Nukes Now

Just to bring a positive aspect to this, you can express solidarity with natural allies like Trade Unionists and academics in places like Iraq. That’s something the right wing won’t be doing (the US army have in fact not helped unions).

My colleagues and I, including some Iraqis (ex-pat and in-country), have just delivered a few hundred pounds of books to a Baghdad University. OK, it’s small beer, unlikely to be of vast importance in the wider scheme of things, but it is at least something. It is perhaps something other academics could attempt.

The TUC Iraq appeal is another way of expressing solidarity and support with ordinary Iraqis trying to lead normal lives in tremendously difficult circumstances, and something I suspect the majority of the Crooked Timber readership would be happy to support.

With regard to your last point that condemnation of terrorist attacks is pointless, then read the words of the TUC leader:

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber wrote to the GFIW’s President Rasim al-Awadi, saying: ‘Trade unionism is founded on the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all, and I have no doubt that, contrary to their intentions, the actions of these terrorists will only redouble the commitment of Iraqi trade unionists, and the solidarity of trade unionists around the world for your struggles.‘

I find it hard to condemn that as “a spasm of useless, self-righteous moral preening”. Surely you can do both? Criticize torture and condemn terrorism?

If an expression of such solidarity with an Iraqi trade unionist is pointless, then surely all expressions of solidarity with any trade unionist in any country are pointless? We should be careful not to make exceptions of Iraqi Trade unionists, because of a desire to react to a right-wing agenda. The TUC work with unions in Burma, China, Colombia, India, Israel/Palestine, Nigeria, Russia, and Zimbabwe because the country’s workers or trade unions face particular problems. There is no reason to leave out Iraq.

http://www.tuc.org.uk/international/index.cfm?mins=376

I would be interested to hear how you organized your book donation.

With great difficulty. There isn’t an obvious way in which you can help develop links with Iraqi Civil society – but it can be done. The US seems to have better ways of doing this, and at least in the medical area run huge book donation schemes.

We went to an international professional/academic organisation and obtained contact details for the Iraqi professional/academic organisation. Once we had built up links with them, we organised a small group of people to help run the scheme – including Iraqis. We decided early on to supply new material – rather than getting people to offload old textbooks they no longer wanted, and the Iraqi academics choose the materials.

Shipping was done at cost price via DHL, who contacted us after we were featured in local newspaper story. The whole thing has been done without any government help. It has however, taken a long time to sort out; even the press release about the arrival of the books has been delayed because of my concern that any photos we use could be used to identify individuals.

Sorry, but I don’t quite your argument re nuclear power, it seems to rest solely on the question of subsidies:

if it’s competitive w/o subsidies, you’d be happy to support it, if not, you would not, being concerned about the negative externalities.

But these externalities come with nuclear power, no matter if subsidised or not, and they have of such disastrous and existential potential consequences, that I wonder how economic competitiveness should be the deciding factor in allowing it or not.

Maybe there’s a disconnect here, because the discussion in Europe and the US about nuclear energy have been very different.

Is nuclear power carbon neutral? The construction and maintenance of the plant wouldn’t be.

Refinement of uranium ore might not be either if the power used was from natural gas or coal powered plants. The ore has to be extracted from a mine a well.

I don’t think I will have any impact on their actions by restating this obvious point.

That is clearly false, unless you believe something very strange about the people who commit, support and acquiesce to such acts.

You can even see why right-wingers detect anti-arab racism in such statements, as it one explanation. And perhaps, for some, the first that comes to mind: if the people involved were see an sub-human beasts, then soft power, international concensus repeatedly and calmly expressed, would indeed seem futile.

Like trying to train a shark to vegetarianism.

I’d assume the real reasons for ignoring such methods are more subtle – a certain defensive nationalism, a focus on domestic issues, an unfamiliarity with the mechanisms for international solidarity, or just generalised despair.

France generates upward of 80% of its power through nuclear power, and has done so for decades. (Waiting to see right wing brains explode on this one – Nuclear Power Good! France Bad! Does not compute!) Saying we should ramp up renewables is correct, but there’s no way we can match our current energy needs with renewables, given current technology. So opposing nuclear power and pushing renewables means a _drastic_ cut in energy production.

We could largely solve the carbon problem with current technology, but it would take mass changeover to electric cars, phaseout of oil and coal plants, and their replacement with nuclear and renewables. It’s essentially a political problem.

You are also discounting the externalities of renewables. Look at all the trouble the Cape Wind project has had getting started.

Ultimately, we are subsidizing oil and coal plants now, by not including the costs of pollution and climate change in their costs. This idea of “no subsidies” is ludicrous, especially since renewables aren’t cost-effective without subsidies either in many cases.

centralized state power? gosh. Thank the good lord that UK and USA do not have centralized state power.

Glad to hear that Belle is all for nukes-because they are coming regardless (wow, you really are part of the reality-based community…)

http://www.cera.com/aspx/cda/public1/news/pressReleases/pressReleaseDetails.aspx?CID=8711

See in particular:

“In the U.S., several dozen reactors are in various stages of proposal development;…”

Sk

I guess the worst thing about responding to flippant criticisms is that one is flippant in return.

Regarding the negative externalities, safety, and central control issues, pebble bed reactors potentially change the story. China is prototyping one, and plans to add 30 in short order.

“Why don’t feminists in the developed world care anything about the opression of women in Muslim countries, huh?”

Katha Pollit used to devote a couple of her Nation columns a year to the situation of women under the Taliban. It’s about the only place I ever recall the subject being mentioned before September 11.

Another possible definition of torture: anything that is unbearable. So for instance, since most people can’t endure more than 15 seconds of water-boarding, it’s torture.

I would venture to say that in our quaint pre-9/11 world, that was basically everyone’s working definition of torture. I miss that world sometimes.

It’s about the only place I ever recall the subject being mentioned before September 11.

You didn’t get the endless mailing-list spam?

I do wish defenders of nuclear power would talk about the whole system. Obviously, the system is not just centered in the nuclear power plant. The dangers of nuclear power are distributed in ways that the dangers of, say, natural gas are not. Plus, the time scale of danger from nuclear material is a teensy bit weird. You can clean up the Prodhue bay in Alaska from the oil spilled by a grounded tanker, and it might take a little time for the environment to recover for safe human use. On the other hand, we will have to wait, oh, 30,000 years before certain no go areas around the Hanford plant are safe. 30,000 years seems like a long time to me, but maybe I’m just a crybaby.

Any form of extraction has human and environmental costs – see what has been happening to West Virginia for the last seven years, for instance, as the Bush administration has pushed sub-Soviet style environmental management for coal mining in that poor benighted state.

But besides the dangers of uranium mining – which fall mainly on the third world, happily out of the picture of the nice domestic nuclear plant buzzing along – there are other hazards as well – since everything isn’t done at the plant. There are separate uranium enrichment facilities, for instance. You can look at their bright and shiny records in Paducah, Kentucky, and Piketon, Ohio, models of responsible disposal, if your idea of responsible disposal is to throw radioactive tailings in the ground water and lie about it.

Luckily, the Bush administration is pushing its all purpose response for problems such as these: de-regulation. The Clinton administration nicely privatized the enrichment of uranium, and the Bush administration is now cutting back on oversite, leading, of course, so we have bipartisan consensus here, so dear to the heart of Washington Post opeders: there’s a better and safer future for us all, with occasional patches of 30,000 year no go areas that anybody can live with.

Nuclear energy is surely a safer form of energy than coal. Should seriously consider building more nuclear plants.

Franck, I disagree that we cannot do with renewables what we can with nuclear. See Greenpeace’s technical report. This is specific to the UK, which has different circumstances to the USA I will agree, but they pretty persuasively argue that using the same amount of cash, all the gains of nuclear in the UK could be gained by energy efficiency, de-centralised power generation and moderate use of renewables. I’m with Belle here: given a pot of money, we should first spend it on things which don’t have obvious downsides! Now this applies in the UK, as no-one is suggesting a large scale move (like France) to nuclear, just a replacement of our current plants, so the pot of money is relatively small.

I’m quite terrified of global warming. The dangers of nuclear power, while real, seem pretty manageable in comparison. And given that the greatest threat to world peace lately is US militarism, I’m not sure that increased proliferation isn’t at least partly a feature rather than a bug.

On the other hand, solar and especially wind power seem to be on the verge of being competitive with fossil fuels, without nuclear’s downsides. So yes, any subsidies should go there. In other words, I agree with Belle. (There should be an acronym for this — IAWB. Learn it and use it, CTers!)

Francke, I must say, I knew blogs were powerful and commenters on blogs were awesomely powerful, but I have never heard the U.S. government dismissed so, well, cavalierly:

“There is no rule that says that we have to run our nuclear power industry the way Bush hacks want us to run it. You’re arguing against a straw man here.”

If I’d known that the people who put the rules in place and have a mighty good chance of electing the next president – so far, Republican candidates routinely outpoll the dems – and who also mightly influence the neo-liberals – hence, the reference to the changes made under Clinton – can be waved away because I say so, my life and arguments would be much simpler.

So, for my next trick, on the count of three, we will be out of Iraq! AIDS in Africa – sorry, we are now distributing all the medicines you guy need, free!

I’ll be back tomorrow to solve the rest of the world’s problems. No straw men allowed!

Jim Harrison,

France went whole-hog into nuclear only thirty years ago, and they are 90% plus nuclear and hydro now. Why would the US need to rely on coal-fired plants for _a hundred years_?

There are downsides with renewables, which people seem to be ignoring. Loss of real estate, pollution due to solar panel production, wildlife loss, flooding to produce hydropower – these are all downsides. They can be mitigated, yes, but so can the downsides due to nuclear power.

if they were really serious about CO2 production, those crazy hippies would support the construction of nuclear power plants. Bwa ha ha ha, in your face, Al Gore!

This sort of argument is usually aimed at people who claim that the consequences of the greenhouse effect are likely to be catastrophic in the not-to-distant future (like Al Gore for example).

Now, I never see anyone actually go on to advocate new nuclear power plants.

Seriously? I’ve seen plenty of people go on the advocate more nuclear power (the infamous Instapundit for example). But in any case, the people who make this argument often do not believe that the greenhouse effect will have catastrophic (or even significant) consequences, so there is no reason why they would go on to advocate nuclear power.

..I think we would be better off subsidising something like wind or solar power…

Wind and solar might put a small dent in greenhouse emissions, but if you want the 50-90% reductions that some greenhouse alarmists are calling for, the only viable option is nuclear.

“because nuclear power plants do have a wee negative externality problem, what with all the extra security needed, and that whole “radioactive” issue.”

Again, if you really think that the greenhouse effect is going to have catastrophic consequences, then these externalities are trivial.

Your position is fine if you don’t believe the greenhouse effect is going to have catastrophic consequences, but then the argument you are responding to is not addressed to you, and your response is beside the point.

It took me a while to get over “the friendly atom” and “too cheap to meter”. But nuclear not only requires subsidies, it is anti-market, and worse, anti-freedom. It requires central government regulation, bureaucracy, and security laws. It is the stepping stone to nuclear weaponry. No market in the world can provide the “right” amount of nuclear security, at any point in the nuclear fuel cycle.

As for the economics of clean energy, Amory Lovins has been crunching the numbers for decades (at the Rocky Mountain Institute, http://www.rmi.org). Energy efficiency and renewables lead the way and keep getting better.

Ms. Waring,

Messrs. Franck and Harrison are the most sensible respondents on this thread, and to the extent of predicting the viability of nuclear power and its related issues, I agree with them completely.

As for the US track record on nuclear power – and this is a decentralized industry compared with France – speaking as someone with a foot in the US nuclear industry, the US has hands down the most effcient, cleanest and safest nuclear plant operations in the world, using thirty year old (at least) designs to boot. In fact, US nuclear plants are so well-looked after that their productive lives are looking like they will go twice as long as originally intended. The NRC has begun re-licensing plants to a presumed 60-year life.

And US nuclear electricity production costs ($/kw-hr)are lower than any save coal, and this includes the provision for decommissioning and storage costs.

The real problem with US nukes is not cost of operation, but construction costs and political risk. These go together, and only your side has the keys to remove this problem, not that I think it will happen.

I do not think this will be solved, because whatever noises are made by one or another individual environmentalist, the environmental industry as a whole (mainstream organizations such as the Sierra Club for instance) cannot accept this. They are a religious lot, and anti-nuclear is an article of faith. They are not and will never move, it would be like the Vatican denying the divinity of Christ. And because of the effective veto power of such a group (shades of ancient Polish Liberum Veto), until this band dies out I do not think you will see any nuclear power plant project break ground in the US for another generation.

As for liberation struggles in the third world – I am as it happens a former participant in one of these, that against our dictator Marcos. It was of extraordinary value for us to have the visible support, from 1983-86, of the US State Department (driven in part by Paul Wolfowitz, to whom, among many other influential analysts and career diplomats, we owe a great debt) and prominent politicians like former Congressman Stephen Solarz, who were often with us on the streets. And then there was the press, unequivocally on our side. The dictators men were on the rhetorical defensive from the first day.

But more than their direct influence in protecting our movement, even unofficially, was their effect on US official policy, because in the end that is what needs to be moved if one wants something done in this world. In our case that was decisively shifted by US public and institutional opinion. Of course Marcos was a bad man – but until the focus was on him and the movement against him, it was very easy to ignore him.

So do not despair at the utility of maintaining perspective and focus in denouncing things that other people do. There is no value in saying “but of course they are horrible, but its none of our business”. As the keepers of the only effective repository of power in this world, it is our business.

With such power comes the responsibility to use it – it must be used, as a moral imperative, even at the risk of errors, even in spite of US moral imperfections. There is so much, so horribly wrong with the world that the US can fix that obsession with what are really petty domestic problems is truly a failure of perspective. It is not better to worry about stains on the US image if that means doing nothing about horrors abroad.

Oh, and I meant to add Belle is the r0xorz. Loved the post.

“Are you able to “mitigate” the disadvantage of nuclear waste lying around somewhere for 10000 years?”

Why not? Are you aware there are substances out there that have half lives of infinity? That’s right, they stay toxic FOREVER. Compared to your typical heavy metal toxin, radioactive isotopes are nice: They eventually go away! They don’t have to be guarded for eternity.

My understanding of the likely cost of uranium and other fissionable materials is based on projections that were produced by the nuclear industry itself, i.e. by people who have a vested interested in promoting nuclear power. Their scenarios include the use of thorium, reprocessed spent fuel, and even plutonium produced in breeder reactors.

Calculating the availability of mineral resources derived from hard rock sources is admittedly difficult. Unlike oil, which pretty much occurs in a geological setting or doesn’t, there are a whole range of concentrations of uranium in various deposits. That’s why you don’t read about “peak uranium.” At a higher and higher prices, lower and lower grade ores become exploitable. Tremendously expensive uranium doesn’t really help, however, especially if you use more energy acquiring it than you gain in burning it.

In any case, as I understand the economics of power production, the rate-limiting factor in building nuclear capacity, at least for the next several decades, is not fuel availability but the cost of new facilities and the political hurdles that obstruct projects.

jim harrison,

So I think I understand where you are coming from now. Your projection of a hundred years assumes a political component that would prevent large outlays on nuclear technology or political will to force through a massive increase in nuclear power.

The fundamental restriction on nuclear power is not scientific or technical, it is political. This means it could be very, very difficult to overcome, as has been demonstrated on this thread. For many people, nuclear power is primarily a moral issue.

For me, I would prefer a mass switchover to electric vehicles and nuclear and renewable power to tide us over for the next fifty years or so until we can get efficient fusion power working. If fusion never comes, then at least we have dramatically reduced our carbon output and mitigated climate change. This is both technologically and economically feasible, but it might not be politically feasible.

roger writes: “On the other hand, we will have to wait, oh, 30,000 years before certain no go areas around the Hanford plant are safe. 30,000 years seems like a long time to me, but maybe I’m just a crybaby.”

Sounds awful, except we’d be ecstatic if we could store CO2 in one place that easily and for so long.

Franck,

I don’t discount the political angle; but the projections I’m looking at are, if anything, rather optimistic on that score. The more fundatmental problem is that ot costs a lot to build a nuclear plant. You can’t just stamp your feet and will a plant into existence, especially since the utilities are mighty nervous about assuming debt for capital improvements.

Shane

The piece you are referring to is Socolow and Paccala’s ’15 wedges’:

http://www.stabilisation2005.com/Robert_Socolow.pdf

http://www.stabilisation2005.com/day3/Socolow.pdf

second reference has the powerpoint slides.

One wedge is building 1000 3rd Generation nuclear power plants, another is burying the carbon output of 1000 large coal fired stations.

You can quickly see (as you do note from your comments) the mammoth size of any one of these tasks.

Building 1000 3rd gen reactors would cost on the order of $4 trillion. And we would have to be building 26 a year from 2012 onwards. When Ontario Hydro was building Darlington Generating Station (4 smaller nuclear units) in the early 90s, it was the largest single construction project in North America.

One can easily see the US might replace its existing 84 nuclear power reactors with 3rd Gen units. The units would be bigger (1350MW average size v. say 800MW now) but overall electric power usage would also be higher. So 84 units, or 2.5 a year from 2016 (the first French 3rd Gen comes on line in 2016 at Flamanville, all being well). Which would match the speed of construction of the original 100 or so civilian power reactors in the US– roughly built between Shippingport (1959) and 1989.

So it will be hard for the US to beat its current 20% share of electricity from nuclear, as the existing nuclear reactors phase out.

MIT estimates a cost of nuclear power at 6.75 cents/ Kwhr, but then argues it can be reduced by 25%. 6.75 cents would put it in line in cost with new wind or cogeneration, and about twice the cost of coal fired plants (c 3.5-4 cents/kwhr) and gas fired (c 2.5-3 cents, but with current gas prices and supply, not economic in the US).

This assumes the government assumes the cost of long term waste disposal. The British decontamination and disposal liability for its civilian nuclear programme (one of the oldest in the world) is currently £70bn (present value) although insiders have told me it is actually more like £140bn.

The French system, no one knows, not even the French, how much their programme cost, because it was conducted by a nationalised industry, with strong cross subsidies from the state.

Complicating the picture, since the MIT study (2003) the price of construction of all power plants (including wind farms) has gone up by at least 30%. And of course there is almost no capacity in the world nuclear manufacturing industry (as no one has been recruited in the last 20 years).

The best place to put nuclear reactors is on the sea coast (they obey Cornot’s law, ie the ratio of incoming water temperature to outgoing water temperature determines the efficiency of the plant). France had to shut down reactors during the heat wave of 2003, because the rivers ran too low.

The coasts of the US are also the hardest places to site reactors, due to concentrations of people. And in Britain, the reactors are sitting on coastal sites that likely will be under water by 2100, at least part of the time.

Similarly although China and India have ambitious programmes, it’s very unlikely that more than 10-20% of their electric power will come from nuclear, in any reasonable timeframe. China has something like 20GW capacity of civilian nuclear power planned or operating, and is fast on track to have a total power system of around 1,000 GW (vs. 800 for the US), 80% of which is coal. So even scaling the Chinese system 10 times (and assuming no further growth in consumption) you get to 20%.

(I’m automatically discounting the post 2050 period. If we have not stabilised CO2 levels at around 500-550ppm by 2050, then we are toast anyways, in fact we may be doomed at a much lower level, but we don’t know until we get there).

One can be reasonably optimistic about the likelihood of new power technologies in the post 2050 world (although we still generate electricity pretty much as we did in 1950, and with very similar thermal efficiencies) but still have great concerns about our ability to adjust, fast enough, in the meantime.

I’d be happier with nuclear power in the UK if a normal commercial insurance company could be found that was prepared to underwrite the risks that it would underwrite without flinching for any other industrial project.
It has been suggested to those enthusiastic about nuclear power that they should pool resources and set up an insurance company to do just that – it should be a licence to print money. But they have never done it.

A rational nuclear system would be burning it, not burying it.

I assume by this that you mean one vastly different from anything in place at present, because present nuclear technologies create waste that is more radioactive than its inputs.

Dave heasman

The Price Anderson Act remains a model for what we will have to do, when we start burying CO2. ie indemnify the industry for the rest of time against the risk of leakage (beyond a certain level of damages).

There are market failures out there, things private markets will just not do. If we want to have those industries and technologies, government has to intervene.

The Valiant Red Army liberated Afghan women back in 1980.

lemuel pitkin

You are welcome. And second re the contributions of others.

I try to preach a gospel of reasonableness about global warming here, on Tim Lambert’s Deltoid, on The Oil Drum (I’m not a peak oiler, but there are very smart people there) and on Mark Kleiman’s blog (when it had comments).

I’ve even had bashes on Jane Galt and Marginal Revolution, but the tide of Global Warming denialism is usually too strong there.

I’ve been asked to do a guest piece on GW and what to do about it, for a blog, which I have yet to write.

One of the reasons that all sorts of people play the “gotcha” games our hostess decries is lack of trust. There’s also ego-one-up-manship, but let’s discard that.

I ask those of a liberal/left tendency, how many times have you automatically assumed racist intent whenever a conservative of any stripe has addressed crime, or social-welfare, or any other issue that can remotely be connected to minority groups? More than once, eh? And didn’t you justify that distrust by recollecting “Well, conservatives fought against civilrights in the 60’s, so they need to prove themselves not racist!” or something similar?

The left has a long history of supporting pretty much any dictator who mouths Socialist slogans. Look up Beatrice and Sydney Webb, or Lytton Streachy, or Walter Duranty, or Roger Baldwin; these were people who if alive today would be solidly left/”progressive”. They also are people who went to great lengths to defend Stalin and his regime, even after it was obvious what was being done to the people of the USSR. Similar “pilgrims” who all but deified Mao Tse Tung can be found; I met some myself in the late 1970’s. Castro has been, and still is, defended by far too many on the Left. You can even find some, such as Anthony Lewis of the NY Times, who defended the Khmer regime of Cambodia for quite some years after it was obvious what they were doing.

This is the history, whether you like it or not. You surely don’t like the notion that lefties have been stumbling from dictator to dictator, looking for some idol to worship, but to those of us outside of leftism…it often appears that way.

Lather, rinse and repeat this point on other issues; it was the left that shut down, via political efforts, all new nuclear power construction in the late 1970’s. The vast majority of green-left people still oppose nuclear electrical generation; you can see the comments on this thread. So really, it’s not all that unreasonable for someone outside your own submovement, to assume that you, like the vast majority of green-lefties going back to the Carter years, oppose nuclear power with intensity. Sorry if the history isn’t what you’d like it to be, but there it is.

Please put some of that well known empathy to work. Try to understand why some people don’t trust you, heck, even ask them once in a while. Not all those who answer will have spittle and foam flecking their lips, some might even have reasons that you had not considered. And since you are all very open minded people, always ready to consider alternative viewpoints, I’m sure it won’t be difficult at all to realize that not everyone in the 20th century who endorsed leftism was as highminded and clear thinking as you are. Many of them were convinced, utterly convinced, that Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Castro, or Ho Chi Minh, or Pol Pot, or any of some of the others was The One Who Would Make True Socialism Work, and as true believers, their minds were made up & they did not wish to be distracted with facts.

You might even consider that one, just one, of the True Facts you hold could, maybe, possibly, be wrong…

Mr. Valuethinker, et. al.,

I have a problem with these estimates of the relative cost of nuclear power generation, and required investment, which is the principal element of nuclear costs. They are all based on what I think are inflated estimates of nuclear plant costs. Historical numbers are very poor guides to this, as these were in the past enormously inflated by politics and litigation.

I don’t see why a nuclear plant of modern design should cost much more than the equivalent capacity in coal plants.

I definitely see possibilities in modern nuclear power, i.e., pebble bed systems where flow of coolant is what causes the reaction to happen – coolant stops flowing, reaction stops going.

Moving to a cookie cutter standard design and making loads of them would also massively improve the costs here of course, in most places existing nuclear power plants were in large part designed from scratch as the technology matured, making it all so expensive.

Still you have to factor in the human equation – that is that the more safe something is considered, the more safety corners will be cut to save money or because someone has a bad day and can’t be bothered to do their job right today because there are four redundant safety systems behind them that will catch any problem they miss. This would probably also explain stuff like TMI and Chernobyl – if people have worked in a place for a decade and more, they tend to become blase about any risks even as they gain experience and seniority.

Mr. Stuart,

Experience means safety.

TMI was new, operating for only about four years prior to the accident. Experienced operators would not have made those mistakes, and the US now has dozens of plants that have been operating for thirty to forty years with no accidents. We have an institutionalized industry, and that makes for safety.

I read somewhere that the French government is notorious for concealing information from the public, when it comes to problems with their nuclear power stations. Whether it’s radioactive leaks, pollution, technical emergencies – it’s all pretty much a state secret.

Apparently, in the aftermath of the Chernobyl incident, when most European countries declared various degrees of emergency, the French official kept pretending that nothing happened for a long time. Supposedly because it’s a taboo to talk about levels of radiations there.

Well, it’s true, the Chernobyl thing happened long time ago, but is the French government any better now in this respect, or is this just a natural feature of any state with a lot of nuclear power stations? I suspect it might be the latter.

Mr. Stuart,

No doubt you will have accidents in the third world. I come from such places, I have no illusions about the likely competence of such operators.

One useful lesson of TMI is that a good safe design can make up for bad operators, at least in maintaining public safety. TMI was almost a worst-case – or probably was in fact a worst case. Every active system failed, leaving only the plant design to prevent a real danger to the public. But the design succeeded.

And then there is the value of having a pool of experienced operators and an institutional knowledge of best practices, that has been built up over these decades. There was no such thing in 1979. New plant personnel can learn from real experts now.

Convince yourself that nuclear power is a great idea. Then consider Iraq. Consider Iran and North Korea. Nuclear power is a casus belli. next, recall the case of Jose Padilla, wherein our own government used the fear of a dirty bomb to abrogate the constitution and torture a U.S. citizen. It is proper to say that the problems of nuclear power are political, as long as you remember that “political” includes peace vs war, and the preservation of constitutional rights. The founding fathers were suspicious of concentrations of power, without having any inkling of nuclear power.

Nuclear power could be terrific as long as it is controlled forever by the right people, by good people. In other words, nuclear power is just fine in a utopia.

I used to be reflexively pro-nuclear. But the devastating arguments against it aren’t liberal. They are conservative.

“The” horses may have bolted, but why breed more? We certainly should not favor India’s nuclear plants– we want to counter proliferation, not feed it. And if the newer technologies make nuclear more cost effective, more people, in more countries, will want it. Is it not far preferable to make efficiency and renewables more cost effective?

Someone please help me complete this sentence: “Nuclear power is good and desirable, and therefore Iraq, Iran, and North Korea . . . . “

Any rational person in the developed world has far more to fear from climate change than from nukes in the hands of Iran/North Korea/tomorrow’s Official Enemy.

I don’t mind North Koreans (or anyone) having knives or bearskins. Nuclear weapons I mind. (They’re WMDs.)

But rather than fear either nuclear weapons or global warming, I simply prefer a clean energy system. Efficiency, renewables, and conservation get us away from both carbon and nuclear. Why not focus our efforts on the energy system we’d like all our fellow humans to adopt? We lead everyone up the learning curve.

Don’t take my word for it. Amory Lovins at http://www.rmi.org has been showing the way for decades. And I know that as I’ve become more efficient, the air gets cleaner, and I get richer, tax-free.

luis alegria

I can paraphrase you the MIT study on nuclear power (can’t crack the pdf, so you’ll have to look up the actual words yourself):

‘ there’s not a lot of research done on why nuclear power plant costs rose so much’

It wasn’t just politics or changing safety regulations, it was incredible overoptimism by the programme managers and utilities: the history of that is common throughout the life of the civil nuclear industry.

As I’ve also argued (comments re France) it’s impossible to assume, if you are building a complex and hazardous technology in a country like the USA, that somehow safety and political concerns are going to be *less* than they were historically.

The reality is nuclear is a complex technology (I was closely associated with reactor construction– the utility managed a $30bn writeoff). Complex technologies have a history of poor performance.

You’ve probably read Charles Perrow’s ‘Normal Accidents’? Failure is inevitable in complex, close-coupled systems. The question is how bad the failure is, and what are the consequences?

TMI was hardly a worse case accident. It was an accident, made worse by incompetence. Worst case could be a lot of things:

– imagine a scenario where 5 guys with boxcutters hijack a 767 out of JFK and fly right over a nuclear power plant, before smashing their plane into another building? Suppose they had diverted and hit the nuclear plant? Even if the containment vessel survives (I’ve not heard of any studies into the ‘spalling’ effect ie internal concrete fragmentation) the loss of external cooling and control systems could be catastrophic. And the concrete will be heated to 1200 degrees F. Helen Caldicott’s nightmare scenario is they hit the swimming pool.

A fanciful scenario you might say, and very unlikely but one of those AA flights did fly over a nuclear plant, on its way to its rendezvous with history.

– Another worst case would be an actual melt by the core, down through the base of the thing. Even if the containment vessel weren’t breached above ground, the radioactive material could get to the water supply.

Yes the industry has learned a lot since TMI. However a GE Boiling Water Reactor was shut down last year, in Illinois, with 2/3rds of the shielding eaten away. It’s not a failure free industry by any stretch of the imagination.

The 3rd Gens will be another jump up in scale and difficulty. Hopefully better designed, and with less cost inflation. But I’m sceptical of arguments that it will cost *less* than the median reactor of the previous generation. And they will be *new* reactors and *new* technology.

I would dispute that a nuclear plant is no more difficult than a supercritical coal plant to build. The thermal tolerances are higher, and you have radioactivity. In an SC plant, you shut it down when you have a problem, that can be harder to do in a nuke. And the tolerances to things like leaks are zero.

As I say, complicating the MIT study is that construction costs for new power plants have risen by 30% since 2003.

Nukes are out there. They are an option, despite all the safety, waste disposal and proliferation problems. My main point is that if you look at the scale of the problem as Socolow and Paccala illustrate it, nukes are at best 1/8th of the solution.

In a world without carbon taxation, no one would rationally build nukes, in the absence of the subsidies the UK government is talking about and the Bush 2005 Energy Act has entrenched. You would build super critical coal fired stations (CCGTs in some places and for peaking power).

If we had a carbon tax or cap-and-trade policy, nuclear WILL be able to compete with other sources w/o subsidy. The only energy source nuclear can not compete with right now is dirty, conventional coal, and that’s just because coal’s massive external costs are not accounted for at all, whereas nuclear is essentially held to a standard of perfection.

Even with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, nuclear is, at best, AS subsidies as all the other sources (fossil and renewable) and these subsidies only apply for the first few reactors. After that, nuclear goes back to being the only unsubsidized major source of power.

Nuclear’s external costs truly are “wee”. The most recent and comprehensive study on the external costs of various energy sources is the “ExternE” study performed by the European Commission. A summary of the results can be found at:

http://www.externe.info/

The study’s results show that whereas coal and oil’s external costs are ~4-8 cents/kW-hr (enough to double their price), nuclear’s external costs are a fraction of a cent, similar to most renewable sources. Fossil fuel plants cause ~25,000 premature deaths in the US alone, every single year (hundreds of thousands worldwide). Western nuclear power has never killed anyone, or had any measurable impact on public health. Even the consequences of an absolute worst case accident or terrosist attack on a nuclear plant would be smaller than the ANNUAL environment and public health effects of fossil fuel plants.

I’m not sure what is meant by “nobody is actually advocating more nuclear plants”. Plenty of us are; some quite strongly. If you mean utility/business interest in building new plants, license applications are being prepared for ~35 new plants, right now.

jimhopf –

The externe study (thanks for the link) didn’t include the cost of subsidies, and probably worse, specifically excluded rying to estimate the risks or costs of proliferation.

And if you want to reduce CO2 emissions, there are faster, cheaper ways to do it (see comments above).

But maybe the thing that should concern me most is the implicit assumption that we need unlimited power generation capacity. This assumption drove the regulated utilities for a century. Why have I never heard a conservative (or a libertarian) complain about that? Is there some problem with supply and demand?

valuethinker –

You hit the crux:
“The history of our civilisation to date is that we always need more energy.”

That assumption certainly drove utility planning for a century. A corollary was cheap waste disposal forever. Oh, well.

So how do we convince China, India, ourselves, etc. to leave all our fossil energy in the ground where it belongs?

One: energy efficiency – better refrigerators, lights, trains, etc.

Two: renewables – solar, wind, biofuels, etc.

Three: conservation – fewer lights, etc. This is the admittedly the hardest, but the best, since it conserves all material resources. So can we please stop insisting that we (6 billion people heading to 9 or 11 billion) need to dissipate more energy?

Subsidizing an expensive, anti-free-market energy source (with security burdens) just subsidizes and promotes consumption. But as we drive down the cost of efficiency and renewables the world will follow.

China doesn’t pirate videotapes anymore. Not because they became virtuous, but because DVDs were so superior.

On Subsidies:

Whether or not the ExternE study included them, subsidy arguments do not weigh against nuclear.

In the US, with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, nuclear went from being the only major source with no significant subsidies to having subsidies that are merely on a par with other (fossil and renewable) sources. As for Europe, it is very clear that, on a per kW-hr basis, renewables’ subsidies are much higher than nuclear’s. Their fossil fuels are almost certainly heavily subsidized as well.

In a sense, this is all moot anyway. The whole subject of this discussion is how to reduce CO2 emissions (I thought). If this is true, nuclear’s costs vs. fossil fuels are largely irrelevant anyway, as fossil fuel use will be required to decrease. As for renewables, intermittentcy will limit their overall contribution to ~15-25% of annual generation, at most. Thus, under any system where CO2 emissions are required to decrease, a large expansion of nuclear is virtually assured, barring laws that specifically prevent it.

BWT, no fossil plant with CO2 sequestration scheme will be even remotely competative with nuclear. The studies I’ve seen suggest that sequestration will roughly double the price (i.e., add ~5 cents/kW-hr or more) of coal generated electricity, after accounting for the energy lost in shipping and compressing the gas.

Western Dave,

The cases you list all involve the nuclear weapons complex and have absolutely nothing to do with commercial nuclear power. US nuclear plants have not made any messes; all of the wastes have been completely contained.

On a per unit energy basis, the environmental/health effects of coal mining are much higher than those of uranium mining, due to the vastly larger amount of material being extracted. On top of that, whereas the effects of coal mining are much smaller than the effects of the coal plants themselves (through air pollution), the effects of uranium mining are essentially the only effects from nuclear power overall, with the power plants having no effect on public health at all. They do use water, and reject heat (hot water), but so do all thermal plants.

Coal plant emissions cause ~25,000 deaths every year, and coal mines have enormous environmental impact. Nothing in the entire nuclear production cycle comes anywhere close to that, even before considering global warming.

Myself, and the great majority of the scientific community knows that Yucca Mtn. “will work”. The scientific analyses showing this have been completed, and the license application will be filed next year. The whole “issue” with Yucca is that there is a tiny (

(trying yet again….)

Myself, and the great majority of the scientific community knows that Yucca Mtn. “will work”.

The scientific analyses showing this have been completed, and the license application will be filed next year. The whole “issue” with Yucca is that there is a tiny (

ValueThinker:

Concerning LWR plant security, crashing a commercial jetliner into a nucler plant has virtually no chance of causing a significant radiation release:

http://www.nei.org/documents/eprinuclearplantstructuralstudy200212.pdf

Other types of attack are unlikely to cause a large release as well. Chemical plants will always be an infinitely better target, with a much higher chance of success AND a larger possible consequence.

Most proposals for pebble bed reactors w/o containment involve burying the reactor underground, which would largely neutralize most attack scenarios.

In any event, is the risk of release from a large-scale attack (on either reactor type) zero? No. But one thing that is clear is that even a maximally successful attack will produce consequences that are lower than those caused ANNUALLY by fossil plants. Coal plants cause 25,000 deaths annually in the US alone; hundreds of thousands worldwide. Credible estimates for Chernobyl’s total eventual death toll range from ~100 to 10,000. The maximum possible release from any US plant, even in the event of an attack, are at least one order of magnitude less than Chernobyl. For large LWRs, the lower potential source term is due to strong (remaining) defenses and a non-flammible core. For the HTGR, the reactor is a factor of 10 smaller than Chernobyl.

So what would you rather have, a tiny chance of an event causing a few thousand eventual deaths, or a 100% chance of 10 times as many deaths every year. Oh yeah, and global warming on top of that. The choice couldn’t be more clear.

Finally, in terms of the number of reactors built, if we limit CO2 emissions, coal will become more expensive than nuclear (if it can be used at all). Gas will be way more expensive. Why do you find it so hard to imagine nuclear winning most of the market share in terms of new power plants, especially under the above (expected) conditions?

You say you can only imagine ~500 reactors being built in 44 years. Back in the 70s and 80s, the world build ~400 reactors in less than half that time, despite the fact that the technology was older and less mature, and the world’s GNP was much lower. Furthermore, the need to go nuclear was much less pressing, as there was no GW problem. That is, other options like coal were much less limited (not at all limited, in fact). Given all this, assuming that reactors are built at the same rate they were back then (~20/yr.) should be considered a lower bound assumption.

There is no reason to believe that all developed countries can not now do what France did 30 years ago. The only real argument against this would be limited uranium supply, but this is hogwash:

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html

jimhopf,

I am confused. I was referring to EROEI (energy return on energy investment), i.e., the amount of energy required to get a new producer of energy up and running. This is one of the reasons why solar power is so unattractive.

For nuke power, uranium must be mined, transported, refined, transported, enriched. The plant must be built, which requires a lot of expensive metals and fabrications. And then there is the ugly business of decommissioning a reactor vessel at some time in the future, and the disposal of waste. The world nuclear website you cited sort of glosses over this.

About 100 miles from where I live was one of the most dangerous nuke power plants ever built. B&R took a lot of shortcuts, was relieved, and Bechtel completed it. It had never run @ full power due to concerns about safety until a decade ago. It was the subject of an ugly CBS 60 Minutes expose a few years after initial construction, during its startup.

The plant has cleaned up its act, and is now a record setter in the US in many areas. But, essentially, it was built twice. My electric bill during the summer last year was incredible, despite its record-setting output. It’s highly doubtful if it will ever pay off in dollars or in energy investment.

Unfortunately, for the US, nuke power is the only card i can see that can be played. If we could get over our love affair with the automobile, this would not be necessary.

Paul #90, Thank you for giving us a perfect example of what Belle was describing. While your post doesn’t present a very good argument it’s a fine study object as we puzzle over this kind of fallacy.