Amateurs only succeed by luck or accident, professionals have the resources of a state behind them and they can usually find out what they need through the usual intelligence channels.
In the US the highest risk right now is at chemical plants and in chemical transport. See the stories on the Ukrainian rail crash to see how poor transport infrastructure is.
There will be never-ending arguments about how "safe" nuclear power is, but its biggest weak spot is the storage of spent fuel. It is easy to find out where on the site this is stored and it is not nearly as well protected as is the reactor. Sabateurs don't need to trigger a nuclear meltdown or explosion to achieve their aims. They just need to make sure the site and some of the surrounding are contaminated enough to cause difficulties. I won't mention all of the obvious ways this could be achieved from off site.
In the US new regulations about chemical plants were ostensibly imposed for security reasons, but in reality it is because the plants don't want to have to tell the surrounding communities what they are producing, or storing or emitting. In a recent disaster the local responders had no clue what sort of chemicals were being released so they didn't know what steps to take to mitigate the problem. How is this in anybody's best interest? Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
imho its biggest weak spot is that it's a weak spot, a multigenerational liability undertaken for a short term energy output, introducing permanent weak spots in the social and technological fabric.
when we build a nuke plant we implicitly either accept, on behalf of our grandchildren's grandchildren's (etc) grandchildren, custodial responsibility for the toxicity of the waste stream (which forks many times, from dust and tailings at the mine, to spent fuel, to the hot dregs from the reprocessing plants) -- or we shrug off that responsibility with a kind of après nous la déluge insouciance and unconcern for the health and wellbeing of our posterity. my $.02: option A is insanely optimistic (time to read Tainter and Diamond again) and option B is chillingly amoral.
when Jerome reverts to the "well it's coal/gas or nuke, which is worse" position, I take this as a desperation move, rhetorically speaking :-) since I and other nuke skeptics on ET have already expressly deconstructed and rejected this as a false dichotomy. the correct answer is Neither. the correct answer, in my long-considered opinion, is demand reduction, accepting a less energy-intensive lifestyle, learning to live within the annual solar budget and generating less power by less toxic means.
[rant mode on] if we continue to promote and expand power-generation technologies whose maintenance and operation is guaranteed to require the sacrifice of our fellow citizens (of the Earth, not just of our parochial little nation-states), then how are we any different, more Enlightenment-oriented, more dedicated to human rights, than the Incas or Aztecs or any other hierocratic state practising human sacrifice? how can we talk about "Progress" as if our hands were any cleaner than theirs? when we can live within an energy budget whose maintenance does not involve picking lottery losers to die protracted and painful -- or brutal and immediate -- deaths, then we might be able to call ourselves democratic, Enlightenmentista, or humane. this is as true of the highly toxic and heterotrophic fossil fuel paradigm as it is of the nuclear paradigm. coal and gas have to go, but replacing them with nuclear is just trading the Ford Navigator for the Hummer H2. our choices are not: Ford Navigator or Hummer H2. what about a bicycle? or even walking a mile or two every now and then. [rant mode off]
in purely pragmatic, project-management terms, if we adopt nuclear power as an "interim bandaid" for a problem (climate destab) that we desperately need to solve in a 10 year timeframe [so some of our leading analysts suggest, and can we afford to go on ignoring them?], and it takes 15 years on average (plus big fossil energy expenditures) to bring a nuke plant online.... then (a) we are wasting precious time and essential resources to a rescue effort that even were it successful, would arrive too late, (b) we are accepting a "forever" liability and cost for this "temporary" bandaid. (or irresponsibly refusing to acknowledge/accept that liability, and most likely dumping the "externalities" on poor-usually-brown-people in the grand industrialist tradition).
perhaps we'd like to "fast track" the construction and inspection process due to the State of Emergency? perhaps we'd like to permit any old slipshod and opaque process, sweep public reluctance and doubt aside, allow technocracy to flex its authoritarian muscle, so as to get hundreds of plants lit up within that 10 year period? my oh my, I feel really safe and secure about that :-) if the industry track record so far is the product of a leisurely process with more oversight than the elite would like to tolerate, just imagine what it would look like with fast-tracking thanks to executive fiat.
meanwhile, note that the industrialised world is forming a consortium that would enforce a cartel monopoly on nuclear technology
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer says talks with the US about nuclear cooperation could lead to Australia joining a new nuclear group known as the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). The partnership includes the US, Russia, Japan, China and France, and aims to keep information about nuclear technology and the disposal of waste within the nuclear club.
The partnership includes the US, Russia, Japan, China and France, and aims to keep information about nuclear technology and the disposal of waste within the nuclear club.
I read two messages here. first, the thunderingly obvious: the colonial powers see a new opportunity to keep the global South dependent and submissive, by turning to a new power generation paradigm whose technology would be strictly licensed and controlled by the whitefellahin of the North... among whom the Chinese elite are finally, grudgingly gaining acceptance as they demonstrate their willingness to enslave and poison their peasants in the great game of capital accumulation -- they are now "made men" and allowed to sit at the grownups' table.
second, the pitbull paradigm: the whitefellahin believe that the technology is so risky that no "lower orders" should be permitted to know about it or practise it unsupervised, as it requires the superior faculties, skills, and god-given authority of whitefella technocrats to operate safely. they will dole out the technology at their discretion to their dependent clients. translation: like the boy in the bubble, it ain't safe enough to allow anywhere outside the ultra-surveilled and -technologised industrial core w/o Northern management and authority. as if the "disorder" and "failure" attributed to Those Other Parts of the World could Never Happen Here (even though it has, and in -- barely -- living memory).
can we imagine a consortium designed to keep the knowledge and practise of wind turbine design limited to a small club of Northern nation-states? any fool can build a windmill and generate electricity -- high technology can build a better windmill or a larger one, and has marginal improvement to offer but not total control of the concept. to operate a nuke plant "safely" [I still think this is an oxymoron when we look at the ore-to-waste lifecycle as a whole] requires a total commitment to high/heavy tech, it is all or nothing, not just a value-added enhancement. I say again, w/face showing faint signs of cyanosis: the technology is inherently conducive to enclosure, secrecy, and authoritarianism. resting my case (for the moment).... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Do you mean only global ones? For country or Europe-focused ones, I showed two projections for Germany in an earlier thread not like that, and there are others.
Nuclear won't be enough because we can't build it fast enough.
The question is, where? The thing is that the rapid demand growth (even without efforts of demand reduction in the West) comes primarily from the Third World, while (renewables) development happens primarily in the First World. If the whole EU adopts a France-like production structure, that won't lead to a renewables mega-boom in place of coal in Asia. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
And wind, f I understand things correctly, has a similar financial structure to nuclear: high capital costs and low operating costs. Nuclear has a more expensive decommissioning. But, in addition, Nuclear power plants have higher decommisioning costs and take longer to put in place than wind farms. So I don't know why China couldn't be building wind farms to replace coal-fired plants. But right now they're building, not replacing, coal plants. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
When all power sources are put on a rational playing field (not a level one, that doesn't exist), I am sure some wind sites will produce power cheaper than nuclear will, and that most hydro sites will.
And then we should exploit those better sites, and no others. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Gas peak power can very well stay for all I care, but it should be able to be replaced with pumped hydro if we thought it important. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
