Random Thoughts: Anti-nuclear protesters, please stop trying to kill people.

They have good intentions but they are doing harm.
I do not want to paint the average anti-nuclear person as being evil. A lot of them think they are doing the right thing. However the facts do not back up their fear driven actions. The fact that they have actually stopped the building of reactors in the US for decades and are now shutting down reactors in other nations has cost and in the future will continue to cost lives. That is not what they want but it is the result of their actions.

A resent study by Pushker A. Kharecha  and James E. Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University took a look at Nuclear power and how many lives it has cost compared to other sources of energy. What they have found is that Nuclear power has saved over 1.8 million lives compared to other sources of energy. 

Here is the paper for you to read for yourself Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power. From this paper we can see data that shows that every nuclear power plant not built has cost lives and contributed to greenhouse gas emissions. 

To put it into a nutshell, coal powered power plants cost the most lives and produces the most carbon. Natural gas is second in deaths and carbon emissions followed by nuclear. This accounts for all deaths including those from mining accidents, transportation, waste disposal, and power transmission. Here is the data from the report. 

electricity source	mean value (range)	unitb	source
coal	28.67 (7.15–114)	deaths/TWh	ref 16
	77 (19.25–308)	deaths/TWh	ref 16(China)c
	1045 (909–1182)	tCO2-eq/GWh	ref 30
natural gas	2.821 (0.7–11.2)	deaths/TWh	ref 16
	602 (386–818)	tCO2-eq/GWh	ref 30
nuclear	0.074 (range not given)	deaths/TWh	ref 16
	65 (10–130)d	tCO2-eq/GWh	ref 34

As you can see there are between 387 to over 1000 deaths caused by coal fired plants for each death caused by nuclear power. Natural gas is much better with only 38 times as many deaths as nuclear power. When you look at carbon emissions, coal produces over 16 times as much carbon for gigawatt hour and natural gas over 9 times as much carbon for gigawatt hour. 

What about Solar and Wind?

Well let's just get the big answer over with first. Not a single canceled or closed nuclear power pant has ever been replaced by solar or wind. Even in the state of Vermont which is known for being ecologically sensitive is replacing it's nuclear power plant with natural gas. 

Nuclear does not compete with solar or wind. Nuclear is a base-load technology and competes with coal and natural gas. Solar and wind are not suitable for base-load because their output fluctuates based on weather and not demand. Solar is not now, and unless massive improvements are made will never be, a viable replacement for base load plants. 

Wind as a base load solution.

Depending on location wind can be a workable base load solution. The midwest is rich with wind resources which is funny because that is also where the source of much of the natural gas and oil is located. It is also where much of our food is grown and the source for most ethanol and bio diesel. Wind is better at solar for a base load, but you still will need peaking plants burning natural gas for when the wind is not blowing or is blowing too hard. Yes, wind turbines have to shut down when the winds get too high, so too much wind is as bad as too little.  There are also siting issues. Do you really want wind turbines on every mountain top of every national and state forest? That is another advantage that midwest has for wind power. The majority of the land of the great plains is used for farming, ranching or just open grass land. Wind turbines do not interfere with those land uses. Good news is that wind farms are being built in the midwest. The down side is it takes a lot of wind turbines to replace one nuclear reactor. The largest wind farm in the US is the Alta Wind Energy Center in California. It covers thousands of acres and produces 1550 gigawatt hours of power. The Saint Lucie nuclear power plant, which is an average sized  nuclear power plant produces over 11,000 gigawatt hours. As you can see it would take 10 of the largest wind farms in the world to replace one nuclear power plant. That would mean 9000 very large wind turbines and well over 10,000 acres of land.

What about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima?

Let's take those one at a time.

Three Mile Island

So far the studies of the people that lived around Three mile island has found no significant increases in cancer and no direct deaths. It is hard to tell for sure since the area has a lot of Radon naturally. But it is clear that any harm is so small that it is hard to detect.  Here is the report by Columbia University http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/132/3/397.abstract.

Chernobyl

Chernobyl is a different story. Officially 33 are listed as killed but could be as high as 3000. The reactor design used at Chernobyl was, to be blunt, terrible. It was never safe and no western power reactor ever used that type of design. It also lacked any type of containment building. Should anyone build a reactor like that again? No. Should the existing ones be shutdown? Yes. Western power reactors are all light water reactors with containment buildings. They can not fail in the same way. 

Fukushima

Death toll from radiation is zero. As bad as Fukushima was no one has died from radiation. How they manage clean up will really tell the story. The problems at Fukushima were caused by the backup generators being flooded. The reactors were actually undamaged by the quake and tsunami that followed. When looking at Fukushima it is important to look at the scale of the disaster, 18000 people were killed by the tsunami and over 400,000 left homeless but none died from radiation. 

What about the waste.

The answer to the waste is recycling. Fuel recycling reduces the mass of the waste and the amount of time it has to be stored. Today fuel recycling is more expensive than just using new fuel. I agree that just sticking spent fuel in Yucca mountain is not a good plan at this time. Dry cask storage while not popular is probably the best plan available today. If in the future recycling is still not practical than vitrification and storage in Yucca mountain may be the solution. I know this is not a popular solution because it feels incomplete but I believe it is the best course of action at this time. 

The future of nuclear reactors.

Today the most advanced commercial power reactors in the US are only second generation reactors. In the rest of the world gen 3 and gen 3+ reactors are in already use. The US has produced gen 3 and gen 3+ reactors but have built them in other nations.While the current generation of reactors have a good safety record the gen 3 and 3+ are much safer and use less uranium so produce less waste. Work has already started on gen 4 reactors that are even safer and more efficient than the gen 3. A reactor that holds huge promise is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. 

Thorium.

Thorium holds great promise as the fuel of choice for future reactors. Thorium its self is not dangerously radioactive. It was used to make lantern mantels burn brighter. You can not make a bomb out of thorium and it is free. How can it be free? It is a waste product from the production of the rare earth metals used in hard drives and the motors of electric cars.  If the US mined all the rare earths that we use there would be enough thorium produced to power the US with ease.  The most exciting reactor design is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. The US built a liquid fluoride salt reactor in the 70s and it worked well. It also featured "walk away safety", you could literally shut the power off and walk away with the reactor in any state and it would shut it's self down safely.  Currently China and India are moving ahead with thorium reactors using the research done in the 1970s in the US. 

Fusion?

Today Fusion is not practical. Let's be honest, the joke is that fusion is always 20 years away and has been for the last 60 years.  There are some exciting new ideas in fusion research that may actually pay off in the near future. The first is the Pollywell reactor invented by Robert W. Bussard and funded by the US Navy. So far the Navy has been happy with the results of the research and have continued to fund the research.The other reactor that is very interesting is the high beta fusion reactor being developed by the Lockheed Martin Skunkworks. The claims that Lockheed Martin are making are hard to believe, they are promising a working prototype by 2017 and production by 2022 and the ability to meet the world's energy needs by 2050.  Frankly if it was any other company than Lockheed I would not believe a word of it.  Lockheed is the company that built the US's first production jet fighter, the first spy satellite, and the world's fastest airplane the SR-71. The number of times Lockheed has done what everyone thought was impossible is impressive, so maybe they will do it again.

So what is my answer?

Working with the technology currently available I would start with replacing all coal fired plants with nuclear power plants. That alone would cut the US's carbon output by about 40%.  Keep increasing the investment in wind farms in the midwest and solar. Ideally, we want to replace all base load power plants with nuclear with wind, solar, and natural gas as peaking loads. Once we have enough clean, cheap power things get really interesting. With excess power the production of synthetic natural gas, gasoline, and diesel fuel becomes practical as does producing fresh water through desalinization. 

Be positive not negative. 

If you care about the environment and climate change be positive. Be pro-solar and wind not anti-nuclear. Nuclear really does not compete with wind and solar, it saves lives, and reduces carbon. The safety record of nuclear is very good. I know that people fear nuclear power but the facts do not support their reactions. Even one or the co-founders of Greenpeace Dr. Patrick Moore has changed his stand on nuclear energy. As always, just read the reports and the links and decide for yourself. Some people will never get over their terror of nuclear power but I hope at least some people can do so.

The big sunny lie, why solar and wind can not replace oil.

Solar and Wind will not significantly decrease America's use of oil and to say or imply that it will is just untrue.

This image is at best a mistake and at worse pure spin.

Yes I said it and it is true, alternative energy will not signinficantly decrease America's dependence on oil. Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Nuclear and Hydro are already being used produce electricity.  However, electrical power does not replace oil for most uses. You can not practically make pastic, fertilizer, or power ships, and aircraft with electricity. 

Some cars can be replaced by electric cars, but the costs are still very high for the batteries and the range is short. Electric car adoption is not being limited by the cost of electricity, or the availability of electricity, so the availability of alternative energy has zero effect on the adoption rate. For more people to buy and use electric cars the price has to come down, charging speeds must be massively improved and range tripled.  However if you can afford a second car for commuting an electric car can make a lot of sense. They payback time will be very long but the Nissan Leaf is a good choice and the new Chevy Volt offers the best of both words so do take a look at them. The problem is that even if we had a major break through in battery tech it will take years to get a large percentage of current cars replaced with EVs.  I left out trains because trains can be electrified and really probably should be but they are not big user of oil. There are just not that many of them and by ton mile are very efficient.

But wait.  Oil is used to make electricity, so we can decrease our oil dependency by using solar for that right? Well yes some oil is used to make electricity, but do you have any idea how much of our electricity in the US comes from oil?

1. 50%
2. 35%
3. 20%
4. 10%
5. <1%

Even 10% must add up to a lot of oil, except it isn't 10%.

Less than 1% of all electricity in the US comes from oil.

Please notice that the US already gets several times the amount of electrical power from renewables than from oil which is great. I want to see that increase and coal start to decrease. 

So oil is used to make less than one percent of all electrical power in the US. That cannot be an insignificant amount of oil. 

Well yes, it really is.  It is less than 1.4% of all the oil used in the US and that amount is dropping. Oil is right now one of the most expensive ways to make electricity.  Coal, nuclear, wind, hydro-electric, natural gas, and solar are all cheaper. Except for a few places where ease of transportation is the biggest factor like in remote villages of Alaska and the state of Hawaii oil is on the way out. Yes, Hawaii should replace it's oil fired plants with solar, wind and geothermal. They are working on it. Remote villages in Alaska are a not well suited to solar or wind.


Another interesting fact is that most of the oil burned to make electricity is residual fuel oil.

Resdiual fuel oil is what is left after all the other liquide fuels are removed. It really is the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. For more info just read this link.

So should we keep developing alternative energy even if it doesn't replace oil?

YES!

Solar, Wind, Nuclear, and Geothermal replace Coal which is a good thing.

Coal is a huge contributor to green houses gases, strip mining damages the land, and even not counting green house gases is not as clean as solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas, and even oil. I am not anti solar and wind, I am pro truth. Yes support alternative energy, but don't support it with a lie. Back in the 70s when we had the first oil crisis, the US did get almost 20% of it's electrical power from oil.  But that was then and today the amount is tiny and decreasing, so maybe people are still living in the past, I don't know, but today alternative energy replaces coal but it will not stop oil spills, decrease the price at the pump, or decrease our dependance on foreign oil. 


Now if you want to do that and an electric car is not an option, might I suggest you look at trading in that big old car or old VW beetle for an new car like the Ford Fiesta? With all the safety improvements like anti-lock brakes, airbags, and electronic stability controls you will actually be safer than you are in your big safe car and will get milage of almost 40 MPG highway.

Support alternative energy but don't support a lie.

Cutting green house gases and reducing the use of coal is reason enough to support solar and wind as well as, in my opinion, nuclear.  However connecting solar and wind development with preventing oil spills, dependance on foreign oil, and or the price of gas at the pumps is just fiction. Look up the data for yourself and you will see the facts. Don't take my word for it when you can do the research for yourself.