More “Uranium is running out” nonsense
January 1st, 2009
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This time it’s from a politician. Geez, who would ever think a politician would mislead the public about the facts? Still, it’s an unfortunate and persistent myth that replacing fossil fuels with nuclear fission will lead us to a ‘peak uranium’ crisis in a few years or decades.
Is uranium going to hit a”Hubbert Peak”?
Hubbert didn’t think so!
“There is promise, however, provided mankind can solve its international problems and not destroy itself with nuclear weapons, and provided world population (which is now expanding at such a rate as to double in less than a century) can somehow be brought under control, that we may at last have found an energy supply adequate for our needs for at least the next few centuries of the foreseeable future.” ~M. King Hubbert
Some counter points to this whole notion of “Peak Uranium”
1. The Current generation of uranium mines are nowhere near peaking. By pessimistic estimates, current world production of uranium from conventional deposits will not have any problem supplying fuel for at least the next fifty years.
2. In the event that all current uranium mines were exhausted along with all known high grade uranium deposits, that would not mean that uranium could no longer be mined. Current mines are located on deposits of high grade uranium ore. There is not much reason to mine low grades of uranium ore, because recovery of uranium from lower grade deposits cannot compete with conventional mining. However, in the event that it became necessary it would still produce a massive energy gain and would not necessarily have a huge impact on nuclear energy costs, because the cost of the raw material for fuel is only a small portion of the final cost of nuclear energy.
3. In most of the world, the current fuel cycle is a simple once-through cycle using low enrichment uranium. Although this fuel cycle is theoretically viable for decades to come, it is amongst the most inefficient fuel cycles possible. Reprocessing, though slightly more expensive than the once-through cycle, can at the very least quadruple the energy per unit of raw uranium. The technology is proven and currently France reprocesses nearly all of its nuclear fuel. Doing so has assured the French nearly absolute energy security. They could operate their nuclear plants for years on only the fuel they have on hand, should some unforeseen event cut them off from mining and importing of fuel.
The amount of spent fuel currently in storage in the United States could provide fuel for all the nuclear reactors in operation in the US for decades if it were completely reprocessed to recover all U-235 and plutonium. MOX fuel is a proven technology, although it is currently more expensive than uranium based fuel and thus is not generally not considered economical. However, since the cost of fuel is only a small part of the cost of running a nuclear power plant, if need be, MOX fuel could be used with only minimal impact on final expense. Many other countries also have enough spent fuel on hand to cover their energy needs for decades if used in thermal reactors. If used in fast reactors, the energy from existing reserves could last centuries.
4. Of all the advanced fuel cycles this one is the simplest and most straight forward. DUPIC (Direct Use of spent PWR fuel In CANDU) does not require chemical reprocessing or refabrication of fuel elements. The spent fuel from light water reactors, the most common reactors in current usage, can be used as fuel for the heavy-water moderated CANDU reactors. Although this is not the best or coefficient fuel cycle, it provides two to three times more energy output per unit of fuel than the standard once-through fuel cycle and is extremely economical.
5. Even if all land-based uranium ore were exhausted, sea water contains an effectively unlimited amount of uranium which can be extracted at a cost of about $300 per kilogram. Using advanced fuel cycles, this cost would not be impossibly high.
6. Fast reactors are proven technology which can co-exist with existing reactors and can dramatically improve fuel cycle efficiency. To make this simple, take any estimates for the amount of uranium-based fuel available for light water and other thermal spectrum reactors and multiply it by by about 50, because fast reactors have an overall uranium fuel efficiency of at least fifty times that of thermal spectrum reactors.
7. Uranium is not the only potential fuel for nuclear reactors. Thorium is another potential fuel with two major advantages over uranium. Natural thorium is composed of nearly 100% thorium-232, which is the most useful kind and therefore nearly all thorium recovered can be used as fuel in a thorium fuel cycle. Also, thorium is three times as plentiful. Thus, take the estimates for uranium fuel in fast reactors and multiply by three. More info here.
8. There is enough thorium in a US stockpile, currently stored at the Nevada Test Site to provide for electrical years for the next decade. Having no current demand or need for it, the US government buried over three thousand tonnes of thorium nitrate at the Nevada test site. This represents enough nuclear fuel to provide for 100% of US electricity needs for the next eight years if all power generation shifted completely to thorium based nuclear energy.
Although this kind of fuel is best suited to thermal spectrum breeders, especially the liquid fluoride reactor, it can also be used in a modified fuel cycle with light water or heavy water reactors. Thorium-based fuel has been demonstrated in conventional reactors since the early 1960’s. With reprocessing thorium can be used to produce uranium 233-based fuel elements.
9. There are at least 1.2 million tons of depleted uranium in stockpiles in the US, Russia, France, the UK and other nations. Much of this depleted uranium may be suitable for re-enrichment by advanced enrichment techniques which can extract the small amount of U-235 remaining in the depleted uranium. DU can also be used directly as a fuel in fast reactors. In such a scheme, current stockpiles alone could provide centuries of power to mankind.
The current fuel cycle, which depends almost entirely on U-235 means that more than 99% of the uranium recovered never undergoes nuclear fission and ends up in spent fuel or depleted uranium stocks.
10. If concerns about future supply are such a big deal, it’s entirely possible to stockpile a reserve of uranium that will last decades or centuries. The energy density of the fuel means that one could even stock a nuclear power plant with enough fuel to last the design life of the reactors and other equipment. The fuel needed would easily fit on the premises and thus insure absolute fuel supply security for the entire life of the plant.
There are countries which have actually gone so far to create long-term stockpiles of fuel to insure the security of supply. Japan has a large reserve of uranium kept on hand as well as spent nuclear fuel which they are capable of reprocessing. Combined, these fuel sources are estimated to allow Japan to operate their nuclear reactors, without any further uranium imports for several years. However, a proposal has been made for Japan to set up a more permanent uranium reserve consisting of enough low-enrichment fuel to power the country for fifty years. This would offer guaranteed energy security even if all uranium mining and importation were stopped for decades.
11. There are tens of thousands of tons of highly enriched uranium and high grade plutonium in active and retired nuclear weapons that could provide tremendous amounts of energy if used for peaceful nuclear reactors. A joint US/Russian program has already begun to convert thirty tons per year of highly enriched uranium from retired warheads into low enrichment uranium for power reactors. The result has been over fifteen thousand tons of down blended uranium per year. However, the uranium downblending programs represent only a tiny portion of the HEU currently in nuclear weapon stockpiles, in both active and retriered warheads. Military stockpiles of highly enriched uranium worldwide equal more than two thousand – enough to provide many years of fuel for all the world’s nuclear reactors. This does not even include military stockpiles of plutonium, which can also be converted to fuel.
Examples to show this point:
A Nimitz Class aircraft carrier produces about 200 megawatts of electrical and shaft horsepower from its two reactors. It has an effectively unlimited range and can cruise at 30+ knots, making it one of the fastest ships of such size in the world. During operation, it produces upwards of 400,000 gallons of fresh water from desalinization per day. It can launch aircraft, from its catapults, nearly as fast as they can be set up to take off.
_GulfOfAlaska.jpg)
There is no fuel gauge on a nuclear aircraft carrier. The two AW4 reactors on such a carrier only need to be refueled every twenty five years. A single hull thus may receive a new core only once in the vessels lifetime. Some ships and submarines have been designed with core lifespans that are equal or greater to the expected useful life of the vessel.
The fuel necessary to power all the nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines in the US Navy for the next fifty years would fit in a modestly sized living room.
The F-1 reactor in Russia is the oldest operating reactor in the world. The reactor first went critical in 1946 and continues to operate as a 24 kW research reactor. Although much lower than power-generating reactors 24 kW is more than enough to heat several medium sized houses in the dead of winter and represents more power than the output of a medium sized car engine while cruising on the highway.
The reactor contains a little more than forty metric tons of unenriched uranium along with a small amount of low enriched uranium. It is estimated that the reactor will be able to continue to function at current power levels for several thousand years without being refueled.
A big thanks to Michael Karnerfors for sending this video!
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Nuclear, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 1st, 2009 at 11:02 pm
We can expect more of this as the bought and payed for shills for coal and gas step up the FUD against nuclear. This is not going to be a clean fight by any means and the pro-nuclear side had better be prepared to start playing dirty or you are going to get walked over by slick lies like this.
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January 1st, 2009 at 11:27 pm
I’ve never seen that quote by Hubbert, but it’s excellent to refute the peak uranium idiocy. I think people just don’t have a full appreciation of the ridiculous energy density that it provides such that it is really beyond comparison to something like oil or gas or coal.
Just try to imagine a ship that’s built to hold enough fuel for its entire service life using coal or oil. That’s ridiculous, it could never be done. Nuclear is the closest thing to “free energy” we’ll ever have.
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January 1st, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Uranium is not rare by a long shot. In terms of overall richness of uranium in the earth’s crust it is on par with zinc or tin and more common than tungsten. It’s about twenty times more plentiful than mercury, a good 40-50 times more than silver and hundreds of times more than gold. It’s not in any way precious, rare or anything like that.
Can you imagine if we applied this kind of nonsense to other materials? There is a real possibility that we may eventually run out of economically recoverable deposits of copper and if recycling of what we have can’t fill the need then we could be in trouble. Of course, this won’t happen in my lifetime or yours, but it’s much more realistic to think there would be a copper shortage than uranium.
The one thing that’s true about uranium versus other elements in the earths crust is that while the overall abundance is very high, only a small portion of it is clustered in high grade ore deposits. Still, there are decades worth of high grade ore deposits known in Canada and Australia. There was a government report in the US about twenty years ago which estimated that US uranium deposits (which unfortunately are limited to low and medium grades) could last centuries just based on the known mining sites. if that’s the case, imagine Canada which has a good eight times as much uranium.
One thing that is good about uranium is that although we may eventually be driven to use low grade ore, the chemical and physical properties of uranium mean that it can be easily recovered using simple techniques of leaching, liquid-liquid extraction etc. Flouridization is a nice way to seperate uranium because it’s one of the few elements that will react to form a gas.
Mining low grade ore represents centuries of energy and it’s fairly economical. Actually it is being done now but only on a small scale. The only reason it’s not done on a greater scale is that it has largely been priced out of the market by the big deposits of urinate in Canada which they can pull out at next to nothing.
If we came down to the end (which I doubt will ever happen) we could extract it from the ocean. The properties of uranium make it one of the few elements that can be extracted in such low concentrations farily economically. It comes out to less than $500 a kilogram. For a fast reactor that has nearly complete burnup that is pennies for the energy.
Then there’s thorium.
This is nonsense!
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January 2nd, 2009 at 7:41 am
“Having no current demand or need for it, the US government buried over ONE MILLION TONS of thorium nitrate at the Nevada test site. This represents enough nuclear fuel to provide for 100% of US electricity needs for the next eight years if all power generation shifted completely to thorium based nuclear energy.”
The capitalized is wrong. The US government burried 3 200 tonnes of thorium, which is indeed enough to power all US electrical production for a decade.
(tonnes denotes metric tonnes, tons typically denotes short tonnes, which is slightly less than a metric tonne)
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January 2nd, 2009 at 8:18 am
Doesn’t all the talk about “only enough uranium for a few decades” have its origin in the Malthusian propaganda from Club of Romer Storm van der Leeuwen?
See my poster
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January 2nd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Soylent said:
Sorry. I meant one million pounds and put tons in by mistake
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January 2nd, 2009 at 10:38 pm
Rand Knight is a scientist who has a doctorate in ecology. I am sure he knows more about this then you give him credit for and probably more then anyone here knows about uranium or nucler power. Also, if uranium really was so common then why are we not all dead from being poisoned by it? Even the dust of uranium is very dangerous and it’s poisoning out soldiers. We do have lots of uranium that we have in stock and that’s a horrible shame because there’s no way to get rid of it and it is dangerous for five billion years. At least we can stop making more to pass onto new generations. Also, why go with nuclear when there are renewable options? They can give us all the energy we want without buying oil from terrorist countries or fighting wars for it. The only byproduct of renewables is jobs. Renewables create lots of jobs and that’s what we need now. That makes it a win-win and is just one more reason nuclear is dead.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 12:05 am
Yeah, renewables give lifetime employment.
— G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)
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January 3rd, 2009 at 12:13 am
GAGirl7 said:
A degree in ecology is not a degree in geology, or nuclear physics or this idiot would know that most estimates of recoverable uranium are much higher that he is saying and that nuclear fuel can be bred in special reactors such that its supply is unlimited. These facts can be easily checked using Google.
GAGirl7 said:
Uranium is not very dangerous and its natural abundance in the very dirt around you can again be verified with a little research. Oh and to date, there hasn’t been one poisoned soldier from uranium dust.
GAGirl7 said:
I know let’s put it back where it came from – in the ground. Idiots like you block its disposal and then scream that nothing can be done about it. And please show me a credible source for your claim that it is dangerous for five billion years.
GAGirl7 said:
Because renewables can’t do what you say they can, because there isn’t enough energy that can be effectively converted from these sources. The numbers just aren’t there. But you can’t deal with numbers can you?
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January 3rd, 2009 at 2:02 am
DV82XL said:
This claim is almost always related to a complete lack of understanding of half-life. I’m sure DV8 can see that, because the five billion year time frame is based on the rough halflife of U-238.
U-238, however, is not highly radioactive. It is radioactive, but both due to the fact that it has such a long halflife and due to the fact that most of the energy in its decay chain is from low energy alpha emissions.
The toxicity of uranium is actually surprisingly low. The chemical toxicity dominated the health concern, but it’s much much lower than cadmium, mercury and even lead. It’s one of the mildest of the heavy metals.
If you look at animal studies they had to give the test subjects absolutely enormous amounts of uranium salts before they observed any significant health effects.
As for the dust being a hazard to breathing, so is most dust. I’d rather breathe in a cloud of uranium dust than beryllium dust any day. Neither is good for you, but relatively speaking, the hazard from uranium is low compared to other stuff like beryllium.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 2:41 am
GAGirl7 said:
He very well might know. The information is out there for anyone who cares to take a few minutes to look at it and if he’s in politics he likely has briefing people and staffers who could even do it for him. A degree in ecology doesn’t mean **** about his knowledge of uranium in the earth’s crust. As DV82XL says though, it could be easily verified. There are plenty of pages like this out there to try to dispel the myth.
Have you considered that there might be another explanation for how Mr. Knight’s statements could be false? He is a politician. Perhaps he’s doing what politicians tend to do and altering the facts to fit his policy instead of vice-versa.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 5:58 am
GAGirl7 said:
Err, jobs are not a benefit, they are a Cost
Creating lots of jobs in renewables reduces output in the rest of the economy. Not what we need now, or indeed ever.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 9:59 am
Consider the Indian Point nuclear reactor. It is wise to not use nuclear energy of fission. It is like breaking bottles of champagne because you need shards of glass.
Consider a triangle. There are additional dimensions that you’re not covering in the fission functions you’re using. You’re opening a triangle and letting the isosceles functions fly everywhere like a slingshot let go. It’s truly unwise, and those isosceles vibrations are valuable and dangerous. You could just tie the atoms back together using those instead. Run out of hydrogen, and tie new hydrogen atoms together from those same isosceles, some doubtless taken from the iron.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 10:47 am
“Consider the Indian Point nuclear reactor. It is wise to not use nuclear energy of fission. It is like breaking bottles of champagne because you need shards of glass.”
No, it’s like taking something that’s worthless and producing large amounts of safe, cheap and clean electrical power.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 11:22 am
William said:
I have no idea what it has to do with Indian Point in particular, and how is fission like breaking bottles of champagne? Uranium has a lot of value as a fuel, but otherwise it’s not worth very much at all. It has some other non-nuclear uses like making stains for electron microscopy, counterweights, armor penetrating munitions and fluorescent green stained glass, but those are only tiny nitch applications and the only one that it can’t easily be replaced with something else is for munitions. Which, by the way, only use a minute portion of the world’s uranium and only for special purpose kinetic energy penitrators.
So without fission, uranium is almost worthless.
I’d say it’s more like turning lead into gold. Turning a common heavy metal into something extremely valuable.
William said:
I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about there other than some kind of weird reference to fusion. Fusion, as it turns out, is extremely difficult. We can’t do fusion with an energy gain. There is one experiment which hopes to sustain fusion reactions with energy gained for a period of a few minutes at a time and at a cost of many tens of billions of dollars. It’s not clear that fusion will ever be viable nor is it clear that it would have any real benefits over fission. The current roadmap to fusion power also seems to indicate that the reactors would be so enormous that it might not ever be economical. Unless there’s a major shift in fusion research, I would not hold my breath on it.
The biggest problem with building a fusion power reactor comes down to the fact that they don’t exist.
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January 5th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
No William, the isosceles of uranium are tense with triangularity, they are suffering in spheres and need our help and stewarding to relax them. We can group them and use our geometers dimensions to help them relax from triangle tension into calmer states where they can reward our kind attentions with a flow of temperature into electrons and energy to help the next relaxation phase.
The isosceles of hydrogen are too loose, they need an immense discpline of pressure to bring them to a higher state and then they can work for us while we work for them.
Or something.
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January 5th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Gee Joffan, I didn’t realize you were so fluent in High Delusional !
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January 5th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
This claim is almost always related to a complete lack of understanding of half-life.
Amen. I’ve actually had someone try and tell me that “a longer half-life means it’s dangerous for longer!” while at the same time claiming to understand fission.
Indeed, it does mean that the element will be around and decaying for longer, but the idea that the rate of decay was what made decay dangerous was impossible to pound through his skull. (The person in question, not surprisingly, was a journalist.)
I suppose at that point the thing to do is point out that protons (if they decay at all) have a half-life significantly (as in many orders of magnitude) greater than the lifespan of the universe*, and wonder why they’re not killing us all…?
I mean, by that logic, all matter is dangerous forever, because there might be a decay event!
*Assuming a non-infinitely-expanding one.
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January 5th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
drbuzz0 said:
That’s why I asked GAGirl7 to provide some proof that it was dangerous for that period of time. But it’s not the poor girls fault. As long as national regulators pay lip-service to this nonsense by offering up ideas and designs for disposal sites that will provide security past any reasonable radiation hazard, and talk of signage that will warn our supposedly degenerate antecedents to stay away, people will think there is good reason.
Beyond the fact that these measures are excessive to the point of being nonsensical, consider the breathtaking hubris of arrogating ourselves the right to determine what our decedents of several thousand years will do. More than likely they would see any attempt of this nature as a pathetic waste of time. It would be similar to the ancient Egyptians dictating terms to us.
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January 5th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
DV82XL said:
As I’ve often said, I think warning signs in English, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese (plus the local language, if not one of these) would be sufficient precaution.
It is extremely unlikely that the three largest world civilizations (Western, Islamic and Chinese) will all collapse, unless no civilization survives at all (in which case the survivors will have much more serious worries to contend with than a nuclear waste dump!)
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January 5th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Sigivald said:
In general I agree. At least all things being equal, longer half-life means less dangerous but there is another side to it too. Nucleotides which have extremely short half lives are not a disposal concern and they can’t ever really accumulate in enough quantity to be of any concern. There’s never any real problem of someone stumbling onto an orphaned source of something like Tc-99m because it is so short lived that it never gets a chance to get lost or stolen or anything. Quantity wise, though there’s much more potency, of course, to the short lived ones.
There is more to the equation than just that, however. Like for example, I consider Radium-226 one of more problematic isotopes to get rid of and fairly dangerous in general. It has a halflife of 1600 years, which is fairly long, but it is still short enough to make it acutely radioactive. It spawns some short lived daughters, though. So really it’s more radioactive as a material than it would seem at first. Once in fractional equilibrium, each initial decay is acomponied by several daughter products decaying including radon and bismuth-214, a powerful gamma emitter. Also, it has a high biological uptake.
Oh wait.. I forgot. It’s natural so it must be harmless…
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January 6th, 2009 at 3:28 am
I think you mean “nuclide”. “Nucleotide” is a single base of DNA or RNA…
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January 6th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
George Carty said:
oopsies. Yea. Sorry
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January 7th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Craniumers:
Would you please take a few moments to read this recent analysis of the costs of nuclear power which estimates USD $0.25-0.30 per kWh. Of course that’s higher than I’ve seen mentioned here, but reading through the report, it’s hard for me to see the flaws. The research seems pretty in-depth and not based at all on the regulatory requirements we usually associate with high capital costs; historically, it seems to be due to much more ordinary construction delays and budget overruns instead.
Please comment.
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January 7th, 2009 at 10:11 am
There’s a discussion on this matter in the Energy From Thorium discussion forum. One commenter there who has some expertise in this and a keen eye for skimming through to the important details noted that one of the assumptions used was a twenty year lifetime for new nuclear plants. Another was that the rise in construction costs for nuclear plants would continue as it has for the last few years for the next decade, and the final price was expressed in the expected value of the dollar in 2020. More realistic assumptions apparently lead to a price of 11-15 cents/kW.hour.
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January 7th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
There is no doubt that nuclear plants have excellent econemy when it comes to operations. They are about the best power source around, with the exception of large hydroelectric when it comes to operating costs per megawatthour.
When it comes to capital cost, there is some truth that the cost of nuclear plants can be high. The cost *should* be on par with coal fired plants, but the issue is delays. Delays increase cost and give a double-wammy when it comes to building up interest costs. The problem has nothing to do with the technology. You can build a large nuclear power plant in two years if nobody bothers you. The issue is 100% regulatory and political. If you try to build a nuclear plant you have to realize that you will have multiple parties do everything in their power to make it as expensive and slow for you as possible. You will be sued, injunctions will be filed, petitions to regulatory agencies, 11th hour appeals, stall tactics.
Worst of all, the regulatory agencies welcome this bull. At least in the US, the damn NRC LOVEs to entertain stall tactics. They’ll never turn down a wacko with a reason to add millions of dollars of cost to a reactor.
The NRC is really an excellent example of federal government at its absolute worst. It’s a disgrace to the country, imho. Lets say, for example, I want to build a reactor: just a simple, conventional pressurized water reactor that’s a design already in use, fully approved etc. It could take me four or five years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get the approval for it before I even lift a shovel of dirt. The battle of paperwork costs more than the actual cost of the reactor. The labor, materials and financing is nothing compared to the beurocratic costs.
Then to make matters worse, if I decide that I then want to build a second reactor, that is a clone of the first one, right next to it, I have to do the whole thing over again. It doesn’t matter that all the systems have already been approved once, now they need to be approved AGAIN!
Many utilities have simply cried uncle when they couldn’t take the delays and costs the NRC imposed on them.
So yes, it can be very very expensive. But this is not inherent, this is an imposed cost.
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January 7th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
I will not comment in detail on what is an American paper addressed to an American audience. However as I have noted here and elsewhere, AECL has been building reactors during the U.S. moratorium on new builds, and hard numbers show that they can build plants on time, on budget – in any other country but Canada where they suffer the same cost overruns as US builders do.
Thus it is clear that the problem is due to other factors than systemic to nuclear itself.
I will also note that the cost estimates (as always) for nuclear are full life-cycle, and full fuel-cycle, including disposal of wastes, something no other power generator is forced to do.
So what this paper seems to be saying is that the system is distorted such that nuclear power is more expensive that other types of energy, so rather than fix the system, it makes more economic sense to go with other power sources. This is typical of the sort of one-dimensional arguments that have been showing up of late, and again it seems that there has been an increase in this sort of story hitting the press in the last few weeks running up to the new U.S. administration taking power. An effort is being made, I think, to soften up the public for some very negative actions that will nip the nuclear renaissance in the bud, at least in the States.
I hope I am wrong.
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January 7th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
DV82XL said:
I don’t know much about the Canadian system of nuclear regulation and permits, so I will not comment on it directly. However, I have to assume that Canada is probably in the same situation as much of the rest of the industrial world, where various groups will throw themselves at any nuclear project to try to delay it, make it as expensive as possible and otherwise use whatever stall tactics, 11th hour appeals, injunctions or anything else they can to, if not stop the project, at least try to make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible to build the reactor.
I don’t know directly whether or not this happens in Canada, but it seems it happens in the US, Europe and plenty of other places. I’d have to think at least some of that mentality is going to spill over into Canada.
Even France suffers from the Greens coming out of the woodwork and trying to gum up every new reactor they construct. However, France has a regulatory structure that tends to shrug off most of that crap, which might be why they have resorted to things like physically chaining themselves to the gates and even firing missiles at reactor construction sites…
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January 7th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
drbuzz0 said:
That’s exactly the point I was trying to make. The difference is is that in our case there is direct proof that it doesn’t need to be this way when you look at the sames company’s projects, building the same product, in other countries. And we are not talking about just one, but several that have been pulled off without major delays or cost overruns.
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January 7th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Oh, and while we are on the subject, this headline has come up several times in my feeds to-day:
“A week after Russia’s Gazprom cut back gas supply into Ukraine, a growing shortage in Europe has resulted in calls to re-open shut-down nuclear power plants.”
It would seen that expensive energy is better than no energy at all.
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January 7th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
drbuzz0 said:
IIRC, The very reactor (Superphénix) which was the subject of the missile attack you mention was later shut down under a Socialist minority government (which needed Green support to avoid a dissolution of parliament).
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January 7th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
George Carty said:
Yeah. It was a real shame. The whole thing with Superhenix is that the entire anti-nuclear movement in France, realizing they couldn’t have a prayer of a chance at actually hitting nuclear power in general threw all they had at shutting down that one plant.
It was in part due to political backhanded tactics, like you mention, the minority government appeasing the Greens to get an effective coalition government that they could hang onto.
They cited events that caused shutdowns and cost overruns. However, in its defense, it was basically a prototype/experimental plant that was never really allowed to develop to its full potential.
As for the rocket attack, that later was found out to be the Swiss Green party. It’s amazing to me nothing happened from that. That’s a very obvious and blatant act of war. For a freakin POLITICAL PARTY in a forign country to fire rockets at you and have the foreign government do nothing to stop them? To even allow them to continue to operate as a legitimate political party? Christ! The French should have fired a few cruise missiles at stratigic targets in Switzerland for that. It’s amazing they didn’t take a stand there.
Anyways, it’s been too damn long since Switzerland has had to actually take a stand about anything and face repercussions. How long as it been? A few thousand years? Oh yeah, that’s right… they’re such a pacifist nation, they’re always sure to stay neutral while they smelt the gold teeth of Holocaust victims or launder the money of drug lords and terrorists.
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January 12th, 2009 at 11:57 am
GAGirl7 said:
Because “uranium” isn’t all that radioactive.
Hint: crack a physics textbook. Then crack a geology textbook. Note the difference between uranium isotopes. Then bang your head repeatedly against the wall in arrant shame.
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January 25th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
drbuzz0 said:
No, it would only be an act of war if the Swiss government had endorsed the attacks or protected the attackers – in fact the perpetrators were arrested in Berne in 1994.
Do you think that the RAF had a right to bomb Irish neighborhoods of New York and Boston in revenge for Irish-Americans funding of the IRA?
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January 25th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
George Carty said:
They would have the right to bomb any sites in the US that were being used to launch missiles at the UK. The US and British have a pretty good diplomatic relation and in general if you blow something up in London and then run to the US, then you’ll quickly find yourself handcuffed to a couple of Federal Marshalls and on your way pack to the UK to be prosecuted.
I was unaware that the Swiss had taken any action against those who attacked the French with rockets from Swiss territory. If they provided safety to those involved and didn’t actively prosecute them then that would be an act of war. It would be no different than if a brigade of the Swiss military attacked France and then returned to Switzerland without any kind of repudiation of their actions or arrest of those involved.
Firing missiles is an act of war or an act of terrorism, depending on the context. If it’s an irregular force that is not associated directly with a government then it’s terrorism. If it’s a group approved by the government and acting within government approval, protection or implicit protection then it’s an act of state-to-state war. If the Swiss don’t approve of their actions then the act is also an act of high treason against the Swiss for an attempt to provoke state to state war by attacking another sovereignty from within their territory.
I;m very suspicious that it took twelve years to apprehend just four individuals. The appropriate response by the Swiss is not only to condemn the action and allow for an open international investigation with the end goal being the apprehension of all those who were directly involved or had direct knowledge of the attack (not just sent funding to anti-nuclear groups but funded it knowing it would be for a missile attack). Those responsible have committed some of the highest crimes in existence (international aggression, high treason, terrorism) and as such it’s impossible for this to require anything less than life in prison.
Failing to do so, the Swiss are identical in capability for providing safe harbor to them to the Taliban for providing safe harbor and implicit support to Al Queda. Any group that has funded these actions can see this in two ways: A) These people acted as rouges without any connection to the group and took money which was intended for other use. In such a situation, the group could be absolved. B) They approve of the actions and support the individuals involved. In this case the organization is a terrorist organization, it is identical in culpability to Al Queda, the Al Auxa Martyrs Brigade, the Colombian drug cartels, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Tokyo Death Cult and any other international terrorist group.
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