Margo Kingston's Webdiary - smh.com.au - Nuclear YES Case

Margo Kingston's Webdiary - smh.com.au:

"Any contemporary nuclear debate in Australia must take cognizance of this fact: So far as our neighbours are concerned, enhanced reliance on nuclear power is a given. Australia can't stop this progress, even if it wanted to."

[Nuclear power stations are not only built as an energy supply. Many countries have a nuclear weapons program that could only be done on the fringes of a nuclear power regime. Pakistan tested weapons in the last few years. Nuclear power could sometimes be an excuse.]

"The crucial question therefore becomes: how can Australia, in a world - and particularly in a region - of widespread nuclear powered electricity generation and concomitantly increasing nuclear know-how, contribute to assuaging real concerns with respect to reactor safety, nuclear waste management and nuclear weapons proliferation?

Whether Australia should implement nuclear power on its own soil is, frankly, a subsidiary matter: International treaties and trade sanctions aside, we are, after all, a small population - our aggregate greenhouse contribution, as against our per capita one, is trivial.

Yet the two issues are linked: any robust contribution to nuclear power security requires an equally robust cohort of domestic nuclear expertise. Australia doesn't have that any more - we have deliberately let it run down."

[That's a really strange reason to go nuclear. If it was such a concern, what would be against us starting a proper education program, maybe as part of a cadetship with a government department, that sends top students overseas to learn about the issues and realities of the nuclear industry firsthand. There are ways other than to build our own reactors if the problem we need to solve is one of building expertise.]

"There have always been earnest, formally-trained nuclear "insiders", and others with relevant technical expertise, opposed to nuclear power on safety grounds. Today, their opposites can be found in erstwhile anti-nuclear committed environmentalists who have come around, in the face of greenhouse juxtaposed against the apparently inexorable human desire for an ever more energy-consuming lifestyle, to embrace (however uncomfortably) nuclear technology as the only on-stream viable energy solution.

Both these anti and nouveau-pro adherents contribute to the nuclear debate in concrete fashion: they try to establish just what the facts are, and then evaluate them in detail. But, historically, and particularly in the broad public domain, this has not been the usual course.

Generally, debate has been between pro-nuclear-power technological insiders and anti-all-things-nuclear enviro-fundamentalists. In fact, it generally hasn't been a debate at all; rather, it has been a one-sided shouting match, with the opponents seemingly engaged in entirely different conversations."

[Are you even trying to sound reasonable? The problem is with the difference between base-load and peak-load power generation and demand. Nuclear power aims to raise the base-load capacity so that it can match the most extreme peak-load demands of hot days (in Australia). This is the wrong way to solve this problem. I have commented on this before, and so has Lindsay Tanner in his speech in Parliament - the NO Case. Smart renewable technology can average out demands and reduce the gap between base-load and peak-load. This will make the need for nuclear power stations redundant. The nuclear industry has planned this campaign on a set of assumptions that simply do not stand. It has been caught out red faced. It is not a one-sided shouting match - the nuclear industry expects a one-sided shouting match: its only too bad that it misjudged and misunderstood the issues.

Furthermore, the writer of this article says that pro-nuclear types like dealing with numbers. Fine, so do I. But it takes time to arrive at reasonable costings of alternatives. The nuclear industry seems to have planned this well, and for it to just say - here lets see your data and numbers, after springing this topic on us at such short notice is the height of rudeness. If they were reasonable - scientific - they would acknowledge this fact - and not just try to ram their proposals through, whatever they happen to be...]

"Given the above caveats, if the postulated timeline and climate impact of industrial-society-induced global warming prove to be accurate, for countries without substantial untapped hydroelectric resources nuclear power is the only viable near term large-scale energy option consistent with economic growth and a commitment to reduced CO2 emissions."

[Rubbish. Uranium oxide is also a limited resource. Its use is not consistent with current levels of economic growth: the costs would blow out as the resource becomes scarcer.]

"Current "thermal" reactor (so called because the neutrons are deliberately slowed) nuclear power technology, which "burns" only a tiny fraction of natural uranium, can remedy both projected shortfalls in electricity generating capacity and provide the additional electricity necessary for the production of hydrogen for fuel cells, all the while substantially ameliorating aggregate greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, burial of high level nuclear waste in glass or SYNROC is scientifically sound (as even Greenpeace admits), and full reprocessing of spent fuel is energy-efficient.

To this end, the proposal by Russia's Minatom for a "closed nuclear cycle", under which it would take the world's unreprocessed nuclear waste, then extract unburnt Pu239 and U235 for incorporation into mixed oxide fuel before burying the remainder, makes much more sense than the proposal Pangea Resources made some years ago for an Australian nuclear waste dump."

[Here we go... Where does someone start with this... Cloud coo-coo land stuff... Is this guy serious... It may take this guy fifteen minutes to write a couple of paragraphs like this. It would take months of solid research even to list and note the various issues involved. "closed nuclear cycle"? Transporting nuclear waste around the world? Have you ever heard about what happened to decommissioned Russian nuclear submarines? Burying the waste - for tens of thousands of years - can any technology and engineering ensure that there will be no leakage into the environment over that kind of a time scale? All for an energy source that won't last and isn't needed if smart renewables were installed instead. Its very easy to write two paragraphs.]

"Let's be conservative: assume a fully-developed 9 billion soul world consumes energy at ten times the current level. That brings the full-burnup uranium supply [NO SUCH THING] estimate down to 300 years. Factoring in an equivalent contribution by thorium brings the total fission energy potential to 600 years' supply. This is not to be sneezed at.

Of course, realisation of that full-burnup nuclear fission potential shall not be easy. But the potential is real, so, surely, in the face of greenhouse trying to develop the technology is worth far more effort and financial resources than have historically been applied."

[Can we try to stay within even a semblance of reality here. Lets talk about what is achievable - now. Not in la-la-land. And you want to be taken seriously...]

["nuclear transmutation" - I'll believe it when I see it. Prove it works... The same goes for the fast-breeder cycles]

"Third, there is the problem of diversion of nuclear weapons grade material (although a competent proliferator, Iran notwithstanding, would hardly squander resources on producing bomb-making material via current-technology commercial power reactors). Fast-breeder technology - teething problems aside - has been resisted, particularly by the US, because of its potential to exacerbate the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The solution to this problem might be a standardised fast-breeder reactor design utilising unenriched fuel (?) and incorporating a feature which prevents plutonium extraction during operation. A nuclear reactor based on these principles, and from which the waste products could be continuously extracted, would have no need of
large-scale uranium enrichment or uranium/plutonium reprocessing facilities (although a small-scale enrichment facility might be required to provide "spike" reactor starter fuel)."

[Can we drop the pipe-dreams PPPLLLEEEAAASSSEEE!!!
Can you stick to reality - with what is possible - with what is proven to work]

What a load of crap - all 7700 words - I'm at the Nuclear Terrorism bit about half way through - but this guy just doesn't seem to have a handle on the issues. I want realistic solutions to energy production and consumption in the REAL world - not some wishful thinking.

Many previous posts on my blog look at the nuclear issue. This article is, relatively speaking, a waste of time.