Nuclear Energy

[draconix]

So here's a pretty good debate that I'd like to start.

 

Nuclear energy is the cleanest method of energy that we have available to us right now. No need for fossil fuels, no need for ethanol. Modern power plant designs produce a small fraction of the waste that older designs left behind, and the cutting edge designs don't produce any waste at all. In addition to being the safer than modern fossil fuel burning power plants since they were first created, several additional fail-safes have been put into place in modern plants that make it so that when something goes awry, the reaction cannot be sustained, effectively shutting itself down in the event of a problem.

 

So what's the big scare? Why are people afraid of Nuclear energy?

 

Fun Fact: The purpose of electric cars is defeated unless the power plant your car is getting power from is getting clean energy, rather than a coal burning plant. For instance, if you're in Kansas, and your power plant is a coal-plant, you're actually putting more carbon into the air by driving your electric car than you would be if it was just burning gasoline.

[Flintlockecole]

The inevitable downfall of society, that pretty much sums it up. I would hate to see one of them go up in flame, figure of speech of course.

[HeyYou]

Public Perception. The events in Japan probably just set nuclear power proponents back about fifty years. We haven't built a new nuke plant in over 30 years, so yeah, I would like to think the designs have improved..... but, to Joe Public, it's "Scarey" (with a capital S)

[Skevitj]

Since when is radioactive material not considered as waste? Yes there are plant designs which can operate on very low power density radioactive products (Traveling Wave reactors), however these plants still output a radioactive product well above natural sources, let alone the background. Yes there are fault stable designs, but IMO these should be use to replace decommissioned plants of older designes, not to drastically expand capacity.

 

Nuclear power is just trading one waste product we're currently having large scale problems with for another waste product we will be having large scale problems with. On top of that Nuclear plants represent an absolutely massive capital investment, they have reduced running costs, sure, but a much better financial investment would be to replace older coal and oil plants with Closed-Cycle Gas plants. That would produce just as large a reduction as implementing Nuclear plants, at a drastically reduced cost. Implementing a global carbon market would produce a massive downturn in pollution emissions for a theoretically 0 cost, why isn't that one of the main goals?

 

Probably the main reason people are afraid of the term "Nuclear" is that radiation is invisible. People are afraid of what they can't see. In addition to that, CO2 pollution in the atmosphere is a simple concept to understand, especially when compared to the effects of radiation on flora/fauna. Lack of understanding breeds paranoia, paranoia breeds restrictive regulation to appease people, restrictive regulation breeds higher incidence of negligible impact events, events (without context indicating severity) breeds further paranoia... and so the cycle continues. If you want anything to be expanded, renewable, coal, nuclear, a carbon market, time and time again it's been shown that the single most effective step to garner support is education, and the most effective dis-incentive is misinformation.

 

 

From your post, you seem to be looking it at it from a one-dimensional point of view. I don't claim to understand every angle, but pollution, cost, environmental and societal impacts, knowledge and education, investment are just a very small group is areas which are all interrelated and have to all be considered together for any real progress to be made. "I provides a subjective improvement in this area and doesn't blow up*" isn't going to convince anyone that it's a good idea.

 

 

Fun Fact #2: What happens when we reach peak uranium? Nuclear power is the only truly non-renewable resource. Coal and Oil regenerate themselves over time (albeit so slowly it's almost 0, dependent on nuclear reactions going on on planet and off.), Radioactive material is the only energy source which suffers natural reductions in it's amount as time goes on.

 

* (As Often)

Edited August 6, 2011 by Skevitj

[draconix]

The current, generation IV reactors produce very little waste comparatively to the earlier Generation I reactors, there are6 current reactor types. There is of course discussion of Generation 5 reactors that don't produce any waste at all.

Clearly the next step would be to move onto nuclear fusion. Our moon as a substantial amount of He3 while is ideal for beginners getting into fusion, the result being Hydrogen, which when mixed with some oxygen is water, which actually gives us a bit more energy in the process. Pretty cool eh? But that's a bit further out.

 

If you're going to use the argument that over time, oil is a renewable resource, then I could say that over time, so is uranium. All elements in the universe are created in the heart of stars. Given a long enough time period, nothing is non-renewable. Saying that we may as well wait for more coal is exactly like saying we may as well wait for more uranium. By the time oil is replenished, the energy crisis will be long over, one way or another.

 

As far as waste goes, most of the nuclear waste we will ever make is already here, generated by the older models of power plants. The fact that this waste is here already should not prevent us from looking at nuclear power as a viable resource for power.

 

The older models have already been retrofitted with additional safety precautions, following the events of three mile island (A shining example of how well the nuclear safety systems worked, not a single death immediate or long-term projected,) and Chernobyl, the worst-case scenario that was actually forced to happen. Some ridiculous person turned off the safety features on purpose, then turned off the cooling mechanism and tried to restart it as an experiment. This also happened in the middle of a shift change... of a skeleton crew, who were untrained miners. Go figure. In the end, all said, estimates are that 1000 to 4000 people will die overall stemming from the events of that worst case scenario. On the flip side, 50,000-100,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer caused by particulate air pollution. So essentially, in order for the death toll from nuclear energy to come close to that which we're already experiencing from fossil fuel pollution, a Chernobyl sized, worst case scenario, would have to happen every three weeks for a year. Just to

match the death toll that we already pay every year in America alone.

I fail to see how Nuclear energy could be any worse, or even close to being as bad as the ship we're currently sinking in. Also, I'm not trying to discuss the merits of any other clean energy source, I'm discussing Nuclear energy, and the unfair stigma that it has been slapped with.

[marharth]

The current, generation IV reactors produce very little waste comparatively to the earlier Generation I reactors, there are6 current reactor types. There is of course discussion of Generation 5 reactors that don't produce any waste at all.

Clearly the next step would be to move onto nuclear fusion. Our moon as a substantial amount of He3 while is ideal for beginners getting into fusion, the result being Hydrogen, which when mixed with some oxygen is water, which actually gives us a bit more energy in the process. Pretty cool eh? But that's a bit further out.

 

If you're going to use the argument that over time, oil is a renewable resource, then I could say that over time, so is uranium. All elements in the universe are created in the heart of stars. Given a long enough time period, nothing is non-renewable. Saying that we may as well wait for more coal is exactly like saying we may as well wait for more uranium. By the time oil is replenished, the energy crisis will be long over, one way or another.

 

As far as waste goes, most of the nuclear waste we will ever make is already here, generated by the older models of power plants. The fact that this waste is here already should not prevent us from looking at nuclear power as a viable resource for power.

 

The older models have already been retrofitted with additional safety precautions, following the events of three mile island (A shining example of how well the nuclear safety systems worked, not a single death immediate or long-term projected,) and Chernobyl, the worst-case scenario that was actually forced to happen. Some ridiculous person turned off the safety features on purpose, then turned off the cooling mechanism and tried to restart it as an experiment. This also happened in the middle of a shift change... of a skeleton crew, who were untrained miners. Go figure. In the end, all said, estimates are that 1000 to 4000 people will die overall stemming from the events of that worst case scenario. On the flip side, 50,000-100,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer caused by particulate air pollution. So essentially, in order for the death toll from nuclear energy to come close to that which we're already experiencing from fossil fuel pollution, a Chernobyl sized, worst case scenario, would have to happen every three weeks for a year. Just to

match the death toll that we already pay every year in America alone.

I fail to see how Nuclear energy could be any worse, or even close to being as bad as the ship we're currently sinking in. Also, I'm not trying to discuss the merits of any other clean energy source, I'm discussing Nuclear energy, and the unfair stigma that it has been slapped with.

Yep.

 

This pretty much sums up the entire topic.

[Sync182]

If you want to really confuse a Greenie Conservationist Environmentalist whatever they call themselves these days, tell them they owe their very existence to nuclear energy (the Sun).

 

That'll put the wind up them. ;)

Edited August 6, 2011 by Sync182

[McclaudEagle]

Much of the public's perception of nuclear energy is based around the safety of nuclear power. We've seen the damage nuclear weapons can do, and we've seen the damage nuclear exposure can do. Despite what some people think, Chernobyl was not the worst nuclear accident in history. That title goes to an event that happened somewhere in Brazil I think when some people found a radiation canister in an abandoned hospital. It's these disasters that make people worry about using it.

 

Despite these worries, more than 80% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power. The UK has several nuclear power plants, I live only 60 miles from one of them. The United States had lots of nuclear power plants, as do many other nations. I believe there are currently 500+ nuclear power plants in the World today, and yet throughout history, only a few have actually gone into a dangerous state, many years ago when the safety technology wasn't as good.

 

The Fukushima incident hasn't helped the overall reputation of nuclear power, and some believe the development of nuclear power will slow down as a result. This is stupid, because what people are forgetting is that the Fukushima plant was built practically on top of a major fault-line, so that incident was a "when", not "if" disaster.

 

Overall, nuclear energy is and should be the future unless someone finds a better and cheaper alternative.

[Skevitj]

You completely misinterpreted the intent of my comment. I was hoping the "it's almost 0" would be enough of an indication that that part of the statement was trivial and wasn't meant to have any weight on it... You still haven't answered the main part of the question: What happens when we reach peak uranium?

 

When you talk about Generation V reactors, you're talking about systems which are just theoretical models. To take an idea and make it into a commercially proven end product is something which happens over decades, assuming everything goes according to plan. G4 reactors already have years of theoretical work but implementation times for them are around 2030, let alone the time after that for them to be commercially proven (construction experience, things like that) Imagine how long G5 reactors will take, what do we do in the mean time? BTW, can you link to an academic source verifying that G5 concepts would produce a sub background waste product... I'm struggling to find sources saying anything close.

 

Chernobyl was human idiocy at its finest, but one of the points both it and Fukushima made painfully clear is that we're never going to be able to predict and counter everything which can go wrong (including human unpredictability). For the actions at Chernobyl, I could say almost the exact same about the actions at Fukushima: What sort of design idiocy forces a nuclear plant's cooling system to rely solely on the plant running at a stable output (ie, it can't be shut down). Losing a grid connection (the fault which caused all the problems) is about as simple a fault condition as you can get when looking at risk management, the fact that there wasn't a sufficient counter in place is a very similar situation to wondering why a potentially dangerous limits test could be approved to be carried out by an inexperienced/untrained crew.

 

As for the 1000-4000 death toll, I'm guessing the report was commissioned by a pro nuclear body? It's about standard for the pro bias, some of the anti bias reports can reach over 200,000+ fatalities and permanent disabilities from the incident. One of the UN commissioned reports threw out a figure around 40,000, but even that was widely considered to by due to pro nuclear bias. The moral of the story is: don't try and produce a figure for the number of dead, it's only a microscopic selection of the total victims. With your numbers for Air pollution related deaths, what % of those are due to car emissions, and how much would that be reduced by switching electricity generation to nuclear. I certainly can't see electric cars rolling out the door within a few decades, even if we did make a complete switch.

 

Once again, you can't discuss something by itself and expect the debate to have any relevance to the real world. There are plenty of alternatives out there which are arguably superior to nuclear power, and that in itself gives it a fair amount of negative stigma: Why use a proven dangerous source when there are already safe, clearer and cheaper sources capable of fulfilling the same role? (similar argument applies to things like a global carbon market) It's not enough to prove that it's "safe", you need to prove that it's better than every other alternative.

 

 

@McclaudEagle: The Fukushima earthquake and tsunami barely scratched the paint on the reactor. What killed it was the loss of grid power during shutdown operations (from the tsunami). An incredibly significant design mistake which has been corrected in the newer commercial reactors (by having onsite backup power), but if something like that can be overlooked, what else could be? TEPCO certainly doesn't have a shining safety record they can show off, even ignoring the Fukushima incident.

 

@Sync182: Don't forget the Earth too, we're all living on a giant nuclear reactor.

 

PS, Don't get me wrong, If the topic you made was anti-nuclear, I would be just as quick to argue you. You asked for a debate, I'm trying to give you one. Well... have an input at any rate.

 

 

EDIT: Weird... I just noticed the post dates, but this only showed up on my "Watched Topics" tab today

Edited September 1, 2011 by Skevitj

[HeyYou]

On site backup power? Diesel generators, right? How well do you think they would work after being inundated by salt water?

 

Better alternatives? Name one, please.

 

I am thinkin' we will run out of oil before we run out of uranium. The Peak Oil folks have been screaming about that since the fifties...... at this point, it isn't supply that is the issue, it is getting the supply to market, and the lack of refinery capacity.