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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."
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
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.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
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.
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
And here's where I fit your caraciture: I do oppose raising energy rates and reducing consuption because it's anti-progressive, or as I prefer to say, regressive. Any extra burdens imposed on the cost of energy are going to disproportionately hurt the poor, and they've had it bad enough. Besides, it's totally unrealistic. Of course we should be doing more to insulate houses, and I strongly support government subsidies for doing that. But in a choice between reducing energy use and not reducing it while taking the risk of global climate catastrophe, Americans (maybe people in general) will choose the latter ten out of ten times. We can get mad about it or we can get realistic about it and provide them with the one clean source of power that we know how to develop on a large scale. Sucks that we'll probably have to bring in French engineers to do it right; we've really lost our technological lead in this industry!
Regarding the spent fuel, there is an obvious answer: Reprocessing. The most radioactive stuff that we bury now are the heavy metals which are actually fissile and could be used to produce more energy. The rest of the waste, if processed correctly, would be less radioactive in 30 years than the ore that was originally mined. So in the long run we'd be reducing the amount of radioactive stuff in the ground.
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.
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.
The point of TFA is that Nuclear power has vastly improved since those days. Additionally Chernobyl was a product of a bad set of safety procedures and fail safes. an entire account of what happened that day can be found on Wikipedia which is as follows: The workers were performing an experiment with the reactor's safety systems. Problems occurred during the tests, the reactor did not receive enough coolant, had built up too much heat in the core and had fully withdrawn control rods, all of which contributed to a very unstable and unpredictable reactor operation. When the control rods were reinserted in an attempt to regain control of the unstable reactor, there was a sudden increase in reactivity, caused by the design of the RBMK reactor and its control rods, and an uncontrollable runaway reaction occurred. The reactor produced tremendous amounts of steam, eventually causing a steam break/explosion, which destroyed part of the reactor. Graphite fires broke out, due to the high temperatures of the reactor and that the graphite was exposed to oxygen, causing it to burn, which occurred after the reactor was damaged from the steam explosion. While it's true Nuclear has been overlooked and underdeveloped for the last couple of decades in the US, we are to the point where it would be highly (if not completely) unlikely that a disaster of even a fraction that size would occur.
TFA points out there hasn't been a Nuclear disaster on US soil since 1979's Three Mile Island and while yes, it could theoretically happen, We've also gained much knowledge to either stop or prevent such a disaster
Yes there were failures in the past... bad failures, but with that comes the knowledge to fix the problem.
The original generic sig.
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.
he waste remains deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.
Guess how radioactive something is with a half-life of 100,000 years? Answer: Not very.
I'd really wish there was like a prerequisite of high school physics before people were allowed to start talking about the energy issue in America.
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.
You gotta be kidding me. We don't use nuclear because it would hurt the oil industry? First off, there's a difference between oil, which runs our cars, and coal, which runs our power plants, which you don't seem to grasp. Second and more importantly, the real reason we don't have much nuclear power in the US is because for decades "environmentalists" have been waging a misguided war against nuclear power. These activists eroded public support for nuclear energy, and their lobbyists got our politicians to impose such stringent roadblocks and regulations that it became impossible for any company to even think about building in a new nuclear power plant in the US. Thanks to their ignorance and short-sightedness, these activists contributed in a major way to the problem of global warming, which they now say will be the doom of us all. And what makes it even more ironic is that the activists are still at it today. Sure nuclear is not perfect. But the safety issue was settled long ago. So the only downside is waste disposal, and the technology to process nuclear waste is advancing rapidly. And anyway, the stuff comes out of the ground, so we just have to put it back there, and make sure it stays there. All this talk about nuclear waste being a terrible hazard and environmental concern for the "next 10,000 years" is ridiculous. Some time in the next 500 years we'll figure out an even better way to handle, or use, nuclear waste, and it'll become a null issue (unless global warming kills us all by then of course).
> natural gas is clean burning.
Yeah, no CO2 output, and there's an infinite supply of it, thank goodness!
Couple of points:
1) Most nuclear wastes isn't even radioactive. This would be equipment used around a plant.
2) The DoE was working on an IFR; which used sodium. The IFR could take nuclear waste, use it. The resulting half life was about 4-500 years. Not to bad, really.
3) Yucca mountain safety is only in question because ignorant people turned it into a political issue inseat of a science issue; whixch is what it should be.
4) What Nuclear waste is flowing into the columbia?
5) It is a lot cleaner then coal.
6) We could make it into glass brick and dump it into the trench. (Radiation isn't contagious the way most people say it is.
7) It's disposal really isn't that difficult, there are several good choices that could hold it securly for 1000s of years, but as soon as the ill informed public hears 'nuclear' they think radiation is coming though their wires.(In one person I saw interview, they literally believed that.)
8) exactly 0 people died from three mile island, however because people wouldn't let them restart the other reactors, approx. 50 people have dies from the pollution from the coal plants they now use.
9) Look at some of the newer French designs, they are awesome. Some of the stuff Japan has on the drawing board is incredible.
10) Chicago is about 90% nuclear, there cost per kilowatt is about a nickel.
When a coal plant opens up, I always remember to thank an anti-nuclear environmentalist.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...And all that process of uranium mining and refinement runs on sweet dreams and sunshine?
Clean in this case means that if stored properly, the actual "dirty" parts never comes into contact with the environment in such a way that would cause any harm or measurable effect. If it were standard operating procedure to just vent the radioactive waste into the air then you could call it dirty. And that's exactly what coal fired plants do, btw.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.
Secondly, reprocessing. The US's main focus for reprocessing is wrapped up in the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). This is a freaking scam, and the National Academy of Sciences backs me up. Basically, the types of reactors envisioned require materials science that just isn't there yet, requires funding that just isn't there yet, and requires an infrastructure that Just Isn't There Yet.
The solution is to turn Yucca Mountain into a medium-term repository. Bury it, safely, for 100 to 200 years, let the exceptionally hot stuff decay away, and I'm pretty darned sure civilization will be able to find some use for the energy stored in there in 100 years. But until then, let the technology mature. The commercial industry (and, by extension, every person in the U.S. who pays for electricity) has been paying into the Yucca fund for too long not to see any return on that investment.
Oh, one more snarky comment. Please provide support via links for your assertions; it's not hard. I would like to see evidence that after 30 years, the spent fuel coming out of a burner like envisioned for GNEP is actually less radioactive than the original ore.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
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.
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.
Option 1: Vitrify (mix with glass to prevent chemical interaction with the environment) and drop to the bottom of the ocean at a subduction zone.
Over a short time the material will be covered in silt and mud. Over a long time it will be drawn into the Earth's crust and mantle. I'd call that a fairly permanent solution.
Option 2: Repeal the law banning enrichment for domestic power purposes.
Currently only about 2% of the fuel potential is actually used in today's power plant. If you can reprocess the spent fuel, separating out the junk from the readily fisible material, you can substantially reduce both the volume of waste and the amount of time the waste is dangerous.
Option 3: Move to thorium-based reactors.
For Thorium reactors, the fuel cycle is far more efficient and leaves far less waste and waste that is dangerous for a far shorter amount of time.
Option 4: Move to fast neutron reactors.
The fuel cycle is, again, far more efficient and leaves shorter-lived waste as well as far less waste.
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Those are four "good answers." No large-scale energy generation is going to be warm and fuzzy. Sorry, but that's the brutal truth. When you're talking about trillions of kilowatt-hours per year, it is absolutely the search for the lesser of many evils.
Think solar will solve our issues? We're having supply problems with silicon as it is. No, we're not running out of sand. Photovoltaics require clean rooms and much of the same infrastructure as computer chips. Lately, the price of computer chip materials have been increasing because of increasing solar panel production. What? Beam it down from space? Show me a prototype and I'll consider it. Until we see a proof of concept, it would be ridiculously stupid to base a nation's energy policy on it.
What? The solar panels that can be "painted?" Where was the prototype for that again? Exactly. Prototype comes before small-scale production. Small-scale production precedes large-scale production. If there's no prototype, you can't even begin to seriously consider policy based upon large-scale production.
That said, I think we should spend time with wind power, just not the windmill variety. Those suck.
Minimum 10MPH wind + Maximum 40MPH = Not Good Enough For a Nation.
Read about kite versions instead and why windmills just don't cut it. But once again I would want to see a proof of concept before committing.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
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.
No, not necessarily.
You balance the construction cost in year zero with the cost of fuel in the out years.
If your nuke plant costs four times as much to build, initially, but, over the life of the plant, it saves twenty times as much in fuel costs (numbers pulled at random out of poster's butt), you have saved a whole bundle of money by buying the more expensive plant.
Also, entirely too much of the cost of building nuclear power plants has been fighting totally frivolous bullcrap from enviro-whackos who wouldn't know what a void coefficient was if it tore their leg off.
However, natural gas (mostly methane, CH4) has the highest hydrogen to carbon ratio of any fossil fuel. That makes it produce less CO2 per unit energy than any fossil fuel.
Anything else has more C-C bonds and so cannot have as high of a ratio.
Disclaimer: I don't have my chemistry books handy or could make sure the above is compltely true. If I remember correctly, it is. YMMV...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yeah, no CO2 output, and there's an infinite supply of it, thank goodness!
There is a technological solution to everything. Just feed that CO2 to photosynthetic methane-generating bacteria and then sequester the methane by pumping it deep underground where it won't bother anybody.
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
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.
I agree, it's unrealistic and unreasonable to ask people to accept a reduction in the quality of their lives- they won't do it. That said, if you want to be realistic, you have to consider that the primary factor people respond to is price. If we really want people to change the fuel they consume, we have two options: provide some alternative that is cheaper to them, or make hydrocarbon fuels more expensive to them. I think we should do both, frankly. This may sound insensitive, but without a pain point to respond to AND a better option worth switching to, nobody that hasn't already will change their behavior.
Yes, there's stuff we can do to facilitate conversions (from coal to nuclear, from gas to electric, etc) and make the conversion process less painful, and we should do that. There's stuff we can do to drive efficiency (like help people insulate their houses) and we should do that. What we shouldn't do is protect anybody from price pressures. Yes, it'll be painful, but in the end it should be painful to do stupid stuff.
If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
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
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).
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 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.
Yes, you're right about the ratio, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_vehicle#Energy_content.
.25 .33 .38 .40
simply, it's the ratio of carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms:
methane- CH4 = 1:4 =
ethane -C2H6 = 1:3 =
propane-C3H8 = 3:8 =
butane -C4H10= 2:5 =
Methane has the lowest amount of carbon per mole.
But no matter how you slice it, all hydrocarbon combustion creates CO2.
IMHO, If we need to, as a civilization, we can survive on solar power using existing technologies if we reduce our consumption to more modest levels.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And they've been saying this for how long for oil? We haven't even put 1% of the effort into finding uranium supplies than we have oil.
Smart usage, like breeder reactors, would give us centuries more with our existing nuclear reactors. Heck, the energy density of nuclear power is such that with thorium reactors we could pull enough out of seawater for it to be an energy positive measure.
I don't read AC A human right
This is still unproven (there are lots of other noxious things people are being exposed to over there, any of which could be contributing to such problems).
However more to the point, depleted uranium is not particularly radioactive; if you had a brick of it in your hand, you would be exposed to relatively little radiation. Remember also that much of the radiation in that brick will itself be locked up in the interior of the brick because it is also a good shield material.
The issue with depleted uranium is not so much the density of its radioactivity, but the fact that when it's used in munitions it gets burned and pulverized into dust particles which are more easily absorbed by the body. You're not likely to eat a brick of DU and, quite frankly, even if you did swallow a small marble of DU the body is not able to absorb much of it and it will quickly be eliminated. However you could easily inhale small particles of oxidized or pulverized DU which allows for both heavy metal poisoning and longer-term exposure to the radioactivity since the small particles and heavy metal oxides would remain in the body for longer periods of time, and the smaller particles present a higher surface-to-volume ratio for the radioactivity to escape into your body.
The jury is still out on whether this is enough to account for the observed health issues, though there is cause for concern. But it is not an issue outside of military scenarios because you wouldn't be making pulverized and oxidized DU and spreading it all over the environment.
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.
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 disagree about solar using existing technologies. I don't think its anywhere near feasible.
However, future technologies in solar might help, but I don't think we're there yet.
The reason Nuclear is the answer is that it works.....now. Wind is the only thing you mention that really works reasonably well, but still has the problem of not being constantly available to generate power. We don't have enough land for all the solar arrays that would be needed, plus the sun doesn't always shine.
Nuclear is a good option, the technology has gotten much much better over the past 30 years.
No, it's a bonus, dinner would arrive right out of the sky!
Beets or cane same thermodynamics. Corn is a stupid program to pursue.
sure.
http://pdf.aiaa.org/preview/CDReadyMJPC2003_775/PV2003_4431.pdf
"...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
Jimmy Carter studied to be a nuclear engineer while in the Navy. So he probably knew better than any other
politician what the risks were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_carter
Breeder reactors _are_ a proliferation concern. You clearly don't know what you are talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Reprocessing
Separating isotopes _IS_ possible...Maybe difficult, but not impossible. Fuel reprocessing is done
to make this purposely more difficult.
And it's easy to look back with 30 years of hindsight and criticize, but it was an intelligent decision at
the time, and might still be today. Breeder reactors have proven to be better, but I'll bet it wasn't
so obvious 30 years ago. And the proliferation issue still hasn't gone away.
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.
I'm not sure what America you live in. The one I live in overcomes and adapts.
- During the 70's we implemented EPA/factory controls to all but eliminate the ACID rain in the northeast.
- During the 80's we mandated catalytic converters to eliminate the SMOG in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago and every other major and minor American city.
- During the 90's we increased Federal mandates on auto makers to increase the MPG on vehicles sold in the United States.
Our "Fat" Asses are....
- Recycling More. Do you recycle your beer cans and plastics? 40 Percent of us do now versus 10 percent a few years ago.
- GWB tried to increase the MPG on cars sold in America, but was shot down by the Democrat and Republican Congress.
- Everyone on slashdot uses more electricity to power their game stations, Computers, cell phones, cable boxes, DSL connections than their parents used in a lifetime. But nobody wants a new powerplant. Trying to get a new Nuclear or Coal fired plant is blocked by the Environmentalist (Nuke) or Global warming fanatics (Coal).
- The USA is buying into the Toyota Pirus and other "Green" technology. Toyota can't keep up.
Stop with the negative vibes. Either mankind overcomes and adapts or we will be extinct. Its not up to me, its up to my kids. If I were them, for every inch of ice cap melted, I'd desalinate an inch of ocean and pump it into the farmlands. We have the technology.
For the record,
I like wearing shorts and I like girls wearing bikinis year round even better. Life on planet earth during global warming is a lot better than an Ice Age on planet earth.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
I have a pottery studio/kiln out in the county a little ways. When I first built it, I had no power of any kind, so I took to charging up a deep-cycle 12v marine battery at home and then carting it out there. With an inverter and a CFL, I'd get 12 hours of power or so. The battery weighs a ton (subjectively) and it was a pain, but also nice to be able to work in the evening. I would also run some other things off it on occasion. Anyway, I realized that even small amounts of electricity represent HUGE amounts of work -- and carrying that battery back and forth was actually the least of the "work" it took to get that bit of light.
We had a big windstorm a few days ago and power was out at the studio (I know have juice there) for the last day and a half. I used to love it when the power went out -- the world became quiet and I was forced to do quiet things I don't do enough of -- read, think, sleep. Now all I hear is the distant sound of generators running (note me -- others).
As a society, we have become so affluent (or debt ridden) that we are unwilling to give up electricity even for a few hours. We can't do without even for a few moments but it comes at a very high price which will be paid eventually. Anyway, back to your point, I suspect most people wouldn't be willing to reduce their energy usage enough. Even if you got 2kw per day out of the sun, that's only 20 hours for one 100 watt bulb. If you have a computer, fridge, 6 lights, and TV on, you could be hitting near 1000 watts per hour (depending on efficiency of course).
Even me -- I realize how work intensive electricity is, and I try to make sure to make efficient use of it by minimizing my use -- still, it would be very hard to limit myself to 2kw per day, which is what I'd get with 10 hours of sun (good luck in Dec) and $1350. Maybe there are better deals out there. I know for sure all those people firing up their generators sure won't survive on 2kw.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
Yes, we have so many roadblocks in place to stop new nuclear power plants from becoming a reality like a $500 million dollar insurance subsidy to anyone willing to build new plants with $250 Million per year for five years after, and credits for nuclear energy production...
I hope someone does something to stop them and their overhyped fears of nuclear materials, so we can start making new nuclear weapons. Everybody knows we have solved any technical issues with dangerous nuclear power production!
...and it should be known by now
Disclaimer: I am not an economist, I've just dumped about 500 hours in the past 6 months into academic research regarding energy markets, renewable energy planning, etc.
why sequester the methane when you can turn around and burn it again?
Because it's a joke. Natural Gas = Methane. Parent is suggesting that we burn natural gas, convert the CO2 back into natural gas, and then pump it back underground.
Now mods have to take away the parent's "funny" modifier, because I explained the joke, therefore killing it.
DATABASE WOW WOW
He didn't say using current solar generators, he said using current solar technology. Obviously we'd have to build some more solar plants to generate significantly more power. But good job knocking down the straw-man. It won't be getting up again.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We have already peaked in our oil discovery.
The extraction peak is essentially now, plus or minus a bit of time. Check it out, oil is now above 90 a barrel.
The uranium forecasts are not by doom-and-gloom fear mongers but by internal forecasts by analysists (geophysicsts, statisticians etc) within the energy companies. They could well be wrong, but their guess is better than yours. Keep in mind that uranium extraction will of course accelerate as energy demands increase and oil supply does not.
-josh
Just to define long time...
The sarcophagus over the Chernobyl reactor was built some 20 years ago, and it might survive another 20.
Long term for current radioactive waste would be something like 10,000 years
The mojave is the best, but any place in Nevada or Arizona is pretty damn good
and anyone who's driven across the miles/and miles of empty BLM land knows
that the US still has plenty of land w/o water and any farm value. Way more
than necessary to power the US completely.
The yearly income from an acre of solar panels would be far more than farming.
It's the startup costs which need to come down.
Land costs would never be an issue except in urban/suburban areas. Never in
agricultural areas.
> 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.
2kw per day
To lower my carbon emissions, I am now only driving my car 35 miles per hour per day!
In other words, you are accelerating at a maximum rate of 0.000181092593 m/s^2. Good luck getting anywhere. (-:
There is NIMBYism with solar too. Someone nearby put up some panels in his yard and the neighbors sued claiming it destroyed their views. Now they may not WIN, but it will be expensive to defend against.
The problem is exactly what the first-post person was modded down for saying. Nobody wants ANY power generation of any type near them, yet they all want cheap power. You can't have both. All the alternative energy plans have environmentalists fighting them for various reasons - so we still burn coal, and lots of it. Give me nuke plants (modern breeder types), wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal. I want cheap power so we can do desalination and run electric cars. Kill the CO2 emissions so my great-grandchildren have a nice planet to live on...
Actually what is suprising is that it hasn't collapsed already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_need_for_future_repairs
For a safe design go and look up "Pebble Bed Nuclear Reactor". These have the capability to become a much safer design but they are still on the drawing board.
For a decent article discussing the various types of reactor currently in use look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_technology
It seems to suggest that Pressurised Water Reactors are the safest design.
I dont read
Nuclear reactors are very safe. The dangerous part is us.
Chernobyl: The idiots turned off the pumps.
Three Mile: The idiots went cheap with the sensors.
A well funded plant with competent people running it is very safe.
The environmental FUD has ensured that modern reactors have both.
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.
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.
The app works good cause we're in northern Arizona, plenty of sunshine at least 350 days out of the year. We still get some cloud cover, and if the clouds hang over for a week, the net goes down. This is why I really don't see solar power being widespread for power generation.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Lights don't burn watts per hour, they burn watts. 2000 watts will give you 2000 watts of light for as many hours as you want. If you ran twenty 100watt bulbs at once, you'd use up that 2kw for as long as you wanted.
Watts are not a measurement of energy. They are a measurement of energy per time. The "per time" part is built-in to the unit watt. A 100 watt light bulb uses 100 joules per second, or 0.134102209 horsepower. Energy is also measured in watt-hours. That's watts TIMES hours, not watts per hour. a 1Wh battery will deliver one watt for an hour. Twenty 100watt bulbs at once will use 2kWh in an hour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Confusion_of_watts_and_watt-hours