WhiteBlue wrote:Plutonium is an artificially man made element with the deadliest properties thinkable. It does not exist in Nature unless man releases it. It radiates practically eternally due to a half life time of 200.000 years. Plutonium spontaneously explodes to Plutonium oxide when exposed to air and forms extremely fine dust that can travel several times around the globe once it is in the atmosphere. There is no safe human tolerance to inhalation of Plutonium oxide because even microgram dust particles will incorporate in the lungs and will release hard radiation causing lung cancer very quickly.
Due to its ultra poisonous properties Plutonium engineering, handling, re processing, transporting, storing and use is inherently unsafe and cannot be made safe. Each step of the cycle is faced with risks of releasing a material that once released to the ecosphere can never be recovered. Once the plutonium cycle is started it snowballs creating more and more contaminated material that has to be safely stored away from entry into the ecosphere for eternity. It is a lie that nuclear power producers have carried all costs of research, development, risk insurance, clean up and waste storage. Usually they have paid nothing at all for these services every other power generation would have to pay in my country. Considering the risks involved at all stages the insurance costs would be so high that you probably have to own half the planet to take that kind of risk on. Just imagine the finance cost of safeguarding the deposits of dangerous materials for many millions of years. The interest snowballs even at moderate rates into dimensions unthinkable.
Germany had a complete Plutonium breeding infrastructure including a 300 MW reactor ready to go in 1985. The breeding reactors are cooled with liquid metal alloys from sodium (Na) which ignites spontaneously on contact with air and react violently with water. This adds another risk dimension to the breeder technology that is already problematic. Sodium freezes at ambient temperatures making it very difficult to service reactors that develop any malfunctions. Costs of the German technology were some 20 billion Deutschmark before insurance and safe deposit. Public democratic protest reached such levels that the state government decided not to issue the license to load the first reactor charge and start production. After the Chernobyl disaster there will never be sufficient support in Germany to go back to Plutonium breeding. The reactor and the recycling facility were dismantled.
People who argue pro plutonium use in the the power generation industry are either dumb, mentally ill or they lie.
So, you are a victim of the plutonium myth!
Actually, plutonium is found in nature, even though in very small quantities and then only the Pu-244 isotope (half life 80 million years). Other isotopes of plutonium have existed in nature, but due to their shorter half life they are gone today.
Secondly, plutonium have been safely handled for over 60 years. It's toxicity have been studied, so have it's radioactivity, and there is no support for the claims you make. It's not particulary more toxic than some other toxic compound we safely handle today, and it's generally poorly absorbed by the body. There are no known deaths caused by plutonium toxicity or radiation, and there are plenty of people that have been subjected to high doses.
The amounts of plutonium that would need to be handled are also quite small, and mostly in non flammable nitride, oxide or similar ceramic form. But plutonium is not the only element that is toxic but still have it's place in energy production or to improve energy efficiency. Solar cells for instance often contain toxic materials, cadmium and selenium comes to mind. Perhaps less toxic, but they will also be much more widely handled than plutonium, and might easlily end up at a waste dump somwhere and pollute the local groundwater. Does that mean solar sells are a bad thing?
Pu-239, the most common isotope, have a half life of 24,200 years, not the 200,000 years you claim, and it's an alpha emitter, so it's radioactivity is only harmful if ingested or inhaled. Due to the long halflife, the radioactivity is also quite low. It is possible to handle plutonium in metal or ceramic form unprotected without putting oneself in any particular danger, although that is probably unwise.
It's also true that nuclear power plants have lower external costs than most other electricity production methods. Meaning, most of the costs caused by nuclear power are included in the production cost. A US study also concluded that the government subsidies per produced kWh were among the lowest for nuclear power, while highest for non hydro renewables.
The costs of storing the waste isn't a problem either. Most of the radioactivity is gone already after 400 years, but if we say that we need to store the waste 250,000 years, that is more than ten half lives for plutonium, that is hardly no time at all based on the age of the bedrock that in places are 2 billion years old. That it works to store these materials in the bedrock has also been shown by the natural reactors in Oklo. But if we recycle the plutonium, there wouldn't be any need to store these long lived transuranics as they would be used as fuel and turned into fission products, mostly of them short lived. France have successfully reprocessed and recycled uranium and plutonium for decades now.
Russia have operated a sodium cooled fast reactor (BN-600) since 1980, and all incidents have only been low level on the INES scale. The japanese have also bought the drawings of this reactor design. The russians have also operated a number of lead cooled fast reactors in their Alfa class submarines which unlike sodium does not react with water, and unlike water can't cause steam explosions. Over the years, different countries have built a number of fast reactors which would be used to breed plutonium. The lead cooled, the sodium cooled and the gas cooled reactor are also the three fast reactor types that are part of the gen iv program.
Insurance costs for nuclear power plants are also quite low. When you assess risk there are two factors that you need to consider. The cost of an average incident, and how often such an incident occur. While nuclear accidents can be costly, they are extremly rare, hence the cost is low.
xpensive wrote:The biggest energy hoax in history is on the other hand those hideous windmills, which unreliably delivers pathetically little energy for its investment. In Scandinavia we calculate 2.5 MEUR per installed MW, but then utilization grade is only 25% at the very best and most stocastic, why you need the same energy investment from a reliable source as back-up anyway. The new Olkiluoto EPR reactor in Finland will deliver a reliable 17 GW at more than 90% utilization. Go figure.
In Sweden it is expected that a tenfold increase in wind power would cost some 10 billion SEK annually (about 1 billion euro) in subsidies. The Finns paid 3 billion euro for the EPR I think, which can produce electricity at market prices with a profit.
Most studies also conclude that aside from hydro, nuclear provides the cheapest electricity. Not too bad given that it also have emissions and loss of years life similar to wind.
