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Creator of the Gaia Hypothesis Urges Nuclear Power
SteamyMobile writes "Professor James Lovelock, creator the Gaia Hypothesis and long-time intellectual leader of the Green movement, says that global warming is a dire threat, more urgent than was previously realized. He compares the threat of global warming with the threat of the Nazis in 1938, and says that in both cases, the Left was not able to grasp the urgency of the situation and see the necessary solution. What is the necessary solution to stop the global warming problem? He says it's nuclear power. Needless to say, the Greens don't agree with him, and he chides them as having irrational phobias of a safer, cleaner energy sources. Even if the "Left" isn't fully aware of the urgency of the world's energy problems, it seems like Slashdot is."
They are there now! They just need a little more focus from the various governments. Half of my country's (Denmark) power in 2012 is supposed to be coming from winds, and we are close to getting there. Check out www.vestas.com, the world's biggest supplier og windmills. Let's harness the nature's powers instead of raping it's resources.
Come on, we're already up to 75% of our electricity from nukes.
Oh, you're not in France.
Get with the act you luddites.
This message submitted with the help of the friendly atom.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Could it be that those more concerned about the risks have taken its release as a good opportunity for sounding their views (since people will be more receptive?)
YES: This is the movie's website, with the banner "The day after tomorrow, where will you be?": www.thedayaftertomorrow.com, while this site is setup by Greenpeace, and highlights current issues and politics, under the banner "The day is today, what will you do?": www.thedayaftertomorrow.org.
Smart marketing.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Please don't replicate the "every SUV must have bad fuel economy" meme. It's just not true. I drive a SUV and it's fuel economy is better than that of many ordinary 2WD vehicles (22-27 mpg). This meme is dangerous, because many Americans believe that and therefore American companies see no reason to improve the fuel efficency of their horribly heavy, clunky and obsolete 4x4 behemoths. Japanese car companies do not have this luxury and it shows - Subaru Forester, Mitsubishi Outlander, Honda CR-V or Nissan X-Trail are great family machines and they are as environment-friendly as regular (non-SUV) vehicles. So you don't have to give up anything, if it's really that important for you to have American company badge on your car, buy a Subaru rebadged as Chevrolet.
Synroc solves the second "Pain in The Arse" problem.
But you're right about the "not in my backyard" syndrome. I've studied Synroc and it really is the perfect solution (btw I work upstairs from where it was developed) but who in the world will listen to reason about it?
This tower doesn't heat air; it causes hot air at ground level to rise through the tower, driving turbines inside the tower.
Now, there may be unforeseen climatic consequences of heating the air 1km up (but the energy "stolen" by driving the turbines should result in the air being fairly cool when it exits the tower), but it's not pumping hot air "out into the atmosphere" - where do you think the hot air came from in the first place?
what else was that solar energy going to do if it wasn't intercepted??? it was going to heat the sand up anyway and eventually the air as well... those solar towers are going to cool the desert, not heat it up...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
That's right, only the communists could mess up something as important as nuclear safety.
Yes, I am sure he knows how much energy goes into mining uranium. Here's a free clue: it's a very small fraction of the energy yielded when that uranium is fissioned (even in a once-through fuel cycle without reprocessing.)
The economics of reprocessing don't make sense. Sellafield could not exist without the British government imposing a levy on all energy sales AND bailing BNFL out on a regular basis.
Furthermore, reprocessing produces enormous amounts of high-level liquid waste which must be treated and stored as well as biblical quantities of low-level waste. Even if you don't have to fill up Yucca Mountain, you still need huge nuclear dumps. Reprocessing *increases* the volume of nuclear waste compared to spent fuel elements.
It is significant that Britain has yet to find a long-term solution for the reprocessing waste generated at Sellafield - which is much more dangerous than spent fuel. We are now told that we might have one in 50 years, in the meantime, the high-level waste is being kept liquid, above ground in 30 year-old tanks. I'm glad I don't live in Cumbria.
All the time, Sellafield has been pouring actinides down the pipe into the Irish Sea - which are now detectable across large areas of the Irish, Scottish and Norwegian coasts.
Sellafield's last big hope was Mixed Oxide Fuel, so far its only customer, the Japanese, have refused to accept MOX after it was found that BNFL was faking safety data. The MOX plant at Sellafield is still not working reliably, MOX is far more expensive than new fuel *and* there are concerns that MOX may shorten the lifespan of Pressurised Water Reactors.
Sellafield is a bad joke and should be closed down.
Its sole reason for existance after the development of the British Bomb was to provide plutonium for Britain's Fast Breeder Reactor programme. Well that was abandoned long ago, FBRs are an engineering boondoggle and have never worked reliably. So we sit on 40 tonnes of plutonium with no end use.
Uranium is cheaper now than in 1970, there is no sign of reserves running out, so there is no need to worry about supplies in the foreseeable future.
Using fuel once then putting it into dry store above ground is better economically and environmentally than reprocessing.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The sun? We've been harnesting the sun for thousands of years for our energy, why not keep going?
Lovelock's answer to this is that there isn't time. Yes, the long term solution is solar power, directly or indirecly. But he says that Global Warming is so large and so imminent a problem that we mhave to reactivate nuclear as a stop-gap until we can ramp up solar.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
The RMBK reactor was designed to generate power and plutonium. It was unusual in that it allowed on-line refuelling. Bomb-grade plutonium is almost pure Pu239 which is made by U238 capturing a neutron. If Pu239 is left in the core for longer, it can capture another neutron or two to make Pu240 or Pu241 which dramatically affect reliability of the weapon.
The RMBK used a robot crane to extract fuel elements after a short period of time, consequently the lid of the reactor was pieced by hundreds of fuel channels through which fuel was added and removed. This is unlike the Pressurised Water Reactor in which the lid is sealed for months at a time.
When the reactor failed, the fuel channels proved a fatal weakness, so the lid was blown off and allowed radiation into the environment. The RMBK design was fairly elderly at this time and no more were planned by the Soviet Union. However, Chernobyl was a new reactor with relatively good safety equipment and excellent reliability. It was just misused.
It would have been better had Chernobyl had a true containment facility like PWRs, but none of the RMBKs were so fitted.
The Soviet Union was in the process of changing over to its own PWRs - called VVRs which did have proper containment. There had been a number of technical issues with their development.
The UK looked at a Chernobylesque design in the 1960s, but concluded that it presented an unacceptable risk in the event of a minor problem.
And finally, Three Mile Island turned out to be an economic disaster for the operators, but its environmental impact was essentially zero. The PWR is a good reactor design, it showed its relience at TMI, and it has been improved since.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I really fail to see why Nazis are considered to be right-wing.
Mainly because they butchered the real Socialists (SPD), the Trade Unionists and Communists (KPD), failed to nationalize companies (instead permitting Corporatism - that which Mussoline regarded as "Fascism"), failed to institute profit-sharing, etc.
Socialism tends to be regarded - by most Socialists - as an Internationalist creed. Fascism - and Nazism - pretty much rejects Internationalism except maybe as a source of short-term alliances.
The Nazis also enjoyed the support of the more conservative sections of Weimar society - the Junkers class, for example, and many industrialists.
This is where the serious fun begins.
You pay a fraction of what everyone else pays for fuel. Here in the UK we're now paying 0.82/L which is roughly $5.2 a US gallon. Now if that were the price of gas in the US THEN you would start to see a reduction in SUV usage.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present you with exhibit A: Windscale, a powerplant so disastrous and badly designed that they spared no expense in making it safe -- they changed its name to Sellafield.50 or so years ago, they were in a hurry to build something that could produce plutonium from natural uranium for the Britsh nuclear weapons programme. The Cold War was on. People were very scared, so they build the two windscale piles - a very poor and primitive design - in a hurry. Hindisght is always perfect. Windscale wasn't. Luckily they fitted iodine filters to the exhaust stacks which saved Western Europe when they set the core alight annealing out Wigner energy from the core (a practice illegal since then).
The whole dodgyness of the Windscale design is an article in itself. You can read about it. Open gas circuit (i.e. natural air exhaused to atmosphere for core cooling) and aluminium fuel cans...A lack of sufficient core instrumentation. Poor operating procedure (annealing Wigner energy).
The next two sites, Calder Hall and Chapel Cross, had carbon dioxide cooling in clode gas circuits, better core instrumentaion, automatic safety circuits and NO ANNEALING OF WIGNER ENERGY allowed.
Still leaking radiation, still poisoning the Irish Sea, but now we needn't associate it with the near-fatal meltdown or the hole linking the nuclear-waste chute with the chimney!
Absolute nonsense. Rubbish. Not even half true. The Windscale site is still there, on the Sellafield site. It's not "leaking radiation" and it's not poisoning the Irish Sea. Most of the poisoning was on land anyway, 50 years ago. The residual radioactivity of the Windscale chimneys was low enough several years ago that men were able to work on them, to begin dismantling. You can read about this on the BNFL web site.
Sellafield does a lot of reprocessing. If you ignorant fools weren't so stupid, we'd be using spent Magnox and AGR fuel again in AGRs in the form of MOX. Sellafield does discharge some effluent into the Irish sea, It's realtively small and harmless. You can check out the facts with HM NII if you like, and the NRPB. You wouldn't want to drink it, but then I wouldn't want to drink sea water...
If you ignorant, self-styled experts would stop scaremongering and telling lies, those of us with a clue could get on and deal with things properly.
The activities at Dounreay were somewhat ammateurish.
Expertise? I think not. The prosecution rests, your honour.
So, you're going to damn the entire industry on two unrelated incidents from many years ago? Have you heard of progress? What rock have you been living under? Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth?
Stick Men
You can find it on the BP website and specifically look here: BP reports
While there is a LOT of energy falling on planet earth and alternate energy forms can yeild a significant source, it is unlikly that these sources combined with reduced wastage can make the kind of difference we need.
The BP reports show 2002 oil ouput in ALL middle eastern countries has been in decline since 2000 and that Norway and North Sea have been in a rather serious decline since 1999.
The 2004 report showing 2003 production is expected shortly. What I hope this report shows is an increase in production in certain countries like Saudi Arabia. I suspect it will not show this. This will put us more than 3 years past the peak.
If within the next couple years we do not see an increase in world oil ouput then I supect we can conclude that looking through the rear veiw mirror we have seen the Peak of World Oil Production. THere is a lot of information to be found at the Hubbert Peak Website
If one assumes a 5% reduction per year and this might be generous, then consider how much the world consumption is cut back within say 10 years or 20...
I am sure slashdotters can do this math and can add the number of years to their age. The bottom line is they may be growing old in world without oil.
However you slice it, do not expect Alberta to be able to pick up much slack with Tar Sands, even though we have about 1.8 trillion barrels in resources. The trouble is our tar sands reserves are only about 300 billion barrels and our TOTAL natural gas supplies (which are needed to supply hydrogen so the bitumin can be chemically lightened) are not even sufficient for 10% and North America is already in a Natural Gas crisis.
WE NEED nuclear plants (CANDU, not enriched, because CANDU burns natural uranium unlike the stoopid USA enriched reactors which I think were designed that way to justify enrichment facilities so bombs could be made)
Not only this, we needed to start building them 10 years ago. We are going to have some major power problems over the next few years.
Solar is not so competitive in cold clouded places. In Finland or the north of Scotland, hydro power is cheap, in Iceland geothermal enegy makes sense. Wind can be less expensive in some places. In big cities, waste combustion is economic. Each to their own.
'crack' the oil (dont ask me what that means, cos I dont know either!)
Cracking is the (usually catalytic) process by which long-chain hydrocarbons, which are difficult to burn efficiently, are broken down into short-chain hydrocarbons, which are volatile and easy to burn. Long-chain hydrocarbons have the advantage of a higher energy density but the engines that can use them are huge and complex (think, power station or large ship). Short chains are harder to handle (for example, they can explode) but they burn much more cleanly, much less free carbon in the exhaust, it's locked up in C02 (which of course has its own set of problems).
You can get a handfull of large solar panels , chuck it on the roof, stick it thru a 240w inverter and blammo
There are much better techniques for mass conversion of solar energy than photovoltaic cells. I'm not talking about enough energy to run a house but enough to make serious industry viable. My preferred technique would be the "black obelisk". It requires a large, open space, which you fill with mirrors on motorized bearings, and in the middle you build a huge black obelisk, filled with pipes. The mirrors rotate througout the day focussing the sun's energy on the obelisk, superheating water that is pumped into it, the steam coming out the other end is used to run the kind of turbine that exists in an ordinary coal or oil fired station. It's very efficient, and reuses existing technology, existing power stations in suitable climates could simply be converted in-place. In fact, a power station could use this technique by day and coal by night to ease the transition (it's all the same to the turbine), eventually it would store power generated by day for use at night.
Lets not forget about the pebble reactor's when talking about nuclear technology. They are supposed to be a lot safer and a lot more efficent than most of the reactors used today.
No transfer of energy here, move along. But IANAQP
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Chernobyl is interesting. The design was inherently less safe than it could have been, but one must remember when it was built. At that time, the design looked quite good. However, that wasn't actually the problem.
Chernobyl melted down as a result of a test by the Soviet version of the NRC. Someone wanted to find out how much power could be extracted from a reactor that was melting down. This information would allow them to better plan for dealing with a reactor meltdown. So....
The Soviet NRC guys came out, disabled all the safety interlocks in place, and tried to "simulate" a reactor meltdown. Worked like a charm! The "simulation" was so realistic they couldn't hardly believe it (that last was sarcasm, if it wasn't obvious).
With the exception of possible undocumented losses of nuclear submarines by the Soviets, there have been four or five nuclear problems serious enough to ruin a reactor (not all of them were serious enough to escape into the environment). That's not a terribly bad safety record, especially since none of them have been technical issues - in all cases, the problems were induced by human stupidity. Of which, I admit, we have an abundant supply.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Imperial Gallon = 4.54litres
Therefore 22-27mpg(US) = 26.4- 32.4mpg (UK), not quite as bad as it appears - though hardly 'economical' in European terms..
Absolute 100% malarkey. Using efficient reactors we could power the world for *thousands* of years using only known supplies. Plenty of time to develop, say, some sort of hyperefficient photovoltaics or whatever the alternative energy wonks dream about.
--- Ban humanity.
Breeder reactors have not caught on because uranium remains fairly cheap, especially compared with the high cost of reformed breeded fuel. Uranium is cheap because there have been few nuclear reactors built since 1970.
If enough non-breeding nuclear reactors are built, the price of uranium will probably increase, which will make breeders become economically feasible.
Do the math. Even if there are a few other unexploited areas in the US that are as rich as the ANWR, domestic demand far outstrips any realistic estimation of domestic production. Even if we put a marginal well in everyone's backyard, we can't keep up with current consumption trends. More drilling might be part of a short term answer, but if our goal is to eliminate our dependency on foreign petroleum then we must find ways to reduce our overall consumption without wrecking the economy at the same time. That's hard.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Firstly, it is highly questionable if the "Left" failed to stop Nazism, or even logically could have, as Nazism was an outgrowth of socialism combined with nationalism.
Then why was the left of the day going off to fight in Spain against the Fascists, who were supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy? Both of these were more corpratist/nationalist than socialist - indeed, the socalist elements in the Nazi party discovered just how sincere their leadership was about socalism on the night of the long knives. The Nazi party was funded by the largest german cooporations with the express intention of repressing the german communist party. I strongly suggest that you read your history books without ideological filters on next time.
As far as global warming goes.. you are completely wrong to say that we are 'just coming out of an ice age'. Temperatures peaked around 6000 years ago and had been slowly declining since then. Man made global warming is accepted by the vast majority of scientists, whatever you wish to assert; it is the magnitude that is up for debate.
Bomb-grade plutonium is almost pure Pu239 which is made by U238 capturing a neutron.
Essentially correct; you didn't mention the double beta decay, but that's essentially a given, considering the instability of Uranium 239 and Neptunium 239.
However, Chernobyl was a new reactor with relatively good safety equipment and excellent reliability. It was just misused.
Enh...not so much. Yes, Chernobyl was a new facility; that said, it didn't have a good safety record. RMBK 1000 reactors all over the Soviet Union had problems, but the KGB clamped down on that information; it is only recently that such information has come to light. In fact, Chernobyl 1 had problems to the now-famous Chernobyl 4, but not so severe; the KGB moved in and hushed things up so quickly and efficiently that even the other Chernobyl reactor operators didn't know about the problem. With such a closed, secretive attitude toward reactor safety, it was inevitable that mistakes would be repeated, and, indeed, they were. The only reason Chernobyl 4 became well-known is that the radiation cloud moved into western Europe, where people started raising questions. In any case, the safety issues with the RMBK-1000 reactors were serious, and known (if only to some) even at Chernobyl.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
you could probably get 70 MPG in a Prius, but good luck achieving that.
It depends on how small of a time slice you look at. I have averaged over 100 MPG (the highest the Prius meter goes) for ten minutes on occasion, and 10MPG on other occasions. My lifetime average (15K miles over 7 months) is 45MPG. The EPA highway test is, I believe, 10 minutes at 48 MPH on a dynomometer. Yeah -- that's going to be accurate.
I drive my Prius normally most all the time (meaning I accelerate faster than I really need to). When I drive to save, I can usually push my one tank average to 48MPG. The lowest tank average I've had was 42MPG.
Anyways, the EPA tests are lousy for all cars. If you're trying to get an idea of how useful hybrid engines are, don't compare real-world hybrid numbers to EPA gas numbers -- something a lot of people feel comfortable doing. And don't compare a comfy mid-size sedan like the 2004 Prius to some tiny econo box. If you compare the Prius to the Camry, similar interior space and comfort, the real world numbers show the Prius with a little more than double the milage.
It's about time that 'environmentalists' started to understand that Nuclear Power is not as evil as the pictures that seem to have been painted for it over the past few decades. I will agree that it is not a perfect solution and that it has it's own set of hazards. If one looks at all of the facts though, it is extremely difficult, (if not impossible), to argue that Nuclear Power is the lesser of two evils. I have no intention of rehashing all of those arguements here, whereas they have all been publicized in many forums, over and over throughout our nuclear history. As a former engineer in the nuclear field, I do understand the facts and am hopeful that others can take a new look at this option under a fresh light. We don't have the time to wait for a new technology to become industrially sound enough to refit our power demands with it. In my humble opinion, the decades that would take will prove to be our end if we travel that road. We should never stop striving to that end, but we should also grasp the opportunities afforded us in the present, to provide our children with a cleaner, better, livable future.
Why don't we take the still-radioactive waste products of using that fuel, throw them back where the fuel came from and bury them again?
If it was only so simple, nuclear waste is a grab-bag of stuff, ranging from used protective clothing through to spent fuel. It is usually graded into low, medium and high level waste depending on its radioactivity. So pretty much anything that comes into contact with radioactive materials has to be classified as nuclear waste.
Low-level waste is usually buried in lined trenches and does not present much of a problem. Fortunately it constitutes about 90% of all waste.
Medium and high level waste is actually more radioactive than materials found in nature. It is stuff like spent fuel, reprocessing waste and contaminated coolant. In the UK this is mainly liquid waste which is currently kept in cooled tanks at Sellafield. It can't be disposed of directly as it will either seep into the environment, or contaminate groundwater. The aim is to eventually combine it with glass at high temperatures - so called vitrifaction to produce an inert ceramic which can be buried.
However, the UK has singularly failed to find a site for the long-term storage of waste. Generally speaking, you are looking for dry, stable rocks that present a relatively low risk of releasing any contamination. The UK actually has plenty of space for a dump - the central part of the country is underlain by thick deposits of salt, gypsum and anhydrite. This stuff has been dry for hundreds of millions of years, there are no earthquakes worthy of the name and we are volcano free.
Indeed such sites were put forward in the 1980s for burying some waste - they just happened to all be under Conservative-held constituencies - the plan but not the waste was buried.
The Conservative government then proposed burying the waste near Sellafield in Cumbria. They were within months of starting drilling a test laboratory, when common-sense kicked in, and they concluded that the rocks in the area were saturated with water and shot through with faults.
At the present, there are absolutely no plans for the long-term storage of waste in this country. It is becoming increasingly likely that reprocessing will come to an end when the economics finally catch up, which would mean that spent fuel will be stored at the power stations where it can be monitored for deterioration.
Best wishes,
Mike.