frozenman on 21/3/2011 at 10:37
Sheesh everything looks correlated on a log-log graph.
Kolya on 21/3/2011 at 13:20
Heywood, all of these comparisons are fallacious arguments because one bad thing doesn't make another bad thing right. Demagogue took this to absurd levels by comparing to obesity and traffic accidents.
Hunger kills even more people than obesity, so hunger is worse and by this logic anyone who fights obesity is wrong and can be ridiculed because he didn't notice this disparity.
This is finger pointing, nothing more. And frankly I wonder why I have to fight each and every distracting pseudo argument and outright lie that the nuclear lobby, specifically the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) in the US, has been purporting for years to instigate their 'nuclear renaissance'.
This institute and the major US energy corporations spend millions every year for lobby work on the American parties and on specific senators, because it's worth it for them. They can rely on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to approve dangerous new reactors like the AP1000, just like they did approve 23 reactors of the Fukushima design in the US. But don't worry, they were tested for every disaster that has happened in their location in the past. Not for several of them together, like an earthquake + a tsunami, but hey, how likely is that, right?
Quote:
Can the Japanese nuclear crisis happen here in the United States?The events that have occurred in Japan are the result of a combination of highly unlikely
natural disasters. These include the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history and the
resulting devastating tsunami. It is highly unlikely that a similar event could occur in the
United States.
(source: (
http://www.nrc.gov/japan/faq-can-it-happen-here.pdf))
They can rely on (
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/03/16/us-still-wants-to-expand-nuclear-energy-chu/) Obama, a self-proclaimed nuclear fan, to give them $36 billion in loan guarantee, because the risks in nuclear energy are always carried by society while the profit is always private.
I get why these people do what they do. They found a way to make lots of money and they're gonna stick with it, as long as they can. What I don't get is why people like you fall to their transparent lies. You get nothing from this. Do you fear that your precious megasized fridge would suddenly turn off if it wasn't for nuclear energy?
US citizens could probably save as much energy just by acting more conservative about their consumption and there are other sources that could be expanded. But instead you run around like headless chicken, buying all Iodine tablets you can find while simultaneously defending nuclear energy against the evils of greens, euros and other commies who clearly want to destroy all that is good and great about America.
I'm sure parents will be appeased by your observation that thyroid cancer likely won't kill their kids by the way.
Finally I wonder why I know all that, when it's not even my country. Cue American media critique.
catbarf on 21/3/2011 at 14:17
Kolya, do you have any statistics on hand for the power-to-cost ratio of nuclear power versus alternative energy sources?
Briareos H on 21/3/2011 at 14:53
Lobbying, which has been your only argument since the beginning, is an absolute non-issue. Modern industry is based around it, and you wouldn't say that trains aren't useful pieces of technology even though there is a huge, cold war of cargo/passenger transportation lobbying.
You're asking a fallacious question ie. "why do we accept nuclear power?", because at the moment the answer is obviously in hands very different than ours* and will be skewed against the technology itself.
A fairer question is "why not?", and while you have a very clear (and valid) opinion on this, things are not as clear-cut for me. But nevermind, I'm just among the blind sheep.
*By the way, I hope you're aware that the biggest investors and largest in-house research departments in alternative energies are large power industries, at least in France and I would be surprised to see Siemens doing without a large renewable energy department. Oh snap, they are actually making wind turbines!
Kolya on 21/3/2011 at 15:29
Briareos H, of course lobbying happens all the time. The question is what the consequences are.
Regarding your example: As far as I know the US do not have a reasonable train system but instead you travel long distances by car or plane. So my conclusion is that the automobile and airplane industry has the better lobby. Whether that's a good thing you can decide for yourself.
Quote Posted by catbarf
Kolya, do you have any statistics on hand for the power-to-cost ratio of nuclear power versus alternative energy sources?
That's very difficult if not impossible to calculate. See, nuclear proponents are the ones who speak of "calculated risks". I've said several times here that they cannot foresee the future, just like Russia and Japan couldn't. Their calculations are based on assumptions gained from the past, but every chance you can calculate that way is only true until something new happens. Which happens to happen frequently.
This is part of why Fukushima is significant. They had all the data, they were technologically appropriately equipped as far as their calculations went and still they didn't foresee this could happen.
Problems like the safe storage of used nuclear rods for the coming few hundreds of years are completely unsolved. They are stored somewhere of course but no one can guarantee safety for such an elongated time. How do you calculate with an unknown variable of potential costs through water and ground contamination?
Similarly it's impossible to get exact data on how much Chernobyl cost the Russians, all we do know is that it were hundreds of billions of dollars and the involved states are still paying about 5% of their yearly income for remedies to this disaster, which is again several billion dollars.
The question of costs looks simple for nuclear reactor operators: They don't calculate the risks into the costs of nuclear energy at all, because to them a disaster is just too unlikely. Convenient solution.
I think you'd have to be able to reliably calculate the risks and reliably simulate the consequences if something bad happened, to create the side by side analysis you ask for. And that is impossible.
But yeah, apart from all that nuclear energy is relatively cheap. Not dramatically cheaper than alternative energy sources though.
catbarf on 21/3/2011 at 21:01
Quote Posted by Kolya
That's very difficult if not impossible to calculate. See, nuclear proponents are the ones who speak of "calculated risks". I've said several times here that they cannot foresee the future, just like Russia and Japan couldn't. Their calculations are based on assumptions gained from the past, but every chance you can calculate that way is only true until something new happens. Which happens to happen frequently.
This is part of why Fukushima is significant. They had all the data, they were technologically appropriately equipped as far as their calculations went and still they didn't foresee this could happen.
Problems like the safe storage of used nuclear rods for the coming few hundreds of years are completely unsolved. They are stored somewhere of course but no one can guarantee safety for such an elongated time. How do you calculate with an unknown variable of potential costs through water and ground contamination?
Similarly it's impossible to get exact data on how much Chernobyl cost the Russians, all we do know is that it were hundreds of billions of dollars and the involved states are still paying about 5% of their yearly income for remedies to this disaster, which is again several billion dollars.
The question of costs looks simple for nuclear reactor operators: They don't calculate the risks into the costs of nuclear energy at all, because to them a disaster is just too unlikely. Convenient solution.
I think you'd have to be able to reliably calculate the risks and reliably simulate the consequences if something bad happened, to create the side by side analysis you ask for. And that is impossible.
But yeah, apart from all that nuclear energy is relatively cheap. Not dramatically cheaper than alternative energy sources though.
Thanks for the response. Leaving aside the risk factor (not saying it's unimportant, just for the sake of argument), how much does the energy itself cost?
And, out of curiosity, what do you think of (
http://www.physorg.com/news145561984.html) miniature reactors? If the site is to be trusted, they don't have nearly the same ecological risk (although I wonder about waste material), and would be relatively cheap to build and simple to set up.
CCCToad on 21/3/2011 at 23:15
Quote:
That's very difficult if not impossible to calculate. See, nuclear proponents are the ones who speak of "calculated risks". I've said several times here that they cannot foresee the future, just like Russia and Japan couldn't. Their calculations are based on assumptions gained from the past, but every chance you can calculate that way is only true until something new happens. Which happens to happen frequently.
This is part of why Fukushima is significant. They had all the data, they were technologically appropriately equipped as far as their calculations went and still they didn't foresee this could happen
I'd like to add another risk factor that played a factor: corruption. The Japanese reactors apparently had a problem with faults in the design that were known, but went unreported due to corruption among oversight agencies.
And this was a problem in Japan. I could only see it being worse in the United States because compared to Japan, corruption in the United States is rampant.
Kolya on 22/3/2011 at 02:28
Catbarf: It's really not that easy to answer, I haven't mentioned yet the costs of dismantling the plant, but it's also dependent on political support (tax breaks, loan guarantees, (
Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity ActPrice-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act) insurance guarantees).
There's a good article on Wikipedia explaining the (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants) Economics of new nuclear power plants. Also a recent NYTimes article says that (
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/business/global/27iht-renuke.html?_r=1) Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage against alternative energy sources. That's just one paper but (
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Nuke%2C_coal%2C_gas_generating_costs.png) other studies support this fact.
I haven't heard of the type of mini-reactor you linked yet. The company's claim that
"It is impossible for the module to go supercritical, ´melt down,´ or create any type of emergency situation," ((http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/why.html) src) sounds like marketing wash. The (
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?sectionCode=132&storyCode=2054804) technical details contradict this claim.
Much of the safety of the reactor is supposed to come from the fact the thing is buried, which
"protects against the possibility of human incompetence, or hostile tampering and proliferation." ((http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/product-faq.html) src) According to the (
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/advanced/hyperion.html) plans available on the NRC site however there is an access to the reactor.
Furthermore the reactor only has a lifespan of 7-10 years (given variously as 8-10 years), after which it has to cool down for 2 years, then be dug up and transported back to the company and a new one delivered back. That raises some practical questions how useful it will be in remote areas. Let alone whether hauling around the projected thousands of mini-reactors all the time doesn't pose its own problems.
heywood on 22/3/2011 at 07:26
Quote Posted by Kolya
Heywood, all of these comparisons are fallacious arguments because one bad thing doesn't make another bad thing right. Demagogue took this to absurd levels by comparing to obesity and traffic accidents.
Hunger kills even more people than obesity, so hunger is worse and by this logic anyone who fights obesity is wrong and can be ridiculed because he didn't notice this disparity.
This is finger pointing, nothing more. And frankly I wonder why I have to fight each and every distracting pseudo argument and outright lie that the nuclear lobby, specifically the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) in the US, has been purporting for years to instigate their 'nuclear renaissance'.
This institute and the major US energy corporations spend millions every year for lobby work on the American parties and on specific senators, because it's worth it for them. They can rely on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to approve dangerous new reactors like the AP1000, just like they did approve 23 reactors of the Fukushima design in the US. But don't worry, they were tested for every disaster that has happened in their location in the past. Not for several of them together, like an earthquake + a tsunami, but hey, how likely is that, right?
Are you saying they should be designed for zero risk under every conceivable natural disaster regardless of how unlikely? That's pathological. It's also not a standard that's applied to other energy sources which have proven far more destructive than nuclear.
And you are missing the point. Any energy investment strategy has to be based on rational cost/risk/benefit tradeoffs including consideration of the impacts to human health and the environment. As bad as the Fukushima disaster looks now, its human & environmental impact pales in comparison to disasters involving other major energy sources, which also occur far more frequently than nuclear. Coal mining accidents are very frequent and kill thousands a year. Not to mention all the indirect health effects of pollution from coal plants. Dam breaks occur periodically and kill over 100 a year on average. Natural gas explosions are also very frequent and often kill people (not sure of the numbers here). Oil fires occur periodically and kill people.
Even alternative sources are not risk free. Wind power risks death to workers from falling and other industrial accidents, road accidents transporting parts, and deaths to the public from blade failure and shedding ice. There have been dozens of deaths due to wind power already. Also, constructing solar panels involves the risk of exploding silicon gas, poisoning by toxic byproducts, and cancer from cadmium mining and handling. And so on.
I'm not saying nuclear is the best answer. But I do think it has to be on the table and its costs, benefits, and risks need to be traded off fairly versus other energy sources. You're basically arguing that it should be taken off the table for no good reason other than irrational phobia.
Quote Posted by Kolya
Briareos H, of course lobbying happens all the time. The question is what the consequences are.
Regarding your example: As far as I know the US do not have a reasonable train system but instead you travel long distances by car or plane. So my conclusion is that the automobile and airplane industry has the better lobby. Whether that's a good thing you can decide for yourself.
The opposite is closer to the truth today. The only reason why there is any inter-city passenger rail service left in the US is because the sole remaining provider is government owned and kept alive on subsidies provided as a result of their lobbying. If the competition for government transportation funding was based solely on merit, it would have been dead long ago. In recent years, the US goverment spent a lot of money on development of a high speed rail corridor in the Northeast in a last ditch effort to save the service. The ridership has increased somewhat, but it's still nowhere near economically self sustaining.
In the early 20th century, the US had thriving passenger railroads that serviced the whole country, but they've been in decline for a long time now. I don't want to get into all the reasons why, but the simple answer is that other transportation options became cheaper, faster, more convenient, and/or more reliable. The only thing that could change the tide back in favor of passenger rail now is a massive increase in the price of oil.
