Climate Change must be tackled NOW

And you characterize my priorities as odd. As long as no solution exists for the radioactive waste, more nuclear energy is out of any rationale.

I know that building clean(er) cars is, in the short term, a more reachable goal than to transform our whole energy production system into wind, solar, biomass, and other forms of clean power sources. The transport sector's CO2 exhaust is the main source of pollution. But it's also the more flexible sector, compared to industrial and household sectors. Short term opportunities here lurk to combat the climatological destabilisation.

The minor ecological problems in the production of fuel cells you cite pose no burden. The electrolysis need not come from polluting sources. The ecological make of hydrogen can even be stimulated through political subsidizing by wind, solar energy and a range of other alternative sources. In this way, clean vehicles can even boost the exploitation of these non-fossil fuels.

You could maybe try to support these trends, instead of countering them with all the awkward arguments you can come up with.

(sigh...) Ever wonder why we have so many coal-fueled plants? Ever wonder why France creates so much less atmospheric carbon (per capita) than do we?

Re - sigh.

You can achieve the Kyoto norms by building more nuclear power plants or by a national effort in renewable energies. Pick one.

There are ample readily available solutions for the radioactive waste. The Yucca Mountain repository is now accepting spent fuel. It was designed to survive (99.9999% confidence) any geological instability for 500,000 years, or 20 half lives of PU 239. For reference, the probability that human life on earth will be wiped out by a large asteroid impact in that period is about 10% Other, cheaper and better solutions are also readily available. There are known subsidence, or subduction, zones in the Pacific where the ocean depth is about 20,000 feet and the sedimentation rate is about 500 cm/year. High level waste packed in a suitable stainless steel container would bury itself 5 meters below the bottom and be covered with an additional meter of sediment every two years. Over time the waste will be drawn under the earth's mantle to be mixed with the molten core and not emerge for a geological eon or two.

There have been two generations of improved reactor designs since the last plant was licensed in this country, and modern gas-cooled reactors are far safer and more efficient than those in use today. By the way, the environmental and industrial damage here after over 28 years of producing over 20% of our electrical power in nuclear reactors has been far less than that (on a unit of power basis) than that from any other source.

Solar and wind power, even with significant subsidies, amount, today,to less than 5% of our electrical power production. Even the most avid protagonists of these sources forecast no more than a doubling of this proportion in the next 10 years - and that will require added subsidies. This is a miniscule amount of power compared to what will be required to produce enough free hydrogen to even dent our gasoline consumption. We have lots of high quality coal that would be the only alternative (other than nuclear) for the production of the power required to produce hydrogen. Please recognize that, due to the several, thermodynamic, mechanical, electrical, and chemical processes involved, a great deal of energy would be lost in the production of hydrogen "fuel". Indeed about three thermal units of coal would be burned for each thermal unit of power that would result from the burning of hydrogen. This is hardly an environmentally beneficial solution to anything ! I recognize that these pesky engineering details do get in the way of the dreams of those who would like to tell others how to live. However they are real.

The "minor ecological burdens" to which you refer are themselves real, practical engineering barriers. If fuel cells end up costing 5 or 10 times as much as a comparable internal combustion engine, then real problems will result from an attempt to impose their use on an unwilling public.

My arguments, which you have characterized as "awkward" are merely statements of reality. They are awkward only to those who wish to wave away any real difficulties that stand in the way of their unfounded fantasies. It would be a great folly to allow such people and their half-baked ideas rule the organization of human life.

Blatham,

I was a bit agitated when I wrote the sentence you quoted. Neither Love canal nor tobacco in any form needed environmental zealots to point out or correct. Basic common sense was enough. I don't advocate the abandonment of all regulation or the restoration of lazziez faire capitalism in industry or the marketing of consumer goods. I am concerned, however, about the excesses of single issue environmental zealots who rarely take the trouble to either fully understand what they talk about or to accept responsibility for the often awful side effects of the "remedies" they demand we accept.

The international trade in plutonium to which you refer is, I believe, a part of BNFL's spent nuclear fuel reprocessing program. It yields emission free nuclear power and a substantial reduction in the high level waste that results. It is good.

The following link provides a good insight into the safety of nuclear power. http://www.uic.com.au/nip14.htm c.i.

Claiming that nuclear waste is safe is nonsense. You can only store as much as there is place to store. And the more waste you store, the more radioactive minefields you create for future generations.

Wolf,

Evidently you didn't bother to read the link which Cicerone posted. There is lots of room in Yucca Mountain and enormous potential in the Pacific ocean option. These solutions are feasible with in place and proven technology The emission free power they offer could solve the 'problem' you have described as so urgent. What you have put forward here so far is fantasy that doesn't survive the most elementary engineering scrutiny, and has no potential to meet the urgent requirement you have postulated. You have every right to your illusions if you wish to keep them. Perhaps you really prefer the sense of indignation that comes from the continuing realization that your fantasies will not be fulfilled.

This link provides some info on the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. It also provides resources. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/eesj/casestudies/EESJyuccamt.html
c.i.

Okay, I choose more nuclear plants.

Oh, but I did read it, georgieboy.

My question to you nuclear fans is: is the low probability of an accident or attack on a nuclear power plant satisfying, considering the tremendous impact one such event will have on thousands of square miles of people, natural resources and the future of the area?

Further I would like to know where you plan to put the waste once the oceans' and the deserts' soils have turned into the biggest planetary radioactive minefield in the universe?

And George, all your under-the-belt reactions will not disempower the arguments I bring. Your reaction is that of a bad looser.

Bottomline: renewable energies are the future, you know it, you don't like it.

I wonder why.

By the way, scrat, your new quote applies perfectly to the development and application of nuclear fusion. That was one foolish thing to do. Ask those six-legged horses and cyclopic children from the Chernobyl accident -- which was a minor accident, by the way. 60% more radioactive material could have been released.

Some more facts for you to try to debunk:

[-The nuclear industry told us that Chernobyl had no containment; actually, it had a thousand-ton 'lid', which failed instantly when the accident began. It is unlikely that any containment could withstand the force of the Chernobyl explosion. - Gregori Medvedev, The Truth about Chernobyl, New York, Basic Books, 1991.

-Although Chernobyl was not a worst-case scenario, food more than 1200 miles from Chernobyl was classified as low-level waste and disposed of, exceeding the NRC's 50-mile ingestion pathway radius by 24 times. Some towns as much as 50 miles away were evacuated, and the U.S. State Department advised Americans in the city of Kiev, nearly 80 miles away, to evacuate. - Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

-"...radiation levels in Kiev, 70 miles from Chernobyl, were 80 times the normal background levels more than a week after the accident." according to a Soviet report to the International Atomic Energy Agency. - "Chernobyl fallout worse than previously estimated", New York Times, Aug. 21, 1986.

-At Chernobyl, evacuees were told to leave their possessions behind. "Their abandoned pets in the city and the farm animals in the country soon took over the deserted streets and roads; after a few days they began devouring one another in a radioactive frenzy. Eventually soldiers and hunters were sent in by helicopter to shoot the packs of dogs roaming the streets of Pripyat. Those streets have remained vacant to this day..." - Loren Graham, "The World Held Its Breath", New York Times Book Review, Apr. 7, 1991.

-"Less than three years after the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet weekly Moscow News recently reported that cancer cases have doubled in the Narodichsky region 50 miles west of Chernobyl.... Scientific estimates of future cancer deaths from Chernobyl range from 10,000 to one million." - Helen Caldicott and Norman Solomon, "Decade after TMI, the warnings go unheeded", The Boston Globe, Mar. 27,1989, p. 15.

-The Byelorussian republic has drawn up a five-year plan that could eventually involve the evacuation of more than 100,000 people. ...the closing of 20 large collective farms and evacuation of 170 villages in the Gomel district alone. A minimum of 37 more villages are scheduled to be evacuated in the Gomel district. ... The explosion & fire on April 26, '86 soon led to the uprooting of 115,000 people in the immediate area and in fallout zones. ... The health of more than 100,000 must be monitored for life. ...thyroid diseases [are] suffered by an estimated 10 percent of the children in the area. ... The five year evacuation would cost about $16 billion, more than the 12.8 billion already spent by the Soviet authorities on the Chernobyl disaster. It would close some villages more than 200 miles north of the plant in farm areas around Gomel and Mogilev [about 120 & 180 mi. from the accident, respectively]. ...the new actions were required in part by the central government's adoption last fall of the tighter world standard of the acceptable radiation absorption for humans, no more than 35 mrems, or units of radiation in a 70-year lifetime. - New York Times International, Sept. 9, 1989.

-Realizing they had underestimated the extent of the Chernobyl accident, Soviet authorities disclosed on April 23, 1990 that:

* - "radioactive dust that has piled up in the 20-mile danger zone around the plant will take decades to remove and will have to be processed by a special complex that has not been built....

* - Thirty-two districts of six regions of the republic are affected by radiation to varying degrees; nearly 60,000 people live in the area that is strictly monitored...

* - 90,000 people have been moved from their homes in addition to the 100,000 who were taken out of the 20-mile zone a few days after the disaster....

* - The accident contaminated 12.4 million acres of land in the Ukraine..."

* - In addition, 20% of the neighboring Byelorussian republic was radiated. - Susan Cornwell, "Soviets to evacuate 14,000 more from Chernobyl region",Boston Globe, Apr. 24, 1990.

-A study by a Soviet nuclear-industry economist found the Chernobyl accident was "the biggest socio-economic cataclysm in (peacetime) history", and the Soviet Union may have been better off if it had never begun building nuclear reactors in the first place, as the accident's costs exceed the total contribution of the country's nuclear industry by several times. (my bolds) - Richard Hudson, "Cost of Chernobyl Disaster Soars in Study", Wall Street Journal, March 29, 1990 (report on study by Yuri Koryakin, chief economist of the Development Institute of Power Engineering, which designed the Chernobyl reactor).

-In a letter published today in Nature, a British science journal, Dr. Vasily S. Kazakov of the Belarus Ministry of Health in Minsk and his colleagues say that the thyroid cancer rates in the region most heavily irradiated began to soar in 1990. In Gomel, the most contaminated region studied, there used to be just one or two cases of thyroid children a year. Now, Dr. Kazakov and his colleagues find, there were 38 cases in 1991 alone. In six regions of Belarus and the city of Minsk, the investigators found 131 cases of thyroid cancer in young children, some of whom were still in the womb when the Chernobyl accident occurred. Because there have been previous false alarms and unsubstantiated reports of cancers in people living downwind of the Chernobyl plant, the World Health Organization sent a team of scientists to Minsk to verify the reports. In an accompanying letter in Nature today, they confirmed Dr. Kazakov's results.

-The World Health Organization group wrote, 'We believe that the experience in Belarus suggests that the consequences to the human thyroid, especially in fetuses and young children, of the carcinogenic effects of radioactive fallout is much greater than previously thought.'" - Gina Kolata, "A cancer legacy from Chernobyl", New York Times, Sept. 3, 1992.
"Most severely affected was the Gomel region, hit first by the radiation: the thyroid cancer rate there is now about 80 times the world average." - Time magazine, 9/14/92

-"The Soviet government, allocating $26 billion in additional funds to help the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster four years ago, acknowledged yesterday that thousands upon thousands of people are still living in areas dangerously contaminated by radioactive fallout, and even more are eating food grown in those areas. The emergency program focused on protecting the safety and health of those in the affected areas, as many as 3 to 4 million people, the official news agency Tass reported." - Cape Cod Times, Apr. 23, 1990.

-Chernobyl released 50 million curies of long-lived radioisotopes. Chernobyl released 1/6 to 1/10th the cesium 137 which was released by all atmospheric weapons testing in man's history. Chernobyl is expected to cause between 10,000 and 1,000,000 cancers. The Fallout from Chernobyl, Worldwatch Paper #75

-135,000 people were evacuated from 179 villages. 20% of the inventory of iodine and 10-20% of the cesium escaped. --National Geographic, April, 1989

-Total cost of the accident is now estimated at $14 billion, nearly 3 times the original estimate. Between 5/87 and 1/88, 6 Russian nuclear power plants were cancelled. -World Watch, 7/88

-According to an article in the July, '89 issue of MIT's "Technology Review" magazine, the Russian reactor at Chernobyl suffered 2 explosions within 4 seconds of the reactor's being at nearly 0 power output. The first brought the power to 50 to 100 times the maximum rated capacity and the second "...almost certainly was a full-fledged nuclear explosion" took the reactor to 400 to 500 times its normal maximum power. According to the article, a study group from the US Dept. of Energy was "quite certain that the second explosion was a pure nuclear excursion" which "blew parts of its core into the upper atmosphere."

-"[Chernobyl's] thousand-ton cover plate was propelled upward, causing the roof of the reactor building to collapse." - Dr. Robert Peter Gale

-Forest fires in the region around Chernobyl concentrated already high levels of radioactivity by about 400 times, and caused further spreading of the radioactivity. - Reuters, 8/6/92]

http://users.rcn.com/agnews/nf/ChernobylOverview.htm

Wolf,

You are beating a dead horse. No one advocates the construction or operation of any graphite-moderated reactors of the type involved in the Chernyobl accident. They are intrinsically more dangerous than the pressurized water, boiling water, and gas cooled reactors in use in the West and now Russia as well. The great differences in the risks associated with them and those of more modern reactors was well described in the link which Cicerone provided.

We now have almost thirty years of performance data from the very wide scale operation of more modern reactors producing 70% of the electrical power consumed in France, 50% in Germany and England and 20%-30% in other countries including the United States, Sweden, Spain and others. This is an enormous baseline spanning the useful life of this generation of plants throughout the developed world. The industrial safety and public health impact of these plants is less, by an order of magnitude, than that from any other source of power, renewables included.

A good deal of the Chernobyl "data"you quoted was from advocacy groups and involved either direct distortion of the facts or false inference through the use of facts taken out of their right context. This is particularly true of the so called statistics you cited concerning cancers, the details of the explosions, and the radioactivity released. To illustrate; the added radiation dose one gets from moving from New York or Los Angeles to Vail or Aspen Colorado exceeds the legally established Federal limits for radiation workers by a wide margin - a result of the increased exposure to cosmic radiation at higher altitudes. It is true, but there is no measurable health impact as a result. Similarly cancer rates for radiation workers in the United States have been consistently less than those of the general public for many years. (It doesn't mean that working in a nuclear plant prevents cancer - only that people who work tend to be healthier than the general public.)

You must be joking. I can't even start to debate this. Thousands of tons of nuclear waste and the risk of an accident that could wipe out the life in an entire state, and you want me to believe that energy from nuclear power plants is safer than windmill parks?

Wolf,

Evidently you didn't read the data in Cicerone's link. There was no specific historical data in it for windmills, but there was for every other category. Nuclear was by an order of magnitude lower than any other source. The data was based on the experience of several decades of operation of all sources. Clealy you refuse to read or even think about the storage problem for high and low level waste. Given that, there is little merit in the attempt to inform or persuade you and, as a result, little merit in seriously considering your opinions.

wolf, On this issue, I must agree with george; you keep crying about the 'dangers,' but offer nothing to support it except your personal bias. We can talk about Chernobyl until hell freezes over, but we can also talk about Nagasaki and Hiroshima without much success, because they are what happened in the past. The advances in nuclear power technology during the past 30 to 60 years have been phenomenal. Safety concerns have always been number one. If we look at the different sources of energy production, nuclear has it won by a million miles. Balance that to the idea of what other dangers lurk in our lives. Driving down the street in your own car is more dangerous than most other activity in our lives. c.i.

an interesting article



brought to my attention by Neal Boortz who had this to say about it....

From the SciAm article:



Malcolm Hughes of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona:



In the research of tree-rings, I hope even conservative zealots will put their money on a tree-ring specialist and not on two astrophysicists.

Furthermore, mr. georgieboy, all your smart talk about nuclear safety can be reduced to the status of political spin. Wind and solar energy is more safe and sound than nuclear energy. It's also much cheaper in construction costs. Therefore it should be promoted.

What?

Apparently Wolf believes a tree ring specialist (whom he doesn't know) is NECESSARILY a better judge of the effects of an observed solar radiation phenomenon than are two astrophysicists (whom he also doesn't know). What does this tell us about his objectivity and his dispassionate quest for the truth?

All of this merely confirms that, amidst all the many physical factors competing to affect the thermal balance of the earth's atmosphere, we cannot determine what the net effect of accumulating greenhouse gasses might be, or how the terrestrial system might act to mitigate any excursions that may result.

Wolf would rather cling to his irrational belief that the sky is falling in (or getting hotter).

ROFLMAO! Um, can you send me a link to a photo of one of those six legged horses or cyclopic children? (Maybe one of a cyclopic child riding on a six legged horse?) I want to have note cards printed.

But beneath the absurdity of your clearly heart-felt albeit irrational diatribe there is an important and valid point: Nuclear power is too dangerous to be undertaken in a haphazard way. (Pointing to Chernobyl as proof that nuclear power is unsafe is like pointing at Colin Ferguson to prove that guns are unsafe. The fact is that both are unsafe when placed in the wrong hands.)