3-Mile Anniversary Present?

[petertribo]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

Sellafield Nuclear Recycling Plant a $1.2BILLION Disaster:

A controversial nuclear recycling plant, approved by the Government despite warnings over its economic viability and reliance on unproven technology, has racked up costs of more than £1bn and is still not working properly.

Backers of the plant at Sellafield, which promised to turn toxic waste into a useable fuel that could be sold worldwide, had claimed the plant would make a profit of more than £200m in its lifetime, producing 120 tonnes of recycled fuel a year. But after an investigation by The Independent, the Government admitted technical problems and a dearth in orders has meant it has produced just 6.3 tonnes of fuel since opening in 2001.

With construction and commissioning costs of more than £600m, the facility, known as the Mox plant because of the mixed oxides (Mox) fuel it is designed to produce, has cost more than £1.2bn, confirming its status as the nuclear industry's most embarrassing white elephant and one of the greatest failures in British industrial history, losing the taxpayer £90m a year. Green campaigners and opposition MPs are now calling for the plant to be closed immediately, and a minister who fought its construction at the time has called for a public inquiry into how the plant was ever given the go-ahead.

The revelations are a blow to the Government as it plans to lead Britain into a "nuclear renaissance", pinning its hopes on nuclear technology to help meet its ambitious targets on reducing carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the performance of the plant was "clearly disappointing". [my bolds]

http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...t-1664427.html

Must be the banana peels gumming that sucker up.

[don]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

Sellafield Nuclear Recycling Plant a $1.2BILLION Disaster:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...t-1664427.html

Must be the banana peels gumming that sucker up.

Remember when the pitch for nuclear power was it would be so cheap they wouldn't charge for it :p

[raja]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

The claim was made that the above map is random. No proof of that claim is offered. Does it appear random to you?

Then this claim is made, after apparently abandoning the random claim:
"I would suspect Prof. Wing is part of W.A.R.N. at the Univ. of NC--- a radical environmental group of frauds. Am I wrong?"

So, there is a suspicion about Prof. Wing. Something is wrong about Prof. Wing. No proof offered about him being a member of WARN. If Prof. Wing is a member of WARN, that is somehow suspicious. No explanation offered.

Then WARN is called a "radical environmental group of frauds". No proof offered that they are radicals. No proof offered that they have ever committed fraud.

So no proof offered for these suspicions. Accusations and innuendo are offered but no supporting evidence.

Here is the website for WARN:

http://www.ncwarn.org/

WARN, unless evidence to the contrary is offered, appears to be a grassroots citizen group concerned with environmental issues. This is not fraud. It is citizens legally expressing their opinions on issues important to them.

Here are WARN's nine reasons for not building new nuclear plants:

http://www.ncwarn.org/Programs/NewNu...wNukes5-08.pdf

DISCLAIMER: I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of WARN. Nor have I ever met or had any association with Prof. Wing.

When I lived in NC two years ago, I was a member of NCWARN. They are not frauds. I checked them out. I also had several direct contacts with the nuclear power plant pr person -- they are the frauds, not NCWARN. Their safety record is abysmal.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

When I lived in NC two years ago, I was a member of NCWARN. They are not frauds. I checked them out. I also had several direct contacts with the nuclear power plant pr person -- they are the frauds, not NCWARN. Their safety record is abysmal.

Do you have an opinion then on whether reasonably safe nuclear power can be deployed in the United States? And if not, why not -- basic scientific problems, current technology problems, or political-bureaucratic-corruption-greed problems?

[Starving Steve]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

Let me tell you about what I have to deal with here in British Columbia:
the govn't of Gordon Campbell elected by hippies who grow marijuana, more often than not, illegally. These criminals produce nothing for the world. But let me tell about the govn't they did elect here in Victoria.

Not only has the Gordon Campbell Govn't of BC Liberals not built any atomic power plants in all of the years that they have governed, they have built no hydro-electric dams, no coal-fired power plants, no nat gas fired power plants, no power plants of any kind. Not only were there no power plants, there were no oil wells, no drilling, no exploration for hydro-carbons, no permits to build oil refineries, no permits for pipelines, no natural gas for home heating in BC, simply NOTHING for the people of BC except for their marijuana.

So now we have a province with no jobs, no future, an outrageous cost of living, electric rates now being hiked to 13cents per KWH, a province which imports electricity from California, a province with speed traps everywhere, 32 MPH speed limits on highways, outrageous housing costs, outrageous land costs, outrageous hidden taxation, outrageous provincial insurance costs, outrageous ferry fees, and a province which smothers and kills all development plans and all projects and kills all initiative of any kind unrelated to pot-smoking.

Take a good look at these BC Liberals. Their banner was saving the environment from development. Their issues were anti-nuclear power. Their campaigns have been run on mis-information and disemination of fear about nuclear power, fear about development, fear about globalization, fear about global warming, mis-information about ozone holes in the atmosphere, mis-information about climate and carbon, hysteria about non-events such as Three Mile Island, etc.

This bunch that I have had to suffer with in BC could be the bunch governing in your jurisdiction next if something is not done now. And in BC, the people are organizing to throw these radical environmentalists and pot-heads out of power for good..... But make certain they don't re-appear in your jurisdiction next because they are well organized and well-funded worldwide. They also have connections in universities and in the media worldwide, so they are a potent and dangerous political force against progress.

Get to know your Sierra Club and Greenpeace, your WARN in North Carolina, and your other radical environmental groups. Find-out where their political connections are in government. (Here in BC it turned-out to be with the BC Liberals, for example.) See who is funding these groups and who is on the payroll of these groups. They have their own studies, their own so-called scientists, their own reporters in the media, etc.

[oddlots]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

I share a lot of Starving Steve's frustrations with anti-nuclear environmentalists but I wouldn't express them in quite the same manner.

There are lots of safety horror stories - Sellafields in Britain being a perfect example. But I think they are beside the point. Here's why.

I would simply ask these environmentalists how they intend to achieve the massive reductions in CO2 emmissions that are required to mitigate the catastrophic threat to the environment that global warming seems to pose without relying heavily on nuclear to replace coal and gas-fired plants. (Please note that I don't take the global warming argument as scripture but I am convinced that CO2 and other emissions can and likely will - if unchecked - interfere with a very complex and delicate web of relationships - e.g., the oceans' ability to operate as a carbon sink - which we barely understand and whose breakdown would be catastrophic and irreversible on any time-scale relevant to humans. You don't gamble with the essentials of life.)

The thing that discredits the anti-nuclear envriomentalists' argument to me is their inability to answer this convincingly: how are we to achieve the reductions, especially in a world faced with projected increasing CO2 emissions.

Individual projects make a lot of sense: tidal power in Scotland for instance, solar in the southern, desert states of the US or other similar climes, geothermal in very select regions. I love these projects. But this doesn't explain why the environmental movement so enthusiastically support projects such as wind in Germany which achieve almost nothing in terms of actually closing coal or forestalling new gas plants, i.e., actually reducing CO2 emissions, while convincing people that something is being done. (The value of these projects in terms of displacing fossil fuel sources of energy is negligible from what I've read.) In other words, it seems to me that the prime objective is to avoid the nuclear conclusion, even at the cost of achieving nothing to solve the problem. That seems, at best, terrifyingly wrong-headed and, at worst, ideological and dishonest to me.

Instances of execrable safety records at individual plants become beside the point if my analysis is correct. First, the worst safety lapses - such as Chernobyl - do not pose an existential threat to the ecosystem as a whole. The kind of disruption that Global "wierding" promises - the thawing and rotting of permafrost or a rise in sea-water PH that disables the carbon-sink processs in the oceans - are exactly that: rapidly accelerating feedback loops that are game enders. The two things are of imcommensurate signifigance. As James Lovelock puts it, "We have swallowed a camel and are choking on a gnat."

The pro-nuclear "environmentalist" argument would go something like this:

- concede we're using the wrong designs. My understanding is that the pressurised reactors we - even still -currently favour are a product of private industry amortising the r & d costs of developing small power plants for the military and scaling them up to civilian purposes rather than re-thinking it. Pebble bed reactors with passive safety systems are the kind of things we should be doing: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
- concede we're using the wrong fuel. (Thorium is more plentiful than uranium - especially in the US - and solves the proliferation issue as it cannot produce weapons-grade by-products.)
- challenge the anti-nukes to come up with a realistic plan to halt the rise in CO2 emmissions without nuclear (Finland couldn't do it and is relying on nuclear. Explain why please.)
- suggest that, in this context, the more rational approach is to be creative, constructive and informed about developing nuclear strategies and technologies - traits in abundance so long as the technology is non-nuclear - rather than hostile, rigid and irrational

[santafe2]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

The thing that discredits the anti-nuclear envriomentalists' argument to me is their inability to answer this convincingly: how are we to achieve the reductions, especially in a world faced with projected increasing CO2 emissions.

While I agree with some of what you said I would argue that this is a health and safety issue not an energy issue. There is no one that objects to nuclear energy on energy grounds. The burden of proof is not on environmentalists to resolve the greater energy issue when the nuclear issue has nothing to do with energy.

The burden of proof with regard to health and safety lies squarely on the shoulders of the nuclear industry and anyone who proposes the use of nuclear energy. As others have done here, one can make the argument that the TMI data does not prove cancer clusters caused by TMI but that argument does not prove that TMI was not a possible and maybe predictable danger that should have been avoided in the first place. As long as the health and safety issues remain open, nuclear energy will remain expensive and nearly impossible to deploy.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

Gosh - think I'll move to BC - gotta be all up hill from here :rolleyes:

That bit about getting electricty from California was a bit scary though. I lived through the Governor Grey-out electricity outages and outrageous contracts in California a few years back. I'd about as soon trust California with my electric supply as I'd trust Geitner managing my investments.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

As long as the health and safety issues remain open, nuclear energy will remain expensive and nearly impossible to deploy.

Would you say the same for any of the other technologies that are currently, or in the near term, capable of handling most of our electricity needs? That would be coal, natural gas, or oil, I believe. And natural gas likely can't handle the load all by itself.

Would you make any allowance for possible improvements in "core" nuclear technology over the last few decades, which might enable far more resilient power plants? Or are all nuclear power plants tarred with the same 30 year old brush?

I suggest one starts by figuring out how much power one needs, and then looks for the best ways (cost, safety, environment, independence from tyrannical regimes, ...) to get it. Unless that analysis ends up with nothing close to a possible solution, then go with it. For the alternative, that being a serious energy shortage, has its own costs. The resulting catastrophic damage to the economy would end up, indirectly, shortening the lives of many. Grinding poverty, unemployment, and inadequate food, water and medical supplies are a bitch.

[santafe2]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

Would you say the same for any of the other technologies that are currently, or in the near term, capable of handling most of our electricity needs? That would be coal, natural gas, or oil, I believe. And natural gas likely can't handle the load all by itself.

Since there's been no leadership in 28 years with regard to conservation of fossil fuel one might consider that our current level of consumption is required. That would be an incorrect assumption. What I would say is that we need to limit our use of fossil fuels to buy our society enough time to research and develop new sources of energy.

Would you make any allowance for possible improvements in "core" nuclear technology over the last few decades, which might enable far more resilient power plants? Or are all nuclear power plants tarred with the same 30 year old brush?

That a brush is 30 years old is not an argument against the brush. TMI did not fail because of some lack of "core nuclear technology". It failed because of a simple leak and because valves were left closed that should have been open and a gauge was broken that would have signaled the problem - among other non-lethal issues.

A quick review of accident theory is useful when considering nuclear energy. Correct system design is only a portion of this complex issue. We also have to control human error, build and follow well laid out procedures, minimize environmental issues and overcome simple mechanical failures. It is this full spectrum of challenges that should give one pause when considering the deployment of additional nuclear energy.

I understand that it can be done. NASA launches humans into space and retrieves them regularly now that they no longer underestimate the complexity of their systems. And this could be done with nuclear plants be they smallish neighborhood nukes or centralized plants. But we have to ask ourselves if we think the same level of care will be used in deploying the plants or will an acceptable failure rate be set to control the cost of deploying and maintaining these plants? When that acceptable failure rate is determined will it be published? Will the public accept less than zero failure as acceptable? In kWh terms, is that affordable?

As I said before, the burden of proof is not on environmentalists. It is on those that would recommend the further deployment of nuclear energy.

[Starving Steve]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

If you drive 32 MPH, you would find yourself breaking the speed limit in BC by 1 MPH. The actual speed limit on many provincial highways is 50 KPH which translates to 31 MPH. The RCMP will usually not give you any leeway over 50 KPH because the Province wants revenue--- the hidden road tax, another one of our hidden taxes.

Here in Victoria, the speed limit on large portions of Craigflower Road is 18 MPH ( 30 KPH ), and this speed limit is enforced to the last KPH. Tickets get written for 31 KPH because my friend got one on that road for that speed. His fine was small, but nevertheless, it was a ticket.... And the Province under-writes the auto insurance, so they love jacking-up your auto insurance premiums with traffic tickets, big and small. ( These are some of our hidden taxation schemes, thanks to the pot-head provincial govn't of Gordon Campbell. )

The Province of BC will NOT allow competition in writing auto insurance premiums. The Province sets the rates and uses the rates as a form of hidden taxation.... And not only does the Province profiteer in their auto insurance monopoly, they use punative auto insurance rates as part of their anti-people, anti-growth, anti-driving, anti-freedom, anti-progress, anti-oil policies.

You need to come and visit BC. Your education would begin with the ride over to Vancouver Island on the BC Ferry System--- another Provincial monopoly and another hidden taxation scheme. Wait until you see the ferry fee they charge; it's almost worth the trip over from Vancouver just to see how they do it. ( Better bring lots of cash; BC means, "Bring cash." )

[renewable]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

The claim was made that the above map is random. No proof of that claim is offered. Does it appear random to you?

That is very clearly not a random correlation. A ridiculous assertion imo.

Is there a prevailing south easterly wind in this area? Which direction was the wind blowing on the day of the accident, and those following it?

We do need nuclear power across the world as our last hope to reduce CO2 emissions; the pebble bed reactor which the Chinese have adopted looks like it could work well?

[raja]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

Do you have an opinion then on whether reasonably safe nuclear power can be deployed in the United States? And if not, why not -- basic scientific problems, current technology problems, or political-bureaucratic-corruption-greed problems?

I have no expertise in this area, nor have I read much about it. So, sorry, can't help you there.

My participation with NCWarn was motivated by the blatant violations by Progress Energy of EXISTING regulations. I lived 21 miles from the nuclear plant, and was not only worried about my future health in the event of an accident, but also about the fact that home insurance will not reimburse for nuclear accident. I did not invest in properties in the area for that reason.

[petertribo]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

but also about the fact that home insurance will not reimburse for nuclear accident. I did not invest in properties in the area for that reason.

How absolutely selfish of you to wish to protect your property investment.

The first requirement of any Economic activity is that it be insured for the maximum amount of damage that it might cause. If you want to open a business, whatever it is, you must be insured for the damage your business may cause to others. That would be by a solvent Insurance company if you can even find one today. So, principle number one, no insurance for maximum damage, no business. Very simple.

So, for example, what would be the cost to insure the nuclear plant above NYC on the Hudson River? Who will do the risk analysis to determine the insurance promium? Corrupt companies like Fitch or Moodys?

Therefore, nuclear is a total non starter for me until they can show the Insurance money. Forget the technical analysis, show me the money!

(If these nuclear companies cannot be insured for maximum damage then they are just another version of TOO BIG TO FAIL which I would think, by now, people would think is not such a good idea. But then again....
Speaking of TOO BIG TO FAIL isn't GE big in the nukes and aren't they rumored to be under stress?)

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: 3-Mile Anniversary Present?

The first requirement of any Economic activity is that it be insured for the maximum amount of damage that it might cause.

That's impossible. I cannot imagine that you would, or could, hold even yourself to that standard.

Worst case, one in a bazillion circumstances could result in a tiny economic transaction causing an enormous loss.

Let's say you have a hot dog and snacks vendor stand. You sell an airline pilot a candy bar. He flies a plane packed full of people, eats your candy bar on final approach, and realizes too late that his severe peanut allergy is about to cause his death. The plane crashes, killing all on board before the co-pilot is able to recover from the sudden unexpected nose dive the pilot executed, in his dying gasp, a few hundred feet above ground.

Oh ... and the plane hits a couple of buses full of commuters on the freeway next to the airport ... and a couple of limos containing Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet and George Soros. ... And a propane gas truck, which explodes, taking out a bunch more people.

Not all risks can be fully insured for. Simply not possible. None of us get out of this life alive. Some of us leave sooner than we expected, or under less pleasant circumstances than we hoped for.