The ability to make important distinctions and choices depends, again, on the ability to make comparisons.
Do you have any estimate of how much coal a single 500MWe coal fired plant burns in a single day?
Never mind, I already know you don't and that in any case you don't care.
I am going briefly to address the irrelevant remarks about wind power, which I support by the way, since anyone who knows anything about energy knows there is a huge difference between base load power and intermittently available peak power. So unless you include the environmental cost of batteries while you ignore completely the cost of steel, transport of materials, transmission lines etc, you have
still managed to not propose any alternative to fossil fuels. Even the most incredulous ass knows that the wind does not blow 100% of the time. I note that the need to provide back-up infrastructure - whether that back-up is coal, natural gas, nuclear or bicycle cranks attached to generators - also implies a global climate cost.
The most advanced wind powered nation on earth, in percentage terms, is Denmark. Denmark, I note, buys its power from France, where nuclear electricity is the 4th largest export, when the wind is not blowing. Many other wind powered places burn natural gas, an incredibly filthy fuel, when the wind is not blowing. One should recall the global climate induced heat wave in Europe in August 2003, when 35,000 people died, was characterized by doldrums. The wind did not blow. Thus the electrical power demands of both Germany (which has 15,000 MWe (peak of course) of wind capacity) and Denmark were severely strained by their reliance on wind.
In any case, hype aside, the wind industry world wide is still tiny and therefore the real consequences of relying on it are not known. In 2004, wind energy produced 0.14 Quads of energy in the United States, or 0.15 exajoules. This is less than 0.15% of US energy demand. I happen to believe that wind power is an excellent approach to providing energy and that it should and will grow. However I do believe for one second that it is an alternative to nuclear power. (It may be a fairly good alternative to natural gas.)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table5b.htmlNow let's return to the claptrap from wise.org. Obviously - as I hardly need to state - wise.org site yet another version of anti-environmental anti-nuclear organizations of the same order of distractable dull witted "only rich white people matter" websites such as is represented by Greenpeace.org and the even more absurd ratical.org. is correct (which I very much doubt) in their unreferenced calculator. (I note that there is not ONE scientific reference attached to their claim about uranium mining and refining.) I assume that you claim that 480 billion tons of carbon dioxide saved is trivial, although this is half of the annual output of the United States for carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere.
One wonders, in any case, how they arrived at their dubious results in the first place. There seems to be no reference whatsoever to
where the putative uranium mines are, the type of enrichment used, the quality of the ores, the distance of the plants from facilities. Anyone who has a passable familiarity with nuclear technology specifically and energy technology in general, knows that the environmental cost of technologies varies widely with practices used and the location of facilities.
One should compare this dubious result with that obtainable at www.externe.info. According to their reports, found under "results" under the link entitled
"Estimation of External Costs using the Impact-Pathway-Approach. Results from the ExternE project series" shows that the global climate impact of nuclear is 0.03 eurocents per kw-hr, as compared to 1.60 eurocents/kw for coal. Thus nuclear involves less than 2% the global climate impact of coal. This is somewhat different that the magical claim of wise.org Unlike the dubious chanting at Wise.org or greenpeace.org or the even dopier rantings at ratical.org, the ExternE reports are heavy on giving their methodology. The report I listed here has (oh gasp, pant, pant) references. Of course, many people of limited intellect merely need a
website to validate their claims. However the existence of a claim on a website does not constitute
truth. Even the Republican National Committee has a website.
Does nuclear energy involve a global warming impact? Of course it does. Breathing has a global warming impact and so does farting. Is the global warming impact of nuclear technology comparable to its alternatives? No, it differs by two orders of magnitude. Everybody with a brain knows this. The International Panel on Global Climate Change, for instance, knows this.
You feign concern about 540,000 tons of "waste rock" from uranium mines, per GW-hr. Do you know how the mass of coal ash produced for an equivalent energy? (Actually I know you don't care.) Do you know the mass of sulfur dioxide produced for an equivalent amount of energy? (Actually you are indifferent, only things nuclear concern you.) Do you know the mass of nitrogen oxides lofted into the air for such an amount of energy? (No, you don't.) Do you know how much methane is released in coal mining operations? (Again indifference.) Do you know the global warming potential of methane with respect to carbon dioxide. (No, you do not.) Do you have any appreciation whatsoever about the difficulty encountered in containing a gas as opposed to a solid? (Apparently not.) Can you differentiate what it is to contain a billion tons of any material and what it is to contain ten thousand tons? (Again, a blank stare.)
Like most disingenuous claptrap about the nuclear industry from intellectual fantasy shitholes like www.wise.org, www.greenpeace.org and www.ratical.org, the calculation is immediately and clearly a misrepresentation though.
Let's calculate for ourselves instead of appealing to a misleading idiot calculator from a misleading idiot website.
The advances in nuclear technology in the last few years have increased fuel burn up which is measured in units of energy produced per ton. Here for instance is a paper that reports a typical burn-up of 30,000 Megawatt-days/ton. (This is actually low.)
http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/enviro.nsf/AttachmentsByTitle/gui_thermnew_WB/$FILE/thermnew_PPAH.pdf A megawatt-day (3.6 trillion joules) is 0.024 GW-hr. Thus a burn-up 30,000 MW-day/ton is the equivalent of 720 GW-hr/ton of fuel. I also note that a typical 1000 MWe nuclear reactor contains 100 metric tons of uranium and operates anywhere from 1.5 to 2 years with a single fuel loading.
One ton of coal contains on average about 30 GJ of energy.
http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html Thus the amount of coal that needs to be burned to produce the same energy as one ton of uranium in the current once through nuclear fuel cycle is 86,000 tons. I note that all of this coal requires mining, transport, environmental degradation, waste rock, removed mountains, dead miners, air pollution etc etc, not one bit of which is ever commented on in the case of nuclear exceptionalism.
Wise.org is full of shit.
By the way the only base load fossil fuel in common use today is coal.
I note that any calculation involving uranium mining and enrichment is by definition a calculation that wholly depends on the once through fuel cycle using enriched uranium. By switching to the thorium cycle or by using CANDU type reactors or both, the need for enrichment can be easily eliminated. (In fact most of the United States, for almost half a decade, has been living off inventories of enriched uranium provided by the dismantling of Soviet nuclear weapons.) I note that in addition the need for any mining at all could be greatly reduced through the use of fuel recycling. I note that the use of MOX fuel has a similar effect, although the clueless crowd at Wise.org always claims that the use of MOX - already an industrial practice in Japan and France - will lead to the end of life on earth. In fact they claim this in spite of existing practice, and,
of course in complete disregard of the alternate possibility that global climate change - which
is happening - offers a much greater probability of doing exactly that: ending life on earth.
As I point out frequently, the once through fuel cycle is stupid and is largely the creation of mysticism about putative nuclear terrorists who don't, in fact, exist. (It is always necessary for nuclear power opponents to use their imagination rather than reality - since a remote sense of reality certainly doesn't support their absurd contentions.)
The United States will soon have about 70,000 metric tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel. About 95% of that fuel is slightly enriched uranium. If this uranium is converted to plutonium, and fully fissioned, it enough to supply 100% of all US energy demand for 50 years at 100 exajoules per year. (A kg of fully fissioned plutonium 239, at 190 MeV per fission, is equivalent to 77 trillion joules.) Therefore, in theory, though not in actual practice, it is not actually necessary to mine any uranium whatsoever for decades. The matter could be resolved (not that I favor it right now) by passing a law
mandating rather than prohibiting nuclear fuel recycling and the use of the thorium/U-233 cycle. This would severely raise the price of nuclear fuel, but that is a trivial matter. The cost of nuclear fuel has almost no effect on the price of nuclear electricity.
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