Nuclear Energy.

maniac101 · 03-01-2008 4:04pm

SeanW wrote: »

So now you know the truth

Do we? You declare your opinion to be "the truth" without attempting to address any of the impractalities of building a nuclear power plant in Ireland.

Firstly, once all planned and approved gas-powered generation plants in Ireland come online in the next few years, Ireland will have more baseload plant than it needs for several years to come. As you know, nuclear is suited only to baseload applications. Sure, our gas supply has become unreliable, but who would invest in a nuclear power plant if it could only sell electricity at times when the Russians cut off the gas? In the deregulated electricity market that we now have in Ireland, no-one would build a nuclear plant, even if no ban on nuclear was in place, because a market for the electricity produced couldn't be guaranteed. Modern nuclear power plants must have an all-year round market for their electricity in order to be financially viable.

Secondly, Ireland will have in the order of 4500MW of wind capacity in 2020 if the the EU renewable targets are met, leading to massive fluctuations of electricity supply. Due to our lack of interconnection and storage capacity, we will need a large amount of peaking power plant with variable output to smooth out these fluctuations, which is exactly what a nuclear power plant isn't! Two interconnectors to the UK are currently planned with a combined capacity of just 1000MW, and will take several years to plan and build. Yes, an interconnector with France is needed and should be built, but it's needed to provide a market for our renewable resources, not for exploiting nuclear power. Exporting nuclear electricity to the French is a bit like selling ice cubes to the inuit.

I'm not saying that we should rule out nuclear on this island for good. But a practical analysis of the Irish electricity market shows that there's no place for it - at least not for the next several years.

silverharp · 03-01-2008 4:12pm

maniac101 wrote: »

Yes, an interconnector with France is needed and should be built, but it's needed to provide a market for our renewable resources, not for exploiting nuclear power. Exporting nuclear electricity to the French is a bit like selling ice cubes to the inuit.

How feasible is an interconnector to France? or would it be via the UK grid?

maniac101 · 03-01-2008 4:30pm

silverharp wrote: »

How feasible is an interconnector to France? or would it be via the UK grid?

Technically, it's feasible. There's already a 700MW HVDC interconnector between Norway and the Netherlands. I've no idea how economically feasible a connection with France would be, to be honest. I'd imagine that cheap electricity in France would be an inhibiting factor on this side of the link as it's a two-way connection!

Going via UK would not be ideal,- their own interconnection with the continent would be a bottleneck, and we'd be relying on them allowing us to use it.

SeanW · 03-01-2008 6:10pm

They are insanely more expensive.

Olkilouto-3, Europe's newest reactor under construction in Finland, is projected to cost €3 billion, for 1600MW. We pay about €1m per MW of CCGT plant.

But you're right - we'd never get that kind of value for money here because any attempt to build a nuclear plant would end up like Sizewell B in the UK - its only modern nuclear reactor - where the builders spent more time (about 6 years) and money in the courts fighting a sequence of legal challenges by environmentalists - the same ones who now claim that nuclear plants take too long to build.

Of course if you subject anything to "starve the horse then kill it because it can't pull" economics, it won't work.

ANY subsidies given to the nuclear industry by government are more than exceeded by the licenses to pollute that the fossil fuels industry has, and cancelled out by the "It's nuclear KILL IT, KILL IT NOW" approach taken by enviro-fruitloops. Another red herring.

Thorium is already close to reality in India where they are looking at this in detail since they have a lot of the stuff, but the reason it's not used commercially right now is because of the ready availability of Uranium. That's why we're burning well-drilled oil instead of tar-sand oil right now - theres plenty of it for the moment.

Selling it to Russia is a morally bankrupt option.

So is burning fossil fuels, the only realistic alternative as proven time and time again, but *oops* I forgot, we don't like to talk about that

Silly me.

In any case, like I said it's an option if we can't do like Finland because of the problems I've mentioned. To keep some perspective, here is a representation of the volume of nuclear waste made to produce energy for one person over a normal lifetime.

Do we? You declare your opinion to be "the truth"

Regarding nuclear accidents yes, in particular Chernobyl which I have shown to be 100% caused by Soviet maladministration. Did you watch the video I linked to?

without attempting to address any of the impractalities of building a nuclear power plant in Ireland.

I already did - I admitted that it is never going to happen.

Firstly, once all planned and approved gas-powered generation plants in Ireland come online in the next few years, Ireland will have more baseload plant than it needs for several years to come.

This being one of the reasons - we've already decided to invest in fossil fuels, much to the apparent delight of our environmentalists!

Yes, an interconnector with France is needed and should be built, but it's needed to provide a market for our renewable resources, not for exploiting nuclear power. Exporting nuclear electricity to the French is a bit like selling ice cubes to the inuit.

This is what I advocate in the near term as the most practical solution - to import nuclear electricity from France.

But if we develop a sideline business in exporting wind power, all to the better.

Lennoxschips · 04-01-2008 12:04am

Exactly, we'd be looking to bury and secure 4 million of these for time period of 100,000 years.

That's why it's so damn expensive.

Olkilouto-3, Europe's newest reactor under construction in Finland, is projected to cost €3 billion, for 1600MW. We pay about €1m per MW of CCGT plant.

So the Finnish pay 3000 million just to build a 1,600 MW Nuclear plant (not including decommissioning costs I assume) and Ireland pays only 1,600 million euro for the same MW from gas. It makes the Kyoto fines look positively attractive.

The biggest savings in CO2 are to be made in reducing the amount of energy we use.

Regarding nuclear accidents yes, in particular Chernobyl which I have shown to be 100% caused by Soviet maladministration. Did you watch the video I linked to?

Chernobyl was indeed caused by severe mismanagement and carelessness. But I'm of the opinion that mismanagement and carelessness is human nature and will probably happen again, somewhere. If it happens at other power sources you get a blackout. If it happens at a nuclear power source you give a piece of land the size of Limerick an almighty radioactive dose.

bonkey · 04-01-2008 1:11pm

Lennoxschips wrote: »

Exactly, we'd be looking to bury and secure 4 million of these for time period of 100,000 years.

Sure...if we took the stupidly short-sighted approach of not reprocessing our waste. if we took that option, we'd have far less, which would be 'hot' for only a matter of hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, reprocessing isn't likely to be accepted because :

a) We'd have to stop moaning about the evil that is Sellafield, and possibly even use it ourselves.
and
b) People are still convinced that "reprocessing == weapons-grade material" (to the same extent that they were convinced that "processing == weapons-grade material" when it came to Iran recently).

So the Finnish pay 3000 million just to build a 1,600 MW Nuclear plant (not including decommissioning costs I assume) and Ireland pays only 1,600 million euro for the same MW from gas. It makes the Kyoto fines look positively attractive.

Thank God CO2 emissions don't actually do anything to the environment, eh? If they did, then there'd be a risk that Kyoto would be superceded with something even more expensive within the lifetime of any plant built today.

The biggest savings in CO2 are to be made in reducing the amount of energy we use.

Its a shame that we can't reduce the amount of energy we use and generate that reduced requirement with a minimum of emissions. If only we could do both.......

Chernobyl was indeed caused by severe mismanagement and carelessness. But I'm of the opinion that mismanagement and carelessness is human nature and will probably happen again, somewhere. If it happens at other power sources you get a blackout. If it happens at a nuclear power source you give a piece of land the size of Limerick an almighty radioactive dose.

If it happehns at a nuclear power source, you might get that if one is talking about a first-generation nuclear power source which additionally fails to maintain or meet its required safety standards. Otherwise....no....thats not what you get.

Here's a quick test...look at the number of nuclear incidents which are reported annually around the world. See if you can explain why your doomsday scenario hasn't happened given that this number is not 0. See if you can go one step further and instead of making a handwaving generality about what 'could' happen, you can specify exactly what combination of events would be required in a modern, 21st-century design to bring this situation about. No-one is proposing building a 1950s reactor in Ireland, so lets not look at the known weaknesses of those designs.

Seriously....this whole "accidental meltdown" doomsday scaremongering is about 30 years out of date. It reminds me of an election poster used here in Switzerland which was trying to scaremonger about the risk of someone flying a plane into a nuclear station....only the poster had it flying into the cooling tower which would...unsurpriginsly...result in a clean and controlled shutdown of the station. Gosh...what a risk that is, eh?

maniac101 wrote:

Firstly, once all planned and approved gas-powered generation plants in Ireland come online in the next few years, Ireland will have more baseload plant than it needs for several years to come.

Imagine if we had all that baseload and we could identify a single 1GW+ coal-burning plant within it which isn't due to be decomissioned by all that gas-plant building. If only we had such a plant, we could think about replacing it with nuclear. Indeed, we could even think about using the infrastructure to deal with 1GW-in-one-place and put the nuclear plant more or less in the same place, decomissioning one as the other came online.

Secondly, Ireland will have in the order of 4500MW of wind capacity in 2020 if the the EU renewable targets are met,

While we're dealing with 'if' scenarios, lets look at what we could have if thorium-based pebble-bed reactors come online in the next 10 years. A virtually limitless supply of fuel and no prospect of meltdown.

Or are we only allowed play the 'if' game when its against nuclear?

Lennoxschips · 04-01-2008 2:26pm

See if you can go one step further and instead of making a handwaving generality about what 'could' happen, you can specify exactly what combination of events would be required in a modern, 21st-century design to bring this situation about.

In 2005 at Forsmark in Sweden the controllers had no idea what was going on in the core for 23 minutes after a short circuit in the plants electricity supply system, and two of the four of the backup diesel generators supplying electricity failed. If the other two backup generators had failed, the cooling system would have gone offline and all hell would have broken loose. They only thing keeping that plant from meltdown was two diesel generators.

If a backup generator fails at a non-nuclear plant, you don't have a risk of a radioactive meltdown.

The Swedes took half of their Nuclear plants offline to investigate the same faulty circuits used in other plants. These were problems that were discovered ad-hoc while running the plant, not foreseen in the design. Even a modern design in a western country has problems that people didn't realise they had. It's arrogant to think the human race has figured out Nuclear power completely after only 50/60 years.

bonkey · 04-01-2008 3:10pm

Lennoxschips wrote: »

In 2005 at Forsmark in Sweden the controllers had no idea what was going on in the core for 23 minutes after a short circuit in the plants electricity supply system, and two of the four of the backup diesel generators supplying electricity failed. If the other two backup generators had failed, the cooling system would have gone offline and all hell would have broken loose. They only thing keeping that plant from meltdown was two diesel generators.

Its worth noting that neither SKI (the Swedish nuclear authority) nor the safety chief in charge of the site agree that a meltdown was in any way likely.

I also believe that the opinion that a meltdown was likely came from a former employee, rather than someone who was actually there on the day, or someone who had access to the full details of what happened.

I assume, incidentally, that you've verified that Forsmark doesn't have any emergency systems in place to handle the situation of all 4 of these diesel generators failing...that the claim that the only thing preventing meltdown was these generators? Most modern nuclear stations have multiple layers of safety piled up on top of each other. Your claim either implies that this was not the case, or that every layer except the last had failed.

Finally, its worth noting that you associate 'meltdown' with Chernobyl (where its not entirely accurate in terms of what happened) and not with Three Mile Island (where it is accurate) and that you picked a 20-year-old station, based on a 50-year-old generator design.....exactly the type of thing I already said that no-one is proposing for new nuclear stations.

It's arrogant to think the human race has figured out Nuclear power completely after only 50/60 years.

Really? I wasn't aware there was a timescale on such things. How many years does it take before its not arrogant to assume we understand a technology well enough to be able to use it? 100? 1000? Any value that keeps it away from you in your lifetime?

So you really expect such an argument to be taken seriously?

I can see it now....

"Why not nuclear"
"I can't tell you what the problem really is, but I don't trust anything thats not older than my grandad".
"What about solar, then? Thats newer than nuclear. So is wave-based, the notion of hte hydrogen economy, and more."
"....."

Lennoxschips · 04-01-2008 3:27pm

you are putting words in my mouth

Finally, its worth noting that you associate 'meltdown' with Chernobyl (where its not entirely accurate in terms of what happened) and not with Three Mile Island (where it is accurate)

I didn't state explicitly that there was a meltdown at Chernobyl. I have used the word Chernobyl once in this thread, in response to Seanw, who keeps bringing it up.

I didn't once mention Three Mile Island.

Really? I wasn't aware there was a timescale on such things. How many years does it take before its not arrogant to assume we understand a technology well enough to be able to use it? 100? 1000? Any value that keeps it away from you in your lifetime?

You correctly dismiss 1950s designs as bad. I have brought up Forsmark, a 1980s power plant which was found to have problems that nobody realised at the time. In the history of nuclear power, what was once thought to be foolproof later turned out to have problems after all. What was safe in the 50s was found to be wrong in the 80s. What was considered the ultimate in foolproof technology in the 80s has been found to have problems in the 2000s. So why should I believe that 2000s technology ("modern, 21st century") won't go tits up in the 2020s?

egan007 · 04-01-2008 3:34pm

SeanW wrote: »

What's wrong with nuclear electricity? Very little in fact.

The chink in the armour.

The pro-nuclear keep using the same line...It's safe
The anti-nuclear mostly agree...

The real problem the anti-nuclear people have?
A - barrels of radioactive stuff that lasts 1000's of years because there is no way of processing it.

maniac101 · 04-01-2008 3:58pm

bonkey wrote: »

Imagine if we had all that baseload and we could identify a single 1GW+ coal-burning plant within it which isn't due to be decomissioned by all that gas-plant building. If only we had such a plant, we could think about replacing it with nuclear. Indeed, we could even think about using the infrastructure to deal with 1GW-in-one-place and put the nuclear plant more or less in the same place, decomissioning one as the other came online.

I agree that if you had to build a nuclear plant, Moneypoint, where a 915MW coal-fired station is currently situated, would have some technical advantages as a location for that plant. However, a substantial refurbishment at the existing Moneypoint station, costing €360 million, will be complete in the next few weeks, and the plant will continue to operate for the next 15 years at least. Also, from a energy security point of view, it would be better to replace a gas-fired station rather than a coal-fired one. Unlike gas, coal can be (and is) stockpiled and can be sourced from more stable parts of the world. All of our CCGT stations are new, have a typical lifespan of 30 years, and won't be replaced anytime soon. Therefore the real debate about nuclear in Ireland is over. Perhaps it could be reopened in 10 years time.

While we're dealing with 'if' scenarios, lets look at what we could have if thorium-based pebble-bed reactors come online in the next 10 years. A virtually limitless supply of fuel and no prospect of meltdown.

Or are we only allowed play the 'if' game when its against nuclear?

No, we're not dealing with an "if" scenario when it comes to wind energy. The 33% renewables target is clearly defined in the Government 2007 Energy White Paper. With nearly 1000MW wind capacity installed to-date, we're already ahead of that target. Unlike nuclear, it's not a case of "if" - it's just a case of "when".

SeanW wrote: »

Nuclear plants are not crazily more expensive than fossil fuel-fired plants, and the savings in Kyoto fines alone would pay for a good chunk of it.

Under the emissions trading system, a nuclear power plant doesn't receive carbon credits for avoided emissions, so the generator wouldn't see those savings. Also, using money saved by the state through emissions avoided or through any other means, to subsidise a nuclear power plant, is prohibited by EU law.

bonkey · 04-01-2008 3:59pm

Lennoxschips wrote: »

you are putting words in my mouth

To a degree, yes.

I didn't state explicitly that there was a meltdown at Chernobyl. I have used the word Chernobyl once in this thread, in response to Seanw, who keeps bringing it up.

That's right. What you said is that :

If it happens at a nuclear power source you give a piece of land the size of Limerick an almighty radioactive dose

I put words into your mouth in the sense that the scenario you describe has happened exactly once - that being in Chernobyl - and did not happen simply because a meltdown occurred, but was rather a combination of design, mismanagement, stupidity, and dangerous mismanagement of nuclear fuel not being used in the reactor at the time.

I didn't once mention Three Mile Island.

Well, that was kind of my point. Three Mile Island is an example of a meltdown occurring where lots of things failed, but the safety design still did its job and contained the leak. Its a prime example of why your argument that I've quoted again above is wrong even if we limit ourselves to older, more dangerous reactor designs - which I've repeatedly pointed out are not what anyone would advocate for Ireland were we to go with a nuclear station.

You correctly dismiss 1950s designs as bad. I have brought up Forsmark, a 1980s power plant which was found to have problems that nobody realised at the time. In the history of nuclear power, what was once thought to be foolproof later turned out to have problems after all. What was safe in the 50s was found to be wrong in the 80s.

I'm not sure where you get your idea that anyone thought the design was foolproof. They put blast shields around Boiling Water Reactors because they're aware of what would happen if everything else failed. If they honestly believed the design was foolproof, why add a redundant, useless containment-shield? Why add all the other safety features, if they believed the reactor itself was a foolproof design?

I put it to you that Forsmark, like TMI, are prime examples of just why so many safety layers were added, as well as being examples that the set of safety layers were well chosen. They are prime examples that the designers understood the weaknesses of their reactor designs and added the appropriate layers of safety to deal with that.

Despite numerous incidents, such designs have every single time successfully prevented a major nuclear incident from resulting...but you want us to believe that this isn't enough for some reason.

The one reactor that did give an unhealthy dose of radiation to a large area didn't have the full gamut of safety features which its reactor design merited and should have had.

What was considered the ultimate in foolproof technology in the 80s has been found to have problems in the 2000s.

They put a series of successive failsafes in place so that should some of them fail a disaster would not ensue. Some of them did fail, and a disaster did not ensue....the system worked as designed.

If anything was considered foolproof, it was the overall combination of all the features together. Given that Forsmark has not 'gone Chernobyl', we should conclude that the April 2006 events support the notion that the safety systems work as designed, rather than what you are suggesting.

Chernobyl, on the other hand, would never have been held up as a 'foolproof' set of safety features even before it went bad. It didn't have the steel reactor vessel that US designs had, nor the concrete containment dome that an LWR or BWR was deemed to need.

So why should I believe that 2000s technology ("modern, 21st century") won't go tits up in the 2020s?

You're entitled to believe whatever you like about any technology, for whatever reason you choose to base your beliefs on.

Its only when you try and pass those beliefs on that I care, at which point I believe that it is necessary that whoever you present your beliefs to be shown the faulty logic on which it is based.

Lennoxschips · 04-01-2008 9:41pm

The Swedish authorities took all their Forsmark-type nuclear plants offline after the incident to fix inherent problems, so obviously they weren't happy with the technology themselves and thought that they had come too close. If they were satisfied that all the safety net functions worked properly then they'd have left the other plants online.

But then Swedish authorities must suffer from the same faulty logic that I suffer from.

SeanW · 05-01-2008 2:44pm

The Finns are paying less than twice the capital cost per MW for their new nuclear installation than we pay capital for gas.

Their plants will produce no pollution of any kind, use a lot less fuel than a fossil fuel plant, and will not rely on massively long pipelines to bring dirty fuel from potentially unstable parts of the world. So their unit costs will be lower and more stable by a mile. The EPR type is also 16% more fuel efficient than previous generation reactors, hence my claim that nuclear power is always improving. The Finns have also solved their waste problem.

They're obviously missing your logic. But, since they're on the road to Energy Easy Street now, I doubt they're too worried.

As for the waste problem - the nuclear industry is the only industry that internalises the cost of waste disposal. Fossil fuel plants just dump their wastes into to smoky air, where the CO2 goes into the atmosphere, the Sulphur Dioxide and Nitrous Oxides fall back as acid rain, destroying forests, monuments and fragile aquatic ecosystems, radiation, and mercury which, when ingested by fish, becomes a potent neurotoxin called Methylmercury.

Delicious.

Brown coal, which the Germans want to use, is even worse for CO2 emissions and particle matter.

I view the reduction, or preferably elimination of coal-fired electricity as an absolute top priority. Using a multi-option non-fossil strategy including nuclear is the only way to do that.

It is a direct choice, as proven time and time again, between fossil fuels and nuclear.

I mention Chernobyl a lot because normally when an environmentalist wants to score some cheap points in anti-nuclear argument, Chernobyl is normally Exhibit A, B and C in their case. Like on Greenpeace's nuclear power section (which now appears to have been removed) featured some drab looking photos of sick Belorussian children living in squalor - a clear effort to pull on the viewers heartstrings and force an emotional response against nuclear energy. Other organisations routinely headline their arguments with references to or pictures of the destroyed plant.

But then Swedish authorities must suffer from the same faulty logic that I suffer from.

Quite the opposite - I agree with the Swedish authorities decision - better safe than sorry is a normal motto when it comes to responsibly running a nuclear programme. But AFAIK all the plants came back online not long after so there must not have been any major problems.

Again, these reactors have double-containment vessels so even if (and that's a very big IF) the Swedish reactor had gone into meltdown, the result would be more Three Mile Island than Chernobyl.

Lennoxschips · 05-01-2008 2:53pm

The Finns are paying less than twice the capital cost per MW for their new nuclear installation than we pay capital for gas.

Less than twice the cost... 180% of what Ireland pays. That's still not cheaper, huh. That doesn't factor in decommissioning costs either, and the fact that the government has to cover the insurance liability, as insurance companies refuse to cover nuclear power plants (insurance companies suffer from faulty logic as well, it would seem).

Fortunately for the Finns they have massive tracts of uninhabited land and geologically sound formations to store waste in. (Even then I'm not a fan of it, but still, they have a place which they consider suitable). Where should Ireland store its waste? Croagh Patrick would probably suitable. Or Carrauntoohil...

I'm just not a fan of energy sources that produce radioactive waste. That includes coal. (But now you are going to tell me that I love coal)

SeanW · 05-01-2008 4:22pm

I never said nuclear was cheaper than fossil fuels in terms of capital costs, which is where your 180% figure rightly comes from. However, it is clear that the capital cost of most nuclear plants is well spent and it's obvious that the Finns will get their moneysworth out of the investment. BTW the expected lifespan of an EPR is 60 years - that's twice the expectation of anything in use ATM.

I'm just not a fan of energy sources that produce radioactive waste. That includes coal. (But now you are going to tell me that I love coal)

Not necessarily, at least you've acknowledged coals existance, which is a good start. However, I fear that anyone claiming to oppose both coal and nuclear isn't dealing in facts. But yes, the fact that we (and many other countries) have none or limited nuclear power while relying heavily on coal, clearly suggests that the environmentalists responsible prefer the latter.

If you actually have a credible basis for your assertion that you oppose both, I'd love to hear it.

Adyx · 05-01-2008 4:43pm

Lennoxschips wrote: »

They promised us fission in the 70s and 80s and it's still nowhere to be seen.

Actually we already have fission. It's a practical fusion reactor that has yet to be realised. Note I said practical. Fusion reactors have been built but currently require more energy than they produce. Such a reactor would be vastly more efficient, safer and produce little or no waste with the exception of components which need to be replaced.

Jack Sheehan · 05-01-2008 7:51pm

My own reason for not having a Nuclear Power Plant in Ireland is that we simply don't need one. With such a small population, Huge amounts of coastline and similarly huge amounts of wind we could make the switch over to non-nuclear renewable energy.

Granted it would take years, absolutely billions of euro and a enormous drive from both the government and people to conserve energy rather than just make more and more of it. I still think it is achievable.

SeanW · 06-01-2008 12:23am

All those CCGT plants we've been buildng would suggest otherwise

Lennoxschips · 06-01-2008 3:03am

Adyx wrote: »

Actually we already have fission. It's a practical fusion reactor that has yet to be realised. Note I said practical. Fusion reactors have been built but currently require more energy than they produce. Such a reactor would be vastly more efficient, safer and produce little or no waste with the exception of components which need to be replaced.

Indeed! Sorry, typo.

luckat · 06-01-2008 6:14pm

There is only one problem with nuclear power (in my opinion), but it's a huge, insuperable problem: the terribly dangerous waste produced.

The idea that anything can be safely stored - and that people will remember where it's stored and why it shouldn't be disturbed - for 100,000 years in a planet riven with wars and invasions is unbelievable.

Mike 1972 · 06-01-2008 7:30pm

Jack Sheehan wrote: »

My own reason for not having a Nuclear Power Plant in Ireland is that we simply don't need one. With such a small population, Huge amounts of coastline and similarly huge amounts of wind we could make the switch over to non-nuclear renewable energy.

Indeed it was economic reasons as much as environmental concerns that lead to the abandonment of the Carnsore Point project.

Other reasons why nuclear is not such a good idea

Peak uranuium: The nuclear industry loves to remind us how reserves of fossil fuels are limited while conveniently forgetting that global supplies of Uranium are even more limited (global production of Uranium peaked in 1980). All of the proposed solutions (fast breeders, thorium and reprocessing) have so far proved to be economically and/or technically unviable. The UK's only fast breeder closed several years ago while worldwide there is only a handful of reprocessing plants.

Chernobyl: The accident they said could never happen became the accident that could only happen in the Soviet Union. Not only are we seriously expected to believe that the USSR had/have a monopoly on mismanagement, incompetence, faulty design and taking shortcuts now they are trying to convince us that the disaster hardly killed anyone and the radioactive contamination in Ukraine and Belarus isint doing any harm at all. :rolleyes:

Decommissioning. Not a single nuclear reactor has ever been successfully decommissioned. Several UK reactors have ceased operation and some decommissioning work has begun but it is proposed to mothball the actual reactor building for 120 years (conveniently making it someone elses problem). A process has yet to be found for permanently dealing with high level waste.

Vulnerability to terrorist/military attacks: The nuclear industry claim that a thin layer of concrete around (most) Western reactors protects makes them immune from suicidal aircraft hijackers. (Remember the WTC buildings were designed to withstand an impact from the largest civilian aircraft then in service) Despite a total lock of test data regarding risks from impacts from Aircraft (or indeed missiles and mortars). The trains/trucks/ships/aircraft transporting fuel/waste to/from the plants would be even more vulnerable

Proliferation/Military issues: If Nuclear power were to be selected as the only global answer to the problems of fossil fuel depletion and climate change it would necessitate exporting the technology to some very dodgy countries which would give governments (and others) in those countries access to (more) nuclear material. Even if these governments have no malign intentions in this regard can we be sure that they are competent to run and manage nuclear installations. (Soviet union etc……)

Lennoxschips · 06-01-2008 8:11pm

luckat wrote: »

There is only one problem with nuclear power (in my opinion), but it's a huge, insuperable problem: the terribly dangerous waste produced.

The idea that anything can be safely stored - and that people will remember where it's stored and why it shouldn't be disturbed - for 100,000 years in a planet riven with wars and invasions is unbelievable.

That's just it, 100,000 years is such a long time... look at how much the world has changed in the past 100, 200 and 500 years. How can we know that the waste will be safely guarded through massive changes in goverment, civilisations, ice ages etc? We can't. We don't even know how things will be in 50 years, let alone 100,000. 100,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens barely even existed yet as a species, how do we know we can secure the waste for the coming 100,000 years? We can't.

IrishKnight · 06-01-2008 10:16pm

luckat wrote: »

There is only one problem with nuclear power (in my opinion), but it's a huge, insuperable problem: the terribly dangerous waste produced.

It's not as dangerous as you might think...have a look at this Coal Ash is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

Lennoxschips · 07-01-2008 2:14am

Peak uranuium: The nuclear industry loves to remind us how reserves of fossil fuels are limited while conveniently forgetting that global supplies of Uranium are even more limited (global production of Uranium peaked in 1980).

In fairness, building of new reactors dropped off in the 1980s, so you'd expect the mining of uranium to have peaked then as well, as people weren't building new reactors after that, so there wasn't any need to mine more uranium.

Uranium is a finite source alright, but the amount left is fairly unclear. By some estimates, if the world's electricity was to be powered fully by nuclear, there'd be three or four years of the stuff left. Others say longer.

Lennoxschips · 07-01-2008 2:27am

IrishKnight wrote: »

It's not as dangerous as you might think...have a look at this Coal Ash is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste

That editorial makes a very bold statement in the title but fails to back it up with sources. It's pretty shocking journalism.

They cite a study which says radiation levels in people were found to be higher around coal plants than nuclear plants, although still nowhere near dangerous levels. Not unsurprising, considering that coal is nasty stuff and when it's burned, the smoke is thrown into the air. At Nuclear plants the radiation exposure of the people living in the area was found to be lower, which would make sense, considering that the highly radioactive nuclear waste is stored on site in drums, and, unlike coal, not burned and ejected into the atmosphere. I suspect that if the latter was the case, that there would have been nobody left living around the nuclear plant to take part in the study.

At no point do they cite a source which backs up their ludicrous claim that "Coal Ash is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste".

It's a really, really bad article.

SeanW · 07-01-2008 5:08am

Peak uranuium:

No-one's been exploring for Uranium since that time because the number of nuclear projects went downhill and other factors hit the Uranium market, such as the beginning of the end of the Cold War, with less demand for Uranium for both civilian and military use, and indeed a return of weapons-grade material for reuse in civilian reactors, then you had Chernobyl, then in 1998 Bill Clinton privatised a federal company storing large amounts of Uranium which it promptly dumped onto the market.

Bottom line is that noone in their right mind would have looked for Uranium or produced more between the early eighties and very recently.

I should also point out our own Green minister nixed two applications for Uranium exploration, so any environmentalist talking about a shortage of Uranium has no credibility.

It's like the people in England who held up the construction of Sizewell B in the courts for 6 years, the same, or similar, people now say that nuclear plants take too long to build ...

Thorium does work, but it's not commercially viable because there's still plenty of Uranium left and that's more effective. However, the Indians are looking seriously at Thorium because they have a good deal of it. Uranium is like oil - we still rely on it because it's still reasonably plentiful.

Chernobyl: The accident they said could never happen became the accident that could only happen in the Soviet Union. Not only are we seriously expected to believe that the USSR had/have a monopoly on mismanagement, incompetence, faulty design and taking shortcuts

Did you have to queue up for 3 days to buy a loaf of bread at a warehouse recently? Last time you visited someone in hospital, did you have to bribe the nurse with 3 packets of Marlboros first?

If not, then you can't compare Ireland with the Soviet Union. Our government may be exactly as bad as one might think of it, but we do have relatively good safety regimes. For example, if you followed the story of the new Intercity railcars, you might know that their deployment in about 4-6 months behind schedule - that's because the Rail Safety Commission held them up. The reason? The grab rails were the wrong colour, as were the door-open buttons, meaning there was a small chance that it might not have been safe for someone with limited vision. Chernobyl-4 on the other hand, went into full commercial operation as soon as the construction crews left.

Are we in any way comparable to the Soviet Union? I don't think so.

Now, I'm sure that some 3rd world ****hole might make the same mistakes, because the USSR doesn't have a monopoly on bad governace. But you must accept that Chernobyl resulted from conditions unrepeatable in the developed world.

If Nuclear power were to be selected as the only global answer

Another fundamental flaw in your argument, since if you had read any of my posts, or indeed the writings of any pro-nuclear person, you would notice that no-one claims that nuclear power is a universal silver-bullet. Most will acknowledge that there are no silver bullets to all our current problems.

I have consistently advocated a multi-pronged, non-fossil strategy including renewables, nuclear, biofuels and energy conservation measures.

That's just it, 100,000 years is such a long time... look at how much the world has changed in the past 100, 200 and 500 years. How can we know that the waste will be safely guarded through massive changes in goverment,

Well, we know a few things for sure.
1: Current approaches such as that of Finland, involve burying the waste very deep inside the ground. So if humanity, for whatever reason, like a major world calamity or world war, ever forgot about the dump, all to the better because it will simply never trouble anyone again.
2: Nuclear weapons will be obsolete - remember humanity has made the art of killing one another into an advanced science. We don't use swords in combat anymore, do we?
3: A sufficiently determined group will get nuclear weapons by any means - like North Korea, they didn't get their hands on any of our waste did they? In theory, anyone with the technology can use new fissionable material to make nuclear weapons.
4: The waste involved is very small, we make more conventional waste in a week than we would nuclear waste in a lifetime, and since we don't incinerate, this stuff will all have to be cared for and isolated by future generations. If you ever threw out anything plastic, you've cause a bigger problem in that act alone than you could ever cause by using nuclear energy. And we're also causing trouble for future generations with the resource wars already being fought over fossil fuels, and there may well be more. It's time to break the addiction.

bonkey · 07-01-2008 7:23pm

Lennoxschips wrote: »

The Swedish authorities took all their Forsmark-type nuclear plants offline after the incident to fix inherent problems, so obviously they weren't happy with the technology themselves and thought that they had come too close. If they were satisfied that all the safety net functions worked properly then they'd have left the other plants online.

But then Swedish authorities must suffer from the same faulty logic that I suffer from.

I would imagine that they suffer from a slightly different logic.

The very same attention to safety which demands the safeties be in place in the first place almost certainly also requires that any problem recquiring emergency intervention be analyzed, its cause identified and - assuming its possible - corrected or alleviated.

Something went wrong. It caused an emergency. Root causes were determined, solutions were implemented, to ensure that the emergency did not reoccur.

dragonkin · 09-01-2008 8:00pm

I doubt it'll sit in the earth forever anyway I'm sure we'll come up with a better solution it just needs to go somewhere accessible (though not too accessible!) for the forseable future before we manage to transmute it into gold

DublinWriter · 09-01-2008 8:33pm

luckat wrote: »

There is only one problem with nuclear power (in my opinion), but it's a huge, insuperable problem: the terribly dangerous waste produced.

Yes, as opposed to the world-killing levels of CO2 that we're currently pumping out from fossil-fuels.

Despite all the arguments to the contrary, the Greens won't accept that nuclear is the *only* way forward and that we all just should put another lagging jacket on our boilers and switch to CFL lightbulbs.

Switching households to CFL lightbulbs at this stage is a bit like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic. This argument is utter, complete naive bullshit.

The Greens are completely dodging the issue that the commerical sector are the biggest polluters and the biggest consumers by far. The commercial sector in Ireland produces over 80% of all waste in the country as opposed to householders, yet who gets all the tax breaks?

We need to tackle the problem of how to supply the manufacturing and service bases with massive amounts of safe and clean energy and stop fiddling about such frippery as how householders can reduce their ESB bill.

Unfortunately, we'll never have a 'grown-up' debate about nuclear in Ireland. Unlike most modern European democracies our national politic debate has always been at 'parish-pump' level.

Twenty years of corporate tax-breaks for the multi-nationals and the resulting explosion in our appetite for Lattes and Paninis has fooled us into thinking that we are a modern European state. We are not. Brown-baggism is still alive and well and its methods have gotten a lot cuter in the wake of the numerous tribunals we've all paid for.

Just remember who you voted for when the lights eventually go out.

Nuclear Energy.

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