Bellona Waste Report

Bellona has issued a report stating that there are 21,000 spent fuel assemblies in a storage system that will explode if water leaks in, and that water is leaking in.

It's kinda flawed.

1. All uncontrolled reactions are not explosions. A reaction can be uncontrolled merely because a person or mechanism is not in charge of it--there were 16 natural nuclear reactors in an African uranium deposit, and they formed in a very similar configuration to this postulated accident. How did they stop? The energy released heated the water and eventually boiled it--and without the water, there's no reaction. After it shut down, it cooled off, letting the water back in; this process was repeated for millions of years until it simply ran out of fuel. No explosions were involved--it didn't even disrupt the ore.
2. There will never be a homogeneous mixture. Ceramic does not dissolve in water, there's no way to get enough water into the fuel assemblies even if it did, and expecting every single one of those 21,000 tubes to open up, let the water in, and not let any of it out afterward is ridiculous.
3. This isn't gasoline. A critical configuration in one area does not create a critical configuration in another nearby area.

Sounds a bit like the Brookhaven Report, which was written in 1957 with no access to computers, and said that if the core of a nuclear reactor were pulverized and deposited equally into the lungs of 10,000 people, they would die. Well, yes--but what's your point? The amount of water in a filled bathtub could drown 40,000 people. Blaming nuclear power for things it didn't, doesn't, and can't do doesn't save lives. It cynically manipulates tragedy for political purposes.

The Nuclear Power Licensing Reform Act of 2007

Rep. Nita Lowey, that eminent friend of nuclear power (joined by woo-woo John Hall as well as Eliot Engel, Maurice Hinchey, and Christopher Shays), is sponsoring a bill intended to make it even more unnecessarily difficult to build a nuclear power plant--or relicense one.

-Require that the NRC determine that plants are safe. In other words, add another piece of paper onto a process that already works.
-Require that the NRC certify that each nuclear power plant doesn't have security vulnerabilities during the licensing process. In other words, the effects of a terrorist attack are the victims' fault.
-Add another level of bureaucracy to the evacuation plans requirement, and expand the EPZ to 50 miles. More stakeholders can veto the plan under this proposal than possible today--any state within 50 miles or any federal agency involved in emergency management--increasing the likelihood of Shoreham-type politics.
-Require that the NRC do the same reviews for a renewal that they do for a licensing, most of which are completely pointless, since the design doesn't change. In reality, all a renewal application should have to prove safety-wise is that a plant's designed-in safety effects won't be affected by aging.
-Require the NRC to determine in any relicensing that the population density around the plant hasn't changed to the point where it is defined as "urban siting," which is bad for some reason. In other words, shut down Indian Point.

Fortunately, the bill doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting past President Bush even if it did pass. But we're going to have to watch out for this in a couple years, when either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will be eager to prove that they're tough on these "problems." Indian Point is going to have a constant fight on its hands come 2009.

Oh, and four Democrats and one Republican do not a bipartisan coalition make. Maybe they put the "coal" in "coalition" (or the "mental" in "environmentalist"), but not much more.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The sound waves penetrate the tank and the Helium Atoms are heated up and then they bounce into each other causing heat and get very hot by the agitation caused by the sound wave bombardment. This will make heat and with an interior of the tank coated with ceramic coating it will get really hot and stay hot, that heat can then be used to run a coil through the center filled with water which will be your basic steam generator on the exterior, which spins an electric motor. Therefore any power lost from the transmission line is recaptured and therefore there is no loss.

These little tanks can be placed on the ground, prevent that horrible noise that [expletive deleted] of [sic] people and hurts the wild life and disorients them from their normal and natural life cycles and daily patterns. The heat is used, the sound is used and we all win. If you have an idea, which is similar or based upon a similar concept, then maybe you should join a group of thinkers who do not close their minds, turn them off, think out side the box and would like to meet people like you."

-Power Lines Should Never Be Wasted

GNEP's International Prospects

The US, Russia, China, France, and Japan have endorsed the concept.

Notice how that doesn't include any potential customers. While the reprocessing part of GNEP is an excellent step, the overall assumption that Third World countries can't be trusted with nuclear technology is absolutely wrong. The laws of physics still apply to the Third World, and an inherently-safe reactor built in the United States would be just as inherently safe if it were built in Ethiopia.

Link.

The Radioactivity of Depleted Uranium

Apparently it magically becomes more radioactive when dispersed.

Need more evidence that anti-nuclear activists have joined the creationist war on science?

Comments on the Palisades Security Incident

Part 2 of this anti-nuclear email alert contains two major misconceptions.

1. That the security presently used at nuclear power plants is necessary. There is absolutely no point to it; a terrorist couldn't really do anything if they did get in. It reflects the nuclear industry's tendency to accomodate requests because they can (not due to necessity) and their penchant for overkill.

2.

"Nuclear plant operators can build all the walls or blast-resistant chambers they want, but if they're not screening the security personnel, none of that will matter."

-Rep. Ed Markey, perennial friend of nuclear power

Actually, yes, it all does matter, and physics overrides the intentions of those involved--good or not.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"People living near reactors have higher levels of cancer and other illnesses, especially children. All radiation released into the environment will harm living organisms. Omissions [sic] are released every step of the way."

-Mary Madigan, President, Western Port Action Group (Australia) (hat tip: Ed of Nuclear Australia)

1. I thought news organizations were supposed to be above printing special interest groups' press releases.
2. They come up with the first statement by looking at cancer rates in counties that they cherry-pick to be "near" reactors, or worse, collecting baby teeth and analyzing them for fallout (which obviously could have come from atomic bomb detonations). And why would they compare, say, Cook County, IL (population 5,288,655 over 946 square miles) with Garfield County, MT (population 1,279 over 4,848 square miles)?
3. If all radiation harmed organisms, why have they been living with it for billions of years, at literally hundreds of times higher levels? Why is going from 90 millirem (pre-industrial, zero cancers) to 90.02 millirem (nuclear power plant) dangerous?
4. Nuclear facilities basically run on electricity or things that could be substituted with electricity. That electricity comes from fossil fuels when nuclear power isn't used--is nuclear power not nuclear enough? And no, the radiation that comes from nuclear facilities is not in the form of radioactive materials that leak out--said radiation is the small amount that "shines" through the facilities' shielding. There isn't any substance leaking; it's light, literally.

They sure do release omissions, don't they?

Alberta Going Nuclear?

via CBC.

1. The article says that the plant will be a two-unit 2200-megawatt CANDU, which almost certainly means an ACR-1000.
2. Chernobyl did of course melt down, but the meltdown was incidental to the major accident, which was a burst cooling system caused by a power spike. The heat produced by the power spike burst the metal cladding around Chernobyl's fuel rods, allowing some of the lighter already-split atoms to get into the destroyed cooling system and out into the environment. As that power spike is impossible (not improbable, but actually physically impossible) in an ACR-1000, Chernobyl isn't relevant to the discussion.
Also not mentioned in the article is the fact that Chernobyl was designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium; no civilian reactor would be designed like that. The Chernobyl-type reactors weren't even a "thing of the past;" they don't belong lumped in with nuclear power plants. In most places (read: everywhere but the Soviet Union) building them was never allowed--for example, they were banned in the United States in 1950, when the first American nuclear power plant started up in 1957.
3. It really should not cost $6.2 billion. They should be able to get 12 units for that amount of money, and would be able to if someone would get going on an IFR or MSR.
4. "Nuclear has been around" for 50 years, not 30. The excellent safety record mentioned in the article also applies for 50 years, as well.
5. The Chernobyl accident killed not "countless" people, but between 50 and 4,000, according to the UN. Greenpeace's estimate of 250,000 was obtained by drawing a line on a graph from the Japanese atomic bomb survivors' radiation exposure and cancer rate down to zero, taking the amount of radioactive material in the reactor and, assuming that it all got out (which it didn't) and all got to people (which it most certainly didn't), finding that amount of radiation exposure on their graph. Voila: 250,000 deaths--which is more than the total number of people who have died in the area since, of all causes.
6. They will be applying for the Canadian equivalent of a construction permit on June 15.
7. Why the Sierra Club needs to worry about how much environmental protection will cost--and how much not killing people with coal fumes cost Ontario in terms of nuclear power plant construction costs--is beyond me.
8. Nuclear waste does not have a half-life of 50,000 years. The actual waste decays to the radioactivity of the original uranium in about 500 years; that assumes an intelligent waste policy that separates the waste from unused and half-used fuel--the half-used fuel posing the greatest long-term threat. Plus, the term "half-life" is meaningless in this context: since it is a combination of many different radioactive materials, each with its own half-life (that combination depending on the composition of the fuel and the amount of time it spends in the reactor), it can't really be said that nuclear waste has one definite half-life.
9. No, it's not a "quick fix" (their term). Would you rather have a quick fix or something that works? And dare I mention that suing to stop the project sort of disqualifies one from complaining about how long the project is taking?

More from Rod Adams.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"They still don't have a way to store the waste which stays toxic for ... it has a half-life of 4.5 billion years."

-Diane Beeny, Union County New Jersey Peace Council

It's been stored for 50 years and hasn't even gotten out, much less harmed anyone. There's no reason why the systems currently in place (dry-cask storage) can't work until the waste decays to the level of radioactivity of the natural uranium that was mined. That will take about 500 years.
So what's the 4.5 billion years from? 4.5 billion years is the half-life of the fuel, not the waste! The actual "waste problem" is the partly-used fuel--plutonium--which still works as fuel for advanced reactors, if only Congress would legalize reuse of the 95% of nuclear fuel that is not used by today's nuclear power plants.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Reportedly, Dr. Charles Bowman has warned that plutonium stored at Yucca Mountain would remain long after the steel casks holding it dissolve. At that point, the plutonium could migrate and concentrate, while the rock in the mountain could actually accelerate a chain reaction and subsequent explosion."

-World Information Service on Energy

Now, it is true that, over time and if not used, the plutonium in spent fuel will become weapons-grade (it currently is not). That is one of the biggest arguments against geologic storage on a policy level; a nuclear waste repository that contains reactor-grade plutonium will become a plutonium mine.
However, spent fuel is about 1% plutonium. By the time it would become weapons-grade if left alone that proportion will be even lower. Nuclear weapons are made of essentially pure plutonium, and even then, they don't go off all the time. A plutonium bomb is extremely finicky, and any suggestion that the flow of groundwater would cause a sphere of pure plutonium metal to assemble, followed by an enormously complicated and precise detonation mechanism appearing from nowhere, is ludicrous.
"Groundwater" brings us to something else: the quote says it will dissolve, but in what? And I've never heard of a rock acting to accelerate a chain reaction; methinks pure graphite is pretty rare in nature.

There is a precedent for this: the natural nuclear reactors in the Oklo uranium deposit, which started up about 1.6 billion years ago and ran for about 500 million years. Water flowed constantly through this deposit, yet the plutonium and waste produced by this reactor moved less than ten feet until the reactors were discovered in 1972. And no, the plutonium did not go critical, or react, or explode. It just sat there, for a billion years.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Reactors are filling up with spent radioactive fuel and there is no safe place to put this deadly waste."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Reactors don't "fill up" with waste. A nuclear reactor of the type in use in the United States today is an arrangement of uranium rods in a tank of water; the waste is the atoms that have already split, which stay in the fuel rods. After a fuel rod is about 5% used, it is taken out of the tank of water and placed in either an underwater rack (of course, in a different geometric arrangement so it doesn't go critical) or a steel and concrete cask. At that point, the 5% of the rod which is waste can be separated and the rest reused (usually in a more advanced reactor that we unfortunately haven't built), or the rod can be stored indefinitely. Currently, all 5%-used fuel rods in the US are stored indefinitely at nuclear power plants, and have been for 50 years.
Sounds like a lot of unused fuel, doesn't it? Turns out it's a 500-year supply, even if uranium mining stopped today. If there's no place to put it, they should want to stop uranium mining and start using up the unused fuel that we're going to have to store anyway--which also includes half-used fuel, like plutonium, that poses the greatest long-term threat. Yet they're also against recycling.

Gee, if you just read their website, it might give you the impression that their objective is to find someone to blame instead of solving problems.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"A single accident releasing radiation into the environment could cost tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up, and could kill and injure hundreds of people (according to Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates, a graduate of the University of Michigan nuclear science department)."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

What purpose, other than scaring people, is served by speculating on the number of people killed by the physically impossible?

By the way, Jan Peczkis is a graduate of the Northeastern Illinois University Geology Department. That doesn't mean that Northeastern endorses any of his strange ideas, but the above internationally-prominent anti-nuclear group apparently feels the need to associate one of their creationist-style "independent researchers" with a credible educational institution. Note: Northeastern, nicknamed "Northeasy" and/or "Northleastern" by many Chicagoans (including its students) is essentially a diploma mill; it's basically one step up from the City Colleges. Peczkis is notable in that he is the only major "creation scientist" who has a degree from an actual secular institution instead of a "degree" in "biology" from a bible college.

Carbon Offsets Cards from Whole Foods

I recently got my hands on a "free offer" from Whole Foods--a card redeemable for $5 in carbon dioxide credits. According to the card, that means 250 kilowatt-hours and 348 pounds of carbon dioxide. No specifics, of course, on how it works--they assure customers/"players"/concerned environmentalists that the card "ensures that the amount of electricity you use is replaced onto the national power grid with wind energy" (however that's supposed to happen--one thing they most assuredly are not doing is using it to finance utility wind projects).

They say that this purchase will offset driving 429 miles or burning 187 pounds of coal (the equivalent, apparently, of planting four trees). I'm too lazy to check whether these numbers are actually correct; I assume there are probably some unfounded assumptions somewhere along the line in their calculations, but I'd just like to point out that 187 pounds of coal is equivalent to a little less than a tenth of a nuclear fuel pellet. A nuclear fuel pellet is about the size of the tip of your pinky, a fuel rod is a 12-foot stack of fuel pellets, and a typical 1960s-era reactor of the type in operation today has about 50,000 fuel rods. Gives you an idea about the cost-effectiveness, eh?

The word "nuclear" appears on the card exactly once--in a footnote to say that it provides 20% of the electricity for the US. Perhaps it's becoming less fashionable to bash nuclear power, although I wouldn't hold my breath.
I use the term "fashionable" in the sense of the effect that everybody worrying about something has on the less-individualistic 90% of the population. The vast majority of people can be very heavily influenced by the fact that nuclear power seems to worry everybody; very few anti-nuclear people have any real reason to believe what they believe. It's entirely possible to introduce nuclear power to children at an early age, and not with those little ANS fuel pellet cards.
A couple of years ago, while trying to teach myself how to throw left-handed (long story), I apparently angered a squirrel, which started running toward me. Once it was within about three feet, it hesitated and stopped. I could imagine the gears slowly turning: this is a creature that, despite never having attended a single mathematics class or heard/seen any high-profile advertising about the importance of math education, intuitively understands the concept "order of magnitude." It doesn't even have to think "wait a minute--if I challenge the big pink blob, I'm going to get punted 150 feet." The squirrel doesn't "know" anything about math, or the physical basis behind why it shouldn't try to attack a 5'9", 195-pound pitcher, but made the correct decision for the correct reason. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was scientific, but it was at least rational. Scientists and engineers accept findings from their colleagues all the time without evaluating the data themselves; they know enough about the process to know that the data was arrived at in a scientific manner. I don't like this as an objective; it's a copout, obviously, but it's more than we have now. I'm not saying that people should simply trust us; quite the opposite, I want people to internalize scientific concepts.
For example, if people treated all data equally, and approached every physical event as data (which it is), not only would there be no nuclear exceptionalism, but no racism or sexism and probably no fundamentalist religion. That's a really basic core construct that's required for scientific thought, yet very few people try to get there (i.e., it's probably not possible to do all the time, but scientists and engineers are essentially the only people who even attempt to apply it to the data they're familiar with). In 3,000 years, when society is ready for that, it could become widespread; in the meantime, teach your kids to do it and try to familiarize people with science in general. That's about all we can do.

Here's a scan of it: front and back. For a better picture of a windmill, click here or here.

Has the nuclear industry ever thought of selling shares in nuclear power projects in a similar way, given that even for the old reactors, each dollar would pay for three times more electricity (and newer ones could raise that to six times through greater thermal efficiency or 25 times through inherently-safe reactors that don't require backup systems)?

Update: More from Know_Nukes.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The report found that California continues to be a leader in installed wind capacity with just over 2,000 MW, and observed that the potential exists to double this amount in the next five years."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

You can increase capacity--the amount of electricity that windmills are capable of generating--all you want, and if the wind doesn't blow, the windmills don't turn, and you don't have electricity.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"In a deregulated market, nuclear plants will have to run at record availability levels to be competitive, possibly jeopardizing safety."

-Citizen Power

1. Only if you don't require their competitors to do something with their waste.
2. They're assuming cheap gas. It's not a good idea to assume cheap gas.
3. Why should it necessarily compromise safety? Steam systems and high-temperature hydraulic systems that are found in the second-generation reactors that operate today break when they're rapidly cycled through shutdown after shutdown, so even if you subscribe to the "part failures are indicative of safety" notion (which is not correct), keeping a second-generation reactor on longer doesn't introduce new safety problems.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Reprocessing Destabilizes Waste
The fuel rods are taken out of the assemblies, chopped up and then dissolved in nitric acid. The resulting highly radioactive and caustic stew is then processed to remove the plutonium and the uranium, leaving the highly radioactive fission products in the liquid."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

That's one technique--the technique used at plutonium extraction facilities. Since nuclear power plants do not use pure plutonium, there is no reason to extract plutonium as it will simply be recombined with the uranium to be used in a reactor. The only reasons these facilities were ever used were that they were available after the major push to develop plutonium bombs ended, and the technology was well-understood.
However, if the real aim is a nuclear fuel cycle, there's not much point to using military-surplus facilities that don't work very well as a nuclear fuel cycle. That makes about as much sense as using dynamite in power plants as part of a "chemical fuel cycle" because the military understands nitroglycerine. No, what we need is a reactor that can fully use its fuel and a way to separate the heavy fuel from the light waste--which we have--and which does not involve nitric acid or liquid waste or separated plutonium.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"And of course both the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents were a result of human error, the one wild card that can never been entirely eliminated."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Human error can't trump physics. The reason that Three Mile Island didn't become Chernobyl was not luck but a physically different design that cannot accelerate out of control under any circumstances.

Georeactor Crapola

I've been putting this off for a long time, but I think it's finally time to eviscerate the "georeactor" hypothesis, which was floating around some pro-nuclear websites a while back. The idea goes that the Earth's core is a huge fast-breeder reactor, constantly extracting waste by settling it out and generating more fuel by converting uranium-238 into plutonium using a critical assembly ('seed') of ~30% U-235 surrounded by a 'blanket' of U-238. It is utterly, totally, and completely wrong.

1. There is no way to make natural uranium (at any time in the past) go critical in the fast spectrum, which is required for breeding in the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle. Presumably, there is no huge supply of heavy water in the Earth's core, or external neutron source; furthermore, settling-based arguments for isotope separation would form a perfectly inverted assembly (i.e., the U-238 would form a ball, with the U-235 as a small shell around it, which does not a seed-and-blanket configuration make). That settling does not actually happen; neither would the required settling out of fission products, and certainly not at the rate required. If correctly assembled, this reactor would work; however, no mechanism is proposed that would in fact assemble such a configuration.
2. Uranium would not settle to the center of the Earth, as it is not pure uranium in nature. Yellowcake is actually less dense than the iron and nickel in the inner and outer core. The minuscule amount of uranium found in metallic form in some meteorites cannot account for all the uranium on Earth, or why that uranium is not in this chemical form elsewhere.
3. The amount of uranium necessary to form a georeactor would make the Earth significantly heavier than it actually is, which would alter the planet's orbit. Nowhere is it shown where this material actually comes from, nor is the lack of stable fission product daughters in the mantle explained.
4. The neutrinos from this huge hypothetical reactor have never been detected.
5. There is enough heat output from decay heat to explain the Earth's internal heat content. The georeactor hypothesis does not explain where this heat goes, or where the extra heat from the decay of highly-radioactive fission products goes.
6. The rotation of the iron core relative to the rest of the planet fully explains the Earth's magnetic field. Without even invoking Occam's Razor, the georeactor hypothesis must explain why this effect does not work. This explanation is not provided.
7. A variation on the georeactor hypothesis states that Jupiter is a fission-fusion hybrid reactor, similar to the crackpot idea circulating around the internet a few years ago that said that the Galileo probe's plutonium would cause a thermonuclear explosion inside that planet upon reentry. This is so laughably wrong it needs no more explanation. Even stranger versions of this concept suggest that protostars are started by fission reactors, which does not even begin to explain where the first stars came from, as uranium is formed exclusively by supernovae. If a purely thermonuclear mechanism is present for the first stars, why should it not work for later ones?
8. Producing the amount of helium inside the Earth does not require any more alpha radiation than comes from the uranium decay chain. The georeactor hypothesis does not explain the absence of this extra helium.

Dear friends, this does not make us look good. It makes us look bad in the scientific community and gives the anti-nuclear activists ammunition. Do we "need" an example of a natural fission reactor to make nuclear power environmentally friendly? Absolutely not. Do we have one? Actually, yes: Oklo--which is an actual reactor whose existence is accepted by the scientific community. The last thing we need is for anti-nuclear activists to be able to lump Oklo together with the georeactor, which is what could happen if we don't let this clown Herndon wither off in the hole in the wall from whence he came and in which he belongs.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

The first Video Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day (and it's a doozy):

-The Birth of Europe, BBC, 1991

1. The pile of coal at the beginning is not supposed to be part of that clip.
2. Chernobyl did explode, but it was a steam explosion (the reactor's heat output spiked and boiled the water in the cooling system, which exploded and took radioactive material with it), not a nuclear explosion, which would require a nuclear weapon. Reactors are a lot easier to build than current nuclear weapons, and if they could explode, they would have been used as weapons.
3. The old technique of "close-up on damage to make it look more extensive than it actually is" features prominently; if you look at the surrounding area, there's very little physical damage beyond the building itself.
4. The point on the construction of nuclear power plants being a way to displace domestic use of oil and gas to increase export revenues is absolutely correct. Today, they're trying to use basically the same technique to turn anti-nuclear Germany into a gas- and oil-powered puppet of Moscow.
5. The narrator, dripping with contempt, pronounces nuclear power dead--neglecting the fact that Chernobyl was not developed to "provide an energy panacea" but for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The only reason to design a reactor like that is weapons-grade plutonium production; it is more complicated, more expensive, and harder to control than a normal nuclear power plant.
6. The narrator repeats the false claim that Chernobyl had anything to do with civilian nuclear power, that it was a nuclear explosion, and that it somehow vindicated decades of scaremongering by illiterates.
7. They say that public opposition caused reactor cancellations, but in a part of this documentary that I did not upload, they grant that 1986 was a world low in oil prices. Cheap oil hurts nuclear just as much (or more) as it hurts coal.
8. This is one of the first uses of the unbelievably specious Economics Argument: that laws should be passed against nuclear power because it's expensive. If it's as expensive as they say it is, they should be confident enough in their projections that they shouldn't need a law against it; all the Economics Argument demonstrated was the departure of the anti-nuclear movement from its traditional concerns--they now felt they could say anything they wanted and get away with it.
9. Nuclear power was not the first source of energy to be rejected--coal was banned in much of Europe in the Middle Ages until they started to run short of wood. Again, another part of this documentary mentions this, so they should know better.
10. The rest of the clip is fairly decent except for the complaints about EdF's debt--which has long been paid off and whose nuclear fleet is now a cash cow and the backbone of the European grid. And nationally, the US has the "biggest nuclear program"--although it's obviously not under the control of one operator.

This clip is disturbing not only because it's indicative of the anti-nuclear movement going off the deep end while managing to retain all of their power, but because the rest of the documentary is an excellent history of energy. Did they feel pressure to trash nuclear power, when they should have treated it as they did other topics? Do they somehow feel that nuclear power is special, that it is not subject to the same market forces and business cycle that everyone else is?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Nuclear reactors produce highly radioactive waste that will have to be contained for thousands of years."

-New Nuclear Power? No Thanks!

First of all, something can't be highly radioactive and long-lived at the same time. If it's highly radioactive, it gives off radiation faster and thus doesn't last as long. For example, uranium (before it is placed in a reactor) has a half-life of about four and a half billion years, but isn't even warm to the touch. The materials that combine the worst of both (moderately long-lived, moderate radioactivity) are partially-used fuel, mostly plutonium. Completing the process in a waste-eating reactor known as a fast-neutron reactor or fast breeder converts this to short-lived materials. The rest is either short-lived and highly radioactive (waste) or long-lived and not very radioactive (fuel)--and the convenient little byproduct is approximately 100 times more electricity than we originally got.

I can't emphasize this enough: Yucca Mountain is not necessary and should not be done.

And interestingly, the waste itself contains a number of very rare and useful materials. There isn't exactly a booming market for it because this type of research has been made illegal. Should we not at least legalize research into it before we throw up our hands and claim it to be an unsolvable problem?

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"One 1000 megawatts reactor, like the two currently operating at the Indian Point facility, possesses at the heart enough fissionable material equivalent of 1,000 nuclear bombs."

-Green Nuclear Butterfly

First, that doesn't mean anything, since the material is mixed with other things that don't work in bombs and can't be separated, and the reactor itself cannot explode even if the materials were correct (a nuclear weapon goes far out of its way to explode, when an ordinary reaction will do in a power plant--there's no reason to build a nuclear power plant like a nuclear weapon and none have been).

Second, "fissionable" does not mean "works in a nuclear weapon." That's fissile material, and while 100% of a fresh fuel rod is fissionable, only about 3%-5% is fissile. The quote's author is trying to make it look like you can build a nuclear weapon out of anything up to and including used pinball machine parts.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"A spent fuel fire disaster at Indian Point could release up to 20 times the amount of cesium-137 that was released from the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown."

-Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition

Just because it's there doesn't mean it's physically possible for it to be released.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The cessation of Indian Point’s operation immediately puts a stop to the production of dangerous irradiated fuel rods."

-Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition

Not if it's between refueling outages.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"With the NRC’s demonstrated lack of effective oversight and Entergy’s apparent disregard for public safety, renewing Indian Point’s licenses for another twenty years puts everyone living in the shadow of this plant at risk."

-Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition

That doesn't mean they can do things that are physically impossible.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Chernobyl was the dumping of a reactor using uranium fuel into the atmosphere and the surrounding earth and water. Plutonium is so much more toxic and cancer causing that MOX fuel would double the number of cancers that a major reactor accident in South Carolina would cause over time."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

A few little details:

1. A Chernobyl-style accident is physically impossible in an American-style nuclear power plant. It's not a Russian vs. American safety culture issue; the Russians have a few American-style nuclear power plants, and a Chernobyl-style accident is impossible in those, as well--Chernobyl was a scaled-up bomb factory; American-style nuclear power plants are scaled-up submarine engines. It is true, also, that the direct cause of Chernobyl was a harebrained stunt (had the reactor been operated to specifications, the accident would never have happened). The key, though, is that an American-style nuclear power plant can be operated wildly outside of specifications with consequences only to the owners' bank accounts, not public health or safety.
2. The plutonium and uranium mostly stayed inside the reactor building. It was the already-split atoms that did the vast majority of the radiological damage, and that has nothing to do with the toxicity of plutonium. The atoms have split in half and thus ceased to be plutonium. What they're assuming is that a "reactor accident" (which, by their definition, includes almost anything they want) will release all the fuel inside a reactor to the environment. On the contrary, we've seen the worst-case accident in basically every type of major reactor design, and nothing remotely along those lines has happened. This is purely an assumption; an artifact of the lack of operating experience in the 1950s (when this was made).

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day