Nuclear energy is more expensive than renewables, CSIRO report finds

Crappy, extremely dangerous, overpriced power, with wastes that must be maintained for eons, is not a socio- economic necessity.

 

I'm not controlling anything. I'm offering you the actual evidence from the actual research. It's actually some of the research that you provided. Your repeated refrain of "industry propaganda" makes if clear that you haven't engaged with any of the research on the subject. Instead of engaging in confirmation bias, I implore you to actually read some of this research.

Nevermind though, as I did previously, this time I also did your homework for you.

https://research.ebsco.com/c/ngbbkk/viewer/html/6zgx5r5bov

The answer to the question, "what do you do about .71g of plutonium released from Fukushima" is: Don't worry to much about it. At Naiemichi you have to eat about 400 kg of polluted dirt, absorb the entire distribution of plutonium contained in that dirt, have it all accumulate in the same kg of your body, and then wait 50 years to have any measurable impact on your risk of cancer. At Futaba-maichi you have to eat about 17X as much dirt for the same effect.

Fortunately for us, the human body doesn't absorb plutonium well even though the part that does stick around does stick around a long time. When ingested, only about 0.04% is absorbed. Man, that really increases the amount of dirt you have to eat. More than 50X as much. Where are you going to find the time to eat that much dirt?

If you're worried about the amount of plutonium in the corium, step one is, don't eat it. Step 2 is stick it in the basement under a bunch of concrete, and surround the basement in secondary containment. The corium at Fukushima is in the basement. It's contained in a bunch of concrete, and they built multiple secondary containment systems that limit anything from escaping. Step 3 is to monitor it for signs of increased activity. In such a case you might have to go in and break it up into some smaller chunks to prevent runaway. Other than that, it's just fine right where it is.

Did you know that the remaining reactors at Chernobyl were decontaminated and continued to operate until around 15 years after the meltdown?

 

Again - distorting the question in an attempt to control the narrative. This is a general question for all nuclear power plants in the world - "What are YOU going to do with all the High Level Radioactive wastes"?

 

I'm going to take this as a concession that the amount of plutonium released at Fukushima isn't really that big of a deal, just like the UNSCEAR impact study suggests. Let me know when you come up with some data that suggests otherwise.

 

Sure, ignore the central question about the foolishness of the Nuclear Power industry. Why - because you know that there is NO response that makes sense.

 

Now on to this new topic change.

"What are YOU going to do with all the High Level Radioactive wastes"?

High level wastes, as you call them, contain energy that we can still use. I suggest we use it. In Gen VI reactors, as an example. Medical sciences use it. It's used in manufacturing for inspection & testing. In agriculture for insect & pathogen control, selective breeding of plants, food preservation. We even stick it in emergency signs. Just because it is a waste byproduct of some types of energy production, that does not mean it no longer has use.

 

Finally you respond, however your response is naive at best, again parroting industry jargon that has no basis in reality.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/reprocessing-nuclear-waste

Each year in the United States, nuclear power reactors produce about 2,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods. This highly radioactive waste, which will remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, is currently stored at the reactor sites where it is generated.
...
For instance, the French company AREVA, which reprocesses French spent nuclear fuel, claims that reprocessing "reduces the volume of waste by a factor of at least four." This statement is contradicted by recent data from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which show that reprocessing greatly increases the total volume of radioactive waste, compared to direct disposal of spent fuel.
...
In addition to high-level waste, reprocessing generates other types of radioactive waste that require secure disposal. These wastes are more dilute than high-level waste (and hence have greater volume). Although most of the waste falls into the low-level waste category, reprocessing increases the volume by a factor of six to seven relative to the once-through cycle.
...
Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel would increase, not decrease, the total volume of nuclear waste. AREVA's claims to the contrary are inaccurate. Reprocessing is not a sensible answer to the nuclear waste problem.

 

I don't care about the volume of the waste. I care about the danger that volume poses. You accused me of trying to control some sort of narrative. Meanwhile, each of your arguments focus on conveying some sort of emotional response, rather than a rational response. You say "plutonium has a half life of 24,100 years!" And of course it's all in bold like you've made some great point about how dangerous it is. Now that I've presented the data regarding the actual risk this element poses to your health now we have to shift topics to waste in general. Now it's all about the volume of low level radioactive waste.

I'm going to insist on actual data here before I engage with you further. Why is the volume of low level radioactive material a problem? Do you think it's hard to store? Does it sneak out of that storage in the middle of the night and peep in your windows? What's the actual problem here?

 

24,000 years is a long-long time. And the volume is extremely important. The UCUSA report mentions 2000 tons of spent fuel rods per year. In the US, these fuel rods are being stored in heavy population centers up-and-down the East Coast, and in the Southeast. We just had an earthquake on the East Coast. Can you guarantee that another earthquake won't happen with the epicenter at one of these many, many storage sites for the next 24000 years?

This industry wants to downplay this possibility, but the fact is - There are no guarantees. It's not a question of "if this will happen", it's a question of "when this will happen, and how bad will it be". Future generations get NOTHING from this waste, but they will be burdened with maintaining it, and always with the threat of an imminent disaster.

THERE ARE BETTER WAYS to power our country and our world.

 

Your religious devotion is touching.

 

And your willingness to dump all these problems on future generations is not religious, but instead - extremely Satanic.

 

The "problems" exist only in your imagination.

 

Why? Let's say we have two volumes of radioactive material. Volume 1 is 1m^3 with ≈ 4E15 Bq/m^3. (average container of high level waste). Volume 2 is 7m^3 with ≤ 3.7E10 Bq/m^3 (standard for LLW).

Prove to me that volume 2 poses some "extremely important" risk to someone somewhere at some point in time due to the potential of maybe something happening.

 

I suppose the CDC is just industry propaganda, but this should be informative regarding the volume debate.

https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/about/how-to-measure-radiation.html

By processing high level waste, and using the energy until all that remains is low level waste, you might increase the volume of remaining waste. But holy crow reducing its radioactivity by 5 orders of magnitude is certainly a plus.

 

https://markets.businessinsider.com...prices-negative-renewable-demand-green-2024-5

Looks like the California problem of too much energy during the day and not enough at night is a problem in Germany too.

 

Let's see what CSIRO has to say about this.
We have World Class windless weather: Today 95% of wind turbines on the continent of Australia are failing
By Jo Nova

There is no saving the Australian wind industry from a high pressure cell
Right now 19 out of 20 wind turbines are essentially towers of fiberglass waste
Australia has built 11.5 GW of theoretical total wind power capacity on the National Energy Market (NEM) spread across 80 locations on the Eastern Seaboard, and at one point today only 4.1% of it was working. Another gigawatt of generation on the Western side is only generating at 3 – 5% capacity.

The green bar below represents total wind generation today compared to the total power consumed (the black line).


Total wind generation for the NEM in Australia.

 

No, it is known as "stating facts" and "refusing to buy into bad propaganda".

Something you actually do not do, as you are so busy denying anything you do not like and screaming at clouds. Which I guess you think is actually more important than say trying to refuse the claims with actual evidence.

 

Predominantly I’m asking the question about what are you going to do about the Low Level Radioactive Waste?

 

What am *I* going to do about it? Why, absolutely nothing. No more than I am going to deal with the destruction of China in their mining rare earth elements or their enormous use of fossil fuels.

Oh, and if that is such a freaking huge concern of yours, then you had better get to work on banning all X-Ray machines, chemotherapy and radiation therapy, and smoke detectors. Because that is actually a large source of such waste.

So tell me, do you plan on banning chemotherapy and radiation therapy? And I am not joking. When my wife underwent radiation therapy in 2009 all the bedding had to be taken to be disposed of because it was considered radioactive hazardous waste.

 

That's quite the comparison you came up with I'm sure you'll be more objective once you learn the facts. Keep in mind in the US, most of these wastes are stored on the heavily populated East Coast and the Southeast.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/safer-storage-spent-nuclear-fuel

If a malfunction, a natural disaster, or a terrorist attack causes the water to leak from the pool or the cooling system to stop working, the rods will begin to heat the remaining water in the pool, eventually causing it to boil and evaporate. If the water that leaks or boils away cannot be replenished quickly enough, the water level will drop, exposing the fuel rods.

Once the fuel is uncovered, it could become hot enough to cause the metal cladding encasing the uranium fuel to rupture and catch fire, which in turn could further heat up the fuel until it suffers damage. Such an event could release large amounts of radioactive substances, such as cesium-137, into the environment. This would start in more recently discharged spent fuel, which is hotter than fuel that has been in the pool for a longer time. A typical spent fuel pool in the United States holds several hundred tons of fuel, so if a fire were to propagate from the hotter to the colder fuel a radioactive release could be very large.

https://cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/nuclear-waste-pilesscientists-seek-best/98/i12

“Regardless of whether you are for or against nuclear power, and no matter what you think of nuclear weapons, the radioactive waste is already here, and we have to deal with it.”

IN BRIEF
More than a quarter million metric tons of highly radioactive waste sits in storage near nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities worldwide, with over 90,000 metric tons in the US alone. Emitting radiation that can pose serious risks to human health and the environment, the waste, much of it decades old, awaits permanent disposal in geological repositories, but none are operational. With nowhere to go for now, the hazardous materials and their containers continue to age. That unsustainable situation is driving corrosion experts to better understand how steel, glass, and other materials proposed for long-term nuclear waste storage containers might degrade. Read on to learn how these researchers’ findings might help protect people and the environment from waste leakages.

That’s Gerald S. Frankel’s matter-of-fact take on the thousands of metric tons of used solid fuel from nuclear power plants worldwide and the millions of liters of radioactive liquid waste from weapons production that sit in temporary storage containers in the US. While these waste materials, which can be harmful to human health and the environment, wait for a more permanent home, their containers age. In some cases, the aging containers have already begun leaking their toxic contents.

 

You did not say spent nuclear fuel, you quite clearly said "Low Level Radioactive Waste".

Look, you are going to have to learn to stop spinning in circles and actually say one thing and freaking mean one thing. This is really dishonest, to say one thing when you mean something different.

 

Ifs and buts, candy and nuts.

Did you forget to argue how important the volume of low level waste was?

Why don't we use the remaining energy in those fuel rods in Gen 4 reactors? There's more than 200 years of non greenhouse gas producing energy laying around waiting for us to use. Using it would turn the majority of it into low level waste.

Your argument was that doing that would increase the volume of the waste, so I'm waiting for your explanation of why that would be worse.

 

We need to wait for him to find the right article to tell him what he thinks.

 

I've already posted this once, and obviously you didn't read it.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/reprocessing-nuclear-waste

For instance, the French company AREVA, which reprocesses French spent nuclear fuel, claims that reprocessing "reduces the volume of waste by a factor of at least four." This statement is contradicted by recent data from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which show that reprocessing greatly increases the total volume of radioactive waste, compared to direct disposal of spent fuel.
...
In addition to high-level waste, reprocessing generates other types of radioactive waste that require secure disposal. These wastes are more dilute than high-level waste (and hence have greater volume). Although most of the waste falls into the low-level waste category, reprocessing increases the volume by a factor of six to seven relative to the once-through cycle. The United States has three NRC-licensed, commercially operated low-level waste disposal sites that currently accept waste. Reprocessing increases the volume of "greater-than-class-C" low-level waste by a factor of 160. DOE is responsible for disposing of this waste, which contains long-lived radioactive isotopes and cannot be placed in a regular low-level waste site, but as yet has no policy on how to do so.

 

Did you read it? It claims the volume of waste increases? So what? Why is a larger volume of low level waste worse than a smaller volume of high level waste? This is my question for you.