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France: Vive Les Nukes ["60 Minutes" praises France's nuclear power! This is excellent!]
CBS News / 60 Minutes ^ | April 8, 2007 | Steve Kroft

Posted on 04/22/2007 9:37:28 AM PDT by grundle

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/06/60minutes/main2655782.shtml

60 MINUTES

France: Vive Les Nukes

Steve Kroft On How France Is Becoming The Model For Nuclear Energy Generation

April 8, 2007

(CBS) With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing large amounts of carbon free energy. One of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go and may now be coming again.

For the first time in decades, new nuclear plants are being built, and not just in Iran and North Korea. With zero green house gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power.

And as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, one of the first the places they are looking is to France, where it has been a resounding success and the attitude is "Vive Les Nukes."

When much of the world spurned nuclear power, 30 years ago, the French, being French, decided to go their own way and embrace it. Paris, the "City of Light," is lit by nuclear energy, which powers just about everything else in France: its homes, its factories, even its high speed railroads.

Nearly 80 percent of the country's electricity comes from 58 nuclear power plants, crammed into a country the size of Texas. Pierre Gadonniex, the head "Electricite de France," the country’s national utility says it all began with a French obsession for energy independence.

"In France, we have nearly no coal. We have no oil. So clearly, nuclear appeared to be the best way," Gadonniex explains. "And 30 years later, it appears to be a very smart decision."

Because nuclear plants emit no greenhouse gases, France has the cleanest air in the industrialized world, and because the price of oil is now around $60 a barrel, it has the lowest electric bills in Europe. In fact, France has so much cheap electricity, it exports it to its European neighbors. French nuclear plants supply power to parts of Germany, Italy and help light the city of London.

"It is a very competitive way of producing electricity when oil prices are beyond, I would say, around $40 a barrel," Gadonniex tells Kroft.

And the rest of the world has taken notice. Nearly a dozen countries, including the United States, are either building or planning to build new nuclear plants, and some of that business will go to AREVA, the French government monopoly that controls every step of its nuclear industry from uranium mining to plant design construction to radioactive waste disposal.

Deep in the wine country of Burgundy, in a massive factory, AREVA is building the first European reactors since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Bertrande Durrande, the Executive Vice President for Manufacturing, tells Kroft the business is "definitely growing."

Besides the new reactors it is building for France and Finland, Durrande says, AREVA is bidding on a project to build four new nuclear reactors in China.

Asked how many plants he thinks might be built in the next 20 years, Durrande says, "A minimum of 20. Which is quite a change when you compare it to the past."

And some of them will almost certainly be in the United States, which hasn't built a new nuclear plant since the 1970's. With energy prices and global temperatures near their reported highs, and the possibility that greenhouse gases will be regulated, the Bush administration is pushing a nuclear revival.

In many respects, the nuclear industry in the United States has disappeared. Over 100 plants were cancelled in the 1970's.

Kroft talked to Clay Sell, the Deputy Secretary of Energy and the administration's point man on nuclear power. With world energy demand expected to rise 50 percent over the next 25 years, he says it is the only practical option for producing huge amounts of electricity with no carbon emissions.

"No serious person can look at the challenge of greenhouse gases and climate change and not come to the conclusion that nuclear power has to play a significant and growing role in meeting that challenge worldwide," Sell says.

Asked how much interest there is right now in building new plants, Sell says, "There is a tremendous amount of interest. Two years ago there was exactly zero plants on the drawing boards here in the United States. Today, there are about 15 companies talking about building over 30 commercial nuclear power reactors. Now, all of those won't get built. But we think there's a significant chance that many of them will be built."

But so far, no one has signed up to actually build one, an undertaking that requires a huge investment of capital and a certain amount of faith. In the 1980's and 90's political opposition, regulatory delays, cost overruns, and a drop in electricity demand forced utilities to pull the plug on dozens of projects, and the industry has a long memory.

"I recall one story, a man who is a CEO today of one of our leading companies," Sell says, "And he described the pain associated with beginning what he thought would be a billion-dollar plant in the 1970's, and bringing it online as a $9 billion plant 20 years later. And he made the point to me that that is not a lesson that'll quickly be forgotten in the industry."

To try and assuage those concerns the government is offering utilities financial incentives, risk insurance and a streamlined regulatory system, which has borrowed a page from the French by pre-approving four basic reactor designs from which the utilities can choose, knocking years off the process. And some of those new plants could be built on existing sites where reactors are already licensed and operating.

But apart from economics, there is the issue of public acceptance. The Chernobyl disaster, and one barely averted at Three Mile Island nearly 30 years ago when a reactor core suffered a partial meltdown, severely damaged the industry's reputation.

"Forget technology for the moment," Kroft says. "Forget energy. Forget greenhouse gases. A lot of the problems of this industry have been political. I mean, people are afraid of them. Fair statement?"

"It is a fair statement," Sell acknowledges. "There is some level of concern. But what we found out and what we have seen is the more educated the public is, the more they understand the technology, the more comfortable and the more accepting they are."

Americans, he says, tend to forget that there are 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States, that have produced 20 percent of the nation's electricity without major incident in the 28 years since Three Mile Island.

"And in fact, they have an outstanding record. There has never been a radiation-related death in the commercial nuclear sector in the United States, ever," Sell points out.

David Jhirad, the head of science and research for The World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, acknowledges that the industry’s safety record has been pretty good.

Why are so many people afraid of it?

"When there's a small probability of a catastrophe people think about the catastrophe and not the small probability," Jhirad says.

"Then why have the French accepted it? And what is there about the two cultures that may influence that?" Kroft asks.

"The French love high technology. Whether it be nuclear power. Or supersonic airplanes. Or high-speed trains. They love that," Jhirad explains. "And they love, they accord huge respect and credibility to scientists and engineers. And scientists and engineers actually run these programs."

One of them is Anne Lauvergeon. She is an engineer, a onetime political aide to former French President Mitterrand and chairman of the nuclear giant AREVA, which dominates an industry that employs 150,000 people, and is a key exporter in the French economy. She may be the most powerful businesswoman in France, where everyone knows her as "Atomic Anne."

Asked what the safety record in France is, Lauvergeon tells Kroft, "The safety record in France is excellent. We have not known very important accidents. We are very, very careful."

"But one accident could change everything, right?" Kroft asks.

"Of course," Lauvergeon agrees. "One accident, one very serious accident could affect the nuclear industry as a whole."

"You must either be very good or very lucky," remarks.

"Maybe mix of both," she says. "You cannot bet on the luck. No luck in nuclear. Only work."

And right now she is working hard to convince the world that nuclear power can help solve some of the world’s environmental problems.

"One of the things the French tell us is that they consider nuclear power to be a green energy source. Accurate?" Kroft asks David Jhirad from The World Resources Institute.

"Accurate, except for one thing. Which is perhaps the Achilles' heel of nuclear power. It's certainly accurate that the plants emit no carbon dioxide," Jhirad says. "The one thing that needs to be solved is the issue of long term radioactive waste storage and management."

For decades, Americans have stored their radioactive waste on-site at power plants, awaiting a permanent solution, the Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada. It's years behind schedule, will cost $30 billion to open, and is already too small to hold all the waste. The French have taken another approach to the problem.

While the United States decided to store its nuclear waste, the French embraced the idea of reprocessing it. Instead of burying the spent fuel rods underground or underwater, they decided to build a massive plant on the coast of Normandy and recycle the used fuel and reuse it.

The high security facility stretches for two miles along the coast. All of France's spent nuclear fuel eventually ends up at the plant in pools of water.

After the fuel rods have cooled five years, the French recycle them to make new fuel. The process drastically reduces the amount of nuclear waste, but one of the by-products of this is high-grade plutonium that can be used for nuclear weapons.

"In our judgment, we have to recycle waste eventually. And recycling makes a lotta sense," Sell says.

"The big argument against reprocessing has been the fact that some high-grade plutonium that could be used in making a bomb could be stolen from the plant," Kroft remarks.

"And we're quite concerned about that as well. And that's why the president has pursued a policy that says we shall develop advanced recycling technologies that do not result in separated plutonium," Sell replies.

The United States is leading an international effort to develop the process, but large-scale, plutonium-free reprocessing is still decades off, and just one of a number of research projects the industry hopes will improve a still young technology.

"Five years ago, nuclear was dead. Now people are really buzzing about it," says MIT Professor Andrew Kadak, who is working on a new generation of nuclear technology, called the Pebble Bed reactor. Instead of conventional fuel rods, the uranium is contained in hundreds of thousands of graphite balls, which would make it safer than than conventional reactors.

"This type of reactor is very unique in the sense that there's no way to melt this down," Kadak explains. "The power inside each little pebble is so low that the temperatures here don't get high enough to reach the melting temperature of uranium, these reactors are exactly what people really wanna see, and that is no meltdowns."

For now the French are pushing an interim generation of nuclear reactors that are safer, simpler and more efficient than the ones that were built in the United States in the 1960's and 70's and they have partnered up with the American nuclear plant operator Constellation.

"It's difficult to fight against climate change. And at the same time to be against nuclear power because you have not a lot of ways to produce energy without CO2 emissions," says AREVA chief Anne Lauvergeon. "You have hydro, you have nuclear, you have wind and you have solar. But wind and solar are you know, temporary sources of energy. It works when you have wind, it works when you have sun. No sun, no wind, no energy. You don't want watch TV only when you have wind."


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: climatechange; energy; globalwarming; nuclearpower
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I don’t care about green, or environment, or global warming. Really I don’t.

I do care about anything that gets us off foreign oil and energy. If that means turning the entire State of Montana into a coal fired power plant and the entire State of Utah into a gasification of shale plant I’m all for it.

Sorry everyone in Montana and Utah, you’ll have to move to Idaho.


41 posted on 04/22/2007 11:52:47 AM PDT by Domandred
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To: Parley Baer

So is the left going to admit they have been wrong about nuclear power?

NEVER. The left never admits ever being wrong. Rather, they will announce that Al Bore has just DISCOVERED nuclear power.


42 posted on 04/22/2007 12:16:27 PM PDT by hardworking (Hill-de-pants: Never held a job. Never bought a home. Never met a payroll. Qualified to be POTUS)
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To: grundle

December 2004
A New Vision for Nuclear Waste By Matthew L. Wald http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/13992/#

Storing nuclear waste underground at Yucca Mountain for 100,000 years is a terrible idea. A better approach may be to buy some time—until new containment technologies mature.

When American Airlines Flight 11 flew at low altitude down the Hudson River valley on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, its target was the north tower of the World Trade Center. But its impact is still being felt at a cluster of buildings it passed about five minutes before it reached lower Manhattan, at a nuclear-reactor complex called Indian Point in Buchanan, NY. Adjacent to the site’s two operating reactors are two buildings packed with highly radioactive spent-fuel rods, in pools of water 12 meters deep and tinged Ty-D-Bol blue by boron added to tamp down nuclear chain reactions. The soothing hum of the pumps that circulate the building’s warm, moist air — and, critically, keep the water cool — lends an atmosphere of industrial tranquility.

Without that cooling water, the fuel cladding might overheat, melt, catch fire, and release radiation. Whether the impact of a Boeing 767 like Flight 11 could drain one of the pools and disable backup water pumps, starting such a fire, is far from clear. Nevertheless, the threat of terrorism in general and the flyover of Flight 11 in particular have reignited the debate about why all of this dangerous fuel is still here — indeed, why all spent fuel produced at Indian Point in three decades is still here — and not at Yucca Mountain, the federal government’s burial spot near Las Vegas, where it was supposed to be shipped beginning six years ago.

Late this past summer, a construction project began at Indian Point that will allow the fuel to be pulled out of the pools. But it’s not going to Yucca. The government says Yucca won’t be ready until 2010. Executives in the nuclear industry say a more likely date is between 2015 and never. So instead of traveling to Nevada, Indian Point’s fuel is traveling about 100 meters, to a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. On a late-summer day this year, a backhoe tore out maple and black-walnut trees to make way for a concrete pad. Beginning next year, the first of a planned 72 six-meter-tall concrete-and-steel casks will be placed there, a configuration that adds storage capacity and thus allows the twin power plants to keep operating. Though they provide a hedge against a worst-case fuel-pool meltdown, these casks are merely another temporary solution. The fact that they’re needed at all represents the colossal failure of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Yucca plans and technology.

Yet as engineering and policy failures go, this one has a silver lining. Conventional thinking holds that Yucca’s problems must be solved quickly so that nuclear waste can be squirreled away safely and permanently, deep within a remote mountain.

But here’s the twist: with nuclear waste, procrastination may actually pay.

The construction of cask fields presents a chance to rethink the conventional. The passage of several decades while the waste sits in casks could be immensely helpful. A century would give the United States time to observe progress on waste storage in other countries. In the meantime, natural radioactive decay would make the waste cooler and thus easier to deal with. What’s more, technological advances over the next century might yield better long-term storage methods. “If it goes on for another 50 years, it doesn’t matter. It could go on for 100 or 200 years, and it’s probably for the better,” says Allison Macfarlane, a geologist at MIT and coeditor of a forthcoming book on Yucca. “We’ve got plenty of time to play with it.”

The government must now accept that its Yucca plan is a failure and that casks are the de facto solution.

Indian Point’s cask pad will not be the first; about two dozen operating reactors have them already. Others are likely to soon join the list. And some casks — at Rowe, MA, Wiscasset, ME, Charlevoix, MI, and a site near Sacramento, CA — are nuclear orphans, having outlived their reactors.

Each cask pad is roughly the size of a football field, floodlit, watched by motion sensors and closed-circuit TV, and surrounded by razor wire and armed guards. Given the homeland-security concern posed by nuclear-waste facilities, and the need to guard them individually, do we really want 60 of them — serving all 125 commercial reactors that have ever operated — to rise around the nation, many near population centers? If casks are the solution for the next generation or two, they should be put in one place.

Yucca is already on tenuous ground; in July a federal appeals court said that to open the mountain burial site, the government would have to show that it could contain waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Extensive scientific analyses by the Energy Department show it cannot. The court’s decision throws the whole question back to the U.S. Congress, which must now decide whether to proceed with Yucca at all. This presents an opportunity to align policy with physics and abandon the Yucca-or-bust dogma that has dominated the debate for nearly 20 years. Casks, centrally located, could make the high-level-waste problem a lot easier to solve and increase national security much sooner, too.

The Tunnel Vision

The federal fixation on Yucca Mountain now spans two decades. Beginning in the early 1980s, the government agreed to take waste from any nuclear utility that paid a tariff of a tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated by its reactors. All the companies quickly signed up. But the selection of Yucca, 150 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas, was never driven by science. The site was chosen by that august group of geologists and physicists, the U.S. Congress. So far, the Energy Department has spent about $6 billion on development, including building an eight-kilometer, U-shaped tunnel through the mountain, in some places nearly 300 meters below the surface. It plans to spend at least $50 billion more to build dozens of side tunnels, package the waste in steel containers that look like the tanker portion of a gasoline truck, place the waste in the tunnels, and operate the site for 50 to 100 years before sealing it for eternity.

Problems have plagued Yucca since the beginning. In Senate debate, proponents stressed how dry it is. Yucca is, in fact, located in what is now a desert. But it turns out that the ground is moist. Even the 19 or so centimeters of rain the mountain gets each year is a major problem. Over time, moisture can corrode even the best alloys known to man. Corrosion would mean that rainwater percolating through the ground could carry radioactive materials with it and convey them to irrigation systems and drinking-water wells in the region, delivering substantial doses of radiation to unsuspecting people generations hence.

Heat is another problem. The shorter-lived radioactive isotopes in used fuel, principally cesium-137 and strontium-90, give a single fuel assembly, fresh out of the reactor, a heat output equal to that of about 20 handheld hair dryers. That’s why each power plant has an adjacent storage pool that circulates cooling water. Once the fuel was underground at Yucca, it would be hot enough to boil ground water into steam. Steam could corrode the containers or break up surrounding rock, raising uncertainty about secure burial. Spreading the waste out would dissipate the heat, but it would also greatly reduce Yucca’s storage capacity. Then there’s the problem of radioactive decay. High-energy particles can interact with surrounding materials, breaking them down or causing them to give off hydrogen, a gas that can explode or burn.

Early this year, researchers at Catholic University of America, hired by the state of Nevada, took samples of the kind of metal the Energy Department wants to use at Yucca and put them in some water mixed with the minerals present in the mountain. As a series of speakers lectured reporters on why Yucca was a bad idea, the researchers sautéed the metal over a burner. By the time the lectures were done, the samples had corroded, some of them all the way through. How faithfully the stunt reproduced the chemistry of Yucca Mountain is debatable. But clearly, Yucca is subject to serious doubts. “You have to think somewhere back in the premise structure of the whole thing, something was dreadfully wrong,” says Stewart Brand, a San Francisco-based consultant who once advised the Canadian government on what to do with its own waste.

Cooler Fuel

The argument against casks is that they are merely temporary, not meant to serve longer than perhaps 100 years, and that they are a kind of surrender, leaving this generation’s waste problem to a future generation to solve. Yet their impermanence is exactly what’s good about them. A century hence, spent reactor fuel will be cooler and more amenable to permanent disposal. In fact, within a few decades, the average fuel bundle’s heat output will be down to two or three hair dryers. After 150 years, only one-thirty-second of the cesium and strontium will remain. The remaining material can be buried closer together without boiling underground water. Reduced heat means reduced uncertainty.

Granted, spent fuel will be far from safe after such a relatively short period. Even after 100 years, it will still be so radioactive that a few minutes of direct exposure will be lethal. “It’s many, many, many thousands of years before it’s a no nevermind,” says Geoffrey Schwartz, the cask manager for Indian Point, which is owned by Entergy Nuclear. “But the spent fuel does become more benign as time goes by.”

The fuel could be more valuable, too. For decades, industry and government officials have recognized that “spent” reactor fuel contains a large amount of unused uranium, as well as another very good reactor fuel, plutonium, which is produced as a by-product of running the reactor. Both can be readily extracted, although right now the price of new uranium is so low, and the cost of extraction so high, that reprocessing spent fuel is not practical. And the political climate does not favor a technology that makes potential bomb fuel — plutonium — an item of international commerce. But things might be different in 100 years. For starters, the same fuel could be reprocessed much more easily, since the potentially valuable components will be in a matrix of material that is not so intensely radioactive.

And in 100 years, advances in reprocessing technology might make the economics compelling. The existing American technology dates from the Cold War and involves elaborate chemical steps that create vast quantities of liquid waste. But an alternative exists: electrometallurgical reprocessing. Though research into the technique has lagged of late because of the economic climate, the concept might be taken more seriously in the future. Electrodes could sort out the garbage (the atoms formed when uranium is split) from the usable uranium (the uranium-235 still available for fission and the uranium-238 that can be turned into plutonium in a reactor), in something like the way jewelers use electrometallurgy to apply silver plate. Resulting waste volumes would be far smaller.

Perhaps most importantly, in 100 years, energy supply and demand might be very different. Reprocessed nuclear fuel might well become a critical part of the energy supply, if the world has run out of cheap oil and we decide that burning coal is too damaging to our atmosphere. If that happens, we might have 1,000 nuclear reactors. On the other hand, we might have no reactors, depending on the progress of alternate energy sources like solar and wind. At this point, it’s hard to tell, but we are not required to make the decision now; we can put the spent fuel in casks for 50 years and then decide if it is wheat or chaff.

There is a final, more practical reason that we might choose to take the plutonium out of spent fuel for reactor use: it makes the remainder easier to store. For the most part, what’s left will not be radioactive for nearly as long, and the sheer volume of material will be lower. Mark Deinert, a physicist at Cornell University, says reprocessing, like recycling, removes about half of the material from the waste, dramatically decreasing storage costs and effectively doubling the capacity of a facility like Yucca.

Betting on Better Storage

While nuclear waste would be easier to handle in 50 or 100 years, it would still require isolation for several hundred thousand years. But there is every reason to expect that storage technology will improve in the next century. When we decide to permanently dispose of the waste, either after reprocessing or without reprocessing, we may be smarter at metallurgy, geology, and geochemistry than we are now.

Today, the basic technology at Yucca is a stainless-steel material called alloy 22, covered with an umbrella of titanium — a “drip shield” against water percolating down through the tunnel roof. That could look as primitive in 100 years as the Wright brothers’ 1903 Flyer looks to us in 2004. Or it might simply be obsolete. Space-launch technology could become as reliable as jet airplanes are today, giving us a nearly foolproof way to throw waste into solar orbit. The mysteries of geochemistry might be as transparent as the human genetic code is becoming, which would mean we could say with confidence what kind of package would keep the waste encased for the next few hundred thousand years.

Or there might be easier ways to process the waste. For example, particle accelerators, routinely used to make medical isotopes, could provide a means to make the waste more benign. The principle has already been demonstrated experimentally: firing subatomic particles at high-level radioactive waste can change long-lived radioactive materials to short-lived ones. Richard A. Meserve, a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now the chairman of a National Academy of Sciences panel on nuclear waste, says this technology, known as transmutation, might become more practical in 100 years. The technology of accelerators has advanced in the last few years, he says, and it is a good bet that it will continue to do so.

Some alternative storage technologies may need only a few more years of research and development.

One is ceramic packaging. Ceramics have good resistance to radiation and heat, and they don’t rust. At the moment, nobody casts ceramics big enough to hold fuel assemblies, which are typically about four meters long. But there is no theoretical limit to the sizes of ceramics; there has simply been no economic incentive to make giant ones. Nor will there be, until the only likely customer for them, the Energy Department, decides that the metal it is shopping for now isn’t up to the job.

Another alternative calls for mixing waste with ceramics or minerals to form a rocklike material comprising about 20 percent waste. The waste would be chemically bound up in stable materials that are not prone to react with water. With a few decades’ grace time, engineers could build samples and test them in harsh environments. But even though the idea has been around for more than 10 years, no one has put serious research money into it, since its only possible American customer, the Energy Department, has been committed to Yucca.

That situation shows no sign of change. The Energy Department, following Congress’s orders, has so far declined to consider alternatives. Man-Sung Yim, a nuclear researcher at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, argues that some of these technologies are already mature but have been shoved aside in the Energy Department’s rush, possibly futile, to open Yucca. “My reading at this point is, people working at the Yucca Mountain project office do not really want to change the design. The more change you bring in, the more delayed the processes,” Yim says. “It’s a pity, because we could make it better.”

Central Casking

But the pursuit of the perfect solution (assuming deep geologic disposal even could be perfected) has ignored a realistic solution. And when the perfect fails, as now seems likely, we will be left with something no rational person would have chosen: waste sites scattered from coast to coast, in places where reactors used to be, each with its own security force, maintenance crew, and exclusion zone. “We’re here to run a business as efficiently as possible,” says John Sanchez, the project manager who oversaw the planning for the pad at Indian Point when he worked at Consolidated Edison, the site’s former owner. “In a perfect world, you would not have 60 of anything, if you could have one.” But after 20 years of pursuing geologic disposal, and 15 years of chasing Yucca and avoiding any mention of a plan B, just such an ad hoc, and suboptimal, solution is emerging.

And it’s emerging without the support of the Energy Department. Testifying before the Senate Energy Committee over the summer, Kyle McSlarrow, the Energy Department’s deputy secretary, said that “continued progress toward establishing a high-level waste repository at the Yucca Mountain site is absolutely essential.” He told another committee on the same day that with progress toward Yucca’s opening, “industry saw clearly that the nuclear-power option was truly back on the table.” (The department would not make McSlarrow or other officials available for comment for this article.)

Cask storage is not pretty, but what’s wrong with the idea of an industrial repository, a few hectares set aside for the next century or so, a single, guarded location in a little-populated area, a location that in ten years or so will be remarkable only because it’s a place where the snow doesn’t stick? Macfarlane of MIT says making such site secure and terrorist-proof would cost $6.5 billion, at most. “Isn’t that worth it? How much have we spent on Iraq? Look what we got for that money. And there’s more at risk here,” she says.

Finding a central site poses obvious challenges; nobody wants any type of radioactive waste site in his or her backyard. But after extended negotiations, a group of utility engineers, including Sanchez, cut a deal with the Skull Valley band of the Goshute Indian tribe for a long lease on part of its reservation 80 kilometers west of Salt Lake City. The area already hosts an air-force bombing range, a nerve gas depot and incinerator, and a dump for low-level radioactive waste; the Goshutes figure they can use the rent to buy themselves land in a nicer neighborhood.

Some experts think the federal government could take over the Goshute project and push it to completion, but there is a snag — an ironic one, given the fears of a September 11-style attack on a nuclear site. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that an F-16’s crashing into the casks on its way to or from the test site is a “credible accident.” But while such a crash would doubtless be disastrous, casks do provide some safety advantages over today’s fuel pools. The fuel in casks is much more spread out and does not require a flow of cooling water to prevent spontaneous, spreading fire. Thus the worst-case effects are more limited. In any case, one remote central site would be easier to protect with air defenses than numerous scattered sites.

Those scattered sites are already creating local problems. The casks from the former reactor in Wiscasset, ME, are blocking the redevelopment of the peninsula where they’re stored, a valuable industrial site. A cask site near the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant in Welch, MN, is adjacent to a tribal day-care center and casino, which is nobody’s idea of a long-term solution. Inevitably, in the wake of September 11, the Indian Point casks will be a locus of fear. These outcomes will seem even sillier in 30 years, when many of the reactors that made the waste are gone.

Sanchez recalls carrying a picnic lunch to the stand of maples and black-walnut trees now being replaced with a concrete pad for storing nuclear waste. As the years roll by, fewer and fewer people will know those trees existed. Several decades from now, as today’s aging nuclear power plants are decommissioned, people may not remember that the reactors themselves existed. If we don’t take action soon, however, casks of waste will stand alone on that bluff above the Hudson River — and in dozens of other places across the country.

bttt


43 posted on 04/22/2007 12:28:34 PM PDT by Matchett-PI (To have no voice in the Party that always sides with America's enemies is a badge of honor.)
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To: grundle

May 2005

Environmental Heresies
The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog believes the environmental movement will soon reverse its position on four core issues.
By Stewart Brand http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/14406/page1/

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from “Only you can prevent forest fires!” to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century.

The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces — romanticism and science — that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That’s fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed socie­ties see themselves as environmentalists. But it also means that scientific perceptions are always a minority view, easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized if they don’t fit the consensus story line. ...”

Page three: http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/14406/page3/

“....So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration” (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

Nuclear certainly has problems — accidents, waste storage, high construction costs, and the possible use of its fuel in weapons. It also has advantages besides the overwhelming one of being atmospherically clean. The industry is mature, with a half-century of experience and ever improved engineering behind it. Problematic early reactors like the ones at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl can be supplanted by new, smaller-scale, meltdown-proof reactors like the ones that use the pebble-bed design. Nuclear power plants are very high yield, with low-cost fuel. Finally, they offer the best avenue to a “hydrogen economy,” combining high energy and high heat in one place for optimal hydrogen generation.

The storage of radioactive waste is a surmountable problem:

(see “A New Vision for Nuclear Waste,” December 2004 http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/13992/# ).

Many reactors now have fields of dry-storage casks nearby. Those casks are transportable. It would be prudent to move them into well-guarded centralized locations. Many nations address the waste storage problem by reprocessing their spent fuel, but that has the side effect of producing material that can be used in weapons. One solution would be a global supplier of reactor fuel, which takes back spent fuel from customers around the world for reprocessing. That’s the kind of idea that can go from “Impractical!” to “Necessary!” in a season, depending on world events.

The environmental movement has a quasi-religious aversion to nuclear energy. The few prominent environmentalists who have spoken out in its favor — Gaia theorist James Lovelock, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore, Friend of the Earth Hugh Montefiore — have been privately anathematized by other environmentalists. Public excoriation, however, would invite public debate, which so far has not been welcome.

Nuclear could go either way. It would take only one more Chernobyl-type event in Russia’s older reactors (all too possible, given the poor state of oversight there) to make the nuclear taboo permanent, to the great detriment of the world’s atmospheric health. Everything depends on getting new and better nuclear technology designed and built.

Years ago, environmentalists hated cars and wanted to ban them.

Then physicist Amory Lovins came along, saw that the automobile was the perfect leverage point for large-scale energy conservation, and set about designing and promoting drastically more efficient cars. Gas-electric hybrid vehicles are now on the road, performing public good. The United States, Lovins says, can be the Saudi Arabia of nega-watts: Americans are so wasteful of energy that their conservation efforts can have an enormous effect. Single-handedly, Lovins converted the environmental movement from loathing of the auto industry to fruitful engagement with it.

Someone could do the same with nuclear power plants. Lovins refuses to. The field is open, and the need is great.

Within the environmental movement, scientists are the radical minority leading the way. They are already transforming the perspective on urbanization and population growth.

But their radicalism and leadership will have to increase if humanity is to harness green biotech and step up to its responsibilities for the global climate. The romantics are right, after all: we are indi­visible from the earth’s natural systems.

bttt


44 posted on 04/22/2007 12:29:50 PM PDT by Matchett-PI (To have no voice in the Party that always sides with America's enemies is a badge of honor.)
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To: All

Caveat to my two posts: I agree with what is said about the fact that we will build more nuclear power plants, but I disagree with the alarmist author’s “conclusions” regarding “global warming” / “climate change”.


45 posted on 04/22/2007 12:40:23 PM PDT by Matchett-PI (To have no voice in the Party that always sides with America's enemies is a badge of honor.)
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To: Parley Baer
So is the left going to admit they have been wrong about nuclear power?

Nothing is ever okay to liberals unless it passes muster with the French. Clearly, if the French do it it must be wonderful. Admit they've been wrong? Never!

46 posted on 04/22/2007 1:14:29 PM PDT by Bernard Marx
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To: Domandred
If that means turning the ... entire State of Utah into a gasification of shale plant I’m all for it.

Nope, sorry. Can't have my piece of Utah because we're working on nuclear power. Anything south of I-80 is okay though.

47 posted on 04/22/2007 1:14:53 PM PDT by Max in Utah (WWBFD? "What Would Ben Franklin Do?")
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To: ASOC
Reprocessing fuel? Unlikely. Why? Two words - Kerr-McGee (+ related mine, mill and tailing/waste)

Actually, it's more of a prosaic matter of economics. Reprocessing is expensive with current technology. The countries that do it, France and Japan, have no uranium of their own and no safe place to store nuclear waste. Since the US has both, we can afford to stash our waste, mine fresh uranium, and wait until reprocessing, like all technology, gets cheaper. Yucca Mountain will then become a fuel mine.

48 posted on 04/22/2007 1:30:49 PM PDT by BlazingArizona
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To: Paleo Conservative; null and void; calex59; BlazingArizona
What you are getting at has a name in engineering. It is called Life-Cycle Emissions. You take into account the energy use at each point in a system, accounting for extraction of raw materials, fabrication of components, site clearing and preparation, construction of facilities, operations and maintenance, and waste disposal. People have done this analysis for various energy sources. Here is a result which might be surprising:

Source: "Life-Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Systems and Applications for Climate Change Policy Analysis," Paul J. Meier, University of Wisconsin-Madison, August, 2002.

You can see they have shown the amount of greenhouse gas-equivalent released to the biosphere normalized to unit energy output for the various sources.

As you can see, the "footprint" for nuclear is about the same as for so-called "clean" or "green" or "renewable" energy sources. Nuclear is actually "greener", by this measure, than that darling of the environmental movement, solar PV, and also biomass, so I guess Sheryl Crow will have to park that biodiesel bus in favor of a nuclear-electric one (wouldn't that be sweet revenge?). And this isn't even getting into the meatier issues such as reliability, capacity factor, availability, etc. On those counts, nuclear clobbers all the others.

49 posted on 04/22/2007 4:48:04 PM PDT by chimera
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To: ga medic

Commercial nuclear fuel would be a poor source of plutonium. The production reactors we used to run in this country for the weapons program (we don’t anymore) used high density, highly enriched fuel that attained very high burnup. Those were optimized for plutonium production, Commercial power plant fuel isn’t. You can get plutonium from it, but it is a lot more work. Plus you’d have to set up a plutonium processing plant. Not an easy thing to do. An experienced national program can do it. An inexperienced national program can do it after a time (like India did back in the 1960s). It’s unlikely that groups below the national level can do it (on their own).


50 posted on 04/22/2007 4:57:48 PM PDT by chimera
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To: grundle

The enviroweenies like laurie David and Cheryl Crow are against the most obvious way to reduce human production of greenhouse gases. It’s not really about global warming, its about anti-capitalism and anti-industrialism.


51 posted on 04/23/2007 6:41:58 AM PDT by finnman69 (cum puella incedit minore medio corpore sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos)
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To: Paleo Conservative
Try building a nuclear plant without emitting carbon. Manufacturing steel requires lots of coal. Cement also requires lots of heat, most of it is supplied by natural gas.

No more or less than a coal fired electrical plant, or a natural gas plant.

52 posted on 04/23/2007 6:46:59 AM PDT by finnman69 (cum puella incedit minore medio corpore sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos)
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To: Judges Gone Wild

Breeder reactors are potentially wonderful efficient users of uranium. The only trick is the byproduct can easily be processed into weapons grade plutonium. Plants that use MOX fuel however can use up weapons grade plutonium as a fuel source and you dont need a Yucca Flats type repository.

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


53 posted on 04/23/2007 6:53:49 AM PDT by finnman69 (cum puella incedit minore medio corpore sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos)
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To: Mike3689
"Hot’ fusion is a much more realistic and scientifically founded idea(that fiery ball in the sky tells us we can do it), and guess which country is planning on having the first self-contained fusion power plant?

I heard that same line 30 years ago and we are no closer to commercial fussion now than we were then. There is absolutly nothing "realistic" about it. Fussion power generation is still only theory after the billions in research dollars that have been spent around the world over the decades.

54 posted on 04/23/2007 7:06:40 AM PDT by Ditto (Global Warming: The 21st Century's Snake Oil)
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To: Saltmeat
I saw Illinois Power’s version. Because they couldn't’t get an television audience, they made their response available to other electric utilities and anyone else that wanted it. I retired from one to those electric utilities.

So did I. I'll never forget watching avuncular old Harry Reasner(sp?) lying through his teeth, and doing so with great sincerity. I didn't have a lot of faith in the news media before seeing that, but thought it was more incompetence on the part of the media than anything else. But since then, I take absolutely nothing at face value and I understand that truth, facts or honesty mean nothing to them.

More than just people in the utility industry so that too. I have seen it cited in Public Relations seminars with one of the leading PR experts in the country flatly saying he would advise any of his clients to never, under any circumstances, to talk with 60 Minutes or any of the TV "News Magazines."

They have their story written long before they ever talk to the people they interview and they don't allow contradictory facts to get in the way of their story line. They are not "investigating" anything. They simply have a pre-determined script and will edit their footage to fit the script.

55 posted on 04/23/2007 7:29:49 AM PDT by Ditto (Global Warming: The 21st Century's Snake Oil)
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To: finnman69
No more or less than a coal fired electrical plant, or a natural gas plant.

A nuclear plant has more concrete, because it is used to shield the environment from radiation and contain any accident. The containment buildings are actually designed to withstand a direct hit by a passenger jet.

56 posted on 04/23/2007 7:41:01 AM PDT by Paleo Conservative
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To: Paleo Conservative

I bet a gas fired or coal plant has more piping and steel, no to mention the steel at the refineries required for a natural gas plant and pipelines (which require concrete footings).


57 posted on 04/23/2007 9:00:44 AM PDT by finnman69 (cum puella incedit minore medio corpore sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos)
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To: chimera
I've also read that Plutonium would be extremely impractical for non-state actor like a terrorist group for the simple reason that it's so incredibly toxic.

Enough weapons grade Uranium to make a bomb can be easily carried in a backpack, or handled with bare hands, without any adverse short-run health effects. It might increase the risk of cancer, but exposure will in no way impede a person from doing something with it now. Plutonium, on the other hand, is so toxic that it can't be easily smuggled or handled without very expensive, specialized and rare equipment. A terrorist attempting to do either would get very sick and possibly die before he would either get to his destination or make a bomb.

Hence it is very unlikley terrorists could steal plutonium and smuggle it to their camps, much less use it to make a bomb.

Weapons grade Uranium, on the other hand, once obtained, would be very easy use to make a primitive bomb.

Rougue states like North Korea & Pakistan are another matter, but they seem to be having little difficulty getting their hands on weapons grade uranium, so I hardly see how an increase in the availability of Plutonium matters.

58 posted on 04/23/2007 8:23:18 PM PDT by curiosity
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To: curiosity
Plutonium is toxic is some chemical forms, but in metallic form it's primary hazard is inhalation of fine particles. It is an alpha emitter of relatively short half-life and so can have reasonably high specific activity.

The popular media likes to portray plutonium as "the most toxic substance known to man", but this is incorrect from a technical viewpoint. There has not been a single human fatality attributed to plutonium toxicity in and of itself. Certainly there have been criticality accidents involving plutonium, but there the toxic effects were a result of irradiation, not plutonium poisoning. Even the recent case of the former Russian spy poisoned by radiation involved polonium, not plutonium. The radiobiological hazard associated with natural radium is about 200 times more severe than that of plutonium.

Biotoxins such as botulin have a higher hazard index than plutonium. Lethality in humans for botulin toxin is in the range of 300 picograms per kg of body weight, a lower threshold than that for plutonium. Naturally-occurring radionuclides such as 40K and 14C pose a high risk when involved in casual contact, since those are beta and gamma emitters, and plutonium is primarily and alpha emitter.

Oral ingestion of plutonium is less harmful from a chemical toxicity viewpoint than ingestion of equal amounts of common substances such as caffeine, pseudoephedrine, and acetaminophen. Plutonium is more toxic on a per-weight basis than pure ethanol, but less hazardous than nicotine. Chemical toxicity of plutonium is about the same as for lead.

It is a difficult material to work with aside from radiological and chemical toxicity concerns. It exhibits a variety of allotropes under ambient conditions, making machining and casting difficult. Finely divided metallic plutonium may react with oxygen and water, which can lead to accumulation of plutonium hydride, which is pyrophoric. This is why machining of plutonium must be done in an inert atmosphere.

As a weapons material, plutonium is a challenge because it is prone to predetonation. It does emit more neutrons per fission, which reduces mass requirements somewhat. Still, the predetonation problem requires a fair amount of sophistication of the implosion mechanism.

59 posted on 04/24/2007 4:35:29 AM PDT by chimera
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