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Nucular Hydrogen Economy
Mark Baard writes "The hydrogen economy will at least in part be based on nukes. The DOE will build a pilot high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), which theoretically can co-generate electricity and hydrogen, side by side, inside a cheap modular unit."
when did dubya start posting here?
You could read the article.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Spell Czech?
Here is the text of the article...
On a sunny Saturday morning 30 years from now, you may decide to take your family for a ride to the country. You'll still be driving a car, and you may still get stuck in traffic. But that's OK, because the only thing you'll be breathing in is water vapor from the car in front of you.
Welcome to the seemingly benign "hydrogen economy" President Bush has touted over the past year. Pollution-free cars. Abundant fuel. A cleaner environment.
But there's one factor the president isn't talking much about: the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new nuclear power plants his administration imagines making all of that hydrogen.
The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry to make high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), which--theoretically--can co-generate electricity and hydrogen, side by side, inside cheap modular reactors. Advocates of the plants say they wouldn't need the expensive protections required for traditional models.
This summer, the Senate is expected to vote on the Energy Policy Act of 2003, which includes funding for new HTGR plants and the construction of a pilot co-generation facility to be run by the U.S. Department of Energy in Idaho. The bill was sent to the full chamber by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month.
Spokespeople for the committee and the DOE say the aim is to cut greenhouse emissions, since energy companies continue to use coal and natural gas in making hydrogen. But small, modular HTGR plants may do it more efficiently and cleanly, they said.
That all depends, of course, on how you define "cleanly." To extract hydrogen from water--to get the H out of the H2O--you first have to make steam. The modular nuclear plants would do that without polluting the air, but would also leave behind radioactive waste.
Scientists have not yet designed a nuclear facility whose safety and efficiency trumps that of gas or coal. One proposal, from MIT, has a nuclear reactor sitting under the same roof as a chemical plant bubbling with sulfuric acid and hydrogen iodide.
Each modular plant would produce as little as one-tenth of the energy of a single light-water reactor. And since by some estimates the United States would need the equivalent of 500 light-water reactors to produce enough hydrogen, it may take thousands of modular plants to get the same job done.
The nuke industry, not surprisingly, says it's interested in joining the hydrogen economy. Entergy, the second-largest nuclear energy producer in the U.S., hopes to break ground on its co-generation Freedom Reactor within five years.
But only the feds seem willing to pay for the research and development that would make the futuristic plants a reality. "We generate electricity," said a spokesperson for Exelon, the country's largest producer. "We're not heavily involved in funding research and development."
Taxpayers may soon be. The Senate's energy bill affords the DOE $1.1 billion to build an HTGR co-generation nuclear plant at its Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory within 10 years.
The bill also proposes to kick-start a nuke renaissance by subsidizing half the cost of six to 10 new HTGR power plants in the United States.
"We need to move toward clean-air energy sources that are more reliable than wind and solar," said Marnie Funk, a spokesperson for New Mexico Republican senator Pete Domenici, chair of the energy and resources committee.
Renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, are emissions-free. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Many people also see wind turbines as an eyesore: Cape Codders are fighting plans for an offshore wind farm that would obstruct their views. "And then you've got the bird issue," said Funk. Wind turbines earned some notoriety by killing as many as 50 golden eagles along California's Altamont Pass during the 1990s.
Today, w
This is really a revival of a program that Clinton zeroed out the funding for in 1992. Supposedly, (I had friends working on it) Al detested the thought of anything nuclear.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I'm aware of two economic methods of generating H2. The least economic is from cracking water using electricity (the topic of this article). The most economic is by cracking natural gas - this is the method used by everybody I know of in the chemical industry.
Natural gas, mostly methane (CH3) is reacted with steam (H2O) such that CH3 + 2H2O = CO2 + 3.5H2
So, when somebody says he wants a hydrogen powered vehicle, what he really means is he wants a natural gas powered vehicle.
-AD
Entergy, the second-largest nuclear energy producer in the U.S., hopes to break ground on its co-generation Freedom Reactor within five years.
OK, we can cut it out with this "Freedom" stuff everywhere now. Tell Entergy that they can go back to calling it their "French" Reactor again, the war is over.
It should be noted that many of these technologies are theoretical and are the result of basic research combined with applied research. While I am not a fan of the current administration, I do tend to agree with their view of nuclear power as long as newer safe designs are implemented. To those who are critical of this, it should be noted that we have a large coal burning electricity plant in central Utah that produces as much radioactivity and throws it into the atmosphere as Three Mile Island did. This is because of the high uranium content of the coal. At any rate, the basic research is important here and should be funded along with the applied research into such things as computational modeling of high temperature physics.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Maybe the nuclear reactors are a temporary measure until we get enough hydrogen to keep the process running primarily with fuel cells. Seems to me that hydrogen should be easy enough to extract from seawater though without resorting to other drastic measures.
Still, what's worse, depending on foreign oil from the volatile middle east, or dealing with radioactive waste here in the states ? I'll bet Nevada isn't too happy about all this.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
The only safe way of getting rid of them would be to send them into the sun, but that would take (with today's technology) make more waste than what it would get rid of.
The Raven
Coal makes up most of the USA's electric generating capacity. If you want a hydrogen powered car that uses "electricity cracked water", then what you have is (largely) a coal powered car.
However, if you use hydrogen from "steam cracking" of natural gas (CH3), then you have a natural gas powered car.
Nobody said the hydrogen was free!
-AD
i have never heard of this... nucular? does it support linux?
I think the keyword is "could" and that might be stretching it
"nucular, it's pronounced nucular." -Homer Simpson
The amount of anti-nuclear sentiment in the U.S. today is just silly. If you think nuclear power is unsafe or damaging to the environment, well, it's possible to make that case, but it's a battle that from both the public safety and environmentalism standpoints is FAR, FAR less important than a bajillion other battles that are just being neglected because they don't have a dramatic scare word like "NUCLEAR!" attatched to them. Moreover, the end result of anti-nuclear protest is NOT going to be in any way to encourage inefficient "alternative energy sources"; the only result will be that corporate interests will stay with "safe" (becuase it doesn't cause protestors) fossil fuel based energy sources, thus increasing our nation's depednence on oil just that little bit further, spewing god knows what horrible things into the air day and night, and harming the environment more than nuclear power ever could. Way to go.
If nuclear power can have the added side effect of producing Hydrogen to use in hydrogen power, then great, that's just one more advantage. Now if only we could convince the U.S. to use breeder reactors so that there wouldn't be quite so much of that pesky nuclear waste that the protestors keep going so much on about.
Note to the anti-nuclear protesters and PETA: You are not doing anything productive, you are reflecting badly on "the left", and you are pre-empting actual important work being done by others because when faced with a PETA or anti-nuclear story the news will run it, because those are issues that catch the public's eye, but when faced with a story in which people are protesting real, harmful corporate abuses they don't run it, because hey, they did the "protester" thing with the PETA story yesterday. Please go away.
(Although i will recognize the people complaining about the nuclear waste dump site near Las Vegas have a point-- building a nuclear waste containment policy in a *mountain* on a *fault line*, even a small fault line, is just a fucking dumb idea.)
And the methane is cheap and easy to get as well... 99 cent menu at lunch means that you can drive home in the evening...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Amen to that.
I would prefer fusion, but that hasn't been done yet. Next on my list would be space based solar power, but sadly that might take longer to be ready than fusion. The only answer that is right-here-right-now is nuclear fission. Done properly it will not only reduce carbon emissions it will even reduce the amount of radiation released into the environment (it seems counterintuitive, but a typical coal power plant will release more radioisotopes into the environment than a typical nuke plant on a per Megawatt of power produced basis).
People just have to get over their knee-jerk prejudices. Unfortunately it may be easier to solve the engineering & infrastructure problems with fusion or space solar power than it would be to get the newsmedia to engage in a sane discussion about the risks and benefits of nuclear fission. Too many of them got everything they know about nuclear power from watching China Syndrome.
the real question is, when will mark baard stop posting his own stories to slashdot? a search indicates this is not the first time he's done this.
observe...
submitter: Mark Baard
url: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0322/baard.php
the story:
It's Nucular
by Mark Baard
May 28 - June 3, 2003
Renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, are emissions-free. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow
One of the main benefits of a hydrogen economy is that you can generate hydrogen cleanly and efficiently in places where there is a lot of sunshine (and access to water) and ship the hydrogen safely to places that need it. Just like oil, only safer, more environmentally friendly, and renewable. And the US has lots of regions that are good for that kind of solar generation of hydrogen.
The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry to make high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs),
I'd prefer greenhouse gases to nuclear waste. Greenhouse gases may end up causing lots of devastation, but they probably go away within a matter of centuries. Nuclear waste poses a lethal risk for tens of thousands of years and can be used for creating dirty bombs and other mischief.
I get the feeling that Bush administration policies can largely explained as using popular issues ("the environment", "national security", etc.) as an excuse to transfer large amounts of government subsidies to big donors.
"No structure - geological or man-built can do that."
So you shoot it out of the solar system (delta v for that is actually smaller than dropping it into the sun). When you reprocess the waste to reduce its mass, you make it hot enough for use in RTG power sources that can run sensors and a transmitter. You wind up with a large number of space probes to explore near interstellar space and you get rid of the waste.
I know there are issues with proliferation and so on. But for nuclear weapon owning states that is not an issue.
This article is pure unadulterated fear mongering, and is an insult too be posted as news. Each man can form his own opinion, thank you.
TurboD
Wired magazine had an article a couple of months ago about Iceland using geothermal energy to generate hydrogen, I believe through electrolysis. They have started using hydrogen in vehicles and fishing vessels. Since geothermal is minimally polluting, and since they have utilized geothermal extensively, Iceland is able to sell some of their Kyoto Protocol 'pollution credits' to other countries.
Octane, the most common component of gasoline is C8H18 (ASCI drawing:)
H H H H H H H H
| | | | | | | |
H-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-C-H
| | | | | | | |
H H H H H H H H
What does this have to do with a cleaner world? Crack water with electricity? Why would you need nuclear power plants to do that? (unless some of the people who gave you money during your election need some PR!) This is a non existant industry. GIVE the nuclear power industry ONE BILLION DOLLARS to do research?
The Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry
This says it all right here. This is CORPORATE WELFARE.
Um....what about the immense "hidden" costs of nuclear? The assertion from nuclear industry insiders in the article seems to indicate that all the rad waste generated by all the worlds power plants could fit in a basketball court sized, 2 story building. If so, then why did us taxpayers get stuck with a $58 billion basketball court called Yucca Mountain? I know government can be innefficient, but...
I'd really just like to hear proponets of nuclear energy production talk about all the costs involved in generation, vs competing technologies.
"would take their heads out of their asses long enough to realize that wind turbines alone could provide enough energy to power the whole planet "
I'd like to see your calculations on this. What are the kw/person rate you are using? What efficiency are you using for the technologies?
As the article says, the US always gets shoe-horned into a "well if we want clean solutions, lets go wind/solar!" agenda... but since either solution is a pipe-dream, we continue living the same coal and oil lifestyle. Countries like Germany, that didn't have the benefit of West Virginia coal, went nuclear a while ago (and haven't been Chernobyl-ing left and right as some anti-nuke FUD would tell us).
Heck, maybe the US can finally sneak into Kyoto if this goes through! Could it be possible that *gasp* GWB might make the US a cleaner place while anti-nuke environmental nut Al Gore screwed the pooch on this one? What is the world coming to?
What is music when you despise all sound?
Then I want a slice of the revenues.
None of this "donated to the public" bullshit.
If some chiseler is going to get a free ride on government patents, he's going to pay a cash license fee for it.
The article's relentless insistence on how THE GOVERNMENT MUST MUST MUST IMMEDIATELY LAUNCH A Manhattan-project-like effort to develop a hydrogen economy and SAVE AMERICA reminded me of those Anime Otakudom lines about "The World Will Be Saved By Steam!", or like various other rants that people go on, usually political or anti-drug. Sure, there's good technical discussion in there about fuel cells and storage issues, but that's not really what it's about.
So Remember, Kids, Hydrogen isn't the answer! Professor Steamhead says ""Steam. Water plus heat equals steam. Always remember this. The world can be saved by steam." and he's got a giant steam-powered mecha robot to do the job with!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you use SEP containment technology it doesn't have to last a million years. It only has to last the career of an elected official. After that, it becomes Somebody Else's Problem.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If anyone can find a copy of it online, there's an excellent article from the Dec 8, 1978 issue of Science that provides some perspective. Someone cranked the numbers for the concentration of uranium in coal and America's yearly consumption, and (if I remember it correctly) they found that the trace levels of uranium were actually high enough that we'd have gotten more energy from using it in a fission reactor than from burning the coal. That means that it'd be far more than the amount of uranium consumed in reactors each year, and it's all just going straight into the atmosphere.
We keep the article posted in our undergraduate physics lab, just in case people start complaining about the weak little sources we use for radioactivity-based experiments.
Microsoft delenda est!
begging the question doesn't mean what you think it means
you mean "raises the question"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Before you complain about the spelling, note that the original article is headlined "It's Nucular" and the /. headline is echoing that on purpose.
:).
Okay, now you can post
"Jerk store Jerry, jerk store... Jerk store!"
Instead of hoax hydrogen cars,
it's better to leave gas cars alone (may be
modifying them like Toyota Prius), and
use http://www.changingworldtech.com
to get oil from waste.
Defending my brother and the good folks at the Voice: the spelling was a joke, a reference to the fact that this potential nuclear revival would result from a Bush administration initiative. I'm astonished so many smart people in this group didn't get an obvious joke, mocking the administration.
Erik Baard
Not to mention that the actual spent fuel is maybe 1/1000th (10,000th?) of the total amount of "Nuclear Waste". Unfortunately anything that comes into any kind of proximity with the fuel or the reaction also becomes radioactive and must also be disposed of eventually. So it really is hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of radioactive waste that will need displosing over the next 30 years just from the plants that are on line right now.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
And when the sheeple are ingorant enough about the physics involved that they can be swayed by "Not In My Back Yard" types and hysterical appeals to "oh no, it's nyuookyular, we're all gonna die!", politicians that want to get re-elected have to put up with it.
For the record, I support Yucca Mountain. If they'd let me, I'd be happy to buy land right on top of the damn thing.
So "Yes. In my back yard."
With Yucca, it's not gonna be in anybody's back yard; for obvious security reasons, the nearest home is gonna be miles away. Of course, to the "we're all gonna die!" crowd, 10 miles, 20 miles, 100 miles, 500 miles, is still "their back yard".
There's no negotiation with the more radical end of the environmental spectrum, because their real goal is the curtailment of human activity in general - stopping nuclear power is merely a means to that end. If oil's banned for greenhouse gases (that haven't been conclusively shown to increase global temperatures), and nuclear power is banned for radioactivity (that hasn't been shown to leak from sites like Yucca), it'll be solar (dangerous chemicals used in the manufacture of solar cells) and wind (slaughter of migratory birds) next.
I'll stop there before I go into full-bore rant mode and conclude by saying that if Yucca does go through, I'll bet there'll be an initial hysteria about it that'll cause property values near the site will drop. At that time I'll be giving serious thought to putting my money where my mouth is. A geek could do worse than to end up owning a ranch in Nevada with acres of land, beautiful mountain and desert scenery, no state taxes, and only a couple hours' drive to the wackiness that is Vegas.
I would be much happier with a reactor of this sort being built within sight of my house, than the equiv. coal fired plant.
... guess what... also a non-renewable resource. Nuclear, Coal, Gas... all non-renewable to some extent.
I've been near coal. I'd rather have the sneaky cancer of possible radiation leakage than the nasty lung cancer of coal. It's dirty, ugly, messy, and
Of course, solar cells cover hundreds of acres and don't do much; they generate tons of nasty by products for the silicon, and wind turbines aren't much better.
Hmm, there's geothermal (if you're lucky), there's hydro-electric (but that kills the fish, etc).
Looks like we're screwed. How about we try building A MASS TRANSIT INFRASTRUCTURE. Perhaps if we reduced the number of cars by a whole heck of a lot, we could use a combination of resources more easily. Easier to retrofit one bus that hauls 500 people a week than 500 cars when the latest eco-FUD technology comes out.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
Yes, the energy required to get equal portions of H2 is less when dealing with methane. But consider the cost of this energy, and of the source of hydrogen.
Also, yes, the startup costs for the process are greater for the nuclear route, since building a reactor is more costly than building an equivalent methane processing chemical plant.
However, on the grand scale needed to provide hydrogen as a significant fuel source to the nation, the cost of the source of the hydrogen will be significantly greater than the cost of production.
With the nuclear route, the bulk of the costs is up-front, and semi-annual for nuclear fuel. With the chemical route, the costs are linear, and grow in proportion to production.
Water is infinitely cheaper, and more abundant, than natural gas.
Consider also the cost of the infrastructure needed to transport the source of the hydrogen. Gas pipelines are more expensive, and more dangerous, than water pipes. And you only need the pipelines when you can't drill for water. But you can, almost anywhere.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Perhaps we can harness the potential kinetic energy of people hugging trees.
Lets face up to the fact that no energy source is 'suitable' for the environmental movement.
Solar panels create toxic waste as a byproduct of their manufacture; endangered birds fly into the blades of wind turbines (yes, this has been raised as an issue!).
Blah.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
We're talking about emissions during generation of electricity, not during creation of the device used to generate it.
If you want to talk about waste during production, don't forget that gas and coal generators have nontrivial waste as side products of their creation, as well. Compare a couple of buckets of nice sand, maybe some heavy metals, wire, and some plastic for solar cell production, to lots of steel and other metals that get strip-mined, not to mention oil, a lot more wire, etc., for gas/coal-burning generation.
If that doesn't convince you, take a look at all the oil and stuff needed to keep generators going, versus maybe spraying the surface of the solar cells with water every now and again to get the grit off...
Get off my launchpad!
actually, you DON'T want all that waste too close together in one place.
t tp://www.logtv.com/chelya/kyshtym.html
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7018-8.cfm
h
Too many fast neutrons + too much unstable material = Criticality
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What I found on the web says that a car moving at highway speeds uses about 15 kW of power. The standard estimate for domestic power use is 1 kW averaged throughout the day.
Back of the envelope, let's say 10 million Californicators spend an hour a day in their cars. Averaged over 24 hours, this is over 6 GW. Entire daytime power usage in CA is about 35 GW (depending on season). And this doesn't account for SUVs using more power or commercial trucking.
I would be interested in seeing a real estimate, but it looks like this would require a substantial increase in power production facilities.
And this leads to a sticky question. If we can provide electricity via renewables to generate hydrogen, as the administration suggests we can, why aren't we using using renewables for half our energy now!
The Most Contaminated
Spot on the Planet
Chelyabinsk Nuclear Disasters
Plutonium and Tritium for Soviet nuclear weapons is produced at three closely guarded locations, each of which includes a "closed" city of workers. These cities do not appear on maps, and until recently, travel to and from them was all but prohibited. Even now, foreign visitors have been allowed to see only two of the sites. Each of the sites has an official name, often including a number that indicates a post office address, but each was known by another name or names abroad as well as in the Soviet Union.
The complex officially known as Chelyabinsk-40 is located in Chelyabinsk province, about 15 kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym on the east side of the southern Urals. It is situated in the area around Lake Kyzyltash, in the upper Techa River drainage basin among numerous other interconnected lakes. Between Lake Kyzyltash and Lake Irtyash is Chelyabinsk-65, the military-industrial city once called Beria, but today inhabitants call it Sorokovka("forties town").
Another Mayak laboratory, the All-Union Institute of Technical Physics, is located just east of the Urals, 20 kilometers north of Kasli. It is better known by its post office box, Chelyabinsk-70. It was opened in 1955, shortly after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in the United States.
Chelyabinsk-65, was reported to have 83,000 inhabitants and "almost 100,000 people." Chelyabinsk-40, the reactor complex, covers some 90 square kilometers, according to a recent ministry report, and is run by the production association Mayak("beacon" or "lighthouse"). All the reactors are located near the southeast shore of Lake Kyzyltash and relied on open-cycle cooling: water from the lake was pumped directly through the core.
Probably fashioned after the U.S. Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex. Construction was started on the first buildings of the new city in November 1945. Some 70,000 inmates from 12 labor camps were reportedly used to build the complex. It is here that the physicist Igor Kurchatov, working under Stalin's deputy Lavrenti Beria, built the first plutonium production reactor, called "Anotchka" or A Reactor, in just 18 months.
The people of the Chelyabinsk Region have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters:
For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks. The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago. Today, as a result of Kyshtym-57's (a local environmental group lead by Louisa Korzhova) fight for radiation victims, a new law was introduced which allows residents of Muslyumovo to resettle themselves elsewhere. Unfortunately, the new law is limited only to one village.
In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded. About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing to radiation over a quarter million people. Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.
The third disaster came ten years later. The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951. In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating half a million people with five million curies.
Chelyabinsk-40, or the Kyshtym complex is best known to the outside world as the site of a disastrous explosion in 1957, only recently acknowledged by Soviet officialdom. The tanks were entirely immersed in, and cooled by, water. But the monitoring system was defective.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Photovoltaics can easily produce plenty of power. The electricity can be used to split H2O dwn to (H2)x2 and O2 for portable fuel cell storage. The drawback of cloudy days and nighttime are mitigated by large scale power storage (battery, fuel cell, etc...)
The only remaining drawback is the ratio of dollars per killoWatt hour production. A good PV gets around 8% to 15% in effective solar to electric production, depending on location, condition, age, materials, etc... Also, material costs are still too high. Pump a few hundred million into solid, steady research and we can get efficiency up and cost down.
It's a matter of priorities. The politicians support what they think the people will go for. The old saying goes like this: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." We "have" nukes now. In reality, the development costs for taking PV to the level that will trounce NUCUL... (whatever) and fossil fuels is within reach. It will probably cost less (wild, but semi-educated guess) to bring PVs to the more cost effective level than the HTNGs.
Think about it...
--==-- I've found Karma to be a relative thing... Ya know, the kind you invite to Christmas...
Plus, the new wind turbine models can power the entire U.S. in only 14,000 acres. If trends continue, by this time next year, wind will be approaching two cents/kwh, placing it firmly under European coal, and in two years it will be on parity with dirty U.S. coal, which is presently running around 1.5 cents.
I need to check Howard Dean's web site to make sure he knows all this.
Uh. A 3,000 megawatt hour nuclear power plant uses a whole lot less raw materials to build than the 100 to 200 square feet per *kilowatt hour* equivalent photovoltaic system.
There are some really nasty things that go into manufacturing some PV cells. Copper Indium Diselenide (copper, indium and selnium) requires hydrogen selenide which is a really really nasty gas. All that plastic, glass, arsenic, silicon, gallium, etc.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Couldn't we simply put the nuclear plant in the middle of nowhere for those people who feel they are dangerous. Why not put it in the middle of the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean. Tankers could then be used to transport the hydrogen to the mainland.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
"When was the last time a coal powerplant had a catastrophic failure that endangered all who lived near it? "
E X. pdf
T .p df
Aug. 15, 1999. Myrna, Georgia (near Atlanta). At least that is the lastest one I know of.
I was almost killed in a coal boiler explosion in Tennessee in 1993, but that probably didn't "endanger" anyone outside the facility.
Most coal disasters are actually at the mines (methane or coal dust) not at the plants (coal dust or steam pressure). Of course, many people have their life expectancy reduced by polution from air and groundwater pollution that comes from using coal for power, but those deaths are spread out over distance and time so they seem less important.
For destructive potential to nearby residents it is hard to beat hydroelectric dams, though.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip14app.htm
http://www.msha.gov/S&HINFO/TECHRPT/FANDE/CDUST
http://www.msha.gov/S&HINFO/TECHRPT/P&T/COALDUS
It takes a ton of energy to make the things.
The elephant in the room is that there currently isn't enough energy available to have the world live on 1st world level energy consumption. With countries being bludgeoned into having decent economies all around the world, everybody is going to bid up the price of energy tremendously if there aren't significant new sources found.
The energy giants have come on board with the idea of hydrogen being the common denominator with everything geared to consume it (or electricity made from it) and energy sources geared to producing it. Thus you have pig farmers and corn growers as hydrogen producers on the side. But even reusing methane and shifting ethanol to hydrogen, you don't have enough. So nuclear ends up having to be rehabilitated to get us across the stop gap until about 20-25 years from now when we can start bringing orbital power stations on line (where solar's promise truly is) on the back of low cost lift systems like the space elevator we've been hearing about.
The article itself, from the title line on, is a hit piece on President Bush and his efforts to fix this huge problem without anybody panicking or even much noticing that the entire world economy might go off the cliff in a decade if we don't fix the energy crunch that's coming.
But I think the Federal Government needs to completely take over the power generation industry. Electricity is, in every sense of the word, a basic need for us now. Without electricity for extended periods of time, people die in this country.
You can disagree and call me a socialist bastard, but I just don't think something so basic as power generation should be in the hands of people who are trying to make a profit out of it. I'm sure that those of you in California who suffer through summer brown outs might agree with me if you think about it.
Furthermore, the Federal Government has a huge advantage going for it. They don't have to turn a profit. The military sure never came close to it, and we love spending money on them (with good reason). But imagine the safety regulations and procedures and the environmental guidelines that could be implemented with government control of power plants.
The U.S. Navy has never had a nuclear incident or accident, despite running a significant portion of the worlds nuclear plants with guys under 30 that don't have college educations. Why? Because no one asks the Navy to make a profit. They can afford to spend the extra money on safety measures, education for those operators and strict guidelines.
On the contrary, the 3 cents/kwh figure for wind includes real estate costs. The 12 cents/kwh for nuclear does not include the external waste disposal costs.
The 14,000 acre area is enough wind power for the enitre United States of America using today's most modern 2.5 megawatt turbines with syncronized directionality. The land below can usually be used for farming or grazing.
The surplus and battery banks necessary are insignificant. Although the wind stops and starts, it is usually blowing somewhere on the grid. Existing grid generators will probably be phased out over time as they are replaced with surplus turbines and PEM-electrolysis fuel cell hydrogen storage tanks.
Maybe you should reconsider your loony conspiracy theory. This policy change originated with the Bush administration.
Unfortunately, the problem of nuclear power in the US is largely based on fears of litigation, being sued to death. Nobody wants to plow money into a field with well organized opponents who will drag you into court every other week until you run out of money.
The real solution, of course, is tort reform, to go to a loser pays system where foolish, ill-conceived lawsuits result in significant financial cost to those who insist on bringing them. But the trial lawyers would be starving in the streets and since trial lawyers are more influential than unions, minorities, or the poor in today's Democrat party we're not going to see loser pays until there's a Republican President with a 60 vote Republican majority in the Senate and a comfortably Republican House. That'll be 2004 if Al Sharpton gets the nomination but probably not otherwise.
Since we're running against the clock, the Republicans, led by GW Bush are pushing incremental tort reform in doses that they think will pass while working around the areas that won't pass with corporate welfare.
As a libertarian, I think it sucks. It's less efficient, distortive in its own right, and its only real advantage is that it's better than the other alternative on the table, doing nothing until we have massive energy spikes as 3rd and 2nd world countries start having significant portions of their huge populations convert to 1st world style energy consumption levels.
France derives 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. This is due to a long-standing policy based on energy security.
France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity, and gains some EUR 2.6 billion per year from this.
Wastes: The national policy is to reprocess spent fuel so as to recover uranium and plutonium for re-use and to reduce the volume of high-level wastes for disposal. Waste disposal is being pursued under France's 1991 Waste Management Act which sets the direction of research which is mainly undertaken at the Bure underground rock laboratory in eastern France, situated in clays. Another laboratory is researching granites.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
The world consumes about a quadrillion gallons of petroleum a year (1,000,000,000,000,000 gallons) of which roughly 70% goes into motor vehicles (700 trillion gallons)
Liquid hydrogen contains approx 30,000 BTUs of energy per gallon while liquid petroleum contains 130,000. Now assuming a fuel cell vehicle is roughly three times as efficient (90%) at converting liquid-hydrogen to horsepower as is an internal combusion engine (30%) then we will need to produce:
130,000 / 30,000 * 700 trillion / 3 = 1 quadrillion gallons of liquid hydrogen a year. Of course my estimate is conservative as we will need to use energy to compress and liquify the hydrogen as well as to keep it cold and to transport it in a distribution system.
According to British Petroleum (or Beyond Petroleum, depending on who you talk to), it takes 55kWh to produce a gallon of liquid hydrogen from electrolysis of water. Thus to produce enough liquid hydrogen from nuclear energy through electrolysis would require:
1 quadrillion * 55kWh = 55 trillion megawatt hours.
(by the way, here in Indiana electricity is roughly $0.04 a kWh so a gallon of liquid hydrogen would cost 55 * $0.04 = $2.20 to PRODUCE. Current liquid petroleum PRODUCTION costs are roughly $4 a barrel (42 gallons) = $0.10 per gallon to produce -- can liquid hydrogen compete economically with petroleum if production costs are 20x higher (not to mention distribution costs)?)
Current world production of nuclear energy is less than 3 trillion megawatt hour. Total world production of electricity is roughly 12 trillion megawatt hours. Thus to both replace petroleum as a transportation fuel the world would need to increase electricity production from 12 trillion to 55+12 = 67 trillion megawatt hours.
Assuming in the future that none of that electricity will be able to come from petroleum sources and that coal burning will not increase means that we need to build enough nuclear plants to satisfy about 60 trillion megawatt hours.
That's roughly twenty times the number of plants, worldwide, that we have now. Even more if it comes from smaller boutique plants.
Do check my math.
Hydrogen is not hard to make. The hard part would be setting up hydrogen stations to refuel the cars. The "evil" and "wealthy" oil companies are not going to invest in H stations. They sure as hell would be out to squash anybody they could that tried. The only way a hydrogen car and a hydrogen fuel station is going to survive is with the automakers themselves. Let's take for example, Honda. Honda has the money and the technology to make a pure H car. They fit every dealer who sells the H cars with a H station. People who live decently close to the dealer could buy a H car and actually use the thing. As more and more of the cars are sold, new stations could be added by demographics. The oil companies could gripe all they want and it would be illegal for them to turn-away gasoline burning Hondas at their gas stations. Hydrogen will have to be a new industry totally separate from the oil industry. It is just going to have to take a company with some insight, duty to the enviroment, and money.
There is one clean and safe way of generating as much power as we will need for the forseeable future. Orbiting solar power stations.
Whilst the original designs for these were costed in the billions - intelligent design and utilisation of space bourne resources would reduce the costs by orders of magnitude.
No more pollution. No more need to build new power stations (coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar, wave, etc). Just a few fields of photovoltaic arrays a few square kilometres across and the use of existing distribution networks.
I would prefer fusion, but that hasn't been done yet. Next on my list would be space based solar power, but sadly that might take longer to be ready than fusion...
;-)
Ironic isn't it? Indeed, we already have *BOTH* of those things! We have a nice, safe (assuming we get real about greenhouse gasses or start wearing a lot of sunscreen) space-based solar power from, get this, nuclear FUSION. As a bonus, it's 93,000,000 miles away in case something goes wrong. Plus, we all have great view seats so we can keep an eye on things.
Other benefits: CLOSED LOOP Energy (use this solar income to convert to H2 via Hydrolysis) 2H20 + Fusion --> 2H2 + 02. No changing to the balance of sequestered carbon, distributed conversion plants (could be rooftop-based micro plants), and worldwide, to benefit all.
To paraphrase Bucky Fuller, here goes mankind, drawing down our energy endowment savings account (oil) while our paychecks (solar energy) go un-cashed. Sad, really.
It's high time we work on getting a real energy policy--something that works for all humankind, sustainably, forever.
I keep hearing about a "Manhattan Project for Energy", and now an Apollo Project for Energy.
Why not? Spread the idea! It's catching.
"That all depends, of course, on how you define "cleanly." To extract hydrogen from water--to get the H out of the H2O--you first have to make steam. The modular nuclear plants would do that without polluting the air, but would also leave behind radioactive waste."
I'd like to see them print up the amount of waste and the life expectancy of each. How much nuclear waste will there be? How much will there be if recycling of this waste is allowed? Yes, even nuclear waste can be recycled.
Compare this to coal and oil, how much waste is generated by these. How long does it remain? Since it's dumping is not as strictly controlled how long will it's effects last in the environment? Even if it's dumping is as strictly controlled how long can this waste have the potential to effect the environment?
This looks to be a good site for information on HTGR technology.
http://www.iaea.or.at/inis/aws/htgr/
If you go to google and search for "coal waste" you won't find any numbers, but you will find page after page of information, most of it high signal to noise.
This is not a simple subject, to allow many countries to enjoy the lifestyle of 1st worlders a
reasonably clean, reasonably non-polluting ENERGY SOURCE is needed. Hydrogen is not an energy source but a storage method that has some appeal. Current nuclear politics are geared to keeping the third world, third and subservient.
A form of nuclear power that is easy to control, cannot easily be converted for weapons use and is within the capabilities of third world countries to install and maintain (and eventually manufacture) would be one method of improving their relative wealth and all that comes with this.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"I'm astonished so many smart people in this group didn't get an obvious joke, mocking the administration."
Well, maybe it's not that we're stupid... maybe it's that your brother isn't that funny.
Most fatalities from coal are not from power-plant accidents but from mining. Mining accidents mostly kill miners (who cares about them?), but also can kill many people who live near the mine. The 1972 flood at the Buffalo Creek Coal Mine in West Virginia killed 125 people living nearby, injured over 1000, and completely destroyed 500 homes.
Worldwide, tens of thousands of deaths per year occur from coal-mining accidents, and that doesn't count slow deaths from black-lung and other chronic conditions that afflict miners. In India, the death rate is equivalent to one Bhopal per month. In China, around 5000 people per year are killed in coal mining accidents.
Compare all this to the estimated 2500 deaths due to Chernobyl.
Wait a sec, let me get this straight. You favour nuclear rocketry, but you're afraid of power plants? Do you realise how utterly insane that sounds?
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I seem to recall a coal plant near Chicago had a very impressive series of explosions (coal dust apparently can explode under certain conditions). That plant is very close to I80/I94 as it rounds the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Fortunately, casualties did not extend to the highway zone. They could have. This was 2000, if I remember right.
The daily death toll of coal is well known.
I've got quite a functional sense of humour, thanks. Can't say the same for the writers, if this was his intention. First off, it's just not funny. Second, if it was intentional, the convention would be to write it in quotes.
As it is, they just made themselves look illiterate, or humour-impaired, take your pick.
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As nu-ku-ler waste decays, it generates a lot of heat. Why not tap that heat, using it to power a small generator and extract hydrogen through electrolosis at a reasonable rate for, oh, the next 25,000 years? It's better than letting it sit there and simmer. We can't get rid of it (without taking the risk of sticking it on top of a directed explosion with the output of a small nuclear weapon), so we might as well do something with it.
I thought Bush was supposed to be in bed with the oil companies.
It would be more accurate to say that Bush is in bed with the energy comapnies. Enron was the most famous example of a company non-oil energy company (though they certainly had oil related holdings) that basically bought GWB the election. Most large companies in the energy industry are diversified, so if they have oil holdings, thay likely have nuclear holdings as well.
If you had read the article, you would know that it isn't critical of Hydrogen power, it's critical of the Bush plan to create the hydrogen. If you can't do that cleanly & safely (something the nuclear industry's record suggests they can't do), then what's the point of switching to hydrogen in the first place? The only group that will benefit from this plan is the energy industry who will get billions of dollars of free money for so called "R&D".
Finally, as for the spelling of "nucular" in the title... Get the joke, people! It's a rather obvious parody of GWB & his well known inability to pronounce nuclear. Just because there's an apparent error in slashdot, doesn't mean that you should immediately post pointing it out. Perhaps if you spent thirty seconds thinking about it, you'd see that it was intentional.
The Space Studies Institute has plenty of studies and reports on the benefits we could receive from power from space - solar satellites, Lunar Solar Power, etc.. There is no basic technology mystery there (unlike, say, fusion), the hardest pieces are some development bits relating to large-scale construction in space and use of resources on the Moon. But there's no public political interest in this for some reason, and the NASA budget category for this has been basically zeroed out for years (I believe the total spent has been about $50 million, with only $2 million spent looking at lunar options).
Why aren't we at least spending more money on research in this area? So many billions are spent on nuclear power, but space-based solar power is the ONLY way we'll ever move beyond Kardashev leve 0.7!
Energy: time to change the picture.
Policymakers, US or otherwise, have not yet faced head-on the central problem of energy policy: there are two viable choices, either fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Renewable energy sources are either too expensive, impratical because they don't generate a constant source of power, or both. Fossil fuels produce greenhouse gases and other forms of air pollution. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous and very long-lasting, has minuscule risks of catastrophic accident, and more relevant risks of intentional sabotage. Fusion won't magically solve this dilemma, either. A fusion reactor produces huge quantities of fast neutrons, and that will generate radioactive nuclear waste when it hits the walls and other components of the reactor. In other words, we get to pick our poison: air pollution and global warming, or nuclear waste and problems with terrorism.
Personally, I'm astonished that anyone who calls themself an 'environmentalist' could possibly think that pouring millions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere each year could be better than radioactive waste, buried deep underground.
Bring on the nuclear power and dump the fossil fuels! Thank God someone in government has some sense.
- Necron69
This is actually a key point. A key failure of the current nuclear industry is that the plants are not standardized - they follow a large number of different designs.
Standardized modules will cut costs and also make them safer; discovered bugs can be fixed in all installations.
Tor
...At least, not in the United States. There hasn't been a now nuclear (or "nucular") power plant ordered in the US since the 70s. I believe the last one was in 1973, though I could be slightly off there.
I work at a nuke plant. This is my third summer as an intern in their IT department. My dad has worked in various nuke plants all of my life and then some. I don't understand why people are so damned afraid of these things. I know how safe they are, and I'm not the slightest bit afraid of anything happening. And don't tell me we have to worry about terrorists doing any damage to them. They're built extremely well.
IIRC, this doesn't offset the energy cost to actually move the cars on the road or whatever, but it's simply a supplemental return. I have no idea how viable the whole thing would be, it just felt pertinent to mention again. Comments, corrections, etc?
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
The administration's point is that the sooner we stop burning fossil carbon as our principal power source, the better off we'll be. Setting aside the environmental concerns, which are not slight, there are serious geopolitical reasons for getting away from fossil carbon: such as the fact that the economy of the United States - and indeed of the world - is enthralled to the increasingly corrupt, increasingly fragile monarchy of Saudi Arabia. A political collapse of that government could deprive the world of a significant source of energy for an extended period of time, with catastrophic results.
While hydrogen is by no means ideal, it's the best alternative that we have now to the fossil-carbon economy, and it does allow us to develop cleaner, more efficient means of manufacturing energy over time. I hope the Left will not let its detestation of Bush blind itself to the fact that this proposal is interesting and creative, and holds promise to lead the world economy out of the energy dilemma that it now is in.
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"I thought Bush was supposed to be in bed with the oil companies. That's what everyone kept crying about. But now liberals are bitching about hydrogen."
Where do you think most all the H2 we use today comes from? it's split from natural gas. Most of that gas is from drilling oil wells, it's on top of the oil and until not to long ago was burned off.
In the future it will be split from water, but this needs power, hense the nuclear. H2 is for portable use, it's not for powerplants and such. In the future they will all be nuclear, wind, geothermal and other non coal, gas, oil methods.
Oil companies are energy companies. They will adjust to what ever comes.
I don't really get what you were getting at with the liberal thing. Maybe it's because people like myself hate how Bush went from bashing and making fun of hybrid cars and things like fuel cells, to acting like he is their champion. Also he touts a hyrdrogen economy, this simple isn't the future, there isn't an oil economy ether, it's a product of republicans minds to try and get insane oil policys.
Eating and injection actually avoid some of the most dangerous effects.
Plutonium is primarily(*) an alpha emitter, which means the radiation gets absorbed in a really short distance.
The worst thing you can do to yourself with a small amount of plutonium is to inhale it in finely divided form. Then zillions of particles can lodge in your lungs and each one will zap the neighboring millimeter of tissue until it finally goes cancerous.
In case you're wondering, last time I looked at a toxicology reference, plutonium likes to settle out of the bloodstream in bone.
So the answer to your question is basically that swallowing X amount of an organic toxin that targest your metabolism can be worse, *in the short term*, than swallowing the same amount of a heavy radioactive metal.
(*) There's also interesting things like neutrons from spontaneous fission in some isotopes, etc.
Fog is quite scathing on an April morning.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
>nuclear energy companies and HTGR proponents are seeking free insurance from U.S. taxpayers. The Senate energy bill also calls for the extension of the 1957 Price-Anderson Act, a U.S.-funded disaster insurance policy, to cover HTGR reactors.
p df
Truth of the matter is, first the reactor operators pay premiums to the American Nuclear Insurers for private insurance. That covers the first $200 million of liability protection. After that, every reactor operator is on the hook for an assessment of up to $83.9 million to contribute to covering the costs of an accident at any covered reactor. Assess the maximum for each of 103 operating power reactors, and you can cover about $9 billion.
Above that the Price-Anderson Act calls for Congress to spend federal money on disaster relief. If you're feeling charitable toward the Village Voice author, you might assume that's what he means by "free" "U.S. funded" insurance.
For an unfriendly but factual look at Price-Anderson insurance, see http://www.safeenergy.org/PriceAndersonFactSheet.
google up 'pebble bed reactor' and you will find that current cutting edge designs take small uranium 235 balls and coat them in a rugged heat resistant cladding that has a higher melting temperature than the heat produced when the coolant all goes away and they're just sitting in air.
Bottom line, a catastrophic coolant failure results in zero meltdown.
Remember where they are planning on making the next big nuclear waste storage facility? Yeah, inside an 'extinct' volcano. Yucca Mountain. and everyone in the area is fighting it for all they're worth.
If we had some way of safely launching the waste into the sun, I would be all for nuclear power generation. But the way it is, we have literally thousands of tons of hot waste sitting around in pools of water, waiting for a place to put it. And noone wants to take care of it. It's the "hot" potato that noone wants to end up with.
Actually no. Whilst the power density of the beam would be higher, the actual power transmitted would be quite low.
We actually did some modelling of beaming power from Earth to geostationary orbit. Without looking at any of the numbers (ie, what I remember) - to get an equivalent power level to the Sun (1300W/m^2) we only needed 470-odd W/m^2 at a particular wavelength (it was a matter of tuning the laser to the existing solar cells) with a spot diameter of 140m. This meant that we needed something like a 1-2MW laser on the ground (36000km is a long way for) with a 1m beam diameter. So, whilst the power density at the transmitter end is high, by the time it gets anywhere useful, the power density is very low. Of course, if you wanted to transmit more power then all the numbers go up.
I was recently involved in a class debate on whether it is necessary to increase nuclear power production threefold to meet a carbon free economy by 2100. It seems many of the topics raised in this thread deal with points we covered in our project, e.g. safety and efficiency concerns, hydrogen production, economic feasibility, etc.
As my portion of the project dealt with safety and proliferation, I can say that at least from safety standpoint, building newer nuclear plants is a better solution to accomplish these goals than sticking with fossil fuels. For example, existing coal plants cause 15,000 premature deaths annually in the U.S. alone. Now, given the probability of 400 deaths in the event of a nuclear meltdown, this would require over 25 meltdowns per year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as the coal industry. Currently the probability of a meltdown is 1 in 20,000 reactor years, or once every 30 years.
But even if you doubt these conclusions, you can rest assured that the effects of greenhouse gases would be far more severe than an incident involving localized exposure of nuclear waste (however unlikely that may be). Keep in mind the last ice age occured when the average global temperature was as little as five degrees (C) less. And currently the global temperature is rising at a rate that tops all previous historical trends.
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens." - Baha'u'llah
Wow, moderation shows its true colors. I've seen about thirty comments saying "its safe, its more environmentally friendly," and generally everything but the one thing that matters.
Yes, this is a perfect solution. Except it creates the perfect enemy. Nuclear waste. US has spent iirc $6 billion looking for a place to stash waste. Waste that it knows will last another couple tens of thousands of years, many lifetimes that of man. Waste that will require extra-ordinary amounts of work to contain, to isolate, to cut off from our reality. We're talking Final Fantasy seal in crystals work here ladies and gentlemen.
Nuclear power is a great ally, but it creates an enemy which will outlive us, our children, our childrens children, and a hundred children thereafter.
In the end, it is not a real solution, but an interem solution. The world can only deal with so much nuclear waste.
Unless we get that stupid space elevator running AND are stupid enough to trust it running barrels of nuclear fuel to the sun. I dont see why NASA wants to build another shuttle when a space elevator would cost less and work so much better. And once we get it running, its not but another fourty to fifty years till we start trusting it well enough to run nuclear waste -> space -> sun. Then i start having less problems with this plan.
Now all we need is superconducting carbon nanotubes as conductors. Just run the nuclear power stations in space, and pipe the power back down to earth. Anything nasty happens up there and you just cut the teather earthside and the power station goes hurtling off into space, no cleanup necessary! Course, getting that power a couple thousand miles down to earth surface wouldnt make much sense unless they get that magic juju superconducting carbon nanotubes thing working, good luck on that one boys! somehow the thought of meltdown'ing power stations being let go to fly off tangentially into space just make it all worth it though.
Either way, I'm still a reknewable man myself. It'd only be like five or ten times the cost (guess came from out of mi arse again). And I'm a big fan of the distributed system. Just put solar on everyone's house. Couple huge honkin wind farms. Less of these gargantuan power lines everywhere.
Myren
It might be useful if you would educate yourself about the physics involved.
Reactors are quite safe. Furthermore mankind will either enjoy a nuclear future or freeze in the dark. Fossil fuel energy resources are quite limited.
The US DOE for instance forecasts that by 2020 the consumption of natural gas will be up about 489%. They actually forecast that much of this gas will come from Canada.
Well completions have doubled in the last few years and the result of this was a rather modest supply increase in 2001. In 2002 the supply dropped slightly. There is just no way on earth that the Exploration and Production industries can increase gas supplies by any significant amount.
American companies are welcome to come up here and look. Many are. Many are also buying reserves, companies like Burlington for instance who just bought Canadian Hunter Exploration Limited are an example.
The issue is that there is a supply side crunch on its way and we are totally unprepared for it.
So, nuclear will find its way back in rather soon I think. But - I do expect that it will be a ways past 2015 before this happens. Also - I do expect that before nuclear starts comming back there are going to be some rather sharp supply problems and some rather panicy people sitting in rather long line ups.
I expect there will be backouts due to insufficient gas supplies to co-generators as well. This could even start to happen say about 2005 and it is always possible that it will happen sooner. But I think 2005-2010 is the most likely time frame that these ugly problems start to be visible over the horizon.
Just a thought, seeing as the article is about modular nuclear power. Quite a clever play on words if that's what it is.
Coming next: Jewlery, certified kosher earings.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
GWB is nothing comparied to Jimmy Carter, who did graduate work in nuclear physics, he pronounces the word nook-ee-uh
The age of the nucleus is yet to come - perhaps not in our lifetime either.
Seriously, think about how people get all irrational over ANYTHING with 'nuke' in it, they're in complete denial, so badly you can't even hold a conversation - it's really like the superstitious, demon haunted people of the middle ages church persecuting Galileo for building a telescope, a 'diabolical instrument' for peering into the heavens. Don't think a vast majority of people today are modern thinkers just because they yak on a cell phone. They still want to blame the ruling authorities for bad weather, that's how much superstition and irrational fears still haunt the masses.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
All isotopes that are produced when uranium splits are relatively short lived; however, some of the uranium atoms do not fission with the first neutron impact. Rather, they absorb the neutron and become a more massive isotope, this process will continue these atoms eventually split forming trasuranics or actinides. Some of these (e.g. plutonium-239) , have long half lives.
Transuranics can be recycled into new reactor fuels rather easily. But it has been (misguided) US policy to restrict this process for fear of making "bomb" materials. There are new reactor designs that do the "recycle" internal which may be more palatable.
End of the day if you are being honest, you have two choices accept the risks associated high energy production (nuclear being one of the cleanest, safest, least understood choices) and industry or advocate that we reduce the size and impact of humanity through massive controls on human breeding. Other solutions available do not scale.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
On the "contaminating" side, check out the vitrification process. Turn the waste to glass (highly radioactive glass, obviously, but still solid). No leaks then.
It's easy to predict how much radiation will penetrate how much ground, so bury it deep and job done. If you're worried about it, don't live near there (hell, the US is big enough you hardly need to worry about that - plenty of places with big areas of sod all!).
Re the birth defects, there's no proven correlation between nuclear storage sites and any birth defects. Also compare and contrast to coal-fired power station emissions which have been shown decades ago to cause birth defects, illness, acid rain, deforestation, death of wildlife in area, etc. Air-scrubbers exist to prevent this, but few power stations use them bcos they cost money to set up and use, and most governments won't mandate them.
And just bcos ppl are fighting it, it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. For a US example, 150 years ago half a nation fought to keep slavery in place! Most ppl don't understand nuclear, or have been given misinformation by anti-nuclear protestors - either way, ppl get frightened and don't react logically. And with the gov involved too, you get all the anti-gov conspiracies in there too. Logic tends to have a poor survival rate in this situation.
Grab.
The hot waste hanging about now is as much a social and political problem as anything else. It needs to be fractioned into new fuel, high level waste, and low level waste.
Obviously, the fuel can go back into production, and the hot waste stored until it cools. If we put our minds to it, it should be possible to extract energy from the hot waste. That's important since turning it into a resource rather than a liability will immediatly improve it's handling. It's the low level waste that will be around for thousands of years unless we can find a way to bombard it and make it into hot (and so short lived) waste.
All things considered, I would rather fence off all of Nevada and have a cheap source of power whose pollution is kept in Nevada rather than a more expensive source, surrounded by political uncertainty that spews its pollution all over everywhere indiscriminantly.
Of course, the people living in Nevada wouldn't (and don't) appreciate that very much!
I once had a summer job where I had to transcribe data collected on a paper strip from a chart recorder. The data that was collected include wind direction and the radiation level in events/second.
Normally the ratiation level showed a random fluctuation around the average background level. Ho hum. But when ever the wind was blowing from a certain direction the radiation level spiked up and stayed at a new level that was 10 to 100 times the normal background level. It would stay that way until the wind shifted.
I processed tapes like that from a number of those recorders. They were on ration monitors set up all over the place. They all showed the same kind of behavior, but with different directions.
We had a map that showed the location of each monitor, so it was easy to draw a line from the monitor in the direction the wind was blowing from. Do that for a couple or five monitors and you find that the lines cross at spedific locations.
Each place the lines crossed was the location of a big coal burning power plant. Coal contains radioactive elements. Burning coal puts those elements in the air where you and I can breath it. IIRC coal plants put out more radioactive pollution than all the nuclear plants combined. And they do it every day, year in and year out.
Stonewolf
Never said I was afraid of nuclear plants. On the contrary, my point was that I'm confident enough in the tech to even support nuclear rocketry in space. Launching with nukes might be more problematic, though sadly that's the critical point of space access at which we're failing. If nukes could be made more secure from terrorism, be run more efficiently, and their waste more securely handled, I would have more confidence in them. These things aren't impossible, and if we don't develop new energy resources to replace fossil fuels, I have no doubt that nukes will return, albeit in markedly superior form.
Erik
If we had some way of safely launching the waste into the sun
Now, the point was to generate usful energy, not to spend it all. Launching radioactives into the sun in itself uses a lot of energy as well as wasting the energy still present in the radioactives.
Remember that as long as it is radioactive it's energetic. Today's radioactive waste is tomorrows fuel.
I've seen ... reports on the California situation which claim that wind is one of the most expensive ways to generate power.
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First off, the statement above is simply wrong. 10-15 years ago it was true, but it is not true now. Wind is *NOT* one of the most expensive ways to generate power. Solar beats it by a mile.
However, I seriously question the $0.03 claim. Based on what I've been able to find out this only applies to the most efficient turbines, none of which are presently in service in the USA (possibly in Denmark, I'm not sure). And even that is a SUBSISIZED price, so the real cost is closer to 0.05-0.06.
CURRENT generation costs are closer to 0.07-0.09, adjusting for the subsidies. About 2 to 3 times the cost of natural gas.
Unfortuantely virtually all the cites I found were from such "unbiased" sources as the National Wind Technology Center, and the American Wind Energy Association. Virtually all of them cited the $0.03 number, which originated entirely from an AWEA study.
I did manage to find one study, by the Cato institute:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa422.pd
One thing that irritates be is the greatly exaggerated costs of generating nuclear power I've seen in these reports. Nuclear power costs about $0.03 per kWh, about the same as natural gas (slightly more expensive), and a lot of that is due to onerous safety regulations (vastly more of this is required over the less-safe coal and natural gas industries). If we moved to a system similar to that of the Japanese or French (fuel recycling), we might be able to cut that in half. If we moved to breeder reactors we might be able to cut it down to $0.01 or so. However, recator development has been stalled since the 1970's.
Most of the cites I found were from such "unbiased" sources as the Nuclear Energy Institute. It took me a while to dig this up:
http://www.seabrookstation.com/sbs%5CSeabrookSt
It claims that nuclear power is cheaper than any other source, even under the flawed US system.
You also haven't adaquately addressed the reliablity problems of wind, nor have you mentioned that many hundreds of facilites would have to be built to replace existing power plants. Wheras 10 (possibly fewer) nuclear power plants could produce all of the electricity for California. And since we've already got 2, we'd only need another 8. You'd have a tough time convincing me that building hundreds of windmill fields is cheaper than 10 nuclear power plants.