Before The Wells Run Dry: Ireland's Transition to Renewable Energy.

This interesting portion of a study of Ireland's transition to the post oil age includes data on the cost of energy in terms of ratio of energy output to energy input. In other words, how much energy must one invest to manufacture an energy plant of any type. Also included is a measure of the greenhouse gas outputs of various energy systems in grams of CO2/kw-hr.

Caveat: If you are familiar with my posts, you will immediately recognize that this article is likely to be pro-nuclear energy, since I am above all, a greenhouse gas nut and an advocate of the idea that nuclear energy represents one of the safest options for our future. Therefore, if you have a religious conviction that nuclear energy is unsafe, you should probably skip the article.

http://www.feasta.org/documents/wells/contents.html?one/horelacy.html

what is your suggestion for the NUCLEAR WASTE by-products made
by reactors....?

Now that I've answered your question, what is your solution to the waste of every other form of energy? Do you have solutions for any of them, or is only nuclear energy responsible for its waste, since nuclear energy is the only form for which technical solutions are possible? Or do the forms of waste from coal and oil, silicon processing, steel making, etc not count simply because no one pays attention to them? What about that big waste, carbon dioxide?

I always get this rather tedious, itsy bitsy question, and I answer it, but I NEVER get an answer to the big question I ask in return.

like the French "re-breeder" reactors, right? I've heard that this
doesn't work as well as advertised and it was a slick gimmick to
get these reactors built on French soil.
I did a quick search on "transmutation of nuclear waste" and it
appears that it MIGHT be a viable method but in reality it hasn't
been implemented. Hmmm...strange.

You take this subject very personaly...you should learn to relax.

You fail to see the entire energy issue in a single dimension. Energy
is NOT the only concern. You cannot make a plastic bottle from
nuclear energy unlike from oil. Oil is not just for energy...its
for component manufacturing. Over 500,000 known products are made
from oil or from oil by-products. Can you say the same thing about
nuke energy? Thought so...

That there IS waste from other energy sources...yes, there IS waste
BUT there is not the WILL to clean up after using them. Just like
there is no financial incentive to "transmutate" nuke waste....

I'm a hardcore environmentalist. I own land...and I am in the,
unfortunately, very slow process of building an Earthship. The main
issue in our society is that our cities and our homes are designed
wrong...requiring the wrong type of energies for the cities and homes
to work. We already have a fusion reactor...very efficient actually,
its called the SUN. PV cells have gained tremendously in efficiency
during these past 30 years and there's more coming down the pike.
PVs with passive solar homes are completely emissions free. Earthships
are completely WASTE free since ALL waste products are recycled within
a living home. Can you say the same about your current house?

Go beyond your single issue, i.e., nuke energy and look at the broader
picture. Unless humans LEARN to clean up after themselves...it won't
matter what energy or energy carriers you use or recycle.

Again...unless you're a nuke physicis with a doctoral dissertation
that promises to "save humanity"...don't take this crap personally.
Make your own little contribution to Mother Earth....

If you go to the link, which I suspect you have not done because of a religious preference, you will see that the external cost (waste, environmental degradation, energy invested on return) is about four or five times greater for PV energy than it is for nuclear.

You have also missed the point entirely about the storage costs (which are profound in both an economic and environmental sense) for PV energy. PV cells are not "emission free" unless you ignore all the costs that go into their manufacture, the wastes of mining and discarding heavy metals such as Cadmium, lead, and extremely toxic and corrosive compounds such as hydrogen fluoride.

If you expect to have a credible understanding of energy issues, it takes more than a three minute google search to decide what is and what is not economical. Indeed, if you are a "hardcore environmentalist" and can only offer platitudes for the nature of the sun, you don't demonstrate very profound thinking. The sort of "Whole Earth Catalog" 1960's thinking, which I was prone to myself in the 1960's and 1970's is exactly NOT what we need. It is elitist in the sense it is available only to people wealthy enough to make the investment. It's wonderful that you can afford PV cells, and I'm frankly glad that you are spending your money in this way, rather than on a monster truck, but your little "spaceship" has no bearing on the world energy equation. A PV system is environmentally suspect because it substitutes point source pollutants (which are always more difficult to contain) for small dense easy to handle fission products.

Nuclear energy has produced 50,000 MT of once through fuel in producing 20% of the US. I would guess that solar PV cells, which do not constitute even 1% of the energy output any where on earth(because it is so expensive) still manages to produce 50,000 tons of waste (including CO2 in the manufacturing process) in a single year. Moreover, 97% of the so called nuclear "waste" is recoverable energy. It is true that today that there is no economic incentive to recycle nuclear fuel, simply because the fuel is so ridiculously cheap. This situation will change, should the cost of fuel rise, as it should as nuclear resources are exploited to their full extent. Fortunately, though, nuclear energy output cost is rather insenstive to fuel cost. Almost all of the cost of nuclear energy is capital, exactly the same as it is with PV solar energy, with the exception that PV solar energy produces far fewer watts per dollar.

I have been studying energy and pollution on a deep level for over twenty years. I care very much about this issue, because as it happens that I have children. It will never be emotionally neutral for me. I am appalled at the level of ignorance about the critical issue of the interface of environment and energy.

Once again, you are demonstrating a one dimensional approach to
a broader issue.
As for nuke sites being "emission free", I'll counter the same way
that you countered my PVs: the costs of their manufacture, the wastes
of mining (uranium in this case), etc, etc.
And lest we forget, that by being DEPENDENT on uranium we will
continue to have expansionistic wars in order to control the steady
supply of the natural resource that will continue to provide us with
JUST ENERGY...and no by-products to use in everyday life.

Again...you're just thinking in terms of energy...not products. MANY
more issues.

And another thing: I have NOT stated ANYWHERE within my posts that
I opposed nuke energy. IF it can be utilized in a safe manner, I
am all for it. What I am against is being dependent on a FINITE
natural resource. We're going back to square one once oil is done.

uses enormous amounts of hydrofluoric acid.

The US nuclear power industry converts ~50 million pounds of yellowcake each year to uranium hexafluoride prior to enrichment.

This requires the manufacture and disposal of thousands of tons of pure hydrofluoric acid per year.

Older methods of PV module manufacture used dilute hydrofluoric acid (HF) solutions in the etching process.

The amount of HF used by the PV industry, however, is orders of magnitude less than the nuclear power industry - and much of it is now recycled.

Furthermore, modern PV module etching methods use sodium hydroxide and eliminate the use of HF altogether.

~90% of PV modules produced today use crystalline silicon, not cadmium tellurium (CdTe)

The amount of Cd used in CdTe PV modules is quite small and effectively isolated from the environment.

http://www.nrel.gov/cdte/cadmium_facts.html

Nuclear power doesn't consume heavy metals??? Guess again...

Zircaloy-4, used as cladding in reactor fuel rods, is ~4% chromium by weight. How much chromium is used by the US nuclear industry each year???

Clue: it's a lot more than the PV industry ...which uses virtually none.

A 26 ton spent fuel shipping cask contains ~20 tons of lead. 100 ton lead-lined shipping casks have been proposed.

Spent fuel from US nuclear power plants will require 35 - 100K individual cask shipments to the Yucca Mountain Repository.

How many shipping casks will be required to transport spent fuel to Yucca Mountain??? Hundreds??? Thousands???

How much lead will be required for this???

Let's talk about the 50 million pounds yellow cake that so concern you, the chemistry of Uranium, the chemistry of Uranium hexaflouride and the chemistry and use of hydrogen flouride in general. of Uranium hexafluoride you talk about and lets talk about the chemistry of hydrogen fluoride and its uses.

“Yellowcake” is actually a generic name for various Uranium oxides of varying composition. A typical composition would be that of the mineral Becquerelerite, UO2(OH)2.xH2O. Let us be conservative and say that the waters of hydration are 2 in a typical yellow cake. The molecular weight of this compound is 372, meaning that it is 63% Uranium by weight. Therefore our 50 million pounds of yellow cake represents 50 million X 0.63 = 31 million pounds of Uranium.

First the molecular weight of Uranium hexaflouride is 352 daltons. Uranium is the heaviest natural occurring element and fluorine is one of the lightest. Even though there are 6 fluorinex in the molecule and one Uranium, the percentage of fluorine occurring in the molecule is 32%. Therefore the amount of fluorine required to process 31 million pounds of yellow cakes is (31 million pounds/238) X 6 X 19. 15 million pounds of fluorine. (The atomic weight of Uranium is 238, and the atomic weight of fluorine is 19. Since we need to add a hydrogen (atomic weight = 1) we can easily show that 15 million pounds of fluorine translates into 16 million pounds of hydrogen fluoride.

What is the world market for hydrogen fluoride before the introduction of millions of tons to make PV cells?

http://www.the-innovation-group.com/ChemProfiles/Hydrofluoric%20Acid.htm

Well before reviewing that, lets convert your disingenuous unit of pounds into a meaningful unit: metric tons: 16 million pounds/(2.2 pounds/kg) = 7 million kg = 7,000 MT. It happens that world demand for hydrogen fluoride is tailing off right now because of a decline in blow foam and refrigerant market in the 1990’s but the worldwide demand is about 360 MT. The link attached shows that about 3% of this production is used in the Uranium processing industry, about equal to that used in the petroleum refining business for petroleum alkylation operations (which are practiced right on the Crenshaw fault in the densely populated suburban community of Torrance, California among other places.) The figure one gets therefore for Uranium processing is 11 MT, different from your figure by about 60%, but no matter. The biggest use is to make refrigerants, which is over 100 MT. Aluminum product uses about 14% of the HF produced and one would assume that the electronics industry is lumped in the 20% (72 Metric tons) listed as ‘miscellaneous,’ including the nascent solar cell industry’s requirement for purified silicon. Also relevant to the solar industry is the application called “etching”, which consumes 3% of the world’s HF, equal to the amount using Uranium processing. HF etching is a critical to the production of solar cells. Therefore, we can see the expansion of the solar industry will vastly increase the requirement for the use of HF. Since the industry produces a tiny fraction of the world’s energy demand, and the application already equals Uranium’s HF requirement, we can see that the expansion of the solar industry will expand the requirement way beyond what is required for nuclear power. Therefore if you are concerned about HF disposal, the best way to approach it would be to ban the expansion of the solar cells industry!

The fact is that sodium hydroxide is a very poor etching agent, and I think your claim about it is rather disingeneous as are your remarks about Cadmium Telluride. You may think that 7 grams of Cadmium Telluride per square meter of a solar cell is trivial and acceptable, but I don't agree. Cadmium telluride is very soluble in nitric acid, where it decomposes to give hydrogen telluride (a powerful toxin) and cadmium nitrate), also a powerful toxin. Since the invention of the internal combustion engine and chemical agriculture, nitric acid is a constituent of rainfall. I very much doubt that millions (or billions?) of solar cells exposed to the elements in a point source pollutant situation will not begin leaching at some time. The millions of tons of Cadmium Telluride dispersed in order to make a viable solar energy, will far outstrip anything the nuclear industry will do in terms of health consequences. Further, there is no guarantee that the manufacturers of the millions of tons of solar cells will avoid releasing the contaminants of their manufacturing operations.

Does this mean we should ban the solar industry. No. All energy is dangerous, and the solar PV industry, though dangerous and expensive, is still preferable to fossil fuels which risk continued life on earth. Although nuclear energy is safer, cleaner, and less risky than the solar PV industry, it is not truely renewable in the sense that Thorium and Uranium are consumables. Therefore it is our responsibility to assume the additional risk of solar energy in service to future generations.

http://esapub.esrin.esa.it/pff/pffv8n1/martv8n1.htm


I should dismiss on your silliness on the subject on Zircalloy, on the grounds that its about as specious an argument as one can make, but I'll comment anyway. Chromium alloys are ubiquitous. The requirement for structural materials used in nuclear plants are rather like the structural requirements of every energy industry, including wind mills and PV installations (see aluminum above in the HF argument). Chromium steels are used in buildings, automotive bumpers, coal fired boilers, kitchen sinks and thousands of other applications. This is a measure of how pathetic the anti-nuclear anti-environmental religious lobby can be, to appeal to the toxicity of Chromium. Chromium for the record, is in the first transition period of the periodic table and is generally not considered a "heavy metal," btw any more than iron is considered a "heavy metal." Like most elements in the first transition period, it is essential to life, playing an important role in metabolic proteins.

As it happens, Zircalloy demand is somewhat low, since most of it that is used in the construction of nuclear plants and not their operations (a smaller amount is used in fuel assemblies). Because of public abject stupidity and ignorance on the subject of nuclear technology, nuclear plants are not being built in the United States. If, before it is too late, we wake up, give a shit about our environment, and are able to reverse this unhappy state of affairs by opposing ignorance, Zircalloy demand will in fact increase. That would be a good thing.

in solar cell manufacture, and a description of their modes of toxicity. It includes cool stuff like arsine. Just one pleasing excerpt:

"Limited animal data comparing the acute toxicity of CdTe, CIS and CGS, showed that from the three compounds, CdTe has the highest toxicity and CGS the lowest (Fthenakis et al, 1999) No comparisons with the parent Cd and Te compounds have been made. Cadmium, one of CdTe precursors, is a highly hazardous material. The acute health effects from inhalation of Cd include pneumonitis, pulmonary edema, and death. However, CdTe is insoluble to water and, as such, it may be less toxic than CdTe. This issue needs further investigation. In production facilities, workers may be exposed to Cd compounds through the air they breathe, as well as by ingestion from hand-to-mouth contact. Inhalation is probably the most important pathway, because of the larger potential for exposure, and higher absorption efficiency of Cd compounds through the lung than through the gastrointestinal tract...

...Processes in which Cd compounds are used or produced in the form of fine fumes or particles present larger hazards to health. Similarly, those involving volatile or soluble Cd compounds (e.g., CdCl2) also must be more closely scrutinized. Hazards to workers may arise from feedstock preparation, fume/vapor leaks, etching of excess materials from panels, maintenance operations (e.g., scraping and cleaning), and during waste handling."

http://www.pv.bnl.gov/art_170.pdf

Energy is a dangerous business. It is handwaving and religious denial to claim that the solar industry is "innocuous" and risk free.

Since nuclear materials are measured of tens of thousands of metric tons, and a putative solar industry will necessarily (because of it's lower energy density) require millions (billions) of metric tons of "waste," I submit and repeat that PV solar energy waste is more difficult to manage and contain, and therefore more dangerous on a watt/death basis.

<snip>

The manufacture of photovoltaic uses some hazardous materials which can present health and safety hazards, if adequate precautions are not taken. Routine conditions in manufacturing facilities should not pose any threats to health and the environment. .

<end>

In contrast, occupational and environmental hazards associated with the nuclear fuel cycle are far greater in scope and severity than the PV industry - period.

"Since nuclear materials are measured of tens of thousands of metric tons, and a putative solar industry will necessarily (because of it's lower energy density) require millions (billions) of metric tons of "waste," I submit and repeat that PV solar energy waste is more difficult to manage and contain, and therefore more dangerous on a watt/death basis."

Greenwash nonsense.

"millions (billions) of metric tons of waste" from PV manufacturing - a value plucked out of thin air. It has no basis in reality whatsoever.

Now lets look at the "green" nuclear fuel cycle!

Uranium miners are exposed to a variety of radiological and toxic chemical hazards. The number of fatal cancers among uranium miners is ~ 44 per year. This does not include fatalities from silicosis.

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ruxfw.html#MINE

As of 1995, US uranium mines and mills produced a cumulative total of 187 million tons of mine tailings.

The EPA estimates that radon emissions from existing uranium tailings cause 50 lung cancer deaths per year. The expected number of fatal cancers in all uranium mill workers is ~5 per year.

http://web.em.doe.gov/idb96/tab52.html

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/ruxfw.html#ENR

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/uwai.html#TAILHAZ

Each year the conversion of U3O8 to UF6 consumes ~20 thousand tons of HF. UF6 is a highly toxic as well as radioactive material.

http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uf6/health/index.cfm

UF6 production is hazardous work. In 1986, an accident at the Sequoyah Fuels conversion plant (Gore OK) killed one worker, hospitalized 42 others, and injured approximately 100 local residents.

Thousands of workers have suffered illness and death as the result of exposure to radiation and hazardous chemicals at US uranium enrichment plants. In 2001, President Clinton signed a bill to compensate uranium workers a one-time lump sum of $150,000 for their work-related medical costs - 22,000 workers are eligible for this program.

Uranium enrichment produces thousands of tons of depleted UF6 per year. The current US inventory of depleted UF6 is 555,000 tons - every gram of which is hazardous and highly toxic.

The decommissioning of nuclear power plants will produce enormous quantities of contaminated debris. The decommissioning of the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant alone produced 60,000 tons of low level waste and thousands of tons of contaminated steel. Decommissioning all current US nuclear power plants will generate millions of tons of radioactive debris - and that does not include spent fuel.

PV waste "more dangerous" than spent fuel??? LOL!!!!!!!!. Even 50 years after discharge, you would receive a lethal dose of gamma radiation by standing one meter from spent fuel assembly for one hour.

If spent fuel is reprocessed to recover uranium or produce MOX fuel, the quantities of hazardous and radioactive waste produced will be enormous.

The now defunct commercial reprocessing plant at West Valley New York reprocessed 640 metric tons of spent fuel which generated 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste.

How much radioactive waste would a large-scale long-term spent fuel program generate??? Lots. The US nuclear weapons program produced 24 million cubic meters of waste that contained 900 million curies of radioisotopes - that is the scale of waste generation to be expected if US commercial spent fuel were reprocessed.

Nuclear energy "greener" than renewables????

Only Dick Cheney would agree with that - but then again he believes that energy conservation is a "personal virtue".

all of which was rejected (= recycled) material from the integrated circuit industry, and all of which was produced using the trichlorosilane distillation and reduction method.

Unlike the conversion of uranium yellowcake to UF6, the production of polysilicon for PV modules does not use hydrofluoric acid - at all.

Again, older methods of PV module etching used small quantities of dilute HF, most of which was recycled. Modern methods don't use HF - at all.

Virtually all PV module manufacturers currently use NaOH in the etching process - this is reality.

The claim that the PV industry consumes as much (or more) HF as the nuclear power industry is thus entirely false.

Disinformation indeed.

Cadmium in CdTe PV modules is effectively isolated from the environment. From the link in my previous post...

http://www.nrel.gov/cdte/cadmium_facts.html

<snip>

The thin CdTe/CdS layers are stable and solid and are encapsulated between thick layers of glass. Unless the module is ground to a fine dust, dust particles cannot be generated. The vapor pressure of CdTe at ambient conditions is zero. Therefore, it is impossible for vapors or dust to be generated when using PV modules.

<snip>

To my knowledge, PV arrays and wind turbines do not produce millions of curies of 90-strontium, 137-cesium, 85-krypton, 131-iodine, 133-xenon, tritium, radon, various radioactive isotopes of plutonium, americium, curium, as well as tons of activated (and highly radioactive) Zircaloy, Inconel and steel each year.

But I could be wrong.

The DOE, and nuclear industry in general, reports yellowcake production, sales, purchases etc. in units of "millions of pounds of U3O8".

Disingenuous?

If so, Dick Cheney, Spencer Abraham and the rest of the pro-nuclear conservative Republicans in the Bush administration should be alerted to this outrage.

Globally, nuclear power is in decline...

http://www.worldwatch.org/press/news/1999/03/04/

whereas wind and PV generating capacity is growing exponentially....

http://www.worldwatch.org/press/news/1998/12/03/

This is reality....and I guess if I was a fan of nuclear energy it would suck to be me.

:)

called energy density. How are you going to replace all of the energy currently produced by nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil? Pave over Arizona, Nevada, and California with PVs and wind turbines? We might as well go back to the 1700s.

With existing technology, a 100 by 100 mile (square) PV array in the Nevada desert could supply all the power required by the US.

If divided among the individual states, this area is reduced to a 17 x 17 mile array per state.

You can start distributing the area required from there.

There is plenty of space on roof tops, parking lots, abandoned industrial land, etc. to accommodate PV arrays.

Land owners could deploy large PV arrays along south-facing fence lines in agricultural fields. This would not affect agricultural production and would enhance farm incomes.

Wind turbines have very small footprint. No "paving over" is required.

In the US, Germany and Denmark, farmland owners are actively seeking to deploy wind turbines on their properties - these ventures are quite lucrative and do not interfere with crop production.

"We might as well go back to the 1700s."

That statement makes no sense whatsoever.

Nobody is talking about using exclusively Wind Turbines (and please remember offshore turbines: more power, no ground) .
As for using smaller, decentral plants: the recent blackouts in the US and elsewhere showed that the concept of few, big power plants is faulty. There is even an official report with that conclusion, posted here a few months ago.
Using smaller plants near to the consumer would put considerably less strain on the infrastructure. considering the huge subsidies (both: hidden and open) paid for the current plants, decentral power might turn out to be actually cheaper.

Polysilicon recycling does indeed require HF, for cleaning of dopants and etching.

Environmentally "Benign Solar Cell Manufacturing.

In any case, chlorosilanes are potent carcinogens, and phosphorous oxy-chlorides are extremely dangerous chemicals as well, as is this dangerous desiccant P2O5. All are products used in the solar cell industry. In addition tetrafluoromethane is one of the most persistent greenhouse warming gases known, since there is no known mechanism for its depletion. Sulfur hexafluoride, also used in solar cell manufacture, is a very persistant greenhouse gas, with a half life of hundreds of years in the atmosphere. Both of these gases are enormously more potent greenhouse agents than is carbon dioxide, sulfur hexafluoride in particularly being the target of emission restraint considerations right now. (It is used in transformers and other electrical applications.)

The fact is that the solar industry PV industry, which produces very little of the world's energy output (is it up to 1% yet) escapes environmental scrutiny precisely because it is so small. It is so small because it is economically not viable. Scale it up to an appreciable fraction of the world's energy demand, comparable to nuclear even, and it will seem less benign.

(I note that if the solar cells contain aluminum supports, this will increase the use of HF, although I certainly do not expect to hear from religious nuclear opponents about this increased risk. To wit: You want to shut the nuclear industry based on 3% of the HF demand (all of which is recyclable) but don't give a rat's ass about the aluminum industry or refrigerant industries which combine to use more than 75% of the world's HF.)

Now, we haven't even touched the environmental cost of storing solar energy.

Your claim about solar cells storing CdTe is valid in the sense that the solar cells will actually reduce the output of Cadmium into the environment since Cadmium is just one dangerous output of coal fired power plants. However, you expect me to accept on faith that thirty years of weathered solar cells will not ultimately become point source pollutants for Cadmium. This is hand waving nonsense. I have been trying to recycle my old fluorescent bulbs (which necessarily contain mercury) and can find no one to take them up. The claim that solar cells will be recycled is dismissive hand waving. We know for certain that point source polluters (the majority of whom are home owners) are very, very, very loose in compliance. Thus, assuming we could get around the rather horrid economics of solar cells, and the environmental (and economic) abyss of storing the energy in a 100% solar environment, we will only place the responsibility for dealing with millions of metric tons of CdTe on future generations. Note that I am leaving out the health costs for workers working with these materials.

How much cadmium telluride are we talking about? This hand waving link Cadmium Facts gives a figure of 70 Metric Tons of Cadmium per Gigawatt. Given that the solar cells will operate (on average) for 1/3 of the day (allowing for night, rain, clouds etc), and that we will have to store the energy for the other 2/3 of the day at (an overly generous) 50% efficiency, we should really multiply by 5 this number to give 350 m metric tons of Cadmium Telluride for 1GW (1000 MWe), the output of a typical nuclear plant. Now if we build enough plants to merely equal the output of nuclear energy in the United States, we will quickly see that we will require 35,000 metric tons of processed Cadmium Telluride alone just to manufacture the cells to provide 20% of US energy.

Now, I'm sure that since you're a good guy, you have absolute faith that none of the Cadmium or hydrogen telluride (one of the more toxic gases known) used to manufacture these cells will harm a single human being during the manufacturing process, because the solar industry is uniformly populated with noble people and the nuclear industry is uniformly populated with evil people. I'm not so sanguine. I think they'll be some cost cutting going on here and there and maybe the violation of some environmental and health laws.

Probably it is true that once manufactured, the solar cells Cadmium Telluride will not leach out for centuries after the cells are discarded, but this is really not particularly different than the claim made about so called "nuclear waste," should it be defined as "waste," in the end. Interestingly this is rather close to the amount of so called "nuclear waste" produced in 30 years of producing nuclear energy, so we can say that based solely on toxic Cadmium Telluride, discounting HF, Arsine, chlorosilanes, sodium hydroxide, phosphorous chlorides, oxides, lead, and other interesting materials involved in solar cell manufacture.

Of course, as I've indicated many times before, nuclear materials differ from point source pollutants like Cadmium in that, because of the equilibrium condition (they decay proportional to the quantity available even as they form), they have accumulation maxima. For instance, the troubling fission product Cesium-137 can (under circumstances under which nuclear power was providing 100% of the worlds energy needs in 2050, 1000 exajoules) accumulate to the tune of 19,000 MT. It will do this slowly but it is true that after 100 years of such a program, the amount of new Cs-137 produced will be only 50 MT/year greater than the amount that spontaneously decays to non radioactive Barium 137. In 200 years, that figure will fall to 4MT/year. Cadmium Telluride, and the other waste products of the solar industry will remain forever distributed as point source (and therefore difficult to control) potential pollutants. Moreover, the amount of these materials produced and processed will NOT fall as amount of energy produced increases, since solar cells will need to be produced to replace those worn out thirty years earlier. Undoubtedly, a wise solar industry, will recycle some of this material, but even at a 90% recycle rate, we will have hundreds of metric tons of point source tellurium compounds spread around the planet.

Still, on purely environmental grounds, discounting economic grounds, entirely, PV cells are definitely preferable to coal in particular and fossil fuels in general.

I think it behooves us to advance PV and other solar technologies and to address these serious risks associated with their expansion. I think the solar industry will have a very very very long way to go to match the safety profile of the nuclear industry, but it is necessary to assume the added risk simply because nuclear resources are in fact exhaustible. It would be very safe for the next several 100 generations to avail themselves of nuclear resources, but I think that each generation, including our own, as a responsibility to use as much truly renewable energy as possible, so that the Uranium and Thorium are available for tens of millenia as opposed to the three millenia they would be available if they simply replaced all current energy output.

I have long stated here and elsewhere, that a wise distribution of these energy sources (especially on environmental grounds because of the tremendous environmental cost of storing solar energy) would be to use nuclear as a base load power source, and solar as a peak load source. This seems to be the best option if we are to survive the next several centuries.

As always, the best energy strategy of all is simply not to use energy in the first place. Conservation is the safest, cleanest, and most ethical of all energy approaches.

Freon 114 is a powerful greenhouse gas and destroys stratospheric ozone.

US uranium enrichment plants are THE largest sources of Freon emissions (88% of all industrial sources) in the US and account for 14% of global freon emissions.

http://radtexas.org/nukesfilth.html

Environmentally benign indeed.

No references, no back up. Lots of "could have" statements.

Pretty typical and representative of the millions of web sites on this subject. (There are millions of web sites similarly devoted to sightings of the blessed virgin Mary.)

Thanks for posting it though. It shows the weakness of your argument.

Reference: Nuclear Fuel, No. 24, 18 November 1996, p.5

http://www.antenna.nl/wise/466/4631.html

From the DOE

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/87-92rpt/chap5.html

<snip>

CFC-114 is a specialty chemical used as a solvent. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses (and emits to the atmosphere) CFC-114 while enriching uranium for nuclear power plants and military purposes. The DOE's enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky (one of two in the United States) emitted 213 metric tons of CFC-114 in 1989. (127)

<snip>

From The Carrier-Journal (Louisville Kentucky)

http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2001/05/29/ke052901s30057.htm

<snip>

The uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Ky., and its sister facility in Ohio have been by far the country's largest industrial emitters of a chemical that eats the Earth's protective ozone layer.

The emissions of the chemical coolant, which are legal, are blamed on hundreds of miles of leaky pipes at the plants operated by the United States Enrichment Corp. This year the company consolidated its enrichment operation in Paducah, making the Kentucky plant the nation's only nuclear fuel factory for commercial reactors.

The production and importation of the refrigerant CFC-114, along with many other ozone destroyers, was largely banned years ago as part of a global treaty known as the Montreal Protocol and the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. But the chemical can still be used in industry until supplies run out.

Critics point to USEC's CFC emissions -- more than 800,000 pounds in 1999, the most recent year available -- as another example of the hidden costs of nuclear power.

<and a lot more...>

BTW: you are wrong, the production of polysilicon does NOT use hydrofluoric acid.

http://www.nwalliance.org/news/press/pr20030307.asp

<snip>

Moses Lake, WA (March 7, 2003) - Solar Grade Silicon LLC (SGSilicon) announced full production of polycrystalline silicon at the Moses Lake facility. The initial start up has been successful with all polysilicon CVD reactors available modified to produce 2000 metric tons annually of solar grade polysilicon for the PV industry. The startup includes development of a new rod breaking process and bulk packaging for products. Five standard solar grade products, including chip-form, chunk-form and rod-form polysilicon have been developed for solar silicon ingot producers. The plant currently employs 160.

SGSilicon is the first production plant to be wholly dedicated to the supply of feedstock to the PV industry. Extensive modifications were made to the process to manufacture a cost-effective feedstock. The PV industry has relied on scrap polysilicon or limited amounts of polysilicon available only during periods of low demand from the semiconductor industry. Despite low IC prices, the demand for semiconductor materials has been increasing, with projections of polysilicon shortages developing over the next year. In times of high demand for semiconductors, PV feedstock supplies become limited and expensive. SGS plans to serve the needs of the expanding PV market with continued capacity increases.

SGSilicon manufactures polysilicon in two steps at the 100-acre Moses Lake plant. Silane (SiH4) is produced by a patented process, reacting metallurgical grade silicon with hydrogen and silicon tetrachloride to form trichlorosilane. The trichlorosilane is then converted to silane in redistribution reactors. The continuous-flow process recycles all hydrogen and chloride materials to the initial reactors, achieving a low waste, low-impact, environmentally friendly process. The silane is then decomposed in hot filament chemical vapor deposition reactors, modified to produce lower-cost solar grade polysilicon. The CVD reactors yield large diameter rods at 2 meters in length, which are then broken and sized into standard chip, chunk, and rod forms.

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a little polysilicon chemistry for the nonreligious...

http://www.siliconsultant.com/SISiFeed.htm

I noticed hundreds of wind turbines everywhere. The wind does blow quite a lot there. This was nothing new according to the locals.

Nuclear power, though safe, would require that Ireland purchase nuclear fuel from non-domestic sources. Kinda like oil and you know who.

but eventually will run out. If we assume a 1000 exajoule consumption rate and 100% thorium and uranium utilization (meaning some fast spectrum reactors), we can expect nuclear fuel to last from 2000 to 3000 years. We can of course, extend the lifetime of nuclear energy by the use of renewable sources like wind and solar and, conceivably fusion, but nuclear fission fuel will indeed run out someday.

There is some hope that in the next 3,000 years something better will develop, but if we are going to bridge ourselves through that
period of history, we'd best explore the best available options now.

That said, nuclear energy has some properties that are suggestive of "renewable" energy. Nuclear energy, for instance, does have the interesting property however that its waste products are recyclable and usuable to obtain yet more energy. Another interesting property is that because of decay equilibrium properties, that there is an inviolable limit on the quantity of its so called "waste" that can accumulate. This is because radioactive products necessarily, by definition, decay at the same time they are formed. As more fission products accumulate, more decay, and ultimately (depending on half life and formation rate) an equilibrium is established. Therefore nuclear energy at some point in it's development will not create any additional "wastes," but will simply decay as fast at is is formed.

The maximum possible accumulation of Strontium-90, for instance, is about 11,000 tons at 1000 exajoules of energy output. (This is roughly double the amount of energy consumed worldwide today annually.) In some ways it is too bad that we can't accumulate more of certain fission products. I would suggest that practically every fission product has a potential use, assuming people can put aside their irrational fear of the word "radioactive." The power output of 11,000 MT of Strontium-90 is about 11,000 MW, or about the output of three nuclear plants. Moreover this energy source is extremely portable, and could conceivably, were there more of it, be used to power hybrid type automobiles, or remote devices and stations. The element Technetium, represents yet another such case, that does not occur naturally on earth has some very interesting physical and chemical properties that are way under exploited. It is the eighth highest melting metal in the periodic table. Potassium pertechnate is one of the most remarkable corrosion inhibitors steel known.

I believe that one of the most important environmental choices one makes is to replace the conception of "waste" with the conception of "resource." It is seldom recognized that nuclear materials represent some of the most important and interesting opportunities to adopt this approach.

Would you REALLY sell nuclear technology to Saddam Hussein (or any other ruthless dictator of a rogue state)???

Renewable energy (PV and wind) cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons.

Can nuclear power pass the "Osama Test"?

If Al Qaeda attacked a (name your energy technology here) power plant. Would the consequences be catastrophic????

Nuclear power fails this one too....

Would you sell Saddam a shipment of medical supplies vital to culture and treat dangerous infections? No, because those same supplies could be used in biological weapons programs. Does that mean all medical supplies that could possibly be used to culture botulism and anthrax strains should be banned?

Similarly with the Osama test, it looks like virtually all skyscrapers fail as well. The US lucked out in that "only" 3000 were killed in the 9/11 attacks, when the potential for 25,000+ deaths existed if the planes had hit later in the day when more people were in the buildings. In terms of human life lost, this would be far more catastrophic. Most reactors are not located so close to urban and suburban centers that the local population couldn't be evacuated and treated for radiation before they were exposed to lethal levels. The death toll from Chernobyl was less than that of 9/11, so why would we believe that a terrorist attack would be more devastating?

I fail to see how these are logical arguments against nuclear power. There is a huge leap from nuclear reactors set up for power generation and those set up for weapons production. There are several reactor designs currently in production that are almost proliferation-proof. In the 1990's when a treaty was signed with N. Korea under Clinton's watch, we agreed to supply them with light water reactors in exchange for their termination of nuclear weapons research. Apparently President Clinton felt nuclear power did pass your Saddam test when it came to at least one rogue nation. Only after we later went back on our word in delivering proliferation-resistant reactors did the N. Koreans resume work on weapons-grade reactors of their own. If we had given N. Korea those reactors, they might not have a nuclear bomb right now.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/172158_doe06.html

New proposal would allow Energy Dept. to skip cleanup of the most lethal material

"Trying to rename high-level nuclear waste doesn't change the fact that it is still a dangerous, toxic, radioactive sludge that needs to be cleaned up," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. "The DOE is just trying to circumvent what the courts have already decided, which is that they can't reclassify it and the DOE needs to clean it up."