Nuclear Power Plant Future
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-11-09/nuclear-power-plant-future
The cooling towers of Three Mile Island's Unit 1 Nuclear Power Plant pour steam into the sky in Middletown, Pa., Tuesday, March 17, 2009. Three Mile Island's Unit 2 nuclear power plant was the scene of the nations worst commercial nuclear accident on March 28, 1979. More than three decades later, fears of an atomic catastrophe have been largely supplanted by fears about global warming, easing nuclear energy into the same sentence as wind and solar power. Dogged by price spikes and an environmental assault on carbon dioxide emissions, fossil fuels are the new clean-energy pariah.
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Problems led to the temporary shut-down of two East Coast nuclear power plants over the weekend. The nuclear power industry – its safety record and its future.
Guests
Arjun Makhijani
President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.
Matthew Wald
a reporter who covers nuclear power issues for the New York Times.
Scott Peterson
Vice President-Communications, Nuclear Energy Institute
Comments
Please familiarize yourself with our Code of Conduct and Terms of Use before posting your comments.
It seems to me that when we are considering nuclear energy it would be appropriate to include the costs involved in the storage of nuclear wastes as well as fitting and fair that storage be done on the site of any nuclear power plants which will be built in the future. The rationale for the latter point is that Nevada does not wish to be the “dumping site” for the nation’s nuclear wastes – a sentiment I suspect would be fairly wide-spread among our states. Thus it would be fair for those who wish to build nuclear plants to include storage for 10,000 years. This storage would include the necessary levels of security to see that these materials did not fall into terrorist hands.
While the major benefit of nuclear energy is its low CO2 emissions and smaller impact on global warming, when one considers the safer storage costs it would seem that the costs of nuclear energy might well outweigh the benefits.
What we have not done is consider the good of the nation as a “community.” If we were to do so we might ask such questions as, “to how much electricity is an individual or business ‘entitled.’” Do we, for example, need to have as many advertising lights and fountains on for 24 hours each day? Might there be alternative forms of energy which would provide sufficient energy for a comfortable life-style?
I recall van Jones saying, “the future of energy is not a hole in the ground, for the future – look up!”
Robert Hughes
These incidents are bad enough, but wait until the Republicans start deregulating everything they can.
Barbara, Michigan.
This is how we can make up the power Indian Point produces. For the same amount of money as a new cooling system, we can make up the power twice over with LED retrofits. Why put $500 mag wheels on a $500 old clunker? Please join us Dec 14th to seal the plant’s fate.
Remy C.
Join us, Tue Dec 14th
6pm at the
Ossining Public Library
53 Croton Avenue
Ossining, NY
to meet and greet the authors of
Green Lighting
Brian Howard, the Daily Green
Seth Leitman, Green Living Guy
William Brinsky, Envirolite Systems
“20% of the electricity we produce goes to lighting our homes and businesses. Green Lighting can dramatically reduce electrical consumption making dirty coal and old nuclear a thing of the past. Come and join us to meet the three authors of the Green Lighting book (McGraw-Hill) at Ossining’s LEED certified public library to discuss all the new emerging green lighting technologies, like LEDs, improved efficiency halogen, CFL, and day lighting.”
Sponsored by Rock The Reactors
One of your guests seems to be very casual about the track record of Entergy's safety record at Vermont Yankee. Entergy failed to disclose the existence of underground pipes that were being used to transport - among other things - tritium.
Here's a little background from a recent article, which illustrates that when a company operates in Vermont, residents expect there to be a certain level of trust; Entergy did not live up to that public trust:
"The revelation last Friday that Vermont Yankee had discovered a radioactive isotope in one of its monitoring wells has led to what is likely to be much more damaging news for the Vernon nuclear plant. Yankee now reports that the tritium could have come from an underground pipe. State officials say they were led to believe by Yankee representatives that there was no radioactive material in underground pipes in the first place. Even the Douglas Administration, perhaps Yankee’s greatest ally, sent a scathing message back to Yankee. Vermont Public Service Department Commissioner David O’Brien told the Burlington Free Press that, “The governor feels this has been a breach of trust.”
I believe Nuclear Power is generally over-regulated already. The real problem with Nuclear Power is the resultant Nuclear Waste. We can't build a Breeder Reactor because of a fear of this technology. So, the radioactive waste sits there in Spent Fuel Pools. If you would be concerned, be concerned about what happens to the Spent Fuel. Should there be more of healthy skepticism amongst regulators? Perhaps, there should be because most regulators I speak with also promote Nuclear Power. But, there is also an awareness of the tendency to over-regulate this technology.
I fail to see how we reduce carbon emissions from our electricity sector without significantly more nuclear power; France and Sweden achieve their low per capita emissions largely due to their heavy reliance on nuclear power.
On the legacy issues, is anyone pushing to require disposal solutions for eternity for the heavy metals used in photovoltaic cells? They don't decay, so they're dangerous forever.
What bothers me is the comment "no leaks have reached water supply." A big enough leak could surely reach water supply.
What are the thresholds used by the NRC? I mean, is our current use of nuclear power, or our expanded use of it, based on the assumption that there will be some contamination and that is the price to pay for the benefits of this power source?
Fly ash from coal power plants also have heavy metals in them that don't ever go away. The public is slowly becoming aware of the heavy metals because the power industry claims that they are not a problem. The nuclear industry has always been forth-coming about the nuclear issues. Also, equipment for detecting radiation is relatively cheap, and can detect radiation presence at levels well below those of health significance. All the heavy metals and chemicals in the environment are hard to detect (i.e., require very expensive equipment customized for the particular hazard), so people worry about radiation because it is easy to detect and measure it. In the case of emissions from fossil fuel plants, it is a case of: since we don't know about it, it must not be a problem. With radiation, no matter what the levels, since we know about it, it must be a problem. These two attitudes defy logic.
What is the viability of Thorium as an energy source as opposed to plutonium? I have read that nuclear power plants may be able to be retrofitted to run on Thorium as opposed to plutonium. Supposedly Thorium is safer and creates minimal, if any, harmful byproducts. Can your guests discuss the state of this technology? Thanks - Kris.
Where do the burned out fuel rods go? Has the fuel cycle been safely closed? What happened to Yucca Mountain?
How can any level of radiation that finds its way into drinking water okay? On what data does the EPA base its "safe" levels of radiation in drinking water?
From the beginning of the discussion, I heard that the reason for the recent shut-down was that "the well failed."
How is it that the nuclear regulatory agencies can not get the idea that the country is in a drought? Using thousands of water per second to cool the reactor is NOT healthy, is totally wasteful of our life-giving resource, and it is obvious that the planet will live longer without nuclear power than we can without water.
PLEASE, PLEASE pay attention to the "radioactive water" . . .as I listen . . ."routine discharges of radioactive water . . ." Humans do NOT KNOW and that's the real problem, isn't it??? Nuclear energy is NOT SAFE! WHY wait until someone's whole farm is contaminated to STOP the the chemicals that could render the land poisoned?
We discuss cancer risk to human beings only, what about smaller life forms and their risk. We cannot going on pretending that these affects do not exist. What about the cumulative affects as background radiation keeps growing over time?
When re-licensing nuclear power reactors, why doesn't the NRC require the operators to make old inaccessible systems like leaking pipes or submerged electrical cable more inspect-able by bringing them above ground and in vaults so that they can be inspected and maintained?
This would only seem reasonable if you really wanted to raise the standard for public safety and environmental protection in a twenty year license extension.
Two factors make nuclear power utterly different from every other source of power. One is the degree of damage that can be caused. The other is the length of time that waste products remain dangerous. Once we generate nuclear waste, we will have to protect it from both accidental and deliberate release, by terrorists or by irresponsible governments, for tens of thousands of years. In the immediate future, the greatest risk is that terrorists will steal nuclear waste and use it to hold the world hostage. No industry is perfectly secure, and the accidents last week are examples of the kind of thing that inevitably happens. To argue that nuclear power could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions sidesteps the even greater risks it brings.
The previous caller's question about fuel life-cycles was cleverly dodged by focusing solely on greenhouse gases. Nuclear energy may be one of the "cleanest" when only carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are considered, but I'd like to hear more about the other associated by-products and contaminants, including mine drainage at the original fuel sources, waste products, etc.
For a NEW Nuclear future please look at the ThoriumEnergyAlliance.com for information on how Thorium was always meant to be the safe, non-proliferating, ultra clean nuclear fuel.
Molten Salt Reactors have a proven history and we need to bring it back.
It evens eats the nuclear waste that other plants create!
John Kutsch
Executive Director
Thorium Energy Alliance
I missed the first part of this broadcast but listened until the end and found it to be inappropriately weighted toward the nuclear power industry. The industry, for several years, has been creating neutral-sounding interest group names to push the message that nuclear power is clean and cheap. The industry (large utilities, generator manufacturers and construction companies) have relied on age-wise generational change and are now making their major push to a new audience. From a political perspective, this makes sense because those who experienced the real horrors of Chernobyl (1986) and the near-disaster of Three Mile Island (1979) are, or soon will be, politically irrelevant. From a safety perspective, the U.S. industry's record since TMI has been uneven and the NRC, far from the caller and participants' claims of high professionalism, has been lax in regulating and fining plants with poor safety records. (I have litigated one such case in which the utility was negligent in running, or failing to run, its plants and NRC fines were probably less than the utility's legal fees from defending itself at the NRC and in state commissions). In addition, the industry has no solution for storage and, contrary to a panelist's claim, Yucca Mountain as a Nevada repository is not dead. It remains in play with a Congressional mandate, notwithstanding the Obama Administration's blatant political play to unlawfully withdraw its Yucca Mountain application at the NRC, while waste accumulates at nuclear power plants. Finally, there are cheaper, more decentralized, cleaner, and less risky (environmentally and economically) ways to produce the energy needed. All in all, nuclear only benefits the owners of industry as such industry is structured today. Diane, you need another show.
One of your guests defending nuclear said: If you walk out into the street and get hit by a vehicle, you better hope that the person who hit you is rich. What about INSURANCE? I would much rather hope he was adequately INSURED rather than rich and trying to protect his fortune!! Who is this guest trying to fool?
Nuclear industries are asking Americans to INSURE their risky investments over and above a small amount! What a crock.
Nuclear reactors would be FINE......
Except for the 4W's
- Waste
- Water (evaporates millions of gallons of water per day PER REACTOR),
- Weapons
- Wall Street.....wouldn't touch nuclear energy - far too risky.
That's why they are trying so hard to bilk the American people....how would they like us to insure their fortunes against nuclear disaster? By depleting our Social Security, eliminating any health care, allowing polluters to destroy our environment, spending millions to buy elections, then reaping $billions from the middle class? Yes, like BP, exactly!
Listen to Arjun Makhijani and read the websites www.carbonfreenuclearfree.org and www.ieer.org as well as beyondnuclear.org, nirs.org. Go to Public Citizen, www.citizen.org and stop listening to the power brokers trying to sell us a bad bill of goods now that they have their corporate government in place.
Thank you Diane, for at least being one of the few news outlets to present the truth among the spin. Love, Deb
The NEI states that there were no adverse effects from Three Mile Island.
Harvey Wasserman has shown this to be untrue.
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2009/1733
People died at Three Mile Island
The NEI stated that tritium from leaks has never reached the public.
Here is one incident.
http://iicph.org/high-tritium-in-ottawa-river-a-public-health-disaster
High Tritium In Ottawa River a Public Health Disaster
The nuclear industry already pays for the long term storage of spent nuclear fuel as a part of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. This ammounts to ~$0.001/kW-hr of electricity generated.
Please. the price of reators have trippled over the last 30 years and all current have come in way over price as in past. The cost is the most expensive of low carbon compared to efficiency, alternative energy, and base line is NOT necessary with diversification. Also the price of dismateling of the the plant is huge but never intered into the equatations.
US nuclear power plants built in the 70’s were subject to runaway inflation* and increases in cost of building materials. Additionally, many plants were stalled for years by activists, causing large increases in price due to interest on the capital building costs among other factors. Removing these factors, it is easy to see why modern power plants built in Japan have come in at, or under, cost and ahead of schedule. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Units 6 and 7 are a prime examples as they were constructed in 3 to 4 years on budget. This phenomenon is not limited to Japanese companies. Westinghouse Electric is constructing multiple AP1000's in China, the first of which is on schedule to be completed by 2013 (just 4 years from the start of construction!). The claim that all nuclear power plants are doomed to “come in way over price” is outdated and/or misinformed.
*The value of $1 in 1979 is ~$2.96 in 2009 due to inflation alone (no wonder costs trippled!)
http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Diane, Scott, Matt and Arjun:
Thank you for a civil discussion about one of the most important topics of our time. Diane's skepticism about nuclear energy is not unusual. The nuclear industry has been widely panned for many years in the advertiser supported media as well as on public radio.
Though many of us long for the day when we will no longer need to burn fossil fuel, the people who are involved in the business of extracting, financing, processing, transporting, refining and marketing fossil fuel keep trying to expand their business and increase their sales volume.
A reliable, clean, affordable alternative like uranium or thorium fission spoils their marketing plans because fission actually destroys markets for coal, natural gas and oil. Some energy debaters like to point out that oil is not competitive with nuclear because it is not used to produce electricity. What they ignore is that the competition there was over a couple of decades ago and nuclear WON.
Here are the numbers - In 1973 oil supplied 17% of the electricity in the US and nuclear supplied about 4%. In 1993, oil was down to about 3-4% and nuclear was up to 19%.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0802a.html
Nuclear fission has also pushed oil out of the electricity markets in France, Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. It made a dent in oil's share in several other large markets. It completely replaced oil in the US submarine and aircraft carrier fleets.
Without including any military figures, the world nuclear power industry produces as much energy as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq put together. (About 12 million barrels of oil equivalent per day). That energy muscled its way into the market without OPEC's permission over a very short 40 year period of time. The oil, gas and coal industry worked hard to slow that growth rate.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Since the 1970's nuclear power has been a topic tabu. I recommend reading Gwynith Cravens' "Power to Save the World". She was an enemy of nuclear power in the 1970's and recently spent years researching this book. Here are some points:
* The idea that there is no safe level of radiation is fallacious: We are all exposed to about 350 millirem per year from the sun, earth itself. Folks in Denver and Albuquerque live with twice that level, or more.
* The question about nuclear waste storage is not "how long until there is no radiation?" but "how long until the level is safe?" Probably more like hundreds of years, not thousands. Further, nuclear waste can be reduced by a factor of ten by reprocessing "spent" fuel.
* Earth burial of nuclear material which no longer has any value is a small price to pay in environmental footprint, compared to coal. Also, coal plants emit lots of heavy metals including uranium.
* A nuclear bomb needs uranium over 95% pure. Fuel rods have about 6%. The idea that terrorists could steal fuel rods and refine them (a process requiring plant, equipment, expertise and a lot of time) without detection is very far fetched, if not absurd. They would be much more likely to steal a completed weapon, or buy one.
* Today's nuclear power plants are very safe, and can be made safer. Chernobyl was built without a containment dome, unlike any western or European plants, or any built since.
My point is that we need to be looking at nuclear power technology and new approaches, such as reprocessing "spent" fuel, breeder reactors, use of Thorium as a fuel, ways to reduce water consumption, etc. Let's not turn our backs on an important energy source which emits no CO2, is highly efficient in terms of volume of fuel per kilowatt and is a heck of a lot safer than coal or oil in terms of fatal accidents and environmental impact.
I agree with the comment of the public lawyer. This program was heavily weighted in favor of the nuclear industry. The lone opposing voice was a journalist whose job is to try to remain objective, vs the consumer relations guy whose full time, high paying job is to spin everything to the positive for the industry that pays his salary. Amory Lovins would be an excellent choice for an articulate voice against the wisdom, practicality, and cost effectiveness of investing in nuclear power. He wrote an article in the Weekly Standard recently (Oct 16th, volume 16 number 06) where he makes the case for nuclear being a bad investment that takes public money and shifts it to private profits. He can also speak articulately about the excellent work his organization (Rocky Mountain Institute ) is doing to create a new energy future that is clean, secure and driven by profit. They demonstrate how saving energy- not just by replacing light bulbs or making other incremental changes, but by rethinking how we design buildings, transportation, and the energy grid- can be much more cost effective than producing it. A recent project is the retrofitting of the Empire State Building. The owners are investing 13.8 million in efficiency improvements which will reduce the energy use by nearly 40%. The payback time on the investment is only 3 years. That means in 9 years, the owners will have tripled their money. How many investments can bring that kind of return? There are a lot of serious problems with reviving the nuclear industry, and some really articulate voices who can talk about a better energy future without it. Please do revisit this subject soon. We have some big decisions to make as a nation and people will need good information. This nuclear issue will be prominent with the new congress in place.
@Michelle
The panel included three people:
Arjun Mahkijani, who recently published a paper titled "Carbon Free and Nuclear Free"
Matt Wald, a respected energy journalist for the New York Times who is known for his thorough research in all kinds of energy topics.
Scott Peterson, who is employed by the Nuclear Energy Institute and is an advocate for the nuclear industry.
It was a journalistically correct panel - one leading opponent, one neutral journalist and one leading advocate.
You have attempted to discredit Mr. Peterson. Somehow, the fact that he holds a full time "high paying" job sharing information about an important energy source is a big negative in your mind.
One reason this facet of your comment intrigues me is that you then go on to recommend the inclusion of Amory Lovins, a man who runs a multi-million dollar consulting operation that also has a "non-profit" arm called the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Here is a quote from Lovins captured from another public radio show - Democracy Now! (July 16, 2008)
"You know, I’ve worked for major oil companies for about thirty-five years, and they understand how expensive it is to drill for oil."
Lovins may have convinced world leaders over the years that he is an energy guru. He claimed for many years to be a nuclear physicist "educated at Harvard and Oxford" but he never obtained any degrees from any college or university.
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2006/05/amory-lovinss-academic-career...
Diane and her producers did a fine job with this panel. I hope that they continue to probe the issue, but there is no need to give an oil industry consultant another platform for selling his employer's products.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
I have been listening, if not following, this debate for some 35 years now, and it never seems to reach a valid conclusion.
The layman seems as confused as ever about the broader subject, despite abundant access to all the relevant information.
Radioactivity and radiation are natural phenomena. There was radioactivity in the air, water and crust of the earth long before humans ever came upon the scene. Moreover, every person gets a certain amount of natural radiation exposure, regardless of the nuclear energy industry. Facts. Are they relevant?
Yes. they are, because they offer a benchmark for judging hazards. By the way, if you really want to scare yourself, look at radiation hazards from medical radiology (especially good old X-rays) They far exceed those of nuclear power plants, any way you measure them.
If you are trying to argue that burning coal is safer than suing uranium, bear in mind that nuclear fuel cans contain pretty well all the waste products when removed from a reactor. Coal combustion, however, ends up dumping its wastes on heads of the public. The public placidly accepted that approach for a longtime, too. Yet, when it comes to nuclear waste disposal, critics act as if nothing less than perfection is ever acceptable. If you applied such standards to carbon sequestration, it would soon be in the same political dead end as nuclear waste disposal.
No conceivable nuclear energy industry will ever dump more radioactivity into the earth’s crust than exists already. Today’s nuclear energy industry could scarcely double the natural radioactive inventory of the oceans, even if it tried.
As far as general nuclear energy hazards are concerned, just look at the facts. There is no evidence of harm to the public outside Chernobyl, and even there it is inferred harm, derived from epidemiological surveys and models. On the other hand disasters at oil, gas and hydro plants have claimed thousands of lives. My quota is up. Over to you.