[Dolorous Menhir]

Gothos;192617 said:

anyways, why shooting nuclear waste into the sun is ridiculous?

Because space missions have a ridiculous failure rate (well over 50%), and if a rocket loaded with nuclear waste was to explode during take-off or in orbit large portions of the Earth's surface would be irradiated.

Gothos;192651 said:

if remaining in the area puts your life at great risk and is sure to bring misery, it's a damn stupid choice to stay. honestly, if you heard "hey guys, this zone is gonna get wtfpwnd by radiation and stuff, get the hell out of here unless you wish a pitiful existance for your children and yourself" would you stay? no bloody way. why would the stay?

There are people who live in the danger areas. I suppose they moved back, or refused to leave in the first place.

[Gothos]

do I have to answer issues twice for you? read posts, jesus

[Imperial Historian]

I agree that the fear of nuclear power is excessive, but suggestion that nuclear could solve all our problems and is that good is a bit of a fallacy as well, the waste disposal issue is a big one, and an interesting statistic is due the fact that the reactors have to have a lot of maintenance it's 'efficiency' (not quite the right word but...) is only just over 50%, which when you compare to hydrocarbons at around 90% means we'd effectively have to build 2 times the capacity of nuclear power stations for every hydrocarbon based one, we can get efficiencies of around 30% for wind and thermally based solar power, with an unlimited resource and much less waste disposal issues.

That said I think nuclear will unfortunately prove to be at least a part of the global energy solution, and for some places I can see the logic but for other places it seems unnecessary, for example I read somewhere that the UK has enough projects involving wind and wave power generation which have been blocked at the planning permission stage to generate a significant portion of it's annual energy use, around 20GWh/year (and I think the UK uses about 50GWh /year), though admittedly some of these projects probably had valid environmental concerns, the majority seem to be due to the unreasoning dislike of windfarms, which for the UK at least is I think more of an issue than nuclear is.

[Cold Iron]

Gothos;192713 said:

do I have to answer issues twice for you? read posts, jesus

haven't seen jesus around here lately, who's this to?

[Thelomen Toblerone]

Sorry, I was in the toilet. I'm here now though!


And rest assured, I'll read through while Im making this wine from water.

[Danyah]

@ Cold Iron: The actual explosion of the reactor killed 40 people instantly, those working there and the milkman on his daily round I guess. The actual death toll caused by cancer and stillbirths is a number with somewhat more zero's idd. Dunno it's relevant, but that's what the other guy meant.

@All the rest: Tomorrow it's election time in the little patch of land they call Belgium (or Flanders, if I have to listen to the brainless separatists). Looks like the centre-right christian party will winn, which is no good for several reasons. At least one is the fact that they will try to keep open the nuclear plants, without caring for the waste disposal. Greenpeace already protested by dumping high level radio active material on the doorstep of their HQ.

How did it become high level, well because they were dumping low level material in a river, which passes several villages and towns, and because it would sink into the mud, concentrations increased gradually to threathening levels. So, gothos seems right when he says that sometimes radiation levels are quite high in inhabited areas. And don't go telling me that Belgium is the only place where it happens or that we are a third world country.

The dumping is an actual problem. They have dumped in concrete blocks in the ocean. The concrete wears down before the radioactivity has degraded to safe levels. They put it in mountains, concrete wears down and drinking water is contaminated. The problem with nuclear waste is that we produce it faster than it can degrade, so it keeps piling up and it costs. And governments don't like that, so some are willing t give it a nudge to make it disappear.

[chill]

Danyah;192826 said:

The dumping is an actual problem. They have dumped in concrete blocks in the ocean. The concrete wears down before the radioactivity has degraded to safe levels. They put it in mountains, concrete wears down and drinking water is contaminated. The problem with nuclear waste is that we produce it faster than it can degrade, so it keeps piling up and it costs. And governments don't like that, so some are willing t give it a nudge to make it disappear.

They also dump it in Bosnian mines that are no longer in use - now THAT concerns me greatly, because it is much closer than Černobil (much closer to Croatia, I mean - Bosnia is our neighbour). By "they", I mean rich European countries that don't give a good god damn for some backward country.
Regarding Černobil, please note that we dreaded the radiation thousands of miles away from Ukraine - it was carried by the wind, or something like that. Anyway, it was regarded as a serious problem for several months.
As for the nuclear waste - quite frankly this is a small planet, and there is only so much space to dump hazardous waste before we face some serious consequences.
Our class was discussing power issues in the world, and someone has come up with the fact that USA has enormous reserves of oil, but they choose to import ridiculous ammounts from the Middle East, rather than using what they have (as a Croatian proverb says, they're "saving for the black days"). My conclusion is that they will be the last country in the world that will start using cleaner sources of energy. Too bad for them.
What we really need is a better technology in order to efficiently use alternative sources of energy.

@Bellurdan, people in Ukraine were simple farmers. Someone probably came and told them :"Gamma radiation is about to overwhelm this area, and it will almost certainly kill everyone in a radius of 500km. It will also render this area uninhabitable for the next 100 years. You are advised to move far away from here as soon as possible".
They said: "Go fuck yourself".

A long time ago, Nikola Tesla had a theory about some sort of energy field that covers entire Earth, and could easily be used as a safe, clean and efficient source of energy for everyone, forever. Oil companies didn't like the idea. I'm not sure about this, so if someone knows more, please clarify or put an appropriate link.

[Thelomen Toblerone]

Since the Prestige I cant get the idea that Tesla is actually David Bowie out my head. And David Bowie proposing energy resources is a slightly odd idea to me. Someone make it stop!

[Gothos]

@chill: the amounts carried by the winds were mostly (as in, with some exceptions, as with every rule) minuscule. I remember reading an article in our edition of Scientific American, where the guy responsible for anti-radiation organisation here in Poland says how extreme were our countermeasures, and how much of an overreaction it was. iirc, we've started issuing medicine-thingys before anyone else, and mostly the whole population got it - which in retrospect and later measurements proved to be not really needed anyway.
500km is a colossal overestimation. Kiev is, how far away from there, 90 kilometers? simple farmers or not, they could at least try to save themselves. if you choose to be the tough guy, you should stomach the shit that's probably going to come at you...

anyways, I remember I read or heard somewhere that Belarus is cashing it large support from the world for countermeasuring results of radiation, and that the cash is mostly just claimed into other areas b/c the issue is indeed smaller than it is beleved to be. can someone verify this somehow?

[chill]

Gothos;192856 said:

@chill: the amounts carried by the winds were mostly (as in, with some exceptions, as with every rule) minuscule. I remember reading an article in our edition of Scientific American, where the guy responsible for anti-radiation organisation here in Poland says how extreme were our countermeasures, and how much of an overreaction it was. iirc, we've started issuing medicine-thingys before anyone else, and mostly the whole population got it - which in retrospect and later measurements proved to be not really needed anyway.
500km is a colossal overestimation. Kiev is, how far away from there, 90 kilometers? simple farmers or not, they could at least try to save themselves. if you choose to be the tough guy, you should stomach the shit that's probably going to come at you...

1. Don't take 500 km serious - I just wrote it to point out that someone needed to explain to the poor people how serious the threat was. If you say 90 km, then 90 km it is. I'm not really an expert in geography.
2. Many people probably were tough guys - I mentioned simple farmers so as to point out that not all were aware of the problem.

As for the wind carrying the radiation, yeah, you're probably right - all I heard were stories, as I wasn't born at the time. My older brother, though, had 2-3 months, so my parents were a little paranoid, since everybody was talking about it, so I can't really blame them. I blame the unscrupulous propaganda.

[Fist Gamet]

Very much an emotive issue, and I find myself in agreement for the most part with Gothos (thought you might have mellowed a bit by now, mate ) For me, the fossil fuel issue is the largest head-burying-in-sand event the world has ever seen! We have all known for quite a long time that it is bad for the environment (even way back in the day I am sure your grandparents glanced up at those chimney stacks belching out black clouds of filth, coughed and brought in their soot-blackened washing off the line and knew it was not a good thing) and we all knew it was a very finite resource that we cannot just make some more of...but even to this day world leaders just keep on stalling. I mean, it's understandable, you would rather the world drowned in a biblical style flood, and froze over in epic hollywood style proportions, than upset powerful lobby groups and lose votes. Wouldn't you? *Argh!*

I don't believe nuclear fuel is the big evil, nor the whole answer but as we currently do not have a cheap, clean abundant energy source for ALL our needs, we must use the cleanest we have. Yes, there is a long-term problem with deep burial of high level nuclear wastes but the destruction of the environment by fossil fuels is, for me, far worse.
Can wave, wind and solar power generate enough power? Would they make enough money for the giant power (powerful) companies to interest them enough?

Agh, we are all going to hell in a handcart...

[D Man]

I'd like to chip in on the waste disposal issue. I work at sellafields waste vitrification plants as an advisor, and that process and its results are watertight.

The problem is that waste fuel is quite unstable. Its not going to explode or anything, but its not advisable to store it long term because its uranium mixed with fission product (VERY radioactive and leaks easily from the uranium into ground water) in steel casing (easily corroded). You can bury that in a dry, tectonically stable region and itll be pretty safe until its activity is reasonably low after a thousand years or so. Btw: the notion that nuclear waste takes 10s of thousands of years to become safe is a falacy. It takes that long o become compltely stable. The principle components of the waste that are the sources of activity are strontium 90 and ceasium 137, which have alf lives of ~30 years.

Then you've got nuclear reprocessing. Only 3% of the uranium in a rod is 'burned'. The rest is recoverable for re-use. The result of this is a quite spectacularly dangerous and very unstable substance called aqeous raffinate: a suspension of metal nitrates (the fission product) in nitric acid (solvent for reclamation). This is evaporated down into HAL (highly active liquour). This is nasty stuff. Toxic, radioactive enough for a litre of it to give you a lethal dosage 1 second if next to it and exothermic enough to evaporate. Its stored in cooled tanks and has been for about 30 years (so its not that bad, but its quite clearly the biggest nuclear hazzard in this country and any other that has the stuff).

Vitrification is the process of removing the water from this, displacing the nitrogen with oxygen, mixing it with glass and heating it to ~1100C to allow it to react with the glass to make a new type of glass. The glass has damn near zero leach rate and there would have to be some sort of cataclysm to return the waste back into the environment fast enough for it to be dangerous. Cataclysmic enough that the waste will be the least of your concern. I'd happily have it buried under my house (far enough down to attenuate the radiation) without fear of release of contamination. Calculations and simulations of the long-term stability of the glass are done assuming that:

A: It has no casing or addional protection
B: Its fully submerged

The results show that its safe. The reality is that its planned long term disposal (varies from country t country) but is to put the glass, which is in stainless steel containers, in large steel boxes filled with contrete in dry and tectonically stable underground storage. i.e. Overkill.

Using reprocessing and vitrification increases the life of uranium deposits by a factor of ~30 and allows you to make a far more stable, safer and easily managed form of waste.

The safety of nuclear facilities does indeed require due dilligence appropriate to the possible consequences of a catastrophic failure, and such dilligence and concern for safety is a major priority of the nuclear industry. I've seen this first hand. In fact, I tire of it somewhat because the massive overkill invloved borders on the irrational. Though not all countries practices are the same (see tokaimura incedent, japan, 99), but France have considerably more relaxed safety measures than we (Brits) do, far more widespread use (something like 80% of power is nuclear iirc) and not one incident to their name: just well trained, knowledgable and dilligent staff (that I have had the pleasure of working with) and provide a good example of well managed nuclear power.

Edit: P.S. Chernoble was an intentional deactivation of the coolant systems in a profoundly foolish attempt to prove that the reactor would stablilise if they failed. It was a bad decision, not an error or malfunction.

The windscale fire is a better example of error (bad design and poor understanding) leading to incident, and poor managment exacerbating it. Three mile island an example of poor design (control system) leading to operator error. Both well learned from now. Tokaimura was pure idiocy: bypassing essential systems for expediency, routine close personell proximity to potentially fissile material and blatent neglegance (poor shift handover), and has also been educational to the industry at large.

[chill]

@D man - I certainly hope that we learnt enough from those incidents to safely use nuclear power. I know people learn on their mistakes, but mistakes in handling radioactive materials are very costly.

[D Man]

I'm not convinced that they are that costly. Theres chernoble, which killed some tens of people directly from the explosion of the coolant system (there was no nuclear explosion, in case anyone is under that misconception) and undoubtadly hundreds mre from cotamination of teh environment. But I'm no sure you can even count that, since it wasnt an accident, it was an intentional act. Shear arrogance and stupidity. Certainly the nuclear industry has learned to discard such extreme arrogance and stupidity as to invite disaster, and the automations and redundancies make a repetition of chernoble impossible. You cant do it if you try.

Other than that, tokaimura caused 2 deaths, three mile island none, and the windscale fire none directly and a maximum upper limit, if you make all the worst assumptions, of 100 indirectly. Much more likely its zero. So lets take a suitably harsh middle ground and say that the nuclear industry has caused 50 deaths.

How many has the fossil fuel industry caused?

Seriously. How many?

I think the greatest part of the percieved capacity for harm of the nuclear industry is due to a number of things:

1: Poor public understanding of nuclear physics in general and power gereration in particular.

2: Its innate association with nuclear weaponry

3: The clandestine and military climate under which it was developed. For example the first nuclear reactors to be connected to a national grid were first used to generate plutonium for weapons: the Calder Hall facility at sellafield, which incidentally shut down after ~50 years of incident-free power generation, and that was the first for public service: how many other first runs of any other technology were so successfull?

4: The youth of the technology. Calder hall was connected to the national grid in '56. The windscale fire was in '57 and largely due to ignorance of the intricacies of the behaviour of a reactor, which we have now learned. There have been no other incidents on a british reactor, and only 2 others globally (including cheroble). There are currently ~450 nuclear reactors in the world and many more have been used and reached the end of their lives. Thats an excellent service record. With 3MI in '79 and no deaths from that, the industry has shown excellent capacity to learn from its mistakes (again, barring the flagrant idiocy of chernoble, which as I say is impossible to reproduce in a modern reactor). The industries youth means its teething problems are still in living memory. You cant prove a negative, and with so little time since nuclear power was an infant its difficult to assure the public of the strides that have been taken to make nuclear power safer. It needs time.

5: Press representation and public opinion. Much of this goes back to N# 1 adn the press playing on that poor understanding and over-playing consequences to sell their wares. I'll give you an example of press misrepresentation: the amount of "NUCLEAR WASTE" produced, and the amount discharged into the environment. There are 3 classifications of nuclear waste. For expediency here is the wiki article

http://en.wikipedia....i/Nuclear_waste

Skip to 'Types of radioactive waste' and try to forget that I wrote half of it, because the half previously present was woefully inadequate even for an introduction. The proportion of 'nuclear waste' that actually comes from a reactor is miniscule and the majority is perfectly safe, merely designated as waste as a precaution: because its cheaper to lump safe stuff in with stuff that might me contaminated than to check everything. You can drink low level waste environmental discharges. But the volume of nuclear waste is reffered to in near-hysterical tones by demagogic groups such as greenpeace and..he he...U2.

A collegue of mine was approached before the birth of his first child by the daily mail a few years ago. I forget how they knew he was having a kid, but anyway, they quite rudely demanded a statement. He flat refused. But soon enough there was an article saying "Mr ________ says that hes very concerned about having a child in such proximity to sellafield and wants to move away as soon as possible". He never said any such thing, has no such paranoia and was absolutely outraged. However there was nothing he could do.

Such representation and indeed lies discourages critical thought by the public at large and encourages hysteria.

6: A british problem of the past, and I feel a current japanese one. Arrogance. The 50s saw a very poor understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle and the measures that must be taken to handle it responsibly (the 'cycle' hadnt happened yet after all, but you can find some very embarrasing statements from people in and around the industry in that time if you look). Hundreds of millions of pounds worth of facilities now exist because of what we have learned. I work in one of them. The 80s saw safe enough but wastefull and haphazard use of secondary nuclear facilities (by secondary I mean non-reactor, but directly connected with the nuclear fuel cycle: storage ponds and the like). We churned the widgets out with little to no regard for the prospect of decommisioning or the long term future of the industry. We now have to deal with that problem, and poeple like me curse the recklessness of people like them.

[Tsundoku]

D Man;203258 said:

A collegue of mine was approached before the birth of his first child by the daily mail a few years ago. I forget how they knew he was having a kid, but anyway, they quite rudely demanded a statement. He flat refused. But soon enough there was an article saying "Mr ________ says that hes very concerned about having a child in such proximity to sellafield and wants to move away as soon as possible". He never said any such thing, has no such paranoia and was absolutely outraged. However there was nothing he could do.

He couldn't sue their arses? :folken:

Always good to read your posts, D Man. You should work in the Public Education section.

Cheers,

La Sombra, WOULD live in the same neighbourhood as a properly built, run and maintained nuclear power plant. "Yes, In My Neighbourhood"

[Gothos]

Sombra;203324 said:

La Sombra, WOULD live in the same neighbourhood as a properly, run and maintained nuclear power plant. "Yes, In My Neighbourhood"

same!
I'd love to work in the industry. sadly I've got like no talent for anything remotely touching physics and chemistry. *sob*

[chill]

A little bit of conspiracy theories...

So, nuclear energy is much safer than most people believe (I admit myself being among them before I was educated by D man:)).
Then why all this paranoia? How come the media focuses on the bad sides of nuclear energy (waste, in particular) instead of good ones? How come people believe that every bit of nuclear waste is a deadly threat that cannot be appropriately dealt with? Why is Czernobil mentioned in almost every public discussion about the safety of nuclear powerplants, when it's clear that it's the product of human stupidity?

Whose interests stand behind all this? Who wants us to use petrol and gas and continue to pollute our planet? Who will lose the most if we start using new sources of energy?

hmmm... now that's a tough one...

[Gothos]

because, mate, nuclear, and with it other "alternative" sources of, power, prophesizes a decline of the fossil fuel industry, which is the pillar of today's economics... or so I like to think.

[D Man]

Cheers sombra!

Apparently he could have made them issue a retraction, but it would be carefully worded, look like a small ad and designed to be unnoticed.

Chill: the media love to scare people. It means people buy their product. News is a business after all. With a carefull selection of information and, mis-phrasings, a calculated lie or two (= the sort they think they can get away with), a reminder of chernoble and picture of a big cold, heartless looking industrial facility you can make a trivial fact about nuclear power or its history into first rate front page scare-mongering.

As far as competition with fossil fuels goes: its there, no doubt. But its not part of a cover-up or spread of misinformation, to my knowledge. Certainly its in the fossil fuels industries favour to draw attention to downsides to the nuclear industry and vice versa, but how deep that goes or sinister that gets, I wouldnt like to say. Not very sinister, would be my impression. Keeping our respective industries running and 'looking after our own house' no doubt takes as much time for Shell as for British Nuclear Group (my employer). But I have no dog in that race and no truck with trying to convice anyone of 'one or the other', or not here/now at least: I just wanted to dish out some little-known facts, dispell some misconceptions and maybe help see how they come about.

[Tsundoku]

I just saw a story today on the SBS program Dateline. It was called The Nuclear Renaissance. I don't know if you can download it, but I found the transcript at least. It's a about a 25 min program, so the transcript is a bit long. On the upside, it's very easy to understand.

D Man, maybe you and your colleagues could take a look at this as an example of the media questioning the possibility of pushing for more use of nuclear power?

---------------------------------------

Transcript was here:
http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/index.php?...=08&fyear=2007#

Archives - August 01, 2007

-------------------------------------------

The nuclear renaissance
About 20 years ago, it would have been almost impossible to imagine nuclear reactors being seen as potential world savers. Back then of course the catastrophies of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were fresh in our minds. Concepts like global warming certainly weren't. Now there is a nuclear plant building boom under way and John Howard of course is highly enthusiastic about the nuclear option. That said, even with the newest technology, nuclear is hardly a totally fail-safe option. Just a few days ago the nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney was shut down for repairs after three uranium fuel plates came loose. For the latest on the pros and cons for the still contentious nuclear option, we sent reporter Aaron Lewis off on a whip around the world.

REPORTER: Aaron Lewis
Right now it is dawn in Toronto, midday in Paris and night in Buenos Aires. While in Helsinki the summer sun never sets. All these cities play a part in the nuclear renaissance, a sudden renewed interest in atomic power. Dateline has traveled far and wide to find out what the experts think about the most controversial solution to the energy crisis.

JACQUES DEBARRIER, (Translation): I’d like to remind you that nuclear power plants don’t produce carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming. So I think it is an industry that is safe and reliable.

FRANK GREENING, NUCLEAR SCIENTIST: We are going against nature. We are building something that nature will fight back.

France leads the world in nuclear power. 80% of its electricity comes from 58 reactors which are spread across the nation and there are more on the way. Construction yards like this one are where the world's next generation of nuclear power plants are being built and yet this facility, the largest in the world was almost shut down a few years ago because new plants weren't being ordered. Today, crews work around the clock and there are plans for expansion to try and keep up with the surging international interest in nuclear power.
This factory in eastern France belongs to the international nuclear construction giant, Areva. They claim that the world now needs nuclear more than ever.

BERTRAND BARRE, AREVA CHIEF SCIENTIFIC ADVISOR: I think that conscience of the threat of global warming is probably the biggest single factor but at the same time you have the problem of oil prices escalating very quickly, gas prices just following suit and the very problem of security of supply which has become more and more obvious with even in Iraq, in Iran. After all, 70% of the oil is in the Middle East.

France says that it has the cheapest electricity in Europe, thanks to nuclear. It even exports its surplus energy and at home, nuclear has widespread public support.

MAN, (Translation): Nuclear power doesn’t worry you?

WOMAN (Translation): No, nuclear power doesn’t worry me at all.

MAN 2 (Translation): Here everything is monitored so there are no particular risks.

WOMAN 2 (Translation): Sure, sometimes when we think about it, we are a bit worried. But we have learned to live with it, we have never had major problems.

Currently nuclear supplies 16% of the world's electricity and France wants to see that global share grow dramatically.

BERTRAND BARRE: In the next 50 years, as you say, I think nuclear can have an impact by supplying something like 25 to 30% of the total electricity.

DAVE MARTIN, GREENPEACE CANADA: The smarter elements in the nuclear industry play their cards fairly safely. They argue that nuclear is an important part of the mix, it can be part of the solution to climate change. I would argue that's not true, for a number of reasons. But the big one is cost.

The $3.5 billion price tag of a nuclear facility is part of what has kept the atomic industry at a near standstill. But in 2002, Finland asked the French company Areva Technologies to build the first nuclear reactor in the west in two decades. This is the construction site for the world's newest nuclear reactor being built in Finland of the. The successor failure of this project is seen as being a litmus test of whether a nuclear renaissance is even possible and it hasn’t been easy going. The project is 19 months behind schedule and by some estimations almost a billion Euro over budget.
Finland has operated four nuclear power stations since the late 1970s and they have been some of the most trouble-free reactors anywhere. Now, three decades later, Finland said it needed to expand its nuclear program to meet its commitments under the Kyoto protocol.

JORMA AURELA, FINLANDS MINISTRY OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY: It means we have to keep our releases on that level, what we had in 1990 and without this nuclear unit, what we are constructing now, it would be very - would have been very difficult.

This reactor is called the European pressurised reactor and the first of its kind in the world. To date, less than halfway through construction, 1500 mistakes have been found. The industry calls this teething.

BERTRAND BARRE: We are somehow teething OVER Kyoto. The delay is not OK and it is just to prove we spend too much time without building new plants, that we have somehow to re-learn, but certainly to get back into the process of managing a big project.

DAVID MARTIN: Nuclear power is a very complex, expensive technology. It's been called an unforgiving technology and for very good reason. When you have a high degree of complexity combined with a very high capital cost, that's a very risky technology.

The catastrophic accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in the 1980’s brought the growth in the industry to a standstill. By the end of 1986, virtually all orders for new reactors had dried up and scientists set about trying to design a reactor that couldn't melt down. The solution the industry came up with is known as a core catcher, a pool that sits under the reactor and theoretically contains and cools radioactive material in the event of a run away reaction. The European pressurised reactor being built in Finland is the first to include a core catcher.

BERTRAND BARRE: Were it to happen, it would not result in massive radioactivity being released into the environment. Somehow, if you have a big melt down, it is out but everything is inside and we are not in Chernobyl.

JORMA AURELA: So I would say in principle, this is the safest plant in the world.

DAVID MARTIN: These reactors can over heat, can get out of control and they can melt down. Admittedly there is a small probability of that combination of accidents leading to a melt down scenario. Low probability, but let's face it, the consequence, it is possible and the consequence of such an accident would be huge.

HEIDI HAUTALA, FINNISH GREEN PARTY: I feel slightly uncomfortable that the finished model is presented as a kind of a model for all the other nations as well.

Heidi Hautala is a leading voice in the Finnish Green Party. The Green's left their coalition government in protest over the decision to commission the new reactor.

HEIDI HAUTALA: If the world really went for nuclear in order to combat climate change, one would need to build many many nuclear power stations every year, all around the world and that would create problems that would really make visible the dark side of the nuclear energy, which is not clean, it's not secure.

This is what the inside of a small nuclear reactor looks like. In order for nuclear energy to provide 25% of the world's electricity by the year 2050, a new reactor would have to be built every week for 40 years.

BERTRAND BARRE: I know it appears a lot, but there again, look at the past. In France, which is a medium sized country, we have built 58 nuclear power plants over 15 years. Six plants per year only for France, it's not such a big deal. It's not possible today but here again, 50 years from now, we have a lot of time to rebuild infrastructures, to get in gear.

Doctor Monique Sene is a French physician respected by both sides of the debate, despite criticising nuclear power for 30 years. I met her at her home outside of Paris.

DR MONIQUE SENE, PHYSICIAN, (Translation): I f they are going to build 800 reactors as planned, on our planet, we want to know where they want to build them. And we want to know how they will be monitored. People will have to be trained, populations will have to be trained. I think it is totally unrealistic.

While France and Finland are seen as models for a nuclear future, other countries have not had the same success. Canada is a country that has had a rocky nuclear history. The reactor that powers Toronto is located closer to a major urban centre than any other reactor in the world. Originally commissioned for $3.5 billion Canadian dollars it was plagued by constant faults and delays and the cost eventually soared to more than 14 billion.

FRANK GREENING: It was cost upon cost. Each one of these has to be inspected at this elbow.

Frank Greening has is a nuclear scientist who has become a whistleblower. He says after nearly 30 years he was pushed out of the nuclear industry because he found so many problems with Ontario’s reactors.

FRANK GREENING: They shipped us a sample down to the lab and asked us "What do you make of this black dust". It came in a petrie dish and we checked it with a geiger counter. We took the lid off, the geiger counter went off scale and we went "What's going on here?". After doing careful analysis, we realised it's carbon 14. If you get it on your hands, it's eradiating your hands. Our real concern was people were breathing this in. They had to stop work and rethink how they were going to control this carbon 14 dust because it got over everything. We had to develop decontamination techniques to remove it.

When you say got over everything, it even got outside the reactor?

FRANK GREENING: Yes, it did, it was found in people’s offices and even in their homes.

More than any facilities in the world, Canadian built reactors have been prone to major breakdowns. Today, two of the 8 reactors at Pickering are still shut down for repairs while another two have been shut down permanently. Once a reactor begins operation they become extraordinarily expensive to fix.

FRANK GREENING: The cost of nuclear, they just sort of pile up. Compared to coal, if you get a problem in a coal-fired station you can replace a boiler tube in an afternoon. A guy can walk in there and take the Tube out and put a new one in. You cannot do that in a nuclear reactor. Everything is radioactive. A guy has to go in, right up to the reactor face where the fields, the radiation fields might be 500 miliar per hour. He might get his year's radiation dose in 10 hours.

By law a technician can only be exposed to a certain amount of radiation each year. After that, even if the limit is reached in a single day, they can no longer work in a radioactive zone.

FRANK GREENING: I think it is absurd to be putting people into that environment, dosing them up, just to collect data that you know in two years you have to collect it again. This is the situation they have got themselves into with these reactors.

How would you illustrate Ontario’s nuclear history, has it been a successful history.

KEVIN FLYNN, MINISTRY OF ENERGY, ONTARIO: I think it has been tremendously successful, it started in the early 1960s and has been providing a safe and reliable power up until 2007. I can't imagine what Ontario's source of power had been had it not been for the nuclear reactor.

Ontario is about to begin building a new generation of nuclear reactors. At the ministry of energy in Ontario, I asked about the problems encountered with the current fleet.

REPORTER: Does that history concern you when you look at moving forward?

KEVIN FLYNN: I think you have to be concerned with any technology. In my hone life I have worked with oil refineries, hydroelectric commissions. You have to be on your toes all the time. Technology is always advancing. Sometimes you learn from the installation of something.

FRANK GREENING: I have often thought that these reactors might suddenly have some catastrophic problem and people would say my God, the feeder pipe has thinned and wasn't there a guy around here who was saying that? But it hasn't happened. So only time will tell.

All nuclear reactors emit a low but constant level of radiation, either through steam or dumped cooling water. Critics say that when the nuclear industries were starting in both France and Canada, requests for comprehensive studies about the effects of radiation on communities near the reactors weren't taken seriously.

DR MONIQUE SENE, (Translation): In our appeal we insisted that much more study was required to deal with the problems of nuclear waste and radiation. In our appeal we underlined the questions that remained unanswered.

DAVID MARTIN: The simple fact is the industry is afraid of, I think, any possible risk of impacts, health impacts or environmental impacts in anyway, shape or form being brought to light. They are just afraid of it.

This is spent nuclear fuel. It must be cooled in water for 50 years before it can be buried. In this one room, 30 years worth of spent fuel from Finland's reactors is being stored. There have always been serious concerns about how to store nuclear waste but Finland has now met this challenge head-on. A tunnel leading 500m down into Finland's bedrock will become the first long term storage facility for high level waste in the world.
Finland's spent nuclear fuel will eventually be buried in giant copper canisters like this one. Each one can hold literally tonnes of spent uranium. The hope is the sturdy construction will be able to maintain its integrity through just about any scenario for literally thousands and thousands of years.
Even Finland's anti-nuclear Green Party believes this will work. In fact they are concerned about it working too well.

HEIDI HAUTALA: Finland and Sweden might become, sort of, interesting sites for nuclear waste to be brought from other countries. That's not what people wanted, that's not what they opted for.

DR MONIQUE SENE, (Translation): You know, they reassure us that nuclear waste can be safely stored deep underground, in rock as well as clay. That is simply not true. It may work for 50, 100 or 150 years, the fact is the containers will start decaying, they can’t last forever. But no one knows for how long they will remain safe. 100? 150 years? From then on, it all depends on how the planet will evolve.

Earlier this year, Dateline traveled to Argentina where we discovered that security in storage facilities is not always water tight. While I was filming in one of Argentina's nuclear research facilities, I was shown weapons grade uranium sitting in a small storage pool.

MAN: This is 90%, the concentration of uranium.

Incredibly, there was no-one there to guard it. It only takes a few kilograms of material to make a bomb. This is where much of the world's uranium comes from. The McArthur river uranium mine in Saskatchewan, Canada is one of the largest single uranium reserves in the world. The future for uranium producers, both here and in Australia seems bright. Prices have soared more than 1,000% in just a few years. But uranium, the mineral that fuels the nuclear process, is running out.

JORMA AURELA: If we would continue like we have now in the world, I mean that we have something like a little less than 500 plants and so it means that the resources in the world, they would cover it quite easily for 200 years or something like that.

But with many new reactors in the pipeline, critics put the world supply at more like 50 years of economically recoverable uranium. The nuclear industry says that the current technology in reactors makes poor use of the uranium and it's possible to get a lot more from the ore.

BERTRAND BARRE: At the end when we move the spent fuel from the coal you have used less than 1% of the content of the uranium ore. That's very wasteful. But the good news is the 99% remaining is still somewhere.

This animation demonstrates how uranium fuel rods can be broken up and then difficult solved in acid in order to be recycled and then reused. Unfortunately this process prowess more waste that can be used to make weapons and dumps higher levels of chemical pollution, which is why most countries have chosen to use nuclear fuel only once. But for all its complications, nuclear remains an attractive option for many. Even for the operators of the infamous Three Mile Island facility.
In the Areva plant in France I found parts which will be used to rebuild the reactor that melted down 20 years ago. It's due to come back online in 2009.

REPORTER: Do you believe that nuclear power can make a substantial contribution to fighting global climate change?

FRANK GREENING: Yes, I do. It has to be the right nuclear technology and it has to be proven and it has to be reliable and it has to be economic.

HEIDI HAUTALA: At best nuclear can only provide a fraction, maybe 20% of the electricity need of the world. And we still need to cover 80% with other means.

Renewable technologies are gaining real ground as sources of alternative energy. But to date, world wide, they have received only a fraction of the investment needed to make them a real contender.

DR MONIQUE SENE, (Translation): If we really want a solution…they have been talking about doing it for years, but nothing has been done. As early as 1974, people in France have said why not develop, simultaneously with nuclear power, all the other sources of energy we have in France, such as solar, biomass, and other sources already available. But it was not done.

DAVID MARTIN: I think that nuclear power is the one thing that will stand in the way of a truly meaningful and permanent solution to global warming. If we invest in nuclear, we won't invest in the real solutions.

BERTRAND BARRE: We can meet a challenge but we must implement all the possible ways to meet this challenge and nuclear is just part of the story. If we follow this path, we will not be able to do the challenge. We are not the saviour, but if we are worried about this, I doubt you will be saved.






Feature Reporter: The nuclear renaissance

Reporter/Camera
AARON LEWIS

Editors
DAVID POTTS
MICAH McGOWAN

Fixers/ Translators
LAURENT HAUBEN (France)
SARAH GILBERT (Argentina)
ILPO SALONEN (Finland)

Translations / Subtitling
GEORGE BURCHETT

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Cheers,

La Sombra, nuke-you-lar power