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Could the US Phase Out Nuclear Power?
mdsolar writes "In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, [German Chancellor] Merkel announced that her country would close all of its 17 existing reactors by 2022. Other nations, including Japan, Italy, and Switzerland, have announced plans to pare back nuclear power, but none have gone as far as Germany, the world's fourth-largest economy. Merkel vows to replace nuclear power with alternatives that do not increase greenhouse gases or shackle the economic growth. Could the US do the same? An increasing number of reports suggest it is not beyond the realm of possibility, and Germany could provide a road map."
No.
And neither can Germany.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
No. This is just another anti-nuclear FUD article from mdsolar. Secondly, if the US did phase it out what exactly is going to replace it? More coal plants? Yeah, that sounds like a brilliant plan but would be an extremely amusing backfire from the anti-nuke nuts campaign.
Why would they want to?
It's easy to panic about whatever the latest disaster was rather than actually rationally evaluate the trade-offs of various options.
...and the coal industry would be thrilled.
See: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
And you men and half of the Internet as well are just as bad. We sit here, considering Wikipedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the America they've lost nuclear power. In Japan, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power.
--Salvor Hardin, paraphrased
The most rational, prudent, safe, and progressive thing to do would be to phase out the current, 1st generation plants, but simultaneously remove, insofar as possible, obstacles to safer 2nd / 3rd generation designs such as CANDU.
Nonaggression works!
The great American cities we have today would have never been built if there was this much fear of the remote possibility of injury or death. Under today's mindset, you would have never had people walking the beams in Manhattan in order to build all that, as quickly and cheaply as they did.
People are dying TODAY from coal and oil. Thousands of them per year. Can we please build something that only has a chance of killing people, rather than assuring people die?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Hydro is only "not bad" if you don't live near where it buggers up the ecosystem, like I do.
Make no mistake: hydro is not as "cheap" as it appears to be. It has hidden expenses (just look at the fish barging on the Snake River) and in many cases is not, in the long run, sustainable unless you want to kill off whole species.
People tend to think hydro is "clean" because it doesn't dump poison into the atmosphere or leak radiation into the ground. But it does leak "poison" (oxygenation) into the water, and it disrupts all kinds of things in the ecosystem, from algae all the way up to peak predators.
But if we use breeder reactors that burn the plutonium then the only place at risk is the plant itself.. It's our backasswards old plants that are the problem, not modern nuclear plants.
It's like arguing against modern hybrid or electric cars because ones built in the 70's were gas hogs.
You mean, like Spain does? Oh, wait, Spain exports energy to France, and last year over half of its energy production was from renewable resources.
Actually, Spain imported 2% of its energy from France, and gets 20% of its domestic power from nuclear plants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Spain.
-- Terry
We could also, if we wished, eradicate widespread vaccination and the refrigeration of food.
if a nuclear reactor explodes, a rare but possible occurrence
If there's anything that SimCity has taught us, it's that nuclear reactor meltdowns are a "rare but inevitable occurrence". Being attacked by Godzilla is a rare but possible occurrence.
That is how they die for the most part. Same for roof mounted solar.
Hydro power makes large areas uninhabitable for as long as you want power. Ask the folks that live in the area flooded for the three gorges damn all about that.
If we want to be sure that we don't want one of our major cities to be blown up one day, we should shut down nuclear power
Of course! It is not like there are THOUSANDS of NUCLEAR WEAPONS ready to do actual damage at moments notice. No sir!! After all, nuclear power produces plutonium so efficiently that the highly inefficient US military decided to make their own plutonium pits instead for these weapons..
And of course plutonium cannot be used as a fuel because using that instead of virgin uranium makes bunnies cry.
proliferation point of view, with respect to the risk of nuclear terrorism
I say we go further. burn all physics books!, especially those ones that deal with particle and nuclear physics. No one needs to know about cross sections. It is the devils knowledge!!
On a more serious note, anyone that brings up proliferation as a significant problem is a little crazy. You know, there are these things like radiation detectors that can detect a few atoms of contamination. I think they would detect a nuclear reactor worth of fuel going missing... It is not easy to build a nuclear weapon even though conceptually it seems so. An effective plutonium device is very difficult to produce and a "dirty bomb" is the most useless type of a bomb and it is easy to clean up.
If you want to worry about proliferation, worry about chemical and biological agents because these happened and are likely to happen again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway
Here's a nice list of attempting smuggling of nuclear stuff. Basically all after USSR fell apart. None of these were sourced from nuclear energy. They call came from nuclear weapons programs.
http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/smuggling-russia
PS. This was mostly sarcasm, but since mdsolar is probably modding with 10 accounts, this will get -1 anyway ;)
And finally, nuclear energy from Uranium will not become exhausted for at least 1000 years. With fusion, nuclear will be permanent base load, unless we nuke ourselves over coal/oil/gas/food/water (take your pick) to kingdom come..
Power reactors do not produce plutonium for bombs. A power reactor fuel cycle produces plutonium that contains a substantial percentage of the isotopes Pu240 and Pu242. These are fine for reactor fuel, but they have a high spontaneous fission rate, which makes them very bad for bombs. (Hint: Neither India nor Pakistan used plutonium from their power reactors to make their bombs -- they both went to the great trouble and expense of building special-purpose breeder reactors. Ask yourself why.)
This is yet another FUD article on nuclear power submitted by mdsolar. I personally have nothing against publicizing the dangers of nuclear power, but this should be done in a fair way. User mdsolar has repeatedly posted FUD articles on nuclear power and frequently gets them through because of the mass volume of his submissions and the lack of attention paid by the moderators to specific users' agendas.
mdsolar, reveal yourself. What is your viable plan for generating electricity once you have wiped all the reactors off the map? How do you plan on dealing with the decommissioning and waste? Could you try easing up and submitting articles not chock-full of such alarmist banter? Are you a BP employee?
The problem is that a big disaster in a nuclear power plant affects a wide area and is broadcasted around the world, so people are afraid of it, while coal and other methods kill people all the time, but only in small numbers at once, so nobody cares.
It's the same as with planes vs cars for transport. People die in car accidents every day, but since the numbers are small nobody cares. On the other hand, if a plane crashes somewhere, half the world knows about it since a lot of people die at once.
In a debate on TED talks, taking the pro-nuclear side, Stuart Brand said something that sums up the whole thing: "I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."
The anti-nukes keep making assertions about how we "don't need nuclear or fossil fuels" that are violations of basic arithmetic.
Assuming we're to be permitted to continue having a technological civilization, of course, which is not, perhaps, a given.
Reading through the first and second pages comes up with such treats as "Fukushima meltdown could be template for terror", "sustainability experts: nuclear energy not essential", "radiation understated after quake" and "nuclear in 2018 more expensive than solar PV today". Definitely an agenda there, especially with the abuse of the word 'terror', regardless of whether or not the stories are credible.
I live above the Marcellus Shale gas formation.
Given the rampant groundwater and stream contamination resulting from hydrofracturing operations south of me in Pennsylvania - I'll take a brand-new modern nuke plant in my area over the commencement of gas drilling operations without any hesitation.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Funnily enough Germany is actually exporting solar power to France, because nuclear power can't provide power during peak hours and solar does. Germany is one of the biggest solar producers, with a capacity of almost 17GW.
http://www.energydelta.org/en/mainmenu/edi-intelligence/latest-energy-news/special-report-solar-power-aids-german-nuclear-shutdown
A couple comments on this.