All Nuclear Reactors Must Go Now, Expert Panels Charge

reply to post by charles1952


It's definitly worth thinking about. The pedigree of 'The Commentator" is pretty neo-con BIG BUSINESS - better then most but still.

Here is one article with differing analyse - moderate in tone and without 'sensationalism' addresses the same issues in the context of 'austerity economics'.

www.eui.eu...

This looks at renewables in Europe as well. I can't find anything about the US or China quickly.

Even if renewables are expensive - between conservation and new technologies - Nuclear power is an unacceptable risk if we want a liveable world for our children and grand children.

reply to post by FyreByrd

Dear FryeByrd,

I appreciate you providing me with another point of view. How different it is remains to be seen.

The speaker in your source article says:

“It is nonsense to suggest that renewables are about energy dependence and that this is a good thing."

If it's not about energy dependence, perhaps it's about "green jobs." But your source says:

Increasing unemployment has seen some politicians promote the concept of creating ‘green jobs’, although Pollitt said this approach is misguided: “It’s nonsense as a policy and the cost of these jobs as subsidies is enormous. If you want to create jobs in the EU you subsidise classroom assistants, you do not subsidise engineers working in the wind turbine industry.”

All right, it's not about energy independence or green jobs. Surely reducing carbon dioxide is important:

A further rationale for developing renewables is that it will help reduce carbon dioxide pollution, an argument Pollitt refuted. “Supporting renewables from an economic point of view has nothing to do with carbon on its own. An extra wind turbine in Europe makes no difference to the amount of CO2 in Europe,”

So, forget energy independence, green jobs, and reduced CO2, how about helping the environment generally, before the disaters predicted for the next 5-20 years occur?

You should subsidise it on the basis that it will produce cheaper electricity not on the basis it might be good for the environment at the moment,” he added, explaining that many of the environmental benefits of renewables would not be felt for decades.

I give up. Is there any reason to go with renewables according to your source?

“What you hope for is that the price of the install cost of renewables falls over time and eventually hits fossil fuel parity with pricing, so it’s worth subsidising if that is the case, and it eventually hits parity with conventional sources of electricity generation,”

So he's hoping that at some time in the future, if we pour enough money into renewables now, it may, possibly, cost as much to buy renewable electricity as any other kind. Maybe.

I'm sorry, but if the best argument your source has is that we can spend a ton of money now, and years from now we may be able to produce electricity at the same cost as with non-renewables, I've heard that before and I'm tired of it. Every politician and quack says "Spend money now. I promise it will be worth it years from now. (When I'm retired and living in some other country.)"

So from you and your source combined, you've ruled out nuclear and made renewables look feeble and unlikely. What have you got left then? Coal, oil, natural gas.

With respect,
Charles1952

darkbake I read on the BBC that although nuclear power might supply 2-3 generations with a good source of power, it could potentially affect up to 3,000 generations with the waste generated, not to mention nuclear disasters like Fukushima.

1. Actually the numbers killed by air-born fossil fuel pollution (hundreds of thousands per year worldwide) make this logic questionable. If a coal plant had been built instead of Fukushima then both would have killed thousands of people, but that’s only because Fukushima got hugely unlucky.
2. Nobody (not even the global warming scientists) are sure to what degree climate change is manmade, and to what degree the negatives like drought outweigh benefits. However if only a fraction of this manmade CO2 arguments are true, then fossil fuel release into the environment is less controlled than nuclear leaks. Furthermore: Although the effects of CO2 pollution on life are mild compared with C02 on a gram by gram basis, the quantities of C02 released are so much more vast it’s hardly surprisingly if they are in fact more dangerous.
3. To effectively compare nuclear power with Fukushima is to assume new reactor designs compare with Fukushima. It is a fact they do not! It is a fact that Fukushima, and 3 mile Island, were all designed and built before Chernobyl.

Where there is a terrible and ethically needless danger, is the way the US and other countries continue to operate old reactors, in deteriorating condition, and very questionable regulation. Unfortunately it is these that the anti-nuclear crowd will use to contaminate the image of e.g. Passive Safety technology. www.abovetopsecret.com...

Eryiedes Just as there is no “safe fire”, there isn’t a safe electricity either. Even with wind and solar (and people have been killed by freak accidents involcing gravity from both) their cost is so high (in the it’ UK over twice the price for wind), that money could better progress mankind if e.g. a nuclear reactor were built and the governmental savings used to fund medical research & general healthcare.

CrankyoldmanNuclear reactors have, and always will be, creators of weapon material. Their byproduct, not their reason for being, their byproduct is heat/steam.

Here you demonstrate a popular delusion built on scientific and factual ignorance…
Regarding Facts: All the UK’s weapons grade plutonium comes from either the two Windscale Piles built in 1947 which never made a single watt of electricity, or from Calder Hall which did make both electricity and weapons grade plutonium and was closed in 2003 after a virtually faultless existence. The U.S also only had one reactor that made both electricity and weapons grade plutonium (the N-reactor closed in 1987 www.hanford.gov...).

The Scientific Reason: If you want a nuclear bomb it either needs to be Uranium 235 (naturally occurring) or plutonium 239. Plutonium 239 is 5 over times better than uranium 235.
However: Whilst all nuclear reactors create plutonium they also create the wrong kinds of plutonium (i.e. plutonium isotopes 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, and 244) the last two are too stable to work in any nuclear bomb. The others are all more radioactive than 239, but so radioactive they would kill anyone handling the bomb, unless the amount of bomb shielding was so thick the bomb would basically weigh too much. They also permanently, naturally, create large amounts of heat which is a problem given every nuclear warhead uses conventional explosive to combine its Critical Mass prio to detonation.
Furthermore: (And this is the big obstacle) if you do not have pure plutonium 239 then your bomb will detonate prematurely, with the result the reaction never becomes more than about truck bomb sized. But separating the different types of plutonium is near impossible because they chemically behave the same.
Plutonium purification by centrifuges is obstructed by it only being 1 neutron, whilst for naturally occurring uranium 235 and 238 it’s 3.

So: A bomb making reactor must allow depletive uranium (U238) to be placed around the reactor core, AND removed before more than 1.5% of it has become Plutonium 239. Otherwise the plutonium concentration will happily build up beyond 1.5% but it will be the wrong kind (i.e. higher isotopes) of plutonium, and (being higher) completely obstruct bomb production.
This is the reason why it took so long to figure out how to make both electricity and weapons from nuclear reactors, it is also why there is a significant difference between Weapons Grade and Reactor Grade plutonium (this being mixed isotopes no matter how chemically pure it is). It is also why it is very easy to tell if a countries reactor is being built for peaceful use, or for defense, as one built for war must have a way of releasing, AND quickly replacing, uranium sheets, before the plutonium concentration exceeds 1.5%.

Physicist: There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster

Firstly let us get something clear. There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster. Total number of people killed by nuclear radiation at Fukushima was zero. Total injured by radiation was zero. Total private property damaged by radiation….zero. There was no nuclear disaster. What there was, was a major media feeding frenzy fuelled by the rather remote possibility that there may have been a major radiation leak.

www.cfact.org...

Also read in the comments from a Naval NO (nuclear operator) about the radiation levels on the ships stationed near by.

As much as I support nuclear energy over both fossil fuel and wasted money over green-gimmick energy, this guy really takes the pee

Physicist: There was no Fukushima nuclear disaster

One only need look at depletive uranium (in spite of e.g. Fallujah www.independent.co.uk... ) to see the degrees that science-industry will go to obscure the obvious truth. Before that we had asbestos, then smoking, virtually every single banned insecticides, agent orange, then lead, and then mercury.

The amount of radiation released is enough to kill millions, granted it won’t kill millions because even a few meters of water absorbs enough neutron radiation to fully protect a man from an otherwise fatal dose, and because the prevailing wind direction is out to sea, and because most of the rest has landed in evacuated areas.
BUT: There will be deaths & birth defects as a result of what happened. Perhaps only a few hundred, and therefore not enough to register www.rsc.org... but I would sooner believe tobacco is good for you than believe nobody has died (or will die) thanks to Fukushima.

Fukushima? Yes they did. Why? The Japanese government introduced a forced evacuation of thousands of people living up to a couple of dozen kilometres from the power station. The stress of moving to collection areas induced heart attacks and other medical problems in many people. So people died because of Fukushima hysteria not because of Fukushima radiation. - See more at: www.cfact.org...

I guess the resource stretched Japanese government both did & maintains the current evacuation for fun then?

This "physicist" isn't too dissimilar to Madonna stripping on stage, or Lady Gagga wearing a dress made of animal meat. In all cases it's all about attracting maximum publicity, for max $, from maximum irresponsibility.

reply to post by Liberal1984

From the linked independent.co.uk article:

High rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiralling numbers of birth defects ranging from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs have been recorded.

Why do you attribute birth defects etc only to nuclear? With all the rest of the toxic materials the military has spread all over the place it's no wonder they have problems, but you can not prove it is from radiation. Depleted uranium is TOXIC, not radioactive, just as lead and mercury are.

And I think I'm more inclined to believe a qualified scientist with a verifiable track record than someone pushing more anti-nuclear false facts. There are no records of birth defects or deaths directly attribuatable to radiation exposure there, only to the nightmare scenario created by the false notion, promoted by the media looking for a good disaster story, that everyone was in immediate danger from radiation. If everyone had stayed put, there would have been no increase in sickness or death, and there may even have been an improvement in health due to radiation hormesis effects. The Japanese have been going to sit in radon hot springs even more often than they used to since 3/11, they don't seems too scared of a little radiation.

Garyn

Depleted uranium is TOXIC, not radioactive, just as lead and mercury are.

Actually it has a well-documented half-life of 4.468 billion years, it transmutes by Alpha decay to form Thorium, Radium, and Polonium which are all long-range emitters. The amounts created by transmutation are small, but the surface area is huge…

Whilst it is true that Alpha radiation can be stopped by something as thin as paper, this only makes depletive uranium safe to handle. The problem is when a round hits a target it vaporizes into a microscopic powder which when ingested-breathed is then able to release Alpha radiation at point blank range against human cells. This can turn them cancerous.

The manufactures of DU rounds have long been aware of these risks, which is why munitions staff are well protected against DU dust. It just so happens that when you go to Kosovo-Iraq-Afghanistan the laws of physics no longer apply, and DU dust is miraculously safe for Iraqis to breath-eat in, for the next 4.5 billion years.

Also: Thorium oxide is still used in some missile engine components, and this is blatantly a cancerous idea.

And I think I'm more inclined to believe a qualified scientist with a verifiable track record than someone pushing more anti-nuclear false facts.

From the people I know, my understanding is most experts believe U238 to be a cancerous thing (when inhaled-ingested). Like global warming there is a question on to what degree it is bad over e.g. lead, but the people who nearly always lie are the absolutists i.e. those who say…
There is zero death from Fukushima
Zero risk from U238

Sadly it’s these extremists who you say are your favourite experts -even though it’s doubtful they are all representative of scientific opinion.

So: Whenever a scientists tells you there is no doubt that… whatever
Look them in the eye, and say liar.

There are no records of birth defects or deaths directly attribuatable to radiation exposure there

Short of lab controlled, human experimentation there couldn’t be. But there should (over time) be statistical differences in health, and that these will show correlation with exposure. That is all science needs to make informed observations.