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Experts split over nuclear power as panacea for climate change

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The panel acknowledged the need to find “acceptable responses” to fears over “reactor safety, radioactive waste transport, waste disposal, and proliferation”.

Don't forget constructing nuclear power plants, mining for uranium, plutonium and cobalt for fuel rod assembly etc. The nuclear industry is wearing big big blinders with this 0.00% emissions nonsense.

A report by the WISE-Paris research agency commissioned by several NGOs, including Greenpeace, concluded that the safety concerns over nuclear power —as exemplified by the 2011 Fukushima disaster—rule it out as a viable energy source.

Highlighting the exorbitant cost of nuclear power compared with renewables, the report also accused the nuclear industry of overstating its contribution to the fight against climate change.

“From uranium mines to nuclear waste, including radioactive and chemical pollution from nuclear reactors, every phase of the nuclear cycle brings about pollution,” the report said.

The researchers made the case for energy saving and greater investment in renewables instead.

Yes, The nuclear industry does tend to underscore all of the pollution it creates just from operating one reactor. No emissions except from uranium, plutonium, cobalt and other mining for the fuel rods and not to forget spent fuel rod storage. The environmental pollution from a nuclear accident can significantly reduce our ozone layer thus allowing more of the sun's light to come into contact with the earth and heating it and the environmental contaminates are a danger and a Bio-hazard to all life

1 ( +6 / -5 )

Dogged by security concerns, the share of nuclear power in global electricity generation has been in steady decline over the past two decades, falling from 17% in 1993 to 11% in 2012, according to the IPCC.

Damn straight. Nuclear is a poison source with legacy destruction tailing behind it. The punch dummy argument is 'why not destroy?' who cares if the children in the future suffer the wastes of nuclear?

Responsible planning says nuclear has had it's day. The global community can do better and the wastes of nuclear is no longer acceptable. Funny, the globe has outgrown nuclear destruction for a light bulb in mom's pantry.

-2 ( +3 / -5 )

There are countrys with severe tectonic incidences and others.

Considering the sea level was lower by over 100m about 6000years ago ( with the paradise being in the Persian gulf area ) who can safeguard nuc waste?

-4 ( +0 / -4 )

Don't forget constructing nuclear power plants, mining for uranium, plutonium and cobalt for fuel rod assembly etc. The nuclear industry is wearing big big blinders with this 0.00% emissions nonsense.

Nobody in the nuclear industry has ever made such a claim of 0.00% emissions.

2 ( +5 / -3 )

The problem is that uranium-fueled reactors that use pressurized reactor vessels are expensive to build, potentially dangerous to operate (especially if the cooling system is cut off and you can't do a safe shutdown, as the Soviet submarine reactor failures and the Fukushima Daiichi reactor failure in 2011 so clearly showed), and the nuclear waste is extremely expensive to dispose of.

A better solution is to look at more advanced reactor types with vastly highly safety potential. Once such reactor is the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), which uses thorium-232 (common as elemental lead in the Earth's crust!) dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as the nuclear fuel. The advantages are numerous:

It does not need an expensive pressurized reactor vessel.

Because the fuel is in liquid form, there's no such thing as a "fuel meltdown."

Thorium-232 is very commonly available, not only here in Earth but potentially the Moon and even Mars.

The reactor design can also use reprocessed spent uranium-235 fuel rods and even plutonium 239 or -241 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, eliminating a huge nuclear waste disposal problem.

Shutting down the reactor on a emergency basis is just dumping the liquid fuel out of the reactor, a lot easier to do, even if it has to be done manually. That makes LFTR's ideal for countries with high seismic dangers like Japan.

By using closed-loop Brayton turbines to generate power, we eliminate the need to build expensive cooling towers nearby or locate the reactor near a large source of cooling water.

The radioactive waste generated is very small in amount and only has a radioactive half-life of under 320 years. That means really cheap waste disposal costs--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!

China and India are currently building test reactors to see if the original LFTR experiments done by Oak Ridge National Laboratories in the 1960's can be scaled up to commercial reactors. If it works, then we have a power source that can operate around the clock, with a fuel supply that could last for tens of thousands of years.

4 ( +7 / -3 )

The mess that has been created by "humans" could be cleaned up by "reducing" the number of people on earth!

-4 ( +1 / -5 )

The industry is secretive and insidious,not to mention extremely patronizing. The advice 'to smile' after Fukushima has not and will not prevent nuclear related death nor damage.Radioactive contamination just continues to build up in all of us-we should not forget that! And there is no safe way to dispose of nuclear waste! It has to be stored and will remain legacy for our descendants for thousands and thousands of years to come.....

-2 ( +3 / -5 )

If they were experts, they would remember the lessons of 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. They would remember the corruption, cost overruns and quality of construction issues that came with almost every single nuclear power plant built on earth. They would realize we STILL have NO safe way to reliably store nuclear waste for the hundreds to thousand years until it becomes safe.

The only argument is between the real experts and those who only claim to be and have a hidden agenda.

-2 ( +2 / -4 )

@ArtistAtLarge, all three are based on old, obsolete nuclear reactor designs that should be phased out completely over the next 35-40 years. We now have much safer reactor technologies--the so-called Generation IV designs--that could resolve a lot of the issues of current reactor technology.

You'd think after the bad Soviet experience with submarine reactor failures, there would be research into far more safer nuclear designs by now. Since molten-salt reactors--the design I like--use fuel in a liquid form, there's no such thing as a meltdown, tremendously increasing safety factors.

4 ( +5 / -1 )

Fast Breeder reactors are sodium based and when there is a problem like the one in China in October 2011 the JAEA detected with their instruments. China denied the problem so we have no idea what happened. The Monju fast breeder reactor also had a sodium leak and was shut down for 14 years no less. The US fast breeder sodium reactor experiment of the 1050's also had a sodium problem that was repaired. I do not think any nuclear reactor is completely safe and emission free to construct or operate and especially the spent fuel rod conversion from the current working reactors that these fast breeders sodium based reactors use as fuel.

-3 ( +0 / -3 )

Nuclear power: the ultimate climate (and everything else) destroyer. Just ask Fukushima people.

-1 ( +0 / -1 )

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