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expense: nuclear power costs very little. CHECK. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

Oh really? According to an independent (can't be said of your sources) report nuclear energy is not cheap and probably never will be. (See The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2009 [PDF]).

ouput: do i even need to provide a reference on this one? nuclear power runs whole nations such as france

Such as? France is the only country that's consuming mostly nuclear energy (see the Statistical Review of World Energy 2009 that I linked to some posts above). Most of the worlds consumed energy is oil, gas and coal. Nuclear energy isn't even close.

it would seem good sir, that you are the one spreading bullshit. I call you out on your anti nuke nonsense, you know nothing about the subject past what greenpeace has shoved down your throat.

Wow. Playing the Greenpeace Card = instant +5. Well played Sir.

Actually, in addition to nuclear waste the world may be running out of uranium: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/08/nuclear-react-1.html And not only that, but uranium mining is a very polluting affair http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=493&Itemid=66 http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/

(Of course, the World Nuclear Association downplays these issues: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html )

Ironically you need to burn fossil fuels in order to mine uranium; mining vechicles use diesel while the mining industry runs mainly on coal -- or have you heard of any solar-powered nuclear enrichment plants?

expense: nuclear power costs very little. CHECK. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

operating life: nuclear power stations have a long life span, plants built in the 60's are still going. CHECK. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.html

ouput: do i even need to provide a reference on this one? nuclear power runs whole nations such as france.

it would seem good sir, that you are the one spreading bullshit. I call you out on your anti nuke nonsense, you know nothing about the subject past what greenpeace has shoved down your throat.

expense: nuclear power costs very little. CHECK. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

operating life: nuclear power stations have a long life span, plants built in the 60's are still going. CHECK. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.html

ouput: do i even need to provide a reference on this one? nuclear power runs whole nations such as france.

it would seem good sir, that you are the one spreading bullshit. I call you out on your anti nuke nonsense, you know nothing about the subject past what greenpeace has shoved down your throat.

I have a personal rule of thumb: never engage in a debate over nuclear power until the word "fuel cycle" has been mentioned. One fuel cycle does not equal another. There's a bewildering smorgabord of choices, each with advantages and complications. Maybe we can cross off direct-to-hydrogen if this battery thing pans out.

You want to choose your fuel cycle carefully. The waste tends to stick around for a long time. What's the half-life in an ex-Soviet state on an unsupervised nuclear warhead? I suspect the big board at the NNSA has been a busy place since the wall fell. Maybe a few of those air traffic controllers that Reagan fired found a new calling in life.

Here's a curiosity. I was reminding myself about uranium supplies and the thorium cycle, when I stumbled onto a WNA propaganda zone. I wondered to myself, is this just one guy who doesn't adjust his meds, or is it manipulated by a powerful DC lobby org? Sometimes it's hard to know. The weird thing: to work there you need a good whitebread scrabble name. Here's all five names from the leadership page:

John Ritch
Andy White
Chris Crane
Hans Blix
Zack Pate

OK, so it's not located in Louisiana. Throw me a bone here, I need the names of their butlers, gardeners and sommoliers to place this outfit. Not a single Amarananda Jayawardena, Pathak Bindeshwar, or even a Nicholas Negroponte, the kinds of names I encountered in "The Ingenuity Gap" the other night.

Apparently, in the pro-nuclear lobby, no one wants to be accused of a stray letter or a spare syllable. Andy, you got some 'splainin to do. And Chris, how do you feel about the letter K? This here director's nuclear melt-down liability insurance form has only got *ten* letter boxes to spell out your name, and unless you're mononymous, you need one of those for the space in the middle.

Check out the kind of balderwashtheir clean little names allow them to publish:

From an economic perspective, these exploration costs are essentially equivalent to capital investment costs, albeit spread over a longer time period. It is, however, this time lag between the exploration expense and the start of production that confounds attempts to analyse exploration economics using strict discounted cash flow methods. The positive cash flows from production occur at least 10-15 years into the future, so that their present values are obviously greatly reduced, especially if one treats the present as the start of exploration. This creates a paradox, since large resource companies must place a real value on simply surviving and being profitable for many decades into the future; and, without exploration discoveries, all mining companies must expire with their reserves. Recent advances in the use of real options and similar methods are providing new ways to understand this apparent paradox. A key insight is that time, rather than destroying value through discounting, actually adds to the option value, as does the potential of price volatility. Under this perspective, resource companies create value by obtaining future resources which can be exploited optimally under a range of possible economic conditions. Techniques such as these are beginning to add analytical support to what have always been intuitive understandings by resource company leaders - that successful exploration creates profitable mines and adds value to company shares.

Now there's a man who once made a lot of money in a former career writing Enron press releases: it's not a cost, it's an option.

I have a personal rule of thumb: never engage in a debate over nuclear power until the word "fuel cycle" has been mentioned. One fuel cycle does not equal another. There's a bewildering smorgabord of choices, each with advantages and complications. Maybe we can cross off direct-to-hydrogen if this battery thing pans out.

You want to choose your fuel cycle carefully. The waste tends to stick around for a long time. What's the half-life in an ex-Soviet state on an unsupervised nuclear warhead? I suspect the big board at the NNSA has been a busy place since the wall fell. Maybe a few of those air traffic controllers that Reagan fired found a new calling in life.

Here's a curiosity. I was reminding myself about uranium supplies and the thorium cycle, when I stumbled onto a WNA propaganda zone. I wondered to myself, is this just one guy who doesn't adjust his meds, or is it manipulated by a powerful DC lobby org? Sometimes it's hard to know. The weird thing: to work there you need a good whitebread scrabble name. Here's all five names from the leadership page:

John Ritch
Andy White
Chris Crane
Hans Blix
Zack Pate

OK, so it's not located in Louisiana. Throw me a bone here, I need the names of their butlers, gardeners and sommoliers to place this outfit. Not a single Amarananda Jayawardena, Pathak Bindeshwar, or even a Nicholas Negroponte, the kinds of names I encountered in "The Ingenuity Gap" the other night.

Apparently, in the pro-nuclear lobby, no one wants to be accused of a stray letter or a spare syllable. Andy, you got some 'splainin to do. And Chris, how do you feel about the letter K? This here director's nuclear melt-down liability insurance form has only got *ten* letter boxes to spell out your name, and unless you're mononymous, you need one of those for the space in the middle.

Check out the kind of balderwashtheir clean little names allow them to publish:

From an economic perspective, these exploration costs are essentially equivalent to capital investment costs, albeit spread over a longer time period. It is, however, this time lag between the exploration expense and the start of production that confounds attempts to analyse exploration economics using strict discounted cash flow methods. The positive cash flows from production occur at least 10-15 years into the future, so that their present values are obviously greatly reduced, especially if one treats the present as the start of exploration. This creates a paradox, since large resource companies must place a real value on simply surviving and being profitable for many decades into the future; and, without exploration discoveries, all mining companies must expire with their reserves. Recent advances in the use of real options and similar methods are providing new ways to understand this apparent paradox. A key insight is that time, rather than destroying value through discounting, actually adds to the option value, as does the potential of price volatility. Under this perspective, resource companies create value by obtaining future resources which can be exploited optimally under a range of possible economic conditions. Techniques such as these are beginning to add analytical support to what have always been intuitive understandings by resource company leaders - that successful exploration creates profitable mines and adds value to company shares.

Now there's a man who once made a lot of money in a former career writing Enron press releases: it's not a cost, it's an option.

they are also one of the leading nations when it comes to adopting renewable energy sources, like wind power

Denmark is funny. The country is split in two, eastern Denmark and western Denmark, with no grid interconnection. Each part is connected to the grids of neighboring countries.

In 2008 the figures look like this:

Source _ _ _ _ _ East _ _ _ _ _ _ West
Wind _ _ _ _ _ _ 1 786 (11%)_ _ _ 5 192 (17%)
Biofuel_ _ _ _ _ 1 549 (9%) _ _ _ 1 708 (6%)
Fossil _ _ _ _ _ 8 666 (51%) _ _ 15 721 (52%)
Hydro, PV_ _ _ _ _ _ 0 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 27
Imports_ _ _ _ _ 4 949 (29%)_ _ _ 7 769 (26%)
Total:_ _ _ _ _ 16 950 _ _ _ _ _ 30 417

Exports_ _ _ _ _ 2 467_ _ _ _ _ _ 8 797
Loss _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 359_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 518
Consumption _ _ 14 124 _ _ _ _ _ 21 102
Total:_ _ _ _ _ 16 950 _ _ _ _ _ 30 417 (hey, the numbers add up!)

(Sorry about the horrible table, the fault of idiot slashdot coders who don't let me use <table> like god intended. Source: http://www.energinet.dk/en/menu/Climate+and+the+environment/Environmental+key+figures+for+electricity/Environmental+key+figures+for+electricity+generation+2008.htm).

So Eastern Denmark generates 51% of it's electricity from fossil fuel and imports 29% from Germany and Sweden. Western Denmark generates 52% of its electricity from fossil fuels and imports 26% from Germany, Norway and Sweden, The power imported from Germany is largely nuclear and brown coal, The power imported from Sweden is about half hydro and half nuclear, the power from Norway is almost all hydro. (Source: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf99.html

So one of the "leading nations when it comes to adopting renewable energy sources, like wind power" generates more than 50% of its electricity from fossil fuels, and has to import electricity that it's neighbors are generating from nukes or even horrible brown coal (lignite).

Amusingly both East and West Denmark export more power than they generate from wind - they effectively export all the green energy they produce, running Denmark itself mostly on fossil fuels and imported nukes!

It still beats the amount of coal you have to dig up by a couple orders of magnitude.

There's 6,150 kWh/ton of energy in coal, you generally get 2,460 kWh/ton of electricity - actual results depends on plant efficiency and grade of coal.

Uranium, on the other hand, gives you 360,000 kWh per Kilogram, Or 327 Million kWh per ton of Uranium(actual generation). Given that each ton of fuel provides 133k times the power, that you need to refine the stuff tends to become background noise.

And 100 tons of refined fuel isn't necessary for a reactor - A gigawatt plant will produce ~ 7.8 Billion kwh in a year. This will consume 21,900 kilograms of fuel, or 24 short tons.

For the 100k to 1 ratio:
The Economics of nuclear energy: In order to obtain(after refining) 150 tonnes of natural uranium, the requirement would involve mining, at most, some 300 000 tonnes of ore[5].

That's a 2,000 to 1 ratio - not a 100,000 to 1. Worst case. Some Uranium 'mining' techniques utilize leaching to essentially dissolve the uranium in the mine and collect the liquid Uranium at the bottom, without extensive extraction of ore.

It also says: Such a quantity of natural uranium burnt in a reactor for one year would generate as much electricity as would a coal-fired station burning over two million tonnes of coal.

Don't forget that construction costs for an equivalent amount of wind/solar stations is even higher for the nuclear fission plant, and they aren't maintenance free.

How is that addressing the point of the GP?

Follow the link. The (G)GP said:

Also, in contrast to a nuclear plant, this swarm can react almost instantly to changes in supply or demand, thus complementing the fluctuating levels of power generated by wind and solar (try achieveing that with a centralized mega-plant).

but he's wrong. EDF does actually run some it's nuke plants in load following mode - it's not as efficient, but when you have a lot of plants why the hell not.

If Germany were to go 100% nuclear, who's left in Europe to buy their power?

All the other idiots who got rid of their nukes and now do nice green things like burn lignite to make power (yes Denmark I'm looking at you).

No one you say? I see 5 countries listed in the table on that page. There is one very notable omission from that list of countries, by the way.

only 1% of the spent fuel rod is actually plutonium.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/nfc.htm

"Spent fuel still contains approximately 96% of its original uranium, of which the fissionable U-235 content has been reduced to less than 1%. About 3% of spent fuel comprises waste products and the remaining 1% is plutonium (Pu) produced while the fuel was in the reactor and not "burned" then."

And, no I don't actually support greenpeace, but the only clown around here is you

Actually the USA has around 6% of the world supply of Uranium, and Canada has around 8%. Russia has 10%, Kazakhstan has 15% and Australia has 23%. Also, the USA reserves are mostly (2/3 total reserve) too expensive to recover while hardly any of the Australian reserves are low grade and expensive to recover.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html
However, the quoted site has some questionable theories regarding long term reserves, the most worrying being that they appear to believe that because there are reserves we don't know about yet, the future will always be rosy. I disagree. Also, our current reserves of Uranium are enough to power our current demand for around 80 years. Even if we were to double the reserves by new discoveries of ore, that would only give us less than 160 years supply at current rates of consumption. If there are to be many new plants across the world, then the reserves will not last that long.

One interesting point they make is that China has coal ash which contains a higher concentration of Uranium than the economic cut off point for many Uranium mines. One ash pile at one power station contains 1000 tonnes of Uranium.

However, it seems to be foolish to jump on to another bandwagon heading for a resource restricted ditch. We need to create power independently of finite earth bound resources. Yes we could likely get much more out of the planet, but only at the cost of digging up most of the surface and mining deeper and deeper. I don't want to live on a spoil heap, I would rather use less energy and make what we have last longer.

So this gives us solar as the only realistic candidate. It's clean, it's virtually limitless, and we don't have to destroy the planet to get at it. All we need are better ways of collecting it.

Nice try, Greenpeace clown. In fact, dozens of reactors, including in France, use reprocessed spent fuel.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf29.html

Your source, which you incorrectly cite, only says they are not burning reprocessed uranium - which is trivially true because spent U is too depleted for reactor fuel (except HWRs). But reprocessed plutonium is very concentrated in fissile isotopes, and hence is viable fuel (as MOX fuel - downblended with U).

Good thing the west doesn't include any of France

Constant small thrust could push it up

For example, if the Russians threw up a Topaz-2 reactor and a couple spools of copper wire, and unspooled them toward the Earth to cross the Earths magnetic field lines, by pumping energy down the wire they could raise the orbit no problem. We considered a couple spools of copper wire as a means of powering space stations, at the cost of increasing orbital drag, but you could easily run the generator in reverse as a motor, so long as you had enough power to overcome atmospheric drag.

See also http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf82.html.

-- Terry

1. If a Primary coolant pipe leaked it would be contained because it is would be in the containment building that is one of the reasons you have them.

2Whoosh..
Even bringing up the Titanic is yet another simple minded attempt to bring fear into this.
What did it have anything to do with anything. It was silly.
But if you want to work with it I will your bringing up that Chernobyl when talking about a modern western light water reactor is kind of like someone bringing up that Titanic as a reason for not going on a modern cruise ship!
"Lets go on a cruise."
"No it is too dangerous remember that Titanic."
"But this ship will have enough lifeboats unlike the Titanic."
"No remember the Titanic it could still sink too fast to get in the life boats!"
"But it has Radar and GPS and satellite communications so it can avoid storm, reefs, and even icebergs!"
"But it could run into one that is totally under water!"
"But we are going on a Caribbean Cruise! There are no icebergs!"
"Just because nobody has ever seen one doesn't mean that they are not there"!
Bringing up Chernobyl or the Titanic when talking about a modern western reactor is NOTHING BUT A FEAR TACTIC.
The both have the same validity to the subject. Nothing at all.

Okay want some sources that disagree with yours
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/costs.htm
http://www.nei.org/keyissues/
Of these are pro nuclear sites but before you dismiss them just realise this. If there where studies of nuclear power that positive results wouldn't pro-nuclear sites post them?
Also wouldn't anti-nuclear sites dismiss them?

Plus you know that France gets the majority of their power from nuclear, Japan gets a lot of from Nuclear, and China is planning on building more reactors "made by GE no less". I find it hard to believe that those nations are being "taken in" and building plants that are no economic to build and run.
And your source isn't a journal of technology, physics, engineering, or economics!
It is a journal of sociology which can include some economics but would probably lack the technical expertise in the subject of Nuclear Engineering or even power generation.
I have seen similar studies. They all use older US plants as the source of their cost data. That is going to give you skewed data because those plants are all over 30 years old in design and each of them was a custom design. The had huge cost over runs because of that. Add in the problems with regulators after TMI and the costs are terrible. If you use modern standardized reactor designs like those used in France and China the costs totally different

Oh and here is one final article but not a study.
It is from one of the founders of Greenpeace about why he was wrong about Nuclear and now supports it along with the reasons.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/131753?GT1=43002

Simple fact seems that you fear nuclear power. No study or history of safe plant operation in the West will convince you because you have made up your mind. Anything that confirms your fear you will embrace and that which contradicts you will reject.
The West had decades of experience running nuclear power plants with France getting something like 80 of it's power from nuclear and Sweden getting around 50% all with reasonable costs and very good safety. The US also has a very good safety record even with TMI.

IANAA (Adult, yes) Nuclear is much more efficient when compared to wind farms, but nuclear energy hasn't been developed enough for it to be used as a main energy source.

Someone should tell that to the French. Nuclear reactors provide more than 75% of France's power requirements..

Ah ha! So you admit it is less than 100%, then!

IANAA (Adult, yes) Nuclear is much more efficient when compared to wind farms, but nuclear energy hasn't been developed enough for it to be used as a main energy source.

Someone should tell that to the French. Nuclear reactors provide more than 75% of France's power requirements..

Dude, there already *IS* a viable long term alternative to fossil fuels for baseload electrical power, heating, cooking and transportation.

It is called "nuclear".

See "The Economics of Nuclear Power" at http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html.

For the people who feel like ranting about nuclear waste, consider the sheer size of the installations that are being proposed for ground-level solar arrays or algae farms, and ask yourselves how many Astrodome-sized nuclear waste storage facilities could be built on that amount of land.

For the people who want to rant about the waste being horribly toxic for millenia (it isn't; the dangerous stuff is very, very short-lived), consider that the CO2 pollution model assumes that industrial carbon dioxide is deadly FOREVER - which it isn't, left to itself, with a little assist from Mother Nature, carbon dioxide turns into trees and grass and FOOD.

(Note that mine tailings, while considered radwaste by the Department of Energy, are actually LESS radioactive than the raw ore was, because the useful uranium has been TAKEN OUT of the mine tailings. If, as raw ore, it was safe enough to leave it in the ground, without any stewardship whatsoever, I really fail to understand how REDUCING its radioactivity has made it UNSAFE to put BACK in the ground.)

For some reason, environmentally-concerned citizens seem to have never learned basic arithmetic OR basic biology The carbon cycle, how animals consume oxygen and emit carbon dioxide, while plants consume carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, used to be taught in elementary school science lessons, and then again, in more detail, in high-school biology classes, at least in the US.

Nuclear... forget it, politically it just isn't going to happen.

There are currently proposals for 20 new nuclear reactors in the US under review. Still, a pretty sorry state considering China has 20 already under construction or planned to enter service in the next 6 years or so, India has 16, heck Bulgaria and Romania each plan to have a new power plant in service by 2015. Internationally, the climate for nuclear power is improving significantly. I only hope a pro-nuclear Secretary of Energy can help push America back into establishing a complete fuel cycle and expanding its nuclear generation capabilities.

The point is, maybe the US are unable to build profitable nuclear power, but that doesn't make nuclear power unprofitable.

Except that even a Freemarket think tank and business magazines say that even China, France, India, and Russis doesn't have profitable nuclear power plants. Or do you not consider the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, or Fortune reputable.

Well what that article mainly states is that the capital costs are rising. While this might affect nuclear power plants more than many other energy production methods, the current economic situation probably corrects some of this. But anyway, capital costs aren't bound to one specific energy production type, all of them are affected.

The same stands for uranium mining. Just because the US has one/some mines that have issues,

And what of other nations? The US isn't the only nation that has had problems with uranium mining. Canada has had problems, so has Austrslia.

I'm not saying that uranium mines can't be a problem. Any mines can have huge ecological impact. However it can't be generalized to all of them.

I dug out the following page about nuclear power in Finland.

I have one question and one problem. The question is is nuclear power profitable in Finland without government subsidies? And the problem is is that that webpage is on the industry's website and is therefor biased. Sure, the links I provided are to websites that are biased as well, but they are biased to the free market and business. If there were money to be made in nuclear power, without government subsidies, they're be at the head of the line in support of nuclear power.

Uhm nuclear power is _not_ subsidised in Finland, so please, welcome to the ranks :).

The point is, maybe the US are unable to build profitable nuclear power, but that doesn't make nuclear power unprofitable.

Except that even a Freemarket think tank and business magazines say that even China, France, India, and Russis doesn't have profitable nuclear power plants. Or do you not consider the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, or Fortune reputable.

The same stands for uranium mining. Just because the US has one/some mines that have issues,

And what of other nations? The US isn't the only nation that has had problems with uranium mining. Canada has had problems, so has Austrslia.

I dug out the following page about nuclear power in Finland.

I have one question and one problem. The question is is nuclear power profitable in Finland without government subsidies? And the problem is is that that webpage is on the industry's website and is therefor biased. Sure, the links I provided are to websites that are biased as well, but they are biased to the free market and business. If there were money to be made in nuclear power, without government subsidies, they're be at the head of the line in support of nuclear power.

Falcon

There may be enough wind in the world to supply our need 40 times over, but is the cost of tapping the energy source competitive with the cost of coal, gas, or nuclear power?

All of this get subsidies, as well as pass costs to others. Coal slurry spills happen all too frequently. Mountain top removal contaminates a lot of land. As does uranium mining. Without government subsidies nuclear power isn't even profitable. Though natural gas emits a lot less CO2 than coal when burned it releases a lot more methane, which is more than 20 tymes as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Then it needs pipelines to deliver it.

Well, actually, just because those two articles found negative aspects of nuclear power price, I dug out the following page about nuclear power in Finland. Here the price of nuclear power was EUR 2.37 c/kWh, when the closest second one, coal was 2.81 c/kWh. Wind power was somewhere around 5 c/kWh. The point is, maybe the US are unable to build profitable nuclear power, but that doesn't make nuclear power unprofitable. The same stands for uranium mining. Just because the US has one/some mines that have issues, is no reason to condemn uranium mining in general, at least with modern methods.

Actually, you don't have to "guard he waste". The MOX process "burns" (transmutes, actually) more plutonium than is generated. It's used in Europe and it allows France to reduce its plutonium stockpile. The remaining mass is about 600 liters (two barrels) of medium radioactivity waste per reactor per year, which can be stored in a warehouse until their decay sufficiently. Google "nuclear fuel reprocessing mox" for much more details.

I am against the idea of burying waste (especially the nuclear kind) becausereprocessing technology will improve and we'll find ways to neutralize today's unprocessable waste.

The nuclear waste problem is a political one, not a technical one. Get the stupid politics out of the way. Solutions already exist.

Actually, solar power isn't that much better than nuclear.
"Nuclear energy averages 0.4 euro cents/kWh, much the same as hydro, coal is over 4.0 cents (4.1-7.3), gas ranges 1.3-2.3 cents and only wind shows up better than nuclear, at 0.1-0.2 cents/kWh average. NB these are the external costs only."
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/default.aspx?id=410&terms=external+cost
External costs per kWh:
Solar PV, roof: 0.4-0.5 Euro cents / kWh
Solar PV, open space: 1-1.1 Euro cents / kWh
Solar thermal, parabolic trough: 0.1-0.2 Euro cents/kWh
www.kva.se/KVA_root/files/events/IMAGE_200862165121_873538026pres_Preiss.pdf

We can't have a sustainable electricity grid when lightbulbs are using 100w or even 60w.

France manages to have a Western-style power grid while generating a majority of its power from sustainable sources. I count nuclear as sustainable because it produces no emissions and because we have a stupidly huge amount of fuel for it.

Go to hell. You know nothing about radioactivity and storage of waste, and you obviously don't care to learn, Mr. Greenpeace. Coal produces about as much radioactive waste (due to thorium present in the coal itself), and it just gets spewed into the atmosphere so we can all breathe it. What the hell kind of accidents are you envisioning? We've already worked out ways to prevent them. You're more likely to see a dam burst or a turbine tear itself apart than any kind of nuclear accident today. "Miniscule" amounts of radioactivity? You mean like the amount that you receive from natural background radiation, both external (cosmic rays, thorium in the dirt, etc) and internal (carbon 14 and potassium 40)? Trust me, you're much better off worrying about things like driving or drinking than about radiation dose. They have immensely higher mortality rates and happen all the time. Even a major nuclear accident like Chernobyl killed fewer people than die in about 2 years in cars in the US alone. Chernobyl can't happen again, because we know how to design reactors now. The next worst nuclear accidents killed only operators and caused an estimated 1 additional cancer per event. More people die due to conflicts over oil than will ever die due to nuclear accidents. About the waste: As I said, coal produces comparable radioactive waste, but the waste from reactors is 100% containable. It can even be reprocessed on site and reused as fuel again. http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html --- Take a look at the table at the very bottom, which estimates deaths per unit energy produced by various methods. Nuclear comes out very favorably. We need nuclear power, and uninformed buffoons like you should be shot.

TMI was a success. Most people do not realize that there are still three of the four reactors on TMI still in operation. TMI was successful because it proved the technology to keep the core from going critical. The amount of exposure to radiation during the TMI incident is less than half of the amount of radiation one gets during an standard dental x-ray. One working through Grand Central Station gets more exposure to radiation (from radon in the granite) than those exposed during the TMI incident. I know this because I work with four or five people who did the post accident studies and worked with the programs to mitigate the hazard during post incident operations.

Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. The poor reactor design, the poor safety design, and the stupid tests being performed caused the accident. To read more : http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html. There are still operations happening near Chernobyl.

Anyway, if we want to handle the energy needs of the demands forth coming, nuclear is an answer. Wind power is not the answer. It only generates power, at the best estimates, 25% of the time. To get the windmills manufacture there are a lot of raw material necessary, with require large amounts of mining. Recycle materials are not always available to produce the steels necessary to provide the structure to support the blades. The birds flying into the blade is an urban and rural legend.

Solar works only during the day, and require toxic batteries to store the energy. Plus, on the environment, the materials to produce solar panels are very earth unfriendly--heavy mining for the raw materials. Supply of silica and gallium is in short supply. China and India are consuming large quantities of copper, gold, and other metals because of the development activities under way.

Bio fuels is stupid! Let burn all our food and starve to death, then no will be around to worry about how to get around because everyone will be dead. Cellulose bio fuels may work, but the US does not have the kind of conditions to allow the growth of those kind of crops. Brazil does a great job at it because they are not burning food, but special crops for bio fuel.

I personally believe thorium based reactors are best. There is an alternative as well--small distributed reactors. Hyperion and NuScale both have reactors perfect to a distributed energy solution. http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/ and http://www.nuscalepower.com/

Go nuclear. Its clear, it renewable, and it proven. It is safe.

So we agree, coal plants generate more radioactive waste than nuclear plants.

No, that's not true. Coal only contains minor radioactive components that are all around us anyway. In nuclear reactors additional highly active material is produced and other components get activated. But it is completely contained and therefore you can control it much better. In that we agree.

It's been a while since I last did a paper on this stuff, but here's a semi recent link:

From the abstract I guess we talk about different things. Transuranic components are not the waste I talked about. They surely can be used for another fission cycle. But the resulting lighter elements thereafter can not be fissioned in a proper chain reaction for energy production and are thus waste.

Coal plants are just treating the pollution as an externality, that and NIMBY are the only reasons it's "cheaper". We've already agreed the nuclear plant is safer. If you want to talk about "terrorists" or boogey men attacking something, drive past the billion gallon LNG tanks in New Jersey and tell me how dangerous natural gas is first.

Ok, first we do agree that coal plants are worse than nuclear. For the time beeing nuclear is IMHO the only real option of energy production. But that doesn't mean it's an optimal solution. There might not have been accidents for a long time but these things are not completely safe. And the worst case scenario of a nuclear plant accident is way worse than of any other power plant. The only good longterm energy source I see is fusion. Inherently safe and only short-lived radioactive waste.
Second, the nowadays so popular terrorist scare tactics might work well in the US, but not where I live.

Fast breeder reactors were indeed in use 20 years ago, they continue today and that usage is, outside the US, increasing. The so-called security concerns are that the US doesn't want other nations to be able to POSSIBLY make weapons out of that plutonium that is a by-product of using U238.

Well, according to http://www.world-nuclear.org/ only 4 breeders are operational at the moment, in contrast to >300 non-breeders. The weapon-making-issue is not what I had in mind. Breeders have a way lower power / volume ratio than other types of reactors, making them economically less interesting. This might change however when the Uranium resources deplete. Plus you have in some types liquid sodium as coolant which has to be handled safely, again increasing the costs. Quite sad that higher costs seems to be a stronger argument than a superior technology...

I'd love to see an accessible paper that shows coal is as clean as and still cheaper than nukes that isn't from a loon, including the cost of storing that arsenic, cesium and other "nasty stuff" that goes up the coal plant smokestack, unfiltered, much less recapturing the CO2 in any fashion.

Most coal plants nowadays use filters which get almost anything out except the CO2. Some of the stuff like sulphur oxides can even be turned into useful stuff like plaster. Extracting the CO2 is currently work-in-progess. The costs for both types of energy are almost the same. Give or take a cent, varies from country to country.

I wonder how those numbers will scale up if a country like China replaced all it's coal with nuclear.

56-70 confirmed for Chernobyl*. Considering the 50 year history of nuclear power, we average less than 2 deaths a year, even including it. Any arguments about cancer deaths also has to deal with the cancer deaths from coal plant pollution. The only power death's I'm aware of since Chernobyl was a couple of Japanese workers who violated about a phone book's of regulations, didn't use the proper equipment and safety measures; preferring to mix the stuff in a stainless steel bucket in quantities far exceeding what they were supposed to.

In 2001, we produced ~ 2.5k TWh of electricity from nuclear sources; 16% of the world's electricity. Coal is 40%.

Build up to 4X as many nuke plants as we currently have and we'd be able to shut off all the coal plants.

Going by our average of 2 nuclear power deaths a year, that'd increase to 8 a year. Big whoopty do. Well, except for the unlucky 8 - but I'd rather sacrifice 8 than 100,000.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

*Sorry, but I tend to discount greenpeace's numbers as an outlier. I've seen no evidence that they considered chemical pollution(the USSR wasn't very clean), tobacco use, heck the very contamination from dirty coal plants.

I think they've already solved that one.

SNAP

RTG

Nuclear Reactors for Space

Using their extensive studies of the Yucca Mountain region, experts estimate the chance of a volcanic event disrupting the proposed repository to be about one in 63 million per year. This equals about 0.0000016 percent chance per year that a volcano will disrupt the repository. Put another way, it means there is about a 99.9999984 percent chance per year that a volcanic event will not disrupt the repository. http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0341.shtml

Nuclear / Fossil fuel prices:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

This is another example of the environmentalist's fallacy.

First, why focus on nuclear waste while ignoring all kinds of other long-lived, harmful industrial outputs from processes like semiconductor manufacturing or steel refining?

Second, the volume of nuclear waste is tiny. The waste produced by a nuclear plant in a decade might fill a house. And by reprocessing the waste, we can reduce its volume by 90%. Compared to other forms of power generation, nuclear plants are practically clean.

Third, the waste that is produced is not all that dangerous: the way radioisotopes work, the more radiation a substance produces, the shorter its half-life. Long-lived waste products will be low-radioactivity and inert.

because they never cut corners in japan?

http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf37.html

On 30 September three workers were preparing a small batch of fuel for the JOYO experimental fast breeder reactor, using uranium enriched to 18.8% U-235. It was JCO's first batch of fuel for that reactor in three years, and no proper qualification and training requirements had been established to prepare those workers for the job. They had previously used this procedure many times with much lower-enriched uranium - less than 5%, and had no understanding of the criticality implications of 18.8% enrichment. At around 10:35, when the volume of solution in the precipitation tank reached about 40 litres, containing about 16 kg U, a critical mass was reached.

insufficiently trained staff mixing nuclear mmaterials. 2 died, but hey they probably saved a buck.

How about a NUhydro Power Plant. These generate electrickery to power a desalination plant (and potentially surplus power too), and have a by-product of Hydrogen (which can be used to power vehicles. - or the Hydrogen is the product and the desalination is the by-product ... er ... it generates electric and as a by-product you get desalinated water and hydrogen ... well, you get the idea anyway).

Wikipedia is lots of fun. Here's another article there that gives quite contradictory information about high level waste:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#High_level_radioactive_waste

And here's one from the US NRC:

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

I think the last one is more accurate than your Wikipedia article, which talks about vitrification at Sellafield. That may be done to some waste in the UK, but most waste in other countries is still stored on-site.

And for a bit more fun, here's an article on an anti-nuclear site:

http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/hlwfcst.htm

and one on a pro-nuclear site:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm

Both of them mention that spent fuel is stored for several years underwater for cooling, but only the anti-nuclear one mentions what would happen if the coolant was removed.

Nuclear Information Generation IV reactors are horribly efficient, even the lest efficient CANDU's use about 8 to 10KG of fuel / day, most reactors are designed to used unprocessed fuel (U238 or Enriched Blackshale) or fuel that requires very little development, the nice thing about the new designs is that they all use light water or liquid sodium.

According to http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf65.html (sources listed at bottom of page), in 2006 13% of California's power was provided by 2 nuclear power stations. Note a station may be multiple reactors.

So it's only 15 or so more power stations. Is it so hard to slowly replace coal stations with nuclear ones?

your other arguments seam to be wind power can't make this country self sufficient (agreed.) But their are not enough known nuclear material in the US to be self sufficient in nuclear, so it definitely can't (currently) solve the US energy problems either (unless were willing and able to kick South Africa's ass next.)

Wind can provide provide the US with a lot of energy. And an article in Sciam, "A Solar Grand Plan says that by 2050 solar can provide 69% of the US's energy needs. And while I don't like nuclear power, there's no need to go to Africa, Canada has some rich uranium deposits. According to the World Nuclear Association Canada mines more uranium than any other country.

But thats where putting them on buildings sounds smart. IE supplement the power as close to the demand, and knock down one of the big problems of big buildings (they channel wind) at the same time.

I don't know if you saw it but one of the proposals for a new World Trade Center had a wind generator in between two buildings with other proposals also including wind power.

It seems to me that the great scientific discovery of nuclear power is just another example of a Win/Lose for us all. It just doesn't seem right: We get a super-powerful energy source that produces a intensely deadly by-product (radiation), plus it gets used to threaten other "enemy" nations all around the world. I'm all for national security, but the Nuclear Age seems to have caused a major schizophrenia affliction among the leaders of "nuclear" nations as well as the ones who clamor for a neutron fix from a good-old Hydrogen bomb.

I also find it rather interesting that both Canada and Australia produce almost 45% of the worlds' raw Uranium that gets mined each year, and neither of them have any nuclear weapons that I know of. source: http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf23.html

Australia is also the nation that leads the world in the development of highly advanced process systems to enrich raw Uranium into more pure forms that get used for both beneficial electrical generation and destructive weapons too: http://www.silex.com.au/

What happened to the plutonium glut? According to the World Nuclear Association, the US has 38 tons of surplus plutonium as of 2007. The USSR had even more, because they kept their production plant going even when there was no demand. The UK has surplus plutonium. What's NASA's problem?

It's wikipedia, the idea is to read the links - the article itself is an encyclopedia summary entry.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html is the link from that page has a bunch of numbers. Of course massively biased source (I seriously don't think you'll find an independent study - the math is boring and the results not "sexy" enough for anyone without an interest one way or the other to do it) and I can't be bothered actually looking through them closely.

4. Which nations have substantial amounts of useful uranium? What would the balance of power be if those nations became the new Saudi Arabia of energy?

I'd take Australia and Canada over Saudi Arabia and the rest of the middle east any day...

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf23.html

The World Nuclear Association published a report on Small Nuclear Power Reactors in november 2007. The nuclear industry is eager to build much smaller reactors, because it's easier to find the initial capital. Once a small reactor has been built, it can start financing the construction of the second one, and so on. This modular approach (taken from solar panels and windmills) can result in a large energy output combined with a fast return on investment.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf82.html

So the USSR, US and french have designed and built small spaceworthy reactors before. Some of these things have flown on actual space missions, particularly the russian Topaz-I system, weighing only 320kg.

They even built and tested nuclear powered aircraft both in US and USSR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft

Wonder why it never went anywhere ?

For me, the biggest issues with nuke are handling long-term bulk waste and the costs: nuke is far more expensive than anything else [...]

No, nuclear power is not expensive. Quote from http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idarticle=9839&t=France%3A+Energy+profile : "French nuclear power is efficient and low cost, and French electricity tariffs are therefore the lowest in Europe.". In fact, it is so inexpensive that we are the "world's largest net exporter of energy, exporting 18% of total production (about 100 TWh) to Italy, Britain, and Germany." See http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf40.htm

More interesting references can be found in this WP article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

"From time to time concerns are raised that the known resources might be insufficient when judged as a multiple of present rate of use. But this is the Limits to Growth fallacy, a major intellectual blunder recycled from the 1970s, which takes no account of the very limited nature of the knowledge we have at any time of what is actually in the Earth's crust. Our knowledge of geology is such that we can be confident that identified resources of metal minerals are a small fraction of what is there. Factors affecting the supply of resources are discussed further and illustrated in the Appendix."

good reading for anyone interested. Of course, verify the info for yourself, no one source should be trusted stand alone.

You're being ironic, right? You couldn't deliberately have meant to say what you said seriously, in a public forum, could you? It's just too humiliating for you to make such dumb statements.

I have no idea whether or not nuclear power plant operators have a consistently superb record in relation to a) and b) in the US, but they certainly don't in the UK. Problems of unsafe secret disposals of nuclear waste have dogged the industry for years. To take just a single example, waste was tipped down an unsealed shaft for 19 years between 1958 and 1977 at Dounreay fast reactor -- it stopped because the shaft actually blew up! Cleanup will cost £100m-plus and take twenty years. The story is dealt with at length in the following documentary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_06 _05_radiation.pdf
Quote:
"O'HALLORAN: How do you characterise the way nuclear waste was dealt with in your time at the plant?
LYALL: There's only one answer to that, a complete shambles and a damn disgrace."

As for every single molecule of waste being accounted for, low-level waste (not particularly radioactive, but certainly not what you'd be happy to have stored under your bed) is still discharged into the Irish sea at Sellafield.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sea

So you're writing either out of ignorance or malice when you say "every single molecule of waste has been accounted for". Or else you think the world consists of America and everywhere else, and only America counts.

And I'm interested to see you think that the concept of "economically recoverable" is just a buzzword. I'd love to see how long it took Exxon executives to stop laughing at such cretinous idiocy. Economic recoverability is what determines whether oil, natural gas, uranium and similar deposits are worth exploiting. Tar shales are not generally economically recoverable, despite the vast quantities of oil they contain. The same will be true for some sources of uranium, including, unless you're aware of some magic technology that no-one else knows about, seawater. Seawater also contains huge amounts of gold, but we still dig it out of the ground, because the concentrations are so low that's it's not economically viable to recover the gold. And, because I have doubts you'll be able to see it without someone pointing it out to you -- the lower the concentration of uranium, the less net energy you get from burning it. In fact, most poor quality ores would, if used, cost more energy than they produce.

Let's see if you've got the brains to understand the difference between quantity and concentration. On your current form, frankly, I doubt it.

If by some chance you do get it, perhaps you'll actually answer the question I posed: "Can you cite any reliable sources for the stock of *economically recoverable* uranium, and how long that stock could meet *all human energy needs* including ground transportation?"

As the chance of your doing this are pretty minimal, I'll help you out:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2005/pdf/Gitzel.p df
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/ cmselect/cmenvaud/584/5110906.htm
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DTNPM.php
http://www.bnes.com/myths.html

These sources all talk in terms of decades, not billions of years.

Finally, I'm all for having solutions. I'd just like ones that don't make things actually worse. Some examples would be: combined heat-and-power; having stores deliver shopping, rather than people picking it up; using coaches instead of buses; increasing use of wave, solar and wind power; opening window

1. The only nuclear fuel mined will be the deposits that have so far been explored, and that are economical to extract at today's prices. Today's prices are ridiculously low, and at higher uranium prices (still much lower per watt than coal), far more uranium will be economical to extract, and it'll be more economical to explore for more. (There's basically been no uranium exploration in the past 30 years due to the insanely low price of uranium.)
2. We're not going to use breeder reactors to recycle waste. Not using a breeder reactor on nuclear fuel is like buying a box of breakfast cereal, having one bowl of it and throwing the rest away. We can convert normally useless U-238 into fissile plutonium-239. 99.284% of uranium is U-238, which means that using a breeder reactor, we'll increase our fuel supply by about a hundred times.
3. We discount thorium, which is more common than uranium and is also fissile.
4. 
   
   
   Please, stop repeating the fallacy that we don't have the fuel for nuclear power. We have plenty.