Hansen goes nuclear and I agree

Natural Gas is clean, domestic source of energy, abundant, and much easier to work with than Nuclear. Storing nuclear waste for multiple centuries is expensive and it is dangerous.

 

Nuclear poison

Acute radiation syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neutron poison - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you feel safe build it in your state.

 

Again, built in the 60's...

 

And I can post pictures of kids with burn injuries too, it doesn't mean fire should be banned. You can install fear into people rather easily, but not smart people. Casualties will happen, it is picking the solution with the lowest human cost. Nuclear is pretty damned low.

 

The problems were already known in the 60s and if anything, the bean-counter driven culture is more prevalent now than it was then. As long as people are getting rewarded for 90 day, 6 month, one year etc financial results instead of 1000 year safety results, nuclear is going to be iffy.

 

This question of how well wind+solar can supply energy needs is complicated, mired in FUD, and very much dependent on the quality of the grid. I think it is much exaggerated, and reasonably easy to handle with hydro in some places, molten salt or other storage tech in others. I assume the gov will stop handing out fossil fuel subsidies and invest in grid infrastructure instead.

 

We still have open 2 risky Nuclear plants open Indian Point (NY) and Diablo Canyon. Those plants were not built to standards for their locations. The 3rd that was pointed out San Onofre, is down, but not because the NRC shut it down for danger, its down because it was leaking radiation, and SCE wants to turn it back on without propererly even fixing the beast. Given that we give extentions to unsafe plants, I do not think we should cut regulation, we should adjust it in the face of Fukishima. In Japan there were 10 incidents in the short time period before Fukishima went. We need to get regulations right to close down at risk plants, and plants with poor maintenance before we go pretending since no one directly died imediately from fukishima we would like a nuclear dead zone around inian point or diablo canyon.

Which brings up the main thing stopping nuclear huge investments in the US. Its not the environmental movement, its the cost. It cost much more using a 40 year timeline for nuclear power than natural gas or wind. That is if nuclear comes in on time and on budget, but it never comes in on time or budget in the US or Europe. The new gen III reactors getting built in France and Finland will end up costing twice as much as projected. If we have another fukishima type incident those plants will get delayed and costs will go up even more. There are plenty of projects in China to do R&D and bring costs down, but at these prices I can't imagine a for profit company investing in nuclear in a deregulated market. That only leaves regulated utilities that can charge their customers for cost over runs over decades.

I find the death scenario quite false when we compare natural gas to nuclear. If we build more nuclear we still need natural gas to be there when places like san onofre go down for maintenance, and to follow loads. What you get is 35% efficient ocgt instead of 60% efficient ccgt. Building base with coal or nuclear above a certain level makes no sense in 2013, and we may already at 19% at the level where we need to close down base plants in windy places.
Why baseload power is doomed | SmartPlanet . Germany in 2020 may quite rightly be better off with no domestic nuclear, but it seems they are paying a lot to get there today.

There are a great many natural gas deaths because people digging don't know where the gas lines are. In order for nuclear to cut these natural gas deaths, you need to shut off the pipelines and force people to get rid of natural gas heat in their homes. I would like to know how hansen drilled down into his statistics for these additional natural gas deaths.

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20090225154550/http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf

A blast from pre fukishima highlighting why unless the government pays for the risks and gives utility companies the rewards, nuclear is a worse financial decision than wind, natural gas, and solar in the US. Note since then nuclear costs have gone up and natural gas and solar have come down. Note becuase China can use much cheaper labor and perhaps 40% lower nuclear construction costs, and doesn't charge utilities for environmental costs anyway, nuclear makes a much better business case there.

 

San Onofre is off the grid. So Cal with it's peak plants run on natural gas makes due. An old plant in Long Beach was brought on line to take up the slack during last summer with the AC running in home and offices. We don't need San Onofre. SDG&E would like to have it crank out more revenue but we don't need it to meet capacity. We improved the grid from Imperial County to San Diego and we can now get all that power from Solar into the Grid. We also import power from Arizona

Also day time power meets peak demand day time energy consumption.

California is technicaly down to one Nuclear plant on line. Onofre future is unknown

 

I think the judgement of nuclear being safer than natural gas and wind, is from pretty biased information.

Part of the problem with the pro nuke side on a risky plant like san onofre, is it is so gung ho on pretending ghg is our biggest risk. That plant was identified as was one of the least safe, before its leaks.
Lawmakers wary of restart at San Onofre | UTSanDiego.com

If we honestly evaluate natural gas + renewables that plant is bad for Southern California. An honest permanent shut down would, should allow for smarter new power planning.

 

One Tidal Wave will do huge damage to San Onofre.
When that plant was built not much of a population in the area.
Now it is in striking distance of 3.5 million Orange County residents and 3 million San Diego residents, and a good million Riverside county residents.

There is no evacuation plan that is real.

It is a accident waiting to happen

 

One of the nukes not on my list, but apparently should have been there with diablo canyon (ring of fire, not built for earthquake risk, old), san onofre (old, leaking, populted, earthquake risk), and indian point (risk of gas line killing it, highly populated, old) is Oconee.

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20130405/NEWS07/304050024/Email-trail-reveals-internal-conflict-NRC-over-potential-Oconee-Nuclear-Station-flooding

This has been a good safe plant with a relatively small population, but it is over 40 years old. You need to question why the life was extended with the flooding risk.

It appears according to the NRC the risk of a flood knocking it out in any given year is 28,000:1, but they extended the license 20 years. That means the risk of a flood causing a potential meltdown during those 20 years is a fairly likely 1400:1. That seems like quite a high risk for an old plant. It seems like they should have forced a flood protection plan or not renewed the license.

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I'm sorry, but I have to address the immense falsehood you stated as some sort of fact you deeply believe is true. "A cloud could wipe out your power". The nine (yes...NINE) SEGS solar plants built a decade ago were designed and required to provide reliable power every day come rain, shine, or clouds. They did this by integrating a Natural Gas System to fill in whenever the clouds or rain occurred. The plants are still working to this day providing reliable power.....every day.

If you are going to point out a flaw, make sure it is a real flaw.

 

People who like clean energy are cool

 

For people that think it can't be done, should look at how fast germany is chnging.
German Renewables Reach 25 Percent - IEEE Spectrum

The germans are closing their own nukes but buy some of the very cheap surplus french nuclear energy at night.

A new nuclear power plant takes 7 years to build (France, Finland).

You can build renewables, but that includes wind and biogas, not just solar. If you want to reduce coal deaths, you can do nothing in 5 years with nuclear. You can do a lot with wind/natuaral gas/solar, and polution control devices on older power plants.

I guess if you switch the question? How can you reduce externalities best? Build new nuclear plants, or build rewables and natural gas, while putting up pollution control devices on the existing polluting plants not being closed down.

Solar is more than old nuclear, but may be competitive with new nuclear. Wind and natuaral gas are less expensive than nuclear.

 

Yes my father probably had a hand designing a lot of those reactors and op guides. Of course, this meant he could never talk about his work, which I think was his natural inclination anyways. He was with Westinghouse. He did the subs (pre-Trident class) and the first trial nuke power plant. I think if Rickover wanted to try something, which he always did, my father tended one of the key engineers doing the work. I don't know Dad ever met Rickover, or he just got the orders through usual management chain. Its sort of appalling to me the tiny pension my mom gets from his lifetime of "service", but that's another story, engineers were less well compensated in those days.

 

EVERYBODY was less well compensated in those days.
My thanks to your Mom and Dad for their service!
Not everybody who supports and defends does so by shouldering a rifle...

One of the (few) things that the government does reasonably well is defense. This is because they don't have to generate a profit. Sometimes.....when a difficult, costly, risky, important program has to be done they will refer to it as a "Moon Landing, or a "Moon Shot" program.
They do this for a pretty good reason. That's because nothing succeeds like success.

So.....the same thing could have/should have been done WRT energy independence.
But however (comma!) it wasn't.
PWRs can work.
Many of the risks can be easily mitigated if you take P&L out of the equation.
For example.....PWRs can ma made smaller, co-located with other "terror threats" and/or placed some place that makes a "little" more sense than on a geologically active national border in an ultra-densely populated area.

People ridiculed the Moon Landing Program as a boondoggle....
YMMV!!!!

 

A couple of friends retired from the Navy side of the SSxN business have told me that when former Navy nuclear techs go out into the civilian nuclear power-plant world they are sometimes shocked at how half arsed safety and reliability is in the civilian world.