For North Country nuclear advocates, grim new questions
Marquil's view
The last couple of months, local politicians from Queensbury to Massena have been calling for a nuclear-powered future, one in which a new power plant located here in the region would boost prosperity.
Freshman Rep. Chris Gibson — who represents the 20th district in the US House — has led the way, making the concept a centerpiece of his first term.
He argues that communities should have the chance to compete for a new plant.
According to the Glens Falls Post-Star, Gibson was scheduled to speak this week to th U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Roundtable luncheon in Washington DC.
But he’s hardly alone in taking up this banner.
Across the political spectrum, nuclear power boosters have more momentum than at any time since the Three Mile Island disaster three decades ago.
The dodgy part of this new push for nuclear power is that many proponents have been insisting that doubters and skeptics are little more than nattering nabobs of negativism.
When the Glens Falls Post Star condemned the idea of building new nuke plants in our region — insisting that the facilities still aren’t “completely safe” — the paper’s editorial board drew derision and mockery at one of Rep. Gibson’s town hall meetings.
But the truth is that there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the nuclear power industry, many of them highlighted by the unfolding nightmare in Japan.
We’ve been promised that these plants are engineered with layers of safety protocols, state-of-the-art engineering, and back-up systems. The situation in Japan suggests otherwise.
A half-dozen reactors in that country are now at risk of full-scale meltdown. We’ve been treated to images of containment buildings dissolving in clouds of smoke and debris.
The crew of one of our US navy ships has now been exposed to at least low levels of radiation.
But Japan’s crisis isn’t the only warning sign. The Vermont Yankee plant has been plagued with technical and safety problems, including hazardous material leaks, for years.
Scientists have also been raising new questions about the Indian Point nuclear facility near New York City. This from the Mid Hudson News.
According to an August 2008 paper in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, there are concerns.
“A study by a group of prominent seismologists suggests that a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed,” the US Geological Survey reported.
“Among other things, they say that the controversial Indian Point nuclear power plants, 24 miles north of the city, sit astride the previously unidentified intersection of two active seismic zones.”
So far, politicians are insisting that the game hasn’t changed. Here’s what New York Senator Chuck Schumer said on Sunday morning’s Meet the Press.
“We are going to have to see what happens here — obviously still things are happening — but the bottom line is we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil in the other half of the globe.
Libya showed that. Prices are up, our economy is being hurt by it, or could be hurt by it. So I’m still willing to look at nuclear. As I’ve always said it has to be done safely and carefully.”
Fair enough. But it’s time for proponents of nuclear power to engage in a more forthright way with critics of the industry.
The truth is that a lot of questions still need to be answered before more plants are built. And it appears that there are more thorny and challenging questions surfacing every day in Japan.
Tags: infrastructure, nuclear power, politics
Here’s a blog post with link to information about thorium reactors (http://www.fastcompany.com/1727914/will-green-nukes-save-the-world).
According to their promoters, these so-called “green nukes” can’t melt down, can’t be used for making weapons, make only low-grade short-lived waste, cost much less than regular nukes, run on widely available thorium, emit no CO2, and can burn up the dangerous radioactive wastes that we’re having trouble storing.
Too good to be true? Worth looking into, at least.
I heard a conservative on the radio (think it was the NCPR piece) comparing a nuclear meltdown to a dam failure. They all have risks, was the pathetic equivalency claimed (kind of like claiming that Afghan civilians have died at the hands of both the Taliban and US troops). The Hadlock Pond dam in Fort Ann failed a few years ago. There was a lot of property damage, but no one was killed and it gave no one cancer or other serious, chronic health problems.
pretty insensitive cartoon if you ask me
Seems like we are jumping to conclusions. Let’s see what happens with this thing in Japan. If this mess can get cleaned up without too much exposure to people than nuclear energy may be the way to go. This seems like the ultimate worse case scenario. If you can shake and flood and blow up and burn a reactor and still keep things in hand then maybe nuclear isn’t such a bad way to go.
If this is a huge nuclear disaster with far reaching consequences then maybe forget it. But for now just wait and see.
Actually Brian just hit on the major obstacle to the Solar Roadway idea. It is not that it would cost too much, not that it wouldn’t generate enough power and not that isn’t technologically achievable. The obstacle is that everyone would have to get on board to a single major alteration in how we generate and consume energy. As long as we insist on everyone, or at least every locality/region having the freedom to independently pursue their own policy, it probably can never happen. The obstacle is our own refusal to see that we are all in this together.
Some thoughts about phasing out nuclear power from over at “Our Finite World”
What makes the author’s writing so compelling is the fact she is a numbers person:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/14/what-would-happen-if-we-discontinued-nuclear-electricity/#more-1651
“The United States is a highly decentralized country with a strong hostility to regulation.”
Brian this may be true, but we have, through regulation one of the safest if not the safest commercial airline fleets in the world. Folks can tolerate regulation when it makes sense.
Could we do the same with nuclear power? I think maybe we could.
“The obstacle is that everyone would have to get on board to a single major alteration in how we generate and consume energy.”
Perhaps this is true James. I will admit that I prefer that we pursue many possible solutions rather than one. History tell us that if we focus too much effort on one way we will get burned.
If there were blogs way back when you could have inserted the “solar powered road” with “oil”. Back then we were convinced to “get on board with one single major alteration in how we generate and consume energy”., using oil.
How many people in the US have died as a result of nuclear power generation?
Suddenly solar breakthroughs like the one below seem all the more important:
“It’s the Holy Grail at clean energy research labs all over the world and something which could address long term energy issues domestically and beyond: more efficient photovoltaic solar. We’ve told you about scientists studying full-spectrum cells, using textured substrates, trying self-regenerating nanomaterials – we’ve even reported on an anti-reflective film inspired by a coating found in moth eyes. Now a Stanford team is claiming a breakthrough in making cheaper, more efficient panels by adding a single layer of organic molecules to solar cells.
The researchers studied this technique on a fairly new type of solar cell that uses tiny particles of semiconductors called quantum dots. Quantum dot solar cells are cheaper to produce than traditional silicon cells, but they haven’t caught on due to their relative inefficiency.
For Stacey Bent, a chemical engineering professor at Stanford, this represented something of a challenge. She knew that solar cells made of a single material have a maximum efficiency of about 31 percent, a limitation of the fixed energy level they can absorb, and that quantum dot solar cells didn’t share this limitation. “Quantum dots can be tuned to absorb a certain wavelength of light just by changing their size,” the Stanford report on her research says. “And they can be used to build more complex solar cells that have more than one size of quantum dot, allowing them to absorb multiple wavelengths of light.”
So Bent and her team coated a titanium dioxide semiconductor in their quantum dot solar cell with a very thin single layer of organic molecules. They found that just that single layer, less than a nanometer thick, was enough to triple the efficiency of the solar cells.
Even with this breakthrough, there’s still work to do: Bent said the cadmium sulfide quantum dots she’s been using aren’t ideal for solar cells, so her group plans to try other molecules for the organic layer, while also tinkering with the solar cell increase light absorption.
Her theory is, said Stanford, that once the sun’s energy creates an electron and a hole, the thin organic layer helps keep them apart, preventing them from recombining and being wasted. The group has yet to optimize the solar cells, and they have currently achieved an efficiency of, at most, 0.4 percent. But the group can tune several aspects of the cell, and once they do it is said, the threefold increase caused by the organic layer would be even more significant.”
But why would we jump on something that is unsafe and expensive when we don’t have too? There is no reason to continue to pursue and subsidize nuclear energy. If the Japanese can’t do it safely how in the world would we think that we could? We do many things well, but Brian made a very good point, top down efficient consistent government control is not one of those things we do well. How can anyone think we could have a large expansion of nuclear energy done safely only 6 months after the BP oil spill?
this is a worthwhile read on our refusal to abandon old types of nukes:
http://www.americablog.com/2011/03/why-does-us-and-japan-refuse-to-use.html
“But why would we jump on something that is unsafe and expensive when we don’t have too?”
Mervel, I agree what clean source of energy can be scaled up to get the job done?
Natural gas to start with and we could do that right now. Clean? Better than coal and oil, but far far better than nuclear. It is plentiful and has the immediate ability to operate motor vehicles and fuel power plants.
Its not perfect but it is far better than the monster than nuclear power is. Nothing good has ever come from splitting the atom, nothing.
Besides that the job is done now, we don’t need to scale up anything. It is a false crisis.
Mervel, think about natural gas and what you just wrote. Plentiful? We have a moratorium on gas exploration off our coasts, we have people trying to stop drilling on land and hydro fracking, we have people fighting gas lines, etc. It’s the same problem we have with everything else be it hydro, wind, solar, oil, coal, nuclear. For every answer there is a group of people or a group of groups fighting it. It’s ridiculous.
I think the problem isn’t our technology or options, it’s people and their self centered NIMBY attitudes. Instead of wild dreams we should be looking at every alternative and clearing the way for private investment in anything shown to be workable.
While it’s still dangerous technology, Thorium fueled reactors should be investigated and pursued. Also, there are very exciting breakthroughs in solar technology that hold the promise of making solar technology, including solar highways, must more affordable and efficient.
And regarding the precious metals issue (and China’s control of them), these breakthroughs could eliminate this problem entirely. And as a previous poster mentioned, we have vastly more space already covered by roofs, roadways, etc than we would need that can simply be retrofitted with new multi-spectrum solar technology. Here’s a link to the latest breakthrough at the University of Stanford:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/10/solar-power-breakthrough_n_833483.html?igoogle=1
I’m not saying solar will be the end all, but it’s becoming more and more a possibility. Think for a moment of the money spent to subsidize much of our energy portfolio, including nuclear. If some of that money were redirected to say a feed in tariff system whereupon a residential or commercial energy user opted to purchase the newer, less expensive, more efficient solar technology, perhaps a windmill, a solar driveway, and a Bloom Box fuel cell, coupled with their natural gas line, is it possible they could now become a energy producer feeding the grid as well as their home? Now think of that scenario multiplied by thousands of homes, businesses, etc. Of course this wouldn’t happen overnight. But could we achieve it if we made it a 5 year plan? A 10 year plan? The potential is there, we just need to push the special interests who want no part of it aside and demand our politicians redirect the subsidies.
Mervel, Natural gas should be a large part of the solution. Living in the Finger Lakes I see firsthand the road blocks that Bret describes.
Also, splitting atoms is required to get solar energy here on earth. Without that we would not be here having this discussion. The sun is a giant nuclear reactor that kicks out the energy equivalent to one trillion megaton bombs every second.
Many good things have come from splitting atoms.
I really should correct my post above the sun’s energy come from nuclear fusion not fission so maybe Mervel is right?
“Many good things have come from splitting atoms.”
Yes, as long as you keep them contained and/or at safe remove.
I have had too much thyroid cancer among my family who have lived around nuclear facilities in the West to ever trust the technology or the industry; who always lied about it and still does lie about it, so I am biased and it is personal. So I am probably not thinking rationally about it.
phahn, if we keep subsidizing nuclear, that’s money that’s not going into solar. And with nuclear energy, a huge chunk of the subsidy is hidden, in that we really have no idea how to manage the nuclear waste over the thousands of years it’s going to be a problem.
I am an engineer at one of NY’s nuclear plants. Some of the items that people are posting on here are not quite accurate. First, there was a lot of talk in the beginning regarding what if there was an earthquake in NY. The current issue at Fukushima I‐1 power station is a result of the loss of offsite power and the backup auxiliary generators, due to the tsunami, not the earthquake. All of Japans 54 reactors, including the one at Fukushima I‐1 withstood the earthquake, and shut down automatically as per design. I will say that again, ALL of them withstood one of the worst earthquakes in the history of man. As someone noted, these are plants that were built long ago, and would not meet today’s standards, and they still withstood the quake. Just to touch on a few points to not drone on… Current US plants have emergency DC systems that could have keep the plant in a safe condition for days, not the 8 hours that caused the issue in japan. No, the US in not using less energy. Whoever said the a Nuclear plant is not viable economically is incorrect. All spent fuel is stored at the plant, at the owners cost, not sure where people were going with that. The fuel rods are safely stored and monitored. When people say “we don’t know how to safely store this fuel” that is incorrect. We do know how to safely store it, monitor it, and move it if necessary.
Oh and just to add to the Natural Gas debate. Before switching to Nuclear, I worked in the oil fields in Alaska. The oil in Alaska is not pumped out of the ground, the oil wells are pressurized by natural gas. I forget the exact figure, but there is something like 7 times the amount of NG under the North Slope of Alaska right now than has EVER been extracted in the history of man. Just a little known fact Norm.