A Rational View on Nuclear Power

Like George Monbiot or James Hansen and James Lovelock, I don't think we're going to be able to free ourselves of our fossil fuel addiction without embracing every non-carbon energy source currently available to us.  What that means in the short term is clear - accepting nuclear power.   What that means in the medium and long term remains to be seen.  We're only beginning to explore alternative energy options, many of them still in their infancy, and it is entirely conceivable we may be able to mothball our nuclear energy resources in two or three decades.  I just don't know.  Neither do you.

The nuclear option has clearly left a deep rift in the environmental movement, especially in the wake of Fukushima.   Yet plenty of very knowledgeable voices in the science community - the same community we implore others to accept on global warming - stand behind nuclear power.

If, like me, you're less than scientifically competent on nuclear power technology - and still have an open mind - here's an article I think you'll find helpful:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/05/28/np-cc-what-now/

Take a read and see if it helps answer some of your questions and doubts.

Russia Takes Floating Nuclear Power Plants to Arctic

When one thinks of Russia and nuclear reactors what first pops to mind except Chernobyl? That little mishap was the mother of all reactor disasters. The destroyed reactor, the nearby town and neighbouring region remain highly radioactive and abandoned.

So word that Russia is now deploying the first of what will be a fleet of floating nuclear reactor power plants to the Arctic Ocean is raising a few eyebrows. Greenpeace has dubbed the first reactor barge, the Akademik Lomonosov, the world's most dangerous nuclear project in a decade. And the Lomonosov is just the first of a fleet of reactor barges planned to be stationed across Russia's northern coastline.

The first barge reactor won't be idle for long. It's slated to power a Russian high-Arctic oil and gas drilling operation. Beyond powering the oil and gas stampede to the Arctic the Russians claim their barge reactors are just the thing for the developing world too. Russia's minister for nuclear energy Sergei Kiriyenko claimed to have "numerous orders" for the floating power plants.

For those of you who worry about the fragile Arctic ecosystem, well - sorry.

Hey George - Here's Your Mushroom Cloud, Dummy!

Remember when the Bush regime hit the airways with dire warnings about how they weren't going to wait until Saddam's smoking gun turned out to be a mushroom cloud over the US?

It turns out the US might have just had that mushroom cloud after all but federal authorities all but concealed it from the American public. The main player was an outfit called Nuclear Fuel Services of Erwin, Tennessee. NFS, a private company, has a contract to transform weapons grade uranium into a weaker product suitable for use in civilian reactors.

As the New York Times reports, last year NFS had a wee problem:

"...the event at the Nuclear Fuel Service factory was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid dribbling under a door and into a hallway. Workers had previously described a yellow liquid in a “glove box,” a sealed container with gloves built into the sides to allow a technician to manipulate objects inside, but managers had decided that it was ordinary uranium.

"In fact, it was highly enriched uranium that had been declared surplus from the weapons inventory of the Energy Department.

"In a puddle, the uranium is not particularly hazardous, but if it formed a more spherical shape, according to the commission, it could become a “critical mass,” a quantity of nuclear fuel sufficient to sustain a chain reaction, in this case outside a reactor. According to the letter sent by the lawmakers, the puddle, containing about nine gallons, reached to within four feet of an elevator pit. The letter from the congressmen says the agency’s report suggests “that it was merely a matter of luck that a criticality accident did not occur.'”

Like so many things in the states these days, it wasn't the slip up but the cover-up that's outrageous. The spill was so bad that it kept the NFS plant closed for seven months last year but residents of the area weren't told why.

After the incident the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency altered the NFS licence and ordered that the public have 20-days to request a hearing on the licence changes.

"But no member of the public ever did. In fact, no member of the public could find out about the changes. The document describing them, including the notice of hearing rights for anyone who felt adversely affected, was stamped “official use only,” meaning that it was not publicly accessible. “Official use only” is a category below “Secret” and, while documents in that category are not technically classified, they are kept from the public."

The incident was even concealed from Congress until one of the five NRA commissioners found a way to leak a reference to it in a memo.

Does this sound like a Simpsons episode?