Steve Milesworthy,
You are very hypocritical. You state:
As I say, you delight in presenting lists of leading questions, and then object strongly if your readers refuse to be led.
You don’t answer my questions but you expect yours to be answered. I have answered yours but you have not answered mine. You avoided them and obfuscated.
Normally I provide explanations rather than ask question. But that wasn’t working with you because you kept asking silly, irrelevant questions about Greeenpeace’s anti-nuclear talking points. So I changed tack and asked leading questions. If you had attempted to answer them, you wpould have realised how silly are your down in the weeds questions.
For example you asked about the “deadly dangerous slag” at Windscale. So I asked you haw deadly, dangerous?” you haven’t answered?
I asked you how many fatalities nuclear waste had caused so far? You didn’t answer that.
I asked you how many fatalities per TWh of electricity supplied (so you could compare this figure with other electricity generation technologies to get some perspective. The idea was to get you to see how irrelevant and silly and scaremongering are the questions you asked me.
You said:
In your Yankee Rowe example, you failed to understand that the project has essentially hidden costs by passing the unknown liabilities onto the current taxpayer and the tax payer for the next several generations.
Wrong. I do understand that the costs of waste management are included in the cost of electricity from nuclear power plants. The cost has been more than paid for. The power plants are now takilng the government to court for compensation for over payment because the government has delayed progress with Yucca Mountain repository. Furthermore, the used fuel has high future value (some 99 times more value than has already been extracted), so it is not going to be disposed of, no matter what the politics of the time say.
I suggest it is you that fails to understand. And you fail to be able to see matters in perspective. You are concerned about trivial quantities of used nuclear fuel but don’t seem to be in the slightest concerned about the much larger quantities of toxic wast from other electricity generating technologies. The latter do not decay over time, are vastly larger quantities, some are more toxic. You also seem to have completely ignored that nuclear is already avoiding some 160,000 fatalities per year (assuming nuclear replaced coal), and would avoid over a million per year by 2050 if nuclear replaced all coal generation.
Your problem is you know next to nothing about this issue and your mind is closed to knowing anything about it. It’s the same closed mind that leads you to believe unquestioningly in CAGW. Zealots and alarmists on one issue tend to be the zealots and alarmists on many. You seem to be a zealot and alarmist of CAGW and nuclear power.
Instead of me answering for the nth time your comments about Windscale, Fukushima and others, I’d urge again you to attempt to answer these questions I asked before. If you do attempt to answer them honestly, you will definitely learn a lot and getter a proper perspective on costs and risks. Picking out Greenpeace anti-nuclear talking points instead of looking objectively at the important comparisons is keeping your brain locked in anti-nuclear, scaremongering thinking. I’d urge you again to challenge your beliefs. Have a genuine go at answering these questions (I’ve answered yours repeatedly, but you have not yet answered these, other than by obfuscation) Here are the questions (again):
1. How long have we had nuclear power and how many reactor-years of experience do we have with commercial nuclear power operation? (hint: 56 years and 15,000 reactor years of operation).
2. In that time, how many people have been killed, fatally injured or made sick by radioactive waste?
3. What is the toxicity of radioactive waste compared with the toxicity of highly toxic chemicals?
4. How long does radioactive waste last and compare that with the life of the toxic chemicals?
5. How much radioactive waste have we produced so far and how much toxic chemical waste have we produced so far?
6. Where is the toxic chemical waste? (hint dispersed in the environment all over the world
7. Where is the nuclear waste? Held in canisters like this http://www.yankeerowe.com/http://www.nukeworker.com/pictures/displayimage-94-5205.html#top_display_media (by the way, those 16 canisters contain all the used fuel from 31 years of operation and 34 TWh of electricity supplied at a life time capacity factor of 74%; the Yankee Rowe plant has been totally decommissioned: http://www.yankeerowe.com/ .
8. Got any wind or solar farms with a record like that?
9. Who in their right mind would want to get rid of the once used nuclear fuel, given it still has 99% of its useable energy remaining for use in the next generation of reactors?
If you don’t attempt to answer them honestly, it is a sure sign you are more interested in pushing your ideological beliefs than in wanting to do anything about mitigation.
