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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.'"
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
Ah, the old scientists in the 1970s believed in global cooling myth rears its ugly head again.
The Spanish-English dictionary is out of ink.
Went ahead and hunted for the link:
Wikipedia: Nuclear Power
I am not a nuclear physicist, so it could be full of crap, but wiki's science info is generally pretty sound.
Energy shortage is no more a disaster than most other shortages, provided you have an economy based on supply and demand.
Look at water. Many people have claimed that there would be water shortages in the California. Everyone should conserve water because we're running out. Now look in the Middle East. People have no problem paying for desalination plants. But you never hear them talk about water conservation in the Mid East, because who on Earth would waste such an expensive resource as water? California would find it has plenty of water if people have to pay what water is worth.
The reason we face energy shortages has nothing to do with the fact that we're running out. It has to do with the fact that we waste it. When the price gets high enough, provided of course that the government lets it get high, then you'll find out people get quite resourceful about conservation. You'll also find that there is plenty of energy to do the things we must.
TW
Does it bother you that hurricane researchers have said repeatedly that global warming had little or nothing to do with it, and that there was an expected upswell of activity due starting last year, give or take? Or that the US coastline had been dodging the averages for the better part of 20 years, with a far smaller fraction of hurricane strikes than the historic record would otherwise suggest? What will you be saying if the next hurricane season shows lower activity than the last?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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."
Oh really?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181
The argument, IIRC, is centred on the intensity of hurricanes. Activity based on numbers of hurricanes do not capture such an effect, while intensity graphs show a pretty good correlation. Though things are still sketchy at the moment, you can't make a handwave motion and suggest that all hurricane researchers are of the same opinion.
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.