Nuclear Energy Belongs in the Technology Museum

But the principal profit-takers on oil and gas are governments, and it is government dependents who are most likely to profess belief in the various putative nuclear energy show-stoppers that somehow, over the past 25 years, have failed to stop the show. Or anyway, not to any greater extent than keeping its factor of production increase over that time to only 3.6.

(It's interesting to note that the supposed government boosters, the IAEA, can't escape the petrodollar-funded climate of opinion of government functionaries enough to project a greater increase over the next 25 years, reasonable thought that might seem to be. Between 1979 and 2004 new nuclear units' capacities remained capped at or below 1.5 GW(e) each by electrical grid limitations. Non-electrical output such as nuclear production of hydrocarbons, or of better fuels, will allow the tenfold scaling-up of unit sizes that occurred in the 1960s readily to be repeated, and repeated again.)

I have never seen any article / writing from the people who support
renewable energy actually opposing the fossil fuels like coal, oil
and gas, but they vehemently oppose nuclear power.

A lot of nuclear power is run by private companies and they bear all
the costs, so there is no hidden cost.

Without nuclear, OIL prices will hit $100 / barrel, so in a way it is
saving a lot of money for people in oil importing countries. Unfortunately
no one thinks about this.

One of our friends argues that rich uranium ores will be exhausted in
3 years, if that is true, uranium prices will increase, but it has
been stable all through. Instead look at the oil prices, it has
hit $ 55 and it continues to increase with the INCREASING CONSUMPTION
in CHINA and the DECLINING PRODUCTION in USA.

I do support wind energy, but everyone should accept the fact that wind
turbines run for only 25 % of the time in a year, whereas an average nuclear
reactor runs for 85 % of the time in a year and that %age continues to increase.

Come on guys, I expect atleast one of you guys to come out and oppose
the fossil fuels. If you dont, I assume that you guys have stocks
in Oil & Gas companies.

Great news folks

Scientific advisers to China's government reckon the country will soon need a nuclear output of 300 gigawatts (350,000 MW).
This will give a big boost to the nuclear industry and will
put it in a path to compete with atleast Coal & Gas.
Oil is still the king of the hill, supplying 40 % of World's energy.

http://www.nuclear.com/nation-by-nation/China_news.html

If China does not follow this path, then their development
will derail.

If there were such a need, the thousands of reactors' worth of naturally occurring radioactive material that underlie every province and state at easily accessible depths would require similar babysitting.

Yes, governments say or imply that in the case of radioactivity whose production cuts into oil and gas revenue, there is such a need. It is an outright lie. The same governments make tens of dollars off the import of each barrel of petroleum that is not replaced by fifty cents' worth of uranium. Tim Gard is of course free not to "follow the money", free to learn nothing, but is a fool if he imagines no-one else is learning.

Pollution from fossil fuels causes acid rain
is a well known fact and how many human beings are
killed is not known, yet no one speaks about this.

Its the smoking which causes cancer is another well
known fact, instead if some people choose to blame
nuclear power for that, then we have to say that it
is a baseless fact.

Medicine related to nuclear technology has saved
many people the world over.

Reducing the population is a meaningful thing, but
the energy consumption will continue to increase
because of development in developing countries.

Think if an average Chinese want to have an automobile,
then the only solution is nuclear, hydro wind all put
together.

My kind request is that the nuclear and wind supporters
should accept the fact that both are needed for the
developing world.

Thus there is the reasonable suspicion that they like renewable energy as long as it is ineffective, and no longer.

Nuclear energy is already saving many lives, and enabling energy consumers to avoid paying many tens of billions of dollars in coal, oil, and natural gas taxes, every year. When renewable energy starts to do the same, perhaps in the form of desert-sited large-scale solar concentrators, it is not inconceivable that someone, in fact a great many someones who will do their level best to drown out a few truthful voices such as mine, will claim that big, effective solar power isn't the answer at all.

The arguments may be shrewd and subtle, but they won't have to be; nor will the petrodollar connection need to be any less obvious than an elephant in the living room. Maybe they'll claim big mirrors in the desert somehow cause cancer in houses 100 miles away.

This isn't any more bizarre than pretending that museum displays of spent fission fuel from Roman hypocausts, if they had been fission-heated and the fuel rods had come down to us, would need any greater separation from the viewing public than glass cases, perhaps with warnings to stand back. For even by King Arthur's time, if he had a time, those Roman relics' gamma dose rate at 1 metre would already have been dropped below a rad per hour. Glass might cut this down a little, but in a world where governments had long been weaned of their dependency on fossil fuel tax revenue, no-one would pretend it had to.

Continuing use of ordinary, non-breeder reactors throughout the intervening centuries would not yet have exhausted uranium ores that are equivalent to more than their own volume in petroleum -- the Chattanooga black marine shale, for instance.

Today's richest uranium ores are equivalent to 200,000 times their weight in oil sand, and yield a barrels-of-oil-equivalent -- a "BOE" -- for under 20 cents each. By that far future time when uraniferous black shales and similarly lean ores are the richest ones remaining, the BOE cost may have doubled a few times, but it certainly won't have reached the cost of today's barrels of actual oil. Some discussions of future uranium availability avoid reference to BOE cost, and so obscure this important point.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/ne/ne3.htm#3.3

These are the quotes from the above URL.

Presently known resources of uranium are enough to last for half a century,

Widespread use of the fast breeder reactor (see 4.2) could increase the utilisation of uranium sixty-fold or more.

thorium is 3 times as abundant as uranium.

Also the latest generation reactors were able to extract more power / tonne
of fuel.

So those who are concerned about nuclear fuel reserves, can be
assured of it. When the world really runs out of it, we can
see the drop in the use of nuclear power.

Above all we can expect a Fusion reactor in the near future. All these
days, they were just talking about fusion, but now the ITER group
which has all industrialized countries are planning to put an actual
reactor. Before Uranium and Thorium runs out, we will have fusion
reactor taking over.

After saying all these things, I still believe that the renewables
especially the wind have a big role to play. So far, 40,000 MW has been
installed and the declining cost of wind turbines will add more of the
wind capacity.

The real advantage of fossil fuels today is that they can be transported
and used anywhere, but the nuclear, hydro and wind power suffer this disadvantage.
However with the declining cost of battery, the concept of storing power
will be used to the advantage of these green sources.

Just like cell phone companies offer free / lower prices during the night
usage (9.00 pm - 9.00 am), if the utilities offer cheaper power during night when
usage is low. And IMAGINE a microwave oven with an inbuilt battery can
grab these cheap power and use it during the daytime. This will put green sources
at an enormous advantage.

One bit of knowledge I like to share is what a "straw man" is: the practice of attacking arguments an opponent has not made, or positions he has not taken, but which would make him a much easier opponent if he did. So if Frazier had wanted a guaranteed win against Ali, he might have made up a straw Ali, sneaked it into the ring, and quite literally beaten the stuffing out of it. Barring some odd and unforeseeable unfolding of circumstances, such as might begin with the real Ali's tapping him on the shoulder while he was getting his breath back, would the hometown audience ever know? Even if they did, would they say anything?

You don't have to know what one is to be in the habit of using them, witness your "feeling" that I would put spent fuel in local landfills. I would not. I'd keep it just as now much of it is kept, in its own thick-walled concrete storage casks, for enough decades that it was no longer very tricky to transport, and maybe a few decades longer, then drop it in a deep part of the ocean. Yes, this would entail throwing away a lot of unburnt uranium. Uranium is not going to be scarce any century soon.

It would lie, cool and undissolving, deep in the bottom mud, its exact whereabouts unknown to anyone; so the far-future worry presented in Per Peterson's repository paper about clandestine bomb seekers tunnelling into land-based repositories of known location, and stealing spent fuel whose radioactivity is no longer daunting, would not apply.

How do I account for the IAEA's position on what should be done with nuclear waste in the indefinitely far future? Well, their position makes no difference to what anyone should do today -- except it may please certain people they need to please today. They're civil servants, and are accountable to other civil servants in the governments of the member countries. Did I mention that those civil servants all live partly off tax revenues from oil and gas? Do you think this might influence how they feel about uranium?

Ocean dumping is illegal by international treaty today. But the longer you put off doing anything with a spent fuel rod, the easier it becomes. If we keep millions of tonnes of them for a century, our experience with tens of thousands of tonnes over decades indicates that no-one will get any harm from them.

Would a walk around a billion oil-burners' hourly production of CO2 and CO, if it were kept in one place, be similarly deadly? Much deadlier, actually, if it were kept on an acre of land as a dry ice mountain.

It would be deadlier because of CO2's tendency to disperse. The warm air lying over it would evaporate it, and long before you could walk around it, the heavy vapour running down the sides would gas you like a pig, or like the cattle and people that were gassed on the natural, unwholesome occasion when Lake Nyos, I think its name was, suddenly gushed out a similar amount.

Some detail corrections: different radioisotopes have different half-lives; 239-U's is 23.5 minutes. Gard is thinking of plutonium-239, but to persist that long it radiates slowly, and most of its rays, while energetic, are of varieties that quickly give up that energy to the matter they are flying through, and stop within the same piece of fuel they began in. If anyone has ever been lethally blasted by a spent fuel rod it was by much hotter isotopes that fire off all their rays much quicker; see figure 2 in this PDF, but pay attention to the scale markings on the sides. Dropping halfway down that graph means a 10,000-fold reduction, not a two-fold one, and the first sixth of the way across it is nine years while the last sixth is nine million years.

If you shoot at a target in front of a haystack, and miss, is the hay containing your fire? I guess you could say that, but "muffling" or "stopping" are better words. Thick lead could do it, but thicker concrete is the usual choice, except when the stuff is really new and hot, and then an even thicker layer of water is used. Plant workers can look down and see it, but it can't see them.

Regarding Gard's "flashback" remark, with respect to "effective inexpensive replacement" of $75 oil -- and some governments do make about that much, despite the suppliers getting only US$50 -- there is a backlash, has been for many years, and he's part of it.

To Sheldon's question about breeders, note that while there may be valid reasons to make them, the prospect of uranium scarcity within the next few thousand years isn't one of them. My remark about the equivalency of typical uraniferous black marine shale to more than its own volume of petroleum was with respect to ordinary burner reactors.

I don't know how nuclear weapons proliferation can be indefinitely prevented, but it seems enough policing of nuclear powerplants has been in place to persuade all clandestine bomb-seekers so far, including of course the Hiroshima ones, to choose other ways.

If a small city uses 400 MW for power supply, which means they
may be using 400 MW during day when the consumption is at peak and
probably 200 MW during night when consumption is low.

In this case, is it possible to have a 300 MW power plant with
a 100 MW battery, where the combined power of plant and battery (400 MW)
will be used to power the city during day and at night when only 200 MW
is drawn from the plant, the other 100 MW can go for charging the battery.

Can anyone comment on this.

Hi Doug Kelley

Congrats on having Prius. Its a wonderful vehicle, I will
even say its revolutionary with its HSD technology. I hope the
next model of Prius will have a Plugin facility.

I am big time supporter of renewable energy and was a member
in Union of Concerned Scientists from 2000-2003 and sent funds
to many other environmental groups.

I have purchased wind power from Community Energy based in
Pennsylvania, USA for 1 year.

I appreciate the great leaps in technology made by wind energy.
It seems a German company has recently installed a 5 MW wind turbine.

The whole reason I am supporting nuclear is to ensure that the
pollution is cut down. Currently the wind along with the solar
contributes only 1/4 % of the worlds energy as I mentioned in one of
my postings.

My point is that it is better to rely on few sources
of clean energy to take on fossil fuels, instead of just relying on
just one source. If wind can do it, let it take on

coal first

oil next

gas next

and then replace nuclear.
As for the subsidies, the nuclear power industry is paying of by
ensuring that the oil & gas costs are lower and reducing the pollution.
After all the wind industry in Europe is also surviving on subsidies.
You should know that still the wind power is few cents more than others,
the reason is they run for only 25 % of time thereby relying on other sources
like coal / gas for the remaining 75 %.

And the cost of decommissioning/storage is included in the cost of
power that we pay.

Please note that pretty soon, USA is going to add 60,000 MW of coal
fired power and China & India is expected to add a lot.

Why not let nuclear take a pie out of it. The concept of uranium
shortage is baseless. Read this again

http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/ne/ne3.htm#3.3

I have 1 question for you guys, given a choice of wind farm to replace
a coal or nuclear power plant, which one will you choose.
If you want to replace nuclear, I assume that you are a POLLUTER.