Bernie rejects Nuclear as Clean Energy, and: Nuclear Plant Leak Threatens Drinking Water Wells in Fl

[amborin]

Nuclear Plant Leak Threatens Drinking Water Wells in Florida

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ MARCH 22, 2016

The Turkey Point nuclear power plant, south of Miami. A recent study found that its old cooling canal system was leaking polluted water into Biscayne Bay. Credit Roberto Koltun/El Nuevo Herald, via Associated Press

MIAMI — When Florida’s largest power company added two nuclear reactors to an existing plant that sat between two national parks — Biscayne Bay and the Everglades — the decision raised the concerns of environmentalists and some government officials about the possible effects on water quality and marine life.

Now more than four decades later, Florida Power & Light’s reactors at Turkey Point, built to satisfy the power needs of a booming Miami, are facing their greatest crisis. A recent study commissioned by the county concluded that Turkey Point’s old cooling canal system was leaking polluted water into Biscayne Bay.

This has raised alarm among county officials and environmentalists that the plant, which sits on the coastline, is polluting the bay’s surface waters and its fragile ecosystem. In the past two years, bay waters near the plant have had a large saltwater plume that is slowly moving toward wells several miles away that supply drinking water to millions of residents in Miami and the Florida Keys....

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/us/nuclear-plant-leak-threatens-drinking-water-wells-in-florida.html

While Sanders Rejects It, Clinton Embraces Nuclear as Part of 'Clean-Energy' Vision

The two candidates battling for the Democratic presidential nomination are divided as to whether nuclear power qualifies as "clean energy"

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http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/03/21/while-sanders-rejects-it-clinton-embraces-nuclear-part-clean-energy-vision

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. Reason #148 why i don't want to vote for Hillary. nt

[JonLeibowitz]

2. I disagree with Bernie here. There are smart, safe ways forward with nuclear technology.

Of course, he is still far better than Hillary.

[deathrind]

3. Nuclear is not clean energy.

It may not put CO2 into the atmosphere but when the byproduct is lethal for hundreds if not thousands of years or when something goes wrong like a melt down and it renders large swaths of real estate inhabitable for life for hundreds of years that can hardly be called clean energy.

[Asteroid Miner]

11. Recycle nuclear fuel.

France already recycles spent nuclear fuel. In the 1960s, we in the US recycled spent nuclear fuel.  We don't recycle nuclear fuel now for two reasons:

1. It is valuable and people steal it. The place it went that it wasn't supposed to go to was Israel. This happened in a small town near Pittsburgh, PA circa 1970. A company called Numec was in the business of reprocessing nuclear fuel. [I almost took a job there in 1968, designing a nuclear battery for a heart pacemaker.]

2. Virgin uranium is so cheap that it is cheaper than recycling. This will change eventually, which is why we keep the spent fuel where we can reach it. The US possesses a lot of MOX fuel made from the plutonium removed from bombs. MOX is essentially free fuel since it was paid for by the process of un-making bombs.

Please read this Book: "Plentiful Energy, The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, 2011. You can download this book free from: http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf. Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, are former directors of the nuclear power research lab at Argonne National Lab near Chicago. Get another free book from: http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet.html

Per Till & Chang: The Integral Fast Reactor [IFR] uses "nuclear waste" as fuel and gets 100 times as much energy out of a pound of uranium as the Generation 2 reactors we are using now. The IFR is safer than the Generation 2 reactors, which are safer by far than coal. The IFR is commercially available from GEHitachiPRISM.com

The IFR is meltdown-proof. The IFR can be turned up and down quickly and repeatably. The IFR uses metal fuel that is recycled in a system that makes it difficult to get plutonium239 out of the fuel. To make a good plutonium bomb, you must have almost pure plutonium239. 7% plutonium240 and higher isotopes or other actinides will spoil the bomb. IFR Pyro process recycled fuel is useless for bomb making.

Elements with more protons than uranium are called trans-uranics alias actinides. Actinides are the part of so-called nuclear "waste" that makes it stay radioactive for a long time. The IFR uses up the actinides as fuel. Actinides include plutonium, neptunium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and all of the other "synthetic" elements.

The IFR is the ideal source of electricity since it does not make CO2. The resultant "waste" is very small, will decay in only 300 years and is useful in medicine. The IFR is commercially available now. See: GEHitachiPRISM.com

The following countries either already recycle spent fuel or are experimenting with a recycling process or both:
France, Japan Russia, China, India, South Korea.
The US recycled spent fuel in the 1960s.

Purex process: The old one. Separates out plutonium, but does not separate the isotopes of plutonium. Any bomb made with this plutonium from a powerplant reactor would fizzle. You can't make a plutonium bomb with more than 7% Pu240.

Pyro process: Leaves plutonium mixed with uranium and trans-uranic elements. [All fissionable elements are kept together with uranium]
Other processes [wet] are also under development.

By recycling nuclear fuel, we have a 30,000 [thirty thousand] year supply.

[HassleCat]

4. Nuclear energy is wonderful, completely safe.

All we have to do is a perfect job of building the facilities, inspecting them, repairing them, maintaining them, decommissioning them when they're worn out, and keeping an eye on the waste for a couple thousand years. What could go wrong? It's not as if there would be a big tsunami or something such as that...

[Peace Patriot]

5. Yep, you got it! "What could go wrong?"

So-o-o-o-o-o-o-o much!

[All in it together]

6. Nuclear power is not the answer to our energy needs

In fact it is a negative with the radioactive spills and waste. These plants are for making a company money and the owners don't care enough about safety, because that costs them.
It does produce CO2 in the process of mining and construction of plants. It takes a tremendous amount of money to build and the risk is on the consumers if there is an accident or if they chose not to finish the plant consumers still have to pay for it. ( it has happened). Too many plants are running beyond their planned life expectancy and are going to leak more and more. They take too long to build and I don't want a new experimental nuclear plant in my neighborhood.
We don't know how to fix Fukushima which is still leaking radio activity into the Pacific Ocean.
Bernie is right again!

[Asteroid Miner]

10. Nuclear is the only possible answer. Wind and solar break the grid

Japanese laws and bureaucrats murdered 2000 people by unnecessary evacuation.

Zero people have died from Fukushima radiation.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/08/fear-of-radiation-has-killed-761-and.html
"Fear of Radiation (unnecessarily hasty evacuation and other measures) has killed 761 and radiation has killed none from Fukushima" as of August 07, 2012

573 certified deaths were due to evacuation-related stress at Fukushima. Zero due to radiation. As of February 4, 2012
ttp://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2012/2/4/japanese-authorities-recognize-573-deaths-related-to-fukushi.html

If anybody had died from radiation at Fukushima, the media would have told you his name over and over again. They didn’t.

Zero people have died from 3 mile island radiation.
Fewer than 100 died from Chernobyl radiation. The Chernobyl reactor was a primitive Generation One machine without a containment building. American reactors have containment buildings that can contain any accident.

We get 99.9% of our radiation from natural sources, called Natural Background Radiation. The total radiation in Fukushima is less than our Natural Background here in Illinois, USA.

A nuclear power plant can not explode like a nuclear bomb. A reactor is nothing like a bomb. I would have to tell you how to make a bomb and how to make a reactor to explain why. The reactor at Chernobyl did not explode like a nuclear bomb because that is not possible. Fewer than 100 people died from Chernobyl radiation. Those Soviet reactors were Generation One without containment buildings. Coal kills 3 Million people every year.

There is no need for any evacuation zone. The containment building is at least 39 inches thick of very good concrete with extreme steel reinforcement and it has a half inch thick steel liner. Chernobyl did not have a containment building.

[RobertEarl]

7. What? Leaking radioactive water? WTF??

Is it safe?

One other thing all nuke plants do besides leak waste, is create heat from atoms. That heat goes into the air and cooling water. Uh, don't we have a problem with Global Warming?

Solar, otoh, takes heat from the sun, takes it out of the atmosphere and creates electricity. Solar is a neutral source. It creates no extra heat and emits no co2 or radioactive wastes.

[Asteroid Miner]

9. CO2 makes Global Warming

We dissipate heat and entropy to the 2.7 degrees Kelvin cold of deep space. Zero degrees Kelvin is 273.16 below zero centigrade or 459.72 below zero Fahrenheit or absolute zero. 1 degree Kelvin is the same size as 1 degree centigrade. Since the universe is expanding, the cold sink will continue to get colder for ever.

As long as the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere are kept down, we have no problem dissipating heat. Too much CO2 is bad because it traps heat. You don't have to worry about dissipating heat as long as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is right.

All water is radioactive and always has been.

WHERE DID NATURAL BACKGROUND RADIATION COME FROM?

The visible universe [ignoring dark matter and dark energy] started out with only 3 elements: hydrogen, helium and lithium. All other elements were made in stars or by supernova explosions. Our star is a seventh generation star. The previous 6 generations were necessary for the elements heavier than lithium to be built up. Since heavier elements were built by radiation processes, they were very radioactive when first made.

Our planet was made of the debris of a supernova explosion that happened about 5 billion years ago. The Earth has been decreasing in radioactivity ever since. All elements heavier than nickel were necessarily made by accretion of mostly neutrons but sometimes protons onto lighter nuclei. The original nickel was radioactive and decayed to cobalt, then iron. Radioactive decays were necessary to bring these new nuclei into the realm of nuclear stability. That is why all rocks are still radioactive. The supernova made all radioactive elements including plutonium, cesium 137, etcetera.

Radiation also comes from outer space in the form of cosmic rays. Cosmic rays come from supernovas that are very far away. There will always be cosmic rays.

Again: 4 Billion years ago, the Earth was a lot more radioactive than it is today. There is no place in or on Earth or in space where there is no radiation. There never was.

[RobertEarl]

18. right

The earth used to have higher levels of radiation. Now the levels are going up due to our radioactive emissions.

It's pollution. And it is the deadliest pollution on a global scale. Best thing we could have done is not dig up and create fission and start polluting the world with radioactivity..

[Asteroid Miner]

8. Bernie is an old fuddy-duddy

Nuclear power is the only way to stop making CO2 that actually works. To stop Global Warming, we must replace all large fossil fueled power plants with nuclear.

Renewable Energy mandates cause more CO2 to be produced, not less, and renewable energy doubles or quadruples your electric bill. The reasons are as follows:

Since solar “works” 15% of the time and wind “works” 20% of the time, we need either energy storage technology we don’t have or ambient temperature superconductors and we don’t have them either. Wind and solar are so intermittent that electric companies are forced to build new generator capacity that can load-follow very fast, and that means natural gas fired gas turbines. The gas turbines have to be kept spinning at full speed all the time to ramp up quickly enough. The result is that wind and solar not only double your electric bill, wind and solar also cause MORE CO2 to be produced.

We do not have battery or energy storage technology that could smooth out wind and solar at a price that would be possible to do. The energy storage would "cost" in the neighborhood of a QUADRILLION dollars for the US. That is an imaginary price because we could not get the materials to do it if we had that much money.

The only real way to reduce CO2 production from electricity generation is to replace all fossil fueled power plants with the newest available generation of nuclear. Nuclear can load-follow fast enough as long as wind and solar power are not connected to the grid.  Generation 4 nuclear can ramp fast enough to make up for the intermittency of wind and solar, but there is no reason to waste time and money on wind and solar.

[hellofromreddit]

12. Nuclear is not where we should go first

On wind turbines only working 20% of the time.

Here's a discussion of capacity factor that also compares solar and nuclear.

Once renewable energy collectors (wind, solar, whatever) the electricity from them is essentially free since there are zero fuel and waste disposal costs. OTOH, sources that require fuel (nuclear certainly requires fuel) have those costs, and they're costs that only increase over time. Decommissioned plants that are no longer generating power still have to be maintained for quite some time--they cannot be demolished.

All fuel-using power generation follows that pattern to some degree, and the crisis we face today from the byproducts of fossil fuels could not have been predicted when the technology was first widely adopted. While we're reasonably confident that we can contain spent nuclear fuel and used, irradiated equipment, we can also be reasonably confident that we're wrong about that in the long term.

On quadrillion-dollar batteries--they're not actually needed.

Nuclear can be avoided.

[Uncle Joe]

13. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, amborin.

[Jitter65]

14. Well Bernie should know. Two word: Sierra Blanca

http://www.thepeoplesview.net/main/2016/2/17/when-brown-lives-did-not-matter-to-bernie

[Gwhittey]

16. Yup that not good

So if we are stacking up points I guess this 1 thing vs Clinton 100s of bad things would be better to vote for Sanders.

[Gwhittey]

15. Nuclear is safe.

The government should just run every reactor not companies. As a former Nuclear Reactor Plant operator in the Navy I can tell you the Navy runs the reactors just fine. Reason being is we do not play around with it like a company does. They like every other corporation try and skimp and save a penny even if it is dangerous to the public.

[MisterP]

17. gee, look at the 4-post newbies saying that the evacuation's deadlier than 200 Grays

http://www.plutopia.net/