Keep burning fuel, or go Nuclear?

SeanW

Well, Forsmark did not melt down so there must have been some kind of safety measure, if the coolant system failed what stopped the reactor overheating?
Even if it had gone into meltdown, I assume Forsmark had full primary and secondary containment vessels to prevent large scale radioactive release. Had it gone into meltdown, the disaster would have been financial rather than environmental. The worst that could have happened was another Three Mile Island. Chernobyl had no containment system worth talking about, and no safety system that wasn't switched off for a doomed test.

Although I don't know that much about the incident, my understanding is that Forsmark had a few more lines of defense left. Ovbiously you don't want stuff like that to happen everyday, but then again, it doesn't. Such incidents are extremely rare.

As for your oft repeated red herring about fuel supply
1: Noone's suggesting switching entirely to nuclear power - paralell to a nuclear programme should be renewables investment, energy efficiency initiatives etc.
2: The pattern of nuclear fuel usage has to be looked at. A typical Light Water Reactor uses less than 6% of the Uranium in a fuel assembly. This, after a year in the reactor will become fission products. The other 95-97% is original Uranium. This can be reprocessed into new fuel assemblies with the fission products stripped out. That's what facilities like Sellafield are there for.

The U.S. which is the largest user of nuclear power, does not reprocess its spent fuels, this was actually banned by President Jimmy Carter because of proliferation concerns which is kind of stupid when you consider how many nuclear weapons the U.S. has. This should be reversed - and you can bet it would if there was a Uranium shock.

Secondly, no-one has been looking for Uranium in the last 30 years because up until recently, it's been a buyers market, with oversupply and relatively low prices. This market signal tells Uranium miners "DON'T EXPLORE FOR RESOURCES." There are other blocks to exploration too, such as law in Australia which limits the number of open Uranium mines. Nothing to do with actual reserves.

Thirdly, new reactor types are using less fuel (such as the EPR which uses 16% less fuel), and research continues into other nuclear fuels such as Thorium.

There are plently of ways to augment and make better use of the nuclear fuel supply if for any reason (higher prices) it is required to do so.

El Stuntman

SeanW wrote:

Firstly, nuclear plants emit less radiation than coal-fired power plants of similar condition and megawattage. Source. So the Donegallians wouldn't have to worry about glowing in the dark or anything.

dammit! can we not paint them in day-glo anyway?

SeanW wrote:

Secondly, if you're worried about "the damn thing exploding" like Chernobyl, it simply would not happen. The Chernobyl accident - the only nuclear accident ever to cause widespread environmental damage, was caused by a mile-long list of Soviet blunders, the Soviet Union nuclear programme was little better than a game of Russian Roulette, and what happened there, cannot happen anywhere in the 1st world. Modern nuclear technology and political practice is such that even Bertie couldn't possibly screw up a nuclear programme THAT badly. Though I'm sure he'd try

maybe by making Cullen Minister for Energy? I can see it now....:eek:

piraka

SeanW wrote:

The U.S. which is the largest user of nuclear power, does not reprocess its spent fuels, this was actually banned by President Jimmy Carter because of proliferation concerns which is kind of stupid when you consider how many nuclear weapons the U.S. has. This should be reversed - and you can bet it would if there was a Uranium shock.

It appears that they are on the road of reprocessing spent fuel.

dermot_sheehan

Lennoxschips wrote:

indeed, except with the added bonus that if backup power fails at a nuclear plant you are faced with the imminent threat of a meltdown, because you can no longer power the cooling mechanisms, as the swedes were reminded just this summer



we know that what happened in chernobyl wouldn't happen again, because we have learned from the design errors in that plant - the hard way. i am not so optimistic to think however that after only six decades human kind has mastered the atom to the extent that "it simply would not happen". there's many other things that can still go wrong, but we won't find out till they happen. basically, the nuclear industry has done nothing but lie for half a century. what they used to tell everyone was safe 50 years ago is now widely recognised as being dangerous. call me a cynic, but i won't take their word now either.



if all the world's electricity production was to switch entirely to nuclear power tomorrow morning there'd be less suitable uranium fuel left than the equivalent amount of fossil fuel left.

Pebble reactors anyone? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
Passively safe, in that if they heat up beyond operating temperature, u28 atoms move about more, absorbing more neutrons, shutting the reactor down. There are plenty of current water cooled reactors which don't rely on pumps either, some on submarines for example you convection currents to cut down on the noise emitted.

What Chernoble proved was that the soviet system was inherently flawed in running large scale industries without environmental catastrophes. Considering that in 3 mile island, a similar melt down occured but was contained by the concrete containment dome that the soviets could have built around the chernoble reactors if they so wished.

Also re: lack of uranium, one could use breeder reactors that in addition to producing power, produce new plutonium fuel.

SeanW

piraka wrote:

It appears that they are on the road of reprocessing spent fuel.

Well, I guess Bush did one good thing.

MorriganGael

More technological effeciency in fuel usage. Nuclear stays around for too long harming living creatures.

The smartest thing is to structure the incentives for an economy to use fuel more efficiently. Better insulation to conserve heat, etc.

Also empowering the equatorial nations in Africa with solar technology licenses so they can ship us electricity, would be the long term intelligent option. Fill the Sahara with solar panels, then they could irrigate it, plant crops and triple their income per square kilometer, selling energy and harvesting a crop. Shipping the solar energy on cables under the med and across land to EU and Ireland.

More brains and more engineering efficiency of energy uses.
That's my view.

SeanW

MorriganGael, I would respectfully suggest that you do some research into nuclear power and it's strongest competition - coal.

If you were fully informed, you would know that the vast majority of nuclear plants generate huge amounts of clean electricity without "harming living creatures." The volumes High Level Waste created by the nuclear process is very small, a volumetric representation of the amount of HLW created to supply one person with nuclear electricity for a normal lifetime could fit comfortably in the palm of ones hand. Source. That waste can then be geologically buried using a number of methods, where it will never be in contact with another living creature until it has stabilised many times over.

Coal plants cause much more harm to the environment and living creatures at large, their fuel requirements and emissions and many orders of magnitude greater than comparable nuclear, and contaminents they spew, such as mercury, arsenic and other toxins, unlike radiation, NEVER decay, coal combustion also releases radiation, and an ORNL report found that all things being equal, one would be exposed to more radiation living near a coal plant than a comparable nuclear plant.

The things you mention are all good ideas but they alone simply won't work on their own if we're serious about mitigating the ongoing calamity caused by fossil fuels.

In good conciense, we have no alternative but to embrace nuclear power. It fundamentally makes sense.

Lennoxschips

the whole non sequitur coal argument is getting really tiring

SeanW

I stand over my claim that there's a certain amount of energy demand that will always be fossil fuels (esp coal) versus nuclear. There is no logical fallacy on my part unless you have some kind of evidence or plan for a world that uses neither.

Coal makes up 39% of world power generation, contributing to a total of 65% for generation contribution from fossil fuels. Coal remains the number one competitor to BOTH nuclear power and renewables. It's cheap, its plentiful, and it's absolutely filthy.

So discussion of coal is fair game in any intellectually honest debate about electricity generation. In my view, eliminating as much of the fossil fuel majority as possible should be priority number 1 - and I simply don't see any viable way of doing that without including nuclear power in the anti-fossil arsenal that will be needed.

Sponge Bob

SeanW wrote:

Coal remains the number one competitor to BOTH nuclear power and renewables. It's cheap, its plentiful, and it's absolutely filthy.

Yep yep yep and yep

So discussion of coal is fair game in any intellectually honest debate about

electricity generation. In my view, eliminating as much of the fossil fuel majority as possible should be priority number 1 - and I simply don't see any viable way of doing that without including nuclear power in the anti-fossil arsenal that will be needed.

Correct, nuclear has gone from near 'root of all evil' status 20 years ago after 3 mile Island and Chernobyl to 'least worst' status. Thats in my opinion as a totally anti nuclear person 20 years ago to a supporter as a substitute fuel now.

Do remember that we are an island and that all our main cities are at serious risk from sea level rises. I mean K4 in Newbridge has not got the cachet of D4, does it ????

Lennoxschips

I could say that anybody supporting nuclear power is supporting the proliferation of nuclear weapons by default. But that would be a dumb argument.

Lemming

Lennoxschips wrote:

I could say that anybody supporting nuclear power is supporting the proliferation of nuclear weapons by default. But that would be a dumb argument.

As dumb an argument as saying that anybody supporting microwave emitters beaming power from orbital solar satellites supports orbital laser-death-ray platforms by default :rolleyes:

Or as dumb an argument as saying that anybody supporting the use of oil supports the many "war machines" the world over .....

Or as dumb an argument as saying that anybody who supports science supports weapons development by default since a lot of our technological/medical advances have been through war (regrettably).

Sponge Bob

Lennoxschips wrote:

I could say that anybody supporting nuclear power is supporting the proliferation of nuclear weapons by default. But that would be a dumb argument.

Have you thought that our neighbours , the Brits and French, have vast amounts of nuclear material that they must store for ummm 100,000 years at great cost. They have 80 tons each of Plutonium. They both had Fast Breeder programs to deplete it / convert it into Uranium but have stopped those now.

It hasn't gone away you know.

lostexpectation

do we give seanw an award for keeping a thread alive the longest?

maybe a gold watch to retire it

MorriganGael

Technology application to the waste products of nuclear and fossil fuels.

We can apply the same amount of expense to develop ways to remove the waste pollutants of a coal or oil fired power plant as we do to radiocative waste.

Coal and oil can burn clean if we spend the resources to significantly reduce the emmissions. That same money could go to solar, wind or ocean thermal projects.

I don't think we should pollute our land with radioactive waste that decays with a half-life of 200,000 years. We need to respect our culture and land for future generations. I appreciate people who have the brains to study nuclear engineering, I just wish they would apply those brains to something a little safer.

I know the French built a safe series of reactors with a good safety record, precautions can be made. I just don't think the time is right for us to develop nuclear, because a funding cutback could cause severe problems with waste management.

We can design great reactors, but we can't plan on human economic wisdom.

oscarBravo

lostexpectation wrote:

do we give seanw an award for keeping a thread alive the longest?

maybe a gold watch to retire it

At least his posts contribute to the topic at hand.

The Corinthian

We don’t have much of a choice is the reality.

Fuel efficiency will at best slow our dependency on the rapidly depleting stocks of fossil fuels, but ultimately you can’t be fuel-efficient with nothing, and that is where we’ll end up eventually. Clean energy, be it solar, wind or wave powered simply scratches the surface and fusion power is still just science fiction – it may be achieved in the next fifteen years, but most experts doubt this, with some doubting that it ever will be a practical source of power.

Italy in the 1980's passed a referendum in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster banning the implementation of fission plants. As a result, she is now dependant on electricity from neighbouring countries which use nuclear fission plants. The entire debate was reopened when a power line accident caused the entire country to blackout a few years back. This is the precarious situation we all are increasingly facing – either we use nuclear generated electricity or we’ll end up buying nuclear generated electricity from a neighbour.

The reality is that coal and oil are both running out and there are no practical alternatives to replace them. Sure, we can become more efficient and supplement our dirty power with clean sources, but these are at best delays of the inevitable. We can put things off too in the hope that science fiction becomes science fact, but even there we’re running out of time and unless you really fancy paying €1,000+ per month on your ESB bill in 2020, then we regrettably have little other choice outside of going back to using candles.

Sponge Bob

The Corinthian wrote:

We don’t have much of a choice is the reality.
We regrettably have little other choice outside of going back to using candles.

Thats it in a nutshell. Its now the least worst technology we can deploy for the next 100 years . I was only convinced of this when Lovelock (Mr Gaia Theory) published this famous article of his a few years back.

http://www.ecolo.org/media/articles/articles.in.english/love-indep-24-05-04.htm

[SIZE=-1]What makes global warming so serious and so urgent is that the great Earth system, Gaia, is trapped in a vicious circle of positive feedback. Extra heat from any source, whether from greenhouse gases, the disappearance of Arctic ice or the Amazon forest, is amplified, and its effects are more than additive. [/SIZE]

and he of all people is entitled to say something like this

Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media.

Its time we said we are going nuclear in Ireland . Wind will not deliver base load electricity but will provide arbitrage/trading/banking opportunities when the wind is blowing ...but not blowing too hard like recently because it causes ALL our wind power to shut down. This will require a european grid of course which is yet another problem for us here.

Waves will not provide base load electricity , this bloody thing spends most of its time in the dock in Galway because it cannot survive Galway Bay for more than a few summer weeks ...never mind the full atlantic in winter.

Solar in Ireland is a great idea when we never see the sun all winter ...eh !

Its game over lads, we are going nuclear but the only question is when and how much completely retarded ****nutting we have to listen to before we do so.

Lou.m

I have been really busy the last while and so i have not been on boards for ages and i was amazed to see this thread still going. And how can i say this in the nicest possible way. Well .. i think some people need to get a girlfriend BADLY:p .
And i think it is time we kind of got something straight here, guys this is all meaningless talk.

There is an official ban on nuclear power in Ireland end of story, the last goverment green paper that came out about seven weeks ago on energy came out more in favour of the ban than the government was previously.
The government now do not even want to have any of our power supplied by nuclear power stations abroad either.

It is illegal.

It is not happening.

What is the point of arguing over something that is not even a possibilty?

I hope everyone had nice Hols.:)

Incidently what is the record for a thread going on for the longest?

Lemming

Lou.m wrote:

I have been really busy the last while and so i have not been on boards for ages and i was amazed to see this thread still going. And how can i say this in the nicest possible way. Well .. i think some people need to get a girlfriend BADLY:p .
And i think it is time we kind of got something straight here, guys this is all meaningless talk.

There is an official ban on nuclear power in Ireland end of story, the last goverment green paper that came out about seven weeks ago on energy came out more in favour of the ban than the government was previously.
The government now do not even want to have any of our power supplied by nuclear power stations abroad either.

It is illegal.

It is not happening.

What is the point of arguing over something that is not even a possibilty?

I hope everyone had nice Hols.:)

Incidently what is the record for a thread going on for the longest?

Funnily enough Lou.m .... "papers" do not publish laws. They make recommendations for courses of action. Stating a desire to not use Nuclear power is a long, longggggggggggggggg way from actually banning its use. And in the case of bans (as is the case in this country as you so ... smugly ... pointed out), they can be repealed, since the whole point of passing law is that it can be changed.

Having a cursory glance through that government paper, guess what they're recommending we increase our reliance on .... coal. And vague references to "clean coal" technology that they don't really go into. For reasons that the technology is not proven on a large-scale commercial basis and the apparently hideous cost involved in creating plants based on this technology.

So ..... further reliance on fossil fuels combined with unproven technology that appears to also have very high development costs. On second thoughts, maybe we shouldn't have Nuclear power in this country. Ever. With people who can arrive at such decisions at the helm

But since we're on the topic of banning nuclear power, guess we'll have to stop buying all that imported nuclear power from the UK & France and use imported coal instead? Bit of a somewhat hypocritical stance no? Not to mention utterly, utterly moot since we either a) Continue to rely on imported fossil fuels as we are and get it in the neck in a decade or so, or b) as the government would apparently now have us do: continue to rely on imported fossil fuel as we are in option 'a' whilst expending a large amount of money on an unproven technology.

oscarBravo

Lemming wrote:

Hypocrasy ... thy name is Lou.m

Careful now.

Lennoxschips

b) as the government would apparently now have us do: continue to rely on imported fossil fuel as we are in option 'a' whilst expending a large amount of money on an unproven technology.

More of the world's energy is supplied by renewable energy than Nuclear energy, according to the United States Department of Energy.

So which is proven and which is unproven?

piraka

Lennoxschips wrote:

More of the world's energy is supplied by renewable energy than Nuclear energy, according to the United States Department of Energy.

So which is proven and which is unproven?

Won't last for long under this scheme

Lemming

Lennoxschips wrote:

More of the world's energy is supplied by renewable energy than Nuclear energy, according to the United States Department of Energy.

So which is proven and which is unproven?

Since when is coal - a fossil fuel - considered a "renewable energy" source? Go back and actually READ what I wrote.

But to answer your wildly off-tangent question, I'll point out that having more of 'a' than 'b' does not preclude that 'a' is more proven than 'b', unless you are of course referring to 'b' being "clean coal" technology. Which is what the Irish government made aspirations towards in their paper, which you seem to have COMPLETELY not picked up on. Several times throughout the course of the published paper.

As an aside point, I would also learn to NOT use wikipedia as your defacto source of information since it isn't entirely credible for reasons that should be blindingly obvious.

SeanW

Lou.M etc have not been able to refute the premise that there's a large extent of nuclear vs. fossils, so I was going to ask Lou.M whether (s)he prefers fossil fuels or nuclear, but given the barely hidden glee that our government (whos environmental policy is to buy carbon credits from Germany etc) wants to burn more coal, I guess my question has just been answered.

Thanks for the clarification.

Lennoxschips picture shows a projection of more reliance on fossil fuels especially oil. This in a world marred by fossil fuel politics and pollution, but unfortunately the projection is in line with most other professional energy use projections I've seen.

Doesn't this underscore the need to embrace all non-fossil options? Even Bush is starting to think so and him a ****ing Texas Republican oilman.

James Lovelock wrote:

Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies and the media.

Pretty much sums it up.

MorriganGael wrote:

We can apply the same amount of expense to develop ways to remove the waste pollutants of a coal or oil fired power plant as we do to radiocative waste.

The problem is that coal's competitive advantage comes from its cheapness, you mandate that it be burned without causing air pollution and suddenly the cost becomes ridiculous.
That and the fact that the clean coal technology doesn't actually exist yet.

That same money could go to solar, wind or ocean thermal projects.

Which have their own attendant problems in that they depend on the weather.

I don't think we should pollute our land with radioactive waste that decays with a half-life of 200,000 years.

Then you SERIOUSLY need to research the nuclear process. First of all, waste can be safely encapsulated and isolated from the environment in a wide variety of ways - one proposal once looked at was to bury HLW in a oceanic subduction zone where the Earth's tectonic plates would carry it down many miles into towards the core (which is kept hot by naturally occuring radiation anyway) - by the time any of it came back up to the surface it would have stabilised many times over. I don't know if that's been done though. One common method of isolation for storage anywhere, is Vitrification. Essentially, waste is encapsulated in a sugary glass type of substance called Boroscilicate glass, this would take 1 million years to degenerate even in water. Other methods of long term storage including deep burial, rock assisted solutions are being investigated etc.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm

Secondly, the root cause of radiation, the chemical instability of atoms, is not changed by the nuclear process, this only concentrates chemically unstable substances for use as fuel and the reaction changes the rate of decay.

We don't have to pollute anything to use nuclear power, in fact it's quite the opposite. If you oppose nuclear power then you have to realise that the default alternative is coal, and that's a LOT worse.

Lennoxschips

Lemming wrote:

As an aside point, I would also learn to NOT use wikipedia as your defacto source of information since it isn't entirely credible for reasons that should be blindingly obvious.

There's no need to make cheap comments like that. I don't use Wikipedia as a de facto source, I don't trust it at all. That's why I went and found the actual source behind the claim, which is a very credible one.

Lennoxschips

Lou.M etc have not been able to refute the premise that there's a large extent of nuclear vs. fossils

I think it's more of a case of not wanting to get involved in that particular straw man argument. Continuing to use fossil fuels or converting to nuclear are both the coward's way out as far as I'm concerned. Both encourage short term gain in exchange for long term problems of one kind or another. What Lou.M is proposing is that we scrap our extremely unsustainable lifestyle, and reduce our usage of electricity considerably.

Nobody here is saying that we should burn coal.

Lemming

Lennoxschips wrote:

There's no need to make cheap comments like that. I don't use Wikipedia as a de facto source, I don't trust it at all. That's why I went and found the actual source behind the claim, which is a very credible one.

It's not a cheap shot. It's a perfectly sensible point to make. You didn't give me your allegedly credible source. You simply gave me a link to a diagram hosted on Wikipedia.

Lemming

Lennoxschips wrote:

I think it's more of a case of not wanting to get involved in that particular straw man argument. Continuing to use fossil fuels or converting to nuclear are both the coward's way out as far as I'm concerned. Both encourage short term gain in exchange for long term problems of one kind or another. What Lou.M is proposing is that we scrap our extremely unsustainable lifestyle, and reduce our usage of electricity considerably.

Nobody here is saying that we should burn coal.

"The cowards way out"? The cowards way out can be found in the Irish Government's green paper so vaunted by Lou.m Why do I say that? Simple really. They propose, in a nutshell, that we centre our focus on maintaining usage of imported fossil fuels that will apparently use an unproven and estimatedly very costly technology. So rather than making the hard, and needed, decisions, they mutter about something that might work out somewhere down the line.

What Lou.m is proposing, and you are supporting, in changing lifestyles is also a "cowards" way out. How do you propose enforcing this change in lifestyle? Who decides what people can and cannot do and what lifestyle choices are a waste and what aren't? And to top it all off beautifully, the entire argument is a straw-man since neither changing lifestyle or usage of electricity changes the issue of where energy comes from one, nor does it address the issue of reliance on imported fuel.

So .... with all those issues in mind, please .... feel free to tell us how we'll go about resolving the issue of fossil fuel by addressing energy usage rather than energy generation,

RedPlanet

The title of this very thread "Keep burning fuel, or go Nuclear" is a straw-man argument.
Why?
Because you are not going to slap and enforce a worldwide ban on Oil and Coal.
Forgettabout it.
Fact: oil is going to be mined and used until it becomes unprofitable to do so.
Fact: coal is going to be mined and used until it becomes unprofitable to do so.
Some of those Energy corporations that want to sell you nuclear are the same ones selling you oil and coal today.

What is meant by advocating "Nuclear Power" is in reality: We Rich Countries Aligned With America, because proponents of nuclear power never advocate setting up nuclear power stations in countries that are not part of the Western World.
And so, nuclear power is in reality, another imperialist enterprise. Concern for "the environment" is just today's marketing concept.

Maybe we really are better off wasting planet earth's fossil fuels on pathetic things like xmas lights and SUV's so we can make progress in the future once those resources are spent.