Reminder: proliferation is a critical problem with nuclear energy

MIT's report "The Future of Nuclear Power":

Democratic Congressman and nuclear physicist Rush Holt:


Al Gore:

The "http://www.usec.com/megatonstomegawatts.htm">Megatons to Megawatts" program has already burned off hundreds of tons of the stock of plutonium once used as bomb material by the world's most profligate proliferationists -- the USA and USSR/Russia. The USA gets about half of its nuclear power (10% of the total baseload) from it. And much more has already been put beyond use, in anticipation of downblending into more reactor fuel.



The chances of a world-destroying nuclear conflict are therefore being reduced rapidly -- yet we hear nothing about it.

And we still haven't discussed the proliferation risk of nuclear medicine.

--d!

in the old soviet states.

Far safer that way... yep. No proliferation concerns there. :rofl:

Nuclear power comes with the threat of proliferation, burning dismantled weapons doesn't change that in the least.

MIT nuclear study – findings

Kris is forced to live in the real world.

What is your plan to deal with them? Pretend they don't exist?

so maybe you should find out what they plan to do.

under a different name and with Russia profiting more directly.

This wouldn't happen to be the same guy who gave us "How Russia's nuclear fuel delivery to Iran benefits nonproliferation" would it?

How interesting. :rofl:

Just as they would if the US ceased all nuclear enrichment, closed every reactor (including naval) and resolved to never make another one.


Which is why the premise in the OP is undiluted BS. :)

and why our next president might nuke them.
Another example of how "peaceful" nuclear energy can lead to nuclear war.

The US doesn't have nuclear weapons because we developed nuclear power... it's the other way around.

Cowboy presidents would have the option of bombing Iran even if we shut down every power reactor and never built another one. (once again demonstrating that the OP is BS).

But your source is ok with actually sending enriched uranium to Iran as a NON-proliferation measure.

Another example of how "peaceful" nuclear energy can lead to nuclear war.

The only nuclear explosions ever used in wartime preceded ALL civilian nuclear power. Your "example" is imaginary. There are no examples of peaceful nuclear power leading to nuclear war.

So what? The reason he thought that the sale would aide in non-proliferation was that they could be trusted to tell the truth about their intentions (that they were only developing the enrichment capability to supply fuel to a power reactor)... so sending them a reliable supply of fuel would get rid of their need to enrich their own.

Of course, they were lying and had every intention of building a bomb... whether a power reactor was involved or not.

Yet again proving the BS in the OP... as well as rubbishing any argument that relies on this guy as a source.

It's saying "acting to reduce nuclear stockpiles increases the risk of theft of those stockpiles."

This nonsense could be used to "justify" not acting on any negative technology. "Acting to reduce coal ash stockpiles introduces the risk that said stockpiles will pollute water tables."

"Acting to reduce coal utilization introduces the risk that coal plants will no longer operate thus causing a catastrophic failure in our electrical grid."

"Acting to reduce our reliance on oil means all of those offshore rigs sitting out there will be allowed to fail into disrepair and start leaking millions of gallons of oil into the oceans."

It's a strawman, it's just, absurd.

(And before any dishonest people attempt to put words in my mouth, I do not believe that reducing coal ash stockpiles, reducing coal utilization, or reducing our reliance on oil are anything but desirable goals.)

He specifically says, "I don't want to suggest that it's safer to keep HEU around than to eliminate it."
So you're the one creating a strawman and putting words into peoples mouth.

The collapse of the USSR resulted in economic and political condistions which created special proliferation risks. Keeping then nuclear workers employed reduced some of those risks. It was a busy-work program to keep them from stealing stuff and selling it on the black market.

He's two faced.

Yup.

For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program.

The quote is misleading because it suggests a cause and effect relationship between civilian nuclear power and military nuclear weapons that does not exist. The suggestion Gore seems to make is that if you just eliminate civilian nuclear power the weapons proliferation issue goes away. This is completely untrue. A state that wishes to develop nuclear weapons does not need to have civilian nuclear power.

South Korea has 20 civilian nuclear reactors. North Korea has none. Which one has a nuclear weapon?

Rush Holt wants to "solve the problem of nuclear proliferation". I'm all ears. As soon as Holt can prove that eliminating civilian nuclear power will "solve the problem of nuclear proliferation", I will agree that we should stop building nuclear reactors. Until then, I say the more reactors the world builds the better.

And he never claimed to invent the internet.

The MIT report said that proliferation is a critical problem with nuclear energy.
That's the title of this thread.
Al Gore's statement backs that up.

Show me how eliminating civilian nuclear power will solve the problem of nuclear proliferation.

MIT, Rush Holt, Al Gore: "X is a problem with Y"
Nederland in post #12: "The suggestion Gore seems to make is that if you just eliminate Y the X issue goes away."
Nederland in post #19: "Show me how eliminating Y will solve the problem of X"

That's faulty reasoning.
Do you understand why?

What Holt said is this:

I don’t want to see us get deeper into a dependency on nuclear power until we demonstrate to each other that we can solve the problem of nuclear proliferation.

Or in your terms: Don't do X until problem Y is solved.

Here's the rub. Problem Y, the problem of nuclear proliferation, will NEVER be solved. The problem of nuclear proliferation will exist so long as a single person who understands the physics of nuclear weapons is alive. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora's box has been opened. The secret is out. Get it? We will NEVER solve the problem of nuclear proliferation. Insisting that we solve the problem of nuclear proliferation before building new power plants is therefore nothing more than a convenient way of looking reasonable when in fact all you have done is set a condition that can never be met. It's a bit like saying you're opposed to airplanes until the problem of airplanes crashing gets solved. Since the problem of airplane's crashing will NEVER be solved, your condition effectively means no airplanes. Which is great, if you are irrationally opposed to flying.

My insistence on showing how eliminating nuclear power won't solve the problem of nuclear proliferation is meant to demonstrate this fallacy.

that he doesn't want more of it until the problem is solved.
Your fallacy: because you think the problem is unsolvable, you can't believe Holt said that.

MIT, Rush Holt, Al Gore: "X is a problem with Y"
Holt: "X is such a serious problem with Y, don't do Y until X is solved"
Nederland in post #12: "The suggestion Gore seems to make is that if you just eliminate Y the X issue goes away."
Nederland in post #19: "Show me how eliminating Y will solve the problem of X"
Nederland in post #27: "I can't think of a solution for X, therefore Holt couldn't have said what he did."

I never said "I can't think of a solution for X, therefore Holt couldn't have said what he did." Not in post #27, not anywhere.

Unlike you, who feels the need to "translate" what was said by others, I will quote exactly what Holt said. Again. Just like I did before. Here is what Holt said:

I don’t want to see us get deeper into a dependency on nuclear power until we demonstrate to each other that we can solve the problem of nuclear proliferation.

It's a lot easier to "win" an argument when you distort what the other side is trying to say, isn't it?

...not you and I.

The lone wolf nutcase has had the theoretical (and sometime practical) capacity to kill millions horribly for at least 1/2 a century in one way or another. He hasn't done it for the simple reason that anyone smart enough to do it, is also smart enough to realise why there is no percentage in trying to hold New York to ransom.

No smaller nation is going to invite almost certain anhilation by launching a nuclear strike.

Think of the only nation which has openly considered the feasibility of using nuclear munitions in a theatre of war of late, and WHERE it is proposed those munitions be used. There are both your biggest losers and winners under nuclear proliferation.

A nuclear armed Iran is not a major threat to sovereignty. It is a threat to imperial ambitions.

You wrote, "No smaller nation is going to invite almost certain anhilation by launching a nuclear strike."
Sure they would:


You wrote, "Think of the only nation which has openly considered the feasibility of using nuclear munitions in a theatre of war of late, and WHERE it is proposed those munitions be used. There are both your biggest losers and winners under nuclear proliferation."

Several nations have openly considered that, including India and Pakistan. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would cause a global nuclear winter, even Jeff Masters said it was "premature" to add global warming to the doomsday clock:

But banned civilian nuclear power doesn't do a damn thing to stop nuclear proliferation.

In the history of nuclear power, nobody has every taken waste fuel from a light water nuclear reactor to acquire the bomb. Yes, that is a carefully parsed statement specifically crafted to counter arguments made by people opposed to nuclear power. I will address those arguments one by one:

Question: Why did you say "light water nuclear reactor" instead of nuclear reactor?

Answer: India did in fact acquire it's bomb by having Canada build a heavy water reactor (CIRUS) for them and then used it to produce the plutonium for their first bomb. As a result, I acknowledge the proliferation danger of heavy water reactors and agree that they should not be built. In fact I have no problem with banning all reactors that burn highly enriched uranium.


Question: Why did you say "acquire the bomb" rather than "build a bomb"?

Answer: The United States and the British have both detonated low yield bombs using material that contained fairly low percentages of plutonium. Other demonstrations have shown that it is possible to acquire bomb material by purifying reactor waste. To my knowledge no one has ever actually detonated a bomb containing material derived exclusively from reactor waste, but nuclear opponents will argue that in theory there is nothing to prevent someone from doing this. This point is highly debatable, but I will concede it because I don't think it's relevant. I don't think it's relevant because there are far, far easier ways of obtaining bomb material than purifying waste from a civilian reactor. In fact, it's so difficult to do, no state trying to acquire the bomb has ever even tried. All of the states that successfully built a bomb or pursued that goal either built reactors specifically designed to produce plutonium (India, Israel, Syria, Iraq, North Korea) or created uranium enrichment facilities (South Africa, Pakistan, Iran).

When you add in the fact that nuclear states like France and Russia may have actually sold bomb material to other states, it becomes clear that obtaining bomb material by purifying civilian waste is not the real danger here. Imagine you have a table which contains a photocopier and a big pile of counterfeit money. Now imagine somebody who says "we need to ban photocopiers because people might buy them and create counterfeit money". It's true, but isn't the real problem the big pile of counterfeit money?

... on the next pointless (yet frequent) repeat of the OP ...

Thanks for the information.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor - http://thorium.50webs.com/

The revolutionary Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) solves all of the major problems associated with nuclear power. LFTRs transform thorium into fissionable uranium-233, which then produces heat through controlled nuclear fission. LFTRs only requires input of uranium or plutonium to kick-start the initial nuclear reaction, and as the fissionable material can come from either spent fuel rods or old nuclear warheads, LFTRs will inevitably be used as janitors to clean up nuclear waste. Once started, the controlled nuclear reactions are self-perpetuating as long as the reactor is fed thorium. LFTRs are highly fuel efficient and burn up 100% of the thorium fed them. Light water reactors typically burn only about 3% of their loaded fuel, or about .7% of the fundamental raw uranium which must be enriched to become fissionable. As LFTR fuel is a molten liquid salt, it can be cleansed of impurities and refortified with thorium through elaborate plumbing even while the reactor maintains full power operation. The cost savings of using a liquid fuel is like the difference between making soup vs. baking a wedding cake. Soup is cheap, and you can change ingredients very easily. The reactor works like a Crock-Pot; you keep the fuel cooking in the pot until it is over 99% burned, so LFTRs produce less than 1% of the long-lived radioactive waste of light water reactors, making Yucca Mountain waste storage unnecessary.

LFTRs produce electric power via a waterless gas turbine system that can use helium, carbon dioxide, or nitrogen gas. The reactors are small and air cooled, so they can be installed anywhere, even in a desert. Robert Hargraves, an LFTR advocate, states that "Liquid fluoride thorium reactors operate at high temperature for 50% thermal/electrical conversion efficiency, thus they need only half of the cooling required by today's coal or nuclear plant cooling towers." LFTRs will be manufactured on an assembly line, dramatically lowering costs and enabling electricity generation at a projected rate of about 3 cents per kilowatt hour, which is cheaper than burning coal for power. It has been estimated that a physically small 100 megawatt LFTR could be built for less than 200 million dollars, which is a bargain. Multiple reactors can be installed at one location and connected to a single control room. With convenient modular design, LFTRs can be transported in pieces by truck or barge for easy assembly on site. This allows for swift construction with reliable results, avoiding delays and cost overruns. Rapid assembly line construction also allows for easy updating of the design, which will improve over time like the dramatic evolution of automobiles, airplanes, and computer chips.

A LFTR can never meltdown, because its fuel is already in a molten state by design. Any terrorists who obtained forceful entry into the reactor complex could not realistically remove any of the hot molten fissionable fuel. Coolant in LFTRs is not pressurized as in light water reactors, and the fuel arrives at the plant pre-burned with fluorine, a powerful oxidizer. This makes a reactor fire or a coolant explosion impossible. LFTRs do not require large, cavernous pressure vessels designed to contain an internal explosion of superheated steam, so LFTR enclosures are tightly fitting and compact, which makes them less expensive. The reactors will be installed underground with a thick reinforced concrete cap, making an attack by a kamikaze airplane pilot ineffective. Overheating of a LFTR expands the molten salt fuel past its criticality point, making the design intrinsically safe due to the unchangeable laws of physics. Even a total loss of operational reactor control would not cause disaster. In addition to the fuel's natural safety, any excess heat in the reactor core would automatically melt built-in freeze-plugs, causing the liquid fuel to drain via gravity into underground storage compartments where the fuel would then cool into a harmless, noncritical mass.

Thorium is more abundant in the earth's crust than tin, and only slightly less abundant than lead. The United States alone has hundreds, if not thousands of years worth of low cost thorium fuel available from domestic sources, and total world thorium supplies are enormous, with estimates ranging from a 10,000 year supply, to a supply lasting millions of years. Until now thorium has been a waste product that has been thrown away by burying it in deserts and in old mine shafts. If we really wanted to find thorium with the same interest we have in finding oil, we could probably obtain more thorium than the human race will ever need to use. NASA rocket scientist Kirk Sorensen stated that "The amount of thorium it would take to power my whole life is the size of a marble that would fit in my hand. The amount of coal that would power my life would bury my yard to 30 or 40 feet."

France's Reactor Physics Group is currently leading in LFTR research. If the United States committed a relatively modest amount of money to develop LFTRs in cooperation with France, a fully operational TOTAL ENERGY SOLUTION might be possible within as little as 5 years, because most of the basic research has already been accomplished and is well proven. LFTR research at the United States Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ended in 1976 because LFTRs cannot practically produce usable nuclear weapons materials.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA), which provides official energy statistics from the U.S. Government, has projected the estimated cost of electricity from U.S. power plants of different varieties that will come into service in the year 2016. These average levelized costs, expressed in 2007 valued dollars, includes all costs of construction, financing, fuel, and all other operating and decommissioning costs. The EIA also listed the expected Capacity Factor (CF) for each power plant type. A power plant with a CF of 85 generates energy at its rated capacity an average of 85% of the time during a given year. The ideal power plant would have a CF of 100, meaning it could output energy at full power 100% of the time. As capacity factor drops, economic efficiency drops, usefulness drops, and real-world costs increase. In the comparison below I have inflated the projected cost of electricity produced by LFTRs from the projected 3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) to 6 cents per kWh in order to allow for unexpected cost overruns.

Natural Gas in Conventional Combined Cycle @ 8.34 cents per kWh (87 CF) - Not carbon free; small footprint, cost effective and cleanest fossil fuel available.

Conventional Coal @ 9.3 per cents per kWh (85 CF) - Not carbon free; medium footprint, causes approximately 24,000 U.S. deaths per year due to air pollution, which also damages buildings. Judged in total, coal is not cost effective due to the environmental damage it creates.

3rd Generation Light Water Reactor Nuclear Power @ 10.48 cents per kWh (90 CF) - Carbon free; small footprint, very high CF, and cost effective. ***Note - These figures are for new construction projects coming on-line in 2016. Our older legacy light water reactors currently produce electricity at a cost of about 2 cents per kWh.

Geothermal @ 11.67 cents per kWh (90 CF) - Carbon free; high CF, small footprint and cost effective.

Wind @ 11.55 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage systems (35.1 CF) - Carbon free; extremely large footprint, not cost effective due to unreliability and very low CF. Most wind turbines shut down when wind speeds drop below 3 to 4 meters per second or rise above 25 meters per second, greatly reducing their total average energy output and making their contribution to our nation's energy grid unreliable, unpredictable, and unnecessarily costly.

Solar Thermal Mirror Oven @ 25.75 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage systems (31.2 CF) - Carbon free, extremely large footprint, not cost effective due to unreliability, high construction cost, and a CF even lower than wind power.

Solar Photovoltaic Panel Power Plant @ 38.54 cents per kWh not including the cost of needed energy storage systems (21.7 CF) - Carbon free; extremely large footprint; very high construction cost; cannot be updated after manufacture, relatively short lifespan, the lowest CF of all. Solar panels are absolutely not cost effective for large scale power production.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Nuclear Reactor @ 6.0 cents per kWh (over 90 CF) - Carbon free, smallest ecological footprint; highest CF available; highest cost effectiveness. If things go well, the actual eventual cost per kWh may be at or even lower than the original 3 cents per kWh projection.

We can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by creating an infrastructure based on thorium power, improved electric car battery design, and the use of new technology called Green Freedom. The Green Freedom process can create superior quality, sulfur free gasoline and jet fuel made from atmospheric carbon dioxide and hydrogen extracted from water. This energy scheme is cheaper than using pure hydrogen gas as fuel because it is completely compatible with current vehicles and our existing energy distribution infrastructure. Green Freedom can also be used to make much needed synthetic fertilizers. The process demands low cost nuclear energy to work efficiently, and as the LFTR design can produce energy at a fraction of the cost of traditional light water nuclear reactors, we can have an endless supply of affordable, superior quality synthetic gasoline produced on American soil by American labor. If you want the United States to progress to the kind of wealthy, poverty free civilization portrayed in optimistic science fiction movies, realize that nuclear power is the only way to get there.

Food equals energy and energy equals food. The more we invest in wind and solar projects, the more we will raise the cost of food, because it takes so much energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, process, and transport crops. If we wished to make solar and wind power our prime energy sources, we would have to revert to a horse and buggy economy and intentionally kill off the majority of earth's human population. The only non-carbon, non-fossil fuel energy sources that are seriously useful for large scale energy production are hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and geothermal power. The appeal of solar and wind power is largely about poetry and symbolism, sending a love letter to mother nature saying that we care. Poetry is fine, but billions will starve if governments try to rely on poetically correct energy sources as a replacement for fossil fuels.

SEE: http://thorium.50webs.com/ - With links to resources

Christopher Calder - nonprofit food security advocate