Dirty, Dangerous, and Expensive; Say No to Nuclear
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The Futility of Nuclear Energy
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A factor of 10 cost escalations are not uncommon when building a nuclear power station. They take 1.6 million tonnes of steel and 14 million tonnes of cement for each power station. 500 to 1000 acres. If the UK wants to continue supplying 20% of our electricity then we will have to build 10 new reactors.
The uranium has to be mined and milled. Each power station will need 16 million tonnes of rock to be mined per year. Sulphuric acid is the primary leaching agent to make yellowcake which then has to be separated into the various metals at a later date. The clearing up of the mining process needs four times the extraction energy to clean up the acidic and radioactive waste, according to Ceedata, and is not usually done. Ceedata says that it would take thirty times the energy to extract the uranium than it will ever generate, thus proving that we only have nuclear power stations in order to make nuclear weapons. U 235 is separated from U238, the latter is called depleted uranium and needs to be disposed of safely, instead it is stored on land. The US has 500,000 tonnes of depleted uranium in cool storage to prevent it becoming gas. Enrichment plants are highly toxic. Half a tonne of fluorine is used to turn one tonne of uranium into uranium hexafluoride. The global warming potential of fluorine and its halogenated compounds is nearly 10,000 times that of CO2. Pollution from the plants finds it’s way into our rivers. Radiation leaks also happen at the power stations, leading to more cancer patients.
5,000 years ago the English Channel did not exist, so where are we going to bury our nuclear waste for a million years? It is estimated to cost £100 million to decommission the Windscale gas cooled reactor nuclear. The project cost of a 3.5 MW Enercon E126 EP 3 wind turbine costs £3.13 million and we could have 32 of them for this kind of money.
Taken from The Ecologist June 2006
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Since 1954 nuclear power stations have been generating electricity for the grid. 65 years later scientists are no further forward when it comes to nuclear waste.
The Royal Navy has retired 20 nuclear submarines since 1980 and has still not come up with a safe way of disposing of the nuclear waste, and has not dismantled any of them. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) estimates that to do so would cost £7.5 billion over 120 years. In spite of their being no geologically safe location for the billions of years some of the nuclear waste takes to become safe the MoD wants to spend another £51 billion on new nuclear submarines that it then will not be able to dismantle. In the civil nuclear industry the waste disposal at least has to be looked at in the design stage, even though there is no way to do it; the MoD still does not have to. That governments and industries are allowed to build anything nuclear without any safe method of disposal shows us that decision makers are illogical and dangerous, this is a much bigger problem than even plastic and there are no signs of an enforceable international agreement to ban the nuclear industry until a safe disposal mechanism is invented, something that nuclear scientists in the field say is impossible. There must be a moratorium to agree that decision makers in the field have a minimum IQ of 150 so that this dangerous farce can end. This vast sum of money must be diverted to solving the climate crisis that will quickly get worse as we ride the 'hockey stick.'
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Nuclear Safety Device
Is My Nuclear Safety Device Installed At Your Local Nuclear Power Station?
When the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 happened Mikhail Gorbachev made an international appeal for ideas to minimize the amount of radiation that was being released by the crippled nuclear power station. I came up with an idea that got used.
My invention was a sprinkler system filled with heavy water, which was in turn linked to a Geiger counter. Thus, when the radiation level got too high, the sprinkler system would come on and the heavy water would dampen down the radiation.
In spite of my contacting my Member of Parliament as to whether or not my invention was being used in UK nuclear power stations, she was not able to tell me because it was an official secret. I am most concerned as to whether my safety device is being used routinely in the world's nuclear power plants. After having to answer an international call for help again, this time from Japan in 2011 over the Fukushima nuclear power station, the answer is probably not. For my invention not to be used in all nuclear power stations within 25 years of the Chernobyl disaster is criminal, and with people like this in charge we are going to have to convert nuclear power stations to clean energy, Buxton Geothermal Turbine Generators are the answer.
If you are interested in lobbying your local nuclear power station over the matter, I would also like to point out that, at this time, I have not yet been paid for my invention!
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