'Urgency needed' on nuclear waste

So says the Beeb. Never say they pass up an opportunity to make nuclear sound difficult.

It's pretty usual stuff to most of us. A proper geological repository is necessary and we better get our finger out on this one.

They say it will take decades. That is probably because of all the annoying litigation involved, just like they say it will take over ten years to build a new reactor even though they can all be built in less than four.

The one thing that did strike me was this.

CoRWM's extensive three-year investigation of the issues has dismissed other
disposal options, such as putting the waste on the ocean floor or flying it into
the Sun.

It actually concerns me that three years was spent and the expense of the tax payer endulging such options as flying nuclear waste into the Sun. We knew it was geological disposal from the beginning. The waste volumes are so small it is a technically easy proposition. Sure the BBC make it look scary, but for fifty years, those figures are a pittance on the industrial scale. Yet they spent three years wondering if flying it into the Sun was a viable option?

This does not bode well for a professional handling of what should be an easy situation.

Even more updates

In a bumper rewrite, I've posted new versions of both the proliferation page and the terrorism page.

Latest updates

I've been making a few alterations lately, most of them cosmetic. But a few more noteworthy changes include:

A complete rewrite of the section on FUD in the more irrationality page.

I've also made some changes and additions to the reactor safety page for greater consistency with the new approach to defining FUD.

Addition of a couple of pictures to the waste page both to provide more information and to jazz it up.

Then there's the deluge of new links to explore.

And further to my point...

Building on what I said earlier. Some reactors could use some touching up. Take Seabrook-1 in New Hampshire. The smooth round shape is good, but the bare dull concrete colour just doesn't work. A nature motif would go a long way to make it look much more aesthetic. It would match the lush greenery in the foreground. And image is in important.

The bright white with the navy blue of Sizewell B works much better. Britain may only have one PWR, but it's probably the best darn looking PWR in the world.

How not to provoke a forest of crime fighting trees

If you were a White Wizard going over to the dark side and you wanted to produce an army of ugly guys to conquer all the known world, where would you get the power to run your armory?

You could chop down the neighbouring forest. All the wood is probably rich in energy. It's certainly cheap and easily accessible. But there are some drawbacks.

1. All the particulate and gaseous emissions from the furnaces are probably not good for health and safety. A happy orc is a productive orc.
2. If this neighbouring forest happens to be filled with walking, talking trees, who hold a grudge, you might end up getting your just desserts Lovelock style.
3. All the fire coming out of your domain will give away what you're doing. As a key piece of military infrastructure for the forces of the Black land, remaining covert is best.

Now a small fission reactor may be just what Morgoth ordered. Perhaps a CANDU if you can't spare the resources for enrichment. All emissions are contained so you keep the operation invisible. You keep the air clean and don't have to chop down the forest, thereby not provoking your neighbours. If they do decide to attack you regardless, you can keep the reactor sealed underground so even breaking the dam and flooding the surface won't affect your operation.

Nuclear in general is pretty low key. With fossil fuel power, you have smoke stacks bellowing out large amounts of nefarious matter. With big wind, where once was a large area of unspoiled country now lies a field of large metal spikes. But with nuclear you have a tiny area of land containing a few buildings and big golf ball. Far less shipping of fuel in and waste out too makes the whole place much quieter.

You could probably green it up a bit more too. Perhaps a bit of turf on the containment structure, maybe some flora on it. Okay, you would probably need to do a little engineering to make sure everything didn't slip off. Stick a tree or two on top and you have the latest concept in modern architecture: nuclear hobbit holes.

If that fails, you could just paint the thing with a big nature motif. It would fit the rebranding advice over at Potential Energy. This way, the place doesn't stand out so much amidst the greenery surrounding it, something not possible with fossil fuels and big wind.

It would answer Greenpeace's concerns (if such a thing is ever possible short of catastrophic global cooling in Mordor) about terrorist threat. How could any terrorists fly an airliner into the reactor if they can't find it?

Now that's positive thinking.

Red top investigative journalism

A Daily Mirror journalist planted a fake bomb on a nuclear train.

Good for him.

Had it been a real bomb, what did he think would have happened?

"A terrorist could have blown up the waste - sparking a vast toxic cloud that
would have killed hundreds."

Wrong! A terrorist could have blown up the train a left a few undamaged and intact transport casks lying in its wreckage.

If, by some contrived and exaggerated scenario, there was a release of radioactive material, the usual emergency response kicks in with cleanup crews decontaminating the affected area and distributing iodine pills and the damage is mitigated. With a great deal of luck, remembering that even the nuclear Armageddon event seemed to have trouble with mass destruction, the aerosolised radioisotopes are able to kill a handful of people.

But placing the bomb in a busy shopping mall could do that and more directly, without the need for a radioactive middle-man. Any explosive capable of breaching a transport cask could take down One Canada Square at Canary Wharf and the multiple thousands working there.

It is possible to conjure up some Hollywood James Bond style plot where significant release of nuclear materials results from a terrorist attack, but the same input of effort and resources by the terrorists and they could decimate half the City of London.

These scare tactics sound like they've been written by the writers of Star Trek, obsessed with notion than the more hi-tech and complicated, the better. Blowing up a plain old building with a conventional explosive may sound low tech, but it sure is effective. Blowing up a nuclear shipment may seem more 21st century, but you get far less return on your investment. Keeping it simple, keeps it deadly.

Nice try, Daily Mirror, but you haven't demonstrated anything which should particularly worry us.

NEW! Double standards

Throughout the blog, I've made numerous references to double standards the Usual Suspects apply between renewables and nuclear. So I decided it was time to put them together in a proper webpage.

So I did.

I also merged the pages about FUD and motives into a single page.

UPDATE 5/12/6: As quick as it appeared, it's gone. Short half-life. The material is now mostly covered here.

The Groaniad

The Guardian and its columnists are not known for being the most reliable source of comment, but lately, they really seem to have lost it. First, we have Polly Toynbee's submission to the International How-Many-Political-Ad-Hominems-Can-You-Fit-Into-One-Article Tournament.

For some reason the old deniers, barely batting an eyelid, shifted over to
nuclear as the only salvation, though those who have been so wrong owe a little
humility when it comes to next steps. Many hail from a bizarre tradition of
right wing bad science: remember Andrew Neill as Sunday Times editor running a
dangerous campaign that denied HIV caused Aids, branding the latter as a disease
only of gays and the wildly promiscuous.

Her essential thesis is that only rabidly right-wing ex climate-deniers support nuclear power. We all know how long it took James Lovelock to get over his climate skepticism.

I don't know what about nuclear makes it right wing. As I pointed out in my swipe at the Tories, nuclear, with its large-scale power reactors feeding power into a monopolistic national grid is quintessentially socialist. The right wing approach taken by Dave, consistent though impractical, is for people to own their own power sources. Still, that doesn't stop ever rabid Polly from asserting beyond doubt that to be right wing is to be a fan of bad science, while to be left wing is to hold yourself to the highest of Popperian standards.

The science-based realos tend to be on the left, conviction fundis on the right.

So we'll ignore Lysenkoism, claims that Chernobyl will kill millions, incessant GM food scares, and worst of all, New Age "medicines" like homeopathy. It's Polly so we shouldn't get too worked up about what she says.

The wise will keep a hawk's eye on the money. Nuclear is not and never was
feasible without heavy subsidy. When the government swears there will be no
price guarantee or subsidy, none of the experts believes it - though the
industry naturally pretends. Investors will only build on a worldly-wise
understanding that the state will step in, one way or another. Always has,
always will.

The conspiracy theory nouveau rears its ugly head again. But even if she is right, didn't she just previously say this?

A ring of off-shore wind turbines round these blustery islands would give
permanent energy.

Renewables continue to receive far greater subsidies than anyone things the nuclear industry might need. Why all of a sudden are subsidies so wrong as soon as nuclear comes into the equation (particularly for Polly "Let's nationalise everything" Toynbee).

Even the CEO of the US nuclear power company Dominion said that, despite US
government wishes for new nuclear power stations, he would not build, to avoid
giving credit raters Standard & Poor's and his own chief financial officer
"a heart attack".

Then why are Dominion preparing applications for combined operating licences GE ESBWRs?

The eyes of would-be nuclear builders, meanwhile, are on Areva, the French
government- subsidised company building in Finland the first new nuclear station
anywhere in decades.

This of course was immediately caught by Polly's fan blog. It is rather typical for a chattering class European to completely forget that Asia too does have some role on the world stage. Between Asia and Eastern Europe, there is a fair amount of new construction going on.

Then there's a bunch of stuff where she assumes the economics for our old gas cooled reactors will still apply to Generation III+ reactors, which is again a double standard because she would only accept consideration of the newest and most advanced wind turbines. So enough of Polly's madness. What about a guest editorial from the science editor of the Ecologist (isn't that an oxymoron?)?

France's 60 operating PWRs emit a relatively benign 29 tonnes of carbon dioxide
per megawatt-hour; but that is for today's high-grade ores, which will last a
few years at best. Once we consider the next grade of uranium ore down, then
nuclear power burns up considerably more energy than it generates and its
emissions will exceed those even of coal.

That's even too much for SLS. High grade ores can last for at least another 50 years, and that's the known reserves. Further exploration yields more resources. Madness of the highest degree. Timmy can barely contain his frustration.

The blueprint for success

It was only supposed to be an "Anti-nuclear Quote of the Day", but Stewart Peterson at Nuclear is Our Future turned it into an absolute must-read post on what is needed to make regulation and legislation work.

Some of the most interesting ideas centre around modelling the NRC after the highly acclaimed (at least by those who know the turmoil that is EASA) Federal Aviation Administration, making fees and levies proportional the resources they consume and eliminating the ability to make frivalous lawsuits, which sees the secondary benefits of increasing unemployment among lawyers.

Go read it.

Horizon

This week's episode, "Nuclear Nightmares", was all about the LNT.

It was a truly excellent programme. Done with the trademark Horizon showmanship, it explored how the linear no-threshold hypothesis of radiation exposure, developed after the nuclear bombings of Japan, has been undermined.

It showed how the apocalyptic predictions of the aftermath of Chernobyl, based upon the LNT, failed to materialise. Animals in the exclusion zone show no signs of genetic damage, despite their higher radiation dosage.

Then there's the lack of correlation between natural background exposure worldwide and cancer incidence as well as the inconclusive evidence of harm coming to air crew, who have the highest radiation exposures of all of us.

It cleverly exposed, how not only the LNT may very have it wrong when it comes to low level radiation dosage, but may even have it backwards altogether.

A wonderful piece of work.

If only people thought this way in Britain

Well probably some do, but they're just not seen on TV.

A council in Australia actually wants one in its backyard.

If Bourke do get their reactor, the first commercial one to be built in Australia, what one should it be? Since Australia has no fuel cycle facilities, probably they'll go for a CANDU so they can use the abundant natural uranium they have.

Not only could this bring jobs to Bourke, but it could also bring jobs to Cumbria in UK since Japan's drive towards self-sufficiency in the fuel cycle means they will no longer need BNFL's help with their reprocessing. So they could use a new customer.

Newsnight roundup

A lively debate happened on Newsnight. I'm sure they'll put up the programme for viewing online soon.

They had four politicians from different parties, Labour (the energy minister Malcolm Wicks), Conservatives (Alan Duncan), Liberal Democrats (Ed Davy) and Greens (Caroline Lucas).

Here's the roundup.

Malcolm Wicks fought a reasonably good fight and talked the most sense.

Alan Duncan spouted incomprehensible crap that meant nothing.

Ed Davy made allegations about stealth taxes. He cited precedent that no nuclear power station has come in on budget and were built with subsidy (no surprise given they were built during the days of regulation in the energy industry). But of course, they were Generation II reactors that were a litigation nightmare to build. With proper licensing procedures, such problems should be reduced. First time problems sometimes occur, but the beauty of standardisation is that they get caught first time and not repeated. Besides, nuclear projects are hardly the only things to overrun. Scottish Parliament anyone?

He also said we needed more focus on other sectors among which he named geothermal. If only we had any geothermal resources his point might have been valid.

He also brought up the waste issue. He said it was different from other types of waste. That's right. It's contained unlike other forms of waste. It's also produced in manageably small quantities and throughout the lifetime of Generation III+, the volume of total radwaste will only increase 10% on what we currently have.

Caroline Lucas was full of bile. She said underwriting accidents was a large subsidy, obviously working on the explicit assumption that nuclear power stations are death traps, Chernobyl et al. Not only is she ignorant, but she is reprehensibly so.

There was also crap about renewables and nuclear being incompatible because they use a different kind of grid. Well large wind farms need the National Grid as much as anyone and I haven't heard her complaining about those. It is also the classic pie in the sky thinking that microgeneration will solve all of our energy problems alone so that large baseload generation will not be required.

Then there was this gem. She said it was uneconomic. She also said that by signalling to investors that nuclear is desired, they would no longer invest in renewables. But if nuclear was so uneconomic, why would they invest in it at all unless renewables were even more uneconomic to the point of ridiculous? It is a classic have your cake and eat it too fallacy. When it comes to renewables, Greens as a whole always insist that money should be no object, but as soon as nuclear is on the cards, suddenly economics leaps to the forefront. That's called not making a fair comparison.

So in conclusion usual fuddite and pie in the sky rubbish with a dash of conspiracy theory nouveau (the whole stealth tax business).

PS I originally said the Olkiluoto 3 delays were purely a litigation issue. In fact, it is due to planning and supply issues, which can partly be attributed to the regulatory framework and partly to some technical problems associated with prototypes.

Stottie shopping for reactors

Philip Stott joins us in celebration of freedom for fission in the UK with some window shopping.

He makes a good point about the value of intra-European commonality by using the EPR. Being able to pool knowledge between us, Finland and France, in the European Northwest, could be a great asset.

If I may chime in with an alternate view. I think the ACR-1000 could be very useful to us. Its fuel cycle flexibility would allow us to make easier and cheaper use of the stockpiles of plutonium and spent fuel sitting up in Sellafield about which the opponents are so irate. CANDUs can also burn spent LWR fuel so if other nations using LWRs wanted another way of getting rid of their spent fuel, we could take the "burden" of their hands accompanied by some maniacal laughter.

But then again, there is something to the simplicity of Stottie's option. We'll let the investors decide.

Victory at Westminster

The UK energy review is out.

It says many things. Lots of carbon to worry about. Loads more renewables needed. A bit of clean coal would be good. And oh yes:

The Government believes that nuclear has a role to play in the future UK
generating mix alongside other low carbon generation options.

Its committment to not screwing up the externalities of carbon dioxide is somewhat vague (in other words, it isn't clear if they will take the climate change levy off nuclear). It does make significant references to pre-licensing however, which is very good news.

Of course, whether or not we get new reactors depends on private investors. Areva, EDF and others sound enthusiastic, but it still remains to be seen. If the review does what I hope it does, it won't make it easy for nuclear power, it will make it fairer for nuclear power. Unfortunately, the paranoid opponents seem to think that anything less than a total condemnation of nuclear is a subsidy.

I've e-mailed the energy minister Malcolm Wicks in support of his apparent efforts to bring greater fairness to nuclear as well as to my local MP Gareth Thomas to urge his support.

Heads thicker than a containment structure

The UK government energy review is due to report tomorrow. The outlook is good. Of course, this means the opponents become ever more feral.

The government has already said what it will not do, and neither do we expect it to do so:

1. It will not provide capital support or soft loans.
2. It will not include nuclear in renewables obligations certificates.
3. It will not provide a price floor.

What it should do is:

1. Remove the climate change levy.
2. Streamline licensing procedures so that the technology itself is pre-certified once and any subsequent use of that technology is subject only to a site specific evaluation. And given that the two main candidates are the EPR, which is already seeing first build in Finland, and the AP-1000, which has already received pre-certification from the NRC, this shouldn't take long if common sense prevails.

Energy companies are already preparing to set things in motion. They do not need any of this rubbish that so many opponents are saying the government will be giving them.

On the bright side, if opponents are now resorting to tearing down a straw man, maybe it's because they've quietly accepted their legacy arguments are bogus.

And to prove it isn't personal, here's a swipe at the Tories

The latest eco-toff to enter Westminster, Dave Cameron, has said nuclear is a last resort.

Here's why:

"We need to think in an entirely new way about energy. The future of energy is
not top-down, it's not centralised - it's bottom-up and decentralised."

He wants a shift to micro-generation. First, let me say that it is entirely consistent for the leader of the Conservative party to be ideologically attached to the concept of micro-generation. The current situation has large power stations and centralised infrastructure under the control of the few, while Dave's vision is for electricity generation to be in the hands of the many, no doubt supported by a large competitive market of micro-generation suppliers, a situation far more compliant with the teachings of Milton Friedman. No longer will people just own their own homes, but they will also own the means of powering them.

Micro-generation is pure Thatcherism! So Dave's support for it is about the only consistently Tory thing he has done since becoming Conservative leader.

Nevertheless, and as much as the British public, particularly those in the North might be offended by what I am about to say, a tunnel visioned focus on the Thatcherite dream is not necessarily the best idea.

How well will it really work? Windmills on top of roofs in the middle of conurbations don't work as well as those in the open country, where the great wind farms are being developed, because wind speeds are far lower. There is also the problem about the structural integrity of the buildings supporting these windmills as they endure the vibration.

Combined heat and power systems involve shipping more natural gas through urban centres, which is a health and safety hazard, and it does it at significant losses since the compressibility of a gas makes it hard to pipe. It is better to burn the gas at a power station and transport the energy across high voltage power lines. The losses are less that way.

Then of course, there's PV. These are limited by the solar constant and the urban environment, complete with its pollution and birds, which will greatly degrade their effectiveness. If simply attached to the roof of a building, they cannot track for best angle of insolation and given relatively low sun angles at these high latitudes, the potential is limited.

Biomass is a recipe for mass respiratory failure since most bio-fuels do not burn nearly as cleanly as the alkanes extracted from crude oil. Air pollution would sky rocket.

That is not to say that these systems cannot contribute importantly to covering our electricity needs, but to depend on them solely without the benefit of the large generating stations, which have served us so well, is putting idealism before realism. You can't just sweep away the necessity of conventional power stations with the wave of a magic slogan.

I'll give Dave credit for not going down the all-or-nothing route the LibDems have, since he has said he is not ruling it out, but he is treading awfully close.

But to the most important thing of all. If micro-generation is Dave's dream, and centralised generation should be avoided where possible and assuming that is practical, why should nuclear specifically be the last resort. Why not coal, which produces vast amounts of air pollution and is the worst greenhouse gas emitter, not to mention the worst radiation emitter? And the solid waste... Why not gas, which also emits greenhouse gases, contributes to air pollution and is increasingly becoming a security liability?

Nuclear does not contribute to air pollution or global warming in any significant quantities. Its wastes are produced in small, manageable quantities. Above all, it is clearly the safest form of large scale generation.

Singling out nuclear as the last resort, rather than other more polluting centralised power sources, seems somewhat discriminatory.

Never send a Liberal Democrat to do a scientist's job

Slightly off-topic, but the LibDems are now drawing attention to air pollution.

Finally they're shifting focus to the largest environmental problem we face. But they manage to get a little confused. They talk about tackling fuel inefficient vehicles when fuel efficiency is not the issue when it comes to air pollution. What is important is that the engine burns cleanly, regardless of the rate of fuel consumption.

Some modern high performance engines, known for getting less than 20mpg, do actually burn rather cleanly emitting less pollutants like particulates and carbon monoxide. On the other hand, some older, small engines, which may make the car do 30mpg+, spit out particulates like a smoker's cough.

Fuel efficiency is only relevant when dealing with carbon dioxide, which is not a pollutant but a greenhouse gas; a separate issue. Leave it to the LibDems to confuse air pollution with global warming.

Now to the relevant bit.

Summer smog causes the deaths of more than 3,000 people each year, the Liberal
Democrats have warned.

So in other words, in one year, urban smog in Britain kills almost as many people as the IAEA estimates under worst case scenario assumptions will be killed over a hundred years by Chernobyl. And unlike Chernobyl, these deaths happened under normal operation.

If they were so concerned about air pollution, you'd think they wouldn't be so unequivocally opposed to nuclear power, which produces none, and displaces much as it substitutes for fossil fuel generation.

NEW! Decommissioning

All good things must come to an end. Even nuclear reactors.

It's not an issue that comes up a great deal overall, but in Britain, recent estimates from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority have given ammunition to the opposite. Therefore, not surprisingly, this new page dedicates a fair proportion of space to the British situation and why the NDA figure is misleading.

The important thing to remember about Britain is that with all those graphite moderated reactors, costs were bound to be higher anyway.