Chris > It (nuclear) has its problems, the major one of which is long term availability of fuel.
Yep, that's the killer arguement. In the long term we have no choice but to use sustainable energy sources.

Chris > Isn't there an argument for some countries, who already have nuclear power programmes and can use the technology safely, using the remaining uranium reserves to help power their societies.

That's the sort of arguement that might not go down well in some quarters. I've got it so can have the rest - you've not got it and anyway can't be trusted so you can't have any.

Anyone with any lingering doubts about the ability of nuclear power to get us out of the hole should read David Fleming's The Lean Economy Guide to Nuclear Energy. Free download of the booklet from here:
http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/book.htm" rel="nofollow" >http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/book.htm

Posted By: biffvernonChris > It (nuclear) has its problems, the major one of which is long term availability of fuel.
Yep, that's the killer arguement. In the long term we have no choice but to use sustainable energy sources.

And in the short and medium term whilst those sustainable energy sources are developed?

I am appalled that Chris Wardle should suggest shipping our nuclear waste across the world to store it in the middle of the Australian outback! What about the people who live there - the Indigenous Australians? Every nation must be responsible for handling its own waste however daunting the prospect.

My view is that however safe modern nuclear power stations may be, leaving a legacy of an extremely dangerous waste product to untold future generations for them to sort out is both arrogant and irresponsible in the extreme. As George Monbiot so eloquently puts it "The most fundamental environmental principle – one that all children are taught as soon as they are old enough to understand it – is that you don’t make a new mess until you have cleared up the old one. To start building a new generation of nuclear power stations before we know what to do with the waste produced by existing plants is grotesquely irresponsible. The government’s advisers have determined only that it should be buried. No one yet knows where, how or at what cost".

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/07/11/thanks-but-we-still-dont-need-it/#more-997" >See 'Thanks, But We Still Don’t Need It' from George Monbiot here

The issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is fact! Around the globe, nuclear weapons development has followed closely on the heels of nuclear power. India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Israel, South Africa are the obvious ones.

When comparing costs of renewable v. nuclear it should be quite obvious that when considering the likely costs of building, decommissioning, safe storage of nuclear waste for countless generations, security, etc. that nuclear is leagues ahead of any form of renewable energy generation.

I see green building as part of a response to the necessity of working towards a sustainable future - i.e. sustainable development. A personal favourite definition sustainable development of mine is "Improving the quality of life for all without damaging the environment or the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Vision 21). In my view nuclear technology in its present state has no place in this process. Others much more qualified than me argue that we do not need nuclear energy to meet these needs - I sincerely hope this is the case.

Sorry if I've offended Graham, but it wasn't me that suggested it. A proposal for an international nuclear waste dump has come from the Australians themselves apparently with Government support:-

http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve07/1310water.html

I would have thought that a sparcely populated, geologically and polictically stable nation would be a good site (although I'd be perfectly happy with one in the UK but we don't seem to making much progress finding a site and clearly it would safer underground than above). The outback is pretty much a desert and there are massive areas that are devoid of human life and when they say a dump, I'm assuming they mean an underground repository so how would it endanger any of the Aboriginal people?

Nuclear power and waste are potentially hazardous in the wrong hands. It makes some sense to me to concentrate the high level waste in one or two places where it could be monitored by the IAEA rather than having it distributed around the planet.

Tom, vitrified nuclear waste can't be inhaled. Further more, it is stored in containment vessels and will, when someone decides where, be buried hundreds of feet underground. Don't see how this poses a risk to human health. A new nuclear program would generate less waste than we have already made because a large chunk of what we already have is military waste and new reactors are more efficient than the ones we were building in the 50s and 60s. I don't see how having 1.5 sports hall's worth of waste to deal with is anymore onerous than 1 sports hall's worth. The solution is still an underground repository and little extra excavation to make it a bit bigger isn't going to be a major cost. I would argue that the stuff going up your chimney or out of your exhaust pipe is far more lethal in any case (apologies if you are a PassiveHaus dwelling cyclist...).

I would prefer renewables to nuclear as well, Graham, but consider the following. In 1750 before we started using coal, there were a billion or so people on the planet. At this time we relied in wind, water and biomass for energy. In 1900, when we started using oil seriously, there were 1.7 billion people on the planet. There are now 6 billion and we are told we are heading to 8 billion. Food production has kept pace with population growth through the use of energy in the form of fossil fuels for transport, machinery, fertiliser, pesticides etc but it has now stalled and grain mountains are being run down. As we pass Peak Oil (could be any year now), food production will start to decline as the inputs required become more scarce and expensive. We have degraded our agricultural land so badly that it is likely that without chemical inputs we will not be able to produce as much food as we did in 1900.

Unless we find another energy dense and reliable replacement for fossil fuels, like nuclear power of some kind, which will allow us to synthesize the food we need or at least produce chemical fertilisers in some other way, we will have to accept that the world population is heading back to about 2 billion. This will play out over the next 100 years or so through the effects of famine and war and I don't believe that, even with advances in technology, renewable energy in all its forms will prevent this occurring - we simply won't be able the generate enough power. You may take the view that this is a necessary process of culling to get us back onto a path of sustainablility without the bonanza of fossil fuels and this may be a realistic view given doubts over uranium supplies, feasibilty of fusion etc. However, the process will be horrific and will put the irrational fear over nuclear waste into a proper perspective.

Posted By: TunaThe choice has to be how to do it with as little waste as possible. At present the alternatives are fossil fuel or Biff's suggestion that we turn the lights off. To me, nuclear power makes sense.

Sorry Tuna, but you misrepresent me. Turning the lights off is not a choice, it is an imperative.

It seems you have not read David Fleming's The Lean Economy Guide to Nuclear Energy yet. Free download of the booklet from here:
http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/book.htm" >http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/book.htm

Posted By: biffvernon

Posted By: TunaThe choice has to be how to do it with as little waste as possible. At present the alternatives are fossil fuel or Biff's suggestion that we turn the lights off. To me, nuclear power makes sense.

Sorry Tuna, but you misrepresent me. Turning the lights off is not a choice, it is an imperative.

My apologies. I assume you mean turn the lights off in the sense of stop using all electrical items in your house completely? To my mind that's not a reasonable request or expectation. A more accurate version of your last sentence might be 'Turning the lights off is not a choice, it's not possible'.

Not quite how I'd put it Tom. The use of nuclear power and coal with carbon sequestration are technologies which could help us to achieve a "powered decent" or a "sustainable retreat", along with a rapid deployment of renewables, to say 2 billion people over, say, 200 years rather than a catastrophic collapse of societies this century. To work, it would need international agreements on population control and managed migration (certainly a one child policy), TEQs and national targets to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, also an oil depletion protocol and agreement on how we divide up the non-renewable resources.

Even if we were able to build fusion reactors, breeder reactors or capture uranium from seawater, I wouldn't want to see the human population remain at its current level permanently or for all to achieve Western levels of resource use. That would spell disaster for the other inhabitants of the planet who are already facing a mass extinction event so we have to cut back on both. Eventually we would bump up against some other resource constraint if we tried to go down that route.

At the moment we have politicians taking the green talk but still suggesting that economic growth is possible. They think throwing a few scraps to the green lobby with buy them some votes without hitting the average punter in his/her wallet. They either don't understand the linkage between energy, food production, population and living standards, or they just don't want to give us the bad news yet. The Chinese and Indians are on a mission to secure all the hydrocarbons and uranium they need to continue their industrialisation and their people just want a slice of what we have. So I'm not very hopeful that things will turn out how I'd like them to at the moment.

I'd be more than happy to go the clean coal route to supplement renewables if it can be shown to work and we get on with it. Would most probably suit us better given that we have coal but no nuclear fuel (except the plutonium stock pile at Sellafield). Pleased to hear Brown announce a demonstration plant (is this a underground gasification plant???) in the budget but less pleased that a conventional coal station is being planned for Tilbury - surely this should be put on hold or at least designed so that carbon capture can be bolted on at a later date.

The worry, of course, is that it can't be made to work at reasonable cost and in the meantime time is lost when we could have been planning new nuclear build and securing fuel supplies. That's the gamble I guess but it might just be worth taking in our case. Can't see the Japanese and the French following suit as they have no coal. No uranium either you might say but the Japanese are researching separation of uranium from sea water. They are an ingeneous people and might just succeed...

http://www.jaeri.go.jp/english/ff/ff43/topics.html

The Russians are planning to lay foundations on 3 new nuclear plants per year from about 2015 I think. They have the Kazakstan reserves stitched up I think. Chinese have signed a deal with the Aussies for uranium and I understand the Indians have plans to use their Thorium reserves. I guess the US will get first shout at the Canadian uranium. Does make you wonder where we would get any fuel from if we did build any new reactors...

Perhaps we are best out of it and should explore the coal angle. Certainly if we could find a way of extracting energy from coal through underground gasification and sequestering the CO2 we would do the world a great service by exporting the technology worldwide. I don't think we have that much coal that can be conventionally mined in any case.

Some info on nuclear fuel supplies and coal supplies on the EnergyBulletin. Doesn't make for very encouraging reading ("Burning the Future" and "Nuclear") - seems we haven't as much as either as many people think...

http://www.energybulletin.net/

If you spot a Churchill, Tom, then let us know. Shame Tony Blair didn't use his undoubted political talents to better effect. I'm not averse to a bit of hardship either, just wonder if the "Big Brother generation" are up to the task???

I have skimmed through the links Chris Wardle gave. The world is dependent on Australia. Paying off for decommissong is just a non starter if <a href=http://www.lbst.de/publications/studies__e/2006/EWG-paper_1-06_Uranium-Resources-Nuclear-Energy_03DEC2006.pdf> Uranium-Resources-Nuclear-Energy </a> does not bare correction through discovery of large new sources of uranium. Hence any Nuclear fission program is not worth while, unless no else bothered, and then you would have the fissile materials to yourself.

I thought I saw a guide on how to make links somewhere?

Tuna >...fortunately the links quoted here for uranium stocks are all from the viewpoint of peak-oil theorists.

Excuse selective quote but peak-oil theorists are more reliable than many government and industry sources.

There are two problems associated with exploiting low grade ores, less than say 0.1%. As pointed out in the paper, as U concentration gets lower so the energy used to extract it gets greater. There is no point using more energy to extract the fuel than you get back by burning it - EROEI<1

But before this happens the amount of CO2 released increases since much of the energy used in the mining, extraction and refining operations is oil based. Nuclear is far from zero CO2 at the best of times but once the weapons stock is used up and lower grade ores are exploited the supposed climate change advantages vanish.

Now lets get on with designing the as yet almost mythical zero-carbon house.

An interesting piece of research suggesting that, even in radiation disaster zones like Chernobyl, Nagazaki and Hiroshima, exposure to non-lethal doses of radiation is comparable with a range of other factors, such as pollution and passive smoking, which can lead to premature deaths, most likely through cancers in the later stages of a person's lifspan.

The logical extension to this argument is to compare the doses of radiation from properly functioning nuclear reactors and contained nuclear waste to things like passive smoking and industrial and transport pollutions and conclude that the risk to humans through premature deaths is trivial in comparison.

It is rare, and welcome, to see a piece in the media that attempts to put the risks from radiation in some sort of context rather than the headline driven scare stories that are the norm. Of course this doesn't change the fact that there are serious questions over nuclear fuel supplies which cast doubt on whether nuclear power is of significant value in providing low carbon electricity for any significant portion of the world's people.

Posted By: Chris WardleThe logical extension to this argument is to compare the doses of radiation from properly functioning nuclear reactors and contained nuclear waste to things like passive smoking and industrial and transport pollutions and conclude that the risk to humans through premature deaths is trivial in comparison.

This is the new 'keep it in proportion' argument that the nuclear industry's plugging, without which their proposed new wave would remain as unthinkable as it was till reintroduced a couple of years ago (that modern properly managed reactors and ditto waste are really 'safe' (so don't judge on past experience/fears), especially compared with other risks that we live with).

This Guardian article doesn't say anything about that 'all under control' argument - it's about what happens when nuclear things go wrong. Just because so far nuclear disasters have only been as bad as other crazy things we routinely do to ourselves
a) ignores the relative good luck we've had so far, and the idiocy of relying on unfailing high-quality control until all eternity to protect from the near-certainty of infinitely worse disaster at some point during that eternity, especially as seems possible society may at some point during eternity revert to more primitive state at the mercy of mad warlords
b) simply reinforces the urgency of tacking those other crazy things, as they're revealed as even a bit worse than nuclear diasters so far.

No way should this article give any confort at all to the nuclear case. There's nothing more hideously risky to life on earth, that humans have ever done - and it's not even necessary.

Chris,

I agree, and to some extent I don't think the future should be bleak. But I do believe there is no downside to reducing reliance on fossil fuels as fuels. (Have you Googled "relocalization"?)

I'm not an evangelical greenist or recent convert, but there needs to be a see change in contemporary attitudes towards the future. I'd also like to see the following questions answered:

Is it better to build high density housing or to build ALL new housing developments with enough garden for a household vegetable plot and communal recreation areas, and wild spaces?

What is the average distance/cost of the "school run"?

Why is there such a media frenzy regarding CO2 when peak oil is unheard of?

Is organic beef from Argentina more sustainable than British non-organic?

I can't help feeling that despite the laudable aims of reducing CO2, going organic, environmentalism, etc, etc, surly the heart of the matter is simply "sustainability" for now, for the future, locally, and globally?

Bowman
(waiting for login)

Sorry Chris W, I am a believer in luck and being the right place at the right time. I earn, better than if I had stayed in Civil Engineering after my Degree. I'd say I was in the wrong place, wrong time in 1994 when I graduated. I know what recessions are like, far too many people now cannot remember them. Or even redundancy at 24, which for me was the kick in the teeth i needed, or the next 3 for that matter.

Moving on. If we cannot find other cheap reliable energy resources; I fear a point in (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2367#more) will hold true, that money will be harder to come by as the lenders will seek a better gurantee on their return. That will be like a recession. Far too many people i know(early thirties) seem to accept debt. As for the twenty somethings I know, I feel that I am showing the same suprise my parents had in me. As Noddy Holder noted noted over the weekend, what comes around goes around. Take a bite from the cherry and some where the will be a bite from you.
As for effects of Chernobyl, noted by Chris way above, the independent reported on a neat study today. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2414826.ece . We are already like frogs in a pot warming up, we may not all know it. Its time to wake up to all forms of pollution, eg driving your car around.

So as to Bowmans comments
I love the west end communal gardens of South kensington(bit expensive but), London. How many poeple care enough for their gardens, and what of the damage to the country side of the plants gardeners are provided with. Japanese knotweed is becoming common place. Rhodendrons, are a menace as much as pleasure. I'd thought more well done communal gardens with denser but only 6-7 storey high buildings.
Most folks I know have gardens because its a Jones thing, they love them or it came with the house. This leads me to believe 50% of gardens are rubbish and the folks who have them would be better of without it. Just a safe place to relax outside instead.

C02 frenzy, lets give peak oil another two years, if the theorists on say the Oildrum are close to right, two years is all the is needed to see if its already too late. Big media like many people can only handle so many big ideas at once, or else it loses its awe.
Beef from argentina. Sounds good to me. Shame many French and Europeans think we produce such good beef, shame we don't want to pay for it and they do. Or so I have read, (no link sorry).

Read this today. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/columnists/clarkson/article652539.ece Seems the flat earth society is growing

Clarkson cites the World Meteorological Organisation as saying 'the Earth is going to cool down next year'. Unfortunately no further reference.

Is he talking cobblers or is there something in this?