Sherwood Ross: Nuclear Power not Clean, Green or Safe

[marmar]

Nuclear Power Not Clean, Green or Safe
By Sherwood Ross
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Wednesday 10 January 2007

In all the annals of spin, few statements are as misleading as Vice President Cheney's that the nuclear industry operates "efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions," or President Bush's claim that America's 103 nuclear plants operate "without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases."

Even as it refuses to concede global warming is really happening, the White House touts nuclear power as the answer, as if it were an arm of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry's trade group. NEI's advertisements declare, "Kids today are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They demand lots of electricity. And they deserve clean air."

In reality, not only are vast amounts of fossil fuels burned to mine and refine the uranium for nuclear power reactors, polluting the atmosphere, but those plants are allowed "to emit hundreds of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year," Dr. Helen Caldicott, the antinuclear authority, points out in her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (The New Press).

What's more, the thousands of tons of solid radioactive waste accumulating in the cooling pools next to those plants contain "extremely toxic elements that will inevitably pollute the environment and human food chains, a legacy that will lead to epidemics of cancer, leukemia, and genetic disease in populations living near nuclear power plants or radioactive waste facilities for many generations to come," she writes. Countless Americans are already dead or dying as a result of those nuclear plants, and that story is not being effectively told.

To begin with, over half of the nation's dwindling uranium deposits lie under Navajo and Pueblo tribal land, and at least one in five tribal members recruited to mine the ore were exposed to the radioactive gas radon 220 and "have died and are continuing to die of lung cancer," Caldicott writes. "Thousands of Navajos are still affected by uranium-induced cancers," she adds.

As for uranium tailings discarded in the extraction process, 265 million tons of it have been left to pile up in the Southwest, and pollute it, even though they contain radioactive thorium. At the same time, uranium 238, also known as "depleted uranium," (DU) a discarded nuclear plant byproduct, "is lying around in thousands of leaking, disintegrating barrels" at the enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Portsmouth, Ohio; and Paducah, Kentucky - where ground water is now too polluted to drink, Caldicott writes.

Fuel rods at every nuclear plant leak radioactive gases or are routinely vented into the atmosphere by plant operators. "Although the nuclear industry claims it is 'emission free,' in fact it is collectively releasing millions of curies annually," the author reports. ......(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/011007EB.shtml

[sam sarrha]

1. it is said to be about as efficient as burning wood

[Dead_Parrot]

2. Who by?

Just curious. Not that I have anything against biofuels, you understand. Indeed, if mined & refined materials are evil and must be destroyed, a stone hearth burning wood is about the only means of energy production we'd have left.

[sam sarrha]

4. THE EXPENCE OF REFINIG THE ORE.. there are ponds of deadly toxic and radioactive sledge all over the

country and the world.. there is no way to clean it up so they spray water on it to keep it from blowing away in the wind...

the cost is prohibitive if one includes the clean up that isnt happening

[myrep]

3. Is PV solar a viable large-scale option?

I'm curious if anyone here who's familiar with PV solar energy systems has come across a U.S. Department of Energy brochure from 2003 titled "Myths about Solar Electricity"?

It makes the following claim:

"For example, with today’s commercial systems, the solar energy resource in a 100-by-100-mile area of Nevada could supply the United States with all of its electricity. If these systems were distributed to the 50 states, the land required from each state would be an area of about 17 by 17 miles. This area is available now from parking lots, rooftops, and vacant land. In fact, 90% of America’s current electricity needs could be supplied with solar electric systems built on the estimated 5 million acres of abandoned industrial sites in our nation’s cities."

And the current page on their website here:

<http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/myths.html>

makes similar claims but seems to be urging caution. Let market forces sort everything out, etc.

Now, I understand even the most efficient PV systems are still expensive to produce but if the above claim is true and we taxpayers spent a fraction of the treasure squandered overseas in the past 5 years instead on this type of national infrastructure, wouldn't this solve a WHOLE bunch of problems?

Not to mention wind power.

Someone pop my balloon, please.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. Welcome to DU, myrep...

:hi:

That question is behind some, err, heated debate on E/E: So which ever view you take expect to get flamed for it (but don't take it too personally!). I'm of the opinion that while it might be practicable in terms of physics, but that there is no way in hell it could be implemented in any sort of useful timescale, and we should be using power sources we've got now to tackle the problem.

But to run through the numbers:
The US currently uses about 4PWh of electricity per year, or about 11TWh per day. Since Solar only produces power for 6 or 7 hours a day, you'd need about 40TW of capacity: The current cheapest thin-film price (from www.solarbuzz.com, a site you might want to take a look at) is $3.79, which makes for $151 trillion.

Two issues with this figure: First is the consumption, and energy efficiency should bring this down a lot. However, there seems a good chance that transport will add quite a lot: Processing biofuels, generating hydrogen or plugging your electric car in are all quite energy intensive procedures that aren't widespread at the moment, but the generation will have to be picked up somewhere.

The second issue is the cost per Watt, which may go down. Or up. New manufacturing techniques and economies of scale will bring it down, but PV-grade sillicon currently goes hand-in-hand with chip-grade silicon (the good stuff goes to chips, the not-so-good stuff goes to PV): if there is huge demand for PV-grade stuff there isn't enough current capacity to manufacture it on the side - so more smelters and refiners, more cost. Take your pick. :)

The real killer is the cost of storing it: by the time the sun gets low in the sky, you need to have enough juice stored to last throught the night and into the next morning. For off-grid homes, this is usually done with banks of conventional batteries, but the waste stream from old batteries is already a nightmare. There are a couple of new technologies that might help: JohnWxy will tell you all about VRB storage, a battery-ish solution using tanks of charged vanadium electrolyte: Skids will, I'm sure, point you towards flywheel storage. For interest's sake, I can tell you the theoretical cost per TWh is about $150 billion for VRB, and $50 billion for flywheel (these are very rough, ball-park figures). My main worries about this are that we've not tried either of these technologies on anything like the sort of scale needed, and we don't really have time to bugger about with any problems, but maybe that's just me.

Solar is good for peak generation: More electricity is used during the day than at night, and a combination of nuclear power for the baseload and solar for the peak would solve a lot of problems, although PV enthusiasts seem to have a tendency to be anti-nuclear as well (hi Jpak :hi:), so that horse might not run...

One thing I would both camps to agree on is that leaving it up to market forces is probably the worst thing to do. They like cheap stuff, which means coal, which means we all loose. :(

[myrep]

6. Thanks, Dead Parrot.

And thanks for the primer. I'm just learning about alternative energy and trying to get a good, practical overview of what's feasible.

I realize there's no easy path but it strikes me that we need broad, citizen awareness and vocal national leadership. There simply has to be a strong collective urgency to find cleaner, renewable solutions for the future or we're heading for a dead end -- a dirty, polluted race to the bottom.

[bananas]

11. Have you seen Al Gore's Major Policy Address last year?

He covers a lot of ground, you can watch the video here:
http://www.nyu.edu/community/gore.html
or here:
http://www.law.nyu.edu/newscalendars/2006_2007/gore/index.html

Appearing on the video, in order of appearance, are:

John Sexton, President of New York University;
Paul Faeth, World Resources Institute Managing Director;
R. James Woolsey, Former Director of the CIA and
Al Gore, Former Vice President.

This event took place at on Monday, September 18th, 2006, at NYU School of Law, Tishman Auditorium, Vanderbilt Hall.

[jpak]

18. **flame**

:evilgrin:

The PV-only model bears little relationship to what's happening in the real world today - as do similar wind-only, biomass-only, etc. scenarios - and does not consider the impact of energy efficiency on the amount of power that will actually be needed by the US in the future.

The Electric Power Research Institute estimated that the US can reduce its electric demand by 24-45% with 80's vintage efficiency technologies - that's a lot of electrical demand that will not have to be met by renewable power systems.

Biofuels can satisfy only a 10-20% of CURRENT US automotive fuel demand. Most of this demand is from gas guzzling SUVs and light trucks. If everyone in the US drove a Prius and/or used public transit and/or reduced daily driving miles, biofuels could contribute many many times more to transportation demand than under the business-as-usual scenario.

23 US states currently have Renewable Portfolio Standards mandating that 10-30% of the electricity produced come from renewable sources (or potentially renewable sources - i.e., fuel cells) by 2015-2020.

Those portfolios include a mix of geothermal, solar, hydro, wind, wave, tidal, fuel cell and solar generating sources - none are solar-only, or wind-only etc.

The rational is this: power production from mix of renewable technologies compliment each other over time and space, reducing potential grid instabilities and the amount of storage that will be required in the future.

Energy storage also does not require exotic or expensive new technologies - small distributed biomass plants (and hydroelectric facilities) can operate at night or during periods of light winds to balance power production from wind farms and PV arrays. This would reduce biomass fuel consumption as well.

Some solar technologies - like domestic solar hot water systems - already have integral storage systems.

Megawatt-scale flywheel storage systems already exist and are in operation world-wide today. This is not an untested technology.

Connecticut is currently developing 100 MW of hydrogen fuel cell capacity (a number multi-MW systems - part of their RPS). These systems will initially use natural gas as their source of hydrogen, but can use H2 produced by electrolysis using renewable power (off-shore wind farms) in the near future.

Megawatt scale electrolyzers are in use today (Norway) and storage in low-pressure tanks does not require further R&D.

When completed, CT will have the basic infrastructure in place to use hydrogen from renewable sources (ain't they some smart :D)

Finally, PV module prices are going to drop like a rock by 2010 - by half or more according to the PV industry.

Solar Nirvana will arrive sooner than you think...

:evilgrin:

:hi:

[Dead_Parrot]

21. Ahem...

The bizarre "solar only" scenario was from the Department of Energy, not me - I'm just pointed out why it's bollocks. And I carefully pointed out that there are emerging storage solutions: I merely note that MW-scale storage is a billion times too small. Now, if everyone on the planet brought a 5MWh flywheel, we'd be sorted.

Can we get all our power from renewables? Almost certainly. Can we we get all our power from renewables before we stick the planet in the toilet? Fat chance.

Oh, and a PS - In case you hadn't noticed, the PV industry is always saying that prices are about to be slashed. Wake me up when they actually are.

[Massacure]

8. Depends on how you define viable.

I certainly wouldn't consider spending ten trillion dollars on solar panels and countless more on energy storage viable.

[garybeck]

13. yes, but the real solution involves several types of energy production, not juts one.

that myths page is a good one I use often.

[NNadir]

7. Sigh...

The repetitive and vastly ignorant stuff goes on and on and on and on and on...

Not only that, but over and over people site Helen Caldicott as if she is an "authority" on something. She is an authority on collecting speaking fees for repeating illiterate nonsense, but little else.

Not once, not even one fucking time, has anyone making these stupid claims starting by acknowledging that fucking carbon dioxide is again, for the ten trillionth time, "waste with which nobody knows what to do."

Can somebody write Caldicott and ask if she recognizes that carbon dioxide, mercury, coal ash, nitrogen oxides are, in fact, "waste," except they are not solids and cannot be contained without a loss of life.

People laugh at Bush for repeating the same reality disconnected nonsense night after night, day after day, about Iraq. Maybe he served some time in the anti-nuclear movement. He's certainly equally disconnected from reality as the anti-nuclear industry is, although it happens that the statements attributed to Bush and Cheney, to wit: "the nuclear industry operates "efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emissions," or President Bush's claim that America's 103 nuclear plants operate "without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases..." are almost true.

Stopped clocks are right twice a day.

It also happens that if Bush or Cheney remarked "the sun rises in the morning," that it would be a lie simply because they said it.

The environmental impact of nuclear energy has been measured independently thousands of times by thousands of researchers and the conclusion is almost universally the same: Nuclear power is not risk free, but it is vastly less risky, by orders of magnitude, than its alternatives.

One would need to understand something about energy - and one could not be anti-nuclear and actually understand energy - to know that the microexajoules of solar electricity are neither a alternative to either nuclear energy nor coal.

It would help dispell the air of complete scientific illiteracy, of course, to some minor extent if the fucking clueless ones would also learn something about scientific units. When the scientific illiterate Caldicott writes "to emit hundreds of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive elements into the environment every year..." she is directly indicating that she doesn't even have enough education to recognize that the ocean contains 500 billion curies of radioactive potassium and many billions of curies of radioactive uranium, uranium daughters, and rubidium.

She, Caldicott, is such an asshole.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Oddly enough...

At the North Pole, the sun didn't rise this morning. Which proves something, but I'll be buggered if I know what.

[jpak]

20. It didn't set at the South Pole today either

The old US South Pole station used PV panels to supplement power from its diesel plant.

McMurdo station had a nuclear power plant back in the '60's - but it had *ahem* problems and was dismantled...

http://www.antarctica.org.nz/06-human_impact/index.html

Buggah!!!

[garybeck]

17. Sigh, Sigh

it's terribly frustrating when nuclear proponents keep mumbling the same garbage over and over again.

you can certainly make a claim that nuclear does not emit greenhouse gases. But this is akin to a stopped clock being right twice a day.

spend 10 minutes on google looking up Uranium mining. Then another 10 minutes on Chernobryl. Then another on nuclear waste.

Now, go wind up your clock and wake up to reality.

Nuclear is a bad, dirty, technology. If it were the only alternative to coal and oil, I might agree with you. But what you and all the other nuclear proponents completely fail to recognize is that there are other choices, that are much better.

It is a FACT, that we could get all our energy from renewable energy sources, and all from within our own borders. Spend another 10 minutes on Google and you'll find the truth. But don't go espousing that Nuclear is the only answer because it is not. In fact it's a bad answer. It is bad for the environment and its dangerous. It would little if anything to help our economy. Consortium studies have shown that utilizing more renewable energy would be the shot in the arm that our economy needs - jobs, manufacturing, and all without destroying the planet we all live on.

Other countries get it. We can't even get solar panels in the US now because other countries like Germany are buying them up faster than we can make them. Poor leadership, and disinformation like your post have contributed to a situation in our country where we are the leader in creating the problem and we are doing nothing about it.

Nuclear only makes sense if it's the only alternative to fossil fuels. Wake up. It's not.

Sigh.

[phantom power]

19. Germany is displacing it's "discontinued" nuclear energy with coal.

[hunter]

9. How's the weather in Australia, Helen?

:eyes:

Disclaimer: Hunter was an anti-nuclear activist in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties. He was also a twit, and may have been somewhat responsible for starting the hideous landslide that led to Project Censored's #4(?) story of 1990. In a quick search I can't find particularly unbiased internet accounts of it, but I did find this Caldicottism on a few:

Every time the space shuttle is launched, 250 tons of hydrochloric acid is released into the air. With each launch, .25 percent of the ozone is destroyed. So far, the space shuttle has destroyed 10 percent of the ozone.

If I recall the dates correctly, I started researching this angle in 1982, but I don't think I was the first.

I met Caldicott a couple of times too, wow, another life, another world, a quarter century ago...

[Dead_Parrot]

12. Is this what you're after?

http://web.archive.org/web/20011028075114/http://projectcensored.org/c1990.htm#2

Cool. :D

Edit: I note there have been 117 shuttle launches, which means either a) we've destroyed 29.25% of the ozone layer, or b) Caldicott should stop peddling horseshit and go back to healing sick children - which is something she used to be good at, and actually serves a useful purpose.

Fat chance. :(

[garybeck]

14. Gary Beckwith: Nuclear Power sucks.

it doesn't take a genius.

uranium mining is extremely destructive
nuclear power production is extremely dangerous
nuclear waste a threat to societies for generations

why even talk about this bad technology, when there are others that are renewable, clean, and would help our economy? why? why?

[GliderGuider]

15. Luckily we don't haver the time left to implement it.

Of course, neither do we have the time left to implement renewables to any effective scale.

That leaves coal.

And that, my green friend, really sucks.

[garybeck]

16. It's never too late to do the right thing.

I never give up hope. Amazing things can happen if people work together.

But if we continue down this path, we are only making it more difficult to change directions.

Our only hope is to change.