Is Nuclear Power Really The Solution?
Prepare yourselves, nuclear lobbyists are about to get enraged
If you’ve been reading Conservative and Alt. media outlets, you’ve probably been sold the repeated flailing nuclear industry claim that nuclear power is the solution to, well… everything, whether it is the climate alarmism or the Ukraine war.
The Daily Beagle is here to shatter this belief (boo, evil Daily Beagle, how dare you challenge the status quo of preconceived notions), and for people who genuinely believe it is the solution this will be painful, but it will also be the truth.
The Daily Beagle can categorically state, unlike other outlets, we don’t care what power supply you use, so long as the choice is informed. And informed you will be. Contrast, our article will use specifics, compared to heavily emotional appeals from supporting articles.
It Isn’t Independent From Russia
I think the first Captain Obvious point everyone can likely agree on is the fact it isn’t actually independent from Russia. France tried to get their media outlets to issue a hitpiece insisting French nuclear imports did not come from Russia:
The only problem with this, is it is categorically false, and the hitpiece article insisting to the contrary, magically disappeared. Oops.
This isn’t just a ‘France only’ problem. Germany used to have uranium mines which were environmentally destructive (we’ll return to that later), and as a result have since been closed, but now Germany imports Uranium from a number of countries, including, surprise, Russia:
Readers might also cast their mind back to the Hillary Clinton Uranium One scandal that resulted in absolutely nothing happening in terms of justice or law enforcement.
For those not familiar, the shortstop is Hillary - as part of Obama’s Head of the US State Department - approved the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom (a Russian atomic energy firm) for $145 million.
So, not only do the Russians control their own export market, but they also gained control of the Akdala, South Inkai, Karatau, Akbastau and Kharasan uranium mines in Kazakhstan, the Willow Creek uranium mine in the US, and the Mkuju River uranium project in Tanzania (although Uranium One later applied to suspend Mkuju River operations).
39.3 percent of Uranium used in European plants comes from either Russia or their allies, specifically Kazakhstan. Former Eastern bloc countries who are nearer, this percentage is higher. Russia also has the world’s largest uranium enrichment capacity.
This ignores the fact that oil and gas serve specific purposes nuclear power simply cannot fulfil, such as petrol and diesel powering cars and lorries, A1 grade jet fuel for planes, plastics, bitumen for tarmac, fertiliser production from excess hydrogen from gas for food growth, household gas boilers and cookers, and more.
This means, no, nuclear power does not grant independence from Russian imports (even if you assume a 100% electricity generation ratio), of either gas, oil or indeed uranium itself.
It Isn’t Environmentally Sound, Either
Personally, I don’t think there should be any appeals to climate alarmism, given there’s obvious signs it is a scam, however I cannot sit idly by whilst false claims are made literally calling nuclear power a “holy grail” in false idol worship as if it has zero flaws (a delusion I’d normally see in vaccine cultists).
Typically the nuclear lobby will be selective and carefully say the words that generation is “green” with weird, flowery, emotional language:
They argue because generation is CO2-free (“green”), the entire operation must be environmentally sound, by following out-of-sight, out-of-mind policies of just not talking about it.
Not so — and the fact they avoid covering the end-to-end process of waste management should alarm sensible minds something odd is afoot.
It’s a very selective term, ‘generation’. Nuclear power isn’t just power generation, nor is the environmental considerations purely on generation. Advocates might be confusing it with renewables, which don’t use any conventional fuel and thus only have point of generation as the surface area to attack.
However nuclear power has the environmental issues of mining, milling, enrichment, plant construction, plant maintenance, uranium transport, security and very long term storage to consider. In-debting our children to maintain for 100,000 years is surely worth it you guys.
Stanford went in-depth on the issues with mining, on account you need large, expensive, oil fueled machinery to drill large holes, use large quantities of water to absorb radon with, and extract large quantities of potential ores with large, oil fueled dumper trucks delivering it to the mills. Uranium doesn’t appear spontaneously by green magic, y’know.
Uranium is not found neatly compacted together as veins of ores, like say, copper or iron, but as tiny pieces of fragments - often merged with other ores or rocks - of which you have to sift large quantities of raw earth for.
All of that mining of large areas is physically destructive. Mining and sifting - in remote locations with no mains power - requires burning fuel non-stop to power. Mmm, smells very green and clean.
Milling Is Destructive, Too
The extraction process produces a lot of uranium waste, with milling being used to produce the precursor ‘yellowcake’. Chemicals are used to leech uranium from the ores, which can ironically include carbon dioxide.
The waste material from milling is called ‘mill tailings’, and gets dumped as a ‘mill tailings pile’ which has to be “carefully regulated, monitored, and controlled” as it gives off radioactive gas as it continues to decay. Mill tailings are also produced from thorium extraction, as well. Mmm, very environmentally sound.
Enrichment then involves converting uranium oxide into uranium hexafluoride. This ultimately leads to a fluoride waste product, hydrogen fluoride, of which “Deconversion permits the recovery of fluoride compounds which have commercial value when processed and purified.”. Hmm. We covered why fluoride is bad previously.
This enrichment process produces another set of ‘mill tailings’ (even though the term ‘mill’ here is a misnomer), which include ‘depleted uranium hexafluoride’, ‘depleted triuranium octoxide’ and ‘depleted uranium metal’. Depleted uranium hexafluoride has to be specially stored and actively managed, with depleted triuranium octoxide being considered by the US as “low-level radioactive waste”.
It Hasn’t Even Reached The Plant Yet And It Already Produces Waste
You might be thinking ‘okay, so what if we dig up large segments of the earth destructively and stuff the unusable waste into concrete containers that many thousands of generations of our children will have to maintain at great cost to themselves; it is safe in the concrete containers, right?’. Wrong.
That depleted uranium waste — before the fuel even reaches the plant — gets sold off. Yeah, you read that right. In the profiteering U S of A, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission remarks: “Processed depleted uranium may be sold for commercial uses such as counterweights, military penetrators, shielding, etc.”.
Ironically it is labelled under the section that asks what the current method of disposal is. None, apparently, unless they meant the disposal of sweet, sweet money into their bank accounts.
That’s right, the waste is sold so it is readily available as a poisonous source of day-to-day radiation in the open world, such as radioactive “counterweights” used in aircraft. Mmm, so not only do passengers receive it, if the plane crashes it spreads depleted uranium upon the world. Nice. Very environmentally responsible. I can sense the disposal rays from over here.
Meanwhile, ‘military penetrators’ - an ostentatious way of saying anti-tank shells and bullets - are even worse. Wow, really saving the environment on that one. Shoot explosive shells with radiation poisoning for the good of the environment. But don’t take my word for it, see what the UK government has to say on ‘depleted uranium’ (DU):
Oh that’s nice. It turns normal, everyday bullets (used in such systems as CIWS) and anti-tank shells and makes them into cancer causing agents that get left behind after they’ve been fired. Hoo boy, so glad there’s no children in Iraq or Afghanistan.
But it is okay to pollute the environment, because destroying the nation with pollution is the ultimate national security defence. Take that Russia! You won’t invade the US now with all the high levels of radioactivity! ‘oorah!
Of course, this assumes that our corporate overseers are benevolent and use the depleted uranium responsibly by firing it out of tanks and storing it inside aluminum aircraft. I mean, they could always just dump the waste in an open field where children play instead.
But The Plants Are Safe, Right?
Ask any source — pro or anti-nuclear — and you will find nuclear plants are eyewateringly expensive to build. That is because radioactive material is so dangerous it requires a lot of expensive safety material. Even a nuclear plant from the 1970s would see a cost overrun of 241 percent.
One of the big expenses is because nuclear plants require a huge amount of steel in construction for a large, zero defect, building-sized singular piece of metal, which forms part of the nuclear reactor unit. It costs millions, and if there is a single defect anywhere, the unit must be scrapped and done again, costing millions more.
Sounds organised. Problem is, construction projects work to budgets, and a huge temptation exists to simply cut corners, reduce costs and avoid losses. Who besides the company is going to notice a slight defect in the steel container? If they’re willing to dump barrels in the fields of children and launch it out of a tank, are they really going to be that concerned?
‘So what, a slight defect’ — when you’re dealing with many thousands of Psi of pressure, a slight defect is the breaching point that can rupture. Corner cutting is what happened at Fukushima. Don’t expect the government to enforce the law. Or workers to report the issues.
In-fact, the faking of steel inspection data was exposed at Kobe steel in Japan. Not just to Fukushima, but to 500 customers. Contrary to popular nuclear lobbyist belief, Fukushima had lethal illnesses and harms. Then there’s the rarely mentioned Windscale disaster in the UK.
It costs billions to refurbish aging nuclear plants. Why not build new ones? Because it costs billions to decommision old nuclear plants too. It is estimated it’d cost $111 billion to decommission aging nuclear reactors.
A lose-lose proposition: either keep using antiquated plants with inferior safety technology that costs billions to keep running, or spend billions to decomission and rebuild new plants.
Why is this a safety problem? If local government or nuclear company goes bankrupt, refuses or is unable to finance the decommissioning of an ageing unsafe plant, it means all waste materials it contains will slowly become exposed to the environment over time. Assuming no natural disaster — like tidal wave or earthquake — happens in the interim.
It isn’t so simple as having installed the latest and greatest safety tools. They must also be maintained and secure. Which they’re not. Especially with Chinese hardware backdoors.
It doesn’t help when employees connect nuclear plants to the internet. The Chernobyl plant also had a lack of safety culture. Think how many safety violations you see day-to-day, the same applies to nuclear plants. Humans are fallible. Software is buggy and flawed.
Transportation Is Fun
Radioactive materials are not like oil or gas. You can’t just put it into a normal container for a journey. You need a special container.
The UK, for example, has the dedicated Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) that handles the transport of radioactive materials. They use special “flasks carrying spent nuclear fuel”.
In 2012 the UK government noted 16 accidents involving the transportation of radioactive materials, including one involving a nuclear flask. This contrasted with 38 accidents in 2011, 30 in 2010, and 33 in 2009. Then it turned out the nuclear flasks failed their safety testing in 2010, where it was found if they were exposed to fire for longer than 3 minutes they would rupture and spill radioactive waste.
The UK government whitewashed the 16 accidents by saying “none of the events reported resulted in any potentially significant radiation dose”, where the word ‘significant’ does the legwork brushing it under the carpet, given they fail to define what ‘significant’ means. Instant death is pretty significant. So there were ‘non-significant’ cancer causing radiation doses then? I feel so much better.
To top it off, the UK uses the antiquated Class 66 train for this transportation, and guess what? It’s a diesel powered train. Flammable. Those wonderful green credentials again. Oh, and the UK government has to pay £75 million in grants (free money giveaways to the nuclear lobby) to keep this all going.
Maybe you consider the flasks to be safe, but international standards tried to weaken them and ship them by aircraft. Aircraft burn jet fuel meaning more pollution, more fire. Of course, having depleted uranium counterweights isn’t enough, you also need spent plutonium on your plane as well… which is bound to burn longer than 3 minutes — the time required to breach a protective flask — if it catches on fire.
Then There’s Nuclear Waste
Reprocessing of nuclear waste, which is oddly called reprocessed uranium (or RepU), even though only 1% recovered is usable uranium and the other 1% is plutonium for use as a MOX (Mixed Oxides) fuel, which is a lower grade fuel with impurities.
This is not a complete solution, and only saves “up to 30% of the natural uranium otherwise required”, therefore the other 70% becomes waste. Despite this, the US has no reprocessing capacity, in contrast, the UK, France and Russia all do.
MOX fuel however increases the safety risks as it is more unstable and increases the odds for accidents to occur, namely as MOX is impure, more toxic, and would increase radiation pollution in the event of a breach. Back in 2001 TEPCO falsified the quality reports for the MOX fuel - for MOX was also used in the Fukushima plant. Another corner cutting exercise.
In the US, waste is buried at the Hanford site, which doesn’t exactly have the peak safety track record. KING 5 news reported as recently as 2021 how 10 workers there had gotten sick, but the event went unreported at Hanford:
Barely 5 years earlier the site experienced a tunnel collapse in the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility. In 2013 it was reported radioactive waste was leaking and only a month ago the US government agreed to allow the radioactive leaks to continue. Back in 1976 the site experienced a release of radioactive Americum 241.
Now 1976 might seem a ‘long way back’, until you realise Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and the facility will need to last that long, if not longer. Finland will have to bury their waste for 100,000 years, and I have zero confidence human engineering will last that long.
We get supposedly “cheap” and “green” fuel now, at the cost of many generations of our children footing the bill — and the consequences — for maintenance of the waste sites. And people are fundamentally opposed to the radioactive waste sites, for good reason.
Now I’m aware people might propose alternative, untested, new nuclear technologies like small modular nuclear reactors or thorium reactors, however small modular reactors are less efficient and produce more waste, and thorium still produces ‘mill tailings’ as a waste byproduct.
So, the next time you see a hitpiece talking about a wind turbine catching fire, collapsing, requiring repairs every 10 years, or killing birds, and proposing “green” nuclear energy as an alternative, remember, it could be so much worse.
You don’t have to bury wind turbine waste for 100,000 years or carry solar panels in special vulnerable-to-fire flasks by a dedicated, accident prone rail authority to be stored in an equally as accident prone nuclear waste facility that leaks.
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Outstanding work. . I feel informed now. It’s such a contentious topic. . I also feel frustrated! Thanks for stellar reporting.
What about this thing?
https://skirsch.com/politics/globalwarming/ifr.htm