Depleted Uranium and the Precautionary Principle

The author of this article posted to Know_Nukes admits that their conspiracy theories about depleted uranium are probably wrong.

But what if they weren't?

That boils down to an extremely conservative attitude. It is formally known as the Precautionary Principle: don't do anything unless all the possible problems to future generations are known and solved. Since humans aren't infalliable and can't predict everything, don't do anything--even if you know the problems you'll cause are less severe than what you're currently experiencing.

How can you know that it's a net gain if you can't know everything that will happen in the future? Easy. Today's problems, if unsolved, will continue unabated into the future, indefinitely. Thus, whatever problem is eliminated, whatever net gain is made, will be projected into the future from this day forward.
I'm all for precaution--eliminating, reducing, and optimizing risks; establishing a coherent system by taking problems that will always be there and letting them work against each other. Given two two-by-fours, I'll lean them against each other instead of trying to balance them on their ends and complaining that doing so requires perfection and is inherently unstable, and mere humans cannot be trusted with two-by-fours as a result. However, I am not in favor of swinging in trees.

The Precautionary Principle has nothing to do with precaution. It is simply a reactionary philosophy that has been with humanity since our first consciousness, and is keeping humans who have the bad luck to be born in the Third World barefoot and sick when solutions are well-known and available.

Give me the real left wing. Not the left wing of Amory Lovins, but the left wing of FDR. Give every person everywhere an American standard of living, and watch their environmental impact go down as they rely less on nature for their needs. Telling a man who is up to his waist in a rice paddy in Bangladesh that he needs to use less energy is not the answer. A radical overhaul of the poverty lifestyle forced upon him by reactionaries is the answer, and doing so is our moral obligation.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Nuclear or Geothermal power plants? Neither."

-'amazngdrx'

Geothermal energy comes from the heat given off when radiation from natural radioactive materials inside the Earth is absorbed by nearby rock or other materials. So it is actually a kind of nuclear power.

It is more commonly grouped with wind and solar under the banner of "renewable energy," but this quote goes to show that "renewable" actually means "unfeasible." When they realize that geothermal energy might in fact work, it becomes scum, the enemy of the environment. Energy allows us to do things, so if the objective is to starve polluting processes so that they can't operate (a perfectly reasonable and understandable tactic), any functional energy source must be opposed, existing ones must be made as expensive as possible, and the depletion of reserves must be sped up--with a ban on exploration for new supplies--until there is no alternative but to revert to the solar-powered 1600-vintage "happy peasant lifestyle." A lifestyle, I might add, which would have killed me at birth.
Thus, I ain't too happy about proposals like this. I can put two and two together, and I like my energy. To quote one of the store designs (itself a quote):

What About All Those Indigenous Populations That Are Being Used as a Dumping Ground?

An Australian indigenous group has volunteered a part of their land as a low- and intermediate-level waste repository (read: for rubber gloves and used reactor parts, respectively).

Do you think they'll stop using the "environmental racism" argument? Don't hold your breath.

Link.

"Nuclear Waste Per Capita"

I didn't know it was this easy to get press. Maybe we should pour orange juice into a vacuum breaker and get the NRC's response on video, or make an inflatable of a polar bear hugging a containment structure, or something like that.

How to turn a five-minute calculation into a "major, startling new report":

1. Figure out how much nuclear waste was produced by nuclear power plants in each state from publicly-available numbers. Inflate this figure by a factor of 20-30 by ignoring the unused fuel still left in the fuel rods that are in storage.
2. Get population data.
3. Divide.
4. Give it to your state groups to make a hullabaloo, even if the number is all of two pounds.

That's right. The most nuclear waste that anyone has accumulated per capita around the country is 2.15 pounds. That's something to be proud of--how much carbon dioxide has accumulated in the atmosphere from coal burning, per capita, and how much particulate matter is in people's lungs from coal burning, per capita? And how much of that nuclear waste is in the environment?

Zero.

Perversely, this is being used to justify a subsidy for fossil fuels, paid for by the operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In Anti-Nuke World, climate scientists have it all wrong: carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming; nuclear power plants do. Sure.

Talk about social responsibility. Yes, nuclear waste is going to be around for a while; a lot longer if we don't reuse the half-used fuel that poses the biggest part of the waste problem. But so are the Pyramids; the Pyramids have no conceivable use to the generations that have had to live alongside them. Like the Pyramids, there's no way for it to magically disperse itself into the environment. Like the Pyramids, it doesn't require any nannying. Like the Pyramids--and unlike chemical toxins from coal burners--it has a finite lifetime. Like the Pyramids, people regard it as magical and not the physical entity that it is.

Let's cite this study in the future. It looks very useful, not just from the data, but from the source.

More from We Support Lee (plus background on the subsidy here).

Link.

More Russian Uranium Deposits

Worldwide, we "use" about 67,000 tons of uranium per year, 670 tons of which is actually used (the rest is stored). Nuclear power provides 20% of world electricity, and could provide 100%, requiring 3,350 tons per year. The US, being 5% of the world's population, uses 25% of world energy; giving everyone American per-capita access to energy using nuclear power would require another five-fold increase in uranium consumption, assuming that the proportion of electricity out of total energy is the same worldwide--totaling 16,750 tons of uranium per year.

These eight Russian deposits contain 320,000 tons of uranium.

The math is not difficult: if their contents were used sensibly, these eight new mines could provide all the uranium needed to fuel all the nuclear power plants needed to provide American-style quantities of electricity to everyone in the world for almost twenty years.

Be reminded that this is 6% of worldwide uranium reserves. That's enough to last almost 320 years. However, there are two other major sources of uranium: coal ash and seawater.
Uranium is present in coal ash at an average level of 4.5 parts per million. In the US--and this is just in the US--118 million tons of new coal ash are available every year. That comes out to 531 tons--about 80% of the world's current uranium requirement.
Seawater is the big one, though. Uranium is present in seawater at an average level of 3.3 parts per billion. The oceans have about 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 tons of water and thus about 4,950,000,000 tons of uranium, with 35,000 tons added per year by runoff from rivers. Quite simply, as long as we use less than 35,000 tons of uranium per year, uranium from seawater is being made available faster than it is being consumed. Technically, it is a renewable resource.

But let's say we only had that 4,950,000,000 tons to use at a rate of 16,750 tons per year. That will last us 295,000 years. And that's not even counting thorium, which is another nuclear fuel that can produce just as much energy as uranium. More here.

So why do anti-nuclear activists say we're going to run out of nuclear fuel?

Link.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Stop Hinkley is dedicated to the removal of nuclear reactors from the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary and is committed to the introduction of greener technologies more appropriate to the new millennium."

-Stop Hinkley

Those "greener technologies" were our first energy sources and belong in the dustbin of history.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The toxic wastes from atomic power systems will poison planet Earth for thousands of years to come. Our soil and water are being poisoned by the widespread burying of nuclear waste on land and sea! Atomic energy is always in conflict with all Life, because the very nature of 'atom-splitting' is destruction not construction. For this reason, it can never be used for peace or peaceful activities. How can peace be achieved by that which is by nature unpeaceful? Splitting atoms disrupts the flow of force through them."

-'infinity2' (hat tip: Freedom for Fission)

Wow.

You know, I'd rather not swing in a tree. But nuclear power sure has a knack for ticking off anti-science crackpots.

CFL Mercury Horror Stories

More very old news, but a minor detail is upsetting a few people in that CFLs contain mercury, which is awful and terrible for the environment and should be banned, because the solution is always to ban everything, as technology is something that was dropped from the sky on an unsuspecting public as a way to exploit them by the evil, evil corporations.

Global-warming-denier crackpot Steven Milloy wrote what is actually is a very reasonable article on April 28, which was posted to Know_Nukes. Go read it if you haven't, and if you have, keep it in the arsenal for whenever someone presents CFLs as the ultimate solution for everything.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"48 Organizations Refute President Bush's Claim That Nuclear Power is a "Renewable Sourse [sic] of Energy""

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

If it were such a great argument, it shouldn't rely purely on repetition. The entire "refutation" is reprinted below in its entirety:

"In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, you were quoted as saying that nuclear power "is a renewable source of energy."

Please be advised that nuclear power is not a renewable source of energy.

For that matter, oil, coal, and natural gas are also not renewable sources of energy.

Nuclear power and fossil fuels are environmentally polluting and non-renewable sources of energy.

The primary renewable sources of energy are biofuels, biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, and wind."

Note how the above simply states claims of its own instead of providing any evidence or giving any reasons for anything it says. How about these to consider:
1. Nuclear power is a term that refers to the extraction of energy from the nucleus instead of chemical bonds. Nuclear power isn't in and of itself renewable or non-renewable, no more than chemical power is or isn't. Fuel sources are renewable, not methods for extracting energy from them, and there are sources of uranium that are renewable. That brings us to #2.
2. What does "renewable" mean? A renewable resource is one that is replenished at a faster or equal rate than its extraction. Wind is one, unless the wind doesn't blow. Solar is one, until the Sun sets. Hydropower is one, unless there's a drought. Geothermal and biomass/biofuels usually aren't, but they can be if managed well. Likewise with the massive amount of uranium dissolved in seawater. Managed correctly, it could provide all the uranium needed to fuel all the nuclear power plants needed to provide 100% of the world's electricity, at a lower rate than "new" uranium is being added from rivers. Is the ultimate source of uranium renewable? Of course not, but neither is the hydrogen fueling the Sun's fusion.
3. Nobody said anything about fossil fuels. They're trying to smear nuclear power by trying to associate it with fossil fuels, even trying to imply that uranium is a fossil fuel and that it pollutes, which it does not. Ignorant, arrogant, contemptuous, laughing mockery is not a substitute for facts.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Petroleum geologists have known for 50 years that global oil production would "peak" and begin its inevitable decline within a decade of the year 2000. Moreover, no renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels.

In short, the transition to declining energy availability signals a transition in civilization as we know it."

-DIE OFF

There's another choice: nuclear power.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Demand radiation standards that follow the precautionary principle"

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

The precautionary principle, meaning don't do anything unless you know everything, and since we'll never know everything, we should go swing in a tree.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"The time is now, for the United States to begin to cut our dependence on nuclear power, and seriously fund alternative energy sources that are far less risky to our health, our environment, and our national security.

An excellent way to begin this transition is to halt the knee-jerk relicensing of nuclear power plants, and to take the time we have left under current operating licenses to move the nation to cleaner, safer transitional energies like natural gas and cleaner coal, and ultimately to renewable energies such as solar and wind combined with a serious commitment to energy efficiency."

-Environmental Wrecking Group

Gas, oil, and coal are not alternative energy sources. These people--a supposed environmental group--want to continue to belch pollution and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These energy sources don't have a waste problem because they simply dump it into our air--which is more socially responsible, a few casks in the desert that don't kill anyone or require significant maintenance, or pollution that everyone has to breathe, whether they like it or not?

And solar and wind aren't futuristic energy sources. Solar energy and wind energy were the first energy sources humanity ever used, and were replaced by coal in the 1700s because they simply could not produce enough. Banning anything that works and attempting to use these energy sources--as well as reducing demand to the point where alternatives of any sort aren't necessary--just prolongs the reign of fossil fuels. But that's what they want.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Taxes also have an energy cost. When taxes are paid to governments, those governments present the money as exchange for energy‑embodied goods and services (gasoline, tanks, police cruisers, police cruisers, policemen, soldiers, pilots, ad infinitum.) I have assigned the related energy required to obtain goods and services via taxes to the energy‑transformation entity ─in this case the electric utility which constructs and operates the nuclear plant."

-Minnesotans for Sustainability

Nice logic: nuclear power plants pay taxes, and governments use those taxes to buy things which require energy to manufacture, so nuclear power plants use energy instead of produce it. Brilliant.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Certain forms of energy are called "renewable" because these fuel sources are constantly replenished and will not run out."

-Citizen Power

If the source of fuel being constantly replenished at a rate equal to or greater than the rate of depletion is the definition of renewable, Integral Fast Reactors running on uranium extracted from seawater count as renewable energy. They would use less uranium in providing all the world's electricity than what is washed into the ocean by rivers annually (and would almost certainly run off the 500 years' worth of unused energy in nuclear waste instead of fresh uranium, further decreasing that demand), so they would be, by definition, renewable.

But if the definition is restricted to mean only fuel that will never run out, nothing is renewable, because eventually the Sun will die. There aren't any perpetual motion machines. "That's ridiculous; we're not talking about that time frame," they say--but the amount of time necessary to exhaust energy provided by (1) existing uranium deposits, (2) unused energy in nuclear waste, (3) heat produced by the decay of uranium deep inside the Earth (geothermal power), and (4) uranium in seawater would indeed last until the Sun dies. Why, may I ask, is energy produced by the decay of uranium counted as renewable when that produced by splitting those atoms is not?
The answer, of course, is that that's not the point. The point is that "renewable" means "not fossil fuels," and fossil fuels do not meet the above definition when used at today's consumption rates (if oil use were cut by a factor of 100,000, it would also be renewable). When something does meet that definition that they don't like (e.g., clear-cutting the rainforest to grow sugarcane for ethanol), they amend the unwritten definition to exclude it. Is whale oil renewable? Was petroleum renewable before about 1870? Is nuclear power from IFRs running on seawater-extracted uranium renewable? Yes, yes, and yes--but Joe Environmentalist would almost certainly say no to all three, because "renewable" is code for "good."

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

"Nuclear waste dumps, toxic incinerators, atomic reactors and other such facilities typically are located where there is cheap land, cheap facilities, and little organized opposition. Too often, this has been in minority and poor communities that have felt powerless to oppose corporate giants."

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

1. The problem is not that a toxic waste facility is located in a suitable area, but rather that racist governments have forced minorities onto land suitable only for toxic waste facilities.
2. The implication is of course that people are not allowed to support things that NIRS doesn't. People either oppose something or "feel powerless to oppose" it. I think nuclear power is a good idea, just like they think windmills and solar panels are a good idea. This is entirely possible, and while I am aware that I am in the minority, it's not a result of corporate bribery. People can have honest disagreements about issues without one being a liar.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Using the creative resources of the arts, analysis, and partnerships with kindred individuals and groups, the Atomic Mirror awakens the need to nurture a sustainable way of life by turning away from nuclear technology."

-The Atomic Mirror

Let's burn our 200 years of coal instead of our tens of thousands of years of nuclear fuel. That's sustainable. Let's keep our nuclear fuel in bombs and out of reactors. That's real safety.

This makes a point that we should listen to, however: we don't use their demonstrably effective methods of actually communicating with people on their own terms. This has the effect of alienating the people who we need most, and if we don't get our act together as a group we will repeat history. We owe it to the 30,000 people who die choking on coal fumes every single year to do the advocacy part right this time.

Report: Ontario Needs Nuclear

Much of this Yahoo News article gives space to people who think burning more coal is a good idea because it's cheap and of course produces no nuclear waste. Coal simply doesn't contain any of its waste, so there isn't a waste problem.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"All candidates must have a thorough knowledge of socioeconomics or related fields, with experience in assessing the impact of nuclear power plants or other large industrial facilities on the surrounding community."

-Alliance to Save Energy

In other words, no experience required.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"During May of 1972, samples from the Cannikin shaft revealed venting of about 14,000 cubic feet of radioactive krypton-85 gas with concentrations of 200,000 femtocuries per milliliter."

-Alaska Community Action on Toxics

This is a great example of the statistical fiddling method of using different units for everything to inhibit communication. There is absolutely no reason to give a number in cubic feet and then switch over to milliliters, unless to make the number sound much bigger than it actually is. "Femto-" means "multiplied by 0.000000000000001 (14 zeros followed by a one)," and there are 28,317 milliliters in a cubic foot, so we're actually talking about 0.0000000002 curies per milliliter, or 0.0000056634 curies per cubic foot, for a total of 0.079 curies. So what's 0.079 curies? The radioactivity from 0.079 grams of radium. Not very much.

That's not the end of it, either. The curie is a favorite unit of the anti-nuclear movement because it is a unit of radioactivity. It measures simply the amount of radiation emitted (number of particles), not the strength of the radiation or how much of it actually got to someone. Recap:
Curie: number of particles
Becquerel: number of particles
Rad/Millirad: amount received
Gray: amount received
Rem/Millirem: effect of radiation
Sievert: effect of radiation
Roentgen: strength of radiation

More information that they don't give: krypton-85 has a half-life of about 11 years. Radioactivity is obviously not in the environment forever. In fact, radioactive materials are the only substances which we know cannot last forever under any conditions.

Notice how, further down the page, they go from krypton-85 to americium-241, implying that the solid americium could diffuse as easily as the gaseous krypton. I refer you to the Oklo natural reactors for a sense of what happens when fission products are released in the environment.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"While nuclear energy is technically feasible for base-load energy generation, it fails to meet important criteria. The problem of nuclear waste is still unsolved and the full-life cost is prohibitively expensive. In the ‘post 9/11’ environment, nuclear power stations are attractive targets for terrorism."

-Centre for Alternative Technology

Anti-nuclear activists want to make sure the problem of nuclear waste stays unsolved so that existing plants have to shut down. Solution after solution has been proposed but they refuse to accept them for political reasons.

The life-cycle costs of nuclear energy are higher than coal because nuclear is socially responsible and coal isn't. Apparently people count for nothing.

See my post on the physics of an airplane hitting a nuclear power plant.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"I don't think you can argue that it [nuclear energy] meets the definition of sustainability because it means not leaving a legacy for future generations at all in any circumstances"

-Margaret Beckett

Huh? "Sustainable" means it works for the forseeable future.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"But this is being litterbugs with radioactive waste, which lasts for hundreds of years."

-Arjun Makhijani

As opposed to coal-fired power plants, which produce more nuclear waste and simply dump it in the air.

Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day

"Or will we recognize that cheap energy is simply a form of subsidy to the status quo at the expense of future generations, and instead take the necessary actions to build a sustainable and equitable energy regime?"

-Center for Energy & Environmental Policy

Just make everything expensive. That will solve the problem.