Every country has access to reprocessing technology - the PUREX process was declassified decades ago, and all signatories of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty have the right to reprocess fuel so long as it isn’t diverted into weapons programmes.
I’m afraid the reprocessing genie is out of the lantern and can’t be put back. The only thing that stops more countries engaging in plutonium extraction is that it is relatively easy to detect by their enemies which invites a military response. If you want to run a covert programme, you invest in centrifuges which can easily be hidden in a factory downtown, don’t use huge amounts of energy and don’t produce lots of waste. And thanks to Pakistan, centrifuge designs are also out of the bag.
Reprocessing is economically unviable with the amounts of uranium available right now. The UK invested tens of billions in developing a commercial reprocessing industry and now it is going to have to spent much, much more decommissioning the huge Sellafield plant because no one wants plutonium and reprocessed fuel is much more expensive than virgin, even enriched fuel. Unless nuclear power really ramps up or uranium becomes much scarcer, no one is ever going to reprocess fuel ever again.
That’s not really a very cogent objection. Every nuclear reactor is a breeder of weapon-usable isotopes. And every reactor is a potential source of weaponizable isotopes, because that’s what nuclear fission is all about.
The reason thorium gets touted as better than uranium is that thorium is cleaner, from an isotopic point of view. Fissioning enriched uranium in a power plant produces all kinds of transuranic by products that aren’t meant to be fuel and make things more difficult by poisoning the fuel rods, making them too hot to continue to use, making them brittle, etc. So you have to pull the rods with 99% of the fuel still unburnt, and then store them somewhere since one of the transuranics is plutonium, so reprocessing the fuel presents a proliferation problem.
Whereas thorium in a power plant produces just one thing, U233, which is the intended fuel, so you burn it. No poisoning problem, no weaponizable waste byproducts. Weaponizable fuel, if you take it out and reprocess it, but that’s so with every reactor.
With uranium, you also have a proliferation problem at the beginning, because the technology that makes enriched uranium can also make highly enriched bomb grade uranium. Thorium doesn’t require enrichment.
The only proliferation problem with thorium is that you have to seed a new batch of fuel with a little U233. WHich is an issue that the boosters of thorium reactors handwave away, but they are right that there are fewer points where things need to be monitored and guarded to prevent bomb materials from being extracted than with uranium.
I was in error to suggest that it was a secret, but the basic point stands - every reprocessing facility can become a plutonium extraction facility. If everybody starts doing it, then you’ve got a much bigger headache making sure nobody is extracting bomb grade materials from their spent fuel rods. The current circumstance of it being too expensive to bother doing it is very fortunate.
Really, the whole economics of nuclear power and nuclear materials is so obscured by the basic infrastructure having been built in secret during the cold war. The price of everything has such a huge buried component that it’s hard to say, really, what is actually cost efficient and what has been made to seem so through through the R&D and the infrastructure having been paid for by the military decades ago and not appearing on any power company’s bill.
Hmm. I’d have to read the original study in detail; so far I’ve only speed-read it, and of course I may have it all wrong.
But so far:
terawatt spelled wrong throughout the text, assuming the SI prefixes used to form decimal multiples and submultiples of SI units are anything to go by
study states under “Sources”: This data is based on European energy production standards and practices. Data includes both acute and chronic effects (chronic effects account for between 88% and 99% of total deaths). Figures for nuclear include all cancer-related deaths. Which means that European standards are assumed for energy production in non-European countries. Which is maybe true for some, but not true for others. This could mean that both fossil fuel based and nuclear plants in places like the former SovBloc countries score better than they should. It is also unclear whether this data includes the Tchernobyl and Fukushima events or not.
study states under “Sources”: This data was originally derived by the authors based on methodology developed by the European Commission’s ExternE report. European Commission. ExternE: Externalities of Energy: Methodology 2005 Update. EUR 21951. Brussels: European Commission, 2005. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/research/energy/pdf/kina_en.pdf (accessed 2017-05-05)
Link is dead; has probably moved, will have to check later.
study states under “Sources”: We have estimated the hypothetical number of deaths which would have occurred globally in 2014 if the world’s energy demand was met through a given source. This was calculated by multiplying the death rate per energy source by the IEA’s estimate of global energy production in 2014 of 159,000TWh (Available at: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld2016.pdf) See next point.
Also, I can’t find that number in the report (which, by the way, is a very interesting read). In the IEA report, I find under electrical energy produced: 2,535 TWh from nuclear, 3,983 TWh from hydro, 9,707 TWh from fossil fuels, and a grand total of 23,816 TWh, which I assume is nuclear+hydro+fossil+everything else. The only way I see to get anywhere near 159,00 TWh would be to take the global Total primary energy supply (TPES) and convert that into Wh. It’s just that the TPES isn’t just electricity, “it is made up of production + imports – exports – international marine bunkers – international aviation bunkers ± stock changes. For the world total, international marine bunkers and international aviation bunkers are not subtracted from TPES.” I.e. it is all the fuel used, including transportation, heating, non-energy use etc.
study states under “Sources”: Data was derived from Table 2 in Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007). Electricity generation and health. The Lancet, 370(9591), 979-990. Available at: doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7 (accessed 2017-05-05). Link redirects to http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673607612537 which doesn’t work from here (tablet, FF), might be behind paywall, will have to check on other computer.
Anyway, the point is: the whole data this study is based on comes from one source, which is an article from 2007 in the Lancet. (Which obviously can’t include data from the Fukushima event.) This data has been normalized by assuming “European standards and practices of energy production” (for which no source is cited) to apply world wide. It has then been multiplied by an estimate of global energy production which includes everything and the kitchen sink, not just electricity produced.
no risk analysis whatsoever; like weighing the probability of catastrophic failure against the scale and consequences of catastrophic failure, etc etc
no outlook to the future; like effects of phasing out coal and switching to gas, renewables, etc
So, all in all, the whole thing seems a bit crude and sloppy.
That doesn’t mean it’s wrong per se, but the numbers are bound to be flawed somewhat. Wouldn’t hurt to check it in detail. Wouldn’t hurt either to get a second or third opinion, maybe based on a larger dataset processed with a better methodology.
Anyway, it’s 02:17 h over here, and I have to go to work in a couple of hours, so good night.
Damming of any sort, for hydro electric power especially is also a epic disaster for aquatic ecosystems. Introduced shellfish fucking things up, native shellfish going away, migratory fish being cut off from breeding grounds, problems with baitfish stocks. You can work around some of it but various sorts of dams have been a pretty big disaster for fresh and marine ecosystems over the years. Even with damnless hydroelectric. Any time you’re diverting or redirecting water, you tend to fuck something entirely. The dynamics of water moving through land can have seriously unexpected consequences. Divert something a little bit and you can see the entire course of a river down stream change. Even without that there are serious erosion problems involved, and erosion can absolutely kill whole chunks of wetlands. Being particularly damaging far down stream where critical estuaries can end up silted up.
Yeah diverting waterfalls isn’t harmless. And damage caused isn’t neccisarily purely cosmetic, see the above.
…and there’s the major problem with fission power.
With modern technology and expertise, it is possible to build and run a fission plant in almost perfect safety.
But these plants are still built and run by people…
Just because it can be done safely doesn’t mean that it will be done safely. While I’m largely unconcerned by the French running nuclear facilities, I am substantially less relaxed about the thought of them being run by, for example, the Belorussians.
Fission power safety requires substantial political stability. Corruption is a danger, and civil unrest is a catastrophe.
Widespread adoption would also make nuclear arms control much more difficult to achieve.
It’s hard to compare when you have a huge catestrophic failure event that at one time kills thousands of people, vs. many, many smaller failure events that each cost one life, or even a reduced lifespan, or a sickness like asthma. It reminds me of the difference between the occasional airplane crash (100’s of people dead) vs. a car crash (say 3 people dead per event)*. The former gets lots of attention, however, it’s the latter that kills more people overall. But in general, it’s safer to fly than to drive the same distance.
*I’m making up these numbers just for illustration.
I am not convinced that is the relevant metric. If air travel didn’t exist, people would not be traveling to the same places. They would mostly choose to travel closer to home. Deaths per travel hour might not be exactly the right measurement, but neither is deaths per mile.
IIRC, Just about every nuclear power plant keeps it spent fuel rods in a pool or pools of water, basically a big swimming pool that you do not want to swim in. Because there’s no place for them to send the waste yet (the US still hasn’t opened their waste disposal facility, or have they?), so they just store it on site.
Even with a waste disposal facility, they have to store the rods on site for at least a few years after taking them out of the reactor until they cool enough to be safe to transport – the rods stay hot, thermally speaking, while the fission products break down into stable isotopes, which takes a few years. A good deal of the heat generated by a reactor is actually the heat from the fission products decaying, short but very hot half lives. So you have to keep the rods covered in water to prevent them from melting or combusting or both.
I was going to post this, glad you beat me to it. Nuclear deaths tend to be scary big events like Chernobyl. Solar deaths are everyday tragedies: construction accidents, road deaths while shipping the parts, industrial accidents as they are being manufactured or shipped. These deaths count, and it’s no surprise that they are low, but slightly higher than nuclear.
As for spectacular accidents like Chernobyl, no one builds plants like that anymore. Any future plants built will have no way of having those type of failures.
Waste disposal remains an issue, but even if we just tossed the waste directly into the ocean, it would cause fewer deaths than coal, which spews radioactive particles directly into the air. We could reduce waste tremendously by reprocessing it.
This, coupled with the fact that all large-scale hydropower reservoirs have limited lifespans before they silt up and have to be dredged/renovated, is why LADWP doesn’t include large-scale hydro as “sustainable” in their “35 per cent sustainable power by 2020” pledge (though they do include the hydropower plants on the LA Aqueduct.)
It’s possible to make it extremely safe, if you have a social structure where you can avoid excessive corruption in the regulatory agency responsible for it. France does this well. Both of the really catastrophic accidents have been the result of lax oversight and other kinds of extreme incompetence. There was a whistleblower a few years before the meltdown who went public with horrific safety violations at the Fukushima dai-ichi plant, and, like had happened with incidents at other plants in the past, instead of fixing it, they just blackballed the whistleblower.
This, once again, comes down to a social problem, rather than a technical one. Using breeder reactors makes far less waste, and allows us to get more energy out of the fuel. The only problem is that widespread use for power would mean large piles of weapons-grade plutonium lying around all over the place. If we, as a species, can’t handle that, it might be our undoing.
I’ve read there’s a solution to the waste issue, aside from next-gen reactors that burn everything radioactive - you just dilute the waste in concrete and put it back where you mined it from. Lower radioactivity than before, and more stable.
Sounded like a pretty good idea, but I have to wonder why it’s just an idea.
BTW, the carbon 14 from coal plants accounts for more radiation-related illness than nuclear plants, IIRC.
When you compare nuclear against fossil fuel the storage issue becomes a lot more obvious.
You already are storing the waste of the fossil fuel in your back yard, and everybody else’s back yard. People are already dieing (prematurely) of this. There are no sensible easy large scale storage solutions for CO2.
When you compare it against renewables like solar it becomes a bit more complicated, but here you should also look at what you do with the waste streams that occur during the creation of the solar panels, even though these mostly end up in China and not in your back yard.
