Nuclear is Our Future

I've been putting this off for a long time, but I think it's finally time to eviscerate the "georeactor" hypothesis, which was floating around some pro-nuclear websites a while back. The idea goes that the Earth's core is a huge fast-breeder reactor, constantly extracting waste by settling it out and generating more fuel by converting uranium-238 into plutonium using a critical assembly ('seed') of ~30% U-235 surrounded by a 'blanket' of U-238. It is utterly, totally, and completely wrong.

1. There is no way to make natural uranium (at any time in the past) go critical in the fast spectrum, which is required for breeding in the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle. Presumably, there is no huge supply of heavy water in the Earth's core, or external neutron source; furthermore, settling-based arguments for isotope separation would form a perfectly inverted assembly (i.e., the U-238 would form a ball, with the U-235 as a small shell around it, which does not a seed-and-blanket configuration make). That settling does not actually happen; neither would the required settling out of fission products, and certainly not at the rate required. If correctly assembled, this reactor would work; however, no mechanism is proposed that would in fact assemble such a configuration.
2. Uranium would not settle to the center of the Earth, as it is not pure uranium in nature. Yellowcake is actually less dense than the iron and nickel in the inner and outer core. The minuscule amount of uranium found in metallic form in some meteorites cannot account for all the uranium on Earth, or why that uranium is not in this chemical form elsewhere.
3. The amount of uranium necessary to form a georeactor would make the Earth significantly heavier than it actually is, which would alter the planet's orbit. Nowhere is it shown where this material actually comes from, nor is the lack of stable fission product daughters in the mantle explained.
4. The neutrinos from this huge hypothetical reactor have never been detected.
5. There is enough heat output from decay heat to explain the Earth's internal heat content. The georeactor hypothesis does not explain where this heat goes, or where the extra heat from the decay of highly-radioactive fission products goes.
6. The rotation of the iron core relative to the rest of the planet fully explains the Earth's magnetic field. Without even invoking Occam's Razor, the georeactor hypothesis must explain why this effect does not work. This explanation is not provided.
7. A variation on the georeactor hypothesis states that Jupiter is a fission-fusion hybrid reactor, similar to the crackpot idea circulating around the internet a few years ago that said that the Galileo probe's plutonium would cause a thermonuclear explosion inside that planet upon reentry. This is so laughably wrong it needs no more explanation. Even stranger versions of this concept suggest that protostars are started by fission reactors, which does not even begin to explain where the first stars came from, as uranium is formed exclusively by supernovae. If a purely thermonuclear mechanism is present for the first stars, why should it not work for later ones?
8. Producing the amount of helium inside the Earth does not require any more alpha radiation than comes from the uranium decay chain. The georeactor hypothesis does not explain the absence of this extra helium.

Dear friends, this does not make us look good. It makes us look bad in the scientific community and gives the anti-nuclear activists ammunition. Do we "need" an example of a natural fission reactor to make nuclear power environmentally friendly? Absolutely not. Do we have one? Actually, yes: Oklo--which is an actual reactor whose existence is accepted by the scientific community. The last thing we need is for anti-nuclear activists to be able to lump Oklo together with the georeactor, which is what could happen if we don't let this clown Herndon wither off in the hole in the wall from whence he came and in which he belongs.

Labels: Crackpots, Physics, Strange

An item for discussion: is it morally acceptable to lie about a technology (i.e., to make statements that are materially false instead of simply omitting complex or irrelevant information from an introductory discussion), when that lie gives the public a generally better picture of how something works?

I have to say I don't think it is, but there's a difference that I can't emphasize enough between lying and effective communication with a non-technical audience, defined as that which doesn't involve a mathematical ton of bricks dropped upon said audience. It frustrates me to almost no end to hear scientist after scientist say that talking to people in an honest manner violates their professional ethics: nothing could be more absurd. I believe that rhetoric (the presentation) is independent of the content. We can package the facts in a way that a non-technical audience can understand: an extremely non-technical audience can understand the concepts of nuclear engineering with no prior knowledge and reasonable intelligence, a technical but non-nuclear-engineer audience can understand how a reactor works if they can figure out how e.g. a carburetor works, and children can be familiarized with nuclear physics from an early age (it works for paleontology, and it can work for us: there are plenty of five-year-olds that can talk endlessly about the difference between an Apatosaurus and an Ultrasaurus, and that's no less arcane than the difference between Three Mile Island and an AP-1000--and has the major side effect of installing a Nuclear BS Detector in the leaders of the future; I became familiar with especially radiation at an early age and, even while I was a fire-breathing leftist and officially anti-nuclear, I became more and more uncomfortable with my fellow socialists' opposition to nuclear power until I felt I had to do something). The fact that we are packaging the facts does not, in my view, detract from the veracity of those facts. Some might be repelled from this position by the idea that I'm even willing to consider the question posed by this post, but I bring this topic up only as a straw poll on advocacy tactics among some of those active in the pro-nuclear cause.

Comments? Ideas? Derisive Laughter?

Labels: Activism

I'm working on the improvements as outlined here; I'll get a few item previews up later tonight.

Update: here they are:
1. Why Oppose Nuclear Power?: a rather angry and bitter shirt design formatted as a poll.
2. This is Your Sky on Sulfur Dioxide: for yellow items.
3. Pro-Nuclear Environmentalist: redone in a better font with higher resolution. I'm going to work on cropping it for a bumper sticker and on a lighter design for dark shirts, as well as a transparent background for the reader-requested blue design.
4. Three license plate frames: one with "PROUD SUPPORTER" on top and "NUCLEAR POWER" on the bottom, one with "NUKE ASTHMA" on top and "www.niof.org" on the bottom, and one with "www.niof.org" on the top and "PROUD SUPPORTER OF NUCLEAR POWER" on the bottom.
5. This is Your Planet on Coal: for dark items (black color option); however, I'll need to replace the black background with a transparent one for it to work on some items.
6. My Other Car is a Nuclear Submarine: a bumper sticker.
7. Old Fossils: a picture of Rosalie Bertell (which will probably end up being a picture of Jackson Browne) and a coal plant. This will be on a poster and perhaps some clothing if it seems to make sense. Any thoughts on improving this design are much appreciated.
8. Nukes: What Are They Good For?: a very long list, subject to the caveat in #5.
9. Nuke Asthma: a general use design promoting the clean-air aspect of nuclear energy.
10. Nu-clear: a pun and another general use design about clean air
11. Nu-clean: a pun derived from a typo I made a few days ago; yet another general use design.
12. Lovins' quote about access to energy: more suited to clothing (except the ones that allow only pocket-sized images) and posters as far as I can tell, although I'd be open to any suggestions.
13. Got Nukes? We Do: perhaps a more memorable way to say "nuclear power makes a significant contribution to the world's energy needs."
14. Go Nuclear..For Me: an old design, reformatted and at higher resolution, intended for baby, toddler, and children's clothing. I'll be working on a design for dark items.
15. Go Nuclear: the old mainstay at higher resolution. I'll be cropping it and working on the background a bit to make it work for more items.
16. Burning Coal is like Playing Russian Roulette with a Semiautomatic Pistol: a design for dark (and perhaps red) items; the caveat in #5 also applies here.
17. Paul Ehrlich's quote on access to energy: to be used in the same ways as the Lovins quote.
18. Nuclear Energy, The Clean Green Power Machine: shamelessly lifted from the Grand Gulf rally (I'm not aware of who came up with it), and a general use design although it might need some cropping for things like bumper stickers.
19. Biomass Pollutes: another general use design.
20. Asthmatics for Coal: a parody of "mutants for nuclear" (note the relative abundance of mutants vs. asthmatics), a dark-item design subject to the caveat in #5.
21. Ask Me About Whole Ecology: for use on light clothing; I'm working on one for dark clothing. The design for blue is delayed until I can change the background to transparent.
22. Ask Me About Nuclear Power: same as above.
23. Another Radioactive Environmentalist: taking pride in Jerry Brown's 1992 debate insult; it will appear first on the Green T-Shirt, and later on blue ones.
24. No Cokes: first, the text "no cokes" in several different colors and fonts (unfortunately, I don't have previews of these ready), second, Jeremy Whitlock's picture (many thanks to Dr. Whitlock for emailing me a high-resolution version), and third a combination of the two with the text on top at 50% transparency (I also obviously don't have a preview of this). Many thanks also to Ruth Sponsler for the slogan!

The Go Nuclear Top 10 is absent so far; I'm working on a better one than the current version but that's on the back burner (to come after the revised dark-item designs).

It will take me all week to get these items up; note as well the lack of dark or bold color clothing, which require transparent backgrounds instead of white ones. I used a print-to-pdf and a pdf-to-image converter (which does not support transparent backgrounds) as a workaround for a problem with getting the necessary fonts and Photoshop in the same place at the same time, and fortunately, the dark items by and large do not use the problem font. It will take longer to get the dark items online, and I will post further as the week progresses with the items that are launched on each particular day. When these items are all complete and the full store is launched, I will post about upcoming designs for the dark items (perhaps a blue shirt: this is your low-elevation land on global warming?). So this is a bit of a two- or three-phase process, but I believe the store will be better when everything's finished. And as always, it's completely nonprofit.

I'd like to hear any feedback anyone has to offer.

Labels: Site

Someone recently asked on Know_Nukes if a video of a wind turbine on fire were on YouTube somewhere; I found one:

Labels: Alternatives, Safety

If the operating costs will be lower due to lessons learned at other plants, it can't really increase costs for consumers (and they're already getting a rebate, which is not coming from the federally-mandated decommissioning fund as the article suggests); it amazingly only took them 15 months to approve it.

Link.

Labels: Decommissioning, Industry Performance, Politics and Regulation

The point that the Iraq war has consumed resources better spent on real problems is absolutely correct; however, it is important to keep in mind that the Bush Administration used radiophobia as one of their excuses to start the Iraq war--and that those scare tactics were completely unsubstantiated.

A terrorist is not going to manufacture a nuclear weapon, period. You can't make these things with materials from the hardware store, and the potential proliferators concerned are having problems with making nail bombs go off. Weapons-grade uranium is worth securing from essentially everyone, but a program to account for it should not have to compete for resources with a similar one for separated plutonium or even weapons-grade plutonium, as the chance of a terrorist making a weapon with plutonium is nil. Spent fuel from reactors, incidentally, is not worth stealing; it would probably kill the thieves if they could even get to it, which in practice would require an entire invading army--and the only way they could use it would be in a radiological dispersion device (dirty bomb), which would cause widespread panic but no real damage: highly-radioactive materials decay quickly and long-lived materials aren't very radioactive. The only reason anyone would consider it is the terror it would cause as a result of decades of anti-nuclear scaremongering.

Link.

Labels: Practical Problems, Proliferation, Security and Terrorism

AFP even admits it's a "spectacular stunt to draw attention to its [Greenpeace's] campaign" (their words). I thought a reputable news organization was supposed to be above printing campaign groups' press releases, but the rules don't apply to Greenpeace, so it doesn't matter.

Missing are any little details about how any accidents would actually happen or anything unimportant like that.

Link.

Labels: Clueless, International, New Build, Safety, Their Actions

"However, while imported uranium is relatively secure in terms of supply, France now has two kinds of serious vulnerabilities in place of one. In 1973 only oil imports were a serious vulnerability. That vulnerability remains."

-Beyond Nuclear

Nuclear reactors don't displace fossil fuels in transportation, unless you've got an electric car (and most people do not). "That vulnerability" has not been removed; it has been reduced, to the extent that nuclear power can reduce it. The fact that it can't do everything isn't a reason to abandon a perfectly good solution to part of the problem.

Labels: Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Missing the Point, Security and Terrorism

"Cementing the argument that one thing can only lead to another (nuclear power to nuclear weapons) was the recent arrest in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia of a man trying to sell weapons-grade uranium on the black market."

-Beyond Nuclear

Nuclear power plants don't use, require, or make weapons-grade uranium. Weapons-grade uranium, furthermore, can only be made by enrichment facilities that are not occupied with the production of reactor fuel.

Labels: Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Practical Problems, Proliferation, Security and Terrorism

"I have no ability to fire my electricity supplier. They are monopolists. If they do something really stupid, like build a nuclear power plant, I want to fire them."

-Jeff Skilling

Labels: Access to Energy, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Economics

I'm still working on getting it online; here's the NRC's account.

Labels: Safety, Three Mile Island

The first Video Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day (and it's a doozy):

-The Birth of Europe, BBC, 1991

1. The pile of coal at the beginning is not supposed to be part of that clip.
2. Chernobyl did explode, but it was a steam explosion (the reactor's heat output spiked and boiled the water in the cooling system, which exploded and took radioactive material with it), not a nuclear explosion, which would require a nuclear weapon. Reactors are a lot easier to build than current nuclear weapons, and if they could explode, they would have been used as weapons.
3. The old technique of "close-up on damage to make it look more extensive than it actually is" features prominently; if you look at the surrounding area, there's very little physical damage beyond the building itself.
4. The point on the construction of nuclear power plants being a way to displace domestic use of oil and gas to increase export revenues is absolutely correct. Today, they're trying to use basically the same technique to turn anti-nuclear Germany into a gas- and oil-powered puppet of Moscow.
5. The narrator, dripping with contempt, pronounces nuclear power dead--neglecting the fact that Chernobyl was not developed to "provide an energy panacea" but for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The only reason to design a reactor like that is weapons-grade plutonium production; it is more complicated, more expensive, and harder to control than a normal nuclear power plant.
6. The narrator repeats the false claim that Chernobyl had anything to do with civilian nuclear power, that it was a nuclear explosion, and that it somehow vindicated decades of scaremongering by illiterates.
7. They say that public opposition caused reactor cancellations, but in a part of this documentary that I did not upload, they grant that 1986 was a world low in oil prices. Cheap oil hurts nuclear just as much (or more) as it hurts coal.
8. This is one of the first uses of the unbelievably specious Economics Argument: that laws should be passed against nuclear power because it's expensive. If it's as expensive as they say it is, they should be confident enough in their projections that they shouldn't need a law against it; all the Economics Argument demonstrated was the departure of the anti-nuclear movement from its traditional concerns--they now felt they could say anything they wanted and get away with it.
9. Nuclear power was not the first source of energy to be rejected--coal was banned in much of Europe in the Middle Ages until they started to run short of wood. Again, another part of this documentary mentions this, so they should know better.
10. The rest of the clip is fairly decent except for the complaints about EdF's debt--which has long been paid off and whose nuclear fleet is now a cash cow and the backbone of the European grid. And nationally, the US has the "biggest nuclear program"--although it's obviously not under the control of one operator.

This clip is disturbing not only because it's indicative of the anti-nuclear movement going off the deep end while managing to retain all of their power, but because the rest of the documentary is an excellent history of energy. Did they feel pressure to trash nuclear power, when they should have treated it as they did other topics? Do they somehow feel that nuclear power is special, that it is not subject to the same market forces and business cycle that everyone else is?

Labels: Access to Energy, Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Chernobyl, Economics, Environment, Financing, Fundamental Flaws, Health, Industry Performance, International, New Build, Non Sequitur, Perception, Physics, Politics and Regulation, Proliferation, Radiation, Safety

First, an announcement: the author of "Global Warming: A Guide for the Perplexed" has moved it onto the NIOF site to avoid the limitations of GeoCities. We're more than glad to have it over here and suggest it as a great place to start on the issue.

Since the mid-1960s, when environmental groups turned against nuclear power (read: when the mainstream of environmentalism shifted from birdwatchers to hippies), essentially every environmental problem has been blamed on nuclear reactors. Global warming is shaping up to be no different, and people on all sides seem to be missing the point.

The facts of the matter are these: nuclear power plants do not cause global warming. Global warming is the heating effect caused by increased emissions of insulating gases (usually carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, and there is no physical mechanism in a nuclear reactor to produce or emit carbon dioxide. Cooling towers--which are a cooling system component unrelated to the reactor (they are used at some coal plants, too)--take heated water from a nearby lake, river, or ocean (or hydropower reservoir, or municipal wastewater system, etc.) and turn it into water vapor so that the heat doesn't affect marine ecology. Water vapor is an insulating gas--but immediately condenses and falls as rain or snow. No, water doesn't cause global warming either.
Where we run into problems is when anti-nuclear activists insist that electricity from coal plants that was used to run the initial tests for a nuclear reactor be counted as "emissions from nuclear power." Unbelievably, the industry concedes this point in the face of all logic, and rationalizes that nuclear power plants "emit" less than windmills and solar panels. I've already covered the problems with this approach here, and I think I'm probably done trying to talk sense to NEI on this one (they censored me the last time I tried to comment on one of their latest statistical gymnastics meets), but the implications need to be made clear until science-minded people understand that this is not only uncommunicative, but the perpetuation of an urban myth. It allows anti-nuclear activists to spread the myth that global warming is caused by human activity, not greenhouse gas emissions, because it allows them to blame CO2 emissions on things that don't physically emit CO2. We're playing right into their hands, and most people don't even realize it. Dear friends, it's time to call a spade a spade. We do not have time to mess around, and being direct in this way does not involve a loss of intellectual honesty. Nuclear power plants don't emit carbon dioxide. That's it. It's a fact.

Scientists and engineers seem to be splitting up into several factions on nuclear power and global warming. Group 1, the traditonal scientific opinion, is the Monumentally Clueless. These are the people who think that science and advocacy don't mix; the people who complain about An Inconvenient Truth because Al Gore didn't label his axes; the people who (selfishly, I might add) think that it is corrupting to their integrity to take external factors into account (e.g., how much extra effort on the part of maintenance personnel is likely to result from the inclusion of a backup system, and how that might affect maintenance of safety-critical systems); the people who think that creationists have come along for a nice, scholarly chat; the people who talk endlessly about "risk;" in short, the people who tell their bulldogs to quit making so much noise when burglars come in. Fine--you don't want to protect your profession; go live under a viaduct. To these clowns, I say: I am your bulldog. I understand both your issue in the qualitative sense (not quantitative: I can't do your job--I know the framework works but not why in a mathematical sense; in other words, I know you do your job well, that there is a physical basis to what I'm saying, because your machines work) and how to communicate it to people instead of simply advertising it. I take the same information that we all start with and bring it to an audience by assessing where they are and determining the logical steps that I need to take to get them to accept that the information is correct, then persuading them to act on it. In that way, I can counter the incessant calls from wingnuts, loons, and screwballs for the banning of your profession. Alinsky, in what I believe is his greatest weakness, said that "those who discuss the ethics of ends and means end up on their ends without any means," which misses the point that rhetoric only concerns the presentation, not the ideas involved. If you have a compelling case--like the case for global warming, or the case for evolution, or the case for nuclear power--you should be able to use rhetoric honestly to fit it into an audience's weltanschauung. I speak not of the rhetoric of lying and baseless exaggeration which most of us have long learned to despise (and some of us seem incapable of separating from all presentation techniques), but of presenting the content in a way that fits the audience, instead of presenting it in a way that fits us and expecting them to bridge the gap. It's called "outreach" for a reason. Books have been written and careers have been made of this; it is an extremely complex issue, and I refer you to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals for an introduction. I warn you, however: please try to understand what he is saying and not why he is saying it, and try not to let one influence the other.

Group 2 is the pro-nuclear old guard--those who have been fighting for 35 years. After seeing their hopes and dreams repeatedly tossed to the ground and spat on, they are generally opposed to anything environmentalists come up with, and correctly see the global warming issue as a political ploy designed to aggregate power instead of an honest attempt to raise awareness on the issue itself. Global warming is, without a doubt, an excuse for environmentalists to get what they want. This fact quite easily explains why they refuse to accept nuclear power (and hydroelectricity), why "global warming" is a buzzword for anything environmentalists don't like, and why global cooling was emphasized in the 70s instead. The old guard correctly identifies the danger of getting into bed with the environmentalists, and intensely dislikes Group 3. Their limitations are a refusal to accept the data that backs global warming and a public reputation as Montana militiamen.

Group 3 is the Bill Nye The Science Guy type: risk-averse, willing to passively accept politically-motivated attacks on their profession, believing that everybody's come along for a chat instead of a fight, but trying to make science "look cool." Like Group 1, they exhibit a maddening unwillingness to fight--they're the people who nod up and down and say "that's nice" when presented with the Wedge Document, and the majority of pro-nuclear life-cycle analysts. They have basically successfully branded themselves as the new face of science, but studiously avoid taking stances, try to sugarcoat everything, and usually get drunk on the sound of their own voices. They think they know politics and don't, but aren't Monumentally Clueless. They see global warming as some nice data that needs to be publicized (and it is), but either don't care about the obvious political agendas behind it or think that it's inappropriate for them to concern themselves with it. To them, the environmentalists are nice people who are promoting their data, and the data has urgency, so it's a good idea to get into bed with the environmentalists. Organizing a Science Advocacy Network is unimportant to Group 3s--it suffices to constantly ride the coattails of others. Group 3 will get a painful lesson in politics if they get very far--when environmentalists hijack the weight behind scientific opinion to support something extremely strange, like homeopathy. The Group 3 mentality unfortunately appeals to tech weenies, which is why it has gotten as far as it has.

Personally, I can't identify with any of these groups: the closest I can get is Group 2, but they have an agenda that I don't want to be a part of. I don't think I'm alone, though; environmentalists will eventually go off the deep end (i.e., past the science) on global warming, and the question is about where we will be when they do it. We might be marginalized, we might be in their pockets, and we might be independent. It is imperative that we stay as independent as possible: if we give them enough rope, they'll hang themselves, and will unite Groups 2 and 3 under a butt-kicking (but more data-oriented) advocacy strategy that I and I hope others would be more comfortable with. But if we go ahead and let them use our credibility in their politically-motivated global warming campaign, they certainly won't stop there and will use it for other politically-motivated actions. The key is: will they make Group 3 scream "that's not science!" before Group 3 is all the way into their pocket? If so, they'll unite us; if not, they'll control Group 3, marginalize Group 2, and Group 1 will sit by complaining about how everyone's shoelaces are tied. 1970s redux. Of course, Group 1 would be a valuable tool for environmentalists, because it contains most of the highly-respected scientists and engineers in their respective fields and has absolutely no idea what it is doing on a political level. If they do fail to marginalize or control the rest of the scientific community, Group 1 will reliably be around to say that anyone who opens their mouth about science is unscientific.

Basically, those who challenge the current approach of riding the environmentalists' coattails until they don't need us any more represent both ends of the cluelessness spectrum. An Inconvenient Truth was a bad sign not because of the minor inaccuracies, but because of a clear pattern of inaccuracies that showed that Al Gore was more of a Malthusian in search of a rationalization than a science advocate. There's not really anything wrong with the content, and it does give viewers a better impression of how climate science works than most people have, but it tried to wed science to environmentalism, and we've got to watch out for that and avoid it. We can do that only by forming an independent and very publicity-seeking professional activist organization to promote science--this means biology people have to really get going, chemistry people have to learn to fight the hippies' chemophobia, and us physics people and engineers have to do something similar, although we probably are readier for a fight than the chemistry people.

I constantly wonder what the anti-nuclear movement has up its sleeve. They're too experienced to be screwing it up as badly as they appear to be doing. Something along the above lines might be it. Lawsuits and other economic tactics might be it. More likely, they don't know, either, and are waiting to develop a tactic as the campaign goes (honestly, that's usually what they do). Had we started organizing in about 1992, we had a chance to obliterate them starting in about 2003, but that didn't happen. Today, they have a slight advantage in that they are more experienced and already have a network, but if we can stop them from expanding their network by organizing college students into another Group--that which really understands politics, communication, and science, or at least knows where to begin--we'll have a chance. And we need to start now.

I don't think I've treated this subject as thoroughly or effectively as I would have liked. I've been writing a similar review of An Inconvenient Truth off and on for the last couple of weeks and I hope to get it online soon.

Labels: Activism, Environment, Scientific Method

The concern is that they think it would cause a new plant to be built shoddily, but the effect would be the opposite if it were present at all: you would tend to cut more corners to try to speed up the construction schedule if interest on loans was hanging over your head. And it's not really a "sweetheart deal" for anyone but consumers, who don't have electric rates spike when the plant goes online (CWIP programs gradually pay off construction costs without a sudden spike in rates when cost recovery starts) and who don't have to pay interest.

Link.

Labels: Economics, Financing, New Build, Politics and Regulation

"Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Nils Diaz has called for 100 new reactors in the United States. That means 100 times more nuclear waste and makes a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant 100 times more likely. And, given that new reactors like the old ones now in use are prone to breakdowns, it multiplies the chance of a serious accident by 100 as well."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

"Jeeee-sus."

-Former US Attorney General John Mitchell

There are 104 power reactors in the United States.

100 more like them would multiply the risks by 2, not 100.

And nobody is proposing to build reactors like they were built in the 1960s. NIRS apparently wants to pretend that we don't know anything more about nuclear reactors than we did 40 years ago. Do they know or care that a Canadian reactor can run on American nuclear waste, meaning that we could double the number of reactors without any more nuclear waste production? Do they know or care the difference between a mechanical failure and a safety problem? Do they know or care that a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant would do absolutely nothing?

Labels: Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Clueless, Fun With Statistics, Non Sequitur, Safety, Security and Terrorism, Waste

I'm starting to get very uncomfortable with the concept of GNEP. The underlying assumption is that nobody but the US can be trusted with fuel cycle facilities, which is not true. An enrichment facility that was in use to supply a fleet of light-water reactors never made a bomb. A PUREX facility separating non-weapons-grade plutonium never made a bomb, with the exception of one in 1962 that didn't work. An RBMK running on reprocessed uranium from light-water reactors never made a bomb. A CANDU never made a bomb; certainly, a CANDU running on DUPIC fuel will never make a bomb. A pyroprocessor never made a bomb. Fluorination and distillation never made a bomb. A light-water nuclear power plant never made a bomb. A sodium-cooled fast breeder never made a bomb. It is possible to have a full fuel cycle without proliferation of nuclear weapons; in fact, any time there is a dual-use facility, the presence of nuclear power renders it useless. Nuclear power isn't the problem; the lack of it is.

There are two major facets of GNEP: one is the aforementioned faulty logic, the other is closing the fuel cycle. I and most other pro-nuclear people support closing the fuel cycle as an alternative to the otherwise inevitable nuclear waste dumps; this is why I support GNEP. A recycling facility and fast breeders, when built, are built. It is far more difficult to shut them down than to upend an international agreement that is built on paternalism. Will GNEP ever achieve both goals? I don't think so. I'd like to see it close the fuel cycle in the US--and spend years trying to get foreign countries to cooperate (they won't). What I would not like to see it become is a program to distribute fuel and collect spent fuel, with no recycling, and a perpetuated myth of inherent proliferation risks. I hope people can also get past the fact that closing the fuel cycle is George Bush's second or third good idea in six years, to recognize that it is a good idea and should be supported.

Ideally, I'd like to see an intelligent system set up to require recycling--it is not beyond the technical capability of the fine minds of today's nuclear engineers, and a cap on spent fuel production with rules legalizing recycling would be a huge political gain with few technical issues. Then Congress can and should kill GNEP and Yucca--but not until then. The US government has certainly spent money on worse things.

Labels: Access to Energy, Activism, Fuel Cycle, Politics and Regulation, Proliferation, Waste

It has failed to bankrupt them, give their CFO a heart attack, and lower their bonds to junk status; World Nuclear News has more.

Labels: Economics, Financing, Industry Performance, International, New Build, Perception

Link.

They suggest that international experience, particularly in France, Japan, and Sweden, suggests a better framework for the US than the one currently in place.

Labels: International, Politics and Regulation, Waste

Link.

I fixed a few bugs in the Nuclear Energy Search Engine, got it its own domain, and added a few other features (news search, government agencies search, industry search, nuclear blog search, and NIOF site search, along with a Nuclear NewsWire News Box).

I'd like to hear any initial feedback anyone has.

Labels: Site

Here or in the sidebar:

Was the Swedish nuclear referendum unfair?
Yes
Perhaps
No, but there shouldn't be another one
What, you couldn't come up with a poll idea this week?
This is starting to sound like NNadir
King Kong doesn't like people who sound like NNadir

View Vote Stats
Discuss this Poll

Labels: Humor, Politics and Regulation, Site

"Nuclear power is not a solution to the energy gap from 2010-2020"

-New Nuclear Power? No Thanks!

They've built plants in Japan in three and a half years. If you really want a nuclear power plant, just say "go," and it will be a solution in that time frame. If you really don't want a nuclear power plant, you can spend four to six years redoing environmental reviews that have already been done for plants that were cancelled in the 1980s (same impacts on the same site for the same purpose, but they can't reuse the environmental assessment; don't ask me why), and sit around suing each other until it isn't an option. And that is somehow the fault of the technology, not boneheaded management.

Labels: Access to Energy, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Fundamental Flaws, Industry Performance, International, Lawsuits, New Build, Politics and Regulation

While writing a review of An Inconvenient Truth, I was reminded repeatedly of the need to not "sell" the rights to scientific opinion to either traditional liberals or traditional conservatives. I believe there is a pressing need to develop a niche in the general political debate for science-minded people, so that we don't have to ride anyone's coattails; if we ride people's coattails, we pick up their baggage. If environmentalists decide to go off the deep end after we've pledged our support, as they almost certainly will, what do we do? Anyone who subsequently speaks out will be pilloried in the press as "unscientific," and we'll end up involuntarily endorsing every crazy idea that they get into their heads. So is this an important medium-term goal, and if so, how can we start?

Labels: Activism

"Nuclear reactors produce highly radioactive waste that will have to be contained for thousands of years."

-New Nuclear Power? No Thanks!

First of all, something can't be highly radioactive and long-lived at the same time. If it's highly radioactive, it gives off radiation faster and thus doesn't last as long. For example, uranium (before it is placed in a reactor) has a half-life of about four and a half billion years, but isn't even warm to the touch. The materials that combine the worst of both (moderately long-lived, moderate radioactivity) are partially-used fuel, mostly plutonium. Completing the process in a waste-eating reactor known as a fast-neutron reactor or fast breeder converts this to short-lived materials. The rest is either short-lived and highly radioactive (waste) or long-lived and not very radioactive (fuel)--and the convenient little byproduct is approximately 100 times more electricity than we originally got.

I can't emphasize this enough: Yucca Mountain is not necessary and should not be done.

And interestingly, the waste itself contains a number of very rare and useful materials. There isn't exactly a booming market for it because this type of research has been made illegal. Should we not at least legalize research into it before we throw up our hands and claim it to be an unsolvable problem?

Labels: Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Applications, Physics, Plutonium, Politics and Regulation, Radiation, Research, Sustainability, Waste

I said I'd post about this a while back; it's a little late, but here it is:

On Friday, March 9th, I was given an opportunity to speak to some extremely liberal Chicago-area students about nuclear power. While I was told that Ralph Nader won this particular school's mock election by a fairly wide margin in 2000, and it remains about 50% Green, 40% Democratic and 10% Republican, I was also told that among this group, those who had not taken Advanced Placement physics classes were considered "dummies." So this is not a particularly representative sample, but I digress.

I started off by breaking a few of my own rules. I assumed the audience to be anti-nuclear (and it was)--but did not break it into small groups, instead giving a variant of The Standard Talk about accidents and waste. Unfortunately, I ad-libbed the whole thing and used up the entire 20-minute allotment talking about the difference between Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. There was a good sign in that one student asked whether control rods were "the graphite things they stick in the reactor to lower the power," and I responded that they were boron--the student added "because graphite makes the power go up" (I nodded)--and I remarked that one of the minor design problems with Chernobyl was that the control rods had graphite tips, so when they tried to shut the reactor down...and I didn't even have to finish the sentence; the group laughed, which suggests to me that they understood enough reactor physics to know the difference between Chernobyl and TMI. The key to that, I believe, was never using the word "moderator"--I've found that it decreases listener comprehension by about 40% whenever it is introduced to a non-technical audience. However, this came about two minutes before the end of the 20-minute allotment, so I spent the rest of the time explaining how the Chernobyl accident progressed (I had focused on the technical differences between the reactors). I stressed the obvious differences, but did receive a helpful question along the lines of "wasn't it operator error"--which gave me an opportunity to explain that yes, it was, and if you operate a Chernobyl-style reactor to spec it won't have a catastrophic accident, but a TMI-style reactor can be abused to no end and it won't happen (which is the important difference between the two). The major part about that portion of the discussion that I regret was that I didn't emphasize enough that Chernobyl's weapons-grade-plutonium-production objective dictated a radically different design from civilian plants.

I was not able to spend a second on waste, although one student stated during the safety discussion that it was their biggest concern (a view shared by probably everyone). In retrospect, I should have started the discussion with waste, since it's a quicker explanation (DUPIC is pretty easy to soundbite) and a bigger concern (12,000 reactor-years of operation is not a leap into the unknown), and prepared the safety discussion in order to reduce "hesitation downtime." I also spent a considerable amount of time at the beginning (about 3-4 minutes) on one of Helen Caldicott's nuttier quotes in order to draw them in; that may have been necessary but I'd have liked the time back. But again, better preparation would have made that irrelevant. It is absolutely imperative that any talk that is designed to make people think about anti-nuclear urban myths prominently include waste; 20 minutes isn't a lot of time but it's enough to soundbite both issues and plant a seed of doubt in the crap they've been fed.

I did try criticizing the industry's approach, which worked: I mentioned that they like to talk about how Chernobyl didn't have a containment and TMI did, which ignores the fact that the reactors were just about as different as possible in design. This established fairly well that I wasn't an industry flack.

The overall objective: make nuclear power a Good Thing. Place it in the same circles among coffeehouse liberals as solar and wind power. Poll data bears out the fact that these things trickle down to the rest of the population: somewhere near 98% of the general public supports wind power, an idea that came from these people.

Good signs:
1. Reactor physics is accessible if you dispense with the terminology and analogies--and the mathematical analysis--and just describe how these relatively mechanically simple devices work. Don't sweat the nuclear physics, or the secondary circuit. Discuss the mechanical aspects of the reactor, and aim for familiarization, not a master's degree. Remember that these people have largely grown up watching The Simpsons but with comparatively little exposure to other anti-nuclear messages--so the little they've heard about the technology is pretty goofy. How you take this into account and how you choose to refine it for a particular audience must be determined on a case-by-case basis.
2. If you have a certain amount of "street cred," and maintain independence from the industry (in my case, by criticizing them at approximately five-minute intervals and/or as an introduction), even the farthest left will not throw fruit at you unless they have a preexisting axe to grind. If you have street cred, are a good communicator (remembering the difference between advertising and communication), and have a strong case (as we do), you should be able to marginalize those who have axes to grind. This is the fundamental reason why I don't recommend filling a hall with 2,000 anti-nuclear activists that you don't know and lecturing to them. You're gonna get lynched. [This is also another reason why a few good, energetic, communicative people on the internet aren't going to have a major real-world impact by ourselves--the internet is a great communications tool and a repository for information for the curious, not an activism medium in and of itself. We need to involve other people by working to get college students together, turn them into pro-nuclear activists and send them out to their respective social circles, where they can change far more minds than we ever could alone. Ideas on how to do that are eagerly invited.]
3. If you can establish left-wing credentials (easy ways to do this: talk about global warming, bash creationism and fundamentalism, criticize government and industry policies, management, and actions), you can make it OK to be pro-nuclear--removing the socially-imposed obligation to oppose nuclear power is the first step. As a former anti-nuke, I can attest to how powerful this is--and how miserably weak the peer pressure becomes when just one respected person gives people the freedom to think. You can be that person. Please, I beg you, don't ignore the lemmings factor. If you assume that everyone is as much of an independent thinker as you are, you will paradoxically end up being very lonely. Now, this doesn't necessarily work in the media, but in a community with actual people, it's extremely effective, and that's really why we need college students as communicators big time.
4. It's a race between us and the no-nukes-kooks to get to those who are currently teenagers and college students. The antis are beginning to see how the tactic of portraying the work of Lovelock, Brand, Moore, et al. as avant-garde is shaping up, and they don't like it and are trying to counter it. If we get in first (i.e., be the first people in our communities in 15 years to care about nuclear power), their effectiveness rapidly decreases. I've given this concept--that humans are part of the environment as a physical system and not distinct from it--the name "whole ecology" in an effort to give those disenchanted with environmentalism-as-an-excuse-for-Malthusian-reactionaries a symbol to rally around. I don't know how that'll turn out, but it's worth a try. In short, talk to the young people, keep the young people in mind when you say things, and try to mobilize the massive grassroots power that they represent.
5. It's pretty easy to associate "Simpsons" with "illiteracy." Branding ourselves (no pun intended) as literate people can be thus accomplished and has enormous potential.
6. The bad signs are things I can fix.

Bad signs:
1. Preparation is essential, but not scripting. If you read a script, you sound like a flack. I did not script myself, but unfortunately went too far in the other direction.
2. I should have talked about waste and didn't. This was a major failure and the sole reason why I don't term this talk a success.
3. I should have given them somewhere to go for more information and didn't.
4. There were two people who identified themselves as future engineers who I should have talked to afterward and didn't. Fortunately, I will be able to talk to them again, but being that lucky is not a given.

Comments? Ideas? Derisive laughter?

Labels: Activism

"Cargill's soy processing facility in Brazil has been contributing to massive destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Until now. Following years of Greenpeace investigations and activist protests, the Brazilian government has shut down the facility."

-Greenpeace

Finding excuses for the ethanol program, eh? And what does a processing facility have to do with the producers' harvesting practices? Sounds like a life-cycle analysis.

Labels: Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Environment, Their Actions

Outgoing NRC Commissioner Merrifield has suggested that this may be possible; it seems feasible especially given today's plants' 60-year design lifetimes, although it would probably be a good idea to wait a little bit before issuing any of them.

The point that the NRC needs to prepare for it still stands, however.

Link.

Labels: Industry Performance, Politics and Regulation

They claimed a deal might be in the works a while back; apparently this is not happening although they have approached the State Department about building a nuclear power plant.

Labels: International, New Build, Politics and Regulation

Old news, but World Nuclear News quoted TVA's CEO as saying that the probability of completing Watts Bar Unit 2 or Bellafonte 1 or 2 was greater than 50% after the Browns Ferry restart is completed in May. The Bellafonte comment is probably referring to the construction of two new reactors on the Bellafonte site, since they in fact cannot complete the old ones (they no longer have valid construction permits). Watts Bar Unit 2 was ordered on January 22, 1973, however, and the cost of the replacement of 30-year-old parts might exceed the cost of two modern reactors.
If they complete one of them, it'll have to be Watts Bar Unit 2; if they need a new nuke and can't afford to complete Watts Bar Unit 2, they'll order either one or two AP-1000s for Bellafonte.

TVA just might regret canceling Bellafonte.

Update 3/24/07 9:24 PM: I've clarified the first sentence; it could have appeared earlier that I was talking about the completion progress instead of the probability that they will be completed. Watts Bar Unit 2 is 65% complete, Bellafonte Unit 1 is 88% complete, and Bellafonte Unit 2 is 58% complete.

Link.

Labels: Industry Performance, New Build, Politics and Regulation

The good news is that it may stay open until 2023; a vote in subcommittee in South Carolina's House keeps the issue alive a little bit longer.

The bad news is that people think it's only for nuclear power plants. It's actually also for hospitals and other low-level waste producers. And they leave out the fact that much of the waste was produced while "protecting" employees from radiation exposure that would have had absolutely no effect on them.

Labels: Politics and Regulation, Waste

As of Wednesday. It is a 100 megawatt non-power light-water reactor located at Cadarache, and is supposed to go online in 2014.

Link.

Labels: International, New Build, Research

Link. Notice how it's Fox News; this isn't some "left-wing misquotation."

Wait, you mean the Iranians have rights? Such as, perhaps, not being invaded for building civilian equipment or dual-use equipment that must be used for civilian purposes if nuclear power plants are there to use its services? You mean Iran isn't simply a billiard ball for international politics between Russia, the US, and the EU? What do these people think they are, their own country or something?

Labels: International, Iran, Politics and Regulation, Proliferation

"Nuclear waste dumps, toxic incinerators, atomic reactors and other such facilities typically are located where there is cheap land, cheap facilities, and little organized opposition. Too often, this has been in minority and poor communities that have felt powerless to oppose corporate giants."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

1. The problem is not that a toxic waste facility is located in a suitable area, but rather that racist governments have forced minorities onto land suitable only for toxic waste facilities.
2. The implication is of course that people are not allowed to support things that NIRS doesn't. People either oppose something or "feel powerless to oppose" it. I think nuclear power is a good idea, just like they think windmills and solar panels are a good idea. This is entirely possible, and while I am aware that I am in the minority, it's not a result of corporate bribery. People can have honest disagreements about issues without one being a liar.

Labels: Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Crackpots, Non Sequitur, Perception, Politics and Regulation, Sustainability, Waste

It's not a done deal, but Duke has won the right to ask the North Carolina legislature to implement a measure that allows them to recover planning costs instead of taking out a loan and paying it all back plus interest when the plant goes online, known as the Construction Work In Progress surcharge (CWIP). I'm glad this is happening; it's good for everyone but fossil fuel producers, anti-nuclear activists (CWIP bans were instituted due to pressure from anti-nuclear activists to encourage gas-fired plants that were cheap to build), and people who can't do math.

More discussion at We Support Lee.

Link.

Labels: Economics, Financing, Politics and Regulation

For MIT people, they seem to not get resource economics (although they see it much better than most): there's traces of practically everything practically everywhere, and the only obstacle to obtaining those traces is whether the price of the mined material is high enough to support the extra cost involved in obtaining it. So it doesn't really make much sense to evaluate the viability of a material like a metal by "proven reserves"--the quantity of material that could be mined at existing mines with existing equipment at existing prices. Where this becomes an issue is with fuels, since we can't get them back--although there are lower-grade fuels, and those must be taken into consideration, along with a real estimate of the actual supply of fuel. And there's the fact that fuels supply energy, which can be supplied by a number of known methods--but fossil fuels have so far been cheaper, so there are quite a few concepts that have been technically viable for some time but have been undercut by cheap coal, oil, and gas.

The valid issue that they raise--and they have likely been misinterpreted into a Malthusian position by scientifically illiterate journalists--is a lack of investment in facilities. However, the uranium price is being influenced by speculation that the nuclear renaissance will succeed, giving the industry enough time and revenue to invest in facilities before supplies start getting short. Enough investment in currently-viable deposits has been made, particularly in Namibia and Kazakhstan, to support it until then--and most of the 1970s-era handling facilities were designed for around twice their current demand, anyway. If anything happens beyond that, we've got 500 years worth of fuel sitting around in casks and underwater racks if we cared to process it or build reactors that could use it.

We could even handle a ban on fresh uranium use until actinides were below 0.5% of the spent fuel stockpile, and I believe that could jump-start a lot of important research and development.

See also the discussion board.

Link.

Labels: Economics, Fuel Cycle, Industry Performance, Practical Problems, Research

This may have implications for uranium prices. But, then again, it might not, as the price of uranium today is more of a bet on the nuclear renaissance by speculators, not supply and demand forces, and this is not an existing mine but rather one that is being developed. If Ranger were down for two years, that would be different.