Saturday 11th of February 2012
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The circus is in town

Ladies and gentlemen

The nuclear circus is in town!

Yes... after seeing the paltry effort on global warming on SBS last night, that showed a greenie turning into a yellow cake eater, I think it’s time to put a few facts straight:

All stats approx ± 5 % of ranges

ELECTRICITY
in 2005 the world consumes 20 millions Gwh
in 1970 the world consumed 5.5 millions Gwh
an increase of 360 % in electricity consumption in 35 years

it is estimated that World Energy (electricity and other) demand will increase by 50 % by 2025 (20 years from now)
33 % in industrialised countries
91 % in developing countries

WORLD Energy demand is
OIL
for cars and transport 60%
for industrial purposes 30 %
for electricity 10%

COAL
for industrial purpose 80%
for domestic purposes 10%
for electricity 10%

others

Thus electricity only represent approx 10 % of total world energy expenditure.

Optimistic outlook
Even if electricity supply was 30 % of energy expenditure and all of the supply came from nuclear energy, we would still have
a 70 % CO2 emission rate on what it is now and
in 2025 an emission rate of 100 % what it is now.

Realistic outlook
by 2006 only 7 % of world electricity will be nuclear.
nuclear energy (NE) only represents 0.7 % of world energy expenditure. Even if 100 % of electricity was nuclear generated this would only represent 10 % of total energy expenditure.
By 2025 even if this total electricity-NE is boosted to 20%
CO2 emissions would be 110 % what they are now.

NUCLEAR ENERGY
A FOOL’S PARADISE
PLUSES
* No CO2 emission

MINUSES
* Radio Active waste (RA for quarter MILLION YEARS)
* reprocessing plants (concentrating plutonium fast)
Shorter half life (25,000 years) but more deadly
* Nuclear war or conventional war targeting energy supplies (spread of radio active particles)
* Big Brother mentality secrecy to protect by-products
* expensive to process and reprocess
* dangerous to process and reprocess

WASTE STORAGE
* space rockets (in your dreams)
* big hole deep in the ground (nuclear blasted)
* vitrification of small vessels buried at different sites
* sea dumping

ALL OPTIONS TOTALLY UNSATISFACTORY

Big hole in ground by nuclear blast would create cracks right up to the surface even if very deep. No go.
Small parcels in smaller holes: expensive and eventually would leak radio activity within 250 years. The vitrification and storing process are also very energy consuming.
Rockets? spent nuclear fuel is very heavy about three times the density of steel. Energy spend to sent the stuff in space defeat the purpose of using it in the first place. Rocket launches are only 95 % failsafe at best.

the nuclear furphy

Please read the blog "the circus is in town" above...Cheers

Check these stats

If only the coalition of the willing had spent their Iraq war budget on developing/installing the necessary infrastructure, we could have a hydrogen economy long before the first nuclear power plant started today gets commissioned. Bonus prize: there wouldn't be any need to bomb miscellaneous oil rich nations.

Wasn't it amazing to see the CEO of Shell get interrupted by the PR person and him shut up LIKE A CLAM?!

Gus, I think a few of your stats are dubious (can I ask where you got them from?).  Particularly "coal for electricity: 10%".  My rough calcs are as follows:

Notes: "Energy in electricity" is an underestimate of the true energy consumption due to electricity use because most power plants only operate at about 30-35% efficiency (although gas-turbine types can get 60% and more if they are a combined heat/steam generator).  So even if (as you say) only 10% of world energy consumption might be electrical, perhaps 30% of world energy consumption would be in the generation of electricity.  Thus 19.5% of world energy would be used in fossil fueled power stations.

If you ask me, I think the future should be solar designed houses, pushbikes and hydrogen or eth/methanol fuel cell or biomass (biodiesel or ethanol) cars, blimps as air transport and yachts the cargo sea vessels.  Wouldn't that be nice?  The hydrogen would be generated from renewable sources (hydrogen production is an ideal use for variable and unreliable energy sources such as wind and solar). No new technology needed. This stuff can happen today.

Why do we allow corporations to push the Chinese to buy shiny new Mercedes Benzes when there is a huge market that could be serviced by a brand new eco-friendly industry.  It would help give renewables the boost they need and may just avert the doomsday predictions of every Indian and Chinese driving a 1400kg oil-powered non-kinetic energy regeneration personal transport device (we call them cars).  Where are the international powers-that-be in all of this?

They say I'm a dreamer.  But I'm not the only one...

something I have already mentioned

Extract from the Moscow times
Global Eye
Dream Weaver
By Chris Floyd
Published: September 2, 2005
........

"""It was the one great fear that trumped all the others, the nightmare scenario that overrode reason, skepticism, and all political debate, stampeding the nation into war: the thought of terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction -- "dirty bombs" packed with cancerous nukestuff and gene-warping chemical poisons that would kill, maim and deform the innocent.

This was the horror that President George W. Bush and his supporters held up -- and still hold up -- before the American people as the moral imperative behind his invasion of Iraq, and the justification for any so-called "abuses" that might be committed in his desperate, noble, no-holds-barred defense of the realm against this ungodly terror.
.......

The country, of course, is Iraq, where the radical extremist George W. Bush has used more than 3,000 tons of depleted uranium -- the radioactive residue of atomic weapons production and nuclear plants -- in everything from missiles and bombs to rifle and pistol shells. As ITT notes, each DU explosion releases clouds of poison particles that disperse over a wide area and stay radioactive for billions [thousands: Gus correction] of years. This dispersal pattern means that the American soldiers handling and firing DU ammo -- or just walking through areas blasted by the shells -- get just as poisoned as the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians stricken by Bush's WMD.

Bush is now committing the same war crime that he himself cites as the prime example of Saddam Hussein's bottomless evil: using chemical weapons against his own people."""""

GUS NOTE: THE LATEST EDITION OF THE NEW INTERNATIONALIST IS NECESSARY READING

More spin-air

From the ABC

Study 'exposes flaws' in anti-nuclear energy debate
By Nick McKenzie for AM
A new study by a group of Melbourne scientists endorses the use of nuclear energy and attacks some of the data used by anti-nuclear campaigners.

GusBlab: This strange article carries on mentioning the "flawed belief that people who are against NE thinks there aren't enough uranium to go around..." What a lot of baloney! There is a lot of uranium to go everywhere and that's one of the problem. The other problem is that Uranium always mutate into plutonium when wiggled in a power-plant... as mentioned in these blogs above, NE is safest when kept in the ground...