Nuclear is Our Future Pro-nuclear activist group

I’ve been putting this off for a long time, but I think it’s finally time to eviscerate the “georeactor” hypothesis, which was floating around some pro-nuclear websites a while back. The idea goes that the Earth’s core is a huge fast-breeder reactor, constantly extracting waste by settling it out and generating more fuel by converting uranium-238 into plutonium using a critical assembly (’seed’) of ~30% U-235 surrounded by a ‘blanket’ of U-238. It is utterly, totally, and completely wrong.

1. There is no way to make natural uranium (at any time in the past) go critical in the fast spectrum, which is required for breeding in the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle. Presumably, there is no huge supply of heavy water in the Earth’s core, or external neutron source; furthermore, settling-based arguments for isotope separation would form a perfectly inverted assembly (i.e., the U-238 would form a ball, with the U-235 as a small shell around it, which does not a seed-and-blanket configuration make). That settling does not actually happen; neither would the required settling out of fission products, and certainly not at the rate required. If correctly assembled, this reactor would work; however, no mechanism is proposed that would in fact assemble such a configuration.
2. Uranium would not settle to the center of the Earth, as it is not pure uranium in nature. Yellowcake is actually less dense than the iron and nickel in the inner and outer core. The minuscule amount of uranium found in metallic form in some meteorites cannot account for all the uranium on Earth, or why that uranium is not in this chemical form elsewhere.
3. The amount of uranium necessary to form a georeactor would make the Earth significantly heavier than it actually is, which would alter the planet’s orbit. Nowhere is it shown where this material actually comes from, nor is the lack of stable fission product daughters in the mantle explained.
4. The neutrinos from this huge hypothetical reactor have never been detected.
5. There is enough heat output from decay heat to explain the Earth’s internal heat content. The georeactor hypothesis does not explain where this heat goes, or where the extra heat from the decay of highly-radioactive fission products goes.
6. The rotation of the iron core relative to the rest of the planet fully explains the Earth’s magnetic field. Without even invoking Occam’s Razor, the georeactor hypothesis must explain why this effect does not work. This explanation is not provided.
7. A variation on the georeactor hypothesis states that Jupiter is a fission-fusion hybrid reactor, similar to the crackpot idea circulating around the internet a few years ago that said that the Galileo probe’s plutonium would cause a thermonuclear explosion inside that planet upon reentry. This is so laughably wrong it needs no more explanation. Even stranger versions of this concept suggest that protostars are started by fission reactors, which does not even begin to explain where the first stars came from, as uranium is formed exclusively by supernovae. If a purely thermonuclear mechanism is present for the first stars, why should it not work for later ones?
8. Producing the amount of helium inside the Earth does not require any more alpha radiation than comes from the uranium decay chain. The georeactor hypothesis does not explain the absence of this extra helium.

Dear friends, this does not make us look good. It makes us look bad in the scientific community and gives the anti-nuclear activists ammunition. Do we “need” an example of a natural fission reactor to make nuclear power environmentally friendly? Absolutely not. Do we have one? Actually, yes: Oklo–which is an actual reactor whose existence is accepted by the scientific community. The last thing we need is for anti-nuclear activists to be able to lump Oklo together with the georeactor, which is what could happen if we don’t let this clown Herndon wither off in the hole in the wall from whence he came and in which he belongs.

Filed under Crackpots, Physics, Strange

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 4 Comments »

An item for discussion: is it morally acceptable to lie about a technology (i.e., to make statements that are materially false instead of simply omitting complex or irrelevant information from an introductory discussion), when that lie gives the public a generally better picture of how something works?

I have to say I don’t think it is, but there’s a difference that I can’t emphasize enough between lying and effective communication with a non-technical audience, defined as that which doesn’t involve a mathematical ton of bricks dropped upon said audience. It frustrates me to almost no end to hear scientist after scientist say that talking to people in an honest manner violates their professional ethics: nothing could be more absurd. I believe that rhetoric (the presentation) is independent of the content. We can package the facts in a way that a non-technical audience can understand: an extremely non-technical audience can understand the concepts of nuclear engineering with no prior knowledge and reasonable intelligence, a technical but non-nuclear-engineer audience can understand how a reactor works if they can figure out how e.g. a carburetor works, and children can be familiarized with nuclear physics from an early age (it works for paleontology, and it can work for us: there are plenty of five-year-olds that can talk endlessly about the difference between an Apatosaurus and an Ultrasaurus, and that’s no less arcane than the difference between Three Mile Island and an AP-1000–and has the major side effect of installing a Nuclear BS Detector in the leaders of the future; I became familiar with especially radiation at an early age and, even while I was a fire-breathing leftist and officially anti-nuclear, I became more and more uncomfortable with my fellow socialists’ opposition to nuclear power until I felt I had to do something). The fact that we are packaging the facts does not, in my view, detract from the veracity of those facts. Some might be repelled from this position by the idea that I’m even willing to consider the question posed by this post, but I bring this topic up only as a straw poll on advocacy tactics among some of those active in the pro-nuclear cause.

Comments? Ideas? Derisive Laughter?

Filed under Activism

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 4 Comments »

I’m working on the improvements as outlined here; I’ll get a few item previews up later tonight.

Update: here they are:
1. Why Oppose Nuclear Power?: a rather angry and bitter shirt design formatted as a poll.
2. This is Your Sky on Sulfur Dioxide: for yellow items.
3. Pro-Nuclear Environmentalist: redone in a better font with higher resolution. I’m going to work on cropping it for a bumper sticker and on a lighter design for dark shirts, as well as a transparent background for the reader-requested blue design.
4. Three license plate frames: one with “PROUD SUPPORTER” on top and “NUCLEAR POWER” on the bottom, one with “NUKE ASTHMA” on top and “www.niof.org” on the bottom, and one with “www.niof.org” on the top and “PROUD SUPPORTER OF NUCLEAR POWER” on the bottom.
5. This is Your Planet on Coal: for dark items (black color option); however, I’ll need to replace the black background with a transparent one for it to work on some items.
6. My Other Car is a Nuclear Submarine: a bumper sticker.
7. Old Fossils: a picture of Rosalie Bertell (which will probably end up being a picture of Jackson Browne) and a coal plant. This will be on a poster and perhaps some clothing if it seems to make sense. Any thoughts on improving this design are much appreciated.
8. Nukes: What Are They Good For?: a very long list, subject to the caveat in #5.
9. Nuke Asthma: a general use design promoting the clean-air aspect of nuclear energy.
10. Nu-clear: a pun and another general use design about clean air
11. Nu-clean: a pun derived from a typo I made a few days ago; yet another general use design.
12. Lovins’ quote about access to energy: more suited to clothing (except the ones that allow only pocket-sized images) and posters as far as I can tell, although I’d be open to any suggestions.
13. Got Nukes? We Do: perhaps a more memorable way to say “nuclear power makes a significant contribution to the world’s energy needs.”
14. Go Nuclear..For Me: an old design, reformatted and at higher resolution, intended for baby, toddler, and children’s clothing. I’ll be working on a design for dark items.
15. Go Nuclear: the old mainstay at higher resolution. I’ll be cropping it and working on the background a bit to make it work for more items.
16. Burning Coal is like Playing Russian Roulette with a Semiautomatic Pistol: a design for dark (and perhaps red) items; the caveat in #5 also applies here.
17. Paul Ehrlich’s quote on access to energy: to be used in the same ways as the Lovins quote.
18. Nuclear Energy, The Clean Green Power Machine: shamelessly lifted from the Grand Gulf rally (I’m not aware of who came up with it), and a general use design although it might need some cropping for things like bumper stickers.
19. Biomass Pollutes: another general use design.
20. Asthmatics for Coal: a parody of “mutants for nuclear” (note the relative abundance of mutants vs. asthmatics), a dark-item design subject to the caveat in #5.
21. Ask Me About Whole Ecology: for use on light clothing; I’m working on one for dark clothing. The design for blue is delayed until I can change the background to transparent.
22. Ask Me About Nuclear Power: same as above.
23. Another Radioactive Environmentalist: taking pride in Jerry Brown’s 1992 debate insult; it will appear first on the Green T-Shirt, and later on blue ones.
24. No Cokes: first, the text “no cokes” in several different colors and fonts (unfortunately, I don’t have previews of these ready), second, Jeremy Whitlock’s picture (many thanks to Dr. Whitlock for emailing me a high-resolution version), and third a combination of the two with the text on top at 50% transparency (I also obviously don’t have a preview of this). Many thanks also to Ruth Sponsler for the slogan!

The Go Nuclear Top 10 is absent so far; I’m working on a better one than the current version but that’s on the back burner (to come after the revised dark-item designs).

It will take me all week to get these items up; note as well the lack of dark or bold color clothing, which require transparent backgrounds instead of white ones. I used a print-to-pdf and a pdf-to-image converter (which does not support transparent backgrounds) as a workaround for a problem with getting the necessary fonts and Photoshop in the same place at the same time, and fortunately, the dark items by and large do not use the problem font. It will take longer to get the dark items online, and I will post further as the week progresses with the items that are launched on each particular day. When these items are all complete and the full store is launched, I will post about upcoming designs for the dark items (perhaps a blue shirt: this is your low-elevation land on global warming?). So this is a bit of a two- or three-phase process, but I believe the store will be better when everything’s finished. And as always, it’s completely nonprofit.

I’d like to hear any feedback anyone has to offer.

Filed under Site

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 2 Comments »

Someone recently asked on Know_Nukes if a video of a wind turbine on fire were on YouTube somewhere; I found one:

Filed under Alternatives, Safety

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

If the operating costs will be lower due to lessons learned at other plants, it can’t really increase costs for consumers (and they’re already getting a rebate, which is not coming from the federally-mandated decommissioning fund as the article suggests); it amazingly only took them 15 months to approve it.

Link.

Filed under Decommissioning, Industry Performance, Politics and Regulation

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

The point that the Iraq war has consumed resources better spent on real problems is absolutely correct; however, it is important to keep in mind that the Bush Administration used radiophobia as one of their excuses to start the Iraq war–and that those scare tactics were completely unsubstantiated.

A terrorist is not going to manufacture a nuclear weapon, period. You can’t make these things with materials from the hardware store, and the potential proliferators concerned are having problems with making nail bombs go off. Weapons-grade uranium is worth securing from essentially everyone, but a program to account for it should not have to compete for resources with a similar one for separated plutonium or even weapons-grade plutonium, as the chance of a terrorist making a weapon with plutonium is nil. Spent fuel from reactors, incidentally, is not worth stealing; it would probably kill the thieves if they could even get to it, which in practice would require an entire invading army–and the only way they could use it would be in a radiological dispersion device (dirty bomb), which would cause widespread panic but no real damage: highly-radioactive materials decay quickly and long-lived materials aren’t very radioactive. The only reason anyone would consider it is the terror it would cause as a result of decades of anti-nuclear scaremongering.

Link.

Filed under Practical Problems, Proliferation, Security and Terrorism

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 4 Comments »

AFP even admits it’s a “spectacular stunt to draw attention to its [Greenpeace's] campaign” (their words). I thought a reputable news organization was supposed to be above printing campaign groups’ press releases, but the rules don’t apply to Greenpeace, so it doesn’t matter.

Missing are any little details about how any accidents would actually happen or anything unimportant like that.

Link.

Filed under Clueless, International, New Build, Safety, Their Actions

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 2 Comments »

“However, while imported uranium is relatively secure in terms of supply, France now has two kinds of serious vulnerabilities in place of one. In 1973 only oil imports were a serious vulnerability. That vulnerability remains.”

-Beyond Nuclear

Nuclear reactors don’t displace fossil fuels in transportation, unless you’ve got an electric car (and most people do not). “That vulnerability” has not been removed; it has been reduced, to the extent that nuclear power can reduce it. The fact that it can’t do everything isn’t a reason to abandon a perfectly good solution to part of the problem.

Filed under Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Missing the Point, Security and Terrorism

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 2 Comments »

“Cementing the argument that one thing can only lead to another (nuclear power to nuclear weapons) was the recent arrest in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia of a man trying to sell weapons-grade uranium on the black market.”

-Beyond Nuclear

Nuclear power plants don’t use, require, or make weapons-grade uranium. Weapons-grade uranium, furthermore, can only be made by enrichment facilities that are not occupied with the production of reactor fuel.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Practical Problems, Proliferation, Security and Terrorism

Posted on March 30, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“I have no ability to fire my electricity supplier. They are monopolists. If they do something really stupid, like build a nuclear power plant, I want to fire them.”

-Jeff Skilling

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Economics, Energy

Posted on March 29, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 2 Comments »