Nuclear Unclear Number Nine
The folks at Bloggingheads.tv have another glowing diavlog with John Horgan and Rod Adams. They talk about nuclear energy. Chamblee54 has written about these gentlemen twice. Mr. Adams thinks nuclear energy is safe, cost efficient, and just plain dandy. In this appearance, his moustache is no bigger, and he has a full beard to go with it. The new look works well.
As noted in the previous two posts, Mr. Adams is a master of rhetoric. He gets going along, throwing out twenty kiloton words like beads at a Mardi Gras parade. Before long, your eyes are glazing over. PG could only listen to sixteen minutes of the latest installment.
For those who are new here, PG is not totally anti nuke. The side effects of fossil fuels like oil and coal are considerable. In theory, nukes can be operated safely. It would require constant, corruption free oversight from somebody, usually a government of some sort. The problems of a mistake can be devastating. PG thinks solar is our best option, but realizes that it is not happening anytime soon in the you ess aa. There are no easy solutions, and a lot of problems any way you go.
Mr. Adams likes to respond to comments. This is in written form, and easy to paste into a blog post. Here is a comment from the recent discussion. “I’m pretty sure I did not claim that Fukushima cores were not melted. I did claim that only a small quantity of radioactive material would be released outside of the containments. I might have underestimated a little; but the quantities that were released really were tiny in physical terms when compared to the amount of material in the core or when compared to the billions of tons of waste products dumped every year as a result of fossil fuel combustion.”
Lets take a look at that. The size and weight of radioactive materials is not the problem. A relatively small plane was able to carry the nuke that destroyed Hiroshima. The problem with nukes is the radioactive juice contained in those small amounts of matter. The mass of the matter that was released at Fukushima is not the problem. Like the motivational slogan says, its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog. To compare the mass of the material released from Fukushima, to the millions of tons of CO2 released into the air every year by fossil fuels, is misleading.
In a verbal discussion, Mr. Adams throws factoids like this out one after another. He spices these statements with big words, which may, or may not, deserve to scare people. It can be a bit overwhelming. It is like the last line of this spam email “NOTE : If You Receive This Message In Your Junk Or Spam Its Due To Your internet Provider.”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Chamblee54 
It is misleading to compare the hazard of a small quantity of radioactive material to the hazard of a nuclear fission bomb that can release the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT in an instant. The material released from Fukushima did not hurt anyone and is unlikely to hurt anyone in the future.
Thank you for stopping by. I hope you are right about the material released from Fukushima.
Did everybody move back into the hoods near the plant ?
I guess I missed that…
I guess I also missed that nobody was harmed – I thought the emergency workers were impacted. I must be wrong about that perception, too.
I really think a combined approach is necessary. Even if one doesn’t care about CO2 emissions, or has doubts about the veracity of the science behind man made global warming, the fossil fuels ARE going to run-out someday…
Part of the problem in the US is that our electrical grid is a regional patchwork built more or less around the railroad and the petrochemical industries. We don’t shift power from coast to coast, even though we have that dandy time difference and even though the most expensive power is that peak power during certain times of the day. Fixing the grid would cost a trillion or two. The grid as it exists now, though it is being modified, is not sufficient for alternatives.
Geothermal could potentially solve a lot of problems; NV has enough capacity for the entire continent. But getting it out of NV with the existing grid, and developing and building geothermal plants also isn’t cheap.
California has the world’s largest geothermal plant. Reno has plants that supply enough power for all residential use. We have a “sun” that never goes down just a few miles under the earth’s crust.
Thanks for stopping by. I haven’t replied to any of your thoughtful comments yet. I will sooner or later.
It’s OK, I am happy to just know you exist. It’s comforting.