No nuclear renaissance

The big problem with nuclear power is the lies of the nuclear power industry.

When Chernobyl blew up we were told that the cause was sloppy Soviet engineering and that the lack of a reactor containment vessel was the key design flaw. Now we have two US designed reactors with ruptured containment vessels undergoing at least a partial meltdown.

A plant that still generates 10 MW of heat after being ‘shut down’ and continues to produce 5MW of heat a year later is not ‘failsafe’ by any meaningful definition. Without the cooling system the reactor will heat up and no containment vessel on earth is going to survive the resulting temperature.

There are much safer designs available but these are not the designs that were to be built under the renaissance funding. At this point it is pretty clear that the renaissance program is dead for all practical purposes.

The most urgent priority in Japanese politics is going to be to decommission the remaining nuclear plants as quickly as possible, beginning with the defective Mk 1 boiling water design. I would suggest a crash program of building renewables, beginning with wind power and moving to wave and solar.

Market forces work very slowly when one technology is being displaced by another. Most of the time, the market is best left to itself but there are exceptions when a command approach is required. This is one of those times.

The US is currently planning to spend over a trillion dollars purchasing and flying a new fighter jet that will contribute exactly nothing to the US economy. It is a pure waste of time and resources. If the same money was spent on renewable energy the US could likely be energy independent. The US has the resources and so does Japan. The question is whether the government will choose to spend or invest.

Fear and cost are intertwined in many ways. There’s a good argument to be made that, in the US the plant that did in the nuclear industry was not Three Mile Island but Shoreham on Long Island. After being completed at great expense (including overruns attributed to regulatory changes and corruption in the NY-area construction industry, tell me you’re shocked) in about 1985 the Shoreham plant was never operated, as local politicians from Governor Mario Cuomo on down led the peasants with pitchforks against anything “nuclear” and so socked the utility with a several billion dollar loss (which the peasants had to pay off in the long run through local rate increases).

Investors may be willing to pro-rate a risk of accident or disaster that can be described within the laws of Nature. But what premium would be high enough to offset the risk — one in ten? one in two? — that local politicians will conclude they can catch more votes with demagoguery than through campaign contributions? It’s politics, not physics, that drives up the effective cost of utilizing this nearly-free source of energy, effectively to infinity.

I fear JQ is correct, that politics will trump physics again for the foreseeable future. For those interested in touring the counter-factual universe in which nuclear plants are built for safety and efficiency according to the best physics, I recommend learning/dreaming about the “liquid fluoride thorium reactor” concept; a good central starting point is this blog: http://energyfromthorium.com/ , check out the informative videos especially.

When Chernobyl blew up we were told that the cause was sloppy Soviet engineering and that the lack of a reactor containment vessel was the key design flaw. Now we have two US designed reactors with ruptured containment vessels undergoing at least a partial meltdown.

Chernobyl blew up and spewed lots of bits of the reactor core all over Europe. As near as people can tell, the Japanese reactors are releasing small quantities of comparatively innocuous radioactive steam in their general vicinity. The situation in Japan has not played itself out yet, but so far the two are not remotely comparable. And the difference between the situations does come down to sloppy Soviet engineering.

It should mean something that the disaster in progress at the Japanese nuclear plants so far seems like it might kill a few tens of nuclear power industry workers. This is a tragedy, but the problem at the nuclear plant is the direct result of a massive earthquake that killed a few thousand people in minutes.

It’s still too early to draw firm conclusions and things may still go horribly wrong, but the problems from the nuclear power plant are still only a small fraction of the problems Japan is facing from the earthquake and tsunami.

As an Aussie, I’m well aware of the climate towards nuclear power – so the question is really simple: what are the alternatives?
Coal is a problem – and we contribute significantly to that through our exports to China and elsewhere.
Oil and Gas are a problem – the downside of an offshore drilling accident is also pretty horrific.

We either move voluntarily (and soon) away from the current fuel cycles or be compelled to do so at some later stage as our new climate starts to kick in and political blindness evaporates in regard to that.

We are fantastically positioned to make significant inroads via solar, wind and geothermal… but we’re doing fuck all about that… and none of those (except geothermal and perhaps solar thermal) make inroads into the “base load” problem.

Forgetting the cost, simply installing 3kW of photovoltaics on a significant number of houses is a job of epic proportions (not to mention the CO2 producing energy required to produce all that silicon, aluminium and copper).

The “smart grid” is all political and accounting subterfuge – physics doesn’t play nice when you have our distances and population densities to deal with.

All the low hanging fruit is gone – the numbers for installing nuclear power stations, the safety requirements etc etc all look insane until compared with the cost of alternatives or even the status quo… the downside of nuclear power is apparent to everyone but the upside (I suspect) is that it’s by far and away the cheapest way to solve the “base load” issue without invoking a whole bunch of other technologies that we can’t make or won’t scale.

And that’s just here where our infrastructure is relatively high tech and our labour force is skilled…

Here’s another thread for Myles, at The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/mar/16/japan-nuclear-crisis-tsunami-aftermath-live

Tim Worstall lives in a pleasanter world, where nuclear power is a transition to an economy that uses energy which produces a lower level of greenhouse gases. But, in fact, we live in an economy where there’s no evidence that nuclear power has ever operated in this transitional way. Rather, we get nuclear power, with its accidents and their scope – which should be included in any price comparison with, say, solar – and increasing use of petroleum.

The word ‘transitional’ is a nice, soothing word. Like the word ‘puppy’. But there is no transitional activity going on in the world at the present time, except as a nice word in policy papers.

The disconnect between what we ‘need’ – given our projections about the environment – and what we don’t get – via our economic choices – should tell us something about the sum value of our economic choices. In 1828, in a scathing review of James Mill’s book on government, Macaulay, from a conservative Whig’s point of view, pointed to one of the key defects of utilitarian thinking: “Throughout his essay, he confounds the community with the species. He talks of the greatest happiness of the greatest number: but, when we examine his reasonings, we find that he thinks only of the greatest number of a single generation.

Therefore, even if we were to concede that all those arguments of which we have exposed the fallacy are unanswerable, we might still deny the conclusion at which the essayist arrives. Even if we were to grant that he had found out the form of government which is best for the majority of the people now living on the face of the earth, we might still without inconsistency maintain that form of government to be pernicious to mankind. It would still be incumbent on Mr Mill to prove that the interest of every generation is identical with the interest of all succeeding generations.”

Mill has gotten the best of that argument so far, in my opinion. But it is looking like Macaulay’s objection is starting to kick in – as the interest of the present generation is beginning to conflict seriously with the living conditions we can expect for the next generation, or the one after that.

“Also, read up on what certain doses in Sieverts (and milliSievert etc) do to people. Those measurements are the only sort-of hard data you are going to get, and it helps if you get a feel for what levels are only unusual, what levels might be unhealthy and what levels might be lethal. ”

Indeed. One banana a day for a year (the Banana Equivalent Dose) is some 35 microsieverts. The numbers from a few days back, of 1,000 micro sieverts dropping rapidly to 500, were worrying only if someone was going to inhale such for days or weeks.

Hundreds of milli sieverts however are indeed worrying (one nuclear engineer of my aquiantance says his dosimeter shows he gets 2 ish milli sieverts a year). 3,000 sieverts is more like standing right next to the Chernobyl reactor as it was burning.

But there is one other very important point: duration. It matters hugely which isotope we’re actually talking about. If it’s the gas from the venting of the pressure inside the reactor, then it’s almost all N16. With a half life of 5 seconds, when it becomes O16. Entirely trivial unless you’re right there sucking in great lungfuls of it.

Cs 137, with a half life of 30 years (and a likely product of an exposed core) is entirely another matter.

Strangely, the plutonium (if any does escape from that MOX reactor) is more dangerous as a chemical poison than it is as a radioactive one.

@a. y. mous the original post was not reliable, see the rather lengthy discussion at LGM. The new site at MITNSE does not interpret the information, although it does contain useful information to allow you to interpret it. I’m sticking with the BBC website, which has been pretty clear in differentiating what is fact and rumor and has been paying close attention to the waste ponds all along.

@ 17: Fair enough. I’m not averse (as one of the likely recipients) to a crash program of investigating, designing, researching, the technologies.

My complaint is more about the calls for crash programs of the installation of the current generation of technology. They’re just not ready yet.

The latest accident reveals that the standard reactor designs are intrinsically unsafe. The absence of electrical power or destruction of their control facilities will lead to a serious radiation release within hours or days. If nuclear power is to be revived, truly fail-safe designs must be developed, including fail-safe storage of spent fuel. A satisfactory design should be stable and safe with zero external power supplied.

To all the people who discussed “storage” of spent fuel: That’s precisely the problem. We should be *reprocessing* this fuel and reusing it, not foolishly trying to sequester it for millennia.

A moderate and steadily increasing carbon tax. My view is that people grossly underestimate the importance of conservation and pay too much attention to energy sources- important, to be sure, but secondary to the question of how much energy we actually need. Cost per unit is also less critical at lower usage. Were the incentives right, investment and consumer decisions would drive us as individuals, communities and businesses to use far less energy than we presently do. My seat of pants guesstimate is that we could live very well on 1/4 of what we presently use (I’m thinking US, but even applied to Europe). Amory Lovins has talked about this for decades.
As an example, heating/cooling is major residential load in temperate climes. And can be virtually eliminated: http://www.oregonlive.com/hg/index.ssf/2009/02/passive_house_the_idea_of_the.html

@22

Unfortunately, reprocessing creates bomb-grade fissionable material. Nuclear power seems to resist easy answers. It is almost as though nature is telling us not to use it.

@25

Large-scale energy production in general resists easy answers. It’s almost at though nature is telling us that we should go back to being subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.

“storage” of spent fuel: my understanding is that the medium-term storage ponds for rods that have been removed from the reactor are a serious risk at the Japanese reactors; if they aren’t cooled they can potentially heat up to the point of failure and release of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Is this correct?

Doubtless, as Switkowski has argued, the failures in cooling and containment systems that gave rise to the present crisis can be overcome and reactor designs modified to improve safety.

This happened a while back; the Fukushima design was being criticized by nuclear bigwigs in this country back in 1972 or so.

We have, I think, 6 in the U.S., but they seem to work pretty well if they’re not hit by quake-tsunami combos.

I read somewhere that there are 64 working nuclear generation plants providing 20% of the electricity in the US. Many of them are near the end of their operational lives.
I have many questions but here are three:
1) How much would it cost and how long would it take to generate 50% of electricity needs using the safest known nuclear technology? Money is no object. Costs to be calculated in switch-on day dollars assuming inflation of 2% per year and include the entire lifespan and carbon footprint of the plant.
2)Do the same thing with renewables and efficiency programs.
3)Which do you prefer in your neighbourhood?

The reassurances just don’t hold up. At Three Mile Island, the cause of failure was faulty instrumentation; at Chernobyl an out-of-control experiment; and at Fukushima, a Tsunami. Each of these sites suffered catastrophic destruction, nullifying their economic value and threatening or delivering dangerous releases of radioactivity.

Current nuclear power sites are intrinsically vulnerable to ANYTHING that disrupts their cooling systems. A few days without electricity or control systems and you have a billion dollar loss and potential dirty bomb. This is not a technology that a prudent civilization should deploy.

When reactors are made that will shut down safely absent all electric power, then it will be time to build new ones. Until then, the existing reactors should be decommissioned as soon as possible.

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/03/march-13-2011-how-black-is-japanese.html

Well worth your time, IMO.

“A few days without electricity or control systems and you have a billion dollar loss ”

Be interesting to know what an earthquake plus tsunami did to any solar or wind systems that Japan had. Complete write offs as well?

@39

The cleanup of Three Mile Island took 12 years and cost over $900 million. That was the cleanup, not the replacement cost. The profitability of the investment in Three Mile Island is a settled question.

The long term waste problem of nuclear power should not be ignored, but neither should the long term waste problems of its fossil competitors. A substantial part of CO2 emitted today from fossil fuels will still be in the atmosphere 10000 years from now, barring active scrubbing efforts. Mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and other hazards that appear in coal stack emissions and in the ash are not sequestered from the environment either and will be around as long as the Earth is. I don’t object to increased nuclear safety standards but I will be very unhappy if the quest for improved nuclear safety leads to greater use of its objectively worse fossil-combustion competitors.

Tim, the write-offs of solar systems would pretty much parallel the write-off in housing, and not be a major feature or problem or additional loss. Wind would be variable (it likes to be up high or offshore; both of which would be safer), and it would be more distributed, which aids local power distribution.

IOW, please think a bit.

Forgetting the cost, simply installing 3kW of photovoltaics on a significant number of houses is a job of epic proportions (not to mention the CO2 producing energy required to produce all that silicon, aluminium and copper).

Indeed. The advocates for solar energy and other advocates often forget this. Just because the energy is free doesn’t mean converting it into a usable form is going to be either adequate or cost effective.

The “smart grid” is all political and accounting subterfuge – physics doesn’t play nice when you have our distances and population densities to deal with.

Right. The tragedy of the commons, as it were. Right now, we don’t have to worry about storage and transmission issues because so few people are going with photovoltaics. But the solution we have now – having the utilities pay for excess power sent back up the wire, for example – won’t work for very large populations.

All the low hanging fruit is gone – the numbers for installing nuclear power stations, the safety requirements etc etc all look insane until compared with the cost of alternatives or even the status quo… the downside of nuclear power is apparent to everyone but the upside (I suspect) is that it’s by far and away the cheapest way to solve the “base load” issue without invoking a whole bunch of other technologies that we can’t make or won’t scale.

Agreed. For a good first cut as to why nonnuclear alternatives can’t be used for base loads in most developed parts of the road, Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air is a good introduction to the issues.

You’ve offered a some numbers for one of the single-digit number of nuclear plant disasters that have happened in the past century, but the environmental cost of coal plants is at this point probably incalculcalable. Why the selective analysis?

Unless you have similar demands about other energy generation technologies?

Exactly. I meet very, very few rah rah nuclear advocates who have a scientific bent that are other than guarded in their endorsement of this source of energy. They’ll freely admit that the nuclear option isn’t something they want, merely that it happens to currently be the best among a number of alternatives. Press them, and they’ll say that they’d prefer something like solar power satellites, or a physics breakthrough like really good batteries or room-temperature superconductors, or monopole-powered baryon annihilation, or something even more exotic.

But those alternatives, unfortunately, are not what we have to work with :-(

@ScentOfViolets I can only echo your sentiments, being similar to my own. I’m not an academic, but have friends who turned down job offers at CERN and Brown to teach physics at local (South African) universities, and my hold similarly qualified views.

In contrast, my experience of anti-nuclear advocacy is a mixed bag, with most of the contents being unconvincing, far too shrill and unwilling to parse nuclear power generation in context.

A particularly irritating incident which turned me against vocal anti-nuclear advocates Earthlife Africa was one in which they whipped up a short-term media frenzy by claiming that the Pelindaba facility in the north of SA had unshielded nuclear waster lying about.

Their claims were broadcasted without any investigation by them (usually) quality press and the subsequent revelation that the so-called waste was in fact harmless isotopes deliberately exposed for medical instrument calibration on private land was largely ignored by the press.

Also, “my I hold similar views” should be “I hold”. Dammit.

Tim:
It shouldn’t be about a crash program to simply install in massive scale whatever we have today, or instead to simply research ways to make the stuff better. A good part of the needed improvements will come about via economies of scale, and moving up the learning curves. The key is for the renewable technologies to grow at a sustainable pace, that supports innovation. A massive program that decalres “we will buy anything you can produce at any cost” wouldn’t deliver that for sure. But, defunding of supports won’t either. This is more a case of slow an steady (or more realistically, medium speed) wins the race.

I always have a problem with the “can’t support nuclear until you have a longterm solution to the waste issue”. Seems to me the waste issue is almost entirely political, and the people making the above argument are frequently the ones determined to make any long term waste proposal politically impossible.

There was some confusion above about spent fuel pools, and reprocessing. The hotter rods in pools are not candidates for reprocessing. Until they have had time to cool off to a safer level. So reprocessing is important for the longterm waste as well as the fuel supply issues, but it not an answer to the problem of spent fuel pools needing to be continuously supplied with water. Fukushima shows that having the pools in the same structure as the reactor implies that there exists a failure mechanism whereby the pools become inaccessible. The problem is not that these fuel rods will melt, but that the zirconium seal will deteriorate, and hence the containment of the fission products contained within fails.

@mclaren

Apparently the cost of conerting to green energy sources is enormous for Germany. Planned expansion of wave energy generators is approximately 75 BILLION euros.

Then of course there’s the problem of output. All green technologies require expensive infrastructure to manage variable output. Coal can be varied by need, (fission) nuclear (AFAIK) operate at max output all the time. In contrast variable output requires expensive infrastructure to manage.

Reduced to a personal analogy (and echoing earlier speculation about photovoltaic installation costs), if you’re earning a german middle-manager’s salary, do you buy the car with a signiicant environmental impact or the car with no significant environmental impact that costs 100% as much? Frequently, the agents or atoms of the economy don’t have any real choice.

Each of these sites suffered catastrophic destruction, nullifying their economic value and threatening or delivering dangerous releases of radioactivity.

Comparing TMI to Chernobyl is kinda like this comparison.

“To all the people who discussed “storage” of spent fuel: That’s precisely the problem. We should be reprocessing this fuel and reusing it, not foolishly trying to sequester it for millennia.”

I get the impression that nuclear reprocessing plants are often more controversial than nuclear power plants. For instance, the British processing plant at Sellafield is a much larger concern in Norway than say, the much closer nuclear power plants in Sweden. The danger is not meltdowns etc., but waste leaking into the sea, that will be carried by the ocean currents to other countries. I believe there are concerns about the plant in Ireland as well.

One reason nuclear plants are causing so much trouble is that the incentives for the people building and advocating them are short-term, but the risks associated with them are long-term. Unfortunately, our economic and cultural systems do not rationally avoid catastrophic long-term risk.

A large fraction of humanity will take immediate substantial personal gain in return for inflicting possible widespread future harm. The more dangerous the technology, the more deadly this bargain becomes.

The importance of nuclear “incidents” is that they provide the only powerful counter-force to the trend toward profitable but irresponsible piling on of future risk. My question to nuclear power advocates is this:

How big does a nuclear disaster have to be to change your mind about the desirability of nuclear power?

Straightwood@64: “more than 1/1000th as bad as the harm of continuing to rely on fossil fuels” seems like an entirely reasonable answer to me. I mean, you are concerned about widespread future harm, right?

How big does a nuclear disaster have to be to change your mind about the desirability of nuclear power?

An earthquake and tsunami are nuclear disasters? Was the Deepwater Horizon a natural disaster?

I think the specter of The Bomb colors many folks’ perception of the issue. If there were a commercially-viable way to generate electricity that was not attended by planet-wide and potentially existential threats to our species, we wouldn’t be here arguing right now. Our options suck. All of them.

How big does a nuclear disaster have to be to change your mind about the desirability of nuclear power?
I have a small discount rate. AGW will be causing harm to humans for at least a thousand years, any nuclear accidents will cause relatively shortlived harm. The nuclear risks are medium term (0 to 20 years) say, the fossil fueled risks go on a long longer than that.

But it is highly probable, that our medium term energy prospects has now gotten a lot worse. We are less likely to build as many (or any) new nukes, and more likely to close existing ones earlier. If the latter happens quickly enough we could experience considerable economic hurt from it.

@ JohnB 3

Sorry, you’re claiming that the renaissance funding was going to pay for a new build of GE mk1 BWR designs? I’m, erm, sceptical.

All the new plants to be built are lightwater designs that have the same fundamental design flaw of generating many MW of heat energy years after being ‘shut down’. Such designs are not failsafe by any meaningful definition of the term. The ability to SCRAM the reactor and shut down the induced fission by inserting the control rods only reduces power output to 5% of the maximum load. It does not make it safe. A reactor that will melt down unless fed 60 gallons of water a minute is not failsafe.

The main difference between the mk 1 design of the boiling water reactor is that the reactor containment vessel is defective as was reported by Sandia Labs in 2006. The later designs are not defective in that respect but they are still defective and unsafe.

There are modern designs that have passive safety. For example the Pebble Bed design. Similar claims are made for the molten salt design though I have not looked at that personally.

Abundant evidence demonstrates that we were lied to when we were told that the mk1 boiling water design was safe. Why are we to believe the same people and the same company when they assure us that they have got it right this time round?

@JM 03.17.11 at 1:51 pm

I sympathize with your position, but arguing this way will get you ignored by anyone who knows anything about the problem

JM, let me put this to you gently. Do you happen to have a degree in nuclear physics? Have you spent any time working in the field? Because I have.

Recourse to presumed authority is never a pretty mode of argument. In this case what is at issue is the credibility of ‘experts’ who have been assuring us that US nuclear power is ‘safe’ to a risk of accident of less than a million to one. Now that we have two plants and six reactors on the brink of if not undergoing meltdown, one does not need a degree in nuclear physics to see that their credibility is nil. But as I mentioned before, I do happen to have one anyway.

I do believe that it is possible to have safe nuclear power. What I have no confidence in is the people running the industry. They have been lying about the safety of their plants for decades and the proof of that fact is seen in Japan.

What makes me even less willing to trust the nuclear industry is the way they resort to the mode of argument you show here. Essentially what you are saying is that the only people arguing against nuclear power do so out of ignorance. Yet we have six US designed reactors that are only being kept from a complete meltdown by plant operators taking doses of radiation that is almost certain to kill half of them within the year.

You do not need a degree in nuclear physics to see that we have been lied to here and that we cannot therefore trust US nuclear power plant designs to be safe.

The boiling water design is not failsafe. None of the US designs are failsafe.

One obvious source of increased costs for future nuclear power plants is that no future plants are going to be able to get away with the eight-hour battery operation life that was apparently available at Fukashima. No approval process is going to be able to get away with under two weeks. Can anyone on-thread say (a) whether this would be (would have been) feasible, and (b) what effect it would have on construction/running costs?

How big does a nuclear disaster have to be to change your mind about the desirability of nuclear power?

Speaking just for myself, this disaster has definitely changed my mind about the desirablity of nuclear power. Specifically, it’s made me think it’s more desirable.

This has been a worst-case scenario. And it’s absolutely clear that the damage caused is trivial compared with what we are facing from climate change. I’m fairly confident that if you could calculate the loss of life attributable to the carbon emissions from coal plants equivalent in power output to Fukushima, they’d exceed it by an order of magnitude. Events in Japan right now are showing as clearly as possible how much more destructive extreme weather events are than nuclear disasters, if we were just paying attention.

@ChrisB 75

The cost of additional batteries for two weeks is relatively trivial. As it happens there was already a program in place looking at that issue for other reasons.

What is going to be a bigger impact on the economics is the rapid reduction in the cost of wind power and the availability of good low power light bulbs as Japan is forced to embark on a crash program to deal with the loss of 10% of their already stretched generating capacity.

It is pretty clear to me that LEDs could be used to make much more attractive lighting fixtures than are available on the market today. The key in my view is to stop thinking about them as ‘bulbs’ and instead think about them as being a part of the fixture itself.

Japan has the technology, the capital resources and the need to move away from incandescent bulbs. If they adopted it as a national priority they could make a transition in maybe three years. Should they do that the same technology will flood into the US and European markets, not to mention China.

@PHB

You say have a degree in nuclear physics and you worked in the field. Okay – what did you work on?

May I assess you credibility by your statement that 1/2 of the workers will be dead in a year? The highest estimate of exposure I’ve heard so far is 106 millirem. Please inform me – is that dose sufficient to kill half of those exposed in a year?

The problem with your “black swan” argument is that it could be used to justify anything.

Not so. There is a clear difference in the probabalities associated with accidents at conventional thermal power plants and accidents at nuclear power plants. Even the most severe accident at a coal, oil, or gas-fueled power plant cannot endanger millions of people downwind. At this moment, nobody knows the ultimate severity of the accident at Fukushima, because we are in uncharted territory. Three Mile Island was caused by an instrumentation failure; Chernobyl by an out-of-control experiment; and Fukushima by a Tsunami. If you can build a valid statistical model from these events, you are truly a magician.

In the “Black Swan,” Taleb excoriates financial “experts” who represented the behavior of complex and unstable derivatives as safe investments with tractable risk characteristics. He would make similar criticisms of those who claim to predict the likelihood and severity of nuclear accidents and calculate the relative benefits of nuclear power generation vs. conventional power plants.

If you disagree with the logic, I’d be interested in hearing your arguments to the contrary.

Taleb’s book, “The Black Swan,” is all about refuting your argument. You are comparing the apples of very tractable measurements of conventional power source danger with the oranges of high-risk nuclear alternatives. The explosion of a single reactor near a densely populated Chinese city could upset your calculus with a single data point, but because it hasn’t happened yet, you calmly calculate based on past accident history. There are no “experts” on the future of nuclear catastrophe, and thus no expert calculations are possible.

Leaving aside the diciness of relying on Taleb, this comment makes no sense. You’re either saying that you can’t compare airline safety with car safety because even though the overall death rate per passenger-mile is lower for air travel, when accidents happen they cause more deaths (which just seems to be plain innumerate.)

Or you’re not questioning the logic so much as you are denying the premise . . . something entirely different.

And if you’re saying that we don’t know how bad a singular event can get, well, that “black swan” argument applies to just about everything else. If you allow that assumption, Cheney’s one percent doctrine makes perfect sense. If you allow that assumption, we should stop the burning of all fossil fuels tomorrow. Who knows, maybe the option is either that or rise in temperature to 90 degrees celsius or higher over most of the globe.

Iow, your black swan is nothing more than Pascal’s Wager in a modern guise.

Care to clarify what you meant then, or perhaps abandon that line of thought and go with another objection?

@Straightwood 84

The claim that Chernobyl failed due to an ‘experiment’ seems to be nuclear industry spin rather than reality.

According to other sources the tests being performed were rather more routine and well within the design capacity of the plant. The cause of the meltdown was not operating the plant outside its design capacity, it was an intrinsic design flaw in the plant itself.

The plant had a region of positive feedback that had not been predicted during the simulations. This is hardly surprising since the computing power to do proper 3D simulations of the reactor bed did not exist at the time the plant was designed. The standard approach used in the East and the West was to run 2D simulations and extrapolate to 3D.

Some of the UK Magnox reactors were shut down shortly after the simulation studies started to identify the cause. I tend to suspect there was a connection.

Now some might say that I don’t have the expertise to properly evaluate the situation etc. and they are probably right. But the situation is not one where I have to prove nuclear power is unsafe. The tsunami has already done that.

The observation I make is simply this: The onus is on the nuclear industry to prove that it deserves yet another chance, they have the entire burden of proof.

For years nuclear power promoters have claimed that the only reason someone might mistrust nuclear power is ignorance, stupidity or irrational fear, we see that mode of argument being applied in this thread.

I do not claim to be an expert on nuclear power but I do claim that I have more than a sufficient degree of knowledge and relevant expertise to back the statements that I have made.

Seriously, we are meant to believe someone because their cousin knew someone who might have gone to CERN but didn’t?

Lots of crackpot realism in this thread. Just remember that from the crooked fuel-rod of technocracy, no safe pile was ever made.
http://blogs.knoxnews.com/munger/2011/03/ex-sandia-engineer-talks-about.html

There’s no doubt the nuclear renaissance is killed stone dead by these events, at least in democratic countries. Whether it SHOULD be dead is another question.

John is correct that nuclear power is held to far higher safety standards than other toxic industries, and recent events have emphasised that (what about the indirect deaths from the oil refinery fire toxic smoke, or the massive chemical pollution that must occur when a tsunami washes away chemical plants all up and down that coast?). However he is also correct that, absent a hefty carbon price, the renaissance never made a lot of economic sense anyway.

PHB, your understanding as you describe it here is an interesting cheese of substance and holes, which makes me wonder what you actually learned in getting your degree in nuclear physics. I will go into a bit of detail here, which this thread could certainly use. (And, in case it matters to you or anyone else, I do have a PhD in nuclear physics; and while I’m not an engineer I have studied reactor physics and have written a refereed paper on reactor design. Or, as the leader of Plato’s Stepchildren put it, “Not twice mine.”)

When you write

“a graphite core. … The major advantage is that it permits a design that does in fact shut down when the control rods are dropped.”

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “shut down,” but I can’t see a definition under which this passage makes any sense.

Fission power basics: There are two heat sources in any running atomic pile, (A) the energy released from neutron-induced fission of a heavy-metal nucleus, and (B) the energy released by stand-alone decays of radioactive elements, particularly the light and middle-weight nuclear isotopes which are produced in these fissions (aka “fission products”). Source (A) is sustained by the neutron chain reaction, and can be stopped by changing the geometry of the pile, in particular by adding neutron absorptive materials (“control rods”). Source (B) is non-negotiable, and cannot be meaningfully stopped or reduced by any outside intervention; that energy will be liberated as heat, somewhere, on a schedule that depends only on the abundances and lifetimes of the isotopes that are present.

Given this very basic physics, I don’t know what you mean by “a design that…does shut down” in any way that’s relevant to the design involving graphite. Source (A), the fission chain reaction, can be stopped (ie reduced by many orders of magnitude in power, ie”shut down”) in any practical reactor, typically by inserting neutron-absorbing control rods; this goes for pressurized light-water reactors, heavy-water-moderated reactors, graphite-moderated reactors, molten-salt reactors, etc. Being able to shut down the fission chain reaction (A) has nothing to specifically with the presence or absence of graphite or water; it’s a feature of all power reactors.

It’s true that, if the chain reaction is only barely stopped by control rods then changes in conditions can lead to the chain reaction re-starting. For example, as a moderator cools the neutrons that percolate through it will, on average, slow down and become more effective at inducing fission; this effect is one way to produce a “pulsed reactor,” a well-known research device. And there are other mechanisms that may follow from geometry changes. But these are all usually marginal effects; inserting enough control rods will always shut down the chain reaction definitively, and that statement has nothing to do with water vs graphite vs other.

On the other side, as described above no reactor can “shut down” power source (B), the decay heat from radioisotopes; and this, too, is regardless of whether the reactor uses graphite or water, or anything else, for moderation or for cooling. So there’s no possible link between this meaning of “shut down” and graphite, either. And so, reading passages like this one really make me doubt that you have firm grasp on what you want to talk about. Similarly, when you write

“the run-on effect of the light water moderator designs is worse than the risk of a graphite moderator catching fire”

I can’t make sense of the phrase “run-on effect,” and you certainly haven’t defined it in any intelligible way. I could go on. But reading your comments here, overall it sounds like you’ve picked up some ideas and nomenclature second-hand from the industry and are then extrapolating to look like an expert in order to boost your overall agenda.

Those who oppose the “Black Swan ” argument against nuclear power have the burden of proving that nuclear power risks are tractable and manageable. So far, the record of accidents is full of “unpredictable” conditions: a bad instrument at TMI; an unknown instability at Chernobyl; an improbable chain of equipment failures at Fukushima. This does not include the “near miss” incidents that have not received much publicity.

It is not a reasonable defense to say that every catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant is a freakish event that could never be anticipated. To simply dismiss these disasters as outlying data points, and declare that nuclear power is “safe,” is absurd. If watching three Japanese reactors explode doesn’t alter the assumptions of the nuclear power advocates, we are dealing with ideologues, and not engineers.

How many more “improbable” and “unforeseen” nuclear disasters do we have to endure before the experts are humbled?

@Straightwood: How many people died in the Three Mile Island? As far as I’m aware, it’s zero. The Kemeny Commission claims that there was no elevated cancer risk for the surrounding area, and maximum exposure levels were approximately equivalent to a chest X-Ray exam.

Now, how many people have died in coal mining accidents? A lot. How many people have died from health problems related to burning coal? A lot more. And this is when everything is going well. How much radiation does a large coal burning plant release every year? A lot more than a nuclear plant is allowed to.

Chernobyl is pretty much our worst-case scenario for nuclear power, and as Matt mentioned above, the US exposes itself to several Chernobyls a decade from the effects of coal power plants in terms of numbers of casualties. So I’d be much happier with the casualty rate from nuclear power than the one from coal power.

Put this one down to miscommunication/misunderstanding.

No, put it down to deliberate suppression of unpleasant information by the industry. Until Fukushima blew up, there was no widespread public knowledge that cooling pools for spent fuel required active, electrically powered circulation of cooling water, and, absent this, would turn into dirty bombs within a few days. The public was encouraged to believe that the spent fuel was just sitting contentedly in large swimming pools. This kind of lying by omission speaks very poorly for the nuclear industry, and justifies intense skepticism regarding its future plans.

Even after these accidents, nuclear energy is still safer than the conventional sorts; that’s just the track record.

You don’t seem to grasp Taleb’s fundamental point, which is that there are crucial qualitative differences of risk associated with different phenomena. Calculating the risk of nuclear plant failure is not a tractable problem. Fukushima just tripled the number of catastrophically failed reactors in a single incident. Who can assure us that this is the last such disaster, or that worse failures will not follow?

Prior to the Wall Street meltdown, CDOs and other derivatives had an excellent “track record,” but their risk and instability were not understood. Despite numerous calls for caution, the “experts” declared these instruments to be safe. Taleb berates the arrogance of experts who repeatedly claim that they have statistical confidence in the incidence of phenomena that do not follow the declared statistical behavior. But the gullibility of the public succumbs to the experts every time.

Like I said, if that’s going to be your justification, then you need to prove to me that the continued emission of greenhouse gases won’t raise average temperatures by 50 degrees C or more.

The case for AGW is based on scientific models. The warming theory deniers do attempt to undermine the models, but so far, the predictive models are holding up. The “improbable” failures of TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are associated with known design flaws present in multiple operational reactors. These factors, and the associated incidents are not anomalies; they are evidence of a fundamental failure to measure risk properly. There have been no comparable events challenging AGW modelling.

The question nuclear power advocates must answer is how many disasters are they prepared to dismiss as irrelevant to their “safety” calculations?

Well, this has been interesting and even informative. I think that PHB, on the whole, nails it best @ #74: “I do believe that it is possible to have safe nuclear power. What I have no confidence in is the people running the industry. They have been lying about the safety of their plants for decades and the proof of that fact is seen in Japan.”
Those of you who seem most annoyed by him and insistent that the main alternative, fossil fuels, are proven far more dangerous (a point I agree with) strike me as far to ready to dismiss that point and far too ready to downplay renewable alternatives and conservation. None of which, by the way, have ever received anywhere near the subsidies and leeway that the nuclear industry has.

I’m very impressed that Scent of Violets has for some decades been more cognizant of design flaws, and comfortable with them, than probably 99% of the population.

The political reality is that it is far more likely that you can convince an agnostic like myself, or an outright opponent, that it is in our best interests to build nuclear (while investing at the same time in the previously mentioned alternatives) than it will be to convince Republicans and industry to actually fund the robust safe designs. And unless that happens, John Quiggens contention is probably correct.

Landru, PHB: at the risk of pointing out the obvious, a mutual appeal-to-one’s-own-authority argument between two pseudonymous internet personas (or even one, frankly), while hilarious, is not very elucidating. If you’re going to play my-degree-is-bigger-than-yours, then put ’em on the table: dissertation and publication citations, please.

While all the arguing about Uranium based nuclear power is fun and all, if there is a future of nuclear power, it is using Thorium as Landru pointed out at comment 4. Easier processing (with rare earth metals thrown on for good measure), spent fuel no worse than coal fly ash within a few hundred years, no possibility of a meltdown, no bomb material produced in the fuel cycle, can burn spent fuel from Uranium reactors, enough Thorium on Earth for 10,00 years of energy at the current world usage levels.

It’s not fair when you’re all in a different timezone :-P

PHB@1

The US is currently planning to spend over a trillion dollars purchasing and flying a new fighter jet that will contribute exactly nothing to the US economy.

This is the most sensible thing you’ve written in the entire thread and fits neatly into my cynical world view as regards our ability to deal with the energy/climate issue in a timely fashion.
(oh, we Aussies have bought that white elephant too – and we paid $750m-ish up front if I recall correctly)
I’m fairly certain that we can’t look to our “great and powerful friend” for the solutions.

gordon@9

There is a legal guarantee that no civil nuclear materials will be diverted for military purposes.

Proliferation is one of the most valid arguments against the “traditional” nuclear fuel cycle.
As I mentioned, I’m an Aussie, so knowing that most of our bigger neighbours are potentially (if not actually) nuclear armed is a worry.

Tim@11

It’s not even really true that we must spend more on R&D. There’s no problem at all in getting VC funds […] Holding off only a few years drastically reduces the price of an installation).

You make a valid argument, but have you tried raising a couple of hundred million lately?

Several reasonable (and well VC’ed) efforts here to get up a 100MW-ish solar plant have failed, and the ROI numbers have not been awful.

The problem is that it is still far cheaper (…) to dig coal out of the ground and burn it and pretty much all you need to do is get environmental approval for the hole in the ground and the scrubbers in the stack…

Lemuel Pitkin@29

Given that most rich countries now are faced with large output gaps and high unemployment […] this counts as an argument for renewables, not against.

I do see your point but I’m not sure that argument totally holds water in the Australian context.

Also:
– installing PVs is not a low skilled or safe (in OH&S sense) job – it requires and electrical trades person almost everywhere I suspect; google for “australian insulation debacle” for where I’m coming from on this.
– we have pretty close to zero domestic production capacity for PV cells (so huge balance of trade issues); how about your country?

chris@34
In my state alone (Victoria) there is currently six coal power plants generating 6500 MW; a back of the envelope calculation for replacing that with my favourite flavour of solar (solar thermal, like in Spain) that would require about 80 square kilometres (ie: 0.03% of the state) and about $3500 million…
Dumb stainless steel pipes, shiny bits of metal, steam…not unreasonable at all even if you triple or quadruple all of that for land barons, political favours, cost overruns, contractor corruption etc.
I have not a clue as to what replacement nuclear plants would cost… It would be interesting but I guess it’s highly technology dependant.

PHB@80

It is pretty clear to me that LEDs could be used to make much more attractive lighting fixtures than are available on the market today. The key in my view is to stop thinking about them as ‘bulbs’ and instead think about them as being a part of the fixture itself.

It’s not that this is a bad idea in itself, it’s just that it doesn’t get us anywhere – the average house uses far more energy for refrigeration, cooking, climate control etc.

I’m all for energy efficiency, I wish that the building standards everywhere would change immediately to require this, and that all the appliance standards would change etc etc.
Short of a eco-fascist revolutionary government it’s never going to happen in a timely enough fashion.

The US Govt established a research cohort after TMI, of all residents (including pregnant women) within 5 miles of the reactor when it melted down. They have been doing follow-up studies ever since, showing no change in rates of stillbirth (1983) and no difference in all-cause or cancer-specific mortality (last study about 203).

Various studies have been conducted in Europe, not just the WHO, and the consensus among the experts appears to be that Chernobyl had no long-term health effects except for (preventable) thyroid cancer in children, and solid cancer in the so-called “liquidators.” I think the WHO report mentioned upthread was quite controversial, and even Greenpeace have had difficulty finding any serious health consequences.

I’m returning to Tokyo on Sunday. I’m quite scared about being crushed in a massive earthquake. I’m not so worried about a meltdown.

Would cooling pools be acceptable if they could prevent disaster with circulating power cut off for a week? a month? a year?

This is an irrelevant argument from extremes. The facts of the Fukushima disaster reveal that the cooling pools were badly situated and thus were damaged and rendered inaccessible. Cooling them is now a very big problem. The design decisions that led to this outcome were not “accidents.” They were made by large, well-funded, and highly respected institutions. These are the institutions that continue to assert that nuclear power is a safe and reliable technology.

Nuclear power advocates tend to treat each inconvenient fact as a singularly rare flaw in an otherwise excellent scheme, but the flaws are numerous and disturbing in their variety and ubiquity. At Fukushima, the flaws included:

– Insufficient battery backup power
– Inadequately protected emergency generators
– Lack of spare generators
– Location of the spent fuel pools within the reactor building
– No provision for hydrogen venting in the reactor building
– No hardened, redundant instrumentation and control facilities
– No emergency reservoir of treated cooling water
– No shielded emergency equipment (robotic?) for evaluation and repair
>
Thus the argument that every reasonable engineering precaution was taken is false. And this failure of design foresight is widespread in the nuclear power industry. As a species, we are very good at pocketing the cash and letting the future take care of itself. Apart from its technical shortcomings, nuclear power is a bad match for human organizational frailty.

PHB, I’ve lived in 4 or 5 houses in Japan and visited my friends’ and colleagues, and I have a good sense of how Japanese people live, and I can assure you that a house with 24 40w bulbs in the dining room is a very rare phenomenon here. They universally use a three-level single fluorescent ring-style lamp in every room. Japanese have very low electricity usage rated by GDP.

The big savings in energy in Japan would come from turning off the heating and aircon; sadly, given the earthquake situation and the low rents people pay here, the majority of housing is prefab-style apartments (aparto) that require heating and cooling equipment to be livable. But since a large proportion of Japanese energy comes from nuclear they don’t need to care.

You may have asked yourself why those Japanese houses floated on the tsunami waves – they’re designed to be cheap, prefab houses that go up easily and don’t kill you in an earthquake. But they require a lot of heating and cooling. Just like the paper houses of legend… so cutting down on already very efficient light bulbs is not the answer.

@SG 118

Interesting, I guess that the bulk of their electrification was taking place somewhat later than in the US and so the incandescent bulb did not achieve the same status as the preferred quality of light.

They may be able to shave a few percent off consumption through measures like lights that turn out automatically in offices though.

Lightweight construction need not be energy inefficient.

Like I said, if that’s going to be your justification, then you need to prove to me that the continued emission of greenhouse gases won’t raise average temperatures by 50 degrees C or more.

The case for AGW is based on scientific models. The warming theory deniers do attempt to undermine the models, but so far, the predictive models are holding up.

I have no idea what you’re on about with this one. I’m agreeing that CO2 emissions will raise temperatures. But not by five or even ten degrees. By fifty. That’s the black swan I’m talking about. And as you well know, the models are not all that accurate. In fact, time and again we’re treated to news releases about, say, glaciers retreating faster than anticipated.

So this mirrors your black swan claims about nuclear power, and the burden of proof is on you to show why this couldn’t happen, or why we shouldn’t stop burning fossil fuels today.

And I must say, it’s been pointed out to you several times the fallacy in your application of this idea – once you admit this possibility into the discussion, you’ve got to be consistent and apply it to all other situations as well.

As I said, Pascal’s Wager in disguise.

I’m very impressed that Scent of Violets has for some decades been more cognizant of design flaws, and comfortable with them, than probably 99% of the population.

Really? Can you point to where I said that? In fact, the claim by Straightwood was that:

. . .put it down to deliberate suppression of unpleasant information by the industry. Until Fukushima blew up, there was no widespread public knowledge that cooling pools for spent fuel required active, electrically powered circulation of cooling water . . .

Really? I repeat, I knew about cooling pools for storing hot waste in middle school, just as knew that hot waste can get very, very hot indeed. And as I pointed out, that information was not suppressed, but readily available and in public libraries. So if twelve-year-olds can find this out using non-electronic media forty-odd years ago, I don’t think that the industry has been too successful at “deliberately suppressing” this information.

I don’t think that the industry has been too successful at “deliberately suppressing” this information.

What fraction of the population do you believe was aware, prior to the Fukushima incident, that a nuclear plant would melt down if it suffered a sustained loss of electrical power? Regarding suppressed information, perhaps you should read the news headlines:

Nuclear Crisis in Japan Follows Decades of Faked Safety Reports, Accidents

PHB & Straightwood,

I must confess that all this talk of black swans breeding with thorium in fields of flaming graphite has me a bit confused. I get that the nuclear power industry are engaged in “deliberate suppression of unpleasant information” who have deceived the citizens of the world of the true dangers of nuclear power (#100). Also the engineering designs of the plants in Japan neglected to consider the impact of a 9.0 M earthquake followed by a 30m tsunami—a fact that is obvious from the pictures on the front page of today’s LA Times. And as you pointed out previously, the “explosion of a single reactor near a densely populated Chinese city” would cause significant loss-of-life (#75). I’m not entirely sure how a reactor melt down is going to kill everyone in the city—but I’ll skip over that for the moment since that’s a black swan and all.

So, could you please explain to me—in simple terms—what the alternative to nuclear power is? Because for all the problems and deceit that seems to come from the nuclear industry, I’m having a hard time understand how this is worse than the damage that is caused anthropogenic climate change. I don’t see how renewable energy is going to solve the issue of power generation in the near term given the baseline requirements of an industrialized country, and while conservation is certainly possible, getting ride of nuclear power and fossil fuel power production would eliminate about 65% of the US electrical generating capacity.

@129 a nearly-religious devotion to the notion that death by radiation is qualitatively, immeasurably worse than death from other causes.

I don’t have a strong opinion on this, but I don’t think this is a fair representation of the position in question.

Try this: sure, coal-burning is a terrible thing, but at least it doesn’t involve a frigging nuclear reaction. If skipping this phase is at all possible, this possibility certainly needs to be considered; why not?

But why are the economics of nuclear so bad? In part, it is simply a matter of technology. Nuclear power has turned out to be more expensive than its advocates have expected, while alternative sources of energy, particularly gas, have become cheaper.

Perhaps that should be amended to “Why are the economics of nuclear so bad in the U.S.?”

But the crucial problem for nuclear power has been fear. Fears about safety have meant that nuclear power plants have been held to much higher safety standards than alternatives like coal, which routinely spew pollutants of all kinds into the atmosphere.

Hopefully this latest incident will put to bed once and for all the myth that nuclear power hasn’t been more heavily adopted in the U.S. because of those anti-tech, granola-crunching, hippie Greenpeace types who hate Progress and Capitalism (yeah, right. Just like we’ve finally managed to discredit that tired old theory that lowering taxes actually increase revenue.)

Good post, John. I would just like to take up the points above to suggest that the implication is that more authoritarian regimes, like the PRC, are as a consequence going to be the leaders in implementing new nuclear technology for some time to come. As you suggest, gas is the most likely go-to source of base load electricity for the developed world, for the short term at any rate.

Exactly. At the end of the day, we don’t have more nuclear penetration into the market (imho) because the Big Boys don’t want to leave off until the last drop of rent can be extracted from the last few liters of fossil fuels.

Bear in mind also that the cycle of design, test, and iterate seems to be broken with regards to this technology. It’s as if people were still driving Ford’s original Model T up into the 60’s and complaining how unsafe, shoddy, and dangerous they are. Iow, we should be about five or six iterations into the design of nuclear plants by now, instead of model 2.4. The thorium cycle, breeder reactors, pebble-bed reactors (first conceived in the 1940’s!), traveling-wave reactors, all of these could have been extensively researched and developed since at least as far back as, oh, 1980 or thereabouts. This hasn’t happened – again imho – because there are certain powerful agents who are heavily invested in more conventional energy technologies. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they excuse their foot-dragging on the grounds that nobody is going to be left high and dry when fossil fuels run low; obviously, nuclear power will be there to take up the slack.

Try this: sure, coal-burning is a terrible thing, but at least it doesn’t involve a frigging nuclear reaction.

Why is a nuclear reaction worse than an oxidation-reduction reaction? Shouldn’t reactions be judged by their outcomes and dangers, not by what kind of process is involved?

Heck, solar energy *does* involve a frigging nuclear reaction, it’s just taking place at a convenient distance rather than in our back yards. Is that a reason to judge it more harshly?

@SG

I doubt that reducing consumption in heavy industry can help much because that tends to already be timed to use off peak. At the very least they will be on a scheme that means they are shut down at times of peak demand. The chlorine cells I once worked on did not run at all during the day but the ramped up to full production the minute the economy-7 tariff kicked in.

@ biannca

The point I was making was that the special pleading made by the US nuclear power industry to explain Chernobyl is rather different to the special pleading made by the UK nuclear power industry. The conclusion I draw is that we should probably trust neither.

@ Chris

What is clear now is that the nuclear industry is dead. There will be no new nuclear plants built of any design for another decade. Even China is having second thoughts about their program.

The only short term alternative is conservation. The best medium term option looks like wind. It is possible that we can also tap solar and wave as the existing nuclear plants are decommissioned.

These plans typically assume a big (ie historically unprecedented) effort at increased efficiency/conservation (depending if you’re red/blue), and big whallops of solar and wind; but the backbone is usually biomass (technically a low-maintenance, self-assembling kind of solar power, if you like). My technical opinion, after having read a few, is that these kinds of plans seriously low-ball the cost of the conversion, and also overestimate the efficiency of the biomass source.

The biomass seems to be a perennial favorite. I’ve seen schemes for unzipping polysaccharides, converting mid-ocean biomass into methyl (not ethyl!) alcohol, etc. The thing is, they always look good on paper, initial trial solutions seem to work well in the lab . . . and then the snags crop up. As always, it’s not the concept that’s off per se, it’s running the numbers in the real world. Anybody remember when thermal depolymerization was all the rage? The next big thing, turning bio waste like turkey guts into sweet, sweet oil? It’s a good idea in concept – if mother nature can turn dead things into oil over the course of millions of years, why can’t this be done artificially, and telescoped into mere hours or days?

Well, as it turns out, you can.

And, as usual, that promising bit of tech has run into a thicket of numbers. Sure hope it finally pans out :-(

This, then, is the bottom line: a non-(nuclear+fossil) future may be possible, but given current technology it is likely to be vastly more expensive than the non-fossil future powered mainly by nuclear. Are you willing to take the non-nuclear route, if it costs an extra 10% of GDP compared to just the switch to nuclear? What if it were 20% or 40% of GDP? This gets us back to the question of, what kinds of risks are worth what kind of investment to avoid or mitigate? And here I have to say (echoing many others) that the anti-nuclear side doesn’t usually shine in this kind of discussion, but rather shows a nearly-religious devotion to the notion that death by radiation is qualitatively, immeasurably worse than death from other causes.

Exactly. I’m not a huge fan of nuclear energy – nor, for that matter, are large numbers of knowledgeable people pressing for it’s widespread adoption. It’s just that as a numbers sort of thing, it happens to be the least bad alternative (sort of like voting against the worst Presidential candidate du jour.)

Of course, current technology can always change. Secretary Chu seems to be placing his bets on some kind of breakthrough solar power, particularly chemical ie artificial plants. And he has a Nobel prize and I don’t, so who am I to argue?

Hmmm . . . maybe solar cells that come out of a spray can with a hip name like “Black Power” and having no more than 3% overall efficiency but fantastically cheap to apply. Along with room-temperature superconductors and batteries with the energy density (by volume if not mass) of good old grade-A gasoline that don’t rely on exotic metals and cost no more than a few hundred bucks. None of which are forbidden by the laws of physics, or even chemistry.

A man can dream, to quote the inventor of the fing-longer :-)

Henri asks: Really, splitting the atom is nothing special these days, no different than making a campfire? I guess I must be too old, then.

Well, splitting atoms is hardly cutting edge. Seen from CERN levels of particle physics, nuclear and chemical reactions are almost brothers. And the chain reaction of u235 requires little more than a bunch of uranium, a moderator and some controlling neutron absorbers to work. Think about Fermi, who built the first reactor pile on a shoestring budget just a few years after the possibility was discovered at all.

Nuclear plants are hardly complicated industrial installations , and most of their complexity is in fact in the non-nuclear systems. The main thing is that fission products are by their nature heavily carcinogenic, making fission the mother of all health and safety issues. But that doesn’t make nuclear reactions particularly special.

If you’re an interested amateur with two right hands and some understanding of electrics, the internet will give you plans to build a small fusion reactor at home for some thousands of dollars (that consumes power, not a net producer, sadly). There is a devoted community to help you.

Zamfir – true up to a point, but waste and decommissioning are less in that category and more just about actuaries agreeing with various posters who note that humans are bad at long term vigilance and care…

humans are bad at long term vigilance and care…

But we are good at denial and deception, so government and industry tell us that they will design, construct, and operate nuclear plants responsibly. Well-paid consultants, lobbyists, and politicians persuade the gullible public that this is so, and then KA-BOOM! Who could have foreseen the problem? Nuclear power technology and Homo Sapiens are a bad combination.

Really, splitting the atom is nothing special these days, no different than making a campfire? I guess I must be too old, then.

Well, once the novelty wore off, the short answer is, well no, splitting the atom isn’t considered all that special these days. In fact, billions of years ago, natural reactors were assembled and run without intelligent guidance for many tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of years without suffering meltdowns. Have you ever heard of Oklo?

The world isn’t going to go back on this whole wealth thing; we need realistic energy generation.

As long as the wealth thing is coupled to the growth thing, the world is going to have to go back. The resources are finite and the growth appetite is insatiable. In a struggle between politics and physics, physics wins. World population, and population growth will either be managed down, with a moderate amount of suffering, or face collapse, with catastrophic suffering.

Carcinogens are a part of it, but surely there’s more to the story? Or am I being a reactionary here?

Nuclear is scary because it acts invisibly. It can come from the thin air. That’s the scary part.

It also seems unnatural. Fire occurs in nature; beavers build damns, but noticeable fission on the surface of the earth generally requires very deliberate human action. Humans simply have not had the long time to adapt, culturally, socially, biologically, to it. Fission, to us, is as alien and frightening as iron swords and firearms must have been to the Incas, or perhaps indeed the Maxim gun to the peoples of Africa.

If one considers every component, coupling, connection, and weld in a nuclear plant as an opportunity for negligence, cost shaving, omission, and error, how many components and steps are likely to be deficient, given what we know about human nature and organizational weaknesses?

Now add to the likely facility flaws the possibilities for operator error, terrorist sabotage, and natural disaster and you have a very expensive time bomb, with an indeterminate fuse setting. This is not a “safe” technology. Once the fuel starts to melt, there is no way to reverse the damage; it can only be contained at horrendous cost in money and lives.

Other than fission giving you the creeps, is there a reason to hold it at such a vastly higher standard than the relevant alternatives?

Because the alternatives have been around for a long time, the dangers are known, and, as you noticed, predictable. Not so with fission; you don’t quite know what to expect, when, under what circumstances.

Now, if expanding, turning nuclear into the main source of power is unavoidable – that’s one thing, but if it’s just a temporary phase between the current situation and the renewables becoming, perhaps only a few decades from now, the main source of energy – then perhaps this dangerous and painful trial-and-error experience can be skipped altogether?

First, I apologize for entering this discussion so late. I hope that the comments I can offer are of utility to the group. First, some general comments:

1. Despite all the brouhaha, there is a bottom line measurement of the harm inflicted by a nuclear plant on the general public: the total radioactive emissions. This can be a little tricky if you want to be strictly correct. For example, releases of radioiodine might not add up to a lot of curies, but their biological pathways make such releases particularly injurious. In the same way, releases of plutonium, while extremely tiny, are nevertheless significant because they are also extremely dangerous. On the other hand, quite a few releases are of such short half-lives that they pose essentially no threat to the public, even though they might be quite intense at the plant itself.

It is impossible to accurately measure all these different factors simultaneously. However, we have two proxies that give us a reasonably good quick-and-dirty estimate. The first of these is the distinction between gaseous emissions and particulate emissions. The gaseous emissions consist of steam and water droplets that might contain tiny particles. These emissions can carry a good deal of radioactivity, but most of it is of lesser public health significance. The particulate emissions are, in general, much more dangerous. They come from smoke from fires, and they carry all sorts of radionuclides from inside the fuel.

Thus, our first proxy is smoke versus steam. The only smoke emissions we had were from the two fires in the spent fuel pools. These were definitely serious emissions. But the bulk of the emissions were gaseous, of lesser concern. (I remind you that the Chernobyl emissions were almost entirely smoke, which is one reason why they were so catastrophic.) This first proxy, then, nonquantitatively suggests that this accident is much less serious than Chernobyl.

The second proxy is more quantitative: the total amount of radioactivity measured at the gate. This gives us a rough idea of the amount of radioactivity released to the environment. I offer two sources of this measurement:

, and . These are both a few days out of date, but they give us a good starting point. If you carry out an eyeball integration of these graphs, you can get an estimate of the total radioactive emissions; I get about 100 millisieverts over the entire accident. In other words, if you had been camped out at the front gate of the Fukushima plant for the last 9 days, you would have received a total dose of 100 millisieverts, which is enough to increase your chances of getting cancer by about 0.5%. If you scale this down by distance from the reactor and apply it to the surrounding population, you get a total population impact of about 0.01 additional cases of cancer. I know that number seems astoundingly small given the font size of the headlines, but that’s what the numbers say. But surely you will agree that, even if we pad the result by multiplying it by 1,000, we still get only 10 additional cases of cancer.

2. If you run it by the numbers, nuclear advocates should be dancing the streets, shouting to the heavens the ultimate proof of just how safe these machines are. But in politics, perception is reality. The numbers say “triumph” but the headlines said “disaster” — and the headlines always overwhelm the truth. I see the extinction of our civilization in this truth. Our body politic lacks the wisdom to comprehend a complex technical problem and draws a conclusion exactly the opposite of the reality. We see the same thing with the teaching of evolution and climate change denial: a total failure to comprehend complex scientific truth. As science and technology advance, they will impose ever more serious problems such as this, and our response to those problems will fall ever more short of what is appropriate. Ultimately, we will face some scientific/technical problem that we simply cannot cope with intellectually, and it will destroy us.

If I may, I’d like to attempt to address Straightwood’s point in #155 concerning the likelihood of catastrophic failure. There are several approaches. The first is to observe that history provides us with a goodly amount of data regarding the safety performance of Western nuclear power reactors. That historical record is basically perfect: in the four decades since we began operating nuclear power plants, and with hundreds of plants operating all over the world, there has not been a single case of a serious accident harming any significant number of members of the public.

At this point, the reader may question my grip on reality. What about Chernobyl? The “catch” here is that I am excluding the Chernobyl accident because that design is of a completely different type, and it would never have come close to obtaining a license to operate in any western country. By way of example, the crash of a unique homemade aircraft says nothing to the safety of a modern airliner.

Yes, there have been plenty of hair-raising accidents at various military nuclear facilities — but again, military facilities have always been exempt from the licensing requirements of civilian power plants. This truly is an apples and oranges situation.

Of course, a perfect past does not insure a perfect future. How do we know that a nuclear accident will never happen? Obviously, we don’t. Straightwood raises the substantial point that the low probability of a serious nuclear accident could be outweighed by the high damage inflicted by such an accident. However, I think that society has already addressed the issue of low-probability, high-consequence accidents. We accept the existence of nuclear weapons in our midst (well, not New Zealand) even though the accidental detonation of one of these would be truly catastrophic. We build high dams that could kill tens of thousands were they to fail. We operate large jet aircraft that could inflicts thousands of casualties were they to suffer an unlikely accident or be hijacked by terrorists — and we operate a LOT more such aircraft than nuclear power plants!

Moreover, we have high risks embedded in our infrastructure. Were a magnitude 9 earthquake to strike the Los Angeles area, the loss of power, combined with the destruction of freeways, damage to water and gas pipes, collapse of large buildings, and the likelihood of fires raging out of control, could easily result in tens of thousands of casualties. Yet we do not expend the funds required to protect ourselves against such an incident because we judge the cost-benefit ratio to be too high for such an expenditure.

Furthermore, it is necessary to compare total systemic risk, not just exotic accident risk. We know that the probability of a nuclear accident killing, say, ten thousand people, is greater than zero. Let’s just posit that the probability of such an accident is one in a thousand per reactor-year of operation. This seems a ludicrously high value to me, as we have already had more than a thousand reactor-years of experience with no such result, but let’s nevertheless be grandly pessimistic. In such a case, we can quantify the total cost of nuclear reactor operation as 10 deaths per reactor-year of operation. Now contrast that with the supposedly low-risk of operation of a coal-fired power plant. I do not have the numbers at hand, but I vaguely recall seeing one calculation estimating the body count at about 100 per year of operation, largely from emissions that generate cancer, heart disease, and respiratory diseases. Thus, we end up comparing the total casualties per year of operation of both sources of power — and the nuclear result comes out so much lower than the coal-burning result that we must conclude that the safest overall strategy is to replace coal-burners with nuclear plants. Once all the coal-burners have been eliminated, we should talk about replacing the nuclear plants with something safer — if we have such a technology.

I caution readers against the common tendency to place more emphasis on sensational deaths than everyday deaths. Sure, tales of radioactivity insidiously killing innocents are horrific, but the death of a fat middle-aged guy from emphysema deserves just as much of our concern as the death of a fat middle-aged guy from radioactivity-induced cancer.

Straightwood: So, I assume that you also wish to claim that we should immediately stop using oil? We have no idea of the long-term consequences of the Deepwater Horizon spill, and the dispersants used in cleanup. That ecosystem is shockingly modified, with oil showing up all over the place where we did not expect to find it. And these spills happen with a great amount of frequency around the world. Near refineries, chemicals like benzene and hydroflouric acid could, in the instance of an explosion, become large poison gas clouds that would kill hundreds of thousands of people, either immediately or through longer-run cancer risks. Do you have a model for why this is a smaller risk that nuclear power?

Also, note that the majority of nuclear engineering focuses on developing passive safety systems, designed to systematically reduce the dangers related to natural disaster, terrorist attack, or human failure. Modern reactor design (like the Toshiba 4S design, or even Pebble Bed Reactors, or Traveling Wave Reactors), all go a long way to eliminate precisely those things that failed in Japan. Modern reactor design explicitly focuses on worst-case scenarios, and designs around ensuring that things fail in a manageable way with multiple passive safety systems.

Even in a not-so-great reactor design, like what we’re seeing in Japan, we are seeing the consequences of pretty much the worst possible confluence of events: the strongest recorded earthquake in Japan, a series of enormous tsunamis, massive power failures, etc, and it looks like the outcome is still going to be less mortality risk than what a coal plant is expected to do to people in a given year of operation. So again, why should we treat this as a remarkably different sort of thing than any other major industrial facility? Fossil fuels have much much higher expected casualties associated with their use, and in truly awful accidents, there aren’t really different upper bounds (especially in the case of oil). Instead, you’re suggesting that we should prefer a very high rate of unnecessary deaths from fossil fuel use to nuclear, because again, fission gives you the creeps.

Straightwood, Ryan has already nailed down the key points that answer your question, but I’d like to tack on a few extras:

1. We never enjoy omniscience in any political decision we make. Therefore, we rely on our best estimate, recognizing the problems that may arise should we be wrong. We do have some history on which to found such estimates. The Three Mile Island accident showed us how to handle a meltdown accident, and while that accident represents a huge financial cost for the owner, the lessons from TMI will surely be applied at Fukushima. Indeed, we can also apply some of the extensive research that has gone into rad waste disposal.

You argue that there is a qualitative difference between nuclear accidents and other classes of accidents because the nuclear accidents are “open-ended”. I disagree. True, there will be impacts of any serious accident extending over long periods of time, but that doesn’t imply that the costs are incalculable. Remember, the emergency personnel who survived the 9/11 attacks in New York were exposed to some asbestos — we’ll be having respiratory system cancers from that group for decades. Decades later, the shores contaminated by the Exxon Valdez oil spill still show some of the effects — and tar balls still wash up on shore occasionally.

Finally, let’s not forget that your argument is founded on the assumption of a worst-case scenario that has never taken place, is extremely likely to take place, and which will be obviated by the retirement of LWRs in preference to modern designs. Yes, it *could* happen — but are the chances of it happening high enough to require inclusion into our deliberations? After all, we have not taken into account the odds of an asteroid hitting a nuclear power plant. There are lots of extremely low-probability, high-consequence scenarios that are plausible, but of such low probability that I think it safe to dismiss them. The kind of accident you’re talking about falls into that class.

And in this climate, a woman could sue a utility for the inadvertent leakage of a few curies on the grounds that the baby she gave birth to the day after had a cleft palate . . . and win. Remember, it matters not whether real harm has been done; it’s enough that nuclear-powered utilities can be found and held liable for said imaginary harm.

The solution to this is to get rid of torts for compensation and do what they did in New Zealand – replace it with a state-funded no-fault compensation scheme. It’s a natural extension of the welfare state. The Woodhouse Report was a work of brilliance.

Of course, when US Republicans call for tort reform, this probably isn’t what they mean.

People here might be interested in the atmoshpheric analyses published by the university of Karlsruhe over the last days, at http://www.kit.edu . In the wake of Chernobyl, they (as part of a greater European effort) have developed rather detailed models of long term and short term radioactivity spread, to aid decision makers in case of emergencies.

They are publishing projections, based on best estimates of the current situation in Japan made by GRS, the main German nuclear safety organization, coupled with current weather conditions. Their projections seem for now to match recorded values reasonably well.

At the site you will also find a document of a few days ago, called 001 or something like that, in which they consider besides a best estimate also a total meltdown scenario coupled with strong wind directly towards Tokyo.

This (roughly worst case) scenario gives for the next year radiation levels in Tokyo of about 1 mSv in total, or roughly doubling natural background radiation. This increases as you get closer to the site, to about 10 to 100 times natural levels in parts of the evacuated zone.

This was just about the worst possible set of conditions that could be thrown at any nuclear plant—yet its safety systems worked.

No, the safety systems did not work at Fukushima – unless you assume the destruction of four reactors and release of lethal radiation reflects a “working” safety system. Recall that the goal of nuclear plant safety systems is to prevent the release of significant radioactivity into the atmosphere. The Fukushima site is still emitting high levels of radioactive debris, witness the current headline:

Workers flee Japan nuclear plant as smoke rises

That smoke is radioactive, and it poses a potentially lethal threat to workers. If you consider the Fukushima disaster an example of a working safety system, you have a very peculiar notion of what safety means.

However, there is one meter that is very useful in this regard: the gate meter.

I thought there was controversy over whether or not the gate meter adequately measures airborne smoke radiation, can you speak to that? I heard on news-radio something about the potential for currently-unmeasured airborne radiation falling back to ground level in precipitation, but I don’t know enough about the construction of gate meters (or the half-life of the particular radioactive substances being lofted in smoke) to evaluate whether or not this could become a medium- or long-term concern. (And it’s not like this morning’s news radio went into detail.) I’d welcome some insight/evaluation of this.

This was just about the worst possible set of conditions that could be thrown at any nuclear plant—yet its safety systems worked.
Well, no. The safety systems of some of the reactors failed completely, and had to be replaced by jury-rigged backups, like direct injections into the core, venting to the atmosphere and cooling by fire truck spray. That’s why we are looking at the current situation. The reactors 5&6, or at the Daini site are examples of reactors that encountered the tsunami and kept most (or at least enough) functioning safety systems.

All we can say is that jury-rigged measures combined with the remaining strength of the RPV and containment seem to keep releases of radioactive materials limited, at the moment to levels of harm typical of non-nuclear industrial accidents. That’s good, I guess, but hardly “working safety systems”.

@Strigthwood, the smoke appeared not to change radiation levels. http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/21_h30.html

Be careful with American news sources, they seem to have trouble following the Japanese news quickly. When that article you refer to was published, it was already known in Japan for many hours that the smoke had gone without effects, even on English-language news.

I am not sure why that is that case. It might be that when journalists wake up, they just pick a random event from during their own night and write about it as if it just happened.

I’m not a huge fan of nuclear power and would prefer to see it be at most one prong of any comprehensive strategy to transition away from fossil fuels (though I live a couple of miles from a nuke plant and I have to say that really doesn’t keep me awake at night), but it’s worth reiterating that we do have here a true worst-case scenario of an obsolete plant overwhelmed by an off-the-charts catastrophe. And while we’re not out of the woods yet, so far the effect on public health seems likely to be well within the range of what coal power does routinely, without even taking climate change into account. If that results in torpedoing the nuclear power industry, that will be an emotional response and not a rational one.

@173

The Black Swan analysis is applicable to nuclear power because it concerns low probability events of potentially very high impact that do not follow normal prediction models. Air traffic accidents are low probability, known impact events that do follow normal prediction models. That is why full insurance is available to all parties in air travel and it is not similarly available for nuclear power. In most of the world, governments limit the losses borne by nuclear plant operators because private insurers won’t cover all risks.

Black Swans are extremely annoying to experts of all sorts, and that is why Taleb’s book is so important. It describes a deliberate blindness to such events that clearly fits the nuclear power industry. The representation of AGW as a black swan seems quite muddled to me, since the theory is based on extrapolation of known historical correlations using sound models.

@Steve Labonne, the “nearly obsolete” will be thrown around a lot, but I wouldn’t put too much faith in it. Similar design in the US have been getting 20 years’ life extension. I have understood from people in the know that the US have made far more upgrades than the Japanese, but it is still the same base design.

The higher amount of upgrades in the US should not be surprising: US operators cannot realistically expect to build new plants, so life-time extensions are critical for them. Japanese operators could build newer plants, so their money went to newer plants with not too much left for the oldies.

@SoV, please leave the guy alone, as a favour? You guys disagree, and nothing is going to change that.

Straightwood writes: Your pronouncement on the public health impact of the Fukushima accident is premature and ill-founded. What is the level of impact on the general public that would cause you to change your views on the safety of nuclear power generation?

No, it is not premature; it is a first estimate. Yes, it is imperfect, but it is unlikely that this first estimate is wildly off-base. Nor is it ill-founded; it is data, whose interpretation requires some care, but the foundation is solid. The complexities lie in the interpretation, not the data.

As to the level of impact required for me to change my views on nuclear power, I just follow the numbers. Right now, the numbers say “impact = 0.01 deaths”, which I consider to be very small. If the numbers end up saying “impact = 10,000 deaths”, then I would consider that to be a very large impact. The interpretation of any number is best made on a relative basis: comparing it with other safety numbers.

Zamfir writes in #172: The safety systems of some of the reactors failed completely, and had to be replaced by jury-rigged backups, like direct injections into the core, venting to the atmosphere and cooling by fire truck spray.

I think that you’re using a narrow definition of “safety system”. The overall safety strategy with reactors is not to achieve perfection, but to buy time so that other measures can be brought to bear as necessary. For example, the backup generators (which failed due to the tsunami) are not intended to provide power forever; it’s acknowledged that they’ll run out of fuel eventually. Similarly, the backup batteries are not intended to permit indefinite operation of the plant; their purpose is to provide some control for a period of 8 hours, which again provides time for other corrective measures to be applied. You can be quite certain that none of the measures taken, such as using fire trucks, was cooked up then and there; reactor safety measures are the subject of voluminous literature and, although I haven’t seen the literature on the use of fire trucks, I’m sure that the idea has been around for years. (There have been a lot of really weird ideas suggested over the years). Thus, the overall safety system consists of a great deal of stuff that isn’t actually on site during normal operations.

If you treat all those prefigured contingency schemes as part of the overall safety system, and you look at the bottom line (no dangerous amounts of radioactivity released to the environment), then you must come to the conclusion that the safety systems worked. We can get into semantic quibbles about whether a fire truck constitutes part of the safety system, but the bottom line remains the same: no dangerous amounts of radioactivity were released to the environment.

In #175, you mention that NISA has published some on-site air sample measurements — thanks! I’ll go look them up right now!

Straightwood in #176 writes: The representation of AGW as a black swan seems quite muddled to me, since the theory is based on extrapolation of known historical correlations using sound models.

The analysis of nuclear safety issues is also “based on extrapolation of known historical correlations using sound models.” Indeed, the reactor safety analyses are based on *more* historical data, *better* correlations, and *sounder* models. It is nonsensical to reject the nuclear safety calculations while embracing the climate change calculations.

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge an important point here: we really should not continue to build reactors using these ancient designs. We can do so much better with the newer designs. Thus, for policymaking purposes, we need to be arguing over the newer designs. I don’t think we have enough data yet to properly evaluate the new non-LWR designs, but the small modular LWRs just about to ship look very promising to me.

@177

Answer the damn question, and quit ducking.

Discussions like this are not games of postal chess. It is not evasiveness to be unable to locate what is asserted to be a crisply defined question upstream in a long discussion thread. Please clearly state this pressing question so that I may answer it properly.

Divert to the R&D. If you decide today to build 5000 new nuclear stations by 2050, chances are you’re not going to spend much on better PVs, batteries, etc. Opportunity cost, and all that.

Since you are fond of the air travel risk analogy, I should point out that before the Hindenberg blew up, there was a solid six-year record of reliable long-distance Zeppelin passenger service. Had you been commenting at the time, I am sure that you would have defended the reliability of Zeppelin technology.

I’m morally certain that before posting this, Straightwood didn’t bother to calculate the actual fatalities per passenger-mile of the history of zeppelin travel, including Hindenberg… anybody know where there is enough data to do so? I’m just curious how it would, in fact, stack up to other transportation modalities, such as contemporary heavier-than-air, modern heavier-than-air, rail (contemporary or modern) or motorized ground.

I’d be shocked if it didn’t at least beat motorized ground, although you could argue that the horde of amateur drivers is largely responsible for the horrible safety record of our most common mode of transportation.

And this expansion of Straightwood’s example illustrates (again) the point that several other people have been trying to pin him (?) down on — whether or not the dangers of one energy source have to be evaluated in comparison to the dangers of other energy sources rather than in a vacuum.

Nuclear power technology and Homo Sapiens are a bad combination.

Also space shuttles, titanic ships of dubious iceberg-proof-ness, motorized ground vehicles, drugs intended to do whatever the heck thalidomide was intended to do… oh yeah, and releasing combustion products by the gigaton into the atmosphere.

Suddenly I’m having a vision of a distant ancestor of Straightwood’s claiming that this newfangled “fire” technology is unsafe for human use — after all, someone might carelessly leave an unsupervised fire burning somewhere and BURN US ALL. Of course, many people throughout history have indeed been burned by fire, and some even died of it. But does that prove that the adoption of fire (novel and frightening though it must have seemed at the time, to people not yet accustomed to it) was a net negative for our species? Even accounting for the possibility of catastrophic AGW (which is, after all, caused by an offshoot of fire technology), I think that would be a hard argument to make.

Suddenly I’m having a vision of a distant ancestor of Straightwood’s claiming that this newfangled “fire” technology is unsafe for human use

You will be pleased to know that I am not opposed to the use of fire for most purposes. You will be less pleased to know that the events at Fukushima have persuaded the German government to confirm the national policy of decomissioning all of their nuclear plants after their operational lifetime has ended. Evidently the temperamental and irrational Germans do not share your confidence in nuclear power technology.

Steve asks in #189: Could you ask him why the number of new installations of wind power facilities in the US has fallen off a cliff?

I think I can hazard a pretty good guess: the economic problems of the last 30 months. Investment capital dried up overnight, and that dramatically changed the ROI calculations. Low interest rates are good for renewables, and high interest rates are bad for them.

@SoV, please leave the guy alone, as a favour? You guys disagree, and nothing is going to change that.

I call bull-crap. And you know damn well it’s not his anti-nuke posturing that I’m objecting to.

Low interest rates are good for renewables, and high interest rates are bad for them.

Then what are zero interest rates? Either you wrote this sentence backwards or your explanation doesn’t explain what it’s supposed to.

The uncertainties of climate change predictions don’t seem terribly relevant, though. I don’t think anyone here argues for fossil fuels; the disagreement is about the nuclear power: would you like to see 10 times the number of nuclear power stations a few decades from now, or would you rather invest all that cash into alternatives: solar, wind, etc? That’s the issue.

They’re not relevant if you’re unwilling to apply black swan scenarios to the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

And that’s being inconsistent ;-)

In fact, worst-case scenarios have us over the edge already and even if all burning of fossil fuels were to cease today, you’d still end up with the tropics at or over 100 degrees C (i.e., the oceans boil.)

And you’re worried about a horribly bad accident with nuclear power that only kills 100 million people?

So yes, the burning of fossil fuels is terribly, terribly relevant in this case.

Discussions like this are not games of postal chess. It is not evasiveness to be unable to locate what is asserted to be a crisply defined question upstream in a long discussion thread. Please clearly state this pressing question so that I may answer it properly.

Really? You mean this question and it’s variants:

I have no idea what you’re on about with this one. I’m agreeing that CO2 emissions will raise temperatures. But not by five or even ten degrees. By fifty. That’s the black swan I’m talking about. And as you well know, the models are not all that accurate. In fact, time and again we’re treated to news releases about, say, glaciers retreating faster than anticipated.

So this mirrors your black swan claims about nuclear power, and the burden of proof is on you to show why this couldn’t happen, or why we shouldn’t stop burning fossil fuels today.

Do you want me to quote the other places where you’ve been asked? Or is this enough to refute your silly “you never told me what you wanted” whine?

Now, would you at long, weary last, stop ducking and answer the damn question.

And no, contrary to your research free assertion, AGW modeling is on far shakier ground than the modeling of nuclear accidents, and no, the worst-case scenario of AGW is far worse than a worst case nuclear accident scenario.

Now tell me why we shouldn’t – by your own criteria of black swans – stop burning all fossil fuels immediately. Like, in the next five minutes.

Let me make my point yet again about Straightwood’s style of arguing:

Since you are fond of the air travel risk analogy, I should point out that before the Hindenberg blew up, there was a solid six-year record of reliable long-distance Zeppelin passenger service. Had you been commenting at the time, I am sure that you would have defended the reliability of Zeppelin technology.

I’m morally certain that before posting this, Straightwood didn’t bother to calculate the actual fatalities per passenger-mile of the history of zeppelin travel, including Hindenberg… anybody know where there is enough data to do so?

I don’t know where you’d find the detailed numbers, but even a cursory search would show that zeppelins were considered extremely dangerous. In fact:

Eckener intended to supplement the successful craft by another, similar Zeppelin, projected as LZ 128. However the disastrous accident of the British passenger airship R101 on 5 October 1930 led the Zeppelin company to reconsider the safety of hydrogen-filled vessels, and the design was abandoned in favour of a new project. LZ 129 would advance Zeppelin technology considerably, and was intended to be filled with inert helium.

And why was hydrogen still used after it’s dangers were widely recognized?

On 4 March 1936, LZ 129 Hindenburg (named after former President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg by Eckener) made her first flight. The Hindenburg was the largest airship ever built. However, in the new political situation, Eckener had not obtained the helium to inflate it due to a military embargo; only the United States possessed the rare gas in usable quantities. So, in what ultimately proved a fatal decision, the Hindenburg was filled with flammable hydrogen. Apart from the propaganda missions, LZ 129 began to serve the transatlantic lines together with Graf Zeppelin.

Iow, no one was going around talking about completely unanticipated failure modes, contrary to what Straightwood tried to imply he had actually researched.

Two black swans do not make a white one. Thus I don’t see how stopping construction of unsafe nuclear plans precipitates destruction of life through global warming. Reduction of demand, accelerated development of renewables, and – in extremis – atmospheric modification to mitigate greenhouse effects are all available options for controlling AGW.

You. Are. Not. Answering. The. Question.

It could be that we pass the threshold of greenhouse emissions for boiling the equatorial regions in the next six months. So why shouldn’t we stop burning all fossil fuels now, based upon your black swanning?

This isn’t a difficult question, nor do I think that I or any of a number of others who have asked you similar questions have been that unclear on what we were asking for.

Hey, you want to be anti-nuke has a matter of gut feeling and in the absence of data, that’s fine. We can, as Zamfir as suggested, agree to disagree. But don’t even pretend that your reasons and mine fall into the same category – that, as it were – experts disagree on the shape of the Earth. I’ve got facts, data, logic. You’ve got your gut. They are not remotely equivalent . . . and to pretend that they are is insulting to boot.

Now, would you at long, weary last, stop ducking and answer the damn question.

Crikey. Is that an ultimatum?

If I’ve understood things correctly, you’re demanding that Straightwood, who by his (or her?) own admission is risk averse with respect to nuclear, must confront this other, terrible, terrible risk that the oceans might boil because of global warming. Because if Straightwood is against nuclear then he or she must be head in the sand with respect to global warming. That logically follows from being anti-nuclear, right?

Unless you mean that the “or else” stick is the fact that he will lose all credibility with me and that I will regard him as someone whose opinion is negligible.

This could be the new mouseover text somewhere.

Seriously, I think perhaps you need to self-administer an ego check. If you mean to help the cause of nuclear power generation, it’ll take something other than this.

Seriously, I think perhaps you need to self-administer an ego check. If you mean to help the cause of nuclear power generation, it’ll take something other than this.

What part of So unless you really care that much what I think, no, it’s not an ultimatum. don’t you get?

Now tell me why we shouldn’t – by your own criteria of black swans – stop burning all fossil fuels immediately. Like, in the next five minutes.

The implicit assertion is that the only way to avoid the unknown risk of AGW apocalypse is to build nuclear power plants. This is not provable, since the substitution ratio of nuclear to conventional plant construction is unknown and the contribution of warming sources from other causes might overcome reductions from a total switch to nuclear power.

Is English a second language with you, or are you just looking for the tiniest fig leaf of deniability when it comes to pointing out you’re ducking.

For the record, I will now explicitly say that I am not suggesting that the only alternative to not burning fossil fuels is to go nuclear. I am only concerned with the consistency of your argument wrt black swans.

As are a good many other people, it seems.

Now will you answer the question? Or are you going to come up with another way to duck?

Frankly dude, I think most people know what you’re on about with this one and have similarly dim views of this type of behaviour. I’m just the one who’s willing to say it out loud.

Oops:

Now tell me why we shouldn’t – by your own criteria of black swans – stop burning all fossil fuels immediately. Like, in the next five minutes.

The implicit assertion is that the only way to avoid the unknown risk of AGW apocalypse is to build nuclear power plants. This is not provable, since the substitution ratio of nuclear to conventional plant construction is unknown and the contribution of warming sources from other causes might overcome reductions from a total switch to nuclear power.

Is English a second language with you, or are you just looking for the tiniest fig leaf of deniability when it comes to pointing out you’re ducking.

For the record, I will now explicitly say that I am not suggesting that the only alternative to not burning fossil fuels is to go nuclear. I am only concerned with the consistency of your argument wrt black swans.

As are a good many other people, it seems.

Now will you answer the question? Or are you going to come up with another way to duck?

Frankly dude, I think most people know what you’re on about with this one and have similarly dim views of this type of behaviour. I’m just the one who’s willing to say it out loud.

The implicit assertion is that the only way to avoid the unknown risk of AGW apocalypse is to build nuclear power plants.

No, it’s not. Let’s assume that we shut down all nuclear power plants tomorrow and never build another. There’s a small chance that burning fossil fuels could put us over the edge into a positive feedback loop for runaway climate change and kill everyone on the planet. We’re confident that it’s a very small chance, but it’s certainly non-zero. What’s the argument for continuing to burn fossil fuels instead of falling back on solar, hydro, wind, and other renewables, and reducing our energy consumption to what we can provide using those power sources?

Is the argument that when you look at plausible guesses for the likelihood of catastrophic climate change and the benefits we get from burning fossil fuels today, that taking the risk seems worthwhile? That you can’t make decisions based on the absolute worst case and at some point have to take the best numbers you have, apply some correction for unknowns, and make a decision? How do you reconcile this with “Black Swan Theory”?

I’m getting a little uneasy about the strong words being bandied about, so I’ll just make a quick observation and scuttle away:

Straightwood #209 points out the analogy between the expert’s assurances regarding nuclear power plant safety and the expert’s assurances regarding the stability of the financial system. It is in some ways a fitting analogy, although the consequences of the financial disaster greatly exceed those of the nuclear accident, both in terms of financial costs and human costs — the number of people who have committed suicide because of the recent financial woes is significant, and certainly many lives will be lost due to the additional stress imposed upon billions of people by the economic hard times.

This analogy would then suggest that the appropriate policy response to the economic disaster of 2008 is to banish complex financial instruments. Anybody for going back to the gold standard? Banning all securitization of loans? How about requiring stronger primary containment around bank reserves (by requiring higher reserve ratios)? Why stop there: eliminate the Fed!

Gee, this analogy works even better than I first imagined: think of all those central bank fire engines pumping hundreds of tons of cooling capital onto the raging fires of the collapse! The (anti-nuke) / (deficit hawks) demanding deep cuts in (nuclear power) / (govt spending)!

Now tell me why we shouldn’t – by your own criteria of black swans – stop burning all fossil fuels immediately. Like, in the next five minutes.

Have you read “The Black Swan?” The future is full of Black Swans, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Are you trying to discredit Taleb’s thesis, or are you trying to say it isn’t applicable to nuclear power. Let’s see:

1. Low probability, but high impact negative outcomes? Check.

2. Experts utilize simplistic assumptions and past experience to predict reliability? Check.

3. Experts fail to consider all contingencies in complex failure modes? Check.

4. Alarming failures occur despite assurances of very low probability of failure? Check.

It looks like a black swan to me. The proper response to a black swan scenario is to avoid investment exposure. This makes it an argument for avoiding further investments in current nuclear power technology. It is far from clear how best to invest so as to avoid an AGW black swan.

And WRT to ‘alarming failures’, I think it’s worth noting here that the consequences of Fukushima Daiichi going u/s include:

(i) A major reduction in Japan’s baseload capacity, which isn’t going to be replaced quickly,
(ii) The evacuation of a large area of habitable land, perhaps for years;
(iii) The condemning of agricultural produce produced on that land, perhaps for years.

Risk here isn’t only a matter of deaths / premature deaths.

Anyway, thinking about this a bit, doesn’t Fukushima-Daiichi fail to be a Taleb-style black swan in that it’s no surprise to anyone who understands what happened at Three Mile Island?

the consequences of Fukushima Daiichi going u/s include:

(i) A major reduction in Japan’s baseload capacity, which isn’t going to be replaced quickly,
(ii) The evacuation of a large area of habitable land, perhaps for years;
(iii) The condemning of agricultural produce produced on that land, perhaps for years.

[citation needed]

Ajay, don’t be bloody silly. The plant has gone offline: 4.7 GW of capacity is a commonly seen figure for the lost capacity. And it’s gone offline forever: the Japanese government has said so, and have you seen the pictures? The current evacuation zone is a big bite out of the east side of Honshu. Every news web site has a map of it. Foodstuffs from certain areas are currently condemned, and it’s not like the Japanese have a surplus of arable producing land. I’m sure this state of affairs won’t continue for any longer than it has to – many people will just swallow the risk and move back, most likely – but you have to admit these are non-negligible downsides. You wouldn’t expect them from a gas generating plant. I suspect hydro is the only other sort of power generation that presents comparable risks.

@225

I am trying to stay with you, SoV, but you don’t seem to be reading what I post:

“I don’t apply “black swan reasoning” to burning fossil fuels because the connection between the magnitude of the activity and the black swan outcome is highly speculative.”

You read this as my saying the effects of AGW are “highly speculative”

Do you see the problem?

Charlie:

You do realize that the evacuation zone is temporary and precautionary, right? This isn’t a nuclear dead zone. The radiation levels are not very high outside of the facility. And the vast majority of the isotopes being released in the steam have a half-life of about 10 minutes. Not a long-term worry at all.

The food contamination is also a temporary worry. The spinach and milk have small levels of iodide isotopes, which have a half life of something like 8 days. These levels, while well above safety regulations, if accidentally consumed by an adult, won’t do much harm. Again, smart of regulators to quarantine the food, but this is not a long-term problem of spoiled farmland. This is more like missing out on one growing season, if you’re being super overcautious. Gulf seafood are more at risk from oil than spinach is from this, given a month’s time.

I agree that losing the baseload capacity is bad, and represents a medium-term problem. But remember, there was just a hugely massive earthquake and enormous tsunami that flooded a lot of equipment. Had a coal plant been there it’s not at all clear that it would be fully operational. (And if it were, people in the surrounding areas would have a lot more health problems than they do now)

You do realize that the evacuation zone is temporary and precautionary, right?

I don’t think ‘realize’ is the word you want. You can’t predict the evolution of an ongoing accident – or the Japanese government’s response to it – any better than I can. But I’d guess that it’ll be temporary, yes.

This isn’t a nuclear dead zone. The radiation levels are not very high outside of the facility. And the vast majority of the isotopes being released in the steam have a half-life of about 10 minutes. Not a long-term worry at all.

That’s very confidently said. I’d want more data before I ventured to say that I knew that. Where are your sample sites? How much testing do you plan, and what sort of testing? Perhaps the Japanese people who’ll be moving back will get adequate data, perhaps they won’t. There’s an effort at a home-brew radiation monitoring network that looks interesting, whether or not it can do anything genuinely useful I don’t know.

Straightwood:

I believe the relevant candidates that have been mentioned are:
1. Oil refining, which leaves us exposed to potential poison gas clouds in the form of benzene and hydroflouric acid, to name 2 chemicals associated with the refining process with nasty effects for humans. Refineries are not regulated nearly as much as nuclear plants, and so are much more vulnerable to earthquakes, terrorist attacks, or even human error. The oil industry also has a lousy safety record.
2. Rapid climate shifts created by positive feedback loops that we understand poorly, caused by burning fossil fuels
3. Oil drilling, which leaves us exposed to events like the Deepwater Horizon accident, which was only the worst case in the US, but not nearly the worst in the world.
4. Hydroelectric dams, which also have a fairly high casualty rate, and occasionally truly awful disasters, which have killed tens of thousands of people at a time. These are vulnerable to the same sorts of attacks or bad weather/geological events that nuclear plants are. And historically have killed more people than nuclear.

I’m sure there are others that we haven’t mentioned, but those are the ones that have been raised thus far in the discussion.

I was hoping to bow out of this discussion but there have been some seriously incorrect statements that I feel a need to correct. Among them:

Safety concerns about transporting spent nuclear fuel across the country and local opposition prevented Yucca Mountain from becoming operational.

This is correct in the sense that uninformed members of the public had safety concerns. The technology for transporting spent fuel safely has been around for decades. Basically, it’s just big heavy steel casks. Really hard nuts to crack, those.

2. Experts utilize simplistic assumptions and past experience to predict reliability? Check.

Straightwood should read through some of the volumes and volumes of analytical material before dismissing it all as “simplistic”.

Charlie’s assertions about the evacuation zones suggest that these zones might be unsafe for some period of time. This is not true; any person who had remained in that zone for the last ten days would not have been exposed to significant amounts of radioactivity. As has already been pointed out several times, the evacuation zone was a precaution against a large release of radioactivity, which in the event never took place.

The use of the “black swan” argument strikes me as merely a ploy to evade a direct examination of costs and benefits. In effect, “black swan” is mumbo-jumbo for “bad”. To apply that label, and then use the label to declare the technology unacceptable, is sophistry. If nuclear power technology is undesirable, it should be possible to explain why it is undesirable without resorting to such indirect methodology.

Moreoever, I find the black swan argument morally repugnant, as it trivializes human suffering. If over the course of a decade, one million people die because of insufficient food supplies, their deaths are in no wise less worthy of our consideration than the spectacular deaths of one million people in a catastrophe. The proper measure for consideration is human suffering, not spectacle. If a nuclear accident ever were to generate large numbers of casualties and great economic losses, its impact must be directly compared, dollar for dollar, tear for tear, and body for body, with any other causal factor that causes human suffering. People have a huge blind spot for mundane suffering. The real death-dealing in the West Bank is not Israelis shooting Palestinians, but the steady stream of deaths due to boring causes, such as Palestinians with treatable ailments dying because they can’t get through the roadblocks to medical care quickly enough.

“I don’t apply “black swan reasoning” to burning fossil fuels because the connection between the magnitude of the activity and the black swan outcome is highly speculative.”

You read this as my saying the effects of AGW are “highly speculative”

Rephrase then: the magnitude of the effects of AGW are “highly speculative”. What are their effects and their magnitude that is “highly speculative”? How do you know this? What sort of research have you done on the matter?

Evidently, not very much. You also seem to think you get to declare what is “highly speculative” and what is not by fiat.

It doesn’t work that way. Further, it suddenly occurs to me that you really don’t know what a black swan event is. Here’s the wiki:

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods(owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

Check out the bolded bits. Now tell me why this stuff about high-impact global warming is not a black swan affair. By your own definitions, in fact.

Charlie’s assertions about the evacuation zones suggest that these zones might be unsafe for some period of time.

I think you misunderstand me. The evacuation zone exists as a matter of Japanese government policy: people have been told to leave. So the downside of an evacuation zone exists whether or not the zone is, in fact, safe. You might want to tell the Japanese government and people to stop being such silly ninnies but the zone exists.

Now personally, I happen to think there’s a moral obligation to give the people who are expected to move back into the zone – once it’s declared safe, whenever that might be – reasonable assurance that it is safe. This, to me, means good data. I also think the nuclear power generating industry will also do itself a big favour if it provides good, consistent, systematic data.

Ryan

You do realize that the evacuation zone is temporary and precautionary, right? This isn’t a nuclear dead zone.

You think that makes it OK?

The Fukushima reactor has already more than exceeded the level of nuisance that would be tolerated from any other industry. At a time of national crisis the first priority of the national and local government has been to run an emergency power line out to a nuclear reactor. The reactor has required the national government to focus on preventing a third catastrophe when it is already trying to deal with the earthquake and the tsunami.

The evacuation of the people is taking place at a time when the emergency infrastructure is already stretched. Industry is shut down, commerce is shut down, schools are shut down.

Even in the unlikely event that there are no more deaths due to the failure of the plant safety systems, the events have inflicted psychological trauma on several million people and that is itself a major health issue.

We have no idea when the emergency will come to an end. The reactors will be generating many MW of heat for years to come. There is no way to know when the process of making the storage pools or reactor cores safe can even begin. The hydrogen explosions have probably destroyed the cranes and other handling infrastructure. It may be months before we even have an idea of how long the process will take.

No, this is not OK.

Nuclear Power cannot claim no harm no foul on this one. It was a US designed reactor, the safety measures have failed, the containment vessel has failed and only heroic action on the part of the plant operators has averted a meltdown.

PHB:
Again, all I insist on is that nuclear power is compared to relevant alternatives. I agree, requiring evacuation is not nothing. But the claim was that it was a long-term evacuation, which it isn’t. Also, I agree that there is mental anguish associated with these incidents, which are real health concerns. I would note, however, that this mental anguish is made worse, not better, when people insist on exaggerating the harms by lumping together Three Mile Island with Chernobyl. One killed a lot of people, the other didn’t make anyone sick.

That said, what I would like to do is ask that we compare these very real costs of nuclear power (evacuation, mental anguish, some food quarantine) compared to the known, every day costs of operating its closest substitute, which is coal power. So with coal, we have an expected regular casualty rate, year after year, for normal operation. With nuclear, with have exceedingly rare chances of a Three Mile Island or Fukushima, and normal operation with no casualties or health risks imposed on everyone else. What I am claiming is that the nuclear power option is on the whole better than the coal power option, not that nuclear has no downsides.

The fact that the Japanese government mandated the evacuation in no wise suggests that they will maintain that mandate indefinitely. The most reasonable prediction for us to make is that people will return to the land once the various measurements of radioactivity levels have ascertained that it is safe to return.

No, I think there are two conditions that will have to be met. The first condition is that the evacuation zone is reasonably free from radioactive material. The second condition is that there is a low risk of further release of radioactive material from the plant: ‘re-containment’ if you like. When will the Japanese government decide that those conditions are credibly met? Are they going to attempt to build an enclosure over reactors 1-4 first, say? That could take a while.

And I agree with you that there should be due diligence in checking those radioactivity levels. But again, there’s simply no foundation for any claim that the land has become unusable.

The evacuation zone is unusable de jure for as long as it remains an official evacuation zone. So right now, it’s unusable. And would remain so even if there were reasonable grounds for saying that the authorities were being over-cautious in maintaining it.

No, I think there are two conditions that will have to be met. The first condition is that the evacuation zone is reasonably free from radioactive material. The second condition is that there is a low risk of further release of radioactive material from the plant: ‘re-containment’ if you like.

I would argue that both conditions have already been met. The evidence we now have suggests that only tiny amounts of radioactivity were released. And there have been no serious releases of radioactivity for four days now. Strictly speaking, then, your conditions have been met. However, I consider the downside of waiting a week to get additional data is so low as to make it a prudent course of action. The Japanese government will probably wait two or three weeks — and I suspect that this delay will have more to do with psychological considerations than radiological ones.

If we do not build hundreds more nuke plants, there is some unknown probability that this will contribute to an AGW catastrophe. But there are countless other crash programs we might undertake that have some unknown probability of averting an AGW apocalypse. By contrast, a nuke plant that is not built is 100% certain not to melt down.

Good lord, Duns Scotus would have been proud of you! Might I suggest that the very convolutedness of your argument is evidence of its sophistry?

Your candidates for comparison to nuclear power as equivalent Black Swans are:

1. Oil refining
2. Rapid climate shifts
3. Oil drilling
4. Hydroelectric dams
.
1. Oil refinery disasters are fully remediable. Even the worst refinery explosion can be cleaned up much more easily than a nuke plant meltdown. (The Three Mile Island cleanup cost about $900 million and took 12 years.) Oil refining is absolutely essential to modern civilization, and there is no substitute technology. Oil refineries can be insured without any government guarantees, an indicator of manageable risk.

2. Rapid climate shifts. This is an outcome, not a candidate Black Swan technology. If the risk target is thermal power generation, there are many alternative technologies aimed at reducing the impact of coal, oil, and gas-fired power plants, including carbon sequestration, energy conservation, and renewables. We simply don’t know how sensitive the AGW effects are to the volume of CO2 generated by current and future power plants. There is no calculus for offsetting AGW risks with nuclear power risks.

3. Oil drilling. I would argue that high-risk offshore drilling is roughly comparable to nuclear power in posing Black Swan type risk and huge remediation costs, but not all oil drilling is offshore. So, yes, I would have the same objections to high-risk offshore oil drilling as I have to conventional nuclear power plants.

4. Hydroelectric dams. I am unaware of any hydroelectric dams that have failed catastrophically. A few hundred lives have been lost over the last century in small dam failures in the USA. These were all fully remediable situations, inflicting no huge cleanup costs comparable to a nuclear disaster. There are no functional alternatives to dams; there are functional alternatives to nuclear power.

Straightwood:

1. Oil refinery disasters that I’m pointing to (an explosion in a benzene tank or in a hydroflouric acid tank) would kill upwards of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, depending on the proximity of the refinery to population centers. That’s a disaster on a scale worse than Chernobyl. If you want to claim that insurance exists for refineries, so they aren’t so bad, then you need to retract your claims about the derivatives market. There were insurance systems in place there too. Remember AIG? There’s a bill in the US Senate about the need for protection against just these sorts of disasters, but the oil industry doesn’t want to pay for it, so it’s being held up. I don’t think that you want to classify this as a fully remediable disaster. If you do, then clearly we just care about different things in our analysis. I care about lives lost and people getting sick.

2. The candidate technology here is the burning of fossil fuels, which could be hugely reduced if we were using nuclear power instead of coal. Your insistence that we can’t calculate the potential damage here should, to be consistent with your analysis with nuclear, militate towards not burning fossil fuels. You’ve already claimed that a nuclear plant that doesn’t exist can’t melt down. Similarly, fossil fuel plants that don’t exist can’t destroy our climate system.

3. Ok, at least we agree on this one.

4. I mentioned such a disaster in an earlier post. Quoting myself: “In 1975, the Banqiao Dam failure killed 26,000 people directly, and 145,000 people indirectly, and negatively affecting millions more.” This is, I believe, the largest power-generation-related disaster there has been, in terms of human costs. Tons of real infrastructure was also destroyed by the unleashed water as well, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of structures.

Again, I’d like to see what the larger method of analysis is. Just saying “Black Swan” doesn’t do much.

4. Hydroelectric dams. I am unaware of any hydroelectric dams that have failed catastrophically. A few hundred lives have been lost over the last century in small dam failures in the USA. These were all fully remediable situations, inflicting no huge cleanup costs comparable to a nuclear disaster. There are no functional alternatives to dams; there are functional alternatives to nuclear power.

Good Lord, do you have to be spoonfed:

1975: Shimantan/Banqiao Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 171,000
Cost: $8,700,000,000
What happened: Shimantan Dam in China’s Henan province fails and releases 15.738 billion tons of water, causing widespread flooding that destroys 18 villages and 1500 homes and induces disease epidemics and famine

Geeze. And the worst nuclear power plant accident, which I think we all agree is Chernobyl? The death toll was 4,056 (Source for this number: United Nations Scientific Subcommittee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.)

The majority of citizens believe that the Fukushima accident demonstrates the danger of nuclear power, when any informed observer must reach the opposite conclusion. How do we resolve this conundrum?

Did I really read this correctly? Chris implies that the Fukushima accident demonstrates the safety of nuclear power. Similarly, surviving an auto accident demonstrates the safety of auto travel, and surviving a dangerous hospital borne infection demonstrates the safety of hospitals. By this logic, the more plants that melt down without catastrophic radiation release, the more confident the public should be of nuclear power safety.

We can easily resolve the “conundrum” by explaining to the public, in great detail, the differences between the assurances made by the plant designers and operators and the facts of the incident. It would also help to show the public videos of the reactor buildings exploding, to show how rugged the pumps, valves, and containment vessels are. This would reassure them enormously.

PHB: I’m not ScentOfViolets, and I haven’t seen any crazy claims in this thread about renewables. So I can’t speak to that. Again, I’m more than thrilled to use wind and solar and wave and geothermal wherever we can. And I’m happy to employ a carbon tax to put these (and nuclear) on a fairer footing compared to fossil fuels.

I’d be more than thrilled to cut military spending. I’d be delighted to use those savings on building fast trains and wind farms and solar power towers and all sorts of good stuff. But I don’t see why you want to bow to “political realities” against nuclear, and then ignore them when it comes to reducing military spending and using the money to fund liberal objectives. Using wind at any real scale, and ramping it up so it’s getting to the point where it’s replacing existing coal or nuclear power, rather than just adding capacity, requires (as I understand it) a complete redesign of our power grid, which is complicated as there isn’t a single agency in charge of it. These are pretty big costs. I’m again, more than happy to say that we should develop a “smart grid”, but it’s certainly not free or easy. And, as Chris points out, you run into serious distribution issues. Not everywhere that people live is there a steady source of wind power. And transmitting power for very long distances is hugely wasteful (and can be fairly dangerous given the power requirements), given line loss.

Point being, you don’t get to assume away problems for your favored outcome, then claim that problems are intractable for the other side. I don’t think anyone is so in love with nuclear power that they wouldn’t rather use wind/solar/wave/geothermal power if it were legitimately cost-competitive and could serve a baseload function for the power grid. I have no bone to pick with renewables. I do have a serious bone to pick with fossil fuels. And given present technologies, nuclear is by far the closest substitute to coal plants, while wind, solar and wave power are complements that can help reduce peak loads.

Straightwood: with respect to comment 258: NO ONE DIED. In an accident brought on by the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Japan, followed by extremely large tsunami. Deepwater Horizon killed a dozen or two people just from the explosions, then poisoned a huge swath of the gulf region. No one’s suggesting that we stop using oil. The oil industry regularly has accidents that kill people. The coal industry regularly has accidents that kill people. The health consequences of both of these industries operating kills thousands of people, just in the US, every year. Besides climate effects, and illnesses. This is a vastly worse record. No one is claiming that nuclear reactors are all ponies and ice cream. But I think we are claiming that they have vastly better safety records than the relevant alternatives.

Ryan,

There are degrees of political unfeasibility. Proposing to continue use of current nuclear stations is risky but feasible. Proposing to build a new nuclear power plant is something that no representative will accept in their own district – unless they don’t mind becoming an ex-representative in the near future. There will be plenty of support for nuclear power if it is somewhere else.

The reason that the US is not using the nuclear waste repository in Nevada has nothing to do with the site or the danger of moving the waste. It has everything to do with the fact that Senator Harry Reid represents Nevada and Nevada is a swing state. Of course it would be far safer if the US moved fuel away from the reactors and put it in Nevada. In safety terms it is a no-brainer. But it isn’t going to happen.

I don’t see the F35 as military spending, I see it as pork voted through Congress to secure jobs for constituents. It is thus at some level fungible with other pork projects – high speed rail, ethanol, renewable power.

The pentagon has been cut in the past and there is huge public support for doing so. People start to realize that the more is spent on the military, the more need there is to go to war.

But yes, there is a major question of political willpower in the US, but that is not a global constant. Japan has an even more dysfunctional political system, but when they get moving on something they can get moving. They have a stagnant economy and a major cleanup to perform and a major shortage of generating capacity. Prospects for conservation look poor.

If I was in charge there I would be throwing the country full tilt into a push for wind and wave generation. A command economy is a lousy way to run an economy in the long run but it can be gratifyingly effective for short periods and for tightly constrained goals.

The big limiting factor as you point out is the grid. But that was already being fixed in the US for other reasons. The US grid is currently vulnerable to a cyber attack. It has very little redundancy, it has a lot of points of failure, the security of the control equipment is primitive at best.

There are other options though. If we look at a 5-10 year horizon wave power is feasible. There are designs we could build today if we were prepared to abandon things like environmental studies. The amount of power surging in and out of various bays is quite staggering. Finding a way to harness it is more challenging though.

There’s something to be said about willing to take a stand on an issue despite not knowing much about it . . . and having no qualms about actually saying that this is the case rather than engage in endless equivocation, weaseling and other such Frankfurtian nonsense.

My dad for example is very up-front, and has no problems with saying stuff like “I don’t know what it is exactly; but I know I don’t like it.”

Folks like “Straightarrow” (more irony!) might take a page from his book.

NO. You’re not answering the question – asked many times – as to why nuclear is a booga booga black swan, but fossil fuels are not, even though their potential for harm – think Permian die off – is far, far higher. You’ve been shucking and jiving all along . . . and only to nullify the actual facts on the ground, which is that nuclear power is far, far safer than burning hydrocarbons. That’s just the facts.

You want to claim there’s something about nuclear that makes it a black swan? Fine. But you damn well better be consistent in your application and apply this to the fossil fuel industry as well. And you’re trying very, very hard not to be consistent . . . and being disingenuous as all get out about what your doing to boot.

And that, my friend, is nasty, rude, and uncivil behaviour. You deserve every bit of my opprobrium until you man up. You can either actually answer the question. You can drop the claim.

Or you can do what people like my father do, namely letting other people know they don’t like something while being very up front about admitting they really don’t know much about it.

Do you believe the Japanese will replace the lost generating capacity of Fukushima with another nuclear plant?

Yes. They have at least four nuclear power plants in various phases of construction but not yet operational, so we can just look for announcements that work on those plants has been cancelled indefinitely.

Translation: “I’ve got nothin’, but I’m going to pretend that you’re being unwantonly hostile as opposed to being rightfully upset at my rude behaviour . . . and use that as a pretext to not answer the question.” Shades of Sigourney Weaver in “Working Girl”.

People like Straightwood don’t seem to realize that people don’t like it when you bullshit them. Or maybe they do, but they think their cause is so righteous the expetionalism fairy will grant them a special exemption for this general rule.

Instead of what’s actually the case, that people then tend to think they’re sanctimonious little weasels and that their opposition to nuclear power is just plain nuts.

PHB writes in #264: If we look at a 5-10 year horizon wave power is feasible. There are designs we could build today if we were prepared to abandon things like environmental studies. The amount of power surging in and out of various bays is quite staggering. Finding a way to harness it is more challenging though.

First, let’s clearly differentiate between tidal power and wave power. Tidal power is a rather special situation: definitely feasible but very limited in total power potential. Wave power has enormous potential, but I’m not as optimistic as you are about making this technology practical. Remember, people have been trying to get this working since the 1970s, and some very clever ideas have been proposed. They just can’t get the economics right, largely because wave power is so diffuse. You end up building these long linear devices that stretch up and down the coast for miles and miles. This raises all sorts of headachy problems with boaters, fishermen, and other users of the seas. And don’t forget the possibility of the Surfer’s Liberation Front engaging in terrorist tactics. ;-)

Good question, Jim. My own opinion, which I emphasize is just opinion, not the more rigorous technical analysis that I have heretofore concentrated on, is that our republic is suffering from political arteriosclerosis. Various factions have mastered the art of manipulating the system to their own benefit, and now our republic no longer functions to seek the greater good. This has taken a long and complex evolutionary sequence, with many different factors at work, but the single factor that I decry most loudly is the overthrow of the intellectual aristocracy. There was a time when our body politic accorded respect to those who were possessed of appropriate expertise. When the physicists told him that they could build a war-winning weapon, FDR took a billion-dollar flyer on their word alone. Nowadays, the term “expert” is often used in a derogatory context. Indeed, this rejection of intellectual expertise has manifested itself in this very discussion. We live in an age of intellectual egalitarianism; as Tom Lehrer said, we no longer discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, creed — or ability. Sarah Palin’s opinions on evolution are just as “valid” as Stephen Gould’s. Senator Inhofe’s opinions on climate change are unswayed by the reports of the National Academy of Sciences. The general public dismisses the assurances of the experts regarding the safety of nuclear power as so much whitewashing. Healthy skepticism has been supplanted by anarchic denial.

When policymaking is a demolition derby of opinions rather than an informed analysis of options, the results are chaotic — and chaotic responses to dangerous problems inevitably lead to civilizational failure.

Good question, Jim. My own opinion, which I emphasize is just opinion, not the more rigorous technical analysis that I have heretofore concentrated on, is that our republic is suffering from political arteriosclerosis. Various factions have mastered the art of manipulating the system to their own benefit, and now our republic no longer functions to seek the greater good. This has taken a long and complex evolutionary sequence, with many different factors at work, but the single factor that I decry most loudly is the overthrow of the intellectual aristocracy.

Hmmm . . . my own opinion is that this is just a particular manifestation of general case of organizational arteriosclerosis. You know the drill: A successful organization, be it a polity, a business, or a special-interest group like a union is initially successful because of the human capital it brings to bear on the problem. So, for example, you have the breakaway’s from Shockley’s company, the so-called traitorous eight, founding Fairchild Semiconductor. Which went on to become very successful indeed, and mostly on the strength of the abilities of those early pioneers.

But after the organization becomes large enough to coast on it’s past successes, it seems to be the usual case that men with an entirely different skill set emerge to take charge of the company. These are the sorts who tend to be very good at organizational infighting, politicking, etc., but who have very little aptitude or interest in the actual business itself (In fact, these skill sets seem to be almost entirely mutually exclusive.) Thus the phenomenon of competent engineering heads of divisions getting displaced by know-nothing MBA types who have the self-serving belief that business expertise is a general skill transferable across businesses, regardless of what they happen to be selling.

Of course, this isn’t generally true, the organization suffers, ceases to be innovative[1], and comes to rely more and more on strong-arm tactics to maintain market share rather than on any head-to head competition. The follow up is that the rot sets in, the organization becomes hollowed-out (one might say “financialized” ;-), and ultimately succumbs entirely – and rather abruptly to an outsider’s eyes. How could Rome possibly have fallen?

A rather long-winded way of saying I’m in essential agreement with our point about the overthrow and eventual debasement of the intellectual aristocracy. Where I would differ is in thinking that as far as public discourse goes, this is more of an effect than a cause.

[1]Funny, but, ever notice how to these types, “innovation” usually means “cut costs” rather than “make new stuff”?