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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.
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.
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
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?
Our President can correctly say the word "nuclear" and not a moment before.
Crimony--what color is the sky, black or white?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
We could also eat fish from our lakes and streams again. Since the methyl mercury being dumped into the atmosphere from the coal plants and other industry has raised the mercury levels in all fresh water fish to high levels.
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.
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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.
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Transition from gasoline to compressed natural gas is fairly straightfoward. I used to drive CGN truck while in graduate school eight years ago. Conversion kits are readily available and car manufacturers could switch over completely in a few model years. I have worked on projects that were investigating the use of CNG in large diesel motors as well. This can be made to work without a huge technology change or big expense.
And we can systhesized "natural gas" which is mostly methane from about any fuel stock on the planet, including coal and biofuels. If we have sufficiently cheap electrical power, we can make it from water and a carbon source...even carbon dioxide.
Nuclear energy plus CNG is a reasonable step forward over the next ten to twenty years both economically and environmentally speaking. Policitally though, it is anyone's guess. Nuclear has no friends now...big oil is in the White House and progressives still can't shake the scare the got from "The China Syndrome."
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'
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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).
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
regarding your 500% territoy && lots of research point:
h tml)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
specifically: (note the Algae number)
Different plants produce usable oil at different rates. Some studies have shown the following annual production:
* Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (40 to 50 m/km)
* Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130 m/km)
* Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 140 m/km)
* Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (610 m/km) [2] (http://www.journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.
* Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)
this guy computes you could cover US oil needs with 10,000 square miles of alage producing biodiesel:
http://www.green-trust.org/biodiesel.htm
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.
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,,2087-1325Is 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.
We've generated anti-electrons, anti-protons, and anti-hydrogen.
Anti-U235 is way, way, way beyond anything we can generate right now, and for the next bazillion years, unless we get a LOT better at it, real fast.
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
I agree with you on the issues where you say that nuclear power is not a sustainable source. The problem is that even if we do have fission reactors we will end up with some decayed materials that have two good uses. One either for making weapons or using them in a fast breeder reactor which further uses the materials for its own use. In short we will have tons and tons of nuclear waste storage sites. Nuclear powerplants ( usually in the US) have been prone to problems with disposing coolant, leaks and contamination of the surrounding areas. Yes they are safe after many years of running. But they have got better in the last 20 years. America has not built a new nuclear power plant due to the problems with safety designs and certain faliures. ..... the future will tell. What do you guys think of the new hyrbid cars comming out?
Fission seems very likely in the future, but the main thing is that we have to run our cars and homes and other "stuff" at higher efficiencies. In Oberlin College at Oberlin, Ohio their is an enviormental sciences building that has all these features to save power and and use waste by products and recycle them to get energy etc.
America is a very gun-ho(e) country where people like to do things no matter what rest of the world does ( look at women's voting rights and slavery etc...). Americans just ignore the fact that there suburban homes with their cars will not last very long because of a limites source of oil. There are two versions to this theory and one of them is that either we run out and think about it when it happens and the second one is more optimistic that says that we will evolve out of the dependence on oil. As humans have done from wood and coal burning times.
But there is always a cost-benefit ratio. And it differs from society to society. And the cost beneifit of having these hybrid cars and maybe other forms of transportation. In short they should be more cheaper avaialable for people to use. I mean there is no reaon for Hummer on a street. If you guys see a Hummer on the street honk at it and flash your lights and flick them off. Make them feel "Un-Wanted" or "un-welcomed". Where I live now I have access to wind power, and I signed up for about 50% of my electricity to come from that source. And I do have a car which I drive to work maybe twice a week( I wake up really late like 10 or so ) and rest of the time I walk or take the company shuttle. We all must do our part.
Nuclear power is not a solution but rather a path in the right step. But to use electricity for combustionable transportation I would recomend using hydrogen powered vehicles but then there are other issues with hydrogen being "explosive" ( not just flamabale ). So
- "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
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.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
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 ----
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
"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)
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.
"(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.
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.
The prices listed are for pre-production systems.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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...
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.
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
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.
...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.
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.
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,
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
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?
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.
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.
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
I think Homer Simpson inadvertently walked out with it.
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!
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.
D'oh! 4.2 billion not million. So I guess it would be plenty of energy for the country if even only 5% of Arizona was covered (based on these wildly optimistic numbers).
> 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
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
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.
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
buy our electricity from the french
This is a great idea; salt water conducts electricity so we won't even need to lay cables.
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.
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
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.
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.