Nuclear power – the economic and safety facts

The Truth About Nuclear Power emphasizes the economic and safety aspects by showing that

modern nuclear power plants are uneconomic to operate compared to natural gas and wind energy,
they produce preposterous pricing if they are the sole power source for a grid,
they cost far too much to construct,
use far more water for cooling, 4 times as much, than better alternatives,
nuclear fuel makes them difficult to shut down and requires very costly safeguards,
they are built to huge scale of 1,000 to 1,600 MWe or greater to attempt to reduce costs via economy of scale,
an all-nuclear grid will lose customers to self-generation,
smaller and modular nuclear plants have no benefits due to reverse economy of scale,
large-scale plants have very long construction schedules even without lawsuits that delay construction,
nuclear plants do not reach 50 or 60 years life because they require costly upgrades after 20 to 30 years that do not always perform as designed,
France has 85 percent of its electricity produced via nuclear power but it is subsidized, is still almost twice as expensive as prices in the US, and is only viable due to exporting power at night rather than throttling back the plants during low demand,
nuclear plants cannot provide cheap power on small islands,
US nuclear plants are heavily subsidized but still cannot compete,
projects are cancelled due to unfavorable economics, reactor vendors are desperate for sales, nuclear advocates tout low operating costs and ignore capital costs, nuclear utilities never ask for a rate decrease when building a new nuclear plant, and high nuclear costs are buried in a large customer base,
safety regulations are routinely relaxed to allow the plants to continue operating without spending the funds to bring them into compliance,
many, many near-misses occur each year in nuclear power, approximately one every 3 weeks,
safety issues with short term, and long-term, storage of spent fuel,
safety hazards of spent fuel reprocessing,
health effects on people and other living things,
nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island,
nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima,
nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima,
near-disaster at San Onofre,
the looming disaster at St. Lucie,
the inherently unsafe characteristics of nuclear power plants required government shielding from liability, or subsidy, for the costs of a nuclear accident via the Price-Anderson Act, and
the serious public impacts of large-scale population evacuation and relocation after a major incident, or “extraordinary nuclear occurrence” in the language used by the Price-Anderson Act. Additional articles will include
the future of nuclear fusion,
future of thorium reactors,
future of high-temperature gas nuclear reactors, and
a concluding chapter with a world-wide economic analysis of nuclear reactors and why countries build them. Links to each article in TANP series are included at the end of this article. http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-28.html

1.This Month

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Arctic-Sea Ice Collapse: Greenland Vulnerability; Global Sea-Level Rise; Extreme Weather Mayhem

How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

PETITION

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nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope