Fukushima Daiichi Open and Update Thread #6

Posted on 18 May 2011 by Barry Brook

Time for a new Open Thread on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. Please use this post to put any new comments about the situation (including technical information, situation updates, analysis, questions, reflections, etc.). Note that the Open Threads on BraveNewClimate.com are a general discussion forum; please follow the commenting rules, although the ‘stay on topic’ rule obviously does not apply as strictly here.

Analyses suggest most of the fuel in unit 1 is now the bottom of the reactor vessel (Image: Tepco)

For context, below is a brief list of recent events since the previous FD post. (For day-by-day detailed updates, I suggest you follow the ANS Nuclear Cafe news and updates (includes links to official reports like JAIF and TEPCO and news feeds from NHK, NY Times, etc.), see also NEI updates, and other links provided in previous posts.)

1) Fuel melt: Recent analysis suggests that the fuel assemblies in unit 1 were almost completely melted in the days following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The ‘corium’ (melted actinide fuel, contained fission products, clad etc.) then dropped to the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV). It is now suspected that during the initial accident, the fuel rods of Reactor No. 1 could have been fully exposed for up to 17 hours, and the earthquake may have caused some structural damage that led to pipe leakage and other problems, in addition to the severe troubles caused by the extended station blackout following the tsunami (which remains the principal cause of the problems).

The temperature of the RPV is now in the range of 100℃ – 120℃, and so the core (or what remains of it) and RPV are stably cooled. That is, this new information is part of a post mortem analysis of events and timeline of the accident, rather than a trigger for a new urgent crisis.

Despite this, this announcement inevitably led to a whole new wave of speculation (and hype), including rumours alleging “1) “melt down in unit 1 has burned a hole through the bottom of the containment vessel” and 2) “that there was a detonation of the fuel rods & pieces of fuel rods were found two miles from the reactors”.

What is the reality? A close nuclear engineer friend of mine says the following:

There is no evidence that the molten fuel has melted through the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel. The latest TEPCO analyses suggest the molten fuel is submerged in water at the bottom of the pressure vessel. Some TEPCO reports mention about “holes” in the containment vessel. What they mean by “holes” is that the seals on pipe penetrations, etc. may not be leak-tight, and hence steam and/or water leaks out of the vessel.

The second claim is absolutely not true. The site is highly contaminated. The radiation mapping of the site, which has taken more than a dozen surveys (because you can do just a few at a time) indicates the contamination is concentrated in the rubble. The steam vented to the reactor building would have carried along volatilized I and Cs, some of which were condensed onto the walls and surfaces, which then blew up in hydrogen explosion.

Read more »

Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear | 289 Comments »

Solar power in Florida

Posted on 15 May 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Peter Morcombe. Peter has over 24 years experience in high tech telecommunications and computers, specialising in fiber optics. Before retirement he worked for 12 years at the Duke University Free Electron Laser Laboratory. His professional qualifications include IEE, IEEE and LEOS. He is known to BNC readers by his commenting moniker ‘gallopingcamel’.

Florida Power & Light is a special kind of power company. It is one of over 50 utility companies in Florida that sell electricity to the general public. Florida has an electricity market comparable with Australia or 60% of the UK. FP&L supplies about 40% of the total power consumed in the state; as one of its customers I appreciate the fact that it is the only company that currently charges less than $0.10 per kWh.

According to the Institute of Energy Research most of Florida’s electric power comes from natural gas (54%), coal (25%), nuclear (13%) and petroleum (4%). Florida has no hydro, as its highest point is only 345 feet above sea level and minuscule wind power capacity because the state lacks good sites for wind turbines.

FP&L is the dominant electric utility in Florida:

President Obama at the opening of Florida’s 25 MW peak, $150 million DeSoto PV plant

One of the things that makes FP&L special is its broad range of generating technologies. It has four nuclear power plants each with a nameplate capacity of around 850 MW. It has conventional steam turbine plants and combined cycle plants. Recently, the company has been building power plants based on renewable energy sources such as photo-voltaic and solar thermal power. Academics write about such projects but FP&L builds and operates them. I decided to take a look at one of these technologies with the idea of assessing its potential for replacing conventional power-generating plants.

My first problem was gaining access. I tried the “front door” by writing to FP&L’s “Public Relations” department, asking for permission to visit all of their power plants including the nuclear ones given my background in physics and radiation safety. This approach was rebuffed unceremoniously so I tried various “back door” routes and eventually gained access to the Martin plant in April 2011. The visit made a profound impression which has increased my enthusiasm to visit other generating plants.

Read more »

Filed under: Renewables | 149 Comments »

Renewables and efficiency cannot fix the energy and climate crises (part 2)

Posted on 12 May 2011 by Barry Brook

This post continues directly on from Part 1 (please read that if you’ve not already done so!). I also note the flurry of interest in the new IPCC WGIII special report on renewable energy prospects through to 2050. I will have more to say on this in an upcoming BNC post, but in short, it fails to address — with any substance — any of the significant problems I describe below, or in the previous post. What a disappointment!

————————

Renewables and efficiency cannot fix the energy and climate crises (part 2)

Renewable energy cannot provide reliable 24-hour, 7-day-a-week power to meet baseload demand

The minimum amount of power that a city or country demands usually occurs at night (when most people are asleep); this is called the electricity ‘baseload’. Some have claimed that it is a fallacy to argue that all of this demand is needed, because utilities tend to charge cheap (‘off peak’) rates during these low-use periods, to encourage more uptake (by everything from factory machinery to hot water systems). This is because some types of power stations (e.g., coal and nuclear) are quite expensive to build and finance (with long terms to pay off the interest), but fairly cheap to run, so the utility wants to keep them humming away 24 hours a day to maximise returns. Thus, there is some truth to this argument, although if that energy is not used at night, extra must instead be supplied in the day.

Some critical demand, however, never goes away – the power required to run hospitals, police stations, street lights, water and sewerage pumping stations, refrigerators and cold storage, transport (if we are to use electric vehicles), and so on. If the power is lost to these services, even for a short while, chaos ensues, and the societal backlash after a few such events is huge. On the other side of the energy coin, there are times when huge power demands arise, such as when everyone gets home from work to cook their meals and watch television, or when we collectively turn on our air conditioners during a heatwave. If the energy to meet this peak demand cannot be found, the result can be anything from a lot of grumpy people through to collapse of the grid as rolling blackouts occur.

Read more »

Filed under: Future, Nuclear, Renewables | 183 Comments »

Renewables and efficiency cannot fix the energy and climate crises (part 1)

Posted on 9 May 2011 by Barry Brook

We must deal simultaneously with the energy-resource and climate-change pincers

The modern world is caught in an energy-resource and climate-change pincer. As the growing mega-economies of China and India strive to build the prosperity and quality of life enjoyed by citizens of the developed world, the global demand for cheap, convenient energy grows rapidly. If this demand is met by fossil fuels, we are headed for an energy supply and climate disaster. The alternatives, short of a total and brutal deconstruction of the modern world, are nuclear power and renewable energy.

Whilst I support both, I now put most of my efforts into advocating nuclear power, because: (i) few other environmentalists are doing this, whereas there are plenty of renewable enthusiasts (unfortunately, the majority of climate activists seem to be actively anti-nuclear), and (ii) my research work on the energy replacement problem suggests to me that nuclear power will constitute at least 75 % of the solution for displacing coal, oil and gas.

Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to mortal man

In the BraveNewClimate blog, I argue that it’s time to become “Promethean environmentalists”. (Prometheus, in Greek mythology, was the defiantly original and wily Titan who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals, thus improving their lives forever.) Another term, recently used by futurist Stewart Brand, is “Ecopragmatists”. Prometheans are realists who shun romantic notions that modern governments might guide society back to an era when people lived simpler lives, or that a vastly less consumption-oriented world is a possibility. They seek real, high-capacity solutions to environmental challenges – such as nuclear power – which history has shown to be reliable.

But I reiterate — this strong support for nuclear does NOT make me ‘anti-renewables’ (or worse, a ‘renewable energy denier‘, a thoroughly unpleasant and wholly inaccurate aspersion). Indeed, under the right circumstances, I think renewables might be able to make an important contribution (e.g., see here). Instead, my reticence to throw my weight confidently behind an ’100% renewable energy solution’ is based on my judgement that such an effort would prove grossly insufficient, as well as being plain risky. And given that the stakes we are talking about are so high (the future of human society, the fates of billions of people, and the integrity of the biosphere), failure is simply not an option.

Below I explain, in very general terms, the underlying basis of my reasoning. This is not a technical post. For those details, please consult the Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy (TCASE) series — which is up to 12 parts, and will be restarted shortly, with many more examples and calculations.

————————

Renewables and efficiency cannot fix the energy and climate crises (part 1)

Boulton and Watt’s patented steam engine

The development of an 18th century technology that could turn the energy of coal into mechanical work – James Watt’s steam engine – heralded the dawn of the Industrial Age. Our use of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – has subsequently allowed our modern civilisation to flourish. It is now increasingly apparent, however, that our almost total reliance on these forms of ancient stored sunlight to meet our energy needs, has some severe drawbacks, and cannot continue much longer.

Read more »

Filed under: Future, Nuclear, Renewables | 189 Comments »

Decarbonise SA – regional action for greenhouse gas mitigation

Posted on 5 May 2011 by Barry Brook

Global warming can only be tackled seriously by a massive reduction in anthropogenic greenhouse gas production. It’s that simple. But just hoping for this to gradually happen — locally, regionally or globally — by tinkering at the edge of the problem (carbon prices, alternative energy subsidies, mandated targets and loan guarantees, “100 ways to be more green” lists, etc.), is just not going to get us anywhere near where we need to be, when we need to be. For that, we need to develop and implement a well-thought-out, practical and cost-effective action plan!

Back in early 2009, I offered a A sketch plan for a zero-carbon Australia. Overall, I still think this advocates the right sort of path. I elaborated further on this idea in my two pieces: Climate debate missing the point and Energy in Australia in 2030; in the latter, I explored a number of potential storylines, along with an estimate of the probability and result of following these different pathways. But the lingering question that arises from thought experiments like this is… how do you turn it into something practical?

Sadly, I can’t think of any liberal-democratic government, anywhere in the world, that actually has a realistic, long-term energy plan. Instead, we have politicians, businesses and other decision makers with their heads in the sand (peak oil is another issue where this is starkly apparent). This must change, and we — the citizenry — must be the agents of that change. That is why the new initiative by Ben Heard, called “Decarbonise SA“, is so exciting. I’ll let Ben explain more, in the guest post below.

But before that, just a small note from me. For the many non-Australian readers of BNC, don’t dismiss this as something parochicial. Think of it instead as a case study — a working template — for what you can help organise in your particular region (local council, city, state/province, whatever). We need all of you on board, because this is a problem of the global commons. Over to Ben.

——————-

Decarbonise SA

Ben Heard – Ben is Director of Adelaide-based advisory firm ThinkClimate Consulting, a Masters graduate of Monash University in Corporate Environmental Sustainability, and a member of the TIA Environmental and Sustainability Action Committee. He is the founder of Decarbonise SA. His recent BNC post was Think climate when judging nuclear power.

I have been a fan of the work of Brave New Climate for some time now. Barry’s knack for cutting through the noise to highlight the information we need to consider for making good decisions is remarkable. His reputation and tenure at Adelaide University also give Brave New Climate a global reach and relevance, exemplified by the one million hits it received in the week following the Sendai quake and tsunami.

Remarkable though it is, BNC can’t do everything, nor should it try. That’s why I have started Decarbonise SA. The first thing you need to know is that this is more than a blog, it is a mission. The purpose of Decarbonise SA is to form a collective of like-minded people who will drive the most rapid possible decarbonisation of the economy of South Australia, with a primary focus on the electricity supply.

To achieve that goal, South Australia needs to introduce nuclear power into the mix of generating technologies. The primary driver for our support of nuclear power is recognition of the fact that the scientific findings in relation to climate change are now so serious, that we require the fastest and deepest cuts in emissions possible. That means attacking the biggest problems first. In Australia, that’s electricity supply, specifically the coal and gas that provides most of our baseload generation. While climate change may be the catalyst, nuclear power provides many important environmental and safety benefits compared to coal, beyond greenhouse gas, that will give us a cleaner and healthier environment for the future.

Read more »

Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear, Policy | 39 Comments »

Would sir like a caesium salad with his steak?

Posted on 2 May 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. To see a list of other BNC posts by Geoff, click here.

——————

A recent Nature column raised the prospect that the legacy of radiation leaks at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant would be decades of caesium-137 contamination around the plant. After reading this opening, I expected a hysterical beat up similar to that which prompted my last BNC piece. I was wrong. The author is the editor of a substantial book on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster and his Nature column ended with a clear and hopeful message summed up in a concluding anecdote about an elderly couple living near a heavily contaminated lake in Belarus. They were growing their own food and eating highly radioactive fish and doing just fine. They were survivors rather than victims. They had aligned their perception of risk with the numbers. The alternative is like the smoker who is terrified of air travel.

The rest of this piece is devoted to doing some risk perception re-alignment but I need to begin with a covering paragraph.

Nothing in this piece should be taken to imply that nuclear reactors should be allowed to become cheap and nasty because we can live with the consequences. Modern reactors with passive safety features are extremely safe and should reduce in price with appropriate modular mass production techniques. There is no need for corner cutting.

There will be two parts to this post. The first part is about the similarities and differences in the way radiation and food shred your DNA and the second describes the practical consequences with a little case study of Japan.

Part I: What exactly does radiation do to your cells?

Caesium-137 (Cs-137) has recently hit the headlines like some kind of scarlet pimpernel. Caesium here, caesium there, where will caesium next appear. Road blocks on Japanese roads now forcibly protect the public against caesium here and caesium there. It causes cancer. So do sake, bacon and steak, but I don’t notice road blocks on Tokyo bars or McDonalds.

Here’s a picture of what Cs-137 radiation does to your DNA. These come from a recent paper comparing damage from a range of sources and this particular picture is of damage caused by Cs-137.

The right hand image looks a little like a comet. Hence the name comet assay. First some cells were exposed to radiation and then they were chemically busted open to expose the DNA material from the cell nucleus. DNA is normally in coiled braids and when the braids are unbroken, they stay globbed up in a ball like the image on the left. On the right, busted strands of DNA are streaming out of the glob. It’s a bloody mess. The cell in this image was hit with 10 Grays. The unit used in most Fukushima publicity has been Sieverts. For the moment, just think of a Gray as another name for a Sievert. So 10 Grays is 10 Sieverts or 10,000 milli-Sieverts. A person receiving a full body dose of just half this amount would have a 50/50 chance of being dead within a couple of months.

What’s the difference between a full body 10 Gray dose and a cell being hit by 10 Grays? Don’t worry about it … just accept that this cell nucleus took a monster hit. Imagine blasting a water melon with a shotgun but instead of a shot cartridge with 200 pellets, you are using something with 100,000 really tiny pellets. That’s about what happened to this cell nucleus … the 100,000 is an approximately correct number, I didn’t just make it up!

Read more »

Filed under: Emissions, Nuclear | 96 Comments »

Nuclear energy challenges for the 21st century

Posted on 29 April 2011 by Barry Brook

The following post, by Dan Meneley, was originally presented at the 17th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference Cancun 2010, and is reproduced here with Dan’s blessing (I plan to buy him dinner, as thanks, when I visit Toronto in June). Its contents are highly topical in the context of the current situation in Japan and the debate that the Fukushima crisis has inflamed. It is also effective as a counter argument to the recent MIT report on the future of the nuclear fuel cycle (which I think made a really bad call, from both a technical and socio-political standpoint).

You can download the 15-page printable PDF version here. There is also a really excellent annotated PowerPoint presentation (30 slides) available here, which is also definitely well poring over.

————————-

Guest Post by Dr. Dan Meneley. Dan, a founding member of SCGI, is a Canadian nuclear engineer with 50 years experience in systems analysis for nuclear energy, reactor safety and physics, plant design, risk analysis and operations and engineering of the CANDU design. He has also worked on research on sodium-cooled fast reactors since the 1960s. He is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Energy Systems and Nuclear Science, University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

SUMMARY

The past fifty years have witnessed the advent of a new energy source and the beginning of yet another in the series of energy-use transitions that have marked our history since the start of our technological development. Each of these transitions has been accompanied by adaptive challenges. Each unique set of challenges has been met. Today the world faces the need for another transition. This paper outlines some of the associated challenges that lie ahead of us all, as we adapt to this new and exciting environment. The first step in defining the challenges ahead is to make some form of prediction of the future energy supply and demand during the period. Herein, the future up to 2010 is presumed to include two major events — first, a decline in the availability and a rise in price of petroleum, and second a need to reduce greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Both of these events are taken to be imminent. Added to these expected events is the assumption that the total of wind, solar, and other such energy sources will be able to contribute, but only in a relatively small way, to the provision of needed energy to our ever-expanding human population.

1. INTRODUCTION

Nuclear energy systems, now more than 50 years old, use a mature technology. They are ready to take on larger and larger roles in the provision of energy for the benefit of mankind. Utilization of this new primary energy source is an engineering task of first magnitude, and is no longer a leading subject of scientific research, except at the margins.

This paper outlines the major tasks remaining for nuclear energy professionals over the next half-century and more. These challenges form an integrated set ranging from the purely technical to abstract questions of sociology and philosophy. They touch on broad matters of public policy as well as on the future development of the world economy.

Today’s challenges to the nuclear industry all arise from the known great energy-related challenge to the world; that is, to find a clean and sustainable source of energy to replace petroleum. The only greater related challenge of our day is to find a solution to the problem of world over-population. Without a sufficient energy supply there can be little hope for successfully managing this underlying issue.

Some people say that petroleum is not, and never will become, a commodity in short supply. Better-qualified and convincing persons and organizations point out the error of this thinking. The world now uses approximately 1000 barrels of oil in each second of each year. The latest annual report of the OECD’s International Energy Agency states simply “we must leave oil before it leaves us”.

This technical challenge to the nuclear industry is indeed very large. Assuming a plant capacity factor of 90 percent, the higher heating value of oil being consumed in the world today is equivalent to the total fission heat produced by about 7000 nuclear units, each with an equivalent electrical capacity of 1 Gigawatt.

Read more »

Filed under: Emissions, Future, Nuclear, Policy, Scenarios | 162 Comments »

Anti-nuclear cartoon book, 1978 – anything changed?

Posted on 25 April 2011 by Barry Brook

A few weeks ago, Haydon Manning passed me an interesting book from the more dusty section of his shelf. It was called “Nuclear Power for Beginners“, and the edition I have was published in 1978. (If you do a bit of searching, you can still find old copies for purchase). If you’ve read this post from 2010: From nuclear sceptic to convert, you’ll know that Haydon was himself once anti-nuclear, but has since been convinced of the need for nuclear power. So I guess that when he bought this book, its contents aligned very much with his views (and those of the majority of environmentalists of the time). Like me, however, Haydon is now off the Christmas card list of Friends of the Earth!

Here is the book’s cover, freshly snapped from my iPhone (with the $2 price tag still clear):

Apparently, it was first published as “The Anti-Nuclear Handbook” but was then re-titled to fit with the popular “For Beginners” series. The cover says it all really — a death’s head in the word “Power”, the black and gloomy background vista, the corporate polluter with a nuclear power plant on his head, and the bright ALTERNATIVES! (with a happy, smiling sun).

It’s worth reading books like this to get a perspective on the roots of anti-nuclear activism, and to reflect on what, if anything, has changed. The best thing I can say about the book is that the format is great — cartoon books are terrific at explaining complex topics to a lay audience. (I also really like this series). Maybe I need to collaborate with an illustrator to write the new version…

The book covers all of the core anti-nuclear arguments — power plants are unsafe (and remember, this was published before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima — so they relied on Windscale, Chalk River, SL-1 etc. and good old speculation), nuclear waste is intractable, the risk of weapons proliferation is enormous and growing, fast breeder reactors just make everything worse (and are theoretical anyway), and so on. But it’s the conclusion that interests me in particular, especially in the context of the arguments being presented by commenters in the Energy debates in Wonderland thread.

A succinct summary of the core argument of the book is given on p46:

Read more »

Filed under: Future, Nuclear | 164 Comments »

Fukushima Daiichi Open and Update Thread #5

Posted on 23 April 2011 by Barry Brook

The problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant continue to be worked on, with no short-term resolution in sight. Here are eight recent notable happenings, compiled from various sources (see list below):

1. Reports indicate that some fuel melted and fell to the lower containment sections of units 1-3, where it dispersed in a fairly uniform residue — but this does not seem to have breached containment in any of the reactor pressure vessels. Re-criticality of this ‘corium’ seems very unlikely, but no details can of course be confirmed until the reactor cores are finally dismantled — which may be years away.

2. Two automated PackBot robots entered units 1 and 3, took photos, and measured temperature, pressure and radioactivity within the buildings. Peak levels were 40-60 mSv/hr.

3. An anti-scattering agent is being sprayed on the ground around the damaged units (about 1,200 square metres in area) to prevent further spread of radionuclides (see photo above).

4. Excess radioactive cooling water continues to be transferred from unit 2′s basement and tunnels to a waste processing facility.

5. Further surveys are being made of the area surrounding the Fukushima evacuation zone and the exclusion area is being policed more strictly. Highest levels were measured at Itate, at about 4 microsieverts per hour (by comparison, the background level is 0.2 — 0.4 uSv/hr).

6. TEPCO have now released a roadmap plan for the restoration of stable conditions at the site, over a 3 — 6 month timetable, leading to a cold shutdown at units 1-3 and various other stability targets. They also released a 27-slide presentation on the timeline of the accident and current situation, that is definitely worth a look through.

Read more »

Filed under: Nuclear, Open Thread | 378 Comments »

Energy debates in Wonderland

Posted on 21 April 2011 by Barry Brook

My position on wind energy is quite ambivalent. I really do want it (and solar) to play an effective role in displacing fossil fuels, because to do this, we need every tool at our disposal (witness the Open Science project I kick started in 2009 [and found funding for], in order to investigate the real potential of renewables, Oz-Energy-Analysis.Org).

However, I think there is far too much wishful thinking wrapped up in the proclamations by the “100% renewables” crowd(most of who are unfortunately also anti-nuclear advocates), that wind somehow offers both a halcyon choice and an ‘industrial-strength’ solution to our energy dilemma. In contrast, my TCASE series (thinking critically about sustainable energy) illustrates that, pound-for-pound, wind certainty does NOT punch above it’s weight as a clean-energy fighter; indeed, it’s very much a journeyman performer.

The following guest post, by Jon Boone, looks at wind energy with a critical eye and a witty turn of phrase. I don’t offer it as a comprehensive technical critique — rather it’s more a philosophical reflection on past performance and fundamental limits. Whatever your view of wind, I think you’ll find it interesting.

————————

Energy debates in Wonderland

Guest Post by Jon Boone. Jon is a former university administrator and longtime environmentalist who seeks more more informed, effective energy policy in ways that expand and enhance modernity, increase civility, and demand stewardship on behalf of biodiversity and sensitive ecosystems. His brand of environmentalism eschews wishful thinking because it is aware of the unintended adverse consequences flowing from uninformed decisions. He produced and directed the documentary, Life Under a Windplant, which has been freely distributed within the United States and many countries throughout the world. He also developed the website Stop Ill Wind as an educational resource, posting there copies of his most salient articles and speeches. He receives no income from his work on wind technology.

March Hare (to Alice): Have some wine.

(Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.)

Alice: I don’t see any wine.

March Hare: There isn’t any.

Alice: Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it.

March Hare: It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited.

— From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Energy journalist Robert Bryce, whose latest book, Power Hungry, admirably foretells an electricity future anchored by natural gas from Marcellus Shale that will eventually bridge to pervasive use of nuclear power, has recently been involved in two prominent debates. In the first, conducted by The Economist, Bryce argued for the proposition that “natural gas will do more than renewables to limit the world’s carbon emissions.” In the second, an Intelligence Squared forum sponsored by the Rosenkranz Foundation, he and American Enterprise Institute scholar Steven Hayward argued against the proposition that “Clean Energy can drive America’s economic recovery.”

Since there’s more evidence a friendly bunny brings children multi-colored eggs on Easter Sunday than there is that those renewables darlings, wind and solar, can put much of a dent in CO2 emissions anywhere, despite their massively intrusive industrial presence, the first debate was little more than a curiosity. No one mentioned hydroelectric, which has been the most widely effective “renewable”—ostensibly because it continues to lose marketshare (it now provides the nation with about 7% of its electricity generation), is an environmental pariah to the likes of The Sierra Club, and has little prospect for growth. Nuclear, which provides the nation’s largest grid, the PJM, with about 40% of its electricity, is not considered a renewable, despite producing no carbon emissions; it is also on The Sierra Club’s hit list. Geothermal and biomass, those minor league renewables, were given short shrift, perhaps because no one thought they were sufficiently scalable to achieve the objective.

Read more »

Filed under: Renewables | 368 Comments »

Helicopters, tall stories and fantasy journalism at Crikey.com.au

Posted on 18 April 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy. His previous post on BNC was: Chernobyl and Fukushima – measuring our monsters in the midday sun.

The biggest problem for people who support nuclear power as a vital part of avoiding dangerous climate events is the general public’s fear of things they don’t understand. This is particularly true when that fear is fanned by journalists who combine fear with ignorance and influence. Long time British anti-nuclear campaigner, journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot has finally worked out that official sources are more reliable than Helen Caldicott. His subsequent devastating hatchet jobs on her in the UK Guardian (also on his website here, here, here and here) should be read by all who have one or more books by Dr Caldicott that need recycling into something useful.

Even less trustworthy than Helen or a hyena is Crikey journalist Guy Rundle. Here he is going ape over Fukushima on 18th of March.

As I write, the Japanese are conducting direct overflies to try and control the continuing damage — most likely a suicide mission for the pilots and crew. The Soviets resorted to this earlier, during the Chernobyl crisis by the simple expedient of ordering airforce crews to do it. No one knows how many died, but they died outside of the glare of publicity. The Japanese crews will slough their skin and muscles, and bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media. It may well be the reason why this step in dealing with the crisis was delayed for so long — because it would demonstrate that dealing with nuclear accidents will frequently involve the painful certain death of emergency workers.

Has anybody seen Japanese helicopter crews sloughing skin and muscles? Two workers with burned feet graced every TV channel in the known universe but how did those air crews escape the paparazzi after their suicide mission? Where are the wikileaks tapes?

This is sheer drivel, fantasy, fiction, balderdash, ignorance and sloppy, unprofessional, incompetent journalism.

Rundle’s ignorant ranting is all the more effective because he’s generally reliable. This is a potent and dangerous mix.

First, we need some basic scientific background that will make the truth about the Chernobyl helicopter pilots unremarkable. When you water bomb a forest fire you fly through a haze of carcinogenic and generally toxic compounds but you will have no idea of how much you are breathing in. Likewise when you watch some firefighters at a local house fire or when you sit before a romantic log fire in a Swiss Chalet sipping your favourite poison. You may see some of the smoke but measuring its toxicity is tough.

Radiation is different. You can’t see it, but you do much, much, better … you can measure it! People can measure it and measure it with astonishing accuracy. A banana is radioactive and will generate about 15 particle emissions per second. When people can’t measure radiation because of broken or missing instruments, they can usually calculate it with pretty good accuracy. And when people have been subjected to unknown doses, you can look at cellular effects in their bodies to determine the dose with reasonable accuracy. A piece of Guatemala green marble on a benchtop in that Swiss chalet might pulse at over a thousand radioactive decay emissions per second per kilogram of marble.

Read more »

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 120 Comments »

Open Thread 15

Posted on 16 April 2011 by Barry Brook

The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason (see Note below). So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least your chat should relate to the general content of this blog.

The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.

You can also find this thread by clicking on the Open Thread category on the cascading menu under the “Home” tab.

Note: This is a new general Open Thread. However, two more specific Open Threads are also still available: (i) if you wish to make a philosophical comment on the Fukushima Nuclear crisis, go here; (ii) for technical comments on the Fukushima situation, go here. Every other non-post-specific comment can go below. For reference, the last general open thread (from 20 February 2011) was here.

Filed under: Open Thread | 195 Comments »

Anti- to Pro-Nuclear, Pro- to Anti-, who’s changed their mind?

Posted on 15 April 2011 by Barry Brook

Today I was speaking to a colleague about Fukushima and its implications on public attitudes to nuclear as a way to mitigate climate change. After I mentioned George Monbiot’s recent investigative journalism on anti-nuclear claims, he responded by asking: Okay, sure, that’s one person, but conversely, how many pro-nuclear environmentalists have turned anti-nuclear as a result of Fukushima?

George Monbiot – anti- to pro-nuclear

Well, that’s actually a good question, and I don’t really know the answer. So perhaps you can help? (see below for my preliminary sketch). What I’d like to do is compile a list of the following:

– Prominent pro-nuclear advocates who have subsequently become anti-nuclear in their sentiments

– Prominent anti-nuclear people who have changed their mind and switched to support of nuclear energy

The above two are binary choices, but there are other possible (more middle-of-the-road) attitudinal changes that would also be worth considering:

– Anti-nuclear to neutral (or neutral to anti-)

– Pro-nuclear to neutral (or neutral to pro-), and finally…

– Folks who formerly said “we can displace fossil fuels with 100 % renewable energy” but subsequently changed their mind after assessing the hard numbers

The largest group of people are almost certainly those that haven’t changed their mind on this matter (or at least not for a long while), and there is probably not a lot of point listing these. Some obvious examples include Bruno Comby (always a pro-nuclear environmentalist?) and Helen Caldicott (perpetually anti-nuclear). Further, as far as I’m aware, no prominent environmental group (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, etc.) seems to have changed their position either, but if you know some that have, then they ought to be listed too.

Okay, to make this exercise tractable, we need some boundaries, so this is what I suggest:

1. The people involved should be prominent and (relatively) independent (e.g., public intellectuals and scientists, well-known environmentalists, politicians, celebrities? etc.). By ‘independent’ I mean those who have no clear vested financial interest in taking any particular position (difficult to be sure of, I acknowledge, given that everyone has some hook to hang their hat on).

Read more »

Filed under: Nuclear, Policy | 90 Comments »

Fukushima rated at INES Level 7 – what does this mean?

Posted on 12 April 2011 by Barry Brook

Hot in the news is that the Fukushima Nuclear crisis has been upgraded from INES 5 to INES 7. Note that this is not due to some sudden escalation of events today (aftershocks etc.), but rather it is based on an assessment of the cumulative magnitude of the events that have occurred at the site over the past month (my most recent update on that is here).

Below I look briefly at what this INES 7 rating means, why it has happened, and to provide a new place to centralise comments on this noteworthy piece of news.

The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to rate nuclear accidents. It was formalised in 1990 and then back-dated to events like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale and so on. Prior to today, only Chernobyl had been rated at the maximum level of the scale ‘major accident’. A useful 5-page PDF summary description of the INES, by the IAEA, is available here.

A new assessment of Fukushima Daiichi has put this event at INES 7, upgraded from earlier escalating ratings of 3, 4 and then 5. The original intention of the scale was historical/retrospective, and it was not really designed to track real-time crises, so until the accident is fully resolved, any time-specific rating is naturally preliminary.

The criteria used to rate against the INES scale are (from the IAEA documentation):

(i) People and the Environment: considers the radiation doses to people close to the location of the event and the widespread, unplanned release of radioactive material from an installation.

Read more »

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 158 Comments »

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear saga – 2 to 9 April overview

Posted on 9 April 2011 by Barry Brook

The nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi has, alas, now evolved into more of a saga. The last seven days of events has been acted out in slow motion compared to the first dramatic week (dating back to almost a month ago), but there continues to be plenty of headaches for TEPCO — and no clear sign of things being locked down any time soon. The economic cost of the earthquake and tsunami has now been put at ~$300 billion, and will probably rise further in the coming months.

I last wrote an update post a week ago (although I’ve also been providing daily updates in the comments section), so it’s best to start this one by looking at what’s happened, day by day, since then. Here is my somewhat potted update summary, with just the main points highlighted.

It was 2nd of April (Saturday) that it was first reported that a stream of contaminated water was flowing into the ocean, leading to extremely high radiation levels immediately offshore of the plant. The water appeared to be coming from the vicinity of Unit 2, and after some diagnostics, including the use of a coloured tracer (dye), the source was identified as a 20 cm crack in a maintenance pit which lies between Unit 2 and the sea. The pit is used to hold cables to power the seawater pumps. Its radiation was measured as ~1 Sv/hr.

In the evening of 2 April, concrete injection was trialled as a means to seal the crack, but this failed. Throughout 3 April, a second attempt was made, this time via injection of a water-absorbing polymer, mixed with sawdust and shredded paper (to aid in the swelling process). This also did not set. To mitigate the leaks to the ocean, plans were then made to try and pump a large amount of the contaminated water out of the pit and into storage, including some barges that had been anchored offshore.

It was also announced by TEPCO that the bodies of the two workers who had been missing in the turbine building of Unit 2 since the tsunami struck had been recovered on March 30. They’d apparently been drowned when the site had been innundated. The image above illustrates just how devastated the landscape around the plant is after the monster wave (14 m in this area of the coastline) wreaked its havoc.

Along with the crane operator at Fukushima Daiini, WNN reports…

Read more »

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 164 Comments »

Lessons about nuclear energy from the Japanese quake and tsunami

Posted on 7 April 2011 by Barry Brook

Below is the second piece published on BNC on the lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. For an earlier perspective, see: Preliminary lessons from Fukushima for future nuclear power plants.

Below is a Guest Post by Dr. William Sacks.

Bill is a highly experienced physicist and radiologist. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Rice University in 1959, a PhD in Harvard in 1966 (cosmology and general relativity), then did a medical degree and two-year postgraduate training at Connecticut Medical School, finishing in 1979. He followed this up with a residency in nuclear medicine and radiology at George Washington University through to 1985. He subsequently worked for 10 years as a general radiologist at Kaiser Permanente and later as a medical officer in the Office of Device Evaluation in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health for more than 7 years. In that time he worked with statisticians, physicists, other physicians, and many other specialties. He later worked as a clinical radiologist in Tuscon, and recently retired to spend time researching and writing on energy, climate change, evolutionary biology, economics, history, and physics/astronomy/cosmology.

 

——————-

LESSONS ABOUT NUCLEAR ENERGY FROM THE JAPANESE QUAKE AND TSUNAMI

Part 1: The recent events in Japan in context

Early media concentration on the nuclear plant at Fukushima Daiichi created a great sense of fear in people around the world. Reporting was distorted by both exaggeration and omission, focusing more on the reactors than on the quake and tsunami that killed over 20,000 people according to recent Japanese government estimates. Media reports still contain phrases like “222 times higher than the legal limit,” “higher than normal,” “radiation found in the water,” all of which are meaningless without comparisons that permit us to evaluate their significance. The patchwork of “experts” who were interviewed to explain the events, each with her/his own particular knowledge and set of interests, added to the confusion instead of replacing it with a sense of proportion.

An example of omission is the absence of follow-up on the oil refinery fire at Chiba, about 20-30 miles east of Tokyo and over 100 miles south of Fukushima. In fact, it killed 12 workers and required 10 days to put out the fire, which spewed toxic smoke and chemicals far and wide, as well as CO2 into the atmosphere that adds to global warming, and resulted in unknown numbers of latent cancers, heart attacks, asthma, and deaths. Yet once TV images of the flames, falsely linked through association with the nuclear reactors, lost their usefulness, they disappeared from sight.

Nor did the media report widely, if at all, on a hydroelectric dam in Fukushima prefecture, burst by the quake, that flooded 1800 homes, with unknown numbers of deaths. In addition to the estimated 20,000+ tsunami deaths, homelessness and ongoing lack of water and electricity affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Furthermore the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electrical Power Co. (TEPCO), owner of the Daiichi nuclear plant, have their own interests that help determine what they are willing to report or relay to the media. Indeed an Associated Press investigation yielded the fact that Japanese scientists had warned TEPCO that a quake and tsunami of these proportions was overdue according to the history of disasters in that area over the last 3,000 years, but the company rejected this prediction.

This is reminiscent of the ample warnings to the administration that New Orleans levees would not be able to resist a storm the size of Katrina in 2005 and that hundreds or thousands would die. Or of the recent BP oil spill in which collaborative malfeasance of both the company and the government regulators caused 11 immediate deaths of oil workers and uncountable deaths due to the toxic pollution of the Gulf Coast, as well as destruction of hundreds of thousands of livelihoods in the area. Or of the Challenger disaster in which 7 astronauts died in 1986, in an explosion of the rocket, seconds after take-off, in which the engineers had warned the NASA administrators that the O-rings had failed in tests and would fail again with fatal results. But NASA had a schedule to keep, under orders from the administration, and that was more important to them than the astronauts’ lives.

Read more »

Filed under: Future, Nuclear, Policy | 185 Comments »

Chernobyl and Fukushima – measuring our monsters in the midday sun

Posted on 5 April 2011 by Barry Brook

Guest Post by Geoff Russell. Geoff is a mathematician and computer programmer and is a member of Animal Liberation SA. His recently published book is CSIRO Perfidy.

For another terrific article by Geoff, related to Fukushima and radiation risk read: Cancer deaths in Japan will be from alcohol and ciggies.

——————————-

Measuring our monsters in the midday sun

The first rule of Horror Films 101 is “Don’t reveal your monster too soon”. Fear is all about suggestion. Hints. Things that go bump in the night. Letting vague connections swell in the imagination. Chernobyl. Fukushima. The hint of a fin caught in the corner of your eye. The Serpent’s Egg is an Ingmar Bergman film from the late 1970s which knew all the tricks. There were sounds in that film more chilling than blood and guts. Violence was suggested rather than displayed, and you heard it ooze through the movie like it did the historical events in the back story … the rise toward Nazism in Germany in the 1920s.

Once your monster is front and center on screen, anti-climax is tough to avoid. Just two workers were killed in the initial explosion at Chernobyl.

The head within the head was a deft stroke in the design of the Alien monster. Even when the monster is confronted face to face, the inner head lurks like Russian dolls meeting Pandora’s box. In the 12 months after the Chernobyl explosion, 28 front line workers died. Over the next 20 years another 19 died from acute radiation sickness suffered in 1986.

Once you have established the genre of your film, you can carry the audience with just the occasional hint of forthcoming carnage. The second Aliens film had plenty to work with. A monster that gestates inside its victim with no outward sign is an excellent starting point. Worse than any cancer, this is a lump which bites. Blind panic can then be induced without requiring heavy handed symptoms or writhing agony. Of around 4000 thyroid cases in children after Chernobyl, 98.8 percent were successfully treated. The cancers are common knowledge, the treatment success is a fact on the brink of extinction.

Shining a light on the monster

There is, however, only so much you can get away with before your monster has to take centre stage. Even if only for the final 10 minutes. If you want your audience to line up and pay for the sequel, then you need to deliver. How many films lack an ending? How many books just fizzle?

It’s time to get the Chernobyl monster out of the shadows and place it out in the midday sun.

Read more »

Filed under: Hot News, Nuclear | 159 Comments »

Some other perspectives on Fukushima

Posted on 3 April 2011 by Barry Brook

Apart from getting on with my life (e.g., building a new computer, catching up with my backlog at work, spending time with the family, etc.), I’ve been spending the last few days reading widely on what other people have had to say, in reflection, on the Fukushima crisis. Here are some highlights:

1. Bill Tucker, author of the book “Terrestrial Energy” (which I discussed in detail in this post back in 2009, and reviewed here), wrote a piece for The Americal Spectator called “Pass the Plutonium“. The leading paragraph:

People think that Fukushima will mean the end of nuclear power, but I’m convinced it’s the opposite. We’re going to lose our nuclear virginity over this accident and start seeing the world as adults. In fact it’s already happening.

2. The video linked to in the image below was mentioned in the BNC comments — an ABC (US) news feature called “Japan Nuke Crisis: American in Dead Zone“. It’s a perspective on local area an sea water radiation levels, from an American doctor Robert Gale (a radiation expert) sent by the US to advise the Japanese government on Fukushima, and has years of experience working around Chernobyl. He is definitely worth listening to…

3. Mark Lynas (author of the wonderful albeit troubling book Six Degrees) and Chris Goodall (author of Ten Technologies to Fix Energy and Climate) — two very serious and critical thinking environmentalists trying to tackle climate change — offer this excellent essay: The dangers of nuclear power in light of Fukushima. You really must read it all, but here, as a taster, is their final paragraph:

Read more »

Filed under: Clim Ch Q&A, Nuclear | 178 Comments »

Fukushima Daiichi crisis – April 1 perspective

Posted on 1 April 2011 by Barry Brook

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis has moved off the front page of most newspapers, but a lot continues to happen, and the situation remains unresolved. Below I offer some personal perspectives on some of the things that have been widely reported over the last few days, and then I conclude with some official updates.

Disclaimer: What follows is my interpretation of the sparse and often confusing information being made available by TEPCO, NHK etc. Take or leave at your discretion.

Will the GE Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (a Gen III unit) be built at Fukushima Daiichi to replace units 1-4?

1. Plutonium detected in the soil around the plant. A few isotopes of plutonium (Pu) have been found in soil at various test sites at the FD plant. This has sent some folks on Twitter apoplectic. So where does it come from?

One theory, and quite a reasonable one, is that it is the global residual left over from the extensive atmospheric atomic weapons testing of the 1950s — 1970s. That would help explain the presence of Pu-238, for instance — an isotope not readily created in a power reactor.

Another thought is that there was a local source, either from volatilisation of sloughed material in the drying spent fuel ponds, or perhaps from the reactor cores (that was then carried away in minute traces via the vented steam). Being a heavy metal, however, the Pu would not mobilse readily and would deposit very locally. Remember, Pu is present in all spent fuel, via the U-238 –> Pu-239 transmutation pathway. All reactor fuel elements that have been fissioning will contain plutonium. It is not something peculiar to mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel (which was being used in FD unit 3), as some have implied — there has been a lot of nonsense written about this during the past few weeks.

In short, Pu is a metal, not a demon. Indeed, from my perspective on the Integral Fast Reactor technology, I see Pu as THE fuel of the future, and boldly predict that it will be looked back on, by some far distant civilisation, as among the most important elements humankind ever encountered. However, that’s for another post for another day. But if you want the full review now, please read Cohen.

Read more »

Filed under: Future, Hot News, Nuclear | 222 Comments »

Fukushima Technical Discussion Open Thread

Posted on 30 March 2011 by Barry Brook

It was suggested in a comment — and I agree — that the previous open threads on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident were becoming difficult to read, because they are such a mixture of technical details and philosophical discourse. That is, it’s generally a bad idea to cater to two different audiences in one comment thread. So, I will split them up.

Please restrict all discussion here to technical information, analysis, criticisms and questions on FD — no philosophising or excursions into whether nuclear power is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or the implications of FD for the future of nuclear power (except for new technical developments, e.g. safety standards), etc. You may impart your deep wisdom on how the world should work on the other open thread I’m about to open.

Besides the above guidelines, the other rules of the Open Threads on BNC apply. Read here for details.

To kick off discussion, below is the latest FEPC status report (I’ll update this as new reports come in). You will also be interested in:

– JAIF Updates #35 and #36

– NISA Major Parameters 0600 March 29

– NISA Summary Conditions 0600 March 29

—————-

Read more »

Filed under: Nuclear, Open Thread | 368 Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 3,798 other followers