POLICY PAPER Heinrich Böll Foundation
Myths and Facts: The German Switch from Nuclear to Renewables
Cover of a German language book of children's fairy tales, 1919. Modifications by Anna Milena Jurca. Picture by crackdog under CC BY 2.0 License. Original: Flickr.
March 16, 2012
Craig Morris
As a reaction to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, starting on March 11, 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition shut down roughly 40 percent of the country's nuclear generating capacity in mid-March 2011 and roughly re-implemented the original nuclear phase-out set forth under Chancellor Schroeder’s Social-Democrat/Green government. This change has been criticized as a panicked overreaction that would hurt the German economy and harm energy security. A year later, however, we can see what the temporary effects have been and what the long-term effects are likely to be.
With its nuclear phase-out, will Germany not have to simply import nuclear power from other countries? Aren't renewables raising the cost of power in Germany, and isn't nuclear cheap? And what about coal – is Germany not going to switch to that? Craig Morris, American writer and translator in the energy sector who has been based in Germany since 1992, answers these and more pressing questions on Germany’s energy transition.
Please click here to read Myths and Facts (8 pages, pdf, 1.59MB)
The German Energy Transition
Arguments for a renewable energy future
November 28, 2012 Arne Jungjohann
http://q.gs/31Wfr
Scientists setting radiation exposure limits took utility money: probe
By Yuri Kageyama
JapanToday
NATIONAL DEC. 09, 2012
March 24, 2011, a young evacuee is screened at a shelter for leaked radiation from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Fukushima.
TOKYO —
Influential scientists who help set Japan’s radiation exposure limits have for years had trips paid for by the country’s nuclear plant operators to attend overseas meetings of the world’s top academic group on radiation safety.
The potential conflict of interest is revealed in one sentence buried in a 600-page parliamentary investigation into last year’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster and pointed out to The Associated Press by a medical doctor on the 10-person investigation panel.
Some of these same scientists have consistently given optimistic assessments about the health risks of radiation, interviews with the scientists and government documents show. Their pivotal role in setting policy after the March 2011 tsunami and ensuing nuclear meltdowns meant the difference between schoolchildren playing outside or indoors and families staying or evacuating their homes.
http://sunsss.com/hosting
One leading scientist, Ohtsura Niwa, acknowledged that the electricity industry pays for flights and hotels to go to meetings of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, and for overseas members visiting Japan. He denied that the funding influences his science and stressed that he stands behind his view that continuing radiation worries about Fukushima are overblown.
“Those who evacuated just want to believe in the dangers of radiation to justify the action they took,” Niwa told the AP in an interview.
The official stance of the International Commission on Radiological Protection is that the health risks from radiation become zero only with zero exposure. But some of the eight Japanese ICRP members do not subscribe to that view, asserting that low-dose radiation is harmless or the risks are negligible.
The doctor on the parliamentary panel, Hisako Sakiyama, is outraged about utility funding for Japan’s ICRP members. She fears that radiation standards are being set leniently to limit costly evacuations.
“The assertion of the utilities became the rule. That’s ethically unacceptable. People’s health is at stake,” she said. “The view was twisted so it came out as though there is no clear evidence of the risks, or that we simply don’t know.”
The ICRP, based in Ottawa, Canada, does not take a stand on any nation’s policy. It is a charity that relies heavily on donations, and members’ funding varies by nation. The group brings scientists together to study radiation effects on health and the environment, as well as the impact of disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. In Japan, ICRP members sit on key panels at the prime minister’s office and the education ministry that set radiation safety policy.
The Fukushima meltdowns, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, brought a higher level of scrutiny to Japan’s nuclear industry, revealing close ties between the regulators and the regulated. Last month, some members of a panel that sets nuclear plant safety standards acknowledged they received research and other grant money from utility companies and plant manufacturers. The funding is not illegal in Japan.
Niwa, the only Japanese member to sit on the main ICRP committee, defended utility support for travel expenses, which comes from the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan through another radiation organization. Costs add up, he said, and he has spent tens of thousands of yen (thousands of dollars) of his personal money on ICRP projects and efforts to decontaminate Fukushima. All ICRP members fly economy, except for long flights such as between Argentina and Japan, he said.
The Federation declined comment.
Clouding the debate about radiation risks are the multiple causes of cancer, including diet, smoking and other habits. That’s why it is extremely difficult to prove any direct link between an individual’s cancer and radiation, or pinpoint where one cause begins and another ends.
The ICRP recommends keeping radiation exposure down to 1 millisievert per year and up to 20 millisieverts in a short-term emergency, a standard that takes into account the lessons of Chernobyl.
“Health risks from annual radiation exposure of 20 millisieverts, the current level for issuance of orders to evacuate an affected area, are quite small particularly when compared against the risks from other carcinogenic factors,” the ICRP says.
The risk of getting cancer at 20 millisieverts raises the already existing 25 percent chance by an estimated 0.1 percent, according to French ICRP member Jacques Lochard, who visits Japan often to consult on Fukushima.
While that’s low, he says it’s not zero, so his view is that you should do all you can to reduce exposure.
Kazuo Sakai, a Japanese ICRP member, said he was interested in debunking that generally accepted view. Known as the “linear no threshold” model of radiation risk, the ICRP-backed position considers radiation harmful even at low doses with no threshold below which exposure is safe.
Sakai called that model a mere “tool,” and possibly not scientifically sound.
He said his studies on salamanders and other animal life since the Fukushima disaster have shown no ill effects, including genetic damage, and so humans, exposed to far lower levels of radiation, are safe.
“No serious health effects are expected for regular people,” he said.
The parliamentary investigation found that utilities have repeatedly tried to push Japanese ICRP members toward a lenient standard on radiation from as far back as 2007.
Internal records at the Federation of Electric Power Companies obtained by the investigative committee showed officials rejoicing over how their views were getting reflected in ICRP Japan statements.
Even earlier, Sakai received utility money for his research into low-dose radiation during a 1999-2006 tenure at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, an organization funded by the utilities.
But he said that before his hiring he anticipated pressures to come up with research favorable to the nuclear industry and he made it clear his science would not be improperly influenced.
Niwa, a professor at Fukushima Medical University, said that residents need to stay in Fukushima if at all possible, partly because they would face discrimination in marriage elsewhere in Japan from what he said were unfounded fears about radiation and genetic defects.
Setting off such fears are medical checks on the thyroids of Fukushima children that found some nodules or growths that are not cancerous but not normal.
No one knows for sure what this means, but Yoshiharu Yonekura, president of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences and an ICRP member, brushes off the worries and says such abnormalities are common.
The risk is such a non-concern in his mind that he says with a smile: “Low-dose radiation may be even good for you.”
The Associated Press.
Coal mines near uranium deposits spoiling value of nuclear fuel
Experts say many coal and uranium deposits are co-located and that extraction of the fossil fuel first is ruining the value of the nuclear fuel
Sunday, 18 November, 2012
Stephen Chen binglin.chen@scmp.com
Coal and uranium are often found in the same location, with extraction leading to the destruction of nuclear fuel.
Huge newly discovered reserves of much-needed uranium are in danger of being destroyed amid a row over digging it up.
And as China's nuclear and coal sectors battle over the sites where the radioactive heavy metal lies buried, experts say the uranium is accidentally ending up in coal-fired power stations - creating radioactive ash that is falling on surrounding cities.
One Canadian firm that declined to be interviewed has built a plant near one coal-fired power station in Yunnan to collect the uranium from the ash.
With the world's largest number of nuclear power plants under construction, China is in desperate need of uranium ore to fuel them.
Currently, domestic supply is limited to some low-grade mines formed by ancient volcano eruptions in southern and central provinces such as Sichuan and Hunan. However, state geologists now believe there could be tens of thousands of tons of uranium in the basins of northern China.
The deposits in Ili in Xinjiang and Erdos in Inner Mongolia were described as "world-class" and "mega-sized" in recent reports by state media.
The problem is these rich veins of uranium are buried between thick belts of coal.
Song Xuebin, former head of China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC)'s 821 Factory that produces uranium fuel, has filed a complaint with the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
He alleged the coal mines were encroaching on the uranium deposits. "These basins contained oil, gas, coal and uranium," he wrote. "Due to its large scale and high speed of construction, coal mining will soon bring huge destruction to uranium resources. It will also cause the environment to suffer radioactive pollution."
Professor Gu Zhongmao, of the China Institute of Atomic Energy and a top adviser to CNNC, said that balancing the interests of the two different energy sectors was proving a headache for the central government.
In the mean time, the government has been importing as much uranium as possible from countries such as Kazakhstan and Australia, while apparently leaving the domestic deposits for future use.
"The problem is that if we leave those deposits there, they will soon be destroyed by coal mining," warned Gu. "It is not unlikely that the bulk of Chinese uranium reserves end up in the furnaces of coal-fired power plants instead of in nuclear reactors.
"When that happens, the enormous amount of radioactive ash becomes a threat to everyone's safety," he said.
The environmental hazards caused by radioactive ash has been kept quiet.
Yin Lianqing, environment professor at North China Electric Power University, said that he conducted some tests in a few cities to monitor the radiation levels in neighbourhoods near coal-fired power plants, and got alarming results.
"We have found some instances of very high exposure, hundreds of times higher than what you would expect near a nuclear power plant. I asked the cities' environmental protection authorities to take immediate measures to reduce residents' exposure, such as adding dust-removing devices to the power plants, but they demanded I keep my mouth shut, or I would be held responsible for causing social panic."
It was the presence of high levels of uranium in coal that led to the discovery of the rich seams of uranium. In 2003, the Ministry of Science and Technology funded a national research project led by professor Liu Chiyang of the Northwest University in Xian, Shaanxi, to solve the mystery.
The research was deemed crucial to China's national security, and accordingly many researchers involved in the project, including Liu, declined to be interviewed by the SCMP.
According to a 2006 paper published in the mainland academic journal Oil and Gas Geology, Liu's team confirmed that nearly all the uranium and coal deposits in north China had formed at the same time. The researchers came up with several theories to explain the co-location phenomenon.
Future lies with fusion power
Sunday, 11 November, 2012
SCMP
I refer to Peter Schwartz's excellent article ("Up in smoke", October 26) on the current revolution transforming the world's energy landscape.
Coincidentally, I too touched upon some of the energy and climate change issues raised therein in my lecture, "The Engineer Leading the Future", at the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers on October 24. A few observations may be relevant.
Shale gas is rapidly replacing coal for power generation in the United States.
Its most significant benefit is that it releases up to 50 per cent less CO2, thus effectively cutting down carbon emissions, besides being the cheapest energy source.
Based on data from the US Energy Information Agency, for the first five months of 2012, this year's emissions in the US are expected to decline by 14 per cent from their peak in 2007 because of the unprecedented switch from coal to natural gas.
As a result, the US carbon emissions have dropped by 400 to 500 megatonnes (Mt) a year, that is, 20 per cent per capita - to the lowest level since 1961.
Against this, the annual reduction from America's 30,000 wind turbines account for 50 Mt, biofuels 10 Mt and solar panels 3 Mt. These are heavily subsidised and expensive renewables. Besides, the needed reduction in CO2 from switching to gas is for free. And, though not a panacea, if the gas rage spreads further, as in the US, this, along with a judicious mix of renewables and nuclear, will radically reduce our carbon emissions to the desired levels and the 21st century could be the century of gas.
However, in the longer term, it will be nuclear fusion that will sustain us. This is the same process that powers our sun and other stars and can give us a near-limitless, pollution-free, cheap source of energy.
Hopefully, it will come to fruition before long.
Recently, Professor Stephen Hawking , the world's most famous living scientist, when asked to name the most pressing scientific challenge facing humanity, answered: producing electricity from fusion power. Significantly, the famous National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California (which I once visited), recently reached a critical milestone in its quest for fusion power, achieving some record-breaking results. And once fusion power, for which the world has been waiting for more than five decades, comes into being, it will be the world's greatest bounty.
B. S. Makhija, The Peak
China boasts of 'world-class' uranium deposit discovery, but experts wary
Nuclear industry experts remain wary of China's grand claims for the Inner Mongolia reserve, saying there have been exaggerations in the past
Tuesday, 06 November, 2012
Stephen Chen binglin.chen@scmp.com
The Qinshan nuclear plant in Haiyan, Zhejiang.
China announced the discovery of a "world-class" uranium deposit in Inner Mongolia yesterday but kept its exact size a secret.
Some nuclear industry experts said the secrecy could be a deliberate government strategy to add to its bargaining power in negotiations to buy uranium mines in other countries.
The reserve, although the largest of its kind in China, could be small by world standards and insufficient to meet the country's growing demand for uranium given that it is building the world's largest network of nuclear power plants, they said.
Xinhua said it was found in the Daying area, in central Inner Mongolia.
"It is a world-class reserve. It will significantly help the increase of domestic, independent supply," the report, quoting the Ministry of Land and Resources, said. But Professor Jiao Yangquan , the chief scientist of the project, from China University of Geosciences in Wuhan , refused to confirm the "world-class" claim.
"I am not allowed to discuss the size of the reserve," he said.
Jiao led a research team on the site and reported the estimated size of the reserve to senior land ministry officials in July, the university's website said.
Neither the ministry nor its Central Geological Exploration Fund, which funded the project, responded to inquiries.
Some foreign and domestic experts doubted the "world-class" claim, saying China was known as a country with low uranium reserves and that status was not going to be changed by the discovery of a few uncertain sites.
A sales manager with a major foreign uranium trading company in Beijing said the last time China announced the discovery of a "world-class" and "mega-sized" deposit, in Yili in Xinjiang , the actual reserve turned out to be only about 10,000 tonnes.
"I don't think the find in Inner Mongolia will be much bigger this time, partly because the government has a record of exaggeration," he said.
According to the World Nuclear Association, China had reserves of 171,000 tonnes in 2009, only a tenth of Australia's and three per cent of the world total.
It produced 1,500 tonnes last year, while Kazakhstan produced almost 20,000 tonnes. Gu Zhongmao , the deputy director of the China Institute of Atomic Energy's scientific board, said there had been embarrassing exaggerations of uranium reserves in the past with "over-optimistic" claims.
"Most of the uranium reserves that have been nailed with certainty in China are small, of low quality and costly to excavate," Gu said. "That's why Chinese companies are actively seeking to buy uranium mines all over the world. Uranium is [a] non-recoverable resource and the more we can import the better. I don't think that policy will change.
"But any news of large domestic reserves will certainly help as leverage in buyout bargaining."
German power exports to France increasing
2012 Feb 6
Switch to renewables
renewablesinternational
The current cold spell in Europe is having an effect on international power exports. On the one hand, demand for heat has skyrocketed, but the clear skies also ensure that photovoltaics reaches relatively high peaks for the winter around noon.
Though the day is short, PV power production is still peaking at an impressive level during the current cold spell in Germany. Source: EEX
As Renewables International has reported, the switching off of Germany's nuclear power plants last spring has led to a sort of stress test for the German grid.
But as the country's neighbors to the east complain about unexpected power flows, something else is happening to the West between France and Germany.
Because France has so much nuclear power, the country has an inordinate number of electric heating systems. And because France has not added on enough additional capacity over the past decade, the country's current nuclear plants are starting to have trouble meeting demand, especially when it gets very cold in the winter.
As a result, power exports from Germany to France reached 4 to 5 gigawatts – the equivalent of around four nuclear power plants – last Friday morning according to German journalist Bernward Janzing. It was not exactly a time of low consumption in Germany either at 70 gigawatts around noon on Friday, but Janzing nonetheless reports that the grid operators said everything was under control, and the country's emergency reserves were not being tapped. On the contrary, he reports that a spokesperson for transit grid operator Amprion told him that "photovoltaics in southern Germany is currently helping us a lot."
Janzing also points out that prices on the power exchange indicated that there was indeed no shortage of power, with the price of a kilowatt-hour peaking at 11.3 cents in the evening, but only reaching 7.7 cents around noon.
http://easss.com/health
One reason might be that the clear skies are ensuring a fairly strong performance for solar arrays. As the chart on the left from the EEX power exchange shows, solar power production has been peaking at around 10 gigawatts at noon over the past few days, such as here on Sunday.
Germany currently has around 25 gigawatts of PV installed, so 10 gigawatts means the country's solar capacity is peaking at around 40 percent – not bad for early February. On the other hand, Germany also has some 27 gigawatts of wind power capacity installed, and the current cold spell has not produced a lot of wind power.
At the same time, Janzing reports that power prices on the French power exchange were up to 50 percent higher, and power consumers in Brittany were called on to reduce power consumption.
(Craig Morris)
Power exports peak, despite nuclear phase-out
11/11/2012 Germany
http://q.gs/2Ytxp
JAPAN-U.S. SEMINAR
U.S. needs Japan to remain nuclear, expert says
Relations in region not likely to change with Obama or Romney, even in China ties
By TAKASHI KITAZUME
Staff writer
11/03/2012
John Hamre, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, discusses Japan's nuclear energy policy during a seminar at Keidanren Kaikan in Tokyo on Oct. 25, as CSIS colleague Michael Green listens. satoko kawasaki
A "zero-nuclear" Japan will be a serious concern for the United States as its key ally both from economic and security standpoints, the chief of an influential U.S. think tank said at a recent seminar on Japan-U.S. relations.
http://digcan.com/nuclear
The policy set out in September by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's Cabinet seeking to phase out nuclear power generation in Japan by the end of the 2030s — in response to strong anti-nuclear sentiments in the country following the triple meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant in March 2011 — is not viable given Japan's vast economic needs, said John Hamre, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Hamre, a former deputy U.S. defense secretary, and his CSIS colleague Michael Green were speaking at a seminar organized by the Keizai Koho Center on Oct. 25 to discuss American policy on East Asia ahead of the U.S. presidential election as well as the imminent change in leadership in China.
Nuclear power generation in Japan over the past four decades has been an important part of Japan's economic success that provided "a strong, reliable supply of base energy" for the historically energy-poor country, Hamre said.
While he said he understood that the Fukushima crisis shook people's confidence in nuclear power — just as the 1979 Three Mile Island incident did for Americans — he noted there is "too much of a romantic idea about alternative energy in this country as a substitute for nuclear power."
The Democratic Party of Japan-led government's policy does not include a specific road map to achieve the goal, but assumes that renewable sources like wind and solar power will account for a greater portion of the nation's energy mix in coming decades.
Citing U.S. experience in wind and solar power generation, Hamre said the low efficiency and output of these sources that rely on natural conditions will not "replace the base capacity of nuclear power generation."
Japan will also face a huge cost disadvantage if it is going to turn more to natural gas as a source of power generation, he said. While in the U.S., where the so-called shale revolution in recent years has dramatically changed the energy industry structure, natural gas today costs $2.60 per million BTU, Japan is paying $14 per million BTU, he pointed out.
"You're paying five times as much for natural gas. So if you're going to make the decision that you're only going to have natural gas-fired electric generation plants, you're going to encumber your economy with energy costs five times higher than the competition," Hamre said. "There can't be any romanticism about alternative energy. If you're going to be a modern, sophisticated economy, you have to address this question of making nuclear power a legitimate source of energy."
Hamre also said the policy poses a security concern from the viewpoint of international control for nonproliferation of nuclear materials.
"Nuclear power from the very beginning was (not only) a source of promise, but (also) a source of great threat because nuclear power electric generation is also the base for making nuclear weapons, and it's a great risk to the world to have commercial nuclear power plants because there is a possibility of diverting the material and turning it into weapons.
"So for the last 40 years the U.S. and Japan, along with Europe, have been leaders in creating an international system to monitor and control the use of commercial nuclear energy so that we know if people were illegitimately going to divert it and turn it into weapons," he said.
If Japan is to give up nuclear energy — and if nuclear power is to wither in the U.S. due to competition with cheap natural gas and in Europe as in the case of Germany — "the countries that have given us the security system are going to diminish, and who's going to replace them?" he said. "Americans cannot afford from a security standpoint to have Japan abandon nuclear power. It's too important to us."
Hamre said the March 11, 2011, earthquake caused triple tragedies — the tsunami that resulted in the loss of thousands of lives, the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns and the loss of public confidence in the government. "Citizens right now do not believe the government can protect them and they don't have any confidence the government can provide safe nuclear power," he said.
"But if you're going to stay a rich and prosperous country, and if you're going to help provide a global system of security, we've got to rebuild confidence that the government can indeed protect citizens and it can oversee this industry and make sure that it's safe and reliable," he added.
Green, a senior vice president for Asia who holds the Japan Chair at the CSIS, discussed the prospect of American policy toward East Asia in the wake of the U.S. election and the shakeup of Chinese leadership in the Communist Party congress.
The importance that the U.S. attaches to its alliance with Japan as a cornerstone of post-Cold War security in the Asia-Pacific region is supported by a strong bipartisan consensus that has been carried on through three administrations since President Bill Clinton, said Green, a former special adviser to President George W. Bush on national security affairs.
The race between President Barack Obama and Republican contender Mitt Romney has highlighted some differences in domestic policy and tone on economic issues, but no major difference has emerged between them on foreign policy, he said.
"One can expect strong continuity" in U.S. policy toward Asia, particularly on Japan, he noted. Romney, if elected, is not going to change America's shift in emphasis toward Asia, and will likely continue the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations, Green said, adding that Obama is also committed to completing the TPP talks.
Xi Jinping, who is expected to replace Hu Jintao as Chinese president in the upcoming party congress, will be the first post-Deng Xiaoping leader of China in the sense that, unlike Hu and Jiang Zemin, he had not been handpicked by the late Deng for promotion to the party leadership, Green said.
Still, Xi is likely to basically take over Deng's worldview that has been carried on by his predecessors, and will continue to view U.S. relations as important, he noted.
In fact, "Xi is going to be very preoccupied with domestic affairs" where huge numbers of protests take place each year, Green said. "China spends a lot of money on its defense now, and that budget is rapidly growing, but in fact China spends more money on domestic security inside the country, which reflects that the real insecurity is domestic, not foreign," he observed.
Some of the nationalistic statements that Xi has made so far, including a speech he made in Mexico in 2009, "was not a message for the world but to the domestic audience to show that he could push back foreign criticism," he pointed out.
With his background as a former party chief in Fujian Province, Xi "has a very good understanding of maritime issues and will be persistent in China's maritime and territorial claims," he said.
When Xi visited the U.S. last year as vice president, Obama made it clear that the U.S. has a stake in China's success and development, Green said. Still, there are "some serious problems in China relations that are expected to complicate things," including its military buildup and apparent pursuit of an ability to "constrain the U.S. from entering or intervening in crises in the waters near China," he noted.
The 2010 collision of Japan's Coast Guard ship and a Chinese fishing boat near the Senkaku Islands "is not an isolated incident" but a part of China's geostrategy on territorial disputes that has seen 22 incidents involving Chinese government ships and local navy or coast guard ships in the region over the past two years, Green said.
China takes right path for expanding nuclear power
Saturday, 03 November, 2012
SCMP
Workers leave a nuclear power plant in Qinshan, Zhejiang
province. China is wary of nuclear energy but needs to cut reliance on carbon-intensive coal.
From every disaster there is a lesson and China has taken the calamity at Japan's Fukushima plant 19 months ago to heart. Rather than charging ahead with its ambitious programme, it has done what should be expected: stop, check, review and proceed cautiously.
http://digcan.com/nuclear
Under plans approved by the State Council, safety standards have been raised and construction of reactors will resume "steadily". It is exactly the approach needed amid so much public anxiety about nuclear energy.
Days before a tsunami, triggered by a massive earthquake, caused a partial meltdown at the Fukushima plant, Beijing had unveiled plans to become the global leader in nuclear energy by 2020. But amid an outcry about safety, it ordered checks on its 16 plants and a freeze on 26 others under construction.
Risks were identified and failings in management found, and these have been rectified. That is as it should be. Fukushima, and the world's worst accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, show that when it comes to nuclear power, safety and preparedness can never be compromised.
But while the moratorium on projects has been lifted, the seemingly reckless drive that previously existed has been replaced by caution. No new targets have been set. Proposals for construction of reactors in inland provinces have also been dropped for three years.
Under the safety plan, a road map is laid out for the nation to attain international standards by 2020. A total of 79.8 billion yuan has been earmarked for upgrading security measures and promoting technological innovation to 2015. The early phasing out of older reactors, sharing and improving access to information, enhancing research and development of safety and improving the handling of radioactive waste has been recommended. These steps, coupled with transparency and regular updates of progress, are what are needed if public confidence in the nuclear power industry is to be restored.
Beijing has to gradually end its reliance on polluting coal and oil to produce electricity. Of the clean-energy alternatives, only nuclear can be considered reliable.
It is safe if reactors are properly built, maintained and operated. The Fukushima disaster was the result of a lack of preparedness and poor oversight. Maintaining the highest safety standards prevents accidents. Beijing's new cautious approach is the right way forward. But it also has to be transparent and keep the nation informed about the industry's every development.
Nuclear energy key to China's development
Hooman Peimani applauds the decision to continue building reactors
Tuesday, 06 November, 2012, 12:00am
Hooman Peimani
SCMP
Fossil fuels still dominate Beijing's energy mix.
The State Council has partially lifted a ban on new nuclear power stations in China - imposed following the Fukushima nuclear incident - allowing construction to go ahead in coastal areas. Under the new terms, no inland projects will be allowed to be built in the next three years of the current five-year plan.
The ban was part of a series of measures undertaken by the Chinese government to ensure the safety of its nuclear power sector at a time when exaggerated reporting about the Fukushima accident and a prevailing lack of knowledge about nuclear energy made many people - both in the East and West - question the wisdom of nuclear energy, which in their minds had become synonymous with accidents and disasters.
http://digcan.com/nuclear
The measures included testing the safety of China's 15 operating reactors to determine whether they should be kept operational. The subsequent issuance of a clean bill of health by the Chinese nuclear authorities allowed for their continued operation, while the ban on new development limited the scope of expansion.
China is already committed to building some 27 reactors that will become operational at different times over the next decade. Construction of these began as early as 2007, and includes one - in Shandong province - where work began in mid-2011, after the Fukushima incident. That signalled China's nuclear-energy commitment, while indicating the temporary nature of the ban.
However, the ban on new inland projects will for now limit China's expansion plans, which were designed to meet its growing demand for electricity while increasing the share of non-fossil fuels in its energy mix, which is dominated by coal.
Oil, gas and coal emit carbon dioxide and account for the bulk of greenhouse gases (about 75 per cent), the main cause of global warming. Decreasing their share in the global energy mix - and increasing greener energy use - is necessary to mitigate global warming.
In an effort to do so, and also reduce its heavy dependence on imported oil, gas and coal - and the associated financial and security risks - Beijing has embarked on an impressive plan to increase the share of renewable energy, such as wind and solar (about 7 per cent in 2011) and nuclear energy (almost 0.8 per cent last year), in its energy mix. Nevertheless, fossil fuels still dominate.
Nuclear energy is currently the only non-carbon-dioxide-emitting type of energy capable of large-scale electricity generation, given the technological limits of renewables. Thus, a continued expansion of nuclear energy is crucial for China.
Against this background, the importance of the State Council decision can be appreciated. While it may only allow for a "small number" of projects to go ahead, it has clearly set the stage for the eventual complete lifting of the ban of proposed projects that are safe, suitable and necessary for China.
To assure the public of its uncompromising approach to safety, the council also stressed that the new plants would be constructed according to "third-generation safety standards".
Undoubtedly, such high standards will be applied to all future reactors, regardless of whether they are on the coast or inland.
By putting back on track the envisaged expansion plan, the moves will help increase the speed and extent of growth of China's nuclear power sector, ensuring that the nation remains at the centre of regional - and world - nuclear power expansion.
Dr Hooman Peimani is head of the Energy Security Division and a principal fellow at the Energy Studies Institute, National University of Singapore
Chinese towns spar over planned nuclear plant
February 16, 2012
By The Associated Press ELAINE KURTENBACH (AP Business Writer)
SHANGHAI - (AP) -- Residents of two towns in eastern China are at odds over plans for a nuclear power plant, in a dispute reflecting mixed attitudes toward the industry as work looks set to resume on projects suspended after Japan's Fukushima disaster.
http://easss.com/nuclear
The government plans to raise China's nuclear power capacity to 80 gigawatts by 2020, according to the National Energy Commission. That is below the 90 gigawatt target reported before the Japan disaster, and less than the current nuclear capacity of the United States, which was just over 100 gigawatts last year.
State media reports Thursday said work appeared poised to resume after inspections that were ordered following a magnitude 9.0 offshore earthquake on March 11, 2011. It triggered a tsunami that killed about 19,000 people along Japan's northeastern coast and knocked out power at the Fukushima plant, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
Top leaders are expected to approve various revisions of safety guidelines and other regulations by March, the Shanghai Securities News and other newspapers reported, citing unnamed commission officials.
Despite widespread public concern over possible radiation contamination from the disaster and calls for improved safety precautions and emergency preparedness, China remains committed to building up nuclear power to help reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants and curb its reliance on costly oil imports.
China currently has 13 nuclear reactors that provide about 10 gigawatts of generating capacity and plans call for expanding that to about 40 gigawatts by 2015.
Nuclear power accounted for only 1.04 percent of all electricity consumed in China last year.
Although the government has generally pushed ahead with whatever infrastructure projects it wants, the Chinese public is becoming increasingly vocal in its concerns over potential environmental risks or other disruptions.
The planned nuclear plant in Pengze, a town on the banks of the Yangtze River in Jiangxi province, is raising complaints from residents of Wangjiang, across the river in neighboring Anhui province.
They say residents will be living dangerously near the plant and are petitioning to delay construction pending further safety studies.
The plant in Pengze, approved in 2008, reportedly was the first such project planned for an inland region: so far most of China's nuclear plants are on the coast.
Both Anhui and Jiangxi are inland regions that until recently remained relatively poor compared with faster-developing coastal province. Local officials would generally view such big investments as welcome sources of jobs and tax revenues.
So far, there has been no sign of public protest from residents in Pengze, who are busy building guesthouses to accommodate the thousands of workers expected to be employed if the project goes ahead, according to a report in the Shanghai newspaper Oriental Morning Post.
But across the river, a group of retired officials living in Wangjiang, led by a former judge named Fang Guangwen, have been getting national attention with their petition drive to have the project delayed or canceled.
An official in the Wangjiang county information office, who gave only his surname, He, said the situation had been reported to provincial authorities. He would not comment further and provincial level officials refused comment.
___
Associated Press researcher Fu Ting contributed to this report.
China faces civic protests over new nuclear power plants
PTI Feb 17, 2012
The Economic Times
BEIJING: China is experiencing civic protest over its ambitious plans to build massive nuclear power plants following the disaster in a Japanese atomic reactor.
An inter-provincial squabble over a nuclear power plant being built near the southern bank of the Yangtze River, has raised questions about China's ambitious expansion of its nuclear power programme, state media reported today.
The plant in the centre of the brewing controversy is located in Pengze county in Jiangxi. Across the river the government of Wangjiang county in Anhui wants the project shelved, saying they don't want the nuke plant so close to their backyard.
A report submitted by Wangjiang officials accuses its neighbour of lying about the population density in the area.
http://easss.com/magazines
They claim more than 150,000 people from Wangjiang alone live within a 10-kilometre radius of the plant. State regulations require that no more than 100,000 people should be living within a 10-kilometre radius of a planned nuclear power plant.
The Wangjiang report also claims the proposed plant is in or near an earthquake zone.
They point to a 2011 quake that shook the city of Jiujiang about 80 kilometres away which measured 4.6 on the Richter scale, and another in 2005 that measured 5.7, state run Global Times reported today.
Just two years ago China announced an ambitious plan to up the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power to five percent of total power by 2020.
This would see the country's nuclear generating capacity increase more than seven times to over 80 gigawatts.
China currently has 13 nuclear power plants with varied capacities and constructing 27 others, mostly with 1000mw capacity, made with US, French and Japanese technologies.
Work in all these plants was stopped for safety review after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors.
Jiangxi country officials argue that planned nuclear power plant with six reactors with installed capacity of 8000 mw is expected to work wonders for its economy.
The first reactor is expected to be operational by 2015. At a total cost of 100 billion yuan (USD 15.87 billion), even the construction of the plant will give the local economy "an enormous kick". But across the river Wangjiang country officials worry their agricultural-based economy is being threatened by the plant.
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China faces civic protests over new nuclear power plants
FRIDAY, 17 FEBRUARY 2012
PTI | BEIJING
dailypioneer
China is experiencing civic protest over its ambitious plans to build massive nuclear power plants following the disaster in a Japanese atomic reactor.
An inter-provincial squabble over a nuclear power plant being built near the southern bank of the Yangtze River, has raised questions about China’s ambitious expansion of its nuclear power programme, state media reported ton Friday.
The plant in the centre of the brewing controversy is located in Pengze county in Jiangxi. Across the river the Government of Wangjiang county in Anhui wants the project shelved, saying they don’t want the nuke plant so close to their backyard.
A report submitted by Wangjiang officials accuses its neighbour of lying about the population density in the area.
They claim more than 150,000 people from Wangjiang alone live within a 10-kilometre radius of the plant. State regulations require that no more than 100,000 people should be living within a 10-kilometre radius of a planned nuclear power plant.
The Wangjiang report also claims the proposed plant is in or near an earthquake zone.
They point to a 2011 quake that shook the city of Jiujiang about 80 kilometres away which measured 4.6 on the Richter scale, and another in 2005 that measured 5.7, state run Global Times reported on Friday.
Just two years ago China announced an ambitious plan to up the percentage of electricity supplied by nuclear power to five percent of total power by 2020.
This would see the country’s nuclear generating capacity increase more than seven times to over 80 gigawatts.
China currently has 13 nuclear power plants with varied capacities and constructing 27 others, mostly with 1000mw capacity, made with US, French and Japanese technologies.
Work in all these plants was stopped for safety review after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors.
Jiangxi country officials argue that planned nuclear power plant with six reactors with installed capacity of 8000 mw is expected to work wonders for its economy.
The first reactor is expected to be operational by 2015.
At a total cost of 100 billion yuan (USD 15.87 billion), even the construction of the plant will give the local economy “an enormous kick”. But across the river Wangjiang country officials worry their agricultural-based economy is being threatened by the plant.
“We worry about two things: So many people are living close by and the potential for earthquakes. What if something happens? What are they going to do about it?” Yu Zehong, director of the development and reform commission for Wangjiang county asked.
Hu Bin, director of the nuclear project office in Pengze, said he has no idea what’s caused the sudden objections from the neighbours a few kilometres downstream. He told the Oriental Morning Post that Jiangxi officials have strictly followed regulations and communicated with the local governments in Anhui.
Yu counters Hu’s assertions, saying Anhui has never been fully consulted and was only informed the project was going ahead last year. Some residents in Wangjiang contacted by the Global Times said they haven’t heard about the project.
One woman in Mopan village, less than five km from the proposed plant, said she had no idea what a nuclear power plant actually does, nor had she heard of the accident in Japan last year.
Some residents in Madang township near where the plant will be built said they knew about the big project but hadn’t been told of any potential dangers.
While the tit-for-tat war of words between the counties in the two provinces isn’t likely to abate soon, experts on the national stage are firing up a larger debate about China’s nuclear power strategy, the Times report said.
He Zuoxiu, a leading theoretical physicist, isn’t only concerned about one nuclear plant near the banks of the Yangtze. “China shouldn’t build any nuclear power plant in the inland regions,” said He, 85, who worked on China’s first nuclear bomb.
“People have failed to consider the potential for accidents like an earthquake or terrorist attacks, or asteroid hit,” He said.
The true extent of China's energy crisis
Shujie Yao and Dan Luo say nation must rely on coal for now, which is bad news for the environment
Wednesday, 03 October, 2012
Shujie Yao and Dan Luo
When it comes to the sheer volume of investment in clean energy, China has no peers. Barely a month passes without the media reporting the latest government pledge to develop non-fossil-fuel sources or another ambitious renewable energy target. While commendable, these promises risk masking the true extent of China's future energy crisis - and its gloomy implications for global carbon emissions.
If China maintains close to its current gross domestic product growth rate, its energy demand will reach 5 billion tonnes of coal equivalent by 2020, far beyond previous estimates of 3.6 billion tonnes. That means, by 2020, China will need to consume 3 billion tonnes of coal and 640 million tonnes of oil each year. China's current annual oil production is steady at 200 million tonnes per year - an indication of the gulf that exists between supply and demand.
A dependence on oil imports will have huge implications for its foreign policy; diplomacy across the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and Latin America will continue to be governed by its appetite for crude.
Amid growing urgency, the National Energy Administration has published its goal for renewable energy to supply 9.5 per cent of the country's total energy needs by the end of 2015. The government also wants to increase the share of non-fossil-fuel energy to 15 per cent of its total energy consumption by 2020 and 30 per cent by 2050. These are ambitious targets; a combination of insufficient infrastructure, immature technology and current pricing mechanisms are likely to render them unattainable.
The distribution of hydropower and wind resources in China is unbalanced. Large hydropower projects have been criticised for their damage to biodiversity, water quality and cultural heritage. And due to the intermittent nature of wind power, grid companies are reluctant to spend money to link up more wind farms.
Last month, the Chinese government ordered its electricity distributors to source up to 15 per cent of their power from renewable energy, including wind power. The target is again unrealistic. Current tariffs set by the government are too low to warrant investment by struggling wind power developers in the additional networks required to transmit electricity from the north and west to densely populated urban areas in the south and east.
China's solar industry has also faltered. Overcapacity has prompted a sharp fall in the price of solar panels and US anti-dumping duties, coupled with the euro-zone crisis, have cut overseas demand.
Nuclear energy offers China by far the most attractive renewable energy solution (nuclear is not renewable) . Despite limited uranium reserves, it is regarded as a quasi-domestic resource and can be purchased relatively cheaply on the international market.
Fuel costs account for only 5 per cent of a nuclear power plant's operating costs, compared to 40-60 per cent for coal and gas plants. Unlike in Japan, the Chinese public appears willing to accept nuclear power and local governments view it as a means to minimise electricity shortfalls, increase tax revenue and create jobs.
Yet the nuclear power industry is not developing fast enough to meet energy demand. It is being held back by a lack of technological expertise and established processes for the treatment of nuclear waste.
Energy pricing mechanisms are still heavily weighted towards coal use, offering little incentive to power companies to diversify. The average on-grid electricity price in China for wind power is 0.617 yuan (HK$0.75) per kilowatt-hour, while solar power and nuclear power cost 0.4 yuan per kWh and 0.436 yuan per kWh respectively. It is easy to see why coal - with a price of 0.346 yuan per kWh - will continue to be the primary energy resource in China for the foreseeable future.
This is grim news for the rest of the world, as any attempts to cut carbon emissions play out in the knowledge that, as reported by the Economist Intelligence Unit, China's coal consumption is expected to rise 35 per cent and carbon emissions by 43 per cent between 2010 and 2020. China will soon account for half the coal burned on the planet.
Realistically, China has no choice but to rely on coal in the short-to-medium term. In order to mitigate the serious environmental consequences, the government must lead the world in the deployment of advanced-coal technologies, such as coal gasification, liquefaction and carbon capture and storage.
The good, the bad and the ugly: Carbon capture and storage
http://q.gs/2JFJ6
A Bad Bet on Carbon
May 12, 2010
http://q.gs/2JFQU
Moreover, it must match its huge investment in clean technologies with structural policy changes, such as new fiscal and tax measures, to ensure renewable energy can compete on a level playing field with traditional fossil resources.
Failure to do so will result in the continuation of an unsustainable path of development, one that affects both China's long-term health and that of the rest of the world.
Shujie Yao is professor of economics and Chinese sustainable development, and head of the school of contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham, where Dan Luo is a lecturer in business and finance
Small Reactors Make a Bid to Revive Nuclear Power
Can small, LEGO-like reactors help create better prospects for the nuclear industry?
By David Biello
4/19/2012
http://q.gs/28cAI
Japan nuclear crisis: Seven reasons why we should abandon nuclear power
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2012/03/japan-nuclear-crisis-seven-reasons-why.html
What Is Wrong With Nuclear Power Plants
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-is-wrong-with-nuclear-power-plants.html
100 Reasons Against Nuclear Power
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2012/08/100-reasons-against-nuclear-power.html
7 Arguments Against Nuclear Power (Why It Should Be a No-Go)
6/15/2012
http://q.gs/1uSmq
10 Reasons Not to Invest in Nuclear Energy
7/08/2008
http://q.gs/1uSp0
6 Reasons Against Nuclear Energy
http://q.gs/1uSqe
What Is Wrong With Nuclear Power Plants
Upon 2020
The Next Decade In Technology: Musings by Johannes Ernst
I lived through the Chernobyl disaster back in 1986, as a teenager, in Germany. I recall watching the radioactive cloud coming closer and closer on TV, wondering whether it was ever going to be safe to go outside again. That was before I became an engineer, but I remember pondering even then whether it was just shoddy Soviet work that was the cause of the disaster, or whether there was something inherently unsafe about nuclear power plants.
The question: If there’s enough money and time and brainpower, and no political obstacles, is it possible to engineer safe nuclear power plants? It should be, shouldn’t it: it’s just engineering after all, and there is no mystery at all how nuclear power plants are supposed to work.
25 years later, watching the Japenese disaster unfold in the past few days, I’ve made up my mind. The answer is: no, it is not possible to engineer safe nuclear power plants.
http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree
Here is why. It has to do with complex systems, learning from experience, and the limits of human imagination:
Any complex system, like a PC, or a car, or some enterprise software, or a nuclear power plant, has one fundamental property that makes it similar to all other complex systems: that’s that it cannot be fully understood by a single person.
There are other definitions of “complex system”, but this is mine: no one person can understand all aspects of it.
For non-engineers, that may sound alarming. It was for me when I first read as a kid about SDI in its day, but is a fact of life that we see all around us: iPhones are complex systems, the electricity grid is, when the UPS truck arrives, Amazon shipping, even more and more toys. Nobody understands all aspects of any of it.
As engineers, we use plenty of tricks to deal with systems that are larger and more complicated than we can comprehend, like teamwork (“I understand my part, you understand your’s, and we negotiate how they interact”) and abstraction.
For example: “when I turn the key in the ignition, the car will start”. Many people do not know this, but not even the engineers who designed your car can tell you in detail what happens when you turn the key. All of them — and I used to work for a car company — will use abstractions, which means they will not know about details they think are unimportant, such as how exactly the network controller for the injection system initializes itself when power comes on, or what would happen if there was a lightning bolt hitting the car at the same time. That’s because they might understand the logical connectivity of the car’s parts, but not what lightning would do to it. (Some other engineers will understand the latter, but they won’t know about the software, and so on.)
The only way we ever get anything to work, as engineers, is to design our systems as well as we can, and then try them out, over and over, and fix what needs fixing. Flippantly, we could call the philosophy: “who cares whether we understand what exactly it does, as long as it does the right thing”; and that is demonstrated by trying out as many things as we can think of. Engineers call that “testing”.
As a result, the highest-quality engineering approaches that I know of for complex systems all put an incredible amount of resources into some form of testing, because that’s the only thing we can think of to make progress.
The design engineer (or team) has come up with a design, and they, their peers, and the test engineers, now throw the kitchen sink at it trying it out in as many circumstances they can think of. If only one of those tests does not produce the desired result, the design engineers go back and change their design until all test cases work. (For the engineers: to keep it simple in this article, I also consider design reviews etc. forms of testing as they follow the same iterative pattern.)
Here’s an example. Let’s say somebody gives you a new pocket calculator prototype that supposedly knows how to simplify fractions, and you are supposed to test it. What will you do? You probably start with simple tests, like “4/6 makes 2/3, that’s right”. And “999/111 makes 9?. But it goes from there: what about we try negative numbers? What if the denominator is 0? What if the numerator is 1.3 and the denominator is 3/4 itself? Etc. etc. Many people would not think of even those simple examples to test. Test engineers will, and many more, like what if the fraction is 1.2E81 over PI? Or what if one of the numbers is an open parenthesis only as you can in some calculators?
The only reason why cars start when you turn the ignition, and why iPads play movies when you touch the right buttons, and why Google delivers the right answer to your search, is testing.
For many complex systems, testing and fixing bugs takes a lot more time and money than actually building the system in the first place.
If there wasn’t any testing, none — I repeat, NONE — of the complex systems I know would even come on, never mind do anything useful.
And even after gazillions of dollars in engineering salaries and testing equipment were spent, Windows still crashes. (and many other products; even my lowly computer keyboard seems to manage to crash occasionally.)
Which brings us back to nuclear power plants.
The problem with nuclear power plants is that they cannot be tested, at least not tested sufficiently.
All the things that have been going on in Japan since the tsunami wave hit — today’s headlines all talk about “heroic staff at the reactor” — have been totally outside of the range of anything that has ever been tested. (Yes, I wasn’t around when they tested, so I don’t know for sure. But trust me on this: engineering pride does not allow for several roofs being blown off by sudden explosions, or seawater corroding the machinery, or remaining staff having to be evacuated, as “normal events”. So it’s a safe bet it wasn’t tested.)
Which means that fundamentally, we have no idea what will happen next: nobody understands the whole system because it is complex, and nobody has ever tried it out (“tested”) in the state it is in now, so nobody has any clue.
My heart is with the engineers fighting to keep those plants under control; they are doing an incredibly hard job while in mortal danger themselves. But everything, ever since we left the realm of what has been tested before (I think that was probably just after the tsunami knocked out the generators), they had to make up on the fly.
Leaving the realm of what has been tested happens frequently with other kinds of complex systems, say, Windows. But there is one crucial difference: if Windows crashes, you reboot. If it keeps doing it, you re-install, or buy a Mac. The costs are rather limited. In case of a nuclear power plant, the costs are catastrophic because people might start dying and not just a few of them.
Why weren’t they tested better? There are two reasons:
First, your neighbors will not approve repeated testing that involves blowing up the roof of your nuclear power plant and releasing some radiation, which is of course what happened recently.
You can guess all day long, using simulations and what have you, but because they are simulations and not the real thing, they are not sufficient. (I’m sure these plants had lots of simulations run on them, but it wasn’t good enough for sure.)
And secondly, in my now 20+ years experience building complex systems, I have never, not once, seen a complex system, that didn’t behave rather badly from time to time. Because I usually build software, it would be the users (they are very good at finding very unlikely bugs!) who managed to do something to the system that left all engineers scratching their beards saying “that’s impossible”. I’ve learned that there are no bug-free complex systems, and the reason is always the same: the engineers did not have the imagination required to come up with all the circumstances that the system found itself in.
“What do you mean, the user managed to click the button twice before the popup went away?” (well, Ms Mary Smith of Hamstead managed) and “Yep, once the data was corrupted in this particular way, and there wasn’t enough memory, bad things might happen. We tested each, but not together.”
In Japan, they did not test (not even simulate) a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami, and certainly nothing that came after that. I’m sure those plants in Japan were tested well, much much better than your average software system.
But earthquake plus Tsunami plus generators-out plus out of fuel etc. etc. was something clearly not considered. And if it had been considered, something else would not have been.
There is always one more bug. In case of nuclear power plants, that one more bug is going to have catastrophic consequences.
We cannot avoid that one more bug because we don’t know how to, as I’ve tried to show.
So let’s stop assuming that nuclear power can be made safe; it can’t. There will be catastrophes from time to time, like the one in Japan this week.
The question is simply this: do we need nuclear power so badly that we need to be okay with an occasional nuclear catastrophe?
Japan nuclear crisis: Seven reasons why we should abandon nuclear power
By Noraini Connie Fattah II in A Nuke Free World
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2011/10/support-no-nuclear-energy-nuclear-free.html
1. Accidents and population centers
Worldwide standard operating procedures at nuclear power plants offer little margin for safety errors, and the industry is scrambling to check safety at each station. But can it reliably prevent another accident? Accidents are difficult to predict and have immediate far-reaching consequences, compounded by the fact that most nuclear reactors are located near major population centers – Moscow, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Budapest, Kiev. It is nearly impossible to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people in a timely fashion, even with advance warning of several days – as hurricane Katrina demonstrated in New Orleans.
Officials at the Japanese nuclear plant did not think to have closed-circuit cameras inside the buildings to chart an accident for which they never fully planned. But we can be certain of the following. Officials belatedly warned surrounding residents of the danger to their lives, belatedly began to issue potassium iodide tablets to protect them, and belatedly expanded the evacuation zone around the station. Now at least 100,000 people have had to leave the area, and at least 100,000 more have been forced to live inside of sealed houses. At Chernobyl, as well, the authorities only ordered evacuation after a shocking delay.
2. Old reactors are dangerous
It is now standard practice to extend the life of reactors from their design parameters of 25 years to 40 years and longer. It seems foolish at best to take such a gamble on complex technology that operates under high temperature and pressure. Any “unlikely” loss of coolant-capacities may result in explosions, meltdown, and significant release of radioactivity into the environment.
3. No secure repository for spent fuel
Utilities and reactor operators still store spent fuel and other nuclear waste in and around reactors, since no truly secure, permanent repository has been built. In the US, 70,000 tons of spent fuel sits at 103 reactors around the country within 75 miles of 125 million people. In Russia, 50,000 tons of spent fuel remains at power stations.
4. Vulnerable to terrorism
Reactors around the world – 55 in Japan, 103 in the US, 40 in Russia, and so on – are also vulnerable to terrorism. For example, a National Academy of Sciences report in 2005 indicated that pools holding spent fuel stored at these reactors might not withstand a determined attack. The industry is now touting – and building – “floating” nuclear power stations that would operate on barges; clearly protection of these stations would be difficult.
5. Mother Nature's threat
As the nuclear crisis in Japan has shown, even the best-prepared facilities can neither predict nor withstand the most severe natural disasters. Exacerbating the inherent dangers of nuclear power, several plants have been built on active seismic faults: Diablo Canyon in California, Metsamor in Armenia, and Fukushima in Japan.
Diablo Canyon in California is designed to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake, but experts have raised serious concerns – even before Japan’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami – that the plant’s safety would be threatened by a tsunami or high-magnitude earthquake.
The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant in Armenia had to close abruptly in 1988 because of a devastating earthquake. It was restarted seven years later to cope with the country’s energy shortage, but has since been condemned by the European Union as deeply unsafe and vulnerable to accident.
6. Costs outweigh benefits
For fifty years, engineers have promised “too cheap to meter” energy, the construction of inherently safe reactors, and solution to waste disposal. Instead, a typical reactor, based on the experience of the advanced French industry, now costs a minimum of $6 billion. The Obama administration approved $54 billion in subsidies to the nuclear industry to jumpstart construction in the US.
Reactor costs do not include transmission, waste disposal, fuel costs, or the great costs of remediating such accidents as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima Daiichi. These billions of dollars will buy only more risk to the general population.
7. Renewable energies are safer, cheaper
With each accident – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi – the nuclear industry has followed the same pattern: hesitation to inform the public about the dangers as matters go from bad to worse followed by assertions that none of the world’s other reactors can face the same fate.
Yet none of these risks and dangers exist with other, renewable forms of energy – wind energy, solar energy – and conservation. If they are costly now in terms of power generation, they end up being less expensive and safer, while Fukushima Daiichi has already entered the lexicon of terrifying nuclear accidents.
http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
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Lord Christopher Monckton presents "Fallacies about Global Warming".
10 Apr 2012
Assembly woman Shannon Grove hosts Lord Christopher Monckton at California State University- Bakersfield. Lord Monckton shares why the Fallacies of Global Warming Theory are going to cost you so much.
“Lord Monckton intellectually beats down another Global Warming fraudster with clear insight and Data live on Australian TV, Sunrise.
Don’t believe the mainstream media, research the science for yourself – CO2 does not cause global warming, there is no correlation.”
- YouTube user ‘UKInfoWarrior’
Lord Monckton fuels global warming debate
March 7, 2012
http://q.gs/1iFul
Global Warming is a Lie - Lord Christopher Monckton - Speaking in St.Paul
Lord Christopher Monckton gave a presentation in St. Paul, MN on the subject of global warming.October 14,2009
