So on to more hypocrisies:
They happily promote biomass-burning powerplants (at least here in Finland) to replace nuclear power, when there are still lots of coal/peat-powered plants pumping fossil CO2 to the atmosphere.

They also forget to mention that biomass has other uses (like biodiesel to replace oil or timber for building-materials), is harvested and transported (and therefore subsidied) with oil and that growing biomass will reduce biodiversity due to landuse. Of course they also demand that there should be more natural forests that are not use for industrial sector. (which I support, to an extent)

And they rarely remember to mention that according to a recent study, small particles kill around 2000 people in Finland every year (even though there is lots of other sources for these, like diesel-powered cars and forest fires). What would be the outcry if Nuclear killed even 1 person a month?

Given that Finland is not totally deforested and has only 5+ million inhabitants, biomass is actually of some use here and has a sizable portion of the energy-production.

Rauli @ http://kaikenhuippu.wordpress.com (blog in finnish)

if you read the entries in this blog, you will find people up on thorium, and you will find much material to calm your fears about the 100,000 years (and other writers who will try and scare you shitless).

the radiation we have to worry about is the radiation with a shorter half life, and radiation that has a significant “body burden.” (you can have the former without the latter but the latter normally implies the former).

CANDU reactors in canada emit seemingly huge quantities of curies legally and safely (I think CANDU reactor Bruce B is allowed 60 million curies of tritium annually though it emits a fraction of this amount). Other substances that emit this amount would be lethal if you happened to be in the same room with it–cobalt 60 for example, since it emits hi energy gamma rays, not tritium’s low energy beta rays.

Tritium thus carries a low body burden, as do radioactive inert (they’re inert, thus don’t react with your body) gases sometimes vented by power plants. Iodine 131, on the other hand, is readily absorbed by the body and has a short half life.

Fears over radiation are often completely irrational, or at least based on lack of information. the consequences are huge, like shutting down perfectly clean energy sources for no reason (see rod adams blog on vermont yankee).

I am an english/philosophy professor who knew little about nuclear power before I started perching here. stick around and you will learn a lot.

Graham, if I’ve said anything in error about radiation, please correct me.

gm

As an ex soft-core anti, I sugget that the main objections revolve around the disposal of waste–it will take 100,000 years or so to decay–and the hazards of the plant malfunctioning–witness Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. For all the inefficiencies and difficulties of renewables and oil, their risks are on a much smaller scale.

But thorium solves it! It should appeal to both sides of the debate. Google it; you’ll find lots of cool websites. It’s made a convert of me.

Please check Why Patrick Moore, founding chair of Greenpeace quit that organisation.

There’s no such possition asd “founding chair” in Greenpeace and Patrick Moore was not a founder member, though scandalously, he allows others to claim this on his behalf without contradicting them. He didn’t quit as much as he was asked to leave when he became involved in endorsing development for personal profit, tainting Greenpeace.

He was and is very close to fishing, forest and other anti-environmental interests so Greenpeace is well rid of him.

Ewen, in the light of what has been coming out around the world, are you still absolutely certain about AGW.

Absolutely. The most reliable data recently to emerge simply affirms what previous analysis has revealed, though here and there, it seemsd that some IPCC estimate may have been optimistic.

Apparently Jones reckons the science is not in.

That’s one of the sillier claims by the proponents of b-a-u, as you would surely know if you’d troubled to pay attention.

Why use all those technical jargons and claims, that AGW sceptics all work for the big oil-/auto- and power-companies etc. , but use simple, common-sense. I am now 76 years of age and I have heard many, many doomsday predictions in my life and sofar nothing has happened! The pseudo-scientists from the Left have since the late 1940′s predicted, that those “horrible bombs” on Hiroshima and Nagaski would render those cities uninhabitable for many thousands of years and there were huge demonstrations everywhere in the West until the 1970″s. Alas for those activists, only 26 years after the bombs were dropped, the American occupying forces with the help of Japanese labour, managed to clean up, rebuild and repopulate those 2 cities, with the result, that they have now more, than double to original populations, are healthy, prosperous and visited by tens of millions of tourists from all over the world! No demonstrations anymore, but the silence from those doomsayers was and is, deafening! As survivors from the brutal Japanese occupation in the former Dutch East Indies, all our families, together with billions of people around the globe, were all too happy, that because of those 2 bombs, the Japanese had to surrender and millions of lives were saved, because of the shortened duration of that terrible war. Doomsayers also managed to stop the use of DDT, with which I myself and all my family and millions of people in the 1940′s/early 1950′s were treated to eradicate our head-lice and get rid of many insects and I am still alive and kicking, while the abolishment of DDT has sofar caused the death of 100 million of innocent people in the 3rd world countries and each year 3 million more are killed by malaria and thypoid (mostly little babies and children). I even see a parallel between environmental doomsay and the communist ideology, when Marx and Lenin warned the working-class of the world, that only by following their manifesto, could they exist. The result: more, than 100 million lives were lost and are still being lost at the present. It is a worrying phenomenon, that so many millions of people are so easily conned into fanatically following demagogues with very slick tongues (especially when they were trained as lawyers). We are not sheep and should learn how to use common sense. Also worrying is, that doomsayers do not like open debate on national or international t.v. and insist, that their word is the bible and that there is consensus among all scientists! And they have a knack to call everybody, who does not follow them, working for those big, polluting companies, even while all my dozens of friends and relatives and I, have never worked for any of those!
And is it not true, that the new fangled “alternative power-industry”, is now worth some one trillion dollars and growing?
And do not those ugly, metal wind-turbine monsters, pollute the air, when being manufactured at great cost in electricity and infra-structure, that needs the building of access-roads (ruining the habitat of ground-dwelling birds and other animals), maintenance etc. etc. Plus the horrible killings of tens of thousands of migrating birds (many are endangered species)!
Doomsayers: please grow up!

If you want to argue otherwise, you need to bring some supporting evidence to the table.

Eli has always said that nuclear will have to play an important role, but, as a nuclear engineer told him a few years ago, “Yeah, pebble bed reactors are great, but no one knows how to make the pebbles.” which is Jim Green’s point. OTOH, we do know how to make pretty good standard vanilla systems (see France and Japan for examples and look at the improvement on the up time for the US ones).

Off-peak power (surplus to baseload, since we are already using that!) might well make sense for desalination, especially in conjunction with some solar heating for the day phase.

If EVs do become common, “smart” overnight charging will be a great way to level electrical demand, with suitable pricing. I could even imagine batteries using strategic algorithms to charge as cheaply as possible for a given full-charrge deadline… :-) probably just a techie’s dream.

More interestingly on batteries, clearly any easily-deployable energy storage system that could smooth and spread the unpredictable inputs of wind and solar will even more directly benefit nuclear power, using predictable off-peak nuclear power to respond to daytime peaks.

So why not invest a little extra effort in making our castles out of granite and mortar, rather than sand and seawater?

We have discussed at length why wind and solar are not going to meet a fraction of our energy needs and that without contributing any reliable capacity, they will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most practical and reliable form of zero carbon energy, less profitable.

Existing plants will be caught in a trap and new construction will be discouraged entirely. Already the British Nuclear Group is complaining that it can’t build any new reactors if they have to compete against subsidized wind farms. Anti-nuclear activists are turning handsprings, claiming joyously that wind is finally replacing nuclear. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, nothing will be replacing existing capacity–namely, the coal burning plants that are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions–as demand increases in years ahead. That means carbon emissions won’t be meaningfully reduced, since coal plants will have to stay on line to provide backup.

It would be best if you showed us the consideration of reading what has been discussed, on this very thread, before extending your views on the subject.

The circular firing squad is every popular.

I have this feeling that having failed to start 1/7/09 the teething problems will be too vexatious for a 1/7/10 start. That’s partly because nobody understands the FUBAR legislation.

Re wind power offsetting desals I wouldn’t worry about LCA just yet over say a 20 year time period. When Kurnell officially opens later this year I think we should just analyse its energy use from that date. Sydney Water are adamant in their PR that the Bungendore wind farm completely offsets their energy use. In that case they won’t mind careful scrutiny or benchmarking against other desals in case a few porkies slip through.

I remember a time when we trusted government announcements. Now we have to check everything.

It is not clear at all whether the LCA / embodied energy payback time is included in the REC allocation. I would be grateful if someone could give me a heads up on that. If this time is not allocated, then it means that REC’s are generated as soon as a windfarm or whatever (e.g. solar panels) goes online. Which would mean that any emissions reductions are over estimated.