However I see nations what are nuclear dependent like France and Japan still around intact. Japan even has one of the longest lifespan despite its not insignificant nuclear mishaps where radiation was not kept in place. It does sound alarmist of her. When there is only a small minority keep protesting about something prevalent, they are unusually not correct, not to say that they are never right. But it is up to them to prove it very convincingly.
When there is a small minority of knowledgeable people disagreeing with the majority, the minority is usually correct. It was a small minority that said the earth was round in 1492, a small minority that said man could fly in 1903, and a small minority that believed in wireless transmiissions (radio) in the early 20th century.
Even if you still don't want to believe what she's saying about the dangers, the fact is that nuclear power isn't cost efficient, which is why even today it can't survive without government subsidies.
You are correct. France <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html">generates 76% of its electricity using nuclear power</a> and is a major electricity explorer to its neighboring countries. The remainder of electricity in France is mostly generated by hydroelectric. <p> The article is ridden with fallacies and half-truths. I shall discuss here some of these: <p> <i>If you take the whole fuel chain as one piece, nuclear power produces large quantities of global warming gases because millions of tons of rock and ore need to be mined to get the uranium out of the ground. And it has to be crushed, using more fossil fuels.</i> <p> Coal also must be mined. Coal has less energy per ton than Uranium. It is less energy efficient to mine coal than Uranium. The major reason why coal is used rather than nuclear is not the fuel cost: it is because <a href="http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm">a nuclear power plant is much more expensive to build</a> than a coal power plant, even if it ends up being a wash at plant end of life. It is also perfectly possible to crush rocks using electric engines, powered by nuclear power. For someone who claims to drive a Prius hybrid electric, she seems remarkably forgetful of this fact. Solar panels, windmills, these all need raw minerals to manufacture as well. Fact is nothing is 100% clean. Nuclear is just better than the alternative: coal. <p> <i>At the moment, uranium is enriched at Paducah, Ky., where they have two 1,500-megawatt filthy, old, coal-fired plants to produce the electricity to enrich the uranium.</i> <p> Here she presents half the facts again. Yes, gas diffusion plants such as these require electricity to power them. The electricity may come from coal, nuclear or whatever. In France, they <a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/france/pierrelatte.htm">use nuclear electricity to enrich the uranium</a>. Another fact, more recent gas centrifuge technology requires <a href="http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm">50 times less energy</a> to enrich the same fuel than such plants. This gas centrifuge technology is so complex, countries like Pakistan and Brazil are using it. The USA still uses its 1970s technology gas diffusion plant and is in the process of transitioning to the newer technology. <p> <i>The...reactors they're planning...one (is) the AP-1000 by Westinghouse, which is essentially the same as the light water reactors that operate today, but cheaper to build because it has less concrete and steel. It's been nicknamed the eggshell reactor and, as such, it's very dangerous and could incur a major accident or meltdown.</i> <p> Ask a Japanese auto manufacturer: less parts mean less possible causes for failure, easier inspections, less manufacturing expenses. These reactors do precisely that. They are meant to be manufactured in series production, rather than being crafts works like the old reactors. Simulations show them to be more reliable than the old reactors. In fact, one of the reasons Three Mile Island happened, was the plant was so complex to inspect, they couldn't figure out which widget was malfunctioning. Since then the industry has tried to simplify and make clearer the instrumentation and operator diagnostics in a nuclear power plant. <p> These people come from the past, they are not seeing the present picture. We are addicted to oil, coal and gas, to break the addiction will take a tremendous effort. <p> We need everything: nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, etc. None alone will do it with present technology. Each has its own limitations. Nuclear has great potential for replacing coal, the renewables have great potential for replacing the gas fired peaker plants. To break the oil addiction will be the greatest problem of them all: try doing the math on replacing 50% of USA fuel consumption with biofuels. I give you a quote from Wikipedia as an appetizer: <i>It would require twice the land area of the US to be devoted to soybean production, or two-thirds to be devoted to rapeseed production, to meet current US heating and transportation needs.</i> <p> It is not that there are not other options, just that it is not expected we will be able to develop them <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report">in time</a> to minimize misery and pain.
This lady is beating a horse that has been dead for years. It's dumbasses like her that stunt the growth of science. Our current nuclear power facilities are aging. Wouldn't a new generation be more efficient and a lot safer than the previous?
The previous generations were built to higher standards than those proposed today. Thinner walls will save the builders some money but could easily cost us our lives.
PBR Reactors use Helium because it cannot pick up radiation. Or at least every scientific explanation of them I have ever read makes this claim.
Gasoline was considered a dangerous by-product of petroleum distillation for the first 50 years, and it was burned off or dumped in streams. Now we use it. The same thing will happen with nuclear waste.
Coal plants have released more radiation into the environment than all the nuclear accidents combined and then SOME.
There is no garuntee that the spent fuel can or will ever be re-used. And unlike your gasoline example if it cant be re-used then the consequences are long lasting.
For a gas to be radioactive, it would have to become radioactive itself by changing molecular makeup and becoming a radioactive isotope. Helium does have four radioactive isotopes, but according to Encyclopedia Britannica, "The four other isotopes are all radioactive, decaying very rapidly into other substances." These other substances are stable, non-radioactive Helium isotopes, and stable, non-radioactive Lithium isotopes.
Just because coal has radiation and toxic characteristics does not mean we should replace one method of killing workers and civilians with another method of irradiating them..... the sun does that well enough these days with the ozone loss....
why not reduce the population? birth control? mandatory contraceptives? birth penalties? they worked in china and they would do much to save the world from needing so much energy and polluting the human race into extinction... at least not so quickly.....
Do we *challenge* people's outrageous assertions anymore? Require them to justify them, perhaps?
> The people who would call me alarmist are nuclear engineers, physicists or businessmen who know nothing about medicine.
Probably not actually that accurate... but their understanding of medicine *has* to be deeper than hers of nuclear power engineering, of which she has none.
I loved, particularly, the graphite moderator strawman, which she tosses in in the context of the AP-1000 (and pebble-bedded fuel; these being three completely unrelated subjects).
Nuclear power is indeed not necessarily all a bed of roses. But *informed* discussion is much more likely to be productive than alarmist ranting.
I think this woman is a nut. Personally, I don't think Big Nuclear is the way to go (if only for economic reasons), but you have to win over people with facts, not distortions. Rants like hers are among the reasons the green movement has had to struggle to be accepted. You cannot promote a cause through exaggeration and hype, and you Have to get the science right. Without that, she has done more harm than good to her cause.
The author?s inclusion of the Swedish incident is alarmist and contains a huge error. The reactor that she mentions was shut down after its power supply was found to be inadequate for proper cooling to be maintained.
The assessment came from Lars-Olov Höglund, who said, ?Since the electricity supply from the network didn?t work as it should have, it could have been a catastrophe.?
He said without power the temperature would have been too high after 30 minutes and the reactor would have been damaged. Within two hours there would have been a meltdown.
The plant operator shut down the plant to prevent damage.
CNet descends to Daily Kos/Huffpost level of discourse
Alarmist loons who sound like Art Bell on LSD pass for news? This woman may be a doctor, but she needs medical help herself. She is scared of her own shadow. I honestly believe she has Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Panphobia.
People who become journalists share one unfortunate feature. They are almost all abysmally ignorant of science. Unlike journalism, science requires something besides wide-eyed enthusiasm and a yearning to be near the center of controversy.
So, reporters are mostly unable to distinguish between the frantic idiocy of Helen Caldicott and the boring but informed explanations of, say, bioradiation experts.
Remember, every moden mania depends on gullible and manipulative reporters to whip up the requisite fear. It's much more exciting than the hard work of unearthing and writing simple facts. The reporter and editor who would publish the hallucinations of Caldicott are ignorant and malicious demagogues. The topic may be green, but the journalism is yellow.
There is no way I'm going to ever trust nuclear energy. The dangers outlined in this article are reason enough. My vision is a solar cell and/or wind power system so refined that each home will be its own autonomous power plant. Oh, but then you destroy the centralized big business we want to control it all system. I WON'T MISS THAT ONE BIT!!!!
Caldicott: "Well, it's sort of like going from tobacco to crack. You don't cure one evil by inserting another evil...The answers are all there, and the people in Silicon Valley know that because they're making millions of dollars. They call green energy green not because it's green but because it makes lots of greenbacks."
I couldn't say it better than that.
Every part or process in creating Nuke power is dirty and creating the energy has too many places where one error or malfunction could lead to massive poisoning or some other mega destructive calamity. Who wants waste that will be around for thousands of years that you can't even tell with your own five senses is killing you?
Have you ever wondered how solar pannels were produced and what wastes that generated? And unfortunately I live in a place where there is only 100 days of sunshine a year, so solar isn't enough. We all should just stop saying nonsense, learn more about what we are talking before getting it written down.
Helen Caldicott is a green party media ***** that does not utilize good science in her work or articles. The benefits from nuclear science and nuclear power has saved more infants than she has in entire career as a doctor.
There are so many lies in her statements I do not have time to address them all so I'll just take the most extreme one.
"...because hypothetically 1 or 2 pounds evenly distributed throughout the world could kill most people on Earth with lung cancer."
Not even close to reality.
Reality is that there are several thousand pounds of plutonium in the atmosphere and settled onto the ground from all the open air testing. It's there. It has been for several decades. Not everyone had died from lung cancer.
Additionally, two pounds distributed evenly across the face of the Earth would not even be enough to be easily measurable: about a picogram (10^-12) per square meter. As a someone who researched the effects of extremely low levels of transuranic materials, I can say that it takes extremely sensitive equipment to measure a picogram of plutonium. And... the negative effects of a few picograms of plutonium is so minimal -- if it exists at all -- that it is not scientifically measurable. There is absolutely no way it would cause lung cancer in even 0.1% of the population let alone most of the people!
The dairy industry is subsidized,the oil companies are subsidized, medical research is subsidized. Removing our dependancy on foregin oil seems like something worth paying for.
That is the entire problem in a nutshell. Except that I would add "Energy wastage is also subsidized" by (among other things): infrastructure building/maintenance (e.g., roads, water, sewer, electric) in far-flung suburbs and rural areas, military intervention in oil-rich areas, and virtually-unlimited home mortgage interest tax deductions (without regard to number of occupants). The true costs would be more clear if they were paid for from energy taxes and user fees rather than from income taxes.
If people want to live away from everyone else in huge empty mansions and drive long distances by themselves in gas-guzzlers, that is their prerogative, but they should have to foot the bill.
(If anyone actually reads all the posts, forgive this re-post. My reply to another comment fit perfectly here also.)
Vitrification is the word you are looking for. It can't be done on site very easily and most likely would occur at central locations and not at each power plant. Basically you mix radiactive material with glass. This doesn't make the radiactive material harmless but if for some crazy reason the container breaks it would keep the radiactive material from leeching into our water and contaiminating our soil. It is an extra safety measure on top of the many many other safety measured used to keep us safe from spent nuclear fuel. Here is a quick article on it I found by googling it <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/eternity/vitri1.html" target="_newWindow">http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/eternity/vitri1.html</a>
Everything mentioned here aside. I understand that yellow cake mining, the material they extract uranium from, is decreasing---as in, we've mined all of the easy to find ore already. If this is in fact a true statement of uranium ore deposits, what's the point of building more nuclear reactors if we're just going to run out of a way of fueling them in 80-100 years? Sounds like the same dead end oil problem we will face in roughly the same period.
No there is plenty of easy uranium ore (yellowcake is concentrated uranium from uranium ore) for well over a century and if recycling occurs (Like Japan) we would have fuel for far beyond that. Most likely alternative sources would arrise long before uranium was an issue.
I'm a nuclear engineer and have a few comments on this story. First of all, I'm not claiming to be all knowning but some of her statements are just silly.
Uranium Mining: I don't know the exact amount of CO2 produced by Uranium mining. But lets put a few things into perspective. A nuclear reactor only re-fuels every 18 months. Uranium has so much energy in it that reactors need very very little fuel compared to other power plants. A coal or gas plant uses more fuel in a week than a nuclear reactor does in a year in a half (comparing mass). That is why there are only a handful of Uranium mines in the entire world. Compare that with coal, nickel, copper, iron ore mines, and etc. Uranium mines wouldn't even be 1%. All those other mines release the same radon gas she talks about and require power to run. Uranium mining is much much better for the enviroment than those other practices.
How many people die in coal mines every year. It is in the hundreds and yet nobody blinks an eye. How many people die in Uranium mining, none! This isn't people getting sick, these are people that die every year. And yes coal mining introduces way more radioactive material into the atmosphere than nuclear ever will. Nuclear power isn't perfect but it is so so much better than many alternatives. And it is realistic, the idea of running the entire country off of hydro-electric or solar power is simple unrealistic at the moment.
And the very program she rips on (GNEP) also recycles the nuclear fuel so new mining doesn't occur. Nuclear fuel has so much energy it can be recycled many times before it is retired.
I about fell off my chair laughing when she mentioned the idea of a nuclear power plant blowing up like a nuclear bomb. North Korea has had a nuclear reactor with plutonium for decades and they tried to create a nuclear bomb a few months ago and failed. If it is so easy why hasn't North Korea been able to do it? Lets just say I'm 100% confident than no matter how a terrorist attempts to blow up a nuclear power plant it will never ever blow up like a nuclear bomb. (And yes I know about nuclear weapon designs).
Now about the new generation of nuclear power plant designs. It is true that one of the benefits of the new reactors is cost and decreases the amount of concrete use. But they didn't do it by decreasing the reactor shield. They didn't by intelligent design. With computers they have been able to cut down the amount of piping, (There is a lot of pipes around a nuclear reactor), equipment and etc in the new nuclear designs. This means smaller buildings and less chance of something failing. The new designs are much safer and the reactor housing is stronger not weaker.
This is the basis of all her arguments, she points out some weakness that in fact is not a weakness at all, throw some technical terms in there and then scares people with consequences that are completely unrealistic. She is definitely an alarmist.
As a nuclear engineer I will say that nuclear power is not the answer to the worlds power problems. All our polution problems won't be solved by it. It is a great realistic alternative to fossil fuel power plants and has a very tiny impact on the enviroment. I hope one day we can throw away nuclear reactors for something even better, but until then nuclear power is (yes I'm going to say it) greener for the world we live in today.
You didn't quite convince me that your perspective is totally correct but you did convince me that Dr. Caldicott's argument has some holes. I still tend to agree with her that nuclear waste is even worse than greenhouse gases. I appreciate your relatively balanced tone (considering the rest of the comments online).
When talking about deaths in coal mining, China reported 4,746 during 2006. Most analysts suspect that this number is actually lower than the real total of coal mining deaths in China. Fortunately most other countries are much better and the total deaths for the rest of the world in coal mining accidents is "only" about a thousand people per year. Definitely one of the world's most dangerous industries!
Also you mention pollution from mining operations. I don't have the numbers for the US, but in Canada you can get a ranking of the worst single-source polluters from www.pollutionwatch.org. #1 is a copper and zinc mine and processing center, #2 is a copper mine and processing center and #3 is a nickel mine and processing center. The rest of the top 10 polluters include an aluminium manufacturer, an oil sands upgrading facility and five coal fired power stations! These are NOT clean industries and while nuclear power may have some issues with waste it is by no means the only one!
Personally I'm all for wind and solar panel where they make sense. However wind tends not to blow very consistently and absolutely can not be increased or decreased at will to match changes in power demand. As such it's going to struggle badly to exceed 10% of any given areas electrical power unless there is some sort of back-up power (which kills the economics of it, even with large government subsidies). Solar is in even worse shape.
When you get right down to it, we've got basically 3 sources of energy to choose from for 80%+ of our electricity needs, fossil fuels (mainly coal since all others are or will soon be too expensive), hydroelectric and nuclear. Hydroelectric is nice where available, but you need the water in the first place, plus it releases greenhouse gases from decaying vegetation and leeches heavy metals into you water and food stream. Fossil fuels are terrible from an air pollution standpoint, especially coal which is one of the largest causes of respiratory illness in many countries, not to mention releasing radioactive waste and heavy metals. So that leaves us with nuclear, which has the best safety record of any of the three, the lowest level of pollution and it's pretty much the only industry that very actively deals with it's waste and sets aside (as per government regulations) a portion of it's costs for long term waste management, transportation and disposal.
Caldicott seems to be a parrot repeating whatever information she is fed by her special-interest-supported group. She has no credibility or experience and I doubt she could correctly explain how a nuclear power plant operates. Let's hear articles written by experts please. Thanks to Mark for putting her bull into perspective.
"I hope one day we can throw away nuclear reactors"
You defend nuclear power, but then, you add "I hope one day we can throw away nuclear reactors", so what does it mean ?
You are perfectly aware that your accusations are at least as skewed as her arguments.
When she talks about sabotage / consequence of a war, she never implied the plant would explode. Chernobyl did not need to explode ...
If you really are a nuke engineer, then think about what YOU would do if your mission was to sabotage a nuke plant with the goal of releasing as much radioactive particles in the atmosphere as possible.
no matter how good are the new reactors, people still are people and a mistake will happen sooner or later.
Thanks for your clear comments. I worked in a coal-fired power plant (newer one with latest pollution controls) and can tell you that the energy required to mine, process, burn, and handle the waste ash is staggering. This without taking into account the replacement cost of filters, refractories, etc... Additionally coal combustion is a large CO2 emmitter as well as being one of the largest cause of mercury pollution. Thus, when everything is considered in whole, nukes certainly has a place in meeting present insatially need for power. All the rhetoric about "clean power" is not going to solve the near-term demand and ones proclaiming 100% renewables got their heads in the sand. YES, most of us, if not all, would love to see all power demands met by clean renewables but one cannot change things overnight. what can be changed immediately without much pain is the wasteful American life habits. 5 or even 10% reduction in energy consumption is immediately possible. No one needs +300 hp SUVs. Almost no one needs to run ACs 24 hours a day. Instead of opposing certain forms of power generation, we should be expanding our energy opposing destructive, wasteful, lifestyles first.
Caldicott had been terrified of nuclear anything, regardless of technology improvements. She was a proponent of the nuclear freeze, which called for the West to lose its spine and surrender to the Soviets. A true member of "if we ignore them, they will just go away" school. Her appeasement and alarmism belongs on the Democratic Underground website, not CNET
I thought I had heard of her before...she's written a few expose fiction novels, I guess she needs any publicity she can get for her current book. Definitely you're right about her past, she got her start in the Pacific nations nuclear-free movement.
This is why pediatricians shouldn't be in charge engineering policy. Her entry on wikipedia documents her various lies...<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Caldicott" target="_newWindow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Caldicott</a>
I am so sick of all of these greenies and their doom and gloom. This is a cult meant to guilt Americans. We all need to take a minute and look back at history to realize that the earth has gone through heat and cold cycles long before the internal combustion engine was invented. Bad hurricanes really did occur long before the white man laid foot in America. Northern Europe made excellent wine centuries ago. This particular activist seems to be doing to the environment what Jesse Jackson has done to race relations. Notably, nothing.
Solar Power will be the answer but not the current Solar Energy Program!
Solar power is what created all that fossil fuel in the first place. Research the amount of energy that hits the planet every day from the sun! We wont be able to wait millions of years for the low solar efficiency of plants and animals to decay. We must capture the most direct energy from the sun with the least amount of material cost and GHG expenditure to create this solar net. Don?t rush out and put solar panels on your roof. That would be a mistake that could cost the planet in the long run. The million solar roofs program is not the answer. SolarTransfer is the answer but only when done the right way.
When COmanche Peak power plant was built it was festooned with sensors everywhere. WHen the day cam eto test those sensors the engineers couldn't get them to stop going off continually. Interestingly enough there wasn't a single grain of radioactive fuel at the plant yet! This baffled the engineers to no end for a while. Finally someone got smart and realized that the COAL PLANT UPWIND was releasing enough radioactive material to exceed the federal safety limits placed on all nuclear reactors in the USA!!!!
The lesson? Coal is far nastier radioactive material release wise than a nuclear plant.
Yes nuclear plants produce radioactive polution, but it's recycleable.
Yes nuclear plants are dangerous, but there's been only a couple accidents so far, caused by gross incompetance. 3 mile island released LESS radioactive material than coal plants do in a single day.
solar, wind, tide, etc.... unfeasible until we improve the technology cost wise compared to nuclear plants.
Am I saying just drop these "green" sources? No! Build them as fast as we can! Use Nuclear plants as a stop gap measure to eliminate fossil fules for now so that we have to time to build the truly renewable energy sources over time.
Helen Caldicott has dedicated her life to attacking all nuclear technology. In my opinion she would twist any issue and exaggerate any risk to accomplish her purpose. But she has no training in and only very limited knowledge of radiobiology, radiation safety, nuclear physics, radiochemistry, or environmental biology. She seems to think that radiation risk is a medical issue and she can speak about it because she has a medical degree. She will go to any extreme, make any scary claim, and pretend knowledge to accomplish her purpose. I do not believe that she is a reliable source of information about radiation risks or the comparative effects of energy sources on the environment. CNET News did a disservice by publishing this melange of mis-information.
Referring to Ronald Reagan ...."And I think retrospectively I did influence him. He started to say nuclear war must never be fought and can never be won. And he did then work cooperatively with Gorbachev to end the Cold War."
people that try to either take credit for or deny credit to Ronald Reagan for the cold war ending that I lost count many years ago. This is just another history revisionist that hates to except reality. Reagan had the opportunity and the will. He did what no one else could or would.
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It does sound alarmist of her. When there is only a small minority keep protesting about something prevalent, they are unusually not correct, not to say that they are never right. But it is up to them to prove it very convincingly.
disagreeing with the majority, the minority is usually correct. It
was a small minority that said the earth was round in 1492, a
small minority that said man could fly in 1903, and a small
minority that believed in wireless transmiissions (radio) in the
early 20th century.
Even if you still don't want to believe what she's saying about the
dangers, the fact is that nuclear power isn't cost efficient, which
is why even today it can't survive without government subsidies.
<p>
The article is ridden with fallacies and half-truths. I shall discuss here some of these:
<p>
<i>If you take the whole fuel chain as one piece, nuclear power produces large quantities of global warming gases because millions of tons of rock and ore need to be mined to get the uranium out of the ground. And it has to be crushed, using more fossil fuels.</i>
<p>
Coal also must be mined. Coal has less energy per ton than Uranium. It is less energy efficient to mine coal than Uranium. The major reason why coal is used rather than nuclear is not the fuel cost: it is because <a href="http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm">a nuclear power plant is much more expensive to build</a> than a coal power plant, even if it ends up being a wash at plant end of life.
It is also perfectly possible to crush rocks using electric engines, powered by nuclear power. For someone who claims to drive a Prius hybrid electric, she seems remarkably forgetful of this fact. Solar panels, windmills, these all need raw minerals to manufacture as well. Fact is nothing is 100% clean. Nuclear is just better than the alternative: coal.
<p>
<i>At the moment, uranium is enriched at Paducah, Ky., where they have two 1,500-megawatt filthy, old, coal-fired plants to produce the electricity to enrich the uranium.</i>
<p>
Here she presents half the facts again. Yes, gas diffusion plants such as these require electricity to power them. The electricity may come from coal, nuclear or whatever. In France, they <a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/france/pierrelatte.htm">use nuclear electricity to enrich the uranium</a>. Another fact, more recent gas centrifuge technology requires <a href="http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm">50 times less energy</a> to enrich the same fuel than such plants. This gas centrifuge technology is so complex, countries like Pakistan and Brazil are using it. The USA still uses its 1970s technology gas diffusion plant and is in the process of transitioning to the newer technology.
<p>
<i>The...reactors they're planning...one (is) the AP-1000 by Westinghouse, which is essentially the same as the light water reactors that operate today, but cheaper to build because it has less concrete and steel. It's been nicknamed the eggshell reactor and, as such, it's very dangerous and could incur a major accident or meltdown.</i>
<p>
Ask a Japanese auto manufacturer: less parts mean less possible causes for failure, easier inspections, less manufacturing expenses. These reactors do precisely that. They are meant to be manufactured in series production, rather than being crafts works like the old reactors. Simulations show them to be more reliable than the old reactors. In fact, one of the reasons Three Mile Island happened, was the plant was so complex to inspect, they couldn't figure out which widget was malfunctioning. Since then the industry has tried to simplify and make clearer the instrumentation and operator diagnostics in a nuclear power plant.
<p>
These people come from the past, they are not seeing the present picture. We are addicted to oil, coal and gas, to break the addiction will take a tremendous effort.
<p>
We need everything: nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, etc. None alone will do it with present technology. Each has its own limitations. Nuclear has great potential for replacing coal, the renewables have great potential for replacing the gas fired peaker plants. To break the oil addiction will be the greatest problem of them all: try doing the math on replacing 50% of USA fuel consumption with biofuels. I give you a quote from Wikipedia as an appetizer: <i>It would require twice the land area of the US to be devoted to soybean production, or two-thirds to be devoted to rapeseed production, to meet current US heating and transportation needs.</i>
<p>
It is not that there are not other options, just that it is not expected we will be able to develop them <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report">in time</a> to minimize misery and pain.
proposed today. Thinner walls will save the builders some money
but could easily cost us our lives.
Gasoline was considered a dangerous by-product of petroleum distillation for the first 50 years, and it was burned off or dumped in streams. Now we use it. The same thing will happen with nuclear waste.
Coal plants have released more radiation into the environment than all the nuclear accidents combined and then SOME.
Dr. Caldicott is fearmongering.
Nuclear power is the cleanest and best source of power, when used correctly. Japan and France are examples.
Pick which hysteria you want to cater to:
1) global warming (if this choose nukes)
2) nuclear power (if this, don't complain about global warming)
> The people who would call me alarmist are nuclear engineers, physicists or businessmen who know nothing about medicine.
Probably not actually that accurate... but their understanding of medicine *has* to be deeper than hers of nuclear power engineering, of which she has none.
I loved, particularly, the graphite moderator strawman, which she tosses in in the context of the AP-1000 (and pebble-bedded fuel; these being three completely unrelated subjects).
Nuclear power is indeed not necessarily all a bed of roses. But *informed* discussion is much more likely to be productive than alarmist ranting.
Why can't anyone talk calmly anymore?
Is it really just the influence of teh tubes?
Put this nut back in hibernation.
Personally, I don't think Big Nuclear is the way to go (if only for economic reasons), but you have to win over people with facts, not distortions.
Rants like hers are among the reasons the green movement has had to struggle to be accepted. You cannot promote a cause through exaggeration and hype, and you Have to get the science right. Without that, she has done more harm than good to her cause.
The assessment came from Lars-Olov Höglund, who said, ?Since the electricity supply from the network didn?t work as it should have, it could have been a catastrophe.?
He said without power the temperature would have been too high after 30 minutes and the reactor would have been damaged. Within two hours there would have been a meltdown.
The plant operator shut down the plant to prevent damage.
They are almost all abysmally ignorant of science. Unlike
journalism, science requires something besides wide-eyed
enthusiasm and a yearning to be near the center of controversy.
So, reporters are mostly unable to distinguish between the
frantic idiocy of Helen Caldicott and the boring but informed
explanations of, say, bioradiation experts.
Remember, every moden mania depends on gullible and
manipulative reporters to whip up the requisite fear. It's much
more exciting than the hard work of unearthing and writing
simple facts. The reporter and editor who would publish the
hallucinations of Caldicott are ignorant and malicious
demagogues. The topic may be green, but the journalism is
yellow.
dangers outlined in this article are reason enough. My vision is a
solar cell and/or wind power system so refined that each home
will be its own autonomous power plant.
Oh, but then you destroy the centralized big business we want
to control it all system. I WON'T MISS THAT ONE BIT!!!!
Caldicott: "Well, it's sort of like going from tobacco to crack. You
don't cure one evil by inserting another evil...The answers are all
there, and the people in Silicon Valley know that because they're
making millions of dollars. They call green energy green not
because it's green but because it makes lots of greenbacks."
I couldn't say it better than that.
Every part or process in creating Nuke power is dirty and
creating the energy has too many places where one error or
malfunction could lead to massive poisoning or some other
mega destructive calamity. Who wants waste that will be around
for thousands of years that you can't even tell with your own five
senses is killing you?
Get off the Nuke bandwagon please!!!!!
And unfortunately I live in a place where there is only 100 days of sunshine a year, so solar isn't enough.
We all should just stop saying nonsense, learn more about what we are talking before getting it written down.
"...because hypothetically 1 or 2 pounds evenly distributed throughout the world could kill most people on Earth with lung cancer."
Not even close to reality.
Reality is that there are several thousand pounds of plutonium in the atmosphere and settled onto the ground from all the open air testing. It's there. It has been for several decades. Not everyone had died from lung cancer.
Additionally, two pounds distributed evenly across the face of the Earth would not even be enough to be easily measurable: about a picogram (10^-12) per square meter. As a someone who researched the effects of extremely low levels of transuranic materials, I can say that it takes extremely sensitive equipment to measure a picogram of plutonium. And... the negative effects of a few picograms of plutonium is so minimal -- if it exists at all -- that it is not scientifically measurable. There is absolutely no way it would cause lung cancer in even 0.1% of the population let alone most of the people!
If people want to live away from everyone else in huge empty mansions and drive long distances by themselves in gas-guzzlers, that is their prerogative, but they should have to foot the bill.
(If anyone actually reads all the posts, forgive this re-post. My reply to another comment fit perfectly here also.)
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/eternity/vitri1.html" target="_newWindow">http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/eternity/vitri1.html</a>
Mark
mining, the material they extract uranium from, is decreasing---as
in, we've mined all of the easy to find ore already. If this is in fact a
true statement of uranium ore deposits, what's the point of
building more nuclear reactors if we're just going to run out of a
way of fueling them in 80-100 years? Sounds like the same dead
end oil problem we will face in roughly the same period.
Mark
Uranium Mining:
I don't know the exact amount of CO2 produced by Uranium mining. But lets put a few things into perspective. A nuclear reactor only re-fuels every 18 months. Uranium has so much energy in it that reactors need very very little fuel compared to other power plants. A coal or gas plant uses more fuel in a week than a nuclear reactor does in a year in a half (comparing mass). That is why there are only a handful of Uranium mines in the entire world. Compare that with coal, nickel, copper, iron ore mines, and etc. Uranium mines wouldn't even be 1%. All those other mines release the same radon gas she talks about and require power to run. Uranium mining is much much better for the enviroment than those other practices.
How many people die in coal mines every year. It is in the hundreds and yet nobody blinks an eye. How many people die in Uranium mining, none! This isn't people getting sick, these are people that die every year. And yes coal mining introduces way more radioactive material into the atmosphere than nuclear ever will. Nuclear power isn't perfect but it is so so much better than many alternatives. And it is realistic, the idea of running the entire country off of hydro-electric or solar power is simple unrealistic at the moment.
And the very program she rips on (GNEP) also recycles the nuclear fuel so new mining doesn't occur. Nuclear fuel has so much energy it can be recycled many times before it is retired.
I about fell off my chair laughing when she mentioned the idea of a nuclear power plant blowing up like a nuclear bomb. North Korea has had a nuclear reactor with plutonium for decades and they tried to create a nuclear bomb a few months ago and failed. If it is so easy why hasn't North Korea been able to do it? Lets just say I'm 100% confident than no matter how a terrorist attempts to blow up a nuclear power plant it will never ever blow up like a nuclear bomb. (And yes I know about nuclear weapon designs).
Now about the new generation of nuclear power plant designs. It is true that one of the benefits of the new reactors is cost and decreases the amount of concrete use. But they didn't do it by decreasing the reactor shield. They didn't by intelligent design. With computers they have been able to cut down the amount of piping, (There is a lot of pipes around a nuclear reactor), equipment and etc in the new nuclear designs. This means smaller buildings and less chance of something failing. The new designs are much safer and the reactor housing is stronger not weaker.
This is the basis of all her arguments, she points out some weakness that in fact is not a weakness at all, throw some technical terms in there and then scares people with consequences that are completely unrealistic. She is definitely an alarmist.
As a nuclear engineer I will say that nuclear power is not the answer to the worlds power problems. All our polution problems won't be solved by it. It is a great realistic alternative to fossil fuel power plants and has a very tiny impact on the enviroment. I hope one day we can throw away nuclear reactors for something even better, but until then nuclear power is (yes I'm going to say it) greener for the world we live in today.
Mark
but it's nice to see some facts backing up my intuition.
D
I'll add a few extra bits on to this:
When talking about deaths in coal mining, China reported 4,746 during 2006. Most analysts suspect that this number is actually lower than the real total of coal mining deaths in China. Fortunately most other countries are much better and the total deaths for the rest of the world in coal mining accidents is "only" about a thousand people per year. Definitely one of the world's most dangerous industries!
Also you mention pollution from mining operations. I don't have the numbers for the US, but in Canada you can get a ranking of the worst single-source polluters from www.pollutionwatch.org. #1 is a copper and zinc mine and processing center, #2 is a copper mine and processing center and #3 is a nickel mine and processing center. The rest of the top 10 polluters include an aluminium manufacturer, an oil sands upgrading facility and five coal fired power stations! These are NOT clean industries and while nuclear power may have some issues with waste it is by no means the only one!
Personally I'm all for wind and solar panel where they make sense. However wind tends not to blow very consistently and absolutely can not be increased or decreased at will to match changes in power demand. As such it's going to struggle badly to exceed 10% of any given areas electrical power unless there is some sort of back-up power (which kills the economics of it, even with large government subsidies). Solar is in even worse shape.
When you get right down to it, we've got basically 3 sources of energy to choose from for 80%+ of our electricity needs, fossil fuels (mainly coal since all others are or will soon be too expensive), hydroelectric and nuclear. Hydroelectric is nice where available, but you need the water in the first place, plus it releases greenhouse gases from decaying vegetation and leeches heavy metals into you water and food stream. Fossil fuels are terrible from an air pollution standpoint, especially coal which is one of the largest causes of respiratory illness in many countries, not to mention releasing radioactive waste and heavy metals. So that leaves us with nuclear, which has the best safety record of any of the three, the lowest level of pollution and it's pretty much the only industry that very actively deals with it's waste and sets aside (as per government regulations) a portion of it's costs for long term waste management, transportation and disposal.
You are perfectly aware that your accusations are at least as skewed as her arguments.
When she talks about sabotage / consequence of a war, she never implied the plant would explode. Chernobyl did not need to explode ...
If you really are a nuke engineer, then think about what YOU would do if your mission was to sabotage a nuke plant with the goal of releasing as much radioactive particles in the atmosphere as possible.
no matter how good are the new reactors, people still are people and a mistake will happen sooner or later.
This is why pediatricians shouldn't be in charge engineering policy. Her entry on wikipedia documents her various lies...<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Caldicott" target="_newWindow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Caldicott</a>
Radioactive material is dangerous because it is actively decaying. That means a short half life, so it becomes harmless quickly.
The less radioactive material has a much longer half life, and is less dangerous because it is NOT decaying. The decay is what produces the danger.
Cancer for millions of years? Pure hogwash.
The lesson? Coal is far nastier radioactive material release wise than a nuclear plant.
Yes nuclear plants produce radioactive polution, but it's recycleable.
Yes nuclear plants are dangerous, but there's been only a couple accidents so far, caused by gross incompetance. 3 mile island released LESS radioactive material than coal plants do in a single day.
solar, wind, tide, etc.... unfeasible until we improve the technology cost wise compared to nuclear plants.
Am I saying just drop these "green" sources? No! Build them as fast as we can! Use Nuclear plants as a stop gap measure to eliminate fossil fules for now so that we have to time to build the truly renewable energy sources over time.
This lady really is nuts.