El Baradi: Nuclear Energy Is Back In Vogue.

"PARIS (Reuters) - Expectations of a sharp rise in energy demand and the risk of climate change are pushing many countries to return to the idea of nuclear power, the head of the United Nations (news - web sites) nuclear watchdog said Monday.


Even the most conservative estimates predict at least a doubling of energy usage by mid-century, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told a conference on nuclear energy in the 21st century.


He said any discussion of the energy sector "must begin by acknowledging the expected substantial growth in energy demand in the coming decades...

..."Nuclear power emits virtually no greenhouse gases. The complete nuclear power chain, from uranium mining to waste disposal, and including reactor and facility construction, emits only 2-6 grams of carbon per kilowatt hour," he said.


"This is about the same as wind and solar power and one to two orders below coal, oil and even natural gas."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=570&e=1&u=/nm/20050321/sc_nm/energy_nuclear_dc_2

There is no perfect solution to "Peak Oil". Tar sands and an environmental disaster. Fischer Tropsch liquefied coal has serious environmental problems. Solar is really for niche markets. Wind is for bigger niche markets. Hydrogen requires either decomposing water (electricity) or reforming petroleum. Biomass is either (a) very slow with a long residence time or (b) industrially an energy hog to produce.

And to the extent that there is a "peak uranium" issue -- there are breeder reactors (I know - non-proliferation issues) and thorium reactors. And there is a waste disposal issue -- just as there is with fossil fuels.

No perfect solution -- every solution has problems.

A story is told that as the New Deal REA (Rural Electrification Administration) got going - Henry Ford told colleagues that when he came out with the Model T, his friend Thomas Edison suggested that he make it an electric car - but hat he decided to go with gasoline because farmers didn't have electricity (the target for the Model T was farmers). But if the REA had been 30 years earlier he would have gone with an electric.

So, there is no perfect solution.

...running them, and the most consistently incompetent government overseeing them, I might feel somewhat better about it. But we do, and so I don't.

There's nothing inherently wrong with nuclear energy -- our sun uses it, after all. I'm all for it for spacecraft, Moon bases, etc. If nothing goes wrong, nuclear power can be fairly clean. There are still serious problems trying to deal with nuclear waste. I'm not convinced that trying to 'rebury it' is an acceptable long-term strategy. OTOH, we've been spreading depleted uranium all over the Middle East and Central Asia for the last 4 years, so we are already creating radiological wastelands even without widespread nuclear power.

The biggest problem of all is that no single source of energy currently known can replace petroleum entirely. Not even nuclear power. Among other things, there's probably not enough Uranium on the planet to power everything we have for very long. Transportation based on nuclear power is limited by battery technology on the one hand, and fears of terrorism on the other (do we want privately operated nuclear powered freight ships?).

Massive conservation HAS to be a part of our future energy strategy unless we stumble onto a pile of 'zero point modules' from some alternate galaxy.

But the biggest problem I have with nuclear power as it is currently generated in this country is that it is done for a profit. And a hefty one.

I have no problem with profits, but it has become all too clear that pressure to increase shareholder profits INEVITABLY leads to cost cutting, and almost always on things like maintenance and oversight (since the safety costs of cutting back don't become immediately apparent).



I do not trust nuclear power plants to be operated by for-profit corporations. I don't know that I would want our shit-for-brains federal government to handle it either, but maybe something like a sponsored non-profit. Just something where there's no pressure to sacrifice safety for profits. Profit-seeking when running a nuclear reactor won't lead to efficiency -- it will lead to disaster.

I used to be entirely against nuclear power. Then one day I had a revelation. I thought to myself, "If I lived in the Star Trek universe, would I still have so much opposition to nuclear power?" The answer was no, no I wouldn't.

You see, in the Star Trek universe, I could trust that they wouldn't do something FRICKIN STUPID in pursuit of the bottom line and cause a disaster. Unless they were Ferengi, I guess.

Allegedly it was not for profit.

I have little patience for socialism myself, and I don't automatically assume that all corporations are evil simply because they are corporations.

Nuclear operations in many capitalist countries have an incomparable safety record, no lives lost, clean, safe power provided and reasonable costs maintained.

Basically, I am a Democrat, and not a socialist. Being a Democrat means to me that I believe in well regulated capitalist industry, industry which participates in the rule of law and industry that serves the greater good of society as a whole while allowing for fair profits to be realized for innovators and investors.

The successful operation of nuclear power, which is definitely from a purely technical standpoint, the safest and cleanest scalable constant energy source available, depends highly on regulation, a system of checks and balances, audit trails etc, etc.

This is precisely what was missing at Chernobyl. The construction plans were not followed because the government was the designer, the contractor, the plant owner AND the regulator. Therefore it had the power to ignore whatever procedures and safeguards it wished to ignore. In particular the important tests of the reactor were bypassed because the government had committed to having the reactor on line according to a five year plan. Moreover everyone including the regulators got bonuses for having the plant finished and on time which meant inexcusable shortcuts and shoddiness. An important test that was set to be completed before the reactor was licensed was actually conducted after the first full fuel cycle, and then by people who were not qualified to conduct it, and who, in fact to the poor extent they had a protocol, violated it nonetheless. (They winged it, with predictable results.)

Even the basic design of the RBMK was complicated by the lack of independence. The reactor was not simply to need the economic need to provide clean safe power at a reasonable price. The reactor was design instead designed for dual use, weapons production AND power production. It was designed to satisfy both the military and the public, with the result that neither were served. No Western reactors have this dual goal. In fact, western (capitalist) reactors are designed to prevent this dual use.

I very much trust countries where law prevails to have continued spectacular success with nuclear energy. On the other hand, I have my doubts about countries where law has less force. I am, for instance, ambivalent about China's aggressive nuclear power commitment. On one hand, the wide use of coal in China is a risk to every living organism on the planet. On the other hand, China has a much higher risk of having a nuclear problem. Such a problem will of course be much magnified by the tendency toward mass hysteria that surrounds all things nuclear, in which complete idiots will respond with loud lowing and crowing in complete indifference to context. On balance, we must hope that China's nuclear capacity expands rapidly - simply because any other outcome may end up killing everyone on the planet. On the other hand, we need to worry that China is doing this in an environment with few restraints on what they can and cannot do. There is certainly a much higher probability that more people will be injured or killed than need be.

People seem to embrace this idea that is a mixture of cowboy individualism and dime store socialism that the only good power sources are ones that can be owned by individuals. This in environmental, technical, and ethical nonsense. Individuals do NOT always behave better than well regulated large organizations. In fact, some of the worst pollution problems, everything from illegally dumped motor oil, to smoky fireplaces, to littering, to the illegal disposal of household chemicals, to the discarding of used batteries and fluorescent (mercury containing) light bulbs are represented by point source pollutants resulting from the actions of individuals. It is not always the case that bigger is better, but it is very often the case as well that small is disastrous. We have a name for this type of pollution which is spectacularly resistant to amelioration: Point source pollution.

The real problem that we face in these times is an ideologically motivated thrust from the right that is equally as dopey as the ideologically driven left can be: The notion that ALL regulation is bad and that ONLY profit is good. The United States is rapidly becoming a third world oligarchy with withered laws. It is probably, under the circumstances, just as well that we are too stupid to know that we should build nuclear power. We will probably be too stupid to operate it as well.

As a liberal, I believe it is the role of government to participate in the economy, to provide the legal structure in which business can thrive and all can profit from its offerings. In my view it is NOT the role of government either to own our economic machinery nor is properly its role to ignore our economic production machinery. The Communist Soviet State and the Republican Soviet State are all the same to me.

Regarding government versus private operation of nuclear power plants, do you trust the US Navy to operate nuclear reactors?

If we had strong government oversight, and responsible corporate management, I would be more accepting of widespread and numerous nuclear power plants. But as I said, we don't, so I'm not.

Just because nothing has happened yet does not mean that everything is safe. If you're walking on a tightrope, just because you haven't fallen yet doesn't mean you're safe. The consequences of things that have almost happened (Three Mile Island and Davis-Besse, for example) are too high not to think very carefully before proceeding further, if we have any choice in the matter.

I need to be able to trust our government oversight and our power companies before I'm going to give my 'okay' to nuclear power. It's a potentially dangerous technology (like many technologies) and needs to be regulated more than almost any other. There are not any other industries that can wipe out and make uninhabitable such a large area, except maybe Bhopal-sized chemical plants. That makes it a public concern.

Do you think that our government is performing appropriate oversight of corporate activities right now? Do you think they have been on a trend to tighten or loosen regulations all across the board over the last five years? Do you think that this is appropriate where nuclear power plants are concerned?

Government and corporations are killing people right now through a poorly regulated coal industry. There is not even an ATTEMPT to deal with the waste. They simply dump it all over your land, your lakes and your lungs.

Given that we have already seen the worst case with nuclear in terms of an accident (Chernobyl), and given that the ordinary operations of using coal are clearly extremely dangerous and toxic, why not choose the safer option?

The only way to reject nuclear energy on alleged "safety" or "environmental" grounds is to ignore the data and the reality. All of the deaths and damage from nuclear operations have come from a single plant of a design type that was rarely built in the past and will never be built in the future.


The problem with nuclear energy is a function of media focus. Every nuclear problem, every nuclear scenario is worth millions of pages of more print and focus than the ordinary every day operations of coal plants. The same people who are making nuclear's problems (and there are some) an inappropriately big deal, are the very same people who are telling you that the condition of a poor woman living in a vegetative state is more important than the lives of living breathing Iraqi children.

Paying attention to one thing at the exclusion of the other is not necessarily a path to arriving at the truth or at wisdom.

Chernobyl was NOT the worst case. It was almost a worst case. If the radioactive slag had not cooled off when it did, it would have burned through the ground to the water table within a few hours. If it had reached the water table, another massive steam explosion would have spread radiation over an even wider area than it did spread.

As you point out, the coal industry is an excellent example of why we can't trust our government and industry oversight. They KNOW it's dangerous and damaging, yet they do it anyway in pursuit of profit. This same 'profits above all' attitude carries over into their operation of nuclear power plants. Because government/industry oversight and regulation has failed us in the case of the coal industry, why would we have ANY reason to believe it would be different in the nuclear industry?

And while coal mines and coal-fired power plants are known to be damaging to our health every minute they are used, they cannot not cause massive death and injury overnight due to negligence. Nuclear plants CAN. Spin that how you wish, but a danger of catastrophic accidents exists in nuclear plants that does not exist in other power generation methods.

The failure of government oversight and regulation in our existing power industry is not an argument to use more dangerous power generation methods. It's an argument to STOP using those dangerous methods we are using now.

And yes, we would have to suffer energy deprivation as a result. We will have to suffer that no matter what route we take at this point -- it is too late to change energy streams without an upheaval.

Finally, this character attack here is just way out of bounds:

The same people who are making nuclear's problems (and there are some) an inappropriately big deal, are the very same people who are telling you that the condition of a poor woman living in a vegetative state is more important than the lives of living breathing Iraqi children.

Painting anti-nuclear power advocates as pro-war and pro-Schiavo is not just incorrect, but a loathsome thing to do. Why do you have to stoop to tactics like this? Nuclear power is something of an inevitability, no matter what I think about it. I just want to ensure I trust the oversight of a dangerous process. Why must you try to demonize all who don't agree with your all nuclear vision of the future? This sort of thing is what makes me most suspicious of the nuclear issue (and you're certainly not alone in using these tactics). If it were the sort of common-sense decision you suggest, the tactics of personal attacks and demonization would not be necessary.

Not to mention greenhouse gasses.

But they do not do so in a manner which can kill tens of thousands in the course of a few hours. There is simply no way a coal mine/power plant could screw up that bad, but that would certainly be possible in the case of a nuclear power plant, if operated by idiots.

And again, does the fact that we know this and STILL use coal fired power plants mean we would be more or less responsible when using other dangerous forms of power generation? To me, it means we can't trust the current level of government and industry oversight.

When my government says that there is an acceptable level of arsenic (a poison that builds up your body over time) in my drinking water, I'm not inclined to trust them to regulate even more dangerous industries.

Nuclear plants can be (and are) operated safely, whereas burning coal can't be made safe.

I'm saying that under our current regulatory apparatus, I do not trust that they WILL be operated safely. Again, the fact that they allow coal plants to continue to operate even knowing the damage they cause is a good argument to not trust them to regulate even more dangerous industries safely.

Do I trust power companies? I trust power companies to do what they think is best for their shareholders' short term interests. For them to do otherwise would be irresponsible as corporate officers under our current economic model. Since they can privatize the profits and socialize the costs, why wouldn't they do just that?

Given the government's performance lately, and their collusion with big industry against public interests at every turn, anyone who believes they will act differently in regard to nuclear power plants is either fooling themselves or is probably receiving a paycheck from them.

On the one hand, we have coal, which is *guaranteed* to pollute, poison us (slowly or otherwise), and spews enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

On the other hand, we have nuclear, which has demonstrated a good safety record, even if you include Chernobyl and 3-mile Island. And doesn't produce any greenhouse gasses.

If I had to choose between (1) a power source that is guaranteed to be unsafe, every day of operation, or (2) a power source that *might* be unsafe, *if* managed stupidly, then it seems like the only sensible choice is to go with option (2).

But (coal-fired plants) do not (release dangerous waste) in a manner which can kill tens of thousands in the course of a few hours.

What difference does it make it you kill people more slowly?

Humans usually want to be alive as long as possible, so yes, it does make a difference whether something kills me in a matter of years or decades versus killing me in a matter of hours.

I'd kind of like to put it off as long as possible -- as do most people, I imagine.

Coal mines DO explode, people are merely indifferent to it and don't pay attention. This IS unethical, since on balance the number of persons killed by coal in a normal year DWARFS the number of persons killed by nuclear power in its entire history. Therefore nuclear power saves lives.

In fact, the number of explosions and deaths associated with fossil fuels does happen overnight, practically every damn night.

My remark is NOT out of line, and it is NOT personal. It simply means that in general, people follow where the media leads them by the nose. You may choose to demonize ME for making the Schiavo analogy but I nevertheless choose to stand by it because it is TRUE. It is NOT true that this unfortunate woman's case is more important than the lives of Iraqi children, and is also not true that nuclear power is more dangerous than its alternatives. The perceptions to the contrary are a function of the attention that these issues get and not the merits of the case. You may choose to characterize my "attack" as personal, but it is not. It is merely a characterization of the idea that nuclear power is somehow magically more dangerous simply because people pay attention to its risks with far more paranoia and scrutiny than they pay to the far more serious risks of other options as dangerous and immoral.

I am not here because I own a nuclear power plant. I am here because I have children and I'm trying to save their lives.

All of the above said, I will confess that I in general have a low opinion of the critical thinking (and scientific) skills of those who oppose nuclear power, all most all of whom at some point, attempt to turn the lack of intellectual merit associated with the anti-nuclear power position into a conversation about my lack of merits as a person. But whether or not I am obnoxious - and I freely concede that I can hardly be characterized as a nice person - has no bearing on the truth of what I say.

susceptible to all manner of unexpected sources of accident and human error. It's an enlightening exercise to regularly read the NRC event notification reports. About a decade ago, I read the reports routinely for several years: people came to work drunk or on drugs, had fights, fell off ladders; at least once during that period, at one of the plants I was following, the entire complement of licensed reactor operators inappropriately left the control area; fuse boxes had the wrong amperage fuses; hazardous chemical spills were common; and of course emergency diesel generators were often disfunctional. And that's all before one considered frequent reactor trips and scrams, leaks, venting of radiation. And, ya know, not much has changed: here's a few events plucked from Feb/Mar05:

People use drugs:


People die:


Emergency warning systems don't work:


Design specs may not take into account clever welders:


Let's all suffocate:


Inoperable emergency diesel generators:


Inoperable high pressure coolant injection systems:

nail polish in our paper shredder. One good shock and it would have exploded.

Boy those boys in the chiller room must have been near death, eh?

I'm amazed that everyone on earth wasn't killed by these things.

It must suck to work in a nuclear plant, what with all the brainless wimps followoing you around. Were similar wimps to show up at a coal facility (which they don't because they don't care about coal) they might see something real interesting: Burning wimps.

... incidents were also potentially serious. Such failures to control suffocating gases have been a sometimes surprisingly common occurrence at the N-plants.

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/features/feature_printable.cfm?ID=1208

If the US had adopted these same policies (as well as strict CAFE standards and efficient reliable mass transit) after the oil shocks of the 1970's - where would we be today????

(clues: more secure, more prosperous, cooler and greener).

We can thank Ronald Reagan, Poppy, Shrub and the GOP for the mess we're in today....

In Germany, the only country with significant PV installations in Europe the environmental cost for embracing PV has been triple of what nuclear costs. As for the economic cost, well, I note that NO nation has followed Germany into solar fantasy land. It's too damn expensive.

Clearly the Germans are thinking, even if they cannot do it out loud becauce of the "Green" (or idiot) party:

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/19495/story.htm

http://www.energybulletin.net/4546.html

Everyone with an ounce of sense in Germany is quietly backing away from the anti-nuclear stupidity, because, well, it's stupidity.

The Germans know how many Euros they are sending to France for electricity.

There's politics, there's religion, and there are brains. Very rarely are the three coterminous, as we see here day after day.

0.2 +/- what????

0.6 +/- what????

Without error bounds these comparisons are meaningless.

Estimates of life-cycle GHG emissions from various energy technologies vary widely. Some conclude that nuclear emits more GHG than PV or wind....

www.australiancoal.com.au/Pubs/CISS%20Summary.pdf

www.oeko.de/service/gemis/files/info/nuke_co2_en.pdf

fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/pdf/fdm1185.pdf

www.kuleuven.ac.be/ei/Public/ publications/EIWP98-03_en.pdf

www.antenna.nl/wise/537/gl/clean.html - 27k

www.nei.org/doc.asp?catnum=2& catid=260&docid=&format=print - 12k

The assumptions used to calculate these estimates are fluid and can be highly subjective...

archive.greenpeace.org/comms/no.nukes/nenstcc.html - 36k

http://www.google.com/search?q=greenhouse+gas+emissions+nuclear+fuel+cycle+photovoltaic&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N

Aluminum (or glass for PV modules) produced using hydroelectricity will have lower GHG emissions than Al produced using electricity from a lignite-fired power plant.

Recycled Al has an even lower GHG emission potential

In contrast to the steel and concrete that is used to construct reactor vessels, steam generators, containment buildings etc. for nuclear power plants, everything that goes into a PV module (except the EVA encapsulation material) is entirely recyclable - is this factored into these analyses?????

Are CFC-114 (a powerful GHG that destroys ozone as well) emissions from US uranium enrichment plants included in these estimates????

How 'bout the fossil fuels used to decommission uranium mines or to build and operate Yucca Mountain (construction and spent fuel transportation)?????

The only thing that can be concluded from these studies is this:

Life-cycle GHG emissions from nuclear, wind and PV are very similar and several orders of magnitude lower than fossil fuel technologies.

nice try though...

Finally, the Germans have concluded that nuclear power is unsustainable in a post-petroleum post-fossil-fuel world and they will be better off in the long run with renewable energy and energy efficient technologies.

Too bad Dick Cheney can't understand this...

Instead the agreement to gradually shut down nuclear power in Germany is an utterly cynical piece of political gamesmanship; a way of putting off a huge political problem until later.

When Germany's Stade nuclear power plant was shut down with great political fanfare, most of the shortfall in generating capacity was immediately picked up by other nuclear plants, and coal fired plants.

The next nuclear shutdown, currently scheduled for May, is of Obrigheim, Germany's oldest commercial nuclear power plant. This is a small 350 MW plant, so the German electric grid probably won't feel any great pain.

After that the situation starts to get rough. I expect the final outcome will be that the Germany can't do it. I would like to be proven wrong, but a lot of the parties who signed onto this "gradual" nuclear shutdown will be secretly congratulating themselves if it doesn't happen, even as they are patting themselves on the back for "trying." This is the kind of political game you can win by losing.

Either the heavy German subsidies to "alternative" energy succeed and Germany becomes a new sort of "Ecotopia" or else the German people start to wonder why their nuclear powered neighbors in France seem to be doing so much better than they are.

A few, but certainly not all, Germans "have concluded that nuclear power is unsustainable in a post-petroleum post-fossil-fuel world and they will be better off in the long run with renewable energy and energy efficient technologies," but I do not believe the majority of German politicians have any such faith.

From my own point of view if nuclear power is "unsustainable" in a post-petroleum world, then it simply will not be sustained and we had better get used to living in a world without any "heavy" industries or significant world trade of agricultural products. A lot of people are probably going to die in that switchover, and it's not going to matter if we keep our nuclear power card in play or not.

A much greater concern of mine is the human population's increasing dependence on fossil fuels. This addiction will almost certainly destroy our current civilization. We can crash hard or we can crash soft, but we will crash. Just as it is foolish to believe that nuclear power will save us, it is foolish to believe nuclear power will destroy us. Even if we start tossing nuclear weapons at each other in a last ditch battle over natural resources, the cause listed on homo sapien's cosmic death certificate will not be "nuclear disaster" it will be "terminal stupidity."



German energy statistics can be found here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/germany.html

:7

We can see the fine understanding of the aluminum industry.

Ever hear of CF4?

I didn't think so?

Ever do a mass balance equation?

I didn't think so.

:wow: It's amazing how poorly everyday technology is understood. Every day my estimation falls lower and lower, even when I think it couldn't be much worse.

What's even more fun is to get links from the coal industry about how safe it is. Let me try to do that with the nuclear industry and boy, we'd hear all kinds of links to uninformed bullshit from the twits at www.ratical.org, greenpeace.org and all the people who join organizations to demonstrate that they don't know doodly squat about basic science. I also guarantee that in three threads or less, some anti-environmental anti-nuclear religous poorly educated person will swear up and down that they NEVER said they support coal.