Energy Lies Believed By Intelligent People

I was at the MIT EmTech Digital 2019 conference. There was a lunch discussion which involved nuclear energy. A supercomputer and Artificial intelligence expert said that Nuclear Power was great except for the dangerous nuclear waste. Someone else at the table talked about using breakthroughs with rockets to send nuclear waste into the Sun or for nuclear waste to be dropped to the bottom of the ocean. These very intelligent people who have deep knowledge on various technical topics have been misguided on key aspects of energy technology.

The truth is nuclear energy is already the safest energy based upon its historical track record. There were highly publicized incidents with nuclear power (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima) but only Chernobyl had actual nuclear energy related deaths. Nuclear Power has generated about 85000 TWh over about 50 years of operation. Nuclear power has saved about 3 million lives. Nuclear power is generating over 2500 Terawatt hours per year. This is saving 50,000 to 100,000 people per year from air pollution deaths.

Nuclear waste is mainly unburned nuclear fuel. Used nuclear fuel is very hot and radioactive. Handling and storing it safely can be done as long as it is cooled and plant workers are shielded from the radiation it produces by a dense material like concrete or steel, or by a few meters of water. We do not have to go to more extreme measures to deal with what is already safe.

All unburned fuel and waste from commercial nuclear energy is contained. How about the waste from other types of energy? Particulates from incomplete burning of coal, oil and gas go into the air and everyone and every living creature on the planet breathes some into our lungs. In China, India and other countries, the bad air pollution is like everyone smoking several cigarettes per day. This means the waste from coal, oil and gas is breathed every day by babies, asthmatics and the elderly. This is why the deaths from outdoor air pollution is about 3 million people per year. This does not include water pollution. All the mercury in fish is mainly from coal pollution. Mercury and toxic metals from fossil fuel air pollution has no half life. It will stay dangerous for millions of years.

While standing exposed and very close to nuclear waste is dangerous, this does not happen. The fuel is stored on site at nuclear facilities. Nuclear facilities tend to be several square miles of land. The nuclear waste is about 100-200 tons per year per facility. However, Uranium is denser than lead. The 200 tons of material could fit into your garage.

The various types of coal pollution is measured in billions of tons, millions of tons or thousands of tons. 7.6 billion tons per year of coal becomes more CO2. The carbon from coal gets two Oxygen molecules added. Fossil fuel emissions (including cement production) accounted for about 91% of total CO2 emissions from human sources in 2014. This portion of emissions originates from coal (42%), oil (33%), gas (19%), cement (6%) and gas flaring (1%).

Nuclear Energy has been 10-20% of world electricity for four decades. This energy has prevented the use of coal and natural gas for electricity generation. Solar and wind have only recently reached 1-3% of world electricity. Nuclear Power has generated about 85000 TWh over about 50 years of operation. Nuclear power has saved about 3 million lives. Nuclear power is generating over 2500 Terawatt hours per year. This is saving 50,000 to 100,000 people per year from air pollution deaths.

Cement and Steel Used for Solar and Wind vs Nuclear Power

For every 10 tons of cement we produce, we release 9 tons of CO2. The average CO2 intensity for the steel industry is 1.9 tons of CO2 per ton of steel produced. Taking into consideration the global steel production of more than 1.7 billion tons, the steel industry produces over 3.5 billion tons of CO2.

A 1970-vintage U.S. nuclear power plants needed 40 metric tons (MT) of steel and 190 cubic meters (m3) of concrete per average megawatt of electricity (MW(e)) generating capacity. For comparison, a typical wind energy system operating with 6.5 meters-per-second average wind speed requires construction inputs of 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per average MW(e).  Wind needs ten times more steel than nuclear and almost five times more concrete. Solar farms need even more steel and concrete than wind to generate the same power.

Wind turbines are about 50 stories tall and the blades are like the wings of a jumbo jet. Solar and wind take up way more land than nuclear power. Solar on building roofs cause more deaths because roofing is the fifth most dangerous profession. Falls cause deaths in solar and wind.

James Conca at Forbes cites Caithness Windfarm Information Forum 2013 (Wind Farm Accidents and Fatalities). James has written and provided additional information to my articles on deaths per terawatt hour. In England, there were 163 wind turbine accidents that killed 14 people in 2011. Wind produced about 15 billion kWhrs that year, so using a capacity factor of 25%. Wind produces 1,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced (the world produces 15 trillion kWhrs per year from all sources).

In 2011 coal produced about 180 billion kWhrs in England with about 3,000 related deaths. Nuclear energy produced over 90 billion kWhrs in England with no deaths. In that same year, America produced about 800 billion kWhrs from nuclear with no deaths.

The global averages in energy-related deaths are much higher than in the USA. Coal produces 100,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs (China is the worst), natural gas at 4,000 deaths, biomass at 24,000, solar at 440, and wind at 150. Using the worst-case scenarios with the highest estimates for eventual radiation-related deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima would increase nuclear to 90 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced. Nuclear would still be the safest energy source.

Handling Unburned Nuclear Fuel

Water can provide both cooling and shielding, so a typical reactor will have its fuel removed underwater and transferred to a storage pool. After about five years it can be transferred into dry ventilated concrete containers, but it can safely remain in the pool indefinitely – usually for up to 50 years.

Currently, the majority of used fuel is not recycled. Reprocessing used fuel to recover uranium and plutonium avoids the wastage of a valuable resource. Most of the used fuel – about 96% – is uranium, and up to 1% is plutonium, with the remaining 3% being high-level waste. Both reprocessed uranium and plutonium have been recycled into new fuel. Plutonium mixed with uranium in their oxide forms is known as mixed oxide fuel (MOX).

105 thoughts on “Energy Lies Believed By Intelligent People”

  1. С прогрессом человечества возрастает размер вреда для нашей планеты в часности ядерной отросли. Люди получили доступ к атомной энергии, что открыло новые горизонты. В любом случае, исследователи не полностью изучили возможности и последствия. https://zombie-film.com/serial-01656e-chernobyl-sezon-1-seriya-1

  2. The area under solar power panels can be put to use to grow stuff – like a partially closed green house. Think horticulture. This is especially true in very hot and sunny regions. The solar panels are spaced with some gaps between them, and let in say 10-20% of the sunlight, this will enable cultivating crops that otherwise would wither in the hot climate also, the partial shade will reduce moisture loss and evaporation.

    I don’t have any real world examples.

  3. The geo plant on Maui got buried by lava – an occupational hazard of not having to drill a couple of kms for your heat source. Most objections in New Zealand are that depletion of the field kills geysers for the tourists and stops Maori using their traditional ovens etc. If you’re worried about ‘susceptibility to attack’ there’s no point living in a city – they’re all nuclear targets, and will be riot central after the apocalypse – head for the hills !

  4. Tritium is not very dangerous. Biological half life in the body is 7 to 14 days. Emission is a beta, which cannot penetrate paper, of 5.7 keV, 170 times less powerful than that of the iodine131 which caused thyroid cancer round Chernobyl. Also, iodine is concentrated in the thyroid, whereas water, and tritium, is spread evenly round the body. That reduces its concentration by a thousand.
    ‘A woman was accidentally exposed to tritiated gas that escaped from glass capillary tubes. She incorporated about 35 GBq (1 Ci) of tritiated water. After several hours of delay, treatment was initiated to reduce the exposure by enhanced fluid intakes and forced diuresis. She was followed for chromosomal aberrations for 11 years. The authors monitored the number of dicentric chromosomes found in lymphocytes, and found that they have fallen over the years with a half-time of 3.3 years. No other significant clinical abnormalities were noted.’
    Note that 35GBq is the tritium dose you’d get from drinking THIRTY TONNES of the water stored at Fukushima, whose release will supposedly destroy the Pacific.

  5. 96 workers were killed building the Hoover Dam. And the Hoover Dam used over 6 million tons of concrete.

  6. They wanted the jobs but they didn’t want the radioactive waste. So they waited until the repository was built then said no.

  7. Tobacco kill a lot more people. Do you actually believe that anyone would have consider starting up those reactors?

  8. Overall cost is probability of failure times the cost of failure. Probability of failure is low but the cost of failure is high.

  9. Finding Tritium in ground water happens now a day for reactors in use. The problem will get bigger when the old reactors fake from memory.

  10. Please review the Fushisama disaster. You will find that the spend fuel rod pools were also a problem.

  11. “The current Price-Anderson Act $13 billion pool is straight up socialist BS pilfering of taxpayers. Privatize the profits, socialize the risk.”

    Except that, in practice it’s been more a matter of socializing the profits and privatizing the risk. Utilities must kick into the risk pool from their profits, and it only pays out in the case of accidents that in practice don’t happen.

    The sort of accidents that actually happen get paid for by the private insurance. The sort that Price Anderson was designed to cover haven’t happened in the whole time it’s been in place.

  12. A well designed carbon tax would incentivise nuclear. In fact, the one in Germany did, so they had to bring in a ‘ uranium fuel tax ‘ as well. Climate science is complicated though – coal has been the biggest driver of warming, but the sulfur smoke it emits, besides killing lots of people and trees, has also been blocking sunlight to reduce CO2’s effects. And natural gas makes about half the CO2 of coal, but leaking methane is maybe a hundred times worse, short term. Leak 3% and gas will be worse than coal. The Trump administration is rescinding Obama-era regulations against methane leaking.

  13. Geo is cheaper than nuclear. Efficiently built at smaller capacity so more distributed infrastructure and less susceptible to attack or other disruptions. Less susceptible to catastrophic events, public objection, lawsuits. And closed-loop has no pollution or waste issues including disposal, attack, accumulation, lawsuits again, dispersement.

  14. Tort law has been drastically modified since the first nuclear reactors went online also.

    You couldn’t just file a lawsuit back then w/o showing some evidence up front, first. In fact, there was a hearing that had to be done to determine if the lawsuit had such merit. Nowadays, it’s all file-and-hope-for-finding-crap-in-discovery once the suit gets rolling.

    Of course, a nuke plant containing dome blowing up and spewing junks of reactor matter all over the country side would definitely qualify as ‘showing some evidence up front’. But insurance rates wouldn’t be so effected until the first time this happens, too.

  15. not too bright are you?

    Ask him how he believes that the rich ‘hoard’ money so it does not circulate in the economy some time. Apparently, On Planet Mark Stewart, they don’t even keep uninvested money even in banks, which in turn loans out said deposited money all the time into said economy all the time.

    Basically, he thinks the rich hoards it like how Scrooge McDuck does with his Money Bins or something.

  16. In the US we don’t have a waste fuel long term storage facility yet

    Yes we do. It was built and can be used. But NIMBYISM prevents that from happening even thought the residents of the state in question KNEW this was coming for some time.

  17. “. It has nothing to do with waste management, eco warriors or “the government”. It has everything to do with the price.”

    To say that fails to recognize that the price is due to the eco warriors warping waste management and government regulation. The plants are insanely over-built from a rational risk management perspective, and that makes them costly.

  18. You don’t get passionate activism converts by saying “Well, it’s not that bad”.

    It has to be the WORST thing ever, it MUST be horrible, People are GOING TO DIE if we don’t DO SOMETHING.

    And that ‘something’ is almost always not terribly related to the issue. “We must stop CO2! YOU must cut back!” is proclaimed by the elite who travel in private jets to exotic locales that host ‘climate conferences’. So – they propose raising taxes. And converting (while it was expensive) coal fired plants to natural gas. When the cost of NG dropped, its desirability as an alternative fuel went away.

    If they were serious, if they REALLY believed the material they’re shoving out for the masses, they’d be pushing nuclear hard. Because they WOULD be fighting an existential threat that would end humanity. But if your only response to a supposed extinction-level event is to go “We need to raise taxes on CO2!”… well, that’s a sign you’re just looking for money, not that you want to save humanity.

  19. The environmentalists in California have been death on dams and hydropower.

    Bad for the fish, you know.

  20. Quite a few people have no idea about radiation except ‘It’s BAD’. They don’t understand background radiation, they don’t have any idea how much radiation it takes to cause problems, but tell them that the ‘radiation count is high compared to background radiation’ and it’s Panic City.

    My immediate thought on that is – “Okay, just how high is it?” but it’s really funny how the scare articles pretty much never have any real numbers.

    I keep telling folks about the chart at https://xkcd.com/radiation/ – it really puts things in perspective.

  21. Chernobyl – the engineering reports on that are astounding. They were literally creating the conditions where the thing was likely to pop off.

    Short (and not terribly precise) form – they turned OFF the cooling pumps, to see how long the plant could provide steam to keep the turbines going.

    That type of reactor doesn’t take well to such abuse. If they had NOT done that stupid-ass test, it’d probably still be running today.

    Fukushima didn’t blow up. It actually withstood an earthquake an order of magnitude larger than it was designed for. AND a tsunami thirty feet higher than it was designed for.

  22. 15 years back, the push was to go to nat gas because it was ‘greener’ than coal. And at the time it was expensive, so it was quickly adopted by the environmental crowd. Yes! Make those energy users PAY for their despoiling of Mother Earth!

    Now it’s significantly cheaper. And they no longer love it, preferring the more expensive and less reliable alternatives like wind and solar. Yes! Make those energy users PAY for their despoiling of Mother Earth!

    They don’t want cheap energy. It’s that simple.

  23. When someone mentions a climate well-suited to solar, Germany is not one of my top ten choices.

    But hey – virtue-signalling is vital to the woke… no matter the cost to the people who actually have to endure it.

  24. IF they can be made commercially viable.

    The promise has been there for decades. “Lab breakthroughs will yield a massive drop in end-user cost!” But what can be made to work in a lab doesn’t necessarily scale up to usability in the market.

    So… we’ll see. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for cheap solar.

  25. Only Chernobyl actually “blew up”, and no *modern* plant has had an accident yet, that I know of.

  26. Literally, even at Fukushima, it wasn’t the nuclear stuff that broke, it was the other stuff. In other parts of the country they were using nuclear power plants for emergency housing, because they were the safest places around.

  27. You go ahead and do that, you have my full (moral) backing. If I don’t forget I will say three hail Marys (or whatever) for you.

  28. Number of people killed by nuclear power (and weapons) combined in the past 2 decades = 2

    Number of people killed by lightning in the past year = 6000

  29. Electricity is safe, that’s why every wire is coated with plastic insulation, there are layers of circuit breakers and fuses before it even reaches your wall socket, and the local substations have exclusion zones and racks of 3 foot ceramic insulators.

  30. Wouldn’t I be a fool to trust though?

    As a taxpayer I’ll not only get off the nuclear industry’s case but vote to roll back the NRC the day nuclear plants can find private insurance. Even private insurance for just 10% of the coverage to set a realistic rate, and then have them pay the rest of that to the government. Probably something like $30 billion of coverage per reactor for Gen I reactors, less for later.

    The current Price-Anderson Act $13 billion pool is straight up socialist BS pilfering of taxpayers. Privatize the profits, socialize the risk.

    It is hard to for me to see that nuclear power is in the taxpayers’ interest.

  31. Leslie Dewan pulled the plug on the Waste Annihilating MSR, after admitting it would only get twice a light water reactor’s power per pound of uranium, not fifty times. ( Assuming it worked at all.) A few billion for some of the other designs would be nice.

  32. You don’t trust any government to regulate anything ? So how often do you leave your bunker, and what sort of armour do you wear ? I tried to find the background radiation of my home town once, by googling it, and stumbled on someone here who’d got hold of a geiger counter, and was staying in his basement because he thought a particularly intense cloud of Fukushimity was passing overhead. We’re in the southern hemisphere, and six thousand miles away, and it’s unlikely that anyone even working in the plant has had his life shortened by radiation.

  33. You could take away all the unreliables and the grid would be just as reliable – it would just use more fuel. Or you could double them, and without storage or imports, there would be little difference past a certain point – dusk would still zero your solar, and a high pressure would still bring your wind down to single figure percentages. Germany has 60 GW of wind and 45 GW of solar, together well over peak demand, but the coal plants are always burning.

  34. Wow in all this talk not one mention of MSR or better yet Waste Annihilating MSR. The US can spend 15 billion on one aircraft carrier but spending even 100 million on MSR technology is beyond the US budget. For 15 billion three different designs can be made and refined and materials tested and a full scale prototypes built. Why are we stuck in this mode? MONEY from the oil companies controls those ladies in the whore house on capital hill. So what is global warming destroys the planet. So what if pollution kills millions? So what if the oceans become more acidified stopping the production of oxygen. Lets not even discuss the heavy metals and the lead posining from gas engines that caused a huge in crease in crime in the 70/80s. Nor the murcury and ash from coal plants etc.

  35. The price of pre-fab carport solar is dropping so robustly over time it probably doesn’t matter if you lose the subsidy.

    Your biggest risk of waiting is any net metering programs being cancelled due to full subscription. That’s often your biggest handout/subsidy.

  36. By then, Oxford’s perovskite solar cells will be on the market. It will be interesting to see if the first commercial product delivers on the promise of “cheap”, or if we have to wait longer.

    But a carport isn’t really big enough. Covering whole parking lots amortizes stuff more effectively.

  37. I’m going to break this into a separate post to keep things somewhat clean. It sounds like your site may be using open racks?

    “Reducing the amount of spent fuel in the pool would also allow for the use of open frame racks, which, in the case of loss of coolant, allow for air cooling of spent fuel rods. The high-density racks in use today in many pools are closed-cell racks that allow for little air access and depend largely on vertical water circulation to provide cooling.” This is from the same nautilus.org link.

    That’s great but open racks needs to be a requirement for all sites is what is being argued here EDIT by me anyways /EDIT

    That it isn’t already the case and yet Westinghouse is touting the safety improvements of the AP1000 is kind of absurd. It’s a waste of money without upgraded fuel pools.

  38. The risks that are being discussed are about fuel in the time frame where it is shortly after spent fuel is discharged into the pool. EDIT So to be really clear dry casked fuel is apropos to nothing /EDIT

    You still haven’t addressed

    “The recent NRC models (NRC, 2014a) suggest that for the first 3-4 months after discharge from the reactor, spent fuel can ignite within 72 hours, if the fuel is uncovered and no mitigative measures are taken.”
    that that doesn’t square with what you have written re: “air cooling safe” nuclear fuel pools?

    Why haven’t you addressed it?

    https://nautilus.org/uncategorized/risks-of-densely-packed-spent-fuel-pools/

  39. Although pretty low in efficiency, Thermoelectric lined containers could be used to power the storage area provided there is access to cool water.

  40. Could you please provide some evidence that nuclear fuel pools are air cooling “dry” safe?

    “The period of highest vulnerability during the operation of a spent fuel pool is shortly after spent fuel is discharged into the pool. The recent NRC models (NRC, 2014a) suggest that for the first 3-4 months after discharge from the reactor, spent fuel can ignite within 72 hours, if the fuel is uncovered and no mitigative measures are taken. Over the 20-year life of a reactor, these 3-4 month blocks add up to a significant period of time – between one and five years (Macfarlane, 2014). This period of vulnerability is exacerbated if recently discharged spent fuel is placed adjacent cells, instead of using a loading pattern that can absorb some heat, like the 1 x 4 or better, the 1 x 8 pattern. Therefore, it is important to require nuclear power plant operators to discharge spent fuel – and especially full cores – into a dispersed loading pattern in the pool, such as the 1 x 4 or 1 x 8 patterns.”

    https://nautilus.org/uncategorized/risks-of-densely-packed-spent-fuel-pools/

  41. allowed practices of replacing distance with tightly kept spent fuel in close proximity with heat densities approaching that of the reactor core is an unacceptable risk. Risks from spent fuel pools now exceed anything from reactors themselves.

    edit: to be more clear fuel densities need to drop. read the link; there have been many screwups of fuel racks being laid in the wrong geometry

    https://allthingsnuclear.org/dlochbaum/spent-fuel-damage-pool-criticality-accident

  42. Yes. It is called solar-thermal. There are two basic kinds. “Power towers” put a black absorber on a tower, and aim many mirrors in a surrounding field at it. Water runs through the absorber, then down the tower to a steam turbine.

    The other kind uses “trough collectors”. These are long pipes carrying a high temperature medium (thermal oil or salt), with a curved mirror alongside to focus sunlight. The pipes then go to a heat-exchanger to boil water, and again a steam turbine. The reason for the thermal medium is very hot water requires strong pipe to withstand the pressure. Thick pipe retards the solar absorption, and also is expensive.

    Both types can store heat during the day, for later use. The challenge has been the rapidly falling cost of solar panels. So not many thermal plants are getting built relative to flat panels.

  43. The problem with current nuclear in the US is that it costs 3 times as much as wind and solar per delivered kWh. The higher capacity factor (average output/nameplate capacity) for nuclear is factored into that ratio. But even nuclear has to shut down 5-10% of the time for nuclear and refueling, leaving a gigaWatt hole in your grid supply.

    The fact is *every* kind of power plant has downtime. That’s why the US has 2.2 times the installed capacity as average demand. The extra covers peak seasonal and daily demand *plus* a margin for maintenance and outages. That’s how the grid maintains reliability.

    You don’t get grid reliability by single plants being highly available. You get it by many plants connected to a grid. You people who focus on single-plant numbers have no idea how grids actually work.

  44. Is nuclear power absolutely safe? Of course not. I’ve never seen the probabilities given for significant accidents, which will vary by location. Considering the number of strong earthquakes, Japan’s accident probability must be the highest in the world. BTW I support nuclear power in the safest locations. The sad situation regarding the deposal of nuclear waste, an international problem, is an indication that the world will not solve the far greater challenge of global warming.

  45. No one wants to live next to a nuclear power plant and for good reasons. They are dangerous and we still do not know the potential long term fallout from the Fukushima failure. We know it is still causing the area to remain evacuated and still discharging radiation into the ocean. The build and operational costs of NPPs are also much higher then we are being told by their proponents. Lastly, I don’t know about you but I do not trust any government to regulate anything, knowing how easily people are bought off or coerced.

  46. These very intelligent people who have deep knowledge onvarious technical topics have been misguided on key aspects of energy technology.

    And in spite of this penetrating insight, Brian Wang managed to miss the entire point of nuclear power’s woes. It has nothing to do with waste management, eco warriors or “the government”. It has everything to do with the price. By focusing on waste, this article is akin to examining a bridge failure and deciding to blame it on the local homeowner’s organization because the protested its construction.

    All reactors currently under construction in the western world are seeing major price increases and average about $10/Wp. Several others were cancelled before construction because the quoted prices came in at this level – this includes Darlington B, the Crystal River replacement, Summer and the vast majority of the UK ACR replacement program (even the remaining two remain on shaky ground).

    The problems seen with these builds are rather mundane. The rapid and lasting increases in concrete prices has some effect, and the major homebuilding boom through the mid-2010’s made skilled labor tough to find and expensive. I’m sure some of that is due to regulatory ratcheting as well. Nuclear is dead for this reason and this reason alone, and pointing fingers elsewhere does nothing to address this.

  47. Todays waste can be burned in next generation reactors, so keeping it handy is not a bad idea.

    The main reason for resistance should be the fact that 2 out of the 160 or so nuclear plants ever built has blown up, so telling people they are safe is not believable.

    You should say, they are so safe, that if the radiation alarm goes, you get a million dollars.

  48. <derision>
    Perhaps you should refrain from defaming coal fly ash. Political exigencies has deemed coal fly ash to be non hazardous. The stuff can safely be disposed of by tossing it into a hole anywhere. In fact, it’s so safe, it’s used to fortify agricultural land which increases crop performance. Any uptake of the non hazardous heavy metals into the veggies you eat is neutralized by the vitamin and mineral content, profits in waiting will always find a way.

    Perhaps the same treatment could be arrange for nuclear waste. Everything is a matter of interpretation and interpretations can change. A lack of a new interpretation is the only thing that is preventing a brave new world where nuclear waste could be disposed of with little to no cost, one where maybe even radium toothpaste could make a comeback.
    </derision>

    “…we learn to deal with most of the dangerous stuff hopefully in a responsible way, sometimes not….”

    The “responsible way” is rarely associated with the little to no cost solutions.
    The “irresponsible way” is usually associated with the little to no cost solutions.

    If nuclear waste components came in different buckets then some of it would useful, but it’s entirely useless because it comes in a big mess that is difficult to separate. Lots of things could happen, but only thing usually results given the supremacy of the worldview that elevates the interest of money above all other concerns.

  49. Who was the crazy nuclear scientist that said he accidentally spilt the entire plutonium supply of the country on to the table that he held in an open cup and then said he had to burn the entire table to reclaim the plutonium atoms that he spilt. I swear I saw that in pbs special once…

  50. All you need is a little bit of nuclear waste, a thermocouple, and an empty energizer AAA battery pack… and you have batteries with a half life of a hundred years… and some lead shielding… actually I have no idea… maybe that trick only works if it’s weapns grade plutonium…

  51. nuclear is safe, that’s why they need to wrap the reactor core in two rings of 3 foot of concrete to contain a meltdown…

  52. In Eavor’s video, they claimed that wind and solar are not reliable, coal and gas not clean, and hydro and geothermal not scalable, but made no mention of nuclear – which is all three. Nuclear has some similarities with geothermal. Most uranium is leach mined. Like Eavor’s geothermal well, a leach mine pumps a carrier fluid down one bore hole and back up another. Most of the heat used by the geothermal plant is a result of radioactive decay of uranium, present in many rocks at a few parts per million. The uranium has been gradually breaking down to lead with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the same age as the earth. Each atom’s decay gives out 50 million electron volts, over time, and the heat from that conducts very slowly up to the surface. So slow is the heat transfer that after fifty years or so the rock near the bore will have cooled below useability, and will take thousands of years to heat up again.
    Uranium leach mines bring up dissolved uranium, instead of heat. They drill in places where the uranium is at much higher concentration than in average rock – instead of 2 or 3 parts per billion, it can be 500 to 4000 ppb. Then they can ship the fuel to anywhere in the world it’s needed – a truck load of uranium has as much energy as a ship load of coal. Instead of waiting a billion years for 50 million electron volts, they hit it with a neutron and immediately get 200 Mev, from fission. The heat is used as 315 C steam, at 37% efficiency, v 10% for geothermal.

  53. Even if the pools could not boil enough to turn a turbine, couldn’t the heat be used for heating homes and businesses, like geothermal? Then the “waste” would have a second life, which would change the economics significantly.

  54. Have they tried solar steam powered generators. Fresnel lenses and mirrors against light absorbing one way checkvalve pipes produce heat to run steam generator, condensing and cooling in pipes underground. Closed loop system.

  55. Geothermal isn’t as benign as nuclear – it can have quite high CO2 emissions, from the bore water, and even heavy metal pollution from arsenic. ( The North Island’s largest river is above drinking water standards for arsenic from the Wairakei geothermal plant to the sea.) Its waste heat emissions are also higher than any other thermal power source, per watt generated – it’s only at about 10% Carnot efficiency, because of the low temperature of the groundwater.
    And dams optimised for irrigation and flood control will be managed very differently from those where the water has to be gushed out every time there’s a power shortfall. It’s nice to have a few wild rivers left, too – I heard that Japan and Sweden each have only one untapped decent sized river.

  56. The tsunami at Fukushima destroyed three reactors – the others could have been restarted. At Chernobyl, one of four reactors exploded, causing far more local contamination than in Japan, yet the other three carried on churning out power for up to fourteen years. In Japan you had a classic case of the immune response causing more damage than the injury. Sure, the tsunami and earthquake killed nearly two thousand people, but the radiation release killed roughly nobody. The evacuation killed about a thousand. The subsequent shutdown of every reactor in Japan, and half those in Germany, is undoubtedly killing more, through increased coal emissions, as will the climate change that expedites. Future nuclear might be better than current, but current nuclear is still much better than any alternative.
    ‘The fact that renewable kill more people than nuclear power isn’t important.’ It’s pretty important to those killed, and their families, but of no interest to a media dependent on scary headlines.

  57. This is again just 3rd grade blind dumb and tendentious arithmetic. It does not take into account what could happen, the cost and harm from uninhabited zones and a calculation of statistical likelihood of death from increased radiation globally similar to that that is given for other sources of power generation. What we need is to learn how to collect static energy from the atmosphere. It is the most obvious, stable energy source and we are not doing much work with it.
    https://newatlas.com/harnessing-electricity-from-the-air/16137/

  58. Well… that’s going a bit far. 

    Geothermal is awfully darn reliable and non-CO₂ emitting. 
    It just suffers from the “has to already-be-here” problem. 
    The Icelanders have it in spades, and export aluminum in turn.

    And really… hydro (dam) power is darn reliable, and non-CO₂ emitting.
    Oh, sure, the dam itself has millions of tons of concrete… 
    Which requires millions of tons of cement, which has a nearly
    1 to 1 ton of cement to CO₂-in-making problem. 

    But over its lifetime, really good conservation. 
    And it keeps water too!
    Good for agriculture. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy ✓

  59. Thank you so much for the heads-up. 
    I, being in the Bay Area, and really close to Fremont, will go.
    Perhaps I can meet Mr. Wang there, as well as others on this forum.

    I’ll let all y’all know.
    GoatGuy

  60. The Russians love the things. They use liquid lead, since it is abundant, cheap, quite easily purified to 5 nines or better purity, and being a very heavy element, does a good job keeping a reactor “fast neutron” moderated. Almost perfect for breeder reactors. 

    Others have found even better isotope nuclear opportunities in liquid sodium. While “spills” (leaks) of the stuff are quite flammable, when contained for the most part it is pretty innocuous. The Japanese had a fine breeder using it, I seem to recall. 

    But I’m not “ScaryJello”. 
    Just saying,
    GoatGuy ✓

  61. So is lead. We make batteries out of it. 
    So is arsenic. It is used heavily in making solar PV cells.
    So is cadmium. Endlessly plated onto steel as a zinc-on-steroids anti-ox.
    So is mercury. Used to be found in baby thermometers. Still in silent-switches.
    So is americium. Not a single smoke detector doesn’t use it. 
    So is radium. Many a glow-at-night watch uses it. 
    So is tritium. Ditto on the watches. 
    So is uranium. The ‘depleted’ form is the backbone of anti-tank weapons.
    So is selenium. Its sold as an over-the-counter health remedy. 

    But more to your point,

    So is coal fly-ash. Terrible stuff. Generated by the millions-of-tons per year. 
    So is petroleum distillation byproducts. Teratogens, mutagens, eew-a-gens.
    So is steel smelting slag. Mountains of it around the world. 
    So is gas-fracking seam-water. Nasty stuff. billions of liters a month.

    The point is, we learn to deal with most of the dangerous stuff hopefully in a responsible way, sometimes not. And the last bit is where the trouble resides.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy ✓

  62. Yes. I was just “technically responding” to the idea that there isn’t enough heat. Fresh rods definitely have enough heat output — especially if a bunch were just extracted from a hot-running reactor. But as you say, it would take extreme neglect to allow the level of suppression water to boil (or simply evaporate) off. Cooling exchange loops are the usual idea.  GoatGuy

  63. Change the title to

    “Energy Lies ‘assumed to be’ Believed By Intelligent People”

    Btw, Nuclear waste is dangerous.

  64. relative. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of energy creation we have. It is extremely reliable and emits no CO2.

  65. There is no boiling in storage pools AFAIK. With the amount of water involved, it would take extreme neglect to allow the level to drop significantly. I believe simple ‘topping off’ is all that is required. Or, perhaps they run the water through a heat exchanger and the other side goes to a cooling tower of some sort.

  66. Xe is one of the fission-products that builds up, and it is one of the most significant neutron getters. However, taken as a whole, the others are just about on-par with Xe as a neutron absorbing species.

    Xenon is the one species though that serendipitously escapes from the molten salt reactors, and cannot build up.

    Makes them particularly attractive for high-burn-up rates of the nuclear fuels loaded within.

    There are also solid-state (well, non-aqueous “salt state”) processes for continuously flushing the molten salts of a number of the other fission product species that interfere on their own.

    Withholding the “we like thorium” idea from discussion still leaves molten-salt nuclear as an outstanding future technology, which if nothing else, could be initially fueled with reprocessed spent-fuel-rods of existing reactors! They have a lovely assortment of fissile materials just waiting chemical purification and fluoride-chloride salt combination. 

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy ✓

  67. Renewables like wind and solar, which are not constant, require more fossil fuel power plants as backup because they are so unreliable, which is why big oil companies are so in favor of them.

    In contrast, nuclear provides an extremely reliable baseline and the only environmental impact is increased water temperature downstream.

  68. Somewhat fear-mongering, my friend.  

    Correct if I am wrong, but one of they key financial remediation mandates imposed by all Western governments as a stipulation for the certification-of-operation of the power plants is to set aside monies which are to be invested at decommissioning … to safely and effectively decommission the plants. Leaving them “walk-away safe” for at least 100 years, providing they remain unbreached by nefarious agents. 

    And in that fund is also provision for continual 24–7–365 electronic and in-person surveillance, periodic containment checks, and a watchdog-force over the watch-dog force to ensure continued operations indefinitely.  

    While the Savannah (and other WW2-to-late–1950s) plants exerted surprisingly lax to shockingly aberrant in-situ remediation practices, the rest of the nation’s nuclear power plants were not so shoddily kept.  

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy ✓

  69. Ah, actually there is. (enough heat).  When freshly withdrawn rods are transferred, they are radiating enough for the first few months to easily boil water. But because the radionuclides quickly decay, that hot-hot mode subsides to a lower, longer persistent radiation. Each rod emits well over 100 watts of heat from week 4 to week 20.

    Just saying,
    [b]Goat[/b]Guy ✓

  70. there is not enough heat output of spent waste fuel to ‘boil off’ the water in storage pools. It’s called normal evaporation, which is very slow. No one will ever ‘abandon’ waste fuel pools … not too bright are you?

  71. Covered parking is an *amenity* for customers, especially in plastic-melting hot and dry climates. There’s more than one reason to build such things.

  72. Well sited land is $12,000 per acre (4000 square meters).

    At 50% coverage and 18% efficiency you get 360 kilowatts of panels costing $360,000 at $1 per nameplate watt for the project.

    Total non-issue at 1/3 of 1 percent of the project cost.

  73. the rods are stored in the waste fuel pool on site. If power is lost for an extended period the pool water will boil off and the rods will melt. In the US we don’t have a waste fuel long term storage facility yet. And it is doubtful we ever will. so what we have now is radioactive waste in storage facilities that were only meant for short term storage. Soon the companies that own these reactors will shut them down. And they will be under financial pressure to abandon the waste fuel pools. They won’t declare it. They will just stop spending money to maintain the facilities. The facilities will leak and poison the ground water underneath.

  74. What intelligent people know about nuclear power is that it is more expensive and that it is inherently unsafe. In the Fukushima incident they lost 6 reactors. The replacement cost would be from $30 billion to $60 billion. Then there is the cost of containing the disaster which will be in the $100 of billions. Yes, nuclear power is safer but its rare disasters are very costly. The things is that there is nuclear technology that is cheaper and safer than the PWR that is currently in use. The fact that renewable kill more people than nuclear power isn’t important. Roofing and truck driving kills a lot more people than both.

  75. I thought it was the xenon gas that builds up in solid fuel rods and absorbs neutrons that leads to fuel rods needing to be removed?

    The even numbered isotopes of plutonim don’t fission well in the thermal spectrum, which limits the amount of times fuel can be reprocessed for a thermal spectrum reactor (eventual build up of plutonium 242) but in a fast spectrum reactor this problem goes away?

    Anyway, that’s just my layperson understanding. Could well be wrong.

  76. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong reported here… perhaps it doesn’t jive with your beliefs.

  77. At the moment, yes, but see the previous NBF article for one of many projects that could change that.

    And of course the only reason natural gas is so competitive is that we don’t make it pay for its externalities.

  78. The Fossil Fuel Industry especially Coal quietly gave substantial backing to to the anti-nuclear movement for decades. They succeeded in injecting a lot of scary disinformation into general circulation and convinced a couple generations of journalists who carried on the project. Fukushima coverage relentlessly showed images of destruction combined with commentary about the nuclear plant that had nothing whatever to do with the destruction.

  79. Sure you can co-locate things but it still takes up a large area and land isn’t free. Raising solar panels, putting them on large metal frames so that you can park cars underneath makes solar very expensive.

  80. The fundamental obstacle for fission reactors is cheap natural gas. Natural gas plants can be built quicker and at much less cost than a nuclear plant,especially in the U.S. where growth of electricity demand is moderate and uncertain.

  81. The majority of used fuel is not recycled. Most of the used fuel – about 96% – is uranium, and up to 1% is plutonium, with the remaining 3% being high-level waste.

    … I thought the HLW was a little low. Here’s the IPFM (International Panel on Fissile Materials) quote:

    For LWR running at a burnup rate of 50 GWd/tHM, the spent fuel consists of about 93.4% uranium (≈0.8% U–235), 5.2% fission products (“hot” waste), 1.2% plutonium (12 kg per ton of fuel), and 0.2% minor transuranic elements (neptunium, americium, and curium, etc.)

    The uranium is significantly depleted in ²³⁵U, the “fissile kind”.

    The ²³⁸Pu, ²³⁹Pu, ²⁴⁰Pu, ²⁴¹Pu and ²³⁹Np are all highly neutron-reactive (often fissioning), or if not fissioning, then breed to the next higher Z isotope, which DOES fission. The real reason the “spent” fuel rods need removing from the reactor has less to do with their depleted ²³⁵U status, than the BUILD UP of those “fission products”, a few of which have a vexingly high propensity to uselessly capture neutrons (generating heat, but no fission).  

    Thing is, with fairly complex (but not “difficult”) chemical processing, the U and Pu and Np can be extracted excluding the fission products. Even if just combined with 30% more high-enriched uranium fuel stock and refabricated, the resulting “hot rods” would be excellent candidates to reinsert in an operating reactor. 

    GoatGuy

  82. From Fukushima doesn’t it seem that the safety improvements to the extent the AP1000 takes them aren’t really necessary…..because the spent fuel pools are a weaker link? Risk and security are often like a steel chain, only as good as the weakest link.

    People sometimes hear stories about the waste at places like the Hanford Site where they did some hair raisingly sketchy things in the 40s and 50s to make nuclear weapons. People conflate that waste with commercial nuclear power waste, when they are really quite different.

  83. > Solar and wind take up way more land than nuclear power.

    Not necessarily. Wind turbines are frequently located on farm land, where they take up about 1% of the space. The other 99% can be used for crops like before. Turbines are spaced about 5 blade diameters apart. That’s so the turbulence the blades generate can mix air from higher altitude, which has higher speeds, and regenerate the wind speed for the next turbine in the farm. So one turbine every 5×5 spaces means 4% of the land. But the turbine base (concrete) is smaller than the blade sweep. The remaining area under the blades can still grow crops, because the tower and blades don’t block that much sunlight.

    Solar panels are frequently installed above existing structures – rooftops, parking lots, etc. Many of them are installed on desert land which wouldn’t be used for anything else. Even those installed on arable land can usually grow something between the rows. You will often see animals grazing to keep the grass from overgrowing the panels. So the land actually removed from other uses is much smaller than the total solar farm area.

  84. This article is written by a writer with no more expertise on nuclear waste than you and I. Why do some people try to speak with such authority, when they have no more knowledge than the average brainwashed man?

Comments are closed.