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Bruce Sterling On Lovelock's Pro-Nuclear Stance
Robert Berger writes "Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, critic, blogger is also the creator of the Viridian Notes series of emails that comment on articles and websites about global warming. The current Viridian Note 00415: Doom is Nigh (scroll down past the inital links) has inserted his Sterling's pithy comments into Jame Lovelock's assertion that 'Nuclear power is the only green solution.'" (See also this earlier Slashdot post about Lovelock's nuclear apologia.)
a burning, corrosive, glowing green.
Unfortuately, coal and oil suck too. Natural gas is better, but also somewhat finite. And the other alternatives suck, too -- solar and wind might be eco-friendly, but they sure ain't cheap. Think the recession in 2000 was bad? Wait until you see what doubling the cost of electricity would do.
Bruce can make all the "pithy comments" he wants, but unless he has some terrific solution stashed up his sleeve they're ultimately not very helpful or insightful. So, unless you're looking to opt out of using electricity and other sources of power (I was camping this weekend -- it's fun, but it's no way to live), it's a necessary evil.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It is the "green" power solution... until a plant goes crazy, and it becomes the "yellow" power solution.
I don't see how this qualifies as a news piece, even by slashdot standards.
Somebody writes a piece in support of nuclear power. Some blogger fisks it, with as poor or lesser quality than the original article was written. No hard science, lots of hyperbole, and random conjectures.
Juvenile activity all around.
What the hell was timothy thinking?
If he's trying to advance his political views- and I'm not so sure this is the proper forum for him to do so- this is the least subtle and least effective way to do so.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Firstly, no, I didn't RTFA. The first few lines were enough to bore me. I'm gonna assume I know what the whole thing says, and here's my response.. (if I assumed incorrectly, boo bloody hoo).
.
We've seen it all before!
No doubt it's all true, or they think it's true. But seriously, how many times have we heard humans will be wiped out in the near future because of insert reason here>
Carbon realses from the amazon, global warming, asteroids, low oil supplies, nanotechnology, nuclear weapons, etc. etc. etc.
Please! We have survived for thousands of years already, people highly overestimate the malvolent potential of whatever. Even if we are going to die because of whatever; no doubt we will come up with some sort of device which will stop it from happening, and no doubt, scientists will start telling us all that that solution is now going to kill us all.
*Yawns*
What is so inherently stupid about fission is that you need lots of fuel at one place in order to sustain the criticality of the reactor. A fission reactor is critical (the normal state of operation) when the number of produced neutrons is equal to the number of lost neutrons. Since neutrons are lost through the surface and produced inside the core you want the ratio of volume to surface to be large. That means a huge reactor core. In contrast to the fission reactor which stores the energy for millions of households for a couple of years there is only a few grams of Hydrogen-isotopes in a fusion reactor. Even in a run-away scenario the fuel is used up very quickly and nothing spectacular happens.
Bruce never even touches Lovlock's central thesis: that at current rates of usage and current estimation of reserves, oil will stop meeting our energy needs within just a few decades, and atomic fission is the only replacement we know can take it's place.
If Sterling's comments are taken at face value, then he wants to see a return to 1700s-style labor-intensive agriculture.
You'll seriously get a higher quality of discussion just re-reading last week's Slashdot, rather than looking for any insight in that blob^Hg.
If he thinks switching to a 'green' power will end global warming, he is in for a big suprise. The Earth is just returning to its pre-mini ice age temperature.
Before several volcanoes spewed greenhouse gasses into the air (several centuries before the industrial revolution), farmers in what is now New Foundland and England grew wine grapes. They will be able to again in another 50 to 100 years...
Hey kiddies, it's life. The world get hot, the world gets cold. Live with it or die, because the Greens won't allow us to build the technology to leave.
Just me $0.02 worth.
"'Nuclear power is the only green solution.'"
That's the only solution?
So what did humankind do for greenness before nuclear power was invented?
He's just picking on the poor bastard for saying what must not be said: we're screwed, carbon burning is bad, nukes are looking more and more the safer alternative, etc. Why does he bitch about nukes getting to everybody's hands? There's no reason we couldn't build nuclear energy plants that couldn't be used for weapons grade plutonium production.
Just starving to death is what's going to happen if we don't do anything. And in that scenario, some idiot starting a nuclear holocaust is much more probable than in "World Government or bust, screw sovereignty"-scenario.
You mean "misinformed wisecracks". The only reason to conflate nuclear power and nuclear weapons, as is done repeatedly here, is because you want to use the fallacy of equivocation to trick your audience into viewing even the safest reactor designs as weapons of mass destruction. You might as well blame gasoline users for the horrors of napalm.
I was under the impression that Bruce Stirling was a cool guy, although I never read any of his stuff, but he comes across as a total asshat in this article. Here is one teeny example:
nuclear energy from its start in 1952 has proved to be the safest of all energy sources. (((If you don't count the nuclear energy released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is.)))
Yeah, those 300,00 dead in the nuclear attacks on Japan certainly look horrible compared to the millions of air pollution deaths. He continually treats nuclear power and nuclear weapons as one and the same, and generally comes off making no sense.
I stopped reading halfway through, I couldn't stand it anymore, but he basically says, "What are you thinking? Nukes are bad. I don't care what evidence you have. I don't care what the alternatives are. Bad! Bad! Bad!" It's like a satire or caricature on the wacko ultra-environmental movement. Maybe that's what it really is. If not, then my only response is to say, what a jerk.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"Um, nukes are bad, mmmkay?"
No, really, that's it. "There are risks, so we shouldn't do it". That sums up the entire argument. He equates all nuclear energy with nuclear weapons. I also find it rather amusing that he assumes that the only use for oil is in fuel; this is not true. It would take a lot more than "green energy" to allow us to "leave the oil and coal in the ground"; we would have to completely break our current dependence on polymers as we know them.
There's plenty of propaganda on the other side, too, don't get me wrong. But I find it amusing to find people who consider nuclear energy "too dangerous" yet push for plenty of other equally-dangerous technologies. Let's have some rationality here, please.
Ok, this is nice, but neither side gives any evidence. Since when does "no it isn't" count as a refutation?
Everything that guy has to say is about nuclear weapons. Well, guess what. WE ALREADY HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS. There, accept it. Get over it. There is no danger of additional reactors turning the US, or China, or India, or Western Europe into nuclear armed powers. NONE, because they already are.
It's easy to tear down someone else's proposal when you don't have on of your own and need rely on nothing but juvenile comebacks. Get some actual evidence. And you know what, even if you count the victims of Hiroshima and Nagisaki against nuclear power (but don't count the victims of conventional warfare against fossil fuels) and you throw in Cherenoble, and maybe round everything up by a few hundred thousand just to be sure, Nuclear killed far fewer people per kWh of energy. It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which it might be otherwise. Fossil fuels kill tens (hundreds, depending on how you count) of thousands of people each year.
A nuclear disaster would have to kill tens of millions (at least) in order to even the score. Nobody can even conceive of how that could happen with civilian reactors built to even the most incompetent of standards, like Cherenobl. About the only real possibility is if WW-III breaks out and people start tossing around nuclear weapons (which they already have, and don't need civilian reactors for), and that is far MORE likely if we start fighting over oil.
Just once I'd like to hear a well reasoned out anti-nuclear position. Include some numbers (you know, dollars and cents, lives lost, that sort of thing) and keep them accurate. Include an honest asessment of nuclear waste dangers (assuming various means of disposal) and honest asessments of nuclear proliferation. I have never seen any evidence that civilian nuclear power leads to proliferation, but it seems to be a given for the anti-nuke types. Japan and South Korea both have reactors, and neither has nuclear weapons.
The only scenario the anti-nuke types ever argue against is such a complete straw man. They assume we dump all the nuclear waste into the nation's beer supply, give away spent fuel to everyone with a driver's license, and somehow (though nobody can really imagine exactly how this happens) have lots of melt downs in highly populated areas. Seriously. Assume an even marginally competent nuclear program (needn't be perfect) and then try a comparison with our fossil fuel system. See how that treats you.
It's like comparing against an oil economy where it's assumed that 99% of the oil is dumped raw into the ocean, the rest is burned in the foulest, dirtiest machines imaginable, and that somehow access to oil allows every fool who can rub two sticks together to build a jet fighter with which to kill people. Be serious.
...the refuge of those who disagree, and wish to respond - but lack an argument.
I'm unimpressed by Sterling's interjections; they come off as no better or more unique than any other flippant Usenet-style response to an article. In the marketplace of ideas, the "brand" ideally shouldn't matter, so I'm not about to give Sterling's amateurish response a pass solely because of his name recognition.
This isn't a logical deconstruction and rebuttal, it's a screed which appears to be fueled by traditionalist hysteria and which assumes a worst-case scenario as the only possible (or likely) basis. I am strongly reminded of the typical Republican and Democrat responses to the notions of minarchy or anarchy; evil is assumed to be inherent in the idea from the start, and the argument proceeds from that premiss.
If Sterling would like to be taken seriously perhaps instead of splattering his Usenetty response amongst quoted material, he could author an article with integrity, his own, and present his ideas cogently and in accordance to protocol set by the initial article.
Nuclear power is honestly not as bad as people make it out to be. The only truly bad nuclear accident was Chernoble; Three Mile Island was almost harmless, people have blown it way out of proportion. Furthermore, since then, we've gotten a LOT better at stopping accidents. The fact of the matter is, nuclear power is fairly cheap, clean (when disposed of correctly), and harmless. Coal mining has killed/harmed a lot more people than nuclear power has, and it's not as efficient. People are just paranoid.
Nuclear is to power what democracy is to political systems. Yes, it sucks. But sucks less than the alternatives.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I think Sterling's comments would have been decidedly better had they actually proposed something else, instead of attacking an idea that is a feasable solution to significantly lowering the emission of greenhouse gasses. I have to wonder if he would have been among the people objecting to wind power because it ruined the view, if he lived in Martha's Vineyard.
I don't need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own. - Christopher Walken
This piece is sad. The commentary is written by someone who obviously has a working mind and can write (see his published works) but is so blinded by an irrational phobia against anything connected to the N word he is blindly attacking it, and because apparently his mind shuts down in the presence of the N word he isn't even doing a very good job of rebutting the idea.
This guy can't even tell the difference between fusion bombs and modern reactor designs that are pretty darned failsafe.
If you are really concerned about global warming, dependence on foreign oil, etc, you have to at least have a rational discussion about fission power. Which is why the ultra greens are having none of that and attacking with such ferocity, to them it ia a matter of religion, not science. Gaia told them in a dream or something that "Thou Shalt not Fission the Atoms that I have given unto thee." That's religion for you though, Galieo wasn't the first to be persecuted by religious intolerance and apparently isn't anywhere near the last.
Democrat delenda est
I don't care if this Bruce Sterling person is Albert Einstein, Gandhi or Jesus. Nobody in the entire world can critique anything like that and sound intelligent.
Not only is he just sitting there with the debating sophistication of five-year-olds saying "I'm rubber and you're glue and what bounces off me sticks to you", he is confusing the issue of nuclear energy generation with nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy can be safe, if treated properly. Nobody will argue that nuclear weapons are anything but dangerous. "Painted with the same brush" is the phrase that pays, here.
Having said that: he has the right to say what he wants. We have the right to laugh and point.
HBH"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
That blog post was the most uninformed, narrow-minded, un-helpful piece of drivel I have had the misfortune of reading all (last) week.
It would appear to me that most people who are anti-nuclear-energy|weapons|whatever are also anti-science morons who think with their feelings and not their brains.
...the point of this story. All I saw was a bunch of smartass comments by someone who I guess is respected for his opinion. Anyway the whole thing reads like an Anonymous Coward with ADD.
Does Bruce Sterling even understand the difference between nuclear power and nuclear weapons? He seems to have them confused, and I'm not sure what his point is. It's just some drunken, rambling attempt to shout someone down.
Nuclear power or not, as long as people insist on eating food, living life and having babies it looks like we're stuck with the greenhouse effect.
Actually, five grams of hydrogen will supply enough energy via fusion to supply a hundred one-kilowatt-consuming households with their electricity for one year. Fusion is nice, but it's not as magical as you say as far as the energy content goes.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
nuclear reactions are one of ( it not )the most abundant natural reaction(s) in the known universe. everything "green", plants, wind; is owed to the energy from our sun. A big, bright nuclear reaction.
The reason nuclear has such a bad rap is that it was introduced first as a weapon, instead of an energy supply. Look up "nuclear" on google images and you'll see what people first think of when they hear the word.
Had we created nuclear power plants before blowing stuff up people might view that infamous nuclear symbol as innocuous as the "+-" of electrical current.
He's right. Unless there's a fantastic amount of oil and coal someplace that we can get at reasonably soon, or unless all the cars in the world start getting 90 MPG Real Soon Now, the price of gas is going to go to a place where it's not usable anymore.
Try to understand: We're not just talking about those evil SUV drivers paying $80 to $100 at the pump. The depletion of the world's fossil fuel supplies will mean a breakdown on a global scale if it isn't planned for *well* in advance. We're talking about a collapse of the global economy and a return to a way of living that can't support the global population. Famine, disease, abject poverty, devistating wars, genocide. A return to a feudal economy, a breakdown of our civilization and another dark age for my children and grandchildren to live in.
While some of the more frustrated environmentalists might suggest that this is what we have coming to us, I'd rather see it avoided. You can't wait for it to happen and then start responding -- humanity has got to get on this one now, and pie-in-the-sky "what if we could increase the yield of solar cell" shit isn't going to cut it.
Once you devise a method of generating power that can compete on an economic level with nuclear, of *course* the world will switch. It only makes sense that we'd switch -- it's basic economics. But we can't count on the tech genie popping up at the last second to save our bacon.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Even though nuclear energy is relatively safe, environmentally friendly, and the only practical solution to global warming we have right now, getting people of Mr. Sterling's generation to accept it will be impossible.
These people have grew up their whole lives with the word "nuclear" being associated with the word "Armageddon". Nuclear energy is permanently associated in their brain with "biblical disaster". They have been sold fear of nuclear annihilation from childhood (duck-and-cover propaganda), to adolescence (China Syndrome), to adulthood (The Day After), and are even now being sold fear about nuclear energy (Iraq weapons of mass destruction, anyone?). Baby Boomer response to nuclear energy is like a Catholic priest response to Satanism. They are never going to be psychological capable of viewing the situation rationally. Nuclear power has been their "Satan" figure for their entire lives, and they will never change.
Once the Boomers start dying off, people will realize the benefits of nuclear power once again. Hopefully global warming won't mess things up too bad before that happens.
Dang, hope Santa has a contingency plan.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
um. WTF are you thinking? you fucking dumb shits.
+5, informative.. MY FUCKING ARSE
how about -1, offtopic. -1, troll, -1, overrated
to the parent, your just lucky i have no mod points.
to the mods, your just lucky im not old enough to metamod.
James Lovelock - 0.5
Bruce Sterling - 0
Am I alone in thinking they're equally full of crap, judging the evidence to date? Each of them blatantly refuses to present a sound argument by presenting and refuting counterarguments, and pretend that there's no reasonable way to hold a viewpoint conflicting with theirs. I'm fairly sure we're trolled by both of them here.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Of course, in the end, this means that we (taxpayers) are paying more money to fund wind and solar producers (*not* wind and solar research, BTW, but to pay off people to have these plants).
If wind and solar were really reliable and less expensive, what in God's name makes you think we'd be relying on fossil fuels? The oil lobby is powerful, sure, but the rest of the economy would crush them like a bug if a cheaper source of energy came along. That's capitalism for you.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Sterling uses "nuke" to mean both "nuclear powerplant" and "nuclear bomb". And he often seems to consider those to be the same thing. Careless language leading to careless thinking?
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
The original article (published in the Indepedent) was a well though, coherent piece of insight about a politically and socially sensative subject. The 'debunking' of it is, on the other hand, a piece that can be ranked little higher than childish writing. The author is part of a movement that (as with many lobbist groups) seems completely ignorant of reality, and is engulfed in their own message find it hard to assess properly another reasonable argument.
Mindless moaning you might say? Wrong. It's because of people like this writer that the public at large is scared / paranoid unduely about the Nuclear industry. ICBM's with nuclear warheads are a field apart from the clean, reliable energy source that is nuclear power. As the original article rightly concludes, 1/3 of us will die from cancer / cancer related diseases, and the carcinogens aren't coming from nuclear power stations.
Because when you factor in the waste storage and decomissioning costs, the nuclear option looks damned near stupid. BNFL for instance is desperate to offload it's decomissioning costs to the government and hence the taxpayer, it's the only way it could be remotely profitable.
e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2091561.stm
Solar and wind power in comparison are being rolled out by already privatised power companies, they can make a profit running onshore and offshore wind farms.
Deleted
This is a joke right? It's April first? - no thats not it. May day? - nope Then why on God's green earth (Pun's intended) would this article be considered even mildly slashdot worthy?
Oh - 3 day weekend, beer + article submission = crap
Got it - knew it was something.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Bruce Sterling has written some decent material in the past, but I have to say the link to his Blog demonstrates a complete lack of an ability to carry on a conversation. Reading it makes it sound like Lovelock's argument is constantly trailed by smartass remarks and links, with never a solid argument to be found by Sterling.
For God's sake, this is Sterling's blog? I would expect a paragraph AT LEAST at the end to mark Bruce's idea or assertion, but instead his page/article left me more confused and with the impression Sterling just hates Lovelock instead of having a good counter-point.
Good point. It is one of them. The word "only" was chosen just to be controversial.
Electricity generation is only a fraction of fossil fuel use. Industrial process heat, living space heating, and vehicles will produce almost as much greenhouse gas as we do today even if, like France, we go almost-all-nuclear for the power grid.
We could go to electric vehicles but not with today's generation of batteries. The battery pack in my Prius weighs about a hundred pounds and stores only as much energy as a few ounces of gasoline.
Things get interesting if we could build small reactors economically and operate them safely with off-the-shelf personnel. Then you could have nuclear cogeneration systems where a factory has its own reactor to generate electricity and generate heat for factory processes. Pebble-bed reactors promise to fill this role, if they work as expected.
You might even notice other goods and services increase in cost. It's silly to think that the cost of electricity is only reflected in your electricity bill.
...it can also be used in a devastating weapon.
Gasoline (oil) is therefore also bad, due to the existance of napalm.
Electricity must be horrendous, because of the electric chair.
Coal is bad because gunpowder exists.
Jesus, Bruce...any energy source can be compacted and used as a weapon.
Not true, There are "warmers" where a non-critical ammount of radioactive material is used, with an armature which rotates to generate heat and boil water... ergo power; however, these can NOT go critical, if they fail, the armarture stops and the cool down and if they go mad, the armature can spin as fast as it wants, the reaction cant go critical.
course, I cant remember which bloody japanese company invented them, but there was a slashdot story about one being offered to a town in Alaska I think. Of course, Ive been wrong before.
err!
jak
I think you have your terms confused. Nuclear reactors are sub-critical, meaning that the fusion reaction is not exponential like it would be in a nuclear weapon where you want all the energy released at one time.
Also, the way fusion reactors are designed, I assume that a critical reaction would be almost impossible given the grade of material used.
Neat concept! ;-)
"You know, I sense the makings of a really good, sensible deal here. Shut off the carbon. Destroy the coal companies and oil companies. Use nukes for fifty years while developing sustainable energy. Then shut off the nukes. Become fully sustainable. Legislate that all, worldwide, with global diplomacy."
Bwahahahahahahahahahaaaa....
Anyway.
I think addressing why this guys vision for the future is totally freaking insane is an exercise in futility, akin to debunking the moon landing hoax or creationist websites. It's just not worth the effort, because no matter how well reasoned or cited (to be honest, the article he was ripping was neither) you're dealing with a true believer.
But regardless, the fact he fails to even suggest a realistic alternative is telling. And while risks of global warming and nuclear power are real, most people seem to be happy enough with the current system i.e. we use fossil fuels until it becomes more efficient to use something else. As the price of gas rises, we increase our usage of alternative energy sources. Until then _very few people actually give a damn_, at least in the sense of "I'll give up my SUV", much less "I'm willing to give up the internal combustion engine."
No doubt global warming may cause us problems in the future, at which point we will have to deal with them. I don't think it's clear that a massive investment of time and money to completely overhaul our energy policies (and therefore, our economic and social policies) is really any better than dealing with the problem 50 years from now. Who know what will happen between now and then?
I could be convinced, but present some evidence at least. Even a shred or two would be nice after that boatload ill written and scientifically inept crap.
While all of these are interesting, and various people can prove how witty they are, balance is generally a good concept to stick to. Of course that would require a balanced energy policy down to, at the very least, voluntary usage limits (a balanced usage policy). How the hell we can continue driving individuals around in several tons of engineered material is beyond me. How we can continue to go without some checks on our desire for bigger and better is also. The general consensus among those who look into reducing waste, is that a reduction in usage, say packaging materials through engineering, is much more effective than attempting to say recycle, or in this case match ever increasing usage requirements. Plenty O big name brains get by on 56k as opposed to personal T1s.
/. a while back. I find this interesting, though would rather not have targets scattered across the landscape. A drastic switch in energy types is probably not even possible without massive expenditures. Hey, let's switch to DC current! Where's my electric car? They've been coming! Hydrogen? I put my bets on 20 years for an economy like ours.
I would agree that attempting to meet our unreasonable energy requirements through drastically increasing nuclear power is ridiculous, and likely dangerous. There was mention of micro-muclear power plants on
I just ditched my BMW, moved into the city, and walk to work. I have to say that I am much happier, not worrying about my car, and losing weight pretty damn rapidly. It was a great decision!
... or just classic misdirection of a discussion to argue the absurd. Both sides of the nuclear debate use this technique.
... just answer the question that you wished was asked that makes the other side look stupid ... oh and make sure your answer is derogatory.
... nope ... everyone would rather spew the same old rhetoric that has been regurgitated for nearly 60 years. Surely we have learned something in all that time to add to the debate?
Q:"Is nuclear power useful?"
A:"No, you idiot, nukes are bad!"
Q:"Is waste from nuclear power managable?"
A:"Would you hippies rather be breathing coal dust?"
Never answer the question
How about some discussion regarding breeder vs. non-breeder reactors. Or half-life of waste. Or decommissioning of reactors. Or standardized independent safety inspection and rules
I hereby festoon you all the Viridian RSS feed. Much handier than getting the Viridian list in email.
A couple of statements :
There are credible statistical studies that show less than 50 people total died from the Chernobyl accident. There were approximately 600 additional cases of thyroid cancer (3 deaths) and little elevation in other forms of cancer, and 38 people who died from direct exposure as well as several hundred who survived acute radiation poisoning.
While not cheap, it is a relatively paltry human cost, comparable to a major accident with conventional forms of power and industry.
Bruce Sterling has little of value to add to this debate. He equates nuclear energy plants using different elements and isotopes to nuclear warheads. Conversion is possible, it is true...but Lovelock is not proposing building nuclear plants in countries that do not already have the warheads. The biggest energy user in the world, the united states, already has so many warheads and so much plutonium it has no need to make more using any power reactors built, and China has a considerable amount as well.
With all this said, solar may ultimately be a better idea. The relatively limited research into creating more efficient solar panels has yield extremely promising results. A panel that is perhaps 50% efficient and wafer thin, mass produced and used to cover vast tracts of unused land might ultimately be cheaper than burning coal.
It seems clear that were the 200 billion already burned in Iraq used to develop this technology further and built the vast plants to make solar panels of this quality on a large scale one would get better results.
I don't believe that nuclear power is entirely green. It may not produce greenhouse gasses or other pollutants, but there's one more thing:
If we're worried about global warming, the amount of heat that we produce should be a factor as well as how much we insulate the Earth with greenhouse gasses. Nuclear power releases very large amounts of heat that would otherwise not be released.
On the other hand, wind, solar, and hydro power merely harness energy that is going to end up as heat anyway.
So, if you're worried about heating up the Earth, would you rather release gigawatts of extra heat, or would you rather harness gigawatts of heat that's being released anyway?
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
did anyone hear anything about this? http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/june14/ ? that site is prob down, was shut by angelfire but a mirror was popped up here http://www.edmphreak.tk
People need to eat and to live a productive life but they don't need to have babies. Overpopulation is probably the biggest reason why we are so keen on devouring resources. If we could control population, or even reduce it slowly over the next 100 years, there would be less need for resources. The debate on whether or even how to do it is wide open, but one nice fact is that countries with high standards of living and better education systems have less population growth. Some industrialized countries, like Italy, even have a negative growth already.
I'm sorry, but I don't see where some left-wing troll's smart-assed (albeit, painfully uninformed) commentary is worthy of being published on Slashdot. Or anywhere other than said trolls own web site.
The fact of the matter is that once you get over all the anti-nuke fear mongering and unscientific scare tactics, nuclear reactors are ultimately safer and less expensive than any other power generation method available today. And it can be far safer than any other, except that we haven't had a new reactor design authorized for construction in over half a century now, and a new plant hasn't been completed in over two decades.
If you want a green planet with clear skies, its time to put pencil to paper and explore more productive technologies, before it gets too expensive to drill and blast the energy out of the ground.
Still a moron.
Pretty much his whole commentary, the strong point of his whole argument, is two words: "with NUKES!" This is religion, not science. Nukes are bad, unquestionably bad, so bad that they trump all other arguments. They are, after all, NUKES!
(pause for reader to quake in fear)
Nuclear power is, like any other energy source, a tool. Like all tools, it can be misused. You can make amazingly destructive bombs with nuclear power, so powerful, in fact, that they've never been used since the first two. But you can also make very, very effective explosives with oil... a fuel-air bomb is vastly destructive. And those, as far as I know, HAVE BEEN used. So which is really worse?
Mr. Sterling, whether he intends to or not, is playing on the confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Think how silly his argument would look with a different energy source.... "with FIRE!"
Humans don't survive radiation very well, we are quite susceptible to it. That does not, however, imply that all of Nature is. In fact, it appears that very few species suffer from radiation as much as we do. The Earth has not always been as cozy and comfortable as it is now, and humans are a relatively recent evolutionary offshoot. We die from even small amounts of the stuff, but most species don't.
(we argued back and forth about why this is, in another thread... no conclusions drawn. Regardless, Bikini Atoll, the site of 20+ bomb tests, including the first hydrogen bomb, is a lush tropical paradise. It's not safe for people to live there, but Nature is doing JUST FINE.)
Since humans are the ones getting the primary benefit from nuclear power, it is just that we're the ones who suffer if we blow it. From an environmental standpoint, nuclear power is nearly perfect. If we screw up completely and have some horrid catastrophe that renders the Earth too radioactive for human habitation, it'll be the best possible outcome for most other species, since their most aggressive competitor would be wiped out.
Now, I did think his comment about how we'll just add nuclear power and keep using oil to be pretty accurate... we'd need a concerted effort to switch power sources, not just supplement them. And of course we'd have to take care of the waste, but that's far from an insurmountable problem. However much it costs, it'll probably take only one prevented major hurricane on the East Coast to pay for it. (which, of course, we wouldn't see directly... but if the weather stopped getting worse, it'd MORE than pay for itself.)
I do think we'd end up with 'nuclear slums', low-rent districts around most plants. Poor people would be the ones to suffer first, but that's ALWAYS true of EVERY technology. And in this case, it would at least be a deliberate choice.
I am cheerfully willing to trade nuclear slums for cleaner air, cleaner water, and more natural weather patterns. I'd probably even live in one.... since I'm such a strong proponent, I really oughta be putting myself in the line of fire, so to speak.
"A fission reactor is critical (the normal state of operation)"
I am neither a physicst nor a nuclear engineer, but something about that statement just doesn't look right. I'm pretty sure that being at the critical point is just a nudge away from "an earth-shattering kaboom."
IIRC, the goal of a nuclear reactor is to produce heat and not necesarily neutrons (glorifed steam plants, etc. etc.). The trick is to have enough free neutrons to generate a high enough reaction rate to produce the desired heat, and keeping those neutrons in the core instead of escaping into the inhibitors is more a matter of efficiency (more heat per free neutron) than in keeping the reaction going.
The radioactive elements in a nuclear fuel are going to emit neutrons no matter what you do (they're radioactive, after all). All a fission reactor does is try to help the process along.
"Since neutrons are lost through the surface and produced inside the core you want the ratio of volume to surface to be large. That means a huge reactor core."
Huh? Generally speaking, maximizing volume and minimizing surface area is more a matter of shape and is independent of scale. A cube has a 6:1 area-to-volume ratio no matter what size it is. There are other engineering factors that affect the size of a reactor core (you want your fuel to be packed desnely enough to react but not so dense that it can't be controlled), but I don't see how this is one of them.
"Even in a run-away scenario"
Run-away scenarioes are a symptom of poor engineering. If they can happen then the problem is with how you built it, not with the underlying physics. See Cherynobyl.
This wise-crack got me confused. People sometimes say that there is no safe level of radio-activity, not realising that this is a methodological assumption, rather than an empirical fact. When scientists have tried to investigate this, using the natural variation in background radiation and existing epidemilogical data, they have found that radiation is a health tonic!
Some scientists have speculated that this might even be a real effect, not a statistical artifact. Their idea is that damage from free radicals is a much bigger deal than damage by background radition. Cells have repair mechanisms that get turned on in response to increased metabolism and the consequent rise in free radicals. Lags in the regulation of repair are responsible for much of the damage caused by free radicals, and if radiation upregulated the repair mechanism that could more than compensate for the actual damage done by the radiation.
My guess, from having done research on speech recognition, is that most scientists just don't get how hard it is to do statistics right, and the "tonic" effect of radiation will turn out to be an artifact, probably due to incorrect compensation for regional variations in cigarette smoking.
Meanwhile Bruce Sterling's attempt at sarcasm is a bit of a disaster, revealing that the controversy over the dangers (or otherwise) of low levels of radiation has passed him by.
BTX is to ATX what a compaq car is to pickup. One PCI-X slot? Give me a break. What we need is MORE expansion, give me a new motherboard standard that has a riser card for memory and at least as many expansion slots as we have now. That the only way to take advantage of these new 64bit systems. Whats the point of being able to use all that memory when there's no room for it on the logic board?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
No one knows where to put the stuff. Everyone says "not in my back yard" and that "nothing will ever grow there. EVER." When you live someplace where there isn't anyplace to put it that you know of, those comments make a lot of sense. Only since I've moved to Utah did I find out there are thousands(?) of square miles of...nothing. Of big salty deserts. Where nothing will ever grow. EVER. People also worry about transporting it..."what if there is an accident?" Also in Utah is an airforce base where they make/dispose of chemical weapons. The most dangerous weapons in the world are disposed of just outside the city. And how do they get there? late at night on the public freeway. And its allowed. Still, regardless of all these facts, the overwhelming hatred for nuclear power is louder than anything else. Shows to go that no matter what, the hypocrisy of the "Green" to nuclear power conquers all.
Actually, the big problem with nuclear fission as a solution to the oil problem is simply one of scale. According to David Goldstein, prof at Cal Tech and author of Out of Gas: the End of the Age of Oil, we would have to bring something like one maximum-capacity nuclear fission plant online every day for the next thirty years to match our current consumption of energy from fossil fuels. This rate of production is somewhat unrealistic, so nukes (at least alone) cannot be the solution, not only because of the risk, but because of the sheer scale involved.
It's worth noting that solar energy, my personal favorite, is also subject to the same problem: in order to meet our current needs, we would have to cover half of the state of California with solar panels. That much land is available, scattered across the globe, of course, but the sheer production of solar panels involved is daunting.
Unfortunately, at some point we're just going to have to face it: we're using too much energy. There is no reasonable way to produce it at this rate. We're just going to have to cut down, and that won't be easy.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
- Nuclear waste.
- Plutonium falling into the wrong hands => nuclear weapons on a large scale.
- Radioactive leaks during operation.
- Containing the radioactive waste from the mining operations.
Radioactive leaks? Not a problem. The only two leaks of any significance were Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Both of those came down to poor plant design combined with operator error (Chernobyl in particular). That leaves waste and plutonium.Waste falls into two categories: "low level" and "high level". Low level waste is your clothing, reactor parts, etc. Store them for fifty or so years, and they're no longer a significant problem. High level waste, on the other hand, is the nasty stuff, and it's what causes all the problems.
HLW includes things like plutonium and other trans-uranic elements (elements heavier than uranium), as well as fission by-products. Those fission by-products are mostly short lived; the long lived products are strontium-90 and caesium-137 for the most part. So the waste problem basically reduces to dealing with the heavy, trans-uranic elements; dealing with the uranium that hasn't fissioned; and dealing with the strontium and caesium. Everything else decays away quickly enough that storage for a year (at most) is adequate.
Trans-uranics and uranium can be dealt with by reprocessing and turning them into additional fuel for the reactor. The problem then becomes keeping this material out of the hands of those that wish to make nuclear weapons. No, I don't have an answer for that problem; I wish I did. The strontium and caesium... again, I don't know. Solve those two problems, and nuclear power is definitely a viable option. They're big ones, though...
The US has coal reserves for about 250 years at current consumption levels. Not trivial to be sure, but not quite 1,000 years.
On the other hand, newer nuclear plants can extend the life of existing uranium reserves to a length of time longer than the entire history of humanity up until this point. And the use of IFR/AFR and other modern designs can do so without mining another once of uranium for some time by processing existing weapons and waste.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Clearly Sterling is a zealot unable to hold a rational discussion; that's why he's getting so panned by all.
But aren't most wacko environmentalists exactly the same, once you dig below the well-written, scaremonging, press-release façade.
The next pasture is always greener
So far the biggest danger to transporting nuclear waste that I've seen is all of the environmental activists protesting the shipments. These people have evenremoved sections of track ahead of the approaching train!
Why do they think there will be an accident transporting nuclear waste? Because they're doing their damnedest to create one.
The only real problem with Nuclear Energy is sooner or later we will fail at keeping it contained. Sooner or later either we or the machines will screw up again, that cant be denied, its already happened twice. If more reactors are built it means more chances for it to happen. I dont know if it will happen tomorrow, or in 200 years, but it will happen sooner or later. We have proven as a species that it will happen.
In all seriousness, can't you take the same sort of containment precautions they take for land disposal, make a torpedo shape and drop it in a couple of miles of water in the middle of nowhere. I would imagine a several ton "bomb" would bury itself really deep in the muck (don't drop it where there are rocks ;-)
Are there any suitable dumping spots? Muddy sea bottom far from land, in deep water? Are all ocean plates opening, or is there someplace where suitable that is also a subduction plate, as a further safe guard that the junk is going in the right direction to be recycled?
Even if you got some leakage, wouldn't it get dispersed so widely as to be "background" noise?
I usually deal with bits, so stuff as large as atomic particles are really not my thing. Please flame gently.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
s=1m; area=6m^2; volume=1m^3; area/volume=6m
s=10m; area=600m^2; volume=1000m^3; area/volume=3/5m;
area/volume=(6/s)m^2
Come back after you've passed 7th (?) grade.
The problem with fission reactors is that you have much extremly dangerous material around and hope that nothing goes wrong. You can make it as save as possible but judging from human history Chernobyl won't remain the only catastrophe and if something goes really wrong in a fission reactor it goes *really* wrong. 500 years ago Europe had just left the middle ages behind and had discovered America. In 500 years the region around Chernobyl will be once again safe for human settlement. That's a hell of a timeframe and I don't even talk about nuclear waste. Had the first homo sapiens built a fission reactor we'd still have that stuff around and radiating
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I wanted to bring attention to your last paragraph there. Nuclear debate aside, if the world spent even a fraction of the money it spends on defense (US especially) on energy research, we'd probably have a number of very good renewable energy sources. I mean, $200 BILLION wouldn't give us some good solar cells?
Don't paint all of us with such a broad brush. I'm enough of a realist (and Engineer) to see that Nuclear power is where the future lies. There's no other technology available at present to meet the energy needs of today's world population, even if there is some significant conservation. Fusion would be great, but it's not happening yet.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
This is completely untrue. Fusion has similar constraints to fission. Fusion requires an enoumous ammount of compression in order to increase the chances of neucli interaction. Fission is easily induced simply by sticking enough U235 or plutonium together. Of course, you could achieve fission with just a few grams of plutonium if you compressed it enough, the difference is that you don't have to. In order to achieve fusion just by sticking enough hydrogen together, you'd need a mass similar to the mass of the sun in order to achieve enough compression. That's a pretty big reactor core! So no, the main advantage of fusion is the abundance of fuel. Fusion even produces radioactive waste (though it is short lived).
In the end it makes no sense to pomote a far-off technology that has never been successfully implemented over an existing and proven technology that could be implemented now. Sure, fusion research should continue, but to do so to the exclusion of all other nuclear research is foolish at best.
All he gave in response were sarcastic comments light on ANYTHING factual. Well, I suppose it did have substance, as he's someone I intend to completely ignore in the future.
Like others are said, he seems to be confusing nuclear power with nuclear weapons many times over. The two, while based on the same early research and sharing very basic principles, are very different. The main difference I'd say, other than purpose, is that one is a CONTROLLED reaction, the other is specifically an uncontrolled one. Never mind that the whole bag of effects for the detonation of a nuclear weapon, and fallout from a power plant are for the most part different.
Or the fact that Nuclear power plants have been operationg perfectly fine for a long time now without ANY screw-ups. Last one was Chernobyl (or Three Mile Island, can't remember which was more recent).
He displays very bad knowledge of nuclear power, and even less sense than most *enviro-nuts who argue against nuclear power do.
*NB: Not all people who argue against nuclear power are enviro-nuts. There ARE good arguements to be made against its use, and there are sensible, informed people who use them. Enviro-nuts don't use those however, because they're too busy protesting against nuclear power to actually become informed enough on the subject to make any good arguements against it.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
They did more than just turn off the safety systems.
They were screwing with the power levels, trying to
test the reactor under bad conditions. They had a
whole lot of stuff disabled, were pressed for time,
and started cutting corners.
Even if things had turned out OK, the people
screwing around should have been severely punished.
One *huge* difference between Chrenobyl and TMI that people often forget to mention is that Chernobyl released tonnes and tonnes of radioactive material directly into the atmosphere, whereas TMI did not. The background radiation levels of the atmosphere were noticably (with radiation counting instruments) higher even hundreds of miles away from the reactor.
;-) After monitoring and replacing them for months, he recorded no significant change above natural background radiation. For all intents and purposes, there was no release of radiation.
Contrast this with TMI. At the time, my high school Chemistry and Physics teacher lived less than 2 miles downwind of the plant, so naturally he was quite worried. He placed radiation detection badges around his neighborhood. (He was a civil defense neighborhood captain, or something. This was still during the Cold War
Technically speaking, there was some release of radiation. The reactor did not "blow" and there was no direct release of radiation. However, the fuel vessel did crack and release radioactive water into the reactor chamber, some of which evaporated into the atmosphere. However, as mentioned before, the amount of radiation was statistically insignificant.
The reason that Chernobyl blew up and TMI did not is a matter of reactor design. Briefly, all nuclear reactors need something called a "mederator" to allow nuclear reactions to happen. They also need a coolant to prevent overheating and meltdown.
The Soviet reactor used graphite (like in a pencil) for the moderator and water for the coolant. When the water circulation system malfunctioned, the reactor continued running full blast until it overheated and blew. America, on the other hand, uses a kind of reactor that used water for both moderator and coolant. Thus, when the water circulation system malfuctioned, the reactor overheated, but there was not enough water to allow it to keep running full blast, and hence it only cracked the vessel rather than blowing it up.
Also, the Soviet reactor was housed in only a cheap warehouse building, whereas American reactors are stored in 7-12 meter thick reinforced concrete domes. Chances are good that such a dome would have held the blast of even a Chernobyl reactor.
So there are definitely major differences between Chernobyl and TMI.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Mr. Sterling may well be a fool; I've never enjoyed his writing as much as many seem to. But there are a couple of differences to the present period of global warming:
1. The last time the weather was this warm, we weren't dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. True, natural events can dump even larger amounts of greenhouse gas into the air, but it doesn't necessarily mean we should be helping them along, especially in light of:
2. The last time, we didn't have such a sophisticated world economy on which we depend. Life, of course, will adapt, including our own species. But in many ways our technological culture may prove less adaptable: hundreds of millions of people living on coastlines, trillions of dollars in immobile physical infrastructure designed for particular climates, and a concentration of agriculture that supports a far larger human population.
In other words, I can't dismiss the present global warming trend as "live with it or die". I presume your goal was to oppose Sterlings article, and support nuclear power, which would (hopefully) end one source of global warming, so you and I appear to be on the same page there, if for different reasons (I'm much more interested in ending the flow of petrochemical dollars to totalitarian countries). But I do hope that we don't have to move New York three miles inland. That would be really expensive.
You can't just compare area and volume like that. One is square units, the other is cubic units.
A cube has 6 square units of surface area for every cubic unit of volume. So, we say a cube with sides u units long has 6 u^2 / 1 u^3 which reduces to 6 / u, so as we increase u the ratio of surface area to volume drops.
0 1 - just my two bits
His main point seems to be that widespread adoption of nuclear power means proliferation of both technology and weapons-grade nuclear materials, and that is a serious problem. He also points out that that is precisely not what you want in a world in which large numbers of nations are threatened by loss of habitable area and natural catastrophes.
To that one might add that there is still no solution in sight for disposing of the kind of nuclear waste even more widespread use of nuclear power would generate.
I see a simple economic solution to all of this: raise oil prices to the point where the market itself will figure out how to save enough energy to make it all work out. Such an increase can happen orderly, steadily, and predictably over, say, the next ten years, so that everybody knows where we are going. Nations can force it to happen through taxes to raise the market prices for oil to a predictable target prices. The extra revenue can be used to help business develop new energy-efficient technologies and to convert.
So, conservation and free market mechanisms rather than nuclear power looks like the real answer.
Well, there *is* some irrational fear mixed in with the anti-nuke stance of most environmentalists. But since all comments in here have been so zealously pro-nuclear, I'll try to point out some problems with fission:
1)The fuel. How much do we have? How is it mined (uranium mining and processing causes radiation sickness and uranium poisoning to a significant number of people. Breeder reactors are, according to some sources, less safe than normal fission reactors.
2)The production. Nuclear power is good for supplying a base demand of electricity, but can't quickly compensate for peaks of consumption - therefore, it can't be the only form of energy.
Nuclear plants are security risks that need a stable government and stable surroundings to be sure (consider an earthquake, for instance). In war, damage to a nuclear plant may very well lead to contamination - and we haven't developed past fighting wars, or developed precise enough weaponry to forget this threat. A cheap "dirty bomb" for terrorists or just a desperate army would be to blow up a nuclear plant. Someone tried to explain away chernobyl by "soviet incompetence" or the wrong kind of engineers... can we count on always having competent people at the controls, then?
A nuclear plant also needs to be in good working condition - consider ex-soviet plants like Soznovyi Bor right now, which have turned into timebombs. Can we count on economical stability?
3)Funding for nuclear power does, and has drained a lot of effort from developing renewable powersources. Considering the developments made in wind and solar power with an infinitessimal funding during the past decades, giving just a few percent of the money used to build reactors and develop nuclear power into renewable energy research could have paid up very well. It still might.
Negawatts, energy savings, are still the most cost-effective and environmentally friendly way of tackling the energy crisis. Failing that, I'm for keeping old nuclear plants running as long as needed, with modernisations when possible, perhaps even some new constructions in the most critical regions of the globe, but mostly building all new power production as renewable, if for nothing else then to give the industry a boost.
Here's an article on the proposed Toshiba plant. Seems like a sound idea, especially for remote places where you have to spend a lot of fuel just to haul the fuel there.
Unfortunately, he seems to merely assert that "nukes are bad, everybody knows that". So I don't think the comments add anything to the original. No facts, no research, no reasoning, nada. Just ranting.
(Here's a tip for budding pundits and columnists: you need to actually do some research, build a case, and explain the reasons for your position. Merely asserting that the other guy is an idiot doesn't cut it.)
This is the real argument against the use of nuclear power, and I find it totally convincing. It's not just a case of idiots, it's a case of human error in all it's forms. Political interference, greed, or just insane malice may lead to a catastrophic nuclear accident. No systems, whether physical or procedural, can totally guard against this.
Accidents will always happen, but nuclear accidents can be a million times worse than accidents involving other power sources.
Ok so nuclear might suck but recently presented study demonstrated that coal electricity is cause for much pollution.
A study done during last August east coast powerfailure as reported in this article that when electricity production was cut, the sky was more transparent and pollutants droped significantly. Transparency moved from 20km to 60km for instance.
So there is no doubt that we need to move away from these polluting energy sources.
Tim
I read that, and my first thought was: "Lovelock is putting in a nuke plant?"
It's a town out in the desert. But no soap. Instead they're going to put a soot-spewing coal-plant out by where they have "Burning Man".
Parent is a really good article! Some amplifications follow.
>Additionally the test was performed late at night when most of the reactor plant managers and supervisors (who would normally watch the tests like a hawk) were gone.
Take a look at major accidents like Bhopal, Chernobyl and TMI. They seem to happen in the middle of the night. Coincidence?
>5. The reactor was operated for full power during the day
For anyone curious, this matters because some fission products absorb neutrons, especially one xenon isotope. Full-power operation means full-rate production of fresh fission products. A short while after you turn off a reactor from full power, it's hard to restart because other precursors decay into absorptive xenon and you have to wait for the xenon to decay. In normal operation, the chain reaction is producing enough neutrons to burn off the xenon as it forms.
The Chernobyl operators didn't know about xenon poisoning, according to accounts I've read. They noticed the reactor was hard to start and kept pulling out the control rods. Eventually they had them all the way out. (Kinda like pouring more and more gasoline on your barbeque). Meanwhile the reactor was engaged in positive feedback: the more fission happened, the more xenon burned off and the more the reactivity increased.
>brief power spike
Up to an estimated 100 times the rated output, in about a second. It takes 30 seconds on that reactor type to do a scram (emergency insertion of control rods). The power spike seems to have been a "prompt criticality" event, driven by the immediate neutrons from fission. Normally reactors keep their chain reactions going only by delayed neutrons that sputter out of fission products seconds to hours after the fission. That's why power reactors are controllable. Prompt criticality is how bombs work.
>the NRC (which IMHO had previously downplayed reactor incidents)
They should have handled things more like the FAA and NTSB, with a culture of sharing safety-related information. If the operators at TMI had known about the Davis-Besse incident they might have recognized the situation and let the plant take care of itself.
Unfortunately, you and not the parent poster have committed the fallacy of equivocation. The parent poster asserted that nuclear weapons != nuclear reactors, and gave an example of the same fallacy when applied to gasoline based weapons falsly equated to gasoline power.
The parent poster never said that napalm was worse than nuclear weapons, merely that any relationship between the "horrors of napalm" and a safe internal combustion engine was spurious. (In this argument, the relationship was merely based on materials used, rather than any deep analysis of historical or sociopolitical factors.)
Likewise a safe nuclear power plant cannot be related to a very dangerous nuclear weapon by any arguement that links them by the materials they are made from. After all, the two devices are designed with diametrically opposed aims: The reactor is designed to keep nuclear materials inside and release energy slowly, the bomb is designed to let nuclear materials out and explosively liberate as much energy as possible.
Lovelock is a pretty cool guy. He's a self-funded researcher which gave him exactly the sort of freedom to ask questions like 'what will CFCs do to the ozone layer'
And the 'greens' who are so predictably up in arms about this statement must never have bothered to read Lovelock and Margulis's original Gaia hypothesis book, because he wrote about nuclear energy in pretty even handed terms even back then.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
It's really amazing that Bruce can spend so much time sniping, without at least addressing the fact that nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons are different things It's very possible to build nuclear reactors that neither run the risk of causing a nuclear explosion themselves, nor create fissionable material for bombs.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
> The problem with fission reactors is that you have
> much extremly dangerous material around and hope
> that nothing goes wrong. You can make it as save
> as possible but judging from human history
> Chernobyl won't remain the only catastrophe and if
> something goes really wrong in a fission reactor
> it goes *really* wrong.
Sorry, but that doesn't really hold under scrutiny. If we were doing the smart thing, we'd be building IFR (integral fast reactors) - they last seventy years, you put your initial energy source (uranium 235 in them) and they consume it *whilst reprocessing the waste*. No long term energy, no excess plutonium, no heavy decommission costs.
They are also *passive* not *active*, and have built-in containment systems so even if you flew a jetliner into one, you wouldn't have a nuclear accident - the reaction would just wind down..
I swear, I really despair when I see this paranoia on *slashdot* the place where I would hope for some rationality. I'm much more worried that Mr Sterling's 'why don't we let 7 billion people starve to death - how's that for a solution' comment will come to pass.
Take a look at wikipedia's List of Nuclear Accidents and decide for yourself weather or not we should be using nuclear power.
The list is either alarmingly long or extremely short depending upon how you look at it.
Some of the accidents are incredibly trivial. Others are pretty darn frightening. It's all a matter of a chain reaction (no pun intended) of bad events happening in succession. Take this one for example:
"September 19, 1980 - An Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo in Arkansas drops a wrench socket which rolls off a work platform and falls to the bottom of the silo. The socket strikes the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area is evacuated and eight and a half hours later, vapors within the silo ignite and explode with enough force to blow off the two 740-ton silo doors and hurl the nine megaton warhead 600 feet (180 m). The explosion fatally injures an Air Force specialist and twenty-one other USAF personnel are injured."
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Integral Fast Reactor? It's supposed to be passively safe, and recycles it's own nuclear waste.
Actually, wrong. As a once-upon-a-time nuclear operator in the US Navy, I know whereof I speak.
t m
Sub-critical = power diminishing.
Critical = power sustaining.
Super-critical = power increasing.
You start a reactor by taking it super-critical, even it out into a critical level where the power is produced at a constant level, and shut it down by taking it sub-critical.
Look it up if you don't believe me: http://www.newnavy.us/nuclear-power/criticality.h
Nuclear reactors have issues, but fuel shortages are an avoidable one.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Sterling is an alpha geek[+] if there ever was one, and he has been writing (preaching?) about catastrophic climate change for the last decade.[*] That makes his opinion on climate change interesting.
Now, I'm not sure I buy his opinion on nukes, just like I don't buy Brin's opinions on privacy. These guys are sharp, though, and their ideas are worth paying attention to.
--
+ - He was part of the austin scene, hung with Godwin, documented the LoD/BoodAxe debacle and formation of the EFF, and is an established figure of the Well. He also happens to write some sci-fi.
* - yes, that was published nine years ago, but I'd be surprised if it took less than a year to write and publish it.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Well, having RTFA'd Mr. Sterling's disturbingly stupid blog, I can see now why I haven't liked his fiction. He's a total, screaming asshole.
"How about the relatively simple solution of seven or eight billion of us starving to death? Or how about a few massive heat-wave-boosted lethal epidemics? That ought to put a swift kibosh on energy demand."
Now that's fucking constructive.
> and Chernobyl was due to Soviet incompetence.
you should read something more about chernobyl before writing something like this
of course, RBMK reactors do have some fundamental problems, but even these were not the real reason
primary cause of of the chernobyl accident was mismanadged experiment, if i remember it right, couple of engineers without knowing physics of the ractor, has been trying some new stuff
and shit happend
what i want to say is that no matter how good your reactor is from the technological point of view, if you use it as a playground, someone will find a way how to blow it up
If the operators at TMI had known about the Davis-Besse incident they might have recognized the situation and let the plant take care of itself.
:w
Which Davis-Besse incident are you referring to? The stuck valve incident? The corrosion incident? Or the Slammer incident? Is there a lemon law for nuclear reactors? How about for energy companies?
Yeah, and who was first there in the bunker with Bush the lesser? The Australian government.
As for the solar chimney, it's one of a number of zero-emission energy projects happening around Australia at the moment. This is good. However, they are all tinkering at the margins at this stage, and dirty brown coal remains the primary source of Australia's electricity, and Australia has an outer suburban SUV boom every bit as large as the US's.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I've been awake for 40+ hours and haven't touched on A/V since first semester calculus.
At any rate, k/x is still a hyperbola with the x axis as an asymptope and quickly reaches a point where even an obnoxiously large increase in x still only nets a negligible decrease in k/x. It's a losing man's game beyond once x > k and you're better off manipulating k (i. e. play with the shape, which is what I said before).
"You can make it as save as possible but judging from human history Chernobyl won't remain the only catastrophe and if something goes really wrong in a fission reactor it goes *really* wrong."
The problem at Chernobyl had almost nothing to do with nuclear energy and had everything to do with the lethally Byzantine bureocracy of the Soviet Union, to which I really don't think there's any possibility of a modern equivalent. It was a reactor design that wouldn't have even gotten on the drawing board, let alone built, except in a system where Party membership counted more than technical skill and a job-producing construction project was more important than what was being built. Chernobyl was a poorly-designed, poorly-built reactor core powering a poorly-designed, pooly-built steam plant that simply wasn't designed to handle the steam pressures possible in a crisis situation (and I'm not talking "not designed safe enough," I'm talking "never bothered to consider safety"). I wouldn't want to live near an LNG-burning steam plant built and operated by these guys, nevermind a fission-based steam plant.
"The problem with fission reactors is that you have much extremly dangerous material around and hope that nothing goes wrong."
You mean like liquified natural gas, liquified propane and coal? Uranium does't get hauled around the country by the ton and doesn't flatten small towns when exposed to a stray spark.
Iran and North Korea both have some sort of commercial nuclear capability, and may or may not even be working on weapons. Coincidentally, both countries have also surfferend horrendous railroad explosions in the past few months, each of which have killed hundreds (perhaps thousands in the case of DPRK). Guess what was on the trains. Hint: it wans't radioactive.
But what about the great grand-mother of nuclear accidents? Sure, the people who wrote it have an agenda, but these facts are still pretty damned interesting:
I recall the same hysteria and the same number being bandied about 25 years ago. "We'll be out of oil in 50 years!", was the war cry but it was being used to push for alternative energy. Like nuclear power. Like wind generators. Like higher efficiencies in electrical appliances. And on and on and on... My first question is - How certain are we for when we'll "run out of oil"? My second question is - How much of the jaw exercise is used to generate interest in research grants, investment by nervous benefactors, etc?
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
Something I didn't reveal in my original post: I'm a non-licensed operator at a nuclear power plant.
You are correct in that human error is the biggest risk, in fact the only risk, if you realize that all systems were designed and built by humans.
In the nuclear industry, there's a huge focus on reducing human errors, and it's a constant topic of discussion.
On my ID badge, for example, I have a list of error precursors- conditions that make fucking up more likely- things such as:
1. Overconfidence
2. Fatique
3. First time performing
4. 1/2 hour after a meal
etc, etc.
We also have a number of human performance tools which we are constantly harped on to use (and use them we do) such as STAR: STOP, THINK (about what you're going to do), ACT, and REVIEW (Make sure the results of your actions are what you expected).
There's a number of techniques we use, and they work. For example, our capacity factor (the percentage of time in a year we're online generating electricity, as an industry) has risen from the low 60%'s to the low to mid 90%'s. This is significant for safety, because many fuck ups result in a reactor trip, and if we're tripping offline less often, we're also fucking up in general a lot less often.
We track human errors, and it's not unusual that in a plant of over 600 employees, we'll go over 100 days without an error. (There are restrictions as to what constitutes a human error, but more often then not these errors result in no percievable threat to nuclear safety.)
My operating crew (11 people) is about to cross over the one year mark without a human error.
So yes, human error is the number one problem, but like all problems there are solutions.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
OK, sure, we're not that advanced. What I'm saying is, we need to adjust our energy use to fit with our ability to reasonably produce energy. As we advance our tech level, we will find better ways to produce more energy, and then we can use more, but until that happens, we need to cut down.
I believe you that demand will increase exponentially, but the question is, can we afford to supply that demand?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
That may well be true, but what you're not addressing is that the government does also heavily subsidize the oil industry, with direct subsidies designed to lower the price of gas so we will all buy more. Perhaps we would not switch to other forms of energy without these subsidies, but we would definitely use less oil because we simply couldn't afford to drive as much. This would drive more alternative energy research.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
*Look, fella, I get to wisecrack about nuclear power
/., it would seem I am not alone in feeling this.
to my own email list if I feel like it. I didn't post that thing on Slashdot,
and not everything that flies off my keyboard into cyberspace
is gonna be solemn, Asperger-style argumentation intended
intended to convince a bunch of Linux freaks.
* If you can't take a joke, take a hike! And if you can
take a joke, then read the friggin' list and get a clue
as to what's been going on there for the past six years,
before you send email to novelists and get
all teary-eyed about your disillusionment.
http://www.viridiandesign.org
bruces
On May 31, 2004, at 9:35 PM, Jakob Eriksson wrote:
Hi Bruce,
I stumbled upon your comments on Lovelock's nuclear power article today. I'd previously read your book "Distraction", and enjoyed it. In particular, I liked your portrayal of the nomads and the political power struggles.
Because I enjoyed your writing, and thus respected you as an author. I was hoping to read a creative and possibly convincing argument against the use of nuclear power. Instead, to my dismay, I was confronted with a series of immature comments, often with very little basis in fact, far from either creative or convincing.
Due to my respect for you as an SF author, I was prepared to take your advice to heart, and to give up the hope of nuclear power, had you shown good arguments for your case. Instead, I'm afraid you've spent all your whuffie (see Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out") on this childish flamebait. Given the comments on
You just lost a faithful reader.
Posting interspersed comments like that is a cheap shot at best. Not providing any realistic alternative is even worse. Sterling is only embarrassing himself by making such a lame posting.
It is the *propellant* that blew up, not the nuke!
In fact, the nuke flew 600ft as a result of the *chemical* accident, with NO CONSEQUENCES. This is a testament to all the failsafes built into untriggered nuclear bombs.
Bruce... what's wrong with you? Still mixing up energy with armament?
The next pasture is always greener
he may be very smart and write very good science fiction, but on this occasion, he's being a complete tit. No solutions, no real rebuttal, just a bunch of sophomoric remarks that appear to be justified by a belief that James Lovelock is proposing that the answer to our energy problems are nuclear *weapons*. Move along, nothing to see here.
... Let's think about this for a second.
I won't make any effort to defend Sterling's glibness. He's obviously not bothering to take the time to write coherent counter-arguments. I suspect, though, that he figures he doesn't have to.
I would have thought that people know where nuclear weapons fuel comes from. But most people posting responses to this article seem confused about why Sterling keeps equating the presence of nuclear energy with the presence of nuclear weapons. Well, it's not difficult to verify that the vast majority of countries possessing nuclear generating stations also - coincidentally? - possess nuclear weapons. Sterling suggests implicitly that nuclear technology proliferation leads inevitably to nuclear weapons proliferation. This is demonstrably true.
I would hope that in this day and age the perils of nuclear weapons proliferation don't need to be spelled out yet again.
People talk a *lot* about nuclear safety, and cite the low number of incidents resulting in injury as a measure of its safety. Perhaps. I know that in Canada this safety has come at unbelievable expense. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent building nuclear reactors that were taken offline far before their end of service because of significant safety failures. When you factor in the cost of repair, the cost in terms of shortened generating lifetime and the cost of paying for alternate sources of electricity at short-term (read: expensive) market rates, the price of this power source is immense.
So, if we do choose nuclear as the energy generation method for us, based on practical experience, we're faced with two mutually undesirable alternatives:
1) Live with the fact that the real cost of energy will skyrocket, because we know now that the cost of running these things safely is orders of magnitude greater than what was predicted.[*]
[*] And no, I don't even touch on the issue of disposal here. Operating costs only.
2) Live with the lower operating costs and pretend that this won't result in a problem.
I personally don't like either one of those alternatives. I suspect that if people follow Lovelock's advice, they will opt for the latter.
So why did Sterling decide to answer in that manner, rather than sagely reasoning out his response? I can't answer for him, but I suspect it's because when he sees idiotic assertions stating that a third of us will die from cancer from oxygen anyway (what?!?), so that makes it okay for us to significantly increase our cancer risk (see item 2 above), maybe he figures that Lovelock's arguments are prima facie ridiculous. I'd be prone to agree. I think Sterling gives Lovelock's misinformed disingenuousness all the intellectual rigour it deserves.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I'm not sure why Bruce Sterling's content-free driveby merits notice as "stuff that matters". Unless perhaps the category was "Yeah, it hurts when your prejudices run into harsh reality, doesn't it?"
There should be a comment against Israel in such a topic, but there still isn't one here. How comes? I feel cheated!
I am somewhat bemused that despite sitting on something like 28% of the world's uranium, us Aussies don't have a reactor of our own (with the exception of the Lucas Heights HIFAR reactor opened in 1958). We even bitch about mining the stuff, the proceeds of which could be used to deal with real threats to the surrounding environment, like cane toads. We make over 10% of the world's supply of computer grade doped silicon, yet we bitch about upgrading the reactor facility too. Hopefully with some debate people will start pulling their heads out of their asses and making it happen before we end up with some serious problems on our hands. Before long chernobyl et al will end up being the most catastrophic events we've ever experienced - not because of the local effects but because of the resulting widespread misconception about nuclear power. Yes, where there are more plants nuclear fuel necessarily is more available so there is a greater need for security. However those linking the increased use of nuclear energy with foolish nuclear enabled governments and terrorists ought to spend more time worrying about who's got the weapons, why, who pays and what they are (or aren't) doing to protect them.
It amazes me that people seem to think that nuclear power = nuclear weapons. Building a nuclear reactor does not magically create nuclear weapons. Not building nuclear reactors does not magically make it impossible to build nuclear weapons. Why is this considered a reasonable argument against nuclear power? I'm not sure I like the idea - I'm not a big fan of the waste product. However, I've read about a lot of work being done in this area, and some theoritical stuff that could potentially come close to eliminating the radioactive waste.
Why do I get the feeling that even if we could eliminate nuclear waste, and could, for all intents and purposes, guarantee that a Cherynobel would never happen again, people would still be against nuclear power because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I think people need to get rational on this subject, and Mr. Bruce Sterling, though an excellent story teller, is hardly the rational side of this arguement. The comments he makes are rather juvenile, and really don't provide a counterpoint. It's full of little "that's not true" and "ain't that silly" blurbs, which is a really sad commentary in itself of the shape of debate in our society today. Shame on us.
It was refreshing to see how many /.ers, despite their possible admiration for Sterling's fiction, recognized that his sophomoric comments are no substitute for reasoned arguments.
Insert witty sig here.
Anyone ever notice how it's always about the non-urban power sources vs the renewable ones?
Why do we seem to have mental blocks against putting power generation for urban needs, in urban areas(solar and wind power could conceivably be put on top of skyscrapers). Whereas nuclear, tide power, dams, and coal/gas/oil generators tend to be out-of-the-busy areas power generation? (Hint: when's the last time a power plant was built on the Island of Manhattan?)
Wouldn't it make more sense to increase power generation in Urban areas, and try to make those self-sufficient, instead of subsidising rural power generation, which eventually means the rural area taxes just subsidize the big city? (I do live in a 1 mil agglomeration, but I'm not sure I like what they're doing to wilder outlying areas for power).
Is there a speculator's market for power plants? Is that a hidden lobbying arm in play here? I'd really like to know why you can't just say: Urban area X, you're responsible for your 80 MegaWatt power needs, and for list of other needs, but you're tax free, as far as X random higher authority taxes are concerned. Of course that's probably it, taxing an urban area is an easier task, lots of businesses, lots of dense people, lots of high tech use, computers, and a captive audience. Taxing outlying areas more heavily would reverse the donut effect.
I got my MS degree in Nuclear Engineering and can say that critical is the normal state of operation for a nuclear reactor. It is not a nudge away from an earth shattering boom.
"Crtical" means that the reactor is generating exactly one neutron for every neutron that is absorbed or escapes - it means the reactor is running at constant power. Virtually all power reactors are designed so that any "nudges" will tend to cause an increase in neutron absorption or leakage and thus causing to power to decrease.
One really, really important concept to grasp is "delayed neutrons" - approximately 0.65% of the neutrons from fissioning U-235 are delayed slightly - so a slight increase in reactivity translates into a doubling time of minutes or hours instead of milliseconds (without delayed neutrons, operating a reactor would be a lot like Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" - nobody knew anything about delayed neutrons when the story was written in 1940).
Chernobyl - the reactor was near the end of core life, which meant that the primary fissile material was Pu-239, which has a delayed neutron fraction of 0.2%. The combination of Pu-239 loading, that day's operating history and the design of that reactor meant that it had a positive void coeffiecient. To make matters worse, the scram rod actually increased reactivity during initial insertion. The reactor was scrammed, and power levels increased, which led to more boiling, which led to more reactivity (remember positive void coefficient), which led to more power, which led to more boiling - which in a short time led to the reactivity equalling the delayed neutron fraction (called "prompt critical") and that's when the serious shit started happening. And one more thing - since the reactor was graphite moderated and the graphite was not in good thermal contact with the fuel (as in the case with an HTGR) - the only thing that would stop the reaction was fuel melting or graphite melting - the result is history.
The standard light water reactors use the water as both coolant and moderator - get too many voids in the coolant and the reactor shuts down.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
OK, maybe this is just an excuse to talk about this some more, but really. We get some snide and "pithy" comments on the article, mostly of worse quality than what many /. contributors had to say, and it's news? I'm not dissing Sterling here, but is his every "pithy" utterance worth a long discussion? I remember that before 9/11 he used to rant against the unnecessary airport security.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
When it came down to it, John Howard made it pretty clear that the reason for going to Iraq was to help "maintain the alliance" - in other words, curry favour with George in the expectation of a few tidbits (the FTA that does SFA for the Australian economy, signs up to the US's insane IP policies, and will hopefully be blocked by the Senate) in the future. Do you really think this is any different?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
What a dork. If he wishes to reserve the right to look like a fool, so be it.
* If you can't take a joke, take a hike! And if you can take a joke, then read the friggin' list and get a clue as to what's been going on there for the past six years, before you send email to novelists and get all teary-eyed about your disillusionment.
He does have a point, I must say. I just read a fairly large random sample of his 400+ "notes", and sure enough, pretty much everything he says illustrates what a fuckin' joke this clown is. His editorializing is always in the form of a snide remark with the occasional assertion of unsubstantiated "facts". He might as well just resort to calling everyone he disagrees with a "fucking NAZI". I mean, if you're going to be an impertinent jerk-off, why beat around the bush? Does he really think people are particularly interested in his "thoughts" when they consist mostly of wisecracks and non sequiturs? I like his fiction, but his blog is a load of crap.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
His answer seems to be for about 8 million of us to die some horible death so he can "worship the planet." No thanks asswipe.
Great response from Bruce, but I'm not sure why you bothered posting it. Bruce is right, his piece wasn't intended to be a "creative and possibly convincing argument against the use of nuclear power." He certainly never advertised it as such. Take it for what it is, some light-hearted jabs at the current embracing of nuclear power as the deus ex machina for all of our energy problems. Did you expect Shrek 2 to be "a creative and possibly convincing argument against using Happily Ever After potions"? Take it for what it is. Hope you are still a fan.
Ignorance about Nuclear Power is Killing Us (literally).
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
If someone has a better realistic solution than nuclear power, please speak up.
- mipe -
The question I have is whether it is realistic. How many wind farms would have to be built to supply the energy of industry and homes?
... over 95% of this "waste" still holds it's energy, so we have only used a little bit of it. Once we learn how to refine and utilize it, we can become more efficiant with nuclear power, and grasp it. The nuclear powerplants we have are from the 80's, if we built new ones, we could start to research and fund ways to make nuclear power even more clean and efficient. Nuclear power is the best way to go. I want to see a Nuclear/Hydrogen economy. Eletric cars and nuclear power == bad for 3rd world countries. Electric cars are very practical, look at www.acpropulsion.com and the TZero, if it hit mass production, and similar cars did, think of the possibilities!
Sig: I stole this sig.
That's the problem. Most people don't want to change their lifestyle one iota to save the planet. Even when there are grants (like those for cavity wall), people won't do it because there's still an outlay (takes about 10 years to pay for). Lots of people still drive 20mpg SUVs to get them and their fat ass to work. I know some people who drive to work - 1 mile.
I wonder if there's a big difference between chernobyl and the UK and the USA. Chernobyl existed in a country with virtually no press freedom. Exposing the risks would have been difficult.
A DOE biomass algae > oil project mothballed after successful completion in the mid-1990s has been revived by the U of New Hampshire.
Bottom lines from the report - replace imported oil will require:
I'm just starting to get into the DOE report, but I've already gotten far enough to know that the technology demo project was mothballed because at the time, nobody saw a market for $2/gallon diesel oil and there didn't appear to be a substantial possibility of real disruption in the Middle East oil flow.
CO2-neutral, the CO2 burned as oil will have been previously extracted from the atmosphere.
Algae is about as efficient a way to convert CO2, sunlight, and nutrients to something which can be processed to oil fuel as is imaginable.
It appears to be "good enough", though I prefer powersats for central station power as a coal replacement. The basic problem with that kind of project has been cost of transport to orbit.
The Space Elevator may already be obsolete (follow the links) ... estimated $250/ton to LEO. No, $250 is NOT a typo, the solution is astounding, and the relevant experts appear to agree that this isn't snake oil. The rest we know how to do. Solar cells at current efficiency levels are "good enough". Microwave transmission is "good enough".
If we as a society have the will (aka willingness to spend money), the solutions to the energy and a few related problems just got dumped into our laps.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Boil Water!!!!!!!!!!!!! To spin a steam turbine subject to low thermodynamic efficiencies.
My job is a power planner and you better wear your hip boots to read these guys (Lovelock and Sterling) because the bullshit is getting deep.
I have been wondering whether the nay sayers about global warming are totally wrong. Lovelock's idiocy about nuclear power makes his scientific authority about global warming questionable to me.
Twenty years ago WHOOPS nuclear project in Washington state and Diablo Canyon showed that nuclear is the MOST overall expensive source of energy (currently photovoltaic is still higher).
Geothermal, Wind, hydro (damn the Sierra Club), biomass, muncipal solid waste, and solar thermal are ALL less expensive than nuclear. There is also no nuclear waste, or other materials, that barbarians like Bin Laden, the Koreans, and the Israelis to use for their retreat into the stone age past.
Also, if the opposition to LNG (liquid natural gas)were to disappear, we could at least make electricty from burning the natural gas in a turbine. Most natural gas is just flared into the atmosphere because the money is in the oil and the natural gas (as a gas) isn't easy to transport.
Wind can be purchased at $50/MWh and built at $37/MWh but is hard to schedule. The costs are still dropping and the National Academy of Sciences has estimated that it is almost cost effective to convert the wind to electricity to pipes to storage to either reciprocating engines or gas turbines to produce electricity (fuel cells can come later). Something like 12% of Germany's power is produced by wind and they are shutting their nukes down (over time).
The environmentalists like Sterling and Lovelock make me want to change my Green Party registration to Republican or Communist Party.
A funny thing that no-one seems to have mentioned is that most nuclear plants are built close to the sea shore. This is due to them being water cooled (only the latest designs are not water cooled), which in turn, I understand, is due to their history as marine reactors (in nuclear powered subs).
:)
So... what happens to the nuclear plants when the sea level rises?
Yup. Good idea. Too bad Bill Clinton shut it down.
To replace imported oil:
$183B capital investment
$50B/year operating cost
$2.12/gallon diesel at the pumps.
This is based on DOE work in the field successfully completed in the 1990s.
I was rather astounded to find that nobody remembered that a large part of the answer to replacing fossil fuel in a CO2-neutral way (the CO2 coming from burning biofuel was captured from the atmosphere) has already been found, and was even posted here. I mean, how much easier does it get?
There was another article here about a launch system that should be capable of getting stuff to LEO for $250 a ton. At that price, solar power satellites look very, very reasonable in cost.
Biomass can buy us time to get solar power satellites up.
We don't need nuclear to solve the problem. The alternatives look easier, cheaper, and faster to implement. What's not to like?
Tech Public Policy stuff
If someone could show me a blueprint for a more environmentally friendly world, I'd be happier. What I hear instead are vague solutions that are not.
There are many proponents of wind power, but it ignores the fact that the UK can't sustain itself on wind power. Solar? Great. Now, who's going to pay to fit cells on the houses. We could get out of our cars, but some trips in the UK are crap without a car.
What many environmentalists and environmental cheerleading politicians also fail to do is to raise the point that what's really required is for people to also change their lifestyles. Instead, we have sticking plasters - wind farms and recycling centres.
I have read about Nuclear disposable mineral not being enough to maintain actual energy use levels for more than 60 years, so its not a substitute for fuel energy in the long run.
then, whats the matter of replacing fossil fuels use and taking new enviromental risk, if we are going to repeat the same discussion in slashdot in 2064?
Also, all actual alternatives take enviromental risk, even wind and solar! (big space and risk for the animals). Our only working idea is Fussion. but then, actual agenda is about working comercial on 2050.
is this too late?
If you can't take a joke, take a hike!
Bruce is employing here a classic Usenet defence. Translated it means "oh shit, I've just realized that I've demonstrated myself to be an idiot, please disregard that evidence and continue to take what I say seriously".
Generally I find that the pro-nuclear power people have arguments backed by hard facts, whether physics or history, and the anti-nuclear power people have nothing but hysterical ranting. It's also no coincidence that anti-nuclear beliefs coincide with all sorts of generally anti-power-generation belief*; the objective of such people is to destroy modern economies, "environmentalism" is just a facade.
* Pro-wind or -solar for all but niche applications is effectively anti-power.
If sterling could have seperated 'nukes' and 'nuclear energy', he'd actually be able to come up with decent arguments.
As it stands, the snide comments at the end of each paragraph just show how reactionary he is, and simply make his arguements weaker (when they actually have a connection and aren't retorts simply linked by the word 'nuclear')
Are all his pages like this?
What?! You REALLY need to read up on statistics. You might say that if there is a one in 100 000 chance a year of a catastrophic failure in a nuclear power plant and there's 100 000 nuclear power plants in the world then there will we one catastrophic failure a year. (The numbers are lower. Much lower.). Even if you live to be a hundre years old, there will only be a
The terrorist attack? Those structures have a LOT of concrete around the nuclear core where the dangerous stuff happens. The concrete is meant to contain accidents inside. But they also mean that crashing a plane into a nuclear reactor is a bit like crashing a car into a mountain - spectacular but ineffective.
I agree with Lovelock. We know that global warming is a global catastrophic event. Let's work on nuclear energy and green energy - the results of our failure to do anything about the problem right now are greater than a few large-scale catastrophes. Cynically put.
Stop the brainwash
It would have been nicer if the article was reasonably serious about the topic. I think that much of his sarcasm was exactly the point that needed to be made. We fucked the planet pretty good and there's no correct way to get out of this situation. But nuclear energy may be the best alternative that we have available today. But this guy really came off sounding like a dick.
When you consider that the typical nuclear power plant of the 1950's design is rather dangerous, and there are better alternatives available, it would make more sense. For example: Nuclear material doesn't need to be in such high purity that exposure means near instant death. Many years ago there were proposals to create a cell (like an oversized scuba tank) that was filled with ceramic balls. Each ball had a concentration of material sufficient to generate a lot of heat. But overall, the cell didn't release heat/radiation sufficient to destroy itself.
Bury these into the ground (about 100-200 feet or better) and hook up pipes to them. Eventually the material decays to a point it where it will not longer create steam and you pull the pipes and walk away. It will take 10,000 years or better before these cylinders are exposed to the surface and can easily be made, by design, to survive 10,000 years underground.
Nuclear Energy isn't rocket science anymore.
"The meltdown process physically triggers events that shut the reaction down, stopping the meltdown." The Chernobyl power station had 4 state-of-the-art (1986) Russian RBMK reactors, and was constructing two more. Chernobyl was caused by an uncontrollable reaction in the core. The "physical triggers" you speak of are nothing but emergency shut down triggers, and have nothing to do with physics. It is dangerous thinking to believe that nuclear reactions are inherently stable. Far from it, they are inherently unstable. Nuclear Power is produced by a controlled nuclear reaction. In case the nuclear reaction becomes out of control, safety mechanisms shut down the reactor. In Chernobyl, these emergency shut down processes were disabled during testing. The controlled reaction got out of control, and after reaching 120 times its full power the reactor exploded, killing 30 people and releasing tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. In only a month, this material was detected as far as Canada, Saudi Arabia, and almost to Japan. Radioactive material from Chernobyl has been detected in the United States. Many heroic firefighters, other emergency workers, and construction workers putting out fires and covering the still reacting reactor with tons and tons of cement after the accident, later died from exposure to the radiation. Robots were also sent in to clear away radioactive material, but the transistors malfunctioned in the radioactive environment and the robots would often crash into walls and each other. Fires were put out in 4 hours, and it was said to be luck that the roof did not collapse on reactor 3 which would have caused an even greater catastrophe. The radiation levels were 15,000 times greater than a normal person's exposure in a year. Over 100,000 people were evacuated to more than 30 km away from the area. Most coniferous trees died within a 10 km radius of the plant. Food in much of Eastern Europe was banned for up to two years. Large amounts of milk in Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Sweden were contaminated. In Sweden, meat from about 50,000 reindeer had to be thrown away, some containing more than 12 times the permissible amount of radiation (Cesium-137). After the accident, thyroid cancer rates increased by more than 750%. The core of the reactor is still actively reacting and producing radiation today, 18 years later. Just last year, Russia's atomic energy minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, said the cement encasing is collapsing and urgently needs reinforcement. "At the animal farm of the Petrovsky collective farm I was shown a suckling pig whose head looked like that of a frog: instead of eyes there were large tissue outgrowths with no cornea or pupil. 'They usually die soon after birth but this one has survived.'" These effects are far worse than anything that could happen with a wind turbine or other conventional explosions. There is no comparison.
"The meltdown process physically triggers events that shut the reaction down, stopping the meltdown."
The Chernobyl power station had 4 state-of-the-art (1986) Russian RBMK reactors, and was constructing two more. Chernobyl was caused by an uncontrollable reaction in the core. The "physical triggers" you speak of are nothing but emergency shut down triggers, and have nothing to do with physics. It is dangerous thinking to believe that nuclear reactions are inherently stable. Far from it, they are inherently unstable. Nuclear power is produced by a controlled nuclear reaction. In case the nuclear reaction becomes out of control, safety mechanisms shut down the reactor. In Chernobyl, these emergency shut down processes were disabled during testing. The controlled reaction got out of control, and after reaching 120 times its full power the reactor exploded, killing 30 people and releasing tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. In only a month, this material was detected as far as Canada, Saudi Arabia, and almost to Japan. Radioactive material from Chernobyl has been detected in the United States. Many heroic firefighters, other emergency workers, and construction workers putting out fires and covering the still reacting reactor with tons and tons of cement after the accident, later died from exposure to the radiation. Robots were also sent in to clear away radioactive material, but the transistors malfunctioned in the radioactive environment and the robots would often crash into walls and each other. Fires were put out in 4 hours, and it was said to be luck that the roof did not collapse on reactor 3 which would have caused an even greater catastrophe. The radiation levels were 15,000 times greater than a normal person's exposure in a year. Over 100,000 people were evacuated to more than 30 km away from the area. Most coniferous trees died within a 10 km radius of the plant. Food in much of Eastern Europe was banned for up to two years. Large amounts of milk in Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Sweden were contaminated. In Sweden, meat from about 50,000 reindeer had to be thrown away, some containing more than 12 times the permissible amount of radiation (Cesium-137).
After the accident, thyroid cancer rates increased by more than 750%. The core of the reactor is still actively reacting and producing radiation today, 18 years later. Just last year, Russia's atomic energy minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, said the cement encasing is collapsing and urgently needs reinforcement.
"At the animal farm of the Petrovsky collective farm I was shown a suckling pig whose head looked like that of a frog: instead of eyes there were large tissue outgrowths with no cornea or pupil. 'They usually die soon after birth but this one has survived.'"
These effects are far worse than anything that could happen with a wind turbine or other conventional explosions. There is no comparison.
Uh... I think his point is that it was lucky that the nuclear bomb didn't explode. It is a good thing the failsafe worked, because if it didn't, many people would be dead and a large area of the US would now be a radioactive wasteland.
If the foregoing makes me a head-in-the-sand Boomer Anti-Nuclear Satanist, then at least I'm older, wiser and sadder than you young idiots. It's no wonder they send boys of your age to war, you're too stupid to accept that you'll die.
Thank you. I was getting rather concerned with the impression that everyone here was knee-jerk pro-nuclear for some reason. And, to help you with your concerns about the younger generation, I'm only 25.
Why is this submission quoting a badly written flame attack on a ridiculous argument? This is crazy. What would be the reasoning behind quoting an obviously poor retort to a partisan argument that contains more ridiculous arguments?
My guess is that the submitter actually wants you to read the ridiculous "people hate nuclear power because of hollywood" opinion in the context of a moron rebutting it. What better way to attempt to get people to accept a stupid argument than trying to show how apparently stupid the other side is. Slashdot you've been had. Who's watching this stuff?!
Submission: +5 TROLL
my sediments egzackly;-) and b.s.'s ("Leave the oil and coal in the ground") is b.s. for the same reason...
more like pithy commenths;-)
really? IME the 'pro-nuclear power people' argue a bunch of fine-sounding details to which the 'anti-nuclear power people' say "uh-huh, but that's what you said last time".
"uh-huh, but that's what you said last time".
Last time? As in, the time before what exactly?
"Radioactive leaks? Not a problem. The only two leaks of any significance were Chernobyl and Three Mile Island."
TMI was a contained leak however. The rest of the plant continues in operation today.
Other posters have mentioned how nice Bikini Atoll is (if you aren't human) - the same goes for the Chernobyl exclusion zone apparently. Lovelock touched upon this in a slightly facetious way when he suggested that nuclear waste be stored in wilderness areas to preserve them from human encroachment.
There have been other leaks of course. For instance the Windscale fire wasn't as large as Chernobyl, but it released a bunch of radiation to the atmosphere. Of course it was covered up at the time and nuclear power wasn't that controversial then, so it doesn't have the same resonance in the public memory.
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
What is a positive void coefficient?
He continuously conflates the issues of nuclear weapons vs nuclear power, seems to think that somehow we can put pandora's spirits back in the box, and generally doesn't say anything useful that might get in the way of his sarcasm.
The article he intellectually defecated upon has a very serious point. If we don't stop burning oil and coal immediately (or maybe, even if we do at this point), we are in a serious world of hurt. Fission power, even with its shortcomings, is a better solution than burning carbon.
What does Sterling offer as an alternative? Starvation, essentially. He says, first Kyoto or something better, then we'll talk about nuclear power.
Well, what are we supposed to do in the meantime, genius? Eat cake, I suppose.
Let's get together and work out a solution that works. If you bury radioactive material in concrete and put it in the desert, it's really not so bad. Expensive? Yes. Better than burning carbon? Abso-freaking-lutely.
Or we can write a bunch of pithy comments and sink into the ocean.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
All this bickering over nuclear power being the only environmentally-friendly solution in the next 50 to 100 years has me thinking of another solution: oribital solar power .
Okay, there's the cost. It'll be expensive.
But if we put that aside for the moment, the orbital solar power seems to make more and more sense for the near future. The idea is to have vast arrays of solar cells in orbit, which can collect solar energy the vast majority of the time (since Earth will block their view of the sun only a small percentage of the time) and then beam that energy back down to earth.
One of the big advantages some see in this is that you could, feasibly, transmit energy to regions that needed it on an on-demand basis, much moreso than we have today.
And it'd get more stuff happening in space. But that's a different story...
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
8-12% is a little low. Current product cell efficiency are around 14-18%, and Concentrators w/ multijunctions get 30%. But who cares? Your car gets 15% efficiency in average use, nobody complains about that even thought you pay for the gas. Sun is free. The question is does 15% efficiency do the job? Yes. Even if it gets no better, it wouldn't matter.
Wrong. The average insolation in the US is 6 hours of peak sun per day, no desert required (ie 6000 Wh/sq. meter per day). For a flat panel, the deviation from the best southern nevada site to the worst northern washington state site is only 2-to-1! The rest of the country is suprisingly small devation within this. See rredc.nrel.gov/solar/
Wrong again. Silicon solar cells degrade less than 10% over 25 years, and are garanteed by the manufacturer to not exceed this over a 20-30 year guarantee - compare that to any other product guarantee! Though, they are guaranteed for 20-30 years, their life isn't limited by it. (see Solarbuzz.com)
Wrong. If you clean them verses do nothing you get a whopping 4% increase. Few people clean PV panels.
My roof doesn't seem to mind. What land? The average roof has 4-6 times the generating capacity of the average house. 1600 sq ft house = 148 sq meters. 148 m x 150 watts x 6 hours = 133 kWh/day. Average house power consuption 24kWh/day. Beat that with some other form of energy.
Wrong. When is the last time you noticed the sun failed to come up (yes you still get power in overcast conditions). Further, home PV systems are designed using statistic based on the past 30 years of weather data (see rredc.nrel.gov/solar/). Ask somebody with PV, their power is WAY more reliable than the grid. In fact, most of the comminucation repeaters throughout the western US use PV for this reason.
Wrong. Solar is a reasonably dense form of energy wirelessly transmitted through a light "grid" in a usable form almost everywhere on the earth. If you wanted to compare space needed to produce all the electricity consumed in the US it would be a small 100 mile square (see picture for scale www.energycooperation.org/solarh2.htm). In fact studies have shown coal uses as much space due to the space required for strip mining. Try strip mining on top of your roof!
Wrong. What would it cost to pay for solar electricity? Try the cost of the Irag war. Seriously, do the math (including new military spending) and that would be enough over the next 3-5 years to t
Bruce is a great example of the failures
of the US educational system.
His understanding of science is nil.
He gives no better solutions to the problems.
More Nukes - Less Kooks!
o bullshit. many countries in the world have
more than double the electricity prices the
US allows itself. not the end of the world.
it's a matter of priorities, and of lobbies.
check out the http://www.renewables2004.de/
conference that started today. there are a
lot of alternative energy sources that are
viable if you are willing to change your ways.
(that, btw, would be a lot closer to being on
par with fossil-fuel-based power if we hadn't
collectively spent our inheritance on nuclear
power in the last 50 years.)
Otherwise, good post, I'm sure Pavel's used to getting his name misspelled, and SlashDot won't let anyone put a cedilla on top of the C anyway. It's a nice blue.
Bruce Sterling needs to learn a lot more about nuclear power than he evidently knows. He seems to be stuck in a Chernobyl culture.
My own answer would be to go off-planet in search of energy, but we can't break that down into small enough pieces to sell to anyone with enough resources to actually do it.
In the absence of that sensible but grandiose solution, I'll quite happily swap the local coal-fired power station (Muja) that burns 12 tonnes of Uranium every year for one that reacts maybe half a tonne of the stuff every year, less than a tenth as much radioactive material involved and the results carefully captured and rationally stored for reprocessing instead of being spewed into the atmosphere.
This says nothing about the Radon and other radioactives released in the mining and processing of the coal, nor about the miners killed and injured in extracting it, nor about the huge amounts of diesel burned in mining and transporting it, nor about the enormous tracts of bush turned over so the miners can whip the coal out from underneath it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Just once I'd like to hear a well reasoned out anti-nuclear position.
Though I'm not rapidly pro- or anti- nuclear power, here goes:
- Plant life would deplete the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, resulting in a colder Earth and:
- Shorter growing cycles would further aggravate the food supply problem.
It is the increase in carbon dioxide which will both create a more favorable climate for food growth, as well as provide raw material for the production of sugar through photosynthesis. While this may flood coastal regions, those displaced will primarily be the wealthy and politically connected - IOW, those most able to cope with change.The whole "global warming crisis" movement is really fueled by a group of elite liberals who fear losing their ocean-front property. What I find ironic is that it seems that the same people who cry foul over the supposed "overpopulation crisis" also cry foul over the use of fossil fuels and global warming, apparently not realizing that the latter will solve the former through longer growing cycles and an increase in the amount of usable land. Barring ignorance, it would seem that their true motivation is not really altruistic environmentalism, but rather the protection of their elite status. (See how Ted Kennedy - the supposedly "Environmentally Friendly" senator objected to the placement of wind turbines in Nantucket Sound. Apparently, his rights to view the ocean trump the rights of his constituents to have an environmentally sound energy source...)
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
...if the Western powers don't start building nice, safe and efficient reactors so that the technology can be developed, up to speed and widely available before the crunch comes and we no longer have any choice, then Russia will build more Chernobyls.
However, even as-constructed Chernobyl would not have failed if the staff had not deliberately (as per instructions from their bosses) deliberately operated the reactor out of spec almost constantly.
"Nice" reactors can probably only reduce the human-idiocy factor rather than eliminate it, but they are straightforward to build so that if they do manage to fail completely, or more accurately be managed into failing completely (as in core meltdown) there is no risk of even a chemical or steam explosion. The reactor just stops, and after a few days even the reactor bed is safe to pick up, cart away and grind up for reprocessing leaving no radioactives on site at all.
Your call.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Where's my mod points when I need them?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Between them, they've already killed off more people than all of the Christian derivatives combined. Think Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, or take a trip back to the French Revolution. Reduce the population, solve the energy crisis, give the Roman/Islamic/Talmudic zealots one less thing to react against.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yes it does. If you manufacture your LEDs to be used that way in the first place, they scale better than flouros.
The problem with LEDs is that they are typically run at the edge of their performance envelope, and at that point, they are guaranteed to wear out faster than your average flouro. Replacing the LEDs costs a lot more than replacing the flouros because you're replacing the whole monty, not just an easily manufactured tube. On the, hah, bright side they typically don't drop dead (just fade slowly) and the wear-rate is very predictable.
Dad's Peugeot is rated at something like 65mpg and regularly got closer to 80 on the highway cycle. It runs on ULP, not diesel. The diesel equivalent is rated at 85mpg and typically gets over 100, highway cycle. That's a family sedan, and only marginally more expensive (in Australia) than a crappy Commodore or Falcon. He's replaced it with a smaller car since Mum died, and hasn't reported the economy from that yet, except to mention in passing that it's "better".
If our stupid government didn't tax the life out of diesel, everyone would buy diesel cars. It costs more than ULP over here, but in Europe it's much cheaper, relatively, in some places close to half the price.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You can argue the merits of Nuclear power from an environmental standpoint, but I see it as nearly unavoidable from a net energy standpoint.
Right now, all of the major power sources (let's call "major" 5% or more of the world energy generation) are basically solar energy. Oil is huge amounts of plants that soaked up solar energy, converted it to chemical energy, then were compressed. Natural gas and coal are also compressed organic energy.
Think of it as living on a constant fixed income, with the sunlight striking the Earth (and not being reflected) as the income rate. For millions of years we were spending less than our income, and saving it in the form of compressed organics. For the past 50 years or so, we've been withdrawing from that account and spending it WAY faster than it's being replaced.
Even if we coated the entire planet with solar cells, and even if they were far more efficient than the current designs, we still can't pull more power from them than the sun sends in. Now, I admit I haven't run the numbers, but I can't imagine even a really ambitious solar deployment matching even half our current consumption rates. There just isn't enough energy coming into the system as a whole.
Nuclear (be it fission or fusion) bypasses this system by drawing energy of non-solar origin. The amount of energy stored up on the planet in the form of molecular potential energy is tremendous, and we couldn't spend it all in thousands of years even at vastly escalated consumption rates. The way I see it, the cleanliness of nuclear is just a side benefit. Dirty energy is still preferable to no energy.
Problem is, nuclear isn't gonna run your car. Not anytime soon anyway.
And this is one of them. Consistently the techy types defend nuclear power as safe, green etc. without stoping in considerations of political, security and safety nature.
1.- Waste management in developped countries is far from ideal. Google for what Ireland thinks about nuclear waste management in the UK. Or Google about how UK re-sells waste to Japan and Jpana stops buying because the UK lies about amounts (unknowingly, since this was done by enmployees, but the checks and balances failed miserably).
2.-What are you going to do when every single country in the planet uses this energy source? Yeah, I am talking about terrorism. If you are scared now just imagine when it becames normal accepted practice to own the stuff. You may not mind now that your countru owns the stuff. You should be worried when countries like North Korea have it.
3.- When nuclear fails, it does so big time. Chrenobyl should be enough to scare the wits out of anybody cavalier enough to keep defending this "source" of energy. Oh yes, western technology is better [tm]. As I said earlier, ask the Irish. Or Goolge around for nuclear plants close to NY and thank goodness that the 9-11 terrorists did not targetthem due to their monumental ignorance.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Good point. As Nikola Tesla said in 1915 "If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful, and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations."
But plastics are essentially a waste product of gasoline production, and anyway they can be synthesized from renewable resources (think of the Trabant's indestructible body panels, for example, made from farm waste). We need to save the oil for things like lubricants and industrial chemicals that we can't really synthesize efficiently from other sources.
We are not running out of fossil fuels any time soon. I repeat, we are not running out of fossil fuels. That, of course doesn't mean we should stay the course.
Most modern reasonable and respectable estimates peg existing reseves at several centuries (depending upon fuel, geographic boundary of analysis, and energy use patterns). While the US may have decades of petroleum or natural gas left, the world has plenty. Likewise, the US has unfathomably expansive coal deposits.
The economics of power systems is not as most people expect. For any sane alternative energy system the sticking point is infrastructure, not the enabling technology. Assuming hydrogen is such a great idea (it's not, at least as currently envisioned by most) the problem is supporting infrastrucure (pipes and pumps), not the cost of fuel cell (even if though it uses platinum).
We have a vast existing system which supports fossil fuels, and this is a huge hurdle for anything else to overcome. Leaving things up to the market many alternatives, even if free, could not comepete. And how did we get into this situation? This network of fossil fuel arteries did not spring from the earth overnight. No, we invested in it, and we paid for it. Largely through hidden costs such as subsidies (but you'll be branded a commie-bleeding heart liberal if you suggest we give even a tiniest fraction of that money to alternative energy systems). The other means a lot of this has been paid for is to work it into the unit cost -- this has been part of the problem with deregulated energy markets.
I recently wrote a brief essay on the readoption of nuclear, it's available at http://pthbb.org/natural /17_32-nuclear.pdf.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Man, the Randite kooks are out in force today. A bunch of patently false statements without even any supporting links to the usual neo-con fake "grass roots" websites, and it gets +5 insightful?
The government does not "heavily subsidize" wind or solar plants. Some local governments grudgingly provide small incentives, but nothing to equal the tax breaks and corporate welfare Big Oil recieves. Hell, Enron is still receiving fedguv handouts even now!
Get a grip, people.
Light hearted jabs, that's funny. Sterling's response tells me that he's an asshole who got caught trading on his "insightful" reputation by spewing out a bunch of inane drivel. His email reply is a classic response to someone getting caught - "Oh, I was just trying to be funny!" Well, I call shenanigans. He's just another egomaniacal asshole with a typewriter.
And it's too bad that there's no "-1, Apologist" moderation because you deserve it!
Every country that has a weapon program started with "peaceful" nuke plants. Very few countries have turned away. South Africa and Japan (because they were bombed by me.)
Slashdot readers seem to ignore this obvious connection. Blinded by "oh it is the future" or
"Oh, baddy bad is the nukular waste."
I am now killing Iraq because "oh, my, that fucker
saddam has WMD nukes", a lie of course but another
noook connection.
So talk all you want about the shining future of nuclear power. I am too busy killing 'Rackies' and
proliferating bombs, dirty or otherwise, to care about the environment or power supplies. I am also ignoring all the nuclear materials I sent around the globe over the last 50 years too.
- Uncle Sam
"Famine, disease, abject poverty, devistating wars, genocide. A return to a feudal economy, a breakdown of our civilization and another dark age for my children and grandchildren to live in."
Come on people! Wake up! Most environmentalists are among the worst scientists in the world (just barely above soothsayers and tarot card readers.)
Not ONE of these disaster scenarios, computer models, or studies EVER takes into account this little tiny detail known as Human Innovation.
The world is not coming to an end because we are driving SUV's. If it comes to an end it will be from a meteorite impact that could have been prevented if we hadn't wasted all our resources trying to control an uncontrollable climate. If we spent 1/10th the resources on learning to adapt to the natural climate changes that we waste on Kyoto and the junk science of all these Chicken Littles we wouldn't have to waste Internet bandwidth on these stories. My God, we could end world hunger with the money these lunatics are throwing away.
RBMK Reactors
They might have been 'state of the art', but they differ significantly from most other reactor types in that they have a Positive void coefficient. Reactors built in the USA and most other countries have a Negative void coefficient.
What this means is that for the RBMK reactor(water-cooled, graphite moderated), when excessive steam is produced, power production increases, leading to a meltdown. In other reactors with a negative void coefficient, when excessive steam is generated, power production decreases, as the water acts as both coolant and moderator. With no moderator, the reaction ceases, stopping heat production. I'd say that would mean physical forces stop further meltdown. Some safety systems operate like a fuse. When the reaction gets too hot, the parts melt, and cause a response, varying from seperating the core to dropping the control rods. This all will prevent a meltdown from happening.
RBMK implemented the way the Soviet Union did at Chernobyl was a flawed design. It was along the line of Ford's exploding fuel tanks. Why should we be scared of properly designed reactors, based off of an accident that represented criminal negligence?
I don't read AC A human right
How are you suggesting we build the LED's? The best I've heard about is 5 watts for the high-power luxeons. They might have 10-15 watt lab models, though. For any wide-scale operation, you need hundreds of watts. Your 'bulb' would get very expensive with an array of LEDs.
White LED's are only marginally more efficient than incandescent for light generation. They're nice for flashlights because they are shockproof/long life and provide more useful light than incandescent at lower powers as they don't dim into the infrared. This makes them useful as flashlights, but not for building lighting.
Dan's Data has a lot of info on LED lighting. Just look around for his flashlight reviews.
As for your dad's car, I don't know. I did a little research, and the quotes I saw were 25-30 mpg. But then, I don't know the model or anything else.
I don't read AC A human right
Everybody should understand we have a fusion reactor with a proven record of reliability - 5 billion years worth, so far, just 90 million miles away. All renewables (except geothermal and tidal power) are simply mechanisms for harnessing the power of our solar system's enormous reactor.
The two fundamental problems with Earth-based renewables are that the sun's energy is (1) quite diffuse by the time it reaches us, and (2) subject to day-night and seasonal variations. If we collect the energy in space, instead of on the ground, #2 is not a problem at all, and #1 is just a matter of distance from the sun. Renewables frequently have a third problem: (3) the energy is collected far from where we need it, and requires efficient transmission. For space, #3 can be resolved with wireless power transmission techniques, but there efficiency has not been proved over such long distances and high power levels.
Unfortunately, real renewable solutions (as opposed to the hydrogen myth), and space solar power in particular, have been starved for funding since about 1980. I just attended a meeting of space advocates and chatted at dinner with one of the few people who has been, off and on, working on SPS designs since about 1992. He's become very discouraged, because no proposal he has prepared on the subject has been funded for years; he's been spending his time on some mostly unrelated projects (solar electric propulsion).
The prime person at NASA involved in space solar power, John Mankins, hasn't been allowed to work on this since about 2001; he's involved in the new space exploration office, so I think that's good for him, but not for the field. All in all, total spending on the idea since 1980 is less than 1/1000th of what has been spent on fission and fusion R&D.
Energy: time to change the picture.
However, I was under the impression from sources like NASA among others that the Solar Constant was only in fact 1,367W per square meter. Far be it from me to agree with rocket scientists.First of all, the use of concentrators is not useful here. Why? If you concentrate three square meters of sunlight with optics down to a square meter panel, you are still taking up three square meters of solar energy, not one. Optics may reduce the amount of panels that need to be created, but they don't really change the equation. And for the record, I care.
As for efficiency, multijunctions are extremely expensive and not the kind of panel you find on people's homes. The versions that don't break the bank (only cost ~$30K to make a roof of them) are between 8-12% efficient. Don't believe me? Let's quote from your own Solarbuzz.com link:That's your source, not mine. The question really is, does 8-12% efficiency do the job?
So let's do some actual math shall we? 1.367kW per square meter at 100% efficiency. 2,589,988.11 square meters (1 square mile) * 1.367kW * 6 hours per day * 250 days (I'm being generous with days without rain, fog, snow, etc.) = 5,310,770,619.555kWH. That is hard limit. That's your potential at 100% efficiency (in other words, unattainable) with 100 square miles. That's 0.144% of the total US demand. A better number would be 69,444 square miles needed at 100% efficiency. 50% efficiency lab samples would take 138,888 square miles. Once again, this is larger than the size of Arizona (113,635 square miles)! 690,444 square miles at 10% efficiency (much more likely efficiency). The US (including Alaska) is 3,537,438 square miles. That's 19.5% of all US land area used for solar panels. And you'll please note that I've been more than generous with my calculations.
Once again, repeat after me: It doesn't matter how much you are willing to pay.
Comparisons with the Iraq war are unnecessary and frankly irrelevant. The supply simply isn't there at any cost. Solar and wind alone cannot do the job; Especially solar. A 5kg weight will never be more than 5kg. A 5cm object is a 5cm object. And 1.367kW/m^2 is the total amount of solar energy that hits the Earth.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
The writings Bruce was critiquing were well-thought-out and well-written. Bruce's comments amounted to "oh yeah? well NYAAAAH!" by comparison. I thought Bruce had more to offer than this.
And, by the way, why does everyone say we have no place to dump nuclear waste? We have a completely lifeless MOON, don't we? Why are so many people obsessed with preserving the moon as a pristine park when it means putting a real living ecosystem at risk? The Moon is a PERFECT Nuclear waste dump. Hell! It's even slowly moving away from us!
1.367kW/m^2 instantaneous... 8.2kWH/m^2 per day. Your estimate seemed a little low. But now I see that you were simply accounting for nominal loss. So 1kW/m^2 and thus 6kWH/m^2 per day. My mistake for missing the correct units.
Adjusted 100 square miles comes out to 3,884,982,165kWH total output at 100% efficiency.
0.105% of total US demand with 100 sq. miles.
95,007 square miles at 100% for all US needs.
190,014 sqaure miles needed for 50% efficient cells.
950,007 sqaure miles needed to 10% efficient -- 26.9% of all US land area.
Mea culpa.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
950,070 square miles needed for 10% efficiency -- 26.9% of all US land area.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
"We're going to use more power so we have to find it somewhere" Every time I see a debate like this I read the same stupid comment. Guess what? The real answer is to use LESS POWER. Yes, we can do it and live comfortably. We might have to give up driving our lovely big Hummers in town though kiddies! Get off your fat butt and walk more. No Nuclear plant that I've heard of has ever produced a net gain in energy, if all costs are accounted for. Additionally many require a substantial fossil fuel input. There's no reason to suspect that newer ones might improve on this. The answer, uncomfortable though it might sound to some is to live simpler lives, in better designed (Low-energy) buildings and use a combination of renewable energy sources. That is the ONLY answer. I'm not suggesting some back-to-basics answer. We could all go a long way by not buying and then throwing away useless junk and learning to tell needs from wants. While I'm ranting, you might want to turn off that fan on your desk, it just makes the room warmer.
...except that no region gets 365 days of cloudless days. Tell ya what. I'll split the difference. 250 days equivalent of sunshine in exchange for 6 hours per day. Fair? (My intention to find the answer, not to get a particluar result.)
.9kWh/m^2/day * 250 days = 225kWh/m^2/year.
So
16,404,444,444.44 m^2 for US total. (Commercial electric is only 3.691 trillion kWh... I neglected to remove some industry which does not pull from the main grid.)
16,404 square kilometers.
6,333.79 square miles.
I stand corrected. Hmmm...
$540.95 for the 155W model. Going down to a square meter and 150W is $523.50. Let's factor economy of scale. What would be fair? This type of cell, while cheaper than the rest, still requires a cleanroom for construction. 30% of the normal price? $174.50 per square meter.
16,404,444,444.44 square meters (needed for total US power) * $174.50 per square meter = $2,862,575,555,554.78. Almost $3 trillion is unacceptable.
Hmmm... What would be an amount we could handle? $500 billion? (I don't know. Just throwing out numbers.) At 150W/m^2, panels would need to hit $30.48/m^2 in order to hit the $500 billion (admittedly arbitrary) mark. So how much with wind? Granted, the inital cost is amortized over the life of the cell. That's still a $16.66 billion per year assuming a 30 year panel lifespan.
I'll have to look into this. Specifically I'd like to compare to costs of nuclear (yes, including cleanup costs). Today, nuclear is cheaper, but I don't know by how much. Decreasing solar cell costs complicate things greatly since you pointed out my 3-order-of-magnitude error.
My thanks.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Lovelock proposes immediate conversion to nuclear
energy to end CO2 emission. It is doubtful that
this would work since the warming is already
occuring and the CO2 presently in the atmosphere
will stay there for tens of decades. Klaus Lackner
(2003 Science 300 1677) proposes that carbon
sequestration is the most cost effective way
to balance or reduce CO2 (net) emission.
Sequestered CO2 can be dealt with on civilization
lifetime-scales while dealing with nuclear waste has
greater uncertainties owing to its species
existance time-scales.
It's been a while since I looked
WRT the LEDs, you use 1- or 2-watt models and make them in strips. A lot of the delivered cost is in individual handling and installation, the price plummets if you make, ship and install them en masse. More of the cost of ordinary flouros is in the wiring and installation than the batten, too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Add this to the logical fallacies. How do you think the grocery store refrigerates your food before you buy it? Now, how much would refrigerated goods cost to you (the average Joe) if refrigeration costs doubled?
You might even notice other goods and services increase in cost. It's silly to think that the cost of electricity is only reflected in your electricity bill.
You can get accurate values by looking at population and total power generation capacity in an area, getting the total per capita power consumption, and then multiplying that by the change in cost.
Up here (Ontario, Canada), we use an average of about 5 kW/person, for all forms of electricity consumption (personal, industrial, etc). That's about 44,000 kWh/year, or $2,200 Cdn/year in real energy cost (at $0.05/kWh; it's actually slightly less than this).
The cost of electricity could double, and while it would be annoying as heck, it wouldn't be catastrophic. Multiply by a factor of 10, and you're in catastrophe territory.
For information's sake on the issue of oil availability from the OPEC faq. "Is the world running out of oil?
Oil is a limited resource, so it may eventually run out, although not for many years to come. OPEC's oil reserves are sufficient to last another 80 years at the current rate of production, while non-OPEC oil producers' reserves might last less than 20 years. The worldwide demand for oil is rising and OPEC is expected to be an increasingly important source of that oil.
If we manage our resources well, use the oil efficiently and develop new fields, then our oil reserves should last for many more generations to come."
One storage method that will work in many places is water, on a hill. About 10 cubic meters of water 1000 ft up stores about 1 MWh of energy.
It turns out that whoever provided you that figure made a rather grave math error.
1000 feet is about 300 metres. Gravitational potential energy near Earth's surface is 10 J/kg*m, so you get 3kJ/kg. Using 10 cubic metres gives you about 10T of water, or 10,000 kg. This gives you 30 MJ of stored energy - about 8.3 kW*h.
It looks like your source confused feet and metres, and then wrote MW*h when they meant MJ.
Practical gravitational power storage would require a huge resovoir (think "hydroelectric plant that you can run forwards or in reverse"). The basin size needed for, say, a day's worth of power storage for Ontario would be roughly the size of one of the Great Lakes. It is questionable that the construction of such a resovoir could ever be practical.
Why do people keep coming up with this fallacy? I've never seen solar panels on the ground, you put them on the roof of the building that needs them.
There is disagreement on Slashdot over how much area you need to meet all energy needs, but to start there are a hell of a lot of flat roofs that could be generating electricity. Generating the power in the middle of nowhere to ship it back to the users makes no sense. (Which sadly means it's the only way big energy corporations will get behind solar, they're locked into the mindset of energy distribution as much as energy creation.)
=S
"In response to your plutonium usage as a bomb, it is important to note that not a single bomb has ever been made from traditional nuclear power-generated spent fuel. Ever. In any country"
Not yet. But dirty bombs (explosives and radioactive materials/waste) count as nuclear weapons in my mind. Hasn't the Bush administration's terror-chiller theatre been scaring you with that scenario for the last 3 years?
Wrong. When is the last time you noticed the sun failed to come up (yes you still get power in overcast conditions). Further, home PV systems are designed using statistic based on the past 30 years of weather data (see rredc.nrel.gov/solar/). Ask somebody with PV, their power is WAY more reliable than the grid. In fact, most of the comminucation repeaters throughout the western US use PV for this reason.
This is more than a little disingenous. Communications long hual equipment requires 99.999% reliability. Which is why central offices (at least in Canada) use the grid, and banks of batteries to filter the power and buffer short outages, and fuel powered generators to charge the batteries/run the place and everybodies phone if there's a sustained outage. And they bring in truckload after truckload of fuel during outages, like the big one last summer.
The reason they use solar power for remote installations is that it's plainly easier to run them off solar than running power lines out to these locations. Don't pretend they wouldn't run lines there if it was at all feasible.
If you rationally calculate what risks really kill people then you find that living near a nuke power plant reduces your life expectancy by about 8 hrs. Going on a driving holiday in the US, or permitting people to smoke tobacco near you, is _much_ more dangerous.
Ours is very irrational society in what we choose to restrict and what we choose to permit.
Sean
PS: And bloody Sterling should know better than to conflate risks of nuke power (minor) and risks of nuke weapons (major).
It is just that people are lazy and stupid and politicians just follow suit.
Coal and oil suck becaus they are used like if there i no tomorrow (ther may not be if we continue this mindless consumption). Industrialized nations should curb the apetite for this. It can be done, it is enough to go to the US and watch the brain dead SUV drivers (at the rate of one person per vehicular monstrosity) to understand theat the US could cut oil consumption just by banning SUVs and in general vehicles that could not provide a minimum amount of kilometers per litre of gasoline.
Anathema to the way of life in some countries is public transport. One bus uses the equivalen of 20 or 30 cars when it comes to gasoline (or diesel) but can transport 50 or 60 people if properly designed (comfortably seated).
Why new houses are not fitted standard (in a compulsory fashion) with solar cells and solar water heating? Why houses are not provides standard with small wind turbines? All these additaments could provide for a lot of energy needs of a normal household.
Why to talk about home termic insulation in some places is considered taboo (to lower airconditioning and heating consumption).
There are many solutions that combined would help to avoid using nuclear energy and to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels. The problem is that democracies lack the politicians with the guts to take this political agenda forward and the populace has a short term view in dire evidence on this thread ("uh... the nuclear plant down the road has not exploded, it should be ok then..."). About dictatorships like China, the second biggest oil guzzler, better not to talk. The environment and sutainable development could not be further away from their minds. At leas on democracies we can point and criticize the mistakes in the hope reality will click in the minds of people. No such hope in the Communist Paradise.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So there is no problem then with releasing radiocative material equivalent to several months of exposure in one single event?
So it is ok that the radiation did not leave the plant thanks to lack of wind (a fortuitous event).
And it is ok to evacuate people form a dangerous aread, wrecking havoc on their lives (obviosuly you have never been under evacuation, otherwise you will not minimize such an ocurrence).
Frankly, with such lousy criticisms, organizations like Greenpeace grow in stature compared to their ciritics.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I love republican conspiracy theorists. They manage to find clouds in every silver lining.
And OPEC is a reliable source to you?
The stats I give are from
Peters, W., Drake, E., Driscoll, M., Golay, M., & Tester, J. (2004). Sustainable Energy:
Choosing Among Options (Review ed. January 2004) (p. 389). Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
Were that I say, pancakes?
Not particularly. "Dirty Bombs" aren't really all that dangerous (in the grand scheme of things.) It is mostly a psychologcal weapon.
Thankfully, there are two main problems/tradeoffs:
1) If you grind the dangerous isotope(s) down into dust so you have a high dispersion rate (cover a larger area), you drastically reduce the dose that any one person will receive.
2) If you leave the isotope(s) in the form you stole them in (ie, spent fuel rods, etc.), then you scatter around a few big chunks which don't kill all that many people and can be recovered fairly easily.
Good luck trying to calm down a hysterical general public though. "Oh dear god, it is radioactive!!!!"
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
They run Slash too, so you'll know the user interface.
Uh... seeing as how they control the majority of the world oil market, and people depend on their numbers to do business in the oil market, and it is even in their best (but unethical) interests to exaggerate how much oil is left, yes.