Up with nuclear power!

[Mr. Lothario]

     Apologies for the rabble-rousing title, but I wanted to get the widest possible audience for this, in the hopes of creating a storm of controversy and/or debate.

     A month or two ago, I read a single-author anthology by a science fiction author named James P. Hogan. The title of the anthology was "Minds, Machines & Evolution". It contained alternately science fiction stories and factual essays on a variety of topics. Mr. Hogan is both an aeronautical and electronic engineer, and is well-versed on a variety of topics. I present this information in order to let you know that I'm not just pulling the arguments in this topic out of my ass, or the ass of an uneducated writer. Now, onward!

     One essay in the anthology which made a deep impression on me was titled "Know Nukes". It presented a strong and closely-argued case in favor of the widespread if not exclusive use of nuclear power in America.

     Hogan's argument is constructed in such a way as to address and defeat each "common sense" objection to the use of nuclear power. I shall present abbreviated versions of these points, combined with some updated facts of my own, for your perusal and comment. Objection the first: nuclear power isn't safe. Argument: Nuclear power is, in fact, the safest of all common methods of energy generation. The two "major disasters" of the nuclear world, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, killed 38 people in total, all of whom were killed at Chernobyl. In the Western world, nuclear power has never caused a single death. The majority of American power (46% in 2000) is generated by coal-burning plants, which require over 5000 times as much fuel per year than a nuclear plant does to generate the same amount of electricity. This entails a huge coal-mining, -processing and -transporting infrastructure, of which the mining alone causes an average of 300 deaths per year. Statistically speaking, the meltdown of a nuclear plant  would cause about 400 deaths. The pollution from coal plants is estimated (at the time of the essay's writing, which was sometime before 1988) to cause about 10,000 deaths per year. "For nuclear power to be as dangerous would require a meltdown somewhere or other every two weeks."

     Objection two: a nuclear plant can explode like an atomic bomb. Hogan's response: basically amounts to "they're nothing alike, there's no possible way that that could ever happen, duh."

     Objection three: The radiation given off by nuclear power plants. Argument: includes "a person sitting on the boundary fence of a large nuclear plant for a year would soak up about a tenth of a millirem above what he'd get from the natural background anyway."

[Mr. Lothario]

     Objection four: the nuclear waste. Argument: The ease of disposal of nuclear waste is one of the best things about the technology. "Over 90% of the spent fuel that comes out of a power reactor can be reprocessed into new fuel and put back in (saving in a plant's typical forty-year lifetime the equivalent of four billion dollars worth of oil [in pre-1988 dollars and oil prices]). Burning it up in this way is the most sensible thing to do with it, and the industry was designed on the assumption that this would be the case. What's left after reprocessing constitutes the "high-level" waste that needs to be disposed of. A large, one-thousand-megawatt power plant produces about one cubic yard of it--small enough to fit under a dining room table--in the course of a year's operation. A coal plant of equal capacity produces ten tons of waste per minute. (Most of the fuss we read about in the newspapers fails to distinguish between this and low-level waste, consisting of things like used gloves, boots, and tools, which present a negligible hazard.) A facility to reprocess spent fuel in the U.S. was commenced as a joint project by gov't and industry at Barnwell, South Carolina. But in early 1977 the Carter administraction halted further work on Barnwell, essentially for political reasons, and at the same time cut the utilities off from the military reprocessing that had been handling domestic wastes safely for twenty years. Thus 100% of what comes out of reactors is having to be treated as if it were high-level waste, to be stored in ways that were never intended, and this is what gets all the publicity--a needlessly manufactured political problem, not a technical one." And once you've buried the high-level nuclear waste, which renders it completely harmless to anyone above ground, there's no other waste to deal with. Nuclear plants produce no combustion gases, there are no smokestacks, no ash, no nothing. This is contrasted with the waste output of a 1000 megawatt coal plant, which produces 1.5 million tons of ash anually, not to mention 600 pounds of carbon dioxide and 10 pounds of sulfur dioxide every second and the same quantity of nitrogen oxides as 200,000 automobiles.

     Hogan also argues the unlikelihood of nuclear power being used by third-world countries to make nuclear bombs, the relative uselessness of "alternative" energy sources, and the various new technologies made possible by widespread use of nuclear power, merely the most spectacular of which are such things as fusion power and matter transmutation. I neglect to spell out these arguments here because I'm tired, and because I'm perfectly willing to do so later, by request or in response to objections of your own. : )

[kami]

Some of the details there sound a bit aged but it's an interesting article, I myself think that nuclear power should be used more, I don't think any sane man could be against it when you compare it to other fossil fuel energy sources.

[Jackal.aHa!]

Wonderful thread Loth, i agree with you 100%.
Nuclear power is safe, stable, and a good source of power.  I know this cause there is one about maybe 20-25 miles from where i live and i would die if it blew up! HA!
I like the quotes and the bottom too, makes ya think a bit, that guy sounds smart, i should read some of his stuff.

Another godd book is FIGHT CLUB by Chuck Palaniuk, its the book that the movie is based off of.

[tasty]

Lothario, my only question is if nuclear plants only produce one cubic yard of nuclear waste each year, what are we doing voting on new locations in Nevada to store hundreds of millions of tons of the stuff from the few nuclear plants we already have? I'm not sure I buy that argument. And what is known about the possible environmental effects of this deposited nuclear waste? nothing to my knowledge.

I would personally rather use much less energy than ever have more nuclear plants built? I just don't think the risk of such an inexact science is worth the benefit.

this is from sierraclub.com:
Depleted Uranium (DU) is, according to the to the Military Toxins Project, the radioactive byproduct of the uranium enrichment process, is "roughly 60% as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium and has a half-life of 4.5 billion years." The United States has in excess of 1.1 billion pounds of DU waste material. Using uranium as a fuel in the types of nuclear reactors common in the United States requires that the uranium be enriched so that the percentage of U235 is increased, typically to 3 to 5%. To enrich uranium, a process called gaseous diffusion was developed by the United States in the 1940s. The gaseous diffusion process creates two products: enriched uranium hexafluoride, and depleted uranium hexafluoride (depleted UF6). The DU decay chain includes hazardous radioactive thorium, radium, radon, the radon "daughters" and lead.

[Flame]

I say up with solar power during the day, and during the night, use nuclear power?

[kami]

Tasty, yeah I heard something about that the nuclear waste having effect on the ground water or something, nothin is proven though but I still believe that it's worth it, if anything, atleast it's way better than fossil fuels.
Solar power is of course the ultimate power source but so far it's way too weak.

[jn.loudnotes]

I say we continue our wasteful cycle of oblivion, and when the fossil fuels run out in 50-100 years, we all die.  Or revert back to the stone age, or something like that :-)

[alaric]

Okay, here's a question for you. Why would we use a source of power that produces ANY waste at all when there is a source of power that is more abundant than ANY other substance ON THE PLANET.

Yes, I'm talking about good old fashioned H2O. Hydrogen power is the way of the future my boy! Ordinary, everyday water and electricity is all you need to produce hydrogen. In fact, before long we won't really even need the eletricity! There is a specific type of algae that automatically produces hydrogen for us! Hydrogen is so efficient that it's only by product is oxygen and WATER which can be used to make more hydrogen! How efficient is that?

But isn't hydrogen dangerous? What about that whole Hindenburg thing? You see, that wasn't actually hydrogen burning! It was the aluminum paint on the hydrogen air bags. Hydrogen is so light that it escapes up into the atmosphere before it can burn! The same goes for car-accidents. Would you rather have a fuel leak that escapes up into the atmosphere or is wet and sticks to your skin?

Hydrogen is already in use in some BMWs and California uses buses that run on hydrogen. So let's all switch to hydrogen and make the world a better place!

[Jeb]

Shit i live in a really liberal state (washington) and i was under the impression that most of the nuclear waste produced by powerplants is shiped to hanford over in eastern washinton.
I have no problem with nuclear power, as long as Homer simpson isn't the person in charge of the reactor  

[Mr. Lothario]

Lothario, my only question is if nuclear plants only produce one cubic yard of nuclear waste each year, what are we doing voting on new locations in Nevada to store hundreds of millions of tons of the stuff from the few nuclear plants we already have? I'm not sure I buy that argument. And what is known about the possible environmental effects of this deposited nuclear waste? nothing to my knowledge.

     Note objection four. It addresses this very issue. To reiterate, America is storing millions of tons of low-level waste (used boots, gloves, tools, etc., which are only slightly radioactive) as though it was high-level waste (the actual waste of the power generation process, which is highly radioactive). If that legislation was repealed and the low-level waste was handled properly, then we'd only need one, relatively small, waste-disposal site in the country.

     As for the environmental effects of deposited waste, I question "which is preferable?" Depositing 1 cubic yard per nuclear plant per year, or dropping 1.5 million tons of ash per coal plant per year into landfills, where it often leaches into the groundwater. And that does not even account for the tons of other waste produced per minute by coal plants, which is simply released into the atmosphere. Yeah, nuclear waste is dangerous. But it's not as though it's being stored in liquid form in someone's garage. Hogan has this to say: "The current proposal [for disposal of high-level nuclear waste] is to reduce the waste to a powder, fuse it into a high-stability glass, seal the glass in steel cannisters, and bury the cannisters in a concrete repository two thousand feet underground. And let's make no bones about the fact that we're talking about a significant concentration of gamma radiation that would have to be confined and handled with great care. If all the electricity generated in the U.S. were produced by nuclear power, the amount of high-level waste produced each year would be enough to kill ten billion people. Sounds scary, doesn't it? But we also produce enough barium to kill one hundred billion people, enough ammonia and hydrogen cyanide to kill six trillion, enough phosgene to kill twenty trillion, and enough chlorine to kill four hundred trillion. There's no doubt enough gasoline around, too, to kill us all several times over, and enough pills and drugs in family medicine closets. But we don't worry unduly, because there's no way in which the population will be evenly exposed to any of those substances--everyone isn't suddenly going to sit down and start eating them. And this is far more true of nuclear wastes, sealed deep underground."
     "Every foot of shielding rock reduces gamma radiation by a factor of ten, which means that there's no hazard to anyone above ground from the waste that remains buried. What hazard there is comes from the risk of some of the waste finding its way inside somebody. To do this, it would have to escape from the repository and be ingested or inhaled. And let's not forget that the toxicity of nuclear wastes decays with time. After ten years of burial nuclear waste would be about as toxic as barium if it were ingested; if it were inhaled, it would be a tenth as toxic as ammonia, and a thousandth as toxic as chlorine. After a hundred years these figures fall to one ten-thousandth, one hundred-thousandth, and one ten-millionth respectively. Nature's biological waste-disposal program dumps a thousand million tons of ammonia into the atmosphere every year, and we use chlorine liberally to clear our bathtubs and swimming pools."

[Mr. Lothario]

Solar power is of course the ultimate power source but so far it's way too weak.

     Not so. "With solar, the big drawback that advocates overlook is its extreme diluteness. To get an idea of how dilute it is, consider a lump of coal needed to make one kilowatt-hour of electricity, which would weigh about a pound, and ask how long would sunlight have to shine on that piece of coal to deposit the same amount of energy. Well, its shadow--which represents the sunlight intercepted--would have an area of about 15 square inches. In Arizona, the sun would have to shine on that area for one thousand hours to deliver one kilowatt-hour of energy, which at twelve hours of sunshine per day is almost three months. For the average location in the U.S., it would be twice that. But if we wanted to get one kilowatt-hour of electricity out of that sunbeam, then, at the 10% conversion efficiency typically attainable today [sometime pre-1988, this would be somewhat higher today], it would take five years--to get the same useful energy that a small piece of coal will yield in minutes! That's how concentrated the energy is in coal, and how dilute it is in sunshine."

     He mentions a little later that to create a one-thousand-megawatt solar plant, which is the same size he uses to illustrate all the power generation technologies he talks about in the essay, would require "covering fifty to a hundred square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, and 1,500 tons of other metals such as chromium and titanium--one thousand times the materials needed to construct a comparable size nuclear plant. These materials are not cheap, and real estate isn't free. Neither is the labor to keep miles of collector area clean. Moreover, these materials are all products of heavy, energy-hundry industries--to the degree that many studies have concluded that building solar plants would produce a net energy loss--and produce large amounts of waste, roughly 10 percent of which is highly toxic. So much for "free" and "clean" solar power." He then goes on to mention that the term "one-thousand-megawatt plant" refers to a plant that can ALWAYS deliver one thousand megawatts, which nuclear and fossil-fuel plants can do, but solar plants can only operate while the sun is shining, "which straightaway gives it a maximum availability of 50%--low enough for a regular plant to be considered prohibitively uneconomical." and that's not even taking cloudy weather into account. Also, "if we use the industry's standard criterion, a procticable system would need to be acapable of recharging at five times the plant's nominal rating. This means that for a 'one-thousand-megawatt' solar plant to mean the same as it means for other kinds of plants, it would actually have to have a peak generating capacity of six thousand megawatts, adding vastly more to cost, complexity, and adverse environmental effects."

[Mr. Lothario]

Hydrogen power is the way of the future my boy!

     You're talking about fuel cells. What is their power-generating ability? How much does it cost, energy-wise, to electrically separate hydrogen out of water, and also, how far away are the hydrogen-producing algae from industrial levels of production? What do the algae eat, as well?

     Fuel cells are an excellent technology, and will be exceptionally useful in situations calling for a relatively small amount of power, as in electric cars and homes. But I'm not certain it's efficient enough to be useful as a main source of power generation for a country. I'd love to hear some figures on it, though.

[kami]

I was not saying that solar energy is the best in amount of energy produced but in an environmental perspective (being that there is no waste to talk about).

About hydrogen power and all that, I think it might be a cool power supply for cars but I doubt that it would be very efficient compared to fossil fuels, kind of like battery cars? I've read a lot about it and I'm positive but it won't happen yet in a while. What those buses use is not hydrogen, it's ?nature gas? (freely translated from swedish), that's not the same thing.

Of course it would be good if you could dispose of the nuclear waste in a good manner without having to dig anything down (if that's possible), but I've never heard of any good ways to do that.. What you have to be sure of is that the waste is sealed and contained in good containers that never break because you would not want radioactive waste to pour down into your groundwater (just as you wouldn't want high amounts of chlorine or ammonia in it).

[Mr. Lothario]

     Kami, read what I posted in the third post above this one, re: solar power. Saying that solar has no waste is true only in a very limited sense. Yes, once you've built the solar collection arrays, then you get non-polluting energy, but making the materials to build those arrays causes a great deal of pollution and also requires lots of energy, enough that building a large solar array actually puts you in the hole in terms of energy generation.

     Also read what I wrote in the fourth post above this one, re: disposal of nuclear waste. In the essay, Hogan mentions plans to store nuclear waste at depths which exceed 2000 feet. I would think that it's possible to find plenty of places where that's below the water table. And again, the waste is not stored in big open vats or anything. It's stored in a very stable form, within very thick concrete walls, under nearly half a mile of rock. If the site is chosen correctly and not for political purposes, there is almost no danger of the waste "leaking".

[kami]

The only thing I was saying was that Solar Power is CLEAN power without waste, I would think that building a solar power plant would not cost more than a nuclear one (of course not saying that both would have the same energy output).

I've already heard of some cases where nuclear waste had been kept in bad containers which had been on the verge of leaking here in Sweden, I think they were pretty old though. Keeping them deep down in a solid mountain is good, yes, I didn't say anything against that, just saying that there are risks to it.

[Mr. Lothario]

     Ah, I see what you're saying. I don't know the relative costs of a solar plant vs. a nuclear plant. I would imagine that the nuclear plant would be cheaper, simply because it's a better-established technology, and thus it's well-known how to build a nuclear reactor of a given power output.

     As for the waste, yeah, there are definitely risks. The important point, however, is that if the waste is properly[/p] disposed of in a well-placed and -designed site, the risks are minimal, and certainly smaller, even in the worst case, than the accepted risks of the pollution of coal-burning plants.

[kami]

Yeah of course they're better than fossil fuel plants, almost anything is better than that.