Why do the Left Oppose Nuclear Power?

After the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s a 'New Left' appeared. The New Left, like the Old Left were anti-Capitalist. They wanted to end capitalism to replace it with communism. But the old anti-capitalist arguments: exploitation, tendencies to capitalist crisis and worker immiseration were no longer convincing. The arguments were too abstract and conflicted with reality: Western workers, compared to Soviet workers, were not 'immiserated'.

So the New Left gave up on the proletariat, or working class. The New Left based their revolutionary movement on a new alliance of: “the new political subjects — women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements, etc.” [citation: “Socialist Strategy, Where Next?”, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, 1981 http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/81_01_17.pdf {PDF}]

STOP: Did I write: "anti-nuclear movements". Yes I did. In 1970s, Friends of the Earth, from 1970 to 1975, set out to convince every green organization of the importance of being anti-nuclear. An important argument they employed against nuclear power was that: "it's not needed". They believed a combination of renewable energy and fossil fuel was better. They believed nuclear power was too expensive and that its costs were hidden; that the main purpose of nuclear power was to provide plutonium for the military. That, at least, was the argument they used in the UK; and it was pretty effective. The greens became the anti-nuclear movements in the early 1970s. Prior to that, in the 1960s, anti-nuclear movement meant anti-Nuclear War. After 1975 it meant anti-nuclear power and anti-War.

Today: the far left have somewhat reframed their argument against nuclear power. There are, in fact, 3 arguments:

• 'too expensive': This is their external argument - given to non-lefties.
• 'not decentralised': This is an internal argument - they argue that nuclear plants are big technology - only possible with massive, state supported, companies. Today's far left present themselves are anarco - in favour of community run business. Nuke are far too big for that. Solar and Wind power can be community run; nukes can't be.
• 'military industrial complex': This is a general argument. We see it from neo-Conservatives too. It was first invented, in the late 1960s, as a neo-conservative answer to Eisenhower's `Atoms for Peace` program. It stresses the links between nuclear power an nuclear weapons. It was copied by the greens in the 1970s

The far left and the actual anti-nuke campaigners are NOT the same people. The Far Left aren't going to come out and try to blockade a nuke plant to shut down nuke plants directly. That's what the anti-nuke campaigners do. The far left political strategy is to 'march through the institutions'. Get themselves appointed to positions of influence. Use their influence to promote the technologies they agreed are best: renewables. Anti-nuke campaigners are different. They are the nutters we meet on the web. They are activists and, often, pretty single issue orientated.

No mostly. Sometimes maybe but not really.

No

We visited the forest occupiers. Interviewed. Explained the lignite is 10 GW, and 10 GW of nuclear has been forced closed in Germany.

Would they support #nuclear to preserve the forest?

‘No’.

Simple Molten Salt Reactor, by Moltex LLP

Reblog. Copied from Energy Knot blog. Moltex SSR

Moltex LLP is a small UK engineering design company based in London. On 20 Oct Ian Scott of Moltex presented his SMSR, lasting 15 minutes, at a House of Lords meeting.

Ian was influenced by the very first Molten salt design from 1950, which placed molten fuel inside narrow cylinders. Ian's design has several such cylinders full of fuel inside a tank of coolant. Both coolant and fuel are molten salts. The fuel circulates in these cylinders by convection, as does the coolant in the tank. A 1 GWe reactor will have a tank about 8 metres in diameter. There are no pumps moving molten salts - circulation is all done by convection. The tank will be a nickel alloy, probably Hastelloy. No moderator either, so it's a fast reactor. Ian reckons the reactor will last many decades.

Stated advantages of the SMSR

• unpressurized
• the reaction is barely critical
• no volatile fissile materials will be left in the reactor (gases will bubble out)
• safe coolant
• no pumps
• materials are all standard industrial parts
• cheap
• fuel will be made from spent nuclear fuel, SNF, extracted by a "simple single-stage process".

Potential Issues:

• The primary coolant is sodium chloride. Natural chlorine is a mixture of isotopes: mainly Cl-35, Cl-37. Cl-36 is present as a trace, and is radioactive, half-life = 300k years, undergoing mainly beta decay to Ar-36, S-36. The thermal neutron cross-section of chlorine-35 = 35.5 σ_a/barns [can't find the fast version, but the thermal spectrum is worryingly high]. It looks like quite a lot of neutrons may be lost to chlorine-35 absorption, producing chlorine-36 which is radioactive. Ian does not believe enough neutrons will be lost to make the reactor too inefficient, but the coolant will become radioactive. A way around this is to use isotopically separated chlorine-37 in the coolant salt. Using chlorine-37 alone, will prevent chlorine-36 forming and Cl-37 is stable against neutron bombardment. Several quite inexpensive routes are available for the separation of Cl-35 / Cl-37. The cost estimate has been done, still giving a very viable project.
• The fuel tubes are a consumable item with an anticipated 5 year life, functioning in a similar manner to fuel rods and needing periodic replacement.

A thorium breeder?

Ian believes that a converter makes economic sense now. A breeder will have to wait till the future:

There would then be an economic case for developing a nuclear breeder version of the reactor (this exists now in outline), which would operate on the thorium fuel cycle. That outline design is far simpler, safer and cheaper than current designs for sodium cooled fast breeder reactors.

- [Moltex Energy LLP – Written evidence, section 29]

The best introduction to the SMSR may be references: 6, 4 [translated via Google], 2, 1, in that order. Refs. 2, 1, 3 contain all the detail.

1. Slides
2. Evidence to House of Lords, pages: "Moltex Energy LLP – Written evidence"
3. Patent Application WO-2014128457-A1
4. Blog on Moltex (in French)
5. Moltex LLP
6. Next Big Future - UK MSRs

Pumped Hydro.

Consider the new Swiss Lake Mutt pumped hydro plant. Should we be building more of them? Can we?

In UK, pumped hydro has never been used as an energy storage feature. I mean it's purpose is not to store energy. Energy storage is just something it does in order to work. UK pumped hydro is used to meet peak demand. Because hydro "switches" electricity onto the grid faster than anything else can. We face peak demand every day so the capital is always in use and the plant provides the grid with electricity every day (so gets revenue daily).

RE advocates don't seem to get this. UK pumped hydro was very expensive to build but eventually pays for itself because it's constantly used. RE advocates talk of pumped hydro as an energy store mechanism to alleviate unreliables. If so, capital plant will not be constantly in use. Unless pumped hydro is regularly making money by selling electricity to the grid, it won't make economic sense.

That's probably the reason RE advocates want the grid itself to pay for storage. If the grid has to pay, existing fossil plant like gas will be paying to put its competitor (peaking provider) in place!

Technically speaking - I'm not sure that UK pumped hydro ever did pay for itself. It was built when the UK grid was one nationalized company. Their accounting systems were bizarre to most outsiders. Indeed - bad accounts - is the reason nuclear became unpopular with UK politicians in the 1990s as the grid was privatised and many of the nuclear plants (Magnox reactors) were impossible to privatise. The effect of impossible accounting on politicians is revealed in Simon Taylor's "Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain".

Decommissioning - facts and fallacies.

I wrote this after listening to The Nuclear Humanist (Thies Beckers') response to Robert Llewellyn's (Fully Charged) snipes against nuclear power. Thies is right but there's an outstanding question he should address to Robert Llewellyn, Mark Z. Jacobson and their ilk. Do you support early decommissioning of German nuclear power reactors?

UK situation.

In UK, all the DECC decommissioning costs (to UK government) are for weapons sites (including submarines) and shut Magnox reactors (which are now all shut). Costs of decommissioning other power reactors: PWR and AGR, is solely the responsibility of the owners. EDF own all remaining power reactors. EDF have a fund growing annually for this mandated by UK government. It's a kind of tax. ~ 5% of their revenue. This is how decommissioning is handled in all Western democracies I know of.

Magnox spent fuel is all being reprocessed to remove plutonium. UK has a PUREX plant called THORP to do this. This extracts plutonium from spent fuel. That plutonium is not quite weapons grade but could provide very useful fuel for fast reactors. Alternatively - if anti-nukes have their way this plutonium will have to be disposed of too so that is cannot be used to make even substandard nuclear weapons. Only Magnox reactors will bear this extra reprocessing cost because Magnox reactors were special. The design was dual purpose. The spent fuel can be used to make nuclear weapons. Magnox are also far more expensive to decommission than PWRs because decommissioning was not considered in advance of their design. A flaw never to be repeated by other power reactor designs.

Europe and Sweden

Sweden has no Magnox reactors. Their PWR reactor decommissioning will be entirely the responsibility of the owners (via the decommissioning fund). Provided they are not shut prematurely, their decommissioning fund will bear the cost. The same kind of fund as per UK EDF reactors.

In Germany, plants are being shut too soon. So German decommissioning funds are not yet big enough to bear the cost. I wonder what Llewellyn and Jacobson think of that? Was early German shutdown a good idea?

Report by Congress says: Obama Admin Fired Top Scientist to Advance Climate Change Plans

I doubt Obama's media darlings will be reporting this

Dec 20, 2016: news report: Congress: Obama Admin Fired Top Scientist to Advance Climate Change Plans, Investigation claims Obama admin retaliated against scientists, politicized DoE

Full report: U.S. Department of Energy Misconduct Related to the Low Dose Radiation Research Program (pdf)

Obama administration fired a top scientist who got out of line and wanted scientific research done into actual harms of banned substances.

Background: For decades now, the old ruling against carcinogenic substances: No safe dose, based on a linear, no-threshold, LNT, dose-response model has been disputed. No-safe dose is widely used by regulatory agencies, especially for carcinogenic substances. Some of the problems with no-safe dose are: at least one agency thinks everything is a carcinogen (such as the UN IARC who literally say 99.9% of everything (substance and activity) they investigated was carcinogenic. They sub-contracted NRDC researchers to find that. The no-safe dose model assumes there is no real protection against carcinogens, in that it considers every animal to be, more or less, equally susceptible. It believed genetic damage is carried down the lineage. That is absolutely not the case. In recent decades, modern biology found several mechanisms, which work at the cellular level, by which animals protect themselves from cancer. Some animals have high protection against cancer, such as: Elephants, blind mole rat, naked mole rat, water bears (tardigrades) to name but 4. These protective measures use a variety of mechanisms (proteins to protect DNA, widely different levels of cell lysis, mechanisms to prevent DNA insertion by alien creatures such as viruses, etc.). Different DNA repair mechanisms are present at a cellular level to repair damaged or broken DNA. Humans are about mid-way. Not the most susceptible animal but certainly not the least.

The cost of no-safe dose to industry may be in the trillions. It is certainly at least tens of billions each year. I guess no one knows because we don't really study it. Regulatory agencies never bothered with cost-benefit before they enacted no-safe dose. They do not review cost-benefits. E.g. Notice how Wikipedia don't even discuss cost-benefit. Presumably because there are not enough comprehensive studies; as academics and regulators are too cowed to write them. One might get sacked.

Scientists in the nuclear power, and radiation medicine (anti-cancer) industries have tried for years to establish a threshold dose instead. It looks like the Obama administration fired at least one scientist to make an example and establish who's in charge. To establish who has the right to decide what science says.

Sarcy sarcophagus

Big song and dance over €1.5bn spent on a sarcophagus, or shield, above the exploded Chernobyl reactor. But what was the point of it? It protects no one from radiation. Radiation travels in straight lines. No one flies in the airspace above the reactor. A shield around the reactor could've been something as simple are a 4 metre wide earthwork about 5 metres high. The 3 neighboring reactors at Chernobyl continued operation for years after. They were shut in 1991, 1996, and 2000. For 14 years, when the radiation levels are much higher than now, workers continued to operate those reactors. The sarcophagus is a 1.5 billion Euro moral statement financed by Chernobyl Shelter Fund saying : nuclear power is forever dangerous - be very afraid.

This sarcophagus is certainly an admirable engineering accomplishment : it is the largest movable object ever built by humanity, but it is useless health wise.

The world is spending €1.5bn (one and a half billion euros) to protect itself from harmless levels of radiation.

For the same €1.5bn Ukraine could've built an advanced molten salt test reactor and prototype. They could've had cheaper, safer nuclear power instead of relying on Russian gas so much. €500 million of that money came from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Rather construct and develop something useful to increase wealth. They chose to throw the money away.