What about nuclear energy?

I really would like to hear from those who are familiar with this field - physicists and engineers and others.

I realize that many here will just say "hell no" to everything with the word nuclear in it (or even nuceelar) but for awhile this was going to be the new horizon of energy, of removing us from depending on oil.

Oil, really, is the source of all the global problems. Starting with the way Churchill drew the borders of Iraq following WWI and making sure that it did not have access to the Gulf by making Kuwait a separate country, through the "Suez campaign" in 1956, when France and Britain invaded Egypt after Nasser nationalize the oil production, and dragged Israel into this ill-fated campaign; through Europe complete capitulation to the Arabs at the expense of Israel - before the 1967 war - and, of course, the real reason behind our presence in Iraq and behind Russia and China helping Hezbollah.

In the late 70s a co-worker, a liberal who was arrested protesting the Vietnam war, but who was also a brilliant physicist (perhaps still is) commented on how the field of nuclear energy was where he parted from his liberal friends since he supported it and knew the benefits that it could bring.

What say you?

I'm not convinced that nuclear is the way to go. I'm not convinced it will ever be safe enough to suit me.

I have a little emergency radio sitting on a window sill... it has a solar panel and a crank... works damn fine.

There are two areas to explore right there. Solar energy has not been tapped to the extent it should. If it's now cheap enough to run this cheap little emergency radio, come on, there are plenty of applications.

I remember hearing a stand up comedian talk about hooking up a generator to all the health clubs in town... sounds funny, but why the hell not?

that has a crank to charge the batteries. Works great. I love it. Wonder if more could be done with that technology?

hydrogen to helium in its core to produce the heat.

multiple nuclear reactors. The industry fed the community's families.
There was and still are a myriad of physical problems for the residents who spent
years (especially during the 1950's) growing up and/or living there.

The debate will rage forever, or at least until most of us guinea-pigs are dead... Is there an effect between nuclear waste, accidental or purposeful
release of toxic emissions and the high incidents of thyroid and prostate diseases and cancers?

This is how it works...If you are willing to "fight tooth and nail" to have nuclear reactors or waste dumps located within your
community...then by all means you should continue your quest for answers.

If you are not...then please move on.


The Tikkis

People can be very arrogant when it comes to technology. We are quick to say we have the answers when we don't, and then when something blows up in our face, we fix the problem that we can see, and THEN we say we have the answer until the next problem blows up in our face.

The Space Shuttles were origianlly believed to be much safer than they actually were. Yes it was always known that there were risks, but initial caluclations had the risk much lower than current ones now admit. But the Space Shuttle risk analysis held up fine up until the day when it didn't any more. "O Rings? Who would have guessed?" Nuclear technology involves catastrophic risk potentials, some inherent in the process, some an inevitable by product of human failures.

And it won't solve global warming either. For one thing, what the nuclear power industry fails to talk about is how incredibly power intensive the managing the nuclear fuel process is from start to finish. I've seen studies but can't quote them off hand. They cook the books much the same way that shipping via Trains get a raw deal compared to shipping via planes and trucks. There are a ton of hidden costs and subsidies for the nuclear industry, and massive "hidden " use of fossil fuels being burned to support the components of the nuclear power industry. For another thing, nuclear power plants are extremely complex things to build, and it takes a long time to build them safely. It would take decades before any sizable increase in nuclear power plants online could be arranged.

The nuclear industry and the Bush Administration want to answer that by "streamlining the process". We all know what that means don't we? It means limiting public input, restricting appeals and creating blocks to legal challanges, loss of trancparency in the process, industry written regulations. and cost cutting measures to speed up production. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power plant was built on an active Earthquake fault in California that Pacific Gas and Electric witheld infomation on that they knew of from regulatory officials. It was the opponents of that plant that dug up that information. As a result the NRC required PG&E to fortify Diablo Canyon from Earthquake damage.

Opponments to that plant, including the Abalone Alliance that I was part of, fought against opening up that plant using all the legal means available to us. Many of those means have already been curtailed, and more are proposed to be curtailed by the Bush Administration. Well as things would have it the day finally came for Diablo Canyon to go radioactive. The Abalone Alliance organized a massive non violent blockade of the plant. Our actions drew massive media coverage at the time.

And guess what? During our action an internal whistle blower stepped forward to reveal that "Oooops", all of the advanced Earthquake support features for Diablo Canyons twin units had been accidently installed inverted. Seems someone got the blueprints reversed for Units One and Units Two. As a result all the braces were installed in the wrong places. It had no added Earth quake protection after all. This was literally hours before Diablo Canyon was about to be fired up. Several years and millions of dollars worth of fixes later, they finally managed to get Diablo Canyon open. In the current regulation environment I seriously doubt much of the serious risks initially involved would have seen the light of day.

You simply will never be able to build the number of nuclear power plants needed to prevent increased global warning. They can not be safely sited in the U.S, and the public wouldn't stand for them near heavily populated areas. Indian Point could not be built today because it is too close to New York City. General Electric doesn't care though. After they beat down the opposition enough to open the door a crack, they'll settle for only building a dozen or so new nukes, that still will provide the industry with many millions of dollars in new profits. That's all they care about. They'll find a few weak links in the chain of resistance, a poor Indian Tribe that can't own a Casino here, a Governor and some local officials in their pockets there, and they'll throw up a few nukes and take the money to the bank, with no appreciatable inpact on Global Warming.

And Nukes can't be safely cited in most third world countries either, for both security reasons and corruption and cost cutting on maintance etc. Either coorporate interests will over ride all sane controls to get enough nukes built, which is a very dangerous proposition, or they are just using global warming as the excuse of the day to generate a little business for themselves where they most easily can, and global warming will not be helped in the process. What would happen instead is only a continued diversion of attention from real solutions that can safely make a difference. And that will only make Global Warming worse.

site is irresponsible. And obviously if reactors are power intensive we will have to weigh the cost and benefits of running them.

It is not just global warming but the continuing dependence on oil which is a diminishing resource - as much as the SUV owners refuse to acknowledge.

of Energy production. They do NOT want either decentralized energy production, competing high technology alternative solutions, or wide spread conservation measures. Currently utilities in some areas must pay consumers who generate their own electricity and export excess power directly into the power grid. General Electric does not profit from that. Currently utilities in some areas must underwrite certain energy saving initiatives rather than develop new power generating capacity. They do not profit from that either. Currently technology already exists to make coal fired plants significantly clearner, it is not being forced on that industry.

Again, I do not regularly write on this issue so I do not have a wealth of resourse materials at my finger tips to link you up with. (In case you are curious - it seems I am writing this so fast now only because I am cutting and pasting from an online debate I had elsewhere months ago.)

A while back I read an industry promoting piece in the Washington Post and it contained the same types of corporate funded scientific research distortions that are common to all major corporate funded public lobbying initiatives on behalf of industries with profit driven agendas to promote. At one time I could have quickly debunked their "glowing" (pun intended) claims about how no lives were lost to Three Mile Island. At root it is the same type of argument that the Cigarette industry used for years about Tobacco prodcuts. Diseases occur naturally in the environment so it was easy for Big Tobacco to argue that cancer was not their problem, nor their products the cause. No one died of short term accute radiation poisoning at Three Mile Island. That is the only part of their statement regarding Three Mile Island that is true.

Of course we need to look at energy issues seriously. Just like Dick Cheney's energy task force needed to look at energy issues seriously, but their agenda wasn't driven by that need, nor were their solutions. The same is true for the nuclear power industry lobby, and the writer of the Washington Post piece I note above is now a high level paid leader of that lobby.

They say that containment vessels will contain all problems, but that is false. Had the reaction at Three Mile Island proceded much further than it did, and it well could have, that containment dome would have been breeched. The industry claims that a containment dome would withstand the impact of a plane crash into it, but that is not exactly what they say when they are officially on record testifying before the NRC challanged by lawyers for environmental groups. I spoke to people who returned from hearings regarding safery concerns at Indian Point, but again I don't have facts at my finger tips here now. One thing I do remember is that no inpact study has been done involving planes of the size, weight, and fuel capacity of those currently regularly used by the airline industry.

This is all just stuff off the top of my head. No one is paying me and a staff to write this. An "editorial" can say all it wants about what happens to all but 1,000th of the radioactivity within 40 years, but they avoid acknowledging how deadly the dispersal of even the tiniest amounts of some radioactive materials, vaporized, would be to millions of people. They side step that part completely. They talk about how 95% of the wastes aren't wastes because they remain locked up in spent fuel rods that can be "recycled"(a problematic solution to begin with) but they neglect to talk about issues involving the transportation of those fuel rods for recylcing. Currently almost all of them have never been moved off sites. Salt mines are far from safe repositories for nuclear waste either. Look into the research associated with the fight over the proposed Yucca Mountain site. Industry plans for safe transport of the fuel rods are just as haphazard and insufficient as their plans for public evacuations after a nuclear accident. This "editorial" doesn't want to touch that one other.

The debate on future energy solutions is now being stage managed by entrenched vested interests in the same manner that the debate regarding making health insurance affordable and universal is stage managed by the current insurance industry. Certain "answers", the best ones, are swept off the table as unfeasable from the moment the debate begins, like a single payer system, because the industry does not want a single payer system, it is not in their economic interests to go to a single payer system. The Nuclear Power industry is promoting business as usual because it is their business to do so. It is not their business to promote anything else.

If we look seriously at Nuclear Power what that means in real terms is that we will NOT look seriously at solor and hydrogen break throughs for examples. Conservation technologies will remain a poor step child in that case . It will just let the status quo off the hook, allowing profit driven concerns to block systematic real solutions to the need for safe enrgy sources. The nuclear industry cares about global warming about as much as the pharmacuetical industry cares about making life saving drugs affordable to all who desperately need them.

progressed from Three Miles Island, that we - or whoever job it was - analyzed what happened there and reached a conclusion on how to avoid such events.

NASA now has black marks but it would be nice if nuclear energy were driven and researched and implemented by a federal agency, to remove the profit incentive, but I don't know whether it can be achieved. I am thinking Oak Ridge Laboratory, or Batavia in Illinois, Sandia Laboratory.. but I may be mixing different things.

I am afraid that conservation will remain a step child no matter what we do. The majority of Americans just care about their own comfort.

Even promoting hybrid cars. I've heard it recently on NPR. There are tax credits for buyers of hybrid... until Toyota sells - not sure - 60,000 vehicles. Then the tax credit phases out and finally ends.

Conservation has to be a national priority but we will not get it from oil men.

comes up with a solution for the unimaginably dangerous and toxic waste that will remain behind for tens of thousands of years after the energy is spent.

Talk about a legacy to our posterity. Your Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandchildren will still be dealing with this particular abomination.

"waste" can be recycled to the point where it returns to its original radioactive level in 300-400 years. The once through uranium cycle and banning uranium recycling by Jimmy Carter is the worst policy decision ever made in American Politics.

was practical, but JC is/was a nuclear engineer and so I figure he knows a lot more about it than I do.

other countries wouldn't either and that would prevent them from obtaining plutonium based weapons from nuclear reactors. As North Korea and India have shown, that isn't the case.

Here's why I am against nuclear energy.

1. What do you do with the spent fuel? So far, nobody has come up with a solution. This stuff is not part of our natural world. What the hell do you do with it? Blast it into space? And what would happen if the space ship blows up before departing Earth orbit? The stuff is horrible and remains horrible forever.

2. Accidents. It is possible to run a reactor safely, but there will always some chance for accidents. At the power levels these big power reactors are run, the margin of error is much reduced. Any accident can have disproportionally severe environmental effects. Nuclear energy has a jaded record, with construction short-cuts, safety short-cuts, and some pretty hideous accidents.

3. There are numerous alternatives which are much safer, much cleaner, and do not involve creating very dangerous stuff that isn't natural to the Earth.

1. What to do with waste: use it as fuel. It is US policy NOT to re-process spent fuel into new fuel, or to use breeder reactors to produce more fuel than they consume.

2. Accidents. # of people in US killed by nuclear power accidents: 0. New designs are much more standardized, simpler, and are passively safe - that is, when controls are removed physics kills the critical reaction. As an extreme example, consider the proposed energy amplifier reactor. I'd rather live next to a nuke reactor than a coal power plant. Look into Gen IV reactor designs, they're quite fascinating.

3. By all means explain how isotopes of elements are unnatural. I eagerly await your response. Wind and solar should certainly be exploited, along with increased energy efficiency, de-centralizing electric generation (i.e. every home has a solar panel or three), designing homes and business to minimize electricity use, and lifestyle adjustments. But if you want modern life, you NEED predictable, steady power supplies. Hospitals and blast furnaces cannot run at the whim of the sun and wind.

So, going forward, we basically have two choices: level the Appalachians and strip mine Montana for coal, or build nukes. Newer, safer, simpler nukes, and decommission the old ones as they reach the end of their useful lives, and use their spent fuel intelligently in new fuel rods.

Have to build a system with sufficient redundant safeguards/controls, an extremely strong containment vessel, and constantly vigilant monitoring to extract the useful energy from an inherently unstable process. Now add in the environmental risks from producing the fuel and disposing of the spent fuel. Stir in the political component for terrorism and NIMBY. This is just the short list of hurdles to be overcome in the nuclear energy field.

With the best minds behind meticulous planning and construction, the risks can be minimized and are potentially less disruptive than a coal fired plant. The problems, as arose in 3 Mile Island (and Chernobyl), are in the weaknesses of humans and the excesses caused by greed. Investigations after 3MI show that many of the certifications were faked (xrays of critical welds were shown to be copies of a good one repeated multiple times) and many of the operations staff were underqualified (not quite Homer Simpson, but close). Procedures to control the processes in the emergency were not clear and delays in execution allowed the initial failures to snowball into the partial meltdown. That there wasn't significant leakage was a testament to the care taken in the design to provide a strong containment/isolation of the central pressure vessel.

In the US, each plant was essentially a working prototype. The industry had hopes of getting precertified designs approved by the AEC/NRC to enable them streamline the permitting/construction, but this never came to be. The Canadian and French systems went with relatively simple designs that could be replicated and have a strong history in the field, but the US build-a-better-mousetrap folks got caught in a redtape cycle that allowed the opponents to tie them up for years on end.

That being said, it should be possible to build reliable nuclear plants. But with the current government/regulatory/business climate even the most ardent supporter would have a hard time convincing the public that all the problems of the past have been overcome. I can't see the KBRs/Bechtels/GEs/Westinghouses of the world having the kind of trust that would be required to put a newly designed plant in right now. The long range hope has always been fusion, but that still seems to be a long way off. Nuclear could help to bridge the gap, but only as a part of a comprehensive plan to conserve and find alternative/renewable sources.

While I don't currently work in the industry, my undergraduate degree is in nuclear engineering (1980) and have worked as an engineer in both the oil industry and for the DoD. Still believe in the potential, but doubt the execution (at least until the political environment changes).

but by a federal agency like NASA - before it started bending under political pressure.

I would like to think that there are still public institutions - like JPL - where engineers and scientists can develop the best that science can offer. To believe in the process/product, and to say when they've reached the end, when a project can continue or needs to end.

As I commented above, I would hope that the lessons of Three Miles Island and Chernobyl have been learned and that today we know better what can be done and what cannot, and without hiding anything or lessening the importance of findings.

This is what I honestly believe, (again I am copying from a post I made to another message board months ago). A world wide expansion of nuclear energy use will directly or indirectly result in one or more events that result in the loss of millions of lives and drastic economic disruptions. It is lke terrorism. It isn't a matter of if, it is only a matter of when. And of course it may well be terrorism that is the trigger to that nuclear event or events. Right now the flight path over Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, situated along the Hudson river, is open to commercial air flights. Forget it's containment vessel and how strong it is or is not. It's spent nuclear fuel rods are lying in unprotected cooling ponds.

They could be the target of a hijacked plane crash. All nukes use cooling ponds to control and buffer radioactivity from used fuel rods. If the pools lose coolant than the fuel rods ignite and the smoke becomes deadly and it travels vast distances. Smoke clears but radiation remains.

Or it could be dirty bombs, fashioned from radioactive materials that become ever more prevelent as more and more nuclear power plants are opened, as typically lax security and corner and cost cutting measures prevail. Or it could be another Three Mile Island, except one that gets just a little bit further in it's out of control nuclear reaction, past a tipping point that the last Three Mile Island accident approached but did not quite pass. The containment vessel for Three Mile Isaland would have exploded had that happened.

Vast areas can be contaminated by clouds of radiation, contaminated minimally for centuries. It could be New Orleans after Katrina, except with no real clean up possible. Catastrophe can come in one relative instant, but slow decaying radioactive particals once dispersed, are essentially eternal in the environment, in the food chain, and in the gene pool. And that is only the most dramatic catastrophe, the one that makes the news, not the slow steady seepage of radioctive contaminated water into the water table

At what price energy independence? At what price Russian roulette with nukes rather than enforcing strict conservation measures, or even use of the cleanest coal burning technology humanity is capable of designing at whatever cost per ton of coal burned using it?

Here is one woman's personal Chernobyl Journal that I urge people to look at. It deals with the region surrounding Chernobyl NOW:

http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html

She maintains this herself so if you can spare her a donation to keep it up please consider giving one.

And by the way, anyone who says that the Soviets were using a poorly designed reactor without a containment dome misses the point. Even the NRC conceded that Three Mile Island could easily have breached it's containment dome, had matters gone slightly differently. The pint isn't really the technology, the point is the capacity of people to screw up any technology by dumb assed human error, or greed that cuts corners, or fraud that results in things not being built the way they were promised. It happens all of the time, but most of the time it doesn't involve something that should it go all wrong, will make hundreds of square miles unlivable for humans for dozens of generations or longer, after the initial wave of deaths has passed.

I also urge readers to rent and view CHERNOBYL HEART

Part of the synopsis of this HBO Documentary Film:

"Following Adi Roche, founder of Ireland's Chernobyl Children's Project, CHERNOBYL HEART opens in the exclusion zone, the most radioactive environment on earth. From there, Roche travels to Belarus, home to many of the children she seeks to aid. The film reveals those hardest hit by radiation, including thyroid cancer patients and children suffering from unfathomable congenital birth and heart defects.

Despite the fact that 99% of Belarus is contaminated with radioactive material, many people refuse to leave their homes behind. Asked why he would not move, the father of a radiation victim replies, "To leave the motherland where you were born and raised, where your soul is connected to the earth - I would not want to. To move to a new place is difficult, especially in terms of a job in Belarus and abroad."

In Belarus, only 15-20% of babies are born healthy. Roche comforts children who are born with multiple holes in their heart, a condition known in Belarus as "Chernobyl heart." A lucky few will have their heart problems fixed by Dr. William Novick, who heads the International Children's Heart Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping children with congenital or acquired heart disease in developing countries throughout the world. After saving the life of a young girl suffering from Chernobyl heart and being humbled by her parents' gratitude, Dr. Novick affirms, "I appreciate this is a bit of a miracle for them...but we have a certain responsibility to these kids."
http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/chernobylheart/synopsis.html

in my mind I am convinced that it was the Chernobyl disaster, not Reagan playing Clint Eastwood, that hastened the fall of the Soviet Union.

and what our options are and what pursuing each might gain us (including nuclear power), check out this report:

Climate Change VI
http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/7052

Actually the entire series is excellent but you can find links to all of it there.

Im an ecologist.

Nuclear energy is energy that is high yield and low pollution... No carbon dioxide.

Is it safe? Its pretty safe. Safer than greenhouse emissions.


I want more nuke power.

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currently all reactors use fission (splitting of the atom) while an experimental nuclear plant using fusion (joining of the atoms) is being built in France. The advantages of energy from fusion?
1. Uranium isn't used instead an element that can be derived from seawater is used which is far more plentiful and doesn't have to be mined.
2. This means that weapons grade material can't be made as a byproduct.
2. The waste created is much less than that from traditional reactors

More on them
http://science.howstuffworks.com/fusion-reactor.htm

For years, the left has been "no nukes"....and made that to include energy as well as weapons.

The problem is, what is the alternative. Alternative, clean energies like wind, solar, and tidal must be fully maximized, and we must conserve.

Still, I think we need to look at nuclear energy more closely in the face of global warming...that is the most important environmental issue facing us, I believe.

Clark was a speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative; "Promoting Prosperity with Climate Change Policy" Climate Change Policy in the United States, on July 10, 2006:

Question and Answer Session

FIGUERES: General Clark. Should a US climate change policy provide incentives for the construction of nuclear power plants?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, here's the perfect case to illustrate what Senator Clinton is just talking about. Because when you put a nuclear power plant in, there are two things that you're producing that impact the public, other than power. One of them is risk. And no matter what you do with nuclear power, there is always some inherent degree of risk that's different than let's say, a natural gas fired power plant.

And secondly, you're producing a byproduct. A radioactive waste which lasts for tens of thousands of years, and which we still haven't quite figured out how to encapsulate and store safely without further environmental damage. So I would be in favor of continuing to work nuclear energy. It's already there. We're producing these waste products now and we know we can make it safer.

But you've got to put it in a larger context. So you've got to look at the overall systems problems and cost, risk, radioactive waste. And you've got to compare nuclear energy against the renewable sources of energy like wind and solar and wave energy, which are already practical, which can be used, and which I would personally prefer to see us put our first incentives there. Because there, we can get a huge slug of energy for much less social byproduct cost than with nuclear.

(Applause)

http://securingamerica.com/node/1172

We do need to look at renewable sources of energy first, but the door needs to stay open to nuclear power because it may still need to be an option. Clark is obviously someone who does a detailed cost/benefit analysis with everything from foreign policy to energy policy. It's the people who politicize the issues without looking at the science and the facts that keep us from effectively moving forward in an enlightened way. You can find those people on the left as well as the right.

I don't wish to sound abrasive but....anyone who wants to switch to nuclear power, will you allow all the plants and toxic waste to be located near you?

I certainly don't want it anywhere here in California. The few we already have is too many as far as I am concerned.

I think we need to be looking into better ways to harness solar, wind and ocean currents.

They are the cat's pajamas for powering Ships, Spacecraft, and Submarines.
There is no substitute for a reactor at the South Pole.
But they're unfit for commercial power generation.
The massive contamination of Power Plant sites renders them useless for millenia afterward.
No matter how much profit they made while operating all of it is consumed on thousands of years of losses keeping the site safe.
This little detail is omitted from the spread sheets, as it is inevitably unloaded on the tax payer.
And it's not like they burned uranium as it is excavated. Most civilian reactors require at least 3% enrichment. These operations consume more energy than can be gotten from the refined uranium.
I have to say thumbs up for limited nuclear applications, thumbs down for commercial plants.
The reason republicans push these plants so hard is that they are made by the same corporate insiders that supply nuclear technology to the military.
They want to sell more reactors.
And the Republicans will utter any falsehood to make it so.

dependent on foreign oil.

They decided to do something about it. They build nuclear plants. Lots of them. Most of their non-transportation energy comes from nuclear sources. Include transportion, and you find that subways and trains use nuclear-produced electricity.

It enables them to keep their carbon dioxide emissions, and other pollutants from things like coal- or oil-burning plants low; they have much less to worry about with Kyoto than most other countries.

Clark and others talk about acceptable risk. Finland has decided that the risk of nuclear energy is outweighed by the risk of global warming, i.e., their Kyoto commitments.

France decided the risk from an oil embargo, from sending so much money overseas to Arab countries, and from pollution--and later, from CO2 emissions--had to be factored into the risk equation and weighed against the risk from melt-down and nuclear waste processing/storage. They toyed with hybrid reactors, in which nuclear waste was reprocessed to yield more fuel; the problem was cost effectiveness, it simply cost too much to do that. They mothballed the process, since fuel costs may rise and then it'll be cost-effective.

France is helping Germany with CO2 emissions by exporting electricity.

Nuclear power is extremely capital intensive. Every nuke that gets built is virtually a corporate welfare program. When you speak of "France decided" it almost sounds as if there were a massive series of town hall meetings, with government support provided equally to all competing view points so that an informed public could openly weigh the inherent advantages and disadvantages of more imported oil, more nuclear power plants, more conservation, increased use of decentralized solar electricity generation, expanded use of wind energy, research into tidal energy sources, improved mass transit, etc, etc. etc. That isn't what happened in France, and it isn't what happens in Washington DC under Republican corporate friendly government either.

It doesn't take much digging to figure out who currently pulls the strings when it comes to Energy policies in either Europe or the the United States. Who has the money? Who stands to profit? Here is what's going on in Great Britain:

"BNFL board puts British Nuclear Group up for sale

Sellafield The state-owned British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) confirmed over the weekend that it would sell off British Nuclear Group (BNG), BNFL’s specialist decommissioning arm, which also manages safety at the Sellafield facility, among other sites, in a bid to make it more attractive to potential bidders like Halliburton, Bechtel and Fluor and other contractors that are tipped to buy into Britain’s nuclear decommissioning industry.

By Charles Digges, 04/10-2005

The state-owned BNG operates most of Britains civilian nuclear sites, including the Sellafield site in West Cumbria, England. BNG has a contract on that site for another three years through Britain’s newly formed Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

After that contract lapses, contract management of the Sellafield site and its decommissioning through the NDA will be put out to general bid, and US-based giants like Bechtel Halliburton and Fluor —which has worked on Britain’s nuclear sites—have made no secret of wanting to get in on the ground floor."
http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area/energy/nuclear/sellafield/40076

By this I mean the true cost of storing and making sure it stays put, all the waste that is generated for the period of 10,000 years it takes to become safe.

I have a feeling if this were really done nuclear energy would soon look very expensive. But since we figure "it's someone else's problem" nuclear energy looks feasible.

is another expensive, comodity-based and heavily polluting energy source.

The nucleopobes have this eco-anarchist fantasy that we can rely entirely on small-scale revewables, that is garbage. Compared to the crap comming out of coal plants nuclear plants are squeaky clean, the amound of nuclear waste is puny compared to the pollutants spewed by coal plants. and the dangers of it are overblown (the poster NNadir knows more about that stuff then I, look for his posts in the Enviroment/Energy foruns).

realistically we will not allow the building of power plants of any kind, nor refineries in "our backyard". There are people near by, like Mexico, that would love to have that type of infrastructure built to provide us with energy. So i would say the future of building these types of power plants and refineries will be built off shore, and the energy imported. The loss of jobs offset by our desire to live free and clear of such facilities.

...The Revenge of Gaia. He gives you guys quite a whooping.