Patrick Moore On Nuclear Power
One of the original founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore has a piece in the Washington Post today in favor of nuclear power. It's rather well written an makes many good points about the myths and misconceptions about nuclear power that have become ingrained in the average person.
What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do — prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.
I've known for years that TMI was actually an overwhelming success story about the safety designs incorporated in American light water reactors. Despite the operators of the plant literally doing almost everything wrong, there was no major release of radiation. This was also a deeply flawed B&W design (the elevation of pressurizer was lower than that of the reactor vessel - since redesigned) and the containment still held.
Moore also explains something I've posted on before, the unreliability of wind power.
Here's why: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple.
Moore addresses Chernobyl and puts some perspective on it:
· Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.)
The Soviet RBMK reactor was an appallingly bad design, period. Part of the problem is that it always was, at heart, a weapons reactor, used to produce plutonium.
And on recycling fuel:
· Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.
We should be recycling fuel, it reduces the amount of waste to be disposed of enormously. With techniques to glassify the remaining waste, storage becomes much simpler and less worrisome.
UPDATE: Here's an AP report on the multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum report Moore mentions.
By James Aach, Sunday, 16 April , 2006 @ 4:06 pm
FYI: Stewart Brand, the founder of “The Whole Earth Catalog” mentioned in Mr. Moore’s article, has also endorsed my thriller novel of nuclear power as a way for the lay person to learn the good and the bad of this energy source.
“Rad Decision” is available online at no cost to readers at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com - - and they seem to like it, judging from the reviews they’re leaving at the homepage. There’s nothing else like it out there.
Regards,
James Aach
20+ years in the nuclear industry.
“I’d like to see Rad Decision widely read.” - Stewart Brand.
“Very nice, good pace. The tech was good but not overwhelming.” - a reader.
“I started reading Rad Decision because of my interest in nuclear power — then found I could not put it down! — another reader.