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NPR Story on the Future of Nuclear Power
deeptrace writes "The Living on Earth show on NPR recently had a segment on the future of Nuclear Energy. The nearly hour long show is available as an mp3 and in transcript form. It talks about hot fusion, cold fusion, and Pebble Bed Reactors. It provides a well balanced and informative overview of progress towards their use for future nuclear power generation. Most interestingly, they talk with Dr. Pamela Boss and Dr. Stanislaw Szpak at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego. Dr. Szpak says of their cold fusion experiments: 'We have 100 percent reproducible results'."
Were these the guys who did the Crystal or Sonic based fusion? As I recal, while they are repeatable, neither of them were particularly usefull for creating large scale fusion reactions.
I love to slaughter the english language.
The whole concept of pebble bed reactors is that they can't blow. Even a catestophic coolant lose doesn't result in a meltdown because the fuel is "diluted" in pebble form.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
Very impractical. The principles are totally different; all they have in common is the word 'nuclear'.
Think about what it would take to refit a coal-fired power plant into a gas-fired power plant. You'd have to rip out and replace the entire furnace. Same with fission to fusion; you might be able to keep the boiler and turbines and so forth, but the heat source - the actual power core - would have to be totally replaced.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
In a nuclear reactor, heat is cheap.
What you're doing with these things is using the heat from the nuclear reaction to boil water, then using the steam to spin turbines and thus turn dynamos to generate electricity. It's a giant steam engine.
Now, if you want to desalinate salt water, one way to do it is to boil the stuff. The salt is left behind, and once the steam condenses you have fresh water. So. Use your nuclear furnace to boil off some salt water from the sea. Direct the hot steam through your turbines. Generate electricity. Then condense the steam in your cooling towers and output fresh water.
There'll be some tricky engineering to be done to make sure you don't get salt deposits clogging up your plumbing, but in principle the idea is pretty sound.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Very little tax money goes to NPR anymore (1-2% of funding).. and the money that does is through competitive grants, meaning that they are in some sense competing for the money. (Note: NPR != NPR affiliate stations)
And as the sibling said, if you think NPR is leftist, your 'left-right' spectrum is way out of whack.
While I personally don't get cable anymore, anyone who does pays for Fox News, whether they like it or not. The only way to not pay for Fox News is to not have cable or satellite, which is a minority of the US.
You're simply misinformed. In any event, thorium is present is higher concentrations in coal than is uranium. Filters do not catch it. Estimates are that 10,000 times as much radioactive material is released from a coal power plant than from a nuclear power plant. This is borne out in cancer statistics in the areas around coal plants, etc. In fact, the uranium released from a coal plant would produce more energy when burned in a fission reactor than the entire mass of the coal it came from in the first place. See this article.
Simple sanity check: How's a coal powerplant smokestack filter going to catch thorium oxide if it's not stopping carbon dioxide? The size of the molecules is not significantly different. Additionally, if it is catching those many tons of thorium and uranium, where are all the nuclear waste disposal people dealing with the spent smokestack filters that by onw are surely clogged with tons of radioactive metal compounds?
Don't kid yourself. Nuclear is clean and safe.
Hydrogen power, on the other hand, is idiotic. Releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is fine as long as it comes from a carbon neutral source. If you were producing methanol from plants and burning that in cars (not farfetched, seeing as several racing leagues use it), it would not matter that CO2 was released, because each molecule of CO2 would be one that was taken out of the atmosphere a few months prior to grow the plant feedstock in the first place. The lack of a carbon in H2 is not an advantage. The very real disadvantages of H2, such as difficult of containment and poor energy/volume, still stand.
Actually, NPR has to compete for their federal money. And that money only makes up 1-2% of their budget, to boot. Plus, they certainly do have to compete for market share, and listener dollars, since pledges (through local affiliates) make up a good part of the budget.
Couldn't find any info on an NPR hiring scandal (unless you mean the recent Bush CPB scandal?) Care to provide a link? Or is this a 20-year old canard that you are still holding onto like Chappaquiddick? Also couldn't find anything on a funding scandal so a source there would be helpful as well.
I don't believe Fox is publicly owned.. or did you mean Fox as the 'government-controlled' media source?
You have no idea what you are talking about. None. What carries radiation in pure H2O? What is it's half life? (Admiral Nimitz once drank reactor water to prove it safe - and still these myths.) The water in most modern reactors never turns to steam - it's used as a heat source to turn a secondary water system to steam to drive turbines and other useful equipment - through heat exchangers - look it up. The reactor water, safe as it is, is never dumped anywhere. It lasts the life of the system.
Here is a nice picture to explain the heat exchange cycle of a presurized water reactor for you.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
It turns out that dropping things into the subduction zones doesn't work out very well. The problems are mainly due to instability, as it doesn't simply suck what's there into the earth's core, but rather spews it around as well. There's some better solutions that involve burying it in the deep clays in more geologically stable areas.
Of course, many countries have banned dumping radioactive waste into the sea under the London Convention. The United States signed it in 1998, but it hasn't been ratified yet.