What are the nuclear options?

December 27, 2005 5:43 PM

I'm looking for objective information about the value of nuclear power. Specifically, how effective is it at generating power vis a vis its pollution A) quantity and B) um... vehemence?

I'm not interested in either end of the propaganda spectrum, here -- if I wanted such, I know enough mindless boosters on either side of the fence to keep me going for a while. What I want, therefore, is not the personal opinions of Mefites (although I suppose those are cool, too) but rather the informed and peer-reviewed opinions of scientists, preferably distilled into journal-length articles.

Where personal opinion == informed stance, of course, please feel free -- along with some statement of bona fides -- to hold forth. That'd be even better, I imagine.

I suppose that, given the premptory and imperious tone of the question above, a "Thanks, in advance!" is in order, too.

posted by ChrisR to science & nature (13 comments total)

Good luck with that. Kuhn pointed out that objective science is somewhat illusory - this will be a classic example. All relevant research will be biased in some manner.

Also, it's an impossible question to answer effectively. Nuclear pollution is terrrible terrible stuff - but 99.99999% of the time it's kept well out of harms way. Of course, given its persistence, it's all just a matter of risk analysis and comparison.

I don't have the figures, but what you're asking is effectively: given that coal-based power generation kills x people a year every year, what is the relevant risk analysis/likelihood for nuclear waste killing many x in the next 10 000 years?

All of the figures in response to that question are likely to be bogus, ie. nobody knows.
posted by wilful at 6:04 PM on December 27, 2005

Nuclear power is emission free, aside from a relatively tiny amount of very nasty waste.

As far as vehemence, the spot where you build a nuclear power plant tends to stay contaminated for a long while. The waste it produces has no where to be stored long term. It's a very expensive way to generate power, if you don't take into consideration the pollution benefits (long term savings to society).
posted by parallax7d at 6:06 PM on December 27, 2005

The CATO institute has a a few good articles on the topic collected on their website.
posted by euphorb at 6:26 PM on December 27, 2005

Smarter User of Nuclear Waste appeared in the December Scientific American. It has some good numbers about how much fuel is consumed, talks a bit about how nasty the waste is, then goes on to describe a new and radically different reactor design. Sadly you have to pay to view it online but you could probably find it in the public library.

If you're trying to more objectively evaluate nuclear power as a policy option, I'd suggest you look into the state of the art in reactor design as well as how reactors as currently implemented. Most were designed in the 70's and 80's and don't really reflect the performance and safety of a plant built today.

Which isn't to suggest that I am advocating anything in particular. I think the debate in US has been hampered by the complete halt of reactor construction in recent years.
posted by joegester at 7:38 PM on December 27, 2005

but rather the informed and peer-reviewed opinions of scientists, preferably distilled into journal-length articles

Start with Nuclear Science and Engineering and Physical Review C.

It really isn't the province of science to decide whether the risks of nuclear power (accidents, waste disposal) are worth the benefits (near-zero particulate emissions). What is known today is that the mitigation of nuclear risks (to the satisfaction of democratic, Western societies) more or less ends up eliminating the fantasy of "too cheap to meter" power. And as fossil fuels become scarcer and more in demand, the attractiveness to society of nuclear power will improve again. Those are some pretty widely-held conclusions.

Science can only document the risks; it's up to society to make the decisions about which risks are worth taking.
posted by dhartung at 7:46 PM on December 27, 2005

I don't have hard numbers for you, but some things you might want to google for. The usual alternative to nuke plants is coal, which contains trace amounts of heavy radioactive material. Teensy, tiny amounts which, when multiplied by the (m|b)illions of tons of coal burnt each year, result in the release of more radioisotopes through coal-burning than nuclear accidents. That's not including the release of C14. One coal-burning plant in Utah releases more uranium in a day than Three Mile Island did; sorry I can't provide a better cite for that than slashdot.

The other indirect information I can give is that one of the northern-european countries (Sweden? - I think Denmark was grumpy about it because the former's reactors are just across from a tourist beach of the latter's) is working on a very nice underground nuclear storage system.

Some technical info about the nuclear side.

You might want to look into Pebble Bed Reactors if you haven't yet. They're a lot more stable than previous designs and loads of them are about to be built by China whether Greenpeace likes it or not. I think they're intending to match current world power output in the next 40-50 years. It'll be interesting to see what the Chinese decide to do with their waste.
posted by polyglot at 8:19 PM on December 27, 2005

There are some good posts and links here here and here on the Treehugger blog. To their credit, they seem to be genuinely curious and open to figuring out whether or not nuclear power is an environmentally and economically viable option. Good discussion in the comments, as well.
posted by joshuaconner at 9:46 PM on December 27, 2005

The last I paid any attention to this there was also an issue over thermal pollution. I throw this in because I see no mention. Perhaps they have just required sufficient cooling before any waste water is released. To be fair, the problem also applied to conventional power plants.
posted by Goofyy at 10:56 PM on December 27, 2005

Burning coal doesn't release 14C -- with a half life of 5730 years, essentially no 14C is left in the coal. In fact, the of coal has significantly diluted the 14C:12C ratio in the atmosphere, making carbon dating of industrial-era samples very dodgy, and, together with bomb test 14C enrichments, messing up carbon dating for the foreseeable future.

On topic: most people agree on the basic parameters of the problem, but not its quantification. This is because of inherent uncertainties: how does one quantify the risk of release of nuclear waste at some point in the next 10,000 years? An event which may never have happened, and may never happen, in a technology (long term waste disposal) that has never been attempted, is bound to have a huge range of known and unknown error. So the issue appears even less objective than science routinely does. Good luck with your quest, but distrust the apparently objective analysis as much as the apparently biased analysis.
posted by Rumple at 11:48 PM on December 27, 2005

I don't know enough to address whether or not nuke plants may make some degree more or less thermal pollution than others, but the thermal pollution under consideration is probably that from condensing the steam after it passes through the turbine. Qualitatively, this is common to steam-driven (i.e. almost all large) power plants, not just nukes.

This is done by water or air cooled condensers - as far as I know the biggest issue with heat pollution is where the limitless supply of river/lake water is used to cool the steam. (As opposed to closed cooling water which is separate from nature and could then be cooled by air.)

I worked at a powerhouse with an air cooled condenser and to give an idea of the difference in scale between the heat given off through the condenser and the rest of the waste heat, everything else cooled by closed cooling water which in turn was air cooled by a heat exchanger that would fit in say, a classroom, while the air cooled condenser had 3 rows of 30 foot diameter fans and required ten foot tall I-beams for support.

The trend seems to be towards forbidding the use of river/lake water for cooling, requiring things like air cooled condensers.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 12:04 AM on December 28, 2005

in order to judge the 'effectiveness' of generation from nuclear in comparison with other generating technologies you need to give some consideration to economics, since the cost of generation tends to be the default method for comparative assessment. I suspect you will still struggle to get 'objective' data as there are many economic implications to different regulatory approaches to the sale of electricity over time and the mitigation of risk relating to operation within a particularly regulated electrical supply industry.
To give some examples which relate to your question, different regulatory systems vary as to the consideration given to the environment, security of supply, quality of supply, loss reduction, etc. The risk relating to nuclear stems not just from the risk within the market of electricity being saleable (as opposed to being priced out of the market) but also to the human and environmental risk , which is difficult to quantify and further to the costs of decommissioning. One key issue concerning the use of nuclear in a liberalised market is that the costs of decommissioning are a very substantial part of the overall operating costs of the project. Any risk that the company operating nuclear capacity might default on these costs is passed to the taxpayer. Effectively this means that the public purse is underwriting the nuclear sector. Most nations try to mitigate this be forcing nuclear generators to pay a fraction of their income against future costs. However, there is no guarantee that these will always be sufficient and further to this, many nations then allow this money to be used for other purposes, such as investment with the idea of growing the central fund or of allowing their (largely still nationally benefiting) power companies to expand internationally (See France, Germany). It doesn't take a genius to see why this might be a problem.
This is a small paper on nuclear in the UK, here is an even shorter article with some good refs.
If you have journal access i suggest going to a journal called Energy Policy and searching for nuclear.
posted by biffa at 7:24 AM on December 28, 2005

Another factor to consider is wear of parts; apparently a lot of the cooling pipes, turbines and other assemblies exposed to radioactive heating and cooling had increased wear and wore out sooner than expected, needing replacement and thus storage in waste disposal facilities, which of course increased costs and negated any real cost savings obtained with a nuclear power plant. The increased wear and maintenance was only one of many factors that erased any cost savings, I believe the cost to prepare a site for a nuclear power plant as well as radiation sheilding, etc. also increased costs. The bottom line was that nuclear power was not as cheap as expected.
In addition, pebble-bed reactors, in spite of all their strong points have their issues as well. Sorry I don't have time to google any of that, but the info I've provided above should help with some paths to pursue for further research.
posted by mk1gti at 8:38 AM on December 28, 2005

Here are some articles from the Rocky Mountain Institute concerning the economics of nuclear power.
posted by Dean King at 9:27 AM on December 28, 2005