More Anti-Nuclear BS

Senor_Pointy

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Senor_Pointy
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This morning, I came upon this in the opinion/commentary section of my local newspaper.
Nuclear power continues to raise concerns

Is it just me, or is this the same kind of uninformed crap you've heard a thousand times before? I especially like the, "Nuclear power is clean, but it uses fossil fuels to get the fuel!" part in the beginning. And these solar panels are just going to spring from the ground? :rolleyes:

Also, I was going to write an angry email to the paper, but I wanted to get my facts straight first.
 
Senor_Pointy said:
This morning, I came upon this in the opinion/commentary section of my local newspaper.
Nuclear power continues to raise concerns.
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Although we’ve been told nuclear power is safe and cheap and doesn’t contribute to global warming, there are many reasons to doubt that is true.

The nuclear fuel chain to create nuclear power involves uranium mining, milling, transporting, processing and manufacturing of nuclear facilities. All along the way massive amounts of fossil fuel, which emits CO2 and other gasses that significantly contribute to global warming, are used.

Uranium ore, which exists in nature, is quickly being depleted and becoming less accessible and more expensive to mine. If global electricity were converted to nuclear power, the supply would be depleted in three years
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It's nice to see that illiterates have been given their own little corner of the web to play in.

Yuri
 
One such substance is tritium, which may be inhaled or swallowed by populations near reactors. Tritium is a dangerous carcinogen that produces congenital malformations and cancer.

I believe populations near nuclear power plants inevitably have higher incidences of mental retardation, stillbirths, leukemia, cancers, thyroid and respiratory disease than communities further away from reactor sites.
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they believe, so it must be true :) Would be nice to see some stats to back that up.......

the thread i've just posted on http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=59931 is kinda similar....
 
BronzeDog said:
Wouldn't tritium float away before anyone has a chance to breathe it?
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Tritium in the form of heavy water can indeed be breathed in (water vapor). Likely doses, however, are incredibly small. It's got a 12 year half-life, too, which means the vast majority of any that does get ingested (by drinking OR breathing) will also leave the body one way or another before decaying.
 
Senor_Pointy said:
This morning, I came upon this in the opinion/commentary section of my local newspaper.
Nuclear power continues to raise concerns

Is it just me, or is this the same kind of uninformed crap you've heard a thousand times before? I especially like the, "Nuclear power is clean, but it uses fossil fuels to get the fuel!" part in the beginning. And these solar panels are just going to spring from the ground? :rolleyes:

Also, I was going to write an angry email to the paper, but I wanted to get my facts straight first.
Click to expand...

Try this site: http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/guide/facts/. I think of particular interest is this bit:

Natural Abundance of Uranium
Concentration - uranium ranks 48th among the most abundant elements found in natural crustal rock.
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If I remember correctly there's a fair bit of it in ocean water as well. There is a LOT of stuff to go around. Although U235 is the favored element for reactors and comprises about 0.5% of all naturally occurring uranium, breeder reactors can convert U238 to U235 through neutron bombardment from the U235 already being used for the reactor.
 
Isn't the fact that we would be sentencing the next 400 generations of humans to stewardship of extremely hazardous waste products (and even after all that time it'll only be half less hazardous) enough of a deterrent?

Like most rental schemes, it sounds like a great idea until you take a closer look at the cost of what you're really signing up for.
 
Beleth said:
...next 400 generations...extremely hazardous waste products...
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Just wanted to point out that these two characteristics, i.e.-long half-life and extreme hazard, are exclusive (generally). The longest half-lifes are low-radioactivity, the most dangerous stuff doesn't last very long. Radiation is not free energy.

Not to mention that modern processes use much more of the fuel to reduce waste, containment methods have improved, and plastization methods to lock hazardous liquids into solid compounds are now possible.

Compared to the alternative of sentencing current and future generations to hazardous by-products that are not stewarded or contained much at all (coal, oil, gas), I don't really see a problem here.

Additionally, I doubt we'd maintain wast that long. I fell fairly safe in predicting that we'll have some type of ballistic-to-orbit capability within 100 years (i.e.-magnetic rail launch or somethig similar) that will allow for inexpensive launches into orbit. This would pave the way for a permanent solution to waste removal: launch to high orbit, with a cheap solid-fuel rocket (or even solar sails or an orbital ballistic system) to push it away on a degrading orbit into the sun.

Nuclear isn't perfect, but it's quite a bit better than much of what we currently use.
 
Huntsman said:
Just wanted to point out that these two characteristics, i.e.-long half-life and extreme hazard, are exclusive (generally). The longest half-lifes are low-radioactivity, the most dangerous stuff doesn't last very long. Radiation is not free energy.

Not to mention that modern processes use much more of the fuel to reduce waste, containment methods have improved, and plastization methods to lock hazardous liquids into solid compounds are now possible.

Compared to the alternative of sentencing current and future generations to hazardous by-products that are not stewarded or contained much at all (coal, oil, gas), I don't really see a problem here.
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Just because the alterntive waste products are more harmful doesn't mean that most nuclear waste isn't toxic. I wouldn't want to swim in the stuff.
Additionally, I doubt we'd maintain wast that long. I fell fairly safe in predicting that we'll have some type of ballistic-to-orbit capability within 100 years (i.e.-magnetic rail launch or somethig similar) that will allow for inexpensive launches into orbit. This would pave the way for a permanent solution to waste removal: launch to high orbit, with a cheap solid-fuel rocket (or even solar sails or an orbital ballistic system) to push it away on a degrading orbit into the sun.

Nuclear isn't perfect, but it's quite a bit better than much of what we currently use.
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Wouldn't sending it somewhere lifelss be a better idea, and less prone to use as a weapon if someones chooses to make falling containers of nuclear waste into a weapon? Isn't stockpiling the waste on the moon, or tossing it in the sun safer than storing it in the space over our heads? That's a bit like carrying wearing a bucket of boiling oil as a hat.
 
Huntsman said:
Just wanted to point out that these two characteristics, i.e.-long half-life and extreme hazard, are exclusive (generally). The longest half-lifes are low-radioactivity, the most dangerous stuff doesn't last very long. Radiation is not free energy.
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My toxicology texts would disagree.

One of the key issues with radioactive substances is their tendency to behave (surprise!) like heavy metals -- e.g., to get absorbed long-term into the structure of the body. A good example of that is strontium (Sr?) , which is chemically similar enough to calcium to be absorbed into bone mass -- in fact, some woo-woo sites will actually sell you strontium supplements specifically to help put (nonradioactive) strontium into your bone matrix, for reasons that I can't fathom off the top of my head. But the same would apply to many of the various heavy metals -- barium, chromium, cadmium, lead, et cetera.

The problem is that once they get into your system, they tend to stay there, and to expose you to radiation for the rest of your rather cancer-shortened life. And because they're insize your body, there's not much you can do to shield yourself. Unless you're talking about something with such a long half-life that it's for all intents and purposes non-radioactive (e.g. a half-life measured in hundreds of billions of years), the "long-half-life" heavy metals are among the most hazardous types of waste.
 
drkitten said:
My toxicology texts would disagree.

One of the key issues with radioactive substances is their tendency to behave (surprise!) like heavy metals -- e.g., to get absorbed long-term into the structure of the body.
...
The problem is that once they get into your system, they tend to stay there, and to expose you to radiation for the rest of your rather cancer-shortened life.
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But if you're talking about isotopes which last hundreds of years, then even if they stay with you until death, their long half-lives will still have prevented most of them from posing any kind of cancer risk. In other words, even for such heavy-metal elements, there's still a finite biological lifetime for the isotope, and if the radioactive half-life is longer than this biological lifetime, then the radiation risk is reduced compared to shorter-lived isotopes. It's a sort of self-limiting threat: there's a tradeoff between the intensity of the danger and how long the danger can persist.
 
drkitten said:
My toxicology texts would disagree.

One of the key issues with radioactive substances is their tendency to behave (surprise!) like heavy metals -- e.g., to get absorbed long-term into the structure of the body. A good example of that is strontium (Sr?) , which is chemically similar enough to calcium to be absorbed into bone mass -- in fact, some woo-woo sites will actually sell you strontium supplements specifically to help put (nonradioactive) strontium into your bone matrix, for reasons that I can't fathom off the top of my head. But the same would apply to many of the various heavy metals -- barium, chromium, cadmium, lead, et cetera.
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But that is a toxic hazard and not a radiological one, it just reminds me of all the people agenst depleated uranium amunition because it has the word uranium in it. Now uranium might be toxic, but depeated uranium is not a radiological hazard and so it is just basicly a heavy metal.

So if it the heavy metal nature that is toxic, why does this make nuclear power more dangerous than say batteries or other things that use heavy metals? I mean think about all the lead in peoples TV's(several pounds in an Cathode Ray Tube, in the glass)?

Clearly we need to ban TV.
 
ponderingturtle said:
But that is a toxic hazard and not a radiological one,
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No, it's not.

I'm well aware of the difference between heavy metal toxicity and radiation poisoning. The problem with much mid-level waste is that it combines both; an otherwise safe dose of a heavy metal will still expose you, chronically, to high levels of ionizing radiation.

I don't have the necessary tables to hand, but perhaps someone could do me the favor of doing some calculations about the yearly radiation exposure from having a milligram of Pb-202 in your bones? A milligram of lead isn't that much from a heavy-metal toxicity standpoint, but it's fairly nasty from a radiation standpoint, in part precisely because Pb-202 is an alpha emitter and so the radiation damage is extremely high for a relatively low number of decay events.

If you're talking about a really long-lived isotope (like Pu-239), then the heavy-metal toxicity is the dominant problem. If you inhale plutonium dust, the heavy metal poisoning will kill you before the cancer does. Conversely, for really short-lived isotopes, the radiation is the problem, but it's a short-term problem; if it doesn't kill you in the first week, it won't kill anyone else in the second week. But with mid-range isotopes (Pb-202 is a good one), it becomes a biologically persistant radiation hazard.
 
ImaginalDisk:

Please wait until the post comes to a complete stop before replying ;)

I did mention a shift to send it into the sun, orbit only being a waystop in that process. Moon storage would work, too.

drkitten:

I was addressing only the radiological hazard rather than toxilogical. Yes, they are heavy metals. But if that's the problem, why aren't the same arguments used against the hundreds and thousands of industrial processes that leave toxic metal waste? Why not the removal of mercury thermometers?

I'm not meaning to minimize the risk of nuclear by-products, but they are most often over-emphasized by those against them. And new long-term solutions are being addressed, including toxicity (the plasterization process I mentioned that locks them into a solid matrix, preventing leakage even if a storage container is broken).

I think that it would be a viable option for replacing some of the current oil and coal burning plants (I'm a bit more lenient on gas, it's appreciably better than coal or oil), and that the waste problems would not be nearly the hassle that many propose. Primairly because although there is a higher danger with the waste, there is much less of it.

A 500MW coial-burning plant produces 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 10,200 tons of nitrogen-oxide, 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide, 500 tons of particulates, 220 tons of unburned hydrocarbons, 720 tons of carbon monoxide, 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge from the scrubber, 225 pounds of arsenic, 114 pounds of lead, 4 pounds of cadmium, traces of uranium and mercury per year.

A 1000MW nuclear plant produces twice the energy, and produces about 30 tons of high-level waste and 800 tons of low and intermediate level waste.

THe nuclear industry is also the only power generation that is held fully accountable for all of its waste, as well.

SOurces:
http://www.nci.org/conf/rhodes/index.htm
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/fossil_fuels/offmen-how-coal-works.html


It's not just about the type of waste, but the amount as well.

Yes, I'd much rather the next 400 generations have to worry about stewarding this waste, than to deal with the aftermath of the billions of tons of waste produced yearly by coal, oil, and gas.
 
Huntsman said:
ImaginalDisk:

Please wait until the post comes to a complete stop before replying ;)

I did mention a shift to send it into the sun, orbit only being a waystop in that process. Moon storage would work, too.
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Until we can deposit the waste somwhere completely safe, I'll entirly trust it. I still prefer solar power as there's no shortage of suitable land for it, and the last time I checked, no one had come up with a weaponized version of a solar panel.

P.S. I do not misspell my own nick.
 
Beleth said:
Isn't the fact that we would be sentencing the next 400 generations of humans to stewardship of extremely hazardous waste products (and even after all that time it'll only be half less hazardous) enough of a deterrent?
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That's the kind of thing that used to sound like a good argument until we started to think seriously about global warming. Just consider the idea of carbon sequestration and the truly enormous quantity of CO2 that wouild have to be safely trapped in the earth forever. Makes the problem of dealing with nuclear waste look trivial. The highly dangerous nuclear waste is small in volume. Keeping this waste relatively safe is no more of a problem than keeping nuclear power plants and their fuel supples safe. It just takes a little effort.

The big challenge for humanity is to get through the next few hundred years without a) cooking the planet b) nuking each other for control of the last fossil fuel supplies or c) going back to a pre-industrial lifestyle due to lack of energy supplies and the consequent extinction of 90% of the human population.

A solution that merely results in not many deaths is a good one.
 
rockoon said:
Tossing it into the sun?

Do you realize how much energy that would take?
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Not as much as you're thinking. Once it gets out of earths orbit it wouldn't need much energy. The energy used to propel it would continue to do so since in space there is nothing acting on it. It would continue to fly towards the sun at a constant speed.
 
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