Nuclear is Our Future

Nuclear is Our Future Monthly Newsletter

December 2006 Issue

This is Your Planet on Coal

In This Issue:

1. Introduction
2. December 2006 Archive

1. Introduction

Welcome to our newsletter! Contained here is the December 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 December 2006 online archive at blog.niof.org/2006_12_01_archive.html.

Link: http://blog.niof.org/2006_12_01_archive.html

2. December 2006 Archive

Sunday, December 31, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Yucca Mountain probably won't last 50 years, let alone 10,000 years."


-Center for Health, Environment and Justice

This isn't even unfounded speculation; it's just wrong. Above-ground storage casks sitting out in the rain last more than 50 years; a stronger one underground in the desert definitely would last much longer.

Don't get tripped up on the big numbers. It's physics and geology.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:21 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, December 30, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"In the absence of a solution for what to do with nuclear waste, the NRC and DOE are trying to fool the public into believing they have an answer. With so-called low-level waste, the NRC has proposed classifying certain levels of radioactivity as "below regulatory concern" (BRC). This means that any waste with less than the selected levels of radioactivity (the numbers have not yet been set), could be disposed of in the nearest landfill, incinerator, water way or even sewer."


-Center for Health, Environment and Justice

Yes, things like coffee grounds and orange juice, both of which are radioactive and both of which would be considered low-level waste if they were artificially mixed with uranium and potassium traces, respectively, instead of naturally mixed. What's the difference?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:12 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Friday, December 29, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"What happens to the nuclear waste generated by the plant and to the radioactive equipment? Right now, it all stays right there on site. There is nowhere to take it."


-Center for Health, Environment and Justice

Radioactive equipment is only a small part of each nuclear power plant, and in the past, it has been taken to Barnwell, South Carolina, or Hanford. Nuclear waste is only 3%-5% of the spent fuel stored on site, and in at least one case (Big Rock Point), the spent fuel was transferred to a nearby operating plant.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:02 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Thursday, December 28, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Although the NRC issues licenses to power plants to operate for 40 years, they were never built to last this long. The average operating life of the 20 or so reactors that have been shut down has been around 13 years."


-Center for Health, Environment and Justice

A classic case of statistical fiddling.
1. The plants were built to last that long; some components were not, and were designed to be replaced.
2. If you average Zion (1973-1998), or Dresden 1 (1960-1978), or Connecticut Yankee (1968-1996), or Maine Yankee (1972-1996), or Shippingport (1957-1982), or Yankee Rowe (1960-1992), or Big Rock Point (1962-1997), or La Crosse (1967-1983), or Millstone 1 (1970-1995), or San Onofre (1968-1992) with experimental reactors that weren't designed for 40-year lifetimes like Saxton (1961-1972), or the CVTR (1963-1966), or Elk River (1964-1968), or Piqua (1963-1966), or Hallam (1958-1963), or Humboldt Bay (1963-1976), or Pathfinder (1964-1967), or Vallecitos (1957-1963), or Peach Bottom 1 (1967-1974) with ships (NS Savannah: 1962-1970), with military reactors (Hanford N), with plants that shut down due to accidents (Fermi 1: 1963-1972 and Three Mile Island 2: 1979), with plants that didn't run at all because of political pressure (Shoreham) or were shut down early because of political pressure (Rancho Seco: 1975-1989), and with ones that had legitimate technical problems like Fort St. Vrain (1976-1989), or Indian Point 1 (1962-1974), or Trojan (1975-1992), yes, it could very well be 13 (Why didn't they throw the IFR in there too? It generated some electricity, after all). But that number doesn't mean anything by itself--each plant has different circumstances.
3. How was that average worked out? I suspect that it was taken by adding up the years that each plant operated and dividing by the number of plants instead of using the amount of electricity produced by the plants, which would lead to a lower number than you would otherwise get if you do include prototypes, since operational plants are bigger than test reactors.
4. What about the ones that haven't shut down yet? Why aren't those included? What about Oyster Creek, which is beginning its 38th year of operation? They're deliberately including only the plants that (a) weren't supposed to last that long, (b) had accidents, (c) had problems, or (d) were shut down by politicians, and extrapolating that figure to every operating nuclear power plant and every one that could possibly be built in the future. Operationally, that statistic is meaningless.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:20 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The basic problem with nuclear waste is that no one knows what to do with it. There's no way to destroy or detoxify it like you can with some chemical waste."


-Center for Health, Environment and Justice

Yes, there is; it's called a fast-spectrum nuclear reactor.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:31 AM | 2 comments links to this post

Tuesday, December 26, 2006
NIOF.org Update #52

Campaign Pages Day:

1. Campaigns index
2. Campaign: Chernobyl+20
3. Campaign: Support a Carbon Tax
4. Campaign: Reinstate CWIP
5. Campaign: Regulatory Reform
6. Campaign: Support ACR Licensing
7. Campaign: Support PBMR Licensing
8. Campaign: Support PRISM Licensing
9. Campaign: Fund the IFR
10. Campaign: Overturn Reactor Bans
11. Campaign: Support Iran’s Right to Nuclear Power
12. Campaign: Fight the LNT
13. Campaign: Consolidate DOE Nuclear Efforts
14. Campaign: Support New Build
15. Campaign: Net.Activism
16. Second Bandwagon Market Nuclear Proposals tracker
17. The following Net.Activism campaign buttons have been uploaded: Chernobyl+20, DOE Priority, Eat Radwaste, Fight LNT, Fund IFR, Legalize Nukes, New Nukes, NRC Reform, Nuclear Iran, Nuke Reform, Pro-Evolution, Support ALMR, Support CANDU, Support CWIP, Support PBMR, and Tax Carbon. Code for placing them on your web page is found on the respective campaign pages.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:48 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"A half century of testing has contaminated vast reaches of the planet, and has resulted in millions of premature deaths by causing birth defects, cancer, and other diseases."


-Western States Legal Foundation

So where are these millions of dead people? Where are all the people with excess body burdens of radioactive material?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:10 PM | 2 comments links to this post

Monday, December 25, 2006
Happy Holidays from NIOF


posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:59 PM | 0 comments links to this post

NIOF.org Update #51

1. The buttons on the sidebar are now separated into two sections: News Feeds and Site Stuff. I hope this makes it a little less confusing to navigate.
2. The Humor Index has been updated to include the 12 Years of Reactor Licensing. The "Special Pieces" section is now in alphabetical order.
3. The Go Nuclear Jr. Ringer T-Shirt is back, and the Go Nuclear Postage Pal, single Go Nuclear mini buttons, and single Go Nuclear rectangle magnets are back in stock, although the 10 and 100 packs of Go Nuclear mini buttons and 10 and 100 packs of Go Nuclear rectangle magnets aren't available yet.
4. I've corrected the newsletter index; code that is being distributed to other sites should not refer to "our newsletter" instead of "the NIOF newsletter."

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:56 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Instead of promoting conservation and modern energy technologies that are clean and inexpensive to build, the [Canadian] government is betting our future on risky and expensive nuclear power, and polluting coal power."


-Energy Probe

1. Conservation is to energy as starvation is to food. We pay for conservation by not being able to do things that we used to be able to do.
2. What, may I ask, is more modern than nuclear power? Unless they're talking about backyard fusion devices that produce less energy than they consume, there hasn't been a single energy source discovered since nuclear fission.
3. Marine life killed by toxic discharges from solar panel factories and birds killed by windmills might argue with "clean." And, to quote Sybil Fawlty, "the reason it's cheap-ish is it's no bloody good!"
4. Inexpensive to build doesn't necessarily mean inexpensive. In the US, a utility billing structure that doesn't allow construction costs to be passed on but does allow fuel costs to be passed on results in utilities building cheap plants that run on expensive fuel--and the result is high costs.
5. I'm glad they've finally admitted that nuclear power is clean.
6. Canada is phasing out coal.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:26 AM | 1 comments links to this post

Sunday, December 24, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl has an absolut [sic] "dead zone" of 23 miles."


-Citizens Against Perkins

I didn't know they made whiskey at Chernobyl, but anyway...

The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl was also a bomb factory and it was also subjected to a stunt that was essentially designed to drain the reactor's coolant. Neither the reactors that would have been built at Perkins (it was a project canceled in the early 80s) nor the reactors that would be built today if that site were selected work close to the way that Chernobyl's reactor did.

And it's not a "dead zone" either--the radiation levels today are high enough that people aren't allowed to live there, but below the standard for occupational exposure. The rest of the plant was operated for years afterward without special equipment.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:09 PM | 2 comments links to this post

Saturday, December 23, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Civil enrichment plants can and have been have been misused in nuclear weapons programs."


-Energyscience

Only when there is no civil nuclear program. So, of course, the appropriate response is to shut down the civil nuclear program.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:46 AM | 2 comments links to this post

Friday, December 22, 2006
Weekly Nuclear Poll #4

In the sidebar or here:

In the context of Britain's civil nuclear program, which Gen-III/Gen-III+ reactor design should be pursued?
ACR-700/ACR-1000
EPR
AP-1000
None; go straight to Gen-IV
A combination of the above
None of the above

View Results
Discuss this Poll

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:31 AM | 3 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"A uranium enrichment plant in Australia could also have a destabilising affect, with concerns having been expressed, for example, by a former Indonesian presidential advisor Dr. Dewi Anwar, who has said that Australia needs to reassure its neighbours that it has no desire to acquire nuclear weapons."


-Energyscience

In a practical sense, what would happen if Australia or Canada built nuclear weapons? On the other hand, what would happen if the US built nuclear weapons and nobody else had them? Oh, right, we dropped two of them on Japan.

Nobody likes nuclear weapons. But the knowledge is not going away, and any effort to completely get rid of them will pass through that scenario, however briefly, where only one nation has nuclear weapons--and the overwhelming likelihood is that they would be used. Realistically, the current situation is probably the best of the situations which are available. Non-proliferation efforts should be focused on the Third World and unstable countries; we can't do anything about a developed nation getting nuclear weapons and it's probably not a good idea to even try.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:00 AM | 7 comments links to this post

Thursday, December 21, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Uranium mining has scarred the landscape and affected areas in 16 countries with millions of tons of dangerous dirt called tailings."


-Reaching Critical Will

Coal mining has scarred the landscape and affected areas in over 70 countries with billions upon billions of tons of radioactive dirt.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:37 PM | 4 comments links to this post

Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Why are we still making nuclear wastes which will endanger life for millennia?"


-Plutonium Free Future

Why indeed, and why do they oppose recycling it or even reusing it to destroy the most dangerous part of it? And if they're for a plutonium-free future, why don't they want to get rid of the plutonium instead of keeping it around?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 7:23 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Uranium is the key to nuclear weapons. During the operation of a reactor, some uranium-238 is converted to plutonium-239. Periodically spent-fuel is removed from reactors and after storing for a year or more it can be treated in a reprocessing plant to recover the plutonium, the essential ingredient of the nuclear bomb."


-Reaching Critical Will

And some of the plutonium-239 is converted to plutonium-240, which does not work in bombs. By the time it is removed from a nuclear power plant, the plutonium in spent fuel--even if extracted--has too little plutonium-239 and too much plutonium-240. It's not a plutonium issue; it's a plutonium-239 issue.
Incidentally, Chernobyl was dangerous precisely because it was designed to integrate these two incompatible aims--electricity generation and plutonium-239 production. The design used at Chernobyl is so radically different from any other power reactor--and so much more complicated and expensive--that it is obvious that any country that builds one is pursuing nuclear weapons.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 4:02 PM | 4 comments links to this post

Monday, December 18, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Links to information about weapons plutonium (MOX) fuel and the effort to import it into Canada"


-Sierra Club of Canada

That fundamentally misrepresents what MOX is--it's a mix of oxides, not pure plutonium.

Plus, would you rather use it in reactors or have it sit around for someone to build a bomb out of it?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:54 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, December 17, 2006
Nice Piece About Fusion

"Freedom for Fusion" (from Freedom for Fission).

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:35 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Israel Has Nuclear Weapons

What a shocker.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 7:45 PM | 0 comments links to this post

NIOF.org Update #50

1. The Search function now works.
2. I've put up a list of the known site issues.
3. The File List is back up.
4. The Site Policies and About pages have been updated.
5. The "I Power Blogger" image has been removed and a title placed above the News Feeds section of the sidebar (the buttons near the bottom). The buttons have also been rearranged so that it might be a bit easier on the eyes. You might also notice a few new ones.

Tell me if there are any problems; there's no point in me distributing code that doesn't work.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:01 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The conference will seek to:
-identify processes needed to transition to a more sustainable future,
..."


-Conservation Council of South Australia

Do we want to sustain the status quo?

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

Saturday, December 16, 2006
NIOF.org Update #49

1. I've updated the Humor Index to include:


Being a Hippie with a Guitar Brings Wisdom
Chicago Board of Tirade Issues Statement on Caldicott Book
Concerned Mothers for a Stone Age Society
Diesel Submarine
EPA: Yucca to Emit Low-Levels of Criminals
Father Knows Best, by Dr. John Gofman
National Council on Petty Crap Endorses Life-Cycle Analysis
Nuclear Engineering Class Taken for Mining, Milling, Conversion, Deconversion, Manufacturing, Transportation, Fuel Loading, Burnup, Onsite Storage, Reprocessing, Actinide Burning, Vitrification, and Geological Storage
Public Citizen: School Buses Connected to Napalm
Report: Nuclear Power Plants Produce Toxic Quantities of Pandemonium Chloride
She Can’t Do Math
The 12 Years of Reactor Licensing
The Smelly Swamp Onions Institute
We Must Do Everything Possible to Stop Global Warming



2. The Regulatory Reform Index is up, although none of the pages are.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 5:17 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Weekly Nuclear Poll #3

Update 2:59 PM: I forgot part of the URL. I apologize to the five people who have tried to vote so far; please try again.

In the sidebar or here:

Do you believe that small businesses and startups can succeed in the nuclear power sector?
Yes
Yes, but only in a different regulatory climate
Yes; theoretically they could, but they won't
No
Undecided

View Results
Discuss this Poll

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:18 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The materials at West Valley will remain lethal for hundreds of thousands of years."


-Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes

In order to be lethal, a toxin has to be separated from the source, collected in the body, and absorbed by the body in toxic quantities. The above quote implies all four steps--with no evidence at all that they would occur, simply assuming that because a toxic material is present it will kill someone. Two main mechanisms have been suggested to bypass these requirements:
1. "If it can kill a bug, it can kill you and me." This anti-intellectual (read: I'm stupid and I'm proud of it) argument is probably a greater political threat to biology than creationism. Simplifying it a little bit (but not by a whole lot), toxins work by interrupting biochemical pathways. If there isn't enough of a toxin to react with the relevant part of that pathway, it won't be interrupted. If the pathway isn't essential, it won't matter, or will injure the affected organism instead of killing it. Different individuals of the same species also react differently to different toxins; recall that someone in Florida recently survived a lethal injection. Sometimes, certain pathways exist in some species but do not exist in others; DDT, for example, works on insects and probably reptiles but not birds or humans. More often, though, there's simply more of a biologically essential chemical in a larger organism--and the same amount of toxin can't react with an excess of that chemical. People who make this argument are often those who simply refuse to understand that all biological organisms are, at their core, complex chemistry (and usually also refuse to understand that a system becomes unnecessarily complex precisely in the absence of a central controlling force).
2. Biomagnification (better known as bioaccumulation). Practical problems with this include the fact that an organism can only accumulate a certain amount of a toxin before the toxin is excreted--and that amount is sometimes not even enough to cause harm. The often-suggested additive relationship between toxins in food and toxins in predators is oversimplified to the point of being incorrect.
At the end of the discussion, the four requirements are still there. In order for an organism to be poisoned, a toxin has to be distributed from its source, collected by the organism, actually absorbed by the body, and absorbed in toxic quantities--none of which actually happen. Details, details.

Guess what? The "hundreds of thousands of years" statement isn't really correct either. That number is derived to the "ten half-lives" rule of thumb about significance, which isn't connected at all to toxicity (i.e., something can be present without being toxic).

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

Friday, December 15, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Children who lived close to Chernobyl have a 200 times increased rate of thyroid cancer and increases in leukemia are expected to appear in the next 20 years reaching figures of 2000-3000."


-Conservation Council of South Australia

1. To paraphrase the famous book title, what's 20,000% of nothing?
2. Well, it's been 20 years since 1986, and the leukemia epidemic hasn't happened.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:39 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Thursday, December 14, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The radioactive fallout [from Chernobyl] was 200 times that caused by the weapons exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fuel was the same, uranium."


-Conservation Council of South Australia

1. The fallout was greater because there was more material to fall out. Most people don't know that while it is certainly possible to build an atomic bomb that produces a great deal of fallout (one with a cobalt tamper), bombs that are optimized for explosive effect do not produce a great deal of fallout--and no cobalt bomb has ever been built, since there really is no point to building one. Most of the radiation exposure comes during the detonation. Remember, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thriving modern cities today. An atomic bombing, while horrible, isn't the end of the world. Even a full nuclear war wouldn't kill everyone on Earth; we're just too dispersed.
2. The fuel was not the same. The Hiroshima bomb used highly-enriched uranium containing 93% uranium-235, the Nagasaki bomb used weapons-grade plutonium containing about 94% plutonium-239 (and no uranium at all), and Chernobyl used natural uranium containing 0.71% uranium-235. Chernobyl was a bomb factory, yes. Did it use bomb materials within the reactor? No--they were extracted offsite. All uranium is not the same.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:17 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Based on TRAC's accumulating evidence of uranium-233 waste in the riverbed, the Washington State Ecology Department jointly sampled riverbed sediments with TRAC on Sept. 23, 2004. TRAC reviewed Ecology's data and confirmed uranium-233 waste in the sediment samples."


-The RadioActivist Campaign

Did the Washington State Ecology Department confirm it, or is it their 'confirmation' of their own assertion?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:15 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Hexavalent chromium is now in the Ogallala Aquifer thanks to our supposedly "safe" nuclear industry."


-Citizens' Nuclear Information Center

That comes from all power plant cooling systems, not nuclear reactors, and has quite a few other uses--all of which could have caused the little contamination that was found.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:51 PM | 2 comments links to this post

Monday, December 11, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Last year nearly 1700 megawatts of windpower were installed in the US alone, more than twice as much capacity as is theoretically provided by Davis-Besse."


-Harvey Wasserman

Capacity isn't production. Davis-Besse operates at 98.45% power on average. Windmills vary between 15%-30%. So (optimistically) twice as much capacity turns into two-thirds as much production, and since output from windmills varies all the time, you need natural gas to back it up.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:27 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Sunday, December 10, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Coal, oil, and natural gas were the world's big three energy producers prior to World War Two--as they are today--and safe, clean energy sources were the "holy grail" of energy solutions--as they are today. The concept of using nuclear power for controlled energy production is old--it was conceived at least as long ago as 1919! Yet, no one could convince either private investors or government to build nuke plants until World War Two."


-Russell Hoffman

1. Energy or electricity? Nuclear power isn't going to be running cars, barring huge advances in battery technology, while oil is used to run cars and is not used for electricity. It used to be--before nukes were built.
2. Demand outpaced the output of "soft energy" sources like wind in about 1600. Talk about old, and that's certainly no holy grail.
3. In 1919, Ernest Rutherford said that with current (at the time) technology, nuclear power was not possible. That was because the neutron hadn't been discovered yet. Reactors were not built until World War II.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:01 PM | 1 comments links to this post

Saturday, December 09, 2006
Weekly Nuclear Poll #2

In the sidebar or here:

Do you believe that Iran has the right to enrich uranium, provided that enough light-water reactor capacity is built to use it and that the Natanz facility is fully declared?

Yes

Yes, but it must be under international supervision

No

No, but Iran should be supplied with other reactor technology as a compromise

Undecided


View Results

Discuss this Poll

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

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"IN THE EVENT OF WAR...NUCLEAR POWER IS A LIABILITY
Nukes are such obvious and potentially disastrous targets that the only sensible thing to do if hostilities break out is to close them down."


-Russell Hoffman

Then why were neither nuclear power plants nor nuclear fuel cycle facilities ever targeted during the Cold War? And why would shutting them off change anything about the load that a containment dome can withstand before cracking?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:49 AM | 1 comments links to this post

Friday, December 08, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Until March 28th, 1979, the nuclear industry assured the American public that there was no way a meltdown would happen here.
This evidence includes the partial meltdown of the Enrico Fermi nuclear power plant. "We almost lost Detroit" was how an industry engineer described it, in a fit of lucidity unequaled since by any member of the Nuclear Mafia.
They also had to ignore an explosive fuel-handling error resulting in three deaths in Idaho (including one man impaled on the ceiling of the facility); and numerous other "near-misses".
But on March 28th, 1979, because of events which unfolded in Middletown, Pennsylvania, the nation's attitude towards nuclear power changed. Since that day, no nuclear power plants have been ordered in America. Numerous nuclear power plants were canceled or converted to other, far safer, fuel sources. However, over 100 American nuclear power plants still operate, as of this writing (2002)."


-Russell Hoffman

1. No, the industry said a meltdown was very improbable--that probability, of course, got higher and higher as first the AEC and then the NRC ignored the consequences of ordering the addition of unnecessary "safety systems" that made plants impossible to maintain or operate. By dividing the attention of personnel, these "safety systems" ironically made the plants more dangerous! Since then, plants have been designed which cannot melt down (i.e., a meltdown is physically impossible).
2. Fermi 1 was a completely different design from Three Mile Island, and the melting core was captured in a specially-designed container. It was in fact restarted but its license renewal application was rejected.
3. "We almost lost Detroit" is hyperbole with absolutely no grounds in physics. Without powerful computers--the plant was designed in the early 1960s--how could they have juggled so many variables? They simply went with a worst-case scenario and calculated the probability of lesser accidents based on that. Computer analysis starting in the 1980s found many flaws in the worst-case scenarios; many turned out to be physically impossible.
4. The Idaho accident was at a military reactor; it was in fact a maintenance accident in which technicians accidentally withdrew control rods (the procedure read "disassembly is the reverse of assembly" and they took it a bit too literally).
5. The public was opposed to nuclear power by 1976 due to PR screwups that began in the 50s.
6. No nuclear power plant has been ordered since 1978 and no successful order has been placed since 1974 because of simple economics. Following the 1973 oil crisis, electricity prices went up (since fuel costs are passed on to consumers) and consumers reacted predictably by reducing consumption to save money in the short-term--which reduced the need for new plants. The nuclear power plants that had already been ordered were usually completed and used to replace the now-uneconomical oil-fired plants. Nuclear power plants still on the drawing board were canceled. Three Mile Island had nothing to do with orders that stopped years before, although post-TMI overregulation and government-ordered design changes certainly contributed to some cancellations.
7. How is coal a "far safer fuel source?" Coal emissions kill 30,000 Americans every year. Tell me that's safe.
8. He also does not mention the actual definition of 'meltdown:' the melting of all or part of the fuel. That's all it is.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 5:06 PM | 2 comments links to this post

Thursday, December 07, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Averaging the current world use of the two different [uranium enrichment] processes--30% gaseous diffusion and 70% ultracentrifuge--the energetic costs are 0.000555 petajoules per 1,000 SWU. (A petajoule is 1 million billion joules.)"


-Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, p.11

Well, using her numbers, that would be about 154,000 kilowatt-hours (about four joules of heat energy will raise the temperature of one gram (!) of water one degree Celsius; for another example of units that are clearly chosen to distort the actual quantity, see the December 3, 2005 Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day). The US has about eight million SWUs of enrichment capacity, so that works out to 1.232 billion kWh if run year-round. Nuclear power plants produced 782 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity last year (the difference is a factor of 635!).

Those numbers aren't necessarily correct, either. I haven't checked her weighted average, and the mix of technologies that she assumes will always be used in fact will not be used. Modern enrichment plants use centrifuges and future ones will probably use lasers. Also, a significant amount (approximately 10%) of low-enriched uranium for nuclear power plants is not enriched from natural uranium but rather downblended from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

Does the term "context" occur to anyone?

posted by Stewart Peterson at 6:57 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"On the private financial side, the enormous expense of simply constructing a nuclear reactor--double the capital cost of a conventional coal plant--means that investors remain less than enthusiastic."


-Helen Caldicott, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, p.23

Such a valid point, given that some of today's reactors are cheaper than today's coal plants and that anti-nuclear activists caused much of that "doubling" by using lawsuits as a delaying tactic during years of double-digit interest rates.
And, since coal emissions kill 30,000 Americans annually, she's putting a price tag on people's lives.

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

Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Read why the Arianna Huffington Online Forum gets the DOE Watch Fascist Forum Award. Arianna's Forum in poorly managed and overrun by ACLU and ADL types that hate the Christian Perspectives on the Science behind the Revelations weather and health effects."


-DOE Watch

This is why this guy was nominated for the Gofman Award.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:44 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Monday, December 04, 2006
NIOF.org Update #48

1. There is now an index for the Weekly Nuclear Poll; I've made a minor correction to the title of the first poll.
2. I've uploaded and formatted the online version of the November newsletter and made the requisite changes to the index, along with correcting a major mistake (blog.niof.org/ instead of neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/ for the NEI blog address!).

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:56 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"The nuclear industry has pushed to allow nuclear power plants to obtain credits under a variety of state-administered, market-based programs designed to reduce air pollution and global warming emissions. These credits represent a financial windfall to the nuclear industry and should be opposed on the grounds that technologies like nuclear power that have major environmental impacts should not benefit from environmental programs."


-US PIRG

Nuclear power plants don't emit carbon dioxide. Why should they pay a tax as though they do? If nuclear power provides an environmental benefit, why shouldn't it benefit from an environmental program? Global warming is about global warming. If you're going to tax nuclear electricity production to create a fund to pay for solving the waste problem (as they already do) why not tax fossil fuel waste? And don't apply taxes on fossil fuel waste to plants that don't produce fossil fuel waste! What if we tried to get solar panel owners to pay into the Nuclear Waste Fund (although it might be a good idea to establish a solar PV production tax to pay for disposal of heavy-metal waste from discarded solar panels as well as remediation of rivers trashed by toxic discharges from solar panel factories)?

Oh, right: hippie logic. It is because it is, and nobody can get an idea into their heads with a crowbar. Lockstep wackjob automatons on parade. Try to talk to one, and within thirty seconds they give you a fundamentalist-style "knowing" smirk and look off in the distance, then walk away, because we are not allowed to think in ways that are not allowed. Reality is what they want to exist, and anything that they don't want to exist doesn't even have the privilege of not existing. It is simply not defined; it cannot even be said to not exist because it transcends nonexistence. Simply put, it isn't. [Isn't what? Isn't. What does that mean? Isn't.]
To paraphrase our illustrious President: I know. I was one.
Ignorance + Arrogance = Antiscience

posted by Stewart Peterson at 12:00 AM | 0 comments links to this post

Sunday, December 03, 2006
Interesting Discussion About Wind

At NEI: Link.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 10:02 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Nuclear power plants are copious consumers of water."


-US PIRG

All power plants require water; it's a cooling system issue, not a type-of-heat-source issue. Nuclear power plants require slightly more water than a coal plant or gas plant because they don't have thousands of tons of air pollution to carry away some of their byproduct heat.

The reason that I used the word 'require' instead of 'consume' is that they don't consume water--it goes in one end, is boiled, spins a turbine, condenses, and goes right back into the river or lake. Nothing is consumed. Some of it is not returned to the river or lake if a cooling tower is used--but the water returned to the river or lake is cooler and there's less of it needed. And eventually it comes back down (the exotic phenomenon known as "rain"), so it doesn't magically disappear. Hydropower, on the other hand (and it is renewable), dramatically alters nearby ecosystems.

Even though they work and are certainly good enough, the standard approaches (direct river cooling, cooling towers) aren't the only ones possible. At least four major approaches are also known to work.
1. Symbiosis with hydropower. Existing hydro reservoirs, especially large ones, have probably permanently altered nearby ecosystems. Dam removal sometimes restores them--and sometimes doesn't. Most hydro dams are used for power and have some transmission capacity already there; nuclear power plants can use the reservoirs for cooling and need only to expand the existing transmission capacity. This is done at the North Anna nuclear power plant (silly arguments about possible impacts on artificially stocked fish in "Lake" Anna notwithstanding) and would have been done at the Bellafonte plant had it not been canceled.
2. Cooling with air. This depends on humidity.
3. Cooling with municipal wastewater. Treated sewage is mostly water, and can absorb heat just as well as river water.
4. Cogeneration. The Russians do this with (AFAIK) every major power plant; instead of putting hot water back into rivers or lakes or evaporating it, they use it for space heat and (guess what) hot water for nearby buildings. It decreases environmental impact of any power plant and most importantly is a bit less wasteful. This is also a great way to reduce consumption of natural gas without reducing the availability of energy or reducing demand for electricity (and hence new power plants using alternative or improved technology)--almost 22% of natural gas is used in homes. There is also a substantial safety advantage to removing explosive substances from homes.

We should be glad that thermal pollution--the release of heat into bodies of water--is one of nuclear power's biggest "problems."

posted by Stewart Peterson at 9:06 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Saturday, December 02, 2006
Weekly Nuclear Poll

Some of you may have noticed that there is now a Weekly Nuclear Poll (see also near the bottom of the sidebar of the blog home page). The first one is about DUPIC; I'm currently testing the system to see if it will work for voting on the Gofman Award.

Speaking of the Gofman Award, does anyone have any nominees?

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

November 2006 Newsletter

I have just submitted it. I am told that it will be sent at around 3:00 AM, although I have no control over when it is in fact sent. If you have not subscribed, you can find it on the internet here, and/or subscribe using the box in the top right corner of the blog home page.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 3:11 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Store Update

Caps are apparently out of stock, although it doesn't say that on the product page.

Cafepress will apparently be unable to fill bulk orders until after Christmas.

Link.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:11 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Energy from Thorium Forum

Kirk Sorensen has launched a forum section. Visit and join the discussion.

(See also the NIOF discussion board)

posted by Stewart Peterson at 2:06 PM | 0 comments links to this post

New Nuke in Idaho?

Link. (Link to plan PDF).

This is the state that banned new coal plants in April. Please, please, please file a comment--the deadline is January 22. Use case number IPC-E-06-24.

They're not too enthusiastic about it; I wouldn't be very optimistic.

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

On This Day in 1942...

Rod Adams reminds us to remember the first artificial reactor on nuclear reactor technology's 64th birthday.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:45 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Whereas fission reactions happen constantly in stars like our Sun, it has happened naturally on Earth in at least one extremely rare occassion with very special circumstances."


-Texas Radiation Online

That's fusion--the opposite of fission (combining rather than splitting atoms). Natural nuclear reactors have been found on Earth, though: see yesterday's Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 1:37 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Friday, December 01, 2006
Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day


"Boiling water reactors are the more dangerous of these two systems (BWRs vs. PWRs), and also produces [sic] several times more radioactive waste than a PWR."


-Texas Radiation Online

A BWR is an inherently safe system--lower down the page, they admit that there were natural nuclear reactors in Africa about 1.7 billion years ago. Those reactors were BWRs.

posted by Stewart Peterson at 11:27 PM | 0 comments links to this post

Link: http://blog.niof.org/2006_12_01_archive.html