planet when Yucca breaks open, or is attacked, or a society 1,000 years from now, which can't read English, trundles into the mysterious cave and comes out with Magical Glowing Glass.)
Industry never changes. Their solutions to waste never change; it's always about hiding it or making it someone else's problem, because those are the cheapest and easiest.
We've got about 50,000 tons of nuclear waste sitting around in various stockpiles across the nation; more than any other hazardous waste, and if you want to get really scared- some of it is sitting in pools of water (because it heats itself constantly) in STEEL CONTAINERS.
The only solution on the table right now is Yucca; only problem is, we're just extending the parameters of "bury a hole" and "be long gone when it becomes a problem." The stuff in Yucca mountain will be around for 100,000 years. There are serious problems with making stuff last that long, making signs that people will understand even 1,000 years from now, geological changes over just a few thousand years, etc.
Please help metamoderate.
Instead of just asking "what can we do to pollute less to produce energy", we should ask "what can we do to WASTE less energy?"
I mean, we can have the most efficient power plants in the world and generate only 10% CO2, but if we keep using incandescent lightbulbs, CRT televisions and XTRA-HOT CPU's, i doubt it'll help.
Instead I'd welcome more investment in solar cells, ultra-efficient lighting and low-heat CPU's.
Block out the sun...
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Nice that this guy has finally come around, just so late to the party. Reasonable people have known for years that nuclear power could be our best hope for relatively clean energy.
But this guy and his outspoken ilk caused us to lag decades behind. So now he has offered his "mea culpa". Maybe he can sleep at night knowing he was a prime cause of global warming, I hope god will spare his soul for the damage he and his kind may have caused.
Don't suppose you have any evidence do back up those accusations do you?
damaged by dogma
World Changing had a post last week explaining why nuclear power is not a great solution to fossil fuels. There are three main reasons why they say nuclear is not the answer: 1) They bring up the issue of safety, not only for the reactors but of storing the radioactive waste. 2) Mining the ore needed is a very high impact activity, so the environmental impact might not be any less, although it would likely be concentrated in a few locations. 3) The money to develop and build new nuclear reactors could be more efficiently spent on greener technologies.
When it comes to climate change, nuclear is probably a better option. But in no way is nuclear a green technology, it just alleviates the most pressing issue facing fossil fuel use. What we need to do is develop truly green and renewable energy sources, which doesn't include nuclear.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
This sounds like it's just a rationalisation of your intuitive dislike of the guy. More objectively, the ability to change one's mind is important. Punishing people for it is bad for progress.
I'd prefer the way that France does it, where there's many smaller reactors, all the same type. This way spare parts are always available "off the shelf" and there's always a pool of well trained plant operators.
One big problem though is disposing of nuclear waste. Trucking it across the country to Nevada is NOT a good plan to dispose of these.Here is an estimate of our Uranium reserves
A breeder reactor can pretty much run indefinately off it's own fuel (sort of, there's always a trade off).
Of course it needs uranium to get started but after that it starts making more fuel than it consumes. It can then run off its own fuel and send the excess to other plants.
It's interesting/funny to read Patrick Moore describing his former colleague in environmental groups:
Ref: Patrick Moore's Nuclear Statement to the US Congressional Committee
I call bullshit on this one. He clearly has the facts wrong.
The article states that the Chernobyl disaster killed just a few firemen who were fighting the fire. In fact many tens of thousands of people already died or will die of some form of cancer as a consequence of the disaster. For the religious among you: it is estimated that there have been 100000 and 200000 abortions because of Chernobyl.
I read the article because I thought it might offer some sensible views on the topic, but in reality it is just a bad piece of lobbying. I wonder why the editors let this slip into the paper.
where's all that Karma?
If the Green movement hadn't opposed nuclear power so mindlessly in the past, the US would have spent the last 30 years building more nuclear plants and fewer coal and gas plants. The extent of our current dependence on middle eastern oil and dirty coal would be much less today if we could have constructed a single nuclear plant in the last three decades.
"Was this article written by the nuke PR folks?"
Quite simply, Yes. The author is a proffesional PR man for the nuke/mining/biotech/etc. industries. He had a brief assosciation with Greenpeace a long time ago, and since has been calling himself a "Founder of Greenpeace" while selling his advocacy to anyone with anti-envrioment image problems big enough to pay him. His "conversion" isn't news; it happened a long time ago in the presence of a big check.
Widely unnoticed by the general public, which is all caught up in Peak Oil yes-or-no discussions, Uranium faces the very same problems as fossil fuels, but they seem to be worse.
_ history/historical_ux.php(flash required for the small graphic, but the numbers are there in plain text)
From this article: In 2001 the European Commission said that at the current level of uranium consumption, known uranium resources would last 42 years. With military and secondary sources, this life span could be stretched to 72 years. Yet this rate of usage assumes that nuclear power continues to provide only a fraction of the worlds energy supply.
And here is the actual development of Uranium price over the last century:
http://www.uranium.info/prices/monthly.html (note that the peak around '78 about coincides with the peak of the US and Soviet nuclear arsenal during the Cold War)
And here you have, again, the development of Uranium prices over the past 4 years:http://www.cameco.com/investor_relations/ux
Now if not only China builds dozens of reactors, but the western industrialized world as well, nuclear (i.e. fission) energy stops looking to be very attractive in the long run. Give us fusion (hot or cold), or give us renewable energy as our main source, but don't try to balance two resources which are ultimately limited and might well be seeing their practical end within our century. Don't floor the gas pedal if you know you will have to stop eventually, either by slowing down yourself or by being slowed down by a concrete wall.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
At last! Some common sence! sorry but that's all I got to say, and that's all there's to say. Opposing nuclear power was and still is un-understandable from nature lovers.
You just got troll'd!
Nuclear power is extremely capital-intensive, and starves other alternatives for capital, and I'm not just talking about power plants. The sensible thing to do is to reduce demand first - not by "freezing in the dark", as nuclear industry honchos characterized conservation in the '70s, but by efficiency improvements. Lighting, for example, is headed toward LEDs vastly more efficient than conventional lamps. So we have a choice: pay more for the bulbs and recoup the cost in energy savings, or keep using cheap bulbs and pay more for shiny nuclear power plants. Which one makes better economic sense to the consumer?
Watch for detailed rebuttal of the op-ed piece from places like the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Perhaps we can move forward then, and finally get some prototypes of safe reactors that can reduce the (now undesirable) waste products into energy, instead of wasting tremendous resources burying them.
*cough* IFRs *cough*
If you're looking to talk about how biased someone is, it's more than a little bit ironic to try and do it by quoting "Mother Jones Magazine," which isn't exactly a paragon of journalistic neutrality. They make NPR look like a bastion of conservative thought.
Your point may have merit, but that's somewhat less than convincing.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I read an article in Wired that really piqued my interest in a form of Nuclear Power plant that the Chinese had been working on. These are called Pebble Core Reactors, and basically look like a big tylenol capsule stood on its side. I am by no means an expert in this area, but in layman's terms the system works like this. Instead of radioactive rods, the system uses radioactive pellets. As the pellets heat up they fall through a grating system to the storage below. If the thing overheats, the system collapses onto itself. MIT continues to work on this, along side the Chinese and many others. One interesting thing from the Wired article, this technology goes all the way back to the 50s. The decision to go with the water cooled system was partly based on the Navy's desire for Nuclear submarines and ships. Of course the others were waaay more expensive, so naturally business wanted those.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
hey, anything that makes it hotter so as to cause the spontaneous shedding of clothing by women is ok in my books
In principle solar panels could be produced very cheaply and they really could meet all of our energy demands. Given the enormous potential of solar power, I find it shocking that there is so little government investment. We should be pumping billions into solar research instead of spending billions on Middle Eastern adventures. We can't rely on propaganda efforts like "BP Solar" to bring us cheap solar power. It will take a lot of money and research. If I were an "oil man" I would see solar power as a massive future threat and would lobby against any government funding of solar research. I wonder if this lobbying has really been going on, and if not, why not?
First, gas prices will rise modestly, into the $3 - $4 range. Industries that can switch away (trains instead of trucks, etc) will start to do so. More people will choose hybrids, more people will ride the bus. It won't be enough, and gas prices will continue to rise over the course of a year or so, probably into the $5 - $6 range. People will start driving even less. More hybrids and motorcycles will be sold. SUV sales will dry up significantly. Trains will continue to subsitute for trucks. Venezuela's massive heavy oil deposits will become profitable to operate. This will cause the rise to dampen, but not stop. Let's say over the next two years the price will rise to $8/gallon. New condos in large urban centers will become more attractive, and more will be built. Many more people will telecommute and take mass transit to work. New drilling platforms will be opened in the Gulf and around Alaska. Signicant advances in fuel efficiency will provide major improvements to car mpg. Grocery and other delivery services will become common again. People will spend more time at and near their homes, and more parks and sidewalks will spring up. around the neighborhoods. Carbon forcing into the atmosphere will drop dramatically.
Let's say this still isn't enough, and the price rises to, say, $10/gallon over the next three years after that. More telecommuting. More delivery services. More intown renewal. More mass transit. Continued innovation in oil extraction from other sources (Shale and tar sands, for example). More electric vehicles with improved battery technology.
Your lifestyle will be somewhat different. You will have to pay more for gas, but you will buy less of it. You are not an automaton, with no ability to respond to financial incentives and disincentives. Why is it that you believe that everyone else is? Why is it that you believe that soccer moms will gleefully pay $100/gallon for gas in a frenzied drive to purchase the last few drops? (which, btw, is also a myth - it's a long slow decline after the peak, not a cliff). Why is it that you have convinced yourself that technology does not advance, that entrepreneurs do not find ways to make money helping people save money? Why is it that you have convinced yourself that governments will not respond to the needs of their citizens with increased funding of mass transit? How can you be old enough to read and write articles on Slashdot and not understand the concept of supply, demand and prices? In the month after Katrina, gasoline use plummeted in the US even though there were no shortages outside of the hurricane-struck areas. People stopped driving so much. And that was at $3/gallon gas. Can you imagine how frugal people will be with their driving if it doubles from that?
There you go.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
The problem is time. Radioactive material is radioactive--it decays into stable elements over time. The most radioactive elements will have decayed in less than a thousand years. Nothing is perfectly safe--crossing the street is a greater hazard to you than Yucca mountain will be to anyone. More on topic, spewing radioactive material into the air is probably a tad less safe than depositing it underground, too. And where do you think we get more stable forms of uranium in the first place? It's been in the ground all over the world for a lot longer than 100,000 years.
English is easier said than done.
Should have read: (Luddite, or at least scientifically uneducated)
i will sidestep all of your suppositions, as flimsy and wrong as they are, by simply saying this:
no energy source is perfect
you can't hold out on switching energy supplies until you find one that works 100% right. because there is no such energy source. ever. you'll wait forever
so you simply find the source with the lowest level of associated negatives. this thinking realistically rather than idealistically.
it's simply a matter of adding up all of the negatives for each energy source, and finding the one with the lowest level of negatives
and right now, due to orders of magnitude advances in nuclear technology safety and fuel usage and pollution limiting, and advances in global warming and islamic extremism and oil prices, nuclear is looking better than oil
in other words, all of your imagined detractions on nuclear, right in principle but wrong on scope (150 years of thorium only? HA! pebble reactors!=100% safe. nothing=100% safe. duh), do not rise to the level of detractions on oil and fossil fuels (hurricane katrina and 9/11: oil-fueled global warming and oil-funded religious extremism)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The slashdot summary promotes Moore himself based solely on himself, not his message. From reading the summary and headline it's clearly not what Moore says that is important, but who Moore is. The very headline says nothing about whether nuclear power is good or bad; it only talks about whether environmentalists approve of it. While whether Moore is a good or bad person is entirely irrelivant to whether nuclear power is good for the environment, whether Moore is an environmentalist or not is entirely relevant to whether "Environmentalists [are] coming around to nuclear power", as the headline says.
If it is reasonable for slashdot to promote this guy's opinion based solely on his environmental-movement activities 30 years ago-- and this slashdot article does-- then surely it is reasonable for commenters to disparage his opinion based solely on his environmental-movement activities today? If one is valid then so is the other. Logical fallacies do not exist in a vacuum, and you've forgotten about "ad hominem"'s brother, "appeal to authority".
If you have anything to say about his actual message
Perhaps it is possible to disagree with the article's depiction of Moore without actually disagreeing with Moore's message in the article?
Myself, I don't know anything about Moore's past or present. I do agree with the idea that nuclear power is both a good thing, and a positive force for the environment, and I consider the anti-nuclear forces within the environmental movement at present to be largely a matter of luddite hysteria. However, I don't agree at all with the tactic, popular among corporate shills, of trying to disparage the entirely valid practice of remembering to consider the source and the source's bias when using some source to form judgements, by confusing it with the very different and wholly invalid practice of ad hominem arguments.
OK, i misread. I thought pebble bed reactors used fusion, I don't know where I got that idea from.
:)
Thanks for the correction
So really, the two things cancel out.
The only reason we are expected to hear what this guy has to say is because he's advertised as an environmentalist, and primarily identified as the cofounder of greenpeace - I mean, go read the summary to see what is being emphasised. Undermine that, as the GP has done, and he becomes just another average Joe, and one who has little to say that hasn't been said, and who doesn't really have enough experience in the field to make professional judgements. If he believes his arguments can stand on their own two feet, then he shouldn't have misled about his allegiance in the first place.
That said, I am personally ambivalent on the nuclear issue. I don't think there is alot of real information out there on what the full costs/benefits are - supporters and detractors seem to constantly give contradictory assertions, and there doesn't seem to be a strong scientific consensus on it.
Just make them all Pebble Bed Modular Reactors and we'll all be safely rockin'
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
The problem with nuclear power is that there is still no safe long-term waste storage (something the article avoids talking about). Furthermore, our current nuclear reactors only utilize a small fraction of the power contained in uranium.
The solution is breeder reactors. Unfortunately, that's something the right wing is opposed to because the consider it a proliferation risk.
The obstacle to safe nuclear power isn't the left, it's the right.
Here a list, maybe other Slashdotters have more current information on these points (it's basically what I remember from observing this issue from the distance over more than 20 years or so).
That said, I personally believe that there is a good case for nuclear power as a long term energy source, but let's not get fooled by the global warming scares from an ex-Greenpeacer-turned-industry-consultant into accepting short term profit-maximizing all-out nuclear solutions.
shoot it into the motherfucking sun!!!
Whatever's causing it now, all the predicted changes I've seen or heard of (Limited Research Warning) land well within the recorded variations, with a consistent, roughly hundred-thousand-year period, over the last ... several ... million ... years. And we're not just due for the next spike, we're in it. What comes next, within the next few thousand years, is a precipitous drop of more than 6 C.
And that drop will continue a much longer, deeper trend. What we're doing now may be the right thing.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
If there are people living around Yucca one thousand years from now, and they aren't capable of understanding English, recognizing the "nuclear" icon, or using a geiger counter, then how are they going to know to blame us?
Uh, no. Radioactive waste is made of many different isotopes. Some have a half-life of 290 years, and some of it has a half-life of 29,000 years.
Half-life does NOT mean "it's safe after" or "it disappears and is harmless after". It means HALF of it decays into something else.
Please see The Bane of Nuclear Energy
Also, if you bothered to read the article in my original post, you'd see that we have 50,000 tons of waste right NOW, and Yucca would only have 77,000 tons of capacity. Yucca, IF it opens, will open at the earliest in 2014. It will only process at BEST 3,000 tons of waste a year. The industry currently generates 2,000 tons a year.
That means by 2014, there will be 66,000 tons of waste, and it'd take 66 years for Yucca to catch up- but five years after Yucca was completed, we'd again have more nuclear waste than storage capacity (it would not be full until 2039, by which point, we would have generated another 50,000 tons of waste, assuming we keep the same level of nuclear power, which is unlikely given petroleum will be completely gone in 20-30 years.)
Please help metamoderate.
The attack is relevant and thus not adhominem.
They are not attacking him for being ugly, a bolshevik, or a pedaphile.
They are pointing out that he works for industry. Thus, his position is influenced and if he were a judge, he would have to recuse himself.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That 48 tons of waste per plant per year could be greatly reduced with spent fuel reprocessing. Most other nuclear nations, including the UK and France, go this route, which is a lot more sensible than just burying everything, however due to some really boneheaded decisions made by President Carter, it's never been done recently in the United States.
Until it was banned, we had a whole system under construction for reprocessing spent fuel that would have reduced the scope of the problem we're now faced with. However, in 1977 the research was cut off, and further development and implementation was banned; although President Reagan quietly reversed the ban, nobody has been willing to put money into it. Except of course the military, their ability to manufacture plutonium for weapons purposes was never affected, something which strikes me as endlessly ironic, given that Carter's justification for banning reprocessing was ostensibly to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
By processing the spent fuel assemblies promptly (before they sit around and create a lot of secondary contamination) you reduce the volume of waste that has to be stored for long periods, and you also get a non-trivial amount of new fuel back (even out of reactors that aren't specifically designed to breed new fuel). Either one of those goals would make the procedure worthwhile in my opinion, pick your favorite and count the other one as a bonus. Right now we're burying tons of waste which isn't itself that radioactive or long-lived or even toxic, but because it's physically joined to stuff that is. The actual volume of long-lived high-level waste produced by a plant isn't that much, if you do the right reprocessing first.
The plan in the United States was a process called PUREX; you can Google it for more information. The French do their reprocessing at COGMA LaHague, and the Brits do it at a commercial facility called THORP.
More information here as well:
http://chemcases.com/nuclear/nc-13.htm
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Trying to promote the benefits of nuclear power by whitewashing the Chernobyl tragedy does not help you. It is like trying to promote the benefits of air travel by whitewashing the September 11 attacks. No, of course the September 11 attacks don't by themselves mean that airplanes are bad and should stop being used. But that doesn't mean that what happened was any less of a horrific tragedy, and if you try to belittle the scope of that tragedy you're only going to make yourself look stupid.
Problem: Too much sulfur dioxide is getting into the atmosphere.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Require installation of scrubbers on powerplants when they are upgraded.
What happens?: Powerplants don't upgrade their powerplants. Those that do upgrade then burn cheaper&dirtier coal leaving net pollution even worse.
Conservative environmentalist solution: Implement pollution trading credits.
What happens?: Pollution reduced in the most cost effective way.
Problem: Power production is heavilly dependent on on fossil fuels... long term issue of global warming.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Subsidize wind, solar, geothermal. Campaign against nuclear, hydropower dams, etc...
What happens?: Power prices go up because wind, solar, and geothermal is massively expensive. Also, these alternative energy sources can't produce enough electricity and today we are more reliant on coal than we have been before.
Conservative environmentalist solution: Implement a modest carbon tax and let the market sort the problem out.
What happens?: Unclear because it hasn't been tried! Theory would predict a slow shift towards nuclear, and low carbon emitting technologies.
Problem: A number of species in the United States are close to extinction.
Leftist environmentalist solution: Ban all construction/anything ANYWHERE these species are found.
What happens?: Developers/landowners have huge incentives to follow a policy of "Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-Up" If the federal government finds that a *insertspeciesnamehere* is living on your land, then your land will become worthless. Therefore, if you see a *insertspeciesnamehere* you shoot it, bury it, and don't tell anyone about it. (Don't think this doesn't happen.)
Conservative environmentalist solution:
Pay landowners some fee if *insertspeciesnamehere* is living on their land. They will then have an incentive not to kill it. Also, the government can try to buy the land from the landowner if it is critical habitat for the animal.
What happens?: Species are protected and society as a WHOLE (not just a few unlucky landowners) is paying the cost of protecting the endagered species. This is a more effective and fair solution.
Did anyone else notice the submitter's name was Heywood J. Blaume?
Well, that's true.
But the fellow in TFA is playing on his name and background to lend his message credibility. He's making an ad hominem appeal to credibility, as it were. Inasmuch as that is so, it's appropriate for others to question if his background as a Greenpeace founder is still relevant to this discussion, or if it really means as much as it tries to imply. In this case, an ad hominem riposte is a completely appropriate way to counter that part of TFA's message... other parts of TFA's message may be addressed separately.
(That said, I'm inclined to agree that careful use of nuclear power is looking like a good idea these days.)
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
The headline should say: "An environmentalist coming around to nuclear power".
m l
Other environmentalists are not quite siding with Mr. Moore, and are in fact quite adamant about it:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore.ht
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Qouting Wikipedia: The primary advantage of a pebble bed reactor is that it can be designed to be inherently safe. As the reactor gets hotter, the rate of neutron capture by 238U increases, reducing the number of neutrons available to cause nuclear fission.
As many have pointed out, while Moore may once have been with greenpeace, he is no longer any sort of environmentalist. Currently he's working for the timber lobby among others and using his former title as founder of greenpeace to dupe people into thinking that he represents the environmentalist movement. A quick search for "Patrick Moore timber" on google will give you the real story.
That said, I personally agree that nuclear power is the best option in most places in the world. It is certainly *not* the perfect option, but the technology has slowly but steadily improved over time, whereas the alternative, fossil fuels, have become more expensive and not a whole lot cleaner.
Solar power has also improved greatly in efficiency over the years, but solar power is only viable in certain places. The same could be said of wind, geo thermal, and hydro power. They are great options where available... but nuclear power represents the only general purpose replacement for hydrocarbons.
My state, Washington, is run almost entirely on hydro power, which provides us with cheap and reliable power. However, even with the large number of damable rivers, there's still excess need for power, which is split pretty evenly between coal and nuclear power. The thing is, that while nuclear is more environmentally friendly, and doesn't rise in cost with increasing fossil fuel prices, it still comes with its own problems. Additionally, cleaning up the hanford nuclear site has been a nightmare, especially for the people downwind... and the federal government has been remarkably slow to clean up the mess they made. This has done a lot to sour public perception of nuclear technology.
If you are interested in nuclear power, hanford is important to consider. The site was of course used for developing weapons (enriching uranium specifically I believe...), but there's a lot to be learned from the cleanup effort... specifically, that it goes very slowly, and that the federal government pinches every dime they can in the effort. I think that the estimated end of the cleanup is sometime in 2030, not counting further delays... Considering that other messes are likely to happen with widespread enough nuclear power, no matter how careful we are, the slowness of federal cleanup efforts could really become a problem.
And I can tell you that not only was electricity cheaper (roughly half of what I pay now two hours away), but the plant was extremely well-guarded. In addition to the actual plant design (I witnessed a test jet crash into a half-size model that didn't even crack the walls), security is strict on the ground, in thr air, and on the water. It took two badges and two forms of id to get into the place. Our worst problem was dealing with sea lions that decided our cooling tubes were the place to catch fish.
I can't help but think that if he'd played Sim City he would have arrived at this conclusion a lot earlier . . .
Driessen's occupation and beliefs are irrelevant. He certainly is idealistic in his vision that corporations will solve all the world's problems. However, his argumentation against green policies is very compelling, and until you actually read his work, you may want to reserve judgement.
I for a fact remember my father had a mimeographed copy of an official-looking document from the CIA regarding the coming ice age. The date was sometime in the 1970s.
I remember asking him about it when I found it in the garage in the late 70s.
I have no idea where it came from, but he had access to weird stuff from working with Military Air Command via the airline industry.
Don't mean to sound rude, but are you stupid?
Nuclear Fuel can easily be reused many many many times.
That stuff you call waste is perfectly good fuel.
PS what do you do with the thousands of tons of CO2 and other such things that are released from coal plants?
Yucca Mountain vs Thousands of tons of junk and CO2 into the atmosphere
You choose.
Wow. You read the article in under 4 minutes. Good for you. You might want to know that the author of the article is a representative for the industry he is supporting. His job or role 30 years ago is not at all in line with what he does today. Today he makes money by promoting what you say he came around on. Nah. He is just a whore today. Like you. And your crackpot, non-scientifically supported "theory" about how Global Climate Change must be a myth because it is bad for industry and the neo-conservative movement told me so (also told me invading Iraq GOOD GOOD GOOD). Yep, you the man, Davey in Alabamba. You. The. Man.
I know they stopped teaching people to think for themselves, but you don't have to make yourself their leader.
It is absolutely not refutable that change is occuring. What is refuta ble is whether or not it is because of a natural cycle, or because of man-made change.
Climate is continuously variable, yes. It has always been like that. There are very many components: variablity in solar output, orbital obliquity cycles, volcanic, biogenic, and man-made components.
But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.
Why is that? Life has endured unfathomable climate change over 3.5Gyr. Hominids have endured great change in the past 5 million. Since the ice ages did not kill homo sapiens in the past 100,000 years, why do you think slight warming should? The climate has been warming for 12,000 years during which we have had the rise of civilization. Your argument is completely hollow. Change is good. Here in Minnesota I look forward to milder winters and a longer growing season.
Hence the concern. It doesn't matter if we are the root cause or not, we're the only species on the planet with the capability to reduce and possibly reverse the cycle.
Seems to me that plants have the greatest effect on atmospheric composition. You are overstating again.
an ill wind that blows no good
You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant"?
RTFA. He specifically addresses the issue of waste. And in case you don't want to read the article, here is what he has to say (addressing common myths about nuclear power):
Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The problem is time. Radioactive material is radioactive--it decays into stable elements over time. The most radioactive elements will have decayed in less than a thousand years. Nothing is perfectly safe--crossing the street is a greater hazard to you than Yucca mountain will be to anyone. More on topic, spewing radioactive material into the air is probably a tad less safe than depositing it underground, too. And where do you think we get more stable forms of uranium in the first place? It's been in the ground all over the world for a lot longer than 100,000 years.
Pan to the high school science teacher shedding a single tear.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
And how does this address:
1) The limited nature of fissionable material?
2) The waste product?
If we'd just get them going, Department of Energy laboratories could pretty much eliminate the problem, but anytime someone proposes doing that, who do you think blocks it? But then, if you let them create a way to eliminate the waste, you couldn't block nuclear plants by complaining there's nothing to do with the waste.
But you know that our usage will go up. You can expect the average household to use 10x as much power by the time we cap our useage. That means that we will only have ~100,000 years. We must conserve now! Think of the children that are born 99,950 years from now! What are we going to leave to them!?!?!?
The parent posts asserts that Driissen promotes junk science. Again, NOWHERE in the Motherjones article does it say that. NOWHERE.
All the article says is that Driessen is a global warming skeptic, is critical of the environmentalist movement, and participants in events put on by conservative think tanks. It's hard to find anything nefarious or evil in that.
Motherjones is a magazine of the political far left, but even it is honest enough not to say the factually incorrect statements svejk is attributing to it.
Water Vapor is the main culprit to global warming, not CO2. The site mentions how the DOE has omitted water vapor as a greenhouse gas.
"In short, if there isn't a direct payoff to me, then fuck it."
That is it right there, a concise summation of how America is destroying the world.
Typical.
"Yucca Mountain vs Thousands of tons of junk and CO2 into the atmosphere"
It won't be (just) a Yucca Mountain.
It'll be some equivalent of a woodshed hidden deep inside some developing country, whose leaders are too corrupt or stupid to not care about what happens to people living in the woodshed.
It's ok, though. It's Not Our Problem (tm).
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
First, I read the article when it first came out Sunday, you idiot. Second, to assume that I'm a conservative (or Rush Limbaugh fan) is even more stupid. I'm neither.
David
In the rest of your points you seem to want to destroy things without getting anything useful out of them, so I'm going to assume you aren't trying to go anywhere with those.
Being an anti global warming guy, I follow these issues very closely. I would love to also embrace nuclear power, just to have something besides fossil fuels and their attendant emissions. And then, every time I hear read a new article, I am let down all over again, because the waste issue has not been dealt with in a new way since the beginning. Until we have a waste free nuke plant, or a can of "Nuke away" (remember Mork and Mindy?) then we really have a bad bad idea.
San Francisco Photographers
you also need to take into account concentration of radioactive material.
Or maybe just maybe the fuel could go into a breeder reactor and be umm REUSED?
it matters scientifically what the cause is in order to find the right antidote, that's true. but psychologically, the blame game is used to defer responsibility
we all have the responsibility to put our hand on the global thermostat and start twiddling. whether its natural or unnatural that the earth is warming is besides the point. its warming. so lets fix that. it might be natural that the earth is warming up, but we like our ecosystems the way they are, so we're going to fight it. which means that mankind is probably going to preserve the earth's global temperature the way it is from 1500-2000 forever, even if naturally it would waver about, hot and cold. and so what?
an asteroid heading towards earth is natural too. but that's not an argument for not deflecting the thing. same with global warming: who cares if its natural or unnatural. it's more important that it's bad, and that we need to fix it. we can apportion cost and blame later. the point is to not apportion blame first, and then do nothing about the problem based on that
if the river is rising because the dam broke, well we better start slinging sand bags. we can find out later if the dam broke because someone dynamited it or it just broke on its own. but it does no good to say "that psycho fred dynamited the dam, so he should fix it!" and then sit back and watch our houses flood
in other words: ok, there's global warming. why? natural processes? or the industrial revolution? well, we know that if we seed dead areas of the ocean with iron, we cause phytoplankton blooms that sequester tons of CO2. so we should do that, regardless of why the world is warming. get it?
of course it still matters why, but we can start fixing the problem, since we all agree there is a problem, before we figure out why we have a problem. this is just being prudent, and having a set of priorities: fix the problem first, apportion blame later. not apportion blame first, and defer responsibility based on that
simple common sense
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Please go tell how safe it is to the thousands of people affected by the Chernobyl accident. Up to 40% of Europe's land mass and population were affected by the radioactive cloud produced by that disaster and much of this land is still contaminated with high levels of cancer among children, land that you can't grow shit on, and animals that you cannot sell and need to be quarantined.
El Pais is Spain's most prominent newspaper, the equivalent of the Nytimes or the Washingtonpost. Check this out
:
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Nuclear power isn't the answer. We need to find a cleaner and safer method of producing power.
As someone who has also been an active environmentalist for the better part of his live, I would say that the main issue revolving nuclear power revolves around the NIMBY movement, and more importantly, the related waste storage / transportation concerns. Nuclear power is far from a cradle to cradle solution.
First and foremost, there is the issue of building a plant. Most people do not want a nuclear power plants anywhere near their home... if only for the reason that their very existence devalues one's property considerably.
Yet, from an environmental perspective, the issue is not really the fuel in the plant... it's the waste outside of the plant. First their is the issue of limited storage in spent fuel rod pools. Temporary (and questionable) storage solutions are being applied, but space is limited and this stuff needs to be shipped someplace (Yucka Mountain). Then there is the issue of placing spent fuel rods on rail cars traveling through major US cities. We've yet to develop a safe secure method of transportation.
Moreover, there is also the issue of the safety of depleted fuels. Several peer reviewed medical and scientific journals have revealed the dangers of depleted fuels.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
This renewed push from industry shills is expected and predicted. It is also conveniently when their partners, the oil cartel (mostly all the same global billionaires at the top) are rolling in oil profits, yet look around, do you see any of the alternative design cars being produced in mass quantities? Nope, they keep needing "more studies". Even the hybrids are selling so well they are taken aback, because at the top levels they "didn't think" there weas a market for them. REALLY People have been begging for all electrics and hybrids for years and years, finally a TRICKLE get produced and they sold out.
There is nothing magical about nuclear power, it *doesn't generate electricity*, steam turbines generate electricity when you throw heat at them. Nuclear fission is a way to generate a lot of heat in a concentrated area. But it is just "heat" and MAN it also concentrates a lot of the nastiest most dangerous and poisonous stuff ever conceived of..
Heat we have plenty of, the planet is awash in heat sources. We have huge hot areas, we have deep geothermal, we have mid level geothermal, we HAVE heat just going begging. And it DOESN'T pollute, it is there already, we don't have to do anything beyond collecting it and using it to generate some useful electricty with it.
THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO EVEN THINK ABOUT THAT
We have wind, so much wind all over that one might think the planet earth was covered in "wind"-oh wait, it IS. We have sunshine, we have FUSION POWER already, it is right there, go outside, look, FUSION POWER, it shines down on us all over.
What nuclear power really means is that the concentrated humongous gobs of wealth currently in the hands of the electric cartels will stay there.
Follow the money! This is like any number of other realities, follow the dang money! The past few years have shown tremendous strides in solar PV and wind generated power, a DECENTRALIZED CARTEL BUSTING way to generate electricity that opens up a lot more people to electric generational facility ownership on the small commercial scale, if not just the personal scale. Good press after good press after scientific breakthrough, undeniable and in spite of only token amounts put towards it compared to nukes over the decades, despite the electric "OPEC" cartel doing everything they could to try and make it not happen. The electric cartel lobbied long and hard to do everything they could to squash solar and wind, they had to be LEGISLATED into accepting "outsiders" power into "their" so called grid by the smaller scale commercial wind developers, they DIDN'T want the competition.
I will say that again, they DIDN'T WANT THE COMPETITION. They will spend, say and do anything they can to try and squash the competiton, including mass astroturfing and shilling. The alternatives scare the socks off of the entrenched ELECTRIC-OPEC cartel, they are seeing that people have finally figured out a way to break their century old monopoly, and they don't like that!
They are pushing nukes-not because it is better, it is not, the true costs of nukes are around three times what they claim if you add in minining and decommssioning, and that leaves out the potential for some huge catstrophes- but because it keeps YOUR money and your children's money and your grandchildren's money in THEIR pockets-forever and a day.
We are *this close* to really having much cleaner and efficient and powerful and cheaper decentralized energy all over the planet, I mean wicked close, it is staring us in the face, *please* don't blow this chance and go back to the old ways of turning billionaires into multibillionaires based on junk economic science, mass nasty pollution and mass propoganda efforts. We have real science, clean science, ways to do things that benefit the all, not just the entrenched and powerful few.
Despite missing the fire fighting reference I still maintain that Chernobyl deaths were for the most part precipitated by a government bent on hiding the problem rather than looking out for it's citizens. Using your logic ship travel would be considerably unsafe because of the Titanic. Pointing out that Chernobyl was a failure of POLITICS rather than technology is not whitewashing.
TT
Of course, we don't really have to worry about burning fossil fuels, as it appears they'll all be gone within 50 years anyway :)
The whole H2O thing is just a distraction being pushed by big multi-nationals to try and confuse the issue and prevent them being reined.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/even t-status/event/2006/
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Patrick Moore says that wind and solar cannot replace coal because of intermittency problems. This is not correct: electric storage is becoming cheaper and more efficient all the time. Check out Vanadium redox batteries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_batter y
In addition the solar tower generates power continuously because of the re-radiation of energy from the ground under the canopy.
http://www.enviromission.com.au/faqs/faqs.htm
No nuclear power station has ever been fully decommissioned successfully. All of human civilization has a history of about 5000 years, and yet we imagine that we can successfully manage this incredibly deadly poison for thousands of years into the future. And, on the basis of barely 60 years, some so-called experts express "confidence" that there won't be enormous disasters, both accidental and intentional, in the future.
Instead of huge taxpayer subsidies to make more Nukes, and continuing to never really clean them up afterwards, why not spend some research and pricing support $$$ to get solar panels as a standard roofing material on people's houses? (Or, at least stop building and re-roofing houses with black asphalt shingles in hot geographical regions.... an incredibly wasteful practice.)
It's a long observed phenomenon that even has a name: the Red-Green Alliance. (No, not that Red Green.) It was an easy alliance for the greens to fall into, because opposition to specific development and promotion of sustainability can very easily and quickly morphs into opposition to capitalism and promotion of socialist policy. Throw in an intense desire to modify the behavior of people by force, and an alliance is born.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Like it or not, Nuclear power is here to stay...at least until something newer and better comes along. Either way, Nuclear power is an efficient and powerful way to generate quite a bit of electricity. With it, there's no smoke to pollute the air and add more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. There are only 2 major waste products. One is steam...okay, that's just water no big deal. The other is the more controversial waste, the nuclear waste, which I don't believe is actually that much, I think it's more hype than anything else. Given some more time, I think the scientific and nuclear community will find a good, clean, efficient way to do away with the nuclear by-product. And if you're concerned with safety, realize this. US Nuclear plants, and probably most around the world have several safeties and failsafes to help prevent any sort of meltdown. And each of those probably have at LEAST one backup, more than likely, more. With all the warnings, indicators, gauges, computers, etc there, the workers know about potential problems well in advance, before they become critical. They use and utilize every method and possibility to keep the plants as safe as physically possible. If they didn't, they wouldn't be in operation. Realize that Homer Simpson doesn't maintain the safety at the plants.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
The Earth's crust is estimated to contain over 30 trillion tonnes of Uranium. To date we've mined 2 million tonnes of this. That's less than one ten millionth of what we've got (compared to about half of all the conventional Oil).
e rgyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
We've published a study on the web that estimates how much of the remaining Uranium we can effectively extract using current mining and milling technology and current light water reactors by looking at the energy cost of mining vs the energy gain in a reactor.
The answer? Very conservatively, 300 times more than our current 50 year supply of proven reserves.
It all here: http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEn
Even without running breeder reactors (which I suspect that a president will soon override the JC ban), we have plenty. When some places speak of running out, they are speaking of high-grade veins. There are loads of low-grade sites, and it is easy enough to take from the ocean.
Even disregarding all that, we can switch to other supplies such as thorium, which is even more abundant. Basically, nuke (fission today, fusion tomorrow) is the way to go combined with alternative.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm glad to see the big fat liar is coming around to making points that finaly make sense. The dork is from my home turf and for more than a decade has been nothing other than a sellout and an albatros around our necks.. "Log the rainforest so it will become more systemicaly productive"... Inefingdeed you jerk Glad to see someone else caught on. Anyway yah nuclear, The self dicipline to solve these problems devolves down to a miniscule percentile of the populace in actual practice (I know) so the unwashed must pay. We don't have any more big rivers up here we're willing to mess up with dams so it will have to be Big expensive nuclear plants gentlemen. And yes please do build that wall on the border, the higher the better.
Seriously. Is there a cabal of fanatically anti-GW mods in action, or something?
... If press reports of the 1970s are not to be taken seriously, those of today regarding the nature and origins of climate change should also be viewed with healthy skepticism.
Let's dissect this piece by piece.
Isn't realclimate.org by the guy who fudged his analysis to generate the discredited "hockey-stick" graph of temperature predictions?
Ad hominem attack. And wrong, because realclimate is a group blog, and the author in question has nothing to do with the hockey stick. And the hockey stick isn't discredited, except in the eyes of a certain small group of people who are often accused of fudging their own maths.
Finally, its clear that there were concerns,[about a potential new ice age] perhaps quite strong, in the minds of a number of scientists of the time. And yet, the papers of the time present a clear consensus that future climate change could not be predicted with the knowledge then available.
And then the page goes on to mention that the knowledge then available was in the absence of GW. i.e. scientists were considering that the Earth would be naturally cooling, if there wasn't a GW effect.
[and present climate knowledge still does not allow reliable predictions]
This line, or sentiment, isn't present in the article at all. It's a direct fallacy of inserting words into someone else's mouth.
So are you attempting to say that: because the concern was not unanimous (it never is) and scientists believed further study was warranted (they always say that) that the concern about global cooling was not common among climate researchers?
No. The point being made by the article was that such concerns were not exhibited in peer reviewed journals. Climate change is. Popular press does not equal peer reviewed journals. Hence, a direct argument that the present situation is identical to that of 'global cooling' is false.
And before some idiot mods this post as troll (like they did earlier to another of mine), can someone please justify precisely what information the parent offers that makes it so 'informative'?
Compared with those of previous millennia, the changes in GSL occurring today are tiny.
It'll become your problem when half of the state of New Jersey moves to Minnesota because NJ is underwater. And we are bringing Tony Soprano with us. I hope you like calzones and AK47s.
You goombas won't cause culture shock up here. There is a fair bit of diversity here. You won't scare us with gunplay either. The woods are mayhem during hunting season. People drive around wasted drunk on the logging roads in their pickups shooting anything that moves.
an ill wind that blows no good
James Lovelock is an environmentalist and serious scientist who supports nuclear power.
n glish/love-indep-24-05-04.htm
http://www.ecolo.org/media/articles/articles.in.e
Patrick Moore is a paid lobbyist for the logging industry, who used to be an environmentalist a long time ago.
http://www.fanweb.org/patrick-moore/liar.html
There's a big difference in credibility. Moore has so little that I'm not sure a quote from him helps the cause any.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
One of the reasons nuclear energy remains so inexpensive is that disposal costs are largely subsidized by the federal government. Once the Yucca Mountain permanent disposal site is up an running, it may be practical to expand the country's nuclear energy program. The various "temporary" storage sites around the country simply do not have the infrastructure to take on more.
That only concerns the cheap uranium. As it goes up in price, there will be plenty. Even if we stay with inefficient reactors, it will be a couple hundred years. Keep in mind, that at this time, the cost of fuel represents less than a tenth of 1% of the total costs. The high costs is the equipment and the operation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
by the same people who duped us about [...] hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s.
The thing is, out of all the 1960s doomy predictions, those were the ones that were right. People would have died. There wasn't an error in the calculations - people were saved, in very large numbers, by the "green revolution" of improved hybrid crops and farming techniques.
Frankenstein foods, intensive agriculture, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides saved the planet. Ponder, o hippies, the world your "scruples" would have left you in!
In fact, chances are the world's luddite opposition to GM is holding back as much improvement again.
Germany and Sweden have already decided to stop using nuclear power and more countries will follow, so the lobbyists are struggling to find new support and spread FUD everywhere. Don't believe them, there are plenty of perfectly clean, safe and renewable alternatives which won't burden following generations with the dangers of ageing technology and nuclear waste.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I bet most young slashdotters dont remember or were not born yet when these events took place.
Nuclear energy is cleaner but certainly not as safe.
The plant at 3 mile island in Pennsylvania was just 20 minutes from going critical and blowing a cloud of radioactive steam that would have hit northern new jersey and New York City. Pretty scare stuff.
To this day the land around Chenobyl is abandonded and highly radioactive and is sealed off.
People today are angry about the radiation from coal powerplants and more than happy to mention they are more environmentally harmful than nuclear power but they are safe.
That is something to consider
http://saveie6.com/
* removes foot from mount*
This is the problem with slashdot. I took some basic classes in nuclear enegineering. I read scientific magazines. The parent of my reply stated a that there were improvements without mentioning what they were. I thought about the issue for two seconds, couldn't think of any improvements and replied. I suppose I could have asked if anyone had rather than just stating that there weren't, but I was in the middle of cooking so I just hit submit. Next time, I'll just ask. I do remeber reading about pebble reactors now that I think about it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Im not sure if you guys have touched base with this one, but Patrick is now a spokeman for the Lumber Industry. Im not saying he is wrong or right, actually i agree with him thats we need to re-examine nuclear, but Patrick is not liked by many of his past associates. I suppose as time passes, we all need to look twice at the soapboxes we stand on.
or you could answer his question as to what you'd prefer. Thousands of tonnes per year spewed right into the air or thousands of tonnes stuck in a hole somewhere.
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
If 1000 years from now, society has completly reverted to some pre-historic time, why should we care?
Have the actions of the industry in this country led anyone to believe that they could be trusted with any significant responsibility?
Let's see--Fishing?
Well, apparently we have fished out most of the streams and oceans of many of the breeds of fish that we like. "Fish and Chips" fish has changed repeatedly because we keep destroying populations. We discovered huge quantities of "Orange Rufe" and immediately set upon it... Turns out it's amazingly long-lived and slow to breed. Whoops? Who knew (or could be bothered to check)?
How about Forests?
Does anyone here doubt that we would be completely out of old-growth forests if we didn't have regulations? It's a fact that we would. They have tried to cut the last few remaining forests again and again. Sure, sustainable foresting may work, I have no doubt, but if so, why do they continue to try for our last few acres of old-growth???
Hmm, how about telephone lines?
We deregulated AT&T, now they are trying to set tiered service charges on the net because they see google making money. Why don't they do the same thing with phones, as a company makes more phone calls they should start paying to receive calls in a timely manner?
Does everyone trust industry with our IP?
Is Disney going to place Mickey and Winnie the Pooh in the public domain as per our original agreement, or are they going to keep paying to have the agreement re-written to suit their income requirements? Can record companies be trusted to write our copyright laws?
Then (and here's the question) why the HELL would you want to, in any way, trust industry with Nuclear energy??? I don't contend that it CAN be safe, but honestly, will it?
And what's the real advantage? Like cupboard space, if you provide more, it'll get used and more will be required.
I'm not saying there is a simple solution--but actually there may be one. What is wrong with us moving towards small, local energy creation? I'm not saying solar panels, water power, geo-thermal, natural gas, wind power or conservation alone will solve the problem, but maybe some combination thereof (combined with increasing production efficiency) will.
Ask someone who lives in an energy co-op area how they like their prices, generally they are very reasonable without investors skimming all the profits.
Chances are, we could be well on our way to this if it wasn't for the energy industrialists trying to protect their profits. That is the ONE "advantage" to nuclear energy--it can be centralized, controlled and monopolized by industrialists.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with it technically, but why don't we think before giving yet another responsibility to those who are driven by nothing but financial interests?
Says the species who lives everywhere from the Arctic to the Sahara: "three degrees of warming will kill our civilization".
And if you bought that one, I have some seafront land in Kansas going cheap...
Sure.
I've got a question for you as well. Here goes:
Did you stop beating your wife yet? Yes or no.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Let's make a fair comparison on the disposal of waste.
Given the amount of coal and natural gas burning stations that spew tons of waste into the air (including lots of radioactive stuff from coal) let's crush spent nuke fuel into a fine powder, built a really big stack, and blow it high into the air.
What? Don't like that idea? Sure. Neither do I. So to make it fair the other way I say require a coal/gas plant to package all emissions (including all CO2) into some form of containment and disposal system. What? Too expensive? Sheesh. Make up your bloody mind.
I haven't seen any thorium veins walking around, but I do know that it can be "enriched" by a lvl 300 enchanter.
Enchanted Thorium is very expensive...
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
1. you can't break these things easily. they don't crumble. they are rather durable
2. even if you did, you have a broken pebble. ok, fine. you remove it from the system. you haven't released any more radioactivity than was already at work in the system, and you haven't gotten anywhere near a meltdown or any other such scary scenario from pre-pebble bed reactor days. that's the whole point. a bunch of pebbles by nature of its essential design is immune to runaway chain reactions
it's superior technology. it's progress. it's safer, by orders of magnitude
it's not some far out wacky concept that needs deep-level analysis to see the superiority. a bunch of small spheres can immediately be appreciated as superior in terms of durability and resistance to chain reactions. no PhD in nuclear physics is needed to appreciate the superiority of this technology over something dependent upon graphite rods and active human intervention to prevent bad things from happening. the only thing you need to appreciate is the concept of designing safety into the basic fundamental units of operation.
it's like this: babies have been found to strangle themselves in a crib's bars. does that mean you stop using cribs? no. does that mean you have someone monitoring the baby at all times to make sure they are not stuck in the bars? no. what you do is you design a crib from the ground up where the bars are spaced wider. now you can put your kid in a crib, and rest assured the baby can't strangle themselves, period
once you appreciate the concept of designing safety into the fundamental functionality of a system, you appreciate the superiority of pebble bed reactors
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The thing is, nobody is going after the weather we want. Instead of taking our lives into our own hands, we have been throwing ourselves at the mercy of "nature".
It's called "The Ocean"
Then as an environmentalist, you know that no one is arguing over whether or not the mean global temperature has increased in the last X number of years. The argument is over whether or not human activity is the cause of it. There is also some disagreement over what effects the increase in global temperatures will have/are having. For instance, global warming crackpots like to blame our recent spat of hurricanes on global warming. World renowned professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, Dr. William Gray says, and I quote:
So much for the "everyone agrees" B.S. you read here on Slashdot constantly. Quickly now Global Warming Jihadist! Find a link between the professor and an oil company or the whole sham will collapse!!
Why does everyone feel compelled to contribute to the environmental debate when very, very few have studed environmental science?
I have a four year degree in Environmental Science. I am also a registered Democrat, if that makes any difference to you... I think global warming theory (Humans->Greenhouse Gasses->Global Temp Increases) is unmitigated crap. I agree with you though: "Debating" global warming here on Slashdot, if you can call it that, is absolutely pointless, because not one of these nut jobs can be bothered to offer any evidence to support their theory. Further, their suggested solutions, assuming their theory is correct, are generally unrealistic *and* inadequate at the same time. Watching these people parrot each other is disgusting, really.
Posting anonymously because I have already modded down several "Oh Noes!!1! Teh SKY IS TEH FALING!!ONE!ONE!!1" rhetoric wielding crackpots and posting under my login name would undo those mods.
The West has mostly left orthodox Christian belief, but it is still inherits the culture. Part of that is the need for Apocalypic End Time accounts. The Christians have Revelation, the rest have what lies to hand--the Environmentalists are happy to fill the need. Note: I am not making an argument for or against global warming, but just making a point about the apocalypic language surrounding it.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
As for passive solar, I'm all in favour, but there are several issues:
As to your objections to nuclear, low-level waste is really a nonissue...the stuff is simply not that dangerous compared to the myriad other waste we dump into landfills or spray into the atmosphere. Compared to the thousands of lung cancers caused by radon annually, LLW is a piffling risk. High-level waste is the problem, if mostly a political one. See how Sweden is dealing with it.
Finally, terrorism. Nuclear plants are a pretty tough target. How well defended is the Maroondah reservoir?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You do the same thing we do with the carbon dioxide (green house gas), sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides (acid rain), uranium, and thorium that are ALL BYPRODUCTS OF COAL POWER PLANTS.... you manage/store them best you can and hope that it doesn't get out of control.
The fact of the matter is that there are very few power generating technologies that we can deploy NOW that will meet our energy needs besides fossil fuels and nuclear energy. So, PICK YOUR POISON.
In the mean time, lets work on problems that will solve our energy crisis like economical mass deployment of environmentally safe technologies (wind, ocean, solar) or fusion/fission possibilities (still a long way off).
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Except that the new fast neutron/breeder reactors can use something like 98% of the waste of the old style reactors, and the waste generated by these needs to be kept safe for a few hundreds years, and is many times less.
Note that the substance of the environmentalist's views have flipped completely. OK, so it's different. Yet he still believes he's totally right and everyone should do what he thinks. At least there's some consistency.
"Nothing is perfectly safe--crossing the street is a greater hazard to you than Yucca mountain will be to anyone."
I don't believe you.
While Patrick Moore was around for the founding of Greenpeace he has been a highly-paid "consultant" to industry for years. No one with an ounce of concern for matters of ecology will have anything to do with Patrick Moore anymore. His recent work includes and wholesale abandonment of anything close to the precautionary principle including the promotion of untested genetic engineering, fish farming, and industrial scale forestry.
His Wikipedia entry can be reduced to the mere descriptor: "Judas of the environmental movement."
Patrick Moore has for many years made a living by offering himself to industry as an "environmentalist" who will argue industry's side of the issue. He is universally loathed as a sellout turncoat by people who truly care for ecological sustainabilty. I'm surprised that the usually savvy editors of slashdot headlines were taken in by him.
If you want to understand Patrick Moore, go see the movie "Thank You For Smoking."
I would say that George Bush is as much of an environmentalist as Patrick Moore is.
If you ever hear him speak or read his writing, you should ask how much he's being paid to do it. He really is dirty destructive industry's whore.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
There may not be any current solutions, but there are tons of scientific groups looking at methods for burning the waste further, until it becomes stable lead, at a gain. Even though none have succeeded right now, I think there's little doubt that someone will succeed within the next couple of hundred years (a relatively short time), and then all that needs to be done is dig up the waste again and use it to generate more energy. Thus, I don't think nuclear waste is a great problem.
If you run Linux, you spend it masterbating and looking for more fuel for masterbation on the Internet until the the re-compile is done.
If you run MacOS, you spend it bragging about running MacOS until Starbucks closes.
If you run Solaris, you spend it looking for a job where you can still run Solaris.
If you run none of the above, you spend it having a life, playing with your children, or humping your wife.
I run Windows, but I'm getting a divorce, so I will soon be switching to Linux.
Well. It is about freakin' time. As anyone who's ever gotten me started on the car problem knows, I am pretty opinionated and pretty radical when it comes to environmental issues. This is one area where I have disagreed with the rest of the treehuggers since almost day one.
I think even the Sea Shepherd types could get on board with nuclear power if presented with the right argument. I would not debate the safety, cleanliness or cost. I would point out the location. Nukes are not built on estuaries, wetlands, swamps or old growth forests. They are clean and quiet so they can be built right where they are needed: in urbanized areas. In the unlikely event that the FUD is true and another plant goes kablooey, I think that Paul Watson would still have no trouble sacrificing a chunk of New Jersey if it meant one less pit mine. Heck, I doubt you'd have to throw in the mine.
Well, if we were building sensible systems, we'd reprocess the fuel. We could reduce the waste to a fraction of the volume by doing that AND what we finally did throw away would be much lower level fuel.
As far as someone playing with the magic glowing glass, that's not an environmental disaster, that's a few people getting killed. Not to sound too crass about it, but people get killed all the time. I don't think it's a very good choice to not use nuclear power because a handful of idiots might get radiation poisoning in 1000 years, and instead continue to puke coal smoke into the air by the tons per day. Even if Yucca were breached, the stuff's still encapsulated and won't get into the water en masse and cause huge contamination anyway.
I'm pretty darned environmentally minded myself, to the point where I ride a bike 20 miles a day to keep from coughing out 20 pounds of CO2; and I've always been in favor of nuclear power. I wish we'd go to a decent FULL CYCLE nuclear system including fuel reprocessing. What we have now is like killing a cow just to get the flank steak, and throwing the rest away. Terribly inefficient.
It's precisely BECAUSE I want to leave the planet cleaner for future generations that I'm in favor of nuclear power.
... too bad your head is already taking up that space.
Now that an environmentalist, the icon of all science, culture, sexuality, and politics, has OK'd it, NOW can I have my nuclear powered car, my nuclear powered house, my nuclear powered laptop, and maybe even my own nuclear powered spaceship? I'm sick of pausing every 300 to 400 miles to restock with smelly chemicals processed from deep earth ooze.
No matter how good a solution nuclear power is, the energy consumers across numerous nations will be left with hundreds/thousands of wind turbines. And to add insult to injury, the same greens who left us with their horrid wind farms, also got, and are getting, many essential nuclear plants closed.
I am sick and tired of nuclear advocates who preach technological 'coexistance' with wind. Stop calling for mediocre energy solutions. Wind is an awful technology and deserves to be critisized regardless of how personally the 'green' community might take it. I have withessed other such pandering-compromises from the past. No one wins.
If we really cared about these postapocalyptic primitives, we'd use nuclear power and leave the oil in the ground to give them an easy power source for redevelopment.
Quite probably, the difference between your quoted number and the grandparent's is that you are talking about weight of fuel used, while the grandparent is talking about the weight of waste generated. Nuclear waste is not pure expended uranium, there is also a lot of other junk that is contaminated.
Also, I always think that it is more relevant to talk about the volume of these things, rather than weight, since no one has an inutituve feel for the weight of uranium in their hands.
Your '2000 metric tons' translates to a cube a little under 5 meters on each side (assuming pure uranium) (will change slightly depending on whether it is enriched or not). Small, eh?
The grandparents '48 tons' (american tons, I assume), if we assume waste is 25% the density of uranium (I have no clue what it really is), comes to a cube half a meter per side per year per power plant. Also very small, right?
Then you can consider that the waste is encased in glass, so is in solid form and not free to roam around our enironment, unlike the fumes generated in fossil fuel plants, which we breathe, and would anyway be much greater in volume if packed into cubes.
That's just the high-level waste -- the worst part of the problem, for certain, but there's plenty of other waste that isn't as potent, takes up much more space, and that is still a challenge to store.
I'm not all that impressed by the analogy. If that much high-level nuclear waste were densely packed together on a football field, alot of it (the more recent stuff) it would be dang hot (temperature-wise & radiation). The analogy excludes all the heavy shielding that has to go around it to make it possible to handle, and it ignores the requirement to keep it cool. In reality, it takes alot more space to place it anywhere or to transport it to that site. You would need a large mine to store all this stuff, and it would be an ever-growing problem. You'd need at least as much secure space for the next 40 years of operation, and the next after that, and so on, assuming no expansion (and I wonder what fraction was generated by the last 20 years versus the first 20 - it is interesting that 40000 tonnes / 2000 tonnes per year is only 20 years).
Can you recommend a site in the U.S. for the reprocessing plant, assuming the legislative obstacles were removed? And, while you're at it, a transportation route to and from it for those 40000 tonnes -- preferably one along the way that everyone would be happy with? In fairness, final storage has the same challenge, but at least you can tell people it won't be coming back.
Keep in mind that while it recovers unused fuel and reduces waste volume, reprocessing generates a fair amount of useless waste itself, which still has to be transported and stored somewhere, and it is usually *alot* hotter than the original, unused fuel bundles were that went into the reactors.
Yes, reprocessing is a solution, but it has its own challenges that make one wonder if generating more new waste is really a good idea.
They're pretty. That would be reason enough for me to plant them, anyhow.
shoot it into the motherfucking sun!!!
In a plane... a plane with motherfucking snakes on it!
And humanity would wind up repeating the vicious cycle...
Unfortunately nuclear energy might be the only viable short term solution. There is no way China, Europe or the US will cut their energy consumption to reasonable levels (reasonable as in all the world's population could use the same lever per capita and the world would not melt or blow to pieces like Melmac when they all turned on their hair dryers at the same time). Sustainable energy sources like wind and water energy can't cover the demand. And coal and oil just add too much CO2 to the atmosphere. So we are left with no choice (until we get fusion, cold or hot) but fission.
But please don't get all excited about it. There seem to be accidents in Japanese plants on a regular basis. Pebble reactors are fine, until you count in terrorism. Uranium is also a limited resource. We produce waste. And even if we refurbish the waste (and take care of the last two points) it still produces waste and it will still run out at some point.
There are new studies coming out every month that either radiation from power plants does or does not make a difference in cancer rates. Until we have that figured out we are still in doubt about that one. So I count that as not being very excited about the prospect of nuclear energy.
But you guys are right about one thing. People need to realize that nuclear energy IS the least worse choice out there now. I come from Germany and it is not possible to build power plants here for political reasons. Nobody will! This is rediculous.
It's all linked - maybe not all of us can directly impact global warming by switching to nuclear power, but there are concrete alternatives to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
For instance, I just picked up my 2006 Toyota Prius today. It's replacing a five year old Toyota Rav 4 - nice car, but can't hold a candle to 55 MPG. My wife and I plan on commuting with the car and would not have done so because of the escalating cost of gas.
This option is not a cheap one and not for everyone, and yet it will almost double the fuel economy of the vehicle it replaced. Imagine the energy savings if the price of hybrid cars drops so that more people can afford them!
Think globally - act locally.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
Why don't we just do what we do with the Uranium in coal?!
According to this paper (which just happens to be the first sort-of-remotely-useful source I've seen in Google, rather than an exhaustive study):
Coal Samples: Coal from Stockheim, Franken, Federal Republic of Germany, having a uranium content of 554 microgramme/gramme of coal was used.
According to a US DoE report on coal production and consumption states that on 2005 prelimary data shows total coal consumption to be around 1.1 billion short tons.
If we assume that the uranium content of 554 microgrammes/gramme is rather typical then:
1.1 billion short tons is about 997,700,000 tonnes of coal, which is 997,700,000,000,000 grammes.
Multiply that by 554 microgrammes/gramme to get 552,725,800,000,000,000 microgrammes of uranium...
Which is (drum roll) 552,725.8 TONNES (about 609,400 short tons) of URANIUM!
And what happens to it all? Well, some of it is in the airborne smokey stuff, and some of it remains as part of the coal ash. And what happens to the millions and millions of tonnes of coal ash? I wonder.
Are you sure that 50,000 tons of nuclear waste is really that much of a problem in comparison?
what you do is you design a crib from the ground up where the bars are spaced wider. now you can put your kid in a crib, and rest assured the baby can't strangle themselves, period
I'm pretty sure they actually made the spacing more narrow. Sort of defeats the purpose of having bars if the baby can just slip through, although at least such an arrangement would preserve the natural selection feature...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Have you seen just exactly what's at Yucca Flats? It sits right in the location where hundreds (if not more) of above and underground nuclear bomb testing has already taken place. Hardly an area where any additional radiation would make much of a difference.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
We told them that nuclear power was safe, it was the answer, it was short-sighted (environmentally speaking) to hold the technology back.
Even right after Three Mile Island, we were saying that yeah, everything worked properly, no injuries, no leakage, it was a nice happy meltdown.
I just want to take the entire environmentalist movement, smack them upside the head into next week, saying "Bi**h, I done tol' your ass, but you just don't know how to listen, do you!? Now you gotta make me hurt you."
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
"What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant?"
48 tons of radiocative waste per plant per year? OH NOES!!!!11!!
Wow, that's about the same as a coal plant fart, but I don't see you complaining about the amount of radiocative crap those plants are dumping STRAIGHT INTO THE ATMOSPHERE. And that's just the radioactive crap. That doesn't include the mercury, lead and other lovely crud you get from burning coal.
"Arrogant people think nuclear power is perfectly safe. Paranoid people think nuclear power will destroy the planet. Intelligent people see plant designs that are intrinsically safe, but want to know what we're going to do with the waste."
Well, I can guarentee they're not going to dump it in the air. And it's energy to waste ratio is a hell of a lot better looking than fossil fuels. Wanna guess how many tons of toxic waste your average coal plant makes a year?
"The ONLY solution the industry has right now is "bury it" (Yucca), "make it someone else's problem" (Arizona's) and "hope we're not around if it is a problem"(whoever is on the planet when Yucca breaks open, or is attacked, or a society 1,000 years from now, which can't read English, trundles into the mysterious cave and comes out with Magical Glowing Glass.)"
Short of breeder reactors, the best option is to just bury it. And it doesn't even take a lot of space to contain all the waste that would ever be generated. As far as a society in a 1000 years, you are arrogantly assuming that a) We'll actually make it another 1000 years (50/50 at best) and b) Society will have completely forgotten about the concept of a geiger counter.
I'm far more concerned about the wastes being generated from our fossil power plants than nuclear waste.
~X~
~X~
You don't get a research grant for saying everything is OK.
You get one like this: "We're doomed. Everybody panic!"
You get the second one like this: "Maybe we have a chance, if I do more research."
The grandparents '48 tons' (american tons, I assume), if we assume waste is 25% the density of uranium (I have no clue what it really is), comes to a cube half a meter per side per year per power plant. Also very small, right?
You have: 48ton / ((0.5m)^3)
You want:
Definition: 348358.94 kg / m^3
Compare with water, density 1000ishkg/m^3 and osmium (the densest substance known, I think) at 22000kg/m^3
I think you made a mistake. Or you are converting the waste to pure neutrons.
"The only solution on the table right now is Yucca"
Well, there's always the reprocessing route. If you use a breeder reactor and waste reprocessing fuel cycle, you can eliminate all of the high level, won't go away for thousands of years waste. Of course, you still have the "low level" waste, but that will go away after a few hundred years (maybe 500 or so to be safe). The great part is that they've figured out how to convert conventional PWR's and BWR's into breeders through advanced computer modeling, so there's no need for any new R&D. The only problem is that it's a lot more expensive than the once through fuel cycle. I guess you can have it clean, or you can have it cheap. Its cheaper and cleaner than coal anyway.
Storing the high level waste isn't really as much as a problem as you think, either. 48 tons of nuclear waste may sound like a lot, but it's really only a few cubic meters. There are salt domes in new mexico that will probably be geologically stable for millions of years (look up the waste isolation pilot plant, WIPP). The only reason yucca mountain is at yucca mountain is politics, it's really a pretty bad location. At any rate, 48 tons of waste per year compares favorably to the hundreds of tones of waste generated daily by a coal plant, in my opinion.
No one argues that Yucca mountain is less safe than the on-site storage of nuclear waste that currently exists. But how many people have died from exposure to this more dangerously stored waste, compared to how many pedestrians are killed by vehicles?
English is easier said than done.
It's worth noting that, while Patrick Moore was indeed a significant part of the start of Greenpeace, he's basically been in the pocket of industry for ages. He's run a salmon farm and called claims that they pollute 'hogwash'. (They do, in fact, pollute.) He's been a front man for the lumber company involved in the deforestation of much of Canada for a long time. He was instrumental in persuading the Pew Charitable Trust not to 'waste its money' on funding environmental groups.
k _Moore
He's the one who said "We found that the Amazon rainforest is more than 90 percent intact." Which is, of course, total bunk. He's basically a greenwasher now... someone who you hire who tells you how to make your industry look more green without actually changing your practices, or whom you hire to do damage control when your industry has just been exposed as a gross polluter, or in some cases even when your industry is about to get much worse and you don't want any flack from it.
Moore's clients have included:
B.C. Hazardous Waste Management Corporation
BHP Minerals (Canada) Ltd. (To claim that dumping mine tailings in a river is not harmful.)
National Association of Forest Industries (heavy loggers)
Westcoast Energy and BC Gas (to play down global warming concerns)
Some sources:
http://www.fanweb.org/patrick-moore/liar.html
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Patric
My favorite quote:
Trees and wood are both good! A world without forests is as unthinkable as a day without wood.
Got wood?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
..uhh, damn. You're right.
I forgot to multiply by 48: One ton of waste is a half meter (0.57 m) cubed, but I want 48 tons, which is (48)^(1/3) times as big per side, giving 2 meters cubed. Still very small. (you method then gives 5442 kg / m^3)
I just had to forget the most obvious thing...
Thinking about the future of the human race on this planet calls for long term planning.
Nope. Not so. That would be entirely analogous to the 18th century folks trying to pre-plan the 20th century. Worse than useless!
"Pushing the problem onto future generations" is exactly the correct strategy. It's like one of those computational problems that you can solve fastest by letting it alone for a few years while Moore's law catches up. Future techological problems are best solved with future technology - our best course is to attempt to reach that future as soon as possible. To which end, fuel the economy! Because economic growth is basically the wave-front that's pushing scientific growth.
You have something that gives off heat. We don't have to do anything to it. It just sits there making heat.
Nice. You could power an engine with that heat. There are many suitable engines: steam turbine, stirling, steam piston, RTG... Replace "steam" as needed, with a temperature-appropriate choice as needed: helium, sodium, neon, freon, ammonia, butane...
Nuclear waste is free energy. Use it.
"The problem is that while technology advanced, we have not built new reactors to take advantage of it."
/ japan/wna-japan.jpg
By "We", I assume you mean the United States, since France and others have been using fast breeder reactors and fuel recycling that never results in weapons grade Plutonium at any point in the cycle, and reduces the actual long term waste to nearly nothing.
The US has held itself back over its continuing collective guilt over ending WWII by using nuclear weapons on Japan. Japan, on the other hand, has 34% of it's electical power coming form 53 reactors, of which the majority are breeder reactors (generate their own plutonium for use as fuel in themselves and other reactors), so it seems they're a heck of a lot less fearful of it than the US is (the US only gets 10% of our electrical power from reactors). http://www.cscap.nuctrans.org/Nuc_Trans/locations
-- Terry
we're human beings. we're unique because unlike other animals that alter themselves to survive in an environment, we alter the environment to fit our needs. our needs are the earth climate as it is, year 1500-2000. if things get hotter, or colder, we're going to remedy that
when and if we have the ability to alter the thermostat economically, we will. not if, but when. it doesn't matter who is to blame. and it isn't going to matter how much it is going to cost either. why? because when we alter the environment, we will do it because of economic incentive
it doesn't make sense for a car company to spend the extra money to add seat belts to a car. it DOES make sense for the insurance company to only insure cars that have seat belts, and therefore compel car companies to add seat belts, because they can't sell cars no one will want to buy if they won't be able to get insurance
likewise, it's only a matter of technological progress before the economic incentive to alter the hurricane season for insurance reasons on coastal real estate becomes a done deal
if we can't afford it, we won't do it. whatever "it" is. but if there is economic incentive, we will do it. so you have to stop being trolled by people who have no economic consideration in their agenda. economics are all that the agenda is about. you can't compel people to do things that aren't in their best interest. all you have to do is change the technological skills and the environmental pressures (need for water, need to avoid bad weather) and people's best interest becomes "we must mess with the environment." so you have to stop believing that we aren't going to be more proactive on our attempts to control the environment
its not a question of whether we should or should not. its simply a matter of human nature: we alter our environments to suit our needs. we build clothes out of animal hides when its cold, we build fires when it is cold, we build huts out of mud when its hot, we build canals with dynamite when we need water. and someday we will seed dead areas of the ocean with iron to sequester CO2. we mess with our environment to suit our needs. that's what we do. we're human beings. we mess with our world. always did, always will
we're way beyond "is the world getting hotter? is the world getting colder?" and we're way beyond whose fault it is. none of those questions matter anymore. we're going to control our environment, and we're going to do it for economic incentives. blame games, climate trends: doesn't matter. moot points. we know what we want, and when we get the tech to make it that way, we'll use it. end of story. every other argument on the issue is secondary and ultimately pointless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And while we're at it, why has nobody observed that 48 tons/yr/plant is a drop in the bucket compared to the many millions of tons of conventional waste being generated annually. Sure its not radioactive (well, most of it isn't) but it sure as hell is toxic and it isn't particuarly friendly to the environment or in a hurry to break down into something less objectional. Its a big planet but its going to fill up with garbage long before we can fill it with nuclear waste.
people don't like to fly because they put their lives in someone else's hands. when they are behind the driver's wheel, they feel like they are in control. that makes them feel safer. except it's illusion of control. because in reality, their lives are now under the control of about 500 other assholes they drive by every day. the guy falling asleep. the woman putting on her make up. the drunk guy. the chick on the cell phone. one flick of the wrist from any of those people and you are dead or maimed.
;-P
if you were the only car on the ground, then yes, driving is safer than flying, as with all sources of mechanical failure being equal, falling out of the air is worse than running into a tree
but in reality, where you share the road with 500 assholes completely beyond your control, and in the air, where the other planes are far and few between and regimented to an air traffic authority, you're safer
and your analogy to nuclear power is wrong. reality today is one or two commercial jetliners in the air only. to make the analogy to a more nuclear future accurate, you simply have to scale up the number of plants to the current number of commercial jets, which you have already agreed is safe, and you have a more accurate analogy
just reference france and japan. they are heavily dependent on nuclear power. using the old school technology. with no three mile island or chernobyl level incidents. heavily regimented contro, just like commercial airliners. now stir in orders of magnitude more safety with pebble bed reactors. compare that to hurricane katrina (global warming) and 9/11 (islamonazi petrol money)
it's a no brainer
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You might believe this, but the fact is that many of the jackasses braying the loudest about anthropogenic global warming evidently do not.
Robert F Kennedy Jr. has been piously lecturing us rubes about environmental correctness for lo these many years, but still flies around in private jets, and is doing his best to scuttle the offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound because it spoils the view from his yacht.
Laurie David and Barbara Streisand and a hundred more Hollywood dingbats are full of coercive Luddite prescriptions for us little people in flyover country, but can't seem give up their Gulfstream V jets and limousines and 20,000 sq. ft. mansions with sixteen air conditioner units.
Ariana Huffington loves to badger the common man about global warming, but is addicted to private jets and fancy cars up the wazoo. Al Gore? Ditto, plus has four children, doubling the footprint of himself and his wife on Earth's limited resources. And of course the Kennedys breed like rats in a granary too.
Listening to these people hectoring us rednecks and hicks, you'd think they actually believed there was some kind of serious problem, but their actions say otherwise, loud and clear. If these dumb shit lefties think that dismantling modern civilization to prevent warming is so important, I say let them go first, or shut the fuck up.
Unless these limousine liberal loudmouths begin walking the walk, I am going to go on believing that the whole thing is a conspiracy by the authoritarian collectivist Left to gain by subterfuge and propaganda that which has been loudly and clearly repudiated at the ballot box.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Who says the next dominant life form on the planet would be human?? :)
If they made a movie of your life, would anybody buy a ticket?
He writes, "And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states". I think it naive to use the term "rogue states" this way. Rogue in respect to what? They don't like to torture their people or other nations? They don't like to bomb civilians?
Then he continues, "Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons. This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy and the most difficult to address, as the example of Iran shows." I can't follow. Why talk about Iran, and not Pakistan, India, Israel, the US? I think he hasn't seen enough of the world.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
because the evidence in favor of applying modern nuclear power technology to solve the world's energy problem has become overwhelming.
I wonder how long it will take neo-con ideologues to realize that we can't burn all the carbon that has been sequestered over hundreds of millions of years without a noticeable effect on the world's climate.
Myself, I'm betting that Crighton and his ilk will hold out until sea level has risen at least 1 foot.
As a wise man once said:
"It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
Use fossil fuel? Hell no! It's better to sell that to the west.
Saudia Arabia actually uses nuclear for desalination.
All of the glaciers throughout the world are melting except for heart of the south pole. While some people will claim that it is caused by pollution, then why is edges of the south poles melting, or Everst and K2? The answer is that even if you deny all the other evidence, you can not ignore that even glaciers in crevises and not exposed to the sun are melting.
Oops, wrong checkbox... Doh!
I have heard that throwing it into the oceans at the subduction point (where tectonic plates meet) is an effective way to get rid of it. Anyone know the pros/cons of this?
Why ruin a perfectly good lie, with facts. Conservatives run around saying whatever they want and point to their own made up data to prove it.
Solar, wind, hydroelectric, tide power, and other technologies _can_ take the place of nuclear and coal power.
I see the future as one without nuclear waste and with decentralized power coming from safe and clean sources. Just because our houses today have high energy demands it does not mean that is how it has to be.
What is wrong with more efficient heating and cooling combined with renewable sources for the future? To hear a bunch of techies debating nuclear technology as the energy source of the future is a little dissapointing.
The author of the Washington Post article is also a spokesman for- drumroll please....the timber industry, the plastics industry, the Three Gorges dam, genetically modified foods [this guys karma is shot so why not shill for the nuclear industry while he is at it?!].
"In an email, former Greenpeace director Paul Watson charges, "You're a corporate whore, Pat, an eco-Judas, a lowlife bottom-sucking parasite who has grown rich from sacrificing environmentalist principles for plain old money." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore.htm l
Ouch!
Moore left Greenpeace in 1986, on account of their views becoming far too extreme for his liking.
Modern-day environmentalists (in the way that the layman would classify them) and Moore do not co-exist, so we are still miles away from Greenpeace or other various organizations ever thinking about nuclear energy. He came by to talk at my college, and I like how he thinks, but he is not indicative of the average environmentalist today.
I know many people on the left feel differently, but this is one place where their sensible instincts let them down. Nuclear power is big, corporate-industrial, complicated, easily vilified and in general not on the wavelength of the standard hippie. (Hippies get windmills and sunshine, stuff that's small, decentralized and not intimidating.) Many big, centralized things like that really are bad and worth opposing, so if you need a quick rule of thumb, you can do worse. But the rule fails in this case. There is no hippie solution for our power needs, don't talk to me about solar panels and windmills (as a replacement for what we now have). So it's time for the people on the left to judge this issue with their heads and not their guts.
The most radioactive elements will have decayed in less than a thousand years.
.38 aimed at your head, yet I'd prefer to do neither.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The half-life or Uranium 238 (the most common variety) is 4.5 billion years... so I don't think I'd want to smell the number you presented, because I think I know where you pulled it from... even lesser isotopes of Uranium (234) have a half-life of 245,000 years. Of course you could be correct with some of the lesser isotopes created during the fission process, but the vast majority (like 90%) will still be Uranium 238.
Nothing is perfectly safe--crossing the street is a greater hazard to you than Yucca mountain will be to anyone.
LOL. So, are you speaking facetiously, or do you take yourself seriously? Take into account the numbers I just corrected you with, and then say, once again, with a straight face, that the nuclear waste present at Yucca Mountain will not ever be a serious danger to anyone.
While saying this, keep in mind that Yucca Mountain is about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the United States. The nuclear waste facility will also be located in a salt mine... which is evidence that water has been present in this area at one time or another, and the seismic conditions at this site are still unknown.
More on topic, spewing radioactive material into the air is probably a tad less safe than depositing it underground, too.
So, pulling the trigger of a shotgun while it's aimed at your head is probably more dangerous than pulling the trigger of a
And where do you think we get more stable forms of uranium in the first place? It's been in the ground all over the world for a lot longer than 100,000 years.
I found this line hilariously funny... with this one sentence, you completely contradict your "1,000 year half-life" claim in your first. If Uranium only had a half-life of 1,000 years, we wouldn't find any of it, we'd have to make it all, because it would have decayed into other isotopes.
Uranium ore is also not found naturally in the concentrations in which it is used in nuclear power plants, otherwise why the hell would they need to 'enrich' it? It is certainly radioactive, but not at the lethal levels after it has been refined.
I think somebody really needs to hit the books again before they go making outlandish claims... and same for the mods that gave you an 'Insightful' rating...
Ever since they stopped posting Roland Piquepaille stories, the quality of slashdot headlines has dropped precipitously. I was never much of a fan of Roland's. And I enjoyed the bashing, but he leveraged himself into a better website. ZDNet, I think. Much like when I read rec.art.sf.written and had a huge killfile to filter out all the Robert Jordan posts. Then they got their own rec.art.sf.written.robert-jordan-sucks-er-I-mean-i s-awesome newsgroup. Half of the traffic went away overnight. I wouldn't say rarsw got worse. nor did it get better, but I missed making fun of the robert-jordanistas and the satisfaction of watching my killfile nuke hundreds upon hundreds of wheel of time posts.
But I digress. Nuclear environmentalists? Pshaw! Never! This has my vote for the worst headline ever. There is no bottom to this place. I don't know what has happened to slashdot, but it sucketh mightily of late. Misleading headlines, incoherent blurbs, and tardy story postings. I will read about what used to be a slashdot worthy posting days before slashdot posts it.
I'll go nuclear when I can have an atomic powered helicopter. So I take it the green these nuclear environmentalists will come from another source besides plants?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
due to some really boneheaded decisions made by President Carter, it's never been done recently in the United States.
You do know that he was/is a nuclear engineer don't you, and that his post graduate work was in nuclear physics and reactor technology? I assume you are not a nuclear engineer nor have a post graduate education in the same. That just leaves the question, what is it exactly that makes Carter's decisions with regard to nuclear power boneheaded and your ideas NOT boneheaded?
I think its a bit funny that nuclear energy is okay now basically it comes down to fucking up some fairly small areas of the planet for 100,000 years or the whole planet for 5,000 years. Friggin funny except we already fucked the whole planet.
So the vast majority of radioactive waste is pretty stable? That's not exactly an argument for the dangers of radioactive waste. Hell, beta radiation can safely be shielded against with household materials.
So, pulling the trigger of a shotgun while it's aimed at your head is probably more dangerous than pulling the trigger of a .38 aimed at your head, yet I'd prefer to do neither.
Heroin is more dangerous than methadone, too. I'd rather do neither, but I'd also like to keep rehab clinics open. The fact is that energy from fossil fuel has a human cost associated with it far greater than that of nuclear energy. Saying that we shouldn't improve our situation unless we can make it perfect is utopian.
English is easier said than done.
My girlfriend is Jewish (not to mention hot), and so far no blacks have come knocking on my door.
Also, I just got a $6000 student loan disbursement. So I think you've got it wrong on that one.
+++ATH0
Point being, don't lump all SUVs into the Excursion / H2 category. The facts don't support your hate. And I'll go head-to-head with any MPG argument with modern compact SUVs any day.
Just like that blue box thingy on your front porch, you can recycle nuclear waste into new fuel.
Just let the stuff 'cool' a few years, run it through the enrichment process again, and voila, 'new' fuel. Of course you get some low level muck out of it, but thats not much compared with what you had before, and at the end of the day, you more or less get a continuous cycle.
as a group. He is widely considered a traitor to the movement, so I wouldn't take his opinions to represent anybody but himself (and the corporations he works for).
Because much like the Bush administration's restrictions on stem cell research is based on political reasons rather than engineering or science, the Carter administration's position was also based more on politics than science or engineering.
There were groups that wanted it stopped due to opposition to nuclear power in general. There were also groups that wanted it stopped because they thought it was a proliferation risk. The civilian nuclear power industry didn't fight so strongly for it as it was looking to be expensive and it appeared to be easier just to deal with the waste problem later. i.e Kick the can down the road.
I remember when the decision was made. I disagreed then as well. Unfortunately, the political conditions were such that it went ahead. I think it was quite a bad idea.
The claim of shutting reprocessing down for proliferation reasons was questionable.
Yes, being able to do the chemical separation is one part of making plutonium for bomb fuel. However, it's relatively difficult to get useable bomb fuel plutonium from reactor fuel that's been in a normal type power reactor. It has too much of Pu 240 and other higher weight isotopes of Pu. (What you want is relatively pure Pu 239.)
Bomb fuel is made in a reactor specifically engineered to produce less of the higher weight isotopes of plutonium. Normal power reactors produce too much Pu 240.
That makes the engineering for building a bomb out of it much tougher, since the core has to be crushed more quickly (due to large amount of spontaneous neutrons from Pu 240). The material is also much more dimensionally unstable. Pu is a weird metal in many ways and with the higher decay rate (and higher heat production) of the Pu 240, it changes phases and shape. Some of the dimensions of bomb cores are fairly tight tolerance.
The British apparently had a program to make a plutonium bomb from Pu with a high level of heavier isotopes, but gave it up.
This is why the US offered to build light water reactors for North Korea. It wasn't a major proliferation risk. The US reneged on it, but that's another sad tail of international relations.
So, just having reprocessing plants is a bit less of a direct problem for proliferation than is often alleged, since the product of them (unless it came from a special reactor) isn't easy to use as bomb fuel.
It's not that big a worry as far as nongovernment entities. It would be tough for even an advanced terrorist group to make use of the usual output material from a reprocessing plant.
The indirect problem is that if a country has reprocessing plants already, it's harder to monitor that they aren't secretly setting up one of their reactors to make bomb fuel.
So, that's the longwinded explanation of why I agree with the earlier poster that the Carter administration's decision was shortsighted.
Just like I feel that the Clinton administration's decision to shut down research on the IFR was also a shortsighted payback to a political constituency. (The IFR was an advanced reactor that would have produced far less waste, and much shorter lived waste.)
does anyone really think we can grow a lot of corn and convert it into enough fuel to even make a blip on the global demand for fossil fuels?
i na.html?pg=1&topic=china&topic_set=
lots of windmills, eh?
nuclear energy is the most abundant form of energy in the universe...we have a huge nuclear reactor in the sky that gives us daylight everytime our planet faces towards it! maybe we should try to understand it a little better and provide everyone on the planet with cheap cheap cheap energy.
this article from 19 months ago pretty much spells it out...
http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/ch
Pebble reactors are fine, until you count in terrorism.
Just the fact that you mention this means that terrorists have already accomplished their goal. They try to make people terrified by stuff that *might* happen by having smaller events happen every now and then.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Only iron is stable.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
...Is paid in human lives. We're too stupid to use this technology.
Patrick Moore is a fucking asshole! Reason? The fact that he did not do his due-diligence all those years ago. When you factor in the real cost to life of the various methods of the production of power, they all suck. Nuclear tends to suck less. If you want to find out why, just read all the other arguments, I'm too tired to go through all the pros and cons again, but I'm sure you'll find it there.
My issue has always been with knee-jerk reactionaries like this who really don't think the problem through. This guy has been an asshole so long that he does not realize the harm he had directly or indirectly caused to the environment by his short-sighted actions. My question is: will he take responsibility for his role in degrading our enviroment? What will he do to rectify the situation?
Regardless, I have no use for people like him and his cronies and I hope that they have a nasty bout of of some sort of lung ailment due to the pollution they're responsible for. Moreover, if it kill them, it will increase the amount of oxygen needed for the rest of us and reduce the pollution due to their methane-producing flatulence and halitosis.
But, apart from that, I have no opinion!!
*** Don't be dull.***
Pro: lots of nuclear waste shipping through either Los Angeles or San Franscisco
con: it'll probably be very well shielded for the trip...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Like people with your attitude wondering why their viewpoint doesn't sell well with the red state types they diss at every turn and consider barely human. You just couldn't resist assuming things because he was from Alabama.
I think I can sum up most of your comment as "I pWned YoU!"
Now, go back to myspace where you belong.
... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4917526.stm
no but seriously, I know Chernobyl could never happen "here" (wherever that is) because our designs are so different yada yada, but the fact is that Chernobyl was considered safe until such a time that the meltdown occured. People had simply not thought of that particular problem until it actually happened. Unfortunately, the same "this is completely safe and can under no circumstances have an accident" attitudes are still prevalent now.
The point is, we don't really know if it's 100% safe, for the simple reason that we don't know all the factors involved infinitely well. Hence, for me, the problem with Nuclear power will always be that while it's almost 100% safe, if for some unforeseen reason it does fuck up, we'll be really really fucked afterwards.
We might be sort of fucked anyway, but I think mitigating the risks couldn't hurt.
my $0.02 anyway
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Last week demonstrators (some from Greenpeace) opposed the construction of a last generation power plant at Cherbourg, saying that the only viable solution is in solar and wind energy. That and wood-burning too. Sigh, we lack pragmatic ecologists.
Or maybe, with 70% of our electricity coming from a nuclear source, they are begining to promote the "next step".
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The BBC reports that:Chernobyl death figures 'too low'
The health effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine 20 years ago have been grossly under-estimated, says an environmental charity.
Recent studies estimate there will be 100,000 extra cancer deaths.
A Doctor 300km (190 miles) west of Chernobyl, said "we now have to deal with people who are a lot weaker than their fathers and grandfathers were. They're falling ill at an age when they really should still be quite fit."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4917526.stm
Shoot it into the sun.. after we've found a way of getting it into orbit safely. It's goddamn obvious.
No, you got your facts wrong.
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) stated in the year 2000 that only 31 people died because of the disaster, and 134 people could have been potentialy exposed to radiation. Furthermore, it's quite possible that most of the 1800 cases of thyroidal cancer diagnosed after the disaster in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus where not the effect of radiation, but rather the result of a scrupulous medical research that was never conducted before on such a mass scale.
The next time you quote some figures, make sure you have offcial scientific documents to back up your theories. The UNSCEAR report I quoted has almost identical statistics and conclusions as reports from WHO, UNDP, UNICEF, and UN-OCHA.
Signature has left the building.
As we're discussing long term solutions, should we bring fusion into the mix?
ITER (and the other tokamak projects) are talking about producing commercial power in the near term, and should at least solve the problem of waste...even if there are other issues.
http://www.iter.org/ (Check out the cheesy front page)
"What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant"?
Well, where did the uranium or other original fuel come from in the first place? It was dug up from underground, right? How much harm was it doing us before we dug it up?
That should provide a clue. We simply put it back underground - naturally, choosing the safest places to do so. Bear in mind, as others have pointed out, that nuclear waste includes some highly radioactive material, and some that will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years - but the long-lived stuff is low-level, and the high-level stuff isn't (relatively) long-lived.
Besides, that 48 tons of waste isn't as big as it might sound. It's mostly heavy stuff. Now, 48 tons of water will fit in a cubic space less than 12 feet on a side; in other words, you could load it all on a single big container truck. 48 tons of nuclear waste takes up less space than that, because it is denser.
Lastly, you have to compare apples with apples. In this universe, you are never going to get huge amounts of energy for nothing. How much waste does a coal-fired, gas-fired, or oil-fired power station emit in a year? In Britain at least, it was impossible to build nuclear power stations on the land previously occupied by coal-fired stations. The reason was that the ground was too radioactive. The tiny amounts of radioactivity in those millions of tons of coal ash built up to a residual level that was illegal for a nuclear plant - but nobody ever even thought of measuring it when the plant was coal-fired. If we insist on having far more stringent safety standards for nuclear than for other forms of energy, of course it is going to be very difficult and expensive.
Note that I am not complaining about high levels of safety. But the nuclear industry has been bedevilled by a combination of unrealistically high standards and unacceptably slipshod delivery. We insist on containment structures with very big margins of safety - which are then built by contractors who have been known to leave bubbles inside big enough to accommodate a small vehicle. We regulate every part of the process to the nth degree, resulting in controls and procedures that are too complex for staff to cope with in emergency. But all of these precautions are vitiated (occasionally) by cynical, greedy management and lazy, incompetent workers.
It would be better to specify realistic safety levels, but make absolutely sure they are always adhered to without exception.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Global warming or Ice Age, it doesnt matter. As we have throughout history and as other species are capable of, we will adapt to whatever climate changes befall us. It seems to me most who clammor about Global Warming wish for others to imagine some End-of-Days senario where millions of people die because of a sudden and abrupt weather uphevil. Many species of plant and animal life that depend of frigile ecco-system will perish as may some primative human cultures, but humanity will carry one with little disruption. Is there a need for us to ween ourselves off fossil fuels? Yes. Is it because we'll all die if we dont? No.
You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant"? Arrogant people think nuclear power is perfectly safe. Paranoid people think nuclear power will destroy the planet. Intelligent people see plant designs that are intrinsically safe, but want to know what we're going to do with the waste.
t ml. Don't have one of those? Well too bad, pardner, vote smarter representatives.
Easy. Put it into the national nuclear waste repository http://www.posiva.fi/englanti/tutkimus_esittely.h
And to put things into perspective, 48 metric tons is a really minor amount when it's packed into containers. You can fit that into 2 standard 20' shipping containers, where the limiting factor is weight, not volume.
48 tons sounds kinda much, by the way. 4 local reactors produce 70 tons combined annually.
LOL. So, are you speaking facetiously, or do you take yourself seriously?
Ok, I'll bite. Has anyone in your community been killed by Yucca mountain? How many people a year worldwide are killed by Yucca mountain?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
http://www.newpath4.com/spacecolonization2006riley fountainofyouthsystemopensspacetourismspacelivings pacetravelspaceaerobicsspacehealthspacebabiesweigh tlessnessnotanissueanymoreflight.pdf
Maybe then we should CLOSE ALL THE
PATENT OFFICES since they aren't needed anymore.
We just need to raise face mask production.
A possible solution would be to send the waste to space...most propably the Sun would be a good solution. Of course it is assumed that a cheap way of launching nuclear waste to space has been invented; the space elevator, for example.
I'd reword that as "we are the only species on the planet with the conscious capability..."
Other species regulate the climate. Plants, in particular, could respond to climatic change by growing vigourously in the higher CO2 atmposhere and greater heat, sequestering the carbon and counteracting the greenhouse effect of CO2.
For a simple treatment of the concept of ecological homeostasis, see Daisyworld
This brings the real problem into sharper focus : Human "Free Will" and ingenuity. As Agent Smith says, every other mammal achieves an instinctive balance with its environment. He neglects to mention the mechanism ; typically, the animal will run up against the limitations of its habitat, and population regulation will occur through competition and scarcity of resources. Human intelligence makes our effective habitat the entire globe, and our only comptetition is each other. So unless we manage to develop a more global worldview, we are going to run up against the limitations of the entire globe, probably damaging the ecosystem further in the process, and fighting resource wars along the way.
Some would say that we are already exceeding the limits of the globe, and that it's only a matter of time before the pain really kicks in.
Since humans are the only species that effects the ecosystem with technology, and those effects are uniquely powerful in comparison to biological effects, it follows that the only comparable opposing force is also human technology. Here's hoping that we learn to distinguish the price of intervention from the cost of apathy, before it's too late.
I think the biggest dishonesty that the environmental movement have pushed is this idea that we can maintain the same standard of living if we some how pushed all the power plants into the ocean and started using biomass, geothermal (hotrock using water pumped down, and using the steam; as well as naturally occuring steam process), wind, solar and the likes.
I'm sorry, but to cut down on output of CO2s, we first have to hault the growth in energy demand - some how come up with more efficient means of product THEN we must go in the reverse in respects to our energy usage. Now sure, we can go around, turn off lights, keep the temperate level rather than what I see in the US - the house so warm that people are walking around in singlets on.
But with all that 'noble' energy savings, all this will come at a cost to our standard of living; now, I'm quite happy to ride my bike to work, use public transport, use less electricity, but at the same time, are the 6.9billion other inhabitants willing to do that? thats the thing they never answer.
They never answer the amount of CO2 put out during the production of these 'renewable facilities' - as a UK environmentalist said, more pollution is put out during the production of these damn wind farms than the amount of CO2 they would have saved - it seems that these things, and sponsored by government, are nothing more than big bits of propaganda to hide the real problems which we face.
Whilst all this is occuring we have GWB running off to Iraq, spending $500billion of US funds for a war that needn't be fought - imagine if that $500billion was all redirected into R&D for Fusion power - imagine where we would be NOW if that occured; we would already be seeing them designed for coming online in 10 years, hydrogen powered car prototypes would be getting tested, and we would be on the road to sustainable power.
The EU, rather than spending billions upon billions supporting inefficient farmers, they redirected it towards Fusion power, same situation; it seems that government are all very willing to spend money on vote winners like corporate or agricultural welfare, but when it comes to long term funding to address long term, unsexy issues, they seem to go AWOL.
For example, how should the energy needs of "rogue" countries be covered? Will a future Iran be trusted with nuclear reactors? and what if they are not? there are not only political consequences, but also environmental ones. If 3rd world countries can not sustain the operation of safe nuclear plants or use them as an excuse for nuclear weapons, then not much good will come out of using nuclear energy.
Of course by using nuclear energy, many political problems will be solved (dependency on oil), but it has got to be worldwide, otherwise there are going to be great consequences.
1970's scientists predicted global cooling.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The half-life or Uranium 238 (the most common variety) is 4.5 billion years... so I don't think I'd want to smell the number you presented, because I think I know where you pulled it from... even lesser isotopes of Uranium (234) have a half-life of 245,000 years. Of course you could be correct with some of the lesser isotopes created during the fission process, but the vast majority (like 90%) will still be Uranium 238.
Sorry, but he's right. In fact, thank you for proving his point. U-238 is called depleted uranium, and due to its long half-life, is not very radioactive. If you have N radioactive atoms with a half-life of Y years, you will get about N/(2*Y) radiation particles per year. To reduce radioactivity, decrease N or increase Y.
The stuff that makes nuclear waste really hot - lots of radiation particles per second - is hot because it has a short half-life. Burning hot equals burning fast. In ten years, much less a hundred, "high-level" waste is a LOT less radioactive.
If you think long half-life is bad, please go to the drug store and protest Pepto-Bismol. It's made with Bismuth-209, which is very slightly radioactive. Its half life is around 1.9e19 years, about a billion times the present age of the universe. And it's an alpha emitter. And it's sold for people to take internally. Oh, my!
Patrick Moore is a nuclear lobbyist, hardly an 'environmentalist' though he loves to trumpet his green credentials. This whole environmentalist argument for nuclear has been roundly debunked already. Don't believe the hype.
It's an Ice Age. Wait, it's global warming. Hold on, it's an Ice age...global warming...
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
Cfx
You have 2 nucular Moderator Points! Use 'em or loose 'em!
The scientists at RealClimate are biased and their conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. Yes I'm a scientist. You don't have to respect my opinion but I'd ask people don't automatically assume they are telling truths just because they are scientists.
Most scientists have some agenda they are trying to push, just like everyone else.
There is 3-4 times as much Thorium as Uranium. All uranium that is. Only the U235 isotope is fissionable and makes up 0.7% of all Uranium. However it is only possible through enrichment to extract 0.5%. And since U233 is 40x as energy rich as U235, the proper calculation looks like this:
3 x (0,5/100) x 40 = 24,000
There is at least 24,000 x as much energy in the world's Thorium deposits as there is in the world's U235.
With a conservative estimate it will take 1,000,000 years to burn all that U233 breeded from Thorium.
Its outrageous that not once in Patrick Moore's article did he mention that we should be doing all we can to REDUCE the amount of electricity we use.
Who has a huge inefficient fridge? Who has a 500 watt powersupply, a fat TV, bar radiators and central heating? Who leaves their computers on when they leave work, or even when they go to bed?!
We need to stop looking for replacements for our massive appetite for power and use our brains to develop devices that are energy efficient. Nuclear power will only replace one environmental problem with another, the long term legacy of radioactive waste.
"I may bend your precious airplane, but I'll get it down." Ted Striker
No, that is utterly incorrect. Iron-56 is the most stable isotope (of great natural abundance -- Nickel-62 is actually the most stable isotope, but due to circumstances unknown to me it is not produced in stellar fusion), but it is by no means the only stable isotope. In this context, X being "more stable" than Y means that the binding energy per nucleon is greater in X than in Y. Being "stable", however, means that the subject does not undergo spontaneous decay. If you want to prove me wrong, how about presenting me with the half-life of e.g. Hydrogen-1? (And no, proton decay does not count -- primarily because it would affect Iron as well)
There have been improvements in safety systems. The Westinghouse AP1000 recently approved by the NRC and proposed for deployment at 5 locations in the States within the next 8 years is projected to be 100 times safer than current reactors (and less than half the price to build).
c identsAtNuclearPowerPlants
s tOfNuclearPower
See:
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeAc
and
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCo
Regarding waste storage, Yucca is undergoing final review. In the longer term the US proposes to build next generation "burner" reactors to transmute the trans Uranics to shorter-lived waste. Current plans are for prototypes in 2014, commercial deployment in the 2020's.
It remains to be seen if the US can maintain the funding required to see these projects to frution. Long term development projects in the States have to have their funding reviewed every year and there is always some senator with an axe to grind...
Anyway, see:
http://www.gnep.energy.gov/
According to some, let the market decide.
As forests disappear, the marketplace will increase their value, and that increased value will lead to the preservation of what's left.
As clean water disappears, its value will increase, etc.
Yeah, right. I see 3 problems with this stance:
1: Marketplace arguments presume that everything is fungible and flexible. I won't say absolutely that forests aren't, but I have this hunch that they're not. It's kind of like the line between quantum and classical mechanics. How small can you make a forest until it's just a bunch of trees, and not really a forest? Or more to the point, how small can you make a forest until it can't really sustain itself or its local ecosystem?
2: Marketplace arguments also presume that if an opportunity exists, someone will step up to fill it. But let's say that after the forest is gone, we decide we really wanted it after all. Someone can try to step up to the plate and rebuild a forest, but I suspect we really don't know enough to rebuild the local ecosystem. Even if we did, there's the question of whether the "base components" still exist, whether they can be transplanted. We might still only be able to rebuild a clump of trees, not a true forest. Beyond that, and assuming we can hurdle all of those challenges, there is the element of TIME. Nature works on many time scales, and some of them just aren't human.
3: People often do just plain stupid things, driven by the marketplace. Let's say that forests dwindle and become scarce. For some that will drive their value up, and drive the urge to preserve. OTOH, others have been making their living exploiting the forests, and while they *should* be motivated to preserve their livelihood for the long haul, it's far more likely that they'll just be more motivated to continue their current business plans on what little's left. Then no doubt after having fought government regulatory "interference" that would have preserved the forests, they'll cry for a government handout when it's all gone. By the way, guess who is in the position to do what they want, the fastest - the people already exploiting the forests, or the people who newly value and want to move to preserve them? (I'm discounting those who currently value and want to preserve forests, obviously.)
As for the endangered species act, isn't that the thing that there's all sorts of court action going on now, in order to gut/limit it? This so that landowners can do what THEY want with THEIR land.
Yesterday there was a report on NPR, about the collapse of the Atlantic marine ecosystem. It turns out that the biggest problem isn't even the fish we think about, but a small fish near the bottom of the food chain. Turns out that there is a company harvesting this (nameforgotten) fish practically out of existence, for uses that are completely replacable by other more sustainable means. In the process they're destroying the ability of the Atlantic marine ecosystem to sustain other industries. Inertia.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
About. Fucking. Time.
-Glee
Many a true word hath been spoken in jest -- mod funny posts "Informative".
The writer of this article had a midnight visit with Bush, or at least some of Bush's croneys.
Truth is a matter of perspective. Wear the other guy's shoes before you dismiss him.
The US has held itself back over its continuing collective guilt over ending WWII by using nuclear weapons on Japan
That's way off base. If the US was holding it self back, how do you explain the massive nuclear arsenal we built to counter the Soviet threat during the Cold War? I can tell you what holds back civilian nuclear construction by the US in three words: Three Mile Island.
I was a kid when that happened, but old enough to remember them showing fallout radii on the 6 o'clock news. It was nothing compared to Chernobyl, but the media feeding frenzy that followed firmly etched nuclear power as unsafe in the American mind. The Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on The Simpsons isn't something Groening et. al. invented--it's just an exagerated look at the way many Americans feel about nuclear.
Until attitudes change and something is done to reassure the public that new plants can be run safely, we will build no new plants.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
According to the Butterfly Effect, when a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world it causes a chain reaction resulting in a hurricane in another part.
Observation: We have been having more and higher-intensity hurricanes in the US.
Observation: We violently oppose the destruction of wildlife habitats, and the conservation of species that might otherwise have gone extinct as victims of natural selection.
Conclusion: By protecting rare butterfly species and their exclusive environments we have increased the number of butterflies in the world, thus increasing the frequency and intensity of the hurricanes by the Butterfly Effect.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Why is an owl more important than a logger's family? Why is old-growth forest more important than a parking lot?
This guy is an obvious troll, but I thought it was a good opportunity to highlight just how
decimated the South American rainforests have become. Personally, I'm a woodworker (see my sig), so I appreciate being able to create beautiful and exotic gifts and heirlooms from unique and natural woods, but it's clear from this that the loggers are acting completely irresponsibly. I understand that in North America, we build our homes out of wood instead of stone and concrete, because it is cheaper. And there's nothing wrong with that, because forests are a renewable resource. The problem, however, comes when the trees are not replanted.
Honestly. Look at this. That blows my mind. Look at the zoom bar on the left, look how far out you're zoomed. Don't you agree that when you can see such massive deforestation from outer space, that maybe it's time to look at our lumber importation policies and ensure that we're only buying wood from loggers who are replanting? Sure, maybe it'll cost a little more, but what are the alternatives? We're going to run out, and it's so stupid, because it doesn't have to happen that way. Trees are renewable! I say chop down as many as you want, just replant them. What's happening right now is just irresponsible, selfish, and short-sighted.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
The short answer is that you load it into two eighteen wheelers or one railroad car and cart it off to Yucca Mountain where it occupies maybe the volume of a suburban living room (after packaging). Even if the number of US nukes were to quadruple -- which is probably pushing what can be done with current technology and site availability -- that's about three truckloads a day arriving at the storage facility. I'd imagine that 100 guys working with hand tools could excavate enough storage space to handle the likely load. Obviously, that's not the way excavation will be done, but it should help to make the point that storage space is not the issue that it seems to be. With reprocessing, (a proven technology that has been used in Europe for more than a decade) the weight and volume of this stuff can be reduced by a lot, BTW.
Why Yucca Mountain? Because, if it leaks, there is essentially no one downstream. The drainage is into one of two closed basins -- Yucca Flat or -- via the Armagosa River (which carries a trace of surface water maybe five days a year) to Death Valley. Considering the number of Nuclear devices that were tested in the Nevada Test Range in the 1950s, I'm not sure that even a defective waste repository at Yucca Mountain would be the worst nuclear polluter in the area.
The long answer is a lot longer, and takes into account waste from Uranium mining (toxic heavy metals as well as radioactives); the radon and other radioactives released by alternatives like petroleum and coal; half lives of everything; the liklihood that damn fools will blow up a reactor by doing something mistaken (Three Mile Island--which, in the long run, did not blow) or incredibly stupid (Chernobyl -- which did) etc, etc, etc.
I don't know the answer -- and neither does anyone else. But I do know that if the planet plans to support 6 or 7 billion folks in reasonable comfort, it will take a lot of joules (about a thousandth of a BTU for us Americans). Probably not the million BTUs a day that each American or Canadian consumes, but way more than the few thousand a day currently used by the average person in say Somolia. My take is that trying to provide all that energy from fossil fuels is going to be a lot worse than nuclear power even if free market forces and the general stupidity of mankind manage to take a few power plants critical I also think that fission power plants are the only proven, available, source that is likely to be able to provide that much energy short term.
I'm not against ethanol, windpower, tidal generation, and solar power, but it's clear that both proponents and opponents of those technologies are lying nonstop about their virtues and defects. When one of them proves itself, and is clearly capable of massive deployment, maybe I'll change my mind about nukes. But for now, fossil fuels are a disaster in progress. Nuclear power is a solvable engineering problem. Other alternatives are betting on unproven technology.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Lets build a circular artificial reef 7 miles off the coast. Place 3 reactors, each in their own hardened containment structure x2, then you can do maintenance on each of them independently without killing the sea life attracted to the thermalk plume your cooling plant produces. Use the electricity to make Hydrogen, and pipe it back to shore. If the pipeline breaks you have hydrogen bubbles that will be absorbed, and at worst if it catches fire you have water in the ocean.
You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant [sfgate.com]"? Arrogant people think nuclear power is perfectly safe. Paranoid people think nuclear power will destroy the planet. Intelligent people see plant designs that are intrinsically safe, but want to know what we're going to do with the waste.
How about we grind it up fine and release it to the atmosphere? Or make big piles of the radioactive waste and leave them laying around?Oh, that's how the radioactive elements in most coal is dealt with... from wikipedia we learn: Coal also contains many trace elements, including arsenic and mercury, which are dangerous if released into the environment. Coal also contains low levels of uranium, thorium, and other naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes whose release into the environment may lead to radioactive contamination.[6][7] While these substances are trace impurities, enough coal is burned that significant amounts of these substances are released, paradoxically resulting in more radioactive waste than nuclear power.
I suppose that using current "waste" in reactors designed to extract energy from it is out of the question?
Okay, I'll bite back...
How many of your friends/family were killed and/or permanently injured at the Chernobyl incident (or insert any other disaster here).
Oh, none? Well, that means that it must not have been dangerous then, correct?
People's inability to think beyond the next ten years never ceases to amaze me.
The point I was trying to make is this... what happens if there's an earthquake that collapses whole sections of the facility, then this waste leaches down into the water table, and traverses it's way down to Las Vegas?
Would you like to have a nuclear contaminated water supply? I wouldn't.
Those aren't the ONLY solutions. I'll tell you what to do with it, and this isn't my idea, it's been floated around before. You take one standard issue ocean oil drilling platform and you postition it at an Atlantic subduction zone. Using its ability to drill down up to 30 miles deep you create a 30 mile deep hole. Then ships bring the nuclear waste material to the platform where it is then packed into the hole. It may be a good idea to leave the top 5 miles or so empty or just stuffed with sand just to prevent morons from tampering with it. When the hole is full move 200 yards to the left and repeat the process. Over the next thousand years geological forces will pull the nuclear material down below the crust of planet Earth.
At this point the problem is effectively gone. There is an outside chance that the material may come back up in a volcano in a billion years or so, but that is well past the half-life of our material and really a volcano is a much bigger issue. Actually, the mantle is higher in radioactive content then the crust anyways. I think this would provide permanent disposal.
I'm not saying that we should try for a Utopian society, I just think we should look elsewhere for sources of energy.
I have a degree in environmental economics, which deals primarily with energy and natural resource use. Now if we take the billions and billions of dollars that would be invested in nuclear facilities and waste containment, and instead invested that into real green solutions, we could solve our energy problems within the next 20 years.
Instead, people would rather look to the past and try to ressurrect failed attempts at 'green' energy production than look to the future.
I'll admit that nuclear energy is a safe way to 'produce' energy, but containing the waste from production is the big hurdle, and we have no idea what consequences we could face in the next 4.5 billion years. To me, that's too large of a risk to take, when we can develop better sources of energy within an eyeblink (in geologic time).
Absolutely, I agree that learning more and at some points changing your mind about things that are incorrect is a great thing. No problem there.
What I dislike is not the guy, but the fanaticism he has about issues that he might not be correct on. I also dislike the blindness that the people who follow him have about the reality of what he is promoting.
The problem I see here, which his change in belief shows, is how these activist groups go off and blaze into the public, demanding changes, when they cannot be sure that these things are really the right things to do. There is no calm reflection and research into these things once the followers get into it; it's all mobs and protests and bullying. That changes our society, sometimes for the wrong, and then it's more difficult to retract later because these things are accepted and the 'norm'.
The point I was trying to make is this... what happens if there's an earthquake that collapses whole sections of the facility, then this waste leaches down into the water table, and traverses it's way down to Las Vegas?
That's what the giant stainless steel casks are for.
"What happens when, what could happen, what might happen if."
I will grant you one thing, people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. It's only through the continual references to the one "victory" for anti-nuclear protestors that the rest of the world realises that safety is always a top priority.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Sustainability
If you really follow the ideas and cause-and-effect through to their logical conclusion, it's evident that non-sustainability is basically just time-shifted murder - stealing something from someone in the future or killing them for it. There is little difference between Bios_Hakr saying something like "In short, if there isn't a direct payoff to me, then fuck it.", and someone saying something like "In short, it's OK to kill Bios_Hakr for his wallet because there's a direct payoff to me".
Of course, there's always the "we'll run out of oil by 1995" theories running around
Where did you get this? Even the most pessimistic peak oil projections put us "running out" of oil at the very earliest around the 2040's.
This is a recurrent refrain from the wooly-headed left: the limited-liability corporation must be abolished, so that everyone associated with the corporation will have to pay when the corporation does bad things. Well, all I can say is that anyone who entertains such a thought, while living in modern society and enjoying the benefits of the modern economic system, had better realize that it would bring the level of economic activity back 200 years, causing mass starvation as one of the least objectionable effects.
The point is that if investors, or managers, are fully liable for the actions of other people who they don't control, the only prudent thing for them to do is to withdraw: dont't invest, or don't accept employment, with any company larger than your family or intimate friends. Even that is not particularly safe: before the widespread use of limited-liability corporations, people were regularly bankrupted by the actions (corrupt or merely incompetent) of their partners.
His brilliant article about SUV's and minivans comparing their safety. It's not just that the SUV passenger has many times higher risk of getting injured once a crash has happened, it's that the SUV has a higher chance of getting in a crash. And it's not just that the SUV's crash more often, it's that, if you factor out the handling differences, people who choose to buy SUV's drive in a manner more likely to lead to a crash than people who choose to drive minivans.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Quotation from the article: "Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric."
Apparently Moore has never heard of Concentrating Solar Power. This is a proven technology which, combined with heat storage, can replace all the baseload plants in the world. Although the heat storage part is still in a more or less experimental phase, there is no doubt that it can be done.
The best and most economical place to build CSP power stations happens to be in hot arid areas, where nobody wants to live anyway. Instead of being detrimental to the environment, the shade of the collector fields will probably be beneficial to the local environment. The current state of High Voltage Direct Current technology is such that one cable can transport over 6 gigawatts of electricity over thousands of kilometers. This is already being done in China.
Moore and the collective Slashdot crowd should be ashamed of themselves for completely ignoring this option.
You sacrifice some small piece of your ideology in exchange for real political power, until piece by piece you haven't got any ideology left, and it turns out you've become everything you set out to change.
Like the quote goes, "The problem with revolutions is that they generally turn you 360 degrees."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
To put this in perspective, all the used fuel produced to date by the U.S. nuclear energy industry in more than 40 years of operation--some 40,000 metric tons--would cover an area the size of a football field to a depth of about five yards, if the fuel assemblies were stacked side by side and laid end to end.
Wow. That does put it in perspective, i.e. it's quite a lot a lot less than I had previously thought. Hell, the average landfill dwarfs that.
Of course it gets a lot bigger once you stick it into barrels, and said landfill has to be pretty deep and in a geologically stable area...
Anyway, isn't there a lot more than used fuel to deal with? Stuff like used coolant is pretty hot too, isn't it?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I meant to say a meter of rising water, not a meter of coastland. And it varies city by city.
A 1m rise would have very little effect on Seattle, but might have a serious impact on Miami.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Um, no.
The quote says that it is wrong to blame a single weather event specifically on global warming, full stop. Because weather is so complicated that there are dozens of possible input factors, the removal of any one of which would prevent that single specific event.
Would Katrina have happened without GW, based solely on a natural cycle effect? Probably not.
Would Katrina have happened without a natural cycle effect, based solely on GW? Probably not.
Would Katrina have happened without a small boy in Eastern Africa coughing at precisely 1300 on new year's day, 2000? Probably not.
So who's to blame? Is not blaming the third option an example of an evil pro-GW agenda? Is this a terrible lapse of logic? The statement is saying that if GW has any effect, it would be that of increasing the likelihood of Katrina, and so we could blame it for a long term trend of increased Hurricane frequencies. But if our data point is one single dot, then it would be fallacious to declare any single factor as 'the one'.
What the statement says is that asking 'was this caused by humans' is the wrong question, because if you are talking about single events in chaotic systems like the weather, you can ask 'was this caused by X' for practically any X and get 'yes' with a near 100% confidence interval.
Greenpeace just issued a report made in collaboration with 40 ukranian, russian and white russian scientists where they claim that the estimated death toll from the Chernobyl accident has been extremely underestimated by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA estimated the total death toll to 4000 people. Greenpeace and the east european scientists estimated that 93,000 people died from Chernobyl related cancer cases. Added to that is the immense social costs from the forced relocation of 300,000 people from the local area.
n obyl-deaths-180406
/. bring news from the anti-nuclear lobby and only news planted by the pro-nuclear lobby?
/. crowd going to accept being tricked by the pro-nuclear power plant lobby? That industry have more money than M$. The last two years increased interest is a classic case of an industry manipulating the public opinion. Do the friendly Linux crowd accept to be manipulated by big business and slick spin doctors? Does anybody?
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/cher
Now, I have a few questions.
Why doesn't
How long are the
And regarding the article: How do we remove the CO2 emissions from the mining, transport and processing of the nuclear fuel? In reality those emissions are so big that nuclear power plants only emits 30% as much CO2 as a traditional coal powered plant.
Nuclear Power is a non-renewable power source. Why not just skip directly to investments in renewable power sources instead of relying on costly, risky, centralized Nuclear Power plants?
I can't find a reference at the moment, but I seem to recall hearing something like we only have a 20 year supply of Uranium if we use it to replace oil. Likewise, I can't find a pretty chart showing how, in about a hundred years, we've managed to deplete an amount of oil that took millions of years to generate.
I don't want to be a pessimist, but I don't think there is a solution to our energy problems other than either (a) a dramatic change in how we live, (b) a massive reduction in World population, or (c) aliens stopping by and helping us out. As I see it, "b" is the most likely to occur as governments fight for possesion of a dwindling supply of natural resources. The bottom line is that our current lifestyle is completely unsustainable and will have to go sooner or later. I'm just glad I'll be dead before the shit really hits the fan.
We know exactly what we face--the Sun will expand as it depletes its hydrogen, and all life on Earth will die.
English is easier said than done.
Real-world powerstations are typically up to 50x as powerful, and (more important) they are typically run for about 8 times as long (i.e., a lifespan of 30-40 years). The scale and scope of the decommission problem is DIRECTLY related to how long the installation was running... that's what determines the radioactivity of the structural materials in the reactor building. And a production reactor also has an enormous volume of radioactive material to deal with-- according to CCNR http://www.ccnr.org/me_worry_2.html, typically about 7000 cubic meters.
They state that Elk River cost only $6 million to build (a pipsqueek; a typical production nuclear site costs $50M+). But they they list a cost of $57 million to dismantle it! This is a success story ???
Another "success story", Shippingport, cost "only $91 million". But that number is fraudulent, because (a) the reactor vessel was shipped intact to Hanford WA, where nearly all of the dismantling work was done for free (i.e., on the TAXPAYERS' dime); (b) the vessel and other disposed materials were disposed in Federal WA and ID facilities at fees far below those of commercial sites like Barnwell; (c) only the "nuclear parts" were dismantled, not the "conventional parts" (they didn't do the whole job!); and (d) like Elk River, Shippingport was a pipsqueek, only 72 MegaWatts.
The only other decommissioned and dismantled reactor in USA history is Shoreham. (I exclude the tiny and irrelevant Sodium-Experimental at Santa Susana.) Shoreham was 100% easy, because it was in 'production' for less than a month: hardly any of the non-nuclear parts had time to develop any radiation at all.
All other USA reactors, AFAIK, are entombed, SAFSTOR, or DECON in progress. Basically, we're waiting several decades for the radiation to "work its way downwards", and inflict the costs on our Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren.
However, it ISmy opinion that this is a great streategy for all of the Nukes which are already built and running (or built, done running, and shut down). Letting all of this hot stuff sit in place for a while, to cool down, is far better than schemes such as packing it while still really hot into "permanent disposal" containers at Yucca Mountain... containers which we might find horribly difficult to dismantle and re-entomb if/when they fail. (Kinda like the Chernyobl concrete entombment failing.)
- - - -
I'd mod gonefishing up... he had a real point of discussion. Dave's post is not "insightful", it's just nasty and thoughtless.
The recent loss off 12 coal miners in West Virginia was tragic, but what the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant?"
I have a truly marvelous solution to this nuclear waste problem, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Nuclear "power" means weapons technology. Whether it is dirty bombs (our "depleted" uranium weapons) or atomic explosives.
What environmentalist wants that? A paid off one.
We have come up with the way to dispose of Uranium from reactors, we pump it into habited areas of Iraq and the
former Yugoslavia by sending burning rounds into buildings,
cities and farm land. And soon into Iran. Or we store it
in river valleys and next to the oceans (the normal location for water hungry nuke plants)
As Greenpeace Russia cites studies of 90,000 plus casualties
from Chernobyl, nukular "power" would be a great solution in
the poorer or richer cultures where lax regulation, corruption or expediency allows an "oops" to happen. A reactor breach, a sale of some enriched stuff to ??, an export of technology from our "friends" (Pakistan) to our "enemies" (anyone who controls their own oil resources).
Technology hubrists will claim that all the above are
just minor problems because:
a. outdated tech caused it.
b. one time abberation.
c. never really happened.
d. can't ever happen again.
e. depleted Uranium is reeeelly reeally reeally safe.
Riiiight.
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!
because they approach the problem backwards. It is literally telling the car companies "build cars people do not want". That makes no sense. You have to change what the consumer wants for this strategy to have any significant impact. This requires a gas tax, which politicians do not have the spine to implement. As for libertarian/free-marketers, most would prefer a gas tax (a tax on a sin) to an income tax (a tax on productivity). Offer them a 1:1 trade and few will turn it down, unless you are talking to teenagers that still do not have coherent thoughts about anything. Odds are, you have only discussed a gas tax in the context of raising total taxes, to which they would be opposed.
As for California, its demographic and climate issues are so different than most of the rest of the country that it is really hard to make a meaningful comparision. I would use a lot less energy, too, if it was 80 outside in the summer and 70 in the winter. CA also has had a tremendous influx of relatively poor people, who use much less energy on average than the rich or middle-class. This alone might account for the trend. CA clearly has a lot of failings, however. Any place with that high of a population density and relatively linear area of heavy population should have a tremendous public transportation network (like the one in Japan, where I live). There is no excuse for the virtual lack that is found in CA or the east coast.
... like Chernobyl was the Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, (My hometown) and the production reactors at Hanford. These were build-as-fast-as-possible-to-save-the-world designs, built during wartime, and seriously contaminated the planet, even during relatively problem free operation. There is still an ongoing effort to remediate the Hanford site, and some areas are (radiologically)inaccessable to humans to this day. But the Graphite Reactor has Historic Register status.
But, nothing good comes without a price. The legacy of 'Nuclear' in general is inextricably linked to the atomic weapons that drove the development of reactor design. We didn't spend billions of 1940 era dollars to light our houses, we did it to blow the fuck out of whoever pisses us off enough. If it hadn't taken longer than it did, we would have used them in Europe, with everyones blessing, (at the time) because we didn't yet have an appreciation, or even definition of, 'fallout'.
We learned about reactor design, and built in safety systems to prevent most problems, and learned to put a shell around the core to contain most of the forseeable crap. I am unsure how a modern reactor shell would hold up to the series of errors involved in the Chernobly disaster, however. Three Mile Island vented some gases, but was relatively insignificant, even tho the core was laying in a lump of slag at the bottom.
The public, as a whole, only remembers the big events, even if the story is only partially true, from a certain viewpoint, and no other. In a war, the winner generally gets to write the history books. Politicians score points anyway they think they can; latch onto a popular cause, a newsworthy topic, or belief and make it their own. Wring it for all it's worth.
Nuclear power became a topic of protest for mostly political reasons; people seem to only see it from extreme viewpoints, and the older, entrenched politicians found it hard to counter the mushroom-cloud mentality that was the nuclear movement in the late seventies. At that time, there were tens of thousands more nukes pointed at us than there are today, so no one liked nuclear anything.
I've always read SF, and many potantial outcomes of human society have been written. Even with nuclear power, we will eventually use enough energy that we will have to cool our planet, or the seas will boil, just from our energy usage. This won't happen for a long time, but it happens before the sun goes out. Of course, some enterprising individual will make a fortune beaming the heat off as infrared, but I digress...
Chernobyl (remember Chernobyl?) was a really bad industrial accident. If we improve designs (google pebble bed reactor) and have better oversight of operations, we can use nuclear power to eliminate power problems for good. Excess capacity could make hydrogen, and if there enough excess power, we could form gasoline. (a bitch, but doable) We just need to get our shit together.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
That's right, the parent post is exactly what's wrong with slashdot. Why? It's well thought out, well articulated, seems to contain lots of useful information, and it currently has a score of 1 and is likely to say there. Meanwhile, posts heavy on opinion and light on both fact and thought are modded to +5, probably mostly because they showed up faster (not having to think saves precious minutes).
Well, here's one person at least who read the parent post and appreciated it anyway.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Fesible nuclear technology like Integral Fast reactors, a proven and operational concept, and newer Sub critical reactor technology, like thorium based reactors are ignored in these discussions. These are the REAL nuclear alternatives.
It seems to me that these discussions are heavily politicised in favour of the current generation of nuclear plants with no regard to the newer and safer nuclear technologies. Facts ignored, like the gross inefficiencies of the current generation of nuclear reactors, the production of Plutonium as a waste product and the amount of time those waste products are deadly for do nothing to promote an argument in favour of nuclear as an alternative. In particular the Half Life of those isotope's, before it becomes the next deadly element - with an even longer halflife in the millions or billions of years, are treated with a 'head in the sand' attitude that illustrates the ignorance prelavent in these discussions.
Furthermore baseload arguments are used to write off wind and solar technology simply because solutions to these baseload issues, i.e Solar and Wind production of Hydrogen for example, have not been explored.
Attacks on Green groups are made because they make arguments about 'Evil Corporations' (even though corporations are LEGALLY OBLIGED to externalise risk to protect shareholder interest), and while I have no interest in the emotional attachment some green groups have to their arguments, it's at least equivalent to the emotional attachment I see here wrt discussions about current nuclear technology.
Which is to externalise the waste component of nuclear power generation to some other generation and just let them deal with it. How can anyone justify such short term thinking and claim it as a viable solutions to the worlds energy demands.
I wonder how many of you in favour of nuclear power are prepared to put your own money into building a new concrete bunker over Chernobyl or your time lobbying your politicians into supporting contributions to same? How can anyone be expected to take nuclear seriously when the current mess still hasn't been cleaned up properly.
Until a realistic look at newer nuclear technology that has better inherrent saftey is conducted, Chernobyl scale events should be expected to occur every few decades, and there is no way this can be considered 'Viable' or 'Environmentally Friendly'.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Dr. John Gofman - worked on the Atomic Bomb's Manhatten Project - and now is the one of the world's foremost experts on health/illness related to the nuclear industry: THE TOP 10 PRONUCLEAR ARGUMENTS ... ANSWERED
ARGUMENT 1: We receive more radiation sitting in our living rooms than is given off by nuclear power plants. A brick wall puts out 3.5 millirems of radiation per year but a nuclear power plant releases only 0.3 millirem in the same time period. In fact you can stand right next to a nuclear power plant and receive no radiation at all.
GOFMAN: First let me agree that certain building materials do give off enough radiation doses to deserve consideration. Let me also agree that there is a very low dose of radiation emitted at the fenceline of a nuclear power plant that is functioning normally. If this were not the case, workers couldn't park their cars nearby or even approach such utilities at all.
However, the "no dose at fenceline" statement doesn't consider the radiation people can receive from the entire nuclear power fuel cycle. We need to take into account all of the steps that make up the atomic energy process including the production of mountains of uranium tailings (unshielded piles that are continuously releasing radioactive radon) ... the inventory of radioactive poisons - such as cesium 137 strontium 90 and iodine 131 - that "leak" or "puff" into the atmosphere when a power plant is not functioning normally ... the quantities of radioactive wastes being moved in fallible vehicles that can (and do) leak ... and the so-called burial sites which have also been shown to leak and spread their material into the environment at large.
Now let's come to the claim that a nuclear power plant itself releases only 3/10 of a millirem per year. Were that radiation dose - coupled of course with other fuel cycle emissions - truly always so small I would hardly waste my time concerning myself with the hazards of nuclear power. But the proof that advocates of this energy source have no confidence whatsoever in their estimate of the plants' releases lies in their behavior with respect to the legal radiation standards.
As late as 1979, nuclear power plants were, legally, allowed to bombard the public with 170 millirems per year. When my colleague Arthur Tamplin and I proposed a tenfold reduction in that standard, the nuclear industry and pronuclear government agencies fought us tooth and nail. Now it has to be regarded as the acme of strange behavior for an industry to say, "Look, we're never going to give you more than 3/10 of a millirem per year" ... and then demand that the permissible standard remain more than 500 times as high as that limit! So I would say that as long as the industry fights against reducing legal standards to a level comparable to the 3/10 millirem per year that nuclear power advocates claim is the maximum dose per plant, any member of the public can dismiss such ludicrously low estimates.
(The legal standard was changed in 1979. It now permits 25 millirems per year of ionizing radiation to be passed on to the general public, under normal operating conditions! The Catch-22 here is that if anything occurs to make the operating conditions "abnormal", a nuclear facility is permitted to release an increased - and unrestricted - quantity of radiation.)
ARGUMENT 2: People living in high altitude cities, such as Denver, receive twice as much natural radiation as do those living at low altitudes ... yet the residents of such cosmically bombarded locales don't display double the average incidence of cancer.
GOFMAN: The answer to this favorite pronuclear argument is that the cosmic radiation hitting the people in Denver probably does cause an increase in the number of cancer cases per capita. (One should not expect to find twice as many cases of cancer, of course, because radiation is not the only cause of the disease.) But to statistically demonstrate such a reality, we would first have to know [
That he is likely paid to be spouting this position does not change that the issue is worth discussing. It's not irrationally pro-nuclear; the "Here's why" paragraph presents a coherent reasoned argument. It is oversimplified — at a glance, there are gross oversimplifications and/or assumptions regarding future power requirements, the measurement of radioactive waste hazards, the weaponization risks associated with reprocessing, the total costs of nuclear electricity, the usability of nuclear fuel, and substitutibility of energy sources (including the uselessness of nuclear for peak load). This is because it's a brief editorial, not a two semester undergraduate course sequence. And, were anyone willing to devote the column inches to it, most of those oversimplifications could be fleshed out with the gory details, even with mathematical rigor.
This isn't to say that those arguments are necessarily dead right, either. The weaponization hazards are far too trivially dismissed, and nuclear power is not fully substitutable for some carbon resource applications. But the debate urgently needs to be held. If a decision is not made, inaction seems certain to lead to unpleasant — or even disastrous — results.
There are alternatives to nuclear power... but all require more work before being useful as carbon-fuel substitutes. Biodiesel is promising, but will likely cut into available food cropland. Solar and wind would require improvements in energy storage methods, due to their intermittency. Nuclear power's problems are at this point 99.44% political. And, as a peak oil kook, I think the problem is imminent.
So, yeah, it's a puff piece, and probably paid. Maybe some of the marching morons (who don't realize that) will be swayed enough by the initial appeal to authority to be willing to listen to a reasoned argument, rather than just saying "NIMBY NIMBY NIMBY!" all the time.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
That is why they are in so much trouble. If they had not signed (like Israel, India or Pakistan) the UN could do nothing about it (the US can and maybe will, but at least it has the comfort of UN backup so far).
Many countries signed this treaty stating that they will use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes only.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm 6'2" and have never felt cramped in a Civic. The Toyota Prius, OTOH, is cramped if I sit in the back seat. Very roomy in the driver's seat, though.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?