We're supposed to take you seriously when you Randomly capitalize words and can't even figure out how to form plurals in the English language?
This is truly petty, any "errors" are intentional. Clearly this is another demonstration of the weakness of your argument.
Your thinking is mired deep in the environmental's fallacy. You fail to consider relative badness.
And your parroting of Nuclear industry propaganda indicates a serious lack of independent thought. Also demonstrates that you are quite happy that the Nuclear industry won't take responsibility for it's externalities. Your ridiculous argument of 'relative badness' doesn't allow the type of thinking required to move the technology forward because it isn't critical of the flaws, it just accepts that nothing can be done to improve it. Your flawed thinking falls into the economist's trap that trades Natural Capital for Manufactured capital and imposes Nuclear Industry externalities as a tax on future generations the same way CO2 externalities have been imposed on our generation. Pathetic.
Still projecting, huh? My science is perfectly valid. We've already demonstrated that you are willing to lie and exaggerate your unsourced figures. (A "million" pounds --- right.)
*sigh*, The data is available to anyone who has the intelligence to look for it. You haven't presented any science, only rhetoric. So what's your scientific method to assess 'Relative Badness'?
In amounts small enough to be negligible, in one obsolete plant that's due for retirement. It's not an intrinsic part of enrichment.
Wrong again. The evidence is that 93% of US emissions of CFC-114 is from the enrichment of Uranium. The word for that is significant. That is the official, government recognised, industrially measured FACT of a facility that has been DUE for retirement for at least 10 years. I'll leave it as an excercise for you to establish why Ultracentrifuge is so difficult to establish on a industrial scale. As for your claim that CFC114 is 'not an intrinsic part of enrichment' you are wrong, yet again. The method of enrichment is called 'Gaseous Diffusion', and if CFC114 wasn't an intrinsic part of the process it would not be used. But since it is, clearly *you* do not know what your are talking about.
That won't satisfy people like you. You'll complain about possible contamination of the water table or somesuch.
What part of "Absolutely I think it is possible to design a reactor facility that is a quantum leap ahead in safety." do you not understand.
After all, if storing waste underground isn't good enough for you, a full-fledged reactor certainly won't be.
Now you're just being belligerent. My first post to you displayed the type of waste containment facility that is an acceptable construction. Again you demonstrate your 'fanboi' attitude as opposed to critical thought or the capability to evolve your thought.
Besides: building underground would make the reactor prohibitively expensive for very little additional safety.
Well the NRC industry panel I referred to (Westinghouse, et al) disagree. What you are saying is 'safety and technological advancement costs too much to implement in the Nuclear Industry. *IF* the Nuclear Industry was financially viable these advancements would be affordable and the Nuclear Industry would be able to produce a financial and energetic return without subsidies.
At least we were forward-looking in the 1950. You, by contrast, are mired in 1812.
You could have just said 'ner ner'. You are a dogmatic skeptic, no proof is possibl
However, as far as I can tell, nuclear is safer, by all possible measures, when compared to coal.
So what you are saying is the coal industry released more radioactive isotopes that the Chernobyl accident. Or are you going to resort to the old 'in normal operations' argument to justify radioactive isotope release.
You guys are like Intelligent Design advocates,...Yes, you are exactly like Intelligent Design advocates.
As expected ad hominem attack. In the first line of your reply no less, clearly demonstrating the weakness of your argument.
The rest of your post is similarly misleading, and not worthwhile to debunk in detail.
Translation; You do not have a reasonable argument to answer these issues. Instead you resort to the same old superiority complex all nuclear fanboi's of your ilk share. When confronted with the evidence and facts your misleading statements fold, evidenced by the condescending remarks your replies are laced with, which are designed to produce an emotional response in an attempt to marginalise the validity of the arguments presented. How predicable you are, don't let the science or facts get in the way of good propaganda. spin spin spin shill shill shill
Your phytoplankton reference is the worst kind of scientific pandering. It's not CFCs that are the primary danger, but rather the acidification of the oceans caused by their absorption of CO2. We've already established that coal emits quite a bit more CO2.
I was wondering what assumptions you would make. Predictably, you tried to deflect the Nuclear Industries responsibilities. Whilst the externalities of the coal industry are serious issues the point is not equivalence of CO2 but the effect of UV on phytoplankton and zooplankton via depletion of the ozone layer. But you don't have to believe me just read the submissions made to the UN for the Montreal Protocol. Or of course Environmental effects of ozone depletion: 1998 Assessment.
Since the Nuclear industry is the number one industrial emitter of CFC's into the environment these oceanic effects can be directly attributed to the inability of the Nuclear Industry to act as a responsible global citizen. Your point about "plans" for new enrichment methods is irrelavent. CFC114 is used in the process, whether it is used to cool the beers of the technicians or comes in direct contact with the element. The FACT is CFC114 is used.
In brief, the noble (I don't know why you capitalized it) gas fission products are managed and harvested (as we've known how to do for 50 years --- read the date on that paper), not simply emitted into the atmosphere. Even if they were emitted, they have very short half-lives, and would contribute insignificantly the background radiation level.
You said: It produces zero emissions when in reality it produces isotope emissions. In Other Words You Were Lying. It is not lost on me that you had no answer for the question of radioactive isotope effluent, for example Tritium, which is highly mutagenic and does bioaccumulate and often leaks from primary to secondary cooling loops within reactors facilities to be released into whatever water source happens to be the coolant source. I am too lazy to list the plethora of other radioactive isotope emissions the Nuclear industry is responsible for at this stage.
Nevertheless, Yucca isn't bad. Even a 5.5 "aftershock" is hardly enough to damage a secure facility.
What part of The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is "inappropriate to contain nuclear waste" don't you understand? You said: The area is seismically stablewhen it is clearly not. You said: There's no water table when the science gleaned from the DOE's own assessment clearly indicate an ingress of water in less than 50 years. In Other Words You Were Lying.
Nothing in the rest of you paragraph even indicates an understanding of my original
And let me know how much radioactive material is released from generating 1MWh from burning coal and from nuclear? Last I heard, burning coal was still worse for the environment than nuclear, radioactively speaking.
Sure, you're right, but it doesn't change the fact that the nuclear industry is primarily responsible for radioactive effluent as the coal industry is primarily responsible for CO2. This is an old standard of deflecting the argument away so the Nuclear Industry doesn't take responsibility for it's externalities. Look at X from Y it's so much more toxic than the Z we release into the environment.
Meanwhile no word on how they will control Z, as if some other industry's externalities somehow absolves them from their responsibilities.
Close but no cigar. While you describe the technical reasons, you ignore the human reasons and just assume that the manager and his crew were suicidal. They weren't.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I didn't think they were suicidal, just under pressure and probably a bit stubborn. I appreciate the extra info.
Probably still more dangerous than granite, but fortunately alpha radiation can be stopped by a sheet of paper. Or if you're a bit more paranoid, tin foil would probably do the trick.
Except that I am talking about ingesting radioactive isotopes through the food chain. Eating the paper or the tin foil won't help.
The same principle applies to nuclear power: another disaster like Chernobyl could never happen to even a 1970s-era American reactor, much less the far-improved versions we have today.
To save money on construction costs the AP-1000 cuts back on significant amounts of concrete and steel. The result is a ratio of containment volume to thermal power below that of today's PWRs, thereby increasing the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident. Consider TMI-2, it was designed with thicker containment than most other reactors so it was resistant to an aircraft crash. Even that suffered from voids that collapsed in the containment building. Aircraft attack on a Nuclear facility is a viable threat, and gravity cooling won't mitigate containment volume vs thermal power, containment is the last thing you want to loose in the event of an accident.
A Nuclear industry panel of Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison proposed
design recommendations specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
The design changes have been made for economic reasons, not to engineer the reactor installations so they are hardened, if anything they are more vulnerable to attack. The new design does not take the opportunity to implement design improvements that the industry *itself* recommended on the behest of the NRC.
I will not be linking to the 'watered down' version of the documentation of design enhancements for Nuclear power plants for obvious reasons. Uncle Sam is way ahead of us and has pulled access to the original document from the web, the original is sobering reading.
The risk of being injured by a nuclear meltdown today is on par with being injured by lightning.
The nuclear industry used to say that about the chance of a melt-down before the two we've seen so far. The difference is lightning is a natural event, terrestrial nuclear power is not.
In fact, for the past few decades, the nuclear power industry has been running on decommissioned nuclear warheads.
Do you mean Mox?, we are not really burning up pu-239 though are we? And heavy reliance on re-processing introduces a weapons proliferation platform - which of course is the other side of the coin. Current reactors have a burn up rate of roughly less than half of one percent of the fuel, not a good starting point fuel wise, with the reactor being around 33% efficient. That might be typical for an industrial power plant but as the industrial energetic inputs weigh heavily off the efficiency of the plant, that is going to be another figure we will never be able to determine simply because the plants will consume energy *after* they are decommissioned.
Wind power can't provide baseload power. Plus, it's limited by the number of sites with good winds.
As I mentioned elsewhere "The breakdown of U.S energy research and development subsidies reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources, even doubling alternative energy research budgets would take 1/7th of the nuclear research budget, there is plenty of scope for us to produce baseload energy from means other than coal and nuclear."
As for insurance --- nuclear plants are so fantast
Even without further technological advance, nuclear power will suffice for several millennia.
Wow, the propaganda machine is on overdrive today. So lets examine your statements;
It produces zero emissions
It produces CFC114 emissions in the enrichment process. CFC114, a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02 which leaks from Paducah at 1 million pounds, thats 453,592.27 kilgrams per year since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms *since* CFC114 was banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah. One thing that is not immediately obvious is it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.
produces a tiny volume of solid waste that doesn't escape into the environment.
I suggest you read up on the emissions that the NRC permit from a Nuclear reactor every second day and that Nuclear power plants vent approximately 100 cubic feet of Noble gasses roughly every two weeks, and they decay into deadlier elements. Thats NRC standard operating procedure even *before* we start talking about unintentional or unauthorised radioactive effluent emmissions.
you'd jump at the chance to build the thing.
and over the time you live there you would have cumulative exposure to radioactive isotopes that you would never be aware of.
But if it isn't, then you can leave it in a cooling pond for a few years, and after that point, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury. There are far worse industrial outputs than cooled-down nuclear waste.
Isn't it the case that the life span of the concrete containment casks have never been tested because it has never been funded? Are you sure your not just 'assuming' that they wont leak? Isn't part of the DOE response to the geology of Yucca Mountain a shift from geological containment to development of a material called 'C-22' to be used as drip shields to prevent water penetration into the 'dry casks' as they are unable to mitigate the egress of water from the casks. Why would the DOE bother funding their creation if they were confident the casks weren't going to leak especially when their original engineering specification of the geology of the site stated a specific geologic chemistry to mitigate an expected egress of water containing radioactive isotopes? Especially if, as you say, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury.
What's wrong with a cave in the middle of the desert? There's no water table. The area is seismically stable,
You mean Yucca? The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is "inappropriate to contain nuclear waste". Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and actually *is* geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. Long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available.
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 ref
Which is why you put it back into another reactor, and use it to generate more power. Hence the term "reprocessing".
All reactors (and supporting industrial processes) leak radio active isotopes into the environment. All radioactive isotopes bio-accumulate in the food chain increasing the concentration. All radioactive isotopes analogue elements when presented to the body through ingestion and are cancerous.
Your statement *totally* misses the point, please educate yourself as to the *micrograms* of exposure in the body required to cause illness and death. These are the immutable medical consequences of ingesting radioactive emitters.
Easy. How many people who were near TMI have died? It has been almost 40 years after all. If there was enough radiation to cause lasting harm, there'd be a pretty big cluster of cancers among people and animals who lived near TMI.
I guess you missed the part of my comment about how far the radioactive isotopes traveled. I think that you will find that cancer rates in the surrounding states are some of the highest in the country.
But yours is exactly the expected position, without scientific data to ascertain *which type* of cancers you can say 'Not many people died from the TMI accident' when in reality the statement should be 'Because scientists were not allowed to gather data on the type of radioactive isotopes in the fallout from TMI we cannot ascertain how many people died from TMI'.
Nuclear research should be embraced by environmentalists
Developing nuclear power plants as an essential step to dealing with Pu-239 and U-238 is something I think environmentalists will support. The reality of Implementing them on a commercial basis is heavily dependent on material sciences technology that supports reactors with a lifespan adequate to avoid the requisite decommissioning issues *all* nuclear reactors have.
unfortunately most of them have been raised on the dangers of nukes, and not the reality of them.
I think it's fair to say that the amount of nuclear industry hyperbole and propaganda is at least equivalent.
Common sense tells you that it doesn't take thousands of megawatts to dig ore out of the ground and refine it.
Correction from my previous post.
Using a conservative energy expenditure of 1528Kwh per ton of rock (containing Uranium) you have to process 500 tons of rock, that's 763500Kwh's, to produce one kilo of Uranium. Assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assuming you have a high grade ore that's roughly 763Gwh's per ton and you need 160tons for your first core. Even before enrichment you've consumed over 100TWhs without a 1/3 core refuel every ten years for forty and we haven't even factored energetic costs of a spent fuel containment facility or the logistics of moving spent fuel safely.
Actually, seawater uranium is indefinitely sustainable
Which type of seawater extraction methods are you talking about on an industrial scale?
What about how seawater extraction of Uranium occurs? If we knew that we'd be able to make a comparison between the energy efficiency of the process and ascertain if there is an energy return, but because it's still theory and not a measurable industrial activity the only thing known is that is might be possible sometime in the future and it's not known if it will produce a net energy deficit.
Solar and wind will never scale that well and aren't appropriate for base load anyways.
The breakdown of U.S energy research and development subsidies reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources, even doubling alternative energy research budgets would take 1/7th of the nuclear research budget, there is plenty of scope for us to produce baseload energy from means other than coal and nuclear.
How does the United States not reprocessing our spent nuclear fuel prevent nuclear proliferation anyway?
From my understaning the proliferation issue was based on the breeder reactor and 'plutonium economy'. Put 5kg of plutonium in the reactor with two*5kg other elements (I *think* lithium and polonium) and you get 15kg of plutonium. Not good for stalling weapons proliferation. What is required is *burner* reactors that consume pu-239 and du-238.
Nuclear opponents sometimes like to quote a study by a guy named Storm van Leeuwen who claims otherwise, but from what I can tell it is flawed.
Oh, I think some scientists would disagree, you can check their research and tell me what you think. The nuclear industry itself has spent much time attempting to refute their research. I believe you will find it's been peer reviewed and constructed using using U.S government standards for industrial process measurement.
Common sense tells you that it doesn't take thousands of megawatts to dig ore out of the ground and refine it.
Over the plant's entire lifespan, roughly 3 Terrawatt hours just for the mining (5.5GigaJoules per ton). That does not include waste disposal or treatment of mine tailings. Once the overall concentration of ore per tonne of rock it falls below 0.01% there is a net energy debt with nuclear power.
Chernobyl blew up because the operators tested the emergency cooling facilities at 200Mw instead of at 750Mw like the test scenarios proscribed AND after they Xenon poisoned the reaction. By the time the were able to restart the reaction there was a shift change from the more experienced crew (who were dead tired by this stage) to a less experienced crew.
Stubbornly the manager persisted with the test, we know this can only be the case because of the shift change, they didn't recognise the danger of the ratio of control rod extraction to low thermal power output was because they were creating steam voids in the reactor core. No water, no reaction moderation. When they tried to scram the reactor the graphite tipped control rods displaced the little the steam was doing to moderate the reaction, thermal power spiked to 30Gw and ***BOOM***.
From memory 750Mw was proscribed because of the time it took to spin down the cooling system for the reactor down was matched to the start-up time of the diesel pumps that would take over. Operator error introduced a new failure-mode into the system and as all these reactors age, those failure modes will change up to and beyond the time for decommissioning.
In other words, the engineers specify sequences for a reasons based on the characteristics of the machine. This is of course just from memory the Chernobyl wiki probably does a better job remembering than I do.
1: almost non reactive with a half life of hundreds of thousands of years. Its about as dangerous as normal granite.
Actually the half-life of Pu-239, the primary waste from once-through cycle reactors, is 25000 years. It is a potent alpha emitter and a dose of roughly a microgram (inhaled) is enough to give you lung cancer. Ingested via other means and it is an iron analogue to the body so is a potent cause of Leukemia. Much more dangerous than granite.
2: highly radioactive stuff with half lives of decades, the stuff will be decomposed and safe after about 2 centuries. We can build safe containment sure to last that long.
From reading about the waste products of breeder/burner reactors the first daughter product was after 600 years, still within the range of human engineering but it's important to be realistic about the time frames and the actual potential for harm (which is still a very potent risk). But your right, a shorter half life means it is more radioactive, and a lot of people here are getting that wrong because the article gets it wrong.
Three Mile Island was an example of a failure at a nuclear facility that was solved correctly.
To quote the NRC documentation of the incident A significant release of radiation from the plant's auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core. That coolant is officially recognised contamination.
In reality large amounts of contamination were released beyond Nuclear Industry assurances. The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days*. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured.
Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind me staggering around making decisions."
If that's an example of "handled correctly" no wonder people don't want nuclear power anywhere near them.
Expert measurements of radioactive iodine in farm animals nearby revealed Nuclear Industry estimates of contamination released to be 'grossly underestimated'. Radioactive iodine, plutonium, strontium, americurium, 172,000 cubic feet of high level radioactive water, large quantities of krypton 85 and later that year 8 million litres of radioactive water containing tritium that were evaporated deliberately were all part of the toxic cocktail that was released.
Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So if the authorities *refused* to take scientific measurements on which to base long term cancer studies can be based, how can a supposition be made about how many lives have actually been lost?
This is only an example of 'solved correctly' by the standards the tobacco industry uses to defend their products. As observed in 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 a scientific approach, is it?
So there ya go, by your own standard Scientology is a religion.
Well no, as I mentioned in the other reply, I just think it's disingenuous to compare scientology with Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hindu's. What I forgot to mention, because I was so flummoxed by the stupidity of the comparison, was you don't have to *pay* to be a member of those established faiths.
do I really need to run down the list for you on how much uglier and VASTLY more evil Christianity has been in the past? Given the same age and time to evolve that Christianity has gone through,
I answered this in my original post, "Back then there was no such thing as police and there were barely courts or laws. The Church *was* the law and since there was no police force brutality was the tool used to instill fear into people so they would not do wrong. I'm not saying it's right - just how it was."
Scientology too will almost certainly drop some of the nastier bits and softent around the edges, exactly as Christianity has done.
I don't think they will soften, their messages will get more sophisticated capturing larger masses for slightly less money. Look at how easily you have been manipulated into defending Scientology, I shudder to think what they will achieve if they become larger.
Scientology stories about galactic emperors and alien mind-control spirits are silly, but no more silly than Christian stories about talking snakes and magic apples...Go ahead, tell me you think stories about talking snakes are somehow less silly than UFO stories.
The bible was the reason the printing press was invented, what you refer to as 'silly stories' are poignant insights to human nature using powerful metaphors whereas Scientologies stories are taken literally. Anyone who has actually spent time reading the bible will find it is densely packed requiring intelligence and imagination to understand. Some messages are blatant, obvious and appropriate so since you referred to the old testament (a very challenging read) I will quote a 'silly story' from it that is designed to be understood easily, I hope it is not lost on you.
Jeremiah 5:21,5:26-28:
Pay attention, you foolish and stupid people, who have eyes, but cannot see, and have ears, but cannot hear...Evil men live among my people; they lie in wait like men who lay nets to catch birds, but they have set their traps to catch men. Just as a hunter fills his cage with birds, they have filled their houses with loot. That is why they are powerful and rich, why they are fat and well fed. There is no limit to their evil deeds. They do not give orphans their rights or show justice to the oppressed.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean radioactive isotopes. More radioactive isotopes than Chernobyl?
This is truly petty, any "errors" are intentional. Clearly this is another demonstration of the weakness of your argument.
And your parroting of Nuclear industry propaganda indicates a serious lack of independent thought. Also demonstrates that you are quite happy that the Nuclear industry won't take responsibility for it's externalities. Your ridiculous argument of 'relative badness' doesn't allow the type of thinking required to move the technology forward because it isn't critical of the flaws, it just accepts that nothing can be done to improve it. Your flawed thinking falls into the economist's trap that trades Natural Capital for Manufactured capital and imposes Nuclear Industry externalities as a tax on future generations the same way CO2 externalities have been imposed on our generation. Pathetic.
*sigh*, The data is available to anyone who has the intelligence to look for it. You haven't presented any science, only rhetoric. So what's your scientific method to assess 'Relative Badness'?
Wrong again. The evidence is that 93% of US emissions of CFC-114 is from the enrichment of Uranium. The word for that is significant. That is the official, government recognised, industrially measured FACT of a facility that has been DUE for retirement for at least 10 years. I'll leave it as an excercise for you to establish why Ultracentrifuge is so difficult to establish on a industrial scale. As for your claim that CFC114 is 'not an intrinsic part of enrichment' you are wrong, yet again. The method of enrichment is called 'Gaseous Diffusion', and if CFC114 wasn't an intrinsic part of the process it would not be used. But since it is, clearly *you* do not know what your are talking about.
What part of "Absolutely I think it is possible to design a reactor facility that is a quantum leap ahead in safety." do you not understand.
Now you're just being belligerent. My first post to you displayed the type of waste containment facility that is an acceptable construction. Again you demonstrate your 'fanboi' attitude as opposed to critical thought or the capability to evolve your thought.
Well the NRC industry panel I referred to (Westinghouse, et al) disagree. What you are saying is 'safety and technological advancement costs too much to implement in the Nuclear Industry. *IF* the Nuclear Industry was financially viable these advancements would be affordable and the Nuclear Industry would be able to produce a financial and energetic return without subsidies.
You could have just said 'ner ner'. You are a dogmatic skeptic, no proof is possibl
So what you are saying is the coal industry released more radioactive isotopes that the Chernobyl accident. Or are you going to resort to the old 'in normal operations' argument to justify radioactive isotope release.
Because I can answer that to.
You are of course assuming that a) Plutonium is the only radioactive isotope and b) that it comes out of a smoke stack.
As expected ad hominem attack. In the first line of your reply no less, clearly demonstrating the weakness of your argument.
Translation; You do not have a reasonable argument to answer these issues. Instead you resort to the same old superiority complex all nuclear fanboi's of your ilk share. When confronted with the evidence and facts your misleading statements fold, evidenced by the condescending remarks your replies are laced with, which are designed to produce an emotional response in an attempt to marginalise the validity of the arguments presented. How predicable you are, don't let the science or facts get in the way of good propaganda. spin spin spin shill shill shill
I was wondering what assumptions you would make. Predictably, you tried to deflect the Nuclear Industries responsibilities. Whilst the externalities of the coal industry are serious issues the point is not equivalence of CO2 but the effect of UV on phytoplankton and zooplankton via depletion of the ozone layer. But you don't have to believe me just read the submissions made to the UN for the Montreal Protocol. Or of course Environmental effects of ozone depletion: 1998 Assessment.
Since the Nuclear industry is the number one industrial emitter of CFC's into the environment these oceanic effects can be directly attributed to the inability of the Nuclear Industry to act as a responsible global citizen. Your point about "plans" for new enrichment methods is irrelavent. CFC114 is used in the process, whether it is used to cool the beers of the technicians or comes in direct contact with the element. The FACT is CFC114 is used.
You said: It produces zero emissions when in reality it produces isotope emissions. In Other Words You Were Lying. It is not lost on me that you had no answer for the question of radioactive isotope effluent, for example Tritium, which is highly mutagenic and does bioaccumulate and often leaks from primary to secondary cooling loops within reactors facilities to be released into whatever water source happens to be the coolant source. I am too lazy to list the plethora of other radioactive isotope emissions the Nuclear industry is responsible for at this stage.
What part of The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is "inappropriate to contain nuclear waste" don't you understand? You said: The area is seismically stable when it is clearly not. You said: There's no water table when the science gleaned from the DOE's own assessment clearly indicate an ingress of water in less than 50 years. In Other Words You Were Lying.
Nothing in the rest of you paragraph even indicates an understanding of my original
Sure, you're right, but it doesn't change the fact that the nuclear industry is primarily responsible for radioactive effluent as the coal industry is primarily responsible for CO2. This is an old standard of deflecting the argument away so the Nuclear Industry doesn't take responsibility for it's externalities. Look at X from Y it's so much more toxic than the Z we release into the environment.
Meanwhile no word on how they will control Z, as if some other industry's externalities somehow absolves them from their responsibilities.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I didn't think they were suicidal, just under pressure and probably a bit stubborn. I appreciate the extra info.
Except that I am talking about ingesting radioactive isotopes through the food chain. Eating the paper or the tin foil won't help.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1361519&cid=29361749
To save money on construction costs the AP-1000 cuts back on significant amounts of concrete and steel. The result is a ratio of containment volume to thermal power below that of today's PWRs, thereby increasing the risk of containment over-pressurization and failure in event of a severe accident. Consider TMI-2, it was designed with thicker containment than most other reactors so it was resistant to an aircraft crash. Even that suffered from voids that collapsed in the containment building. Aircraft attack on a Nuclear facility is a viable threat, and gravity cooling won't mitigate containment volume vs thermal power, containment is the last thing you want to loose in the event of an accident.
A Nuclear industry panel of Westinghouse, General Electric, Bechtel, Sargent & Lundy, Northern States Power and Commonwealth Edison proposed design recommendations specifically targeted at reducing the opportunities to sabotage a nuclear reactor installation. The AP-1000 incorporates none of the design changes the industry *itself* recommends be applied to reactor facility design. AP-1000 is a rehash of the Standard Westinghouse Nuclear Utility Power Plant (SNUPPs) examples of which are installed at Wolf Creek and Callaway, you will note in the picture the uncanny resemblence to the AP-1000 design (and similar capacity).
The design changes have been made for economic reasons, not to engineer the reactor installations so they are hardened, if anything they are more vulnerable to attack. The new design does not take the opportunity to implement design improvements that the industry *itself* recommended on the behest of the NRC.
I will not be linking to the 'watered down' version of the documentation of design enhancements for Nuclear power plants for obvious reasons. Uncle Sam is way ahead of us and has pulled access to the original document from the web, the original is sobering reading.
The nuclear industry used to say that about the chance of a melt-down before the two we've seen so far. The difference is lightning is a natural event, terrestrial nuclear power is not.
Do you mean Mox?, we are not really burning up pu-239 though are we? And heavy reliance on re-processing introduces a weapons proliferation platform - which of course is the other side of the coin. Current reactors have a burn up rate of roughly less than half of one percent of the fuel, not a good starting point fuel wise, with the reactor being around 33% efficient. That might be typical for an industrial power plant but as the industrial energetic inputs weigh heavily off the efficiency of the plant, that is going to be another figure we will never be able to determine simply because the plants will consume energy *after* they are decommissioned.
As I mentioned elsewhere "The breakdown of U.S energy research and development subsidies reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources, even doubling alternative energy research budgets would take 1/7th of the nuclear research budget, there is plenty of scope for us to produce baseload energy from means other than coal and nuclear."
Wow, the propaganda machine is on overdrive today. So lets examine your statements;
It produces CFC114 emissions in the enrichment process. CFC114, a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02 which leaks from Paducah at 1 million pounds, thats 453,592.27 kilgrams per year since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms *since* CFC114 was banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah. One thing that is not immediately obvious is it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.
I suggest you read up on the emissions that the NRC permit from a Nuclear reactor every second day and that Nuclear power plants vent approximately 100 cubic feet of Noble gasses roughly every two weeks, and they decay into deadlier elements. Thats NRC standard operating procedure even *before* we start talking about unintentional or unauthorised radioactive effluent emmissions.
and over the time you live there you would have cumulative exposure to radioactive isotopes that you would never be aware of.
Isn't it the case that the life span of the concrete containment casks have never been tested because it has never been funded? Are you sure your not just 'assuming' that they wont leak? Isn't part of the DOE response to the geology of Yucca Mountain a shift from geological containment to development of a material called 'C-22' to be used as drip shields to prevent water penetration into the 'dry casks' as they are unable to mitigate the egress of water from the casks. Why would the DOE bother funding their creation if they were confident the casks weren't going to leak especially when their original engineering specification of the geology of the site stated a specific geologic chemistry to mitigate an expected egress of water containing radioactive isotopes? Especially if, as you say, it's safe enough to handle, store, and bury.
You mean Yucca? The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that the Yucca Mountain's geology is "inappropriate to contain nuclear waste". Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and actually *is* geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. Long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available.
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 ref
No it didn't, otherwise the plant would have never been put into the situation in the first place.
All reactors (and supporting industrial processes) leak radio active isotopes into the environment. All radioactive isotopes bio-accumulate in the food chain increasing the concentration. All radioactive isotopes analogue elements when presented to the body through ingestion and are cancerous.
Your statement *totally* misses the point, please educate yourself as to the *micrograms* of exposure in the body required to cause illness and death. These are the immutable medical consequences of ingesting radioactive emitters.
I guess you missed the part of my comment about how far the radioactive isotopes traveled. I think that you will find that cancer rates in the surrounding states are some of the highest in the country.
But yours is exactly the expected position, without scientific data to ascertain *which type* of cancers you can say 'Not many people died from the TMI accident' when in reality the statement should be 'Because scientists were not allowed to gather data on the type of radioactive isotopes in the fallout from TMI we cannot ascertain how many people died from TMI'.
Palo Verde makes NRC watch list. Such a great example of Nuclear industry operations. What a joke.
Developing nuclear power plants as an essential step to dealing with Pu-239 and U-238 is something I think environmentalists will support. The reality of Implementing them on a commercial basis is heavily dependent on material sciences technology that supports reactors with a lifespan adequate to avoid the requisite decommissioning issues *all* nuclear reactors have.
I think it's fair to say that the amount of nuclear industry hyperbole and propaganda is at least equivalent.
Correction from my previous post.
Using a conservative energy expenditure of 1528Kwh per ton of rock (containing Uranium) you have to process 500 tons of rock, that's 763500Kwh's, to produce one kilo of Uranium. Assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assuming you have a high grade ore that's roughly 763Gwh's per ton and you need 160tons for your first core. Even before enrichment you've consumed over 100TWhs without a 1/3 core refuel every ten years for forty and we haven't even factored energetic costs of a spent fuel containment facility or the logistics of moving spent fuel safely.
Which type of seawater extraction methods are you talking about on an industrial scale?
What about how seawater extraction of Uranium occurs? If we knew that we'd be able to make a comparison between the energy efficiency of the process and ascertain if there is an energy return, but because it's still theory and not a measurable industrial activity the only thing known is that is might be possible sometime in the future and it's not known if it will produce a net energy deficit.
The breakdown of U.S energy research and development subsidies reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources, even doubling alternative energy research budgets would take 1/7th of the nuclear research budget, there is plenty of scope for us to produce baseload energy from means other than coal and nuclear.
From my understaning the proliferation issue was based on the breeder reactor and 'plutonium economy'. Put 5kg of plutonium in the reactor with two*5kg other elements (I *think* lithium and polonium) and you get 15kg of plutonium. Not good for stalling weapons proliferation. What is required is *burner* reactors that consume pu-239 and du-238.
Oh, I think some scientists would disagree, you can check their research and tell me what you think. The nuclear industry itself has spent much time attempting to refute their research. I believe you will find it's been peer reviewed and constructed using using U.S government standards for industrial process measurement.
Over the plant's entire lifespan, roughly 3 Terrawatt hours just for the mining (5.5GigaJoules per ton). That does not include waste disposal or treatment of mine tailings. Once the overall concentration of ore per tonne of rock it falls below 0.01% there is a net energy debt with nuclear power.
Chernobyl blew up because the operators tested the emergency cooling facilities at 200Mw instead of at 750Mw like the test scenarios proscribed AND after they Xenon poisoned the reaction. By the time the were able to restart the reaction there was a shift change from the more experienced crew (who were dead tired by this stage) to a less experienced crew.
Stubbornly the manager persisted with the test, we know this can only be the case because of the shift change, they didn't recognise the danger of the ratio of control rod extraction to low thermal power output was because they were creating steam voids in the reactor core. No water, no reaction moderation. When they tried to scram the reactor the graphite tipped control rods displaced the little the steam was doing to moderate the reaction, thermal power spiked to 30Gw and ***BOOM***.
From memory 750Mw was proscribed because of the time it took to spin down the cooling system for the reactor down was matched to the start-up time of the diesel pumps that would take over. Operator error introduced a new failure-mode into the system and as all these reactors age, those failure modes will change up to and beyond the time for decommissioning.
In other words, the engineers specify sequences for a reasons based on the characteristics of the machine. This is of course just from memory the Chernobyl wiki probably does a better job remembering than I do.
Actually the half-life of Pu-239, the primary waste from once-through cycle reactors, is 25000 years. It is a potent alpha emitter and a dose of roughly a microgram (inhaled) is enough to give you lung cancer. Ingested via other means and it is an iron analogue to the body so is a potent cause of Leukemia. Much more dangerous than granite.
From reading about the waste products of breeder/burner reactors the first daughter product was after 600 years, still within the range of human engineering but it's important to be realistic about the time frames and the actual potential for harm (which is still a very potent risk). But your right, a shorter half life means it is more radioactive, and a lot of people here are getting that wrong because the article gets it wrong.
To quote the NRC documentation of the incident A significant release of radiation from the plant's auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core. That coolant is officially recognised contamination.
In reality large amounts of contamination were released beyond Nuclear Industry assurances. The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days*. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured.
Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind me staggering around making decisions."
If that's an example of "handled correctly" no wonder people don't want nuclear power anywhere near them.
Expert measurements of radioactive iodine in farm animals nearby revealed Nuclear Industry estimates of contamination released to be 'grossly underestimated'. Radioactive iodine, plutonium, strontium, americurium, 172,000 cubic feet of high level radioactive water, large quantities of krypton 85 and later that year 8 million litres of radioactive water containing tritium that were evaporated deliberately were all part of the toxic cocktail that was released.
Dr Carl Johnson, an expert in radiation related diseases asked the NRC and DOE to do a survey to look for some of these elements in the respirable dust around TMI after the accident and they refused. So if the authorities *refused* to take scientific measurements on which to base long term cancer studies can be based, how can a supposition be made about how many lives have actually been lost?
This is only an example of 'solved correctly' by the standards the tobacco industry uses to defend their products. As observed in 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 a scientific approach, is it?
Well no, as I mentioned in the other reply, I just think it's disingenuous to compare scientology with Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hindu's. What I forgot to mention, because I was so flummoxed by the stupidity of the comparison, was you don't have to *pay* to be a member of those established faiths.
I answered this in my original post, "Back then there was no such thing as police and there were barely courts or laws. The Church *was* the law and since there was no police force brutality was the tool used to instill fear into people so they would not do wrong. I'm not saying it's right - just how it was."
I don't think they will soften, their messages will get more sophisticated capturing larger masses for slightly less money. Look at how easily you have been manipulated into defending Scientology, I shudder to think what they will achieve if they become larger.
The bible was the reason the printing press was invented, what you refer to as 'silly stories' are poignant insights to human nature using powerful metaphors whereas Scientologies stories are taken literally. Anyone who has actually spent time reading the bible will find it is densely packed requiring intelligence and imagination to understand. Some messages are blatant, obvious and appropriate so since you referred to the old testament (a very challenging read) I will quote a 'silly story' from it that is designed to be understood easily, I hope it is not lost on you.
Jeremiah 5:21,5:26-28:
Pay attention, you foolish and stupid people, who have eyes, but cannot see, and have ears, but cannot hear...Evil men live among my people; they lie in wait like men who lay nets to catch birds, but they have set their traps to catch men. Just as a hunter fills his cage with birds, they have filled their houses with loot. That is why they are powerful and rich, why they are fat and well fed. There is no limit to their evil deeds. They do not give orphans their rights or show justice to the oppressed.