- Related Stories
-
Green tech powers forward
January 16, 2008 -
Tech vets making leap to green tech
May 29, 2007 -
Humans fiddle while the planet heats up
April 3, 2007 -
Report: Feds manipulate release of climate change research
March 28, 2007 -
Silicon Valley's Mr. Green
September 25, 2006
Lately, in some circles, nuclear power has gained a
But the nuclear industry hasn't cleaned up its act, according to
Not only is atomic energy inefficient, but it adds to greenhouse gas emissions while releasing deadly radiation for countless generations, argues Caldicott. Her recent work is summed up by the title of her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer.
She is working with the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which she founded, to convince Congress that solar and wind power instead can mitigate global warming.
Caldicott is known for courting controversy, whether by debating with world leaders, marching naked in the streets of San Francisco, or implying that Hershey sold radioactive chocolates containing milk produced near the Three Mile Island disaster. While she no longer receives death threats as she did in the 1980s, Caldicott told CNET that just proves that her voice hasn't been loud enough lately.
Q: There's been a lot of talk lately about a nuclear renaissance, particularly with concerns over global warming getting so much attention, as something that environmentalists are starting to support.
Caldicott: The nuclear power industry was moribund after Chernobyl and
They then decided to conduct this propaganda exercise to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, virtually telling mistruths, that nuclear power is free of emissions and green and clean. Nuclear power's main emission, of course, is massive quantities of radioactive waste that pollute food chains and cause cancer for hundreds of millions of years.
If you take the whole fuel chain as one piece, nuclear power produces large quantities of
At the moment, uranium is enriched at Paducah, Ky., where they have two 1,500-megawatt filthy, old, coal-fired plants to produce the electricity to enrich the uranium. Also, 93 percent of the
When uranium is mined, millions of tons of uranium tailings, emitting radioactive gas, radon and other such elements, are left lying on the ground. That material should be placed back in the ground from whence it came and the whole area reconstituted. That would take up huge amounts of fossil fuel as well, and also cost the industry so much it would almost not be worth producing the fuel in the first place.
What about new technologies making nuclear power safer, cleaner and more efficient. Is that possible?
Caldicott: That's another fabric of lies. The...reactors they're planning...one (is) the
A pebble bed reactor has millions of tennis ball-sized spheres of graphite embedded in which is enriched uranium, and they continually circulate. The whole thing is cooled by helium gas. If there's a leak of gas, it will be incredibly radioactive, one. Two, what burned at Chernobyl was graphite moderating rods, just carbon, the same stuff you put in pencils. It's very flammable. Already there has been an accident in a pebble bed reactor in Germany during the time that Chernobyl melted down.
See more CNET content tagged:
Helen Caldicott,
nuclear power,
global warming,
emission,
fossil fuel
It does sound alarmist of her. When there is only a small minority keep protesting about something prevalent, they are unusually not correct, not to say that they are never right. But it is up to them to prove it very convincingly.
disagreeing with the majority, the minority is usually correct. It
was a small minority that said the earth was round in 1492, a
small minority that said man could fly in 1903, and a small
minority that believed in wireless transmiissions (radio) in the
early 20th century.
Even if you still don't want to believe what she's saying about the
dangers, the fact is that nuclear power isn't cost efficient, which
is why even today it can't survive without government subsidies.
The article is ridden with fallacies and half-truths. I shall discuss here some of these:
If you take the whole fuel chain as one piece, nuclear power produces large quantities of global warming gases because millions of tons of rock and ore need to be mined to get the uranium out of the ground. And it has to be crushed, using more fossil fuels.
Coal also must be mined. Coal has less energy per ton than Uranium. It is less energy efficient to mine coal than Uranium. The major reason why coal is used rather than nuclear is not the fuel cost: it is because a nuclear power plant is much more expensive to build than a coal power plant, even if it ends up being a wash at plant end of life.
It is also perfectly possible to crush rocks using electric engines, powered by nuclear power. For someone who claims to drive a Prius hybrid electric, she seems remarkably forgetful of this fact. Solar panels, windmills, these all need raw minerals to manufacture as well. Fact is nothing is 100% clean. Nuclear is just better than the alternative: coal.
At the moment, uranium is enriched at Paducah, Ky., where they have two 1,500-megawatt filthy, old, coal-fired plants to produce the electricity to enrich the uranium.
Here she presents half the facts again. Yes, gas diffusion plants such as these require electricity to power them. The electricity may come from coal, nuclear or whatever. In France, they use nuclear electricity to enrich the uranium. Another fact, more recent gas centrifuge technology requires 50 times less energy to enrich the same fuel than such plants. This gas centrifuge technology is so complex, countries like Pakistan and Brazil are using it. The USA still uses its 1970s technology gas diffusion plant and is in the process of transitioning to the newer technology.
The...reactors they're planning...one (is) the AP-1000 by Westinghouse, which is essentially the same as the light water reactors that operate today, but cheaper to build because it has less concrete and steel. It's been nicknamed the eggshell reactor and, as such, it's very dangerous and could incur a major accident or meltdown.
Ask a Japanese auto manufacturer: less parts mean less possible causes for failure, easier inspections, less manufacturing expenses. These reactors do precisely that. They are meant to be manufactured in series production, rather than being crafts works like the old reactors. Simulations show them to be more reliable than the old reactors. In fact, one of the reasons Three Mile Island happened, was the plant was so complex to inspect, they couldn't figure out which widget was malfunctioning. Since then the industry has tried to simplify and make clearer the instrumentation and operator diagnostics in a nuclear power plant.
These people come from the past, they are not seeing the present picture. We are addicted to oil, coal and gas, to break the addiction will take a tremendous effort.
We need everything: nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, etc. None alone will do it with present technology. Each has its own limitations. Nuclear has great potential for replacing coal, the renewables have great potential for replacing the gas fired peaker plants. To break the oil addiction will be the greatest problem of them all: try doing the math on replacing 50% of USA fuel consumption with biofuels. I give you a quote from Wikipedia as an appetizer: It would require twice the land area of the US to be devoted to soybean production, or two-thirds to be devoted to rapeseed production, to meet current US heating and transportation needs.
It is not that there are not other options, just that it is not expected we will be able to develop them in time to minimize misery and pain.
proposed today. Thinner walls will save the builders some money
but could easily cost us our lives.
Gasoline was considered a dangerous by-product of petroleum distillation for the first 50 years, and it was burned off or dumped in streams. Now we use it. The same thing will happen with nuclear waste.
Coal plants have released more radiation into the environment than all the nuclear accidents combined and then SOME.
Dr. Caldicott is fearmongering.
Nuclear power is the cleanest and best source of power, when used correctly. Japan and France are examples.
Pick which hysteria you want to cater to:
1) global warming (if this choose nukes)
2) nuclear power (if this, don't complain about global warming)
> The people who would call me alarmist are nuclear engineers, physicists or businessmen who know nothing about medicine.
Probably not actually that accurate... but their understanding of medicine *has* to be deeper than hers of nuclear power engineering, of which she has none.
I loved, particularly, the graphite moderator strawman, which she tosses in in the context of the AP-1000 (and pebble-bedded fuel; these being three completely unrelated subjects).
Nuclear power is indeed not necessarily all a bed of roses. But *informed* discussion is much more likely to be productive than alarmist ranting.
Why can't anyone talk calmly anymore?
Is it really just the influence of teh tubes?
Put this nut back in hibernation.
Personally, I don't think Big Nuclear is the way to go (if only for economic reasons), but you have to win over people with facts, not distortions.
Rants like hers are among the reasons the green movement has had to struggle to be accepted. You cannot promote a cause through exaggeration and hype, and you Have to get the science right. Without that, she has done more harm than good to her cause.
The assessment came from Lars-Olov Höglund, who said, ?Since the electricity supply from the network didn?t work as it should have, it could have been a catastrophe.?
He said without power the temperature would have been too high after 30 minutes and the reactor would have been damaged. Within two hours there would have been a meltdown.
The plant operator shut down the plant to prevent damage.
They are almost all abysmally ignorant of science. Unlike
journalism, science requires something besides wide-eyed
enthusiasm and a yearning to be near the center of controversy.
So, reporters are mostly unable to distinguish between the
frantic idiocy of Helen Caldicott and the boring but informed
explanations of, say, bioradiation experts.
Remember, every moden mania depends on gullible and
manipulative reporters to whip up the requisite fear. It's much
more exciting than the hard work of unearthing and writing
simple facts. The reporter and editor who would publish the
hallucinations of Caldicott are ignorant and malicious
demagogues. The topic may be green, but the journalism is
yellow.
dangers outlined in this article are reason enough. My vision is a
solar cell and/or wind power system so refined that each home
will be its own autonomous power plant.
Oh, but then you destroy the centralized big business we want
to control it all system. I WON'T MISS THAT ONE BIT!!!!
Caldicott: "Well, it's sort of like going from tobacco to crack. You
don't cure one evil by inserting another evil...The answers are all
there, and the people in Silicon Valley know that because they're
making millions of dollars. They call green energy green not
because it's green but because it makes lots of greenbacks."
I couldn't say it better than that.
Every part or process in creating Nuke power is dirty and
creating the energy has too many places where one error or
malfunction could lead to massive poisoning or some other
mega destructive calamity. Who wants waste that will be around
for thousands of years that you can't even tell with your own five
senses is killing you?
Get off the Nuke bandwagon please!!!!!
And unfortunately I live in a place where there is only 100 days of sunshine a year, so solar isn't enough.
We all should just stop saying nonsense, learn more about what we are talking before getting it written down.
"...because hypothetically 1 or 2 pounds evenly distributed throughout the world could kill most people on Earth with lung cancer."
Not even close to reality.
Reality is that there are several thousand pounds of plutonium in the atmosphere and settled onto the ground from all the open air testing. It's there. It has been for several decades. Not everyone had died from lung cancer.
Additionally, two pounds distributed evenly across the face of the Earth would not even be enough to be easily measurable: about a picogram (10^-12) per square meter. As a someone who researched the effects of extremely low levels of transuranic materials, I can say that it takes extremely sensitive equipment to measure a picogram of plutonium. And... the negative effects of a few picograms of plutonium is so minimal -- if it exists at all -- that it is not scientifically measurable. There is absolutely no way it would cause lung cancer in even 0.1% of the population let alone most of the people!
If people want to live away from everyone else in huge empty mansions and drive long distances by themselves in gas-guzzlers, that is their prerogative, but they should have to foot the bill.
(If anyone actually reads all the posts, forgive this re-post. My reply to another comment fit perfectly here also.)
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/eternity/vitri1.html
Mark
mining, the material they extract uranium from, is decreasing---as
in, we've mined all of the easy to find ore already. If this is in fact a
true statement of uranium ore deposits, what's the point of
building more nuclear reactors if we're just going to run out of a
way of fueling them in 80-100 years? Sounds like the same dead
end oil problem we will face in roughly the same period.
Mark
Uranium Mining:
I don't know the exact amount of CO2 produced by Uranium mining. But lets put a few things into perspective. A nuclear reactor only re-fuels every 18 months. Uranium has so much energy in it that reactors need very very little fuel compared to other power plants. A coal or gas plant uses more fuel in a week than a nuclear reactor does in a year in a half (comparing mass). That is why there are only a handful of Uranium mines in the entire world. Compare that with coal, nickel, copper, iron ore mines, and etc. Uranium mines wouldn't even be 1%. All those other mines release the same radon gas she talks about and require power to run. Uranium mining is much much better for the enviroment than those other practices.
How many people die in coal mines every year. It is in the hundreds and yet nobody blinks an eye. How many people die in Uranium mining, none! This isn't people getting sick, these are people that die every year. And yes coal mining introduces way more radioactive material into the atmosphere than nuclear ever will. Nuclear power isn't perfect but it is so so much better than many alternatives. And it is realistic, the idea of running the entire country off of hydro-electric or solar power is simple unrealistic at the moment.
And the very program she rips on (GNEP) also recycles the nuclear fuel so new mining doesn't occur. Nuclear fuel has so much energy it can be recycled many times before it is retired.
I about fell off my chair laughing when she mentioned the idea of a nuclear power plant blowing up like a nuclear bomb. North Korea has had a nuclear reactor with plutonium for decades and they tried to create a nuclear bomb a few months ago and failed. If it is so easy why hasn't North Korea been able to do it? Lets just say I'm 100% confident than no matter how a terrorist attempts to blow up a nuclear power plant it will never ever blow up like a nuclear bomb. (And yes I know about nuclear weapon designs).
Now about the new generation of nuclear power plant designs. It is true that one of the benefits of the new reactors is cost and decreases the amount of concrete use. But they didn't do it by decreasing the reactor shield. They didn't by intelligent design. With computers they have been able to cut down the amount of piping, (There is a lot of pipes around a nuclear reactor), equipment and etc in the new nuclear designs. This means smaller buildings and less chance of something failing. The new designs are much safer and the reactor housing is stronger not weaker.
This is the basis of all her arguments, she points out some weakness that in fact is not a weakness at all, throw some technical terms in there and then scares people with consequences that are completely unrealistic. She is definitely an alarmist.
As a nuclear engineer I will say that nuclear power is not the answer to the worlds power problems. All our polution problems won't be solved by it. It is a great realistic alternative to fossil fuel power plants and has a very tiny impact on the enviroment. I hope one day we can throw away nuclear reactors for something even better, but until then nuclear power is (yes I'm going to say it) greener for the world we live in today.
Mark
but it's nice to see some facts backing up my intuition.
D
I'll add a few extra bits on to this:
When talking about deaths in coal mining, China reported 4,746 during 2006. Most analysts suspect that this number is actually lower than the real total of coal mining deaths in China. Fortunately most other countries are much better and the total deaths for the rest of the world in coal mining accidents is "only" about a thousand people per year. Definitely one of the world's most dangerous industries!
Also you mention pollution from mining operations. I don't have the numbers for the US, but in Canada you can get a ranking of the worst single-source polluters from www.pollutionwatch.org. #1 is a copper and zinc mine and processing center, #2 is a copper mine and processing center and #3 is a nickel mine and processing center. The rest of the top 10 polluters include an aluminium manufacturer, an oil sands upgrading facility and five coal fired power stations! These are NOT clean industries and while nuclear power may have some issues with waste it is by no means the only one!
Personally I'm all for wind and solar panel where they make sense. However wind tends not to blow very consistently and absolutely can not be increased or decreased at will to match changes in power demand. As such it's going to struggle badly to exceed 10% of any given areas electrical power unless there is some sort of back-up power (which kills the economics of it, even with large government subsidies). Solar is in even worse shape.
When you get right down to it, we've got basically 3 sources of energy to choose from for 80%+ of our electricity needs, fossil fuels (mainly coal since all others are or will soon be too expensive), hydroelectric and nuclear. Hydroelectric is nice where available, but you need the water in the first place, plus it releases greenhouse gases from decaying vegetation and leeches heavy metals into you water and food stream. Fossil fuels are terrible from an air pollution standpoint, especially coal which is one of the largest causes of respiratory illness in many countries, not to mention releasing radioactive waste and heavy metals. So that leaves us with nuclear, which has the best safety record of any of the three, the lowest level of pollution and it's pretty much the only industry that very actively deals with it's waste and sets aside (as per government regulations) a portion of it's costs for long term waste management, transportation and disposal.
You are perfectly aware that your accusations are at least as skewed as her arguments.
When she talks about sabotage / consequence of a war, she never implied the plant would explode. Chernobyl did not need to explode ...
If you really are a nuke engineer, then think about what YOU would do if your mission was to sabotage a nuke plant with the goal of releasing as much radioactive particles in the atmosphere as possible.
no matter how good are the new reactors, people still are people and a mistake will happen sooner or later.
This is why pediatricians shouldn't be in charge engineering policy. Her entry on wikipedia documents her various lies...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Caldicott
- Hyperbole
-
by Phillep_H
June 11, 2007 9:20 AM PDT
- Nuclear waste causing cancer for millions of years?
-
Reply to this comment
-
See all 183 Comments >>Radioactive material is dangerous because it is actively decaying. That means a short half life, so it becomes harmless quickly.
The less radioactive material has a much longer half life, and is less dangerous because it is NOT decaying. The decay is what produces the danger.
Cancer for millions of years? Pure hogwash.