Liberals and Nuclear Power

[Samuraikoku]

I'm a liberal by U.S. standards and I support nuclear power, provided of course there are proper safety measures.

[DesAnges]

As with any power source, nuclear power has issues to go with the benefits of implementing it.

The energy produced is certainly a lot 'cleaner' than the than the traditional fossil fuel set i.e. less carbon dioxide emissions. I believe it is also more efficient.

However, it also ridiculously expensive. You have to build a power plant, not a task to be taken lightly, average cost of which is between 1 and 2 billion pounds.

Ensuring your new, shiny, lump of concrete fulfills all the requisite safety regulations, you then have to source your fuels. This brings its own costs, obviously. Uranium itself, you must remember, is not renewable - as with fossil fuels, the supply is limited. This of course doesn't matter immediately as there is still quite a lot of the stuff around. 5 year old estimates put the cost of uranium at around the 10% cost of production mark, as opposed to 80% in a gas-based plant.

You can now commence with your energy production. Yay!

Oh. Your uranium has been used up, and you need to shift the radioactive residue. This is also very expensive, as there are any number of federal/national/global regulations that need to be adhered to in order to not get yourself a heavy, heavy fine. There is also finite space in which we can actually dump the stuff into as well, without breaking or altering the regulations and risking ecological disaster. It is quite expensive to dump the waste, as new plants would cost more billions. No one wants a nuclear waste dumping site next to their house, anyway.

Be sure to keep an eye on the stuff too - uranium is, of course, the stuff used in nuclear weapons. So you might not want to lose any of it. Don't cause a meltdown, either - this is bad.

Of course there are alternatives to uranium. Thorium is more abundant, less easily weaponised and comes with the added benefits of being almost impossible to meltdown and producing less toxic waste. France is currently using a thorium plant. Or maybe building one. I can't remember.

After around 40-50 years, your plant is to be decommissioned. Huzzah! No more annoying costs...after the cost of decommission, of course. Much more expensive than decommissioning a normal power plant.

So you can just walk away now, right? Well, actually, no. The plant may be decommissioned but you can't close it straight away. You will still have a staff working there for a number of years, ensuring that the decommissioning process was sound and that there is no possible chance of a leak. From memory, this process is roughly 10 years, costing another billion or so.

So whilst nuclear energy is a nice enough idea - cheaper cost to the payer on demand, less greenhouse gas production etc. etc. - it is very very expensive.

As for the 3 incident remark - that depends on your definition of incident.

There are 8 levels of nuclear accident:

0 - Deviation. Ignore this, this is fine.
1 - Anomaly. Not really much to worry about at this point, just make sure it doesn't get out of hand.
2 - Incident. Slightly more serious, but nothing really serious.
3 - Serious Incident. This is where you need to start paying attention. This can range from a stolen source of high radioactivity, to someone receiving nuclear burns.

Those 4 are incidents. From 4 to 7, they become accidents. You do not want to be in charge of something at this end of the scale.

4 - Accident, local consequences. For it to be an accident, at least one person in the local area needs to have died, or a small release of radiation.
5 - Accident, wider consequences. Sever damage to core, several people have died, limited (but quite large) release of radiation resulting in public exposure.
6 - Serious accident. Significant release of radiation or nuclear material. Very, very bad.
7 - Major accident. Chernobyl. Widespread environmental and health consequences requiring pre-planned, extensive counter measures.

Three Mile Island was a 5 on this scale, Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only 7s. I can only find mention of one level 6 accident, at a Soviet plant in the 60s named Mayak.

I forgot to sum up, and missed a couple bits.

Nuclear energy is a nice idea, if you can find someone who will splash the cash, although efforts in other directions would be personally preferable. It is also much less likely to cause environmental problems than you might expect.

[CTALNH]

They probably didn't know what a Commie is.

They're probably having an office in-joke and are well aware of what Communism is.

Or that.

[CTALNH]

I'm a liberal by U.S. standards and I support nuclear power, provided of course there are proper safety measures.

Samuraikoku...Why are you stating the obvious?Of course every supports proper safety measures.

[DesAnges]

I'm a liberal by U.S. standards and I support nuclear power, provided of course there are proper safety measures.

Samuraikoku...Why are you stating the obvious?Of course every supports proper safety measures.

Nah just dump the shit in a cow field and move on.

[Samozaryadnyastan]

Samuraikoku...Why are you stating the obvious?Of course every supports proper safety measures.

Nah just dump the shit in a cow field and move on.

Still a better disposal procedure than what Sellafield used to have.

[DesAnges]

Nah just dump the shit in a cow field and move on.

Still a better disposal procedure than what Sellafield used to have.

Fair point.

[Samuraikoku]

I'm a liberal by U.S. standards and I support nuclear power, provided of course there are proper safety measures.

Samuraikoku...Why are you stating the obvious?Of course every supports proper safety measures.

I am from Argentina, remember. There's a reason why I bring safety measures up.

[YellowApple]

[Zonolia]

I'm not a Liberal (actually Progressive) but I do support nuclear power...that is until LFTR become wins over as the primary nuclear-like power source...

[Samozaryadnyastan]

I'm not a Liberal (actually Progressive) but I do support nuclear power...that is until LFTR become wins over as the primary nuclear-like power source...

...
How is an LFTR only 'nuclear-like'.

[Grand Britannia]

I fully support nuclear energy and accessories, for science.

[Screensaver]

I fully support nuclear energy and accessories, for science.

But not for commercial scale electricity generation?

[Risottia]

So I am wondering what liberals think about nuclear power for electricity generation. I have met many liberals (mostly poorly informed about the facts of nuclear power) that outright oppose nuclear power.

Erm, the country with the most electricity generated from nuclear fission is France. The notorious liberal hellhole.

[Grand Britannia]

I fully support nuclear energy and accessories, for science.

But not for commercial scale electricity generation?

I meant to say for advancement of technology, but "for science" sounded better to me.

Also yes, that too.

[Grenartia]

So I am wondering what liberals think about nuclear power for electricity generation. I have met many liberals (mostly poorly informed about the facts of nuclear power) that outright oppose nuclear power.

Erm, the country with the most electricity generated from nuclear fission is France. The notorious liberal hellhole.

If its so liberal then how come it only recently legalized same-sex marriage?

[Risottia]

Erm, the country with the most electricity generated from nuclear fission is France. The notorious liberal hellhole.

If its so liberal then how come it only recently legalized same-sex marriage?

Mysteries of the American stereotyping of France.

[Zonolia]

I'm not a Liberal (actually Progressive) but I do support nuclear power...that is until LFTR become wins over as the primary nuclear-like power source...

...
How is an LFTR only 'nuclear-like'.

Ya see, I was won over by the many pros I read about it...I'm not too science savvy to be as so sure it is fully nuclear? (That is if what it is supposed to be?) Either way, I was won over by flashing pictures and a list of pros/cons...

[AiliailiA]

So I am wondering what liberals think about nuclear power for electricity generation. I have met many liberals (mostly poorly informed about the facts of nuclear power) that outright oppose nuclear power. I am in favor of nuclear power because it is much cleaner than Coal, Oil, and Natural Gas and despite popular misconception it is actually safe. After all in the 50 year history of nuclear power there have only been 3 nuclear power plant incidents and only one of them (Chernobyl) resulted in fatalities. Chernobyl and 3 mile island could both have been prevented by following safety regulations and the Fukushima incident could have been prevented building nuclear power plants to handle a higher amount of stress. While I welcome non-liberals to this thread I really want to know what liberals think about nuclear power.

Well firstly I don't know what you mean by "liberal". I'm a democratic socialist (small d, small s). I'm socially very liberal, I support a big role for government in equalizing opportunity from birth and a strong welfare state (for those countries which can afford it) and I'm also something of a globalist (ie, welfare across state borders, some global law and some global taxation), but I'm barely a liberal at all in the matter of economic rights. Money is a social construct, both poverty and great wealth are subject to law. By the US standards of this catch-all phrase "liberal" I guess I'd be an Extreme Liberal ... why Left and Right have been replaced by Liberal and Conservative I have no idea. It's the same old dumb one-dimensional ranking scale which tries to set the range of political opinions apart into just two camps. This two-party thinking isn't inherent to democracy nor to government, it's an artifact of the electoral system. Choosing new words won't change anything.

Anyway. I guess I'm what you call a liberal, and I'm for nuclear power. It's not outstandingly cheap when long-term safe storage of waste, and decomissioning of plants which themselves constitute radioactive waste are accounted for (arguably, it has been subsidized in that respect). Its safety must be seen in the light of the heavy regulation which has made it less cheap and stopped the commissioning of new plants in any democratic country: you must take one with the other. You can't say "look it's very safe so we don't need all that regulation". No corporation can be trusted to account those long-term costs. As we've seen with other industries (like mining, chemical industry, and even agriculture) a decade or two of good profits and leave a mess for the taxpayer (or no-one) to clean up is perfectly sound business practice. Even a huge corporation like Westinghouse can just separate the nuclear facilities from its other interests and "sell" their obligation to some other corporation.

Only a democratic government has the long term responsibility to do nuclear power right. Not just take on the liabilities as the US government did: that completely smothered the US market for waste reprocessing. Where there should have been subsidiary industries using the valuable parts of that "waste" and providing a market incentive to reprocess, was instead a cheap way for commercial plant operators to get that liability off their books. The French did it better, and the reason is far greater government investment in the whole cycle. France is still a world leader in reprocessing, though that took a massive hit in the 70's and 80's with local opposition to fast breeder reactors.

Isotope physics is very complicated of course, and I'm no expert. Thorium reactors are apparently better, though I don't understand exactly why: being closer in atomic weight to the common elements of organic life, the reaction products of thorium should be quite dangerous too. But in any case, reprocessing of waste has to go beyond just separating the harmless, from the nasty, from the extremely nasty. Long term storage is just too hard to assess a "right price" for. We need to transmute the nasty and the extremely nasty into something useful (a nuclear fuel) and there is only one way to transmute elements. In a reactor.

We had that option way back in the 70's: fast breeder reactors. They were cut off and shut down by the Anti-Nuclear movement. I was with them (sorry) and I'll tell you why: those reactors made plutonium. That's the element most associated in the public mind with nuclear weapons. This is my final point: nuclear power has ALWAYS been associated with nuclear weapons. The weapons came first, and the steady increase in destructive capacity of those weapons through the 50's and 60's overshadowed nuclear power which no-one really needed back then. Certainly the US didnt, with its huge reserves of coal and (at the time) quite sufficient oil. The countries where nuclear power was developed were also nuclear powers: US, USSR, France, Britain. THIS is what killed nuclear power in the public mind: its close association with nuclear weapons.

[AiliailiA]

...
How is an LFTR only 'nuclear-like'.

Ya see, I was won over by the many pros I read about it...I'm not too science savvy to be as so sure it is fully nuclear? (That is if what it is supposed to be?) Either way, I was won over by flashing pictures and a list of pros/cons...

Charming self-deprecation. Isotope physics really is quite complicated.

I think I have a slightly better grasp of the fundamentals, but I must admit I don't really understand why Thorium reactors are so much better. I do know there is thorium in the existing nuclear waste, and in the huge-and-growing piles of coal ash. So there's an argument for using that "waste" rather than digging up more uranium.

[Samozaryadnyastan]

I've not read much up on the topic either.
So far as I'm aware, it's just a different way of operating a breeder reactor. It has the added advantage of what little U-233 would get out, it's all poisoned by the Thorium, so is too dangerous to work into warhead material, and is highly detectable.

[Call to power]

I've always found support for nuclear power goes hand in hand with internet usage.

That said as a card carrying member of the British labour party I do not. I don't trust government to maintain safety standards (given we have Sellafield/potholes everywhere) or not be screwed on the cost and I don't think centralized energy grids are the way to go.

Better to go with solar energy and work on a wider EU energy grid to reduce waste and save the hassle of large infrastructure projects. With the added R&D we can also at the same time work on providing power to the third world so that all those Nigerian princes can get in touch.

Including my father, who, before he retired, was responsible for writing many of the international private sector's nuclear power plant safety protocols

That must have gotten awkward after Fukushima

Considering we still don't have any other viable replacement for fossil fuels yet, I think its pretty much inevitable that we will have to (and quite soon) rely on nuclear energy. Especially with ever-growing big economies like China, Brasil and India.

You seem to be forgetting a large manufacturing nation on the continent that leads the world in solar power.

Erm, the country with the most electricity generated from nuclear fission is France. The notorious liberal hellhole.

I can't say I blame the powers that be of keeping that one quiet.

'We should have nuclear power so we can be just like France!' *Suddenly entire world rises up and smashes nuclear power plants*

[Samozaryadnyastan]

I've always found support for nuclear power goes hand in hand with internet usage.

That said as a card carrying member of the British labour party I do not. I don't trust government to maintain safety standards (given we have Sellafield) or not be screwed on the cost and I don't think centralized energy grids are the way to go.

Better to go with solar energy and work on a wider EU energy grid to reduce waste and save the hassle of large infrastructure projects. With the added R&D we can also at the same time work on providing power to the third world so that all those Nigerian princes can get in touch.

Including my father, who, before he retired, was responsible for writing many of the international private sector's nuclear power plant safety protocols

That must have gotten awkward after Fukushima

Not at all.
Fukushima's a good example of disaster relief and plant survivability well applied, for the most part.

[Call to power]

Not at all.
Fukushima's a good example of disaster relief and plant survivability well applied, for the most part.

Regardless of the opinions you have formed in under a minute, I'm quite clearly taking the piss.

[Samozaryadnyastan]

When people talk about Fukushima, you can never be sure.