Switching off lights (and brains)

[vanesch]

Ivan's first statement is the biggest problem. A fairer comparison would be "how many people die in car traffic in my home town?"

BTW, I think that even that comparison is ok. Probability to die in a car accident is about 0.01% per year worldwide. Now, take a town of about 100 000 inhabitants, and consider a Chernobyl nearby in that town every 100 years (they are not going to win the lottery every time! We assumed a Chernobyl every 10 years, worldwide). Per year, we have 10 victims in car accidents, which make about 1000 victims in 100 years.
Chernobyl made about 4000 victims in the nearby town, but that was due to very late evacuation. So let us say that reasonably, we could bring that down to 1000 victims if we have better evacuation plans and so. Given that there is a Chernobyl every 10 years, we can tune the procedures.

So we see that under the super disaster hypotheses of having a town of 100 000 inhabitants with normal drivers, but with a Chernobyl every 100 years (each tenth Chernobyl is for this town if we assume there is one every 10 years worldwide, which is already a hugely pessimistic disaster hypothesis), that in this very unlucky town, driving is as dangerous as having the power plant there.

But I want to stress again that I have made extremely pessimistic hypotheses. Indeed, if there is a Chernobyl every 10 year worldwide (which is already a crazily pessimistic hypothesis), given that there are 400 power plants working now, that would mean normally that the town would only be hit on average every 4000 years. But I gave them bad luck, and put it to 100 years.

 

[Azael]

It's not a good idea in general to put a nuclear powerplant in a city, big or small. You should put it in the country side !

Its still a good idea to place NPP's close enough to supply district heating to cities. There where major plans for that in sweden until they where stopped by environuts. A big chunk of the heating needs of Copenhagen could have been meet by the Barsebäck plant in sweden. Same with Göteborg and the Ringhals plant.

 

[vanesch]

Its still a good idea to place NPP's close enough to supply district heating to cities. There where major plans for that in sweden until they where stopped by environuts. A big chunk of the heating needs of Copenhagen could have been meet by the Barsebäck plant in sweden. Same with Göteborg and the Ringhals plant.

Mmm... personally, I'd prefer them to be in low population density areas, because it eliminates the very last of worries. Chernobyl was really the worst of the worst, with a high smoke plume, driven by a fire and a not-stopped reactor (the reactor was still working many hours after the accident, because there was - in contrast to all western reactors - no passive safety mechanism that stopped it). It was THIS which spread out the activity over such a large area. But this is simply physically impossible in a plant with build-in passive safety, which means that the worst of the worst in such a plant (breakdown of reactor vessel, breakdown of the containment building, massive dispersion of the core material) is a heavy contamination, but of a more restricted area. The long-term consequence is then that this area is turned into a natural reserve with build-in guarantee against promotors The contamination will last for 100 - 200 years.

So one should foresee a zone of a few miles around a power plant as a potential natural reserve which will be selected randomly by the distribution of accidents. It is then economically wasteful to put towns in there.

This view has the advantage that one can create more natural reserves worldwide by lowering security standards for power plants So again, I wonder why ecologists are against nukes: in the worst case, they generate natural reserves with guarantee

 

[Azael]

Mmm... personally, I'd prefer them to be in low population density areas, because it eliminates the very last of worries. Chernobyl was really the worst of the worst, with a high smoke plume, driven by a fire and a not-stopped reactor (the reactor was still working many hours after the accident, because there was - in contrast to all western reactors - no passive safety mechanism that stopped it). It was THIS which spread out the activity over such a large area. But this is simply physically impossible in a plant with build-in passive safety, which means that the worst of the worst in such a plant (breakdown of reactor vessel, breakdown of the containment building, massive dispersion of the core material) is a heavy contamination, but of a more restricted area. The long-term consequence is then that this area is turned into a natural reserve with build-in guarantee against promotors The contamination will last for 100 - 200 years.

So one should foresee a zone of a few miles around a power plant as a potential natural reserve which will be selected randomly by the distribution of accidents. It is then economically wasteful to put towns in there.

This view has the advantage that one can create more natural reserves worldwide by lowering security standards for power plants So again, I wonder why ecologists are against nukes: in the worst case, they generate natural reserves with guarantee

Thats one way of looking at it

 

[mgb_phys]

Thats one way of looking at it

There was a semi-serious suggestion that the best way to preserve the Amazon rain forrest was to detonate a dirty bomb over it so that you couldn't cut it down and grow cattle for McDonalds - I like to suggest this to the more over the top eco-freindly types!

 

[Moonbear]

A nuclear reactor wouldn't be placed in the middle of a large city simply because of the number of lives that would be jeopardized in an accident. You have to find a small town well outside a large city to assume the risk for the large city. It's a good move in theory, but the town selected to host a nuclear power plant usually doesn't think so.

It would seem there are a number of good potential sites along the "rust belt." To put it bluntly, many of those areas are already so contaminated and polluted from the old industries that have died off that you couldn't do much more harm to them if you tried, so you'd alleviate such unfounded worries. They're located near the sorts of waterways that would be required for the cooling systems. The towns are depressed, with few residents left, and in desperate need of the jobs such a plant would bring to the area. These are already locations that have been deemed "industrial" much more than residential, so they seem like perfect places. Many of the people "stuck" living there are only stuck because there is no value to their property anymore, so they can't afford to pick up and move out...who would buy? But, if a power plant comes in and offers them a good price for their land, they could relocate out to a nicer place (so you don't have to deal with the "not in my backyard" issue...give them a price that gets them out of the backyard of the proposed site), yet they also may stay close enough to benefit from the jobs and provide the workforce for the site.

One thing that would limit a few areas, however, is mine subsidance issues. Unfortunately, the towns that might be willing to adopt an industry that's cleaner, but still provides jobs for them, would be the coal-mining towns. Coal mining accidents have taken far more lives than nuclear power plants in this country. But, the ground there would be too unstable I think.

And, maybe we need some brave politicians...perhaps some nearer the end of their careers who don't have to worry about getting reelected...who will simply say, yes, this is the site for it, and you can complain all you want, but it's still happening.

 

[russ_watters]

One of the more likely ways to die is by a meteor impact; not because we usually have large impacts, but because when one does hit, billions will die. The same logic can be applied here. One catastrophic failure is unacceptable, and there is no such thing as perfect controls.

It is not true here because one catastrophic failure will not kill enough people for it to be that big of a deal. Chernobyl was orders of magnitude smaller than what is needed to equal the yearly damage done by other forms of energy. Vanesch used cars as a comparison, but the same comparison works for coal power. We'd need several Chernobyls a year to equal the death rate due to coal power. Air pollution kills people at a pretty surprising rate.

This ignores the political reality that no one want a reactor in their back yard.

Anti-nuclear environmentalists are stupid, but that doesn't mean the rest of the general public is. 20 years after TMI, it is easy to show people the evidence and convince enough that it is a good idea - especially when you factor in the money it feeds into the town.

I live about 5 miles from Limerick and there is no vocal opposition to the existence of the plant. I realize that there are places out west where there are people working to get plants closed, but areas where the concentration of enviro-nuts is very high are the exception, not the rule.

 

[russ_watters]

A nuclear reactor wouldn't be placed in the middle of a large city simply because of the number of lives that would be jeopardized in an accident. You have to find a small town well outside a large city to assume the risk for the large city. It's a good move in theory, but the town selected to host a nuclear power plant usually doesn't think so.

A nuclear plant (or any other large power plant) isn't built in the middle of a city for technical reasons. There is no safety benefit to placing a nuclear plant in Limerick (20 miles west of Philly) rather than in Philly. The fallout from an accident would be more effectively spread over Philly than if, for example, the plant were placed on the Deleware in south Philly.

 

[russ_watters]

By the way, vansech - you are being far to accomodating of the fearmongering. I know you gave the caveats already, but there is simply no reason to use Chernobyl as your basis for analysis of the risk. It is like using the Titanic for analysis of car accident risk. Cars don't strike icebergs and sink and a Chernobyl type accident is a technical impossibility in the west.

Using TMI as the basis for a risk analysis shows just how "risky" nuclear power is. The worst "what could have happened" scenario for TMI probably still wouldn't have killed anyone. But then, of course, you run into the problem of trying to predict a disaster rate based on a historic rate of zero. After 40 years of waiting, we're still at zero. Assuming we haven't been unusually lucky, a bad disaster tomorrow would set us up for a rate that would probably allow all the world's energy to be nuclear based and have one disaster a year. Given the death rate from things like air pollution, that's certainly something people could live with.

 

[vanesch]

By the way, vansech - you are being far to accomodating of the fearmongering. I know you gave the caveats already, but there is simply no reason to use Chernobyl as your basis for analysis of the risk. It is like using the Titanic for analysis of car accident risk. Cars don't strike icebergs and sink and a Chernobyl type accident is a technical impossibility in the west.

I know, but my reasoning is the following: nobody will claim that any car accident will be WORSE than the titanic sinking. If we can show now that "titanics sinking" are still less risky than making shoes, then we should allow for cars.
Translated: no imaginable accident with a power plant will ever be worse than Chernobyl: we've had the maximal accident there. This puts an upper limit, by observation, to the phantasies about what could happen with power plants. If given this upper limit, we're still having acceptable risks, then the REAL (but yet unobserved) risk will definitely be lower.

Because it is the fact that the real risk is still unobserved which feeds the fears: "we've been lucky, but the Big Bang is maybe for tomorrow". Well, consider, as a cure for that fear, that the worst possible Bangs happen regularly...
and you'll see that even that is no big deal compared to other accepted risks, such as driving cars, smoking...

 

[Art]

By the way, vansech - you are being far to accomodating of the fearmongering. I know you gave the caveats already, but there is simply no reason to use Chernobyl as your basis for analysis of the risk. It is like using the Titanic for analysis of car accident risk. Cars don't strike icebergs and sink and a Chernobyl type accident is a technical impossibility in the west.

Using TMI as the basis for a risk analysis shows just how "risky" nuclear power is. The worst "what could have happened" scenario for TMI probably still wouldn't have killed anyone. But then, of course, you run into the problem of trying to predict a disaster rate based on a historic rate of zero. After 40 years of waiting, we're still at zero. Assuming we haven't been unusually lucky, a bad disaster tomorrow would set us up for a rate that would probably allow all the world's energy to be nuclear based and have one disaster a year. Given the death rate from things like air pollution, that's certainly something people could live with.

Last time I checked Windscale (Sellafield) was in the West.

 

[vanesch]

Last time I checked Windscale (Sellafield) was in the West.

Windscale wasn't a power reactor. It was a hastily build military reactor to produce plutonium an tritium after Eisenhower had decided to cut the British off from the military applications of nuclear technology (and hence material supply).

It was an extremely dangerous design: it was essentially a graphite reactor in a corridor, with a big ventilator on one side, which blew air (!) through the channels in the reactor in order to cool it, and a stack on the other side, where the air was given off to the atmosphere. And regularly, one let the reactor overheat (to a few hundred degrees C) in order to relax the Wigner energy in the graphite. So you essentially had a hot cole stove with a ventilator and a stack, stuffed with uranium and - this was the main contribution to the contamination - a lot of materials to be irradiated, such as polonium.
At one point, the overheating went wrong, and the graphite/uranium took fire.

One estimates that the Winscale accident has made around 200 victims (over 50 years), again under the hypothesis of linear dose-effect relation etc...

All this has nothing to do with a western powerplant.

 

[russ_watters]

I know, but my reasoning is the following:

I follow your logic and it is sound except for the fact that it allows crackpots and the ignorant to believe something that isn't true. Yes, you are working within their expectations/beliefs and still making a convincing argument, but I just don't like letting untruths slide. Conceding the point will undoubtably make people who are simply ignorant think that Chernobyl really is a possibility here. It isn't so much a problem for this discussion because people are smart enough to follow your reasoning, but as a general tactic, I prefer to demand realism.

 

[t-money]

Biofuel is a joke!

If we devoted the total biosphere of Earth to production of biofuels we still could not sustain our current and future energy demands which is ever increasing.

 

[Art]

Windscale wasn't a power reactor. It was a hastily build military reactor to produce plutonium an tritium after Eisenhower had decided to cut the British off from the military applications of nuclear technology (and hence material supply).

It was an extremely dangerous design: it was essentially a graphite reactor in a corridor, with a big ventilator on one side, which blew air (!) through the channels in the reactor in order to cool it, and a stack on the other side, where the air was given off to the atmosphere. And regularly, one let the reactor overheat (to a few hundred degrees C) in order to relax the Wigner energy in the graphite. So you essentially had a hot cole stove with a ventilator and a stack, stuffed with uranium and - this was the main contribution to the contamination - a lot of materials to be irradiated, such as polonium.
At one point, the overheating went wrong, and the graphite/uranium took fire.

One estimates that the Winscale accident has made around 200 victims (over 50 years), again under the hypothesis of linear dose-effect relation etc...

All this has nothing to do with a western powerplant.

It has everything to do with Western nuclear safety records and Sellafield is still a part of the nuclear power plant cycle supplying reprocessed fuel.

The fact it wasn't a far far bigger disaster was entirely down to luck.

Once the reactor started burning they hadn't a clue what to do. In desperation they tried using water to put it out. They didn't have enough people on site and in desperation recruited volunteers from a local cinema to man the fire hoses.

This didn't work and they were incredibly lucky they didn't cause a steam explosion which would have caused an absolutely massive catastrophe spreading contamination over hundreds of miles.

Eventually someone had the bright idea of switching off the fan to stop the flow of air to the reactor which put out the fire.

The point is, it is not only in the East reckless and stupid decisions have been made in relation to safety matters in the nuclear industry and so although Western reactors might be safe from an exact replica of the problems of Chernobyl, based on prior experience, there is nothing to say they can't cobble together an equally disastrous outcome albeit with different ingredients.

btw As recently found following the publication of secret documents released under the 50 year rule the fire wasn't caused by heating to dispel the Wigner energy. It was caused by the components placed in the reactor catching fire due to political decisions to reduce the size of the heat fins on these components to increase production of tritium. This was discovered at the time but was covered up and all references to it in the official report deleted personally by the then PM Harold MacMillan who chose to blame the workers instead.

The reason there is a deep distrust of nuclear power is because this reaction by the British gov't is typical of how the industry responds to problems. It's knee jerk reaction is to cover up it's mistakes and lie to the public. The public however aren't stupid. They know they have been lied to in the past and wonder what other lies they are being fed. A recent example would be the use of depleted uranium in weaponry, gov'ts who use these armaments still keep insisting they are safe no matter how much evidence to the contrary accumulates. Even if you give the gov'ts the benefit of the doubt and allow they believe their own bs then you are merely substituting a fool for a liar neither of which fills one with confidence.

 

[russ_watters]

It has everything to do with Western nuclear safety records and Sellafield is still a part of the nuclear power plant cycle supplying reprocessed fuel.

Except that since it is unlike any other facility, it cannot be used to extrapolate the safety of normal power plants. The saftety of normal power plants is what people would be worried about if we planned to double (quadruple?) the number we currently have. When a company proposes a new plant, no sane person would calculate a failure probability of that plant based on what happened at Sellafield. Again, it would be like deciding not to buy a car because you are afraid of hitting an iceberg.

 

[Art]

Russ - Seems to be a lot of icebergs around

From today

Radiation leak at Russian plant
Russia says there has been a radiation leak at a nuclear reprocessing plant in the Ural mountains east of Moscow, but that it has not harmed anyone.
Local emergency officials say a faulty tap allowed radioactive waste to leak from a tank onto a stretch of road at the Mayak plant last Thursday.

Radiation levels inside and outside the plant are normal, the officials say.

The plant was a top secret Soviet atomic weapons facility. In 1957 it was the scene of a major nuclear accident.

In the latest incident, a violation of safety rules was blamed for the leak.

Russian prosecutors are considering whether to open a criminal case.


Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7068041.stm

Published: 2007/10/29 16:36:37 GMT

© BBC MMVII

From last year

Russia challenged by nuclear woes
By Leonid Ragozin
bbcrussian.com, Moscow


The new boss of Russia's nuclear industry, Sergei Kiriyenko, has announced ambitious expansion plans which alarm environmentalists worried about continuing radioactive contamination.


This week prosecutors charged the director of Russia's main nuclear waste processing plant - Mayak in the Urals - with violating safety rules.
Vitaly Sadovnikov is accused of allowing many tons of liquid radioactive waste to be discharged into the River Techa in 2001-2004.

In a separate investigation, the former head of Russia's Federal Agency for Nuclear Energy (Rosatom), Yevgeny Adamov, was arrested in Switzerland last year on corruption charges and extradited to Russia.

The Mayak plant was also the scene of a major nuclear accident in 1957, when a waste storage facility blew up, releasing 20 million curies of radiation into the atmosphere. The scale of the disaster was kept secret by the Soviet authorities at the time.
[snip]
The committee's chairman, Vladimir Grachev, has warned that the dams standing between the radioactive water and the Ob river basin may collapse.

Environmentalists say dangerous waste water has been seeping into the soil for years.

Gosman Kabirov, an environmental activist who has spent years near the Mayak plant, says "the situation is indeed very dangerous, because the reservoirs have accumulated 1.2bn curies - that is 22 Chernobyls".

It is silly to contend that as nuclear power plants are (probably) generally safe the nuclear industry is safe. The whole process has to be included in any safety analysis including ore extraction through reprocessing (where used) to disposal of waste.

To use your car analogy - you're saying the equivalent of a car is dead safe just so long as you don't take it out of your garage which is true if one takes the existence of the car in isolation but misleading if one doesn't account for fueling and driving the car.

In 50 years there have been 21 major accidents in Sellafield alone. If a single ship hit that many icebergs I doubt there would be many people queuing up to buy tickets for a cruise on her.

 

[Azael]

It is silly to contend that as nuclear power plants are (probably) generally safe the nuclear industry is safe. The whole process has to be included in any safety analysis including ore extraction through reprocessing (where used) to disposal of waste.

To use your car analogy - you're saying the equivalent of a car is dead safe just so long as you don't take it out of your garage which is true if one takes the existence of the car in isolation but misleading if one doesn't account for fueling and driving the car.

In 50 years there have been 21 major accidents in Sellafield alone. If a single ship hit that many icebergs I doubt there would be many people queuing up to buy tickets for a cruise on her.

How many people have been injuried or killed by radiation released from Sellafield? The acctual dosage to the population because of Sellafield is LESS than the dosage caused by some other non nuclear industries.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/21/1/004
0.1mSv is a trivial dosage, it is not harmfull in any way.

No part of the nuclear industry anywhere in the world today release enough radioactive material for the dosage to the public to even come close to natural background radiation dosages!

If you include everything from uranium mining to waste storage nuclear is one of the safest form of energy we have. Look at the results of ExternE for instance, just one of many life cycle assesements that has been done.
www.externe.info

It seems like your demand is that the nuclear industry has to be perfect, a unreasonable demand. The nuclear industry just needs to be safe enough to harm less people than the other energy sources. The "leak" out of the chimney of a avarage coal power plant is more harmfull than the leakage from sellafield.

 

[Art]

How many people have been injuried or killed by radiation released from Sellafield? The acctual dosage to the population because of Sellafield is LESS than the dosage caused by some other non nuclear industries.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0952-4746/21/1/004
0.1mSv is a trivial dosage, it is not harmfull in any way.

No part of the nuclear industry anywhere in the world today release enough radioactive material for the dosage to the public to even come close to natural background radiation dosages!

Not deliberately perhaps As for deaths due to Sellafield - it's impossible to say owing to gov't lies and propaganda. Here's a recent extract from the N Ireland gov't assembly

1957, the British Government carried out a massive deception in relation to the catastrophe and covered up its own records on the wind direction in the area at the time of the incident. At the time, reports that were backed up by the Meteor*ological Office stated that the wind was blowing seawards towards the Isle of Man and beyond to the Dublin area. However in 1974, 17 years after the disaster, a Government agency claimed that the winds at the time came from the northwest, thus blowing the radiation inland. The prime purpose of that announce*ment was to create the belief that no significant radiation made its way to the Isle of Man or Ireland.

When members of the Low Level Radiation Campaign (LLRC) went to the Meteorological Office in Windscale to find the truth, they found that the original reports detailing the westerly direction of the wind, and its speed, had been tampered with. Record sheets for 1957 had been removed and replaced with new sheets that were slightly different in colour from the sheets of previous and subsequent years. The new pages for 1957 read: “No Record – Mast Dismantled”.

According to the records, the mast reappeared in November 1957, which perhaps says something.

It may be wrong to despair, but I fear that we will never learn the true facts about the catastrophe, or be able to prevent a reoccurrence of the event at Windscale. As individuals we have no chance of discovering the truth, and, as much as we might try, I doubt that the Assembly as a body would fare any better. However, we must continue to try. I pay tribute to my colleague Eddie McGrady MP, as did Carmel Hanna, for his endless efforts to keep the Sellafield debate alive. I am sure that successive British Governments have wished that Eddie McGrady would ease up on the issue, when they should have been admitting failure and warning their people of the constant threat that exists.

As we have heard, the people of Dundalk, many people on the east coast of Ireland and the people of the Isle of Man do not need a Government admission to confirm the facts. The death rate on the Isle of Man soared in the decade following the incident at Windscale, and many mothers in County Louth believe that they know only too well of the consequences of the radiation clouds that descended on their area in 1957 — conse*quences that they live with to this day.

If you include everything from uranium mining to waste storage nuclear is one of the safest form of energy we have. Look at the results of ExternE for instance, just one of many life cycle assesements that has been done.
www.externe.info

You saying it's the safest doesn't make it so. Where is the data to support that contention? It seems it's safe so long as nobody actually looks, for example

DAKAR, 28 April 2005 (IRIN) - When residents of the desert town of Arlit, Niger's uranium mining settlement in the far north of the country, started getting increasingly sick, they questioned whether this had to do with their overexposure to radioactivity and called in French NGOs to investigate.

Reports by the French teams found that water, soil and metal scrap from the area where two uranium mines are mainly exploited by subsidiaries of French company Areva-Cogema were contaminated with dangerously high radioactivity levels.

"Contamination levels in water samples were 10 to 110 times higher than standards considered acceptable by the World Health Organisation," said Bruno Chareyron, who carried out the tests at the laboratories of CRIIRAD - a French NGO specializing in protection against and monitoring of radioactivity.

"The French multinational Areva-Cogema and its subsidiaries ... released contaminated metal scrap from their site, distributed water contaminated with uranium to the populations, left radioactive waste in the open where desert winds could disperse it far away and disregarded internationally recognised international norms for the protection against radioactivity," the nuclear physicist told IRIN from France.

Unfortunately most of the problems related to the nuclear industry are in 3rd world countries with zero health screening and zero records.

It seems like your demand is that the nuclear industry has to be perfect, a unreasonable demand. The nuclear industry just needs to be safe enough to harm less people than the other energy sources. The "leak" out of the chimney of a avarage coal power plant is more harmfull than the leakage from sellafield.

Err no.. my 'demand' as you call it is simply that the nuclear industry stop lying, stop covering up it's mistakes, stop cheating to reduce costs and explain how it intends disposing of the stores of highly toxic pollutants it has already created before producing an order of magnitude more, that way we actually might be able to draw a fair comparison with other energy producers and avoid silly emotional based arguments.

 

[Azael]

Not deliberately perhaps As for deaths due to Sellafield - it's impossible to say owing to gov't lies and propaganda. Here's a recent extract from the N Ireland gov't assembly

Well the link I posted states that the dosage to the most exposed is 0.1mSv. I seem to remember reading studies that show releases from sellafield in the past might have exposed some people to 1mSv. Thats still far from anything even remotely dangerous!

Like I said, the biggest release of radionuclides into the sea around the UK is not from nuclear industries.

No study that I have seen or even heard of have been able to show a statisticaly significant increase of cancer rates around Sellafield, La Hague or around any civilian nuclear site anywhere in the west. You can't cover up a large release of radiation today, its so damn easy to detect.

You saying it's the safest doesn't make it so. Where is the data to support that contention? It seems it's safe so long as nobody actually looks, for example Unfortunately most of the problems related to the nuclear industry are in 3rd world countries with zero health screening and zero records.

The data is in the link I provided! ExternE has examined all externa costs of electricity production from different energy sources. Its one of the biggest life cycle assesements ever done so you can't claim that nobody is looking. The external costs of nuclear power is about the same as for windpower and that includes the entire nuclear fuel cycle.

I honestly don't care what they do in third world countries, its not representative of how it is done in the west, accidents in third world country mean only one thing, that they are incompetent and need to get a better safety culture.

Most uranium is mined and enrichened in western countries not in thirld world countries. Show me proof that uranium mining or enrichment in australia or Canada causes statisticaly significant increase of cancer rates!

Where is your evidence that modern nuclear power is more dangerous than other energy sources? Even if the windscale incident back in 57 did cause a statisticaly significant increase in death rates(something you have shown zero proof off) it still doesn't say ANYTHING about nuclear power of today.

Err no.. my 'demand' as you call it is simply that the nuclear industry stop lying, stop covering up it's mistakes, stop cheating to reduce costs and explain how it intends disposing of the stores of highly toxic pollutants it has already created before producing an order of magnitude more, that way we actually might be able to draw a fair comparison with other energy producers and avoid silly emotional based arguments.

Whats wrong with the current method of storing waste until it can be transmute in gen 4 reactors? Whats wrong with the swedish KBS-3 method? Whats wrong with Yucca mountain? The reasons no long term storage method has been implemented yet is political, not scientific.

I don't know how much the nuclear industry lies, cheats and cover things up. What I do know is that western civilian nuclear power has never killed one single member of the public in europe and as far as I know it hasnt in the US either. Does any other industry have that kind of safety record. You are the one making emotional arguments not based on any facts at all.

If you claim nuclear power is more dangerous than other energy sources then provide evidence. None of the things you have quoted has stated any population dosages or anything else even remotely significant. Seems like regular media fearmongering. Nuclear power has problems, but the problems are smaller and easier to handle than the problem for all other baseload power sources.

 

[vanesch]

Err no.. my 'demand' as you call it is simply that the nuclear industry stop lying, stop covering up it's mistakes, stop cheating to reduce costs and explain how it intends disposing of the stores of highly toxic pollutants it has already created before producing an order of magnitude more, that way we actually might be able to draw a fair comparison with other energy producers and avoid silly emotional based arguments.

The problem here, as with all the rest of the nuclear business, is that the demands are much much more severe than for any other activity.
Each time a nuclear site "has a radioactive leak", it seems as if another bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, while the objective consequences of it are most of the time totally neglegible, and would, for equivalent toxicity (because that's what matters!), be ridiculous in another industry.
As I noted before, the "radioactive leak" from the plant in Japan had a toxicity equivalent of one single glass of oil. Now, I've never heard somebody complain about a garage where, after an Earth quake, a glass of oil was spilled in the grass !
People go screaming when they discover a "cover up" that a pump or so wasn't working in a nuclear power plant (where there are often several backup systems ready to take over), while nobody will ever look upon a similar disfunctioning in, say, the chemical industry. The report level required in the nuclear industry is on the level of the minor anomaly, while the same report level in other branches is usually on the level of an *accident*. And yes, sometimes responsibles for nuclear systems fail to do the low-level reporting. That's not good, but sometimes understandable. But they are reprimanded seriously for issues which wouldn't even come to mind to talk about in other industries.

People put crazy demands on the nuclear sector, which are a far cry from what happens in any other human activity - and the point is, these demands are even most of the time respected. It is this utmost safety culture which makes that the nuclear business is one of the safest around.

You really should transpose every "complaint" or demand of the nuclear industry to an equivalent (in victims, loss of life/property...) demand in other industrial sectors (car driving, chemical industry, oil industry, agriculture...) and you will soon realize the enormous difference in the public treatment of both. Most other human activities would simply have to STOP if they were required to meet the demands that are met in the nuclear sector.

===============

continued:

Concerning Windscale: nobody will deny that people have been lucky there, normally one should have had a Chernobyl style accident (probably less so, because the installation was smaller). It was a very stupid construction, build in a hurry to set up a crash atomic bomb program, and without any regard for safety (as was usual in those years, not only in the nuclear, but also in the chemical and military business). We are in 1957! People did atmospheric bomb tests at that moment. It was a different mind set.
There has been a scientific study on the impact of the Windscale accident on population, and more specifically the total dose, which is estimated to be about 2000 man-Sv. Now, the probability to die of the stochastic effects of a dose (under the linearity hypothesis) permaturely over 50 years time is 5.6% per man-Sv, which brings us to something like 112 casualties over 50 years.
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0955%2d3002&volume=46&issue=5&spage=479

If I understand correctly, Windscale is mainly covered up because it happened at a really bad time when the UK government was going to negociate with the US to give them again access to nuclear secrets/materials, and the argument was that they would nevertheless find them out by themselves. If Windscale had serious problems during the negociation, this meant a weaker position for the UK negociators.BTW, you site reports from the CRIIRAD, but that's an anti-nuclear lobbying organisation.

Concerning nuclear waste, this is the biggest untruth that anti-nuclear lobbyists have been able to pass as "well-known fact".
Nuclear "waste" (in fact, nuclear spend fuel) has the following properties:
- it still contains about 99% of its energetic potential, only about 1% has been used in LWR. So it is a bit silly to consider it to be a "waste".
- the real waste (the fission products) are highly toxic, small volume, and *decay*. The small volume means that it can be handled/stored in its totality without huge costs, something that cannot be said of low-toxicity high volume waste. The fact that it decays means that *the problem goes away*, something that cannot be said about most other forms of waste, such as heavy metals or CO2 for instance. As such, geological storage is ideal: the volume is small enough for it to be feasible, the timescale is small enough (most danger is gone after a few hundred years (about 1000 times less toxic after 300 years), and return to normal after a few 10 000 years for geological storage to guarantee "quarantine" from the biosphere over this small time lapse (as compared to other geological processes).
Moreover, most radiotoxic products are very immobile in most geological situations - especially the actinides.

Compare this to, say, CO2 sequestration: one has to guarantee the sequestration FOR EVER, the volumes will be HUGE, and it is highly MOBILE. The dangers of a sudden leak, 10 million years from now, of a huge CO2 repository are orders of magnitude bigger than the dangers of a leak of ex-radioactive waste 10 million years from now: while in the last case, only with sensitive instruments one would be able to detect that something came free, with no sanitary impact what so ever, a release of the CO2 would gas an entire region and give a huge spike of CO2 in the Earth atmosphere. The toxicity of CO2 is the same 10 million years from now, than today, while the toxicity of radioactive waste would have decreased with a factor about 10^10.

One can apply similar reasonings for heavy metal toxicity: it doesn't go away with time. Only radioactive waste has this property. As such, if there's waste to have, the properties of radioactive waste (small volume, decays) make it an ideal form of waste.

 

[Art]

To minimise the problem of nuclear waste is disingenuous. Already Britain which has relatively few nuclear facilities estimates clean up of their existing waste stock piles will cost stg£70 billion when they eventually decide on how they are going to get rid of it.

In the meanwhile this waste does not appear to be well managed

The nuclear material in question is held underwater in a concrete pond known as B30. Built in 1959 to store and unpack uranium fuel rods used to power Britain’s first generation of military and civil reactors, B30 was phased out in the 1970s after some fuel started to corrode, and it was closed down in 1992.
The open air pond contains uranium, plutonium, and other radioactive wastes such as caesium and strontium.

In accounting terms, the Commission said Tuesday, "it is impossible to determine accurately the quantities of material stored, and on-the-spot inspections cannot take place because of the high level of radiation and poor visibility in the part of the facility concerned."

Estimates for uranium in the pond range between 300 and 450 metric tons, and there may be as much as 1.3 tons of plutonium but it is impossible to tell because pond visibility is restricted by algae.

Confidential British Nuclear Fuel (BNFL) documents leaked to the London "Sunday Herald" last July indicate that the company does not know precisely how much radioactive material is in the pond.

BNFL documents published by the newspaper and dated 1999 give a glimpse of what corrosion and decay have done to the underwater waste. “Individual elements have also fallen from various process operations," the company wrote. "Poor pond visibility and accumulated sludge in the pond make it difficult to retrieve spilt fuel and undertake visual inspections."

As for radioactivity decreasing with time whilst true the time scales can be enormous for example Uranium 235 has a half life of 162,000 years. Plutonium 239 has a half life of 24,000 years. Plutonium 241 is intensely radioactive for 14 years, on which it converts to Amercium 241, probably the most toxic substance on Earth (traces of Amercium 241 have been found on Sandside Bay at Dounreay in Scotland). After 433 years, Amercium 241 becomes Neptunium, which remains consistently radioactive for 2,000,000 years, and so the process goes on ad infinitum

 

[Azael]

Art you still haven't shown how large dosage the population is exposed to because of civilian nuclear waste.

We can talk about horror stories all day, but until you can show that it acctualy endanger someone its just horrorstories without any basis in science.

 

[Art]

Art you still haven't shown how large dosage the population is exposed to because of civilian nuclear waste.

I already pointed out much of the damage from waste occurs unrecorded in 3rd world countries and damage from nuclear 'accidents' are deliberately minimised in 'the national interest' example

The full extent of the Chernobyl disaster has yet to be assessed, but some years ago a leader in the British Medical Journal said that the amount of fatalities would be much higher than previously estimated. This information was produced by examining the lungs of young people in Eastern Europe killed in traffic accidents, which showed much more plutonium than was anticipated, with a likely 100,000 extra deaths.

We can talk about horror stories all day, but until you can show that it acctualy endanger someone its just horrorstories without any basis in science.

Poorly stored nuclear waste does endanger people or do you wish to argue to the contrary? If you are suggesting a problem isn't a problem until it actually kills and that view is prevelent in the nuclear industry then we have a lot to be concerned about.

To minimise the dangers of radioactive pollution is naive and reckless given that every person on the planet now contains strontium 90 in their bones as a result of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons 40 years ago which demonstrates just how mobile and persistent this stuff can be.

And as an example of the previous recklessness of the nuclear industry there is over a ton of radioactive plutonium at the bottom of the Irish Sea dumped there by the reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Spread evenly over the planet that is enough plutonium to extinguish all life on Earth.

 

[Azael]

I already pointed out much of the damage from waste occurs unrecorded in 3rd world countries and damage from nuclear 'accidents' are deliberately minimised in 'the national interest' example

That sounds like a conspiracy theory unless you have proof that dosages are higher than what is stated by IAEA ect.

As I also siad, most uranium is mined in western countries and what they do in 3rd world countries does not matter since it doesn't tell anything about the safety of nuclear power.

Here is what the IAEA has to say about chernobyl. 28 confirmed deaths, 4000 possible extra fatal cancer cases. Far from 100 000.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

The number of deaths due to acute radiation syndrome(ARS) during the first year following the accident is well documented. According to UNSCEAR (2000), ARS was diagnosed in 134 emergency workers. In many cases the ARS was complicated by extensive beta radiation skin burns and sepsis. Among these workers, 28 persons died in 1986 due to ARS. Two more persons had died at Unit 4 from injuries unrelated to radiation, and one additional death was thought to have been due to a coronary thrombosis. Nineteen more have died in 1987–2004 of various causes; however their deaths are not necessarily — and in some cases are certainly not — directly attributable.
.

The international expert group predicts that among the 600 000 persons receiving more
significant exposure(liquidators working in 1986-1987, evacuees, and residents of the
the most ‘contaminated’ areas), the possible increase in cancer mortality due to this
radiation exposure might be up to a few per cent. This might eventually represent
up to four thousand fatal cancers in addition to the approximately 100 000 fatal
cancers to be expected due to all other causes in this population. Among the 5 million
persons residing in other ‘contaminated’ areas, the doses are much lower and
any projected increases are more speculative, but are expected to make a difference
of less than one per cent in cancer mortality.

Poorly stored nuclear waste does endanger people or do you wish to argue to the contrary? If you are suggesting a problem isn't a problem until it actually kills and that view is prevelent in the nuclear industry then we have a lot to be concerned about.

Well civilian western nuclear waste has been stored for around 60 years without injuring one single civilian. Id say that is pretty damn good waste management. Compared that to how many dies from fossile fuel waste every single day. Even if there was a large waste accident it still would not change the fact that nuclear power kills far less people than any other major energy source. Do you argue that point?

To minimise the dangers of radioactive pollution is naive and reckless given that every person on the planet now contains strontium 90 in their bones as a result of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons 40 years ago which demonstrates just how mobile and persistent this stuff can be.

and what is the dosage received from the Strontium 90? The fact that we have strontium 90 in our bodies does NOT mean we are getting harmed by it.

And as an example of the previous recklessness of the nuclear industry there is over a ton of radioactive plutonium at the bottom of the Irish Sea dumped there by the reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Spread evenly over the planet that is enough plutonium to extinguish all life on Earth.

And how high is the population dosage because of this waste? 0.1mSv to the most exposed population group! Compare that to the natural radiation dosage that ranges from 2mSv to several hundrads of mSv.

You are missing that the only significant quantity is the dosage that the population is exposed to. Talking about how many tons or how many Bq's there is is totaly irrelevant.
There is enough gasolin in a car to kill plenty of people if they ingest it. Should we ban all cars because of that simple fact?

How many people can the chlorine used by the indsutry each day kill? Should we can all chlorine use?

LD50 for plutonium is higher than for nicotine! Yet smoking hasnt killed the entire world population.

 

[vanesch]

And as an example of the previous recklessness of the nuclear industry there is over a ton of radioactive plutonium at the bottom of the Irish Sea dumped there by the reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Spread evenly over the planet that is enough plutonium to extinguish all life on Earth.

You might be surprised but a rational nuclear waste management would simply be to dilute it in the oceans. The world ocean is about 1.3 10^9 cubic kilometers or 1.3 10^9 10^(3x4) liters = 1.3 10^21 liters. You have to know that 1 year's worth of waste from a 1GWe plant (about 25 tons of enriched fuel that went through the cycle) has an activity of about (less than) 10^18 Bq after 10 years cooling (see the calculator on http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfca.html for instance, but I know that the order of magnitude is about correct).
So if we dump this evenly in the oceans, this means that 1 year's worth of working of a powerplant gives rise to about 1 milli-Bq increase in the activity of 1 liter of seawater. The natural activity of seawater is about 40 Bq/liter. So if you'd dump the waste of the existing 400 nuclear reactors during 100 years in the oceans, you'd just double its (very low) natural radioactivity - and it is not even true, because after 100 years, the activity has decreased by a factor of more than 10.

But nobody is thinking of dumping all used fuel in the oceans. It is just that it wouldn't be dramatic. This puts things in perspective.

 

[Art]

Again Vanesch that is an oversimplification. It would be true if the dumped fuel dispersed homogenously in the oceans but experience from Sellafield, who are never slow to take risks to test a theory no matter how dubious or dangerous, showed that the radiation gathered in clumps due to different densities and it's take up by plant organisms from whence it enters the food chain.

 

[Art]

That sounds like a conspiracy theory unless you have proof that dosages are higher than what is stated by IAEA ect.

I already provided information and sources relating to safety issues for Uranium mining in Africa.

As I also siad, most uranium is mined in western countries and what they do in 3rd world countries does not matter since it doesn't tell anything about the safety of nuclear power.

Seems your info is less than complete. 15% of the EUs uranium supply comes from Niger alone.

Here is what the IAEA has to say about chernobyl. 28 confirmed deaths, 4000 possible extra fatal cancer cases. Far from 100 000.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf

Whereas the British Medical Journal says something very different. Wonder who's right but not so much that I'd like to risk my life on the outcome.

Well civilian western nuclear waste has been stored for around 60 years without injuring one single civilian. Id say that is pretty damn good waste management. Compared that to how many dies from fossile fuel waste every single day. Even if there was a large waste accident it still would not change the fact that nuclear power kills far less people than any other major energy source. Do you argue that point?

'I might be bad but the other guys worse' does not make for a compelling argument. If you disagree then try it during your annual review sometime at work and see how far it gets you.

Did you read the piece I provided about the state of the storage tanks holding nuclear waste? 60 years is nothing. This stuff needs to be safely stored for at least hundreds of years.

and what is the dosage received from the Strontium 90? The fact that we have strontium 90 in our bodies does NOT mean we are getting harmed by it.

Maybe, maybe not although leukemia rates have risen quite sharply which could be a coincidence or then again?? Regardless as I said my main point was to show the potential mobility and pervasiveness of nuclear pollution. Personally I object to having my bones contaminated with a radioactive material just so boys can play with their toys.

And how high is the population dosage because of this waste? 0.1mSv to the most exposed population group! Compare that to the natural radiation dosage that ranges from 2mSv to several hundrads of mSv.

You are missing that the only significant quantity is the dosage that the population is exposed to. Talking about how many tons or how many Bq's there is is totaly irrelevant.

Cars are incredibly safe too right up until the moment they crash then you go from healthy to dead instantly as will happen in a nuclear accident. Meanwhile the radioactive material dumped in the Irish sea continues to accumulate in pockets. Who knows when these pockets will become large enough to cause problems? It's an experiment still in progress so no conclusions can be drawn other than the original dispersal hypothesis has proved wrong.

There is enough gasolin in a car to kill plenty of people if they ingest it. Should we ban all cars because of that simple fact?

No but we should ban it from being dumped in the sea.

How many people can the chlorine used by the indsutry each day kill? Should we can all chlorine use?

No but we should ban it from being dumped in the sea.

LD50 for plutonium is higher than for nicotine! Yet smoking hasnt killed the entire world population.

Eh?? Smoking has killed millions if not billions of people. Where are you going with that argument?

 

[Azael]

I already provided information and sources relating to safety issues for Uranium mining in Africa.

And I said that its irelevant, what they do in those countries is not relevant to how safely mining can be and is done in australia and canda.

Seems your info is less than complete. 15% of the EUs uranium supply comes from Niger alone..

Canada produce 25%, Australia 18% and Russia 8%. I should have said developed countries, not western.

Whereas the British Medical Journal says something very different. Wonder who's right but not so much that I'd like to risk my life on the outcome...

You gave me a quote without any link or reference to what issue of the BMJ. So Il go with IAEA. IAEA is simply the most reliable source when it comes to chernobyl.

'I might be bad but the other guys worse' does not make for a compelling argument. If you disagree then try it during your annual review sometime at work and see how far it gets you.

That there are worse options is the entire point. A energy source doesn't have to be perfect to be preferable, it just has to be better than the other options. Nuclear energy is so superior to fossile fuels from a health and environment perspective that its ridicilous.

Nuclear power is as safe as release as little CO2 and polutants as wind and hydro. Se for instance vattenfalls LCA.
http://www.vattenfall.se/www/vf_se/vf_se/Gemeinsame_Inhalte/DOCUMENT/196015vatt/815691omxv/819778milj/P0282332.pdf

If you think nuclear is unacceptable what else is there? There is no other baseload energy source that has less of a environmental impact than nuclear power except maby hydro but that has no expansion potential.

Did you read the piece I provided about the state of the storage tanks holding nuclear waste? 60 years is nothing. This stuff needs to be safely stored for at least hundreds of years..

I see no reason to read a unverifiable quote from a unknown source. Give me a link or a reference and I will read it.

You never answered my question on what is wrong with yucca mountain or KBS-3. If you think we can't handle the waste for thousands of years then you obviously think those two methods are flawed. So in what way are they flawed?

Maybe, maybe not although leukemia rates have risen quite sharply which could be a coincidence or then again?? Regardless as I said my main point was to show the potential mobility and pervasiveness of nuclear pollution. Personally I object to having my bones contaminated with a radioactive material just so boys can play with their toys.

well the number of telegraph stations has gone down, maby leukemia rates and telegraph station abudance is inversely related? If we don't care about mechanism then we can invent all kind of statistical relations.

For a radionuclide to be harmfull it has to give the exposed person a dosage high enough to do harm. Its doesn't matter if its strontium, plutonium, radon or whatever. It doesn't matter if its naturaly occurring or man made. There are plenty of natural radionuclides in the environment. The dosage to the population from the environment is orders of magnitude above the dosage from nuclear power. You are "contaminated" from the moment you are created in the womb.

I strongly object btw to having my air polluted by coal and biomass power plants when there is a cleaner option. I object to having my lungs ruined because of peoples fear of nuclear power.

Cars are incredibly safe too right up until the moment they crash then you go from healthy to dead instantly as will happen in a nuclear accident.

That WONT happen in a nuclear accident. How many dropped dead from TMI? You seem to have a totaly unrealistic picture of what will happen if something goes wrong in a western reactor. What do you believe can happen?

Meanwhile the radioactive material dumped in the Irish sea continues to accumulate in pockets. Who knows when these pockets will become large enough to cause problems? It's an experiment still in process so no conclusions can be drawn other than the original dispersal hypothesis has proved wrong.

And yet all that accumulated waste only gives the most exposed group a yearly dosage of 0.1mSv. So what is so horrible about it? Such a small dosage can not cause any health problems. If it could the people living in areas with yearly background radiation over 100mSv would die at alarming rates. People working with radionuclides and beeing exposed to a few extra mSv every year would drop dead at alarming rates. But they dont.

Sellafield should clean up no doubt, simply because its possible to do so. But the current discharge from sellafield is not a health hazard.

Eh?? Smoking has killed millions if not billions of people. Where are you going with that argument?

Im simply relating the toxicity. Plutonium is closely monitored and virtualy no one is exposed to measurable levels of plutonium, nicotine is released without any regard for safety. Yet nicotine is more toxic! Worrying about plutonium leakage is a complete waste of time because it is such a tiny risk compared to all other everday risk like inhaling fossil fuel waste. Literally everytime you pass by a smoker you are exposed to a risk larger than the risk you are exposed to from a lifetime of living in a country with nuclear power.


Lets get to the bottom line here. Do you agree or disagree that chernobyl the worst nuclear accident ever, worse than anything that is even physicaly possible in a modern reactor, has far less of a health and environmental impact than fossil energy during regular operation?

 

[Art]

During normal operation yes I do agree. I thought I had made it plain I think nuclear reactors in general are very safe these days it's more the ancilliary operations I'd be concerned about. I'll spell out my concerns for you;

1) Management and disposal of uranium mine waste - including Australia http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:_kSJ0a_I0TwJ:www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/waste/frenchpaper.pdf+uranium+ore+mining+waste&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4

2) Movement and transport of nuclear products

3) Disposal of waste - Although countries such as Britain and the US have looked at geographic sequestration neither have actually done anything yet and so a decision on this should precede any expansion of the industry.

4) A full costing of nuclear energy for comparison against green energies which must include full decommissioning costs, ore extraction and mine clean up charges, transport and security charges, fuel waste disposal charges as well as the actual energy production cost.

5) Health impact - I'd like to see a scientific consensus on just how much radiation exposure is safe. The figures you quoted are all well and good but ignore the fact that different radioactive materials affect the human body in different ways and accumulate in very specific parts of the body and so a small overall dose could become a very large local dose if concentrated in one small area such as radioactive iodine's affinity for the thyroid gland.

I'm not totally against nuclear energy I just don't think there has been enough information made available to make a definitive decision on whether it is the right way to go.

 

[vanesch]

During normal operation yes I do agree. I thought I had made it plain I think nuclear reactors in general are very safe these days it's more the ancilliary operations I'd be concerned about. I'll spell out my concerns for you;

1) Management and disposal of uranium mine waste - including Australia http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:_kSJ0a_I0TwJ:www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/waste/frenchpaper.pdf+uranium+ore+mining+waste&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4


2) Movement and transport of nuclear products

You are right that these are the two "most polluting" parts of the entire nuclear industry ; in fact most of the pollution that comes from that industry can be attributed to this. However, there are two remarks: these FEW mines (there are much less uranium mines than there are coal mines and petrol holes) still pollute FAR LESS than the equivalent amount of extracted energy by fossile mining ; and also, the uranium mining will probably diminish and even stop once gen IV reactors will be generalized, as these will essentially work on the 99% of remaining energy that is still present in the current "waste" and we'll have a closed fuel cycle. Try to imagine this: with the current "waste" we can extract still 50-100 times the energy we've already extracted from it, without new uranium.

3) Disposal of waste - Although countries such as Britain and the US have looked at geographic sequestration neither have actually done anything yet and so a decision on this should precede any expansion of the industry.

The technological and scientific case for this is clear. The amount of geological studies is quite big and encouraging, but one lacks the political courage to do so. Also, there is no hurry. The "cooler" the materials are when they will be burried, the better: one preconizes a surface cooling period of 50 years - this has to do with the heat generation which drops quickly during the first 50 years, and a lower heat generation allows for a more dense packing of the waste packages in the repository (which can handle only a certain amount of heat per volume as this heat has to be evacuated through thermal conduction: one wants the temperature to be limited in order not to have a transformation of the materials).

4) A full costing of nuclear energy for comparison against green energies which must include full decommissioning costs, ore extraction and mine clean up charges, transport and security charges, fuel waste disposal charges as well as the actual energy production cost.

This is in fact already the case: in France part of the electricity price serves to build up a fund to dismantle old plants and for waste management. Compare this to the CO2 ejection which is not taken into account in fossile fuel burning. Plants are being dismounted, it is not such a terrible thing as anti-nuclears are trying to make believe. It generates essentially very low level waste which can be cleared after 30 years or something. The waste management in a repository is not more costly than a deep mining activity. The erroneous opinion exists that we are building up an enormous passive of huge costs for the future, but this is simply not true.

Concerning green energies, you simply have to realize that in the current state of technology, *there do not exist green technologies* that can replace entirely fossile fuel burning apart from nuclear. There's a difference between doing 10-20% production, and doing 85% production. No known green technology has ever shown to be able to provide a country for 85% with its energy and allow for growth. The closest comes Denmark, with 20% wind energy and a lot of problems.

The growth rate of renewables is indeed spectacular, but that's because they come from almost 0. If I start up my business, and today I make 20 Euro, and tomorrow I make 40 Euro, I have a growth rate of 100% a day! Microsoft can't compete with me on that!

So forget all this green talk: the only workable large scale alternative to fossile fuels is nuclear for the moment. Maybe this will change one day, but as of now, no such technology exists. It isn't perfect, but it is so much better in ecological matters than fossile, that it is an outright anti-ecological stance to refrain from replacing fossile by nuclear.

5) Health impact - I'd like to see a scientific consensus on just how much radiation exposure is safe. The figures you quoted are all well and good but ignore the fact that different radioactive materials affect the human body in different ways and accumulate in very specific parts of the body and so a small overall dose could become a very large local dose if concentrated in one small area such as radioactive iodine's affinity for the thyroid gland.

This is in fact well-studied, and of course when talking about activities one should also specify from which sources. The thing you talk about is called radiotoxicity, and is specific to each different nuclide (and does take into account what you express: different target organs etc...). All this is taken into account with correction factors (the difference between physical dose, expressed in Gray, and "human health impact" dose, expressed in Sievert, with exactly those coefficients between them).

I'm not totally against nuclear energy I just don't think there has been enough information made available to make a definitive decision on whether it is the right way to go.

All this information is available in fact. There are books on all these matters. The problem is that hysterical reaction of the people concerning all things nuclear, aided in their visions by anti-nuclear lobby groups.

 

[Azael]

I can't add much to Vanesch excelent post. Just mention that in sweden as in france the full cost of decomisioning and waste storage is payed for by taxes on the companies owning the nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is acctualy the only energy source that takes full economic responsibility for its waste. If the same burden was put on coal and oil they would become uneconomic in a instance.

Nuclear power is the most heavily taxed energy source in sweden and nuclear electricity production costs is still only about one quarter or one third of the production cost for wind. This despite wind beeing favored in sweden because of our large hydro capacity. That means there is no need to build backup for wind since the hydro acts as backup. Wind can not compete against nuclear without heavy government support like in sweden and germany. Especialy not if the cost of building a backup is factored into the price of wind.

I don't mind that support though, more renewables is a good thing. But nuclear is the only thing that can realisticly replace coal on a large scale.

 

[Azael]

This is btw a reasonably near future method of extracting uranium with virtualy zero environmental impact and it will also give a practicaly unlimited supply.
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/4_5.html

 

[Art]

This is btw a reasonably near future method of extracting uranium with virtualy zero environmental impact and it will also give a practicaly unlimited supply.
http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/4_5.html

It sounds good if it can be made commercially viable.