Senator Obama’s campaign to become president of the United States has been complicated by many factors, including the fact that he is neither white nor female, and not least of which is his use of the terrorist fist jab. Of course, some of these "issues" are more significant than others. For me, the issue of greatest concern has been Senator Obama’s use, or rather lack of use, of the N-word.
Nuclear.
Americans have been afraid of nuclear energy ever since Three Mile Island, despite the fact that no one was injured; and indeed, no one has been injured by an American nuclear power plant since then (despite America’s 104 civilian reactors and 34 naval reactors). This fear has been fueled by Russia’s many nuclear disasters, despite the fact that countries like France, Japan, and Germany have been producing 87.5% and 30% of their electricity, respectively, from nuclear energy without any major mishaps.
To illustrate this fear, consider that Univeristy Hospitals of Cincinnati, which is only two blocks away from me, operates a coal-fired power plant almost 24/7. This coal plant exposes me, daily, to 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of electricity would, yet no one seems to care. Now imagine that the University Hospitals were to announce plans to replace its coal-fired power plant with a nuclear one. The entire city of Cincinnati would be up in arms, even though the the proposed nuclear plant would be cleaner, safer, less costly to operate, and less radioactive than the coal-fired one!
No new nuclear power plants have been built in America in the last 23 years. The difficulty in building new nuclear power plants is exacerbated by the issue of nuclear waste. The nuclear waste produced by power plants in America remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and has potential applications in a terrorist "dirty bomb", although it would be useless in a bona fide atomic bomb. This, of course, presents problems when it comes to storing nuclear waste in the long term.
Fortunately, scientists have invented a technique called nuclear reprocessing that "recycles" some of the waste as fuel. The advantages of reprocessing are threefold. It increases the fuel economy of the power plant thus further reducing operating costs. It reduces the amount of waste that actually has to be stored in the long term — according to Dr. Gregory Greenman (a nuclear physicist):
If ALL the electricity used by a family of four for 20 years were generated by nuclear power; the accumulated nuclear waste due to that electricity generation would fit in a shoebox if it was not reprocessed. If it was reprocessed, then the equivalent amount of nuclear waste for the family of 4 for 20 years would fit in a pill bottle or shot-glass.
Lastly, this reprocessed waste remains dangerously radioactive for only hundreds of years, a considerably improvement over hundreds of thousands of years that makes safely storing the waste feasible.
Unfortunately, President Carter banned nuclear reprocessing, fearing that the technology might run contrary to his goals of nuclear non-proliferation. Reprocessing techniques that cannot be manipulated to produce bomb-grade materials now exist, however, and France has been using them for some time now. (Perhaps we could sell our nuclear waste to France, where they could use it as fuel in their reactors.) Also, America was developing its own Integral Fast Reactor until the project was canceled by the Democrats under President Clinton’s administration; Senator Kerry sponsored the amendment to cancel the IFR, while Senators Biden and McCain voted to continue funding it. Fast reactors, now in use by several foreign nations, do reprocessing within the reactor core itself, removing the opportunity for would-be terrorists to spirit away fissile material.
In politics, "Nuclear" has become a word as dangerous as another word that starts with the letter N. This is unfortunate, because the barriers to cost-effective nuclear energy in America are largely political. Although energy and the environment are arguably the most important issue America faces today, one of our most promising solutions to this issue it not being discussed by politicians.
Senator McCain has this to say on his website under American Energy:
John McCain Will Put His Administration On Track To Construct 45 New Nuclear Power Plants By 2030 with The Ultimate Goal Of Eventually Constructing 100 New Plants. Nuclear power is a proven, zero-emission source of energy, and it is time we recommit to advancing our use of nuclear power. Currently, nuclear power produces 20% of our power, but the U.S. has not started construction on a new nuclear power plant in over 30 years. China, India and Russia have goals of building a combined total of over 100 new plants and we should be able to do the same. It is also critical that the U.S. be able to build the components for these plants and reactors within our country so that we are not dependent on foreign suppliers with long wait times to move forward with our nuclear plans.
In this video, Senator McCain defends his pro-nuclear stance against a largely hostile student audience, saying "We have to do something about it [climate change] before we hand you a damaged planet," and, "If we really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… we’re going to have to go back to nuclear power." In this video Senator McCain references nuclear reprocessing explicitly and shows interest in modeling American nuclear power generation of of France’s success.
Senator Obama has this to say in his comprehensive energy plan:
Safe and Secure Nuclear Energy: Nuclear power represents more than 70 percent of our non-carbon generated electricity. It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table. However, there is no future for expanded nuclear without first addressing four key issues: public right-to-know, security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation. Barack Obama introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate to establish guidelines for tracking, controlling and accounting for spent fuel at nuclear power plants.
To prevent international nuclear material from falling into terrorist hands abroad, Obama worked closely with Sen. Dick Lugar (R – IN) to strengthen international efforts to identify and stop the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction. As president, Obama will make safeguarding nuclear material both abroad and in the U.S. a top anti-terrorism priority. Obama will also lead federal efforts to look for a safe, long-term disposal solution based on objective, scientific analysis. In the meantime, Obama will develop requirements to ensure that the waste stored at current reactor sites is contained using the most advanced dry-cask storage technology available. Barack Obama believes that Yucca Mountain is not an option. Our government has spent billions of dollars on Yucca Mountain, and yet there are still significant questions about whether nuclear waste can be safely stored there.
Although I can’t disagree with any component of Senator Obama’s nuclear stance, I think it reads more like an apology to Greenpeace than an energy plan. It’s hardly a surprise — Democrats have historically been opposed to nuclear power. While Senator McCain sets clear nuclear goals and, it seems, would lift the ban on fuel reprocessing, Senator Obama doesn’t promise to do anything but "consider" nuclear as an option. Moreover, Senator Obama completely ignores the immediacy of the global warming problem and the utter impossibility of solving it without nuclear power.
True, Senator Obama’s state of Illinois does have more nuclear power plants than any other American state. And Senator Obama does mention "reusing" nuclear waste, presumably a reference to reprocessing and/or reactors like the canceled IFR project, in this video. However here, Senator Obama says, "Nuclear should be in the mix if we can make it safe, we know how to store it [the waste], we make sure it’s not vulnerable to terrorist attack, it’s not enhancing nuclear proliferation — right? I mean, there are a whole set of questions, and they may not be solvable…"
Of course, it’s hard to disagree with any of this, and it’s not as if Senator McCain is saying we should disregard safety in our plants and give our nuclear waste away to terrorists. The issue I have with Senator Obama’s stance is that these "questions" are not merely "solvable", they are solved! We could start building nuclear plants that satisfy Senator Obama’s strict conditions right now using proven technologies that have been around since the 60’s. If Senator Obama isn’t willing to consider implementing these existing solutions now, why should I expect him to suddenly consider them after he is elected?
Senator McCain’s plan is not perfect. Building 45 new plants by 2030 seems like an admirable goal, but it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of why America needs to go nuclear. It isn’t about trying to win a tit for tat match against countries we don’t like over who can build the most plants. It’s about replacing our greenhouse gas emissions and foreign energy dependence with clean, sustainable, nuclear power — before out economy collapses and our coastlines flood. We would be better off taking our lead from countries with good safety records and sound energy plans. Japan, for example, aims to produce 41% of its electricity from nuclear by 2014 (and 60% by 2050), up from 30% today.
To increase its nuclear power generation by an equivalent 11% of total electric demand, America would have to go from 14% nuclear power to 25% by 2014. If America’s total electric power production is 604,514 MW, and we assume each nuclear power plant puts out 600 MW on average, then America will need to build some 251 new nuclear power plants in the next six years. (Data taken from the Department of Energy.) Obviously this isn’t possible, but equally obvious is Senator McCain’s ridiculously inadequate goal of "eventually" building 100 new nuclear power plants sometime after the year 2030.
Senator McCain talks as if he appreciates the immediacy of the global warming problem, but the number of nuclear power plants he actually proposes to build falls far short of what we need. Other aspects of Senator McCain’s energy plan (the futility that is offshore drilling, for example) and environmental voting record leave a lot to be desired. For these reasons and others, I’ll still be voting for Senator Obama come November. However I really appreciate Senator McCain’s straight-talking on the nuclear issue, and I really wish Senator Obama would use the N-word more often.
you scientific types need to just figure out antimatter. after all, that would be a completely safe technology.
or we could solve america’s obesity problems and energy problems simultaneously with government mandated bicycle-powered TVs for any overweight person under the age of sixty.
I don’t know if your comment about antimatter is sarcastic or not, but I ought to point out that antimatter, like the hydrogen of hydrogen fuel cells, is not an energy source — it’s a way of storing energy, like a battery does. The energy to separate the hydrogen from water, or the energy to create matter-antimatter pairs, has to come from somewhere.
What scientists do need to go figure out is nuclear fusion. Unlike nuclear fission, the power source I describe in this blog entry, nuclear fusion neither requires radioactive fuel nor produces radioactive waste. The problem is, scientists have yet to achieve sustained nuclear fusion that generates more power than it consumes, and it could easily be 30 more years before they come close. The point I was trying to make is that nuclear fission power is a time-tested and proven technology available right now. If we wait for fusion power, it will be too late to stop global warming.
I do like your suggestion about human-derived bicycle power, but unfortunately the numbers don’t add up. For instance, my one-bedroom apartment used 210 kilowatt-hours of electricity last month. That comes out to around 7 kilowatt-hours per day. Your average fat person eats around 3000 Calories per day, and even if all that energy could be converted directly into electricity it would only produce 3.4 kilowatt-hours per day. That’s less than half of what I’d need to power my apartment, let alone my workplace.
Keep thinking about creative solutions to our energy crisis!
yes, i was kidding about the antimatter thing being safe.
and even if bicycle-TVs don’t make that large or an energy consumption difference immediately, think of all the energy used charging defibrillators for fat people suffering from coronary disease. bike TVs could put an end to that.
(again, mostly kidding.)
You guys need to watch Soylent Green to get the real scoop on bicycle power, not to mention dieting through being too grossed out to eat.
P.S. Stop slamming fat guys. (I resemble that remark).
[...] became lest fluent when the debate moved on to foreign policy. Although it’s really just a pet issue of mine, Senator Obama still refuses to take a stand on nuclear reprocessing. Perhaps the most devastating [...]
According to several articals that I have been reading, Obama opposes reprocessing. This is good.
Frank, thank you for your comment; my apologies for taking so long to reply. I checked out the links on your website, but I wouldn’t consider them authoritative. For my readers, here are the links:
The first link goes to the "African American Environmentalist Association" blog, which claims Obama is against reprocessing, but it does not cite any sources. The last three links go to conventional media websites citing John McCain as saying Obama is against nuclear reprocessing. However none of the links actually cite Obama saying he is against reprocessing, so all we can really do is speculate. If you come upon a statement by either Obama or his campaign that is either for or against reprocessing, I would be grateful if you would share it with me.
I’ve deduced from your website and candidacy for the Senate that you are opposed to nuclear power, and you have surely deduced that I hold the opposite view. Still, I am surprised that you are opposed to reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. Reprocessing be used to transmute nuclear waste into a form that will not remain radioactive for as long and thus not require a long-term storage facility like Yucca Mountain.
It’s true that Sellafield, a nuclear reprocessing facility in Britain, has released quite a bit of radioactive material into the environment, often deliberately. This has been a failure of management, not engineering. Reprocessing facilities in France, Russia, and Japan have been operating for decades without serious incident. Given the opportunity to literally eliminate nuclear waste and bring thousands of high-paying jobs to New Mexico, I would have expected you to support GNEP.
The company that is bidding to have a nuclear waste reprocesssing plant less than 40 miles from my house and 15 miles from my swimming and fishting hole is EnergySolutions which is basicly an offshoot of the management that did such a great job at Sellafield.
A while back, as I was reading a web site from France of an entity that would be equal the US Public Health Services in the United States. It said that France had the highest cancer rate in Europe.
I would like to respectfully suggest that you look a little deeper into the serious indidents that have occurred in France, Russia, and Japan.
As for Obama and Reprocessing, I understand your skepticism. But I hope my findings have been accurate.
EnergySolutions, an American participant in GNEP, did indeed purchase a component of BNFL when the latter company was dismantled in 2005 after the latest Sellafield incident. I think calling them an "offshoot" of BNFL is a bit of a stretch, though. EnergySolutions has been managing two nuclear waste facilities in the United States since before its acquisition, and its total nuclear portfolio is much larger than the component of BNFL it purchased.
According to an article in Annals of Oncology, France (59 nuclear reactors) did make it into the top five of cancer incidence amongst European countries. It came in behind Hungary (4 reactors), Ireland (0 reactors), Belgium (7 reactors), and Switzerland (5 reactors). The cancer incidence in Japan (55 reactors) was lower than all but three European countries. Cancer incidence in the United States (104 reactors, more than any other country) was lowest of all. These statistics do not seem to support a link between nuclear power and increased cancer incidence.
I am familiar with the nuclear industry’s safety record, and I am proud to say that it surpasses that of industries like coal and oil in the United States, France, and Japan. I think it is unfair to compare our safety record to that of Russia, which has, historically, been deliberately unsafe, a direct result of which was the worst nuclear accident in history.
A comprehensive list of nuclear accidents is available on Wikipedia. Certainly the nuclear industry does not always inspire confidence, but I am not familiar with any French or Japanese accidents in which the public was demonstrably harmed. I would be interested to know which of these accidents you deem "serious" enough to merit such virile opposition to nuclear power.
I should make a correction to be more clear about this. Instead of saying EnergySolutions is basicly an offshoot of the Management that did such a great job at Sellafield, I should have said that the same people that did such a great job at Sellafield are now in management positions with EnergySolutions.
Ben,
Hey – work in the industrial automation industry and I was just wondering if the picture with the smiley faces on the stacks is a real plant and where you got it from. Need to spice up some presentations. Thanks!
Bridgette
Actually, I shamelessly stole the image from another blog, the Bigger Better Deal. Unfortunately, I don’t know if the smilies are real or where the picture was taken. The linked blog post talks about making biofuel from algae, which might also be useful for your presentation. Sorry I can’t help more!
How costly would it be to put the plant, (obviously not the smiley face cooling tower), underground. Old guys like me have a much higher tolerance for underground nuclear explosions than surface explosions.
And can the waste heat be used in desalination?
And how about that Dr. Rashidi guy. See
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/majid-rashidi/
And how about an entry on algae rather than corn for ethanol production?
Putting a nuclear power plant underground is not a merely a matter of cost, but an optimization of cost and safety. The question you should be asking is: for the additional cost of putting the reactor underground, could I make it even safer via alternate means?
Putting a pressurized or boiling water reactor underground would not obviate the need for a containment structure. Anyone who has seen a geyser knows that earth is quite permeable to steam, and steam is going to be your main vehicle for radioactive release in the event of a catastrophic accident. Also, putting a reactor underground necessarily puts it closer to the water table, so special care would have to be taken to ensure that contamination of the latter does not occur in the event of a leak. Thus, situating a conventional reactor underground truly represents an added cost.
Assuming you could convince/mandate utilities to spend more on safety, would putting a reactor underground make it safer than, say, spending an equivalent amount of money on a thicker containment structure? I honestly don’t know, and it’s going to depend on the size of the reactor (among other factors). You’ll have to ask a nuclear engineer. However if putting reactors underground would mollify opposition to them, that might be worth the added cost all by itself!
The LFTR (see my latest blog post) is among reactors that could very well be situated underground. It is small enough to bury economically. It would not produce radioactive steam in the event of a catastrophic accident, so situating it underground could very well reduce the need for a man-made containment structure. So yes, people have certainly been thinking about it.
As for your other questions:
I was re-reading your comment, and I noticed that you mention nuclear explosions. Nuclear power plants can certainly explode like dirty bombs — conventional explosives mixed with radioactive material to create fallout. This is what happened at Chernobyl, and it’s what probably would have happened at Three Mile Island save for the latter’s concrete containment structure. Reactor designs like LFTR and TRIGA are especially resistant to this kind of accident.
However I want to correct the popular myth that nuclear reactors can explode like the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They cannot. Nuclear bombs are intricately precise instruments with just the right proportions of nuclear material and just the right geometry. Nuclear reactors have neither the content nor geometry of a nuclear bomb. Thus, nuclear reactors cannot explode with the force of a nuclear bomb. It’s not physically possible. It has never happened, and it will never happen with any existing reactor design.
If anyone is confused on this point — that nuclear reactors do not explode like nuclear bombs — please post a comment here so that I may address your concerns.
I would like to say one thing in the defense of France and the Cancer rates brought up by Frank McKinnon a long time ago.
It is known to be one of the largest smoking countries in the world, as the stereotype is that a frenchmen often has a cigarette in his mouth.
It is proven that smoking cause cancer, and thus you cant deny that there would be a much higher cancer rate in France than other countries.
You’re for nuclear re-processing? That’s madness. Thankfully, Obama does not agree with you and now he has closed by Yucca Mountain and ended Bush’s attempt at reviving nuclear reprocessing in the US.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7252/full/460152b.html
I appreciate your vote for Obama, but don’t mistake Obama’s nuclear energy policy. To get nuclear energy off the ground there would need to be major reform and Obama if anything Obama is stopping these dangerous reforms. Let’s go with wind and solar.
By the way, your math is a bit weird. Currently the US has around 100 commercial nuclear reactors, and they generate 14% (according to you). Also, new nuclear plants are going to be at least 1000MW, I’ve not heard of anyone building 600MW plants. Now, they are all way over budget and a waste of money, but they are not 600MW. So McCain’s proposal would boost us to at least around 20% (that is until one blows up and we have to shut them all down).
By the way, here’s a real nutjob. This guy wants America to have 100 nuclear reactors in 20 years? You really think that is a safe option?
http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/energy/stories/senator-calls-for-100-new-reactors-in-20-years#comment-3158
Republicans ongoing love affair (like Sen. Lamar Alexander) with Nuclear demonstrates clearly they are simply not sane people.