Since Austria passed a law banning the importation of nuclear electricity in 2015 it has claimed to be 100% nuclear-free. But 25% of the electricity Austria imports and over 8% of the electricity it consumes is still of indisputably nuclear origin. Austria’s claim to be 100% nuclear-free is either deliberate misrepresentation or an implicit admission that the Austrian government has no idea how Europe’s electricity grid works. (Inset: Austria’s Zwentendorf nuclear plant. Completed in 1978. Never put into operation. Now a museum.)
And once power is in the grid how do they tell if it’s from nuclear or other sources. To paraphrase Commander Scott (Star Trek) “Aiii Captain, there be insanity in the European family!
Like BC thinking it runs on hydro while importing 8% from Alberta
According to some leftists I spoke with years ago in University, Nuclear electricity is ‘Radioactive.’ Even 30 years ago University was chock full of stupid people.
According to some leftists I spoke with years ago in University, Nuclear electricity is ‘Radioactive.’ Even 30 years ago University was chock full of stupid people.
The basis of longevity, prosperity, excess leisure time in the world, is: energy.
Not just energy, the energy must have three qualities: reliable, cheap, plentiful.
What can nuclear do? It is a source of energy.
Can nuclear provide reliable energy? Yes.
Can nuclear provide plentiful energy? Yes.
Can nuclear provide cheap energy? Yes, as the number of reactors worldwide tell us.
So, nuclear power works.
Which is why, it must be attacked and destroyed, just like coal.
Hydro dams can also do cheap, reliable, plentiful energy.
Which is why they will eventually be the target; to save the fish, or something.
Until we get someone who will attack their base directly, this will never stop.
How do you attack their base? You attack cities.
How do you attack a city? Let’s use Toronto.
“Residents of Toronto will henceforth pay a $25 per litre fee to protect the earth.”
“We will cut the power lines to Toronto; only wind energy will be allowed in Toronto. There will be no nat gas back, nothing but wind.”
If voters stiall actually matter, which I doubt they do, about 50 years of that would convince maybe 10% of them to stop voting Liberal. Yes, living in darkness, in the cold, might educate a small percentage of them; but the cult programming is generally too strong.
California is a good example of how NOT to do things. Smog in LA always bad. Always has been, always will be. So, California emissions standards were created, that apply to the WHOLE STATE; NOT JUST THE CITY OF LosAngeles.
With socialists, they are always very careful that the pain and misery is spread equally. Unless you live in flyover country, then you can just be ignored.
Don’t be silly; everyone knows that electricity comes from the wall socket.
It’s like what a number of power marketing companies did here in Edmonton a few years ago. They advertised that the electricity they provided to their customers was produced by wind turbine generators.
The only thing is that there weren’t any commercial WTGs anywhere near the city.
I finally found out how they could make that claim. The power would be produced by the WTGs in southern Alberta but the marketers purchased that output through the provincial power pool. Considering how that system operates, I doubt that the power that originates in, say, the Pincher Creek area is actually routed to Edmonton.
For a lark, when one of those marketing companies had a display in a nearby shopping centre, I asked one of its representatives how their company knew that the electricity actually came from a WTG. I suggested that it might be tracked by putting bar codes on the individual electrons and then scanning them as they passed through the system.
The kid didn’t get the joke.
Kevin:
I continue to be baffled by leftists demonizing Nuclear power and by countries like France, Austria preaching about moving away from Nuclear as if it were a noble policy goal. Wynne Liberals are not quite that stupid, or at least not admittedly as about 68% of electricity comes from there and to axe it would bring conditions you mentioned very quickly to Toronto. I think about 3 days without heat or power would bring cries of residents for Wynne to “do something”.
But apart from delivering food baskets door to door what could she do, wait for the wind to pick up? Ont had a very good thing with clean green affordable electricity from hydro, nuclear and gas until Liberals decided the sources weren’t “renewable” enough. Our grandchildren will still be paying for this colossal stupidity decades from now.
There are two major problems with nuclear power.
The one that is of long-term concern is waste disposal and where to ultimately store the spent fuel. That’s an issue that still hasn’t been satisfactorily resolved.
The other one is that it takes a brand-new power station on the order of 20 years from original concept before it’s actually commissioned. The design and construction can take several years on their own, but much of the remaining time is spent in public hearings and ensuring that all the government regulations and requirements are complied with. A lot of trees have to be felled in order to produce all the paper needed for the documents.
The latter, in itself, is one reason why nuclear power is so costly. I used to know someone who worked for AECL and it was through him that I learned how long it takes to actually build such a facility.
“…. but much of the remaining time is spent in public hearings and ensuring that all the government regulations and requirements are complied with….”
Indeed. But the same can be said for anything in this red tape-strangled Country.
Don’t forget the moving goal posts of regulations and standards. If nothing changed, it is probably just a couple years to get a nuke plant built. But, every year the goal posts move; the plan has to be changed and re-certified. Sometimes more than yearly (looking at Canada’s regulatory leviathan). Sometimes monthly or even weekly. South Korea does well in getting them built, and not pulling rugs out during construction.
Nuclear waste is a non issue. All the power for the entire world, could come from a block of uranium the size of your easy chair for a whole year. The “waste” from first gen reactors is fuel for third gen… If reactor research was actually allowed to take place, all current waste is potentially fuel.
In terms of fissionable material, there is more energy in the grams of radioactive impurity in coal, than can be obtained from burning tons of it.
Don’t forget the moving goal posts of regulations and standards.
Then there’s the aspect that the projected market for which the power station would be built might not exist when it’s completed. In other words, it could have too much capacity or, alternately, it’s insufficient for the actual load demand.
Nuclear waste is a non issue.
But there’s still the problem of what to do with all the material that’s accumulated over the past 70 years. Many of the cooling ponds built to house the extracted fuel rods are getting full.
Even if that fuel could be extracted and, somehow, reused, there will still be waste that’s produced through the processing.
Now, as the older generation plants are being decommissioned, it isn’t just the fuel and associated waste that has to be disposed of. The reactor hardware is radioactive as well.
While nuclear fission plants may provide a solution, we need to be cautious about going that route.
It is no mystery when you read about Russia trying to corner the U.S. uranium supply with the collusion of the Clintons.
Ever hear or read about the CND back in the ’80s?(Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament)
When the USSR Politburo voted itself out of existence the CND quit as if it was a single body and then they all joined the Environmental movement.
Same goal, though. Still get their marching orders from Moscow too.
“Still get their marching orders from Moscow too”. OZ (gollum)
WHY Not? If you became a Target during a WAR your Windmills will go down like bowling pins by ONE drone.. Lights out for a very long time.. Dumb… not very sustainable during hostile action…
But Jay, it is. Electrons are B particles.
When in college the woman I was boarding with was a leftist (single mom, two kids). We were talking food storage and shortages, and she brought up how she was disgusted by the idea of irradiated foods. I asked her why. She said there’s two much radiation around us every day already, and how did I know what effect that radiation would have on us? I pointed out that we were being irradiated as we sat there in front of the television set (not a flatscreen, targetted electron signalling inside the tube), and that sunlight was radiation too and too little of it was bad for us. If she was against the active particles in irradiation then they’d better rip out the electrical and phone lines from the house.
She never brought up irradiated foods again.
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“it isn’t just the fuel and associated waste that has to be disposed of.”
any idea how much toxic waste is generated by plants that produce
solar panels? or what it costs to recycle old solar panels?
i’d love to see an apples to apples comparison.
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Beta particles. Stupid brain……
any idea how much toxic waste is generated by plants that produce solar panels? or what it costs to recycle old solar panels?
I have no data on that.
The main concern with nuclear waste isn’t so much its chemical toxicity but that it is radioactive and, depending upon the material, may remain so for decades or even centuries.
For example, many of the facilities built during the Manhattan Project require considerable remediation. Much of the waste that is currently stored at, for example, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is of unknown composition. (Records concerning the contents of the vessels they are contained in were incomplete or have, with time, gone missing.) Even worse is that some of the containers are leaking.
Reclaiming that site will take decades in part because the materials (including liquids) are radioactive.
Storing spent nuclear reactor fuel is also a major concern. Currently, the facility at Yucca Mountain is the best candidate for that purpose. But, because of the long half-lives of some of those fuels, they will have to be kept there for, in some cases, thousands of years.
Whichever site is ultimately selected will have to be geologically stable and the material will have to be encased to prevent contaminating groundwater. In addition, because the material will be stored there for so long, there’s an additional problem that needs to be addressed, namely how to convey to the future workers at the facility and residents in the region what the purpose is and that the material kept there is deadly.
BA – does it have to be stored on earth? We need to keep some fast breeder reactors around for medical (and other uses of) isotopes. If we put a maglev up the side of a mountain (powered by the fast breeder, which would use some radioactive “waste” as its power source), jacket the waste in magnetic iron or steel, and launch each payload aimed at a particular crater on the moon (waste not, want not), we don’t waste it and it will be available for later mining and use. The metal sleeve will break on impact, but there’s no ecology on the moon to be adversely affected. Put the whole thing on a military base for security.
Recycling will occur if we ever get to the point of moon bases. If we don’t ever leave the planet, then it won’t matter what we do on the moon.
Don’t dangle problems in front of engineers, we take them as a challenge. 🙂
Most of the problem is that so few understand anything about nuclear power. The scale of it is one thing; all the spent fuel rods from every reactor in the country will fit under your coffee table. That is the scale of nuclear power.
does it have to be stored on earth?
Right now, it’s more practical and economical to store it down here. If it’s kept in a repository, such as under Yucca Mountain, it can be monitored and the geology is, for the most part, understood.
Launching it into space like you propose would be a bad idea. If you think back 20 years, you may recall the public protests against the launch of the Cassini spacecraft. Even though its nuclear battery was designed to survive high speed impacts and, for that matter, the actual amount of nuclear material was relatively small, protesters didn’t see it that way. There were fears that had the booster failed or it re-entered during its gravity assist flybys, the material (plutonium, as I recall) would escape and spread.
It didn’t help that celebrity scientist Michio Kaku, someone who certainly should have known better, added his support to the objections.
There’s also a legal aspect to this. Under the terms of current international agreements, the moon doesn’t belong to any one country, much like Antarctica is. Storing nuclear waste there would certainly lead to prohibitively expensive lawsuits because it would be seen not only as a violation of the applicable treaties but because it would be considered polluting a pristine environment.
That alone would kill the idea.
Then there’s the actual reliability of the boosters that would be used. One of the most successful rockets ever built, the Delta II, was launched 153 times and had only 2 failures. Even the much-vaunted SpaceX lost 2 vehicles in recent years, one during flight and another one during a pad test.
That could make a few people nervous.
On top of that, launches are expensive. SpaceX can deliver a payload into low earth orbit at around $5000/kg. Going further requires more propellant and tracking and the costs start adding up.
One proposal for nuclear waste disposal was to send it into the sun, but then there’s the problem of tracking the payload and knowing that it was indeed destroyed.
Ultimately, it all comes down to money. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
I suggest you take a look at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel#Common_physical_forms_of_nuclear_fuel
Spent nuclear fuel has been accumulating ever since the first reactor went critical under Stagg Field almost 75 years ago to the day.
Consider how many reactors there are in the world now and how long they’ve been operating, as well as how often the fuel needs to be replaced. (That’s assuming that all of the rods can be removed. Some of them get stuck because the cladding has swollen as a result of neutron absorption.) In addition there have been numerous reactors that have been started, ran, and are now decommissioned.
The volume of all that spent fuel that’s been is considerably more than what can be stored under a coffee table.
Avoiding boosters is why I suggested a magnetic accelerator.
The political fall-out from keeping it here is avoided if an off-planet recipient can be found. I agree that Yukka or somewhere similar is ideal from a scientific viewpoint, but the politics are terrible. My suggestion is for something that even BANANAs should be able to agree to. Though society would be better off if we just shot the BANANAs instead, but that’s a separate topic.
Magnetic mass launchers are still in the realm of lab experiments and have never been shown to accelerate objects as massive as a nuclear waste container. The amount of power required to to produce the magnetic fields in order to reach escape velocity would likely be prohibitive.
Then there’s the aspect of co-ordinating air, and, for that matter, space traffic so that the payloads can be safely launched. That assumes, of course, that such flights would receive legal approval.
Possibly this method will be like nuclear fusion: it’ll become available in another 20 years for the next half century or so.
Permanent disposal of used nuclear fuel is and always has been senseless. After a single use, only about 10% of the energy in the fuel has been used. It’s removed from the reactor because its fission fragments absorb too many neutrons. So it’s removed and put in storage; wet storage for about five years, and dry storage thereafter (for which there are no practical limits on capacity).
The most useful thing to do is reprocess used reactor fuel, and use it again. In the used fuel storage in just Ontario is the energy equivalent of approximately the oil and gas reserves of the Persian Gulf. Each kilogram of uranium can produce about 35 times as much energy as produced by a single use (1 kg of UO2 = approx 50,000 kWh per single use). There is not and never will be any shortage of fissile material for nuclear power. There will only ever be a shortage of facilities to turn nuclear waste into new nuclear fuel.
Martin, there’s no mystery about the origins of antinuclearism. It grew out of the ban-the-bomb movement in the 1960s and 1970s. By and large it remained a group of hairy hippies whom no one took seriously until the oil and gas companies got involved. Atlantic Richfield started the ball rolling with millions provided in funding to create Friends of the Earth. Again with oil company funding, FOE would go on to create the first eco-terrorist organization Earth First!.
The reasons was simple: the oil companies believed that nuclear was an existential threat to their business. That nuclear would replace oil and gas in its core business. Indeed this turned out to be the case, as nuclear virtually eliminated bunker oil as a fuel for electricity generation on a global basis. As late as 2008, Enbridge was a leading funder of the Ontario antinuclear group Ontario Clean Air Alliance OCAA.