Bid for Britain's nuclear power stations goes piff paff poof

A new atomic age may not be as dangerous as you may think. The levels of cosmic background radiation from that we experience on a day to day basis is far more than we expect.
Even though nuclear deposits in the earth may sound like a horrific idea, it is no less dangerous than living near granite areas in Scotland. Radiation is natural. Having nuclear waste encased underground would almost certainly not threaten nearby areas unless (stupidly) it is near modes of watery (or otherwise) transport.
In the 60's some people had even been treated for sinusitis with radium, and although its risks are apparant and highly possible, many people still chose to cling to an irrational fear of what may be a necessary intermediate step to providing the UK (eventually) with a fully renewable source of energy.

The only justified concerns of nuclear should be that of a meltdown. But there is a critical ratio that is required for any nuclear substance which, if gone over, would risk a chain reaction beyond control. However, in nuclear power stations there is insufficient material undergoing fission at any stage for there to be such a risk (or at least, it has been engineered in this way since Chernoble).

The blockade against nuclear power forces power companies elsewhere to create CCGT, or coal (God forbid!) power plants instead, which are less efficient, and more dangerous to working personnel.

The renewable alternatives are slim. Ironically individual wind tubines very rarely produce enough energy to save the oil used to produce it in the first place. Furthermore, these turbines depreciate within only twenty five years. Its unpredictability too is mainly due to the fact that if wind speed were to drop by half, the energy produced (ignoring inefficiencies) would be scythed to an eighth!

I wont bother even mentioning solar power in the Uk, although the solar projects in the US are very promising.

I bumped into a Greenpeace member on the street one day and asked him why he did not support nuclear power. He changed the subject and told me that a decentralisation of power in the UK was necessary. However the expense of an operation on this scale is stratospheric. Whether the solution involves tearing up the national grid or not, I cannot forsee an inexpensive operation - epecially considering the costs of transporting energy, above or below ground

If nuclear power is not a viable option, I would like to know what is? I know we should economise, and use such things as solar panels and the like, but unless we make the intermediate step of harnessing nuclear power, we are embracing ignorance and plunging ourselves into a dark age.

I agree with 80% of the values of Greenpeace, but the stubborness to accept that nuclear power is an unavoidable neccessity, and to blindly believe that things that merely sound more environmentally friendly (like hybrid cars, which again ironically are by and large less efficient than those powered by petrol), are part of the backward mentality that threaten our campaign to reduce our detrimental impact on our world

replies to seb_spiers@hotmail.com

There's a difference between the background radiation we're exposed to all the time (and have evolved to cope with) and the acute man-made variety which is highly dangerous. It's one thing to be exposed to certain types of radiation as part of medical treatment in highly controlled circumstances (there's a good reason radiographers stand behind shielding every time the x-ray machine fires), another entirely to have extremely toxic byproducts from the nuclear industry leeching into the environment.

I'd be interested to see the information on which you base your assumptions about the generating capacity of wind turbines - can you provide more info? And yes, they have a life span - everything does, including nuclear power stations. At least with wind turbines they can be dismantled and replaced with no lethal waste to worry about or contaminated sites to monitor for decades or centuries.

Equally, any new development is going to cost something but the costs of nuclear far outstrip those of renewable energy sources or combined heat and power installations. The bill for dealing with just the waste and decommissioning of just the existing plants is currently estimated at £73bn, although that is just an estimate and has recently been rising sharply.

But to answer your question, we have plenty of viable, alternative options - here's the convenient solution to climate change.

web editor
gpuk

Jamie, there is no difference between man-made radiation and natural radiation. The radioactive materials might be chemically different, but the radiation emitted is qualitatively the same. The difference between an acute exposure (which causes radiation sickness etc) and a low level exposure (which poses a small cancer risk) simply depends upon the quantity of radiation.

Acute effects (radiation sickness) require a large dose, upwards of 1000 mSv of exposure, delivered in a short space of time. This is equivalent to receiving 500 years-worth of average background radiation over a short period of time (minutes or possibly hours). Average exposure from the nuclear industry is 1000 times lower than background radiation and tens of millions of times lower than the level required for acute effects.

Apart from Chernobyl, nobody has ever been killed by an acute radiation dose from a civilian nuclear powerstation. The only acute exposures at Chernobyl were for those workers on-site who tackled the reactor itself. In contrast fatal accidents due to the misuse of medical radiation sources are fairly commonplace.

The only way to receive an acute dose from a radioactive waste repository would be to enter the repository and stay next to the waste for a period of time. (And after a few hundred years or so even this foolish action would not result in an acute dose, because the most highly active isotopes would have decayed). Any possible leeching from a nuclear repository would have the same character as background radiation (i.e. it would present a small cancer risk) and the repository is designed such that the risk around the site is a hundred times lower than background radiation for all time.

Persistent reference to the cost of decommissioning the UK’s legacy nuclear sites still does not make it relevant to new nuclear build. Most of the legacy decommissioning cost is related to research and military facilities. Only about a fifth of that bill relates to powerstations, and those old Magnox stations bear no resemblance to modern plant (which is designed to be easy to decommission to keep costs low).

The estimated bill for delivering 35% of our electricity from renewables by 2020 is £100billion. It will realistically cost another £5billion per year forever afterwards to incrementally replace those renewable generators. I am not saying that this should not be spent, but it is clearly wrong to state that equivalent nuclear powerstations would be more expensive.