Links - 18th June 2019 (2) (Nuclear Power)

The Reason They Fictionalize Nuclear Disasters Like Chernobyl Is Because They Kill So Few People - "HBO’s “Chernobyl” writer and director, Craig Mazin, tweeted on April 8, “The lesson of Chernobyl isn’t that modern nuclear power is dangerous. The lesson is that lying, arrogance, and suppression of criticism are dangerous.”Mazin later told a reporter, “I’m pro-nuclear power, I think that nuclear power is essential to combat climate change.” He later agreed with a tweet that said Chernobyl could not happen in the US... Chernobyl’s total death toll is small compared to other famous disasters. According to the United Nations, 31 deaths are directly attributable to the accident. Three people died at the scene of the accident and 28 died several weeks later. Since then, 19 died for ”various reasons” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and trauma. The U.N. concluded that “the assignment of radiation as the cause of death has become less clear.”Accidental deaths are always tragic, but it’s worth putting them in perspective. The worst energy disaster, the collapse of a hydroelectric dam in China, killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people. The Bhopal chemical disaster killed 15,000.Even other fires are much worse. When Britain’s Grenfell tower caught fire in 2017, 71 people died. During the Twin Towers fires caused by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 343 firefighters died.What about cancers? There have been 20,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer in those aged under 18 at the time of the accident, and the UN’s most recent white paper from 2017 concludes that only 25%, i.e. 5,000, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation... Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be 50 to 160, with the vast majority of them occurring in the elderly.That’s it. There is no reliable evidence that radiation from Chernobyl caused an increase in any other disease or malady including birth defects... Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be 50 to 160, with the vast majority of them occurring in the elderly.That’s it. There is no reliable evidence that radiation from Chernobyl caused an increase in any other disease or malady including birth defects... The World Health Organization (WHO) calls the “psycho-social impacts” of Chernobyl the “main public health impact... the real insensitivity is to either exaggerate, or lead the public to exaggerate, the death toll of Chernobyl, and the potency of radiation, since doing so results in panics, like the one in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, which killed about 2,000 people. While some amount of temporary evacuation might have been justified, there was simply never any reason for such large, and long-term, displacement.“With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” said Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management who led a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”"

Nuclear power may have saved 1.8 million lives otherwise lost to fossil fuels, may save up to 7 million more. - "It’s worth noting that the authors consider only deaths and exclude from the model serious health crises such as heart failure, bronchitis and other respiratory problems; including these problems would further weaken the case for fossil fuels. The study also excludes aspects of nuclear power that cannot be easily quantified, such as deaths from nuclear proliferation... Of course it’s not just the deaths. All the fossil fuel sources replacing nuclear power would contribute a very significant concentration of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and severely aggravate the effects of climate change"

Storage of nuclear waste a 'global crisis' as stockpile reaches 250,000 tons, Greenpeace warns
250,000 tons of toxic nuclear waste is a global emergency!

More solar panels mean more waste and there’s no easy solution - "Solar panels might be the energy source of the future, but they also create a problem without an easy solution: what do we do with millions of panels when they stop working?In November 2016, the Environment Ministry of Japan warned that the country will produce 800,000 tons of solar waste by 2040, and it can’t yet handle those volumes. That same year, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that there were already 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide and that this number would grow to 78 million by 2050... Usually, panels are warrantied for 25 to 30 years and can last even longer. But as the solar industry has grown, the market has been flooded with cheaply made Chinese panels that can break down in as few as five years... Usually, panels are warrantied for 25 to 30 years and can last even longer. But as the solar industry has grown, the market has been flooded with cheaply made Chinese panels that can break down in as few as five years"
78 million tons of toxic solar waste is good for the environment!
Especially considering that solar energy has been responsible for so little of energy production (even in 2015 solar's output was minuscule, while nuclear had been steady for at least 20 years)

If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste? - "The problem of solar panel disposal “will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment” because it “is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.”...
“Contrary to previous assumptions, pollutants such as lead or carcinogenic cadmium can be almost completely washed out of the fragments of solar modules over a period of several months, for example by rainwater.”...
“I’ve been working in solar since 1976 and that’s part of my guilt,” the veteran solar developer told Solar Power World last year. “I’ve been involved with millions of solar panels going into the field, and now they’re getting old.”... today recycling costs more than the economic value of the materials recovered, which is why most solar panels end up in landfills... The problem with putting the responsibility for recycling or long-term storage of solar panels on manufacturers, says the insurance actuary Milliman, is that it increases the risk of more financial failures like the kinds that afflicted the solar industry over the last decade... somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of electronic waste is illegally traded and dumped in poor nations"
There's a fascinating chart showing that solar energy needs the most materials per TWh

Spent Nuclear Fuel is not the Problem - "Nuclear energy is distinguished from fossil energy by the remarkably small volume of spent fuel that nuclear energy generates, by the availability of practical technology to store and transport this spent fuel, and by the practicality to use deep geologic disposal to provide safe, long-term isolation. For the young generation today who must do most of the work to fix our energy infrastructure, it can be eye opening to work through the comparisons needed to place different risks into context. In doing this, they can rapidly find that analysts who describe spent fuel and the deep geologic disposal of radioactive waste as being “dangerous” never makecomparisons to risks posed by permanently hazardous chemicals."

2020 Democrats & Nuclear Power: Presidential Contenders Curious Disdain - "The Democrats’ disdain for nuclear energy deserves attention, because there is no credible pathway toward large-scale decarbonization that doesn’t include lots of it. That fact was reinforced Tuesday, when the International Energy Agency published a report declaring that without more nuclear energy, global carbon dioxide emissions will surge and “efforts to transition to a cleaner energy system will become drastically harder and more costly.”... The report makes it clear that solar and wind energy cannot fill the gap left by the decline of the nuclear sector. Among the reasons cited by the Paris-based agency is land-use conflicts, a problem that is evident in Europe and across the U.S. The IEA says that “resistance to siting wind and, to a lesser extent, solar farms is a major obstacle to scaling up renewables capacity.” To take one example, last month, in Illinois, the Dewitt County Board voted against a wind project that would have covered more than 12,000 acres of land with 67 wind turbines standing nearly 600 feet high. To take another, earlier this month, in Indiana, the Tippecanoe County Commission passed a zoning ordinance that prohibits the installation of industrial-scale wind turbines. By my count, since 2015, about 230 government entities from Maine to California have moved to reject or restrict wind projects. And an increasing number of rural communities are fighting large solar projects, too... At the same time that an increasing number of rural communities are fighting the encroachment of large-scale renewable projects, the U.S. is facing a wave of nuclear-reactor retirements... At the same time that an increasing number of rural communities are fighting the encroachment of large-scale renewable projects, the U.S. is facing a wave of nuclear-reactor retirements... In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that achieving deep cuts in emissions will “require more intensive use” of low-emission technologies “such as renewable energy [and] nuclear energy.”"

Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear Power Completely Renewable - "America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible... uranium extracted from seawater is replenished continuously, so nuclear becomes as endless as solar, hydro and wind... seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years."

Chernobyl has become a refuge for wildlife 33 years after the nuclear accident - "After the accident it was assumed that the area would become a desert for life. Considering the long time that some radioactive compounds take to decompose and disappear from the environment, the forecast was that the area would remain devoid of wildlife for centuries. But today, 33 years after the accident, the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which covers an area now in Ukraine and Belarus, is inhabited by brown bears, bisons, wolves, lynxes, Przewalski horses, and more than 200 bird species, among other animals... the area hosts great biodiversity. In addition, they confirmed the general lack of big negative effects of current radiation levels on the animal and plant populations living in Chernobyl. All the studied groups maintain stable and viable populations inside the exclusion zone."