I think that nuclear power is a sufficiently sustainable source of power to provide all of the growth in our energy demands that are going to come in the next million years or so. (Emphasis added)
Yes, I checked the audio to make sure the ABC transcribers got it right and that’s exactly what he said. That was Barry Brook talking on Counterpoint last week.
In a recent post Steve Kirsch describes Brook’s conversion to nuclear:
Prominent Australian climate scientist Barry Brook admitted that he spent months educating himself on fourth generation nuclear before he came to the same conclusion Hansen did. In fact, before Brook heard about fourth generation nuclear, he thought the global warming problem was intractable because his own calculations confirmed the observations of many others (including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, MIT President Susan Hockfield and US Senator Lamar Alexander) regarding the necessity of nuclear power due to the problems with renewables being able to scale to meet our energy needs. (Emphasis added)
The so-called fourth generation nuclear is the Integrated Fast Reactor (IFR) which Kirsch tells us was invented in 1974 and worked on thereafter, but was cancelled in the early Clinton years by people who used to work in the oil and natural gas industry. Brook has now written copiously on the merits nuclear energy. In a recent article in the Oz which addresses the myths surrounding the nuclear power industry Brook says:
Worldwide, nuclear power is undergoing a renaissance. There are 45 so-called generation III reactors under construction, including 12 in China, and another 388 are planned or proposed.
The IFR plants will burn all of the uranium 235, plus the uranium 238, known as depleted uranium, yielding potentially 100 to 300 times the energy we currently get, with the waste residue returning to background levels of radiation within 300 years. Brook says the new reactors would have to violate the laws of physics to melt down or explode.
One issue not addressed by Brook and Kirsch as far as I know (I haven’t read all their stuff) is the safety of mining uranium. For 4G nuclear power, however, it shouldn’t be necessary for a few centuries.
According to Kirsch at current rates of power usage we could get 700 years out of the existing nuclear waste.
When I looked at Germany’s nuclear dilemma I said:
…if we want our grandchildren to live in a half decent world, I think we need to de-carbonise electricity grids by about 2030 and then go negative on emissions growth from 2030 to 2050, that is, reduce atmospheric CO2 from 450 ppm plus, or whatever it is then, and head for 280.
Brook suggests that to electrify everything, including our transport system, we’ll have to treble our stationary power production. I’d like to see the advanced economies phase out coal-fired power by 2020, with the developing countries doing likewise in the following decade. In Brokk’s vision in a portfolio of energy sources nuclear may well turn out to be the staple.
Brook says:
In terms of costs and build times, standardised, modular, passive-safety designs, which can be factory built and shipped to site, are game changers for the industry.
Brook sees this happening right now in India and China. So Brook thinks we could have nuclear in Australia within 10 years with more that half of that time being taken in getting our heads into gear and making the plans.
It’s worth emphasising that this industrialiastion of the production of nuclear power plants has advantages for safety which are built in to the specification. Previously, says Brook, each nuclear power station was a one-off project with a unique design.
In our case the Rudd Government is only aspiring to a 20% Renewable Energy Target (note the “mandatory” has been dropped) by 2020 and has proposed a CPRS that is an ETS on training wheels for some years. It’s hard to see us making a significant dent on emissions with energy savings, roof-top installations, a rising population and an increased demnd for stationary power if Brook is right. Unless the Queensland graziers give over half their properties to growing trees (not a joke, post forthcoming).
Meanwhile Hansen points out that Waxman-Markey, which he calls a “monstrous 1400-page absurdity … hatched in Washington after energetic insemination by special interests” builds in approval of new coal-fired power plants. He pointed out to the Germans that if they went ahead with new coal-fired power stations they’d have to persuade the Russians to leave some of their oil in the ground.
Not to mention the Canadians and their tar sands and someone said the other day that the Victorian Government had approved a project to turn brown coal into oil. Just 60,000 barrels for now but potentially more oil than all the Middle East!
Victoria is sitting on 25% of the world’s brown coal reserves. This glossy informs (warns) us what they intend to do with it. That includes liquefaction and gasification as well as drying it out to compete directly with blck coal exports.
I don’t know about you, but somtimes life get’s tee-jus, don’t it?
Meanwhile in Britain where the Government has given the green light to nukes we have an activist Government driving hard on renewables especially wind power. I suspect that when they want to go beyond 50% renewables nukes will come back to a more central focus.
So what should we do? I don’t know, but in Australia we have unrivalled potential for solar, geothermal and probably (I don’t know much about it) wave power, the last two of which could supply our base-load requirement. The viability of large-scale geothermal should be settled in a half a decade or so. If we did large-scale conversions from coal to methane we could buy time.
But for the rest of the world with 388 nuclear plants planned or proposed (and I assume these are all 3G) the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. As a major supplier of ore we need to think well as to how we mine the stuff.
An article from February in Der Spiegel includes this image showing where nukes are and where they will be:
It is now presumed out of date, but the action appears to be in China, India, the rest of Asia, Russia, the USA and to a lesser extent Latin America and Eastern Europe. Western Europe may well be turning which leaves Africa.
Necessary or not, there is little doubt that nukes will be part of our future and that may not be as bad as many now perceive.
I think climate change is such a threat, putting anything non-carbon related off the table is a bit silly.
This said, nuclear power certainly isn’t as cheap, fast, or efficient and its many boosters would have us believe in practice.
But at the same time,I think opponents have a tendency to get pretty hysterical about nuclear waste. No it’s not great, but the waste output is tiny compared to carbon, and we have shitloads of room to put it in, at least.
jeez Brian, I thought your headline meant A-bombs
Millions of years, eh? Adolf only dreamt of ein tausend-Jahr Reich : a thousand years was generally thought a little boastful and a teensy-weensy bit excessive. People do notice these hyperboles
I suppose one of the bases of the fears, patrickg, is the very long half-lives of some of the waste components, as well as their lethality. Carbon etc processes tend to be faster.
You’re right that nuclear power isn’t quick to set up.
I’ve long opposed the use of nukes as a power source for reasons involving:
1. Safe disposal of waste (with 1/2 lives of thousands of years, and high toxicity of the elements/compounds) produced, not an insignificant problem.
2. Safe disposal of “decommissioned” plants – which, in my understanding is also not an insignificant problem
involving the “current” generation(s) of reactors (and I don’t think the use of DU in armaments qualifies as “safe” disposal, BTW).
If the technology you refer to in the post can in fact deliver on the first point, what effects will there be on the second (if any)?
If both of these issues are addressed realistically, then it would in fact be a
“game changer”, as far as I am concerned wrt to the use nuclear power.
I remain concerned though, that significant effort (and $$$) is being put into “future” techs, such as this, and the fantastical search for “clean coal” technology rather than taking any immediate steps to meaningfully address the problems arising from GW, principally involving our gluttony for energy.
Particularly when many of the “low hanging fruit”, such as improved energy efficiency, and “sensible use” options (for energy use)are being at worst, ignored, and at best, given only token support by the government.
Irrespective of the possibilities of this technology, I am still concerned at the lack of either meaningful or realistic actions to address to potential catastrophe we all face, as a result of our greedy lifestyles, and pessimistic about any government’s willingness or ability to take such meaningful actions, while in the thrall of the fossil fuels lobbies.
The cost of nukes is pretty high per unit of energy, there is not a case for them in Australia unless AGW is accepted as a reality.
There was an extremely interesting article here http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3748014,00.html
Which claims to have a teatment for radiation that is near perfect. Because of its source I canr help wondering if its meant to dissuade Iran from it nukes proggamme though.
If that treatment was real would that change anyones mind on the safety of nuclear energy?
And the terribble side effect of making it a option for war again?
Not too long ago there was a large particle accelerator located in the lower floor of a prestigious institute in Melbourne.
After it had run for a year, one of the Professors calculated that a large gamma ray flux was entering the brick wall behind it.
Perhaps he suggested we should find out what is on the other side of the brick wall? It was a major bus stop.
They closed the installation down the next day and we were all told to say nowt.
Humans are basically not smart enough to mess with this stuff.
Huggy
I don’t know anywhere near enough to pronounce on the numbers (700years?), and I’m certainly amongst those who is accepting of a role for nuclear in the energy mix, but AIUI the cost of reprocessed fuel is way above the stuff that goes into LWRs, so you have to think we are going to build up a lot more waste before we get anywhere near going to this method.
We’re also going to have to build a massive number of reactors with inxdecent haste and close caol plants on a schedule that is going to sacrifice much of the sunk cost of existing capacity. How you’re going to fund that is anyone’s guess.
Clearly, the question isn’t a purely technical one but one over infrastructure and economic policy
NB: no mention of thorium in this mix …
Fran
Nuclear power is the only viable base load solution, other than coal, gas, geothermal and hydroelectric.
The Latrobe Valley has been promoting its various coal-to-oil project since I was in primary school in Traralgon, and now I’m 34. I’d be thrilled if it was actually getting somewhere, but I have my suspicions that it’s as energy inefficient as ever.
Good news about the nuclear plants, though – especially on more efficient usage of existing waste.
Rationalist@7
Coal is only “viable” if you zero rate the damage to the commons attached to it. NG prbably has a quite limited lifetime and is still GHG producing. Geothermal isn’t available everywhere. Neither is hydro. Nuclear probably isn’t either because there are some states too flaky to have it.
Huggy, we stuff around with all manner of dangerous things all the time. If we’re not smart enough to stuff around with nuclear material, there’s a whole load of other stuff we should stop touching too.
Mole, that kind of thing shouldn’t change your mind about the safety of nuclear power one way or the other. There were only a couple of hundred cases of acute radiation sickness from Chernobyl amongst the plant workers, of whom 37 died. The vast majority of deaths from Chernobyl, if they have/will occur, is the result of an increase in the rate of cancer caused by a slight increase in radiation exposure across millions of people, which this drug wouldn’t change one iota (assuming it works). However, the projections are the result of applying something called the “linear-no-threshold” model – for which the evidence is weak-to-nonexistent at very low doses – across such a population. It will probably never be clear whether these extra premature deaths actually occurred.
The same goes for nuclear war – not to mention that nuclear weapons can turn tens of thousands of people into superheated plasma at a single blow, and a substantial nuclear exchange would trigger very severe global climactic effects. Nuclear war remains teh really, really, really bad.
Pterosaur: the barriers to disposing of waste are political, not technical.
First thing to appreciate is that (to a first approximation) the longer the half-life of something, the less radioactive it is. Uranium-238 has a half-life of a few billion years, so its chemical toxicity (it’s a nasty heavy metal, and can affect you in similar ways to lead) is a greater threat than its radioactivity. By contrast, there are many isotopes with half-lives of milliseconds, or even shorter periods – they’re extremely radioactive, but since they’re around for such short periods they don’t generally represent a waste disposal problem. The really dangerous ones are the ones with half-lives with periods from days to centuries – such as Cesium-137 or Iodine-131 (which caused all the thyroid cancers post-Chernobyl).
Nuclear waste from power plants is a mixture of short-lived and long-lived isotopes. The short-lived stuff fizzles away and is gone well before the stuff gets buried, leaving only the medium-life and long-life stuff. After a couple of thousand years, the waste is little more radioactive than the ore it came from.
The second thing to keep in mind is that radioactive stuff is all around you. Uranium is present in small quantities everywhere, which means that its associated decay products (radium and so on) are there too.
If you bury nuclear waste in nice, stable rock a few hundred metres down, any water molecule that whizzes past the waste will pass comparable quantities of nuclear material already present in the rock on its way to the surface.
So, yes, I reckon the risks of disposal are manageable.
Interesting that the Nuke lobby has been so well prepared to condition us to acccept that they are the only solution.
Robert Merkel
Oh I wasnt advocating the use of nuclear weapons, just wondering if such a medical development might remove some of the taboos that have held back tatical use of them. I hope not.
On the up side it would also remove some of the scare factor from a dirty bomb incident in a major metropolis (one of the WOT scenarios), it would still be a major incident, but with few if any deaths, much more manageable.
I appreciate that, Mole, but just making the point that it’s not radiation sickness that makes the use of nukes too horrible to contemplate.
Dirty bombs are a hollow threat, but, again, this drug wouldn’t help much to mitigate against the real risk – in essence, people inhaling radioactive particles into their lungs and dying of cancer years hence. But that’s largely illusory anyway – any dirty bomb powerful enough to cause significant casualties would almost certainly kill its creators before they had a chance to use it.
It’s really hard to have these debates when the philosophy of science of so many participants is stuck in the 1970s.
Science is not just a truth finding exercise.
The reason nuclear waste debates are so intractable is that technical issues are so thoroughly entangled in political ones.
As Brian Wynne and others have demonstrated again and again, nuclear experts are also political actors whose knowledge comes into conflict with local actors in ways that aren’t just about ‘educating’ them or filling in knowledge gaps. Beginning with that assumption is a very poor way of developing energy policy, especially when nuclear expert advice is so often (always?) tied up with security and military issues that make building consensus through candid decision-making so difficult.
Mole@4
That drug appears to be an ideal tool for genocide in a mixed population.
Give the drug to all your good guys and then explode a nice high radioactivity, low blast bomb and there go all the bad guys. I am very suspicious of that report.
Rationalist@7
Could I add Coal Seam Methane to the gas list, it has the advantage that it is probably as good as uranium from a CO2 reduction perspective, after you take into account the vast apparatus required to dispose of waste: Train the experts that will have to fix the plants and the academic experts who will explain that the accident never happened and if it did they have this new gee whiz drug that will fix it , set up a number of high security reactor component manufacturing plants, build the secure roads rails and ports, mine the ore, train and pay the security guards, decommission the radioactive plants, define and protect huge exclusion zones with 24 hour security, train and pay the troops that guard the uranium trains on their way to Darwin,Overfly the mines with 24 hour helicopter surveillance, pas new laws relating to nuclear safety that restrict any observation of a reactor , pass the new laws to restrict reporting on accidents. Build the Jails for protesters. Provide safe rest homes for the criminally insane nuclear boosters.
Oh gosh nuclear utopia will be upon us.
Huggy
Without wanting to derail too badly into warnerd territory, the barriers to nuclear war are political, not technological. They stopped being effective weapons of war the moment the Soviet Union announced their “Joe One” test, and became diplomatic and theoretical tools of IR—they effectively abolished full-scale war between nuclear armed states, turning total war from merely a large risk into a certain catastrophe. Hence, of course, the motivation for arse-out-of-pants dictatorships at risk of regime change to seek nuclear weapons.
Proliferation is scary and frightening as an IR issue, and expanded use of nuclear energy has its own risks, waste rather than accident being IMO the most compelling, but they’re not necessarily as bound together as they were in the sixties and seventies.
Pwned before preview, DK, heh. Fair cop: public war-philosophy’s also having a hard time changing gears from the good old days of Kremlinology and CTs with their urban guerrilla minimanuals.
Huggybunny
I hadnt thought of that little scenario either. Well Im off this weapons topic now, it wasnt the intent of the post, so I hope no-one thinks I was trying to derail it, apologies if it seems that way.
sometimes irrational paranoia is just irrational paranoia, dk.
John Howard tried to use the nuclear power wedge to create disunity on the left and to generate yet another excuse to procrastinate on climate action. For this reason I think that, in the short term, we should put distractions such as nuclear power and emission trading on hold and get on with direct action aimed at doing the obvious, easy things to reduce our carbon footprint.
At this stage, all the clean power generated will be used no matter what technology is selected because we have the necessary base load power. In the longer term it is not so simple because the fossil fuel fired base power will have to be phased out. For example, even with good geographic spread, we would need a large excess in wind power capacity to be sure that power needs will be met. Under these circumstances the competitive position of reliable base load sources such as nuclear and geothermal may improve.
In 10 yrs time we should have amuch better idea whether technologies such as geothermal, kite power etc. have reached their claimed potential as well as know more about how 4th or later nuclear power stations have performed in practice. Al we should really be doing now is keeping a low key watch on nuclear.
Perhaps I should expand on that a bit.
I find the nuclear debate surprisingly similar to that on the science of climate change.
21 Robert Merkel Jul 20th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Pr Q is a critic of nuclear power energy generating options, largely on grounds of cost, regulatory delays and technical hassles.
I think its his beard talking. but he shaved it off. Do may be it goes deeper.
Robert Merkel
Probably because one is riding pretty hard on the coattails of the other.
Without a carbon tax/cap and trade, nuclear power (at least in Australia) is an expensive way to generate electricity.
If you kneecap the ony baseload opposition (currently anyway), of coal than you literaly have the only game in town. It would be interesting to see how nuch nuclear industry money has gone towards greenhouse studies. Id be betting it would be a pretty penny or 2.
Yeah, and GMOs, probably pockets of the nanotech debate … most contemporary Empire science, really.
And Liam, I wasn’t even thinking specifically of game theory etc. Hoisted by an unintentional petard it would seem …?
Liam
Nuclear war as an extension of politics by other means may be irrational and catastrophic, but while a non-negligible set of nations has these weapons, it’s not unreasonble to feel worried IMO.
There have been instances (in the 20th century for example) when States have done war-like things which knowledgeable strategists would label seriously loco, si?
Huggy: your gamma ray anecdote sounds like University of Melbourne physics dept (though I’m merely guessing). Bus stop? Tram stop in Swanston Street?
RMIT had a physics dept and plenty of nearby bus stops but did they have an accelerator in the basement? BTW, presumably there was good, solid shielding to protect the physicists and postgrads? I mean, harming the passing public is one thing, frying your own people is a special kind of dastardly incompetence.
The SS-27 PETARD is leaving its launchpad deep inside cyberspace. Warheads will begin exploding above my argument in thirty-five minutes. That gives me about fifteen minutes with reaction time to get a Godwin retaliatory strike in.
Robert@22
I recall going to an anti-uranium rally in about 1980 in which there was a sign which read “you can’t hug children with nuclear arms”.
Cute …
Fran – that rules out the ‘nuclear family’, eh?
Well IIRC the people carrying the signs were late 70s-style feminists … so I’d say so …
Sorry, general crankiness and exasperation showing through…
But I suppose my concern is that nuclear power gets held to absolutely unreasonable standards because of what is, essentially, guilt by association.
Most sane people who have spent any length of time in remote central Australia can see why it is an ideal location for Nuclear Waste Disposal. The only thing stopping it is NIMBYism.
Robert M
One of the aspects with nuclear power is media vigilance and suspicion over every accident or incident. I recall a couple of decades ago, someone writing that deaths in the solar hot water and solar PV panels industry had been ignored. The argument was that with more plumber-hours being spent on roofs, there would be a higher death rate amongst plumbers DIRECTLY caused by installation and maintenance, as they plummeted to their demises.
Good old “back-of-the-envelope” indicated a relatively high death rate. (i.e, miniscule, but comparable to coal mining deaths in Australia, f’rinstance)
Razor,
Apologies if I’ve misunderstood you here. It seems like you’re saying that it is okay for whitefellas to steal all the most productive land in Australia, and then make much of the rest of it more radioactive, because only brown people care about that land anyway.
With attitudes like that, we’ll need KRudd to apologize for our future as well.
Ay carumba!
On the issue of storage and disposal, I found the Marianas Trench solution an elegant one.
Make the waste into synroc torpedoes that are dropped into the 10 km deep floor of the trench which then, over time, transport the torpedoes into the mantle as the tectonic plate sinks.
Lets face it, the objections to nuclear power are a lot of anti scientific hogwash. Its a crucial technology for fighting climate change and Australia should be doing it. PS to hell with the Nimbys!
Razor has just made two really stupid suggestions for dealing with nuclear waste. That sort of waste needs to be where it can be monitored, even in synroc, for a start, but if Razor had bothered to do some research it would have discovered that both the IFR and LFTR 4th gen reactors would produce electricity from this waste.
For reasons beyond our control, the world is persisting with 3rd gen technology and it seems there is nothing left for us but to make money out of this idiotic path until the captains of this ship of fools decide the time is right for 4th gen.
Especially if the 4th or 5th gen can work out, really, honest and for true, what to do with the waste.
ut I suppose my concern is that nuclear power gets held to absolutely unreasonable standards because of what is, essentially, guilt by association.
No, it gets held to unreasonable standards because the waste has to be stored and managed for longer than any civilisation on earth has ever lasted. Good luck writing the specifications for the next civilisation.
Helen, the point of 4th generation nuclear power is that the waste a) is shrunk in volume by a couple of orders of magnitude and b) all the long-lived isotopes are used up so that the waste becomes inert within a century.
As to your second point, no it doesn’t.
From an environmental perspective, I am absolutely convinced that the stuff can be disposed of in a way that absolutely guarantees that, left to its own devices, it will not pose an environmental or health risk to anyone until the end of time.
Why?
For one, 99.9% of the radioactivity in radioactive waste is from short-lived sources that dissipate within a century. The stuff gets less dangerous over time, unlike, say, lead or mercury.
For another, there is lots of radioactive material in the natural environement. Any water molecule that traverses past a container of nuclear waste, even if whatever it’s held in breaks down, will pass a comparable quantity of radioactive material by the time it reaches the biosphere.
The other reason why we need to monitor the stuff is so that somebody doesn’t turn it into a nuclear weapon.
If our technological civilization goes to pot, this becomes a moot point, as we’ll lose the ability to turn plutonium into weapons.
Assuming it’s still around, the existence of spent reactor fuel is neither here nor there. There are plenty of other ways to obtain fissile material, and frankly several of them are a much easier route to a bomb.
“I find the nuclear debate surprisingly similar to that on the science of climate change.”
..maybe that’s because you are surprisingly similar to most other nuclear advocates, in that you seem to jump to the conclusion that anyone that questions ANYTHING about mining of Uranium, use of Uramium and the storage of radioactive waste as being a fervent anti-nuke hippy.
I’m happy to consider Barry Brook’s contributions to the discussion, simply because he doesn’t say things like “…radioactive stuff is all around you. Uranium is present in small quantities everywhere”. You make a comparison about this debate and the climate change debate, presumably to compare anyone who raises doubts about nuclear science with climate change deniers, and you’re the one talking about the radioactivity around us?…err….carbon dioxide is all around us too, it exists in small quantities everywhere, it’s good for you, we’d be stuffed without it, it’s plant food and all! You might want to take another look at your analogy.
Robert, leaving aside the point you have well made about its diminishing radioactive toxicity isn’t it also true that the waste will also have chemical toxicity just like lead and mercury and, umm, depleted uranium?
Is it really that pressing for adults today and immediate ones still undergoing physical changes,to drop all other energy possibilities for the sake of Robert Merkel’s confidence in his understandings and presentation of those understandings!?I have similar stuff to this from time to time.I don’t feel at all wrong in anyway to having carried banners in the 1970s anti-nuke pro land rights. I think therefore,as a result of those experiences,which included insults, then, of major and minor type, that suggesting something about 1970′s types,is in fact,a type of senility to those who need do that.I am opposed to the wind generators today,because simply not enough people get an advantage out of them,and other minor problems. I cannot however see why research,about nuclear waste specifically in Australia could include seeing if the waste can be mixed safely with present gases available in Australia..but not in ways that someone or place could be immediately threatened.There are many gases Australia already produces,and, because of a major problem of science not being that large on the agenda except as wow type journalism, not much is researched.Coal burning has some aspects of isotope related matters,I would prefer this not to be so,by maybe means of more inclusion of isotope treated gas.Today as I walked by the road out the front of this place,a strange fungi that occurs regularly out here seems to grow in bituminous road environments, thus even shale deposits ,if somehow biological extraction was possible remains somewhere in my imagination as a future possibility.Solar and wind do not have to be in the configurations that are often seen today.And KeeleyNet.com.what’snew often goes there including historically.The fact remains,however,that Nuclear power as well as some configurations of even solar are way out of reach of consumer needs,and, competition may not lead to price drop,but, failure in production.I dont want my future always to be in the hands of monopolists,the one trick ponies of energy futures,are already hogging the show.And the show is boring and non-participatory right now.Titanium Dioxide even in nuke research gases crystal piezo electrics doesn’t get to be much on the team.Yet that is a easy stuff to produce.Crystal growing could be a useful thing in underground long wall tunnels and to stop rivers from disappearing.Crystals can grow into very large planned shapes,and ,thus can be standardised. Crystals and coal dust equals roadmaking materials.No takers.No imagination.All one trick ponies everywhere,I am out of it.Energy arguments,I will stop participating in.The country is full of would be science journalists.Tellme Robert what powered the lasers for the measurements of the reflectors you accept as being placed somewhere in 1969 on the Moon!? I can’t take you bloody Tertiary educated pricks any longer..you just simply feed on everybody elses work and imagination.
Furious balancing: that’s not what I meant, and it was dumb of me to use the analogy without explaining further.
My use of the analogy was that some members of the hardcore anti-nuke set use the same techniques as climate science deniers.
As to your point about my claim about natural radioactivity – you might think I’m indulging in an irrelevant debating point, but I’m really not. The fact is that even in the case of Chernobyl, the level of additional radiation exposure for the cleanup crew and the people living in the path of its fallout is considerably less than the natural radiation levels in some parts of the world. Furthermore, there isn’t any apparently correlation between natural background radiation levels and cancer rates. Go read the IAEA’s documents.
GregM: Yes it is chemically toxic.
But the quantities of stuff we’re talking about are extremely small, and it will have to be carefully disposed of.
But the stuff will likely be buried half a kilometre down below the Earth’s surface, in rock that’s been stable for hundreds of millions of years. I wish we ere that careful with all the other toxic waste we randomly spray around the joint.
Robert, I don’t need to read the IAEA’s documents, I understand the point you are making about natural background radiation levels, my point is not to challenge the validity of that statement, I really just wanted to challenge the analogy, because I think it’s quite unfair, and inflammatory. It’s not the first time in recent days, comparisons with climate change deniers has been made and I don’t really see how it’s helpful to go down that road.
“Nuclear waste from power plants is a mixture of short-lived and long-lived isotopes. The short-lived stuff fizzles away and is gone well before the stuff gets buried, leaving only the medium-life and long-life stuff. After a couple of thousand years, the waste is little more radioactive than the ore it came from.”
I see this as an attempt to down play the risks associated with waste. The waste is extremely lethal and some of it has a very long half life.
It’s probably true that once you have correctly packaged and buried the waste the risk is diminished somewhat. However this comfortable scenario leaves out the transportation phase. Waste may have to move through built up areas, accidents happen (look at that fuel tanker explosion in Italy the other week and think radioactive isotope). It also presupposes that waste disposal will be carried out to the most exacting standards in perpetuity. There is plenty of scope for standards to fall over time as more waste is produced and disposal contracts go to the cheapest tenderer.
It’s easy for Barry Brook to sit down, read the latest journals, do some maths and then declare (rather stupidly for a scientist) that nuclear power can deliver us into energy Nirvana. Like I said elsewhere, where are the models for a fully nuked world?
From this link http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971#more
“In addition to the thorium present in mine tailings and in surface monazite sands, burning coal at the average 1000 MWe power plant produces about 13 tons of thorium per year. That thorium is recoverable from the power plant’s waste ash pile.
One ton of thorium will produce nearly 1 GW of electricity for a year in an efficient thorium cycle reactor. Thus current coal energy technology throws away over 10 times the energy it produces as electricity. This is not the result of poor thermodynamic efficiency; it is the result of a failure to recognize and use the energy value of thorium.”
I don’t like nuclear fission. I too marched against it in the 70s, but in the face of it’s continued application around the world, I have come out in favour of 4th gen nuclear power for the sake of making the best of a bad situation.
Perhaps, a smart Australia will take back the world’s 3rd gen waste, at a price, and stockpile it until it becomes more valuable than mined Uranium, when it can be sold again to produce electricity in 4th gen reactors.
Meanwhile, a smart Australia will continue full steam with the utilization of its renewable sources, tides, waves, wind, geothermal and solar. And the world will reduce it’s population to one billion and stop overfishing the oceans and stop wasting energy and restore the forests and stop extinguishing other species and stop poisoning the soils and water and can somebody please slap me?
Levy a carbon tax and let the market sort out the best form of power. I suspect it would be baseload nuclear, but maybe I’m wrong.
It is never both at the same time, is Robert’s point. What is highly radioactive has a short half-life and quickly decays to something less radioactive. What is not highly radioactive has a long half-life and stays at a low level of emission for a long time.
They are inverses of each other.
Highly radioactive stuff is like a sprinter. It puts it lots of energy very quickly, then loses its power quickly. Lightly radioactive stuff is the bushwalker. It moves slowly but retains its energy for a long time.
There is no radioactive substance which has both high radioactivity and a long half-life. They are mathematically inverse.
If I sound like I am repeating this in tedious detail, it’s because this very simple point is frequently misunderstood but very important to understanding the environmental and economic impact of nuclear waste.
Huggy, the google tells me that of the several dozen particle accelerators around the world there is only one PA in Australia, the Synchroton down near Monash Uni. It has it’s own building independent of any other institution, cost us taxpayers a mint, and, AFAIK, hasn’t been shut down.
This “prestigious institute” didn’t happen to also house a creative writing course, did it?
Robert, you can fantasise as much as you like about “4th Generation Nuclear Power” but IT DOES NOT EXIST. Repeat – it is nothing but a wet dream.
The nice little green painted reactors that comne to your gated community in a mini movers van do not exist.
Maybe in 20 to 30 years they will exist Robert but by then they will be too late to have any impact at all on GW.
In the meantime while you are fantasising about the green reactor in a mini mover just about every-body will be building conventional nukes and making bombs with them.
Meantime the true Greenhouse deniers will be pointing to the distant golden glow of a the nuclear “true grail” while the most obvious and up close soltions are ignored.
I will argue that we stand at yet another bifurcation in our future. Take the road of massive global nuclear power programs and it leads straight into nuclear war and fascism.
Huggy
Huggybunny: the simple fact is that msot of the world’s population lives in countries that already have nuclear weapons or could get them fairly easily without building power reactors. The limitation is the will, not the means.
As for waste transportation, have a look at this:
nickws
that may be so now, but some years ago 70s? 80s? Melb Uni Physics had a betatron (and earlier had had a cyclotron in the 50s? 60s). The cyclotron was large, unwieldy and above ground. Arts students would have walked past its building.
As I pointed out at the end of the post, the world appears to be going nuclear in a big way no matter what we think of it. In view of this a big effort in developing 4th gen nuclear seems essential, and has the prospect of offering a world that is not power-constrained.
I don’t think this should just be left to the market to work out.
Whether we go nuke in Australia is a different question. John D’s summary @ 20 seems about right.
The most bothersome part of the nuclear cycle may well be mining. I’ve just found my notes on the Olympic Dam expansion. Try this for size.
They are planning to scrape off 350m of overburden which will involve shifting one million tonnes of earth every day for 4 years. To do this BHP will have to buy every one of those big earth movers produced in the world for a year. On late last year’s prices they will burn $6 billion worth of fuel in the process. The project is due to come online in 2015 when they will draw power to the equivalent of 50% of SA’s current consumption. Almost certainly they will have to commit to largely traditional (dirty) power sources for this.
With this, Victoria’s coal liquefaction plans and expansion plans for coal burning in NSW and elsewhere I’m buggered if I know how Australia is going to reduce emissions.
Of course Olympic dam is also about copper and other minerals.
A big advantage of 4th gen nukes is that mining uranium should become redundant. Brook says a 100,000 year waste storage problem becomes a 300 year problem. 4th gen is probably worth pursuing for that alone. Salient Green’s notion that we should take in nuclear waste (and get paid for it) then flog it back for fuel is not such a bad idea. The Swede’s will probably do it.
nickws
Like they really wrote a letter in a time loop or summink telling the world that they had a whole raft of secret and semi secret nuclear physics based programs back in the 60′s and 70′s. I guy I shared a house with was died in a really bad way when he knocked over a pile of graphite bricks in a reactor, in Melbourne, see if you can find that in Google. If you go down to the south coast of Vic and look in the right place you can still find the foundations for a reactor that was never finished because of a change in government policy and the builders had proceeded without a planning permission or notification of any kind.
Huggy
A credible explanation for confused stories about particle accelerators…
…Not so much.
Anyway, Huggy’s response to the policy issues raised in this thread go straight to Godwin’s, so I don’t feel at all guilty in raising questions about what is and isn’t embellishment.
Brian @54
It’s a point that is worth making. Not only does this solve a problem with possible proliferation offshore, but we get new fuel out of it and an industry.
The point about the fuel load for the mining is also a fair one. Masses of diesel will be required. As you say, it’s not only uranium but importantly copper — a key mineral for anyone wanting electrification, but still, it’s no bagatelle.
Given AIUI that a lot of the existing thorium in Australia is simply discarded as tailings from harvest of monazite, you do wonder why this resourcece isn’t used more often in the nuclear fuel cycle.
Fran, Indeed if you must use nuclear power, use Thorium.
Trouble is the Thorium reactors are just as far away as the nice little green Spacewarp generation 4 ones.
Thorium has the advantage that you can burn it in accelartor based reactors that cannot explode and that cannot make nuclear weapons. The last being the reason no-one has developed it.
Huggy
HB@58
Thoiorum reactors were amongst the first ever built and yes they were abandoned because they were no good at producing weaponizable Pu. They can also be used to degrade MOX and Pu when these are used as the fissile material.
Fran Barlow -
Yes, and the masses of diesel required will cost a motza. But even with that cost BHP finds it worthwhile, and in fact cheaper than running an underground mine. It suggests they are confident there is a helluva market for uranium and copper.
.
Huggybunny -
Bullshit, pure and undiluted bullshit.
Derrida@60
My point was against the oft quoted claim that nuclear energy is carbon neutral. Maybe if all the diesel were biodiesel but at this stage …
I agree with Robert Merkel that nuclear accidents are surprisingly less deadly than they are made out to be, and given the circumstances – 20 years of dithering and delay by people with the power to make these decisions – we need to consider nuclear. I don’t think it will be a great solution because of the time involved in constructing plant, etc. but it needs to be considered. And Australia should definitely be finding a way to take the waste – we can get a lot of money from it, and we are the best placed to do it.
And of course SG the less often stated problem is the mecanics of phasing out coal in favour of nuclear in ways that leave the stakeholders of both happy. It’s hard to see how that can proceed at anything like the speed it needs to happen without massive compensation for sunk cost losses.
I just Wikied Olympic Dam and the ‘Uranium represents only a minority of the mine’s total revenue’. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Dam,_South_Australia
I tuned out him or her months ago. If blogs had killfiles Huggybunny would be in mine.
As far as I’m concerned, Huggy is welcome here – as long as he behaves, which he usually does.
Brian: Your figures on mining equipment reuirements may be a little exaggerated. Total movement at Mt Newman was around 400kt/day while I was there. The fleet required to do this was not particularly large by mining standards. Olympic dam may require more equipment per tonne because it will be deeper. However, deeper pits offer the prospect of trolley assist to reduce diesel requirements.
I also seem to recall that Olympic Dam was being touted as a logical market for geothermal power since it is so close to the geothermal source.
Even with gen 3 the total life emissions for nuclear are very competitive.
For what it is worth, the following data was put out by the uranium information centre:
TYPE G CO2/kWh % OF COAL MEDIAN
HIGH LOW MEDIAN
Coal 1306 966 1136 85 to 115
Gas 688 439 537 39 to 61
Hydro 236 4 238 0.3 to 21
Sola PV 280 100 190 9 to 25
Wind 48 10 29 0.9 to 4.2
Nuclear 21 9 15 0.8 to 1.9
for practical purposes the emissions from uranium mining and processing would be negligible for gen 4.
Salient Green, Olympic Dam is the world’s largest deposit of Uranium, it is therefore appropriate that the mining of Uranium be discussed in a way that reflects the importance of that deposit.
Brain, I think I have the numbers on my other computer of the volume of soil that will be displaced, and the amount of land that the displaced soil is likely to cover, I’ll try and track it down when I have more time.
John D the information was from notes I took listening to a program on Radio National, Bush Telegraph I think. I think from memory the guy giving out the information was a Green in the SA parliament, I’ve forgotten his name. He seemed to have gone into it in great detail, but I’d say he wasn’t a rolled gold source.
I did a google map link between Olympic dam and Innamincka and from memory it was about 1,000k, but it wasn’t a direct route. Geodynamics isn’t scheduled to enter the commercial market until 2015 and then is unlikely to offer the quantities required by BHP Billiton. So I’m thinking that they’ll have to commit to traditional sources.
OTOH I did read today that SA was increasing its wind power significantly, but the point of the article was that renewable power coming onstream in Australia is not even keeping up with increased demand.
There is another geothermal development in the Flinders Ranges that might actually have its nose in front from a snippet I heard, but I don’t have any real information.
“another geothermal development in the Flinders Ranges”…
That’d be Petratherm/TruEnergy/BeachPetroleum’s Paralana project, 40 kilometres east of Arkaroola. Mar’n Fer’s'n has given them $7 mill under the geothermal funding program, they are drilling as we speak and they have an application in for some of his $435 mill Renewable Energy Demonstration Projects funding round, applications for which closed over 3 mths ago, presumably awaiting announcement to suit some political agenda, like as a green ALP plank in a double dissolution election .
“By 2011 we expect to be supplying geothermal energy on a commercial basis”…
that commercial basis will be providing electricity first to the Beverley uranium mine, then the Olympic Dam behemoth.
Ironic what, large swags of Australia’s renewable energy funding going to provide juice for
SA Labor’s Reelection Plandigging one of the world’s biggest holes, in the process depleting and despoiling one of continents most precious resource, the Great Artesian Basin:From the draft environmental report
the mine’s requirements will “increase from 37 megalitres to 216 megalitres per day, and power which must go from 125 MWe to 775 MWe – representing about 10% of South Australia’s current baseload demand.”
Nice one Mar’n, Penny, Pete, and Kev, diverting renewables funding to provide a green smokescreen for BHP-Billiton’s big uranium project, and get Mike Rann re-elected. You cynical bastards.
Thanks, Danny, that looks like better information than I had.
Furious#68, the point is, the largest deposit of uranium in the world will have no importance in a world of 4th gen nuclear power, nor has it significant importance in terms of the viability of the mine, meaning, the project would go ahead for the copper, gold and silver regardless of demand for uranium.
How’s that for reflecting the importance of the deposit?
Contributors to this thread have made the following points:
1. Somewhere in the far distant future there will be Nice Little Green (NLG) nuclear reactors that will be totally safe.
2. These reactors will use only the fuel provided by decommissioned nuclear weapons and will use flying pig urine for coolant
3. That huge and energy and water intensive mines will be required for the present and future “conventional” nuclear reactors
4. That the same mines will be required for the NLG reactors in the event that the flying pigs are unable to deliver
5. That there is already a vast supply of nuclear weapons and we should welcome this because it is all a matter of the will (to power perhaps?).
New stuff.
A University of Melbourne research group estimates the cost of decommissioning conventional nuclear reactors as between AU$400 million to AU$2.4 Billion. Each.
France has allocated AU$100 billion for decommissioning it present reactors (Ian Lowe QE 27 2007 P62)
Recommendation:
Suggest that Reaction Time Climate Change and the Nuclear Option by Ian Lowe (QE 27 2007) be read by all and sundry.
Note on decommissioning. The decommissioning costs were never considered in the past because the real driver of the nuclear “Power” programs in the US (10,000 bombs), Soviet Union (10,000 bombs), Great Britain (185 bombs), France (454 bombs), China (410 bombs), Israel (200 bombs), North Korea, India Pakistan and South Africa
was the nuclear bomb.
Huggy
Actually, baseload power CAN be supplied by renewables.
(1) Wave/tidal looks promising
(2) At least in non-drought-ridden countries (and I think one of the Scando countries is planning it), you can use windmills to pump water back up above a hydro dam/generator. I think New Scientist a while back had calculations that Scando dams held enough water to power Western Europe for a couple of weeks even without any wind.
Dave Bath@74
Yes it’s called pumped storage.
You might want to look here for a detailed discussion on managing intermittency in a system.
So where do these magical 4th generation reactors exist?
What? They don’t?
Shame.
Dave, Monbiot in Heat in 2006 talked about the pump some water up a hill trick, but two weeks for all of Europe is impressive.
Yes Brian@77 … As keen on pumped storage as part of the solution I am, that does sound like a huge claim. Raising a 1kilolitre (1m3) of water 100metres demands 0.272KwH of energy.
Allowing for losses at the head when you release it to recover the energy you can get about 80% of that back, (although if the top reservoir gets topped up by more rainfall than it loses in evaporation perhaps you’ll do a little better in practice), you may do the match and work out what 2 weeks of energy storage would look like. I’ve never done it, but unless they have some truly massive mountains suited to containing large volumes of water and huge catchments at the bottom, or they are near the ocean/sea/large lakes 2 weeks does sound very ambitious.
Look here for someone who has done some of the maths in a UK context.
The real value of pumped storage is instant despatchability, which allows you (subject to the storage you have) to bridge the gap during a slew (a disjuncture between demand and supply) between power from major sources. It may take 30 minutes to bring gas fired plants online, a ccouple of hours for nuclear and perhaps 8 hours or more for some coal fired.
Used properly, pumped storage allows you to reduce active redundant capacity and get closer to just in time supply with a near zero emission technology. It may even be used to do desal/water purification as an alternative to power — and since this too requires power, offset existing demand.
Fran
Pumped storage is a routine tool used by virtually every power system in the world.
The Wivenhoe Dam in Queensland, commissioned in 1985 is a good example. The Snowy has 600 MW of pumped storage capacity that is over 40 years old.
The neatest system I know of is a wind powered system that pumps air into a large underground cavity and then uses the air in a gas turbine to generate electricity, the removal of the air compression to a renewable resource (wind) results in a massive increase in turbine efficiency and a big multiplier on the stored energy. In Japan they also use liquid sodium/sulphur batteries for energy storage.
Huggy.
I will respond to a few other commenters, in no particular order.
Nuclear energy, when analyzed in realistic quantitative terms, is clearly able able to be deployed considerably faster and cheaper per real capacity-factor-corrected kilowatt of output than any other clean technology.
Let’s see.
“Generation IV reactor” usually includes metal-cooled fast reactors, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, and molten-salt reactors, just to name a few examples.
The ones generating useful electricity output on the grid in use today:
The French Phenix fast reactor.
The BN-600 sodium-cooled fast reactor in Russia.
The Monju fast breeder reactor in Japan (to be restarted soon)
The Russian (well, Soviet) Alfa-class naval lead-cooled fast reactors.
(Well, they’re not on the grid obviously, but generating useful energy.)
The ones that were formerly generating energy on the grid:
The Fort St. Vrain HTGR
The Peach Bottom 1 HTGR
The German AVR high-temperature, gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor.
The German THTR high-temperature, gas-cooled thorium-fuelled pebble-bed reactor.
The Fast Breeder Test Reactor in India.
EBR-II, which served as the first prototype for the Integral Fast Reactor.
The Fermi I fast breeder reactor.
The Dounreay Fast Reactor and the Prototype Fast Reactor at Dounreay.
The Superphenix fast reactor in France.
The French Rhapsodie fast reactor.
The BN-350 in Kazakhstan (Notable for its use as an integrated desal plant.)
Research reactors, prototypes or reactors under development, that didn’t or don’t generate electricity on the grid:
The ORNL Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
The Aircraft Reactor Experiment(s)
The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor in India.
The Clementine mercury-cooled fast reactor at Los Alamos
The Ultra-High Temperature Reactor Experiment (UHTREX) at Los Alamos
The SNR-300 in Germany. (completed power-generating reactor, never operated.)
The High-Temperature Test Reactor (HTTR) in Japan.
The Chinese HTR-10 small, modular pebble-bed reactor.
So, let’s assume 1000 MW, 95% capacity factor, 50 year lifetime.
Thus, you’re talking about between 0.1 and 0.6 cents per kilowatt-hour.
You only pay for decommissioning once, and you’ve got the entire operating lifetime of the plant to collect the money for it. It’s not a significant cost at all.
Anti-nuclear activists love to cherry-pick Olympic Dam as an example of energy inputs into mining, because it’s absolutely nothing like a typical uranium mine – it’s a large copper mine and integrated copper smelter, which produces a little bit of uranium on the side.
The total energy input, including all the energy used to mine all the ore, and smelt all the copper, plus the energy that would be required to supply all the water needs via desalination, is a tiny fraction of the energy output in the form of uranium production, even with inefficient use of uranium in existing LWRs.
The life-cycle energy use and emissions argument originally established based on highly flawed, biased work by Storm van Leeuwen and Smith and endlessly repeated parrot-like by morons like Helen Caldicott has been absolutely done to death, debunked, and buried.
The life-cycle emissions intensity of nuclear energy is as low, if not lower, than any other clean technologies such as wind and hydro, and certainly clearly lower than that of solar photovoltaics.
Well, we used to have the betatron (and a cyclotron, I think) at Melb. Uni, and we still have the several-story-tall pelletron accelerator which is used to drive a nuclear microprobe system. (as an aside, most of Switkowski’s research used to involve studying proton-driven reactions using this machine). I believe there is also a still small proton accelerator used for undergrad teaching, the only particle accelerator dedicated to this purpose in the Southern Hemisphere, so I was told.
There is a small accelerator at RMIT I believe, and most other serious universities will have at least one too. There’s also a cyclotron for nuclear medicine at the Austin Hospital, I think. Plus the Australian Synchrotron, of course. And this is just within Victoria. There are many accelerators, all over the country.
Of course, these are all under the care of expert people who know what they’re talking about where health physics and radiation safety is concerned, and all these institutions are under ARPANSA’s regulation concerning their use of ionising radiation, from any source.
“Half-lives of thousands of years” for the waste? No. This is simply rubbish.
The bulk of the radioactivity in reactor-produced fission products is nowhere close to being that long lived. Caesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, strontium-90 has a half-life of 29 years, and iodine-131 has a half-life of 8 days, to name a few well-known examples of typical radioactive fission products.
Some actinides have longer half-lives, eg. 432 years for americium-241, but that’s still less than thousands of years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of ~24,000 years, but that’s not waste, it’s a valuable fuel. In an efficient reactor, Pu-239 is the internal intermediate step in turning abundant uranium-238 into abundant clean energy. It certainly isn’t “waste”.
There have been many examples of the successful decommissioning of nuclear power reactors, and research reactors. As my above comment elucidates, it’s not even expensive.
It’s certainly a waste to turn DU into munitions – it’s such a valuable energy resource. Of course, this use has got absolutely nothing to do with nuclear energy. If uranium didn’t have the nuclear characteristics that it does and you couldn’t use it for energy, it would still be mined for use in things like munitions which use it for its mechanical properties and density.
When talking about so-called “waste”, you must stop and ask why you’re calling it waste, when it is valuable, useful material.
Yeh, valuable for terrorists!
The above seems to be Big Brother himself making implied commentary about how tired we must all be getting not to already be sleeping with the Nuclear Genie….
(Sleep, sheeple, sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!)
Who are the real terrorists? The Nuclear Powered dream machine is a blind wave of treasure and The Ten Million Dollar Mal knew he would never be Prime Minister by pushing that disingenious barrow too hard whilst simultaneously running the line that Australia is only responsible for less than 2% of GHG emissions.
If you go to sleep, but, Freddy( the metrosexual Liberal voter ) WILL get ya!