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The Nuclear Power Renaissance
Actual Reality writes "It is ironic to me that much of the same sentiment that thwarted the nuclear power industry back in the 80's is partially responsible for reviving it. Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel. The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology. We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again stifle our progress."
The road to total nuclear power:
The last battleground and current battle ground for decades, where to bury the waste from Nuclear Power. Nimbys are the log-jam there. Just find the place with the weakest resistance and bury it there. There's hardly anyone in North Dakota, so that state should be a push-over.
Don't anybody even suggest raising rates to reduce consumption, that's anti-progress!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
does that mean that manbearpig will not come kill us? Or is the only way to stop global warming still to raise taxes?
We need to keep the Homer Simpson's out of them and Don't cheap out on safety like M.R. Burns plant.
We KNOW that converting to nuclear energy would largely solve the global warming problem. Have a nice gander people, the solution to this seemingly intractible problem is staring us in the face.
No, nuclear isn't perfect. But in combination with electric cars, the CO2 problem is solved.
Then we just have to worry about the CO2 we've already put in there.
expandfairuse.org
For fuck's sake, learn how to use a comma.
We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again, stifle our progress.
Environmental concerns as an "impediment" to changes in our oil-based economy is a red herring.
We don't use nuclear because it would put the oil barons out of business, not because it's dirty or unsafe. Most of France's power comes from nuclear, and they don't have any problems with it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I'm in favor of nuclear power - as long as no-one tries to run it at profit.
Trying to run the thing at a profit, even a hugely government subsidized profit, leads to cutting corners, which means that waste is not properly disposed of (which is by far the leading relevant concern) and that proper precautions are not taken to prevent sabotage or attack (which is still a concern with a modern nuke plant, even though meltdowns are not.)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The US has missed several advancements in nuclear technology.
Well, this is good because it means that the US has the opportunity to move straight to the latest and safest state of the art nuclear power plant technology.
I can't recall, but didn't Godzilla oppose nuclear power? I know he didn't like nuclear weapons, as that's what woke him up.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Oh wait, most of you don't think it was that bad.
I guess nuclear radiation isn't a big deal when you don't leave your house.
Not to suggest we break the law or anything, but the best way to make sure something happens is to make sure someone makes a ridiculous and unfair amount of money out of it, if it does happen.
As for burying waste, well the Pentagon or Whitehouse are probably secure enough to store the nuclear waste - full of bunkers.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
While I have no technical expertise, I do believe it's theoretically possible to run safe fission reactors. But we shouldn't even consider building any until we have a *completed* (very) long-term storage/disposal solution for nuclear waste. Deferring it to the next generation is not OK.
As opposed to someone who's working in the non-profit sector who will do anything to make his numbers?
Non-profit is just a tax status. Meaning, there's a restriction to what you can do with the profits: there's nothing restricting you from making as much money or as much profit as you want - you can get rich off of a non-profit.
My wife works for a non-profit and there's plenty of meetings where they are encouraged to cut costs. So, sorry, not making "evil" profits won't make the plant any safer. Neither will having it run by some Government bureaucrat. Do you really want the caliber of person that works at the department of motor vehicles running those plants?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I don't know in detail about the US situation, but in the UK what killed nuclear power was not environmental concerns but the cost. When the government privatised the nuclear power stations they had to finally admit what had until then been denied - that it was the most expensive form of generation then in widespread use. It's possible this has changed, but the dearth of new builds despite apparent government sympathy leads me to believe that it probably hasn't.
your going to turn this 'can' into 'CANDU' .....excellent....
-I only code in BASIC.-
Another concern is the current ban on re-processing in the U.S.
This leads to an increased amount of medium-half-life waste (not to mention waste of energy), which would be converted to much more radioactive short half-life waste by the re-processing. Such waste is more hazardous, but its disposal is less challenging because the necessary term of safe storage is greatly reduced.
I really don't see the big deal. We're ALREADY a nuclear power, and I sincerely doubt that our energy companies are going to be selling plutonium to the highest bidder.
Fusion seems like it will always be the energy of the future. In the meantime, fission seems like a reasonable solution. There's been many of saftey advances in the past 30 years, and American saftey standards are high enough to prevent something like Chernobyl from happening in this country. (Overheating a 35-year old reactor without saftey features on) A former nuclear engineer who is now my supervisor once told me: "More people have died in of Ted Kennedy's car than have died from American nuclear reactors. The main problem is, many environmental activists oppose fission power, but also want to clean up greenhouse gases. My position is go with nuclear power, use it to generate electricity, then make electric cars, or cars that run off of hydrogen produced from nuclear reactors. We can then all say goodbye to at least 90% of American CO2 emissions.
While I agree it's interesting that *some* environmentalists are rallying around Nuclear power, I think we need to make a few things clear that the poster of this news article seems to have missed.
1) Most environmentalists supporting the Nuclear option do so only because it is the lesser of two evils, the latter of which (Global Warming) was not known of or understood back when the Nuclear Power protests were going on. This isn't ironic, it's evolutionary. It's the scientific process at its finest: new data comes in, and those looking out for the best interests of everyone reevaluate their previous conclusions based on that new data. The two are NOT mutually exclusive.
2) The "We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again, stifle our progress," is a bit more blatent of an example of flamebaiting. The reason that environmental concerns occasionally "stifle our progress" is because it would be foolish for anyone NOT to think of environmental concerns. Would the poster of this article rather that environmental concerns never be taken into account in the case of new technology? It would be like a scientist intentionally ignoring a key variable in a study. You wouldn't tell a clinical group performing studies on a new (for example) vaccine to ignore if the vaccine causes heart attacks just because said vaccine is supposed to cure cancer.
-Vendal Thornheart
We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again, stifle our progress.
... I know California's power problems of a few years ago made a lot of folks I know very nervous (even though that was yet another manufactured crisis and not due to any lack of capacity.) We don't have a lot of ways to generate the kind of power a high-technology civilization requires, we really don't. We can continue to invest in the R&D (fusion perhaps, and other alternate energy sources) but if we want to keep the lights on we'd better start taking the proper steps now.
We can only hope that a bunch of ignorant, loud-mouthed assholes won't stifle our progress. That same level of idiocy is still present in large measure in our population, of course. The difference is that today we are much more aware of the limitations and liabilities of our existing power generation technology than we were forty-odd years ago. People are starting to understand that burning coal and oil for power is not a benign activity, and that, while nuclear power has risks so does what we're doing now.
Hopefully the fear of living in the dark without blow driers will help more people see reason
Still, to be fair, the anti-nuke crowd may have actually done us a favor, by forcing us to hold off on any significant investment in atomic energy. This time around, we'll have the advantage of nearly half a century's worth of development in nuclear technology. That's a very good thing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
We don't need nuclear. Nuclear is the dirtiest of all known fuel sources, NOT the cleanest. The waste remains deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
The simple truth is that we don't need nuclear, much the same as we don't need fossil fuels. Using totally clean, renewable resources is well within our technological reach.
The problem is with renewable technology is that it takes the market away from the current big players. The oil, coil, and nuclear industry are all based on the same basic process:
- bribe the government so they let you mine the resources you want
- claim the resource as your own, as if you have some sort of actual legitimate right to it
- convert the resource into power
- dump the waste without any thought as to the consequences
A switch to renewable energy undermines this model completely, as the resource is coming at us from the sun, and it's quite distributed in nature. That means that it favors distributed capture and conversion into usable energy. For the big energy companies, this is simply not on.
What's more, renewable energies scale up and down extremely well. This means that instead of requiring massive capital investment to get a huge power plant working, a local community can install solar, wind, etc generators, and bring them online as required. For the big energy companies, this is REALLY not on. And they'll fight with everything they've got to make sure it doesn't happen.
Right now, the battle is in convincing people that renewables are a viable solution. The energy industry would have us believe that this solution doesn't exist, and that we have to keep burning fossil fuels, and then switch to nuclear. BULLSHIT! We need to invest seriously in renewables, and leave the toxic fossil fuel and nuclear energy and weapons industry in the past.
This brings me to the final point: that nuclear energy == nuclear weapons. In most nuclear countries, the US included, there is NO separation between the so-called civilian and military nuclear fuel cycle. While we have nuclear energy, we'll have nuclear weapons. While we have both these abominations, we'll have nuclear waste, accidents, horrific damage to the environment, and possibly a world-wide nuclear catastrophe. It doesn't take much to cover the world in radioactive dust. And what do we do then?
"Nuclear power is very clean..."
Only if you ignore the waste products. If you think spent nuclear fuel is clean, why not make useful consumer goods out of it?
The Greenpeace info site on the nuclear reactor now under construction in Olkiluoto, Finland:
http://www.olkiluoto.info/en/
Plenty of scandals.
I cannot understand why people are so against Nuclear. In Australia we are still burning coal / natural gas for our power. Yes there are a few hydro / tidal plants (but what they do to the enviroment is not much better). We need a transition power source.. "Clean Coal" et al are a short stop gap solution. What am I missing here but, why not get a few Nuclear Power stations, as a longer transitional power source until we can find a better power source, Perhaps cover the desert with solar?
i was under the impression tha when you included all the necessary mining of uranium ect nuclear power emits arond 75% of the carbon of normal power?
Nuclear power and oil power largely do not compete - oil is used to power internal combustion engines; for the most part very few power plants run on oil; most run on either coal or natural gas.
You might have had an argument had you said "coal" barons, or "natural gas" barons. I'm not denying that there are some pretty fucking evil oil barons, but this is not their handiwork.
That's already an issue in... just about every industry. The solution we use in the US is regulation overseen by bodies like the EPA and OSHA.
In fact, there's already a governmental body set up to regulate nuclear power generation: The NRC.
Yes, for-profit businesses try to cut corners. As such, cutting corners has been made illegal (and is heavily monitored) in cases where it causes undue risk to public/employee/environmental safety.
Amazing -- every time I make this point on Slashdot, I get a swarm of deluded people flaming me. Now that there's an article on it, maybe people will begin to see that if they're really serious about things like Global Warming, switching from Coal to Nuclear power would be the only cost-efficient way to do it. All other sources of non-emitting power cost about ~3x as much per kilowatt. According to the DOE (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/co2_report/co2emiss.pdf) 40% of all CO2 generated in America is produced from electricity generation.
The stupid, stupid environmental prejudice against nuclear power has come back to bite us all on the ass. If we had all nuclear power plants now instead of majority coal plants, we'd have eliminated almost half the CO2 production from our country which is MUCH MUCH more than reductions mandated by agreements like the Kyoto protocols, which specify either minimal cuts (8% for Europe) or capping increases (Australia can go up by 8%).
If you're an environmentalist, you should be for nuclear power. Either shit or get off the pot -- if you just talk about "climate change" and then live in some sordid China Syndrome fear of nuclear power, you're not just an idiot, you're a hypocrite. If you're not an environmentalist, you should also be for nuclear power, since it's cheaper than all the alternative energy sources being pursued right now, and everyone likes low power costs.
Morons like you killed the nuke industry. Morons like you, but with a different fetish, are trying to kill the hydro, wind, solar, etc. Each have their own little pet peeves and they whine and march and protest. I say we collect all you mother fuckers and burn you bodies for fuel. Won't last long but it sure would be enjoyable.
Most large-scale power plants have some bad impact on the environment.
Burning carbon - air pollution
Wind farms - dead birds
Hydroelectric - dams and all that this implies
Nuclear - nuclear waste disposal
Solar and other relatively-little-used technologies may have a better footprint but they are still too expensive to be cost-effective in a large scale.
Until we get something cheap with a light footprint, it's a game of "pick your poison."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel.
Nuclear power is definitely not 'clean.' 'Nuclear Power' means nuclear
fission which produces all sorts of 'dirty' extremely toxic fission
byproducts
such as radioactive isotopes of cobalt, cesium, strontium, tin,
iodine, etc. which persist in the environment and require enormous
expenditures of money just to contain so that they don't contaminate
the air, water, and soil that we use.
Noone has mentioned anything about what to do with the waste. This is the sticking point as far as I'm concerned. I have no doubt that we can make safe nuclear power plants. But there are waste products that must be safely stored for a very long time and we don't seem to have any good answers for that. We can't even effectively store the waste we have now, it's leaking into the Columbia River. Yucca Mountain does not appear to be the safe place that some have hoped it would be.
We need Solar and Nuclear en mass to supply the electric/hydrogen for the next fuel source. At least that's how I see it. Here's my shot in the dark which I could be totally wrong:Disposing of Nuclear waste should be easy. Just put it back where you got it. I mean there has to be a lot of uninhabited areas to dump waste. After all, the earth supplied it to begin with.
God spoke to me.
As Nikky Telsa said in 1915, "No matter what we attempt to do, no matter to what fields we turn our efforts, we are dependent on power. We have to evolve means of obtaining energy from stores which are forever inexhaustible, to perfect methods which do not imply consumption and waste of any material whatever. If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wasteful and will have to be stopped in the interest of coming generations."
If it uses up a limited resource, it's "burning fuel", at least metaphorically, and therefore lame. Screw that. Let's figure out how to tap into the vast power represented by the titanic spinning mass we live on, or the even more titanic mass that shines in our skies, instead of perpetuating the cycle of digging stuff up stuff until it we use it all up. Those experiments with dangling wires from the shuttle are a step in the right direction.
How does having it government run not do the same thing? Chernobyl was government-run, and it's the worst reactor disaster in history.
I don't have a problem with private nuclear plants, providing the safeguards are in place, and that includes government inspectors with the independence and know-how to do it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes nuclear power is clean but the radioactive fuel is not a renewable resource. No more than oil and other petrochemicals.
Build a mighty infrastructure to power the world with the atom, end up with tons of radioactive waste with five digit half lives and once all the uranium and plutonium are used up what will mankind use next?
Go ahead and argue that Earth's crust has a limitless supply, considering humanity's lifespan, but there's going to be a point where mining uranium will be more expensive than generating electricity with nuclear power plants causing another energy crisis.
Finally are humans using nuclear energy to its fullest potential? Humans are using it to boil water rather than actually tapping the atom for its energy.
at mucking up our own life support system?
and min wage pay is ok.
after all, it's not like we need an environment!!
Sadly the nuclear 'industry' seems more concerned with profitability than safety. From TMI, Chernobyl, Silkwood and the China Syndrome, they haven't given us any reason to trust the. This looks like just more already affluent people who want to make even more money they don't really need and without any regard for the risks or people involved.
...And all that process of uranium mining and refinement runs on sweet dreams and sunshine?
And for nuclear fission, the reality is that there are significant downsides rarely mentioned in the popular media.
These include, but are not limited to:
a. deaths in the mining process itself;
b. waste byproducts from the mining process;
c. heavy metal contamination from the ore extraction process;
d. chemical contaminants released into the environment during ore extraction;
e. air and water pollution due to methods used for ore extraction;
f. failure to consider the 100,000 plus year lifespan of the spent elements in risk scenarios.
I'm not saying, looked at from the viewpoint of fuel rod usage that the reactors aren't safe, although the CANDU and French reactors are safer by virtue of design.
But the risk factors of the full process are rarely measured properly when compared with other methods.
All energy production entails contaminants of some sort in the full life-cycle spectrum, and nuclear fission is not much cleaner than many other less risky choices.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'll take a small amount of horrible radioactive material buried underground in the middle of nowhere, rather than the insane amount of crap that gets pumped into the atmosphere daily by coal plants.
Sure, there are things far more cleaner than nuclear - solar, wind.. Oh - wait, are you taking into account the industrial waste used to produce solar panels/etc?
Nuclear, for all intents and purposes, is goddamned clean.
Yes, we know all about low cost nuclear power here in New Hampshire. Hah!
All power plants suck up water from a nearby body of water, heat it, and dump the waste heat. Nuclear plants are less efficient because the temperatures are much lower than fire-powered plants. They dump a lot more warm water into the river per kilowatt output because of this. What shall we do with all this warm water? Shall we dump it in the river and kill the fish? This is already a serious problem at plants like Vermont Yankee.
What shall we do with the nuclear waste? NIMBY is the battle cry! Just ask the poor slobs in Washington State who are getting radioactive waste in the river. Ask the folks in Nevada if they want to be the world's nuclear dump. I don't think so.
The real answer is to 'get off the pot' and not need power plants like this at all. We could chop power consumption by a lot. Just watch, it will happen as energy gets more expensive. People can get quite ingenious when the alternatives are grim.
"f. failure to consider the 100,000 plus year lifespan of the spent elements in risk scenarios."
What the FUCK are you talking about? it'd not near 100,000 years and in fact there are techniques to reuse the spent fuel making the half life 500 years. Far less the half life of leaving the elements in the ground.
There other point don't even warrant talking about.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I mean it's not like an accident would have any serious consequences.
And anyway, accidents won't happen because corporations are not greedy and government does it's job.
And the waste that remains lethally radioactive for thousands of years, well nothing will go wrong during that thousands of years. I guarantee it. Yay, rah rah nuclear!
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Back in the early 80s, I thought I had the ideal solution to plutonium waste. There was only a few tons of it on earth - let's pack it up, put it in a booster stage which would be launched from the space shuttle in near earth orbit and, after a few months of slow travel would fall into the Sun where it would totally negligible. Do it every ten years or so - no waste problem. Space shuttles at that point, seemed like a damned reliable method.
Then the Challenger disaster happened. My first thought, after the lives of the crew, was to thank god nobody implemented the solar waste proposal. I'm not sure if a few tons of plutonium distributed into a cloud by the explosion at that altitude would have wiped out life on earth as we know it, but I'm sure the consequences would not have been good.
Glad to be wrong.
Of course, if we follow your wise comment, we would have to ask the obvious question:
What if we had spent $1,600,000,000,000.00 USD on building alternative energy sources (not including nuclear fission) instead of on the Iraq War costs to date.
If we had done that the sheer literal economies of scale would have reduced the cost per energy unit to below that of oil or the more expensive nuclear fission.
Think of how much solar photovoltaic cells used to cost - $2 a Kwh - they now cost less than $0.20 a Kwh and we've invested one ten-thousandth that amount in actually building them, so the economies of scale haven't even started to kick in.
Or think of wind energy - in the EU it costs less than 4 cents a Kwh while it's twice as expensive here because we don't invest in building units.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How plentiful is Uranium for nuclear power? Will we find ourselves in the same dire straits tomorrow seeking vanishing uranium deposits? What is the situation?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Tell that to the radioactive underground plumes and spent nuclear fission shells in my state.
They'll be radioactive for a lot longer than 500 years.
As you very well know.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Nuclear power is the only way forward in our carbon conscious world. It is the only solution that efficient/financially viable enough to replace carbon based power. No renewable source has yet proved itself anything close to being a geninue replacement for fossil fuel based power.
Nuclear power no matter how fantastic has inherent risks of nuclear disasters and spillage, this however is something we simply have to live with if we want a low carbon energy supply. We have to accept the fact there will be disasters and incidents and deal with them if we want relatively clean energy.
Uranium will last for several hundred years, even more if you reprocess it. Thorium can also be used as a nuclear fuel, but requires different reactor designs. It's more abundant than uranium, so it should last quite a while.
The mining/extraction is a big problem too since you're dealing with pretty nasty stuff. Coal mining is no walk in the park, but uranium mining is a lot worse.
Any comments on how clean a technology is need to look at the whole lifecycle not just on the smokestack emmissions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Reprocessing is expensive mainly due to the labor involved in reprocessing it. Spent fuel must be cut apart and chemically treated in a clean room environment. Removing the tans-uranic elements from spent fuel is not complicated from a chemistry standpoint, but handling spent nuclear fuel is always expensive.
One potential solution is molten salt reactors, which do not use fuel elements but rather use molten uranium salts. Since there are no fuel elements, fuel from the reactor can be chemically treated without a lot of handling. It may even be possible to continuously process the fuel while it's still in the reactor (though this has never been done). Doing this could completely solve the problem of long-term nuclear waste. The only waste produced by such a reactor would be depleted uranium and fission products. Of course, the fission products would need to be safely stored for 300 years before they were safe, but that's a lot better than the trans-uranics that we have to deal with now.
Molten salt reactors also have advantages when it comes to fail safe design. Since they don't have fuel elements or control rods, there is nothing in the reactor core which can break or wear out and cause a melt down to occur. In the case of emergencies, the reactor can be drained into sub-critical containment vessels.
Nuclear for so many reasons is not the way of the future. I cannot understand why so many persist.
America is currently the biggest polluter on the globe this may not always be the case as countries like China and India are developing.
If America decides to set an example to the rest of the world by using nuclear power plants to run the country to cut down on green house gas emissions what then gives the US the right to tell Countries such as Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Iran and North Korea they are not allowed do the same.
These countries have to have power aswell, its a stupid move to only allow so called clean power generation from Nuclear in the west as we would all suffer the consequences from constantly burning fossil fuels in vastly populated countries who aren't allowed to have greener technologies because they are a security threat?
Secondly the article makes false claims.
"You can't build wind and solar fast enough and their inherent production profiles are different enough such that you can't use them for base-load generation," said Michael Carboy, an analyst with Signal Hill.This is rubbish current Solar Thermal technology is perfect to supply generate base load power for the US and plenty of other countries worldwide where there is enough sun to keep it all cooking. Check out what Ausra are doing
I am not saying Nuclear research is a bad thing by any means, but once base load power generation is considered I think it has extremely dangerous implications world wide.
Interestingly, the current crop of reactor designs are really poor compared to what they could be. There's a lot of scope to improve the safety and efficiency of nuclear power, but I'm not surprised that there's reluctance on all parts to put time and effort into new designs considering the uncertainty.
For example, breeder reactors that yield more energy for a given amount of fuel and keep all waste on site, burning it down to relatively safe forms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
It's not so much how much is there (plenty by-the-way), but how long it will last before refueling. In a breeder reactor, the Uranium is broken-down into another fissile isotope which is then broken-down into another fissile isotope. Only about 5% of the original mass remains as a solid when the reactor would need refueling.
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." - Albert Einstein
The game.
The concern for the environment should act as the necessary friction against knee jerk reactions like this one. One of the biggest issues with any form of industrial energy production is waste disposal. Coal contributes to global warming. Nuclear waste cannot be disposed of in any convenient ways yet. Putting it in a glass box, in a metal tube and burying it under a mountain (the plan for long term waste disposal in both the US and France) is exactly like sweeping dirt under the rug. It works as long as the amount of dirt is small. If there is a lot of dirt, this method doesn't work anymore. To those saying throw it in space, orbital lift is expensive. Bottom line- any method of energy extraction leaves waste products. Some are easier to handle than others. Radioactive goo is harder to dispose than CO2.
Legally obligatory sig : My opinions are my own... etc etc
Yeah, the containers would be designed to not leak in an explosion... just like the Challenger was designed not to explode and kill its crew.
My first thought on reading "nuclear power renaissance" was along the lines of "Wouldst thou care for some weapons-grade plutonium, m'lord? Huzzah!"
As a radioactive isotope decays, it converts it's mass into radioactive energy that is released into the surrounding environment. An isotope with a short half life decays quickly, releasing lots of energy a short period of time. An isotope with a long half life decays slowly releasing a little radiation over a long period of time.
Isotopes with a long half life (such as uranium) are generally safe to handle. As a matter of fact, the most significant danger of uranium is not it's radioactivity; being a heavy metal uranium is extremely poisonous (in the same manor as lead.)
The most dangerous isotopes are the ones with a short half life, such as Iodine 131 (with a half life of 8 days) and Caesium 137 (half life of 30 years,) both of which were released during the Chernobyl disaster.
Huh? Hopefully you want society in general to run nuclear power plants at a profit...it would be awfully stupid to run them at a loss.
Or do you mean that you don't want anybody to make money running one? I don't share your view that someone not trying to make money is going to be a great deal more reliable(mostly because the people around him will still be trying to make money, but also because I don't trust them when they claim that they aren't trying to make money). If you are really concerned about it, you should be in favor of requiring obscene liability insurance to be carried on any new plants -- sufficient precautions would then be a prerequisite, in order to make said insurance affordable.
Note that there isn't really any way to properly dispose of waste, at the moment it needs to be carefully stored, for a very long time. Glass vitrification is scary, as it isolates the waste from future technological improvements in processing. The status quo of on site storage is actually pretty good.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
On a recent trip to the UK I was amazed at how many nuclear facilities there were, configured in two, four, six, and even eight-packs all over the countryside, sometimes several clusters within view of each other. Some of them were so close to the freeways (er, um, motorways?) that you could throw a rock and hit a cooling tower as you drove past. You couldn't even think about a nuke plant in the US without a severe negative reaction. Why? Is the UK a hotbed of nuclear accidents and proliferation of fissionable material? Or has the eco-fascist environmental lobby stifled yet anothe move to energy independence?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
The fuel cycle for power production does not result in weapons grade material, they are entirely different processes. It is possible to create special plants that do produce material that can then be turned into weapons, but this requires deliberate intent to do so.
... but then he would have undermined his position. Enrichment is also an expensive process, and my understanding is that we monitor supplies of the necessary equipment very closely.
... it
Hence the controversy over Iran's enrichment program. It would have taken the GP about ten seconds to Google the difference in the two processes
You know what the problem is? Well, I'll tell you what it is. You need to explain to people like the GP what a terawatt is (there may be too many zeroes in it for rapid comprehension, though) as well as how costly it is to generate that much energy with windmills, tide motors and other forms of "alternate energy." I suspect that when the rolling blackouts come for real, these self-proclaimed environmentalists will be the first ones crying out "Why isn't my refrigerator running? My soy-milk popsicles are melting!" To which the answer will be, "Well, dipstick, we're out of coal and oil, and thanks to the likes of you we didn't implement the one technology that could have saved us."
I find it helps to put people like that on an exercycle connected to an alternator, and have them try to light a hundred watt incandescent light bulb. Just one. The effect is, from their perspective, often highly illuminating, although most at first don't believe it (no way it takes this much work for one lousy light bulb!) Then {ding!} another (much smaller) bulb goes off in their heads. Yes, Virginia, it's not bloody magic, the energy does have to come from somewhere, and we use one HELL OF A LOT OF IT.
Look, I know some true environmentalists, and I respect them, and I find that, while they may not be technical people, they bend every effort to educate themselves as the implications of the technologies involved in order to do their jobs better. I try to help out there whenever I can. These are also the people that try to work within the system to effect positive change, and I respect them even more for that. There are actually a good number of such individuals, but you never hear about them on the 5 o'clock news because they're busy working with business leaders and politicians to get them to invest money in less-wasteful manufacturing processes, better regulation, etc., rather than trying to get their faces on TV.
Then there are the knee-jerk reactionary types (and that's where I class most so-called "environmentalists") whose only goal is to oppose, as loudly and publicly as possible, and preferably with donations involved. They're what you might call "Jesse Jackson Environmentalists" because they generate lots of hot air and waste considerable quantities of broadcast airtime. They usually haven't got a clue what they're talking about either, but unfortunately neither do most of the people that listen to them.
The reality is unpleasant: we don't have a lot of options when it comes to large scale power production, and we don't have a lot of time left to implement them.
Or really, pending a breakthrough in power generation
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Nuke power is "very clean" only if you ignore the dirty process for mining and processing its fuel, and all the extremely toxic waste it produces for which there's no alternative but watching it like a hawk for what amounts to forever.
Nuke power boosters think we're stupid, because every time they think we're desperate enough to fall for lies about nuke power's extreme costs, they rehash them again.
When nuke scientists have a way to process the waste into safe byproducts within a decade or so, and when making the fuel is less filthy than, say, building an equivalent amount of tidal or geothermal plants, then they should try again. They've got some good ideas. I'd just like to see more on the science and engineering, and less on the made-up marketing.
--
make install -not war
The Integral Fast Reactor produces a comparatively small amount of waste (the designers guess estimate than a ton per gigawatt of power per year), and the waste itself is no more radioactive than uranium ore after about two hundred years (as opposed to thousands or millions of years).
After the project was nearly ready for production, it was torpedoed largely by John Kerry and Hazel O'Leary. This wasn't a partisan thing; two of the biggest backers were Richard Durbin and Carol Moseley Braun. It's one of the biggest wallbangers in political history that I can think of. I am at a loss as to why anyone is considering building a reactor on any other design.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
At the end of the year, you get a check with your dividend, and you get your share of the waste. Cash the check, but you (and your children, and your grandchildren etc..) have to keep the waste in your house until it is safe.
San Francisco Photographers
"Those experiments with dangling wires from the shuttle are a step in the right direction."
We have a winner. Construct giant boosters to send wires up into Earth orbit to collect energy.
Where do you think the energy in those wires comes from? Hint: it's not from the magnetic field.
To those of you who think that nuclear may be worse than coal power because of the nuclear "waste". Just checking: you are aware of the phenomenon called radioactive half-life right? If you keep a radioactive material isolated (for example, underground geological storage), it decays until it is no longer radioactive. The most radioactive constituants go inert in only a few days. The ones that take a long time are less radioactive in proportion to how much longer they take to decay. Meanwhile, your body itself is composed of radioactive materials like carbon40. Just living, you are constantly exposed to cosmic radiation, radon, etc. in levels that are very high relative to anything you'd be exposed to from open plutonium240 or any of the other nuclear wastes that take more than a few decades to decay.
No I guess not. Just a guy saying "I told you so."
And he's full of crap. Not that much has changed. Nuclear power is still expensive, still has a nasty meltdown risk (yeah yeah, modern designs have never failed; doesn't mean they never will, especially with complex technology tempting both Captain Murphy and your friendly neighborhood terrorist), still has a huge potential for bomb material falling into the wrong hands, still creates waste that will have to be stored and carefully guarded for thousands of years.
And note that the supply of fissionable fuels isn't all that big. So in a century or so we'll have all the fallout of nuclear power (pardon the pun) and be back where we started.
What are the benefits? Well, there's no toxic gases emitted during normal power generation. That's pretty much it, except now the reduced CO2 emission matter more than it used to. And notice that I said "reduced" not "zero". Fuel doesn't just magically appear. You have to dig it up, process it, and transport it. Still produces less CO2 than burning coal (almost anything does), but a long way from zero.
I don't think the dangers-versus-benefits balance has made much of a shift in the favor of nukes. Actually, it's gone the other way. On the plus side you have a slight benefit to the fight against global warming. That wouldn't be enough to tip the scales, even if there weren't a nasty counterweight: a huge increase in the prevalence of terrorism. Do you really think it's a good idea to give terrorists so many juicy targets in the form of vulnerable nuclear plants and huge repositories of dirty bomb material?
Let me put the question another way: are you totally insane???!!!
Nuclear true believers (Jerry? You there?) like to blame the failure of their beloved technology on technically illiterate hippies and knee-jerk pacifists. Those groups exist — they're even as stupid as their detractors claim — but they're a red herring. Nuclear power didn't fail because of hysteria; it failed because it was a bad idea.
There are designs which don't produce long-lived waste. Our lovely government just happened to can the project before it was completed.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"Trying to run the thing at a profit, even a hugely government subsidized profit, leads to cutting corners"
That's utter horseshit. You're basically saying that not only does capitalism not work, but its dangerous as well.
Capitalism and market economies are all about efficiency. Efficiency isn't the same as "cutting corners". The longer you cut corners, the more likely that your business will suffer, or disappear completely. And as another poster has pointed out, simply making the whole thing a bureaucratic exercise is certainly no guarantee of safety. A government drone with a protected job and a quota to meet isn't exactly inducible to quality control.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Here's an interesting factoid: In the U.S. alone, pollution from coal power plants kills over 30,000 people each year. Of course, this is just a fraction of the worldwide number, and a fraction of those suffering health ailments from coal pollution. If you look at air pollution in general, the WHO estimates 2.4 million annual deaths worldwide.
This means that every few years (or less), more people die from coal than have died in the entire history of nuclear weapons and accidents, including Hiroshima (140,000), Nagasaki (80,000), and Chernobyl (4,000, although this has been argued about).
I don't mind the idea of nuclear power, but I don't believe that it can be done competitively (compared to other forms of energy)
When you add up the costs over the complete life-cycle (not just the running costs):
- Design
- Building the reactor
- Fuel costs
- Very high security
- Very safe fuel disposal & security for the disposal for many years after the reactor is closed.
- Very high safety measures, maintenance and continual review by an external body.
- Safe disposal and demolition of the reactor after its life cycle has finished.
It will add up pretty quickly. It may be economically viable in the future to do this on a large scale for large countries like the US, but for smaller countries like Australia, it might never be viable.
As you say, any for profit company is going to try and cut many of these very high costs, and many would avoid paying many of the clean-up costs by shutting down operations and claiming that they don't have enough funds to cover upgrades, leaving the taxpayer with the bill. We saw how the energy companies avoided paying infrastructure maintenance costs and got the government to pick-up the tab during the Californian energy brownouts.
Congrats on the marriage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How plentiful is Uranium for nuclear power?
This link is a pretty good read for that information. Current price of uranium is nowhere near the historic inflation-adjusted high ($75/pound versus $145/pound). However, the author gives some very good information on why the price will be skyrocketing soon:
-there's a gap between production and consumption that's currently being closed by using stockpiles, i.e. old Russian nukes. Once those are used up, that gap opens up again.
-there are many nuclear power plants coming online in the next decade or so. 28 are currently under construction, over 100 more in the next decade.
-at current rates of demand, we'll need 900 new nuclear plants by 2050 to keep up.
In short, it's plentiful now, but it won't be soon.
I wish I knew the economics of nuclear power. My understanding is that the US Federal government bears the responsibility for nuclear waste disposal. I think when nuclear power is considered, there should be consideration of the costs included for waste disposal. When this is done, I strongly suspect that nuclear power will not be cost competitive with other options, including wind, solar, hydroelectric and conservation. What will it cost to 'mothball' a reactor for 10,000 years or cut it up for disposal?
And note that the supply of fissionable fuels isn't all that big. So in a century or so we'll have all the fallout of nuclear power (pardon the pun) and be back where we started.
Don't knock it. If we've already hit Peak Oil we'll need that century to come up with something else.
I don't think the dangers-versus-benefits balance has made much of a shift in the favor of nukes.
I agree. The balance has been in favor of nuclear power all along.
Nuclear true believers (Jerry? You there?) like to blame the failure of their beloved technology on technically illiterate hippies and knee-jerk pacifists.
Nope. I blame the Department of Defence. Particularly the Navy.
You want to know why? Google for it yourself.
The same exact downsides with uranium ore mining exist with coal mining. Did you know that coal is rich in uranium and we need several orders of magnitude more of it to produce the same amount of electricity? Did you know that when coal is burned, radioactive isotopes, uranium included, are put into the atmosphere for people to inhale?
There is very little waste. Right now, we are doing nukes poorly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have sat here reading so many posts from the usual mountain of slashdot experts about how nuclear is clean, cheap or the only way to go but they all over look the one big insurmountable problem. It is not the tail end waste that is the major problem in nuclear, it is the lead up waste from the refinement process
2 words....
Uranium Hexaflouride ( go on google it )
9 tonnes of Uranium Hexaflouride is produced for every tonne of usable uranium fuel. It is highly corrosive, breaks down on contact with dihydrogen oxide to form UO2F2 (uranyl fluoride) and HF (hydrogen fluoride) both toxic and has a half life in the range of 4.5 Billion years.
The current method of storage is above ground in steel containers that have a life of only decades and as a result they need to be constantly inspected, repainted and replaced. An expensive option that must be maintained until the uranium threat has gone, and you are still left with the hexaflouride part.
The alternative options for storage all require high energy processes to extract the flouride.
As I said, forgetting about the environmental impacts of nuclear power there are serious issues with the energy and cost calculations that have been touted by nuclear proponents.
But it's not the answer, for the very same reasons that we're currently going apeshit over Iran's activities.
"How plentiful is Uranium for nuclear power? "
Since I have a mining background I'll chime in. They found so much up through the '70's they sort of quit looking for more, especially after TMI when the demand dried up. Even without breeder Rx, there is enough for a couple hundred years. With breeders, five or six hundred; with thorium breeders, a couple thousand? And this is what we know about now. There is actually a surprising amount of the stuff in seawater, so if the price goes up enough that supply becomes viable too.
In many land deposits, the uranium is trapped in sandstone between two shale layers (look up roll front deposit). In this happy case, you can use a system of wells to dissolve the uranium and pump it out without sending anyone underground.
The planet is so loaded with uranium and thorium you have to wonder about the supernova that seeded our proto-solar nebula.
Until and unless no other options but the quickest dirtiest ones are possible. In 1973 the OPEC embargo should have convinced people that we needed to take another view at oil alternatives across the spectrum. Instead we had a brief emotional flirtation with some forms of conservation with the hope that soon things would just go back to the way they were. So we built down nuclear and after TMI practically outlawed it. Car companies driven to bankruptcy churned out cheap smaller cars for a few years but by the early '80's were back in gas guzzler mode. We built energy efficient homes for a few years and stopped. And we touched on replacement furnaces and boilers for homes and businesses that were 97% efficient but we never rolled them out in quantity so they remained expensive to the point where the economic breakeven point was beyond the operating life of the equipment.
Now too we have Green this and that on TV. Every car company claims to have a hybrid. Except most of them are 5% hybrids on 300hp trucks or E85 engines where you can't get E85 fuel. Or the Great Salvation, corn ethanol which is 1/7th as cost and energy efficient as Brazilian sugar beets. And we'll do this too for a few years until we're used to $6/gallon gas. After that recession/depression finally wanes, we'll be right back up there with Escalades and coal fired power plants.
So who cares? We're stupid and selfish and there's no hope. Science and technology can't save us because no one wants to be 'saved'. I own a 4cyl Camry and a 4cyl Focus and when gas is $5/gal I'm getting a 125-150cc scooter that gets 85mpg. And one of the cars will not get used unless it's a real need. In fact with only one more kid at home for 2 years until college, one of those cars will go away and I'll just use the scooter for my main transport when the remaining car is out. I work at home and I suspect more people will too. Hell - just get a Bajaj power rickshaw - 2 wheels, a roof, 8.5hp, seats 4. Unless it's the dead of winter or bad weather it's fine. I'll get a big lock or chain for it or something.
Because waiting for America to get off its fat ass and do something is pointless. We'll all be freezing in the dark by the time anyone perks up their ears and by then it will be some draconian horrorshow of rations, forced relocations and law enforcement.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's the internet. If someone makes a claim you're unsure about, look it up yourself. Don't use someone's failure to list some web sites supporting a claim as a basis for disbelieving their logic. That's a cheap, ineffective tactic, and it's petty of you.
The reprocessing issue came up in a Slashdot discussion earlier this year (at LEAST once):
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/14/2321216
Check Wikipedia; even if the article is trash (which is seldom but not negligible), there are usually near-optimal, authoritative references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
Seriously, stop being childish. People should be informative enough to provide links, but other people shouldn't get bent out of shape if they don't. Less than 30 seconds of searching turned up relevant, informative facts.
I've probably missed the window for getting any moderation, but here goes.
You're taking into account the entire process involved in nuclear power generation. This is good. However, you're forgetting that it will inevitably be used to replace coal, which is not good. If you follow the news, you will know that coal miners constantly die all over the world. Also, coal mining pollutes and causes respiratory disease in the most heavily mined areas. Finally, it destroys entire mountain ranges, even in the US.
Uranium mining has the same destructive effects, but we need thousands of times less of it. If you've heard of uranium miners dying in the news, then you have heard something I haven't. I think this sums it up quite well: uranium mining does use much more nasty chemicals than coal mining, but still comes out ahead by virtue of being several orders of magnitude smaller.
If nuclear is so cheap and low cost, why do we need $50,000,000,000 in govt. subsidies to get it restarted?
If you put $50B into solar energy, there'd be no need for nuclear (although solar is technically fusion power with a space-based reactor).
What we really need is a level playing field. Too often the politically connected funnel taxpayer dollars to their own source, be it ethanol, oil, coal, or nuclear. Wind and solar currently receive a small but sensible per kWh subsidy. All new forms of power should be changed over to the same per hWh subsidies, with no additional subsidies. Then they would compete on the level.
With a per kWh subsidy that was the same for all new energy sources, the market would determine the most efficient way to supply the needed energy, not the number of lobbyists each industry could afford.
And of course you can count on the American people to elect a competent executive that will appoint competent administrators to oversee the department with those government inspectors. An executive that won't cut the budget for those oversight bodies on the grounds that the market should decide. An executive that won't have secret meetings where industry corporations get to solely set energy policy.
An elected executive like George W Bush and Richard Cheney, that hires qualified people like ex-FEMA director Mike Brown to oversee critical functions.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
It's possible that depleted uranium is a factor (maybe even a big one) in the Iraq War Syndrome, but there is a very sensible reason for that.
Because it is used in weapons and reactors, uranium has a terrible reputation. The real honest truth is that naturally occurring uranium (of which there is a substantial amount) is not very radioactive. It has a half-life of roughly 4.5 billion years and so radiates weakly. Depleted uranium is only about half as radioactive as that. Really, you could sleep with a box of the stuff under your bed for a long long time.
So why is depleted uranium ammo bad? Because it gets shot at things at very high velocities and when it hits something, the DU part of the round disintegrates. Inhaling any of that is bad news. It has far more surface area and it is now inside your body where your layer of dead skin cannot stop the weak radiation.
As already mentioned, there are plenty of other uses for DU such as counterweights in planes (takes up less of the limited space), shielding in medical radiation devices (because it is so dense) and others.
I'm not sure what your beef with uranium is. Maybe some uranium sneaked up on your grandfather and mugged him? I'm just guessing here...
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
I don't understand everyone crying for lots and lots of reactors. There are huge problems with waste, with the possibilities for disasters, terrorism, sabotage, etc. The potential for disasters that contaminate huge areas and render then uninhabitable is very very real.
What is so wrong with building wind farms, solar arrays, geothermal installations, wave generators, etc? What is wrong with mandating all new homes use solar to augment their heating and water heating requirements?
Virtually any area of the country has some renewable resource that can be exploited - fairly easily - to provide power. The roof of an average home will provide twice the energy you actually need. Install solar water and air heaters, photovoltaics and an inverter and you can have all the energy you need with no utility bills at all. None.
On larger scales it is entirely feasible to supply large cities. If you haven't seen a huge wind farm, go visit one. They are impressive. Or solar arrays that heat a working fluid that drives turbines (Mojave).
None of that will contaminate the area of a state to the point that nobody can live there without birth defects and cancer. If you haven't read about the people living near the Chernobyl plant, look into it. There are people dying from horrible cancers and people being born with monster movie birth defects. Do you really want to risk that? And for acute exposure if you happen to be near an accident, dying by radiation is a horrible way to go. Your mucous membranes just sort of fall apart because fast growing (and dying) cells can't regenerate.
The waste has to be contained for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. That will not be free. Think of it as "interest" on the debt. Is it really worth creating something (radioactive waste) that has to be contained for longer than civilization - or even people - have existed just so you can run a hot tub?
What about just plain old conservation? It is the absolute height of arrogance for people to insist they need to waste energy because it is their "right" to enjoy themselves when it means global warming and nuclear waste.
Nuclear power should be an absolute last resort. It should come after conservation and renewable energies have been maxed out. Then and only then should it even be considered.
With coal plants they just burning it and letting the waste go out the stack. So you're likely breathing stuff like mercury, lead and radioisotopes all the time. I'd rather we figure out a place to put it than just burn it and pretend we aren't putting tons of hazardous compounds in the air for our families to breathe.
Some would argue that nuclear is not cost competitive at all, once you factor in the cost to build the facility.
See:
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=672
"S&P found that new 2005 U.S. subsidies roughly equal to the next six units' capital costs (on top of big prior subsidies) won't materially improve builders' credit ratings, because most of the risks that concerned the capital markets remain. This unprecedented bailout experiment will probably have the same effect as defibrillating a corpse."
In contrast, According to Greenpeace, a 1000 MW nuclear plant generates 27 tons of highly radioactive waste and less than 1000 tons of total radioactive waste. (Realistic amounts are probably lower, but I'll use Greenpeace as an upper bound). The total amount of spent nuclear fuel generated by all nuclear power in the U.S. since 1951-2003 is about 49,000 tons. At a density of about 8-10 tons per cubic meter, this represents a cube about 18 meters on a side, about the volume of two olympic-sized swimming pools.
So what do we do? Continue dumping billions of tons of pollutants, and thousands of tons of uranium and thorium into the atmosphere killing an estimated 24,000 each year? Because we aren't sure it's safer to switch to a power source which has had zero fatalities in 50+ years, and we aren't yet sure what to do with the two swimming pools of waste it's generated in that time?
With privately held corporations, maybe.
However, in case you haven't been paying attention in the last 15 years, company executives for public corporations have often concentrated on short term profit at the expense of sustainability, because a major portion of that executive's (often excessive) compensation is tied to (relatively short term increases) in the stock price. Enron, Worldcom, and the like have only been the most egregious examples where fraudulent behaviour was used to inflate the stock price. However there are many more public companies where more legal means were used that sacrificed long term sustainability for short term profits. For an easy example, look at all the fiascos over poor-quality outsourced tech support in the tech industry.
I can't see the nuclear power industry being immune to that disease. And I have suspicions that there will be few private capital firms interested in the huge investments required for building nuclear power plants. Private investors want growth potential whereas nuclear plants are built for a certain capacity.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Way back when, in the '70's and into the early '80's, I was fairly active in the anti-nuke community. In a way, my feelings have mellowed since then although I still have serious reservations about disposing of things that will still be dangerous ten thousand years from now. I never intended to become involved, but then some fedral officials decided that my backyard may just possibly make a good site to dispose of this waste. The area that they were looking at was about 90% swamp. It was a stupid idea and everyone knew it. Looking back, I think it was in the list only because it was so stupid that the place they really wanted (Yucca Mountain) would appear to be the only reasonable place that could be found. The whole siting process was far more political than any sort of science.
At the time, I took the time to educate myself on a wide variety of things, everything from the way that granite fractures to the way that radioactive waste affects various metals and minerals. Pretty wild stuff. There is no such thing as perfectly safe, perfectly secure long term high level radioactive waste storage. Dormant volcanos occasionally come back to life. Granite (even without stressors) cracks. Concrete exposed to the heat from radioactive decay disintigrates. Stainless steel stresses from expansion and contraction and slowly weakens. It also is subject to (very slow) corosion.
The only practical method of disposal is passive storage where the waste is protected by layer upon later of different kinds of shielding. In practicality, the waste is placed in casks designed to hold in most of the radiation, these casks are then placed in a sort of glass-lined tomb which is burried deeply inside a granite cave inside of a mountain. When the tomb reaches capacity it is outfitted with monitoring gear and is filled with concrete and sealed. It is then "monitored" from outside the repository, if any problems are detected they will then take corrective action. Only problem is how do you do that? What happens if the detection equipment breaks down, how do you fix it?
I still have all these questions and I still wrestle with why would we make something that makes waste that is so dangerous? This is a real question that deserves a real answer and nobody seems to have a real answer.
Still, millions of tons of coal ash isn't harmless and there isn't enough oil to go around forever. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. We can't dam enough rivers and every year we get hungrier and hungrier for energy.
There are hundreds of ways to generate electricty (or more simply perhaps, to make energy). Every method has advantages and disadvantages. Most are hard to scale up to provide meaningful meagawatts.
Nuclear power is one of those things that scales up. It is in a sense "clean" -- simply because its waste per KWH is so damned low. We have learned how to reprocess, reduce, and recycle radioactive waste but we have not made it safe. The waste that remains is still very dangerous.
The Pebble Bed reactor seems to answer for the short-term at least for many of the safety issues inside of the nuclear power plant. It also reduces the waste generated (not in weight, but in reactivity). In some ways it is even easier to dispose of. Spent pebbles can be used to generate moderate heat allowing them to be used commercially in other applications long after they have been retired from generating electricty.
I said earlier that my views have mellowed a bit. Today I think that nuclear power probably has a place. I think that I would much rather see new plants with new, safer, and more efficient technologies be built than see forty year old plants with stresses components be recertified to operate many years beyond their original designers intention. If this is allowed to continue to happen the infrastructure will fail, people will die. We can not afford this. It is better to replace than patch and fix.
We still need to solve the disposal problem. Perhaps we can make the waste into radioactive micro capsules and imbed them in our highways as autonomyous vehicle guides? Maybe we could use the coal ash to vitrify the capsules?
I think he's saying that capitalism doesn't work reliably enough. Remember Enron? Remember Bhopal? Remember the Exxon Valdez? etc.
One problem with capitalism is that its main goal is maximizing profits (and often short-term profits at that). Capitalizsm sees safety at best as a means to that end, and at worst as a obstacle to be subverted. But with nuclear power, you really need to have "safety first".
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
That's pretty funny. On the one hand, you say that private corporations are better at running nuke plants. Then you point to France and China as the example of countries that are heavily invested in nuclear.
So did you realize that most nuclear power plants in France are owned by EdF, the primarily state-owned corporation with a monopoly on electrical power distribution in France? Somehow I doubt that the situation is significantly more private/market-oriented in China.
So your examples belie your assumptions.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The problem in the UK is space and politics more than cost, at least with the current prices of oil, gas and coal. In Canada you can build a plant next to a small town and there is nobody else within 100km who will complain. The small town is kept happy by the influx of skilled workers to their economy (or else you pick a different small town which is).
In the UK you probably can't find anywhere where there is less than about 1 million people within 100km except maybe for national parks where you are never going to be allowed to build one. Since very few of these people will directly benefit from the plant there is no/little motivation to overcome their inherent distrust of nuclear power and so they complain.
These panels will block my view of Mars!
and lower my property values!
Just think of what the microwave beams would do to migratory birds!
Increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration puts more people at risk than nuclear meltdowns do. It's not like we have some magical technology that will make all the problems with energy production go away.
http://outcampaign.org/
On another note,That line reminds me of something I have wondered about for quite a while... Although the lack of any such animal with a fire-breathing capability would suggest is isn't, is it actually biologically possible for an animal to breathe fire (and survive to do it again)???
Also, another old wonder of mine; as many animals can metabolise metals, could one ever evolve to have a metal skeleton?
And while we're looking to completely unrealistic fiction for advise on the real world; we should stop all superhero wannabes from jumping into nuclear power plants, and we should stop terrorists from smuggling the nuclear fuel out inside of black diamonds.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Or the Great Salvation, corn ethanol which is 1/7th as cost and energy efficient as Brazilian sugar beets.
Firstly the organic energy source commonly used in Brazil is not beet-derived, it's from sugarcane.
Second, corn ethanol is not very efficient if compared to sugarcane.
I think that corn is overrated as an alternative for energy production, it probably suits best for the corn farm owners' lobby in the US.
The first time I was surprised by this was when they demanded that fast food no longer be wrapped in paper, in order to save the trees. Then of course a few years later they demanded the paper back, since the polystyrene containers were much nastier to the environment. They were right about the polystyrene of course, but McD's et al would never have changed from paper in the first place if they weren't forced to. And if memory serves it really was force, at least in Berkley laws were passed.
What is your (very) long-term storage/disposal solution for waste from coal plants? You know, all that CO2 that's changing our climate. The particulate matter. The sulfur dioxide. The mercury. The heavy metals. The radioactive uranium and thorium. What's your long term plan for all that? Haven't got one?
How about your short term plan? Haven't got one of those either?
Why is it that we must have a (very) long-term plan do deal with storage and disposal of nuclear waste, in some perfectly safe perfectly clean way, when coal plants have no plan what-so-ever to deal with the vastly greater and more damaging waste they generate?
Not viable for smaller countries like Australia? Try France, which today supplies about 70% of its energy with nuclear power (as has been mentioned before).
Fine, show me the prototype of a high-to-very-high-power microwave beam to electricity convertor.
Not communication, power.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Yes, nuclear power is better than it was...Yes it's currently
cheaper than solar (I believe that will change though), but
the waste problem is not small. We generate over 2000 ton of
HIGH level waste per year. And that will have to be under armed
guard for > 500 years...after we stop producing it. And most of
it is still sitting next to the reactors that produced it. No
long term repository has been agreed on. If we can't even
solve our old waste and we've had > 50 years to come up with
a solution. Hanford has rooms within rooms within rooms because
it's easier to just contain contaminated areas.
France has plenty of problems too. A nuke reactor was attacked by
ecoterrorists during construction (They damaged the containment
building). It was shut down in 1997 _and_ STILL has the fuel
on site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix
Chernobyl killed > 50 people. Not just 1 or 2 guys. A large city
was evacuated..More people will likely die from cancer.
Three Mile Island didn't hurt anyone, but it was the result
of a bad valve and a couple of failed meters. That can still happen today.
Nothing has changed. Technology still fails...all the time. And the
worst failures are usually human. and that's not gonna change.
Adding more Nukes will just add to the problem. Figure out a REAL
place for the waste..and implement it, not just rhetoric about how
science will figure out something...someday... then maybe I'll consider it.
Solar is better...It can meet our needs..It's just 2-4x
more expensive...And that could easily change..Solar thermal
plants can store energy. The SEGS plants have been quietly
working for 20 years now. Sure it's expensive..but it's
worth it. And it will get better...even w/o goverment assistance.
Maybe Nuke subs and aircraft carriers makes sense though.
I said prototype, not proposal. BIG DIFFERENCE.
The CIA spent a great deal of research money (read: tax dollars) to train people to effectively channel the thoughts of others or events not immediately available to them. In other words, they spent millions researching ESP. After all, it would have been a very "disruptive game changer" in the intelligence community.
Too bad it didn't amount to a pile a shit -- not even a *big* pile of shit.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
And this goes to show why one needs to be careful with these challenges.
New challenge: show me a prototype that could convert solar power from orbit to the surface of the Earth in a controlled fashion and has a snowball's chance in hell of producing a statistically significant portion of the US electricity usage (5 trillion kilowatt-hours/year).
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
You'll also have an easier time recruiting good people. The top-flight engineers might not be so happy about working at some little dot on the map in Nevada. Even if you pay them more, quality of life issues could give them the "get in, get rich, get out" mentality. That would result in higher turnover, depriving the plant of experienced technicians and engineers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The gist of your article is correct but your numbers are not. U-238 has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years but "natural" uranium is a mixture of various isotopes of which all but U-238 have a half-life of significantly less than 4.5 billion years, so the effective "average" half-life of the uranium is significantly less than that. Depleted uranium is, very roughly, half as radioactive as "natural" uranium (the exact amount depending on just how depleted the uranium is).
But you are correct - if you live in a brick house, or you sleep in the same bed with your partner, you are most likely being exposed to more radiation than you would be if you had a brick of the stuff under your bed. The problem only comes about when something makes that relatively inert block of metal more biologically available.
Unfortunately a lot of people have a fuzzy understanding of what radiation is, what the different types are, when it's potentially dangerous, and when it's not anything to worry about. Most people probably don't understand very clearly that radioactive materials emit vastly different densities of radiation. They just think (radiation == bad) and stop thinking at that point.
IAAChE (I am a Chemical Engineer):
You do realise the current waste product (hot Thorium) can ALSO be used in a nuclear reactor, but that the returns are - for the moment - not economical. As the design, process and engineering are refined by study, experimentation and industrial use, returns will improve. Economic viability will improve with the preceding, and is moderated by rising energy costs from other sources. The bulk (and I do mean bulk - exceeding 80%) of the material the US has pained itself to sequester in Yucca Mountain will one day be dug up and put to service.
For the curious, the output from a Thorium reactor would be Lead. Yes, lead is a problem - but a far more manageable one than toxic wastes from solar cells, for example. I suppose I should include a wikipedia link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_technology. There, go read.
Nuclear "waste" is still a radioactive material that has some energy it can release. With the right reactor design, you can use almost any radioactive material as your heat source for power generation.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
"...So, the UK is importing nuclear power from France. I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power is currently fairly competitively priced."
Not necessarily. People say, "let the market determine whether nuclear is cost-effective." The market in the U.S. already did decide, and it said it was not cost-effective. That's why no new plants have been built since 1974. The only reason we're building them now is because the government is heavily subsidizing it. (And, need I add, this says nothing of the cost of waste disposal which is another problem altogether...)
The biggest cost of nuclear is the up-front capital cost of construction and working with government regulation and oversight. Therefore once you have the plants built, it is in the owner's best interest to utilize them to their maximum potential. This doesn't mean that new nuclear power is competitively priced, however.
You will hear the nuclear industry (as well as the U.S. government) touting a 1.8/kWh figure as the cost of nuclear energy, but this figure only refers to the operating costs of nuclear and DOESN'T include the capital cost of building a nuclear reactor itself (which is the biggest part), nor does it include the cost of decommissioning a reactor when it is finally retired. This also says nothing of the fact that uranium prices have more than tripled in the last few years. If we're not going to include capital construction costs when describing the cost of nuclear energy, then why should we use a different standard for measuring energy costs for other technology such as windmills? Wind suddenly become extremely cheap (less than 1/kWh to maintain) if you exclude the capital construction cost.
What killed nuclear in the U.S. was regulatory cost. That changed with President Bush's 2005 Energy Policy Act included several billion dollars of incentives to the nuclear industry, for instance guaranteeing that for the first six new nuclear plants constructed, the U.S. government will pay for any cost overruns (up to $2 billion). This means it's a no-brainer for the nuclear industry - they get paid even if the same kinds of regulatory delays that killed previous plants creep up for these new plants. In addition there are huge tax credits for the first eight years of operation.
IMHO, we don't have to worry about nuclear reactor safety at all. Operationally they are very safe (even Three Mile Island basically operated as it was supposed to during a meltdown). What is less clear is whether nuclear is economically feasible, and whether we have a viable solution for storing waste. Currently the solution is to store them on-site at the reactors themselves.
Lose 20 pounds, instantly! Just send £20 to... - Bizarro
Also note that nuclear energy may be energy negative, and there is a limited supply of fissionable materials of sufficient quantity, as discussed here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4446/nuclear-power
We must also consider that nuclear may not be profitable, once all the expenses are considered, such as proper disposal of waste.
As mentioned earlier in the discussion, almost every viable form of power generation has a negative environmental impact. The only real way of reducing this is to reduce our consumption, which means changing the way we live, and slowing or reversing population growth.
BHP's Olympic Dam expansion should come online within a decade or so. I really wouldn't worry about supply keeping up with demand, that mine is going to be huge.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I meant size as in population not size as in land area. Australia's population is spread out over a very large area, making decentralised energy generation more attractive. France's also has a nuclear weapons program and has developed its nuclear industry for decades, which Australia has not.
The ultimate in safety, especially if combined with modern glassification techniques. But why bother? Recycle using breeder reactors -- there is after all a finite supply of mine-able uranium on the planet.
Please tell me what our current solution for dealing with waste from fossil-fuel plants is.
Blowing it all into the air is not OK.
No problem some will say - let us build the early 1960s designs with a few tweaks learned in the 1980s while the designers are still alive and just absorb the high costs with massive taxes on somebody else (penalties on fossil fuel plants are the current target to avoid annoying the taxpayer). High costs don't exist others will say - they will say the Brits, the French, the Russians, and the Canadians are really stupid and can't build the "cheap" plants the USA built, but they can't tell you how much the "cheap" plants cost becuase it is CLASSIFIED.
I don't have a clue, you don't have a clue - none of us have a clue how expensive these things are because it is a secret. We can only look at the expensive technology that goes in and spot the lies, we don't know how bad the lies are.
The article summary above uses the word "clean" to describe nuclear power - fairly irrelevant unless you are talking about washing powder and certainly a sign of somebody that has heard the PR but has no clue about the nuclear fuel cycle.
I'd like to point out a few problems with what you've written:
You argue that coal power plants warm surrounding waters, which is correct, but so do nuclear plants. One on the Tennessee River had to shut down this Summer because it was over heating the water.
You argue that coal mining has killed a lot of people and so it has, but urianium mining and milling is also unsafe.
You say that uranium found in coal produces more radioactive emissions that nuclear power. If you consider that the concentration of uranium in coal ash is pretty much the same as in wood ash (as it must be) then you are really stretching things. And, you've neglected emissions from nuclear accidents in your comparison, which include radioactive iodine.
You negelect further that there are irreducible carbon emissions associated with nuclear power because of the large amount of concrete involved in the construction of nuclear plants.
Nuclear power has many other problems that coal does not have. One of them is that there is only 85 years of fuel left at the present rate of use. Replacing coal with nuclear power would see the fuel run out before the end of the new plants' design lifetimes. Coal will run out as well, but not at such an added expense.
Coal plants do need to be shut down, but so do nuclear plants, and most immediately those close to the ocean since decommisioning takes time and the London Dumping Convention does not allow nuclear waste to be dumped at sea. With sea level rise possibly near 5 meters this century, those old reactors are going to have to be moved.
Then recover the left over energy indirectly; Geothermal energy is just indirect nuclear energy after all.
Nuclear is far less dirty and actually realeases less radiation than a coal fired plant. Coal has radon in it and when the coal is burned, the radon trapped inside is released. Although it is a tiny percentage by weight, the far larger amount of coal burning releases a lot of radon into the air. In addition coal burning also releases mercury and tiny amounts of other poisons. Mercury being an element is present forever which is a lot longer than long life nuclear waste.
Two, nuclear waste is composed of many things which only a little has a long half life. Most of the waste is short lived isotopes which are gone in a few years like the steel and other such materials used in containing the nuclear fuel. The high radiation stuff is short lived by definition. Its intuitive that anything that has a high degree of activity burns out sooner. The stuff that emits the nasty neutron radiation, is the very stuff that could be recaptured by reprocessing the waste. By doing that, you remove the usable Pu-239 and U-235 fuels and the U-238 that can be converted to Pu-239 and make new fuel. Less U-235 needs to be used to make the same amount of nuclear fuel that was "burned". The resulting leftovers can be separated into short life, medium life and long life waste. Only the long life waste needs long term storage and that is less than 1% of the used nuclear fuel "waste" prior to reprocessing.
Only because the reprocessing yields Pu-239 is why it isn't done in the US. Yet it would drastically reduce the amount needed to be stored at the Yucca mountain facility. If a reprocessing line could be made that never allows the Pu-239 to reach above 5-10%, these objections would be moot. The thousands of tons of spent fuel could be reprocessed into thousands of tons of usable fuel and tens of tons of long life nuclear waste.
Another disposal method exists that would not require the long term monitoring, disposal of the waste into subduction zones between continental plates. This process causes the deep ocean trenches. Place something a kilometer below the surface at the bottom of the trench and it will slowly descend into the molten lava of the core. Then it gets dispersed over the whole core (most of the long life waste is very dense and likely will sink to the center of the earth over time effectively reducing its threat to zero.
Renewables have their own problems. One is that they are unreliable over the short term. The sky is not cloudless every day, wind doesn't blow all of the time, rain doesn't occur on a set schedule and waves change sizes. Second, those with good reliability have other things that make them undesirable. Getting your geothermal plant covered in lava from the nearby volcano every few years is a big downer. The desert may be cloudless most of the time, but water and a nearby work force is scarce. Wind turbines kill birds. Third, the power density is low over most of the country. It takes a lot of area to get the same power as a single conventional plant. For example, one baseload coal plant generates about 1GW continuously 24/7. That is 86.4 trillion joules of energy.
Lets look at solar. It shines 1KW over a square meter at noon during the spring or fall equinox on the equator. The center of the US population is at about 45 degrees north latitude. Thus the average US citizen, gets about 700W per square meter at noon. Times the low cost thin film solar cell efficiency of 10% (this is high compared to actual low cost amorphous solar cells) and we get 70W at noon. Over the day, that angle changes and we average 50W over the 12 hours the sun is up. Its lower during the winter and higher during the summer which is ok given the typical demand cycle over a year. Thats 2.16 million joules over one day without taking clouds into the picture. So just from the first hack, we would need 40 square kilometers of area for those cells. That's about 10,000 acres. Then we lose another 20-40% to store that energy in batteries, pumped storage or some other method to give
The design of the Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island Nuclear reactors was based on our primitive understanding of how to harness nuclear energy. But these incidents have by and large shaped the way 90% of the people today see nuclear power generation.
Pebble reactors change the risk equation and can be thought of as "failing safely" if cooling fails (as long as the container can withstand high temperatures of around 2000K.)
An easy to understand reference on pebble reactors: http://pebblebedreactor.blogspot.com/2007/01/pbr-passive-safety-comes-from-basic.html
China is doing it - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
I believe that pebble reactors also change the equation when it comes to "spent fuel" but I'll leave that for someone else to follow up on.
We could have clear nuclear power by using breeder reactors: efficient usage of fuel and little left-over radioactivity. However, the kind of nuclear power plants we have right now are incredibly wasteful of the nuclear fuel (only a few percent of the energy are extracted), and they leave a highly radioactive and dangerous nuclear waste that we have no way of disposing of. The irresponsibility of burning coal pales in comparison to the irresponsibility of burning nuclear fuel in the kinds of reactors we have today.
Why don't we have breeder reactors? Mostly because of US concerns about proliferation. Breeder reactors can theoretically be used for turning non-weapons grade uranium into weapons-grade plutonium. It would really be practical, but there you have it anyway.
So, the write-up for this article is extremely biased. Nuclear technology, as we have it right now, is not "clean"; rather, it leaves us with a huge unsolved waste disposal problem. Until people start building breeder reactors or other types of reactors that use nuclear fuel efficiently and leave little high-level waste, nuclear power is environmentally unacceptable.
Overall, however, it is still not clear why you would even want nuclear power. Wind, solar, water, geothermal, and ocean power are abundant and can satisfy our energy needs many times over.
You want literary excellence on the internet...on Slashdot? What have you been smoking?
"I'm in favor of nuclear power - as long as no-one tries to run it at profit."
Chernobyl was operated by the government.
While I am not an opponent of nuclear energy, because of the "cleanliness" compared to fossil fuels I think proponents tend to leave out the tiny detail of nuclear waste. If all the countries were generating their energy with nuclear reactors a couple of generations from now we'd have huge problems with the happily radiating waste material. Even nowadays we can measure the increased radiation everywhere. E.g. to actually find iron that is free from radiation we have to dig deep down or look for pre-WWII shipwrecks on the sea floor.
What (the sane) environmentalists advocated when fighting nuclear power was to put all the research money in renewable energy. The ultimate goal is to be able to generate energy that adversely affects our environment to a minimum. Nuclear power can only be the 'lesser of two evils' to bridge the gap until enough minds in the industry and governments have been swayed to invest into 'clean' power.
I don't think you can blame environmentalists for shedding light on these issues. What you can blame them for may be their hippyesque appearance and their tree-hugging, but at least they are not responsible for leaking radiating waste water, oil spills or an increased cancer risk.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
That's all well and good, but I wouldn't trust the Sierra Club for stats like that any more than I would trust BP.
I can't make any guarantees, but this seems shortsighted considering the Earth receives something like 89 petawatts at any given time.
Also, you ignore one of the greatest problems with nuclear power, which is the waste. Even the vaunted nuclear submarine has a waste-stream which must be dealt with. Furthermore, nuclear power relies on the mining of large amounts of uranium, an inherently dirty and destructive process. With the right planning this can be mitigated, but let's not pretend that nuclear power is the end-all and be-all of future power-generation. We need a mixture of systems, and frankly if we're going to spend significant amounts of money on R&D, we'd be better off going right to renewables.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
The nuclear guys always say nuclear is such an efficient fuel. However if you look at the total fuel cycle - that is mining the stuff, transporting it to where it's needed, and retiring it (ie. burying it) when it's used - you find that the energy cost of nuclear is more than you imagined...
Has anyone calculated the Slashdot resource drain - how many power plants (ok, megawatts) it takes to run Slashdot? how many devices?
Not just the host servers and infrastructure, but also the power to the (thousands of?) devices multiplied by the time those devices spend on this site, plus the power it takes to build them ( for example, if a laptop has a life of 10,000 hours and an average user spends 50 hours per year on the site and there are 500,000 users per year, then 2500 laptops must be built per year just to allow everyone to read slashdot), plus the network power overhead.
Anybody got realistic estimates?
Can we save a nuclear plant by shutting down this site (ducks and runs for the door)?
People trust their lives to reactors while living next to them for months on end...in a sealed vessel under thousands of feet of saltwater! ... uneducated, ... bigoted ... kids.
Yeah, John Kerry considers those people to be stupid,
And the people that voted for Kerry feel the same way he does.
Nuclear fuel is politically dead.
We haven't built an oil refinery in this country for ~30 years!!!! How the Hell are we going to summon the political will to build a nuclear reactor? We can't even build wind farms off ~3 miles (MILES !!) of Cape Cod because Ted Kennedy (Mr. Democrat) and Walter Conkite (American can't win in Vietnam) spiked the project.
Do you really think the activist crowd is going to let us build a nuclear "bomb" near any living human being in this country.
Which party do you think wants to keep us on oil? Because I notice that one particular party sure as hell won't let us move on to anything else.
The nuclear game is over Johnny.
Homer Simpson is the Industries Spoke Person. DOH !!!!
Its not the years, its the mileage
There is a lot of Uranium ore but not a lot of it is pure enough to be worth using - it's a fairly rare isotope of Uranium that we use for fuel so you need easily extracted and fairly pure Uranium to start with. That is why we have the nuclear physicist looking at Thorium as a fuel while the nuclear fanatics that do not understand the fuel cycle can't tell the difference and do not think there is a problem. From current results accelerated Thorium looks promising and can have other materials such as discarded weapons materials thrown in on top of the Thorium.
The geology dudes at the university tell me that the coal we're burning in the state's power stations contains Uranium.
So our non-nuclear power stations have been spewing out Uranium (and other goodies) from their smoke stacks for decades.
In the good old days the British extracted Germanium (used in semiconductors) from Northumbrian coal ash from power stations.
Might be a good cheap (no extra mining) source of Uranium, given the quantities of coal involved.
If you believe that humans are causing or contributing to a changing climate and that stopping human activities are the only way to stop it - assuming it can be stopped, you need to think about positive actions.
Let's assume that Al Gore is correct and if human activities aren't changed drastically in the very near future millions of people will die in the coming changes. Doesn't that demand that every person believing this go out and stop rampant addition of carbon to the environment? Sure, driving a hybrid car may help some, but wouldn't destroying a coal-fired power plant be far more beneficial? How about burning 10 cars a day? Destroying a jet airliner?
Come on, if you believe that global warming will be the death of millions of people how about doing something about it?
Does Greenpeace realize that uranium fuel rods aren't magically delivered to nuclear plants? Have they done any calculations on how much oil is used in extraction, refining, and clean-up of the mess? Private industry walked away from their responsibility in Moab, Utah and I can tell you that is going to take a hell of a lot of oil to clean up those tailings they left behind.
Uranium Miner Cancer (5x Greater than non-miners)
Lung Cancer in Non-Smoking Uranium Miner
Cancer Kills 14 Aboriginal Uranium Workers
Google can find you lots more, just search for uranium miner cancer.
Remember the radon scare? Now just imagine going to work every day where there is a lot of radon present and your boss doesn't give you an air-tank to avoid it.
As far as cleanup, take a gander at the Moab tailings pile left behind from the last time someone made a buck off "cheap, clean nuclear power".
And further, we know that they can't *now*. We have nuclear power now. Research into those things for the future is great, but they won't reduce our carbon emissions today.
Ahem. *Cough*. Hello?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
this made me laugh: ...as opposed to power sources that run on hopes and dreams?
"compared to any power source that burns fuel"
All power (yes, even solar) comes from the conversion of matter (read: fuel) into energy by some process or another.
I'll have to do the research, but I still think there are substantial questions out there about nuclear energy, including waste, protection against nuclear proliferation, safety issues (including dealing with the low-level waste), and problems with the fuel-supply.
Lastly, we can't just focus on nuclear energy, but rather we should work towards a wide-range of power sources, including nuclear, solar, wind, and tidal where appropriate.
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.
Apparently there are a lot of shills for the Nuke power industry out today.
I knew a guy who ran a reactor for the Navy on an Aircraft Carrier. He
mentioned a few near accidents.
1. Carrier steamed into a bunch of tin-foil chaff dropped during flight exercises.
A bunch of electrical equipment shorted out. According to him, it was a little
hairy for awhile.
2. Training exercises on the electrical generation was preformed while the ship was not moving. At the
same time flight exercises were going on. So very little power was being dissappated, but the pilots
demanded more steam pressure for the catapults. So your reactor is running hot, but no energy is being
disappated by the turbines..so it gets hotter and hotter. The answer is to cool the reactor using
an emergency cooling system....but a shift was ending. So the officer in charge (who was a young lt.)
didn't want to run the emergency cooling _yet_ and the asoociated paperwork. Apparently it got into a hot
and heavy argument, and logic prevailed in time, Although according to him, it could have come
to blows.
accidents happen. Technology breaks. Some of you nuke shills sound like the same stupid NASA managers
who said the shuttle could never blow up.
Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel
Damn, somebody has been breathing too much of George Bush's butt fumes. What about all the energy required to mine and transport the nuclear fuel and then used to transport it to it's storage facility after it is of no more use for producing power?
And what about the waste with it's massively long half life? It would make a great target for demented looneys and drooling religious morons determined to force their quarter baked, idiotic, brain dead stupidity on people capable of realizing they are being sold a bill of goods.
No thanks
In five hundred years humanity will most probably have perfectly clean means of obtaining energy and of disposing of any amount of radioactive waste.
It makes no sense to treat differently 500 and 100.000 year radioactive waste.
Given that wind/wave power can never meet 100% of our energy needs:
In what way is nuclear power worse than any of the alternatives?
No sig today...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
that's because coal deaths are spread out. nuclear accident deaths are sudden events. The number of deaths due to planes hitting skyscrapers was pretty negligible until 2001. Then for some sudden reason the stats jumped.
Coal plants don't give Chernobyl style disasters. the fact that its been a long time since a Chernobyl disaster does not mean it can never happen. whenever people tell me that US reactors are 100% incapable of having such problems, I'm reminded of the assurances that the twin towers were designed to withstand a plane hitting them. As it happens, that didn't work, and thousands of people died. In the UK, the nuclear industry has been caught lying through its teeth on pretty much every topic. they are not trusted, and with good reason.
I think the chances of another chernobyl are very very low myself, but concerns about nuclear waste, proliferation, and the insane cost and huge history of UK govt subsidies to nuclear, combined with the fact that we waste a stupid proportion of our energy at the moment, means I'm still opposed to new nuclear.
When we start seeing some vague concern about fuel efficiency in domestic appliances and new building design as a matter of routine, I'll accept that we have done what we need to do and might have to look at undesirable energy sources. This is not yet the case.
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Hi. I'm an environmentalist opposed to nuclear power. re-read your post, with its insults, vitriol and sarcasm, and ask yourself while you are completely incapable of changing peoples minds...
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"Clean" only in the sense that —with the proper and rather expensive care— it doesn't cause trouble right away. It does leave us with waste products that are difficult to deal with and require safely storing it for the next, oh, five millennia or so. Do you think our grandchildren's grandchildren will thank us for leaving that as a legacy?
Never forget that the total cost of the endeavour includes wasteproducts. Glossing over that is misleading at best, but I'd call it criminally irresponsible. The fact that for most of the lifetime of the problem we'll all be long dead doesn't mean we can disregard it.
And that is disregarding all the operational problems of a design that requires positive action to stop it in case of trouble (runaway processes, meltdown, etc.). Go read the RISKS list digest for plenty of insight in what such designs can do.
> We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again stifle our progress.
Even looking at this phrase with my most benevolent goggles, it still looks like a terrible thing to say.
"Progress" in contemporary society does not automatically denote "that which is beneficial to mankind", a lot of people equal it to "profit". Or "winning" whatever race they imagine we are having.
Damn Swedes....
That's all well and good, but I wouldn't trust the Sierra Club for stats like that any more than I would trust BP.
Good point. The following MSNBC article mentions a figure of 24,000 deaths per year in the U.S.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/
Coal plants don't give Chernobyl style disasters. the fact that its been a long time since a Chernobyl disaster does not mean it can never happen.
The thing is though, even if you had several Chernobyl-style disasters every year, it'd still kill fewer people than coal.
Indeed, as the poster above me said, BHP's Olympic Dam mine in Australia is going to be freakin' huge. How huge? Well, BHP recently announced that the deposit is twice as large as previously thought. They're still doing exploration drilling, too. They're gearing up to expand mining there - converting from Australia's largest underground operation to the world's largest pit (I think something like over 3km in diameter and over 1km deep) and when ramped up will be producing about 15,000 tonnes per year of Uranium with an expected mine life of 70-100 years! It apparently now accounts for 40% of world reserves, even though the Uranium is a by-product of it being a Copper mine (it's also a huge reserve of Gold and Silver). Basically, they'll be digging out over 1 tonne of ore per second, 24/7 for well over half a century... I don't think there's a word that describes just how big a bad-ass operation that is! =]
Just coal or gas fuelled power stations. All of our nuclear power stations are in relatively isolated locations next to the sea, which provides coolant for the cores. The most striking one is probably Torness in southern Scotland because it is right next to the A1, the main road to Edinburgh. Map of nuclear power stations in Great Britain.
When a North Sea oil rig was going to be dumped in the ocean rather than dismantled (as they had agreed to to in the beginning and given tax breaks and incentives to do so at the time), I was against it purely for the reason that they had taken money in an agreement and now when it came to ponying up for their side, they wanted to bow out.
If they'd have said "here's the money back, with interest at the base rate applied" then fine. But they didn't.
So with the nuclear industry, will they live up to their promises? If they won't then bugger them too.
The methods by which that 95% of fuel is made available is the exact same process that NK and Iran were using to produce nuclear reactors and were threatened with practical annhialation. These are the same processes that produce nuclear weapons.
Politically very dangerous.
Also, if nuclear fuel is so cheap, why is it that the nuclear fuels lobby stated that they would not be creating any more nuclear power stations if the tax breaks and incentives were removed. Surely a fuel so dependable and cheap would not need subsidy.
Whats wrong with spreading the waste through the ocean? Let's face it, there's plenty of radioactive material in the ocean already. The solution to pollution is dilution. And oceans are pretty dilute for a few tons of waste a year.
I would argue that nuclear power, when used only to make electricity and not weapons material, is always much cheaper than any other alternative. Even when you have just one or two plants, it's more economical.
Case in point.. here in Finland we have four nuclear plants, and a fifth is currently being build. The first two were designed and made in Soviet union. The Soviet mentally actually renders in these quite well: they couldn't transport the reactor core in one piece so they cut it in half and welded it in Finland. Luckily Finnish were able to persuade Soviets that they could buy the safety systems from western suppliers. The other two were from Swedish company ASEA. The first two were government owned, the second two were privately owned. All plants to this day have been commercially hugely profitable. Now a fifth reactor is being build by Areva, and already both TVO and joint EON and industry backed consortium is looking on building sixth and/or seventh power plant.
I would say that there is nothing wrong or uneconomical in nuclear power. Maybe the biggest thing making nuclear power in some places uneconomical is general management. In example here as they build the nuclear plants and discovered that at night time they generated way too much electricity, they opted on selling electricity on lower price at night, when it's generally used in house holds to warm up both house and water tank, and thus enabling very high run time for the reactors.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Apparently, at least several or more were alive upon hitting the water. They actually survived the blast. It was hitting the water and subsequent drowning that did them in.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the byproduct of these reactors is a high energy substance (otherwise it wouldn't give a bang in a weapon), why this energy couldn't be extracted peacefully?
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I've watched an interview of the CEO of Electrabel/Suez (a big French/Belgian producer). He said nuclear "fuels" should be carefully managed because you need +/- 7 years between your order and the delivering. (he uses it as an argument to speed up approvals of new nuclear power plants in Belgium).
Sounds good but isn't a valid point. Politics is responsible to todays population. If it weren't we would call it dictatorship. Claiming to do good to someone nobody can ask inevitably leads to dictatorship: "Your grandgrandchildren may live in communist paradise some day if only you accept dictatorship of the proletariat today, which is a prerequisite for communist paradise." So if you are trying to convince me of whichever political idea of yours, please tell me why it is good for me or at least to somebody I might talk to for verification of your claims. Otherwise your claims are in no way different from, say, the idea that we should prepare for a giant spacecraft to arrive some time soon to pick up those of us who did prepare -- indistinguishable from plain nonsense.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
If the nuclear power advocates didn't sound so much like used car salesmen trying to sell a lemon. To be honest, I think nuclear's one of the cleanest sources around, but their advocates suck. I took an intro to nuclear engineering course in college, and was considering going into their minor program. But the prof. came acorss as so desperate to sell us on the benefits even I thought there was something he was trying to hide. Nuclear power advocates need some new spokespeople if they want to get anywhere in the U.S.
wasn't there an article not all that long ago that determined that the primary thing causing cigarette cancer was cesium. if the source of this type of cesium was the nuclear processing industry as opposed to just being naturally present [a point i am uncertain about] it and other types of cancer may need to be included in your figures.
I wouldn't say NOBODY...
;)
I've sent email on a couple of occasions to President Bush stating my willingness to have a nuclear power plant in my back yard. I grew up in Iowa near the Mississippi River and toured nuclear power plants when I was a child, and I have degrees in physics, so I'm quite comfortable living around nuclear power plants.
My children glow, but that just means I never had to buy them night lights.
Near Atlanta, GA is the largest coal plant in USA. It takes 10 train loads of coal to keep this plant running for 1 week. This is just 1 plant. The pollution for 10 train loads of coal is unbelievable. However, the environmentalists think this is better than nuclear power. It is crazy.
American Scientist (the magazine of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society) published an article in 2004 describing how much more efficient a novel new plant design can be. This type of plant is much safer to run and actually burns its own waste - minimizing the amount of waste that needs storage - and gets more energy out of burning the partially-spent fuel (even spent fuel from other older reactors). The site requires a subscription, but here's the abstract and link to the article for those sufficiently interested:
"It's been decades since a nuclear power plant was commissioned in the United States, but nuclear engineers mindful of problems with reliance on fossil fuels for long-term power generation continue to look at novel reactor designs. Loewen and his colleagues have evaluated one of the technologies under consideration for the next generation of reactors. It would exploit the physical and safety characteristics of lead--chiefly, a high boiling point--as a coolant in place of water. Such a reactor could use fast neutrons and operate at high temperature, making it capable of burning many of the radioactive isotopes in the spent nuclear fuel produced by the nation's 103 light-water reactors."
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/37188
Preferably with facts.
The Genius Doctor Who Diagnosed Nuke Power's Deadly Disease
The reactor at Torness is an Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR), a British design built in the 1980s and optimised for efficiency. As it turned out, fuel costs for nukes haven't risen particularly over the last couple of decades so fuel efficiency isn't as important as the designers thought it would be. That's why the UK built cheaper GE-designed Pressurised Water Reactors (PWR) after the last of the AGRs was commissioned. They're not as efficient in turning fuel into power as the AGRs but they're cheaper to build and operate and they were available off a production line instead of being hand-built one-offs.
Here's the tale of a visit to the Torness nuclear power station by an old denizen of Slashdot.
Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel
Perhaps you'd like to contribute to the £3bn cleanup bill (current estimate) for Dounreay?
And maybe donate some of your time to the 30 year cleanup (current estimate) too...
The Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) was, somewhat covertly, repealed in the 2005 Energy Bill and passed by the senate in July 2005. PUCHA was put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurance of the 1929 stock market crash, because during the '20's utility companies became cash cows for energy tycoons who set up complex holding companies to milk income from ratepayers (like ma and pa Tilley) to fuel speculative investment. The stock market crash of 1929 destroyed the holding companies, devastated ratepayers and investors alike. PUCHA was designed to outlaw these structures and protect the American economy from a repeat of the circumstances that led to the events of 1929.
With limited oversight under the new laws the scene is set for consortium's to form those structures again, and how can any regulatory body, with limited staff have the capability to understand - much less control - the books of a huge conglomerate? Of course, it's the oil companies that are best positioned to benefit from the change in these laws. Anyone care to imagine what the future of renewable energy will be like if the Oil companies have a monopoly on energy utilities as well. It would make MicroSoft's monopoly look innocuous by comparison as the NRC will not allow challenges based on the need for the electricity or disposal of the waste.
Public participation or intevention is excluded because the reactor design is "approved", the procuring company get's half a billion dollars worth of subsidies even if they do nothing and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do, truly a lose lose situation for all American taxpayers. The reality is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability it would cease to exist and the hope of it operating without subsidies is totally unrealistic.
So who are you subsidising?
One is the Nustart Consortium consists of Excelon, Etergy, Constellation Energy Group, Duke Energy Group, EDF International, Electricite de France (as Florida Power and Light) Progress Energy, Southern, Tenessee Valley Authority, GE and Westinghouse.
For a country built upon the principles of economic pragmatism and unadulterated capitalism, how have such dubious investment's been forced upon it with barely a whisper of debate? It's clearly contrary to the interests of both sides of the political spectrum, so how can America, of all countries, continue to justify this form of corporate welfare?
For more information, have a look at this article . ~
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Not trolling as I'm for Nuclear... But I always wondered if the vast amount of steam that comes out of these reactors influences weather patterns. Where I live I'm surrounded by three Nuclear plants (Limerick, Peach Bottom, and TMI). When I can see all that steam from miles away... makes me wonder if I get more rain because of it. May not influence it in a bad way who knows.
In general I think the fear about nuclear reactors has dissipated. I can remember a time when noone wanted to live near Limerick. Now it's a nice little town with above average real estate value.
Uranium is distributed with reasonable uniformity about the Earth - there are areas which are more accessible, such as in the more arid portion of the United States, but this is an engineering issue solved readily by the mining industry which expends far greater resources for lesser returns on even copper. In short, uranium is attractive not only due to cleaner power generator, but more civil international relations as there are no great concentrations to spar over - in fact, with oil at $100USD per barrel, extracting Uranium from seawater becomes economically viable.
Quoting from WSJ, Wednesday, November 14, 2007: NYMEX West Texas Intermediate for December delivery closed up $2.92 at $94.09 per barrel.
I'm anonymous for a reason.
Did you know that the radiation detectors for airborn release at Three Mile Island were miles away and mostly upwind of the reactor? There is substantial evidence gathered from the underside lf leaves downwind (the wind was blowiing in the prevailing direction at the time of the incident) gathered months later by a "bunch of college professors" doing biological field work that suggests huge amounts of radioactive iodine and other radionucleides was released at Three Mile Island. You won't find any mention of this in the cover your ass government report (I knew one of the people who prepared the report who was shocked to learn of this later.) By the time it was discovered, there was no way to accurately determine the true release at Three Mile Island - but can you imagine the level of incompetence that doesn't check downwind of a radioactive release: it had to be a deliberate omission, to cook the data for the subsequent report. It is virtually certain we dodged the big one because nearly all of the radiation went a short ways down a sparsely populated river valley and out to sea, undetected until months later.
Then there is the reactor built in Sourthern California that they designed to be earthquake proof and then flipped the plans over before they built it (since it made site access easier for the work, I think).
Then you have the French, with their much vaunted nuclear program, oops, dribbling radioactives down the highway in their super secure high tech waste transfer vehicles.
I am a professional scientist, and I recall the outright lies of the AEC from the 1950's up until they were terminated and most of their function passed into the NRC. Between outright lies and bureaucratic cover your ass, I have no expectation of any sort of intellectual honesty from the fission power industry and its government regulator counterparts. The standard design of American reactors is criminally stupid, and there are much better and infinitely safer designs, but every time they have built one they went back to the same design firm who rolled out their old design for a new site. Everybody in the industry knows this. Safety has never been a particular design criteria in the US, although the Europeans have largely been blessed by starting at a later stage of reactor development and their initial designs were safer - which they keep copying since they worked and the designers got the job done, so why change.... Most of the French designs, for instance, have the reputation of being pretty well idiot proofed and for having robust safety systems from the get go, not added on back-up systems like in the US. The public understands this in an intuitive way, and there is no way they can participate in highly technical design issues discussions, but most of the public is wise in rejecting more of the same old reactor designs, which is all they have ever been presented in this country (except, perhaps for the gas moderated reactor in Colorado which was such a total flop and which leaked vast quantities of radioactives that nobody every paid much attention to since it might damage the image of the nuclear power industry, and besides they were over open country the first couple hundred miles except when the wind blew them towards Denver - fortunately, this reactor never stayed on-line for very long.)
My personal opinion of the nuclear power advocates is that they are a pie in the sky bunch who are overly preoccupied with engineering numbers (which are admittedly favorable in most regards), but are blithely ignorant of human systems and bureaucratic factors in the equation and have never looked closely at the safety issues, especially the number of times we have come close to a China Syndrome situation, which you will never find properly reported in any publicly available forum, not ever!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It's impossible to make nuclear reactors safe as long as metal parts are used in reactors. Why? Because radiation accelerates corrosion.
Right now, humanity still cannot design a nuclear reactor that's not going to fall apart. Maybe later, but we're not there yet.
And what materials are they planning to make this reactor out of?
If there's any metal in the design, it's still going to fall apart at because of the accelerated rate of corrosion caused by radioactivity.
Actually, there is a lot of work being done with algae farms where hydrocarbon absorbing algae has coal fire exhaust fed to it. The result is a huge drop off in emissions, and an oil rich algae that can be easily process to produce consumer grade Bio Diesel, and the remnants can be safely used as feed stock for cattle.
Coal isn't perfect, but with gasification technologies, algae farms, carbon scrubbers, and some of the other more recent advances, it can be made a hell of a lot better. The big problem is not the technology, it is forcing the existing power plants to advance. Just last week a court in Wisconsin ruled that the down town coal fed power plant would have to meet modern standards (instead of the grandfathered 1970's standards) due to the amount of modifications that had taken place. Because of the laws in place, it is almost always in the power plant's best interests to NOT upgrade their equipment significantly because, like cars, their emissions are measured against the limitations in place when the plant opened. So only new power plants being built now have to worry about paying for the latest greatest technology to reduce emissions, while that carbon belching and highly inefficient system built decades ago is free to just spew away.
I don't expect any single entity to fully replace all others. Sure, ramping up Wind generation in the Dakotas would help A LOT, upgrading/rebuilding nuclear plants to highly efficient/lower waste pebble bed reactors would help A LOT, and cleaning up coal would be a huge boon. Distributed generation, such as integrated shingle photo-voltaic cells (solar power on each house) could also dramatically cut the need to increase centralized generation and level out peek usage demand in high temperature climates. The whole space based solar power deal is a no go though, in order to pipe that kind of power down you're talking about a multiple mile wide receiver dish taking huge amounts of microwave. Anything, animals, birds, planes, etc... that gets into that huge beam is going to be cooked in an instant. And I can't imagine the passing of that kind of energy through the atmosphere would do anything good either.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Coal plants don't give Chernobyl style disasters.
Neither do nuke plants not called Chernobyl being run in a proper manner.
the fact that its been a long time since a Chernobyl disaster does not mean it can never happen.
"We can't do anything that isn't 100% safe!" is not a practical way to run a civilization. The risk can be reduced and managed.
whenever people tell me that US reactors are 100% incapable of having such problems, I'm reminded of the assurances that the twin towers were designed to withstand a plane hitting them.
They were designed to withstand the *impact*, not having planes slice through them and blast a raging kerosene based jet fuel fire into their innards. Despite what the conspiracy lunatics claim, the *fire* led to the collapse. No one thought to design for that because architects are generally not batshit insane fundamentalists.
In the UK, the nuclear industry has been caught lying through its teeth on pretty much every topic. they are not trusted, and with good reason.
"Some folks over here lied about stuff, therefore we can never trust a totally different group of people around the world" is not a practical way to run a civilization.
I think the chances of another chernobyl are very very low myself, but concerns about nuclear waste,
A political and engineering problem. The recycling of fuel was banned by that sanctimonious son of a bitch President Carter, and newer types of reactors simply produce little waste.
proliferation,
Of what? Nuke plants across the US? If you mean terrorists, then "We can't do this because of the small chance terrorists may get some" is not a practical way to run a civilization.
and the insane cost
Again, new tech and some standardization will fix this. France is, what, 75 to 80 percent nuclear? This works. We have a real world example.
huge history of UK govt subsidies to nuclear,
Relevance?
combined with the fact that we waste a stupid proportion of our energy at the moment,
Granted, but that's not a reason not to plan for the future. We can enact better conservation AND build nuke plants. It's not an either-or thing.
means I'm still opposed to new nuclear.
But your reasons are either irrelevant to the issue or out of date.
When we start seeing some vague concern about fuel efficiency in domestic appliances and new building design as a matter of routine, I'll accept that we have done what we need to do and might have to look at undesirable energy sources. This is not yet the case.
Again, we don't have to choose one or the other. I'm sorry, but this is a silly POV, and not a practical way to run a civilization. We can build nuclear plants, find ways to be more efficient, continue trying to get solar more efficient and explore many other things.
Nuclear power is only cheap for Bechtel to produce IF someone else... ...like maybe some government no-bid, cost-plus contact... ...pays for the nuke plant to be built...
...like the government... ...pays for the decommissioning cost of the plant at the end of the plant's useful life when the company that operated the plant spins off the nuclear plant from the parent corporation to a new corporation created just to declare bankruptcy and leave the clean up mess in someone else's lap.
and then someone else...
The problem with nuclear is that it requires fuel just like a coal plant or a natural gas plant. My understanding is that if we build a bunch of nuclear power plants (along with the rest of the planet) we'll run out of nuclear fuel in about 100 years just like we're running out of oil. (Unfortunately I can't find the references I was looking for. Don't yell at me, look it up yourself.) Then we'll be in the same place we are now - running out of fuel for our existing plants and wondering what the heck we're going to do. I am by no means an environmentalist, but we need to be looking for sustainable ways to generate electricity. Be it solar, wind, waves, hydroelectric, some fancy bacteria that turns garbage into methane with amazing efficiency, whatever - it just needs to be something that we can use indefinitely.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Coal or Nukes is like the choice between Vader or Palpatine for president. One way, you choke to death, the other way you get blasted with radiation! Frankly radiation is cooler, so I'll go with Palpatine.
I kid, I kid! Restarting the building of nukes is the smartest thing we could do. There's a lot smarter (see other comments about France's Nuke situation) things we could do, but we need to do something now, and this is something that can be done.
Unfortunately too much of America is scientifically stupid and they are likely to kill this before it can get going.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
This would be a non-issue if the USA would start doing nuclear reprocessing. If the number of "60 times" the amount of uranium is true, I'm guessing that it would last us more than long enough to figure some other power source out (like nuclear fusion, deeper geothermal heat sources, etc.)
Every new house in the Southwest is required to use solar power. I live in the Northeast, and I'm pricing out a system for my house. For about $30K, I can take care of 90% of my residential electric needs. This would add about 15% to the price of an average new home in the Southwest, which is not an undue burden on those who can already afford to buy a new house.
I'll consider nuclear power when every new car and truck in the US is required to get at least 40mpg. I already own one, so it's not impossible or unproven technology. It cost me $20k, so the technology is not especially expensive.
I'll give nuclear a chance when you can't buy an incandescent light bulb. I swapped out all mine for fluorescent last year.
We already have technology and resources in place to reduce our power consumption incrementally, and we're not doing it. I don't see the need to make massive investments in nuclear when we're not taking these simple steps.
I would like to see us make the same investment in solar that Germany is making. The article makes it clear that Germany would not be investing so massively in solar power if they did not have such a strong anti-nuclear movement.
You're anonymous because you don't want all of your comments in the future modded down -5 RETARD.
You don't know what you're talking about at all, clearly.
Go read up on the tragedy of the commons and get back to me about that proposal. The biosphere in this case is the commons. While Nuke waste disposal is highly regulated and thus expensive, but dumping combustion results (or wacking birds with very large props) into the air is essentially "free", especially for other countries like China, despite the fact that it might cause that whole greenhouse thing, which may (or may not) raise sea levels, washing away many coastal cities we have.
Once you can account for that (unpaid) cost as part of the current generation methods, then you'll be rich beyond belief.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
So many of you use the words "global warming" as a shortcut to "human-influenced global warming".
.... moves on the north pole).
I think this is a dangerous mind set: the warming is (as far as we know) part of the end of the last ice age, and as such a natural phenomen & part of our habitat. We need to cope with it & prepare for it, no matter how much our CO2 emission is going down.
And if we envision major problems in the future, with coast lines vanishing, millions fleeing and a breakdown of infrastructure and probably law, we can ask ourselve if we want big and hazardous nuclear plants, depending on a national power grid and highly developed services and infastructure, or if we rather have a multitude of different producers, including local solar and wind power generators which can uphold some technology in the local area even if the greater infrastrucure is becoming unreliable.
This is even more true in the not to unlikely event of war about land & other recources (see the brits move on the south pole & chile and argentinia reaction, as well as the russion, danish,
Nuclear plants are a rather nice target for military and commando (say: terrorist) operations. As are central power grids.
So, going nuclear seems like a real bad move (, really).
Just a few years ago a large football-sized hole was discovered in the Davis-Besse Nuclear power plant. The plant was closed for two years to undergo repairs. This seems to indicate that the safety issues are still a major concern, at least for those living near a nuclear plant :?)
A nuclear plant designed to be much safer and more efficient seems to be the answer, however, I for one am still convinced that nuclear energy is not the panacea that proponents claim it to be. Nuclear waste sticks around for quite a while and taxpayer subsidies are vital to the industry (their is no nuclear industry without taxpayer subsidies). If we consider how long it takes to bring a new nuclear plant online (est. 5-10 years), then the prospects seem even more grim.
Bring into consideration the prospects of a dirty bomb or a nuclear bomb in the hands of terrorists and the prospects for expansion of the nuclear industry seem more and more gloomy...
With renewable energy coming into favor as fuel prices continue to rise it's just a matter of time before clean renewable energies from solar, biomass, wind, etc. are cost competitive with nuclear. What will happen when nuclear plants are made obsolete by new technology??? We can be assured that the nuclear industry won't be around when that happens. The US tax payers, who are subsidizing the industry in the first place, will be left with the bill...
We are at the cusp of a new generation of technology that people cannot imagine. Faith is needed to support the research in physics/chemistry/biology/mathematics/computer science/engineering that will make commercialization of this technology possible. Supporting known, antiquated technology of the past is the easy way out. Keep the faith and call you congress person and tell them to support the education of future scientist/engineers/mathematicians. The money it takes to empower the next Einstein is pennies compared to the cost of a single nuclear plant. Keep the faith...
Those experiments simply indicate that we can turn rocket fuel into electricity in a rather inefficient way. Making electricity with orbital space tethers induces a drag force on those tethers. That uses up some of the orbital kinetic energy of the tether and host spacecraft. How did that orbital kinetic energy get there? Oh yeah, someone had to burn humongous amounts of rocket fuel to get it.
Making electricity with orbital tethers is like making ice water by putting ice in the microwave -- interesting but not efficient.
Those heavy transuranics are the most rare, and by some measures most valuable, elements in the universe. The only place they're made in quantity is in supernovae, and then only in relatively small amounts. You don't want to get rid of that stuff just because it's a little inconvenient to handle.
Many, many tons of plutonium have already been distributed around the planet by above-ground nuclear testing.
People protested the Cassini launch for about the same thing you are talking about: Cassini carried more than the LD-50 of Plutonium for 5 billion people, so (in principle) it the RTGs were distributed suitably among the population, they could kill about half the people on Earth.
The thing is, each and every teenage boy generates enough semen weekly to impregnate nearly half of Earth's population -- but that hardly every happens, mostly because such careful distribution would be difficult. In practice, both the plutonium's and the semen's effectiveness is reduced by many (perhaps nine) orders of magnitude, because they don't get distributed appropriately to cause damage.
If you read the League of Women Voters' Nuclear Waste Primer (a bit long in the tooth now, but an excellent introduction to population health physics, and free from the partisanship in most such books) you'll find a lot of good stuff on the relative risk of nuclear waste and other types of poisonous material.
Please adress the nuclear waste issue and it's costs. Then I will be on your side.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I believe I used the word all. And I meant it.
You're taking into account the entire process involved in nuclear power generation. This is good. However, you're forgetting that it will inevitably be used to replace coal, which is not good.
I agree, a total comparison of coal with nuclear is useful.
Read the parent post I wrote - it says all energy sources.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Parent writes about a big source of corruption in 'the system' that comes from the legal fiction of letting corporations negotiate as persons. Couldn't hurt to throw a +1 (something) his way...
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
I am a professional scientist ...in the field of bullshit.
You know one of those rail systems with a radius of like a few miles that can accelerate an object fast enough to escape the earth's gravity? I wonder if the energy to propel nuclear waste into the sun is lower than the energy netted from byproducing that nuclear waste.
Let's be real. If a deranged person steals a used fuel rod and grinds it up, he's a stick of dynamite away from a terror weapon. So you hire Barney Fife and his two brothers to stand outside the Perfect Nuclear Waste Storage Facility in eight-hour shifts around the clock. And you pay him 10 bucks an hour. Somehow I don't feel safer. Especially since the dirty bomb spreads waste with a half life in the hundreds of thousands of years. I'd rather not trade strip mining for that.
But we shouldn't even consider building any until we have a *completed* (very) long-term storage/disposal solution for nuclear waste. Deferring it to the next generation is not OK.
This is crazy. Do coal plants, currently generating a massive proportion of the electricity in the US, have a long-term storage/disposal solution for all the wastes coming out of their smokestacks? Why hold nuclear, which by all accounts is cleaner and uses much less fuel, to a standard that existing power producers aren't held to?
Did you stop and think before writing that down? Or do you think existing power comes from magical gnomes? (And the gnomes have a long-term storage/disposal solution!)
Comment of the year
Greenpeace is anti-nuclear, so you're just arguing the same points that they would be. Which is why I'll never contribute money, or for that matter even talk to the enthused college kids they have handing out flyers in Seattle.
What's interesting to me is that quoting the stats on nuclear plants from Greenpeace, which are nearly guaranteed to be designed to make nuke plants look as bad as possible, you still came to the conclusion that Greenpeace *supports* nuclear power.
Comment of the year
You're getting a little loose with terms there and your statement is on par with saying it's impossible to make safe bridges because water accellerates corrosion. Apparently the bridges we are currently making are safe enough because no objects to building a new bridge from a safety standpoint.
It's not radiation that accellerates corrosion. It's neutron bombardment, which is another effect of uranium fission. However, this is predictable, just like seawater corrosion, and is not only accounted for in the design and service life determination for a reactor, but constantly monitored during operation.
Right now humanity can not build anything that's not going to fall apart, and that will never change, but we can build nuclear reactors that are safer than toys from China, bridges in Minnesota, and chicken pot pies, to pick just a few headline-garnering safety issues from the last 3 months.
I'm glad to see somebody got the point!
Nuclear power does not produce any CO2 emissions. But that in itself does not make it clean. Nuclear waste, the radioactive remnants of the Uranium fuel that become useless to power plants, requires storage and it is by no means clean. The problem with nuclear waste is that it will continue being dangerously radioactive long after the facilities built for its storage begin to deteriorate. Any building or construction will deteriorate in time, and radioactive waste will be here for hundreds of years, which is longer than any facility built for its storage would last. And if it gets into water, there will likely be radioactive poisoning among animals and possibly humans.
The bottom line is, in the short term nuclear power is cleaner than fossil fuels, but in the long term nuclear waste has to be managed and monitored continuously to make sure it is being contained in storage and isolated from environment.
I will treat intelligent questions and commentary with respect. I don't see any here, sorry... "ocean of broken panels" my ass.
I'm sorry...can you link to one instance of a reactor falling apart due to corrosion in the history of the industry? I know of a handful of cases of higher-than anticipated maintenance costs due to this effect, but nothing like you seem to imply.
Nobody relevant has ever claimed reactors are indestructible. They have limited operational lives, their integrity is monitored during that life, and at the end of it they're retired.
You're latching onto one technical facet which can be and is in fact addressed and falsely attempting to construe it as a fatal flaw.
Clean? Nope. Doesn't pollute the air or water much, when things go right, aside from overheating some lakes and rivers a bit and releasing a few extra neutrons. There are new reactor designs which are much safer all around, but we have quite an investment in the old. Fuel is not cheap or free, either, and mining it results in quite a deal of environmental destruction.
But really, the most serious issues are two: 1) Nasty waste, and this one apparently can't be easily solved. Not only where does one put it, but how does one get it there. 2) You can't safely (or legally) run a fission reactor in your backyard. So we're stuck under the thumb of the energy mobsters. PV or micro hydro or in some cases wind or geothermal or fuels from crops empower individuals and give us real liberty. These production methods become much more competitve economically if one includes the real costs of the alternatives. This is something I would think all the de facto Libetarians here could easily grasp.
Standard Disclaimer: Of course my opinion in no way represents those of my employer, if they exist.
All you "kids" never lived in the fear of the reality of nuclear waste. It not only lasts longer than you do - it lasts longer than what is currenty recorded history. Having watched one parent die from cancer brought on by the best chemistry our puny brains can muster - I strongly feel that anyone that considers nuclear energy is "clean" is on the contextual level of belief as "the check is in the mail" or "I won't cum in your mouth." Any advocate that promotes nuclear energy is genocidal - to our future. The argument that the future will "solve the problems we create" is incredibly naive and narcissistic. I'll take global warming long before nuclear waste - the planet will heal faster after the "cause" has become extinct.
Teach me. Show me your figures.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Well subject says it all. Currently no insurance company in the world is willing to insure a nuclear plant against an accident. That should make us stop and think. Usually these guys are quite good at accessing risks and benefits. Just looking how many near misses have happened lately in Europe lately, and how many times power companies have ignored safety for profits makes me shiver.
Secondly nuclear power is not cheap. It is very expensive actually. I really don't understand that all the free-market proponents who usually cry out foul about every subsidy don't mind massive subsidies for nuclear power. If only a small fraction of that money would have gone into research into renewable energy sources we'd already have better alternatives.
Then there is the fuel. If you think oil is limited, well there is lots more around than uranium. Also about 70% of the worlds uranium resources are in the control of 2 countries Canada and Australia, compared to OPEC they'd have a lot easier time to agree to do price fixing, then what?! Recycling actually is not much of an option either. It's expensive, it produces weapon-grade plutonium, and it actually does not reduce the amount of nuclear waste. It only reduces the amount of highly radioactive waste, but in the course of recycling you produce _large_ amounts of low to mid radioactive waste, and you have to dispose of that for hundreds to thousands of years as well.
The reason why big companies are so interested in nuclear power is, because it keeps their monopoly in place, it even increases the entry barrier into the market. That's why all the big power companies are so opposed to renewable energies, because they significantly lower the market entry barrier. Everybody can put solar panels onto their roof, a windturbine into their backyard or a small biofuel block power station into their basement (at least almost everybody). So communities could suddenly become totally independent of the large power corporations, that's their nightmare. For me that is already reason enough to oppose nuclear power. Why should my money go into subsidising large corporations?
If you find my post insulting perhaps you should be more polite. I'm OK with either level of discourse myself.
You obviously have to factor in what adverse effects the waste products have on the environment. The problem is that with nuclear, the time scale for potential adverse effects is spread WAY OUT compared to non-nuclear energy sources. That time scale is so distributed out that there seems to be a marked tendency to just say "we'll just dump it into Yucca mountain (or equivalent)," and proceed to act like there ARE no adverse effects and consequently nuclear is really "clean".
And certainly, if you're expecting to be carted off by the rapture any day now you couldn't care less about very long time scales, something that the rapture enraptured seem to have a specific problem with comprehending anyway...
Fallout only applies to nuclear weapons where ash from the explosion rains down over a wide area. Reactors are designed so that they CAN'T explode (they don't have a critical mass of anything). Nor can modern reactors even go into meltdown (e.g. pebble bed reactors).
About the worst that can happen in modern reactor designs is contamination of the nearby area through coolant leaks and the like.
You're an idiot. That plant was closed down already thanks to pressure from your government ( among other things ). Meanwhile the coal fiered powerplants your government operates emit more radioactive material into the air every year than Barsebäck did during its entire lifetime.
"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right."
- Dr. Bob Park
-----
Hmmm... Go back and re-read my previous post. Be sure to keep an eye out for where I said that it would not be possible. Don't be too surprised when you can't find it. Your comment, my dear slashdotter, is an example of a Straw man fallacy; you are presenting my argument in a distorted light so as to easily refute it. Unfortunately, the argument you are refuting isn't mine.
I do hope that one day you will learn the difference between advocacy of armed forces in populated areas and requesting a prototype.
I also truly hope that you will learn why one should not base national energy policy on technology that has not been invented yet.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
The real trick here is that for-profit organizations also have a tendency to lobby the government to stop looking over their shoulders. We either need to make sure that our leaders have the integrity not to listen (and that history is not a pretty one), or somehow tweak the system so that the incentive to lobby away controls goes away. In that sense, the OP's solution of government run facilities isn't particularly crazy--even though it's "Marxist" which, I suppose is always universally bad to some people. The free market is great for optimizing cost of production and producing huge volumes of desirable goods at low cost. Don't mistake that for being the same thing as producing those goods the way they "should" be produced, though. Cost isn't always the variable we want to optimize for.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think that markets are great, but don't assume that they always optimize for the most important variable. The key to using market is knowing when to use them in their bare state, and knowing when other variables are more important. In the latter case, the trick is simply a regulatory system that ties profit to safety (i.e. we fine the crap out of you if you fail to meet very stringent safety and cleanliness standards).
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
We KNOW that converting to nuclear energy would largely solve the global warming problem. Have a nice gander people, the solution to this seemingly intractible problem is staring us in the face.
No, nuclear isn't perfect. But in combination with electric cars, the CO2 problem is solved.
With alternative energy sources like solar, wind, and tidal all the energy needs of the US can be met, without the problems of nuclear energy.
Should there be a Law?
A close family member did his U of Mich. Metallurgical Eng. Ph D research work on the subject of the accelerated corrosion rates caused by radiation seen in the nuclear industry at what was then GE's Hanford nuclear research complex.
Anywhere there's metal and radiation, there's accelerated corrosion. It's the reason the service lives of nuclear reactors has been consistently overestimated. They have no means of making reactor cooling system piping last until the end of industry projected reactor service lives.
It's not "falling apart" because radiation-caused corrosion is a very well known problem in the industry that inspectors check for in every inspection and shut down reactors permanently for when the corrosion gets too bad.
The same moral and intellectual fanatics who are giving us global warming gave us hysterical anti-nuclear power warnings in the 70s and 80s. Result: the US continues to lose its technological edge in power generation. Ten or twenty more years of superstition and bullshit will reduce this country to the level of a banana republic..Sooner or later China or Russia will just tell the US to go F*&K itself. People are tired of listening to politicians blathering on and on about imaginary dangers that only help get them elected by an increasingly gullible electorate. What do you expect from a nation brought up on McDonalds and masturbation?
Of the 127 nuclear power plants built in the US, already 23 US nuclear reactors have been forced into retirement.
"Fact Sheet on Decommissioning Nuclear Power Plants
Background
When a power company decides to close its nuclear power plant permanently, the facility must be decommissioned by safely removing it from service and reducing residual radioactivity to a level that permits release of the property and termination of the operating license. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has strict rules governing nuclear power plant decommissioning involving cleanup of radioactively contaminated plant systems and structures and removal of the radioactive fuel. These requirements protect workers and the public during the entire decommissioning process and the public after the license is terminated.
Discussion
Decommissioning involves three different alternatives: DECON, SAFSTOR, or ENTOMB.
*
Under DECON (immediate dismantlement), soon after the nuclear facility closes, equipment, structures, and portions of the facility containing radioactive contaminants are removed or decontaminated to a level that permits release of the property and termination of the NRC license.
*
Under SAFSTOR, often considered "delayed DECON," a nuclear facility is maintained and monitored in a condition that allows the radioactivity to decay; afterwards, it is dismantled.
*
Under ENTOMB, radioactive contaminants are encased in a structurally sound material such as concrete and appropriately maintained and monitored until the radioactivity decays to a level permitting release of the property.
The plant owner may also choose to adopt a combination of the first two choices in which some portions of the facility are dismantled or decontaminated while other parts of the facility are left in SAFSTOR. The decision may be based on factors besides radioactive decay such as availability of waste disposal sites.
To be acceptable, decommissioning must be completed within 60 years. A time beyond that would be considered only when necessary to protect public health and safety in accordance with NRC regulations.
Regulations
The requirements for decommissioning a nuclear power plant are set out in NRC regulations (Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations, part 20 subpart E, and parts 50.75, 50.82, 51.53, and 51.95). In August 1996, a revised rule went into effect that redefined the decommissioning process and required owners to provide the NRC with early notification of planned decommissioning activities. The rule allows no major decommissioning activities to be undertaken until after certain information has been provided to the NRC and the public
Several opportunities are provided for public involvement during the decommissioning process. The NRC holds a meeting in the vicinity of the plant to discuss the decommissioning process and to invite public comments and questions. NRC approval and issuance of a license amendment is required for changes to the plant license and decommissioning activities that could adversely impact the public. The license amendment process provides an opportunity for a public hearing. Additionally, a license termination plan must be approved by license amendment, thus providing another hearing opportunity for affected members of the public.
Also, as a result of recent deregulation of the electric power industry, NRC now requires nuclear power plant owners to report to the agency the status of their decommissioning funds at least once every two years and annually within five years of the planned end of plant operation. This requirement went into effect in late 1998.
Phases of Decommissioning
The requirements for power reactor decommissioning activities may be divided into three phases: (1) initial activities; (2) major de
Anyone who thinks we'll get all our energy from one source in the foreseeable future, however, is out of the loop.
I think that's the biggest problem. Most people will only consider one, or a small number of, large energy source(s). Instead use hydro where appropriate, the same with geothermal, solar, tidal, and wind.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Could it be that Jane Fonda is almost single handedly responsible for Global Warming? Her activism in the 70s culminating in the China Syndrome movie put an effective moratorium on nuclear energy use in the US. Other countries went right on - for example 80% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power stations. The IPCC reckons that it was about the mid 70s when CO2 emissions started reaching a critical point for GW - if the US had built and used nuclear energy power plants through the following two decades many US drivers may well now be plugging their cars into the power grid every evening. (A useful side effect is that the Middle East nations and Chavez would not be arrogantly rolling in the money that we pay them every time we fill up. Dictatorships funded by drivers everywhere.) Alas even liberals and progressives are subject to the law of unintended consequences
Ethanol is proven as a fuel. Brazil has proven ethanol made from sugarcane is feasible. Switchgrass however is a better raw material than sugarcane.
Windmills turned out to be bird-blenders are useless with still air.
Older technology windmills, with their faster blades, are a danger to birds however today's slower spinning wind gennies are safer.
The problem is that solar, wind, and biofuels are actually not half bad for "peak" load, but most folks can't tell the difference between base and peak load.
Many people are able to live comfortably Off the Grid with solar and/or wind gennies. "Homepower and Solar Today show how people do it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
No process that create dangerous wastes that remains dangerous for THOUSANDS of years - longer than any human instituion has ever existed can be thought of as clean or economical unless you are just so stupid, you deserve a kilogram of this stuff hanging around your neck.
But still, after your dead, who is gonna take care of it? Who pays?
Commerical nuclear power could be the single most irresponsible human activity in history.
Last time I checked, I still had a payback period of infinity for a solar system
Clark Beebe, 57, of Springfield, N.J., bought a $50,000 solar power system two years ago for $15,000 after rebates, installing it on the roof of his four-bedroom house. Because he offsets what he uses with what he pumps into the grid, his annual power bill has dropped from $1,270 to $170, though he also installed energy-saving appliances. His $1,100 yearly savings is supplemented by $500 in clean energy credits, cutting the payback period for his system to nine years. After that, he'll effectively net at least a $200-a-year profit. "I am now an electricity company," says Beebe 57. "Plus, I'm generating electricity without any pollutants."
Carrie Buczeke, 42, of Livermore, Calif., rolled the cost of her $54,000 solar panels -- $25,000 after rebates and tax credits -- into a home-equity loan. She has wiped out her $400 monthly electric bill and pays $300 a month for the loan. After seven years, the loan will be paid off. "It was such a no-brainer," she says.
We have plenty of uranium at slightly higher price points. It helps that major deposits are in countries like Australia and Canada - not the middleast.
But you are not paying all the costs of nuclear power, even those who don't use any have to pay for it. All that's being done is shifting the costs onto everyone. I bet if owners of nuclear power plants had to pay all of the costs, including storage of nuclear waste and insurance, not only would your bill be a lot higher but not many businesses if any at all would even build a nuclear power plant. The only reason they exist is because of massive government subsidies.
FalconShould there be a Law?
So would solar + tidal + geothermal + wind.
'Course, that's not actually sufficient to power our civilization
Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States. Combining geothermal, solar, tidal, and wind with efficiency should meet the US's energy needs.
'Course, that's not actually sufficient to power our civilization, leading to wide-spread collapse and subsequent famine and pestilence
Guess what will happen when oil is gone. Collapse of civilization that's what. We have millions of people dying of hunger now, but when oil is gone not only will transportation suffer but so will food crops. WHY? Because conventional western agriculture depends on massive amounts of petrochemical inputs. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides are all made from petro.
Should there be a Law?
However, your standpoint is laudably moderate for someone discussing nuclear power, so I don't really feel I have to prove myself right or "win" or anything. The fact that we agree that one should take the entire cost of coal into account is enough for me.
I see no way for 40 000 people to die from uranium every year, even under the worst conditions. Also: Remember the radon scare? Now just imagine going to work every day where there is a lot of radon present and your boss doesn't give you an air-tank to avoid it. That's not the fault of uranium, nor is it the fault of nuclear power. It is the fault of the boss who should be punished. He's clearly at the same level as the "village elders" in the BBC article I linked who conveniently don't live in their polluted home. Even with air tanks there's still room for improvement: uranium is so valuable that mechanized mining is very viable - the costs of nuclear are in personnel and safety anyway, not in the fuel.
To sum up: nuclear has some nasty side-effects, as you showed clearly. They pale in comparison to the effects of the current coal use though, which was and still is my point.
In Europe, it's only cheaper in Norway, Switzerland, and ... Finland. Not sure about why it is so in Finland, but for the first two this is due to their exceptional hydroelectric potential.
Electricy is much more expensive in all other similar-sized countries in Europe. Especially in UK and Germany since they privatized -- prices have gone WAY up. Privatizing electricity is pointless, and shouldn't be done. I'd rather have the "inefficiency" of paying lots of civil servants who have the luxury to do their job right in between naps, rather than have a Golden Boy "rationalize" on security to pay for his next private jet.
Case in point, there is a reason capitalists are salivating at EDF's possible privatization. Its nuclear reactors have been provisioned very conservatively, financially speaking. IOW billions of euros have been set aside for future dismantling and servicing. Future owners would love to use this money as leverage -- because obivously they don't get to spend it, at least directly.
I said "not much cleaner than many other less risky choices".
Coal is only one of many choices. Wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, hydro - all other choices that are less risky than coal.
And it depends on what coal (caveat - at one point I owned 500 Peabody IPO shares) actually - some is high in sulfur, some is hard to mine, some is low in sulfur and easy to mine.
Repeat after me - all advocates tend to ignore the downsides of their chosen energy source.
Wind advocates ignore their own downsides, solar too, nuclear fission too.
You are not alone in thinking your choice is the best thing since sliced bread and has no problems. It's a common problem in energy research, this blinkered focus one has that one's choice is totally wonderful and has no faults. Believe it or not, oil and coal people are just like you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm not completely following you anymore here. I apparently haven't read your posts as thoroughly as I should have. I'll just concede this point in order to make another.
No problems? I went through all my posts in this discussion to check this, and saw what I expected: I mentioned downsides of nuclear in every post, often using the word 'nasty'. At no point have I said that nuclear is problem-free, only expressed my belief that the problems of coal are greater (the only mention of other energy sources I have made is that they don't provice enough energy, meaning I've essentially ignored them for good or bad).
I admitted I didn't read your posts thoroughly enough. I hope you do the same in return.
"Spent fuel" is hardly spent - most of the original fissionables are still in the bundle, waiting for wastes to be removed and new fuel bundles made. There are hundreds of highly-enriched U-235 reactors that can be recycled to make commercial fuel (lightly-enriched with U-235).
Some fairly smart people made very bad decisions in the 70's that haunt us today.
Have a look at the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) http://www.gnep.energy.gov/gnepPublicInformation.html for a plan to get rid of the nuclear waste we have (by burning it in reactors), and supply a lot of energy worldwide.
As an aside, we need to think about multiple sources of energy - Perhaps bio-diesel from algae http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html for transportation. Solar and Nuclear for electricity and heating.
Conservation via insulating, is another great solution. My home has R-46 insulation. Try to get someone to build one of those for ya! "No can do!", says the builder, because he's never done it.
We're between a rock and a hard place with Natural Gas and Propane this winter - demand has outstripped the supply, and (us) idiots in California and other places built Nat Gas fueled electrical plants - the most expensive fuel on planet earth and we use it for base load. Incredibly stupid.
I read an article recently that most of the Sierra Club consists of geezers. Since they kind of missed the point on a lot off issues, drinking bad ju-ju koolaid, it's probably best that they trundle off in their birks to history and leave Environmentalism to those who can think things through. We can use technology (and computer modeling using _all_ of the relevant variables) to peer through the haze and find good solutions for the future.
Yeah - I'ma geezer, too. Let's rock.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Or if you want to pick on research, pick on the NCCAM; that's what you get when you fund every scheme somebody dreams up. Well, yeah. The majority of basic research doesn't produce results, but some of it does. Consider the National Cancer Institute's survey of thousands of plant compounds for potential anticancer properties; the vast majority came back negative, but one didn't, and that led to the discovery of a new and highly useful class of chemotherapy agents. Comparing basic research to seed corn is rather cliché, but it's quite apt. I have an idea; you should like it. The local firehouse has an old, broken down fire engine, but they've recently received as a donation a very nice, new, shiny one. There was some consternation about what to do with the two engines, but it was decided that the old engine should be taken to false alarms, and the new engine should be used for actual fires.
More seriously, there already exists a system to determine what gets funded and what gets whacked; it's called the grant application process. You seem to be complaining that researchers don't know ahead of time what the results will be. I'm a bit confused as to why you would imagine things to be otherwise.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I think that the term you'd be looking for would be 'displacement'.
Thanks, "displacement" may work. Another word I thought of when I read the above was "distort" and I'll try it too.
My house needs to be heated. I'm outside of NG range, so my main choices are electric or propane. Right now propane is substantially cheaper than electric - but with the right setup(like a geothermal heat pump), electric would be cheaper.
I rent now but it's kind of like "rent to own". When the building is transfered to me I plan on converting the heating as well. Right now a boiler in the basement, burning propane, provides heating with only 1 thermostat covering the building. What I want to do is first improve the insulation, my apartment on the first floor can get warm while the apartments above will be cold. Then if feasible I want to use a geothermal heat pump as well. I'll use radiant floor heating and create heating zones for each apartment controlled by thermostats in each apartment. A person would be able to have the bedroom warming up before they hit the sack then lower the temp once they're out the door. The kitchen zone would then warm up before they got up so the floor wasn't cold while cooking. Now, do I really expect people to setup the room like that? No, but they will have the ability.
It'd just take a large capital investment - which isn't worth it at this time.
Yea, I hope I'll be able to save enough after a few years, I want to get a loan for it but still want to make sure I have at least most of the money. I could either take out a second mortgage or an equity line of credit, then roll it into a new mortgage when interest is low.
If it gets bad enough - you see more people driving electric cars because they're cheaper.
I think it was late last year but it of been early this year when I read about a study the "Economist" had that basically said those in the US pay something like 17% of their income on transportation. When oil prices are low they'll drive expensive gas guzzlers but when oil prices are high they drive fuel efficient vehicles.
On to your list of links... I found #4 interesting, because it considers not charging for CO2 emissions a subsidy.
In a way I consider a subsidy myself. Instead of the government giving the money, it's future generations who will have to pay. The Inuit in Nunavut are already paying. And not just for Global Warming, but for industrial pollution as well. Although the Inuit neither make nor consume Polychlorinated biphenyl, known to be highly toxic, their blood as been shown to have high PCB levels. Heck they even have high levels of DDT.
I hate to say it, but I think that they need to stop concentrating on reducing energy usage for a while and concentrate on appliance longevity. Chopping 10% off the electricity usage of an appliance makes sense when it lasts 20 years, but the average today is often less than 10, and for some is as low as 5, on average.
Oh, I'm in total agreement. It seems nobody takes pride in making something that can be handed down to grand and great grand children today. I lost it but about 15 years ago I had the shell of a Zippo lighter with the graving of a Chinese dragon that was made in the 1930's. It was in great shape. Design today is for planned obsolescence. Things should be made to last a long tyme, then easy to recycle. There's a good book partially on this, "Natural Capitalism". It has case studies of how company X improved it's bottom line by cleaning up pollution,
Should there be a Law?
Look up the mass of the earth.
Look up the speed of rotation of that mass.
Calculate the energy required to slow that mass by 1 meter per million years.
Look up the estimated yearly power use of the human race. Double it to provide margin of error. Round up.
Subtract the power use number from the mass retardation number.
Achieve enlightenment yet?
Here's another one I like:
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest." -- Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line" (1939)
All of this could very easily be applied to the airlines. Planes are built by the private sector, airlines are owned by the private sector, and investors do make money off of them. As for safety, flying is safer than driving a car.
Arkansas Nuclear One has been run by the private sector at a substantial profit by Arkansas Power and Light (Now called Entergy) for nearly a half century with no problem. AND it is still going strong.
It is the absolute lowest cost way of generating electricity and with the new pebble bed reactors, which are walk away safe, there is now no reason not to. The oil companies, though, will run a 24/7 campaign to try to scare the public into rejecting it. They know there is only one form of energy out there that can easily compete with oil and nuclear is it. With new pluggable hybrid cars out there you can go 40 miles on a 50 cent charge. At todays gasoline prices that 40 miles approaches $10. Again, there is NO way for big oil to compete, so they want it stopped. And they are willing to spend ANY amount of money to quash it. They'll hire armies of Gilligan's out there if that is what it takes. If France and Japan have been doing it for this long as well as so many other advanced countries, we should probably wake up to Nuclear once and for all.
If you applied the parent's logic of cost in all things, NOTHING would ever be worth doing, even a simple house. You could not build a simple house - think about it: No way to guarantee it could hold up in an earthquake, it might catch fire, a tornado could kill you if you lived in it, who will pay for the cleanup when it gets old?, termites could weaken it, are all the component parts safe to ingest of inhale? wiring in the house could shock and kill you, someone could drown in the tub, fall down the stairs, on and on. Nuclear is the answer, particularly pebble bed reactors. The sheeple need to wake up to the answer sitting RIGHT under their nose.
ie the birth rate declines.
Which doesn't reduce the population, it only reduces the rate of population growth.
By improving education, equality, and economic opportunity the population will reduce. The replacement rate or fertility rate to maintain a steady population is more than 2 children per female. However in developed nations where there is equality and educational as well as economic opportunities the birth rate is below 2 births per female. As it is now where the population is growing the fastest, Africa, is also where there is a lack of economic opportunity, education, and equality. By increasing, improving, these 3 factors in Africa the population will decline there. Admittedly it won't happen instantaneously but within a short tyme it will. It may take 20 or 30 years but it can happen. China and India are good examples. Until these 3 factors improved there, China and India had the highest population growth rates. However now that both nations have improved their birth rate has dropped. Some will cite China's One Child per Family policy, but while it may of helped, it does not explain India's drop in birth rate.
I think America is still one of the relatively small number of first world countries with intrinsic population growth.
Without immigration it appears the US population is increasing slowly, in the US I found this on the rate of Fertility: " The U.S. average fertility rate is currently 2.1335 births per woman, the U.S.'s highest fertility rate since 1971. (For comparison, the United Kingdom's fertility rate is 1.7, Canada's is 1.4, and Germany's is 1.3.)" This may lead to an increase in population but if so it's real low. As the US is becoming more religious I wonder how much religion influences this as some of them call their followers to "multiply".
FalconShould there be a Law?
For example, given the premise, 'all fish live underwater' and 'all mackerel are fish', my wife will conclude, not that 'all mackerel live underwater', but that 'if she buys kippers it will not rain', or that 'trout live in trees', or even that 'I do not love her any more.'
Explain to me why it is better to remain ignorant than to perform experiments. Your example is not inspiring. How would YOU measure the energy, given that all other methods appear to have returned wrong values, and your claim that doing tethered satellite experimentation is "the stupidest idea in the history of mankind"?
We already knew scientific research does not guarantee return on investment. What's your point, other than proving how smart you are? You failed that already, with your pythonesque leap of illogic that implies I recommended using incomplete research as a basis for building infrastructure.