Gauging the Prospects for Nuclear Power in the Obama Era

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Get with it

Blaming nuclear plants for radioactive waste that is likely from coal fly ash is stupid. Sternglass is junk science, correlation does not imply causality. Sternglass's "research" is not accepted in the scientific community.

While Obama kicks the can and anti-nuclear zealots run rampant in this country, France laughs their ass off at us.

Irony

I find it ironic and sickening at the same time ... both Waxman and Markey have not included nuclear power as a renewable source of energy.

Someone earlier mentioned reprocessing. If we reprocessed all of the fuel sitting at the power plants, we could power the USA for 50 more years.

Let's get past the China Syndrome / Three Mile Island / Chernobyl fear. More people have died in plane crashes than from the generation of electricity from nuclear.

Let's get to building the already approved Westinghouse AP1000 design. Safe and efficient. Build many and bring the price down.

nuclear energy

i dont approve it because its reall not going to make a difference. it cost too much money and how is the president going to pay for it all. hopefully not with our hard working money that we need to support our kids and college funds.

Steam Power

Lindilu Ashbury of NH:

Steam power is a "wonderful use of water" and it is emmission free. It's what coal and nuclear power plants use to create power. There is no such thing as "steam power" by itself, you cretin. Water doesn't spontaneously combust.

After you used that little brain to come up with a response, it would probably sound like this: "Steam power is geothermal power!"

But you would still be ignorant of the fact that geothermal power is actually a product of uranium and thorium nuclear reactions going on in the earth's crust all the time. These reactions heat the water and create steam!

Nothing to Fear but Fear itself

I'm all for solar and wind, but the simple fact is that current technology cannot meet the demand for energy. Solar energy is approximately 10 times more expensive per unit of electricity. Not to mention solar powered system work about 12% of the time in places like Maine and about 19% of the time in places like arizona. Dust, clouds, and angle of incidence all drastically reduce efficiency. Not to mention night time.

These are our options:

Option A. Only renewables. Well why we technically choose to do this, we'll have to survive on at max about 20% of the power we currently use. We will pay 10 times as much for it. The enviroment will be clean but our economy will collapse. The only way to do it would be a massive population reproduciton. And as long as everyone keeps having babies that's not going to happen. Therefore, by relying on just the sun, we're gonna live in the dark.

Option B. Continue what we're doing. Coal makes up about 50% of the U.S. energy production. It's economical, but it pumps its byproducts directly into the atmosphere. Pollution is a definite.

Option C. A balance of energy sources that attempts to shift more toward renewables and other low greenhouse emitting sources of energy. Nuclear power can make up the 80% of the electricity that renewables in the near term future can't. Yes nuclear wast will be created. But the relative amounts compared to coal are small. The entire amount of spent fuel for the past 40 years in the U.S. is 56,000 tons. We burn 1 billion tons of coal every year. Reprocessing would further increase the amount of energy we could get out of the fuel and we would be left with even less waster that would have to be stored for a much shorter length of time. What most people aren't aware of is that there was a natural nuclear reaction in Oklo, Africa about 1.7 billion years ago. The fission products of that reaction moved 10 feet or less over that time period. I think one can surmize that a geolocial depository can be done safe.

And to the last argument, there are two ways to weapons grade material. You can reprocess it which nearly every major country with Nuclear power does including, France, Japan, etc (Some of the few countries that actually met the Kyoto Protocol). Reprocessing is stripping out certain isotopes that can either be used to form a bomb or put back into a reactor to get even more energy. The other way is to enrich natural uranium (.7% U-235 to above 90% U-235 through a centrifuge system. Both systems are expensive. We can however, develop reprocessing methods that are incapable of producing weapons grade process. However, I must say that if the argument against nuclear is that some day some one can use nuclear energy to make a nuclear bomb, then I say yes that is true. If this is the position, then we must also address medical facilties where technology exists to make bio weapons

The number one problem with nuclear energy is unjustified FEAR.

Breeder reactors: renewable energy source

It actually is renewable using breeder reactors. This phenomenon was explained in "Breeder reactors: renewable energy source" by Bernard Cohen.

nuclear drawbacks

Since I can't seem to post a couple of links, I'll just say that the Union of Concerned Scientists (ucsusa.org) and Public Citizen online have very good summaries of the problems with nuclear power. A recent report by Craig Severance analyzes the exorbitant costs also. When insurance companies won't touch them you know there are liabilities. Three Mile Island has yet to be outed and properly recorded, and never will, since the monitors were pegged and 'official' reports used monitors not in locations that measure the huge releases. Power plants routinely release a great deal of radioactive emissions that go into the upper atmosphere (where we should be testing the atmosphere for toxic conditions). Ernest J. Sternglass spent decades studying the effects of nuclear radiation, and it is not a pleasant history to read (SECRET FALLOUT, 1981).

Nuclear Idiocy

How many nuclear proponents can fit on the head of a pin? I guess it depends on how many pinheads there are. "The sun is burning out?" give me a break! Nuclear power can be done without producing bomb-useable material? Where did you get your facts? There's enough plutonium in a couple of spent fuel rods to make a bomb. The technology to recycle fuel rods is the same technology to make bomb material. Molten salt is a hugely toxic and dangerous way of moving extremely hot nuclear material around. If water-cooled reactors leak how safe is molten radioactive salt on the move?

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is a shaft in a salt bed --- with a sea of compressed brine just ten miles away. It will never be approved for high-level nuclear waste. It's for dirty clothes and radioactive wrenches. The amazing mindgames being played in trying to redefine nuclear power as renewable would make Rush Limbaugh proud of you. If we don't stop nuclear power now we'll have a world full of nuclear weapons and a cancer rate that won't stop. You can't pay for the night watchman to monitor nuclear waste for 100,000 years. Ten years of use/ 100,000 years of toxicity. You can't afford the healthcare. We can do solar power full court press and have enough panels up in five years to make all the electricity we need --- for less than it cost to bail out General Motors or AIG. Cost depends on scale of production. It just takes a determination to face reality. Solar is the only way to go and it works anywhere on a cloudy day.

New Nuclear Technologies

The problems, small as they are, with nuclear power can and will be solved by new nuclear technologies. Most of these have been so far developed here, but anti-nuke (and that means and ONLY means pro-coal) advocates are all but insuring that when we have finally awakened to the fact that Amory Lovins and his ilk are wrong we will be importing these technologies from China, who is actively developing them. They are as we speak breaking ground on high temperature gas cooled reactors that are safer and cleaner than light water pressurized reactors we currently run in this country. We developed the Molten Salt Reactor (currently known as the LFTR) in the 1950's and 60's but shelved it because it didn't supply us with weapons usable material in its fuel cycle. Importantly, these technologies run on the Thorium cycle, which produces far less long lived waste and both have much greater safety operating margins and are unable to melt down due to physical constraints within the nuclear reactions themselves. Thorium can also be utilized in light water reactors. The leading fuel design is from a US company called Thorium Power Ltd. The Thorium cycle requires a neutron source to drive the reaction forward and in this design these neutrons are supplied by Plutonium from recycled fuel. Since this fuel is designed to be a drop in replacement assembly in current light water reactors, it not only provides a cleaner burning nuclear fuel, but it also is the most rapid means of Plutonium disposal, besting MOX by three times, while creating vastly less new waste.

Coal is the ONLY substitute for nuclear power, unless you live in a place where you can tap sufficient geothermal power or you are willing to dam more rivers. Coal sits in the ground and acts as activated charcoal, soaking up heavy metals for hundreds of millions of years. The metals in coal that are released into the environment include Mercury, Uranium, Thorium and Arsenic. The average coal plant emits 30,000 pounds of Mercury a year and there is over 20 times the amount of energy in the Uranium it emits into the air than is released by combustion of the coal. 90% of Arsenic pollution comes from coal fired electricity. Heavy metals accumulate in the environment and concentrate in animal tissues as you rise up the food chain. The longer you live, the more you will accumulate. They are especially toxic to the unborn and children. Because of opposition to nuclear we are slowly poisoning the planet with elemental toxins that will be circulating through the biosphere for thousands of years. Even the worst catastrophe imaginable at a current nuclear plant will cause local damage, the waste is contained in intact assemblies, in contrast to soil, river, streams, the oceans and everyone's bodies currently reading this, as is the case with coal. If you are anti-nuclear power, this is what you are supporting. Go to your average anti-nuclear page and see if it is not sponsored by a "clean coal"