No Solar Way Around It

[FBaggins]

...
So it came as a shock to many and an offense to some to learn that new nuclear plants still cost substantially less than solar. Solar advocates have challenged our recent analysis finding that the electricity from Finland's beleaguered Olkiluoto plant is still four times cheaper than electricity from Germany's solar program, claiming that we cherry-picked cases to make nuclear look good and solar look bad.

It is an odd objection, given that we selected perhaps the most expensive nuclear power plant ever built for our comparison. The complaint is odder still because many of the same critics who accused us of cherry-picking then turned around and, without any apparent irony, cherry-picked small, one-off solar projects as evidence that our analysis is slanted toward nuclear.

The reason we compared the Finnish plant to the German solar program is not just because renewables advocates have long claimed that the two examples prove that solar is cheap and nuclear is expensive. We also compared the two because both projects exist in the real world at significant scale, which helps avoid the cherry-picking problem of overgeneralizing from particular cases. Thanks to generous subsidies, Germany generated 5 percent of its electricity from solar last year — a huge amount compared to other nations. By contrast, last year the United States produced just 0.18 percent of its electricity from solar, according to the EIA.

Some have reasonably asked if there aren't broader surveys of the costs of new solar and new nuclear. There are. Both the International Energy Agency and the EIA have done them, and both find that solar costs substantially more than new nuclear construction.While those figures represent the cost of the average solar installation today, they don't tell us what it costs for a major industrial economy to scale up solar rapidly, such that it gets a significant percentage of its electricity from solar. To date, Germany is the only major economy in the world that has done so. The costs of Germany's solar feed-in tariff represent the only real world figure we have.



http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/no-solar-way-around-it

[BlueStreak]

1. Simple question. Does the cost analysis include the cost of taking care

of the nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years, or do you just figure it is OK to ignore that?

[mopinko]

3. or mothballing the reactor one day?

[BlueStreak]

6. At Fukushima, they are having to install a huge new water tank every week now

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/radioactive-water-leak-found-fukushima_n_3396588.html

And this is because they have real solution for dealing with the radioactive fuel. They have to keep dumping water in or else it will overheat. But then that water is contaminated, so it has to be contained.

One will find posts by "nuclear experts" scattered around the Internet that say the entire amount of fuel used by a reactor in a year would fit under your office desk. These "experts" evidently never even considered the idea that this stuff could contaminate everything around it.

Here are the so-called "temporary" water containers. And what do they plan to do with this waste after the "temporary" period? This water will be hazardous for thousands of years, but I guess if the public stops watching for awhile, they can just dump it in the ocean.

?6

[FBaggins]

10. The water will be hazardous for thousands of years?

Not very good at math? Or just don't understand half lives?

[wtmusic]

11. They're recycling the water as it's cooled.

Of course the reactor core is a mess - there are holes, so some water gets out, and has to be sopped up as best they can.

It's a mess, and it's probably going to be responsible for as many deaths as one moderately sized coal plant in the U.S. in normal operating mode for 30 years. It doesn't help to get too excited, in context: it's the result of the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history (1,500 years) and nuclear, as an industry, has prevented millions of other deaths from burning fossil fuels.

[kristopher]

24. They have massive amounts of groundwater leaking INTO the reactor water.

The problem is severe and they have no viable solution. Right now they are talking about build a 'wall' of frozen ground around the problem areas.

[FBaggins]

4. Simple answer. Yes.

Waste storage and/or reprocessing are a very small portion of the cost of nuclear power.

[BlueStreak]

7. Yes, I guess it would be if you don't actually plan to do anything about the waste.

[wtmusic]

14. People are exposed to hundreds of times as much radioactivity from coal as nuclear.

Nuclear waste is just not as hazardous as you think it is.

[FBaggins]

15. Finland is building the world's first deep geological repository.

1700 feet down... You think they aren't planning on using it?

[kristopher]

25. If we were to lean heavily on nuclear it would require a new Yucca Mtn every 8 months.

[FBaggins]

29. Nonsense.

Or did "heavily" just take on an entirely new meaning?

There are currently between 300,000 and 350,000 tons of such waste stored worldwide (about 20% of that in the US).

The Yucca limit was originally set at 77,000 tons (enough to handle everything we've produced in the US to date with room to spare)... but that limit was entirely arbitrary. Some studies have shown that they could easily store 3-10 times that amount with expansions.

So does "heavily" suddenly mean that we're getting close to 100% of world electrical generation from nuclear power?

[kristopher]

33. Since nuclear isn't compatible with most renewables...

Last edited Sun Jun 9, 2013, 06:09 PM - Edit history (2)

...if you want a carbon free world, then yes, it means getting nearly all of our electricity from nuclear. Getting 1/3rd would require a new Yucca Mtn every two years.

eta:

From a presentation by John Holdren.

The nuclear option: size of the challenges

• If world electricity demand grows 2% /year until 2050 and nuclear share of electricity supply is to rise from 1/6 to 1/3...
–nuclear capacity would have to grow from 350 GWe in 2000 to 1700 GWe in 2050;
– this means 1,700 reactors of 1,000 MWe each.

• If these were light-water reactors on the once-through fuel cycle...
---–enrichment of their fuel will require ~250 million Separative Work Units (SWU);
---–diversion of 0.1% of this enrichment to production of HEU from natural uranium would make ~20 gun-type or ~80 implosion-type bombs.

• If half the reactors were recycling their plutonium...
---–the associated flow of separated, directly weapon - usable plutonium would be 170,000 kg per year;
---–diversion of 0.1% of this quantity would make ~30 implosion-type bombs.

• Spent-fuel production in the once-through case would be...
---–34,000 tonnes/yr, a Yucca Mountain every two years.

Mitigation of Human-Caused Climate Change
John P. Holdren

Director John P. Holdren



Dr. John P. Holdren is Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Prior to joining the Obama administration Dr. Holdren was Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, as well as professor in Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Director of the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center. Previously he was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he co-founded in 1973 and co-led until 1996 the interdisciplinary graduate-degree program in energy and resources. During the Clinton administration Dr. Holdren served as a member of PCAST through both terms and in that capacity chaired studies requested by President Clinton on preventing theft of nuclear materials, disposition of surplus weapon plutonium, the prospects of fusion energy, U.S. energy R&D strategy, and international cooperation on energy-technology innovation.

Dr. Holdren holds advanced degrees in aerospace engineering and theoretical plasma physics from MIT and Stanford. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He served as a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Board of Trustees from 1991 to 2005, as Chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control from 1994 to 2005, and as Co-Chair of the independent, bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy from 2002 to 2009. His awards include a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, the John Heinz Prize in Public Policy, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and the Volvo Environment Prize. In December 1995 he gave the acceptance lecture for the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international organization of scientists and public figures in which he held leadership positions from 1982 to 1997.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/about/leadershipstaff/director

[FBaggins]

36. Of course it's compatible.

What a ridiculous assertion.

A carbon-free world would dramatically expand electrical demand (electrification), with much more demand-side flexibility. The newer nuclear designs don't ramp from second to second, but they are far more flexible than the existing fleet. Hydro combined with the storage that we must have in order to expand solar/wind gives more than enough flexibility to make the system work.

Getting 1/3rd would require a new Yucca Mtn every two years.

Nope. Still doing the math poorly. Everything produced worldwide to date wouldn't overfill an expanded Yucca... and it's hardly all that expensive when compared to that many units.

[oldhippie]

39. What?

33. Since nuclear isn't compatible with most renewables...

WTF are you talking about?

[PamW]

41. WRONG AGAIN!!

I've never seen any justification for this platitude that nuclear and renewable are "incompatible" that some environmentalists accept without any substantiation.

It's just an assertion that if uncritically accepted means that if one is in favor of renewables that one has to reject nuclear power. It's just a "cheap" way of dismissing another power generating technology.

For Heaven's sake; California has wind turbines at Altamont Pass. We also have geothermal power from the Geysers. Shortly, there will be solar power from the Mojave desert.

California also has the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

There is no reason that we can't have all of these energy generating technologies, because that's what we have now.

We may need to make some changes to the grid to accept new renewables; but there's no reason that the diversified "smart" grid can't be "backward compatible" with the nuclear power plants and other centralized systems we have now.

In any electric grid, the power of the generators have to be matched to the demand of the load. Let's say the power of the generators lagged the demand by 1 watt for 1 second. That would be 1 Joule of energy that the load took out of the grid that the power generators didn't produce. The grid would have "created" 1 Joule of energy. The Laws of Physics do NOT allow that.

Likewise, if the power generators produced 1 watt more power for 1 second than the load demanded. That would mean the grid "destroyed" 1 Joule of energy, ( beyond the normal line losses ). The Laws of Physics don't allow that either.

Since the Laws of Physics don't allow either the "creation" or "destruction" of energy; if there ever is a mismatch; the grid will "fall" so that it won't violate the Laws of Physics.

So the power generators have to match their generation to the demand. That's what a "smart" grid is all about. The "smart" grid also has a parallel computer network so that the demand of the load can be communicated to all the renewable power sources like solar and wind. The renewable power sources have to be told what the demand is by the "smart" grid.

Then how does the present system without the "smart" grid match supply and demand?

Our present supply has rotating AC generators that are directly tied to the power lines. Because of one of the Laws of Physics; "Lenz's Law"; these AC generators can "feel" what the load is from the powerline.

It's like when you pick up a big rock. Nobody has to tell you how much force to use to pick up the rock. You can "feel" how heavy the rock is.

The same is true for power plants with rotating AC generators; they can "feel" the load from the powerline. Renewables like wind and solar can't do that.

So we build a new "smart" grid for the renewables that can't sense the load through the powerline. However, there's no reason whatsoever that our old rotating AC generators can't be supplying electricity to that new smart grid.

The old rotating AC generators will just be sensing the load the same way they always have; and they won't need the new "smarts" that we put into the electric grid. But just because the old rotating AC generators don't need to use the new "smarts" doesn't mean that they are incompatible, or won't work with a new "smart" grid.

Let's give the forum readers ACCURATE information; instead of LYING one's way into garnering support for one's favorite generation technology.

PamW

[oldhippie]

46. Pam, great explanation, but a question ...

The same is true for power plants with rotating AC generators; they can "feel" the load from the powerline. Renewables like wind and solar can't do that.

Aren't the "generators" in the big wind turbines actually AC induction machines that should be able to "feel" the load? I was under the impression that they were "synched" to whatever the line frequency is, and the blade pitch could be adjusted to pull the necessary power from the wind, within limits, of course. Maybe that is too simplistic an explanation on my part. I have to admit I am more comfortable on the electronic side (PV) than on the mechanical (wind.)

[PamW]

49. NOPE!!

Last edited Sun Jun 9, 2013, 08:14 PM - Edit history (1)

The generators on wind turbines are DC generators.

The AC generators that are directly attached to the power grid all have to rotate synchronously.

That is; as the AC generator turns, every "angle" of its rotation corresponds to a level on the 60 Hz ( 60 cycle per second ) sinusoidal AC waveform that we get at our electric outlets.

Just like a bunch of lumberjacks using a multi-man saw, or a bunch of men "pumping" one of those hand-pumped railroad cars.... all the them have to be on the same part of the push-pull cycle.

In an AC grid, all the generators have to be "synch-ed" together too. They all have to be "in phase".

Once the operators of an AC power plant get the generator running; they then have to "synch" it to the powerline before they can start to pump large amounts of power into the powerline.

There's a feedback mechanism that controls the throttle valve on the turbine, that monitors if the generator is in synch with the powerline. If the load increases, there will be more current flow in the armature of the generator, and because of Lenz's Law, it will be harder for the turbine to turn the generator. If nothing were done, the turbine-generator combo would slow down a bit, and get out of synch with the powerline. That feedback circuit controls the turbine throttle to increase turbine power so that the turbine-generator combo doesn't slow down and fall out of sync with the rest of the AC power grid.

That's "how" the power station "feels" the load.

If you were to hook a wind turbine directly to an AC generator like in our present power plants; then it too would need that feedback circuit to control the power delivered to the generator so that it doesn't fall out of sync with the rest of the grid.

The problem is unlike the case with the steam turbine which has a throttle valve; there's NO THROTTLE on a wind turbine. We can't "throttle" the power that Mother Nature is giving us with a wind turbine. ( You could throttle back by adjusting the blade pitch; but you can't throttle up if you are already maxed out and the demand increases. )

So wind turbines usually have DC generators, and then they use electronic inverters to take the DC energy and convert it to AC electric energy that matches the current phase on the powerline.

Because we can't "throttle" Mother Nature to give us more power; and wind power varies from moment to moment too; the wind turbines that are on a powerline are more of a source of "disruption" due to the variation in their power output from moment to moment.

Currently, its the other power plants with throttles, which the industry calls "dispatchable"; that is the grid operator or controller can command / dispatch power the way a police dispatcher can dispatch a police cruiser to handle a call; are the ones that have to compensate for the variations induced by the wind turbines.

That's why the National Academy of Science has been saying in their energy studies for the last 20 years ( which kristopher keeps claiming don't exist ) that renewables can be no more than about 20% MAXIMUM (near term) to 50% MAXIMUM (long term) of our electric generation capacity unless we have some technology to store large amounts of energy. A good summary from the National Academy of Sciences 2009 energy study:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12619&page=4

Solar power plants operate on an inherent 25% "duty cycle". Consider the 24 hour day. You don't get any solar power during the 50% of the 24 hour day that is night. In the early morning hours and late afternoon hours; the angle of the sun to the Earth's surface means that we don't get the full amount of solar energy - it's going above us. Solar plants develop the bulk of their energy over a 6 hour period from 9AM to 3PM. That's 25% of the 24 hour day. They thus need to have a storage capacity to handle the other 75% of the time.

How much energy do we need to store? A typical large coal plant or nuclear plant is about 1 Gigawatt. So in a given day, the amount of energy it produces is 1 Gigawatt-Day. ( The product of a unit of power and a unit of time will always be a unit of energy ) We can convert this unit of energy into any other unit of energy just as we can convert any unit of length, like the "foot" to any other unit of length, like the "inch", the "meter", the "furlong"...

So how much is 1 Gigawatt-Day. Wolfram's Alpha can help there:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Convert+1+gigawatt-day+to+kilotons

In a single day, a 1 Gw power plant produces an energy equivalent to 20.6 kilotons or about the energy of the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. If we need to store 75% of the daily total; we need to be able to store 15 kilotons of energy which is equal to the energy of the Hiroshima bomb.

So for every 1 Gw conventional power plant you want to supplant with solar power; you have to be able to store a Hiroshima bomb's worth of energy daily. That just gives you an idea of the magnitude of the storage problem.

So now you can see why we can't just go 100% solar or 100% wind at the present time, if ever.

When people say that wind and solar are "unreliable", they don't mean that solar and wind aren't "up and running". No; wind and solar are "unreliable" when they are "up and running" in the sense that they are "unreliable" at being able to guarantee a certain level of power output; which they can't because they are relying on Mother Nature for their energy, and we don't control or "throttle" Mother Nature. We just have to accept what Mother Nature is offering from instant to instant.

Sorry to be so long-winded on a simple question; but I got on a roll.

I hope you enjoy the information.

PamW

[oldhippie]

52. Thanks. I see where I might have been confused ...

I remembered reading this in the past:

http://www.alternative-energy-tutorials.com/wind-energy/induction-generator.html

Wind Turbines using Induction Generators

As the Synchronous Generator we looked at in the previous tutorial, there is also another more popular type of 3-phase rotational machine that we can use as a wind turbine generator called an Induction Generator. Both the synchronous generator and the Induction Generator have similar fixed stator winding arrangement which, when energised by a rotating magnetic field, produces a three-phase ( or single phase ) voltage output. However, the rotors of the two machines are quite different with the rotor of an induction generator typically consisting of one of two types of arrangement: a "squirrel cage", or a "wound rotor".

Also, unlike the previous synchronous generator which has to be "synchronised" with the electrical grid before it can generate power, induction generators can be connected directly to the utility grid and driven directly by the turbines rotor blades at variable wind speeds, but for economy and reliability many wind power turbines which use induction machines as their electrical generator are driven through a mechanical gearbox to increase their speed of rotation, performance and efficiency.

Induction machines are also known as Asynchronous Machines, that is they rotate below synchronous speed when used as a motor, and above synchronous speed when used as a generator. So when rotated faster than its normal operating or no-load speed, an induction generator produces AC electricity. Because an induction generator synchronises directly with the main utility grid - that is, produces electricity at the same frequency and voltage - no rectifiers or inverters are required.

Three-phase induction machines are very well suited for wind power and even hydroelectric generation. Induction machines, when functioning as generators, have a fixed stator and a rotational rotor the same as for the synchronous generator. However, excitation (creation of a magnetic field) of the rotor is performed differently and a typical design of the rotor is the squirrel-cage structure, where conducting bars are embedded within the rotors body and connected together at their ends by shorting rings as shown.

I guess this Induction Generator isn't actually synchronous, but can connect directly to the grid. I think I got it now.

[PamW]

42. Holdren is blowing smoke

Holdren is blowing smoke because the diversion of enrichment capacity is a big deal and is detectable.

It's like saying that an average pharmaceutical plant could be altered to produce deadly nerve gas and other chemical weapons. Therefore, we have to give up and destroy all the pharmaceutical plants and do without the medicines that the modern health profession relies on because the plants could be utilized for a nefarious purpose.

We don't do that! Instead we monitor our pharmaceutical plants to ensure that they are producing only life-saving pharmaceuticals and not deadly chemical weapons. We haven't had any problems with that in the last 50+ years.

Likewise, the nuclear weapons nations like the USA have all the nuclear material that we need. That's why the USA stopped making bomb materials back in 1988. The only bomb material we currently make it Tritium, because it's radioactive and goes away with a 12 year half-life. So we have to replenish that; but NOT the Plutonium nor HEU.

So how about we do what we've basically done for the past 50+ years and restrict HEU enrichment to ONLY nations that already have nuclear weapons and like the USA don't need any more weapons material. The present nuclear weapons nations have no incentive to divert enrichment capacity; because all of them have more nuclear weapons material than they know what to do with. Making more would just mean having to store it. That facility at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge that the 82-year old nun and her companions infiltrated is where the USA stores excess HEU. The USA isn't going to divert enrichment capacity to make more of something we already have an excess of.

Japan is a non-weapons state that has been enriching for years now; and there has been no problem with diversion. So we just keep the enrichment technology away from the people we don't want to have nuclear bombs just as we do now. We can still use nuclear power and do what we have to do anyway to keep the nuclear weapons "wannabe" states from getting their hands on it.

It's a false dichotomy ( that seems to be the anti-nuke theme ) in saying that there is some kind of link between using nuclear power in the USA and keeping nuclear bombs out of the hands of other nations.

Either kristopher or Holdren is playing "fast and loose" with the numbers. Nuclear power has been providing us with about 20% of our electricity for 50 years and has so far amassed 77,000 tonnes of waste. So the waste generation rate is:

77,000 tonnes / 50 years / 20% = 77 tonnes / year / % electric generation

So where does this 34,000 tonnes per year come from?

Even if we got 100% of our electric power from nuclear it would be 7,700 tones per year at today's electric usage rate.

Holden, kristopher, Jacobson, and the other anti-nukes keep proving the old maxim:

Figures never lie, but LIARS sure can figure.

It would be so refreshing if the anti-nukes told the scientific truth in these discussions.

PamW

[PamW]

38. WRONG AGAIN!!

The above is another of the "pseudo-facts" that kristopher just makes up as he see fit.

As FBaggins points out, the capacity of Yucca Mountain can hold ALL the waste the USA has generated in the last 50+ years that nuclear power has been in existence. FBaggins is also correct that it can really handle an order of magnitude above that.

However, those figures are for waste that has NOT been reprocessed. About 96% of nuclear waste is Uranium-238 which is no more radioactive than the day it was dug out of the ground. Suppose we reprocess our spent fuel and separate out the 96% that is Uranium-238. That Uranium-238 could just be put back in the Uranium mine where we originally got it. It doesn't require a Yucca Mountain to dispose of Uranium-238. We reserve the space in Yucca Mountain for that 4% of the spent fuel that needs a Yucca Mountain type repository.

The analogy I use to explain this is a medical office. Your doctor's medical office makes two types of waste. There's the medical waste consisting of used needles, and swabs contaminated with blood that may contain the AIDS virus, for example. The other type of waste is just the everyday office trash; botched copies of reports, the leftovers from the receptionist's lunch...

The cost of disposal for the two types of waste vary greatly. The office trash can be disposed of just like the trash from your home at the going rate that Waste Management or whoever charges to haul away your trash. The medical or "biohazard" waste is much more expensive to dispose of.

That's why the doctor has two different trash cans in the exam rooms. One for the normal office waste, and one for the medical waste. The doctor keeps the two separate so the medical waste can be disposed of at the higher cost, whereas the office trash can be disposed of at the low trash rate.

The doctor doesn't mix the two types of waste together; because then it would all have to be disposed of as biohazard waste and that would be expensive. Why spend money to dispose of as biohazard waste the remnants of the receptionist's tuna fish sandwich from yesterday's lunch?

That's why the doctor keeps those wastes separate. Spent fuel, unfortunately, comes with the two types of waste mixed together. However, one can use chemical separation, called "reprocessing" to separate the Uranium-238 from the fission products, Plutonium, and other actinides.

The Uranium-238 which comprises 96% of "nuclear waste" can then be disposed of by putting it back in a Uranium mine where we got it, and it would be no more dangerous there than if we had never dug it up in the first place.

Of course, every time I've made this suggestion here before, the resident anti-nukes have always demonstrated their abject IGNORANCE of science by claiming that reprocessing "creates" more waste. To be blunt that is just a flat out LIE.

A chemical process - ANY chemical process merely "sorts" atoms. It's a way of directing which way the atoms go based on their "valence" or "chemical properties". If any of you studied ANY chemistry in high school, you would know that's what chemistry does.

For example, you have a solution that has a mixture of chemical "X" and chemical "Y". You add chemical "Z" to it and the "Z" atoms combine with the "X" atoms to form the compound "XZ" which is non-soluble and it precipitates out of solution. You have just separated the "X" atoms from the "Y" atoms. You now have a waste stream with just "Y" atoms.

Later, you can use another process to dis-associate the "XZ" into "X" atoms and "Z" atoms; the latter of which you can recycle / reuse by adding to more solution containing "X" and "Y" so as to repeat the process.

The end result is that you have two waste streams; one with "X" atoms and one with "Y" atoms.

Note that all the atoms are conserved. Additionally, any atom that was radioactive before the reaction is still radioactive after the chemical reactions, and any atom that was not radioactive before the reaction maintains its non-radioactive status after the chemical reactions. Chemical reactions do NOT create new radioactive materials.

Let me repeat this last point. Chemical reactions do NOT create new radioactivity. Nuclear reactions can create radioactivity; but chemical reactions do NOT.

Anybody that tells you that chemical reaction create "new" radioactivity, or "more" radioactivity is a BLITHERING IDIOT. Any of the anti-nukes that want to make the claim that one gets "more" radioactivity from chemical reprocessing reactions is willingly accepting the mantle that says BLITHERING IDIOT.

If you don't believe the above; just visit or call up your local high school and talk to the chemistry teacher and find out that chemical reactions do NOT create "more" radioactivity.

So separating the Uranium-238 ( 96% of spent fuel ) from the rest of the spent fuel, we can dispose of it by putting it back where we got it; and only put the 4% of the waste that is the remainder into Yucca Mountain.

Doing so would increase the capacity of Yucca Mountain by a factor of 25. Since Yucca Mountain can store 50+ years of un-reprocessed nuclear waste; the 25 fold increase would mean that Yucca Mountain could store all the waste we generate in 12.5 centuries if we used nuclear power at our present rate.

If we increased our use of nuclear power from 20% of our electric power to 100% of our electric power which is a factor of 5 increase; then the current Yucca Mountain would last 2.5 centuries at current use rates.

As a colleague of mine once calculated, the total volume of unreprocessed nuclear waste that it took 50+ years to generate will fit in the volume of a high school gymnasium. If we reprocess; then the amount of waste that has to be specially disposed of would take up 1/25-th of a high school gymnasium.

Because nuclear fuel gives you pound for pound MILLIONS of times more energy than chemical reactions ( which is why a single nuclear bomb can destroy a whole city, whereas an even heavier chemical high explosive bomb only takes out a single building ), the amount of waste one has to dispose of with nuclear power is MILLIONS of times LESS than if chemical reactions were used to produce the same amount of energy.

That's why chemical-fueled power plants have "smokestacks"; the amount of waste is so huge that the only way to deal with the amount of waste CO2, water vapor, sulfur dioxide.... is to throw it into the atmosphere. That's the only "sink" big enough to accept all that waste.

By contrast; the amounts of nuclear waste are MILLIONS of times less; and are of amounts that we can dispose of without having to resort to tossing it freely into the environment. The amount is low enough so that we can build facilities, like Yucca Mountain, like the Finland facility, like the Swedish facility; that can keep this waste separated from the environment.

Additionally, if you use your reprocessing step to separate out the Plutonium-239 which is the long-lived waste, we can return that to the reactor and burn it as fuel so that it becomes fission products.

If you do that, then the longevity of the waste drops by a factor of about 1000 because the longest lived radioactive species is no longer the 24,100 year half-life Plutonium-239. The longest lived species is the 30 year half-live of Cesium-137.

So there are ways to both reduce the volume and longevity of nuclear waste that we are NOT taking advantage of; but we could.

PamW

[oldhippie]

40. Thank you for a voice of reason .....

There are so many here that are math and physics challenged that it feels good to hear real facts now and then.

[PamW]

43. Thank You.

I'm not a "salesman" for a particular generating technology.

I'm not going to LIE to someone like a "used car salesman" lies to people in popular mythology.

I want the public to have ACCURATE scientific information.

I don't want to see people "stampeded" by fear due to INACCURATE scientific claims.

In the choice of power generating technology for future generation capacity; there are certainly "value" decisions to be made, things like trading off cost vis-a-vis environmental degradation. ( We all make that decision every time we use our cars; we accept the environmental degradation due to pollution from the trip against the need / desire to make that trip. ) There are no right / wrong answers there.

But with science, there are indeed right / wrong answers. Mother Nature is our neutral arbiter of scientific information.

Unfortunately, there's a host of people who want to "stampede" people into choosing "their" way by LYING to them, scaring them with bogus information, or telling them that something is infeasible when it isn't, or the flip side, telling them something is feasible when it isn't.

This misinformation gets spread to others by people who don't understand the science. We have some anti-nuke professor that juggles the numbers and makes an erroneous claim, and someone who is scientifically illiterate takes those lies and repeats them here; as if that information came directly from the Almighty, himself.

It really does no good to LIE about the science. In the end, Mother Nature has her way. If Mother Nature forbids something; then you just can't do it, no matter how many people you've LIED your way into joining your side.

A good way of finding out who is the LIAR and who isn't is to ask them to explain it in their own words.

If the only thing they can do is to do a "data dump" on you ( the old "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullsh.. approach ), or they say "it's obvious", or some other way of avoiding explaining it to you in their own words; then WATCH OUT!. It means they don't understand it themselves, and they are just relying on some "guru" who is promoting his/her own agenda.

PamW

[BlueStreak]

2. Another question, if the first one was too hard. Does the study include the costs

of increased disease that results from our use of nuclear reactors? That is a very well known quantity by now -- not speculative at all. Does the study attribute any cost to the cancers, deaths, and increase health care expenses that are entirely predictable as a direct result of nuclear power?

A simple yes or no will do.

[FBaggins]

5. Nope. It also doesn't include...

... the cost of fighting off the UFOs that you think will come to conquer us once they realize that we're using nuclear power.

In other words... they have no need to include the costs of your imaginary reality. The "very well known quantity" is that there is no "increased disease that results from our use of nuclear reactors" if you're talking about the normal operation of undamaged reactors.

[BlueStreak]

8. Yeah, right.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/child-leukemia-rates-increase-near-u-s-nuclear-power-plants/13825

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-42066/New-study-links-nuclear-sites-cancer.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-127786/Cancer-rates-times-higher-near-power-station.html

In fact, the only studies that DON'T show this are the ones funded by the NRC, which is fully funded by the nuke industry. They aren't a watchdog, they are a partner/enabler to the industry.

You probably also will deny that there have actually been hundreds of significant, emergency releases of radiation at US reactors over recent decades.

[FBaggins]

9. You realize that's Chris Busby's nonsense, right?

Even the Caldicott nuts have stopped calling on him since he's gone so far off the deep end.

This is the guy selling overpriced vitamins to the japanese on the claim that they will protect them from radiation... and that you need to buy they all over Japan because the government has secretly been releasing more radiation all over the country so that cancer studies will show no difference between Fukushima and the rest of the country.

The other study was done by the tooth fairy. Not entirely rejected by the nuts... but long rejected by the scientific community for blatant cherry-picking (to outright inventing) data.

You probably also will deny that there have actually been hundreds of significant, emergency releases of radiation at US reactors over recent decades.



A new definition of both "emergency" and "significant".

[BlueStreak]

16. ad hominem attacks, the last refuge of people who have no answers

Have a good evening. No point in discussing further. You have made your point of view clear.

[FBaggins]

17. Ad hominem would be simply calling him a nutcase

Though it would still be true...

But I pointed out that even the anti-nuke fringe has ceased to accept him and gave examples of why.

Though I can see why you would run... with multiple embarrassing errors already on the thread.

The simple fact is that the nonsense that you claimed to now be accepted science... is anything but. It has, in fact, been roundly rejected by the scientific community.

[PamW]

48. The "tooth fairy" above was the "Tooth Fairy Project"

FBaggins is correct that good independent scientists have TOTALLY DISCREDITED the "Tooth Fairy Project" and the guy behind it; Joseph Mangano and his co-author Jan Shermann.

Check out what good independent scientists; like the "Health Physics Society" says about "Tooth Fairy Project"

hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q616.html

Mangano and Sherman published an analysis a few weeks after the Fukushima accident in the online journal "Counterpunch" They claimed the death rate went up after the Fukushima accident.

However, Counterpunch readers noticed that Mangano and Sherman averaged the fluctuating weekly death rates over unequal intervals before and after the accident; 4 weeks in one case, 10 weeks in the other.

Counterpunch's own statistician also thought that was funny, so he revisted the data and averaged over 10 weeks on both sides of the accident; and reported there was ZERO increase in deaths.

That was a particularly "ham-handed" attempt by Mangano and Sherman to fudge the data.

One has to do their own homework. If the sources one cites lead back to charlatans like Busby, Mangano, and Sherman that good independent scientists have discredited; then one shouldn't cite those sources.

Additionally, the main studies concerning health impacts due to nuclear power were NOT funded by the NRC. The National Cancer Institute funded the main study:

No Excess Mortality Found in Counties with Nuclear Facilities

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/nuclear-facilities

Additionally, the "nuclear industry" doesn't fund/control the NRC any more than the aviation industry funds/controls the FAA. If Boeing controlled the FAA; would the FAA have grounded the Boeing 787 until the battery problem was fixed? If Southern California Edison controlled the NRC; then why hasn't the NRC allowed SCE to restart San Onofre at reduced power as SCE wants?

It's just a convenient MYTH that the regulators are controlled by the industries they regulate. It's an unproven assumption that lets some avoid answering some difficult questions that don't square with their "world view".

PamW

[wtmusic]

12. Agree that the NRC is too close to industry.

90% of their funding comes from fees and there is too much of a potential for conflict.

It's expensive as hell, and taxpayers should foot the bill. But there's no evidence that they haven't done a very, very good job. Not one documented radiation-related death from nuclear power in the U.S - that's a truly remarkable statistic.

[PamW]

44. Have you stopped beating your wife?

Just like the question in the title of this post; your question makes an invalid ASSUMPTION.

Such a question, with an invalid assumption, can't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no" answer; because to do so with either "yes" or "no" tends to validate the invalid assumption in the question. ( If I were the suspicious type, I might think that was why you phrased the question that way, and asked for "yes" or "no". )

The National Cancer Institute studied whether nuclear power plants cause cancer:

No Excess Mortality Risk Found in Counties with Nuclear Facilities

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/nuclear-facilities

This study dates to 1992; but the National Cancer Institute is currently conducting a follow-up study to see if anything has changed in the last two decades. Stay tuned for the updated results.

Additionally, we can see how much of our radiation exposure is due to the use of nuclear power. Courtesy of the Health Physics Society chapter at the University of Michigan:

http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/radrus.htm

You can see that the average person's percentage of radiation exposure due to all aspects of the use of nuclear power, called "Nuclear Fuel Cycle" in the table is <0.03%

One can see that we are all unavoidably exposed to 3000X as much due to Mother Nature because of all the cosmic rays and radioactive substances, like Radon, that Mother Nature makes.

We can withstand the radiation that Mother Nature throws at us. Just as we evolved an immune system to fight off all the nasty pathogens that are in our environment courtesy of Mother Nature; we also evolved a DNA radiation damage repair mechanism. If you overwhelm the radiation damage repair mechanism as the World War II atomic bombs did to the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; then you get cancers. But that <0.03% due to nuclear power is well within the capability of our natural defense to take care of as world-renown researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory point out in an article in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/20/low-dose-radiation/

“Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”

PamW

[wtmusic]

47. .

LNT was given the imprimatur of fact in an erroneous 1946 Nobel address. It's time to set the record straight.

[PamW]

50. It should have been set straight in 1977

It should have been set straight in 1977.

That's when Dr. Rosalyn Yallow received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 1977 for her work on radioimmuno assay.

The problem is that LNT makes things "too easy". With LNT it doesn't matter how a dose is distributed among the population. With LNT, you don't have to determine how much dose a given member of the population got. With LNT, all you have to do is count the number of fatal doses.

Let's say an entire 200 tablet bottle of aspirin is a fatal dose.

You give 1 person 200 aspirin tablets, that is a 100% fatal dose and you get 1 dead person.

Suppose you give 100 aspirin tablets to two people "A" and "B". Both "A" and "B" receive 50% of a fatal dose; so under LNT there's a 50% chance of each of them dying. So there are 4 cases with the following probabilities:

25% chance "A" dies and "B" dies
25% chance "A" dies and "B" lives
25% chance "A" lives and "B" dies
25% chance "A" lives and "B" lives

Let's calculate the "expectation value" of the number of dead people. That is the number of dead people weighted by the probabiltity:

A dies / B dies: 0.25 x 2 deaths = 0.50
A dies / B lives: 0.25 x 1 death = 0.25
A lives / B dies: 0.25 x 1 death = 0.25
A lives / B lives 0.25 x 0 deaths = 0

Sum = 1.0 death. That's the nice thing about LNT; it doesn't matter how you disperse or distribute the deadly agent. To get the "expectation value" of the deaths; you just have to count the number of fatal doses.

It was just too easy to do the calculations; and to scare people with LNT.

That's one reason LNT has survived this long; and there are some that will fight to the death to save this "anachronism"

PamW

[wtmusic]

13. Shellenberger featured prominently in "Pandora's Promise"

Opening next Wed. June 12 in NYC, 6/14 others

http://pandoraspromise.com/

[msongs]

18. of course the costs include everything relating to chernobyl , hiroshima, & nagasaki nt

[wtmusic]

19. and radon and solar flares and bananas.

You have no clue what I'm talking about, do you?

[PamW]

45. Why lump Hiroshima and Nagasaki into it?

Why do people continually lump Hiroshima and Nagasaki deaths and morbidity into the use "cost" of nuclear power.

The deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't due to an "accident" while using nuclear power.

NO - the US Government set out on a program that cost Billions of dollars and employed thousands of scientists and engineers and built massive facilities; for the sole purpose of developing and manufacturing weapons of war to use against our enemies in World War II.

You can be "outraged" all you want at the toll the atomic bombs took on the Japanese; but it wasn't an "accident". It was done "on purpose". It will happen again, if ever, only "on purpose". You don't get city-destroying nuclear explosions as a result of an "accident".

PamW

[FBaggins]

51. For the same reason that...

... when we figure the price of a car, we have to include the costs of all of the trillions of dollars that are spent on wars for oil reserves.

In other words... there's no good reason at all.

[kristopher]

20. Shellenberger's Breakthrough Institute is on par with the Heritage Foundation

They don't produce analysis, they produce propaganda.

Case in point, BI is comparing the cost building the solar manufacturing infrastructure that lowered this curve:



With the cost of a plant built by a fully mature long subsidized industry. If we were to look at the total value of subsidies and compare it with the value of the electricity produced by nuclear we'd see a much higher figure than BI is using by selecting this one plant - in many cases nearly double. BI accounts for the solar subsidies in the retail pricing, but externalized the nuclear subsidies.

He is not taking into account any of the value from solar's contribution to greatly reducing the German grid's peak energy prices - and that is a substantial savings that radically alters the benefit/cost equation for solar.

Here is a question for you.
If the author's numbers are correct, how is it that the estimates for Finland vary so widely from the strike price the UK is preparing to pay EDF for the two reactors at Hinkley:

We already know what a kilowatt-hour of new nuclear will have to cost for EDF to build a new plant in the UK: around 9.5 pence per kilowatt-hour. That's roughly 0.114 euros or closer to 0.15 dollars – so the French firm is asking the British government for more than twice as much as Mr. Trembath says nuclear power in Finland will cost.

Then it occurred to me – Trembath is stealthily displaying his skills for the British government! You see, the two new reactors planned for Hinkley Point C will have a total capacity of 3,200 MW at a price tag of 14 billion pounds, or around 22 billion dollars. Olkiluoto will have only half of that capacity (1,600 MW) but apparently cost 15 billion dollars, putting the cost of a MW in Britain at only 73 percent of the cost in Finland. So according to his math, the British should only be paying 73 percent of half of what the Finns will pay – not the 15 cents being discussed, and not the seven cents in Finland, but 73% of seven, or around 5.13 cents.
http://www.renewablesinternational.net/the-cost-of-german-solar-versus-nuclear/150/537/62779/

UK - $22B / 3.2GW = $6.875/W = $0.15/kwh
Fin - $15B / 1.6GW = $9.375/W = $0.07/kwh

Why isn't the UK going to pay $0.053/kwh?

[kristopher]

26. Why isn't the UK going to pay $0.053/kwh?

Good question self.

[FBaggins]

28. Why aren't they building lots of solar at over three times that price?

An even better question.

[kristopher]

30. Because they make economic policies based on Right Wing Values.

Now, answer the question.

How does Breakthrough Institute's numbers make sense in light of the prices we know of in the UK?

I'd say that it is prima facie evidence that BI's numbers are bullshit.

[FBaggins]

32. British citizens all have right wing values?

That's the price that they're offered. If solar is actually so much cheaper... why wouldn't large masses of people jump at the chance to install it?

Now, answer the question.

Already done. They're two entirely different measures. One is the cost to produce power, the other is the price demanded to provide an investment return high enough to 1 - make the investment and 2 - not build something cheaper instead.

Which takes us right back to the strike price expected for solar and offshore wind. Why are they higher than nuclear? Because if they were the same, solar and offshore wind would die out... as it's more profitable to build a nuclear plant at ~95 than it is to build solar at anywhere close to that price.

[kristopher]

34. That doesn't answer the question - it's nonsense.

"Already done. They're two entirely different measures. One is the cost to produce power, the other is the price demanded to provide an investment return high enough to 1 - make the investment and 2 - not build something cheaper instead."

The source of revenue in both cases is your "1" - the price paid for electricity.

With "2" - are you saying the british are getting gouged? That they are paying a French company not to build cheaper generation?

Is the UK party in power the same to you as "British citizens"?

The question stands, how can a plant that cost more sell electricity for less? It can't. The explanation is that BI's numbers are bogus.

I hope people are reading your responses closely because they demonstrate exactly the kind of subterfuge the BI paper engaged in.

ETA: No more bumps - I'm done with you.

[FBaggins]

37. "Over Kris' head" and "nonsense" aren't the same thing.

Coincidentally... just like "disagreeing with Kris" isn't the same thing as "Republican".

The source of revenue in both cases is your "1" - the price paid for electricity.

So?

With "2" - are you saying the british are getting gouged?

Nope. I'm saying the same thing you've been dodging for years. Coal and gas are cheaper. If you want to drive public policy away from coal and gas, you either need to make them more expensive (either through regulation or taxes) or pay enough more for other sources to make it more profitable for investors. In the absence of long-term policy stability, you'll have to pay even more.

You can call it "gouged" if you like. In which case, the calculus changes to "nuclear power gouges Brits less than solar gouges them". Same answer.

Is the UK party in power the same to you as "British citizens"?

There is no party in power. Two parties are sharing power.

The question stands, how can a plant that cost more sell electricity for less? It can't.

And the answer stands. You're not comparing apples to apples.

If Ford currently makes car A for $10,000 and sells it for $12,000... and the government comes along and wants to contract with them to build a cleaner car... you can whine all day long that a study showing that car B would cost them $12,000 to build is disproven because they want to sell it for $15,000... but that simply isn't true. If they're going to shift from making a car with a known return to making a different car with a capped return - they're going to ask for a higher price. The fact that they aren't interested in sinking capital into a new model is not proof that there would be zero profit at $12,001/car... it's proof that they aren't stupid.

You can't compare producer costs to a long-term commitment for consumer costs. You have to either compare consumer costs or one to those of another or producer costs of one to producer costs of the other. The fact that this simple error on your part eludes you is very entertaining.

[FBaggins]

27. Intellectual laziness on your part.

They are in no way "on par with the Heritage Institute".

Your continued fallacious attempts to tar anyone who disagrees with you as a right winger (including apparently the last two Democratic presidents and a majority of Democrats in the House and Senate) is childish. It's also ridiculously circular (and laughable that you can't see it). "We don't have to listen to X's position on nuclear power because they're right wingers... and we know they're right wingers because they're pro-nuclear".

So let's take a quick one-question quiz. There's a group that has been calling for hundreds of billions of dollars in renewables and efficiency improvements for about a decade now. Harry Reid gives them credit for helping to create the first steps of the new clean-energy economy (with the 2009 energy-related pieces of the stimulus).

Is this group pushed by members of the Heritage Foundation... or by the same two guys who gave us Breakthrough?

Case in point, BI is comparing the cost building the solar manufacturing infrastructure that lowered this curve:

Could you try that claim again with a touch more honesty? I know you want to get a chance to fit in some of your spam, but do you seriously expect people to believe that the cost estimate for Germany's solar pv expenditures includes high costs going back to the 70s? What percentage of Germany's PV capacity has been installed in the last five years or so (all at the bottom of that curve)?

And we all know that the largest impact on prices during those years has been China's cost of building the manufacturing infrastructure. Those were certainly not included in the scoring.

With the cost of a plant built by a fully mature long subsidized industry.

Nope. With the very first unit of a brand new design (with all the attendant delays and cost overruns). They didn't pick the units under construction in China (at much lower cost), or the estimates for units to be constructed in the UK/India/etc.

You continue to pretend that once a few decades of experience go by, there are no more savings to be found... when many of those savings are economies of scale, and not just technology advances. There's every reason to believe that many reactors of identical design will cost less than pilot units.

He is not taking into account any of the value from solar's contribution to greatly reducing the German grid's peak energy prices

That's because it hasn't lowered the price that germans actual pay for their electricity. You can't cherry-pick a given hour and say "see! It makes things cheaper!"

If the author's numbers are correct, how is it that the estimates for Finland vary so widely from the strike price the UK is preparing to pay EDF for the two reactors at Hinkley:

If solar is cheaper... why isn't the solar industry anxious to strike the same deal?

The answer on the nuclear side is simple. A huge expenditure of capital (locked up for 40-60 years) with uncertain fossil prices in the future is too risky when they don't have to do it. Absent a firm price for carbon (or similar support structure)... there's no point in building anything but coal/gas in the UK (or nothing at all and let government deal with it).

The answer on the solar side is equally simple. They won't accept that price because they can't make money at that price. The current incentive for solar is roughly double this amount and it's too small to incent much. Last week's installations were about 1/20th of the peak week from last Spring.

[kristopher]

31. Still waiting: Why isn't the UK going to pay $0.053/kwh?

Germany's FITs are what jump started the industry. China is riding on the market that was built by 14 years of German feed-in tariffs; and the low prices for solar today would not be possible without the German effort and willingness to plan for a carbon free future. The cost of the electricity from solar in Germany includes all the subsidies they've provided in the price tag.

No matter how much nuclear is subsidized - and it has been supported far more aggressively than solar - its price continues to escalate. (You talk of China's plants as being less expensive when, in fact and like France, there is ZERO cost transparency in the process and the actual numbers are literally unknown. That certainly don't prove that there is a way of doing what the nuclear industry has never done before - namely lowering costs.)

As far as "the very first unit of a brand new design" being more expensive than following units, there is no indication of that being the case. Every instance of nuclear build has demonstrated a negative learning curve - the more they know the more expensive it becomes. It sounds good to say it because that is the pattern we'd intuitively expect, but it just isn't true. We're seeing the same cost escalations and delays that we see at Olkuluoto at the Flamanville plant in France.

Perhaps the most bizarre claim you make is that less expensive peaking prices in Germany don't reduce the cost of electricity at the retail level. If you believe that, I'm not sure how you think electricity prices are determined, but it clearly has little to no basis in reality. Solar input has resulted in the cost of the most expensive electricity on the grid being reduced to the approximate level of baseload generation - and sometimes even lower. As a solar buildout continues that is going to start curtailing baseload generation also.

That is direct value that is easily monitized and counted. If Shellenberger etal had the integrity of honest researchers, all of the above would be accounted for in their paper; but it isn't included because they are economic right-wingers. Just because they cloak their push for right-wing policies with lots of lip-service given to green values (we see a huge amount of the same strategy here) doesn't make the actual policies progressive. They are no more left leaning than Nixon was - arguably less.

[FBaggins]

35. So the Chinese are dishonest about the price of nuclear...

... but honest about the price they're paying to build out solar and wind?

Interesting theory.

Save some of what you're smoking for the rest of us.

As far as "the very first unit of a brand new design" being more expensive than following units, there is no indication of that being the case.

You mean... apart from basic economics and logic?

We're seeing the same cost escalations and delays that we see at Olkuluoto at the Flamanville plant in France.

Neither unit is remarkably ahead of the other. Summer isn't going to gain much advantage for coming after Vogtle either. It's when there's a dozen of them going on at once (and a string of orders behind) that you would expect signifianct economies of scale - and nobody expects 10+Billion per reactor.

Perhaps the most bizarre claim you make is that less expensive peaking prices in Germany don't reduce the cost of electricity at the retail level.

You may find it to be "bizarre" - but it's exactly what's happening, whether it fits your preconceptions or not.

Solar input has resulted in the cost of the most expensive electricity on the grid being reduced to the approximate level of baseload generation

No it hasn't. Germany's peak demands are in winter - when solar did almost nothing at all. It lowers it some of the time - forcing Germany to shift to paying for capacity - which remains a price that consumers must pay. Shift from paying ten euros for a little peak power to getting that power for next to nothing but having to pay the same amount to have the other power available... and you're still paying. The solar didn't cut your price... it just shifted the money to paying the FIT and the capacity payment. Big deal. Close one eye and squint and you can pretend that you've saved money... but your wallet is no thicker for it.

If Shellenberger etal had the integrity of honest researchers

And if you did, you might actually read it before making such accusations.

[Kolesar]

21. We could move your family to a new campus with all of the spent fuel rods produced in America

Would you like to live there?

[wtmusic]

22. Does the campus look like this?

Last edited Sun Jun 9, 2013, 06:42 PM - Edit history (1)

Where do I sign up?



Just some of the millions of people living safely within a mile of spent fuel rods right now.

I'm much more worried about earthquakes, like the one that killed 18,000 in Japan, for which antinukes seem to have a blind spot.

[FBaggins]

23. Why not?

Spent fuel rods (once they can be removed from pools) are hardly all that dangerous. The extra 20 pounds I'm carrying around are of far greater concern.

My preference to not live surrounded by them is the same as my preference to not live in a pile of cinder blocks.