Posts Tagged ‘nuclear power’

Chris Busby and "The Tall Tale Of Ten Tons Uranium Gone Missing"

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Professor Chris Busby is a man that has made himself somewhat of a career in being the golden boy of nuclear opponents, saying just the things they want/need to hear. There is only one problem with this: he doesn't have a foot to stand on when it comes to his tall tales about the evils of nuclear power. Previously we have exposed his claims that the Chernobyl disaster supposedly caused an increase in breast cancer in Sweden. This turned out to be an unfounded conclusion, based on frivolous interpretation of data along with some outright cherry-picking and willful suppression of data that didn't fit the claim.

In the case of The Tall Tale Of Ten Tons Uranium Gone Missing, Busby and his colleague Cecily Collingridge have issued a report where they claim that there has been a leak of enriched uranium from the British nuclear power plants at Hinkley Point in the order of about 10 000 kg. We analyzed the data which he used to make his claim, and took the same steps as he did, following his chain of reasoning from data to conclusion. The result is hardly flattering for the Busby and Collingridge, because the claims they make hinge on...

- Unsupported postulates

- Sparse and highly uncertain data

- Graph fitting done on this data, while ingoring uncertainties

- Low resolution geological surveys

- Misreading of said surveys

- Ignoring local variations in said surveys

- Ignoring missing indicators that must be present if their claim was true

All over the place...
When you can fit any random graph of the data, in this case an elipsoid, something is not right.

The full analysis can be found in our forum. But I'll just cut right to the chase and ask the obvious question: how would 10 tonnes(!) of uranium go missing without anyone noticing? And more important: why didn't anything else go missing? The data that Busby uses to make his claim shows barely detectable levels of fission products, such as Cobalt-60 or Cesium-137. Considering that uranium is a lot less mobile than these products, if uranium goes missing but not the fission products, there cannot be a leak in the reactors because any such leak would have seen more fission products escape than uranium.

This leaves only one path as to how 10 tonnes of uranium could escape into the environment: when reactor fuel arrived fresh at the plants, someone took some fuel elements aside, stripped them of their cladding, ground them to dust and blew them out over the surrounding areas. Alternatively someone made a bonfire with them. And all of it happened without anyone noticing.

Since this is clearly not a reasonable explanation, we must conclude that Busby and Collingridge are wrong: there has not been a leak of 10 tonnes of uranium from Hinkley Point. The data they rely on does not support the claim, and it is only through their frivolous interpretation of the data, misreading some of it, and making unsupported assumptions that they arrive at the claim.

This begs a final question: claims have been made that there are numerous health problems around Hinkley Point, such as an increased incidence of childhood leukaemia. If there are no leaks from Hinkley Point, how would this be explained? Well... to find that answer, maybe you should go ask the one person making the claims: a certain professor Chris Busby.

/Michael Karnerfors and Mattias Lantz - members of Nuclear Power Yes Please

Say Yes To Fourth Generation Nuclear Power

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

By Michael Karnerfors, previsouly published at Currents, the Swedish-American Chambers of Commerse magazine

Today’s policies on nuclear energy dictate that we shall put fuel that is unspent – 95 percent of it – in an expensive hole in the ground. There are better ways. Fourth generation nuclear power helps save us from our own foolish plans.

Picture this…

You are on a family car trip. You need gas, so you stop at a station and fill up twenty gallons of fuel in your car. You drive ten-fifteen miles down the road, using up one third of a gallon of gas, and then you stop. To the puzzlement of your family you siphon all of the unused gas out of the tank. Two thirds of a gallon you pour out on the road and set fire to. The remaining nineteen gallons you give back to a gas station. Your family asks you: “Why are you doing that?!”. You reply to them: “Oh that gas will be sent back to the oil well and put it into the ground again, not to be used”

By now your family will call for an ambulance and have you committed on grounds of insanity, because such behavior is without doubt utterly ludicrous.

But what if I told you that this is how most counties in the world are managing their stock of nuclear fuel, including the US?

In the middle 1980’s most of the nuclear power plants that are in operation in the world today had been built. They are of the so called second generation nuclear power. After thirty years in operation the results from these plants are quite excellent. Apart from Three Mile Island (TMI) accident – which incidentally didn’t hurt anyone – none of the pressure and boiler water reactors of West or East Asia have had a major accident. They are sturdy and reliable designs.

They do have a few drawbacks though:

  • Only 5 percent of the energy in the fuel is extracted.
  • Of the energy extracted from the fuel, two thirds is washed away as waste heat.
  • When the fuel is taken out from the reactor, it is highly radioactive, necessitating storing it for 100,000 to 1 million years while it decays.

Today tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel are sitting in casks or storage pools around the world, waiting for us to come up with a solution for it. For countries that do not allow reprocessing, there has only been one solution seriously proposed so far: deep geological repositories. You build caves deep into stable bedrock, and stuff the nuclear fuel there. Seen from a safety perspective that is a good idea because we know from the natural nuclear reactor site in Oklo, Gabon, Africa, that such repositories are extremely safe. A geological repository will keep spent nuclear fuel locked inside for literally billions of years. The only major worry is human intrusion.

Seen from a resource and sustainable development standpoint though, this is an awful(!) idea. 95 percent of the energy in spent nuclear fuel is unused. Why would we want to put that in the ground for hundreds of thousands of years when we can use it to get clean, safe energy instead?

Fourth generation nuclear power is an umbrella term for emerging reactors designs. Some of them have existed as experimental plants for decades. Countries like the U.S., Russia, France and India have been working on fourth generation for quite some time. The advantages of this new nuclear power are substantial: 

  • Fourth generation reactors use what we call “waste” today as fuel and extract twenty times the energy, used nearly twice as effective.
  • The storage time for the nuclear waste goes down to approximately 500-1,000 years instead of 1,000,000 years.
  • They can use plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons as fuel.

Two things have held fourth generation nuclear power back so far. First the negative attitudes towards nuclear power after TMI and Chernobyl. The second factor has been the fact that Uranium has been – and still is – dirt cheap considering the fantastic amounts of energy that is extracted from the material, even with the second generation reactors.

But today, when we are faced not only with the problem of nuclear waste but also the urgent need of phasing out fossil fuels, these accidents have in the grand perspective proven to be exceedingly rare and either harmless – like TMI – or not relevant to the issue of future nuclear power, because no one is building dangerous Soviet junk-reactors designed in the 1950’s anymore. Nuclear power is without doubt coming back.

While countries like the US and Sweden are mulling over how to get people to accept nuclear waste dumps in their neighborhoods, others – like Russia and South Korea – are moving forward aggressively in the field of new nuclear power. With the current rate of expansion China will be the world leader in a couple of decades; the country is breaking ground for ten(!) new nuclear reactors every year.

Until fusion power is commercially available, the question is what role the western world will take in the continuing history of nuclear power. Will we:

  • Stop the development of our own nuclear power and bury our nuclear fuel in the world’s most advanced and expensive garbage dumps, hoping no one touches it for a million years?
  • Move forward, develop new nuclear power and produce clean energy for hundreds of years while eliminating nuclear waste and nuclear weapons?

If the first option sounds good to you, I urge you to get a siphon and start draining your gas tank…

Michael Karnerfors, Lund, Sweden

The author is a Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering, and co-founder of the independent network Nuclear Power Yes Please” (NPYP) which seeks to gather people who consider the issue of nuclear power too important to be squandered with junk arguments and outrageous claims aimed more to scare and terrify people rather than informing them on the issues for and against nuclear power.

Atomkraft? Kernenergie? Kernkraft? Ja, bitte!

Friday, September 24th, 2010
By Michael Karnerfors, 2010-09-24

For our German friends, there are now three versions of the Smiling Atom artwork available for download in German.

In case you are wondering why there are three versions, well it's because our german friends are a little ambivalent to the whole concept, which reflects on the language. :) Nuclear power can be translated synonymously to "Atomkraft" (Atom(ic) power), "Kernenergie" (nuclear energy) and "Kernkraft" (nuclear power). The person that requested a version (you know you can do that, right?) in German wanted "Kernenergie" and "Kernkraft". But in the old days, when the Smiling Sun logo was made, it said "Atomkraft? Nein Danke", so I included that as well.

I hear nuclear power in Germany is facing quite a few upturns and much debate, so I reckon this might come in handy soon. Best of luck to you!

Atomkraft? Ja, bitte

Atomkraft? Ja, bitte

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Election gives no clear answer on nuclear power in Sweden

Monday, September 20th, 2010
By Michael Karnerfors, 2010-09-20

After the election in Sweden september 19, 2010, the situation for the Swedish nuclear power remains uncertain. While the pro-nuclear Alliance coalition did take the biggest count, and the anti-nuclear redgreen leftist coalition fell flat on its face, neither coalition got majority which leaves the the xenophobic Sweden Democrats (sd) with tiebreaker seats in the Swedish riksdag (parliament).

For the past 30 years in Sweden, no permit for building nuclear power reactors has been given, because it has been prohibited by law. The center-right Alliance that won the last election in 2006 tore up that law in June this year... almost anyway: it's not going away until the end of this year. The redgreen coalition, with the Green Party in it, promised they would rip up this decision and reinstate the law. For the most part it looked like a clean cut situation: if the Alliance wins, we get new nuclear power. If the redgreens wins, we get none.

Now when all the premilinary counts are in it turns out we landed on the knife's edge: neither coalition got majority. The (sd) party are pro-nuclear, by all means, but the question is what the Alliance will do now.  Will they seek passive support from (sd), or will they - as has already been hinted - seek support from the greens and have that party move from their redgreen coalition just to keep (sd) out of the government? And if the greens - which are dogmaticly opposed to nuclear power - end up in the government, what happens then?! It's completely impossible for them to go along with any pro-nuclear proposition, or they will split down the middle. On the other hand, three out of four parties in the Alliance are strongly pro nuclear and they went into this election that way, so they can't back down either and suddenly say no to nuclear power again.

So... all in all: this election leaves us with no clear answers on the nuclear power in Sweden for now.

The Swedish ban on nuclear power lifted after 30 years

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

 

By Michael Karnerfors, 2010-06-17

By a narrow margin, after over 10 hours of debate (minus breaks), the Swedish parliament just made the decision to lift the 30 year old ban on giving permits for new nuclear reactors. While this is very uplifting, and certainly a big thaw in this deadlocked issue, it's not over quite yet. We have an election coming... (more...)

We do not need nuclear power

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
By Michael Karnerfors, 2010-06-15

A common argument against nuclear power is this:

"We don't actually need nuclear power, because we could potentially use other clean sources of energy".

I am not going to argue against that particular statement, because it is true. We could potentially rid ourselves of nuclear power and have clean energy from other sources.

There are a few implications and practical matters that must be addressed though. So let's take this kind of reasoning a few steps further. What other areas is this statement true for? What more could we potentially be without?

Not needed?

Do we actually need any of these?

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Merkel wins big in Germany; can drop anti-nukes.

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

This just in on the news: Angela Merkel and her party CDU/CSU wins the 2009 federal election in Germany, along with the Free Democrats while the Social Democrats does their worst election since World War II. Merkel has announced her intention to form a government with FPD.

The upshot of this is that Merkel does not have to have the nuclear hostile SPD or the Green Party on her government, which in turn means that the German moratorium on nuclear power can now be reviewed and perhaps dropped.

If this happens it means that with Sweden, the UK, Italy and Germany reconcidering their stances on nuclear power and moving in favour of this form of energy, 2009 is a year of tremendous success for European nuclear friends.

How to get professionals to agree with your opinion

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

...or...

How the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives used nurses to lie to the government.

Surveys and questionnaires are a simple and effective way of gauging people's opinions. The result can then in turn be used to influence the opinions other people hold, most often to become opinions you want people to have.  And the more supposedly trustworthy the people you survey are, the greater you can expect the compliance to be.

Let me show you an example of this. This is a TV advert from 1949.

Simple enough isn't it? If many medical doctors like this brand of cigarette, it must be really good, right? Right! Doctors can't be wrong. Moving along...

Surveys and questionnaires that you make yourself have a nice bonus: you can make them any way you want. The advantage of this is that if you phrase the questions just right, you can get any answer you want.

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Greenpeace admits "emotionalizing" is one of their tactics

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Gerd Leipold, executive director of Greenpeace International appeared on the BBC show "Hardtalk".

When pressed about a specific issue where Greenpeace appeared to have exaggerated their claims, Leipold admitted they are "emotionalizing issues", and that they do it willfully and consciously. He went on to defend this practice saying that they do not feel they gain enough sympathy for their statements if they do not "emotionalize" their messages.

We, as a pressure group, have to emotionalize issues, and we are not ashamed of emotionalizing issues.

Gerd Leipold - Executive Director of Greenpeace International, 2009

He may call it "emotionalizing", but  that is merely a euphemism for scare-tactics, FUD and propaganda. When he calls it "emotionalizing" he is in effect green-washing the act of lying.

Greenpeace was not late to react to this and the signature "Brian" posted a blog entry lambasting BBC, saying they got it wrong about the factoid that triggered the confession. But while that blog post may be technically correct, it is insignificant because Leipold still admitted that "emotionalizing" is indeed a Greenpeace tactic.

If Greenpeace cannot argue their cases without "emotionalizing", they are not only justifying skepticism, but rather necessitating it. This confession shows that scrutiny is long overdue. It proves it's time we started looking at if they know what the heck they are talking about or just bilking sympathizers for money with whatever fairy stories they can come up with.

After all... we don't exactly lack examples of  "emotionalizing" in the nuclear issue from Greenpeace...

We must abolish wind power because of World War I and II.

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Yes it is true; the use of wind power is a constant reminder and an insult to all the millions of people that suffered and died in the world wars. And the reason for this is steel.

Steel was used to kill, maim and terrorize countless millions of people from 1914 to 1919 and 1939 to 1945. It was used in rifles, in tanks, in artillery shells and hand grenades. All of it culminating with the steel birds Enola Gay and Bockscar dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Steel and war are forever linked because you simply cannot wage war without steel.

The connection between war and wind power is steel. Practically every wind turbine in the world uses steel. Steel is everywhere in them: in the tower that holds up the turbine; in the gearbox; in the bolts that hold it together, just to mention a few examples. This of course means that wind power always connected with the use of weaponry and war.

Wind power is an insulting tribute to the memory of those who died in the world wars. Turning away from wind power and, in turn, weapons and war should be a true lasting legacy and memorial of those victims.

What?! Wait...

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