Glowing Bright Green?

November 10, 2005 7:38 AM

The latest in something of a trend, left-leaning LA Weekly has warmed to nuclear power. Earlier this year, Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore endorsed it as well (along with such practices as salmon farming). The idea that Nuclear is green has appeared in the pages of the New York Times, with (both subscriber only, sorry) Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof making the case back in March and April. They've encountered some resistance, but it seems to be a growing position. (Of course, there are some people who aren't being asked to join the club.) Is this a "Greenwashing" or a legitimate change in the environmental movement?
posted by graymouser (77 comments total)

Why do you characterize the LA Weekly as left-leaning? Are there ANY left-leaning papers in the US?
posted by nofundy at 7:40 AM on November 10, 2005

I've heard rumours that the environmental lobby was going to do an about face on this. Lesser of two evils, I guess.
posted by thejimp at 7:41 AM on November 10, 2005

I worked at a nuclear plant for a time working on the control computer systems. One day my supervisor took me for a tour around the waste storage area. I was actually quite impressed that the entire waste output of the plant's 20 year lifespan could be housed in a relatively small fenced-in area, compared with the tonnes of emissions that coal and other plants just throw into the air each year.

The one creepy part was that it was a slightly drizzly day, but some of the containers were completely dry because they were warm enough to evaporate the water droplets that hit them. (Not hot, just warm to the touch.)

Oh, and my dosage results showed no higher than normal exposure to radiation even after that and after working in the plant for 8 months.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:43 AM on November 10, 2005

nofundy:Why do you characterize the LA Weekly as left-leaning? Are there ANY left-leaning papers in the US?

I'm not sure I quite get this criticism; LA Weekly has a history of going toward the Left; and its recent coverage of the 2005 special election seems pretty undisputedly on the left. I included the descriptor because my point was to note pretty definitively that it isn't just the right wing that is talking up nuclear power plants these days.
posted by graymouser at 7:44 AM on November 10, 2005

Nuclear power has been terribly demonized, but environmentalists should love it. It does almost no damage to the environment at all, unlike fossil fuels, which appear likely to change the climate on Earth and wipe out thousands (millions?) of species.

Humans are uniquely susceptible to radioactivity. Most of the rest of Nature is not; they have much better cell repair mechanisms than we do. (that's also why we get cancer so much and most animals don't.)

If we make a mistake with nuclear power, we could irradiate a large area for many generations. But for the most part, that doesn't matter to any species but humans. Bikini Atoll, which was the site of many bomb tests, is now a lush, healthy tropical paradise. And a lot of the reason it IS a lush tropical paradise is because humans can't live there. It's an environmentalist's dream.... unspoiled and lovely.

Yes, leftover waste from reactors is powerfully enough radioactive to be toxic to humans for a very long time. (and that stuff is nasty enough that it's probably dangerous to most animals too.) But it can be concentrated into a small geographic area. Fossil fuels damage everything at once... at least with nuclear power and the resultant waste products, we can quantify and measure the damage pretty darn well.

It's something we can deal with, in other words, and it's quite apparent that global warming from the use of fossil fuels is NOT.
posted by Malor at 7:51 AM on November 10, 2005

Yeah, I've never understood why environmentalists are opposed to Nuclear power. it's the only possible energy system we could use that doesn't cause much pollution.

It seems more like irrational fear then anything else.
posted by delmoi at 7:53 AM on November 10, 2005

A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen.

The Daniels pile, as the concept was called, was taken seriously enough that Oak Ridge National Laboratory commissioned Monsanto to design a working version in 1945. Before it could be built, though, a bright Annapolis graduate named Hyman Rickover "sailed in with the Navy," as Daniels later put it, and the competing idea of building a rod-fueled, water-cooled reactor to power submarines. With US Navy money backing the new design, the pebble bed fell by the wayside, and Daniels returned to the University of Wisconsin. By the time of his death in 1972, he was known as a pioneer of - irony alert - solar power. Indeed, the International Solar Energy Society's biennial award bears his name.
posted by petebest at 7:55 AM on November 10, 2005

I used to be a big booster of nuclear power. I still think the usual arguments for operational risk and long-term storage risk are valid. The counter-arguments I've seen over the years mostly range from misinformed to disingenuous. Anti-nuclear activists tended to engage in lots of magical thinking and vague pseudo-scientific babbling, and showed little interest in really understanding basic concepts like half-life.

That said, I came to believe long ago that nuclear power is non-viable for one simple reason: No one will take the waste. That's one counter-argument that hasn't been countered.

It's really simple. Space Coyote's observations aside, you can't just leave it at the plants; it's too dangerous there, both in terms of its potential for accidental and intentional contamination. You've got to store it somewhere secure, and no one is willing to be that place.

NIMBY has been a simple and astoundingly effective blocking technique for the anti-nuclear movement.
posted by lodurr at 7:55 AM on November 10, 2005

Petebest: I talked to my father and eldest brother about those rubble-bed reactor concepts. They agreed that they're great designs, but there's a big problem: Helium supplies are problematically finite. You'd really need to rework the design to use another heat transfer medium.
posted by lodurr at 7:57 AM on November 10, 2005

... sorry, "pebble bed" ...
posted by lodurr at 7:58 AM on November 10, 2005

That said, I came to believe long ago that nuclear power is non-viable for one simple reason: No one will take the waste. That's one counter-argument that hasn't been countered.

What about Yucca mountan? I know the people in (navada, right?) don't want it, but they don't really have a choice.
posted by delmoi at 7:59 AM on November 10, 2005

lodurr - the answer to that is that nuclear waste could easily be re-processed into more fuel rods and used again and again. The problem with this is that it eventually produces weapons grade plutonium, which is the only reason it isn't being done. I'm of the opinion that the U.S. should be capable of guarding such materials within its own borders, and that the risk is thus worth the payoff, but that's a minority opinion.
posted by kavasa at 8:00 AM on November 10, 2005

Aside from the issue of waste, which I agree trumps the pro arguments, one of my problems with nuclear power is the high human cost of uranium mining, which I think is overlooked in the consideration of nuclear as a power source. It's not like the stuff, a, is not hazardous for humans to be around, b, is safe or easy to extract, and c, is just lying around on the ground to be picked up. Until the waste and human issues are cleared up, I am personally opposed to nuclear power, but I do think the debate needs to happen publicly.
posted by graymouser at 8:01 AM on November 10, 2005

We will have an energy crisis if we don't find some way of replacing fossil fuels. Nuclear power seems like the logical step.
posted by j-urb at 8:08 AM on November 10, 2005

All the arguments for how compact a nuclear pile and its post-reaction waste is conveniently elide over the *massive* and protracted pre-processing that must be performed to concentrate the reactor-grade material. This consumes vast amounts of water and outputs vast amounts of low-level waste.

And let's not get into the issue of plutonium reprocessing!

There really is no such thing as a free lunch.
posted by meehawl at 8:08 AM on November 10, 2005

As a former NRC inspection team member, my position is that people don't watch black and white movies anymore, particularly those that portrayed high-energy radioactivity as producing huge monsters bent on destroying the world.
posted by mischief at 8:18 AM on November 10, 2005

That first link would make a great book.
posted by xowie at 8:22 AM on November 10, 2005

I think the fear is based on lowest bidder construction contracts, cronyism and lax safety standards, I think considering that modern American capitalism tends towards quick profit now cut corners thinking rather than how do we make damn sure we have a sustainable and safe as possible standard for how we do business, that is a fairly rational fear.*

That having been said, technically and practically nuclear power has to be considered and probably adopted on a wider scale. I guess the Pebble Bed jams.

Best of all would be geographically apropriate energy sources, Solar in the desert, Hydro by the waterfall and so on. This also conflicts with for profit massive energy trading concerns and so on.



*plus the human costs, plus the preprocessing.
posted by Divine_Wino at 8:27 AM on November 10, 2005

Waste disposal is my big deal-breaker when it comes to nuke power.
Could a sufficiently powerful onsite Coilgun be useful here? Simply launch the waste in to the sun. When might we see sufficient advances in this technology to make the notion feasable?
posted by Scoo at 8:29 AM on November 10, 2005

I've always found the Coilgun to be an intriguing technology....as long as it doesn't backfire that nuclear waste. ;-)

This is one reason why NASA stopped launching payloads with nuclear reactors following the Challenger accident in 1986: a fear that an aborted/destroyed launch vehicle would spray nuclear waste along the Florida coast.

Coilgun is a great idea - but again, NIMBY.
posted by tgrundke at 8:37 AM on November 10, 2005

What worries me about nuclear power plant operation isn't the science or engineering, it's the management. I trust scientists and engineers to run a plant safely, but I don't have much faith that cost-cutting management won't cut corners on safety precautions until another accident happens. Maybe pebble-bed reactors will solve this problem. They still leave waste products.

Having said that, I think a move to nuclear power is inevitable. There's simply too much demand for energy, and climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions is becoming a real concern. None of the other energy alternatives seem to have the potential to replace fossil fuels.
posted by Loudmax at 8:38 AM on November 10, 2005

2 fun facts from a fascinating American Herititage article [1]on the early history of nuclear power in the US:

"The fissioning of one uranium atom, minuscule though it is, produces enough energy to make a grain of sand visibly jump."

"In 1953 U.S. atomic energy facilities busy at weaponry consumed no less than 2.5 per cent of the total national electricity supply. "

[1] I have no idea what the scholarly or political reputation of this magazine is.
posted by allan at 8:38 AM on November 10, 2005

has any of you actually read the LA weekly article?
it's not about warming up to nuclear power, but rather weighing the pros and cons with an open mind.
i've met judith lewis and know that she is a most thorough reporter and takes her journalistic responsibilty for backed up research very seriously.
hence her piece gives good perspective from all sides.
this is the second, concluding part of it.
posted by threehundredandsixty at 8:44 AM on November 10, 2005

...the answer to that is that nuclear waste could easily be re-processed into more fuel rods and used again and again.

NIMBY still applies.

The real obstacle remains NIMBY, which in turn is fueled by a variety of magical thinkings. Until then, it's all spitting into the wind.

Also, debates about energy solutions tend to engage what I could call a "single solution" fallacy: They look at solutions in isolation. For example, nuke advocates used to ridicule solar solutions by doing calculations to show that it would take an area the size of Montana (or Texas or wherever) to provide for energy needs using photoelectric cells. Might be true, but doesn't make photoelectrics irrelevant, and misses the deeper point: If you assume that nothing changes about how how we use energy, then you are much more limited in your solution set.

If we can drastically reduce power consumption at the nodes, then we start to see ways that we can make significant contributions to the net power consumption from localized generation methods, like bioelectrics, wind, or even photoelectrics. I'd argue that the biggest waste factor is in the distribution: 1) We can make huge gains by increasing the efficiency of distribuiton; 2) the less we distribute, the less we lose through distribuiton. But power companies have little incentive for (1) and none for (2).
posted by lodurr at 8:53 AM on November 10, 2005

There's an ongoing debate in the UK over the potential future of nuclear energy. It's quite possible there will be a significant development with regard to nuclear in the UK in the very near future.
The last UK energy paper in 2003 suggested that the nuclear option should be kept open, should it be required for the future. This is likely to imply some research spending and training, but given the long lead-in time for nuclear plant (10+ years) some statement will be required soon. There are 2 major drivers for nuclear in the UK, firstly the environment and the wish for the UK to stay on track for its greenhouse gas emissions reductions and secondly, the issue of security of supply.

With regard to the environment the UK is among a very small group of Western countries that have been on track to hit it 2012 Kyoto targets, it is now slipping away from this as emission begin to increase again and move away from year on year targets. Nuclear may offer a way to reduce this at the national level. However, controversy remains over the level of greenhouse gas emissions that nuclear is responsible for. While not directly comparable with emission levels from coal and other fossil fuel sources, uranium mining/extraction process still implies significant levels of CO2 and other gaseous emission. An increasing global demand for nuclear power is likely to mean an increasing focus on less concentrated ores and a corresponding increase in GHG emissions linked to their exploitation.

The second reason for an increased focus on nuclear in the UK is that of security of supply. Since the discovery of North Sea Oil and Gas the UK has been a net exporter of both oil and gas, this year will sea us become a net gas importer, next year will probably see us become a net oil importer. Our main sources of oil are the middle east, out main sources of gas will come from the ex-soviet states, neither of these are desperately stable and the UK is at the end of a long pipeline with a lot of demand along the way. There have been a number of scare stories that the Uk may have blackouts this winter (or next) due to the very low amounts of gas that it currently has in storage. Nuclear is seen as an option for increasing domestic generation.

The other side of the energy security issue in the UK is that since privatisation of the electricity sector in 1990 prices for electricity have fallen (until the last few years anyway) and this has led to the closing down or mothballing of a number of power stations. As with all western countries, the UK has more capacity than is required to meet demand at any point. This allows for the comparatively large amount of time that all generators spend off line for maintenance, etc. Before privatisation the UK had around 33% more available capacity than the peak demand. This fell to 25% and is currently heading below 20%. Nuclear accounts for around 25% of all electricity currently supplied in the UK. If all of this power were to go off line (for financial reason for example, as almost happened 3 years ago) then severe blackouts would result. For this reason the Government is effectively compelled to support the existing nuclear sector. Blackouts would be extremely damaging politically. The potential for blackouts now however appears to be being used to drive the cause of new capacity that will not be in place for at least a decade - disingenuous at best. The reality is that the need for government to step in and rescue the nuclear sector is actually an argument against new nuclear capacity. The electricity sector in the UK is totally predicated on competition to sell electricity. Privately owned companies compete to produce, sell, buy and supply power with the minimum of regulatory interference in order to provide it as cheaply as possible. Companies that fail impact only on their shareholders. The nuclear sector in the UK is unlikely to attract private finance without government support, meaning interference with the market that would not be allowed to competitors. Aid to the nuclear sector would effectively contradict the position of the Government (and the current opposition) regarding the application of the free market. further, should finance be secured, it is not the private shareholder who bears all of the the risk of investment. The long-term nature of the decommissioning process for nuclear power plants can be in excess of 100 years. If the company with responsibility for the nuclear plant goes out of business before this period is up it will fall to the taxpayer to take on the significant debt associated with the remediation process. Essentially, the taxpayer (not the consumer or shareholder) bears a considerable part of the risk associated with nuclear development, and may bear a considerable part of the cost. This is not the case (or to anywhere near the same extent) with any other operational energy technology.

To sum up, the case against nuclear technology does not have to depend on environmental reasons, though there are certainly valid ones - there are significant financial reasons why nuclear is not the technology that we should depend on in the future.

NIMBY has been a simple and astoundingly effective blocking technique for the anti-nuclear movement.

And for renewables too. In some places (e.g. California), it's blocked everything, with the result that no new power plants got built and eventually demand outstripped supply with the result that consumers got screwed.
posted by biffa at 8:55 AM on November 10, 2005

It's the massive fossil-based infrastructure that nuclear fuel processing requires that's my major beef with it. That, and quotes like this:

[Stewart] Brand has enormous faith in future engineering and human invention

We don't need things that might work in the future. We need things that work now.
posted by scruss at 9:03 AM on November 10, 2005

Well, I grew up in Southern Ontario east of Toronto, with a nuclear plant a few miles to the east and another nuclear plant a few miles to the west. I suppose the possibility of a catastrophic event at these plants should have scared me, especially since investigative reports from the local media showed that they were not as safe as they should have been.

But I have felt far more effects from the Ohio coal plants. As anyone in Southern Ontario with respiratory problems knows, Southern Ontario is right in the middle of what my doctor refers to as the "Ohio Smog Belt". It means that during the summer I can't exercise outside and I have to carry an inhaler. Toronto of course adds its fair share of pollutants to the mix but I am told the Ohio coal plants are by far the biggest contributor.

Energy has to come from somewhere. I'd take nuclear over coal any day.
posted by PercussivePaul at 9:04 AM on November 10, 2005

Nuclear is, alas, our only hope of keeping our society at the level it is at. We, quite simply, cannot continue to burn other fuels at the levels we are on and not make the planet uninhabitable, that leaves Solar, Geo, and Nuclear Power.

Solar isn't anywhere near workable on large scales. Geothermal does work, but doesn't scale. Geo-hydraulic works, is devastating to the lands around it, and once again, doesn't scale -- there are only so many canyons, and most of the big ones are already dammed. Geo-wind isn't cost effective, and nobody knows the effect of what producing 10% of a nation's power via wind would be, but I'm betting it wouldn't be good. Heck, enough wind power, you start changing weather patterns.

Nuclear is the only tech we have now that 1) can generate the loads we need 2) without destroying the biosphere and 3) without taking up huge fractions of land to support it.

Yes, the waste is an issue. But the waste from coal and oil is what is currently killiing the planet, and burning coal release a goodly amount of radioactive material (radon.) Coal is the great death trap -- easy to get, plentiful, and packs enough carbon to turn Earth into Venus, and as oil gets rarer and rarer, people are going to start looking at burning coal and cooking coal into oil.

Do you honestly think anybody in the industrial worlds will vote themselves into scarcity if burning coal means they don't have to? We cannot leave that as the last choice, because we will take it, and it will destroy the planet.

Yes, conservation would be great. If we could reduce the energy requirements of our civilization by, say, 90%, we could go it on solar, wind and geothermal. Guess what? That isn't happening, short of 90% of the population dying.

So. We either generate most-to-all of our electical power by nuclear means -- even the old, dangerous, water-cooled rod reactors, which we know work and we know scale (Pebble bed works in small reactors. Scale has never been tested. The helium issue is noted above. See also "CANDU" for another tech, with similar issues>) -- or we keep burning oil and coal in greater amounts. Except, of course, we're running out of oil. That means we burn coal in greater amounts to feed the grid -- and the carbon load on the atmosphere continues to increase, and the temps rise, and the seas rise, then suddenly, hey, we aren't using so much power anymore, as *billions* die, and the next mass extinction really gets going.

That's why Greenpeace has changed its position on nuclear power. Society insists on power, and lots of it, and there isn't an alternative that will both provide it and do less harm than nuclear.

Personally, I think we're fucked.
posted by eriko at 9:08 AM on November 10, 2005

"has any of you actually read the LA weekly article?"

Best joke I've read all day!!!
posted by mischief at 9:12 AM on November 10, 2005

As with all western countries, the UK has more capacity than is required to meet demand at any point.

Uh, no... not all western countries. In Ontario, we sometimes have to import electricity and after 2006, we expect to not have sufficient generating capacity to meet peak demand. [ECSTF Final Report]. Many Canadian provinces & US States rely on the few areas in the US & Canada that can generate a lot of cheap hydroelectricity (or US states where there's still lots of cheap coal, which of course has some unpleasant side-effects).

Many parts of Canada run on the ragged edge of meeting peak demand in the summer and most new power generation plants burn natural gas, which isn't as cheap as it used to be.

We have three nuclear plants in Ontario and as much as I like them, waste isn't their biggest issue. They have gigantic up-front capital costs and it's hard to predict how long they'll last. Planners seem to project 20 to 50-year lifespands for nuclear plants, but it only takes one bad valve to shut the whole thing down. Yes, the fuel is cheap, but the system complexity is very high, making them a pain.

As much as I loathe to see the government try to solve electricity problems by burning more natural gas, the economics of nuclear reactors isn't a lot better.
posted by GuyZero at 9:12 AM on November 10, 2005

Thank you for the explanation graymouser. My question wasn't intended as a criticism of your post, just curious.
posted by nofundy at 9:22 AM on November 10, 2005

Geothermal does work, but doesn't scale.

Could you elaborate? I've always been curious as to why geothermal isn't considered a more viable alternative... Lots and lots of energy, just sitting underneath us. I understand that there must be some (seemingly, at least) unsolvable engineering problem in harnessing it, but I don't know what it is.
posted by COBRA! at 9:24 AM on November 10, 2005

I don't have an opinion about nuclear power, but really, claiming that Patrick Moore has any connection to environmentalists is just silly. The man's been an anti-environment corporate shill for nearly two decades.
posted by cmonkey at 9:37 AM on November 10, 2005

I don't see any reason we can't just launch nuclear waste into the sun. :)
posted by linux at 9:45 AM on November 10, 2005

Patrick Moore is a complete and utter sellout and has become the most despicable shill for RapeBritishColumbia Ltd.

just sayin'
posted by Rumple at 9:48 AM on November 10, 2005

Could you elaborate? I've always been curious as to why geothermal isn't considered a more viable alternative... Lots and lots of energy, just sitting underneath us. I understand that there must be some (seemingly, at least) unsolvable engineering problem in harnessing it, but I don't know what it is.

Simply, it depends on the temperatures available and the depth of the resource. Accessibility will of course play a part, so geological stability, available engineering etc need to be taken into account. In Iceland (which is probably most advanced at geothermal exploitation) a resource has to be pretty hot to be useful for electrical generation (>200C at 1000m), a bit less hot for use in meeting heating needs (~150C at 1000m). Not everywhere has that kind of resource, even in Iceland it is only the parts of the country lying on the mid-atlantic fault that have it, i.e. the ones that have the resource closest to the surface. Geothermal isn't always predictable/reliable in terms of energy output either. It's not renewable in the same sense as wind/wave etc. Since they started opening up wells in Iceland some have stopped producing energy and being abandoned, some have increased their output - for reasons as yet unexplained.
posted by biffa at 9:48 AM on November 10, 2005

Is this a "Greenwashing"

yep.

enough wind power, you start changing weather patterns.

nope.
posted by 3.2.3 at 9:55 AM on November 10, 2005

I understand that there must be some (seemingly, at least) unsolvable engineering problem in harnessing it, but I don't know what it is.

No expert here, but I repeatedly hear corrosion brought up as a major issue - and since geothermal would seem to involve metal parts in an environment with a lot of hot water and salts, it seems plausible enough.

My own opinion on this is that fission power via pebble bed reactors should simply be seen as a stopgap until fusion. We need something to act as a backbone for our energy production (that is, a core source outside of solar/hydro/tidal/wind/geothermal) until we get there. Given the choice between rendering a cubic kilometer under the Yucca mountains uninhabitable for functionally eternity or choking to death on the byproducts of fossil fuels while drowning in melting glaciers . . . sucks to be you, anaerobic bacteria.

The preprocessing is a bitch but compared to what we've got now it just doesn't seem like there's much of a choice to be made here, you know?
posted by Ryvar at 9:56 AM on November 10, 2005

Why is the US so focussed on putting all the nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, when most of the plants are on the other side of the country?
posted by biffa at 10:08 AM on November 10, 2005

Sorry to be going on in this thread, but quite a big new story for renewable energy has just broken: The UK government has committed to a target of 5% of all fuel sold on forecourts in the UK to come from renewable sources by 2010. The conditions for setting a Renewables Transport Fuel Obligation were laid down in the 2004 Energy Act but with no commitment for policy change. This announcement may have significant implications for fuel use in the UK.
posted by biffa at 10:19 AM on November 10, 2005

The major input to the nuclear fuel cycle is energy to do the initial isotopic separation. It still consumes fossil fuel, just less of it. Fuel cycles can be tuned to minimize end high-level waste, but the reprocessing imposes a considerable transaction cost on moving from one stage of the cycle to another. It could be managed better than in the past -- given all the flap about dirty bombs, the biggest dirty bomb ever set off was Hanford. It just went off real slow.

Most of the people I've known who've worked at Hanford end up horrified by what's still going down.

OTOH, the atmosphere is already wrecked, so damage control is called for. Boiling all the oil executives down for glue would be a good start. So would a genocidal war of extermination against Texas.
posted by warbaby at 10:26 AM on November 10, 2005

The kicker for me is this: Ask a reactor operator just what wastes his plant produced, where they are now, and what impact they've had - he can give you an exact answer. Try asking the same thing of any fossil plant operator. You'll find they release hundreds of tons of pollutants into the biosphere, and have no idea where they end up.

The problem of "internalizing" the environmental impact of any activity is difficult. But I encourage you to visit a nuclear waste storage facility. When you see just how small twenty years of generating enough power to drive a city can be, you'll be convinced Nuclear offers the only viable approach to this ideal.

Renewable sources are always brought out in these discussions as a counterpoint, and so they should be. But on the whole, there just isn't a big (and dense) enough source of renewable energy to generate the amount of electricity we use. So while I whole heartedly endorse more investment in wind power (for instance, as it's the most viable), and am willing to pay for the more expensive energy, I realize that it won't ever meet all of our needs.

So given all the FREAKY scenarios I've read about the impact of global warming, and the knowledge that wind won't fix it, I strongly endorse a major shift from fossil power to nuclear.
posted by Popular Ethics at 10:27 AM on November 10, 2005

It's worth remembering that France generates ~80% of its power from fission. This is largely a result of policy decisions taken during the 1970s, while most other industrialised economies were rejecting or stalling fission. France also reprocesses much of its fuel, as well as exporting fission fuel. That's one reason, I guess, why French politicians can adopt a more hands-off approach to expansionism and power projection within the Middle East.
posted by meehawl at 10:30 AM on November 10, 2005

Waste disposal is my big deal-breaker when it comes to nuke power.

Why?

What worries me about nuclear power plant operation isn't the science or engineering, it's the management. I trust scientists and engineers to run a plant safely, but I don't have much faith that cost-cutting management won't cut corners on safety precautions until another accident happens.

First of all it's possible to build nuclear reactors that cannot melt down, for example, a design the rods are held up by a magnetic field. If the rods get to hot, they'll lose their magnetic 'charge' and drop back down.

Or the pebble bed reactors talked about already.

If you trust the engineers, then plants can be made with no corners to cut. Even the worst driver can't accidentally make their car fly off into space


Why is the US so focussed on putting all the nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, when most of the plants are on the other side of the country?

Probably because most of the people are on the other side of the country...
posted by delmoi at 10:31 AM on November 10, 2005

I've always thought it was interesting that, of all countries, France has embraced nuclear power wholeheartedly, going so far as to generate 76% of their electricity that way. Seems to be working out pretty well for them, more or less.
posted by afroblanca at 10:36 AM on November 10, 2005

2) the less we distribute, the less we lose through distribuiton. But power companies have little incentive for (1) and none for (2).


Power companies have incentive for less distribution losses. I don't know the details very well (or at all), but when the payment is calculated it includes a correction for losses. Look at this map. The L is the correction for losses (which is positive sometimes, but I don't know why.)

I know a tiny bit more about the C, which is the correction for congestion. Basically if you make power in NYC as opposed to outside it it's more valuable since the transmission lines into NYC are pretty "congested." On a heavy day Long Island has enormous congestion bonuses because it's even harder to bring power down from upstate, through NYC, and into LI.

As a point of interest, on a hot summer day those prices can hit $900+.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:02 AM on November 10, 2005

The problem of "internalizing" the environmental impact of any activity is difficult. But I encourage you to visit a nuclear waste storage facility. When you see just how small twenty years of generating enough power to drive a city can be, you'll be convinced Nuclear offers the only viable approach to this ideal.

Except that that isn't the total. It doesn't account for the mining impacts. Also, are you sure it isn't just the high level waste, does it include the middle and low level wastes. There have been too many instances of nuclear power stations releasing contaminated water into the Irish Sea for me to think there's only the amount of waste you suggest. Plus that doesn't account for the fact that the reactor itself is highly irradiated and the site will have to be sterilised for future use for an extended and costly period after generation.

Renewable sources are always brought out in these discussions as a counterpoint, and so they should be. But on the whole, there just isn't a big (and dense) enough source of renewable energy to generate the amount of electricity we use. So while I whole heartedly endorse more investment in wind power (for instance, as it's the most viable), and am willing to pay for the more expensive energy, I realize that it won't ever meet all of our needs.

Dense in that they don't produce enough high voltage power? Biomass burners can produce high voltage, firm electricity to order. Bigger wind turbines produce at high voltage. Most of the electricity we use (and certainly the stuff you use at home) isn't high voltage though and there's no reason it ever should be. Producing it where you are going to use it is more efficient, entailing less costs for both losses and thus fuel and reduced need for capital investment in infrastructure. Distributed generation may prove to be a valid alternative to the traditional centralised model and it is unwise to insist on the current paradigm without its proper consideration.
posted by biffa at 11:14 AM on November 10, 2005

To clarify my previous comment, it's not really so much that power companies care / don't care about transmission losses. It partly depends on what you mean by a power company. Some of them just own plants and can't do anything about the transmission system, which might be owned by an entirely separate entity that just does transmission. Some other company might handle the distribution. So some of them can care, others can't, but in general there's an incentive to localize production and consumption - e.g. building a power plant in NYC will earn you more than building one in Bumblefuck. Economies of scale balance this so that there's incentive to have a few big power plants in NYC rather than a little generator on top of every apartment.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 11:26 AM on November 10, 2005

The LA Weekly *is* left-leaning in some respects. But the story does not entirely "warm" to nuclear power. Not really. Not at all.
posted by judlew at 11:38 AM on November 10, 2005

James Lovelock (of Gaia Theory fame) also advocates it

(Don't blame me for the url, I googled 'lovelock' and found the thread here.)
posted by homunculus at 12:19 PM on November 10, 2005

it.
posted by homunculus at 12:20 PM on November 10, 2005

A simple solution to the NIMBY problem for nuclear waste disposal: put it in ANWR!
posted by kindall at 12:25 PM on November 10, 2005

Patrick Moore has endorsed nuclear power for years, and this, along with his enthusiasm for salmon farming (which may or not be the most "green" activity ever) is what drove a big fat ugly wedge between him and Greenpeace.

I'd say that if it weren't for the pesky waste problem, I'd be a huge advocate of nuclear waste. If we could just put a bit more research into getting rid of it when we're done (hint: depleted uranium bullets not perhaps the best way to go), then perhaps it'd have legs.

And also, what about fusion, people? I know cold fusion is impossible, but what about lukewarm fusion? Or even fairly warm fusion?
posted by Deathalicious at 12:45 PM on November 10, 2005

s/nuclear waste/nuclear energy

Thanks.
posted by Deathalicious at 12:45 PM on November 10, 2005

It's got to be better than coal.
posted by dilettante at 2:03 PM on November 10, 2005

biffa: Plus that doesn't account for the fact that the reactor itself is highly irradiated and the site will have to be sterilised for future use for an extended and costly period after generation.

I didn't mean to suggest that the nuclear industry has everything internalized (otherwise you'd have to include the pollution of the employees' drive to work), but that the externals are orders of magnitude smaller than any other generating technology of the same scale. The reason you know about releases to the North Sea is that the discharges were accounted for. Compare this to any fossil plant, where megatonnes of pollutants are pumped into the atmosphere as a matter of course.

biffa: Except that that isn't the total. It doesn't account for the mining impacts.

The impacts of mining coal are no more hazardous than for coal, but the world mines only 34,000 tonnes of uranium, compared to 4,629,000,000 tonnes of coal, about 95%[pdf] of which is used to generate electricity.

The reactor site has to be decomissioned at the end of its life, but it's misleading to say the whole site has to be sterilised. Those parts that are contaminated amount to a small percentage of the buildings mass. What's left is surveyed with detectors, then demolished like any other site. This is also a perfect example of how well the nuclear industry internalizes its environmental impact. I work in an area of the city filled with derelict factories which cannot be redeveloped because the sites are contaminated with PCBs and PAHs

biffa: Dense in that they don't produce enough high voltage power?

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing here (how does voltage matter?). By density, I mean the amount of power (watts) in a given area. The best windmills in the world right now produce 2MW each, at no better than 30% capacity factor (when the wind is blowing). So to replace the US 480 TWhr/month peak demand from august, you'd need a million turbines. Put another way - at 40% efficiency, and average wind power density of less than 150 Watts/ meter squared in the US, you would need to build windfarms covering an area of roughly 600,000 square miles, or about the size of Alaska! Such a windfarm would not even be suitable for building an electricity grid, because the numbers I've used are seasonal averages. A utility can't rely on averages - the electricity has to be available when demand is.

And don't get me started on biomass. The US produces 228,000,000 tonnes of corn per year. Corn has an energy density of 4500 kW-hr / tonne of heat. If we multiply that heat by an electricity generating efficiency of 50%, and divide the annual corn production into twelve months, we get a corn-as-energy output of 0.04 TW-hr/month, or about 0.00009% of the US's peak needs.
That's not just using agricultural waste. That's burning all the corn.

Of course renewables will play a growing role in global electricity supply. England has set an ambitious target for renewables to make up of 5% of it's domestic supply. It's ambitious because even that small will be hugely expensive.

To summarize:
1) The impacts of nuclear power are small, accounted for, and manageable.
2) Nuclear is the only viable option for eliminating greenhouse gasses from electricity production.
posted by Popular Ethics at 2:04 PM on November 10, 2005

"The fissioning of one uranium atom, minuscule though it is, produces enough energy to make a grain of sand visibly jump."

²³⁵U + n -> ⁸⁹Kr + ¹⁴⁴Ba + 3n [1]

Isotopic masses, in amu: [2]
²³⁵U 235.0349
n 1.0087
⁸⁹Kr 88.9176
¹⁴⁴Ba 143.9230

The difference in mass between the reactants and products gives us the energy released, according to the formula E=mc².

The energy required to lift a given mass a certain height is E=mgh.

Since we've got two different masses already (and will add a third in a minute), let's call m_r the mass lost in the nuclear reaction, and m_s the mass of a grain of sand.

E = m_rc² = m_sgh

m_s we'll have to ballpark, but let's say 1mg. [3]

g is the gravitational acceleration at the earth's surface, defined by g=Gm_E/r_E², where G is the gravitational constant, and m_E and r_E are the mass and radius of the earth.

Solving for h gives us:

h = m_rc²r_E²/m_sGm_E

Google calculator says 2.6 microns or 0.0001 inches.

I doubt the jump would be visible. However, a lot of this is predicated on our ballpark figure for the grain of sand; some of the figures listed in that link are 1/100th of the figure we've used here, so if they're accurate the grain of sand would jump 100 times higher than what the calculation here suggests. My conclusion is that it's probably not true for a typical grain of sand, but might just barely be true for an unusually small grain of sand.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:08 PM on November 10, 2005

Deathalicious, there's been tons and tons of research done on waste disposal. The key technical problems are all solved. The principle remainign issues are semantic and political. Semantic, in that when some scientist publishes a report that says that you may get material leeching out of boro-silicate pellets after three hundred years, thus proving that some other scientist was wrong about his/her predictions, the report is misconstrued as being much more serious than it is. Political, in that even with waste storage techniques that are really good, still nobody will take it.

(As for Yucca mountain: I'll believe it when I see it. Last i knew, there was a legal injunction against storing anything new there.)

Now, as for fusion: ................................

... which is to say, if you wait for fusion, you could be waitng a long time. Sure, the potential is vast, but we're not even vaguely close to getting useful fusion power. And when we do, the risks and the waste problem will be non-trivial. The nukes I used to work with in the late 80s used to scoff at the idea of "clean fusion". And as for concentrating cost, it will make the nuke plants look like turnpike affairs.

A better bet is revisiting the pebble-bed and other "inherently safe" designs (to find something that works without helium) and trying to solve the NIMBY problem w.r.t. waste storage.

... Now, as for the (predictable) "conservation ain't gonna happen" protestations up-thread: It is gonna happen. Bet on it. Why and how it's gonna happen -- those are the open questions. It could (and most likely will) happen because our hand is forced.

IMHO, energy consumption and production need to become radically more localized. We have to make power closer to the place it's used -- wherever feasible, we have to make it right there where it's used. And we need to use less of it. And we need to rethink how we do the things we currently use electric power for.

And these are achievable aims, but they require re-thinking how we do things like light rooms: Use more light-concentrators, use more efficient light sources, maybe even bioluminescents. Or how we do simple things like power our phones and our small electronic devices. It's possible now to build [sic] clothing that generates electricity as you walk; considering the trend toward lower power consumption in devices, we should reach a point where we don't need to (as a trivial example) buy batteries for our mp3 players or charge up our cell phones from wall current.

Of course, if we do things like ride Segways everywhere instead of walking and run ou rair conditioners every time it gets over 80 degrees, we won't burn less energy. Well continue to burn a lot.

How has this thread gone this far without anyone uttering the phrase "peak oil"?
posted by lodurr at 2:14 PM on November 10, 2005

it's the only possible energy system we could use that doesn't cause much pollution.

Um, no. But as a choice solely between nuclear and fossil fuels, then sure, waste is a definite issue.
posted by dreamsign at 3:13 PM on November 10, 2005

Crap. Just triple checking my math, and I noticed that I got my unit conversion wrong at one point. Google calculator says 480TWhr/mo worth of wind would take 42000 square miles - More Conneticut than Alaska. But that puts over 230 turbines per square mile, compared to the more normal 50 turbines per square mile. Using that figure, the area required is 20,000 square miles, or the size of west viginia (covered in turbines). Sorry for the error, but the point still stands.
posted by Popular Ethics at 3:46 PM on November 10, 2005

double crap. Burning all the corn in the US would produce 42 terawatt hours / month, or 9% of the peak demand. Still a ridiculously small sum. From now on I only use Google for my unit conversions
posted by Popular Ethics at 4:04 PM on November 10, 2005

triple crap: You're engaging the single-source fallacy. Google doesn't have a correction for that.
posted by lodurr at 5:45 PM on November 10, 2005

The best nuclear reactor is 93 million miles away, requires no maintenance, generates no radioactive waste, costs nothing to run, and is always on. Why not just use it?
posted by euphorb at 6:17 PM on November 10, 2005

Popular Ethics: I think you are pretty much victim of lodurr's 'single solution' fallacy. Wind power will never be able to produce 100% of peak demand in august and that is obviously clear to anyone. But wind production can realistically produce a significant amount of energy. Why did you choose corn as the source of energy? Finland already produces 9% of non-transport energy needs using renewable biomass, most of it forest industry waste product and feltleaf willow and reed canarygrass burnt for heat in distance heating facilities where it directly replaces coal. Granted, biomass won't be able to produce 100% of august peak energy but it too can produce a significant amount of energy. That said, I'm fully in favor of building more nuclear-power, but it is not the only viable clean energy source.

The best nuclear reactor is 93 million miles away, requires no maintenance, generates no radioactive waste, costs nothing to run, and is always on. Why not just use it?

We can't build powerlines there.
posted by lazy-ville at 6:32 PM on November 10, 2005

lodurr: triple crap: You're engaging the single-source fallacy

Am not. I'm saying that, compared to all other available options, on the balance of capacity and environmental impact, nuclear is the most competitive. I took pains to endorse a mixed source supply.

lazy-ville: Why did you choose corn as the source of energy?

I chose corn because it is the preferred feedstock for ethanol, (which is usually cited as the preferred carrier for biomass energy), and a huge crop in the US. I illustrated the shortcomings of biomass by calculating the energy content of the the entire crop (directing all away from food and livestock), a much higher value than just the waste products.

There are lots of great success stories like Finland's. Denmark supplies nearly 20% of its electricity from wind for instance. I share your hope that the rapid growth of these industries continue. In fact, I would like to see electricity prices continue to rise so the they become more competitive.

I also believe its crucial to shut down all of the coal plants in Ontario and the mideastern US immediately. I have come to the conclusion, along with many others in the environmentalist community, that this can only be accomplished by constructing new reactors.

(on re-read of my old post, I see the difficulty is with my use of the phrase 'the only option'. I did not mean that as 'to the exclusion of all other contributors', but rather 'not possible without')
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:12 PM on November 10, 2005

on re-read of my old post, I see the difficulty is with my use of the phrase 'the only option'.

I think the difficulty was that you kept using the 100% production of august peaktime needs as an indicator for how useful a given energy source is.

[ethanol] is usually cited as the preferred carrier for biomass energy

That is not true, at least not in the context of electricity production.
posted by lazy-ville at 7:53 PM on November 10, 2005

I think the difficulty was that you kept using the 100% production of august peaktime needs as an indicator for how useful a given energy source is.

OK, point taken. I just wanted to highlight the enormous difference in scale between the availability of renewable power, and nuclear power. I think we agree that both should be pursued. If that's the case, I'll finish here.
posted by Popular Ethics at 8:50 PM on November 10, 2005

That is indeed the case. I think we have no choice but to agree to agree.
posted by lazy-ville at 9:15 PM on November 10, 2005

James Lovelock, pioneering inventor of the electron capture detector and the Gaia hypothesis ( among other firsts ) supports Nuclear Power as the lesser of two evils.

Lovelock loves both life and the Earth. And, he has no ties to the Nuclear power industry I'm aware of.

He merely fears for the end of most of life on Earth, via a Carbon based atmospheric chokehold.

_______

That said, I think we should sink many billions into wind and solar power and also - above all - energy efficiency.
posted by troutfishing at 9:32 PM on November 10, 2005

Just some very rough calculations: Building the million 2MW wind turbines hypothetically required to meet peak need would cost roughly 2 trillion dollars. Building the 480 1600MW nuclear plants required to produce the same amount of energy would cost roughly 1.2 trillion dollars.
posted by lazy-ville at 9:57 PM on November 10, 2005

I always saw nuclear waste disposal as the ultimate benefit from constructing an actual space elevator. Aside from the initial cost, it would be the cheapest way to get rid of the stuff and "launch it into the sun".
posted by mortisimo at 12:27 AM on November 11, 2005

AFAIK wind generators do directly effect the area in their lea, causing unusual pressure and subsequent temperature changes, FYI. I think this effect could be negligible in some areas and of no consequence in others. I also think it could be used as a benefit if wind generators are designed to take advantage of the micro-climates generated in inner-city sky scraper ghettos. I like the idea of lots of little (possibly nano-machines) fans or drums on the sides of buildings to absorb the energy of the wind and generate power with it.

Also, an increase in the use of nuclear power to generate electricity would require an increase in the use of uranium. I understand this would run out within 5 years if nuclear power use were to replace fossil fuels for electicity generation. Other things to consider.

Obviously power consumption cannot continue at its current levels, indeed it must drop even as the population increases. Local power generation is the obvious way forward, alongside efficiancy in construction and insulation, changes in local transport and sustainability being the most important consideration.

I look forward to the day that I can use my multi-fuel boiler to burn my combustible waste to generate power for my house, whilst its filters collect the heavy metals and other pollutants from the exhaust in order that I can sell them on to the highest bidder.
posted by asok at 4:12 AM on November 11, 2005

And don't get me started on biomass. The US produces 228,000,000 tonnes of corn per year. Corn has an energy density of 4500 kW-hr / tonne of heat. If we multiply that heat by an electricity generating efficiency of 50%, and divide the annual corn production into twelve months, we get a corn-as-energy output of 0.04 TW-hr/month, or about 0.00009% of the US's peak needs.
That's not just using agricultural waste. That's burning all the corn.

Mmmmmm, popcorn.
posted by IronLizard at 6:17 AM on November 11, 2005

lodurr - Helium supplies are problematically finite. You'd really need to rework the design to use another heat transfer medium.

Interestingly enough, the first closed cycle nuclear gas turbine ever built used nitrogen as the coolant. Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. likes that choice of gas for several reasons.

(1) Since N2 makes up almost 80% of the Earth's atmosphere, there is little chance of it being a limiting factor in the deployment of hundreds or thousands of pebble bed heated gas turbine engines.

(2) Since N2 and air have very similar thermodynamic properties because of (1) above, the same machines that work well to move air work well to move N2.

(3) At the temperatures of interest, N2 is inert.

(4) N2's slight affinity for neutrons is a known issue that can be overcome with straightforward engineering provisions.
posted by atomicrod at 2:18 AM on November 12, 2005

Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear power has always completely contained all of its wastes, and is even being asked to prove that they will always remain completely contained for all time. The volume of waste generated by fossil plants (e.g., coal) is hundreds of thousands of times as great, never decays away, and is freely dumped into the environment.

Due to these facts, fossil fuel plants cause ~25,000 premature deaths every year in the US alone (hundreds of thousands worldwide), where Western nuclear power has never had any measurable impact on public health or the environment over its entire (~40-year) history.

With nuclear, there is a miniscule chance of a significant release of radioactivity into the environment, but even a worst-case event would have a much smaller impact than that inflicted EVERY YEAR by fossil plants. Even at Chernobyl, which released orders of magnitude more radioactivity than a Wester plant could unser ANY circumstances, estimates of total eventual premature deaths range from 32 to ~4000. Maximum concievable effects from any Western plant accident would be far smaller. This, compared to hundreds of thousands of deaths every single year from routine fossil plant operation. On top of that, fossil plants are the number one single cause of global warming, whereas nuclear plants have no effect at all.

The only tangible (albeit small) environmental impact from nuclear are heated water discharge from the power plant, and uranium mining effects. All thermal power plants (fossil, nuclear, or renewable) release hot water into the environment, which is a tangible, but small and manageable problem. With respect to mining, it must be pointed out that all fossil fuels (coal, gas, and oil) have even larger fuel extraction impacts. For coal, the environmental/health costs of coal mining are far smaller than the impact of coal plant emissions. The effects of uranium mining are, in turn, far smaller than those of coal mining, due to the smaller quantity of material being extracted. Meanwhile, nuclear power plants have no emissions, or any other measurable health effects.

The bottom line of all this is that the external (i.e., environmental and health) costs of nuclear are much smaller than those of fossil fuel plants. The results of formal scientific studies confirm this. The most recent and extensive study on the external costs of different enegy sources, the European Commission's "ExternE" project, calculates an external cost of only 0.2 cents/kW-hr for nuclear, as compared to a cost of ~1 cent/kW-hr for gas, and ~5-7 cents/kW-hr for coal and oil.

If external costs were ever added/considered, as some of the above posters suggest, nuclear would far far better versus fossil fuels than it does today. Others questioned nuclear's economics. Next generation nuclear plants are already just about cost competative with fossil fuels, even without the external costs considered. If these costs were considered, nuclear would now be the least expensive source. At the current cost of natural gas, nuclear is already cheaper. The only source it can't quite compete with is dirty, conventional coal, and this is only due to the fact that its massive environmental, health, and global warming effects are not accounted for at all in the economic calculations/decisions. If we ever placed limits on CO2 emissions, OR ever got serious about limiting the health effects from pollution, nuclear would win out.
posted by JimHopf at 1:41 PM on November 12, 2005

"While not directly comparable with emission levels from coal and other fossil fuel sources, uranium mining/extraction process still implies significant levels of CO2 and other gaseous emission. An increasing global demand for nuclear power is likely to mean an increasing focus on less concentrated ores and a corresponding increase in GHG emissions linked to their exploitation."

The "net" CO2 emissions from various energy sources, including non-fossil sources like nuclear and renewables, has been extensively studied. The analysis shows that the entire nuclear power process (including any and all emissions from mining, ore processing, uranium enrichment, and plant construction and decommissioning, etc...) results in net-CO2 emissions that are only ~2% that of coal, and less than 5% that of gas. These net CO2 emissions are comparable to those of wind, and are actually less than solar.

Of course, I've always thought the concept of net CO2 emissions was misleading, because if we were to use these non-fossil sources for most of our energy, then energy inputs into these sources would not result in CO2 emissions anyway.....

As far as uranium supplies, and the effects of reduction in ore grade, this is simply not an issue. The fact that the cost of uranium ore is only responsible for ~2% of the cost of nuclear electricicty is a (economic) clue as to how much input energy is required (i.e., not much). Also, the amount of resources we've put into uranium exploration, thus far, are miniscule compared to what we've put into oil and gas exploration. As the cost of ore goes up (w/o significantly affecting the final power cost), exploration efforts will increase massively (it is as we speak, in fact), and we will find enormous quantities of high-grade uranium ore.

We probably have ~1000 years worth of economically-recoverable uranium, even assuming the once-through fuel cycle. That will give us more than enough time to develop breeder technology, which results in an effectively infinite fuel supply. I've spoken at more length on this topic at:

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html
posted by JimHopf at 2:13 PM on November 12, 2005

Meanwhile, nuclear power plants have no emissions, or any other measurable health effects.

Ask the Welsh hill farmer contemplating suicide about the measurable health effects ...

Oh, and despite what americanenergyindependence.com says, the last time the US led the world in wind energy technology was in the mid-19th century, with the Chicago wind pump.
posted by scruss at 12:02 PM on November 25, 2005