Sitting in Bill Richardson's office while he was Secretary of Energy under President Clinton was an opportunity that my colleagues and I from Standing for Truth About Radiation had worked hard to obtain. We wanted Richardson to not only close the research reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, but also to shut down the Millstone plant in Waterford, Connecticut, which we asserted had been killing enormous amounts of fish with its water intake system for cooling. Local groups had been charging Millstone with destroying millions of pounds of local fish and with pumping superheated water back into the Long Island Sound, the temperatures of which had negatively impacted fish and shellfish habitat for decades.
Richardson, like any DOE Secretary before or after him, wasn't all that interested in closing Millstone. Everywhere we went, government officials like Richardson invoked the figure "20 percent." Twenty percent of domestic power in the US is derived from nuclear energy. The clean and safe source of power.
Often when discussing the advent of a new era in nuclear power generation, advocates for nukes, like Stewart Brand, who I referenced in my previous post, tread lightly over certain subjects, such as waste disposal and security issues. Other problems inherent in nuclear power generation, they simply ignore completely. One such issue is the impact of mining and processing radioactive materials into actual fuel. The mining and processing of material like uranium is one of the most carbon intensive processes used in creating energy. To mine, mill and refine uranium and to then submit the material to the enrichment, or gaseous diffusion, process takes vast amounts of energy. In sites around the US, massive coal burning plants pollute the air while providing the energy for uranium enrichment. Add to that the power needed to fabricate the enriched UF6 into fuel rods, and the resources needed to store the byproduct, reduced or depleted UF6. You begin to see that everything that leads up to a utility reactor going on line is anything but clean.
Another issue that nuke advocates sidestep is calculation of the true cost of bringing nuclear power plants on line. Just as oil, and thus gasoline, actually costs astronomically more than what we pay at the pump, due to the cost of US military interventions in the oil-rich areas of the world ( not to mention the costs in human lives, US and foreign), nuclear power has its own menu of hidden costs that are now, or one day will be, inherited by our children. Waste storage is the primary issue here. But the actual decommissioning and decontamination of reactors themselves will soon come to pass. Even with current licenses being foolishly extended and, thus, pushing the operational lives of these units years, even decades, beyond their original design, these units will eventually expire. The cost of closing them safely in current dollars is staggering. In the future, that will only get worse.
Scott Simon never asked Stewart Brand about Price Anderson. Even as utility operators put hundreds of millions into the Price Anderson fund respectively and billions collectively, one accident at, say, Indian Point, adjacent to New York City, would mean potentially many billions in costs. Who pays that? US taxpayers do, while Entergy, a private energy company, profits from the operation of the plant. Insuring these plants, over a hundred of them in the US, all aging, falls largely to US taxpayers. Another hidden cost. At least hidden in so far as most US citizens are concerned.
In the next piece that I post here, I will touch upon the issue of the health hazards posed by exposure to ambient radiation, which I believe is the least discussed and among the most insidious components of the nuclear powered utility legacy.
While we often hear the phrase, "solves two problems at once", using double deduction for co2 is nothing but an accounting trick enabling temporary hyping of this product's "net gain". While it may be applicable to some short "transition" phase, as landfills are phased out, in the end transition phases cannot be considered to last forever, and the public is left with having spent their money to produce only 1/3 reduction in co2, not the intital 2/3 hyped by using accounting tricks.
Biochar likewise uses double accounting for both it's sequestered carbon from the char, and from deducting the full emissions of coal, that it is assumed to replace. Not only is the carbon not sequestered forever any more than the carbon in the oil we burn today was, without the "transition phase" double accounting trick, it is not even carbon negative. Figures don't lie, but liars sure can figure.
How Waste Bio Fuels works:
All the good land is used all the time for food, clothing and wood.
We stop corn ethanol as well.
Everything we grow and harvest, eventually gets used up and thrown away. Got that?
When we throw it always, instead of dumping it someplace, we convert it into energy and fuel.
Got that?
Bio Char is one the easiest, cheapest, and best of the bio fuel systems.
For instance toxic sewage dried and Bio Charred eliminate all the toxic organic chemicals: drugs, hormones, pesticides, pathogens.
Got it?
For anyone serious about energy, see my profile.
Evidence????
if anybody else wants to know and can;t find it, just ask, and not the other pro nuke pr folks like charles.
http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html
Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an incinerator.
The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours or a compact fluorescent bulb for 20 hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
"The average yearly deaths from rooftop solar is 0.83/TWh. Those who want a lower bound estimate can double the life of the solar panels (0.44deaths/TWh). This is worse than the occupational safety issues associated with coal and nuclear power. (see table below). 12 to 25 times less safe than the projected upper bound end effect of Chernobyl (from WHO figures). "
The real truth seems to be that raw material issues have not yet been analyzed sufficiently in the aggregate for anyone to really know for sure if Gigawatts per day quantities of the stuff can even be supplied if we decided today to go all out for solar PV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride
"At the present time, the price of the raw materials cadmium and tellurium are a negligible proportion of the cost of CdTe solar cells and other CdTe devices. However, tellurium is an extremely rare element (1-5 parts per billion in the Earth's crust; see Abundances of the elements (data page)), and if CdTe were to be used in sufficiently large quantities (for example, to make enough solar cells to provide a significant proportion of worldwide energy consumption), tellurium availability could be a serious problem."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=explosive-gas-silane-used-to-make-photovoltaics
the CdTe is sealed under glass, there is no work exposure.
No work exposure while installing perhaps. What about during their manufacture, storm damage, or recycling?
If you had looked into it at all, you would have seen that some of these nanomaterials, being on the scale of nuclear particles themselves or "quantum dots", they have some of the same toxicity issues for humans. Other people have tried to point this out, only to be hand waved off by you without any RESEARCH on your part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride
"The toxicity is not solely due to the cadmium content. One study found that the highly reactive surface of cadmium telluride quantum dots triggers extensive reactive oxygen damage to the cell membrane, mitochondria, and cell nucleus.[5]. Many nanoparticle chemicals have safety issues. "
The truth is Solar PV hasn't been around long enough for anyone to know what the problems with decommissioning and recycling it's waste materials really are. Any claims of total safety, are similar to claims for many drugs that seemed perfectly safe for the first few years, until health problems suddenly started showing up.
Complete lifecycle analysis has not yet been fully done for Solar PV, biochar, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride
"The disposal and long term safety of cadmium telluride is a known issue in the large scale commercialization of cadmium telluride solar panels.
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are nominating Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) for inclusion in the National Toxicology Program (NTP). This nomination is strongly supported by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and First Solar Inc. The material has the potential for widespread applications in photovoltaic energy generation that will involve extensive human interfaces. Hence, we consider that a definitive toxicological study of the effects of long-term exposure to CdTe is a necessity.
http://stockology.blogspot.com/2007/11/cadmium-telluride-cast-shadow-of-death.html
http://www.nrel.gov/pv/thin_film/docs/20theuropvscbarcelona4cv114_raugei.pdf
"Module decommissioning at the end of their life cycle was not included in the analysis, because of the current lack of a widespread decommissioning/recycling strategy for thin film modules.
The need for further development of specific recycling strategies for module decommissioning is recognised."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmium_telluride
"The disposal and long term safety of cadmium telluride is a known issue in the large scale commercialization of cadmium telluride solar panels.
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are nominating Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) for inclusion in the National Toxicology Program (NTP). This nomination is strongly supported by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and First Solar Inc. The material has the potential for widespread applications in photovoltaic energy generation that will involve extensive human interfaces. Hence, we consider that a definitive toxicological study of the effects of long-term exposure to CdTe is a necessity.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2009/09/energy_sec_chu_if_its_coal_vs.html
On an annual basis, for a typical 1000 MW uranium powerplant, you start with 250 tons of uranium ore. A 1000 MW thorium system uses one ton of thorium, and the typical ash produced in a 1000 MW coal facility results in 13 tons of thorium.
We found no evidence of a link between exposure to low-level ionising radiation before conception and increased risk of adverse reproductive outcome in men working in the nuclear industry. Similarly for women there was no evidence of an association between monitoring before conception and malformation in offspring.
http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/07/test.html
"documented cases of wind turbine related accidents
...The trend is as expected - as more turbines are built, the more accidents occur. Numbers of recorded accidents reflect this, with an average of 72.1 accidents found per year from 2002 to 2009"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States
"To compare the historical safety record of civilian nuclear energy with the historical record of other forms of electrical generation, Ball, Roberts, and Simpson, the IAEA, and the Paul Scherrer Institut found in separate studies that during the period from 1970 - 1992, there were just 39 on-the-job deaths of nuclear power plant workers, while during the same time period, there were 6,400 on-the-job deaths of coal power plant workers, 1,200 on-the-job deaths of natural gas power plant workers and members of the general public caused by natural gas power plants, and 4,000 deaths of members of the general public caused by hydroelectric power plants.[4][5][6] In particular, coal power plants are estimated to kill 24,000 Americans per year, due to lung disease[7] as well as causing 40,000 heart attacks per year[8] in the United States. According to Scientific American, the average coal power plant emits more than 100 times as much radiation per year than a comparatively sized nuclear power plant does, in the form of toxic coal waste known as fly ash.[9]"
Nuclear will be needed as well.
http://carbonsequestration.us/Papers-presentations/htm/Pacala-Socolow-ScienceMag-Aug2004.pdf
Waste Bio CHar let's us use the land for wood, clothing wood.
After humans are done with it and throw it away,
that's when it is converted to energy and fuels.
The total output of the land can eventually be converted into energy and fuel,
without competing with food, clothing and wood.
Something you are clearly pretending not to understand.
After food is thrown away, it goes into municipal waste which is polluted with other toxic materials, and the resulting biochar cannot be put back on the land. Zero co2 sequestration unless you radically change the way food is thrown away.
After lumber from a house is torn down, it goes to municipal waste, where it is already too polluted with lumber chemical treatments and other construction material waste, to be biochared and returned to the land.
After the tires are used and thrown away, woops, can't put that biochar back on the land, either. What part of that don't you get, exactly?
So, no matter how many times you repeat, repeat, repeat the same line about "total output of the land", does not make it true unless you can supply some evidence to back it up. So far, you have not. Quite the contrary, the very same links you supplied show otherwise if you just read more than one sentence or quit cherry picking out only the parts you like.
more than just about any industry I have ever seen.
Perhaps it's because the truth about their product is so apocalyptic.
Maybe it's just the legacy of secrecy, lies and disregard for the safety of civilians from the Manhattan project.
Now they claim life cycle emissions are cleaner than pv solar.
sure, as along as you don't count
THE MILLION YEAR DEADLY WASTE!
Nukes, 25 cents not 3, proliferation risk, millions of early cancer deaths from waste released...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/profile/research for more details and links.
Stop wasting time, and resources on fossil and nukes, and commit big time to green energy.
Solar wind and biofuels can supply all the energy the world needs cleanly, safely, cheaper and forever.
sure, as along as you don't count THE MILLION YEAR DEADLY WASTE!"
That sounds like you are finally admitting there are less emissions of all types to the air, from nuclear, than from any other source.
Is that waste deadly like the Virginia coal mine accident this week, or the gas plant explosion a few weeks ago? Can't wait to see your evidence link for deaths this week directly attributable to that deadly nuclear waste, because as far as I know, there wern't any.
thank god there wasn't nuclear waste stored there.
This is even more conclusive nuclear wins hands down in the lifecycle analysis, and covers all emissions, not just co2. Check it out and you will have to admit the nuclear lifecycle is the lowest.
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/documentlibrary/protectingtheenvironment/graphicsandcharts/lifecycleemissions/
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
““How about a newer technology reactor design that can recycle wastes?
http://energyfromthorium.com/essay3rs/”
“Proposal for recycling the existing nuclear waste we have now, into 1000 Gigawatts per year of near zero co2 producing electricity.
http://energyfromthorium.com/2010/03/29/kirk-sorensen-teac2-talk/””
http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/GenInfo/NewsAndEvents/SpecialPrograms/ScienceMatters/NuclearEnergy/docs/Peterson.ppt#460,17,Life Cycle GHG Emissions
More radiation/contamination is released from coal plants than nuclear plants. All thermal power plants have the same cooling requirements, the water released is not "superheated" please do not use words that you don't understand.
http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/GenInfo/NewsAndEvents/SpecialPrograms/ScienceMatters/NuclearEnergy/docs/Peterson.ppt#460,17,Life Cycle GHG Emissions
More radiation/contamination is released from coal plants than nuclear plants. All thermal power plants have the same cooling requirements, the water released is not "superheated" please do not use words that you don't understand.
Thank you!