Nuclear Power is the Problem, Not a Solution

[chlamor]

Nuclear power is the problem, not a solution

by Helen Caldicott

At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.

The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only $US9.1billion - 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years - are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity.


It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very different. In the US, where much of the world's uranium is enriched, including Australia's, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global warming.

<snip>

In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0%2C5744%2C12835747%5E12332%2C00.html

[Maple]

1. You need pebble bed reactors

China is putting up 200 of them.

"To meet that growing demand, China's leaders are pursuing two strategies. They're turning to established nuke plant makers like AECL, Framatome, Mitsubishi, and Westinghouse, which supplied key technology for China's nine existing atomic power facilities. But they're also pursuing a second, more audacious course. Physicists and engineers at Beijing's Tsinghua University have made the first great leap forward in a quarter century, building a new nuclear power facility that promises to be a better way to harness the atom: a pebble-bed reactor. A reactor small enough to be assembled from mass-produced parts and cheap enough for customers without billion-dollar bank accounts. A reactor whose safety is a matter of physics, not operator skill or reinforced concrete. And, for a bona fide fairy-tale ending, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is labeled hydrogen."

SNIP

"Wearing disposable blue paper gowns and booties, the grad student leads the way to a windowless control room that houses three industry-standard PC workstations and the inevitable electronic schematic, all valves, pressure lines, and color-coded readouts. In a conventional reactor's control room, there would be far more to look at - control panels for emergency core cooling, containment-area sprinklers, pressurized water tanks. None of that is here. The usual layers of what the industry calls engineered safety are superfluous. Suppose a coolant pipe blows, a pressure valve sticks, terrorists knock the top off the reactor vessel, an operator goes postal and yanks the control rods that regulate the nuclear chain reaction - no radioactive nightmare. This reactor is meltdown-proof.

Zhang Zuoyi, the project's 42-year-old director, explains why. The key trick is a phenomenon known as Doppler broadening - the hotter atoms get, the more they spread apart, making it harder for an incoming neutron to strike a nucleus. In the dense core of a conventional reactor, the effect is marginal. But HTR-10's carefully designed geometry, low fuel density, and small size make for a very different story. In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure, instead of skyrocketing into a bad movie plot, the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius - comfortably below the balls' 2,000-plus-degree melting point - and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.

"In a conventional reactor emergency, you have only seconds to make the right decision," Zhang notes. "With HTR-10, it's days, even weeks - as much time as we could ever need to fix a problem."

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html

More info, especially history, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

[chlamor]

2. We need

less of everything and to get off the JUNK.

[Maple]

3. You might

However there are 6 billion other folks in the world who disagree.

[chlamor]

4. Are you

speaking for these people. All 6 billion? show me the study or survey where these 6 bill say I want nukes.

Ill informed people make ill informed choices

[Maple]

5. Did you read any of that?

Did you see where China...a quarter of the world's population...is putting in 200 of them?

You think India doesn't need massive power and will follow the same route?...there's half the world right there.

Do YOU speak for the 6 billion when you dismiss things out of hand?

Who do you speak for when you sniff 'ill informed people make ill informed choices?'

[OneBlueSky]

6. why is reducing demand never on the table when discussing energy . . .

the amount of energy wasted in developed countries is obscene . . . it could be cut in half with minor lifestyle changes among individuals coupled with government incentives and, where necessary, new laws . . .

"meeting demand" becomes a far more managable problem when demand is reduced through conservation . . . decentralizing energy generation would help, too . . .

[Maple]

7. Reducing is nice

but it won't solve the problem...all it does is postpone it.