Nuclear is Our Future Pro-nuclear activist group

Anti-nuclear activist Frieda Berryhill has left no turn unstoned in a recently-published conspiracy theory about the Browns Ferry accident in 1975.

She describes the opposition to the Summit reactors, proposed in 1973 and canceled in 1975, for no reason other than the old they-don’t-want-them-as-neighbors argument (which makes about as much sense as the identical argument made against racial integration in the 1960s). They were certainly safe (that type of reactor–a High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (HTGR)–cannot even melt down), would have produced less waste than the average American reactor (approaching Canadian efficiency), and pose zero proliferation threat. They could even have run off of Hope Creek and Salem’s nuclear waste, with some minor processing to change its shape. The “excess capacity” argument doesn’t really hold, either, since a lot of that was oil-fired (and becoming rapidly uneconomic with the 1973 Arab oil embargo), you need some excess capacity in case a major plant breaks down, and electricity demand was growing fast enough to quickly eliminate any cushion.

But here’s where it gets interesting. She says that the Browns Ferry fire in 1975 was somehow covered up by a conspiracy involving the industry periodical Nucleonics Week (which she incorrectly refers to as “Nuclearonics Week”), the industry’s trade association at the time (the Atomic Industrial Forum), and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, because somebody at DuPont had not heard of the accident (she also gets 55 Crackpot Points for her use of all-caps, but I digress). Now, if that’s not a damning charge, I don’t know what is.

On top of that, she apparently thinks that Browns Ferry Unit 1’s startup hiccups, which happen to any newly-restarted power plant of any type, mean that the unit will be permanently shut down and decommissioned, wasting $1.8 billion but allowing them to get a license renewal (which they got before the restart) and BILK THE TAXPAYER OF BILLIONS (no specifics on how that will happen). Or maybe they’ll replace a hose and fix a pump, which is what they did.

“Are you on drugs?”

-Judge Chamberlain Haller, My Cousin Vinny

Sadly, this is representative of anti-nuclear opinion–which unfortunately doesn’t get published a whole lot. I have a strong suspicion that we’re rebutting arguments that people don’t worry a lot about (such as the proliferation potential of PUREX) without covering most people’s major concerns and certainly not going on the offensive. For example, most people probably think that there aren’t any nuclear power plants any more, that uranium is a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide, and that global warming is caused by human activity per se instead of a physical process that humans are using (carbon combustion). They certainly think that nuclear reactors can explode like atomic bombs. I’ve said it before, but I think the best answer overall is to explain how a nuclear reactor works in conceptual terms (especially to young people, who basically “get” the engineering design process), so that the urban myths don’t get started in the first place. There aren’t a whole lot of urban myths about coal burning, because people understand it. They can’t design a coal burning power plant, but people have internalized the concept of combustion. And I don’t see any reason why somebody who can disassemble and reassemble a Volvo carburetor by memory can’t understand the very simple mechanism behind a nuclear reactor. Again, they’re not designing it; they don’t have a master’s degree in it, but they know how it works. I can (and have) explained to a group of 50% Green, 40% Democrat and 10% Republican students what the difference is between a PWR and RBMK, in 20 minutes, without using the word “moderator,” such that they knew where I was going half-way through an explanation of Chernobyl’s graphite-tipped-control-rods problem. And as those who know me will tell you, I am no master communicator. We just have to abandon our nuclear exceptionalist egos and tell it like it is in ordinary terms.
If we try to make nuclear energy seem impressive and use difficult-to-understand terminology, we’re going to leave the door open for people to just make stuff up. But I know we can do better than that. I know we will do better than that.

Filed under Activism, Clueless, Conspiracy, Crackpots, Terminology

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

“Certain forms of energy are called “renewable” because these fuel sources are constantly replenished and will not run out.”

-Citizen Power

If the source of fuel being constantly replenished at a rate equal to or greater than the rate of depletion is the definition of renewable, Integral Fast Reactors running on uranium extracted from seawater count as renewable energy. They would use less uranium in providing all the world’s electricity than what is washed into the ocean by rivers annually (and would almost certainly run off the 500 years’ worth of unused energy in nuclear waste instead of fresh uranium, further decreasing that demand), so they would be, by definition, renewable.

But if the definition is restricted to mean only fuel that will never run out, nothing is renewable, because eventually the Sun will die. There aren’t any perpetual motion machines. “That’s ridiculous; we’re not talking about that time frame,” they say–but the amount of time necessary to exhaust energy provided by (1) existing uranium deposits, (2) unused energy in nuclear waste, (3) heat produced by the decay of uranium deep inside the Earth (geothermal power), and (4) uranium in seawater would indeed last until the Sun dies. Why, may I ask, is energy produced by the decay of uranium counted as renewable when that produced by splitting those atoms is not?
The answer, of course, is that that’s not the point. The point is that “renewable” means “not fossil fuels,” and fossil fuels do not meet the above definition when used at today’s consumption rates (if oil use were cut by a factor of 100,000, it would also be renewable). When something does meet that definition that they don’t like (e.g., clear-cutting the rainforest to grow sugarcane for ethanol), they amend the unwritten definition to exclude it. Is whale oil renewable? Was petroleum renewable before about 1870? Is nuclear power from IFRs running on seawater-extracted uranium renewable? Yes, yes, and yes–but Joe Environmentalist would almost certainly say no to all three, because “renewable” is code for “good.”

Filed under Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Energy, Environment, Fuel Cycle, Missing the Point, Sustainability, Terminology

Posted on April 6, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“One 1000 megawatts reactor, like the two currently operating at the Indian Point facility, possesses at the heart enough fissionable material equivalent of 1,000 nuclear bombs.”

-Green Nuclear Butterfly

First, that doesn’t mean anything, since the material is mixed with other things that don’t work in bombs and can’t be separated, and the reactor itself cannot explode even if the materials were correct (a nuclear weapon goes far out of its way to explode, when an ordinary reaction will do in a power plant–there’s no reason to build a nuclear power plant like a nuclear weapon and none have been).

Second, “fissionable” does not mean “works in a nuclear weapon.” That’s fissile material, and while 100% of a fresh fuel rod is fissionable, only about 3%-5% is fissile. The quote’s author is trying to make it look like you can build a nuclear weapon out of anything up to and including used pinball machine parts.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Physics, Proliferation, Safety, Terminology

Posted on March 18, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 4 Comments »

“Plutonium fuel makes really bad nuclear waste worse. The waste that comes from the use of MOX fuel is hotter and more radioactive even than the high-level waste that uranium fuel produces.”

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

Not if the plutonium originally came from nuclear waste (in this case, military nuclear waste), which we’re also going to have to find something to do with, and if you consider that highly-radioactive waste decays much faster than plutonium, it’s a net gain. Yes, that particular piece of spent fuel rod is more radioactive than a fresh uranium equivalent–but then you have to do something with the plutonium that you didn’t destroy, and the entire waste stockpile lasts longer than it otherwise would.

And again, they’re implying that these reactors have sticks of plutonium in them; MOX fuel (which they call “plutonium fuel”) is like uranium fuel (stacked pellets in a metal tube that is closed on both ends), except that it’s a grand total of 5% plutonium.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Plutonium, Terminology, Waste

Posted on March 5, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“Plutonium is a commodity under the MOX program.”

-Nuclear Information and Resource Service

No, plutonium is destroyed under “the MOX program,” a term that can apply to a lot of things but which in this case actually means government paying a fee for the use of a nuclear power plant to consume nuclear fuel containing 5% plutonium and 95% uranium–not a French-style “plutonium economy” that involves separating plutonium at a military-surplus facility, then recombining it with uranium and selling or trading it to reactor operators. The program they’re talking about does not involve changing any rules about the sale of fuel or recycling (which traditionally involves plutonium separation although it does not have to by any means and will not in future recycling programs).

And what exactly would be wrong with making it a commodity, as long as it was properly regulated commerce?

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Economics, Fuel Cycle, Plutonium, Proliferation, Terminology

Posted on March 4, 2007 by Stewart Peterson | 2 Comments »

“Converting warhead plutonium into fuel for generating electricity would stimulate commerce in this extremely toxic, weapons-usable material.”

-Nuclear Control Institute

How? By destroying it? By combining it with things that make it impossible to use in a nuclear weapon?

And the term “weapons-usable” actually means that it is not physically impossible to use it in a nuclear weapon–if a detonation mechanism were developed that could use it. Weapons-grade means that it could be used in bombs with today’s most-advanced technology. That technology–or, in fact, any plutonium bomb–is far out of the reach of terrorist groups that sometimes can’t make a nail bomb go off correctly. You can’t exactly build these things with tinfoil and wire from the hardware store.
While nuclear weapons states are ambiguous about whether it is possible to build a nuclear weapon with plutonium from commercial reactors, the fact that they have never done it and that the reactors they do use (Chernobyl-style reactors) are extraordinarily complicated compared to commercial ones suggests that the bomb designers know something that NCI doesn’t.

If these think it’s such a problem, they should support destroying it permanently–and the only way to do that is with a nuclear reactor. Burying it with highly-radioactive material only allows the highly-radioactive material to decay away, leaving a “plutonium mine” for future generations. Worse still, the part of reactor-grade plutonium that makes it non-weapons-grade decays faster than the part that works in bombs, so while there’s no way to separate the two artificially, allowing the non-weapons-grade component to decay underground does that quite well. On the contrary, their disposal method does not enhance security: given enough time, it’s a surefire way to turn non-weapons-grade material into weapons-grade material.

Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Clueless, Non Sequitur, Physics, Plutonium, Proliferation, Terminology

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

This article is missing some key information:
-Capacity factor: the percentage of theoretical capacity that can actually be generated. This is a simple number with a complex background; every factor that can possibly rob kilowatts from the power plant in question has a part. In the case of wind, it’s mostly the lack of availability of wind that drives wind’s capacity factor below 30%. The other 70+% of the time, no matter how much you propose to pay for it, it isn’t there and can’t be bought. This is not to be confused with efficiency, which is the measure of the percentage of energy converted into useful work.
-Heavily subsidized loss-leading wind turbines may very well cost 8 cents per kilowatt-hour the 30% of the time they’re on. Gas on the spot market may cost 13. Nuclear costs 1.82.

However, it does present one item which is not getting enough exposure: wind turbines have an environmental impact.

Filed under Alternatives, Economics, Environment, Fun With Statistics, Terminology

Posted on December 26, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

“According to the report in U.S. News and World Report, in 2002, federal agents began tracking more than 100 Muslim institutions in six cities — Washington and its suburbs, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Seattle — to detect radiation that may potentially be used to make bombs.”

-Link.

There are three materials that can be used in nuclear weapons–uranium-233, uranium-235, and plutonium-239–and they have to be almost 100% one material. For example, there might be 500 pounds of americium-241 somewhere, but making a nuclear weapon out of it is physically impossible, no matter how much you have. You could also have 400 pounds of plutonium from spent fuel–but it’s contaminated with plutonium-240 and plutonium-241, so it won’t work.
Dirty bombs are hype. Short-lived isotopes would decay in a short amount of time, and long-lived isotopes aren’t very radioactive. The effects would be akin to moving from a wood house into a stone house.
Finally, radiation doesn’t make bombs of any sort.

Filed under Physics, Proliferation, Radiation, Security and Terrorism, Terminology

Posted on December 25, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Link.

Libyan highly-enriched uranium has been exchanged for Russian low-enriched uranium in a Libyan research reactor.

Please also note that highly-enriched uranium isn’t necessarily bomb-grade. Bomb-grade material is 93% or more uranium-235, and highly-enriched uranium is anything over 20%. If someone were going to make a bomb with it they would also have to construct the bomb–a very complicated step–and that assumes that the reactor has not been running on the fuel; this type of reactor degrades nuclear fuel.

Filed under Applications, Physics, Proliferation, Terminology

Posted on December 23, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »

Interesting quote:

“The North claimed in February that it had nuclear weapons, and experts believe it has enough radioactive material for at least a half dozen bombs.”

-Link.
Uranium-233, uranium-235, and plutonium-239 can be used in nuclear weapons. No other substance, radioactive or not, works in bombs. Additionally, just because they have it doesn’t mean they can extract it and use it–the two hardest steps.
In this case they probably have. But don’t assume plutonium=bomb automatically.

Filed under International, Physics, Plutonium, Proliferation, Terminology

Posted on December 21, 2005 by Stewart Peterson | 0 Comments »