First ACPR-1000 Nuclear Unit Begins Commercial Operation in China

[NNadir]

China’s first reactor adopting its domestically developed evolutionary third-generation ACPR-1000 design has wrapped up trial operation and begun commercial operation.

CGN Power, a subsidiary of China General Nuclear Power Corp., announced that the 1000-MW Unit 5 of the Yangjiang Nuclear Power Plant in Guangdong province completed a 168-hour period of trial operation on July 12. Construction of the unit began in September 2013, and it was connected to the grid on May 23, 2018.

The ACPR-1000 design is based on China’s CPR-1000 technology, which is in turn a “significantly upgraded version” of the 900-MW French M310 three-loop technology imported for the Daya Bay nuclear power plant in the 1980s—one of China’s first nuclear plants built on the mainland, according to the World Nuclear Association. Today, mainland China has more than 40 nuclear power reactors in operation, and about 20 under construction. The technologies stem from China’s drive to domestically fabricate and supply nuclear fuel assemblies and plant equipment.

But compared to the CPR-1000, for which Framatome, a company majority owned by the French government, retains intellectual property, the ACPR-1000 has full Chinese intellectual property rights. The three-loop ACPR-1000 reactor design with double containment and a core-catcher was intended to be demonstrated at Fangchenggang 3 and 4, which began construction at the end of 2014. At Yangjiang, where Units 1 and 2 feature a CPR-1000 design, and Units 3 and 4 use CPR-1000+ technology, Units 5 and 6 evolved to be ACPR-1000s, CGN said. Yangjiang Unit 5, specifically, “achieved technical improvements on 31 items based on previous reactor designs, and meets up-to-date technical safety standards,” the company noted.

Unit 6 is expected to be operational in 2019. ACPR-1000s are also under construction at Hongyanhe Units 5 and 6, and Tianwan Units 5 and 6, all of which are scheduled to come online between 2019 and 2021.

First ACPR-1000 Nuclear Reactor Begins Commercial Operation.

The reactor, built in less than 5 years, will provide, in a single building, more than half the energy produced by more than 6,000 Danish wind turbines built and still operating over the last 40 years of wild cheering and more than 3000 of which have been decommissioned.

The six Chinese reactors to come on line before or during 2021 will produce more energy in six buildings than the entire State of California produces in all of its ballyhooed solar cells - many of which involved mining toxic metals in China - and all of its wind turbines combined.

California Energy Commission: Electrical Generation Statistics

In 2017, all of the wind turbines, and all of the solar energy units in California, including the disastrous Ivanpah solar thermal/natural gas plant, produced 37,190 GWh of electricity combined, or 12.7% of the States electricity. This means by pure subtraction, that 87.3% of California's electricity was not produced by wind and solar energy, this after half a century of cheering for both.

The amount of energy that solar and wind combined produced in the entire State of California is 0.173 exajoules on a planet which consumes (as of 2016) 576 exajoules of energy.

In 2017, after the El Nino rains, California produced 43,333 GWh of electricity from hydroelectricity, with the obviously long overlooked cost of the complete and total destruction of the Colorado Delta ecosystem. This was 14.8% of California's electricity. This contrasts with the drought year of 2015, when all of the hydroelectric plants produced 13,393 GWh of electricity or 4% of it's electricity generation in that year.

Don't look for 2018 to be too pretty.

Still, in California, it remains popular to make energy production dependent on the weather, weather destabilization by climate change be damned.

Shades of the 18th century!

Apparently China doesn't plan to depend on the weather.

When the 20 reactors under construction are completed, bringing the total to 60 nuclear reactors completed, China will displace France as the world's second largest producer of nuclear energy. As the United States shuts its historically built nuclear plants and begins dumping gas waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, and flow back water into its rivers and land, China will be the world's largest producer of nuclear energy.

This, by the way, is a good idea. Dangerous fossil fuel waste kills more than 1 million Chinese per year, not that anyone gives a crap about how many people die from dumped dangerous fossil fuel waste.

The Chinese nuclear power program, to all appearances, is dynamic, and from what I see of the research efforts there, innovative.

Say what you will about China - a lot of what happens there is no prettier than running out of water in Lake Mead - they don't hate engineering and science there.

One often hears that building nuclear power plants "takes too long" even though the United States historically built more than 110 reactors in about 25 years in the third quarter of the 20th century, many of which still operate, still producing more energy than all the wind and solar facilities in the entire country. Most of the engineers who built these nuclear power plants are either dead or retired.

Nuclear power plants though, are often reported to "take too long to build."

Not in China. Not in China. In China, "nuclear takes too long" is a Trumpian scale lie, as it was, by the way, in the period between 1960 and 1980 in the United States. Of course, today, in similar Trumpian scale distortions, people confidently assert that what has already happened is impossible.

We may add to this complaint about "taking too long" the complaint that "nuclear is not competitive" made by the kind of asshole who thinks, say, for instance, that the collapse of a tunnel at the Hanford Nuclear Weapons plant was a world class disaster while climate change, um, isn't. This kind of asshole can't figure out that if it takes two systems to do what one system can do alone, the cost of both needs to be included in the overall cost. This kind of asshole is also the kind of asshole who pays no attention whatsoever to external costs, the costs of the destruction of human flesh, animal flesh, the environment at large, and all future generations of human beings.

Apparently, in China, nuclear is cost competitive, probably since nuclear energy saves lives that would otherwise be lost to "traditional" air pollution, and "modern" air pollution, climate change.

Have a nice evening and a wonderful day tomorrow.

[Fred Sanders]

1. Solar is just getting started. True disruption to other sources is not in our lifetime.

German scientists' projections:

[NNadir]

3. Yeah. I know. Solar has been "just getting started" since 1954.

It's a trival and useless form of energy that will never be clean and will never be sustainable.

I'm an old man; and I've been hearing these useless predictions my whole damn life. You do realize, don't you that the solar cell was invented in 1954?

The result in the inexplicably popular but dangerous faith in solar energy is that the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste reached more than 411 ppm this year, despite the fact that the asshole Amory Lovins predicted in 1976 that by the year 2000 the United States would be producing 20 "Quads," (1 Quad = 1.055 exajoule) of energy.

On the whole dying planet, the solar industry doesn't produce 2 quads as of 2018, despite the production of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of soothsaying graphics like the one you produced here, year after year, decade after decade, 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide after 100's of billion tons.

Do you have any idea of how many similar soothsaying graphics I've seen in my lifetime? I'm not young, but I was seeing them when I was.

This bullshit is irresponsible and frankly criminal, since it dumps responsibility on future generations to do what we have been unable to do ourselves.

Here's the 1954 Bell Labs ad telling us that solar energy would save the day:



Guess what? It didn't save the day.

The great "benefit" for mankind has proved to be wishful thinking, massive environmental destruction and an industry that can't even produce enough energy to power all the computers and servers dedicated to saying how great it is.

[Fred Sanders]

8. Uh, first it is an ad and so hyperbole is par. Second, it is one battery. See no claim it is going

to save the world.

Using strawmen constantly to try to knock down the obvious surge in solar use consistent with the graph weakens your entire premise of anti-solar.

[NickB79]

11. So is climate change

And it's already getting pretty bad globally. 410 ppm, rapidly rising towards 500+ in a few decades, will make large swathes of the planet unliveable.

If we aren't completely off fossil fuels in 20-30 years, the very definition of "lifetime" may get revised down a few decades as civilization starts to collapse.

[Eko]

2. Tired of this crap.

If you are going to call me an asshole you should do it right to me. I am also tired of you strawmaning me all the time. Here is the link to where I talk to NNadir about Hanford and I do nothing she said I did. https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127109489

[Fred Sanders]

9. I got the same Strawman!

[sfwriter]

4. So this is the convincing part of your arguent...

And this is going to sound a lot more harsh than I intend. My aim is not to belittle. I am interested in the answer.

"Not in China. Not in China. In China, "nuclear takes too long" is a Trumpian scale lie, as it was, by the way, in the period between 1960 and 1980 in the United States. Of course, today, in similar Trumpian scale distortions, people confidently assert that what has already happened is impossible.

We may add to this complaint about "taking too long" the complaint that "nuclear is not competitive" made by the kind of asshole who thinks, say, for instance, that the collapse of a tunnel at the Hanford Nuclear Weapons plant was a world class disaster while climate change, um, isn't. This kind of asshole can't figure out that if it takes two systems to do what one system can do alone, the cost of both needs to be included in the overall cost. This kind of asshole is also the kind of asshole who pays no attention whatsoever to external costs, the costs of the destruction of human flesh, animal flesh, the environment at large, and all future generations of human beings. "

Calling them assholes really wins them over, huh?

Let me be that asshole for a moment. I'm really curious, why do you think Nuclear fails economically in the United States?

It's not the political fear of nuclear played up by by a cold war weapons complex that dictated the framing of the word "nuclear" as remote and dangerous for three generations, resulting in the brainwashed "assholes" as you so eloquently describe them. They are a side effect of a culture that conflated nuclear power and nuclear weapons with the nuclear nightmares for three generations. I'm not surprised that a generation that grew up on radioactive monster movies and duck and cover are leery of nuclear energy. Same goes for the ones that watched Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishima. All big televised disasters, primetime disasters that walled of entire regions from habitation. You can point out these images aren't fair, the land around Fukishima is habitable. Hell, Hiroshima and Nagasaki thrive. I get you, that fear is unreasonable. But that fear is real, and it is irrelevant. We don't vote nuclear power plants int existence.

Nuclear power is an economic decision. But why is nuclear so expensive, and so uninsurable that the government has to be the underwriter? China is a command economy. China can improve their nuclear industry where ours is bound to the marketplace, except for the risk, that is fully socialized.

I grew up in and around Oak Ridge Tennessee. It took me until college (1990s) to realize that people had a problem with nuclear power. I grew up with no nuclear fears. I knew nuclear scientists as a kid and saw designs for pebble bed and molten salt reactors that promised to be cleaner, safer and less bound to the nuclear weapons industry than what we actually built. They were "cheaper than coal" as one display proclaimed at my beloved childhood haunt, the Museum of Science and Energy proclaimed. Power would be "unmetered." That was written by an engineer, not an economist. If China is getting there, then great, at least someone is doing it. Maybe they will invent cheap, unmetered nuclear and sell those Oak Ridge designs back to us.

But I don't think anti-nuclear activists kill nuclear power, that happens in board rooms and accounting departments. What kills nuclear power? It isn't preference. You said, "people confidently assert that what has already happened is impossible." Fuck those people, do they even matter? Which people specifically? I don't get to vote on building nuclear power plants any more that I get a say over the water system in my town, or what's in my wieners, or whether we get power from coal. That decision is made by experts and technocrats, and I don't think they are swayed by what we both agree are phantom fears.

What causes nuclear power to fail economically? Does that fear translate into regulation? Nuclear power has always been heavily regulated because of the real harm unregulated fissionable material could cause. No way the government steps out of that game. You think those Chinese plants lack regulation? The Chinese perfected bureaucracy when westerners still though Feudalism was an economic breakthrough. Is the cost caused by NIMBYism? Lots of industries face that from refineries to tanneries. We still find room for them somehow. Is it the designs themselves? They are not the most efficient. It can't be the off-book accounting in lives you often cite? Our whole economy is based on not seeing the true cost of anything.

I'm honestly curious, because the screeds you write come across as rabidly anti-renewable when I don't see anyone choosing renewable over nuclear. They choose renewable over coal. Nuclear never even got considered. Why?

I do not know the answer, but without a new solution that comes from understanding that answer, I don't see things changing. I don't see it changing until things get a lot more desperate, resulting in the kind of command efficiency that China enjoys, and I don't see how that happens without bloodshed, because thems that own the property sure the hell aren't giving up their capitalism and economics to save poor kids from asthma, black lung and cancer.

I'm curious, why does Nuclear fail economically? If the answer is because we don't keep all deaths on the same balance sheet, then your fight is with capitalism, not wind and solar.

[John ONeill]

12. 'I don't see anyone choosing renewable over nuclear. They choose renewable over coal.'

'I don't see anyone choosing renewable over nuclear. They choose renewable over coal.' The Germans have chosen coal over nuclear - the last of the reactors which used to provide nearly a third of the country's power will close by 2022, while there is no plan on when to phase out the coal plants, by far the largest power source now.
In the US, Democrat-led states have been closing nuclear plants to the benefit of natural gas - San Onofre in California, and Vermont Yankee, have mainly been replaced by gas power. Diablo Canyon will supposedly be substituted by mandatory solar roofs, but as soon as the sun sets or the clouds move in, the gas turbines will be busy making CO2 ( unless maybe Michael Shellenberger gets to be Governor.) Even is sunny California, solar gets less than a third of nuclear's capacity factor, and over most of the country, rather less.

[sfwriter]

14. I thought the thread concerned the US market.

[NNadir]

15. By your logic...

...if I'm nice to Mitch McConnell he'll become a Democrat.

Sorry, but some assholes are assholes. They cannot be convinced of anything. If one is discussing the origin of life in connection with the asymmetry of amino acids found in the Murchinson meteorite, it isn't going to be useful to continue the discussion if the subject turns to quotes from Genesis.

As for your comments about "board rooms," it may be suitable for people who only care about money, and nothing else.

I am not making an argument saying that I'm personally OK with people who care only about money and nothing else. I do find amusing that people who make noise about being environmentalists and liberals turn into laissez faire capitalists of the Ayn Rand ilk whenever nuclear energy is discussed.

Neither am I concerned about the use of the word "could" as in "harm nuclear could cause," but with with the word "are"
as in "7,000,000 people are killed each by air pollution."

I link this paper from one of the world's most prestigious medical journals again and again and again, but somehow the very, very, very, very basic fact concerning the death toll of air pollution can't get through to people who elevate their fantasies about "nuclear danger" over the reality of fossil fuel and biomass's death toll doesn't get through:

A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)

I often invite people who tell me they are "honestly curious" to use one such evocation, while they are concerned about "nuclear dangers" to travel to a basic scientific library - in your case this might involve taking the BART to Berkeley - to access the paper and see where, in the huge tables reporting the overall causes of human mortality on this planet, "nuclear accidents" is listed, or "exposure to (so called) 'nuclear waste'" is listed.

You know what the difference between so called "nuclear waste" and dangerous fossil fuel waste is? Used nuclear fuels in this country have been successfully contained at the place where they were used for half a century without killing anyone, whereas dangerous fossil fuel waste is indiscriminately dumped directly into what they regard (in board rooms and common parlance) as a waste dump, the planetary atmosphere.

Coal waste contains mercury, solar wastes contain cadmium. Do these materials have half lives? Do they obey the Bateman equation and are thus subject to maximum accumulations dictated by secular equilibria? No, they do not and are not.

I'll take this argument more seriously when the same people making it report that natural gas, coal and petroleum should be required to keep their "waste" contained for eternity in such a way that no one can imagine anyone, anywhere ever dying at any time ever.

I hear all the time from people making this specious selective attention argument that what they (not I) call "nuclear waste" lasts for "x million years" where the value of x is defined by how poor their scientific educations are.

Now, about regulation: If I were to regulate anything - and I won't be allowed to do so because I'm a voice in the wilderness - I would make regulations requiring that each current generation do the best for future generations.

An asshole - and yes is the correct word - who sits in a board room thinking only about short term profits and building gas and subsidized toxic solar garbage plants to gain short time profits is deliberately making future generations pay for his or her decision. If gas were required - as nuclear is - to contain it's external costs, there wouldn't be one fucking gas plant on this planet. The subsidy for the gas industry is climate change; it's the radium laced flowback water in Pennsylvania, it's the chemical pollutants from fracturing operations in surface and ground water, it's leaving all future generations with no resources and vast amounts of waste to clean up, including waste in a destroyed atmosphere.

I am rabidly against so called "renewables," because the word "renewable" as applied to short term crap with an extremely low energy to mass ratio is a Trump scale distortion - a lie - particularly when it requires redundant systems to operate, systems that are almost always gas based because of very low capacity utilization and random availability. A similar distortion is the tiresome and often repeated lie that so called "renewables" replace coal. They do not, because they cannot not. No system that operates at the whim of the weather can displace a system that has high capacity utilization. Coal plants have the second highest capacity utilization in the United States, roughly 70-80% as compared to nuclear's 90%. If one shuts a coal plant because the wind is blowing for a few hours, a very simple experiment that anyone with a kitchen, a faucet, and a pot can do shows what happens in terms of energy. The experiment involves boiling water, shutting the boiling pot off for an hour and turning it on again. In the period during which the pot cools energy is being wasted.

If you are serious, think.

I'm unimpressed, by the way, that you lived next to nuclear engineers at Oak Ridge. I'm a chemist. I've talked to my neighbor's kids at various times, sometimes about chemistry. None of them are, as a result, competent however to understand advanced chemistry, although it may have helped them in a tiny bit in their high school chemistry classes. From your remarks, you seem not to have learned very much from your neighbors at Oak Ridge. That's too bad. It should have been a better place to grow up than what you apparently made of it.

I have, by the way, no sympathy with the specious argument about "capitalism" being the subject about which my argument is It is very much about solar and wind; the fact that two trillion dollars has been squandered on them in the last ten years alone, this on a planet where two billion people lack access to basic sanitation, squandered for no result. My argument is about climate change. Despite these trillions of dollars, the rate of accumulation of dangerous fossil fuel waste accumulation is accelerating, not decelerating.

I'm a highly educated person who has read widely, often on topics that have nothing to do with my professional work. I don't like simplistic statements. They're lazy and they're garbage. (Regrettably we live in the twitter age, where no thoughts are expressed in more than 20 or 30 words are valued.) I find an argument that some big, bad capitalist somewhere is responsible for all the world's ills and that all other individuals are excused to be obscene and, on the part of people making them, self serving.

I note that most of the people I personally encounter handing out this self excusing nonsense are appallingly bourgeois.

In your comment, you have dragged out many of the tiresome and again, specious arguments that anti-nukes make, including some of the worst, including the obviously fraudulent statement that so called "renewables" are an alternative to coal.

If we were serious, we'd stop lying to ourselves.

I would submit that all of us, myself included since I am using electricity to write this post that is partially generated by dangerous fossil fuels - although some comes from New Jersey's nuclear plants - have responsibility for this grotesque attack we are conducting on all future generations.

If you want to know why in 2018, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere hit 411 ppm, and why, in the 21st century the rate of accumulation has doubled as compared to the rate in the 21st century, you might try looking in the mirror.

Have a pleasant Sunday and enjoy drinking that San Francisco water - however much of it remains - access for which the Hetch Hetchy Valley was destroyed, giving us all the privilege of "renewable" electricity on the side. Although it's probably some of the best water in the world, whenever I think of it, it breaks my heart a little.

[GeorgeGist]

5. Move to China ...

you'll obviously be happier.

[NNadir]

6. Actually, I love my country and despise the morons who are making it unsafe...

...by making it more dependent on dangerous fossil fuels.

I'm not a shit for brains who's about to abandon my country, and by extension, the world by idiot platitudes like, "move to China."

However this said, only a xenophobic moron like the one in the White House believes that Americans can't learn from the success of other cultures.

I personally know a large number of Chinese born scientists who came here to learn from us, some who stayed, and some who went back.

They profited by the exchange.

Now if there are people who are too stupid to understand that, and to learn from it, there's nothing I can do about it, but willful optimist that I am, I know that despite the general popularity of ignorance, smart and reasonable people exist right here in America, if not in the present company, then elsewhere.

I'm not about to leave my country because there are so many ignoramuses in it who hate the science developed here by a wide array of Nobel Laureates and prominent scientists in the middle of the 20th century, that science being um, nuclear science.

I am a scientist and I deplore the popular hatred of science and engineering on both far ends of the political spectrum, creationism and climate denial on the right, and anti-nuke, anti-GMO, anti-vaxing nonsense on the far left.

Nuclear was an American invention largely and if there are Americans who are too ignorant to understand what it can do, I'm not about to give this country to them, any more than I'm willing to surrender my country to Putin worshiping racists.

Nuclear energy is the last best hope of the human race and until I die I plan to fight to see that recognized. It is already too late for it to do what it might have done, but nothing else will do as much.

Seven million people will die this year from air pollution, and even if you don't give a shit, I do.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[Fred Sanders]

10. I am actually with you on nuclear. Pocket nuclear plants today, without being a expert, seem

far safer than the days yore.

Fukushima was a freak accident, an act of God, not an accident of design or function.

To me nuclear is now far less dangerous than fossil fuel....turns out it always was!

How man killed by toxic air and water via fossil fuel discharges versus nuclear deaths, not via a bombing? Millions versus a hundred?

As others have said you could really get your point across better if you did not randomly insert very non-scientist insults into your discourses. Just saying.

[NNadir]

13. Thank you for your civil and kind suggestion about an approach to, um, "getting my point across."

Of course, as you might imagine, it's hardly the first time I've heard a similar suggestion about how I might better persuade people to hold a certain viewpoint.

It's quite possible that I've heard hundreds of similar suggestions over the years.

I would crudely estimate that about 80% of similar suggestions come from anti-nukes, many of whom like to engage in the pretense that they have open minds.

I can actually date the year in which I changed my mind about nuclear energy becoming a pronuke person, after having spent many years previous being a dumb ass anti-nuke. It was 1986, when I began to look into the situation at Chernobyl. Having been a dumb ass poorly educated anti-nuke myself - although I trained as a chemist, none of the institutions I attended offered a single course in nuclear chemistry (few institutions do) - I needed to educate myself about nuclear chemistry, nuclear engineering, and general nuclear science, mostly at the level of neutronics.

The reason I changed my mind is because I had been trained by dumb ass anti-nuke rhetoric, which I accepted uncritically as a participant in the vast anti-nuke circle of grotesque ignorance, to believe that Chernobyl would kill hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people.

Now this idea may not be popular among anti-nukes, since no amount of information can make them change their minds, but over the years I've come to believe that experiment trumps theory. (Under current conditions the language needs another word for "trumps," but I'm stuck with it here.) The results of the unintentional "experiment" at Chernobyl are in. It killed people, to be sure, and it was a very bad event, not just because of the physical damage it undeniably caused, but especially because it gave extremely ignorant people a talking point to do great damage to humanity.

Anti-nukism kills people, because nuclear energy overall saves lives, on balance.

Balance...

Now a word about the much recently discussed - in a completely absurd fashion - topic of "civility."

Kelly Ann Conway is an extremely ignorant person who clearly lacks in intelligence, education, and a fragment of human decency. She who has devoted her life to doing great damage to humanity by producing propaganda for the most clearly evil person ever to live in the White House, a corrupt, venal, thug who compromises the stated (if hardly lived) principles of even his supporters, never mind Americans as a whole. Every word that comes out of her mouth is raw sewage. I would be very surprised to learn that even 10% of the members here would be inclined to treat Kelly Ann Conway, or any in the set of her peers with a shred of civility. I am most definitely in the estimated 90% who thinks she is beneath contempt and does not deserve an iota of respect.

Now. I've been an advocate for nuclear energy for over 30 years. You say that you are not a nuclear expert but support nuclear energy. That's fine with me.

I will state that I am a nuclear expert, because I've made it my habit to dig deeper and deeper into the details of the topic at the highest publicly available level, the level of the primary scientific literature. I have traveled deep into the bowels of academic libraries to locate copies of papers published in obscure journals in the 1950's - there are research librarians who have come to know me personally, at least by face. I can also intelligently discuss recent nuclear publications: Just this morning (for an obscure example) I was reading (in connection with Fukushima) a paper on the effect of chloride ions on the oxygen potential related to the chromium component of zircaloy-4 in the cladding in used nuclear fuel in the presence of highly oxidizing hydroxyradicals.

As it happens, at the risk of encouraging the flights of innuendo and idiocy of the ignorant anti-nuke community, the cladding in used nuclear fuel does corrode faster than used nuclear fuel in water with controlled chemistry, and thus the cladding in the pools at Fukushima, where the pools were temporarily cooled with seawater, had accelerated corrosion. The question is not whether or not this is a good thing or not; clearly it isn't. The questions are "does it matter?" and "Is it significant?"

Suppose a used nuclear fuel cladding is breached. Would this mean that all of the radionuclides would instantaneously find its way into baby food and concentrate there? How many people would be injured or killed if the fuel was breached? As many as will die in the next two hours and every period of two hours thereafter from air pollution?

The tacit assumption in these representations is that a single radioactive atom is somehow worse than a ton of mercury routinely released by coal plants, never mind 31 billion tons of carbon dioxide every damned year.

Now I referred to a particular instance - without naming the person - of an anti-nuke asshole in the OP here. The selection of this particular asshole is somewhat generic. Just as we generalize at DU about Trump supporters, after 30 years of often direct experience with these intellectual and moral human disaster zones, I generalize about anti-nukes. To my mind the individual variances among them are without interest. What is of interest is that they are working to cause great harm, much as Kelly Ann Conway is working to cause great harm.

Instead of referring to the asshole who carried on about the Hanford tunnel, I could have chosen to refer to another such asshole, for example the asshole who used to write here who believed that having temporary access to a tritium based RIA kit put him on a level to judge the life's work of Glenn Seaborg, or the asshole who loved to report about how much money was being spent on so called "renewable energy" because it was so popular, or any of a vast array of similar anti-nukes who embrace equally specious rhetoric.

Now here is one of the many lists of logical fallacies available by simple googling on the internet: 15 logical fallacies

I am personally known for engaging in the use of the ad hominem fallacy, especially before I came to my senses, and realized that some people are so stupid that there is no value in engaging directly with them on any level, and began using the wonderful "ignore" key here. I do use logical fallacies from time to time, because most often, I am addressing people who utilize all or most of them unashamedly. I don't believe in unilateral disarmament; I think it would be an ethical mistake to be civil to Kelly Ann Conway, or Donald Trump or a generic anti-nuke. So, I'm completely comfortable to using the term "asshole" to describe anti-nukes in the generic general sense.

The overwhelming majority of the posts I write here are either in this forum, or in the science forum, and of those, the overwhelming majority of these refer to papers in the primary scientific literature that I excerpt and include some editorial derision directed at the anti-nuke community of idiots. Now, in my case, these idiots have proved to be useful idiots for me, because, as a political liberal, I used to embrace the idea that so called "renewable energy" is a good and viable thing. This is not even remotely true, as it turns out, but I rather blindly accepted that it was true until I began to look into some of the claims made by people who were not interested in replacing dangerous fossil fuels with so called "renewable energy" but rather with replacing what proves to be the only available sustainable form of energy there is, nuclear energy.

I recently heard a dumb guy, the head of the Sierra Club in New Jersey, make the Trumpian scale lie - this at was advertised as the "New Jersey March for Science" which proved to be, much to my chagrin, the "New Jersey March for Renewable Energy." The lie, addressed to a person who noted the toxicology associated with the failed and unacceptably expensive solar industry, was the claim that "solar cells are becoming less toxic."

Now the most efficient lab scale solar cells, with thermodynamic efficiencies greater than 20%, are perovskite solar cells. The perovskites most often discussed are based on lead iodide, lead being the neurotoxic element that has been widely distributed by the coal, automotive (historically), and plumbing industry. This has lead to disasters like, but hardly limited to, the Flint, Michigan crisis. Now before us is a proposal to distribute lead solar cells for "distributed energy" with as little consideration as went into the distribution of lead for the distributed energy device known as the authomobile.

Now let us consider the specific asshole to whom I referred in the OP, although I certainly had a huge array of other equally generic assholes to whom I could have referred instead of this particular asshole:

I wrote a commentary on a proposal to recycle lead perovskite solar cells even before the disaster of making and selling them actually takes place. This a fantasy designed to put lipstick on an unacceptable pig: Recycling low energy to mass density materials that are widely distributed further degrades their already unacceptably low energy return.

Most of my highly technical posts in this space sink like rocks; which is perfectly fine with me. If some is amused by one or if someone actually profits by reading one, that's great, but my purpose in writing them is to force me to think about a subject I find interesting or useful either for rhetorical or practical reasons.

The post in question did just that, sank like a rock, only to reappear a few weeks later. Was the post that brought it back up a post about recycling lead perovskites or a comment on the (dirty) process by which the recycling was described? Did it relate to the sustainability of solar cells?

No. It was a comment about the collapse of a tunnel at the Hanford nuclear weapons plant...

Now. Here is how I described myself 11 years ago on another political website:

Here is the problem with my tone: I am extremely arrogant, extremely conceited, dismissive, insulting, fierce and rude. Other than those small drawbacks, I think I'm a nice guy. I have, I think, a number of strengths, but modesty and grace aren't necessarily among them, even though by any independent standard, I'm no great shakes...

(I wrote this about myself as part of a blogsphere apology, an apology I now regard as a mistake. The Nuclear Shill Apologizes.

Now suppose I point out that Donald Trump is "extremely arrogant, extremely conceited, dismissive, insulting, fierce and rude." Would this prove that I am not "extremely arrogant, extremely conceited, dismissive, insulting, fierce and rude." Of course not. The fact that Donald Trump is "extremely arrogant, extremely conceited, dismissive, insulting, fierce and rude," has no bearing whatsoever on whether I am also "extremely arrogant, extremely conceited, dismissive, insulting, fierce and rude."

Arguments of this type touch upon the Tu Quoque fallacy which is very popular among the right wing assholes in the Republican party, including the awful orange excuse for a "President."

Among the logical fallacies in raising a point about a Hanford tunnel collapse in a post about recycling lead laced solar cells are the red herring fallacy, the Hasty Generalization Fallacy (a claim that a particular instance of a problem with a radioactive site implies all nuclear operations are problematic), faulty comparison...etc...etc...etc.

Now as it happens, I did interact briefly with the dullard in question only to end up violating the rule here against ad hominem attacks. In addition, the person here was so stupid that I found my blood pressure rising.

To what end?

The asshole pretended to be open minded - a Trumpian scale misrepresentation - and "not really opposed to nuclear energy" but experience teaches that this sort of generic person is just full of shit. I neither knew or cared about this person before hand, but apparently he or she was familiar with me, familiar enough to stew for a few weeks over a post that pointed to a real problem with the expensive, toxic and useless solar industry to raise a point about problems with a nuclear issue, albeit one that had nothing to do with nuclear power (or recycling elements from toxic solar cells) but actually related to nuclear weapons, the latter, by the way, being a class of objects I generally oppose.

Now we could argue that fertilizer is dangerous because of the fertilizer terrorist Timothy McVeigh who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building using ammonium nitrate fertilizer along with dangerous diesel fuel.

An argument that fertilizer is a bad thing - and there are many environmental problems with fertilizer that have nothing to do with terrorism - might have, were it to succeed, an effect upon the survival of billions of people who need to eat using foods grown with the use of fertilizer.

Thus, like nuclear energy, the use of fertilizer needs risk/benefit analysis, balance.

But let's turn finally to the basic assumption that you make in arguing that I should be polite, which is that my tone is ineffective at changing people's minds. The assumption is that this is my goal, to make people change their minds. Often closed minded anti-nukes try to claim that they would in fact be more reasonable if I weren't rude and obnoxious, which is also bullshit, since no reasonable argument politely stated would have any effect on them whatsoever.

If I scream at someone on a roadway in the path of a speeding truck, "Hey! Get out of the road asshole!" it would not serve their interests nor the interests of the truck driver if they respond, "Ask me nicely and I'll consider it."

Anti-nuke ignorance kills people. There's nothing nice to say about that.

The fact is that I neither believe that these people can change their minds, nor am I attempting to change their minds.

I'm an old man. I'm seeing and deeply regretting what my awful generation is leaving behind. My goal in writing here, beyond clarifying things in my own mind is to express anger.

I stated it elsewhere thusly:

Thanks for your friendly suggestion, but...
...let me explain why I write the diaries the way I do.

The process by which I write my science diaries here begins with a scan of the usual journals that I read - although I do mix it up here and there and try to include some journals that I usually don't usually read - until I find some paper relevant to the on going catastrophe that I think I might be able to use to construct a poll here.

The polls are the thing itself.

Generally this list might involve 20 or 30 papers.

I narrow the list by deciding which paper involves a subject that I would like to know more about - since I always learn something when I write the diaries.

Writing this one while collecting the references from the original paper, for instance, I learned that the death toll from the 2003 European heat wave is estimated to be 70,000 people.

I didn't know that until two days ago.

When I was a younger man, I used to be very serious about writing, and engaged in lots of rewrites. Although there are exceptions in my diaries here, what I try to do is here now (partially because of time constraints) free write: Blurt out what comes into my mind as the diary evolves.

I think this shows up in the sometimes confusing rambling that my diaries sometimes involve.

I cannot read the things I read - for instance about the 70,000 deaths - without being simultaneously angry and filled with a sense of the absurd, and usually by the end, the anger just pours out.

The writer Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that he never felt as if he had absolute control over the lives of the characters in his novel: He compared himself to a puppeteer: A peppeteer (sic) with elastic strings.

So it is with my diaries.

I don't generally have time to fix them, which is why they sometimes appear with grammatic errors and mispellings. I might go back and change something a year or so later, but that's long after they've gone down the memory hole.

And, the truth is, really I don't want them to be nice.

You read scientific papers, and you recognize that they are often about real tragedy, real human tragedy, and the authors are trapped in this polite and gracious writing style.

The last excerpt from the Nature Climate Change paper above is about as strongly emotional as one sees, but look, they can't say, scream "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE INSIPID JOURNALISTS!?!" can they?

The editors wouldn't allow it.

We're supposed to be "polite."

Well there are no editors here. This place has its flaws and its frustrations, but it has no editors.

I have to think that there are a lot of scientists who want to do more than be politefeel it some of them: Jim Hansen for instance in "Storms of my Grandchildren.

I mean, 70,000 people dead from heat and we are all about the "radioactive" tuna fish?

I'm not writing here to save myself or to make myself seem neat, or professional or kind. I'm none of those things.

I'm just screaming.

I'm screaming in hopes of letting someone in the next generations know - should any of them ever read any of this - that someone cared about what we were doing to them, someone tried to stop it, that some of us weren't seeking to live in some kind of sybaritic narcotic haze where we didn't have to know anything and just did what we damn well pleased to do in the moment.

But that hope too - that someone will notice what I say and what I tried to do - is like the hope that humanity would have addressed climate change before it was too late, is nothing.

(Hence the Shakespear paraphrase above: "He should have died hereafter..." )

This is a backwater website; and I'm a minor writer on it; nothing that I say is likely to accomplish anything or even survive long; but if, by some accident, something of my work is noticed and survives, I want it to seem that I least I tried to do something.

I appreciate your kind words, and kind suggestion but these diaries have been this way a long time and I'm afraid I don't really control them as much as they control me.

Peace.

Comment in "Is It Just the Weather?"

By the way, I was banned from that website for crudely telling the truth.

Here's the comment that got me banned:

Did anyone die from radiation at Fukuishima, anything like the 37 dead yesterday from the oil train crash? The 167 who died at the Piper Alpha explosion? Anything like the 200,000+ who died from the great Banqioa renewable energy dam collapse?

The great climate scientist Jim Hansen has published in the primary scientific literature a paper with something called scientific references, data that shows that nuclear energy 1.8 million lives. (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895) Hansen shows that were it not for fear and ignorance, nuclear energy might save 10 million lives more, with just a minor tech.

It follows that anti-nukes are not merely enemies of the people, they are murderers, pure and simple, murderers whose weapons are fear and ignorance.

Have a nice of evening.

Now "Kos" worked to elect Barack Obama, something I very much agreed was a good thing, and Barack Obama chose Nobel Laureate Stephen Chu to be his first Secretary of Energy, who then worked to restart the building of nuclear power plants in the United States, an effort thwarted by the lie that natural gas energy is cheap, which it isn't if one includes - as is not practiced - external costs.

But Kos's energy views are ignorant, as are the views of his equally energy ignorant journalist Tim Lange. They are efforts to kill people by opposing clean energy and allowing dirty energy not only to persist but expand. My statement above is true, and since Kos owns his website, he is perfectly free to ban me, which he did.

That power however does not make him any less asinine however; and one good thing - working to elect Obama - does not imply that the bad thing he's done, the evil thing - opposing nuclear energy - is either admirable or morally or intellectually acceptable. Both activities stand or fall on their own merits independent of one another.

People have written me to suggest I should apologize to Kos. For what? Telling the truth? This is an ass who once had his front page writers falling all over themselves to praise the "science of Jim Hansen" until Jim Hansen said something that they didn't like.

How does this make them different from Jim Inhofe or Mitch McConnell, the claim that science is valid if and only if it jibes with their political rhetoric?

Actually both sides are expressing contempt for science and scientists in order to aggrandize what is, in fact, awful political rhetoric.

No, I am not going to "be nice." Thanks for the suggestion, but there's nothing worthwhile in it. The planetary atmosphere is collapsing and there is nothing at all that I can do about it other than to scream into the void.

Thanks, again, for your suggestion. Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[Fred Sanders]

16. Thank you for the response, I am truly flattered, as much as I can be given my resistance to

flattery of any kind...ulterior motives seem to always be a handmaiden to flattery. I did not choos Grumpy Cat as my avatar for no good reason.

Anyhow...you make a compelling argument for nuclear, but for nuclear in the absence of renewable.

Because a power generation damn burst and killed people, as more than one has, is no reason to ban dams!

Isn't that an example of the Tu Quoque fallacy? Because once a dam failed, we should ban all dams?

"The Ancient Greeks were some of the greatest thinkers. They had slaves, so we should have slaves too."

I believe all forms of renewable and nuclear can live in harmony...as do most liberal folks I believe, and it is not due to propganda, it is due to real day happenings...hybrid cars, electric cars, homes both remote and in cities powered by solar. It is happening, it is progressive and it is cumulative.

We are a long way from any kind of tipping point, any kind of real disruption but it is inevitable.

Not filling the gap between now and the agreed still distant, but not as distant as you suggest, future with nuclear is indeed a triumph of fear and political propaganda over science...not my cuppa logic.

Again, thank you for your kind response...I read every word with interest.

[John ONeill]

18. Are renewables useful ?

I think Nnadir is correct, that renewables - intermittent ones, anyway - are a mere distraction, and will make decarbonisation more difficult. Some of the newer high-temperature reactor designs will provide their output heat as molten nitrate salts, ' solar salt ', on the grounds that this can be stored in insulated tanks at times of low power demand, then used to power turbines with several times the reactors' nameplate output, when demand is high. This, it's claimed, will allow the reactor to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. But solar and wind can have such long periods of low power, especially in winter, that in effect you'd have to have the reactors capable of handling the whole load anyway - just as coal and gas do now. If nuclear can do the job alone, and wind and solar can't, why waste money on unreliables ?

[Fred Sanders]

19. Word...Battery...once the power density storage efficiency reaches a certain point, all the energy

can be stored and released at will.

The Tesla Model 3 has two batteries each storing 170 kw each, total range 320 miles, as an example of the leading edge...and Tesla has full electric transport trucks!

What happens if battery storage capacity say, doubles every 5 years? Everything can then be powered by these mega cells.

[NNadir]

20. I do recognize that it is difficult for bourgeois liberals to see so called "renewable energy..."

...for what it is. As a bourgeois liberal myself, I've been there, done that.

I used to believe that so called "renewable energy" was a good thing. I've changed my mind completely. It isn't, if you look into it, not even "renewable." The name for this stuff is a lie, never mind what it actually does, which is very little.

In the period between 2006 and 2016, over 2.0913 trillion dollars were squandered on solar and wind alone.

UNEP Frankfurt Report, Investment in Renewable Energy, Table (Figure) 3, page 14

What do we have to show for it?

The bulk of this money went to solar, trillion dollars. The horrible thing about this is that no one really expects a solar panel to work more than 25 years. Thus a solar panel purchased in 2006 is near the halfway point of its lifetime, whereupon it will become toxic electronic waste.

Combined, this money, wind and solar alone over the last ten years, is approximately equal to the annual gross domestic product of India, a nation with 1.3 billion people in it, many of whom live in dire poverty and are not involved in our fantasies about cars, electric or otherwise.

Frankly I'm not interested either. As I point out here, Current Energy Demand; Ethical Energy Demand; Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come, my political liberalism is connected with my view of the intrinsic worth of every human being, and as such, a fondness for Section 1 of article 25 of the 1948, UN approved, Declaration of Human Rights, which is honored regrettably, more in breach than in practice.

To my mind there is no legitimate reason for nuclear energy "to live in harmony" with so called "renewable energy." Nor am I about to embrace the "Appeal to Popularity" fallacy, by caring whether "most" liberals like so called "renewable energy."

However, I do think that we can take the reluctance to use logical fallacies too far.

In terms of deaths per Gwh of electricity, dams are more dangerous than nuclear power plants, but both types of plants are tough on fresh water supplies, at least as nuclear energy is applied to dams in the general sense. In pointing to this fact, however, I am not arguing that this is the chief reason that dams suck. They are safer than dangerous fossil fuels, and many cities around the world rely on their water. If we get too attached to avoiding rhetorical logical fallacies, we risk losing the willingness to do simple comparisons, and this would greatly damage a happily growing branch of engineering environmental science, "life cycle analysis." We need to do life cycle analysis for all forms of energy and indeed all of the ways we live our lives. To the extent we don't do this - and we don't do it very much at all - we are stealing from future generations, criminally stealing.

Nuclear plants cooled by seawater are a different game, although in an ideal way we'd do more sensible things with so called "waste" heat than dump it. Designing nuclear reactors to operate at much higher temperatures than typical light water reactors will help in recovering waste heat in two pathways, higher thermal efficiency, and more concentrated waste heat.

I note that salt is completely insoluble in water in the supercritical state, and very soluble in liquid water; regrettably very few reactor designs today are capable of heating water to supercritical temperatures and pressures. Designs for doing this are well known, and advances in materials science should make a clear path to avoiding some of the corrosion issues that have vexed the path in the past.

Desalination has some very profound environmental risks of course, but I note that if large amounts of water were removed from the oceans and stored or utilized on continental land masses, this might off set to some extent, albeit probably a minor extent, sea level rise. This might ring a little of geoengineering, but it needs consideration, particularly because of other resources seawater contains besides water and uranium; it is an excellent source of carbon dioxide. In fact the oceans are a huge carbon dioxide extraction device; without it, we'd probably be closer to Venutian climates than we are now.

Dams are not expandable; we are out of new rivers to destroy, and whether rivers survive at all is a function of how bad climate change is, and as we're experiencing around the world this summer, the nightmare is already here. Also dams waste water by significant evaporation, prevent the drainage of salts to the sea, and thus destroy land, destroy important ecosystems, particularly estuarine resources, and otherwise cause they cause unacceptable environmental destruction to important habitats and species.

I'm a free river kind of guy. Although the modern day Sierra Club is devoted to grinding up bats and with wind turbines, and destroying pristine habitats by making them into wind farm industrial parks, it was founded to oppose dams, including the horrible Hetch Hetchy dam. It's too bad that it, and many other ersatz "environmental" organizations have transformed into habitat industrial development advocacy organizations. John Muir had it right, and he'd probably weep over what his legacy has become.

David Brower "traded" - without any authorization to do so - the Glen Canyon for the Grand Canyon - yes there were proposals to make it into a reservoir - and the Glen Canyon dam should be removed in my opinion, although generations will be required to restore Glen Canyon to what it was, likewise the Hetch Hetchy valley. (Glen Canyon has done a fan dance with humanity in the recent droughts; they'll be more as the effects of climate change get even worse than what we are seeing in 2018.)

I do believe, understanding the enormous risk of changing saline flows in the oceans, that properly managed, desalination could be preferable to dams. I say this knowing that the only real viable option for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a challenging engineering task but one which may be possible, or at the edge of possible, goes through seawater. By exploiting the electrochemistry associated with salt gradients, it may be possible to recover some of the electricity lost from dams while minimizing brine zones at outfall pipes.

To the extent that desalination can eliminate reliance on dams, it's desirable.

Dams are, I agree, slightly less obnoxious than solar and wind plants, but not all that much so. As a whole, all so called "renewable energy" schemes are all failed and unnecessary technologies. None of them can be as clean and as sustainable at nuclear energy. The so called "renewable energy" scheme is a scheme to make two systems do what one can do, and this has implications both in the thermodynamic and (as follows) the environmental sense. This is, I note, inclusive of batteries. Batteries waste energy.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[hunter]

21. Laos dam collapse: Many feared dead as floods hit villages

At least 20 people have been killed and more than 100 are missing in flooding following the collapse of an under-construction dam in south-east Laos.

Workers found the hydroelectric dam in Attapeu province was partially damaged on Sunday, and villagers living nearby were evacuated.

The dam collapsed late on Monday, sending flash floods through six villages.

--more--

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44935495

The government in Laos has launched an ambitious dam-building scheme to become the "battery of Asia"

But Fukushima... sigh.

[JayhawkSD]

7. Improvement comes from criticism.

An organization, be it nation, industry or business, which is unwilling to accept criticism can never change, can never grow, can never become better than it presently is. It can only stagnate and fall behind other like enterprises which are willing to examine themselves critically and seek to improve.

A true patriot, one who loves his nation, demands that his nation lives up to its own standards and be the best that it can be.

A true patriot does not denounce free speech as unpatriotic.

[hunter]

17. To the extent this displaces the typical Chinese coal fired power plant...

... this is a win for everyone on planet earth.

For all of us, anti-nuclear or not, it's reasonable to wish this power plant a long, prosperous, and uneventful life.