Pro-nukes are a diverse lot. They range from hard core climate deniers to hard code climate alarmists. They include button downed engineers and purple haired Tiktok influencers. But there are four anti-nuke positions they all seem to agree on. I have no idea why. So I'm asking you.
The masking point is new to me, that's very interesting and good to know. Thanks.
I often see the 600 year fact in these conversations so I would disagree that this is universal. I do see some pro nuke people argue for a permanent repo but they argue it is easier to do this as a 'PR' win than it is to educate the public. I think this is an incredibly dumb way to fight that battle. Not least of which is that it means the opposition can continually invent new hurdles for you to clear.
In a sense yes. , Fear of plutonium "the most dangerous substance known to man" was manufactured as part of the program to end atom bomb testing. This was created by imagining an impossible delivery scenario in which just the right amount of plutonium was somehow deposited in just the right place in everybody's lungs.
In fact, even if it were somehow ingested, Pu is not a health problem. Ingested plutonium may be one of the least harmful components of the fuel. The uptake is 0.001 which means 99.99% is excreted in a day or two.
See also the reprehensible Albert Stevens experiment, Flop Book Chapter 2. Stevens, age 58, was injected with Pu-nitrate spiked with pu-238 directly into his blood stream. He died of heart failure at 79. His body absorbed and repaired about 8 mSv/d for 21 years.
You can concoct a proliferation issue thousands of years down the road sicne Pu-239 is one of the longest lived Pu isotopes. Reactor grade plutonium will eventually become weapons grade as the other Pu isotopes decay away. All the more reason to recycle the spent fuel in a few hundred years.
One thing about waste I would like to know is what are the numbers for thorium-based reactors, like that one those Thorcon guys are designing? No trans-U's is good. A little bit of HALEU to keep it going, but not much. How long 'til no gamma's? How much less than a Coke can/lifetime?
Thorium, Uranium or Plutonium fissioning doesn't really change the resulting fission product spectrum that results (maybe slightly, but not markedly). In the end, it is really only the Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 which have ~30 year half lives that generate the photon radiation.
Right, but from a fission product perspective Sr90 is there and will need shielding for 10+ half lives. It isn’t a concern in NPP accidents, just present in spent fuel or post nuclear weapons delivery. Greenpeace has left us with the legacy of the Sr90 baby teeth scare forever.
Practically speaking, beta and gamma aren’t all that different biologically- they just need different levels of shielding. My bad calling them photons…
Totally different levels of shielding. Electrons interact with the electromagnetic fields that surround each nucleus. Uncharged photons do not. Even without any shielding most Sr-90 electrons won't penetrate all the way through your skin. If you wait long enough so that the Cs-137 gammas are easily shielded, Sr-90 betas are a non-factor. Your comment sort of implied they were. That's why I had to nitpick.
I think we've seen contemporary public attitudes to "wear an N95 correctly to avoid the risk of death and serious permanent health conditions" is largely "DON'T TELL ME TO WEAR A MASK".
Except that you'd only be wearing a mask for the few days it take for the fallout plume to pass, not for the period lasting longer than a YEAR that it took to first develop Covid-19 vaccines and then administer them to the majority of the population.
As usual, great insights at "a cut above". Can you direct us to the decay-chain calculation details behind the 600-year no-gamma reality? Thanks! Knowing the details behind the claims is helpful -- and necessary -- when out there doing advocacy.
Again, as a newbie, some of your specialized vocabulary was unknown to me. (never heard of "plume dose" or "LNT" before). But I appreciate learning that nuclear waste is only a 600 year problem; not millions of years. I especially liked "Come up with a alternative model which recognizes our remarkable ability to repair radiation damage, and does not depend on the unprovable threshold claim." and would love to hear more sources on the repair mechanism (RNA repairing DNA damage?) so I can pass this on to my daughter who teaches microbiology.
Very nice essay discussing 4 simple factors. We could hope it is that straightforward to turn the discussion back to some form of reality, and aid in achieving N2N.
But, on Table 1, are those measurements really out to 5 significant figures? Values with 3 trailing "0's" suggest not.
On the masking, just what does "almost all the dose is from inhaling contaminated air..." really mean? That the air gas molecules are now radioactive; or the dust particles in the air; or* ??? The story on mask efficacy during the pandemic went up and down and all around as to their effectiveness of filtering viruses, apparently finally coming out as not really effective against particles that small, but perhaps able to reduce the inhalation or exhalation of water droplets carrying viruses to some degree. For the nuclear plume protection, are the N95 masks truly shown to be effective at minimizing the inhalation contaminated dust?
And for the N95's, they must be tightly adjacent to the face, so all air flow is through the filter media and not around the edges (including the fogging of glasses, etc.). But (at least my experience is) that seems to restrict air flow so much that people tire of using the masks or end up having air flow around the edges in any case. Presumably good enough for shop dust, etc., but not really high quality filtration as would be supplied by real "face masks"?? Some masks also come with "valves or flaps" to aid air movement from breathing to minimize that sort of restriction, but undoubtedly compromise filtering quality.
Some form of cheap but better masking seems to still be required to provide the sort of valid protection you are suggesting is valid and merited. Some version with a plastic helmet or plate for visibility and no fogging for glasses wearers, and insertable filter pads? Of course wearing glasses also could make head sealing difficult unless some other attachment mode is used?? Plus those of us with some form of engineering background don't need to make "better the enemy of good enough" :-)
*This is probably one of those cases where you are so close to the topic and so familiar with it that you forget just how ignorant the rest of us are about such details. :-)
Some good comments. Collective response to all the comments to date.
Masks
Doubt if the Covid 19 experience applies. Since radiation damage is not contagious, there would be no social pressure to mask up, The Release Pamphlet will make it quite clear that masking is completely voluntary.
The iodine and cesium aerosols in a radioactive release have a mean diameter of roughly 3 microns. From memory, the Covid virus was much smaller, about 0.1 microns. N95 masks can be pretty effective IN THE FIELD against 3 micron particles. See for example Figure 7.2 in the Underwriter Certification Manual. Yes, there will be leakage. But if your harm model is SNT, then cutting the dose rate by a factor of ten, resulting in cutting the harm by more than a factor of 100. Pretty compelling numbers.
600 year SNF
AFAIK, the 600 year number goes all the way back to mid 2022 when it was introduced in the 2nd Edition of Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop. It was included in one of the first pieces on this sustack in late 2022. I did not understand why I had never seen the penetrating/non-penetrating distinction made before that but figured that once somebody pointed it out, pro-nukes would jump all over it. This has not happened. I dont know why.
I have had people tell me that Joe Sixpack is too stupid to understand the difference between penetrating and non-penetrating radiation. Most of my friends are Joe Sixpacks. They have no problem at all understanding the simple argument. The people who make this argument are the stupid ones.
The NWMO study does not do a very good job of saying exactly how they calculated the dose rate at the fuel element surface. Doing the calc myself has been on my todo list for quite a while. Maybe this will prod me to get this job done. But a quick check is possible. From year 50 on, the gamma dose is total dominated by Cesium-137 with a 30 year half-life. 600 years is 20 Cs-137 half-lives .5**20 is 9.5e-7. After 600 years, the Cs-137 is down by a factor of a million.
All fissions whether it be U-233, U-235, or Pu-239 produce about the same amount and spectrum of fission products (gamma emitters) for the same amount of thermal energy. ThorCon and other thorium burners has no advantage here. The whole point is that any difference in alpha emitters is totally unimportant from the waste handling point of view. High thermal efficiency designs do have a waste amount advantage on a electrical output basis. ThorCon has an overall thermal efficiency of a little over 45%; a standard LWR is abound 33%. So 40% less waste/Mwe. Important economically but not really important for present purposes.
Threshold
The Non-threshold Model which the Gordian Knot Group is advocating is called Sigmoid No Threshold. It and our damage repair processes are discussed extensively in various GKN pieces. But if you are really serious, you should study the The Underwriter Certification Manual which you can download from https://gordianknotbook.com/download/underwriter-certification-of-nuclear-power
All my stuff is under the Creative Commons A4 license which as far as I can tell means you can do whatever you want with it except sell it.
Yes, please do get that job done, calculating the dose rate from used fuel rods, so it can pass the gauntlet of anti-nukers who insist that all our source be impeccable. I've copied your chart to our Citizendium article on waste management, on the tab where we summarize the best arguments on each side.
Your point about masks was new to me also - one of those things I just never thought about, but is obvious in retrospect. I like that it can be voluntary. Let the idiots suffer, if they insist. For those with more common sense, let's have a stockpile of N95's, on a plane, ready to be dropped anywhere in the world on short notice.
I happened to be aware of the 600 year figure from a really good Decouple Media video
The video has 85k views and excellent cinematography with the money shot revolving around the question of how old of a spent CANDU fuel bundle you could watch a movie with and experience no measurable harm
100 years: you can watch a movie with the bundle 10 feet away
400 years: you can hold the bundle for the entire movie
As far as I know there is a borderline reasonable case for 100,000 year isolation which is that one isotope can be carried by water and therefore could travel to crops or an aquifer and cause theoretical LNT deaths of some thousands
I gave Keefer the 600 year figure which ended up in the video. UO2 does dissolve and
under a preposterous unlikely delivery scenario combined with the even more preposterous harm model called LNT might conceivably cause a little harm. But if you stupidly dont use the uranium as fuel, cement it with phosphate sand. Uranium phosphate is insoluble and you eliminate even that nonsensical scenario. Keefer's misuse of the info I gave him was one of the motivations for the Four Questions piece.
I think the regulation piece is just a lack of willingness to rock the boat. Nobody bothers with effective regulation anymore, it is all just pass the bill, cut the ribbon and then bitch about it.
I'm sure many in the NRC really actually care, but they are trapped in a system with terrible incentives. Anyone who advocates changing those incentives will be branded a baby killer, industry shill or some other nonsense, and many (most?) people who aren't libertarian autists don't like opening themselves up to that kind of criticism.
In reality though, most have not thought through good alternative systems like you have actually taken the time to propose... so I think that is mostly it. Changes in nuke regulation will only happen as part of some kind of grand compromise to get the industry moving again and the more everyone sees that renewables make electricity unreliable and punishingly expensive for the poor, the easier that grand compromise will be to make.
Most people are anti-nuclear by default. They have heard things about nuclear waste and the other issues Jack discusses, but have no time to read articles like Jack's Substack series. At most, they will read something in Wikipedia, with mob-written articles following the general public bias against nuclear power. Surprising to me is the fact that even journalists who wail about climate change don't even mention nuclear power as a possible solution.
I believe the best way to tackle this problem is educate the journalists, starting with those who are most concerned about climate change. What do these journalists need? - a trusted summary of the facts and best arguments on each side of the most important issues, like Wikipedia, but neutral, not anti-nuclear. Citizendium provides that summary, with links to reliable sources for those that want to dig deeper. What we need right now is people who understand nuclear power to reach out to these journalists, and provide them with links to answer their questions.
Don't think so. The 600 year argument depends on making the distinction between penetrating and non-penetrating radiation. On a skim, this document never even mentions this crucially important difference. Perhaps you can show us that I'm wrong.
Again on a very quick skim, I dont see any really significant changes. Seems like its focus is on paperwork which of course is what NRC does. I do not like the continued defense of close packing which is a really dumb idea. See Ch 4 in Flop book.
I'm a big fan of HALEU availability. MSR's can take advantage of higher enrichment . On 20% enriched LEU, ThorCon can get 25% of its energy from thorium. That's cheap electricity On 5% LEU, they cant spike the fuel with thorium and reach criticality. Some of the fast reactors simply cant get started on 5% LEU.
However, the DOE approach to HALEU by creating a tax payer funded monopoly is precisely the worst way to get higher enrichment. See the Centrus Fiasco piece.
I'm happy somebody is working on gas reactors and pebbles. Part of the 1000 Flowers. I've made it clear I'm skeptical of small scale.
But the bottomline is that until we regulate nuclear, all nuclear, like we regulate other beneficial and potentially hazardous activities, none of the technologies will come close to reaching their potential.
"But the bottomline is that until we regulate nuclear, all nuclear, like we regulate other beneficial and potentially hazardous activities, none of the technologies will come close to reaching their potential."
This will certainly be put to the test with the X-Energy & Dow Chemical Company project to build essentially a replacement for a gas cogen plant to provide both steam and electricity to a captive industrial site.
Right. But this works both ways. If we end up with another NuScale, can we agree that the NRC has to go? How many times do we have to hear, this time it will be different?
X-Energy has been working with teh NRC for something like 4 years. They've submitted at least 23 formal documents, not including revisions. And they are still pre-application. They have not even started the formal application process.
I already agree. The push is tremendous for non-grid applications but who will take the risk if an established execution minded company like Dow can't get the project built and operating. I see all these events(https://www.arsummit.org) and they all sound the same but don't address the issue of putting steel in the ground. But then again, that's the point of your Substack.
Dow's support of nuclear power goes back to the late 60's, when they pushed a plant at Midland, Michigan to replace the steam that in the past has been produced from lumber waste. But that source was drying up. It was a grid plant but they would be the keystone customer.
But they were a little late. By then, the Westinghouse's and GE's had learned that turnkey contracts and AEC backfitting do not play nice together. They had retreated to component vendors The job was turned over to Bechtel on a cost plus basis, the rules kept changing, and things went from bad to worse. After enormous losses, the Midland plant ended up being converted to gas. Pretty gutsy of Dow to try again.
"The 1974 55 MPH speed limit on the Interstates was a mild, modern form of the Red Flag Act."
Was it really?
My understanding is that the National Maximum Speed Law was not about safety at all, but was rather a fuel-efficiency measure (55 mph was close to the optimally efficient speed for most cars) introduced in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
The masking point is new to me, that's very interesting and good to know. Thanks.
I often see the 600 year fact in these conversations so I would disagree that this is universal. I do see some pro nuke people argue for a permanent repo but they argue it is easier to do this as a 'PR' win than it is to educate the public. I think this is an incredibly dumb way to fight that battle. Not least of which is that it means the opposition can continually invent new hurdles for you to clear.
Isn't the "spent fuel dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years" thing essentially based on 10 half-lives of plutonium-239?
Makes me wonder if the concern at its root isn't so much about dangerous radiation, as about fear of nuclear weapons proliferation?
George,
In a sense yes. , Fear of plutonium "the most dangerous substance known to man" was manufactured as part of the program to end atom bomb testing. This was created by imagining an impossible delivery scenario in which just the right amount of plutonium was somehow deposited in just the right place in everybody's lungs.
In fact, even if it were somehow ingested, Pu is not a health problem. Ingested plutonium may be one of the least harmful components of the fuel. The uptake is 0.001 which means 99.99% is excreted in a day or two.
See also the reprehensible Albert Stevens experiment, Flop Book Chapter 2. Stevens, age 58, was injected with Pu-nitrate spiked with pu-238 directly into his blood stream. He died of heart failure at 79. His body absorbed and repaired about 8 mSv/d for 21 years.
You can concoct a proliferation issue thousands of years down the road sicne Pu-239 is one of the longest lived Pu isotopes. Reactor grade plutonium will eventually become weapons grade as the other Pu isotopes decay away. All the more reason to recycle the spent fuel in a few hundred years.
The masks need to be n95s.
One thing about waste I would like to know is what are the numbers for thorium-based reactors, like that one those Thorcon guys are designing? No trans-U's is good. A little bit of HALEU to keep it going, but not much. How long 'til no gamma's? How much less than a Coke can/lifetime?
Thorium, Uranium or Plutonium fissioning doesn't really change the resulting fission product spectrum that results (maybe slightly, but not markedly). In the end, it is really only the Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 which have ~30 year half lives that generate the photon radiation.
Sr-90 is a pure electron emitter. It is alos not nearly as volatile as cesium. Sr-90 has not played a major role in any release to date.
Right, but from a fission product perspective Sr90 is there and will need shielding for 10+ half lives. It isn’t a concern in NPP accidents, just present in spent fuel or post nuclear weapons delivery. Greenpeace has left us with the legacy of the Sr90 baby teeth scare forever.
Practically speaking, beta and gamma aren’t all that different biologically- they just need different levels of shielding. My bad calling them photons…
Totally different levels of shielding. Electrons interact with the electromagnetic fields that surround each nucleus. Uncharged photons do not. Even without any shielding most Sr-90 electrons won't penetrate all the way through your skin. If you wait long enough so that the Cs-137 gammas are easily shielded, Sr-90 betas are a non-factor. Your comment sort of implied they were. That's why I had to nitpick.
New points for me, thank you.
I think we've seen contemporary public attitudes to "wear an N95 correctly to avoid the risk of death and serious permanent health conditions" is largely "DON'T TELL ME TO WEAR A MASK".
Except that you'd only be wearing a mask for the few days it take for the fallout plume to pass, not for the period lasting longer than a YEAR that it took to first develop Covid-19 vaccines and then administer them to the majority of the population.
As usual, great insights at "a cut above". Can you direct us to the decay-chain calculation details behind the 600-year no-gamma reality? Thanks! Knowing the details behind the claims is helpful -- and necessary -- when out there doing advocacy.
Again, as a newbie, some of your specialized vocabulary was unknown to me. (never heard of "plume dose" or "LNT" before). But I appreciate learning that nuclear waste is only a 600 year problem; not millions of years. I especially liked "Come up with a alternative model which recognizes our remarkable ability to repair radiation damage, and does not depend on the unprovable threshold claim." and would love to hear more sources on the repair mechanism (RNA repairing DNA damage?) so I can pass this on to my daughter who teaches microbiology.
Check out many of Jack's previous articles. He even produced some handy indices, for example: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-gordian-knot-news-a-list
Very nice essay discussing 4 simple factors. We could hope it is that straightforward to turn the discussion back to some form of reality, and aid in achieving N2N.
But, on Table 1, are those measurements really out to 5 significant figures? Values with 3 trailing "0's" suggest not.
On the masking, just what does "almost all the dose is from inhaling contaminated air..." really mean? That the air gas molecules are now radioactive; or the dust particles in the air; or* ??? The story on mask efficacy during the pandemic went up and down and all around as to their effectiveness of filtering viruses, apparently finally coming out as not really effective against particles that small, but perhaps able to reduce the inhalation or exhalation of water droplets carrying viruses to some degree. For the nuclear plume protection, are the N95 masks truly shown to be effective at minimizing the inhalation contaminated dust?
And for the N95's, they must be tightly adjacent to the face, so all air flow is through the filter media and not around the edges (including the fogging of glasses, etc.). But (at least my experience is) that seems to restrict air flow so much that people tire of using the masks or end up having air flow around the edges in any case. Presumably good enough for shop dust, etc., but not really high quality filtration as would be supplied by real "face masks"?? Some masks also come with "valves or flaps" to aid air movement from breathing to minimize that sort of restriction, but undoubtedly compromise filtering quality.
Some form of cheap but better masking seems to still be required to provide the sort of valid protection you are suggesting is valid and merited. Some version with a plastic helmet or plate for visibility and no fogging for glasses wearers, and insertable filter pads? Of course wearing glasses also could make head sealing difficult unless some other attachment mode is used?? Plus those of us with some form of engineering background don't need to make "better the enemy of good enough" :-)
*This is probably one of those cases where you are so close to the topic and so familiar with it that you forget just how ignorant the rest of us are about such details. :-)
Guys,
Some good comments. Collective response to all the comments to date.
Masks
Doubt if the Covid 19 experience applies. Since radiation damage is not contagious, there would be no social pressure to mask up, The Release Pamphlet will make it quite clear that masking is completely voluntary.
The iodine and cesium aerosols in a radioactive release have a mean diameter of roughly 3 microns. From memory, the Covid virus was much smaller, about 0.1 microns. N95 masks can be pretty effective IN THE FIELD against 3 micron particles. See for example Figure 7.2 in the Underwriter Certification Manual. Yes, there will be leakage. But if your harm model is SNT, then cutting the dose rate by a factor of ten, resulting in cutting the harm by more than a factor of 100. Pretty compelling numbers.
600 year SNF
AFAIK, the 600 year number goes all the way back to mid 2022 when it was introduced in the 2nd Edition of Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop. It was included in one of the first pieces on this sustack in late 2022. I did not understand why I had never seen the penetrating/non-penetrating distinction made before that but figured that once somebody pointed it out, pro-nukes would jump all over it. This has not happened. I dont know why.
I have had people tell me that Joe Sixpack is too stupid to understand the difference between penetrating and non-penetrating radiation. Most of my friends are Joe Sixpacks. They have no problem at all understanding the simple argument. The people who make this argument are the stupid ones.
The 600 year number comes from a graph in an NWMO study of a Canadian Repository which I redrew and relabeled. This is referenced and discussed in the PDF version of the substack piece which you can and should download from https://gordianknotbook.com/download/nuclear-waste-a-tale-of-two-particles/
The NWMO study does not do a very good job of saying exactly how they calculated the dose rate at the fuel element surface. Doing the calc myself has been on my todo list for quite a while. Maybe this will prod me to get this job done. But a quick check is possible. From year 50 on, the gamma dose is total dominated by Cesium-137 with a 30 year half-life. 600 years is 20 Cs-137 half-lives .5**20 is 9.5e-7. After 600 years, the Cs-137 is down by a factor of a million.
All fissions whether it be U-233, U-235, or Pu-239 produce about the same amount and spectrum of fission products (gamma emitters) for the same amount of thermal energy. ThorCon and other thorium burners has no advantage here. The whole point is that any difference in alpha emitters is totally unimportant from the waste handling point of view. High thermal efficiency designs do have a waste amount advantage on a electrical output basis. ThorCon has an overall thermal efficiency of a little over 45%; a standard LWR is abound 33%. So 40% less waste/Mwe. Important economically but not really important for present purposes.
Threshold
The Non-threshold Model which the Gordian Knot Group is advocating is called Sigmoid No Threshold. It and our damage repair processes are discussed extensively in various GKN pieces. But if you are really serious, you should study the The Underwriter Certification Manual which you can download from https://gordianknotbook.com/download/underwriter-certification-of-nuclear-power
All my stuff is under the Creative Commons A4 license which as far as I can tell means you can do whatever you want with it except sell it.
Yes, please do get that job done, calculating the dose rate from used fuel rods, so it can pass the gauntlet of anti-nukers who insist that all our source be impeccable. I've copied your chart to our Citizendium article on waste management, on the tab where we summarize the best arguments on each side.
https://citizendium.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste_management/Debate_Guide#Nuclear_Waste_Lasts_Forever
Your point about masks was new to me also - one of those things I just never thought about, but is obvious in retrospect. I like that it can be voluntary. Let the idiots suffer, if they insist. For those with more common sense, let's have a stockpile of N95's, on a plane, ready to be dropped anywhere in the world on short notice.
I happened to be aware of the 600 year figure from a really good Decouple Media video
The video has 85k views and excellent cinematography with the money shot revolving around the question of how old of a spent CANDU fuel bundle you could watch a movie with and experience no measurable harm
100 years: you can watch a movie with the bundle 10 feet away
400 years: you can hold the bundle for the entire movie
And 600 years: the only danger is if you eat it
https://youtu.be/jM-b5-uD6jU?si=s5aNtAbjRp8KuSH9
As far as I know there is a borderline reasonable case for 100,000 year isolation which is that one isotope can be carried by water and therefore could travel to crops or an aquifer and cause theoretical LNT deaths of some thousands
Smopes,
I gave Keefer the 600 year figure which ended up in the video. UO2 does dissolve and
under a preposterous unlikely delivery scenario combined with the even more preposterous harm model called LNT might conceivably cause a little harm. But if you stupidly dont use the uranium as fuel, cement it with phosphate sand. Uranium phosphate is insoluble and you eliminate even that nonsensical scenario. Keefer's misuse of the info I gave him was one of the motivations for the Four Questions piece.
I think the regulation piece is just a lack of willingness to rock the boat. Nobody bothers with effective regulation anymore, it is all just pass the bill, cut the ribbon and then bitch about it.
I'm sure many in the NRC really actually care, but they are trapped in a system with terrible incentives. Anyone who advocates changing those incentives will be branded a baby killer, industry shill or some other nonsense, and many (most?) people who aren't libertarian autists don't like opening themselves up to that kind of criticism.
In reality though, most have not thought through good alternative systems like you have actually taken the time to propose... so I think that is mostly it. Changes in nuke regulation will only happen as part of some kind of grand compromise to get the industry moving again and the more everyone sees that renewables make electricity unreliable and punishingly expensive for the poor, the easier that grand compromise will be to make.
Most people are anti-nuclear by default. They have heard things about nuclear waste and the other issues Jack discusses, but have no time to read articles like Jack's Substack series. At most, they will read something in Wikipedia, with mob-written articles following the general public bias against nuclear power. Surprising to me is the fact that even journalists who wail about climate change don't even mention nuclear power as a possible solution.
I believe the best way to tackle this problem is educate the journalists, starting with those who are most concerned about climate change. What do these journalists need? - a trusted summary of the facts and best arguments on each side of the most important issues, like Wikipedia, but neutral, not anti-nuclear. Citizendium provides that summary, with links to reliable sources for those that want to dig deeper. What we need right now is people who understand nuclear power to reach out to these journalists, and provide them with links to answer their questions.
https://citizendium.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_reconsidered
About the 600 years mentioned.
Won't the updated regulations affect this?
www.ans.org/news/article-5798/final-decommissioning-rule-expected-by-fall-nrc-says/
C
Don't think so. The 600 year argument depends on making the distinction between penetrating and non-penetrating radiation. On a skim, this document never even mentions this crucially important difference. Perhaps you can show us that I'm wrong.
Again on a very quick skim, I dont see any really significant changes. Seems like its focus is on paperwork which of course is what NRC does. I do not like the continued defense of close packing which is a really dumb idea. See Ch 4 in Flop book.
what are your thoughts about the push to use HALEU in the form of TRISO particles, for example, X-Energy's pebble reactor.
I'm a big fan of HALEU availability. MSR's can take advantage of higher enrichment . On 20% enriched LEU, ThorCon can get 25% of its energy from thorium. That's cheap electricity On 5% LEU, they cant spike the fuel with thorium and reach criticality. Some of the fast reactors simply cant get started on 5% LEU.
However, the DOE approach to HALEU by creating a tax payer funded monopoly is precisely the worst way to get higher enrichment. See the Centrus Fiasco piece.
I'm happy somebody is working on gas reactors and pebbles. Part of the 1000 Flowers. I've made it clear I'm skeptical of small scale.
But the bottomline is that until we regulate nuclear, all nuclear, like we regulate other beneficial and potentially hazardous activities, none of the technologies will come close to reaching their potential.
"But the bottomline is that until we regulate nuclear, all nuclear, like we regulate other beneficial and potentially hazardous activities, none of the technologies will come close to reaching their potential."
This will certainly be put to the test with the X-Energy & Dow Chemical Company project to build essentially a replacement for a gas cogen plant to provide both steam and electricity to a captive industrial site.
Right. But this works both ways. If we end up with another NuScale, can we agree that the NRC has to go? How many times do we have to hear, this time it will be different?
X-Energy has been working with teh NRC for something like 4 years. They've submitted at least 23 formal documents, not including revisions. And they are still pre-application. They have not even started the formal application process.
I already agree. The push is tremendous for non-grid applications but who will take the risk if an established execution minded company like Dow can't get the project built and operating. I see all these events(https://www.arsummit.org) and they all sound the same but don't address the issue of putting steel in the ground. But then again, that's the point of your Substack.
Sorry, misinterpreted yr comment.
Dow's support of nuclear power goes back to the late 60's, when they pushed a plant at Midland, Michigan to replace the steam that in the past has been produced from lumber waste. But that source was drying up. It was a grid plant but they would be the keystone customer.
But they were a little late. By then, the Westinghouse's and GE's had learned that turnkey contracts and AEC backfitting do not play nice together. They had retreated to component vendors The job was turned over to Bechtel on a cost plus basis, the rules kept changing, and things went from bad to worse. After enormous losses, the Midland plant ended up being converted to gas. Pretty gutsy of Dow to try again.
"The 1974 55 MPH speed limit on the Interstates was a mild, modern form of the Red Flag Act."
Was it really?
My understanding is that the National Maximum Speed Law was not about safety at all, but was rather a fuel-efficiency measure (55 mph was close to the optimally efficient speed for most cars) introduced in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
Youre right. That's how it was sold. The correlation was a bit of a stretch.