Excerpts from 103rd Nucular Bloggers Carnival

The 103d Carnival of Nuclear Bloggers is hosted at Yes Vermont Yankee. Here are a few excerpts, devoted to debunking a portion of the anti-nuclear hysteria being propagated by lefty-Luddite greens of the dieoff.orgy persuasion:

The Debunking Blogs

In a group of posts, nuclear bloggers debunk various anti-nuclear scare stories.

Debunking Kelp: At Nuclear Diner, RADIOACTIVE KELP--Now What!! Susan Voss looks at newspaper stories of radioactive kelp washing ashore in California. She also helps her 8th grade son with a project on radioactivity in soils around Los Alamos.  In both cases, radiation is not present at levels measurable above background.

Debunking Cost: The Canadian Nuclear Association responds to Greenpeace Canada’s claims that nuclear energy is responsible for Ontario’s rising electricity rates. The post Nuclear Main Source of Affordable Clean Energy in Ontario, shows that the more likely culprit for electricity price rises is the “Billions of dollars [committed] to renewable energy without fully evaluating the impact, the trade-offs, and the alternatives through a compre­hensive business-case analysis.” Nuclear energy provides over half of Ontario’s electricity, it’s enabling the province to be coal-free by 2014 and provides the stable base needed to bring renewables onto the grid.

Debunking Collapse: For a little comic relief, Rod Adams  of Atomic Insights posts a video clip of a No Agenda podcast, which takes aim at Robert Alvarez and his fear-mongering story of the "catastrophic" risk from Fukushima Daiichi unit 4 spent fuel pool.  No Agenda is produced by Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak, and in the Atomic Insights post about the Spent Fuel Pool Fable, you can hear Dvorak call Alvarez a "hysteric." It's not nice to call names, of course, but it is sometimes fun to watch other people calling names.  Especially when the names are justified.

Debunking Daydreams: Reality bats last, after all.  Be Here Now and the Debate. Meredith Angwin at the ANS Nuclear Cafe discusses her participation in a recent nuclear energy radio debate on station WHMP in Northampton, Massachusetts -- from the perspectives of mindfulness, being in the moment, and accepting reality as it is (includes a very interesting discussion in the 'comments' section as well).  (I thank ANS Nuclear Cafe for choosing my post as the one to submit this week)

Debunking the Joys of Being Nuclear-Free: As of yesterday, Japan has no operating nuclear reactors.  At HiroshimaSyndrome, Leslie Corrice writes about the shuttering of Japan's last operating nuke. Japan is "nuclear free" for the first time in 42 years, and the future looks ominous.
_Yes Vermont Yankee

There is much more at the carnival linked above.

Sandia is developing a Brayton-cycle super-critical CO2 gas turbine which should be able to extract up to 50% more power from small modular reactors, as compared to the Rankine steam turbines currently being proposed. Efficient new forms of nuclear fuel transformation will provide a magnitude of clean, safe, reliable electrical power and industrial heat which cannot be matched by combustion sources, on a large scale. Human societies are being blocked from developing these safe, clean, reliable forms of abundant power, energy, and process heat by lug-headed politicians, academics, journalists, and pundits of the lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgy persuasion. But by leveraging abundant hydrocarbons in a clean and responsible way, more intelligent humans can out-last the lefty-Luddites to the point of being able to develop the necessary new generations of more efficient nuclear power and heat.

As an added bonus, humans will be able to utilise abundant high quality process heat from new nuclear reactors to produce high quality chemicals, polymers, lubricants, fertilisers, liquid fuels, and other materials which were once thought by doomers to be subject to permanent scarcity. H/T Brian Wang