And Fukushima had a 20 km exclusion one. That's about 1200 square kilometers. Large parts, about half of it, already lifted.
...and this is better than solar, why?
Because solar isn't an alternative at the moment. What is build in Europe, and what is projected to be build in Germany, is biomass. An energy source, which in certain situations, is worse than coal.
http://www.energypost.eu/biomass-hidden-face-energiewende/cancer for those people who were exposed as children
...and this is better than solar, why?
Because if it were solar, those children would not have existed, as their parents would have dropped of a roof installing solar panels, or died due toxic solar thingies.
Solar is deadlier than nuclear, after all.
Ground water levels tritium levels peaked at 37 times the federal limit. No contamination of site. On site contamination resolved within a few weeks.
...this is better than solar, why?
Compare and contrast the poisonous chemicals released if a house with solar power on it burns down. On a per kwh basis, that is going to be having a higher effect on the environement than these tritium emmissions.
If you want to say that nuclear is not as bad...if you want to say that it's only occasionally had catastrophic failures resulting in hundreds of miles of exclusions zones that only last a little while...if you want to say that only the people in the immediately vicinity of accidents acquired cancers...that only the children and elderly and people with weak immune systems have problems, ok....
No what I wanted to show is that you're deliberately misrepresenting facts. Making it seem like there are dramatic cancer increases over large swathes of the population, while it is only a small increase of a small part of an even smaller part of an already small affected community.
Let's go back to the original statement for the moment.
"A 2013 WHO report predicts that for populations living in the most affected areas there is a 70% higher risk of developing thyroid cancer"
But experts said the overall risk was small. The radiation exposure means about 1.25 out of every 100 girls in the area* could develop thyroid cancer over their lifetime, instead of the natural rate of about 0.75 percent.
*A few villages, FYI.
...but why is that better than solar? You can whitewash and diminish the waste and the health issues and so forth all you want...but solar doesn't have these problems. Maybe nuclear meltdowns happen only rarely. Solar installations don't have meltdowns. Maybe nuclear stations don't generate all that much radioactive waste and maybe radioactive waste isn't as bad as one might think...but solar doesn't generate radioactive waste.
However, solar does cause deaths, and it does create toxic wastes. An on a per kwh basis, the damage from solar is bigger than that of nuclear.
Solar emits more Co²,
causes more deaths, and does not bring a usefull contribution to the grid.
What reason is there to prefer nuclear?
Other than "America, Fuck yeah!" there's really only one: it's cheap. And yes, nuclear is cheaper than solar. And probably will be for at least a couple more years. Personally, I think the increase investment now is worth eliminating all those "but only a little" nuclear meltdowns and exclusion zones and wastes that you seem so eager to embrace. And eventually when solar is similarly priced to nuclear, we'll have both the low and not the "only a little" meltdowns and waste.
New nuclear technologies are in place, and could be deployed to eliminate waste, meltdowns and other systems. And these aren't fantasies like assuming solar will drop again, by one third. Those are reactor designs that can, and are, build right now. That could be deployed within a decade, unless your solar strategy, which is waiting and seeing what happens next decade.
the storage conundrum.
Here's a simple one: Solar Thermal
"The principal advantage of CSP is the ability to efficiently add thermal storage, allowing the dispatching of electricity over up to a 24-hour period. Since peak electricity demand typically occurs at about 5 pm, many CSP power plants use 3 to 5 hours of thermal storage. With current technology, storage of heat is much cheaper and more efficient than storage of electricity. In this way, the CSP plant can produce electricity day and night. "
I actually live near one of these plants. There's no magic here. This technology is from the 80s.
Ah, CSP. Also, the link for that quote is dead. As far as I know, most CSP does not have storage ((the link is dead)).
Capacity : 50 MW
Cost: 300 million
I doubt you can find me any example of a CSP with storage (the link is dead) which cost less than 10 000 $ per kilowatt in capital costs.
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=117Also remember that the grid is mixed, and power consumption at night is much reduced. Meanwhile, the wind continues to blow, water continues to flow, and geothermal sources continue to radiate heat. If you want a non-coal/non-nuclear grid, it can be done. These imagined scenarios of transoceanic cables and generating power on one side of the planet to supply power to the other side are completely unnecessary.
Non coal/non nuclear isn't what we're going for though. It's non-coal, non-gas, non-oil grid. Hydro might help, but wind is to unstable to be of much use. Geothermal likely to limited.
On aside, it's quite easy to be safer than the power source which kills million each year.
Already said I wasn't defending coal.
They said the same thing in the 1990's. You say you're not defending coal, but in the absence of alternatives, that is what happens.
Radiation level from Nuclear waste drops very, very rapidly in the first few years.
No.
I already cited numbers. High level wastes have half lives in the hundreds of thousands to millions of years. That means that it takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years for the amount of radiation to reduce to half. Then hundreds of thousands to millions of years to reduce to a quarter, etc.
50% reduction in hundreds of thousands to millions of years is not "very rapidly in the first few years"
Yes, but those matters with half life's of millions upon millions of years are not the thing that makes nuclear waste radioactive, nor particularly dangerous. See, radioactivity is released when an atom decays. If you have substance with a long half life, it decays slowly, and is thus not all that radioactive. Actides and other material are what makes it more dangerous, and those decay relatively fast.
Okay, I know this is reprocessed material, but for unreprocessed material the graph doesn't look very different.
The earth has a surface area of 510,072,000 km². That's a rad distribution of 20 grammes of High level waste per square kilometer.
For millions of years. Radiation effects are cumulative. Yes, the actual proportion of radioactive material over volume will be relatively low, but (in this scenario we're discussing) your exposure would be constant over your entire lifetime.
Let's go into this a bit more details. HLW has several billion Becquerel of activity per cubic centimeter. As an interesting matter, 1 cubic centimeter of Uranium happens to weight about 20 grammes. (gross estimate here). Spreading 10 billion becquerel out over 1 square km means 10 000 Becquerel of radioactive material per square meter. Still within legal limits.
Then again, launching things into space was a silly suggestion.radiation limits are often an order of magnitude or more below the point where actual damage occurs.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000026.htm
"The risk of cancer depends on the dose and begins to build up even with very low doses. There is no "minimum threshold."
What a surprise, the official government document confirms the government regulation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model#ControversyThere is no scientific evidence whatsoever than a dose under 100 mSv can do damage.
Which resulted in an exposure of 3.95 microsieverts per hour on a distance of 1 cm. Or about 35 millisievert. Still just one third of the lowest 1-year dose which can actually be proven to cause cancer and this requires you to faceplant on the groundsheet for an entire year.
Or be living there during that year. What, do you think if you live in an area contaminated with radioactive material, that you're somehow not going to be receiving radiation during the entire time up until you measure it? Do you think that after the one year all the material will simply vanish and you'll no longer be exposed?
There was a local hotspot on the ground. Not an entire area blanketed in uniform radiation. The groundmat was cleared and then it was gone.
one third of the lowest 1-year dose
...and rather than one year, or even for three years...you'll be exposed at these rates for potentially your entire lifetime. And, as pointed out in the "throw it into the sun" scenario, also eating and breathing the material and receiving yet more radiation for decades after you decide to leave the affected area.
Do you see why this is a problem?
I see that you do not understand the notion of a one year dose.
See, the one year dose is the dose you can receive each year, for your entire lifetime, without measurable harmful effects. ((provided said dose is spread out, obviously. Receiving your entire yearly dose in one go is problematic.)).
I do consider the fact that you will need to move power from on side of the globe to the other an awkward production bottleneck.
...that was a bizarre proposition, and in case you missed it in the wall of text earlier, it kind of looks like that whole idea was a misunderstanding by Gavj of something that mainiac said. I don't think anyone was seriously suggesting it.
I even bolded the relevant part in his statement.
You can not say, at the same time, that solar will reduce the need for a central grid, and that solar's unproductiveness at night is irrelevant because the sun is always shining somewhere on the planet. It's one or the other.
On solar panels: they wear. So you have to keep manufacturing them
Yes, 20-30 years. But nuclear plants are typically decommissioned after 40-60 years at an average cost of of $325 million per reactor in the US, and $1 billion per reactor in europe. Note that plants routinely have multiple reactors. The nuclear plant near where I live has three. Also, the decommissioning process takes decades.
40-60 years for the current generation of reactors. Keep in mind, those where designed with an initial lifetime expectancy of 30-40 years. Next generation reactors (ie, those being build now) have a design lifetime of 60 years, so we might be saying 80-100 years if they're modernized.
Besides, decommissioning cost is included in the price, a bit irrelevant really. (Same for solar, also included in price calculations).
And that's when everything goes well. Estimated cost for Fukushima's decommissioning is $100 billion over 40 years
Also included in the price.
A lot of the problems with nuclear fission, as usual, stem from the way it is applied in the society of today. Firstly, the fissile material itself. We currently use uranium. That's silly, because it's less safe and less abundant than other elements we could use (Thorium, for example - more on that later.) Why do we use it then? Because it's easy to turn into bombs :/ We can build safer reactors than we could even twenty years ago, but the problem still remains that reacting with uranium produces more and longer-lived waste than other methods, and is also more dangerous thanks to the reaction running pretty damn hot.
No power reactor has ever been used to produce weaponsgrade material. The reason that we preferred using Uranium above Thorium is that it's a much easier technology. See, there are two types of materials used as fuel for a nuclear reactor. Fissile materials, such as U-235, and fertile material, such as thorium.
Now, in order to use fertile material as fuel you need a breeder reactor. This is an important bit of information, as breeders have various other advantages.
- The waste produced from using thorium lasts for high tens/low hundreds, rather than mid-high thousands of years
Not an advantage of thorium, but an advantage of Fast Neutron breeder technology.
-Roughly half the volume of waste would be produced anyway, and it's less dangerous than the isotopes produced by the uranium reaction, and easier to store.
Not an advantage of thorium, but an advantage of Fast Neutron breeder technology.
- it's actually a lot more efficient than the equivalent weight of uranium
Actual advantage, but irrelevant due to Fast Neutron breeder technology.
-it's less costly and much more common
Actual advantage, but irrelevant due to Fast Neutron breeder technology. Also irrelevant without FNBR tech. Fuel costs are not a major cost in Nuclear power cost.
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This is a post I made over a year ago and have recycled a few times but the information is reasonably accurate. As it happens I don't think nuclear power should be considered an option as long as capitalism persists because frankly we can't even trust our food and water half the time these days and no scheme is going to be run to be equitable, safe and transparent as long as profit is the primary motive but still, these are my thoughts. As I say in this post I am 100% for mixed power generation (excluding fossil fuels if at all possible) and my vision of a nuclear future does not exclude renewables and vice versa.
I must note that Communism doesn't have a much better track record when it comes to nuclear power.
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Topic: Alternative Power Sources. (Read 10982 times)