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New Nuclear Power Plants in the next 5 years
Guinnessy writes "As oil, coal, and gas become increasingly expensive, energy utilities take another look at nuclear power. The nuclear reactor builders are jostling for business as more than 26 plants may be ordered or constructed over the next five years in Canada, China, several European Union countries, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. Companies in the US and UK may order an additional 15 new reactors. Physics Today magazine has a global roundup of the new plants on construction, and how the builders are getting around some of the potential road blocks in their path. I'm sure many slashdot readers would be surprised to know that some new plants will be coming online so soon."
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We will soon enough run into the same problems with nuclear power that we're running into with coal power. Such plants still consume very finite, non-renewable resources, and produce a significant amount of pollution.
While economics may dictate that we head towards nuclear power before wind, solar or hydro power, for instance, we should really be skipping ahead. Putting more research towards power generation from renewable resources may in the end prove to be a far better investment.
It is likely that we will see nations like Denmark and Canada, which have put significant resources towards wind, hydro, solar, tidal, and other renewable energy sources, surge ahead in the long run. Nations that have put their efforts behind nuclear power will find themselves in the same boat as we are in today with coal, oil and natural gas power plants.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Have we learned nothing in the last 50 years? The future lies in De-Centralized power generation and distribution, not in centralized nuclear reactors.
There have been a lot of projections on when we'll finally run out of petroleum, how about the various materials used to provide nuclear power? How much longer will it last?
Err...if you're patient.
Given our dismal level of overall education I doubt it would be long before some random neighborhood in the US would be visible from space. I know one of these is proposed for construction here in Georgia, and somehow the idea of "rural south" and "nuclear power plant" in the same sentence worries me.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Here's a fun fact - who knew that coal produces more nuclear waste than a nuclear power plant? By a lot. Not to mention the mecury and other heavy metals and by-products of coal. Go NUKES! And I would like to be Mr. Burns if I may... excellent...
It would seem that jumping headlong into Nuclear energy will get us into BIG problems with Nuclear waste. Where would we put it? I mean yes we can burry it down a mine shaft and guard it 24/7, but eventually we would need to create more and more spaces to put that shit, and it doesn't NOT go away anytime soon (can anyone say 10,000 years?).
Yeah, they probably want nukes too, but given we contained Mao and Stalin, who had a lot more of them and hated us as much for our "bourgeois capitalism", as the Iranians do for being the "Great Satan", it's not a big deal.
...down the line, hydrogen is the way to go -- maybe fuel cells. There's just so much energy available in what is the most available substance in the universe that the better we get at working with it the better off we are.
Ideally, I'd like to see home or neighborhood sized power generation. This would DRASTICALLY reduce the total amount needed due to loss in transmission lines. I read somewhere that this nears 50% of what's generated.
Since the "waste" of a fuel cell running on hydrogen is heat and water, wouldn't it be great to water the garden with that waste product, and perhaps cool the fuel cell using a heat transfer coil that used that heated water to warm the pool, or pre-warm that hot water for the house? Obviously its not perfect and you'd probably generate less heat than you need overall -- but every bit counts, right?
I've wanted to do this with a home air conditioner for a long time. Why not cool the condenser with water using a heat exchanger and dump that heat to the pool?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I am perfectly comfortable with nuclear power. Give me decent lease payments and I'll let you build a reactor in my back yard. (I want free electric in addition to the lease payments.)
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
This doens't have to end badly for the planet.
Pebble Bed reactors are the future: they are supposed to be safe, cheap and modular. They'll be mass-produced, and allow cities or factories to power themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
what few people know: nuclear raw material limited too...
i just recently heard about the news, that our raw materials (uranium) for nuclear power plants also only lasts like 25 to 30 years into the future at the present rate of poweroutput in the plants. when building more/new plants, this will even reduce to fewer years.
and there is definitely no more raw material on our planet than what the scientist found so far which they estimate to similar short periods of time as oil
now this struck me completely by surprise since i never thought about uranium also becoming scarce so far. and only shortly therafter (european) media also talked about this issue...
so arent we all pretty short sighted to build now even more plants for as little as some 30years or something, and what will we do thereafter.
this wont solve our energy problems at all, not even in the mid-term range, but the big disadvantage that nuclear energy always means is the big problem with the waste, that stays around for some million or even billion years into the future and thats a very long time.
even if you can handle nuclear power plants much better than for example the problematic ones like chernobyl and harrisburg, are you people actually sure that mankind can keep the waste for some million or billion years safe and sound?
besides, like i said, we will only gain like 20 or 30 years, and without need and pressure the industry will never develop new energy means and better efficiency, or save power and resources, use more natural/renewable energies or build better engines and so forth...
besids the big problem with oil shortage is, that even with nuclear power or stuff like that, you cant drive around some normal trucks, busses or some heavy-duty transport stuff like caterpillars, and so forth....
so we definitey also need something in exchange for oil. solar panels for big consumers like trucks, planes or stuff like that wont be any good. and if oil runs out, how you gonne fly around in planes, or transport all that electronic shit from asia to the rest of the planet.....
With the fossil fuels we use now burning away the ozone layer, I'm sure solar power has never been more feasable.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
I work for one of the agencies in the NuStart alliance, and the Alabama reactor is looking promising... they're going for a whole new, safer approach, and hope to have it operational by 2014...
Nuclear waste is scary, but it is very possible that the CO2 released by burning oil is more dangerous. Global warming is at a minimum decently probable, and at the very least our CO2 production is significantly affecting our atmosphere in ways that will take a long time to understand. The only difference is that unlike the atmosphere, which is inconceivably large and complex, we can wrap our heads around the idea of nuclear waste, so it seems scarier. Chernobyl is much more dramatic than melting Antarctic icecaps, but he latter is probably more serious.
I'm rather old. While I'm not yet a centenarian, let me tell you, 100 years isn't a very long time. Depending on medical advances, my grandchildren may be alive in 100 years. My great-grandchildren likely will be alive then, as well. I wouldn't want to leave them with the same problems we're dealing with today. That is why we need to think further than we currently are thinking.
We know there are renewable resources out there, and in many places they are abundant. Talk about mining material from extraterrestrial sources all you want. There's no need to do that when all we need is already available to us. All we need to do is put slightly more resources towards learning how to efficiently tap those resources, and we won't have to worry about mining for coal, or drilling for oil, or disposing of nuclear waste.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm really sick and tired of breathing heavy inversion air every winter, hydro-chloric acid in our acid rain. With those and the coal plant shut down, maybe my chronic breathing problems would lessen. It sure would make it easier to breath when I exercise too!
Nah, people will just blame that I'm fat on being lazy, it's not like there could be other contributing factors.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Nuclear power = genocide of all life forms a kilometer under Nevada's mountains.
First they came for the anaerobic bacteria, and I said nothing because I was not an anaerobic bacteria . . .
--Ryv
Before we build one more plant, we need to do what other countries who use a lot of nuclear power - design every plant the same so the entire nuclear work force can easily move between plants and to new plants. The current American way - redesign the plant every single time - it not smart or efficient. Didn't we learn this during the colonial times with making muskettes? Hello?
That being said, we need a lot of nuclear power. We have the technology to control it, we have the smart people to maintain it. All we need now are death sentances for contractors who attempt shoddy work, supervisors who place safety after work shifts, and CEOs who place profits ahead of all else.
Oh, and we need to make sure these plants are built in weather neutral states. No tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc etc etc.
Coal is not the answer. Look at all those dead lakes in Canada. Anyone taken a look at the acidity levels of rain in the New England states? It measures up there with tomato sauce.
Wind and hydro - not enough to meet our insatiable demands. They can contribute to it, but they can't pull all the weight. Oil - forget it - it's going to run out or become more expensive that other means of producing power sooner rather than later. While I'm sure there will be future technologies we will be able to utilize, we need nuclear power now to fill in the gap.
For anyone concerned about radiation, check some numbers over at DOE. Plant workers can receive no more that 300 milirads of exposure before the red flags go up. A single flight from Tokyo to New York takes you high enough up in the atmosphere to expose to you 900 milirads.
Unfortunately, free hydrogen is not abundant enough on Earth to be a true solution to our energy problems. There's a massive amount of hydrogen on earth, but it's all chemically bound to oxygen (think ocean water). Separating hydrogen from oxygen is possible, but it takes almost as much (or maybe more) energy to separate it from oxygen than you get from burning it. At best, hydrogen is a energy storage medium (think nuke plants creating the energy necessary to create hydrogen from water, and then that hydrogen being used in your car).
The reason for the powerlines extending so far is the economies of scale, and people do not want powerplants in their back yards. One large plant with a large transmission grid using high voltage-low amperage lines with voltage reduction substations is much more efficient in the number of people needed to maintain and run the plant and grid versus many small power plants, and the transmission lines are not as high maintenance compared to manning those many little powerplants.
It's about time. I agree that nuclear waste is currently a very real problem. However, I believe in the ingenuity of people and am confident that in the next 100 years we will have solced the nuclear waste issue. Just look how far we have come in technologically in the past 100 years. People think that this is a strange sentiment coming from me because I am an environmental scientist and am as liberal as they come. We need to reduce our CO2 output and wean ourselves off of petroleum and nuclear energy is currently our best bet. Hydrological power is clean but is an environmental disaster. Wind power shows some promise but is associated with bird and bat kills and can never scale up to meet our energy consumption. Solar is great for small energy requirements but scaling up requires hectares of land and is currently inneficient. Nuclear is the way to go for the time being. Temporarilly store the waste for a couple of hundred years until our technology develops to deal with it.
Hydrogen is not a source of energy; it is way of storing energy or moving it around. (We don't have any hydrogen, except what we have made. To get more, you need to make more, which takes at least as much energy as you get from burning it.)
In addition to a lot of oil and gas, Alberta has a lot of clean coal.
I don't see the problem with putting nuclear waste in deep mine shafts in precambrian rock and then topping the shafts off with a few hundred feed of concrete.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Dude - where does the energy come from? Hydrogen isn't an energy source. It has to be produced somehow (from the water...) requiring more energy than you can liberate. You still then need power plants powered by something - gas? wind? What?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
There isn't any energy whatsoever in hydrogen per se, unless you're talking about a fusion process. The hydrogen around here is all locked up in water etc, so you can store energy in with it by separating the hydrogen out, but the enrgy you store still has to come from somewhere. The point of nuclear is that it doesn't suffer the obvious limitations of sources like wind and solar. If we move to a hydrogen economy, much of the hydrogen will be produced using nuclear power, at least until we get fusion working.
Oh no... it's the future.
I'm down with the pebble bed designs and all that, but last I checked nuclear reactors take a decade to plan and build, and ... we don't have a decade.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Too bad California will never allow one, seeing we're run by a bunch of fat, short-haired, middle-aged white women
I'm convinced the sheeple out here would vote 80% to 20% for the "Golden Beaches Environment Protection Act", even if it was actually a 2 Trillion dollar bond to exterminate all white men.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
i wouldnt really include Iran in the list of countries making nuclear plants for energy. From what i can see, they seem to be doing it for the power. Well, either that or to wipe jews "off the map"..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Thorium is at least as 3x as abundant as uranium and can be used in a breeder reactor to create nuclear fuel. Also, plutonium, as a by product of fission reactions, can be used as a nuclear fuel. Just look to Japan for an example.
Considering that ice ages tend to disrupt hydro power generation and occur rather more frequently than once every hundred thousand years, I'd say that nuclear power is less finite than hydro power.
um...how many ice ages have we had in the last 100 years?
In a de-centralized system, who pays for the infrastructure? The Government? Sounds to me like a subsidy program, really.
Yes, but where would you get the "most abundant substance in the universe" considering that most of the terrestreal sources of it are either fossil fuels or water?
:P
You might as well try burning smog.
Gentoo Sucks
The article was very disappointing because I didn't see any mention of the pyrometalurgical reprocessing and fast reactor design that would allow much more efficient use of the nuclear fuel. Current reactor designs and pebble bed only use about 3-5% of the Uranium (the U235 in the enriched Uranium), whereas the reprocessing method I mentioned above uses nearly all the heavy metals (actinydes) from Americium to Plutonium, including the Uranium 235 and U238.
There's a really good article (only a preview available) at Scientific American which explains the pyrometalurgical process and the fast reactors that allow this.
On the other hand, the reactors mentioned in the article won't hurt anything if the reactors I'm talking about get built later. They can supposedly burn up the nuclear waste from existing reactors.
Enough of the "short term" benefits that add gloss to the decision maker's short term in office. we need long term solutions. Renewable is the way to go.
We have to look at the different types of Nuclear waste as well. There are two different types. The first type requires short-term storage. The low level radioactive waste consist of Cooling water pipes, radiation suits, reactor parts. These things, and mind you there's going to be a mass influx of them in the next few years as the operating liscenses are set to expire on several plants, are required to be stored for approximatly 10-50 years before they decay to a normally-disposable level. Now on the other side, you have the actual nuclear pellets. These things as we all know take well over 5 thousand years to decay. So what do we plan to do with these things again? I doubt anyone will notice if we dump it in the ocean again. *Whistles*
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
Unlike many today, I recall very well the 1950s, when we heard the very same thing about nuclear technology of that era. We were told that they'd have the very attributes you just listed: they'd be safe, cheap, mass-produceable, decentralized. Of course, such claims failed horribly when faced with reality. The systems did work to some extent, but they never lived up to the original hype surrounding them.
I have little reason to believe that we're not seeing the same thing, 50 or 60 years later. We hear about how great all these technologies are, but then once implemented they hit the various snags that are present in the real world. And then perform nowhere near as well as they were originally claimed capable of.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Hydrogen fuel cells won't get us unhooked from oil. Among the various easy ways to acquire hydrogen is from petroleum. Why do you think Bush is so gung-ho for it?
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Not my front yard, but on my personal land... where I will eventually also build my home. Currently I have it staked out, but it'll take me another year of saving up to buy it cash down... right now I've slapped cash down for the man to hold it :)
~D
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Given our dismal level of overall education I doubt it would be long before some random neighborhood in the US would be visible from space.
... and somehow the idea of "rural south" and "nuclear power plant" in the same sentence worries me.
The only education that is really relevant is that of the gifted, the rest of the populace is merely trained.
Clueless.
...down the line, hydrogen is the way to go -- maybe fuel cells. There's just so much energy available in what is the most available substance in the universe that the better we get at working with it the better off we are.
Since you say fuel cells I can only assume you don't mean fusion. You must be really confused because hydrogen for fuel cells is an energy transport medium, not a source; there isn't an abundant supply of elemental hydrogen (H_2) on Earth (or are you talking about harvesting from gas giant planets? what about the oxygen?).
There is an abundant supply of fissionable material, thus fission can be considered a source. There is an abundant supply of sunlight, so solar power can be considered a source (although at ~ 1000 W/m^2 we'd consume too much land area using only solar). There is an abundant supply of deuterium so fusion, if technically feasable in the future, could be considered a source.
You are talking about transport mediums. Electricity is a primary medium for much of our energy consumption. Hydrocarbons (oil, coal, & natural gas) act as both a source (because we've found a lot of them) as well as a transport medium. But since as a source it is finite on a human life timescale, we need alternatives.
And think of all the fish that would float up on the river - whoo hoo!
Nuclear power plants are a reasonable option, if we can do two things:
a) Depoliticize the running of them - the first thing that suffers when politics overtakes reality is safety, as NASA is a perfect illustration of. Having a good, long-term safety policy built into an organization isn't something that can be done overnight, and building an agency to replace the DOE is impossible in the current polarized political environment.
b) Figure out how to prevent proliferation of high-grade fissionable materals; the technology for generating and seperating such is inherent with breeder reactors, if I understand them correctly.
Both of the above are certainly technically possible; but with our current disdain for effective governmental organizations, I think it unlikely we will achieve the above soon.
So, nuclear plants will work, and be built, but I wonder how they will be built. Slowly, carefully and sited & managed rationally? Or be built hurriedly, in a panic to dampen swings in energy prices, with no coherent oversight, policy or judgement?
If it is the latter, we will have our own Chernobyl in time.
FTFA:
US Congress 2005 energy bill, tax credits worth $3.1 billion, along with liability protection and compensation for legislative delay
In other words, without subsidies and special protections (the likes of which I wish I had) nuclear power is not economically feasible.
I find it disgusting as well that one of the reasons nuclear has to be subsidized is due to huge subsidies to oil and coal industries.
Basically it just a way for special interests to stuff their snouts deeper into the public trough. And this is not factoring in disposal of waste or cost of eventual decommisioning (some of the info i read on decommishing was that it costs at least as much as building a plant). And nuclear electric rates always seem to be the most expensive where there are many nukes (at least where I have lived in the US).
I have 2 ideas:
1) susidize research into alternative energy at least as much as older forms -or-
2) slash all subsidies and just let market forces play themselves out.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The Shearon Harris plant has been selected by Progress Energy for their proposed new reactor -- a Westinghouse AP-1000.
Morningstar news report
This will be the second reactor on this site. The existing one was the last commercial nuclear reactor certified for operation in the US after the 3 Mile Island accident.
Because the new rector is more powerful than the one built in the 1980's, they may have to increase the depth of Harris Lake to provide additional cooling water capacity. Which would suck, as the area where I go mountain biking would be under water. But better that than rolling blackouts.
Chip H.
Whats the alternative?
... if you have ever seen a true northern river you would understand ... standing 10 feet from shore is enough to make you tremble in fear ... the rivers feeding James Bay are enormous and violent ... the flow rate is enormous ... hyrdo projects have already created resevoirs the size of the great lakes ... just look at the map of northern quebec ...
... but given moral conisderation and proper respect I think it's the worlds only ethical option! We have to chance it ...
Wow!
The alternative is not necessarily "clean coal" we can always dam Canadian rivers and flooding out native reserves for petty exchanges to compromise there life style
Nuclear is risky science
ps my understanding is windfarms are just not ready and will not be!
I think you will need nuclear plants to generate the power needed to crack the water to get to the hydrogen.
Hydrogen is simply a means of storing energy...There is very little H2 occuuring naturally on our planet, so it must be produced (most likely by the electrolysis of water), which will need a lot of energy..(I believe there is quite a bit of energy loss in the process)...
The energy to produce H2 could come from wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro, or nuclear, but the source will have to be scalable, which currently leaves nuclear..
The amount of waste per watt from a nuclear plant is incredibally small, compared to fossil fuel plants, and nuclear plants release no waste products into the general atmosphere (they keep it all contained) - in fact a typical coal plant releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere than a nuclear plant.
I know South Africa was going to start using PBMRs to generate electricity, and the heat would be used for de-salanination to produce drinking water...If theis were done on a large scale, the excess electricity could be used for H2 production
Wind power is more widely available than nuclear power, cheaper, and better for the environment as well; yet, for who knows what reason, we're build nuclear power plants!
Anyone got the going odds on which nation will meltdown first?
Judging by the articles in the newspaper I would guess Iran is headed for a melt down fairly soon.....
20 Billion to one your coal plant will catch fire first. :P
Hint: The laws of thermodynamics still apply. You need more energy to break up an H2O molecule than you would gain by burning H in the presence of O.
but it takes almost as much (or maybe more) energy to separate it from oxygen than you get from burning it.
It quite definately takes more - first law of thermodynamics. Of course the old page and replace it with the article that the government is somehow unified under the microscope?
Ripping the water apart, you get:
2.H2O + Energy -> 2.H2 + O2
Burning the hydrogen, you get:
2H2 + O2 -> 2.H2O + Energy
It would be the same amount of energy out as in if you could make the processes 100% efficient, but the second law of thermodynamics effectively says that you can't get both of those processes to run at 100%. But when you watch the Director's Cut on the internet is simply a meta-effect of the word, of course.
Honestly, why such focus on nuclear fission when nuclear fusion is so close to being achieved? The only thing stopping the next nuclear fusion prototype from being built is a disagreement between France and CHina as to where to build the reactor. Building fusion would greatly reduce the non-renewable energy consumption rate.
I find that although many people are liberal in beliefs, they are conservative in actions.
A lot depends on whether the designs are standardized or one-off. Then, for good or ill, building anything in the US will cost you a decade dealing with lawyers, and that's where the time usually goes.
Nuclear fuels are only limited because the reactors currently in use are old and very wasteful. They only consume U-235, which is relatively rare. Breeder reactors take U-238 and Thorium, which is much more abundant, and convert it into fissionable fuel. You get more fuel out of the reactor than what you put into it! (This does not violate the laws of thermodynamics because the energy released by fission is much greater than the energy required to make stable isotopes unstable.) Using this technology with fuel reprocessing (taking what we currently throw away as "waste" and making it suitable for use again as fuel), our supply of nuclear fuel is practically unlimited, and the waste produced is greatly reduced in both radioactive energy and quantity. I've read that a thousand-megawatt reactor of this type running for a year produces a mere cubic meter of waste material. That's not very much.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
The Soviet Union (1986)
Umm... Hydrogen fuel cells, for primary power? Not going to happen.
The problem is that you need H2 to get power. There are insignificant amounts of this on earth. It's all tied up in compounds such as H2O, CH4(methane), and such.
So you're looking at having to crack it from CH4(producing just as much carbon and less power than simply burning it), or seperating it from H20, and that pesky 2nd law of thermodynamics. You loose power from cracking water to simply turn it back into water in a fuel cell.
Hydrogen fusion, maybe. When you're going to fuse the atoms, the energy needed to electrolyse some water isn't beans. Hydrogen fuel cells for cars, maybe. That's more like using hydrogen as a storage medium, a kind of refillable battery, for the electricity from a big generation plant(like a nuclear fission or fusion reactor).
I don't read AC A human right
Welcome our new lease paying nuclear reactor overlords.
Please, do some research before spouting off.
Problem of H2 generation: solved.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Specifically, three to five feet thick, typically, and able to withstand the impact of a passenger jetliner.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Why the F?ck isn't the US building these??
The problem with pebble bed reactors is that it is not economical to reuse the fuel. Read about the reactor built in Germany which was for the purpose of breeding U233 from Th232.
The result of this is that while they are "safe, cheap, and modular" they will not efficiently burn the fuel we have, resulting in running out of uranium about 2 orders of magnitude sooner than we would if you run standard breeder reactors or reprocess fuel. Oh, and you haven't convinced me that new designs are not safe, the electricity that they produce not cheap, or that modular is necessarily a good thing.
neocons will likely detoante one just to blame it on "those damn Eigh-Rabs"... yep... they just need lots of them.
I hope that's a joke, but I'll be honest, I can't tell.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I'm not sure how certain Peak Oil is, but its clear that over the next 20 years there is going to be a significant energy crisis. I believe in the long term future of distributed renewable energy, however its unknown whether these technologies can scale fast enough to fill the near-term gap. In terms of energy "availability", nuclear is a known technology and has a lower risk of failing to provide the required energy. Environmental risk is a different topic, but new technologies like pebble bed reactors look promising.
Fuel sources only need to last 100 years. With the increasing rate of technological advance, in 100 years, the options available for renewable energy generation will far advanced. However we need to survive the 20-30 years.
First of all, a nuclear plant, as made in Western Europe, the US, Japan and most of them everywhere else have someting called a Containment Dome.
n t_or_attack
While the Chernobyl accident caused great negative health, economic, environmental and psychological effects in a widespread area, the accident at Chernobyl was caused by a combination of the faulty RBMK reactor design, the lack of a containment building, poorly trained operators, and a non-existent safety culture. The RBMK design, unlike nearly all designs used in the Western world, featured a positive void coefficient, meaning that a malfunction could result in ever-increasing generation of heat and radiation until the reactor was breached.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Accide
RBMK is an acronym for the Russian reaktor bolshoy moshchnosti kanalniy which means "reactor (of) large power (of the) channel (type)", and describes a now-obsolete class of nuclear power reactor which was built only in the Soviet Union.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
"In September 2005, a report by the Chernobyl Forum, comprising a number of agencies including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, UN bodies and the Governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, put the total predicted number of deaths due to the accident at 4,000. This predicted death toll includes the fifty workers who died of acute radiation syndrome as a direct result of radiation from the disaster, nine children who died from thyroid cancer and an estimated 3,940 people who could die from cancer as a result of exposure to radiation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_accident
Not that much of Asia or Europe were "fucked" by Chernobyl.
Linux is STILL for fags.
Such as legislature to add solar panals to the roofs of homes? That alone will take in excess of 70% of home power use off the grid (per home) in a mild climate. Sure we'd still need power plants but the huge drop in power usage would make a very very large impact on our overall need for power.
and requires only a will. Microgeneration coupled with renewable energy sources including hydro, wind and wave power could go a long way to limiting our dependence on fossil fuels. It doesn't matter how good nuclear power is in theory. Its always been good in theory. In practice, governments can't afford to do nuclear themselves and the private sector has shown time and time again that they are not responsible enough. Thats why they've been so quiet for the past few years. They've been waiting for everyone to forget and look what has happened, its working. Otherwise intelligent people are now seriously considering giving them another shot. If anywhere near the same amount of money had been spent on renewable energy sources as has been spent on nuclear research, we would be living in a pristine environment without the constant threat of war and without having already damned our children to a fucked up world climate. If the geeks here want to jerk off about nuclear fusion then can they please do it in their own bedrooms with the doors locked. Don't pretend you're making serious suggestions for our future energy policy.
There's just so much energy available in what is the most available substance in the universe
Bravo, that's the subtlest troll I've seen in a long time! Off to get the marshmellows.
1) First off, Chernobyl exploded because of idiocy in the Ukraine. You do not conduct an experiment on a nuclear power plant and turn all the safeties off. That is asking for trouble. However, NO FALLOUT WAS EVER RELEASED FROM THE FACILITY. The facility was 100% lost, but everyone was safe that was not inside the plant.
Um... NO . Not only no, but hell fucking no, you're wrong. You're probably thinking about Three Mile Island. How this shit got modded up, I'll never know. That half-assed link of yours also glossed over Chernobyl, which was actually a quite major event. I'm not saying nuke plants aren't much, much better than Chernobyl was, but we need to be continually cognizant of the dangers inherent in things like nuclear power. That being said, the greater the risk, often the greater the reward. We just need to make sure the risk is managed.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
...the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ordered inspections of all nuclear plants in Illinois (11, the most of any U.S. state) following an "emergency" at an an Exelon-owned plant on Monday along with several tritium leaks at more than one plant in past months. Of course, Exelon's flacks downplay the chances of public danger in all these cases.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
All we need now are death sentances for contractors who attempt shoddy work, supervisors who place safety after work shifts, and CEOs who place profits ahead of all else.
Do you really believe every safety breach is due to negligence? No matter how severe the punishment, people will always make mistakes. With only 2 major accidents, fission reactors have a remarkably clean record. Would any punishment be enough to improve that with future reactors?
The problem is iodine.
Radioactive iodine has a half-life measured in the millions of years, and the stuff can have nasty effects on the thyroid gland, where it gets concentrated once ingested. It is very difficult to find rock formations which will remain stable on that kind of time-frame.
Of course, there are still probably many places we could safely stick the radioactive waste, but the BANANA principle (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) will always make such sites a very difficult sell for politicians.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
In the USA, nuclear "fuel" is used only once. In March 1977 President Jimmy Carter used a Presidential Directive to block the commercial reprocessing of nuclear fuel for plutonium, blocking "breeder reactor" technology. That can change at the stroke of a pen. If the Earth needs more fissionables there are plenty in metallic asteroids. Or at least a lot more than we already have and probably enough for us to figure out how to power the next million years.
You might not want to work at it all your life, but a year or two of work in the nuclear field could easily pay for a Harvard education or two, grad school, and a nice car.
According to this page, by Prof. Bernard Cohen, burning coal (the primary source of electrical power) is responsible for around 10,000 deaths per year. You would need to have an average of 25 meltdowns a year for nuclear power to kill as many people.
No doubt that we should move to alternative energy. But one of the issues that our current situation should be showing is that any nation that depends on just one source runs great risk. Jimmy Carter (and somewhat Nixon) realized this and tried to move us to alternative in a quick fashion. Of course, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and the current Bush all ignored the long-term peril to our nation. Even now, GWB says to go with alternative, yet has cut NREL budget by 50% over the last 5 years and now has the US gov. spending more on Oil research for the big players (increased again that last year, while NREL was cut originally 20%; but rolled back to 10%).
Yes, we should push alternative. But we should also push Nukes as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What happens with all the nuclear waste? I say this problem will come up in 100 years just like everything else right? Space waste, global warming(incl. deforestation, carbon dioxide), those things that eat the ozone, and all the other crap that we just can't seem to plan ahead for but it's so obvious every time. hmph, humans....
Energy is the key to the world, since the cost of anything eventually boils down to energy. Want to fly from America to Europe? Gotta pay for the fuel. Want to buy a computer? Gotta pay to transport that computer, have to pay for the energy to mine the raw materials and run the factories.
Energy ultimately determines how much things cost and how easy it is to make things, so the cheaper it is the better.
"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk." - Ronald Reagan
Nuclear waste can now be reused like someone above said, for thousands of years on end. Is there a danger with nuclear power? Yes, however, due to technology we are able to successfully harness the power of nuclear energy with minimal to none side effects.
Also, in terms of wind and hydro, lots of crazy enviro freaks are against THAT now cause they harm birds and fish....
The subject says it all.
a bunch of people said it already, but parent put it so clearly.
Are we talking pebble bed reactors? What about Magnetohydrodynamic generators? No? Guess what, we're talking about standard heavy water or light water reactors, like the one at Three Mile Island, the only type Brown and Root has ever built, because it's "proven" technology. It's proven, all right.
I happen to think the we do need more nuclear reactors, just not the kind Haliburton builds.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
If you think about it you will soon come to the conclusion that there are only two sources of energy readily used on the earth, nuclear and geo-thermal. It's just that the largest reactor is the sun. Fossil, solar, wind and hyrdo are all nuclear at their heart. So in a sense a nuclear power plant is just cutting out the middle steps of storage. I know there are lots of differences like fission and fusion, but in the not so distant future that might disapear also.
Just a thought.
Hydro: Ruins the ecosystem in the entire river by deprivig it of water, changing temperatures, and destabilizing water levels in lakes.
Fossil: Significant atmospheric sideeffects such as greenhouse, pollution etc.
Nuclear: Even worst case scenarios have little impact on ecosystems. Longitudinal studies of rodents living in areas with radioactive waste, such as Hanford shows degenerative metations in a very small percentage. Mice populations appears just fine after hundreds of generations with high lifetime radiation.
Of course, a meltdown near a big city can be devastating. The alternative however appears to be:
1. A healty diverse ecosystem and nuclear power, or
2. Hydro and fossil fuel and a ruined earth.
"Fix it"
I'm pretty much for nuclear power at this point in our history. However I have to wonder why the government needed to provide the industry with liability protection. Especially when the reactors are so safe. Surely the only outcome of that sort of law is to reduce the safety of plants.
Either you're a troll or you are ignorant of a great human suffering. Why did thyroid cancers increased dramatically if there was no fallout? http://www.belarusembassy.org/humanitarian/rtc.htm
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Features/Chernobyl- 15/cherno-faq.shtml
...not surprised, just pleased.
Is it possible to dispose of potential nuclear waste down a volcano? Would the magma burn the radioactive waste into non existance or we all perish as a result?
- High-density energy storage for vehicles. (hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water... sucks. Ethanol produced by using hydrocarbon-sourced fertilizer to raise and ferment corn... sucks only marginally less.)
- Plastics and other hydrocarbon products. (which are a real bitch to synthesize from nothing but the hydrogen half of electrolyzed water, and, umm... coal.)
> I'll use oil as an example. ... ]
>[
> Certain fields almost spit it out, and then you have things like oil shale, where you have to really work at it. So it might cost $2 a barrel to extract from a Saudi Oil field, while it costs $60 a barrel to extract from Canada's oil shale fields.
Nitpick: Canada's tar sands aren't the same as the US's shale fields. (Don't feel bad - the confusion arises because they both require massive energy input to extract or refine useful oils - hence, both have about a $60/bbl cost.)
But the nitpick doesn't matter. The original poster's essentially correct: if you want to get oil out of these icky, high-energy-cost sources, you need to put energy in. The interesting big? That energy is usually in the form of heat, and that heat is usually in the form of steam used as part of the production process.
So the poster's very much on the right track, but hasn't carried his own argument to its proper conclusion. That "$60/bbl" figure he cites is basically correct, but the "OMGWTFBBQ you burn more than a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil out of the ground OMG peak oilz!" conclusion that many clueless n00bs draw from it is based on the assumption you're burning oil to extact tar sands and/or shale oil.
The short version (for Republicans): Build a nuke on the site of the tar sands. By 2010, North America can tell the fucking ragheads - shit, we can tell the rest of the world to quite literally, "go pound sand".
Amendment (for Democrats): "Tell the fucking ragheads to go pound sand" is merely "Stop interfering in their culture" translated into Republican. Republicans and Democrats are asking for the same thing, just using different words. :)
OK - the long version (for Engineers): Build a nuclear power plant on the site of the tar sands (or a shale oil deposit). Atomic pile superheats water into which nasty stuff might leak in the event of catastrophic failure. Potentially-nasty water passes through heat exchanger, superheats clean water.
Instead of using that power to boil water and run a bunch of lossy steam turbines hooked up to lossy generators, to generate the electricity (another huge proportion of which is lost in the thousands of miles of transmission lines), you use the nuke to generate the steam you use to extract the oil.
I'll bet a breeder reactor on either a tar sands deposit or an oil shale deposit could cut that $60/bbl cost in half.
> It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey. This would translat to a few more cents per kw/hour of electricity. Fuel for a nuclear plant is actually one of the smallest expenses. Labor is the largest. Going with breeder reactors would, of course reduce the fuel cost.
YES! (Thank you!)
And that leads me to the final version - for the people who matter - the financiers: You finance the whole thing by short selling a metric assload of 2010 oil futures at ~$50-60/bbl, and by buying a similarly-sized assload of uranium futures as, umm, I'm too lazy to look up a quote.
You use $10/bbl of what you sold your 2010 oil to buy enough US lobbysists to buy enough Congressmen to pass a law that scraps all regulation and authorizes construction of your nuke plant atop the shale fields (or enough Members of Parliament to authorize construction of the same plant in Alberta's tar sands
Hmmm... what's the alternative... what's the alternative... hmmm... how about conservation?
How about the a multi-pronged approach? Save a good fraction of the energy we currently use, and supplement existing production with a variety of more responsible alternatives?
Continue to pour money into fusion development, and eventually we'll get this problem licked. We do have to survive long enough, though.
-Greg
One of the biggest FUDs of the XX-iest century -- "nuclear reactors are inherently dirty".
The truth is that the coal power plant throws more radioactive material into the environment per unit of produced power, then you'll find contained in the solid concentrated nuclear waste from the properly operated nuclear power plant. When I said "properly operated" I meant reactors operated by sane and rule-oriented people who do not switch off safety dead-switches in order to experiment with a with the exiting "toy" they control (yes, I do refer to power plant operators).
What do you think volcanoes are best known for doing? Yeah, I want radioactivity shooting up several KM into the atmosphere and falling everywhere
When I was working in 3D animation, one of my clients was Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago electric company. ComEd's plants were mostly nukes. I loved working for them, because most of the work I did was to explain concepts. Anyway...
They have a project called "Northwind". It consists of two 5 story tall buildings in downtown Chicago (eventually four) that, during the summer months, make ice all night long. During the day, the ice melts and the 33 degree water travels through pipes to subscribers to air-condition buildings. This allows client buildings to avoid wasting floors on their own chillers and avoid using electricity during the day for air-conditioning. ComEd can even out the demand for power and avoid building additional plants for a while.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Nuclear is risky science ...
I'll dispute that.
Nuclear Power Safer Than Peanut Butter
Even including chernobyl, nuclear power is safer per kilowatt/hour than any other source(except maybe hydro).
I mean, you have to be a total idiot in not following procedures to get yourself killed even in reprocessing operations.
I don't read AC A human right
Net gain: not much.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Asthma and exercise have a negative reinforcement cycle. It's possible to break it, but it ain't easy. Any chance you could move to a place w/ better air quality?
[o]_O
which group of nations or single nation gets to dictate to all the other nations who can own nuclear power, inclduing buying the uranium, processing it, storing it, using it? If you notice, even today it's a small handful of nations, and most of them aren't even stable politicaly, and some are pretty scary places. Where do you draw the line? Who gets to dictate matters with nukes? And why? And for how long? And suppose some nation not on the approved list decides they want nuclear power? Do you invade them, embargo them? Suppose nations a,b,c think nation d should have nukes, but x,y,z say no? Look around the headlines now, it's already controversial, and it might lead to some pretty heinous wars, and soon, too. that's some "fallout" from nuclear power, even PLANNING on having nuclear power is controversial for most of the planet.
Now, look at the alternatives, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, biofuels, algae to hydrogen, all sorts ofnew stuff, etc. Who cares if abc or xyz develops solar? Or puts in wind towers by the thousand? Or develops some advanced cellulosic power supply?
Concentrating on "watts potential by the ton" isn't the ONLY criteria for being for or against nuclear power. A lot of people who AREN'T luddites are perfectly aware of the process that uses fusion to generate vast amounts of heat. Big deal. The "other stuff" that goes along with that make it a bad idea. Nuclear power is an offshot of the weapons industry, that's where it came from. Those weapons are now easy enough to make that there's a huge controversy over any nuclear tech, I mean, like I said, check headlines. Right now the nuclear club is half a dozen, another half suspected or could be there in short order. Within 20 years it could be dozens and dozens of nations, especially if the industry gets much larger. Both the US and UK have "lost" plutonium, and no idea AT ALL what happened inside the old warsaw pact. there could be several "lost" devices out there now, crap or not, the insides might still be "useful" for political point making purposes.
Where's your guarantee, where are the credible oversights, where is geopolitical reality and human nature observations here? have people lost sight that a slew of nations seem to always wind up with megalomaniacs in charge? Even so called western civilized nations seem to generate some serious nutcases, places that already have advanced nuke tech.
Now, show me the guarantee anywhere that all of a sudden the human race is going to just give up war in general terms in the next 20 years. Show me that guarantee, I'll think it might be useful. Until then, I think it's better to stick the genie back in the bottle as much as possible and spend those HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS on developing alternative cleaner and more renewable tech.
The why is that when Australia refused to extend subsidies that all the wind projects canceled?
And where do you mean "No more tax cuts?" There's alot of areas in the world with differing laws.
Nukes: such as ignoring a number of the environmental issues
What enviromental issues? Other than making sure that the waste doesn't get into the enviroment, and that feedwater isn't released too much hotter than what it was coming in?
I don't read AC A human right
Bush is gung-ho for hydrogen because it's a drawing-board technology. In all likelihood it will stay on the drawing board forever, even after all the major technical hurdles of safely storing, transferring, and combusting hydrogen have been solved.
Why? Simple: no-one will buy the cars until there are enough hydrogen stations to make them practical, and no-one will put up the money to build thousands of ultra-expensive hydrogen stations when there are next to no cars to use them. There simply is no way to achieve a nice smooth transition (unlike, say, gas-electric hybrid cars, which would provide a beautifully logical and economical transition to an electric-car infrastructure.)
Procrastination Man strikes again!
I used to work as an intern at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. They had some sort of big meeting and outside the conference hall they had different displays from different countries. The most bizarre thing I saw was a video of some guy in the Philippines driving around a forklift with barrels filled with cement and with a yellow "nuclear" sign attached. Oh, and they had Kenny G. saxophone music playing in the background. That was one of the most random things I had ever seen.
Coal has enough problems without making things up. Paticularly in the USA sulphur oxides are a problem, and NOx are a problem everywhere (which is why we have pollution controls to stop acid rain and lesser problems) - and even after the pollution controls coal has the CO2 problem.
It's time for nuclear to talk about how good it is instead of bashing the opposition or comparing to purely portable or remote area solutions like solar cells that don't scale up. Push the new technology instead of regurgitating propaganda that doesn't stand up to minor scrutiny.
Life is about balancing risks. The main argument against Nuclear are the safety/environmetal risks. Even burning fossil fuels isn't risk free either, due to their atmospheric emmisions. How then do you rate WAR, in terms of environmental damage and loss of life?
...and what is the risk of this snowballing into a global conflict?
The US war in Iraq is (I believe) at least partly to protect the continuity of their oil supply in the coming energy crisis. So what happens when China runs short of oil, and needs to contest for it?
In terms of balancing risks, I for one am very glad China has significant plans for so many pebble reactors. I feel a lot safer that this will reduce their need to contend with the US for energy.
Where would we put it?
Well, first concentrate it so that it's really, really radioactive. So it'll kill you in 10 minutes, give you cancer in 30 seconds, that kind of thing. Then just pile it all up on a big waterproof pad -- say a wide shallow dish carved out of an outcrop of bedrock, out in the middle of the desert somewhere.
Next, put up an ordinary 10-foot chain-link fence around the pile, with signs on the fence every hundred feet, in a few different languages, saying:
If you cross this fence, you will die.
Don't bother guarding the fence. It's just a helpful little fitness-to-survive test. Every time someone too incautious, too mindlessly anti-authority, or too stupid to ponder helpful signs comes along, the average intelligence of the species will go up a bit.
I'd even suggest not putting up a fence with warning signs, just to speed the process up even more. The mummified corpses strewn near the pile will certainly be a plain enough warning to those of adequate intelligence. But I suppose it's more civilized to give even the first customers a sporting chance...
You should have replied to the post you critique or, at least reference it.
The quote is outrageous -- being Russian I am supposed to go along with bashing of Ukraine, but, at the time, the plant was controlled by the central goverment (read "federal", if you are in US). One of the problem was that the plant was transferred from the "Sredmach"(Official name for the nucs ministry) ministry(committee, if you are in US) to the Energy ministry which was dominated/controlled by people who were well informed about power generation and turbines, and not enough about nuclear reactors.
& sparklethedarkup, already!
...they passed the energy bill and you now got TAX CREDITS back to get your own alternative energy system, a serious cost savings. So what if joe government didn't take your tax money and give it some big lab, they are saying they will give it to YOU, which is better from my POV. The tech we have now is MORE than good enough to be useful. If you are in a bracket where they take a lot, and even after all your normal deductions, etc, they still wind up keeping a lot of your cash, you can get quite a bit of that back and do something positive for yourself and family. Free stuff man, or to be fair, heavily subsidised in your favor. It might not do your whole electric bill, but I can tell you as a solar user it's real sweet to have instant "clean, no fuel neededm don't need to do nothing else other than use it" on demand power, at least some, when the rest of the neighborhood goes out from an ice storm or some drunk hitting a power pole up the street someplace.
When you look at what some folks blow their money on, it's a no brainer to see that we could go a long way-not all the way but a long way-to increase the nations energy supply and add in millions more points of production. And the more people that use it, the more legit business private funding will go into more research, etc, making any tax money thrown at it being unnecessary. Look at any other tech over the past 20 years, anything that has gone mainstream has gotten better/faster/cheaper, etc quickly once it passes a threshold from being a niche product only used by a few to commonly used by joe six pack.
A good example is the personal computer. Now imagine how good solar tech might be if the same number of people decided to at least get a minimum sized system going at their home, enough for one circuit perhaps, use it for your home UPS system for the computer network maybe? 20 years from now your children might be enjoying solar PV panels that cost 50 bucks a kw and are 80% efficient or something, economies of scale and further R and D in the private sector.
But that means WE need to not only get the ball rolling but keep it rolling. All of us can afford computers,20 years ago it was only serious niche hobbieists and government and business. Most of us could afford at least a 2 or 3 panel small system now, that's like between a grand and two grand with a real nice battery backup system, or even larger into the actually practical class of 1 kw or larger, just because it's a good long term idea to encourage the tech. And it's useful now, I know, I use it, and I know there's a lot of other guys here who have the tech.
I did. Hint: if you click the link "Parent" at the bottom of my post, it takes you to the one I replied to.
But yes. Chernobyl was basically just a clusterfuck on top of a nuclear landmine.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
There is a problem with nuclear reactors and that is radio active materials and governments that are prepared to use radioactive materials for weapons.
radioactive materials can be used to poison and cause slow death from cancer in lowish doses. Fancy a dirty bomb in your city?
nuclear is big boys toys, if you want to solve your countrys energy problems with nuclear than you have to accept the rest of the world wanting and doing the same.
who here is comfortable about irans nuclear program. Do you trust them?
you can't just allow certain countrys to develop nuclear energy and then try to deny this energy source to the rest of the world no matter how unstable you view them.
Do you honestly think your nuclear nirvana isn't going to be viewed with hatred from the eyes of citizens of other nations who have been kept out the nuclear club.
The imbalance of wealth is tearing this world apart as it is, as energy costs rise this is only going to deepen.
If iran was developing huge arrays of stirling engines would the world be worried, I doubt it.
Harnessing energy sources like wind tidal solar energy farming bio fuels. to create an energy solution safe for the whole world to have is what this planet needs.
As for costs I think you might find its not as expensive as we are led to believe.
http://www.windpower.org/en/pictures/offshore.htm
Shows a number of wind farm projects.
national geographoic ran a documentary a few weeks back and in it they stated the time to recover the energy put into making one of the danish offshore wind turbines was 3 months.
If the first world cannot balance it's energy demands without needing nuclear power then it's not going to be possible for the rest of the world either.
So if we want our civilisation to be viable long term we have to develop an energy policy and technology that is sustainable and can be shared with the rest of the world.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I'd say that thousands upon thousands (maybe millions?) of acres strip mined is a huge environmental cost even before you count the dollar cost of doing that.
And subsurface mining is dangerous - and I'm not limiting it to "mine disasters". The long-term health effects on underground coal miners are well documented. But what happens when huge caverns are left underground? What about the long-term effects on groundwater?
And no, the current designs of commerical nuclear power plants can't handle demand surges very well (the inability of power-generating reactors to handle power transients is one of the indirect causes of Chernobyl...). But that's just a design "feature" - nuclear plants on naval vessels handle power transients quite nicely, thank you.
And even if 99.5% of the uranium and thorium gets caught by the fly ash precipitators, that 0.5% is still considerably greater than just about any other man-made source of radiation in the world.
Safer than wind?
There is a surplus of nuclear fuel from decomissioned nuclear warheads and the cost of fuel is a pretty small part of the cost of nuclear energy anyway. So why recycle?
High-burnup fast reactors are interesting, but the current technology being promoted (IFR) is cooled by molten sodium. I don't know about you, but I don't like the concept of handling so many tons of liquid that ignites in contact with air and explodes on contact with water.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I read it and now I wonder why it was rated as troll(-1). The only trolling frase in the entire post is the unfare reference to the "Ukranian stupidity"
Hydropower, wind, solar, tidal, etc. There are lots of possibilities. I doubt there is any magic one size fits all solution, but there are plenty of existing non-nuclear technologies if we want to use them.
I bet you recycle your own poop too, huh? All those "alternative" energy sources sound nice and I'm sure they give you the warm fuzzies at night but they are useless for generating the massive amounts of electricity we need. They're good if you want to power your home, but the amount of land and money you'd need to power a large city makes them unfeasable. This is why we don't use them now in case you didn't notice.
Hybrid cars can't even get much better milage than regular gas cars and their increased cost actually makes the vehicle more expensive in the long run because you're really not saving much gas.
This is the world as we know it. We don't have any choice other than to use what we know can produce massive amounts of electricity.
I lived in Tehachapi, CA for a while where there is a massive wind farm. It produced enough power for a small part of LA and that was it. It covers mile after mile of extremely windy mountain passes. What makes you think wind power is any kind of solution? The 15,000 windmills in Calif produce 800 million kilowatt-hours of power which is 1% of the state's needs. Please tell me where we're going to put enough windmills to supply even 25% of one state?
We need nuke plants and we need them now. There are no alternatives. There are no other sources that we can use. That's reality.
What about the Mazda gasoline-hydrogen hybrids? Seems to be solving a different problem with the same solution.
Most of the new reactor designs are third-generation pressurized-water reactors (PWR), although companies in China, France, and South Africa are looking to build a fourth-generation design called a gas-pebble-bed reactor (PBMR). The new reactors are supposed to be inexpensive to build, more powerful, and safer; and they can be operated for up to 60 years, according to nuclear-power trade groups.
Can someone please explain to me why we are even considering building PWRs. It doesn't look like they have much going from them and they are the type that, historically, go peeuufff!
I remember seeing TV programmes many years ago outlining how and why PWRs are so dangerous and how there are alternatives that are intrinsically safe from the same problems. If PBMRs are even cheaper than PWRs then why even mess with them?
Note that I predicted they would restart construction on it about the time I go on social security. That starts in April!
word
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Most pressurized water reactors (PWRs) have their power controlled by the temperature of the water used to cool them!
OK, so it's not so simple as that, but in general:
Suck more steam off the boilers and they cool down, cooling the primary coolant and making it denser. The denser water moderates more neutrons, slowing them down and increasing the neutron flux in the core, causing more thermal fission events.
Of course, this releases more heat, which raises the temperature...
The only first-order effect of "controlling the neutrons" in a PWR is to change the primary coolant temperature - which might be something you need to do to maintain the secondary steam pressure that drives turbines. Since nuclear reactors don't do superheated steam, only saturated steam, the only way to maintain steam pressure is to maintain steam temperature. But there has to be a higher temperature difference between the primary and secondary at higher power levels. So, to maintain steam temperature and pressure requires higher primary coolant temperatures at reactor higher power levels.
Yeah, there are some long-term effects like which fuel in the core is burned when, but that's usually not a concern for reactor operators as much as it is a concern for the designers.
So, if you pull the control rods out on a PWR, steady-state reactor power doesn't go up, but temperature does. The power only goes up long enough to raise the temperature and establish a new equilibrium.
If you want to increase reactor power, just suck more steam off. Increase the load on a constant-speed electrical generator, for example, so that its control system draws more steam by opening its throttle valves.
And after you do that, you might find you need to withdraw control rods to raise primary temperature to maintain steam pressure.
And yeah, I did this for a living 15 years ago.
Maybe because when you take security issues into account, it's not safe at all.
Much safer, if you happen to be a migratory bird.
For a reactor that gets most of its energy from the thermal fission of U235, about 7% of a steady-state power level comes from the radioactive decay of fission products.
In other words, if a reactor continuously produces 100 megawatts of power for a few weeks and you shut down the nuclear reactions suddenly, the decay of radioactive fission products will still produce about 7 megawatts of power. That power level will decay rapidly over the next day or two, but it will still be considerable for about a month.
So you can't just shut the thing off. If you try, think "meltdown".
Oh, and a lot of those radioactive fission products are what are termed "poisons" - they suck up neutrons, some to the point of severly limiting the ability of a reactor to continue operating. In other words, if you shut it down suddenly from a high power level you may not be able to start it back up for a few days (another contributor to Chernobyl...). And unless the reactor is designed for power transients, even a moderate downpower transient can force a shutdown. (I-131 -> Xe-131 comes to mind as a huge contributor here)
People shouldn't be suprised by this. You look at the modern technology around nuclear reactors and their increased safety and you really have to ask yourself, why have more been built already?
it takes a lot more energy to seperate hydrogen from water than you get back by burning it, perpetual motion machines arent possible. we'd have no problem at all if we got back more energy from burning hydrogen than it takes to produce it (even a small amount), as the waste product is water, so it could be recycled, sadly its impossible. hydrogen fuel wastes energy.
the advantage of hydrogen fuel cells is that they produce energy good for running cars on, from electricity. we need nuclear power even more, if we are going to use hydrogen as a fuel, if the energy needed to produce it comes from oil or gas, we only make the current situation worse.
Web Design
Maybe because when you take security issues into account, it's not safe at all.
When the plant and it's security is run by people one step away from terrorists/religious fanatics.
We're worried that they'll tune it for weapons production themselves. Not that somebody will raid it for weapons material.
I don't read AC A human right
Do you have actual numbers to back this up? How do they compare to road deaths, tall buildings, feral cats, etc?
If a large portion of the world can't be trusted with nuclear power technology (or won't be trustable after their next coup d'etat), then nuclear power is never going to be the solution to the world's energy needs.
If I recall correctly, pebbles excel where you need easy to maintain, relatively small power plants. Say, a small town in Alaska. They have downsides, the safety "shell" of the pebbles ends up being radioactive and it becomes waste that is impractical to recylce. Spent fuel in regular reactors are relatively pure, so they can be reprocessed. Also, they don't scale as well. There are some very good articles on the web about this -- probably some on the Wikipedia.
because we hate a-rabs and want to stuff them. Where would we Americans be if we allowed the rest of the world to use modern technology?
Bomb them back to the stone age!
and very very dangerous. it's a fact. /.) ...
/.-er can come up with an ... 2c
i have read many times (mostly on
that coal is "more radioactive" the uranium.
well might be, but sounds really strange. i mean
if this were a fact then i'm preetttyy sure
that coal plants need to filter their exhaust
no back to tha nukes. i'm just amazed at how
much technology goes into a nuke plant JUST TO TURN
A TURBINE AND GENERATOR. it's freaking redicilous.
i'm sure some smarty
analogy. i mean the whole tech-thingy about transmuting
elements with "neutrons" and stuff just to heat water
and turn a turbin. freaking AMAZING!
oh yeah, and it's all so difficult because we can "think
out of the box" and insolate(?) our homes better or buy
more expensive but more efficient appliances, etc. etc.
go figure. i thought we're going to the future
or something ??? i think it (energy) needs abit more thinking
and involvment at the roots, not some "brave" decision from
the top
Nuclear reactors run on radioactive material. Nuclear reactors also generate radioactive material. Radioactive material used for the production of atomic and nuclear devices generally come from a special type of nuclear reactor, called a breeder reactor. Radioactive material can contaminate things, but it does not "cause slow death from cancer in lowish doses". If that were the case, everyone who ever received an X-ray would get cancer, as would people who fly a lot. People are exposed to "lowish doses" of radioactivity every day. A "dirty bomb" can be made with naturally occuring radioactive material. Want some fun? Get a good bit of iodine and cobalt, set it in a natural uranium outcropping for a year or so. Then, go get it and analyze them. Then, read up on the effects of the isotopes that were created.
Yes, nuclear power is "big boys toys" and just as a one would not give a child a loaded gun, one does not give and tries to prevent immature, aggressively violent regimes from acquiring dangerous technology. They may view our "nuclear nirvana" with hatred, but they already view us with hatred because we will not bend to their will and follow their religion.
If "huge arrays of sterling engines" are a viable, safer, and cheaper means of energy production, why isn't Iran building them? And, why isn't Iran building massive wind and solar farms and tidal generation facilities? They could, they have the ability, the money, and would actually get help from everyone, including the U.S. Could it be that they specificly want nuclear power to get the material to build nuclear weapons?
Did that National Geographic show say how much power was generated by that wind farm and what percentage of the local power was generated by it? Or how long it took, or will take to recoup the costs of putting up that wind farm? How about the costs of maintenance for a large number of metal struc
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It's show time!
I wonder as well. Obviously, I messed up, confusing two disasters (3 Mile Island vs. Chernobyl), but it was due to the fact that someone in the Ukraine made bad decisions. Thusly, idiocy. I didn't poke any fun at the Ukrainian people, just "because of idiocy in the Ukraine". Obviously, it WAS in the Ukraine, and someone there was an IDIOT.
I don't know why I got modded -1, Troll, because of a flop in a fact. The rest of the post is golden truth and is informitive in that respect.
I put a lot of work in that post!
Actually I don't recycle my own poop the local water company does extracting methane initially and then passed over to farmers who spread it over thier fields.
e n.html
y -myths1.html
2 8/v/3/sp/332749698941328167358
California has a fair bit of coastline perhaps some turbines might be located offshore. maybe geothermal energy is a possibilty too. Biodediesil and sugar producing crops should grow well in california. I don't live in california but i would guess air conditioning is a fair proportion of energy use.
http://www.oksolar.com/solar_home_systems/
might be of interest to you.
Myself I went for the easier option
http://www.npower.com/At_home/Juice-clean_and_gre
My electricity is generated by renewables.
hybrid cars seem to be a combination of expensive and still not that fuel efficient.
cars like the renault megane claim over 60 miles to an imperial gallon (4.454 litres) US gallon is 3.785 litres
runnning a 1.5 litre diesil engine. when your paying around 96p close to $1.75 a litre fuel efficiency becomes important.
As for energy use
http://www.calvert-henderson.com/energy.htm
shows that american energy use per person is twice that for western european nations such as the UK.
however this page shows california to be quite energy efficient for an american state
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/energ
most uk homes are not very energy efficient however I can tell you that this room is lit by a 15 watt energy saving bulb which equates to the same as a 60 watt bulb. I do have 20 watt bulbs which equate to 100 watt bulbs. They last longer too.
If you could reduce your own energy use then you could save yourself money and get better returns on your states windfarms.
http://www.earthscan.co.uk/news/article/mps/UAN/4
reports on many projects including some in california.
I don't know if you have the equivilent of npower juice in california but if you have the choice of supplier choosing one which is prepared to use renewables to generate your electricity will help and you can be part of the solution.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Perhaps even more than America because people like the UN are all over their asses.
Whereas here in America, we've got a government that has legislated a new secret spying program, has black budgets for defence, invades other countries on "bad intelligence" and so on.
America is slowly but surely self destructing to give the people with money and power more money and power (and to help them feel safe at home during the night when they sleep.)
America is not the paragon it once was.
Solar power is actually rather polluting.
It requires the producing high-purity silicon or other semiconductors such as Gallium Arsenide, which currently makes the most efficient panels. The refining process requires high temperatures and strong chemicals, and a lot of energy. Some steps in the process require heating large quantities of material to over 1000F. Toxic waste is a byproduct.
Producing huge solar panels on a scale that would allow them for hundreds of millions of homes would create massive toxic waste problems all on its own.
It's irresponsible to keep using nuclear energy before we have solved the question of waste disposal.
In fact, technically, waste disposal is not such a big problem: using breeder reactors, nuclear power could be generated without large amounts of high-level waste. Unfortunately, breeder reactors can theoretically be used to produce weapons-grade material, so the US government prefers accumulating lots of hard-to-dispose of high-level waste rather than building breeder reactors.
I see point 1) has been dispelled, now for 2) and 3).
2) I've never heard anyone object to nuke plants on the ground that they emit cancer-causing radiation. I think everyone agrees that they are pretty safe when operating properly (see #1).
3) Nuke plants are pretty cheap to RUN. It's the decomissioning and radioactive waste that are costly, and the planners always seem to leave those factors out.
I consider myself an environmentalist - in that I realise it is very important to care for our environment in order to secure earth as a habitable planet for as long time as possible. This is important because we, as a lifeform, have intrest in spreading life across the universe which is more likely to happen the longer earth is habitable.
:)
One way to minimize damage on our environment is to use nuclear power therefore I am pro nuclear power at the same time I am an environmentalist. You should say "For me the real mystery is why SOME environmentalists aren... (or most, or some type of non-absolute quantifier)". Not all environmentalists are anti nuclear power. In fact, I think it is mostly the militant environmentalists that gets lots of media attention that are against nuclear power because "its just bad and everyone know it" - they are jocks and those have big muscles and lots of testosterone but small brains
CFD339 Wrote: There's just so much energy available in what is the most available substance in the universe that the better we get at working with it the better off we are. Just to be abundantly clear, Hydrogen is _not_ a fuel. It does not provide any net energy. There are no "hydrogen mines", like there are for coal or uranium. To make hydrogen, you take water and apply electricity. A hydrogen fuel cell does this in reverse, reverting to water (and a little heat) and electricity. Hydrogen is energy _storage_, much like a battery. Time to check your assumptions, buddy. FinalMidnight
In the maelstrom of the chaos at the center of my mind, I taste the salt of sadness as I feel my soul unwind.
Carter did it for political reasons, not because of any technical problems in using breeder reactors for power.
It will be the country with the worst education and highest level of political and economic corruption. I'd say it's a toss up between the US and China.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
because by then, our technology will be so advanced that we will just dig all the crap up with robots and put it in our new 100,000 year containers. Of course, those will be unnecessary, as after another thouseand years, we will dig it up again and use our mass transporters to teleport it all to the center of Alpha Heptarion 7.
It isn't the depth of the lake that provides the cooling capacity, but the surface area and evaporation of water.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Mining uranium releases heavy/highly soluble radon gas http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html which is highly radioactive and pollutes any nearby water table. Currently it kills more people than drunk driving per annum.
As for breeder reactors, put in 5 kg of plutonium waste to use as fuel and get 15kg of highly nuclear waste from the other 10kg of elements (pollonium and paladium i think). In other words - the tonnage of waste created by these reactors increases exponentially, why do you think they were banned?
The reason is deliberate, CURRENT GENERATION NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE ENGINEERED TO PRODUCE PLUTONIUM FOR WEAPONS AS THIER MAIN PRODUCT and electricity as a by-product. Consequently they are heavily subsidised to make them appear economically viable.
The only realistic future for nuclear is the INTEGRAL FAST REACTOR, liquid metal cooled, uses 99% of the radioactive elements U238/U239 (vs less than 3% for cold war reactors)and current nuclear waste becomes a useable fuel. No need to mine uranium any more as there is enough spent fuel to use for many thousands of years, and no need to worry about those pesky terrorist spoiling your day because of the pyro-process closed loop feul re-processing. These are the types of reactors that we need to invest in around the world because they virtually eliminate waste transuranics, the volume of waste decreases and the remaining fissile radioactive material (the plutonium ash) is reduce to a half life of a mere 500 years.
Cold War reactors, should all be left to run out thier remaining lifespan and decommisioned in favour of these new generation reactors, in every way Integral Fast Reactors are safer and are engineered to produce electricity as a main product.
Sure it's easy to accept the rhetoric about Cold-War nuclear power but it's all been said before (power to cheap to meter etc), however SAFER NUCLEAR ALTERNATIVES EXIST. This is a no-brainer and I'm suprised how many people get duped into thinking that we stopped being able to come up with any new methods for generating energy since the 1950's. You think patents are only used to stop software being developed? What do you think these industry's lobby groups are doing, influencing politicians to make introducing alternative enery sources easier? Do you think these industries care that they pollute the air, make greenhouse gasses or kill generations that aren't even here yet? Public opinion must FORCE goverments and corporations to invest in better technology or we face a bleak future.
The reality is our economies are heavily dependant on oil and coal and we have reached a point where it is obvious that this economic model is not sustainable. Cold War Nuclear (including pebble bed) power is no better than these because it to produces deadly wastes from the raw material stage to the spent feul stage, and lets not forget the millions of litres of radioactive water that is also produced.
There is no future in somthing that kills our kid's kids kids kids kids.... It's time for you 'Cold War'-nuke jocks AND anti-nuke types to take a pragmatic approach, look at the facts and evolve your thinking. A sustainable nuclear alternative exists and now is the time for people to get thier heads out of the sand and relegate coal, oil and cold-war-nuclear to where they belong - history.
IFR information is available here http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/ifr1.html
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
hohoho !!! And just WHO is the only country to have used fissile materials in aggression ? Answer your own question. And just WHO now touts using them pre-emptively against innocent civilians ? Answer your own question. And just WHO has the largest accumulation of unprotected fissile factories ? Answer your own question. Ooooh, but we're americans, we're cool, we can be trusted to look after nukes. Fuck off. You pro-nuke dittoheads can sometimes be so short-sighted and unimaginative. Waste of existing energy sources is the biggest problem, and indulgent lifestyles, corruption and stupidity are the reasons. Combinations of wind, hydro, solar and geothermal (and maybe even some biofuels like biobutanol) work great, but you'd rather we subsidize oil, coal, nuclear options instead. Without the massive subsidies, and including decommissioning costs, as other posters have pointed out, nuclear power is NOT economical. Don't forget in your calculations to include the massive prior investment of subsidies to get the nuclear power industry to where it is today. Nerds, indeed. What a fine collection of brains. More useless than used mouthwash. Insulate your home instead of your brain - you'll get better performance for your efforts.
The bottom line is that all of these are nothing more than supplemental sources. And if we're going to ever transfer to a hydrogen-based transportation system we're going to need a LOT of relatively cheap power.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
....and we all know what can happen when you build nuclear power plants in Sim City, eh?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Wind power shows some promise but is associated with bird and bat kills and can never scale up to meet our energy consumption.
... if you are extremely unlucky you might get a wing on your head (that has never happened to anyone you to my knowledge), but compared to the effect of a failure in any of the other central big power solutions that is truly nothing.
... this is terrible nonsense. I live in Denmark where we have the biggest wind farms of the world or at least they were the biggest for many years, there has been several studies about how these windfarms have been affecting bird life and the conclusion of every study has been pretty much no effect. Yes maybe one bird get's killed once in while but the overall birdlife is not affected at all and the birds breed happily below the wind mills. Actually one of the wind mills farms on the ocean at the west coast of Jutland has become a seal habitat where the seals live on the foundations of the mill's and there is also plenty of birds there, they have totally gotten used to the mills being there and the technicians out there pretty much never see a dead bird but lot's of livings ones (I have been talking to one of the technicians myself).
... I once was very strongly against nuclear power (I actually have been sitting on the rails, and doing everything I could peacefully to get past police to block the so called castors which contain nuclear waste that has an "non permanent" depletion place in the area of Gorleben (northern Germany)), but I have by now accepted that for the time being nuclear power is needed, no matter how unpleasent it is. I especially don't like the way nuclear power forms "small governments" outside public and government control (I guess the oil-companies are in no way better when it comes to this) and the waste problem still being pretty much unsolved doesn't make things better ... still I am accept that nuclear power is needed for now.
I agree that wind power will probably never scale to meet energy consumption, but wind turbines are up in the 3-4 MW by now sold comercially. But there are other big advantages of wind energy.
The biggest advantage I see is that it is the only working decentral power solution we have right now, if we totally rely on big power plants, that being coal, nuclear or hydroelectric we are suddenly very vulnerable to enviromental disasters (with the global warming the extreme weather conditions probably aren't getting fewer) and terrorism which also seems to be a problem on the rise.
So investing in wind-power is way to secure power in critical situations for critical needs.
Another great thing about wind power is that if a wind turbine fails
As for the bird and bat kills
Yes I am very pro-wind
As I recall, the twin towers were famously designed to withstand being hit by a jet. Problem is, you cant do accurate crash tests with buildings and real 747s.
As I recall, the twin towers design promise turned out to be incorrect, and 3000 people died. The difference is, The building can be rebuilt, and the area is still livable. If that had been a nuclear power station instead, I'd imagine the whole city would be permnantly evacuated. Even if you would argue that there still wouldnt be a radiation release, i cant see local house prices and the economy doing well afterwards can you?
By comparison, I'd rather risk terrorists attacking a few wind turbines. *oh the fear!*
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Last time I checked, I was not a bird.
I did happen to be fairly close to Chernobyl (i.e. in Poland), when it blew up, though.
Man, I find it really encouraging that quite a few posters are correcting the grandparent poster. I've always found it frustrating that so many people think that hydrogen (when used for combustion, not fusion) is an ultimate fuel source. The conversation usually goes something like this:
Them: Everything should switch to hydrogen combustion so we can have clean energy forever!
Me: Hydrogen is not an ultimate energy source; it's only useful as an energy storage mechanism, like a battery.
Them: No way, there are cars that can run on hydrogen, a plentiful energy source!
Me: Huh? Where are you going to get hydrogen from?
Them: Water, of course! We can get hydrogen right out of the oceans!
Me: Water is hydrogen that's already been burned. You have to unburn it by putting all the energy back into it.
Them: **confused look**
Me: Sigh. Look, what's the by-product of burning hydrogen?
Them: Clean, environmentally friendly water! That's what makes it so great!
Me: So if I had a portable electrolyzer in such a car, I could take the water by-product, turn it back into hydrogen, put the hydrogen back into the car, and have free energy forever? Violating the law of conservation of energy?
Them: Whoa! I never thought of that, but that just might work!
Okay, so maybe the last line is an exaggeration... by that point, I usually just get confused looks as people struggle to understand why I'm trying to shatter their utopian dreams with pesky "facts". I'm all for using hydrogen to store energy and power our machines, but people need to understand that it's not a primary energy source like coal, natural gas, solar, nuclear power, etc.
No, really, I'm suggesting putting the nuclear waste in rain forests. Most nuclear wastes are harmful because the radiation exposure builds up in animals over a really long period of time (years, decades), causing cell division errors.
That means short-lived species (like most in nature) never get a very large dose before dying naturally, so nuclear waste is mostly just harmful to humans because we live longer than most other animals. Actually, the radiation may help cause mutations which could speed up evolution a bit.
Anyway, since this waste is deadly to humans but harmless to other animals, why not spread the stuff around places where we don't want humans to inhabit? In other words, we need to preserve the rain forests from being cut down to provide land for Brazilian farmers, so why not do it with nuclear wastes? That should give the rain forests a few millenia or so before we start slashing and burning them again.
dom
Ok the claim on the national geographic channel was energy costs for manufacturing a turbine were met in 3 months.
this website gives quite a lot of information regarding Danish windfarms
http://www.windpower.org/en/core.htm
It's not easy to get figures from that site on costs on individual projects.
http://www.windpower.org/en/pictures/offshore.htm
Nysted Offshore Wind Farm
The most recent large offshore farm is Nysted Offshore Wind Farm at Rødsand built in 2003. The wind farm is located app. 10 km south of the town of Nysted on Lolland and consists of 8 rows with 9 turbines each. The total power of the 72 wind turbines each of 2.3 MW thus reaches 165,5 MW. The annual electricity production of the wind farm is 600GWh, enough to supply 145,000 (Danish) households. The wind turbine towers are about 70 m tall, and the rotor blades 41 m long.
What do you propose Iran should use for energy since you agree that letting them have nuclear reactors isn't a good idea?
Cancer is a possible from doses delivered by xray machines this is why operators get behind lead shielding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
very famous case of patients getting killed by short high level doses. Lower levels of radiation over longer time periods can also kill and cause cancers.
I don't doubt that its possible to operate a reactor safely and store the waste safely in some parts of the world. Other parts well lets say an alternative is required.
Do you think the united states should depend entirely on nuclear energy and for how long 100 years a 1000, 2000?
Problem is you can't use nuclear to solve the worlds energy crisis. best you can hope for is to become fortress usa and live as free as your government see's fit. Since your always going to be the target of terrorist attacks.
My countrys going the same way we already have home grown suicide bombers who were born and brought up here.
Maybe the answer is less people in the world. China's addressing this now, birth rates are declining in western nations... if we can't generate the energy needed for our current population maybe it's not sustainable.
Yes I think Iran wants nukes, it also wants a reliable affordable energy source. An alternative is needed and really its going to be the west to show its viable
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
That figure for transmission losses looks a little high, Wikipedia quotes losses of 7.2% in 1995 in the US and 7.4% in the UK in 1998. Whith efficient small fuel cells, distributed power generation might still be a good idea in the future (widespread blackouts, for one, would then be a thing of the past and 7% is still a considerable amount). The problem might then become the distribution of the hydrogen, however.
Using waste heat from air conditioners and such is an excellent way to increase overall energy efficiency, on a larger scale why not use waste heat from factories to supplement urban energy supplies?
...i gotta wear shades...
...
Finally the world realizes that burning things ain't healthy.. we are only about 30 years to late but heck... Maybe a bit of education and people won't fear "nucular reactions"
as my high school physics teacher used to say, fission is fun!
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Always has been, always will be ;)
Physics is good
More of this "coal make nuclear waste" FUD.
Coal on average contains 3ppm (parts per million) of uranium.
By comparision, ordinary soil contains between 1.8 and 5ppm of uranium.
So let's all try and not smear the boards with nuclear industry marketing material shall we?
May the Maths Be with you!
Tell that to Cumbrian farmers in England, who still have restrictions on selling their milk 20 years after the event. I can assure you that there was a LOT of fallout, and it travelled a LONG way (depsite this, I'm still very pro-nuclear).
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
So by that reasoning only Europe, Egypt, and China should have nuclear power, since all the other countries have immature regimes :)
I mean, seriously, if your country hasn't been in existence for at least a thousand years how can you possibly claim to be civilised :)
James P. Barrett
Sources I've read say that current nuclear resources can meet current supply for about 500 years. Near as I can tell, that doesn't take into account any of the newly developing countries. Add the power demands of China, India, and eventually Africa, and the total lifespan of nuclear energy might go down to that of oil since its first major usage. Unless new sources of uranium are found that is.
Renewable energy sources on the other hand have a lifespan of about 5 billion years.
May the Maths Be with you!
So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved two designs for future construction in order to remedy the situation where no two plants are the same. (The plus side of having a hundred unique plants is that we know which are easiest and the most cost-efficient.)
In my opinion, the best place in the United States for nuclear power plants is California. The warm temperatures year-round mean that freezing is not an issue in backup (normally non-circulating) pipes. The cold ocean water provides an excellent heatsink that does not require cooling towers and is therefore more thermodynamically efficient. Not that there is a problem with building them elsewhere. Natural disasters need to be considered but are not a siginificant issue. Power plants should be spread out in case part of the power grid is taken out for some reason. Also, is there anywhere that doesn't experience natural disasters and has lot of water for cooling?
The problem with being 100% nuclear is that nuclear power plants are baseline power plants, meaning that they are designed to run at 100% power whenever they are running. You can't start and stop them easily as the intermediate decay products will interfere with the neutron absorption cross section.
Regarding the comment about radiation absorption during a plane flight, radiation is a funny thing. The unit rads indicate how much energy is being absorbed by your body but does not take into account the type of radiation. Units which take into account the health effects of different types of radiation are those or rem or millirem. The average total natural exposure to radiation is 300 millirem with your LA-NY-LA plane flight giving you a mere 3 millirem of cosmic radiation. Workers in the nuclear industry are allowed as much as 5 rem of exposure each year.
Just my $0.02.
Nuclear energy is a non-renewable.
If humans start to replace fossil fuel with nuclear fuel, to meet ever increasing energy demands, it will be the case that sometime around 2100 AD, a replacement for Nuclear energy will have to be found, since all of the Nuclear fuel available will be spent !
Not a particularly far-sighted approach to addressing the basic fact, that our civilisation is founded on non-renewable sources of energy and is extremely wasteful of the energy it does produce.
A better solution is investment in Geo-Thermal, Hydro, Solar and the potential of Moon-based Helium-3.
I personally think that the vultures in the Nuclear Fuel game, see their opportunity with the demise of fossil fuel and that in the panic to replace fossil fuel, the public are being taken for fools... Nuclear energy produces *masses* of extremely hazardous waste, which must be safely stored for TENS and sometimes HUNDREDS of thousands of years.
I can gaurantee anybody reading this message, that people in the year 2150, will not thank people in 2006 for going the route of Nuclear... all those future generations will have as legacy from us is A) The on-going headache of storing Nuclear Waste and B) Belated development of alternative forms of energy... renewable forms... and energy generation research which should have been undertaken 50/100 years earlier... ie. today !
Scale. Invariant. Networks.
Or, for the tabloid readers, the Kevin Bacon Effect.
Facts, damn facts... and the IAEA.
No fallout, yeah sure... The OP couldn't have been more wrong.
...
I live in Poland, and I had a friend at that time who was working at the Nuclear Physics Insitute - no reactors there, but plenty of radioactive materials, so they had these gates at entrances with Geigers in them, to prevent any contamination getting out of the building.
When the fallout cloud reached Poland, these gates would trigger alarms when people were coming from _outside_ the building
Before we get into any discussions about replacing {coal/oil} with {nuclear/solar/wind/biomass} in the US, everybody look at the chart here.
The biggest thing that jumps out at you from this chart is that increasing nuclear power won't decrease our use of oil. Current rhetoric from the Bush administration about nuclear power aiding energy independence is just that, rhetoric, and that won't change without massive restructuring of the US energy system. Similar rhetoric about replacing oil with solar or wind power is also nonsense.
What it will do is reduce our use of coal, and maybe allow some natural gas to be shifted away from electricity towards heating and industrial use.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
These nuclear reactors we are building still have the potential to reach critical mass. I am wondering why we are not building alternative nuclear technology such as pebble bed nuclear reactors. I just doesn't seem to make any sense to me in any way. Can anyone give me a sane reason to build traditional reactors in light of this safe technology?
Nuclear material for reactors will last us about 70 years (with the current usage). So this means we replace one finite ressource with another one. Of cource there are predictions of huge uranium finds in some unforseen future, just as there are for oil, but i'd say 70 years is a good number.
with the current increase in energy usage and china awakening 30 years is probably more realistic. So what do we win with increassed usage of nuclear power? In the end some radioactive ruins and still no lasting concept.
Of course the industries probblem with regenerative energies is that many of them are decentralized. They don't want everyone to get cheap energy from the roof and reduce their energy usage because that would loosen their grip on the energy market and cut into their profits. So for them it makes perfect sense to build nuclear power plants to prolong their grip on the energy market just for a little longer, but from a global perspective it makes no sense at all.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Some math:
world consumption of oil 31Billion Barrels/year
31*10^9 barrels/year * 5800000btus/Barrel * 1055 Joules/btu =
1.89*10^20 Joules/Year is the worlds energy consumption
Now Assume 2 gigawatt reactors (2*10^9 watts)
A watt is a Joule/Second
with 31536000 seconds/year a 2gigawat nuclear reactor generates
6.3*10^16 watts/year
Now, (world oil energy use/year) / (nuke plant output/year) = the number of nuclear plants we would need to build to replace our oil dependance
1.89E20 / 6.3E16 = 3000 nuclear powerplants
Keep in mind a nuke plant costs a billion to build, takes 5 years and the US has not tried to make one in 25 years.
I'm not saying it would be impossible, but it would be the single largest undertaking that humanity has ever attempted.
Yes, we all know the parent is an idiot. I have been to Ukraine a number of times and while I have never bothered to go on the Chernobyl tour (too expensive), I do know that there are STILL areas of Ukraine and Belarus (Belarus arguably took the worst of the accident) that are dead zones near Chernobyl. There are some crazy old Ukrainians who have moved back into areas that are supposed to be abandoned and are officially considered uninhabitable by the Ukrainian government, believe it or not. Most people know that it is crazy to eat mushrooms and berries from these areas, but it has been alleged that some foodstuffs are illegally harvested from these areas and sold in certain markets. I think they've been alleged to be illegally imported into Russia. I remember 2 years ago when I was in Kiev and I talked to a local guy who told me that he liked to fish but he wouldn't keep or eat anything he caught in the Dniper River in Kiev because of Chernobyl. Kiev is (I think) about 100 miles south of Chernobyl and I can tell you that he is not the only person in Kiev who is afraid to eat anything that comes out of the Dniper.
...may enable power plants to use the same Uranium another time, but all the processes involved in this "recycling" increase the volume of nuclear waste by a factor of >15! Because it's not just the Uranium itself, it's the glass containers into which the nuclear liquids are molten etc. pp.
So, unless you happen to have a huge desert in the middle of your country where you can dump nuclear waste without anyboding giving a damn, this "recycling" process is a joke.
It depends on the design. The classic designs that have been used in the U.S. have a serious problem. If coolent flow fails, the reactor can melt down.
Pebble bed reactors are designed to fail safely. If the flow of coolent stops, so does the reaction. The fuel is safely encased in tennis ball-sized graphite "pebbles" which are dropped in the top of the reactor and retrieved at the bottom. For there to be a release of the radioactive material, the pebble has to be broken open. Even if that happens, the amount that's released is very tiny.
There is a problem with fire, since the pebbles are graphite, but fire is a lot easier to deal with than a melt-down.
The point is that we need nuclear power in order to ween ourselves off of oil, but we also need to demand that safe reactor designs are used.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
The 'dead zones' are, paradoxically, developing extremely diverse and rich ecosystems - the enforced absence of humans (barring the aforementioned crazy geezers who won't be told) allows the wildlife to bounce back very quickly. You see the same thing at places like Bikini Atoll, which were bombed to smithereens back when atmospheric nuclear testing was all the rage.
Humans are unusually susceptible to radiation poisoning - most other species are perfectly happy in areas which are long-term uninhabitable for people. It's why Lovelock has (mischievously) suggested randomly dumping caches of high level nuclear waste in the amazonian rain forest.
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
Interesting article pointing out the economic argument against new nuclear plants
To summarise: "The upshot is that nuclear power is seven times less cost-effective at displacing carbon than the cheapest, fastest alternative -- energy efficiency, according to studies by the Rocky Mountain Institute. For example, a nuclear power plant typically costs at least $2 billion. If that $2 billion were instead spent to insulate drafty buildings, purchase hybrid cars or install super-efficient lightbulbs and clothes dryers, it would make unnecessary seven times more carbon consumption than the nuclear power plant would. In short, energy efficiency offers a much bigger bang for the buck. In a world of limited capital, investing in nuclear power would divert money away from better responses to global warming, thus slowing the world's withdrawal from carbon fuels at a time when speed is essential."
Slashdotters are correct when they point out that some people have an irrational fear of technology, and this is undoubtedly what drives some people's fear of nuclear power. But has it ever dawned on you that people who frequest "News for nerds" may have just as irrational a love for technology, that may, I don't know, be affecting their own judgement?
It's the height of arrogance to assume that you've got it all figured out - with your only problem being all the idiots in the world (I think someone actually used the term "teeming millions") not realising how clever you are and how clear-cut this all is. I mean, the multi-billion dollar nuclear industry would never have enough resources to lead you on, now would they? Only those other idiots get led, not you. You're much too clever.
Sheesh.
3000 nuclear powerplants...Keep in mind a nuke plant costs a billion to build, takes 5 years
Assuming your numbers are correct, this is not a very big undertaking at all. We're talking about a total cost of 3 trillion dollars spread over 5 years, which is 600 billion dollars per year, given that the Earth's population is 6 billion this represents a total cost of $100 per person per year for 5 years.
In other words, it seems doable.
Then they don't do anything.
Actually, the exisiting water moderated reactors are quite safe. When these is insufficent coolant, there is also insufficent moderator.
Changes reducing moderator density [heating beyond specification, formation of saturated steam bubbles] act to reduces the neutron's probablity of capture, slowing the reaction. The pebble bed designs don't have this negative feedback in their design, they just try to make the fuel elements more tolerant of extreme tempetures.
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
What should Iran do? If windfarms, sterling engines, tidal generators, and solar are such good ideas, let Iran use those. Or don't you believe in your own words?
A short high-level dose is not comparable to a long term low-level dose. Just like a one-time dose of of say 50 grams of aspirin will kill an adult. Ten 5 gram doses of asprin over 5 days will not.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I happen to agree with James Lovelock, (and oddly enough GWB), that modular reactors are a big part of the answer to clean energy right now, both for electricity and hydrogen production. I belive "pebble bed" reactors can be made cheap and safe, there is no need to risk another "China syndrome" ( the movie was another big factor in the nuclear power debate ).
I also noticed that life experience (actually watching a smoldering reactor live on TV) is now moderated "overrated". In the 60's and 70's people were still blowing up islands and deserts with nukes, in the 50's the US/USSR/UK were all deliberately exposing their own soldiers to fallout!!! Guess the moderator and the OP have never heard of the term "20/20 hindsight".
I was in grade five in the late 60's and there was a unusually large bushfire nearby (Australia). The teachers assembled us to evacuate but didn't tell us why at first. The whole school was gathered in the yard looking up at the huge column of smoke that had mushroomed out high in the atmosphere. All the kids in the school started saying the USSR had dropped a nuke. The teachers eventually got around to telling us what was happening but for a while we all thought WW3 had started.
And yes, those rational arguments still apply, do we trust goverments and corporations to play with fire? Have we got any other choice? Probably not.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Nah, people will just blame that I'm fat on being lazy, it's not like there could be other contributing factors.
Have you considered the role of hypochondria? Sounds like a classic case. Anti-depressants can help.
an ill wind that blows no good
Round up all the Greens. Thank God for voter registration.
Freeze dry them, toss them in the furnance.
Now that's Green Power!
There is a difference between age and maturity. You seem to forget that civilization arose first in the Tigris river valley.
A mature society does not support sectarian violence and terrorism. A mature society does not believe that the minority has the right to subjugate the majority through violence and murder.
A mature society tries to provide liberty and personal freedom to it's citizens.
A mature society accepts that the world does not exsist to be ruled by said society.
Sadly, my country is becoming more and more immature. Soon, I will not trust it to have nuclear weapons or nuclear power. Damned fundimentalist christians.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Last I checked, I didn't breath in ordinary soil, and I had to have the decay products of that uranium in the soil (radon and radioactive lead) pumped out of the air in my house in order not to get lung cancer.
Not only that, but all the carbon that makes up the majority of the coal gets burnt off in the power plant, so the concentration of uranium is *much* higher in the soot.
Let's not all try and smear the boards with the anti-nuke lobby's propaganda, shall we?
Well $100/year is a un-realistic amount of money for a huge segment of the worlds population. Additionally there will be other major costs besides building the plants. Major infrastructure will be required, We need perhaps half a million more nuclear physists, (those people require 10 years of education). New schools and tranining facilities will be required. Uranium Mining will have to be stepped up by a factor of at least 100. I'm not sure how this could be called "not a very big undertaking at all." What other peaceful, world-wide, multi-trillion, decade-long projects can you point to?
"Only problem is that most of those "common compounds" are in fact hydrocarbons. So you (a) do little to solve the fossil fuel dependency"
S-U-G-A-R. MOST of the bacteria convert sugar and starch to hydrogen. If you can explain why this will not help solve the "hydrocarbon" problem, I'm listening. Truthfully, I think you're regurgitating information that you didn't bother to actually look up.
"(b) still end up releasing large quanitities of CO or CO2 into the atmosphere."
No, this is wrong too, but for a different reason. You're assuming an open system where byproducts are vented into the atmosphere, but that's a dumb idea, and a decent engineer wouldn't wast a valuable resource like CO2, especially since it could be used to help grow the plants that the sugar is made from.
Your arguments have no merit.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Last I checked, I didn't breath in ordinary soil, and I had to have the decay products of that uranium in the soil (radon and radioactive lead) pumped out of the air in my house in order not to get lung cancer.
Best you stay away from quarries then; and fields, and roads, and construction sites, and the seaside.. and deserts. Then you should be OK.
Not only that, but all the carbon that makes up the majority of the coal gets burnt off in the power plant, so the concentration of uranium is *much* higher in the soot.
It's been pointed out in these comments already, but 99.5% of the radioactive material burned from coal is caught by modern, manadtory, filters.
The argument that burning coal produces more radioactivity than nuclear plants is pure FUD. It must assume that every single becquerel of radioactivity generated by the nuclear industry is safely stowed away in secure containers. It is not. Radioactive waste material is quite literally thrown into open air ponds in places such as sellafield, and irradiated waste water is simply dumped in most plants also.
Coal pollutes because its kinematic and chemical properties, which are very significant, far more so than any trace amounts of naturally occuring radioactivity. It's radioative properties are absolutely minimal, a mere punctuation mark on the long, long list of its other ill effects.
People have latched onto this ridiculous argument that coal burning produces more radioactive waste than nuclear fission, and keep bandying it about. It's pure nonsense. Coal emmisions are about as radioactive as your breakfast cereal due to its carbon-14 content.
May the Maths Be with you!
I've been blogging on the "hydrogen from green algae" trick for a while, but that's the best paper I've seen yet.
Europe and Japan are reprocessing and simply stuffing the Pu back into the reactors as MOX fuel. While the USA is not doing reprocessing yet - they will.
What you might consider "waste" is another reactor design's fuel. Mankind will need all the energy we can get from this and the day of reconing is a lot closer than most people realise. While the price of oil and gas may be down a little at the moment - this is quite temporary.
IMHO the world will see the peak of world oil production in about a year. It certainly will happen within a decade. When this happens we can expect oil and gas prices to skyrocket well past $100 bux and possibly past $300 per barrel.
There will be wide spread layoffs, recessions and people will be wondering how they are going to heat their houses. The oil crisis of the 70's will look like a picnic and the comming crisis will be permenant.
In al liklihood it is already too late and we have to embark on every energy conservation program and every energy source available. Even with a consorted effort it is probably too late. There are going to be some mightly lean decades just around the corner.
Best you stay away from quarries then; and fields, and roads, and construction sites, and the seaside.. and deserts. Then you should be OK.
.5% of it in the air? Wonderful. Go read the air quality reports from the day of the east coast blackout a few years back. It could be like that *every day* if we used nukes instead.
...but I think you're underplaying this. The effects of trace radioactive particulate in the air are well understood, and it's quite likely that the recent increase of lung cancer in non-smokers is due in part to coal. It doesn't take much airborne material to put the incidence at around 2% over 70 years. Admittedly, the uranium will settle out of the air much sooner than the rest of the particulate will, and only those within a few miles of a plant are probably affected, but *nobody* would be breathing in uranium if we weren't burning so much coal.
There's lots of reasons to stay away from quarries... As for the rest of that stuff, the type of dust that usually gets stirred up isn't usually from the types of soil that contain uranium. The uranium is usually contained in pebbles broken off of granite ledges.
It's been pointed out in these comments already, but 99.5% of the radioactive material burned from coal is caught by modern, manadtory, filters.
Leaving
The argument that burning coal produces more radioactivity than nuclear plants is pure FUD.
Good thing nobody makes that argument then. The argument is that it releases more radioactivity into the air, and it's pure fact.
Coal pollutes because its kinematic and chemical properties, which are very significant, far more so than any trace amounts of naturally occuring radioactivity.
I completely agree with that statement.
It's radioative properties are absolutely minimal, a mere punctuation mark on the long, long list of its other ill effects.
Admittedly, the uranium will settle out of the air much sooner than the rest of the particulate will, and only those within a few miles of a plant are probably affected, but *nobody* would be breathing in uranium if we weren't burning so much coal.
People eat uranium every day. More uranium is probably ingested oraly by people living around coal burning plants than is released into the atmosphere by the plant itself.
May the Maths Be with you!
14 direct replies to remind me that my chemistry skills are not what they should be. I'm sure more will come soon.
Actually, contrary to one post my comment wasn't a troll - it was a misconceived belief. Thanks to the thread I now know more obout the hydrogen fuel issue than I did before, so thank you.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Everyone posting (at level 5 moderation) is making good points about how nuclear waste is minimal, that there are solutions and that burning coal releases radioactive materials too. What are these 'solutions' to nuclear waste? Is anyone aware that right now, and for the past decade, every single nuclear power plant in the US has their spent rod containment facilities to maximum? We've run out of temporary storage! So where is all the waste going?
The Admin and the Engineer
"However, NO FALLOUT WAS EVER RELEASED FROM THE FACILITY. The facility was 100% lost, but everyone was safe that was not inside the plant."
The reason you got modded troll is because YOU TYPED THE CENTRAL POINT OF YOUR POST IN CAPS, emphasizing it.
You should have been modded -1 incredibly fucking stupid, but the absence of such a modifier means people have to make do.
Seriously, if you don't know the difference between 3 mile island and Chernobyl well enough that you noticed your colossally moronic mistake as soon as you wrote it, then you need to refrain from posting until you learn HOW TO LOOK SHIT UP.
And do it BEFORE YOU GO OFF TYPING YOUR MISTAKES IN CAPS.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
This is total horsecrap. I realize you were originally talking about uranium, but you've now forgotten about the carbon-14 in the emitted CO2. The beta radiation from that far exceeds the radiation from released uranium. Beta radiation is ionizing radiation, and far from harmless. Many feel that beta radiation is a major contributor to lung cancer. To quote the EPA site:
As you can see, beta radiation from C14 is a great concern, both in CO2, and in carbon-based particulates.
I applaud the building of new nuclear plants. The new designs are very safe, and they release virtually no radiation or greenhouse gasses into the environment under normal conditions. The time is right to improve our energy diversity and benefit from this bountiful power source.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I would probably agree with this. Although i think China and Iran have a good chance before we do in the US.
China seems more experimental and Iran seems like they're just going to mess up anyways.
Big question is, will we let Iran get to that point?
Hmm
They may view our "nuclear nirvana" with hatred, but they already view us with hatred because we will not bend to their will and follow their religion.
I have no doubt in my mind that we'll never solve our problems with the Middle East. It will haunt us indefinitely, because we seem to be too stupid to realize the nature of the problem and thus the solution.
Religious ideology doesn't make a whole country on the other side of the planet hate you. It's an irrational and ideological belief. It's based on a delusion that there is something special about us or them. Neither is true. Iranians hate America not because we refuse to submit to Islam, but because we propped up an unpopular monarchy, have constantly threatened, meddled with, and embargoed their country, impede their development of technology, and because we support an antagonistic nuclear power in their back yard with money and weapons.
I'm not going to argue that interfering with another country's affairs is morally wrong --- that's a subjective opinion. I will argue, however, that if sticking your finger in the power socket hurts, it makes more sense to stop doing it than to try to change the nature of electricity. Ironically, terrorism has managed to accomplish precisely what the terrorists need to stay relevant. America can't disengage from the Middle East because the people view that as capitulating to the terrorists. Terrorism has effectively guided American policy --- we are prevented from persuing the logical course of action because of it.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Not even close.
The twin towers were thought to be capable of being hit by a smaller passenger jet at a MUCH slower speed.
Instead they were hit by a larger (more fuel) and much much much faster than anyone ever would have thought.
They were expecting the possibility of a jet being lost. not flying at 600mph
and just remember: More people have died in Ted Kennedy's car than by American Nuclear Energy (and at the rate he is going vs the new safe reactors, more people will continue to die by way of him)
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
The problem is not with nuclear power but with mans inability to manage it. The safety record at plants like Indian Point just north of NYC are pathetic. There is really no oversite since the NRC seems to be in the back pocket of the industry particularly with this administration.
What concerns me even more is security. One of the planes for 9/11 flew right over Indian Point which was a target if they could not make it to WTC. Yet little has been done to secure Indian Point or the spent fuel pools should any form of attack from land or air occur.
This is one area I agree with the French who are smart enough to put the military and anti-aircraft batteries at the nuclear plants due to threats of terrorism. Despite the public outcry the administration is unwillingly to do what is necessary to secure our nuclear power plants and our borders.
Scale and distribution will nail you every time. Even if used to an extreme amount at the same time, all the alternative sources still can't make up for current consumption let alone future. The only reasonable alternatives found so far that work today are nuclear and geothermal/core tap. The difficult parts are one: getting widespread geothermal to work without doing something really bad, and two: how to store and distribute energy better. Distribution and storage is where most of the waste is right now. Heck if we could figure out how to transmit electricity without loosing 80% or more of it to heat, we would add a couple of hundred years to our reserves.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
People eat uranium every day. More uranium is probably ingested oraly by people living around coal burning plants than is released into the atmosphere by the plant itself.
Again a red herring. Only the material you breath in causes any signifigant level of harm. Any uranium you eat passes before if can cause much damage. Particles you breath in get lodged in there emitting alpha particles for years.
As you can see from studies on uranium toxicity, 0.63mg is the maximum amount of uranium considered "safe" to inhale in a year, while it's "safe" to ingest 31.5mg of uranium per year. I doubt people living near coal plants are eating 50 times as much uranium as they are inhaling.
- http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA409.html
- http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA378.html
- http://www.nationalcenter.org/TSR50802.html
Hmm, this seems to be a pet issue at http://www.nationalcenter.org/ which calls itself The National Center for Public Policy Research.karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Speaking economically:
Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the billions on wave and wind generation systems? Wouldn't they produce more energy AND distribute the system so that if one wind/wave station breaks down/needs service the others can still operate. Take the multi-billion dollar nuke plant down for basic maintainance and all those billions used to make it are producing 0 power...
Thoughts/flames?
I don't usually footnote jokes, so if you want hard numbers you can do the research yourself. I have visited the Altamont pass wind farm and have personally seen dead raptors on the ground. Several thousand birds are killed each year at this single wind farm, and this is a significant problem for already threatened birds of prey in California, where wind farms tend to be located in windy mountain passses that concentrate the annual hawk migrations. It is reportedly much less of a problem for the new generation of wind turbines, which are larger and have much slower turning blades, and in other locations (like the American midwest) where the turbines are not concentrated at bottlenecks in the continental flyways.
Nuclear power based on fission has long seemed like a very good idea and has been put to use in many power plants around the world. On paper it looks like a good alternative with just the substantial problem of nuclear waste.
The problem is the factor of Human Fallibility.
If people always ran nuclear plants in a non-negligant manner things would work out okay. Proponents of nuclear power (industry in particular) assume that nuclear plants will be run in a non-negligant manner. The problem is that is not how it works out in reality. In reality Homer Simpson is at the controls. Well, not Homer, but there is a lot of negligence. The results of negligence in nuclear power plants is very bad. It is not just Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island, but more recent accidents in Japan. Experience shows us that nuclear power plants will not be running perfectly. There will be at least some negligence. What happens when there is negligence in a nuclear power plant? Well the danger can be extremely great and this is the problem. There is negligence and the danger resulting from that negligence is potentially enormous (Kaboom). That is why nuclear (fission) power is really a bad idea.
There is a company called Thorium Power working on Thorium powered nuclear reactors. The tech is also proliferation resistant. http://www.thoriumpower.com/english/about/history. htm
So basically although electricity may get slightly more expensive we'll always have it available from breeder reactors. For me the real mystery is why environmentalists aren't crazy about this, taking nuclear waste and generating energy and non-radioactive waste? Sounds like an environmentalist's dream, but I guess they just can't see past the N-word.
Because environmentalists these days aren't about the environment, they're about politics. Real environmentalists are all for nuclear power.
You did not include cost estimates of all these other costs in your original calculation, and as I don't feel like coming up with numbers for them, I can't account for them.
But as for $100/year being too much for billions of people, of course this is true. I was not suggesting that everyone on the planet contribute $100/year, only putting the number in perspective in per capita terms. World GDP according to the CIA world factbook was approximately $59.38 trillion last year, so 600 billion per year is a fairly small fraction of this. Of course, most of it would come from the first world, but if we're talking about powering the whole world, we have to look at it in terms of the economic cost to the whole world, and 600 billion out of 59.38 trillion is not as massive as you make it sound.
As for peaceful worldwide decade long multi-trillion dollar projects, well probably I couldn't point to any that are multi-trillion dollar, that's true. But there have been prolonged worldwide projects at somewhat lower budgets that have been unprecedented and highly successful, like the eradication of smallpox, as well as some that have not yet succeeded but that have produced a great deal of knowledge, like the ITER project.
More importantly, powering the whole world with nuclear power is not likely to be one giant international project, it's likely to happen in a decentralised way. All I was trying to establish is that given the numbers that you gave, the costs are not all that great as a percentage of world GDP.
So then how long until we use up the planet's supply of fissionable uranium and have to switch to yet another power source?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Since C14 only collects in living animals/plants, and decays when they die, by the time something is converted into coal/oil the C14 has long since decayed to negligable levels. Remember the half life is 5760 years, so by 200,000 years less than 1 ppb of the original C14 is still C14.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It's still a "breeder" reactor design, since you're making fuel for depletion reactors. That U233 will be mixed with uranium ore (239/235), and put into a depletion reactor. A "breeder" reactor needs an initial load of U233/238/235/Pu239 to start working. That's it. After that, it is completely self-sufficient. It will make it's own fuel, and it will make enough fuel for other non-breeder reactors (depletion reactors).
India has the thorium. The only thing they don't have is the industrial base, and a certain amount of technology, to seperate the U233 from all the other transuranics (Pu240/242, U235/238) in order to form a stable depletion core.
It's an interesting fuel-cycle, although it is completely possible to make a U233 bomb. U233 is even more fissile than U235.
I'm currently taking an environmental systems class in college, the main point of which is to learn how to better manage energy in building design. One large focus in this class is the impending oil crisis and how to deal with energy production, distribution, and conservation in the event that we can no longer rely on fossil fuels. When asked about the practicality of using nuclear power, my professor stated that the total energy gain from using nuclear power is less than the energy required to build the plant, refine the nuclear materials, and run the plant. Therefore, nuclear power would actually result in a net energy loss.
I've wondered about the validity of this statement and was curious as to whether current technologies are changing this energy loss problem, assuming it is correct. Does anyone with extensive knowledge of nuclear power have insight in this issue?
Sigh...never mind. lol
Reminder to self...think before posting.
(It turns out there is some C14 in some coal caused by natural radioactivity in the rock, but very little and not enough to worry about.)
On the other hand, C14 is an issue with most of the renewable fuels like ethanol and biomass.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Nice post -- just one thing I don't understand. Why is no one worried about what the effect might be on the world climate if even a small percentage of the worlds energy is extracted from winds. Energy is not created it is transferred from one form to another. If you build 100 turbines in a canyon you probably won't lower wind speed noticeably, but if you build 10,000 ?? What effect will lower wind speed have on climates further down wind -- will weather systems tend to stall out over your windmill farm, leading to flooding there and drought elsewhere. Please windpower is not feasible.
It's all very nice to joke, but if a joke continues a harmful meme resulting in people making a bad choice seriously affecting millions of lives, is it funny? Clearly I didn't see the humour in your previous post, I wonder how many others did.
So in other words bird kill is probably is no more of an issue with modern turbines than with bridges, skyscrapers or trucks - all things it seems we are completely happy with. Or at least not concerned about.
Nuclear waste doesn't go quietly into that long, glowing twilight of a night, not for hundreds of thousands of years.
Sigh.
Solve the disposal problem - hint, the Marianas trench - and we can talk.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
to watch the pro and anti nuclear lobbys go at it like cats and dogs. Austrlaia is one of the bigger exporters of Uranium and do you know how many reactors it has? One! Thats right, one. It is used for medical isotope breeding and research. We are happy to export our uranium for you guys to turn into radiactive waste that is almost impossible to dispose of safely. But we aren't prepared to perform such idiocy ourselves. It's quite funny really, all we have to do each time some dickhead politician brings up the prospect of nuclear power is to suggest that the radiactive waste be disposed of in the elctorate of that politician, preferably as close to their home as possible, and the whole issue dies an inglorious death within a day or two.
Hey, you guys keep your dams to yourselves. Well, unless you want to put one in Southern Alberta. We need more nice lakes. You have to give me a boat though.
Indeed. Organisms such as subterranean bacteria, which comprise vast tons of organic material. Living material. Some of which dine on coal.
31*10^9 barrels/year * 5800000btus/Barrel * 1055 Joules/btu =
1.89*10^20 Joules/Year is the worlds energy consumption
Now Assume 2 gigawatt reactors (2*10^9 watts)
Wow, you have devised a way to make use of the entire energy potential in a barrel of oil?
Do tell!
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Dude, lighten up. I took your post "Safer than wind? to be a light-hearted, off-the-cuff remark, and responded in kind. I had no idea that I was perpetuating a "harmful meme."
Is it possible that "Wind power is safer than nuclear." is also a harmful meme, seriously affecting millions of lives by taking a viable alternative to fossil fuels off the table? Not funny, mate! You should be ashamed.
Anyway, I doubt that we disagree very much about wind power. Whatever you or I think may about it, in the US at least, wind generation is going to be a significant part of our electricity future. Wall Street has recognized that wind generation is profitable and investment dollars are pouring into wind farm development. The major limiting factor for wind development in this country is transmission line and storage capacity.
More research should be devoted towards this very promising technology.
There are sound solutions, but that's not one of them. Nuclear reactions cause changes in radioactive toxicity and in chemical reactivity; a large chunk of the nuclear waste is more toxic than the starting uranium. Glassification isn't a bad idea, but you want to find a hole not likely to have groundwater issues for a few hundred years.
Ignoring the facts, such as the fact that any coal fired plant that's running releases radioactive gasses (14-CO2) at levels that would be considered an "incident" in a nuclear plant
IIR, it's the traces of thorium and uranium in most coal that's the bulk of the activity-- although you're partly right. Those release levels from a nuke plant would cause a permanent NRC shutdown five minutes after discovery, and that if the coal ash waste came from a nuclear plant instead, it would have to be treated as "high end" low-level nuclear waste.
Adroitly dodging regulation while imposing absurd regulatory burdens on nuclear power, and then using this to claim that nuclear isn't as cheap as promised.
Fact: even if you were willing to run mindbogglingly stupidly unsafe designs, it would never be as cheap as they promised back in the 50's and early 60's. "Too cheap to meter" was a dumb slogan even then. Yes, some of the nuclear safety requirements are excessive. Most are reasonable, based on probable cost/benefit calculations. Of course, those for fossil fuels are generally unreasonably low....
Nuclear power may not be perfect, but even the horror stories are better than what we're drifting into by letting the fossil fuel industry lead us down the garden path.
No; the horror stories include Chernobyl. OTOH, Chernobyl included design flaws that the US had prohibited since early small scale learning experiences.
About the worst disaster the carbon mongers will inflict is global warming. While the "risk" of that is judged near-certainty by everyone outside of the current White House, even worst case, that won't cause humanity to go extinct... just modern civilization. I contrast, widespread nuclear disasters are much less likely, and easier to avoid by design... but do have the potential to kill off humanity if we're stupid enough.
Myself, I'm pro-nuclear... but not blindly so. I understand why some people are nervous, and fission is only likely to solve the energy problem for a hundred years or so. The biggest problem I have is the people who insist we shouldn't use nuclear power because it isn't perfectly safe. Nothing in life is perfectly safe; you just have to make careful choices of calculated risks.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I am sure, that a "terrorist" carrying a small porta-nuke into a plant and setting it off, will be COMPLETELY contained by your precious concrete walls. Especially since bush is going to give the chinese the means to produce mini nukes, which of course, they'll improve and sell to anyone that is willing to pay. Hopefully YOU will be living near such a plant, because you need to live with your decisions :)
And please, don't give me that shit about "security". Any idiot can leave behind a lunchbox (there were suitcase nukes in the 70's and 80's, by now its impossible that they're not smaller than a lunchbox). With proper shielding and design, one can probably sneak one into a plant near a population center and set it off. Voila, bush has world war 3, and all it takes is one idiot compromising his JOKE of a security agency.
~D
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
The biggest problems with nuclear waste are more sociological than technical. If think you can solve both "NIMBY" and terrorism, you should be explaining how to everyone right now. It's been two thousand years since a guy who suggested being nice to each other got nailed to a tree for it, and there hasn't been diddly-squat progress since.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
A more reasonable standard (and the one currenly aimed for) is for the waste to become as harmless as the original unprocessed uranium ore that the waste ultimately came from.... which, I will point out, was not "stored" with any care. It also becomes simpler if you reprocess, and separate out the longest and shortest lived wastes by type. That brings it down to about a 10ky timeframe, which while a difficult criterion for a repository, looks achievable.
Hey, if mother nature can manage the problem, humanity ought to be able to figure it out.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Urban myth: Strike on Box matches do not make nuclear reactors go BOOM! Honey! go ahaead and fire up the grill...
i agree
Wrong, on two counts. First, breeder reactors only take advantage of transuranic wastes (or, yes, thorium) and make more fuel. To use radiocobolt and other suburanics as reactor fuel, you need either a passive thermal-gradient based system — which does NOT cause the radioactives to go away any faster, but merely uses the released energy — or an particle accelerator based reactor, which still has a number of challenges. (Not that breeders are routine engineering, either.)
And Second, the main "nuclear waste issue" is SOCIAL problems; NIMBY and radiological terrorism aren't anywhere near solved yet.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Also, when you hit the $2000/kg threshold, the supply goes into the multi-century range, even with exponentially rising demand; oceanic uranium become econmically recoverable at that level.
Worry more about running out of concrete for the shielding.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Okay, that's fine. The French don't want nuke power? Shut it off for a year, and ramp up coal power to meet the demand. At the end of a year they'll be begging for it to be back on, or putting pressure on the government to foot the bill for the increased energy cots. I'll laugh my ass off if it comes to pass.
The controversy sucks, but it's not because of nuclear energy. It's politics. It's big money. It's no suprise. Anywhere there is big money there will be money scandals, and people acting stupid... Let's face it though, they're foaming at the mouth because they're getting the money from the government. If they had to use their own money, everything would be much more conservative. You think 60 billion Franks is bad? The US goes through more than that in a month supporting a fake war and...Haliburton.
Note that you need to not only reprocess, but use a breeder cycle, which has yet to be done in a commerically viable manner. Without breeders, using current methods, the Uranium supply extractable at under $250/kilo is only equivalent to about thirty times the worlds current annual energy demand.
Of course, when the price per kilo goes high enough, oceanic uranium extraction makes the supply effectively infinite... but at that point you need to start explicitly calculating energy costs in the process.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
If you had a porta-nuke powerful enough to blow up a nuclear plant, why would you waste it on a nuke plant? Why not just attack people directly with your nuclear might?
I don't know about the situation in Australia, but in the US all sources of energy are heavily subsidized, including wind.
Wind turbines in the US are currently profitable (for their investors), but only because they are subsidized in two ways. First, by tax incentives designed to encourage alternative energy development and second, by the electric transmission infrastructure. This infrastructure is much more expensive for distributed energy sources like wind, than for concentrated sources like oil, coal, hydro or nuclear. Also, in the US the best sites for wind development are a long way from population centers. This means that transmission costs (and energy losses) are high. If wind energy generators had to directly pay for their part of the marginal costs of the electric grid, they would not even be close to profitability.
Sorry, was a bit of a cranky pants yesterday. (not enough sleep)
:)
I'd like nuclear to work, but I think I'd rather it were done above the table than with backroom deals.
Storage is a biggy, I suspect that demand side management will appear more viable - even now there is a company here in Melbourne that sells negawatts by switching off airconditioners at my work when electricity becomes too expensive (which annoys the inhabitants a little
And in addition to all of your comments on Anti-Nuclear FUD, there's a few others:
The nuclear industry itself does not wish to compete in parallel with Oil companies. First of all, they will make more money if the world has no oil. Secondly, the oil companies make more money without nuclear power out there. And a lot of the board members and shareholders of each industry sit on the opposing industries' boards also.
Dick Cheney, who will probably shoot me if he reads this (BTW, that was a diversion to sweep the domestic wiretapping story under the rug ), owns about HALF of Wyoming (and is the former governor, senator, and has in place friends and family who still run the state), which is the leading source of Uranium in the United States.
As another poster said earlier, we only have about 50 real years of "Enrichable" Uranium to power the plants with. This is what the plants that are currently in operation run on. Yes, there are newer, better technologies out there, but they would involve more efficient processes which would eliminate all the potential profit for the uranium producers and power utilities.
You see, the American economy is built on Waste, and right now we waste oil. Then we will waste the uranium. Then and only then will we seriously employ new technology. So, even if we run out of oil TODAY, we have about 50 years of nuclear using today's technology to power the world's energy requirements.
I don't know if this takes into account the growth of second and third world countries or not, but we still have a very long time to think about it. Actually, only my great grandkids will even have to worry, so why should I? AND WE HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS AS A SPECIES FOR ABOUT 8 GENERATIONS ALREADY.
Well anyway, OF COURSE BIG BUSINESS IS TRYING TO PROFIT. That is why they exist, for profit. And I don't think you should say they are being socially irresponsible because Greenpeace says they are. I think that the benefits of excessive and practically free energy have done more for the advancement of society than ANY "green" policy ever. Yes, we are heading towards a day that we won't have as much abundant energy, but at that time, we will adapt to a more stable society with less growth. It HAS TO HAPPEN. Either we will settle into a stable society when we run out of oil or we will all die in a huge apocalyptic war.
If you want the stable society, you have to wait until we run out of oil. Otherwise, SOMEONE will still be comfortable enough to continue this growth.
If you want the apocalypse, you have to wait until we run out of oil.
It doesn't really matter if it's 15 years or 50 or 500, it's going to happen. It might as well happen sooner than later and us reap the sociological rewards of cheap and abundant energy now.
Also, peak oil may have already been reached, so we are on the decline. But don't think we're just going to RUN OUT all at once. It's going to be a slow decline, a slow long process where prices will go up up and up and waste will have to come DOWN DOWN DOWN in order to save what little oil we have for the most precious purposes (Not burning it). I think that the economic systems will work and we will all be fine.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Nice strawman, but GP didn't say 'ban' anything -- just that all the options have consequences, and that to determine the appropriate course of action one must study the consequences. Duh. If putting up 10+ floor buildings caused such disruption to air currents that world climates went into turmoil then yes we friggin should ban them, but they don't, and so we (very) obviously don't ban them. If pulling power from water currents caused such disruption that they messed up wind and sea current patterns in a devestating way then yes we should ban them, but if not then we don't.
And quite frankly that reasoning should be obvious to a 6-year old.
Because you don't need a city-destroyer to set off a nuclear plant, especially one based on plutonium or even 235 or 238 (I'm curious what the projected destruction based on a thorium plant would be).
The mini nuke only needs to breach the reactor wall (or better yet, the fissile materials storage areas, or perhaps even just a truck dropping off fissile materials), and you don't need one that wipes out a city to do that. A nuke with an effective radius of a few blocks could probably be the size of a 1 liter coke bottle at most. This is by current standards (current meaning "available for the last 10 years".
Given the obscene gigaton yields of nukes built anywhere from 10 to 20 years ago, we don't need bigger bombs, but we could easilly reduce them to miniature weapons still capable of great destruction. This is where I believe that an effective trigger bomb (as used in hydrogen bombs as well) doesn't need to be bigger than a coke bottle).
However, given the QUANTITY of fissile material available at a nuke plant, it would be FAR more effective to annihilate a large portion of our continent (and poison it for the forseeable future) by setting off a porta nuke at a power plant based on said fuels. Setting it off in a city creates terror, but does not do what the "terrorists" are really trying to do... that is "attack their enemy". To seriously destroy us the way Rome wiped out Carthage (remember? "salted the lands" namely planted rocks of salt in the fields, preventing ANYTHING from growing for quite a few years (a few centuries)). To do that, the terrorists would need to set off the nuke inside the blast shield/dome and let the ensuing reaction wipe out the area... the extra fissile material going off all at once, would be more than enough to supplant the normally "controlled" fission with an uncontrolled nuclear weapon like explosion of cataclysmic capacity. Do you really think 3 or 4 feet of concrete will stop this from getting out? Do any of you know what happens to an explosion that is "compressed" into a tunnel or box? Have any of you actually DONE the experiments on this fact as I have, or do you just read ".gov" sites as your final authority on explosions? I have never handled a nuke, but I have experimented with miniature explosions (fast burns as we called them in the physics lab in college) and I must say it scared me how violently a small amount of flower in a plastic tube could "explode"... on an open table it was a puff of smoke and a burn, but inside the tube it shot out like a rocket engine. You said the blast dome can take a hit from a 747... but a 747 couldn't wipe out NYC... it took 2 of them to take out the towers. And those were just TWO BUILDINGS. A nuke plant exploding in one uncontrolled fission event would be a lot bigger than the nukes at hiroshima and nagasaki, and those would've wiped out NYC off the map too... a 747 wouldn't have.
(remember the US ran bombing sorties on those towns before we hit them with Fat Man and Little Boy (the names of the nukes, for those of us that don't know our own fucking history, and those bombing raids were more than easilly the equivalent of a LOT of modern airliners crashing into the city, yet it took nukes, and not bombing sorties to annihilate the majority of those cities (and those were barely close to 10 megaton bombs, a "nukular" plant would set off a LOT more fissile material, and if its a plutonium based plant, do the math, a barrel's worth of unfissioned material is enough to make the japan nukes look like firecrackers... just do the math)
~D
(you may recall that the boston tea party was ALSO an act of economical terrorism, much like attacking the WTC was, england saw it the same way in those days, a small weak group fighting off a well armed and supplied enemy, this is what terrorism is... trying to kill the support of an enemy army, when too weak to fight it directly!)
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
More people have died in Car Accidents.
More people have died of Cancer.
More people have died from Smoking Side Effects.
More people have died from abortion clinic bombings.
More people have died from lousy diet side effects (malnutrition, starvationg, etc).
More people have died from lack of proper medical care in a "wealthy" "first world" country (namely ours).
More people have died from gang violence and racial violence.
More people have died from organized crime related activities.
More people have died from US foreign policy.
More people have died from US allies' foreign policies.
More people have died from NON US allies foreign policies.
More people have died from a LOT OF THINGS, but NOBODY has fixed those either. Greed is a powerful force, as powerful as hunger and fear. And the governments and those who control their actions know that those 3 are the best tools to induce blind hatred, blind greed, and gluttony. If you think it is a joke, you show just how well you've been indoctrinated and why everyone thinks we "amurikans" (read US'ies) are a bunch of fat, lazy, couch potato, ignorant bastards who only care about watching TV and believing everything we're told. We're no different than the poor muslim schmucks we're blowing up in the name of "freedom". In looking for cheapest product at any cost you're showing your lack of foresight. This saddens me, but doesn't surprise me. US forecasts are a year and a quarter of a year ahead, always trying to make a profit by "scalping" the market, making quick gains and equally quick losses, but too quick for anyone to react before their investments are either increased or totally destroyed. Chinese plans are 5, 10, 15 and 50 year plans. They are far reaching and already they show that foreward thinking allows them to trump the mighty Amurikah.
~D
PS - if you think I'm a conspiracy theorist, I'll draw to attention my great grandparents, who died when the communists took power in the eastern block. They too thought those who hated communists were merely "conspiracy theorists", strangely, those "conspiracy theories" killed them off relatively quickly, after plundering EVERYTHING they had labored to build and earn. They were middle class and had worked long and hard to build what they had. Conspiracy theories are only theories until they drop the falsehoods and advertise their presence openly, too bad they only do so after having fully consolidated their power. I've lost family that were not willing to look beyond the lies, and I'm willing to wager YOU have not. I fully believe the government is willing to kill millions of us off to give their masters absolute power, and using a nuke to blow up a nuke plant seems adequate enough to stir up mass hysteria and hatred enough to vote for ANY war they want. And the fact that you find anything to be inconceivable shows you're no more than a puppet. I am sorry my friend, truly I am.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
What country are you from? I ask, because your country's system of government seems similar, but much simpler than my country's system of government.
In my country, a representative republic (commonly considered to be a type of "democracy", broadly defined), things work like this:
1. The government is elected by the public, and therefore scared of the public, and therefore works really hard. Politicians spend most of their time pandering to their constituencies.
2. Special interest groups try to scare the public, so that the public will both fund their special interests, and so that the public will pressure the politicians who are already scared and willing to do just about anything the public demands.
3. The special interest groups also use the funding they receive from the public they've frightened to finance their own power plays directly.
I imagine things are very different in your country, though. What kind of a government do you have? A totalitarian dictatorship?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Not that I disbelieve you, you understand, but the people that argue with me don't.
/.er's: how likely is the radioactivity from coal to cause memory bit failures compared to the measured value for :-)
Burning a lump of coal produces more nuclear waste than using a lump of uranium? Who woulda thought?
Do we have to worry about coal-burrning countries creating nuclear-coal enrichment facilities and building nuclear "soot" bombs?
I'm for nuclear power, and such, but could you be a bit less vague about quantities, level of radioactivity?
There is radioactivity that comes both out of the earth and that which comes through the atmosphere (cosmic rays _can_ corrupt memory!).
Perhaps more important to
cosmic rays?
-l
double whammy, you take out the local power supply, and scare the crap out of people within 200 miles of every power station in the country. Thats what I'd choose, and AQ nearly did it on 9/11 remember?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
hows about fast neutron reactors - new and improved mr burns would like 'em. See SciAm article. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D556 0-D9B2-137C-99B283414B7F0000
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
How about denying Palestine's right to exist? Sure - they talk about a seperate Palestinian state, but actions speak louder than words and while I wholeheartedly believe they intend to support some Palestinian state their actions clearly indicate that they expect such a state to be creater on their terms.
While Israel does have a range of political views, just like here in the states, the majority of the people, to include those in the government have asked for only one thing for the creation of a palestinian state: A cessation of the attacks on them.
As for the 1967 expansion, well, that was gained in war when Israel defeneded itself from attacks by several countries in the region.
Here's another little fact: Hamas and other palestinian group's maps of the region show 'Palestine' taking up the entire area. There is no Israel on the map. Palestine goes right up to the sea.
I don't read AC A human right
In California, electricity demand in the summer exceeds the capacity of our distribution system, so the utilities have instituted a similar system. In exchange for reduced rates, some big industrial power users have agreed to either shut down completely or switch to off-grid backup generation on short-notice request from the utility. I don't recall any blackouts last summer, so it must be helping. It has also created a new market for large fuel-cell backup generators (Which meet CA emissions rules more easily than diesel generators.)
Did you know that when petroleum is refined into gasoline a thick sludge material is left over as a by-product of that process?
;-)
The oil industry would have to pay big money and would have big problems trying to get rid of the sludge. So what do they do? They chemically massage it, soften it up, and bottle it up and sell it as motor oil!
This is one reason why synthetic motor oils are MUCH better lubricants than petroleum based motor oils. This is also why you can get a qt of petroleum motor oil for $.99/qt whereas most high quality synthetics start at $4.20/qt.
And yes I am a distributor of synthetic motor oils
Libertas in infinitum
Even if the rest is assumed to be true, they also hate us because we refuse to submit to Islam, on top of all that.
The vast majority of the people couldn't care less about the religion of a bunch of people on the other side of the world. We're talking about the common people here --- ideology isn't very useful if your major goal is to put food on the table. Undoubtedly, there are people who hate us because we refuse to submit to Islam. But those people would never get the kind of support they do among the masses of people if it weren't for the political factors. Joe Palestinian isn't going to get riled up if the Mullah tells him "there are all these non-believers in America!". He'll say "that's nice, I've gotta go work so I can feed my family". If he tells him "these non-believers in America support Israel, which stole your land!" Well, that'll get him riled up.
The key thing here is sustainability. What forms of strife are sustainable? Those based on ideology alone aren't. The number of examples throughout history where ideological strife has lasted for any length of time in the absence of political strife or competition for resources is slim. Simply, the masses of people will always be concerned foremost with their day-to-day lives, and ideology doesn't fit too well with that. Political strife, on the other hand, is quite sustainable. If people believe their day to day lives are made harder because of some political entity, that's a different situation indeed.
And that's the popular excuse for hating us these days as well
I don't think you're very in-touch with the state of the Muslim world. When was the last time you were in a Muslim country, or spoke to a Muslim for that matter? The popular excuse for hating America has been, for the last couple of decades, and will continue to be, for the forseeable future, America's support of Israel. The whole invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq is the new popular excuse. Religion is actually quite far down on the list.
Look --- the masses of Mulsims aren't irrational. They may be uneducated, poor, and willing to absorb a lot of rhetoric spouted by their leaders, but they aren't irrational. Their basic human instincts of survival and maintainence of their society are intact. The assumption that Muslims will continue to hate us no matter what we do, just because of religion, is couched in the assumption of their irrationality. It's also an assumption that has very stark reprecussions --- either they must be destroyed or we will be destroyed. That's not a line of thinking that gives you a whole lot of options for action, and its not a very useful assumption if your goal is the solving of the underlying problem (fortunately for some people --- most of the leaders on both sides are uninterested in solving the problem...)
and an excuse for hating Joe Citizen instead of just the government or the army or such. And if you give it enough time and it'll change from just the Excuse to a real Reason.
Religious hatred is historically unsustainable among the masses. Most instances in history where religious factors have caused long-term strife between groups have been the result of political factors, not religion itself, even if religion was the supposed cause. This is true for everything from the persecution of Muslims in Spain to the persecution of Jews in Germany to the warring between Byzantine Christians and Muslims. Religion is almost always a cover for some political purpose, and when that political purpose dissipates, the assertion of religion also dissipates. It's the history fo the world...
A weakness in American thinking is our assumption that we are somehow special, and our circumstances are unprecedented in history. This causes us to ignore the lessons of history in choosing our course of action. Of course, there is nothing new under the sun. The basic social dynamics that have driven history to this point will continue to drive history long after we are gone. There are no hard-and fast rules to human behavior, but there are patterns that will generally be followed, and its foolish to not take advantage of our knowledge of those patterns.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The climate changes from global warming, and associated change in habitat ranges for other species (eg: malaria) is the best chance for the carbon mongers to wipe out the human race. Nuclear power has a better potential -- if people are stupid enough with it -- to wipe out our species outright.
It just struck me--we're contrasting the potential worst case of nuclear with the expected outcome if everything works as it should with fossil fuels. And, if we do that, it's pretty much a toss up.
--MarkusQ
Nobody has any idea of how well any kind of encasement technology holds up under those conditions or whether things you put there stay there. And once you put it there, you can't get it back out.
What's just as irresponsible is that fissile material is a scarce resource and without using breeder reactors, you are only using a tiny fraction of the energy you could potentially get from it.
Maybe some of you should go pick up a large book on Environmental Science and open it to the Nuclear Power section. Do most of you realize how inefficient nuclear power is? How much unnecessary radiation is being concentrated and released upon large populations?
What's the normal age for a plant before it has to be decommissioned? Quite short, and then what do you do with all that contaminated material? The collection of uranium from rock and ground and processing it into fissionable pellets is wasteful enough.
What about nuclear waste? Those rods that only last 3-5 years before becoming spent and becoming labeled nuclear waste? Uranium lasts for thousands of years; Plutonium, a byproduct of fission, lasts even more so. Both are very dangerous to humans in quantities such as these. Those concrete storage pools under most nuclear power plants are filling up quick. Some have even been accused of loading to 120% capacity. And there is no designated or constructed facility whereby this nuclear waste can be kept away from people and destructive plans. Sometimes the Uranium is processed at a government facility to lower the overall half-life of the waste, and then the product of this reprocessing is used to add even more nuclear weapons to our already large arsenal. Why we even import foreign nuclear waste; where do we plan to put it all? Also know this, a recent study of background radiation in Florida detected high amounts of Strontium and some other nuclear isotope (memory fails me), concentrated in the teeth of children. The theorized total area of this unusually high amount of radioactive material was estimated to be within a 100 mile radius of a nuclear power plant. So would we then be again endangering human life because of radiation that escapes power planets through the steam columns or microscope cracks about the facilities?
Look toward other technology. More efficient means of using already present energy and cutting back on energy waste (Industrial; I don't mean keeping unnecessary lights off in your home). Wind power is highly efficient and has no real pollution beside the humming sound and the occasional hail of bird blood; this all of course in usable regions and of course backed up by already existent coal/natural gas/oil power plants in case of low output. Solar->Hydrogen is also looking promising.
Anyway </rant>
Oh yeah, and the center of the earth has a tasty goey center full of oil and nuclear raw materials.. that just keeps growing. I fucking love economists!!
Never mind the cost of recovering these materials, while suppling energy for the 12 Billion people in your magical future.
Ever hear of net energy returns? The energy numbers that I am hearing for nuclear reactor construction, operations and long term management of waste and high, very high. As a matter of fact, some experts are not even sure that nuclear is a net energy winner.
Some energy costs for building nuclear facilities:
mining the ore (petrochemical costs + CO2 to the atmospher)
processing the ore (petrochemical + coal (electrical) + CO2)
building the facilities (petrochemical + coal (electrical) + CO2)
costs of new grids for power distribution (petrochemical + coal (electrical) + CO2)
nuclear plants use ALOT of stainless steal. One of the most energy expensive metals to process. (Coal Coke + Electrical + CO2 emissions)