NUCLEAR POWER: Safe, Reliable, Clean, Poised for Growth

I would ask JHV1 to contact me and I will give “chapter and verse” on all of the issues raised here. If you visit the Suffolk CANE web site in the UK (http://www.suffolkcane.org.uk) much of the evidence is posted there. If you leave a message via the “Contact Us” page I will ensure that the many and numerous sources that I have will be sent to you.

I too am a “stickler for the truth”. My oppostion to nuclear is based on sound science and real wortld economics. In assessing opinion, you may like to consider the difference between a “country” and a “government”. In the UK, the industry claims on the basis of an opinion poll asking a biased question that the public are in favour of nuclear power. The UK government policy is to support nuclear power only if it can be built without public subsidy. If you ask the question “would you be happy to have a nuclear power station built in your community” support melts away. Even less support if you say “built with the support of public finance”.

I still can’t believe that in the UK we are taking the word of a company (EdF Energy) which late in 2007 said that they will be able to build new nuclear power stations without any public subsidy and now saying they need public financial support (over and above that given already).

In this U.S., however, environmental organizations decided that giving up reprocessing in this country would be the best way to prevent nuclear proliferation. Shortly after taking office, President Jimmy Carter heeded their advice and canceled the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which was scheduled to use recycled plutonium from the privately financed Barnwell Reprocessing Center in South Carolina. Barnwell’s investors quickly pulled out and reprocessing was abandoned—immediately creating the everlasting problem of “nuclear waste.“
Carter solemnly asked other countries to follow our lead but no one paid any attention. Britain, France, Canada, the Soviet Union and Japan all continued with reprocessing and now have full-scale operations. France, with the most mature technology, is now recycling surplus uranium left over from the Soviet weapons program and selling it to us. Half our reactor fuel comes from former Soviet weapons. Meanwhile, France stores all the high-level waste from thirty years of producing 75 percent of its electricity with nuclear beneath the floor of a single large room at Le Havre.
Now here’s the point. None of this has ever had anything to do with our reprocessing nuclear fuel. It’s a great big world out there. There are a lot of smart people and nuclear technology has never been that difficult to master. None of these countries have had to steal anything from us, nor do we act as gatekeepers as to who gets what. Instead, by abandoning reprocessing, we have put ourselves back in the middle of the pack.
Nuclear power is now keeping France afloat. Besides having Europe’s lowest electric rates—plus the lowest carbon emissions—electricity is now France’s third largest export. Belgium, Germany and Italy would close down tomorrow if France stopped sending them nuclear electricity. Marketing its technology to other countries has also become a major source of revenue. France is now building facilities in Finland, China, South Korea, Poland, and—believe it or not—that backwater of nuclear technology, the United States of America.
Russia, meanwhile, has bounced back from its economic doldrums, put containment structures around its reactors (a little detail it overlooked at Chernobyl), and renewed nuclear construction. The Russians brought their first new reactor online in 2001 and are now planning to add two or three more per year through 2030. They are also building reactors for China and Bulgaria and have signed various technological pacts with Brazil, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, South Korea, Finland, Chile, and Bangladesh. In November 2008 the Russians announced they would build a reactor in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez.

Nuclear energy from uranium or thorium can not be used directly as a portable fuel of course to move long-haul transport vehicles (airplanes, trucks, etc). But its turbine-generated electricity can be converted into portable bio-fuels and other synfuels (synthetic fuels) with acceptable efficiency. In bio-fuel production, nuclear electricity can empower farms and the extraction/distillation operations to obtain alcohols or bio-diesels from vegetation. Without input of nuclear electricity, bio-fuel farming would be unsustainable since energy needed for cultivation, harvesting, and extraction exceeds the energy stored in combustible plant chemicals. Bio-fuels have other limitations however. They can at most replace about 15% of today’s petroleum fuels because biofuel farming is limited by available arable land; man also needs to grow food to survive. The other 85% of oil-replacement must come from hydrogen and ammonia synfuels which can empower combustion engines as well as (future) fuel-cells. Hydrogen can be affordably produced by electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. But hydrogen has the problem of being very difficult to compact into a reasonably-sized fuel tank. So ammonia (formed by compressing hydrogen with air)is favored because it can be stored at moderate pressures in normal-size fuel tanks. 
Modern nuclear power plants are absolutely safe. Because of the negative “coefficient of reactivity”, reactor fuel elements only melt (an explosion is not possible) during a maximum credible accident in which the emergency core cooling system totally fails. This was “experimentally” proven in the Three-Mile-Island (TMI) accident with 0 casualties. A negative coefficient of reactivity means that neutron multiplication is automatically stopped when the temperature in the reactor gets too high. The Russian Chernobyl reactor, which took the lives of 57 people, had a positive coefficient of reactivity because it used graphite as moderator. Such a design for nuclear power plants is now prohibited in all countries. Furthermore the Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel, as is the law in all Western countries and now worldwide. The assertion that perhaps thousands of people could still die from radioactive fallout around Chernobyl is nonsense. Of the 60,000 inhabitants of Pripyat who had been exposed to fallout, about 9,000 will die at an advanced age of cancer because worldwide 15% of all people ultimately die from cancer. To ascribe those 9,000 deaths to Chernobyl’s fallout is equally ridiculous as claiming that such a death toll is due to drinking coffee because 15% of all people drink coffee. Security precautions and containment measures for today’s nuclear power do reckon with the possibility that terrorists might crash a large airplane or bomb on a reactor. Even if aerial obstructions or underground construction can not prevent penetration of the large dome-shaped containment vessel, the reactor core vessel is designed to remain mostly intact. In case of a meltdown it is inundated with neutron-poisoning borated water which suppresses all further uranium fission.
A stale anti-nuclear cry is “what to do with all the long-lived radioactive nuclear waste”. The volume of waste amounts to one aspirin tablet per year per person using nuclear electricity, compared to tons of air pollutants and globe-warming gaseous CO2 emitted by coal or fossil-fuel combustion. Nuclear waste can be easily stored and safely transported, as the US nuclear navy has done for half a century. Contrary to allegations that uranium and plutonium in spent fuel elements pose a problem because of million-year half-lives, they are burnt as fuel in future fast-breeder reactors. They will not be dumped. This reduces 50 tons of spent fuel per reactor per year to 1 ton of fission products (with shorter decay lives). The notion that long radioactive lifetimes are undesirable is also erroneous. The longer the decay lifetime, the less the radiation emitted per gram of radio-isotope. Most elements in our bodies (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc) have infinitely long decay lifetimes. All humans are “hot” because everyone has radioactive potassium-40 (K-40; 0.012% abundance) in his body, which continuously emits beta particles with a half-life of one billion years! Man successfully evolved in this environment, and there are even indications that low levels of radiation benefit health (called hormesis). Energy is man’s third most important need after water and food. Those who hinder expansion of nuclear power will be viewed as irresponsible neo-luddites by future generations and must be held accountable. Any further delay of a committed worldwide nuclear energy program will cause certain impoverishment and deaths of many people by 2050. Unless the follies of previous administrations are reversed soon, the USA will see a (preventable) economic catastrophe by 2050.

Let us address two other issues that proponents of nuclear raise, i) that nuclear is the only low carbon way of addressing the times when renewables are not working. You say that wind and solar do not produce electricity for 60%-70% of the time. For wind, the variety of sources even in a smaller countries like the UK and Germany mean that there are few times, especially when demand for electricty for heating is at its highest in the winter, when wind generators are not working. In the UK we are able to generate around 5% of our peak load, virtually at the turn of a switch (well within 18 seconds actually) by the use of two pumped storage hydroelectric projects in Wales. We need more of these to smooth out the intermitent nature of some renewables. We should also bear in mind that tidal power is very predictable and that pumped store at the point of generation mean that a continuous and uniform amount of electricity can be generated if needed. ii) As for politicians preventing nuclear scientists researching ways to use nuclear waste, this is sheer fantasy. If the nuclear industry had a way of turning this major liability into an asset, they would be shouting it from the rooftops. If I were to back a future technology to solve our energy problems, than I’d be backing controlled nuclear fusion, not using fission waste to do ??? what exactly ??? Poison us?

Carbon-free nuclear power is the ONLY way the world can retire emission-belching coal generating plants and possibly check global warming. It’s that simple. Wind and solar power are not up to the job because they require backup for the 60-70% of the time they are not generating electricity.  That backup usually is in the form of fossil fuels—coal or natural gas.  The importance of energy for the future of the US is so great I launched http://www.energyplanusa.com where I attempt to take an objective look at global warming and energy policy. If we have scientists address the nuclear waste problem, not politicians, nuclear waste can actually become a resource.