Had the equivalent power of Fukushima been generated any other imaginable way (wind, solar, hydro, coal or gas), and the same tsunami hit, the devastation and loss of life would most likely have been much worse.
Don’t be ridiculous. There is no bye-bye Japan scenario. Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t call for the absurd measures speculated here.
Why is it obvious to all but nuclear advocates that nuclear power catastrophes differ markedly and on several levels from the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons?
Because it isn’t the things you don’t know that hurt you, it’s the things you know that aren’t so. It was once “obvious” that the earth was fixed in place, too.
If you read and post here, presumably you believe and support the science behind the claims of anthropogenic climate change. But despite this, you deny the (far older and better-supported) science of the effects of radiation, including hormesis.
It’s no wonder you can’t get anywhere with the political opposition. Hypocrisy completely destroys your credibility.
If you have no scientific evidence on your side, I suppose that comedy is the best you can do. But isn’t that supposed to be the characteristic of the climate denialists? You know, only taking science seriously when it agrees with your politics?
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Tell ya what, I’ll gladly be called a hypocrite by ridiculous, know it all blowhards every single day and wear it like a badge of honor. In the end, I’ll still demand a lead lined apron to protect my son’s or daughter’s germ line cells from the SCATTER of the the low dose of radiation they receive on a nominal visit to the dentist. You, being a bozo, are free to demand otherwise. But as soon as you, or clowns like you, try to impose that BS on me and mine, I’ll fight with my life’s blood to stop you and rally the many others I know willing to join me.
Once again, good luck in the marketplace. Yer gonna need it, Krusty.
So I’ve got many of the top names in both environmentalism AND climate science publicly pro-nuclear, and a foil to help illustrate the wrong-headedness of those still on the anti side.
I couldn’t ask for more.
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I do believe why e.g. James Hansen embrace nuclear is that if we plan on keeping civilization running at present speed, the only option to power it is nuclear no matter how bad it is. No doubt taking a risk on nuclear is better than the risk of CO2 emissions rising. In many ways its really just a way of repeating what James Hansen has been saying all the time, we need to stop CO2 emissions now! If nuclear is the last way out, then be it, but only if it replaces the majority of fossil fuel energy. It also hastens the need to replace fossil fuel driven infrastructure with electrically driven as that doesn’t care if it comes from nuclear power or renewables.
So far nuclear power has been used to fuel growth in addition to any other fossil fuel burning, so I certainly understand the environmentalists saying that the best option is really to “turn off” industrial civilization, by replacing it with something severely scaled down purely run on renewable energy sources and where we learn to conserve and care for our planet.
Replacing plague with cholera is generally not seen as any real solution to the problem in the long run though…
I still think that only a revolution or mass revolt will bring about enough change or focus on the problem. Quite likely when we do change, its really a bit too late as well, as we have set in motion a flywheel it takes thousands of years for earth to slow down, even if our species is not around then to see it.
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So far nuclear power has been used to fuel growth in addition to any other fossil fuel burning
Not in Ontario. When the refurbished reactors at Bruce Point came back on-line, Ontario essentially stopped burning coal to make electricity. I gather that a dent was made in natural gas generation too.
There’s no reason for e.g. the USA to suddenly find new uses for coal if it stops being burned to generate electricity. There’s no real reason for people to suddenly start commuting longer distances if they replace ICEVs with electric cars; there are only so many hours in the day for driving. Plus, once the essentials have been de-carbonized it will probably become as morally offensive to burn fossil fuels as it is now to use leaded gasoline.
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The characteristic of climate denialists is the same as the nuke cheerleaders. They both claim they have special knowledge and can ignore any science they choose because they know better. They both believe vast bodies of knowledge and evidence contradicting them is an evil conspiracy. Welcome to the club.
Chinese Thorium:
Understand: China is taking American discovered, American developed, American proven viable, Thorium nuclear technologies: safer, cheaper scalable, plutonium free, 99% fuel efficient, near waste free, with benign waste after 300 years sequestration, to a new level. They rebirth, research, re-engineer, modernize, improve, Thorium LFTR styled technologies as we speak. Will this newer, safer, nuclear technology, already proven in working reactors in U.S., and brought to a new Chinese level of sophistication, eventually supplant the suicidal, dirty, inefficient, expensive, dangerous, Plutonium creating, expensive, current American enriched Uranium systems? Could China give birth to a new nuclear age? For all mankind? Remember: Uranium is in limited supply on earth. Thorium yields much higher energy per unit of fuel and Thorium is a much more plentiful fuel on earth.
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I’m a hypocrite because I don’t accept a PowerPoint by some clown at the Heartland Institute over the well founded science of the National Academy of Sciences.
For such people, climate change is irrelevant. The important part is maintaining the current lifestyle, consumption, and economic model. Anything that threatens that, like environmentalism, is the enemy. Anything that could maintain it, like nuclear power, is embraced.
Continued use of fossil fuels, on the other hand, is in the process of repeating the PETM and producing a mass extinction event. Rather than asking people to go back to the energy poverty before the Industrial Revolution (a very tough sell, especially when the entire third world wants what we have and will not balk at burning coal to get it), I’d rather switch to reliable decarbonized energy supplies. Maybe in the long term people will achieve enlightenment, but we can’t wait that long.
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Well said. Although you could elaborate a little:
For such people the fact that climate is and has always and will always change is irrelevant. The important part is maintaining and growing human prosperity and the continued climb from poverty for the poorest peoples of the world. Anything that could maintain it, like nuclear power, is embraced. And anything that challenges it with superstition, needless fears or some cockamamie notion that we can stop climate from changing is skeptically required to prove itself.
Really? I doubt the Fukushima and Chernobyl refugees were introduced to a higher level of comfort and prosperity. But oh, yes, I forgot. You don’t count that.
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Nano-materials engineers are pretty smart. The days of arrogant nuclear engineers looking down their noses at the rest of us have long since passed.
Comfortable for the moment – Japan continues to function, little immediate reason for change. Truth is: Pacific tuna caught in U.S. waters are proven contaminated by fuckoshima event. Three “corium’ disappeared? Stored fuel rods are so in a precarious position and poised for extreme results if altered in any way.
“” Long-lived radionuclides such as Cesium-137 are something new to us as a species. They did not exist on Earth in any appreciable quantities during the entire evolution of complex life. Although they are invisible to our senses they are millions of times more poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They cause cancer, leukemia, genetic mutations, birth defects, malformations, and abortions at concentrations almost below human recognition and comprehension. They are lethal at the atomic or molecular level.
They emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy that we might compare to fire, because radiation burns and destroys human tissue. But unlike the fire of fossil fuels, the nuclear fire that issues forth from radioactive elements cannot be extinguished. It is not a fire that can be scattered or suffocated because it burns at the atomic level—it comes from the disintegration of single atoms.”” http://climateviewer.com/2013/10/11/the-implications-of-the-massive-contamination-of-japan-with-radioactive-cesium/#prettyPhoto
This page offers many references, much more factual information but neglects to reveal that also associated with Fuckoshima event are: “” other things being contended with at Fukushima the longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a “half-life” ; of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years.””
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UT2yYs5YJs Kun Chen from Chinese Academy of Sciences on China Thorium
And: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971
And: Be reminded, these are all publicly available, and well outside the bounds of secret government information.
More-over: Survival here is being measured by the American yardstick of McMansions, McHummers, and life in the burbs on a 35 hour work week, on the extremely unhealthy Mc’merican diet, all: recently evolved and all sold by the Great Corporate American Propaganda Whores as necessities for life, and have nothing to do with a very contented sustainable survival system and everything to do with highest Corporate Profits possible. Possibly, a better thought out, otherwise motivated lifestyle, could be provided ample energy by Solar, Wind, Wave, Hydro, Tidal, Geothermal, Biological, domestic, renewable, therefore perpetual energy, but in the face of the Whore and her corpocracy, where even super insulations have been buried deep in patent Hell, alongside NiMh storage systems, EV-1 electric car technologies that proved satisfactory for the peons, Aluminium billet electric storage systems, (see Israel’s 1000 mile car) and ‘military secret’ situations, where rampant, drunken, foolhardy, primitive, savage, near consequence-free mongrel breeding practices are de-rigure, over even the more civilized controlled birthrate practices of Asian communities, and the sloffing off of socially undesirables by limiting medical and food aid, a tool akin to selective breeding, is acceptable as humane over birth control in the first place, we can hardly expect fair measure. We can hardly expect rejection of the “Enriched Uranium” systems that offer fast solution to any energy requirement where life is so debased.
Will China’s thrust for American discovered, American developed, American proven, American forsaken, Chinese revived, Chinese re-engineered, Chinese modernized, Thorium LFTR and associated technologies, if brought to fruition supplant the “Enriched Uranium” systems and bring mankind a new safe nuclear power age? Replace the American petro-dollar oil energy monopolies, the American enriched Uranium energy secrets monopoly, and ‘Change World Energy Maps Forever”? Can Thorium systems release adequate energy for mankind’s needs, in safer, cleaner manner? For now, proven, up and working, Pellet bed gas reactors do so operate cleaner and safer, and the CANDU efforts no matter how suppressed by the Great Corporate American Propaganda Whores and their military might, still pump out safer cleaner energy around the world.
Fallout is essentially the ash and dirt particles caused by large explosions and/or the demolition of large structures, which was so graphically displayed by the collapse of the World Trade Centers in 2001. The biological effects of the fallout of dust and microscopic debris on 9/11/2001 were unquestionably horrible. Nuclear weapon’s fallout has the added biological hazard of being intensely radioactive. It’s the instantaneous avalanche of neutrons spewed forth by a nuclear weapon detonation that makes the dispersed dust and debris radioactive. Neutron is the only form of radiation which can cause other materials to become radioactive. The avalanche of neutrons is the only reason why atomic bomb fallout is radioactive. Thus with nuclear fallout, the air is not only fouled by the thick fog of dust, the dust is also significantly radioactive.
The thick dust fog scenario is virtually impossible for power plant reactor accidents, even for the worst-ever nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl. The invisible concentrations of microscopic radioactive dust and radioactive gasses from Chernobyl were considerable and resulted in significant short-term biological consequences. But, even the atmospheric release of radioactive material from Chernobyl was many, many times less concentrated than would be the case with nuclear weapon’s fallout. However, this comparison only holds for Chernobyl, a type of nuclear plant only built by the old USSR; a type of plant judged by America to be too dangerous to be considered, soon after World War II. The plants used in the West cannot have Chernobyl-type accidents, and the worst possible invisible radioactive release from a Western nuclear power plant is thousands, if not millions of times less than Chernobyl. The mis-association between weapon’s fallout and Western nuclear reactor accidents makes even less sense than with Chernobyl.
And the newest reactor technology is physically incapable of radiation release.
Neutron is the only form of radiation which can cause other materials to become radioactive.
That’s not strictly true; gamma rays can raise some nuclei to excited states, and they emit gammas when they go back to the ground state. But as a general rule, it’s good enough.
Radionuclides were released into the air from both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Windscale did likewise. There were copious amounts of radionuclides released all over Europe and Asia. There is no way to directly compare an atomic weapon with a disaster like Chernobyl. Hiroshima victims were directly radiated externally, some lethally. As you know, the fallout danger is from inhalation or ingestion and continues for a long time after the event. Different radionuclides have different hazards. It is well known that strontium90, cesium137, and iodine131 present special hazards, because of how our bodies concentrate them at vital organs, because the microscopic distance from our cells means the energy released by radioactive decay is directly transmitted to our unprotected cells, and because other organisms concentrate them to high levels, making them dangerous to ingest. Based on the aerosols emitted from the Chernobyl fire and explosion, it is estimated that much more fallout was emitted than at Hiroshima. It is unnecessary to have a nuclear explosion to spread vast amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Explosion and fire at Chernobyl and Fukushima proved capable of doing that. In that sense, and because there is so much more radioactive material available, a nuclear power plant is capable of causing much more widespread contamination. The damage due to Chernobyl is primarily contamination by air, but also some through the water supply. Fukushima has some of both, but more to the water supply and ocean. For both, the problem is that the melted pile nuclear material is in an uncontrolled state and open to the environment risking further contamination. http://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-17/news/mn-16573_1_hiroshima-atomic-bomb
There is a lot of talk about TEPCO exposing a single fuel rod to the air for a fraction of a second causing global doom. Millions, even billions of fatalities! Suzuki appears to be repeating this.
It’s not plausible.
But many nuclear bombs were deliberately exploded in the 40s and 50s. And while this did in fact do some cumulative damage, it didn’t cause millions or billions of deaths like some people are squawking.
Suzuki lost his credibility with me with this ridiculous squawking.
If nuclear is taken off the table it should be because of arguments based in fact, not in over the top irrational fears. This talk makes me more favorably inclined to nuclear as a climatologist, because I sympathize with a professional group subjected to absurd over-the-top rumors.
Yes. So being a little more precise would be helpful. Like how many people die due to fallout? It’s like cigarettes or air pollution. Who said it was billions? Find the quotes and references and do the math. Adding another statement that says you doubt something non specific is not helpful. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wAXPYbs39D4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwAXPYbs39D4
Start with a reference, then start digging into details.
In the face of profit there is no end to humanities folly. You can choose to step on an airplane, its very unlikely to fall out of the sky, but if it does, chances are you are toast. Though luck. Well, you cant choose to not be affected by the effects of nuclear disasters in your neighboring country. Somewhere, someone made that choice for me, even though I did not ask for it. Now that I know the consequences of that technology, I’d like to file a complaint – this is clearly yet another technology which humanity has no understanding of the dire consequences if it fails. And hence it should never have been put to use no matter how tempting it is to fuel the wheels of industrial civilization.
I haven’t heard of anyone dying from solar panels even though I am sure some monkeybrain can still get electrocuted. No doubt that would be an individual choice of risk, and not one that could kill of huge ecosystems (and people). Monkeybrains playing with nuclear energy is not a good idea.
I wonder sometimes if the people who build nuclear plants sometimes think what the chances are of a Haiyan strength typhoon or hurricane will pay them a visit? Or how about a small but well placed asteroid hit? Did they build them to sustain that? Or how about a good old bomb, doesnt even have to be nuclear.
Nuclear energy can really only be justified if they are 100% safe, not even 99,99999999999999999% would be enough in my opinion.
I wonder sometimes if the people who build nuclear plants sometimes think what the chances are of a Haiyan strength typhoon or hurricane will pay them a visit?
Grain elevators survive direct hits by tornadoes. NPP containment buildings are much stronger than grain elevators.
Or how about a small but well placed asteroid hit? Did they build them to sustain that?
Reductio ad absurdum. By the time you’d get any damage to a NPP from something like the Chelyabinsk meteor, you’d have tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths from heat flash and blast. Most of the people in the area that would be affected by radiation would already be dead.
Nuclear energy can really only be justified if they are 100% safe, not even 99,99999999999999999% would be enough in my opinion.
Thereby trading off a vanishingly small chance of harm from radiation for a 100% chance of catastrophic climate change and mass extinction event, not to mention a host of smaller hazards you cannot otherwise avoid.
If you are anti-nuclear, you are objectively pro-super typhoon. Maybe we should name the next 2000-km wide storm after you.
So thanks to you and your heroes, the “anti-proliferation” example to the world proliferated the practice of digging up and burning black dirt, dumping the byproducts into the atmosphere. This is exactly what we now understand as the ultimate cause of super-typhoon Haiyan.
I’ve been pro-nuke and anti-coal since before I could vote. You own this one.
Fabricated alternative realities are so easy. Anything can happen in a made up alternate reality and you can make yourself the victor every single time.
Watch, I can do it too.
What if the nuclear industry hadn’t actively worked to stop renewable technologies and research into them (like the Salter Duck) from taking place? Where might we have been if we had decided to heavily invest in renewable tech research long ago?
What if we had gone for energy efficiency long ago?
What if we had priced externalities long ago?
There, I’ve just proved that your “what if”, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” Monday morning QB BS is just that.
Ya gonna answer my other questions now, Bozo D. Clown? I kinda doubt it
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Fabricated alternative realities are so easy.
Refuting historical fact is hard. It’s a fact that the early generations of nuclear power plants in the USA came in at lower cost per kilowatt than coal. It’s a fact that nuclear was expected to replace coal.
As new regulations were issued, designs had to be modified to incorporate them….
As anyone who has tried to make major alterations in the design of his house while it was under construction can testify, making these changes is a very time-consuming and expensive practice, much more expensive than if they had been incorporated in the original design. In nuclear power plant construction, there were situations where the walls of a building were already in place when new regulations appeared requiring substantial amounts of new equipment to be included inside them. In some cases this proved to be nearly impossible, and in most cases it required a great deal of extra expense for engineering and repositioning of equipment, piping, and cables that had already been installed. In some cases it even required chipping out concrete that had already been poured, which is an extremely expensive proposition.
What if the nuclear industry hadn’t actively worked to stop renewable technologies and research into them (like the Salter Duck) from taking place?
Didn’t happen. NREL got funded, while research funds for nuclear were zero from 1994 through 1996. Wave-energy tests go on to this day. It’s not going commercial.
Where might we have been if we had decided to heavily invest in renewable tech research long ago?
For centuries, renewable tech research is all there was. The 1 megawatt Smith-Putnam wind turbine at Grandpa’s Knob pre-dated the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. There’s a simple reason these things failed to take off: they do not work as well as what we came to use instead.
What if we had gone for energy efficiency long ago?
Go figure. I did personally, but I’m an outlier.
What if we had priced externalities long ago?
Then nuclear would have taken over from coal, just as in the non-NRC (or sane-NRC) scenario. The cost of managing intermittency would have kept your pet sources at the level of bit players.
Ya gonna answer my other questions now, Bozo D. Clown?
Questions? Your aggressive, clueless assertions do not become questions just because you put something other than a period at the end of a sentence.
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“Grain elevators survive direct hits by tornadoes. NPP containment buildings are much stronger than grain elevators.”
Tornadoes are wind events. hurricanes are wind AND WATER events. This hurricane had an epic black swan storm surge. Had a nuclear plant been on that island, it would have been been drowned.
Black swans happen and are generally not designed for. Had the North Anna earthquake, for example, been a point or two higher on the Richter scale, the resulting disaster could have made Washington, DC uninhabitable. Had the flood at Fort Calhoun been just a bit more severe, America’s bread basket would have been poisoned for century
I can see why irresponsible clowns like you want to limit the liability of nuclear (lol, like that’s going to happen)
Nuclear power is not well suited for the extremes coming due to climate change.
Rising seas threaten nuclear plants
Floods threaten nuclear power plants
Wildfires threaten nuclear plants
Droughts threatens nuclear plants
JELLYFISH threaten nuclear power plants.
Solar energy solutions will bring power to the people affected by this typhoon MUCH MUCH faster than than nuclear could ever dream of. A destroyed nuclear power plant would have made the island uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years and further threatened the biosphere.
Tornadoes are wind events. hurricanes are wind AND WATER events.
The tsunami following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake was a WATER EVENT. No nuclear plant suffered significant damage to its foundations as a consequence; had it not been for the brain-dead decision by GE to locate the backup diesels and their fuel where they could be flooded out by a wave which topped the seawall, David Suzuki wouldn’t have Fukushima to talk about.
It’s not hard to design so that flooding a plant is impossible. Diablo Canyon sits atop a 50-foot cliff.
Had a nuclear plant been on that island, it would have been been drowned.
Even the Phillipines have hills, you know.
Had the North Anna earthquake, for example, been a point or two higher on the Richter scale
One point on the Richter scale is a multiplier of 30 in total energy. It may surprise you to learn that geologists can calculate the stored stress energy available to create quakes, but it’s true. And now that that energy has been released, anything building up in the area can be measured precisely.
Had the flood at Fort Calhoun been just a bit more severe, America’s bread basket would have been poisoned for century
The Fort Calhoun reactor was in cold shutdown at the time of the flood, and “poisoned for a century” is absurd. If fallout from all the above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada, at Bikini atoll and all the Soviet bombs including the 50 megatonner didn’t do it, not even ball-milling all 60,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA and dumping it from crop dusters would.
I can see why irresponsible clowns like you want to limit the liability of nuclear (lol, like that’s going to happen)
So you’ve dropped your objections to Price-Anderson? The current socialist scheme is okay with you after all?
Nuclear power is not well suited for the extremes coming due to climate change.
It’s the only thing that can stop those extremes from getting much, much worse. Your square miles of solar panels are far more fragile, produce for only a fraction of the day and seasonally all wrong for temperate-zone climates, are largely useless without huge expense for storage systems, and are not growing nearly fast enough to even cut into the increase in the rate of coal burning. The biggest success story on earth of replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free power isn’t Denmark, it’s France. In about 16 years France shook off its grid’s dependence on imported oil and switched to uranium. The next biggest is Ontario, also nuclear.
The crazy thing is that purveyors of “renewables” that don’t work are getting sane people to ignore the huge success stories to try to do something that not only has never achieved its claimed objectives anywhere, it probably can’t.
How about that human error, huh? Can’t design for that.
“Diablo Canyon sits atop a 50-foot cliff.”
– Yep, point to Diablo Canyon, that’ll help your losing proposition
“Even the Phillipines have hills, you know.”
– Hills have mud slides, you know.
“Speaking after a two-hour flight with Filipino forces, U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy said every building and house he saw was destroyed or severely damaged. ”
Your unbelievably arrogant assertion is that despite this, despite damage to every other structure, nuclear would have remained perfect. Sorry, not buying it. Investors aren’t either. And your cockamamie scheme to absolve nuclear from all blame in the event of an accident ain’t gonna fly either.
“One point on the Richter scale is a multiplier of 30 in total energy. ”
– As I said, black swans happen and are generally not designed for.
“North Anna Nuclear Plant: East Coast Earthquake Shake Exceeded Design, Officials Say”
“So you’ve dropped your objections to Price-Anderson? The current socialist scheme is okay with you after all?”
– Lol, how did you come to this conclusion? I want nuclear to pay for IT’S OWN liability insurance – the same way I have to pay for it for driving my car
“It’s the only thing that can stop those extremes from getting much, much worse.”
– BS
“Your square miles of solar panels”
– …he means rooftops
“are far more fragile”
– but can be integrated directly into building materials, are cheap, easy and fast to replace – oh and don’t cause heritable mutations
“produce for only a fraction of the day”
– Lie. Production peaks during a certain portion of the day, but they produce all day long and energy storage solutions are viable
“and seasonally all wrong for temperate-zone climates”
– Except Germany, right? Lol.
“are largely useless without huge expense for storage systems”
– More expensive than nuclear??? LMFAO! What a clown!
“and are not growing nearly fast enough to even cut into the increase in the rate of coal burning”
– And nuclear is? Wait around for a year or two, Krusty. Solar is getting ready to explode.
“The biggest success story on earth of replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free power isn’t Denmark, it’s France.”
– Ah that happy happy Nuclear land, France. Where is France going to store bury all her nuclear waste, again? Oh and that decommissioning bill is gonna come due, son, and it’s gonna be a doozy. BTW, The French public wants France off nuclear and LOVES renewables. Democracy, huh? – whatcha gonna do?
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Lost in the nuclear mythologies of the Great Corporate American Propaganda Whores and their media, videos, magazines et. al.
See: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971
Understand: China is taking American discovered, American developed, American proven viable, Thorium nuclear technologies: safer, cheaper scalable, plutonium free, 99% fuel efficient, near waste free, with benign waste after 300 years sequestration, to a new level. They rebirth, research, re-engineer, modernize, improve, Thorium LFTR styled technologies as we speak. Will this newer, safer, nuclear technology, already proven in working reactors in U.S., and brought to a new Chinese level of sophistication, eventually supplant the suicidal, dirty, inefficient, expensive, dangerous, Plutonium creating, expensive, current American enriched Uranium systems? Could China give birth to a new nuclear age? For all mankind? Remember: Uranium is in limited supply on earth. Thorium yields much higher energy per unit of fuel and Thorium is a much more plentiful fuel on earth.
I wish there was a link to the “bye bye Japan” paper Suzuki mentions
Had the equivalent power of Fukushima been generated any other imaginable way (wind, solar, hydro, coal or gas), and the same tsunami hit, the devastation and loss of life would most likely have been much worse.
Don’t be ridiculous. There is no bye-bye Japan scenario. Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t call for the absurd measures speculated here.
Why is it obvious to all but nuclear advocates that nuclear power catastrophes differ markedly and on several levels from the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons?
Because it isn’t the things you don’t know that hurt you, it’s the things you know that aren’t so. It was once “obvious” that the earth was fixed in place, too.
To learn some of the ways the “obvious” knowledge is faulty, I recommend starting here.
Hormesis bologna – yep, had ya figured.
If you read and post here, presumably you believe and support the science behind the claims of anthropogenic climate change. But despite this, you deny the (far older and better-supported) science of the effects of radiation, including hormesis.
It’s no wonder you can’t get anywhere with the political opposition. Hypocrisy completely destroys your credibility.
Everything you know is wrong!
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EtXGKqWz8nU&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEtXGKqWz8nU
Why stay in college?Why go to night school?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ER0vQssXUrg&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DER0vQssXUrg
If you have no scientific evidence on your side, I suppose that comedy is the best you can do. But isn’t that supposed to be the characteristic of the climate denialists? You know, only taking science seriously when it agrees with your politics?
Tell ya what, I’ll gladly be called a hypocrite by ridiculous, know it all blowhards every single day and wear it like a badge of honor. In the end, I’ll still demand a lead lined apron to protect my son’s or daughter’s germ line cells from the SCATTER of the the low dose of radiation they receive on a nominal visit to the dentist. You, being a bozo, are free to demand otherwise. But as soon as you, or clowns like you, try to impose that BS on me and mine, I’ll fight with my life’s blood to stop you and rally the many others I know willing to join me.
Once again, good luck in the marketplace. Yer gonna need it, Krusty.
So I’ve got many of the top names in both environmentalism AND climate science publicly pro-nuclear, and a foil to help illustrate the wrong-headedness of those still on the anti side.
I couldn’t ask for more.
I do believe why e.g. James Hansen embrace nuclear is that if we plan on keeping civilization running at present speed, the only option to power it is nuclear no matter how bad it is. No doubt taking a risk on nuclear is better than the risk of CO2 emissions rising. In many ways its really just a way of repeating what James Hansen has been saying all the time, we need to stop CO2 emissions now! If nuclear is the last way out, then be it, but only if it replaces the majority of fossil fuel energy. It also hastens the need to replace fossil fuel driven infrastructure with electrically driven as that doesn’t care if it comes from nuclear power or renewables.
So far nuclear power has been used to fuel growth in addition to any other fossil fuel burning, so I certainly understand the environmentalists saying that the best option is really to “turn off” industrial civilization, by replacing it with something severely scaled down purely run on renewable energy sources and where we learn to conserve and care for our planet.
Replacing plague with cholera is generally not seen as any real solution to the problem in the long run though…
I still think that only a revolution or mass revolt will bring about enough change or focus on the problem. Quite likely when we do change, its really a bit too late as well, as we have set in motion a flywheel it takes thousands of years for earth to slow down, even if our species is not around then to see it.
Not in Ontario. When the refurbished reactors at Bruce Point came back on-line, Ontario essentially stopped burning coal to make electricity. I gather that a dent was made in natural gas generation too.
There’s no reason for e.g. the USA to suddenly find new uses for coal if it stops being burned to generate electricity. There’s no real reason for people to suddenly start commuting longer distances if they replace ICEVs with electric cars; there are only so many hours in the day for driving. Plus, once the essentials have been de-carbonized it will probably become as morally offensive to burn fossil fuels as it is now to use leaded gasoline.
The characteristic of climate denialists is the same as the nuke cheerleaders. They both claim they have special knowledge and can ignore any science they choose because they know better. They both believe vast bodies of knowledge and evidence contradicting them is an evil conspiracy. Welcome to the club.
So all these Gen IV reactors are going to usher in the new age of cheap energy? Really?
“Generation V reactors refer to reactors that may be possible but are not yet considered feasible, and are not actively being developed.”
That’s just three seconds of googling.
See: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UT2yYs5YJs Kun Chen from Chinese Academy of Sciences on China Thorium
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF_Thorium_test_begins_2106131.html
http://www.timesargus.com/article/20130720/OPINION04/707209975?hubRefSrc=facebook#lf_comment=87264137
http://climateviewer.com/2013/10/11/the-implications-of-the-massive-contamination-of-japan-with-radioactive-cesium/#prettyPhoto
Chinese Thorium:
Understand: China is taking American discovered, American developed, American proven viable, Thorium nuclear technologies: safer, cheaper scalable, plutonium free, 99% fuel efficient, near waste free, with benign waste after 300 years sequestration, to a new level. They rebirth, research, re-engineer, modernize, improve, Thorium LFTR styled technologies as we speak. Will this newer, safer, nuclear technology, already proven in working reactors in U.S., and brought to a new Chinese level of sophistication, eventually supplant the suicidal, dirty, inefficient, expensive, dangerous, Plutonium creating, expensive, current American enriched Uranium systems? Could China give birth to a new nuclear age? For all mankind? Remember: Uranium is in limited supply on earth. Thorium yields much higher energy per unit of fuel and Thorium is a much more plentiful fuel on earth.
I’m a hypocrite because I don’t accept a PowerPoint by some clown at the Heartland Institute over the well founded science of the National Academy of Sciences.
Is anybody buying this guy’s BS?
I can think of something more terrifying. David Suzuki’s head explodes with scaremongering and we have to evacuate the solar system.
CNN Films to air PANDORA’S PROMISE today Thursday, Nov. 7.
Watch intelligent people discuss how our future energy needs will be met.
Have you abandoned your climate-change denialism?
I’m OK with people doing the right things for the wrong reasons.
For such people, climate change is irrelevant. The important part is maintaining the current lifestyle, consumption, and economic model. Anything that threatens that, like environmentalism, is the enemy. Anything that could maintain it, like nuclear power, is embraced.
there is considerable question about whether a nuclear society could maintain a lifestyle, or even life, on the planet.
Given the stubborn persistence of life on Earth despite crazy acts like the atmospheric detonation of the 50-megaton test version of the Tsar Bomba, there is obviously a lot less hazard from things nuclear than many have been led to believe.
Continued use of fossil fuels, on the other hand, is in the process of repeating the PETM and producing a mass extinction event. Rather than asking people to go back to the energy poverty before the Industrial Revolution (a very tough sell, especially when the entire third world wants what we have and will not balk at burning coal to get it), I’d rather switch to reliable decarbonized energy supplies. Maybe in the long term people will achieve enlightenment, but we can’t wait that long.
Well said. Although you could elaborate a little:
For such people the fact that climate is and has always and will always change is irrelevant. The important part is maintaining and growing human prosperity and the continued climb from poverty for the poorest peoples of the world. Anything that could maintain it, like nuclear power, is embraced. And anything that challenges it with superstition, needless fears or some cockamamie notion that we can stop climate from changing is skeptically required to prove itself.
Really? I doubt the Fukushima and Chernobyl refugees were introduced to a higher level of comfort and prosperity. But oh, yes, I forgot. You don’t count that.
Nano-materials engineers are pretty smart. The days of arrogant nuclear engineers looking down their noses at the rest of us have long since passed.
I’m not getting that from some of these comments
No, some are still doing that. It’s just that with the collapse of nuclear, there are less of them.
Comfortable for the moment – Japan continues to function, little immediate reason for change. Truth is: Pacific tuna caught in U.S. waters are proven contaminated by fuckoshima event. Three “corium’ disappeared? Stored fuel rods are so in a precarious position and poised for extreme results if altered in any way.
“” Long-lived radionuclides such as Cesium-137 are something new to us as a species. They did not exist on Earth in any appreciable quantities during the entire evolution of complex life. Although they are invisible to our senses they are millions of times more poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They cause cancer, leukemia, genetic mutations, birth defects, malformations, and abortions at concentrations almost below human recognition and comprehension. They are lethal at the atomic or molecular level.
They emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy that we might compare to fire, because radiation burns and destroys human tissue. But unlike the fire of fossil fuels, the nuclear fire that issues forth from radioactive elements cannot be extinguished. It is not a fire that can be scattered or suffocated because it burns at the atomic level—it comes from the disintegration of single atoms.””
http://climateviewer.com/2013/10/11/the-implications-of-the-massive-contamination-of-japan-with-radioactive-cesium/#prettyPhoto
This page offers many references, much more factual information but neglects to reveal that also associated with Fuckoshima event are: “” other things being contended with at Fukushima the longest-lived are plutonium-244, with a “half-life” ; of 80.8 million years, plutonium-242, with a half-life of 373,300 years, and plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,110 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are less than 7,000 years.””
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UT2yYs5YJs Kun Chen from Chinese Academy of Sciences on China Thorium
And: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971
And: Be reminded, these are all publicly available, and well outside the bounds of secret government information.
More-over: Survival here is being measured by the American yardstick of McMansions, McHummers, and life in the burbs on a 35 hour work week, on the extremely unhealthy Mc’merican diet, all: recently evolved and all sold by the Great Corporate American Propaganda Whores as necessities for life, and have nothing to do with a very contented sustainable survival system and everything to do with highest Corporate Profits possible. Possibly, a better thought out, otherwise motivated lifestyle, could be provided ample energy by Solar, Wind, Wave, Hydro, Tidal, Geothermal, Biological, domestic, renewable, therefore perpetual energy, but in the face of the Whore and her corpocracy, where even super insulations have been buried deep in patent Hell, alongside NiMh storage systems, EV-1 electric car technologies that proved satisfactory for the peons, Aluminium billet electric storage systems, (see Israel’s 1000 mile car) and ‘military secret’ situations, where rampant, drunken, foolhardy, primitive, savage, near consequence-free mongrel breeding practices are de-rigure, over even the more civilized controlled birthrate practices of Asian communities, and the sloffing off of socially undesirables by limiting medical and food aid, a tool akin to selective breeding, is acceptable as humane over birth control in the first place, we can hardly expect fair measure. We can hardly expect rejection of the “Enriched Uranium” systems that offer fast solution to any energy requirement where life is so debased.
Will China’s thrust for American discovered, American developed, American proven, American forsaken, Chinese revived, Chinese re-engineered, Chinese modernized, Thorium LFTR and associated technologies, if brought to fruition supplant the “Enriched Uranium” systems and bring mankind a new safe nuclear power age? Replace the American petro-dollar oil energy monopolies, the American enriched Uranium energy secrets monopoly, and ‘Change World Energy Maps Forever”? Can Thorium systems release adequate energy for mankind’s needs, in safer, cleaner manner? For now, proven, up and working, Pellet bed gas reactors do so operate cleaner and safer, and the CANDU efforts no matter how suppressed by the Great Corporate American Propaganda Whores and their military might, still pump out safer cleaner energy around the world.
Fallout is essentially the ash and dirt particles caused by large explosions and/or the demolition of large structures, which was so graphically displayed by the collapse of the World Trade Centers in 2001. The biological effects of the fallout of dust and microscopic debris on 9/11/2001 were unquestionably horrible. Nuclear weapon’s fallout has the added biological hazard of being intensely radioactive. It’s the instantaneous avalanche of neutrons spewed forth by a nuclear weapon detonation that makes the dispersed dust and debris radioactive. Neutron is the only form of radiation which can cause other materials to become radioactive. The avalanche of neutrons is the only reason why atomic bomb fallout is radioactive. Thus with nuclear fallout, the air is not only fouled by the thick fog of dust, the dust is also significantly radioactive.
The thick dust fog scenario is virtually impossible for power plant reactor accidents, even for the worst-ever nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl. The invisible concentrations of microscopic radioactive dust and radioactive gasses from Chernobyl were considerable and resulted in significant short-term biological consequences. But, even the atmospheric release of radioactive material from Chernobyl was many, many times less concentrated than would be the case with nuclear weapon’s fallout. However, this comparison only holds for Chernobyl, a type of nuclear plant only built by the old USSR; a type of plant judged by America to be too dangerous to be considered, soon after World War II. The plants used in the West cannot have Chernobyl-type accidents, and the worst possible invisible radioactive release from a Western nuclear power plant is thousands, if not millions of times less than Chernobyl. The mis-association between weapon’s fallout and Western nuclear reactor accidents makes even less sense than with Chernobyl.
And the newest reactor technology is physically incapable of radiation release.
That’s not strictly true; gamma rays can raise some nuclei to excited states, and they emit gammas when they go back to the ground state. But as a general rule, it’s good enough.
Radionuclides were released into the air from both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Windscale did likewise. There were copious amounts of radionuclides released all over Europe and Asia. There is no way to directly compare an atomic weapon with a disaster like Chernobyl. Hiroshima victims were directly radiated externally, some lethally. As you know, the fallout danger is from inhalation or ingestion and continues for a long time after the event. Different radionuclides have different hazards. It is well known that strontium90, cesium137, and iodine131 present special hazards, because of how our bodies concentrate them at vital organs, because the microscopic distance from our cells means the energy released by radioactive decay is directly transmitted to our unprotected cells, and because other organisms concentrate them to high levels, making them dangerous to ingest. Based on the aerosols emitted from the Chernobyl fire and explosion, it is estimated that much more fallout was emitted than at Hiroshima. It is unnecessary to have a nuclear explosion to spread vast amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Explosion and fire at Chernobyl and Fukushima proved capable of doing that. In that sense, and because there is so much more radioactive material available, a nuclear power plant is capable of causing much more widespread contamination. The damage due to Chernobyl is primarily contamination by air, but also some through the water supply. Fukushima has some of both, but more to the water supply and ocean. For both, the problem is that the melted pile nuclear material is in an uncontrolled state and open to the environment risking further contamination.
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-17/news/mn-16573_1_hiroshima-atomic-bomb
Here is the fallout comparison between Fukushima and Hiroshima.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2011/08/24/news/fukushima-fallout-said-30-times-hiroshimas/#.UnwdF7K9KSM
There is a lot of talk about TEPCO exposing a single fuel rod to the air for a fraction of a second causing global doom. Millions, even billions of fatalities! Suzuki appears to be repeating this.
It’s not plausible.
But many nuclear bombs were deliberately exploded in the 40s and 50s. And while this did in fact do some cumulative damage, it didn’t cause millions or billions of deaths like some people are squawking.
Suzuki lost his credibility with me with this ridiculous squawking.
If nuclear is taken off the table it should be because of arguments based in fact, not in over the top irrational fears. This talk makes me more favorably inclined to nuclear as a climatologist, because I sympathize with a professional group subjected to absurd over-the-top rumors.
Yes. So being a little more precise would be helpful. Like how many people die due to fallout? It’s like cigarettes or air pollution. Who said it was billions? Find the quotes and references and do the math. Adding another statement that says you doubt something non specific is not helpful.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wAXPYbs39D4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DwAXPYbs39D4
Start with a reference, then start digging into details.
In the face of profit there is no end to humanities folly. You can choose to step on an airplane, its very unlikely to fall out of the sky, but if it does, chances are you are toast. Though luck. Well, you cant choose to not be affected by the effects of nuclear disasters in your neighboring country. Somewhere, someone made that choice for me, even though I did not ask for it. Now that I know the consequences of that technology, I’d like to file a complaint – this is clearly yet another technology which humanity has no understanding of the dire consequences if it fails. And hence it should never have been put to use no matter how tempting it is to fuel the wheels of industrial civilization.
I haven’t heard of anyone dying from solar panels even though I am sure some monkeybrain can still get electrocuted. No doubt that would be an individual choice of risk, and not one that could kill of huge ecosystems (and people). Monkeybrains playing with nuclear energy is not a good idea.
I wonder sometimes if the people who build nuclear plants sometimes think what the chances are of a Haiyan strength typhoon or hurricane will pay them a visit? Or how about a small but well placed asteroid hit? Did they build them to sustain that? Or how about a good old bomb, doesnt even have to be nuclear.
Nuclear energy can really only be justified if they are 100% safe, not even 99,99999999999999999% would be enough in my opinion.
Grain elevators survive direct hits by tornadoes. NPP containment buildings are much stronger than grain elevators.
Reductio ad absurdum. By the time you’d get any damage to a NPP from something like the Chelyabinsk meteor, you’d have tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths from heat flash and blast. Most of the people in the area that would be affected by radiation would already be dead.
Thereby trading off a vanishingly small chance of harm from radiation for a 100% chance of catastrophic climate change and mass extinction event, not to mention a host of smaller hazards you cannot otherwise avoid.
If you are anti-nuclear, you are objectively pro-super typhoon. Maybe we should name the next 2000-km wide storm after you.
“If you are anti-nuclear, you are objectively pro-super typhoon”
Objectively… Lol. Sell it, baby.
It was all you anti-nukes who couldn’t tell the difference between watts and bombs who drove the cost of nuclear power through the roof in the USA and saved the nation for coal-fired electricity.
So thanks to you and your heroes, the “anti-proliferation” example to the world proliferated the practice of digging up and burning black dirt, dumping the byproducts into the atmosphere. This is exactly what we now understand as the ultimate cause of super-typhoon Haiyan.
I’ve been pro-nuke and anti-coal since before I could vote. You own this one.
Fabricated alternative realities are so easy. Anything can happen in a made up alternate reality and you can make yourself the victor every single time.
Watch, I can do it too.
What if the nuclear industry hadn’t actively worked to stop renewable technologies and research into them (like the Salter Duck) from taking place? Where might we have been if we had decided to heavily invest in renewable tech research long ago?
What if we had gone for energy efficiency long ago?
What if we had priced externalities long ago?
There, I’ve just proved that your “what if”, “woulda, coulda, shoulda” Monday morning QB BS is just that.
Ya gonna answer my other questions now, Bozo D. Clown? I kinda doubt it
Refuting historical fact is hard. It’s a fact that the early generations of nuclear power plants in the USA came in at lower cost per kilowatt than coal. It’s a fact that nuclear was expected to replace coal.
It’s a fact that NRC regulation is what drove costs through the roof:
Didn’t happen. NREL got funded, while research funds for nuclear were zero from 1994 through 1996. Wave-energy tests go on to this day. It’s not going commercial.
For centuries, renewable tech research is all there was. The 1 megawatt Smith-Putnam wind turbine at Grandpa’s Knob pre-dated the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. There’s a simple reason these things failed to take off: they do not work as well as what we came to use instead.
Go figure. I did personally, but I’m an outlier.
Then nuclear would have taken over from coal, just as in the non-NRC (or sane-NRC) scenario. The cost of managing intermittency would have kept your pet sources at the level of bit players.
Questions? Your aggressive, clueless assertions do not become questions just because you put something other than a period at the end of a sentence.
“Grain elevators survive direct hits by tornadoes. NPP containment buildings are much stronger than grain elevators.”
Tornadoes are wind events. hurricanes are wind AND WATER events. This hurricane had an epic black swan storm surge. Had a nuclear plant been on that island, it would have been been drowned.
Black swans happen and are generally not designed for. Had the North Anna earthquake, for example, been a point or two higher on the Richter scale, the resulting disaster could have made Washington, DC uninhabitable. Had the flood at Fort Calhoun been just a bit more severe, America’s bread basket would have been poisoned for century
I can see why irresponsible clowns like you want to limit the liability of nuclear (lol, like that’s going to happen)
Nuclear power is not well suited for the extremes coming due to climate change.
Rising seas threaten nuclear plants
Floods threaten nuclear power plants
Wildfires threaten nuclear plants
Droughts threatens nuclear plants
JELLYFISH threaten nuclear power plants.
Solar energy solutions will bring power to the people affected by this typhoon MUCH MUCH faster than than nuclear could ever dream of. A destroyed nuclear power plant would have made the island uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years and further threatened the biosphere.
The tsunami following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake was a WATER EVENT. No nuclear plant suffered significant damage to its foundations as a consequence; had it not been for the brain-dead decision by GE to locate the backup diesels and their fuel where they could be flooded out by a wave which topped the seawall, David Suzuki wouldn’t have Fukushima to talk about.
It’s not hard to design so that flooding a plant is impossible. Diablo Canyon sits atop a 50-foot cliff.
Even the Phillipines have hills, you know.
One point on the Richter scale is a multiplier of 30 in total energy. It may surprise you to learn that geologists can calculate the stored stress energy available to create quakes, but it’s true. And now that that energy has been released, anything building up in the area can be measured precisely.
The Fort Calhoun reactor was in cold shutdown at the time of the flood, and “poisoned for a century” is absurd. If fallout from all the above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada, at Bikini atoll and all the Soviet bombs including the 50 megatonner didn’t do it, not even ball-milling all 60,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA and dumping it from crop dusters would.
So you’ve dropped your objections to Price-Anderson? The current socialist scheme is okay with you after all?
It’s the only thing that can stop those extremes from getting much, much worse. Your square miles of solar panels are far more fragile, produce for only a fraction of the day and seasonally all wrong for temperate-zone climates, are largely useless without huge expense for storage systems, and are not growing nearly fast enough to even cut into the increase in the rate of coal burning. The biggest success story on earth of replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free power isn’t Denmark, it’s France. In about 16 years France shook off its grid’s dependence on imported oil and switched to uranium. The next biggest is Ontario, also nuclear.
The crazy thing is that purveyors of “renewables” that don’t work are getting sane people to ignore the huge success stories to try to do something that not only has never achieved its claimed objectives anywhere, it probably can’t.
“had it not been for the brain-dead decision by GE to …”
– Yeah, about that…
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/08/how_tenacity_a_wall_saved_a_ja.html
How about that human error, huh? Can’t design for that.
“Diablo Canyon sits atop a 50-foot cliff.”
– Yep, point to Diablo Canyon, that’ll help your losing proposition
“Even the Phillipines have hills, you know.”
– Hills have mud slides, you know.
“Speaking after a two-hour flight with Filipino forces, U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy said every building and house he saw was destroyed or severely damaged. ”
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131111/NATION/311110044/U-S-general-Typhoon-Haiyan-left-total-devastation-942-confirmed-dead
Your unbelievably arrogant assertion is that despite this, despite damage to every other structure, nuclear would have remained perfect. Sorry, not buying it. Investors aren’t either. And your cockamamie scheme to absolve nuclear from all blame in the event of an accident ain’t gonna fly either.
“One point on the Richter scale is a multiplier of 30 in total energy. ”
– As I said, black swans happen and are generally not designed for.
“North Anna Nuclear Plant: East Coast Earthquake Shake Exceeded Design, Officials Say”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/08/north-anna-nuclear-plant_n_954680.html
“So you’ve dropped your objections to Price-Anderson? The current socialist scheme is okay with you after all?”
– Lol, how did you come to this conclusion? I want nuclear to pay for IT’S OWN liability insurance – the same way I have to pay for it for driving my car
“It’s the only thing that can stop those extremes from getting much, much worse.”
– BS
“Your square miles of solar panels”
– …he means rooftops
“are far more fragile”
– but can be integrated directly into building materials, are cheap, easy and fast to replace – oh and don’t cause heritable mutations
“produce for only a fraction of the day”
– Lie. Production peaks during a certain portion of the day, but they produce all day long and energy storage solutions are viable
“and seasonally all wrong for temperate-zone climates”
– Except Germany, right? Lol.
“are largely useless without huge expense for storage systems”
– More expensive than nuclear??? LMFAO! What a clown!
“and are not growing nearly fast enough to even cut into the increase in the rate of coal burning”
– And nuclear is? Wait around for a year or two, Krusty. Solar is getting ready to explode.
“The biggest success story on earth of replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free power isn’t Denmark, it’s France.”
– Ah that happy happy Nuclear land, France. Where is France going to store bury all her nuclear waste, again? Oh and that decommissioning bill is gonna come due, son, and it’s gonna be a doozy. BTW, The French public wants France off nuclear and LOVES renewables. Democracy, huh? – whatcha gonna do?
Lost in the nuclear mythologies of the Great Corporate American Propaganda Whores and their media, videos, magazines et. al.
See: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UT2yYs5YJs Kun Chen from Chinese Academy of Sciences on China Thorium
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF_Thorium_test_begins_2106131.html
http://www.timesargus.com/article/20130720/OPINION04/707209975?hubRefSrc=facebook#lf_comment=87264137
http://climateviewer.com/2013/10/11/the-implications-of-the-massive-contamination-of-japan-with-radioactive-cesium/#prettyPhoto
Understand: China is taking American discovered, American developed, American proven viable, Thorium nuclear technologies: safer, cheaper scalable, plutonium free, 99% fuel efficient, near waste free, with benign waste after 300 years sequestration, to a new level. They rebirth, research, re-engineer, modernize, improve, Thorium LFTR styled technologies as we speak. Will this newer, safer, nuclear technology, already proven in working reactors in U.S., and brought to a new Chinese level of sophistication, eventually supplant the suicidal, dirty, inefficient, expensive, dangerous, Plutonium creating, expensive, current American enriched Uranium systems? Could China give birth to a new nuclear age? For all mankind? Remember: Uranium is in limited supply on earth. Thorium yields much higher energy per unit of fuel and Thorium is a much more plentiful fuel on earth.