Co-FOunder of Greenpeace now Pro-Nuclear Power

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html

About time someone got their head out of the ground.

Briana Dawson

In an ideal world, I'd be pro-nuclear-power myself.

Unfortunately, I live in a non-ideal world, where humans are responsible for nuclear plants and errors occur.

It's been twenty years since Chernobyl. Three Mile Island had a partial core meltdown the year I was born.

It'd be nice, but reality always gets in the way of perfection - and when it comes to nuclear material, I really don't think that "close" does the job.

Other than that both were nuclear reactor accidents, Chernobyl and TMI have almost nothing in common. The reactor design used for Chernobyl's 4 reactors (#4 being the one that went kaboom) was a poor design that among other deficiencies didn't include a concrete containment dome to contain accidents, and in the absence of cooling water would actually generate more power (read: heat).

US Nuclear Regulatory Commission fact sheet on TMI

information on the Chernobyl accident

How do you get out of bed in the morning knowing that all of humanity is just human and likely to make mistakes?

Heh, I was just in the area of 3 Mile Island last week. My fiance NEVER heard of 3 Mile Island

The reasons you state are the original reasons that the Co-Founder of Greenpeace 'was' anti-nuke.

Facts changed his mind.


3 Mile Island was contained and never vented fissile material into the atmosphere like Chernobyl.

Briana Dawson

How to solve the energy crisis:
90% of people are idiots.
KILL THEM ALL!
Et voila, energy surplus!

Occasionally I wonder why I bother with this forum, since Champie is apparently having a hard time reading lately.

Briana,

It's very easy for you to dismiss it, apparently. I have met people from the area surrounding Chernobyl, so it's harder for me to do so.

Until we figure out a way to make these plants much, MUCH more idiotproof - well.

Doesn't help that Nevada is bound and determined to fight the Yucca Mountain project tooth and nail, to the point of denying water to the facilities; if that's our best plan for waste disposal, we're kind of, well, screwed.

I see nothing wrong with being extremely cautious with material that is so exceedingly toxic. I do see things wrong with being cavalier about it.

Until that day never comes, we should continue to use them anyways, because nothing will ever be idiot proof.

On a different point, ...

Speaking from the part of the world that spawned GreenPeace, Patrick Moore is not really the "founder" of GreenPeace, although he spends a lot of time claiming he is.

He was on the first boat trip, along with a dozen others, but GreenPeace really grew out of the SPEC environmental group.

Bob Hunter was a part of SPEC and was key in forming the "Don't Make a Wave Committee" (he also coined the term), which was GreenPeace's name when they were organising that first protest trip.

First Chairman of the Greenpeace Foundation: Ben Metcalfe, 1972
First President of the Greenpeace Foundation: Bob Hunter, 1973

Possibly you don't hear about these guys cause they are dead while Patrick Moore is still alive and doing interviews.

Just Sayin,

We kill a lot of people in the extraction, refinement, and generation of power with fossil fuels, not to mention the effects of fossil fuel pollution on health and lifespan. Neither is a 100% safe.

Power companies in the US stopped building nuclear plants because it was not economically viable:
-nuclear plants are huge capital investments. If power production is delayed the cost per kW-hr starts to skyrocket because of the loan intrest.
-Until a long-term waste disposal plan is in place the storage and disposal costs of spent fuel (along with the required security measures) are a huge unknown and long-term liability.

No one in their right mind would invest in something like this until these two issues are resolved.

Lastly, the world's supply of nuclear fuel is pretty limited, probably more so than fossil fuels. In our current once-though and thow-away system we'll burn through it all pretty fast. What is really needed is recycling and the use of breeder reactors. The problem is that you end up generating and using plutonium for this and so you need much much higher security. (for those who don't know making a bomb with Plutonium is A LOT easier than with Uranium)

I think there is a place for a next generation of nuclear power plants in the US, but we need to approach it sensibly.

I'd say it helps Nevada quite a bit. The lives lost, the damage done, and the unethical behavior of the federal government regarding the nuclear tests of the 1950s are still remembered there and in southern Utah.

Fission may be an alternative to look at again, but many issues have to be addressed - and this time in a responsible fashion.

I'm pro-nuclear too...as long is it isn't in my backyard, or country come to think of it. We should harness the power of the wind, sea and water. Give everyone their own windmill!

Fact is that uranium cannot be used for bombs. The chain reaction literally fizzles with uranium. That's why they use plutonium instead. Also the plutomium produced as a byproduct in nuclear power plants is too impure to actually be used in bombs. For starters, not enough plutonium is produced and it's too impure and fizzles from all the uranium.

HOWEVER That is not to say that they are not a threat to the world at large. The fact is that there is no real way to dispose of the waste products. This is why the US Military is using "Depleted Uranium Shells". That's actually the very meaning of "Depleted Uranium". Often it isn't even uranium anymore. Much of it has already decayed into lighter elements but is none the less still radioactive.

If we could find some way to recycle the depleted uranium back into something useful as something other than a sinister weapon, then I say go for it. Have all the nuclear power plants you want. But the fact is that we have no real way of disposing of it all... If only we could somehow teleport the radioactive stuff to the core of the earth so it could be rapidly recycled back into legitimate materials.

The fact is that all the radioactivity already exists within the earth, the only reason it's not a danger is because the core spreads it out too thinly and under the earth's crust. That's the only real way I can think of to dispose of the stuff safely and cleanly. Unfortunately teleportation is an impossibility at this point in time.

I live within 15 miles of the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant.

Where's Fermi 1, you say? Well, it partially melted down. Would have been a bad deal if it completely melted down. But that was in the 70's.

That being said, I've lived in sight of a nuclear power plant since I was six years old.

Looking out my window, I see the cooling towers of Fermi2 on the left side, sending steam into the air and forming clouds.

On the right side, I see a coal-burning Consumer's Power plant spewing smoke and soot into the same sky.

I fear the coal plant more than I fear the nuclear one. I know folks who work at Fermi; you'd have to essentially nuke the power plant before it became a problem, making it a moot point anyway. They have so many safety regulations and designs built into that place, retrofitted, enhances, and so on, that it's ability to "meltdown" is severely limited. Terrorist plane attack? That's nice; the steel-reinforced concrete bunker the plant is encased in would bounce a 747 right off of it. Anything else internally, and the plant simply shuts down.

More uranium is sent into the air via coal plants than are sent into the environment at a nuke plant.

And the environmental effects, you say? Well, we get a neat "hot-spot" of water in Lake Erie that's fun to swim around in due to the coolant towers. Yes, it's safe. And maybe some of the steam might make it rain a few more millimeters a year.

Aside from that, I really have no complaints about having a nuke plant, one that almost melted down, even, in my back yard.

Solar power is interesting, but it's not economically viable yet (they're close; there's about a dozen or so solar panel companies putting up Megawatt-sized stations out in the southwest desert). Wind power is unreliable and limited.

ANd there's about 50 years left of "readily available" uranium. If/whent hat runs out, it's simply a matter of throwing a pickaxe into a mountainside and finding a huge pile more. The 50-year figure is just what we can dig out right now, as we speak.

And finally, we're comparing 30, 40 year old plant designs and deeming them scary and unsafe. Well, sure; they were built four decades ago! Today we've got a ton of different, safer options that are cheaper to make (read: pebble bed reactors).

Meh. I'm pro-nuclear power, obviously, but I figure I'm a bit more qualfied to answer about the perceived dangers of nuke plants seeing as I live next to one.

Impractical, unreliable, and expensive.

I have no idea where you got this information. Tell that to someone who survived the Hiroshima attack. The "Little Boy" device that destroyed Hiroshima and killed 150,000 people contained 60 kg of enriched uranium-235.

It is true, however, that since that time, plutonium has been the material of choice for nuclear weapons, because it is much more highly fissionable than uranium.



I can't even respond to this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium

P2

ROFL

Quote from wikipedia...

"Hydroelectric power, using the kinetic, or movement energy of rivers, now supplies 20% of world electricity. Norway produces virtually all of its electricity from hydro, while Iceland produces 83% of its requirements (2004), Austria produces 67 % of all electricity generated in the country from hydro (over 70 % of its requirements). Canada is the world's largest producer of hydro power and produces over 70% of its electricity from hydroelectric sources."

Ah, you beat me to it Phoenix.

under the Manhatten project they were uncertian which material would be easier to produce, so they decided on a 2-prong approach. Uranium enrichment took place at Oak Ridge TN while plutonium production took place in ... stretching my mind Hanford, WA, I think.

Naturally occuring uranium contains a mixture of U-235 and U-238. U-235 is the easily fissible stuff that you want for reactors and bombs, while U-238 is more stable, although it is the primary source of Pu-239 (via transmutation).

When you "enrich" natural uranium you end up with two piles: a pile of "enriched uranium" that has a higher than natural abundance of U-235 and a plie of "depleted uranium" (also called "tailings" that has a much lower abundance of U-235.

Depleted uranium is used in armor and weapons because it is extremely dense. Compared to other commonly used materials:
Iron (steel) ~ 7.8 g/cc
Moly ~ 10.2 g/cc
Lead ~ 11.4 g/cc
Tungsten ~ 19.3 g/cc
Uranium ~ 19.1 g/cc

Depleted Uranium tailings are typically a by-product that no one wants, while Tungsten is... friggin expensive. Hence... the use of depleted uranium for armor and ordinance.

Setting aside, for the moment, the ill advisability of citing Wikipedia as a serious reference, for many parts of the world hydro is impractical, and even where it is practical there are assorted objections mostly centered around environmental concerns (or, less kindly, NIMBYism*).

Solar is getting closer to being economically viable on a large scale, but still is expensive, and with a low efficiency as far as present commercially available panels go.

Wind is even more limited in where it can go, for similar reasons as to hydro plants, only more so since the turbines need to be out in the open to catch the wind, where everyone can complain about how their precious little view (for which they most likely paid way too much) is damaged.

(And, of course, the people who object to new plants because of NIMBYism are the same ones that, a few years down the road, will bitch and moan about how they're running short on power for their umpteen dozen appliances, and "why didn't the power company make more plants years ago?" ("because you were being a short-sighted, selfish twit" is a pretty accurate response, but not one that is conducive to a long power industry employment history for the person making that reply).




* For those who may not know, "NIMBY" is short for "Not In My Back Yard"

Absolutely nothing you cited controdicted anything I said.

Impractical: Check. Wind and solar farms take up ungodly amounts of space that can otherwise be used for people and/or food production. To distribute a grid of them across a wide area is a rather impressive engineering feet in and of itself. Energy output per footprint is pretty low with both systems.

Unreliable: Check. Hyrdoelectric and geothermal (which hasn't been mentioned) are entierly region-specific. Wind and solar are both region specific and weather-specific, to get a reliable energy output you need both working in tandem, and even still you will have periods when neither is producing signifigant energy.

Expensive: Check. Natch. Not only do you have all the operating costs normal methods do, some are higher - keeping wind collectors running isn't always cheap, for example. Add to this the fact that they take much more land than conventional or nuclear power plants - land which costs money to buy(Particularly since, as region is important, you often have to buy prime land to put the things on), costs taxes to own, and 'costs' money in lost income and added work from using land that could be used for farming, housing people, commercial or industrial deveopment, etc.

Check. I still don't want a nuclear power station in my backyard.

Actually, there's more of a difference than that. First off, DPU has a lower melting point than Tungsten. So, what happens when a DPU penetrator's under heat generated by the friction of hitting hard armor or structure, it melts it's outer layers. Thus, the DPU actually sharpens itself as it's penetrating, getting expotentional sharper as it goes further in (until it either runs out of material or velocity). Tungsten, OTOH, mushrooms a little bit, weakening it's penetration power unless it's compensated by using a longer barrel (like the Germans have done with the later Leopard 2s, when they banned DPU in the late 90s, IIRC).

Incidentally, that low flash point is also where a lot of the DPU health concerns from as well: all that sheered and melted DPU becomes DPU particles, which are breathed in. Those little particles of DPU are what give you an increased chance of cancer, even thou the radiation levels in DPU are technically safe to handle outside your body.

Secondly, 75% of the all tungsten deposits in the world are held by China. Considering the American military is making ammunition out of it, that's considered a strategic resource and doesn't want to dependent on foreign suppliers, especially China.

Eggy, were you Stalin in a previous lifetime? or Marquis de Sade? Napolean? *considers posting a poll*

I wonder if that was a line from Dr. Strangelove. Might have to go google it.