Saturday, January 24, 2015

The Funny Thing About Nuclear Haters

Nuclear Power - In the USA it has been a bogey man ever since Three-mile island (TMI).  Never mind that TMI's accident was entirely a human fault.  The mere whiff of something bad maybe happening scared people unreasonably.  This is something special to nuclear power.

For example a gas turbine plant in Middletown CT exploded because of human error in purging some of the pipes and a malfunction in the safety system that happened prior to the safety valve.  It went off like a giant bomb but we don't talk about not building them because they *might* and *have* exploded in populated areas.

What happened at TMI was the result of mainly human error.  The system that did fail gave notice that it was failing and there was plenty of time for the engineers to act.  However they were ill trained and made mistakes.  Even so there was not a full meltdown of the core and only a small amount of coolant was leaked.  The coolant was water.  People under many guises of 'expertise' have somehow used human error as a reason why the technology itself is flawed.  Which of course is a red herring.  One must be careful to spot hidden agendas.

In the book 'Nuclear Roulette' (co written by Jerry Mander and Gar Smith) the authors mix fact, fiction and opinion.  Let us get some examples.

In regards to their preferred tech (solar power) they cite the Olmedilla de Alarcon solar plant in Alarcon, Spain.

Stated:  Build Cost of $350,000,000
Actual:  Build Cost of 385,000,000 ($530,000,000)
Error: Basic fact checking
Bias:  wishful thinking

Stated:  62MW capacity, 85 MWh Generation
Actual: 9.7MW/85MWh generation
Error: Lie of Omission
Bias:  Being intentionally obscure

The 60MW capacity is only achieving 16% of its generation capacity or 9.7/60MW
SOURCE

The reality is that it does have a potential of 60MW but many factors from dust to clouds to jet contrails and other obscure things prevent it from ever achieving anything even close to peak.  The authors of Nuclear Roulette decided that solar had to look good even though it is terrible.  Every square meter of the Olmedilla PV park generates 9 Watts of power.

To compare that to a similar sized gas turbine power plant of something under 100MW in capacity we get 4-5,000 watts of power per square meter.  The solar energy might seem attractive but the energy density is obscenely low.  Assuming 4,000W/M-sq that leaves a solar panel generating 0.00225 as much energy per square meter as the gas turbine. That is 0.225%.

Others spout much the same in terms of lies.  They then talk about doing with less.  De-industrializing.  These are the population control people, the ones who tell you that YOU will have to do without for the good of the planet.

The reality is that we have a solar system full of bounty.  We are doing a poor job of leveraging our early energy stores to gain access to greater stores and ignoring greater potential energies here on earth out of fear, ignorance and juvenile attention spans.

In their section describing the various alternative nuclear (Gen IV+) reactors some are described accurately and others are not.

Their molten salt reactor description is vague and filled with falsehoods.

"THE MOLTEN SALT REACTOR uses nuclear fuel dissolved in molten fluoride salt flowing into a graphite core. It requires super-durable structural materials and poses proliferation risks."

That is it.  The first sentence is accurate, but the term nuclear fuel is vague.  What nuclear fuel are they talking about?  Well it would be thorium in almost all cases.  The thorium fuel cycle is not only proliferation resistant due to the actual decay chain, but it produces many useful isotopes of other elements that we can make use of in science, industry and medicine.  On top of that the half life of many materials are in seconds and minutes or hours with none of them being longer than 70 years.  The materials with a 70 year life time are at the beginning of the cycle and can be kept in the reactor and re-used until in a less harmful state since this is a LIQUID fueled reactor.

Every other reactor type uses solid uranium oxide fuel except the traveling wave reactor.  That uses solid depleted uranium and is low pressure passively cooled.

The second sentence has the first part implying that the requirement for super-durable materials is somehow far too difficult to obtain to be worth the effort and the second part speaks about proliferation 'risks' without any discussion as to the actual level of risk (very low).

The super durable materials were created in the late 1950's and the specific one that is still used and available is called Hastelloy-N.  It is designed to be one of the most corrosion resistant alloys ever.  It was specifically engineered for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors.  The test reactors devised in the 1950's ran for 20,000 hours (nearly four years) without a hitch.  It was this initial reaction that gave us the plutonium (PU-238) that was used in the nuclear thermal batteries we used in our deep space probes.  We are out of that plutonium now.  That plutonium could not be used in nuclear weapons.  Plutonium is not found in nature.

People often enough govern their lives out of fear rather than knowledge.  This needs to be corrected.




Monday, January 05, 2015

WTF is a samoflange!

So the FBI is again pushing back against our civil liberties and this time in a hardcore manner.  The FBI's Assault On Freedom & Privacy is getting worse and worse as time goes on.  The FBI has never been great with civil liberties regardless of being at war or peace.  The FBI has recently complained that by allowing users to encrypt their cell phones that its harder for them to do their job because now they have to serve the target of the investigation with a warrant rather than a 3rd party service provider.  In fact in that article they demand backdoor access...that is artificial vulnerabilities in your personal devices.  If the FBI can access it so can anyone else with some skill and determination.

Oh that pesky 4th amendment.  Additionally the FBI and all police have had a 'set back' because the US Supreme Court ruled that cell phones are part of the person's and property that are regarded as private and secure without a warrant due mostly to how they have evolved into a more complex data storage and personal organization device in addition to entertainment and work related value.

This most recent decision on the part of the FBI coincides with many people taking notice of all of the fake cell towers in the DC area and around our military bases where everyone's traffic is captured and redirected without their knowledge through government or other third party run interception towers.  The sad fact is that a crypto-phone sells for 1,500 Euros...which at the current exchange rate is...$1,792.00.  Good luck getting your company to pay for that unless you're an executive and not too many people know enough or care enough much less can afford to spend enough to obtain one of these.  No major carrier stocks them.  The alternative is the Blackphone and retails for about $630 before taxes.  Again you cannot walk into your carrier's local store and get one as part of a contract.

People should stand up and take notice of how much the FBI wants into your personal life and reject it out of hand.  The FBI much like the IRS or the ATF has gotten out of control and unlike those other organizations congress has never chartered it.  The FBI is quite literally a rogue agency.