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US Plans "Disposable" Nuclear Batteries
holy_calamity writes "A US government program is in the works to design small nuclear reactors for use by developing countries. The work continues despite fears about security and nuclear proliferation. Plans include having reactors supplied with fuel by the US and other trusted nations, or to build reactors with their whole lifetime of fuel packaged securely inside — like a giant non-user replaceable radioactive battery.' '"
. . . don't stick the terminals to your tongue to see if there's still a charge.
Why worry about proliferation? They're not going to be sending these things to Iran -- if they're ever built -- and any financially and technologically stable nation can already build nuclear weapons. There's over 100 research reactors operating around the world, hundreds more medical reactors, and all the power-generating ones as well. Sounds like a good plan to me.
Having nuclear reactors with a lot of common parts opens up a lot of possibilities. Never mind hassling Iran for having nuclear power, train their guys to use Western reactors and if they start getting a bit too good, steal the talent.
While this is in theory a great way to help other nations develop much more quickly and better the lives of their populace, why is it at times that it just seems like the US's own citizen are treated like third class citizens? (I'm so getting modded to hell for this one...)
The work continues despite fears about security and nuclear proliferation.
Fer crying out loud. It's bad enough that we're running out of fossil fuels, but between the hardcore environmentalists and paranoid first world countries, we're not making much traction on the nuclear issue, which is a shame. Talk up your fave green project all you want, but all of us need to get on the nuclear power plant bandwagon sooner rather than later. cheap fusion's not going to be here for a while.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Don't forget powering desalinization plants.
If you can build desalinization plants around the nuclear device, it would be easier to secure, and immediately noticed if someone started tampering with it. i.e. the loss of power.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In many countries their is a severe need for cheap plentiful energy to do things that we take for granted like water purification. It's a given that before a country starts receiving these reactors that they will have to ratchet up a lot of the infra-structures to distribute the energy and maintain security. I can't help but see this has the potential to help everyone involved.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The Energizer Nuclear battery, it just keeps glowing, and glowing, and glowing....
I apologize profusely.
Monstar L
...we require something with a little more kick- plutonium!
I'll be able to take my N95 away for a weekend without the charger.....
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
I like the Nuclear Batteries idea. It at least tries to solve a difficult, but important, problem with a creative solution that might help create a compromise between our needs for energy secure neighbors and want of nuclear non-proliferation. Sadly, we have people in our own country who protest and actively try to stop transport of our own nuclear wastes. I imagine, sadly, that the uproar of transporting "live" material in this form will be even greater. It is not at all about the actual hazards of the "batteries," but it is all about the perception of hazards. I like the direction, but there are elements missing in the formula.
Demented But Determined.
Toshiba has already developed this as a viable technology and is in the process of deploying something like this in Alaska as part of an NSF-funded replacement of a diesel-fired powerplant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
And Toshiba's not the only game in town as far as micro-reactors go. Why would the government spend a boatload to develop something that already exists commercially? Why not just allow countries to select the best commercial design that fits them and ease the regulatory barriers to permit easier US fueling of self-contained sub-50 megawatt reactors? Seems like the AEC is just caught flatfooted in response to new technology, that's all -- no need to develop anything, just rework the regulations to take into account new technologies.
With very few, if any, exceptions, developing countries are governed by corrupt or easily corrupted leaders. A chance to "lose" a reactor and gain a few $M is really hard to pass up. May as well just bypass the bullshit and put them on the open market.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Nuclear batteries have been in place for a long time, resulting in bad things: http://www.bellona.no/bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/navy/northern_fleet/incidents/31772
But maybe that is because Russia lost so many of them and people broke into them to get warm.
"non-user replaceable radioactive battery"
Sweet! Now, finally, I'll take the iPod plunge...
What do you think nuclear powered ships use for cooling? Seawater.
Is Apple going to be building these things?
(Not that I don't like Apple products, I just wish the batteries on iPods were replaceable.) :)
The last time a big country had a bad idea for developing countries was when the United States gave WEAPONS to Afghanistan to push out the Russians.
If we are going to give them a "mini-nuclear reactor", why not give them instructions on how to weaponize it while we are at it?
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Finally, we can get rid of those cranks in the XO....
Then when your laptop battery explodes, it'll take out a whole city block.
Cool!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
What are they going to do, encase the entire reactor in a giant epoxy glob? Humans have a knack for being able to open things (opposable thumbs, reasoning, abstract thinking)
I understand AC has it's transmission limits, so lets backpedal a bit here.
Put the reactor under the ocean at some insane depth near the 3rd world country, and run undersea cables to the shore.
iNuke
I think TFA misses the point entirely: the main reason for the work is to address security and nuclear proliferation fears. Packaging reactors that are not particularly useful in an arms program with a complete lifetime of fuel and making them available to developing countries is intended as a minimize both the reality and the appearance of a legitimate need for developing countries to have their own civilian (or merely "civilian") nuclear programs, which could more easily be converted to (or covers for) military programs.
Clearly, they aren't proliferation proof, but traditional reactors, especially built and developed locally (even if with outside assistance) are even less proliferation-proof, and those are spreading in the absence of any effort to provide an alternative. This is an attempt to lessen the both the actual need and the political viability of the claim of a need for those kind of independent programs.
The alternative to this program is not that the developing world gets no nuclear material and no reactors.
Have you noticed that it is the US that is planning the "solution" to a foreign problem? Did anyone ask for help in the first place? Or they are mandating it?
What if, say, Peru plans a solution to US health care problem and decides unilaterally to deploy that solution to the US?
like a giant non-user replaceable radioactive battery
The iPod Yotta cometh. Steve's gonna be pissed that it leaked.
(The news, I mean. If the battery leaked, you would have to evacuate the city.)
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
It's a brilliant idea, especially if they can miniaturize it!
Stick one in a car! How about torch batteries! Laptops etc etc!
Even remote controls!!!!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Plans include having reactors supplied with fuel by the US and other trusted nations
Trusted by who?
1. In today's economy, energy availability is one of the keys to economic growth and a reasonable standard of living, especially for developing nations.
2. The general consensus is that carbon fuels are harming the environment.
3. "Alternative" energy sources such as solar and wind are much more expensive per unit of energy than carbon, and developing nations have little interest in them.
Therefore, AFAIK, the only feasible source of energy that can lift people to western standards of living without burning huge amounts of fossil fuels is nuclear. Even so, developing nations have no interest in nuclear (except Iran and DRK) because it is still more expensive than coal. To spread nuclear power will require incentives and R&D taylored to small nations.
Nuclear power is by far the safest source of energy that can be deployed anywhere in the world (sorry hydro and thermo), and I think a program such as this one could be one of the greatest developments for the world's poor. Even the US could use 100 new nuclear plants today to achieve its environmental goals.
1. Bomb Iran ...
2. Disposable Nuclear Reactor
3.
4. Profit!
I'm John McCain, and I approve this message.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Since when, in the last few decades anyway, has the U.S. been a "trusted" nation? Any by whom? I sure as hell don't know, and I live here.
"Anyplace is walking distance, if you have the time."
Any reactor is disposable, if you have the place.
As for arguments that the design precludes abuse and proliferation, never underestimate those of persistence, regardless of intent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_boy_scout). They tend to take explanations of supposedly difficult things (like http://science.howstuffworks.com/uranium-centrifuge.htm) and hack an easier method, such as using the "centrifuge" part but not the "gaseous diffusion" part. I thought up one just writing this. Any uranium enrichment process might work, if you have the time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hmph. Reactors that could "accidentally" go into meltdown at the touch of a remote button. Essentially, the USA wants to landmine the developing world with nuclear bombs. How helpful and charitable. Thanks, but if the developing world has any sense they'll stay the fuck away from "gifts" from the regressing world nations, particularly the USA.
Why would we give away free power to the rest of the world?
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
While it is a habit lately to redefine words at whim to win arguments the old meaning of viable is a bit different to this and the old meaning of deploying is something other than very early design stages. The old meaning of "already exists" is also something that I'm a little happier with than the redefinition where ideas can be described that way instead of physical objects. While the thing is promising it DOES NOT EXIST YET and you can not buy one. You could get second hand submarine reactors that are similar but they were orginally very expensive to build.
They just say nuclear as a cover and if any one digs deep they will find the name homer simpson.
I hard that homer simpson is working on this.
Isn't it great when people work together?
...
I can see it now - we make nuclear disposable batteries and al-Qaeda recycles them out of the kindness of their hearts
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A US government program is in the works to design small nuclear reactors for use by their international military deployments.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
The rest of you - we can't go on like this. Other countries are "coming on line" soon and will need their share of oil, too. There's just not enough to go around; not in the long term. All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to change this - we need to find another energy source, go back to the stone age, or fight World War Three to secure what's left of a disappearing resource.
Those who think that hydrogen or ethanol are the solution - go to the back of the bus. There's no free hydrogen on this planet and to obtain free hydrogen you need to add energy. Current methods for obtaining hydrogen: electrolyse water (big energy) or catalytically extract it from natural gas (limited supply). There's no free energy here, hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy supply.
The ethanol solution is also based on mostly fantasy. Sure, you can ferment carbohydrates at virtually no cost other than the carbohydrate source. But distilling it to obtain the ethanol is a high energy operation. Can ethanol be distilled using less energy than can be obtained by burning it? Maybe someday, but using today's technology it's a losing proposition. And don't forget that the carbohydrate source is the same one that we call "food". Our government's current push for ethanol is the reason that Mexican farmers are plowing under their agave crops and planting corn instead. When you notice that the price of your tequila has skyrocketed, thank your government.
When looking for an energy source, forget just looking at things you can burn to release energy. Look at things that can be found naturally in a state where they can be burned to release energy; these may be useful energy sources. That eliminates hydrogen and ethanol, both of those require energy input to manufacture.
Until something else is discovered, other than oil the only primary source of energy we know of is nuclear power. You can demonstrate against it - and it is indeed an imperfect source of power; disposal of the "exhaust" is a very difficult problem. But it's the only thing that we've got to work with in the long term.
Wind and water may provide some energy, but they won't be enough. If you don't want nuclear energy, suggest something else that will provide a positive energy result.
but who's going to institute the battery recycling? you know you can't just throw that away.
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9308/88789055ds1.jpg
For disposable nuclear weapons! There's a lot of demand in third world countries and the extra income could shore up the US's suffering corporations.
Seems to me I've seen this plan of using nuclear power sources before... oh yes, here it is: Russian Nuclear Batteries These were used to power lighthouses, but there were no plans on what to do when they got old, and no protection from vandals stealing the shielding to sell as scrap metal.
So, how are they planning to protect the locals from harm? Or just create Darwin Awards for folks who don't understand the dangers of cracking the casing on nuclear sources?
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
Is there any reason why people can't buy solar panels and put them on their roofs? Are they too expensive? Ugly? Do they not provide enough power for the average home?
1. Nope
2. Very much so
3. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
4. Sure, you just need a lot of them, not to mention a storage bank if you want power when the sun's not out.
Limited exceptions aside, the only thing keeping solar from being part of the standard roof installation is that even with 50-75% subsidization on the part of various government agencies the payback is over 20 years in most cases. If you assume a 5-10% cost of capitol, many systems would never break even.
Cut the cost of panels in half and double the cost of electricity and it makes sense in orders of magnitude more places, such as areas where electricity is extremely expensive, such as some European countries and California when the legislature is having a particularly large cow.
Get the cost of an install that'll cover ~50% of a home's needs down to ~$2-4/watt and I'd expect them to be building factories to build the panels left and right. I say 50% because more than that and you'll likely need battery banks($$$) to go off the grid otherwise the power companies will start doing things like charge a monthly connection fee to pay for infrastructure and maintenance, and refuse to buy power because they have no demand when you have power to sell.
A single watt of panel can be expected to produce ~2-3 kwh a year. If you're paying $.30 a kwh, you're looking at a payback period of around 4-5 years. That's reasonable. The problem: I haven't seen a new panel kit for less than $10/watt, and I only pay $.10 per kwh. So I'm not installing them anytime soon.
I don't read AC A human right
...instead of lawyers to make statement. At the very least they should have someone with a background in science to proof read statements before they're released. It'd keep incorrect statements like this: "At this point, there are no proliferation-proof reactors," Sokova says. "If a country develops a reprocessing program, they then have the ability to turn the fuel into the plutonium needed to make a nuclear bomb." from being made. There are ways to create fuel (like pyroprocessing) that cannot be easily enriched into a weapon. The impurities it leaves in the fuel are nearly impossible to remove to get the concentration necessary to actually create a weapon. What I mean by "nearly impossible" is nobody, not Russia, the US, the UK, France or China has figured out how to do it, much less a way to make it cost effective. If any nation is sophisticated enough to develop a program capable of separating out the strong alpha emitters they'd already be capable of creating a weapons program without foreign aid.
I have a small correction to make: current ethanol production does produce a net energy gain if it's extracted from sugars like corn. The kind that's still operates at a loss is ethanol produced from cellulose and that's the breakthrough that we'd be waiting on since it can be produced from food byproducts like corn husks or the grass stems from wheat. At our current energy level consumption ethanol isn't a miracle cure but it does have a place at the table along with hydroelectric, solar, wind and atomic power. Fossil fuels, whether or not you're concerned about global warming, simply cannot meet the world's growing energy demands forever and humans are going to have to diversify if we want to maintain our current standard of living.
Why do we trust the US to make good decisions concerning nuclear weapons, when the US is the only country ever to use them against an enemy? There may be others out there who'd like to get their hands on nukes for nefarious purposes, but the US is not exactly innocent.
Legalize it.
Two headed rabbit with one nipple.
Plans include having reactors supplied with fuel by the US and other trusted nations
Since when has the US government been a trusted country for anything? If other countries want nuclear reactors, allow them to build or purchase their own from who they want, and get their own fuel at their discretion. Don't make some stupid cartel that is controlled with an iron fist by the US.
The US needs to stop trying to be the world police, and clean up their own back yard for a change. If they can't do that, at the very least, they need to stop trying to profit from the roll at every turn.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I think you can draw many parallels between this and DRM (and the failure of it). You give people the object and want them to be able to use it only in a certain way, and not let them access the internals. It's flawed by design. You just can't do this without active monitoring of some sort.
Similarly, once it's out, it's out. With movies this means high quality piracy. With a nuclear reactor...
My UID is prime. Hah!
I wonder if Thorium could be uses instead of Uranium, India has made a Thorium powered reactor that outputs 600MW.
The only way I believe you can count corn-derived ethanol as a positive energy source is to ignore the energy input by the farmer. There is no way that it makes sense to burn 1 gallon of diesel fuel (to plant, fertilize, weed and harvest the corn) to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It never will, no matter how much wishful thinking there is.
Biodiesel? Sure, but does it make any sense to burn 1 gallon of biodiesel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol?
Great. Develop third world countries so they can compete for resources with us on a global scale. Now we can pay $5+ for a loaf of bread because the entire globe is overpopulated; with food an energy more scarce than it is today. Similar to the use of corn to create ethanol. Food that could be put into starving people's mouths in our own country if we just tapped Alaska for more oil. Good job bleeding heart liberals in Washington!!
Why not just fund Bussard's work on the Polywell reactor. Radiation-less free fusion power, zero waste...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
"Plans include having reactors supplied with fuel by the US and other trusted nations"
i for one do not consider US a trusted nation!
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
It doesn't take a gallon of diesel to produce a gallon of ethanol, that's why I said it was a net positive energy producer. Don't take my word for it, here's a technology review article: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19924/page1/ From the text: "... 54 percent of the total energy represented by a gallon of ethanol is offset by the energy required to process the fuel; another 24 percent is offset by the energy required to grow the corn." That's less that 100% energy consumption, so it's net positive. There are lots of other issues, food supply, cost, production unable to meet our current energy demands but it is a net positive producer meaning it does make sense to use it as a fuel.
...for such beacons of national independence as:
1. Poland.
2. Romania.
3. Estonia.
4. Latvia.
5. Lithuania.
6. Georgia.
7. Kosovo.
8. Iraq.
How else can anyone make sure that their governments won't stop licking US boots within two or three decades?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Let the price go up..... Of course that will hit the poor first, but governments just thrive on complex tax and welfare schemes to get around stuff like that. Let prices double, and let money spent on heating oil, electricity etc be written off against tax for the people earning less than n$ per month. Better still make the write off inversely proportional to their earnings so that there's no discontinuity. D
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
One more way for the rich western countries to make poor countries depend on them.
I can see the security concern in teaching physics to poor people, they have a legit reason to want to blow you up, but not doing so gives them an even bigger reason to do so in the long run.
Basicly, this is like using MS licensed software - the poor country has to continually pay the rich for the tech to continue to work. Yak!
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Hello Iran! You wanted a nuclear powerplant? Here you go and take this tank of plutonium but whatever you do not open it ..
--
(Couple days later)
Newsflash: Irani nuclear powerplant exploded for unknown reasons that are still being investigated.
I see.. i guess i was right after all then. The faqs haven't been updated tho.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
But other country successfully use ethanol as a positive energy source, from for example sugar cane. And there are research to produce it from algae with an efficiency as good.
Don't take your own local bungangle or shenanigan corruption on corn industry to be the general rule.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"Adjusting Aid Numbers to Factor Private Contributions, and more
David Roodman, from the CGD, attempts to adjust the aid numbers by including subjective factors PDF formatted document:
* Quality of recipient governance as well as poverty;
* Penalizing tying of aid;
* Handling reverse flows (debt service) in a consistent way;
* Penalizes project proliferation (overloading recipient governments with the administrative burden of many small aid projects);
* and rewards tax policies that encourage private charitable giving to developing countries.
In doing so, the results (using 2002 data, which was latest available at that time) produced:"
With all due respect, your link uses the above factors to skew the numbers. The fact that they openly admit the numbers are subjective destroys their usefulness. I could skew the numbers any way I liked if you let me pick the variables.
"but those studies invariably count things like immigrants sending money home to their family"
Why wouldn't that be counted? Dismissing that out of hand is just as irresponsible as using "subjective" numbers to skew the data.
"As far as real aid goes, 90% of the money genuinely donated by generous Americans never makes it out of the country"
I'd like to see your source for this, if one exists.
"This meme is simply not true"
Well, if that is so you haven't proven it. If you thought a "reassessment" using "subjective" numbers was enough to do that, you need to "reassess" your thought process.
A pebble got stuck in the reactor and some idiot tried to move it with a metal pole, breaking it. The "radiation release" wasn't airborne, it was a few pieces of broken pebble. At no point was anybody in any danger.
The reason the reactor was closed down was:
a) This is Germany, the land of green
b) It happened two weeks after Three-Mile Island when the press was full of nuclear nightmare stories.
Pebble bed reactors are not as 'safe' as people say
Yes they are. Nobody's claiming 100% safety - there's always unexpected idiots with metal poles.
Besides, if "safety" is your concern: Do you have any idea how much radioactivity and other contaminants the average coal fired power station releases into the air per year? How many coal miners die every year to feed that plant...?
Pebble-bed reactors are orders of magnitude cleaner/safer than coal-fired generators, it's just that coal seems "natural", it comes out of the ground and hippies can hold it in their hands.
No sig today...
power your Geiger meter...
You need to read up more on these subjects. As I understand it, coal power plants generates worldwide about as much energy as burning petroleum in plants or vehicles. You also exaggerate the problems with ethanol production. Ethanol from sugar cane, for example, produces a lot more energy that is consumed in its production. Seperately nuclear, solar, or wind can satisfy the world's energy needs. You need better energy storage and transportation to compensate for the peculiarities of an absurd restriction on power production, but it's possible. Your remark that you need energy to generate hydrogen is correct, but flawed. Hydrogen is not a means of generating energy, but a means of transporting it. If you had actually read about proposed hydrogen infrastructure, you'd see that this is already understood. There are a number of problems with using hydrogen, but "you need to add energy" isn't one of them since we already have many forms of energy production.
While I'm a big fan of nuclear power, it's foolish to say that nuclear power is the only form of primary energy production or that primary energy production is the most important aspect of a power generation system. For example, solar power satellites (SPS) are proposed arrays of solar cells in space that beam power to a point on Earth. You can have SPS systems in constant sunlight. Even if the satellite has to be in low Earth orbit (say because it can't focus microwaves very well), you can maintain a constellation of them in orbit and keep several spots on the planet constantly illuminated with microwaves. That means you now have solar power as a primary power source. Improving storage and transportation of power are ways to reduce the need for primary power sources.
Moving on, primary power sources aren't the only part of a power generation system. You also need auxillary power sources and energy storage to handle peak load. That's where hydroelectric and solar power come in (as well as natural gas generators). These produce power when it is needed most.
I used to create fires in my backyard by sticking two live 9Vs together, terminal-to-terminal.
What happens when you stick two of THESE babies together in the same way?
FAIL
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
I don't disagree with most of your points, and my few disagreements have been addressed by others. What I have is a link to a CNET article about cellulosic ethanol production which is much more efficient than most others. "Is vinegar the secret ingredient for biofuels?"http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9891603-54.html?%5E$/
See:
http://www.bellona.no/bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/navy/northern_fleet/incidents/37598
/Z
This is a great idea. Just include a self distruct and we are set.
"Yes, and most of that skewing is in favour of the US..."
You might want to check that again, and as it's subjective, it is still useless. I think you assume my objection is with one thing when it's the total lack of validity of the measures used that I object to. I don't care if they make the US look like the greatest country ever to exist, and put our contributions 37 orders of magnitude above the total contribution from the rest of the earth. They're still subjective, and so still useless.
"Because it isn't aid. It's individuals keeping their money in the family."
That's semantics, and not an answer. It's money, from US citizens, that is going to foreign nationals. If it helps them, it's aid. If it doesn't meet your personal definition, that's fine, but saying "it isn't aid" as decisively as you did is just plain wrong.
No upmods, yet someone downmodded as overrated? From the moderation guidelines:
Clear cut case of moderation abuse.
The Radioactive Boy Scout in more recent times...and he ended up going to jail.
And check out the mug shot...
Police say that Hahn's face was covered with open sores, possibly from constant exposure to radioactive materials.
Yikes.
You mean Dr Helen Caldicott, Nobel Peace prize winner. Is that the DOCTOR you are talking about, you know the one with a NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, the one that has spent time in the U.S President's Oval office advising the president of the medical ramifications of the nuclear industry. You know I really think that, as an academic, you should pay Dr Caldicott the appropriate level of respect, even if I don't deserve it.
But you live and learn, so thanks but unfortunately I've had to learn a whole lot more than I actually wanted to know about industrialised Nuclear power and I have no desire to be a physicist. So while I'm impressed at your apparent knowledge, your naivety is as impressive. You said
In isolation this statement looks like "oh well it's just a tiny bit" but in context we have to ask, what sorts of cancer because some are worse than others. What happens when it the person's *local* water supply and that's what they drink e.v.e.r.y.d.a.y, they shower in it, brush their teeth with it, wash their face and eyes, cook their food with it and it is the water that their food is grown with.
And it is the same for the entire community, and there are other radioactive elements (if I using the terminology correctly) released into the environment which, according to your own blog, do bio-accumulate. Even if I got it wrong about tritium bio-accumulating how many other radioactive elements released by the nuclear process into the environment do bio-accumulate? So with that as a basis why don't you calculate the cancer rates for that community, because Pickering - in particular - will be a source of radioactive products well after the reactor is closed down permanently.
Like many Nuclear Power advocates you make a simple sweeping statement like this and ignore the actual logistics involved in achieving it. Safe extraction from existing plant based storage, safe transportation, reprocessing, more transportation. Yes I loved the idea of IFR, but - as pointed out to me by a nuclear advocate - sodium is extremely volatile, and radioactive sodium - exactly how dangerous is that, and importantly to the long term viability of the reactor - how corrosive?
Great, more sweeping statements, no consideration of logistics. I support ITER, don't know about DEMO (is it fusion too?), but until they're operational guess where it is going to go?
*How the fuck would I know*, however like many of the toxic externalities that the Nuclear Industry dumps into the environment *As much as they say* and they wouldn't lie would they, would they? Like I said, with respect for your knowledge, but naivety with respect to the political characteristics of the nuclear industry is at least equal.
As observed by the many other aspects of the Nuclear Industry the political supporters of Nuclear Power block funding attempts to find exactly that data, which allows people to say "no scientific study has been performed" on the toxic effects. Hardly the type of scientific approach you would support, is it?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Conceded, I'll be more thorough checking statements written in the wee hours.
I contend that until a reactor is available with the characteristics I described in my earlier post the nuclear power industry is closely related to maintaining a state of preparedness for nuclear war. From my understanding the same enrichment process you advocate to recycle nuclear fuel can be used to create weapons grade plutonium. Is this the case?
Why? Even if half of what they are saying is true, it's concerning. Not only is it possible that Nuclear power plants leak radioactive elements into the environment, we know it has happened and continues to happen. Additionally peaceful use of nuclear power will *always* be attached to nuclear weapons because *it can be done*. I've never heard of a city being blown up by a coal bomb, or a solar plant going critical. The fact is Nuclear power will never be benign, because it isn't. Not that I'm an advocate of coal, but the worst case scenario I can expect from a coal power station is a fire, the worst case scenario from a nuclear power plant is the rendering of 3000 Sqkms of land uninhabitable and nuclear fallout over an entire continent. That is the reality of a nuclear power plant, operator error or not.
Indeed, but you did sidestep the question of *other* bio-accumulating elements released into the environment, just how many radioactive elements are created inside a nuclear reactor? And isn't it possible, indeed probable, that those elements continue to be released into the environment. Are you saying it's immpossible for those element to escape?
You may advocate that nuclear power is safe based on your scientific understanding that the elements produce limited harm, but I posit that if we *have*
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.