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Could Nuclear Power Wean the U.S. From Oil?
bblackfrog asks: "Is a Federal nuclear energy program viable? That is, can the USA eliminate our economic dependence on crude oil with a large scale federal program to build and maintain enough nuclear power plants to replace our current oil-based energy needs? The obvious political hurdles are (a) the left opposes nuclear energy, (b) the right opposes federalizing energy, and (c) the oil companies and Saudis wield a lot of clout. This makes a federal nuclear energy program far fetched I admit, however I'm more interested in the economics. Slashdot has covered advances in nuclear power technology. China's doing it." (Read more, below.)
"How much energy is required to replace our fossil fuel consumption? What are the initial costs of the program, and just how cheap could the electricity be? How expensive would it be for our industries to convert? How expensive for home and auto conversions? How much of this cost should be picked up by the government? Bottom line: is nuclear power cheaper than our current oil-driven middle-east policy, with all of its blowback?"
A nuclear disaster would wean the US off a lot of things.... oil, food, water, you name it.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
And what'll wean us from nuclear power?
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
You're forgetting that Bush was just reelected.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Privatize it, and let the citizens start deciding.
I'm wrong and so are you.
(d) In whose backyard does the nuclear waste go?
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
I am all for an alternate energy/fuel source we can mass produce to replace a limited resource.
/. has said many times. Nuclear = bad word to the public.
The problem goes back to what
A quote from my fav book:
Wizards first Rule: People Are Stupid.
People can be made to believe any lie because they want to believe it is true, or because they are afraid that it is true.
With respect to conventional nuclear energy, what many people don't realize is that Uranium is a finite resource which will run out way before oil. Based on what's on this page (this was just a quick google, there probably is better data out there), with 4 million t available and at the rate of 34K t per year, there is only 117 years of Uranium left.
So if it's going to be nuclear energy, it will need to be a process that does not require Uranium.
Do you really think that President Bush will sell out his oil buddies?
Not likely.
Oh, come, come, come. Without a monster or two, it's hardly a quest... merely a gaggle of friends wandering about. - Owl
Realize that the other animals already use all the other forms of energy. Birds use the wind, fish use hydroelectric, and all use hydrocarbons as food. Nuclear is a step forward, which only the sun has mastered. The symbolic value of our progress needs to be considered.
With the cyberthalamus, the singularity will happen.
The president of a country has a fortune invested in oil. Would that country rather:
1. Develop a nuclear energy program;
2. Develop an alternative energy program;
or
3. Relax regulations for pollution control, so that fossil fuel energy can be more conviniently utilized?
Why would the US need to wean itself from oil? When they need more, they can just steal from their neighbors as usual. And now we know that half of the population approves of this policy ;-)
I believe it's pronounced nucular.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Well, we know that in the USA, coal and gasoline cause a large percentage of the pollution. Nuclear power might solve the problem of the coal/other fossil fuel plants. But what about all those Dodge Durango and Surburbans?
(d) Creating a dependence on yet another finite resource found under the ground in various countries that may or may not welcome you to dig it up, now and in the future.
While the damage caused by a nuclear catastrophy is much larger than that of a coal or oil burning plant, isn't the day-to-day pollution from a nuclear plant going to be far less than that of other non-renewable energy sources?
Yes, we should be looking to renewable sources, but its just not cost effective right now. Invest in the distance future with renewable research, and invest in the present with nuclear.
About the dumbest thing a person can do with fossil fuels is 'burn' them, whether in a power plant or driving to work.
When you burn them, they're effectively gone.
When they're gone, you can no longer use them to create the materials that, to a large extent, drive the production of goods in this country. Just think of it: Fertilizer, toys, drugs, etc. They are all largely based on petroleum derivatives.
Some can be recycled, which is great.
But if you just burn the petroleum, you lose it forever, and create toxic emissions to boot.
If nuclear power could help stop the petroleum 'burning' I'd be all for it. The problem is safety.
Can nuclear energy ever be truly safe?
---- Richard L. Goerwitz III
...because there are millions of vehicles on the roads that still require gasoline. Nuclear power could be a good replacement for fossil-fuel based power plants, but for the existing fleet of private vehicles, it just won't happen.
What will my car run on? More specofically, since electric cars don't cut it for long distances, what will the big rigs that hold most of my food and goods run on?
Once we have efficient fusion power plants, our dependance on oil will go away. With fusion, there's too much radioactive crap left behind that no one wants to deal with.
Too many people are too scared of another 3-mile island or Chernobyl. Fusion plants would be much safer.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
In the US. But in Europe and Japan they use Nuclear power extensively. Even though they have much more to lose in the event of a disaster due to the population density. I'm I the only one that wonders about this?
Considering that most all of our electrical energy comes from burning COAL and not oil, the only thing switching to nuclear power would do is clean up the air... it wouldn't reduce our dependence on foreign oil to run all of our vehicles.
"The unicode stuff in the latest version is working fabulously well. My russian mafia friends are ecstatic."
Nuclear powered Ford Mustang. 0-60 in 5.4 nanoseconds. I'm all over that...
It will just push us from depending on the oil rich countries to the uranium rich countries.
Our President can correctly say the word "nuclear" and not a moment before.
That's so hypocrite, USA doesnt want other countries to use nuclear but they would have some kind of nuclear energy program? lol
...because France have already done it.
Well since we pretty much don't use Oil in the US for generating power, adding new nuclear power plants is pretty worthless.
Now I guess you could be talking about replacing fuel oil for heating and using nuclear for hydrogen generation and fuel cells for cars. But really any plan for wide spread car conversion is talking trillions of dollars, maybe more with all the infrastructure upgrades.
Plus you still have oil use by industry (creating plastics, etc etc) and thats not going away.
They need to develop some friendlier fast-release nuclear power plants (a.k.a. neutron bombs). Go feds!
Crimony--what color is the sky, black or white?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
that's just what we need, more nuclear reactors on the surface of our planet! Hey, here's an idea, put them in space and microwave the energy back to us. Nuclear reactors have no business on inhabited planets.
The dependancy on oil is not just as an energy resource. Most of our belongings are manufactured from oil by-products. Just to throw an insensitive clod in the already muddy water!
We don't use oil as our primary means of generating electricity. We use coal. And then natural gas. Neither of which are big foreign dependencies for us. I guess you're suggesting that we use nuclear energy to break down water for hydrogen power? But the cost of that is more than the cost of gasoline at the current rate. Electric cars, maybe?
As much as some people hate to hear it, we're not fighting in the Middle East because of oil. We're there because we're fighting Islamofascism. Otherwise, we would have used Saddam as an oil-for-food crony the way France and Germany were.
We can wean ourselves off oil better with deisel-electric hybrids, which would give us the same efficiencyt as is projected with fuel cells, and burn vegetable oils as well as (or instead of) petroleum. Vegetable oil powered electric hybrids are actually Solar Powered (think about it.) Which means they're Nuclear Powered. So maybe that's how nuclear weans us off petroleum.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
A lot of electrical power is generated using coal and natural gas. Very little is generated using oil.
Oil is popular for uses that require portable power storage (planes, cars, etc.).
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
But if we switch to nuclear power, then oil demand and prices will drop. And THEN what justification would there be for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?! That's the GOAL, and we need to line up REASONS-- don't you understand? So switching to nuclear is a dumb idea, at least in the short term.
...in both Eastern and Western Europe nuclear has been standard for some time.
All the same, I'm not in favour of further adoption: for all the arguments of the safety of nuclear power plants, the fact is, as the duration of a plant's operation approaches eternity the probability of human or manufacturing errors causing an accident approaches 1. And in the case of nuclear power, the cost of a single accident make it not worth the risk.
Sure, by the same reasoning as California will one day fall into the ocean, and geologic time gives the same level of precision as the probability for a competently-run nuclear plant to experience an accident, so one might say that I should argue that no one should set forth on California. But there are better alternatives, less "20th century" than nuclear, which I believe could be made feasible with sufficient investment.
Since the oil companies are holding the patents on most of these viable alternatives, however, I won't hold my breath.
nt
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
This is true for solar, ethanol, fuel cells, nuclear, etc energy sources - how much oil will it take to produce the infrastructure to supply those sources to the public, to ship them, to build the factories that create them, to even POWER the factories that create them? Will it even be worth the cost (in oil as well as $$)?
Where do you store nuclear waste?
Where do you put nuclear plants? If you like it so much, would you like having a plant in your backyard?
How do you keep it safe?
Do not get me wrong, I am all up for alternative sources of energy; however, there are issues with most all of them that we need to consider.
A nuke powered Dodge Viper would totally rock!
Just trying to make the point that electric powered cars + nuclear power would be a good step on the long road to weaning the US (and subsequently the rest of the world) off oil.
Jokes can often be +1 insightfull too.
"goatse? What's that? Anyone have a link?" - AC
we will use nucular power instead, it's much cleaner
Windfarms generate Hydrogen which can be used for fuel cells. This way, you can take Wind (which is inconsistent) and convert it to something more consistent. Utsira Island, in Norway, already has it up and running.
This is an interesting question, and I hope a lively discussion. I think one thing is perfectly clear and that is that oil is a finite resource and something must be done in order to shift reliance from oil. I don't think nuclear is the step. It just costs too much money. I understand that energy is 'clean' and efficient once the reactor is running, but the costs at startup are astronomical and maintainance is lethal. The government in Ontario recently felt that when trying to modernize their Nuclear power plant in Pickering. The cost for overhaul for $4B. This is not chump change. I think, perhaps, the solution to the energy crisis that s coming (and it IS coming) may not be invented yet. In fact, I suspect that the West (its not only America that loves oil) will have to invent their way out of the problem. Although I think that the clout wielded by the oil barons will stall this development for years to come.
Politically it's also a big win. Nevada has a low population, so it has few Representatives in the House. Plus, it voted for the Dear Leader despite his approval of Yucca Mountain. So if any locals do object, there's no real leverage for them politically.
Best Slashdot Co
... is who would profit from it. If a new industry is going to make trillions by selling the same stuff the old industry does, those old industries (oil/coal/current nuclear plants) are going to fight tooth-and-nail to keep things in the status quo.
Overall, I think changing the base infrastructure of electric generation is a good thing. New industries mean new jobs, and the benefit is a cleaner electric generation model. But it won't happen until something sates the old industry financially.
My main complaint about capitalism is when businesses become large, they don't want to make major changes to their business because it will increase cost. Thus, they lobby in Congress, pursue marketing campaigns and everything else to make sure consumers keep using their products without having to change their ways. Making money without change is a businesses dream, but unforuntately that can contradict what's in the benefit for the many. And that's what's happening today.
The question should be, why do we use sooo much damn energy. I'm all for computers, gadgets, and a variety of power tools, but aren't we just being plain stupid and wasteful? I'm a designer, and the understanding in packaging is, that saving resources upfront (minimal packaging) is much, much more effective than say recycling. Recycling would be absolutely great, if we actually did it, but alas do not do it very effectively.
I ditched my beemer and am walking and such now. Not only is the stress of driving and owning a car that costs way too much to maintain in its glisteney state gone, but I lost ten pounds and save about a thousand a month.
We want it all, but simply cannot have it all. For long anyway.
Why would we need to wean ourselves from nuclear power? As we get better at disposing of or otherwise containing the waste, nuclear power will become cheaper and more feasible. We may want to look for an [additional,replacement] power source N years down the road but would not need to do so in the short term.
PS I am referring to generating electrical power to homes, businesses, etc.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
The US is a huge country with huge natural resources and a lot of wealth. With every other fuel resource being finite, wouldn't it make sense to try and lead the world in renewables. Tidal Power along that massive coastline, wind power along the sparsely populated plains, hydro power in the mountains. Those sort of developments would not only reduce reliance on foreign supplies in the short term, but would provide massive economic benefit in the medium to long term.
Well, nuclear energy could help, but the problem is, that you won't be able to fit a nuclear reactor into a car. And no one in the whole world drives cars that need more gas than US citizens.
www.weberseite.at
According to the russians, it's not only oil and SUV's that are causing a great deal of pollution...
d ust.html/
e xperiment.html/
It's also dust.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/14518_
However, also according to the russians, Time travel is possible, and occurs in the South pole!
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/379/12190_
... to point out that Bush is a big supporter of fossil fuels? It's indisputably true. Sean
2) Do we have enough fissionable fuel to accomplish this?
I know #1 is a problem, I honestly don't know the answer to #2. Either way, these need to be addressed *before* we build more reactors.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
I'm sure you'll be outraged to learn that France gets most of its elecriticy from nuclear plants - I think the percentage is somewhere around 60-80%. So - their reliance on oil is much less than yours.
Stop the brainwash
Yes. But too many people would rather fear-monger the ills of nuclear power than join a rational discussion of how it can be widely implemented in a safe, clean, and effective manner.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
* can make in USA (no foreign dependence).
= UBB44
* runs in existing diesel engines.
* less toxic than regular diesel, in fact biodegradable.
* creates more demand for US soybean crop.
* no new infrastructure needed, just more diesel engines.
* emissions better in almost also cases than existing diesel emissions.
* can mix in any percentage with existing diesel fuel.
yes i know it would take *a lot* of soy crop to meet the US oil consumption - but check out some of the research on using algae for biodiesel production at a much higher land density.
overall there are a *lot* of pros vs. cons regarding this alternative fuel IMHO.
for more information:
http://www.grassolean.com/
http://www.biodieselnow.com/
http://forums.tdiclub.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board
Worked great for California.
As another poster here mentioned, there is simply not enough uranium to provide for the worlds energy needs. Also, one needs to build a staggering amount (1 per day for the next 50 years) of new nuclear plants in order to provide for the worlds energy need (about 10 TW). There is only enough uranium for 10 years at our current energy consumption rate. Check out http://nsl.caltech.edu/energy.html for a talk that a caltech professor gives all the time before congress and other places. (sorry in powerpoint)
Savannah River Site just across the border from me in SC is where a lot of the nation's nuclear waste is treated and stored. I know a lot of people that work there. TMK it's pretty safe and they do a pretty good job. Very tight security.
If there was a Nuclear technology that didn't require extensive transport or processing of fuel and waste, and only produced very short-lived waste products, I would agree. But there's not. Breeder reactors sounded promising since they make their own fuel and can process to the right kind of waste, but they seem to have relatively severe risks otherwise.
Nuclear tech looks attractive on paper. I don't doubt that designs are safer. But the environmental and material costs in mining and disposal are still large, and they make very attractive targets as well.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I can tell you that I do not oppose nuclear energy, nor do a number of my "leftist" friends.
Try to keep the generalized character assasination out of the posts and preserve them for the flames and trolls in the comments section.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
The way investors look at it, a natural gas power plant can be installed for half the price, half the time, and can break even in a third of the time any nuclear plant can. We as consumers of electricity have to make a effort to bear the additional cost of cleaner production means.
If you really want to talk green power, stop thinking nuclear and solar and think WIND. Wind power could provide the USA with more electricity than it currently needs if it is installed properly. The problem? again, wind electricity at the moment is a couple cents more per kWh than natural gas and coal. Are you willing to add the money on your bill each month? I am. Ever wonder why california has more wind turbine farms than any other area, even though they have one of the lowest wind potential west of the missippi? Because people are starting to want cleaner power, even at a cost.
Did you know a single 750 kw turbine can provent as much CO2 emmision as a 500 acre forest can absorbe annually?
Did you know, at the current death rate due to living in proximity to a coal plant, for every 33 wind turbines installed, we save a life. thats one less person who will die from lung related problems caused from emmisions. Coal plants are esimated to cause the death of over 35,000 americans a year.
If we want to get off the oily road we are one, we must make an effort and bear the cost of doing so. It is the only way this will ever work. And it can work. Look at europe, note germany's emmisions over the past 15 years and how they have dropped to next to nill. Ohio alone now produces more NOx emmisions than germany does per year. think about that.
Nuclear powered Delorean! Wow! Wait..
Breeder reactor. There is a nearly infinite supply of U-238 that could be turned into plutonium for this purpose.
Sean
Haha. Pretty lame troll attempt. Can't even get hosting without a bandwidth limit.
Muppet.
Especially in a time when the US is threatend by terrorists like never before in its history building more potential targets that can not be secured strikes me as an excelent idea.
And my standard question to those advocating nuclear energy:
What are you going to do with the nuclear waste? Do you really think it's possible to dump it somewhere safely for 10 000 years or more?
I don't have the links handy at work, but for the cost of the war we could build solar power plants using existing, proven designs that would generate 5% of our total energy use using boilers instead of photovoltaics. That includes all oil, natural gas, nuclear power, coal, and other power sources. And other than maintenance there is no continuing cost.
F*ck Iraq and the religious reich.
There, that's better.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Without question the green party and it's movement are the largest impediment to nuclear energy out there. It's a power trip really, one that has no scientific weight. Now the good news is that some of the greens are starting to realize that their opposition to nuclear power had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with science, and are starting to renew the calls to look at nuclear power.
From pebble bed techniques to better designs, there is no reason we cant build nuclear power plants that can provide widespread clean energy for the masses. Really, if groups like greenpeace were serious about the environment, they would be spending money on research for safe ways to store and process nuclear waste, not fighting it at every turn.
a lot of people here are pro-nuke, but I submit that government nor industry have a good safety record in ANYTHING. And the time lines we are talking about could include massive economic depressions for the US and global warming etc. etc. I don't think it's fair to leave all that waste, and all these ailing stations around for our children.
I believe you when you say that there are good methods to contain waste. But since when has government followed good methods and not cut corners? Since when has industry (because no doubt much will be privatized) followed safety before profit?
I think people need to face facts.
There is a carrying capacity for the earth - a resources to population limit. You can use technology to get more out of things, but in the end you will hit a roof. And there are only two things you can do:
a) reduce consumption
b) dispell the myth we need billions more people on earth. We are doing just fine without an extra two billion on top of the current six... why to we need more?
In the case of western countries, who's populations are shrinking, that leaves - reduce consumption.
I have made a commitment to not owning a car until there are viable electrics I can run off green grid power. And will be moving into hooking my power up to green grid energy soon. And solar water heating is on the cards. Reduce the amount of computers you use, LCD over CRT etc. etc. Plan houses better, have "GPL" house designs that are energy efficient that people can download off the net etc. etc.
We need to just reduce consumption and push green energies. What better engineering principle is there than a decentralised grid running off a resource which is "unlimited" such as the sun or the wind?
It is the supreme principle.
It is also very interesting re: libertarian principles. When everyone has a water tank and their own electricity - they are not only more independent, but feel and think more independantly of government.
So, to sum up:
I don't see a future for nuke because of the dangers. I know it's safe in theory. But it's not going to be in theory, it's going to be in the realities of government or capitalist administration both of which I don't trust with a freakin 100 foot pole with running a plant (even a failsafe no-core meltdown modern design) OR with getting rid of the waste properly.
Green energy IS viable, it just needs some effort to reduce costs. And in the end produces a better result, with decentralised (more terrorist aircraft proof than a reinforced dome) system. There is a beauty to decentralised systems from an engineering standpoint. As is there a beauty to harvesting energy which is readily available rather than forcing it out of atoms with quite large industy (and don't talk to me about the "mini-reactors" which are prime candidates to get stolen... and I know you can't get a nuke out of them immediately, but you can get a dirty bomb).
All I am saying, and I might get modded down for this, is that there ARE real concerns about nuke power that aren't hippy ravings. And there IS an interesting scientific and political case for solar and wind, and hydro etc. combined in a decentralised manner.
The US designs have become stodgy and outdated after three decades without new local customers. Some the new ideas from abroad are much more safer and less expensive.
Fusion yes. Fission, no.
The US people are scared to death - scoreboard this week's election. This same fear (which comes from a lack of education, among other things) killed off nuclear fission a long time ago in the US. The last fission plant to go on line was in the what - early 1980s? And there are no outstanding permits to build any electrical generation plants of any kind, IIRC.
Fusion is the answer. It's the only option that has the energy density (or more) of fossil fuels, that isn't as dirty or dangerous as fission.
That said, the first fusion power plant is at least 30 years out. And if you started building today, the first new fission plant would be 10-12 years out.
Beside, the regressives aren't interested. What interests them is putting money in their own pockets, and the pockets of their friends at the country club. Anything farther out than next quarter just doesn't register.
Sure, first and second generation nuclear plants did kinda suck -- but all that proves is that early revisions of technology under the control of incompetent twats is a bad idea.
Modern nuclear technology is not only outrageously safe, but can also create significantly less spent fuel per gigawatt.
Less what? People complain about the very idea of nuclear waste, but personally I'd prefer to see waste products in storage (yes, back in the ground (where it came from) than in the atmosphere (where fossil fuels absolutely didn't).
Simon
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Nuclear reactors are viable only for a certain number of years before they become too contaminated and have to be shut down. They were to account for this in the operation of the reactor, but for most reactors, that is a forgotten rule. These reactors will remain contaiminated for 1000's of years after they have outlived their service life.
Spent fuel rods for nuclear reactors will also remain radio active for centuries after we have used the energy they generated. Long term storage of them in the Nevada desert is the best solution they can come up with for these so far.
This is far too dangerous a proposition, given the extreme number of years the waste from these plants will generate. I am not anti-nuclear fuel, but I do not see it alone as a viable solution.
Our entire transportation base is based on fossile fuels. From our Deisel trains to all of the automobiles and trucks in the states. The emergence of energy driven vehicles and hybrid vehicles is too new and there are far too few of them that could be used for the backbone of the transportation industry. The cities could not afford to put in all of the electricity lines necessary to replace their public transportation systems with electric ones. The list just goes on and on.
There is no way we could do this, and I fail to see how creating tons and tons of radioactive waste would improve the situation.
GP
In the current insane situation, the US government subsidizes oil companies enormously(spending hundreds of billions in the middle east) and nuclear companies(insuraning risk from accidents)-but very little is done to provide clear, incentives to research dramatically new forms of energy. As this link shows, the GOP leadership had the chance to address this issue at virtually no net cost and simply blew it.
The second problem is stationary energy, that is electricity and natural gas. We have enough coal to generate electricity for many decades. In most cases, electricity can be substituted for natural gas The only constraint on coal is global warming. Nuclear can help here. I will not get into the debate of safety etc.
Could Iran Nuclear Power Wean the U.S. from Mid-East Oil?
http://www.areva.com/
They advertise for atomic energy on TV a LOT...
we all know that nuclear power plants are incredibly dangerous; I mean, how many times when playing simcity did the damn explode on you? This risk is far too great that such a program is not viable. We need to get rid of all nuclear power and return to burning coal, oil, and gas. Anything else and we run the risk of the destroying the planet. oh wait....
Most of the energy in my country, Norway, is based on recycable sources like waterfalls. As we are now approaching a crisis in the powerconsumption (We consume more than we produce) a lot of intrest is given to alternative energy sources like harvesting the energy of waves and wind, but several organisations are looking into the possibility of using natural gass as an energy source.
I must admit that I am oblivious to what other nations like USA use as energy sources.
Would anyone be as kind as giving me a resume?
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index. html
He discusses more than just the world's energy needs. He makes a number of good points and provides references for his conclusions.
In the pages about nuclear energy he discusses the amount of fuel available to the world (there is more uranium disolved in the oceans than available in the earth's crust - there are already technologies being developed for extracting it), and how long it could be made to last (millions of years, or if breeder reractors were used, billions of years - read his writings, don't rely on my summation).
It is one of the least biased analyses I've seen.
-mortis
1) What will we do with the waste?
It should be reused for fuel. This allows a reactor to get more energy out of less nuclear material, resulting in both reduced cost and waste. The only reason why the US doesn't do this, is the concern over terrorists or spies obtaining bomb-grade materials.
2) Do we have enough fissionable fuel to accomplish this?
The estimates are that we'd have a ~100 year supply of Uranium if all power was switched to nuclear power today. This figure does not take reprocessing and non-uranium fission into account.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's a myth that oil is a finite resource ...
It would be easier for us to consider synthetic alternitives that can run in conventional combustible engines than to switch to a radical new means of energy and horsepower production.
This doesn't mean that car companies in particular should not be MANDATED to produce cars and SUVs that get 40+ mioles to the gallon on a short time table.
The technology is there - it is the reluctance of the car companies (and it's influence from oil companies) to make this small change.
Will it cost money? Yes
But, if high mpg cars could come out at reasonable pricepoints - they would see them like hotcakes and make up for the lower margins.
The key would be combining synthetic with hybrid technology and making batteries that do not pollute the environment when the time to replace the batteries in the hybrid comes.
Fuel cell technology comes to mind.
Oil is not a finite resource if it can be produced organically/synthetically.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
On its impact: "Many nuclear suppliers express the view that without Price-Anderson coverage, they would not participate in the nuclear industry." from U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, The Price-Anderson Act - Crossing the Bridge to the Next Century: A Report to Congress, October 1998.
Finally, read economic analysis carefully to ensure that it covers the cost of decommissioning a plant and waste storage. On the other hand, competing arguments must cover the cost of pollution.
Constructing a balanced economic argument for any power source is complicated.
(d) none of this addresses the root of the problem, namely, excessive energy consumption in the West
yes i know it would take *a lot* of soy crop to meet the US oil consumption
That's why we need "Lipodiesel"-- when you climb into your SUV, you plug a little hose into a couple stents in your thighs and belly, and it gives you liposuction treatment while you drive, sending the fat into your engine to propel the vehicle. This would solve both the oil problem and the fat problem plaguing the united states, would mean that lazyass drivers wouldn't have to exercise, and could not only eat all the french fries they wanted, they would need to in order to fuel the vehicle. You just stop at the McDonalds drive-thru to fill up.
#1 is NOT a technical problem, it's a political one. If the government does away with the stupid policy that prohibits converting and using the waste for other things, there would be no waste problem.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Can't wait to power my Delorean with Mr. Fusion :)
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
This option makes a lot more sense to me. No likelihood of glowing children, and, despite the suggestion of flooding the dessert, could be easily decentralized around the country to make it harder to take out by terrorists.
I do wonder how making the middle east irrelevant would affect world politics. Think it would be a good idea to do BEFORE their nuclear weapons programs come to full fruition.
President Carter was the one to popularize nyü-ky&-l&r and he was a nuclear engineer.
If the US government had invested the approximately three trillion dollars spent on war and "homeland security" since 9/11 maybe we would be closer to a viable Fusion power power solution. Virtualy zero radioactive waste, self-terminating reaction in the case of containment failure, compact plants, high output (possibly very expensive) but a very promising technology.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
"Safe" is a relative term. Some people hold that any risk at all is completely unacceptable. But mining and burning fossil fuels involves risk. Harvesting and burning wood involves risk. Even building and operating solar or wind energy plants involves risk. None of the alternative is completely, absolutely "safe". Given that there is no absolutely "safe" alternative, it really comes down to minimizing and choosing between the risks.
Look, I voted for Kerry who voted to preserve national resources. However, since Bush won and since Alaska supported him, let's drill the living crap out of it. Afterall, isn't it what they wanted?
just make up your argument
Your brilliant logic is just a wee bit undermined by the small fact that Pres. Bush did not, in fact, own a significant amount of oil company stock when he won in 2000. His assets have been in a blind trust: even he doesn't know what he owns.
Stocks of US oil companies have actually underperformed the market during the Bush presidency, so you join the other moonbats in assuming that he is evil, brilliant AND stupid.
Perhaps you were thinking of the President of France? The Duelfer report showed that Chirac's cronies received a nice chunk of the $11B that Saddam siphoned off the Oil for Food/Palaces program.
Why does widespread use of nuclear power require federalization? If it's economically viable, power companies will build them (securing the facilities would need to be regulated). If not, let's look at other solutions. It's ignorant to think that power companies will just sit on their hands and consume all fossil fuels without preparing an alternative source of power generation.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
This is one of the issues that escapes most debates about the use of nuclear energy. There is no such thing as nuclear waste, there are only byproducts. These byproducts may be used in later processes. In fact, some reactors are specifically built in order to continue using these byproducts for the generation of energy. Unlike CO2, carbon soot, sulpher oxides, nitrogen oxides, etc. the "waste" of nuclear energy is not a pollutant unless allowed to be and has further value. Furthermore, the "waste" is very well contained and manageable, that is to say, it is difficult to lose control of the byproducts of nuclear energy production.
There are only 6,863,795,529 types of people in the world.
They could run on it now! Most of Europe has B20 diesel which has 20% Bio, 80% Petro diesel. Kind of like in the United States a lot of gas is 10% ethanol.
While this doesn't do a lot to reduce emissions right away, it is renewable at least and all diesel engines can run on B100. After that push to require diesel engines to run on straight vegetable oil, which is a much cleaner, renewable source.
Eventually we could think about moving to hydrogen as well.
And I think we should heavily consider Wind and Sun. If every new house built had supplemental Solar Power it could greatly reduce our need for power over the long haul. I know California had some new regulation requiring solar power on a percentage of new houses and over 10 years it would be equivalent to building a couple medium to large coal plants in the state, although I don't remember the GWh totals.
So could renewable energy sources. Nuclear
is another BIG thing. That's what the government
wants. BIG things. Lets try a whole bunch of
small things. Distributed diverse power sources.
Much better for the economy - though possibly not
good for Bush's friends. Much safer, much better
environmentally.
There was an old saying, which I repeat knowing it is going to get me modded down, to the effect that more people in the United States have died in Ted Kennedy's car than have died as an result of American nuclear power plants. For those on the left, substitute Iraq for Teddy's car and don't be offended.
It points out a perception problem: people simply fear the idea of a controlled nuclear reaction, despite empirical evidence that it is safer and less environmentally damaging than conventional sources of power. The probability of a mushroom cloud blossoming over the power station or a Chernobyl-style vessel breach is very low in a western reactor today, yet people feat this much more than they fear the thousands of invisible lung cancer, asthma, and contamination injuries and deaths caused by the fossil fuel plants.
Unfortunately, the factoring of probabilities is not something societies tend to do well. In America, fear of anthrax attack, fear of SARS, fear of the flu shot shortage are all excellent examples of this phenomena.
In France, an effort by the government to educate people about the real dangers to health means nuclear power is seen more favorably, especially by the left. Although EU pressure threatens to change this.
1) We can recycle the nuclear waste we have. Yes, it is possible. What we essentially do is re-enrich and purify it. The problem with this is that it is that it is the same process used to create weapons grade material. I think that is the only reason why it is not done. If we start refining the waste, the amount of toxic material left over shrinks rapidly to less than 1% of the volume.
2) Nuclear power supplies about 20% of the total power generated in the US. There is a lot of uranium and plutonium in the world. We have enough in order to supply it. Epsecially if we start re-enrichment of the waste.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Personally, I think that we need to start getting a more balanced policy. That would include not only nukes, but more alternative as well as money to research on energy storage. Sadly, over the last few years, the US admin cut a lot of alternative research and has invested in oil all the way.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We will return to nuclear power, but to see what it will look like when we do, go to this site on Z-pinch and Wikipedia's article on Inertial fusion energy".
UK Laptops
They say thay nuclear will wean the country off of foreign oil needs. First, we have 3 major uses of oil. Electrical, Industrial, and Automotive(or transportation). Each of these three actually uses about 1/3rd of the oil we get every day. We need oil for 2/3rds of those requirements (it would be a sad day when your car, running windows, crashes and has a meltdown at the same time). Although to say that electricity is 1/3 and make it sound like a small number is a farce in it self. If we do cut 1/3 by switching to nuclear, we will greatly reduce our dependence, but we will still require foreign oil for everything else. The other problem lies in the public's fear of anything that is said to be nuclear. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging had the word Nuclear removed because people would be afraid of it. Chances are that we would never get enough public support to open all the facilities up. The other problem we have is to open up a nuclear facilitiy requires a lot of funding and a long time to start making money on it. there arent a lot of places that are willing to just shell out money to open a plant because it takes quite a bit of its lifetime to start returning and that is only if there are no problems and demand is still there. We also have to recognize that there is no way to get X number of nuclear plants lisenced and approved, then pushed through construction and made operational in 5 years. They are huge projects. The last thing that must be considered, is we have no place to store waste. Until yucca mountain is approved, its not a good idea to just multiply the amount of nuclear waste we create.
If Bush would stop warmongering and shift his efforts into a real alternative energy program such as fusion research, then this would be a great idea. It would be nice to be free of being dependant on unstable countries for our life blood (oil).
So far, all we've had is a lot of lip service and a shiny hydrogen car with no viable source of fuel. We can do better.
When all else fails, run.
While it seems like a lot of the oil used by the US should go to powering our quad-processor overclocked boxes that sit under our desks, that's not actually true. I seem to recall that Roughly 50% of our electricity is actually generated by coal-fired plants.
Rather, the majority (somewhere between 60-80%) of the oil used in the US becomes gasoline for our cars, planes, &c &c.
If we're to end our dependence on foreign oil, significant changes to the US transportation infrastructure must occur first: either we go electric or we move to a hydrogen economy...both of which present even greater challenges than replacing old coal plants with new reactors. At the very least we'll need a lot more plants simply to generate the additional electricity or to free the hydrogen. Then you get into distributing said additional volts or H2 to all the cars & trucks that need it...
While we can reduce the US dependence on foreign oil slightly. It all comes down to a chicken-egg problem: no-one will buy a hydrogen or electric car until they can purchace the fuel, and no one will build the infrastructure to distribute the fuel until someone wants it. Likely the only thing that will make such a move economically feasible is when the price of gasoline becomes truly expensive...
credo quia absurdum
The cost of building nuclear power plants greatly exceeds that of fossil-fuel plants due to the safety measures required. When I researched this for a physics paper in college, building a nuclear plant cost about 3x as much as an oil plant. That cost is often left out of analyses that claim nuclear energy is cost effective compared to fossil fuels.
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? - Will Rogers
The availability of energy really isn't a problem over the long term. The problem is with all the wastes produced - byproducts of burning petroleum based products, nuclear waste from nuclear reactors, and wastes from industry as they use even more energy to process even more resources.
I get disappointed when I keep reading about science's best minds working on new ways to tap huge amounts of energy. Why the hell not concentrate on new ways to more efficiently use available energy resources, that is, do more with less. The U.S. (and Canada) are not energy efficient countries. If you visit Europe you'll see how they are getting used to making do with less. If the U.S. can not learn to do this, in 50 to 100 years they will be wallowing in one big cesspool, because the reality is that waste doesn't just disappear.
On the one hand, in a previous discussion on nuclear power, someone pointed out that most of the oil imported into the United States is used for transportation. So just building more nuclear plants isn't going to eliminate our dependence on oil.
On the other hand, plentiful electric power could be the kick-start we need to transition to the hydrogen economy /.ers seem to get all misty eyed over.
On the third hand, any new nuclear power plants are going to get wallpapered by lawsuits by "The Greens" the moment they're proposed. So it's a nonstarter from the beginning.
I think it will be interesting, over the next ten to twenty years, as we will have to close down many of our existing nuclear power plants (which are reaching the end of their design lives) and we will have to replace them with coal and oil-fired plants. [sarcasm]That will be just wonderful for pollution and our dependency on foreign oil.[/sarcasm]
I read the Wired article that poses a compelling argument for the pebble bed reactor. Summary: With these small plants you still have the waste issue, but the waste is contained in durable billiard ball-sized chunks. Much safer than conventional nuke plants because you can walk away from the plant and not suffer a meltdown. (So if you put Homer in charge the worst that's going to happen is the plant will stop producing power.) Helium is gas used to transfer the energy to turbines so no containment tower needed.
Call me a PIMBY as in: Give me free power and you can Put It in My Back Yard.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
U235 is a finite resource and we have probably enough in the USA to keep us supplied for our lifetimes, but I think different nuclear fuel and fuel cycles are needed for nuke power to be an effective and safe system.
Thorium Fuel would cut out most of the Nasty Waste products, and it has been used on an experimental basis, but more work needs to be done check out www.thoriumpower.com
Argonne National Labs had the EBR II reactor for processing waste but it was shut down after proving that it could process waste in decent quantity.
Accelerator Driven Systems are a nice idea, but again, more research is needed.
What must happen for Nuke power to be an alternative here in the US is a focus on not what is cheap, but what is safe and clean long term. That is the main strategic issue.
We need better solar energy collection. Why re-invent the wheel? We do not really need another fusion generating source in this solar system. We need to figure out how to harness all that wasted energy that is being sent out to all those other stars. I've heard that the sun puts out enough energy in 1 sec to power our whole civilization for thousands of years. We just need to figure out how to harness that damned energy without a huge solar panel. We need to develop the tech to gather that energy. Think some type of energy funneling field. IF we could send out a constellation of sat. that redirect all the solar energy in a given area to a more compact usable form, we wouldn't need anything else.
O.k. say Fossil Fuels will get use 50 years. Say tradional nuclear will get us and additional 120 years. Don't you think with 170 years that we might be able to build a space based power source of some sort?
The sad thing about Nuclear (or wind, solar, etc) alternatives is that they only can work as alternative to electrical grid power. Much more than half of the oil used in this country powers car, trains, trucks, and planes. Another big chunk goes to providing actual heat for buildings and industrial processes.
Since the efficiency of electrical power generation is less than 50%, heat generation will almost certaintly never use electrical power. If we can get fuel cell systems to work well with hydrogen, and can efficiently use electricity to isolate hydrogen from water, then MAYBE cars and trucks could benefit from this. Jets will almost certaintly remain oil-fueled.
Thus you might be able to impact 40%-50% of the energy needs of the nation. Though obviously it doesn't really matter where you save the oil, just so long as the total consumption goes down.
The big spoilers in all this are India and China, whose energy needs are going to increase constantly over the next several decades. It doesn't matter who is the president, we're gonna have to compete for the oil, whoever controls it. Gas prices are only going to go UP.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.htm First line: "Uranium is ubiquitous on the earth. It is a metal approximately as common as tin or zinc, and it is a constituent of most rocks and even of the sea."
FYI- 4 million tons is what's economically to mine at today's uranium prices. If uranium prices double, 15 million tons of uranium become economically feasable to mine.
One important issue is nuclear waste. Why, instead of making unmanned trips to Mars and the Moon, don't people start investing in finding ways to send nuclear waste far away, cheaply?
However, I was in elementary school when Carter was elected.
The Bush reference is a tad more current/topical at the moment.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Joe Public doesn't have to benefit from the theft, oh not at all. Oil Corps get to steal oil (or to be honest, buy it really really cheap) then sell it onto the public at huge markups!
Big Profits! Big Bonuses! Happy Wall Street! Happy Oil Company Directors! Sad car driver, sad environmentalist, sad poor original owner of said oil.
heres a fact that might be interesting. In a properly running and contained nuclear plant, the nuclear plant will give off less radiation into the atmosphere than a coal or gas plant. as for nuclear waste we have plans to store it but no one will approve of it yet.
So instead of invading Mid-East countries to protect 'our oil' we'll be invading Canada, Australia, and various African countries to protect 'our uranium'.
Good thinking.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
Nucler power could wean the US off of coal and (partially) natural gas, a laudable goal, but not oil. Oil isn't used to make electricity, and nuclear power isn't used to fill up cars.
When plug in hybrids are available, nuclear will be able to mostly eliminate oil, but not before.
However, in the meantime, we should be building up our nuclear capacity so we can ditch coal/natural gas, and then when the day comes that we all have plug in hybrids, sure nuclear will partially eliminate oil.
Until then we can use bio-diesel. Please don't even mention hydrogen unless you know what you're talking about. Generating hydrogen for industrial processes (including oil refining) is a decent use for nuclear as well, but it's not going to be too useful for cars, as it takes up too much space, even whe compressed or cryogenically liquified.
60 MPH is about 26.82 m/s. Divide that by 5.4 x 10^-9s, and you get a net acceleration of around 4.97x10^9 m/s^2. Acceleration due to gravity on Earth is about 9.8 m/s^2, so you're talking the equivalent of just a little over 500 million Gs.
You would quite litterally be "all over" the interior of that Mustang.
A good paper on Sustainable Energy Policies is here
One option that was much raised in the price shock of the 1970s was to minimize energy waste. Unfortunately, that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Marc Faber, Dr Doom, warns that we could see $100 oil and this could be the setting for World War III. I've discussed some economic implications of this here
And more in the US, with fewer electrified railroads, disperse population and big thirsty SUV's.
Replace one finite, polluting resource with another? Uh, I kind of fail to see the logic there. The only way to wean the US off oil is to reduce total energy consumption. Get people in urban areas to stop driving around in assault vehicles, encourage geothermal heating, research better ways of burning fuel, etc etc. But with the current interests in the White House, that's obviously not going to happen -- as long as there's good money in burning more and more oil, it's just going to get worse. Nuclear isn't the answer.
The problem with nuclear power is that two of the major steps in the process that would make it viable are completely unknown. First, we have no idea how to re-process and re-use spent fuel rods and second, we have no idea what to do with the high-level radioactive waste. This stuff has a half-life of 25,000 thousand years. Do we really need energy so badly we're willing to generate waste that will last longer than human history? Seem like an unbelievable short-sighted thing to do. What if the Romans had done this all over the Europe... we'd hardly appreciate having to dodge their radioactive waste sites for another 50,000 years.
A far better solution would be to switch as much as possible to natural gas which burns far cleaner and is in pretty good supply in the US and then put a huge effort into really making solar and wind viable options.
We got to the moon in ten years and built a nuclear bomb from scratch in 6. Seems like we could develop hydrogen fuel cells and cheap solar/wind power if there was any real governmental/financial commitment to it.
If the nuclear people are as smart as I think they are, they'll be able to get their pebble bed reactors going in a cost-effective manner and simply undercut oil in pricing.
I think the technology is there to do it, from what I've read. The problem is the politics of it - proving to stupid Americans that it's safe. How to do that, I don't know. People are quite stubborn.
Berto
A leading environmentalist (damned if I can remember his name) views substitution of Nuclear Energy for the existing fossil fuels as the only chance to save the world from global warming.
The plan would be to create a large nuclear power capability, then use it to produce *hydrogen* which would then be used to power automobiles - byproduct of combustion = water. Naturally, the surplus of available electricity would easily deal with the need for power to heat and cool houses, run factories etc.
It seems unlikely that it could happen fast enough to solve global warming fast enough. If the permafrost starts to thaw in the norther regions for example, the decay of plant matter will release *CO2* - resulting in an increase in the pace of global warming.
And there is the problem of the *nasty* residues to solve first.
What to do, what to do?
FYI, while France has a lot of nuclear power plants (75% of the nation's electricity), Italy has none (barred by referendum), and neither does Norway (they don't accept anything dirtier than hydro power, gas turbines with CO2 removal are already looked with skepticism).
Honestly I don't know much about the situation in Japan, but in most european countries nobody wants nuclear: the people still remember Chernobyl (it was not just a "thing in the news", I had to stop eating yoghurt for a month or two); the decision-makers are well aware of the costs of nuclear power, and most countries (as Sweden or Germany) are gradually phasing it out. Even France has had a longtime stop to its nuclear program.
I'll remind that nuclear power is a source which is economically insane. The costs of maintenance, security, and especially initial investment dwarf the cheap production price. Pro-nukes will point only to the last ones, conveniently "omitting" that an investment should repay itself.
Scientific evidence has shown that, even in the best possible scenario for nuclear, which is quite unlikely to happen anyway, the economic relevance of nuclear power is "marginal at best", with payback times well in the 30-years range and final internal rate of return of 3%. Given these data it should not surprise that private companies avoid nuclear like the plague (unless someone--the state-- is contributing).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
You forgot the big one in finding a way to use nuclear energy in a portable application. Battery powered vehicles are okay if you don't need to go that many miles a day, and you can have enough down-time to recharge. The real key is fuel cell technology that can be refilled in minutes.
Bush has been pushing for nuclear energy since his 2000 campaign. In fact, his Energy Bill included pushing nuclear energy.
The poster is correct, the left is against nuclear power. Why? I don't know.
When electricity first came out, people were afraid of it... people protested it, especially when someone was electricuted, and people just plainly would not accept it. But today, electricity is a given in everyday life in most countries.
Nuclear power is no different in this case. There are those who protest it, especially when there is a "disaster" like Chernobyl... and people just won't accept it. It's new... anything new will be shot down by fear.
And, yes, nuclear fuel is limited, as is oil. The point of building nuclear plants would not be to replace oil, but to reduce our reliance on oil for energy. This technology exists (while bio-tech is still an emerging technology). If we help reduce emissions with the use of nuclear energy, we can focus more time on bio-tech and less time complaining about global warming.
IAASE (I am a safety engineer).
This is not a very good way to frame this question, because nothing is truly safe. It's not truly safe to drive to work in the morning, for example, because there's a relatively high risk that you'll be killed in an auto accident. But it's not truly safe to lie in bed either, because you could get hit by a meteorite, or more likely, suffer from health problems related to lack of exercise. Nothing is "truly safe".
A better question to ask: is the expected net cost/benefit operating nuclear plants better or worse than the expected value cost/benefit from operating conventional plants? The risks of nuclear energy include improper waste disposal and radiation release due to nuclear plant malfunctions. The risks of conventional energy include global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, increased illness due to other pollutant emissions, economic harm due to trade deficits with oil producing countries, and possibly, terrorist attacks funded by oil revenues.
The risks involved in waste disposal and plant malfunction can be mitigated - think vitrification of waste and fail-safe reactor designs. Some of the risks of conventional plants can also be mitigated - think carbon sequestration, higher efficiency plants, and increased domestic production of oil. These mitigation measures also have costs, both economic and other. The question is which option produces the required quantity of energy at the lost cost in economic and environmental terms. Safety is one of the costs.
Sean
70%+ of France's electricity comes from nuclear energy. It's perfectly safe and much cheaper and, oh yeah, better for the environment, when done properly. Anyone willing to throw Chernobyl at my face, just remember that Chernobyl was caused by human error. If only the US chose to move to nuclear energy.. The earth's lifespan would find itself prolonged.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
We need nuclear NOW, like right now, look at the rate of glaciers melting in "ice"land and at the poles and tell me shit isn't going down we need to attack this problem on all levels.
We need to pour money into solar, wind etc. NOW to reap the benefits before the end of a decade.
We need to reduce consumption NOW.
But Bush and his "base" would rather ditch kyoto and make sure oil is their choice to keep the SUVs churning. Fuck you america.
According to a small study done by my grandfather, the answer is "not fast enough". The only real choice is to drastically reduce our energy needs.
While building hundreds of nuclear plants may extend this age of massive consumption somewhat, we're still heading for nasty fall.
There are two technologies that I think will be cruicial for this to happen:
1) Micro-sized nuclear power plants like this one need to be tested and then widely deployed. They are completely safe from melt down, and incredibly cost effective. My town of 50,000 could reduce it's energy costs by about 80% by installing one.
2) Tritium-D needs to be used to replace or augment batteries in electric cars. A very small amount of Tritium-D, which is safe to use and is already used in consumer products like night sights on guns, could power an electric car for 10 - 20 years. It may not entirely replace gasoline for all operating conditions, but could take the MPG into the 100 - 200 range.
Unfortunately, neither of these will happen anytime soon. Not for the reasons listed in this story, but because doing so would take money and power from the top levels of our government, and that will not be allowed to happen.
The fact that our average car gets 15 MPG right now is attrocious. And these low MPG's are actually encouraged by the government. As evidence see the IRS code for a Section 179 deduction, which requires the vehicle to be over 6,000 Lbs, regardless of the industry the vehicle is used in. I'm a self-employed web designer / software engineer, and I used the Section 179 deduction last year. I would have much rather purchased a Hybrid Civic or Prius, but could only get the deduction by purchasing a Ford F-150 (or similarly sized gas guzzler).
Thanks for nothing politicians (wastes of skin).
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
Progress toward working fusion reactors dropped off when fission reactors went out of fashion. We need it ALL: Wind and solar on our tall buildings, fission/fusion for homes and car assist and gas for our cars and trucks. If we can get fusion to take up 50% of gas/coal powerplants we will clean up lots of air. Make electricity so cheap that is available from parking meters and electric assist cars become viable. (a teacher in AZ is working on a H2/gas car - great concept use H2 as the battery)
salvation:
1. pebble bed reactors. they don't melt down. no china syndrome, no 3 mile island, no chernobyl, no silkwood. but of course, all the nimby's who wouldn't let these things be built would apparently rather ship their children to falluja to protect oil than build a completely safe pebble bed reactor. meanwhile, china is investing heavily in this technology. so while the us wears itself down fighting islamonazi wackjobs sitting on top of their precious oil, places like china will enjoy air pollution free totally safe pebble bed reactor power. because the morons in the west don't understand the science, but know how to yell loudly and chain themselves to train tracks to prevent uranium shipments. stupid fucks.
2. biodiesel. during the last oil crisis in the late 1970s, the us started a program that culminated in algae ponds producing diesel at good yields. the program was of course trashed in the early 1990s, but the data is still there, and some scientists have even sequenced the genome of the biodiesel producing algae to increase yields. this is pure gold. remember, diesel himself demonstrated his engine running it on peanut oil. of course, we are talking about increases in air pollution here by going all gonzo for biodiesel, but emission standards and catalytic converter tech should scrub most of that.
3. fusion. always the pie in the sky. fusion is the holy grail of energy needs. but of course, as you well know, we don't have much to go on right now. however it is a fact that some genius, hopefully in this century, will forever place his name alongside the likes of einstein and newton by figuring out how to get fusion working.
boondoggles:
1. hydrogen. what BULLSHIT. i don't understand what the fucking point of hydrogen is. yes, clean emissions. but do people understand the energy conversions required to make hydrogen? what is the fucking point of turning gas or coal or sugar or ANY energy medium into hydrogen, therefore burning MORE energy and making MORE pollution, just so your car smells nice. hydrogen, if you understand the science and the costs of converting from one energy medium to another, is a laughable waste of time.
2. solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, wave, etc.: in certain locations, these things are fucking great. i had the pleasure of visiting the largest geothermal electricity plant in the world, in leyte in the philippines. it's a giant electric plant that supplies electricty as far north as manila, in the middle of the fucking rainforest (where it is always raining, btw, because of all the steam). you don't get much more environmentally friendly than that! near where i live in manhattan, they are building a turbine field in the east river to harness tidal energy. awesome! but, these sources of energy are always fringe, always tiny, always exotic. they will never be the meat and potatoes of energy needs. like solar: if you understood that problems in energy needs is more about storage and converting between energy mediums than about the actual source, you realize something like solar can never scale. put those solar panels on the roofs of homes in arizona though! feed it back to the grid: have the power plant pay you instead of vice versa! but again, not the meat and potatoes, because converting it, and storing it, and the finicky nature of the weather, means that solar will always be fringe. do the math.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nuclear power is a safe viable alternative. Most reactors in the United States are 2nd generation reactors. They still have some manually controlled safety systems, and the efficiency is actually quite low. On the other hand, today we have a set of 3rd and 3rd+ generation reactors ready for implementation, with even safer more efficient 4th generation reactors well into development. They also have a smaller footprint, resulting in reduced cost. Everything is automated, required only a small tech crew to stand by for usual maintenence. These reactors are a viable alternative to fossil fuel reactors. However, in order to meet the rising energy demand, we would have to build around 100 of these smaller reactors just to meet the expected rise in energy demand over the next decade. That means that if we want to become dependant upon nuclear energy for a bigger chunk of our energy needs, we need to start building NOW......
I'm in favor of nuclear power, but then I'm in favor of most technologies. But what we might want to consider, invest more in, etc., is the process of turning organic waste into oil: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/11 25_031125_turkeyoil.html#main
And as for the nukes, I thought I read somewhere recently that someone's invented a method for taking the hazard out of nuclear plant waste.
The biggest thing we could do today to reduce our consumption of crude oil is to use less, plain and simple. How? Hybrid-electric cars... increase fuel economy. Smarter engine that only use the number of cylinders necessary at the time. These are all real things that can be used today. A combination of hybrid-electric engines and smarter cylinder usage are coming our way in '05 models from Honda, GM, and Ford Companies, from what I have read... and this could be a short list.
Also, making our homes more energy efficient would help out in reducing other energy sources, freeing them up for other uses. Make your home use passive solar energy... use an on demand water heater, by a more efficient wash machine that will use less water and energy and it will all your dryer to do less work. I have seen many busses and government vehicles that run off of natural gas... with reduced natural gas consumption, we could have more of these vehicles.
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
In addition to the political considerations highly-moderated posters already state, nuclear power has another problem: it's not going to help the car and plane situation. According to the estimates I've read, cars and planes account for so much oil consumption that converting to nuclear power won't help as much as fewer people driving SUVs and pickups.
* Makes your car smell like McD';
* Gasoline burns much cleaner;
* Is expensive;
Most importantly:
* You'd have to deducate 500% of the U.S. territory (or something like that) to grow enough biodiesel to satisfy our energy needs.
In other words, you need a *lot* of research and development to make biodiesel viable. Research in this case would be into increasing land density, and development would be land development, to a large extent:-).
Plus, it would be kinda nice to come up with a way to make it burn cleaner, 'cause otherwise any damn moderately large town would smell like ONE BIG MCDONALDS!!
Talking about nuclear energy is all fine and good when it comes to the electrical needs of our citizenry here in the US but what about the millions of cars on the road? Don't these suck up more oil than the power companies? We won't "eliminate" - the word used in the story - our dependence on foreign energy until we find a way to reliably power the vehicles that make our way of life possible.
I'm Swedish but I have moved to Texas. I love most of this great state. But environmental responsibility is not one of its virtues.
One example is individually wrapped cheese. Why is that necessary?
Nobody in Sweden has ever seen an individually wrapped piece of cheese. And we have survived just fine, eating cheese on a daily basis. We have large blocks of cheese and a special "cheese grater" to serve the same purpose.
This is just one example, but everywhere I look, I see wasteful use of resources.
Oooh, and don't get me started on those who commute to work in a Hummer or a Ford F250.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
The political compass (http://www.politicalcompass.org/) puts me far in the lower left quadrant, pretty much adjuacent to Nelson Mandela. This puts me pretty far left of the American mainstream. I've spent most of my working life working in the environmental community.
I think a well thought out program of nuclear power development could be a part of a comprehensive energy independence program, along with conservation and development of renewable resources.
What I do oppose is a rush to nuclear power as a quick fix and as the sole solution to our problems. There are probelms of safety, decomissioning and of course disposal. However, I believe a modest, well thought out nuclear program would, while having negative aspects, be a net plus compared to practically exclusive use of fossil fuels.
Why should leftists be against nuclear power? Well, historically because it was pushed by environmentally and socially irresponsible companies. It doesn't have to be that way. Granted, nuclear power is far from perfect. It would be a bad thing for us to put all our eggs in the nuclear basket. But diversifying our energy sources would reduce the horrendous environmental impact of fossil fuels while simultaneously contribute to detoxifying our foreign policy.
In the end, the great untapped resource is of course energy conservation. Even renewables such as tidal power or biomass have undesriable enviornmental impacts. But energy conservation is not going to succeed on its own in the short term, because it involves a combination lifestyle changes that will be hard to absorb and technologies that haven't been developed yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Our entire transportation base is based on fossile fuels. From our Deisel trains to all of the automobiles and trucks in the states.
Want diesel? Keep your diesel. Just stop digging up Mideast dinosaurs to make it.
Note: for this game, you need patience, rather than good eyesight!
Anybody who thinks that getting our energy from nuclear power doesn't realize how dependent modern society is on oil. Most food is produced via the use of petrolium based pesticides. You know all those things in the stores that you buy that contain plastic? Where do you think the plastic comes from? We have an infrastructure built for cars. Unless you get a real alternative fuel source (hydrogen is not an answer as it's currently produced because it requires more energy to produce it than it returns) and convince everybody to buy new cars that use that energy source... and retrofit all the gas stations to supply the new fuel, you'll be dependent on oil for quite some time to come.
According to what I have read, the nation could probably NOT be weaned from foreign oil by a domestic nuclear energy industry. The bulk of the foreign oil that we import goes to fueling America's transportation infrastructure, not its power needs. It is a solution for the consumption of refined oil products by cars/trucks/planes/ships that is needed, not solely nuclear energy.
Oil 39%
Natural gas 24%
Coal 23%
Nuclear 8%
Hydropower 3%
Other 3%
The coal, nuclear, and hydro are almost all for electricity generation. If we got up to roughly four times as many nuclear plants as we currently have, we could stop burning coal, and we'd be up with France (see here in total energy from nuclear power.
Oil is used mostly for transportation (and feedstock for the chemical industry). Without a major breakthrough in transportation energy (hydrogen, fuel cells, batteries), nuclear can't replace oil for transportation,
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
We are still dependent because we need oil for plastic. We use plastic so much that is no small portion of our input/output of our consumer/throw away economy.
First off we can recycle a certain amount of nuclear waste in breeder reactors and gain a bit more out of the waste and along with the new fused sillica containers we can rather safely store nuclear waste underground without worry of contamination. Currently US utilities are working towards moving people to fuel cell electric at homes (pumping natural gs and then converting it to electricity is cheaper and more profitable for the Utilities then power lines. Remember you lose energy [profits] in the form of resistance over power lines. Gas can be pumped under pressure with little loss of energy). The key to any conversion is it must be profitable. If it's not profitable, no matter how altruistic an entity is, if it's not profitable, that entity will cease to exist. All those zelots out there that believe that "The Man" or "The Big Oil" types are keeping alternative fuel sources out of main stream need to take a few economic courses.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
My concern is America's dependence on oil. Scientists from all over the world say we have less than 60 years of oil left on the planet... Then what?
This reminds me of an episode of Futurama where New York shot all their garbage out into space in the early 21st century, saying "It'll return, but not in my lifetime, so it's not my problem." It returned in early year 3000. After shooting a rocket into space to "bounce" the garbage rocket into space again, Dr. Farnsworth exclaimed that it wouldn't return in his lifetime, so it wasn't his problem anymore. Sense a theme?
We (America) should immediately invest in clean energy sources like wind and solar. The prices of these sources are now extremely competitive with oil or coal burning sources. The sun and wind aren't going away any time soon.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
one of the problems we face is not nuclear safety, as nukes are tremendously safe, and it's not transportation, as that is safe too. forgetting for the moment the radical enviro-wackos, the real problem is federalism. in other words, the federal gov't is prevented from ordering states to store the waste, or from ordering states to accept transfer through their state. yucca mountain in nevada is a great site, however, if nuke waste is coming from say, california, not a problem, but if it coming from tennessee, then it has to pass through several states. each state has the right to say no. and if the feds want to build a storage facility somewhere else, states have the right to say no as well. it's that pesky constitution that y'all're so fond of.
(yes, i'm a history teacher)
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
The real point of a smart energy policy should be to reduce total consumption of oil so as to reduce green house emissions, with the nice side effect that the less a percentage of our energy needs are met by oil, the less we depend upon unreliable sources, as well as causing a slump in the oil market so that the Saudis have less money to promote their extermist form of Islam, or Iran has to build nuclear weapons, etc...
This should be done through a gradually increasing gas tax, though, and not through some centralized government energy plan that will be inefficient and rigid. As gax become more expensive other energy sources become more competitive, and the market will find some good mix based on existing technologies and some new ones which increased investement in alternate energy will have given us. This is better than a statist, one-size-fits-all energy policy.
That's exactly what the French are doing. And we've been doing this for 40 years. No way this administration is going to admit that we had one good idea. Besides, your President can't pronounce the frigging word.
Unless... Yeah, maybe changing the name would do it... What about Freedom power instead of Nucular?
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Even though I'm a Bush-voting Republican (and proud of it!) and think the French are mainly cheese-eating surrender monkeys, I'll give France one thing: they have the best nuclear power program in the world.
Unlike the US which went with several designs for nuclear reactors, none of which was quite like the other, the French bought the design for Pressurized Water Reactors from Westinghouse in the US and built 56 reactors, all of the same design and all using interchangable parts and systems. That way problems in one reactor can be fixed systemwide using the same techniques.
France gets over 75% of their power from cheap nuclear energy. Electric power in France from nuclear sources is about 3 Euro cents/kWh, which is very competitive and less than half of the US average cost for electricity.
France reprocesses used nuclear fuel to create new fuel and maximize efficiency. That produces less waste and increases overall efficiency. The French also found that it's psychologically better to say that waste is being "stocked" rather than disposed of.
I don't give France credit for much, but the way in which the French have run their nuclear program is a model for the rest of the world. France is far less dependent on foreign energy for power than most countries, and their costs are lower - and there has not been a major nuclear accident in France since the program began.
If we did something similar with more efficient breeder reactors, we could reduce pollution, reduce energy costs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Besides, we can't let the French beat us, can we?
President Carter, a nuclear engineer in the US Navy, also pronouced nucular that way.
It's a southern thing.
Kinda like pecan is "puh khan" (a yummy nut, good for pies) not "pee can" (what you piss into on a bass boat).
-gandalf23@work
You all need to read the book the End of Oil. It goes into detail about the economics of the energy supply and why nuclear energy is a non-starter in the USA, especially given our current/new president. If the poster purely wants to discuss the economics, then that's fine, but the economics are only a piece of the puzzle and not the major piece (as he/she alludes to). It's like me as a doctor saying "I know you have lung cancer and are dying, but let's talk about your sex life". Kind of missing the major issues...
It is foolish to let such decisions be made by hysteria...
1) You have to compare the hazards of nuclear power against ALL of the health hazards resulting from using coal. (including mine and air pollution) If you were to assume that we had a major disaster today and then repeated the history of nuclear power over and over (doing no better), you might still be better off than with coal.
2) More readlily available power is a key factor in making electric vehicles more cost effective.
3) If we stop burning natural gas for fixed power, then it is available for heat (instead of burining heating oil, a.k.a. diesel fuel) and becomes a better option for natural-gas powered vehicles.
4) global warming, global warming, global warming
The power debate has neglected a sane analysis of the appropriate role of nuclear power in the mix. I dont advocate plopping nuclear plants right in the middle of urban areas or doing a sloppy job of building and runnign them. I think we should be seriously considering them where appropriate.
Not to forget India. With its huge thorium reserves, India is planning big on Fast Breeder Reactors. FBR are considered even more riskier because of sodium used as a reactor coolant. http://www.barc.ernet.in/webpages/about/anu1.htm
Also note that this is a form of recycling.
Recycling is reusing matter.
The carbon emissions from biodiesel engines contribute to greenhouse warming, but the contribution is exactly balanced by carbon removed from the atmosphere to be fixed in biological form. Voila -- a closed cycle.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When looking at changing the market trend to alternative methods of energy we have to look at a couple of things. 1. in north america national policies and internatiional agreements esentially prohibit the induction of new methods of energy. 2. we're a "dreamer" culture not a "doer" culture. sure we can "say" this is what we need. let someone prove it. and 3. no one wants to invest billions of dollars in something that dosen't have a solid footing in the market. One way this can be resolved is to establish energy facilities in areas of the world that are virtually unpopulated. ie antartica, iceland, greenland, northern canada. this way in case of extreme diaster casualities are low. plus you will recieve tax breaks in "developing" (not refering to above examples)countries for bringing jobs in and keep labour costs down. then like every good business person sell the energy back to the countries that require it. create the need don't wait till we realize we need this. this is my 2 cents.
On federalizing:
Federally sponsored = inefficient; I've worked with too many goverment agencies and their contractors, to be fooled otherwise.
On Nuclear Energy:
Nucular Waste: The problem we face right now is that we have no good place to dispose nuclear waste.
Negative Conotation: Many people do not want reactors in their backyard - 3 Mile Island got a lot of bad publicity (I personally think that was very successful disaster if you can have such a thing).
IMO the core issue here may not be energy production; it's energy storage. Hydrocarbon-based fuels hold more energy than any other form of medium that we know of (eg lightweight batteries, hydrogen, ethanol (does that count as a hydrocarbon?)). All those mediums could be regenerated by adding energy to the end products, but they have limitations. They are either tricky to handle or don't hold enough energy. And up to this point, we don't have the ability to put energy into a system to generate hydrocarbon fuels easily. (And really those fuels are just mediums containing solar energy from long ago.)
However there is the possibility of at least generating CH4 via inorganic means. It's possible to take CO/CO2 from the atmosphere and generate CH4 from an industrial process; all of this could be powered via solar/hydro power. It would seem that if this was feasible, CH4 could be designated as a renewable fuel. Maybe vast amounts of CH4 could spur the faster adoption of fuel-celled cars... Maybe Halliburton and the Sierra Club may end up in a giant group hug over this... Maybe...
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I was impressed to see all sides blamed for America's dependance on foreign oil. Most people here would probably consider me a far right-winger, and yes, I would much rather see private enterprise come up with a viable energy solution- nuclear or otherwise. But I think government has a roll in funding research into the more promising alternative energy sources. The trick is not to hang our hats on any one solution. Sure, nuclear seems great now, but I'd hate to see so much focus put on that, that some far better solution is ignored. That's where a little capitalism really shines: businesses will pick the one that is most efficient, because it will carry the largest profits. A socialized system, on the other hand, has little incentive to innovate. With regards to mid-east oil, I think we can all agree that it's best to get out of that as soon as possible. However, it's also a bad idea to get out of there, and potentially destabilize the region, before we have a viable alternative in place.
It's the cost. At the moment, decomissioning a nuclear reactor when you're done with it adds a truly huge cost. It's a cost which is generally swept under the carpet in the name of profit.
Deleted
I think long term research between the Toshiba idea and Pebble Bed would be required to determine which one is better, if that can be determined. However research into Fusion is really what is necessary for the long term. A H3 Fusion reactor would produce no significant radiation, however that would require mining the moon.
I'm pretty sure that King George will have the spelling changed to N-U-C-U-L-A-R.
only 20% of US oil imports come from persian gulf states. the rest, the majority, comes from venezuela, mexico, canada, nigeria, the north sea, etc.
when we're looking out for oil interests, when we stick our nose in the middle-east, our concern is the global economic impact of middle-east oil reserve problems (its not altruistic -- global problems can effect us in a big way). so if you're posing this question with the idea of divesting ourselves from the middle-east, the rest of the world would need to follow suit in order for us to no longer care about what happens in persian gulf states.
The obvious political hurdles are (a) the left opposes nuclear energy,
Well, the problem is where to dispose of the stuff. While "the right" likes to talk about how wonderful nuclear energy is, it doesn't have a solution either. Right-wing and centrist ideology these days wants to leave stuff to the market, but it is pretty obvious that the market hasn't provided a safe, cost-effective solution for storing and disposing of the stuff. The only reason we have nuclear energy at all is because the government assumes the risk and takes the stuff off the hands of nuclear plant operators.
When the right talks about how wonderful nuclear energy is, what it really amounts to is a massive government program to subsidize nuclear power plant operators, who would not dream of building such a risky and costly power plant out of their own pocket, and it amounts to a massive taking of private property, namely those people whose lands are devalued or affected by the nuclear waste dump (but those people are just "the little people", so "the right" doesn't care).
In any case, there you have it: the reason why nuclear energy isn't used more widely is because it simply isn't cost effective; they only reason we are using it at all is because we are ignoring some of the costliest parts of it, foremost the disposal problem.
a tyranny is even worse than an islamofascist theocracy, which at least pretends to hold it's leaders accountable (to a higher power, instead of to the people, like a democracy)... a tyranny is accountable to no one except the mad dictates of one megalomaniac who put himself in the position in the first place out of his own ego, attacks his neighbors at his whim, and has anyone killed who might challenge him
a theocracy would actually be an improvement in iraq
but a democracy, of course, would be the best
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What the heck is this (D) (R) and (I) crap? :)
How about (IDK) as in I don't care.
Anywhere Yucca Mountian is in NV because it really is not in anyones back yard. Unless your idea of your back yard is pretty expansive. A lot of nuclear fuel can be recycled or "burned" ie bombard it in a reactor until it is SUPER radioactive and has a half life measured in days or weeks and not thousands of years. Throw in vitricifacation (making glass out of it) and cermets and you have reduced the waste problem a lot. Going for more nuclear power can also reduce the stockpile of weapons grade Uranium by burning it up in reactors. Frankly Nuclear power really is one of the future power sources we need to look at. Solar should be more common place than it is. every home in the south should have a solar roof feeding back into the grid. The problem with solar is storage. It does get dark at night, and it rains and it gets cloudy. Batterys are an econightmare all that heavy metal and acids. Li costs too much and has a bad habit of going boom.
hydrogen even in liquid from is not very energy dense. So you would need HUGE tanks plus the energy cost of cooling it would be huge.
My question is why does it need to be funded by the goverment? Regulated yes, researched yes, bonds for building the plants maybe, maybe some loans but not paid for. You see there can be a middle ground. Of course the middle ground means that you have people to the right of you and too the left that hate you
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There's too many uninformed idiots and groups like greenpeace (also under the grouping of uninformed idiots) who would rout against it, using aged, outdated and unapplicable disasters like three mile and chernobyl as examples (FUD) to worry the populace. With pebble bed reactors we could have so much cheap power safely created, I just don't think it will happen. I mean... look at who's -still- president somehow. Nukular reactors are morally wrong... right Georgy? And it would mean all his oil butt buddies would suffer!! OMG NOOOOO!!!!!1111oneoneoneeleventyone China's doing it? France get's 90% of it's electical power from nuclear plants. They have for years and have never had an issue. And were supposed to be better than France..... right? ShaBot
...to get those against nuclear energy to change their position.
You simply pro-rate their energy bill, based on their distance from the power generation plant. I.E., the further away you live from the source of the energy, the more expensive your power. If you choose to protest nuclear energy and maintain that you don't want nuclear in your state...fine. Then you just pay an arm and a leg for your power.
I don't want to hear any people in Washington State bitching about nuclear power...especially people in Seattle. A large portion of their power comes from the Energy Northwest plant here in Tri-Cities. If they are really against nuclear power, then they should disconnect from the power grid and use solar.
...waste product that cannot be controlled and is simply released into the atmosphere?
you're making it yourself too simple, my friend. although the world's (by far) largest producer of carbon dioxine has chosen to ignore it, the world's been busy controlling CO2 output.
either way, the world will be different by 2020: it has turned into a desert, or it is radioactively polluted.
so let's hope the "new" US administration will help fighting the greenhouse effect.
like they did before.
oh, wait...
1) What will we do with the waste?
It should be reused for fuel. This allows a reactor to get more energy out of less nuclear material, resulting in both reduced cost and waste. The only reason why the US doesn't do this, is the concern over terrorists or spies obtaining bomb-grade materials.
You still end up with waste. See: thermodinamics
2) 100years a long time but it's still finite. If it took 30 years to do a transiton you would only have 30 years before you would need to do the next one. And even less when you take into act of increasing energy needs over time. See: China/India
We could only succed in doing this if we made a real effort to reduce our power consumption to begin with.
For starters, how many LED clocks do you really need in the house?
And how many appliances would we live with if they didn't have warm-start circuitry to allow for a quicker power up?
Read any article on going off grid and these are two major hurdles. Typically you have to replace most of your appliances before you can get the power consumption down to a realistic level.
"Let's all just switch from oil to 'X'..."
There really aren't any values for 'X' that are going to let western society continue living in the style to which we've become accustomed.
Here's something to think about:
Can we adapt nuclear power to transportation (planes, trains, automobiles), heating (electric heat I guess), and the production of pesticides, plastics, and petrochemicals?
Right now, we use oil for all of these things. So, we might use nuclear to keep the lights on and our houses warm... but we need to keep looking for other ways to get things we now get from oil.
Or: We get used to the idea that a change away from oil is going to mean a change in our lifestyles....
Yes, nuclear energy (fission/fusion) and a strong, dedicated program to get the systems online would go far to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels for electrical generation. As I see it and experience it, we, in the US, do not have people who have enough of a strong, base education to operate and maintain these technological beasts correctly. You have to have a college-level education to understand these items and the vast majority of workers out there, even though they may have graduated from High School, can't understand anything above the fifth grade level in complexity. The employers do not want to pay for qualified employees because the few that really understand the material can command a high salary, and as we all know, that money is needed to pay the CEO, but I digress. The waste issue is, of course, a NIMBY. So is the waste from a fossil fuel plant a NIMBY (power plant, car, etc.). Until the US decides to do this and come up with a comprehensive, sound timetable to do this and one based on sound engineering principles and not politically motivated deirriere-bussing, this will never happen.
why can the white man do,
and the other not....??
At least the militants will have less trouble getting sufficient quantities in your country.
If this is not irony, nothing is.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Problem: Nobody wants to have one anywhere near them, and there's the problem of the waste...
Problem: birds get killed around them because they don't recognize the danger. The result is that this is one of the least favorite possibilities of the animal lovers. If the wind turbines are placed off the coast, then people complain that the warning lights on the turbines ruin the view of the ocean at night.
Problem: Many environmentalists insist that this method of power generation is a hazard to marine animals. This option also gets complaints about any warning lights.
Problem: Some are afraid that the microwaves involved will cook them, if the beams were aimed wrong.
Obviously, this is not a complete list, nor does it provide all of the arguments against the alternative.
There are many more ideas that would help to alleviate the need for oil (foreign and domestic), but for each one, there are many who scream "NIMBY!" out of fear, paranoia, or just because they think that the initial costs would be prohibitive.
In order to be able to actually do something, though, we'll have to take the risk of offending someone. Everything has its price.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Nuclear power certainaly has it's place in the menu of power choices for North America but it can never replace oil. All those extenstion cords would get in the way on the freeway.
My primary energy concern right now is that oil is our life blood. Dry up our supply of oil and we will die. Think I'm kidding? I'm not. Without oil, agriculture, transportation, and manufacturing all grind to a halt. Even a minor bump in the supplies could have disasterous effects on our economy and our way of life. Currently it is impossible for us to produce enough of our own oil to sustain us. To make matters worse, the flow of oil into our country is controlled by only a few entities that don't necessarily have our best interests at heart (their job is to leech just enough cash from us so that they don't hurt the beast the feeds them). Finally, there are only a handfull of major ports where all of this oil enters our country, making these ports easy and attractive targets for terrorsts and others who wish us ill.
We need liquid energy to ensure transportation, agriculture and other parts of our economy can function. It has to be liquid because we can not retro-fit fast enough for any other kind to work. Germany was faced with a similar situation in WWII and turned to the manufacture of "synthetic" fuels to augment their meger oil reserves. Of course we bombed the heck out of those syn-plants too. But the point is, that the technology existed back in WWII and it has gone a long ways since then. It can be done. These fuels inlculde things like Bio-diesel, ethanol, methanol, cellulose ethanol and others. In many cases they can be mixed with petro and in other cases, they can be engineered to stand alone. The argument against them has traditionally been that they are all more expensive to produce than oil - but that is less true now and if we build large plants, the economy of scale can make them completely justifiable.
My personal opinion is that we would have a safer, more secure nation if we started developing and using this technology so that we could attain energy independance from outside sources. It would also strengthen our economy by revitalizing agriculture (which would grow the crops to make the fuel). If you think that this can't be done, think again. Many cars produced today are E85 compatible. All gasoline sold in Minnesota is currently required to conatin a minimum of 10% ethanol and that number is goint to be increased to 20% in the not too distant future. Minnesota; an oil-less state is pretty close to already producing 10% of it's energy "inhouse"! There is plenty of fallow land that can be used to produce crops (perhaps genettically engineered) for fuel.
I'm not a nuclear advocate but agree that it has it's place in our society. The big problem I see with it is as much political as it is technical. The disposal of high level nuclear waste does not have a perfect solution. Technically, Yucca mountain may be viable but it still has a lot of opposition and some of those who oppose it have some valid points. I'd like to see something practical done with some of that "waste." Perhaps tiny pieces of it could be encapsulated in glass and placed in the roadways to allow more accurate vehicle positioning using a geiger-counter to detect the pellets in the center of the road? Maybe some of it could be used to build really strong x-ray machines that are used to x-ray cargo containers as the enter the country? There has to be some safe, technological solutions to use some of this stuff!
James Lovelock, a leading British environmentalist, recently wrote a scientific paper extoling the virtues of nuclear power as one of the only curbs to rampant fossil fuel usage.
This was further backed up by Hugh Montefiore quitting (or rather pushed from!) the board of FoE after coming out in favour of nuclear power.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1325Why not build a few solar towers instead? Anywhere in those hot southern barren parts of the US... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Tower/
:S
I have seen calculations on a dutch tv documentary that show such structures as quite viable. The guy said something like: if you cover 10% of the surface of the Sahara with these things you'd generate enough energy to amply supply the entire globe with. Not sure how accurate that was tho..
Probably a long shot in Bush Country anyway
For a more reasoned, thoughtful approach to the entire "energy policy" issue, 99% of Slashdot readers could do little better than reading http://oilendgame.org/
It's expressed by the saying - "fusion power is 20 years away - and always will be". We just don't have the technology to build fusion power plants, and won't for the immediate future... but we're experiencing problems related to conventional plants NOW.
Umm, won't Greenpeace, et al, say the same thing about fusion plants that they say about fission plants? They both involve that scary radiation stuff.
Sean
See Dictionary: Thermodynamics
The OLD RIGHT opposes federalizing it.
The new right are a bunch of religious fucknuts passing more legislation and federal laws than the left.
To qoute what someone had put out before:i d=04/10/0 4/1950217&tid=134
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?s
"A particle of anti-matter colliding with its matter counterpart will produce an annihilation of 100% efficiency. And yes, there will be resulting gamma-ray photons. But this reaction will not produce radioactive materials, like a nuclear fission reaction would.
And the article didn't mention the chief problem with storing anti-matter. You can't allow it to touch anything. At all. It has to be in a vacuum container and make no contact with the edges. Otherwise, you'll get an explosion.
Damien Sorresso"
So my question is what would happen if you used antimatter to get rid of the waste?
Even if we do convert to a nuclear based power structure, it's only a matter of time before we run out of uranium. As long as we're dependant upon some non-renewable energy source it's just a matter of time before energy production peaks and we're no longer able to obtain the fuel we need for all of our everyday things, not the least of them being the production and transportation of food.
The only solution really is to either develop an energy infrastructure which does not rely on oil, or some other non-renewable energy source. Any thing else is just delaying the inevitible collapse, when resources are no longer relatively cheap and freely available.
I advise everyone to read over this website if they get a free moment, it'll be well worth your time http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
you can also use thorium or plutonium in nucler reactors. Plutonium can be made from U238 fairly easily.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Is was not the best choice. It is prone to Earthquakes. The absolute best location in America, in terms of science and engineering, was west texas, then lousianna, and finally Nevada (personally, I always thought that locations in Utah should have been looked at). It was one of the 3 locations that was being looked at, but W. selected Nevada instead. Shocker.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All reactors except the proposed accelerator based subcritical reactors are precisely critical during normal operation. Criticality is the point at which one fission causes exactly one more fission. This is necessary to keep the reaction going. A bomb is supercritical, and you don't want your reactor to be supercritical except when you are bringing it up to full power, and even then it is just barely supercritical. The reactors he was refering to use a subcritical nuclear assembly fed by a particle accelerator. Thus you have the safety measure that if you shut off the accelerator, the reactor naturally shuts itself off.
Here's something the mass media conveniently was distracted from reporting.
U.S. oil companies' profits for the first nine months of this year have increased by more than 35 percent over last year, with the bulk of those profits coming from charges for domestic oil and gas refining, not from higher crude oil prices, consumer groups say.
...
For all but the wealthiest 20 percent of American families, rising petroleum prices have eaten up the entire Bush Administration tax cut.
So even if Iraq was for oil, why would the commoners benefit and not our feudal^H^H^H^H^H^Hcorporate lords?
Those in power in America are the most keen to keep the status quo or even push us backwards in some areas. If anyone is going to break from coal/oil it will be developing countries that don't have an overwhelming negative stigma towards nuclear power, and America won't change until it realizes it's behind.
Don't believe the tax cut part? Here's some fun math: Let's compare our budget between $1/gallon and $2/gallon. For the average mileage for a car a year we'll use the used car standard of 15,000. For mileage, let's use 25 mpg to get us 600 gallons. That's $600 a year 4 years ago, vs. $1200 this year. Have two cars? Double that. Have an SUV? Well, let's be generous at 15 mpg and get $1000 vs $2000 each. And this is just gas for your own cars, not heating oil, natural gas, or price inflation/profit loss in services that depend on any of the three.
If you want to calculate your specific amount, take the miles you think you drive in one year and divided by your estimate of your miles per gallon. That number will be the cost of your gas if it were $1/gallon. Double it to get this years amount.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
The public interest must be #1.
I would support widespread nuclear energy if the following conditions were met:
- Plants would be run by a bond-secured government authority that was insulated from congressional meddling and the energy interests
- Naval engineers establish a nuke school for operators with the same saftey fanaticism that the US Navy employs (with a top-notch saftey record)
This won't happen anytime soon, of course, but we can all dream.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Anyone who advocates doing ANY kind of industrial operation in space needs to figure out a way it can be made profitable. There is simply NO WAY that you can put a nuclear plant in orbit and have it produce AFFORDABLE energy.
Besides, opponents of nuclear energy get hot and bothered about sending up tiny reactors aboard spacecraft that aren't even going to stay in orbit! How will you ever get the public to accept a reactor that eventually will need to be deorbited?
Sean
Canada (especially Quebec) generates hydroelectric power cheap - so cheap they sell some to US.
While this doesn't solve the gas problem for cars or planes, why don't we close down the oil burning plants and go hydroelectric for generating our home electricity?
What kind of dogmatic magic wand makes hydro power innefective when you cross a fronteer to the US??? Quebec is doing FINE with it.
And if I'm wrong about America's ability to use hydro power, why don't we buy from Canada/Quebec who have more than enough? We have a free trade agreement, right?
And once we close down the heavily subventionned, highly polluting, obsolete oil and charcoal plants we'll be better off. While there is not much of an electric car right now, *There will be more oil left for the cars* if we go hydroelectric. With a side order of solar/eolian for deserts.
Such a nice, straightforward, environnementally sound plan! (except for flooding some native lands and making deserts noisy with eolian power, of course)
Oh, rats. Bush got elected. He's gonna invade another oil country instead! Venezuela looks good; let's claim they have WMD and ties to Bin Laden!
History books will not be kind to Bush when global warming strikes - oh, I forgot. Under Bush you CAN'T teach global warming so the next generation will not know until it hits them hard. Rats!
Makes me proud to be Canadian and NOT an American!
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
You still end up with waste. See: thermodinamics
1. That's "thermodynamics".
2. There's nothing in thermodynamics that precludes a 100% conversion into energetic particles. For example, antimatter achieves this without violating any physical laws.
3. The amount of waste would be a small percentage of the starting amount. So for every *ton* of fuel (that's one HELL of a lot of energy!), you'd end up with a few dozen kilograms of stuff left. Of the remaining "waste", a large portion of it would be stable materials.
100years a long time but it's still finite. If it took 30 years to do a transiton you would only have 30 years before you would need to do the next one.
1. You're making an assumption based on time, not quantity. I said that we'd have 100 years if ALL power was switched over today. If it takes a transition (which it will), you'll have an extended life time.
2, You ignored my point about reprocessing and other fission methods. Reprocessing fuel leads to MORE energy than was originally extracted from the Uranium, and fission plants can be built from materials such as Thorium and Radium.
3. Nuclear materials can be replenished from elsewhere in the solar system. It is the only fuel we currently use of which this is true.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What does political inclination have to do with a cost benefit analysis and why the restrictive,'government run'? There is nothing the government can do that an independent standards organization can't do just as well. The role of government is in setting regulations for safety. The standards organization would establish a uniform methedology for compliance. Industry would be free to compete in this framework.
Unlike coal, nuclear power does not release greenhouse gasses, mercury, and radioactivive products (except accidently).
The historical problem with nuclear power is what to do with waste. We live in a big country. There is plenty of space for storage. Some of the waste products of current nuclear tech last a long time. However, if they are stored from the get-go wtith the idea that they will be reprocessed or worst case, repackaged later, as the technology improves then it's difficult to argue that the waste is a problem.
If there is to be government ownership, perhaps a scheme similar to the interstate highway system would work. Again, some study is in order.
Study now and be prepared, just in case the decision and deployment have to be made on short notice.
Who collects the money for those $50 barrels of oil? Your mistake is the "we," because the oil mutlinationals don't give a damn about you, only their enormously engorged profit margins.
What I love about righties is their tendancy to identify with powerful groups that consider them to be little more than dirt.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Isn't the commonly quoted problem with global warming the flooding from the icecaps? Warmer temperatures can carry more moisture, you'd have more precipitation.
I figure fission technology is perfectly acceptable given that we probably still have at least 50 years until "next generation" power generators come along (and online). I really don't like coal power.
I don't read AC A human right
The problem with Nuclear Power is that Nuke stations put out a given level of power, and don't really like to change their output. In the UK the famout example is that when there is a commercial break in "Coronation Street" the total electricity demand in the UK shoots up as people switch on their kettles all at the same time. fossil plants on the other hand can easily ramp up and down the levels of power they create. So in the UK we tend to have most of the power supplied by big Nuclear plants like Seizewell B which is a pretty new high tech PWR (Pressurised Water Reactor) plant. In addition to that we have a lot of older bigger fossil plants. These are constantly running and putting out a fair amount of power to top up the capacity (we don'thave enough nucelar) but also they can ramp up and down for demand. Then we have small modern fossil plants - such as a certain plant in Yorkshire. This is a CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) station - it basically is a Jet Engine running off gas turning the generator - but the exhaust from the jet is also used to make steam which also drives the generator - imrproving efficincey. This station can ramp up and down as often as required, and a lot of the time might not even be running. The next level down is little diesel generators that are scattered round the country. The advantage of this setup is obvious - cheap consistent power from Nuclear, with the ability to meet demand spikes quickly when they arise. Also, if the grid ever went down completely, the diesle generators can start without geid power, the CCGT's can use that power to come up, and the nuclears can start from that. So nuclear on it's own is not a solution.
Why move to a drastically different energy source when doing so will probably require the changing of a vast amount of infrastructure and markets? People's day-to-day lives will also probably have to change. We can spare ourselves all of this bother.
We've already got one of the best energy sources available in the world: the US military.
That's right: just take over small, oil-rich countries! Now that the gloves are off, the American Empire can just go ahead and pluck the oil-sources like ripened fruit. Who's going to stop us? Who wants a "real" (or, "hot") war with the USSA?
Granted, this strategy isn't really viable in the long-term. However, as the Emperor Nero once wisely said, "When I am dead, let the world be consumed by fire!"
Stealing something is always better for "the economy" than actually working for it. So, let us Americans stand with heads held high and make the world an offer it can't refuse: we'll trade you Democracy for Oil. If you don't want to do business on these lines, then you're against Democracy, and thus a threat.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that the ROTW (rest of the world) understands that America is the greatest country in the world. Who deserves the oil more? Iraq or the USSA? Think about it.
"Sic transeunt omnia."
- "How much energy is required to replace our fossil fuel consumption?
- Depends on the definition of "fossil fuel consumption". It would take around 200 GW plus losses to replace the US consumption of petroleum-based motor fuel, according to my analysis. (Yes, I know, the EIA has broken the important links. Worse, they've split the data which used to be on one page over several.)
- What are the initial costs of the program, and just how cheap could the electricity be?
- The problem comes in two parts, generating the power from nuclear and then transforming it to something which can be put aboard a vehicle. As a quick BOTE calculation, if you need 250 GW of generation at $1110/KW, that's $275 billion dollars. The most efficient way of getting it aboard vehicles is to use batteries. Add 20 KWH of batteries for 100 million vehicles at $100/KWH and I get an additional $200 billion. Over ten years that would be about $50 billion per year.
- How expensive would it be for our industries to convert?
- Industries which need oil as a chemical feedstock would be largely impractical to convert to non-fossil, though non-petroleum is much easier. Industries which simply consume electricity would require no conversion. Industries which use process heat would pay a lot more if they used electricity instead, or perhaps less if they were close to a nuclear plant and could get spent steam.
- How expensive for home and auto conversions?
- It's not going to be practical to convert most cars; they will be replaced. Neither are you going to convert a home to nuclear. Converting to electric is cheap, converting natural gas appliances to hydrogen would also be cheap if it could be made safe enough (which I doubt). Cost of energy would be much higher; it would be cheaper to re-insulate, change building codes and use e.g. solar water heaters.
- How much of this cost should be picked up by the government?
- Do you mean paid out of increased taxes or added to the deficit? (The question betrays stupidity.)
- Bottom line: is nuclear power cheaper than our current oil-driven middle-east policy, with all of its blowback?
- When we could do it for $100 billion/year or less over 10 years? Absolutely.
Your questions are easy. We could easily set up a bunch of thorium-breeder reactors and start them with our surplus fissionables from decommissioned nuclear weapons, and the fission products (the real "nuclear waste") needs to be isolated for only a few thousand years, save for a few troublesome isotopes. It's not our chemists and engineers who have trouble with this, it's the politicians and activists.Sustainability and energy independence essay
It is a political problem, but not a stupid one. Breeder reactors produce an abundance of weapons-grade materials. If the world started counting on them for power, those who would like to do us harm would have thousands of easy targets from which to steal what they need to wipe out cities.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
As to our energy demands, if we continue as we have in the past and are now, we MUST switch to nuclear energy, or face destroying the environment with the pollution from fossil fuels. It's as simple as that.
About the Bush re-election: America is going down. Religious morons in the hick states are multiplying like rats. In 50 years the US will be a 3rd world country. If I weren't rooted here I would consider Canada or Italy.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Thing is, most people have irrational fears of nuclear power. I am quite frankly amazed that Finnish people seem to support nuclear power - this level of rational thinking would be unheard-of in the States. It's really quite simple: 1) Chernobyl-like reactor designs have never been used outside Soviet Union (and nobody in their sane minds would build them like that anymore), and 2) Three Mile Island didn't cause one single death.
Coal and oil power plants shoot up hundreds of tons of particulate matter into the sky every year, and some of that is radioactive, too. I'd much rather deal with easily containable highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants than the output from fossil fuel burning plants which is impossible to contain.
Using oil for electricity generation supports terrorists, no matter how many times you try to change the regime - Middle East pretty much proved this already. Uranium does not. The biggest producers of uranium are Canada, USA, Australia and France.
Nuclear energy. It's the logical choice. Make Spock proud.
As much as some people hate to hear it, we're not fighting in the Middle East because of oil. We're there because we're fighting Islamofascism.
What a crock of shit!
First the term Islamofascim is wrong. You have not defined what it is, nor who qualifies for it. It also denigrates 1.2 billion people by maligning their faith and associating it with Fascism.
Second, can you tell me what did Saddam had to do with Islam at all? He was even a tool for the USA to fight Iran, who was run by Islamic extremists after the 1979 revolution.
As for oil, it is one of the main reasons the USA is there, but not the only one. I don't see the USA invading North Korea or Cuba? Your Dubya is from Texas, and heavily invested in oil. Haliburton is also invested in oil. Oil companies are back in Libya too!
Did you vote for Bush too? Figures ... only dumb people would. Sad to see half of the USA doing that.
http://www.sunmachine.de/
In the prototype stage at the moment. The production systems should compete very favourably in cost terms with photovoltaic cells.
Deleted
By that argument, any energy source in finite.
And yes, you still end up with waste, but much, much less of it. And even the waste can be somewhat useful. Many forms of nuclear waste still produce large quantities of heat, which can be used to extract energy for thousands of years.
A mix of nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, tidal and biofuel energy sources can completely solve the world's energy problems for pretty much the rest of human existance. The only real hurdles are economic (using coal/oil is cheap and effective, verses huge investment in developing new sources) and policital.
=Smidge=
- Nuclear fusion benefits:
- It uses hydrogen as fuel, the most abundant material in the universe. It can also use Helium 3, which is very rare on the Earth, but plentiful on the moon.
- It is not a self sustaining reaction, unlike fission, and therefore safer. (Although, to be fair, modern nuclear fission plants are very safe.)
- It produces no significant radioactive byproducts. (Tritium, a byproduct in some approaches to fusion, is radioactive, but it is not produced in any significant quantity. Also, it can be reused as fuel, so it would not require disposal.)
The down side is that nobody has been able to get a sustainable fusion reaction yet. Still, some new approaches seem like they may be able to reach that goal, and so fusion may be only a short way off.Drop the price of electricity enough, and it becomes economical to use it to power vehicles. Especially in the cities with lower driving speeds, shorter total distance,
Also, coal would become dirt cheap, and coal can be processed to make natural gas or even gasoline with the proper processes. The methodolgy also keeps alot of the contaminates out of the atmosphere from what I've heard.
I don't read AC A human right
Nuclear, oil, coal... you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Well, unless you're using biodiesel or solar power...
We'd let them rot in their own filth like the rest of Africa. They only have influence because of the oil and the money it generates.
There are recycling methods for the spent fuel rod assemblies. There's still going to be a significant amount of waste left over, but at least it will reduce the amount of waste that needs to be processed and burried. The French have been recycling portions of their nuclear waste for years. That practice has been outlawed in the USA since the Carter administration to keep the waste away from "the terrorists".
Yucca Mountain is not the end-all, save-all solution. There is already such a huge backlog of waste to be send down there that the current massive tunnel system will be filled up all the waste generated by the year 2013. As soon as work finishes on Yucca Mtn, they're going to have to start drilling another complex elsewhere.
Some of the "newer", safer reactors, such as the Pebble Bed type the Chinese are starting to use, actually produce far less waste than the 1960s style reactors used in the USA. If we update our reactors, we will produce less waste. But then we're still going to have to find a resting place for the old reactors.
Nuclear might be our only hope for gigawatt-scale power production by the end of the century. At the very least it's going to employ many engineers to work on solutions to these problems.
Even though I don't think you have to apologize that much when giving us credit, I thank you for the praise anyway :)
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
How much of our oil consumption is used in the form of gasoline, or in the manufacturing of petro-chemical-based plastics and other industrial chemicals? And the asphault in our roads, etc.
You see-- even if we were to be able to produce all the energy we need in the US today (in the form of Hydrogen), we would still have all the cars on the road that we have today guzzling not H2 but C8H18 and similar chemicals in the form of gasoline.
And oil is not just a source of energy. It is also a source of many many other industrial chemicals. So what about those?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'd like to see more money spent on energy saving designs and technology. For example, a LOT of energy is lost transmitting power over power lines. We should actively look at ways to reduce some of this loss. We need to encourage energy saving designs through coporate tax rebates or reductions. We are a very innovative people. We need to leverage that. Bottom line, our energy needs are going to grow. We need to start by reducing the rate of growth and find alternate sources of energy.
Fortunately, there is a third choice: just use less energy and produce neither emissions nor nuclear waste.
1. Start a war for oil.
2. Pass savings to customer.
3. Profit!
Winning The Oil End Game is a newly released, 400ish page technical manifesto for getting America completely off oil in twenty years.
This is not a lightweight document. The previous book by these authors, Small Is Profitable was The Economist's Book of the Year in 2003, and this book has heavy, heavy political and scientific credibility. The foreword is by George Shultz.
What's the plan? Roughly:
1> Double the average efficiency of the current vehicle fleet over twenty years, using established technologies like hybrid power trains, and new technologies like lightweight car bodies.
2> Replace the fuel supply, half-biodiesel, half hydrogen. Hydrogen initially to be made from natural gas, and transitioning over to renewable resource hydrogen, mainly from wind.
The entire book is available for download. I suggest you read it, and actually take a look at the numbers, before casually suggesting that the plan won't work.
They're RMI. They've been right about every major innovation in the energy sector for about thirty years, as far as I can tell. They know which way the wind blows, and their technical and scientific approaches are impeccable. This isn't some eco-hippie dream, this is a plan. America can get out of the Middle East completely by 2025 and make Arab Power a thing of the past.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Every time I see an argument like this I want to shoot someone. "We shouldn't use X, it's a finite resource! We should use wave or wind or solar power!"
As if those aren't also finite resources, powered by the sun / the moon's / earth's motion. Yeah, they'll keep going for a long time sure. Coal and oil were going to last forever when we first started using them too -- long enough we wouldn't need to worry.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
A safer, better type of nuclear reactor design, one cooled by liquid metal, was covered in the recent issue of American Scientist (the journal of Sigma Xi). Such a design could also burn the type of nuclear waste destined for Yucca Mountain.
An abstract of the article is here.
Although accidents could be a serious problems (along with terrorism), the real problem is waste disposal, and Europe doesn't have a good solution there either.
Right now, everybody is just keeping the stuff in more or less temporary holding facilities. And if you take into account the costs and resources required to maintain that kind of storage over decades and centuries, nuclear energy starts looking a lot less attractive. But we just allow nuclear power plants to pretend those costs don't exist, and in the long run, the tax payer has to shoulder them.
There have been 30 years since this country cried about high costs for fossil fuels. "The End" has always been coming. Why now switch from short-term gains to long-term solutions?
I think the greater burden on our country for foreign oil dependence is with our gas consumption, i.e. cars. Nuclear power wouldn't eliminate this in the way that fuel cells would. The most that Nuclear energy would do would be the elimination of coal burning plants, which would yes be great for our air (real clean skies), but then there's the question of nuclear waste disposal.
A friend of mine sent me this link that talks about the near-term problem (read the next 3-4 years away) of the world reaching Peak Oil. Peak Oil is where we have reached the peak of all oil in the world, soon after the amount of oil being pulled out of the ground will begin to diminish.
You may say "So what, we're moving away from gas as a transportation mechanism". But the problem with that is that most of the alternatives rely on Natural resources like Natural Gas, Coal, etc. that are also very finite. We don't have anything in place that can easily replace gas or finite-resource based fuel easily, inexpensively, or quickly.
For more on this I recommend you check out this site: http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ . Once I started thinking about the problem it truly is frightening, everything we do relies on oil in some way or another (transportation, plastics, food delivery, electricity, etc.).
The answer isn't one thing (like nuclear) but many things. We should not have all our eggs in one basket (oil). We should be pursuing many alternatives. You know them: wind, solar, nuclear, tidal, etc. They should all be funded and give a good chance.
Yes, politics is part of it. Bush and team have no imagination.
Nuclear power is VERY VERY VERY EXPENSIVE. The only reason the nuclear industry exists at all is massive, massive government subsidies to the power industry.
Yucca Mountain? Taxpayer dollars at work, my friend.
Nuclear power can't pay it's own way in the world. That's why they stopped building reactors about twenty years ago. They're just too expensive to run relative to other energy sources.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Nuclear technology will not lessen our dependence on foreign oil because nuclear and oil techs are used for different types of energy requirements.
Nuclear tech is currently used for generating heat which turns turbines - to create electricity. Most electricity is created from coal and hydro, not oil.
Oil tech is currently used to create explosions which move pistons - to create motion. Most motion is created from gasoline and diesel fuels derived from oil.
The American Way of Life is dependent on the (relatively) cheap energy oil provides. It sustains suburbia and is responsible for the transit of goods via shipping and people via automobiles and airplanes. There are no nuclear alternatives to this fact.
Scientists warn that demand will soon exceed oil supplies. It is important that we find solutions to fill these demands. Synthetic fuels that may be used in place of distilled light sweet crude is much more important than nuclear tech which is better for some things least of which is autos, ships and airplanes.
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Sindri Traustason.
1. Life of Container.
Something called "Weathering" occurs not only on Rocks, but non-Rocks also.
2. The NewClear Waste.
Just filter out the waste, then you NewClear Material in one 'Pile', and raw materials in the other.
Administrative Note: The logistics of the above nightmare were discussed back in the early 1970's.
A: Only if they can put it in SUVs (in other words: No). Next question.
Nathan's blog
Those technologies may be 'cleaner' (in some sense), but each have many problems for mass deployment, lets choose three problems for example:
1- Power density is low
2- Dependent on climate
3- Some are not so 'green'
Wind and Solar require huge ammounts of terrain to produce a usable ammount of energy. The Power density is not very good (in the same surface area, a nuclear power plant can produce much more energy and provide storage and processing facilities for the residue)
Hidro requires dams (which tend to destroy the envirnment by the way), and most importantly, they require huge ammounts of water.
Geo-thermal also requires much water and produces some residue that might be toxic.
Hidro, Wind and Solar all tend to destroy the environment when deployed in large scale, and all depend on the weather for production (hidro uses dams as buffers to compensate water flow).
You say that "The only thing standing in solar's way is the large up-front cost"
I almost agree with you, that's one of the reasons, but solar systems tend to deteriorate very fast (5-10 years on the average) and need replacement.
If you take in consideration that you usually need more energy to manufacture solar cells than the energy they provide in their lifetime, they are not so 'green', although that may change in the future with organic solar cells.
Its long past time to cut ties with our dependance on oil (espcially oil that is supplied elsewhere from the contentional US).
Nuclear is just cleaner and cheaper then oil, and if done properly, safer.
Will it last forever, no of course not, but a few more generations of power will give us time to figure out a permanent solution to the energy needs of the country.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
ask some iraqi females
they would agree with me
you apparently have never heard of uday hussein and his serial sadistic raping sprees
i said theocracy was only an improvement over tyranny, albeit not much of one
doing anything you want, period, versus doing anything as long as it is proscribed in 13th century sharia law is the difference between impunity without any laws and brutality according to crude fundamentalist laws
i'll take the bullshit moronic fundamentalist laws over no laws at all any day
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
2) Do we have enough fissionable fuel to accomplish this?
I know #1 is a problem, I honestly don't know the answer to #2. Either way, these need to be addressed *before* we build more reactors.
Already been addressed: breeder reactors essentially reprocess waste into more fuel. The initial load of a breeder reactor is U-238, which is 140 times more plentiful than U-235 (our current fission fuel). The fuel supply is effectively unlimited. Too bad President Carter decided to ban breeder reactors in 1977.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
A large nuclear plant produces only a few semi loads of high level nuclear waste a year. Actually, it's only a few hundred pounds. Given ground transport with it's relaxed weight restrictions, with it's very easy to make a container that will survive 200 mph collisions (head on accident + margin).
Also, if you read the posts, you'll find that many of us support the use of breeder reactors, that would reduce the fuel requirements by a factor of up to a hundred.
As for Yucca Mountain, I think that we'll eventually end up digging up & reproccessing anything we put there. It's still good fuel!
I don't read AC A human right
Seriously. Our energy problems are complex, and there's no one magic bullet that will solve them. Hybrid vehicles should definitely be part of the mix.
Sean
If the wealthy really came up with a way to monopolize the distribution of electricity from other sources or fuel from biodiesel, we could probably be off oil as a power/fuel supply fairly quickly. I don't guess the uber rich/corporations have come up with a fail safe plan to make sure no one can supply their own power or for the little guy to set up his own business. When that happens, things will move much faster.
But....that won't stop the addiction to producing everything from plastic. But, I did recently see a business that "harvests" plastics from landfills like a mining process. It sorts the plastics, chips them, then reduces things back to the oil based form.
America needs to get over its manic paranoia regarding nuclear power if it expects to continue to meet the energy needs of its industrial base and mass population centers without strip mining the south east and burning millions of tons of coal.
Nuclear reactors are safe, and the waste produced (and I mean real waste, after multiple reprocessing) is substantially less harmful to the population than the by-products of burning fossil fuels at an equivalent rate. New reactor technologies (like pebble-bed reactors) are fool-proof and stunningly cost-effective versus heavy water reactor designs, and could easily be deployed in proximity to high demand areas, eliminating the need for the (re)construction of a massive (nationwide) power transport grid.
Is there another choice? Sure, go live in a cave.
I hear this a lot, and frankly, it doesn't make much sense. There's no such thing as a pure oil company. There are, however, many energy companies. They know as well as anyone else that a) oil is a finite resource and b) there's a demand for green energy. You can bet that any "oil company" that is sitting on alternative energy technology is going to get its lunch eaten by competitors.
Sean
There's one problem with a nuclear: portability. There's two good thing that petroleum based fuels have going for them, ubiquity and portibility. Petroleum fuels have a storage and delivery infrastructure and they're fairly inert as far as fuels go (gasoline is not explosive, although gasoline vapors are). For now, let's address the issue of portability, since I don't think that the infrastructure problem is as difficult.
Of course, we can't go totally nuclear. If we went totally nuclear, we would have millions of nuclear reactors zooming around on the streets. Just looking at the car next to me with a slow oil leak, this probably wouldn't be a good idea. Also, consider that a large portion of our fuels goes to fuel aviation. The public won't be so hot about having radioactive material zooming over their heads.
So, we can't go totally nuclear, what's left? We would have large nuclear power stations to generate power and transfer it into portable containers. But what would the containers look like? We could use the nuclear energy to generate hydrogen and carry that around. The problem with that is that hydrogen is a lot less inert than petroleum products. For automobiles, this would mean puncture-proof fuel tanks and the like (which isn't a horrible problem). For aircraft, this is unacceptable. The flying public probably won't accept aircraft zooming around with hundreds of pounds of hydrogen (think hindenberg).
Batteries are currently out of the question. We can't power a laptop for more than a few hours or make a small electric car go more than a few hundred miles.
While I believe that Nuclear power is a good thing, the main research problem here to be one of the container that the energy is stored in. It would need to allow for the efficient extraction of energy and would need to be safe enough to allow for transit both on the ground and in the air. Water, for instance, would be a poor container. While it is safe, the energy cannot be extracted efficiently.
This is a really hard problem!
what the benefits would be if we converted half of our energy needs from oil to nuclear.
Not only would pollution become less of a concern, but the political and economic benefits would be huge. Less dependence on oil would mean less involvement in oil-rich nation entanglements and the economic benefit from cheaper energy would be a huge boost to the economy.
Yes there are hurdles to overcome but I don't consider them insurmountable. I think the biggest problem we have now is FUD and ignorance surrounding the safety and disposal issues. Those are really technical issues that could be addresses given enough resources. It's also a political lightning rod but something we should tackle now before we are forced to address it as a result of a oil supply disaster.
I've been a nuclear engineer at electric utilities for over 25 years, so let me offer a few thoughts: - Smaller, lower-cost nuclear power plants (of the designs already generically approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and those being built by South Africa and being considerd by China) could be used to convert water into hydrogen. - This hydrogen can be used to power cars. The big three are already experimenting with hydrogen powered cars. Hummer is building a HumVee for Gov. Schwartzenager (sp?) that's hydrogen powered. The exhaust is water vapor. - Nuclear power already provdes 25% of the electricity in the U.S. - All of the nuclear waste from the 103 U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored in an area the size of a football field. It's made of a hard ceramic - no liquids. We have a place (Yucca Mountain), the money (billions collected from utility customers since 1982 but with the majority withheld by congress), and the technology to dispose of all of the nuclear waste permanently. - The U.S. has been described as the "Saudi Arabia of Uranium." We (and Canada) have vast supplies of Uranium. Hundreds of years worth. - Should the supply of uranium start to become limited, we have breeder technology (developed in the US but cancelled by Pres. Carter) that actually produces more fuel than it burns. - There are no other viable alternatives. We have exploited the usable hydro locations, adding air polution controls to coal burners makes the power prohibitivly expensive, and the industry has always known that the natural gas bubble would only last for about 20 years before the price skyrocketed. -I think the choice is clear but it takes political willpower and a willingness to take a long term view. Both are in short supply because the American people typically punish leaders who favor the long term over the short term.
Actually, it's not the same process, just a similar process. A fuel-reprocessing reactor will produce a mixture of Pu239, Pu240, Pu241, and Pu242. Weapons-grade plutonium is pure Pu239. If you don't have pure Pu239, your bomb won't work. No one has ever successfully separated Pu239 from a mix with Pu240-242. This is what makes president Carter's ban on breeder reactors in 1977 so baffling. Here's a man who's a nuclear engineer who bans breeder reactors because terrorists might get ahold of the plutonium and make a bomb, even though he should know that refining the Pu239 from the mix is impossible.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
What to do with the waste is a curious problem. Hydrocarbon energy soruces produce lots of waste too, however, with that we pump it into the air because we can. One big advantage of nuclear power is that, although we also get lots of dangerous waste, we keep it all in one big, easy to manage block (easier than free CO anyway.) So generate the waste, find a big useless mountain in Nevada, and bury it in a big hole. It seems a better plan than puking it into the atmosphere.
It can work because it already does
Ontario only uses fossil fuels for 24% of its energy with 50% coming from nuke plants
how can this happen in a liberal country like canada...its the rock solid safe technology of CANDU (heavy water reactors) I toured the Pickering plant while it was being constucted and the engineering and design is so much more advanced than US technology. it is a true Fail-Safe system as failure of any system shuts the reactor down.
this type of reactor along with soy and alcohol based fuels could easily replace most all of our fossil fuel use.
By that argument, any energy source in finite
Not solar energy! Oh wait... n/m.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No, you get about a ton of waste fuel from a ton of fuel. The mass->energy conversion is a tiny fraction of the fuel's mass. And once the U or P atoms are split, the daughters can't be split again.
And then you have the problem that the neutron flux inside the reactor makes _everything_ radioactive. And _everything_ in the fuel processing cycle becomes radioactive.
All that radioactive stuff is waste. It must be stored carefully, for long periods of time. And noone has a solution that works both politically, geologically, and medically.
What will we do with the waste?
Obesity is a growing problem, but scientists say the nuclear waste will remain between the nuclear hips and the nuclear chest.
This is not about going off the grid, nor is it about reducing power consumption. What it is: Given our current insatiable power needs, is it possible to replace our oil-based infrastructure with one that is nuclear-based.
LED clocks don't consume much power. What does consume oil/power: automobiles, TV, computer, monitor, incandescent lights, A/C, heating, large appliances. What does not consume significant power: clocks. I doubt that "warm-start circuitry" has much of an effect on the bottom line when over half of my bill each month (and far more in the summer) is A/C or heating.
I don't know about you, but I am not about to go without the significant energy consumers in my life: computer, car, lights, refrigerator, W/D, and A/C. I have been known to buy energy-efficient versions of these, but this is only an incremental improvement.
In summary, we definitely need a better energy source.
Just to add to this. An Alage farm can be placed on the surface of the ocean, not taking up cropland.
Also lets not forget that process mentioned in discover magazine about the breaking down of waste into a useful fuel.
We have alternatives, we're just NOT using them.
The waste isn't just fuel. It's everything contaminated by the fuel which has a limited life span. Containers, transport and the like. There's an awful lot of that stuff around as well, and the more reactors, the more that pile of residual will grow.
h
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
In Minnesota, XCEL Energy allows customers to elect to purchase a percentage of their electricity from wind-powered technologies. Now that my financial situation is a bit better, I'm considering paying 100% of our electricity bill on wind power.
assert(expired(knowledge));
"The estimates are that we'd have a ~100 year supply of Uranium if all power was switched to nuclear power today. This figure does not take reprocessing and non-uranium fission into account."
Of course, that's WITHOUT counting all your uranium supplies in, say, Niger, SouthAfrica, Kazakhstan, Namibia, Uzbekistan, and some other countries waiting to be liberated by US Marines.
I don't have a sig.
BC and Quebec for example, are almost all hydro damns.
biofules, solar power, wind, maybe hydrogen fule celll power plants, but absolutely NO nuclear power.
New Scientist had the definitive article about this some years ago.
To summarize:
If you build five plants a year, the inactive ones end up consuming all the power that the plants on line produce after about 80 years.
It is not possible to have a net energy output from building nucelar powerplants, unless you build them in space (and can toss them away harmlessly when you're done with them).
It's not prejudice, it's just math.
Also, you're taking real estate out of use forever and nuclear power plants aren't small. Over time, it adds up to be a significant chunk of your countryside to throw away forever.
Stop me if I'm way off the deep end here, but:
Given 2nd law of thermodynamics all energy sources are finite, and will eventually run out.
therefore even tidal energy will eventually run out.
and I think that the energy that will eventually run out is the Earth's rotational motion, (Tidal forces create resistance to earth's rotation, harvesting electricity creates more resistance.)
3. The amount of waste would be a small percentage of the starting amount. So for every *ton* of fuel (that's one HELL of a lot of energy!), you'd end up with a few dozen kilograms of stuff left. Of the remaining "waste", a large portion of it would be stable materials.
What about the tonnes of 'soft' waste that is generated (the outlived protective clothing, reactor parts, plumbing, etc.)? I know this stuff isn't nearly as hazardous as the heavy elements and such left over from the reaction, but from what I've read there is lots of this waste generated and needs to be disposed of. Maybe just dump the stuff in the old shafts where we dug out the uranium and other ores? Make some kind of super sealed container and dump it in the deep ocean? Good use for active volcanoes?
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
I think ethanol would be a great alternative to our fuel problems. Here is the reason why:
YOU CAN GROW IT!
Ethanol is made from corn. Nascar uses 100% ethanol in their cars because it burns clean (less polution) and hot (mmm more horsepower).
Currently the US Gov is paying farmers all throughout the nation to NOT grow corn on parts of their fields.
Ok, I feel better. Just a though on my part. It seems almost to easy. (Now if we would only get more cars to use ethanol)
Original article from here.
BURN CRUDE PALM OIL TO GENERATE ELECTRICITY
The launch of Tenaga Nasional Berhad's (TNB) power plant, which uses crude palm oil as fuel, marks an important milestone in the country's power sector. Malaysia has started conducting feasibility study on burning palm oil diesel fuel in its power plants. Blended with medium fuel oil, the fuel mix has been successfully tested at the TNB Generation Sdn Bhd power station in Prai, Penang.
Palm oil, traditionally used for cooking and making soap, is the latest addition to the country's power source, though on a limited scale. This is in line with the government policy of introducing a fifth fuel policy; fifth fuel is meant to mean renewable energy. As of last year, 80 percent of the country's power supply was generated using gas, 10.6 percent hydroelectric, 6.6 percent coal and the remaining using medium fuel oil. In February this year, TNB was approached by the Malaysian Palm Oil Board to jointly conduct a study on the possibility of using palm oil to generate power. TNB's research arm, called TNB Research Sdn Bhd, took three weeks to complete its preliminary study. Starting from March 28, 2001, the national utility's power plant in Prai has been using palm oil to generate power, which was claimed to be the first in the world. (Background: In February, crude palm oil (CPO) prices hit a low of RM697 per ton with the buildup on palm oil stocks rising to 1.5 million tons. As a result, the Malaysian Palm Oil Board signed a memorandum of understanding with CPO producers for the supply of the produce at RM725 per ton. The CPO is then sold to TNB at RM700 per ton, with the board subsidizing the price difference).
Blended with a ratio of 20 percent crude palm oil and 80 percent of medium fuel oil, the mixture is burnt in a boiler and has a capacity of generating 120 megawatts of electricity.
The major advantage of using CPO is it results in less pollution, containing less than 0.05 percent sulfur dioxide during power generation, compared to three percent using medium fuel. Palm oil is also renewable and takes only between three to five years for plants to mature.
However, on the downside, CPO is not an economically-viable option. The gross heating value- the amount of electricity that can be generated- for palm oil is 40,000 kJ per kg, compared to 42,600 kJ per kg for medium fuel oil and 45,000 kJ per kg for diesel. Furthermore, CPO is 16 percent more expensive than using diesel and costs 38 percent more compared to medium fuel oil. Under the pilot project in Prai, the Finance Ministry will subsidize the difference in power generation cost.
Malaysian CPO will be sent to a United Kingdom-based research center, Power Generation, for further testing.
For further information on the Malaysian environmental market, please contact:
United States-Asia Environmental Partnership (US-AEP)
American Embassy
376 Jalan Tun Razak
50400 Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
Tel: 60-3-2168-5050 Fax: 60-3-248-4035
E-mail: usaep@po.jaring.my
Contact: Vivian How or Looi Chee-Choong
URL: http://www.usaep.org
Will sys-admin for food
I didn't realize tanks ran on nuclear
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Nuclear could replace our dependence on oil and coal for our electric power generation, but without drastic steps, we'd still be just as depenedent on oil for vehicles.
As I have always seen it, the American Government has never had a realistic energy policy. It's been
the policy for the cheapest to be used, damn the environment and future costs.
If we want to be energy self-sufficient, we need to do the following:
1. Double the number of nuclear power plants over a 20 year period. Decommission 1 coal-fired plant or oil-fired plant for each nuclear plant built. A coal fired plant releases almsot as much radioactives into the atmosphere during its lifetime than a nuclear plant creates. Reconditioning/updating a nuclear plant does not count as a new one.
2. Establish a NATIONAL tax break for people who install small alternative power systems to power their houses if they feed their excess back into the grid. Prorate the tax break to account for the # of watt hours above their power consumption they return to the grid.
3. Establish a 'bounty' program for recycling CRT devices that aren't energy-star compliant.
4. Encourage replacement of CRT devices with lower power LCD or Plasma screen technologies.
5. Fine people for driving I.C.E. vehicles that are not properly maintained. If it's not a deisel, and it smokes, it's off the road until it's fixed. If it isn't with 10% of MPG standards for the year of production & model, it's off the road until it's fixed.
6. Subsidize the use of electric commuter vehicles at the personal level. Corporations already can get this.
7. Establish commuter (>5, 5>10 and >10 mile) commuter rail systems that are designed to go where people need to.
8. Slowly wean the road system from constant expansion.
9. Encourage growth of the hydrogen/cng/methane fuel system and similar vehicles.
10. If it's used like a personal vehicle, looks like a personal vehicle, and is occupied like a personal vehicle, it should be taxed, regulated, and emission tested like a personal vehicle.
11. Discourage single-occupancy-vehicle commuting by establishing HOV lanes on roads with more than 2 lanes where it inconvienences S.O.V drivers without adding another lane to the road (3 lane freeway to 2 lane +HOV lane, 4 lane to 3+1 and so on). Be anal-retentive about ticketing violations.
12. Establish a national government low-interest loan program to retrofit houses with insulation to a min of R-13 for 2X4 walls, R-32 for 2X6, R-32 attic, and R-13 for subfloor.
I am just an
-Obnoxious Twit
Consider this: Coal Power (where we will go unchecked) produces billions of tons of greenhouse emmisions, millions of tons of toxic air pollutants, and over 200 tons per year of unchecked mercury into our air. Additionally, radioactive particles emitted from coal plants create a higher onsite background radiation than Nuclear power plants. Nuclear power, which creates almost 30% of this nations energy, generates around 1000 tons of waste a year... and there may be uses for this waste in later generation nuclear power.
France gets 70% of its power from nuclear plants (not a ringing endorsement to some), but it does demonstrate that it is sustainable.
yes would it happen of course not. 1)consequences if something goes wrong and 2)oil companies have too much clout, they'll let all the oil in the world run out and let civilizaiton die off before they give up their billions
"I'm largely with you, but note that even those two energy sources come with negative environmental consequences - energy requirements and hazardous chemicals in the case of photovoltaic solar cells, and Carbon Dioxide emissions for wind (assuming the windmill bases are built using concrete)."
1) Why do you think research is going on the reduce or eliminate hazardous chemicals (since the '70s)?
1a) What makes you think all the other present means of energy production don't have hazardous chemicals involved (especially oil).
1b) All the others take energy to make energy, even nuclear.
2) And just what do you think energy plants are made out of? Come on you can come up with a better reasons than the above.
Uranium is all over the place. In the 1950s, folks ran around prospecting for it, until careful analysts noticed it makes up about .1% of granite. Might not be economical to extract, but granite is everywhere.
I agree with you on the exploration angle. We need to get established as a permanent presence elsewhere in the universe. But until those colonies can build their own spaceships and spacesuits, they are just long camping trips. It is the old Thoreau's Axe syndrome.
My,
Understanding is that conversion of coal to oil becomes economically viable when the price of crude reaches $70.00/barrel.
So I would say that the nuclear option is a bad idea.
Just let the Saudi's raise the price of a barrel to seventy bucks and the USA will start digging our energy up out of the ground in West Virginia.
---- Go ahead, mod me down, I'll just post it again and you lose your mod points.
You could level an entire freaking state and people would barely bat an eyelash as long as they can still drive a vehicle you could land an aircraft on. One trillion dollars? No problem! Try to take away my Maibatsu Monstrosity and you'll hear some real whining.
Anyway, it doesn't matter yet. We'll stick with oil as long as it's so "cheap" to pump oil out of the ground. When oil goes up to $200 or $300 a barrel, then we might start looking at other options.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I believe that in the US, it is spelled "nukelyur".
The opposition to nuclear power will go down in history as the epitomy of anti-technology ignorance. I have compiled a few articles on the matter by the great Bernard Cohen.
Bernard L. Cohen is Professor-Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy and of Environmental and Occupational Health at University of Pittsburgh. He has authored 6 books, over 300 papers in scientific journals, and about 75 articles in non-technical journals. He has presented invited lectures in 47 U.S. States, 6 Canadian provinces, 7 Japanese prefectures, 6 Australian states and territories, and 24 other countries in Europe, Asia and South America. His awards include the American Physical Society Bonner Prize and the Health Physics Society Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award. He has been elected Chairman of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society, and Chairman of the Division of Environmental Sciences of the American Nuclear Society.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
The U.S. has a number of different reactor designs, both within the PWR class and the Boiling Water Reactor class entirely because the reactors were still being evolved. It's not that we made a poor decisions per se, its just that other countries had the benefit of our development experience. You see similar build out programs in other nuclear dependent countries such as Korea which derives the majority of their power from the KSNP a System-80 plant design purchased from Combustion Engineering.
Obviously it's easier to maintain a lot of the same type of technology which allows you to take advantage of well known economies of scale. Westinghouse's new reactor design the AP1000 takes full advantage of such standardization in components and design.
I have always wondered why we can't shoot it into the sun....
Right now we're burying "nuclear waste" instead of reprocessing and using it because the US Federal Government is skeered of letting Plutonium fall into the wrong hands. So instead of breeding fuel we're simply refining more Uranium and producing more waste.
There are three kinds of radioactive "waste": Useful material, like Plutonium and Thorium and various other radioactives that can be harnessed for all sorts of interesting purposes; "hot" waste, which is intensely radioactive but due to the way "half-life" works burns itself out fairly quickly, and "cool" waste, which can just be sealed up and stored, out in the open, with little danger to anyone.
Treating nuclear power (or any other new technology like Stem Cell et al) like the "boggyman" is why there are no plans to expand any use of nuclear power. To go with the analogy, if nuclear power is a boggyman then you'll never know what is under your bed because you are perpetually afraid.
People didn't just wake up one day and created a safe and efficient internal combustion engine. It took years of research, refinement, and practice making these things before it got safe, robust, and reliable enough to use regularlly without maiming people haphazardly. Why do people expect anything different from something like nuclear?
How do you make nuclear power safer? Certainly not by treating as something unholy or evil. The other current factor is money. How do you make nuclear cheaper? Once again, it isn't by shunning it. Research and refinement and studying how system behave creates better engineering and more robust designs. As noted in Europe and Japan they are many generations ahead and have some fairly safe and robust designs while in the US there are no plans to issue any more building permits for new plants...ever.
Make no mistake that nuclear technology is dangerous but you can't make it safer by vilifying and cursing it. Researching these types of technology should be embraced instead of shunned.
Given 2nd law of thermodynamics all energy sources are finite, and will eventually run out.
:-/)
Once one truly understands this, one finds that it is an extremely sobering revelation. You see, to achieve high-speed interstellar travel, we need energy stores equivalent to the Sun's output. If we started building these ships, we'll notice a few results:
1. We'd begin to make a noticeable dent in the amount of usable energy in the Universe, thus decreasing the time until there are no more fuels or other usable energy in the Universe.
2. After a "short trip" to another galaxy (say a few years there, a few years back), you'd return to find our Sun and Earth both long gone. (Isn't relativity a bitch?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"1) What will we do with the waste? It should be reused for fuel. This allows a reactor to get more energy out of less nuclear material, resulting in both reduced cost and waste. The only reason why the US doesn't do this, is the concern over terrorists or spies obtaining bomb-grade materials. You still end up with waste. See: thermodinamics"
Yes, but LESS waste than otherwise. Moreover, it would produce more usable fuel than it would consume, making the " If it took 30 years to do a transiton you would only have 30 years before you would need to do the next one." argument a moot point.
Apart from that, it does not take a "nuclear" economy to prduce radioactive wastes, hospitals being one of the better producers of radioactive waste. In addition to that, remember that between the US and Russia, there are between 3000 and 4000 nukes to be dismantled.
would you prefer that nuclear material to pay for itself producing energy, or simply stored somewhere? and where?
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
The nuclear industry uses huge amounts of electricity, and if you counted the refining and reprocessing, until recently, the nuclear industry used more electricity than it generated.
Don't believe me? Go pick up The Curve of Binding Energy.
The sun is Really hot, so any spacecraft we try to send there will melt long before it gets into the Sun. There's also that issue of solar wind. Ok, let me illustrate this in terms that everybody can understand. Take a really powerful fan and set it on "high." That's the sun. Stand in front of it so it's blowing against you. You're the Earth. Now piss into the fan. That's what would happen if we tried to launch nuclear waste into the sun.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Newer plants are built to be fail safe.. Actually fail safe. France is huge into this and doing a great job at it. I like nuclear power.. I like it because we can afford to pay someone to stand there and watch it. That is a viable option. Seriously, I would rather have someone staring at spent fuel in a storage cask vs spewing out the polution from fossil fuels into the air where everyone can enjoy it. Side note: I don't think liberals are against nuclear power, I think they feel there are better green options.
The left is against the sloppy mismanagement of nuclear materials that could present an environmental risk to the U.S. population.
Given the track record of energy companies, and the fact that they know that it's cheaper to deny contamination, tie it up in court, and wait for a friendly administration, than to actually clean it, the risks are massive. Several European countries use nuclear energy, and people live within several miles, and nearby radiation levels are normal.
Nuclear energy powers a significant portion of the midwest's power, and that's part of the reason that energy prices were stable there compared to California's crisis.
What is so confounding is how rural communities fight tooth and nail to keep wind farms from sprouting up. If you try to open a chicken farm, stinking a mile in every direction, that's fine, but god forbid a row of windmills pop up on the horizon.
Why import a dirty bomb when the government just built 20 for you
...except that they refuel reactors on an annual basis, and when the waste is taken out, it is stored on site while it cools. Reprocessing would mitigate much of this, as it would be going right back into the reactor instead of sitting around.
Except that all reactors within the United States have containment vessels that are made to withstand the reactor having a critical failure. It would take a hell of a lot of explosives to do anything to that.
consider the ships and trains carrying new and spent fuel every four weeks
Also, I guess it never occurred to you that they might *protect* fuel and waste shipments, did it? No, it's much easier to crank up the FUD machine than it is to think objectively.
Renewable energy is all well and good, but when you see what the 8 dams have done to the Columbia river, and how much everyone is bitching about what they are doing to the salmon popluation, you might think twice.
Myself, living here in Oregon, I'd much rather that they would have refit the Trojan Nuclear Generating Station. Instead, they scrapped it and made Oregon 90% reliant on hydroelectric power, with wind and geothermal making up the other 10%.
Oh well, at least it's not coal...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"(d) We don't even know how the hell to deal with the solid waste we're producing from nuclear plants now, let alone if we ramped it up."
Dealing with radwaste is simple. Just take a big hole in the ground, cover and seal it thoroughly, and start filling it with radwaste. THEN add a low-temperature-difference power generation system, like OTEC. Remember all those thousands of years they claim you have to keep radwaste sequestered? It's actually lots less; after about 600 years, the radiation diminishes to the normal background level. Anyway, such a waste pile would give us MORE POWER for all those years, AND because people will need to maintain the power plant, people will always be there to warn others of the danger.
Apparently no one rembers it but you & me. On Sept 30th, 1999, I looked around for anything to mark the occasion. Coudn't find anything.
Boiling water reactors are designed to deliberately produce plutonium in the normal course of operation. Plutonium can be easily refined from spent fuel rods.
You cannot make gun-type (hiroshima) bombs with plutonium: you can only make them out of uranium, the isotopes of which are rather hard to separate out. Implosion-type bombs (trinity, nagasaki and pretty much all the rest) can be made from plutonium, and the excess polonium found in spent fuel rods make the use of initiators irrelevant.
Why limit yourself to one dangerous poluting energy source when you can have ALL OF THEM!?!
Look, we're doing it for the kids, okay? Does that make you happy now? Stupid environmentalist..
I would like to remind you that Finland is building it's fifth nuclear plant right now. Finland has now four nuclear plants which are operated by commercial enterprises.
When the power plants were build, Finnish goverment legislated that the power companies would have to put money on the save to gather costs for destruction of plants and building safe place for the waste. The other power company is TVO which is mainly owned by Finnish industry and the other is Fortum which is owned mainly by Finnish goverment. This both companies have been very profitable, have saved lot's of money for the future and have had very high safety standards.
Maybe you should research little bit before saying nuclear energy is economically insane. In Finland it hasn't been insane, it has been a very good investment. In fact the industry now is considering proposing sixth nuclear power plant to be build in Finland.
1) We spend $$$ to develop alternative energy technology and infrastructure
2) We virtually stop using oil (the exceptions being things like airplanes- and you thought an electric *car* was tough to develop!)
3) With the glut of oil due to our decreased consumption, the global price of oil goes through the floor
4) All the other countries using oil now have super-cheap energy - for a much longer time than if the U.S. kept it's consumption up
Think about how that plays on the global market - we've now spent money to give the rest of the world a huge competitive advantage. So...
5) != PROFIT!!!
So if we keep our consumption high, the world runs out of oil as soon as possible and we use our industrial/technological advantage to bring alternatives online when everyone else has to as well - competitive balance and maybe an advatange to the U.S. over all.
Um, I like my nuclear power source a safe distance from my skin, say 8 light minutes away!
It's about time the USA switch to SOLAR everything, and redo the infrastructure so light is our power.
Get rid of 100 watt light bulbs when 15 watt mini-flourecents will do the same job for less energy.
The new President should pick up where x-President Clinton left off - a million more rooftop solar buildings per year would be a nice start.
For those who say solar is expensive, it
Sure beats spending the $200 BILLION on killing handfuls of people while taking their oil...
The prices listed are for pre-production systems.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
the most dishonest aspect of nuclear power in the united states is that when a utility builds a nuclear plant, the stockholders of the utility get rich, the contractors who build the plant get rich, and when the time comes to decomission the plant, the rate payers get the shaft.
Mexico becomes the worlds largest supplier of Electricity and Hydrogen by creating a series of N-plants that plug into the sw and texas grids, and creates hydrogen which is trucked and piped into the United states.
This diverts massive amounts of wealth from the middle east to north america. Dramatically raises the wealth and conditions of the middle class in Mexico. Crime is dramatically reduced. Reverse immigration as Mexican Citizens return home to better paying jobs.
This seems so plausable, I am stunned it hasn't happenned yet...
The proof of the pudding is in the eating
1. Doable: We've had a widespread nuclear program running the entire US submarine fleet for somelike like 50 years with nary a hitch. They dispose of their spent fuel correctly and I know several people that have worked on these boats and they are fine, healthy people. The oldest is around 52 and he is in perfect health.
2. Renewable, Recyclable and Long Lasting: Proof that nuclear energy could last a good long time. Using breeder reactors you generate more nuclear fuel by using plutonium etc. This means we have a nearly inexaustible supply. One of the problems is that Jimmy Carter (ironically a submariner himself) signed the law that forbids us in the US from using recycled nuclear fuels. This means that if it's used once it becomes hi-level waste Thats insane and it generate mre radioactive waste. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
3. Safe: By designing the damn thing right in the first place you prevent meltdown accidents from happening. How? Install a pebble bed reactor. The nuclear fuels are engineered into glass spheres designed so that they can only react with a certain amount of volume of neighboring spheres. They can never meltdown because it's physically impossible. When they are spent, you simply recycle the spheres until 99.9% of the fuel is gone. Then you bury them.
4. Rational: For a pittance of what it costs to police the planet, slaughter innocent civilians by the 10's of thousands and just generally create bad PR you could set up a series of pebble bed reactors across the US which would generate electricity for homes/businesses and hydrogen to be used in hydrides to power cars and/or power cells. Any wastes that are created are used until they are almost used up. Anything left is buried safely. Small contingents of special forces could protect these installations against terrorists and theft. Multiple independent safety auditors and inspects keep track of fuel, procedures and any contamination. You could overdo this entire design 10 times over and still not have spent what it took to just deploy our troops to Iraq.
No, it's not completely safe, but very little in this world is. It keeps the pollution in one place where it can be controlled, checked and inspected instead of spreading it through the air for us to breath etc. How many people die a year from lung diseases brought on by hydrocarbon pollution. How much vegetation dies because of acid rain.
When I see trainloads full of coal heading for St. Louis's power plant I just shake my head.
When the left gets off it's religious crusade against Nuclear energy we might have a chance. Until then they are the best friends the Bushs ever had.
I'm all for saving the environment. Let's start with the stuff we are being forced to breath.
Somebody do the calculations.
That's right, the only option that everyone agreed on was:
They're adundant (check the animal shelters), cheap (they're just giving the things away) and renewable ("breeder reactor" = 2 cats in a box with some catnip and a Barry White CD). It just goes to show that, with a little ingenuity, we can solve even the worst crises.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Nuclear waste is a by product of older reactors. The new reactors like the one in South Africa are based on pebble beds instead of rods. This is a much safer form of nuclear energy and not prone to meltdowns. The hurdle is to either construct new power plants or upgrade grandfathered plants. Nuclear power would answer a lot of our needs, but what would be nice is if the federal government would allow tax breaks for people who install solar panels on their roofs or on their property. Newer panels can provide nearly all power to run a house and sometimes can provide excess energy back to the public grid. http://www.solarcentury.com/ http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.htm l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
Abandon all hope ye who enter here...
Have you ever heard of distributed energy?
It is a solution that is currently at test somewhere over here in canada. It consist of adding solar panels to homes and connecting homes in a bi-directional way to the electric supplyer...
In times of High energy productions and low house energy use (like when you are not home...) the surplus of energy produced is sent back to your electric supplyer and credited to your account.
This way use of energy from big oil central is limited and there is a increase in energy availability due to the numerous small energy providers.
Providers should not be against since anyway they sell all the energy they have available...
This way you can reduce the need for new power plants in a significant matter.
But you are right, the bush administration is in bed with the oil industry, and they would never disturb the oil industry by seriously looking into replacement power systems.
Any reactor design that can reasonably use plutonium would have a serious advantage over our current designs. Pebble bed, HTGR, all the ones using graphite, require highly enriched uranium. I'm not concerned about the fire potential, since our plants use containment vessels designed (3-5 feet thick walls of reinforced concrete) to take direct hits by passenger jets; Chernobyl, like all Soviet designs, did not have any containment vessel.
To be widely adopted, any future energy source needs to be:
1) available
2) cheap
"cheap" includes the cost of creating the energy, the cost of handling waste products, the cost of safety, the cost of handling fear/uncertainty/doubt, the political costs, the costs of fighting the established energy interests, etc. etc.
When oil, coal, and natural gas get more expensive and you hear the clamor for "alternative" energies, my bets are on:
1) high-cost fossil fuels, such as coal and oil that's not currently cost-effective to extract or process
2) existing "clean" sources, such as hydro, solar, wind, and others
3) experimental- and not-yet-widespread "clean" sources, such as tidal, satellite-solar-to-microwave, ethanol and bio-diesel (auto fuel), and others
4) better efficiencies reducing the demand for raw fuel.
I don't think nuclear will catch on in the USA until we can figure out how to handle the long-term waste problem. Too many people are literally spooked by it to make it politically feasuable. By that time, other, cleaner, energy sources will be availble and it will be a moot point.
My bets in the next 20 years are on high-cost fossil fuels, with gradually increasing use of "clean" sources. 100 years from now, "clean" energy will dominate. In particular, low-environmental-impact sources like wind and solar will dominate over relatively high-impact sources like hydroelectric dams.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Has everyone forgotten the term "National Sacrific Zones"? The term coined during the rein of the first Bush. It still gives me chills. The land gave it's life for it's country. To those that have forgotten it was term coined for land in this country that was too contaminated for humans to inhabit. There's a large number of them already and I believe at the peak we never used more than 15% of our power from nuclear sources. Imagine 100%? I try not to. Right in Los Angeles there are several areas with ground water that has been contaminated with nuclear material. "Clean" and "Cheap" are not words to be used when talking about nuclear waste. It's cheap for the power companies because the government always seems to pick up the costs of clean up. What are those costs? No one knows given nuclear material has never been successfully stored long term.
Anyone remember the baby teeth sudies? We all have levels of astronium 90 in our systems for the first nuclear tests. The claim was those levels would go down over time. The haven't they've steadily increased. The argument was the material would cycle out of the environment. It hasn't it concintrated in the environment. The only thing we have proven is we can't safely handle nuclear materials. The facts are out there and they're scary. Now the third world is going nuts for nuclear. We're looking at large areas that will be contaminated, "sacrificed". The problem is it doesn't stay in those areas. The contamination migrates out into the rest of the environment. We've grown up thinking cancer is a normal part of life. I'm old enough to remember a time when it was realitively rare. I can only remember a few cases of skin cancer when I was young. Now everyone is getting it. It's not seen as a national disaster because most of it is caught early and treated but I know people in their twenties with it. Forty years ago that would have been unheard of. Just how much of the cancer today is being caused by environmental factors? Just how much desease and how many birth defects are we willing to accept before we do the hard work of fixing the problem rather than throwing a bandage on a gapping wound?
What do current nuclear power plants do?
I'm asking because I really don't know...not to be a smartass. =)
Even if the oil companies are the ones running the nuke plants, that's less oil they're selling. Price++. Can you imagine $5/gal or $10/gal for gas? Hint: You're not their biggest customer; try $90/gal or more.
You will never refuel your car again.
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Doing homes might not be so hard, just using some of the waste. As long as it's radioactive, the energy can be converted to heat and run in a heat exchanger usable by anyone using hot water heating. There is quite a lot of that around. Hot air could be even easier, with the heat exchanger similar to that used for air conditioners now. Wouldn't work forever, just a few decades, but gives a decent use for the junk that comes out after all breeder cycles are done until it becomes too unradioactive to use. With some longer term work on fusion power, we would not need to depend on fission anyway. My guess is that in less than the decay time mentioned, fusion power could be made to work.
Not in our backyard...not in our country....
If the leftover materials can be used to make a bomb powerful enough to wipe out a city, why can't they also be used in a nuclear reaction to create more electricity?
The biggest drawback is nuclear waste. Enven with safe plants, what do you do with nuclear waste? No one has a solution. Shipping it to underground storage is expensive and dangerous (e.g. a hijacked container or an accident). Burying it onsite is insecure and leaky.
Also, what do we do when the plant reaches its end of life? Dissasemble it and ship it somewhere? Build a crypt and abandon in place?
Nuclear power only looks good if you do incomplete accounting. Once you look at ALL the costs and technical challenges it is not a good solution.
As some of the posters suggest we should start with conservation, and this is a great idea. Western Europe has about the same GDP as the US, but does so using about 1/2 the energy. We could conserve quite a bit and still have a good lifestyle if we followed Europe's example (in some cases better, e.g. longer vacations).
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I haven't had time to read all the posts here so 2^10 pardons of someone already said this. In the 1950's scientists promised electricity so cheap we wouldn't need to meter it from nuclear power plants but the reality is exactly the opposite; nuclear energy is the most expensive way to generate electricity there is. The reason why we don't use more nuclear energy isn't because of its dangers or because the left opposes it; it is because it is too expensive. Many nuclear power plants operate at a loss because it costs more to generate the electricity than anyone would pay. The economics can change if fossil fules get expensive and new reactor designs make nuclear power cheaper. It is essential to reduce our dependance on foreign oil but the best solution is a multi-pronged approach: conservation, geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, biofuels, coal, oil shale (?) and nuclear.
Which was worse?
I think you're thinking of Radiocarbon dating (aka "carbon dating"). Atomic weapon testing has affected the calibration of the data.
You may also be thinking of the need for pre-1945 "clean steel." This is the first explanation I found in a quick search.
Section G.7: Salvage of German WWII U-Boats
"All steel made since the detonation of the first atom bomb in 1945 has contained tiny amounts of radioactivity. This is because the atmosphere now contains trace amounts of radioactivity. The steelmaking process involves the use of large amounts of air, which transfers the radioactivity to the steel. Instruments and equipment used for measuring radioactivity must be free from extra background radiation, so post-1945 "new" steel cannot be used for these purposes."
not mentioned before in this thread so I'll do it.
Per capita the US uses more than 12000 KWh per year, Japan ~7500 and Germany ~6000 (source) ). Same for oil: US per capita: 68 gallons, Japan: 42, Germany 33 (source: source). So we're comparing the three of the whealthiest and industrialized nations on Earth and one uses more than two times the energy. There's not a single reason for this depite the fact that the US wastes energy like noone else on this planet.
When atke into account that less than half of the US energy comes from Oil and that a not that small part comes from domestic sources, I guesstimate that by saving less than a third of the current energy usage the USA could become completly independent from foreign oil. And you would still use more energy than Japan for example.
This goal is reachable rather easy as you can see in Japan or Germany.
Sell your SUV, buy a Volkswagen/Audi TDI (will use less than half of your energy). Switch off your AC when you leave or when you don't need it. Change to energy saving light bulbs (will use less than 15% of your original energy usage). Throw away your old fridge and buy an energy saving new one (will use less than half of your old). Etc. pp.
It's doable. It's easy.
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
Only certain elements are susceptible. If you don't use those elements in your metals then you vastly eliminate waste. One of the biggest waste problems with current pwr designs is the water.
...in the short term, yes, it's a good thing.
But you run into a big economic problem in about 20 years. What to do with spent reactor cores, pressure vessels, etc.? Storage and reprocessing of spent fuel? Ship and sell it all to China (hmm... now THAT's an idea...)? Drop it into ocean subduction zones (so it eventually gets cycled back to the earth's mantle, which is where it all came from anyways)?
If we changed to designs that reduced slightly the efficiency of the fuel (i.e., ceramicized fuel pellets) in exchange for making them impossible to reprocess into weapons-grade fissile materials, then maybe it would work.
I agree with the short-term view (i.e., the next 20 years at this point). It's the long-term economics that don't seem to make sense.
But we still spew tons of radioactive coal fly ash into the atmosphere, too, daily. What are the total lifecycle costs on that?
And not at the same time concerned about the ore from which the uranium was extracted? If we diluted the waste to the same radioactive concentration of the ore and put it back in the mine, there would be no difference. But paranoia reigns....
> What do current nuclear power plants do?
They store it in vast containment pools at the plant. And they're running out of space. And they're not very secure. And there's dozens of them.
One reassuring thing is that most of that waste is "self-protecting" against theft, i.e. it's so hot that stealing it is probably a suicide mission. Not that that stopped 19 hijackers...
The government shouldn't be making any energy decisions. The consumers should decide what they want, and when the right time to switch is. One thing the government should definitely do is not get into bed with leaders of other governments and corporations in order to provide energy to the citizens of the United States. Doing so is dangerous becuase the line between government and business is blurred, and when something goes wrong, the odds of prosecution and correction are slim to none. The U.S. government is -- even when not literally, then effectively -- immune to punitive and corrective legal action, so when they cause or allow major environmental and human rights disasters, they continue their operations unchecked. This is dangerous because the people these actions affect feel they have no power or recourse to find justice. This is how violent action and uprising begin.
We (the people; the citizens) should be 100% responsible for -- and therefore hold all the power of -- our decisions. Let the price of gas do what it will, and let the free market decide which fuel wins. If the desire for U.S. gold drives other countries to enslave their citizens, they really have nobody to blame but their own government. That's their fight. At one time we had cotton and tobacco industries that relied on slavery, and I'd argue that we are substantially and fundamentally better for having dealt with that on our own.
1) What will we do with the waste?
I think Bush made that one a no-brainer: weapons, of course.
3. The amount of waste would be a small percentage of the starting amount. So for every *ton* of fuel (that's one HELL of a lot of energy!), you'd end up with a few dozen kilograms of stuff left. Of the remaining "waste", a large portion of it would be stable materials.
I think the problem is that conversion of U-235 into fissile byproducts isn't complete. Plus, you have these big really radioactive pressure vessels, etc., that need to be replaced every 20 or 30 years as well, and all the other differing radioactive materials and byproducts that get generated as part of the process of dealing with nuclear power.
The fission efficiency of most uranium byproducts is pretty low (bad neutron capture probabilities, non-neutron decay paths, etc). There is no point in using gamma ray, beta or alpha particle-emitting radioactives for fission fuel.
Maybe you haven't seen the news since Tuesday evening.
All your uranium are belong to U.S.!
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
> I have always wondered why we can't shoot it into the sun....
It's heavy. You want to try and lift it? Maybe with a space elevator, but that's still science fiction.
Well, the US just decommissions reactors once they've used up the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel (which holds the core) is removed, put into a big huge steel casing, and trucked across the country to INEL, Hanford, or Nevada. The spent fuel rods are kept on-site in water pools for long periods of time (20-30 years). The rest of the radioactive byproducts are shipped to some burial sites or, again, to Hanford, Nevada, INEL, depending.
You would think that such a huge chunk of high-strength steel would be impervious, but the neutron radiation does weaken all the parts over time.
we could mail it to china for all the poor children who dont have any radioactive waste.
dunno about number two either,but then we could just keep using petrolium products.for that matter,we should just go back to regular gas too.
I was thinking the other day about all the dust and heavy metals that enter our atmosphere from space.I'll bet it dumps more pollutants on us than motor vehicles ever would.We should legislate a giant dome to keep the sky from falling.Gosh imagine all the radioactive dust from space.Lets do it for the children.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
4. China's demand for oil has skyrocketed in the last decade.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Well, #5 there basically is saying "how much of this do we achieve through taxation (and thus wealth redistribution) and how much of this do we foist on those who can barely afford it?"
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
An IFR could even be used to burn existing n-waste.
The biggest problem was mentioned earlier: It's too dangerous to transport it on the highway, so we can't move it to the launch facility...
um, right?
The parent poster claims "Even France has had a longtime stop to its nuclear program."
Then explain this: "In mid 2004 the board of EdF decided to build the first demonstration unit of an expected series of 1600 MWe Framatome ANP EPRs. Construction of France's first unit is expected to start in 2007, following public consultation which will include finalising the site, and licensing. Construction is then expected to take 57 months to start up in 2012. EdF is aiming to firm up an industrial partnership with other European utilities or power users for construction of the initial EPR before the end of 2004 - negotiations continue with German utilities. (Finland is also building an EPR unit at Olkiluoto.)
EdF is expected to announce its preference of sites following discussions with representatives from several places eager to have it. The leading candidates are apparently Penly and Flamanville in Normandy. After experience with the initial EPR units, a decision would be taken about 2015 on whether to build more of them over 30 years or so to replace the present EdF fleet, or switch to alternative designs such as Westinghouse's AP1000 or GE's ASBWR."
which can be found at: http://www.uic.com.au/nip28.htm/
It would be interesting to see your post redone using thermonuclear fusion. There is a thermonuclear fusion reactor operating 24/7 about 93 million miles from here. Why don't we just use that? If the solar energy that falls on the Shara Desert or many other deserts of the world could be harvested, stored and transported, the world's energy needs would be met for as long as anyone alive today could even imagine.
All theory is gray
There are actually 2 nuclear reactors in Norway. One at Halden and one at Kjeller. Both are used for research purposes, but the energy generated is distributed to the main power-net.
Last thing I heard it amounted to a bit less than 1% of the Norwegian energy consumption.
Just because I voted that a marriage is only between a man and a woman, does not mean I am a homophobe you asshat. I don't see why you gay folks want marriage anyway. Don't you know with marriage comes divorce?? Try that once and you will not WANT message.
Solent Green! It's made from reactors!
...as it stands right now. See the Price-Anderson Act for more details. If nuclear power plants had to insure themselves in the case of accidents, etc., nuclear power would be even less viable than it is today. The point of Price-Anderson was to make it possible for private companies to get into the market to make nuclear energy viable. In almost 50 years the nuclear energy industry has failed to do that and the current energy bills in congress are looking to extend the Act permanently.
The estimates are that we'd have a ~100 year supply of Uranium if all power was switched to nuclear power today.
Show your source, as I've seen 30 year estimate.
Nuclear energy isn't the best. The best, clean, and never ending source of fuel for power plants is garbage. Think about it, it will eliminate land fills, provide a source of energy, and it doesn't smell or pollute. Plus, there isn't a radiation danger either.
Maybe it would be helpful to point out the specific leftie factions that have been very vocal about it... It's the Eco-nazi wing of your party that has the problems.
These people didn't exactly vote for Reagan.
Now in deference to you, and the previous like minded posters, I googled a little to find some specific vocal anti-nuclear groups, and I stumbled across this link:
PDF
It was prepared by the Nuclear Energy Institute, and their findings seem to indicate that opposition to nuclear energy has reduced over the years, even among left-leaning and environmental groups. (From the source, you may consider this propaganda, but I sincerely hope it's true. I'd love to tell the Middle East we don't need their oil any more, so have a nice Jihad without us.)
I sincerely hope that during this second Bush term, we can find an increased role for nuclear energy in a coherent and comprehensive energy policy. (Even if we still relied on oil for gasoline, how great would it be if we didn't need any oil at ll in the production of electricity?)
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
A problem with Nuclear energy, beyond the possibility of a meltdown, is thermal water pollution (i.e. over-warming of water) and the construction of more barriers to fish passage. Many aquatic species of plants and animals require very specific temperatures to survive and reproduce. Thus, large scale roll-outs of nuclear power plants may very well result in a disastrous amount of thermal water pollution which could significantly alter downstream ecosystems.
Additional dams are another matter. We're already having problems with wild salmon strains being depleted across the west due to insufficient fish passage measures on many dams in the region. Now, one could require the construction of fish passage devices on all newly constructed dams but, for example, research has shown that the likelihood of an Atlantic Salmon returning to spawn decreases significantly for every dam they must pass during their trip (they don't know which way is upstream with no current, etc.). Though I've not seen the research, I'm sure a similar effect would be observed for western salmon strains.
So, we're not only changing the thermal characteristics and, inherently, the chemical composition of their habitat but we're also changing the entire structure of the ecosystem via water impoundments. In other words, we have some issues that still need worked out.
Getting weapons-grade materials from a fast breeder reactor is not the best (or only) source. The former Soviet Union seems to hold a lot of weapons-grade plutonium in a usable form. Wouldn't it be better to secure that?
This must never, ever, be allowed to happen again. I stand with you, brother.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
The problem here is that the stuff was never properly stored/disposed of.
I think that the storage of those materials was criminal. To a large extent, these wastes were produced by a weapon industry concentrating on delivering material-not disposing of waste. It wasn't particularly concerned with efficiency either, so here's alot of waste.
Best I can say - they're working on cleaning it up, but it's a slow process.
It's like the leftovers from the various war efforts. We're still digging stuff up that was pretty much just dumped in a hole in the ground.
I don't read AC A human right
100% of the reason why there are less fatal accidents between the hundreds of planes flying at 500mph than there are between the millions of cars driving at 15mph is because of the strict rules governing gneral aviation. The volume of traffic has NOTHING to do with it.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Winning The Oil End Game is a newly released, 400ish page technical manifesto for getting America completely off oil in twenty years.
This is not a lightweight document. The previous book by these authors, Small Is Profitable was The Economist's Book of the Year in 2003, and this book has heavy, heavy political and scientific credibility. The foreword is by George Shultz.
What's the plan? Roughly:
1> Double the average efficiency of the current vehicle fleet over twenty years, using established technologies like hybrid power trains, and new technologies like lightweight car bodies.
2> Replace the fuel supply, half-biodiesel, half hydrogen. Hydrogen initially to be made from natural gas, and transitioning over to renewable resource hydrogen, mainly from wind.
The entire book is available for download. I suggest you read it, and actually take a look at the numbers, before casually suggesting that the plan won't work.
They're RMI. They've been right about every major innovation in the energy sector for about thirty years, as far as I can tell. They know which way the wind blows, and their technical and scientific approaches are impeccable. This isn't some eco-hippie dream, this is a plan. America can get out of the Middle East completely by 2025 and make Arab Power a thing of the past.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Are you perhaps thinking of this study? It says that there is 40 year supply of Uranium at < $80/kg, but at least a 100 year overall supply of the material.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You don't need nuclear power or a federal program to eliminate the United State's dependence on foreign oil. From an article on thermal depolymerization:
"Changing World say that converting all of the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4bn barrels of oil, roughly equal to the volume of US oil imports in 2001."
That's just the agricultural waste. Add municipal waste, and all the carbon locked up in our landfills. The process was developed by Changing World Technologies. They have a demo plant at a Con-Agra turkey processing facility in Missouri, which is producing 100-200 barrels of oil a day. At a price of about $15 a barrel to produce, it seems to me that freeing up the carbon in our waste stream is a cheaper alternative.
User Training for Busy Programmers
Leader: That is, can the USA eliminate our economic dependence on crude oil with a large scale federal program to build and maintain enough nuclear power plants to replace our current oil-based energy needs?
Parent: France is far less dependent on foreign energy for power than most countries... we could reduce pollution, reduce energy costs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
I really don't understand this (largely American) dependence-on-oil argument. We are dependent on others for a lot of other things, too: electronics, consumer goods, even clothes. In an interconnected world, everyone buys important items from others.
Yet certain American leaders can justify wars as "defending our interests" when it comes to oil (even though it is not "ours"), but we don't find it necessary to attack China to defend our economy even though a Chinese embargo would ruin it. We don't talk of protecting "our" electronics industry abroad.
Get over it. We buy foreign products. They need our money. Even oil embargos against South Africa failed. Make your leaders explain their wars a little better.
Lies about crimes
yup. We already have nuke plants and they are already faced with problem no. 1 that you mentioned. I don't know about problem no. 2 though. From what I understand (very limited and old info though) is that the waste is mainly water that was used for cooling and spent rods. If it can be solved it definetly is an answer. The left would hate it of course because they wouldn't have anything left to whine about as it fullfill what they've been demanding for years anyway. I absolutely hate whineing without a solution.
i'm confused about your point. 30 people a year * 100 years of coal mining is 3000 dead people. which is way less than what has been killed by terrorism. never mind that people are free to make choices about what kind of job they will take.
also bush is the one who has tried pushing nuclear power despite the green wackos of the democratic party. what the heck.
why do i bother replying to posts like this? you are obviously irrational and retarded and i'm just wasting my time. parent post is a troll not insightful.
my numbers came from the research into the book at http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
They can, but reprocessing spent fuel is prohibited by treaty due to the fact that it produces potentially weapons-grade material (I say potentially because its not weapons grade 'out of box').
It is a feature of oil fields that they diminish in daily yield over time. Furthermore, techniques used to boost production temporarily have destructive long term effects (pumping in saltwater to pump out oil = eventually getting lots of saltwater instead of oil). From this, one can see that global oil production follows a bell curve. As such, there is a daily limit on how much oil can be produced. While this limit has been expanding for some time, it is now largely at a standstill and will soon decline. For further information, please consult www.peakoil.net
. htm
When scarcity of a resource becomes a factor as supply can no longer meet demand, prices increase. However, oil is not just a luxury good. It fuels nations' economies through allowing mass trasnportation of people and goods; it plays a huge factor in agriculture as most fertilizers and pesticides are petroleum based; and it provides the energy for most types of military machinery.
A global decline in oil production would cause severe effects around the world. For instance, what will happen to China's expanding middle class and their booming automobile industry? What sort of power will nations who control oil wield over nations who require oil but cannot acquire it?
From Clinton's actions in the Republic of Georgia to aid for Africa and war in Iraq, the big picture lies in a strategy more complex than simply endorsing specific companies or driving up prices. Think of securing oil supplies as the soon to be most effective way to either destroy or subordinate a country. That is why this shall become, in the words of President Bush, a perpetual war.
For the neoconservative take on energy and its relation to the economy: http://www.newamericancentury.org/global-20030923
(please notice that some urls may become distorted; check that there are no unnecessary spaces)
Sure, as long as it is not in my backyard.
Would piping hydrogen through existing Natural Gas pipelines be feasible? Would it really be more dangerous? Natural Gas is pretty flammable as well, and heavier than air, hydrogen might be safer if it disappated faster during/after a leak.
What about mixing in a certain percent of hydrogen to spike the gas, like adding ethanol to gasoline?
What a great way to fight those "extremists". I guess they take the "fight fire with fire" tactic to the extreme.
Like a friend said: US citizens worry more about men kissing men than men KILLING men
All that radioactive stuff is waste. It must be stored carefully, for long periods of time. And noone has a solution that works both politically, geologically, and medically.
Energy Amplifier
or more realistically, Integral Fast Reactor.
Both reuse waste.
As a true Star Trek fan, I feel compelled to point out that Dilithium Crystals do not generate power. Rather, they capture the energy released in matter/antimatter annihilation. Thus the correct answer is "antimatter". I suggest that you sweep the issue of *where* the antimatter comes from under the rug. :-)
Ya know... I assume a matter/anti-matter reaction would be similar but produces way more power than nuclear fission. However, physics and chemistry have become ancient history for me now, so I don't know what sorts of waste products and thus problems of disposal you'd possibly get from such a reaction.
That said, if you can actually harness the power of a nuclear explosion the way a flux capacitor should theoretically be able to harness a bolt of lightning, we would probably have enough fuel with all the stockpiles of weapons to make worries about fuel shortages a thing of the past.
But then again, this is all speculation on non-existant technoglogy...
Actually, the main reason for not breeding fuel is because breeder reactors are more expensive and less safe. Our last breeder used liquid *sodium* as coolant. Apart from the simple fact that having molten sodium around is a bit dangerous (to say the least), it's also really nasty on the pumps that move it around.
:)
I mean, I suppose we could come up with worse coolants. Hydrofluoric acid, perhaps?
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
Actually as long as your attached to the grid you don't need a battery for solar power, effictivly the grid acts as your battery. Of course you go out when the grid goes out, but thats just the tradeoff you have to make unless you want to buy a battery.
Other note is solar cells are expensive to make and have a pretty high energy cost that isn't recovered till several years of use, and then only generally last for about 20 year. Now solar energy power done on massive scale is generally done through reflection which heats up water which turns turbines and whatnot. Not practicle on a household scale, but works on a power plant scale. Though for your money your still not getting a very good return.
Yes difinitely
........... list goes on and on (It was all thanks to white fundamentalism).
We need to watch out for those Islamic Fundamentalist, they have done a lot of harm to this world:
1) Killing Jews in Germany
2) Killed all the Aborigine people in Australia and New Zealand
3) Killed all the native Americans
4) Spanish inquisition
5) Bhopal accident
6) Destruction of Kabul, Bairut and now Baghdad. Those muslim fundamentalists should not have attacked Afghanistan in the first place right
What I dont understand that muslims ruled Spain for a long time and they ruled India for about 1000 years, according to what I hear about muslims, there should not be a single Spanish christain or hindu left in this world.
This is highly arrogant to fuck everything up yourself and blame your victims for this. If you do something have the honor (I know prode is falling out of your ass, but honor is what matters).
While a nuclear accident would be catastrophic, it's technologically possible to run a safe nuclear reactor. The problem is that a safe reactor requires careful design, continuous monitoring, preventive maintenance and strict procedures. A corporation slaving to meet its quarterly profit expectations will be unable to meet this criteria. A government wholly owned and operated by such corporations will not be enforcing standards either.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
And that's ignoring breeders, and is based on known deposits. If we use breeders, just using our known uranium deposits, the number rises to about 2,000 years at current usage rates, if I recall correctly.
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
Putting radioactive waste into millions of homes would give every one of those people the essential raw material for a dirty bomb. What problem are you trying to solve? Terrorism? Yeah, that would let everyone breathe a sigh of relief!
According to UCS, nuclear is down to 21% of our energy production and falling as old plants get retired. Russia used to have a pretty active nuclear program as well, but they've had a few problems.
Meanwhile coal is doing 54%. If the Clean Air Act had not been watered down, we would have much cleaner air.
One of the safest orbital launch systems in history is the Shuttle, with its ~98% success rate. Still, you want 1 out of ~50 launches of 24,000 kilograms of high level waste to explode? (Ok, 1 out of ~100, since only one of the failures was on the way up; the other was during reentry).
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
I personally favor the use of Nuclear energy in efforts to curb or even stop our dependence on fossil fuels. I feel that our dependence on nuclear energy, in the scheme of things, wouldn't last very long until we finally develop new, cleaner sources.
As Nuclear goes today, it's a clean, safe, effective means of generating vast quantities of energy for our ever increasing needs. It holds the potential to reverse this country's disproportional production of greenhouse gases, and also could serve to free ourselves from the lesser acknowledged damage caused by hydro-electric projects.
If we dedicate ourselves to strict safety controls (as do many Nuclear dependent countries like Japan and France), and find uninhabited places to send our waste materials, the staggering half lives of these toxic materials will likely be negated by our future improvements in technology. By that I mean we will likely find comparatively cost effective ways to process these waste materials in later years; or perhaps even ship them to the Sun for incineration.
While seemingly implausible in our current times, isn't it logical to expect, as we continue to improve in our technology regarding energy production, propulsion, space travel, etc., that some day we will be in a position to effectively eliminate the waste materials of our previous centuries? I'm not saying this would happen overnight, but where will we be in, say, 200 years (provided we don't kill ourselves first or are otherwise doomed by a massive meteor impact)? There will be methods of travel and energy production we can't fathom today, and we'll be able to use these technologies to sweep away the last remnants of our admittedly disgusting years in primitive energy production.
Or we can choose to melt our polar ice caps, pollute our groundwater for centuries, dam up our waterways, and exhaust all remaining reserves of fossil fuels-- Problems that will stay with us essentially indefinitely-- Long, long, long after we've since moved away from dino-fuel.
Nuclear is an excellent bridger, and I support it. I claim not that it is perfect, but it's better than continued use of fossil fuels and stands to stop the destruction of our environment right NOW. Before it's too late (if it isn't already).
And I posted before thinking... 24,000kg is to LEO (we don't want our waste in LEO!). I'm not sure how much you could get to the sun per trip (it'd clearly need a disposable second stage if the shuttle was the first stage; I'd guess around 5,000 kg. Still not an amount you'd want in your atmosphere!!!)
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
Thinking back to that /. article of the high school project where they put solar collectors in the back of that pickup to generate hydrogen, I'm wondering what the return is on hydrogen generation through electrolysis.
I'd guess that generating hydrogen with nuclear power would be rather expensive and way too many steps from a natural resource to electricity and then to a useable fuel.
But there is hydro electricity, wind and solar that can probably do it cheaply.
Let me ask this...
Rather than going with nuclear and fossil fuel produced electricity plus burning of fosil fuels in cars, what is the cost of and how much would we need of hydro electric dams, wind and solar farms to produce enough electricity to make enough hydrogen and power the current grid?
the East Shore is a wasteland, but I doubt that radioactivity has much to do with it.
Bomb makers get rid of this problem by very short irradiation of a depleted uranium element; if the Pu-239 is not allowed to build up it cannot be transmuted. On the other hand, building up fuel is the purpose of a power-producing breeder reactor.
An excellent summary with a table of typical isotopic compositions for weapons-grade Pu and spent reactor fuel is here. It was the first hit I got with the search string "PWR fuel plutonium isotopes" in Google; what's your excuse?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
(a) the left opposes nuclear energy, (b) the right opposes federalizing energy, and (c) the oil companies and Saudis wield a lot of clout.
Not to nitpick, but why not merge c with b?
The US right is extremely close to the Saudi regime (some may say they even protect each other). group C may not like if the US ever DID try to re-assert soverignty over energy matters, but Group B will always act on their behalf.
Nothing is going to divorce Group B and C, short of a major disaster or terrorism incident. Group B depends heavily on campaign finances from group C, and there's some fair amount of overlap of far-right viewpoints as well.
Besides, silly, Nuclear can not wean the US off terror-state oil.
On one hand, US-made corn methenol Methanol could provide energy independence and employ LOTS of farmers and UN-employ certain theocratic dictatorships.
On the other hand, such an effort would require government intervention into the market, depriving investors of their god-given right to gamble on the market.
Those "fair and balanced" folks might comment that methanol REQUIRES more energy to create the fuel, than you get by burning it. Never mind that ALL energy conversions cost more than you gain (and HERE is where nuclear can help).
I've recently heard about a new technique about nuclear waste disposal. Too bad I only can find the following:
[Source]A new technique has been discovered that will allow much easier cheaper disposal of nuclear waste. Instead of storing the waste in special, very expensive, underground areas, it can now be transformed into different non-radioactive and harmless material.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Know the differences!!!
Fusion = No long term radio active waste
Fission = Radioactive waste & possible creation of materials for Atom weapons
or just remember
Fusion "Good
Fission "Bad"
Thermonuclear fusion really needs a new name, anytime any bumkin hears "nuclear" whatever they immeadiately think "Three Mile Island" and cancerous mutation and painful death. Can we start calling fusion "Solar Combustion" or something without nuclear related to it?
Work has been started in the 1950's and is continueing today http://www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/nstx.html Selling contained Fusion reactors which generate large amounts energy would be good for the US economy (or any country's economy bold enough to make portable fusion reactors). Not to mention I'd like one in my neighborhood or basement too.
What's it going to take?
High cost of oil (We are getting there) well... possibly just getting really pissed off with idiots who control the oil supply (I think we are there too) a little psychology (informing Joe 6-pack that fusion will not create a 3 mile island event) funding (oh maybe one tenth of what we spend on oil in a year) and significant brainpower to unlock the mystery of our Sun's energy process.
No, wait, that can't be done for another 16 years!
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
In your own backyard, Mexico.
We welcome all kind of foreign investment.
I see many commenting on different energy generation systems, accepting higher costs, and running away from nucler energy.
What I see is not an availability/cost issue, but more a utilization problem. For instance, lighting. Almost all cities use a poor utilization of lighting, with widespread diffusion, rather than a focused system, where all available light is focused downward, rather than sideways. This would allow a city to create a more effective amount of light on streets, and residences, with lower consumption of electricity.
Many businesses keep lights on even when they are closed - what a waste.
Residences use high energy brigh lights for security, but there are methods that give the same coverage without the high energy costs.
The problem is not simple, and alternatives need to be found and implemented, but we should also start in our usage, creating more efficient systems that can maximize their design implementation while minimizing the amount of energy required for the task.
Of course, the average consumer could give a shit about the problem, gimme my SUV/MTV/backyard searchlights please.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What about the 'u' in flavour, favourite, colour, neighbour, and the others?
My other first post is car post.
Last time I checked, fusion reactors required more energy going into them to sustain the reaction than the energy produced from the reaction. In other words, it isn't a generator yet, but more like an appliance. It's not a solution yet.
Also last time I checked, solar energy wasn't cost-effective in large scales, which is why we haven't seen large-scale deployment of the technology.
My other first post is car post.
Oil - 41%
Natural Gas - 23%
Coal - 16%
Nuclear - 13%
Hydro - 5%
other renewable - 1% (in denmark 400% from pigshit)
source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/euro.html#Table2
in the same chart it can be gleaned that the US uses about 30% more energy and emit 50% more carbon emissions, the EU (EU-15) having 100 million more people but only about a third of the landmass.
I think Homer Simpson inadvertently walked out with it.
"Actually as long as your attached to the grid you don't need a battery for solar power, effictivly the grid acts as your battery." That was more or less my point but you have to have something besides solar on that Grid. Nuclear, Gas, Oil. Wind will never be a good solution except for some small locations and for things like pumping water.
"Other note is solar cells are expensive to make and have a pretty high energy cost that isn't recovered till several years of use, and then only generally last for about 20 year."
Actually the seem to be lasting much longer than that. Very few photovoltaic systems where around 20+ years ago. There seems to be little loss in there power output. Now in space they tend to fail faster due to atomic oxygen. Not a problem on earth. The reflective system has high costs do to land needed and keeping the mirrors clean. Also the cost of solar cells would tend to come down with economies of scale.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Nuclear power could also fuel a vigorous space program
Please read before passing judgment: Liberty Ships
Science is the Real TRUTH!
Sorry, I did not follow the link. If you read my posting, you will see that I am not opposed to sending it to space, just aware that we can not solve everything easily. Even the mass driver can fail as can the booster. Personally, I would prefer that before we send nuke garbage out to space that we look at other alternatives, or simply have a near perfect record on a system. Besides, down the road, we may find some very interesting uses of "garbage". I suspect that we simply have not applied ingenuity to the problem.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
this space intentionally left blank.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Yeh the cancellation of the Integral Fast Reactor was amazeingly stupid. It was a great solution to what to do with nuclear "waste".
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
So, let me get this straight. Pu generated in regular power reactors would still require isotopic separation to be used with weapons, and that is already hard to do (see uranium isotopic separation). And there are *large* stocks of already-purified weapon's grade Pu left over from the Soviet Union and U.S. weapons programs that has to be disposed of somehow.
[Queue Monty Python voice]
So, what should we do with the plutonium??
Burn it! Burn it! Burn the Pu!
I see no evidence contradicting this: power use will always increase to a level where the resulting negative effects are still bearable (with a short term view)
There are early examples, for example, London 12th century. Coal was burnt in huge amounts producing smog and smoke. Laws where introduced, and the smoke and smog went back to a "bearable" level. Today there are more efficient fuels. But go to London and the air is pretty bad (unbearable for me, but locals differ, it seems)
What is the limit to how much one person can wish to be able to consume in a day? Equipped with a computer one can control many, many powered devices.
See you
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Currently the highest grade solar panels are like 30-40% efficient and they are horribly expensive, fragile, and difficult to make. When the materials engineers figure out how to make it 45% efficient, cheap, and robust. Solar power will become a good option, not quite as good as you think it is but it will help us. The honest truth is we have to concentrate on making devices more efficient, we probably should build some nuclear powerplants, we need to go to biodiesel, CWT process for turning waste into oil is another good concept, wind power, tidal power, hydroelectric power are all great options. If we could reduce the amount of fuel used in cars, reduce our electricity use, and institute new power initiative everything will be good again.
Take a look at this Wired article that outlines COMPLETELY SAFE walk-away pebble-bed Nuclear Reactor technology that is:
1. Ridiculously cheap to build because no cooling towers are needed.
2. Waste problem is negligable in comparison to traditional plants
3. Powerplants scale very well due to small size
4. NO MELTDOWNS - if reactor goes critical, you could hang out for the show and not grow another leg!
5. Offers a reealistic way to produce Hydrogen for our upcoming Hydrogen-based economy.
A GREAT read!
Taken from another post here: Wired article summary: With these small plants you still have the waste issue, but the waste is contained in durable billiard ball-sized chunks. Much safer than conventional nuke plants because you can walk away from the plant and not suffer a meltdown. (So if you put Homer in charge the worst that's going to happen is the plant will stop producing power.) Helium is gas used to transfer the energy to turbines so no containment tower needed, which is the majority of the ridiculous cost!
Saudi oil is used in Japan and Europe!
The US gets it's oil from Venezuela!
Get a free ipod.
Finally, someone who can explain free market economics in terms we all can understand.
I agree. If we the goverment would build enough nuclear power plants across the country and lease them at a very low cost to energy companies, we could then feasible have low energy for homes, companies, and automobiles...We will never have hybrid cars if we dont use nuclear. Windmills can only do so much. I think the far left is valid point, but big oil is more the problem. Money talks especially in Washington. ANyone that says Nuclear == kill enviroment is a moron. If you would rather dig holes in the ground and flood our oceans with oil, then you are a hypocrite. Nuclear power is the only option we have right now....I am for 3 eyed fish...vote Burns for 2008.
Deserving got nothing to do with it.....shuffle
There is a lot of ignorance showing in the posts!!! I was surprised in fact that slashdotters would be so ignorant.
Argonne labs designed the Fast Integral Reactor and proved its concept by 1994 before Clinton shut them down. This is a very good design and much better than breeder reactors.
With a reactor fleet such as this, the spent fuel can be burned as well as the depleated uranium and this would provide about 5,000 years energy supply using just the exisiting depleated uranium and spent uranium.... this is meeting 100% of USA energy requirments as well, and that means no oil, no gas, no hydro, no solar or anything else - just nuclear.
Doing something like this would mean building about 1300 reactors each in the GWe size range. However clearly there is no reason to not use traditional energy sources other than perhaps coal and oil and gas which should be saved for chemical feedstocks...
Furthermore Canada has offered to take the spent fuel because it is a lot hotter than natural uranium and our CANDU reactors can easily burn it. It should be re-processed though so that the nuclear poisons are removed - but this costs money and makes mined uranium a little cheaper than the USA spent fuel. The impass seems to be that the USA wants Canada to pay for the re-processing. The logic of this idea fails me.
Nevertheless, the spent fuel can be used and will supply a fleet of about 100 CANDU reactors for about 50 years. Then the Fast Integral reactor can kick in and run for additional 1000's of years.
The best idea however is to re-instate the Argonne Labs Fast Integral reactor program and get fuel reprocessing underway.... these are programs which have been shut down for political reasons.
With these two programs underway the waste problem actually disappears because a reactor like the Fast Integral will burn up the actinides and turn them into electricity. In addition there is also spallation technology that can be deployed.
So, the technology is there. Its the politics that is standing in the way and creating the problem. Many lives will unnecessarily be lost before this problem gets resolved. But I guess this is not unlike religeous wars in the past, the difference being that the public has been lied to so much about nuclear energy that it has almost taken on a religeous tone.
The submitter of this story misses what is the biggest problem with nuclear power:
What to do with the waste? A nation-wide nuclear system will generate hundreds of tons of the stuff. Yucca Mountain, should it be opened against the protests of the poor suckers who have it in their backyard, is already full with what waste we have waiting. As Yucca Mountain shows, it is rather difficult to bring new storage facility on line.
Without a comprehensive storage plan, we end up with stopgap measures and overfilled warehouses that lead to contamination.
-- Hello_World.c: 17 Errors, 31 Warnings
Read Ending the Oil Endgame by Amory Lovins and others. At less than the cost of burning oil, we already have everything we need to wean ourselves from oil. And with little policy restructuring, etc. It is similar to power companies back in the 80's spending money on making peoples homes more efficient rather than build new power plants. It is the same concept.
We should be investing in existing and emerging technologies that are renewable and are low or non-polluting. This is a duh, and most people just don't get it!
We don't individually wrap cheese, we individually wrap cheese food, look closely at the wrapper.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
All technology is dangerous in the wrong hands. Nuclear power if we use it wisely could help us immensely in weaning us from limited oil/gas/coal based resources use that oil/gas/coal for other products that nuclear power cannot be easily be converted. If we can reprocess the spent reactor fuel we can limit the dangerous byproducts the nuclear reactors. This is no better that when we started add catalytic converters to cars and scrubbers to smoke stacks. If you lived in the 1970's in Los Angeles, CA you know how bad smog was and now there is not as much but we live what little there is. If you want your lovely computers and other lovely electronic toys then I would suggest you to look at you electrical bill and add up all of the kilowatts of power you use to power your equipment up. Now consider that about 60% in the US of the power comes from oil/gas/coal based generators then you could either cut down on your equipment usage or change the source of your electrical generation. Now it is up to you to decide since this is a free country.
Where did you get that figure from? Why 50 or 100 million, why not 500 million (the world population in about 1650)? Why not 1 billion (the world population in about 1820)? Or, indeed, why wouldn't the current world population be able to adapt to a sustainable lifestyle? There is a lot of middle ground between living like an American and a Bangladeshi farmer.
The answer to #2 is to start importing from places like Iran and North Korea.
With our clever diplomacy they'll probably band together and form an OPEC-like cartel for fissionable fuel, and we'll be right back where we started.
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
Lets say for a moment we all turn off the lights, refrigerator, electric stoves...everything. The power plant would still be burning the same amount of energy even though nobody at the moment chose to use the power! Its wasted. The plant chucks along driving an electric potential that nobody really used.
Maybe I'm confused but each home in the US need a large battery. When you want the energy then you "fill it up." Then you disconnect from the power plant. Now one uses the energy when they really need it and it is not lost.
Maybe plants detect the load on the grid and determine whether or not to turn on more generators. But I still see some waste going on. Never worked at a power plant...
"however I'm more interested in the economics." /.,you want $.
this is
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
1) What will we do with the waste?
We make radiological dispersion bombs and sell them to Osama.
2) Do we have enough fissionable fuel to accomplish this?
Hell yes.
Um, what about oil's longevity? Funny that you would point out others' ignorance of the availability of uranium.
You think oil will "way outlast" 117 years?
Try 40 years. And the tail end of the reclamation curve will have oil being unaffordable. So, less than 40.
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/ (go to)
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/ (go to)
By some estimates, we've used half the oil reserves since we began a hundred years ago. You might think that means another 100 to go, but take into account our exponential growth. If you've done any biology, you have probably seen what happens to the limited food supply in a petri dish with exponentially growing bacteria. More importantly, you know what happens to the bacteria.
Bye bye, bacteria! (I'm talking to you.)
random energy source -> work
energy is wasted in that step
random energy source -> hydrogen -> work
you've just increased your energy waste by about an order magnitude, at LEAST, depending upon the nature of the conversion: it could many orders of magnitude of waste... and if you need more steps in the conversion? please...
why don't we use steam engines anymore?
combustible material -> heat -> steam -> motion
modern engine:
combustible material -> heat -> motion
getting rid of the steam step creates a MASSIVE increase in efficiency... 10-1,000x or more!
has this little crash course in thermodynamics rung any bells upstairs yet?
converting things to hydrogen?
you are
increasing pollution
increasing energy consumption
don't you get it?
one of the most efficient energy factories we know of: our own mitochondria, wastes 30%... 30%!!! of it's energy source converting our fuel to intracellular work that needs to be done- after billions of years of fat-trimming evolution of the process!
an average car engine wastes 70%
when you add an energy conversion step that is unnecessary to any process, you are not wasting 1%, or 5%, or 20%, you are wasting something like 60-99% of your energy with primitive manmade processes compared to something like mitochondria... for what?!
however you imagine you are going to convert an energy source, ANY energy source to hydrogen, do you give absolutely any thought to the tons of fuel you are wasting and the tons of pollution you are creating in pursuit of exactly what?
what can POSSIBLY be gained that outweighs that collosal increase in waste and pollution by adding the unnecessary step?
please, don't comment on a problem you don't understand because you can't do basic science and math
hydrogen is COMPLETE BULLSHIT
SNAKE OIL
sold to scientific ILLITERATES
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's only impossible until somebody finds a way to do it.
The best efficiencies that I have found that solar plants can achieve is 30%.
Most solar plants have a large thermal reservoir underground that stores heat generated during the day. This reservoir can be tapped (just as efficiently as during sunny days) on cloudy days and at night.
Not applicable in the case of a solar plant.
Using your starting estimate of 2 trillion kWh per day (which, while optimistic, is correct given your assumptions) and using a system efficiency of 30% and a transmission loss of 30%, and your assumption of 100kWh of power per houshold per day, it looks like Arizona would produce enough power to serve 4.2 million households. Enough to power about 1/3 of California. But more than enough for Arizona.
I don't have any references of the costs per watt for solar plants, but I'm sure it is substantially less than solar cells. The best I could find is that some sites claim that California uses the most cheaply produced energy from solar power in the world (using solar plants of course). Nearly the entire cost would be up front since the plants need very little maintenance and no fuel.
Not applicable to mirrors which are just coated with melted sand (basically).
Not if the energy storage system is a thermal reservoir of hot water or molten sand.
"There is a thermonuclear fusion reactor operating 24/7 about 93 million miles from here. Why don't we just use that? If the solar energy that falls on the Shara Desert or many other deserts of the world could be harvested, stored and transported, the world's energy needs would be met for as long as anyone alive today could even imagine."
;-)
...It so reminds me of the "water is scarce" argument. No, turning off my shower after 3 mins doesn't do dick about water elsewhere, because the combined cost of transport/storage/safety/distribution would be too much. Same goes for solar energy, but in the reverse direction: building solar cells in the whole desert (and mantain them: the weather can be forbidding at times over there) would probably not be a practical proposition.
....Unless, of course, we're talking about ambient temperature superconductors. Better yet, water-cooled...water going in, energy going out...can I patent that?
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
The real reason that the US government wants to push nuclear is because its centralized and makes a lot of money for their corporate contributors, just like oil does.
:(
But nuclear power plants, like it or not, produce lots of highly radioactive nuclear waste, and more importantly, they become HIGHLY risky targets of terrorism.
Despite what the government would like you to believe, NO nuclear plant currently being operated could withstand a direct hit on its containment vessel by a jet airliner, like the ones that hit the WTC in 2001. Think of the implications for America on something like a direct hit on Indian Point (20 miles N. of NYC on Hudson River) or Three Mile Island. The health implications for literally tens of millions of people and the financial cost to this nation would be staggering. Also, real estate values for a huge area would crumble, causing many, many loans to be called in. (home insurance policies typically have exemptions for acts of war and nuclear radiation, so they would not pay any costs associated with a nuclear reactors meltdown) This would bankrupt millions of families..as well as making them homeless..
NO, WE SHOULD NOT BUILD ANY *MORE* NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ANYWHERE NEAR POPULATED AREAS..
On the other hand, we are not that far away from being able to make solar energy much more efficiently. The amount of solar energy that falls on a given amount of space is really quite substantial. Current photovoltaic cells only use a tiny amount of it. If we made this a national priority we could make ourselves independent of the oil producing nations within 20 years.. Given the *inevitability* of our oil costs continuing to rise over that time, its a no brainer..
Unfortunately, we have a leadership who are so beholden to the energy industry that they will do almost anything to obfuscate the true issues and prevent this from happening..
What do you expect from a President and Vice President who still have a huge vested interest (you dont want to know how much conflict of interest - they had to change the laws..) in the oil industry..
So, you, no, we, will pay, and pay, and pay...
The will of the people has spoken!
> The estimates are that we'd have a ~100 year supply of Uranium if all power was switched to nuclear power today. This figure does not take reprocessing and non-uranium fission into account.
But if you DO take into account reprocessing, you can arrive at an estimate of a 1,000,000,000 year supply of fission fuel on Earth. See this FAQ on some of the issues involved in nuclear power. It's an excellent FUD-buster.
The major premise of that faq and its related site is that human progress depends on, and will benefit tremendously from, MORE energy, not less. Conservation is a false "alternative" for energy problems. Fuel efficient vehicles that still burn petroleum products only postpone the inevitable.
I wish people would better understand how amazingly safe nuclear energy is, and can continue to be, and especially how in the big picture is is much much MORE safe than coal, or natural gas, or oil. Thousands of people die EACH YEAR in accidents related to those industries, whereas a TOTAL of about a thousand have ever died from nuclear accidents, EVER.
Everyone just thinks of "nuclear" as scary.
Even the waste issue is easily solved: bake the stuff into glass or ceramics, which makes it chemically stable. Then store it away somewhere. It doesn't matter if that somewhere has an earthquake, because the waste won't "leak" even if shattered.
But as this election cycle has shown more clearly than ever, Americans cannot have a rational discussion about pretty much anything, because rational discussions don't fit into soundbites.
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
some stuff here and here. I found that one by googling "mean free path plutonium." So there!
The reason that governments (or more precisely real armies) do not go in for NBC warfare is that it is difficult to use these technologies and not hurt your own troops. The Germans testified to this after WWII, for instance. Besides which, we know where they live and have promised to retaliate (remember MAD) Terrorists do not care if anything in the US survives or if they can come over here afterwards. They know that we do not know where they live (and would not do anything really damaging even if we did). Hence they do not fear to use such weapons. On the other hand, it is difficult to envision something that can easily replace gasoline as an energy source for automobiles and trucks. Batteries do not come close nor does anything else that I remember hearing about. Unless you can find a way to easily synthesize long chain hydrocarbons from raw energy it will be difficult to replace oil.
It takes oil to build a nuclear plant. So you have to weight which will give us more energy. If the nuclear plant cannot give us back the energy used to build it and then some obviously it wasn't worth the effort.
That sounds interesting, and I think I like your suggestion.
You are forgetting Canada, it has massive deposits of uranium. In fact all the fissile material used in the manhatten project and for several decades after the war came from canada.
and more importantly:
4 - 100 years is a LONG time as far as technology goes. Who knows what we'll be using to provide electricity by then. To put it in perspective, 100 years ago most households in the US didn't even have any electrical service of any kind yet. The "grid" was still being built and service only existed in big cities, and nobody had even contemplated nuclear power of any kind.
By the time that 100 years would run out, we'd be doing something different.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
There will always be a quantity of nuclear waste. I believe that high level waste can be safely stored when reformed to a glass-like solid. Giving the Sun more fuel however is always a possiblity.
As for the second question, both a noble-prize winning nuclear physicist & I agree that the worst mistake the US ever made was to close the door on nuclear fuel reprocessing. It would be a lot safer to do it in the US rather than trying to ship it to France.
Both of those answers are for fission power. Unfortunately the money spigot has been virtually turned off for the fusion answer which can cut waste by several orders of magnitude.
I also wish someone in the world would buy one of the new safer nuclear power plants that have been designed. These designs are considerably safer with passive fail-safe methods.
Somebody's already thought about it...
d ln l-net071204.php
http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2004-07/
...is being attempted in Mildura, Australia with a 1km tall 'solar chimney'. The technology has already been operating at a smaller scale (200m tall IIRC) in Spain for some time.
another exciting episode of Questions That Were Answered in 1950.
Can a *different form of energy* wean *country* from *current mainstream form of energy*???
There are problems with reprocessing fission fuel. You can chemically seperate it, but you end up with lots of really radioactive compounds. It also makes the plant you reprocess it in radio active. All of these can be dealt with, but it costs money. The reprocessing ends up being much more expensive than just using enriched uranium that is dug out of the ground and processes. Reprocessing would be much more expesive than just using coal, oil, solar etc.
There is also fusion that does not have many of the fuel problems. You do get some radioactive pieces from fussion reators, but they tend to be much less radioactive. They also use Hydogen for fuel. Although fussion has barely reached the point were it makes more energy that you put in,
it will be a good alternative in the future.
Get Canada to build a bunch of nuke plants for Tar Sands operations and send the waste up here. We'll burn it in the CANDU's for the next 100 years or so and sell you gasoline, ok?
Wind power could satisfy 95% of our electrical power demands with only 3% of our farmland, the vast majority of which would still be farmland.
You guys are forgetting that coal burning releases radioactive materials too....
and the fission products (the real "nuclear waste") needs to be isolated for only a few thousand years
Ah, only a few thousand years. Phew, I was just worrying what would happen to the by-products, but we just need to store it for a few thousand years and we're home free. Do you have any idea how long a few thousand years is? I mean, most of human civilization was within a few thousand years.
At 1.5 watts per SQ foot, covering an area of the roof with solar panels will only net you 12 amps per 1000 sq feet of home @ 120V. Consider that most homes have 200 amp power panels. 1000 sq feet of panels costs $62,000. Saving $100/month, the panels would exceed their life expectancy before making back the raw cost.
The average price for a 1,000 sq foot house in my area is around $80,000.
Consider that in areas further south, power production goes up more than 50%, which makes the panels a much beter deal. Add in maintenance and repairs, and it makes no sense to install solar panels here.
I don't read AC A human right
There may be a really obvious reason why the following wouldn't work, and if so I'd like to know it!
As I understand it, the sun is an enormous ball of fire with all kinds of nuclear activity. It's also the biggest thing in our solar system, and the greatest center of gravity.
So wouldn't it be fairly easy, and relatively risk-free, to package up our nuclear waste, put it in crude little rockets without a whole lot of need for navigation systems, and push 'em off in the general direction of the sun, to be dealt with however the sun generally deals with its nuclear waste?
When I was in high school, there was some talk about sending nuclear waste out to space, but that was deemed (a) expensive and (b) polluting. Doesn't this idea address both points, at least to some degree?
Even if it's not possible/practical today, mightn't technological advances make it so in the forseeable future?
I understand this isn't a perfect solution, but on the face of it, it seems like it might be better than some of the alternatives.
If anybody can help fill any of the gaping holes in my scientific knowledge, I'd appreciate it!
Pete Forsyth
1) Certain high-level nuclear waste products (spent fuel rods have significant amounts of the starting unreacted fissionable isotope left after the percentage of them is too low for them to be usable, for example.) are routinely recycled in France and Japan, and research is being done there to make this recycling more efficient.
Alas, you're sort of right if you're referring to the US- it is forbidden to do so here. The nominal reason was indeed the possibility that such a process could be used for making weapons-grade material. Jimmy Carter signed an executive order banning the practice in the US nominally for proliferation reasons and no subsequent president has rescinded it, so it's illegal here.
(The US has literal tons more weapons-grade plutonium than it has installed in weapons... so much that we shut down production facilities years ago. Plutonium is not the limiting factor preventing the US making more nuclear weapons, so non-proliferation is a poor reason for a ban.)
This ban is bad for many reasons- it both wastes nuclear fuel and 'creates' more high-level waste by redefining perfectly good (if impure) fuel as illegal-to-refine waste. This would be a double win for recycling, turning something we're defining as high-level nuclear waste to useful fuel, but politicians don't even want to address anything remotely addressing nuclear processes.
I did some work peripheral to this process on a code which could be used to design new actinide chelating molecules for chemical separation. Japanese and French labs were very interested, flew my boss in to give talks, etc... while the US DoEnergy (who funded the research, though not for that application) couldn't use it and therefore didn't care.
2) is not true as you phrase it, particularly given we're discussing this in reference to an article about oil independence- 20% of all electricity is not 20% of all power. Gasoline, for example, is certainly a source of power and mostly never becomes electrical.
The last thing the world needs now, are Americans driving with over-dimisioned SUVs propelled by a mini reactor...
Neither are you going to convert a home to nuclear. Converting to electric is cheap,
Um, nuclear power creates electricity. I don't know of any houses in my neighborhood that aren't wired for electricity. Electric furnaces and water heaters are readily available. Hell, the computer you are using to post on Slashdot runs on electricity. Converting to nuclear means nothing to the homeowner. We still get electricity from the power grid.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
- The spontaneous fission rate listed for PWR plutonium by your first reference is more than twelve times as high as weapons-grade. This makes the requirements for the implosion mechanism more than 100 times as steep (12 times the implosion velocity means 144 times the kinetic energy).
- It's actually worse than that. The isotope abundances listed by your reference reflect a slightly lower burnup than the 33,000 megawatt-days/ton listed for mine. I understand that current PWR practice is to use a burnup of 50,000 MW-d/t or more, which would make the isotope composition even worse for the hypothetical proliferator.
- There's more to a bomb than just the fission elements. The implosion mechanism has to work correctly and not pre-trigger, and the more heat and radiation emitted by the "pit" the more stress it's going to put on the explosive mechanism. Your bomb is not going to work if the explosive lenses have turned to jelly, and it's going to be mighty hard to hide a bomb if it requires a huge cooling system to avoid melting itself.
Those factors make it so difficult to make bombs out of recovered PWR plutonium that not one proliferator, not India or Pakistan or Iraq or Iran or North Korea, has even tried to make a bomb that way. Not even one; they all used small research reactors designed for (surprise!) irradiating materials for testing or making specialty isotopes (Co-60 for medicine counts, but Pu-239 is just another "speciality product"). The Russians designed the RMBK reactors for continuous refuelling so that they could make weapons materials; PWRs have no such features.Add to this the niggling detail that we are talking about a US nuclear program, we'd be keeping the stuff within our borders, and the US could easily add a bit of some nasty isotope to any recovered fissonables to make diversion both difficult to do and easy to detect. That makes it a non-issue.
Ah, yes. You're going to take a spent PWR fuel rod bundle, with the fuel pellets swelled from crystal damage and the expansion of the fission products, un-weld the zirconium cladding, substitute fake pellets (which will not have any of the radioisotopes characteristic of the pellets removed), and weld them up again. You're going to do this to enough rods (in what hot cell?) to steal the materials for at least one, and preferably several, bombs. And nobody's going to notice the disturbance in the cladding, the difference in isotope loading, or any of the other details that you'd alter in the process?If that's so easy, why has every proliferator thus far taken another route?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
It can be made into one problem. Generate electricity however you like at the plant, then use it to charge up electric cars at the socket. We could get started on this now, then when nuclear / solar / whatever becomes feasible, simply upgrade the power plants.
Of course, you've got to somehow cycle out the legacy internal combustion vehicles, but stuff like biodiesel, ethanol etc can possibly help there, in addition to buyback schemes, tax breaks etc for upgraders to electric.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
France still doesn't know what to do with all its waste. While this may be primarily a PR issue, it is an issue none the less. Politics are all to real.
One of the most often 'brushed under the rug' issues is that there has never been a sucessful breeder reactor. They all cost massive amounts of money and then make less fuel than they use...
That said, I'd like to see an evenhanded (ha ha!) comparison of coal and nuclear. Both have some cons. But both have huge lobys so it is hard to cut through the BS and know what is real.
This is a good article from wired a few months ago about how china is planning 10's of reactors to furnish the growing population with power
h tm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.
"If you're going to have 300 gigawatts of nuclear power in China - 50 times what we have today - you can't afford a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl," Wang says. "You need a new kind of reactor."
Pretty cool stuff
I'm 98% Libertarian, but I don't understand how ordinarily sane, rational, intelligent people can have it so wrong. Your statements belie a fundamental flaw in logic shared by, unfortunately, a great many (of all political denominations): don't make any changes in the broken system.
... or cake; neither you nor I have any direct say in how the power that comes out of our sockets is made. Or by what proportion each type of energy source is used, even. We don't really even have the choice in our power company. (It's a logical choice, but, since the prices are so similar between competing companies, and the inconvenience factor is too high today, how many of us who know that such a choice is possible make it?) We do have a "choice": power versus no power. Honestly, is that really a "choice"? No, it isn't. (And for those who'd say one could always go independant: if you have the moola that takes, you probably don't even care about the issue, or at least you have the luxary of being flip about it. For the rest of us, we have to do such things as eat and pay rent.)
;) But The Government also has a responsibility to provide me with those things I can't reasonably provide myself: education, medical care, and access to collective resources, such as power. (NOTE: I never said the government would be my only source for these things; freedom of choice is paramount to all, but the Have Nots have a choice between nothing and nothing, which in reality is to say they have
I have a better suggestion: fix the system!
Corporations and Governments are treated, legally, as entities in their own right. Their plan of framing the arguments, of changing perceptions, has been so completely successful that most around us even think of them as such: Big Oil, Evil Corporations, The Government.
Newsflash: They're run by PEOPLE. P-E-O-P-L-E, PEOPLE!
From the smallest to the largest company/governmental body, they're all planned, operated, and owned by INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE. (Even groups/collectives are made up of multiple INDIVIDUALS...)
Change the broken legal (and other) system(s) to take this reality into account: hold the PEOPLE who make, enforce, enact, enable, and/or subvert company/government resources to do bad things accountable for THEIR actions. Don't slap Evil Corporations with a fine - it's big money to you-and-me, but always a mere drop to their corporate bottom line. (Plus, as a loss, it's a tax write-off. Go figure. Furthermore, who in the company REALLY suffers? The peons at the bottom who do the actually work in the company, that's who; layoffs, pay decreases and/or lack of raises, less hires [so more work required of those left behind], etc.) If the PEOPLE involved in the wrong-doing are held PERSONALLY accountable, with FINES, IMPRISONMENT ( real time, too), SIEZERS, etc., then I think the INDIVIDUALS considering driving companies/governments to do bad things would think twice.
Why Libertarians, of all people, who are all about individuals being personally responsible for their own actions, can't, or won't see this obvious (to me) truth and use THAT as a rallying point, I'll never know.
INDIVIDUALS can only make a CHOICE when there are more options than
Again, as a 98% Libertarian, I believe the government, fundamentally, exists for a few simple purposes, like to protect ME from all of YOU. (Whomever YOU turns out to be; an angry mob, "terrorists", a foreign power, etc.) It's to be the Great Equalizer when it comes to Li'l' ol' Me v. Big Bad Deep-Pockets Corporation. By all means, let me make my own decisions, take personal responsibilities, live in a truly free society, with truly free markets. (Well, I dream of such a day...
"To err is human, to totally fsck things up requires an election." - L.W. Hale
Ignoring ecological problems, you just made this a no brainer for dollars and sense. Being independent of oil could EASILY save us $100 billion per year in defense spending, so essentially the gov't COULD pick up the tab without creating even more debt.
Hell, this could probably save the defense department more than that.
Seeds floating on air are taking energy out of the atmosphere. Somehow, the world keeps on turnin'. Why? Because the world is really, really, really, really, really big relative to a seed.
Do you know how much bigger than your ship the universe is? really^really^really^really^100,000,000,000,000^a lot.
"noticeable dent"? Nonsense.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
To get rid of waste:
Load it on the space elevator then shoot it into sun, another nearby star or just heave it in the direction of Pluto.
The British made such a bomb as their second atomic bomb. The Osirak reactor in Iraq, that the Israelis bombed some years ago, was one such "research reactor."
And, somehow, even though we all live on a rock that's FULL of fissile material, civilization happened.
It's just some hot rocks, people. Put them in a hole and forget about them.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Note the poster said the coal mining unions were proud of getting the death toll down to 30/year. In the past it has been much, much higher.
We covered some of the coal mining reforms in a history class I took. Looking references up in google is left as an exercise for the reader.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The Annual Energy Review offers a fascinating graph of our energy sources and destinations. We use about 1e+15 BTU, or 300 terawatt hours. We get roughly 8% of our energy from splitting atoms. We get about 75% from dinosaurs, of which roughly 30% is imported oil.
We would need to add a capacity of 276 terawatt hours, but because we've only seen 90% capacity from the existing plants, we need about 300 terawatt hours. Building "advanced nuclear" plants cost about $2117 per kwhr [1], so we would expect to pay about $600 trillion for the plants. (If we started building in 2002 and finished in 2007.) Economies of scale would likely cut that number by a significant factor - let's guess 10 - and we're still looking at $60 trillion, or about 30 years' worth of the federal budget at present spending rates.
Further calculations - the costs of converting virtually all our energy to electricity, losses related to storage, and so forth are left as an exercise to the reader.
Lawrence-Berkeley Labs also runs NEMS and has produced some reports that may be of interest.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
If we are trying to get rid of a bunch of nasty isotopes with half-lives up to 30 years (strontium 90), putting them away for a mere thousand years reduces them to about one ten-billionth of their original abundance. 3000 years is both overkill and not very difficult.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Sure, we could of pushed the "instant win" button.
Drafting troops, calling up new troops? It'd take at least a year. That's about how long it takes to train a modern infantry trooper up to standards. Our troop mix is not up to the task of limited strikes in that amount. There are also substantial costs in terms of control and coordination. Extra supplies and equipment would have to be obtained too.
I see it taking 10-20 years before we can withdraw. We have to train up the Iraqi military from pretty much scratch, and senior officers and a good NCO core take years. I will say that we're taking more and more of a back seat to the Iraqies, letting them handle things. But building the trust, the skills, of government by the people takes time.
Middle America even approved of the Abu Ghraib attrocities. 57 million of them
Say WHAT? We approved? That's news to me! I cheered when I heard that the first soldier was convicted with maximum penaties. I ask why the highest ranking person being charged was an E-6. I expected at least a captain (note: the military can and often does hold an officer responsible for the acts of the troops under him or her).
A more credable statement would be that the Midwesterners saw the matter as "being handled". Investigation was done, people being punished, and besides, the terrorists are beheading people! Murder is worse than some idiots doing the equivalent of fraternity pranks.
I don't read AC A human right
It's all relative. Right now we're mining the Earth's fuel stores to the point of depletion. But we're only working at a scale of the Earth. Now do some BOTE calculations on how much energy it would take to send a 5,000 tonne starship on a 1 G constant acceleration trip to Wolf 359. How much energy would it take to reach Sirius? Sigma Draconis? Upsilon Andromedae?
:-/
So far, that's only 44 light years! What if we wanted to visit another galaxy altogether? Say, Canis Major? That's a mere 25,000 light years. Do the calculations. We've already outstripped our own Sun's output by a pretty good margin. Now what if we have dozens of starships? Hundreds of starships?
Space is pretty damn big, but so are the energy requirements for moving mass A to point B. It doesn't take much to start thinking of energy on a galactic scale. You and I could get on a spaceship bound for Barnards Galaxy and get back in about 50 years. By the time we got back, our Sun and Solar System would be noticeably different. It's even possible that all our friendly stops (Earth for example) would have been ripped out of their orbit and would be no longer inhabitable.
Thinking on those scales is extremely sobering.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Why fund nuclear when wind is cheaper!! Now who needs to wake up from Repubilcan propaganda?
A whole range of energy choices could help wean Americans from foreign oil. Nuclear power generation technology appears to be improving, so it would be a no brainer if the f***ing environmentalists weren't against economic growth and technology to begin with. Offshore drilling is another rarely-mentioned possibility as well as drilling in Alaska on government-owned land (something that the federal government has far too much of). As long as Republicrat try to appease the left-wing environmentalists we'll just get more tax breaks, subsidies, and even mandates for windmills, hydrogen cars, etc, but nothing will change and we'll still be buying oil from the filthy Saudis, corrupt African dictators, and Castro-wannabes.
Which is partly why I want to eliminate all that federal funding(and taxing). Let the states fund it if they chose. Federal funds come with way too many strings attached.
I don't read AC A human right
That's without going to lower yield Uranium ores or breeder reactor usage. Either of those will extend it by a factor of ten or more, more than a factor of 100 if you do both, and if you include oceanic Uranium then the total lifetime goes out towards a billion years.
See for example:
John McCarthy's Sustainability page on nuclear power resources.
Why bother when Why fund nuclear when wind is cheaper? Sure the wind doesn't blow everywhere but it blows in most of the country. Nuclear should be a back up energy source. Even when its safe and efficient, you still have really nasty waste to deal with.
"Then store it away somewhere."
;-)
It's the "somewhere" that's the problem
One other issue is that while there's little question a nuclear reactor _can_ be operated very safely, there are entirely reasonable doubts over whether a government can effectively ensure that a large collection of nuclear reactors _are_ operated safely.
Sloppy operation is a risk, as is insufficient inspection and monitoring. Another potential issue is underfunding (especially with privatised operation) of safety measures. Even if abundant government funds were thrown at the task, there's the risk they'd be abused or redirected to other things and still leave safety underfunded and undermonitored.
The Japanese government was unsuccessful. If they can't do it, there's no chance in hell we (Australia) can with our current government. I wouldn't rate the US's chances as even worth considering, especially as right now a reactor program would probably be contracted out to private industry (buddies, no doubt), probably with terms that paid well but didn't do as much for proper regulation, inspection, and safety requirements as required.
My big problem with nuclear power is that it only takes one big fuck up to do major amounts of essentially permanent damage. If you're running several thousand reactors for extended periods of time, almost no risk is only questionably good enough.
If I thought I could trust an organisation to get it right, I'd be all for it anyway - I do think it is possible to make it low risk enough. I don't think there is any such organisaion, and people being what they are (as you noted yourself) I'm not sure there ever will be.
It was a straight quote from the site. It even acknowledges that there are more deaths, just that they can't be accuratly measured.
I was simply pointing out that TMI happened before Chernobyl. A commercial company would not have run a reactor of Chernobyl's design because of the known safety problems. However, it was designed by a friend of a party rep or something like that, so it was the design chosen.
It's almost like the Kursk. We(United States), had a sub suffer a similar disaster, underwater in rough water, even a little deeper than the Kursk, and we managed to rescue all hands that survived the initial accident. The politics and delays the Russians played possibly cost those sailor's lives.
American designs tend to be safer.
I don't read AC A human right
Suppose there was no such limit, as would be the case in a free market? Who would insure a nuclear generating plant for liability, and what does that add to the costs?
I have no answers.
1. Everyone sweats Chernobyl. Chernobyl operated PRECISELY as it was designed to. The technicians on duty deactivated every single regulatory system in the plant, AND overrode the backup systems designed to prevent such an occurance. If you simply train your technicians NOT to override every single safety system that had been designed and installed in the plant, then another Chernobyl cannot occur. It cannot occur because the plant has been designed in such a way that it is not ALLOWED to occur (unless, as I've said, you override every single last safety system).
.03% U-235, the same uranium that bombs are made out of. Reactors (as they are currently designed) require between 3 and 6% U-235, with the remaining 97-94% is U-238. The Russian reactors were designed to use NATURAL URANIUM ORE . That is, the ore did not require refining in order to produce power. So all of these "estimates" of our future uranium resources are based on having to refine 100tons of uranium ore, just to extract that .03 tons of U-235.
2. Every reactor in service, in the world, uses enriched uranium. Average uranium ore contains close to
3. I support well engineered reactors. I also support upgrading our power transmission lines, which are FAR MORE IMPORTANT than the actual power production plants. It's great that the treehuggers can install tidal-wave and solar generators, at the expense of the burds. But when you lose 10% of your power for every 200km away from the generating source (it limits how far from the coast and mountains that you can transmit it. A solution that might work for a specific set of treehuggers in the Californian mountians, doesn't necessarily help the people in Montana who need to heat their homes.
4. Conservationism is great, and it's important, but I will only support a reasonable solution to the Great Power Issue. Shutting down civilization and returning to Muther Earth is not a solution, it's an alarmist agenda.
" What if we relocated nuclear power plants to places similar to Yucca mountain."
France has great success with nuclear power. What if we moved all the nuclear power plants to france, and buy our electricity from the french.
I'm not joking.
Nationalizing any industry is crazy.
When an industry is nationalised, which is to say, funded by tax rather than its customers, that industry no longer has ANY need to produce a service which is in ANY way desirable to its customers.
The connection between customer and provider is unlinked.
In this case, customers like reliable, cheap electricity. What exactly is supposed to lead to this sort of electricity being generated?
The National Power Company, being part of the State, will have it's wages bill paid no matter what happens, as long as it doesn't become *so* awful that it becomes politically necessary to dispose of it.
A real private company has an extreme sharp and pointed need to provide electricity to its customers satifaction; they pay its bills, and if they don't like it, they leave.
How do you leave a National Power Company, when there ARE no other companies to turn to? and why should the NPC even care, since its bills are paid by the State?
You'll also find, as the UK experienced during it's period of nationalised power, that the National Power Company has responsibility for ensuring adequate power generation reserves, whcih is to say, for deciding how many power plants are built.
Now, who else but the NPC are competent to decide such a matter? so their recommendations are acted upon. However, building a power plant is an expensive and profitable construction, for the various private construction companies involved, and for the taxpayer, since he's funding all this.
What happens is the construction companies become rather pally with the NPC, who tend to be rather generous in their estimation of the necessary power reserves.
All of which increases both taxation, to pay for unnecessary power plants and their maintaince while they turn over, idle.
Nationalisation is almost invariably a disaster. Economics has a reputation as a boring subject, which is why, I suspect, almost everyone is so uninformed, and why people keep touting these insane ideas.
--
Toby
It's only impossible until somebody finds a way to do it.
Irrelevant. It was impossible in 1977 when he banned breeder reactors based on the argument that terrorists would somehow be able to achieve this impossible task. It's not "can't quite figure out how" impossible either. It's more of a "we dumped millions into research and neither we, the Russians, nor the Brits, nor anyone else can figure out a way to do it, because it's ALL frickin' Plutonium" type of impossible.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
(The most popular method is to saturate the radioactive material with electrons, as SOME forms of decay involve the absorbtion of electrons. Many more forms involve the absorbtion or emission of neutrinos. There are no real good ways of producing neutrinos, but neutrino detectors offer some thoughts on how to shield from them.)
If you could accelerate the rate of decay enough, then waste wouldn't be too much of a problem. That's an unsolved problem, but that doesn't make it unsolvable. I'd be in favour of the Government throwing money into researching options there.
Alternatively, why restrict yourself to nuclear fission? It's not the best nuclear energy source. Nuclear fusion is vastly superior and produces next to zero waste. If the Government threw the same number of dollars into fusion research as it claims Kyoto would require, there's a decent chance we might actually crack that problem.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Guys, name one government function that works.
List the organizations you hate to deal with. Your list will begin with all gov organiations, then include all heavily-regulated entities (telephone, power, insurance, bank), then the biggest private organizations (food stores and other unionized entities).
The ones you like to go to are the neighborhood bar, Nordstroms (at least in the old days when they had a good incentive plan), and Trader Joe's.
Giving money to government increases the world's dissatisfaction, poverty and death rates.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
One of the most often 'brushed under the rug' issues is that there has never been a sucessful breeder reactor.
h tml (search for "plutonium")
... oh. Touche'. Guess it depends on your definition of "success" ;-)
On the contrary! See, e.g.,
http://home.uchicago.edu/~cmcfaul/quiz.html (search for "breeder")
http://www.nyx.net/~drwalker/990519.scavhunt.nyt.
They all cost massive amounts of money and then make less fuel than they use...
- Speaking to "the haves and the have-mores." George W. smirks: "Some people call you the elite, I call you my base"
are you just a Michael Moore parrot or do you actually now the context of that quote?point 21 on http://www.fahrenheit_fact.blogspot.com/
CNN article about the Al Smith fundraiser that also included Gore: http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1 0/20/al.smith.dinner/
following text quoted from an F911 critic:
Gore joked, "The Al Smith Dinner represents a hallowed and important tradition, which I actually did invent."
Michael Moore by making a movie full of misrepresentations and "almost falsehoods" has done a huge disservice to the critical discussion concerning Bush et al and his policies.
By not sticking to the simple facts he has made it easy to for undecideds and fair minded Bush-supporters to discredit all people and topics critical of Bush et al.
Bush is good example of somebody that adheres to the style of goals justifies means.
And Moore does exactly the same thing: exaggerate, misrepresent, twist, say whatever it takes to get rid of Bush.
The problem with this kind of think is:
- If you can make people "hate" the wrong guy with wrong methods,
btw, I voted Kerrythen later you can make people "hate" the right guy with the same wrong methods.
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
While oil is so cheap, and while the fossil fuel producers have so much political power, we will continue to head down this dead end. Nuclear may be better than fossil fuels, but it is far from ideal. There are better options available, or within reach of our scientific understanding. While we operate under a capitalist system, we will continue to cause ourselves harm while the true cost of certain things is not relfected. For example, the cost of oil reflects the cost to remove it from the earth, but not the cost to repair/ameliorate that damage its use causes. Include that cost, and suddenly there will be a great deal more investment in alternatives.
Which nations do you trust to use nuclear weapons responsibly?
At least we have a start...didn't you see the news?
We are mining one tiny facet of Earth's fuel stores almost to the point of it being inconvenient to mine more. Depletion? Someday. 50-100 years. But we'll be getting smarter, and production costs will continue to go down.
You do understand that India was supposed to bankrupt the world's food supply about 15 years ago, right? Somehow that didn't happen. Why? We grew. We adapted. This will continue to happen.
The power output of one sun, or even a million suns, is a trivial fraction of a fraction of the energy available in this galaxy, let alone the Universe. We're not going to be going far on sublight vessels, that's for sure. We'll have to think of something more efficient.
But, in the next 100 years, that question is totally immaterial. The Romans couldn't wring their hands about how hard it would be to get to the moon, because they had about zero of the required technologies. Now, it's a relatively straightforward (though challenging) engineering process.
Relativity? Yeah. It's a problem. Round trips are not feasible. That's the way the Universe crumbles.
Am I to understand you that we should not pursue nuclear energy here on Earth because it's hard to make big things move interstellar distances at near-light speed?
Your point doesn't exactly track.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If the solar energy that falls on the Shara Desert or many other deserts of the world could be harvested, stored and transported, the world's energy needs would be met for as long as anyone alive today could even imagine.
The solar energy falling on earth already is being harvested by grass, trees, and algae, stored as peat, coal, and petroleum, and transported by pipe, ship and truck to those who eventually maximize it's entropy.
If it's not nuclear fission or geothermal, it's some form of solar energy. What you are proposing with fantasyland solar panels across deserts is simply a less efficient form of the natural processes currently in place. Since the current method is not sustainable what makes you think a poorer one would ever meet current energy demands?
Please realize you are not proposing a reduction in environmental impact, but rather a much larger impact that is conviently out of sight for you.
and always will be. I believe this is the gist of the common quote. I will suspect economic fusion power is possible when they are building the first generating plant on the public grid. I will believe it when they are operating in numbers.
Research is good but you can't reliably predict success....
"Meanwhile, we're still developing nuclear fusion which is coming along a lot better than most people think...No uranium (or oil or coal or gas) required."
Uh, huh. So what powers those machines that build the materials for the reactors, produce the reactor fuel, build the roads the stuff is transported on, build the transmission lines, blah, blah, blah....? Like the people who say fission produces no CO2. Sure, not DIRECTLY.
"If Bin Laden were to disrupt the flow of gas from Siberia to Europe and plunge the continent into chaos, cold, darkness, sickness and death, maybe the politicians will do something about it."
OOOOH, the bogeyman. Look, Bin Laden is a relatively insignificant figure. IF gas/oil supplies are disrupted, he is VERY, VERY, VERY far down on the list of people/countries/things that are likely to be the cause. Plain old incompetent people are likely to be the cause (see Chernobyl disaster).
Am I to understand you that we should not pursue nuclear energy here on Earth because it's hard to make big things move interstellar distances at near-light speed?
:-)
On the contrary. I am merely attempting to shed light on the issue of limited energy reserves. There's a LOT of energy in the universe, but not so much as to be unable to fathom real uses for it.
We are mining one tiny facet of Earth's fuel stores almost to the point of it being inconvenient to mine more. Depletion? Someday. 50-100 years. But we'll be getting smarter, and production costs will continue to go down.
I agree completely. I am merely comparing what we do on Earth to a galactic scale.
We're not going to be going far on sublight vessels, that's for sure.
Now that, I don't actually believe. We understand antimatter, and we have the Sun sitting right next to us. Give us some time and we'll figure out how to start producing enough antimatter for a five year trip to Proxima Centauri. Give it some time to work out the technology, and ships really could visit other galaxies. (Not that anyone here on Earth would notice.)
You'd probably end up with two very different cultures. The culture that thrives here on Earth, and the culture that planet hops the Universe, looking for places to plant colonies.
The power output of one sun, or even a million suns, is a trivial fraction of a fraction of the energy available in this galaxy, let alone the Universe.
How many galaxies are we aware of? A hundred or so? Maybe a few hundred? Granted, there may be more beyond the edge of the known Universe, but life won't be so great for those left in the known universe.
But, in the next 100 years, that question is totally immaterial. The Romans couldn't wring their hands about how hard it would be to get to the moon, because they had about zero of the required technologies. Now, it's a relatively straightforward (though challenging) engineering process.
Relativity? Yeah. It's a problem. Round trips are not feasible. That's the way the Universe crumbles.
It's just painful to think about, that's all. Travelling at relativistic speeds means that you're travelling through an unreversable time warp. At those space-time "speeds", the death of the Universe is barely a few generations down the road.
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What the profs. who certified it didn't know is that there was already plutonium on the ground at University of Chicago campus from weapons tests.
STAR once found plutonium comming out of Brookhaven National Lab in a river. Nobody knew it until they did some looking in to it (including none of the nuclear physicists or weapons people at Brookhaven), but plutonium is just spread all over the world now and is everywhere. The levels that they describe detecting are totally consistent with that.
I've talked to many nuclear physicists about this (one of whom was on a nobel prize winning team) incidnet and they all agree that they almost certainly made zero plutonium.
I think the best option is to privately put it on a ship in international waters, and sell electrolosys generated hydrogen back to the mainland, otherwise the regulations will kill you. I think there are a lot of libertarian minded people like me, who would love to be on an economically independent zone while at the same time bypassing regulations that are 100 times more overbearing than they should be.
Lets face it, this is much more likely to happen over degerulation or federalization any time.
Blame Bush all you want.
But the primary reason nuclear energy will not succeed in the US at any time in the near future rests entirely on the shoulders of anti-nuke activists, who are so successful at scaremongering that the millions of uninformed individuals in this country will never permit nuke power in their vicinity.
First we need to make the anti-nuke activists irrelevant. Then we can worry about getting politicians signed up.
IIRC, /. was the place I saw a piece about "pebble bed reactors" according to that info chineese made
a viable 10MW reactor wich is totaly safe.
the reaction is based on radioactive(don't remmember the exact material) balls
covered with protective coating (Carbon something)
To test the safety of the reactor they completly
shut down the cooling system (helium not water)
reaction stopped by itself after reaching a certain top
temperature - wich was much lower then the dangerous level for this type of reactor.
Another thing is that the size of units in these
reactors are much smaller and can be mass-produces
in contrast to current "custom made" reactors.
regards, Boris.
boris at goldenmyth dot co dot il
Everyone here seems to be talking about nuclear fission and the waste from it, but what about nuclear fusion?
Are you serious? You can't re-use waste. That's why it's called 'waste'. Sure you can reprocess it slightly to try to squeeze more out of it, and in the process produce about 100 times the pollution than the original fission produced, but you certainly can't "just" re-use waste, and the extra energy you get out of it by reprocessing it will be very slight and very expensive.
nukes are a great solution, the problem is you only get to make 1 mistake and then public outcry will force government to stop it's progression for a couple of decades... there are lots of countries, many of them certainly not economic super-stars that have managed to make nuclear power work and have benefited greatly...
Get your torrents...
No, nuclear power can not wean us from oil, because nuclear power does not compete with oil in the US.
Oil produces a tiny and shrinking fraction of electric power in the US. Oil is used in gas tanks.
Nuclear power makes electricity. The majority of electricty in the United States comes from coal, of which we have a 100+ year ready domestic supply, and new clean coal technologies that will allow us to burn the coal with as few pollutants as produced from burning natural gas. Doubt it if you like, but the new plants are more than 100x cleaner than the old plants. The problem with coal is that the "Clear Skies" initiative, along with exemptions to the Clean Air Act, has allowed aging, incredibly dirty plants to keep chugging for years. Replace those plants, and you'll drastically cut pollution from coal.
In any case, make all the nuclear plants you want, and it won't affect our need for oil one bit. The only thing that can affect our need for oil is a better energy storage system for use in vehicles.
As an aside, I worked at the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analysis towards attempting to solve the waste problem.
Of course the wind blows because of temperature differentials created by the sun. and therefore is being replenished by another finite source of energy.
If anyone doesn't beleive me, look up British Nuclear Fuels, subsidies from Baltic nations to the former USSR, the amount of money spent by France on Nuclear power (only nuclear power plant decomission ever done - cost ludicrous amounts), etc.
As for the China angle - the correct answer is that China have a tiny prototype and are going ahead on building production systems of the new technology, so success cannot be declared yet.
Perhaps the new technology will break even, unlike the 1950's white elephants around now. If nuclear power was so cost effective - why did Thatcher cancel the proposed plants? She certainly is no greenie.
1) Find (or make) a very deep hole, and dump the waste down it. Then forget about it. If the hole is deep enough, subduction will take all the nasty radioactives back where they came from. Also, use a modern, cleaner design of reactor (they do exist), rather than the 30-40 year old technology that is currently stinking up the place.
/ colmain.html
2a) Yes. Refine all the fly ash from the current coal fired power plants and recover the 1-2 ppm of uranium and 3-5 ppm of thorium that is currently either blown away in the plume or dumped on the ground. Not to mention all the other useful minerals present. Dump what's left down the hole from question 1 with the waste to dilute it. Bear in mind that a 1GW coal fired power station goes through about 4 million tons of coal per year, which represents a couple of tons of uranium and two to three times that of thorium. Also bear in mind that this means that coal power generation produces more nuclear waste/pollution that the nuclear industry by far. See http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text
2b) Yes. Just take apart the tens of thousands of warheads scattered all around the US and use the fissionables for something that isn't intended to kill millions of people.
The behaviour resembles that of materials exposed to high temperatures and pressures - microscopic gaps form, and those gaps collect into cracks.
Neutrons have the added effect in that they can also make the material they hit radioactive - which is something you don't get with gamma radiation etc.
After removal from the reactor, the spent fuel itself is temporarily stored in pools of water in concrete tanks, awaiting shipment to a final disposal site. Those temporary tanks are now full to capacity, and they are degrading quite rapidly (continual neutron bombardment is not healthy for things like concrete.)
All the power plant operators in the country are pretty much hoping that a national disposal site like Yucca Mountain will be opened to them soon for storing their spent fuel. But dealing with nuclear waste is quite literally a "hot" potato for any politican. Nobody wants to store it short term in their back yard, nobody wants to store it long term in their state, and the states in between the plants and the waste site don't even want the trains of waste to cross their state.
Yucca Mountain has long been talked about as a national disposal site, but the native Americans in the area are opposed to the idea. (They were once in favor of selling the site to the federal government, but have since changed their mind.) The proposal is to dig tunnels under the mountain, load in the waste, and backfill the tunnels with concrete.
There have been other interesting proposals to permanently store the waste. One is to bury it in the sea bottom, using drilling rigs similar to that used for off shore oil drilling. They'd plant the waste several hundred feet below the sea floor, and backfill them with the naturally present clay. Models show that the radiation would leach no further than a few dozen feet from each glass log, even after 20,000 years. But try to imagine the reaction when you tell the Greenpeace organization that you want to study planting radioactive waste under the ocean. Not a popular proposal.
Spent reactor fuel has a fairly long half life, and it will take 20,000 years for the radiation levels to drop to "safe" levels. Humans have never built a structure designed to last 20,000 years. Modern engineers realize they have no way to build anything that permanent; and even more so they know they cannot build a structure that would be able to withstand continual radiation for 20,000 years. The best they can hope for is to bury the waste deeply in an area that is as inaccessible as possible.
So, the "temporary" storage tanks remain full, and there are no current plans to empty them because there is no final disposal site. But there needs to be.
John
(a) the left opposes nuclear energy,
Thats quite a doozy of an assumption.
The Left dosnt 'oppose' anything. The left is not a single, uniform group -- with a single opinion.
Further, I am of the left. I oppose nuclear energy. Why? Risk. Why would I willingly accept the risk of a nuclear accident? Why would I welcome the cost of handling nuclear waste?
When you add the costs of the risk (which is currently handled by the government (not by private entities paying for insurance (not that they could 'afford it'))) and the cost of handling the waste, nuclear energy gets very VERY expensive.
Why would i want expensive energy (when the formally externalized costs are included)?
There are better, simple, more-sustainable, cleaner, cheaper alternatives: Reduction in Demand is the first one. I am not willing to accept the risk/cost of nuclear so that people can waste energy. As long as the costs are externalized, people will not conserve.
If a conservation effort were mounted, and it was taken seriously, you could save alot of oil.
If people refuse to conserve -- or pay the true cost of energy (even oil/coil based energy enjoys externalizing costs of increased health care costs, pain/suffering, pollution, etc).
Truely renewable sources are far and away the cheapest energy. Wind and Solar, when full-cost accounting is used, is by-far the cheapest energy.
Why even consider nuclear?
We use natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear and coal for gas. We use oil almost entirely for gas (diesel, unleaded, kerosene, etc.) and also manufacturing. Nuclear energy solves none of this. Something like 70% of our oil consumption is for stright up gasoline. What we need is a gas replacement. For that, you should all look up biodiesel (vegetable based fuel). I happen to be writing my BA on it. It is the future. We can grow all the soybeans in the US and make our own fuel. The country would end making trillions. Look it up. Now if only we could get rid of those goddamn Oil lobbyists. And Bush. Kerry was going to put 20 billion towards alternative fuels. I dont think Bush will be giving any. Bush likes oil.
There is enough uranium/plutonium sitting in swimming pools on reactor sites in the USA to power 100 CANDU style reactors for 50 years and this is without mining a single gram of new uranium. It is the USA idea of not re-processing fuel that promotes the mining.
With a reactor design like the fast integral reactor there is enough uranium already mined to power 100 reactors for about 60,000 years. The reason for this is because the fast integral reactor burns 100% of the fuel load instead of the 2% that the current enriched reactors burn. Please note that companies like USEC discard as "depleated" about 93% of the uranium that hits the plant and therefore the USA fuel cycle is really only burning 2% of 7% = 0.14% of the uranium that is mined.
That a nuclear program can be profitable with such low usage rates is indicative of how much potential there really is for energy from this source.
Now the USA produces about 8% of its total energy from Nuclear so if 1200 reactors are built then there is only about 5,000 years supply of fuel but this will be producing 100% of the required energy.
This is still without more mining.
Also please note that by the time 100% of the uranium has been burned there are no actinides left and the only by-products are relatively safe short lived isotopes. So this really does solve the waste problem but it still takes 5,000 years to do it.
On this basis the once-through program is even more idiotic. We have so damn much uranium kicking around that we really do not know what to do with it. We can't burn it because we have no use for the energy.
Meanwhile young men and women are in the middle east shooting at people in the mistaken belief that America's oil supplies need to be secured.
A better idea is to build some CANDU reactors, re-cycle the existing spent fuel, use the electricity to produce hydrogen and drop that through a Fischer-Tropsch upgrader and convert coal, bitumin, oil shale or pretty much any other carbon source to liquid fuels. Meanwhile some of the hydrogen can be pulled off as CH4 if desired or if feasible just put into the natural gas pipelines as H2 for home heating. I really think H2 is not going to be a very good idea mind you... but maybe its ok.
First off the amount of troublesome isotopes is a small percentage of the total waste. Secondly, the alternative is fossil fuels which pump thousands upon thousands of tons of poisons directly into our breathing supply every single day. Not to mention that burning coal releases radioactive material - again - directly into our breathing supply. What is wrong with you people?
How many galaxies are we aware of? A hundred or so? Maybe a few hundred?
Try 100 billion.
And as for:
So far, that's only 44 light years! What if we wanted to visit another galaxy altogether? Say, Canis Major? That's a mere 25,000 light years. Do the calculations. We've already outstripped our own Sun's output by a pretty good margin.
Let me get this straight. You believe that accelerating a 5000 ton spaceship at 1 G for 25,000 years is more than the power output of the sun? The sun provides massively more energy than the power to accelerate said spaceship, and will be doing so for 5 billion more years, not a mere 25,000.
Regardless, it's a bizarre concept to discuss in the first place. How is your 5000 ton spaceship carrying the energy for 1 G acceleration? After all, it only has 5000 tons of mass to begin with.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I'm not generally in favor of technology that leaves hazardous waster around for 100's of thousands of years but there is a VERY interesting article in this months issue of American Scientist that essentially says new Nuclear reactor designs have fewer moving parts and dramatically increased safety margins, can use current spent fuel, reduced overall waste production by 99.9%, the waste that is produced has a half live of decades rather than thousands of years and it more difficult to produce material that can be used for bombs. Hmmmm..... Maybe I should at least open my mind to the possibility of nuclear power
DNA, the splice of life.
My dad worked at an oil refinery. He told me stories about how the oil was refined and opened my eyes to how many uses besides gasoline for cars. He said that over 300 products were created from the crude. (Interestingly, he also told me that the refinery was profitable just from the sale of coke, the last product off the line.)
So my question: How will we replace all the non-fuel uses for crude oil? Asphalt, fertilizers, and plastics are a pretty big part of modern life afterall...
This link lists the products that come out of crude oil:
This space for rent.
2, You ignored my point about reprocessing and other fission methods. Reprocessing fuel leads to MORE energy than was originally extracted from the Uranium, and fission plants can be built from materials such as Thorium and Radium.
No. You're not taking into account the amount of energy it takes to reprocess this waste. The net energy available after you take this into account is so low that it is much more cost effective to enrich newly mined uranium... hence the reason all reactors have holding ponds for spent fuel rods. If it were economical to reprocess this waste there wouldn't be such a clamor for a safe disposal site (i.e. Yucca Mountain), it would be reused.
Actually one of the programs that the DOE and the NRC is working is using depleted uranium mixed with lead and concrete to encase hazardous nuclear waste.
Depleted uranium, while still being slightly toxic, is far more dense than the current lead linings that we use (on the order of no noticable radiation other than the minute levels in the dpu escaping). Plus with a number of years of testing (on the order of 5 to 10 {while not alot, functional to give an estimate of breakdown}) they are finding no leakage from the test "plugs".
The idea is to encase a standard radioactive waste container in this dpu/lead/concrete mixture to form a cube, then stacking them 3-4 high, row after row. Once the facility (like Yucca mountain) is full, use the same mixture to seal the entrance, mark it as possibly hazardous/radioactive and then basically forgetting about it for 5-10 thousand years.
With little or no leakage, the only thing you'd actually have to worry about is erosion.
For more info see Ducrete
Try 100 billion.
:-)
Actually, I believe the estimation was 125 billion. But according to this, there are only 3000 observed galaxies. Which means that it's great for those who push out into unknown space, but the rest of us are screwed.
Let me get this straight. You believe that accelerating a 5000 ton spaceship at 1 G for 25,000 years is more than the power output of the sun?
Ummm... yes. A few BOTE calculations shows that the entire sun puts out somewhere around 8.0e23 watts. From here, a 30,000 light year trip would take 62 tonnes of antimatter per kilogram. 62 tonnes of antimatter times 5000 tonnes of ship works out to 5.58e28 Joules of energy. (I'd work it out for exactly 25,000 lightyears, but it's late, and I'm lazy.)
Now if you could collect ALL of the Sun's output for 19 hours AND convert it to antimatter with 100% efficiecy, you could reach that amount of energy. Unfortunately, the later will never be the case, even if the former is. Converting Solar Energy to Antimatter can never be more than 50% efficient. Currently, it's about 0.0000001% or so. Best estimates put antimatter conversion at about 0.01% with current technology. At 0.01%, you'd need all of the Sun's output for 80 days to reach the necessary level of antimatter.
In short, outstripping our Sun's output is not that hard. If you were thinking that I was referring to extinguishing our Sun, then I apologize for the miscommunication.
How is your 5000 ton spaceship carrying the energy for 1 G acceleration? After all, it only has 5000 tons of mass to begin with.
Whenever ships are discussed, their mass is always referred to in terms of "dry mass" unless specified otherwise. Our ship would need a disposable stage or ten to carry the extra 620,000 tonnes of matter and antimatter.
Regardless, it's a bizarre concept to discuss in the first place
No, I'm merely trying to point out the rediculous energy requirements for doing a little space population. My original point being that all energy in the universe is finite, and that we will eventually bump into that little snafu.
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Pragmatic environmentalists have been trying to understand this phenomenon for years. Here you have a technology that has vast potential to produce high amounts of energy and little amount of air pollution, yet it gets demonized by environmentalists. However, if you read in between the lines and pay attention to some of the statements by the liberal environmentalist leadership, it becomes apparent what their views really are.
"Giving Americans lowcost access to highly abundant energy supplies would be like giving a 5 year old a stick of dynamite" is what a prominent 70s environmental leader said in a speech to his loyal followers. Their thinking is actually logical and makes sense, however I disagree with it and I think its very disingenuous to hide their real agenda. They believe that if energy prices are low and it's available in near infinite supply, a lot of inefficient manufacturing and consumption will result. This will result in a lot of other waste materials. It's easy to take production data and find that even if energy is completely 100% nonpolluting and free, higher energy consumtion will equal higher production waste.
Let's just take a pretty simple demonstration of their techniques. I live in Washington state. Environmentalists who opposed nuclear power have for years given hydro electric as the wonderful alternative. Well, they succeeded in shutting down and halting nuclear plants. Yet 15 years ago they decided they'd like to shut down all the hydro plants in Washington as well (because of the salmon issue which was really just a red herring).
So, dont believe them when they say they only want clean energy. What they want is decreased consumption of energy, which is a perfectly reasonable position. They just know that not a lot of people would agree to conservation if they knew there was a reasonable alternative.
We need to ground all of these black helicopters.
They're just using way too much fuel.
Assuming that this is the Prairie island plant, I can see why the local tribes would be upset, especially by how the reservation boundry jogs over to make room for the plant.
If the holding tanks are the structures south of the main building, it looks like they are using river water to help keep things cooled down. I hope I'm wrong, but even if I am, it looks like the island is only at most 10 feet or so above the river. Even if there isn't a direct channel from water used for cooling, waste materials would not have very far to travel to make it to the river.
At least it looks like they've been doing a good job of keeping everything contained - I don't see any records of spills or leaks that have been considered for the NPL in the area.
Remember what happened to the moon back in 1999? That's what all that ground storage of nuclear materials will get ya - and THAT was in space!
I don't suppose Command Koenig or anyone else survived that disaster...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
If this is the case, then I imagine this would have some significant bearing on biodiesel solutions. Have you studied this, how big an issue is it, and have you studied alternative methods for re-mineralizing soil?
-FL
Remember, one of the first things Bush did when he got into office four years ago was break the Kyoto agreement and re-open a whole mess of coal-fired power stations.
But you're right. Pebble Bed reactors are one of the most rational implementations of nuclear power I've seen.
-FL
It's not possible because of petrodollar. Currently, oil can only be bought with dollar. So, the world needs dollar. If the USA switches to other means of energy then the dollar will be replaced with euro (most probably). Petroeuro will be born.
However, the USA has a huge debt and it can only live with this debt because of the petrodollar. Without petrodollar the monetary system of the USA will collapse which means the monetary system of the world will collapse which means the economy of the world will collapse.
Sorry, but this switching can't be done without serious economic crisis which will be much severe than the Great Depression.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Can't we just call up Doc Brown and have him give us his design for Mr. Fission or whatever that device on the back of his Delorien was called?
From the reading I've done, the "bury and forget" approach is not great. What you want to do is identify an isolated area with stable tectonics where you can bury the waste below the water table, and monitor it on an ongoing basis.
This gives you the opportunity of knowing if something goes wrong with the containment for any reason, if some terrorists attempt to steal it, etc. In other words, take the same approach as you would to any security problem: secure the target, then monitor.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
The Waste?
Easy, just invade some third-world country and dump it there.
I guess the whole thingy called NP is what brought
holocaust to the Jews.
But now, Bush has an alternative,which is called faith power.
And I heard he has plans to replace the statue of liberty with one of his own statue, made in his own shape, holding the cross and a bible and it is going to be called "statue of faith"
Without the sun, you will not get thermal convection (a fancy way of saying wind) here on earth. In fact, the earth would just freeze colder then Pluto and remain silent, motionless, and damn cold.
Life is not for the lazy.
but you discount the waste and extra pollution?
i don't get it
isn't the whole point to waste less and pollute less?
how the hell can adding an unneeded step, that increases waste and pollution, be good at all, in any scenario?
and you understand the math, and you still can't grok this?
it's baffling beyond belief
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a republican myself who has family ties to oil (Yes, my father worked for Shell for 30 some years), we had better find an alternative if we wish to maintain the status quo of ecconomics. Simply put, there is not enough oil on this planet for everyone. And with more hands in the pie (China, US, Europe) Expect oil to reach maybe 80 dollars a barrel in the next 20 years at best. In fact, OPEC is rumored to have overstated the current oil volume in the ground by over 50% for fear of the US investing into alternative energy. Dispite what Micheal Moore would tell you, the Middle East WANTS our business. Oil is their major bread and butter to support their own countries.
If I had something to say to the Bush administration, I would tell them to get oil companies to invest in bio technolgies and Ethanol production. Hell, even Wind Energy is a great industyr for land owners to profit themselves.
Life is not for the lazy.
ok... this argument disgusts me. I have worked in the business and have seen how it's handled. First of all, American nuclear power plants that still exist are wasteful crappy old designs from back when nuclear was a buzzword and noone knew enough to build a clean reactor. It is true that current plants cost WAY TOO MUCH to run and if it weren't for the governments other dependancies on nuclear "fuel", it could not be justified to produce it.
Now on the other hand, modern plants such as the newer owns on nuclear subs, large ships, and if I remember correctly the experimental reactors in Norway run at 90% or better efficiency and when the cores are wasted, they are almost safe enough to hold (though I'm not sure if I'd try personally).
The older facilities run at under 50% with all the optimizations that have been made. I would be shocked to find out if they run even close to 25% efficiency levels.
Also, the older plants require tremendous crews to run. A nuclear facility should require less people to run than a hydroelectric plant.
As for other arguments I've read regarding wind power, I personally think that there's no possible way that placing a great deal of resistance on wind currents is good for the environment. If anything it sounds like a great way to increase temperatures in places that already need more energy to run the air conditioners.
But hey, in California where they were built, people tend to like living within miles of fault lines.
To all the people that are anti-nuclear blabbering off ridiculos information about how it's dangerous, just look at this plant or that plant. Let us build a new plant somewhere and we'll gladly show you how nice it really can be.
One of the operational problems with nuclear power plants is they operate best and most safely in a steady state. The problem is that energy use is not constant, so the variation in demand has to be dealt with by costly or limited non-nuclear sources.
n ingcenter/ generating/pumpedstorage/
An example of this is Duke Power - they built a large hydro facility which consumes excess energy by pumping water uphill during periods of slow demand, and generate hydro power by reversing the process during peak periods.
http://www.dukepower.com/community/lear
However, if a viable hydrogen vehicle develops, using the excess energy during low-demand periods to generate hydrogen would seem to be a perfect fit.
Hey, France gets over 75% of its electricity from nuke-ular power - how can you argue with that?
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
Well, we already have the ability to do production with more coming on line. At /., space, and spacedaily there have been stories of the solar cells that are either gaining more efficiecies and/or others that are much lower costs. Likewise, Wind, Tidal, Geo. are all being done at lower costs and generating more power. In addition, nukes have better designs in every place except for America.
The real problem is one of policy and storage of energy. The admin cut back huge on alternatives and their research. I know a number of people over at seri and they are struggling to survive. The only thing getting dollars increase is oil based fuel cells. Wrong approach.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And then you have the problem that the neutron flux inside the reactor makes _everything_ radioactive. And _everything_ in the fuel processing cycle becomes radioactive.
All that radioactive stuff is waste. It must be stored carefully, for long periods of time. And noone has a solution that works both politically, geologically, and medically.
One small correction, which alters the sense of your post quite a bit. Radioactive waste can be classified as high-, intermediate-, or low-level.
High-level radioactive waste loses it's radioactivity relatively quickly: "...a newly-discharged light water reactor fuel assembly is so radioactive that it emits several hundred kilowatts of heat, but after a year this is down to 5kW and after five years, to one kilowatt." (see reference below). Low-level waste can be disposed of in a shallow landfill.
People shouldn't think that an entire nuclear power-station needs to be buried under kilometres of rock - the bulk of the waste is not highly radioactive.
See http://www.uic.com.au/ne5.htm for some really good reading about nuclear waste disposal.
Thanks for the reply.
This may sound like an obvious and somewhat simpleminded suggestion....but what about launching it into space?
Is it too heavy to make getting out of the atmosphere an cost/energy-effective solution, would we only be able to get it so far so that it'd essentially orbit the earth (or the sun?)?
Are there any current ideas on how to do this?
what is wrong with you? seriously?
CONVERTING ANYTHING TO HYDROGEN IS AN UNNECESSARY STEP
so while the internal combustion engine wastes some energy, and hydrogen wastes some energy, the combustion engine IS A DIRECT CONVERSION OF ENERGY SOURCE TO WORK NEEDED
while converting ANY energy source to hydrogen adds TWO UNNECESSARY CONVERSION STEPS WHERE WASTE AND POLLUTION IS INTRODUCED
don't you fucking get it???????!!!!!!!!!!!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not mine! But I still want cheap and dependable electricity for all of my crap.
"Prove global warming before you attack CO2 emissions."
The north polar ice cap is melting. Now last time I checked the temperature had to go UP for ice to melt. If you need more proof please stick your head in the sand instead.
And not again, despite their shortage. There's a lesson, if you're open to learning it.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The second british atomic bomb ever made was made from plutonium from spent fuel rods back in 1953. It included lots of PU240. Even numbered isotopes of PU might suck as bad as even numbered star trek films, but you can still make a bomb from the stuff. I'm not sure why it became "impossible" 20 years after the British did it.
You can engineer rock into a weapon. Launch some sort of spacecraft capable of deploying a solar sail and cruising to a small asteroid. Hook on with a piton and a few km of line, then use the photon thrust to aim the rock at the desired target.
Too much effort, you say? Too hard to make sure it will all work? Takes too long? Other things pay off much more easily? Sure, no argument. Same thing with bombs from spent PWR fuel.
But orders of magnitude more threat of detection at any of these stages:
You can get rid of most or all of these problems by enriching uranium instead, or stealing bomb-grade materials (or finished weapons) from the ex-Soviet block nations. Given these avenues someone would have to be a fool to divert spent PWR fuel for bomb-making, and it appears that nobody with the money to make the attempt is that foolish.
Your own source agrees. I quote:
Sophistication which a terrorist group (as opposed to a cats-paw for a state actor, which would not require diverted PWR fuel) would simply not have. They would be at high risk of having an accident which reveals their plot, kills their essential skilled personnel, blows up friendly territory or all three. To be a threat to the US they have to avoid all of those failure scenarios and then get their bomb to the target undetected. This isn't trivial and is getting harder.
There's a common delusion among people world-wide that nuclear powerplants are more dangerous than chemical plants or oil refineries. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet the public misperception persists. If a terrorist wants to kill people, it would be much easier to put some sort of poison into municipal water supplies than to divert, process, and fabricate PWR fuel into a bomb; neither would such efforts tip off the civilized world beforehand and place the program at risk before it could yield results. It is easier
Sustainability and energy independence essay
First, spent nuclear fuel is extremely heavy -- uranium is more dense than lead. Next, you can't just launch it into orbit. Orbits decay over time, and this isn't something you want coming back as a giant asteroid of doom. So you actually have to get it to the sun for proper disposal. Low Earth Orbit launchers (such as the space shuttle, or the Atlas series of rockets) are inadequate to the task. It will require rockets the size of the old Saturn launchers to boost this material to the sun. So the cost will be enormous -- I think a billion dollars per ton is a conservative estimate.
The bigger problem is that rockets are far from perfect. Would you want to be anywhere on the planet if a Saturn V carrying six tons of depleted uranium exploded at 50 miles up? The waste would be dispersed across an area covering several states.
A space elevator might make space-based nuclear waste disposal a possibility, some day. But for now, rockets are not a viable disposal option.
John
Remember, it will be dangerous for the next 20,000 years. It's not up to us to tell our great-great-grandchildren to stand guard over our poopy diapers. No civilization has ever lasted on a time scale like that, and it would be the ultimate in hubris to think we're somehow different. So guards will eventually fail. Monitors will stop being monitored. Buildings will crumble. Governments will collapse. We can't even hope to post a sign on the site that will last more than a few centuries, as our language may evolve beyond the point where that ancient writing hold any meaning to our grandkids.
The best we can hope for is to plant this stuff very deep in the earth, in a place where it can't be extracted without notice, and where future generations will probably never "bump into".
My first choice would be to use the deep well drilling techniques used by the petroleum industry, and inject the stuff a kilometer or more down into some very stable layers. But drilling rigs are only a few inches in diameter, and the storage requirements are vast. Some of the liquid waste (such as what is being held at Hanford) could be pumped down those holes. But spent fuel rods wouldn't fit as-is, and I don't know if it can be adequately liquified to pump down there. Yucca Mountain still seems like a not-bad choice, since we have to deal with this crap anyway.
John
do your calculations take into consideration that the angle of the dangle is inversely proportional to the heat of the beat?
vodka, straight up, thank you!
The Earth definitely has enough. In addition to the insulative properties of rock, the Earth's warmth can be attributed to the radioactive decay of heavy metals (mostly uranium and thorium). Whether we can get to most of them is another question, but the supply of radioactive materials won't be a problem until the Sun becomes a red giant, and even then we'll have plenty.
So, you're saying that wind counts as solar? There is a proportion involved, but it's greater than 1/2. You must be from Colorado?
YES!!! Wind only happens when you have thermal energy. And in this case, from the sun. It's called THERMODYNAMICS!
Life is not for the lazy.
Most hydrocarbon techs spew CO2 out the pipe if we were to use the process of Thermal depolymerization (anything into oil, aka the turkey squeezer) you can nearly close the carbon cycle. This same process could be used to extract problem hydrocarbons from things such as oil shale. (which by the way was supposed to be profitable at $34.00 per barrel)The question is why use standard hydrocarbons as feedstock when we generate such a large amount of organic waste? I used to think that coal was the way to go but after reading this http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html I have decided otherwise. It does make you wonder if maybe we could just lightly spew radioactive waste into the air and be done with it.
Oh and don't get me started with the amounts of energy which are locked up in methane hydrates.
A small fraction of the energy in wind did not come from the sun. Anything that was heated with geothermal or nuclear fission here on Earth counts as non-solar. The geothermal portion is what you should start with to find how much wind qualifies as solar. Coal and other fossil fuels don't count as solar (because of the 100-million year delay, not to mention the greenhouse effect), so you ought to use them, too, but they are negligible compared to geothermal-related wind. Be careful, because not even hydroelectric can be considered 100% solar on similar grounds. Although the timescale for the water cycle is measured in days to several months, instead of being geologic, the point is that some of the water also evaporated because of geothermal heat.
You are assuming that Canada .. one of the world's main suppliers of uranium, especially to the USA, is willing to sell it to you after all the damn unfair tariffs and broken trade agreements on lumber, hogs, beef, energy, drugs and more that you bastards pull on us every chance you get.
screw you! you dont deserve it.
ya, who cares about that Other little problem with plutonium ... the fact that it is the most carcinogenic chemical known.
... then no one will care about terrorists flying planes into buildings, because there won't be anyone living there anymore.
One one-millionth of a gram will give you cancer if inhaled.
Let's powder up a few KG's of it, dust New York City with it (or better yet, some other city where a large chunk of those 59million Bush supporters live)!
Dusting not viable? fine! dump the powder in the city's water supply, ruin the entire water infrastructure for decades til the Pu decays!
only 10% Of oil imports are from the Gulf.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
Great, that's all we need. An old blue haired lady driving a nuclear powered car.
where is all this magical hydrogen supposed to come from?
i mean, seriously, don't talk fucking feedstocks, talk fucking real nuts and bolts supply and demand
you can't, it's a fucking pipe dream
there is no giant, unending supply of hydrogen, anywhere, unless we convert an existing energy form into hydrogen... so why not just use the existing energy form instead?
do you see my fucking point?
you want to use hydrogen because there's no emissions...
at the cost of making more emissions somewhere else in order to make the hydrogen!
FUCKING STUPID!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Because you still buy your software!
I'm glad that your read the comment, but simply couldn't stop looking in the f-ing mirror. this was a decision to move my office three blocks from my home, and walk to f-ing work. I'm not applying any ethics to your world view no matter how insulated it may be. Nor, am I legislating my ethics. But, if you think that I'm sending my eighteen year old son to Iraq to defend your right to go to the Walmart, you're wrong. I'd sooner put a bullet through your head than some happless Iraqi who just happened to be born above a resource we need to thrive in the way we feel is our right.
I'm not even trying to be funny. I really don't think that human beings will even exist 5,000,000,000 years from now. I'd be pretty suprised if we made it to the year 10,000,000. If slashdot exists in the year 5 billion, you can mod me down.
Matt
At today's oil prices, the Alaskan oil reserves are worth roughly 500 billion dollars. We should drill in Alaska and use that money to build a bunch of nuclear power plants, powering hydrogen electrolysis generation, and hydrogen filling stations, and transition to a fuel cell economy. Yeah, the Elk take a hit in Alaska, but when we're all done, we wind up with a much, much cleaner overall form of engine. I'd take the risks of a few hundred centralized nuclear facilities over the constant mess of spilled hydrocarbons leaching everywhere, not to mention NOX, SOX, (speaking of which, when is Europe going to kick the NOX/SOX habit?).
This is my sig.
It's nice to see this topic being discussed. Global energy resources happens to be my technical specialty. The short answer is, "No, nuclear energy is definately NOT a viable replacement for oil in the manner and quantity in which the United States uses oil, BUT increased use of nuclear energy COULD partly mitigate the suffering we will all soon experience as a result of oil depletion and crisis in the Middle East". Rather than post a dissertatation on the topic, I'll make a few brief points and then direct you to where you can find out more for yourself. I. Blowback from US dependance on Middle East oil is just a SYMPTOM of global oil depletion. II. Nuclear power plants have rather poor net energy. This means that it takes many years of continuus operation before a nuclear plant pays back the energy used to consrtuct and operate it. The advanced new designs, such as those being deployed by China, probably reach energy break-even in as little as 10 years, whereas the old-style plants in the USA took 40 years of operation to break even. III. I have no useful input on the radioactive waste problem. Previous replies cover the issue well. It seems very likely that we will never run short of Uranium, given new technology that allows extraction of Uranium from seawater in marketable quantities. IV. Global fossil fuel supplies are failing. Global oil supplies will certainly peak and enter permanent decline before 2010. Therefore, no possible alternative energy program started today (including nuclear) can offset the expected permanent 2%/year decline in available global net energy. This fact is guaranteed to wreak havoc with the global financial system (which requires constant growth in available energy), and is an intractible problem without revolutionary changes. In order to offset the decline of fossil fuels we would need to build more than 50 large new nuclear power plants EACH YEAR. V. Many global leaders (certainly including the Bush/Cheney administration) are totally aware of this issue. VI. There are only two viable solutions to this situation: a. Voluntarily reduce global energy use in a cooperative way. This option is called Plan Powerdown. b. Involuntarily reduce global energy use via war & strife. This is known as Plan Resource War or Last One Standing This option is the default approach of most world leaders. Finally, here are some excellent sources of information on this topic: 1. The Yahoo Groups RunningOnEmpty2 forum, which has been discussing this and related issues for years. This group includes many physicists, petroleum geologists, and other concerned citizens. 2. The websites http://www.dieoff.org http://www.peakoil.net and http://www.energycrisis.org 3. Be warned that you will encounter much misinformation and disinformation on this topic. Be very suspicious of any single source (including me!). In particular, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) provides seemingly authoritative data on future energy supplies which is a complete pack of lies. A historical study of the EIA shows that their PAST data is always accurate, but that future projections are politically, not scientifically, motivated. I can only speculate on the reasons for all this disinformation, but it is probably due to a combination of the corporate profit imperative, false assumptions in the 'science' of Economics, and human nature. Thanks for your time and attention, all! If you feel this is an important and well-informed post I encourage you to vote it such that more readers will see it. Regards, Bruce Stephenson, aka EnergyScholar bruce@peak.org
They actually can do this (well over relatively short distances between landmasses). Its called a monopolar High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) line.
k est.html
http://members.iinet.net.au/~emfacts/basslink/wea
Minor problems with electromagnetic fields in the vicinity, and chlorine gas production at the +ve electrode....
Well yes i agree that flywheels or centrifuges (what i work with) are damn scary things to be around. With objects easily generating tonnes of force just waiting to be flung around in a catostrophic failure. (5kg rotor, 10,000 g = 50 tons of not so friendly die cast aluminium wanting to be free)
Although it would have to be cool to have a car that could not roll over due to the gyroscopic effect of a flywheel...
hmmm speaking of which, how the hell am i going to turn corners?
The prolem in France is that most of the nuclear reactors are PWRs. They're not a very efficient design, and they require a lot of very cold cooling water. Ideally, they should use cold sea-water for cooling, but I believe that in France a lot of the nuclear power plants use water from rivers. This is not such a good idea.
The wonderful thing about France, is that 75% of their electricity comes from nuclear, and what really amuses me is that other continental European countries, such as Germany, who have been bullied on to the "environmental" anti-nuclear bandwagon by the Greens, are closing down their nuclear power stations. They claim that they can generate enough "environmentally-friendly" electricity to meet thier demands form wind power and burning gas, of all things. In reality, they can't generate enough electricity to meed demand and are having to import it from France. France has an excess of capacity because it has nuclear power...
Ah, politics :-)
Stick Men
OTEC stands for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. It seems as the most viable alternative till date. It neither displaces people like Hydel nor is it risky like Nuclear. It has more capacity than Solar or Wind. There are lots of side benefits we attain as a result of OTEC. And chief among them could be gettting desalinated water. This makes it a commercially viable alternative both for developed as well as developing world.
exactly where is this "no laws" afghanistan place?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You have forgotten the second law of thermodynamics. The entropy of the universe is always increasing. Some energy will always be lost, and because fission/nuclear decay. itself does not completely destroy an atom, merely reduce it to smaller parts that are often radioactive themselves, you will always wind up with a huge load of useless radioactive crap with enormous half lives. When I say useless, I mean useless in the worst sense of the word. The crap that is left over only puts out extremely low quality heat but more than enough radiation to seriously, for lack of a better word, fuck up anything with DNA. And yes, that means people. And as of yet there are NO viable ways to store this material for the neccesary period of time. (Estimated to be about 100,000 years or more.) So no, due to logistical and environmental concerns, nuclear fissions is not a viable answer to our long term energy needs. But why are we even talking about this? We got a nice large fusion reactor right now bombarding us with free energy. It's called the sun, and it aint going anywhere.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
An interesting fact is that the sea proposal was thrown out becuase the supposedly stable ocean floor actually moves and the glass logs would most likely be unearthed in a much shorter period of time than 20,000 years. There are just too many concerns with nuclear waste, so why even bother? Solar is cheaper and easier with no long term problems.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
You have forgotten the second law of thermodynamics.
No, I haven't forgot it. My point was that 100% of a given quantity of matter may be transformed into energetic particles (e.g. photons, pions, beta radiation, etc.) without violating thermodynamics. Keep in mind that thermodynamics also states that energy and matter may NOT be created or destroyed. It may only be converted from one form to another.
The reason why there are losses in a system is that a certain amount of heat will be lost in a process due to the fact that heat travels from a warmer body to a colder one. The closer the colder body is to the temperature of the warmer body, the more energy is lost in the transferance. Once the temperatures are equalized (i.e. complete entropy), there is no way of extracting more energy from the system. The system can only be disturbed by adding energy from outside the system. Eventually, our Universe (the largest system) will reach complete entropy and there will be nothing but equally distributed particles with equal amounts of energy.
Some energy will always be lost, and because fission/nuclear decay. itself does not completely destroy an atom, merely reduce it to smaller parts that are often radioactive themselves, you will always wind up with a huge load of useless radioactive crap with enormous half lives.
The remainder is left because fission is not an efficient process, not because of thermodynamics. You see, fission is the result of an atom becoming too heavy. When it gets too heavy, it collapses in on itself and splits into several smaller atoms. The energy released by this split causes some of the particles to gain kinetic energy and become independent, as well as cause some particles to become zero mass or low mass particles such as photons. The new atoms that are "created" in this process are what we think of as "waste".
When I say useless, I mean useless in the worst sense of the word.
Fission byproducts are by no means "useless". Americium-241 is used in smoke detectors, Sr-90 and Pu-238 work well in atomic batteries, Pu-239 can be recycled into more fission fuel, CS-137 has been used in hydrologic studies, and Tritium is commonly used for professional "glow-in-the-dark" applications. Carbon-11, Nitrogen-13, Oxygen-15, and Fluorine-18, and many other isotopes have been used as medical tracers.
When I say that stuff is useful, I mean it in the best sense of the word.
The crap that is left over only puts out extremely low quality heat but more than enough radiation to seriously, for lack of a better word, fuck up anything with DNA.
Not all radiation types pose a threat. In fact, low level radiation often doesn't pose a threat at all. Alpha particles can't penetrate the skin, nor can low levels of Beta radiation. Gamma and X-Ray radiation penetrates so well that it's most likely to completely miss your body! Only neutron radiation is a major concern, but that stuff is only produced during fission.
And as of yet there are NO viable ways to store this material for the neccesary period of time.
Again, that stuff is useful. Some of it can be reprocessed into fission fuel, and some of it can be made into products we use every day. (Duck! Your smoke alarm is emitting radiation!) The remaining stuff is miniscule in size, and most likely wouldn't harm anyone.
(Estimated to be about 100,000 years or more.)
Anything that takes 100,000 years to become "not-so-dangerous" is already "not-so-dangerous" as long as it's kept out of the water and food tables.
So no, due to logistical and environmental concerns, nuclear fissions is not a viable answer to our long term energy needs.
Ahem. Nuclear Fission is a fine source of energy with few problems. The primary issue is that advancement and processing techniques have been held back by the fear of "terrorists".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I have always found the argument that being poisoned by radiation is in some way worse than the thousands of other ways one can be done in living in a modern society such as by chemical, biological, or mechanical means. The effective life of some chemical agents is as long as the worst of the nuclide types. Is it that people are inherently more afraid of that which they don't understand, or just too many badly researched Hollywood productions convincing them that there children will be born as 3 pound hairy eye balls if they are exposed?
One of us is confused about relativity. I'm not sure if it is you or me, and I feel confused, so it might be me.
.99c. It takes us 3 years to get to .99c. Time dilation at that speed is a factor of 7. This means: That it would take us, the pilots, 10 years to go 70 light years, and the rest of the universe would have slightly over 70 years pass.
.999c, the dilation factor increases to 22. We can get within 222 light years, no sweat. The heat death of the universe is still quite aways away. While it is painful to think about travelling half-way across the universe (as if that statement meant anything), our local region is definietly within the realm of human life, even from the perspective of observer, not pilot. Outside of one generation ! necessairly = outside of humanities grasp.
:)
Let's assume constant acceleration, 3g. I'm not sure what that would do to human health, but lets just assume that we'd be okay, or that we figured some way around it. Here is the calucation done to reach
Add some time for slowdown&speed up.
If you go
The otherside of the cosmos, however, might be.
Now, if I can only think of a way to build my DIY Alcubierre drive
IMHO, this is what we need: Cheap, easy to store energy. Antimatter, or something. Purely inductive drives, or some kind of low-fuel requirement ramscoup thing. Longegevity treatment.
If we live forever, or a REALLY long time, the heavens can still be ours, even though breaking the FTL problem might be impossible.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
You just answered your own question. Here's a calculator for you to experiment with.
Now the Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. Punching that into our calculator (with 1g of acceleration) gets us:The first non-satellite galaxy is 701,000 light years away. Thus:Andromeda (a galaxy of much interest) is 2,363,000 light years away. For this, we find:You'll note how ship time is only going up a few years at a time, while Earth is losing thousands to millions of years after each trip.
The biggest issue in your calculations above, is that you reach a specified speed and coast. A true intergalactic ship would always be under power, or it would be unable to make the trip in a reasonable amount of time for the crew.
Does that help clarify things for you?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
WHERE DO THE FRENCH STORE THEIR WASTE. From what I understand a large portion of their energy is generated from Nuclear power (86%). They have to put the waste somewhere.
France is traditionally further left than the US, so if they can have an expansive nuclear program, I believe so can we. It just has to be economically viable.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Absolutely :) Nice to have it so clearly laid.
Most people, I think, are disappointed by the thought that intra/intergalactic travel is impossible.
It's not. You just leave everything you've every known behind.
The stars are within humanities reach, and I find that comforting.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Natural gas is only 55% of the density of air.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)