Parker: “For most of our electricity needs our choice remains between coal and nuclear. If you oppose nuclear you de facto support coal. Either that you support higher prices for energy (and some do). Some who oppose nuclear power take offense at this line of argument.”

Well, I don’t know if I would say that I take offense at that argument. There is some truth to it, insofar as a large expansion and replacement of power infrastructure is bound to occur in the next couple of decades. Coal isn’t intrinsically bad – you just need to clean it up, and that technology is readily available right now. If we build new, highly efficient, carbon sequestering power plants near petroleum producing areas, then we have the best of both worlds. As Parker’s excellent reference points out, CO2 has very real positive economic value as an agent of enhanced petroleum recovery. As a college student, I visited the very first large scale CO2 flooding projects in the Permian Basin of West Texas. The economic limitations of this technology have always been low oil prices and high CO2 prices. Most experts suggest we needn’t worry much about low oil prices in the foreseeable future and by putting large power plants near large pressure depleted oil fields, the CO2 sequestration has a large positive economic value, independent of the avoidance of the negative impact of increasing GHGs. So what is the problem with coal? And when we add the huge potential of direct carbon fuel cells as extremely efficient carbon fueled power sources that emits pure CO2 as its exhaust, coal looks positively green and rich.

Solar power in particular can be rapidly expanded since it is a natural peaking power source, especially in the US southwest. When the sun is shining the power demands go up and the peaking power of solar becomes very viable. Advances in power storage will continually increase the viability of both wind and solar. Given that the US Southwest is also blessed with mountainous areas, storage methods based on pumping water uphill are already viable. Recent breakthroughs in solar thermal and in the cost and efficiency of photovoltaic technology make the long delayed mass adoption of solar immanent.

On the other side, nuclear power has had decades of publicly supported research to solve it’s problems and has failed miserably to do so. The absurd optimism of NRC Commissioner Peter B. Lyons only points to the ridiculous situation of the NRC’s dual, conflicting roles as regulator and cheerleader for nuclear power. The lack of new blood coming into nuclear engineering only points out that people smart enough to be nuclear power engineers aren’t stupid. In spite of the frenzied promotion of nuclear power as a solution to the global warming problem (ironically by those who have denied its reality) there remains no technical solution to the safety and waste problems that have dogged nuclear power from the beginning. Nuclear power accidents proved the huge challenge of maintaining any high power technology in a failsafe mode for decades at a stretch. And with the much greater potential of competent terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities, the risk of catastrophic dispersal of highly radioactive isotopes over huge swaths of land makes nuclear power even more untenable without massive government support. That the nuclear power industry has always required the Price-Anderson Act’s taxpayer supplied guarantees of liability protection in the event of nuclear catastrophe, in itself proves the very real nature of the risk. Without this free insurance from Uncle Sam and Joe Citizen, nuclear power would only be a pipedream. No “free market” insurance company would touch nuclear power. Therefore it is fairly said that supporters of nuclear power are advocates for massive government corporate welfare. Nuclear never has and never will stand on its own economic viability.

I gather that nuclear power needs a massive energy subsidy from fossil fuels, including coal, to function. You need fossil fuels to find, mine, transport, process and assemble fissionable materials for nuclear reactors. And, of course, all the Homer Simpsons who run the power plants need gasoline to commute to and from work. This doesn't even get into the role fossil fuels play in isolating nuclear wastes and decommissioning nuclear reactors at the end of their lives.

So how, exactly, does nuclear power reduce our dependence on fossil fuels?

Mark Plus,

The amount of energy required to build and operate a nuclear power plant is a lot less than the amount of energy provided by the power plant. The fuel cost is a small portion of total costs. Uranium fuel cost does not rise much when oil prices rise. So obviously oil costs do not figure in as that big a percentage of total fuel cost.

Does the US have any ambitions in developing controlled hot fusion?

You need fossil fuels to find, mine, transport, process and assemble fissionable materials for nuclear reactors.

You don't need much energy to do this, and, in principle, the energy doesn't have to be from fossil fuels. Of course today fossil fuels are used in various of these activities, just as fossil fuels are used in various activities related to the manufacturing, transport, and installation of solar and wind generating facilities.

Here is a good compendium of considerations about the wisdom of massive increases in nuclear power from Australia, one of the largest producers of uranium: http://www.sea-us.org.au/acfuconf97.html

The most compelling argument is probably the fact that one dollar spent on efficiency displaces as much carbon as seven dollars spent on nuclear. Or is it that the bill for Chernobyl is about $300 billion, an accident that spewed only about 2% of the reactor core materials into the atmosphere. That's more than the total value produced by nuclear energy in the history of the Soviet Union/Russia. What would the bill be for a nuclear explosive terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor that vaporized most of a nuclear core? Keep in mind that real estate values are higher here than in Ukraine.

If we took the subsidies headed toward the already subsidy-stuffed nuke industry and applied it to retrofitting older buildings for high efficiency insulation, we could probably re-insulate every building in the US and save much more fossil fuel growth. It's all about protecting the investments of big business in the nuke industry, not protecting the environment.

This is a very good discussion about the problems of keeping highly enriched uranium out of the hands of terrorists: http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=8130

Nuke power folks love to point out that a nuclear plant can never explode like an atomic bomb. Unless, that is, a nuclear bomb goes off in a nuclear plant. In that case, the nuclear fallout would be thousands of times worse than a nuclear bomb. If there were only a 10% probability in the next 20 years that terrorists could get their hands on a nuclear device, the risk weighted cost of an attack on a nuclear plant would clearly put nuclear way out of the running in any legitimate economic analysis. Any economic analysis of nuclear power that does not include this risk element is simply not legitimate.

Sure, but the economic damage of a nuke going off in a city center is many thousands of times worse.

Dezakin,

How do you figure that? A small nuclear bomb will destroy a few square miles. A 20 KT bomb has a total destruction radius of less than a mile. (http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2742/numbers.htm) The radiation drops to reasonable levels in a few weeks. A vaporized nuclear core contains tons of nuclear material, thousands of times more than a nuclear bomb, and could easily make several large cities, their suburbs and all of the farmland in between uninhabitable for generations when it is distributed in a nuclear fireball. It's actually no contest and Al Qaida knows it, even if you don't.

Dezakin,

How do you figure that? A small nuclear bomb will destroy a few square miles. A 20 KT bomb has a total destruction radius of less than a mile. (http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/2742/numbers.htm) The radiation drops to reasonable levels in a few weeks. A vaporized nuclear core contains tons of nuclear material, thousands of times more than a nuclear bomb, and could easily make several large cities, their suburbs and all of the farmland in between uninhabitable for generations when it is distributed in a nuclear fireball. It's actually no contest and Al Qaida knows it, even if you don't.

Guys,

If your comments do not immediately show up please do NOT repost. I installed a new version of MovableType and it is deferring all comments for moderation. I can not figure out how to make that more selective (there are obvious settings for it that have no effect) and I've posted to support to get answers. So today it will be problematic. Sorry about that.

"How do you figure that? A small nuclear bomb will destroy a few square miles. A 20 KT bomb has a total destruction radius of less than a mile. "

Because the fallout from blowing up a reactor is easy to evacute. Somehow I place the value of human lives a bit higher than real estate.

I've probably mentioned it here before, but if you'd like an inside perspective on the nuclear power industry and what an accident in the US might really be like, see my website. Based on the reader reviews on my home page, I've provided a fairly entertaining tale - and it's free.

James Aach (20+ years in the nuclear industry).
RadDecision.blogspot.com.

Dezakin: "Because the fallout from blowing up a reactor is easy to evacute. Somehow I place the value of human lives a bit higher than real estate."

Oh, that is touching. But still wrong. Take the area where I live for example, in the DFW area. The Comanche Peak Reactors are located about 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth. If the terrorists were just a little smart and checked the weather report, they could wait for a breezy spring day with a twenty MPH wind blowing from the southwest. Now do you really think that five or six million people are going to be able to evacuate the city in two or three hours? Not likely. And at that range the radiation would still be massive and could probably take out Little Rock. If exploded in the early morning hours millions of people could get a lethal dose, although they might take 20 years to die. And there are plenty of other places where reactors are even closer to large cities.

"If exploded in the early morning hours millions of people could get a lethal dose, although they might take 20 years to die."

This sentance is indicitave that you dont actually know what you're talking about.

Dezakin: "This sentance is indicitave (sic) that you dont actually know what you're talking about."

Yes I do. Just saying I'm wrong isn't really an argument. You have to say why. Otherwise it's, just contradiction. From Monty Python:
M: I came here for a good argument.
A: No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument.
M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't!
A: Yes it is!
M: Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
(short pause)
A: No it isn't.

C'mon Dezakin. Let's have a real argument. I'll start.

I do know what I'm talking about.

Fine then; The problem is you assume pretention of knowledge when its merely a political view that you're attempting to bolster. I'm cutting short the bluster and noise because you really dont know what you're talking about but you want to insist that I'm wrong anyways.

You believe that blowing up a reactor causes radioisotope dispersion that causes a lethal dose, when you dont even know what that term means. It doesnt mean a slight statistical rise in cancers of a couple of percentage points that are eventually fatal. Radioisotope dispersion is not nearly so fatal or the open air hbomb tests would have incredible casualty rates, given that almost half the energy from the traditional megaton h-bomb is from fission of U-238 by high energy neutrons yielding very significant amounts of high energy short lived fission fragments.

A fairly accurate description of Chernobyl for instance, Richard Bell in a recent discussion added:

"Chernobyl had all of the containment integrity of a garden shed. The reactor
building was only built to keep out the weather, and the reactor itself was
not fully contained (the biological shield, which prevented radioactive
releases into the plant, was only held in place by gravity).

The big thing about terrorists attacking a nuclear plant with a nuclear bomb
is that it does not actually generate a large bodycount. It is a severe
inconvenience to have to relocate, but radioactive contamination, by itself
does not kill in job lots, nor does it kill quickly.

The reason that fallout was such a disaster in a hypothetical WWIII was not
the fallout itself, but that there was nowhere to go to escape the
contamination, and no outside help. Finally, no one actually knew what
would happen in a mass contamination. Compared to the nightmare scenarios
that came out of the Cold War, Chernobyl failed to meet our expectations
(not that we are angry or disappointed, just thankful). Now that nuclear
immolation has become little more than a local, if very severe, tragedy, it
has lost much of its bite."

In chernobyl there was no stay indoors order, and there was a chronic deficiency in dietary iodine, so radioiodine had a very rapid biouptake. There was no stay indoors order, people would take radioactive souvenieers, and thousands of liquidators worked on the cleanup of the reactor. After all was said and done next to large cities, even greenpeace's bodycount is far short of your millions of dead.

Now pray tell why do you get the idea that incinerating a reactor core will have such a high body count, when you were pretty close to the situation in chernobyl to begin with. What you would have is a statistically significant rise in thyroid cancer, which is fatal maybe 1 time in ten. In Chernobyl there was no statistical evidence of increase in leukemia or the other fatal cancers we expected. We just have no reason at all to suspect your nightmare scenario is in any way related to a reality.

You really don't understand radiotoxicity or this subject at all, which is okay because most people dont. Most people think there is significant risk from the 'dirty bomb' scenario too. If you want to learn thats fine, but I suspect you only want to argue for the sake of being contrary and because you don't like nuclear power. Its fine to not like somethinge for aesthetic reasons, or even because you really dont like me, but please lets not distort the truth.

Kazakin,

You can believe whoever you want (who is Richard Bell, anyway?) but your “facts” certainly don’t lead me to believe you know what you’re talking about. Everybody knows that Chernobyl did not have effective containment. But Chernobyl released less than 2% of it’s core’s mass and still created hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. And most of that was volatile and short lived isotopes like iodine, which is gone in weeks. Chernobyl is not even close as an analogy for a nuclear attack. A nuclear explosive would instantaneously loft the entire core into the fireball and in windy conditions spread it over thousands of square miles. I prefer to believe people I know understand the situation.

Gordon Thompson, Institute for Resource and Security Studies: “A few days afterwards, the direct effects of a nuclear attack on a nuclear power station are greater than after the isolated explosion of a nuclear bomb, but they are not dramatically different. But the delayed effects will far exceed those of an isolated nuclear explosion, because a nuclear power plant contains many more longlife radioactive substances than a nuclear warhead. A decade later, a nuclear attack against a reactor will have contaminated with radioactivity an area of ground over a thousand times as large as that contaminated by the explosion and fallout of a nuclear bomb.” (http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/terrorism/031996war.html)

Or:

Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, Kosta Tsipis and Steve Fetter: "The lethal zone for the detonation of the weapon on the reactor would be more than 500 square miles, an area 30% larger than the lethal zone created by the detonation of the weapon alone," Tsipis and Fetter estimated. Also a fireball rising 12 miles into the sky would carve a crater 400 feet deep and spread a lethal blanket of molten rock and white ash over 4,500 square miles. Furthermore, a 30% increase in delayed casualties can be expected; anyone who could not swiftly relocate would probably be dead within two months. While the area lethally contaminated would not be significantly larger, solely because the weapon was detonated on a reactor, "the length of time a given area is made uninhabitable ... is significantly larger ... ten times larger in the case of the reactor-bomb combination." This is because a bomb generally yields short-lived radioactive fallout, while a blasted reactor would scatter long-lived isotopes over the land. The total loss, according to Tsipis and Fetter, would be "of the order of 4,000 square-mile-years; consequently it would result in vast capital losses that would dwarf losses from any other single natural disaster in the history of the modern world." The MIT scientists added that hundreds of square miles would remain 'inaccessible for over a hundred years, creating a permanent monument to the event.
That sounds like a bit more than a “severe inconvenience”. It is, in fact, the greatest disaster in history.

If you are downwind of a vaporized nuclear core you will be inhaling dust with long lived isotopes that could kill you next week or 20 years from now. That is a big difference from Chernobyl.

You have no idea what I know or don’t know about radiotoxicity. But I’m pretty sure I know more than you.

"(http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/terrorism/031996war.html)"
These I've seen before; Anything coming from wise is activism with an agenda.

"This is because a bomb generally yields short-lived radioactive fallout, while a blasted reactor would scatter long-lived isotopes over the land."

Guess which is actually more dangerous.

"If you are downwind of a vaporized nuclear core you will be inhaling dust with long lived isotopes that could kill you next week or 20 years from now. That is a big difference from Chernobyl."

I think I'd be a fair bit more worried about the short lived isotopes for good reason.

"You have no idea what I know or don?t know about radiotoxicity. But I?m pretty sure I know more than you."

I've been researching this for the past five years. Your arogance and pretention is out of place and just silly. Believe what you want though. I stand by my statement that blowing up a reactor core produces a significantly lower body count than blowing up a city center, and you still havent drawn up any evidence to the contrary. The closest event we have thats similar was Chernobyl and that was several orders of magnitude less severe than what you're insisting.