Nuclear is Our Future Pro-nuclear activist group

The author of this article posted to Know_Nukes admits that their conspiracy theories about depleted uranium are probably wrong.

But what if they weren’t?

That boils down to an extremely conservative attitude. It is formally known as the Precautionary Principle: don’t do anything unless all the possible problems to future generations are known and solved. Since humans aren’t infalliable and can’t predict everything, don’t do anything–even if you know the problems you’ll cause are less severe than what you’re currently experiencing.

How can you know that it’s a net gain if you can’t know everything that will happen in the future? Easy. Today’s problems, if unsolved, will continue unabated into the future, indefinitely. Thus, whatever problem is eliminated, whatever net gain is made, will be projected into the future from this day forward.
I’m all for precaution–eliminating, reducing, and optimizing risks; establishing a coherent system by taking problems that will always be there and letting them work against each other. Given two two-by-fours, I’ll lean them against each other instead of trying to balance them on their ends and complaining that doing so requires perfection and is inherently unstable, and mere humans cannot be trusted with two-by-fours as a result. However, I am not in favor of swinging in trees.

The Precautionary Principle has nothing to do with precaution. It is simply a reactionary philosophy that has been with humanity since our first consciousness, and is keeping humans who have the bad luck to be born in the Third World barefoot and sick when solutions are well-known and available.

Give me the real left wing. Not the left wing of Amory Lovins, but the left wing of FDR. Give every person everywhere an American standard of living, and watch their environmental impact go down as they rely less on nature for their needs. Telling a man who is up to his waist in a rice paddy in Bangladesh that he needs to use less energy is not the answer. A radical overhaul of the poverty lifestyle forced upon him by reactionaries is the answer, and doing so is our moral obligation.

Filed under Applications, Sustainability

Posted on June 3, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“Nuclear or Geothermal power plants? Neither.”

-’amazngdrx‘

Geothermal energy comes from the heat given off when radiation from natural radioactive materials inside the Earth is absorbed by nearby rock or other materials. So it is actually a kind of nuclear power.

It is more commonly grouped with wind and solar under the banner of “renewable energy,” but this quote goes to show that “renewable” actually means “unfeasible.” When they realize that geothermal energy might in fact work, it becomes scum, the enemy of the environment. Energy allows us to do things, so if the objective is to starve polluting processes so that they can’t operate (a perfectly reasonable and understandable tactic), any functional energy source must be opposed, existing ones must be made as expensive as possible, and the depletion of reserves must be sped up–with a ban on exploration for new supplies–until there is no alternative but to revert to the solar-powered 1600-vintage “happy peasant lifestyle.” A lifestyle, I might add, which would have killed me at birth.
Thus, I ain’t too happy about proposals like this. I can put two and two together, and I like my energy. To quote one of the store designs (itself a quote):

Filed under Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Energy, Sustainability, Their Actions

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

An Australian indigenous group has volunteered a part of their land as a low- and intermediate-level waste repository (read: for rubber gloves and used reactor parts, respectively).

Do you think they’ll stop using the “environmental racism” argument? Don’t hold your breath.

Link.

Filed under Environment, International, Perception, Sustainability, Waste

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

I didn’t know it was this easy to get press. Maybe we should pour orange juice into a vacuum breaker and get the NRC’s response on video, or make an inflatable of a polar bear hugging a containment structure, or something like that.

How to turn a five-minute calculation into a “major, startling new report”:

1. Figure out how much nuclear waste was produced by nuclear power plants in each state from publicly-available numbers. Inflate this figure by a factor of 20-30 by ignoring the unused fuel still left in the fuel rods that are in storage.
2. Get population data.
3. Divide.
4. Give it to your state groups to make a hullabaloo, even if the number is all of two pounds.

That’s right. The most nuclear waste that anyone has accumulated per capita around the country is 2.15 pounds. That’s something to be proud of–how much carbon dioxide has accumulated in the atmosphere from coal burning, per capita, and how much particulate matter is in people’s lungs from coal burning, per capita? And how much of that nuclear waste is in the environment?

Zero.

Perversely, this is being used to justify a subsidy for fossil fuels, paid for by the operators of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. In Anti-Nuke World, climate scientists have it all wrong: carbon dioxide doesn’t cause global warming; nuclear power plants do. Sure.

Talk about social responsibility. Yes, nuclear waste is going to be around for a while; a lot longer if we don’t reuse the half-used fuel that poses the biggest part of the waste problem. But so are the Pyramids; the Pyramids have no conceivable use to the generations that have had to live alongside them. Like the Pyramids, there’s no way for it to magically disperse itself into the environment. Like the Pyramids, it doesn’t require any nannying. Like the Pyramids–and unlike chemical toxins from coal burners–it has a finite lifetime. Like the Pyramids, people regard it as magical and not the physical entity that it is.

Let’s cite this study in the future. It looks very useful, not just from the data, but from the source.

More from We Support Lee (plus background on the subsidy here).

Link.

Filed under Activism, Environment, Fun With Statistics, Sustainability, Their Actions, Waste

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Worldwide, we “use” about 67,000 tons of uranium per year, 670 tons of which is actually used (the rest is stored). Nuclear power provides 20% of world electricity, and could provide 100%, requiring 3,350 tons per year. The US, being 5% of the world’s population, uses 25% of world energy; giving everyone American per-capita access to energy using nuclear power would require another five-fold increase in uranium consumption, assuming that the proportion of electricity out of total energy is the same worldwide–totaling 16,750 tons of uranium per year.

These eight Russian deposits contain 320,000 tons of uranium.

The math is not difficult: if their contents were used sensibly, these eight new mines could provide all the uranium needed to fuel all the nuclear power plants needed to provide American-style quantities of electricity to everyone in the world for almost twenty years.

Be reminded that this is 6% of worldwide uranium reserves. That’s enough to last almost 320 years. However, there are two other major sources of uranium: coal ash and seawater.
Uranium is present in coal ash at an average level of 4.5 parts per million. In the US–and this is just in the US–118 million tons of new coal ash are available every year. That comes out to 531 tons–about 80% of the world’s current uranium requirement.
Seawater is the big one, though. Uranium is present in seawater at an average level of 3.3 parts per billion. The oceans have about 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 tons of water and thus about 4,950,000,000 tons of uranium, with 35,000 tons added per year by runoff from rivers. Quite simply, as long as we use less than 35,000 tons of uranium per year, uranium from seawater is being made available faster than it is being consumed. Technically, it is a renewable resource.

But let’s say we only had that 4,950,000,000 tons to use at a rate of 16,750 tons per year. That will last us 295,000 years. And that’s not even counting thorium, which is another nuclear fuel that can produce just as much energy as uranium. More here.

So why do anti-nuclear activists say we’re going to run out of nuclear fuel?

Link.

Filed under Energy, Fuel Cycle, International, Sustainability

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“Stop Hinkley is dedicated to the removal of nuclear reactors from the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary and is committed to the introduction of greener technologies more appropriate to the new millennium.”

-Stop Hinkley

Those “greener technologies” were our first energy sources and belong in the dustbin of history.

Filed under Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Decommissioning, Sustainability, Their Actions

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“The toxic wastes from atomic power systems will poison planet Earth for thousands of years to come. Our soil and water are being poisoned by the widespread burying of nuclear waste on land and sea! Atomic energy is always in conflict with all Life, because the very nature of ‘atom-splitting’ is destruction not construction. For this reason, it can never be used for peace or peaceful activities. How can peace be achieved by that which is by nature unpeaceful? Splitting atoms disrupts the flow of force through them.”

-’infinity2‘ (hat tip: Freedom for Fission)

Wow.

You know, I’d rather not swing in a tree. But nuclear power sure has a knack for ticking off anti-science crackpots.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Clueless, Crackpots, Environment, Missing the Point, Sustainability, Waste

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

More very old news, but a minor detail is upsetting a few people in that CFLs contain mercury, which is awful and terrible for the environment and should be banned, because the solution is always to ban everything, as technology is something that was dropped from the sky on an unsuspecting public as a way to exploit them by the evil, evil corporations.

Global-warming-denier crackpot Steven Milloy wrote what is actually is a very reasonable article on April 28, which was posted to Know_Nukes. Go read it if you haven’t, and if you have, keep it in the arsenal for whenever someone presents CFLs as the ultimate solution for everything.

Filed under Alternatives, Environment, Sustainability

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“48 Organizations Refute President Bush’s Claim That Nuclear Power is a “Renewable Sourse [sic] of Energy”"

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

If it were such a great argument, it shouldn’t rely purely on repetition. The entire “refutation” is reprinted below in its entirety:

“In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, you were quoted as saying that nuclear power “is a renewable source of energy.”

Please be advised that nuclear power is not a renewable source of energy.

For that matter, oil, coal, and natural gas are also not renewable sources of energy.

Nuclear power and fossil fuels are environmentally polluting and non-renewable sources of energy.

The primary renewable sources of energy are biofuels, biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, and wind.”

Note how the above simply states claims of its own instead of providing any evidence or giving any reasons for anything it says. How about these to consider:
1. Nuclear power is a term that refers to the extraction of energy from the nucleus instead of chemical bonds. Nuclear power isn’t in and of itself renewable or non-renewable, no more than chemical power is or isn’t. Fuel sources are renewable, not methods for extracting energy from them, and there are sources of uranium that are renewable. That brings us to #2.
2. What does “renewable” mean? A renewable resource is one that is replenished at a faster or equal rate than its extraction. Wind is one, unless the wind doesn’t blow. Solar is one, until the Sun sets. Hydropower is one, unless there’s a drought. Geothermal and biomass/biofuels usually aren’t, but they can be if managed well. Likewise with the massive amount of uranium dissolved in seawater. Managed correctly, it could provide all the uranium needed to fuel all the nuclear power plants needed to provide 100% of the world’s electricity, at a lower rate than “new” uranium is being added from rivers. Is the ultimate source of uranium renewable? Of course not, but neither is the hydrogen fueling the Sun’s fusion.
3. Nobody said anything about fossil fuels. They’re trying to smear nuclear power by trying to associate it with fossil fuels, even trying to imply that uranium is a fossil fuel and that it pollutes, which it does not. Ignorant, arrogant, contemptuous, laughing mockery is not a substitute for facts.

Filed under Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Energy, Fuel Cycle, Nitpicking, Sustainability

Posted on May 9, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“Petroleum geologists have known for 50 years that global oil production would “peak” and begin its inevitable decline within a decade of the year 2000. Moreover, no renewable energy systems have the potential to generate more than a fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels.

In short, the transition to declining energy availability signals a transition in civilization as we know it.”

-DIE OFF

There’s another choice: nuclear power.

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

Posted on April 22, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »