It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
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John Quiggin 
So the Rodent wants a debate on nuclear? We might start with this report from the Sustainable Development Commission (UK).
With the long delayed public focus on the conditions faced by rural Aboriginal communities, it may also be time to look at the Aboriginal permit system. See http://weekbyweek7.blogspot.com/ for details
The exclusion of journalists and government officials is particularly restrictive, especially concerning public disclosure.
I do not appreciate how data mining might work. It seems to me, based on overhearing telephone calls in public spaces, there would be a lot of noise. It seems to me it would be easy to escape detection. So, aside from the question of legality, why would the NSA (or whoever) consider this method of pervasive surveyance effective?
gordon, that report from the SDC is a great place to start. With a title of “Sustainable Development Commission” it goes without saying that the report weighs in strongly against the nuclear option. But closer examination of the summary objections is illuminating:
That may well be true in the UK, but in Australia we can just dig a ruddy great hole in the middle of the desert and throw the stuff in.
Hmm. I think the unprecedented increase in oil prices is effectively neutering that objection.
The UK already has a centralized distribution system. As does Australia. This objection is equivalent to “we prefer decentralized distribution so nuclear is bad”. Might as well say “we prefer generating electricity using warehouses full of hamsters on running wheels”. The particular preferences of the Sustainable Development Committee are irrelevant. If they have a decentralized solution, they need to put it forward.
Au contraire, a new nuclear program would send out the correct message: energy efficiency matters only insofar as inefficient energy use costs (both hip-pocket and the environment).
If we provide other countries with new nuclear energy technology, how is that going to increase the probability of accidents and terrorist attacks compared to the alternative, which is to have those countries use old nuclear technology?
All very coherent stuff. Why didn’t they just write “we don’t like nuclear energy because it allows wicked humans to carry on with impunity their profligate ways” and be done with it? Would have saved the UK taxpayer a lot of money.
With positive thinking like that Dogz you should join Ford Corporation. Prematurely in the 1950s, Ford dumped their plans for the Ford Nucleon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
This revolutionary concept car was to be powered with a nuclear reactor in the trunk (boot).
The specifications of the Nucleon called for “an extreme cab-forward style provided more protection to the driver and passengers from the reactor in the rear.”
It was that kind of negative thinking that killed the project. Who knows, the mutants bred in the back seat may have turned out to be more productive economic actors than conventional humans. More hands (and arms). Even extra heads!
Katz, if you’d seen X-Men you’d know that mutants are vastly more productive than we non-mutants.
Always a pleasure to read Katz and Dogz.
Dogz, you still seem to be getting moderated, although I’ve removed both your email and IP address from mu list. I think you tried a few variants when the moderation was put in place, and it may take a while for me to find them all – WordPress is not v helpful on this.
Dogz, I take it that X-Men is science fiction, just like your first contribution to this thread.
Why not cooperate with India on Thorium-fueled reactors?
Could it be that this is because Australia is trying to capitalise on its uranium reserves despite what sounds like would be a huge advantage with this style of reactor.
Isn’t this part of the “open and informed debate” Lying Rodent wants us be having?!
And why not go further – let’s debate if Australia develops its own nuclear weapons, then we need not rely on anyone for our defence, or have any fear of a nuclear Indonesia or China, since we could deliver our own devastating response to any attack.
In fact we could also go that one step further again and declare our policy to be a nuclear warfighting capability and we’d then be on equal footing to the USA.
Should not that also be part of the Howard debates on Uranium enrichment? Where are the “hard men” of the Labor right and the Liberal/Nationals on the question of an Aussie nuke?
Unlikely. Australia has 25% of the known (in 1999) Thorium reserves, 30% of the known Uranium reserves. We win either way.
“WordPress is not v helpful on this.”
When did bloggers start abbreviating ‘very’? Or was that a typo? If it was an innocent typo then just ignore this comment and make me look foolish please. I think I must be paranoid, maybe I should change my blog name to “blog watch” or “blogosphere watch” or “anti blog blog”.
Dunno about you, Benno, but I’ve been seeing the “v” abbreviation for decades.
The teachers at my school, for example, tended to write “v. good” at the top of most of my assignments. 😉
Mark,
Economically, and in view of the US alliance, the cost of developing a nuclear detterent capacity is unlikely to be justified.
I like your thinking, though. Perhaps we should work on biological weapons in their place.
PS, if John had written “WordPress is doubleplus ungood on this”, you might have had serious cause to worry. 😉
The Bureau of Meteorology has updated its website. One of the new features is a page on Australian and global climate change. See http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/
at least ‘doubleplus ungood’ is something I have learnt from students at school near the commission flats. Truncations are what really gets up my nose. Like exam instead of examination and zoo instead of zoological gardens. I thus use the monday message board to launch a war on truncations.
‘v. good’ sounds more like it could be a latin abbreviation than anything else.
(linkspam deleted)
“at least ‘doubleplus ungood’ is something I have learnt from students at school near the commission flats. Truncations are what really gets up my nose. Like exam instead of examination and zoo instead of zoological gardens. I thus use the monday message board to launch a war on truncations. ”
Others are irritated by sentences which start with a l.c. letter full stop
Benno Says:
It ain’t something you should have learned from students at school near the commission flats. If you did, it’s a sad reflection on both you and the students. On you, for not reading your Orwell. And on them for failing to conform to their proper stereotypes.
I draw your attention to these:
‘Actors’ for WoT
BI Power Blogger
Proposed boundaries – PR for Vic Upper House
They are, of course, titles of entries on the current front page of your own blog. Abbreviator, heal thyself. 😉
Benno,
I don’t mind abbreviations myself. What gets up my nose is when people put an unnecessary space before the comma or period. As example, let me point out the “professional tanslation company ,” spam above.
Before John deletes it, that is.
Always makes you feel confident in a translation company when they can spel rite and grammer there is grete, dont it.
To change the subject. David Attenborough is quoted on the front page of the Independent as no longer being a sceptic about climate change:
Which brings to mind JQ’s recent denigration of all sceptics:
So which kind of sceptic was David Attenborough? Dogmatist? Ideologue? Paid off?
“‘Actors’ for WoT
BI Power Blogger
Proposed boundaries – PR for Vic Upper House
They are, of course, titles of entries on the current front page of your own blog. Abbreviator, heal thyself.”
It is a disease which needs healing and I am infected, no doubt about it, but notice that those titles you have shown were posted before I saw the light and launched my war on truncations in the comment section of John Quiggin’s blog on May 23rd 2006.
Now to preemptively cover other bases, I don’t believe that ‘blog’ or ‘AFL’ are truncations for the definition of my war on truncations. But I plead guilty to abbreviating ‘the United Nations’ to ‘the UN’, it won’t happen again. *will not*. Sorry.
Of course, we all knew this sort of thing would happen.
Here’s another critical report on nuclear for Dogz to read. Click on the title “Mirage and Oasis: Energy Choices in an Age of Global Warming” at the bottom right. We’ll convert you yet, old son!
God bless ’em.
Another report claiming how wonderful all these other technologies are. Well, if they’re so great, why don’t we just open up the market to all comers at let the best technology win?
Hard to beat one cubic meter of waste per year per plant.
U-235 is your friend
Dogz Says:
I believe that this quote comes from John McCarthy, ex-Comp Sci professor at Stanford, who, like you, possesses no relevant experience or qualifications.
But to be fair to McCarthy, what he actually said was:
And also:
Get that, Dogz? In a mixture with other substances.
Doesn’t that cause any alarm bells to go off for a self-proclaimed “scientist” such as yourself?
Here’s a hint. Contaminated waste. McCarthy is only claiming that the contaminants are one cubic metre.
You and he are relying on some magical “reprocessing” which will decontanimate the contanimated waste.
SJ, reprocessing is standard practice. Nothing “magical” about it. But even without reprocessing, what’s the volume of waste?
How many serious contamination accidents are there per annum in Europe and Japan, both big users of nuclear energy? How does that compare to the impending environmental disaster we face with global warming (on your reckoning, that is)?
By that sort of logic, why don’t you embrace renewable energy on the grounds that it produces no waste at all, as well as preventing ‘global warming doom’?
because I’ve yet to see a study of renewable energy that shows it can satisfy our current and projected energy requirements cost-effectively
Dogz Says:
Yeah, yeah, whatever.
Dogz Says:
Look it up, and get back to us.
A point of clarification to the above. The reason why reprocessing was carried out by the other nations was to extract bomb material. The U.S. had a separate program for bomb making, so it wasn’t affected by its own ban.
Japan sends material to Europe for reprocessing, but not into bomb material (or at least they used to).
OK, so what is the volume of waste produced by a Japanese reactor? Is it one cubic metre per year after reprocessing?
“About 25 tonnes of spent fuel is taken each year from the core of a l000 MWe nuclear reactor. The spent fuel can be regarded entirely as waste (as, for 40% of the world¹s output, in USA and Canada), or it can be reprocessed (as in Europe [and Japan]). Whichever option is chosen, the spent fuel is first stored for several years under water in large cooling ponds at the reactor site. The concrete ponds and the water in them provide radiation protection, while removing the heat generated during radioactive decay.”
“The 3% of the spent fuel which is separated high-level wastes amounts to 700 kg per year and it needs to be isolated from the environment for a very long time. These liquid wastes are stored in stainless steel tanks inside concrete cells until they are solidified.”
“Solidification processes have been developed in France, UK, US and Germany over the past 35 years. Liquid high-level wastes are evaporated, mixed with glass-forming materials, melted and poured into robust stainless steel canisters which are then sealed by welding.”
“The vitrified waste from the operation of a 1000 MWe reactor for one year would fill about twelve canisters, each 1.3m high and 0.4m diameter and holding 400 kg of glass.”
So there’s your answer: pi * 0.2 * 0.2 * 1.3 * 12 ~ 2 cubic meters of crap from a 1000MW reactor running for one year. Nifty.
You didn’t provide a cite for your quote, but I suppose it comes from here:
I’ll let you work out the pi r squared on the 50,000 tons.
how is the 50,000 tonnes of ore waste?
Because that’s the (US) legal definition.
Dear me SJ, you are clutching at straws. Natural uranium is taken out of the ground and the stuff left over (now less radioactive than it was as the uranium has been largely extracted) is considered dangerous waste? I hope I have misundestood you.
Firstly, it isn’t a matter of digging up uranium mixed with harmless stuff, taking out the uranium and putting the harmless stuff back.
The uranium is mixed with the products of uranium decay, i.e. thorium, radium, radon, polonium, etc. These aren’t considered useful, so they get left behind.
The tailings are radioactive, and are considered dangerous.
See here:
The tailings are no more dangerous than the ore itself, which we happily dig up today. I dare say there are plenty of other industrial/mining processes that are at least as hazardous.
So you happily concede that your original claim: Hard to beat one cubic meter of waste per year per plant was complete rubbish?
So you happily concede that your original claim: Hard to beat one cubic meter of waste per year per plant was complete rubbish?
Yes. I was out by a factor of two. It’s 2 cubic meters.
No, you don’t get to claim that the 50,000 tons of low level radioactive waste isn’t radioactive waste somehow. It may be that in your completely ignorant opinion that it doesn’t count, because it’s no more hazardous than some other hazardous thing that you can’t even think of. That opinion, however, don’t count for much.
You’re also wishing away the 24 tons per annum of medium level waste from the spent fuel, and the tens of thousands of tons of medium level waste left after the thing is decommissioned.
I shouldn’t leave this unremarked, either.
Dogz Says:
It’s true that the tailings are no more dangerous than the ore itself. But the ore itself is dangerous. It’s pointless to argue otherwise.
SJ, your original question was: “OK, so what is the volume of waste produced by a Japanese reactor? Is it one cubic metre per year after reprocessing?”
The answer turned out to be not one but two cubic meters, although that is only because the waste is embedded into a large volume of glass.
We were clearly talking about high-level waste. That’s the stuff that gets reprocessed.
I suggest you start here for a discussion of how all levels of nuclear waste are dealt with safely.
It isn’t what you actually said, though. And given your demonstrated level of understanding of the issues, I seriously doubt whether you had anything clearly in mind.
Here’s what you should have said:
Hard to beat 2 cubic metres of incredibly dangerous high level waste, 24 tons of dangerous medium level waste, and 50,000 tons of dangerous low level waste per year per plant, plus a few tens of thousands of tons of dangerous medium level waste left over when the plant is shut down.
BTW, the page you linked to makes this outrageous assertion: “Mine tailings:… Strictly speaking these are not classified as radioactive wastes.”
The author must be strictly speaking about some classification system that doesn’t doesn’t apply here in the real world. In addition to the U.S. Atomic Energy Act referred to above, Australia’s Radiation Protection and Radioactive Waste Management in Mining and Mineral Processing Code of Practice and Safety Guide clearly treats it as radioactive waste:
Is there some problem with the weekend thread? I don’t see it yet, and JQ usually gets it posted as early as Friday.