OT Electricity Generation

Indeed. Dynamo Hansen is a man whose job depends on windpower.

On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:07:09 +0100 someone who may be Tim Streater wrote this:-

The comment which started this sub-thread was not made by me, but I agree with it. It was:

"How can you (or anybody) possibly make this claim when we STILL don't know how much it will cost to get rid of the waste material we have already stored, let alone that which we have yet to generate."

We have some idea what to do with it, at least in the shorter term. That doesn't mean it is ideal, there are formidable problems including how to pass information across thousands of years. We were foolish enough to create the stuff and it cannot be wished away, but that is not an argument for producing more of the stuff.

The nuclear lobby want to do something else though, which is to put it out of sight and out of mind.

We still have no idea how much it will cost to deal with this legacy, but we know the estimated cost goes up regularly. At one time some decommissioning was to be paid for by a levy on everyone's bills, but that was diverted to pay for Sizewell B. Then the vast profits made by Windscale were going to pay for decommissioning (yes, they seem to have been serious about that, it wasn't a bad joke) together with profits from the remaining Magnox stations. In another place I found an excellent report for FoE on that idea .

As Mr Huhne is reported as saying

"The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority oversees the process and runs a handful of operational plants which provide some of the money it needs to pay for the clean-up. However, the burden falls increasingly to the taxpayer as the operational power stations are closed down and become subject to the costly decommissioning process.

"The Secretary of State added in an interview with The Guardian: "The costs are such that my department is not so much the Department of Energy and Climate Change, as the department of Nuclear legacy and Bits of Other Things.""

The fact that, 66 odd years after it started being produced in quantity, we have yet to come up with something which is other than a least worst option tells me that it is a problem.

Don't give up your day job and take up mind reading.

If they had listened to me we would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions decades ago.

Excuse me, we didn't create it. We dug it out of the radioactive earth, and reduced the Earth's net radioactivity by making it get a a lot less radioactive a lot quicker in a reactor.

Lord knows what you think radioactivity is.

It's natural, its part of the way the world works, and always has been.

Why on earth you think that putting it back in the earth after we have finished with it, is a bad idea, lord only knows.

However, for high level waste, its certainly better to store it because we can use it again by recycling it. But that applies only to short half life materials. That are sufficiently active to make power from.

Long half life stuff is so faint an emitter, that there is no point in doing anything at all with it...stuff it down an hole and forget it. You MIGHT get cancer if you ate it. For years. But really, its a lot less dangerous than say asbestos (another naturally occurring material that strikes fear into the heart of PC man).

If people 10,000 years from now haven't got radiation counters to know where low level waste is buried, because green energy has destroyed civilization, I don't actually care.

The only 'problem' of nuclear waste disposal is in the minds of people like you.

In reality, it splits into three simple categories.

2/. High level waste from e.g. fuel rods. This is nasty. This will kill. Its also relatively small in quantity, and contains enough re-usable fuel to be very much worth reprocessing, more so if uranium ore ever gets more expensive. It does need to be stored until its processed and re-used. The most appropriate place is in an active nuclear power station itself, where all the safety checks are in place, and the monitoring. However its not THAT lethal. While you wouldn't want to eat it, or have it in the same room for a lifetime, stick in a concrete box, its no big deal.What is in your smoke alarm is just as radioactive.

Ther is no shortage of ways to deal with radioactive mater8sl. The wgole issue is a catch 22 situation engineered by te anti-buclear lobby.

"Tell me how much nuclear decommissioning will cost" "Right, once you have decided what an acceptable standard is, we will tell you" "We cant tell you that, because we haven't a clue: We are bearded Greenies, and we are clueless" "Right, then we cant tell you what it will cost" "TOLD YOU SO, OPEN ENDED COSTS FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS NAH NASH-NEE NAH"

And so it goes on.

Meanwhile Dynamo Dave and his cohorts are leaching cash out of the public for useless technologies that simply don't work, but like anyone else sucking on the public tit, they don't give a f*ck about the nation, or the world.

Just about their continued salaries.

Basically a traitor to the nation.

Hangings too good really.

On 21/10/2010 11:32, David Hansen wrote: ...

If the waste from conventional reactors is processed in a fast reactor, not only is the volume of waste signifcantly reduced, but the storage period drops to under 500 years.

Don't confuse (his) prejudice with facts...

There are so many ways of dealing with it, that have not been worth exploiting due to political uncertainty about nuclear power and dirt cheap uranium.

On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:56:11 +0100 someone who may be "Nightjar wrote this:-

These were promised for decades. They were not used because they are even more outrageously expensive than the nuclear plant we already have.

I would also need to study a lot more about the "electrorefiner" to judge the claims. The main difficulty with the current system is what to do with the nitric acid and what remains dissolved in it, something which if it is mentioned in descriptions is glossed over. I see what appears to be some similar glossing over in bits of the article.

I thought that another reason for them not being used is the problem of the plutonium that they produce and re-use as fuel. There were feelings that, because of its use in weapons, the less of it there is in the civilian area the better. Wasn't Dounreay a fast breeder?

Peter Scott

On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:29:24 +0100 someone who may be Peter Scott wrote this:-

The nuclear lobby have an answer to that, put it into MOX. There is a plant at Windscale, a huge white elephant .

Read all about it in the report for FoE .

The decision to build the thing was debatable. Having built the thing it should never have been used [1]. Tony B Liar slipped out the announcement just after the Labour party conference had ended to prevent questions being asked about it . The courts failed to do their job and halt it despite the excellent case put to them

Supposedly things will get better , but we have heard that one many times before from the nuclear lobby.

One part of it was. The main part at one time.

But not as outrageously expensive as useless windmills.

Which is all still 1/3rd the price of windpower..

No relation to the wind power lobby glossing over almost every aspect of windpower, one assumes.

Before criticising things, it usually pays to understand the technology.

Oh, I forgot. You can't.

Pretty sure one of the reactors was, yes. bomb making plant, never designed for decommissioning at all. Or power generation, but they had to do something with all the waste heat.. ;-)

Sadly there has been little or no R & D in reactor technology in the last 30+ years as it all became a political hot potato, and with cheap abundant north sea oil, no incentive economically. A tragic waste of opportunity.

More research in India than the UK...

Correct. Nor as dangerous.

Pity though. The theory seemed very promising - being able to reuse waste. I am impressed by your collection of sources, but there seems to be a lack of detail (not by you) of costs and reasons and no further references to the studies done. Could this be because of sensitivity and 'national security'? If it turned out that the reprocessing was not actually that difficult it could significantly increase the number of countries able to produce their own plutonium for weapons, including oil-rich nutters. I am not being paranoid at all. This could be a case of justified caution. I do remember that security was at the forefront some years back.

Peter Scott

Fast breeder reactors are inherently a tad more dangerous than ordinary ones, and more expensive, BUT they are a simple way to make weapons grade material. Which is why they are frowned upon. However there are other ways to achieve the same result (more reactor fuel and 'burning' otherwise not very useful radioactive materials into useful ones) by different methods.

We really haven't even begun to explore the possibilities.

Iran is probably ahead of Europe, by now.

Weapons grade plutonium has to be a fairly pure grade of one particular isotope and early fast breeder reactors were optimised to produce that. Modern ones produce a mix of isotopes that are not particularly useful for making weapons.

Colin Bignell

And on that note.....!

I didn't know that. Let's hope that the costs and risks are re-assessed. As uranium becomes scarcer, we will need to use it as efficiently as possible. That was one of the selling points of breeders I seem to remember

Peter Scott

Far more balanced than the UKWEA for example...

Interesting and re-assuring. Maybe New Scientist got it wrong when it talked about the impending shortages of various metals, mostly the rare earth ones, but I though U was in there too. It was a while back so maybe my memory is at fault, or perhaps they were projecting for potential increaed usage?

Peter Scott