New Green Technologies

reply to post by C0bzz


nukewatch.com...

The Oct. 25 derailment of at least two train cars at the Shearon Harris nuclear reactor site, 25 miles from Raleigh, North Carolina, and the 2005 derailment of a military waste fuel cask in New York State are a pair of the “Lucky This Time” events. At Shearon Harris, workers were moving a 150,000-pound canister filled with extremely radioactive waste reactor fuel or “spent nuclear fuel,” that had arrived from the Brunswick reactor, 220 miles away near Wilmington and Southport. Information about the accident has been strictly controlled by Progress Energy (PE), which operates the facility and owns it jointly with North Carolina Municipal Power. No photos of the incident have surfaced that could verify the company’s claim that the waste canister did not go off the tracks. PE informed the press that only a caboose and a buffer car derailed. Progress Energy and the Nuclear Regulator Commission (NRC) claim that federal law prohibits releasing more information. But the restrictions apply only to the scheduling, destination or origin of nuclear waste shipments, whereas the train accident took place entirely on PE company property.

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[edit on 28/4/2010 by Mirthful Me]

reply to post by C0bzz


nukewatch.com...

Between 1957 and 1962, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) secretly dumped at least 1,457 barrels, holding between 350 and 548 tons, of military waste from Honeywell’s Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant, into Lake Superior along the North Shore near Duluth, Minn.1 An era of lake dumping began earlier when, in 1945, at least 600 tons of munitions were thrown into roughly the same area of the lake by the U.S. Army. (See page 7.)

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[edit on 28/4/2010 by Mirthful Me]

reply to post by C0bzz


nukewatch.com...

Indeed, all nuclear power reactors produce huge quantities of global warming gases as they are wrapped up in the mining of the uranium ore that goes into the fuel, and in the milling of that ore into fuel rods. The American West is littered with gargantuan piles of mill tailings that pour thousands of curies of radioactive radon into the atmosphere. Fabricating fuel rods is one of the most electricity-intensive industries on earth, consuming millions of tons of coal in the process, emitting untold quantities of greenhouse gases. The radioactive emissions from the reactors themselves also unbalance the atmosphere, and the heat they dump into the air and water directly heats the planet.

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[edit on 28/4/2010 by Mirthful Me]

nukewatch.com...

The estimates never even include the cost of managing radioactive waste, a bill that keeps coming for centuries. The New York Times reported five years ago that the owners of nearly half the reactors in the U.S. “are not reserving enough money to decommission them on retirement.” The newspaper’s sources were Congressional auditors, who also said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was not tracking the money carefully.

Radioactive tritium has poisoned groundwater near at least 14 reactors in the U.S., including in Kewaunee, Wis. Groundwater is contaminated with tritium above Environmental Protection Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowances under the communities of Braidwood, Ill., Dresden, Ill., Brookhaven, N.Y., Palo Verde, Ariz., Indian Point, N.Y., Diablo Canyon, Calif., San Onofre, Calif., and Kewaunee.

Nuclear is so dirty Germany legislated a national phase-out of its 17 reactors by 2025. That 1998 decision was based partly on government studies that found high rates of childhood leukemia in areas near German reactors. In July 2007 the European Journal of Cancer Care published a similar report by Dr. Peter Baker of the Medical University of South Carolina that found elevated leukemia incidence in children near U.S. reactors. U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., complained to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005: “The nuclear industry and the NRC have automatically dismissed all studies that link increased cancer risk to exposure to low levels of radiation. The NRC needs to study — not summarily dismiss — the connection between serious health risks and radiation released from nuclear reactors.”

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[edit on 28/4/2010 by Mirthful Me]

reply to post by drew hempel


Hi drew,

"All the spent fuel produced to date by all commercial nuclear power plants in the US would cover a football field to the depth of about one meter." If fully reprocessed it will take 15% of that space. This means that the 'storage' issue is a non issue made to appear complex and 'dangerous' out of all proportion to reality by media people who clearly spend more time getting their pockets lined/ staying employed than checking the facts; presuming they care what the reality might be that is.

In fact it's known, if not widely, that coal ash by shear volume are much more radioactive and freely released into the environment which means rather more likely to end up in your digestive tract or lungs. As far as i am concerned the vast majority of cancers blamed on smoking, bad diets or nuclear 'accidents' can more reasonably b allocated to coal power but since their lobby is FAR more powerful than the nuke not a few knows that.

Essentially i could fill a few pages with the various pro's and con's that makes nuclear power the best ( safest, cleanest, cheapest) of all current commercial varieties but since you might just disagree for the the sake of it i will just state that if you can't live with nukes your merely ignorant of the facts for by default suggesting that coal is today, or was sixty years ago, safer than nuclear power. This presumes, since i have not checked out your posting history, your not just one of those fanatics that doesn't really care if true alternatives exists while just insists on 'safe' practices despite the fact that cold and heat extremes ( sans air conditioning/heating/cooling) would kill people by orders of magnitude more in the absence of either coal or nuke electricity.

I can easily agree that only central governments should be in control of day to day operations ( so we know who to hold responsible) but in terms of what's commercially viable, meaning it gets done, our choices are in fact limited.

Obviously if the Pentagon budget were spent on a combination of solar, hydro, and wind power generation ( For self defense i would makes the nuclear warheads by the thousands thought; their really cheap and no one likes unfair play of that magnitude) the energy economy could be entirely renewable but apparently we don't get to have that choice because most people horrendously misinformed as their first step up from being totally ignorant.

So there.
Another depressing post.

Regards,

Stellar



[edit on 28-4-2010 by StellarX]

Originally posted by StellarX
reply to post by drew hempel

 

Hi drew,

"All the spent fuel produced to date by all commercial nuclear power plants in the US would cover a football field to the depth of about one meter." [edit on 28-4-2010 by StellarX]

NOPE - that's just THREE YEARS of spent fuel:

40 years of commercial nuclear power has only produced an inventory of spent fuel in the U.S. that would fill one football field to depth of below 30 feet. ... www.powershow.com/view/.../Reprocessing_of_Spent_Nuclear_Fuel

library.thinkquest.org...

The amount of spent fuel removed annually from the approximately 100 reactors in the U.S. would fill a football field to a depth of one foot.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, barrels of radioactive waste were frequently dumped in oceans. This ended in 1970 when the EPA (Energy Protection Agency) determined that at least one-fourth of these barrels were leaking.

Then there's the uranium mining waste:

By 1989, some 140 million tons of mill tailings had accumulated in the United States alone, with 10 to 15 million tons added each year. Although their radiation is generally less concentrated than other types of waste, some of the isotopes in these tailings are long-lived and can be hazardous for many thousands of years.

But the radiation is a lot from spent fuel!

www.ens-newswire.com...

Then, in 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had to revise its dose limits for people exposed to radiation from Yucca Mountain to satisfy a July 2004 court order to extend the standards' duration from 10,000 to one million years. The court also ordered the EPA to require that the Department of Energy consider the effects of climate change, earthquakes, volcanoes, and corrosion of the waste packages to safely contain the waste during the one million-year period.

reply to post by Alethea


8 years I was approached to help get a biomass heat company off the ground in Scotland. We spent a lot of time in Finland studying their business model. There you dont see oil boilers in every house its all woodchip or log, more or less carbon neutral if sourced from renewed forestry with local farmers contracted to supply fuel direct to hoppers. In Scotland approx 54% of every tree cut down goes to waste. ie: wood left on the hill, brash laid out to drive harvesters on also it was uneconomic to send short round wood to the mill ( 200mm dia & down ) there was no market for lopped off tops.
We calculated that all this waste was enough to heat every dwelling in Scotland !
Our model was to supply and install kit free of charge, run and maintain it & only charge per Kwhr consumed . I designed 1600m3 chip drying shed that worked really well We went bust after 3yrs because the cheap kit we could afford was difficult to run unattended, high cost of inferstructure, and resistance to change away from fossil fuel. Originally we thought the sums stacked up with a consuption of 250,000 Kwhr / annum ( 10 bed hotel ) . I think we tried to expand too quickly to grab a virgin market.The Forestry Commission shoud of invested in inferstructure to provide market for waste but it was like pulling teeth.l was amazed at the lack foresight. We were 8yrs too early.

(NC) 336-977-0852 Groups Urge Feds to Suspend Nuclear Licensing; Westinghouse Reactor Defect Was Missed By Regulators Today, twelve national and regional environmental organizations called upon U.S. nuclear regulators to launch an investigation into newly identified flaws in Westinghouse's new reactor design.

Gunderson assumes that the AP1000 will have the same issues regarding corrosion as the current reactor containment vessels, but doesn't take into account other design changes that have been made with the AP1000 that are designed to mitigate the possibility of undetected corrosion. He is essentially saying that if you don't maintain a car properly it will rust. Gunderson is a professional anti-nuke, it is only fair to let NEI have their say:

The report alleges that the gap between the plant shield building and containment creates an area that is “extraordinarily difficult to detect until the rust creates a hole completely through the steel.” In reality, unlike the example cited by the report, the AP1000 containment vessel is accessible for inspection.

neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com...

Something you posted earlier before it was removed criticized the AP1000 for having design revisions. Err, making a technology even better doesn't mean it's bad. The software in Airbus aircraft have had dozens of revisions, yet when is the last time you have heard of an A320, A330, A340, or A380 going down due to software problems? It hasn't happened. That argument is like claiming that adding airbags to new cars makes cars dangerous. Or that adding rails to stairways makes stairs dangerous. It makes no sense.

The Oct. 25 derailment of at least two train cars at the Shearon Harris nuclear reactor site, 25 miles from Raleigh, North Carolina, and the 2005 derailment of a military waste fuel cask in New York State are a pair of the “Lucky This Time” events.

So? They're in concrete and steel casks. Tell me why that is a big deal? A train derailed? So what? What if a train derails carrying Chlorine gas in the middle of Las Vegas. That is far more likely.

Between 1957 and 1962, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

You must be desperate if you're using military statistics that are 50 years old to build your case. Why do you keep positing completely irrelevant data?

Indeed, all nuclear power reactors produce huge quantities of global warming gases as they are wrapped up in the mining of the uranium ore that goes into the fuel, and in the milling of that ore into fuel rods.

I already provided total lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit of electricity produced on the previous page. If that's not enough then here's another. Life-Cycle Energy Balance and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Nuclear Energy in Australia. Nuclear is similar to wind alone in that regard, but any fair comparison with wind would factor in the natural gas backups that wind needs.

and the heat they dump into the air and water directly heats the planet.

The effect is marginal.

Would 10,000 nuclear power stations cook the planet? - Brave New Climate.

It is also forgetting that solar concentrating thermal and geothermal need more cooling water than Nuclear. Natural gas backups also need water, although that amount is less than Nuclear. Additionally natural gas is 25 times worse than CO2 if it leaks. Increased fossil gas use would have to be factored into the equation if we went wind and gas to replace coal.

The estimates never even include the cost of managing radioactive waste, a bill that keeps coming for centuries.

Who is claiming that we maintain it for centuries? Nice strawman. Put it in a big hole and you can forget about it. Build breeder reactors and it will be one of the most valuable materials on the planet.

Drilling deep under the US to dispose of nuclear waste

Deep boreholes offer distinct advantages over mined repositories such as Yucca mountain, which would have been about 300 metres below ground. In addition to the physical barrier offered by kilometres of rock, deep boreholes ensure that waste is unlikely to seep to the surface in groundwater. Water found below 2 kilometres or so is highly saline, and therefore far heavier than water closer to the surface. As a result, water at depth - and any radioactive material it could transport - stays at depth. Samples so far taken from basement rock show that water has been stagnating there for hundreds of thousands of years or more.

www.newscientist.com...

The New York Times reported five years ago that the owners of nearly half the reactors in the U.S. “are not reserving enough money to decommission them on retirement.”

Not all reactors are decommissioned straight after closure? In any case, most studies include the cost of decommissioning in their cost projections.

Radioactive tritium has poisoned groundwater near at least 14 reactors in the U.S., including in Kewaunee, Wis. Groundwater is contaminated with tritium above Environmental Protection Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowances under the communities of Braidwood, Ill., Dresden, Ill., Brookhaven, N.Y., Palo Verde, Ariz., Indian Point, N.Y., Diablo Canyon, Calif., San Onofre, Calif., and Kewaunee.

So? What concentration? What amount? On average nuclear plants emit about 1/10th the radioactivity that coal plants do. Additionally I can buy key-chains that contain more tritium than these supposed leaks.

Nuclear is so dirty Germany legislated a national phase-out of its 17 reactors by 2025.

Nuclear is so clean that studies show otherwise. Nuclear is so clean that Sweden, United Kingdom, Italy and a few states on the US have reversed bans on nuclear.

That 1998 decision was based partly on government studies that found high rates of childhood leukemia in areas near German reactors.

That's far from ubiquitous and completely disingenuous.

No Excess Mortality Risk Found in Counties with Nuclear Facilities

A National Cancer Institute (NCI) survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, March 20, 1991, showed no general increased risk of death from cancer for people living in 107 U.S. counties containing or closely adjacent to 62 nuclear facilities. The facilities in the survey had all begun operation before 1982. Included were 52 commercial nuclear power plants, nine Department of Energy research and weapons plants, and one commercial fuel reprocessing plant. The survey examined deaths from 16 types of cancer, including leukemia. In the counties with nuclear facilities, cancer death rates before and after the startup of the facilities were compared with cancer rates in 292 similar counties without nuclear facilities (control counties).

www.cancer.gov...

The ExternE report I used as a source included death rates per unit of electrical generation counted deaths from the entire fuel cycle, including mining. Nuclear was superior to wind in this regard.

Economic Analysis of Various Options of Electricity Generation
- Taking into Account Health and Environmental Effects



[edit on 3/5/2010 by C0bzz]

Regarding Amory Lovins... is that the same Amory Lovins who predicted in a 1976 paper that there would be no electricity being produced by nuclear power plants in the the United States after 2000 and in the same paper advocated for a doubling of coal consumption?

. The NRC needs to study — not summarily dismiss — the connection between serious health risks and radiation released from nuclear reactors.”

Which they are doing.

NRC Asks NAS To Study Cancer Risk In Populations Living Near Nuclear Power Facilities

Your main problem is that you do not compare Nuclear with other sources, as I have done, you simply yell out that Nuclear is bad and that alternatives are better. Convince me. You seem to be under the impression that wind can provide baseload electricity, which is extremely disingenuous.

Are you familiar with the term 'capacity value'? It is the amount of capacity that a generator can contribute to overall grid stability. Due to intermittency of the wind, generally this is around 5% for wind, but decreases the more that is implemented. It is 99% for conventional energy sources. This means that all that 30,000 megawatts of wind that is built each year, will only displace approximately 1,500 megawatts of fossil fuel generation. For example, if I have a 1000 megawatt system of wind, then it will require approximately 950 megawatt's of Natural Gas capacity to back it up. More often than not, it will be simple cycle natural gas, as it will need to be able to rapidly change power level due to change in the fluctuations in wind speed. Simple cycle has a 30% lower efficiency than combined cycle natural gas plants. Is the prospect of having to build less efficient natural gas plants ever included in studies of wind's emissions? NO. Are the environmental effects from hydraulic fracturing and drilling for natural gas considered? NO. Are natural gas explosions that occasionally kill people considered? NO. Last time I checked the US got a large proportion of its gas from the Gulf of Mexico, where there's a big spill at the moment that nobody knows how to plug. That's what increased fossil gas use by virtue of wind means.



This is wind generation in the Bonneville Power Administration today:


This is what it was in January:


You can NOT run a country on that basis. THAT is why wind requires natural gas backups. I saw one study that showed that wind can possibly provide a steady state output of 33% of its maximum capacity, but even that doesn't abolish gas. As a matter of fact, when is the last time you have heard the natural gas industry oppose wind? They love it. iirc, protests against Shoreham Nuclear Plant during the 1980's were sponsored by the Natural Gas industry, whom were actually promoting wind. Fact is, displacing coal with wind simply means more natural gas as coal cannot ramp up and down fast enough (or else it incurs massive efficiency losses) and wind is completely incapable of providing steady electricity.

This is what Nuclear does, no backups required:

source: The Capacity Factor.

There is also the term 'capacity factor', which is essentially the average power level at which a power plant operates at. For wind it is 35% onshore, max. For Nuclear it is 92%, average in the United States. 30,000 megawatts of wind may be added each year, but on average that will generate 10,500 megawatts of electricity needing natural gas backups. At the rate we are starting to building Nuclear Plant's we will have about 15,000 megawatts of new reactors started construction by the end of the year, which will eventually be operating at a capacity factor of >85%, or 12,750 megawatts steady state electricity. Three years ago there was about 150 reactors proposed, today there is about 350. At the peak of Nuclear, we were opening about 35 gigawatts of capacity per year. That's 3 times the rate wind is being built taking into consideration capacity factor. Ask yourself what is better for replacing old coal plants, it's obvious. Wind needs Natural Gas backups, Nuclear does not. Wind needs a massive transmission grid, Nuclear does not. Nuclear is relatively competitive to coal, wind is not. The differences in mortality and carbon dioxide emissions (excluding natural gas emissions) are merely decimal dust.

I've said it before, Nuclear is one of the safest forms of power, it is the most reliable form of power, it has some of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of any source of electricity, and has relatively low costs of generation. The main problems are high capital cost, public perception, and the fact that ways to dispose of the waste keep getting stone walled. I am not saying wind is useless, but it can not do what Nuclear does. I support expanding the Nuclear industry so we can replace Coal sufficiently. We certainly will need all the help we can get, and that includes wind also.


source.

Along with this it was found by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), that for 1982 the total release of radioactivity from 154 typical coal plants in the United States was approximately 97,318,510 megabecquerels, the equivalent of the radioactivity in 3200 household smoke detectors. They also found that the radiation exposure from an average 1000 MW power plant comes to 4.9 person-sieverts a year for coal-fired power plants and 0.048 person-sieverts a year for nuclear-fired power plants.

www.uow.edu.au...

Exxon ‘Recklessly’ Hid Radiation Risk, Workers Claim (Update1)

www.businessweek.com...

Workers say Exxon Mobil hid cleaning job's radiation risk

www.chron.com...

Yes... it's somehow going to fly out of steel and concrete containers and somehow kill you.


Please don't copy and paste anti-nuclear garbage that is easily thrown out the window. It's misleading, annoying, and it wastes everyone's time.

[edit on 3/5/2010 by C0bzz]