As Curt Stager and other researchers like him have determined, the material will be suspended in our atmosphere and affecting our climate for at least 100,000 years. Many of the effects are somewhat unpredictable and not terribly beneficial. The duration of the effect gets worse if we continue on our present course and speed. An unaltered dependence on fossil fuels also puts future generations at risk of trying to figure out how to operate an economy WITHOUT access to reliable sources of controlled heat.

The twin attributes of supply sustainability and climate change mitigation are nuclear fission power advantages topics that have attracted some high profile converts (Mark Lynas, George Monbiot, James Hansen, Stewart Brand, Gwyneth Cravens, and Patrick Moore, for example) to the cause of pronuclear advocacy. If nuclear energy’s potential as a climate change mitigation strategy is something that attracts former antinuclear protesters and causes them to reevaluate their opposition, that alone makes it something worth emphasizing

It was interesting to hear that the primary nuclear technology that Curt mentions as being worth aggressive pursuit is based on thorium, but I am pretty sure that is mainly because thorium evangelists have done a better job of guerilla marketing since 2005 than the people who have been refining uranium-based nuclear reactors for the past 5 decades.

As I often to tell my thorium enthused friends – you cannot build or operate a thorium reactor without uranium. I also tell both my buddies who are thorium advocates and my integral fast reactor (IFR) friends that any atomic fission power plants is better than any hydrocarbon based power plant. I hope that someday soon, fission fans will stop engaging in fratricidal attacks on each other, but I guess I have always been a bit of a dreamer

I have been involved in the financial analysis of enough large projects to know that there are two sure ways to add cost to any project. The first method is to add delay

The second method is to add lawyers to the mix; they are professionally motivated to argue and delay. After all, they bill by the minute.

Here is the response that I posted in the comment section of Ms. Smith’s Wall Street Journal article.The sad part of the story was the apparent lack of understanding by the project detractors of the impact of their actions on the cost of the project. The length of time spent building the plant will have a very real impact on the cost of the project due to the fact that more time means more salaries, more interest on borrowed money, and a greater chance of increased prices for materials and equipment purchased and installed at a later time than planned.

Maintaining projected costs and schedules is highly dependent on the actions of regulators and intervenors who continue to slow down progress with legalistic arguments that have nothing to do with safety. The issues that the regulators raised are related to a difference of technical opinion on whether or not is reasonable to neglect the impact of solar heating and cooling while modeling the behavior of the containment building after an accident that releases 600 F water and steam into the building.

Westinghouse went back and recalculated the impact of the minor term in the equation – the final result was that under absolutely worst case conditions, the final pressure inside the containment went up by about 0.3 psi and was still well below the building’s allowed maximum pressure.

The current Chairman of the NRC is a professional political staffer whose complete professional experience following college was working for two avowed antinuclear politicians. He has cost taxpayers in 31 states billions already with his decision to refuse to finish the Yucca Mountain license review; now he is aiming to cost Georgia ratepayers and GA Power investors (remember, utility investors are often widows and orphans) hundreds of millions to billions more. He took the unprecedented step of issuing a press release calling Westinghouse’s application into question over such a technical dispute regarding the significance of terms in a mathematical model.

Americans need to know just how job unfriendly the NRC Chairman is.Full disclosure – I work for a company that is designing nuclear reactors that will soon need to be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I fear for my long term employment and that of hundreds of my colleagues and neighbors.

Ben has produced and continues to refine a PowerPoint Presentation that is worth a look. He calls it Nuclear Power from Opponent to Proponent and he is working to find ever larger audiences to hear him tell that story.

His most recent post is titled Why pro-nuclear has failed when anti-nuclear has succeeded. It is an intriguing essay that points out a key factor – the antinuclear message is so simple that it can be stated in a single word that can be grasped and repeated by any two-year-old – “NO”. That is a message that is easy to propagate. In contrast, Ben believes that nuclear supporters have never developed a strong sales message.

Your analysis leaves open an important question whose answer offers the key to pronuclear success – “Why?”

Here is a copy of the comment that I left on Decarbonise SA

The mission of the antinuclear movement is clear enough, as you stated. It is a simple “NO”. However, pronuclear activists hand that opposition all of the moral strength that they need by accepting the premise that the basis for the “NO” is fear of radiation or fear of the bomb or fear of the possibility of a massively damaging accident that never seems to actually happen.

The real strength of the opposition to nuclear comes from the people who derive their wealth and power from the whole range of economic activities required to extract, refine, transport, distribute and consume the hydrocarbons that produce the emissions that you want to stop. Fossil fuel pushers have a fundamental reason for disliking clean, concentrated, abundant, affordable nuclear energy. They hold sway in a LOT of decision making bodies that can delay nuclear projects and add to their cost. They have influence in the media due to their continuous use of paid advertising campaigns sustained over many decades. They have influence in foundations that have been formed from fossil fuel derived wealth and they have influence in powerful unions like those associated with the railroads that derive most of their steady income from moving bulky fuels like oil and coal.

Your message of DecarboniseSA scares the heck out of the very rich and powerful people who are rich and powerful because THEY SELL CARBON!

The real way to defeat the “NO” to nuclear energy is to find people who benefit from “YES” to nuclear energy. The fuel suppliers have concentrated strength, but the majority of the world’s population does not supply fuel; they consume fuel and have to pay high prices, accept nasty pollution, and suffer through periods of supply constraints. Some of those consumers are major corporations in their own right and have a lot of sway – they just need to be told (over and over again) why fission is so much better than combustion.

Japan’s cabinet has approved draft legislation to help the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to compensate victims of the radiation crisis around the Fukushima plant.

In a statement on Tuesday Tepco said that it hoped the bill would be approved by parliament as soon as possible and that it will pay fair and speedy compensation payments

During the six-hour meeting shareholders shouting at managers over their handling of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster and the company’s subsequent slide to near bankruptcy.

One attendee suggested the board “jump into the reactors and die,” before being forced by security guards to sit down. Another said the board would have been forced to perform ritual disembowelment had they lived in an era when such actions were deemed necessary to preserve honour.

The Fukushima disaster has erased close to 90 percent of the value of TEPCO stock, once considered a safe investment. In May, the company reported an annual loss of 10.4 billion euros

TEPCO’s biggest shareholders – including Japanese financial institutions – rejected the call to close all its nuclear plants which generate nearly a third of the company’s electricity.

“We lost today to the big investors, but our message was heard,” said Masafumi Asada, a 70-year-old from Fukushima, who introduced the anti-nuclear proposal on behalf of a group of 402 shareholders.

Meanwhile, Japan has a new Reconstruction Minister, Naoto Kan. He replaces Ryu Matsumoto who resigned after just a week in the job over remarks that offended survivors of the quake and tsunami

After the crisis at the Fukushima plant, the EU began safety checks all of its 143 reactors. It is urging similar inspections worldwide

Indonesia has signed contracts for 2.3 gigawatts of plants, Bloomberg New Energy Finance data show. A gigawatt is about equal to the output of a new atomic reactor, and requires $2 billion to $4 billion of investment. “There’s a remarkable opportunity for Indonesia to increase the amount of power generated from geothermal,” says Stephen W. Green, former head of Chevron’s Indonesia and Philippines operations and now its vice-president of policy, government, and public affairs. “There are synergies between oil and geothermal and it makes sense for us to exploit that.”

Unocal negotiated Indonesia’s first foreign-partnership geothermal license in 1982 with the help of U.S. President Barack Obama’s late stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who worked for the U.S. company as a government liaison. Chevron acquired Unocal in 2005. At the plant in Java, which lies inside a nature preserve, hot water and steam are pumped from as deep as 10,535 feet below the earth’s surface through 34 miles of pipes to turn turbines to make power. Each well takes as much as 90 days to drill and costs up to $7 million, Chevron says. The company is now planning additional plants in Indonesia, including a potential 200-MW facility in South Sumatra.

With nuclear power out of favor, the number of academic institutions offering degrees shrank to 32 in 2010 from 77 in 1975, according to the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. Bachelor’s degrees awarded in nuclear engineering fell to 120 in 2001, from 863 in 1978. Power companies and engineering schools redoubled their recruiting efforts in recent years to replace retiring baby boomers and staff the 34 new plants that were on the drawing boards as of 2009. Urged by two utilities with nuclear ambitions in Texas—South Texas Project and Exelon (EXC) —Texas A&M University in College Station launched the Nuclear Power Institute in 2008 to spearhead a statewide effort to train 2,000 nuclear workers, boost math and science programs at high schools, and develop a new two-year nuclear training degree with community colleges based near eight proposed new plants.

The Nuclear Power Institute has graduated its first two classes of technicians, yet Peddicord worries that the weak economy and the growing uncertainty overhanging a U.S. nuclear expansion will depress interest in the program. The partners in two new reactors planned for nearby Bay City— NRG Energy (NRG) and Tokyo Electric Power, operator of the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant—yanked funding for the project after the disaster. “The real test will come in the fall, when we look at enrollment,” he says.

The bottom line: Nuclear plants in the U.S. need to recruit some 25,000 new workers by 2016. Japan’s nuclear crisis has made reaching that goal harder.

Japan has no easy options to replace nuclear power, which before the crisis supplied about 30 percent of its electricity, one reason the government is rushing to persuade communities to restart halted reactors to meet summer demand.

Promoting renewable sources will take years and burning more fossil fuel use is costly and contributes to global warming

For towns and cities such as Tsuruga, where Japan's first commercial reactor came on line in 1970, the dilemma is a more personal one after decades during which the government promoted nuclear power as clean, cheap and safe while locating reactors in rural backwaters eager for economic windfalls.

"They talked about the firm bedrock, but the reason they picked regions like this was because there are fewer people to die," said coffee shop operator Kazuya Ueyama, noting that power generated in Fukui supplied western Japanese urban centres.

with local jobs heavily reliant on nuclear plants and town finances addicted to nuclear subsidies and tax revenues, not many in host towns are willing to speak out.

A Tsuruga city assembly panel in late June adopted a statement urging the promotion of renewable energy but withdrew it within days after the resolution was characterised in media as anti-nuclear. "This is a town that cannot speak out," said assembly member Harumi Kondaiji.

But critics warn that the recovery process is fraught with dangers because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium, a highly flammable substance, to cool the nuclear fuel.

The Monju reactor, which forms the cornerstone of a national project by resource-poor Japan to reuse and eventually produce nuclear fuel, shows the tensions between the scale of Japan’s nuclear ambitions and the risks

On June 7, there was a fire -- apparently unrelated to the flooding -- in an electrical switchgear room at Fort Calhoun. For about 90 minutes, the pool where spent fuel is stored had no power for cooling. OPPD reported that "offsite power remained available, as well as the emergency diesel generators if needed." But the incident was yet another reminder of the plant's potential vulnerability

And so, Fort Calhoun remains on emergency alert because of the flood -- which is expected to worsen by early next week. On June 9, the Army Corps of Engineers announced PDF that the Missouri River would crest at least two feet higher in Blair than previously anticipated

The Fort Calhoun plant has never experienced a flood like this before

this spring, heavy rains and high snowpack levels in Montana, northern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas have filled reservoirs to capacity, and unprecedented releases from the dams are now reaching Omaha and other cities in the Missouri River valley. Floodgates that haven't been opened in 50 years are spilling 150,000 cubic feet per second -- enough water to fill more than a hundred Olympic-size swimming pools in one minute. And Fort Calhoun isn't the only power plant affected by flooding on the Missouri: The much larger Cooper Nuclear Station in Brownville, Nebraska, sits below the Missouri's confluence with the Platte River -- which is also flooding. Workers at Cooper have constructed barriers and stockpiled fuel for the plant's three diesel generators while, like their colleagues at Fort Calhoun, they wait for the inevitable.

The cesium absorption subsystem is set up inside the Central Waste Processing Facility. There are 4 rows of 6 cylinders that contain cesium absorption material [zeolite], and when the radiation level reaches 4 millisieverts/hour the cylinders are to be replaced. According to TEPCO, the system started the full run at 8PM on June 17, but the worker who was remote-operating the system noticed that the radiation measurement device on the surface of the cesium absorption cylinders was 4.7 millisieverts/hour.

The study was commissioned by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, which is jointly funded by the British government and the car industry. It found that a mid-size electric car would produce 23.1 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, compared with 24 tonnes for a similar petrol car. Emissions from manufacturing electric cars are at least 50 per cent higher because batteries are made from materials such as lithium, copper and refined silicon, which require much energy to be processed.

Many electric cars are expected to need a replacement battery after a few years. Once the emissions from producing the second battery are added in, the total CO2 from producing an electric car rises to 12.6 tonnes, compared with 5.6 tonnes for a petrol car. Disposal also produces double the emissions because of the energy consumed in recovering and recycling metals in the battery. The study also took into account carbon emitted to generate the grid electricity consumed.