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Climatologist James Hansen Defends Nuclear Energy
First time accepted submitter prajendran writes "James Hansen, the former director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, has been a strong defender of using nuclear energy to replace coal and renewable energy. He and three other researchers had written a letter, arguing just this. In this interview with rediff.com, an Indian news site, he was asked to address some concerns surrounding the issue, especially given the strong feelings generated by it. It may not be Hansen's best interview, but it did bring out his passionate side."
Dear kids from the future,
Well, we went nuclear so we wouldn't cook the entire planet (and thus allowing you to live).
On the other hand, there is a one small cave in Nevada with some nasty stuff. Seems to me like you guys should be able to handle it with your quantum teleportation technology or whatever you come up with. Or just keep an eye on it.
Underground. But I don't see any envirohippies making a big fuss about all the uranium ore in the ground and the massive fission reactor thats probably at the heart of the planet so why the big fuss when someone suggests burying the radioactive waste underground later?
There's so much knee jerking going on in the enviromental movement with regards to nuclear power that they could probably audience for starring roles in Lord of the Dance.
Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk. Sincerely, the kids from the future.
Dear kids,
Extremely small volumes of waste needing safe storage for only ~300 years is probably the best we can do. Shall we do it -- or will you prefer to be sharpening sticks to hunt among the silent rusted remnants of wind turbines?
Sincerely, LFTR
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.
Gee, 300 years of storage for a small segment of the waste. The rest of which can be reprocessed into fuel, unless of course you're in the US and have this boogyman fear of plutonium.
Om, nomnomnom...
>On the other hand, there is a one small cave in Nevada with some nasty stuff.
This is the dream solution so far, but this does NOT exist. Hanford - nasty waste tanks buried in the ground. Fukushima - fuel pool at reactor 4 dangerously tipping and leaking. Yucca Mountain plans closed.
At this point, a lot of nuclear waste sits in fuel pools because there is no long-term solution. We need to get on this and make a place like you describe, pronto. Nuclear can be clean and safe, but so far nobody is really running it clean and safe. Money and greed are too human.
If you ask questions about our energy future from a nuclear context, you will get nuclear answers. If you think about it from en environmental viewpoint you get environmental answers. If you think about it from the economic perspective you get economic answers. If you think about it from the renewable context you get renewable answers.
Unfortunately, the solar industry looks at the issue from the context of huge solar power plants instead of dispersed solar installations. That is where the money is. If the solar energy issue is addressed from the dispersed solar context it looks way different. Imagine empowering businesses like WalMart to cover every store with solar panels. Imaging requiring every new home to have solar panels. Imagine retrofitting all the appropriate buildings in the country with solar panels. Imagine the hydroelectric power plants changing their generation schedules to generate at night when solar power goes away, instead of in the day like they do now when demand is highest.
This can be done much quicker and more cheaply than the nuclear path. It takes twenty years to get a nuke online. Dispersed solar can be online in a year or so. The cost of solar panels comes down almost every day. If you think dispersed solar, the equation changes on everything.
+5 insightful
Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are. They'll be better-equipped to deal with it than we are -- and it's a much easier problem for them to solve than a planetary climate that has been pushed to extremes.
Yeah, it'd be nice if solar, wind and wave energy could address all of our needs, but at present they can't provide the baseload coverage needed to eliminate coal and oil burning.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.
Meanwhile, Germany is implementing soloar and energy efficiency and is AHEAD of its targets.
And buying nuclear power from France, Poland, and the Czech Republic. All the while, that solar energy is driving millions to make the choice between roof over head, food on table, or electricity. As prices start climbing towards of 40c/kWh.
Om, nomnomnom...
The truth is that there are no big advances in nuclear power plant technology. There are ideas from the 1960 and 1970, like thorium reactors, breeder reactors or the pepple-bed concept. They all have been tried out and failed for different reasons. Present reactor technology is still based on the same concepts from the 1960s. Improvements in safety have been made, but only in small steps issued after accidents in plants. This is the same principle as in aviation where every crash is analyzed and used to improve planes.
For the pebble-bed thing. Germany tried it and they failed (see wikipedia). The only one having one operational is China (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-10). While it is stated that the design is saver than present western reactors, it uses graphite for moderation. It cannot burn as cooling is done by a non-burnable gas. However, a leak might introduce O2 and that can reproduce Chernobyl all over again. So I am not really convinced that this is a better solution. Furthermore, it is not a solution to the nuclear waste problem. And it is not a solution as a long-time energy source.
While after 50 years of nuclear energy, industry and research where not able to provide a complete solution, while the re-newable energy fraction have working machinery and also the energy storage problem is solvable, as we already have that technology even if it is not yet cheap, reliable or implementable everywhere. However, these issues are easier to fix than come up with totally new technology.
Worse, they're buying coal power from Poland (Poland does not have any power-generating reactors ... yet). All because of shutting down their own nuclear reactors in the wake of the post-Fukushima nuclear-is-bad hysteria.
Agreed. Absolute safety with nuclear materials is unattainable. But we can certainly make it as safe as it was before we dug it up out of the ground.
Liquid fluoride thorium reactor.
Westinghouse AP1000 reactor.
Something like the Argonne Experimental Breeder Reactor-II.
Do I claim the ultimate in safety has been achieved and is sitting on a shelf next to the holy grail waiting to be used as-is for the Final Ultimate Answer? No, but large advances in safety have been made and need to be pursued further, along with undoubtedly other fresh ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
What makes them interesting is being able to "burn" up existing nuclear wastes. So use LFTRs to clean up existing long term nuclear waste and get power as a byproduct.
Germany is not buying power in any significant amount from its neighbours.
We are still exporting roughly 30% of our energy production.
Prices for ordinary customers like me are about 17 - 18 c/kWh.
Don't get where from you have your crazy ideas.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And Poland is buying wind power from germany.
So what is your point?
Selling and buying beyond frontiers is exactly the point of an international continent spanning energy grid.
If we would only sell and never buy you would blame us, too. Won't you?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.
Nuclear can scale up very easily and rapidly. It merely requires the balls to bring down the miles of red tape standing in the way of building new reactors and reprocessing their waste. It handles base load and we know that it works because we've been using it for decades. If you want to bet the farm on something, bet it on something we already know works. As for the fuel, CANDU plants can already breed fuel from thorium and it can use MOX fuel including the weapons-grade plutonium from all those decommissioned nuclear weapons we have laying around.
There's plenty of fuel, waste is ridiculously tiny and low risk if you reprocess the fuel, it scales very well, and we know it works for all kinds of load. Why you'd want to bet human civilization on something new that's more damaging to the environment, causes more human fatalities, and has many unknown risks associated with it is beyond me, but I can say that it won't scale to what we'd need without obscene amounts of environmental damage and unknown risks to the overall climate.
The real solution involves using proven safe, clean technology on a larger scale.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.
So? The pools are a pretty good long term solution, if by "long term" you mean at least the next century or so, until future generations figure out a better place to store it, or more likely, an economic use for the "waste".
Until we have electric trans-atlantic pasenger air transport in six hours, we'll need more than just nukes.
Transport fuel especially air and ocean needs to remain chemical, even nuclear advocates are pretty unanimous on this.
0. LFTR for electricity and process heat ASAP
1. use oil, while it lasts
2. use synfuel made from coal or natural gas, using Fischer-Tropsch and LFTR heat source
3. use hydrogen separated from water by energy from LFTR stored as liquid, gas or (preferably) oxide pellets
With number 3 we have attained a state of complete, virtually limitless energy with extremely small footprint of Thorium mining, zero CO2 emissions and zero use of agriculture for energy production. Oh, and we can make limitless amounts of ammonia-based fertilizer with hydrogen separated from water and atmospheric nitrogen.
(Nothing but win. Think of me as the hyper 'Trix Rabbit' of Thorium)
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
"potentially ecosphere-killing crap"
The longer lived the radioactive byproduct, the _less_ harmful it is. I'll take waste with a 10,000 or 100,000 half-life over something that decays in 1 year any day. Heck, just put it in my back yard. I could use the steady income.
I'm no nuclear physicist, but I'm pretty sure that in substantially less than a few hundred years, the waste from your typical nuclear power plant will asymptotically approach background radioactivity levels. The tail that 10,000 year half-life begins almost immediately, and is exponentially less dangerous
What's dangerous about nuclear waste isn't the 10,000 or 100,000 half-lives. It's the fraction of byproducts mixed in it that decays in seconds, minutes, hours, days or a few years. Once those disappear, the rest is not that big of deal. Put it into a container, seal it, and put it someplace where kids won't climb all over it. Problem solved.
Science has solved the waste issue. Titanate nanofibers. One gram cleans a ton of waste water.
Right now no one knows how to solve the waste problem. ;D
That is likely the reason why now country on the world has a long term waste deposite.
If you have ideas regarding that, publish them
You are completely wrong about this. There are plenty of ideas how to deal with "waste". You simply use it as fuel in fast neutron reactors. For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor
Then you have real waste that only lasts 300 years before it is less radioactive than the ore original uranium was extracted from.
But of course, why build a reactor that uses $120/lb fuel when you can just dig up new uranium for $50/lb and store the current waste for later?
There is plenty of option for fuel waste treatments. France has been the world pioneer and leader of reprocessing. Only the US have decided NOT to reprocess their spent fuel. This is a political problem, not an engineering one. After reprocessing, you are left with a small portion of the original spent fuel which can be vitrificated and buried. These waste have a really high density and do not occupy much space. Trash landfill is causing more harm on the long term than there waste, but you don't object to trash landfill...
OOTH, during the previous centuries, political bs has caused more death than nuclear waste will ever, so this would really be the last of my problem should a worldwide political crisis emerge. At worst, the storage site will turn out as a Tchernobyl-like exclusion zone, which is pretty OK.
Talk to Harry Reid. The scientists figured it out decades ago, but some politicians refuse to act.
Hey coal/gas advocates,
The nuclear folks have a better handle on the waste than you do.
Sincerely,
Someone from the present
This is the dream solution so far, but this does NOT exist.
Wrong.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Waste is not a small problem. There is a salt mine in Germany where there were nuclear waste was stored. Turns out, this mine is not as safe as originally thought. The mine is instable and there is water inflow and the nuclear waste stored there has to be brought back to surface. The German parlament just passed a law about this. Estimated cost (tax payers of course) 4-6 billion Euro. This is the thing with nuclear energy: It seems such a nice solution. As long as you ignore all the details. Then it gets messy and expensive. Really expensive.
The thing that has me really worried about LFTR is the removal of fission products.
In a conventional nuclear reactor, the fission products are confined within the fuel cell cladding. The only place rendered long-term insanely radioactive is the reactor core, which is mechanically pretty simple.
In a LFTR, there is a facility for removing fresh fission products from the liquid fuel. This is a combination of multiple processing steps, high temperatures, corrosive chemicals, and way too much radiation to let humans anywhere near for running or maintaining the equipment. Then the removed products either need short term storage, or to be rendered into a form suitable for long term storage - requiring still more processing.
I'll grant you that the core of a LFTR isn't going to cause an accident, but removing and dealing with those fission products on a regular basis with such a huge price on failure sounds like an engineering nightmare.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
+5 insightful
Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are.
The key thing to understand in our generation is the cost of the infrastructure to transport the spent fuel around. In the U.S this is estimated to be a 30 year project with significant costs attached to it, in and of itself. Fukushima has demonstrated the danger inherent in the spent fuel cooling pools, that is why any infrastructure project has to start with an actual location to transport it to.
In the U.S Yucca mountain does not meet the requirements Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products, especially the ones you are referring to. Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash, you *need* granite if you want a serious facility. Even the Swedish test facility is better designed than Yucca and the design of the actual facility shows the U.S how it *should* be done.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"3. use hydrogen separated from water by energy from LFTR stored as liquid, gas or (preferably) oxide pellets"
Round here Hydrogen Oxide pellets fall out of the sky naturally - small ones at this time of the year but in the summer time you can get them as big as golf balls
The two are NOT equivalent. The US nuclear industry generates about 20% of our national power and 2,300 tons of radioactive waste per year. The US uses about a billion (with a 'b') tons of coal per year for 50% of our national power.
So if we replaced coal energy generation with nuclear generation, we would have roughly 5750 tons of radioactive waste to handle instead of soot and particulate emissions from burning roughly 174000 times as much mass in coal.
So you have a choice between unsightly outhouses here and there (storage facilities for nuclear waste) or pissing all over the lawns of everybody all over the country. The difference in scale is mind-boggling.
Do you have a source for that? I was able to find this and world energy per capita is certainly going up. I also found this for the U.S. but it shows a rather recent peak that could be more related to the financial crisis than a real long term trend. In any event, why would a decline in per capita energy use indicate a decline in civilization rather than just increased efficiency?
Hm, no, that doesn't solve "the waste issue" it only makes one aspect of it easier to deal with. It's useless for spent nuclear fuel, for example.
The problem with SNF is that it's all mixed together. Most of the isotopes are actually quite useful for medical or industrial uses, but only if they are isolated from each other. As described in this video SNF from today's nuke fleet is like taking everything from your pantry and dumping it out on the floor in one big pile. There isn't much you can do other than shovel it into the dumpster. But if you have flour, sugar, salt, etc. all in separate containers you can use them to bake a cake.
This level of fine-grained reprocessing is difficult and expensive for solid nuclear fuels, but relatively easy and cheap to do with liquid nuclear fuels. This is one reason why molten salt reactors are getting more attention in recent years. It's just so much easier to chemically separate the various byproducts "on the fly" while the reactor is online.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
But terrorists! And NIMBY!
Actually, NIMBY applies to everything (nuclear, coal, wind, solar, power lines, pipelines [above and below ground], every other method of power generation and transportation).
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I read somewhere that if a human got all their electricity in their entire life from Nuclear power, the total waste product would fit in a coke can. Not sure if that is true or not (your figures indicate about a coke can every year) but if it is (or even 10x times that) it makes the waste issue seem to be blown way out of proportion.
Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.
That means we're looking at dealing with 1 billion * 2.86 short tons = 2.86 billion short tons = 5,720,000,000,000 (or 5.72 trillion) pounds of CO2 per year. My calculator suggests that's around 497,000x the mass of the potential nuclear waste, not to mention more radioactive waste actually in the atmosphere. Do you really want to discuss which of these methods is contributing more radiation to the atmosphere and whose house all these byproducts are polluting? I'm pretty sure they don't usually entomb the resultant CO2 in concrete, even if half of (less than half, actually) fly ash winds up that way.
The energy density of coal pales in comparison to thorium:
At these prices the value of the energy produced by the thorium is an average cubic meter of the Earth’s crust in a LFTR is worth (11000 to 17000)/(220) = 50 to 77 cubic meters of anthracite coal.
At this point, NIMBY is just mindless obstructionism. There is no scientific ground left to stand on, unless you happen to have an actual, implementable solution for long-term base power, and no, solar isn't cutting it. For that, you have toxic build and recycling processes, short life, low efficiency, the sort of thing that's okay on a small scale but hasn't shown real base-load promise due to the cost of storing energy en-masse for use during off-peak hours instead of throttling a nuclear reaction pulling energy from a very dense storage medium.
LFTR isn't just some pie-in-the-sky. It's a tried and tested reactor design, and we learned from our initial failures (metal embrittlement, evolution of uranium and plutionium), and we came out the other side with a new process for decommissioning. This is how science and engineering work, folks.
AC may have mocked this, but it is correct. Several instances were discovered at Oklo, in Gabon, Africa. I'm not really sure what this has to do with practical energy generation, however.
Not only that, but coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
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