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'No Quick Fix' From Nuclear Power
humoly writes to tell us BBC News is reporting that while many are calling for nuclear power, new nuclear plants are not the answer to combating climate changes or the wavering energy concerns for the UK. From the article: "The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) report says doubling nuclear capacity would make only a small impact on reducing carbon emissions by 2035. The body, which advises the government on the environment, says this must be set against the potential risks. The government is currently undertaking a review of Britain's energy needs."
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This (pay wall past intro) is an interesting article I read in Scientific American about a plan to recycle much of what is currently considered nuclear waste for use in advanced fast breeder reactors. It seems the most feasible alternative to oil I have seen.
Nuclear power will most likely never surpass its existing use as a source of supplemental power for the world market. That said, I disagree with the article in its suggestion that it cannot make a significant dent in carbon emissions.
Nuclear power could very easily become the largest source of power for fixed location consumers. Existing coal and oil plants could simply be replaced with nuclear facilities. This eventual phase-out of legacy power supplies could easily cut carbon emissions by hundreds of tons per year.
However, nuclear power will never become the totally dominant source of all our power needs unless the near future reveals a revolutionary advance in battery or super-capacitor technology. Until then, transportation technology will never be able to efficiently harness power off the Grid. Transportation will continue to use energy sources that are easy to transport and distribute.
The major hold-up with nuclear power is two-fold. First, current generation nuclear reactors use uranium as a fuel source. This fuel creates huge amounts of radioactive waste. Although this waste was once highly desired for nuclear weapons projects in the past, today it is a worthless product that is expensive and dangerous to dispose of. Also, this fuel is quickly becoming scarce. Some scientists suggest that the world has less than 60 years worth of reactor grade uranium at current consumption. Secondly, current generation reactors have a high potential for danger. The horrific blunder of Soviet engineers when running a coolant test at the Chernobyl facility will haunt generations to come. America's own scare at Three-Mile Island brings that fear close to home.
Surprisingly, most of these issues have modern solutions. The French has developed an encapsulated uranium fuel source that places fuel within a heat resistant shell. This shell keeps the density of the fuel low enough that in the event of a coolant failure, the fuel rods never go critical.
Second, scientists have suggested that a switch from uranium to thorium could reduce radioactive waste by over half, and could reduce our plutonium stockpiles by using it as a seed for these new reactors. Furthermore, thorium is a more common element than uranium, with prices being only a fraction of uranium.
However, political pressure will most likely never allow it to happen since traditional power companies fund many anti-nuclear lobbies. Oil and coal hate nuclear. Popular media demonizes nuclear. Environmental laws make it nearly impossible to even whisper nuclear without the threat of civil lawsuits.
As such, we will continue to pump greenhouse gasses into the air. At our current rate, my home in Washington State might experience weather similar to that of Southern California today. Sunshine is good. . .
Thorium reactor acrticle: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68045, 00.html
The problem with conservation as a solution to CO2 emmissions is industrial energy use and the economy.
There are probably ways via market prices or the tax system or whatever to motivate individuals to use less energy. But industrial users, who account for something like half of all energy use, aren't having any. Charge them more for energy and they will move to places where cheap energy is available.
Here in Ontario, industrial growth for 50 years or more has been driven by cheap energy. Now that energy is getting scarce, people are getting scared. I'd love to see market prices in energy as means of promoting conservation and helping open up the market to alternative sources that are too expensive under the current capped-rate system. But the political reality is that if this was done across the board, major industrial users would up stakes and head for Mexico or where-ever the kW*hr's are more affordable.
I don't have a clue what to do about this. No one worthy of the name of green wants to engage in such obviously unsustainable policies as trying to put artificial controls on the movement of capital and industry. That was tried by the socialists in the century just past, and all that happened is people refused to invest, and rightly so.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
More radiation comes from coal plants than from all the nuclear waste, reactors and mining. Now as to your statement that Yucca Mountain is overflowing, that'd be hard since it isn't taking waste until 2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_mountain
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/about/index.shtml
"The Yucca Mountain Project is currently focused on preparing an application to obtain a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a repository."
In Australia, _right_now_ you can buy 'green power', which is power that comes only from renewable resources. It costs a little more (maybe AU$40/year more). Perhaps a 10% price increase.
;-).
There is no reason why what can't be scaled up to provide electricity to every one in Australia (and presumably other countries too). (Of course, if everybody signed up in one day, I doubt they'd have the infrastructure
This isn't an anti-nuclear rant - it just isn't the best option for domestic electricity.
It seems that this very important government body only has one (yes, only one) PHD scientist on it's board (a metallurgist)... and zero (yes, no-one), with any knowledge of nuclear energy or physics at all!
Nearly all of the people on the board are lawyers, administrators, or prominent members of anti-nuclear organizations.
So a government body of people, with no knowledge whatsoever of nuclear power, and who were already ideologically dead set against nuclear power from the get-go, decided that nuclear power is bad. Wow, what a shock!
Yes, the advanced research determined that if you double the tiny amount of energy produced by nuclear power in England, you get double a tiny amount! Wow! I wonder what happens if you generated ALL OR THE VAST MAJORITY OF ENERGY VIA NUCLEAR ENERGY? I guess that would produce a lot more energy and reduce a lot of greenhouse gases, wouldn't it?
How come people take things like the "Sustainable Development Commission" seriously? I mean, this "commission" is a joke!
I'm not sure what you mean by "suburban lifestyles" as a contributor to anything other than cultural pollution. I'm sure he means that all those people who live in the burbs are spread out and thus require oil burning autos to get anywhere, whereas in a dense city it is much easier to have a decent public transit system. Tokyo vs Aurora, IL for example
It amazes me to see so many informed comments, yet none practically based.
How many people here have worked in a nuke plant? How many know the logistics of it?
First off, redundancy factors make failure and meltdown a near impossibility. Unless an operator is asleep in the control room, and then deaf and blind to all of the alarms and lights that go off when a coolant failure might occur, the reactor will be shut down.
Second: Waste storage. Many people don't seem to know what a spent fuel pool is. Everyone's talking about disposing of waste, when all nuclear facilities in this country already have a means of storing the waste for the approximate life of the reactor. The spent fuel pools are huge buildings with a huge pool, where spent Uranium fuel bundles are stored. The walls of this building are solid concrete, approx. 10 ft thick. No radiation is getting out of there.
On top of that, most slashdotters would probably be surprised to know that they pick up more radiation in a year from their computer monitors, cell phones, simple radios, and other devices, than a nuclear employee does from the plant. Everything is carefully monitored with dosimeters (devices that measure your radioactive dose).
Another thing that annoys me: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A RADIATION SUIT. The suits that nuclear workers put on are are called "Anti-C's" or anti contamination suits. Inside the reactor building, and in other areas where boric acid is used to absorb radiation, loose radioactive particles are everywhere. Movement of those particles from where they're expected to where they're not desired is called contamination, so these suits are used to prevent the spread of contamination. There's even a special process you are to use in removing these suits which prevents contamination. After that, you enter a scanning device which does a once-over of your entire body to detect contaminants, and if you're contaminated, a number of things can happen. If it's an article of clothing, it's simply disposed of. A shoe or boot, generally on the bottom, the offending region is sliced off. On your skin, anti-contamination soap is used, and if that isn't successful, they bring out the SOS pad.
Also, people don't realize how common Radon is. Often, workers would enter the "hot side"(we call it that because that's the area where exposure to radiation is possible) and come out, having gone nowhere near contamination, and they set off the alarm, mostly on rainy days. That's because of Radon. The water causes the radon to essentially stick to your shoes, and while sticky pads on the floor can help removing this, often a de-ionizing fan is required to get rid of it totally.
This is the extent to which they go to prevent public exposure to radiation/radioactive material from their facility. Environmental concerns are nil.
Fear of meltdown is an irrational, uninformed position, and an easy fear to maintain through ignorance.
"Oh but what about all the waste from the batteries"... I hate that typical response to your opinion/suggestion. Duh, recycle them into *gasp* new batteries. I just wanted to chip in that my current ideal world (until we have those transporter thingies) would be absolutely covered with maglev train routes and hubs for them. Soon as we make them go 500mph or so we get rid of the planes. The government is just sitting on its ass. Fun and interesting linkages: http://www.evworld.com/images/US_highspeed_railcor ridors.jpg
http://www.nlr.net/images/NLR-Map-large.jpg
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/mag netrain.html
Yes we can - just keep using coal plants and dumping radiation into the atmosphere.
we will only have 10,000 years until the waste we create today will be even approachable
That's "will be safe enough to ignore", not "approach". And the newest line of breeder reactors take in waste like that and give off less radioactive waste that only lasts 1/10th as long. Even if it didn't generate energy, just using these reactors to clean up the mess we already have makes a lot of sense.
CO2 waste compared to RadioActive waste isnt even in the same league
But this isn't a CO2 vs radioisotopes question. It's between CO2 and radiation in the air we breathe, and radiation sealed in glass, encased in lead, and entomed within the earth.
I posted another comment as an AC in a different thread. But I find the SDC conclusions "specious" at best and destructive at worst!
"Minor" dent in CO2 emissions? For reference I did some local research as Canada passed legislation requiring us to meet our Kyoto requirements. Just replacing electricity production in Alberta & Saskatchewan(roughly 4 million of Canada's 30 some odd million people) would meet 41% of Canada's Kyoto requirements! This can't be termed "minor" in any way, shape or form UNLESS your committed to stopping the use of Nuclear Energy using any means possible, including misinformation.
The storage "problem" has been solved and it's been solved for many years. It is NOT a technical issue it is political and societal. There has also been no rush to "solve" the real problem because of the relatively minor amount of waste compared to production of electricity. It is still simply inconceivable to a great many people that electricity can be generated by the relatively small amounts(by volume) of nuclear products used. It always sounds like a lot but it's always quoted without context. Compared to equivalent energy production from Coal, the nuclear waste truely is "trivial"(again by volume).
That's a red herring. additional nuclear plants can easily be built to conform to existing infrastructure using current technology. PVs on every roof aren't enough to power the houses under them without massive batteries, not only for operation at night, but also for operation on cloudy days, and during the winter. How much energy is required to create those pvs and batteries? what is the environmental impact of their producition and periodic replacement?
It is not immediately clear to me that decentralized power generation is all that superior to centralized power generation, and any form of generation that relies on a heat engine to work is going to benefit from efficiencies of scale for at least the following reasons: tolerances: fittings have much tighter tolerances percentwise the bigger they get due to machining capabilities
carnot efficiency: a large plant can achieve a Thot much higher than a small plant can practicaly achieve, and can often be located conveniently close to a Tcold significantly lower than can be found within a reasonable distance of any given local or household plant. for instance a deep lake or a river perhaps.
In fact, even solar power benefits from efficiencies of scale like this. a solar dynamic power plant of sufficient size is going to be far more efficient than the equivalent area covered in PV cells, in a region which has little cloud cover. At a cost of efficiency (but perhaps an increase in safety), the daily flux can be averaged out using wax or thermal salts to store energy in their phase change for later use in the generating plant. I'd like to see PV try that...
If it is demonstrably more efficient to decentralize the power plants, I'm certainly in favor of the redundancy that can be potentially had, but it certainly wasn't the case when the power companies were established (or they wouldn't have been. ).
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The reality is that any grouping put together by this man is unlikely ever to come out and say nuclear power (of any type, including Pebble Bed) is acceptable. The only acceptable solution in their book is for everyone to 'power down' and accept an energy budget akin to the Victorian era.
Although Nuclear Power isn't the full answer, we need lots of renewable investment as well, its almost certainly the best shot we have at the existing time for continuing our civilisation in roughly the same shape as it is at the moment as the oil supply declines. Renewables are just too low in energy density to be able to build fast enough to match the problem.
File under ignore - the government will.
Oh no, it's already been done
That didn't really make sense. But I'm going to post it anyway.
More radiation comes from coal plants than from all the nuclear waste, reactors and mining.
Coal contains on average 3ppm uranium.
By comparision ordinary soil contains 1.8-5ppm uranium.
Coal fueled power plants have aerosol filters. Fields, roads, deserts, and lawns do not.
Could people please stop perpetuating this idea that coal is radioactive please. Coal is a kinematic and chemical pollutant, not a radioactive one. Unless you consider your breakfast cereal to be radioactive.
May the Maths Be with you!
Actually, that energy was stored for the entire history of the Earth, but it was built up in a matter of seconds by the enormous neutron flux in a supernova. We're releasing the energy over a much larger timescale than it was built up over... in reactors, at least.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The energy used to make a panel is recovered within 1-2 years of operation, beyond which a further 13-18 years of net energy production remain
Also here
Since the price of solar panels makes the economic breakeven point 10-20-50 years, this must be because of the cost of materials, which can be recycled. All of this, of course, assume you live somewhere solar is useful, not, say, England.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
" Cover the polar ice caps with solar cells, ... to stop the ice caps from melting."
Nope, the cells would absorb more heat from the sun than the nice white ice. The temp would go up.
Ethanol does not come straight from the field; it requires considerable inputs to grow the crop, and more to turn it into liquid fuel. The average EROEI that I've seen for ethanol from today's sources is 1.34:1; the most optimistic is 1.67:1. Further, about 20% of the energy in a gallon of E85 is from petroleum. Summing that up, you've got:
- 0.15 gallon of gasoline per gallon E-85
- Of the 0.6 gallons-gasoline-equivalent of ethanol in the
.85 gallons of ethanol, between .36 and .48 gallons-equivalent is from fossil fuels (petroleum, coal and natural gas).
Your total fossil energy per gallon of E85:Sustainability and energy independence essay
And that oil is declining. Cantarell (Mexico's biggest field) has peaked. Kuwait's biggest field has peaked. Even Ghawar has peaked (and if you don't know what that that means, you don't know enough to expound on this subject). A million barrels a day from Alberta tar sands will offset a whole 5% decline in other US sources. Big whoop. Even if it pays off, you still have to replace most of that oil with something else.
Sustainability and energy independence essay