What are the major arguments against nuclear power?

[OnionPatch]

My sister and I are arguing about nuclear power with her formerly-conservative-leaning husband. One by one, each of his right-wing talking points have been debunked over the last eight years and he's become much more moderate. He's down to mainly this one thing that he disagrees with Obama/Democrats on: He thinks we should invest in nuclear energy. :banghead:

I know why I don't support it; The fear of Chernobyl type accidents and the fact that the storage of waste is a huge problem. No one wants it in their backyard and most are worried about how trustworthy the process of containing it is. The plants use a huge amount of water, and on and on....I just don't get why we would bother with it when we can apply the same resources toward clean energy.

I was hoping people here could give me some good links to back up these reasons. I have some links, but a lot of them are from groups like Laurie David's, Al Gore's, etc. and if the source of information is even slightly perceived to be left-wing to my brother-in-law, he will not accept it as evidence that nuclear power is a bad idea. I trust Al Gore, but he does not. Can anyone point me to some good resources I can refer him to?

[rfranklin]

1. Is he willing to have a nucelar waste dump in his neighborhood?

Is he willing to die from radiation poisoning? If no, then he cannot support nuclear energy.

[Bobbieo]

5. What are we going to do with all of the nuclear waste that currently exists?

[ensho]

2. lethal waste - plant meltdown

nt

[kristopher]

3. Fears of another Chernobyl are irrational.

But there are very valid reasons to pursue wind and solar before turning to nuclear energy development.
I recommend you download and read the report at this page:
Nuclear power generates approximately 20 percent of all U.S. electricity. And because it is a low-carbon source of around-the-clock power, it has received renewed interest as concern grows over the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate.

Yet nuclear power’s own myriad limitations will constrain its growth, especially in the near term. These include:

* Prohibitively high, and escalating, capital costs ƒ
* Production bottlenecks in key components needed to build plants ƒ
* Very long construction times ƒ
* Concerns about uranium supplies and importation issues ƒ
* Unresolved problems with the availability and security of waste storage ƒ
* Large-scale water use amid shortages ƒ
* High electricity prices from new plants ƒ

Nuclear power is therefore unlikely to play a dominant—greater than 10 percent—role in the national or global effort to prevent the global temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above preindustrial levels.

The carbon-free power technologies that the nation and the world should focus on deploying right now at large scale are efficiency, wind power, geothermal power, and solar power. They are the lower-cost carbon-free strategies with minimal societal effects and the fewest production bottlenecks. They could easily meet all of U.S. demand for the next quarter -century, while substituting for some existing fossil fuel plants. In the medium-term (post-2020), other technologies, such as coal with carbon capture and storage or advanced geothermal, could be significant players, but only with a far greater development effort over the next decade.

Progressives must also focus on the issue of nuclear subsidies, or nuclear pork. Conservative politicians such as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and other nuclear power advocates continue to insist that new climate legislation must include yet more large subsidies for nuclear power. Since nuclear power is a mature electricity generation technology with a large market share and is the beneficiary of some $100 billion in direct and indirect subsidies since 1948, it neither requires nor deserves significant subsidies in any future climate law.

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2008/nuclear_power_report.html

[Barrett808]

6. Indeed, nuclear will certainly remain a small part of the energy mix

But it's no panacea.

Unfortunately, coal will remain king for most of the 21st century. :(

[kristopher]

8. In the US or globally?

I think the US will be off coal within about 20 not more than 30 years. Global use will take longer but once the basic industries behind solar and wind get more firmly established, I believe a transition could occur faster than most envision.

[Barrett808]

11. I hope you're right.

This graph from TOD doesn't give me a lot for reason for hope:




World Energy to 2050: A Half Century of Decline (http://canada.theoildrum.com/node/3222)

[bananas]

13. Fears of another Chernobyl are not irrational.

According to the 2003 MIT report "The Future of Nuclear Energy":
"Expert opinion using PRA considers the best estimate of core damage frequency to be about 1 in 10,000 reactor-years for nuclear plants in the United States."

There are about 440 nuclear plants operating worldwide, if they all have a similar failure rate, then we can expect a core failure roughly every 23 years. Chernobyl was 22 years ago ... tick tick tick ...

Although it's expected that these will be more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl, it is possible for them to release large amounts of radiation with results similar to Chernobyl.

The new "Generation 3" plant designs are supposed to be safer, but just like the "unsinkable" Titanic, you don't know how well it works until it hits an iceberg.

The world's largest nuclear power plant, consisting of seven reactors, was disabled by an earthquake that was supposed to be impossible. They didn't know there was a fault line running right underneath these reactors. They were lucky - we now know the fault line could have produced a much larger earthquake, the results could have been worse than Chernobyl.

<snip>

In the past two years, major quakes took place in close proximity of three nuclear power plants: the Onagawa plant in Miyagi Prefecture (August 2005), the Shika plant in Ishikawa Prefecture (March 2007) and the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant. In each case, the maximum ground motion caused by the quake was stronger than the seismic design criteria for the nuclear power plants. The latest temblor near Kashiwazaki generated a peak ground acceleration of 993 gal, compared with the design value of 450 gal.

<snip>

What happened to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Plant should not be described as "unexpected".

What happened there could have been much worse. If the focus of the quake had been a little farther southwest, toward the plant site, and the magnitude had been 7.5--the size of a quake that hit Niigata Prefecture in 1964--and if all seven reactors at the plant had been operating, genpatsu-shinsai, a combination of an earthquake and a nuclear meltdown, could have occurred.

<snip>

I was a member of the expert panel that developed the new seismic design guidelines, but I resigned during the final stage of the work last August to protest the panel's stance on this issue. This defect must be fixed quickly, learning from what happened at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant.

<snip>

http://japanfocus.org/_Ishibashi_Katsuhiko-Why_Worry__Japan_s_Nuclear_Plants_at_Grave_Risk_From_Quake_Damage_

<snip>

The July 2007 Chuetsu-Oki Earthquake was a miraculously lucky escape.

<snip>

KK Scientists was formed shortly after the Chuetsu-Oki Earthquake by four scientists/engineers who, on 21 August 2007, issued an appeal, "Call for Closure of Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant". To date over 200 scientists and engineers have endorsed this appeal. They are actively demanding that objective scientific and technical investigations be carried out keeping in mind the possibility of permanent closure of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant.

<snip>

http://www.cnic.jp/english/topics/safety/earthquake/kkscientist24feb08.html

[kristopher]

20. The Chernobyl design isn't used any longer.

What happened there simply can't happen in the ones now in operation. That don't mean there can't be accidents, there could be; just not that kind of accident.

I don't know the particulars of the Japanese plant you are referencing, but it sounds a bit sensationalistic to me. As I understand it, a "meltdown" can only occur if the reaction persists after a loss of coolant. Is there a design still in operation where the coolant isn't also the moderator? This design ensures that coolant loss stops the reaction since you also lose the moderator.

It is a complex and dangerous system, and as the space program demonstrated so well, such systems inevitably fail.

[bananas]

15. "A quake ... could smash the reactor and send a radioactive cloud over Tokyo within eight hours"

<snip>

The Hamaoka plant, said Mitsuhei Murata, a former diplomat and professor at Tokai Gakuen University, presents Japan with its biggest risk of genpatsu-shinsai.

A quake there, he said, could smash the reactor and send a radioactive cloud over Tokyo within eight hours: “We would be looking at 24 million victims and the end for Japan.”

<snip>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2112763.ece

<snip>

According to Leo Lewis in The Times, talk is rampant of a "Genpatsu-shinsai," defined by Japan's leading seismologist, Katsuhiko Shibashi, as "the combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying millions of lives and bringing a nation to its knees." Shibashi warns that the recent 6.8 magnitude shock exceeded the design capabilities of the Kashiwazaki nuke by a factor of three. A Kobe University research team is reported as saying that if the quake had been 10km further to the southwest, a "terrible, terrible disaster" would have resulted.

Prof. Mitsuhei Murata of Tokai Gakuen University is quoted as warning that a quake at the Hamaoka nuke could bring "24 million victims and the end for Japan." Japan's earthquake experts assume the probability of an 8.0 quake within the next 30 years to be 87 percent.

As in the US, Tokyo Electric has long denied that its seven Kashiwazaki reactors were sited atop a fault line, only to have it turn out to be true. As at Three Mile Island, vital data has already disappeared from the Kashiwazaki disaster, and the exact quantities of radiation released are unknown. Radiation at both sites escaped well after the reactors were shut down.

<snip>

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8892

tick tick tick ...
Another Chernobyl is possible, a massive scale-up using current technology would make it inevitable.

[NNadir]

16. All your whining about the Japanese earthquake that actually happened

has not caused you to call for banning buildings, which caused 100% of the deaths in the recent Japanese earthquake about which you continue to spread distortions and misinformation.

I note, with contempt, that you have not called for banning cars because of the collapse in an earthquake of the Oakland Bay Bridge and the elevated freeways.

You couldn't care less.

You also couldn't care less about the lost lives due to dangerous fossil fuels that have been burned while the nuclear plant is repaired.

It stood up with only minor damage, unlike the coal facilities about which you couldn't care less.

The fact is that your paranoia is highly selective. You keep claiming that ONLY nuclear energy be held to a standard of ZERO risk. Nuclear energy doesn't need to be perfect to be better than all the stuff you don't give a rat's ass about. It merely needs to be better than all the stuff you don't give a rat's ass about, and it is.

[bananas]

18. tick tick tick ...

I've never said "that ONLY nuclear energy be held to a standard of ZERO risk".
You're full of shit.
tick tick tick ...

[NNadir]

19. On any given day over the last 100 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping

we will see some whiny bullshit post from a certain poster on this website, whining over some imaginary nuclear disaster, or some bullshit crap taking the only major nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, out of context.

This is a de facto insistence of the type I have claimed for the noodnik in question: The insistence that only nuclear power need be perfect.

Now, almost all of this crap consists wholly of stupid media links from the vast circle jerk of irrational selectively attentive anti-nuke websites. NONE of it comes from the scientific literature. You're last reference is from SmirkingChimp, a provincial website if ever there was one.

I read the scientific literature pretty much every damn day. In the twenty seconds since you produced your "tick...tick...tick..." whatever the fuck that means in Yuppie language, I was able to produce a reference "Engineering Geology 83 (2006) 307– 331" entitled "Assessment of liquefaction and lateral spreading on the shore of Lake Sapanca during the Kocaeli (Turkey) earthquake."

Here's a quote from its abstract genius:

The 1999 Kocaeli earthquake of Turkey (Mw=7.4) caused great destruction to buildings, bridges and other facilities, and a death tall of about 20,000. During this earthquake, severe damages due to soil liquefaction and associated ground deformations also occurred widespread in the eastern Marmara Region of Turkey. Soil liquefaction was commonly observed along the shorelines. One of these typical sites is Sapanca town founded on the shore of Lake Sapanca.

If you have written a "concern troll" post anywhere on this website about building safety in earthquakes that is not connected to nuclear power, you are absolutely free to link it.

The fact is that over 50 years of nuclear operations, during a period which millions of people have died in earthquakes, many in countries with large nuclear operations, a period that is coterminous with the deaths of tens of millions of people from dangerous fossil fuel waste, dangerous fossil fuel wars, and dangerous fossil fuel terrorism, there have been ZERO deaths from earthquake effects on nuclear power plants.

ZERO.

Got it?

No?

Yet you come here, with continuing contempt for reality, to insist that anything you imagine about nuclear energy - with your obvious ignorance of the subject - represents certainty.

Go ahead, throw your stupid little bomb now. It won't do nearly as much as damage as the anti-nuke ignorance has already done, now representing the loss of many millions of lives.

[scubadude]

4. I remember in college reading a book by John Gofman that changed my life forever.

Up until that point I had been a pro military pro nuclear power type. After reading one of his books I realized that there may be unforeseen consequences to many of my positions at the time. His writing made me think hard about my standings.

Take a look here:

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/PlowboyIntrv.html

http://www.amazon.com/RARE-FIRST-Poisoned-Against-Soldiers/dp/B0018NKOEU/ref=sr_1_30?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222531689&sr=8-30

Good luck,

Scuba

[Wilber_Stool]

7. Cost, time to come online,

the lack of a carrier to carry any insurance, limited amount of uranium for fuel. How long of a list do you want?

[bananas]

9. For conservatives, the main arguments are economic

New nuclear plants are expensive and financially risky.
I'll post more links later, but this news article shows how risky investment firms consider nuclear power to be.
Now you have to realize that the big news this week is the $700B bail-out of investment firms for making risky investments, and these same firms wouldn't touch nuclear because it was even riskier.

http://michiganmessenger.com/2014/critics-say-mccain-nuke-plan-is-economic-poison

Critics say McCain nuke plan is economic poison
By Eartha Jane Melzer 8/6/08 8:01 PM

<snip>

Last year, several of the nation’s largest investment banks — Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley — told the Department of Energy, “We believe these risks, combined with the higher capital costs and longer construction schedules of nuclear plants as compared to other generation facilities, will make lenders unwilling at present to extend long-term credit.”

<snip>

Critics worry that the loan guarantee program will cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and they note that this Congressional Budget Office report concluded that defaults on loans to nuclear industry are likely:

"CBO considers the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high — well above 50 percent. The key factor accounting for this risk is that we expect that the plant would be uneconomic to operate because of its high construction costs, relative to other electricity generation sources. In addition, this project would have significant technical risk because it would be the first of a new generation of nuclear plants, as well as project delay and interruption risk due to licensing and regulatory proceedings."

<snip>

[krispos42]

10. We need nuclear fusion, not nuclear fission

Nuclear fission requires uranium which we import from overseas. Then we have to spend a ton of energy centrifuging and and enriching the ore to usable levels. And then we have to get rid of the waste products which are chemically and radioactively toxic for centuries or millenia.


Now I can see the argument for building a few reactors that would run off of the waste of our existing nuclear reactors. This would help solve the problem with waste products.


But ultimately we need nuclear fusion, the process of converting hydrogen isotopes into helium and energy. No toxic fuels or waste products, non-radioactive, non-polluting, and the supply of hydrogen comes from domestic water sources.

The "polywell" idea of Dr. Bussard (of Bussard ramscoop fame) is probably the best bet for nuclear fusion as a power source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

[joshcryer]

23. Yeah, ironically one of the worlds largest sources of uranium is in Iran.

Talk about "ridding ourself of dependency on the middle east."

Of course the praisers of nuclear power will claim seawater but don't buy their arguments, it's completely economically infeasible.

[Booze]

25. Could be wrong but

I thought Australia had plenty of uranium

[diane in sf]

12. too dirty--no one wants the waste, too expensive compared to conserving, wind and solar

needs a continuous source of fuel, as opposed to the three I name above. Harvesting radioactive ore kills miners and people nearby, elevated rates of cancers around plants, etc.

[NNadir]

14. There are NO good arguments against nuclear power.

In any criteria one uses, nuclear is superior to all of its alternatives.

These criteria include

Costs (if external costs are included as they should be)

Wastes (The energy mass density makes nuclear infinitely superior on this score, irrespective of the enormous mysticism to the contrary.)

Reliability.

Sustainability. The argument is easily made that for the long term - hundreds of thousands of years or millions of year - nuclear power is the only true source of truly renewable energy.

[OnionPatch]

21. I can think of one but I'm no expert.

Just trying to figure it all out....but it seems to me that if we are going to put a lot of resources and effort into a new type of energy, wouldn't it be better not to be centralized and under the control of huge corporations? With solar, wind, wave, etc., there can be many different sources tied into the grid instead of one huge one. We wouldn't all be at the mercy of their price gouging like we are with oil. If we focus on developing wind and solar, etc., towns, businesses and individual homes would have the chance to be energy independent. This appeals to me a lot more than huge energy companies controlling so much of the means of our power. I don't want to swap "big oil" for "big nuclear". I trust big nuclear to keep their plants and waste areas safe and in compliance about as much as I trust big oil not to have any more oil spills. Am I completely out of the park here?

[Dead_Parrot]

30. That's corporate culture, though.

The no reason to assume a renewable energy company wouldn't cover up accident details to avoid paying compensation to a widow or dump toxic waste by a playground.

Pick your poison.

[Barrett808]

27. "Nuclear power is the only true source of truly renewable energy."

"And Lord, we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream." -- Homer Simpson, "Bart vs. Thanksgiving"

[jpak]

28. "...nuclear power is the only true source of truly renewable energy."

Those are Bush talking points - and he used those very terms.

What a crock.

[bananas]

17. BusinessWeek: Nuclear's Tangled Economics

BusinessWeek might be the kind of source you're looking for.
This article covers a lot of the issues regarding costs.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_27/b4091024354027.htm

Nuclear's Tangled Economics
John McCain says new plants can help solve the energy crisis and address climate change. It's not that simple

<snip>

[joshcryer]

22. 58% worldwide R&D,.2% growth, in 30 years.

That's all you need to know.

If someone is going to subsidize it then go for it. I'm for renewables or things like Polywell.

[TheWraith]

24. Hate to break it to you, but Obama is for nuclear power too.

Because the infinitesimal risk of an accident is better than the certainty of a climate change catastrophe.

[madokie]

26. Only under certain conditions does he, IIRC

such as what to do with the highly radioactive waste. Figure that one thing out and I am all for nuclear energy too. As it stands today we have no viable solutions to that.

[bananas]

29. Here's another article, by a participant in the Keystone report

"In summer 2006, the Colorado-based Keystone Center convened a panel of about 25 experts from all sides of the compass to investigate the possibility of a major nuclear revival."
Jim Harding was on the panel, and describes some of the results in this article.
The full Keystone report can be downloaded from their website www.keystone.org
Although the report was released last year, it's cost estimates are already considered too low.

http://www.boalt.org/elq/C35.01_08_Harding_2008.04.10.php

Myths of the Nuclear Renaissance
Jim Harding*

More than thirty years ago, my now-deceased colleague David Comey was asked to make a presentation before the annual meeting of the Atomic Industrial Forum, then the major trade association backing expansion of nuclear power worldwide.<1> He was asked to deliver that speech because he had built credibility with the press and with key decision makers by being scrupulously careful with his facts and analyses. The industry understood that its reputation—particularly with the media—was poor, and they wanted to understand how David did it. In Comey’s view, there was an easy explanation—the nuclear industry regularly exaggerated and misled.

In the intervening years, not much has changed. The industry still seems to prefer the sound of a splashy argument to a defensible case. Popular articles in the press, some opinion leaders and politicians, and even some environmentalists have bought the notion of a nuclear renaissance. Among other things, we hear that:

1. nuclear power is cheap;
2. learning and new standardized designs solve all past problems;
3. the waste problem is a non-problem, especially if we’d follow the lead of many other nations and “recycle” our spent fuel;
4. climate change makes a renaissance inevitable;
5. there are no other large low-carbon “baseload” alternatives;
6. there’s no particular reason to worry that a rapidly expanding global industry will put nuclear power and weapons technologies in highly unstable nations, often nations with ties to terrorist organizations.

In summer 2006, the Colorado-based Keystone Center convened a panel of about 25 experts from all sides of the compass to investigate the possibility of a major nuclear revival. Participants included representatives from the utility industry (e.g., Southern Company, American Electric Power, and Florida Power & Light), the environmental community (e.g., Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, National Wildlife Federation, and Pew), two former commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and others. We were asked to look at economics, safety and security (in light of TMI, Chernobyl, and 9/11), waste, and proliferation. The report was released in June 2007 and is relatively sober and free of misleading one-liners.<2>

<snip>