Call to action might be more effective if Bill Nye would stop denying the usefulness of nuclear energy
National Geographic Explorer — now part of the Rupert Murdock media empire — published the below clips of Bill Nye, the bow-tied science guy, beseeching “deniers” to stop denying so that we can all get to work.
He calls for an immediate halt to the use of fossil fuels and their replacement with “renewable energy” which helps to illustrate his lack of contact with reality.
Nye is a nuclear energy skeptic whose skepticism often borders on denial of the utility of nuclear energy as a tool for substantially reducing — not eliminating — fossil fuel consumption for a host of important reasons. Among those reasons is the fact that nuclear fission produces heat without releasing CO2.
Even when the full life cycle is taken into account, using our current primitive once-through fuel cycle, nuclear power plants produce about as much CO2 per unit of useful power as windmills and several times less than solar PV systems.
Nye’s call for people to “quit denying and get to work” would have more impact on the total use of fossil fuels, improve the world’s economic standard of living, and mitigate the effects of climate change if he would stop denying that nuclear energy is a proven, abundant, effective way to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
Nuclear energy’s proven capability to reduce fossil fuel consumption is, in my opinion, one of the main reasons that it isn’t very popular yet. Fossil fuel producers — long-time masters of politics, advertising and propaganda techniques — have many reasons to discourage solutions that would reduce their product sales.
Since the ad-supported media is one of the main financial beneficiaries of the fossil fuel industry’s continuing, long-running marketing campaign to promote its own products while discouraging competitive products this is a line of argument that you will not hear very often.
It might be, but he won’t. Every one who sees the Epcot Universe of Energy gets to hear him diss nuclear energy. And you know who sponsors that pavilion (it’s initials are Exxon).
Now appears that Bill Nye is a fossil fuel hasbarista.
I don’t usually come to this site for humor, Carlgh — but your comment got a laugh from me.
Or, to use internetspeak: “ROTFLOL”
If friends hear of the economic pervasiveness of fossil fuels, and understand “barriers to competitive entry”, they seem to understand. Maybe they’re just being nice.
Recently Glenn Beck (yes I know) went on a “climate change is nonsense” rant listing all power sources, saying each was OK. He mentioned each of them, all but Nuclear. It was like Nuclear didn’t exist. He advertises natural gas.
I think one thing the masses need to understand is transference: A big example is funding for the NRDC. Any “Environmental” organization that has a budget of over $100 Million is definitely on the take from huge elements of the elite. There certainly aren’t a Million people each giving $100.
I also wonder about the XL pipeline. There is public opposition, but who is most financially hurt? There must be major aspects of the oil and gas industry with much of their in-ground inventory located in the Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma area, whom don’t want Canadian and Baakan oil flooding their markets, making them compete both in Markets and in refining assets. The Marketing aspect is never reported. What’s reported is always an “environmental” angle.
It is becoming ever more clear that the worst thing for the environment is the massive financial incentives involved in contorting environmentalism itself. That being said, I can’t begrudge Bill Nye in earning a living by helping the elite glean more wealth from the masses without actually producing a better product for less money and selling it. Bill Nye is just another example showing how much wealth goes to maintaining barriers to competitive entry for the elites limiting and controlling power required by the masses.
That mention of Glenn Beck´s omission of nuclear energy is useful. Do you know which day’s radio program it was?
@Ruth
Sorry, I don’t remember the day. It could have been awhile ago, it stuck in my craw…
I’ll scan for it though….. 😉
“I also wonder about the XL pipeline. There is public opposition, but who is most financially hurt? There must be major aspects of the oil and gas industry with much of their in-ground inventory located in the Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma area, whom don’t want Canadian and Baakan oil flooding their markets,”
Perhaps you are right, but I would point out that Canadian oil doesn’t reduce the value of Southern US oil. Why? Because So. US oil, generally, has lower cost of production than Canadian oil. So, in effect, Canadian oil only sells when market demand is greater than can be filled by the ‘easy cheap’ sources of oil.
Although, there are now US producers of shale oil and gas, which is a bit more expensive than conventional or seabed crude, so perhaps that would be cause for US oil companies to oppose the pipeline?
@Jeff S
The most direct interest in halting KXL is in the railroads whose crude shipments increased from about 30,000 tanker cars per year a couple of years ago to more than 400,000 last year. That increase has benefitted not only the railroads, the rail unions, and the tanker manufacturers, but also the construction companies that have been fully employed in building out the terminal infrastructure.
The cost, sadly, includes 47 people who experienced a fiery death in a nightclub in Lac Megantic Quebec when the brakes holding an undermanned, parked train let loose and allowed the oil filled cars to collide with the downtown disco.
There have been a number of other impactful oil train derailings, including one in my current hometown of Lynchburg, VA where thousands of barrels of oil spilled into the James River and the fire just missed lighting up the historic downtown area.
It would salvage nuclear’s image like gangbusters if the nuclear community would get its act and self-preservation together and sponsor its own Nye/Sagan/Natural Gas Lady.
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Convincing the Masses that C02 free carbon baseload generation will help keep both their electric and Natural Gas prices down will go a long way in ensuring all aspects of the nuclear supply chain remain profitable. The people need to know: Nuclear competes with Natural Gas. Renewables support it. It seems that so many “links” in the Nuclear supply chain are so eager to walk away from their nuclear business in favor of the fossil fuel gravy train, that the whole nuclear supply chain will become non-viable, at least here in the United States.
To stop it we need to convince people of the importance of competitors to Oil and gas, and of the Oil and Gas associated industries willingness to promote the weakest competitors over competition who can genuinely threaten their market shares. If a Grapefruit size lump of Actinide can vaporize a city, whaddya think it can do to Natural gas prices? Dare I ask?
Must remind people we’re loosing the climate change war.
Rejecting nuclear irrational.
Scaremongers winning the debate.
The anti nukes are too loud. Should we get louder ?
Must build a video that shows coal/ng/oil consumption still going up every year, explaining that renewables are just the front to continuing increase in fossil consumption.
They are a front and that is a very good point to make to whoever will listen. When I talk to students and laymen I point out that the only things that give the illusion of success to renewables is either ready access to backup hydropower (e.g., the Denmark-Norway link), or gas in the pipeline that can be used for low cost, low maintenance quick-start gas-fired plants. So basically you have subsidized capital building these monstrosities, and then fossil or hydropower making them look good. That is a deadly combination for nuclear as a competitor in the (manipulated and distorted) market.
Here is part of the problem: Pro-nuclear ppl have a “fifth column” among us who are sabotaging any efforts that we make to promote nuclear as an abundant source of CO2-free baseload energy.
Who is that “fifth column”? It is comprised of the loud and vociferous, but fairly small number of nuclear proponents who STILL refuse to accept the reality of climate change. Patrick Moore is one of them.
We ARE losing the war against the fossil fuel competition, and those people and their propaganda are, along with the anti-nuclear “renewable-only” crowd, are a big part of the reason why.
The anti-climate change zealots among nuclear supporters need to be run off from our herd like a small herd of rogue cattle.
Yes! Climate change IS real! It’s called “weather.” And neither the setting on my thermostat, nor the effluents from my Ram 2500 diesel pickup are influencing said climate change one iota. Climates are cyclic by nature….there’s NOTHING we can do about it. AWG is a hoax being perpetrated by those with a pathological need to control the lives of others (i.e., tax them into oblivion), along with their willing accomplices in the media. What caused the warm-up that melted all those glaciers that once extended all the way down to the Great Lakes?? Or for that matter, what caused the glaciers to form in the first place? Hmmmm? I waiting…..
@Dan Williamson
It’s amusing how often people who conflate climate and weather point back to warming periods that were hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago and forget that human civilization is only about 10,000 years old and that most of our infrastructure has been developed in the last 100 years.
It would not take much warming or sea level rise to have a major impact on our current built infrastructure.
Human emitted CO2 quantities are not small in the aggregate – approximately 30-35 billion tons per year. That is about 1% more than the annual loss term from natural forces of plant growth and ocean absorption. That is why, every year, the total concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere ratchets inexorably higher. There is no controversy about those measurements; they are not based on any modeling at all.
There is some legitimate uncertainty about the effects of the increases and the future course of events. It may or may not be catastrophic if no action is taken. I, for one, am not willing to undertake the large scale experimentation necessary to validate the climate models using the only atmosphere that we have for the experiment.
In addition to warming and sea level rise — which admittedly don’t necessarily concern all humans equally since many Canadians, Russians, and Norwegians would probably benefit from little warming — I’m concerned about the increased dissolution of CO2 into the worlds oceans and other large bodies of water. In chemistry classes I learned that dissolving CO2 in water produces carbonic acid and in biology I learned that many creatures in the foundation of the aquatic food chain are adapted to a fairly narrow range of pH.
There are many good reasons to slow fossil fuel consumption. Reducing the growth rate and eventually the total rate of CO2 production each year is one of the big ones. Another great reason to like fission is its ability to take power away from the hydrocarbon industry and its fellow travelers in media, finance, politics, transportation and weapons contractors.
They have repeatedly proven that they do not have the best interests of the rest of us at the top of their priority list.
I’m glad you included ocean acidification as it is often the overlooked effect in discussions of the carbon load in the biosphere, and I tend to pound the podium about it whenever the subject comes up. It is no less of a problem than CO2 in the atmosphere for the reasons you mention. The oceans are prodigious sinks for CO2 releases, at the cost of producing an equilibrium amount of carbonic acid. Marine organisms can be incredibly sensitive to pH and non-acidic CO2 dissolution. Molluscs (such as mussels, oysters and pteropods) are one of the groups most sensitive to ocean acidification. There is also growing evidence that cold water coral communities are adversely affected. This is particularly troubling as they provide habitat, feeding grounds and nursery areas for many deep-water organisms.
The ongoing loss of nuclear plants and their replacement with gas-burning facilities only exacerbates the degradation of the marine environment.
@Dan
I wish you were correct. But you’re not.
> Climate change IS real! It’s called “weather.”
No, climate is the long-term average of the daily, monthly, and yearly variations in weather, averaged over decades and centuries.
Yes, climate is cyclic by nature. These cycles are, in the absence of violent interference, of the order of several tens to hundreds of thousands of years. The Milankovitch cycles of variation in the Earth’s orbit (affecting how long the seasons are compared to each other and how much solar heat the icy land areas of the northern high latitudes receive in summer) are strongly related to the onset and cessation of the ice ages.
As far as the Milankovich cycles are concerned, we’re in a relatively quiet, middle of the road period. If this were the only contributing factor, we could expect to go on as we are, with maybe a slight cooling over the next 30k to 50k years.
During such steady state periods, the planet is radiating away as much heat as it receives from the Sun. Sea levels are steady, and the total mass of ice sheets and glaciers stays about the same on average.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re measuring these days.
The earth is receiving, overall, somewhere between 0.5W to 1.5W per square meter of its surface MORE than it’s radiating away.
The main ice masses of Greenland and the Antarctic exert a gravitational pull which perturbs satellite orbits in proportion to their mass. The GRACE satellites, launched in 2002 to measure this effect with precision, have measured a nett ice loss of 5 trillion tons from these two sheets between 2002 and 2014. The loss rate has been remarkably steady over this period, and there are no signs that it is coming to an end.
Sea levels are rising steadily, due not just to melted ice but also nett thermal expansion, just as the alcohol in a wall thermometer expands when the temperature goes up.
And these are measurements, not suppositions or just models.
All this points to a strong and sudden warming over a period of mere decades and centuries, compared to the relatively much slower variations over tens and hundreds of millenia from orbital causes.
This can be well explained by the measured strong and sudden increase in CO2 from 280 ppm to 400 ppm since 1850, man-made and mostly from fossil fuels. Most of this increase has been in the last 50 years. The resulting greenhouse effect from the added CO2 is raising the temperature, which in turn causes an increase in atmospheric water vapor. Water vapor is an even stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and is amplifying the warming from the CO2. Yes, there is uncertainty about exactly to what degree the amplifying effect is and how long it will take. No, there is no doubt that several degrees C of warming is in the pipeline.
> AWG (sic) is a hoax being perpetrated
> by those with a pathological need to control the lives of others
> (i.e., tax them into oblivion)
Last I heard, none of the multitude of scientific bodies supporting AGW had tax-raising powers. Neither have I noticed that scientists generally are control freaks. Generally (unfortunately) they seem to prefer a quiet life with their heads below the parapet.
“Last I heard, none of the multitude of scientific bodies supporting AGW had tax-raising powers. Neither have I noticed that scientists generally are control freaks.”
Really? Pull the string a little harder. It’s not the “scientists” that disgust me so much as those in DC who decide which camp in this argument gets the grant money and air time.
“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” (BHO, January 2008) Understand this….he wasn’t intending that any of the petroleum kings benefit from that largess.
And which of the camps is it that’s attempting to use the powers of the state to silence and ostracize the opposition? Those dissenting opinions are so pesky.
Just because certain politicos in Washington DC want to capitalize on the AGW problem for their own ends, does not make AGW a hoax. Neither have you shown that that is the case.
You are wrong to believe politically inspired pronouncements about AGW. Much better to go by those who actually know something about the topic.
It will take Germany getting stuck at 30% solar penetration when its instantaneous solar production is so high in early summer at noon (close to 100%) they can’t store excess production anymore.
Most people don’t think. They feel. Understanding nuclear power requires actual thinking.
Or will it take Germany having a major blackout ? Unlikely as they have plenty of coal/NG backups.
I’m ok with solar+wind paired with big hydro, but big hydro is just about maxed out worldwide. Pumped hydro is close to maxed out exactly in places where the solar+wind religion is strongest.
Ah … there’s nothing quite like a good old purity test to get your organization back in gear and humming smoothly. Just ask the GOP.
Since you mentioned Dr. Moore, I thought you might want to respond to a recent lecture he gave. Here’s the link:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/15/greenpeace-founder-delivers-powerful-annual-lecture-praises-carbon-dioxide-full-text/
And here’s another former “believer” who took the time to investigate the claims by the IPCC and found them wanting. No, he’s not a scientist but that should be to his credit rather than a negative. https://medium.com/@pullnews/what-i-learned-about-climate-change-the-science-is-not-settled-1e3ae4712ace#.6hluudid8
Gwyneth Cravens, Stewart Brand, Mark Lynas, Steve Wright, Laura Jackson, Annette Smith, Richard Rhodes, James Lovelock. What do these people have in common? They are all labeled “heretics” for changing their minds about AGW in general and nuclear power in particular. Has the AGW mindset become a cult-like religion where dissenters are excommunicated rather than debated in an open, vigorous manner?
Take on Dr. Moore’s and David Siegel’s challenge of proving them wrong in their assessment of the evidence and facts. Show them where they are misguided then share it here or on their own sites.
The debate that matters is not here, in sound-bites of half-truths. It goes on in peer-reviewed scientific journals. If you are someone like David Evans, who claims to have found a massive error in physics that just happens to be common to all of the major climate models, but you haven’t bothered to write it up so everyone can see exactly what you are claiming, you still don’t count. AAMOF, with the amounts of money at stake such hand-waving “debate” is far more likely to be propaganda.
David Siegel’s so-called “assessment” would fit on a couple of PowerPoint slides and includes a number of major red herrings. For instance, he states that the Sun is very important to climate… but carefully avoids referencing the current measurements of the solar constant, which are stable to sinking. Such cherry-picking and hand-waving is the modus operandi of the professional liar. With literally trillions of dollars at stake, there’s plenty of money for people of sufficient credibility willing to say what those interests want them to say.
As a commenter I’ve never seen before who leaps in with well-polished talking points, I am pretty sure that you are part of the propaganda apparatus.
@E-P
Docforesight has been reading and making comments here on Atomic Insights for several years. He’s not terribly prolific, but you even addressed him specifically about year ago.
He has recently limited his commentary to rejection of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), but there was a time when he seemed more interested in other topics, including using nuclear energy to desalinate and move water in California.
Even though he is repeating propaganda and ignoring all of the non AGW issues associated with dumping 30-40 billion tons of CO2 plus other waste products into the atmosphere, he doesn’t have the characteristics of someone who is part of an apparatus.
Rod, you are correct in that I have not been prolific over the past couple of years in posting here. Life happens and other priorities took the lead. I have continued to read your blog, Nuclear Townhall and a few others in the pro-nuke “community”. As a background, my career is as a Doctor of Optometry for the past 30 years. I also am involved in a small start-up of solar and battery back-up systems for residential and commercial or small industrial projects.
It was your site, among others, that caused me to re-think the entire value of intermittent, diffuse, uncontrollable, unreliable “renewables”. There is a place for them – namely, remote, off-grid, rural sites that wouldn’t otherwise have some power. To that end, and to extend my reach in the health field, we are beginning to place solar/BBU power pods in 3rd world remote village health clinics where they have no power now and wouldn’t receive it via a central power plant for decades, if ever. That could be a life-changing improvement for remote village dwellers.
I live in California, enduring one of the worst governors to ever be elected here. Thanks to him and his coterie of “advisors”, I and my start-up stand to become fairly wealthy off the backs of my fellow taxpayers for subsidies Gov. Brown has signed into law. It’s pathetic but true.
You mentioned the 30-40 billion tons of CO2. Dr. Moore references other amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere at different geologic periods. Is he incorrect in his assessment? Are other factors like water vapor, cloud formation and the chaotic nature of … nature playing a role in climate variability that extends beyond mankinds’ influence?
What confounds and concerns me is the pervasive attitude of certainty that animates the AGW side of the issue. And not just certainty but aggresively so – so that anyone who voices modest skepticism (uncertainty) is labeled as a “propagandist”. That, and effectively shooting people on your team — the pro-nuke team — who don’t hew to the party line. Dr. Moore is pro-nuke. David Siegel has become pro-nuke. The pro-nuke team needs a serious infusion of positive PR to counter the hydrocarbon and anti-nuke “environmental” industry. Shooting your own teammates doesn’t advance the ball.
I anticipated push-back when posting these two links. I was hoping for measured, reasoned responses that addressed the points of contention these two informed people have raised. Will my hope be restored or dashed?
@Docforesight
Welcome back. The quantity of 30-40 billion tons is the annual addition rate from human activities.
IMO Patrick Moore is not a particularly useful or reliable ally. He has been riding on his “founder of Greenpeace” label for several decades now. It is wearing thin. His recent messaging on Twitter seems to be more pro-natural gas than pro-nuclear. Sure, he still works for NEI and says positive things about nuclear, but he does not like to recognize that artificially low gas prices, driven to uneconomic levels by over-production, are resulting in permanent nuclear plant retirements. The natural gas/petroleum industry has the proven capability to rapidly recover when the supply demand balance inevitably raises prices and returns the energy market to a very profitable phase in its cyclic behavior.
Water vapor, cloud formation, chaotic nature, solar variations are all factors that are accounted for — perhaps not perfectly — in climate models. Again, there are more concerns than JUST global warming associated with increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans.
Finally, I don’t really have a team. I believe that low price, abundant, emission free, reliable energy is a boon to humanity and will improve prosperity for the vast majority of us. However, there are a number of interest groups that will lose their wealth and power when they no longer can influence the total supply and control key portions of that supply.
Translation: He doesn’t always say what I want him to say.
He was more than that. He was president of the Greenpeace Foundation (later Greenpeace Canada) and he was a director of Greenpeace International. Heck, he was on the Rainbow Warrior the night that the French blew it up and sunk it. His environmental credentials are pretty well established.
Rod – Sure, he doesn’t have the same take as you, but he’s not a one-issue fana… er … advocate. He doesn’t have your background. He never lived on a nuclear submarine, and he has never worked for the nuclear industry aside for working for the PR end of the industry’s trade group.
His background is in forestry and ecology. His involvement in Greenpeace was mostly focused on opposing nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon testing. His take on the environment has tended to be on the pragmatic side — favoring good stewardship rather than some sort of radical call to return to a medieval “utopia.”
Personally, I think that he sincerely believes what he says, but I also suspect that he’s somewhat cynical. He has not only seen but also lived through the catty infighting, the personal agendas working at cross-purposes, the selling out, the hypocrisy, and the frequent triumph of politics over principles that goes on in the “Environmental” world.
Has he sold out? Yes, probably somewhat. But as far as Baby Boomers go, I think that he has sold out far less than most.
And the effect of low-dose and low-dose-rate exposure to radiation are accounted for — perhaps not perfectly — in LNT radiation-risk models. The value of the model is in the eye of the beholder.
@Brian Mays
He was more than that. He was president of the Greenpeace Foundation (later Greenpeace Canada) and he was a director of Greenpeace International. Heck, he was on the Rainbow Warrior the night that the French blew it up and sunk it. His environmental credentials are pretty well established.
Exactly. He stayed with the organization for a very long time, even when it was long past the antinuclear weapons phase that supposedly attracted him.
I’m not terribly trustful of converts who waited so long after they should have known better to decide that nuclear energy is different from nuclear weapons.
Rod – Er … No.
Did you notice that I mentioned that he was on Greenpeace’s ship, the Rainbow Warrior, on the evening that it sank? The French sank it because it was on the way to protest against a planned French nuclear bomb test in the south Pacific. This happened 1985. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986.
So say the Earth is not warming due to human produced CO-2 (which I know is not the truth….but whatever) there is absolutely no denying that air polution (from fossil and the hilariously titled Biofuels) kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.
Commercial Nuclear Power (WORLD WIDE) has directly killed <70 people, all at Chernobyl (all because the Soviets were idiots with their horribly designed reactor) while saving millions of lives by providing basically polution free power. That's 40+ years of commercial Nuclear Power.
@Bonds 25
Once again, I feel compelled to challenge the myth that Chernobyl happened because the reactor was “horribly designed.” The cause of the event was a small team of operators on the back shift conducting an unapproved test with all safety systems isolated after putting the reactor into its most unstable condition following its worst possible recent power history.
The commonly accepted interpretation of that event was a test gone horribly wrong. The phrase used in the IAEA post mortem published in 1992 is “a highly improbable combination of violations of operating instructions and procedures.”
I’m not so sure. Coincidences, especially when they occur at strategic historical inflection points, are often the result of some amount of planning and purposeful alignment.
The proof that the basic design was not the problem is the fact that there are still more than a dozen RBMK reactors with virtually the same design still operating safely and reasonably reliably, nearly 30 years after the event. There were even more that were forced to shutdown – 2 in Lithuania shut down in 2004 and 2009 and the other 3 in Ukraine at the Chernobyl station that were shut down in 1991, 1996 and 2000.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nuclear-Fuel-Cycle/Power-Reactors/Appendices/RBMK-Reactors/
There is a major inaccuracy in the description of the RBMK reactor design on that World Nuclear Association web page. It was not conceptually unique. The N-Reactor at Hanford was also primarily a plutonium production light water cooled, graphite moderated reactor without a full scale containment structure. It was converted into an electricity production reactor with some modifications added. John F. Kennedy announced those modifications with great fanfare during a visit to Hanford in the summer of 1963, just four months before he was assassinated.
http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor
That reactor was shutdown for routine maintenance and refueling in 1987, about a year after the Chernobyl accident. During that year, GE, Westinghouse, Siemens, B&W and Framatome had conducted a massive propaganda effort to convince the world that the weakness at Chernobyl was its poor “Soviet era” design. Few people knew much about the N-Reactor. Those who did recognized that it needed to quietly go away, so the reactor was never restarted after that routine shutdown. It is now cocooned in a structure that is analogous to the one enclosing the destroyed Chernobyl reactor.
I believe the designers of the N reactor had the lesson of Chernobyl in mind. See “A comparison of N Reactor and Chernobyl”, published after the shutdown (http://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/6913274 ):
Also at http://www.bonestamp.com/sgt/breeding_reactors.htm :
@G.R.L. Cowan
The N-reactor was more fool-proof, but my point was that RBMKs can be and have been operated safely. It was also that the demonization of the design was in the interests of other reactor manufacturers as well as in the interests of the American government’s efforts to get rid of the evil empire of the Soviet Union.
That propaganda effort was successful enough against graphite moderated reactors to kill the already operating THTR, the entire German high temperature reactor development program, and the N-Reactor. My own little “propaganda” effort of one to rehabilitate the idea that graphite is a useful material in nuclear reactors is aimed to help both molten salt thermal reactors and high temperature gas reactors.
“The proof that the basic design was not the problem is the fact that there are still more than a dozen RBMK reactors with virtually the same design still operating safely and reasonably reliably, nearly 30 years after the event.”
I don’t believe this is a correct statement. The current fleet of operating RBMK reactors has had significant design changes, specifically in the reactivity control areas and reactor scram system, that allowed those operators to set their own trap. That accident is not repeatable by adverse human intervention in the current fleet of RBMKs, because of those physical design changes. It is well written up, but takes some internet searching to find the details.
Graphite moderation and containment design are two totally different issues. There are currently no operating RBMKs with a design “virtually the same” as Chernobyl.
Rod
Ok, the Soviets were idiots with a idiotic designed reactor that they should have not been idiots with.
@Bonds25
What if a few people who conceived and led the test were not idiots, but rather cleverly diabolical?
Wonder how Bill would spin this article in Environment & Energy –
http://www.eenews.net/special_reports/greater_expectations/stories/1060026477
Seems like 100% Renewable does not work.
@Rich
Here’s how I spin it. The electricity provided by solar collectors to people who have never had electricity is like the free samples given of almost any attractive product. They are not designed to satisfy demand, but to stimulate it.
There is a good reason why so many foundations, including not only corporate sponsored foundations, but foundations created by leading lights of the hydrocarbon Establishment, think it is a good idea to pay organizations like Greenpeace to design and install solar collectors and batteries. They produce tantalizing quantities of power; the next step is increased pressure on governments and utilities to connect those unconnected areas to the grid. There is, of course, no magic involved in electricity production. The existence of wires simply provides another distribution channel for the refined product of electricity. More wires and more customers means more fuel gets sold to make that product.
Electricity will also lead to greater development in the previously unserved areas.
That process of development can be a wonderful thing, especially if the fuel that is consumed to produce the electricity is as densely compacted and pollution-free as uranium, plutonium, or thorium.