Nuclear is Our Future

Nuclear is Our Future Monthly Newsletter

April 2006 Issue

Go Nuclear Baseball Cap

In This Issue:

1. Introduction
2. April 2006 Archive

1. Introduction

Welcome to our newsletter! Contained here is the April 2006 Nuclear is Our Future weblog archive. Given that it is in plain text format, the HTML has been removed and thus many posts do not look the same as when they were posted. If you want more information, please check the April 2006 online archive at blog.niof.org/2006_04_01_archive.html.

Link: http://blog.niof.org/2006_04_01_archive.html

2. April 2006 Archive

Sunday, April 30, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #84


"When comparing reactors, the USA reactors are pressure vessel reactors where an extra supply of ordinary water cools the fuel, whereas the RBMK reactor contains a solid called graphite. In USA reactors, the moderator heat is taken away in the steam to the boilers."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

Almost. It's not an "extra supply"--the coolant and the moderator are one and the same; the reactor is the boiler in a BWR (hence the "boiling") and there isn't (shouldn't be) any steam in the primary coolant system in a PWR (because it's under "pressure.")

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:36 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Over the past six decades, we have spent a total of $7 trillion in today’s dollars on nuclear weapons. It is estimated that the investment required to solve the major humanitarian and environmental problems we face today would cost approximately $260 billion for 10 years. This includes eliminating starvation, providing adequate health care and AIDS control, providing shelter and clean water, eliminating illiteracy, providing sustainable energy, retiring developing nations debts, preventing global warming and removing landmines. This investment is less than one half of what we’ve spent on nuclear weapons!"


-Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center

Leaving the accuracy of the statement aside, just look at the numbers in the context of the last sentence. You'd wonder why they publish this stuff.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:03 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, April 29, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #83


"Also, the evaluation was realized as an electrical test only and it is thought that the test was under the supervision of the turbine manufacturer and not the regular operators."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

No, the regular operators just weren't trained on RBMKs.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:42 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The less electricity you need, because you use it more efficiently, the smaller, simpler, and cheaper the supply can be"


-Rocky Mountain Institute

If we were building a generation and grid system from the ground up. Unfortunately, we aren't. Plants would be taken offline in order of operational costs, leaving us with coal and the nukes already built. When said nukes are shut down, more conservation would be encouraged, since there is no reason for a utility to order a plant to fulfill demand that is not there.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:35 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Friday, April 28, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #82


"Nearby trees that had absorbed the radiation were all cut down and buried in concrete pits."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

Anything can absorb radiation. That doesn't make them radioactive.

However, if they took up radioactive materials through their roots, the materials would be dispersed inside the wood and make the tree appear radioactive. Since there's no way to separate the materials from the tree while it is still alive, they cut them down.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:03 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"where have our rights gone? what of free speech? and what about peace?
what does that mean to you? control? clandestine operations?
raising a family that is whole and not under threat?
or watching your grandchildren play in nuclear waste?
...security ????"


-Renegade (caution: obscenities)

Nuclear waste, meaning spent fuel, or nuclear waste, meaning anything radioactive (even naturally radioactive) that comes out of a nuclear power plant?

Or nuclear waste, meaning anything radioactive, even if it was already radioactive before we did anything and has been in the environment much longer than we have?

Or nuclear waste, meaning uranium-laced coal ash and radon-laced oil well flare, both perfectly natural?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:57 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Thursday, April 27, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #81

Note: Daily Chernobyl #80 was our 20th Anniversary feature, Energy Policy in the Shadow of Chernobyl.



"Even after the fire had been extinguished, radioactive particles were still escaping from the reactor core itself. The Soviets realized that they would need to contain this and prevent further environmental damage. They devised a plan to cover the entire reactor with a shell that was to be able to exist forever."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

It was only intended as a temporary structure. The Soviet military, which was in charge, was never sustainability-oriented.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:08 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The Alliance has worked since 1978 to make sure that the nuclear plant, one of the oldest and dirtiest in the country, would never reopen and will be properly dismantled."


-Redwood Alliance

You can't really call any nuclear power plant that has ever been built "dirty." So far, no nuclear power plant has had operational radiation levels even close to a coal plant of the same size.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:02 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Energy Policy in the Shadow of Chernobyl

Today is the twentieth anniversary of a completely unnecessary accident with wide-ranging consequences: the botched test at the Chernobyl military reactor #4 in the former Soviet Union (now Ukraine).

Most nuclear power plants are a subset of thermal power plants (those that convert heat into electricity). Thermal power plants use a heat source to boil water which then turns a turbine connected to a generator. Nuclear power plants simply use a nuclear reactor as the heat source. Many reactor designs have been tried.
-Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) are the simplest type of nuclear reactor. They consist of rods of low-enriched uranium fuel (between 3% and 4% uranium-235, the rest being uranium-238, as opposed to natural levels of 0.71%) carefully arranged in a pattern that expands on heating like a thermostat. This gives BWRs an equilibrium temperature; as a BWR heats up, it expands, and the power decreases, lowering the temperature. BWRs also take advantage of the fact that water slows down or moderates the neutrons produced and used in nuclear chain reactions. They only work on slow neutrons, due to their size and layout and the fuel they use. When a BWR is immersed in ordinary water (as it must be to function), the relatively high temperature it produces (~600 degrees Fahrenheit) boils the water. Without the water's moderating effect, the reaction slows down as the water boils. These two passive effects--expansion (a negative temperature coefficient) and boiling (a negative void coefficient)--prevent any manual action from taking the reactor out of control. Usually the fuel also contains neutron-absorbing materials known as burnable poisons that are destroyed during the reaction, which maintain the same reactivity level over the life of the fuel (normally it would go down as more fuel is burned; these initially decrease the efficiency of the fuel to offset this effect). In fact, is very feasible in principle to design a BWR that cannot melt down. Of course, manual methods for control of the reactor are provided. These are silver or boron control rods, which absorb neutrons and slow down the chain reaction when inserted between the fuel rods. Adjusting the flow of water through the reactor can have the same effect. However, there are 16 known naturally-occurring BWRs in uranium deposits, which automatically regulated their power for millions of years without any intervention. Clearly, safety is an effect in nuclear reactors, not a feature (By the way, this is a major disagreement that we have with the way the nuclear industry did business until recently (and still does to some degree): they tried to design extra safety systems into reactors instead of designing the basic mechanism correctly. This method is known as defense-in-depth and has the singular effect of costing money as it cannot make a bad system work.). Safety problems have to be designed in, as we will see later.
-Pressurized Light-Water Reactors (PWRs) use the same basic reactor of a thermostat-like arrangement of low-enriched uranium fuel rods and movable boron or silver control rods. PWRs have a negative temperature coefficient as well, since they slow down on the expansion of the fuel, and a negative void coefficient, since they slow down when they lose the neutron-moderating effect of their cooling water if it boils. PWR fuels can also use burnable poisons. The difference is that instead of allowing the water to boil, the water is pressurized and simply transfers heat. PWRs are not as quick to shut down (i.e., not as idiot-proof; Three Mile Island happened in a PWR), but are more stable. Some PWRs, like the modern AP-1000, are so stable that they can be cooled without actual coolant flow (a BWR's coolant flow is the boiling steam). PWRs also cannot be controlled by changing the flow of coolant, since they do not boil their coolant (although they would shut down if there was a loss of coolant and the remainder did boil; the Three Mile Island meltdown happened when a loss of coolant flow--and eventually lowered coolant levels--in an early reactor allowed residual radioactivity to heat up the fuel). PWRs do not easily follow a changing electrical load, either; it is not as easy to change the reactor's power level because they are so stable. PWRs are more complex than BWRs, meaning more mechanical complexity, but can also minimize the amount of material exposed to radiation (isolating, for example, steam handling equipment and the generator). PWRs and BWRs are usually united under the heading of Light-Water Reactors (LWRs), which have some general shared characteristics:
LWRs cannot be refueled online. The reactor is inside a large steel pressure vessel, and the top must literally be unbolted to access the fuel.
LWRs produce fairly large amounts of plutonium.
LWR-produced plutonium is not weapons-grade. When used in a bomb, it tends to start its own mini-reactions before the bomb can go off. Such a bomb would use most of its fuel during the detonation command, leaving too little to actually explode. It's been tried for 50 years in the USA, Britain, France, and Russia, and nobody has been able to make it work.
LWRs cannot produce more fuel than they consume, with one specialized exception. Uranium-233, uranium-235, and plutonium-239 are considered fuel; thorium-232 and uranium-238 can be turned into fuel. Only the net production of uranium-233 from thorium-232 is possible in a LWR.
LWRs require enriched uranium. Light water doesn't moderate neutrons efficiently enough to use natural uranium; too many of the neutrons from the splitting atoms are wasted, and extra "splittable" or fissile atoms need to be added.
All American nuclear power plants use LWRs. They are the most common reactor type.
-Pressurized Heavy-Water Reactors (PHWRs) use heavy water (the heavy hydrogen in the H2O is twice as heavy as ordinary hydrogen) in place of light water. Heavy water is a better moderator than light water, which allows a PHWR to use natural uranium and produce more fuel than it consumes under almost all circumstances. PHWRs usually have subtle design differences from PWRs due to the high cost of heavy water and to allow exploitation of the better moderator. The most common PHWR uses heavy water as the moderator and coolant but in separate pressurized systems; this type is known as a CANDU (some more modern ones, using light water coolant and heavy water moderator, are known as Advanced CANDU Reactors or ACRs). CANDUs place their fuel rods in heavy-water-filled high-pressure tubes, which are embedded in a tank of heavy water. Heavy water is pumped through the tubes, which then boil light water to generate steam to turn a turbine. In LWRs, the coolant and moderator are the same thing: the water. In the CANDU, the coolant and moderator are separate, which can cause a problem: if the coolant absorbs neutrons (which moderators also all do to some degree), removing it will allow more neutrons to get through. Instead of slowing down the reaction, boiling the coolant can then speed it up. The design of each pressure-tube reactor is different, though, which is why the CANDU's positive void coefficient is small enough for the other passive safety effects and active safety systems to compensate, but the other major design that uses separate water coolant and moderator--the Russian RBMK--can go out of control, and the ACR's void coefficient is actually negative. A meltdown in CANDU reactors would probably involve only one pressure tube, and would immediately stop the reactor. CANDUs can also run directly on nuclear waste from LWRs and refuel online. They do not use burnable poisons but rather distribute old and new fuel with the online refueling system.
-Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs) use no moderator (they use fast neutrons). This can remove the safety effect of the negative void coefficient, create a positive void coefficient, or a negative one, depending on the reactor design. Sometimes, the coolant (which usually absorbs neutrons) is between the reactor and a neutron reflector; if the coolant were removed from such a reactor, fewer neutrons would be absorbed and the reactor would speed up. If the coolant has nothing to do with the neutron flux (normally), there is no void coefficient. If the coolant tends to enable more reactions--for example if it reflects neutrons--there will be a negative void coefficient. FBRs usually operate at the edge of criticality and most FBRs have a strongly negative temperature coefficient. FBRs can only run on enriched uranium (higher enrichment than LWRs) or a type of fuel known as MOX (a mix of plutonium and uranium) because of their poor use of neutrons. FBR coolant cannot absorb or moderate neutrons, so FBRs use liquid metal as coolant (usually liquid sodium). The main value of FBRs, though, is that they produce large amounts of plutonium fuel from uranium-238. This allows the use of the other 99.3% of natural uranium. They can also consume nuclear waste much more thoroughly than CANDUs. There are as many types of fast reactors as there are slow reactors, but FBRs generally use a reactor with enriched uranium (at least 5.64% as opposed to 2.14% for LWRs and 0.71% for everything else) surrounded by a "blanket" of uranium-238.
-An important subset of FBRs are Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs). An IFR is a fast reactor with the entire fuel cycle onsite. Most probably, an IFR would be fueled by nuclear weapons material mixed with depleted uranium left over from enrichment (enrichment increases the amount of uranium-235 in uranium by taking out some uranium-238; the U-238 is stored in barrels at the enrichment plant but is still useful). After that, however, an IFR could extract 99% of the energy in its fuel, as opposed to current reactors' 3%--meaning that 60 years of operation could be fueled by one truckload of fuel. This efficient use of fuel means that IFRs could generate all of the electricity for the United States for the next 500 years using only the uranium left over from enrichment. IFRs are also passively safe, meaning that they rely on the physics of the reactor, not active controls, to prevent accidents. IFRs are geometrically arranged to have an equilibrium temperature: excessive heat makes the fuel expand, which disrupts the reaction and slows it down. Because IFRs cannot melt down, they do not need high-temperature fuel, and can use high-efficiency metal fuel instead of ceramic as in other reactors. IFRs can be configured to either consume or breed fuel, but would probably be used to extend the current uranium supply while consuming nuclear waste and making fissile material useless for bombs--three supposedly daunting problems.
-Some nuclear power plants are not thermal plants. These reactors are cooled by gas, usually carbon dioxide or helium, and moderated by graphite (although one, Lucens in Switzerland, used heavy water). Since there is no liquid coolant, there is no void coefficient, but the geometry of the reactor can still be used for passive safety. The Pebble-Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) is one advanced example. Older gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors include Britain's AGR and MAGNOX reactors. Graphite is an excellent moderator; these reactors can use natural uranium. Graphite is also flammable, but these reactors can prevent fires by not reaching ignition temperatures and using an inert gas coolant, and those without passive safety can use a water flood system to extinguish a fire. There are as many ways to build a gas-cooled/graphite-moderated reactor as there are to build a LWR or fast reactor. Done right, they can work just as well.
-An important type of nuclear reactor which is not used in nuclear power plants is a weapons-production reactor. Only the isotopes uranium-233, uranium-235, and plutonium-239 at greater than 90% purity and in the absence of certain others (plutonium-242, erbium) work in bombs. Reactors normally produce plutonium that is a combination of isotopes 239, 240, 241, and 242, and use uranium that is at most 4% uranium-235. Plutonium-239 is produced from uranium-238, and plutonium-240 and up are produced in order from plutonium-239. Weapons-production reactors then must remove fuel rods before more than 10% of the plutonium-239 becomes plutonium-240. This condition can be reached in a matter of days, depending on geometry. To remove the fuel, the 150,000-pound reactor head must be unbolted and laid to the side by a crane while the oldest fuel is removed, new fuel put in, and the rest rearranged to control power (burnable poisons cannot be used, since the presence of any in a bomb would render it completely useless). The world record for doing this is 15 days, and the average in the United States is 38. Weapons-production reactors also cannot achieve high burnups and consequently waste a lot of fuel. Clearly, weapons production is incompatible with a power program, which must be on as much of the time as possible and must conserve fuel. A major design influence for the reactors at Chernobyl was to try to fuse these two incompatible aims.
-The type used at Chernobyl was the Water-Cooled/Graphite-Moderated Reactor (RBMK in Russian). The general class of water-cooled and graphite-moderated reactors (LWGRs) is not bad in and of itself, but have to be designed correctly. The RBMK is a particular kind of LWGR that is a textbook example of how not to do pretty much everything in reactor design.
A little history: the Soviets were not very good at industrial-scale uranium enrichment or heavy water production, and needed electricity and nuclear weapons. They lacked real heavy industry, but needed to build large plants. They did about as much as they could with the BN-600 breeder, but that was a civilian program, and not a very large-scale one at that. They decided to kill four birds with one stone: build a weapons-production reactor that would generate large amounts of electricity without any enriched uranium or heavy water. The RBMK was the result.
It used a graphite moderator in an inert-gas-filled container--but the reactor could reach ignition temperature, so if oxygen were to somehow leak in while the reactor was at full power, it could very easily catch fire.
Light-water-filled pressure tubes, which contain the fuel rods and control rods, go vertically through the graphite. Consequently, the refueling machine must be mounted on top of the reactor instead of at its side, making it too tall for a containment building.
The control rods use a graphite tip, followed by a section of water, and then the actual control rod, supposedly to make emergency shutdowns faster. The tiny problem with this is that graphite and water are moderators, so inserting a control rod briefly raises the reactor power. If enough control rods are withdrawn (more than 181 out of 211), an emergency shutdown is actually dangerous. So did the Soviets put an interlock system--not even a notoriously unreliable Soviet computer--in charge of the control rods? Of course not. It's completely manual.
The main problem, though, is that the RBMK has a large positive void coefficient, so large that it overshadows any other engineered safety features. The water in the pressure tubes absorbs more neutrons than the graphite does, so if it boils, the moderator is made more efficient and the reaction speeds up. Obviously, this is a safety problem: if you lose coolant, the reaction should slow down to prevent a meltdown. Furthermore, the RBMK was actually designed to boil the water in the tubes! If the geometry were done better, if heavy water were used as the moderator instead of graphite, if the pressure in the tubes were higher, or if the enrichment levels were higher, the positive void coefficient could be engineered into a negative one, just like the CANDU's (much smaller) positive void coefficient became a negative one in the ACR. These measures, of course, would defeat the RBMK's original purpose, so they were not used.
The net effect of the positive void coefficient and the badly-designed geometry was a positive temperature coefficient (i.e., if the temperature goes up, the reactor speeds up, raising the temperature, making it speed up more, until power is manually reduced or it melts down). Interestingly enough, the RBMK is fairly stable at high power, when there is so much steam in the tubes that the water isn't a significant factor. Only at low power can the amount of water in the tubes change significantly with fairly minor boiling.
The positive temperature coefficient is such that neutron poisons--isotopes that absorb neutrons and inhibit the reaction--can drastically affect power. The fission product xenon-135 in particular can cause power to spike if it is present in large quantities and suddenly disappears. A perfect cause for such an event would be high-power operation, followed by a reduction in power, then a power surge, and a loss of coolant pressure. Sound improbable? Read on.
The RBMK's last major fatal flaw lies in near-laziness on the part of the designers. In order to increase the capacity of the RBMK for newer models, the layout of the reactor was not redesigned. They simply made it longer. This works fine until you get to the point where you have two separate critical masses. Normally, the control rods only have to be inserted a certain distance into the reactor for it to start to lose power. If there are two critical masses, the first must be completely stopped and the control rods must reach far enough into the second to stop a power surge. This takes 18 seconds in an RBMK. A power surge can easily destroy the reactor in under six. To try to mitigate this obvious safety problem, floor-mounted control rods were added to help shut down the second critical mass. Unfortunately, floor-mounted control rods cannot drop into the reactor; they have to be driven, and a loss of electricity renders them completely useless.
Other, more minor flaws exist in the control system, backup power, and miscellaneous systems. They contributed to the accident, although in a more minor way.
Still, the RBMK can be operated properly. If it is, it can provide reliable, clean electricity. A list of things--which have a low probability of happening during normal operation and some of which are incompatible with normal operation--need to be in place in order for an accident to happen:
1. The reactor must be at low power to be unstable.
2. More than 181 control rods must be withdrawn.
3. The reactor must have been operating for a long time.
4. There must be a breach of the pressure tubes and/or an oxygen leak into the moderator.
This is with the reactor designed as it was. Almost every design feature of the reactor allowed the accident to happen. Had even one major flaw in the reactor not been there, the accident would not have happened. For instance, if the control rods were fast enough to shut down the reactor before a power surge could destroy it, the power surge that happened during the accident could have been controlled. If the geometry of the reactor had given it a negative temperature coefficient, the positive void coefficient wouldn't have mattered. Had the pressure tubes been horizontal, not vertical, they might have built a solid, American-style reinforced concrete containment dome instead of a warehouse with a concrete lid. The design was truly a perfect storm of bad engineering. But how did the accident happen?

The Chernobyl accident was doubly unnecessary because it occurred during a test. The Soviets wanted to learn whether the primary electricity supply (the main generator) would last long enough for the backup (a diesel generator) to start (the fact that it didn't start immediately is another minor RBMK design flaw). Secondarily, the test could prove to the world that their RBMK was as advanced as the safe American reactors, so they chose their most advanced RBMK--Chernobyl Unit 4.
In the afternoon of April 25th, the test was supposed to begin with the reactor being taken off the grid. However, unexpected load prevented the reactor from being disconnected until that evening. When it was disconnected, there was not enough time to bring the reactor safely down to low power. The test should have been aborted at this point, but the operator in charge of the test, who had never been trained on the RBMK (he was trained on nuclear submarines), ordered that the reactor be lowered to about 30% power. The operators conducting the test went too far, though, and lowered the power to about 1%. Instead of aborting the test (their second chance), they raised power to a little over 6%. During this time, the burnable poison xenon-135 started to build up, as power was too low to consume all of it. At this point, the number of control rods in the core was reduced manually to try to offset the xenon. The equipment which was supposed to draw the current from the generator and diesel backups was then turned on, which unfortunately was the coolant pump system. The positive void coefficient then performed its only good function and lowered the power of the reactor, since higher coolant flow would result in fewer voids, and more control rods were removed to make up for this. At this point, only six to eight control rods of a required 30 were in the reactor. The primary electricity supply was then switched off. As the coolant flow decreased, the water in the pressure tubes started to boil, and the positive void coefficient kicked in. The reactor accelerated out of control--over 1,000% of rated power--and an operator, unaware of the number of control rods in the reactor, panicked and scrammed it. The graphite tips of the control rods entered the reactor, the power spiked, and fuel pellets started to melt and pop out of their rods into the coolant. The remaining water flashed to steam, rupturing some of the pressure tubes, blowing the concrete lid off of the reactor, and setting it down nearby at a 75 degree angle. The lid pulled the rest of the tubes out with it.
Meanwhile, in the second critical mass in the lower half of the reactor, the xenon escaped through the broken tubes. Since the xenon was keeping the lower half of the reactor under control, and the control rods were by now melted or blown out, the lower half of the reactor experienced a second power surge, which melted fuel and caused the remaining fuel rod cladding to burst. The operators detected the second explosion and tried to scram the reactor again. It didn't work.
Simultaneously, air rushed into the reactor from the outside. The graphite was obviously far past its ignition temperature and burst into flames. Radioactive material went with it: approximately 5% of the fuel was ejected during the two explosions and subsequent fire.
The operators reacted to this by trying to determine the radiation level in the building. The plant's two detectors didn't work. A third was brought in, and registered what they thought were ridiculously high levels. Apparently not noticing the fire, they tried to pump water into the reactor to prevent a meltdown. By that time, of course, the reactor no longer existed in any recognizable form, so what happened wasn't strictly speaking a meltdown. It was certainly not a nuclear explosion, which would have required a dedicated device much different from any reactor in existence (much less the RBMK) with materials not present at the site and precise timing.
When they saw that pumping water had no effect, they notified Soviet authorities, who prepared a typical Soviet response: they tried to put out the fire by dumping clay, limestone, sand, and the neutron poisons boron and lead on what remained of the reactor building. This only acted as insulation and made the overheating worse, and was stopped. Thousands of people, known as "liquidators," were brought in to put out the fire--without radiological protection. Forty-seven of them would die from radiation poisoning. It took over a week to put out the last pieces of graphite.
The day after, April 27, the nearby city of Pripyat was finally evacuated. It took the Soviets almost a month to evacuate a 30-kilometer-radius exclusion zone.
Work was begun on a shack to surround the destroyed reactor until a permanent structure could be built. It was assembled mostly by remote control, and is not at all structurally sound. A new shelter for the reactor is planned--hopefully before the "sarcophagus" currently in place caves in.

Long-term effects are not as well-known. The most credible report--the September 2005 report by the UN--predicts approximately 4,000 cancer deaths. Of course, anti-nuclear groups point to the 100,000 people who have died in Ukraine since the accident and ask whether only 4% of them could have been killed by Chernobyl. They point to tragic birth defects and cancer, especially pediatric cancer. However, birth defects and cancer happen in other places as well, and for most cancers there is not a statistically detectable increase in the area around Chernobyl. That does not mean that we do not value or care about these people's lives. But determining the specific Soviet pollution that caused their cancer is very difficult. Blaming it on our personal bogeymen, whatever they may be, is fundamentally disrespectful. These thousands of personal tragedies deserve more than a knee-jerk response.

The policy implications are huge. Future RBMK construction has been rightfully stopped. Unfortunately, Chernobyl politically affected construction of reactors that have about as much to do with each other as a coal burner and a gas turbine. Why should a harebrained stunt at a uniquely terrible Soviet reactor condemn nuclear power that's done right? After all, one doesn't associate chemical processes with each other; coal mining disasters don't bring calls to stop using natural gas.
Chernobyl showed us how much one has to really, really try to cause a nuclear reactor accident. The RBMK is a very bad design, as we have seen. However, even with every design problem in the RBMK, human error on a test that should not have been run in the first place was required to cause an accident. Had the reactor been operated correctly in a culture of safety, Chernobyl never would have happened. Had the reactor been designed correctly in a culture of safety, it could have been abused even more excessively than was done and Chernobyl never would have happened. Does it really say anything about the nuclear industry, nuclear technology, or the general concept of nuclear energy? No. It says a lot about the Soviet system, and others like it, where irresponsibility was rampant. They didn't do much of anything right, and nuclear power is no exception. We can be just as irresponsible, possibly even more than the Soviets, by pushing energy policy off on the current teenage generation's grandchildren. We could get away with it. With widespread enough extraction and infrastructure investments, natural gas could replace nuclear power and coal for perhaps 40 years. Once we run out of that, coal could work for electricity and as a feedstock for motor fuels for perhaps another 75. Then the grandkids get to figure out where to get electricity and hydrocarbons. They get to start over, reconstituting nuclear technology that could sit abandoned for 115 years. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them tried to move to the Moon if it got bad enough. The economic conditions are perfectly set for such a disaster. This frustrates me, because I know it could be better: objective analysis shows good nuclear power to be orders of magnitude better than good chemical power. Even bad nuclear power is significantly better than good chemical power--Chernobyl's 4,000 deaths are dwarfed by the human toll of coal fumes, which is approaching one million since the last American reactor order. We could, I suppose, waste money and time on renewables (which by definition have a production cap--oil could be renewable so long as it's not depleted faster than it's produced), or "soft energy," or magic wiffle dust, but XYZ power source, no matter how vast it may be, is useless unless you can collect it. We could get into the numbers--1,400 watts per square meter, 20% absorbed by the atmosphere, 35% reflected off clouds, then spread out a factor of two or three because of the angle of inclination to the Sun, 5%-15% conversion efficiency, 14,767.75 terawatt-hours global consumption, but I leave that exercise to you. I don't "believe" that nuclear power is the answer. I think, and analyze, and struggle, and come to the conclusion that I honestly didn't want to draw:
Nuclear is Our Future
(and if it isn't, it should be)
In closing, I ask you: Do you, personally, have the courage to tackle the energy crisis? Will you do what you can, in your corner of the world?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:23 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Both radioactive U-235 and stable U-238 are found in naturally occuring uranium deposits."


-Reaching Critical Will

U-238 is radioactive with a half-life of 4.6 billion years.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:39 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #79


"When radiation levels began to reach extreme highs, the order was given to evacuate cities, towns and villages near the damaged reactor"


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

Radiation reached its most extreme high at the beginning of the accident. The Soviets actually thought that they could salvage the reactor and didn't evacuate the local city until a day later.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:32 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"We perform engineering and economic analyses of low-level waste facilities, evaluate the impacts of transporting radioactive waste and cleanup options on the public health and the environment, and assist plaintiffs in radiation injury cases."


-Radioactive Waste Management Associates

Gee, I wonder what the result of their analysis is going to be.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:28 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Monday, April 24, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #78


"Multiple fires, a reactor core on fire which was billowing radioactive particles into the air, citizens nearby, high radiation levels locally and worldwide, were all the ingredients of a huge disaster."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

1. There were multiple fires.
2. The core was on fire because it was graphite, which is flammable at the high temperatures experienced at Chernobyl. Obviously (or perhaps not so obviously for some people), the water in the core of an American light-water reactor cannot burn.
3. Radioactive particles--amounting to about 5% of the fuel.
4. Citizens nearby should have been evacuated but weren't.
5. Local high radiation levels? Absolutely. Forty-seven first-responders were killed by it.
6. Worldwide high radiation levels? No.
7. A huge disaster? Chernobyl was terrible, no doubt, but in the grand scheme of industrial disasters it was pretty small.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 4:22 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Exelon claims new reactors are 100 percent safe, and the NRC agrees. However, both are turning a blind eye to substantial contrary evidence. After opening in 1987, the existing Clinton reactor experienced a series of mechanical problems, which finally caused the plant to shut for nearly three years in the mid-1990s. Mechanical failures continue, especially as the reactor ages."


-Radiation and Public Health Project

Reliability does not mean safety.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 3:19 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, April 23, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #77


"With the world's greatest disaster already underway, the fight to contain and control the invisible killer was just beginning."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

It's not even the world's greatest energy-production-related disaster. The Banqiao-Shimantan dam break in China in 1975 killed 171,000 people. Talk about a catastrophic failure.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:02 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Accidents like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the Rocky Flats, Savannah River, and Hanford nuclear plants have been some of our darkest moments in this century of Star Wars technology."


-Proposition One Committee

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:38 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, April 22, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #76


"The operator tried to take over the flow of the water which was returning from the turbine manually which is very difficult because small temperature changes can cause large power fluctuations."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

Only at low power, when there is significant water in the pressure tubes.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:39 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"As the accompanying article by Owen Wilkes points out, Canadian-designed reactors have contributed directly or indirectly to the nuclear programs of every nuclear-weapon state except China."


-Project Ploughshares

The United States, which had used nuclear weapons before Canada started its first reactor? Russia, which was on the other side of the Cold War? France? Britain?

The CANDU doesn't breed plutonium and certainly not bomb-grade plutonium. It breeds uranium-233 from thorium-232.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:25 PM | 2 comments links to this post

Friday, April 21, 2006
The Physics Community's Chickens Come Home to Roost

(Fairly old news, but still worth comment)

This post finally brings it home for me. I knew it was going to happen, sometime, and that's one of the reasons I got into pro-nuclear advocacy.
The front line against antiscience is mainly biology: the fight against creationism. It's been a long time since physicists faced down the guys with pitchforks and torches. But we can't hide behind the biologists and hope the wackos go away. They're coming after us now, after our projects, after our jobs, and after the concepts and methods of science.
We must have solidarity against antiscience. All of it. All the time. It means physicists fighting creationism. It means biologists fighting these two-bit peace activists. Everyone must recognize antiscience, whatever it is, and fight it.
We--all of science--have powerful enemies. But they can be overcome if we try.

I warn you now: if every scientist and science-minded individual does not recognize antiscience and fight it, science will be wiped out. You cannot hide.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:06 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Daily Chernobyl #75


"In a few moments operator error, bad decisions, and lack of knowledge will cause the greatest nuclear disaster in the history of mankind."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

That would be Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At least they aren't saying that it's the worst environmental disaster in the hisory of mankind.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:45 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"This will force the early shut down of PI if no federally authorized program is accepting PI waste when the 17 casks are full, around 2003."


-Prairie Island Coalition

:-)

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:10 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Thursday, April 20, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #74


"Before the 1986 disaster, Chernobyl was rated as one of the safest nuclear power stations."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

By the Soviets. Everybody else knew that it had major, fatal design flaws.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:46 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The French government has never stated publicly that it has been approached by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to consider fabricating LTAs at Cadarache. This leads to a perfectly contradictory situation. On one hand, there is no indication that the low-paced closure process at Cadarache rules out the technical possibility of a decision to proceed with the LTA fabrication at ATPu. But on the other hand, it is obvious that such a decision would add to technical, regulatory and safety concerns that have led to the shut-down decision of ATPu in the first place."


-Plutonium Investigation

Can anyone say "conspiracy theory?"

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:33 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #73


"The operation of a nuclear reactor is as follows:
-as the reaction occurs, the uranium fuel becomes hot
-water pumped through the core in contained pressure tubes removes the heat from the fuel
-the water boils into steam
-the steam turns two turbines which spin electrical generators
-the water is cooled"


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

Vastly oversimplified. There are almost as many ways to conduct nuclear reactions as there are to conduct chemical reactions. This is only one of the ways, and it is one of the most suicidally dangerous yet devised.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:38 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"It’s not the technology that stands in the way of countries and terrorist groups building nuclear weapons, but rather the difficulty in acquiring the requisite amounts of weapon-usable plutonium or highly-enriched uranium."


-Ploughshares Fund

Actually building the bomb is no piece of cake, especially for plutonium bombs. Criticality alone doesn't do it. Timing and geometry are critical.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:05 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #72


"By 1986, the year of the accident, four of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power station were the most modern to date Soviet reactors, the RBMK-type."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

Modern? Meaning what? Advanced, with the basic flaws present in the first version?
The best reactors they had, meaning those without fatal flaws, were VVERs.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:01 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The report estimated that even if just 1% of a jetliner's fuel ignited after impact, it would create an explosion equivalent to 1,000 pounds of dynamite inside a reactor building. An explosion of this magnitude impacting on a containment structure that has already been weakened by the crash of a high-speed jetliner crash could potentially compromise the integrity of the power plant."


-Physicians for Social Responsibility

Then why wasn't there a huge explosion at the World Trade Center? The fuel set fires. It burned; it didn't explode.
This scenario requires that the aircraft get into the building. I did the math here, and you can see why Al Qaeda considered--and passed over--nuclear power plants.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:26 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Monday, April 17, 2006
Think You Pay a Lot of Taxes?

It's tax day in the United States, and it's time to remember the exorbitant fees levied by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

In February, they announced that they would need extra money to handle all the new applications that they think are going to come in. So they raised licensing fees!


"Operating Power Reactors (including Spent Fuel
Storage/Reactor Decommissioning): $3,655,000
Spent Fuel Storage/Reactor Decommissioning: $168,000
Test and Research Reactors (Nonpower Reactors): $76,300
High Enriched Uranium Fuel Facility: $5,579,000
Low Enriched Uranium Fuel Facility: $1,643,000
UF6 Conversion Facility: $1,076,000
Rare Earth Mills: $97,900
Typical Materials Users:
Radiographers: $15,300
Well Loggers: $4,700
Gauge Users (Category 3P): $2,900"


-Link to Press Release

Edit 3:59 PM: Oh, how could I have forgotten the nuclear electricity production tax! 0.1 cents per kilowatt-hour times 782 billion kilowatt-hours means $782 million in taxes paid to the Federal government. For what? Waste disposal, theoretically--but the Yucca Mountain Project never sees most of that money. It sits in a government bank account doing absolutely nothing and certainly not its intended purpose.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:40 PM | 2 comments links to this post

NRC: Put Public Safety First

The recent outcry over tritium leaks at nuclear power plants across the country has caused people to rightly ask the question: Is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission protecting public safety?
No, it isn't.
The rigid, uncommunicative reaction to a leak of a substance 60 times less radioactive than orange juice raises fundamental questions about the NRC.
Such as, what are they regulating? Public safety or equipment failures?
Equipment failures are bad, no doubt. Nobody wants an equipment failure. But public safety has to come first.
So what's wrong with shutting down a nuclear power plant as a precaution? First, what precaution are you taking? If the plant is unaffected, and the environment is unaffected, why not fix the problem during the next refueling cycle? Second, what problem is it? Why is it a serious problem? Is it an academic consideration--inoperable backup equipment or primary equipment that's not doing anything or isn't safety-critical? Third, backup power is not only expensive, but it comes from a fossil fuel plant. So the NRC's academic shutdowns and power reductions cause greenhouse gas and other pollutant emissions.
But the main thing that's wrong with heavy-handed regulation is that it sends a message to utilities: if you build a nuclear power plant, the best source of electricity in the world, we will take our sweet time at your expense to do anything, from setting up an arcane regulatory structure to processing your application at our leisure to telling newspapers across the country that your irrelevant tritiated water leaks are a safety hazard. A large part of the responsibility for the lack of new nuclear build lies with the NRC's regulatory structure. But it's not directly their fault. It generally progresses like this:
1. We're uncommunicative.
2. The public, which doesn't know a nuclear power plant from the Greater Waukegan Sausage Emporium (not their fault), is outraged at an inconsequential problem.
3. The NRC is uncommunicative.
4. Hippies and their lawyers get involved and pressure the NRC to change regulations.
5. We don't get involved.
6. The NRC changes regulations.
7. Go back to the beginning.
That is a recipe for high costs and no public benefit. If it happens to beneficial infrastructure--like nuclear power plants--it has huge consequences.

Let's change steps 1 and 5.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:48 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Daily Chernobyl #71


"The RBMK reactor is unstable when its core is filled with water."


-Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster

It's unstable at low power. The water level, while related, doesn't entirely determine the power level by itself.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:14 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"TONNES OF WEAPON GRADE PLUTONIUM--FUEL FOR BOMBS--ARE ALREADY ON THE HIGH SEAS"


-Petition Postcards

Mixed in with depleted uranium, which makes it non-weapons-grade...

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:07 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, April 16, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #70

Q: How many Chernobyl operators does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Three: one to smash the light bulb with a hammer, one to pull the base out of the socket with a pair of pliers, and one to sweep up the floor. There's an optional additional operator who detects that the wire is still live and responds by turning on the sprinklers.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:57 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The poison the Government is talking about will poison the land."


-People Against Radiation in Aboriginal Homelands

Which is why the uranium that was in the ground stayed in the ground and didn't move into the groundwater.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:54 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, April 15, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #69


"About 200,000 people ("liquidators") from all over the Soviet Union were involved in the recovery and clean up during 1986 and 1987. They received high doses of radiation, average around 100 millisieverts. Some 20,000 of them received about 250 mSv and a few received 500 mSv. Later, the number of liquidators swelled to over 600,000 but most of these received only low radiation doses. The highest doses were received by about 1000 emergency workers and on-site personnel during the first day of the accident."


-Uranium Information Centre

Yes, there are different types of liquidators.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 5:55 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The fact that the material, originally from Sellafield, was rejected by the Japanese when it was discovered that safety records at BNFL had been falsified, should only heighten BNFL"s embarrassment. But no. The complacency and arrogance that has characterized the British nuclear establishment shines through: "We've been carrying out these kind of radioactive transports for 30 years in complete safety and security." That may be true, but it does not mean that those transports are desirable, or that they are a risk worth taking in an age of globalized terror."


-Peace Movement Aotearoa

So errors on quality control documents for items make a shipment of those items unsafe? They don't have any proof:
1. That there are actual defects
2. That defects could cause a problem
3. That defects could cause a problem during shipment
4. That those problems during shipment have safety significance
So what do they do? Change the subject to terrorism--also without any evidence!

posted by Stewart Peterson at 5:00 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Friday, April 14, 2006
Chernobyl+20

Nuclear is Our Future is remembering the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl by:
-Posting a Daily Chernobyl item, which is dedicated to clearing up a common misconception surrounding the incident,
-Publishing an article on the day of the incident (April 26), and
-Encouraging you to get out and spread reliable information. We need you. The people who have never heard real information on Chernobyl need you. The 30,000 people who die every year from coal fumes need you. Get out and do something!

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:15 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Daily Chernobyl #68


"Reachers [sic] also found that 64% of all Ukrainian thyroid cancer patients age 15 of younger lived in the most contaminated regions (the provinces of Kiev, Chernigov, Zhitomir, Cherkassy, and Rovno and the city of Kiev)"


-Chernobyl.co.uk

In this case, since those provinces contain 18.8% of the population and 64% of the cancer cases occur in these provinces, it may be valid.
But it usually isn't, since a "province" is a completely arbitrary definition. Let me also emphasize that I did not factor in the fraction of the population that is under the age of 15, or the actual distribution of fallout, or the time since exposure, which all have the potential to eliminate the difference.

Let me make very clear that there isn't enough data presented here to draw a conclusion.

This does not mean that I think these tragic cancer cases don't exist. It simply means that I don't know what caused them. Withholding judgment is an important part of critical thinking and key to the scientific method.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:50 PM | 2 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The Nobel Peace Prize should not obscure the fact that the IAEA is seriously challenged by its inherently contradictory dual role: on the one hand, working to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, and on the other, promoting the use of "civilian" nuclear power (which of course can be the first step toward acquiring nuclear weapons).
Managing this contradiction is difficult if not impossible. The solution is to develop and invest in renewable sources of energy, rendering nuclear power and its insoluble waste problem obsolete, and to move with all deliberate speed toward the global abolition of nuclear weapons."


-Peace Action

1. Civilian nuclear power does not produce bomb materials. It can either reduce the total amount of fissile material present (burners) or produce a type of plutonium that works very well in reactors but is too unstable for bombs (breeders). Anything else is military.
2. Renewable energy was the first developed and the first rightly abandoned. Burning wood and damming rivers (both methods considered renewable) were the first electricity generating methods; waterwheels have been around for thousands of years; windmills have been used for agriculture for centuries; passive solar heating was the only method until fire was invented; biomass is the world's second-oldest source of heat (counting fresh lava). The reason that these were abandoned is that they are "soft" energy, that is, they produce very little energy, usually intermittently, and with a huge environmental footprint. They can't support modern society.
3. The "waste problem" can be solved. We could start out with using more than 3% of a fuel rod at a time. That would leave us with short-lived fission products, 99.999% of which will have decayed within 40 years, and which produce heat in the interim.
4. A great way to completely and totally get rid of a nuclear weapon is to literally turn it into electricity.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:13 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Thursday, April 13, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #67


"The sudden increase in temperature caused part of the fuel to rupture, fuel particles then reacted with the water creating a steam explosion which destroyed the reactor core."


-Chernobyl.co.uk

This 'reaction' is known as 'heat transfer.'

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:19 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"New nuclear power stations would increase the risk of nuclear terrorism by increasing the number of potential targets."


-Oxford Research Group

This touches on the difference between the common and academic definitions of 'risk.'
The academic defintion of 'risk' is the probability of an event occuring; for example, the risk of shooting yourself in the head while playing Russian roulette is one in six, or 0.167. The common definition of the risk of shooting yourself in the head while playing Russian roulette is 'unacceptable.'
Now what would happen if there were more guns? The academic risk would go up, proportionally, but that probably wouldn't make much of a difference to the person doing it.
What would happen if you knew all the guns were jammed? The academic risk would still go up, since there are more chances to shoot yourself for the same probability. Furthermore, you would fire as many shots as possible as quickly as possible to try to take advantage of the guns being initially jammed.
Now you may be wondering why I, a pro-nuclear activist, am comparing new nuclear build to Russian roulette. My comparison is:
-We'll always be doing it. Academic risk is inherent in life.
-We're distributing the same number of rounds to more guns.
-We're playing Russian roulette with a jammed gun.
There's also the issue of alternatives. In my comparison, continuing to burn coal is like playing Russian roulette with a semiautomatic pistol when you've got the options of (1) a jammed revolver sitting there or (2) distributing the bullets in the revolver to five other jammed revolvers. What's the risk of choosing the revolver over the semiautomatic pistol? Less than zero--you're reducing risk.

Translation: What's 100 times zero?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:59 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, April 12, 2006
This Date in 1961

Forty-five years ago this minute, on April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into Low Earth Orbit inside a converted spy satellite (which turned out to have had a serious malfunction and wasn't strictly speaking a legal spaceflight). Despite the fact that we were not behind them at all technologically, a perception existed that we needed to do something ahead of them. They proceeded to launch:
-Someone into orbit for more than a day, which was not a huge advance as it did not even require any modifications;
-Two spacecraft into orbit in close sequence, which should have been a dead giveaway that they were simply borrowing equipment from the military;
-A rendezvous which was later determined to be completely bogus;
-A woman, which is completely meaningless;
-Three people stuffed into the original spacecraft;
-Two people in spacesuits stuffed into the original spacecraft minus some components, one of whom went on a dangerous, uncontrolled spacewalk and almost died getting back in;
-Nobody for almost two years;
-A robot that made a "soft" landing on the Moon which would have killed a human;
-One person in their first new spacecraft design in six years, who died when his parachute failed and the backup became entangled in the first (this emergency reentry would not have been necessary had the spacecraft not seriously malfunctioned on orbit);
-And eventually, eight genuine space stations from 1971-1986.

What did the United States do? NASA was established as the space program in 1958--as opposed to the Soviets' four or five simultaneously competing "design bureaus"--produced three spacecraft designs, completed actual engineering objectives, and learned how to fly in space during the 1960s with a clear mandate to get an American to the Moon. These real flights often came only months or weeks after Soviet smoke-and-mirrors. NASA met the challenge, and sent six people to the Moon during 1969. Our next move then stunned the world.
We chickened out.
The Nixon Administration and Congress cancelled the subsequent Apollo flights which had not yet been paid for, leaving only four more lunar landings. During the second-to-last flight, Apollo 16, Congress approved the Administration's proposed space shuttle. It never met its objectives, sending the American space program into a 25-year tailspin in which almost nothing was accomplished. Ironically, its first launch came on the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet accomplishment which gave us purpose.
We weren't ahead in everything, admittedly--some Soviet rocket engines were more advanced than American equivalents and American attempts at a space station (with surplus Apollo hardware) were laughable. But what NASA tried to do it succeeded at while it had a purpose. If Kennedy had announced a space station, it would have been built and operating by 1968, and better than anything the Soviets could have done.

NASA was a victim of an overall national degeneration into bickering that occurred in the 1970s. Some have gone so far as to say that we have moved beyond the distribution of money--capitalism--to the distribution of risk and liability. But on this day I ask:
Will someone take the lead?
Even if it's not the United States, will someone take the lead? Does any country or international group have the courage to rally humanity to some positive purpose, something other than our next hamburger and the private lives of celebrities?
Anyone? Anywhere? Anything?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:07 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Daily Chernobyl #66


"While there have been numerous nuclear accidents, those of Windscale (UK), Three Mile Island (US) and Chernobyl (Ukraine) have most forcibly demonstrated the serious risks associated with nuclear energy."


-Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy

There have been numerous accidents, the others too unrelated to power production or with consequences too minor to argue over.
Windscale showed what happens when you build a weapons-production reactor only about 15 years after nuclear reactors were invented without any knowledge of how the materials worked and then run a dangerous test on it.
Three Mile Island showed what happens when the instrument panel is confusing, one valve bypasses all the regulator-required backups, the operators cause an accident, and the safety systems step in to stop an accident that ends up temporarily raising the radiation level to that of a coal-fired power plant.
Chernobyl showed what happens when you place a uniquely dangerous weapons-production reactor under the control of rookie operators and proceed to break every rule in the book to run a test that everybody should have known wasn't going to work.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:05 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"She questioned whether enough is being done to shut off potential access from Lake Erie, even with the Coast Guard’s heightened security measures. She worries about the possibility of other forms of terrorism [than an airliner], such as a "dirty-bomb" explosion."


-Ohio Citizen Action

If the Federal government built a duplicate containment structure, detonated a tactical nuclear weapon inside it, and nothing happened, they would complain about it not being a strategic nuclear weapon.

What if Davis-Besse were attacked? What would actually happen? What could a terrorist do?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:03 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #65


"It has been claimed that the RBMK reactor is fundamentally more dangerous than other reactors and that this is the reason for the Chernobyl accident occurring. This is not true. The Chernobyl accident occurred primarily through human error. (Ulrike Fink et al, The International Control of Atomic Energy Agency- 35 Years Promotion of Nuclear Energy, Anti-Atom International, Austria.) In fact, in 1983 Mr. Semenov, Head of the IAEA Department of Nuclear Energy and Safety praised the RBMK reactors for their safety features.(IAEA Bulletin 25 (1983) No. 2.) IAEA reassurances that such an accident cannot happen in other reactors are misleading and fallacious."


-Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy

1. See Daily Chernobyl #64 for a list of critical design flaws.
2. Yes, it did occur as a result of human error. If you operate an RBMK according to the rules and procedures of its designers, you will not have an accident. The difference with other reactors is that you can deviate widely from procedures and also not have an accident. The RBMK's design flaws allowed that human error to result in an accident.
3. Mr. Semenov, eh? I wonder if he's from the Soviet Union? And of course the Soviets had no vested interest in trying to prove that their reactors are safe.
4. It couldn't happen in other reactors that don't have those design flaws.
5. This is what happens when you have a lawyer make a technical analysis.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:17 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"They carry lethal radioactive materials..."


-NukeWatch Scotland

Almost everything is radioactive. The real question, when discussing toxicity, is "how radioactive?"

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:03 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Monday, April 10, 2006
Unscientific American Followup

(Link to Original Post, Link to Article)

I never expected such a response: 508 hits and 435 unique visits on Wednesday, November 16th alone plus a NIOF-record 40 comments. Thank you.

Also, two very negative posts from Sid the Fish and J&C. I'd like to address the comments therein.

I admit that the post was not a triumph of my writing skills. That may or may not explain the unusual lack of reading comprehension. It does take two to communicate, and it is partially my fault. However:

Sid the Fish says that I'm an idiot (his word) because Amory Lovins does not give a snappy quote about governmental intervention to lower energy consumption. Reading the article with the intent to derive meaning from the parts and unify them into a whole would help. He also questions my credibility by pointing out that I have no special expertise in fission reactors. Does he? In fact, as a fusion researcher, I have every incentive in the world to trash fission. I refuse to, out of intellectual honesty.
First they came for the biologists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a biologist.
Then they came for the astronomers, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an astronomer.
Then they came for the chemists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a chemist.
Then they came for nuclear power, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't in the nuclear industry.
Then they came for the physicists, and there was no one left to speak up.

J&C says:
1. The same thing about a quote. Lovins wrote an article which advocates government intervention to lower energy consumption. He realizes that if everything were dumped onto the market, his solution could not compete. Thus, he advocates government intervention to make his solution viable by enforcing it.
2. That Lovins agrees that cities, industry, and electricity are necessary. He probably does, in principle. However, cutting electricity consumption in the way that he suggests can be done indefinitely has the ultimate result of pastoralism. Less drastic cuts result in proportionally less drastic deindustrialization. I'm saying that getting rid of or decreasing the use of cities, industry, and electricity results in an erosion of the standard of living we've been developing since the start of urbanization. If J&C agrees, then great. If J&C believes that the argument is so obvious that it shouldn't have been made, I congratulate J&C on not being a pastoralist. I couldn't believe I was defending the use of electricity. Perhaps I should have been clearer. J&C remarks that J&C does not believe that anyone would disagree with the use of electricity; there are a surprisingly large number of people who do who have influence.
3. That energy efficiency as a business operation is a growing sector, which it is. Lower energy prices are good for the consumer in the short term but a long term perspective requires that you look at why the prices are low. If you get there by creating a glut of supply via enforced reductions in demand, you end up entrenching the old technology of power generation. Developing technology to achieve a glut of supply ends up stifling development of power plant technology.
4. That no innovation in power plant technology means no new power plants. Of course it doesn't mean that. It means that the old methods get entrenched if there is no development of new power plant technology. Fairly obvious. Perhaps my writing made this unclear. Energy conservation, depending on the amount used, reduces demand for power plants nearer to zero, decreasing the demand for power plants using advanced technology, which in turn decreases the R&D on advanced technology. It also draws resources away from pure technological development into resource management, which wastes engineering talent, but we'll get to that later.
5. That I need to explain more why energy conservation is bad for the environment. OK. It prevents the building of new power plants, removing the incentive to develop new power plants, and new power plants using new technology are cleaner.
6. That the 1973 oil crisis had nothing to do with the 1974 nuclear industry collapse. Originally, the nuclear industry thought that this was good for business--utilities would turn away from oil and go nuclear. However, the actual result was a decrease in demand for electricity due to conservation, just as oil-fired plants became uneconomical and nuclear plants came online. What do think the utilities did? They closed the oil-fired plants, used the nuclear plants just coming online, and cancelled a huge amount of orders for all types of power plants. Other types of power plants eventually recovered, but nuclear drew an entire global movement against it--something that didn't hamper gas or coal. Anti-nuclear activists spent years simply trying to inflate the costs of building a nuclear power plant beyond where it made sense to build any more from a utility's perspective. They were incredibly successful.
7. That utilities care about nuclear waste storage when it's not an imminent threat to their bottom line. Utilities will build nuclear power plants if it makes sense economically. Currently, largely because of the political climate, it does not. That's why we pro-nuclear activists are here: to do what we can to change the political climate. There are many solutions to the supposedly intractable nuclear waste problem; these include reactors which are designed to use the waste as fuel.
8. That I should have addressed the nuclear waste issue. This is a blog; a blog is a news feed, not an entire website. J&C would find the main site and the discussion board useful in this regard. Admittedly, I have dropped the ball in getting the main site fully operational; it has been up nearly four months and doesn't even have a decent overview or search function. I the meantime, I suggest the discussion board and monitoring this blog for updates to the main site.
9. That there is no difference between fuel conservation and energy conservation, or that energy conservation leads to fuel conservation. You can get fuel conservation two ways: using less energy or using a different technology which uses less fuel. Energy conservation is the enemy of the consumer and the environment for reasons I have already detailed, but recklessly using fuel is a bad idea. Currently, they try to conserve fuel by decreasing energy use, which is an even worse idea. Nuclear power plants use a miniscule amount of fuel with no decrease in energy production. This is completely independent of the type of fuel used--pound for pound, nuclear fuel has immensely higher yields than any other type. There is overall fuel conservation using nuclear, not just conservation of the fossil fuels which remain unburned; less total fuel is used.
10. That changes in demand for power plants rely on a total stoppage of electricity use. If there is not enough demand for electricity to justify building a new plant, the plant will not be built. Increasing electricity demand must meet a threshold for new power plants to be built, and decreasing demand must meet a threshold to close a plant. Of course this is all tied in with fuel prices, too: if it's uneconomical to run the plant, the utility won't run it. If demand doesn't hit that threshold for a new plant, no new plants are ordered. Not hitting the threshold is the net effect of energy conservation. Basic economics.
11. That "many of the old ones are getting old" (J&C's words) and will be retired; thus there will be new orders. Why would you develop a new design at the cost of millions of dollars on the chance that a few would be built? It makes no sense from a manufacturing economics standpoint--every plant would be insanely expensive because every unit would include all the design costs. Looking simply at prices, if I had to generate 1,000 megawatts--sad but true--I would use conventional coal. A utility needs growing pains like a hole in the head. There will be new orders--of conventional plants.
12. That the proper alternative to running out of natural gas is to build natural gas cogeneration plants. Increased consumption of natural gas is what Lovins is proposing, since he proposes to build natural gas cogeneration plants to replace nuclear and coal facilities. We have seen what happens when natural gas consumption goes up: natural gas prices go up.
13. That Lovins "does not propose" closing plants without replacements. That's akin to "proposing" walking on the ceiling without special equipment. Basic economics will tell you that removing demand without changing supply or lowering prices is impossible, and has historical precedent (1973). Once again, electricity demand doesn't have to go down. It just has to fail to hit the threshold that makes a new power plant viable. That said, it has gone down before and could again.
14. That comparing the use of electrically-dependent devices (i.e., ones for which no non-electric replacements exist, such as computers) is irrelevant to a discussion of energy conservation. It makes it much harder to cut electricity use when a bigger fraction of your electric appliances cannot be converted from electricity to other energy sources. Computers can't run on gas.
14. That my arguments in favor of using electricity are somehow insidiously suggesting some kind of conspiracy or something. Once again, I congratulate J&C on not being a pastoralist. Some of the people I deal with are.
15. That efficiency is not an abstract concept. It is the idea that you can take more out of what you have using more work with a similar result. That is an abstraction. It's not worth killing people by denying them access to reliable, cheap, accessible energy--basically electricity. Redefining our modern society in which anyone can get energy for a nominal fee by simply plugging in a cord to one where people have to once again scrounge will come at the expense of the weak and is wrong.
16. That the nuclear fuel cycle emits air pollutants. It does not matter that the electricity to power uranium mines and enrichment facilities comes from coal; it could just as easily come from nuclear. Here J&C uses a lack of new construction to argue against new construction.
17. That nuclear waste is an intractable problem. Reactors have been designed that can consume waste, and nuclear batteries which use short-life fission products have been around for 40 years. Low-level waste is less radioactive than the ore it came from, which nature has been dealing with since the formation of Earth. Not a problem. It is also important to remember that E=mc^2 and the entire mass of the original uranium does not exist at the end of the fuel cycle. Again, J&C is justifying not solving the problem based on the fact that the problem exists.
18. That Lovins does not propose a slide back to a pre-Renaissance standard of living. Again, what matters are the effects of his proposals, not his proposals taken alone.
19. That a grid is beyond the capability of developing countries. I point to the industrialized world: how did we get here? We have a grid. Everyone who is connected to the grid can access professionally-managed electricity very easily for a nominal fee. From a consumer's perspective, centralized generation is easy, reliable, cheap, and frees them to do other tasks instead of resource management. Decentralization supposedly promotes independence, but from whom? Society? What value is there in trying to isolate yourself from everyone else? Decentralization of electricity generation would eliminate or cripple an entire microeconomy, and damage the macroeconomy by robbing people of valuable time needed to do their jobs. J&C is correct in that urbanization in developing countries is required before an urban grid is installed, and that nomadic populations need decentralization. However, it puzzles me why nomads would use electricity at all--electricity is an artifact of settling down. I don't see how this is an issue; there are plenty of settled farmers and city/large town residents in developing countries that need electricity and can't do it themselves. Most individuals in industrialized countries can't even manage a generation system without setting something on fire. Let's leave it to the professionals.
20. That coal-fired generators are there simply because of environmental activists' interference. Partly true. They're there because they were there first. A failed attempt at breaking into the market will result in the old generators still being there. Plus, if no new power plants are needed, they won't be ordered, and the utilities will keep the old ones. Energy conservation entrenches the old, whatever it is--and in this country it's coal.
21. That Lovins "endorses market solutions." Lovins "endorses market solutions"--with government enforcement. The government would be heavily involved in forcing companies and people to conserve energy.
22. That building new plants increases environmental impact. New plants are always cleaner and usually cheaper (unless activists intervene with the specific objective of increasing costs). When new, cleaner plants are built that are cheaper, older plants are phased out. When it is cheaper to not build a new, clean plant, it simply won't be built. If there is no demand for power plants, power plant designers will not invest in development. If there is no investment in R&D, decommissioned plants will be replaced with new plants using the old technology. Governmental actions to cut demand result in suppliers cutting supply. What's difficult here?
23. That utilities don't have more liquid assets when use and thus income goes up. The perturbative factors that J&C describes ("regulated markets, costs of production, costs of distribution, overhead costs, repairs") either stay constant under all conditions or would be there even if demand did not increase. I know of no regulations anywhere in the country that would outlaw profit after a certain amount of units sold. Costs of production stay constant at a certain number of cents per kWh. If anything, they go down with increased use (economy of scale). Overhead is a constant, and so are repairs. If they go up, they either would have anyway (not dependent on demand) or go up slightly as demand increases, but never become a higher fraction of total costs (ignoring inflation, which would affect prices as well).
24. That power plants are working at capacity most of the time and thus utilities couldn't make more money from higher demand. If demand goes up past what they can generate, they buy power from somewhere else. "Somewhere else" has to get power from somewhere, and eventually, someone is so short of power that they order a new plant. My point in saying that higher demand results in more liquid assets for when they need to build a plant obviously works only until demand is so high that they have to build a plant. Once that happens, the extra liquid assets come in extremely handy.
25. That Lovins only "uses bad examples." J&C singles out Lovins' statistics on output per dollar of production, which would seem to be his measure of efficiency, and the fact that he attempted to hide the real reason for the difference--the growth of IT and the export of American industry--in optimistic numbers and clever phrasing. Those would be major. It's still something he said, and it's still wrong.
26. That I dismiss out of hand (J&C's words) the use of cogeneration. I support it. I said that. What else should I say? But not with natural gas, as J&C says. Natural gas prices have already skyrocketed due to use for heating and electricity. Proposing increased use of natural gas to conserve electricity is either stupid or a statistical trick to make electricity conservation look more plausible. Cogeneration can be done with anything that produces heat as a byproduct of electricity generation. Lovins says that wind should be the major source of electricity for the US. He does not explain how wind is supposed to produce heat, but wishes that cogeneration descend from the heavens. His statement that "decentralized non-biomass cogeneration" (decoded: fossil-fuel-fired backyard generators that are used secondarily to heat something) and wind capacity are increasing at a faster rate than nuclear is obvious: no nuclear power plants have come online since 1996 in the US. Any capacity increases have come from upgrades. Also, capacity is not real production--wind capacity can go up past nuclear capacity without actually generating as much electricity. Same goes for "decentralized non-biomass cogeneration."
27. That I didn't compare costs. I didn't. That would require a full article. Again, this is a blog; a blog is a news feed, not an entire website.
28. That the development of energy-efficient technology has economic benefits and uses. The issue is whether it has enough benefits to outweigh gutting an entire microeconomy.
29. That we can have research on both energy efficiency and production at the same time. We could, but any successes in efficiency are going to prevent uses of research into production. If national policy emphasized conservation, the government would have to fund energy production research. Of course, this is a great idea: research into something that is against policy and that we know at the start will never be used. Translation: a money pit.
30. That renewables will provide more electricity in the future than they currently do. Maybe so. But the 30,000 people who die every year choking on coal fumes need something right now.
31. That capacity is indicative of possible future performance. The sun will be shining and the wind will be blowing with the same intensity 20 years from now. Solar panels and windmills will never reach the capacity of a combustion or nuclear plant because the energy is simply so diluted that it is impossible to capture it efficiently or consistently. In addition, the phrase "potential capacity" may be an even more interesting rationalization of "it doesn't work" that we can throw back at them.
32. That I "dishonestly" suggested that Lovins proposes to shut down conventional plants with only renewables as replacements. For the record, I am explaining basic economics and the results of his proposals. I am not reading deeper into his proposals; I'm sure what he's saying is what he wants to happen. This does not mean that he can propose to walk on the ceiling and then criticize those who balk at the expense of the required equipment, saying that he "never proposed" special equipment. And no, for the conspiracy theorists out there, I'm not saying that J&C is Lovins' spokesperson.
33. That weight doesn't matter for crash safety. I think anyone who has driven in a crosswind knows innately why this is false. In an accident between an SUV and a Geo Metro, which car would you rather be in?
34. That carbon fiber cars can have padded dashboards and crumple zones. Sure, they could have padded dashboards. However, my main point was and is that carbon fiber doesn't crumple--it transmits the energy straight through to the driver. I--and investors worldwide--would like to see a composite that acts like a metal. Or we could just use metal.
35. Sidetrack from the format thus far: here's how to design for crash safety: flexibility. Strength will get you nowhere because the weakest part of the car is the part you're trying to protect and it can't get any stronger. A crash-safe car is intentionally weak at points so that it absorbs the energy before it gets to you. A composite like carbon fiber is very stiff, meaning that a carbon fiber vehicle will absorb very little of the energy of a collision. You can't really machine carbon fiber in an attempt to make it flexible, either; it is formed into the intended shape and if it is modified, it no longer carries the properties of the material (Remember Flight 587?). Composites as a class of materials are stiff. No way around it.
36. That the first cars were heavy but not much more unsafe than current models. The main problem with the first cars was that nobody knew how to engineer them for safety. None had seatbelts, none had crumple zones, none had airbags or padded dashboards, and few had door locks. By the way, I mention Henry Ford in the original rebuttal because Lovins cites him as an authority on crash safety, whereas he designed deathtraps.
37. That I question Lovins' credentials by placing the word 'physicist' in quotation marks. I don't care what his credentials are on paper; he can't be a physicist and say that stiffness enhances car safety. Just today, for example, I had the privilege of speaking with a "physicist" who thinks that the Moon landings were faked.
38. That using bicycle helmets as an example of stiffness being beneficial to crash safety is simply a bad example. It demonstrates a lack of understanding of basic physics. Nobody would give that example if they understood what it meant.
39. That the amount of energy used to accelerate a driver is important. Like I said in the rebuttal, if the only thing that matters to you is how much of the energy of the gasoline is used to accelerate the driver, buy a motorcycle. Cars are for transporting things.
40. That nuclear batteries are fraught with problems, namely weight, size, accidents, refueling, the lack of a working prototype, and pollution. Weight could be anywhere from six pounds to 300 depending on what you used. The actual weight, based on the heat produced by fission products in fuel rods (which is where these materials would come from), would be around 50 pounds for the isotopes themselves. The weight of the shielding and associated components would bring the total weight near 100-110, which, considering that it is a solid ceramic block, is actually quite small--on the order of 2.5 cubic feet if that. As for accidents, these batteries have survived a free fall from space. No car crash could top that. Refueling? Not needed. These batteries would work for years and then go into the same landfill as ever-so-much-safer lead-acid batteries currently do. Let's see which one leaks first. "Prototypes" have flown in space for 40 years, and I have no clue where J&C believes pollution is coming from. If J&C is talking about ultimate disposal, I'd like to ask where the lead-acid batteries from current cars go and suggest that these heavily-shielded units might be a bit safer.
41. That cogeneration will make an electrical system more efficient. Lovins singles out the electrical generation of a centralized plant; unless more of the energy of the original fuel goes into electricity, there is no way to optimize it under his system. Gotcha.
42. That centralized facilities are inefficient, regardless of Lovins' numbers. The only electrical efficiency improvement that can be made at a decentralized facility is line losses. Decentralization doesn't convert any more energy to electricity. Thermodynamic efficiency can be improved, yes, but not power production efficiency. Also, what about when low-grade process heat or space heat aren't needed?
43. That radon doesn't come from insulation. Of course it doesn't. Insulation just traps it inside--it comes from decay of trace amounts of uranium-238 in bricks and stone. A choice of insulation to save electricity over a new nuclear power plant due to fear of radiation is incredibly ironic. That's all I was saying. The radiation isn't remotely dangerous in most cases.
44. That Lovins' exclusion of "office equipment" from his "home appliances" makes his comparison of his house to others' houses valid. Unfortunately, there are things that can be used for both--dual-use equipment that can't really be divided one way or the other. Examples include lighting and computers. Furthermore, he only counts electricity--which can easily be thrown off by electric space heat or an electric stove. My point that you can't build housing like that for the masses still stands.
45. That I shouldn't "promote energy demand and then buy EnergyStar appliances." Firstly, I don't promote it. I just think it's a really bad idea to artificially curtail it. Second, I use EnergyStar appliances because they're cheap. Bad for the economy? Yes. In the long run, bad for the environment? Certainly. Cheap? Also yes.
46. That LCDs use more electricity than CRTs, based on "various sources." I'd like to suggest that one source with one consistent method might be more appropriate (WalMart and MIT might use slightly different methods!). As for their actual energy consumption, they are dimmer, produce less heat, and have a different effective viewing area. Every single source that I have consulted shows lower power consumption. J&C looks only at costs, which may or may not include capital investment divided over expected life. Furthermore, when J&C looks at costs, they are for plasma TVs, not LCD monitors.
47. That you can conserve energy without focusing on household appliances. Eventually, you run out of industrial processes to ship overseas, however.
48. That there's no reason to convert from gas to electricity. How about safety (you can't suffocate on an electricity leak), security (the Russians can't cut off electricity), costs (my latest gas bill was for over $400), and the environment (electricity doesn't pollute)? Secondarily, I know Lovins doesn't support such changes, since a very effective way to conserve electricity is to use other sources of energy for as many things as possible. He most assuredly supports the second method.
49. That you can build houses for everyone with the energy-saving methods that Lovins used. Sure, you can build odd-looking expensive houses that no one will buy, are difficult to maintain, and uncomfortable to live in. Then you can build another house next to it and completely destroy its ability to use passive solar effects. I am currently facing north. If I turn around and look south out of my windows I see a brick wall. To the north: a brick wall. To the west: a taller brick wall. Not much of an opportunity to heat the house there.
50. That the use of oil for transportation validates comparing every energy use to a barrel of oil, and conversely, every energy efficiency program's success in barrels of oil. Unfortunately, we don't use oil for everything. How about we just measure everything in BTUs?
51. That Lovins' recommendation that other plants than corn should be used for ethanol validates ethanol use. Corn is the most efficient commonly available feedstock, so others wouldn't make much of a difference.
52. That using natural gas for heating, electricity production, and transportation equates with conserving it if used efficiently. These processes still produce heat that cannot be converted into useful work. Imagine converting our transportation sector, which is 27.9% of our total energy use, to natural gas when we are having trouble supplying our electricity and heating sectors.
53. That we should take into account the "potential" of electricity sources when comparing output. Output is output. How about we take into account the potential of nuclear-generated electricity to be too cheap to meter?
54. That I blame delays on "regulation." I did not say "regulation." I said "protesters," which can also include "lawyers" and "regulation influenced by protesters."
55. That utilities must face public opinion when making a power plant decision. Those opposed to the project must hit the utility's bottom line in order to make a difference, however.
56. That mechanical reliability must be weighed against capacity factor when deciding on an electricity source. Unfortunately, mechanical reliability contributes to capacity factor, so it's already factored in. Capacity factor is the amount produced divided by the amount possible to produce--the very simple result of the complex interactions of anything that can affect production.
57. That I "fail to acknowledge that there is value in discussing potential capacity of a fuel source." I "fail to acknowledge that there is value in discussing potential capacity of a fuel source" because, beyond academic debates over whose favorite source is underutilized the most, there isn't. My favorite sources are, in order:
1. Nuclear fusion ($-my job)
2. Geothermal
3. Nuclear fission
4. Solar
5. Wave power
I advocate for #3 because the others don't work.
58. That it should be considered that nuclear power plants might be a potential terrorist target. Being a target means you're valuable. If we got rid of everything that's a target we'd have nothing to defend. That doesn't necessarily mean that anything would happen if they were attacked. And yes, there are a lot of people who want to close nuclear power plants because they "might have potential to be targets."
59. That a terrorist attack on PV panels would require "an incredible amount of personel, possibly numbering into the thousands, working in very visible locations." All you need is a few crop dusters loaded with black paint. How would the panels then be cleaned? Is paint thinner going to damage their chips? This is actually a very feasible way to take out spy satellites with solar panels. How about windmills? All you need to take out a 1-megawatt windmill is a single .50 caliber rifle bullet.
60. That I said there were no subsidies to nuclear power plants. Of course there are. They are just used to counter the artifical barriers set up by regulators. That's why I said "no net subsidy."
61. That I am "patently dishonest" in criticizing Lovins' use of capacity instead of output. I do not care what Lovins intends, or who he is, or his writing style, or whether his mother wears army boots, or anything about him. I want to discuss the ideas in the article he wrote. I know what he is talking about, and I disagree with it. No dishonesty there. Specifically, he intended to illustrate the "potential" of wind turbines to generate all of the electricity for the United States. I stated that wind turbines standing still are useless, regardless of their numbers; counting capacity as output when the capacity factor is around 30% results in a much larger amount of electricity on paper than actually is there.
62. That line losses don't change based on the source. Usually no, but there are some specialized situations, such as sending electricity that could only be produced on the Great Plains to California and New York, which is what relying on North Dakota's wind for 100% of our electricity would entail (what Lovins suggested in the article).
63. That solar panels can be used as roofing materials. They can, but anything can, and they aren't as good as shingles (read: don't meet building codes).
64. That solar panels produce more energy than they consume. Of course they do. The question is whether they produce useful amounts of power when that power is needed. J&C, in the provided link, again confuses energy and costs.
65. That, although most people do not live in "big, flat-roofed commercial buildings," those buildings can return power to the grid for people to use. Unfortunately, those "big, flat-roofed commercial buildings" generally use a lot of energy. Is this a cost-effective way to provide power for that building?
66. That developing countries can't afford and don't need a grid. Grids are useful in urban areas and then are extended to rural areas (remember Rural Electrification?). Urban areas need a grid, and developing societies need reliable electricity. In this case, I'm not using "developing" as a euphemism for "poor," but rather to describe societies that are actually developing into first-world nations. Many poor countries also can't afford food. Is that an excuse not to provide it?
67. Sidetrack: J&C does not remember the economy in 1977-1985 (Lovins' grand example of conservation's economic benefits). I don't either, so I asked my parents. They replied (I quote), "It sucked." It "sucked" so much that my father thought it would be a good idea to join the Army. Four years later, with muliple herniated disks and compression fractures in his back from being thrown off the back of a truck, and an untreated torn ACL from slipping in the mud around an artillery piece in his low-bid-government-contract boots, plus gastrointestinal problems from the "food" and a stubborn foot fungus, not to mention the psychological effects of Army life (read: having all of your citizenship beaten out of you to reduce you to a mindless physical laborer), he would regret this decision. Yes, I would say, the economy sucked.
68. That carbon sequestration "is not mentioned in the article." Carbon sequestration is what they mean when they say "clean fossil fuels," though, so it's an obvious implication. Again, I'm discussing ideas, not analyzing the rhetoric.
69. That coal burners' production of nuclear waste doesn't mean nuclear operators can discharge theirs. Of course not. What it means is that nuclear waste isn't unique to nuclear power plants, is in fact produced in greater quantities at coal plants, and we have to consider it in full. J&C asks how much waste can be eliminated through recycling, batteries, and medical uses. Recycling alone elminates 97% of the volume of spent fuel that requires disposal, and batteries can take all of the rest. Medicine uses specific isotopes which mainly come from research reactors. Low-level waste can be minimized by better regulations surrounding it. Many times, things that are not actually radioactive (or any more radioactive than when they came in) are counted as nuclear waste for procedural reasons. Coffee cups and rubber gloves aren't the end of the world.
70. That I don't acknowledge that energy production can be distributed. I know that it can, I just oppose it, because it puts electricity production in the hands of amateurs, is difficult to regulate (getting a million people to install scrubbers is harder than getting one plant owner to do the same), is unreliable (more things to fail), is expensive (doesn't use economies of scale for electricity), and forces people to spend time on resource management instead of their jobs.
71. That I should be in favor of "decreasing government involvement in power production." I am in favor of smart regulations that level the playing field. I am not in favor of cutting everything loose and letting the most cutthroat monopolist win.
72. That renewables exploit an economy of scale. Anything that is mass-produced exploits an economy of scale, but distributed generation does not exploit an economy of scale for production because it requires that everything that used to be done in a large quantity in a central place now must be done over and over again in small quantities with approximately the same results (until something fails).
73. That net metering can work in any grid. It can work in a grid with modern switching and meters so that utility workers don't get zapped by your electricity flowing through what they think is a dead line and so that the meter actually registers the electricity going out.
74. That fuel economy will soon go up for SUVs. OK, but that's not what Lovins was talking about. He said that fuel economy went down for cars and light trucks since 1987; this is a meaningless statement because there is an increased number of light trucks on the road, which is what led to this decline. Fuel economy for cars has gone up. You might as well say that average energy consumption of personal computers and refrigerators has gone up since 1950.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:41 PM | 4 comments links to this post

Daily Chernobyl #64


"Design Fault In The RBMK Reactor - The RBMK reactor type used at Chernobyl suffers from instability at low power and thus may experience a rapid , uncontrollable power increase. Although other reactor types have this problem they incorporate design features to stop instability from occurring. The cause of this instability is:
-Water is a better coolant than steam
-The water acts as a moderator and neutron absorber (slowing down the reaction) whilst steam does not.
Excess steam pockets in the RBMK design lead to increased power generation this is known as a positive void coefficient. This excess power causes additional heating thus producing more steam and means less neutron absorption causing the problem to escalate. This all happens very rapidly and if it is not stopped quickly it is very hard to stop as it supplies itself."


-Chernobyl.co.uk

Other reactor types do not have this problem because they are unique to the design of the RBMK. The fact that liquid water is a better moderator than steam is actually a positive feature in most reactors, because if the water boils due to excessive power, the reaction slows down. The reason for the instability is that graphite is a better moderator than water, so that the attenuating effect of the water coolant overcomes its moderating effect. If you combine a solid moderator with a liquid coolant that is a moderator (but not as good a moderator as the solid), then boil off the coolant, the power goes up. This is known as a positive void coefficient of reactivity. A very simple way to avoid this is to not use any graphite, or if you do, don't use any water. Nobody else does. The RBMK is unique in this.
The fact that water is a better coolant than steam is only incidental to the positive void coefficient.
This is not the only design flaw in the RBMK:
-The tips of the control rods moderate, as well, so a minimum number of control rods (30) must be kept in the core or a SCRAM will actually increase power. At Chernobyl, they were using between six and eight during a test.
-The RBMK actually consisted of two critical masses in one reactor, so that a SCRAM could successfully stop the reaction in one and not reach the second.
-The RBMK had no containment structure. It was so large that constructing a containment would have been prohibitively expensive. If Chernobyl had been constructed with a containment, all of the reactor design flaws, human errors, incorrect construction, and flawed testing, leading up to a steam explosion, would have been stopped at the containment and never reached the outside world.
-Graphite at extreme high-temperatures is flammable. When an RBMK is operating, the graphite needs to be kept away from oxygen. When the concrete block on top of the reactor was blown off by the steam explosion, the graphite was exposed to air and caught fire. As this only happens at extremely high temperatures, graphite-moderated reactors that cannot reach such temperatures (like the pebble-bed modular reactor) are not affected.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:33 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Currently, a grassroots group, Minnesota Voices forChoices, is sponsoring a food irradiation right-to-knowbill in Minnesota. Introduced into the House as bill number1795 and the Senate as number 1450, the act would requirethe school board to adopt a formal policy prior topurchasing irradiated food, as well as labeling the productand notifying parents if irradiated food is served inschools."


-Nukewatch

Oh, what could possibly be wrong with a "right-to-know?"
Maybe because it implies that there's something to know about? Let's have a big orange label on our milk that says:

NOTICE
THIS PRODUCT HAS BEEN PASTEURIZED

Or a label on shirts:

NOTICE
THIS PRODUCT WAS PUNCTURED WITH NEEDLES

The obvious implication being, why is this label on here? What's wrong with pasteurization? Is my shirt going to fall apart?

What's wrong with parading a suspect in front of cameras in handcuffs while a tough-looking police officer with an arrogant smirk pushes him along? It's our right to know.
What's wrong with telling everyone that Joaquin Behindu has been "accused" of robbery? It's our right to know. Who cares if it prejudices us against them. It's our right to know. It's our right to know.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 8:25 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, April 09, 2006
Daily Chernobyl #63


"The Chernobyl nuclear power plant located 80 miles north of Kiev had 4 reactors and whilst testing reactor number 4 numerous safety procedures were disregarded. At 1:23am the chain reaction in the reactor became out of control creating explosions and a fireball which blew off the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid."


-Chernobyl.co.uk

It was actually superheated steam, not a fireball. The fire came later.

It's also important to remember that the "heavy steel and concrete lid" is not a containment structure.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:59 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"WE CAN SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE OUR VULNERABILITIES BY CLOSING / CONVERTING THE NUKE PLANTS TO NATURAL GAS AND WIND FARMS, ETC.."


-NukeList

Natural gas can be cut off at any time and more than a few days' gas can't be stored onsite, whereas a nuclear power plant can store 60 years' worth of fuel and waste.
A 1-megawatt windmill can be taken out with a single .50 caliber rifle bullet, and is inherently not securable, whereas a nuclear power plant can survive a direct hit by a 747.
Where's the security there?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:51 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, April 08, 2006
Why Pay Attention to Pro-Nuclear Advocates?

The mainstream media tends to ignore scientists and pro-nuclear advocates in the nuclear debate. Instead, they see it as a debate between the pro-nuclear industry and the anti-nuclear environmental activists.
This is the wrong mindset.
Industry seeks only to protect its bottom line. If touting a 'waste problem' is going to make money (i.e., if your business is decommissioning or waste storage), industry will promote a 'waste problem' or at least do nothing to prevent this idea from taking hold. If your business is selling KI pills and radiation detectors, a nuclear disaster is imminent at every turn. And if your business is nuclear electricity generation, the bottom line matters just as much. What does that mean?
-Keep externalities externalized. Don't think about decommissioning. Don't care about where spent fuel goes so long as you don't have to pay for it. Shuffle classification systems around to minimize costs, not to make sense.
-Advocate for your bottom line, not the use of the technology. What makes sense scientifically and (in the broad scheme of things) economically does not necessarily make sense to the utilities. The Nuclear Energy Institute is perfectly willing to join the no-nukes-kooks and nonproliferators in trashing recycling in a short-sighted attempt to get Yucca Mountain built. Yucca Mountain, though, makes sense only to their bottom line. It might be different if spent fuel wasn't useful.
-Look out for #1. A utility, like any other business, needs political opposition like a hole in the head. It will try to avoid building a power plant of any type. When it appears that one is necessary, it will try the options that look best to its balance sheet. First, it will try to slow the rate of growth in demand--energy conservation. A monumentally successful effort prevented major new infrastructure from about 1980 to an as-yet-undetermined point in the future. Once that option is exhausted, it will find loopholes to try to find the cheapest plant to build. Knowing that fuel costs are passed on to customers, it will opt for natural gas. If any noise is made about 8-10 cent/kWh electricity prices, it will weigh the cost of environmental litigation over a real baseload plant against the cost of price-gouging litigation and the PR problems inherent in single moms sobbing in front of Channel 6 News. If they find the tradeoff acceptable, they will go to coal under normal circumstances. (Others include subsidized nuclear, the threat of the nationalization of the nuclear industry, and a Bandwagon Market--or a market that internalizes fossil fuels' fuel and waste costs.) Once the capacity is there, the utility will start the cycle over again.

If you were in their position, would you be able to do anything else? Think about it. Altruism and ethics are fundamentally right, but if you are faced with repossession of your car, will you write a $500 check to feed 2,500 starving Africans?
Let me make this very clear: I don't blame the nuclear industry for what they are forced to do. You really can't.
I blame the media for setting up this false dichotomy of nuclear industry vs. people. They assume it's a choice--for once, they do not weigh off all credible viewpoints. While assuming that 2+2=5 is a perfectly acceptable alternative Theory of Math is a major media weakness, setting up those who see 2+2=4 as elitists is equally wrong.
I blame scientists for not looking out for their jobs. We aren't in solidarity against anti-nuclear activists, Creationism, and Immanuel Velikovsky, for example, but rather leave the biologists to fight their own fight, the astronomers to fight