Upcoming NASA launch draws anti-nuke protesters

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/volusia/orl-protest0806jan08,0,2637823.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-volusia

Aw, for fuck's sake... :banghead:

I'm betting they are stupid enough to think that solar panels could do it.

They protest every one of these...ridiculuous...

This does the anti-nuke cause more harm than good. And of course they will say its not the exploration of space they are protesting, but some unspecified flaw in NASA's testing of plutonium as a power source. Course they never cite any credible source to prove this. ANd I guess the fact that NASA has a 100% safety record with these menas nothing.

I remember them protesting Cassini...they were worried that when Cassini came back around to earth for a gravity assist that it would radiate the planet somehow.

That is because it is ridiculous.

I have two big reservations;

1. I worked for a nuclear power utility which was lying to the NRC about safety issues, and I think that perhaps private corporations ought not run plants. The Navy seems to do a much better job.

2. When you factor decommissioning and waste storage costs, I have my doubts that nuclear power is a paying proposition for domestic power production.

And we have a really nice fusion plant just 7 light-minutes away that we really could make much better use of...

Everyone raises so called "nuclear waste" as an issue, but no one can produce a single case of a person injured by it.

Global warming and air pollution are different. They kill constantly, every day. There is no solution for their waste, but no one cares.

Solar power is sexy. Solar power is cool. Everyone wants solar power to work, even me. The problem is that it doesn't work. Solar power is still toys for rich boys.

It is not time for platitudes, since our atmosphere is collapsing now.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=37086&mesg_id=37086

We must go with what works.

...is only 4-5 years right now. Much less for a solar water preheater. And there are products in the pipeline that will move the payback point down considerably. I know of a very successful installation here in cloudy Chicago.

However, you are correct about the waste costs of other forms of power, but since those mostly don't have to be paid for by the utility they don't exist for the utility. If we could find a way to charge them back, things would change. But the decommissioning costs are still a real issue. A thermal plant can simply be scrapped.

gas wells? Refineries?

No, none of things are decommissioned, and were such an attempt made, it would be prohibitively expensive. Again a nuclear power plant is the only kind of plant that can be decommissioned.

Nuclear power plants have been decommissioned. The loss of life, again, has been zero.

People think that we should spend billions of dollars per life saved if the word "nuclear" is involved, and so they set so called "nuclear clean up" costs that are irrationally close to "non-detect." Air pollution standards meanwhile are nowhere near non detect - in fact air pollution standards are routinely violated every damn day - and not one fossil fuel plant is shut down.

When a nuclear plant has the paperwork filled out incorrectly - even if there is no loss of life, indeed no system failure whatsoever - it is international news and the subject of much silly carrying on and carping.

Meanwhile the seas rise as the icecaps melt.

If we were willing to spend the same number of dollars per life saved on health insurance for children, there would be no uninsured children on the planet.

I also debate (very much) the concept that thermal plants "can be scrapped." The reason they are scrapped easily - probably with a great deal of pollution (think of decades of coal ash depositing in piping) is not that they are safe to scrap but simply that no one gives a shit what kind of crap leaches out of them when they are landfilled. In general, a failure to pay attention to danger is not the same thing as safety.

Again, the case against nuclear energy is simply irrational. I call it "nuclear exceptionalism." Every single objection raised to nuclear power also applies to other forms of energy, only the scale for other forms of energy is much greater than it is for nuclear energy.

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

So it is not likely that you'll every find one with decades of coal ash in it. But you can send guys into a thermal plant with blueprints and blowtorches, and cut them up and haul the vast majority of the machinery to NuCor for recycling. In older plants there is asbestos, of course, and some old transformer gear has PCBs, and some of the switchyards have PCB contaminated earth, and there are the general problems of backup generator fuel tanks and coal piles that might need some cleanup, but it presents no major scrapping issue.

Whereas I would not care to be too near most parts of a BWR's piping for many years after de-fueling. And you know I am right about that, if you are going to handle that material at all, you have to take precautions.

Why it's almost as safe as dumping a hundred million tons of coal ash.

I do indeed feel deeply for the hundreds of millions of people who have died from exposure to BWR piping though.

I'll see if I can find an reference as to why.
My recollection is that it was to reduce the risk of an accident.


On June 24th, 1999 Cassini did another flyby of Venus, then it headed BACK TOWARDS EARTH for a flyby of this planet at just 312 miles above the Earth (June 1995 NASA EIS. In the June 1997 FSEIS the figure was raised to 496 miles above the surface of the Earth. They raised it again and again in a phoney attempt to look like they have listened to our pleas. It is a ruse! (It ended up about 725 miles away when it actually did the flyby.)

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/index.htm

that Cassini could 'somehow' radiate earth during the fly-by?

That wouldn't have been too good.

EIS
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/safety-eis.cfm

Critique
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/mk9708so.htm

I especially like this part:



This is pretty classic, and amusing.

Dr. Kaku is a theoretical physicist. There is very little in his entire argument that suggests that he actually understands very much about engineering.

One of the most important issues, as Dr. Kaku, for all his fame should know, is that stating an improbable event is not the same as making it likely.

I note that several incidents with RTG's crashing into earth have already occurred. These, of course, represent experimentally observed conditions, not theory.

Maxwell Boltzmann indeed. It rather sounds like mystification rather than explanation.

The whole bit reminds me of B. Kliban's famous cartoon: "Proving the existence of fish"

November 17, 1996 – The Russian probe Mars 96 fails during launch and crashes back to Earth with an RTG on board. The location of the crash is disputed - either in the Pacific Ocean or in the mountains of Chile.
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/List_of_nuclear_accidents


Cosmos 954
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_954

Here are some references to other cases, including one where the fallen RTG was recovered and reused.

http://www.nuclearspace.com/facts_about_rtg.htm

Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package
http://tinyurl.com/9pplr

The lunar module burned up in Earth's atmosphere 17 April, 1970, having been targeted to enter over the Pacific Ocean to reduce the possibility of contamination from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) on board (had the mission proceeded as planned, the RTG would have been used to power the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package, and then remained on the Moon). The RTG survived reentry (as designed) and landed in the Tonga Trench. While it will remain radioactive for approximately 2000 years, it does not appear to be releasing radioactive material.

http://www.answers.com/topic/apollo-13


Thanks for the tip.

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/authorit.html



It is certainly my contempt for science and scientists that makes my interest in the fun bit about the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution in this case so amusing.

:eyes:

Definition of a Misleading Authority:
"2. The "authority" cited is not an expert on the issue, that is, the person who supplies the opinion is not an expert at all, or is one, but in an unrelated area.
3. The authority is an expert, but is not disinterested. That is, the expert is biased towards one side of the issue, and his opinion is thereby untrustworthy."

That would include any NNuclear power plant engineers:
"III. Calculation of Risk

The analysis used by the EIS to calculate the probability of a maximum accident with the Cassini mission uses methods pioneered by the nuclear power industry (e.g. single event failures, event tree analysis, Monte Carlo calculations, etc.)

Although these methods are standard for the field, these methods have largely been discredited by the actual operating record of nuclear power accidents. Three Mile Island, for example, was a Class IX accident which was largely unforeseen by MIT's WASH-1400, the standard reference within the industry, which largely ignored small pipe breaks.

The methodology is flawed for several reasons:
..."

us from seeing Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and soon Pluto in the name of science, thus saving the lives of everyone on the planet.

And I acknowledge their wisdom in citing one authority who works in theoretical physics - and who is now comparing Three Mile Island to a spacecraft - even though the technologies are completely unrelated - as a "competent authority." I note that for all the hysteria that went into shouting "Three Mile Island!" for the last 25 years, not one dead body resulted from the accident.

Were Dr. Kaku not being disingenuous he would surely recognize that most models include new data as they evolve. That should be an element of his work that bears most relevance to the matter at hand, even if he not an expert on space flight or the engineering behavior of iridium.

I note, with derision, Dr. Kaku, with his great concern for risk, has not extended himself into an area of engineering where he is also not professionally qualified to speak, coal mining engineering although many thousands of people die from that activity every year than have been killed in the entire history of the space program, including the 1962 burn-up of an RTG, according to design, in the atmosphere.

Nor does Dr. Kaku anywhere cite the fact that over 1.3 tons of plutonium were released into the atmosphere by being vaporized by the United States alone in the period between 1945 and 1962.

If one reads the fallacy files, one sees that "authority is not needed" since there have been many experimental events in which RTGs have fallen to earth without loss of life.

If one actually knows scientists or something about scientists, one quickly understands that scientists, even good scientists, can be wrong, especially when they step outside their field of expertise.

I very much doubt that Dr. Kaku, for all his photogenic cutesy appearances on PBS, has ever participated in a detailed forensic analysis of an RTG. I would imagine any knowledge he has of rocketry would probably not qualify him as a flight technician at NASA.

He's posturing here and he's making himself look like an ass. Many thousands of man-years went into the construction of these devices, and it would be an insult to the focused work of thousands of scientist-years on the problem at hand to cancel these beautiful missions because Kaku has become a luddite champion. It would be rather the equivalent of placing Van Gogh's paintings in a toxic waste dump because some credible scientist can produce results showing that some of the paints he used contained toxic cadmium that, if accidentally eaten my museum goers, could be fatal.

I have, really, very little interest in Kaku overall, except to the extent he is drawn into affairs in service to petty luddites in their usual exercises of the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy. It is unfortunate in some sense, but the day of the overweening polymath is past. Some fields require specialized knowledge. Space technology, in this regard, is no exception. NASA has, of course, had its failures, and misdirection, especially in areas of human space flight. However NASA has probably done more to extend humanity's conception of itself in the universe than any other government organization in the history of the world. The engineers at NASA have a long and storied history of demonstrating spectacular abilities. I am glad that my children may have a chance to see Pluto up close. Maybe this bit of imagination will comfort them as they deal with an increasingly endangered world.

Pluto will be of interest for as long as humanity exists because it harks back to the conditions that created us. I suspect that interest will always exceed the interest in Dr. Kaku and his unfortunate, negative part in the game of discovery.

*snicker*

Why don't they spend their time protesting something important. Or should I say NOT important? While I think NASA could spend their money in a better way than sending a probe to that cold rock (like putting more money into the Terrestrial Planet Finder), it's still a worthy venture. Just look at the success of other nuke-powered probes like Cassini, the Voyagers, and Galileo. The benefit is worth the negligible risk...

:puke:

Some people just deserve to be smacked upside the head with a 2x4.

cotton-pickin
finger lickin
diamond studded
plutinium basket ball

Or something! (And yes, I've heard that line before, uttered seriously.)

Nevermind the fact that if you took the total amount of nuclear waste on the planet, ground it to a fine powder and spread it evenly over the entire world, it probably wouldn't substantially increase the dosage that we receive on a daily basis. Or, you know, drop the waste into a couple-mile-deep hole far away from fault lines, but that is apparently unacceptable too. %P

Besides, there's plenty of stuff out there far more dangerous to be around than plutonium. People even inject some of them into their face.

Pristine plutonium powered probe plans powered Pluto passage. Protesters predict plutonium plague possibilities. Pleasing Pluto planetary pictures prevail: Planners pin protesters puerile prevarications as political posturing. Precautionary prelaunch procedures pronounced perfect. Predict proceeding as planned. Perfect! Perfect! Perfect!

...scientists seek superb stratospheric scenario.

drearily dramatize danger. Don't despair!

Those who were convinced that that this was "the end of days," the nuclear illiterate crowd can chalk this one up as so called "nuclear waste," launched into space.

The risk of this particular 21+ kg of actinides is now essentially zero, unless of course the spacecraft bounces off some unknown Kuiper belt object and comes back to earth...

...I shouldn't encourage them.

and reappear on the other side of the Galaxy where a beneficent but slow machine civilization repairs it and sends it looking for home...

"Must. Sterilize."