The real truth about Nuclear Energy - a history lesson

[shance]

Atomic Economics

Fifty years ago the pushers of the "Peaceful Atom"---including Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission---promised electricity that would be "too cheap to meter."

The pledge has turned into the biggest lie in U.S. financial history.

Far from being cheap or reliable, nuclear power plants have drained the American economy of hundreds of billions of dollars.

That money could have financed green power sources that would have avoided the global warming crisis and freed the US from dependence on foreign energy sources.

The key decision was made in 1953.

A year earlier, Harry Truman's Blue Ribbon Paley Commission reported that the future of American energy was with renewable sources.

Predicting 15 million solar-heated homes by 1975, the Truman Administration knew that our best route to energy independence and economic security was with green power.

In 1953, Bell Laboratories made an historic breakthrough, perfecting photovoltaic (PV) technology to the point that cells made of silicon could transform sunlight into usable electric current.

The first cells were used to power space satellites.

But the prospect of making homes and offices energy self-sufficient with PV rooftop installations was a monumental moment in technological history.

In an essentially military decision, Dwight Eisenhower chose nuclear power instead.

Pledging to share the Peaceful Atom worldwide, Eisenhower turned the US away from green power.

But even with huge government subsidies, no utilities would step forward to build Ike's atomic reactors.

So in 1957, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which made the taxpayer and the victims of any potential disaster the ultimate insurers. The industry promised that improving technology would entice private insurance companies to take the risk.

But after fifty years it hasn't happened. And despite today's hype about new designs, no private company will assume the risk for new reactors either.

Through the ensuing half-century, atomic reactor construction was defined by epic cost overruns and delays.

The two reactors proposed in the 1960s for Seabrook, New Hampshire for a total of $250 million turned into one for $7 billion, decades late. Long Island's $7 billion Shoreham operated briefly, then shut.

Overall, Forbes compared the losses on nuke power to "a commitment bigger than the space program ($100 billion) the Vietnam War ($111 billion). The scale of the "collapse" was "appalling."

During the deregulation crisis of 1999-2001, the industry took more than $100 billion in "stranded cost" payouts from state and federal sources.

Reactor owners argued that nuclear power was too expensive to compete in a deregulated market, and that they were owed compensation for having risked their capital on an experiment that failed.

Today the nuclear industry says all that is behind them, and that a "new generation" of reactors will somehow reverse a half-century of catastrophic economics.

But in Finland, the first of these plants is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.

And the renewable energy industry on which Eisenhower turned his back on 1953 has come of age.

Wind power is far cheaper than nukes, can be installed quickly, and helps solve rather than worsen the global warming crisis.

Solar, bio-fuels, efficiency and conservation all have investors lining up for them, without the need for taxpayer guarantees or government-backed catastrophic liability insurance.

To invest in nukes is to throw still more good money at a bad technology.

Those who do so guarantee us all fifty more years of economic chaos and energy shortfalls.

http://www.nukefree.org/facts/uninsurable

Resources:

Daniel Ford
The Cult of the Atom

Rocky Mountain Institute
http://www.rmi.org/

The Union of Concerned Scientists
http://www.ucs.org/

[AndyTiedye]

1. Allow Me to be the First to Kick and Recommend this Thread

:kick:

[shance]

4. Thank ya Andy :)

Mighty kind.

:toast:

[NutmegYankee]

2. Some regions do not have good renewable options.

New England for instance, can use wind power offshore, but the density along the shoreline far exceeds the wind power available. Solar is just a dream in the winter, but in the summer would work well. With the excessive demand that electric heat needs, I frankly don't see anything other than Nuclear or Coal providing the energy to prevent us from freezing to death in the winter. Electric Heat is the only good option to counter the older oil heat set-ups.

I think the best approach in a region such as ours is to mix the renewable energy sources with conventional nuclear plants. Admittedly, nuclear doesn't bother me, and I live within 10 miles of one.

[bananas]

5. Some regions do not have good nuclear options

"Massachusetts nuke workers question Vermont Yankee operation"
"union members at the Plymouth plant were worried their career prospects could be harmed if another potential employer viewed Pilgrim's operations as similar to those in Vermont"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x122119

[NutmegYankee]

7. I don't see how that is relevent.

Management is easy to correct, geographic and environmental factors are not.

[druidity33]

29. well

if management were so easy to correct, why have there been problems at that plant FOR YEARS?


:shrug:

[druidity33]

28. my home has

double thick walls that are super insulated. I have PV panels as well as an evacuated tube solar hot water system... both generate gains on sunny winter days. It is a poured concrete slab with radiant floor heat. My wife and i and our child live in this beautiful, "affordable" home in NWestern Massachusetts, just 10 minutes away from the Vermont border. It is only 1300 sq ft but that is mostly how it becomes so efficient. Not a lot of wasted space. The joy is in the 3+ acres that accompany the house.

It can be done, but people need to think more about integrated systems as well as voluntary simplicity. Next year i'll be putting up a Victory Garden and digging a root cellar!

Nuclear DOES bother me BECAUSE i live so close to one that has had a lot of issues in the past.

There are better ways.

[Massacure]

3. The French and Japanese are an example that nuclear power DOES work.

[shance]

6. You have some references on that? I'm hard pressed to believe

anything about Nuclear energy being successful really after reading about all the 'successful' disasters which have been created because of it.

With regards to the toxicity of it all - the cancer, the soil toxification, the water toxification and ultimately the food toxification.

At some point the profiteers and humanity in general have got to confront the inherent evil of monetary profits when it comes to promoting those things that are destroying everything and serving nothing or no one in the end.

Nobody but a bloody dollar bill, which in the end represents absolutely nothing.

[Massacure]

8. France has the lowest electricity rates in Europe.

You went on a rant about the economics of nuclear power in the U.S., and while I don't disagree with you that there were several boondoggles in the U.S., France has some of the lowest electricity rates in Europe, and is a major exporter of electricity.

The the that the French have going for them is they made all of their reactors using the same design and the same company operates them all so they have gotten very good and running them, unlike the U.S. where we operate several types of reactors by many different companies. In the U.S., each separate reactor is also licensed separately which creates a lot of legal problems.

Another complaint I have with the U.S. is that it doesn't reprocess its fuel. Argonne did some pretty promising experiments with the EBR and pyroprocessing. They took nuclear "waste" and brought it to the point where it would reduce its radioactivity to less than the original uranium ore in about 400 years.

[gateley]

9. But I read somewhere that a poll of French citizens overwhelmingly wanted

to replace nuclear power with renewable energy. Maybe that wasn't as much as statement against nuclear power as it was a statement for renewable energy, but I was surprised nonetheless.

I don't have a link or even remember where I read it (probably here on DU, though) -- sorry.

[Massacure]

21. The French overwelmingly support nuclear power. Are you sure your not thinking of another country?

There are quite a few European countries that do not support nuclear energy.

[gateley]

27. Yeah, I'm pretty sure anyway. I was surprised because, like you, I was under

the impression that they were very happy with their nuclear power. It may have been the questioning -- e.g. "if solar (wind, whatever) power could sustain the country as well as nuclear energy, would you be in favor of it?" Something along those lines - leading questions.

I just kind of made a half-assed google search to see if I could find it, but didn't really have the energy to actively pursue it.

[TheMadMonk]

19. How many people have been killed by the most unsuccessful disasters?

Answer, less in total over the entire anticipated life of "disastrous" results, than are killed (directly and indirectly) every month in generating equitable amounts of power with coal.

Every single nuke plant on the planet could go the full Chernobyl (an impossible scenario) and the results in terms of lost life would still not hold a candle to coal.

Talking up nuclear power'a drawbacks best serves governments who prefer to reserve the technology for military uses. Solutions exist and have existed in principle from the very first days of the Manhattan Project. Why has this open avenue been deliberately blocked for all purposes except weapon's research for over sixty years?

[ThomWV]

26. Thank you for pointing that out. Nobody here will listen, but you are right

[gateley]

10. Recommend - interesting! I had no clue they were even thinking/aware of

renewable energy, solar power in Truman's day. Thanks!

[shance]

12. Thank you Gateley - glad you joined us.

I think it's a pretty pertinent subject these days.

[shance]

11. How does the use of uranium tie into nuclear energy?

Probably a stupid question, but I know very little about nuclear energy itself other than the most generalized info.

[NutmegYankee]

13. Uranium is the fuel

One particular isotope, U235, which is less than 0.7% of uranium is the one that fissions to produce the energy.

Try this: Great Site!

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power.htm

[shance]

14. Thank you NY***

Will earmark this for tomorrow.

xoxo

[SidDithers]

22. It was your anti-nuke OP...

and yet you "know very little about nuclear energy"?

Maybe you should familiarize yourself with the subject, rather than just reposting material from a site with an obvious agenda.

Sid

[Heywood J]

25. Seconded.

If you're going to make the OP, please be knowledgeable about the subject on which you speak.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

15. Oregon taxpayers are still paying for Trojan, shut down for years & demolished

over a year ago. It was live for 16 years, under half of it's expected lifetime.

[shance]

20. One can only imagine the toxic aftermath left behind. Wonder what the cancer rates are

around that area?

[ClayZ]

16. K and R

[Nutmegger]

17. Down with nuclear energy.

On KGO, a guest host had Harvey Wasserman on for an hour. It was quite fascinating.

[TheMadMonk]

18. Sounds almost reasonable doesn't it? Except for a couple of glaring errors.

Photovoltaics: Marvelous things. Love them to pieces. And ten billion dollars (then money) ploughed into the technology at the moment of the discovery of the phenomenon in silicon might have gotten us to the point we are today perhaps 2 to 5 years earlier. A good deal of the recent improvement in solar cell technologies is down to advances in a field of optics (non-imaging optics) which IIRC is less than 20 years old. And those improvements have in turn depended upon follow up research into developing materials which we can barely manage to manufacture today.

There HAS been tens of billions of dollars of research into silicon based technologies and a good deal of that research translates directly to applications in photovoltaics. Truman's decision to leave silicon to the market was not, ultimately, a bad one. Even though no one could have predicted the specifics and that computational circuits would become the giant, it could reasonably be foreseen that spin-offs from research into silicon switching technologies for innumerable applications (driven by a consumer market) would be as efficacious as any "Manhattan Project" into photovoltaic power.

The main choke point in getting silicon photovoltaics off the ground has been, for years, the production of nine nines fine mono-crystalline silicon. And behind that is the problem of convincing the manufacturers of said material to ramp up production enormously and thereby cut their own throats. There are fundamental limits to the necessary processes and doing them on a larger scale will gain very little in terms of savings. Essentially only what can be gained by buying more of the same machinery. And yet the price has to come down significantly. And the only place that has any real "give" in it is profit margins.

Solar Thermal: Again luvly jubly. However, it has been stalled for quite some time, not for want of research dollars, but because fundamental physical limits have been reached in the directions that have been most fully explored. There is some new stuff beginning to happen, but it's dependent on mega engineering and recent material advances.

I just don't believe government intervention could have made enough difference to time frames to have been worthwhile.

And much the same story can be told for a lot of other emerging technologies. The concepts themselves are simple enough. Mostly they are millenia old. It's the execution which has been the hold up. And that, as if often the case, has required multiple advances in a number of unrelated fields. And not always on paths that would have been on any "roadmap" drawn up back in the fifties.

Nuclear on the other hand was pretty much dependent on government assistance to get underway. And the thing that really killed it was the near blanket ban on anything to do with breeder reactors. Breeder style reactors can incinerate nuclear ash, including their own. But the technology was all but abandoned except for weapons applications, for nearly half a century whilst we built up huge stockpiles of radio-toxic waste.

We've indeed pissed a shitload of unnecessary money up against the wall pursuing wrongheaded nuclear "solutions". But the barriers have been mostly political, not technical. There were explorable paths that had to wait for computer simulation (since experimentation with breeders was problematic when you're not allowed to build one to play with).

And again in the past few years techs have begun to emerge that open up the possibility of a clean burning tabletop reactor. But this was not necessary to pursue industrial transmutation. It just makes it easier still. And controllable at the flick of a switch.

The biggest secret of harnessing nuclear energy for good or ill, is that there is no big secret. Just technological hurdles. And the solution to peaceful nuclear energy's biggest bugbear (waste recycling and disposal) was known in principle from the start, and there was an open exploratory pathway, again at the beginning, that was deliberately blocked. For reasons of national security.


The year 2000 is a reasonable arbitrary cutoff date for where "intervention" would have become reasonably productive. Now is the time (albeit a little belated) to throw money at the problem. Now, when we have all (or at least most of) the pieces we need to bootstrap ourselves past coal and oil. Where a few billions cast scattershot across a number of technologies could make a disproportionate difference.


Look to politics for the barriers getting "alternative" (including nuke) energy up and going in a viable and productive fashion, not to past mistakes that were arguably near perfect foresight. The biggest barrier to getting alternatives up is the alternatives themselves, because once those alternatives start making a significant difference, all those businesses dependent on doing energy the "non-alternative" way go the way of the dinosaurs unless they can adapt in the blink of an eye. They probably do have plans, but those plans almost certainly include squeezing every last dollar possible out of the old ways before abandoning them.

[SidDithers]

23. Ontario gets more than 50% of it's electricity from nuclear...nt

Sid

[Heywood J]

24. If you're going to cite Shoreham as a nuclear-industry

failure, then full disclosure should make you offer more than "it was shut down". If you don't want nuclear energy, that's fine, but it's better to be fully honest in the position taken.