Nuclear fallout? / Media blackout?

Moriarty wrote: »

Hang on though.. that's rather disingenuous. Nuclear waste can technically include the hands of expensive wrist watches which are quite often coated with luminous radioactive material - tritium - to let them be seen in the dark. Never mind the mountains of 'nuclear waste' generated in the medical community every year.

There's a relatively small amount of highly radioactive and dangerous waste.. and most of that could be dealt with by reprocessing if anti-nuclear lobby groups hadn't almost managed to throttle the life out of that particular avenue.

It's almost like.. they wanted to create a largely artificial problem to get in the way of the nuclear industry. I imagine you'll agree that there are ideologues on both sides which have only muddied the waters, very much to the detriment of society?




How about it, then? Are you aware of exactly how much radiation cancer patients are exposed to during treatment to successfully battle these diseases?

This is a far more nuanced issue than you appear to appreciate, going on your posts.

The comment i made about 250,000 tonnes and 100,000 years half-life was an aside and i didn't honestly mean to come across as disingenuous. I saw a documentary about this which i'll link to at the end, and was quoting the figures directly from that. Did a check on the figures and it seems a few media sources are in agreement or at least were prepared to publish. If thats disingenuous then am guilty as charged.

Ok first of all lets separate the technicalities of nuclear waste from whats used for medical purposes or fancy wrist watches and whats being currently being produced in all the power plants worldwide. Go with whatever figure you like, but 250,000 tonnes at least is what i'm led is current estimates. I stand corrected on that and would appreciate if you have a revised figure.

As regards re-processing, I gather the anti-nuclear lobby are throttling the life out of it is because it's sort of because they have major issues with safety aspects of nuclear power in general. Now i've read that there are models of power plants that actually don't produce any waste and that's all well and good but from the basic knowledge i have, the current ones are definitely not one and the same hence why i said "nuclear power in it's current form".

I fully agree there is muddy waters on both sides and Caldicott is certainly not the best anti spokesperson as someone said above.

I also agree it's more nuanced than my posts. It's far too important an issue as you rightly point out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qxu2YJF4rc

Our future is nuclear.

We need to embrace it, we need to work on the side effects. We have 100 billion years of fuel if used in fast breeder reactors.

Sure there are physical problems and potential disasters, but a nuclear battery that could have been marketed 20 years ago that could run my digital camera for ten years.

POLITICAL dogma stopped research.

jackiebaron wrote: »

This statement right here blows open the hoax that the best Leaving Cert results come from Cork.

Don't be obnoxious.

fanciful talk nuclear batteries aside, he is correct. Nuclear power is the cleanest, reliable and safest power source we currently have available.

hooradiation wrote: »

Don't be obnoxious.

fanciful talk nuclear batteries aside, he is correct. Nuclear power is the cleanest, reliable and safest power source we currently have available.

Whatever gbees opinions on this, and going on his/her previous posts am sure he/she probably knows way more about this than most. I don't think gbee would have come out with a doozie though like that statement you made. And forgive me if i'm not nuanced about this for some tastes.

If you want to slap some evidence on the table to back up the truth of that statement then be my guest. I'm all ears.

ed2hands wrote: »

Whatever gbees opinions on this, and going on his/her previous posts am sure he/she probably knows way more about this than most. I don't think gbee would have come out with a doozie though like that statement you made. And forgive me if i'm not nuanced about this for some tastes.

If you want to slap some evidence on the table to back up the truth of that statement then be my guest. I'm all ears.

Of course,
Nuclear power is cleaner and safer than fossil fuels:
There is a thing called deaths per TerraWatt Hour, basically for every terrwatt you produce how many people do you kill. It comes from the pollutants released by generating energy.
Some light reading on this include
Economic Analysis of Various Options of Electricity Generation Taking into Account Health and Environmental Effects
and some Deaths statistics from the fuel chain for coal and nuclear

Here's a blog post detailing all of that if you'd like to read more.

In these areas Nuclear comes in far behind fossil fuels, which is why i call them safer (they kill less people) and cleaner.

Now, you'll notice i don't mention renewable like wind, hydro etc, this is because they fall under my third caveat, reliability.
Wind is not reliable enough in this area to power a nation on it's own.
And as for Hydro power that is limited by appropriate geography and thusly fails for the same reasons.
Both also have environmental concerns that are often brushed over when talking about them - they're not deal breakers per say, but should be weighed against any proposal to go renewable, especially for environmental reasons.

I hope that's given you a sufficent idea of where i am coming from.

jackiebaron wrote: »

Tell me how nuclear power is safer than any other source.

please see above.

jackiebaron wrote: »

And tell me how it's cleaner than any and every other source.

It's certainly cleaner than any of the major sources and renewable are too inefficient at this point for me to care about them.

jackiebaron wrote: »

You're trying to tell me that if an earthquake struck and reduced a hydro-power station to a pile of twisted steel and rubble and it also reduced a nuclear reactor to a radioactive slag heap you'd feel 'safer' and 'cleaner' living beside the latter??

I'd rather not be near any of them in the case of such a catastrophic earthquake, but thats more to do with the earthquake than anything else.

But setting aside your emotive language and weasel words - if given the choice i would rather live beside a nuclear power plant than a coal one or a wind farm and either would be fine either way with having to pick between a nuclear or hydro.

hooradiation wrote: »

Of course,
Nuclear power is cleaner and safer than fossil fuels:
There is a thing called deaths per TerraWatt Hour, basically for every terrwatt you produce how many people do you kill. It comes from the pollutants released by generating energy.
Some light reading on this include
Economic Analysis of Various Options of Electricity Generation Taking into Account Health and Environmental Effects
and some Deaths statistics from the fuel chain for coal and nuclear

Here's a blog post detailing all of that if you'd like to read more.

In these areas Nuclear comes in far behind fossil fuels, which is why i call them safer (they kill less people) and cleaner.

Now, you'll notice i don't mention renewable like wind, hydro etc, this is because they fall under my third caveat, reliability.
Wind is not reliable enough in this area to power a nation on it's own.
And as for Hydro power that is limited by appropriate geography and thusly fails for the same reasons.
Both also have environmental concerns that are often brushed over when talking about them - they're not deal breakers per say, but should be weighed against any proposal to go renewable, especially for environmental reasons.

I hope that's given you a sufficent idea of where i am coming from.


please see above.



It's certainly cleaner than any of the major sources and renewable are too inefficient at this point for me to care about them.

Thanks for the reply.

Yea i had a feeling you were going to trot out the usual comparisons to fossil fuels. It doesn't make your statement any more true though whatever way you want to slice it. And it's ridiculous IMO to claim Nuclear is safer and quote statistics from coal mine deaths etc to back this up. Fossil is obviously not the answer either now is it?

Renewables and general Reducing doesn't either have the finance or the political will because the politicians and fat cats of this world have their heads too far up their fat greedy arses to see that.

Malty_T wrote: »

Um, think about this for a second. If a Hyrdo damn ruptures everyone in the immediate flood area is f**ked. If a Nuclear Plant goes up in smoke unless you get a brutally high dosage your chances of survival will be based on the statistics of radiation and your own luck in regards to those statistics.

Oh and for what it's worth. Nothing has taken more lives energy generation wise than Hydro.

Oh yeah, you're right of course and this did occur to me, but that's an exceptional case. Hydro electric power stations or indeed nuclear ones don't have a habit of just falling over, so my impromptu ranking of what power source I'd prefer to live beside was based on more mundane, day to day things.

jackiebaron wrote: »

Weasel words??

yes, When you were describing your earthquake scenario you described the hydro plant as becoming "a pile of twisted steel and rubble" conveniently ignoring, as Malty_T pointed out, how instantly devistating that'd be but decided to categorise the nuclear plant as "radioactive slag heap".

Downplaying one and inflating another. text-book example of weasel words.

jackiebaron wrote: »

You stated categorically that nuclear was the cleanest source of power that is available and now you can't back it up.

I'm sorry you've decided to ignore what linked to and the subsequent explanation of why i excluded wind or solar, but that is your decision.

jackiebaron wrote: »

How is nuclear cleaner than hydro or wind or solar?

How can hydro, wind or solar produce anywhere near the level of energy needed to power a nation our size, let alone anywhere bigger. They're not primary sources of power production and i treated them as such.

jackiebaron wrote: »

Go ahead and head over to Japan for a little seaside holiday in Fukushima. Feast on the freshly caught fish there too and tell us how clean it is.

This is the kind of emotive language i was talking about. Hold up an edge case and use it to damn everything.
But it's nonsense.
I'm no more going to accept that your Fukushima challenge is proof positive that nuclear power is a dangerous untamable beast than I'm going to accept that 9/11 makes flying or being in tall buildings unsafe, that the death of princess dianna makes cars, tunnels or having a chauffeur unsafe.
It's a logical fallacy and i have no time for it.

jackiebaron wrote: »

You also stated that nuclear is the safest...right!

The number of people who've died as a direct result of nuclear accidents is infinitesimally small and as per the links i've already provided kills less Per terrawatt hour.

hooradiation wrote: »

The number of people who've died as a direct result of nuclear accidents is infinitesimally small.

I'm sorry but i don't buy that for a second, and you're completely ignoring the elephant in the room which is the nuclear waste issue. Not to mention the questionable carbon footprint that uranium mining, maintence, de-commissioning etc has. It's neither cleaner or safer than anything.

ed2hands wrote: »

Thanks for the reply.

Yea i had a feeling you were going to trot out the usual comparisons to fossil fuels. It doesn't make your statement any more true though whatever way you want to slice it. And it's ridiculous IMO to claim Nuclear is safer and quote statistics from coal mine deaths etc to back this up. Fossil is obviously not the answer either now is it?

But it's the only other real option available, so i think a compare and contrast of the two is very relevant.

ed2hands wrote: »

Renewables and general Reducing doesn't either have the finance or the political will because the politicians and fat cats of this world have their heads too far up their fat greedy arses to see that.

They also have neither because they're currently very inefficient. It's easy to blame rotund felines and politicians but it's let us not simply assume that the sole reason we aren't all working of wind and solar power is because a clandestine group of ne'er do wells have decided we can't.

There are business interests at play, always that's an inescapable fact of the world- but currently the technology for renewable energy isn't good enough to make it worth switching, eventually it may well be but in the meantime nuclear is the best option available, because we need power now, not twenty years down the road.

ed2hands wrote: »

I'm sorry but i don't buy that for a second, and you're completely ingnoring the elephant in the room which is the nuclear waste issue. Not to mention the questionable carbon footprint that uranium mining, maintence, de-commissioning etc has. It's neither cleaner or safer than anything.

I did say "directly" - that was about 50 people at Chernobyl, currently at Fukushima we have, zero i believe. Anything else?

And then as i remarked on the deaths per kilowatt hour, its substantially lowers than every other fossil fuel (and lower than wind if you read the pdf's i linked) so i think I've covered nearly everything.