Horoscope II drew little attention from the media machine because the alleged collapse of Soviet military might has made it out of date. That is why the media are much more interested in the panics over global warming, clean air and ozone depletion.
As shown in several previous issues, there is little evidence for global warming, and less for man-made (or indeed, natural) CO
2 as its cause; but there is plenty of evidence to contradict the hypothesis on both historical and theoretical grounds. The Water-melon Church [AtE Feb 90] has been clamoring about the alleged threat nevertheless, and ritualistic international agreements on curtailing fossil fuel burning are now being considered by the Bush-Thatcher type wimps as a way to build political coalitions. However, even if the danger were real, the obvious answer would be an accelerated switch to nuclear power, and the evasion of this telling point is evidently damaging to the Green Priests' credibility,for of late they have attempted to dispute the superior environmental properties of nuclear power.Sister Bertell's profound argument that nuclear plants cause acid rain and emit CO
2 because they use diesel generators as stand-by emergency sources says more about the intellectual level of the professional antinukes than about air pollution, and I will not insult readers by dwelling on it.Kendall's radical-left, antinclear and well-heeled Union of Concerned Scientists is pushing the greenhouse panic with mass mailings "The heat is on," urging conservation, "soft" energy, and claiming that nuclear power is no solution because of alleged safety and waste problems. The latter are due entirely to the obstruction by UCS-type organizations, for there are no substan-tial unsolved technical problems in nuclear waste disposal. What the UCS approves of by default is waste disposal in human lungs; in the same spirit, the UCS, the NRDC, and the other obstruc-tionist organizations (now joined by Reilly's EPA) refuse to com-pare the safety of nuclear power to the safety of what produces electricity now.
Next, we have the "explanation" that nuclear power may deliver us from greenhouse doom only at the cost of polluting the environ-ment with uranium tailings. This is the type of argument working on the listener's ignorance, for the exact opposite is true. The radioactivity of uranium itself is exceedingly weak; its main radioactive effect is the production of radon. The great majority of uranium is mined from shallow deposits where it produces radon that bubbles up into the atmosphere for the life of the uranium (halflife 4.6 billion years) unless the uranium is removed by mining it. In that case its useful part is turned into heat and light before it decays into radon; the tailings, on the other hand, are by present law so screened by a deep ground cover that only negligible amounts of radon can reach the atmosphere. Mining uranium, then, cleanses the earth of radioactivity, the bumpersticker "Uranium: leave it in the ground!" is the equivalent of "Garbage: leave it where it is!"
And finally there is the hoax that the nuclear power cycle produces an increase in atmospheric CO
2 via power plant con- struction and fuel manufacture. Let us assume (wrongly and generously) that the energy needed for both is supplied only by coal-fired power, the biggest producer of CO2 per unit electric energy delivered. Then the amount of eliminated CO2 during the life of the plant can, first of all, be judged from the following figures for1) the yield ratio, the amount of energy produced by an energy source per energy invested in its construction and operation, and
2) the energy pay-back time, or time needed to produce the total energy invested in the construction of the source (in months):
Nuclear: yield ratio 108, payback 2.2 months; coal-fired plant 71.4, 3.4 m.; wind generator 15, 12 m.; photovoltaics (pv), monocrystal 2, 123 m.; pv, multicrystal 2, 120 m.; pv, amorphous 3, 80 m.
These numbers (1) demolish the hoax, but then, the entire idea of global warming is highly improbable. What is indisputable, how-ever, is the elimination of dangerous air pollution by a 1,000 MW nuclear power plant in kilotons (thousands of tons) per year. The columns in the table below are for sulfur oxides, nitrous oxides, particulates, and carbon monoxide (toxic), as well as carbon dioxide (main greenhouse gas). The table is based on EPA data (2); see also a recent USCEA publication (3).
You might want to send this table to your congressman grand-standing in the upcoming debate on Bush's coercive and wasteful clean-air proposals.
[1] W. German newsletter Argumente, published by Siemens-KWU. [2] Compilation of air pollutant emission factors, vol. 1, US EPA, AP-42, Sept. 1985. [3] Reducing airborne emissions with nuclear electricity, by Science Concepts, December 1989, free from USCEA, 1776 I St., NW/#400, Washington, DC 20006.
TABLE
Airborne emissions in thousands of tons per year
Source SOx NOx Particlts. CO CO2
coal 65.0 25 120 .7 1,600
natural gas < 15 < 1.1 900
residual oil 31.0 13 .6 1,300
wood .35 6.5 31 60 1,300
nuclear 0 0 0 0 O
nuclear/coal* 2.5 1 4 < 60
< less than 0.1 kt/y (100 tons/year).
* Nuclear fuel manufacture assuming use of coal-fired power only.
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Vol. 17, No. 7
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 17, No. 7 Date: December 01, 2004 03:31 PM Title: Trading fur coats
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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