[ RadSafe ] nuclear power is nowhere near green (was Re: Nukes are Green)

[James Salsman]

> nuclear power is the cleanest and best bet

On the contrary, the amortized costs of disaster insurance --
currently hidden in the U.S. by the Price-Anderson Act -- combined
with the cost and serious risk[1] of waste disposal, make the actual
expected amortized cost of nuclear power in excess of 50 cents per
kilowatt-hour, far above the cost of every other major source,
including photovoltaic solar.

[1] http://radlab.nl/pipermail/radsafe/2005-April/001075.html

> Wind is promising, for its costs have fallen 80 percent, but it 
> suffers from one big problem: wind doesn't blow all the time. 
> It's difficult to rely upon a source that comes and goes.

That is seriously misleading.  The cost of "shaping," or providing
back-up of wind power using, for example, hydroelectric generation,
increases the cost of wind power from about 3.7 cents per kilowatt-
hour to about 5.3 cents typically.  Wind power can be easily stored
by pumping water to elevated tanks or reservoirs, and using the
potential energy to run ordinary hydroelectric turbines.

> nuclear energy already makes up 20 percent of America's power

The U.S. could provide 90% of its electrical demand using wind
turbines on just 3% of its farmland.  Building such turbines would
cost far less than building the nuclear power plants to provide
the same 90% of demand.

Jerry Cohen wrote:

> I am bothered by the ethics of fighting against one phony issue 
> (nuclear energy dangers) by invoking another phony issue such as
> global warming.

Global warming is not a phony issue.  The amount of energy forced
into the troposphere is a function of the transparency of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases at visible wavelengths, combined
with their opacity in the infrared.  The extent to which the
atmospheric concentration of CO2 has been increasing closely follows
a logistic sigmoid curve[2], which suggests that we will not reach
another equilibrium for 300 years, consistent with the size of our
remaining coal resources.

[2] http://www.bovik.org/co2.gif

Global warming adds energy to the atmosphere, increasing average
wind speeds and the strength of storms.  Wind power, by removing
energy directly from the atmosphere, is the only direct mitigation
of global warming.  Nuclear power, in contrast, just adds more
heat to the atmosphere that would otherwise be absent.

If the entire world converted all electricity utilization to wind
power over the course of ten years, then the amount of energy
being extracted from the atmosphere would be approximately equivalent
to the amount added by the excess in 1970 levels of CO2 above
those from the steady state of the year 1500.  Transportation
solutions can be provided with modular electric vehicle battery
recharging stations in place of petroleum fueling stations (or
perhaps hydrogen fuel cells.)

Extrapolation from rates of installation of wind power suggests
it will be the dominant form of electricity generation in less
than thirty years.  In contrast, nuclear installations have been
much slower.

Nuclear power is not a solution to global warming.  Wind power is.
However, in as much as the origin of wind power is nuclear fusion
in the Sun, wind is a form of nuclear power.  So perhaps it is
better to say simply that fission is far more inefficient and dirty.

Sincerely,
James Salsman