Climate change/oblivion: breaking point or slow death spiral?

Didn’t greenpeace publicly say that they were directly responsible for a massive amount of CO2 pollution due to their anti nuclear stance ??

i’m sure I remember seeing a tv program which said exactly that.
and it was greenpeace that were saying it, not someone else claiming ‘greenpeace did this that or whatever’

Didn’t greenpeace publicly say that they were directly responsible for a massive amount of CO2 pollution due to their anti nuclear stance ??

I don’t know, did they? Unless they set fire to a load of coal oil or gas it doesn’t make it true.

Greentricky.  tidal  FLOW is much less damaging than barrages

anagallis_arvensis

So that’s a no then eh? Makes you think doesn’t it!

Either way they are LIARS… either they have been lying about their stated aims to prevent nuclear energy or they are lying about the disinformation.

Which one do YOU believe..?

martymac

Didn’t greenpeace publicly say that they were directly responsible for a massive amount of CO2 pollution due to their anti nuclear stance ??

i’m sure I remember seeing a tv program which said exactly that.
and it was greenpeace that were saying it, not someone else claiming ‘greenpeace did this that or whatever’

I’ve not seen that TBH but I suspect it’s an ex-greenpeace person, as per the video crossfire posted earlier of the ex founder.

anagallis_arvensis

I don’t know, did they? Unless they set fire to a load of coal oil or gas it doesn’t make it true.

of course it’s true they are one of the main organisations that have prevented adoption of nucelar and instead encouraged burning of coal, oil and gas

UK reopening deep coal mines and extnding coal powered generation, germany getting rid of nuclear and switching back to coal…
its all on them but they are too gutless to admit they are the cause and misguided pricks keep funding them

I’ve had a look at the Greenpeace website. It seems clear to me. You’re acusing them of lying, stevextc, the burden of proof is on you. Pick something on the website and prove it a lie with links not rumour, heresay and libel. seems to me that they are aware of contradicting issues and have decided to take a non ambiguous stand point. I’m not a donor but admirative of what they do.

I’m more of a fan of Friends of the Earth. As with any political movement I don’t agree with everything they say but enough to make me a supporter.

I totally agree that a lot of environmentalists have dropped the ball by opposing nuclear, but that does not take away from the fact that fossil fuel interests have and are the main issue here

Not only have they been spreading misinformation about climate science for decades, but they have also been central to the anti-nuclear movement since the 1950s and an oil baron even seed funded Friends of the Earth in the hope that they killed off nuclear

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/28/the-dirty-secret-of-renewables-advocates-is-that-they-protect-fossil-fuel-interests-not-the-climate/

Friends of the Earth accepted oil funding in 1969 at a time when many were still convinced planet earth was heading for the next ice age but nuclear war and nuclear accidents were of major concern to ecologists.

In my geology training the prospect of an imminent ice age was given as much time as the atmospheres of the planets and the changes in Earth’s atmosphere through geological time. Man’s role in changing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere wasn’t covered. It was only in the mid 80s that my work with Welsh Water led me to reading papers on CO2 in relation to global warming.

We are leaving two legacies for future generations, climatic change and a pile of nuclear waste to deal with, and probably a nuclear wasteland too given that man generally ends up using the weapons he builds.

Slagging off Greta, FOE and Greenpeace usually comes from petrolhead, gas central heating using, flying, intensive consuming hypocrits. Well? Because it’s a bit embarrassing going on about EVs, solar, nuclear and ecoaviation when you have oil-fired central heating.

Get your own house in order before slagging off those trying to do something. And when your own house is in order and you’ve proved you can do it you’ll realise a renewable future is possible with or without nuclear.

Are there any climate sceptics with whom one could have a sensible discussion? By which I mean people who don’t use playground insults to describe their opponents, claim elected politicians should be in prison or randomly type words in capitals. I’m open to hearing the arguments against man-made climate change, but as soon as I encounter any of those I switch off  I’m afraid.

Stevextc doesn’t know the difference between lying and being incorrect.

I’m open to hearing the arguments against man-made climate change, but as soon as I encounter any of those I switch off  I’m afraid.

You will probably have hard time finding any.  As I said a few pages back, it is good to question everything but there comes a time where such a vast majority of experts and scientists who have researched the subject all of their lives means you don’t need to question the high level aspects of it, i.e. is it man made

a pile of nuclear waste to deal with

Not as much as you’d think. The vast majority of nuclear waste is only really dangerous in the short-to-medium term. This makes sense if you think it through – something with a long half-life is decaying slowly, which means a relatively low risk. We’ve been conditioned as society to hear “long half-life” and assume that it’s dangerous.

The most severely radioactive byproducts from a nuclear reactor have half-lives measured between hours (where do you think nuclear medicine gets short-lived isotopes from?) and about 30 years. Pu-249 has a half-life of ~24,000 years but is broadly harmless provided that you don’t eat it or sleep on top of it.

Wrap it in concrete and stainless steel, lob it in a deep hole somewhere and the problem is largely* dealt with.

* the biggest risk is water-source contamination, but you can mitigate that by burying deep below the water table / under the sea bed / or just putting it somewhere that you don’t care about like Aylesbury.

of course it’s true they are one of the main organisations that have prevented adoption of nucelar and instead encouraged burning of coal, oil and gas

I thought these things were controlled by governments? How about you take the time foil hat off and open the other eye!!

LOL (edit: at flaperon’s naivity)

There are piles of nuclear waste waiting to be buried and every final storage site I can think of is dogged with problems.

Go on , what is your propositon for the 4% of highly radioactive waste that is dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. I’m a geologist remember and finding sites and materials to contain stuff over that time period isn’t a problem I’d like to be asked to solve.

At present it’s just in borosilicate glass in stainless steel containers piled up in various places because nobody knows what to do with it. Attempts at burying have so far been plagued with problems to the point that some should really be dug out again because it’s leaking like a sieve – thankfully most of that is lower level waste that will only be polluting for thousands of years.

60 odd years and it’s still piling up with no answers – that’s the legacy were leaving to future generations.

That’s waste, then we have operational leaks, about half the US reactors are leaking, leaks from French plants often make it onto the local news.

Then the “disasters”.

There have been debates on STW before, I’m in the “no safe level” camp. The idea that any level of radiation is safe is nonsense, it’s just that the level of background radiation means no causal link can be proven, even if it exists.

Go on , what is your propositon for the 4% of highly radioactive waste that is dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. I’m a geologist remember and finding sites and materials to contain stuff over that time period isn’t a problem I’d like to be asked to solve.

You accuse me of being naive? The irony. You literally can’t have “highly radioactive” and “dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years” at the same time.

thankfully most of that is lower level waste that will only be polluting for thousands of years.

As flaperon explained, the longer the stuff is radioactive, the lower the intensity. As I understand it, a lot of the low-level waste doesn’t actually have a lot of radioactive material, it’s just diluted among other stuff and expensive to separate. So, there’s a small volume of stuff that will be very dangerous for a relatively short time, and a large volume of stuff that isn’t highly dangerous, but will take a long time to decay.

I think you need to do some reasearch, thols2, it’s exactly the opposite of what you say.

There’s the mass of low level stuff, clothes, gloves, material s with low levels of contamination. Then there’s the 4% of spent fuel that can’t be recycled and armaments waste:

https://www.nrc.gov/waste/high-level-waste.html

Edukator

Friends of the Earth accepted oil funding in 1969 at a time when many were still convinced planet earth was heading for the next ice age but nuclear war and nuclear accidents were of major concern to ecologists.

But it’s no longer 1969 and they continue with the same anti-nuclear rhetoric
There is a VERY BASIC question … do we do everything we can or just the stuff FOTH/Greenpeace say is acceptable?

Despite what you might think I’m not pro-nuclear or anti renewables … I’m pro doing EVERYTHING to mitigate climate change at this point not just what Greenpeace or FOTH approve of without taking options off the table.

There’s the mass of low level stuff, clothes, gloves, material s with low levels of contamination. Then there’s the 4% of spent fuel that can’t be recycled and armaments waste:

That’s what I said. Small amount of very dangerous stuff. Large amount of not very dangerous stuff.

anagallis_arvensis

I thought these things were controlled by governments? How about you take the time foil hat off and open the other eye!!

democratic Governments do as the electorate agree to through either truth or deception, most of them taking as much advantage of making as much money for themselves as possible.

You could argue Thatcher closing down the mines was a positive move done for environmental reasons but I think its more commonly accepted she hated the miners and wanted rid and used the memories of the winter of discontent in that

In this case the alleged “environmental” organisations have provided the fear … done the governments lying for them and allowed the government and its friends to rake in the £ from oil and gas…

or just putting it somewhere that you don’t care about like Aylesbury

Quote of the thread so far. Sorry, but it made me laugh.

(Edit: apologies to those in Aylesbury 😉)

democratic Governments do as the electorate agree to through either truth or deception, most of them taking as much advantage of making as much money for themselves as possible.

Greenpeace are no more than a fringe campaign group to blame them for climate change is laughable. Maybe you are joking but it’s hard to tell.

High-level radioactive waste is stored for 10 or 20 years in spent fuel pools, and then can be put in dry cask storage facilities.

In 1997, in the 20 countries which account for most of the world’s nuclear power generation, spent fuel storage capacity at the reactors was 148,000 tonnes, with 59% of this utilized. (60.68 tonnes)

Away-from-reactor storage capacity was 78,000 tonnes, with 44% utilized. (43,680 tonnes)

So just over 100,000 tonnes… or a little over 2 titanics….or less than half the Statfjord platform at 245,000 tonnes
This would fit comfortably in the bottom 1/3 of the Kola deep borehole (below 8000m) with 8000m of concrete and ballast on top

Greenpeace are no more than a fringe campaign group to blame them for climate change is laughable. Maybe you are joking but it’s hard to tell.

I’m not joking in the slightest … if you were to go to the high street / shopping centre aka Politics Joe interview and ask people opposed to nuclear where they got their perception from where do you think they are going to say?

Incidentally, where they say is probably not that true in that they may have been told by someone else “Greenpeace say”… but ultimately their perception is GreenPeace/Friends of the Earth etc.

In the same way successive governments don’t really care if they got the information directly or not.. they just care about the sentiment.

I’ve avoided this thread since it started, but stupidly curiosity got the better of me today. I cannot believe the attitudes and denials that are on display here.

The planet is ****ed, the evidence is there. Stop being selfish and think about all life on Earth (not just human) that is being impacted by the climate disaster.

You agreed with this, thols2

As flaperon explained, the longer the stuff is radioactive, the lower the intensity.

High grade waste is both highly radioactive and for a very long time.

Low grade waste often contains low levels of fast decaying isotopes, is not very radioactive in the first place and those isotopes decay faster.

Think about about it, what’s the origin of the radioactivity? Take Uranium, formed in super nova explosions and blasted around the cosmos, rained down on planet earth, moved aound a bit by plate tectonics, magmatism, metamorphism, sedimentaton to end up concentrated in a few places in the continental crust where it’s been for hundreds of millions of years and is still radioactive. In Gabon there’s a high enough concentration for a natural plutionium producing nuclear reactor. In areas where it’s concentrated it’s still a health issue even in its dispersed natural state. Take Cornwall where there’s uranium in the Hercinian/variscan granites. Even though well dispersed radon gas is being produced and causes a couple of thousand death a year due to lung cancer:

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/westminster-hall/2002/jan/30/radon-gas-south-devon

The nuclear industry exploits  uranium from the rocks which already have the highest concentrations found in nature then concentrates it further so that it’s more radio active and will decay faster but still on a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years.

And ends up with lots of it left over and doesn’t know what to do with it. I’ve worked in pollution control/management; the usual strategy is treat, dilute and disperse. You can’t do that with nuclear waste.

High grade waste is both highly radioactive and for a very long time.

The radioactivity is linked to the half-life. If it has a short half-life, it will produce much more intense radiation (because it’s reacting more quickly), but it will deplete itself more quickly. If it’s very long-lasting, it means it has a long half-life so it’s reacting more slowly.

Natural uranium is about 99.3% uranium 238 and 0.7% U235. U238 has a very long half-life, but decays to U234, which has a much shorter half-life. Even though the overwhelming majority of uranium is U238, most of the radiation produced is from the U235 and U234 components, not the U238.

Radioactive isotopes are spread throughout the rocks of the earth, so radon gas forms in basements. Coal also contains traces of radioactive isotopes, so burning coal spreads them into the atmosphere. So, coal fired plants actually give off huge amounts of radiation too because they burn huge amounts of coal. Even though nuclear plants produce radioactive waste, it’s relatively easy to contain compared with the radioactive waste produced by coal. Despite the problems of nuclear plants, we would be much better off replacing coal plants with nuclear.

High grade waste is both highly radioactive and for a very long time.

No, it’s not. The radioactivity of something is measure of how fast it’s decaying. If it’s decaying very rapidly (so “highly radioactive”), by definition it won’t last very long. This is the half life (the time at which half of it, statistically, has decayed). This is complicated by the fact that most unstable elements actually go through a whole series of decays but not enough to really impact the argument.

In order to have a long half-life, it must therefore have a relatively low rate of decay, and consequently isn’t particularly dangerous. Even then, the type of radiation produced largely determines the danger and all radiation is stopped by a few feet of water.

On top of that DNA is insanely robust. Every cell in your body experiences circa 3,500 DNA errors per day, of which 3-4 are caused by background radiation. People dying from air pollution will exceed the death count of people who die from nuclear waste by many orders of magnitude. Quite frankly so will skin cancer yet we don’t seem particularly worried about UV radiation as a species.

I agree with all of that, thols2. So why did you agree with Flaperon? And his “broadly harmless” comment. He went on to add the qualifiers “provided that you don’t eat it or sleep on top of it.”, conveniently ignoring the breathing in factor which is how most victims have been contaminated with plutonium.

I’m against coal burning too. My solutions, along with FOE are cutting demand and increasing renewables. Cutting demand has enormous scope, check out the heating bills threads.

You say “easy to contain”, now google nuclear leaks from power stations and waste storage and get back to me.

We are where we and the future starts now. We should avoid the mistakes of the past and build on the sucesses. Both the nuclear and fossil fuel industries have proved highly polluting and dangerous whilst renewables have been providing an ever increasing share of power with far less environmental impact or disasters. I know where I want the future to go.

Except “No it’s not”, obviously.

Slightly irradiated clothing is low level waste that will have a short half life and wasn’t very radioactive in the first place. High-level waste is what the name implies however safe you or Flaperon say it is. That’s why it’s being stockpiled, no-one has yet worked out how to safely store it for forever in human terms.

So why did you agree with Flaperon?

Because what he said was correct.

Slightly irradiated clothing is low level waste that will have a short half life and wasn’t very radioactive in the first place.

If it has a short half live, it’s highly radioactive. I think what you may mean is that it has low levels of highly radioactive contaminants. The contaminants will be highly radioactive, with a short half life, but there will be only a tiny amount of them mixed up with a large amount of harmless material. Newspapers will report it as hundreds of tonnes of radioactive material, but the radioactive part is only a few grams, mixed in with hundreds of tonnes of harmless material. If it has a half live of 1 year, the radioactivity will have dropped to 1/1000 of the original level after 10 years. So, if you start with 1 g, after 10 years you have 1 mg of radioactive material left. If you just incinerate it and let the smoke escape, it’s probably less harmful than a coal powered plant.

If it has a short half live, it’s highly radioactive

Not if it’s got a tiny amount of radioactive material in it. You understand this but still deliberately misunderstand my posts.

FFS a glove with nanograms of a fast decaying isotope isn’t as radioactive as kilograms of plutonium.

The concern is and always will be the risk of radioactive material entering the environment and the consequences for the ecosystem and humans. Accidents tend to be very harmful, normal operation variously harmful,  and waste as harmful as what becomes of it results in.

Nuclear plants are a long term liability, check out Ukraine past and present.

And why the constant comparison with coal? We all agree coal is **** filthy from both a greenhouse gas and radioactive contaminaton point of view. How about comparing with wind turbines and hemp insulation materials.

FFS a glove with nanograms of a fast decaying isotope isn’t as radioactive as kilograms of plutonium.

The glove isn’t radioactive, it has been contaminated with radioactive material. If the isotope is fast decaying, it’s not long lasting. A tiny amount of fast decaying isotope could be more radioactive than kilograms of plutonium, but only for a short time. That’s exactly what happens with uranium. U238 is 99.3% of natural uranium. U234 is a tiny fraction, but it contributes about the same to the radioactivity because it has a much shorter half life.

Anything emitting alpha, beta and gamma I’ll consider radioactive. The more of those emitted the more radioactive the object. So 5kg of plutionium is more radioactive than several tons of low-level waste whatever the isotopes or half lives in the low-level waste (by **** definition). And it will be for as long as man is on the planet.

Jesus Christ, do you ever admit to the possibility that you might be wrong on something?

Yes, there is a link between activity and half-life.
Activity = (ln2/T)*N where T is the half life in seconds and N is the number of nuclei

But N isn’t fixed. More stuff means more activity. So it’s quite possible to have a lump of stuff that is highly active (in decays per second) and has a long half-life

Not when I’m right.

Check out the alpha, beta and gamma emissions from 5kg of plutonium and now tell me how many tons of low-level waste emit the same however fast decaying the elements/isotopes present in tiny quantities.

As for these likes restricted to the club of full members they’re just a distortion of opinion on the forum. Two people on the same side of an argument liking each others posts because they have a paid for rosette. No way would I pay for this level of debate.

Sleep tight on your plutionium, Flaperon. And never forget the silent majority on these threads who are reading, understanding and thinking for themselves.

Edit: thank you, roverpig

I blame CND, if we’d stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb the world would have nuclear plants every where spitting out weapons grade plutonium :/

and if it wasn’t for those greenham common “witches” I could heat the house for free.

I’m not joking in the slightest

Oh dear.

if you were to go to the high street / shopping centre aka Politics Joe interview and ask people opposed to nuclear where they got their perception from where do you think they are going to say?

Chernobyl? Or that other one in Japan?

Incidentally, where they say is probably not that true in that they may have been told by someone else “Greenpeace say”… but ultimately their perception is GreenPeace/Friends of the Earth etc.

You what now? Don’t understand, is that tin foil hat too tight?