something serious for a change

[baratron]

I'm a woolly left-wing liberal, who is carfree by choice and recycles everything. But news that Greenpeace have been protesting against proposed new nuclear power plants just seems wrong to me. What, exactly, are they proposing as the alternative? Lovely though it would be for us all to reduce our use of petrol and electricity and for people to start walking and cycling everywhere, I can't see it happening.

In an ideal world, wind turbines would be shiny and wonderful and provide vast amounts of power. But in practice, they are noisy, and a large number of them are needed to produce a small amount of electricity. Many of the most suitable sites for them in the UK are areas of outstanding natural beauty, such as hill and mountain tops, and/or interfere with wildlife, such as offshore locations. Also, they are subject to the weather. Yes, it is often windy, but not always.

I don't know what the answer is. Ideally we'd use a large range of different non-polluting renewable sources. But replacing the entire country's fossil fuel stations with wind turbines isn't going to work. Nuclear power could be a short to medium-term solution to ease the transition between fossil fuels and renewable power.

What do you think?

[Poll #623017]

I'm not very impressed with Greenpeace for saying that nuclear power stations are a terrorist target. I can't really explain why this bothers me, except that I think that Fear of terrorism is the way the terrorists win. Let's take people's current Fear of Terrorism and combine it with their existing Fear of Radiation and use those emotions to win the argument, rather than science, logic and rational debate. *sigh*

Comments

[hattifattener]

Yeah, I'm another one of those pro-nuke(-power) lefty greeny liberally types. The US environmental organizations' anti-nuke-power stance has never made much sense to me, except as an unreasoned side effect of the anti-nuke-weapon and anti-technology stances. Nuke power certainly has a close association with the military-industrial.

Waste processing is a significant problem with nuke plants, but I think it's more significant than it has to be. In the US, the plan was to reprocess most of the waste (the technology was pretty well planned out), but since the late '70s, that's been effectively banned due to a fear that some of the plutonium that would be separated from the waste could be stolen and used by terrorists. So instead the waste piles up at what were supposed to be short-term storage sites.

[nmc.livejournal.com]

Waste processing is a significant problem with nuke plants, but I think it's more significant than it has to be.

Well, yes and no.

I sort of have reservations about that. Yes, if everyone involves was reasonably intelligent and responsible, then you could do pretty well with waste disposal. You'd have a waste disposal facility on the plant site, which would only store the stuff that couldn't be reprocessed into something safe.

But, that doesn't happen. Basically, you have a plant, and when you've got waste, you put it wholly into a truck, which then ships it overland to some "temporary" storage site, which is probably inadequate for the task. Then you'd shift it, again by truck, to some permanent storage site, which was built by the lowest bidder, who probably cut a corner or two, and who may or may not have gotten a rigorous safety inspection.

So, from an environmental standpoint, the chance of a problem is equal to the chance of a reactor meltdown + the chance of a truck crash (times 2) + the chance of an inadequately built truck + the chance of a failure at the temporary storage site + the chance of a failure at the permanent storage site. That makes me a bit uncomfortable.

If we had a very reliable cure for cancer and/or a very reliable mechanism for shooting things out of orbit, I'd be much happier with the technology. Or, again, if I trusted the people involved to be intelligent and responsible. But without any of those, I'm a bit wary.

[nmc.livejournal.com]

This may or may not piss others off, but I've pretty much been under the impression that Greenpeace went the way of PETA years ago. In that, basically, they started from a sensible core that I agreed with, and then went fucking insane about it.

As for the transition ... I'm not sure there's going to be a full-on transition without a major technological breakthrough. There's a lot of little things that could help a great deal, though.

Here's an example. I live in Utah. It's a desert. There are a whole lot of really sunny days. If the price of photovoltaic roof shingles became more competitive, a number of the power issues here would be lessened. It's not that said shingles are going to generate all the electricity the building needs, but generating even 10% of one's power on-site would be a nice little improvement.

Just in general, it'd be nice if people thought less about ways to improve energy generation problems totally, or 80+% of the way, and more about little things that'd help. Roofs, for example. Solar cells and small wind turbines for those. Maybe a small dam here and there. A small wind farm where it works. Find the little ways to improve efficiency, and then require them. Make the larger ways to efficiency more competitive. Stuff like that.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I know where you're coming from. I've never really decided what I think about Greenpeace, ever since I heard about the Rainbow Warrior as a child. I do have an opinion on PETA, though - I am a vegan who cannot stand PETA's militance. The "highlight" for me was when they ran a campaign about the evils of the dairy industry to encourage teenage girls to stop drinking cow milk.

Now, I believe that the dairy industry is not kind to cows, and that cow milk is not the most ideal for humans to drink. However, running a campaign aimed at young kids who probably have a pretty unhealthy diet is not on in my book. Milk might be the only source of protein, calcium & B-vitamins that a faddy teenager who thinks she's overweight despite being a size 6 gets. And how many parents will be willing to swap cheap cow milk for expensive, weird-tasting soy milk? Do PETA expect the kids to pay for it themselves?

My belief is that information should be available for kids who become vegetarian or vegan off their own backs, so they can find the resources to do so healthily - making sure that animal products are replaced with nutrient-rich plant products (not all soy milk has calcium added, f'rex). But campaigning, trying to convert people, should only be aimed at adults.

[inquis.livejournal.com]

And there are some of us who would be really sick if I tried to be vegan :o)

I'm all for nuclear power too. But I think they need to make it clear to everyone what safety measures are in place, and make sure that corners are not allowed to be cut where they might pose a risk of a disaster. OK, it's never going to be risk free, but neither's burning fossil fuels and that's just a longer term environmental effect.

[tropism.livejournal.com]

Actually, one of the biggest problems with solar energy is simply that you only get it during the day. You've got to store it somehow if you want to use it at night, and this generally involves batteries. Because of the limited life of batteries, this can be a losing proposition. Of course, there are alternate ways of storing energy, but these generally require somewhat radical solutions and large tracts of land. (For example, you could use excess power to pump water uphill into a large basin. At night, you run the water back downhill, through turbines, in order to generate power.) Windpower also has this same problem.

I completely agree, however, that we need to increase efficiency, and even solar panels will help reduce power-generation demands during peak consumption hours, which tend to be during the day.

If oil really is running out soon, I think that the best stopgap measures will be nuclear combined with steam-cracking biomass into diesel fuel, via some method that was devised a few years ago. (Feed garbage in. Heat under pressure with water. You get natural gas, fuel oil, and inorganic detritus. Generally, the amount of natural gas given off by the process is enough to run the process, so you don't have to put any external energy into the system once you get it running, other than the biomass. And, of course, plants -are- probably the most efficient solar-collection devices extant. ;))

[nmc.livejournal.com]

I was about to disagree with you, but I think we actually agree.

As a source for powering the grid, I don't think solar works all that well, for all the listed reasons.

I do think it works well for a near-to-usage supplement. Put solar cells on a roof. If it generates power, use it. If it's more power than you need, sell it back to the grid. Someone wants it. If it's not enough power, get what you need extra from the grid. If they're not generating anything, just use the grid. No batteries required, just some circuitry (which should have a long life if you overbuild it).

If we were doing this, as a species, we wouldn't erase the need for the grid, and the coal / gas / nuclear plants that power the grid. However, we might be able to decrease the power requirements on the grid, which in turn would mean a need for fewer plants, or running the plants less hard. Which in turn reduces the demand for the fuel to power them.

Oh, and when it comes down to it, this planet doesn't have to last until the death of the species, the heat death of the universe and/or the death of the sun. It just has to last long enough for us to find somewhere else to go.

[djm4]

I think it's an entirely justified fear. I man not see eye-to-eye with Greenpeace on everything, but I honestly thought I'd slipped into some sort of alternate reality when I heard that we were even considering restarting the nuclear power programme.

Firstly, the waste. We have no idea how to get rid of this. No idea at all. It stays around, and is lethal, on a timescale we can barely comprehend. The fact that we haven't had an accident with it so far is barely significant when considering the length of time that we and our ancestors will have to be able not to have an accident for.

Secondly, the power plants themselves. We still have no idea how to decommission one safely. And now we're proposing to build more of the things in the vague hope that we might find out in the next thirty years. It didn't work last time - why are we thinking it might work this time?

Thirdly, our power needs. Power is not a blank cheque that we can just write and expect to have satisfied. If we don't have enough capacity to satisfy our power needs, then we're basically going to have to grit our teeth and use less fricking power. This may reduce our quality of life, and it may cause us to be restricted in what we can and can't do, but it's still an option we can choose - and it's an option we're going to have to choose at some point, whether or not we go nuclear.

And I wouldn't be so dismissive of the terrorist threat. It seems to me to be an entirely reasonable worry. If the terrorists could actually win by targetting a nuclear power or reprocessing plant, I don't mind granting them that partial victory of considering how to stop them doing so.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Eeek, you're up early. With a well-reasoned set of points, too. Damn you morning people!

I'm not dismissive of the terrorist threat. It's more that I think it's irresponsible of Greenpeace to go around putting those kind of ideas into people's heads - the fact they're almost making it the central point of their argument. I would like to be able to dismiss the idea of nuclear power with scientific principles (including "the half-life of this is n billion years, do we REALLY want to do that to the world?") rather than some nebulous fear ("$bad_people will blow it up").

I'm sure that a great deal of modern politics is based on emotion rather than logic, and that the various politicians employ spin to make their ideas appeal emotionally. Like ID cards "preventing terrorism". But I can't help but find that uncomfortable. I'd like decisions on the future of the country to be made with a clear head.

[djm4]

Yes, but the argument that ID cards will prevent terrorist attacks is almost entirely specious and based on no evidence whatsoever.

The argument that nuclear power stations and reprocessing plants are terrorist targets is based on credible intelligence. It is not in any way new, or specific to Greenpeace, either; to take a relatively recent example, Al Qaeda claims that it considered it for the 9/11 attacks, although probably one of the reasons that they didn't is that flying an aircraft into a nuclear power plant wouldn't cause a release of radioactive material unless they were incredibly lucky. The science behind what could happen if 'bad people could blow it up' (although personally I suspect 'blow it up' is a far less likely scenario than stealing some quantity of material from a reprocessing plant and introducing it into the local water supply) is perfectly good science, very much available as a weapon to people who want to attack nuclear power with it.

The fact that some (most?) people don't think rationally about terrorist threats shouldn't stop us trying to do so.

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

I don't think that nuclear power is the best answer - apart from the low probability/high risk stuff (both terrorism, and just fuck-up Chernobyl/3 Mile Island scenarios) its just too expensive to be my first (or even 2nd or 3rd choice) choice. When the government has actually put all the money that might sensible be spent on better/cheaper/quicker alternatives (such as wind power - where, btw, I disagree with your assessment, tidal, geothermal, cogeneration and most of all conservation) then I'd be prepared to resort to nuclear if we are still not getting there.

George Monbiot, who thinking i do respect, did write an article yesterday [http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1653215,00.html] arguing that we needed everything, including nuclear, if we were to make a reasonable impact on our carbon emissions - I'm afraid I'm not really up to checking his calculations - but unfortunately the govt. seems more concerned about dealing with 'real politics', such as the threat that electors might have to turn down their central heating thius winter than the real issue of global warming.

[memevector.livejournal.com]

It stays around, and is lethal, on a timescale we can barely comprehend. The fact that we haven't had an accident with it so far is barely significant when considering the length of time that we and our ancestors will have to be able not to have an accident for.

I'm glad you said that - that is what I always think of when the subject comes up.

(oh, except I've just noticed you said ancestors, but we mean descendants don't we)

[djm4]

Yes, but I was posting BC (Before Caffeine). That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. ;-)

[hiddenpaw.livejournal.com]

Nuckear has it's problems but at the moment it dose seem to be the best opption. Focil fuels are causeing too much damage. I can't say nuclear is totaly clean/safe, background radiation does go up and if you have enough powerstations over enough time it could build up a problem like focil fuels, but there is no evidence of that at the moment where as the damage of focil fuels has reached critical levels.

The only workable renewable source to be stable and constant (Not including biofuels) is wave power (wind sometimes fails to happen and the supply at solar power is at it's worst when we need it most). The effect of wave based genorators on sea based wild life. Give sea bararges tend to form long lines it could be a serious danger to migratory fish. maintanence would be difficult and it would not be popular with shipping. That said there's alot of sea out there so alot of space for bararges. I wonder if enough wave power bararges would alter costal errotion or destroy the ecological balance of mud flats (Vital areas for many birds).

The other thing that anoys me is people saying the carbon costs of building a nuclear power station would be worse than what you would save from useing it, but I wonder if they have taken on to account the carbon cost of building a convetional station of transporting the coal or gas. The maths seems to make little sense.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Greenpeace are usually stupid and usually miss the point, and complain about what's trendy, not what's important. I don't see them complaining much about, say, Russian nuclear waste handling which is truly horrific. And the Brent Spar they were complaining so much about? Was home to endangered cold-water corals, amongst other things.
As for nuclear power, suggestions of what's going to provide the baseline electricity load for the UK are welcome: it's got to be reliable.
I think pebble-bed reactors are the way to go. We can license the tech from the South Africans.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, we're likely to see ropey Westinghouse PWRs instead of anything more efficient. We already have the AGRs, which are about the most efficient commercial reactors IIRC (and with none of those embarrassing containment breaches when your primary coolant changes phase from liquid to gas), but they're the Concordes of the reactor world; engineering masterpieces, but you wouldn't want to foot the bill. I don't know enough about pebble beds, but they seem like a sensible design.

I've also got a bit of a soft spot for the Dounreay Fast Reactor due to its use of sodium/potassium alloy (NaK) as the primary coolant - less corrosive than hot water or steam, and excellent thermal properties (good enough to convect and conduct away much of the heat generated by the pile in the event of circulation stopping).

(and don't get me started on the white elephant that is fusion research - even if it demonstrates break-even and a sustained reaction, it's not going to be as effective for generating power as current fission technologies, and it may well have *more* of an issue with readioactive waste)

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I've been working with a futures analyst from the energy sector over the past year. He reckons that the most promising technology is microgeneration based on evacuated tube solar thermal collectors driving a sterling engine to produce electricity, which is stored using a closed-cycle fuel cell. Looking at the figures, I'm pretty convinced; the only remaining sticking point is the fuel cell, but we have the rest of the stack, and it won't take too great a rise is oil and gas prices for us to reach the tipping point where a system of this sort becomes more economical for the average consumer than their existing arrangement.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

In theory, nuclear isn't a bad option if it's implemented correctly (modern reactor design like those used in canada, proper waste management, less reliance on non renewable uranium).

Unfortunately the British approach is none of these things:

The government has already said they will not use a new modern design
Thorp and sellafield have a history of poorly managing situations - read the news and the safety reports.
They were trying to push Lord 'blue sky' Birt to head the investigation for fucks sake!
The public 'will not pay' for the reactors - yet the government has already decided on the type of reactor, and the private sector has indicated it will need public money.

In short, whilst nuclear is a credible, if unpalatable compromise, it is wholly unacceptable because of the lack of credibility and transparency of the government.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

I think all of the risks and benefits of various power generation and use strategies need to be looked at clearly, including waste products. I've seen little reporting that does this.

I think nuclear power has a low chance of anything major going wrong, but if it did go wrong the consequences would be awful. I think this risk is important both as a real threat and as a psychological stress.

The cover-ups, lies and sheer incompetence of nuclear power generators around the world over the last few decades makes me distrust them.

I don't think we should build any plants unless we have good ways to get rid of the waste. The timescales involved make it difficult to hold anyone responsible for it (we still have pollution in some areas from comparatively recently - Roman times) and I think that is dangerous.

Overall, my opinion is against nuclear power for similar reasons as New Scientist came out against it a few years ago: It might be possible to use it reasonable safely but I don't trust the companies involved and think the cost of doing it properly would be prohibitive.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

p.s. Little known Grant fact: One of my university applications was to Manchester to study Nuclear Engineering - together with quite a few others interested in alternative power.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Do you have a reference? I'd love to read that article.

Actually, I need to buy a subscription to the online version of New Scientist anyway. I'd never get round to reading the paper version, and it just wastes resources to buy it and have it sitting round the house.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Energy from waste seems to be missing from the debate so far - but supplies lots of energy in Denmark and other countries.

The thing with nuclear is that it has to be run by humans. And humans are, well, human.
Conflux worked on a reactor one summer as a student (Torness?), which was enough to convince me against it.

The problem of nuclear waste clinches it, and then there's the question of how to get the energy to get the enriched nuclear material in the first place.

[tropism.livejournal.com]

Actually, there're some nifty, new nuclear reactors, primarily designed to supply several MW of power in remote areas, that can run for a decade or more with someone just around to watch them, and which cannot fail catastrophically.

[evilref.livejournal.com]

Our electricity requirements will actually rise threefold when the petrochemicals run out, since the heating and factory processes using natural gas will have to switch to electric, and so will most road transport.

Cars do maybe 3 to 5 miles per kWh, trucks do 1 or less. Work out how much energy the average daily commute will require - or Tescos will use trucking vegetables around.

The only sensible solution is Satellite Solar Power. The correct place to put solar panels is where the Sun always shines - up in space, away from the Earth's shadow. The way to send the energy down is as UHF (in the 500MHz to 800MHz range) since we are used to pumping megawatts of this stuff out ever since television went colour.

It sounds like "Star Wars" stuff, but it is no less likely than nuclear power, and it is probably cheaper and certainly safer.

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

How do you protect your UHF power satellites from a fragmentation cascade?

[evilref.livejournal.com]

How do you protect your UHF power satellites from a fragmentation cascade?

My first reaction would be "you don't", since they are so cheap and so temporary anyway that if you lose a few, you bung a few more up. I'm assuming that a modular design would mean that panels could be lost and the system continue operation: the bit that does power conversion for the downlink would be tiny (and so statistically unlikely to be hit) compared to the area of the panels.

But if you know the asteroid is coming (and we really ought to have some sort of asteroid radar net, yes?) then you could improve their odds of surviving a lot by orientation. In other words, you could turn the panels to line up with the orbital path of the debris, to lower the chance of being hit. You dodge.


Here is some more detailed breakdown of a cost analysis by the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science:-

http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/a_common_cost_target_of_space_transportation_for_space_tourism_and_space_energy_development.shtml

As you can see, the cost of them is mainly launch cost - and is much, much lower than the cost of nuclear power stations.

[otterylexa.livejournal.com]

Radiation! We're all going to die!!!111!!!" (http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00066.htm)

[tropism.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, nuclear power is an excellent stopgap measure.

With modern nuclear power plants, you _really_ need quite a few human and non-human systems screwingn up, simultaneously, in the right order, in order for the plant to fail catastrophically.

Nuclear waste is an issue, but it's also not an issue. Yes, it's hazardous, and yes, it hangs around effectively forever. However, waste can be re-processed into fuel. It can also be buried far underground where it just won't matter if it's there or not. As for transportation, have you seen the things they've designed to transport nuclear waste in? They're so goddamned armored and insulated and everything that it would take a truly significant event to breach one in a bad way. If we just get a bit smarter about this, it's not something I'd worry about too much. Also, unless one gets hit by several kilotonnes of explosive, any spills will be localized.

Uranium is a limited resource and something that we're going to run out of. A handy solution exists in breeder reactors, which create plutonium, but, of course, there are the "OMG TEH TERRORIST" factors to consider here. (Frankly, I just don't consider them. Refining spent fuel isn't exactly a job you can do in your basement. Tactical uses of unrefined spent fuel are highly limited in scope.)

Me, I'm hoping for breakthroughs in fusion. Tritium-deuterium fusion is getting to the breakeven point, but there's a nifty new fusion method that uses plasma and, IIRC, boron, which shows promise.

[evilref.livejournal.com]

The only problem with fusion is that we're back to the radioactive waste problem. All the fusion reactions being considered at the moment produce neutrons, and those slippery little fellows make other things radioactive.

The neutrons produced by nuclear reactors are the main reason why decommissioning the things is so expensive. You end up with tons and tons of radioactive masonry.

The same problem is going to exist with fusion. Which is why I favour making better use of the fusion reactor we already have running - the one about 93,000,000 miles in that direction.