Nuclear plants are the answer

[NVMojo]

April 3, 2006

Energy problems have become a way of life. It's time to take stronger corrective action instead of pussyfooting around. There are many angles to these problems and they did not develop overnight; there also are many solutions. Our lust for oil is the greatest problem, and also, our dependence on natural gas and coal is abominable.

What are the answers? Conservation is a must. Also, solar energy, wind power and ethanol are all-important alternatives, but their large-scale production is not enough to solve our problems. Nuclear energy is absolutely necessary, a must.

In a joint statement on global warming, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences last year issued the following key points prepared by 11 leading international science bodies:

• Significant global warming is occurring.

• It has caused increases in sea levels, retreats of glaciers and changes in many biological systems.

• Most warming in recent decades can likely be attributed to human activities, largely from developed countries.

• Action taken now to reduce the build-up of greenhouse gases will lessen the magnitude and rate of climate change.

• Failure to implement reductions now will make the job more difficult in the future.

snip...

Even Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., appears to be coming around his thinking because of a possible reduction in the amount of spent fuel to be stored at Yucca Mountain. It has been determined that Yucca Mountain is suitable for long-term isolation for spent nuclear fuel. This facility will remain open and closely monitored for 100 to 300 years. If there is ever a problem, casks containing the used fuel can be removed and the problem corrected.



more...

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/14247927.htm

[400Years]

1. No, reduction in energy usage is a better solution

[phantom power]

7. How much do you plan to reduce it?

Current world energy usage is about 400 exajoules per year. What number can we reduce it to, and what will be the consequences?

[400Years]

14. more than what we would get out of going the nuclear route

everthing has consequences, I think the consequences of living a simpler lifestyle would be better mental health.

[phantom power]

15. I like numbers. Can you give me a number?

I'm not sure what you mean by "going the nuclear route." If I said that, it might mean "replace all the energy we currently get from coal, oil and natural gas with nuclear power." But different people mean different things.

[400Years]

16. I'll explain

by "going the nuclear route" I meant using nuclear energy as a way to offset what will be a reduction in energy we get from dwindling supplies of petroleum, assuming they are dwindling.

Some people are advocting a stronger reliance on nuclear energy which I don't think is a good idea.

[rfkrfk]

35. very little petroleum is used for electricity, at least in the US

http://eed.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/USEnFlow02-quads.pdf

look at the graph, 0.9 quads

worldwide, could be different

for reasons I don't understand, European policymakers seem to
prefer the most expensive fuel they can find

[400Years]

43. I am aware of that

[AndyTiedye]

2. Only Three Problems

How do you keep them safe, when the companies that operate them have so much incentive to conceal any problems that occur?

What do you do with the waste?

It takes a lot of energy to extract/refine the fuel and build the plant, and the plants are only operable for 25 years or so
before the reactor vessel becomes embrittled by all the radiation.

[sweetheart]

3. fluffy fake numbers

Anyone with a little math exposure knows what an infinite series is.
The amount of nuclear radioactive waste in the world is just such an
infinite series. The pile increases at rates geometric to its decay,
and the cost of maintaining it, far in to the future, implies
constancy of political control and economic means to continue to
reprocess and store safely an every increasing amount of toxic waste
for thousands of years.

Any person who actually penned the numbers of the public expense in
the end-to-end cost of nuclear power, would be immediately personally
attacked by the neocrims.... they want nukes... big centrallization and
public budgetary theft, rather than massive micropower, the real solution,
to break the generator monopolies and make micropowermarkets sustainable
so individual houses can sell excess power back to the grid at industry
rates.

[wtmusic]

11. "The pile increases at rates geometric to its decay"?

What ARE you talking about? What does the amount of waste have to do with an infinite series?

[sweetheart]

21. Ok, lets do some of that?

Lets say it takes 40 man hours to reprocess 1 cubic meter of nuclear waste,
combined with 1 billion dollars worth of plant and equiptment. Now, given
that that person is being paid 1000 years in the future to deal with the waste,
if we apply the unknown average interest rate of inflation over 1000 years and
calculate it back using NPV, the costs are outrageous.

But the implied presumption, in all of the nuclear thinking, is that the long
long term costs will be paid for free by the taxpayer... because the math for
the costs 1000 years from now just looks like a load of silly mathematical series
and powers...

The amount of waste increases say 1% per year... and yet diminishes at a much
smaller rate... say .001% per year. The increase is geometrically higher. Perhaps
simplistic, but a fair comparison.

If you tell me the waste product from your nuclear reactor will decay over 10000 years,
then when you price out the cost of the power, include in the price the costs of
10,000 years of waste keeping, and all ancillary costs, present value.... its not
"infinite" series, but it might as well be given the number of fantasy civilizations
on earth that have survived over 1000 years without radical transitions that would
put a stockpile of highly toxic nuclear waste in severe risk.

The hubris of the 10,000 year future is the joke of nuclear power, and at the
bottom of it all, it is your and my descendents who will pay the price, both
in taxes and in radiation leaks, terrorism and toxic contamination.

[mdmc]

4. I would prefer if they closed Indian Point

but I can take nuke power in very limited quantities.

[Lindacooks]

5. If we had invested the hundreds of millions of dollars in solar

and wind energy, it would be absolutely as feasible and as capable of generating as much energy as nuclear. Nuclear energy's costs are so high, in terms of dollars AND in the threat to the planet, that it is NOT a feasible solution to the problem.

I live a short distance away from a single windmill that provides more than 40% of the energy to the college that owns it. ONE WINDMILL. There's no pollution, no adverse compounds produced, no worry about storing spent fuels.

This is the argument that I had with a college roommate, who was convinced that nuclear energy was safe. She worked in the nuclear physics field, and guess what? She died of cancer at the age of 37. NO history of cancer in her family. Coincidence? I don't think so.

[Dead_Parrot]

13. What do they do when it's not windy?

Odds-on they buy coal-produced electricity from the grid. Still, it makes them look green, I guess.

[Lindacooks]

25. As I said, it provides 40% of their energy. And it's almost always

windy here. You don't need much wind to turn these windmills, even though it's huge - you can see it from everywhere in town. They're still on the grid, and I know it's coal and nuclear. But our state is building more and more wind farms. You can, for a fee, have all your electricity come from wind power, according to the utilities.

[Dead_Parrot]

27. They're lying.

It's impossible to get all your power from wind, because it's not always windy: Otherwise, you need something else. Only hydro and NG can produce energy on demand: At the moment, you can loose drops in wind power in to output of coal, but as it becomes more important you have to look at the backup. Neither coal or nuclear are suited to on-demand, so it's a dead-end.

[Ready4Change]

30. Its always windy somewhere.

The sun is shining on half the world, all the time.

Solar and wind power takes a different mindset than nuclear or coal. Rather than single, large plants, you need to do a distribution of thousands of small installations.

We already have the wiring, because we already deliver the power to nearly every building in the country. What if every roof had at least 1000 watts of PV panels? Not just every home, but every gas station, every convenience store, every mom'n'pop store. What if every school had enough panels to meet 50% of its daily electricity needs? Every new Wallmart was required to meet 100% of its daytime needs, or it would be denied building permits? Every factory roof were made into a public generation asset?

How much less coal would we burn? How much load would be removed from nuclear power plants? Enough energy slack to allow us to take a nuke plant offline every 25 years for refurbishment without worrying about how to meet our needs? Enough to lighten the pollution loads in cities around the Great Lakes?

Initially, it's NOT about replacing fossil and nuclear fuels, its about reducing our dependance on them. To buy enough time so that, whenever they run out, we are ready to handle it.

As you say, right now, we can't handle it. But we need to start learning how to.

[Dead_Parrot]

32. It's not that simple, sadly

When ever you put electricity down a wire, you get less out than you put in: some comes out as an electrical field around the wire. Even with the US's current distributed generation, something like 40% is lost in transmition from the powerplant to the end users. The idea that electricity can be made in, say, Colorado and piped off to New York sadly has little mileage in reality. If only it did, but short of a grid made of high-temperature superconductors you need to make do with what you've got.

Putting PV on every roof (ignoring the cost, for the moment) has a certain attraction since more electricity is used during the day: Theorectically, you could strip nearly all of the peak load off this way (0-300Gw), and leave the base load (something like 300GW) to be generated by other means. In practice, it's a little more tricky because you need to allow for cloudy days, but you're in the right ball park here. A nuclear/solar combo has a lot to say for it, pollution and dependance wise: the high cost of PV make it a bit of a non starter, but there are other solar techs that would offset this.

Incidentally, I'd dissagree about reducing dependance as being the key concern. The CO2 is (IMHO) the overriding problem at the moment: getting off fossil fuel ASAP is the only way to limit the damage that's already occuring.

Edit: This is, BTW, why I don'y jump with joy at the current offering from wind and solar. They're nice, and they help, but they can only help so much. At the moment, the US is well short of the ~15% wall, so it's not an issue - but when it is, it's a biggie. :(

[JohnWxy]

79. Wind turbines will be sited closer to major load centers -

a link to the report that this excerpt is from can be found at this link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x48959

"Continued cost reductions from low wind-speed technologies will increase the resource areas available for wind development by 20-fold and move wind generation five times closer to major load centers."

U.S. Climate Change Technology Program – Technology Options for the Near and Long Term
August 2005

"It isn't hard to think of possible difficulties before you embark and it is a bit harder to come up to solutions to potential problems, in the end it's advisable to not give up before trying."__ JW

[Dead_Parrot]

80. I was assuming they would be AT the population centres

So you're telling me it's even worse than I thought? :D

[Lindacooks]

36. They're not 'LYING'. Sheesh.

There is no reason to lie.

If you're looking for liars, look at the nuclear energy people. They're the ones who have something to hide: pollution that lasts forever, risk to human health, extraordinary costs.

[Dead_Parrot]

52. Let me guess...

...It says it on a "green tarrif" leaflet, along with pictures of a turbine and a PV panel, and probably a smilling child, where it offers you the chance pay an extra 10% on your bill - despite the fact that <2%% of the power will be coming from renewables.

Paging Mr Barnum...

[struggle4progress]

59. What do you do when the local nuclear plant is refueling? Or ..

... shut for repairs? We have a large grid because essentially every local power source is offline sometimes ...

[Dead_Parrot]

81. Main difference being, you can decide when that is.

Unless you have some God-like abilities you're not telling us, you can't command the wind to blow and stop at command. Also, most nuclear power plants consist of several reactors, so shutting down one reactor does not mean stopping power production (as an extreme example, the Chernobyl power plant continued to produce electricity until 2000).

[struggle4progress]

85. Planned like this?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=48544&mesg_id=48544

or this?

... The new rotor will replace the defective one at Koeberg's Unit One generator, which was damaged by a loose bolt in December. The shut down at Koeberg resulted in Western Cape consumers having to contend with chaotic power outages. However, consumers can still expect outages this winter as unit one at Koeberg has to be shut down for the repairs ...
Replacement rotor for Koeberg arrives today
http://www.sabcnews.com/economy/business/0,2172,125077,00.html

or this?

San Onofre reactors shut down
... The nuclear power plant shut down its nuclear reactors this week after discovering faulty gaskets in some of its backup water tanks used to cool reactors in an emergency ... and the power plant's electricity customers continued to receive power from backup sources in and out of California ...
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20060401-9999-2m1onofre.html

[hunter]

89. Spain has been chronically short of power for many years now.

Minor disruptions quickly escalate into major disruptions.

These disruptions have been caused by everything from natural gas shortages, to hydroelectric shortfalls caused by drought, and insufficient generating capacity during heat waves.

Spain has some of the dirtiest coal fired plants in Western Europe. The most probable solution to these problems will be the construction of more coal fired power plants.

Anti-nuclear activism in Spain indirectly supports the coal industry there.

The situation in South Africa is strikingly similar.

If San Onofre was shut down, the shortfall would almost certainly be made up for by the construction of new coal fired plants in the southwest.

You don't work for the coal industry, do you, struggle4progress?

[NNadir]

95. My guess is that it depends on what you mean by "work for."

I don't think they pay him. He does it gratis, I think.

[struggle4progress]

99. Can you produce a link in which I cheer for coal? If not, please ..

.. kindly consider blowing it out your nose.

This "anti-nuclear = pro-coal" propaganda is a mystification -- it obscures the real political and economic forces which contribute to our current problems. In fact, the coal and nuclear industry are intertwined ...

[Dead_Parrot]

101. Bullshit

If you want to stop greenhouse gas emitions, your options with todays technology are:

Nuclear baseload with peak solar;
Fluctuating wind with hydro backup; or
Shut the hell up.

Supporting wind and solar and nothing else is like eating hamburgers whilst protesting slaughterhouses.

All of which will go over your head: Like the Union of Concerned Scientists, you think "let's get 20% of out power from renewables" is an energy policy. Yeah, that's really going to save the fucking planet.

[NNadir]

103. All of your posts cheer for coal.

This is because you repeatedly ignore the risks of coal, while magnifying every single minor risk associated with nuclear power.

You have no option to present to replace nuclear with an alternative. None. Zero. Moreover you have no demonstrated evidence beyond silly newspaper articles about every bolt to demonstrate that it is more important to replace nuclear power plants than it is to replace fossil fuel facilities. When asked about this, you change the subject, issuing yet another vague and essentially meaningless one liner. All of your statements are negative statements about nuclear power, but you can offer no positive alternative except (also) vague meaningless blather about "politics and economics." Actually there is no evidence that your understanding of either politics of economics is stronger than your understanding of energy in particular or technology in general. Neither do you seem to have even a rudimentary sense of risk.

If you have a political or economic program that you think will work and realistically address the immediate crisis of global climate change, come out with it then. Tell us what political or economic plan you advocate to address global climate change. I note that many people are clear on that. DCFirefighter, for instance, writes eloquently about detailed programs of tax policy and the philosophy of ownership. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=48057&mesg_id=49176 One need not agree with him (or her) to recognize that he is specific, thoughtful, and clear about what he or she thinks needs to be done.

In my opinion you are the sort of person vilified by Theodore Roosevelt - correctly I think - in his 1915 speech "Citizenship in a Republic."

The relevant parts of that speech I reproduce here:

There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the The rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.

http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/3745/tr.html

President Roosevelt the first had his faults, but he certainly wasn't a coward, intellectual or otherwise.

[Dead_Parrot]

93. Actually, yes

Both of these were deliberately shut down for safety reasons. It's not like the fuel just vanished one sunny afternoon.

[struggle4progress]

97. Planned to have a bolt damage the rotor?

[Dead_Parrot]

98. Ahem, my bad...

...I thought were talking about the loose screw again. :blush: Although of course, since it's in the generator, it was as likely to happen to one of the coal plants you are so in love with as a nuke plant.

[JohnWxy]

51. wind power - check this out

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=48480&mesg_id=48480

[benevolent dictator]

6. Hasn't it been shown,

more than once, that nuclear energy is NOT the solution?

There's a thread on it here http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=46584&mesg_id=46584

I don't really think generating tons of radioactive waste that has to be "stored" for millions of years is really a great solution to our energy crisis. Not to mention the effects that nuclear plants would have if anything were to go wrong...

[wtmusic]

12. Nuclear energy IS the solution

Far less dangerous than burning coal or oil per watt of energy produced. Wind/solar not viable. Takes over 1000 windmills to create the energy of a medium-sized reactor. No wind/sun? You're out of luck.

Here's what 1000 windmills looks like:



Where do you want the windmills? That's what I thought--same place as where nuclear waste is stored. Not in your back yard.

[Lindacooks]

26. Those are small, outdated windmills. I HAVE a windmill in my

backyard, about 1/4 mile away, and I think it's fantastic. No noise of any kind, it's gorgeous, kind of sculptural looking, and as I said before, if you factor in the cost of pollution and human health, nuclear power is by FAR the most expensive fuel.

Do you want a nuclear waste storage site in your backyard?

I didn't think so.

[Dead_Parrot]

28. The cost of human health?

Fossil fuels kill over 700,000 per year: About 1 every 45 seconds. Arseing about with solar and wind, with no back-up, is just continuing the deathtoll. And whilst I don't particulaly want a nuclear waste dump in my back yard, I'd rather have that than the rising sea level, changing rainfall, and massive drought & starvation I'm going to get at the moment.

Nuclear waste is contained. The stuff from your exhaust pipe and coal power-plant isn't. It really is that simple.

[Lindacooks]

37. Uh huh. Like the radiation levels from Chernobyl was 'contained'.

That crap blew all the way around the world. There is NO containing a nuclear accident.

[Odin2005]

47. I'm sick of the nucleophobes bringing up Chernobyl.

IIRC, meltdowns are pretty much impossible with some the newer designs. All the old-school enviromentalsts, such a Lovelock, support nuclear energy. I also consider the claims by the nucleaophobes that Chernobyl causes thousands of deaths to be utter BS.

Anti-Nuclear = Pro-Coal = Pro-Global Warming as far as I'm concerned.

[Dead_Parrot]

49. That what happens

when people get their environmentalism from Greenpeace et al, preferring to get their 'knowledge' in sound-bites rather than actually studying the subject.

Sad but true.

[struggle4progress]

58. "Trust us. Don't worry. It's completely safe." We heard it for years ...

.. before TMI or Chernobyl. That sort of noise belongs to a long industrial PR tradition, familiar from other similar claims such as, "This ship is unsinkable."

[Dead_Parrot]

78. Or claims like "we can get all our power from renewables"

or "This technology will be ready in 10 years", or "we've got 30% more of this than we had last year"

I notice that most of the anti-nuke crowd never seem to comment on the threads relating to the climate change that is happening now, preferring to talk about what may happen in n-years time. Why is that? :shrug:

[Dead_Parrot]

48. The crap from coal power

Blows all the way around the world every fucking day. And that's not an accident, that's normal. pollution from fossil power killed more people last week than the Chernobyl disaster. It's killing everything from Pacific coral reefs to polar bears, setting us up for the biggest mass extiniction in 250 million years. And you are supporting them.

Why?

[Odin2005]

50. Bingo.

Anyone who thinks Nuclear is even a fraction of as dangerous as Coal needs to educate themselves.

[JohnWxy]

75. Wind Power Potential = 3 Times U.S. Demand

North American Wind Power: Capacity Expected to Quadruple by 2010


Wind Energy Potential = 3 U.S. Demand

[wtmusic]

29. How much of your power do you get from your windmill? nt

[Lindacooks]

38. I don't get your point.

I'd love to have a windmill, but I don't because at this point they're too expensive for me. If we had subsidized wind and solar energy as much as we've subsidized nuclear, things would be very different.

[JohnWxy]

76. Want savings numbers? How about Hundreds of thousands of dollars?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x48498

SACO, Maine --City officials are exploring whether it makes sense to erect a wind turbine to generate electricity and cut down on the city's energy costs.


Members of the City Council's energy committee, along with Mayor Mark Johnston and City Administrator Rick Michaud, are planning a trip on April 17 to Hull, Mass., where two wind turbines save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in electricity costs.

[wtmusic]

34. Honestly I wouldn't care

Many misconceptions about the true hazard of low-level nuclear waste. I could fit the spent fuel rods for the entire city of Los Angeles, using electricity for a year, in my back yard. Given the safeguards which are employed at these sites and the inert form in which it is stored (melted into glass "pucks") I'd be happy to perform that public service. Really.

[Lindacooks]

39. Fine. Then you can have them.

Just keep them away from me.

[struggle4progress]

41. Spent fuel rods aren't what's called "low-level" waste. eom

[struggle4progress]

56. Spent fuel rods are not currently stored as "glass pucks"

[poopfuel]

91. and furthermore, as a friend puts it

The only reason why anyone can even make an argument for nuclear power with a straight face is that no one has tried to decommission a power plant yet.

I suppose we could use illegal aliens....or convicts.... or Republicans!

[hunter]

96. Quite a few plants have been decommissioned actually.

In the United States:

-- Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station
-- Shoreham Nuclear Power Station
-- CTVR (Pressurized Tube, Heavy Water); and
-- Pathfinder (Superheat BWR).

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/decommissioning.html

Many research reactors have also been decommissioned.

A rational way of building new power plants would be to site them very carefully with the expectation that these sites would always be set aside for nuclear power. This way the old plants could be left in place and would be overseen by the security systems of operating plants.

It's very expensive to strip a plant to bare ground, and to ship everything to a central repository such as Hanford. A nuclear power plant that has been shut down and emptied of fuel is not particularly hazardous unless you are inside of it. Locking disused plants down is a reasonable option unless you need the land for something else.

In the United States the decommissioning of nuclear plants is a bizarre political process very much influenced by contractors who expect to make a lot of money doing it. The more frightened the public is of the entire process, the more money these contractors make.

[TheWraith]

92. Do you have any idea how little power one windmill produces?

Stunningly little. To make a significant dent in US energy needs, you would need to cover all of Nevada and Utah in windmills. Pave over everything. Somehow, I don't think that that's what you had in mind.

I'm no great fan of nuclear power, but this idea that the solution to energy for the future is solar roofs and windmills is ridiculous. It's a fantasy.

[Ready4Change]

31. I want windmills.

I want PV panels on my roof. I want to replace/boost my gas water heater with a solar heater. I want to install enough panels to be a net contributor to my power grid, rather than a draw.

I know how much it would take. I know it would fit. I'm gonna do it.

Big power stations are dinasours. Future generations will wonder what we were thinking.

[wtmusic]

33. More *ahem* power to you

If everyone would do that the world would be a far better place. But it will be practical for very few people, and even you will need to draw on the grid when it's cloudy. We can't just shut down everything whenever it rains, now can we?

[Lindacooks]

40. Overly simplistic analysis.

For somebody who obviously knows something about energy, you sure are oversimplifying solar and wind energy.

[wtmusic]

44. Just realistic

No solar/wind proponent here has addressed what happens when there's no sun/wind. Call it simplistic if you like; it's a major hurdle which, until some economically-viable way to store excess energy is found, has no solution.

If you've ever been to Palm Springs, CA you know what a wind farm looks like. It's not one windmill here or there, it's thousands. They're ugly and create a huge environmental "footprint" in the desert. Most were created as a tax deduction which no longer exists, so when they break they're left to rust where they are (it's not even worth it to fix them). Solar arrays are similar--like windmills, they take a huge amount of energy to produce (some argue more than they could ever create in their productive lifetime).

I know a little bit about energy and I admit that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". But these threads crop up every once in awhile on DU, and sometimes a physicist or mechanical engineer shows up and they invariably say the same thing: for the amount of risk (and there is some) nuclear is still the way to go. I defer to them.

[hunter]

17. Why would you cite that awful thread?

It's dead, Jim.

[jpak]

8. No surprise that the author is a retired utility executive

Perhaps he can tell us where the uranium is going to come from....

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0903.html

[MemphisTiger]

9. From Nigeria of course like the other "yellow cake" in 2003

:sarcasm:

[azndndude]

10. From Navajo lands where much of the uranium is.

However the Navajo Nation council has passed a law banning uranium mining.

[NNadir]

20. Uranium is not produced because the stocks are so high.

The world has been awash in excess uranium about 2 decades. This is the chief reason it has not been mined actively.

So linking the figures for uranium mining completely ignores economics.

Actually a person who is a utility executive would be an expert in the field. Or do you suggest that we ask hairdressers what the best form of energy is. I know pretty much what hairdressers would most likely answer: Solar power. They saw it on TV.

[jpak]

22. In this case, the hairdresser would be right

and the so-called "expert" wrong.

US uranium production peaked in 1980 at 43 million pounds per year - US mine output has declined to ~2 million pounds per year today.

US uranium stocks are in decline and currently maintained by imported yellow cake - not by domestic production.

US reactors consume ~62 million pounds of uranium each year - significantly higher than the 43 million pounds produced in the peak year of 1980.

The US can't supply fuel to its present stable of reactors - it's an unsustainable industry.

And every hairdresser knows that....

[NNadir]

23. No doubt that much anti-nuclear information comes from people who don't

understand very much.

I notice that lots of nuclear reactors have shut down world wide because they lack fuel. They're closing everywhere because there is "no uranium" in the United States, and as well all know, the United States is energy self-sufficient and does not trade in energy.

The world has stopped building nuclear reactors because there is no fuel.

We also note that the United States dumps huge amounts of Thorium because it is so rare and it can't be found anywhere.

One wonders why anti-nuclear activists need to go such shrill and worried lengths to justify their irrational paranoia. I mean, if they were right about the claimed uranium shortage, nuclear power would do what they always have promised it would do, go away. They wouldn't need to appeal to arguments one might overhear at cosmetology school, but certainly not in nuclear engineering programs. It would appear that the anti-nuclear crowd doesn't believe itself where the alleged fuel shortages are concerned. This seems to be about the only thing they've gotten right for decades of pronouncements.

I note that the world supply of plutonium alone is enough to provide the entire earth's energy demand for about 6 months, and nuclear power has just gotten started. Moreover, in the case where plutonium were burned (as it should be), additional plutonium would be created in the process, albeit not necessarily as much as is consumed. Moreover, the types of nuclear reactors that have been built have been rather limited. The Gen IV program, which will be complete - should humanity survive global climate change - when the world's supply of U-235 available at under $200/kg - is stressed, has six types of reactors, including epithermal reactors. The raw energy contained in spent fuel - already isolated - represents over 60 years of the entire current US energy demand. Moreover, there is a considerable amount of depleted uranium that is so cheap and available that it is used as ballast and for tank shells.

Thus it is easy to see why the anti-nuclear crowd doesn't just sit back and confidently wait for the uranium to run out - because the claim is nonsense. The earth contains billions of tons of uranium. Moreover, because uranium has such high energy density, it is possible to expend a great deal of energy to obtain it, and still have a very high energy return on the energy invested. Even in a once through light water reactor, the energy content of uranium is half a million megajoules per kg. Completely fissioned, uranium (and thorium) have an energy content of almost 80 million megajoules per kg. This of course also demonstrates why nuclear energy is so environmentally attractive - it doesn't take much mass processing to produce it.

As I have noted many times - should uranium prices rise to $200/kg - which may not happen in the lifetimes of anyone reading this and which will in any case have a trivial effect on the cost of nuclear energy - uranium is recoverable from seawater. Even at $200/kg, the cost of uranium is the equivalent a gasoline at considerably less than a penny a gallon.

Rod Adams covers why fuel burnup has not advanced as far as technologically possible, and lingers at about 40-50 megawatt-days/metric ton: The nuclear fuel companies would face lower demand for fuel, which is their primary source of income. However when fuel becomes a competitive affair - and it will - these same companies will be compelled to offer fuel types offering higher burn-ups. Radkowsky type reactors can achieve burn-ups three times as large as current types.

Basically though, I have no problem believing that the anti-nuclear argument consists entirely of people who are ill equipped to understand even the most basic concepts about energy content.

In any case, even if nuclear resources were limited, which they're not, there simply is no other workable option right now in the global climate change crisis. This situation of objecting to nuclear energy right now is similar to a person on the Titanic objecting to the lifeboat on the grounds that it might be too cold in it to get a decent night's sleep.

[jpak]

45. Extraction of uranium from seawater = pie-in-the-sky

The concentration of uranium in seawater is 3.3 micrograms per liter.

US reactors consumed ~28,000 metric tonnes of uranium oxide last year.

How many cubic kilometers of seawater would have to be processed to extract enough uranium to meet *current* US uranium demand (you can assume an unrealistic 100% extraction efficiency to make it easier)?????

Some numbers for comparison:

mean annual discharge of the Mississippi River = ~535 km3/year

volume of Chesapeake Bay = 73 km3.

tell us all about it...

[dcfirefighter]

53. 7300 cubic kilometers

28,000 tonnes uranium oxide ~= 24,000 tonnes of U

24,000 tonnes U / 3.3 ug U/l = 7.3 x 10^15 l seawater, or 7300 km^3, 100 x the volume of the Chesapeake.

Impressive huh?

The technique for removing heavy metals from seawater is to get it to adsorb to some treated polyethylene. So I could use some sort of net to filter it.

How about a 10,000 m^2 (0.01 km^2) cone (55m across) dragged behind a boat traveling 10 km/h for 8,000 hours a year? How about 10 of them? That would be 8,000 cubic kilometers of water passing over my adsorbant matrix.

Better yet, I could anchor these nets in the gulf stream, which is 5 km/h, but I'd need twice as many.

If the process was 1% efficient, I'd need 2000 of these nets. Compare this to 510,000 US oil wells,the 1400 US coal fired power plants, or the 6600 worldwide super tankers currently in service.

Not a pipe dream, if you ask me.
At $200/kg this haul represents $5.6 billion. 2000 moored nets. $5.6 BILLION. 2000 moored nets.
Wait. You said 100% efficient. 20 moored nets. TWENTY moored nets. $5.6 BILLION. $280 million per net.
You'd also get 44,000 kg of Gold ($850 Million) and who knows what other precious heavy metals.
pie in the sky. huh.

[struggle4progress]

57. Sell your house, buy a boat and some nets, and knock yourself out.

We'll all be eager to hear about your fortune when you strike it rich.

[dcfirefighter]

61. Spot price of U308 is only $100

IOW, there are easier ways to get it.

[NNadir]

67. No one will get rich from this right now. Uranium is too readily

available.

If uranium prices ever get high because uranium dominates the world energy supply - that would be the only case in which humanity survives global climate change - someone in a future generation may get rich from the technology.

One of the more silly claims of those people who sit around complaining that nuclear energy doesn't work, even though it produces nearly 30 exajoules of energy annually, is that various technologies are failures since they are not currently used.

When oil was first refined to make lamp oil in the 19th century, no one would have ever believed in off shore oil platforms. "That would be way too expensive," they might have said.

Now of course, we have people crying because the platforms are threatened by hurricanes - but they exist and have done so for decades now - although they continue to kill people in huge numbers through the agency of air pollution - including pollution with carbon dioxide.

Uranium is cheap. The cost is equivalent to gasoline at less than 0.1 cents per gallon. That will not always be the case, but in any case, the cost of fuel has very little to do with the cost of nuclear energy. When the cost of uranium rises enough, there will be plenty of ways to get it - some of which are now considered novel.

The argument that the world is going to run out of uranium quickly is about equivalent to all other increasingly rejected and desperate anti-nuclear arguments.

I have a new metaphor that I recently used and liked, and I'll repeat it with a slight alteration. A person arguing against nuclear power is rather like a passenger on the Titanic who, upon being offered a seat in a lifeboat petulantly announces, "I am not getting in that lifeboat. It will not get me to New York! I bought a ticket to New York! I DEMAND to be taken to New York in the luxury suite I paid for!"

[struggle4progress]

84. No one will ever get rich from nonsense like that.

[jpak]

64. Those things will be coated with bacterial biofilms within hours

of immersion, and a community of algae and macroorganisms within a few days or weeks...

http://www.biosciences.bham.ac.uk/external/biofoulnet/What%20is%20biofouling/NERC%20Article/mar_biofouling_sticky_problem.htm

http://www.altcorp.com/affinitylaboratory/biofilms.htm

http://www.mdsg.umd.edu/Education/biofilm/baier.htm

The chelation sites on these materials would be rapidly isolated from seawater and become non-functional.

Furthermore, because other metals are present in far greater concentrations than uranium in seawater, they would rapidly saturate the adsorbing material and significantly reduce the yield of uranium.

These things would be great for culturing bacteria, shellfish and algae in static arrays and very good at destroying plankton communities and larval fish if towed....but they will be useless to supply industrial quantities of uranium from seawater...

again, pie-in-the-sky....

[NNadir]

66. Gee, I wonder they worked then?

Maybe they should have asked you for a diktat on the subject before they tried it out, no? You could have explained to them that it wouldn't work because of biofilms.

During preliminary heavy metal recovery experiments from seawater, roughly 1 mm thick, 30 cm x ~ 15 cm sheets of adsorbent were stacked until roughly 1 kg was loaded into a 50 cm diameter cage constructed from metal mesh. This cage was moored by float and anchor at a water depth of 10 m (roughly 20°C water temperature) at 6 km offshore from Sekinehama of the Shimo-kita peninsula of Aomori prefecture. While the adsorbent was allowed to contact natural ocean current (averaging 0.1 m/s), the adsorbent was pulled up every 20 days, and the quantity adsorbed was measured. The quantity of uranium recovered from the adsorbent is shown in Figure 3. As indicated by this figure, the adsorbed quantity increased with days moored, and about 2 g had adsorbed per 1 kg of adsorbent at 60 days. Simultaneously vanadium (V) as a heavy metal was recovered at a loading 1.5 times that of uranium. In addition, 0.3 g of nickel (Ni), etc. was also recovered

http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html

Maybe you can write to these people and tell them that they are only imagining things, and are confusing the biofilms with uranium, nickel and vanadium. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to hear from you.

[jpak]

68. When they can publish this nonsense in an international peer reviewed

marine chemistry journal and let their colleagues repeat and verify their work, I'll believe it.

Pie-in-the-Sky.

[NNadir]

69. You mean like this article in a peer reviewed journal?

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/iecred/2000/39/i08/abs/ie990474a.html

Here is the abstract.

Methacrylic acid (MAA) and 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) were cografted with acrylonitrile (AN) onto polyethylene fiber by radiation-induced graft polymerization. The cyano groups produced were converted to amidoxime groups (-C(=NOH)NH2) by reaction with hydroxylamine (NH2OH) to recover uranium in seawater. Various weight ratios of AN/MAA or AN/HEMA in the monomer mixture for cografting generated MAA- and HEMA-cografted amidoxime (AO) fibers with various hydrophilicities. The amidoxime group density and water content were balanced to enhance the uranium adsorption from seawater. MAA-cografted AO fibers exhibited a higher adsorption rate than HEMA-cografted AO fibers. The optimum value of the weight ratio of AN/MAA = 60/40 in the monomer mixture was observed both in a submerged mode at an ocean site and in a flow-through mode in the laboratory. The amount of uranium adsorbed was 0.90 g/kg of the MAA-cografted AO fiber at 293-298 K after 20 days of contact at the ocean site.

You're kidding when you say you'll believe it, if it's published in peer review journals of course. You are on a quest to prove that nuclear energy doesn't work and make a series of ever more desperate arguments in the face of the fact that it does work and is going to be expanded by an ever more crisis shrouded world.

I could produce many more such references, but you would find ever more tortured ways to deny them.

In my view most of your arguments are reminiscent of similar types of arguments from religious groups arguing that evolution doesn't work. It's desperate and deliberate misconstruing of the data.

[jpak]

70. I've read that article and it's full of holes

They claim that the fouling they encountered wasn't due to organic material - it was all iron precipitates they removed ultrasonically.

You can't remove organic biofilms this way - and you certainly can't with dilute acid or base...

and there's no such thing as inorganic "gelatinous iron oxides"

Some of us understand marine chemistry and biology and know bullshit when they see it...

Let them publish this nonsense in Marine Chemistry, otherwise....

Pie-In-The-Sky

[NNadir]

72. QED.

Like I said, you would find ever more twisted ways to deny it.

You are in the position of merely insisting that they are lying because, well, you say so.

If you did indeed read this article, I personally would not have much expectation that you would know how to interpret it, but that's my opinion.

You think that all nuclear technology is "pie-in-the-sky" because you object to it on religious grounds. I note that you are nowhere near as severe when it comes to solar PV electricity, even though solar PV electricity has yet to produce a single exajoule of energy on the planet in a single year. Solar PV technology is not "pie in the sky," to you, and again the criteria consists "I say so."

You just hear what you want to hear and see what you want to see.

Now maybe you can tell us immediately that you've read this article as well, and found it to be invalid since the authors are lying because, well, you say so:

A new procedure for the concentration of uranium, dissolved in seawater with extremely low concentration, was studied. Plate module membrane filtration equipment was operated to evaluate the performance and selectivity of four different nanofiltration flat sheet membranes. Experiments were first carried out using different model waters. The membranes were discriminating by the rejection of uranium, calcium, and sodium. Then, a uranium concentration test using a nanofiltration membrane showing the highest selectivity for uranium toward alkaline and alkaline-earth ions has been performed on natural seawater. A nanofiltration membrane shows a high selectivity for U(VI), illustrating the advantageous use of nanofiltration for the concentration of uranium from seawater.

No one should ever do research without checking with you first since you can immediately declare anything to be bullshit because of your special insight granted by God.


:eyes:

[jpak]

73. BS

The old stand-by personal attack...

"If you did indeed read this article, I personally would not have much expectation that you would know how to interpret it, but that's my opinion."

and strawman...

"You think that all nuclear technology is "pie-in-the-sky" because you object to it on religious grounds."

I did indeed read the article and am more than qualified to critique it.

and I know BS when I see it.

and it was full of it.

my opinion

[NNadir]

74. I produced a peer reviewed article in an instant.

Thirty seconds later you came back with a typical statement "bullshit!" Then you offered that it must be a particular peer reviewed journal, Marine Chemistry.

The quality of your response speaks for itself.

In fact, you frequently respond to arguments in this way. You say "bullshit!" as if that means something.

You may choose to see my assertion of an analogy as a "strawman," but that in no way makes me wish to withdraw it. I see almost all of the anti-nuclear arguments as being religious, since they are all irrational. All of them depend entirely on evaluations in isolation. I note that once again, the argument, in this case "the world is running out of uranium" fails to make comparisons. It is well known that the world is running out of fossil fuels and moreover that even if it weren't, it is running out of capacity in the atmosphere in which to dump the waste of fossil fuels. In the face of this dire immediate emergency, you wish - on very tenuous grounds - to discuss whether or not the world will run out of uranium someday. However, the availability of uranium is not really a problem right now. Not one crisis of operations has ever occurred because there was no uranium, although many crises have occurred because there are no fossil fuels.

When possible solutions are offered to say that there may be ways (and in fact there are many, many, many such possibilities being explored by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of highly educated people) to avoid uranium shortages, you imperiously say "Bullshit," "BS!" or "Dick Cheney."

If all that was required in the world was to fire off an expletive, nothing would happen at all.

I see no evidence whatsoever that you are in any way qualified to judge the experiment with amidoxime resins in seawater for the concentration of uranium. Nor do I see any reason to pretend that I have any regard for what you think or what you say, because I don't.

The world is, of course, not stopping this work in any way. It's being taken quite seriously, even though any industrial application - on economic grounds - will probably come to bear long after everyone on this website today has died. This work - nothing more than preparing for the future -is proceeding and there's nothing that you can do to stop it.

[jpak]

77. Sorry

But uranium extraction from seawater is a joke - as are your personal attacks.

:)

[NNadir]

82. Apparently there are a number of researchers who don't find it funny.

I really don't care whether you take my pointing out that you don't know what you're talking about is an "attack."

If you really think that you are in a position to publish a report showing that the report I've referenced (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 39 (8), 2910 -2915) is wrong because you can show that "it's iron, or biofilm" or whatever, by all means go ahead and do so. I note that any such report would need to consist of experiment and data not a knee jerk "I have read this report," statement. One would not simply demonstrate this by waving one's hands and making assertions. Somehow I'm quite sure that Drs. Kawai, Saito, Sugita, Katakai, Seko, N.; Sugo, Kanno, J. and Kawakami know how to distinguish between iron and uranium, given that they have also distinguished uranium from vanadium from nickel and cobalt. I'm not convinced that you would demonstrate similar expertise, but it's not an issue, since no one is expecting you to actually publish a result backing up what you claim. Reading what you write, I am well acquainted with your level of understanding of the issue of actinide chemistry, which is in my opinion very, very, very poor and I very much doubt that Ind. Chem. Eng is about to accept a paper supporting your claims.

But, if you are about to publish some work supporting your hand waving, while you're prattling on about how aldoximes don't work, maybe you can also offer the scientific world a "refutation" of this paper on the same subject:

Environ. Sci. Technol., 37 (17), 4011 -4016, 2003

A new active material for the treatment of uranium-contaminated groundwater using permeable reactive barriers has been developed. This material, called PANSIL, is an example of a tailored ligand system that selectively removes a contaminant from solution. The active medium in PANSIL is a polyacryloamidoxime resin derived from polyacrylonitrile, which is deposited from solution onto the surface of quartz sand to form a thin film coating. PANSIL is highly effective at sequestering UO22+ from solution when the pH is between about 5 and 8 and can preferentially sequester UO22+ from solutions that are typical of the groundwater from a mine tailings site, due to the stability of the polyacryloamidoxime uranyl complex formed. Uranium sequestration capacity will depend on the surface area of the sand that is resin coated, but in the batch of PANSIL tested (<2% resin by weight), it exceeds 4000 mg of UO2 per kg of PANSIL at pH 4.5 when the dissolved UO22+ concentration is greater than 300 mg/L. PANSIL largely retains the permeability and strength of the sand employed and therefore has suitable engineering properties for permeable reactive barrier applications.

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/2003/37/i17/abs/es020178g.html

[NNadir]

63. The idea is to use amidoxime resins in ocean currents.

It's a demonstrated technology. Again, it works when the uranium price goes high enough, which it will not do in the lifetime of anyone here.

Many materials are mined from low concentrations, including the world supply of the following elements: Scandium, Ruthenium, Rhodium, Palladium, Rhenium, Osmium, Platinum, Gold, and Radium. All of these elements are found in workable ores wherein their concentration is tiny. Moreover, in many cases, these elements are not in solution, making their processing even more difficult. One needs to, in effect, dissolve rock.

Because of the enormous energy density of uranium, such recovery from seawater is thus easily feasible, especially where, as the Japanese developers of the process intend, the resins are anchored in ocean currents through which kilometers of water flow. (They also expect to recover significant Vanadium as a side product.) The Japanese in their demonstration projects have used amidoxime resins for these purposes.

Let's look at your numbers to see what a flow rate must be. If uranium is contained in seawater at 3.3 micrograms per liter, then there are 3.3 milligrams per cubic meter. To obtain one kilo in the resin 330,000 m³ of water must flow past the resin. Note that the floats can be arbitrarily deep, and the resin can extend hundreds of meters in the ocean.

According to the US Navy, the "Black Current" or Kushiro current off of Japan runs at between 4-5 knots (http://www.usna.edu/NAOE/courses/en200/ch07.pdf, page 7-21) This is the current that Japanese propose to use in exploring this technology. Four knots is 7.4 km/hour. Ten football field sized barges, 100 m in length, relatively small devices, trailing resins 100 meters deep, would thus experience a flow rater of roughly 7 cubic kilometers of water per hour. A cubic kilometer is a billion cubic meters.

Putting all of the above together, we see that the resin could theoretically recover under these circumstances 3 MT or uranium per hour or 72 metric tons per day. Thus for two days of floating the barge, one could recover 1.5 times as much uranium as is necessary to run a reactor up to two years.

Note that the barges are rather small and are placed in just one current on earth.

I don't think this will be necessary for a very, very, very long time, but certainly it is feasible.

[struggle4progress]

86. You may also want to invest in space elevators and giant plastic bags ..

.. so we can ride boldly into the heavens and snag some of the big clouds of hydrogen floating around up there. It's just waiting for us!

Money should be no object. Many Nigerians desperately email Americans every day, just to ask for help in giving away millions of dollars. You only need to post your bank account information here to become rich!

[NNadir]

88. Thanks for the technophobe response.

The abandonment of technology will require the death of billions of people in the short term. This may happen anyway, because the forces of ignorance are growing in strength and doing their best to obstruct our best shots at an orderly and ethical reduction in population, the reduction being inevitable either way.

In the specific case of amidoxime resins, you and your buddy show no evidence of having a remote understanding of the chemistry involved; you clearly have no idea about energy or economics except to say "It is bad." But what you guys say is all of no consequence. The world is clearly ignoring you and is trying to face reality. The fact that there is a nuclear debate at all at the dawn of the 21st century is a true measure of how widely rejected the anti-nuclear arguments - they peaked in the 1980's - are. Ironically it was the failure of a poorly designed reactor - a type that will never be built again - that delineated clearly and ambiguously the relative levels of risk of various forms of energy. Nuclear is, in fact, imperfect, but it is better than all of its alternatives.

I further note that the only people working on amidoxime resins are the Japanese. The driving force for this work is psychological, not economic. The Japanese, who must import nearly all of their energy, uranium included, wish to develop a technology that will make them independent of any other nation. On some level this is a little bit silly. The world is not running out of uranium immediately, the representations of the anti-nuclear squad notwithstanding. The Japanese can buy all the uranium they wish, even if all of their ships are followed around by diesel powered Greenpeace boats piloted by spoiled brats. The price of uranium remains low, although it is rising enough to allow for some lower quality sources that were abandoned in the 1970's to come back on line. If, however, the world does run out of uranium someday, the Japanese work will form the basis of an approach for obtaining more of it. There may be even better approaches than amidoximes developed in the future, but most people are not really worrying about the matter right now. All that is important is that we seek to raise uranium demand as high as possible as quickly as possible.

I think the amidoxime approach deserves modest funding. It is reminiscent of the fellows who in the 1950's - during the age of super cheap oil - developed nuclear power in the first place. Their generation really didn't need the work, but they were thinking of their grandchildren - us actually. Not all of their vision has been realized, but now that we really need the results on which they broke ground, it is available.

We need to act. We cannot sit on our asses and wallow in pseudo-intellectual carping, whining, and sleepwalking into the abyss. People who simply sit around and say "Won't work! Won't work!" are useless in the crisis, even though the crisis involves all humanity, the intellectually lazy and the people who actually give a shit alike. That the whiners are in the same boat as the rest of us is no comfort whatsoever. Again, all humanity is involved. We can go even further. The matter involves all living things, all life forms on earth.

[struggle4progress]

100. Thanks for a completely bogus calculation.

Nobody is going to get the full ocean current passing close enough to a bunch of resin-coated threads to collect a reasonable amount of uranium: boundary effects will ensure that most of the water just bypasses the apparatus. And there are those pesky thermodynamic issues: to usably concentrate dilute uranium in seawater, large energy inputs will be necessary for entropic reasons.

[NNadir]

102. Thanks for showing again that you haven't a clue.

The stuff is placed in a current. Maybe they don't teach this in coal class, but a current is energy. The current flows.

I thought even the worst thinkers could understand that.

(By the way, I found your attempt at pretending to understand thermodynamics most amusing.)

If however, you can prove it doesn't work, you can always submit a paper to a journal showing why that is so. I think their must be one or two journals that would publish it, maybe one of those journals that publish your buddy Sternglass for instance.

The system already works. It's just expensive right now, more than 5 times as expensive as conventional uranium. No one has bothered to industrialize it. That's because uranium and thorium are readily available and are very cheap. The Japanese have given some thought to industrializing the process by subsidy, but only for political and security reasons, but right now, as they expand their nuclear program, they still import uranium.

AII‐5.1.4 Marine experiment for 1 kg‐U collection in Mutsu
The stacks, 16 cm x 30 cm x 30 cm, made of new non‐woven fabric adsorbent were dipped in Mutsu offing. The stacks of 144 pieces were put into a square adsorbent cage, 4 m x 4 m x 45 cm. Three adsorbent cages were hang down from the square floating frame, 8 m side on the sea surface. During the three years, twelve soaking experiments, in which 1800 stacks were immersed, were carried out and 1 kg of uranium was adsorbed on the adsorbent. The average ability of the adsorbent was 0.5 g‐U/kg‐ad for 30 d soaking. The uranium adsorption was correlated with the temperature of seawater and the wave height. This is because the high temperature of seawater accelerates the chemical adsorption of uranium on the adsorbent. The motion of waves is transferred to the adsorption cage through the hanging ropes and the motion of up and down of adsorption cage realizes the effective contact between seawater and adsorbents.

AII‐5.1.5 Braid type adsorbent

Since 2001, a braid type adsorbent has been developed. This adsorbent was manufactured by braiding the adsorbent fiber around the porous polypropylene float, 2cm in diameter. The length of fiber adsorbents surrounding the float was 10 cm. The braid type adsorbent can stand on the bottom of the sea and does not need the adsorbent cage when it is soaked in the sea.

In 2002 and 2003, the uranium adsorption of braid type adsorbent was evaluated in the sea of Okinawa area. The average ability of the adsorbent became 1.5 g U/kg ad for 30 d soaking. The nonwoven fabric adsorbent in the size of square with 2 cm one side attached on the braid type adsorbent showed 3.0 g‐U/kg‐ad. Temperature of the seawater in Okinawa was 30 °C (10 °C higher than that of Mutsu area). The rise of 10 degrees in the seawater temperature increased by a factor 1.5 the uranium adsorption for the nonwoven fabric adsorbent( square size with 2 cm side). Therefore, the braid type adsorbent had 2 times higher adsorption ability of uranium in seawater than the stacks of nonwoven fabric adsorbent ,due to the better contact between seawater and adsorbent.

The Environmental Science Research Laboratory, the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry reported that 1,200 t U/y could be collected from seawater if the 2.1 millions braid type adsorbents, 60 m length, were set in 134 km2 sea area with an interval of 8 m.

Since the higher temperature of seawater accerelate the uranum adsorption, the sea area should have the Japan Current, the depth from 100 m to 200 m, and no fixed net. The sea site (6000 m2 ) proposed for the recovery of uranium from seawater is located between Nansei islands and Tosa bay.

http://www.iupap.org/wg/energy/annex-1b.pdf

The Indians, who have huge thorium reserves, have also considered the question, but with less interest.

I note that because of the huge energy density of uranium the cost of fuel is almost trivial in nuclear operations.

"The uranium will not last forever" argument is in any case irrelevant, yet one more case of the nuclear exceptionalism that characterizes all of the increasingly tortured anti-nuclear arguments. You will eventually run out of coal too, and kill the atmosphere in the process. You never discuss this in your fascination with every piece of paper and every piece of metal remotely connected with a nuclear operation.

I don't know if uranium will last forever, but there is reason to expect that it can. There is no reason at all to expect that fossil fuels can last as long as uranium, no matter how fond of them you are. This is an emergency situation involving all life on earth. While you chase around panicing over every minor screw-up in nuclear plants - while completely ignoring the major screw up of global climate change - the rest of the world is being serious.

[struggle4progress]

104. But -- the collector can only collect uranium which is close enough ..

.. to the resin to diffuse to the resin during the time that the transporting current passes the resin. That will be a thin layer of the current near the resin. If you pack the resin close together to increase the surface are per volume of collecting apparatus, there will be an increased resistance to flow near the collector and much of the current volume you included in your calculation will simply flow around the collector, bypassing it completely.

You're starting at the microgram per liter level for your target species, in a solution that contains unwanted species at much higher concentrations. So there's a big entropy barrier to preferentially extracting the U. Obviously, that can only be beaten that very large energy inputs.

Take into account collector fabrication and transport, degradation in the marine environment and replacement, plus the costs of separating the U from other ions, enriching it, etc -- and what you're proposing will turn out to be a big net energy sink ...

[NNadir]

105. The mathematical modeling of U resin extraction in seawater

extraction is covered in Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1991, 30, 190-196.

It's clearly over your head, but it is quite comprehensive in the approach to flow systems in resins. Unfortunately DU has no equation editor, and it is basically not possible to excerpt the article, but here is a list of some of the variables discussed, cut and pasted, with the editor's limits ignored, the editor translating symbols into letters as it will:

Cb = uranium concentration in seawater, k ~ m - ~
C, = uranium concentration at certain axial location in the
c1 = numerical constant defined by eq 2
D = diffusivity, m2.s-l
De = effective diffusivity, m2&
d = diameter, m
de = diameter of spherical electrode, m
df = fiber diameter, m
d, = ball diameter, m
End = adsorption efficiency
k, = mass-transfer coefficient, m d
L = length of bed packed with balls, m
L’ = length of bed packed with fiber, m
Ne = dimensionless number defined by eq 2
AP = pressure drop across bed of balls, Pa
AP’ = pressure drop across bed of fiber, Pa
qnd = adsorption rate coefficient of fiber, s-l
qapp = overall adsorption rate coefficient of adsorption unit,
rad = adsorption rate, (kg of U).(kg of dry fiber)-W
U1 = superficial velocity in column, m d
u1 = superficial liquid velocity in ball, m d

Greek Symbols
a = swollen fiber volume/dry fiber volume
cf = void fraction in ball
cp = void fraction in packed bed of solid balls
r) = viscosity of liquid, Pa.s
pf = density of dry fiber, k ~ m - ~
pI = density of liquid, kgmm3
Y = kinematic viscosity, m 2 d
q5 = shape factor of granular packing

As usual you are making stuff up and don't have a fucking clue what you are talking about. I note that the matter of uranium from seawater is not a theoretical concept. It is backed up by experiment. The fact that uranium is not industrially recovered from seawater is a function of the fact that uranium is so readily available that it is cheap. However the energy density of uranium is so high, that the cost of recovering uranium from seawater will not have much impact on the cost of nuclear energy. It may raise the prices a few cents per kilowatt-hour.

There are a series of at least 15 papers on the subject in Ind. Eng. Chem Eng, and many more in journals that are available only in Japanese.

[Odin2005]

18. MULTIPLE THINGS are the answer.

Not just nuclear, not just renewables, not just biofuels, not just using less, it's ALL Of them.

[NNadir]

19. That pretty much sums the entire argument up succinctly.

The real problem is the carrying capacity of the planet which is exceeded.

But to palliate the effects of the real problem, your statement is pretty accurate.

To the extent we can do anything we must reduce the use of fossil fuels, drastically, quickly and due urgency.

Probably though it is the case that time's up, and there is very little that can be done.

[sweetheart]

24. We need to price our externalities in our markets

Traditionally, economics allows for externalities, when things are pushed
off-paradigm and ignored for the sake of the balance equation. This has created
a discounting of feminism, houshold labour as neoliberal economics arose in the
predominantly patriarchal anglo-european cultures. The traditional argument
suggests that the number of total fishstocks in the oceans is unlimited for the
taking, with a little backing off, but not much, given national interest and the
popularity of closing down over fishing industry.

So we have several non-priced econonomic commodities that are now officially scarce
given the planet's population. pure air, fresh water, unraped land, wild fish, unpolluted ocean
un=billb0arded roadways, un-jetski'd waterways, un-helicoptered noise free skies, seeing the
stars and the milky way due to light pollution, little everythings gone.

The need is for global, regulatable markets that price externalities fairly, and the
total elimination of all industry subsidies, as well as the micro-ization of the power
and resource industry markets. A residential home that is sitting in arizona dumping
kilowats of solar generated power back on to the grid, should be paid the spot price, on
their power bill, as a micro supplier. The benefits of commoditized effective global
resource markets for micropower and the regulatory controls that prefer big-industry,
and we're back to our same civil war through just another door.

Big business is fucking the people because it doesn't care, and since it runs everything,
the future is an amoral trampling of all values. It doesn't care about an effective
energy solution, it's just a pork addict willing to kill for a fix of more public
subsidy... distorting subsidy. A fair micropower market, pricing externalities of the
generation in to the market price, would permit the mass millions to get creative in
power generation... unleash the dam, the people are smarter than any corporate, let
the better power generation systems rise in a properly-selecting power market.

[dcfirefighter]

87. Green Economics, Green Tax Shift, Green Scissors

and my favorite, a tiny step a local government could take and make a difference, the Land Value Tax.

[Oerdin]

83. This is the third or forth time...

This is the third or forth time JPAK has been pawned to hell after claiming the world was running out of fissile material. I recall with great enjoyment his previous claims that that the world would run out of Uranium in just a few years. I also couldn't help but laugh some more when, after being shown how stupid his claim was, JPAK later attempted to claim he'd never said such a thing. Yet here he is recycling the same failed argument again.

I have to hand it to old JPAK; he truly never learns.

[Lindacooks]

42. And read this: the TRUE cost of nuclear power.

http://www.mecgrassroots.org/NEWSL/ISS38/38.07CostNuclear.html

Your confidence in people who build and invest in nuclear power plants is touching, but misguided.

[hunter]

46. I don't see them building nuclear power plants in my neighborhood.

Do you?

The United States is essentially out of this business.

When the United States starts to build nuclear power plants again it will be an act of desperation, and we will be importing much of the technology from nations that have made nuclear power work.

[humus]

54. The triumph of the industrial economy/Amazing waste on Mother Earth

"When you have reached the edge of an abyss, Alwyn Rees said in Wales,
the only progressive move you can make is to step backward.
A New Zealander whose name escapes me improved upon this retrograde
advice with an alternative; turn around, and step forward."
-- David Brower, "Progress as if Survival Mattered"

"A few years ago, in the mail-order catalog Seeds of Change, Peter
Bahouth provided an ecological accounting of the typical North
American supermarket-bought tomato. Here's an abbreviated version:
The tomato was grown in Mexico from a hybrid seed patented by a
genetic-engineering firm. The farm was fumigated with methyl-
bromide, one of the most ozone-depleting chemicals in existence, the
doused with toxic pesticides; the toxic byproducts of manufacturing
the pesticide ended up in the world's largest toxic waste dump, in
Alabama. The tomato was packaged in a plastic tray covered with
plastic wrap, and placed on a cardboard box. The plastic was
manufactured with chlorine, a process that produces extremely toxic
byproducts, in Point Comfort, Texas, while the cardboard originated
in an old-growth forest in British Columbia, was manufactured in the
Great Lakes, and was then shipped to the Mexican farm. The entire
process was fueled by oil from the Gulf of Campeche, Mexico. The
packed tomatoes were artificially ripened through the application of
ethylene, then transported in refrigerated trucks cooled by ozone-
depleting hydrochlorofluorocarbons to consumers throughout North
America. At several points in the process, workers and nearby
residents risked potentially harmful health effects through exposure
to various toxins. And needless to say, a tomato thus produced
doesn't offer much in the way of flavor, especially when compared to
a mouth-watering `Brandywine' tomato grown organically in the
backyard."

"The widespread belief that clean and abundant
energy is the panacea for social ills is
due to a political fallacy, according to
which equity and energy consumption can be
indefinitely correlated, "
...
"Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of
energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is
physically
harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between
Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its addiction to
alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no society can have
a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy
slaves and whose members are also autonomously active. "
-- Ivan Illich, 1978
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/Illich02.htm

The first characteristic of a plan is that it won't work. The bigger
the plan and the more far-reaching and "futuristic" it is, the less
likely it is to work.
• Wendell Berry

"It is extremely difficult to exalt the usefulness of any productive
discipline as such in a society that is at once highly stratified and
highly mobile. Both the stratification and the mobility are based upon
notions of prestige, which are in turn based upon these reliquary social
fashions."
 Wendell Berry “The Unsettling of America”

"...our country is not being destroyed by
bad politics, it is being destroyed by a bad way
of life. Bad politics is merely another result."
 Wendell Berry (http://www.brtom.org/wb/berry.html)

"Do you think the party guests are beginning
to notice that the presents were made in
china and that they were bought with money
borrowed(extorted?)from the guests...?

"To the extent that we consume, in our present circumstances, we are
guilty.
To the extent that we guilty consumers are conservationists, we are
absurd."
-- Wendell Berry, 1987 http://www.tipiglen.dircon.co.uk/berrynot.html

"A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another
pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life."
-- Wendell Berry in "The Idea of a Local Economy"
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/archive_om/Berry/Local_Economy.html

[BeFree]

55. Had to be said, eh, humus?

Thanks...

Amazing waste
How great thou art

[hunter]

60. In other words, you worry that nuclear power DOES work.

That's a reasonable fear -- that cheap, safe, reliable nuclear power will lead to the further destruction of earth's environment. Billions of American style consumers would quickly destroy everything left of our environment.

To be honest, this is one of my fears.

But if I'm afraid nuclear power will work, I can't very well argue at the same time that it won't work: that it's not safe, that there won't be enough uranium, etc., etc. If those things are true, the problem of nuclear power will be self limiting.

But meanwhile nuclear power keeps 25% of my lights lit.

I do know for a fact that fossil fuels are killing us now. In comparison to the carnage caused by fossil fuels (including air and water pollution deaths, mining and industrial accidents, wars in Iraq, terrorism, etc...) nuclear power seems to be relatively safe. I'd rather have a nuclear plant in my neighborhood than a coal-fired plant. If I could trade a coal fired plant for a nuclear plant I would. If I could figure out how to do away with both without harming anyone I would, but I haven't. In our current primitive political and economic system people need jobs, food, and shelter. Without affordable energy these things are very difficult to come by.

[poopfuel]

62. it's about the cost folks

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/456542/the_true_costs_of_nuclear_power/index.html?source=r_science

[ramapo]

65. The U.S. is paralyzed and it will kill us

Once upon a time the U.S. was a world leader. It built an amazing, once technologically advanced civilization. Then, around the year 1980, we stopped and began to regress.

We have been unwilling and unable to develop alternative energy sources during the grace period provided following the early oil shocks of the 1970s. Today we want to close aging nuclear plants, which makes sense, but for one small problem. Where will the energy come from to replace what is lost?

The ravages of coal will haunt us for untold years. Greenhouse gases from coal-burning plants have contributed enormously to the speedup of global warming. We are destroying vast ranges of our country while extracting this poison.

Meanwhile the problem of nuclear waste continues. The logical solution, get it all together in the desert where it can be guarded, has been resisted for years. So we have one hundred plus accidents/terrorist targets around the country.

If we were smart, which we are not, we would be building solar, wind and new nuclear plants. We would've moved all nuclear waste products to secure areas in the most desolate parts of the west. We would've nationalized the nuclear industry, taking away the need for profit and cost-cutting by the utility companies and helping to insure safe operation.

We would've embarked on serious conservation programs covering electricity, water, and motor fuels. Cars and trucks would be only as large as necessary to provide transportation. Each city would have a mass transit system that reaches out into the suburbs. Sprawl would've been contained by an urban revitilization programs.

We would've continued a serious space program. We would have a passenger railroad system that is the envy of the world, not one that is a bad joke.

We would have jobs for young people that invest themselves in the sciences instead of seeing them languish with advanced degrees.

Pollution control would be a great source of jobs and technology, not a "burden" on business.

I could go on but it gets more painful to detail how we threw away our future.

[hunter]

71. That's a good response to poopfuel's post # 62.

The article poopfuel cites is all about beating the dead horse. Nuclear power plants are not being built in the United States, and it doesn't seem they will be anytime soon. I don't even worry much about the Bush Administration's support of nuclear power because they have demonstrated many times their ability to destroy anything they touch. Successful renewal of nuclear power programs under the Bush Administration seems about as likely as a manned mission to mars.

The United States is moribund, and it's silly to argue about the costs of nuclear power here in the United States because any numbers you get are are more a reflection of our broken and corrupt government than any actual economics. We are in the same sort of situation the Soviet Union was in before their collapse; our entire economic system is obscure. Far too many accounts are no longer true. Everything is always three to fifteen percent better than it was last year, even when it's blatantly obvious to everyone that it's not. There are ten percent fewer holes in the streets, not because they've been repaired, but because the small holes have merged to become big holes.

If you want to figure the true costs of nuclear power, you have to look outside the United States to France, Canada, Japan, and other nations that haven't slipped over the economic precipice; other nations that are not rapidly loosing hold of their "first world" economic status.

Our own Department of Energy does this: they look to the statistics of other nations, they even fund economic studies in other nations, so that they might somehow organize all the screwball numbers they come up with here.

Opponents of nuclear power should do the same thing. Here's a discussion of nuclear power economics on a pro nuclear site:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.htm

I would love to see a similar report on an anti nuclear site -- something that's well organized, international in scope, and not just a dirty rag ball of scary factoids gleaned from great stinking piles of U.S. bullshit and misinformation.

[Dogmudgeon]

90. Breeder reactors ... ?

At one time, they were quite widely discussed. It was claimed that they could create more nuclear material than they took in -- suitable for powering the reactor -- which would have many benefits, the least of which was the economy of the process. "Breeding" new fuel could theoretically be done entirely within the system, reducing the number of points in the process where radioactive material would be exposed to the outside world.

Fears over proliferation resulted in a total international ban on breeder technology back during the Carter Administration. Yet, that never sounded quite right, because breeder technology would have conceivably led to better control over nuclear material. I was strongly anti-nuclear then, and was still suprised to see that such a promising technology would just be abandoned.

I've been off-line for a couple days and I just finished catching up here, and I don't recall having seen breeder reactors mentioned more than once or twice at DU in the past few years, although there are several anti-nuclearists who have made the point that "we're running out of Uranium," or some similar argument.

So ... why can't we use breeder reactor technology?

--p!

[NNadir]

94. Right now uranium is too cheap.

Breeder reactors were conceived in the 1950's and 1960's when it was thought that uranium was a very rare element. In those times, it was thought that if nuclear power was going to be widespread, it would be necessary to get all of the potential energy in the uranium, not merely the uranium-235.

Uranium proved to be much more common than thought, about as common as tin.

Plutonium is very expensive compared to freshly mined and enriched uranium. In fact, uranium would have to rise to several hundreds of dollars per kilo to make plutonium as cheap as uranium.

There are, however, good reasons to isolate plutonium and use it, by providing subsidy if necessary.

The first is to provide a large source of isotopically varied plutonium. We can never eliminate the possibility of the use of plutonium in nuclear weapons, but we can lower the probability of success of such attempts succeeding by increasing the proportion of Pu-238, Pu-240, Pu-241 and Pu-242 in all of the world's plutonium. This is best done by running the plutonium through a reactor several times. I believe that almost all of the risks of nuclear power are overstated. That, however, is hardly the same thing as saying that the risks are nonexistent. Of all the risks of nuclear power, I regard weapons diversion to be the greatest risk, although a risk which remains acceptably small when compared to global climate change's risk. A distribution of isotopes of plutonium complicates weapons design and therefore makes it far less likely.

The second is that it builds infrastructure that ultimately will be required. We should respect future generations. They will need fissionable nuclei. We should leave them as much as we can. In a breeder reactor, an important parameter is the doubling time, the length of time required to produce as many fissionable nuclei as were originally loaded into the reactor. The doubling time for all breeder reactors is on the order of decades, not weeks. Therefore fissionable fuel cannot be produced as if from a spigot.

The third is that it reduces the necessity for mining. All mining is environmentally damaging, including uranium mining.

The fourth is that it reduces the toxicity of any spent fuel much faster than would be otherwise the case. It happens that if plutonium is recycled the overall radioactivity of the planet will fall below that associated with uranium ores in about 1000 years time.

The fifth reason is that it reduces the mass of spent fuel.

I note that the best alternative for breeders is not the uranium/plutonium cycle at all. The best opportunity is represented by the thorium/uranium-233 cycle, which is more flexible inasmuch as it can be practiced with thermal reactors. However it is not possible to recover all of the energy in uranium and thorium solely in a thermal system. Some reactors will need to be fast spectrum reactors.

The Gen IV nuclear reactor program recognizes this. Three of the reactors proposed in this program are fast breeder reactors. One is an updated version of a sodium cooled fast reactor. This is the only type of fast reactor that has ever been built, and all had mixed technical success and poor economics. (The poor economics, again, involves the fact that uranium has been historically very cheap.) The technical faults have had to do with poor materials choice and systems. I'm not fond of these reactors, although I think the IFR program canceled in the 1990's may have succeeded. The second is the lead cooled reactor in which the coolant is either liquid lead or a lead/bismuth eutectic. I think this is probably a good design. These reactors will probably be economic since they will be designed to run 15 to 20 years without refueling. They will also be able to run on transplutonium actinides. The third type of reactor is the fast gas cooled reactor, which will also be able to operate as a breeder.

Another Gen IV type reactor is the molten salt reactor - a design type that was abandoned in the 1960's in spite of very successful piloting. Abandoning this design and not developing it further was probably the greatest technical mistake of the first nuclear era. Molten salt reactors are really not just one type of reactor, but represent an almost infinite series of reactors related by common design elements. Many types of molten salt reactors can be operated as breeders. One of the chief drawbacks to this technology is a commercial factor. It is not necessary to fabricate fuel in this type of reactor. Fuel fabrication is precisely the place where nuclear companies make their money. Thus they therefore haven't been exactly inspired to push this design. I believe that in a few generations, if humanity survives global climate change, this type of reactor will be the workhorse of energy production world wide. It is just too good a design.

The other two Gen IV reactors are not breeders but are designed to produce process heat for the manufacture of liquid fuels and other chemicals.

Finally I note that only a small proportion of the types of nuclear reactors that are possible have been tested. Of all types tested, only one type as been shown to be unacceptable, the graphite moderated reactor of the type represented by Chernobyl. Two of these reactors have failed catastrophically and thus reactors of this type will never be built again.

An existing type of reactor that has been successful can be operated as a breeder, although at a marginal breeding ratio. This is the CANDU, which is used in Canada (where it was developed), in India, and in a few other countries like Argentina and Romania. If the CANDU is switched to a thorium based fuel, perhaps using some plutonium for the initial loading, it can be a near breeder or a slight breeder. This approach would be possible in the near short term. I wish the United States had some CANDUs. They are great reactors.

[Coastie for Truth]

106. Six arrested at downtown nuclear demo 4/11/2006

Six anti-nuclear activists from Massachu-setts were arrested outside Entergy Nuclear's corporate offices Monday morning in the latest in a series of protests targeting Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant's owner.

Brattleboro Police arrested the protesters — including an 87-year-old woman — shortly before 8 a.m. after they allegedly blocked a foyer into one of the buildings. They were charged with unlawful trespass and released.

Earlier that morning, the women left effigies of themselves made from old clothes and newspapers outside the main gates at the nuclear reactor in nearby Vernon.

They said they wanted to take the protests to the plant itself, but were concerned with being exposed to radiation. "We felt it was too dangerous to be that close to the plant," she said. "So we left the effigies there as mock bodies."
<<<snip>>>

:shrug:

:shrug:

They said they wanted to take the protests to the plant itself, but were concerned with being exposed to radiation. "We felt it was too dangerous to be that close to the plant," she said. "So we left the effigies there as mock bodies."

I am biased. Bettis National Lab Alumnus and former staffie for Dr. Ivan Itkin (Itkin is a PhD nuke engineer, Bettis Alumnus, Democratic Leader in Pennsylvania Assembly, Ass't Energy Secy - and friend):shrug:

[NNadir]

107. Their fear of being irradiated says about all that you need to know.

They are clueless.