Nuclear is Our Future Pro-nuclear activist group

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Filed under Humor, Site

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

Link. “Targeted” my foot, but anyway…

They used to be so much faster; they used to make the news, not react to it. Now is the time to go on the offensive!

Filed under Activism, New Build, Their Actions

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

No, the fact that there’s another reactor doesn’t mean that an accident could reach farther than it can; no, the probability of core damage at the existing ones hasn’t gone up in the last 25 years (and in fact was way overestimated in the days before powerful computer models); no, the proposed new one isn’t more dangerous (and is in fact safer–because it replaces backup systems with physics–although the old one was good enough); and no, incidents (read: trash can fires in the manager’s office) aren’t indicative of anything nuclear. The article basically uses the old “aging-means-we-shouldn’t-build-new-ones” argument throughout; the good news is that we have at least a chance to be heard.
This isn’t Nazi Germany; we shouldn’t think we’re so marginalized that we can’t act like a counterculture.

Link (hat tip: Know_Nukes).

Filed under Emergency Response, New Build, Non Sequitur, Safety

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

Link.

All I’m saying is “watch out.” These groups have a tendency to suffer from mission creep. What we really need is a few good, articulate, credible students on traditional lefty campuses; UW-Madison has a nuclear engineering program and could be a good place to start.

Filed under Activism, Proliferation, Their Actions

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

They want a new nuke to replace Wylfa when it closes.

Take any support you can get, guys.

Link.

Filed under Decommissioning, International, New Build, Perception

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

It will allow a major life extension (Canadian reactors are not relicensed for 20 years like American ones but rather allowed to operate in two-year increments until they fail to meet regulations). This life extension program will also involve the replacement of other components (mainly the pressure tubes that hold bundles of fuel rods in Canadian reactors and the steam generators), which will require a fairly long outage beginning in about 2010.

Link.

Filed under Politics and Regulation, Waste

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

Those headed for the four Westinghouse AP-1000s to be built in China will come from South Korea.

No, the US does not have a factory that can do it, although one in Indiana is getting ready.

Link.

Filed under Industry Performance, New Build

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

Link.

I doubt this will have a serious effect on the rest of the fuel cycle.

Filed under Fuel Cycle, Politics and Regulation

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

With stories like this one in World Nuclear News about Toshiba’s 2006 profits being significantly influenced by the purchase of Westinghouse, how can anti-nuclear activists continue to say that nuclear power is uneconomic?

Easy. A couple of technicalities to start.
First, “contributed” is a very general term. It could have brought down what should have been a higher total, it could have made very little difference to a firm that was already profitable, and lastly, it could have saved Toshiba from going into the red. Personally, I suspect a combination of (2) and (3).
However, it does not comment on where that money came from. The anti-nuclear argument is not (usually) that nuclear technology companies cannot make a profit. The argument is that the profits are coming from the government giving them handouts. When things like the $0.00 Department of Energy 1998 nuclear power research budget are presented, the argument changes. Now, the very fact that the government allows the nuclear industry to operate (without all of the restrictions that the anti-nuclear activists–whose simple, stated mission is to destroy the industry and the technology–deem necessary) is a subsidy. And, of course, subsidization is always bad, and it’s better to have unsubsidized pollution than subsidized clean energy. Dare I also remind people that there is no such thing as an inherently uneconomic product? The whole idea behind a market economy is that different products and amounts of products are chosen as market conditions change.

They also often say that you can’t predict the cost of storing nuclear waste 250,000 years into the future, but ignore a couple of things. The first and most obvious problem is that they’re the only people who propose to store it for 250,000 years: we want to recycle it and reuse it in new reactors. The second is more subtle; 250,000 is a big number, but it’s a finite number and storage systems will last a finite amount of time. Multiply the replacement cost by the number of times you have to replace it, and you have an easily quantified cost. Turns out that number of required installations is one; geologic formations far less stable than Yucca Mountain have held waste from natural reactors for almost two billion years. Or we could put it inside a subduction fault, and let the motion of colliding continents pull it inside the Earth forever, etc., etc.
That, of course, is not the issue; the issue is that we are not allowed to use any energy that didn’t come from nature, regardless of the actual environmental impact involved. There’s not a pro-nuclear person who cares whether something “came from nature” or not; of course, something as good as nuclear power can be rationalized to fit anyone’s agenda, from Marxists to LaRouchies. The question posed by Whole Ecology–the idea that people are part of the environment–is, quite simply, “is it physically valid to draw a line where we currently do?” The answer, I am not ashamed to say, is an unqualified no.

The economics argument isn’t about economics. It’s about the anti-nuclear movement’s ability to do whatever it wants, without any serious opposition from real people. That must stop.

The overall moral of the story? Don’t use examples without theory to back them up.

Filed under Economics, Industry Performance

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

I recently got my hands on a “free offer” from Whole Foods–a card redeemable for $5 in carbon dioxide credits. According to the card, that means 250 kilowatt-hours and 348 pounds of carbon dioxide. No specifics, of course, on how it works–they assure customers/“players”/concerned environmentalists that the card “ensures that the amount of electricity you use is replaced onto the national power grid with wind energy” (however that’s supposed to happen–one thing they most assuredly are not doing is using it to finance utility wind projects).

They say that this purchase will offset driving 429 miles or burning 187 pounds of coal (the equivalent, apparently, of planting four trees). I’m too lazy to check whether these numbers are actually correct; I assume there are probably some unfounded assumptions somewhere along the line in their calculations, but I’d just like to point out that 187 pounds of coal is equivalent to a little less than a tenth of a nuclear fuel pellet. A nuclear fuel pellet is about the size of the tip of your pinky, a fuel rod is a 12-foot stack of fuel pellets, and a typical 1960s-era reactor of the type in operation today has about 50,000 fuel rods. Gives you an idea about the cost-effectiveness, eh?

The word “nuclear” appears on the card exactly once–in a footnote to say that it provides 20% of the electricity for the US. Perhaps it’s becoming less fashionable to bash nuclear power, although I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I use the term “fashionable” in the sense of the effect that everybody worrying about something has on the less-individualistic 90% of the population. The vast majority of people can be very heavily influenced by the fact that nuclear power seems to worry everybody; very few anti-nuclear people have any real reason to believe what they believe. It’s entirely possible to introduce nuclear power to children at an early age, and not with those little ANS fuel pellet cards.
A couple of years ago, while trying to teach myself how to throw left-handed (long story), I apparently angered a squirrel, which started running toward me. Once it was within about three feet, it hesitated and stopped. I could imagine the gears slowly turning: this is a creature that, despite never having attended a single mathematics class or heard/seen any high-profile advertising about the importance of math education, intuitively understands the concept “order of magnitude.” It doesn’t even have to think “wait a minute–if I challenge the big pink blob, I’m going to get punted 150 feet.” The squirrel doesn’t “know” anything about math, or the physical basis behind why it shouldn’t try to attack a 5′9″, 195-pound pitcher, but made the correct decision for the correct reason. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was scientific, but it was at least rational. Scientists and engineers accept findings from their colleagues all the time without evaluating the data themselves; they know enough about the process to know that the data was arrived at in a scientific manner. I don’t like this as an objective; it’s a copout, obviously, but it’s more than we have now. I’m not saying that people should simply trust us; quite the opposite, I want people to internalize scientific concepts.
For example, if people treated all data equally, and approached every physical event as data (which it is), not only would there be no nuclear exceptionalism, but no racism or sexism and probably no fundamentalist religion. That’s a really basic core construct that’s required for scientific thought, yet very few people try to get there (i.e., it’s probably not possible to do all the time, but scientists and engineers are essentially the only people who even attempt to apply it to the data they’re familiar with). In 3,000 years, when society is ready for that, it could become widespread; in the meantime, teach your kids to do it and try to familiarize people with science in general. That’s about all we can do.

Here’s a scan of it: front and back. For a better picture of a windmill, click here or here.

Has the nuclear industry ever thought of selling shares in nuclear power projects in a similar way, given that even for the old reactors, each dollar would pay for three times more electricity (and newer ones could raise that to six times through greater thermal efficiency or 25 times through inherently-safe reactors that don’t require backup systems)?

Update: More from Know_Nukes.

Filed under Activism, Alternatives, Economics, Financing, Physics, Scientific Method

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