Clean Energy - Renewable vs Nuclear....

[rockchick]

Don't think there is any one energy source that is going to be the answer here. I can't imagine the world population going on a voluntary fossil fuel cold turkey. If the population is forced to do without I have no doubt it will manage. But if there is an easy or relatively easy alternative like nuclear to replace the power supply then I suspect ultimately that's where we will go. Hopefully it will remain unpopular for long enough that we can invest the money needed in renewable energy sources to make them more efficient and financially viable, but I wouldn't bank on it!

[Tucson Bass Player]

Unfortunately we need it all or people are going to start starving. I fear the lower crude prices are threatening the alternative energy movement.

[Rod in Japan]

The factors that are driving crude prices down are also driving wages down, and so people are still going to be looking for cheaper ways to get about and keep warm. A lot of people will also have more time on their hands to address this problem.

Probably.

[invisiblepiper]

Unfortunately we need it all or people are going to start starving.

Em - a big lot of people are already starving - have been for some time - many as the direct /indirect result of our(developed nations) greed.

[Enrique]

Im glad to see i've generated some discussion. Any approach needs to encompass a raft of technologies and whilst I'm certainly not a fan of nuclear that definitely seems to be the way we're going. Particularly since EDF have just bought up swathes of nuclear sites and have the expertise to get stations built. The price and availability of Uranium must be of concern to them though? Im sure radiation/accidents/waste and decommissioning are too, but not enough to prevent stations being built.

[swiftnick]

First post.

Interesting and sensible considerations of the pro's and con's.

I'm moderately pro having come from a position of being moderately anti nuclear.

My biggest concern for the next 10-20 years is the potential for semi / full state failure and all the nastiness that will come with that. A precurser of state failure is likely to be the failure of the state / economy to provide a reliable energy supply. Nuclear isn't the silver bullet IMO should be part of a coherent and integrated energy policy.


There isn't a shred of reliable evidence (epidemiological) showing any causal links between nuclear power in the western world and leukaemia and other forms of cancer. Indeed even the much vaunted Germany Study showing a statistical increase in luekaemia fails to demonstrate a link.

Chernobyl aside, all the other nuclear incidents appear to have not caused any significant harm.

1st and 2nd generation plant was built in haste primarily to generate weapons grade plutonium. In contrast 3rd and 4th generation models built for power generation and more significantly have built in safety features off the back of whats been learnt in the last 50 years. Decommisioning costs for 3rd and 4th generation will be a fraction of the cost of cleaning up 1st and 2nd generation. Costs could be further reduced by adopting techniques such as entombment - and I don't mean Chernobyl style.

Fully agree that first approach should be energy conservation. Sensible renewable policy a good thing aswell. However even if we cut energy consumption in half in the UK the cost of renewables in the short to medium term prohibitive. At the end of the day we are a small island with 60 million people.

The only alternative to nuclear will be coal and gas. Gas is becoming increasingly expensive. Coal is filthy and burning it releases huge quantities of uranium and thorium plus a host of other nasties. Its estimate 60,000 people die annually in Germany due to respiratory problems caused by coal burn related air pollution.

Forget carbon capture - the new economic reality will not permit us to use 30-40% of the energy pumping the CO2 into old oil and gas fields.

Uranium supply can be expanded considerably. New capacity is coming online in 2013 - noteably Roxby Downs in Australia. Reprocessing and fast breeder reactors will further extend supplies. Thorium could be used. In addition the Japanese are developing an effective method to extract uranium from seawater - it will be more expensive but ultimately create a virtually limitless supply.

[The Riff-Raff Element]

Forget carbon capture - the new economic reality will not permit us to use 30-40% of the energy pumping the CO2 into old oil and gas fields.

Welcome!

You are right about this: the only really effective carbon capture technology that is also energy efficient is a lo-tech system called planting trees

The "dash for coal" does bother me: very few people seem to appreciate the vast quantities of heavy metals that are liberated when burning coal, some benign, others most certainly not. Certainly clean-coal technologies help, but they are not a panacea.

Hopefully one outcome from the current economic strife will be a less profligate use of energy. We can but hope.

[gdb]

With respect this is like asking whether or not the deckchairs should be folded or left open on the deck of the Titanic.

Nothing we have - nor anything we can produce - will suffice until local and global expectations of energy consumption are dramatically reduced. (In this respect - as one of the most obvious ways of achieving a reduction in consumption is significantly higher prices - nuclear has a definite disadvantage as it is too cheap. So the further development of nuclear energy will only continue to encourage the idea that humanity can use energy at will. In this respect renewables are definitely preferable).

Sadly as such reduction in consumption is highly unlikely to happen - at least before a gloabl climatic catastrophe - the only real solution to the problem is a huge reduction in global human popuation. How we produce energy afterwards will not be a problem.

[Green Aura]

I don't know anything about nuclear energy production in Sweden, GDB, but it is most certainly not cheap over here. In fact it has never been self-supporting but has always received huge government subsidies to operate. And that's only financial cost.

[gdb]

Absolutely. And that's part of the problem. Nuclear is so heavily subsidized that the costs the consumer pays for electric is artificially low. So people have little incentive to economize on it's use. Even the recent price rises in the UK - for stuff like gas and so on - still leave energy at prices below real cost.

On the other hand, if renewables were subsidized as much as Nuclear they would be a lot cheaper than forecast. But still, by all accounts, more expensive than Nuclear.

Of course money is only one type of 'cost' we all have to pay for using oil or coal or Nuclear....

[Annpan]

Had a bit of a 'discussion' with BIL about this last week (he is typical anti-alternative - if that makes sense)

So his argument is that nuclear is the best, it is just badly managed..... and there is no problem with GM foods, it is just bad management EXACTLY - and I don't see the multi-nationals saying, 'we really should manage this better and make less money'

[MuddyWitch]

One of the most frightening things I ever heard:

If the romans had built nuclear power stations instread of Hadrian's Wall, we would still be storing radio active waste.

Put it in persective for me.

MW

[john37]

If the Romans had built nuclear power stations instead of Hadrian's Wall the waste would cost a lot less to store than Hadrian's Wall does to maintain. And on that topic I never cease to be amazed by how often Radio 4 seem to confuse this with the border between Scotland and England.

People don't really understand the relationship between radioactivity and half lives. The fiercey radioactive istotopes have very short half lives, so don't need massively long storage. The long lasting ones like Uranium and Plutonium are pretty feeble as far as radioactivity goes, so they don't need a massive amount of protection to reduce dosage. The low level waste (the high volume stuff) is mostly not radioactive, but classified as such because it's cheaer than testing individual items. Quite a significant amount of it is disposable clothing worn by reactor workers. There's probaly not much more than a couple of semi detached houses worth (volume) of the high level waste - from forty odd years of operating reactors.

Shall I inject some interesting facts into this forum.

There used to be enough nuclear fuel sitting on the car parks of sellafield to power the whole of the UK electricity network for 500 years.. (not sure where it is now - that was about 20 years ago).

Plutonium occurs naturally.

There have been natural fission reactors.

Burning coal was estimated to kill 2000 people a year in the UK by the long defunct CEGB. I note the much higher German estimates.

The nuclear industry in Britain has been badly managed, but has also suffered from the being the early adopters of the technology. So we've got a plethora of different designs which mitigates against commercial success. Countries who adopted the technology later (France) were able to avoid the mistakes of the early adopters. It's also had a pretty good safety record (with the exception of Sellafield). Accidents at three mile island were commercial disasters with almost no release of radioactivity. Windscale was mitigated by quick administration of iodine to local inhabitants which stopped the uptake of released caesium by the thyroid glands of those exposed, and the

Chernobyl was a terrible accident but it was the result of a reactor design which had postitive reactivity coefficients which meant that when things went wrong - the power output tened to increase as opposed to western designs which have negative reactivity coefficients for various things like loss of coolant or coolant boiling. The operators lifted the control rods to a level which ensured that upon the coolant boiling the reactor became prompt critical on fast neutrons which meant an explosive increase in power occurred. These danger factors were well understood by western reactor designers and are all designed out of western reactors.

As for the terrorist threat - it's difficult to see terrorists aquiring the technology to breach reactor containment, and even if they did I suspect that they would be clever enough to realise that if they did the consequences would be massive retaliation and an almost complete disengagement of the west from the non-oil producing moslem world.
9/11 style attacks wouldn't work - reactor containment vessels are too strong - and any other attempts at theft of radio active materials would be defeated by the radioactivity of the materials - it would fry them before they could move it.

[Annpan]

Hi John, Welcome to the site.

I really don't want to go through your whole post and pick your arguments apart but can I just focus on your last paragraph

As for the terrorist threat - it's difficult to see terrorists aquiring the technology to breach reactor containment, and even if they did I suspect that they would be clever enough to realise that if they did the consequences would be massive retaliation and an almost complete disengagement of the west from the non-oil producing moslem world.
9/11 style attacks wouldn't work - reactor containment vessels are too strong - and any other attempts at theft of radio active materials would be defeated by the radioactivity of the materials - it would fry them before they could move it.

Terrorists tend not to be very clever - eg1. loading the back of your Dad's car with calor gas canisters and crashing it into the front of an airport... then setting your clothes on fire. eg2 Trying to carry a bag of explosives into a national assembly building and trying to pass it off as 'performance art'
The ones who are organised enough to blow up a nuclear reactor are not going to give a flying f%^$ about the west cutting off the Muslim world (assuming a Muslim extremest attack - and since in Britain we have lost more to Catholic extremists in recent years there is no reason to believe it would be muslim extremists)
All buildings in New York were required to be able to withstand a plane hitting them (since 1945 when an aircraft crashed into the empire state building) Right up until the moment the trade center towers collapsed the architects who and structural engineers who built them believed they were safe, and could not collapse - so proclaiming that nuclear power stations are safe from such attacks is not going to fool me I am afraid.
And theft of radio active material would be perfectly possible if they had the right money, resources and insiders (both of the latter can be bought by the former)

Now.... try blowing up a windfarm.... well they would probably just blow up one wind mill.... it would fall over, with out hitting any houses, any other windmills, and certainly wouldn't cause they death of everyone within a 40mile radius. Stealing a windmill.... well if they were organised to do it, and sneak it away on the back of 5 x 40ft flatbed trucks at least they would be providing themselves with green energy

It would appear that Nuclear energy is one thing that will always be contested - I for one am glad that we will have no more built in Scotland, now we just need to get rid of the entire nuclear deterrent and submarine fleet from Faslane.

[jim]

Dear John37,

We could argue round in circles about safety just digging entrenched positions ever deeper. My own opinion is that nukes are unsafe and bad news for the environment in general. So, let us consider auditing them from the viewpoint of environmental impact.

Let us not take into consideration whether or not they produce huge or small amounts of nuclear contaminants or we once more run into the danger of retreating to entrenched positions without adding anything constructive to the debate. However, let us look into the construction of a nuclear power station.

Let us first consider the amount of energy that goes into the quarrying, processing and transport of the materials to make the massive amounts of concrete required. Now consider the environmental impact this has.

Now consider in the same light the mining, smelting and transport of the steel to reinforce the concrete.

Next, the lead and graphite required to meet safety standards for the containment vessels and consequent environmental impact.

Go on to the huge amounts of uranium ore that requires mining and refining to extract the small amounts of highly toxic metal contained within.

Reflect that enrichment plants now have to be built to get the uranium into a state fit to use in the fission process with consequent demands on energy, transport, contaminents and subsequent environmental impact.

Now add this to the demands upon energy, resources and environment that SAFE storage of both high and low level waste will require.

All in all it can be demonstrated that a nuclear reactor is an energy SINK rather than an energy producer. More environmental damage is dome by its construction than is saved by its operation.

These aspects of the problems nuclear power poses is rarely contemplated by the governments or not publicized by them. Why then do so many macho governments try to make us believe they are our energy salvation? Would it be cynical of me to suggest weapons grade plutonium? Those that are in possession of this technology always do a headless chicken act when another government seems close to achieving the same ..... makes you think?

Annpan is quite right about terrorists, if it dictated by HISTORY or the WILL OF GOD then I'm afraid rationality goes flying out the window! And the number of corrupt officials who have sold off bits from the rusting nuclear fleet round Murmansk is terrifying ....

Love and Peace
Jim