To build a nuclear weapon you need weapons grade fissile material.   This could be plutonium or uranium.  (It could theoretically also be something like neptunium or americium, but nobody has ever bothered with that, as it would be far more difficult.)   In the case of uranium, it must be highly enriched uranium and in the case of plutonium, it must be “weapons grade” plutonium.

The process of extracting plutonium from spent fuel for reprocessing, use in fast reactors or MOX fuel usage is similar to that used to extract plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.  For this reason, many nuclear energy opponents will scream “AH HA!” and say that a nuclear power reactor is clearly a “proliferation hazard” regardless of what type it is.  Furthermore, they’ll tell you that reprocessing is the ultimate danger and that if we dare recycling fuel, then others will recycle their fuel too (many already do, by the way) and if they do that then certainly they’ll be building weapons.

Of course, there are plenty of countries that reprocess fuel to one degree or another and don’t have nuclear weapons.   Germany, South Korea, Japan, Belgium and Italy either reprocess fuel or have done so in the past but never had a nuclear weapon.   Countries like Russia, France and the UK reprocess civilian reactor fuel but have never used this fuel to build a nuclear weapon.

There’s a good reason for this.   As it turns out, the spent fuel from a modern power reactor, such as a BWR or PWR reactor is completely unusable for a nuclear weapon.

Here is why:

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Interestingly I was an observer to a disaster today without even knowing it.

My parents are out of town for a while and because I live quite near to them, I am staying at their home to take care of the dogs and keep down the fort.   Their home is in Guilford CT, which is about 15 miles, as the crow flies, from Middletown CT.   That’s slightly closer than where I’d otherwise be.  A bit before noon, I felt and heard what I would describe as  “surge” of wind or vibrations.    My parents house is fairly large and when a gust of wind hits it broadside, you can hear and feel the windows and walls rattle.   This event was a bit like that, but far more acute.  While wind gusts last a few seconds, this was more like a surge of pressure that lasted under a second.   It shook the house more than normal, to the point where it felt a bit like it might have been a seismic event, transmitted through the ground.

It was noteworthy enough to make me go to the window and look outside to see if there was something going on, like maybe a big truck or something else that could account for this weird sudden surge of pressure and vibration.   The event was not like a “BOOM” but perhaps a bit like a “thud,” although not an easily heard sound.   It may have been infrasonic – the kind of sound that you don’t hear directly but which you can feel in your chest and which you can hear indirectly due to the reverberations it causes.

It’s hard to describe the event, but the words “thud,” “woosh” and “surge” are the best I can come up with.

In any case, I went back to what I was doing, which was writing the previous post (the one about diamonds).

Turns out a natural gas power plant blew up and killed at least five people!!!

It seems a bit ironic that it’s called the “Clean Energy Plant” or at least it was, before much of it was blown up.   It’s far too early to tell exactly what happened here, but it’s worth noting that the event is not entirely unique.   Some enormous explosions have occurred at natural gas fired power plants over the years, as well as at natural gas pumping stations, storage depots and other facilities that support them. A massive natural gas explosion in New Jersey left hundreds homeless in 1994 and deadly natural gas explosions have occurred in recent years in Russia, Texas, Virgina, Alaska, several parts of Canada, China, India and numerous other places. This includes explosions at the power plant location, as was the case in St. Petersburg Russia.

I have to admit that while I’m acutely aware of the potential for disaster that lurks wherever you find massive amounts of flammable gas, this reminder hit especially close to home.   In addition to living near a natural gas power plant, I also live about 20 miles from a nuclear plant.  The nuclear plant, unlike the gas plant, has never killed anyone or had a major incident that effected the safety or property of those who live in the area.    This shouldn’t be surprising, however, because while the American  natural gas industry’s safety record is fairly descent, it’s far from spotless, unlike the nuclear energy industry which has never had even a single solitary incident in it’s history that endangered the local community or caused loss of life to citizens in the area.

During its history of roughly five decades, there have been a handful of worker fatalities in the US nuclear industry.  Nearly all of them have been from common workplace accidents found in all industries, such as falling off of a ladder or catwalk.   There has never been a death of a worker at a US nuclear power plant due to reactor malfunction or a nuclear accident.  There has been only one death attributable to a “nuclear” accident of any kind – a worker died as the result of a criticality accident in 1964 at the Woods River Junction reprocessing plant when he improperly mixed a solution of uranium and plutonium, resulting in unexpected critical.    Of course, the US is not alone in this.   With the exception of the former Soviet Union, most other countries with a nuclear industry have a spotless record and the rest have a nearly spotless one.

Sadly, in a single event, the natural gas industry has killed five times that many.   So which one is the dangerous one again?

Those who know me are probably aware that I’m not very happy with the current administration’s handling of the monetary system, government spending, domestic policy in general, buisiness regulations and many many other things.   Politically, I’m pretty much a libertarian, at least to some degree.  I tend to favor less social spending, less buisiness regulation and more pro-enterprise policies.   I prefer the budget be kept balanced and I prefer the government focus on things with stratigic value, such as scientific research, over things like entitlement spending.

However, I have to admit that even those who I don’t generally support do occasionally get it right, and President Obama has actually done a few things which I can’t help but applaud.

Via the New York Times:

Obama Acts to Ease Way to Construct Reactors

The Obama administration moved vigorously on two fronts Friday to promote nuclear power, proposing a tripling of federal loan guarantees for new projects and appointing a high-level commission to study what to do with nuclear waste.

Administration officials confirmed that their 2011 federal budget request next week would raise potential loan guarantees for the projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion. A new Energy Department panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it.

The current loan guarantees were provided in the 2005 energy act but have not been disbursed because of bureaucratic delays. The Energy Department has said it would start issuing those soon. Because the loan guarantees are supposed to cover 80 percent of construction costs, the current amount of $18.5 billion would cover only about three projects.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has been saying for weeks that the administration would seek a greater amount of guarantees; commercial investment has been hard to come by because there is so much uncertainty about the cost and schedule for building plants.

When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Wednesday that the country should build “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,” it was one of the few times he got bipartisan applause.

The idea may have more support among Republicans than Democrats, but even opponents of nuclear power concede that the loan guarantees may be necessary to muster enough votes for the kind of measures that many environmentalists favor in a climate and energy bill, like firm national goals for renewable energy and a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

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Sure, the Linear Non-Threshold Hypothesis is not exactly supported by scientific evidence, and it was simply created as a “worst case” model for radiation exposure, since emperical data on low exposure was, at one time lacking.   Admittedly, it can be difficult to screen out the statistical noise when it comes to verifying or refuting effects as trivial as those which LNT predicts for low exposure.   Even if the model was correct, it would predict that the dangers of getting a dental x-ray would be on par with those of spending a few minutes in a smokey bar or eating a large box of french fries.  Still, what data we have managed to acquire has generally refuted, rather than supported LNT.

Still, LNT does not seem to be going anywhere and many agencies have adopted it as their standard for evaluating radiation exposure.   It might be said that it could serve as the absolutely worse, even unreasonably bad case for the potential for radiation’s health effects.

Some will use LNT as a means of opposing nuclear energy.   Various special interests and extremists like Ernest J. Sternglass insist that nuclear energy can’t be tolerated because the effects of even the low levels radiation on the public are intolerable.   Sure, even the supporters of the model have to admit that by their most liberal estimates the increased risk of cancer from living near a nuclear power plant is only a tiny fraction of a percent, but they insist that this is something that should not be imposed on the public and even one death is too many.

Okay, so lets, for the sake of argument, assume LNT is correct (which it isn’t).    If we accept that this is the case, then there are a few outcomes from this.   First, we will have to admit that it’s impossible to avoid radiation entirely, since it is – after all, your body emits radiation from the carbon-14 and potassium-40 in your food.   Secondly, we will have to realize that there are human activities that increase our exposure to radiation and that these vary in their magnitude.   Since we can’t tackle all of them, or at least, we can’t all at once, we will have to figure out what our priories should be when it comes to reducing exposure by as much as we can.

(From the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory)

So how do we get our radiation exposure down as low as we can?

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A very important announcement:

A fellow nuclear energy promoter and very knowledgeable about the subject, Rod Adams has one hell of an engine design, one hell of a mustache and is one hell of a guy.  Rod knows how reliable and safe nuclear reactors are because he used to live next to one, while under hundreds of feet of ice cold sea water, no less!  He’s a very smart and knowledgeable nuker and runs an excellent site that is informative and occasionally shows his excellent sense of humor.    Above all else, he’s always very insightful.

Why am I mentioning this?   Because it’s his birthday!

A BIG HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ROD ADAMS

It is not as if Slashdot doesn’t, from time to time, put up a horribly biased or just plain stupid story, but this one really takes the cake, as does the item it lists to.

NRC Relicensing Old “Zombie” Nuclear Plants

“In the Dec. 7 edition of The Nation, Christian Parenti details what he considers to be the real problem with nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions in the US: Not the high cost of new nuclear power, but rather the irresponsible relicensing of existing nuclear power plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The claim is that the relicensed plants — amounting to more than half ot the 104 original 1970s-era nukes in the US — operate like zombies beyond their design lifetimes only because of lax regulation spurred by concern over carbon dioxide emissions. But these plants are actually failing, as demonstrated by a rash of accidents. And some of the ancient plants are now being allowed to operate at 120% of their designed capacity. There is a video interview with Parenti up at Democracy Now.”

The article itself is bad enough, but there’s also no doubt that Slashdot does get a LOT of traffic. This is not a news item at all, it’s an editorial and a bad one at that. Why is this reported as fact there or anywhere? I don’t know, probably because some idiot who knows nothing about nuclear energy saw it and didn’t even have the sense to notice the obviously inflammatory language.

In any case, I am going to write a rebuttal to this. However, today turns out to be a very busy day for me and I’m not entirely sure I can get it done right away, as I want to be sure I can verify the facts.

In any case, I don’t want Slashdot to take down the story, because that smacks of censorship. I would, however, like the opportunity to rebut the story. If you agree, I encourage you to contact Slashdot and ask them to give this site an opportunity to have a rebuttal posted as well. Of course, it does not need to be this site, and if anyone else wants to write a full rebuttal on their site, then they are just as welcome to take the load off of me.

Surprised the user is named mdsolar? No, me neither. It seems this user is a newbie, and prefers coal to nuclear energy. (yeah coal)

Sorry, but I’m not sure what the best way is to contact slashdot.  You can use the “submit story” link, but otherwise, it’s a bit difficult to find a “contact” link on the site.  I realize this post is uncharacteristically short and generally sub-quality.  However, as I said, I’m a bit too busy at the moment to write a full post on this and I thought it was important enough to put this out.

At the very least, anyone who sees this crap for what it is is encouraged to refute it in the Slashdot story comments.

God, I hate it when something this ignorant and driven by special-interest ends up in the mainstream and reported as if it were fact.

Sure, wind and solar don’t actually seem to work very well for providing grid energy.   However, they do one thing that seems to be popular:  provide a great smoke screen to hide the enormous amount of actual smoke being blown out of coal stacks.

The US Coal industry would like to remind you that coal and wind make a great pair.   Coal provides the power and wind makes it seem palatable.   In reality, using wind in combination with coal is about the same as using coal alone.  Even if you do manage to build enough turbines to create a non-minuscule amount of power, it always has to be backed up by reserve totaling the full generating capacity.   When used in a spinning reserve capacity, coal fired plants don’t actually consume all that much coal than when they’re running at full tilt.   In order to allow for the kind of instantaneous dispatch required, the plant must maintain full steam pressure and cannot allow the system to slow down or cool.

However, the coal industry would like to point out a couple of things:  Coal is plentiful and cheap.   It’s as plentiful as dirt and as cheap as dirt.   It’s also as dirty as dirt, if not dirtier.   They would like to assure us all, however, that new “clean coal” plants are not quite as filthy as the older plants.    Unlike the old coal plants, that dump all the filth into the atmosphere, the new plants only dump some into the atmosphere and dump the rest into ash and precipitate ponds.

The natural gas industry would like to point out that it is not quite as filthy as coal.   When it comes to dirt burners coal is king and gas plants only produce a nominal amount of filth in the form of sulfur, nitrous and soot emissions.

Gas plants do also have some advantage over coal in terms of load-following.  Although keeping a gas fired plant in spinning reserve mode does use a significant amount of gas, it’s not quite as bad a break as coal.    That said, there has been some debate over exactly how much you really can save by paring wind and gas.   Forcing a gas turbine to throttle up and down tends to impact the effeciency of the system and if the plant is forced to go to full power after a period of low activity, it may have to operate in “simple cycle” mode, until it is able to generate enough heat to get the steam turbines spun up – this can cut the effeciency in half.

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The TVA or Tennessee Valley Authority is the largest utility and power generator in the United States.   It is also an enormous consumer of coal and a major polluter.   The TVA is a government-owned entity that was originally formed with the intention of electrifying the Tennessee Valley, upper Southern States and Appalachian region of the US.   When formed in the 1930’s, one of the major goals of the TVA was to produce large amounts of low cost electricity from the area’s hydroelectric reserves and coal.   This was intended to help bring industry to the area and improve industrial economics in general.

The plan worked quite well, and the availability of electricity helped to attract Alcoa’s aluminum smelting operations to the area and later played a pivotal role in the choice of location for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

However, in the past few decades, the demand for electricity has increased and hydroelectric capacity has remained all but unchanged.  This has resulted in the TVA increasingly depending on fossil fuel power generation.   Not only has this lead to an extreme increase in air pollution in the Tennessee Valley, it has also resulted in catastrophic ash spills from some of the largest power plants the TVA operates.

As the largest utility and electrical generator in the US, the TVA has also become one of the largest consumers of coal in the US.   The use of coal has resulted in a marked increase in air pollution in the Tennessee Valley area.     Although efforts have been made to improve the exhaust treatment at TVA plants, the increase reliance in coal continues to damage the enviornment and the health of those living in the region.

TVA Fossil Fuel Capacity:
Coal Fired Plant Capacity: 15,032 MW
Natural Gas Combined Cycle: 4,662 MW

Total: 19,694 MWe

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I won’t make it a secret that I hate, loath, despise the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and all the problems that they cause.   One of the most shocking things about this agency is that many of those who worked for the NRC or even served as commissioners have gone on to become prominent anti-nuclear campaigners.   In general, most will not be so blatant about their anti-nuclear agenda while at the agency, as that would make their intent too obvious and present a conflict of interest that even Jimmy Carter couldn’t turn a blind eye to.

Most disturbingly, many of the most viscous anti-nukes were the founding members of the NRC or helped establish the regulatory protocol in the early years of operation.   This should leave no doubt as to why the agency was created and the agenda behind the NRC from the beginning.  Although some less anti-nuclear commissioners have been appointed since, it is impossible to erase the legacy of the organization or deny the fact that it was born out of an attempt to kill the nuclear industry.

A few examples:

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The German Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety has a website with some questions and answers about nuclear energy. I’m a bit surprised at how bad they are when it comes to facts.   Actually, the site is not just misleading and full of errors – it contains out and out boldfaced lies.   It’s not science based or even veiled in the extreme dogma and self righteousness it portrays, even to the point of attempting to make nuclear energy seem immoral.   The site is quite shocking for a government site.

It’s hard not to see some parallels here.  If this kind of crap were published on the official website of most European countries, it would be the worst example of misinformation in modern history.  However, this is Germany, so it’s actually not quite as bad as some in the past.  The idea of scapegoating and the belief that it is okay for the government to lie in order to make a policy seem justified, even invoking pseudoscience to make this point has been proven quite effective in Germany in decades past, as has the appeal to fear of inaction.  Strong words from the government about a festering and dangerous group that are going to undermine the safety and prosperity of the German common man and woman are a very effective way of getting people to turn a blind eye to atrocious government policies.

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over” – Joseph Goebbles

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