I have been thinking about what I said in an early post about the politics of nuclear power. I have to question whether my statement about the debate over nuclear power being purely political actually holds water. There are many out there who believe that there are too many different interests out there and that the debate cannot be settled by the spitting out of facts about nuclear power. In other words, communication isn't believed to be able to settle the debate. This is what I was conveying in my earlier post, but upon thinking and talking about it further, I think I disagree with what I said.
I was up visiting a good friend of mine last weekend who happens to be very wise in the ways of communicating. He had some basic ideas about good communication that I found very interesting. The first of which was so obvious that you never even think about it. I mean who thinks that an act of communication is only an act of communication if it results in an understanding of the message being sent. Such a simple idea that carries so much power, but yet we don't think about it like that. We are only communicating when we are creating an understanding.
Unfortunately I cannot say that the communication around the nuclear power industry has ever resulted in an understanding to those around. I mean, facts are facts and what I have been trying to get across on this blog is in general the facts of the situation. We can't argue about the amount of physical waste that has been produced by U.S. nuclear power plants. It is just a physical fact. We can't argue about the amount of uranium we know exists on the Earth. It is just fact. We can't argue about the safety record that nuclear power has had for the last 25 years. It is just fact. There are many things that are just fact that can't seem to be understood.
I don't think that this says that it is not fact. It really can't say that these things aren't facts because again, facts are facts. What is causing this lack of understanding? Well, there are other factors that play into communication as well. These are such things as amiability to what is being communicated. This plays with the special interests and political side of nuclear power. How much can you like nuclear power if it is the only real competition to the product that you are supplying. This is the case of the coal industry. This does not take away from the truth of the facts about nuclear power though.
So it is not politics that causing the debate to continue. I think that we institute more nuclear power before we have a real necessity for it. At least, I hope that nuclear power can grow before this happens just for the sake of our economy. I think that the problem has just been that the nuclear power industry has never really communicated well about what nuclear power is. How do I know this? There is a lack of understanding out there about nuclear power! This just tells us that there is no communication, though it might not have been for the lack of trying.
The deficit model is not working as far as achieving understanding. It is not communicating the issue. Thus, I think that the nuclear power industry needs to find a way to communicate to the public its true power. I don't have a solution for how this should be done at the moment, but all I am trying to say is that the argument is not purely politics. The argument is due to a lack of understanding. The facts are simply not know. There is a right and a wrong answer, yet nobody knows how to tell which is right and which is wrong. I feel confident that I know the right answer because I have studied a lot about the issue. I have a good understanding about the safety risks and the environmental impacts, some of which I have tried to get across here. You guys have even been learning along with me some of the time. These are all facts though. It is a fact that there is risk, and it is a fact that nuclear power harnesses enough power to solve our energy problems. It is a fact that nuclear power is the most viable energy solution on the table as of the time being. The nuclear industry just is having a hard time creating an understanding about this. It has not really communicated to us yet.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Nuclear Waste Equals Nuclear Resource?
Nuclear waste is the Achilles heal of the nuclear power industry...or is it? It is true that what comes out of nuclear power plants is not safe for humans to live with nor is it something that we want to encounter in our every day lives. In this way, nuclear waste is a major hassle and is something that we need to figure out how to deal with if we are going to continue on with the building of the industry. Katie Couric gets this idea across in a short clip that she did on CBS news when the Yucca Mountain project was still underway.
As you guys probably know, Yucca Mountain was shut down recently by the Obama administration through reasoning that according to anybody involved with the project was just insane. That is another issue though, and perhaps I will talk about this in another post. The fact is that nuclear power lost its deposition place for its high level waste. This would seem like the end of nuclear power. How could the plants operate if they had no place to put the waste? They would be over run with dangerous waste right? This was what environmentalists groups such as Green Peace was hoping for, and as soon as Yucca Mountain was shut down, they began calling for halt on all construction of nuclear power plants in the United States as well as the closing of all reactors currently running. Have they finally won the debate over waste?
Thankfully they have not won the debate and nuclear power will continue. Nuclear waste seems to be a highly misunderstood area which has been reflected in policy decisions as early as the Ford administration. There has been a popular article circulating around the internet, even showing up in the Wall Street Journal, giving a totally different perspective on nuclear waste. Could the failure of Yucca Mountain actually be a good thing for the nuclear industry? Well, it seems that it can!
First, let's understand how we currently treat our high level nuclear waste. As an aside, high level nuclear waste simply refers to the radioactive materials which are emitting radioactivity at a high rate, such as spent nuclear fuel rods. Today, these types of waste are stored at the nuclear power plants themselves. This type of storage is referred to as "interim storage," meaning we are storing it there until we find something better to do with it. The storage facilities are basically lead boxes filled with water. The lead is used to stop the gamma radiation put off by the stored contents, and the water is necessary to stop the neutrons being emitted. We have to use water for this because it turns out that hydrogen is the best way to slow down a neutron with lots of energy. Think of it like a pool ball. It is possible to hit the pool ball at another pool ball and transfer all of the energy from the pool ball you hit to the one you hit it at. I am sure all of you pool playing people out there will agree. No replace the second pool ball with a bowling ball. Hitting the pool ball at the bowling ball will simply result in the pool ball bouncing off in a different direction without slowing it. The same is true with neutrons. Lucky for us, hydrogen has roughly the same mass as a neutron and we have a substance on Earth that is easy to work with and full of hydrogen. Good old water! Sorry for getting side tracked, but I though you might find that interesting.
As the article points out, it seems that it is a good thing that we have kept our spent fuel out of permanent disposal. Why? Because it is not really waste. In fact, waste is possibly the most inaccurate term you could use to describe the stored spent fuel. Remember that the spent fuel is not used completely. I discussed this in my article on reprocessing nuclear fuel. When the nuclear power plant is done with the fuel, roughly 95% of the energy remains in the spent fuel. We just have to install new fuel because fission is inhibited by its own fission fragments. If we clean these out through reprocessing, there is much more energy that we can harness from the fuel.
I said earlier that we do not yet need to reprocess in the nuclear power industry because uranium is currently so abundant that it is cheaper to mine more of it than to reprocess the spent fuel. I still do hold to this argument, though in the future this might not be the case in which putting all our spent fuel in a permanent repository would be a huge mistake.
There is an economical reason to process the fuels today though. Many industries use nuclear materials including the medical industry and the exploratory oil industry. The nuclear medicine industry is a four billion dollar industry, so the demand for the materials in the fuel is there. And as a byproduct of the reprocessing, we regain the U-238 from the fuel rods which can be used for new fuel as well as retrieve the important stuff: the fissile materials such as U-235 and Pu-239. France does not reprocess fuels for the nuclear power industry, but they do to meet the demand of other industries. The parts of the spent fuel that are left over that we don't have a current use for can then be placed into "interim storage" until we do have a use for it. This is such a small amount of material that it really doesn't need to be taken anywhere. It can be stored right at the reprocessing plant thus avoiding the transportation of nuclear materials on our highways. Sounds like the way to minimize risk to me!
I guess really what I want to point out, just like the article, is that the term nuclear waste is a misnomer. I don't think there is such a thing as nuclear waste. We have uses for almost all of the nuclear material in one way or another. To give you some perspective, to bury the 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel that the U.S. currently would, just in the energy capacity alone, be the equivalent of burying five billion gallons of oil! That is a lot of energy! And the 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will fit roughly on a single football field stacked five meters deep. That is a lot of bang in a relatively small volume! I don't think we can begin to call this waste.
As you guys probably know, Yucca Mountain was shut down recently by the Obama administration through reasoning that according to anybody involved with the project was just insane. That is another issue though, and perhaps I will talk about this in another post. The fact is that nuclear power lost its deposition place for its high level waste. This would seem like the end of nuclear power. How could the plants operate if they had no place to put the waste? They would be over run with dangerous waste right? This was what environmentalists groups such as Green Peace was hoping for, and as soon as Yucca Mountain was shut down, they began calling for halt on all construction of nuclear power plants in the United States as well as the closing of all reactors currently running. Have they finally won the debate over waste?
Thankfully they have not won the debate and nuclear power will continue. Nuclear waste seems to be a highly misunderstood area which has been reflected in policy decisions as early as the Ford administration. There has been a popular article circulating around the internet, even showing up in the Wall Street Journal, giving a totally different perspective on nuclear waste. Could the failure of Yucca Mountain actually be a good thing for the nuclear industry? Well, it seems that it can!
First, let's understand how we currently treat our high level nuclear waste. As an aside, high level nuclear waste simply refers to the radioactive materials which are emitting radioactivity at a high rate, such as spent nuclear fuel rods. Today, these types of waste are stored at the nuclear power plants themselves. This type of storage is referred to as "interim storage," meaning we are storing it there until we find something better to do with it. The storage facilities are basically lead boxes filled with water. The lead is used to stop the gamma radiation put off by the stored contents, and the water is necessary to stop the neutrons being emitted. We have to use water for this because it turns out that hydrogen is the best way to slow down a neutron with lots of energy. Think of it like a pool ball. It is possible to hit the pool ball at another pool ball and transfer all of the energy from the pool ball you hit to the one you hit it at. I am sure all of you pool playing people out there will agree. No replace the second pool ball with a bowling ball. Hitting the pool ball at the bowling ball will simply result in the pool ball bouncing off in a different direction without slowing it. The same is true with neutrons. Lucky for us, hydrogen has roughly the same mass as a neutron and we have a substance on Earth that is easy to work with and full of hydrogen. Good old water! Sorry for getting side tracked, but I though you might find that interesting.
As the article points out, it seems that it is a good thing that we have kept our spent fuel out of permanent disposal. Why? Because it is not really waste. In fact, waste is possibly the most inaccurate term you could use to describe the stored spent fuel. Remember that the spent fuel is not used completely. I discussed this in my article on reprocessing nuclear fuel. When the nuclear power plant is done with the fuel, roughly 95% of the energy remains in the spent fuel. We just have to install new fuel because fission is inhibited by its own fission fragments. If we clean these out through reprocessing, there is much more energy that we can harness from the fuel.
I said earlier that we do not yet need to reprocess in the nuclear power industry because uranium is currently so abundant that it is cheaper to mine more of it than to reprocess the spent fuel. I still do hold to this argument, though in the future this might not be the case in which putting all our spent fuel in a permanent repository would be a huge mistake.
There is an economical reason to process the fuels today though. Many industries use nuclear materials including the medical industry and the exploratory oil industry. The nuclear medicine industry is a four billion dollar industry, so the demand for the materials in the fuel is there. And as a byproduct of the reprocessing, we regain the U-238 from the fuel rods which can be used for new fuel as well as retrieve the important stuff: the fissile materials such as U-235 and Pu-239. France does not reprocess fuels for the nuclear power industry, but they do to meet the demand of other industries. The parts of the spent fuel that are left over that we don't have a current use for can then be placed into "interim storage" until we do have a use for it. This is such a small amount of material that it really doesn't need to be taken anywhere. It can be stored right at the reprocessing plant thus avoiding the transportation of nuclear materials on our highways. Sounds like the way to minimize risk to me!
I guess really what I want to point out, just like the article, is that the term nuclear waste is a misnomer. I don't think there is such a thing as nuclear waste. We have uses for almost all of the nuclear material in one way or another. To give you some perspective, to bury the 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel that the U.S. currently would, just in the energy capacity alone, be the equivalent of burying five billion gallons of oil! That is a lot of energy! And the 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will fit roughly on a single football field stacked five meters deep. That is a lot of bang in a relatively small volume! I don't think we can begin to call this waste.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Told You it was a Terrestrial Force
Have you guys every been trying to make a statement and while you are doing it, something comes along that exactly proves your point? Well it happened to me. In my last article, I was trying to convince you that we need to change nuclear powers image to where it look more like a gift from something higher than us...a terrestrial kind of power.
So this week I was sitting in my reactor physics class, and my professor, Dr. King, began talking about the natural percentage of uranium-235 in uranium ore. Just like in metals such as copper, isotope percentages are constant throughout the world in a pure substance. This hold true for uranium in every part of the world except for in one place: at Oklo in Gabon, Africa. In 1972, a French processing plant received a shipment of ore from this site, and upon doing tests to check in the level of U-235 in the ore, discovered it was lower than expected. This was very alarming as U-235 is a highly controlled material due to its need in weapons. The lower levels of U-235 meant that someone was extracting some of the material before sending the ore to be processed. Either that, or they were sending already used fuel to them.
As it turns out, such was not the case. To get a good summary of the events, I suggest checking out the Wikipedia page, as it provides the best quick summary of what happened at Oklo. When further looking into the site, something never expected was discovered. Tests on the ore at the site revealed fission fragments in the fresh ore. But it could not have already been used in a modern power plant because it just came out of the ground! So what does this mean?
Well, it means that this was the first nuclear reactor on Earth, running roughly 1.5 billion years ago! It seems that following the decay chain of uranium, the percentage of U-235 in the soil at Okla would have peaked at about 3% around this time. This is the lower limit of what modern commercial reactors are enriched to for power generation. This high level of U-235 covered such a large area, and the fact that the rock in the area was porous due to volcanic activity meaning that water was running able to run through the rock at Oklo created what is the basis of how our light water reactors are designed today. The large area allowed for the neutrons to be kept within reach of fissile material long enough to likely fission. The presence of the water acted as a moderator, which means that the water slowed down the neutrons to appropriate speeds so that they were likely to fission. I can talk more about the physics of fission later, but the fact that this naturally occurred is just mind blowing!
The conditions in the soil outside of Oklo enabled the uranium ore to go critical, meaning that it caused a stable nuclear reaction as long as the water was present. Could you imagine walking along and wondering why the ground is hot? It is not geothermal energy. It is not fire in the ground. It is a release of nuclear energy done by the hand of nature! You can still today see the evidence of the reaction.
Once upon a time, this natural nuclear reactor operated at about 100 kW, which in today's terms of commercial reactors is very small. These reactors started up in several different locations in the area, but none of them are active today. Though these are not viable sources for power production, they are interesting for other reasons. Largely, this allows us to study the storage and disposal of nuclear waste over billions of years. The studies that we do in labs give us a lot of information, but they do not allow us to place in the time factor. I don't want to go into discussing nuclear waste here as this is the subject of my upcoming posts! I love it when things just lead in so nicely to where you are going.
As to my original point, does anyone else see this as a bit of a miracle? I mean, nature didn't only supply us with the material to build a nuclear reactor, it also took it upon itself to show us that it can be done. It is not a power source that is foreign to nature, but one that occurs on Earth naturally. It is almost as though God is trying to give us a hint!
So this week I was sitting in my reactor physics class, and my professor, Dr. King, began talking about the natural percentage of uranium-235 in uranium ore. Just like in metals such as copper, isotope percentages are constant throughout the world in a pure substance. This hold true for uranium in every part of the world except for in one place: at Oklo in Gabon, Africa. In 1972, a French processing plant received a shipment of ore from this site, and upon doing tests to check in the level of U-235 in the ore, discovered it was lower than expected. This was very alarming as U-235 is a highly controlled material due to its need in weapons. The lower levels of U-235 meant that someone was extracting some of the material before sending the ore to be processed. Either that, or they were sending already used fuel to them.
As it turns out, such was not the case. To get a good summary of the events, I suggest checking out the Wikipedia page, as it provides the best quick summary of what happened at Oklo. When further looking into the site, something never expected was discovered. Tests on the ore at the site revealed fission fragments in the fresh ore. But it could not have already been used in a modern power plant because it just came out of the ground! So what does this mean?
Well, it means that this was the first nuclear reactor on Earth, running roughly 1.5 billion years ago! It seems that following the decay chain of uranium, the percentage of U-235 in the soil at Okla would have peaked at about 3% around this time. This is the lower limit of what modern commercial reactors are enriched to for power generation. This high level of U-235 covered such a large area, and the fact that the rock in the area was porous due to volcanic activity meaning that water was running able to run through the rock at Oklo created what is the basis of how our light water reactors are designed today. The large area allowed for the neutrons to be kept within reach of fissile material long enough to likely fission. The presence of the water acted as a moderator, which means that the water slowed down the neutrons to appropriate speeds so that they were likely to fission. I can talk more about the physics of fission later, but the fact that this naturally occurred is just mind blowing!
The conditions in the soil outside of Oklo enabled the uranium ore to go critical, meaning that it caused a stable nuclear reaction as long as the water was present. Could you imagine walking along and wondering why the ground is hot? It is not geothermal energy. It is not fire in the ground. It is a release of nuclear energy done by the hand of nature! You can still today see the evidence of the reaction.
Once upon a time, this natural nuclear reactor operated at about 100 kW, which in today's terms of commercial reactors is very small. These reactors started up in several different locations in the area, but none of them are active today. Though these are not viable sources for power production, they are interesting for other reasons. Largely, this allows us to study the storage and disposal of nuclear waste over billions of years. The studies that we do in labs give us a lot of information, but they do not allow us to place in the time factor. I don't want to go into discussing nuclear waste here as this is the subject of my upcoming posts! I love it when things just lead in so nicely to where you are going.
As to my original point, does anyone else see this as a bit of a miracle? I mean, nature didn't only supply us with the material to build a nuclear reactor, it also took it upon itself to show us that it can be done. It is not a power source that is foreign to nature, but one that occurs on Earth naturally. It is almost as though God is trying to give us a hint!
Friday, February 18, 2011
Politics...Really!?
The other night I was out cruising the blogosphere and started reading an article on my favorite blog, "Atomic Insights." Rod Adams, the author of blog, is a very out spoken pro-nuclear advocate who brings up a lot of interesting issues on the nuclear debate. If you are interested in getting a very pointed view of the debate, I recommend checking out what he writes. His article that I read the other night though got me thinking.
Mr. Adams discusses an interesting point in the article (well actually he discusses many, but I will try to stick to just a few of them). He starts by wondering why it is that oil has increased in price so much without ever bettering the product. When he was a kid, gasoline was about 25 cents a gallon and was the same gasoline that we buy today at nearly three dollars a gallon. Gasoline actually has less bang for the buck today than it did then due to the addition of ethanol to it. Prices of things such as houses have also gone up, but the houses that we are buying today are a much better product than when he was a kid as well. Air conditioners, better insulation, etc... Nuclear power has also increased its efficiency over the years. Today we are producing more power than we have in the past while using the same amount of fuel. The thing about nuclear power is that the cost has actually decreased! What? A better product and the price goes down?
What Mr. Adams is getting at is that we have such an abundant and almost miracle power source here already and yet we continue to fight over whether we should use it or not. He refers to nuclear power as "a terrestrial process that converts tiny amounts of mass into large amounts of energy." We don't have to depend on solar power which only works part of the time or on crude oils and coal which took millions of years to form and which we use now much faster than it is being replaced. We have our own power of the sun right here in nuclear fuels, which is abundant, clean, and reliable.
He definitely gives a convincing argument here, which is the best that I have seen him give for nuclear power. Going to school for nuclear engineering, I obviously like the technical arguments which he presents and which give solid proof as to why we need more nuclear power, but I don't think that this type of argument will be the one that convinces the normal person. I like the argument presented in this article because it is more of an argument of need. It doesn't just give the facts of why to the reader, but it makes them feel that nuclear power is a God given miracle to power our future. This is a better argument. We all know that facts never are the cause of victory in a political debate. We need to get to the basic human need. We have to make people think that this is why uranium is on the Earth. It is not just another metal, but a terrestrial miracle given to us for energy.
Mr. Adams discusses an interesting point in the article (well actually he discusses many, but I will try to stick to just a few of them). He starts by wondering why it is that oil has increased in price so much without ever bettering the product. When he was a kid, gasoline was about 25 cents a gallon and was the same gasoline that we buy today at nearly three dollars a gallon. Gasoline actually has less bang for the buck today than it did then due to the addition of ethanol to it. Prices of things such as houses have also gone up, but the houses that we are buying today are a much better product than when he was a kid as well. Air conditioners, better insulation, etc... Nuclear power has also increased its efficiency over the years. Today we are producing more power than we have in the past while using the same amount of fuel. The thing about nuclear power is that the cost has actually decreased! What? A better product and the price goes down?
What Mr. Adams is getting at is that we have such an abundant and almost miracle power source here already and yet we continue to fight over whether we should use it or not. He refers to nuclear power as "a terrestrial process that converts tiny amounts of mass into large amounts of energy." We don't have to depend on solar power which only works part of the time or on crude oils and coal which took millions of years to form and which we use now much faster than it is being replaced. We have our own power of the sun right here in nuclear fuels, which is abundant, clean, and reliable.
He definitely gives a convincing argument here, which is the best that I have seen him give for nuclear power. Going to school for nuclear engineering, I obviously like the technical arguments which he presents and which give solid proof as to why we need more nuclear power, but I don't think that this type of argument will be the one that convinces the normal person. I like the argument presented in this article because it is more of an argument of need. It doesn't just give the facts of why to the reader, but it makes them feel that nuclear power is a God given miracle to power our future. This is a better argument. We all know that facts never are the cause of victory in a political debate. We need to get to the basic human need. We have to make people think that this is why uranium is on the Earth. It is not just another metal, but a terrestrial miracle given to us for energy.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Green vs. Green
I have refrained so far from using this blog as a soap box for ranting about alternative energies. I will try to continue avoiding this, but I have found something that gets my point across without me having to rant. My grandmother sent me this article the other day and I couldn't resist sharing it with you.
The article is about how Holland is stepping away from renewable energy sources due to the high costs, and in turn stepping toward nuclear power. In doing so, Holland has become the first nation to break away from the EU's goal of being 20% renewable. To make the statement stronger, Holland was a strong supporter of the Kyoto Agreement and was responsible for persuading other nations to adopt renewable energy sources for their future.
So why would Holland make such a drastic turn-of-face? The answer is simple: Money! Like every other industry, the power industry also must be profitable to be viable. Holland was putting roughly 4 billion euros a year into renewable energies. In short, they don't ever see their investment being returned upon, or at least not in the near future. The recently cut this yearly subsidy to about 1.5 billion euros a year and instead are first the first time in 40 years allowing the construction of nuclear power plants. As opposed to renewable energies which will never recoup the expenditures they require, nuclear power is a sustainable clean power source that is economically viable. It makes sense ecologically and economically.
I don't mean to imply that renewable energy sources don't have an important role to play in fulfilling our power needs, but that fact is simply that they cannot be expected to support a large percentage of the base power needs or the base load. In general, they are not reliable or strong enough to supply the constant power that we consume. I vote that we too quit so heavily subsidizing an industry which cannot support the role that we hope it will and look to a solution that can. At least for now, that is nuclear power. I am sure though that there are other sources out there which we would be better off pumping money into.
The article is about how Holland is stepping away from renewable energy sources due to the high costs, and in turn stepping toward nuclear power. In doing so, Holland has become the first nation to break away from the EU's goal of being 20% renewable. To make the statement stronger, Holland was a strong supporter of the Kyoto Agreement and was responsible for persuading other nations to adopt renewable energy sources for their future.
So why would Holland make such a drastic turn-of-face? The answer is simple: Money! Like every other industry, the power industry also must be profitable to be viable. Holland was putting roughly 4 billion euros a year into renewable energies. In short, they don't ever see their investment being returned upon, or at least not in the near future. The recently cut this yearly subsidy to about 1.5 billion euros a year and instead are first the first time in 40 years allowing the construction of nuclear power plants. As opposed to renewable energies which will never recoup the expenditures they require, nuclear power is a sustainable clean power source that is economically viable. It makes sense ecologically and economically.
I don't mean to imply that renewable energy sources don't have an important role to play in fulfilling our power needs, but that fact is simply that they cannot be expected to support a large percentage of the base power needs or the base load. In general, they are not reliable or strong enough to supply the constant power that we consume. I vote that we too quit so heavily subsidizing an industry which cannot support the role that we hope it will and look to a solution that can. At least for now, that is nuclear power. I am sure though that there are other sources out there which we would be better off pumping money into.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Reprocessing U.S. Reprocessing?
The entire energy industry's eyes are watching the success of the nuclear industry in France. In case you haven't heard, France generates roughly 80% of its power via nuclear power. Many nuclear advocates strongly want to follow France's design to make nuclear power a majority producer in the United States. If you talk to someone who supports this, one of the first subjects that will come up will be nuclear fuel reprocessing, a popular subject around nuclear power for the last thirty years. For those of you that have been asking me about this subject, here is what I can gather about it.
First, lets start by exploring what the reprocessing of nuclear fuels means. Remember that nuclear reactors work due to fission. When an atom undergoes fission, it is split into two smaller pieces which are known as fission fragments. Common fission fragments are strontium-90 atoms and cesium-137 just in case you were curious. So what does this mean? Well, though these fission fragments are radioactive, they do not undergo fission. In fact, many of them form what are known as nuclear poisons which cause the reactor to stop undergoing fission. When fission stops, the reactor does not create heat to create power. These are therefor a large performance inhibitor. Nuclear poisons kind of act like dust on old CRT televisions. As you watch television, the static from the television causes dust to stick to the screen and make it harder to watch television with clarity. After a while, you have to clean the screen in order for the television to get back to is full operating potential. In this way, it is often the nuclear poisons that cause a fuel to be considered "spent," at which point the reactor is refueled and the spent fuel is sent to storage. Not all of the fissionable material has undergone fission though when this is done. New reactor fuel usually contains about 3-4% of uranium-235, which is the fissionable element in the reactor. When the fuel is spent, only about half of the uranium-235 has been burned up.
This is where reprocessing steps into play. By chemical processes, the leftover fissionable products can be taken out of the spent fuel and recycled into new fuel. It turns out that the reactor also makes fissionable plutonium during the operation (about 1-2% of the fuel becomes plutonium), and this too can be extracted during the reprocessing of the fuel. The plutonium is important for other types of reactors known as breeder reactors, but I will talk about them more in the future as they are quite important for the future of power generation. But to sum it up, reprocessing enables us to burn up the fuel more completely so that we are not just throwing away half of the power production capabilities of the Uranium we pull out of the ground.
So now you are wondering why there is so much controversy over this issue because it sounds like a good idea. But there are some issues with the reprocessing of nuclear material. PBS did a great article on Frontline summing up the arguments of the reprocessing debate. I suggest that you read the article to get a clear picture of the situation, but I will try to address the important parts of the article.
Two words have been very prevalent in American culture since the beginning of the Cold War: nuclear proliferation. These were the two words that killed the reprocessing of nuclear materials in the Untied States. It was nuclear proliferation that caused Jimmy Carter to stop reprocessing within the United States in 1977. When nuclear material is reprocessed, pure forms of uranium-235 and of different isotopes of plutonium are yielded. It was proven by U.S. physicists that the plutonium from the reprocessing could be used in an explosive device. Because material that can be used for weapons is obtained by the reprocessing of nuclear materials, Jimmy Carter decided that is would be best to make an example to the world and not reprocess, thus preventing nuclear weapons being generated by nuclear power.
The creation of weapons from the material created by reprocessing is not so simple though. The yielded Plutonium is a mix of different types of plutonium. As it turns out, not all types of plutonium are good for weapons. The heavier isotopes of plutonium (240 and 241) are strong neutron absorbers and cause the weapons to be unstable and yield unpredictable powers. When I say this, I don't mean that they are more dangerous, but less as they often do not go off or are small explosions when they do. Remember, it is very tough to build a nuclear weapon. This means that nuclear proliferation was a bad excuse for canceling of fuel reprocessing in the United States. Why would a nation want to use an unpredictable fuel in weapons that involve such a great investment. When a country develops a nuclear arsenal, they have to not only design and build the weapons, but also gain the trained manpower to operate and maintain the arsenal as well as develop the policy that goes along with such power. Bad material for the weapon is not a risk that a country would take when investing so much. There are ways to develop much more reliable fuel.
On the other hand, today we have another threat in terrorists that don't have such investment. But we must also keep in mind that reprocessing of nuclear material is not easy to conceal. Also, the spent fuel is an internationally regulated substance which they would have to get a hold of in order just to put through expensive reprocessing in order to build an unreliable weapon. Unfortunately there are cheaper, more easily concealed, and more reliable methods to obtain weapons grade nuclear material out there.
The other side of the argument is more intriguing to me. Critics say that the reprocessing of nuclear materials is not economical when it comes to yielding more fuel for the reactors or for reducing the cost of storing the spent fuel. In other words, reprocessing is expensive, and it is. I will defer talking about the waste part of the debate until later since I plan on doing a lot of discussion in the future on the subject. But the economics of nuclear fuel is interesting.
If you guys have been following on my previous articles, especially my posts on uranium exploration, you already know that fuel is not a large expense for the production of nuclear power. The price of the fuel can increase greatly, but the increase will not affect the price the consumer pays for the power. So it is not really that the reprocessing of nuclear material is not economical, it is just that it is currently much cheaper to mine the uranium we need for the reactors. We can pull it out of the ground cheaper than we can pull it back out of the spent fuel. This will not always be the case though. At some point, the unburned fuel sitting in the spent fuel rods will be of high enough value that we will want to reprocess the material. This makes it a good thing that all this spent fuel will continue to lie around at the plants so that it is there when we need it. It helps with the waste issue just a little, but I will talk about that later.
So today, it is still against U.S. policy to reprocess nuclear material. This is alright with me though since our uranium reserves are so large. It is not that we can't reprocess like France does that is killing nuclear power in the United States. The industry has bigger problems at the moment to worry about.
First, lets start by exploring what the reprocessing of nuclear fuels means. Remember that nuclear reactors work due to fission. When an atom undergoes fission, it is split into two smaller pieces which are known as fission fragments. Common fission fragments are strontium-90 atoms and cesium-137 just in case you were curious. So what does this mean? Well, though these fission fragments are radioactive, they do not undergo fission. In fact, many of them form what are known as nuclear poisons which cause the reactor to stop undergoing fission. When fission stops, the reactor does not create heat to create power. These are therefor a large performance inhibitor. Nuclear poisons kind of act like dust on old CRT televisions. As you watch television, the static from the television causes dust to stick to the screen and make it harder to watch television with clarity. After a while, you have to clean the screen in order for the television to get back to is full operating potential. In this way, it is often the nuclear poisons that cause a fuel to be considered "spent," at which point the reactor is refueled and the spent fuel is sent to storage. Not all of the fissionable material has undergone fission though when this is done. New reactor fuel usually contains about 3-4% of uranium-235, which is the fissionable element in the reactor. When the fuel is spent, only about half of the uranium-235 has been burned up.
This is where reprocessing steps into play. By chemical processes, the leftover fissionable products can be taken out of the spent fuel and recycled into new fuel. It turns out that the reactor also makes fissionable plutonium during the operation (about 1-2% of the fuel becomes plutonium), and this too can be extracted during the reprocessing of the fuel. The plutonium is important for other types of reactors known as breeder reactors, but I will talk about them more in the future as they are quite important for the future of power generation. But to sum it up, reprocessing enables us to burn up the fuel more completely so that we are not just throwing away half of the power production capabilities of the Uranium we pull out of the ground.
So now you are wondering why there is so much controversy over this issue because it sounds like a good idea. But there are some issues with the reprocessing of nuclear material. PBS did a great article on Frontline summing up the arguments of the reprocessing debate. I suggest that you read the article to get a clear picture of the situation, but I will try to address the important parts of the article.
Two words have been very prevalent in American culture since the beginning of the Cold War: nuclear proliferation. These were the two words that killed the reprocessing of nuclear materials in the Untied States. It was nuclear proliferation that caused Jimmy Carter to stop reprocessing within the United States in 1977. When nuclear material is reprocessed, pure forms of uranium-235 and of different isotopes of plutonium are yielded. It was proven by U.S. physicists that the plutonium from the reprocessing could be used in an explosive device. Because material that can be used for weapons is obtained by the reprocessing of nuclear materials, Jimmy Carter decided that is would be best to make an example to the world and not reprocess, thus preventing nuclear weapons being generated by nuclear power.
The creation of weapons from the material created by reprocessing is not so simple though. The yielded Plutonium is a mix of different types of plutonium. As it turns out, not all types of plutonium are good for weapons. The heavier isotopes of plutonium (240 and 241) are strong neutron absorbers and cause the weapons to be unstable and yield unpredictable powers. When I say this, I don't mean that they are more dangerous, but less as they often do not go off or are small explosions when they do. Remember, it is very tough to build a nuclear weapon. This means that nuclear proliferation was a bad excuse for canceling of fuel reprocessing in the United States. Why would a nation want to use an unpredictable fuel in weapons that involve such a great investment. When a country develops a nuclear arsenal, they have to not only design and build the weapons, but also gain the trained manpower to operate and maintain the arsenal as well as develop the policy that goes along with such power. Bad material for the weapon is not a risk that a country would take when investing so much. There are ways to develop much more reliable fuel.
On the other hand, today we have another threat in terrorists that don't have such investment. But we must also keep in mind that reprocessing of nuclear material is not easy to conceal. Also, the spent fuel is an internationally regulated substance which they would have to get a hold of in order just to put through expensive reprocessing in order to build an unreliable weapon. Unfortunately there are cheaper, more easily concealed, and more reliable methods to obtain weapons grade nuclear material out there.
The other side of the argument is more intriguing to me. Critics say that the reprocessing of nuclear materials is not economical when it comes to yielding more fuel for the reactors or for reducing the cost of storing the spent fuel. In other words, reprocessing is expensive, and it is. I will defer talking about the waste part of the debate until later since I plan on doing a lot of discussion in the future on the subject. But the economics of nuclear fuel is interesting.
If you guys have been following on my previous articles, especially my posts on uranium exploration, you already know that fuel is not a large expense for the production of nuclear power. The price of the fuel can increase greatly, but the increase will not affect the price the consumer pays for the power. So it is not really that the reprocessing of nuclear material is not economical, it is just that it is currently much cheaper to mine the uranium we need for the reactors. We can pull it out of the ground cheaper than we can pull it back out of the spent fuel. This will not always be the case though. At some point, the unburned fuel sitting in the spent fuel rods will be of high enough value that we will want to reprocess the material. This makes it a good thing that all this spent fuel will continue to lie around at the plants so that it is there when we need it. It helps with the waste issue just a little, but I will talk about that later.
So today, it is still against U.S. policy to reprocess nuclear material. This is alright with me though since our uranium reserves are so large. It is not that we can't reprocess like France does that is killing nuclear power in the United States. The industry has bigger problems at the moment to worry about.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Uh huh! Nuh uh!
The sad part about much of the debate surrounding nuclear power nowadays is that it resembles two small children arguing over something without a factual answer. People saying nuclear power is safe...people saying it is not safe. People asking what to do with the nuclear waste...people saying there is no nuclear waste. What has the debate become?
What brings me to say such things? Last week, I was heading to the Mines rec center when I was stopped in front of the student center by a representative of a small environmental activist group known as Environment Colorado. I do not remember his name since I am horrible with names, but he was out spreading awareness about allowing oil and gas drilling in Colorado state parks. This is what he lead with anyway before promptly getting to the point of needing money. Why he was approaching college kids for money is beyond me, but I digress. After talking with him about how much I love experiencing the outdoors as well as playing the role of the poor college kid to get out of giving him money, I had to venture into the lion's den and ask how his organization stood on nuclear power. Beyond giving the standard environmental answers and then concluding that nuclear power is probably a necessary evil, he began to talk about the high cost.
He told me that nuclear power is not viable because of the high cost associated with it. I cleverly retorted, saying that it is actually cheap but only made expensive by regulations. Of course he didn't believe me and began to tout about high construction costs and long build times due to how "complex" nuclear power is. At this point, the argument turned into the "Uh huh!...Nuh uh!" kind of argument.
Not wanting to be one-upped by a CU graduate, I had to go home and do my research, which has lead to some interesting findings. In summary, I think I finally have identified what has killed nuclear power and unfortunately it has little to do with science. I highly recommend reading this article passed on to me earlier this week by my dad.
The article has many good points about what has harmed the growth of nuclear power in the United States, many of which seem to be directly tied to President Jimmy Carter. I will try to avoid bashing him here and instead try to present the facts of what his administration "accomplished."
I have mentioned in the past that images of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed the growth of nuclear in this country because it caused the general public to be afraid of it. Well, I was wrong. Keeping in mind that the Three Mile Island incident took place in 1979 and that reactor number four at Chernobyl melted down in 1986, take a look at this graph.
This graph is from the article mentioned above and the sourced of the information comes from the atomic industrial forum. Notice how the number of nuclear power plants being planned fell nearly to zero in 1976, three years before the Three Mile Island incident. If it was not people realizing the dangers of nuclear power, what could have caused the growth of nuclear power to die off so quickly? The sad part is that science and reasoning has nothing to do with it; it is all politics.
I have to admit that some of the decline in growth of nuclear power was due to the energy crisis of the mid 1970s which made nuclear energy an excess to the market. The killing factor to the growth of the industry, though, was dealt by the Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker on Columbus Day of 1979 when he drastically raised interest rates. This cost would not have killed the nuclear industry had it not been for the help of the anti-nuclear interventionists who continually sued companies building new plants. These law suits caused the construction of the plants to be halted while in court. When one suit was settled, often another would be brought against the same plant. This resulted in the excessively long construction times notorious to nuclear power plants. This has nothing to do with the complexity of the plant being that in reality nuclear power plants are not much more complicated that coal-fired plants.
The long construction times though stretched out the time that the plant had to be financed. The new plants could not begin to pay off the loans used for construction until the plant could produce power. The high interest rates over long periods of time simply made the construction of new plants uneconomical. Companies could not afford to invest in them as they would never be profitable. The actual construction of the plants is not expensive, but financing the plant over long periods of time is.
Just to give you an idea, the article talks of the Boston-Edison's Pilgrim-2 plant which was finally canceled in 1981 after the cost of construction went from 400 million to 4 billion dollars! It seems to me that the Carter administration's efforts to stop nuclear power in the United States was pretty successful. I don't know what you guys think, but this is more than a little maddening to me. People need to read a little before they continue to talk about how expensive nuclear power is. We need to stop the slow down on the construction of nuclear power plants!
What brings me to say such things? Last week, I was heading to the Mines rec center when I was stopped in front of the student center by a representative of a small environmental activist group known as Environment Colorado. I do not remember his name since I am horrible with names, but he was out spreading awareness about allowing oil and gas drilling in Colorado state parks. This is what he lead with anyway before promptly getting to the point of needing money. Why he was approaching college kids for money is beyond me, but I digress. After talking with him about how much I love experiencing the outdoors as well as playing the role of the poor college kid to get out of giving him money, I had to venture into the lion's den and ask how his organization stood on nuclear power. Beyond giving the standard environmental answers and then concluding that nuclear power is probably a necessary evil, he began to talk about the high cost.
He told me that nuclear power is not viable because of the high cost associated with it. I cleverly retorted, saying that it is actually cheap but only made expensive by regulations. Of course he didn't believe me and began to tout about high construction costs and long build times due to how "complex" nuclear power is. At this point, the argument turned into the "Uh huh!...Nuh uh!" kind of argument.
Not wanting to be one-upped by a CU graduate, I had to go home and do my research, which has lead to some interesting findings. In summary, I think I finally have identified what has killed nuclear power and unfortunately it has little to do with science. I highly recommend reading this article passed on to me earlier this week by my dad.
The article has many good points about what has harmed the growth of nuclear power in the United States, many of which seem to be directly tied to President Jimmy Carter. I will try to avoid bashing him here and instead try to present the facts of what his administration "accomplished."
I have mentioned in the past that images of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed the growth of nuclear in this country because it caused the general public to be afraid of it. Well, I was wrong. Keeping in mind that the Three Mile Island incident took place in 1979 and that reactor number four at Chernobyl melted down in 1986, take a look at this graph.
 | |
| Graph depicting the new number of nuclear power plants ordered versus the year. |
I have to admit that some of the decline in growth of nuclear power was due to the energy crisis of the mid 1970s which made nuclear energy an excess to the market. The killing factor to the growth of the industry, though, was dealt by the Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker on Columbus Day of 1979 when he drastically raised interest rates. This cost would not have killed the nuclear industry had it not been for the help of the anti-nuclear interventionists who continually sued companies building new plants. These law suits caused the construction of the plants to be halted while in court. When one suit was settled, often another would be brought against the same plant. This resulted in the excessively long construction times notorious to nuclear power plants. This has nothing to do with the complexity of the plant being that in reality nuclear power plants are not much more complicated that coal-fired plants.
The long construction times though stretched out the time that the plant had to be financed. The new plants could not begin to pay off the loans used for construction until the plant could produce power. The high interest rates over long periods of time simply made the construction of new plants uneconomical. Companies could not afford to invest in them as they would never be profitable. The actual construction of the plants is not expensive, but financing the plant over long periods of time is.
Just to give you an idea, the article talks of the Boston-Edison's Pilgrim-2 plant which was finally canceled in 1981 after the cost of construction went from 400 million to 4 billion dollars! It seems to me that the Carter administration's efforts to stop nuclear power in the United States was pretty successful. I don't know what you guys think, but this is more than a little maddening to me. People need to read a little before they continue to talk about how expensive nuclear power is. We need to stop the slow down on the construction of nuclear power plants!
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
In Situ: A Mining Solution?
I recently did a post discussing the hazards of Uranium mining in which I focused on traditional surface and shaft type mines. If you didn't see the post, you can read it here. In the article I mentioned a type of mining known as in-situ leaching. I didn't talk about it much there because I feel that it was worth discussing as its own subject.
I first heard about in-situ leaching in my stewardship of nuclear materials class earlier this semester. It caught my interest because my professor, which is an environmental scientist seemed to be excited about the benefits of this method of Uranium extraction. Thus, I had to do some research and learned that this method actually mitigates many of the negative effects of tradition mineral mining methods.
So what is in-situ leaching? In brief, it is a type of mineral recovery that does not involve the removal of mineral ore from the ground. Instead, in-situ leaching injects a solution into the ground which dissolves the mineral from the rock and then and then pumps the solution back to the surface. At the surface, the mineral is separated from the solution, yielding relatively pure Uranium oxide. The picture below is a diagram of a in-situ leaching system.
As can be seen in the image, this type of mineral recovery only works when the mineral is confined between two layer of solid rock which prohibits the leaching liquid from passing through. This is to make sure that the leaching liquid does not escape into ground water areas and contaminate our drinking water. Contamination of the ground water is the largest concern with this type of mineral recovery. It does happen that the leaching solution leaks through the confining boundaries into the ground water, making this method a little nerve racking to those who depend upon the water. This risk though is small and does not contaminate the water in large concentrations.
So why don't we use more of this method for Uranium mining seeing that it gets rid of the need to remove large amounts of land and leave large tailing piles behind? Well first of all, in-situ leaching is not good for removing large amounts of Uranium. It is instead an good method extraction where there is a low concentration of Uranium in the ore. This method is much cheaper than traditional mining practices and thus makes getting lower concentrations out of the ground more efficient. It cannot replace traditional Uranium mining though due to its limits.
From an environmental standpoint, leaching does permanently change the composition of the rock. Some are opposed to this method for this reason. I say that this method is much less destructive than digging up large amounts of ore to extract the Uranium. And besides, how can we extract any mineral without affecting the rock it is contained withing. I think a little common sense is needed here...we need Earth's resources to live modern life. We need to accept that taking these resources out of the ground is a part of life.
Is in-situ leaching an alternative to traditional mining techniques? I think probably not, but it is an efficient way of extracting low concentrations. We still need to mine Uranium though. I don't see a way around it, but like I have already said: such is a product of the lives we choose to lead!
Do some further reading on in-situ leaching here. This is the site I used, so let me know if you disagree with my opinion.
I first heard about in-situ leaching in my stewardship of nuclear materials class earlier this semester. It caught my interest because my professor, which is an environmental scientist seemed to be excited about the benefits of this method of Uranium extraction. Thus, I had to do some research and learned that this method actually mitigates many of the negative effects of tradition mineral mining methods.
So what is in-situ leaching? In brief, it is a type of mineral recovery that does not involve the removal of mineral ore from the ground. Instead, in-situ leaching injects a solution into the ground which dissolves the mineral from the rock and then and then pumps the solution back to the surface. At the surface, the mineral is separated from the solution, yielding relatively pure Uranium oxide. The picture below is a diagram of a in-situ leaching system.
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| Image taken from http://www.wise-uranium.org/uisl.html |
As can be seen in the image, this type of mineral recovery only works when the mineral is confined between two layer of solid rock which prohibits the leaching liquid from passing through. This is to make sure that the leaching liquid does not escape into ground water areas and contaminate our drinking water. Contamination of the ground water is the largest concern with this type of mineral recovery. It does happen that the leaching solution leaks through the confining boundaries into the ground water, making this method a little nerve racking to those who depend upon the water. This risk though is small and does not contaminate the water in large concentrations.
So why don't we use more of this method for Uranium mining seeing that it gets rid of the need to remove large amounts of land and leave large tailing piles behind? Well first of all, in-situ leaching is not good for removing large amounts of Uranium. It is instead an good method extraction where there is a low concentration of Uranium in the ore. This method is much cheaper than traditional mining practices and thus makes getting lower concentrations out of the ground more efficient. It cannot replace traditional Uranium mining though due to its limits.
From an environmental standpoint, leaching does permanently change the composition of the rock. Some are opposed to this method for this reason. I say that this method is much less destructive than digging up large amounts of ore to extract the Uranium. And besides, how can we extract any mineral without affecting the rock it is contained withing. I think a little common sense is needed here...we need Earth's resources to live modern life. We need to accept that taking these resources out of the ground is a part of life.
Is in-situ leaching an alternative to traditional mining techniques? I think probably not, but it is an efficient way of extracting low concentrations. We still need to mine Uranium though. I don't see a way around it, but like I have already said: such is a product of the lives we choose to lead!
Do some further reading on in-situ leaching here. This is the site I used, so let me know if you disagree with my opinion.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Creating a New Image
I see a lot of pictures out there making wind turbines look green and making solar panels look green, but it is hard to find a picture that makes nuclear power look environmentally friendly. Thus, I took the liberty to play around in Photoshop (GIMP actually) and work on a new image. I think this is important as I am trying to re-frame the image of nuclear power. How does this image make you guys view nuclear power?
Exploitation or Exploration?
I am sure that you all have observed the negative feelings that exist toward oil exploration. It is to the point that "exploration" is almost a dirty word being associated with drilling and places such as ANWR. So it is obvious that the oil and gas industries have problems with exploration, but the truth is that the nuclear industry also needs to rely on exploration to validate its future.
There is a popular myth out there which says there is only enough Uranium on the Earth to power us for roughly the next 50 years. This statement is based upon the Uranium reserves that we knew about in the 1950s though and does not represent the true situation. Interestingly enough, it seems that it is this fact which drives many to believe that by choosing nuclear power, we are only going down the same path as we have with oil and coal. To them, it is a finite resource which will only run out in the near future.
What our reserves actually tell us is how much Uranium we know about. Thus, if we don't look, our reserves will be really small. It is not that there is only a small amount of Uranium available, but it is that we just have not looked for it. Doing some reading this week, I stumbled on an interesting article detailing the history of our Uranium reserves. I recommend that you read this article to really understand how important this resources really is.
The article shows that we have not invested much into finding Uranium reserves. Some have even said that we have invested less in Uranium exploration that we had in oil exploration in the early 1900s. Yes, this is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but there is a lot of truth in the statement. We have not looked. In 2007, there were some substantial funds invested in Uranium exploration, and this resulted in a significant increase in our Uranium reserves in under two years. The graph below is a visual representation of the data collected by the World Nuclear Association on Uranium reserves. It is a bit complicated, but take a minute to look at it.
The dotted line in the graph shows the funding trend for Uranium exploration over time with the funding values being shown on the left-side axis. The shaded green part of the graph represents the known Uranium reserves separated into three cost categories. The categories aren't too important for my point, so don't worry about them here. Notice how well that the reserves seem to correspond to how much we invest into finding more. It is almost a linear relationship at this point, meaning that it is directly related to how much we spend as to how much we have. This is one reason for believing that we are just beginning to tap the resource.
There is a popular myth out there which says there is only enough Uranium on the Earth to power us for roughly the next 50 years. This statement is based upon the Uranium reserves that we knew about in the 1950s though and does not represent the true situation. Interestingly enough, it seems that it is this fact which drives many to believe that by choosing nuclear power, we are only going down the same path as we have with oil and coal. To them, it is a finite resource which will only run out in the near future.
What our reserves actually tell us is how much Uranium we know about. Thus, if we don't look, our reserves will be really small. It is not that there is only a small amount of Uranium available, but it is that we just have not looked for it. Doing some reading this week, I stumbled on an interesting article detailing the history of our Uranium reserves. I recommend that you read this article to really understand how important this resources really is.
The article shows that we have not invested much into finding Uranium reserves. Some have even said that we have invested less in Uranium exploration that we had in oil exploration in the early 1900s. Yes, this is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but there is a lot of truth in the statement. We have not looked. In 2007, there were some substantial funds invested in Uranium exploration, and this resulted in a significant increase in our Uranium reserves in under two years. The graph below is a visual representation of the data collected by the World Nuclear Association on Uranium reserves. It is a bit complicated, but take a minute to look at it.
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| Graph from http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html |
Another advantage nuclear power has over its competitors such as oil and coal is that its cost to the consumer is not greatly affected by the cost of the fuel. This stems from the fact fuel is not the large cost in operating a nuclear plant. Maintenance on a nuclear power plant is the largest operating cost, but really the only real expense of a nuclear plant is permitting and building it. But I digress... The fact that the fuel is so small in the operating cost means that the price of the fuel can rise drastically without effecting the cost of the power to the consumer. When the price of a resource such as Uranium can vary so much without having a large effect on its demand, it becomes more cost effective, when needed, to extract the resource as a higher cost. This means we can get it from difficult places, where resources such as oil become unfeasible economically when the price of extraction greatly increases.
This opens up many possibilities. Some of the largest reserves of Uranium actually lies in sea water, but as of now this is an expensive and unneeded process. We have so much Uranium right now that we are not even being conservative with it. As of now, we are operating reactors that burn through large amounts of fuel inefficiently and we are not heavily promoting reprocessing.
Also, I am just talking about Uranium reserves, but this is not the only nuclear fuel. It is just the most convenient because in its natural form it is easy to manage. In fact, fuels such as Thorium are even more plentiful than Uranium and technologies such as breeder reactors along with the large amounts of Uranium in the Earth's granite crust offer us an essentially limitless power supply. That should be enough time to get the renewable energies right! Until then, nuclear power will be here for us.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Power is Dirty
All the buzz today in the energy industry in making your power clean. We all hear about "clean" coal technology, and natural gas. Photovoltaics (solar panels) are portrayed with butterflies and bunnies all around them, and wind power is the same way. The energy industry has set out to appear clean.
When I tell people that I am going into the nuclear industry, much of the concern I inevitably hear is about the handling of the nuclear fuel, whether it be the mining and processing or the handling of the waste. Nuclear power is having a problem making its image "clean" due to the attacks on Uranium mining, milling, and waste storage. I have to admit that I did not know much about the details of these processes, so I am setting out with you to learn about the process starting with the mining of Uranium. As an aside, I am currently taking a graduate environmental class on the stewardship of nuclear materials. Therefore, by the end of the semester I should have a few more interesting points to discuss with you guys.
For those of you who haven't been following the argument, I feel that this video does a pretty good job at getting to the heart of the argument.
Being raised in southern Colorado, I have heard many stories about Uranium mining. One of the largest Uranium milling sites, the Cotter facility, was located about thirty miles west of where I was raised. This facility was shut down when traces of Uranium was being found in the water supply for Canon City, Colorado.
This brings to light the problems that the people near the mining sites have. Everybody is afraid of anything that is radioactive. Activists attack Uranium mining as being different from other types of mining. The truth is that there are many issues that are universal to any mineral mining that takes place. If you are interested in the details of Uranium mining, I recommend that you check out this website, but I will try to highlight the key issues here.
Uranium mining is attacked as being extremely wasteful due to the large amount of material that must be ground up in order to get the needed amounts of Uranium out. This is due to the fact that Uranium in the highest quality ore only makes up about 0.1% to 0.2% of the mass. Therefore in order to obtain the roughly 200 tons of uranium ore needed to operate a plant for a year, over 100,000 tons of earth are ground up. This results in the "tailings" piles that are so infamous from Uranium mining. Now I know this seems like a lot of dirt to remove for so little, but before you judge too much, take a look at this video.
UP 5647 east.
Uploaded by BNSFrailfan. - Discover new destinations and travel videos.
(h/t to Rod Adams at Atomic Insights for finding the video) This video is of a train delivering enough coal to a power plant to operate for about a day and a half. Doing some research online, it seems that each of these large coal trains hauls nearly 20,000 tons of coal on average. That means that in a little over a week, the train will have delivered over 100,000 tons of coal to the plant to operate. Thus, over a year the coal power plant will have consumed millions of tons of coal. Now think that all this coal has to be removed from the ground, just like the Uranium ore. This is why whole mountains are being destroyed in West Virginia and Kentucky. This makes the amount of ground moved to get the Uranium seem quite insignificant. Keep in mind that after processing, the nuclear power plant will only "burn up" about 20 tons of fuel grade Uranium. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of resources being used by the coal industry.
Another argument against the tailings piles is that they are dangerous and need to be stored away from society for many many years. I think the fact that the Uranium is radioactive has little to do with this. What is more concerning is that Uranium is still a heavy metal and thus we need to worry about keeping the tailings away from water supplies. This again comes with the territory of any mineral mining. As far as the radioactivity, we must remember that the Uranium is naturally in the soil, and that is why we are mining it. We are exposed to it everyday living in areas where Uranium is present. It is just part of the background radiation we deal with living in Colorado. As far as the Radon levels, again those of us in Colorado know about that since we have to have ventilation systems in our basements to keep the Radon gas clear. I am not saying that the tailings piles don't have an effect on the radiation dose of those near them, but the dose is not that high and is by no means dangerous.
I want to also address the secret that solar power likes to keep. Photovoltaics relies on the use of batteries to store the power that they make. This means that they rely on lithium, which is another metal that must be mined. The process is similar to Uranium mining, but Lithium is much more caustic that Uranium. It has many respiratory effects, and like Uranium requires large amounts of water to mine. I don't want to attack the process, but I do want to bring to light that the dirty mining process is not central only to nuclear power. If we want to use the natural resources that mother nature gives us, then we really have no way around it.
There is much more to discuss on the topic, but I think this is a good introduction. In the future I will be posting on a different mining process known as situ leaching, which gets rid of many of the complaints about conventional Uranium mining.
I hope you see that activists are using any means by which they can to attack nuclear power. I don't want to make the claim that the mining has no negative environmental effects, but I can say that the mining process is not only for nuclear power. Why then does nuclear power have to bear the criticism for it when power sources such as solar power totally can ignore it?
As an aside, there is another nuclear blog for this class called the Nuke Truth which is addressing some of the same topics that I am. There has been an article posted there this week about Uranium production, so I suggest that you check it out.
When I tell people that I am going into the nuclear industry, much of the concern I inevitably hear is about the handling of the nuclear fuel, whether it be the mining and processing or the handling of the waste. Nuclear power is having a problem making its image "clean" due to the attacks on Uranium mining, milling, and waste storage. I have to admit that I did not know much about the details of these processes, so I am setting out with you to learn about the process starting with the mining of Uranium. As an aside, I am currently taking a graduate environmental class on the stewardship of nuclear materials. Therefore, by the end of the semester I should have a few more interesting points to discuss with you guys.
For those of you who haven't been following the argument, I feel that this video does a pretty good job at getting to the heart of the argument.
Being raised in southern Colorado, I have heard many stories about Uranium mining. One of the largest Uranium milling sites, the Cotter facility, was located about thirty miles west of where I was raised. This facility was shut down when traces of Uranium was being found in the water supply for Canon City, Colorado.
This brings to light the problems that the people near the mining sites have. Everybody is afraid of anything that is radioactive. Activists attack Uranium mining as being different from other types of mining. The truth is that there are many issues that are universal to any mineral mining that takes place. If you are interested in the details of Uranium mining, I recommend that you check out this website, but I will try to highlight the key issues here.
Uranium mining is attacked as being extremely wasteful due to the large amount of material that must be ground up in order to get the needed amounts of Uranium out. This is due to the fact that Uranium in the highest quality ore only makes up about 0.1% to 0.2% of the mass. Therefore in order to obtain the roughly 200 tons of uranium ore needed to operate a plant for a year, over 100,000 tons of earth are ground up. This results in the "tailings" piles that are so infamous from Uranium mining. Now I know this seems like a lot of dirt to remove for so little, but before you judge too much, take a look at this video.
UP 5647 east.
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(h/t to Rod Adams at Atomic Insights for finding the video) This video is of a train delivering enough coal to a power plant to operate for about a day and a half. Doing some research online, it seems that each of these large coal trains hauls nearly 20,000 tons of coal on average. That means that in a little over a week, the train will have delivered over 100,000 tons of coal to the plant to operate. Thus, over a year the coal power plant will have consumed millions of tons of coal. Now think that all this coal has to be removed from the ground, just like the Uranium ore. This is why whole mountains are being destroyed in West Virginia and Kentucky. This makes the amount of ground moved to get the Uranium seem quite insignificant. Keep in mind that after processing, the nuclear power plant will only "burn up" about 20 tons of fuel grade Uranium. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of resources being used by the coal industry.
Another argument against the tailings piles is that they are dangerous and need to be stored away from society for many many years. I think the fact that the Uranium is radioactive has little to do with this. What is more concerning is that Uranium is still a heavy metal and thus we need to worry about keeping the tailings away from water supplies. This again comes with the territory of any mineral mining. As far as the radioactivity, we must remember that the Uranium is naturally in the soil, and that is why we are mining it. We are exposed to it everyday living in areas where Uranium is present. It is just part of the background radiation we deal with living in Colorado. As far as the Radon levels, again those of us in Colorado know about that since we have to have ventilation systems in our basements to keep the Radon gas clear. I am not saying that the tailings piles don't have an effect on the radiation dose of those near them, but the dose is not that high and is by no means dangerous.
I want to also address the secret that solar power likes to keep. Photovoltaics relies on the use of batteries to store the power that they make. This means that they rely on lithium, which is another metal that must be mined. The process is similar to Uranium mining, but Lithium is much more caustic that Uranium. It has many respiratory effects, and like Uranium requires large amounts of water to mine. I don't want to attack the process, but I do want to bring to light that the dirty mining process is not central only to nuclear power. If we want to use the natural resources that mother nature gives us, then we really have no way around it.
There is much more to discuss on the topic, but I think this is a good introduction. In the future I will be posting on a different mining process known as situ leaching, which gets rid of many of the complaints about conventional Uranium mining.
I hope you see that activists are using any means by which they can to attack nuclear power. I don't want to make the claim that the mining has no negative environmental effects, but I can say that the mining process is not only for nuclear power. Why then does nuclear power have to bear the criticism for it when power sources such as solar power totally can ignore it?
As an aside, there is another nuclear blog for this class called the Nuke Truth which is addressing some of the same topics that I am. There has been an article posted there this week about Uranium production, so I suggest that you check it out.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Self Introspection and Self Evaluation
As I mentioned in my previous post, this blog is for a class that I am taking so from time to time some of the posts will be more oriented toward assignments for the class. This happens to be one of those posts. Read this if you are curious as to what I am trying to do with my blog and what I feel is good and bad about what I am doing.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
A Step in the Right Direction
For those who don't know this, the motivating reason behind the formation of this blog is my communicating science course at the Colorado School of Mines. The class is aimed at bettering the communication ties between the sciences, government, and the public on scientific issues. Therefore, I want to give you a little idea on where I want to take this blog in response to what I have learned so far from the class.
First of all, being a student it is easy to subscribe to what is know as the deficit model. This just means that it is easy to think that all we need to do to fix the problem (in this case, the nuclear power debate) is to educate the general public about the issue. It assumes that once a person is cognizant of the facts, they will follow the idea being presented without further conflict. This thus just involves the "lay person" (member of the general public which is not an expert on the scientific issue) being fed information and expected to accept it without hesitation. I say that it is easy to subscribe to this as a student because this is how we live our lives.
This has been the approach of the nuclear power industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s until the conversation just died. Obviously, this is not the approach to successfully get the point across about nuclear power. In today's media filled world, it is not a linear relationship between what the scientists say about nuclear power and how it is related to the public. This means several things. First, it is not just a one way message anymore, which makes the deficit model hard to work under. With modern media abilities, the public is able to talk back to the scientists and tell them what they think. So what now has to happen is that both sides have to both listen and be heard. This leads to a dialog, which is the point of modern day science communication. This is what the nuclear power industry needs to have in order to change its public opinion.
A dialog is what I want my blog to be. I will do my best to present the controversial issues that face nuclear power and I will present the facts behind the arguments without trying to fall back into my old habits of lecturing on nuclear power (as my first posts have been). On the other hand, I need to know what concerns you have and what questions you want answered. I can't guarantee that I can answer them, but I will do my best. I also want you to challenge what I know and believe. This is how advancements are made in the scientific process: challenge and creativity.
The second goal of my blog will be to re-frame the nuclear issue. By this, I mean that people see nuclear power as dangerous, a result of both the highly covered Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents. This is the frame that the pronuclear advocates had to fight with during the 1970s and 1980s. Today, I believe this track record has been reversed and people need to not see nuclear power as a potential disaster, but as a potential solution. Thus, I will work to frame the first of my posts by presenting the facts as they relate to the controversies, but then I will progress to present nuclear power as a solution, as I believe it should be seen.
Here is to the beginning of an educational journey which will hopefully bring to light the true issues of nuclear power!
First of all, being a student it is easy to subscribe to what is know as the deficit model. This just means that it is easy to think that all we need to do to fix the problem (in this case, the nuclear power debate) is to educate the general public about the issue. It assumes that once a person is cognizant of the facts, they will follow the idea being presented without further conflict. This thus just involves the "lay person" (member of the general public which is not an expert on the scientific issue) being fed information and expected to accept it without hesitation. I say that it is easy to subscribe to this as a student because this is how we live our lives.
This has been the approach of the nuclear power industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s until the conversation just died. Obviously, this is not the approach to successfully get the point across about nuclear power. In today's media filled world, it is not a linear relationship between what the scientists say about nuclear power and how it is related to the public. This means several things. First, it is not just a one way message anymore, which makes the deficit model hard to work under. With modern media abilities, the public is able to talk back to the scientists and tell them what they think. So what now has to happen is that both sides have to both listen and be heard. This leads to a dialog, which is the point of modern day science communication. This is what the nuclear power industry needs to have in order to change its public opinion.
A dialog is what I want my blog to be. I will do my best to present the controversial issues that face nuclear power and I will present the facts behind the arguments without trying to fall back into my old habits of lecturing on nuclear power (as my first posts have been). On the other hand, I need to know what concerns you have and what questions you want answered. I can't guarantee that I can answer them, but I will do my best. I also want you to challenge what I know and believe. This is how advancements are made in the scientific process: challenge and creativity.
The second goal of my blog will be to re-frame the nuclear issue. By this, I mean that people see nuclear power as dangerous, a result of both the highly covered Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents. This is the frame that the pronuclear advocates had to fight with during the 1970s and 1980s. Today, I believe this track record has been reversed and people need to not see nuclear power as a potential disaster, but as a potential solution. Thus, I will work to frame the first of my posts by presenting the facts as they relate to the controversies, but then I will progress to present nuclear power as a solution, as I believe it should be seen.
Here is to the beginning of an educational journey which will hopefully bring to light the true issues of nuclear power!
