No to Nuclear Power 101: ‘clean and safe’
(This series of blog posts examines the false and dangerous claims of the nuclear industry. The introduction to the series can be found here)
If nuclear power is as clean and safe as the industry and its supporters claim, why is it so dirty and dangerous?
Start with the highly dangerous waste nuclear power stations produce. Before we start producing more with a new fleet of reactors, we simply do not have the capability to store the highly dangerous nuclear waste we have produce in the last 50 years safely or for the length of time – millions of years in the case of some waste – needed until it is safe. Waste produced by the new generation of power stations is going to be even more radioactive and dangerous.
The morality of nuclear waste is also highly questionable. Our producing and storing of nuclear waste in the past and present asks a binding commitment from a group of people we cannot consult or ask permission: namely, future generations. If Neanderthal man had built nuclear reactors, we would still be guarding the waste.
The operation of nuclear power stations is also inherently highly dangerous. The local residents living close to the Triscastin power plant in France were last summer told not to swim or fish in the nearby rivers, or feed their animals and irrigate their crops with river water, after 18,000 litres of a uranium solution were leaked. The French authorities are currently conducting tests of groundwater at the country’s 58 reactors to monitor contamination.
Ask why the British nuclear industry has to employ sharpshooters to cull the seagulls that swim in the water of outdoor nuclear waste storage pools. Or why ships transporting nuclear fuel require armed guards and naval guns. Find out who Hisashi Ouchi was and how he died. The list of questions about the dangers of nuclear power is almost as long as the list of leaks and accidents.
With the Chernobyl disaster fading in some people’s memories, many now question or even deny whether such an accident could ever happen again. Yet Europe found itself within minutes of a similar disaster as recently as 2006 when safety systems failed at Sweden’s Forsmark power station. The Boiling Water Reactors at Forsmark are of a design used around the world.
It’s an irrefutable fact that renewable energy sources are incapable of creating the dangers to human health and the environment that nuclear power does – dangers that extend into the future far further than human experience or expertise has ever known. Nuclear power is neither clean nor safe and presents not just a threat to us in the present but also to the very planet and the lives of future generation.
Comments
I am very sorry, but your argumentation is based on bare emotions and cases which you are not really familiar with. Chernobyl is an extreme and extraordinary case, and the information about it was hidden due to the political system of the country in which this has happened. Reactors of that type are no longer built, and the country that used to run it no longer exists. There are cases when information about accidents is hidden - but I am not sure that info about accidents with chemical plants is brought into public. Finally, burning oil and coal that cause the global warming is already killing the entire planet. Nuclear is the best up to day solution to this.
I'd rather suggest you go through a specfic course on nuclear energy cycle, and then we can talk. Otherwise it's nonsense.
Posted by: Alexandra Prokopenko | March 2, 2009 11:32 PM
I like the The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). The LFTR is a very simple, efficient, and elegant type of reactor. It can use any kind of nuclear fuel, bomb material, or nuclear waste product to produce very high temperature heat and at the same time breed more fuel in the bargain. This thrifty approach to nuclear energy greatly appeals to me, but I became even more interested in the LFTR when the details of a new patent were revealed by Dr LeBlanc (see below @ minute 53). It opens up the possibility of building a reactor that can run for 30 years without refueling in an unattended mode sited underground while it breeds new fuel within the thorium structure of the reactor itself. In order to get to this U233 that has been produced inside the very walls of 200 ton reactor containment vessel, a proliferator must destroy the reactor, chop it up into small pieces while enduring heavy gamma radiation exposure without being detected, then reprocess these reactor pieces using isotopic separation since the U233 is denatured with enough U238 to make chemical separation of bomb grade U233 impossible. Now, this is a tall order for any proliferator and may just be an impossible assignment.
At the end of the service life of the Lftr, the reactor vessel is sent back to the factory where it is reduced to liquid fluoride salts that become the feedstock of a next new Lftr. This feedstock can only be used by the new Lftr and not for bombs. The waste products are held at the factory for a few hundred years to cool down before they are mined for the many precious elements contained within like platinum and iridium. Now that’s what I call a safe, efficient and thrifty mode of operation!
For more information see the following:
What Fusion Wanted To Be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
Liquid Fluoride Reactors: A New Beginning for an Old Idea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So
Posted by: Axil | March 8, 2009 8:46 AM