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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.
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
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.
A lot of the waste could actually be recycled into usable fuel, but in the US it can't be because of legal restrictions. *sighs*
--- Bwah?
"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.
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
At the moment, hydrogen is very hard to extract from sea water. Basically you need to put in all the energy (more in fact) that you want to get out. The problem is that hydrogen is a great storage form for energy (like oil, batteries, gas, nuclear materials, flywheels) but not a source of energy (like sunshine, wind, waves...). We can use nuclear materials and oil as if they were a source of energy because we have access to vast amounts of them, but they are not really sources, and will run out.
Until we get either some revolutionary new method of extracting the hydrogen (wasn't there a story here about some method involving a laser heating up a large tank of water on an artificial island and breaking up the water molecules?), or we get access to the atmospheres of planets like Jupiter which have many earth masses' worth of hydrogen, hydrogen remains a storage form, unusable as a source.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
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.
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?
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!"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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...
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.
"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
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?
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
...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
"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.
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.
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
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.