The dangers of nuclear in a society that has been so dumbed down...there is nothing that is 'fail safe!.' If there were a melt-down it could contribute to long term damage and extensive radiation. Radiation can last hundreds of years. It could destroy all life. There has to be a better answer...and I suggested an answer...go to the 'Top.'
Prof. Simon Michaux (Adelaide and Geologian Tutkimuskeskus), being a professor of mining engineering, obtained the list of "technology units" that the IEA demands must be built to save the Earth. He added up the metals needed by them, and compared them to known reserves: 1.6 times more copper is needed than is known to exist, thirteen times more nickel, thirty times more cobalt, ....
Details of this and much more in my new book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?"
Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. More than 350 bibliographic citations (including to Prof. Michaux's works).
VS: Yes. This renewable insanity is due to 1) sophisticated and aggressive renewable lobbyists, and 2) legislators value virtue signaling over what is in the best interest of their constituents.
There were natural nuclear reactors about 1.5 or 2 billion years ago. U235 has a half life of about 700 million years while U238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years. As a result the percentage of U235 is decreasing. Uranium deposits used to have enough U235 for natural nuclear reactions to occur in the presence of water. The fission products didn’t migrate very far in all this time. Nuclear “waste” is less of a problem than other types of waste.
I am a board certified nuclear engineer in California. The apparent safety of nuclear power is the result of reductionism under which a "complex" physical system is mistaken for a "non-complex" physical system in the construction of a model of this system, where a "complex" physical system exhibits one or more "emergent properties," each of which is a property of the whole system and not of the separate parts of this system whereas a "non-complex" physical system exhibits no such properties.
So far, in the entire civilized world, nuclear power is safer than Teddy Kennedy's car.
Even in the old Soviet Union, which had neither a meaningful safety culture, nor nuclear power plant licensing criteria, there have been 28 nuclear power-related deaths -- according to both UNSCEAR and the UN Chernobyl Forum. So worldwide, the only thing safer than nuclear power is space programs.
As a chess player, I was taught to think, before I made a move. Many higher ups in industry don't do this and the world has suffered for it. I agree that the Green Solution has shown its downside. However, the downside of nuclear is far worse. It is one of the most dangerous solutions that physicists could come up with. There has to be a solution, which does not have the potential to destroy Planet Earth!
The Creator who had the ability to turn the 'third Rock from the Sun' into a habitable planet...has answers. Thomas Jefferson referred to our Creator as the Supreme Intelligence. Mankind's intelligence is limited. its about destroyed Planet Earth! There has to be better answers! The vaxes for the last sixty plus years...caused brain-damage to it's recipients worldwide. It's amazing there are still people left who can think. I believe in miracles, because I have seen them in my own life. I am open minded and converse with the Creator I have been doing this since I was 4 years old. Try it! You are intelligent...you have a mind. ...so ask for help! I am not into religion, but I've been a reader for 82 years. who is always looking for answers...Look at: Matt 6:5. Religious leaders don't emphasize it.
Barbara: I agree with that. I am promoting the use of Critical Thinking in dealing with our societal issues. In this case, Critical Thinking concludes that nuclear energy is a net societal benefit, while renewables are a net societal liability.
The brainwashing by the renewables industry has been very effective. When debating with a friend over the intermittent and weak wind and solar "farms" and how they will always need 100% back up from conventional fuels, the friend was not swayed one bit. "Even if they don't work, they're a symbol of what we should be doing." That was the response. If all those renewable subsidies had been sunk into nuclear power, we'd be eons ahead of the game. Nuclear waste must be recycled, as France is doing, and small modular reactors need to be build the way Russia is building and selling them now.
It's interesting that your friend thinks that wasting huge amounts of money that provide no net benefits, but unequivocal cause extensive environmental damage "is a symbol of what we should be doing." That should make it very clear why I am extremely concerned about our education system!
The main concern about nuclear energy is nuclear waste. In scanning your email I did not see any deep dive into that. “Renewable” is a straw man that doesn’t need much discussion as far as I am concerned.
Carter: I was going to say that the "nuclear waste" issue has been purposefully distorted by some self-serving parties (e.g., wind and solar lobbyists). When I get a chance I'll write a Substack article about it.
"Nuclear Waste" is an intentionally deceptive term for valuable 5%-used fuel.
We've known what to do with it for eighty years, but refuse to do it: Separate fission products and put the fuel back into reactors. Russia and France do this. Britain stopped when activists prevented repairing a leak at the THORP reprocessing plant. If Rokkasho ever enters service, Japan will be doing it too. But they all use an inferior process called PUREX, which requires enormous plant and equipment, and does an incomplete job. A better way is the pyroelectric process, developed as part of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) program at Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. Read "Plentiful Energy" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang. You can get it on paper from Amazon, but Dr. Chang has generously given permission for me to post a PDF of it at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Plentiful_Energy.pdf.
The IFR project was cancelled, and the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe had described as "the best research reactor ever built," was destroyed, and the building's cavity filled with concrete, by the Cliton administration in 1994. When President Cliton's Science Advisor, Frank von Hippel, was told that it would cost more to terminate the program than to complete it, he said "I know; it's a symbol. It has to go."
And what about fission products? Caesium and strontium contribute 99.4% of radiotoxicity and require 300-400 years of custody, but constitute only 9.26% by weight. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive (and some such as rhodium and palladium are very valuable, up to $500/gram). An easy rule of thumb is that fissioning one tonne of heavy metal produces one GWe-year of electricity, or 92 kilograms of caesium and strontium. At a density of more than two kilograms per liter, that's less than 46 liters per GWe year. Why do activists shout "300,000 years?" That's how long you'd need to try to hide unused fuel. Turning it into electricity and fission products is a better idea. "Nuclear waste" is not a difficult problem (there's a chapter about it in my new book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?").
Renewable has always been a strange and mostly poorly defined word. It amused me during the “peak oil crisis” that every time we studied oil reserves, we found we had more oil than the last time we studied it (lots of reasons for this). One explanation might be that fossil fuel production is higher than our use. Plants and animals still die everyday and yes, evil CO2 gets absorbed everyday…all of which eventually turn into evil fossil fuels…oil, coal, gas, etc. Thus, fossil fuels must be renewable.and the result of natural CO2 absorption….maybe one might call this nature’s sequestration. Where do the pseudo scientists think fossil fuels come from…some alien visiting Earth eons ago and inserting them into Earth?
How many hippies are excited about"natural" food? Ask the FDA what that means, and you'll learn there is no definition for it, just like the EPA and DoE have no definition for "natural" energy sources. FDA's rationale is "we know of no supernatural foods."
The dangers of nuclear in a society that has been so dumbed down...there is nothing that is 'fail safe!.' If there were a melt-down it could contribute to long term damage and extensive radiation. Radiation can last hundreds of years. It could destroy all life. There has to be a better answer...and I suggested an answer...go to the 'Top.'
Prof. Simon Michaux (Adelaide and Geologian Tutkimuskeskus), being a professor of mining engineering, obtained the list of "technology units" that the IEA demands must be built to save the Earth. He added up the metals needed by them, and compared them to known reserves: 1.6 times more copper is needed than is known to exist, thirteen times more nickel, thirty times more cobalt, ....
Details of this and much more in my new book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?"
Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. More than 350 bibliographic citations (including to Prof. Michaux's works).
VS: Yes. This renewable insanity is due to 1) sophisticated and aggressive renewable lobbyists, and 2) legislators value virtue signaling over what is in the best interest of their constituents.
There were natural nuclear reactors about 1.5 or 2 billion years ago. U235 has a half life of about 700 million years while U238 has a half life of 4.5 billion years. As a result the percentage of U235 is decreasing. Uranium deposits used to have enough U235 for natural nuclear reactions to occur in the presence of water. The fission products didn’t migrate very far in all this time. Nuclear “waste” is less of a problem than other types of waste.
CANDU reactors can be fueled with natural uranium. But they're illegal in USA.
STAND ALONE
is a requirement that we ought to see appended to the required characteristics of a renewable energy.
John: Yes, if reliability is a necessary concern.
I am a board certified nuclear engineer in California. The apparent safety of nuclear power is the result of reductionism under which a "complex" physical system is mistaken for a "non-complex" physical system in the construction of a model of this system, where a "complex" physical system exhibits one or more "emergent properties," each of which is a property of the whole system and not of the separate parts of this system whereas a "non-complex" physical system exhibits no such properties.
So far, in the entire civilized world, nuclear power is safer than Teddy Kennedy's car.
Even in the old Soviet Union, which had neither a meaningful safety culture, nor nuclear power plant licensing criteria, there have been 28 nuclear power-related deaths -- according to both UNSCEAR and the UN Chernobyl Forum. So worldwide, the only thing safer than nuclear power is space programs.
As a chess player, I was taught to think, before I made a move. Many higher ups in industry don't do this and the world has suffered for it. I agree that the Green Solution has shown its downside. However, the downside of nuclear is far worse. It is one of the most dangerous solutions that physicists could come up with. There has to be a solution, which does not have the potential to destroy Planet Earth!
Barbara: TY for your comment. I don't know what you are referring to about "a solution, which does not have the potential to destroy Planet Earth!"
The Creator who had the ability to turn the 'third Rock from the Sun' into a habitable planet...has answers. Thomas Jefferson referred to our Creator as the Supreme Intelligence. Mankind's intelligence is limited. its about destroyed Planet Earth! There has to be better answers! The vaxes for the last sixty plus years...caused brain-damage to it's recipients worldwide. It's amazing there are still people left who can think. I believe in miracles, because I have seen them in my own life. I am open minded and converse with the Creator I have been doing this since I was 4 years old. Try it! You are intelligent...you have a mind. ...so ask for help! I am not into religion, but I've been a reader for 82 years. who is always looking for answers...Look at: Matt 6:5. Religious leaders don't emphasize it.
Barbara: I agree with that. I am promoting the use of Critical Thinking in dealing with our societal issues. In this case, Critical Thinking concludes that nuclear energy is a net societal benefit, while renewables are a net societal liability.
The brainwashing by the renewables industry has been very effective. When debating with a friend over the intermittent and weak wind and solar "farms" and how they will always need 100% back up from conventional fuels, the friend was not swayed one bit. "Even if they don't work, they're a symbol of what we should be doing." That was the response. If all those renewable subsidies had been sunk into nuclear power, we'd be eons ahead of the game. Nuclear waste must be recycled, as France is doing, and small modular reactors need to be build the way Russia is building and selling them now.
It's interesting that your friend thinks that wasting huge amounts of money that provide no net benefits, but unequivocal cause extensive environmental damage "is a symbol of what we should be doing." That should make it very clear why I am extremely concerned about our education system!
The main concern about nuclear energy is nuclear waste. In scanning your email I did not see any deep dive into that. “Renewable” is a straw man that doesn’t need much discussion as far as I am concerned.
Carter: I was going to say that the "nuclear waste" issue has been purposefully distorted by some self-serving parties (e.g., wind and solar lobbyists). When I get a chance I'll write a Substack article about it.
"Nuclear Waste" is an intentionally deceptive term for valuable 5%-used fuel.
We've known what to do with it for eighty years, but refuse to do it: Separate fission products and put the fuel back into reactors. Russia and France do this. Britain stopped when activists prevented repairing a leak at the THORP reprocessing plant. If Rokkasho ever enters service, Japan will be doing it too. But they all use an inferior process called PUREX, which requires enormous plant and equipment, and does an incomplete job. A better way is the pyroelectric process, developed as part of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) program at Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. Read "Plentiful Energy" by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang. You can get it on paper from Amazon, but Dr. Chang has generously given permission for me to post a PDF of it at http://vandyke.mynetgear.com/Plentiful_Energy.pdf.
The IFR project was cancelled, and the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, which Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe had described as "the best research reactor ever built," was destroyed, and the building's cavity filled with concrete, by the Cliton administration in 1994. When President Cliton's Science Advisor, Frank von Hippel, was told that it would cost more to terminate the program than to complete it, he said "I know; it's a symbol. It has to go."
And what about fission products? Caesium and strontium contribute 99.4% of radiotoxicity and require 300-400 years of custody, but constitute only 9.26% by weight. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive (and some such as rhodium and palladium are very valuable, up to $500/gram). An easy rule of thumb is that fissioning one tonne of heavy metal produces one GWe-year of electricity, or 92 kilograms of caesium and strontium. At a density of more than two kilograms per liter, that's less than 46 liters per GWe year. Why do activists shout "300,000 years?" That's how long you'd need to try to hide unused fuel. Turning it into electricity and fission products is a better idea. "Nuclear waste" is not a difficult problem (there's a chapter about it in my new book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?").
John,
Renewable has always been a strange and mostly poorly defined word. It amused me during the “peak oil crisis” that every time we studied oil reserves, we found we had more oil than the last time we studied it (lots of reasons for this). One explanation might be that fossil fuel production is higher than our use. Plants and animals still die everyday and yes, evil CO2 gets absorbed everyday…all of which eventually turn into evil fossil fuels…oil, coal, gas, etc. Thus, fossil fuels must be renewable.and the result of natural CO2 absorption….maybe one might call this nature’s sequestration. Where do the pseudo scientists think fossil fuels come from…some alien visiting Earth eons ago and inserting them into Earth?
How many hippies are excited about"natural" food? Ask the FDA what that means, and you'll learn there is no definition for it, just like the EPA and DoE have no definition for "natural" energy sources. FDA's rationale is "we know of no supernatural foods."
Don: I agree. The whole renewable business is being promoted by some of the most sophisticated and agressive lobbyists in the US.