New material soaks up nuclear waste

[bik0]

A Venus flytrap for nuclear waste

Published: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 - 16:38 in Physics & Chemistry
Not every object is food to a Venus flytrap. Like the carnivorous plant, a new material developed at Northwestern University permanently traps only its desired prey, the radioactive ion cesium, and not other harmless ions like sodium. The synthetic material, made from layers of a gallium, sulfur and antimony compound, is very selective. The Northwestern researchers found it to be extremely successful in removing cesium -- found in nuclear waste but very difficult to clean up -- from a sodium-heavy solution. (The solution had concentrations similar to those in real liquid nuclear waste.)

It is, in fact, cesium itself that triggers a structural change in the material, causing it to snap shut its pores, or windows, and trap the cesium ions within. The material sequesters 100 percent of the cesium ions from the solution while at the same time ignoring all the sodium ions.

The results are published online by the journal Nature Chemistry.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/01/26/a.venus.flytrap.nuclear.waste

[FiveGoodMen]

1. Interesting and undoubtedly useful.

But once you're done, you've still got a whole bunch of gamma-emitter do deal with.

IOW, it's nice they know how to sweep it up, but where are they going to put it?

[madokie]

2. Before I go read, How can they make a blanket statement like this without qualifiers

*The material sequesters 100 percent of the cesium ions from the solution while at the same time ignoring all the sodium ions.*
how much is doing what here?

I'll see what more they have to say on this but if that's it I'll be suspicious of the rest.

edit to add: Are these guys serious here? Fail

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[silverweb]

4. And *then* what do you do with it?

Is nuclear waste in a more compact, concentrated form no longer nuclear waste?

:shrug:

[Statistical]

5. Store it or transmute it.

One of the major issues with nuclear waste is it is a soup of short lived isotopes, long lived isotopes, anticides, extremely lethal gamma emitters, relatively harmless alpha emitters, etc.

Developing methods to separate and isolate the various isotopes is incredibly useful.

First it is useful because "spent" nuclear fuel is only about 3% used. If a cost effective method of separation was developed it would be far more effective to reprocess spent fuel. The same enriched uranium could go through a reactor a dozen times instead of just once.

Imagine if your car worked like that. You fueled it up and when gas gauged got down to only 97% full you dumped out all the rest of gas in the tank and refueled it.

The second area it is useful is transmutation. Via neutron emitter we can literally change isotopes from a long half life to a much shorter one. Nuclear waste is a mix off isotopes. Many have very short isotopes. Sr-90 with a half life of 30 years for example will be 99% inert within 300 years. While Tc99 has a halflife of 210,000 years.

Fuel could be placed in holding for couple hundred years to allow the more dangerous short half life isotopes to burn off. Then it could be seperated. Tc99 for example could be extracted and subject to nuetron bombardment. Tc99 picks up a neutron and becomes Tc100 which is incredibly unstable. It has a halflife of only 16 seconds. Thousands of tons of Tc99 which will last millions of years could be turned into Tc100 which decays into Ruthenium Ru100.

Nuclear transmutation is almost like magic. The ability to turn waste with half life of 210,000 years into one with half life of 16 seconds. However a key factor is the ability to separate waste.

[TheWraith]

8. Not to mention, some isotopes have other uses.

For instance, tritium is a byproduct of nuclear fission which is used commercially to produce self-powered lighting, such as emergency exit signs, illuminated watch dials, things like that. Other isotopes are often used in things like X-ray imaging or radiation therapy.

[silverweb]

16. Very helpful answer. Thanks.

The concept of nuclear waste hanging around an inhabited planet still makes me very nervous. With such separation/sequestration techniques, the idea of jettisoning what we don't want/need here into the sun doesn't sound quite so far fetched, though.

[wtmusic]

18. There is kind of a deal-breaker issue with that

and that is if a spacecraft carrying waste were to crash back to earth we'd be worse off than when we started. Crashes are not that infrequent.

[silverweb]

23. No room at all for an "oops," is there?

I really don't like the idea of messing with nuclear energy at all. There are so many other options that are much safer and less problematic, and we could just phase nuclear energy out altogether and be done with it.

[Statistical]

19. The eventual goal would be a 99% reduction in nuclear waste.

In a traditional reactor spent fuel is only about 3% fissioned when it is "spent".

The reason it is spent is some of these long lived isotopes are massive neutron blockers. Their large neutron cross section blocks thermal nuetrons. As the amount of long lived isotopes build up this interferes with the fission of uranium (and generation of heat and thus electricity) in the reactor.

So when fuel is "spent" it simply means the % of neutron blockers is so high it becomes difficult to sustain nuclear fission at levels that can produce power.

Future reactors will likely not used fixed fuel. Something like a molten salt reactor will have nuclear fuel mixed with salt which is liquified by the heat of nuclear fission.

The liquified salt could pass out of reaction chamber into a refining chamber. Think of it like oil filter on your car but one that seperates out long lived fission products.

Those long lived isotopes then could undergo fast neutron bombardment to transmute them into isotopes which decay much faster.

The combination of using greater percentage of original fuel and transmuting long lived isotopes could massive reduce the length of time before waste decays to harmless elements as well as the amount of waste.

Current U-235 fission products via thermal neutrons

Half life length % Yield
<1 year
Less than 1 year ~65%
1 to 100 years ~15%
200K to 300K yrs ~6%
1.5mil+ years ~13%

Transmuting Tc99 would eliminate 6% of the long lived isotopes.
Leaving a relatively tiny amount of waste which is very long lived
Cs-135, Pd-107, I-129 these isotopes despite having very long halflives are actually relatively harmless. They can be sealed in glass and are "inmobile" = tends not to move in air,water, earth.

So isotope separation, transmutation, and future reactor designes (like molten salt Gen 4 reactor) could substantially simplify the waste disposal question.

[silverweb]

25. Very informative -- but why bother?

There's no room for error and consequences of an accident are dire. I just can't warm up to the idea of nuclear energy and messing with nuclear waste at all, especially when we have much safer energy options available.

[Statistical]

26. Well I won't hold it against you.

Variable output power sources (wind, solar, tidal) can never provide baseload power.

What happens when 10,000 MW of power is demanded by the grid but only 9,000 MW are being produced by wind or solar?

I will tell you what happens. A power utility will like a coal or natural gas furnace.

Electrical power is dispatchable meaning it is a resource which can not effectively or cheaply stored. Ever second of every day we produce exactly the amount of power neded.

Demand is variable. You can't match variable demand with variable source. You need something to "fill in the gap". It will be fossil fuels.

We can massively build out renewable. Going from 2% of generation to 20%-30% however something will need to provide baseload and something will need to provide load following.

The reality is we will still burn some fossil fuels. A mixture of 60% nuclear, 30% renewable, and 10% high efficiency natural gas is likely the best we can achieve with current technology.

A vote against nuclear is a vote for coal. People like to say otherwise but history shows us the truth. Nuclear power plant growth stopped in late 70s.

Did demand for power stop growing? No
Did we fill that demand with wind, solar, tidal? Sadly no.

Instead of building couple hundred more nuclear power plants we built 870 new coal plants.
Yup we replaced growing nuclear industry with a growing coal one.

A single coal plant burns 3.2 million TONS of coal a year. Multiply that by 870 new plants and 30+ years. That is 87 BILLION tons of coal. It literally is a mountain of coal and it all went into the atmosphere. That is the cost of not going nuclear.

[kristopher]

27. That is false.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because
they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed
to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force
governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand
analytic scrutiny.

[Statistical]

28. Nothing in there indicates how wind would provide baseload.

Nor does it indicate how/why wind plants would compete for base load power.

Basload power tends to be the utterly lowest cost rate ranging from 0.02 per kwh to 0.03 on average.

Load following power collects feed in rates double that.
Also there are penalties for failing to meet baseload obligations. Not only that in a baseload contract
power generators are fined for exceeding baseload feed in. So what happens in a wind farm (or collection of wind farms) secures via wholesale auction a baseload contract for say 10,000 MW. Now the wind if blowing harder and the farm generates 12,000. The farm is going to shunt (waste) 20% of its power to meet the contract when it is already getting bottom of barrel pricing. Now later the farm is only producing 9,000 MW so it will be required to pay a peaking plant an insane tarriff to make up the diference.

Sure wind could be used as a baseload if you want to massively over build capacity, burn off a lot of power, and pay massive amounts of money to peaking plants (who are burning natural gas BTW).

It just doesn't make economic sense to use wind for baseload.

Not when there is GW of load following capacity to replace first. Not a single wind farm or solar plant in the US is providing baseload power. Not one.



Finally wind is variable and if it falls short

[kristopher]

29. You don't understand the issue and are just repeating nuclear industry propaganda

In other posts (the ones on China) I've given you the explanation of why your reasoning is faulty. You can't respond to the specifics of the arguments presented against nuclear because you don't understand the issue. Therefore you are forced to fall back on basic descriptions of the attributes of a centralized thermal grid without being able to relate those attributes to the technologies going forward. Your objections, such as the contractual obligations that have evolved around a central thermal system, have absolutely nothing to do with the technologies we should select to meet our energy needs going forward.

However these three papers have a great deal to do with the meat of the issue. It is pathetic that you keep arguing so vociferously for something you have no grasp of.

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181 Issue Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Pages 31 - 220

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Alexey B. Nesterenko a , Vassily B. Nesterenko a ,† and Alexey V. Yablokov b
a
Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), Minsk, Belarus b Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Address for correspondence: Alexey V. Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospect 33, Office 319, 119071 Moscow,
Russia. Voice: [phone]; fax: [phone]. [e-mail]
†Deceased


ABSTRACT

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former.

Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia.

Accelerated aging is one of the well-known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.

This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations.

Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination.

Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.

The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and 2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I-131 and Cs-137 radioisotope doses to which populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre- and post-Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High levels of Te-132, Ru-103, Ru-106, and Cs-134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.

A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups.

From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

[Nederland]

30. Question

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%).

I wonder what the statistics would be for wind capacity and solar capacity. Do you know?

[kristopher]

31. Did you read the paper?

Apparently not.

[Nederland]

32. Yes I did

The information I'm looking for was not in it. Lovins lists the average shutdown percentages for coal, nuclear and gas, as well as the unexpected shutdown numbers for these. The only numbers Lovins offers up for wind is this:

Anyhow, capacity factor averaged 35–37% for 2004–08 U.S. wind projects, is typically around 30–40% in good sites, and exceeds 50% in the best sites.

But "capacity factor" is not the same as planned and unplanned shutdown percentages. As far as I can tell, Lovins does absolutely nothing to explain why Brand is wrong about wind being unable to provide baseload power. If anything, the numbers tend to back up Brand's assertions. If nuclear power only goes down in an unplanned fashion 2.5% of the time, how can it be replaced by a power source that goes down in an unplanned fashion 60%-70% of the time?

[kristopher]

33. Are you being deliberately obtuse again?

The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent.

The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency.

The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

All of that was in the paper.

[Nederland]

35. You don't get it

You are making the same mistake that Lovin's makes. There is a difference between capacity factor and intermittency. They are not the same thing. The problem with wind is not it's low capacity factor. The problem with wind is its high intermittency. High intermittency is what makes wind problematic once its percentage of the grid gets above 20%. Let's walk through a simple example slowly so you can understand the problem:

Consider a grid that looks like this (Plant Type, Grid Percentage, Unplanned Outage Percentage):

Coal, 50%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 20%, 2.5%
Gas, 25%, 2.8%
Wind, 5%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this grid is 6.8%.

Now let's see what happens when you increase the percentage of power supplied by wind:

Coal, 40%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 10%, 2.5%
Gas, 15%, 2.8%
Wind, 35%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this wind heavy grid is 26.85%.

THAT'S the problem. Get it?

[kristopher]

36. I get it perfectly, you are making the same false argument.

You are just phrasing it differently. I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

Energy Environ. Sci., 2009, 2, 148 - 173, DOI: 10.1039/b809990c
Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security

Mark Z. Jacobson

This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition.

Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered. The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85.

Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85.

Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss.

The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs.

The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

For specificity, this review of these four notions focuses on the nuclear chapter of Stewart
Brand’s 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline, which encapsulates similar views widely expressed
and cross-cited by organizations and individuals advocating expansion of nuclear power. It’s
therefore timely to subject them to closer scrutiny than they have received in most public media.

This review relies chiefly on five papers, which I gave Brand over the past few years but on
which he has been unwilling to engage in substantive discussion. They document6 why
expanding nuclear power is uneconomic, is unnecessary, is not undergoing the claimed
renaissance in the global marketplace (because it fails the basic test of cost-effectiveness ever
more robustly), and, most importantly, will reduce and retard climate protection. That’s
because—the empirical cost and installation data show—new nuclear power is so costly and
slow that, based on empirical U.S. market data, it will save about 2–20 times less carbon per
dollar, and about 20–40 times less carbon per year, than investing instead in the market
winners—efficient use of electricity and what The Economist calls “micropower,”...


The “baseload” myth

Brand rejects the most important and successful renewable sources of electricity for one key
reason stated on p. 80 and p. 101. On p. 80, he quotes novelist and author Gwyneth Cravens’s
definition of “baseload” power as “the minimum amount of proven, consistent, around-the-clock,
rain-or-shine power that utilities must supply to meet the demands of their millions of
customers.”21 (Thus it describes a pattern of aggregated customer demand.) Two sentences
later, he asserts: “So far comes from only three sources: fossil fuels, hydro, and
nuclear.” Two paragraphs later, he explains this dramatic leap from a description of demand to a
restriction of supply: “Wind and solar, desirable as they are, aren’t part of baseload because they
are intermittent—productive only when the wind blows or the sun shines. If some sort of massive
energy storage is devised, then they can participate in baseload; without it, they remain
supplemental, usually to gas-fired plants.”

That widely heard claim is fallacious. The manifest need for some amount of steady, reliable
power is met by generating plants collectively, not individually. That is, reliability is a statistic-
al attribute of all the plants on the grid combined. If steady 24/7 operation or operation at any
desired moment were instead a required capability of each individual power plant, then the grid
couldn’t meet modern needs, because no kind of power plant is perfectly reliable. For example,
in the U.S. during 2003–07, coal capacity was shut down an average of 12.3% of the time (4.2%
without warning); nuclear, 10.6% (2.5%); gas-fired, 11.8% (2.8%). Worldwide through 2008,
nuclear units were unexpectedly unable to produce 6.4% of their energy output.26 This inherent
intermittency of nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants requires many different plants to back
each other up through the grid. This has been utility operators’ strategy for reliable supply
throughout the industry’s history. Every utility operator knows that power plants provide energy
to the grid, which serves load. The simplistic mental model of one plant serving one load is valid
only on a very small desert island. The standard remedy for failed plants is other interconnected
plants that are working—not “some sort of massive energy storage devised.”

Modern solar and wind power are more technically reliable than coal and nuclear plants; their
technical failure rates are typically around 1–2%. However, they are also variable resources
because their output depends on local weather, forecastable days in advance with fair accuracy
and an hour ahead with impressive precision. But their inherent variability can be managed by
proper resource choice, siting, and operation. Weather affects different renewable resources
differently; for example, storms are good for small hydro and often for windpower, while flat
calm weather is bad for them but good for solar power. Weather is also different in different
places: across a few hundred miles, windpower is scarcely correlated, so weather risks can be
diversified. A Stanford study found that properly interconnecting at least ten windfarms can
enable an average of one-third of their output to provide firm baseload power. Similarly, within
each of the three power pools from Texas to the Canadian border, combining uncorrelated
windfarm sites can reduce required wind capacity by more than half for the same firm output,
thereby yielding fewer needed turbines, far fewer zero-output hours, and easier integration.

A broader assessment of reliability tends not to favor nuclear power. Of all 132 U.S. nuclear
plants built—just over half of the 253 originally ordered—21% were permanently and
prematurely closed due to reliability or cost problems. Another 27% have completely failed for a
year or more at least once. The surviving U.S. nuclear plants have lately averaged ~90% of their
full-load full-time potential—a major improvement31 for which the industry deserves much
credit—but they are still not fully dependable. Even reliably-running nuclear plants must shut
down, on average, for ~39 days every ~17 months for refueling and maintenance. Unexpected
failures occur too, shutting down upwards of a billion watts in milliseconds, often for weeks to
months. Solar cells and windpower don’t fail so ungracefully.

Power plants can fail for reasons other than mechanical breakdown, and those reasons can affect
many plants at once. As France and Japan have learned to their cost, heavily nuclear-dependent
regions are particularly at risk because drought, earthquake, a serious safety problem, or a
terrorist incident could close many plants simultaneously. And nuclear power plants have a
unique further disadvantage: for neutron-physics reasons, they can’t quickly restart after an
emergency shutdown, such as occurs automatically in a grid power failure...

From Amory Lovins
Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings

Journal or Magazine Article, 2009

Available for download: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/Library/2009-09_FourNuclearMyths

Some nuclear-power advocates claim that wind and solar power can’t provide much if any reliable power because they’re not “baseload,” that they use too much land, that all energy options including new nuclear build are needed to combat climate change, and that nuclear power’s economics don’t matter because climate change will force governments to dictate energy choices and pay for whatever is necessary. None of these claims can withstand analytic scrutiny.



******************************************

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181 Issue Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Pages 31 - 220

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Alexey B. Nesterenko a , Vassily B. Nesterenko a ,† and Alexey V. Yablokov b
a
Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), Minsk, Belarus b Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Address for correspondence: Alexey V. Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospect 33, Office 319, 119071 Moscow,
Russia. Voice: [phone]; fax: [phone]. [e-mail]
†Deceased


ABSTRACT

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former.

Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia.

Accelerated aging is one of the well-known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.

This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations.

Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination.

Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.

The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and 2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I-131 and Cs-137 radioisotope doses to which populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre- and post-Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High levels of Te-132, Ru-103, Ru-106, and Cs-134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.

A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups.

From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

[Nederland]

37. Interesting

You seem to place a great deal of faith in peer reviewed papers.

I would therefore point out the following: the Lovin's article you cite that addresses the "baseload myth" is NOT peer reviewed.

However, as Lovins points out:

Public discussions of nuclear power, and a surprising number of articles in peer-reviewed
journals, are increasingly based on four notions unfounded in fact or logic: that

1. variable renewable sources of electricity (windpower and photovoltaics) can provide little
or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able to run all the time;
2. those renewable sources require such enormous amounts of land, hundreds of times more
than nuclear power does, that they’re environmentally unacceptable;
3. all options, including nuclear power, are needed to combat climate change; and
4. nuclear power’s economics matter little because governments must use it anyway to
protect the climate.

So, we have numerous peer reviewed articles claiming that renewables can provide little or no reliable electricity because they are not “baseload”—able, and we have a non-peer reviewed commentary saying all those peer review articles are wrong.

Who are you going to believe?

:rofl:

[kristopher]

38. Still trying to avoid the challenge...

They set a certain minimum level of credibility and that applies to the two OTHER papers I posted. While that specific paper by Lovins might or might not have gone through peer review, it is based on a very very well established and proven body of work going back 35 years.

If you can answer the challenges I presented you please do so. If not...

[Nederland]

39. Stop changing the subject

My original post addressed Lovins ridiculous claims about baseload power. I know that you would prefer to talk about ten things at once in order to avoid being pinned down and proven wrong on a single issue, but I think it is more sensible to cover one thing at a time. Given that, only one of the papers you posted is relevant.

If you are conceding your argument concerning baseload power, I'll be happy to discuss something else.

[kristopher]

41. You were given the answer, YOU are the one trying to divert the discussion

Are you being deliberately obtuse again?

The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent.

The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency.

The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

All of that was in the paper.

You are making the same mistake that Lovin's makes. There is a difference between capacity factor and intermittency. They are not the same thing. The problem with wind is not it's low capacity factor. The problem with wind is its high intermittency. High intermittency is what makes wind problematic once its percentage of the grid gets above 20%. Let's walk through a simple example slowly so you can understand the problem:

Consider a grid that looks like this (Plant Type, Grid Percentage, Unplanned Outage Percentage):

Coal, 50%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 20%, 2.5%
Gas, 25%, 2.8%
Wind, 5%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this grid is 6.8%.

Now let's see what happens when you increase the percentage of power supplied by wind:

Coal, 40%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 10%, 2.5%
Gas, 15%, 2.8%
Wind, 35%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this wind heavy grid is 26.85%.
THAT'S the problem. Get it?

I get it perfectly, you are making the same false argument.
You are just phrasing it differently. I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.

Intermittency is the same thing as "unplanned outages" and intrinsically related to "capacity factor". So I have to repeat: Are you being deliberately obtuse again?
The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent. The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency. The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.

[Nederland]

42. I already explained why you are wrong

You just refuse to see what is in front of your face.

[kristopher]

43. No you just added some made up numbers and made an inappropriate word subsitution.

Intermittency is the same thing as "unplanned outages" and intrinsically related to "capacity factor". So I have to repeat: Are you being deliberately obtuse again?

The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent. The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency. The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.


I take it by your refusal to explain WHY your rephrasing isn't addressed by networking power sources to be an acknowledgment that you can't explain it.

I further presume that you have no sources that refute Jacobson's analysis with a better one.

[Nederland]

44. Peer Reviewed?

Where? I haven't seen anything peer reviewed regarding the baseload power issue.

[kristopher]

45. Are you seriously claiming you are trying to have a legitimate discussion?

The peer reviewed basis of Lovins' article is extremely well established. If you had any interest in a discussion you'd answer the challenge posed to you. You have no such interest, you are only interesting in being obnoxious.

If you reject Lovins as a source just go to google scholar and google "wind baseload" and let us know how many peer reviewed articles you find that support your absurd criticism of what Lovins wrote.

The reason the glow-in-the-dark crowd hates Lovins isn't that his work is shoddy or inaccurate, it is that he writes a lot of his material to enable the average person to gain a full understanding of the important issues behind the energy decisions that are being forced on the public by the huge funds of the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.

Google it - wind baseload

http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&ned=us&q=&tab=ws

[Nederland]

46. Thanks

I'm glad to see you admit that you haven't posted any links to peer reviewed papers that support Lovins' article.

[kristopher]

47. Poor little feller... Doesn't even know how to use google.

He thinks that he can extend the tactics he uses for climate denier to energy...

It is obvious to everyone you're blowing smoke.

[Nederland]

48. Really?

Tell me again what post of yours contained a link to a peer reviewed study that supports Lovins' claim?

I must have missed it...

[kristopher]

49. I'm not humoring your crap - this summarizes where you started trying to divert the discussion

No you just added some made up numbers and made an inappropriate word substitution.

Intermittency is the same thing as "unplanned outages" and intrinsically related to "capacity factor". So I have to repeat: Are you being deliberately obtuse again?

The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent. The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency. The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.


I take it by your refusal to explain WHY your rephrasing isn't addressed by networking power sources to be an acknowledgment that you can't explain it.

I further presume that you have no sources that refute Jacobson's analysis with a better one.

[Nederland]

53. Still ducking the issue are we?

Come on, where is that post where you linked to a peer reviewed study supporting Lovins' baseload power argument?

:rofl:

[kristopher]

51. You want to see how it is really done.

See posts 22 and 24 this thread.

[Nederland]

52. I know how to use it, do you?

Here is the results from your recommended Google Scholar search:

http://www.sage.wisc.edu/pubs/articles/F-L/Holloway/Denholm_es049946p.pdf

The combination of wind energy generation and energy storage can produce a source of electricity that is functionally equivalent to a baseload coal or nuclear power plant.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2W-4K4WN1R-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1192647266&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=4c682a2e9f9fd130cc4815394e56b982

The economic viability of producing baseload wind energy was explored using a cost-optimization model to simulate two competing systems: wind energy supplemented by simple- and combined cycle natural gas turbines (“wind+gas”), and wind energy supplemented by compressed air energy storage (“wind+CAES”).

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122625997/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

This paper presents a novel strategy for developing wind power in large-scale (multi-GW) wind farms in China. It involves combining oversized wind farms, large-scale electrical storage and long-distance transmission lines to deliver 'baseload wind power' to distant electricity demand centers.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V4S-4GY870M-1&_user=10&_coverDate=07%2F31%2F2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1192653730&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0615d9bc1b84bce3dc3461f3b46b2807

A completely renewable baseload electricity generation system is proposed by combining wind energy, compressed air energy storage, and biomass gasification.


Every single one of these peer reviewed papers support Brand's assertion that wind power needs to have storage in order to function as baseload power. The only exception was this paper:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/winds_distributed_jamc.pdf

And even it found that even when you interconnect wind farms, on average only 33% of yearly-averaged wind power can be used as reliable, baseload electric power.

Keep on giving me suggestions on how to prove you are wrong... :rofl:

[kristopher]

54. That does prove you wrong - it also proves you aren't able to understand the topic.

The GRID isn't JUST WIND power and as Lovins specifies, the GRID is the answer to the problem - not specifically storage designed in conjunction with wind. The network is the answer - get it; exactly as Lovins described. Those papers are studies designed around narrow examples in order to provide quantitative data from which we can extrapolate the larger picture. Biologist Brand's assertion is that renewable energy cannot transition us away from fossil fuels and that we need nuclear. That is the argument that Lovins takes on and destroys.

Here is the conversation we are having ONE MORE TIME since you can't seem to focus:

I wrote:

The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent.

The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency.

The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

All of that was in the paper.
________________________________________________________________________________________


You wrote"
You are making the same mistake that Lovin's makes. There is a difference between capacity factor and intermittency. They are not the same thing. The problem with wind is not it's low capacity factor. The problem with wind is its high intermittency. High intermittency is what makes wind problematic once its percentage of the grid gets above 20%. Let's walk through a simple example slowly so you can understand the problem:

Consider a grid that looks like this (Plant Type, Grid Percentage, Unplanned Outage Percentage):

Coal, 50%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 20%, 2.5%
Gas, 25%, 2.8%
Wind, 5%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this grid is 6.8%.

Now let's see what happens when you increase the percentage of power supplied by wind:

Coal, 40%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 10%, 2.5%
Gas, 15%, 2.8%
Wind, 35%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this wind heavy grid is 26.85%.
THAT'S the problem. Get it?
___________________________________________________________________________________________

I wrote:
I get it perfectly, you are making the same false argument.
You are just phrasing it differently. I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.


Intermittency is the same thing as "unplanned outages" and intrinsically related to "capacity factor". So I have to repeat: Are you being deliberately obtuse again?
The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent. The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency. The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.

____________________________________________________________________________________________


NOW you are trying to say Brand's right because he said wind needs storage??????????

Give it a break. You cannot support Brand's contention that renewables cannot do the job more economically, more rapidly and with far less environmental impact than nuclear.

You cannot support it...
You cannot support it because...
You cannot support it because it is false!

[Nederland]

55. Did you know

That if you cut and paste something that is wrong, it's still wrong?

BTW, what is the post number where you supplied a link to a peer reviewed study supporting Lovins' argument? I still can't find it...

:rofl:

[kristopher]

56. I get it; you think you're with KKKarl in that "alternate reality" where the facts don't matter

Why do we need nuclear power?

What is it that you assert a distributed renewable grid cannot do, AND do more quickly, more cheaply, and with a far smaller environmental footprint than nuclear.

That is Brand's assertion. that is what Lovins' article shows to be wrong.

Continuing to divert the topic isn't going to change the underlying fact that Brand's conclusion is completely unsupportable.

[Nederland]

57. Trying again to change the subject?

Please Kristopher, where is that post where you supplied a link to a peer reviewed study supporting Lovins' argument? I still can't find it...

[kristopher]

58. The subject is

Here is the conversation we are having ONE MORE TIME since you can't seem to focus:

I wrote:

The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent.

The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency.

The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

All of that was in the paper.
________________________________________________________________________________________


You wrote"
You are making the same mistake that Lovin's makes. There is a difference between capacity factor and intermittency. They are not the same thing. The problem with wind is not it's low capacity factor. The problem with wind is its high intermittency. High intermittency is what makes wind problematic once its percentage of the grid gets above 20%. Let's walk through a simple example slowly so you can understand the problem:

Consider a grid that looks like this (Plant Type, Grid Percentage, Unplanned Outage Percentage):

Coal, 50%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 20%, 2.5%
Gas, 25%, 2.8%
Wind, 5%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this grid is 6.8%.

Now let's see what happens when you increase the percentage of power supplied by wind:

Coal, 40%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 10%, 2.5%
Gas, 15%, 2.8%
Wind, 35%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this wind heavy grid is 26.85%.
THAT'S the problem. Get it?
___________________________________________________________________________________________

I wrote:
I get it perfectly, you are making the same false argument.
You are just phrasing it differently. I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.


Intermittency is the same thing as "unplanned outages" and intrinsically related to "capacity factor". So I have to repeat: Are you being deliberately obtuse again?
The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent. The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency. The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The GRID isn't JUST WIND power and as Lovins specifies, the GRID is the answer to the problem - not specifically storage designed in conjunction with wind. The network is the answer - get it; exactly as Lovins described. Those peer reviewed papers you googled are studies designed around narrow examples in order to provide quantitative data from which we can extrapolate the larger picture. Biologist Brand's assertion is that renewable energy cannot transition us away from fossil fuels and that we need nuclear. That is the argument that Lovins takes on and destroys.

NOW you are trying to say Brand's right because he said wind needs storage??????????

Give it a break. You cannot support Brand's contention that renewables cannot do the job more economically, more rapidly and with far less environmental impact than nuclear.

You cannot support it...
You cannot support it because...
You cannot support it because it is false!

[Nederland]

59. That is not the subject

The subject is that you claimed your assertions were backed up by peer reviewed papers. You made that claim first in post 36 where you wrote:

I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

This statement is a lie. You have never provided peer reviewed resources to back up the Lovins' claims regarding renewables providing baseload power without some form of storage.

As a result, I suggest you follow your own advice either provide a peer reviewed article that backs up your claims or piss off.

[kristopher]

60. Poor little feller keeps trying the climate denier tactics

Sure it's the subject - the record is right there for all to see. You are just trying to divert the subject because you cannot meet the challenge given you and you KNOW you are getting ready to get spanked if you try.

Here is the conversation we are having ONE MORE TIME since you can't seem to focus:

I wrote:

The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent.

The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency.

The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

All of that was in the paper.
________________________________________________________________________________________


You wrote"
You are making the same mistake that Lovin's makes. There is a difference between capacity factor and intermittency. They are not the same thing. The problem with wind is not it's low capacity factor. The problem with wind is its high intermittency. High intermittency is what makes wind problematic once its percentage of the grid gets above 20%. Let's walk through a simple example slowly so you can understand the problem:

Consider a grid that looks like this (Plant Type, Grid Percentage, Unplanned Outage Percentage):

Coal, 50%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 20%, 2.5%
Gas, 25%, 2.8%
Wind, 5%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this grid is 6.8%.

Now let's see what happens when you increase the percentage of power supplied by wind:

Coal, 40%, 4.2%
Nuclear, 10%, 2.5%
Gas, 15%, 2.8%
Wind, 35%, 70%

The aggregate unplanned outage percentage of this wind heavy grid is 26.85%.
THAT'S the problem. Get it?
___________________________________________________________________________________________

I wrote:
I get it perfectly, you are making the same false argument.
You are just phrasing it differently. I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.


Intermittency is the same thing as "unplanned outages" and intrinsically related to "capacity factor". So I have to repeat: Are you being deliberately obtuse again?
The point of quoting the shutdown percentages is to demonstrate a point - that ALL generation is intermittent. The use of a GRID is the answer to intermittency. The promotion of the idea that individual generating sources must have high capacity factors is based on analysis that disregards this aspect of the grids function and it is therefore an irrelevant consideration WHEN CONSIDERING THE POTENTIAL OF TECHNOLOGIES TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.

It is the AGGREGATION and DISTRIBUTION of GENERATION that are the key elements that determine a grid's reliability.

I've provided peer reviewed resources to document my assertions time and again, and it is now time for you to either do the same or piss off.

I challenge you to show WHY your argument about the percentage of "unplanned outage" (you are mischaracterizing the performance characteristic with this name attached to that percentage) is relevant to the ability of a RENEWABLE GRID to meet our needs.

I also challenge you to support your claims for nuclear by providing a peer reviewed comparative, comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics related to selecting a strategy for moving away from fossil fuels.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

The GRID isn't JUST WIND power and as Lovins specifies, the GRID is the answer to the problem - not specifically storage designed in conjunction with wind. The network is the answer - get it; exactly as Lovins described. Those peer reviewed papers you googled are studies designed around narrow examples in order to provide quantitative data from which we can extrapolate the larger picture. Biologist Brand's assertion is that renewable energy cannot transition us away from fossil fuels and that we need nuclear. That is the argument that Lovins takes on and destroys.

NOW you are trying to say Brand's right because he said wind needs storage??????????

Give it a break. You cannot support Brand's contention that renewables cannot do the job more economically, more rapidly and with far less environmental impact than nuclear.

You cannot support it...
You cannot support it because...
You cannot support it because it is false!

[Name removed]

61. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[kristopher]

20. Reprocessing costs WAAAAY too much energy.

With once through reactors it takes 1 unit of energy to get a return of about 15 units of energy.

Reprocessing is so energy intensive it only yields 5 units for 1 unit of input - that SUCKS.

Solar yields between 20-40X the input while *current generation wind is between 50-50X the input, and both are climbing.

Whenever you track down these "great fixes" offered by nuclear power you'll ALWAYS find there is corresponding negative that defeats the alleged "fix".

[wtmusic]

6. Still nuclear waste

but very compact. A cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter is enough to provide power for a family of four for twenty years.

How much coal ash do you think is produced in performing the same feat?

[madokie]

7. I'd like to see where you get this info from

Not that spot but where its written that 'A cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter is enough to provide power for a family of four for twenty years.' It's not so much I doubt you, its that I find that hard to believe.

[wtmusic]

9. It is hard to believe, but it's true.

Why the French Like Nuclear Energy

"French technocrats had never thought that the waste issue would be much of a problem. From the beginning the French had been recycling their nuclear waste, reclaiming the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricating new fuel elements. This not only gave energy, it reduced the volume and longevity of French radioactive waste. The volume of the ultimate high-level waste was indeed very small: the contribution of a family of four using electricity for 20 years is a glass cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter. It was assumed that this high-level waste would be buried in underground geological storage and in the 80s French engineers began digging exploratory holes in France's rural regions."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html

That is high-level waste, and I (often) have it pointed out to me that there's low-level waste which has to be dealt with as well. But what's undeniable is the waste created from nuclear fuel is extremely compact for the amount of power that it delivers.

[madokie]

11. I've got my suspicions

that the mafia is disposing of the French's hottest nuclear waste after reading about them having sunk a couple ships of the stuff that we know of. No telling how many has come before or for that matter after we found that out.

To me it matters not so much how compact it is, it matters only that its there and there is no safe viable place to store it. Thats what worries me. We have a responsibility to make sure that future civilization don' t come into contact with this stuff until they've at least had a chance to figure it out. I mean what the fuck. We can kill ourselves off with co2 and the world can rebound pretty fast, not so sure about with nuclear though. It kinda sounds irresponsible to me to possibly sabotage a civilization coming behind us and don't think for a minute that won't be the case as the stuff we've found has shown us that there has been many before us. They''ve all died of, or something happens, out of their control or what ever, but they die off and thousands of years later we're finding some of the artifacts now to prove that. Nuclear energy being safe is the biggest lie ever perpetrated on humans ever. Never before has there been anything, that we've found evidence of, that compares to the devastation that our present foray into the use of nuclear for weapons and our electrical energy have the potential to bring. I'll fight nuclear energy until they have a solid, viable, safe way to deal with the leftovers. Period

[wtmusic]

13. You need to be afraid of the people, not the technology.

The technology is extremely safe. The people who deal with it need to be watched like hawks, but that's been the case with everything that's potentially dangerous, and there's a lot besides nuclear waste.

Long-term nuclear waste is not some drippy, gooey stuff that seeps into rocks and groundwater - it is melted into glass pellets. Even if it would come into contact with water, as much would be transferred to the water as is glass from the glass you're drinking from. Nada.

As far as devastation, smoke from coal plants kills far more people every day than nuclear power has killed in the last fifty years.

Most people are afraid of nuclear power not because of what they know, but what they don't know.

[madokie]

15. Theres nothing safe nor clean about nuclear energy

repeating to me the same canards as I've been hearing for 40 some odd years does not change a thing. I didn't buy it then and I'm not buying it now.

Actually all its done is reinforce what I've thought all along. The people are not to be trusted and if they can't be trusted how can you even suggest that nuclear energy is safe. Check out whats happening in Fallejah sometime and tell me that there is no deaths from nuke energy, its happening right here in America too. Check out the cancers rates down wind from nuke plants, especially three mile island or what it's done to the Navajos, Hanford and on and on. The only reason you can even suggest that no one is dying is because the nuke industry denies it but that doesn't make it true. Nuclear energy is neither safe nor clean. Not one thing about it is.

This is one nasty place right here and humans will be dealing with this forever in one shape or form, if not forever then a damn long long time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

[wtmusic]

22. Nuclear energy is 300 TIMES safer than coal on a deaths/TWh scale

so OK, if you want to consider nuclear as being unsafe then you're undoubtedly far more concerned about coal, which has caused about 15 deaths in the US since you posted - or even rooftop solar (about 12 times more dangerous than nuclear):

"Rooftop solar is several times more dangerous than nuclear power and wind power. It is still much safer than coal and oil, because those have a lot of air pollution deaths.

Rooftop solar can be safer <0.44 up to 0.83 death per twh each year). If the rooftop solar is part of the shingle so you do not put the roof up more than once and do not increase maintenance then that is ok too. Or if you had a robotic system of installation.[br />
World average for coal is about 161 deaths per TWh.
In the USA about 30,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 2000 TWh.
15 deaths per TWh.
In China about 500,000 deaths/year from coal pollution from 1800 TWh.
278 deaths per TWh.

Wind power proponent and author Paul Gipe estimated in Wind Energy Comes of Age that the mortality rate for wind power from 1980–1994 was 0.4 deaths per terawatt-hour. Paul Gipe's estimate as of end 2000 was 0.15 deaths per TWh, a decline attributed to greater total cumulative generation.

Hydroelectric power was found to to have a fatality rate of 0.10 per TWh (883 fatalities for every TW·yr) in the period 1969–1996

Nuclear power is about 0.04 deaths/TWh."

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

When you say you're suspicious, that you don't buy it, etc. etc. fine - but realize these emotions are not based on fact.

[kristopher]

24. Episode 2794 of Nuclear Energy Institute Proganda theater brought to you by wtmusic

OK first, I refuse to dignify this claptrap you keep posting with the term "analysis". It is pure misinformation designed as propaganda for the nuclear industry.

1) The number of nuclear fatalities is not 0.04/TWh. If we go to the original source (ExternE 1995) it is 0.69/TWh. That represents 0.04/TWh in OCCUPATIONAL fatalities AND 0.65/TWh in PUBLIC fatalities.

2) The number of wind fatalities is not 0.4/TWh nor is it 0.15/TWh. Again going to the original source (Gipe, 2006, 2009) we find that the actual number as of 2009 is 0.07/TWh. That includes ALL KNOWN FATALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH WIND including incidents that strain credulity to attribute them to the technology. Also, there is a very strong case to be made for the position that this already low number hugely exaggerates the actual risks associated with the wind industry.

3) The number of deaths cited for solar has no basis in the solar industry - instead the number is a wild ass guess based on an airheaded agglomeration of information about the death rate for roofers, deaths from all falls in the construction industry, and a whole host of shoddy assumptions about the amount of electricity actually produced by solar.

4) One of the most significant issues, however, is the typical glossing over of what deaths are attributable to nuclear.
Quote "The World Health Organization study in 2005 indicated that 50 people died to that point as a direct result of Chernobyl. 4000 people may eventually die earlier as a result of Chernobyl, but those deaths would be more than 20 years after the fact and the cause and effect becomes more tenuous."

Compare to this 2009 peer reviewed study.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1181 Issue Chernobyl
Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Pages 31 - 220

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Alexey B. Nesterenko a , Vassily B. Nesterenko a ,† and Alexey V. Yablokov b
a
Institute of Radiation Safety (BELRAD), Minsk, Belarus b Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Address for correspondence: Alexey V. Yablokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Leninsky Prospect 33, Office 319, 119071 Moscow,
Russia. Voice: [phone]; fax: [phone]. [e-mail]
†Deceased


ABSTRACT

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl.

Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former.

Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia.

Accelerated aging is one of the well-known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.

This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations.

Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination.

Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.

The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and 2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I-131 and Cs-137 radioisotope doses to which populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre- and post-Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High levels of Te-132, Ru-103, Ru-106, and Cs-134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from Cs-137, Sr-90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.

A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups.

From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

The continued lies and misinformation of the nuclear industry are enough to make any ethical person want to vomit.

[kristopher]

34. Strange, no reply ...

[kristopher]

50. Strange, still no reply.

[silverweb]

17. Good points. Thanks.

I still have reservations about nukes, but see my post #16 above.

[Statistical]

10. It makes sense. Here is why.

Nuclear fuel is incredibly energy dense.

Nuclear reactor is 1000MW. Load factor (uptime) in US is about 95%.

1000 MW * 24 hours * 365 days *0.95 load factor = 8,300,000 MWH (megawatt hours) per year.

Fuel assembly in nuclear reactor is good for about 5 years so that is 40 million MWH of electricity per core.

Core weight about 30 tons. So it works out to an energy density of about 1.3 million MWH per ton of waste. That is 650 MWH per pound. Just to put it into perspective energy density of coal is about 1 KWH (0.001 MWH) per pound.

In US annual electrical consumption is 14MWH per household.

So 20 years of power consumption = 20 * 14 = 280 MWH which is roughly half a pound of nuclear fuel.

[madokie]

12. cough cough

You go right ahead but I'm not buying it

[wtmusic]

14. Thanks for numbers

Knowledge is power.

:thumbsup:

[kristopher]

21. Only if you ignore the energy it costs to get that energy

Energy costs are so high that reprocessing is a nonstarter. Energy technologies are competitive and there are much better options.

See post 20.

[Kaleva]

40. I see no reason to give up on Bounty.