It’s essential for us to look long-term and not waste our efforts on campaigns that will not promote new build. I put this proposition to you:
Nuclear power is better than chemical power.
This does not mean “follow me” but it is rather a respectful suggestion that we should consider long-term new build when we decide to do something. We should be promoting new build and keeping current reactors online, not our cleanup businesses, or our new reactor businesses, etc. I would even go so far as to say that someone who trashes light-water reactors (or anything else) to promote their personal favorite design is not pro-nuclear. They are simply an industrial opportunist, and it is important to recognize the distinction. Coal kills 30,000 people every year in the US, for a total over a million since the last successful reactor order. Remember those people.
Nuclear power, even imperfect nuclear power, even bad nuclear power, is better than the best chemical power. It’s a choice: one or the other; even windmills require gas turbines to back them up. Pro-nuclear activists recognize this and apply it to their public actions.
In short, anything preventing new build needs to go. Bad NRC regulations need to be fixed. The rate structure needs reform. Reactor bans, though, are the clearest legal block to construction. They need to be repealed as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to pursue this–yet. We don’t need to start small as much as start obvious. Let’s lay the groundwork. If the political climate doesn’t change drastically, that will probably mean getting exceptions written into state reactor ban clauses to allow waste-eating reactors (See Support DUPIC). Once we have a voice, we can push to repeal reactor bans. It will take a while–the anti-nuclear movement began in the early 1960s and didn’t get reactor bans on the ballot until the late 1970s. Think long-term, act short-term: the ultimate goal is new build.
Individually, let’s do what we need to do in our corners of the world. People are open to DUPIC, and I believe we should start there. But never forget:
Nuclear power is better than chemical power. Our goal is new build.
Filed under Activism, Alternatives, New Build, Politics and Regulation
Posted on August 31, 2006 by Stewart Peterson |
Nuclear power, even imperfect nuclear power, even bad nuclear power, is better than the best chemical power.
Stewart, you’re so wrong in so many ways it hurts to think about. Bad nuclear power is REALLY bad. It’s so much worse than chemical power. Bad nuclear power can destroy cities and render huge areas of the Earth uninhabitable. Stop spouting insanity.
You’re incredibly zealous, but woefully uneducated. Go study nuclear engineering for a few years and learn to moderate your pronouncements. They do not further your cause and only make you look crazy.
Your pronouncement that anyone who doesn’t like every kind of nuclear reactor and every form of nuclear technology is anti-nuclear smacks of Donald Rumsfeld.
Kirk:
The worst nuclear power plant design in the world is the RBMK, if you count it as a nuclear power plant and not the bomb factory that it really was. One of them had a steam explosion during a harebrained stunt and killed (perhaps) as many as 4,000 people. It didn’t destroy any cities and turned an evacuated area into a nature preserve. Bad? Yes. The end of the world? Nowhere close.
Recall how many people are killed by coal every year. If we replace coal with nuclear power, all we have to do is avoid seven Chernobyls per year and we come out ahead from a public health standpoint.
Fortunately, we don’t have to do that, because the only use of an RBMK is to produce weapons-grade plutonium–as I hope you know, the source of its design compromises. A true civilian nuclear power plant is either passively safe (I await you figuring out how to trash the ESBWR) or kludged to the point that even a bad design would outweigh the risk(s) of inaction. And by pure, dumb luck, the Navy chose a safe design in the 1950s and it has been with us ever since. Those origins–accidental safety–don’t detract from the safety of the light-water reactor.
The basic problem is that you, like anti-nuclear activists, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking of every possible scenario and practically no time thinking about the mechanisms and/or effects that stop those scenarios from actually happening, nor the risk(s) of inaction. Please elaborate on the mechanisms for your scenario.
Pointing out that you have gone to school does not give you an excuse to say things that aren’t accurate. If you indeed know of something that would “destroy cities and render huge areas of the Earth uninhabitable,” please tell me, and we’ll discuss ideas instead of people.
It’s not a matter of whether you like something or not. I don’t have an emotional attachment to a reactor design; I hope you don’t. I’d also prefer it if you didn’t call me names.
Oh, and if you oppose nuclear power, you’re anti-nuclear–regardless of whether you’re using that opposition to sell something, and even if that something is a replacement reactor.
Kirk:
I have to agree with Stewart almost completely. His phrasing is a little extreme, since it would obviously be POSSIBLE to design an extremely dangerous reactor, but such a design would never be built. Of the designs available today, I have no safety concerns with any of them.
The only comment that I have to take issue with is “And by pure, dumb luck, the Navy chose a safe design in the 1950s and it has been with us ever since.”
The choice of a pressurized light water reactor with a steam plant secondary was not “dumb” luck; it was the result of intensive study by a number of very smart and experienced power plant engineers.
I have no nuclear engineering degree, but I have operated a few plants and experienced more than a few different operating conditions. I would much rather live next to even primitive nuclear plants than near a fossil powered electrical power generator.
Rod
Stewart, being called “anti-nuclear” by you is a badge of honor. What’s really scary is what you expect people to believe to be called “pro-nuclear”.
Rod:
While the light-water reactor is certainly good enough, most designs would have been, and they had neither the operating experience, nor the time, nor the computing power to fully analyze their options. Had they been able to do this, another design may have been chosen. They easily could have chosen a design that we now know has serious flaws–like the RBMK. The overwhelming majority of reactor designs can obviously be made to be safe, but the LWR is one of the few that already is.
For example, what if they made a piston engine with the head as a neutron reflector and HEU pistons, operating on the thermal neutron spectrum, with water as the working fluid? Now, I just made that up off the top of my head (and I’m sure everybody else has thought of it), but it could probably have been made to work and would have been much closer to their experience. And, although I wouldn’t think there’s a reason why it couldn’t be passively cooled (conduction?), it’s a lot more complicated than a conventional LWR, and given the problems people already have with cooling piston engines, I would think that there’s a slightly higher probability of core damage. Certainly, there would have been problems with it, but they could probably have been solved and the Navy could probably have chosen it.
Kirk:
In order to be called pro-nuclear, I expect people to support nuclear power. Others aren’t necessarily anti-nuclear; there are people in the middle as well as a certain small group in some parts of industry that wishes to make a buck off anti-nuclear sentiments. This last group includes people who want to sell new reactors on the premise that there’s something terribly wrong with the current fleet.
I am aware of the problems with the current fleet. But I recognize that those problems don’t exist in a vacuum; while certain characteristics make certain reactors preferable under different circumstances (i.e., a LWR is preferable to an IFR in a submarine), they’re all better than coal. Coal is a clear and present public health hazard.
I’m not asking you to actively support anything you don’t want to support. I am asking you to either stop actively trashing nuclear power or stop using the “pro-nuclear” label. Promote MSRs if you like, but if you call yourself pro-nuclear, don’t try to make MSRs look better by attacking other things that work well enough.