IS THERE A ROLE FOR NUCLEAR POWER?

 From the New York Times this morning:

• Covid death has been far more common in red America. Over the past three months, the death rate in counties that Donald Trump won in a landslide has been more than twice as high as the rate in counties that Joe Biden won in a landslide, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst.

The second lesson is that interventions other than vaccination — like masking and distancing — are less powerful than we might wish.

• Although masks reduce the chances of transmission in any individual encounter, Omicron is so contagious that it can overwhelm the individual effect

One, nothing matters nearly as much as vaccination. A continued push to persuade skeptics to get shots — and to make sure that people are receiving booster shots — will save lives.

Two, there is a strong argument for continuing to remove other restrictions, and returning to normal life, now that Omicron caseloads have fallen 95 percent from their peak. If those restrictions were costless, then their small benefits might still be worth it. But of course they do have costs

• Hawaii became the final state to announce it would drop its indoor mask mandate. 

Here is a map of where Ukrainians are going:

About my science topic of this Wednesday, is there a role for nuclear power into the future?  Some affirmatives from the Nuclear Power Office of the Department of Energy about the fission (Uranium/Plutonium) form of this option:

• 94 nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce 20% of our electricity.
• Protects air quality.  Little carbon dioxide and a lot less pollutants that contribute to acid rain, smog, lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.
• Small land footprint.

• A typical 1000 MW facility needs a little more than 1 square mile.
• Wind farms need 360 times more land area, and PV plants 75 more space.
• Minimal waste.
• All the used nuclear fuel produced by all nuclear powerplants over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.

But here are seven reasons why fission (process currently used in nuclear facilities to generate electricity, which is also applied to Atomic bombs) is not the answer to solve climate change:

• To begin, nuclear power costs 5 times more than onshore wind power per kWh, takes up to 17 years longer to plan and operate and produces 23 times the emissions per unit of electricity generated.  Then there are the risks associated with weapons proliferation, meltdown, mining lung cancer and storage of wastes.

• Today nuclear power is second to only natural gas peaking plants as the most expensive form of power generation.  And you thought anything to do with natural gas was "cheap."
• The average age of the world's nuclear reactor fleet has reached 31 years.

• 
  Long planning time lag from announcement to electricity.  According to the World Health Organization, about 7 million people die from air pollution each year, with more than 90% from energy-related sources.  
• A nuclear power plant takes on average 14.5 years to build, but solar and wind farms only take 2-5 years, with home PV perhaps 6 months.

• 
  Thus, doing all the calculations, this wait would result in about 93 million needlessly dying while a new nuclear plant is getting readied.
• China, a country that took 10 days to build a COVID-19 hospital and just finished the largest airport (Beijing Daxing International Airport) in 5 years, took 13 to 18 years to complete its last few nuclear facilities.
• Did you know that the USA is #1 in number of nuclear reactors?
• Cost is a dissuading factor, for nuclear plants now are at $151/MWh, compared to $43/MWh for onshore wind and $41/MWh for utility-scale solar PV.  And, oh, that nuclear cost does not include the inevitable requirement to store wastes for hundreds of thousands of years.  The U.S. spends half a billion annually to safeguard nuclear wastes.
• Weapons proliferation represents a huge danger.

• 
  Accidents and meltdowns.
• There have been 16 of them costing more than $100 million, with 9 occurring in the USA.
• Frenchtown Charter Township, Michigan, 1966 = $132 million
• Jaslovské Bohunice, Czechoslovakia, 1976 = $1.7 billion
• Three-Mile Island, Pennsylvania, 1979 = $2.4 billion
• Athens, Alabama, 1984 = $1.8 billion
• Plymouth, Massachusetts, 1986 = $1 billion
• 
  Chernobyl, Ukraine, 1986 = $6.7 billion
• Hamm-Uentrop, West Germany, 1086 = $267 million
• Delta, Pennsylvania, 1987 = $400 million
• Lycoming, New York, 1987 = $150 million

• 
  Lusby, Maryland, 1989 = $120 million
• Waterford, Connecticut, 1996 = $254 million
• Crystal River, Florida, 1996 = $384 million
• Oak Harbor, Ohio, 2002 = $143 million
• Forsmark, Sweden, 2006 = $100 million

• 
  Fukushima, Japan, 2011 = $2+ billion
• Keep in mind that these are gross underestimations.  For example, this Wikipedia entry indicates a cleanup cost for the Fukushima calamity will be $187 billion.  No, wait, here is one report that says the the real cost will approach $1 trillion!!!

• 
  Uranium mining causes lung cancer, mostly from radon gas.  10% of all miners died of lung cancer, a rate six times higher than from smoking.
• Carbon-equivalent emissions and air pollution.
• There is no such thing as zero carbon emissions from a nuclear power plant.
• Read this article to comprehend why, but solar/wind farms emit far less carbon than nuclear power plants.
• Waste risk.  The USDOE projects a nuclear waste cleanup cost of $494 billion.

Last month Scientific American reported that we do not have enough time for nuclear to save us from the climate crisis.  To quote:

...planting a trillion trees doesn’t help much, because it takes too long for them to grow. Another was that nuclear power doesn’t help either, for essentially the same reason: nuclear plants take too long to build and bring online.

Plus, showing that even a prodigy with an IQ of 190 can sometimes be wrong.

The first American civilian nuclear power plant broke ground in Pennsylvania in 1954, around the same time that physicist John von Neumann predicted that, within a few decades, nuclear power would be so efficient as to make energy “free —just like the unmetered air—with coal and oil used mainly as raw materials for organic chemical synthesis.” That didn’t happen. Today nuclear power remains the most expensive form of electricity generation in the U.S.—typically costing twice as much to operate as a fossil-fuel-based plant. While the price of renewables has dropped dramatically, the cost of nuclear has remained stubbornly high. Nuclear fission is a technology with a track record of overpromising and underdelivering.

So if fission has little chance of helping humanity overcome the specter of global warming, then fusion (process used by our sun and all the stars, and a hydrogen bomb) is worse, for the concept was advanced in 1943 and has always been 30 years away from being commercialized.  That would put us past 2050.  In 2019 Forbes reported on several billionaires dipping into this field.  Then earlier this year Forbes reinforced this influence, and would you believe, within the decade?  I don't.

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