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World Nuclear University Launched
nuke-alwin writes "The first meeting of the 'academic council' of the newly-launched World Nuclear University (WNU) was held in the UK last week. The mission of the WNU is to strengthen the international community of people and institutions to guide and further develop nuclear power and many other nuclear applications (in agriculture, medicine, environmental protection). As workers in the nuclear industry are aging, organisations have started Young Generation Networks such as the YGN of the British Nuclear Energy Society. The WNU is a further recognition that the nuclear industry needs to educate a new generation of workers, so that nuclear power can continue to provide electricity without the production of greenhouse gases."
Last time I checked, there were'nt a lot of opertunities for employment for Nuclear Engineers. Why go into a field with no jobs?
The DOE promised that they'd have a solution for waste instead of stockpiling it at the reactors. Still years after the deadline and nothing yet.
You're hardly "at the mercy of nature" with solar and tidal power. The movements of Sun, earth and moon tend to be somewhat predictable. Even windpower is fairly consistent over longer periods of time.
Furthermore I'd hesitate to call nuclear energy 'clean'. It maybe so at the actual power station site, but the production of the fuel rods (digging up and enriching uranium) and the actual power station both require a lot of clean-up.
Finnally being confident that a solution will be found seems a rather dangerous approach to waste material that will remain highly dangerous for hundreds or thousands of years.
While nuclear power is fascinating to those physicists and engineers who have studied it for all these years, the promise of cheap energy from nuclear power has never materialized. All nuclear installations are subsidized; in a couple of countries (France and Japan) the limited range of other energy options has made nuclear a significant player, but for the rest of the world it is just not cost-competitive against oil, coal, hydro-electric, and now wind power.
What about the decline in fossil fuels and green-house emissions? If just a tiny fraction of the effort that has been wasted on nuclear energy had been put toward space-based solar power systems, we'd have a ready-to-go solution that has no adverse environmental consequences. There's still time to make it happen though...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Folks, pay no attention to the radioactive waste. Nothing to see here.
We repeat: Pay no attention to the radioactive waste. Move along...
Folks...errr...we might need to slightly modify our previous "emission-free, clean" statements. The statements are still true, but for a slightly smaller value of "true" than we'd used originally.
All right folks, we'll level with you. There are a few by-products that are created by our nuclear power plants, and they're what you might describe as "incredibly hazardous". But remember, a watermelon can also be very hazardous if you try to swallow it whole. Just want to keep things in perspective here.
However, the good news is that these clean, non-emissive, watermelon-like by-products will be around for thousands of years, so there's ample time to study them, and we're sure that technology will someday be able to deal with them. Until that time arrives, we'll just be...ummm...well, kind of shoving it in a hole in the ground.
Here, look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
I'm not convinced. The half-life of radioactive waste that comes from nuclear power plants is measured in hundreds of thousands of years. What are you going to do with it? Put it in the ground along a fault line or in an active volcano like Bush is doing? Or how about put it somewhere where the US isn't likely do start a 'shock and awe' campagin. And then you have to consider problems like meteors and sabbotage and a long list of unknowns that carries on for hundres of thousands of years.
If we did something like shoot the radioactive waste into the sun, I would be satisfied that we are disposing of it safely. Any other way of disposal, such as the most common - paying 3rd world countries to deal with it - is simple not acceptable. As humans who live for 60 - 90 years, we don't have a right to make decisions that could make a part on the Earth uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Anyone who tells you differently is either not considering the consequences fully, or has a stake in the nuclear industry.
Keep in mind when you government tells you how 'safe' nuclear power is that they are using ammunition made from 'depleated' uranium which they claim is 100% safe, and yet there are plenty of claims to the contrary, coming from both the victims ( Iraqis, for example) and the aggressors ( US soliders ).
There are yet more problems with nuclear power. Think of the trouble the world is in over oil. Uranium will be no different. If you base the world's energy needs on a scarce resource, it will result in eternal military conquest. We must use a renewable energy source. There are plenty of them. The sun has given us all the energy we have needed for the past couple of million years, and will continue to do so for many more to come. The reason why governements don't put more research into renewable energy technology is that they think they can gain control of the scarce energy sources, and make absurd profits in the process.
Living in Australia, with one of the world's richest known sources of uraniam, I am petrified at the thought of what will happen when the oil runs out and the US comes looking for alternative sources. Renewable is the only answer.
>I think the biggest problem with these technologies is that they take up very large areas.
There are a variety of problems associated with so-called "clean" energy sources. Unpredictability and size are certainly two. Another problem is that they often aren't environmentally friendly. Most people are aware of the damage caused by hydro-electric dams, but similar effects come from all natural sources. Tidal power obviously affects currents and erosion. Even solar and wind power on large scale will affect weather patterns and climate in addition to the effects of their sheer size.
Basically, you can't just extract energy from the environment (technically, move it, since it isn't being destroyed) without affecting the natural sinks for that energy. True, fossil fuels and nuclear add to the net energy (since they were stored in the ground), so perhaps they are worse in that sense. There's really no solution that doesn't cause some harm.
A. Caird
B.S. Nuc. Eng. 1993 U. of Michigan
M.S. Nuc. Eng. 1996 U. of Michigan
(but I've never worked as a nuclear engineer; IT jobs are available in nearly every city in the world, computational reactor design jobs are not)
Take it for what it's worth.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
Technically, speaking as someone who is currently working as an engineer in the energy/utility field, there are two fundamental problems with people talking without knowledge of what they are talking about.
1) Yes, you are at the mercy of nature. Let's get some facts straight for the mis-information givers. To begin with, the two largest problems facing solar power is that for one, the farther you are away from the equator, the less solar power you can produce. Most of the US in not on the Equator. Secondly, solar power production is directly related cloud cover, among other factors. Building a solar powered facility in Wisconsin, where I live, never pays off. At night, you need energy storage, and that is a whole other issue. Some states it may work, but 90% of the rest of the US...it doesn't.
2) Now, wind power does not take up large amounts of space. What you don't understand is that the actual footprint of a wind turbine is only around 100-150 square feet. A wind turbine is generally 50-100 meters tall. The taller the wind turbine, the more power it can produce (on flat land like Iowa, Nebraska, etc.) Wind turbines are always built based on worse case scenario wind shear conditions at a design height. Wind turbines do not speed up or slow down, since the generator has a naturally occuring electrical braking action (think Eddy Current braking) and is built to worse case scenario wind shear conditions for minimum operation. The real problem, at least in Iowa where I have done utility studies for the IDNR (Iowa Department of Natural Resources) is that a lot of birds get killed flying to into these huge wind turbine farms and animal activities/tree huggers try to get them shut down. Apparently, the tree huggers want their cake and eat it too. Idiots.
For a great example of wind power helping out on a massive scale is look at Denmark. They are currently working on converting 90% of their entire COUNTRY to using solely wind power. How are they doing this? Simple. They are building large wind farms far out into the ocean and using constant ocean winds to power the wind turbines. Is it working? YES. Here is an internet link to check this out for yourselves
http://www.windpower.org/en/core.htm
Now, the idea has been presented in the United States by several MAJOR utility companies in recent years. The response they have gotten? "We don't want hundreds of wind turbines blocking our view of the ocean."
You want renewable energy? You change the piss poor, "I only care about me and my pretty ocean view and my pretty birdies, but SAVE THE EARTH and give me FREE CLEAN POWER" Of course, only the US seems to care about points #1 and #2.
PS-According to a multi-year study in Denmark on their ocean wind turbine farm and birds? Guess what, after a couple of years, the birds learned to fly around the wind turbine farm. Gee, figure that.