Way back in August 1988 on Usenet I wrote:
Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all
(if it's really happening - we probably won't be sure until its too late)
caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad - burning fossil fuels
could well be more harmful to the environment than nuclear power.
The evidence I've seen since then has convinced me that it is almost certain that greenhouse gases are causing warming and that burning fossil fuels is more harmful than nuclear power.
Fran Barlow kicked off a discussion on nuclear power in the open thread with this comment, concluding:
Frankly, I believe we do have to factor in very substantial amounts of nuclear energy if we are to have any realistic hope of avoiding a human catastrophe. This course is not without its risks, but then, this is true of any system configuration we can adopt. What seems inevitbale though is that if we become stuck in old arguments about what is natural and what is not, about big centralised technological fixes and small local ones, we may authort a future in which no substantial part of our vision is capable of realisation, and that, I take it, would be self-evidently paradoxical. If we leftists continue to block with the enemies of nuclear power, then the big winners will not be wind and solar thermal, but dirty coal and dirty liquid fuels and the losers will be all of working humanity.
We ought, I believe to propose an immediate plan of replacing the 1000 worst coal fired power stations with the best equivalent nuclear replacements. This one line item could cut the output of CO2 from coal fired electricity by about 72% and likewise cut emission of toxic particulate by whatever the antecedents were producing in the fuel cycle. A whole brace of coal miners would lose their jobs, but their lives and health and those even of their children would be extended. That latter is surely something over which every leftist could feel a warm inner glow, particularly since the bulk of these deaths would be avoided in places where the said miners are poorest.
Barry Brook argues that fourth generation reactors will eliminate most of the drawbacks of current nuclear technology:
This is the technology of the future. And it solves a lot of other problems that are currently associated with nuclear power. One of the biggest is, we've generated all of this nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel that we have to manage for 100,000 years. Well the rather neat thing about the new technology, which is called generation four nuclear power is that it takes that waste and uses that as fuel.
Here at Scienceblogs we have Matt Springer and Ethan Siegel in favour and Benjamin Cohen against.
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Barry Brook argues that fourth generation reactors will eliminate most of the drawbacks of current nuclear technology.Well the rather neat thing about the new technology, which is called generation four nuclear power is that it takes that waste and uses that as fuel.that's great.i don't believe but i am satisfied Barry Brook argues.
> ...it is almost certain that greenhouse gases are causing warming...
Sorry to nitpick, Tim, but that seems a little wishy washy at this stage in the game - there is no reasonable doubt that GHGs are dangerously warming the planet. The IPCC FAR gives 90%+ certainty - and that was determined on 5+ year-old science. The evidence accumulated in the interim moves certainty as close to 100% that it makes no difference - ACC is fact.
As for nuclear, I'm ideologically opposed but have recently accepted that we do need to start building reactors - anything is preferable to coal, [the following video is good demonstration of why](http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller)
I'll repeat what I said the other day on John Quiggins blog:-
We canât continue to ignore nuclear energy. It is the elephant in the room for these sorts of discussions (carbon emissions). Consider this:-
1. An Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) produces about 100 times more energy compared to a conventional Light Water Reactor. The fuel to power the energy needs of your entire life would be about the size of a golf ball.
2. If fueled using nuclear waste an IFR reduces the worlds stockpile of nuclear waste. Both quantitatively and qualitatively.
3. Using IFRs the worlds current stock pile of nuclear waste could provide all our current energy needs for a period of 700 years with no requirment to mine additional uranium or fossil fuels.
4. Processing the worlds nuclear waste via an IFR is cheaper than the current and proposed storage options.
5. In nuclear accident terms IFR reactors are fail safe. If control is lost they shut down rather than melt down. Not through applied controls but throught natural physices. You could fly a plane into an IFR reactor or cut off the cooling system and it will not go into melt down. It canât.
6. We have over 300 operating years of experience with large scale IFR equivalent reactors. They are proven technology.
7. Nuclear power can easily be cost competitive with fossil fuels. In fact it is generally cheaper.
8. If built in tandem with desalination plants the heat generating capacity of an IFR can be switched to creating cheap fresh water production whenever there is any slack in electricity demand. In fact this has been done in a large scale nuclear plant in the past.
9. An IFR is quick to build.
10. All that stands in the way of scaling up such a solution is politics. Otherwise there are no technical or commercial barriers.
11. Even if we only removed (or reformed) the red tape in nations that currently have some form of nuclear power anyway, this would still allow us to elliminate most of the worlds energy related CO2 emissions via this single technology.
And because of the hawk's hawking (pun unintended) of the terrist threat, your solution is no solution to world power needs.
The red tape is to stop someone legging it with 50lbs of reactor-grade Uranium and making dust of it to spew in a busy national rail terminal.
Actually the red tape in Australia goes beyond that and makes it illegal to produce electricity using a nuclear reactor. And I don't think this is a case of accidental regulatory overshoot.
The world already has a huge stockpile of nuclear waste. IFRs are a good way to use up that waste and get electricity as part of the deal. The alternative is ongoing storage of this waste for 100,000 years which entails worse security problems.
It doesn't seem as though we can rely on Light Water Reactors. From The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction Part III: How (un)reliable are the Red Book Uranium Resource Data?
"The following ... studies are from groups that favor nuclear energy. They find that even a small 1% annual nuclear power growth scenario will be faced with serious and unsolved uranium supply problems during the first half of the 21st century.
* A report published in 2002 entitled: A Technological Roadmap for Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems points out that the known conventional uranium resources will only last between 30-50 years. Thus, a new conventional nuclear power plant, which might be operational in 2020, may only obtain uranium fuel until sometime between 2040 and 2050.
* A 2007 M.I.T. study group concluded that "lack of fuel may limit U.S. nuclear power expansion" ."
I see the Yamal is again moving arctic ice researchers around the arctic.
Gruntled neighbours, including voluntary neighbours such as these, are a good advertisement for nuclear power.
Dividing cumulative uranium consumption for land-based nuclear electricity production by the world's present population yields an amount on the order of 200 grams per person, mined at a cost ~$25. Government and industry are sad that they didn't get, instead, several hundred dollars per person in fossil fuel money. Sad, and also angry, and willing to say, or pay to have said, anything to prevent much greater future losses.
If you get a government cheque, and oppose nuclear energy, you may think you do so on principle, but in fact, with you, it is not the principle, it is the money.
--- G.R.L. Cowan ('How fire can be domesticated')
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/
I have reluctantly come to agree with Fran et al that nuclear is a way out wrt to emissions and because of lots of factors such as mindsets we are going to have to go for it.
WRT to operating IFRs I'm still wondering whether recycling spent fuel rods is gonna have to be done in central facilities or whether it is possible and economic to carry this out where an IFR is sited. It seems to me that as an engineer getting this part right is one of the key things to making IFR successful.
However, in my view IFR is just a technical fix. One reason I am reluctant about technical fixes as an engineer is they rarely address the underlying problems. E.g. we need IFR to replace coal to stop emissions which are basicaly due to the belief that growth, in all its forms, is the only way forward for our society. Lets hope we can get things like IFR to replace energy supply and reduce emissions drastically but I don't think thats gonna 'fix' everything as we will still have the paradigms that have caused too many emissions in the first place.
Existing stockpiles of nuclear waste could power the world for hundreds of years using Integral Fast Reactors. Mining of uranium could start again around the year 2700.
"The red tape is to stop someone legging it with 50lbs of reactor-grade Uranium and making dust of it to spew in a busy national rail terminal."
And it won't be much worse than spewing powdered lead or mercury.
It depends how you look at it. Tom Casten makes the argument that we could do a lot more with waste heat from electricity and other industrial processes, notably for space heating. So while the direct contribution may be tiny, the indirect contribution from wasted heat -- that we need to consume more fossil fuels than we would if we'd used those "negawatts" from heat -- increases greenhouse gases and hence global warming.
PS but I agree with your main point, that we need to use more nuclear. (In fairness though, waste disposal is not the only issue. Perhaps the biggest issue is nuclear arms proliferation as many countries use nuclear energy programs as a basis to develop nuclear weapons as e.g. Iran and North Korea currently.)
> And it won't be much worse than spewing powdered lead or mercury.
> Posted by: Alex Besogonov
1) So? Let's say it's the same size problem.
So having banned 50lbs of Uranium being used as a dirty bomb, the risk has now been halved.
2) This is the Big Scare that the right put us under to keep us afraid. If they remove the red tape they lose their opportunity to scare us.
Point 1 means that such a bomb is not wanted, so let's take care of it, hmm? (my POV). And point 2 is why the red tape won't be removed anyway.
PS we don't need to use more nuclear.
Use less power will create more opportunity for a safe power future than ANY possible build-out. And nearly instantaneous in effect too, unlike ANY of the build options.
The nuclear proliferation issue does complicate things greatly. Because of concerns over proliferation, anything nuclear tends to be surrounded by heavy layers of security and secrecy. As usual, secrecy breeds corruption and inefficiency; existing nuclear reactors have generally been vastly more expensive and almost certainly considerably less safe than should have been possible with the technology available. Unfortunately, we should probably expect the same to be true of future nuclear reactors, and so we need to take that into account in evaluating optimistic predictions about future reactor technologies.
Re Crust @ #11
Perhaps the biggest issue is nuclear arms proliferation as many countries use nuclear energy programs as a basis to develop nuclear weapons
As I understand it, IFRs are much more flexible than thermal reactors regarding fuels and therefore require a much lower level of fuel reprocessing [normally on-site], making diversion to weapons difficult and the additional processing facilities required could only have military use.
"Perhaps the biggest issue is nuclear arms proliferation as many countries use nuclear energy programs as a basis to develop nuclear weapons
Fortunately no country has ever actually done that. The use of the word "many" shows intent to deceive. It might refer to one or two countries that have used nuclear research programs thus; for instance, India's use of the CIRUS reactor to produce weapon-grade plutonium. The fact that its CANDU power reactors were not so used is somewhat inconvenient to linkers of nuclear power and bombs, but only somewhat, because they have not found it difficult to just lie and say they were.
GRLCowan, I'm impressed at your mind-reading powers that you can divine my "intent to deceive".
As you may have noticed, the examples I raised didn't involve India or CANDU reactors. I've got nothing against CANDU reactors. Indeed, because they are heavy-water reactors that run with natural (as opposed to enriched) uranium they are better from a proliferation point of view. They're also better from a safety point of view because if the coolant boils off, the reaction stops. Or at least that's my understanding. I'm not an expert. If that's incorrect or misleading, it's because I'm just wrong, not because I'm lying to you.
The examples I did raise were Iran and North Korea. As I understand it, officially their nuclear programs are for peaceful power generation. Not that many people really believe that a major oil producer like Iran would really be that anxious for a new source of power; it's just a pretext. The concern is validating this pretext may ultimately lead to more nuclear armed countries.
Again, maybe I'm wrong. FWIW, it is an argument I've heard both Al Gore and Jim Hansen raise. And I explicitly said I think this is a factor to consider, but I don't think it carries the day. I think we should be expanding nuclear power because of the urgency around global warming.
I always though only using 0.7% of the energy in natural Uranium was crazy: 140 times as much mining required; something like 140 times as much waste produced.
As far as (irreducible) waste goes, I've wondered whether Australia could give up one of its salt pans for this purpose. There are a fair number of these in Western Australia.
I always though only using 0.7% of the energy in natural Uranium was crazy: 140 times as much mining required; something like 140 times as much waste produced.
It can actually be up to about 1 percent in one pass because some 238-U gets converted to plutonium and then fissioned.
Crazy is a relative term. Burning a little less than 1 percent of mined uranium has not caused the other 99 percent to transport itself to M31; it's all sitting in pools or dry casks, waiting for us to get around to it.
Also, burning a little less than 1 percent has been the means by which a mining industry that has a few billion a year in worldwide revenue has deprived oil and gas interests -- including government -- of more than $100 billion annually. How crazy must mining those things be.
Burning 100 percent would get you 100-to-140 times more residual radioactivity in the ashes in early decades.
So a CANDU fuel bundle that, ten years after retirement, can give you a lethal dose of radiation from 1 metre's distance in 12 hours, and has produced enough heat for your lifetime electricity requirement, would give you the same dose in five to seven minutes if it had somehow attained 100 percent burnup, and produced 100 people's lifetime thermal electricity requirement.
In general, waste production, in terms of radiation wattage, is proportional to energy extracted. Mass and volume may vary, but are not what's important.
'Crust': sorry, I was out of line. Also, shutdown upon loss of water is not unique to heavy water reactors, light water reactors also have it.
(How fire can be domesticated)
GRLCowan, no worries, thanks.
Mark @12:
"1) So? Let's say it's the same size problem.
So having banned 50lbs of Uranium being used as a dirty bomb, the risk has now been halved."
You CAN'T do a dirty bomb with Uranium. It's barely radioactive, you can literally sit on it without negative effects.
In fact, the prime mechanism for toxicity in your case will be heavy metal poisoning.
Count me as another reluctant and qualified conversion to some nuclear for base load. The critical issue for me was always safety, particularly regarding weapons proliferation. But 4th generation reactors seem to solve that problem. I certainly prefer newer design nuclear reactors to the completely unproven 'clean coal' technology that so many seem to be betting their houses on. Long, long, long term storage of vast amounts of CO2 is not a good safety bet in my books.
There is a potential problem of people starting to think that if we get a bunch of reactors that the energy problem is solved, and so they do not have be so concerned with the equally important waste & efficiency issues. But that can be dealt with by a combination of education, regulation (high efficiency buildings, machines, etc), and pricing (make it expensive to waste the stuff).
We should still get as much of our energy from 'renewable' sources as practically and economically possible. There is a lot of good basic research being done on a range of such technologies, and a handful of critical technical (and related economic) breakthroughs in this area could make a huge difference to the bigger picture, though we cannot assume it will happen.
"... Long, long, long term storage of vast amounts of CO2 is not a good safety bet in my books ..."
Your books should acknowledge that accelerated weathering, enhanced weathering I think they call it, will store vast amounts of CO2 in a completely stable form, not a "safety bet" at all: alkaline earth carbonate, solid, or bicarbonate, dissolved in the sea.
It is the only proposed CCS method, AFAIK, that has spontaneously demonstrated itself.
(How fire can be domesticated)
While I personally don't like it, I think nuclear is coming to Australia. I can accept nuclear power in Australia if it has the condition that nuclear reactors can only replace existing coal fired power stations, and that no more coal fired power stations are to be built in Australia.
Without a condition like the above, we will just end up with a bunch of nuclear reactors along side the original coal fired stations, in which case Greenhouse Gas emissions won't have been reduced by one jot.
One may add as well that even putting entirely to one side the serious climate change and human health impacts of resort to coal combustion, as Professor David Mackay points out, at projected rates of consumption growth, coal reserves may last as little as 60 years.
Following the method of Jevons, who correctly predicted 'peak coal' in the UK by 1910, Mackay claims:
Letâs repeat his calculation for the world as a whole. In 2006, the coal consumption rate was 6.3 Gt per year. Comparing this with reserves of 1600 Gt of coal, people often say âthereâs 250 years of coal left.â But if
we assume âbusiness as usualâ implies a growing consumption, we get a different answer. If the growth rate of coal consumption were to continue at 2% per year (which gives a reasonable fit to the data from 1930 to 2000),
then all the coal would be gone in 2096. If the growth rate is 3.4% per year (the growth rate over the last decade), the end of business-as-usual is coming before 2072. Not 250 years, but 60!
This model does not assume the far more coal-use intensive 'clean' coal proposals.
If Mackay is close to being correct, then sooner or later, the world will be obliged to resort to nuclear power. The only question being whether the world that resorts to it would be better off with for the environmental legacy of the coal combustion fuel cycle and depletion.
The conclusion is urged that we must abandon resort to coal for power generation as soon as we possibly can if humanity is to preserve something like the standard of living it has now. That the potential to use uranium and thorium ought, with good management, to take humanity eons into the future while clearing the atmosphere of excess CO2 and other hazardous material offers a complelling case for such resort.
Donald O@23
There's only so much demand for power in Australia. In practice, if nuclear power does come to Australia it will only be viable at the expense of coal and will have to be phased in. Other measures here aimed at efficiency should put a cap on longterm growth in future demand because the lead time to full replacement is unlikely to be short.
On this business of how important waste heat is...
First off, I'm not an unbiased observer. I'm associated with Recycled Energy Development, which Tom Casten runs. But the reason I'm associated is the massive waste in our system and the massive potential to do more with less. Consider these two facts: about 67% of our nation's greenhouse greenhouse gas emissions come from the generation of electricity and heat. Meanwhile, the typical power plant is about 33% efficient, with almost two-thirds of the fuel it burns getting vented into the atmosphere as waste heat. That means inefficiency in how we use fossil fuels is playing a HUGE role in global warming. Your two statements (waste heat isn't a big deal, but fossil fuels are bad) don't make sense together. It's precisely because fossil fuels are so bad that we have to deal with waste heat.
Everyone is talking as if IFR is a done deal. They are only hypothetical at this stage.
History so far shows that all Fast reactors are not without their difficulties. As far as I know no prototype fast reactor has operated anywhere near expectations.
So I would argue until there is a working IFR operating to design spec, which allows for full life cycle costings, lets focus on application of existing technologies that we know work.
IFRs have considerable problems associated with their liquid sodium metal cooling,see for example the Japanese Monju reactor which had a leak within 4 months of commencing operation in 1995 and is still shut today.
IFRs can also be used to 'breed' plutonium so their widespread would use would pose major nuclear proliferation threats.
Re: miggs 26
CHP and other schemes to use waste heat/energy are more efficient, and although efficiency helps to reduce the carbon footprint, but there is still the problem of GHGs staying in the atmosphere for a long time.
Also if you use say coal in a CHP system, you don't actually reduce emissions a great deal, or rather it depends on what the waste heat is displacing.
eg. in the UK the most popular form of domestic heating is gas central heating.
The carbon footprint of coal is roughly 900g/kwh.
I'm not sure of the footprint of current gas central heating systems, but assuming it is around 300g (a gas turbine generator system has a rough footprint of 500g/kwh, but half the energy is wasted by the compressor) then at best coal CHP would give a carbon footprint of about 600g/kwh.
Compared to renewables or nuclear, improving the efficiency of fossil fuel use is not comparable.
"Compared to renewables or nuclear, improving the efficiency of fossil fuel use is not comparable."
That's a common misconception. In the U.S., EPA and DOE estimates suggest there's now enough RECOVERABLE waste energy (mostly heat) to slash our greenhouse gas emissions by 20%. That's as much as if we took every passenger vehicle off the road entirely. Recovering this energy would be done mostly through CHP, and also through waste heat recovery -- which is essentially the same thing, but recycles the heat that manufacturers are already emitting rather than building a new power plant on site.
Meanwhile, costs would be actually lower than they are now -- certainly FAR lower than nuclear, and significantly lower than traditional coal plants as well.
Denmark is the poster child for this work. They emit less than half the GHG that the US does (relative to GDP). And it's because over half the country's power comes from CHP.
Fast Breeders are old hat. The BN-600 in Russia is still in operation after nearly 30 years. Also an IFR prototype of significant scale was operated in the USA for decades.
See the following comment by Tom Blees on this notion that this is novel new technology:-
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/02/12/integral-fast-reactors-for-the-ma…
Interesting article on 4th Generation plant on the ABC Science Show
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2009/07/ssw_20090718_1205.mp3
> Denmark is the poster child for this work. They emit less than half
> the GHG that the US does (relative to GDP). And it's because over
> half the country's power comes from CHP.
Bzzt ... wrong. Sorry, miggs, but Denmark does _not_ "emit less than
half the GHG that the US does ... relative to GDP"; however, France
can make this claim.
CO2/GDP (kg CO2/2000 US$ PPP):
US 0.51
Denmark 0.32
France 0.22
In fact, France emits a little over half of the CO2 _per
capita_ than Denmark does. This is in spite of the fact that France
is a much larger country and one that is the leader in Europe (outside
of Russia) when it comes to agriculture, a sector that is still rather
heavily dependant on fossil fuels, because most farm equipment still
runs on oil.
When it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the comparison
between nuclear power and CHP is almost ridiculous: nuclear power wins
hands down, as the statistics show.
CHP, as pitched by miggs, is simply an excuse to burn _even more_
natural gas, of which Denmark has had ample supplies in recent
decades, thanks to [abundant resources in the North Sea][nso].
[nso]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_oil
Does anyone have a time line on how long it will take to build the infrastructure to replace the coal fired power stations?
Dear TerpjeP
Your reference gives the impression that a PRISM reactor is up and running. All I can find in the literature is conceptual designs.
I do not deny that Fast reactors have been operational since the sixties but these have experimental/demonstration units with that purpose. None of them have achieved the breeding ratios desired which is critical to their sucess.
I would also point out that gen IV reactors, are not expected to come on line until 2030 at the earliest, which implies there are still issues to resolve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GenIVRoadmap.jpg
I'd like to second Aaron @ 13.
The problem with nuclear power now is not so much its technical possibility of being relatively clean and efficient (as Barry Brooks has said, Gen IVs overcome most if not all of these problems) as the culture of security and secrecy, which has degenerated into a culture of coverups, featherbedding and denial which surrounds the industry. For example, IIRC the French didn't warn their population to avoid fallout-affected foodstuffs after Chernobyl until far too late, because they didn't want to stir up anti-nuclear sentiment (The same mechanism on a different issue happened with the british government coverup of the mad cow disease/CJD link).
The nuclear industry (including relevant bits of government) have acquired themselves an appalling reputation as past coverups have gradually been revealed, for which they have no-one to blame but themselves. The public now has a legitimate opinion that any new nuclear proposal is an attempt to pull the wool over their eyes, which no amount of spruiking of the technical benefits of a particular kind of reactor will overcome, because it misses the point of lack of trust.
I'm not sure what can be done to overcome this. In other areas where corruption and coverups are persistent problems (e.g. police) the solution is often to appoint statutory independent auditors who report to parliament (and hence the public) rather than the government, and staff them with people with technical expertise but who aren't necessarily connected with the industry. Historically, I think something like this is what Oppenheimer had in mind when he insisted that the US's nuclear energy authority (I forget the name, was it part of the DOE?) had to be civilian rather than military. But they seem to have been captured by the industry anyway.
Terje - "An Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) produces about 100 times more energy compared to a conventional Light Water Reactor. The fuel to power the energy needs of your entire life would be about the size of a golf ball."
However as yet there are no IFRs currently operating. Only a conceptual design exists. Further to this as I have pointed out a extensive length on Barry's blog the actual fuel reprocessing plant (the I in IFR) has never been demonstrated on the required industrial scale. Nobody really has any idea if the electro metallurgical process will work on the required scale.
IFRs at this point are imaginary technology.
Australia is the one country in the world that should never need nuclear power. We have abundant renewable resources and abundant land to situate them and a small population to supply. We should be the leaders in renewables and a renewable showcase for the rest of the world.
We should not as Barry seems to think, be importing all our nuclear energy technology from China, at Chinese prices with all our fuel also coming from China. This is not a safe way to power Australia.
> In other areas where corruption and coverups are persistent problems
> (e.g. police) the solution is often to appoint statutory independent
> auditors who report to parliament (and hence the public) rather than
> the government, and staff them with people with technical expertise
> but who aren't necessarily connected with the
> industry. Historically, I think something like this is what
> Oppenheimer had in mind when he insisted that the US's nuclear
> energy authority (I forget the name, was it part of the DOE?) had to
> be civilian rather than military. But they seem to have been
> captured by the industry anyway.
Huh? The DOE (Department of Energy) was created by the Carter
administration in the late seventies. Oppenheimer had been dead for a
decade by that time. "Historically," you have no idea what you're
talking about.
Furthermore, Your rambling about "corruption and coverups" is
bordering on psychopathic paranoia.
I'm sorry that this is news for you, but the "statutory independent
auditors" already exist. They're called the IAEA, and they were the
winner (along with their director) of the [Nobel Peace Prize in
2005][1]. Although this organization is not officially part of the
United Nations system, it works closely with the UN and reports
regularly to the UN General Assembly and Security Council.
I guess that the IAEA is the Rodney Dangerfield of the international
community. It wins a Peace Prize for its nonproliferation efforts and
still gets no respect. What a damn shame!
[1]: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2005/
You forgot to mention the energy storage. Presumably you could build energy-storage hydroelectric reservoirs in the Snowys but much of the country would be on a "when the sun shines and the wind blows" economy.
Gen4 is 20 years away. Not saying that we shouldn't continue the research because we always want to have options, but that is 20 years of other forms of energy generation and conservation that we can implement.
The Heinlein crowd who up till recently were big deniers of global warming have always hated environmentalists and always worshipped nuclear power. Most of this is about feeding the various military-industrial complexes, and not ceding anything to environmentalists, etc.
That plants are being built in China and will be built other places is very likely. That nuclear technology will be improved is also likely.
But to say that promoting research on renewable energy preferentially to nuclear power - which has about a 50-year head start on worldwide taxpayer funding and which still insists on being a welfare project for R&D and insurance purposes - to say that that is promoting coal plants is a total lie, and one I'm very tired of.
Again, I have seen the most UNSCIENTIFIC discussions about this. And it's all tied into the world free market religion, I might add - the big energy companies simply MUST be right and we have to cast around for ways to demonize our environmentalist enemies and damn well MAKE the energy corporations right.
Plus, of course, the topic discussed is always a slippery one. If you don't agree that nuclear power is not "the" solution to the AGW problem, you're not only "not serious," you're some sort of nature-worshipper who's superstitious and so on and so on and you must want the existing plants shut down, mustn't you?
And conjectured plants are just as useful as those already built, I might add. It's the biggest double standard going. Those of us involved with solar and wind know the limitations and downsides very well and are very honest about them. The nuke boosters, on the other hand, close their eyes to any bad news and cherrypick their way to victory in their own echo-chambers. They've done that for at least a generation, too. It's not a level playing field. The nuke boosters have the military on their side and the multinational corporations on their side. When the economic establishment is backing you, it's pretty easy to bully people raising legitimate objections. And yet, despite efforts to kill it off from the nuclear lobby and its acolytes, somehow renewable energy has struggled on.
When was the last time one of the nuclear power boosters dealt with, for instance, European programs where the cost of a nuclear power plant was broken down into credits to build as many solar plants as that money would build, the plants were built instead, and more power was generated for the money?
Indeed, no matter WHAT you bring up, the same kneejerk reaction is the response: "We're working on ... " "Shut up. Nuclear power is the answer. Admittedly we were wrong about global warming, but the point stands, if you don't agree nuclear power is the only solution to all human problems, we can discard you safely." And back to the mindless boosterism.
Different places have different needs. Australia has uranium, it's losing, as far as I can determine, some of its other energy potential (I've been told most hydro is exploited already there and that some of it is declining). And it's better to build nuclear plants than coal plants, if that's what was going to be done.
By the way, to acknowledge that a nuclear plant is better for the climate than a coal plant is not the same thing as, or even close to, saying that massive ramping up of nuclear power is the answer.
Indeed, the science blogger who characterized THAT plan as the last attempt to keep business-as-usual without any work, thought, or sacrifice was precisely right.
Those of us being dismissed as having some sort of nature fetish are actually the ones wanting us to keep all our options open, not just trash and dismiss efficiency and conservation and sequestration and renewable energy and so on.
I see no signs that the nuclear industry or its boosters have cleaned up their dishonest and environmentally ignorant act, either, and the more they tout big businessmen and engineers as the saviors of humanity and trash ecologists, the more justifiably people are going to be skeptical of them.
This is very well put. And we will have to build something along the lines of a waste-burning fission plant to clean up the mess left by current plants. No argument there.
We have three timelines: one is curtailing emissions as much as possible, as soon as possible scaling back production and economic growth and population and eating less meat and conserving and scrubbing and sequestering. Another is the timeline for improving our renewable energy, and that takes time, know-how, money and manpower. It's a continuous process. The third is the timeline for improving nukes. That's a little more in discrete jumps since plants should be physically big (hence costly initially) and run a long time to make them at all efficient. For waste-disposal purposes, it's not that pressing since so much of it has a long half-life.
All three overlap - we'll be doing all of them. But if we neglected solar and wind and other alternate energies completely, put all our eggs in the nuclear basket, and that let us start burning waste 25 years earlier, we wouldn't be that much better off. If we went the other way, radically improved renewable energy, neglected nukes, and we couldn't burn nuclear waste for 45 years instead of for 20 years, we would not as a planet be much worse off. The main reason we can't neglect nuclear R&D is that if we're going to build the things, we want safer designs, especially if we're extending the operating life from around 35 years to around 60 on average.
I don't believe fission plants are the terminal solution to humanity's energy problems. Renewables are at least closer to it, and things like fission plants should be no more than bridge technologies. As my physical science teacher in high school and people like Amory Lovins told me many years ago.
I'm going to focus on the one testable claim in Marion Delgado's stream of consciousness @40 above
That is indeed what will be done, not just here in Australia, eventually, but everywhere. (In Australia, one of the world's worst polluting plants -- the 1960s Hazlewood plant in Victoria -- has just been extended until 2031. This single plant is responsible for 9% of Australia's electricity-related CO2 emissions and 5% overall.)
On a world scale, eventually, sometime after it is clear that the coal will not suffice to the end of the century and the planet's biosphere is heading inexorably down the crapper and people start looking at how to hoard the dwindling resources for themselves, nuclear will suddenly become the most urgent thing governments can do to maintain the privileges of the elites and everyone else can please themselves about how they survive amidst the ruins.
Of course it is not the answer but it is an answer along with quite a few other things. Yes we of the first world must pick the low hanging fruit in energy efficiency and avoidance of wasteful energy consumption. We should cut down very seriously on our consumption of animals, and especially commercially raised ruminants, switch to public transport, live closer together in more thermally efficient dwellings, cut down the unnecessary travel, have no more than two children, restore our wilderness areas as far as we can, stop logging of all but plantation forest, shut down marginal agricultural enterprises, stop subsidising corn, discourage low nutrient convenience food, transfer long haul goods to rail etc ... (Interestingly, something like 40% of US bulk rail goods traffic is coal!)
And we have to support the developing world too in lifting their standards of living in ways that don't repeat our errors, not simply because this is a starting point for anyone who sets store by human wellbeing, but because healthier happier more empowered people are more likely to live in ways that are consonant with sustainability. But to do this latter task we will need to pour very considerable resources into those 3-4 billion who are living in much worse circumstances than we first worlders would regard as minimally acceptable, and if what we have done is waste squillions making ourselves feel righteous by spending 8-10 times what we should have powering our cities with renewables and plan to do likewise in the developing world, it's a fair bet that this later part of the plan will fall over even if the first hasn't become reduced to tokenism and coal will triumph in the end, at least until it has done its worst.
There's no reason why if the components of nuclear plants were made in modular format, tested and assembled off-site that nuclear plants could not be built for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time with perfect safety. The Chinese are currently bringing, on average, about 1GW of coal-fired capacity every 10 days. It would be far better if this schedule was nuclear power instead. Would it not be a good thing if this capacity was in the form of thorium-232 with the fissile material drawn from MOX or other high level reactor waste?
Of course it would.
Fran...I just heard a rumor that GE has so many forward orders from China and India that even if we wanted to go nuclear we wouldn't get a 'look in' before 2020.
El Gordo spoke
If that rumour is well founded, then it is very good news indeed, because they need them more urgently than do we and these will foreclose more growth in emissions than would be the case in Australia or the US. Given that Australia is most unlikely to contract any nuclear capacity for at least ten years and possibly 15, if that is indeed the case then the builds should be demonstrably proven by the time we can have a serious decision taken on this and the installed cost and delay should be much smaller. While I'd prefer an earlier start, given that that is improbable, this is the next best thing.
We here in Australia can develop our renewables and possibly gas and then get the very best expertise to develop nuclear later on just as the question of what to do with our ageing coal plant comes up.
An interesting point on renewables which will be amusing to those who know of Jevons' Paradox. The country in the world that makes greatest proportional use of renewables today, AFAIK the only one whose stationary energy is near 100% renewable is Iceland. It also uses more energy per capita than any other country -- about 400KwH/per day per person. This makes the US look like total slackers at just 250KwH/per day per person and your average European at 125KwH/per day per person.
Amusing ...
Iceland consumes so much electricity per capita largely on account of its aluminium smelting plants. Which is also largely responsible (16%) for Australia's profligacy. The difference being, we burn brown coal to make aluminium, while they tap into abundant geothermal. The aluminium industry, including bauxite mining and alumina refining (neither particularly emissions intensive) employs a total of 6,000 people in Australia. One of the four Australian smelters is in Tasmania and gets its electricity from hydro. So three smelters, employing in total less than 1500 people, are responsible for about the same amount of emissions as the whole private car and truck fleet. Of course 1500 people aren't expendable, but then again as a nation we're apparently happy for over 100,000 clothing, textiles and footwear jobs to be sacrificed on the altar of the Global Free Market. Are manly aluminium jobs more valuable than girly TCF jobs? Why shouldn't aluminium smelting and its ilk not all be done where the electricity is emissions-free, while Australia concentrates on what we are good at in the carbon-constrained future? Indeed, this is inevitable, absent public subsidies for smelters to burn coal to electrolyse their ingots.
Jevons' paradox is a poor fit for Iceland and is irrelevant to Australia, where a rising carbon price will keep incentives on increasing efficiency.
On the general nuke issue - I'm happy for it to compete against renewables in the context of a rising carbon price, but not for it to receive the generous public subsidies that have propped up the industry everywhere it has flourished. The most important role nukes have played in the debate thus far has been as a distraction deliberately introduced by the terminally ill Howard regime to forestall genuine action on climate change mitigation. The nuclear industry, as Marion says, has a lifelong history of technological breakthroughs just over the horizon that will solve all the messy problems and bad publicity - remember Synrock? Forgive me if I choke on my weeties at this latest radioactive geewhizzery that is so damn good no-one appears to be signing up for it.
I quite take your point Hal9000@45. It would be far better if energy intensive industries were conducted where CO2-emissions were smallest, all else being roughly equal. It would make more sense to send the portion of the workforce producing aluminium above the emissions of Iceland on paid holiday on full pay than to run the business here. I read somewhere the per worker subsidies in Victoria worked out at about 250K each. That's a pretty nice lifestyle if it's even close.
Still, it makes Jevon's point too, since in a world with a carbon price aluminium will be cheaper to make in Iceland than almost anywhere, and so it doesn't encourage us to think about the wise use of the aluminimum nearly as much.
Here we can agree. As soon as there is a suitable carbon price on all net CO2e then let the subsidy and protection regime for each industry vanish (though I'd reserve the right to protect/deal differentially in cases where basic labour standards were being infringed, but that's a whole separate issue from energy policy). I should say that I don't agree, if this is where you are heading, that Price-Anderson and similar amount to a subsidy, and my problem with abolishing it is that this would entail a fall in protection for the public. I do think that costs of storage of nuclear hazmat should be based on the degree of hazard the waste poses, treating more radioactive isotopes more harshly than less radioactive ones. That might spur more interest in the development of thorium plants that can play a role in degrading the worst of the isotopes.
I have no doubt that in a market where net CO2e was about $AUS100 per tonne -- the widely touted price for 'clean coal' feasibility -- nuclear would be more than competitive. Can I add that if someone could contrive to have wind or wave power or tidal or any of the others do the same job as nuclear or coal at comparable cost with ubiquity nobody posting here would be more chuffed than me.
To provide comparative data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_per_ton_of_carbon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country
Denmark's advantage over the US is better than 2 to 1 in GDP/C02, exactly as miggs said, so BMS gets the buzzer here, I'm afraid. Also note that while having a large percentage of nukes helps vs. having coal plants, it's not mandatory.
But that's what we were saying, isn't it?
Marion@47
Firstly, I am thrilled that Denmark uses as much windpower as it does and is in a position to make good use of the hydro capacity of its neighbour, Norway, so as to get maximum value from the wind resource. This is a very sensible thing to do.
However, the picture is a little more complex than you make out.
Fran Barlow - "Firstly, I am thrilled that Denmark uses as much windpower as it does and is in a position to make good use of the hydro capacity of its neighbour, Norway, so as to get maximum value from the wind resource. This is a very sensible thing to do."
However France with it's high proportion of nuclear power makes just as much use of hydro as Denmark as most of it's nuclear is baseload and depends on a connected grid for peaking.
All power systems from wind to nuclear depend on each other at different times. The baseload could just as easily come from solar thermal with storage or geothermal.
>That's a common misconception. In the U.S., EPA and DOE estimates suggest there's now enough RECOVERABLE waste energy (mostly heat) to slash our greenhouse gas emissions by 20%.
20% is roughly what I suggested, the problem is it isn't anywhere near enough.
That 20% to 30% or so is the limit of what is achievable and if that is done throughout the system worldwide, then fossil fuels will be providing the energy requirements and no more cuts would be achievable.
Renewables and nuclear will cut emissions by 3 or 4 times as much.
Re miggs...
BTW i think CHP using biomass and other renewable fuels is OK.
Really with a lot of power plant systems that burn stuff, the issue is what fuels are used and how it is managed.
Even a Anaerobic Digestion system can be mis-used and end up creating un-intended problems (eg. actually create a market for waste which may reduce the incentive to reduce waste).
Paul UK@52
I've no problem at all with creating an incentive to reduce waste. If people waste less stuff, that is a very good thing. Even if the recovered waste heat comes from fossil fuels, then ceteris paribus that is a_good_thing.
Mackay suggests though that ground source heat pumps are probably a_better_thing than CHP as their coefficient of performance can be as high as 4.0 (ibid p147).
Stephen Gloor:
>However France with it's high proportion of nuclear power makes just as much use of hydro as Denmark as most of it's nuclear is baseload and depends on a connected grid for peaking. All power systems from wind to nuclear depend on each other at different times.
Yeah, recently France had to temporarily shut down a large number of nuclear power stations that were using river water for cooling because the river water was to hot.
There is a temperature limit on the river water downstream of the power station, to protect wildlife.
BMS: "In fact, France emits a little over half of the CO2 per capita than Denmark does. "
Now have a look at the result for NON-NUCLEAR Sweden.
> You CAN'T do a dirty bomb with Uranium. It's barely radioactive, you can literally sit on it without negative effects.
> Posted by: Alex Besogonov
The "dirty bomb" isn't a real bomb: it's a scare bomb. It never would have worked. Like liquid explosives and planes. Won't work IRL, but plumped up to scare. By either the hawks or the terrists.
I'm sorry, Marion, but you're going to have to
do better than citing a Wikipedia page that even
itself claims that it might be out of date.
My numbers (which I included above) come
straight from the [International Energy
Agency](http://www.iea.org), and I have far more
confidence in them than some out-of-date numbers
from a random Wikipedia page. The IEA numbers
also indicate that Denmark has almost twice the
CO2 emissions per capita that France
does.
Mark, I hope that you were trying to be funny,
because if you were serious, I'm afraid that you
are sadly mistaken. "Non-nuclear" Sweden gets
almost half (about 47%) of the electricity that it
generates from its fleet of 10 nuclear reactors.
It gets about a third (34%) of its total primary
energy (which includes everything, even oil for
transportation) from nuclear.
Less than 3% of Sweden's electricity production
comes from fossil fuels. When it comes to
CO2 emissions, Sweden is probably
the cleanest country in Europe, thanks to its
heavy reliance on a combination of nuclear and
hydroelectric power.
Oh ... and Sweden's CO2 per GDP (at
0.17 kg CO2/2000 US$ PPP) is slightly
more than half of Denmark's.
Fran Barlow - "I've no problem at all with creating an incentive to reduce waste. If people waste less stuff, that is a very good thing. Even if the recovered waste heat comes from fossil fuels, then ceteris paribus that is agoodthing."
But the whole nuclear thing is in my opinion an attempt to perpetuate business as usual. Proponents of nuclear see nuke plants as a direct replacement for coal plants with no real need to reduce waste as there is in their view plenty of energy available. As far as I can tell from reading Blee's book the road to world peace and prosperity is simply supplying energy in unlimited quantities so that we can continue on the unsustainable party.
Embracing renewables as the primary solution also usually means energy efficiency and conservation are the number one priority BEFORE attempting to supply demand. Nuclear being primarily baseload encourages high demand so that the nuke plants can be run in the most economical mode ie: flat out 24X7.
We have major problems with our society that cannot be fixed with more energy supply. We must reduce demand and demand growth to give our society any chance of avoiding collapse and/or dangerous climate change.
Mark:
Reasoning behind the idea that liquid explosives on planes "never would have worked"?
BMS@56
Marion quoted dollar value per ton of CO2 and you are quoting per capita CO2 so the two references don't match.
Stephen Gloor@57
Unlimited energy for its own sake may well be on some people's agenda, but not on mine. I'd be for just enough nuclear to replace the coal-fired capacity while doing all the other stuff to dampen demand -- as I think I've made clear here.
Stephen Gloor, regarding the pyroprocessing module of the Integral Fast Reactor:
>Nobody really has any idea if the electro metallurgical process will work on the required scale.
We have a very good idea that it will work because its been done before. This is a very conventional technology that is deployed at all scales. Its pretty much the same process of electrowinning from a high temperature molten salt bath that is used to produce the sodium metal for the reactor core, for instance, or the aluminium in your window frames.
Doug Clover:
>Your reference gives the impression that a PRISM reactor is up and running. All I can find in the literature is conceptual designs.
Indeed. Though the design exists, and the principles were proven through the EBR-II pilot plant, scale up and certification is not a trivial process. However, the engineering appears to be in the category of development, not discovery or research.
> I would also point out that gen IV reactors, are not expected to come on line until 2030 at the earliest, which implies there are still issues to resolve.
I think the 2030 timeline assumes business as usual, and, as with renewables, we'd hope there is a sense of urgency. I don't think it is because there are unknown technology development issues, and it should be possible to advance it, if the will exists.
In any case, Gen III designs are in production now, so its not as if we have to wait for Gen IV to be available. And it probably requires the 'waste' from a fleet of Gen III reactors as the startup charge for a Gen IV rollout. So there's no lost time through the Gen IV development phase.
"Reasoning behind the idea that liquid explosives on planes "never would have worked"?
Posted by: Alex"
They can't be brought on board unmixed and liquid explosives are too volatile and need either a lot of cooling (you gonna bring a stack of liquid nitrogen cannisters on the plane too? And bring them to the small portaloo too?) or very steady and VERY SLOW mixing.
El Reg did a good section on the idiocies of the liquid bomb. Go search their site for it.
Stephen Gloor:
> But the whole nuclear thing is in my opinion an attempt to perpetuate business as usual.
Not really.
The "whole nuclear thing", as you put it, is about passing on a habitable planet to my kids, complete with the natural endowments, beauty and meaning that make it a worthwhile place to live. For me anyway.
Fran - Huh?
What part of "CO2 per GDP" do you not understand? (Hint: GDP is the abbreviation of "Gross Domestic Product.") Every figure that I have included in the comments here has been the amount of CO2 emitted divided by the total market value (adjusted for purchasing power) of all goods and services produced by the country. I added a per capita comparison of France and Denmark, but I didn't actually quote any numbers for these statistics.
Nobody, not even Marion, is quoting the "dollar value per ton of CO2." You're obviously confused.
The recovery of waste heat to improve the efficiency of coal fired power stations is a good idea. The problem in Australia is that most coal fired power stations are a long way from where the heat could be used. However, community based CHP e.g. servicing business parks etc would perhaps be more practicable but then thats getting away from centralised power which is another part of the whole argument about replacing coal fired stations.
John - "We have a very good idea that it will work because its been done before."
So where have extremely radioactive metals been seperated electrically in a remotely operated factory environment?
Anyway this is not really the point as imaginary technology cannot be counted on to solve the world's problems.
Fran Barlow - "Unlimited energy for its own sake may well be on some people's agenda, but not on mine. I'd be for just enough nuclear to replace the coal-fired capacity while doing all the other stuff to dampen demand -- as I think I've made clear here."
So why then is nuclear necessary at all? With EE@C reducing demand and demand growth, renewables in a smart network can replace coal in most cases. There will be a few countries that will not have access to enough renewables however nuclear should be the last choice rather than the first. Renewables can be deployed without fear of proliferation and you do not have to clean up their waste.
For instance most solar thermal can burn gas to provide despatchable power. The gas can be natural gas at first however renewable syngas and hydrogen can fill this need in the future. When nuclear needs peaking then gas is burnt so how is this different from solar thermal?
Additionally the solar thermal storage can be used in novel ways to store energy. Consider when there is a surplus of wind, the wind operators can pay the solar thermal storage plants not to produce electricity. The solar plants can then devote their entire solar input to heating up the hot tank to full capacity in effect banking heat for the future. When the wind companies need electricity to fulfil contracts then they can then get the stored energy out of storage for free as they have paid for it before. In the winter when solar output is low the solar plants can buy electricity from the wind and other renewables to electrically heat the cold salts thereby storing energy to fulfill their own contracts.
As I said in a blog far far away the possibilities of a networked smart renewable grid will be far beyond what we can think of today if we remain wedded to the Victorian era power stations and grids that we have now. Nuclear is replacement for heating water in the same way as coal heats water now and offers comfort to people that dislike change. You perhaps can embrace EE&C however the vast majority of nuclear people see nuclear as a insurance for no change in the future. To these people EE&C and renewables is equal to the hair shirt and back to the caves.
Because the wind doesn't always blow at night.
I'm all for research into the storage problem, but until the "100% renewable" partisans solve it, we need base-load power. Which means either nuclear or fossil fuels [1].
Ignoring that problem is making the perfect the enemy of the good.
[1] In some cases hydroelectric or geothermal, but both are geographically limited.
> Because the wind doesn't always blow at night.
It doesn't always blow in the day either.
But that's a solvable problem. And not only by hyrdroelectric or geothermal.
Remember: the tides run twice a day, even at night. And all those waves? they don't take the night shift off.
> Nobody, not even Marion, is quoting the "dollar value per ton of CO2." You're obviously confused.
> Posted by: BMS
You don't remember a thread on just that subject, do you.
Noob.
PS adding in per capita makes no sense unless you're going to put forward the idea that CO2 production is a measure of economic growth.
Which, oddly enough, was the same idea that the troll you missed and I've alluded to above had.
Anyone checked whether BMS is a doppel?
Mark, are you referring to this article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/
What about this more recent article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/10/liquid_bomb_verdicts/
which seems to debunk the first one?
The second doesn't debunk the first.
It does say the first one was probably a bit too certain. TATP is still out, but other binary liquids may have some use.
Mark:
>Remember: the tides run twice a day, even at night. And all those waves? they don't take the night shift off.
A few UK/Irish companies developing tidal and wave energy:
http://www.marineturbines.com/
http://www.openhydro.com/
http://www.lunarenergy.co.uk/
http://www.swanturbines.co.uk/
http://www.tidalenergyltd.com/
http://www.pulsegeneration.co.uk/
http://www.wavegen.co.uk/
PS DC Sessions, nuclear power stations are geographically limited. This doesn't stop them supplying power to people...
i don't think you use "geographically limited" in the same way as the rest of us. nuclear power plants can be built wherever the people who need their power are, or within reasonable distances of them. geothermal, tidal, and wave power plants --- like hydroelectric --- can only be built where their power sources happen to be, and if the people who want power aren't conveniently nearby, then you must build power transport networks (and take the transport losses) or move the people. that's what "geographically limited" means.
Mark - Well, if you want to resort to childish name calling, that is your right, but it doesn't do much to help your argument. However, I am totally baffled by the following:
That sentence makes no sense whatsoever.
There are two common measures that are used to compare the CO2 emissions of different countries: CO2 per capita, which attempts to adjust for size by considering the population; and CO2 per GDP, which attempts to adjust for size by considering economic output. For example, these two measures are used by the Energy Information Administration in its International Energy Outlook report (see the section entitled "Carbon Dioxide Intensity Measures").
The phrase "dollar value per ton of CO2," on the other hand, is nebulous to the point of being meaningless. The most obvious interpretation is the cost of CO2 emissions in the form of a carbon tax or credit. I suppose that this could refer to GDP per ton of CO2, but that is not clear from the wording nor is it a commonly encountered figure.
> i don't think you use "geographically limited" in the same way as the rest of us. nuclear power plants can be built wherever the people who need their power are,
I don't think you read the post.
They CAN be, but they AREN'T. The power they supply goes a long way to get to where it's used.
The same mechanism can get the coastal tidal power to distant towns.
It's called "a national grid system".
Many developed countries have one.
> Mark - Well, if you want to resort to childish name calling, that is your right, but it doesn't do much to help your argument.
But if you're going to take "childish name calling" into effect, you're not actually listening to the arguments, are you. You're making an unsupported emotional response rather than reasoning.
PS if you call "noob" name calling, you need to get out a LOT more...
> There are two common measures that are used to compare the CO2 emissions of different countries: CO2 per capita, which attempts to adjust for size by considering the population; and CO2 per GDP
And where in that is the "CO2 per tonne"?
> Marion quoted dollar value per ton of CO2 and you are quoting per capita CO2 so the two references don't match.
And you replied with
> Fran, huh?
So that whole pile of nonsense had nothing to do with the argument being promoted.
Yes, but that wasn't what you said before. You said:
You stated there that liquid explosives wouldn't work in planes. You didn't say TATP, you said liquid explosives.
In BMS's defence, "noob" can be a type of name calling. From my experience, it can be used in a non-derogatory sense, usually between mates, or it can be used in a (sometimes deserving) harsh sense to disparage someone. Since this is the internet, no-one other than you can know what sense you were using it in.
Yep, I'm as green as they come but we need nuclear, and we need it now. Its safe, non polluting and provides good baseload power. And we've got tons of the stuff. We need nuclear, I just wish my fellow greens would stop their hysteria about it and listen.
and this is the nuke plants' fault how? "geocraphically limited", if you want the term to have any meaning reasonably distinct from "politically limited", is best applied to technologies that simply CAN'T be built just anywhere, whether we build them there or not.
and yes, we do need a distribution grid. it will incur resistive losses on the power generated, though; no, these losses are not automatically negligible. and FWIW, building a modern, reliable distribution grid in the USA --- a worthy project in itself --- won't be cheap no matter what we use to feed it.
And they take the week off twice a month.
They're just wind power. The Environmental Impact Statement for harvesting nontrivial amounts of power from the California coast (and the delays from the NIMBY lawsuits) will be fascinating.
However, once again you need storage or a base-load power source. Still not in evidence.
Mind, it might yet be developed -- I hope so. However, telling the world to put all its hopes on that particular breakthrough happening on schedule seems just a bit unwise. Politically, it's a death sentence. Massey will beat you to death with it and the end result will be more coal plants.
> And they take the week off twice a month.
So?
It's not like you can't store energy (else laptops don't work).
Or that you need it dependable, since your quandary was "what happens when the wind stops at night???".
> They're just wind power.
No, they are wave power. They gain their energy from wind, but check up on the meaning of the word "fetch":
http://en.mimi.hu/meteorology/fetch.html
So the wind would have to be quiet over thousands of miles to stop the waves.
Please try again.
> and this is the nuke plants' fault how?
It's not a case of "fault".
It's a case of "we currently have nuke power that is geographically limited and that still doesn;t cause nuke power to fail to work, so why should geographic elements cause wind or tide or whatever to fail".
Try "comprehension".
> You stated there that liquid explosives wouldn't work in planes. You didn't say TATP, you said liquid explosives.
Yup, liquid explosives as a bomb wouldn't work. As something making a big bank and hurting some people, it would.
But blowing aircraft out of the sky with massive casualties?
No.
FTFA:
> Sure, some of the accused were planning to cause explosions - they have admitted as much, saying they intended to let off a small bomb inside a Heathrow terminal as a political statement.
And:
> A sensible bombmaker would always handle a small HMTD det using tongs or something (just as a sensible man doesn't let his fingers touch a normal det any more than he has to, and absolutely never encloses one in his hand). He would always avert his gaze, or wear industrial safety goggles.
So "safe" is a very relative term. Premature explosion would not be devastating.
So you need a few litres dragged off to the john, a pair of tongs and a pack of batteries...
Not at all odd.
Therefore the risk of someone getting away with this (and note: that article does say there are plenty of other ways of doing this from ages ago, yet not one attempt: maybe there's a reason) is pretty damn low.
And it's not as if you can claim "I didn't know that!", is it. Unlike "accidental" running-someone-over.
Mark - As I stated above, I really don't give a damn what you call me. My point is that you just don't seem to have a freak'n clue. For example:
Per tonne of what?
FYI, CO2 is measured in tonnes, kilograms, or whatever. The mass goes in the numerator; there is no "per tonne." Asking for a country's carbon emissions in "CO2 per tonne" is like asking for a vehicle's fuel efficiency in "distance per mile." It doesn't make any sense.
Do yourself a favor: take a science class, for goodness sake, and stop shooting off your mouth about stuff that you don't understand. While your lack of comprehension of even basic concepts is rather amusing in a pathetic sort of way, it is also annoying, and you're only embarrassing yourself.
are you seriously proposing we run entire cities on lithium-ion batteries for up to 50% of the time? have you no faintest clue about energy storage technologies and their current limitations?
...
never mind; reading your "response" to me it appears there are quite a few things you lack clues about. here, i'll give you a few whacks with the clue-by-four and see if any of them take.
a bit down the Lake Michigan coastline from me, a local power company presently runs a power storage operation --- evening out production and usage peaks, precisely the sort of thing we're talking about here.
when they have excess power, they pump hundreds of thousands of gallons of lakewater up a three hundred foot incline to a holding pond. then when they need power, they run it down through a turbine again. this is vastly more efficient (for the quantities of power stored) than any battery technology now known or speculated could be. you cannot duplicate that sort of storage capacity with electrical batteries or capacitors; trust me, or prove me wrong.
and it is geographically limited, because you can only build such things where you have (1) enough land to (2) build an artificial lake (3) a good distance above a permanent body of water. that only happens in certain geographical locations, which is why we call that limitation a geographical one.
nuclear power plants are not limited by geography, because you can plunk one down wherever. geothermal (for instance) is, because there are only so many places in the world where the ground is hot enough at a shallow enough depth to run them --- volcanic hot spots. develop all those spots into power plants, and your geothermal capacity is used up. but you can build nuke plants wherever...
if your power is being generated at point A, and the people who want to use it are all at point B, you must build a distribution line to connect them. this is routine and usually unavoidable. but it incurs losses, always and necessarily, and the longer the line the greater the losses. nuke plants can be sited to at least try to minimize such losses, as long as politics oblige. power sources that are geographically limited CANNOT be so sited, no matter what politicians might like; they have to go where they have to go.
did you ever wonder why the Grand Coulee dam is not in lower New York state, or perhaps eastern Pennsylvania? it's not because the politicians of those areas were all, "great bloody big dam? NIMBY! put it in the backwoods of WA state!" no. it'd do much more good in the east; more people, more industry. that was so especially when the dam was built. but it was and is geographically limited. if the eastern seaboard of the USA lacks for nuke plants, it is not because there aren't any convenient uranium rivers there to power them.
"Do yourself a favor: take a science class, for goodness sake, and stop shooting off your mouth about stuff that you don't understand."
Red rag, meet bull.
/thread
> are you seriously proposing we run entire cities on lithium-ion batteries for up to 50% of the time?
> Posted by: Nomen Nescio
I've read the post you were responding to and could not find one instance of lithium-ion being mentioned.
Do you often hallucinate?
Oh clueless one:
> My point is that you just don't seem to have a freak'n clue. For example:
> > And where in that is the "CO2 per tonne"?
I point you back to post #63 where you said "huh?". Obviously not enough of a clue for you. Then go back to the post that you were responding to:
> BMS@56
> Marion quoted dollar value per ton of CO2 and you are quoting per capita CO2 so the two references don't match.
Which is post #59.
That is where value per ton comes from.
It seems you don't remember posts you make yourself or read and responded to at all.
Your momma met with a goldfish a few years ago? Or is this just the MTV generation at work?
PS if you really want to get all righteous, you DO get "CO2 per tonne" since CO2 is not continuous and therefore has a discrete number of CO2 molecules per tonne.
Maybe you should find an education system that will work for your kind...
oh, i'm sorry; i tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. hence when you mentioned laptop computers, i assumed you meant the most efficient, power-dense battery technology commonly used in such.
i see now you are neither that smart nor that honest; that, when you bring up laptop computers in the context of power storage, you really mean Volta stacks. or maybe potatoes with bimetallic prongs stuck into them.
unfortunately, that means you're operating on a level i simply cannot think down to --- either morally or IQ-wise; much less then both. hence, *plonk*.
> oh, i'm sorry; i tried to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, laptops need batteries.
No, they aren't the only batteries.
You weren't giving me the benefit of the doubt, you were busily making hay to create a strawman.
PS, it's "plonker", you plonker.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=plonker
Wow, intellectually dishonest or what, Mark?
You quote this paragraph from the second Register article:
in order to back up this statement:
But you don't seem to notice the sentences surrounding the paragraph you quote:
How can you tell whether others are constructing giant strawmen, when you're too busy digging yourself to China?
So Mark cites laptop batteries, but doesn't like the best laptop batteries.
What batteries do you want to use instead?
Are you going to hook New York up to a Morris Minor?
It would help if you would tell us what batteries you intended.
My idea of how a big storage battery could smooth out renewable power production between winter and summer is partial thermal deoxygenation of magnetite.
It's not an electrical storage battery, nor strictly a thermal one, but it should do the job. As I say elsewhere,
Interesting that the fossil fuel interests, eager to be thought of as dirty countercultural hippies who know nothing about the big money that somehow benefits from their activities, should unforthrightly try to label themselves thus by putting the assertion in opponents' mouths and pretending it is an insult. They're certainly dirty, but they ain't hippies.
(How fire can be domesticated)
What's next, spelling lames? Hint.
Depends upon your definition of "work." After all, the object of terrorism is to create terror. Killing people is just a means to that end. And while any plausible dirty bomb would probably kill hardly anybody, it would produce a huge degree of fear and economic disruption. Radioactive materials are detectable at very low levels, and the degree of public fear is such that it would have to be cleaned up completely. Official reassurances that levels are too low to be harmful would not be believed. So you would have people fleeing from potentially a large area, followed by a hugely expensive clean-up operation, with many of the people who fled still being too fearful to return home. This would be followed by years of lawsuits by people who believe that they have been harmed due to inadequate cleanup. I suspect that in comparison, hurricane Alicia would seem cheap.
the degree of public fear is such that it would have to be cleaned up completely. Official reassurances that levels are too low to be harmful would not be believed.
Just as X-rays are a thing of the past, and thousands of lawsuits are in progress from people who believe Colorado should be evacuated. The public is not as stupid as public fossil fuel money recipients would have it believe.
trril,
As you say that is exactly the reasoning behind a dirty bomb.Mark, meanwhile, doesn't have the first clue about what he is saying>
In which case, "dirty bombs" are the most effective weapons in history: they have cost trillions of dollars, major social disruption, loss of civil liberties, environmental destruction, etc. -- all without one even being built!
BMS, addicted to the buzzer, said:
Any reading whatsoever of Wikipedia policy or even overview would have immediately revealed that Wikipedia pages are almost never "original content." The source for the figures was not, in fact, the random Wikipedia page. For the C02, it was a study by a division of the US Department of Energy, conducted for the United Nations. That data has been updated for 2006 here
And the 2004 GDP data is from the International Monetary Fund here
Since the comparison is CO2 to GDP and CO2 has been updated for 2006, we should use 2006 GDP, available from the IMF here.
The data is thus:
{CO2 = thousands of metric tons per year}
{GDP = billions of USD }
Nation CO2 GDP ratio
US 5,752,289 13,244.550 0.0023
France 383,148 2,231.631 0.0058
Denmark 53,944 276.611 0.0051
Leaving Denmark - STILL - better than twice as efficient in GDP per emission of C02 volume.
As for the ever trustworthy International Energy Agency:
Maybe BMS can find out for the IEA why wind will stop blowing worldwide in 2015. He should get the Economics Nobel Peace Prize for Medicine in Physics, if so. I think Monckton got one of those.
Renewable Energy world hopefully says
But change in some quarters is a very gradual process, given they're still fudging the data to promote nuclear power and attack renewables. They were, by the way, grossly under in their estimates of wind power to date. Every year. So their 2015 cutoff, while insane and bizarre, is par for the course.
I certainly didn't say dollar value per ton of C02, since my unit (our crude, insanely market fundamentalism-biased unit of productivity, GDP*) is a per capita one. But on everything else, BMS was simply wrong, and miggs was simply correct. The IMF, US DOE, etc., miggs and I are on the same page, and the fossil-fuel industries**' "International Energy Agency" and BMS are the odd ones out.
*RFK was challenging the GNP measure, but most of that applies just as well to the GDP.
**But forward-looking, for former fossil fuel executives.
Marion:
Of course not, I never said that you did. In fact, I unequivocally stated that you did not say this. Please explain this to Mark.
Nevertheless, I have no idea what you are talking about when you claim that your unit is "a per capita one." "Per GDP" and "per capita" are two completely different beasts.
No, that is simply not true. You have cited nothing but a stupid Wikipedia page. Meanwhile, I can cite the statistics from not only the IEA, but the US DOE (Excel spreadsheet) as well. These figures are taken from the latest (2006) numbers in the DOE spreadsheet [the units are "Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide per Thousand (2000) U.S. Dollars"]:
United States: 0.52 Denmark: 0.33
Sorry, Marion, but you and miggs simply don't have a clue. Both the International Energy Agency and the US Department of Energy stand by the figures that I cite.
In the future, please reference something other than a Wikipedia page, if you want to be taken seriously.
Dave Andrews:
I couldn't agree more. Add Marion to the list.
Marion - I'll just add that, unlike the IEA and the Department of Energy's EIA, "Source Watch" and "Energy Watch" are accountable to no one. They are simply propaganda farms, putting forth unsubstantiated nonsense and misinformation on the internet to promote the interests of "renewable energy" scams such as wind and solar.
Only crackpots such as you take these transparently fake and partisan groups seriously.
Now, care to tell me again how the US DOE stands behind the claims that you cite?
A tip to those pushing the pushing the "until you solve the storage problem" meme, or the "it canât provide baseload" meme.
You arenât going to convince knowledgeable people with false or irrelevant memes.
1.)It is always sunny somewhere, the wind is always blowing somewhere, waves etc, etc. It comes down to a question of the economic renewable capacity in various regions, how well different renewables complement each other, and the economics of connecting regions.
2.)The economics in point 1 change with experience, technology and the cost of competing alternatives.
3.)There are numerous storage options available today, thermal, kinetic, chemical, electro, and potential energies. It comes down to a question of the economic storage capacity in various applications and the economics of combinations of storage options.
4.)The economics in point 3 change with experience, technology and the cost of competing alternatives.
5.)Integration/Connectivity (point 1) mediates the need for storage (point 2). And Storage mediates the need for larger integrated areas of connectivity. The balance is to be determined by capacity and economics. And the economics change with technology, experience and infrastructure (and competing alternatives).
6.)Demand management and load shifting mediates the scale of need for either or both storage and intercontinental transmission.
A question to those (if anyone is) arguing that we can get to 350ppm CO2e with renewables alone: It might be possible, but is it economic? What will it cost? What do governments need to be establishing right now to give this any chance of coming together? What will the ecological cost be?
If renewables advocates donât address these questions, then nuclear advocates will.
One step at a time:
The ultimate sources of my list were not "some random Wikipedia page." Wikipedia lists are not sourced to Wikipedia authors but from external sources.
The CO2 part of that list (List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions (now 2006)) came from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, a division of the US Dept. of Energy, as I said.
The source for GDP for that "random Wikipedia page" was the International Monetary Fund.
Here is CDIAC's list*
The comparison had not been updated from 2004 in Wikipedia's co2/gdp list, as they said.
The first document my CDIAC search turned up was a list of nations by per capita GHG 2006, so I divided each entry by its 2006 IMF per capita GDP which is why that was my dividing unit. I came out with units of C02 (expressed as carbon) over unit of GDP. The formula is GHG=PC.GHG x Pop, GDP=PC.GDP x Pop, GHG/GDP=PC.GHG/PC.GDP. When I use ratios, it's nice to have both quantities already adjusted for population - makes it easier to see whether you're ballparking things correctly.
If you wish to check it, CDIAC's gross carbon emissions by country 2006 is here
The IMF's 2006 GDP list is here.
And keep in mind, all of this simply to validate Wikipedia, which listed the sources of its list. Properly and accurately.
From DOE's CDIAC: US 2006 per capita emissions: 5.18 metric tons of carbon. Denmark 2006 per capita emissions. 2.71 metric tons of carbon.
From the IMF: US 2006 per capita GDP: 44,118.967. Denmark 2006 per capita GDP: 50,509.251
(Denmark GHG/GDP)/ (US GHG/GDP) = 0.457 which is LESS THAN HALF.
I note on BMS's cited source that Bush's DOE used "Global Insight" a private market forecaster, for GDP instead of the IMF. Perhaps the Energy Information Administration right hand didn't know what its CDIAC left hand was doing in that case.
I also note that the International Energy Agency is an energy company think-tank staffed by the fossil fuel industry which consistently underpredicted renewable energy especially wind. For some reason, for instance, the IEA predicted wind power would stop growing in 2015. I see they used the same document from the DOE, but I repeat, I don't trust "Global Insight" to be as accurate as the IMF.
One last thing, and I mean last. The US DOE now does stand behind what I said. If I had had the ability to grill them, in, say, a congressional hearing, I believe I could have forced them to stand behind what I say even back when BMS's report was generated. But that's speculation.
And miggs was right, BMS was, and is, wrong. And it's over such a trivial point. Not WHETHER non-nuclear Denmark emits fewer units of carbon per GDP. Nope. BMS is going on and on trashing us because he quibbles about the DEGREE to which that is true.
Stephen:
>So where have extremely radioactive metals been seperated electrically in a remotely operated factory environment?
>Anyway this is not really the point as imaginary technology cannot be counted on to solve the world's problems.
It isn't the point, but the objection on these grounds is raised often enough that I feel I ought to address it.
There is a large difference between engineering process development based on existing practice, and new process discovery. One is relatively hard, and one is relatively easy. The separation by pyroprocessing is a combination of well understood existing engineering processes, and as such is a process that can be developed by cranking the usual handles of an engineering development programme.
A number of existing large scale and long-deployed industrial processes are in use that exemplify one or other aspect of this process module. The proposed IFR separation process is metal 'electrowinning' from a high temperature molten salt bath, under an inert argon atmosphere, under remote handling, and the metal is highly radioactive. There is also preprocessing and postprocessing of the fuel assemblies, ie separation from casings, chop and melt down to remove volatile fission products (like iodine and xenon), then recast fuel rods from the melt.
As I said above, the molten salt bath electrolysis process has a very long process history in producing metallic aluminium and metallic sodium, amongst other products. These are obviously done under inert atmospheres.
You're right to point out in the case of the IFR the products are extremely radioactive, and this changes things. However, the experience of the LFTR development (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor), and related work, provides the necessary materials science and engineering handling body of knowledge to support molten salt electrowinning of intensely radioactive materials. Consider, the LFTR reactor core is an intensely radioactive solution of thorium and other fluorides in a molten fluoride salt, which is basically the material being dealt with in the pyroprocessing bath. We have excellent knowledge of the material properties, the material compatibilities, pumping, valving, actinide solubilities, electrochemistry, phase diagrams, etc. Complex handling operations for such a fluid have already been used. Basically all we're talking about is sticking some electrodes in it.
The EBR-II breeder reactor - the IFR prototype - did fuel reprocessing by remote handling in an argon capped 'hot cell' attached to the reactor building, which involved separating the fuel assembly, melting down the intensely radioactive metallic fuel, driving off and recovery the volatile fission inhibitors, recasting new fuel rods and creating new fuel assemblies.
Remote handling, automation, and control are an industrial commonplace, and now considerably more developed than at the time EBR-II was operating (up to 1985). EBR-II lacked the electrolysis step, but this is specced out in the PRISM design, based on solid engineering experience.
The IFR development might fail for various reasons, primarily commercial or political. If it does, what you won't read in its obituary is that "attempts to commercialize the IFR failed due to unforeseen and intractable problems with the pyroprocessing concept".
D. C. Sessions@66 - "Because the wind doesn't always blow at night.
I'm all for research into the storage problem, but until the "100% renewable" partisans solve it, we need base-load power. Which means either nuclear or fossil fuels [1]."
The storage problem has been solved and it works. Look at Solar Two. Molten salt storage was tested in working conditions and it worked perfectly. It is now in a production prototype in Spain called Solar Tres.
Nuclear power plants don't generate power when they are being refuelled either. The point is all power systems have capacity factors lower than 100% and all need backup of other systems because of this.
We don't need base load power stations as these are inflexible dinosaurs. What we need for a smart grid to work better is more intermediate and peaking plants that can interact automatically with renewables to achieve the lowest emissions possible.
John Morgan - "It isn't the point, but the objection on these grounds is raised often enough that I feel I ought to address it."
It is the point because I never said anywhere that it could not be done, just that these exact conditions of extreme radioactivity and electrochemical processing has not been done before. Because it has not been done on an industrial scale it will require considerable time to implement and debug the process which will also not be cheap to do.
Blees imagines, and I have talked to him on this, that the IFR complete can be rolled out in 5 years which is completely ridiculous. Just the processing part could take 10 years of work to get to a point where a turnkey processing plant is ready to go let alone the PRISM design which has to be certified first.
The point is that the IFR is at least 20 years away from making any sort of difference to CO2 emissions even if the concept correctly scales up from the lab to the industry. Wind is currently growing at 30% per year, solar is starting to take off with solar storage now mainstream and other renewables are waiting in the wings with much lower lead times that the IFR. Also there are no problems with energy efficiency as all the technologies required are tried and tested.
Whey wait for imaginary technology when we have the required technology that is already making a difference?
> If renewables advocates donât address these questions, then nuclear advocates will.
> Posted by: Mark Byrne
But as implied with your opening statement:
> A tip to those pushing the pushing the "until you solve the storage problem" meme, or the "it canât provide baseload" meme.
> You arenât going to convince knowledgeable people with false or irrelevant memes.
and later on, these ARE being answered by renewables proponents.
And maybe some nuclear power could be used, for example, for powering military installations. After all
a) they can't really afford even a minor risk of a powerout
b) they generally have very high power demands
c) they are already secure locations
d) if a terrorist gets on there and away with some Uranium, there are more problems than a dirty bomb to look into
etc.
> Of course not, I never said that you did. In fact, I unequivocally stated that you did not say this. Please explain this to Mark.
And I never said you did.
I said that you were using a different measure and that your "Huh?" was therefore unwarranted and that responding to Fran's point with a REPEAT of the wrong measure was not a response to Fran's point.
YOU then started the strawmaking process.
> Mark, meanwhile, doesn't have the first clue about what he is saying
> Posted by: Dave Andrews
Coming from the guy who regularly shows he couldn't find a clue with a team of sherpas and a map, I take this as a compliment.
If I can't find a clue that DA thinks is there, I MUST be on the right track.
> Depends upon your definition of "work." After all, the object of terrorism is to create terror.
It does.
And a dirty bomb isn't a bomb. In just the same way as DHS is "security theatre", this isn't a bomb and if ever used for real would demonstrate that. So it won't work.
A blank from a gun makes a heck of a noise, but if you get menaced by a gun and they actually *try* and use it, the loud bang scares you and then you find you're still alive and without holes. Then that "scary" gun becomes a poorly proportioned club.
Not nearly so scary.
So they don't work unless you stop thinking and WANT to be scared.
That's not terrorism, that's cowardice. Like all the USians who were too frightened to get on a plane to the UK. Including macho men like Sly Stallone.
That wasn't terrorism (go to Israel, there's terrorism: you really CAN lose your life to it). It's cowardice (where you're afraid of something that isn't going to kill you).
The dirty bomb doesn't work.
You allow it.
Good points Mark and using military bases for starters is probably the safest option in a dangerous world.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/16/nuclearpower-nuclear-…
I disagree with the "for starters", but thanks.
Indeed. The largest single generation failure in the UK was when Sizewell B abruptly droppped off the grid last May (May 27th, 11:30 am to be precise), resulting in 1,200 MW disappearing essentially instantaneously. It's hard to come up with a realistic scenario in which the failure of renewable generation could cause such a severe balancing problem.
So after 20 years or when people find that they still aren't dead cancer, maybe they will decide that they weren't actually hurt by the dirty bomb, and stop being afraid to go into areas "contaminated" by the dirty bomb, or fearful of the terrorists responsible for it. Gee, I'm greatly reassured that a dirty bomb will not create fear, massive economic disruption, and massive cleanup expense.
You can sneer all you want at the people who are afraid of radiation, and who suspect the government of lying to them when tell them that the levels are much too low to be significantly dangerous. But your sneers won't stop huge numbers of people from being fearful, from fleeing the area of the attack, and from demanding the government spend whatever is necessary to reduce counts of radiation in the affected area all the way down to background (on the bright side, the radiation detector industry will experience a huge boom).
Mark,
The point about a dirty bomb is that it doesn't have to work particularly well in any conventional sense. If you explode a device in Wall Street that spreads plutonium you shut down a large part of the US economy for a considerable time. Environmental groups etc would insist that there had to be rigorous clean up, costing God knows what, whilst many people would simply refuse to go into that particular area again.
I campaigned against nuclear weapons for 25 years and in that time came across numberless people who had a totally irrational fear of radiation. No amount of discussion with them could shake this fear - indeed any discussion with them on this was likely counterproductive as their fear of radiation was often much greater than their fear of nuclear weapons. (And this is campaigners I am talking about, not ordinary members of the public).
As an anecdotal example, a knowledgeable and prominent anti nuclear campaigner preferred to go to an anti Bush demonstration in London, shortly after the 7/7 terrorist bombings there, rather than visit Sellafield (the UK's reprocessing plant) on a fact finding mission because of fears of radiation.
Andrews seems confused about his own past intentions. If he was campaigning against nuclear weapons, fear of radiation was helpful to his campaign, and to be counterproductive for that campaign a discussion would have to reduce that fear, not, as he says, shake it.
Similarly, the distinction between campaigners and ordinary members of the public naturally is in the direction of those members of the public being less fearful.
Because of professed fears of radiation; because of his or her occupation, that claim would be made regardless of whether it was true or not, and conveys no information.
What's illuminating, in cases like those, are cases where the walk doesn't match the talk; for instance, Greenpeace researchers routinely getting about the Arctic on a nuclear icebreaker.
(How fire can be domesticated)
MBS @ 38,
The agency I was referring to, having had time to look it up, was the Atomic Energy Commission, headed up by Oppenheimer. Its functions were later absorbed by the DOE.
It's hardly controversial that leaks and safety concerns at civilian nuclear facilities have often been covered up. Just check the wikipedia pages on civilian nuclear accidents.
I was unaware that the IAEA's mandate covered safety standards as well as nonproliferation. Ta. I still think that national-level audit/ombudsman style officers would be needed to reassure the public.
Finally, please stick your accusations of psychopathic paranoia back in the diseased rectum they appear to have been spoken from.
As the old bumper sticker has it, "Ynni niwcliar? Dim diolch!"
There are far more accessable redioactive materials for making a dirty bomb than Plutonium. For example, material could be stolen or otherwise obtained from medical isotope sources. The only thing special about Plutonium is that one of its isotopes can be made in pure enough form (i.e. relatively free from other Plutonium isotopes by specially controlling a nuclear reactor) to make a fission bomb. Dirty bombs, radioactive or otherwise, can be made much more easily using materials other than Plutonium.
Not to mention the fact, Chris@124 that any number of other chemical or biological toxins would be a lot easier to contrive, hide your tracks, particularly if panic is mainly what you are after.
> The point about a dirty bomb is that it doesn't have to work particularly well in any conventional sense.
Then it's not a bomb, is it, any more than airdrops of leaflets on opposing troops is carpet bombing.
It's propaganda and it only "works" if the victim makes it.
That's hardly working, is it.
> So after 20 years or when people find that they still aren't dead cancer, maybe they will decide that they weren't actually hurt by the dirty bomb
Or, like Swine Flu or Avian Flu, find out that after a few weeks, nothing was anywhere near as dangerous as made out and it will never work again.
If someone blows up a dirty bomb and nothing bad happens (a few people get a bit ill) then a few weeks later, there's NO FEAR of the dirty bomb. Another "dirty bomb" goes off and feck all happens because it onlt works if you're afraid of it and that's destroyed by actually meeting it.
Didn't work, did it.
Fear is the mind-killer. I will face my fears and they will disappear. Only I will remain.
It's why we face our fears. Because we often find that there wasn't anything to fear.
So the dirty bomb only works as long as you don't use it.
Assuming that nobody tells them that the primary hazard of radiation exposure is cancer, years or decades later...
You really think people are going to stop worrying about their kids coming down with cancer when it doesn't happen after a few weeks?
This is true, and it doesn't even require plutonium if the primary purpose is to spread fear. All you need is radiation hard enough to be picked up by a geiger counter. Any one of a number of radioisotopes widely used for research would do the trick.
Which also means that nuclear power does not appreciably increase the risk of a "dirty bomb" attack.
GRL Cowan,
Yes I was campaigning against nuclear weapons but I also believe in telling the truth.
Your remark that a 'fear of radiation' would have been helpful in the campaign gets to the heart of the problem with many environmental and single issue groups. That is, essentially, the end justifies the means as far as they are concerned, and just like politicians, they will spin the facts for their own purposes. This is a very slippery slope and if you don't see it you are part of the problem not the solution.
Chris O'Neill,
I was using plutonium as an example and would agree that other materials are easier to come by. Their resonance with the public would not be as great, however.
Fran Barlow,
Chemical and biological agents could indeed produce panic but their effects would generally be short lived in comparison to radiological agents, especially in the minds of the public.
Yes Dave, but the object is always to create fear within a definite political cycle. It doesn't really matter if people are still scared 30 years later, but it does matter if they aren't worried 3 years later.
Just wait till the hysteria gets beaten up. It doesn't take long. As far as hysteria goes, Plutonium is just a name. There's no reason why the same level of hysteria couldn't be built on any other accumulating radioactive poison.
Chris,
You may be right as far as Australia is concerned. All I can say is that here in the UK, and probably most importantly, the US plutonium has always been seen as the greatest danger.
This relates directly back to both countries 'status' as nuclear weapons states.
You are also absolutely correct in saying, in any situation, how the hysteria is whipped up matters a lot.
Tim has suggested in the initial post that warming caused by nuclear energy use will not be a problem. Eric Chaisson pointed out that large scale use of nuclear (and geo-thermal) could pose a problem.
Something to think about:
[Chaisson, E.J., âLong-term Global Heating from Energy Usage,â Eos transactions of the American Geophysical Union, v 89, no 28, p 253, 2008](http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/eric/reprints/eos__agu_transactio…)
Apologies for the duff Chaisson link, here's an alternative tiny URL: http://www.tinyurl.com/d75q23
GRL Gowan said:
>What's illuminating, in cases like those, are cases where the walk doesn't match the talk; for instance, Greenpeace researchers routinely getting about the Arctic on a nuclear icebreaker.
What nuclear ice breaker is this??
And when did these events occur?
This sounds like an unfounded rumour started by someone with a vested interest. eg. a lie.
Greenpeace has it's own ice breaker and it isn't nuclear powered (pretty obvious really).
Actually I said that it isn't causing warming at present. Chaisson has continued exponential growth in energy use for hundreds of years until we use 300 times as much energy as today -- then it will make a significant contribution.
There has been much said, here and on Barry Brook's threads, on both the pro-nuclear and the pro-renewables sides regarding what is 'practical', and about 'numbers'.
I will admit that I started from a pro-renewables point of view, but I am becoming less convinced of their capacity for complete replacement of fossil fuels as the latter are currently used around the globe. Conversely, although I am less antagonistic toward nuclear-generated energy that I was in the past, I remain very unconvinced that it is able to serve as a long-term and ubiquitous source of energy for the whole of humanity, in the place of fossil fuels.
I have grave doubts that even in combination there would be a solution, based on the current growth in global per capita use of energy.
The real problem for me though is one that I have mentioned previously, and which I feel has never been adequately addressed and solved. And that is, if humanity is able to replace its reliance on fossil fuels with another source, whether such a source lasts for one hundred years or one thousand, how does this create a sustainable planet?
As Jeff Harvey has discussed many times on a number of threads, humanity has already co-opted significant proportions of the planet's water, arable soil, fisheries, forestry and sundry other resources, and at the expense of the very ecosystems that ultimately sustain all life on the planet. Even if we humans do not increase our total annual energy usage beyond today's consumption, at the rate that our current energy use permits us to exploit the other biological and non-biological resources there will soon be serious shortfalls in other materials required for the sustenance of Western society, and most likely for the sustenance of large numbers of people at even a subsistence level.
The common chestnut that we need several planets to live at our current level of resource use is not wrong: there has been much said about how much of the planet's resource base is required for maintaining the wealthiest 20% of the planet's human population. How will a maintenance of the current energy-consumption affect the planet's resources, ignoring Chinas' and India's (amongst others) rushings to join the fray? How would a provision of the Chinas and the Indias of the planet, with our current profligate level of energy use, exacerbate the pressure on planetary resources?
And this is all in addition to the inevitability that humans have already missed their best opportunity to mitigate the impacts of AGW. Even a screaming optimist would have to acknowledge that both nuclear and renewable replacements for fossil fuels are a decade, if not several, away.
The best option that humans have as a species would be to follow Ted Trainer's approach and embrace a profound cultural shift in the pattern of our energy (and consequently, of other resource) use: in so doing the problems of bottlenecks for many resources might be reduced. I seriously doubt though that any of the major carbon emitting countries in the world will demonstrate a significant drop in their rates of emissions in the same time frame, just as they are very unlikely to voluntarily reduce their consumptions of other resources.
I know this sounds very 'Club of Rome', but I challenge anyone to point to 'the numbers' that scientifically and comprehensively demonstrate how there will not be critical shortages of certain resources in the future, and just how the various ecosystems of the planet will maintain their integrities.
Up until about 12 or 18 months ago I was still optimistic about the future, but as I continue to observe the inertia and malaise that our species demonstrates in its responses to the inevitable problems of this century and beyond, I grow ever more despondent. Yes, there has been much improvement in 'green' technologies and cultures over the last several decades, but in comparison with the inexorable decline in the many indicators and functions of the globe's ecosystems, I suspect that our efforts are more likely just shifting the time-frame of the approaching kick-in-the-arse, rather than altering its magnitude.
I would dearly love for someone to point me to a detailed analysis/deconstruction/reconstruction of energy, biotic, and abiotic resource uses â in the context of future global population and social/cultural trends â that shows how we will, for more that several more generations, maintain a global society of anything like that which we currently have.
Sadly though - naivety, Denialati, and sundry nutters aside - I doubt that anyone could produce such a study: else we would already be seeing improvements is systems that are relentlessly degrading.
> This is true, and it doesn't even require plutonium if the primary purpose is to spread fear.
True, but the political scaremongering requires something scary.
Likke nuclear radiation.
Therefore the status quo political figures want to maintain fear of a nuclear rogue state.
Using nuclear power worldwide means breaking that fear in favour of practicalities.
Which isn't going to happen until those in power are no longer going to be affected. A generation at least.
And to ensure more fear, the effect of binary liquid explosives is overblown (pun unintended), since they don't want people afraid that the UK/US nuclear power is so easy to get hold of: if they do, then there would be more pressure to avoid nuclear power. And there's a lot of concentrated money in nuclear power.
Neither require a real bomb and, because of the limited (if any) effect of such mechanisms, they cannot be used, only threatened to be used, they don't actually work: to work they need to explode. And that removes most of its power: the fear.
be a lot better if it were, really. oil-powered ships burn a lot of fuel oil, after all. then again, finding qualified engineers for a nuke-powered ship can't be entirely easy --- i imagine they'd have to recruit amongst recent retirees from the U.S. Navy, essentially.
"....An IFR is quick to build. ..."
I'm very interested in this exciting new technology.
Could you tell me about some of the doubtless numerous examples already operating or about to go into operation?
Nomen Nescio:
>be a lot better if it were, really. oil-powered ships burn a lot of fuel oil, after all.
Agreed. But i forgive them because I think they have made some progress, especially in getting some industries to change.
Re: Tim and Chaisson.
Agreed that Chaisson is making a prediction.
My problem with nuclear is that it just encourages the myth continued resource abundance and growth in the use of resources.
I think if we just satisfy demand the human train will end up hitting another buffer in the future (nuclear being the current instant solution to the current 'climate change' buffer).
Chaisson just points out one of the potential issues, one assumes some sort of trekkie paradise world with abundant nuclear fusion fueling every human desire. One where everyone is obese probably!
[From the horse's mouth](http://www.projectthinice.org/blog/view/3444/)
(Secrets for sale)
Ray Kurzweil argues that solar energy is following an exponential path for price performance like many other technologies. It appears that the doubling time is 2 years and in 8 doublings it will be more than competitive.
GRL Cowan No. 145
To be precise about that trip. The two scientists 'teamed' up with Greenpeace. Greenpeace and the Arctic Sunrise remained in Greenland.
Greenpeace have have provided the blog site for the two scientists to use.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/explorers-begin-histo…
Well said, Paul UK. It took 144 comments to get there, but that is the really inconvenient truth.
We are in an age of depletion. More energy will only hasten the end.
We need to manage a descent to a steady state economy or face global resource collapse.
Stabilising and then reducing the world's population will make it a whole lot easier.
Pongoland,
"We need to manage a descent to a steady state economy or face global resource collapse."
What have you been taking today?
1. nuclear power is not cheap under any circumstances.
Since the 'nuclear renaissance' began in the late 90s, the estimated cost of a new nuclear plant has risen from c. $2.5bn USD to nearly $6bn. That's a standard estimate across a wide range of estimates (some higher, none less than $5bn). Moody's, for example, the credit rating agency, has a recent estimate in that range.
At $4500 per installed Kw (1300MW stations) this is just not going to be cheap power. That's 4.5 times a gas fired station, 3 times a kw of wind power, 2.5 times a new coal-fired station etc.
There will need to be massive government intervention to get these things built and to guarantee returns to investors.
2. 4th Gen is a chimera. The cost savings come from doing away with the containment vessel, and in the age of 9-11, who would be willing to do that? Bury it underground and you have all the issues of risks to groundwater, plus you have to dig it up to decontaminate.
the 'graphite pebble' doesn't work: if a pebble breaks up in the recirculation system, then you have a completely ruined reactor with no way to decontaminate.
It has taken us nearly 50 years to develop a 'dominant design' for a nuclear reactor (pressurised water) that we are fairly happy with and understand many of its complexities of design,construction and operation. We just are not going to junk that technology this side of 2050.
The reality is if we are building new nukes, they will be Pressurized Water Reactors (because that is what the US civilian programme chose in the 1950s, and it did so because Rickover and his boys had made that work in submarine technology) from the 3rd Generation.
Then there are the 3rd Gen safety risks:
- the original plan was to be 'inherently safe' aka negative power flux and reliance on passive safety. To scram the reactor, you simply shut down and the water does the rest.
However it turns out that doesn't work, economically. It works for a 650MW reactor, but to be economic you need a 1300+ MW reactor.
So the AEC has agreed to allow the Westinghouse and GE designs to go forward with fewer 'active' safety systems, but untested passive safety systems.
The EPR (French) reactor is a little different. It still has 4 key active safety systems, a double-walled containment vessel (in case history repeats, and someone rams a 767 into your powerplant, or fires an anti tank missile into it, as was done at Super Phenix). And it has 'the catcher's mitt' which is intended to stop 'the China Syndrome' in a meltdown (but we don't know if it will work).
So we are going to proceed on the 3rd Gen without a good idea how well it will work in emergency, just a wing and a prayer that it will be better and cheaper and safer than a 2nd Generation reactor.
It will need to be, as there is more uranium in that core (twice as much?) burning hotter.
3. many discussions about Australian aluminium. Nobody will build an aluminium smelter powered by nuclear generated electricity-- it's just too expensive. The French had one at Dunkerque when they had a surplus of electric power, but I believe even that one has closed.
You build aluminium either where there is cheap hydro power (Canada, Norway, Iceland, Russia), or cheap gas (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Russia, Qatar etc.). Despite conversations above, so far the Icelandic smelters are hydro-powered NOT geothermal.