Deaths from electricity production, some more data

[ZiprHead]

I touched my tongue to a 9 volt battery once.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Aye, there's the rub. It would remove any need for a sense of responcibility. It will have the same result as the Treasury bailing out the big banks.

...

No. I'm not saying they provide all insurance, but insurance above the amount that the insurance market won't cover.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Except we haven't figured out how to get it done (re:Yucca Mt debacle). 30,000 yrs worth if the price ever goes high enough to mine sea water. Otherwise our proven and potential reserves at current usage level is 230 years. From there on we have to count on various technological improvements. Not saying we shouldn't do it, just that you're painting too rosey a picture.

1) The waste issue is a political one, not a scientific one. I live <100 miles from Yucca Mountain and it's not going to do anything to me except possibly with property values. I'm opposed to it on policy grounds--I'm not worried about it functioning, I just oppose sealing the waste away so inaccessibly when in time I expect we will come to our senses about reprocessing. I favor the salt mine approach so that if we decide to dig it up we can do so readily. Salt mine/Yucca/embedding in the abyssal plains--all will work from a technical standpoint. If we could be confident of stopping global warming then reprocessing/dumping it at the south pole would also work. (It would melt it's way down and come to rest on the ground below. Reprocessed waste would decay to ambient long before it was moved to the ocean. I am opposed to ice sheet disposal because I don't think we can count on the ice sheets sticking around long enough.)

2) 230 years with no reprocessing. "Spent" fuel still has 90% of the fuel left.

3) 230 years without the use of breeder technology. I don't know what the multiplier here but I suspect it's in the ballpark of 100x. (As at present we use only the U-235, a bit less than 1% of the uranium.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As to nuclear waste, there is absolutely no need for long term 'Yucca Mountain' style repositories; For over six decades we have been storing spent fuel at reactor sites, and in that time, exactly zero people have suffered the slightest injury; What we are currently doing is perfectly good, and it is only a false perception that this is inadequate, along with the highly inefficient practice of dumping partially used fuel (largely due to the blocking of reprocessing by NIMBYs* and BANANAs**) that makes it necessary to do even that.

Nitpick: There was a diver who suffered a minor radiation burn. He picked up what was thought to be a piece of debris that ended up in the pool. Note that he actually handled a piece of a spent fuel rod and lived to tell the tale. (Admittedly, it would have been far more dangerous had he not been underwater at the time.)

The anti-nuclear myths are so all-pervading that they are simply assumed to be true; But they are not. Nuclear waste needs to be handled with care for a few years, but not for thousands - the short lived stuff is the dangerous stuff, and it disappears after a couple of decades (in some cases, such as ¹³¹I, much faster than that).

The long-lived stuff is mostly usable as fuel, and by its very nature isn't particularly dangerous.

Once you remove the fuel and the commercially useful isotopes the remainder will decay to ambient in 10,000 years and will be only very mildly radioactive long before that.

Insurance is currently available on the private market, and does not rely on government, except to insure the very large 'risks' which we can now see are not significant from an actuarial point of view; and to cover liabilities for events such as cleaning up of spilled materials that other power producers don't even pay for, much less insure against. Coal and Gas plants just squirt their toxic waste into the air and forget about it; If they were treated the same way as the nuclear industry, and had to ensure that none of their hazardous waste entered the environment (and pay to clean up if it accidentally did) then there is no way coal or gas could compete with nuclear on price.

Yup. A nuke plant that emitted radioactivity like a coal plant would be shut down pronto.

There's also the nuke plant in Arizona that had to get an exemption about the radioactivity of some discharge water. Compliance with the rules was impossible--they were using treated sewage water for their input and it was too hot due to nuclear medicine (with imaging studies the spent stuff just goes down the toilet. Only when they are dealing with really hot stuff do they capture the waste.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

... Did you read your own link? Not 30,000 years if we mine sea water. "Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies." If we also mine seawater then the Scientific American numbers mean we'll run out in 8 million years.

What we will run out of in 230 years at current usage levels is proven reserves of U-235. If we haven't solved the problems with fusion by then, and if we haven't abolished the practice of throwing away the U-238 that our U-235 comes to us mixed with, then at that point it will pay to prospect for more uranium ore. Proven reserves of metals grow when prices rise.

If breeder reactors are the solution why aren't they being built? It can't simply be that it would cost 25% more than standard reactors because it should drastically cut the amount of fuel required as well as the cost of waste storage.

1) 25% more would be a show stopper in today's world. The fuel costs of a reactor are a small part of it's total cost.

2) That's irrelevant anyway--we don't use breeder technology because of that magical phrase that shuts down all reason: Plutonium. A breeder reactor doesn't breed uranium, it converts the otherwise useless U₂₃₈ into plutonium.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I touched my tongue to a 9 volt battery once.

I've been hit by 100,000V before. I had the sense not to be hit in a sensitive part of my body.

I saw the teacher hit by about 300,000V through his little toe. He was limping for the rest of class.

 

[ZiprHead]

I was in a class with a guy that accidentally stuck his finger in a charged crt anode. Funny stuff.

 

[Bomb#20]

If breeder reactors are the solution why aren't they being built? It can't simply be that it would cost 25% more than standard reactors because it should drastically cut the amount of fuel required as well as the cost of waste storage.

A variety of reasons. As Loren notes, fear of plutonium is one -- you can count on the NIMBY folks to go the extra mile. Regulatory agencies are used to dealing with conventional reactors and getting breeder reactors approved would be more complicated. And the main advantages of using them will benefit people far in the future -- less radioactive waste to deal with and more uranium ore remaining close to the surface. So the whole prevalent corporate quarterly-bottom-line mentality isn't well-suited to making that choice. Switching to breeder reactors any time soon would take a government decision.

(Of course arguably, the right approach might be to just let people far in the future make that choice instead of switching now. I.e., we just keep growing the waste storage pools and using up the ore until "mining" our existing reactors' waste becomes cost-competitive with digging fresh uranium out of the ground. On the other hand, I suspect allowing current power companies not to build breeder reactors right away may just be begging for them to externalize their expenses, pay out all their profits in dividends, and then when it's time to decommission their conventional reactors and recycle all that accumulated waste, at that time instead of building breeder reactors they'll just go bankrupt, so when the bill comes due the taxpayers will eat it. I'm certainly not qualified to figure out if that's going on; I only hope regulatory agencies have some competent accountants keeping an eye on the long term costs. If power companies planning for that scenario is part of what's holding back breeder technology, it's nothing that putting a tax on nuclear waste couldn't fix.)

 

[bilby]

Nitpick: There was a diver who suffered a minor radiation burn. He picked up what was thought to be a piece of debris that ended up in the pool. Note that he actually handled a piece of a spent fuel rod and lived to tell the tale. (Admittedly, it would have been far more dangerous had he not been underwater at the time.)

The anti-nuclear myths are so all-pervading that they are simply assumed to be true; But they are not. Nuclear waste needs to be handled with care for a few years, but not for thousands - the short lived stuff is the dangerous stuff, and it disappears after a couple of decades (in some cases, such as ¹³¹I, much faster than that).

The long-lived stuff is mostly usable as fuel, and by its very nature isn't particularly dangerous.

Once you remove the fuel and the commercially useful isotopes the remainder will decay to ambient in 10,000 years and will be only very mildly radioactive long before that.

Insurance is currently available on the private market, and does not rely on government, except to insure the very large 'risks' which we can now see are not significant from an actuarial point of view; and to cover liabilities for events such as cleaning up of spilled materials that other power producers don't even pay for, much less insure against. Coal and Gas plants just squirt their toxic waste into the air and forget about it; If they were treated the same way as the nuclear industry, and had to ensure that none of their hazardous waste entered the environment (and pay to clean up if it accidentally did) then there is no way coal or gas could compete with nuclear on price.

Yup. A nuke plant that emitted radioactivity like a coal plant would be shut down pronto.

There's also the nuke plant in Arizona that had to get an exemption about the radioactivity of some discharge water. Compliance with the rules was impossible--they were using treated sewage water for their input and it was too hot due to nuclear medicine (with imaging studies the spent stuff just goes down the toilet. Only when they are dealing with really hot stuff do they capture the waste.)

When the time came to decommission the Calder Hall magnox reactors, BNFL wanted to build a small coal power plant to provide on-site power when the nukes were disconnected from the grid.

They had to buy land to build it outside the main Sellafield complex site boundary, because the coal burners would have emitted radioactive materials in excess of their site license.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When the time came to decommission the Calder Hall magnox reactors, BNFL wanted to build a small coal power plant to provide on-site power when the nukes were disconnected from the grid.

They had to buy land to build it outside the main Sellafield complex site boundary, because the coal burners would have emitted radioactive materials in excess of their site license.

Oh, that's rich!