French nuclear scientist: "We should abandon nuclear power"

[bananas]

This really needed it's own thread.
The article being discussed is http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0728-06.htm

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=62177&mesg_id=62216

In France, nuclear scientist Hubert Reeves urged the government to "invest massively" in renewable energy resources. "We are behind many of our European partners such as Germany, Denmark and Spain in this matter, and cannot wait until the energy crisis reaches its climax to find an alternative to our present model," he told IPS.

A crisis, he said, "is round the corner." Fossil energy sources are about to be exhausted, and "nuclear technology will not solve present problems within a reasonable period of time. We should abandon nuclear power and invest in alternative sources."

[tuvor]

1. Okay, here's what I don't get.

Nuclear facilities exist. These nebulous "alternative sources" I'm willing to bet, do not exist to the same potential output as nuclear facilities.

Seems to me like nuclear energy has a headstart that alternative sources do not, and he would like to see present problems solved within a reasonable amount of time.

Where's the advantage of the "alternative sources" over nuclear, as far as timeliness is concerned?

[bananas]

2. "to the same potential"

The fact is, and this is incontrovertible, is that most of our usable energy is solar, not solar PV, but solar in the total sense of energy received by the sun, the organic energy received by plants, etc. The energy used for heating and cooling is a minor adjustment of a few degrees to the variation of this solar energy.
The second most usable energy is geothermal, the primordial energy stored in the earth, there are two main forms of this energy, one is hot geothermal, where hot springs are used to convert heat to electric energy; the other is sometimes called geoexchange energy, it's the energy of cave people, about 3 or 4 feet underground the temperature is fairly constant at 40-60 degrees F.

[tuvor]

3. I'm not seeing how this gives alternative energy a time-advantage

over nuclear energy. If there's a crisis brewing as this scientist claims, it would seem that alternative sources have an awful lot of catch-up to play compared with nuclear energy.

Sorry, I'm a little thick (not to mention sleepy) right now. Thanks for the earlier reply.

[NNadir]

5. Most of our usable energy is solar?

Stop smoking dope:

[bananas]

13. People in New Jersey use it to melt the glaciers off their driveways

at the end of an ice age. Is your food grown under lamps, or outside in the sunshine? Turn the sun off, it would get very cold very quickly. How many nuclear powered heat lamps would it take to melt antarctica? Solar energy is gonna do it.

[NNadir]

14. Are you talking about energy or food?

I have no doubt that your thinking harks back to the ice age, but as the Lawrence Livermore Energy Flow diagram shows (unless you're high on something) the use of residential/industrial solar energy is trivial.

Of course, we in New Jersey are now experiencing what much of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere is experiencing from the rather weak understanding of energy that characterizes the "solar will save us" crowd.

Not one place on this entire planet is there still a single exajoule of solar energy that displaces fossil fuels. Even with the crisis reaching the proportions there is still not one exajoule. Let me repeat, in case that isn't clear. Not one exajoule. Not one exajoule. Not one exajoule.

I cannot repeat, of course, "not one exajoule" as many times as people have represented that "solar will save us," since I am already over 50 and will not live another 50 years.

The energy chart just lumps the solar under "other." And with the world's glaciers melting all we hear from the "solar will save us" is the same 50 year old nonsense.

I do find it telling that you are amused by melting glaciers. You're about to see a lot more of that, Bub. Enjoy it.

[Canuckistanian]

16. Solar as in "derived from the sun"

Not PV or Thermal-panel solar.

Ultimately, almost all of our energy souces are from the sun. Oil is from plants that derived their energy from sunshine. Same with ethanol.

Only Geothermal and nuclear are non-solar derived energy sources.

[bananas]

4. Timeliness - have you ever heard the term "Whoops!"

Well in BC you are in a good position.
I will tell you that in Washington State a few years ago they had a vote regarding the fate of the incomplete nuclear boondoggles, and they were voted down.
The term "Whoops!" is defined in my sigline. I'll say more if you're totally clueless, or maybe not.

[tuvor]

7. I haven't got a clue what you're talking about, to be honest.

I wouldn't be "clueless" is you weren't so vague.

[bananas]

15. Sorry, I was tired when I wrote that.

Here's what I was referring to. A few years ago, they had a public referendum on whether or not to finish building these. I'll see if I can find a better link:

Whoops
What does it Mean? Slang for the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS), which made the record books with the largest municipal bond default in history.

Investopedia Says... During the 1970s and 80s, the WPPSS financed the construction of five nuclear power plants through the issuance of billions of dollars worth of municipal bonds. In 1983, due to extremely poor project management, construction on a couple of plants was canceled, and the completion of construction on the remaining plants seemed unlikely. Consequently, the take-or-pay arrangements that had been backing the municipal bonds were ruled void by the Washington Supreme Court. As a result, the WPPSS had the largest municipal debt default in history.... Whoops!

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/whoops.asp

[bananas]

18. Here's what I meant about "timeliness"

Here's an article from 2002. They spent a lot of money for nuclear power that was never delivered - and they'll be paying for it until 2018. That's what I meant when I said nuclear power wasn't "timely" - years wasted and billions wasted for nothing. That's not timely at all, and they're not going to build any more nuke plants for a very long time.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2002/02/04/story2.html?t=printable

WPPSS no more
Maligned energy agency is reborn
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - February 1, 2002
by Steve Ernst
Staff Writer

...
At that time, Energy Northwest's nuclear plant had seemingly redeemed nuclear energy in the eyes of many people in the state. There was even talk of Energy Northwest finishing off WNP1, a scuttled nuclear plant located on leased land on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, near the Columbia Generating Station.

That is not going to happen, said Vic Parrish, chief executive officer of Energy Northwest, even though Energy Northwest last year commissioned a study on the future of the plant. The cost of finishing off the plant would be somewhere between $3 billion to $4 billion.

"We will not finish WNP1," said Parrish. "We have a responsibility to ask one last time if it's worth it, and to pursue any interest that others may have in the site. But we are going to focus our attention on wind and solar energy."
...
When Energy Northwest defaulted on its loans, public utility districts in the region were forced to raise their retail rates, in some cases by as much as 50 percent, to help cover the loss. The debt on Energy Northwest's nuclear power plants stands at $6 billion, and won't be paid off until 2018.
...

[jpak]

19. What could you buy with $6 billion????

1 billion compact fluorescent light bulbs

or

8.5 million Energy Star refrigerators

or

12 million Energy Star windows

or

1.2 million solar hot water heaters

or

5000 MW of wind turbine capacity

or


1100 MW of PV modules

or

any combination of the above

What a waste...

[macllyr]

6. Dr Reeves is not a "nuclear scientist" stricto sensu

Hubert Reeves is an astrophysicist, known mainly for the books he wrote 10 - 20 years ago ("Patience dans l'azur"). He is not at all a specialist in energy production, apart what happens in the core of stars.

[NNadir]

8. Of course the astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize for showing how stars

work and who had worked on reactor design had a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very different opinion that Hubert Reeves.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Bethe campaigned for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. After the Chernobyl accident, Bethe put together a committee of experts that analysed the incident, and concluded that a similar episode would not happen in any good US reactor, as the Russian reactor suffered from a fundamentally faulty design and human error also had significantly contributed to the accident. Throughout his life, Bethe remained a strong advocate for electricity from nuclear energy.

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

In fact, the "appeal to authority" type fallacies that are used to justify the anti-nuclear position are becoming increasingly futile and as worthless as most of the other arguments. Most people on the planet are coming to the realization that without nuclear energy, we're almost certainly irretrievable.

By the way, nobody objects to France developing renewable energy if it can. The last three words are the kickers, world wide. France still produces a small amount of energy by conventional thermal means, primarily gas:

[mccoyn]

9. Build more cooling towers?

If the problem is waste heat pouring into constrained rivers can't they build more cooling towers and dump more of the waste heat into the less constrained air.

[NNadir]

11. Cooling towers are expensive. I think the main problem is that

as the climate breaks down (largely from the lack of use of nuclear power) many areas are experiencing temperatures for which their infrastructure was not designed.

It is immediately obvious that any thermal system can be cooled if the heat exchanger is large enough. However the cost of heat exchangers adds cost to power.

Anti-nuclear activists, most of whom don't know shit from shinola and who operate by intellectual fraud, will try, as usual, to pretend that this problem is limited to nuclear power plants, but the situation holds for their real alternative, which is coal. Of course, this is another example of "nuclear exceptionalism" which is the lie that a situation that applies to all energy is only important in the nuclear case. The most notorious such misrepresentation is the question of waste. The pro-coal anti-nuclear lobby doesn't want you to recognize that nobody knows how to make coal waste safe, the worst coal waste being carbon dioxide.

The difference between nuclear and coal, however is clear. Coal makes the probability of high temperatures worse whereas nuclear energy is essentially climate neutral.

The short term solution will be unfortunate, which is to exceed output temperatures. I note that many rivers are already warm from the air around them. Many rivers will also become warmer as the glaciers feeding them disappear. In that case, of course, the rivers themselves may disappear.

For continuous scalable power there are two primary options: Coal and nuclear. Both of these options require a thermal gradient. Both can have their efficiency raised, paradoxically by raising their internal temperature - in general to the temperatures of super critical water - but the second law of thermodynamics still requires a thermal gradient.

In saying that there are only two options for continuous power, I am ignoring a third option that is situationally available, the renewable energy option of geothermal energy. Geothermal energy also requires a thermal gradient.

Geothermal energy, which oddly enough has been restricted in some cases by environmental concerns, is an under utilized resource. One of the big problems with it has been access to cooling water.

In reviewing my tenure here - I am approaching 10,000 posts - one of the posts of which I'm most proud is that which talked about the geothermal situation in the Salton Sea area. http://journals.democraticunderground.com/NNadir/1 The point I'd like to drive home is that thermal output energy can be made useful. This scheme is known as co-generation, and represents one of the most outstanding opportunities for energy conservation known. Great progress has been made industrially with co-generation, but much more remains to be done.

[jpak]

12. "Anti-nuclear activists, most of whom don't know shit from shinola"

"and who operate by intellectual fraud"

My My...

[Dead_Parrot]

10. So Germany's building coal plants...

...Denmark had to import electricity last year, and he wants to join them?

It's possible, of course, that astrophysicists know stuff-all about energy production - I thought I proved that every time I posted. :D

Still, there you have it.

Reeves is a Canadian, and the whack-jobs at Sortir du Nucleaire (also quoted in the article) are on record as actually wanting coal.

Quality environmental reporting here. :eyes:

[Odin2005]

17. LOL, what a moron, he is as out of thouch with reality as fundies are.

"who cares about reality when my ideology says nuclear energy in inheirently bad" is basically how these people think

I have just started reading Jim Lovelock's new book and he basically condemned the nucleophobes as ignorant, naive, idealistic yuppies.