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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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