Nuclear

This page is of documents by Gordon Taylor

2023-06-06 Nuclear Power Has No Future

The UK government proposes to build nuclear power plants totalling 24 GW.
This implies Hinkley Point C, Sizewell C and about six more of similar size.
The Labour party proposes to include nuclear power in it’s new ‘green’ energy policy.
Yet nuclear power has no future, as shown in this document of 3 pages with 52 references.

The first section shows that nuclear fuel may be effectively exhausted before 2050, when the climate targets should be met.
The second section shows that the costs of nuclear power have risen over time, and are now uncompetitive.
So nuclear power must be replaced by sustainable and affordable options such as energy savings and renewables like wind, solar and storage.

The third
section shows that nuclear power conflicts with energy savings and renewables, so impairing the business case and deterring investment.
So the UK should phase out nuclear power and join the rest of the world in deploying energy savings and renewables.

Although this document is published after the latest Government and Labour Party proposals,
I have published many earlier documents on nuclear power, dating from 2006-0-19. (See below).
Most notably, my report on the Fukushima disaster was published on 2012-04-11, with copies sent to several MPs and Ministers.

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2022-10-05 Nuclear Nonsense

The new UK government appears to support the previous government’s proposal of building new nuclear power plants.

The Labour party proposes to include nuclear power in it’s new ‘green’ energy policy.

However such nuclear proposals are nonsense, as shown in this 4-page due diligence assessment.

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2022-08-13 Nuclear Power And Weapons Are Killing Us

The Manhattan Project in the US covered every stage of the production of nuclear weapons. This included the mining and refining of uranium, enrichment to 80 to 90% U235 for uranium bombs, fuelling nuclear reactors with uranium to produce plutonium, and reprocessing the spent fuel to extract the plutonium for plutonium bombs. It was recognised from the beginning that these processes and plants would give rise to radioactive releases that would be harmful to the plant operators and the general public, yet they were never informed. This continues to the present day, when the nuclear weapon and power industry does everything in its power to deny and understate the many and extensive harms done to all living things. To this has been added the use of uranium in bunker-breaking bombs and tank-busting shells, that spread the dust so formed over their own forces, the enemy forces, and innocent bystanders, harming them all for generations to come. The human harms include many and extensive cancers, and also non-malignant diseases such as stillbirths, deformities and mental impairment and heart disease. With so much harm already done to humans that will take up to lifetimes to express, and so much nuclear debris laying in wait to harm even more humans, it is essential to identify every strategy and measure that can reduce the total harm.

This document covers the first warnings of nuclear harms in the 1950s and - following studies beginning in the 1960s - five books of evidence by Dr Ernest Sternglass in 1981, Mr Harvey Wasserman et al in 1982, Dr John Gofman in 1990, Mr Paul Zimmerman in 2009, and Professor Chris Busby et al in 2010.

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2022-08-12 Stopping Sizewell C and all nuclear power in favour of a rational energy policy

Among the last acts of the Johnson government was the approval of a new nuclear plant - Sizewell C. The claim was that it would increase energy security and reduce carbon emissions. But the invasion of Ukraine has underlined that all nuclear sites are targets, and reduce national security. Also nuclear power would be far more costly than energy savings and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, with storage, and could not be generating electricity before 2030. They need uranium for fuel, yet almost half comes from Russia and Kazachkstan, so that the money and carbon costs would increase twice as fast. Moreover, they require huge amounts of energy to manufacture and build, so reducing energy security until construction is complete, and this energy repaid. Yet Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C are coastal sites, at risk from flooding by sea level rise and storm surge by 2100. As decommissioning and site clearance would take at least 50 years, they would need to be shutdown before 2050.

Many reasons for stopping Sizewell C and all nuclear power are given in this collection of five documents.
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2022-06-18 Nuclear Insecurities

This is a three-page re-cast of 2016-08-09 Nuclear Insecurities (below).
It includes 16 criteria under the original 10 headings, supported by 21 references.
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2021-09-29 Nuclear Power and the EU Taxonomy

Around September 2021, the European Commission considered the inclusion of nuclear power in the taxonomy for future investments in energy.

This was based on a single report from the European Joint Research Centre, which still has close links with the nuclear industry and is widely perceived as playing a promoting role for nuclear energy within the European Union.

The JRC Report ignored the report of the German Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply of 2011, which had lead to Germany phasing out nuclear power by 2023.

The European Commision also ignored 'Sustainability at risk, A critical analysis of the EU Joint Research Centre technical assessment of nuclear energy with respect to the "do no significant harm" criteria of the EU Taxonomy Regulation, of 2021-09 by Dr. Christoph Pistner, Dr. Matthias Englert and Dr. Ben Wealer, for the Heinrich Boell Foundation.

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2021-06-09 The Futility of Fusion - A Dream Too Far

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For the Presentation, Conclusions and a document with references, click on Read More.

Nuclear fusion power on earth poses extreme technical challenges.
One is the attainment of at least 100 million degrees C for long enough to produce net energy.
Another is that any power plant fuelled with Deuterium and Tritium must 'breed' enough Tritium to sustain itself.

Yet fusion power is futile because it cannot be deployed at a meaningful scale before 2050.
This is the target date for Zero Carbon - hopefully limiting Global Warming to less than 2 C.
So by this date all energy must be supplied from proven renewable sources such as Solar Photovoltaics, Wind Power, Hydro Power, sustainable Biomass and Solar and Deep Geothermal Heat.

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2021-03-10 Fukushima at 10 Presentation - What Happened and the Real Lessons for Energy Policy

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The Fukushima disaster was aggravated by the personnel being responsible for multiple reactors under emergency conditions.

There had been no testing or drills of Station Blackouts and Loss of Cooling Accidents in the 40 years since the reactors were built.

Once reactor meltdowns and radioactive releases had occurred, they had no means of mapping the fallout to guide evacuation.

The later Abe government coerced ‘voluntary’ evacuees to return by stopping their housing subsidies after only six years. Many still resist returning, despite the hardships.

The Abe government also sought to restart the 39 remaining operable nuclear power plants, but succeeded with only a few. Nuclear power is still strongly resisted by most Japanese.

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2016-08-09 Nuclear Insecurities

Nuclear Insecurities
A short document 'Nuclear Insecurities' outlining ten that would result from new nuclear plants such as Hinkley Point C.
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2014-01-16 NHK Fukushima 'Meltdown' Documentaries

There have been many official enquiries into the Fukushima disaster (2011-03-11). However NHK, the leading Japanese broadcaster, waited a year or more until people were ready to talk, interviewed over 300, later 400, of those directly involved and outside experts, and collected huge amounts of data. This has enabled realistic re-enactments of the sequence of events. So among many other programmes on the Fukushima disaster, NHK has produced three 'Meltdown' documentaries in English, first broadcast on 2012-01, 2012-08-18, and 2013-03-05. This last was about 24 months after the disaster
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2013-11-01 Nuclear Power's Fatal Flaws

I had produced a 73-page study 'The Real Lessons of Fukushima', dated 2012-04-11, based on the evidence from over 230 references. This showed the crucial importance of 'decay heat' – an inherent characteristic of nuclear fission – in the event of a 'Loss of Cooling Accident' (LOCA). It also showed that the probability of a LOCA was unknowable, as the chains of events number billions, each requiring data on reliability, and failures could lead to catastrophic radioactive releases to air, land and sea. So nuclear disasters are inevitable, as the record shows.
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2013-06-07 The Consequences of Major Nuclear Releases

The consequences of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear releases are horrendous. Yet the 'worst-case' nuclear releases are 100 times greater, with far worse consequences.
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2012-04-11 The Real Lessons of Fukushima

The Real Lessons of Fukushima - click for full size image
This study is based on evidence on the Fukushima disaster and it's consequences, almost all from the internet. Many quantitative studies have been found, but no proper studies from the IAEA or the UK ONR. The fast-moving and highly dangerous events of such a disaster require decision support. Thermal models of the reactors and spent fuel pools are essential to predict their behaviour under Station Blackout and to evaluate possible counter-measures. Also plume (dispersion) models of possible radioactive releases are essential to inform decisions on the magnitude and direction of evacuations. The Japanese have such a plume model, but it was ignored until later. Also they had no instrument for airborne radioactivity measurements at hand and had to rely initially on aerial surveys carried out by the Japan-based US Emergency Response Centers. These deficiencies were omitted or downplayed in the reports of the IAEA Fact Finding Mission, but most were included in the report of the Hatamura Panel.
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2011-06-08 The Case Against Nuclear Power

The critical issue for nuclear power is the consequences of a major radioactive release. These were predicted in the Sandia CRAC-2 study as 42,000 to 100,000 early deaths. They were confirmed empirically by Chernobyl, which contaminated huge areas of the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia as well as 40% of Europe, with an eventual death toll put variously at 10,000 up to 1.8 million. Due to the high population density, Fukushima has been predicted to cause up to 210,000 excess cancer deaths. The probability of any size of radioactive release is not just unknown but unknowable, so must be taken as 1 - i.e. inevitable. This was understood by the worldwide insurance industry from the start and by some involved in the Reactor Safety Studies as well as by independent analysts. If insurance was fully paid, the cost of nuclear power would increase by e.g. 45 to 348 p/kWh. Other countries are adopting safer, sustainable and infinitely cheaper solutions for supplying electrical and other energy services so there is no need to add to our already huge nuclear risks and debts. Moreover the consequences of a major radioactive release are completely unacceptable, so all existing nuclear plants should be phased out forthwith.
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2011-03-11 Fukushima - My Documents

On 2011-03-11, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan was damaged by a major earthquake and tsunami. The three operating reactors overheated, leading to hydrogen explosions and radioactive releases, which necessitated progressively wider evacuations of the populace. In the weeks that followed, it became clear that Reactors 1 to 3 and the spent fuel pools of Reactors 1 to 4 had the potential for far greater radioactive releases.
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2007-10-09 Response to the Nuclear Consultation

'The Government published a nuclear Consultation Document, THE ROLE OF NUCLEAR POWER IN A LOW CARBON UK ECONOMY, May 2007.
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2006-09-19 The Risks of Nuclear Power

As an engineer I became concerned that nuclear power posed unacceptable risks.
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