From: Michael S. Lorrey (mike@datamann.com)
Date: Wed Mar 15 2000 - 15:07:40 MST
Charlie Stross wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 12:12:15AM -0500, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> >
> > What stumbles occured with nuclear power? Even counting Chernobyl (more
> > a result of socialism than nuclear technology) and the two bombs dropped
> > on Japan there are still fewer people killed by nuclear technology in
> > its entire history than are killed every year by the pollution of coal
> > burning technology, and coal burning plants put more radioactive
> > materials into the environment every day than the entire US nuclear
> > industry has released in its history.
>
> Remember "electricity too cheap to meter"? Possibly not, as that was
> rhetoric used in the UK to promote nuclear power in the 1950's.
>
> Nuclear electricity was grossly oversold because when the second
> generation reactors were being introduced -- the first post-military
> generation -- they were installed without any thought about decomissioning
> costs. In some cases (e.g. the USSR) they were installed without
> any disaster planning -- as witness the RBMK reactors built with no
> containment vessels. (If Chernobyl had been equipped with a western-style
> containment vessel, the accident would have caused no consequences worse
> than Three Mile Island.)
If the Chernobyl reactor had been of western design, it would not have been able
to go as far as it did.
> To make matters worse, civilian reactors were based on military designs;
> for example, the PWRs used in the west were originally based on scaled-up
> naval propulsion reactors. This means essentially we have lightweight
> high performance reactors, not reactors optimized for (a) safety, (b)
> economical operation, and (c) easy decommissioning. (I'm inclined to
> ascribe this to the fact that most nuclear developments were government-
> led from the start, except that without government intervention it's hard
> to conceive of a commercial entity building the damn things in the first
> place.)
You are forgetting that the breeder reactors that France uses are actually of
more military value, in addition to having the advantage that they burn off all
of their high level nuclear waste. The anti-nukers here didn't want such plants
because then there would not be a waste problem, and they'd have to get real
jobs.
> The upshot is that nuclear reactors today are a bit like space launchers
> -- hyper-evolved military spin-offs, expensive, powerful, but unreliable
> and not really suitable for low-cost, safe, civilian use. The problem
> with this picture is that there is no nuclear equivalent of ROTON or
> Beal or Kistler on the horizon; because nuclear technology has strategic
> military implications, no government is going to let some bunch of
> eccentric whacko technology entrepreneurs reinvent it in a cheap, fast,
> and out-of-control format that can prove its merit on the open market.
And they won't be allowed to develop it without fulfilling every government
bottleneck and triplicate form, or without billions of dollars in legal fees
fighting the greens in court. The number one reason why nuclear power is
uneconomical in some parts of the country is that the legal fees have increased
the cost of the project to such a large extent.
> > While some countries are shutting
> > down their nuclear plants, they are increasing output at their coal
> > plants, and are buring lower quality coal than ever before.
>
> Or natural gas. In the UK, coal plants are being shut down and switched
> to methane-burning turbined at remarkable speed. Meanwhile, the nuclear
> industry is moribund. The real exceptions are France and Japan, which
> for reasons of state policy are building potloads of nuclear reactors.
> By 2020, a much higher proportion of the UK's electricity will be nuclear
> than is the case today -- and it will be imported from France.
Who have no waste problem. However, you didn't comment on my main assertions
about the coal industry.
--
TANSTAAFL!!!
Michael S. Lorrey
Member, Extropy Institute
http://www.extropy.org
Member, National Rifle Association
http://www.nra.org
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- General John Stark
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