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Cost and safety dangers should rule out nuclear power for the Philippines

Going nuclear, (The Philippine Star ) – October 3, 2020,  As if the country didn’t have enough disasters, certain quarters still haven’t given up on harnessing nuclear power for electricity. The idea is to revive the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, built during the Marcos dictatorship. The BNPP was mothballed after the 1986 people power revolt because of a corruption scandal and safety concerns arising from the fact that it sits on an earthquake fault connected to the dormant Mount Natib volcano in Bataan.

A report this year placed the cost of reviving the BNPP, as estimated by a foreign group, at $3 billion to $4 billion. Reviving it will go against a trend in other countries to reduce nuclear power in their energy mix, because of safety concerns in the power plants as well as the risks posed by nuclear waste, which remains radioactive and cannot be destroyed or recycled……..

Like Japan, the Philippines sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire. Before the start of this year’s pandemic, Taal Volcano’s powerful phreatic explosion emptied surrounding communities, displaced thousands and blanketed towns and cities all the way to Metro Manila with toxic, suffocating ash. Earthquakes and aftershocks continue to be recorded in Taal, with seismologists warning of the possibility of a cataclysmic eruption.

If the BNPP is revived, at great cost to a cash-strapped government, what happens if Mount Natib also acts up, or if an earthquake hits Bataan? If all the proponents of nuclear energy will live together with their immediate families near the BNPP – and not just for show, buying a house nearby while the kids live in an exclusive village far from harm’s way – then by all means, go ahead with the project. https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2020/10/03/2046802/editorial-going-nuclear

October 3, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, Philippines, politics, safety | Leave a comment

Nano diamond batteries from nuclear waste? Impractical and not likely to ever happen

Arkenlight “surprised” by NDB’s grand nuclear diamond battery claims, New Atlas By Loz Blain, September 30, 2020  Totally safe, self-charging batteries that generate power for thousands of years … It’s an exciting thought, and when we wrote about California’s NDB in August, the story generated all kinds of feedback. A lot of people felt some of NDB’s claims were outrageously false, contravening the laws of physics and vastly overstating the capabilities of a device that was already well understood.

To briefly recap, the device in question is what NDB calls the nano diamond battery. This is also known as the nuclear diamond battery, a technology first developed at the University of Bristol. The concept is this: you take particular types of nuclear waste from nuclear power stations – specifically parts of the graphite moderators and reflectors that have been exposed to fuel rod radiation and that have themselves become radioactive in the form of carbon-14. ………
The claims that caused the uproar were around the technology’s utility in consumer devices. NDB representatives told us in an interview that if the company made one of these cells the same size as an iPhone battery, “it would charge your battery from zero to full, five times an hour,” for decades. They said they could replace the battery in a Tesla electric car with something slightly more powerful that’d last some 90 years without ever needing a charge, and would come in cheaper than a standard Tesla battery……..
Commenters – and indeed YouTube debunkers – called us out for publishing these claims, saying that carbon-14 simply can’t produce energy fast enough to be useful in a device that requires sustained high power draws. The diamond part of the battery would charge up the supercapacitor so slowly, they pointed out, that either you’d need a much, much larger quantity of it, or you’d need to find applications that give the supercapacitor a long time to charge itself up between high-power discharges. The idea of using one in a phone or a car, they said, was laughable.

IWe ended up having a very informative chat with Morgan Boardman, an Industrial Fellow and Strategic Advisory Consultant with the Aspire Diamond Group at the South West Nuclear Hub of the University of Bristol.

He is also – and this is much less of a tongue twister – the CEO of a new company called Arkenlight, which has been created to commercialize the Bristol team’s diamond battery technologies, among other radioisotope-driven power sources.

In short, Boardman broadly agreed with the position that these “betabatteries” produce power far too slowly to replace the cells in your iPhone or Tesla; yes, you could build a betabattery for a phone or a vehicle, but only if you’re prepared to have the battery be several times the size of the device it’s powering.

What’s more, he pointed out that the University of Bristol took out patents covering all devices that embed radioisotopes in diamond structures, and that Arkenlight now holds those patents. So if NDB is talking about using the same kind of nuclear diamond technology – which it sure sounds like it is – it could have some licensing issues ahead of it.

So it seems it’s time to pump the brakes on some of NDB’s more exciting claims  ……….. https://newatlas.com/energy/arkenlight-nuclear-diamond-batteries/

October 3, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, Reference, technology, USA | Leave a comment

In September, French nuclear production reached its second lowest level on record

Montel News 1st Oct 2020, French nuclear production in September reached its second lowest level on
record – also its second lowest this year – at 21.6 TWh, down 21.5%
compared to 2019, while outages several reactors have been extended, RTE
data said Thursday. Nuclear output last month was thus slightly higher, by
0.3 TWh, the lowest recorded in June, at 21.3 TWh, according to Montel’s
calculations. And it has decreased by 1.2 TWh compared to August. On
average, nuclear represented 68.4% of electricity production in France,
against 69% in August.  https://www.montelnews.com/fr/story/production-nuclaire-%C3%A0-un-2me-plus-bas-record-en-septembre/1153335

October 3, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, France | Leave a comment

Two new appeals against the Flamanville EPR

La Presse de la Manche 2nd Oct 2020, Nuclear: two new appeals against the Flamanville EPR. Several associations
have decided to seize the Council of State in order to cancel the decree
extending the construction of the Flamanville EPR until 2024. On March 25,
in the confinement, the government issued a decree extending to 2024 the
validity of the creation authorization decree of the EPR in Flamanville,
which set earlier in April 2020 its deadline for commissioning.
In a press release, several associations (“Sortir du nuclear” network, Greenpeace
France, France Nature Environnement Normandy, Crilan, Stop EPR neither in
Penly nor elsewhere) “strongly denounce this government obstinacy in
tolerating the continuation of this catastrophic project.”

https://actu.fr/normandie/flamanville_50184/nucleaire-deux-nouveaux-recours-contre-l-epr-de-flamanville_36493945.html

October 3, 2020 Posted by | France, opposition to nuclear | Leave a comment

Refuting the nuclear lobby’s nonsense on risks of ionising radiation

Clean Technica 28th Sept 2020, Recently, a report appeared on BBC News, titled “Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?” It has been re-posted or restated at a number of news sites since. It says that 28 people died as a direct result of the Fukushima explosion and exposure to the immediateradiation. It goes on to say that there were 15 deaths in the region from thyroid cancer. And the conclusion that it bases on these figures is specifically stated: “[A]ccording to the UN in 2005, just 43 deaths could be directly attributed to the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever seen.”

Really? Just 43 deaths? And this is according to the UN? There is a lot of well documented material on the Chernobyl Disaster available. One article at Wikipedia is, “Deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster.” It states, “[T]here is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of projected deaths due to the disaster’s long-term health effects; long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe.”

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/09/28/is-nuclear-power-as-safe-as-the-bbc-claims/

October 3, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, spinbuster | Leave a comment

The human cost of the Trump pandemic response? More than 100,000 unnecessary deaths. — limitless life

The human cost of the Trump pandemic response? More than 100,000 unnecessary deaths. By Michael Riordan, September 30, 2020  President Trump, joined by Vice President Pence and CDC director Robert R. Redfield, takes questions during a Coronavirus Task Force update on February 29, 2020. Credit: White House photo by D. Myles Cullen In early January 2018, […]

The human cost of the Trump pandemic response? More than 100,000 unnecessary deaths. — limitless life

October 3, 2020 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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