Which is why it fits the Greenpeace MO to reduce nuclear to a 'Non!' soundbite.
This suits the pro-nuclear lobby just fine, because it makes it easy to dismiss more substantial criticisms on the basis that the anti-nuke lobby is staffed entirely by woolly-hatted extremists.
But you can also turn the question around and ask - if there's going to be a debate about nuclear, where is it going to be held? In what public forum?
Aside from online, I'm not sure where it's possible to find a venue where nuclear issues can even begin to be debated intelligently without PR mortar bombs flying from entrenched positions on both sides.
The parliamentary Labour party in the UK has always balanced an alleged but fictitious affinity with that kind of left-wingery with a fairly mainstream statist centrism.
Tony isn't really all that new from that point of view.
But it's the more extreme activist old left I'm thinking of - and Greenpeace is one of the few noteworthy surviving remnants.
You can argue whether or not green = left, and there are some obvious differences. But my point is really that the Greenpeace approach has a lot in common with what is now a very dated single-issue protest-driven activist approach, which can easily alienate anyone who isn't a fervent believer.
It's a different approach to (say) FoE which is making more of an effort at the lobbying level.
And still is. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
They are talking about the estimated cost of externalities (in that case, of potential externalities), and finding it unacceptably high in the case of nuclear.
Your notion of a debate on frames might be applied to the distinction between costs already borne (pollution, climate change) and those that are not borne, but have a non-nil probability of occurring (reactor meltdown, terrorist attack using nuclear material), i.e. certain risks vs potential risks.
And that actually puts the anti-nuclear group more firmly in the "externalities" camp, as they are the one that set a price to potential risks, whereas the nuclear camp looks at actual consequences today of their industry and say that they are excellent (so far) and will continue to be so.
The disagreement is on the 'will ocntinue to be so'. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
This reminds me of the way NASA would claim that the chance of an accident due to individual causes (say, a failure in this or that engine component) was as low as one in several hundred years of daily flights.
[I hope I'm not putting words in De's mouth here] "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Wind Power Momentarily Outperforms Nuclear Power in Spain
Taking advantage of a particularly gusty period, Spain's wind energy generators this week reached an all-time high in electricity production, exceeding power generated by all other means, the nation's electricity network authority said in a statement. At 5.40pm (0340 AEDT on Tuesday) on Monday, wind power generation rose to contribute 27 per cent of the country's total power requirement, Red Electrica said. At that moment wind power contributed 8,375 mega watts to the nation's power consumption of 31,033. Nuclear power, the second largest contributor, added 6,797 mega watts, while coal-fired electric generation came third with 5,081, the statement said. National broadcaster TVE said it believed this may have been the first time wind power exceeded nuclear power's contribution to the power grid. Over the course of last year wind power contributed nine per cent of the nation's requirement while coal-fired power stations put in 24 per cent and nuclear power 22 per cent. Spain has in recent years turned to harnessing wind power through the use of tall, slender electricity generating turbines on remote hillsides.
At 5.40pm (0340 AEDT on Tuesday) on Monday, wind power generation rose to contribute 27 per cent of the country's total power requirement, Red Electrica said.
At that moment wind power contributed 8,375 mega watts to the nation's power consumption of 31,033.
Nuclear power, the second largest contributor, added 6,797 mega watts, while coal-fired electric generation came third with 5,081, the statement said.
National broadcaster TVE said it believed this may have been the first time wind power exceeded nuclear power's contribution to the power grid.
Over the course of last year wind power contributed nine per cent of the nation's requirement while coal-fired power stations put in 24 per cent and nuclear power 22 per cent.
Spain has in recent years turned to harnessing wind power through the use of tall, slender electricity generating turbines on remote hillsides.
I doubt that Spain's wind power facility is fully built out. What might it generate at full build-out (every suitable site optimally populated with towers, on large and small scales)?
The traditional argument is that wind, being intermittent, is an "unreliable" source of energy; however there are increasing concerns in the literature of late about vanishing ice pack and lower river levels, extended droughts etc. forcing the shutdown of existing nuke plants that rely on river water for cooling. Higher winds are more likely as the global climate destabilises, reliable river flows are less likely. Which would be wiser to bet on? My county is looking at water rationing starting May 1 this year.
I have always seen nuclear as a very fragile technology, an optimist's wager; the era we are heading into is likely to be unkind to fragile technologies. If stranded on a desert island I would rather have a Swiss Army Knife and an umbrella than an iPod and a laptop -- let alone a chainsaw and a Humvee. In unstable/unpredictable conditions, the lowest and simplest level of technology that will do the job is the safest bet. [any sailor knows that -- GPS is a luxury, a sextant is a comfort, but you'd better know how to improvise a latitude hook.]
Most technomanagers do their thinking from highly stable built environments, insulated almost entirely (by urban structures, by affluence, by lifeway) from the very notion of uncontrollable events; they are wholly acclimatised to perching atop a vast pyramid of interlocking assumptions of stability and order. It;s a workplace culture thing. Consequently a weakness of the technomanagerial culture is the temptation to live and design in a dream of perfect predictive power and complete control. This is sometimes called "success-oriented engineering" but I call it Optimist's Poker -- it assumes stabilities (social, technical, physical) and predictabilities that may not actually obtain. [a more succinct but less diplomatic summation might be "hubris."]
My impression is that events are moving now faster than the newsfeeds can keep up, and faster than I can keep up with the news feeds. Massive public (or private) works projects can take a decade and more to complete; how much will the facts on the ground have changed before project completion? When conditions are chaotic, think small, light, and distributed :-)
One simple example of success-oriented engineering is that nuke plants need a reliable power source in order to shut down safely. If the rest of the grid fails, they need diesel generators. And if there is no fuel for the diesel generators?
If I were doing long-term infrastructure planning today, I would say, "design for NOLA. design for Iraq. don't assume geopolitical, climate, demographic, water stability. assume unpredictability. and hence: decentralise, diversify, fractalise." If the road ahead is bumpy, fragile technologies (and I count big coal, big nuke, big anything in this category) are not the best investment. They break just when you most need them, like fancy marine electronics. [People who had bicycles found it easier to get home in NYC on the afternoon of 9/11 than people in cars.] And if you've spent all your money on the fancy stuff, and none on fallbacks, it's too late to change course.
IMHO and as I have said in earlier diary form, the debate is between optimisms and pessimisms. Both big coal and big nuke proponents are technomanagerial optimists. Their detractors are not necessarily anti-technology, but usually anti-authoritarian and hence anti-technomanagerial -- pessimistic about continuity and stability at the macro level, pessimistic about the honesty and competence of elites, but optimistic about the empowerment, competence, and stability of community at the micro and regional level. These are deep philosophical differences. They lead to the heart of what we mean by (and feel about) community and State, security and risk, liberty and hope.
And I suppose, for the bean-counters among us, there's always the inconvenient graphs that show the cost of uranium going up 900 pct in the last decade. Hard to build trustworthy thirty-year payback calculations in such a volatile market. Whereas the cost of prevailing winds has remained pretty constant for the last few millennia: zero :-) If I were a project manager with an honest fixed-price contract -- rather than a porkbarrel welfare billionaire counting on cost overruns to finance my third mansion -- I know which plant I'd rather bid on.
All of this begs a lot of other questions, particularly the extractive/destructive nature of both coal and nuclear, environmental disasters left in the wake of mining operations, "externalised costs" in the form of waste disposal, colonialist dynamics between the extracting interests and indigenes and workers, etc. -- the same complex of issues found in fossil fuel, gold, cashcropping, and other extractive industries. We could argue that the metals used in wind tower construction are a product of similarly abusive practises, but at least they are extracted once for a long operational lifetime... and they don't get recycled into exotic munitions to poison a generation of soldiers and civilians...
The whole coal-vs-nuke circus to me is like WWF on TV; just change the damn channel already :-) I am not really interested in a victory by either the Anthracite Hunk or the Neutron Nabob. To crown either one as king imho would be a loss for the biotic realm and for social capital, the keys to our survival and thrival. We need to start thinking outside this box of Pharaonic construction projects -- and imho to grow out of proving how macho we are by playing Chicken with high toxicity technologies. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Like in quantum field theory, the appearance of infinities is indicative of the clash of frames. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
But then, of course, comes the deconstruction of the "standard of living" frame. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
But I think coal is unacceptable considering all the possible competitive alternatives.
When you have a choice between squalor and CO2 emissions, I don't blame you for choosing to emit CO2. But if you are already living at a very high standard of living the act of not choosing a realistic alternative to coal becomes an immoral act. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Within a risk/benefit analysis coal simply has a quantifiable risk and a quantifiable benefit, just like nuclear. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Some people, for very different reasons, have absolute beliefs no amount of debate and statsitics can change...
I think that is a very bad position and thoroughly support debate and risk/benefit analysis. I am not a pro-nuclear fanatic. If for example solar power had a great break through and became better than nuclear I would switch all my support to it in a second. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The difference I wanted to make is between the argument that a certain well-defined risk, whatever its magnitude (at least within a range) is unacceptable (say, the risk of error in judgement for the death penalty); and the argument that due to not well enough known factors or too many important factors to take them all into account or nonlinear, loopback dependencies, the risk can't be computed reliably (and numbers presented are almost certainly underestimations). *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
as pointed out on an earlier thread I have heard Americans refer to the UK contemptuously as a "third world country" because the cars were smaller than giant US gas guzzlers. obviously to them, driving anything smaller than an F150, or at least a luxury US-market sedan, was squalid and infra dig.
we'd have to have a good definition of "squalor" before any choices can be proposed between "squalor" and something else. and we'd have to do some careful exposition and analysis of "squalor-elsewhere" technologies which deliver comfort, order, and luxury to one demographic or region while imposing disorder, degradation, illness and loss of life on another demographic or region. the technologies which affluent industrialistas cherish elements of The Good Life -- cheap jet travel, cheap longhaul food, mountains of material goods, the cheap energy that underwrites such luxuries -- all produce mountains of Squalor Elsewhere, in mine tailings, marine and aquifer and soil toxicity, destruction of habitats and cultures, despotism and immiseration, corruption, slavery and wage-slavery, grotesque animal and human suffering, climate destabilisation, resource wars, etc.
someone once said that nothing could be considered beautiful if it produced ugliness elsewhere. I would say that no way of life can be called non-squalid if it produces squalor elsewhere. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
s/b
cherish as elements of The Good Life The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
I find it yet another false dichotomy to say we must choose between "squalor" and high energy consumption via extractive technologies.
I didn't mean being more energy efficient equals living in squalor, not at all. I meant that we can't blame Chinese peasants who are living in squalor for not caring that their electricity is coal-fired.
But to maintain a high economic standard of living (something definitely supported by the people) we do need very cheap electricity to run our extremely energy efficient heavy industry, which is what makes my country go. If you live in Denmark or the UK cheap power does not matter as both countries pretty much lack heavy industry. London is the world capital of finance (high value-added low-energy jobs) and Denmark is all about agri-business.
Ordinary people don't need cheap power (people don't starve in spite of our massive power taxes) but the Swedish companies that supply high value-added jobs in industry do (and are exempt from said power taxes) as their much more energy inefficient competitors in Russia, Australia and South Africa has.
Otherwise the jobs move and then that's the end of the Swedish welfare state. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
(though not than a nuclear meltdown,
That I don't understand: TMI and Chernobyl have shown that a core meltdown isn't so terrible on the world scale. Even if one or two hundred thousand people develop deadly cancers, over the course thirty years, in a total population of several billions (making it a laughably small portion of all natural deaths that will happen over such a long period of time in such a large sample), Chernobyl is a non-event beyond a few hundred miles of the site.
Look at the sea-level rise simulators over the century, who will effectively displace and starve hundreds of (unborn) millions... Pierre
The normal(!) operation of coal in the US is about as bad as six nuclear meltdowns each year. (see http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter6.html for details)
As NNadir often says, "there is no risk-free energy, only risk-mininmized energy".
But this is an impossible position of the antis as they then would have to start comparing different alternatives instead of just screaming "NO!".
They would have to be responsible stakeholders and accept compromise. And it's much more fun to be radical and against things in general.
And the idea that the cost of a meltdown would be infinite... preposterous, of course. I mean, it's not like Harrisburg was vaporized by the TMI accident. The only one who was hurt by it was the plant owner, and on a pr-level the entire nuclear industry. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
So it is not absurd that there should be unacceptable risks. There will, of course, be disagreements on whether a risk is unacceptable.
The question is what happens when you have a group of people who believe a certain course of action is unacceptable but you still have to make a collective decision. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Sooner or later tempers will cool and a compromise will be reached, or one of the sides will be completely and thoroughly marginalized and destroyed.
"Dictatorship of the majority" and "the worst of all systems of government except all the others", remember? :) Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
To WHOM was it thoroughly acceptable!?
You are irresponsible deathtrippers. I stop writing now before I actually lose patience. The Fates are kind.
Is your position so weakly grounded that even discussion about discussion is unacceptable?
I consider your opinion of being that of an irresponsible deathtripper which will result in the destruction of, if not the planet or the human race, then at least a vast number of other species and a thorough fucking up of the climate.
And the assertion that Chernobyl has anything to do with LWR's is just as preposterous as usual.
I am trying very much to be civil. It is rather hard considering what I believe your opinions will result in. But I try and will continue because I believe the only way to solve all these issues is through fact-based unprejudiced debate. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
News also for the family who stayed with us last summer, I guess they just pretend that their house in Kiev isn't actually a pile of ash-strewn rubble surrounded by thousands of miles of desolate wasteland...
Regards Luke -- #include witty_sig.h
So Ukraine wasn't devastated, but the situation was pretty fucked up for a while. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Children die from ailments that elsewhere are not even diseases, because of suppressed immune systems due to radiation exposure. Exposure is endemic and unavoidable.
Yes about the geigercounters. The industry/government has always lied, and still does.
You are wrong to construe this as an argument for coal. I am not a fan of coal. In the US coal mining is (and has been for decades) destroying the Appalachian Mountains, and poisoning the watersheds that feed the Ohio River. The scale is geographic.
I do not agree that coal vs. nuclear is the argument. It is only if you are committed to the death trip. The Fates are kind.
This complete nonsense is no longer about evaluation, this is gross ignorance of basic physics and borders on religious faith. These groups dislike nuclear power for no good reason and just rationalise their position. They are either completely stupid (Helen Caldicott), shills of the coal industry (Peter Beattie) or in the business of selling a good conscience (Greenpeace), which requires a bad conscience to begin with.
As Colman says above, if your arguments are grounded, that should be sufficient.
The problem is not the facts, it's the narratives. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
every rational argument, and every irrational one, is based on the assumptions that people make about the world.
That's why a Model is so important and, I submit, why a Model hasn't been constructed. Neither side in this debate wants to find an intellectual solution. They prefer shouting at each other.
In other words, what we've seen for the past 30 years.
I'm sorry, that's just a description of politics. Nothing specific to nuclear energy. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Where government is not technocratic, what you describe is the case. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
decommision 25% keep, but not build 40% build more 35%
But my memory might be playing tricks on me. As it really is two over-lapping questions you end up with a mayority for keep and a mayority for do not build more.
I would call it moderately pro-nuclear. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
The breakdown is about this:
Build new: 30 %
Keep the old but don't build new: 50 %
Shut down before the reactors are decommisioned because of economic or safety reasons: 10 %
Don't know: 10 %
In the event of even a small energy/climate crisis, or even just a serious proposal to build a new reactor, I guess at least half of the "keep but don't build new" will switch to "build new". Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I'll write a responsive comment later today as I have to run.
How about they have incompatible sets of axioms?
OK, I'll buy that.
The trick about axioms, as you know, is since they are the Rules of the Game, they cannot be defended. They just is.
So we see a lot of "you're being obtuse but you're obviously not a moron so you must be evil". "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
And so on. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Of course that is assuming one of the parties in the discussion haven't played the "there is no alternative" card. When that happens all you are left with is a shouting match.
On the green corner, that the risks of nuclear are unquantifible; on the black and yellow corner, that energy consumption is non-negotiable. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
To clear this up, energy consumption is of course negotiable, and so are risks. Ultimately, everybody will weight convenience against risk, and the customary way to do that is to quantify both and compare costs. Now please try an honest calculation and then decide what electricity you want to buy. (I did. And I'm slightly angry at the black/yellow color.)
Personally, I reject the idea that everything is quantifiable in the same units and thus comparable. There isn't a linear order of all possibilities. But we still have to make choices and trade-offs. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
Look at the facts again: the pressure in a reactor cannot rise high enough to launch the vessel, whatever happens. The guys at anti-atom.de should be able to see that, but they claim the opposite. Why? Hm, because they are lying scum, it seems.
Or take Ms. Caldicott, who wrote that French nuke operators cooled their plants with garden hoses in the last hot summer (just one of her many wrong statements). Plainly ridiculous. Why is that? Because she's technically illiterate.
Peter Battie has been identified by Rod Adams as a "smoking gun" that coal interest are behind opposition to nuclear power in Australia. There's no doubt he is paid by the coal industry. I could use that fact to reject his arguments or at least cast doubt on them, but actually I didn't.
Well, and then there's Greenpeace. That's where it gets personal. I flipped when I read in BUND magazine (not Greenpeace, only a similar German organisation) that Chernobyl had already killed 125.000 people by 1996 without even citing sources. This number is based on a mistranslation and they should know that, but they still repeat this completely wrong number, continually embellishing it. Why? Because they need to talk people into a bad conscience to get more donations. They are greedy, lying scum.
Can you see the flow of the logic now? Even if not, I still reject their nonsense on the ground that it's nonsense. Beyond that, I also take the liberty to call idiots idiots.
Beyond that, I also take the liberty to call idiots idiots.
And what do you hope to acheive by that? A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
What could possibly be achieved by pretending that idiots have a functional brain? Whatever you come up with, is that desirable?
If there was rational evaluation of adverse effects, people would be rallying against coal. They aren't. This debate isn't rational, it's driven by misinformation and hidden agendas.
