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On Carbon Dioxide and Nuclear Energy: The Great Divide and How to Cross It
@ThisOldMan
It sounds to me like you have declared victory and are moving on. I am pretty sure, however, that I have refuted what you wrote about Admiral Rickover by providing a more complete context of the isolated quote that you probably found in a publication produced by professional antinuclear activists.
Here is a refutation of your assertion about light water reactors. Every one of the currently operating reactors in the United States uses light water reactor technology. That whole fleet of 103 operating reactors is virtually paid off, with most of the debt incurred to build the machines retired. However, more than 2/3 of the fleet has already received a 20 year extension on its operating license so it can continue to provide electricity for the next 20-30 years.
In that situation it is wonderful to know that the average production cost of electricity from those machines is only 2.19 cents per kilowatt hour. That compares quite favorably the the production cost from "cheap" coal (3.23 cents/kw-hr) and "cheap" natural gas (4.51 cents/kw-hr). It is incredibly cheap compared to those unfortunate places in the US that still depend on burning oil (mostly Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico) - electricity from petroleum has an average production cost of 21.56 cents per kilowatt hour, almost exactly 10 TIMES as much as the cost of producing electricity at a nuclear plant.
Though those 2011 costs admitedly ignore capital costs, they do not ignore regulatory costs or the cost of employing a large number of nuclear professionals at every plant. They do not ignore the cost of mining, enriching and fabricating nuclear fuel. They do not even ignore the cost of both paying the government for the service of removing the used fuel AND paying the cost of storing the used fuel on site because the government is more than 14 years deliquent in starting to perform the service that it forced the utilities to contract from it (with no alternative supplier allowed to provide bids.)
Light water reactors are perhaps not "inherently safe" but they are safe enough. Not a single person in the world has ever died because they were exposed to radiation from a commercial light water nuclear power plant.
Can we make better nuclear technology - sure. Are we already producing nuclear power plants that are effective long term investments that produce electricity that is cheaper than the competition, more reliable than the competition, cleaner than the competition and safer than the competition? You bet.
Why have too few people heard and learned just how good nuclear energy is compared to the competition? Part of the reason is the companies that operate nuclear plants also operate coal and natural gas plants. They do not like to compare the benefits of nuclear against the competition because someone might actually ask them why they have not built more nuclear plants and SHUT DOWN their fossil fuel plants.
In my opinion, a bigger part of the reason is that the advertiser supported "mainstream" commercial media has been bringing you a "word from their sponsors" for the past 50 years that happens to be antinuclear. That is because the competitors to nuclear - coal, natural gas and oil - come from companies that are heavy ad buyers. No one in the media is willing to bite the hands that provide them with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue every year and has ever since the earliest days of large metropolitan newspapers, radio and television.
As a guy who lived within 200 feet of an operating light water reactor for months at a time, I am pretty darned tired of people who claim that we should never build any more light water reactors and should instead wait until better reactors have been designed, tested, and constructed. All that delay does is provide more profits for the multinational petroleum companies.
On Carbon Dioxide and Nuclear Energy: The Great Divide and How to Cross It
Jim - you mischaracterize my comment - I said that fuel that has been out of a reactor for more than about six months will not produce enough heat to boil water. Vapor certainly rises from a used fuel pool, but it also rises from a hot tub and those are generally at about 110 F or less. It rises from a swimming pool or a lake on a cold day.
Transferring heat from the ocean's surface to deep under its surface would not do much to lower the average temperature of the ocean or the volume that it occupies. It would do nothing to slow any potential rise in ocean levels due to global warming.
On Carbon Dioxide and Nuclear Energy: The Great Divide and How to Cross It
Rather than paying attention to an anoymous internet commenter attempting to portray the nuclear opinions of Admiral Rickover, perhaps it might be more informative to read what Ted Rockwell, a currently living wise old man, said about the final testimony to congress provided by his former boss:
"His testimony is published in a 205-page congressional report (and that’s just “Part 1″ of six.). In all those small-print, single-spaced pages, there are only a few sentences, on pages 60 and 61, mentioning abandoning nuclear technology. The subject of the testimony is economics, and this is the Joint Economic Committee. In the first paragraph headed “Nuclear Reactor Safety,” Senator Proxmire opens with the question:
“In view of the experience with Three Mile Island and the other accidents and mishaps, do you believe that civilian nuclear reactors can be operated safely?”
To which Rickover answers “Absolutely, sir.”
On page 60, under “Need for Nuclear Energy,” Rickover says, “Ultimately, we will need nuclear power because we are exhausting our non-renewable energy resources; that is, coal and oil.” Then he diverts to the subject of radiation and the need to control it. And then, “There are, of course, many other things mankind is doing which, in the broadest sense, are having an adverse impact, such as using up scarce resources. I think the human race is ultimately going to wreck itself. It is important that we control these forces and try to eliminate them.”
Note that this talk of restricting use of resources is generic; no mention of nuclear yet. And then, in the next sentence, Rickover says: “In this broad, philosophical sense, I do not believe that nuclear power is worth the present benefits, since it creates radiation. You might ask, why do I design nuclear-powered ships? Because it is a necessary evil. I would sink them all.”
There is more to the story. You can read Ted's full analysis of Admiral Rickover's final testimony at the following URL:
http://atomicinsights.com/2010/11/admiral-rickovers-final-testimony-to-c...
By the way, Ted, Meredith and I openly use our own names and provide plenty of publicly available information about our backgrounds and the source of our knowledge about the safe, reliable, economically competitive operation of CURRENTLY AVAILABLE light water reactors. Those people who claim that nuclear MIGHT be okay if only we do some more research and development and solve its remaining "issues" are actually fossil fuel advocates trying to claim to be nuclear energy supporters.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Resume available for download at http://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/Rod-Adams-resume-web-1-8-12.pdf
On Carbon Dioxide and Nuclear Energy: The Great Divide and How to Cross It
Hurricanes are powerful, but distributed, unfocused and uncontrollable. That is not the kind of power that we need to enable humans society to "do work."
I once studied under the tutelage of Chih Wu (who like to be called "Bob). He was a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the US Naval Academy, but he was also the man who "wrote the book" on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC).
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/EarthSciences/Oceanography...
I took two advanced alternative energy courses from him and then signed up for a semester long research project. After running the numbers for all of the alternatives covered in the courses, including OTEC, and engaging in many after class discussions with Bob, we agreed to produce a paper together on the alternative that made the most sense from a climate, resource and potential cost perspective.
http://www.atomicengines.com/Documents/IASTED_Aug5-7_1992.pdf
Not surprisingly, that alternative was nuclear energy.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show podcast
Founder, Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. (now defunct)
On Cancer, Low Dose Radiation and Fukushima
Policy Analyst - you sound like someone else I know who blogs under her own name.
http://nucleardiner.com/forum/8-health-effects/371-the-effects-of-low-le...
Interestingly enough, I have seen some recent experimental results that show how repair mechanisms can keep up with the rate of damage caused by low levels of radiation with margin to spare.
Here is a link to an article I saw Tweeted this morning by Barry Brook, but there were also stories out of Berkeley and MIT within the past few months.
On Carbon Dioxide and Nuclear Energy: The Great Divide and How to Cross It
Meredith - as a member of the discussion board that you mentioned that banned climate change as a topic because people were getting too acrimonious, I understand your point. I also know that you are one of the nicest people I have ever met and that it distresses you to get involved in acrimony and heated discussion.
As a career military officer, I never shy away from conflict. Since I am kind of a loner who has odd sleeping habits, I am not particularly worried about offending people. I do not go out of my way to be nasty, but I have plenty of family and friends already.
I'm also not trying to build any kind of "movement" in the hopes of ditching my day job to be its leader. I like my day job just fine; in fact, my effort to contribute to the movement of pronuclear supporters is kind of aimed at improving my chances of success at that day job. I figure that the bigger the movement is to support nuclear energy, the more nuclear plant orders and the more work for me and my friends in the business.
For those reasons, plus my very real concern about the large scale experiment that human society has been running for a few centuries by dumping fossil fuel waste into the only known atmosphere in the universe that supports human life as we know it, I never shy away from talking about the climate change aspect of my pro nuclear fervor.
There was a time when I did - every time I mentioned climate change I could predict that Kit P would jump in to tell us all how clean coal was in the US - but I ended up just banning him from my site.
I freely admit that I like burning fossil fuels for such activities as driving, flying and boating. I also believe that the world has some natural sinks that help to mitigate the effects of some burning - our creation is pretty well designed from a systems point of view. However, I know that any differential equation can become unbalanced if production is greater than absorption and I can read the figures to see that CO2 concentration has been increasing at an increasing rate in our atmosphere for about 50 years.
Nuclear is clean enough to operate inside a submarine. It is the most powerful tool available for reducing fossil fuel waste dumping and for giving us a bit of breathing room before we turn our planet back into something that is not terribly hospitable to "naked apes."
On The Challenge of Natural Gas
This might be the first time that I have agreed with a Lou Grinzo article posted on The Energy Collective. I do not believe that natural gas is perfectly evil, but I do believe that the people using natural gas should have to pay the rest of us something for the priviledge of using our common atmosphere as their waste storage solution.
The fairest and most logical proposed method for making that cost clear is James Hansen's Fee and Dividend approach where dumpers pay based on the amount of waste that they put into the atmosphere and 100% of the money that is collected is distributed back to the atmosphere owners on the basis of their natural ownership of that shared resource. Since we all have a right to life, we are all born with an equal share of the atmosphere required to sustain that life.
Low energy costs can lead to low costs for investments that will last for a very long time and pay power dividends for as long as they last. The best place that I know of for those investments is in the form of new nuclear power plants that produce ultra low carbon emissions for many decades while also producing power that you can schedule and control to serve needs for consumers, commercial enterprises, transportation and industrial production.
On Nuclear Roads Not Taken (Yet) in Germany, Japan and the US
@Tom Blees
I am not sure what evidence you expect to find for a hidden conspiracy. There has been an open, relatively well organized and well funded effort to halt the development of nuclear energy that has been in business almost since the first plants were built. I have found evidence dating back to the early 1960s that the fossil fuel industry - particularly the coal industry - recognized the competitive threat to its business posed by a new entry into the market for reliable power.
By the mid 1970s, the effort was large enough so that Ralph Nader could organize a conference with thousand of attedees from dozens of distributed groups that came together to form the Critical Mass Energy Project. One of the planks of that project was that they would use "the waste issue" as a means to constipate the industry.
By the late 1970s, there were rock concerts being organized for the No-nukes effort that attracted tens of thousands of attendees.
There is no need to find evidence of any particular conspiracy against the IFR. It was certainly a well engineered, science based solution that solved many of the supposed questions about nuclear energy, but like all nuclear energy projects it still posed an existential threat to the prosperity of the fossil fuel industry. As you noted, it remains a distruptive technology that threatens many very powerful interests. Those interests are well tuned to their industry and recognized the threat a long time ago.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights. Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
On Lawrence Berkeley National Lab: Breakthrough Study of Low Radiation Dose Effects
@Paul O
I mentioned the AP1000 approval in my most recent post on Atomic Insights. It might show up here, but you can go to http://atomicinsights.com to comment and ask any questions.
It is a major step forward.
Disclosure: I have been accumulating stock in Shaw, Scana, Toshiba, and Curtis Wright and will continue to do so.
On Jaczko Must Go
Amelia:
I have documented a number of specific reasons why I am certain that Greg Jaczko is unfit to serve as the Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If you go to the original version of the post above on Atomic Insights, you will see a list of related posts. Those are only a sample of what you can find if you search Atomic Insights using "Jaczko" as the search term. (It was nice of him to have such a unique moniker; it makes the indexing system pretty easy.)
Here is a brief list:
1. He worked on nuclear energy issues for Rep. Ed Markey, a man who has partially based his political career on fighting against nuclear energy since before Three Mile Island.
2. He worked on nuclear energy issues for Sen. Harry Reid with a singluar focus on ensuring that American law would be ignored. (I actually do not like Yucca Mountain for philosphical reasons that the material is not waste, but fuel. However, there is nothing unsafe about the idea of storing used fuel containers in an arid underground storage locker.)
3. He met with antinuclear activists that he called "community groups" in Vermont to help stoke their concerns about tritium leaks, even though the total amount of material that leaked out was completely harmless. A single person could have ingested all of the tritium in the 150,000 gallons of "contaminated" water and not recieved a dangerous dose of radiation.
4. He publicly questioned the design of the AP1000 in a rather unusual press release in May.
5. He testified to Congress that the used fuel pool for Fukushima Daiichi unit 4 was dry and on fire and used that as the justification for recommending that all Americans within 50 miles of the station evacuate. That was a dangerous recommendation and could have contributed to widespread panic in any country less disciplined than Japan. He ignored the reports that the Japanese were providing, a serious breach of diplomatic respect for a technically astute ally.
6. He has directed his staffers to hide information from other commissioners.
7. He has purposely submitted declining budgets and then claimed that a lack of resources requires his agency to slow down their review of license applications.
8. He has continued to emphasize his commitment to nuclear safety, giving the impression that most of the rest of his 4,000 member agency and the hundreds of thousands of people in the industry that he regulates are NOT concerned about nuclear safety. That is a totally false and misleading impression.
I'm tired. Please go and search Atomic Insights for the rest of my beefs with the appointed Chairman.
Rod Adams, Publisher, Atomic Insights
On Inspiring Vision of Hope for Thorium Powered Future
@CharlesBarton
The public has been taught its irrational fears for reasons that will not disappear no matter how perfect the technology is. I can come up with dozens of reasons - many of them irrational but sellable - why people should fear molten salt reactors.
My point is that a political problem based on carefully crafted marketing messages cannot be overcome with a technical solution. It needs a political solution led by people with the courage to look others in the eye and tell them that they are being sold a bill of goods when they are taught to fear low doses of radiation.
As we have discussed many times, I believe that the proliferation arguments are just another tact of the antinuclear activists who will NEVER be satisfied until we stop using nuclear energy altogether. Their arguments are not based on truth, so any efforts made for a technical solution are doomed to fail.
There is NO energy source without risks, just a whole bunch of them with risks that are acceptable and manageable.
On Nuclear Power Still The Energy of The Future After Fukushima
@BenTen
Thank you for the fine comment.
You have, however, touched on one of my pet peeves. Why do people think that pointing out that businesses plan, businesses fight competition, and businesses raise the barriers to entry in order to protect their profits has anything to do with "conspiracy theory" thinking?
I've taken the courses and read the books - people with business degrees are TRAINED to take effective actions like the above against their competitors! Spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about other sources of the same or similar products is a well tested technique that is part of a broader strategic plan to maintain profits.
Nuclear energy is extremely threatening and distruptive to established energy suppliers. On OBJECTIVE measures, it wins nearly every competition in almost ever energy application with the exception of personal or small industry vehicles.