Let's hear it for nuclear power

[Andy44]

SF author James Hogan writes in support of nuclear power. Long, but very interesting.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/hogan3.1.1.html

LRC is a libertarian website, for the sake of full disclosure...

 

[willy88]

Shh! Don't say the N-word!

 

[Tommy]

I always get a bit annoyed when people keep saying that nuclear power is cleaner and safer. It is, until you consider the waste. We still don't know how to safely dispose of it. It's some of the most toxic stuff on the planet, and radioactive to boot. It will be for thousands of years. Nothing mankind has ever built has lasted as long as nuclear waste needs to be safely stored, and I doubt we can build a safe depository any time soon.

With Polywell reactors looking quite promising in the near future (~20 years by average prediction) it just doesn't make sense to make more Nuke plants. It's a "quick fix" that will cause more trouble down the road than it's worth. Just one dirty bomb made from nuclear waste will do it. Sure we've made the plants themselves much safer since Three Mile Island and Chernoble, but we still just stick the waste into barrels and stick it somewhere, figuring that "someday" we'll figure out what to do with it.

 

[Dig Gil]

I'm not going to read it...
We need to evolve our technology.

 

[Sky Captain]

Part of the problem is current commercial nuclear power reactors are very wasteful - they can use only U235 which is something like 0.7 % in the ore. There are much better reactor designs called breeders around that can use U238 which is much more abundant. 1 GW reactor of such design would need only 1 - 2 tons of uranium each year and waste produced would need special storage only few hundred years. Even waste from current reactors could be used as fuel.

 

[Urwumpe]

Also, the key question should be: For what do you need a nuclear reactor? What other kind of power station do you want to replace with it?

The biggest advantage of nuclear power plants is also their biggest disadvantage:They provide a constant stable large amount of electrical energy (and four times more thermal energy, which you can't use for something better as making electricity). When they drop out, you loose a lot of electricity.

Also, Hogan argues very very poorly. I might disappoint his fans now, but: When Hogan writes, that 95% of the nuclear waste can be reprocessed into nuclear fuel, he ignores (obviously willingly) that reprocessing nuclear waste produces also 20 times more nuclear waste - the many working liquids, machines and stuff are quickly also nuclear waste. Unless you want and need Plutonium for a nuclear weapon program or have problems getting the needed amounts of Uranium out of your mines, reprocessing is ecologically madness. And it is even more madness to claim that reprocessing reduces the amount of nuclear waste - it does exactly the opposite.

Most nuclear waste reaching the German not-permanent storage of Gorleben is waste produced during the reprocessing in France. Germany saves Uranium, France gets Plutonium, all are happy. Except those stupid farmers and citizens, who live around the waste storage.

Storing nuclear waste is BTW, not that easy as many proponents put it...

 

[garyw]

it just doesn't make sense to make more Nuke plants. It's a "quick fix" that will cause more trouble down the road than it's worth.

So how do you feed a countries thirst for energy? Those requirements will only continue to go up? What do you want? more coal feed plants?

 

[Aviator]

The thing with nuclear waste is that it origionaly came from the ground, as long as we place it back there once were done with it while taking things like underground water into account it will be more or less a safe as any natural deposit of radioactives.

 

[doggie015]

Remember that FISSION is what we currently use, and it is the more dangerous. Once FUSION on earth becomes a commercial reality via ITER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER then we can pretty much kiss the waste problem goodbye, and the safety problem too, not only is a runaway chain reaction impossible due to the conditions required for fusion to occur. Also the process of harnessing is several times more efficiant than fission. The only problem is getting enough heat to begin with...

 

[Urwumpe]

So how do you feed a countries thirst for energy? Those requirements will only continue to go up? What do you want? more coal feed plants?

Not with something as uneconomic than nuclear power. If you would remove tax payers money from nuclear energy production, the energy would cost between 50 and 200% more than coal or gas.

Also nuclear power plants lack the needed agility for modern power demands (large and slow) and fail too often. When a wind turbine fails, you loose 6 MW. When a nuclear reactor fails, you loose 500 MW at once, which you have to get from other sources that can react faster. Nuclear reactors can't be quickly increased in power output to compensate for other nuclear reactors, you effectively need a high proportion of coal and gas anyway. The fastest reacting power source is hydropower BTW.

 

[simonpro]

Just one dirty bomb made from nuclear waste will do it.

Uh-oh, he's dropped the D-bomb. Damned media scare stories.
Unless I'm sitting on the bugger when it goes off then a dirty bomb isn't a particularly scary thing. the problem is that people (especially those journalists at the monkey end of the evolutionary spectrum) think that anything radioactive is instantly going to kill everyone.
Luckily a tin foil hat (or any other lid) will protect you from a fair bit of that nasty stuff.:lol:

 

[Ghostrider]

Just one dirty bomb made from nuclear waste will do it.

In order to make a dirty bomb you need to steal the nuclear waste, which already isn't that easy to begin with, and then work with it which is another can of worm. Chemical weapons are much cheaper and you can make them with very little infrastructure.

 

[Notebook]

Uh-oh, he's dropped the D-bomb. Damned media scare stories.
Unless I'm sitting on the bugger when it goes off then a dirty bomb isn't a particularly scary thing. the problem is that people (especially those journalists at the monkey end of the evolutionary spectrum) think that anything radioactive is instantly going to kill everyone.
Luckily a tin foil hat (or any other lid) will protect you from a fair bit of that nasty stuff.:lol:

There's been more dangerous accidents I think, didn't know about this one. Only found out when looking for UK incidents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

N.

 

[Urwumpe]

It also depends on the material... the plutonium inside a nuclear bomb would be enough for contaminating a region by a Dirty bomb about 10 km across. If you use it as primitive nuclear bomb (without the many optimizations of classic nuclear powers), it could devastate a region 10 times larger and spread the fear of nuclear material a few thousand km further (As a dirty bomb does not reach the Stratosphere).

Chemical weapons are really cheaper. For producing a cheap chemical weapon, you just need to go shopping in a supermarket. Maybe not as terrible as modern chemical weapons can get, but you can easily produce something to injure and kill many thousand people. You just need enough criminal energy.

 

[Andy44]

I always get a bit annoyed when people keep saying that nuclear power is cleaner and safer. It is, until you consider the waste. We still don't know how to safely dispose of it. It's some of the most toxic stuff on the planet, and radioactive to boot. It will be for thousands of years. Nothing mankind has ever built has lasted as long as nuclear waste needs to be safely stored, and I doubt we can build a safe depository any time soon.

With Polywell reactors looking quite promising in the near future (~20 years by average prediction) it just doesn't make sense to make more Nuke plants. It's a "quick fix" that will cause more trouble down the road than it's worth. Just one dirty bomb made from nuclear waste will do it. Sure we've made the plants themselves much safer since Three Mile Island and Chernoble, but we still just stick the waste into barrels and stick it somewhere, figuring that "someday" we'll figure out what to do with it.

Please read the whole article. He counters (nukes?) every one of your arguments.

 

[atuhalpa]

I'll just say that Hogan is "blinded by the light" and so is anyone who believes that more technology is going to get us out of the mess we are in. No one really addresses the root problem of how obsessed we are with "gadgets" and how now all of our "gadgets" use electricity or hydrocarbons to operate. There is NO fix for the energy crisis except to reduce the population and the number of "gadgets" that we hoard for the false feeling of security and the diversion they provide from dealing with the real problems that plague our species.

We are a predatory ape that unfortunately figured out how to start fires, and that has been our obsession ever since. First it was wood, then it was hydrocarbons, now it is fissionable material, and we aren't content with that as we dream of the day we can control the fusion fire.

What we really need to control is the population and live within our means for about 200 years and then if we are still around I would say we might have a chance at moving onward and upward. But continuing this headlong plunge of ever increasing population and ever increasing energy usage is madness of the first order.

Nuclear energy no matter what the pundits say, is just another nail in our species coffin. I personally believe the die is already cast and homo sapiens sapiens is just another dead end branch on the hominid tree. In fact for the earth's sake I hope it is!

 

[Ghostrider]

Well, why are you wasting energy powering your computer and internet connection to tell us that? Lead by example.

 

[insanity]

What we really need to control is the population and live within our means for about 200 years and then if we are still around I would say we might have a chance at moving onward and upward. But continuing this headlong plunge of ever increasing population and ever increasing energy usage is madness of the first order.

Nuclear energy no matter what the pundits say, is just another nail in our species coffin. I personally believe the die is already cast and homo sapiens sapiens is just another dead end branch on the hominid tree. In fact for the earth's sake I hope it is!

People who advocate population control should lead by example. Also, I see no problem in technological progress, it is hominid nature to create tools that help us manipulate our environment. We face the same challenges as all life on Earth does (food, shelter, sex, and death), but on a larger scale. Anyways, Earth usually has a way of curving invasive species and keeping some balance, so in the long-run I assume our populations will fall (as they have in the past). Sure we need to stop having as many babies and get off fossil fuels and every solution leads to a new resource problem; but we are the only known self-aware life in the universe and it would be a shame to just give up because we may have grown beyond our original means.

 

[Ark]

I'm surprised the world hasn't figured out population control yet. It's compound interest, eventually the runaway growth will deplete our resources to the point that even if we discovered a solution, we wouldn't have the energy or raw materials to pull it off. Then we all die here, killing each other over the dwindling scraps. We're at the point where we need to stop having more than a couple of kids per family. Maybe less than that, we're already pretty far past the long-term self-sustaining population limit. Whackjobs like those people out west having 18+ kids are doing tremendous long-term damage, a generation from now their kids will probably have 100 kids between them. It kinda sucks, but prevention of runaway growth is a necessary thing that we're gonna have to face sooner or later. We're going to be over 10 billion by what, 2050? We already can't feed a sixth of our population, let alone provide electricity and clean water.

That said, on to nuclear power. It's a stopgap between fossil fuel and fusion, and should be treated as such. Nuclear fuel is still a finite resource, and solves no long-term problems. It would only put off the energy shortage for a while, and generate massive amounts of one of the most dangerous materiels ever created, along with leading to a proliferation of nuclear armaments. I'd honestly rather we pick up space-based solar power instead of nuclear, it's much safer and the economy of scale would make launch costs more reasonable for other pursuits, along with the priceless effect of convincing people that what happens in space has a positive effect on Earth life. People would support space exploration more if it had more to offer than footprints, flags, and boring TV.

 

[Urwumpe]

I'm surprised the world hasn't figured out population control yet.

Maybe it has. How would you know?