Slashdot Mirror
Europe Warms to Nuclear Power
FleaPlus writes "The CS Monitor reports that for the first time in 15 years a European nation has started building a nuclear reactor, with six more likely to be built in the next decade. France is also planning to develop a safer and more efficient "fourth generation" reactor by 2020. This is in light of rising fossil fuel prices and a desire to reduce CO2 emissions. Still, a majority of EU citizens are opposed to nuclear energy, primarily for environmental reasons, even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal."
Nuclear energy and Hydrogen are two effective ways to counter the diminishing fossil fuels. Once the heavy industries and transportation shifts to these alternative fuels, the world doesn't have to depend on Middle-East anymore.
only if you are using that a non fossil-fuel energy source to get that hydrogen. It is currently cheapest to get hydrogen from hydro-carbons. (if memory serves)
Somebody realised that existing nuclear reactors account for 10-15% of production in Europe and they're pretty much all due to be decommissioned within the next 15 years or so. With solar and wind power still impractical and increasing oil supply a risky prospect what else was going to happen?
well i'm not sure about this one, but having an exposed reactor core doesn't seem to be standard operating procedure.
Everyone knows that nuclear power is clean. Europeans are concerned about two other things:
1. Disaster. Nuclear engineers say that the chance of a meltdown is very small, but this argument is worthless after Harrisburg and Chernobyl. People in general are mathematically clueless, but they do know that the risk is real and not small after these two events.
2. Waste storage. Where do we put the waste products after burning it? People are afraid it might pollute the environment, perhaps not now but for furure generations. It will have to be stored for thousands of years. Shooting it out in space is not an option to most, having pictures of an explosing Columbia in the mind.
Attitudes are changing now because people have to choose between a rock and a hard place, in the light of tough economic times and rising energy prices, and nuclear power is thus the pragmatic way to go. People will still be afraid of it, though.
Generally anyway, when things work as they are supposed to. But things happen. People worry about a catastrophic failure of a nuclear plant. A catastrophic failure of a coal-fired electric plant would result in minimal environmental damage and could be easily cleaned up. A catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant on the other hand ...
Welcome to the 1970's.
Right. Try telling that to the folks who used to live in Chernobyl.
Beautiful straw man there. Read this: How many died? Oh, and while we are at it, lets compare the number of deaths due to the mining of coal....
I think you will find that Nuclear power (as long as it is not used as a weapon) is considerably safer than coal on the whole.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Uranium was originally obtained from coal. Just because it supports nuclear power doesn't mean that it is wrong.
Again, try telling that to the folks who used to live in Chernobyl.
Another issue that has re-sparked the debate, Many European countries rely on gas supplies for their energy requirements. Its not a massive % however with the recent russian/ukranian issues with gas supply it has highlighed the direct requirements for countries to have their supplies of energy.
A WORKING coal-fired electric plant is catastrophic environmental damage and there is no way to clean it up. Still no one seems to care.
Nuclear power does release very little radioactive material. It's the blowing up part that's a problem.
But there are current designs that have no chance of melting down. 20 years makes a lot of difference.
in Collie, Western Australia, Muja #1 plant burns 4 million tonnes of coal per year. Coal which is 3 parts per million Uranium. Simple arithmetic says that 12 tonnes of Uranium goes up the stack or into the ash every year. Muja has been operating for many years.
Tell me, O Zoltar, what would happen if a nuke plant mislaid 12 kilos of Uranium?
Yes, nuclear power plants suck. But they suck an awful lot less than any of the currently viable alternatives. If sticking in nukes now makes for a far-less-painful transition to solar or whatever in two decades, then I'm all for it. Even if it doesn't, I'm still all for it because of the coal, oil and gas plants (and mines, refineries, tailings dumps, transportation facilities etc) which won't get built because they weren't needed.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What kind of retarded reply is that?
How about we stop driving cars because of the bad memories people have of getting run over or rammed into something by a car?
Get a clue.
Of course, mining coal for fuel and power never hurt anybody...
...even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal.
If you've ever been near to a coal fire you'll know that it releases a LOT of radiation in the infra-red and visible light spectra. Scary but true.
For safety purposes, it's best to keep the room convection cooled and to wear dark glasses, to avoid the hazards of getting warm or being able to see.
This has been a public safety post.
I don't particularly want to see more reactors built but it is starting to look inevitable. But if we have to build them at least look at safer designs like pebble reactors which, unless anyone else on the board has more information, look like a better option.
Of course we could drastically reduce the power needs of the populace if we just saved more energy. Leaving computers on all night, and worse monitors, is shockingly wasteful and we need tax incentives to insulate the current housing stock and regulation on new building projects. I'm over in Finland a lot and they are the puppies packet at this sort of thing; the average modern home needs one or two wood stoves to meet most energy needs.
It's also important to remember that the major cost on nukes comes not in building the things, but in dismantling them and storing the waste - something that the pro-nuke lobby often forgets.
The current British government also appears to be cautiously in favour of building a few more nuclear power stations to replace the ones due to be decommisioned in 2020 - the major barrier being that about half of the population is against them.
(We worry about things like the increasing amounts of radioactive waste in our dumps, possible indications of higher incidences of leukemia and cancer in areas like Sellafield, and risks of a serious accident.)
fortune -o
True, and today's cores are not self perpetuating. Due to the construction and materials, the core will die out when the plant is abruptly shutdown. The core will even die when the coling systems shutdown or fail. Which was a (if not the) large problem in the design of the old reactors.
I think that this is a bad development. No matter how safe proponents say it is, many future generation have to deal with the waste of an energy form that we can just use for a short time (there is only enough low-cost uranium for fifty years, at the *present rate* of power use). Apart from that many regimes are not cautious, or even worse, use it for development of nuclear arms.
For those reasons, we should strive for disarming countries with nuclear weapons (including European countries, and the United States), and try to find better alternatives for nuclear energy.
In The Netherlands, where I live, wind energy could be very viable as an alternative. Oddly, building of windmills is blocked by environmental groups. And in other countries dams and solar energy may work (with enough development).
And yes, it would help a bit if we used less energy. So, buy a Soekris or VIA Epia board next time ;).
Well, I have relatives who live near Chernobyl's exclusion area. So I know a little more about the disaster, and it's not as bad as the press says. The actual number of casualities is 'only' 56 and estimated number of people with Chernobyl-related illnesses is about 5000.
That's bad. But not as bad as the number of lung cancers caused by soot from coal or oil powerplants.
And Israel will be left to its own destiny? You anti-semite!!!
And since when conventional power plants are safe? Even if you count just accidents alone, more people die per year in coal plants than the total death toll from Chernobyl.
Not to count the amount of pollution. This very article shows that radioactivity alone is a lot bigger when burning fossil fuels -- and then add all chemical-based emissions, which are none for nuclear power.
Nuclear power is like having a vial of concentrated poison in a closed bottle, fossil fuels are like taking a bucket of the same poison and spraying it thinly over a city. In the first case, the poison is more visible, that's all.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Nuclear power has promise, though. Especially if we can get IFR reactors going. There is sufficient fuel to power IFR type facilities for many many years. This results because the IFR is a breeder reactor which can utilize uranium 238 and damn near anything else that's densely radioactive. There isn't much of a future for standard fission reactors, and fast breeders are politically insane - but Integral Fast Reactors could really be the ticket for quite some time.
Or, at least until the oil gets so expensive we can't build computers to control the reactors...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You can't just look at the worst disasters. You have to look at the average pollution output over an extended period of time. Your argument is like saying planes are less safe because when one crashes a lot more people die than in a car crash. If you analyze it on a per passenger-km basis, planes are much safer than cars.
We could get rid of waste by burying it deep in oceanic subduction zones, where the plates are moving downward. A guided drop would cause a penetration of about 100 feet or so into silt, then it goes down a few more feet each year (mostly due to sediment buildup).
Recycling at it's finest. Nuke materials under miles of seawater + about 100 feet of mud, getting deeper all the time.
Just put it in a casing shaped like a torpedo, beefed up with an armor penetrating nose, and drive it to the sea floor. It'll be going fast when it hits, and it'll keep going down a long way.
Good luck digging that up again.
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
1) It's not cost efficient, even when compared to wind.
2) It's dangerous. (That's a really good article, by the way. It should be required reading for anyone commenting on this Slashdot story.)
We really need to look toward alternatives (wind, solar-thermal, solar tower, wave, tidal, biomass...) if we intend to keep consuming power at current rates. (alternatives are also great for generating hydrogen, because the hydrogen can be a storage medium to account for the unreliability of sources like wind.)
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
So, what are the arguments supporting radio-activity?
Am I the only one who wonders about... In which European country is it being built?
Or does the writers of this article presume that Europe is one single country.
It's in here Finland too they're building it.
When the russians reduced the gas supply to Ukraine last week, many of the big european countries, that get the gas from rusia realised what a voulnerable situation they were in. many countries get a large part of thir gas from russia.
In the European union there is now a debate going on each country having to produce more of its own energy. also the need to form a Musketeer agreement to stand against potential energy-blackmailing or catastrophes. Nuclear power is for most of the larger European countries a very viable sollution. that will greatly reduce the dependency of other countries.
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
Finland as the nation which is building the new reactor. Was heavily critized for it when the decision went through to start the construction work...
Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the Dihydrogen Monoxide...
In its "lit" state, coal can cause severe burning to the skin.
Under certain conditions coal can release invisible and explosive gases.
Inhalation of coal smoke can cause choking, asphyxiation, and death.
Despite claims of responsible practices by industry, coal has been found buried in the ground at sites across the country.
DHMO2: Coal, the black^WAfrican American killer.
So, I live in Slovenia (I doubt any of you know where that is). But we have a nuclear plant. And it's been running for quite a while now. Because I've also studied physics I've found out, during some lectures, that the measurments taken around the nuclear plant show, that the grass around it recieves the exact same amount of the yearly dosage of radiation as something located far far away. Therefore, this energy is very clean, much cleaner than cole.
:-) ), we'll have to face it that we live in a world we created. Maybe we should build reactors underground, or in a separate nation somewhere in the middle of nowhere... It's all a possibility. Anything is better than coal.
Right, so, then a disaster happens. Well, chances are very slim for a disaster. Today, we have a higher safety regulation for operating of nuclear power plants, and we are not competing on who gets to restart the turbines faster (check this) without using safety measures.
Besides disaster possibility, the problem is also waste dispossal as a poster pointed out before me. Where to put it. You simply cannot dissolve the waste, or this is to expensive. And I don't think the problem with space dumping is the image of Columbia blowing up. Waste baskets can be made that whitstand such blasts. It's more of the awarness that we can't already pollute the space, since we fuc*** up mother Earth. And it's becoming an increasing security concern too with all the terrorists roaming around. Imagine a break-in into the waste storage facility. It's easy to make a dirty bomb. Breaking into the plant itself is much harder, although it's still a possibility.
In conclusion, I think we have to accept the risks of possible danger (we fly with airlens, but those also crash don't they?) if in turn, we get back a possibility for a cleaner environment. And until we develop things than can use all the free enegry just lying around and as long as we use things that rely on our supply of power (computers among other things
The waste run-off can be used to make an especially invigorating health-tonic which can be sold to corner stores across the nation.
I mean however some governments preach against pollution, just take a good look around the globe and try to honestly say something is made against it. While some minor things are done, globally there's nothing happening.
So, when talking about building new nuclear power stations in europe, one has to thing about two things as causes:
- cheaper energy,
- lesser dependency on russian gas (as recent russian-ukrainian developments have shown).
People of course are afraid of anything nuclear, and why shouldn't they ? There's no perfect station, there's no 100% guarantee a station won't fail, and there's absolutely not much space on this planet to store our nuclear waste, which will only be more and more.
I for one would more like to see space technology developed not towards space tourism, but towards expediting nuclear waste into space, be that into the Sun, towards some distant planet in our system, or else. I know this may sound harsh, but I'd say it's better to have it off planet than on planet, whichever place on earth that may eventually be.
Until we don't arrive to a point in technology and time where we will be able to use more efficient and less polluting energy sources, nuclear power plants seem to be the best compromise.
Of course, you also have to think about other issues, like e.g. if there will be too many nuclear plants, they will be nice targets for terrorists to crash their planes into.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
the safer or longer lasting reactors all have a political problem - they are more open for abuse by terrorists.
How to backtrack...
Disclosure: I'm not impartial about this because I earn thousands of euros translating documents concerning nuclear power and reprocessing, so nuclear power is good for me. The spin off is that I know a LOT about waste storage issues.
It seems to me people are too easily sidestepping the waste storage issue. I see plenty of discussion about waste products released into the atmosphere, but what about the stored waste.
You're all aware of it but I don't see anybody coming up with solutions. It is a concrete problem.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
No, no single Slashdot poster can summarize it, but I like to think that Slahshdot is some kind of cross between a complex system and groupthink. It all works out in the end. (Or maybe not.)
There is no way to safely and durably sustain the energy consumption rates of the so-called Western civilization. We can go by with it only because we really are a very small minority. If the whole world switched to the same lifestyle ...
Really, it's all about consuming less, not producing more.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Good link, but I'm 95% sure you'd have to reach pretty far for a reason to call the original post a straw man.
listen to yourself... "no chance". you mean "less chance, as far as we can estimate". Go watch the film "titanic". she was "unsinkable".
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Radio-activity is such a complex issue, that I dare say no single Slashdot poster can succinctly summarize the arguments for and against it.
We can, however, be reasonably certain that there is no hyphen in it.
That said, I think we can all agree that radioactivity, as in, "Oh, my God, Tompkins, the... the... Geiger Counter is off the scale! You're... we're... ALL... RADIOACTIVE!" is not a good thing, but nuclear power plants which create electricity are not quite so bad.
Is your thesis that if we build more nuclear power plants we will become radioactive? If so, I would love to subscribe to your newsletter.
Damn... When will someone make a working Tokamak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak)? Nuclear fusion is the future! Cheap, clean energy, from hidrogen plasma.
And this is the reason behind the research into these 4th generation nuclear plants. These would be small plants that can be put anywhere (almost) to generate power for the production (extraction) of hydrogen for instance.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Many Governments in Europe support Iran's allegedly peaceful nuclear program. It makes sense that they are warming to nuclear power. Of course, if they're not more fore-handed, they may do more than merely warm.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
>Nuclear Power will get us over for a while. but hydrogen is bullshit. It takes
>more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an
>energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O. It's better to simply use the
>electricity you make to crack the water As Electricity to Do Work than to blow it
>on H.
Hydrogen has the potential of being a way of tapping resources that are otherwise not easy to exploit. Iceland, for example, has huge geothermal potential but it isn't exactly easy to export that electricity out of the middle of the atlantic. Making H could be a decent way of doing so.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility has been controversial for years.
3 5400.ece
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article10
Personally I think reactors in britain could be invitation for terrorists! It's like building them a bomb in the right place that they need only come along and detonate... surely?
The Titanic was "unsinkable" through rhetoric. Modern nuclear reactors have "no chance" of a meltdown or explosion due to physics.
People who wheel out "Won't somebody think of Chernobyl!" as though it's relevent to anything other than a discussion of 40 year old Soviet reactor design and an example of poor safety procuedures should have their flesh flailed from their bodies as an example to other stupids.
Exactly. Nuclear power is not what it used to be in the 70s and 80s. The reactors are quite safe nowadays, especialy the N-type (which the Chinese are also developing). I am for safeguarding the environment but we have to be rational about this, nuclear is efficient and cleaner. Nuclear power has been "labeled" as evil and dangerous but other energy sources, such as coal, tend to cause a lot more damage which is difficult to measure. For example, coal mining alone, is the cause of lung illnesses and lung cancer among people who are exposed to the dust. But when burned (and if the mining is not done properly) this same dust spreads among a larger popullation. I come from a country where the main source of energy is coal. Not only is it insufficient for our energy needs but it also causes unimaginable polution. Totaly opposite with nuclear, where the reaction environment is contained, unless human error causes meltdown (such as in Chernobyl or the Three Mile Island).
--gks
At least in Germany, we would be actually *more* dependend on foreign sources with nuclear power than with other forms of energy as we get 100% of or Uranium from foreign countries.
Well, yes, there is nuclear power and there is burning coal... and nothing else of course...
NASA scientists are about to publish conclusive studies showing abundant methane of a non-biologic nature is found on Saturn's giant moon Titan, a finding that validates a new book's contention that oil is not a fossil fuel.
http://home.earthlink.net/~root.man/sci.html [earthlink.net]
People keep bringing up the "point" that hydrogen takes too much energy to generate. It DOESN'T HAVE TO BE done with electrocity! There are ways of doing it biologically.
, 00.html. html?pg=5
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54456
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/mustread
It's basically using solar energy to make hydrogen, but without the trouble of solar cells.
guess where you get uranium from
I have to say the first time I read "Europe warms to nuclear power" I thought there had been a massive core meltdown somewhere!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Although they appear to provide 'free' energy, in reality today's solar cells cost more energy to produce then they generate in their entire lifespan. So it's not an option. Negative return on investment.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The UK Windscale nuclear plant - now the Sellafield reprocessing plant, and soon probably to be re-badged the Ravengalss Wildlife park or something like that has a pipeline that put dissolved low-level waste into the sea. At first this sounds like a really, really bad idea. However, the Atlantic has about 10^13 curies of mixed radioactive stuff in it - a lot of it a duterium, tritium, C14, and a mess of heavy metals. You could dump all the waste that had ever been produced into the Atlantic, and provided you mixed it in well, you would never be able to detect the difference. The 1950's solution was to stick a pipe far enough into the ocean to get the waste into some of the fast currents in the north Irish sea, which should sweep it out into the Atlantic. It has been argued since that this did not qork quite as designed, but at the time this bit of the Irish Sea had been surveyed as well as anywhere. The other UK solution was to stick the stuff into drums and drop it into the mid-Atlantic. The drums were designed to burst half-way down, again dispersing the material into the fast ocean currents.
Compare this to the US idea of chucking solid waste into a concreted drum, and sending it right to the bottom. The bottom of the oceans are often quiet places where the water hardly moves. Fish and crustacea live in the rusting cans, and lay their eggs on the concrete. We are trawling for deep sea fish like grenadiers these days as the cod has virtually gone, so we may be getting it all back again - we don't know.
We seem to have lived through an age when Science was trusted to do anything, and the nuclear budget could be underwritten by weapons work; then through an age when Science was not trusted at all, and anything nuclear was controlled by evil warmongers. We might actually be heading for a balanced view. Coo!
Hydrogen is only meant to be used as a method of storing electricity. It's currently more desirable than using battery-power due to the ridiculous weight of batteries and the fact that batteries often wear down over time, while a fuel-cell system does not. Hydrogen probably offers a better ratio of energy stored to weight than battery systems.
If you can think of a better way to store energy than in cumbersome metallic batteries or as hydrogen, by all means, sell it to the masses!
Generally the friction caused by the subduction creates immense heat, melting the rock layer that is subducted. When the rock melts, superheated steam causes volcanoes to form above the subduction zone. For an example, see http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~leeman/Cascades.gif
So unless you want volcanoes of nuke waste (!) it might be better to bury it in a geologically stable area, such as the middle of a continent.
Logically, if they started reprocessing waste, it would be such a small amount you would only need a single salt mine or similar.
Well, if Friends of the Earth had anything to do with energy policy, we'd all be living in mud huts, wearing hemp smocks and gathering nuts and berries from the woods. Forget medicine too. It'd be shamens and healing crystals all the way.
Unfortunately, political pressure groups such as these have had far too much influence over the last 20 years.
The nuclear industry (the R&D part) in the UK is all but dead now as a result, and the generating stations don't have long left.
Stick Men
er well, store energy. Doesn't have to be electricity. As other posters have noted, you can bypass electrical generation altogether in the process of making hydrogen.
If you analyze it on a per passenger-km basis, planes are much safer than cars.
Yet despite all the world's car bombs, people accept far more restriction on their lives due to two plane crashes into two skyscrapers. Plane crashes, like nuclear meltdowns, have a certain Gran Grenoble factor to them.
May the Maths Be with you!
A point I haven't read in this discussion yet:
I find it rather funny, when after the recent gas troubles German politicians proposed nuclear power as a means to make Germany independent from resource imports.
I realy would like to know where in Germany the uranium mines are located! The European countries have to import uranium as they have to import oil!
And even for those countries who have there own uranium sources, uranium is as finite as oil and gas, estimates range from twenty to sixty years. Considering the price for the development and building of new power stations and the waste problem (including the old plants!) I realy wonder if it is worth it!
A WORKING coal-fired electric plant is catastrophic environmental damage and there is no way to clean it up.
Yes there is. Carbon Sinks. A nuclear meltdown is also "cleanable", but to a much lesser degree. Long term, the area around a melted down reactor is largely a writeoff.
May the Maths Be with you!
I live in Stockton. I do not like this idea!
Different designs of reactors have different failure modes.
The laws of physics prohibit certain kinds of faults in certain kinds of reactors.
You cannot have a "meltdown" in an AGR or Magnox. (You can have a fire in a Magnox, though and it has happened.)
You cannot have a "Chernobyl" in a Magnox, AGR, PWR or Candu. It is not physically possible.
You can have a meltdown in a PWR.
It's too complicated to go into details here. Imagine trying to explain it to the General Public. You have no hope.
As far as the General Public is concerned, nuclear power is "Dangerous" and "Evil" and won't somebody think of the children etc.
Stick Men
Why not say Finland, instead of "a European nation". Did you know that Linux Torvalds is Finnish, and that Nokia is a Finnish company? And that Santa Claus lives http://www.scandinavica.com/culture/tradition/sant a.htm in Finland?
I have now changed my mind twice about the issue of nuclear power. At any given time, I like to think, my opinions have been knowledgable, well-reasoned, and justified by current circumstances. Still, facts and circumstances change.
As a young science geek (I was born in 1952), I was excited by the possibilities of nuclear technology - power generation, of course, but also less obvious things like, say, canal excavation or spacecraft propulsion. Those were heady times, looking forward to the atomic age.
A few years later, we had developed a better understanding of some long term problems, most seriously the storage of radioactive waste. (High-level wastes are small in volume, but pretty much inimical to life; there are in addition large quantities of low-level waste and irradiated materials to deal with). I had also learned a lot more about the gulf between idealized science and the behavior of those governments and large corporations who were actually capable of building nuclear installations. I decided the risks were just too great to accept.
Today, with much more sophisticated reactor technologies, and at least a glimmering of real solutions to the waste storage problem, I think the risks of operating nuclear plants have become justifiable. And faced with the worsening consequences - moral, environmental, and political - of our world-wide petroleum addiction, nuclear power is the best alternative we have.
Shipping refrigerated liquid H2 isn't exactly cheap, ya know.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Like it or not, but we will need MORE electricity in the future, to cover other energy usages like transport. If Belgium wanted to run 100% of its transport on biofuel, it would need 5 times the surface of France to produce it. With massive amounts of electrical power, you could make hydrogen, or heat waste into plasma and crack it to fuel. Heating your house could also be done with electrical power, provided you spread the consumption over the day by using heat accumulation. Wind power is good, but I don't think it will be enough.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Ohh puhleeease.. Have you realy been brain-washed enough by your government to see potential terrorist actions *everywhere*? We have been dragged into an Orwellian world with thousands of camera's and undercover agents to report everything about everyone. It's getting totally disgusting.
Here in Holland it gets so far that today they are taking down an entire forest in the name of 'safety' for Awacs planes that take-of and land just across the border in Germany. They could have lengthened the runway 300ft to get the same 'extra safety' but reality is they are afraid a potential terrorist may hide in the forrest to shoot an Awacs down. How incredibly sick!
Let's hide all rivers under a concrete shield. Terrorists may try to pollute them upstream and make the water undrinkable... Let's forbid air travel entirely, a terrorist may slip through security and turn the plane into a bomb.
Instead of seeing terrorists everywhere and trying to avoid every possible 'attack', deal with the reasons for people to turn into terrorists.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Oh lord, not one but TWO references to Wired. The world's leading source of hydrogen hype and fantasy. If hydrogen is the answer to the world's energy problems, it isn't in separating it from oxygen, but fusing it into helium. See, you have to think in terms of energy SOURCES, not in energy storage.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Why is it we have to have an oil crisis when its time to talk nuclear power plant contracts?
Who is it that is actually responsible for the softening process?
Nice safe nuclear reactors? Where did they suddenly come from? Whatever happened to debate? We seem to have settled on nuclear futures and are wondering which type of reactors to build.
And we all have to start building them NOW.
Someone reminf me which parts of the USA and Canada are sitting on coal? I know nearly all of the UK is. What happened?
...With their Hummer H2s! ...And humidifiers! ...And national reserves! ...And McPackaging! ...And the War in Iraq! ...And with your danm TV shows! *shakes fist*
May the Maths Be with you!
The way that was phrased implies to me that the average slashdotter is below the level of the average high school student
Those were just the first results I grabbed. Here's the Berkeley press release:
0 2/02-21-2000.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/
Nuclear power has only been used in a very limited way for say fifty years and we already have a massive disposal problem. If the solution is to replace fossil fuels with nuclear power we're talking 100X the waste in the next fifty years. Dealing with the waste is insanely expensive so there's a great myth about how cheap it is. Ask our great grandkids how cheap it is? It's simple is why people and companies like it. Put up a handful of plants and you get a lot of power, and a lot of waste by products not just the fuel cores. Decomissioning a plant largely involves walling them up and forgetting about them. Have we all forgotten "National Sacrific Zones"? Probably the single stupidest idea to ever come out of the government. This plot of land gave it's life for it's country. There are many places that won't be safe to enter in our children's lifetimes. The worst mess oil or coal ever caused people can walk on. Now we want this times 100? Just how much land needs to be declared uninhabitable before we percieve this as the madness that it is? Oh gee one day it'll be safe. Not entirely true. Ever hear of the baby teeth studies? Nuclear material doesn't cycle out of the environment. Plutonium even dead cold is still toxic. Our recent battlefields have been contaminated because some genius decided depleated uranium would make neato shells. It leachs into the ground water and causes health problems. Ask the people in Bosnia. There's less rainfall in Iraq but the ground water will eventually be contaminated there as well. Just because it's high tech doesn't mean it's a good idea. In fifty years there's never been a way found to safely store or dispose of nuclear waste. Even chemical weapons can be incenerated and reduced to carbon but not nuclear waste. There is a simple solution to storage. Everyone that is pronuclear power gets to store a drum in their back yard. Just remember it's perfectly safe and you'll be just find. And on the brightside if the cat goes missing you can track them with a gieger counter. Ain't technology grand!
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
Most of the posts about clean, low CO2 emission and cost fail to take into account the fact that it's quite a lot of work to refine nuclear fuel (U-325) out of garden-variety uranium. This processing does generate CO2. Storage of waste and doing something about nuclear power plants is also going to cost in both money and CO2. Both mostly in hindsight, but i haven't heard of those costs being estimated and factored in.
And with burying it in the seabed it seems like all you need is a ship, a few special casings and a restraining order against anyone who is suspected of having ties to greenpeace, but it's impossible to check up on simple things like: are there hair fractures in my casings? How is the casing material holding up under nuclear conditions? (radiation can cause structural weaknesses, especially neutron radiation)
Anyway, the supply of nuclear material available isn't very large. One of the estimates for the amount of fuel left in easlily mineable conditions would give us nuclear power for some 50 years or so. It's not exactly a sustainable solution. Why not switch to a bit more longer term solution right away? Peak sun is in my personal guess still not for another 3.5 billion years.
I thought this was funny too:
"even though nuclear power releases less radioactive material than burning coal."
Sure. But when it DOES release that radioactive material, I dont want it to be in my country, OR the next one. Heck the atom bomb has probably released less radiactive material in the 20th century than all other industrial processes during that time, therefore it is harmless.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
As we watch the the world vanish, we should ask ourselfs why... Some may consider how will we explain are doing nothing?
.Perhpas this article will inspire someone to write more poetry. (and make me fell better) .possibly I have made a lasting contribution to poetry. (forever)
:(
As I share this with the slashdot crowd. . . . . I think to myself (outloud)
Maybe this post will inspire someone to write a letter. (to a political leader)
or. . .
Unlikly but. . . it may inspire me to stop posting on slashdot. (which could only be better)
or. . .
Conclusion : this article has not improved my poetry
Others opinions? RE Article : please no comments on my poetry- unless you would like to sign up for fan club mailing list.
PS : origional post was aborted by the lamness filter (had to make modifactions - even slashdot AI, hates my poetry - honestly it was better.) I for one do not welcome our new AI lameness filter overloads)
Related Article : E-Waste
The English, Scots, Welsh and Irish are also Europeans!
Or do you think that British peoples are not Europeans?
Get a grip on reality!
Low levels of ionizing radiation seems to be actually beneficial to human health.
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This is called radiation hormesis. And this theory started after they found that people who lived in such a distance from hiroshima and Nagasaki that they received low radiation doses. And, years later, this population, exposed to radiation, had much lower cancer rates than non-exposed similar populations.
You can check some references:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n1s/full/7
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00019A
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/radioadaptive/inthorm
http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2004/Hormesis-
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I wonder why nobody disusses the neccessarity of more and more energy. Take a look around your room and see all the glowing "standby" LEDs. Take a look inside your computer and ask yourself if you really need that 2 GHz processor whithout any power saving technonogy. Esp. if you're American, ask yourself why your country doesn't subscribe to the Kyoto protocoll, or why you all drive these SUVs when oil is a decreasing, limited resource. Could it be that this whole discussion is just about "We don't want to save energy, so nuclear power has to be clean and riskless!" I'm a physicist. I know about radioactivty. I know the difference between theory and real life. Don't tell me nucelar power is save. Tell that to the people in Chernobyl, Harrisburg, Sellafield, ...
If you're still not convinced, ask yourself why you get a bad feeling if Iran or North Korea fight for thier rights for peacefull(?) use of nuclear energy. If that energy is save, why could one build nuclear/dirty bombs using nearly the same techniques? I never heard of a wind/solar bomb.
Ask yourself how you would guarantee that all the processing of nuclear material is done in a safe way.
Now wouldn't it be easier to simply say: Let's concentrate on saving energy instead of keeping it cheap at any consequence?
Yes, but countries that have substantial uranium deposits include Canada, the United States, France, South Africa, Australia, Russia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even the worst of those is a better country to be in business with than, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia. There's also no uranium equivalent of OPEC manipulating prices.
The Japanese think they'll be able to extract uranium from sea water, at a price of ~$300/kg. Which sounds expensive, but would only add about a penny per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
And there's enough uranium around to last, at current consumption rates, for millions of years.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
The issue of cost is a red herring; You might need 10MW of wind power to replace a single MW of baseload coal/gas/nuclear. This is the nature of wind, solar and tidal: they are not consistent and cannot be relied upon 24/7.
, 00.html
For example here in the UK, we recently had frosty weather across the country with absolutely no wind, and it was dark by 4pm. Considering peak time is 3.30 to 6.30 because of the combination of residential, commercial and industrial loads, this is the time when you need maximum reliablilty, and NO renewable energy would have been generated at all. As it was, the grid barely coped; there were very nearly blackouts just after christmas: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1964324
Denmark has also had problems; they have only about 15% wind power and suffer from grid instability, which suggests this is the maximum about that a country should aim for. Also considering there is not a single large tidal power station in operation anywhere, it is an unproven technology.
I would encourage people to look at the example of France, which generates 80% of its electricity from Nuclear and exports it throughout Europe. They have never had a serious accident since the beginning of their nuke programme, and the programme is a source of pride for the French people.
With the recent Russian natural gas crisis and the realization that coal is a filthy technology, it seems to be either nuclear power with reprocessing (which reduces waste by 90%) or sitting in the dark. The green lobby seems to be very keen on the latter.
We can do it!
We can build a gigantic heat sink pipe from earth to space (or close to outter atmosphere) and use the gradient cycle to power the generator! By doing this, we can kill 2 birds with one stone! Rid of excess heat from earth (global warming no more!) and storing electrical power from doing so!
Yeah!
Sure, from outter space, the Earth might look like it just had a morning boner, but we can post up a sign and say "C'mon, the Moon!"
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Hypothetically speaking. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Coal which is 3 parts per million Uranium.
It's not so bad when you consider that soil on average contains 1.8 parts per million of Uranium. Source.
Also of note here, is that with coal and soil, we are talking about natural Uranium, not enriched uranium used in plants, which can take 100 years to return to natural radioactivity levels.
May the Maths Be with you!
The Simpsons are responsible for global warming on this planet. More than any other group the Simpsons franchise alone has turned the average person againt nuclear power. Once the Simpsons gets so boring the endless repeats finally die, then nuclear power stations will become acceptable again. Its simple really.
I know a lot of people have a negative, knee-jerk reaction to nuclear power, but given the world we currently live in, it's looking better all the time.
The latest nuclear power plant designs are much safer than older designs, and can also efficiently generate Hydrogen from water filling a critical role in the Hydrogen Economy (today most Hydrogen is produced from natural gas, which won't scale to a full blown Hyrdo economy).
Here's a nice view from 10,000 feet - http://zfacts.com/p/285.html
When you think about all the environmental and political fallout generated by using fossil fuels (especially the now undeniable fact that the Earth is getting warmer), a few tons of nuclear waste buried here and there doesn't seem too bad. Future generations will be able to handle the nuclear waste before it becomes a critical issue. Wouldn't it be better to leave them a world with some nuclear waste than no world at all?
Never mind complicated automatic saftey systems. Design your power plant to be intrinsically safe. Design it such that meltdowns, fires and prompt criticalities are not possible by the Laws of Nature themselves. It is possible and it has been done.
Stick Men
My Babies!!!
*OMF rushes its mutant offspring away from what was previously a sweet and alluring fireside, panics throwing water over the blaze, in the process causing the fire to spit, which it turn ignites are carpet fire setting the entire house ablaze and killing all the occupants, except for one of the mutant offspring who developed a resistance to heat due to grotesquely thick skin*
Announcer: "In conclusion, using nuclear energy could have saved these innocent freaks of nature. It is clear that in order to save our country and the world, we must give massive tax incentives to the nuclear industry"
May the Maths Be with you!
All this talk about sources is fine but what do I use in the car when oil is too expensive or will we all drive futuristic Delorians?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is largely due from the incredibly rapid decline of the North Sea oil and gas fields.
d =630622
Britain developed the North Sea oil and gas in the 70s, this largely saved its economy by providing three decades of cheap oil and natural gas. However, the good times are now about to abruptly end. Oil production is down dramatically- nearly 50% since 1999.
In fact it fell 13% in just the last year! http://realtimenews.slb.com/news/story.cfm?storyi
In fact the North Sea is now well down on its peak production, and the UK will now be reliant on Russia and the various OPEC countries, many of whom are in decline themselves. The global competition for oil and gas is immense.
Unless the UK can commit to a new generation of nukes, the future here will be very dark indeed.
Shipping refrigerated liquid H2 isn't exactly cheap, ya know.
It's not for export but to substitute for fossil fuel imports. Iceland is probably an exceptional case, though: very few other countries have more renewable energy than they know what to do with.
I wonder why nobody disusses the neccessarity of more and more energy. Take a look around your room and see all the glowing "standby" LEDs.
Yes, we can save a lot of energy. In the west. But in rapid developping countries, there is no way to use less energy, other than to stop development. They do need an alternative to burning coal.
Hell, even Iran needs an alternative to fossile fuel in the long run -- and uranium reactors are not the answer. Even if Iran would change their mind (and government) and become a peaceloving nation, there are always mad men somewhere in the world. We need a energy source that is safe enought that it can't be misused for making the bomb. A few years ago, there was a lot of fuss about efforts to make a working spallator reactor that ran off thorium (which is plentiful in the Earth's crust and also produces only short and medium-term waste (that you can't reprocess to make bombs from).
Unfortunately there hasn't been that much news from the spallator camp lately.
Well, tidal can...I'm going to rely on the tides more then on the supply of oil...and as you guys learned very recently, the supply of gas is a big wildcard too. (actually, the reason your grid almost popped on Christmas was because of gas prices, as your article states.)
Solar towers are reliable...assuming you build them in the right places (obviously, no good for England, very good for the American Southwest. I'm too tired to do the research for you on solar tower technology...do it yourself.) The others can be reliable too, but you have to use technologies like pumped storage.
Furthermore, it only takes about 10 seconds to spin up a gas turbine in case you start to exhaust your supplies of green power. Hell, you could hook up a natural gas engine to turn to the same turbines that your solar thermal plant uses.
I appreciate that nuke is cleaner then oil or coal, but carries with it too many other burdens...and the cost (research and now production) has received more subsidies then green power. Also, your solar tower will still be around in 50 years, long after you've built and decommissioned 2 nuclear plants.
I didn't green power was easy, but at the same time, neither is nuclear. And please, don't cast greens as anti-progress, or as a bunch of nutters who want everyone to spend their days farming organic veggies. We don't want that...we want a future with clean air and a climate somewhat similar to our current.
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
France imports electricity in the summer because they have problems cooling their nuclear power plants. (Low water in the rivers.)
This is misleading - naturally occurring uranium is much less radioactive than products from nuclear fission. I would quite happily pick up a fuel rod before it goes into a power plant but I wouldnt go near one once it comes out. The uranium from coal combustion is relatively harmless.
---
The point is that if you put uranium into a reactor, some of it undergoes fission into other substances. It turns out that a lot of these substances are very radioactive. OTOH anything radioactive in the earth would have decayed ages ago so naturally occurring stuff is not really very radioactive, relatively speaking anyway.
Last I read at the current rate of usage, we have about enough Uranium left for 50 years, now if there's going to be Nuclear plants all over Europe to, wecould probably reduce that number to 30.
And don't start with "we can filter it from seawater", because that's not economically possible.
Hydrogen has some specialised uses - consider an offshore windfarm: when the wind farm is generating more electricity than demanded, it can store the excess as hydrogen. When the wind is light, the wind farm can make up for the shortfall by passing the stored hydrogen through a fuel cell. (Of course, this isn't without some engineering challenges - elecrolysing straight sea water will result in all sorts of nasty chemicals such as chlorine and sodium hydroxide being released which would be a pollution nightmare).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Tidal power, Wave power, Hydroelectric power. All nice clean sources of power with reasonably good efficiency, ideal for coastal nations. Hydroelectric dams are ideal for mountainous nations with high precipitation.
Supplement that with wind, and nuclear to fill your power budget and you've reduced your reliance on the politics of oil-producing nations.
As for transportation, imagine the above power sources pumping electricity into a transport system where the vehicles pick up energy from the infrastructure. You've just imagined electric railways. Get lots of rail infrastructure, get the bulk of the freight onto rail, get more passengers on the railways.
Now all we need is someone to produce some sort of industrial complex that *produces* natural gas in a clean and efficient way, and we'll all be mostly happy when the oil and gas runs out.
Again I ask you, where is there a large-scale tidal power station in operation? How likely is it that coastal communities are going to allow their harbours to be choked with industrial machinery? Considering the difficulties in even siting a windfarm, I would say not bloody likely.
Solar towers are more pie-in-the-sky dreaming. Sure it might work in some places in the world, at fantastic cost; but not useful for 99% of the worlds population.
The supply of oil and gas is a huge factor- the price is about to rocket upwards as the supply gets tight, this is the reason new nukes are crucially necessary. The green movement with its cold-war-era anti-nuke stupidity is starting a movement alright- to coal and runaway global warming. Supreme irony that.
Hmmm....
A coal-fired power plant explodes, you might have a few dozen deaths and maybe a couple hundred injured. A nuclear plant goes critical, you've half a continent growing three-eyed frogs for the next couple hundred years.
Coal is more or less non-toxic, whereas the fatal dose for plutonium is less than a microgramme.
A terrorist with a truckload of coal can burn down or blow up a building. A terrorist with a rucksack full of refined uranium or plutonium can level a city - or turn an average-sized US state into a giant cancer ward.
Given a choice between the two, I'll take coal.
Although I'd prefer to see biomass/hydrogen, solar, hydro, and wind predominate - the potential of these sources hasn't yet begun to be tapped. Or maybe fusion - heaps of power without the potential for all those fissionables to get loose.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This is why policy makers hopefully look at facts rather than gut feelings.
Public opinion is important, but I hope they consider the facts too...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
can anyone say "yabba dabba doo" ?
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
'Hot' rad-waste decays very fast- short half-life. The whole OMG radioactive for a gazillion years thing is BS...
The Chernobyl accident was worse than most people think. There are still many places in the countyside where you get equivalent of one chest x-ray per hour. The original 1986 pollution cloud from the explosion actually hit the free world, the northern and western european countries than many central european soviet satellite countries! For example the free Austria and Bavaria was hit 3x as hard as the neighbouring communist Hungary due to unpredictable weather. The press kept mum on it as a gentlemen's agreement, east will not publish it and west will not exploit Chernobyl for anti-communist propaganda. both were concerned that contamination fears will ruin their agriculture and exports. A lot of ukranian and bulgarian people, who were kids in 1986 will suffer and live less due to the radiaton exposure.
The big problem with energetic reactors is that they are an econimic venture after all, so cost efficiency cuts corners no matter what standards and procedures you implement. This is an apparently unsurmountable conflict. The fact that very safe japan with perfect ultra-fast railways and highest work morals has such a shameful nuclear record speaks volumes about the severity of this issue.
Nuclear Wastage
The wastage, that is the spent nuclear material, from a nuclear reacotor is turned into glass and is stored in a safe location, usually deep underground in a hard rock area. The wastage is turned into glass which gives of surprisingly little radiation. The thought of big barrels filled with lime green ooze is, unfortunatly, what most average person percieves as the wastage from a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear energy is no way to counter the diminishing fossil fuels.
As you should know uran is limited too - give it 70 years to last.
It is not very clever to spend billions to develop 'better' nuclear power stations to have dangerous energy for only a few years instead of putting that money in an energy supplier which has future and does not leave back the most poison substance the mankind knows.
I lag
Carbon sinks don't help too much with some of the nastier stuff in coal. Heck, if it were feasible to completely eliminate any sulphur dioxide, heavy metals, and other pollutants, I wouldn't mind one being built IMBY.
Seems to me that the challenge of dealing with nuclear power generation's highly radioactive by-products is referring to them as "waste". It's not waste - they are a danger because of the high levels of energy they release - energy that we simply haven't found a suitable way of harvesting yet.
So really it's just an energy resource we haven't figured out how to exploit. Come up with a way of utilising that radioactivity other than burying it.
One of the design issues facing the designers of the Yucca facility is the large amounts of heat generated by the decaying substances stored there.
Heat you say? Er seems like we're missing something there. Maybe Yucca could generate it's own electricity...?
I think the way H2 is presented (as a transportation fuel) is BS. For starters, the potential energy density just isn't there.
We should be driving more efficient right now. Use tax breaks and subsidies to push battery-electric cars in urban areas, and biodiesel and ethanol for the "exurbs" and long-haul vehicles.
Thought experiment:
So I come up with a way to get bountiful fusion working tomorrow. The whole world switches to an equivalent lifestyle (differences in climate mean we wouldn't have the same lifestyle)
Is consuming more energy still the problem? (assuming we don't care about damaging the environment - all the extra heat probably would...)
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Oh man, hahahahaha, you should do stand up at the next Greenpeace demo! You're classic! Your sig. is certainly acurate!
A nuclear plant goes critical, you've half a continent growing three-eyed frogs for the next couple hundred years.
Maybe you could explain what you mean by "Go critical" Is that something you read in a comic once?
Coal is more or less non-toxic, whereas the fatal dose for plutonium is less than a microgramme.
Coal is very toxic once you burn it, and no commerical power producing reactor uses Pu as a fuel. Even if you did work at a plant that handled Pu material, it's not like you'd be spreading it on your toast.
A terrorist with a rucksack full of refined uranium or plutonium can level a city - or turn an average-sized US state into a giant cancer ward.
Please. Nuclear plants do not use weapons grade (Highly Enriched) Uranium. Even if the boggy man got hold of a tonne of fuel grade Uranium, the best they could manage is to build a dirty bomb. If you seriously believe that a dirty bomb could "turn an average-sized US state into a giant cancer ward" you need to go back to high-school physics and perhaps start reading Janes. The best a dirty bomb could do is cover a small area with large lumps. We're talking a square mile, tops. It's not like you can aerosolise it, spray it over an entire state and instantly give everyone cancer. Such things only exist in the paranoid fantasies of the masses.
Given a choice between the two, I'll take coal.
Given the choice between the two, I'll take nuclear each and every time.
In europe we have
laws
to keep the environment clean.A european coal plant
filters
its exhaust. If the coal contained radioactive material it is in the ashes afterward. And far more important: nor all coal is radioacive contaminatedangel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What happened to riding your bike in the city?
Wasn't this the cause of the whole Godzilla thing?
It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. ... ever heared about fuel cells? You very likely won't burn H but make electricity from it.
....
Ooops
Therefore it is an energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O.
But cracking H2O with solar power is cheap
It's better to simply use the electricity you make to crack the water As Electricity to Do Work than to blow it on H.
Not if you have to "pipe" the electricity via thousands of miles. E.g. from the ocean or from a desert.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It Doesn't Have To Be Hydrogen, Either. Why the big monomania for one technology? I mean, besides generating hype with a futuristic-sounding buzzword?
Solar is a great way to produce biodiesel, a fuel that's available now for use in a vast array of existing vehicles. And that's just one example. BEV's are another terrific alternative (and no, I do not consider the range to be a significant hurdle at all).
I'm all for nuclear power, every step away from fossil fuels is a step away from Saudi swine, every gallon of oil funds Saudi terrorists and the fascist little-girl-burning police. I know we can use coal but I feel that the very idea of burning fossil fuels is something the belongs in the dark-ages - kinda like Saudi Arabia. In case you didn't know I like to pick on that graping feces-hole excuse for a country. One day we will be free of them, oil is the only useful thing that's come out of that country in centuries.
I swear this isn't a troll or fb. Also my comments are directed at the Saudi establishment, police etc, and anyone like them, not the entire country, don't confuse this with racism.
Er yeah so to get back on topic, I think were going to find that we have no choice about nuclear power, with all the population growth, could we feasibly do anything else right now? How many nuclear plants could we replace with fossil fuel plants - considering all costs?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Nuclear energy and Hydrogen are two effective ways to counter the diminishing fossil fuels. Once the heavy industries and transportation shifts to these alternative fuels, the world doesn't have to depend on Middle-East anymore.
A more immediate solution to dependance on oil and the middle east is actually by making petroleum from coal (or natural gas). The Germans widely used the Fischer-tropsch process during the second world war, and was later used by South Africa during the oil embargo against the apartheid regime.
If sharp increases in oil prices occur, which they will, demand for coal and gas will subsequently sharply increase as well, because the world needs petrol. Unfortunately most power stations in the world use these fuels as well; this could easily make nuclear the most economical option in the long term.
Keep reeding that wikipedia article. Newer breeder reactors use U-238 instead of U-235. That's enough Uranium for thousands of years, even calculating the ever increasing power demands.
As a bonus, breeder reactors are much safer since the core can't achieve cain reaction on it's own and therefore can't cause a melt down.
My other comment is funny
- It's way, way more expensive than anything we're currently using, including wind power. That's why wind farms have been going up all over the place, not solar arrays.
- We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid.
- Neither of these problems are going to be solved quick enough to prevent China and India, particularly, building the biggest set of coal-fired power stations, belching lethal pollutants (which will kill millions of their own citizens) and greenhouse gases (which might just send the US and Europe into an Ice Age, flood much of Bangladesh, send Australia into perpetual drought, and so on...), the world has ever seen.
Nuclear energy is the only thing that's available now that can replace coal and gas at anything like a comparable cost and without releasing greenhouse gases.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The nuclear issue can be summarised thus:
A) Do you want to take the small risk of radioactive waste leaking into the
enviroment in a few hundred years time which with an extra few centuries
of technology our descendents probably won't have an issue cleaning up anyway?
or
B) Do you want to take the very large risk of continuing using fossil fuels
creating CO2 and sending the climate on a rollercoaster to hell and us along
with it?
Seems to me its a fairly simple choice.
Photos of Babies Deformed at Birth as a Result of Depleted Uranium (DU) 2003m
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/DU-Baby2003.ht
The internal collapse/dismantling and privatization of Swedish infrastructure, in combination to coming into EU law, means that the waste can be put there without political or economic difficulty. Even though the average Swede has been actively against nuclear power and especially nuclear waste, the new conditions and regulations allow a way around that. The privatization of nearly everything removed accountability and oversight. Even though a spin-off may be charged with the exact same tasks as an earlier agency, there is absolutely no record keeping requirements beyond those of a normal business and there is absolutely no obligation to comply with the freedom of information article of the constitution. Joining the EU opened more possibilities for foreign ownership and control of local businesses, such as waste disposal. The problem is similar to that of Michigan.
So the result is that the French bought and operate Swedish nuclear waste disposal, which means that the only industry with a voice is not going to protest the import of French nuclear waste.
The French have already selected sites within driving distance of continental Europe and begun to bore production grade long term in the province of Smaland. It went on with a clever bit of distraction of the Swedish anti-nuclear protesters who had a multi-decade protest over nuclear waste. The protesters got the government to sign off on an agreement that it [the government] would not bury waste [not its job] at the protest site [but said nothing about nearby or anywhere else in Sweden]. While that was happening the company which will bury the waste actually started digging nearby though not at the site in the agreement.
<nelson>ha ha</nelson>
Also, people probably woke up to how dangerous it is to shut down the modern Western European plants and extending the operation of the Eastern Block's Chernobyl style reactors.
The last time I brought this up here some brainwashed loony started going on about how fly ash should go into some sort of nuclear waste repositry instead of building materials, automotive putty etc.
Remember, anyone that talks about a one true energy source is selling something or has been conned.
I stick to the arguments that nuclear power is dangerous. Power plants could have an accident but more likely the nuclear waste is a lot more dangerous.
Not only in the short term but the stuff will stick around for thousands of years buried under some rock. How long can one guarantee its safety? How long is europe going to be governed by stable governments? What if democracies fail one day, will that mean that european nations will have access to plutonium for nuclear weapons? How about a Nazi bomb?
I look at the argument for nuclear power a short-sighted goal of people seeking fix-it-quick solutions. Did anyone ever consider that uranium is running low just like oil? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the sun is responsible for the majority of energy on earth, let's use it. Wind is a byproduct of the sun btw. You'd be surprised what sheer power potential the sun gives us in case you want the best of the best.
Most of the electricity-using devices in the house are anachronisms and the discrepancy between what we actually use and what is practical will increase.
I'm wondering how long it will be before houses and other buildings will get re-tooled completely for energy efficient devices. A second set of wiring for 12 V DC or something similar would be one option, if done right. I'm seeing all kinds of power-eating wall warts that consume power as long as they're plugged in, regardless of whether the device they power is active or not.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&art_id=vn2 0060108130233485C155993
Koeberg's bolt blunder to be investigated
Helen Bamford
January 08 2006 at 01:14PM
"A loose bolt has apparently been bouncing around inside a generator at Koeberg nuclear power station and may have caused the "major equipment failure" that now threatens the Western Cape's electricity supplies.
It may have punched holes found in the rotor of the generator and may also have been the cause of a short circuit.
Now an investigation into the faulty generator is under way. It will check whether poor maintenance may have contributed to the problem, according to a source at the plant.
The loose bolt was found lying inside the generator when it was stripped down by experts looking for the problem this week.
The generator fault, which was discovered during the unit's return to service after a scheduled shut-down for refuelling, maintenance and modifications last month, has raised fears of more power cuts in the Western Cape.
Koeberg has referred to the fault as a "major equipment failure" of the Unit 1 generator. Late last year a series of major power failures caused widespread chaos and financial woes for the regional economy.
Specialists from France are currently in Cape Town to try to establish the cause of the fault at Koeberg's Unit 1.
Last week when problems with the generator were discovered, staff at Koeberg were recalled from leave and the French experts were called in.
A staff member, who asked not to be named, told Sunday Argus that there was also great concern about whether the fuel in Unit 2, which is the one currently being used, would last until the other unit was back in use - the nuclear fuel is only expected to last until April 30.
"Nuclear fuel does not run out like petrol in a motor car but it can only last so long," said the staff member.
He added that once fixed, Unit 1 would still have to run for a month before Unit 2 could be taken offline for its scheduled maintenance.
"Koeberg may have to import power from upcountry again which could result in sporadic blackouts."
Unit 2 has already been described as a "problem unit" which increased the likelihood of something going wrong.
Concern has been expressed that any major surges could cause the unit to trip.
The staff member said that investigators were looking at whether the loose bolt had knocked holes in the rotor arm of the generator, which would have to be sent to Rotek in Gauteng for repairs.
Rotek is a subsidiary of Eskom and provides maintenance services to Koeberg.
"With the bolt bouncing around it could have also caused a short," he said.
The source said there was concern that a lot of experienced staff had left the company and that current maintenance staff lacked experience.
"People are thrown in at the deep end," he said.
Eskom spokeswoman Carin de Villiers said it was impossible to comment at this stage because "scenarios were changing on a daily basis".
"I can't confirm or deny anything. We want to finalise the investigation and then make a complete statement," she told Sunday Argus at the weekend.
De Villiers said they were planning to hold a press conference at which their specialists would be available to answer any questions.
This would only take place once the investigation was complete."
Tidal power, Wave power, Hydroelectric power. All nice clean sources of power with reasonably good efficiency, ideal for coastal nations. Hydroelectric dams are ideal for mountainous nations with high precipitation.
Well, they *sound* nice and clean, but for hydroelectric power you need a large valley with nothing in it that you particularly want to keep. Huge areas of Scotland were submerged in the 1950s and 1960s to form hydro-electric dams. No-one knows what may have been lost, because the areas weren't particularly closely surveyed.
For a lot of people the jury is still out on tidal and wave power. It works, and it works well, but what are the effects of absorbing that much energy from the sea? Don't forget - the energy has to come from somewhere. Wind power has the same problem, where the airflow downwind of a windfarm is colder, slower and more turbulent. That shows it has a very direct effect on the atmosphere. Whether it's a good one or not, we don't know.
So what's the impact of a catastrophic failure at a solar plant?
H20 -> H2 might suck in terms of energy loss, but when you've got a big flaming ball just a few million miles away which is (a) producing more engergy than most of us can even comprehend, (b) is not likely to run out during the lifetime of our species, and (c) seems to have the waste issue completely sorted... I wonder why we keep dragging our feet trying to get solar technology off the ground.
Electricity from collector/sterling arrays is (as i understand it) getting close to the same price-point as coal anyway, and then there's all the direct H2 production methods which are emerging (particularly the bio variants which trick primordeal green sludge into producing H2 instead of O2).
I find it amusing that a lot of people (including very smart people) run around looking for yet even more complicated non-renewable ways to get the energy harnessed we need for a practical eternity, when every day we walk outside and the answer LITERALLY slaps us in the face.
From the article: He [Chirac] said the government will set up this year an independent authority to oversee the safety and security of France's nuclear power industry.
Probably a little off-topic but...
Europe warms to Nuke ? C'mon who's surprised ?That we are all gonna rely on nuclear power is no news, no surprise because simply said we (western folks) are too energy greedy to have any alternative providing sufficient power. This last statement is exemplified by Germany position: one of the most radical decision was made about getting rid of all nuclear power plant by 2020. Here we are (2006): there is no choice but to have nuclear, because it is today the only way to satisfy our sick demand. And Germany says "well maybe..."
The hijacking toward weapons... Chirac's statement is IMO *the* thing to be noticed because it relates to nuclear safety. Indeed today the main problem with nuclear power plant is human hijacking with goals of producing nuclear weapons. Mr. Charpak (physics Nobel price), Garwin and Journé explains well that the priority for now (I mean Monday 9 Jan 2006) is to set up an independent international authority with all powers: zero delay, unplanned inspections in all plants; no exceptions in every country. The priority is really to control precisely what happens with all nuclear fuel materials as well as waist materials.
Mr. Chirac wants to create a national authority ? Good. Not enough. Let's go for this international one which so much needed.
Go and read this book De Techernobyl en Tchernobyls (fr) (ref below). Pretty amazing things to be learned. To get a picture of how serious the problem is see the old The Russell-Einstein Manifesto. BTW discover the little known Pugwash organisation.
About availability of nuclear fuel. In the same book it is explained that sea water contains uranium. Precisely (page 195): Estimated 2.10^9 tones are available in sea water. By 1998 the Japanese estimated extraction cost at 100 USD per Kg. That could supply 2000 traditional nuclear power plant for 5000 years. So... it seams there is some FUD about fuel availability.
Reference: (fr) - "De Techernobyl en Tchernobyls" - September 2005 - G. Charpak, R.L Garwin, V. Journé - Edition Odile Jacob - ISBN 2-7381-1374-5.
Bye. Z.
I find the arguments in this article extremely compelling. Measured over the course of decades, the risks are severe. And all to expand the apetite of overreaching consumerism in nuclear-club nations; states that are too powerful to bully away from nuclear energy with accusations of terrorism, etc. because they already acquired some A-bombs.
If nuclear energy is so indispensible then it must be available to everyone. Otherwise, a double-standard will lead to nations placing a premium on the attainment of nuclear weapons on the path to securing their energy future.
And I have to wonder; Is this hyper-consumerism based on nuclear energy, with all of the additional environmental pressures it will bring such as consumer waste, such an attractive path? The geometrically-intensified nuclear politics? The "regime-changes" among foreign populations halfway around the globe, founded on trumped-up animosity and misunderstandings?
How would this very Slashdot thread be different if, say, we had spent that vast sum of Iraq-invasion money on PV panels instead?
I mean both "real need for energy" and "need for real energy".
A real need requires a real and timely answer. We'd consider how long (and how much) it takes to build a power sorce that can provide enough power for everything.
I fear that only nuclear power, fission by now and fusion in the future, can be a real answer.
Is there any plan for hydrogen powered fridges, ovens, laundrettes and light bulbs?
What about the millions of routers, switches and firewalls building up the entire Internet?
How big, heavy and costly would be a home hydrogen powered energy source?
We need an average of a kilo watt per hour for our houses and more to move our cars accordingly to our current (western) life models.
A real change in this model would take tens of years, not weeks or months, even in the most optimistic view!
So, unless someone has a real good idea that can be implemented within months, nuclear fission remains the only one solution ready to be used.
In my humble and hopefully wrong opinion.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
What happened to riding your bike in the city?
Getting flattened by the cars and trucks you have to share the road with since noone bothered to build decent cycle paths can be a bit of a turn off...
http://blog.nexusuk.org
The poisonous fly ash contains heavy metals like mercury as well as radioactive stuff, what do you do with that? Dump it in a landfill and watch it leach into the rivers? Nice alternative.
When the wind is light, the wind farm can make up for the shortfall by passing the stored hydrogen through a fuel cell. (Of course, this isn't without some engineering challenges - elecrolysing straight sea water will result in all sorts of nasty chemicals such as chlorine and sodium hydroxide being released which would be a pollution nightmare).
What you're describing can be built as a closed system - crack pure water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen and then when you oxidise it to get your energy back you get pure water back which you can store. Admittedly you need to deal with losses from the system, but desalinating small quanitites of sea water to replace lost hydrogen shouldn't be too hard.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Nice reporting that "... for the first time..." ;-)
Finland is in Europe and has been building new reactors for a while. If they can't get even basic facts right in the article, don't make a slashdot story about it mmkay?
What happened to riding your bike in the city?
I forgot to mention it, but thanks for bringing it up. For that matter, a large increase in commuter bike paths would be a tremendous asset in reducing our environmental footprint.
Unfortunately cycling on many city streets isn't terribly safe. And then there are attitudes to cope with.
I am from Romania (go on, laugh all you want) and I had visited the one and only power plant we have. I was amazed by the security measures and by the people workking there. I am also a physicist, and I understood the most part of tehnical stuff. It's safe. Even in Romania. (well, it's CANDU - Made in Canada)
Yes very funny. Was he an accountant or was he an economist? The rest of us know the industrial world is full of dangerous stuff that should be handled with care - except in clean nuclear fantasy land. Fortuantely nuclear engineers are unlikely to dwell in that fantasy land, and are aware that the stuff they use is dangerous in cool and interesting ways but can be kept contained with enough care and expense.
4. Solar cells have a relativly short life span.
5. Since they are packed with heavy metals they are expensive and energy consuming to recycle.
My other comment is funny
It probably will happen though, as our existing nuclear plants (especially Pickering and Bruce) are nearing the ends of their lives, and the govt. wants to phase out our fossil fuel plants because they contribute to the smog problem in southern Ontario every summer. And with increasing electricity consumption, especially during the hot summers, we are faced with the threat of rolling blackouts and having to buy electricity off of Quebec and the US in order to meet demand.
Some states (and countries) have a phenomenon called 'weather'. Snow and ice covered streets would be extremely dangerous for 2 wheeled vehicles, and wind chill is also a problem at this time of year. In the summer it is too hot an humid for that sort of exercise.
Almost all so-called "renewable energy sources" are pretty direct transformations of solar energy, much more direct than fossil fuels. Wind power is solar power (the atmosphere being used as a big turbine, as it were). Hydroelectricity is solar power (the sun causing water to vaporize, and we harness the process of letting it flow down to lower levels again). Even if photovoltaics or other direct solar energy harvesters are quite expensive nowadays, I don't buy the argument that it's economically impossible to tap the abundant amount of energy that is thrown at us every second. If economics didn't allow that, there would be something seriously wrong with economics.
Sources? Numbers to back that up? I don't see how it should be impossible to generate electricity at day time and store it until night time, especially if you have much more energy than you need to begin with. Plus, as I said, wind power and hydroelectricity have no daylight constraint and are just solar energy in another form.
As to your final point about China and India, using nuclear power as a temporary measure until we can get our energy production lined up with physical realities could well be an option. But it certainly isn't a sensible solution for much of the planet's future.
Complete bullshit, and yet again we see this tired old lie trotted out again and flogged until it stumbles around the ring once more... this is true ONLY if you only count "releases" as "stuff that comes out the top of the chimneys on site". Apart from the tons of highly radioactive waste (the spent fuel rods, cladding, reactor containment material etc) there's also the issue of how you decommission a nuclear station. I happen to live and work within fifteen miles of the site of the first ever nuclear power generation reactors to be decommissioned, so I take some interest in this topic. They started work in 1988/89, IIRC, and I believe work is scheduled to finish, ooh, any decade now. In fact final site clearance (leaving a 100 foot wide concrete cube containing the reactor core, which will be lethally radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and cannot safely be disposed of elsewhere) is scheduled for completion in the year 2089. No, I'm not making this up, that's how long it's going to take. Costs? No idea, who knows? It's a blank cheque - we HAVE to clean it up, regardless of the cost; if it comes down to it, nuclear clean up must be funded ahead of the health service, education, armed forces, transport,.. *everything*, in fact. Strangely, the govt and the privatised nuclear energy company refuse to divulge cost estimates, but the BBC mentions a figure of 2.5 billion quid.
Folks: it's not worth it.
the official plans (which of course are highly optimistic and filled with disclaimers along the lines of "if nothing goes wrong" - ie., we don't have any major disruptions of civil society, loss or power or shortages of energy, skills, resources, raw materials -
Photovoltaics are not the only option to harvest solar energy. I don't buy the argument that they are, in principle, economically or ecologically infeasible, but even if they were, other forms of solar energy use could be developed. Heck, we have them already in the form of hydroelectricity and wind power (see my other post). And let me repeat it: if it was economically infeasible for us to tap an energy stream that hits us every single second with several thousands of times more energy than we could possibly use, something would be seriously wrong with economics.
And since the general standard of living of a population is directly proportional to energy usage, who decides who doesn't get as much energy and therefore winds up with a lower standard of living.
You? Or some other animal that's more equal than the others?
A good part of the radiation released from burning coal comes from the radon, a noble gas that is not easy to filter.
There's something that everyone seems to be missing: Every kilowatt-hour saved is better than a kilowatt-hour being generated. Instead of taking more resources and polluting more to produce an additional kilowatt-hour so that we can continue to use heat^H^H^H^H light bulbs instead of switching to LEDs or CF bulbs or just turning off the lights when you leave a room. Putting more people onto existing capacity is better than eating up land to build power plants.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
No, they keep bringing up the "fact" that hydrogen takes more energy to generate than you get back from it.
Hydrogen will never be an energy source. It will be used for energy transfer, from renewal sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and yes, that eeeevil nuclear plant.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
More bike paths would be fantastic - they certainly made biking (and by extension, walking) around Berlin much easier and safer. However, the problem is that streets in cities cannot be make any more wider since there are buildings on both sides. There is enough room for two lanes of road and sidewalk on both sides, that's it.
Yeah, until the waste containers start leaking and leach material into water tables.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for nuclear power, but I'm not convinced that we've got a decent mechanism for storing the waste yet. Maybe we could team up with these guys.
Incidentally, is there a nuclear physicist in the house? How does the waste from pebble reactors compare to traditional rod reactors when it comes to waste disposal? --- SER
> It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it.
And it takes more energy to charge a battery than you get back out of it. What's your point? You're just another one of the hordes who just doesn't get what the "hydrogen economy" is all about. Hydrogen is an ENERGY CARRIER, not an ENERGY SOURCE. It's a battery substitute that's more environmentally friendly, has a higher energy density, and "recharges" much more quickly.
That's why we shouldn't be building old-style slow reactors that do only a single reaction on the fuel. The US government has been against breeder reactors because they can be used to generate munitions-grade plutonium, but there are newer types of breeder reactors which generate contaminated plutonium, perfectly useful for continuing the reaction, but not for building bombs. And re-reacting the fission products will get rid of long-lived nuclear waste, which means less uranium is needed to begin with, and there is no need for 10,000-year waste dumps when you have waste half-lives measured in decades.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The science of carbon sinks is far from certain.
Cities block wind much more than wind farms ever could. The concerns you raise are simply ridiculous.
It has become a fashionable trend to look for downsides to all new solutions, equating tiny and/or unknown downsides of the new solution with the large and known downsides of the existing ones. It is a lot like Luddism.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Hmm. If the Japanese have a way to extract heavy metals from sea water at $300/kg, wouldn't they do better at extracting gold. At $500/Oz that's be $17642 per kg. That's cover the $300 extraction costs, easy! :)
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
a separate nation somewhere in the middle of nowhere
I vote Slovenia. Not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but in case of an accident, it will.
I have read (hey may as well start of with unsubstantiated factoids right off the bat!) that most estimates yeild results of "only" about 125 - 150 years worth of uranium at current consumption levels.
Could be be BS.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Check out the history of the Niger River delta, for example.
only if you are using that a non fossil-fuel energy source to get that hydrogen. It is currently cheapest to get hydrogen from hydro-carbons. (if memory serves)
Duh... then we just need to make sure that all the workers at the plant have Alzheimer's
simply the fact that there are too many people. Now, obviously, I don't have a solution to this, but the problem is clear. All our technological mechanisms are simply delaying the Malthusian Solution unless we find an effective way to either have a lot of people leave the planet for stellar parts elsewhere, and/or stabilize the population of the planet at a sustainable level.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I remember reading an article in Wired magazine about China developing these small bubble reactors that will be deployed all over the country. It seemed like a win win. I will have to look around the web for more info.
Then redesign some of your roadways. Here in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) I can move around on bike pretty safely and quickly. Granted the city is smallish (say an area of 10 x 10 kilometers) and flat (ex flood plane / swamps), but still. Large parts of the city are older than cars and bikes and we adapted it. Traffic will come to a complete standstill over here if everybody who travels by bike or public transport decides to travel by car. You can't tell me that there is no space in American towns for better bicycle lanes (the medium sized towns I'm not talking about places like Manhattan / New York). And traveling by bicycle does not mean you can never use a car, just don't use it for small errants.
But I agree if there are no proper bicycle lanes riding a bicycle can be pretty scary. I've been to some other European countries where I would not want to be biking around. Another problem are steep hills, those will "kill" you on a bike (and tourists who don't understand the concept of sidewalks and walk all over the bicycle lanes --- a big problem in Amsterdam.)
Hydroelectric dams are not "clean." They are in reality far from it.
While they don't release toxic gasses into the atmosphere directly, the contribute to vast water pollution problems by blocking the natural flow and aeration of rivers. A quickly flowing river is like a sewage treatment plant -- you can dump quite a bit of organic waste into it upstream, and it will be clean by the time it runs into the ocean. However if you dam that river and make long stretches of it stagnant, the water flowing downstream of the dam will be much more polluted.
This is a significant problem in Maine, which has high amounts of organic waste from paper mills. This wouldn't be a big problem, and is not in excess of what could be handled by many rivers (e.g. the Androscoggin) except that hydropower projects have removed many rapids on the river and cause the pollution to remain. There are experiments to artifically aerate the water behind dams, just as you'd do in a fish tank, by pumping air down to the bottom and allowing it to bubble up, but they're not nearly as effective as rapids used to be. And of course you pretty much kill the native fish population overnight, if they are one of the species that swims upstream to spawn.
I can imagine in other areas that organophosphate pollution from fertilizers is a similar problem when you dam a river. Plus regular old sewage effluent can be problematic if the river isn't flowing quickly.
There is a public perception that dams are "clean energy" but in reality this isn't precisely true. There are huge ecological downsides to hydropower projects, which are not normally considered (and definitely weren't considered when many of them were constructed, in their defense). Arguing against nuclear power by saying "build more hydro dams!" isn't a particularly useful response.
To be perfectly honest, although nobody wants any sort of power generation facility in their back yard, I'd much prefer to have a nuclear power plant in my neighborhood, than to have my neighborhood be under 20' of polluted water.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Battery-electric cars aren't 100% either. It takes a lot more energy to charge a battery than you get back out of it. Although I'm not sure what the particular figures are for what the state-of-the-art is these days, many smaller battery systems dissapate a lot of energy as heat as they're charging. Enough so they have to have heatsinks or big air cooling systems.
And of course you have significant energy losses in production (a nontrivial portion of a generator's output actually goes back into that same generator, to energize it's coils), and distribution of electricity.
I'd be interested to see what the overall efficiency, source to tires, is for battery-electric versus hydrogen-electric vehicles. And of course the economic analysis, which might cause one to win out over the other regardless of potential efficiency.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Er.
As compared to buying your gas from Russia?
Frankly, I'd rather be dependent on buying uranium from any of a large variety of foreign countries, than dependent on buying my gas from Russia. Uranium has the advantage of relative portability, meaning that at least you have a choice of vendor.
Nuclear waste could never wipe out the polar bears.
Global warming can!
Stop nuclear power!
Drown the bears!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Well, one of the large and known downsides of windfarms is that they have to be so far away from where the electricity is needed. This means building huge runs of electricity pylons. Also, they only work when it's windy. If you get a calm spell, you'd better hope your gas stove is big enough to cook everything in the freezer.
Incidentally, show me *anywhere* in my original post where I said that cities were a good thing?
Do me a favour. Have you any idea how large the oceans are? (about 1.37 billion km^3) Besides, they are already about 45,000 commercial vessels at sea, each using on average, say, 10MW's for propulsion. If only half of them are at sea at any one time, they're still pumping over 200GW into the oceans, and have been for years. Also the energy in the sea is renewable as it derives from the Sun (heating) and the Moon (tides) so we can never deplete all its energy.
Would this be like the effect buildings have on airflow? Do you think it would be any worse than building a town? Besides, how big is a wind farm going to be? The atmosphere continues up to about 90km (the mesopause). In reality a wind farm has no more effect downstram than a small forest would, so perhaps it would be a good thing as so many forests have disappeared. As for cooling the air, the effect is minimal, but hopefully it would make up for all the heat we are pumping into the atmosphere from other sources.
Nuclear power is not what it used to be in the 70s and 80s. The reactors are quite safe nowadays, especialy the N-type (which the Chinese are also developing).
That's because one of the primary goals of a nuclear reactor in the 70's and 80's was to help produce nuclear grade weapons material. That's the reason reactors are built the way they are, and the waste is so dangerous. Most of the heavily funded research was for reactors capable of producing byproduct that could be used in weapons.
If the goal of a reactor is not to produce weapons grade material, then it will not only be safer, but produce less dangerous waste.
At least, this is my understanding of the whys and hows of nuclear energy. We don't build them as much these days because they really have to be subsidized to be built, and the financier (gov't) doesn't need them any longer.
-Adam
Just use the energy from the nuclear power plants to perform electrolysis on water. You get 2 moles of hydrogen (H2) and 1 mole of oxygen (O2) for every mole of water (H2O). So let's see:
1) Nuclear power: good!
2) Water: good!
3) Oxygen: good!
4) Hydrogen: good!
Seems like a win-win-win-win to me.
a) maybe you are smart enough to read the text, but you arent to click the frist link...
b) Its called irony. In this point contrasting the overexposure of risks of one think to the underexposure of risks of something else is archived by reversing the point of view.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So you mod me a troll, and snigger at me because you think I'm wrong?
Have you considered things like earthquakes, or attacks by the military or terrorists?
Can you really predict the future with certainty? I can't, and I don't pretend that I can, either. Speaking of the future...
Have you considered the fact that nuclear waste disposal requires that the stuff be stored for 10,000 years or more? Can you guarantee that there won't be geological shifts or that somebody won't dig it up during that time? Can you even design a sign that is absolutely certain to communicate to your descendants 50 or 60 centuries hence, "Don't excavate here, what you dig up can kill you and everybody in your vicinity and make it uninhabitable for generations"?
You'll have to pardon me if I prefer to err on the side of caution in this regard.
I am still of the view that fission power is inherently dangerous and deadly, not just to us and our neighbours, but to our posterity and its environment as well. Why invest so much time and effort in trying to make it "safe" and rationalising that we can make it so when there are much less hazardous alternatives?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Perhaps I should have expanded a bit. There are finite resources in addition to food that are involved as well. The improvements in technology are, indeed, very significant with regard to better use of those resources. I still believe, though, that it is in the long-term interest of humankind to think in terms of controlled population levels while, of course, improving technology as well. Will that happen? Not likely, as the right to procreate at will is not something that people will easily give up. It's too much of a general human instinct to reproduce. Thanks again for your input.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Well, it is looking like hybrids are next. Maybe double or tripple the average fuel economy (we can dream, eh?). If gas get really expensive, I would expect to see more pure electric (probably have better battery tech then). A few fringe users toying with alternatives. I wouldn't expect to see many hydrogen cars unless electricity becomes cheap enough to throw away or H can be made economically from coal or something like that. But in the short term I see hybrids.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The ~2 billion people who may survive the end of oil will be doing the same thing people did before oil; shovelling horse manure.
Denmark has also had problems; they have only about 15% wind power and suffer from grid instability, which suggests this is the maximum about that a country should aim for.
WTF are talking about? There are NO grid instability problems in Denmark connected to wind power. And in fact the latest energy report I saw, said that Denmark over time, could easely cover 80-90% of its electricity consumption by windpower alone. Update your stoneage knowledge about windpower technology and check out this 3 MegaWatt windmill http://www.vestas.com/uk/Products/v90/v90_UK.htm
Their next generation windmill is a 4.5 MegaWatt whopper with carbon blades; and thats what I like about
about the windmill industry; it is rapidly technology driven with massive computer simulations and new hi-tech materials like carbon fibre and ceramics, and it is and free enterprise too, unlike the nuclear industry with its heavy government involvement, if not outright control.
Alternative energy sources like wind power is the future, since alternative energy only requires brainpower, technology research, and capital, all available to any country that wants it, unlike old fossil and nuclear technology, whose raw materials always seems to come from suspect and unstable countries, and always seems to leave environmental damage in its trail.
Alternative energy sources like wind power is the future, since alternative energy is nimble technology, able to utilize the rapid progress in computer and materials technology, unlike nuclear plants that are decades in planning and building and usually don't carry the cost of dismantling it when obsolete, meaning that tax-payers are going to pay for it.
Alternative energy sources like wind power is the future, since alternative energy safely can be driven by private enterprise and greed, unlike the government subsidized nuclear industri whose real reason to exist is nuclear weapons, not energy.
Alternative energy sources like wind power is the future, since alternative energy isn't a stepping stone for nuclear weapons; India and Pakistan had a "peacefull" nuclear industry, then, BOOM, they also had nuclear weapons; Israel and South Africa too, and Iran is next. It is simply impossible to seperate the nuclear energy sector from the nuclear weapons industry, and nuclear proliferation makes the world an unsafer place. I think it is better that North Korea and Iran had 50 large windmill parks, instead 5 nuclear powerplants and 50 nuclear warheads.
But then, Iceland is a small place. Why wouldn't they just drive electric cars? Sure, they won't have much range, but who cares? Its Iceland, where are they going to drive to??
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Plutonium is really not very toxic. See here for a quick overview and here for a more detailed view of the radiation danger in particular.
As near as I can tell, chemical toxicity is barely a concern, and radioactive concerns are vastly overblown.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
What about blasting it into space using electromagnetics, like the new catapults that are going to be used on the next generation aircraft carriers... just larger in scale. I think space is the way to go if we can get it up there safely. Though my answer is flawed if the energy required to send up one barrel of waste, produces one barrel of waste.. heh..
Any other thoughts or ideas??
I didn't mod you a troll, nor did I snigger at you. Not much, anyway. If you bother to read my post, I provide facts that might help you gain a better understanding of the topic. Because at the moment, you're simply totally clueless and right in there with the "Nuclear ate my baby!" nutcases.
It has become a fashionable trend to look for downsides to all new solutions, equating tiny and/or unknown downsides of the new solution with the large and known downsides of the existing ones. It is a lot like Luddism.
Not at all - Luddism was more about replacing livable wage jobs with factory ones that paid shit, not explicitly about opposing new technology
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
That sounds like pretty interesting technology. Any chance of a link or reference? I wonder what's involved -- there has to be a catch, otherwise as the other poster pointed out, it would be more than cost effective to do the same for gold and the platinum-series metals.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Heh. Try to be sympathetic-- (American) tourists are not used to bike lanes. When they do exist in the US they tend to be on the same level as the motor traffic and generally separated from the pedestrian traffic by a grass strip (like this.)
2^5
In the case of tides, the energy basically comes from the earth's rotation. The intertial moment of earth is about 10^38 kg m^2, and the rotational speed is of course 2pi/day, which gives a total rotation energy of 2.6*10^29 J. Or put differently, a Terawatt energy production would correspond to a slowdown of about 10^-23 seconds per day (about 4 attoseconds per century).
That's of course assuming that energy would otherwise remain in the earth's rotation. Given that the water actually is stopped by the continents anyway, I doubt that. After all it's a fact that earth's rotation is slowed down through tidal forces about 5*10^-8 s/day (2 ms/century), i.e. the tidal forces dissipate about 5*10^15 Terawatt (well, actually part of that energy is not dissipated, but used to move the moon away from earth; I'm now too lazy to calculate that).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Just use the energy from the nuclear power plants to perform electrolysis on water. You get 2 moles of hydrogen (H2) and 1 mole of oxygen (O2) for every mole of water (H2O).
Or you could just use the electricity as electricity, maybe?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
That's only because of the horribly inefficient way we 'burn' Uranium; if we did even the most basic, 50-year-old reprocessing of spent fuel, there would be more than enough nuclear fuel to last generations. And that's without fast plutonium breeders, which personally I think are one of the most brilliant inventions that nobody seems to care about (unless you're interested in building an atomic bomb). They really are like a car that you can fill full of water, drive 300 miles, and then pump out a tank full of gasoline.
Right now we use Uranium pretty much like we use oil: we put it in a power plant, split it into some waste components, extract a little energy from it, and throw away everything else. It's totally non-renewable, totally wasteful. It's nothing like the system that was envisioned for nuclear power back 50 years ago.
Frankly I think it's a mistake to build any new nuclear plants right now, when they would probably be of the old type. All we're doing is using up a finite resource (uranium) in a hideously inefficient way. It would be better for our civilization in the long run if we waited until we were really desparate and willing to break down the political barriers to the full fuel cycle before building new plants -- that way we wouldn't waste nuclear fuels in the same way that we wasted fossil ones.
Years from now, maybe generations from now, people are going to look back at the reactors currently operating for commercial power generation in the U.S. and cringe. The wasted potential energy in the fuels that they consume is just enormous, and some day, we're going to wish we hadn't squandered it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So don't refrigerate it. Fill balloons with it, let them float to mainland, drain hydrogen, and bulk ship the empty balloons back to Iceland.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes, there are too many nattering nabobs of negativity. Yeah right, like harnessing wave power is going to change the oceans....
I think one of the problems with these nabobs is they just don't have any idea of scale. The oceans are really, really huge. So is the Sun. It would take tidal powered installations many orders of magnitude larger than what could be built in the next hundred years to make any difference.
Wind power does have its drawbacks, but where it is used well it is quite useful. Off of Cape Cod, for instance, is a great place for wind turbines. I think Kerguelen would be even better, if it wer enot so remote.
What I am trying to say is we need to diversify our energy harvesting and distribution: oil, coal, wood, gas, nuclear, wind, tidal, solar, biogas as harvesting and electric, octane (gasoline), vegetable oils, biodiesel, hydrogen, organic gases, lithium, water, interia as storage and distribution. Probably more I've missed. Nuclear fission is a part of this: we need consistent and concentrated heat to do such things as smelt metals, and nuclear fission can do this with less pollution than the alternatives of coil and petroleum.
I think the point of the grandparent is that you use the nuclear power to generate hydrogen - thus removing fossil fuels from the transportation equation.
doesnt anyone remember his article from a couple years ago? we have a way to mass-produce hydrogen with newer nuclear plants.
2 8/1921233&tid=126&tid=99&tid=14&tid=1o gen.html
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/politics/28hydr
Fission plants become, as is well known, uneconomical below 50 megawatts,
Is this still true? My understanding is that many of the newer designs could easily economically satisfy small community needs, must like gas and coal plants do today.
Any know?
Plus the article that asserted this in the first place is crap and only has been cited in the media and not other scientific papers (prove me wrong someone).
Peer reviewed science:
Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, R. E. Blanco
Science, New Series, Vol. 202, No. 4372 (Dec. 8, 1978) , pp. 1045-1050
Abstract
Radiation doses from airborne effluents of model coal-fired and nuclear power plants (1000 megawatts electric) are compared. Assuming a 1 percent ash release to the atmosphere (Environmental Protection Agency regulation) and 1 part per million of uranium and 2 parts per million of thorium in the coal (approximately the U.S. average), population doses from the coal plant are typically higher than those from pressurized-water or boiling-water reactors that meet government regulations. Higher radionuclide contents and ash releases are common and would result in increased doses from the coal plant. The study does not assess the impact of nonradiological pollutants or the total radiological impacts of a coal versus a nuclear economy.
Actually, right now...today...Japan has IC engines which produce less emissions that the absolute best hybrids available now or tomorrow. Hybrids, as built today, are nothing but a waste of money. Several recent cost analysis indicate the hybrids will save you ~$100 over its life. Yes, they may be slightly cleaner for the environment than the current ICE's, but it doesn't have to be. Superior engine technology already exists.
Wind power has the same problem, where the airflow downwind of a windfarm is colder, slower and more turbulent.
You just solved global warming!
You've never been to Iceland, have you? Distances in Iceland are pretty huge, at least once you get out of the rather miniscule towns.
This is America though, where driving an SUV is the ultimate display of 'success' for many people. I still have trouble understanding where a SUV is practical for *most* people. I live an active outdoor lifestyle and have no problem getting me and my gear around in my Accord. I don't have kids, but I have 13 nieces and nephews ranging from 1-12 years old and never have any problems transporting them( not all at once of course).
Hauling cargo via truck or rail is another story. You can't just throw a smaller engine in a truck or locomotive. What's the big holdup with Biodiesel?
Ingenious, but silly. :-)
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Piffle. Spend $40 on studded tires. Get a windbreaker. Drink more water. Get in shape. There! Problems solved.
Hydroelectric dams produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane.
When you dam up a river, you end up converting all of the organic material drowned into methane over time through biological effects. Over the longer term, organic material from upstream washed into the new lake also decays because of stagnant water.
Since Russia decided to try to force a price increas of 400 percent, it is no wonder that nations are looking for alternatives. I wish their were alternatives instead of being proce gouged for gasoline (petrol) here in the U.S.A. I know Europeans pay much more for fuel, but Europe also has bullet trains and alternative means of transportation. In America, we are force to keep giving more and more of our income to the damned oil companies. Fuel supply is limited (and too expensive) only because it is controlled by a few government-protected monopolies. If there was such a thing as free enterprise in the United States, there would be competition, and the fuel prices will be no where near what they are today.
So why not use the superior ICE's in the hybrids and get the best of both worlds? The hybrids we are drivign (in the US) aren't nearly as efficient as they could be. Diesel hybrids, for example, can get 80+ MPG, IIRC. Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about what will happen when gas gets REALLY expensive. By then the benefit will be much greater. How much more cost effective will a hybrid be when gas doubles in price?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Why are you burning coal? Burning coal doesn't do much good for the environment.
As to filtering exhaust, if it were easy, I'm sure it would be done. But it is far from easy to separate radioactive uranium from other materials. Ask Iran about it. It is not cost effective to perform this process on the ash coming out of a coal plant, there's just too much of it to do so.
As to clean coal deposits, coal isn't manufactured, it is mined. Yes, different deposits will differ in what they are contaminated with, but it'd be very unusual to find a vein that was completely clean.
What you have to realize here is the amount of coal that is burned in a such a plant. If you have only 1 part of contaminant per million, then you burn 100,000 tons of coal a year, you have released 200lbs (or 100kg, depending on your definition) of contaminant. For most contaminants, 200lbs just isn't much to worry about. But 200lbs of Uranium is pretty serious, and does indeed emit far more radiation than a nuclear plant is allowed to emit.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
When is someone going to try building the so-called "safe" pebble bed reactors? We've all read the hype that this is the safest form of fission reactor you can make, so why aren't there any being built and talked about in the popular media?
At $500/Oz that's be $17642 per kg.
Yeah, but if the Japanese (or anyone else) start producing gold in enough bulk to really be worth their while, how long will gold prices stay at $500/oz? I suppose they could do it by very gradually introducing their product into the world gold supply, but I doubt they will be able to make a significant profit without pretty much destroying the gold trade.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
The world has looked for uranium much harder than they have looked for any other naturally occurring substance.
Uranium is the most strategically important resource on this planet--far more important than oil or any precious metal. Governments directly fund exploration for it, and reward those who find it richly. As a result, uranium is a far more economically lucrative resource than oil (per unit) and has been for over 50 years. And unlike oil, it announces its presence...anyone can look for it with a cheap geiger counter.
Uranium has been looked for as hard as, if not harder, than oil. The problem is simply that there is just not very much of it in concentrations great enough to extract.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It's quite simple. They just fuse some of the hydrogen in the water with all those cold water reactors they were building some time back. If they go deep enough (around their shores there is a lot of deep water) they could find it pretty cool.
KEWEL, even.
The beauty of that method is that they can fuse just the right amount of hydrogen to make exactly the right grade of fissionable stuff -so no expensive refining.
No doubt they will also come up with a way to re-energise the spent fuel using similar tech. Beam me up Y-tox.
Tidal energy comes from the kinetic energy of the spinning earth. The daily rotation of the earth is slowing down (hence the leap second added to 2005) due to "friction" from the tides. Harnessing the tidal energy might increase that drag slightly, or it might not. Jury is still out. In the mean time, the moon recedes by a couple of centimeters every year. This process stops when both the earth and moon have the same face pointing at each other all the time -- a day and a (lunar) month will be the same... at around 40 of today's days, IIRC.
Waves are created by wind, so harnessing wave energy is indirectly harnessing wind energy.
So what? These places can be easily localized and decontaminated. But you can't decontaminate coal plant's wastes because they are spread over very large territory.
Radiation exposure for European countries also was not that fatal. Current estimate of cancer cases affected by Chernobyl disaster is about 5000.
well, to be frank, the RBMK-1000 reactors that were used at Chernobyl was a pretty poor design. the thing was designed to be built cheap and run cheap. it was cheap to build, as it used normal light water for coolant and graphite for a moderater, and it used natural uranium as fuel, though this made it unstable.
the remaining reactors of that type have been made much safer by using more enriched uranium which makes them more stable and also used a differant design of the control rods (which was one of the major contributers to the chernobyl acident).
there are much better reactor designs, such as the CANDU. which also runs on natural uranium, but it pricy to build due to the inital investment in a large quanity of pure heavy water, but is very safe. or if you like, an even safer one called a pebble bed reactor, which will not cause an explosion even in the event that all support machinary is destoryed and all coolant flow is cut. (this isn't just theory. they have tested this using a reactor in germany. the tempature hits a certain point (well below a critical level) and then just stays there until you can repair things and get power flowing again.)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This is the first headline pun in awhile that didn't make me want to kill the editor with a tiger bomb. Kudos.
Or you could just use the electricity as electricity, maybe?
If you're plugged in somewhere, sure. I think the ancestor post was looking for something more portable; yes, there are batteries, but those have their own environmental concerns for production.
THe whole "Energy Sink" argument is stupid anyway. We aren't in a closed system, so we can afford all the energy sinks we want, as we get enough solar energy in a day on this planet to feul our civilization for the next 1000 years. It's about packaging the energy into useable forms.
I'm not going to stop charging my cell phone battery simply because it's a "net energy loss". The fact that I have transformed the energy into a nice chemical bundle is well worth the loss of energy in the process.
The big holdup with biodesiel is that it's hard to justify growing crops to make fuel out of when free fuel is squirting out of the ground at you wherever you look. When the price of fossil oil outstrips the price of vegatable oil, then biodeisel will be everywhere. A few months ago, when gas prices were topping $3.00, there were 3 gas stations in the local Seattle area supplying biodeisel. If gas topped $4.00, then we'd see it everywhere.
I actually agree with you, but I imagine the same sort of thinking was applied when we released all of our waste into the atmosphere. "The atmosphere is so big that this just isn't going to make a difference" - it is all about scale right? It turns out that didn't work out too well. Turns out we destroyed our ozone layer and have caused global warming. I doubt anyone thought of scenarios like those portrayed in "The Day after Tomorrow" when we started releasing waste into the atmosphere, but nowadays there does seem to be a slim (admittedly extremely unlikely) chance that parts of that crazy movie could happen.
The good thing is that there seems to be a lot of research happening on many different energy options. Wind power is coming along (though it can never be our only source), there is research into nuclear and hydrogen options, and there is research into cleaner burning (maybe even zero atmospheric emissions) of fossil fuels. The other good thing that is happening right now is that energy is getting expensive enough that people are starting to seriously look at reducing consumption. This very much needs to be encouraged, as we waste ridiculous amounts of energy.
Between saving energy and having decent batteries (this is probably the biggest problem for mobile devices and storage of renewable energy), we could have a much more efficient energy system.
Why not build the wind farm ON TOP of the city? Nice and close to where the power is needed, and not disrupting any natural landscape. It should even be a bit windier up there!
That's why we shouldn't be building old-style slow reactors that do only a single reaction on the fuel. The US government has been against breeder reactors because they can be used to generate munitions-grade plutonium, but there are newer types of breeder reactors which generate contaminated plutonium, perfectly useful for continuing the reaction, but not for building bombs. And re-reacting the fission products will get rid of long-lived nuclear waste, which means less uranium is needed to begin with, and there is no need for 10,000-year waste dumps when you have waste half-lives measured in decades.
Yes. Just one point breeder reactors do not generate munitions grade plutonium current reporcessing technology (PUREX?) creates munitions grade plutonium. If the reprocessing simply stripped the fission products out and left the U-238, PU, and U-235 alone the resulting output is nto even close to munitions grade.
...then conveniently forget about pollution controls designed to remove even GASSES and assume that all of those heavy metals end up in the atmosphere...
No, all you have to assume is that all of those radioactive heavy metals end up somewhere.
You can safely assume that, right?
And, that somewhere is where it wasn't before, right?
And, where it was before was behind lots of convenient radioactive shielding called "earth" or "dirt and rock." Pretty good shielding, I hear.
And now it's all conveniently filtered out and concentrated, right?
So, now you've go to shield it. What are you going to do with all of that radioactive waste? How are you going to dispose of it?
Do coal producers even consider how to dispose of their radioactive waste?
That's completely ridiculous of course and so are most of the arguments against developing nuclear power it's interesting to note that more people were killed on 9/11 than at Chernobyl and unlike the Chernobyl figures, which have been spun into fantasy by anti-nuclear environmental groups we can actually say that around 3000 people died on 9/11 because we found dead bodies or pieces thereof unlike Chernobyl where most of the body counts are the result of statistical extrapolations. But enviros haven't called for a cessation of air travel, probably because so many of them are rich and white and like to fly to places like Costa Rica for their vacations.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Why not build the wind farm ON TOP of the city?
Because for some reason, if you suggest doing that people start going on about the noise and danger and problems that the wind farm would cause. Obviously sticking 30 of the in someone's back garden in the country isn't going to cause any problems at all.
Personally I think that small wind turbines are the way forward for buildings. An 8-foot machine could power all the lights in your house, with a bit left over. Deep-cycle batteries would deal with calm days, and if all else failed you could use mains or diesel generators to charge them. Obviously you'd run the diesel gennies on waste veg oil...
Also, isn't Diesel idential to home heating oil (minus the red dye)? Couldn't biodiesel be used to heat homes during the winter?
"Nuclear Power will get us over for a while. but hydrogen is bullshit. It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O. It's better to simply use the electricity you make to crack the water As Electricity to Do Work than to blow it on H." Of course it takes more energy to make H then what you get from burning it, otherwise it'd be an energy generator. The thing is: How are you going to get this electricity to power your car? You could have an electric car that you'd have to charge for hours and get shit HP (at this point) or have instant refuel with some oomph. Nuclear power in combination with hydrogen for portable energy would be a very good system IMO. I agree that nuclear power is great. In fact, in almost every aspect it's leaps and bounds better. Insane energy production. Rediculously low environmental issues, esp compared to coal. The waste with nuclear power is an advantage; would you rather be able to accumulate all your waste (much less of it) and bury it or just release it into the atmosphere? More people die mining coal every year than have ever been killed by nuclear power.
Snow and ice on the road can make things more interesting, but if you slow down a bit it is not really a problem.
During the summer, you will sweat but that is a good thing as long as you can take a shower at work.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
They use it instead of road sand some places.
The fly ash is relatively clean of uranium. It gets the mercury.
Your right about the one true energy source people though.
Besides nuke plants have not yet been designed that can load follow. Those that tryed to load follow are run as baseload once they saw the affect of ramping on maintenence costs.
The simple answer is we will be burning lots of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
people accept far more restriction on their lives due to two plane crashes into two skyscrapers.
Depends on why you consider 'accept'. Many people have limited or stopped their flying due to all the hassle ans stupid rules. As an individual I can't change the ridiculous laws and regulations, but I can avoid flying.
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Good thing you haven't looked at the energy cost to make uranium.
This is a significant problem in Maine, which has high amounts of organic waste from paper mills. This wouldn't be a big problem, and is not in excess of what could be handled by many rivers (e.g. the Androscoggin) except that hydropower projects have removed many rapids on the river and cause the pollution to remain.
And don't even get me started on what the canals in Derry, Maine have done to the Kenduskeag. I hear things float down there.
I'd much rather have a discussion about downsides than someone decreeing that a solution is good because it is unimaginable that it is bad. There might be some trolls in the discussion, but at least it gives people a chance to educate themselves and come to a better understanding of the situation. Without a discussion, this chance does not exist.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I am confident that hydroelectric power has displaced more people than nuclear ever will. The Three Gorges dam alone has displaced nearly 2 million people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam
Now that they aren't getting cheap/free oil from Iraq in illegal under-the-table dealings that leave millions of innocent Iraqis without food or medicine, they will have to get their energy from somewhere.
If the increase in CO2 from current energy technologies causes an increase in the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans we might NEED to harvest energy from them at a tremendous rate to keep ourselves safe from huge storms, climate change, and rising waters.
I can see a government subsidy (ala American agriculture) for wind and ocean current farmers to "harvest" more energy than they need and then find a way to harmlessly dissipate it, just to try to keep up.
Of course this is just a flight of fancy. The energies we are talking about would probably require ever inch of coastland, undersea temperature gradient, and landmass to be covered with energy producing technology.
It could be done, i'm sure, but at the cost it would be cheaper to just let people die.
Seriously.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I saw this on /. a few months ago...
Scientific analysis has determined that the most efficient way to store hydrogen for combustion is to wrap it up with carbon in long-chain "hydrocarbon" molecules, store them in a liquid state, and use either applied kinetic or induced electrical energy to remove the hydrogen molecules from the carbon molecules within the engine the hydrogen is intended to power.
Note, the article shows that radioactivity (released into the atmosphere) is higher when burning fossil fuels when the fly ash is not trapped. Most modern coal burning plants (I used to work at one) mix crushed limestone with crushed coal to react with the sulfur, to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions. The majority of the particles are trapped, as fly ash. The major (airborn) pollutant is CO2. In most plants the fly ash is shipped to landfills where it is sprayed with water to form a concrete like substance.
/ 17/192235) ?
Most regions do not permit mixing the ash with concrete as a filler (even though is can make concrete up to 10x's stronger) because of (very valid) concerns of heavy metals leaching out of it. So, this stuff sits in landfills waiting for the liners to fails so that the heavy metals can leach into the water supply.
The radiation hazards from (modern) coal plants are trivial. The health risks from the other by products are huge. Besides, the newest reasearch into fission breeder reactors could have waste byproducts with half-lives in the hundreds of years vs. thousands with the old style fission reactors.
In the U.S. about 5% energy is extracted from the fissile materials (6% in Europe), giving us about 70 years worth of known extractable ore. Using the newest technology for breeder reactors, we could get about 90-95% of the energy from the same materials, and generate much lower level waste. We could generate engery for another couple hundred years with the products already mined. The risks of bomb making material are also reduced.
As for dirty bombs, they could be made now (with readily available supplies) anyway. Anybody remember this (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? Isn't hydrogen energy supposed to be portable, to power electronics or cars and such? I imagine it takes more energy to make a AA battery than it holds. Also, whenever these discussions come up, people always talk about the difficulty in storing and transporting energy.
Wow, 431 comments and the word FUSION shows up 6 times. Pretty amazing...
I think most home heating oil is still petroleum based, but I'm not really sure. It would be my guess that there is some, if not alot of biodeisel in it though.
And as to your first question... no. Lowest price always wins. Biodeisel manufactures DO try to take advantage by marketing, but when your product costs 33% more than the competition for the same performance, the low cost advantage is going to win except in the most die-hard consumers. It is my opinion that Biodeisel will come into it's own and have a golden age in the not so distant future because fossil fuels are non-renewable, of course, and biodeisel is a very convenient drop-in replacement for the current breed of engines and generators, but currently fossil oil is so unbelievably plentiful that it's price is on par with sand.
I know someone that rode his bicycle around Buffalo, NY to school, work and home, year-round, for years.
I'd say that the #1 downside of windfarms is that having them doesn't absolve you of building the enough 'traditional' plants to cover their capacity on calm days.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Or you could just use the electricity as electricity, maybe?
Electricity->Hydrogen would most likely be used as a substitute for petrol in cars. Currently, batteries would take several hours to take a full charge, where I could just use hydrogen and have a full tank in under 10 minutes. Electricity->Hydrogen is going to be the fuel for the forseable future.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Chernobyl was a disaster because the Russian government built it, with little regard to human safety. So in order to cut costs, they decided not to build contamination tanks, therefore when the reactor had a meltdown, it leaked into the atsmophere.
Three Mile Island never had a leak. This is because it was built by America, and they built contamination tanks. There was a meltdown within the plant itself, but it never breached walls, it simply went into the contamination tanks. Therefore making the "nuclear power is a disaster waiting to happen" propaganda totally blown out of proportion. No nuclear plant that had built-in contamination tanks has ever had a disaster like Chernobyl did. Ever.
Some good reading here.
As far as radioactive storage, I agree with the concerns over that, as there are no ways of safely destroying it, and storing it always adds risk. However, the current push for nuclear fusion will eliminate that worry, along with the concern of radioactivity altogether.
The US government has been against breeder reactors because they can be used to generate munitions-grade plutonium
A single execuitive order by Jimmy Carter does not translate to an opinion of anyone else that is or has ever been in power.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
but hydrogen is bullshit.
I'm a little late to the party and will probably never be read, but heres my wild and hairy idea... Hydrogen might have a strong future, as might solar power. The fact of the matter is that there is a near-infinite amount of solar power being pumped out by the sun. We already have the technology to harness this. Its not trivial but far from impossible to set up a satellite that pulls in tens or hundreds of gigawatts of electricity. It doesn't even need to be in geosynch orbit, put it closer to the sun than the earth and in a paralell orbit, and there you have all the energy you could ever need.
The problem then becomes one of storing the energy. There are a few methods that could be used, but production of hydrogen from water is one we can do right now, via electrolysis. So where do we get the water? I'm not sure what the current consensus is on cometary composition, but assuming they contain a significant amount of water, one of those could supply sufficient hydrogen for quite some time. Basically the problem is one of storing heat energy in one form or another. The "beaming power to earth" idea is a non starter I reckon.
Once you have the hydrogen or whatever ingots produced, the next issue to resolve is transportation to earth. This is probably the trickiest part. You need to coat the fuel in some kind of material that will allow re-entry, and then collect it for processing and redistribution (space elevator?). I haven't worked out how that would function yet, but its just an engineering problem, to whit, it is solvable with today's technology.
Even if this is not practical for earth's power supply needs, it certainly would be a valuable asset in exploring and colonising the solar system, both for unmanned drones and for manned colonies. Storing the power and delivering the power are the two tricky parts.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Increasing the ability to harness energy is the goal period end of story. If we don't do it the entirity of human civilzation is guaranteed to be doomed. Energy is what holds the entirity of civilization back, and your proposal is that everyone should sit back and wait for the inevitable end. Well, I refuse, when energy is abundant anything is possible, including getting out of this galactic backwater before the oceans evaporate due to the continued increase in solar temperature.
The first step is the ability to harness the available energy of the entire planet. This does not necessarily mean depleting the planet, but means harnessing the same amount of energy. My guess is this requires space based acquisition and transport of solar energy. Fusion is another alternative, but the giant fusion reactor in the sky is already running. Still, fusion allows for possibly portable energy. And, portable energy on that scale opens up the stars.
So, maybe we shoud slow down energy use a little until the energy technology catches up, but the ultimate goal has to be to go way beyond todays energy use.
According to the global warming theorists we're already adding energy to the sea. Removing some could be a wash...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
>It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O.
I was trying to shut up and not post, but I can't help it.
Yes, you're right, it takes more energy to make H2 than you get from burning it. That's called entropy. Oddly enough, every other system where you do work to go from A -> B, and then recover that work as you push B -> A, also is an energy sink. Batteries? take more energy to make than you get out of them. Shall we stop using them? Coal took more energy to make than we get from it. So does gasoline. And, news flash, uranium, too, took more energy to make than we'll ever recover from fission.
The nice thing about hydrogen is that it's considerably more portable: you can build a car that has a hydrogen fuel tank a lot more easily and safely than a nuclear-powered car, and somewhat more easily than a coal-powered car. Propane or methane are probably better choices than hydrogen. But hydrogen is a viable alternative, with many advantages in some situations -- just like nuclear power is a viable alternative to coal-fired power plants, probably a better alternative for big power-generation. They all have their place.
But to diss hydrogen simply because entropy exists is a stupid argument against hydrogen.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Why wouldn't you heat your home with nuclear power? Are electrically-driven heat pumps and heating coils dangerous in some way that setting a hydrocarbon on fire isn't?
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
One minor nit, in that "water" isn't just water. Break down water to get H and O, and you also get all of the minerals and chemicals disolved in it. Dealing with the byproducts is one of the reasons seawater desalination plants are major engineering projects.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
No, but it's a big waste of energy to heat your house with electricity.
We lose ~50% of our electrical power generated for remote use (non-on-site) in transmission. There are two ways to remedy this situation. One is to generate power closer to where you want to use it. Unfortunately, no one seems to want a nuclear plant in their backyard. The other way is to minimize the cost of transmission. It's cheaper to ship liquid fuel than it is to waste power transmissing electrical power over wires for thousands of miles.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Also, we [humans] have deforested the shit out of the entire planet and we [americans] have included the U.S. in that. Trees slow down wind. Cutting down trees means the wind goes faster. Putting up windmills slows down the wind. The only difference is where the wind is slowed down, and if we put up windmills where we took down trees then we're helping to RESTORE the balance. (Putting up trees again would be more helpful in the long term, though. If we want to keep our topsoil, anyway.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would guess the answer is cost. These engines are provided to California but at the cost of HP. These engines are more expensive.
Diesel engines put out more crap into the air which is generally frowned on.
It may be that thse will be in our future hybrids...but if we already have the engine techology, why mess with a more expensive Hybrid...that was my point.
Home heating oil is pretty much all kerosene, which is more or less diesel. From what I hear, my diesel will start and run on the stuff just fine (Mercedes-Benz 300SD with the inline 5 turbo diesel.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sure, the little japanese super-controlled gasoline engines might have better emissions, even as compared to biodiesel, but they don't have the efficiency. We need both...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"what you dig up can kill you and everybody in your vicinity and make it uninhabitable for generations"
So you're assuming that people in the distant future will:
(a) Have become completely incompetent regarding the identification of chemicals and radiation
(b) Will have developed a habit of eating strange materials they dig out of the ground, and then feeding it to 'everybody in [their] vicinity'
(c) Enjoy digging strange substances up and tilling them throroughly into the surrounding soil with no idea what their effects are
Or alternately you're assuming:
(a) People of the distant future would not be able to identify radioactive material and
(b) yet they'd still be able to make a fission/fusion bomb out of what is mostly low-level waste (irradiated rubber gloves, etc) anyhow
(c) while not realizing that they were building a bomb.
I find either your grasp of the scale of the danger of radioactivity or your vision of the future consisting entirely of idiots with the ability to unconsciously engineer nuclear weapons frightening... I'm not sure which is more disturbing.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Have you considered the fact that nuclear waste disposal requires that the stuff be stored for 10,000 years or more?
This is because we only use 1% of the energy avilable in uranium ore. Increase that to 99% which is well within current technology and first, the waste mass per unit energy is reduced because we are not treating fissionables as waste. Second, while the waste is highly radioactive it reaches the radioactivity of the original ore in 1,000 years, instead of 10,000 years.
Oh and if the reprocessing is done on-site there is limited transportation of plutonium.
Can you guarantee that there won't be geological shifts or that somebody won't dig it up during that time?
Nope, but much less likely in 1,000 years than 10,000 years.
Can you even design a sign that is absolutely certain to communicate to your descendants 50 or 60 centuries hence, "Don't excavate here, what you dig up can kill you and everybody in your vicinity and make it uninhabitable for generations"?
Shouldn't be a problem for a thousand year. As we a re quite capable of reading signs from over 2000 years ago.
Diesel engines put out more crap into the air which is generally frowned on.
Modern diesel engines use self-cleaning particulate filters which eliminate virtually all of the particulate pollution traditionally associated with compression ignition engines. Modern diesels certainly emit less CO2 per kilometre travelled than conventional petrol/gasoline engines.
listen to yourself... "no chance". you mean "less chance, as far as we can estimate".
No, generally it means physically impossible. At least that is the goal use the laws of physics themselves to make a catastrophic accident impossible.
#1 Don't use water. The potential for rapid conversion of a liquid into a gas is what creates and explosion risk. Consider the helium in a pebble bed reactor running at say 200C (i think it is hotter) and 1atm. At 400C it is 2atm at 800C 4atm, 1600C 8atm. Not even close to enough to cause an explosion. Water vaporized at 800C will explose.
#2 Make sure heat poisons the reaction. Another pebble bed feature when it gets too the reaction slows and eventually settles at a relatively low temperature.
#3 Make sure a fire doesnt release significant radioactive material. Fire is a pebble bed risk, but it looks like a fire could not result in a fuel release. And, again poisons the nuclear reaction by removing the graphite moderator.
As I understand it, effeciency is 40-50MPG...sounds pretty good to me.
The vast majority of Japanese vehicles can not pass U.S. crash test standards, which are necessary because we still have 4700 lb cars from the 1960s on the roads and your 1400 pound air/electric hybrid might as well be made out of porcelain when they go head to head in a collision. Those engines will not provide the same mileage in a full-american-size car.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is amasing how much disinformation and outright lies have been told over the years. Without a firm grasp of the facts many solvable problems are viewed as impossible. In part - this was the objective of the disinformation campaigns.
First some terminology:
Natural uranium......... 99.3% U238, 0.7% U235
Depleated Uranium....... 99.7% U238, 0.3% U235 (varies: 0.2%-0.4% U235)
Reactor grade uranium... 96.0% U238, 4.0% U235 but this varies also.
Slightly enriched(CANDU) 99.1% U238, 0.9% U235 (varies: 0.9%-2.0% U235)
Spent fuel.............. 95.0% U238, 1.0% U235, 1.0% Pu, 3% crud (varies)
Reactor grade here refers to Low Enriched typically used for the USA light water pressurized reactors.
In the spent fuel, the U235 fraction can be as low as 0.4% and the Pu fraction is composed of Pu239 and Pu240. The Pu isotopes are practically impossible to separate and the Pu240 is so reactive that it is questionable - although probably possible - to have use as a bomb. A dirty weapon is possible.
The Candu fuel cycle starts with 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. The spent fuel is about 0.23% U235 and 0.27% Pu.
The Thorium fuel cycle converts Th to U233 which is as good as U235 for weapons and which can be easily chemically separated from the thorium.
---------------
It should be painfully obvious to just about everyone that only about 3% of the mass of the spent fuel is crud. This is the nuclear waste and it _can_ be burned up several ways including spallation. The _other_ 97% is fuel. Furthermore the spent fuel from a light water pressurized reactor would generally be considered enriched for a CANDU reactor.
Fuel reprocessing removes the "crud" and allows over 97% of the "spent fuel" to be elegible to be stuffed right back into the reactor.
So why isn't reprocessing used? Well - in Europe it is. The USA in a magnificent display of stupidity and circular thinking decided to go it alone and proclaim that a once through fuel cycle is the _only_ way to go. Part of of the political support for this stems from the build up of stock piles of "spent fuel" which the public is told has no use. It does - its future reactor fuel. By analogy - if someone were to dump a litre of crud in a barrel of oil we certainly wouldn't call it "spent oil"! We'd figure out a way to remove the crud. However I can remember my father dumping "waste oil" on the ground - hopefully we now collect it and re-refine it.
So one faction of the anti-nuclear crowd realised that keeping large stockpiles of deemed "waste" around gave them something to point their fingers at. Another faction perhaps with some justification just didn't want anyone to develop the technology to recycle the fuel because this does involve building plants that can separate the Plutonium. Also - by shortening the exposure time of the fuel mix the ratios of Pu 239 to Pu 240 can be controlled with the Pu 240 fraction reduced to under 7%. This is weapons grade plutonium. Yet another faction didn't want competition from a viable nuclear industry so they supported anything that generally doesn't make much sense.
Now the thing is to look at the issue of depleated verses natural uranium. The enrichment process is expensive and still leaves about 1/2 of the original U235 in place.
As such - there is very little difference in radioactivity between natural and depleated uranium. To say one is "safe" and the other is "unsafe" is splitting hairs. They are about the same.
In fact - if we look at "spent fuel" and reprocess it to remove the highly radioactive fraction - then what is left over is very similar to both "natural" and "depleated" uranium... it just has a little plutonium. The 1/2 life of plutonium makes it more radioactive than uranium. However one must also realise that since both uranium and plutonium are very heavy metals, they act as excellent sheilds for radiation... more effective for instance than lead.
What this all boils down to is that there is very little r
Not only that, but most of the time a valley is flooded to create a hydroelectric dam, the vegetation is not removed first. It decays, releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. The Three Gorges dam in China is projected to release far more greenhouse gasses this way than it saves versus traditional energy generation, let alone nuclear.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My grandfather was. He was called in to fix the hydrogen problem at Three Mile Island, and did so by developing a Hydrogen-Oxygen recombiner. His invention is now used in many nuclear plants to mitigate the risk of a hydrogen conflagration. Talking to him, I came to the conclusion that a Hydrogen fire was a real risk to the personnel in the facility (although it probably wouldn't lead to loss of containment). Your post is the first time I'd heard it suggested that there was no Oxygen present; what is your source on that information?
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
That probably has much more to do with the "it's always the motorists" fault heuristic of Amsterdam traffic laws than the state of bike lanes. Public policy certainly won't protect you from a delivery truck running amok whereas a nice concrete barrier at least gives you a fighting chance.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The "city" here is about 40-60 miles across.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Jesus, am I the only one here who took high school chem? You get two moles of H2 and one mole of O2 for every TWO moles of H2O. 2*(H2) + 1*(O2) == 2*(H2O).
But cracking H2O with solar power is cheap ....
How so? Do you know of a magic way to do it that doesn't involve making electricity out of the solar energy first? In which case, why waste the energy on the additional, inefficient H2) cracking step?
Not if you have to "pipe" the electricity via thousands of miles. E.g. from the ocean or from a desert.
Because hydrogen has no transportation costs, right?
I used to spend my summers at Lake Bled. My wife liked the caves in Western Slovenia; my daughter's favorite was the horses. It's directly East of Italy and North of Croatia.
Oh, and when I was in Bosnia, I partied with a bunch of Slovenian soldiers on their Independence Day. I was pretty drunk but I think it was late June or early July...
Damned fine country. You guys got beat pretty bad because of the Euro; I hope that's working out better now.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I forwarded this article to my dad, and got this back from him (edited to preserve company secrets)
"My guess we will have a new 3rd generation operating plant in by 2015 and a
new 4th generation by 2020. Lots is happening on in the nuclear world
right now. The problem is all the talent is old and the schools are not
training new Nuclear Engineers. We will be trying to get 200 new
Engineers within the next year. GE and Westinghouse are also trying to
get the same talent."
Dealing with the byproducts is one of the reasons seawater desalination plants are major engineering projects.
;)
Eh, just dump it back into the ocean. That's where it came from, so it's OK, right?
Incidentally, show me *anywhere* in my original post where I said that cities were a good thing?
Allright, you hippy. Go live in the mountains without electricity or other modern conveniences, then. Just leave the rest of us alone.
Give me the comfort of a warm fire, but take your atomic poison power away
Remember that? It was the mantra of the baby boomers, of which, sadly, I am one. I would prefer to be in either the generation before or after the boomers, since the boomers have wreaked incredible harm and I suffer guilt by association.
The boomers were in the forefront of the battle to stop the advancement of nuclear power in North America. Never mind that even including Chernobyl (which happened in a Communist dictatorship with no accountability), many times the number of people are killed by fossil fuels each year that have ever been killed by nuclear power.
Not only did the boomers stop nuclear power, but they also acted to stop oil and natural gas exploration in the US. Take the refusal to develop the North Slope oil fields in Alaska; you're talking about as close to a wasteland as can be imagined, perfect for industrial use. Yet, by selective telling of facts, the majority of Americans believe that a pristine "Arctic Serengeti" is under attack.
Do you love our current war for oil? We're going to have a lot more of them, and it's you kids who are going to be sent to fight them because your boomer parents are safely too old for the military. Oh, your mommy may dress in black and light little candles, but you can bet that when she can't fill up her SUV she'll be on the phone to her congresscritter demanding that the oil flow.
Don't you understand what it's all about yet? Why do you think the boomers are so opposed to Bush's plans? The fear isn't of failure, or even of more wars. The fear is that Bush might succeed, and create a modern democratic society in the Middle East and other oil producers. This is a nightmare to them, because it will extend the easy availability of oil for generations to come.
No, what the boomers want is nothing less than the collapse of our energy-based society. Mind you, they don't want you, their little darling Bradleys and Heathers, to live in a tiny socialist apartment with your workplace downstairs. No, it's the other parents' Bradleys and Heathers who are to live in the politically correct manner. You're supposed to be part of the wealthy Party elite, who get to live in the mansions and be carted around in big cars on the largely empty roads (because the proles can't afford cars any more).
They defeated the hope of nuclear-generated electricity that would be too cheap to meter, and with it any possibility of electric cars being practical. They're fighting to defeat oil and gas. Coal is currently beneath their notice (never mind that it's the worst source of fuel for the environment.
OK, there are a few boomers (myself included) who fought the long battle against the majority in the most selfish generation of history. But we're getting old and tired.
You kids are going to have to take over, and hopefully build the energy-secure world that we boomers should have built. Sadly, I can't offer you anything more than "I'm sorry. I'm terribly sorry."
Conventional reactors (thermal reactors) only use 5% of the potential energy from the fuel rods. So 95% ends up as unused, highly radioactive waste product. A newer type of nuclear reactor, the so-called 'fast-neutron reactors' are capable of recovering more than 99% of this waste to generate energy, effectively reducing the existing amount of nuclear waste. Waste that remains after the recovery process is 'only' dangerous for 500 years, instead of 10,000 years in the case of thermal reactor processing.
Europe Warms to Nuclear Power
But not exactly to glowing reviews.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Everyone's aware that nuclear power accounts for 80% of electrical production in France, right? 16 countries get more than 25% of their electrical production from nuclear power.
Americans like lawyers?
We *HATE* lawyers! That's why we elect them, because we *HATE* our government too, and we might as well kill two birds with one stone.
paintball
Not to mention the fact that when you flood a forest (a common outcome of damming a river), the decomposition of the organic material emits vast quantities of greenhouse gasses.
Where's dbIII ?
Interesting. Can you give me a link to where I can read about the byproducts factor?
You (US) have zero uranium for practical purposes.
Certainly Canada and Australia will provide for you, but the other half of Uranium is in such promising places like Niger, Namibia, Uzbekistan, Kazhakstan and Russia.
Of course that is immaterial, nuclear power is uneconomical, companies providing nuclear power do so thanks to generous subsidies. These white elephants are bankrupt everywhere and almost bankrupted the French goverment, in the medium term uranium will not last long anyway, so we are just postponing the inevitable by a few years.
The only rational solution is to use less energy, and the energy we use has to come from renewable sources.
Any other solution based on mining something is basically wasting everybody's time.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The rest of us know the industrial world is full of dangerous stuff that should be handled with care - except in clean nuclear fantasy land.
And in clean coal-power fantasy land. That was the point he was making. Coal plants just take all their dangerous stuff that should be handled with care... and pump it into the surrounding environment. Why are we so paranoid about nuclear plants (way above normal industrial caution) on the one hand, and so blase about coal plants (way *below* normal industrial caution) on the other?
The beauty of fossil fuels is that the end product of thousands of years of solar radiation and natural biological and geological processes have concentrated that solar energy in a convenient product. Is it any surprise that it's harder to replicate the whole process ourselves?
It's not impossible, but with present or near-term technologies it's very, very expensive. See grid energy storage for a quick survey of the current state of play. Note that aside from pumped-storage and compressed air, none of these technologies are out of the small-scale trial stage.
I think we are discussing apples and oranges. My point is that we don't have time to implement "perfect" technologies; we need to implement the best we have right now.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Even if gold can be extracted as easily as uranium, and I have no idea if that is true, uranium is more than 100 times more abundant in sea water. That would make it unprofitable to extract gold by itself, but it could be an important part of the total revenue stream.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
What percentage of energy is lost in the process of turning water into H2 and O2?
From what I understand, current methods are remarkably inefficient.
+++ATH0
As for the 1 percent of everything in the coal gets out of the stack assumption - it is ignoring the pollution control process entirely and just assuming it is a black box with a small hole in it. The whole point of pollution control is to target specific things, so you get more of some things coming out with the exhaust gasses and less of others. It's not a high school assignment so they should do better than this and get someone who knows about the process involved.
To sum up - if you are going to advocate a source of energy you should learn about it, and if you are going to compare it to others you should learn about those too or others will question faulty assumptions and call the entire thing crap. All those nuclear power advocates - get out there and learn about the process from start to finish, learn about the advantages and have the intelligence to understand that there are disadavantages too or you will never understand why plants are designed the way they are and why there are various nuclear technologies. Recently a bunch of nuclear power advocates thought they were getting somewhere and then realised that if we build a lot more plants there won't be enough high grade fuel - but they admitted the problem and steps are being taken to solve this, same as the waste problem was ignored for years and finally materials like synrock are being used to deal with the problem.
I so envy you. My favorite car ever was a '77 300SD inline 5. That car made it from Seattle to Sacramento on 1 tank and could spin around in an alley.
Seeing as how France currently gets 76% of her electricity from nuclear power, it's hard to imagine how she could get any warmer.
"(probably have better battery tech then)."
They have been saying that for decades and have got nowhere, H is useable NOW and it can be generated from seawater by electricity. The question of sources that everyone goes on about is asking how to generate that electricity. Regardless of the source, H is a much cleaner and more efficient way to store some of that energy for use in personal transport than any foreseebale battery technology. The trick is learning to use H as a safe and convinient substitute for oil, batteries will probably still be much the same a decade from now. They are unsuitable as a replacement for oil in a family car.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I doubt it will come to that, the survivors will probably eat all the horses well before they start thinking about crops.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The lithium ion battery in your cell phone begs to differ. Not that we are likely to see it in a car anytime soon, but the poitn is that batteries are getting better. There's also the lithium polymer cell.
H is useable NOW and it can be generated from seawater by electricity.
Heh, talk about technology that has been around for a long time and hasn't changed in, what, 200 years? Even the fuel cell is like 100 year old tech. There are still some severe limitations to electrolysis. It does not scale very well. There is a reason why almost all hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels and not water.
The question of sources that everyone goes on about is asking how to generate that electricity. Regardless of the source,
It is all about the source. The source is the only thing that matters. If you don't have a surplus of electricity, you don't have anything. People will argue on and on about hydrogen and how great it is, but that is like fussing over how to build a gold truck before you've found the gold mine.
H is a much cleaner and more efficient way to store some of that energy for use in personal transport than any foreseebale battery technology. The trick is learning to use H as a safe and convinient substitute for oil, batteries will probably still be much the same a decade from now.
And we'll still have the same problems finding enough electricity a decade from now. So it doesn't really matter.
They are unsuitable as a replacement for oil in a family car.
Hydrogen seems to have a very simiilar problem. The awkward physic characteristics are hydrogen are not going to change. By the time someone figures out how to "safely and conveniently" use hydrogen it is going to look a whole lot more like a battery than oil. Making hydrogen from electricity and then converting back to energy is exactly the kind of thing that a battery would do.
Also, keep in mind that there is more to replacing oil than just automobiles. A LOT of useful things come from crude oil.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
There are various solutions to this problem -- one is diversifying; the odds of having a calm, cloudy day during a drought are low. Another is changing rates, so that electricity is cheaper on windy or sunny days, combined with automation of household devices so that say the freezer cools down a few extra degrees and the washing machine starts when electricity is cheap. The lower off-peak rates would probably also make charging of hybrid cars more popular.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It surely isn't. We needn't replicate that whole process, though. Rather than trying to concentrate the energy into a convenient, highly-concentrated product, we can tap the energy directly. This is more difficult than just burning fossil fuels, correct. But fossil fuels are a finite resource. For a civilization entering the industrialized state, fossil fuels can only be a kind of kick-starter until non-depletable long-term energy sources can be exploited.
Interestingly, it has been commented that if we were to pay for the actual amount of energy that went into producing one gallon of petroleum, it would have to cost a million dollars.
Thanks for that hint.
I'm reply to my own post because this is supposed to answer all three of the comments. To rufty rufty: the problem is exactly the effect on the environment and ultimately on us. Energy consumption is not a 'bad thing' abstractly, per se. It's the depletion of all available energy to the detriment of the environment we live in, the problem. And it has nothing to do with tree-hugging or anything. It has to do with breathing clean air, swimming in a clean sea, sunbathing without getting roasted, skiing without having to worry the next year there won't be snow, and so on and so forth. If we had hypothetical ways of producing and consuming energy without having such a tremendous and horrible impact on what's around us, the problem wouldn't even arise. The matter is, we don't. So Dastardly's suggestion makes sense. The Anonymous Coward seems to miss a few things like the standard of living depending on way many more things than just energy consumption (I can consume three times the energy you do, but if I have to wear an oxygen mask to go downtown and it takes four hours to drive a distance which I could walk in thirty minnutes, has my life quality improved? What if there is no clean beaches, no clean water, no natural green in a hundred kilometers radius?). Sure, some aspects of what is today considered a better living standard depend on a higher energy consumption than the past. Too bad a tenfold increment in life quality came with a hundredfold increase in energy consumption most of which is simply wasted. And to quote a recent italian comic "Globalization is an african boy not driking water for one day so that a westerner boy can keep his sink tap running while brushing his teeth".
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
"We can't store energy cheaply enough, and on a large enough scale, to run an electricity grid."
You don't need to store all the energy for future use if you can use the energy being produced right at this moment to offset the requirement to generate additional energy. Basically if a solar system (not necessarily photovoltaic) means that you don't have to burn some coal, oil, or gas, right now, then it helps. Appropriately designed you can get a solar system to do various useful jobs, such as water heating (no nasty heavy metals, just plumbing) or use it to power air conditioning (makes sense - Sun is out - probably hot - get the sun to help cool your house).
What actually makes more sense is to plan systems (houses, cities, etc) better so they need less energy inputs in the first place. Improved insulation means less energy use in both summer and winter, for example. The typical additional cost for a new build house of office building
is very small (circa 2%) with a large energy saving per annum (circa 30%) that can typically pay off the capital cost of the improved insulation and so on in around 3 years. If this was mandatory then, yes, building costs would go up a very small amount, but after three years those buildings would provide a boost to the economy via lower running costs. Given that the turn over in buildings is relatively modest it is not an instant solution, but then by the same virtue, neither is it a sudden huge cost either.
As I understand it, the cars and engines I'm talking about are available in California; where they can justify the increased prices to meet higher emission standards, as required by law.
Well there are some uranium deposits in Germany - as far as I know in the Fichtelgebirge in northeastern Bavaria and in the Harz. None of them are commercially exploited anymore, as it is not economically feasible. My major concern is rather the lack of a viable long-term storage facility for highly radioactive waste.
This comment does not exist.
The reason to use H2 is energy density, mass and refuel time. Of course using the electrical output is more efficient in an absolute sense. Coal is more efficient than gasoline, but it doesn't have the energy density. H2 is useful because we can use either fuel cells or Hydrogen internal combustion engines to replace the motors in modern cars. This is a more manageable change over for our economy/lifestyles, and doesn't require a major revamping of our road and highway infrastructures. There's no battery tech I know of that can match a combustible chemical fuel like H2, gasoline or diesel on all counts.
It's worth asking if producing H2 from fossil fuels is more efficient than burning them. Also if fossil fuels for H2 production require less refinement, it will still be a better use for the fossil fuels. What about H2 production from agriculturally produced biomass? Just because bio-diesel isn't efficient doesn't necessarily mean a bio-H2 process wouldn't be. I don't know, but I know I'm going to try to find out as we get closer to committing to these energy systems.
Spyder
To summarise Cold War reactors were designed to produce Plutonium (for weapons) with electricity as a byproduct, whereas IFR is designed to produce electricity. It produces half the waste and no plutonium or weapons grade material.
The main differences is Cold War reactors make the isotope into a ceramic and attempt to cool it with water where IFR uses the isotope as metal cooled with liquid metal. As ceramic is generally an insulator and water the coolant the fundamental design limitations become obvious (as the metal coolant can absorb much more energy where the water becomes steam).
However the really good thing about IFR technology is that it can use plutonium as fuel. This is the very waste product of Cold War reactors that cause the greatest concern as it has a half life of roughly 25,000 years. I believe this would be a win-win situation for many countries with large stockpiles of nuclear waste (you know those really big tanks with blue glow in them) as the current waste would become fuel and new waste products would have dramatically shorter half lives (in the hundreds of years).
Unfortunatley politicians are not very good at picking winners when it comes to these things and I think it was the current U.S administration that cut the funding to this promising facility. From what I learned about IFR, the best way to build a facility is complete complete with Fuel Reprocessing Facility. Lets just hope the French have it available as an option.
Hey, it might be all fantasy, but so far it the closest thing we have to a pragmatic and workable future for Nuclear energy that addresses the question of spent isotope waste products in a practical way (producing electricity) as opposed to letting future generations deal with it.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with the IFR project and while IANANP, my brother is.
Some links
http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/ifr
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy99
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Yeah, I have an '81, that's the W126, not the W123. Still has the superbadass turning radius, but it's a bit longer so it needs more room to turn around. OTOH it gets a bump of like 10hp and 20ft-lb over the W123 model so that's pretty happy. The W126 is Mercedes' first 100% high strength steel unibody.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So, you can either pump out the dino juice, and have practically "zero" emissions except that you put out plenty of CO2 that has been locked up for hojillions of years, or you can run a non-topsoil-based diesel biofuel (read: hydroponics, probably algae) which will create other kinds of waste (soot, and nitric oxides) but which does not affect the carbon balance. To me, it's actually not that difficult a decision to make, because the dino juice thing is so destructive. If we ARE going to be pumping oil, sooner or later we're going to need all of it for plastics...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You make the same points others make, but you people always forget the same thing.
Hydrogen can be used to transport energy. It isn't a very good energy source, but it's great for transporting energy from other places. And this
"It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it"
is just a pathetic lie. Some methods of making hydrogen fall in this category, but many others do not, and like so many others fools, you assume the current level of technology is what we'll be using forever.
You just don't know what you're talking about.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
It is always cheaper just to let people die.
Electricity->Hydrogen would most likely be used as a substitute for petrol in cars. Currently, batteries would take several hours to take a full charge, where I could just use hydrogen and have a full tank in under 10 minutes. Electricity->Hydrogen is going to be the fuel for the forseable future.
How much are you willing to pay for that hydrogen? 'Cause producing it, compressing it, storing it, transporting it, then pumping it into your car (where it will again need to be compressed) is wasteful and expensive. Hydrogen is not a viable solution IMO.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
How so? Do you know of a magic way to do it that doesn't involve making electricity out of the solar energy first?
... for exampe: solar engergy only works at daytime? And you probably like to Have Hydrogen for the night? ... for example a car or truck runs perfectly well with a hydrogen burning engine or with a hydrogen suing fuel cell, but not at all with a few solar cells? And not at all with solar cells at night?
.... you seem of the same opinion ;D
Yes. But its just physics and not magic, I suggest you google a bit.
In which case, why waste the energy on the additional, inefficient H2) cracking step?
Hu
Or
So what exactly was your point?
The first poster was of the opinion that a hydrogen powerd world is a heresy
Because hydrogen has no transportation costs, right?
Well, to answer your question, no you are wrong. Hydrogen has transportation costs. I wonder why you ask such a silly question, must be ment ironical?
So please calculate:
a) 1000 miles electric current power line with 400kV voltage plus electric utility transformers to connect it to the local power grids. Maintanance and personal costs per ten years would be nice to.
b) a gas pipeline for 1000 miles transporting hydrogen.
c) a pipeline transporting liquid hydrogen.
d) using Zeppeline like air lifters to tranport the hydrogen to the next clsoest harbor.
So, we have two things we know for sure:
a) fossile resources are not endless, at some point in future they are all used up
b) burning them causes green house effects, we certainly don't like them to get to strong
So, my question: with which power do you want to drive your car after a) has happend?
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Hmm should have phrased my post more like a question... But really flamebait!? Cmon guys I'm a programmer not an expert in nuclear power plants... so cut me some slack! However I now feel reassured, and even a tad silly :/
Thanks for the follow up! You shared some good information.
Cheers!
How much are you willing to pay for that hydrogen? 'Cause producing it, compressing it, storing it, transporting it, then pumping it into your car (where it will again need to be compressed) is wasteful and expensive. Hydrogen is not a viable solution IMO.
How much are people willing to pay for Gas? 'Cause finding it, drilling it, pumping it, transporting it, refining it, transporting it again, then pumping it into your car is expensive too. I'm not sure how Hydrogen would be much more wasteful than Gasoline. As for the compression required, that all depends on the setup. Assuming we can measure the gas acurately enough, just having a highly compressed source in the gas station tanks, and a gas tank with little compression, should supply a large ammount of compressed hydrogen for a full tank. Put a valve in the car or gas station pump that keeps the car tank pressure from getting too high and you can have the gas station tank compressed at a much higher pressure than the car gas tank.
The only issue here is how much it will cost. Given that Hydrogen vehicles don't have to be piston based and could be turbine based, they can be more efficient (reducing effective cost). Couple this with electric vehicles as a generator (in addition to a battery) and you have a possible replacement for petrol engines.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
FYI: One way to prevent corrosion in water-bearing pipes is to apply an electrical charge to the pipe. One of the byproducts (and actually the primary reason why the process works) is hydrogen.
Many (most?) nuclear power plants generate hydrogen anyway. Imagine the potential if that was one of their primary goals?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Enough solar energy in a day for 1000 years? Ummm... can I share some of your apparently abundant supply of crack?
The US alone uses 8.4 trillion kilowatts of electricity. The sun provides up to 1.367kW per square meter during daylight hours. After factoring night, cloud cover, inclimate weather, and latitudes that seasonally aren't receiving much light, it comes out to about 164 Watts per square meter over a 24 hour day. All together, the entire planet receives the equivalent of 84 billion kilowatts. Multiply by 24 (hours) to get 2.016 trillion kilowatt hours or a little less than one fourth of just the US annual consumption. Multiply that last number by 365 and we get 735.840 trillion kilowatt hours per year. Quite a lot, but far less than 1000 years' worth. Less than 100 years just for the US.
Factor in the energy requirements for the rest of the world and you start talking in terms of a decade.
But there's an important thing forgotten here:
This assumes that we completely cover the planet in solar panels that are 100% efficient. We will never be 100% efficient. I find it highly unlikely that we'll get above 50% on a large scale. Our most efficient panels that last longer than 18 months and don't cost more than its weight in platinum are about 15%-20% efficient. So now we're into the realm of covering the planet just to break even.
But there's one more important thing forgotten here:
We need that sunlight! We need it to grow crops, for all animal life and plant life to sustain itself, for warmth, etc.
So please, for the sake of all rational thinkers, stop spouting nonsense like, "...we get enough solar energy in a day on this planet to fuel our civilization for the next 1000 years." It's not true (unless you want a large portion of humanity to starve because we've reverted to pre-1900 technology), and it only serves to hurt your credibility.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Too bad gas and oil are increasingly finite resources. In that sense, using them to heat your home when alternatives are available is a waste.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Obligatory comment about how I wish I had mod points. Of all the "Informative" comments, yours is one of the few that honestly deserves it.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
I listed 8.4 trillion kilowatt-hours.
Take away the crack pipe. Apparently I had way too much when I wrote 8.4.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Certainly open and public debate, public records,the right to petition the government are all hallmarks of democracy.
However there is a difference between something being 'necessary' for democracy and something being 'sufficient' for democracy.
There is an additional element and a necessary element that is removed. And that is the right to have ones vote counted.
The moment that representatives consider factors other than what would be the desires of their constituents (had their constituents been fully appraised of the situation) then you dont have democracy. Not even representative democracy.
To many so called "democracies" are based on the notion that once a representative is in office, it is his luxury to vote however he personally feels on the issues. He is a stand in to represent what his constituents feel. And his democratic duty (if we are to have a democracy) is to use his best judgement and knowledge to vote and speak for THEM.
What instead we typically have now is a candidate claims to belief X,Y, and Z, and then people vote on that basis. and later on issue W comes up, and the representative them votes in the way that best benefits his CONTRIBUTORS. Those who paid for his election campaign and showered him with gifts. i.e. the "lobbiests".
If a majority government intends to do X, and is going to do X regardless of what anyone else wants, then holding some token public hearings is little more than a PR show. It is a farce. The decision has already been made. This is not democracy any more than a kangaroo court is Justice.
When a representative pursues an issue without putting the will of his constituents (not his contributors or his party) up FIRST then what he is doing is taking away the vote from his constituents.
To have democracy every citizens vote must count.
What we basically have is something like 'democracy for the rich'. Similar to a corporation with shareholders. If you are rich and can afford to make significant enough contributions, your vote counts. The more contributions you make.. the more your vote counts.
Our "democracy" is corporatism dressed like democracy.
Wealth doesn't buy elections. But wealth buys representatives in parliament/congress/sentate/whatever.
You may have the right to lobby, yell and scream. But you dont have the right to force the government to do anything in particular, unless you are a regular contributor and can threaten to withhold your contributions. Or alternatively, close your plant and fire 300 voters telling them which politician cost them their job. (in fact you are going to close the plant anyway and outsource to China, but your poorly educated workers wont know the difference).
If the minister had been allowed to make his own law unimpeded this would have resulted in disaster.
The results were a disaster anyway. Just a different kind of disaster.
Democracy is much more than voting once every four years,
it's reading the papers (free press),
which is owned by the wealthy elite media conglomerates and services to its advertisers.
complain and demonstrate when things go bad
whatever the aforementioned media tells you has gone bad, you can complain about.
(free association, right to strike, right to free speech),
however, if you dont want to lose your job and watch your family wind up broke and destitute, you better associate only with the right kind of people, show up and work when your are told, and keep your mouth shut and your head down.
perhaps get involved into local politics
Because there is no way in hell you are going to get anywhere at the national level without the backing of the media conglomerates. And you wont get that unless you sell your soul, and give up on your naive democratic ideals.
or more, to name only a few things you can do.
without representatives who are legally compelled to count my vote it won't be democracy rega
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Whoops, sorry about that.