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Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

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Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Pablo2079 » Thu 20 Mar 2014, 14:45:42

Just watched Pandora's Promise. It's about Environmentalists that have converted to being Pro-Nuke (even in the wake of Fukishima). I found it to be enlightening, but I'm still skeptical. The documentary goes onsite in Japan (Fukishima), Ukraine (Chernobyl) and multiple other locations. It covers some of the inherent problems with early reactor designs and how the push to light water reactors (away from breeders) was a mistake. It also covers how wind and solar really encourage NG (due to the intermittent nature of their contribution to the grid). Covers a little coal and oil issues as well.

Anyone else check it out yet? I just stumbled on it... just about 90 minutes long. Very well done. (It seems to have been backed by Paul Allen.)

http://pandoraspromise.com/
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby dinopello » Thu 20 Mar 2014, 15:47:43

Thanks, I'm always looking for new stuff to watch on netflix rather than watching Breaking Bad for the third time.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Subjectivist » Sat 22 Mar 2014, 14:15:39

Having been a pro nuclear environmentalist all my adult life it is great to see powerful voices coming around to using science instead of appeals to emotion based on myths. I was especially pleased to see Mark Lynas of 6 degrees could change the world as one of the main voices. This will rank up there with A Crude Awakening on my list of recomendations to those seeking the truth.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Subjectivist » Sun 23 Mar 2014, 13:58:53

pstarr wrote:I will watch this with my wifey. It's probably too late to get a modern nuke program going. Peak oil is now and there is no money, political will, (uranium?) or cheap energy to build a reasonable number of nukes. Certainly no time to put a dent the coal-fired road we have taken. And diesel and gasoline account for much of the CO2. I don't know what we'd do with extra electricity. Never have enough to replace ICE's with EV's. There isn't the electric infrastructure needed to get electrons to EV's outside suburbia. Etc. Etc

Regardless, this film is brave. I was agnostic (must admit I was rabidly anti-nuke for a few young years) after 3-mile Island-- it seemed pretty minor. Completely changed my mind for good after "Nature: Radioactive Wolves" from PBS.

You might be interested in this,
http://resources.yesican-science.ca/tre ... urces.html

Guarapari Beach, Brazil

Radioactive beach sands eroded from surrounding mountains.
800 mSv ·a-1
The beach sands tend to concentrate heavy elements in much the same way that prospectors "pan" for gold. The natural sloshing and washing of the waves tends to remove all of the silt and clay from the soil. This concentrates the remaining heavy particles in the sandy residue.

Since most naturally occurring radioactive materials have large atomic mass numbers, they form very dense (and therefore heavy) compounds.

Ramsar, Iran

Hot springs
700 mSv ·a-1

These springs are so named because they are thermally hot, but as irony would have it, they are also radioactively "hot". All natural radioactive sources of radiation arise from the decay of unstable atomic nuclei. One of the products of these radioactive decays is radon gas which is found dissolved in the waters of many hot springs.

Radon gas is slightly denser than air and therefore tends to accumulate in depressions and basements. This gas is a strong emitter of alpha particles. Radon is an inert gas and can be easily inhaled without detecting its presence. It can cause serious damage to the sensitive lung tissues.

Radon is also slightly soluble and becomes dissolved in the blood stream

Kerala Beach, India

Radioactive beach sands eroded from surrounding mountains.
35 mSv ·a-1
In this instance the combination of naturally occurring radioactive minerals in the surrounding rock and the concentration of these minerals by geological processes has created soils which are enriched with radioactive elements.

City of Pripyat,
(near Chernobyl)
Ukraine
Permanently Evacuated

Nuclear accident fallout
5.0mSv ·a-1
This is not a result of naturally occurring radiation from the surrounding soil, but is inserted here for purposes of comparison.

In 1986 a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl began an uncontrolled, runaway nuclear reaction. The heat produced a massive steam explosion which released large amounts of radioactive material into the air.

Most of this material precipitated out of the air into the nearby farms, villages, and towns making them uninhabitable.

Luckily much of the high level radiation was produced by radio isotopes with short half-lives, and the radiation levels quickly dropped. Nevertheless, the residual background radiation stabilized at a level which has been considered high for human occupation.

It is interesting to compare the levels of radiation that people will happily encounter when it concerns their recreation, and the levels of radiation they will not tolerate when it does not. A one week vacation at Guarapari Beach, Brazil is equivalent to living three years in the City of Pripyat,near Chernobyl. Six months at Guarapari Beach is equivalent to living eighty years (almost a lifetime) in Pripyat.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 23 Mar 2014, 21:40:37

Watched it earlier with my spouse. It was uplifting to see some of the toughest anti-nuclear environmental movement people have at last joined me in pointing out that the hazards of Fission are grossly exaggerated. The real danger is extreme climate change from CO2.

One statistic did catch my attention. Every smart phone requires a connection to a server farm to be 'smart' and as a consequence it uses a portion of the energy consumption of the server farm equal to operating a refrigerator every day. If your household has multiple smart phones you are adding a refrigerator worth of daily energy consumption for each and every one of them. Just one example of why the high tech future is not a low energy future.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 23 Mar 2014, 22:34:46

Tanada wrote:Watched it earlier with my spouse. It was uplifting to see some of the toughest anti-nuclear environmental movement people have at last joined me in pointing out that the hazards of Fission are grossly exaggerated. The real danger is extreme climate change from CO2.

One statistic did catch my attention. Every smart phone requires a connection to a server farm to be 'smart' and as a consequence it uses a portion of the energy consumption of the server farm equal to operating a refrigerator every day. If your household has multiple smart phones you are adding a refrigerator worth of daily energy consumption for each and every one of them. Just one example of why the high tech future is not a low energy future.


Correct but not complete. It is the combination of the manufacturing energy and the operating energy - both the charging of the mobile device and the portion of server power used - that equals a refrigerator.

Electronics used to be thought of as a "clean" industry, but it is anything but. I was on an engineering task force that converted my employer's manufacturing facilities to "green" status. We switched to organic citrus-based cleaners for our circuit boards, we eliminated lead from solder, we put solar panels on all our buildings, we used every trick we could, and succeeded brilliantly.

In the process, we caused about a 50% increase in our manufacturing costs. So the Board of Directors in it's infinite wisdom cut a deal for contract manufacturing and the unfashionably large, intricate, and expensive computers I continue to work on are now produced in Singapore from components in mainland China made using some appallingly dirty manufacturing processes. Which is pretty much what happened to most of the industrial production in America.

Silicon chips, "Gorilla glass", and lithium polymer batteries are the terribly toxic finished components of mobile electronic devices. NOT toxic by nature, but toxic in the sense that the raw materials are terribly terribly energy-intensive to manufacture.

Modern electronics is reliable and long-lasting. I am still using a 7-year-old HDTV that replaced a working 12-year-old SDTV. But I have to resist the urge to "upgrade" to the latest and greatest. But just TRY to find somebody with a first generation iPhone. SmartPhones are recycled about every two and a half years, a fraction of their usable life.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Subjectivist » Mon 24 Mar 2014, 17:21:52

pstarr wrote:Watched it last night with the wifey. Riveting. I was one of those activists who broke into the Shoreham nuclear power plant back around 1980. Silly kid. What scared me then was the impossibility of evacuation, the problem of choke points and bridges. Even on a good day the Long Island Expressway was a parking lot. It was really the only major artery off Long Island.

I was disappointed that the wolves of chernobyl exclusion zone were mostly ignored (does 'Nature' magazine have a copyright on the animals?. The Coptic priest was not a compelling fill-in. LOL). It never discussed the competing theories of radiation damage either. All health code is based on the linear no-threshold model. No mention of the the threshold model or radiation hormesis supported by seven generations of healthy wolves. Otherwise outstanding.


If you want a wild life update you should watch the new documentary on youtube,
http://youtu.be/IEmms6vn-p8
II Chronicles 7:14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Subjectivist » Tue 25 Mar 2014, 08:04:59

pstarr wrote:Damn Sub, you expect me to spend another hour of my life doing something worthwhile? LOL.

Plus I have to read this now; Advanced nuclear power systems to mitigate climate change Have you?


Thats a new one on me, thanks for the link! The Discovery video is very Disneyesque, like a cross between Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom and the adventures of The Incredible Journey.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 25 Mar 2014, 14:20:33

pstarr wrote:Sub, the bravenewclimate article is good.

The metal fuel and cladding expand during a loss-of-coolant accident, the reaction goes subcritical, and the reactor shuts down. What could go wrong? LOL


The article you linked is pretty solid, I have liked the IFR concept since I first read about it 25 or so years ago but I always figured it would take real Government commitment to put the system into use. At one time I calculated that using the DUPIC process invented in South Korea you could take the spent fuel from Light Water reactors, grind it and mix it with powdered depleted uranium 50-50 and form it into fresh fuel for CANDU reactors, then after it was spent CANDU fuel dissolve it in molten salt and either pour it into a Molten Salt reactor or put it through electrorefining at the IFR facility and use it as fresh fuel for either system. That gives you three cycles of use minimum and also eliminates a lot of your depleted Uranium stockpile, and the Plutonium that comes out of the reactor at any stage is so denatured it would be pretty useless as a weapon material. So here is my ideal complex, you bring in fresh UOX fuel at about 7% U-235 concentration and run it in a LWR for 36 to 48 months. You take the spent fuel out and put it in a cooling pond for three years while the next batch is going through its service life in the reactor, then when you are about ready for the next fuel cycle you grind the older spent fuel into powder and mix it with depleted Uranium and make it into CANDU fuel which you run for about 18 months in the CANDU reactor on the same complex site. After it is CANDU spent you put it in the second cooling pond where it sits for another three years cooling off. Once it is cool you dissolve it in Molten Salt of Lithium Fluoride and Beryllium Fluoride and then either send it into the electrorefining process or cast it into fuel bricks that can be set aside in secure storage until you need to add them one at a time to the Molten Salt reactor that will use them as fuel. In this manner one batch of fresh fuel has a minimum useful life of 54-66 months as fuel in the old style LWR/CANDU reactors, then use until fissioned away in Liquid Sodium or Molten Salt reactors. All of the existing stockpile of spent LWR fuel in the USA would be eligible for going through this process directly once it is 3 years in the cooling pond, that works out to almost 75,000 TONS of spent UOX already on hand. Anyone claiming a Uranium shortage simply does not understand the already proven technology either because of their political position or ignorance of the facts.

Oh and by the way that 75,000 tons of spent fuel would make a stack 100 meters long by 33 meters wide less than 3 meters high. Nuclear fuel is incredibly energy dense.

As for the movie link
Discovery Channel Chernobyl Life In The Dead Zone


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEmms6v ... e=youtu.be

it is a cute presentation featuring a mother cat, a wolf and two bear cubs and their encounters with each other and other forms of wildlife. It was nice to watch but clearly very staged at every step of the process, no way did anyone get all this footage with genuinely wild animals. Also the film has a plot, which I find totally absent in real documentary films :D That doesn't mean you shouldn't watch and enjoy it, it was fun in a Elementary School educational film kind of way. They also emphasized about a hundred times that all the wildlife in the Zone is radioactive and if animals had longer lifespans they would be getting cancer instead of living perfectly healthy lives. No evidence of this claim was ever given, it was just repeated about every 5 minutes of the film. It could have just as easily been titled
Mamma Cat Finds A New Home After Noisy Neighbors Join Her Village
.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby TemplarMyst » Tue 25 Mar 2014, 15:21:49

I was wondering whether this thread would develop any traction. Watched the thread for a bit, with only Pablo's initial post and Dinopello's first comment being the only activity for a while.

I'll chime in with the folks who were encouraged by the reaction to the movie. I watched it not that long ago on Netflix myself.

It was, I admit, Radioactive Wolves which completely changed my mind on nuclear power a couple of years ago. Since then I've only continued to develop a deeper sense that nuclear power is probably the only way we might (repeat might) get out of this mess. I've followed Guy McPherson's blog for a while too. It may be too late, but if we have, say until 2050 instead of 2030, we might have a chance. Maybe.

I'm old enough to have watched The China Syndrome during it's theatrical release. I lived through Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I was terrified of nuclear power as a result of all those events.

Come to find out my fear was utterly and completely misplaced. I've tried to get some others in my local community to take another look at nuclear as a result. Having a bit of luck, actually.

To pstarr, I've thought we could use the extra electricity to actively pull GHGs down and reprocess them into either a solid matrix suitable for burying in the many open pit mines we've dug, or alternatively converting it into some useful short hydrocarbon chains for fuel. Both of those activities are thermodynamically intensive, but hey, when you're running off an energy source a million times more energy dense than oil, not a problem.

So definitely a thumbs up for Pandora's Promise from this neck of the woods :)
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 25 Mar 2014, 22:03:33

pstarr wrote:This is really my first interest in so-called breeder reactors. I can see why. It always seemed like magic. Perhaps part of the confusion and resistance among the public (and non-interest in nuclear) could be a consequence of engineer/weenies and their techie nomenclature. These are not actually 'breeder' reactors per se (the machines do not magically 'birth' fuel, like a 'momma' reactor) but rather process an otherwise lower quality fuel to make it a high quality fuel ready for fission. They don't 'breed', they steal some energy that would have gone into the fission process, while operating, to convert fertile material into fissionable material.


ROFL! The analogy is pretty plain spoken the Fertile Nucleus (EGG) gets impacted by a Neutron of the right energy (SPERM) and they make beautiful music together creating a new Fissile Nucleus (Bred Baby) . As long as you have a supply of Fertile Nuclei (EGGS) and Neutrons (SPERM) you can keep breeding and breeding and breeding......

If you are really skillful you can even use Protons (ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION) to breed your Fertile Nuclei (EGGS), but that is a much tougher job to do when regular Breeding is cheaper and easier.

People frequently fail to realize that a standard LWR has a fuel replacement breeding ration of 0.5 to 0.7 depending on how well designed it was in the 1960's-1970's. IOW for every two Fission reactions that take place at least one new Fissionable nucleus is bred. With the more carefully designed more modern Generation III reactors like the EPR designed by France and Germany in the 1990's the ratio is 0.8+ which means for every four fission reactions three new fertile nuclei are bred into fissionable nuclei. This coupled with the higher enrichment of the fuel to start with is why newer systems can run for 24-36 months or even longer at full power between refueling cycles where the older Generation II design reactors that make up most of the ones in operation today only run 12-18 months between refueling cycles.

In the technical terminology any reactor with a breeding ratio below 1.0 is a 'burner' because when the fuel elements physically wear out they have less fissionable material in them than they had at start of operation. By the same token any reactor with a ratio greater than 1.0 is a 'breeder' because when the fuel elements physically wear out it has more fissionable material in its mass than it had at the start of the cycle. Technically a perfectly balanced reactor with a 1.0 breeding ratio is a 'convertor' because it converts exactly as much fertile material to fissile as it consumes, but in practice you are always going to be a little higher or lower because that kind of perfect balance is neither easy, nor particularly useful. Physically wearing out a fuel element can mean a couple different things, the element might be damaged by the constant exposure to high heat, high pressure water streams and other stresses, or enough fission fragments that absorb neutrons have accumulated to make it more efficient to remove it so that fresher fuel can be put in its place.

Hopefully that wasn't too wonky for you Pete, if it was just tell me what I made seem more complicated than it needed to be.
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby sparky » Tue 25 Mar 2014, 23:25:25

.
From long past memories ,
The choice of light water nuclear reactor was due to the development of nuclear propulsion for US Navy subs
the taxpayer took on the reasearch and development cost
so GE civilian program had a fully functionnal and fully tested reactor to sell
it just needed to be scaled up , not a problem if it wasn't going to sea
the gravy on top was that the supply network for the fuel was operationnal
the maintenance and operation protocols were written
and the ex sub officers could be poached to provide experienced engineers with great moral qualities
that was a win win , even if the light water path wasn't really the best possible one

The man who did most to make the nuclear sub a success was Admiral Hyman Rickover
a real character who warned the world of a coming energy crisis in 1957


"The earth is finite. Fossil fuels are not renewable. In this respect our energy base differs from that of all earlier civilizations. They could have maintained their energy supply by careful cultivation. We cannot. Fuel that has been burned is gone forever. Fuel is even more evanescent than metals. Metals, too, are non-renewable resources threatened with ultimate extinction, but something can be salvaged from scrap. Fuel leaves no scrap and there is nothing man can do to rebuild exhausted fossil fuel reserves. They were created by solar energy 500 million years ago and took eons to grow to their present volume.

In the face of the basic fact that fossil fuel reserves are finite, the exact length of time these reserves will last is important in only one respect: the longer they last, the more time do we have, to invent ways of living off renewable or substitute energy sources and to adjust our economy to the vast changes which we can expect from such a shift.

Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use his capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare. "

Rickover's stringent standards and powerful focus on personal integrity are largely credited with being responsible for the United States Navy's continuing record of zero reactor accidents.
During the mid-late 1950s, Rickover revealed the source of his obsession with safety in a personal conversation with a fellow Navy captain:

"I have a son. I love my son. I want everything that I do to be so safe that I would be happy to have my son operating it. That's my fundamental rule."

He was on board of each and every one of his boats going for its first dive
he personnally interviewer each and every of the the new officers , A terrifying experience
he was grilling them to know if they were competent to his standards
Jimmy Carter was one of them ,
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Re: Pandora's Promise - On Netflix Now

Unread postby Subjectivist » Tue 25 Mar 2014, 23:41:41

Actually the whole Jimmy Carter Nuclear Engineer meme is an urban myth. Carter was asigned to work on the Naval Reactor program under Hyman Rickover in 1952, but less than a year later he resigned from the Navy when his father died and left him the family farm and business. Carter had a good career in the Navy and deserves respect for serving his country, but he never went through nuclear power school and never became a nuclear engineer. The Nautilus wasn't even launched until a year after Carter resigned from the Navy.
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