400+ nuclear power plants around the world saving the release of Billions of tons of CO2 and dirty pollutants which would have to be emitted from coal. It’s time to move forward people. Nuclear is the BEST and CLEANEST renewable energy available.

Here is one of the links on the NCI cancer survey:

http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/nuclear-facilities

As they said in their statement, you can never prove a negative, but the lack of a strong correlation (would expect to see rising cancers with rising radiation doses everywhere not just in Massachusetts) would imply a low risk from radiation from nuclear plants. Also attached is a link to the Technical Brief for the Health Effects of Low Radiation Position Statement of the American Nuclear Society (this contains many references to studies showing no correlation between low level radiation and cancer):

http://ans.org/pi/ps/docs/ps41-tb.pdf (specifically pg 2 of 10 regarding geographic distribution of radiation doses)

Solar cells require toxic elements such as cadmium and arsenic. Someone’s neighborhood will be affected by having the processing plants in their backyard. Radiation is not the sole carcinogen in our society. I am not saying solar cells cannot be made safely, only that there is not a zero-toxic, zero-danger way to make electricity.

I cited the ExternE study and the other links as they have greater professional acceptance than van Leeuwen which used estimated energy inputs for the uranium mines versus actual data. My previous links posted showed only a small energy increase even for ore grades as low as 0.01%. Uranium ore is milled near the mine and only the U3O8 is transported for enrichment, minimizing the amount of material being moved (versus coal which requires greater energy input per kwh due to transportation).

I previously stated that a weakness of nuclear energy is the high capital cost and need for additional trained personnel. Many vendors and utilities are working to fix this problem. By the way, this same problem affects wind and solar as they need the same skilled craft to build and maintain their plants. As for on-line maintenance, it has been done in Europe for decades and increases the overall safety and reliability of the plants (i.e., not letting a problem fester).

Now to your comment on thermal conversion: solar thermal plants also have to reject heat to either water or air, so even the renewable industry is affected. We are stuck with thermal conversion for a little while yet…

By the way, the cite for carbon emissions from the nuclear fuel cycle being comparable to emissions from burning natural gas is from Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen — who shows that over the period of operation, fueling new reactors will involve having to process less-than-prime uranium — and the emissions will go steadily up — to where it will be more cost effective to burn the fossil fuels to make electricity than to bother processing the uranium. See Nuclear Power the Energy Balance — updated at: http://www.stormsmith.nl/

Finally, the only reason that nuclear power LOOKS like it can compete is that a whole bunch of school teachers in the 1980’s and 1990’s lost their retirement funds — lost them. There was a wholesale roll-over of the nuclear capital investment from the first generation — and where it was not LOST, it was socialized — some via electric bills that include a so-called “line fee” as in California. The fact that these nukes today have relatively low overhead is due to the collusion of the federal regulators who now allow many forms of testing and maintenance to be done while the fission process is going on, and the reduction of technically trained staff on reactor sites. We are living on borrowed time. I can only hope that your confidence in these systems that are aging and have radically reduced resources is rewarded rather than my fear made manifest.

Finally — the part about thermal systems is 100% part of the problem — 2/3 of the CO2 was generated dealing with the latent heat of phase transition and never directly generated any electricity! Same with high-level nuclear waste production — 2/3 of was generated without resulting in any electric power… thermal systems just plain have to go.

I have spent about 22 months underwater sealed up with a nuclear power plant that provided all of the power needed to drive a 9000 ton ship around the ocean. At the same time, that power plant provided electricity for cooking, air conditioning, lighting, computers, atmosphere control, and even enough to produce fresh oxygen out of water.

If it is clean enough to seal up inside a ship, it is clean enough for me.

With regard to the time to complete a significant number of plants, let’s take a look back in history. At a time when engineers still depended on slide rules and rooms full of draftsmen to produce drawings, and when there was no such thing as CNC milling machines, the US managed to complete about 120 large nuclear plants in about 20 years. We could have completed twice as many if there had not been a situation in the market that led to a perceived “overcapacity” and a desire to slow down the growth.

At the same time that we built those commercial reactors, we produced 12 surface ships, more than 100 submarines and several large aircraft carriers that all ran on uranium fission. We could have done more, but the fossil fuel industry pulled out the lobbying stops and convinced the Navy to shift back to oil power for most surface ships.

Shifting topics completely - if you want to figure out why Germany once decided to shut down its reactors, look no further than the very selfish economic motives of its leader at the time - a man named Gerhard Schroeder. He worked very hard to put the agreement together and was rewarded immediately after leaving office with a very nice and high compensated position working for Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly that was seeking security of demand for the gas from its proposed pipeline directly from Russian to Germany through the Baltic Sea. (See, for example http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2005/Gerhard-Schroeder-Gazprom13dec2005.htm )

One more thing - the source of much of the false idea that nuclear is a bad idea from a climate perspective appears to be that famous energy “guru” Amory Lovins. Here is a recent quote from that man during a recent interview on Democracy Now:

“You know, I’ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil.”

In other words, the man has a bias towards continued burning of fossil fuels, but he would like to keep the growth in demand low enough so that major oil companies can fill the demand using as much oil as possible from already existing wells. That is the most profitable way for them to operate - but it sure hurts all of the rest of us.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast

Robert

Oh, now here is an excellent primer of how Germany got here. It appears to written circa 2006, and so gives the history of Germany’s nuclear power production and the politics thereof, up until that time:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf43.html

NOW I hope that’s helpful. Sorry for the misdirected answer in the last post. Please understand it was unintentional.
Kelly

The link below is an annual report from E.On (one of Germany’s preeminent robust wind power utilities) regarding the difficulties of harnessing high capacities of wind generation.
Their qualifications to teach: “At the end of [2004], there was an installed capacity of 7,000 MW in the E.On Netz grid area. This accounted for over 40% of German wind power capacities and more than the entire wind power capacity of the United States.”
“In Germany, the ongoing expansion of wind power is making the public increasingly aware of the technical challenges of its integration into the existing system.” -? Since when should the *public* need or want to be aware of the technical challeges their utility is battling?

You can study the entire report, with a focus on variability of wind during the day or week (max output and min output within 24 or 48 hours of each other - conventional power stations must make up the deficit), the variation between the forecast and actual supply, and the expense of grid investment and reinforcement. If you have wind power available when you don’t really need it, then the grid must shunt that excess power away to other areas that can use it. The grid must be robust to do that, and/or you may find a utility nearly ‘giving away’ excess capacity that it has no customers for.

http://www.viewsofscotland.org/library/docs/EON_Netz.report_2005_e_eng.pdf

Hope that helps!
Kelly

http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf100.html

http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html

While the weblinks are from a nuclear website, you will see that they do point to non-nuclear entities for their information. The second link is probably better, as it presents different ranges for both the estimates on nuclear fuel cycle inputs and (at the bottom of the second weblink) a g/kwh comparison. Also in the second weblink, please note that they also provide, in the notes for Table 1, energy input information for ore grades as low as 0.01%.

If you have further questions on the data, please let me know. The point I am trying to make is that nuclear energy is so concentrated that it provides low carbon power even at low ore grades. The big challenges for nuclear are lack of experienced personnel for a large expansion and capital costs. However, the personnel and capital issues also impact solar and wind since you need many of the same kinds of skilled craft workers for these devices too (i.e., electricians, welders, mechanics, etc.) and these devices along with their required grid upgrades are also quite expensive. If it were that cheap and easy the utilities would have already built them (just as they went on the big building spree for natural gas turbines in the ’90s when gas from Canada was $2 per million BTU).

Honestly this goes for a lot of yours and michael stuart’s arguments. the thing about germany’s trying to phase out nukes - can someone refer me to somewhere to read up on that. cuz i don’t know nothing about germany. you say that and all i can do is either assume what you’re saying makes sense even though i don’t understand it or assume you’re lying and neither one of those options is really very reasonable. generally not a good idea to assume.

so here’s an email address (appalachian-always(at)riseup.net) where either of y’all can contact me to explain this stuff. or if you want to explain it on the blog, that’s fine too.

w