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Is Rehabitating old nuclear power stations a priority?

CliveS

Planning permission is always a problem for new nuclear sites but surely we can rebuild an existing station on the same site?

I am against trying to clear existing sites of tiny amounts of radio active dust when in fact we need to rebuild our nuclear power stations.

The alternative would be to go back to coal once we have prioritised the design for some carbon capture plant for the chimney stack.

In the meantime DRAX and other stations should burn plastic as well as wood waste rather than shipping it at huge cost to be burnt overseas. 

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    CliveS said:
    I am against trying to clear existing sites of tiny amounts of radio active dust when in fact we need to rebuild our nuclear power stations.

    I'm sure that's going to go down well with the prople who you're trying to recruit to work at the new nuclear station.  "Don't worry about the low-level nuclear waste we've left scattered around.  We've decided it's not worth the cost of cleaning up".

    CliveS said:
    The alternative would be to go back to coal once we have prioritised the design for some carbon capture plant for the chimney stack.

    Carbon capture as a technology seems to have gone nowhere.  Possibly because the efficiency loss of fitting it to power stations makes them economically unviable.

    CliveS said:
    In the meantime DRAX and other stations should burn plastic as well as wood waste rather than shipping it at huge cost to be burnt overseas.

    We already have municipal incinerators around the country, burning rubbish to generate electricity.  Potentially, burning plastic can create all sorts of toxic byproducts, so it has to be done under carefully controlled conditions.

    But I do wonder if incineration would be better for those awkward mixed plastics that currently get "recycled" to Turkey, and actually end up on illegal landfills.

    But in the longer term, it would be so much better to insist that all products must be sold in packaging that is genuinely recyclable.  And not just at one demonstration plant somewhere in the country.

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    Simon Barker 16 hours ago:
    I'm sure that's going to go down well with the prople who you're trying to recruit to work at the new nuclear station.  "Don't worry about the low-level nuclear waste we've left scattered around.  We've decided it's not worth the cost of cleaning up".
    What is low level nuclear waste? What are the risks? High levels of radiation are certainly hazardous but at low levels it tends to become emotions and non science. This is copied from the Sellafield thread:
    __________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    The real risks from ionising radiation are also not discussed. It is fairly well established from the atomic bombs dropped on Japan and from various accidents that a rapidly received dose of 100 mSv or more will increase the risk of cancer, a dose of 4 Sv will be fatal without medical intervention and a dose of 10 Sv will be fatal. When the dose is less than 100 mSv or is delivered over an extended time the science becomes much more woolly.

    The current legislative requirements are based on collective dose and the Linear Non Threshold (LNT) principle.  These state that there is an increased cancer risk for any dose and that if 100 people receive 1 mSv this carries the same risk as one person receiving 100 mSv. It also follows from them that the risk of 2 mSv per year for 50 years is the same as the risk of a one off 100 mSv dose. There is no scientific basis for this and it is not supported by the large differences in background radiation levels around the world.

    The average background dose in the UK is 2.5 mSv per year. Parts of Cornwall and around Aberdeen can be three times this. Do we see three times the incidence of cancer in Cornwall? Other areas of the  world have more than 10 times the average background radiation level. This does not show as an increase in cancers.

    radwatch.berkeley.edu/.../

    So what are the real risks? There have been a lot of extrapolations based on mathematical models and a lot of emotional outbursts without much fact, a bit like AGW  Thinking

    If I take a piece of granite into a nuclear power plant it becomes radioactive waste and has to be disposed of accordingly. Are the current rules sensible?

    This HPA document goes into some detail of what is real and what is conjecture.

    Ionising radiation: risks from exposure - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

    I find that report sensible  and realistic. It notes that the LNT is probably wrong, but it is the only usable risk tool we have. To try and incorporate a threshold and a dose rate response in radiation control legislation is currently not possible.

    When you consider the entire cost basis of nuclear power is based on a concept that is probably wrong it is a little worrying. More sensible radiation limits would significantly reduce the costs of nuclear power with no increased risks.

    The report addresses and discounts the ‘low dose radiation is more risky that high dose radiation’ concepts put forward by Busby and his cohort but doesn’t look at the other argument for radiation hormesis.

    There seem to have been two main areas of research into hormesis, one the Radon - lung cancer relationship in the USA and two the group of buildings in Taiwan that were built with Cobalt 60 contaminated rebars. Both appear to show a reduction in the incidence of cancers with an increasing low level of radiation. As a well-documented long term exposure to moderate levels of radiation I would expect the Taiwan apartments to carry similar importance to the study of the atomic bomb victims but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The only western journal to carry it is the potentially dubious ‘Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons’. Here are links to the Taiwanese report and a hormesis paper, both well referenced.

    www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.../

    www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.../

    I am not sure about radiation hormesis, we have always been bathed in natural radiation so it is likely that we have developed some protection mechanisms, but is radiation really a requirement for our bodies? Is the lack of research because there is nothing there or because it is potentially embarrassing to the ‘establishment’?

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    "Don't worry about the low-level nuclear waste we've left scattered around.  We've decided it's not worth the cost of cleaning up".
    At the right price that would work for me. I have a physics background and can do the risk sums. It always amuses me that there is an inversion, and the general public are !"£ scared of radiation, and really blase about viruses and food poisoning and so on, and the respective  professionals are quite calm about radiation, and !"£$ worried about biological hazards...

    Low level waste is just that.

    Mike.

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