Nuclear energy is a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

[Massacure]

Note: There are several people who oppose nuclear energy in this forum. I would like them to post a roughly 300 word rebuttal to this "letter" that I wrote for one of my homework assignments. Once I get several post I will give further instructions asking for one more follow up requests.


Energy companies in the United States operate 104 reactors with 101 gigawatts of nameplate capacity. In 2007, these reactors operated with a capacity factor of 92%, exceeding that of any other energy source in the United States. In addition, nuclear power has a track record of being safer than any other form of power. Between 1970 and 1992, 39 nuclear workers died, whereas 6,400 coal workers died. Nuclear energy does not contribute to acid rain, smog emissions, global warming, and does not emit heavy metals such as mercury or arsenic. Nuclear power forms radioactive substances, a form of pollution that is far easier to contain than pollution generated by fossil fuels. In current light water reactors, spent fuel remains dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Research with the Experimental Breeder Reactor II used a fast spectrum fuel cycle and spent fuel recycling that reduced the amount of nuclear waste by 1/20 and would cause the waste to become less radioactive than the original mined ore after just 400 years instead of tens of thousands. An underground repository would be sufficient for storing dry casks for this amount of time.

Last month, the federal government issued a loan guarantee for Vogtle 3 & 4. The federal government is also guaranteeing that it will not delay construction once the licenses have been issued. The project is expected to cost $14 billion, more than $6,000 a kilowatt. Hopefully cost will decline as more reactors are built and approach the cost of those built in Japan and France. At $2.5 billion, the last reactor to go online in Japan, the 900 megawatt Tomari-3, cost less than $3,000 a kilowatt. Flamaville-3 in France will cost $5 billion and produce 1650 megawatts, which also puts it in the $3,000 a kilowatt range.

[Botany]

1. Because it doesn't work and is the most expensive way to produce electricity

Holding something @ 100% stability for an infinite period of time and making
energy violates the basic laws of thermodynamics.

Nuclear energy does not contribute to acid rain ..... so the coal that is burned to feed electricity
into enrichments plants does not make acid rain?


BTW do you have a place to put the wastes yet?

[Statistical]

2. "so the coal that is burned to feed electricity into enrichments plants does not make acid rain? "

Couldn't you use wind, solar, hydro, or nuclear (or more likely a combination of sources) to power enrichment? By that same logic doesn't wind, hydro, and solar contribute to acid rain? Coal generates 50% of power in this country and that powers turbine and PV manufacturing facilities.

Holding a something @ 100% stability for an infinite period of time and making
energy violates the basic laws of thermodynamics.

This is just gobbledygook nonsense. You can be anti-nuclear, but come on lets at least keep science in the discussion. Reactors don't keep anything at "100% stability". The heat is produced from fission which obviously indicates there is no "100% stability".

[Botany]

3. I know the science and some of the engineering too.

Reactors are just 1 part of the nuclear fuel cycle.

mining, milling, enrichment, fuel tablet production, electricity production, decommissioning, and long term waste disposal are all
part of the equation.

BTW it is far more efficient to use the solar, wind, or hydro to just make electricity than to funnel that power into the nuclear
enrichment and then to fuel fabrication and then on to a reactor ..... or is that just gobbledygook nonsense?

[Statistical]

4. While we can agree to disagree that statement at least makes sense.

Saying having a + EROEI from nuclear energy violates the laws of thermodynamics because you need to keep it "100% stable indefinitely" is just nonsense. If you have a scientific background you don't indicate it by making false and silly statements like that.

[Botany]

7. lack of understanding on your part does not make what I wrote silly or false

the real costs of nuclear power have always been hidden.

[Statistical]

8. Hidden or not even the most zealous nuke haters with scientific background makes claims that silly.

Nuclear energy having a negative EROEI ranks up there with climate-change deniers saying "snow" means no global warming or evolution-haters saying dino fossils near human fossils "proves" the earth is only 5000 years old.

The exact return on energy is debatable. If you made a claim of low EROEI I would disagree but I wouldn't call it silly.

Estimates range from 5:1 to 57:1. Since year 2000 the low end has moved to more like 15:1.

However nobody with a clue claims it is negative EROEI. :rofl:
Sometimes a claim is just that, silly and false.

Many anti-nuclear scientists show a positive EROEI for nuclear energy.
Maybe they too (despite thousands of hours of research and advanced technical degrees) "don't understand what you are saying"?



"The two large EROEI values reported here were for nuclear life-cycle which used centrifuge fuel enrichment as opposed to diffusion-based enrichment. Centrifuge enrichment uses much less electricity than other methods (Global Security 2007)."

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877

Of course any EROEI not using centrifuge enrichment is worthless at face value. Gas Centrifuges are 5x as efficient in terms of enrichment per unit of energy as gas diffusion. Nobody is building gas diffusion plants. Calculating EROEI without gas centrifuges would be like calculating EROEI of solar panel using 2% efficient panels from 1970s as benchmark.

[kristopher]

11. The claim has substance.

It is from a methodology used by Wang in his GREET-@ modeling program. I haven't seen it applied to nuclear power, but the same sort of results are achieved with analysis of fossil fuels.

[joshcryer]

5. $3,000 a kw? That's remarkable.

I've been told it was as high as $20,000 a kw! Who would've thought.

[BeFree]

6. well

By the time all the nuke wastes are, well, safe, and that looks to be at least 400 years, yeah, 20G per.

Of course we don't have to pay that now, we get to defer it!!
Ain't we lucky?

[kristopher]

9. Neither Japan nor France have transparent numbers to judge their costs by.

They are also in the business of selling nuclear power plants. Independent analysis placed the cost of delivered electricity from new nuclear plants in the US it the range of $0.25 - $0.30/kwh.

Your numbers are pure fiction. If they represented reality, loan guarantees would not be needed.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/03/nuclear_financing.html

[bananas]

10. What class is this for - Marketing 101?

It's a lot of fluff and hype. Mentioning the capacity factor is fluff and hype, natural gas plants have low capacity factor because they're used for peak load. You've been around here long enough to know this. If this homework assignment is for the class "Logic 101", you get an F.

What class is this for, and why are you asking us to do your homework?

[yourout]

12. I prefer the Molten salt reactor.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor>

[Massacure]

13. Part 2: Nuclear Energy is not a viable alternative to fossil fuels

The class I'm doing this for is called Interpersonal Communication and the assignment was for us to write a letter both supporting and opposing a particular issue. The goal is for us to perceive what other people's reactions might be to our argument. This is the letter I wrote opposing my own position on nuclear energy that I wrote at the same time I wrote my previous post but have I've been sitting on for the last day. I would like comments as to how closely it reflects the opinion of people who oppose nuclear power.


Nuclear energy is not a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Reactors in the United States historically have cost overruns and it is not realistic to expect cost overruns to end just because of federal licensing and loan guarantees. A new nuclear reactor hasn’t been built in the United States in over 30 years due to cost and licensing issues. Nuclear reactors produce toxic waste. Even reactors such as the Experimental Breeder Reactor II produced some waste, and it is unrealistic to expect that an experimental reactor can scale up commercially. A reactor like the Experimental Breeder Reactor II would cost even more than the currently astronomically expensive reactors. Even new reactors have a risk of melting down and causing a Chernobyl-like accident. Thousands of square miles of land are unsuitable for living as a result of Chernobyl, and many livestock had to be quarantined or culled to prevent the spread of radiation in the food chain.

Money spent on nuclear energy could be better spent on energy conservation and renewable energy sources such as solar or wind. Wind energy cost between $1,200-2,600 a kilowatt installed, and even though it has a capacity factor of roughly only one third, three gigawatts of wind turbines still cost less than a one gigawatt reactor in the United States. Connecting several wind farms over large regions increases the reliability of wind power because wind power is less intermittent over large regions as opposed to small ones. Wind power has experience double digit exponential growth and will continue to do so into the future. In countries like Denmark, wind power produces 19% of the electricity, while wind power produces 11% in Spain and Portugal. Wind energy produces no pollution like coal or nuclear power do. Wind power provides the best alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power is completely unnecessary.

[kristopher]

14. Your premise could be phrased bettter.

The question isn't which technology is a "viable" alternative to fossil fuels. Viability is an evaluation that revolves around the scope of the discussion and the way we prioritize our values.

The basic choice is summed up by Amory Lovins in his paper "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" Both nuclear and renewable technologies CAN replace fossil fuels and must therefore be considered "viable". It is how people perceive risks and rewards that determine their general reaction.

Someone posted an article recently that I felt contained a great deal of insight, summed up briefly as "Citizens experience scientific
debates as contests between warring cultural factions."

Our research suggests that this form of 'protective cognition' is a major cause of political conflict over the credibility of scientific data on climate change and other environmental risks. People with individualistic values, who prize personal initiative, and those with hierarchical values, who respect authority, tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire. By contrast, people who subscribe to more egalitarian and communitarian values are suspicious of commerce and industry, which they see as sources of unjust disparity. They are thus more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted. Such differences, we have found, explain disagreements in environmental-risk perceptions more completely than differences in gender, race, income, education level, political ideology, personality type or any other individual characteristic4.
Cultural cognition also causes people to interpret new evidence in a biased way that reinforces their predispositions. As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarized, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information.

Fixing the communications failure
Dan Kahan
Nature 463, 296-297 (21 January 2010)
doi:10.1038/463296a; Published online 20 January 2010

(With many thanks to who ever originally brought this to DU.)

[bananas]

15. You left out the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation.

The famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ranks nuclear weapons "first and foremost", Professor Martin Hellman at Stanford estimates the risk of deterrence failure at 1% per year, Al Gore places global warming "alongside" a nuclear exchange, and the Nobel committee unanimously awarded Obama the Peace Prize for his efforts at arms reduction, see the references I posted here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=225698&mesg_id=225763

Reducing the risk of nuclear war means careful restrictions on nuclear energy.

If you're going to do a more extensive project for this class, you might want to search for comments made by Jim Harding and others regarding the Keystone Center Nuclear Power Joint Fact-Finding Dialogue they participated in. The Keystone Center gets experts on all sides of an issue together and locks them in a room for a year to find out what they can agree on.

I'll post more on the question of viability later, it isn't black-or-white.

[bananas]

16. Another reference

The 230-page report can be downloaded from www.icnnd.org

http://www.sabanews.net/en/news204132.htm

Risks of nuclear catastrophe are "real" - weapons expert
25/January/2010

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 25 (Saba) -- Professor Gareth Evans of Australia on Monday warned that the risks associated with existing nuclear weapons, including the risk of nuclear terrorism, are "real" and that it is "sheer damn luck" that a nuclear catastrophe did not happen since World War II, according to Kuwait News Agency (KUNA).

Evans, co-Chairman of the International Commission on Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (ICNND), presented the December 2009 report "Eliminating Nuclear Threats" during a press conference and warned that "the risks associated with existing nuclear arsenals ..., with new countries joining the list ..., with nuclear terrorism, are real".

"It's sheer damn luck that we have succeeded as a world in surviving ... a major nuclear catastrophe since 1945. It was not a function of good policy or anything else rather than luck," he added.

He noted that the world has come "hellishly close to a (nuclear) catastrophe on many occasions during the Cold War, which only now are beginning to come to light after all these years".

He warned that one "cannot make any assumption at all that the status quo will continue, that we can live with 20,000 or more nuclear weapons without (the risk) of nuclear catastrophe".

<snip>

The 230-page report, the most comprehensive of its kind yet produced, is the unanimous product of an independent global panel of fifteen commissioners, supported by a high-level international advisory board and worldwide network of research centres.

<snip>

[Massacure]

17. Would you consider this better written?

Red text is removed, blue text is added:

Nuclear energy is not a viable alternative to fossil fuels a viable alternative to fossil fuels, but better options exists. Reactors in the United States historically have had cost overruns and it is not necessarily realistic to expect cost overruns to end just because of federal licensing and loan guarantees. A new nuclear reactor hasn’t been built in the United States in over 30 years due to cost and licensing issues. Nuclear reactors produce toxic waste. Even reactors such as the Experimental Breeder Reactor II produced some waste, and it is not necessarily unrealistic to expect that an experimental reactor can scale up commercially. A reactor like the Experimental Breeder Reactor II would cost even more than the currently astronomically expensive reactors. Even new reactors have a risk of melting down and causing a Chernobyl-like accident. Thousands of square miles of land are unsuitable for living as a result of Chernobyl, and many livestock had to be quarantined or culled to prevent the spread of radiation in the food chain. Even if the United States were able to economically and safely expand the use of nuclear energy, other countries like North Korea and Iran might use it as an excuse to build reactors of their own. Reactors built by rogue nations have the potential to divert materials for the use of nuclear weapons. Thus the United States should set an example and not use nuclear power, even if it is a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

Money spent on nuclear energy could be better spent on energy conservation and renewable energy sources such as solar or wind. Wind energy cost between $1,200-2,600 a kilowatt installed, and even though it has a capacity factor of roughly only one third, three gigawatts of wind turbines still cost less than a one gigawatt reactor in the United States. Connecting several wind farms over large regions increases the reliability of wind power because wind power is less intermittent over large regions as opposed to small ones. Wind power has experience double digit exponential growth and will continue to do so into the future. In countries like Denmark, wind power produces 19% of the electricity, while wind power produces 11% in Spain and Portugal. Wind energy produces no pollution like coal or nuclear power do. Wind power provides the best alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power is completely unnecessary.

[bananas]

18. I liked the first one better.

The problem with the question "viable" is that people interpret that differently.
Are you talking about replacing all fossil fuels some day far in the future, replacing some fraction of fossil fuels over the next 40 years, or replacing a particular coal plant with a particular reactor proposal?

Example: The federal loan guarantee program is $18 billion, that was supposed to be enough for a half-dozen reactors. No investors believed they could be built for that, but the nuclear industry lobbied hard, we had a Republican Congress and President, and they convinced Congress that once they built a few reactors, private investors would be convinced and be willing to provide loans without federal guarantees. Well know the nuclear industry has admitted they can't build them that cheap. So it was unviable to build them at that cost.

In the short term, nuclear is not a viable replacement for fossil fuel, at best it may or may not be a viable replacement for existing nuclear plants. Most of the 100 reactors in the US will come to the end of their life-cycle over the next 20 years, most sites were selected to support a half-dozen reactors, so a new reactor could be built there and use the existing transmission infrastructure and experiemced technical staff to run the new plant. But the nuclear industry is still low-balling its estimates, when you use realistic cost estimates, it would be cheaper to replace the reactor with more efficient appliances, so it might not even be viable for new nuclear to replace old nuclear when you consider the options.

[bananas]

19. Also, I'm not really anti-nuclear

I know people, including scientists, who are anti-nuclear, they want all reactors shut down now and think further research is a waste of time and money. I'm not like that. So you might want to ask real anti-nuclear people about your letter.