Everything you could possibly want to know about nuclear power - in one pdf

[bananas]

The Keystone Center got a group of experts from all sides to see what they could agree on.
Here's who funded it - the nuclear power industry and a bunch of electric companies:
American Electric Power
Constellation Energy
Duke Energy
Entergy
Exelon
Florida Power & Light
General Electric
National Commission on Energy Policy
Nuclear Energy Institute
Pew Charitable Trusts
Southern Company

So if there was any bias - you would expect a pro-nuke bias, right? Oops...
Here's a short article about it - read the whole article:
"Everything you could possibly want to know about nuclear power — and its (limited) potential as a potential climate solution — can be found in the new Keystone Center Report with the less-than-captivating title “Nuclear Power Joint Fact-Finding.”
http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all

You can download the full Keystone report here - it's about 2 megabytes:
http://www.keystone.org/spp/documents/FinalReport_NJFF6_12_2007%281%29.pdf

Also essential reading - an interview with a co-author of the Carbon Wedges study:
he discusses solutions, and says "I personally think nuclear is a non-starter."
http://theclimategroup.org/index.php/viewpoint/stephen_pacala/

And of course - Al Gore's policy address - he discusses solutions, and says,
"As a result of all these problems, I believe that nuclear reactors will only play a limited role."
http://nyu.edu/community/gore.html

[NNadir]

1. And your point is what?

Are you claiming that the Keystone Report is justifying a reflexive antinuclear position and that it says that "nuclear energy should be abandoned" because it will not produce 400 exajoules by 2015?

As the soothsayer in the oracle, you're rather weak, mostly bdcause of your poor reading comprehension skills and your continuous need to make "appeal to authority" arguments.

I personally think that the question of whether nuclear energy was a starter or a non starter was resolved somewhere around 1980, when nuclear energy was producing twice as much electricity, 2.5 exajoules of pure electricity, (roughly 7.5 exajoules primary) as all of the world's non-hydro renewables were producing in 2004 (1.2 exajoules of electricity).

Of course, this is historical data rather than oracular soothsaying interpretations.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table17.xls

Oh, and by the way, it is a rather dubious claim coming from someone who knows almost zero about nuclear energy that any document represents "all you need to know" about nuclear energy. In fact the size of the literature on nuclear energy is millions and millions of pages in length, much of it in small print. There is some useful information in this report, but there are also a lot of conditional statements. Surely conditional statements, which represent decision trees, can only be interpreted as predictions by a person with poor reading comprehension skills.

I think you should go back to trying to count the dead from the nuclear reactor release in Japan. Knowing your poor facility with numbers, let me help you: Zero, zero, zero, zero...

[bananas]

2. My point: even the nuclear industry knows there won't be thousands of nukes in 2050

"Are you claiming that the Keystone Report is justifying a reflexive antinuclear position and that it says that "nuclear energy should be abandoned" because it will not produce 400 exajoules by 2015?"

No - I'm saying that even the nuclear industry knows there won't be thousands of nukes in 2050.
There might be hundreds, maybe even a thousand, but not thousands.
At most, nuclear will only solve one carbon wedge - and probably less.
It's an option - there are enough low-carbon technologies to fill all the wedges without nuclear.
How much of a wedge nuclear actually fills will depend on many things - economics, politics, and how bad the next core failure is.

[NNadir]

3. Really? You're now a spokesman for the nuclear industry?

Now besides telling us what Al Gore thinks, you're telling us what the nuclear industry thinks?

I have always thought that you discounted and refused to believe anything that the nuclear industry said, on the grounds that it is the nuclear industry.

Knowing that you cannot simultaneously be a reflexive anti-nuke and understand basic math, let me tell you how far away 2050 is: It's 43 years.

Forty three years ago, it was 1963. John F. Kennedy was President of the United States. The Beatles released their first album. Yoko Ono had her marriage to a Christian fundamentalist annulled. Nobody, not even John Lennon, predicted that Beatles music would become what it is today.

In 1963, the automobile industry which had been arguing against seat belts because it thought consumers would be uninterested and resistant to the idea of automotive safety was a year away from making them standard issue, grudgingly.

In 1963, the computer industry completed the very first standardization scheme to allow computers from different companies to communicate with one another, a code called ASCII, but full implementation was to be delayed for 18 years because IBM couldn't produce punch cards for it and its newly released OS/360 system.

If you are here to produce 1963 predictions by any person in the computer industry indicating that the computer industry would be what it is now, I invite you to do so.

Now, let's turn to your soothsaying representations about what will happen in the energy field:

If you have identified a recent nuclear reactor core failure, I invite you to produce it.

If you can show a single "carbon wedge" that functions on an exajoule scale, I also invite you to produce that.

If, on the other hand, you are here to quote Pacala and Socolow with the reverence reserved for a sacred texts, I personally am unimpressed.

Pacala and Socolow wrote all kinds of bullshit about carbon sequestration, but neither you nor they can point to one place on the planet where significant sequestration facilities are even proposed, never mind planned or under construction. Their paper is now three years old. When, exactly, do you as oracle foretell the commencement of carbon sequestration? Got some tea leaves and some mystic ashes?

You will, in fact, produce no evidence of sequestration, no exajoule scale forms of renewable energy and no reactor core failures because basically you are soothsaying. Guess what? I don't care what you read in the Tarot cards in the oracle.

Reflexive anti-nuclear Greenpeace types are always talking about 2050, because basically they are unable to face what is happening now.

Let me tell you what is happening now: Climate change.

You don't know shit about what the nuclear industry thinks and, in any case, there are very few industries that have predicted their own state 43 years in advance.

If you ask me, I think it will be very difficult to produce the 4000 nuclear reactors that the world would need to produce 500 exajoules of energy. That said, I'm no shit for brains who comes here to oppose all new nuclear reactors on the grounds that I don't like things that start with the letter "N."

I want every nuclear reactor that can be built, built. If the world can only build 400 reactors like it did in the period between 1960 and 1980, I want that done. If the world can built 2000 reactors in that time, I want that done. If the world can build only 50 reactors, I want that done.

Got it?

No?

Why I am I not surprised?

If you don't know what you're talking about, make stuff up.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. The version WITHOUT Spin: some quotes

(All formating is mine, except where otherwise noted. --p!)

Quoth Bananas:

The Keystone Center got a group of experts from all sides to see what they could agree on.
Here's who funded it - the nuclear power industry and a bunch of electric companies:

The traitors, whores, and paid shills?

Oh, wait, that's ME. (Except the part where I get paid.)

American Electric Power
Constellation Energy
Duke Energy
Entergy
Exelon
Florida Power & Light
General Electric
National Commission on Energy Policy
Nuclear Energy Institute
Pew Charitable Trusts (basically anti-nuclear; I know PCT director Rebecca Rimel personally, and she paid about half of my salary in 1996-7 --p!)
Southern Company

So if there was any bias - you would expect a pro-nuke bias, right? Oops...

"Oops" is right. Bananas left out half the membership! Here's the rest of the players; there are plenty of anti-nuclearists, notably the UCS:

Bradford Brook Associates
Union of Concerned Scientists
Exelon
Environmental Defense
Natural Resources Defense Council
Clean Air Task Force
Nuclear Energy Institute
Southern Nuclear
Pew Center on Global Climate Change
Seattle City Light
Entergy Corporation
George Mason University
Marston Consulting
GE Energy – Nuclear Climate Solutions
Kansas Corporation Commission
American Electric Power
National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners
Duke Energy
Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate
National Commission on Energy Policy
British Embassy
Maine Department of Environmental Protection
Maine’s Public Advocate
Michigan Public Service Commission
FPL Group
National Wildlife Federation

So much for the iron rule of The Man and the doleful sneer of Darth Cheney.

Members of the Nuclear Power Joint Fact Finding (NJFF) reached no consensus about the likely rate of expansion for nuclear power in the world or in the U.S. over the next 50 years. Some group members thought it was unlikely that overall nuclear capacity would expand appreciably above its current levels and could decline; others thought that the nuclear industry could expand rapidly enough to fill a substantial portion of a carbon stabilization “wedge” during the next 50 years.

But ... but ... I thought there was "limited potential as a potential climate solution".

I guess that there is a limited potential for being consistent, too.

We know that in a carbon-constrained world, in which either a substantial greenhouse gas (GHG) tax or cap and trade program is implemented, the relative economics of nuclear power (as compared to fossil-fueled power) will improve.

Right here, there will be incentive to build more reactors. Fact is that nuclear energy is already economically attractive. It wasn't, when oil was $25/bbl and natural gas was $1.50/Tcf, but those were back in the heady, happy days of DOS 3.3, The Backstreet Boys, and Smells Like Teen Spirit ... and Britney was still a virgin.

On balance, commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S. are safer today than they were before the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.

This is a major departure from anti-N orthodoxy. They have been saying that today's nuclear cores are ten to one hundred times as potent as they were in 1978.

... oh, sorry, that's marijuana. My mistake!

The public ought to be able to trust both the nuclear industry and the federal agency conducting its security oversight. Transparency is a key cornerstone for public trust-building. However, when it comes to the security of nuclear power plants, full disclosure may be counter-productive.

Transparency OR security? This guarantees that there will be plenty for the anti-nuclearists to protest, no matter what happens. They will be able to scream "Nuclear 9-11!" as well as "Fear The Cheney!" at the same time. It's win-win for Greenpeace.

Hoist the mizzenmast and keel-haul the yardarm! The Rainbow Fundraiser sails at sunrise, me mateys!

With regard to older spent fuel that must be stored on an interim basis until an operating repository is available, the NJFF participants believe that this spent fuel can be stored safely and securely in either spent fuel pools or dry casks, onsite. The NJFF group also agrees that centralized interim storage is a reasonable alternative for managing waste from decommissioned plant sites and could become cost-effective for operating reactors in the future.

I thought this was the worst thing since getting a gremlin wet. So much for fears of not having anywhere to store it.

Bananas also cites Stephen Pacala of Carbon Wedge fame. To begin with, some of us are not impressed with a system to ostensibly "save the Planet" that is modeled on the diabetes food exchange system.

Pacala appears to be antinuclear for one reason: terror. Rather than take on terrorism, he simply dispenses with an entire method of energy production.

The blog which was Bananas' inspiration, Climate Progress ("An Insider's View of Climate Science, Politics, and Solutions"), is anti-nuclearist. And that's okay. It is a position, no less than my own pro-nuclearist position. But the blogger made the same fundamental error that Bananas repeated -- that ANY equivocation of nuclear energy development is identical with opposition.

It just ain't so. Equivocation is not opposition. People are allowed to be on the fence, to not take a position, and to sit issues out. It is only among middle-class revolution tourists that the slogan "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem" is elevated to the level of a truth.

Meanwhile, here is a quote from Al Gore:

" ... I am not opposed to nuclear power ... "

This, and all quotes, will be from the address ot NYU unless otherwise noted.

So, what gives, Al?

The main reason for my skepticism about nuclear power playing a much larger role in the world’s energy future is not the problem of waste disposal or the danger of reactor operator error, or the vulnerability to terrorist attack.

So I guess Al's not on too many anti-nuclearist buddy lists.

The first is economics; the current generation of reactors is expensive, take a long time to build, and only come in one size - extra large. In a time of great uncertainty over energy prices, utilities must count on great uncertainty in electricity demand - and that uncertainty causes them to strongly prefer smaller incremental additions to their generating capacity that are each less expensive and quicker to build than are large 1000 megawatt light water reactors. Newer, more scalable and affordable reactor designs may eventually become available, but not soon.

As much as I love Al, he's just plain wrong about the scalability of nuclear power production. Pebble Bed reactors are economical at sizes as "small" as 50 MWe. There are other widely-scalable technologies, too. Perhaps this is Gore's way to telling the industry to diversify a little. But his overall point on economics and energy demand is well taken. The coma that all non-petroleum investment fell into during the Reagan years was due to economic forces; mainly the conservatism of investors. The enormous demand destruction that took place after the OPEC embargo in '73 had the unintended consequence of breaking OPEC's monopoly -- and bringing the Bush/Cheney/Texarkana petro/political faction into power.

Secondly, if the world as a whole chose nuclear power as the option of choice to replace coal-fired generating plants, we would face a dramatic increase in the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Another serious concern, one that I consider to be the primary difficulty nuclear energy will face. Terrorism as a primary method of political action has become common. Yet there have been no instances of nuclear terrorism. It is not easy for NGO terrorist groups to acquire and process nuclear material of any kind; buying it on the clandestine arms market remains the easiest solution.

But the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and a world-wide effort to control terrorism and rogue states will be required for any energy regime. Whether nuclear material is or is not available, terrorism must be dealt with, not just waved as a red flag in the service of one's pet political causes. These are properly TWO problems, neither of which can be ignored. Timidity in building nuclear reactors will not reduce the motivation of the terrorists, and cheaper enrichment technology will soon allow even small countries access to nuclear material from low-grade ores, mineral mining, and even seawater.

I will end with another quote from Al Gore:

" ... I am not opposed to nuclear power ... "

Al said it, I believe it, and that settles it.

--p!

[Systematic Chaos]

5. I guess that makes Gore a f**king nutcase too?

:evilgrin:

[phantom power]

6. Well, my straw-poll suggests that 2/3 of us E/E participants are fucking nutcases.

I suppose it's possible.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. What kind of nutcase?

Edited because I am an idiot.

I haven't had sex in ... in a long time. Too much Peak Oil does that to the libido.

I guess that makes me a non-fucking nutcase.

With a hat full of ice cubes.

--p!
If you have a powerdown lasting more that four hours, seek prompt nuclear treatment.

[bananas]

8. The O'Pidgewidgeon No-Spin Zone - as bad as O'Reilly's No-Spin Zone

Funny how the pro-nukes sound so much like Republicans - I wonder which party they'll be voting for next year.

What I wrote:

The Keystone Center got a group of experts from all sides to see what they could agree on.
Here's who funded it - the nuclear power industry and a bunch of electric companies:

What P. wrote:

"Oops" is right. Bananas left out half the membership! Here's the rest of the players; there are plenty of anti-nuclearists, notably the UCS:

I said "funded" - and didn't leave anyone out.
I said "experts from all sides" participated.
Keep spinning - and claim you aren't - just like O'Reilly.

You even spin Al Gore like the Republicans did in 2000 - he's said a number of times that nuclear won't play a major role in solving global warming, and that he doesn't expect nuclear to be much more of a percentage than it is now.

[Dogmudgeon]

9. That's very fair and balanced of you

I refute your nonsense, and in return, you say I'm Bill O'Reilly.

Sounds like the usual.

--p!