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Former Anti-Nuclear Activist Does A 180
palegray.net writes "Wired is running a story on how Gwyneth Cravens, a former nuclear power protester has changed her views on nuclear power as a viable solution to the world's energy needs. Said Cravens: 'I used to think we surely could do better. We could have more wind farms and solar. But I then learned about base-load energy, and that there are three forms of it: fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear. In the United States, we're maxed out on hydro. That leaves fossil fuels and nuclear power, and most of the fossil fuel burned is coal.'"
Who told you that?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Can you point towards a reputable source? I have never heard about this and want to learn more.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
1. World production at current prices has peaked I'm assuming you meant to say, there is plenty of it around but just not at current costs of extraction. The cost of the uranium is a small part of the total cost of nuclear power plants so even a substantial raise in the costs of extraction can be dealt with.
2. Uranium 235 is not the only fuel that can be used in nuclear power plants.
...who is going to pay to take care of the waste for the next 100,000 years? No human institution has ever lasted that long and yet we build reactors that can only work for 40 years or so but have this waste that is hot and nasty for at least 100,000.
Insanity.
Fingers? Dikes?
Eh, its not all bad. I guess after a few hundred (thousand?) years of an irradiated water supply perhaps he *could* plug all those holes!
Go nuc-u-lar!
Bought the ticket, taking the ride.
Either way, we're screwed as long as we depend on something that will eventually run out. Switching energy sources only postpones the inevitable.
Try looking up the Olympic Dam mine in Australia owned by BHP Billiton. Every few years they send the geologists out a few more hundred meters and add another 50 years to the life of the mine when they need to boost reserve numbers for financial reasons. No one knowns how big the deposit is but it is HUGE - I've heard figures sugesting it might supply 30% of world uranium demand for the next century or more.
It's not nearly as dire as that, unless we keep using light-water reactors... take a look at a brief summary of the situation that jibes with what I've heard from various sources. Can't seem to find anything peer-reviewed at the moment, but I'm sure it's out there.
Cyg
Seriously.
"Activitist?"
Can we replace "editors" with "those guys who post shit?"
It's just embarrassing.
I used to be pro-nuke, worked for a nuclear company etc, but am no longer so. For me, the biggest issues with nuke are handling long-term bulk waste and the costs: nuke is far more expensive than anything else even though the promises of the 50s and 60s were energy that would be so cheap that it was not worth metering.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Can you point towards a reputable source? I have never heard about this and want to learn more.
Trying to find some stuff online turned up nothing but I did find this article interesting about the topic...
PDF WARNING!
Conversion to html from google
I was gonna say that! oh well lol. But also don't forget how much energy it takes to find, ship, and refine uranium. I think Hydrogen (tritium) is way easier to get and there's way more of it. Too bad we're apparently not so good at fusion. All I can say though is I hope we can easily convert fission nuke plants to fusion when we perfect it cuz fission isn't going to last much longer.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html
"From time to time concerns are raised that the known resources might be insufficient when judged as a multiple of present rate of use. But this is the Limits to Growth fallacy, a major intellectual blunder recycled from the 1970s, which takes no account of the very limited nature of the knowledge we have at any time of what is actually in the Earth's crust. Our knowledge of geology is such that we can be confident that identified resources of metal minerals are a small fraction of what is there. Factors affecting the supply of resources are discussed further and illustrated in the Appendix."
good reading for anyone interested. Of course, verify the info for yourself, no one source should be trusted stand alone.
I'm always pleased to hear about an activist (doesn't matter what kind) publicly admit they were wrong after learning more about the subject. Firstly because they took the initiative to actually research something instead of taking as gospel anything those around them say. Secondly because they're big enough to admit they were wrong. I just wish more activists would do the same.
That'll work for a good long while. But in Total Reality we are simply going to have to make OTHER PLANS. We live in a high energy society thanks to fossil fuels. This level of energy consumption is not sustainable, and I would argue, not desirable. We need to adjust our direction of civilisation away from more toys and gadgets to higher quality human interactions and more meaningful labour.
Sorry all you PR saps and admin assistants at hedge funds and nail salon operators. I would recommend you learn something useful, like FARMING. Or dismantling Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Until we slide down that far, though, I would recommend Vanadium redox/solar/wind combo. And DO IT NOW. WHILE WE HAVE THE ENERGY TO SPARE.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If something goes wrong at the plant, blame the guy who can't speak English.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Hands up all those who read the headline as 'Former Anti-Nuclear Activist Dies at 180'..
;)
if protesting against nuclear power will give me a lifespan like that, i'll look for a placard right now
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
2: No, it hasn't.
3: Doesn't matter. There are other radioactive materials that can be used for fission.
how many ppm U235 is most coal burned in the united states again?
Interview goes like this: Hi, I'm a StupidPerson(tm). I protested something I didn't understand to puke FUD to the masses. Now I learned a couple facts (wow! facts are cool!) and now I'm going to make money and sell a book about me not being (as) stupid anymore. Buy lots of copies guys!
(and re: nuclear waste, they're called breeder reactors guys learn some before thinking about being anti-nuke)
Oh good! An excuse to get NASA to send a mining expedition to the asteroid belt. Bound to be plenty out there.
Your solution advocates a (*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to solving a looming energy problem. Your idea will not work as the current situation stands. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state or country to country before a bad federal or international law was passed.) ( ) It will be fought by entrenched fishing interests (*) It will be fought by entrenched energy corporations (*) It will succumb to NIMBY Syndrome ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Technology doesn't work that way (*) NIMBY Syndrome will prevent mass deployment Specifically, your plan fails to account for: (*) Extreme misunderstanding of the technology by the public (*) A sensationalist press won't let mistakes die ( ) Idiots with boats ( ) International reluctance to engage in sweeping change (*) Technically illiterate politicians (*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who vote ( ) A lack of support from famous Musicians and Actors (*) Conflicting environmental interests and the following philosophical objections may also apply: (*) Meltdowns Suck! (*) People have been trying for years to implement your solution and haven't succeeded ( ) The money could be better spent curing cancer ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem (*) Your solution is expensive (*) Your solution may be politically infeasible ( ) The money could be better spent implementing [other] solution ( ) It makes life harder, not easier Furthermore, this is what I think about you: (*) We're really close, but still no cigar. I agree with you're idea in general, so maybe one day in the distant future... ( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I got a catholic block.
It is unfortunate that the damage is done. People are convinced that nuclear is a dangerous, dirty, and impossible to maintain power source. Building one is next to impossible due to the misinformation. It will take another 30 years to convince people that they are ok.
I don't see any real down side as long as nuclear is being used as an interim solution until we solve the problem of finding a renewable, ecological friendly energy source. Waste storage is a necessary evil with nuke power but it sure as hell beats oil or coal. CO2 as a byproduct of our energy production has the potential to kill our planet and in my opinion is already doing so. At least nuke plants don't generate CO2.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Either way, we're screwed as long as we depend on something that will eventually run out. Switching energy sources only postpones the inevitable.
There's no such thing as renewable energy. All conceivable forms of energy will eventually run out. Even if we could turn our sun into the earth's generator, it too, will eventually run out. At the end of the line, for humanity, is a lonely death, frozen to death in a cold universe. Just imagine, a few billion years from now, we won't even be able to see very many stars.
SO, there's no planet to save, no universe to save... its all going to end. Whether we like it or not, humanity is ultimately doomed. Of course, all that work you do protecting all of the species on earth will be thrown away when the sun expands to the size of mar's orbit, and incinerates the earth in the process. And that assumes that nothing happens with the sun, like a minor nova or something. Or, there's no local gamma ray burst, or no local supernovae, or even something terrestrially unpreventable like a yellow stone eruption or a re-emergence of the siberian traps, or, a comet smacking into the earth.
This is my sig.
U-235 can be created, even from just natural uranium in a heavy water reactor. And thorium can be bred into U-233, and the planet has thorium for thousands of years even at present growth rates.
hell, we just need more dilithium crystals
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Well, there is always Uranium 238 that you can convert to fissible fuel...unless you have a crazy society where you have to fear about the possible abuse of Plutonium to threaten your neigbours. And there is Thorium, that you can convert to Uranium 233 that is also fissible. Anyway, I doubt that it will run out as soon as the fossil fuel, and it is also quite hard to create plastic from sunlight and uranium, so we shouldn't burn organic fuel anyway. ;-) Oh, and don't forget CO2, even if we stopped producing it right now, the nature won't recover anytime soon. Stop burning fossile fuel right now and build those damned reactors, I'd say...
Ezekiel 23:20
Nuclear power has always been safe, and the technological developments of the past twenty years have made it even safer still.
The worst nuclear accident in the Western world harmed no one. The Chernobyl accident happened because the Soviet engineers who designed and ran the plant were idiots.
This space intentionally left blank.
"nuke is far more expensive than anything else even though the promises of the 50s and 60s were energy that would be so cheap that it was not worth metering."
So the long term operating costs of those reactors built back then have been higher than comparable non-nuclear power plants? I'm asking because I've been looking for this info and have not been able to find anything definitive regarding it. Would you be able to refer me somewhere?
Your solution advocates a
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to solving a looming energy problem. Your idea will not work as the current situation stands. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state or country to country before a bad federal or international law was passed.)
( ) It will be fought by entrenched fishing interests
(*) It will be fought by entrenched energy corporations
(*) It will succumb to NIMBY Syndrome
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Technology doesn't work that way
(*) NIMBY Syndrome will prevent mass deployment
Specifically, your plan fails to account for:
(*) Extreme misunderstanding of the technology by the public
(*) A sensationalist press won't let mistakes die
( ) Idiots with boats
( ) International reluctance to engage in sweeping change
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who vote
( ) A lack of support from famous Musicians and Actors
(*) Conflicting environmental interests
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Meltdowns Suck!
(*) People have been trying for years to implement your solution and haven't succeeded
( ) The money could be better spent curing cancer
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(*) Your solution is expensive
(*) Your solution may be politically infeasible
( ) The money could be better spent implementing [other] solution
( ) It makes life harder, not easier
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(*) We're really close, but still no cigar. I agree with you're idea in general, so maybe one day in the distant future...
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
I got a catholic block.
http://claybennett.com/pages2/godzilla.html
By Clay Bennett.
Nuclear might be better than fossile fuels from a greenhouse gas perspective, but we'd have to build a new nuclear plant every two days to supply the world this way. And we would still have the issues of nuclear waste to deal with on an even larger scale than the one we can't seem to solve today. Nuclear energy from the sun provides us with over 10,000 times the energy that humans use every day! Harvesting a small amount of this energy using photosynthesis is probably the most sustainable long term solution for the world's energy problems. To hear these issues explained very clearly and logically watch the argument for biofuels . This is a lecture by Dr. Chris Somerville for the American Society of Cell Biology. Dr. Somerville is the head of the new $500 million biofuels institute at UC Berkeley and is a true visionary in the field.
oops, meant Pu-239 created from U-238 in heavy water reactor, neutrons from small amount of U-235 in natural or even depleted uranium can then do their thing!
No, really... what's a prote? Dictionary.com says it's a short form of proteo, which is from proteins. I really don't think that's it.
The closest possible word it could be is "project."
That's a really bad typo.
Actually, the most obvious way to get past petroleum is not dirty, insecure, expensive nukes, but clean, safe, cheap wind turbines. Solar has a lot of promise, geothermal probably the best longterm prospects (though space-based solar is probably the most exciting), and lots of niches for biofuel.
But just keep in mind that US oil wells average about 10.5 barrels of crude per day (down from a peak about 18.5 in the early 1970s) at 3510Mj:bbl, burned at about 40% efficiency for about 171KW per US oil well (from a peak of 300KW). Which is enough to power about 35 US homes.
300KW is the about the smallest wind turbine in use commercially. Already. And the US is a leader in the wind turbine tech and industry, despite doing it without any real leadership, and competing with the vast subsidies to petrofuels and nukes.
But I guess when you're an expert in nukes, even though there's no money or fame left in opposing them, why not just flip sides - especially when there's so much bribe money, and you're so old now that you can hope that the waste won't hit the fan until after you're dead from something else.
--
make install -not war
What a little education will do for ya.
the facts about Chernobyl are wrong, she does not know shit about what the cost from that "little accident" was. both here in sweden and finland. maybe not so much cancer, but we could not eat reindeer for many years, many families livehood depended on that.
and only 60 cases in Russia that sound like old soviet propaganda. if you look at Chernobyl now days you will see very "funny" things happened to nature around. and take a little look at birth-records after the accident and you will start to see it's not only nature but also humans that are affected and it's is not so local you might think.
arrg articles like this makes me mad.
preview button, my computer does't have any preview button
you realize their is more danger from exposure to radiation from coal than their is nuclear, and humans have been burning it for hundreds of years constantly.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Noticed the question in the tagging section... apparently, "prote" is short for "protester"... news to me :).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Among those evaluated, the number of healthy people sank from 1987 to 1996 from 59 % to 18%. Among inhabitants of the contaminated areas from 52% to 21% and among the children of affected parent from 81% to 30%.
Nuclear power can be safe, and Chernobyl was poorly designed, but to claim only 69 people died from that event is wrong
Joking aside, I recently learned in a history class the clever theme that is Homer working there. It makes fun of and illustrates one of the main things that went wrong with the nuclear program - The technology was developed by geniuses but run by idiots. It was rushed out of labs after WWII by governments and industries who promised the public endless energy.
[alk]
propaganda poses all the negatives of a scenario in a vacuum, and assumes deductions that can be made from those negatives looked at by themselves have any real world value
true intelligence, not just on nuclear power, but any contentious issue, is gotten at by looking at the negatives of many competing solutions, and trying to pick that which is the least negative
this is very difficult. you are asking people to pick from between varying shades of gray, whose shade of gray is gotten at via a complicated value assessment of various goals and potential pitfalls. choosing thew right energy source to invest in is hard, even without all of the ignorant and propagandized yelling their very loud and shrill opinions, arrived at by looking at the negatives of only one solution, and expecting their opinion to mean anything
a REALISTIC environmentalist champions nuclear, as from an environmental point of view, it is the least hazardous to the environment. there is however, a very loud and shrill arm of the environmental movement which poses "solutions" which equate to nothing more than an agrarian utopianism, who want us all to become amish somehow
but the real tipping point towards nuclear in the west nowadays is anyone worried about energy security. anyone worried about energy security chooses nuclear as it is the power source least held hostage by autocrats in russia and venezuela, and religious fundamentalists in the middle east. the use of oil in the west does nothing more than hand money to its enemies. chavez's grip on power, and putin's grip on power owe themselves to petrodollars. wahabbi fundamentalism, funded by the saudis and influential in the creation of islamic fascists, is in turn funded by petrodollars
meanwhile, going nuclear starves our enemies. in the current world climate, the west is basically funding those who are out to destroy the west. it is a no-brainer that we have to go as 100% nuclear as possible, and drive nothing but electric cars. extremely difficult task. as if sending our children, husbands/ wives, or parents to iraq every 10 years is supposed to be easier. if japan and france can embrace nuclear for as long as they have, without horrible pitfalls, then the west can begin a new foray into nuclear, with all of the modern technological improvements that have taken place since the 1960s, making things a lot safer than the cold war era technology that a lot of anti-nuclear western opinions concerned with safety are based on
really, it is energy security which is causing the recent turn towards nuclear in today's world. the environmental benefits of nuclear are just pure gravy on top of that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But Grimey speaks English fine.
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I am all for nuclear power, if anyone googles "Pebble Bed Reactor" you'll find out about an extremely simple and safe reactor design that would change everything.
However, this lady is completely clueless on the number of people dead from Chernobyl -- she states the figure as 60... 60! Watch HBO's "Chernobyl Heart" documentary (http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/chernobylheart/) and you'll be shocked at how many of just Russian military were killed in the cleanup.
One word:
Challenger
I just want to know how she stopped being a nuclear power protien.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
The CSIRO (google them) will be able to tell you that Australia has the bulk of the worlds known Uranium deposits, however Canada is the worlds largest producer.
This is because the vast majority of Australia's Uranium is, as yet, untapped. This limit is not due to technology or environmental concerns preventing the rights holders from extracting the material from the ground. It's because they are waiting on the market prices to rise.
There is no shortage of Uranium, it's just that the raw materials are, mostly, in the hands of a very small number of companies who are colluding to exploit high demand while controlling supply.
You know, just like the Oil companies have done for decades, with great success.
At this point in time, Uranium demand hasn't even BEGUN to peak. Once everyone starts rushing towards nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, expect to see production ramp up.
from the article :"12-ton railroad cars"
Where, the planet of the little people? A regular big dumptruck can hold 12 tons, railroad cars hold a lot more.
Solar PV can hold its own, day time and night time, fairly easily, there are right now hundreds of thousands of installations out there right now doing it, and I know several just normal middle class people who use it. It just works, and eventually it is paid off. And hydro isn't maxed out, in the US they have been tearing out smaller hydro dams all over for the last decade or so to save the three horned minnow or whatever, and tidal and wave power installations are just now being test trialed and are looking good.. And they have just begun to scratch the surface with geothermal potential as well.
Nuclear power just means the same old energy monopolists that exist today and are screwing you over will still be sending you the perpetual monthly bill which will rise in price all the time. The rich keep getting richer because the poor allow themselves to be put into economic bondage to them.. It's not "your" nuclear power, it is theirs, and they will still screw you over if you remain dependent, and it doesn't matter how it is generated. Keep harping and lobbying to have your wallet picked, and they'll be happy to oblige. It's like the sheep begging to be sheared then made into lunch. Just like when I hear bleating over "drill the arctic!". Even though it is public land, it will still be one or more of the huge oil companies barrels of oil, and you'll still pay top dollar for it, forever, as long as you stay tied to fossil fuels for your transportation needs.
Nuclear power does nothing to address the twin issues of ultimate ownership, and energy decentralization, all it does is perpetuate some fatcats owning the power, and keeps you and your home tied to their rental service, with zero guarantees on prices, ever. At least with a mortgage after getting reamed for 20 years you might get to actually mostly own it outside of maintenance and property taxes, with your electric bill and piped in natural gas and so on-never, you'll never be rid of them, economic thralldom to the cartels. And you get to pass that on to your children like a valued inheritance or something.
About 8. Thorium is about 24. Non-radioactive badness in coal includes mercury and other heavy metals.
Mike Scanlon
The implication that renewables such as wind, geothermal, solar etc cannot form base-load power is not proven. With enough diversification of sources there can be base-load power from renewables.
What makes you so sure American plants are designed any better, or will be designed better in the future?
Just because we have safety regulations doesn't mean that safety regulations are followed.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Concentration of uranium and thorium in coal in the USA is about 1-4 ppm. How much coal do we use?
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
For those of us who missed that joke.
Hey, now there's an idea! What could possibly go wrong?
I read Usenet for the articles.
Or lets take a look at what happend this year in one swedish reactor(Forsmark), both primary and secondary security system malfunctioned on a test and when they did a surprise alcohol-check they found like 20 persons was intoxicated.
and remember this things are run by companies with the only goal of max profit for shareholders
they also did find a small leak, because they had not replaced a part when it was supposed to be replaced
preview button, my computer does't have any preview button
Everyone keeps claiming that nuclear waste is a huge long-term problem or that we'll run out of U235. This is a political problem and not a technological problem. Technologically, the problems have been solved, but due to a federal mandate from President Carter we are stuck with the current mess.
It is well known how to convert U238 into plutonium as a usable fuel, and the isotope of Pu is not suitable for bombs either. Thorium is also readily available as a fuel as well with a much larger supply than Uranium.
The other problem that always comes up is nuclear waste. When a fuel rod is removed from a reactor, it still contains a lot of usable fuel, which can be extracted and reused. If we use breeder reactors, the long term nuclear waste can be burned up so the only remainder is stuff that has a half life in the hundreds of years instead of thousands or tens of thousands of years, and it would be a fraction of the amount of waste. France already does this. It's expensive, but cost can probably be greatly reduced as the process is improved and the scale grows.
Granted, we do need to have very strong safety standards, but modern designs for nuclear reactors are a lot safer than the old designs. And the cost could also be drastically reduced if we stopped making each reactor a complete custom one-of and had a bunch with the same basic design.
The other form of energy I'd like to see tapped is geothermal, since that's almost free.
I consider myself green and am looking into installing Solar when the price drops a bit more.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Just because one former nuclear power opponent has been hoodwinked doesn't make it a fact that nuclear power is a viable and worthwhile option. Nuclear is more expensive, it's harder to deal with the waste, it creates a lot of risks beyond the usual fears of meltdowns, and it just creates more material for terrorists to use. The article seems to be of the opinion that since wind and solar don't provide steady power 24/7, then nuclear is the only option. It's not the only option. It's a false dichotomy, and it's sad that Wired has sunk that low.
There are plenty of ways of storing energy from wind and solar, including water storage and hydrogen generation. Aside from that, wind and solar aren't our only options. There is tidal power, biomass, algae-produced biodiesel, switchgrass grown ethanol, and so on. What a completely transparent piece of nuclear power propoganda.
And Olympic Dam is officially a copper mine, or is it nickel. It just happens to have a bit of Uranium mixed in.
http://greenwood.cr.usgs.gov/energy/factshts/163-97/FS-163-97.html
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
we use about a billion tons.
Solar irradiation at the Earth's surface is approximately 150,000 TW.
Mankind's projected peak power needs by 2020 or so amount to about 22 TW. Yeah. 22, not 22,000.
So throw stupid statements like "three forms of base-load energy, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear" in the rubbish bin of irrelevancy, and tap what is effectively an infinite supply (and if that's not enough, place solar arrays into LEO).
There are hundreds of times more permanently irradiated deserts in the world than would be needed to supply Mankind's power needs for the forseeable future. What's more, they're spread around the world, so base load is as easy to supply as peak, without storage. All that's lacking is the will to do so --- especially the will to act against the greed of those who are currently making megabucks off fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
So dear Gwyneth, think again. You've just been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a costly mistake.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Am I the only one that read the title: Former Anti-Nuclear Activitist DIES A 180
Living in Arizona - rather close to a N. power plant - I have to put up with slightly higher radiation levels in my drinking water. Not to mention, every horror story about a "minor" leak in any of the other US plants freaks me out. Sure, the government pays you for your troubles - if you can get though the court battle to prove you were affected.
So, maybe there is a smaller chance for the population (as a whole) to have problems from the Plant (or storage facilities for the Waste), but that doesn't make those of us on the front lines feel OK. If you like your Nuclear-supplied-Power so much and believe it to be perfectly safe, I suggest you live with one in your backyard.
She and all them Greenpeace, anti nuclear folks - they should picket all the coal power plants!!
What's the chance of that?
Because the sun might asplode!
Oh we all consider ourselves green here and I have no doubt when the price drops a little more then we'll all install solar. Say when it becomes cheaper than anything else, such as base-load coal generated power.
And I'm pro-American too and will consider buying good old USA goods when the price drops a bit more - say to just a little bit less than the Made In China stuff we all currently by.
. What smells around here?
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
This lady who ever she is just jumping on whatever bandwagon she can to get stupid people to buy her books. First using peoples fear of nuclear power to get them to read her stuff now she is on the global warming bandwagon and correcting her stupid ideals about nuclear to work with the global warming theory. I really think that neither coal, gas or nuclear are the way to go for long term energy needs and we need to use a combination of wind, hydro, geothermal and solar. Obviously It will take a long time to remove the dependency that humans have on fossil fuels but we do need to do something and nuclear is much better than coal, at least in terms of polluting the atmosphere, which is what's important at the moment.
Yea some how we just have to make the Sun shine 24 x 7 365 ever where and solar panels can handle base load am I right? You can dump money and time in to Solar and Wind and you still can't achieve base load requirements. Ask Germany how it's working out for them. Well you can because it isn't.
As closely as I can figure it, there are about 11_515_262_616_000 metric tons of Uranium-235 in the earth's crust.
.099% of that. Uranium occurs at a rate of about
2.7 milligrams per kilogram in the crust, and about 0.7204% of that is Uranium-235.
The numbers work out as follows: The mass of the earth is about 5.98e24 kilograms. The crust is about
Some of that would undoubtedly take more energy to mine, purify and enrich to usable levels than it would produce as output -- but even if only one percent is usable, it still works out to quite a large energy supply. Enrichment isn't necessarily needed -- but if you don't enrich the Uranium, you typically also have to moderate your reactor with deuterium, and it takes a fair amount of energy to purify deuterium from normal water as well. In any case, once you've purified the Uranium, enrichment is roughly a fixed cost regardless of the original source.
There's also Uranium in sea water, though the rate is quite low (3.2 micrograms per liter). That might be a practical supply as well, but I don't know enough about how difficult it is to purify from sea water to be certain. My immediate guess is that if the only alternatives were things like solar or wind power, somebody could figure out a practical way to do it.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
1. fit engines to asteroid. 2. point towards earth. 3. wait a few months.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
since hydropower is really just gravity power generating with a water medium, we can add hydro-electric dams in a series down rivers so long as the bottom of each dam is above the top of the next. gravity doesnt care! it just wants to pull the water down! we could dam the Mississippi river from Billings Montana(the yellowstone) to the Gulf of Mexico and power the nation.
this would reek havoc on the local environments of coarse but diversion dams and capillary river dams could certainly provide power with less environmental impact, especially when compared to coal! they would also provide localized power and eliminate some of the distance loss from transporting power many miles.
FYI, lignite(newer coal, used to power germany) requiers 2 KG of coal to power a lightbulb for a day. that basically means that each house in america needs over 20 KG daily!
And yet you sit here reading Slashdot. (:
Sorry, couldn't resist. But seriously, preaching to people that they need to lower their standards of living just ain't gonna work. (This probably has a lot to do with the impression that many of the people doing the preaching don't practice the same.) We're already making progress in reducing the energy footprint of any particular activity--hybrid cars, low-power CPUs, and so forth--which is a perfectly valid way of reducing society's energy usage as a whole, and much more acceptable to people in general than forcibly reducing their standards of living. And if nothing else, there's a huge fireball just a hundred million miles away that's putting out 5.38 hojillion watts of energy; I doubt we'll run into that limit anytime soon.
Try not to be a total idiot. Electricity travels just fine. Distance losses are trivially overcome by the sheer amount of irradiation available.
And the OP didn't even mention the possibility of storage by uphill hydro pumping during the day, which totally demolishes your point all by itself.
The facts are far more die of serious lung diseases from coal plants each year, than have died from nuclear accidents EVER to warrant your fear. Heck there isnt even enough of a cancer danger to warrant it, as more die from the carcinogens in coal, oil and gas burning than nuclear radiation (just about all of the dangerous stuff being able to be blocked by a piece of paper...) Your scared because you want to be, not because you have a rational reason to be.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Now if the rest of the alternative power crowd would get a clue we might actually make some progress....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As a scientifically-minded person, you are certainly aware that the sun is the most difficult place to get to in the solar system, right?
First, there are years worth of uranium even at lower prices (more mines are being opened up right now). But if W. would restart the IFR project, then uranium would not be needed by the west for another 50-100 years. Sadly, the only man who had the vision on that was Poppa Bush (though Clinton did not want it shut down, he did it as part of a deal). All that W. has to do, is restart it, and in 10 years, we would be building new plants that would use nothing but American waste for the next 100 years.
I really wish that folks like you would simply stop. You solve nothing and force US (and probably EU) back to coal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Two technologies -- tying together several dispersed wind farms, and high-altitude wind -- have the potential to enable wind to address the variability of output that otherwise makes it unsuitable as a base-load source of power.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
Just because we have safety regulations doesn't mean that safety regulations are followed. Because the Chernobyl reactor was an incredibly stupid design run by idiots. Most modern designs shut down when idiots go out of their way to mess with things. The worst western accident was a coolant leak. Event he Russians moved away from the same design as Chernobyl. Chernobyl was build liek a giant steam bomb with radioactive bits.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
4. Hope you have good aim.
Link broken. Extra / at the end of the URL.
All these damn hippies who protested during the 60's and 70's firmly have their noses in the book deal trough. Now all they care about their SUV's and their medicare funding - completely ignorant of the fact they've screwed over the country and their kids for the next 10 generations. Why is yet another one at all surprising.
Just so long as we keep Republicans and private enterprise the hell away from it. The last thing we need is fucking Enron-style bullshit with the nukers. Run public utilities as non-profit monopolies operated in the public's best interest. Treat any free market deregulation dittohead as a saboteur to be shot on sight.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Another suitable candidate for baseload energy generation is geothermal.
However, nuclear really is the only practical future solution to widespread baseload generation. Hydro and geothermal are too location-constrained, clean coal is decades aways from "production" use and "carbon sequestration" is really just like "cleaning up" by sweeping all the rubbish under the bed.
People are idiots and should be beaten about the head with blunt objects capable of causing (or in their case, reversing) brain damage.
Maybe it's because I've lived most of my life within sight of a nuke plant, but I rate the anti-nuke crowd up there with the 'OMG video games cause violence!' and 'OMG Jeebus invented the universe!' crowds. Power companies and politicians need to grow a pair and start building, regardless of the whining moronic masses.
Heavens, yes, it'd be so terrible to have stupidly cheap energy that isn't pumping an arseload of carcinogens into the air 24/7. Think of the planet! Err, wait, what?
So, a guy like me goes to school for six years, learns some things, and can't for the life of me get my friends take a fair look at nuclear power. They used to go on and on about Browns Ferry and Yucca Mountain and all that. They just took their youthful rebelliousness and ran with it.
So, one such person, this woman, years later, finally decides to learn what "base load" power is? And she's been mouthing off all these years to anyone who will listen without knowing?
Young people. Sheesh.Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
5. But not to good.
Might want to do a little fact checking. Where is this Carter's fault? He was pro nuke and wanted to get entirely off foreign oil. Regan reversed that course and the pair of Bushs finished the job. Clinton didn't do much either way. I'm anti nuke but I don't want to waste the energy since it's a pro nuke crowd. There's enough bad info floating around so you might not want to attack one of your fellow pro nuke people. I'd just love a form of power that my great grand kids won't be paying for so we can keep on wasting it. We've got to get out of this short term mentality. Civilization can't survive the way we are going so it's all a waste unless we start thinking in terms of millenia and not what keeps the TV on and the SUV running for the next few years.
Of course, companies would never lie to inflate their stock prices...
Humanities demands for power vary over the course of a daytime. From 2200 until 0500, the load is at its lowest. During the morning, it jumps, and then varies through out the day. In addition, during the summer months, when AC is used heavily, the power goes up higher. Power plants MUST provide for ALL times. But plants are EXPENSIVE. So, what they really want to do is build a LARGE cheap to run plant that can provide the power for the most or all of the AVERAGE day. In fact, most will make it handle about 95% of the average day. Where do they get the rest? From peak power plants. Probably the most useful IS natural gas. For a base-load, coal and nukes have been the choice. Fortunately, with CO2 entering into the equation, nukes are going to make a BIG comeback for base-load generators. nukes really make the most sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The worst nuclear accident in the Western world harmed no one. The Chernobyl accident happened because the Soviet engineers who designed and ran the plant were idiots.
But that doesn't prevent idiots from running nuclear plants in the Western world.
I think the guy who said it was named...
POL POT!
Yes, and the CSIRO has been telling our government that the whole country could easily be run from renewables for at least the past decade.
The CSIRO also identified the base load issue as a red-herring - hint: in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere. Wind & Hydro provide the base load for other renewables (solar, tidal, wave, geothermal), just as Hydro currently provides a fast switch "base load" for coal fired plants (that require scheduled shutdowns for maintenance and even then they still break down from time to time).
However our politicians after doing their best to ingnore the issue (lest it affect our coal exports) have been busy colluding with the likes of GWB and GE for the last few years in an attempt to monopolise the nuclear fuel industry.
It seems to be working quite well if you consider the price hike in Uranium over the last 5yrs or so. IMHO the main reason for this state of affairs is not money but the fact that renewable energy can not (easily) be used as an international political lever in the way that fossil fuels have been since WW2.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The naturally-occurring world supply of Uranium was pretty much fixed billions of years ago. But so what, the same is true for almost every other element that doesn't get resupplied by meteors or other cosmic resupply events.
/. readers.
The world's supply of oil was for practical purposes fixed long before man came on the scene. Sure, there's probably a small amount added every year but that's negligible.
The interesting question is will the recoverable supply outlive the fuel's necessity? If we have a 100,000-year recoverable supply of oil or coal or uranium or whatever then it might as well be unlimited. If it's only a 100-year-supply then we better increase the recoverable supply or find alternatives or both. With fossil fuels we are doing both.
By the way there are other alternatives for the base-load problem. Developments in capacitors and batteries can shift loads across time. Transcontinental transmission lines and power-transmitting satellites allow solar power to feed areas where it is currently early evening, late morning, or with satellites even nighttime. In certain areas wind can handle base loads, as can ocean-wave-harnessing-generators. None of these technologies are ready for prime time but I think they will be within the lifetime of most
Another time-shifting technique is to use solar power to create fuel for fuel cells then use it on demand. A simplistic version is to use solar energy to split water during the day then use the hydrogen at night to create electricity. Sure it's inefficient but it shows solar-based electricity doesn't have to be used when the sun is shining. Using solar energy to charge a capacitor or battery may be more practical.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
One of the quotes from TFA was about how many 12 ton RR cars would be needed to haul away the ash from a coal plant for a lifetime's worth of electricity generation. Current US practice includes gondola cars with about 120 tons (short tons) capacity - a typical coal train is carrying between 12,000 and 14,000 tons of coal per trip.
I consider myself green and am looking into installing Solar when the price drops a bit more.
Problem is that solar has been just around the bend for 20 years now. At this point, it's just crying wolf. Plus I live in Western Washington.
Comment of the year
I was under the impression that the total amount of U235 peaked millions or billions of years ago.
Time was, the concentration of U235 relative to total Uranium was about 3%, high enough to sustain natural nuclear reactors. It is now less than 1% here on planet Earth.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hot fusion is useful for baseline energy demands and can be built large enough to support it with reasonable growth. Another advantage is the lack of large scale radioactive waste products. Cold fusion on the other hand has the advantage of being portable and fairly reliable. It can easily be used as a replacement for fuel cells, in/external combustion engines and with a simple conversion readily replace current automotive engines with electric drive systems.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
That's very informative, Thanks.
Mod parent up!
While I'm not anti-nuke when it comes to power generation (done properly, and carefully), she seems to dismiss Hydro out of hand. As I posted recently, wave and tidale power seem to be vastly underutilized in North America and the world. Is there anything to back up the "maxxed out" premise of hydro?
:)
I'd sooner deal with grumpy fishermen and planning for the oceanic ecological impact, than dealing with the risks and waste associated with nuclear power. The lower-tech of utilizing the wind power of the waves, or the gravitational power of the moon through tidal, just seem like better, underutilized ideas to me. But maybe I'm naive
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I don't think the people bemoaning nuclear power are keen on doing this kind of math, and anyway, they also think that nuclear power plants blow up like nuclear bombs when they melt down or malfunction, which is of course also not true. Now... if I could only get myself to stop typing in run-on sentences...
Speak for yourself.
As several posts (including one of mine) have pointed out, fission can be used for quite a while (even if you don't take breeder reactors into account). Converting a fission plant to a fusion plant would be interesting. Basically, the reactor itself would almost certainly be scrapped entirely. The turbines and generators, OTOH, wouldn't generally care whether the steam was produced by fusion or fission, so they could probably remain more or less intact.
Interestingly, when/if you actually look carefully at the history of accidents (and near-accidents) in nuclear power plants, most of the problems are surprisingly mundane. In fact, it looks like a lot of the problems are basically mechanical -- things like building a steam valve that simply opens and closes dependably for years at a time, even though the steam involved is at high pressure and temperature (e.g. ~300 degrees C and 2000+ PSI). Quite a bit of research has been done into temperatures and pressures of primary coolants (near the bottom of the page).
Even if a repair is strictly in the steam part of the plant (where nuclear radiation isn't a problem) it can take months to cool hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, etc., down from its normal operating temperature to the point that a person can enter and work on something. This makes the cost of repairs so high that the system must be engineered to run for years (preferably decades) at a time without them.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
(laughs) "Prote" can sometimes mean "Protagonist".
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It's not a problem for modern fast reactors (which the parent erroneously calls "breeder reactors"), since they can consume more than 90% of the fuel in a single cycle.
Fast reactors are the reason Greenpeace is full of shit. (Well, they're a reason, anyway.)
I first read the headline as, "... Activist Dies at 180"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I agree, and I blame Bert.
Carter issued a Presidential directive suspending nuclear reprocessing the US in 1977, out of fear of nuclear weapons proliferation.
The problem with renewable resources is the people in power, by not being able to control nature, have no means to control production.
Our society will embrace socialism before it embraces renewable energy as a replacement for fossil/nuclear power.
This isn't renewable energy's problem - just our society.
why not? it could spare us another messy invasion. (just kidding guys)
Oh and...
6. Profit!
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Does it get anymore patriotic than that?
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
if your view is which is better for the earth as a whole, it should be remembered that we are looking at decades of nuclear development vs decades of smog belching fossil powered generation, so a change in view is not really the acceptance of the atom, more a rejection of pollution.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
We need to start doing all of it and get used to that idea.
What I don't understand about nuclear is that with the fears about it, it seems like they can be managed. Take eastern Wyoming, it's a beautiful country but it's also an empty prairie without a lot in the way of residents. We can fairly well transport electricity through wire at a nominal costs so why don't we build these plants out in the middle of nowhere. There are huge tracts of land in Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, eastern Colorado, Arizona, Kansas, and other places that are good distances from population centers. Design these plants like oil rigs, you work 2 weeks on and stay there and then a week off when you can go home and try to keep large cities at a distance. If this could be made to work well, what about like northern Canada? It just seems impractical that we'll ever really lower our energy consumption enough to make a difference but if we generated say 1/2 the power for north America in Yukon, far away from cities, it would make it harder to terrorists to attack, and it seems like it could be a huge economic advantage to some of these less populated places.
"the wind is always blowing somewhere" Indeed, usually from the White House, the Pentagon and CIA.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Do you have some links for CSIRO predictions on renawable energy and what can be done with current technology for Australia? I couldn't find any after a quick search.
Sure, we could've made laws making it difficult to sue and having lower safety thresholds and accepted nuclear plants with a rate of 1 3-mile-island per 10 plants per decade but as a society, through our lawmakers in Congress who made the rules governing such lawsuits, chose a different path.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
not tomention carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide/troxide, soot and miscellaneous cacinogins like PAHs and Benzene. nasty isn't it? millions of tons of coal burned just like that every year...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
are you one of them pseudoscientist?
Look, part of the reason why we use so much power is not because it is making life so easy. It is that we are doing a lot so inefficient. For example, right now, we are focused on creating solar and wind based power. But for a fraction of the price, we could instead, lower our energy utilization from 20-40%. How? By moving American homes from using gas|coal|oil furnaces, AC, regular heat pumps to instead using geo-thermal heat pumps. To add one to a new home adds about 3K to the house (a house that already costs from 100-500K). To even retro-fit a home is from 8K-15K. Keep in mind that HVAC costs a homeowner 50-75% of their utility bill. This would use a fraction of the power. Roughly, it will save 2/3 to 9/10 of the HVAC bill. Paybacks on this is anywhere from 1 year to 3 years. Solar, even with gov. help, takes 20-40 years payback. So which makes more sense? Conservation combined with new power generation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1) Who cares?
2) Who cares?
3) Who cares?
Just because we COULD use nuclear does not mean that we should. There's no where to put the radioactive waste and without HUGE government subsidies (no private insurer will cover nuclear power plants) it's prohibitively expensive for the private companies running them and with the subsidies it's outrageously expensive for us to pay for it just to make these greedy assholes richer.
Nuclear power is NOT the answer, it never has been and never will be. If we can't do better than this bullshit we might as well all just go out back and shoot ourselves because there is nothing left for failure that is humanity.
The Farewell Tour II
Hydro is typically used for peak generation, because it can react very quickly to changes in demand.
Unlike a coal plant, which can take hours to heat up, or otherwise react to a change in power draw.
The only places that use hydro for baseload power are areas like New Zealand, which gets 80% of its electricity from hydro generation.
What will happen when we reach a Hubbert Peak of uranium?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Wow, I guess all you pro-nuclear people wouldn't mind Iran and other middle eastern countries to have clean base-load energy now would you? Nuclear power plants across the country would make fine targets for local and foreign enemies of the state. I guess the US wouldn't have to deal with any nuclear waste they could store it in Afghanistan, or Iraq could hold on to it(what a pal), or any other poorer nation, maybe with a nice dictator, that would take it off their hands at a reasonable low price.
Ya know, we do have the technology to reprocess the "waste" and convert most of it into fuel that can be used again. The United States chooses not to use such technology due to concerns about proliferation -- but it's around. The French have been doing it for quite some time now.
Nuclear power is NOT the answerWhy? Mankind learned how to harness chemical reactions (fire). Then we learned how to split the atom and harness nuclear reactions. Sounds like a natural progression to me.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It'll still buy us hundreds or thousands of years to get fusion working.
It's going to happen, and other technologies do not have the density. Deal with it. I'm not going to turn my thermostat down, I'm not going to stop using my computer, and I'm going to keep the lights on if I damned well please. As soon as you start telling people en masse that they have to do any of the above or that you're going to cut power, thorium reactors, pebble bed units, and all other types of reactors are going to start popping up.
And as far as shooting yourself, go right ahead. I'm tired of whiney little emo boys.
First of all, there are many different kinds of nuclear waste. Some are fairly safe, others aren't. Your analogy to Hiroshima is bullshit; exposure to a nuclear bomb and nuclear fallout is not the same as exposure to nuclear waste.
Second, there is no safe permanent nuclear waste disposal at the moment; all nuclear waste is stored above ground in temporary storage because there is no agreement on where to put it for the long term. That's not just political wrangling; it's simply that nobody knows what storage locations are stable over the long time.
Third, currently deployed nuclear reactors are irresponsibly wasteful of nuclear energy; they extract only a small fraction of the energy and generate high-level dangerous waste.
I think what you're saying is that nuclear energy could be safe. But it is not safe using current or planned reactor technologies and current nuclear waste disposal techniques. So, let's go ahead with nuclear technology after adopting efficient nuclear power plants and after getting consensus on waste disposal.
Obligatory Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
Build it today.
Then fully support ITER: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
and tomorrow build fusion power plants.
I recommend NoScript brand condoms, the best condom for your cyber-sex needs.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
First, no matter what kyoto says, economics will rule the situation (in fact, if kyoto ppl were smart, they would start charging a carbon tax on ALL products based on where from; If from USA, China, Russia, then high tax; if from France, very low tax).
Second, this was first that I had seen of the battery, and yeah it looks interesting (with 63 million tonnes, I am not too certain that it is enough). What I would guess is that the first use of these batteries will NOT be for alternative power. It is far more likely to be used with nuclear generators. Why? Because almost all (if not all) nukes are used for BASE-LOAD generators. That means that they are short during the height of it, but will typically be a bit under during the night. When the system is low, it could instead be ran up, and used to charge these batteries. Combine that slowly with alternative and now you have a system whereby, the base load generators can work at night WHEN they are needed. All in all, nukes, combined with some in expensive form of storage, is alternative energies best friends.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
why can't we just lease or buy the info to build reactor tech from a friendly government, say, a pebble bed reactor tech from germany?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The CSIRO also identified the base load issue as a red-herring - hint: in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere.
??!!?!11! WTF? How many turbines would we have to construct to take advantage of all the 'somewheres' around? How much environmental damage are we willing to do in the name of wind power providing base load? I hope that is a very poor interpretation of their argument, whatever it is. Australia, the US and Canada are all very large countries. I don't think that argument truly respects the difficulties in transporting "base loads" from the northern midwest where the wind is blowing down to Southern California where it isn't.
Wind & Hydro provide the base load for other renewables (solar, tidal, wave, geothermal)
Wait, aren't the waves and tides always moving somewhere? What about geothermal?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Well, I went the other way: I used to be pro-nuclear, and after learning more about it, I think it's a really bad idea.
I guess it should make you happy that I admit that I was wrong after learning more about the subject.
I remember thinking about how unscientific people's objections to nuclear power were even when I was a kid, but somehow all of the sentiment got caught up in the anti-nuclear movements of the time.
But people who suddenly reverse their opinion based on something as simple as an energy crisis don't deserve a lot of respect for their position... Which basically all along was to get what they wanted which pretty much boils down to the lesser of their fears.
Nuclear power always was a good alternative, except for one problem.
Karen Silkwood would have been a good person to point that problem out.
Otherwise, trading coal for heavy metals is just out of the fire, into the frying pan.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I'd be happy for them to build nuke plants if 1) the designers were forced to live within 10km of the plant they design 2) the contractors were forced to live within 10km of the plant they worked on 3) the politicians were forced to live within 10km of the plant they approved 4) ... and we stored the barrels of waste under their back yards
It's been clear from the 1980s that breeders and reprocessing are not a simple solution (France tried this and shut the plant down, that's why it's clear the post above is 20 years out of date). Thorium is very promising but there is no prototype yet of any size. The problem of high quality ore is real and is why there was a great deal of excitment this year about a new ore body in Australia that almost doubled the known reserves. It isn't easy to make the fuel as news reports from Iran should make clear.
Base-load plants are ones that are difficult or impossible to quickly adjust output. Nuclear plants cannot be turned on within minutes of being down-regulated. They have to wait for xenon-135 to decay before they can be safely restarted (see xenon-precluded-startup). Coal plants need to warm up large boilers and their pollution control systems work best at one nominal load.
Hydro is something that can be turned up mid-day and turned down at night. Hydro is just the sort of large-scale energy storage system that is needed to complement non-dispatchable renewables like wind and solar. You can run hydro turbines on cloudy days or exceptionally calm days. So I don't think we should be calling hydro base-load power. It is a relatively precious variable output stored energy source.
Of course some hydro doesn't come with large volume storage behind the dam. I guess that should be considered base-load, but I think most hydro does have a large degree of flexibility about the schedule of water release.
Chris
Is this true? Because I would be of the opinion you'd just need a lot more launch power, launch from east to west, then point directly back along earth's orbit until you're basically standing still relative to the sun. Then you play the waiting game, and place your bets on whether the shot hits Venus or Mercury on the way in :)
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Yey! We should cover all oceans with solar panels! The connect it all and use that energy! That would fix all the energy problems. It is not like oceans are really needed for anything. Or, let's put solar on all rooftops. We'll just invent a magic device A for easy installation and integration. And then the mystic superconducting global power grid will make sure we can use solar as a base-load!
Now, since this is reality, solar/wind will NEVER be base-loads (just complimentary peak power) because of the lack of global political stability and lack of scientific knowledge to build global, interconnected, superconducting power grid so Sahara could power US and US could power India (ie. sunny area powers dark areas, then you can star thinking of base-loads for solar). Opps, even if technical problems are solved, political will not be.
So, nuclear is the *only* solution. Biofuels are bad-bad-bad. They use MORE of the energy that the ecosystem needs to function and transforms it to our use! Any so called environmentalist that supports them needs a kick in the ass. Jungles, savannas, forests, all need solar energy for the life cycle of our planet. We CANNOT use more and more of the energy from the sun by occupying new areas and draining all the energy. You know, Earth with just humans and cockroaches and rats and "perfect" grass would be a rather bleak and lonely planet
But I guess we can cut down the stuff in areas we can't use for agriculture. It is not like it has any value. Animals/plants that live there are worth what? $4/gallon?
So far I would like to congratulate the environmental lobby for contributing to the destruction of the Amazon and major part in killing off Indonesia's jungle in the name of "environmentally friend" fuel.
http://www.bt.com.bn/en/focus/2007/11/20/biofuels_vs_indonesian_natives_forests
Am I the only one here who hasn't forgotten about nuclear fusion? Tokamak. Polywells.
Nuclear, it's not just fission any more.
Nuclear may well be the best available alternative. We'll never know, because it's so heavily subsidized market forces don't apply. Alternatives like wind, tide and solar (or a decentralized mix of them) are still in their infancy because oil and nuclear suck all the air (air = government money) out of the room.
And I have a problem with the definition of "energy needs". Direct and indirect subsidies make energy so cheap we're careless and stupid with it. We could make major reductions in energy use with no effect on our lifestyles. One easy example: a national no-idling law. If you're going to leave your car/truck running for more than a minute, you'd better have a damned good reason. Otherwise, you pay a fine. Sort of like a "selfish asshole tax". HUGE energy savings. Another: use compact fluorescent lights temporarily while we develop full-spectrum LED's. Again, huge savings, low cost. (I know fluorescents aren't 100% enviro-cool, but the total cost is less than regular light bulbs.)
My former boss has a place at the rural/urban boundary area. He's gone off the grid completely, and is doing fine. He hadn't planned on it...just figured he was nearly there anyway and wanted to see how easy it would be to go whole-hog.
We also have to face one sad fact: Nuclear reactors and their waste are attractive targets for terrorists. One incident could have major, long-term, EXPENSIVE consequences. Even tailings from uranium mining operations have had some nasty environmental effects. You don't want to think about the contamination from a pulverized shipment of spent fuel rods if it got blown up.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
"Base load" is a bad phrase to use for this issue (to the extent it's an issue). Today, the base load is the electrical demand that's always there, 24/7. It's met by sources like coal and oil and nuclear that can't be started or stopped slowly (or are just too expensive to allow to sit idle); we've got stuff like natural gas plants that we switch on quickly to meet the occasional peak in demand. In a renewable energy future, the problem is that occasionally, it's nighttime and the wind slackens off and suddenly you need to get a crapload of power from somewhere. You don't solve this problem with a slow base load station: this is an intermittent spike problem, you solve it with a fast-starting, cheap-to-idle supply like a gas plant. Which brings me to two points:
1) Who cares if there are a few jobs that renewables can't fill? Use fossil fuels to make up for their shortcomings. Insisting on a 100% renewable future is overly idealistic: I say, if we can fill 95% of our energy needs with renewables, go ahead, use natural gas or whatever when you need to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
2) There are plenty of renewable forms of "gap-filling" energy. People have mentioned biomass burning. Here's another one: TFA quotes the "prote" as saying that "hydroelectric is maxed out." Well, it's not. It's maxed out as far as its *average* power output, because of limits on available water supply to the reservoirs. But we can get a lot more out of it if we use it to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. Shut off the hydro plants during the day when the solar plants are running, run them twice as hard at night, and you're good to go. Need more nighttime power? Use solar electricity to run a pump to pump water *up* the dam into the reservoir in the daytime, then run the plants even harder at night. The gap-filling potential is almost unlimited.
3) The main reason modern-day "base load" is so high is because major industrial power users (aluminum smelters, etc) shut off operations during times of peak demand, when they get charged extra for electricity: they make up for it by sucking up cheap power in off-peak hours. Change the pricing structure, so they get charged extra whenever supply dwindles. I can guarantee you that if you tell an aluminum plant "Tomorrow night's gonna be calm: if you want wind power then, you're gonna have to pay triple per kWh", they'll stop the smelters tomorrow night.
4) There is one overall problem: I'm describing an electrical system with much more variability. Everything, from the hydro turbines and generators to the high-tension lines to the substations, has to be built to handle higher peak power draws. That costs money, but it's not a fundamental problem.
Not without doing the research myself. ;)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Copper, gold and uranium. The nuclear advocates forget that while uranium is not scarce the isotope used for fuel is so large amounts of high purity ore and a Manhatten project worth of gas centrifuges is needed. Turning a heavy metal into a gas requires quite a lot of energy so not just any lump of rock with uranium in it is worth turning into fuel. While there is a lot at Olympic Dam and a few other spots the dream of going 100% nuclear overnight is only possible in the cocaine dreams of PR folks - hence efforts with other fuels like thorium. There are other known very deep deposits of uranium at the bottom of the crust radioactive enough to generate a lot of their own heat - some nuclear advocates may be factoring that in despite it being a massive undertaking to drill a hole over fifteen kilometres deep let alone mine it.
You sound like the people who say the only reason marijuana is illegal is because anyone can grow it. Do you have some weird vision of everyone building themselves a hydro plant or manufacturing their own solar cells? Let's not be too retarded here, please.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Although I have read the peice of absolute garbage that this came from that you can read on the ornl website I know enough physics and chemistry from high school let alone furthur study to see it as the peice of rubbish it is. Often cited by the press but not in scientific literature and nothing like it since the 1970s - for good reason. Don't mistake something cobbled together to nobble the opposition in advertising for reality. Coal has enough real problems that kill people without making garbage up.
Jesus loves you.
This is a great example of a knee-jerk anti-nuclear response, completely devoid of any facts, data or evidence to support the position. We don't have anywhere to store the carbon we're releasing now! At least there will be thousands of times less waste with reactors.
We're now at the point where, no matter what solution we come up with, we HAVE to worry about the waste. Up until now we've been worried about nuclear waste, but happily ignored the carbon. No longer feasible! Nuclear is far from perfect, but it is sooo much cleaner and safer than coal it isn't even funny.
Jeremy
1:
wind is not a 24hr source.
2:
also wind (and silicon solar ) are mostly *not* net providers of energy
(you can not be a geek (same for whoever moderated you informative)!)
you use more energy by making these things than you ever get back from them.
sheesh.
So in other words you are like everyone else, green as long as it isn't an inconvenience.
I'm not trying to flame you in particular but I hear a lot of people saying how green they are but aren't doing more than the average person. I buy the low energy bulbs, recycle, try to only drive when I need to and what not but I don't consider that being green; I consider it being economical. Al Gore is trying to save the planet but not at an inconvenience to him, he uses far more energy than the average person does.
"How much environmental damage are we willing to do in the name of wind power providing base load?"
Wind power is the least environmentally damaging of all and takes up the least amount of space, but depending on your idea of beauty they could fuck up your view somewhat.
"Wait, aren't the waves and tides always moving somewhere? What about geothermal?"
AFAIK wave, tidal and geothermal are nowhere near as efficient as wind but I could be wrong. And if I am wrong then there is even more reason to belive the "only FF, Hydro, or nuclear can provide base load" meme is a red herring.
"How many [extra] turbines would we have to construct to take advantage of all the 'somewheres' around?"
IIRC about 10% more than what is used to generate the required amount of power, since the complete absence of wind across even half a continent is an extremely rare occurance (ie: has never been recorded) there is no need to transport it that far.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well, there's probably some truth to that. It has frequently been said (citation needed, sadly) that the cotton industry was instrumental in pushing for laws to ban marijuana growing and processing because they realized how much easier and cheaper it is to grow plants from the cannabis family than cotton.
It grows just about anywhere (unlike cotton), requires dramatically less water to grow, is much less susceptible to damage from insects (since you're using the stalk rather than the fluffy contents of a seed pod), and I suspect that it produces much more fiber per unit of field area, though I don't know for sure.
So while I'm not saying that the ease of growing it is the only reason it is illegal, yeah, it probably played a part. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have a much better idea. Instead of nucular power (yes, this spelling is correct, as is President Bush's pronunciation), what we need to do is fit all our prisons and jails with stationary bicycles that are attached to generators. Instead of letting those inmates waste the state's money, make them pedal all day long to produce energy.
I agree. The only reason we have cheap off peak (base load) power now is because coal fired / nuclear power stations cannot supply power on demand. They can't change their output so they almost have to give it away at night to be able to supply enough during the day - solar however almost matches demand if a few hours of storage are added for the early evening. ,the problem will disapear because people / smart devices will use energy when it the price is suitable and the price will representative of supply - i.e. a market.
Thats why we can waste it by heating water at night and running lights in empty buildings etc.
When we have significant penetration of renewables and time of use metering, and electric cars that push and pull power from the grid http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/10/0317210
I don't think that point number 4 will be a real problem. In many countries peak is when everyone turns their air conditioning on. Time of use metering and distributed storage (cars) and distributed generation will all mean that transmission peaks are reduced.
When electricity prices are greater - which they will be when a carbon tax is introduced, we will all use energy in much more sensible ways like designing better houses, using solar powered heating and solar powered chilling, which will reduce the peak power demand.
In Summary - No need for nuclear because of base load power.
Renewables are the future
in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Because transmitting power over very long distances, and wasting the majority of it pushing the smaller part to its goal, didn't contribute to the current problem, and we should keep doing it, right?
You make a lot of good points. Yes the current plans involve who is retaining or expanding political power, often more than any considerations of physical power generation. Some types of resources lend themselves to political domination much more than others. Oil and Uranium are two that do.
Further, I agree wind has good potential to be a fast switch source similar to hydro. Yes, and nuclear doesn't lend itself to fast switch at all, at least in its current emphasis. The best prospective nuclear designs, i.e. pebble bed, are going to be much better at replacing coal and oil plants than any other sources.
Still, the 'red herring' opinion ignores a very important, indeed fundamental point - wasting huge portions of generated power to cross continental distances is such a serious part of the reason we have a mess on our collective hands, that it should always matter a great deal to the final opinion. No solution that treats typical 1,000 km + transmission losses as a minor consequence is going to be a good solution.
Who is John Cabal?
when will people learn... to learn?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
You've actually just proved the exact opposite to what you wanted to prove. You see, on the upward swing of production ( 1st half of the bell curve ), prices drop as output production heads towards the peak. On the downward swing ( ie the 2nd half of the bell curve ), prices increase as output continues. So the old argument that goes along the lines "Oh but we just have to wait for prices to increase" is partly correct
Sure. But U235 is BY FAR the most plentiful source of nuclear power. It dwarfs everything else so massively that I'm surprised you mentioned it.
Don't be stupid. We're not talking about a perpetual motion device here. You use it once. It's used. If you want to 'reinvigorate' it to the point that it's usable as fuel again, you have to put in more energy than you'd get out of it.
Ash produced from burning wood doesn't kill everything it comes into contact with, and last for millions of years.
Does your assertion still make sense to you if you consider how the oil price has developed?
is to control our population. Without that, we are just delaying the inevitable catastrophy (be it famine->wars or population+travel+pollution->diseases).
The ironic thing about this statement is that it only applies to non-renewable resources. Renewables don't produce pollution. Wind turbines don't produce pollution. Solar cells don't produce pollution. Biomass doesn't produce pollution ( carbon is cycled around the system, but the net output is zero ).
The Chernobyl accident happened because the Soviet engineers who designed and ran the plant were idiots.
Good thing, then, that idiots have entirely died out. Since there are no more idiots left on the Earth, we can be 100% confident that such accidents will never happen again.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Wind turbines convert wind - when it happens to be blowing - into electricity.
The hard part is converting intermittent electricity into energy available in the form we want it, when we want it.
There is no large-scale energy storage method worth a damn. Well, except, um, dams and pumped-storage hydro, but there's bugger-all scope for extending that.
We don't have a clean energy problem. We have an energy storage problem, and the sooner more environmentalists figure out the difference the more chance they'll have of their preferred solutions getting up.
And wind is not cheap. I should know. Despite the energy storage issues not being relevant when it makes up a tiny fraction of the grid, I still pay a substantial premium to buy power from it over dirty coal.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power
Wind power is the least environmentally damaging of all and takes up the least amount of space, but depending on your idea of beauty they could fuck up your view somewhat.
I'm not so sure about least environmentally damaging, but let's address the space issue: Gigawatt reactors are fairly typical and take up about 100 acres. You would need 17,000 acres of windfarm to match that, and it would only match it when the wind is blowing. So if we assume we need 3 locations to get 1GW of base load, suddenly we need 51,000 acres of wind farm to produce the base load of a 100 acre reactor.
Again I say WTF.
IIRC about 10% more than what is used to generate the required amount of power, since the complete absence of wind across even half a continent is an extremely rare occurance (ie: has never been recorded) there is no need to transport it that far.
"complete absence" is a red herring. Just because there is wind blowing doesn't mean its enough to make use of it.
Here's a wind atlas of the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_wind_power_map.png
The white and light cyan areas do not have enough wind for economical wind generation. The next bluer area is unlikely to have enough wind. Certainly not enough for companies to risk investment.
Going to the 3rd blue area, can you see any areas of more than half the continent where wind energy would have to be transported? I know I do.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
According to the EU's Externe study (a big, multi-year project), there are 300,000 premature deaths annually across the EU from air pollution.
And you're worried about not being able to eat the odd reindeer (which, frankly, you're probably not permitted to eat because of government paranoia rather than any actual risk)?
And if you have a look at the birth records, there is no evidence of increased birth defects, no matter how many pictures of deformed babies you might see in documentaries.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I agreed with you, right up until "for us". We have no right to take power from the oceans. Have we any idea what that'll do to the ocean currents? To breeding cycles? To weather? To plankton upon which many other things (directly or indirectly) feed?
Some questions for you: (1) is the extra energy Al Gore uses coming from renewable/carbon-neutral sources? and (2) when you balance that extra energy he uses against the benefit he's provided by promoting climate change as an issue that ought to be taken seriously, do you find it to be a net positive?
Because I'm sure Mr. Gore could well have reduced his carbon footprint to zero, perhaps by spending the rest of his life as a hermit in a cave; it's just not clear how that would have helped people realize that global warming was a serious problem that needs to be dealt with.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Of course. What is your point exactly?
Observe the price-supply effect of historical uranium consumption:
http://stockgroup.stockgroup.com/baimg/img/fs_uranium/vialoux_1-1.gif
http://www.stockinterview.com/News/03162007/world-prod-cons-U3O8.gif
Uranium mining has everything to do with politics, economics, and military needs, not geological realities a la hubbert. It's present in a wide spectrum of concentrations in most of the earth's crust, all that's needed for reserves to jump by orders of magnitude is a little bit higher price. Uranium power has more to do with the price of cement than the price of uranium - it is hugely price-insensitive (and don't even ask me about the insane energy return). Reserve estimates based on an artificially low price ceiling to rule out more difficult extractions ($130/kg looked pretty high in the 90's when prices were flirting with $20/kg) aren't exactly valid at this point - spot prices passed $300/kg this year.
We get around 40,000 kilowatt hours out of every kilogram of natural uranium. That means that at the ludicrously high $1000/kg, incremental cost due to uranium price is 2.5 cents per kwh. At that price, however, most experts agree that we could refine even trace amounts of uranium from seawater (for millions of years of supply), or simply build breeder reactors which get around 100x the amount of energy out of a given uranium input..
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Turning a heavy metal into a gas requires quite a lot of energy so not just any lump of rock with uranium in it is worth turning into fuel.
Except for the deposits in natural reactors, natural uranium all has the same ratio of isotopes. The process of enrichment is separate from the extraction of uranium from ore.
Also, you can build a reactor with naural uranium.
Play Command HQ online
.... that argument truly respects the difficulties in transporting "base loads"..........
Transporting large amounts of electricity long distances is lossy and therefore expensive. It is also difficult to build huge power lines because of NIMBY from a large number of property owners. There are places where it is cheaper to build certain kinds of power plants, but getting that power to the population centers where it it most needed is expensive to construct. Nuclear power stations can be built much closer to the places where the power is needed.
All theory is gray
Bio is not perfect, there is not a 100% cycle in it, and it produces a lot of not so nice waste that kills people. But, yes the net CO2 contribution is less than coal and oil.
The only solution viable today is nuclear, but waste can be dealt with for most part, and it is more or less a temporary solution till we have fusion up running.
It is also possible to use the excess heat from nuclear reactors to do heat catalysed electrolysis and produce massive amounts of hydrogen, which is the clean way forward with cars.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Factor in the cost of building and operating the nuclear power station too, not just the fuel. Still looks pretty good, actually. How many of these to we need to power the US?
Building them everywhere is a incredibly expensive and stupid idea.
In most places the wind doesnt blow nearly enough to justify them.
You'll only find wind farms in consistently windy places which is sensible.
There are a number of places where it rarely stops.
A while ago, there was a large development that generated a lot of controversy. The mayor had tried to pass it through without any discussion, but after petitions, a referendum was put on the ballot. A group of people started campaigning visibly but mildly against the project, but a few weeks before the election, they publicly reversed their decision, and campaigned *for* the development.
After the election, it was discovered that the group was funded and backed by the developer himself, the entire switcharoo was just a PR stunt.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Can't use U238 for fuel. It's all being shot into Iraqi trucks. Once the oil runs out we'll have to go back to dig the spent rounds up again.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
I've been told that in real world usage conditions, 200 tonnes a year of natural uranium is used in a 1 gigawatt plant. At modern capacity factors, that's around 40000 kilowatt hours per kilogram. At a 2% low concentration ore, mine just a ton of the stuff and you have the equivalent of (at 20% load factor) a 1MW wind turbine running for 5.5 months. I assure you that the steel and carbon fiber used to produce one of those isn't free, either.
So yes, huge amounts of energy are input in order to run things. But absolutely absurd amounts of energy are taken out, as well. The observed phenomena with uranium reserves is that when you decrease the concentration you consider practical to 1/10 of your current metric, you increase the observed reserves by a factor of 300. Any concentrations above 20 ppm for solid deposits are considered viable from an energy return on invested energy standpoint, and the highest deposits available hit around 20% concentration. Liquid refining uranium from seawater traces is considered practically undepletable as well (millions of years).
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
2) is the done by pumped storage hydroelectricity.
I think the problem with nuclear energy is that whether it is actually problematic is largely irrelevant. They told us it was a good idea before. Then we got cancer, worldwide panic, and a disposal problem. No matter how many times you tell us it's _really_ safe now and all the problems have been solved, we're not going there again.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You do know that Chernobyl, as awful as it was, killed fewer people than coal power kills every year, don't you?
You make it sound like terrible accidents happen all the time, whereas accidents that caused people to die has never happened in the west. I wish we could say the same about coal. Or oil...
And there will be no shortage of uranium... the supply needs to last only for 30 to 40 years. Fusion power plants are expected to replace current fission nuclear plants in that time and they require no uranium to run (well, maybe for starting them up) and they run on clean fuel - hydrogen (afaik it also requires lithium catalyst), and 'waste' product is helium.
Reading about (on wikipedia) nuclear incidents such as Chernobyl have been kind of reassuring for me. Whenever there are major issues, they're always the result of the incompetence of management or operators, or not adhering to established safety protocols. It's good to know that the technology itself is mature and well-understood, that it can be controlled if only we can address the human element.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Build these god damn solar towers, basically they MAKE THE WIND , google it.
And a message to you environmentalists, especially greenpeace which is a front for coal (they stop all nuclear options in the 70s/80s) and the result?
Doubling of coal usage.... bloody morons greenpeace are, they are Pro Coal, pollute the earth idiots with zero brains.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yeah, there will be no NIMBY outrage over nuclear power stations close to residential areas at all. Oh, and you need BOTH nuclear power stations and power lines. One doesn't work without the other. So you have double the NIMBYism.
... and then they built the supercollider.
1. fit engines to asteroid. 2. point towards earth. 3. wait a few months.
So your solution is to crash asteroids into Earth and create a nuclear winter?
Seriously, though how do you expect to efficiently move an asteroid large enough to be worth grabbing for its Uranium content to Earth *and* land it safely? That would require big expensive rockets; amd we can barely land toy cars with cameras on them on Mars without causing a disaster at this point.
"5. But not too good."
why not? it could spare us another messy invasion. (just kidding guys)
Oh and...
6. Profit!
I hear Iran needs some Uranium; maybe we could test our aim there!
If used to its max, theres enough uranium to last 5 billion years, as quoted from an expert about it at roughly September in the FSN radio on www.financialsense.com
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
World supply of Uranium 235 has about peaked as well. It's not exactly a long-term solution.
What a good thing it is that nuclear reactors don't rely on Uranium, then.
Transporting power is easily done. With modern power electronics, it's even easier than ever before. For example, over sufficiently long distances (continent-wide), DC is much more efficient than AC (look it up if you don't believe me). It used to be a pain to convert big voltages from one to the other; it's now done with off the shelf components.
And if it's such a big deal in the future, long lines could be made supraconductive. It's gonna be expensive, but when energy itself is expensive, it's not really an issue.
Today the problem with all this is the financing. This guy is a banker in the offshore wind business, and has lot to say about it. Wind *is* competitive, today, with all electricity sources but coal. It should be competitive with coal if externalities (i.e. the cost that's paid for by others, such as pollution) were taken into account. The problem is that the almighty and super smart free market is afraid of the 30+ years it takes to amortize a wind turbine. Yet once a wind turbine is set up, there is almost no maintenance, there is obviously no fuel to feed it.
Still, those days the market can barely see beyond the odd quarter or two. And not only are windmills long term investments, they also are big industry. They take quite some time to build, each; you can't really mass produce them yet. Turbine makers can't ramp up production on a whim. In particular, gov't subsidies and regulations in the US change almost year to year, and this has hampered adoption.
I don't think you understand the current problems. They are A.) pollution B.) global warming gasses C.) renewability.
Wind and solar suffers from none of those things. You could waste 99% of the wind or solar electricity, and that won't be an issue.
Nuclear suffers from both A and C (although C doesn't seem like it would be an actual problem for the next few million years), but even so, nuclear pollution is much more containable than coal pollution, and does not contribute to global warming. So even if (again) you waste 99% of nuclear generated electricity through inefficient transmission, you're still better off than using coal.
Slow down space cowboy ;)
Nobody is recommending actually dropping tons of uranium on the planet. It's poisonous, regardless of the radioactivity. It's unlikely to undergo fission in the atmosphere (it takes more than an explosion to set it off.. regardless of what the movies tell you) but it would still be an ecological disaster.. not to mention a waste of perfectly good resources.
It's a much better idea to build something like that in space, when that becomes economically viable in itself. I'm guessing that will be at least 30 years, but it could be possible within our lifetimes... With a little luck, our current energy reserves will last that long, and we won't kill ourselves waiting.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Unfortunately we're in high-sec solar system and only veldspar is available. I guess NASA could mine that and get some tritanium out of it and sell it in Jita...
I don't know if the OP was speaking tongue-in-cheek, but it brings up an interesting point.
If you are a believer in the free market, how can you support nuclear power? The numbers don't seem to add up, especially if you consider the -entire- life-cycle of a plant (from empty dirt lot to empty dirt lot).
Maybe it's possible, but from experience so far, nuclear power on the open market is an economic disaster.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Using Uranium 238 involves a breeder reactor turning it into Plutonium. Which is best known as nuke material, so it's a good way to get half the globe scared. So it's really only an option for the USA, USSR and other major nuclear power.
If you try even hinting at such a reactor, say, somewhere in the Middle East, I see some high explosives in your future. Lots of them, in fact. If the USA doesn't bomb you into oblivion, then the peace-loving folks in Israel will.
(Google it. It wouldn't be the first time they conducted air strikes against any neighbour even suspected of building a nuclear reactor. E.g., Operation Opera.)
Which by association makes Thorium scary too. Turning it into Uranium 233 involves a breeder reactor too, so people start thinking "Plutonium." So you're back to square one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I prefer to walk over safely buried crap, than to breathe it.
Solar, wind, sea, bird shit and whatever power are awesome and I really mean it, because I'm an environmentalist. And exactly because of that, I see nuclear power as the viable solution for now, as the alternative, "greener" energy sources can't provide the energy we need, and burning crap is much, much worse.
Moreover, a huge part of nuclear fuel can be recycled after some years of storage (so you don't need as much long-term storage as you need a short-term cache), and we could always pay a country with deserts the size of Spain to store it in the middle of nowhere, where no life would possibly be affected.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
A little known fact: producing a solar cell consumes more power than the cell is able to produce during its whole lifetime.
This may change sometime in the future. Not anytime soon though. (The cells MAY cost you than grid energy, because they are manufactured in bulk, power bought in bulk. Doesn't mean they provide actual energetical savings)
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Thats no moon, its a er.. Solar Driven Water Cycle..
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
And even if the LNT is valid, at low doses of radiation there just isn't that much risk. If it wasn't for the somewhat mindless terror associated with the specter of radioactivity, the problem would be much less significant and could be dealt with fairly easily (The amount of high-grade waste produced by most plants is small, in terms of volume, and because of its high activity has a relatively short "dangerous" period). The low grade waste, hell, pay a fraction of the fees these storage people charge and you can bury it wrapped in a bit of steel and concrete in my back yard.
You've covered just about every knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power there is. It creates nuclear waste which will kill everything it comes into contact with, it's too expensive, makes greedy assholes richer and will be the doom of humanity. You left out creating mutants with superpowers though.
Nuclear power isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than much of the other options. There isn't a perfect method of generating power yet and so they will all have drawbacks. Ther isn't any *one* solution yet that will solve all of the problems. I actually spent six years in the Navy on a submarine doing nuclear power. I do have training in nuclear power and real world hands on experience. It can be done safely and the waste isn't nearly the problem that CO2 emissions are.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Damn kid's been doin' 900s since '99
What?
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter... Dr. Hans Zarkov, I presume?
However, if by "tools" and "anything" you actually mean: "Everything and anything that will be irradiated during the operation of powerplant will be made out of Uranium 238 and recycled after it is broken, replaced and Plutonium 239 extracted from it", then you *may* have something there, depending on mechanical properties and suitability of U238 to be used in particular needed mechanical parts. This shrieks with unfounded optimism and blind hope. Now, seriously, have you ever heard of the law of diminishing returns?
Overall, your post is too naive to be moderated "interesting", but I guess moderators are on same level of understanding the problematics as yourself. It is always nice to see non-geeks taking interest in "nerdish" topics. However, a little bit of additional education (even online) is in order for those out of the trade before taking actions such as posting or moderating... Little knowledge is dangerous thing, but you probably already heard that one.
As the parent says, when you reach a peak on U-235, you switch over to breeding U-238 or Thorium, or use an Energy Amplifier (accelerator driven system). And once you reach the peak on those, well, given that estimates for U-238 reach from a thousand years and up, by that time you should have fusion.. or parallel universe extraction, or a ZPM, or who knows?
Why not dig 3-5 miles down and use Geothermal? Seems like if we can dig for
oil, we can dig for FREE geothermal earth heat.
> Now, since this is reality, solar/wind will NEVER be base-loads
Tell that to PG&E who have started moving their baseload supply to solar based on technology developed in Israel and Australia.
I'm a former Earth Firster and am still pretty hardcore about enviornmental issues. The fact of the matter is that once upon a time we assumed that nuclear was worse than coal. We now know that we were wrong.
As someone with a fair sized network running in a one bedroom apartment, I also know that power is too important to me professionaly for me to want to mess with anything off grid.
Ummm, NO.
Some of youse need to talk to the power people....
Green Mountain in Vermont or New Hampshire does the pumping and dumping. It works sort of. They use the cheap electricity at night from the base load stations to pump water up a mountain and release that water during peak times. You're making money off of the difference between prices at night and peak.
As far as I know - you can't run water twice as hard. Either pressure or pipe diameter must increase. There's some physics involved..... and they don't pressurize reservoirs. The path through the turbines is fixed and once at capacity - you can't make more water run through without increasing something.
And the people in Georgia will have a problem using their drinking water to sell electricity....
So at best unless you're on a major river with ample water supplies and stopping commerce - hydro is a weak baseline solution.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071210/sc_nm/britain_wind_power_dc
Look, this person is so daft arrogant as to believe that only 60 people died and a few people got thyroid cancer as a result of the Chernobyl tragedy. Surely no one will take her ludicrous claims seriously, right? Especially not the highly edumacated Slashdot reader, yes?
Her stupidity is bad enough, but what's even worse is that these tabloid-quality articles make it to Slashdot while relevant sci-tech news is to be found on Yahoo instead. Slashdot news ain't werth asswipe these days.
Article posted below (because it will expire soon):
Even if a repair is strictly in the steam part of the plant (where nuclear radiation isn't a problem) it can take months to cool hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, etc., down from its normal operating temperature to the point that a person can enter and work on something. This makes the cost of repairs so high that the system must be engineered to run for years (preferably decades) at a time without them.
It takes Days- as in two or three- to cool down a steam plant, even one attached to a nuclear power plant.
We do mine every 18 months, and in the 30 or so day's it's offline, we can take apart EVERYTHING, work it, and put it back together again. Our minimum refueling outage time is perhaps a couple weeks.
Most nuke plans run on an 18-24 month fuel cycle- 18 months is fairly typical and balances out the required maintanence vs cost of being offline. We do buy and use things meant to run for years at a time, because we want to cut costs.
It costs us well over a million dollars a day (maybe two) in lost revenue and additional staffing costs during a planned refueling outage.
Aside from that timeline problem your post is pretty accurate.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
And you should google "tipping point"
Here, here.
I think Nuclear is going to make for a wonderful source of power once we finally get some serious work happening off-planet, but here on planet earth proper we are just swapping the storage of one material's dangerous wastes for another.
A series of things, unrealistic as they may sound, could certainly help us solve the growing energy crisis. If large economies could scale back energy use coupled with renewable energy creation appropriate for their locale, and if growing economies could start making some serious in-roads in that same direction, I think everyone could still benefit economically speaking (which is what most nations are concerned about...are the people employed? can they afford food? clothing? material goods? can we tax that?)
Certainly someone will come along and tell me "it's just not gonna happen, so we need nuclear." In that case we'll just have put off the human race's danger point for a little bit longer.
If we don't start thinking about the long term now we may never get the chance to think of it at all.
Do You Experiment?
Hemp fiber fabric is coarse and it irritates the skin... There is no good substitute for cotton when it comes to clothing. Hemp is good for ropes, perhaps for working clothes (provided you have cotton underwear). But I am probably wasting words, because it is not about fiber, right?
The idea of people using their own small wind turbines (Micro-generation) has become so popular here in the UK that the government has announced plans to make it easier for people to erect them and to make it easier to sell your surplus back to the grid at a fair price. Basically, yes, they are encouraging people to do it themselves. It's actually quite a good idea, although obviously you still need a grid to supply a base load.
Yeah right. It's statements like these that make her story a lot less believable.
Considering the cost of building safe nuclear reactors, the cost of taking proper care of the waste and all the other things such as mining a shrinking reserve of usable fuel make nuclear only viable if propped up by massive government subsidies. Why not put those subsidies into wind and other altrnatives? The real solution here is using less energy. Something that for some reason is not mentioned as an option at all.
Rgds,
Arjen
Sorry I disagree. 3 years ago there was much fewer customers of uranium that we could sell to. Now we have trade agreements, signed and sealed, in place with China, Russia and India to buy our yellowcake. It makes sense that the 3 major players (blame the environmentalists for the 3 mine policy) not to extract more from the ground than they were selling. Mining more than is needed, wastes resources, and requires storage space which for yellow cake is not a simple or cheap thing to do due to the high security it requires. The safest place to have uranium you haven't sold is to leave it in the ground. Why would these companies control the supply now when the future looks like there will be a flood of new uranium MINERS in Australia? the 3 mine policy is breaking down. Just earlier this year a new company in australia (not australian owned mind you) was granted the right to start mining. And there are literally dozens of young start ups exploring for the stuff. Companies like Pepenini and Marathon look quite promising, if Rio or BHP buy them out you might be onto something but these company are also heavily funded by Chinese shareholders who won't sell easily.
a Manhatten project worth of gas centrifuges is needed
You don't have to process fuel grade Uranium in this manner. Some reactors can use Uranium dioxide, which is created using a chemical process and doesn't involve converting it into Uranium Hexafluoride. You process the dioxide into hex if you want to separate the U235 and U238 I.e. you can enrich the amount of U235 you have in your fuel by recombining it later, or just keep the U235 for use in a bomb.
Besides which, why couldn't we build a few more gas centrifuge plants? The energy required to enrich Uranium via. gas centrifuge is much, much less than the enriched Uranium can produce as a fuel. It's totally an energy positive process.
I am not an expert on nuclear power, and though I am quite worried about environmental contamination by radioactive material I will just add some real data points to the discussion.
1. Having read many nuclear power plant operations inspection documents, I believe I can say that human error is quite common although if run by sane management who don't hire illiterate part-timers, then most such error is not very dangerous. But if you think all safety procedure is perfectly followed always, or that the physical parts (pipes, etc.) in a power plant don't end up mislabeled, confusing and sometimes rusted or leaking, well you're wrong. And sometimes there are total idiots allowed to handle this stuff because work is outsourced to other companies run by utter criminals, as demonstrated by actual recent accidents.
2. NIMBY is not "idiots who won't forget past mistakes" or even "idiots with boats". It is mostly people who are well aware that there will be contamination and maybe utter disaster. At least in Japan, where you have not only the above management and engineering problems, but also earthquakes and potential missile attack from China or North Korea to worry about.
3. I was at a talk recently and heard the president of TEPCO (a major Japanese electric power operator with nuclear reactors). He was seriously complaining about the press and how they never listen to facts. That seems correct. However even without worrying about #2 above #1 above provides plenty of incidents, both minor and major, to keep the home fire burning among those vociferous against nuclear power.
4. The president as mentioned above was talking at the 150th anniversary of Keio University. They are opening a new school for systems design, digital media, and hopefully as this guy was saying it can train new talented people who can understand human factors in engineering - they must have such people in the future for nuclear power plant design and there is not a single person like that who is really competent and working in his company... who would want to work there, he said in fact.
5. As a combination of my own reading of what it really is like to be observing worker teams in nuclear power plants, and also heavily based on this recent talk, I must conclude that nuclear power plants of the current design generation are far too complex, and also are made of materials that are far too weak, and the designs are prone to accidents. And sometimes work is done without a real safety framework solidly in place. It also seems that these plants are built on such a large scale, with so much tension, such difficulties in teaching new procedure, and generally such complex psychological issues that they really cannot be run perfectly safely.
That is, they are fine, if you are willing to accept little mishaps now and then, but they aren't 100% safe and can't be. Reading about it (sorry I know it is not 1st hand experience so perhaps this is hyperbole but..) it feels like the movie Brazil, a bureaucratic maze on a huge scale. Or paralleling the movie 2001 with people dwarfed by this huge machine they live in. I read about bead reactors once some years ago, and they sounded great. But whether they stand up or not there is a real problem, evidenced by human factors analysis I've seen and the talk of the top person in charge of managing this stuff in Japan as a business, and the whole system is full of pressures from the bottom up, including requiring absolute perfection from people over long term and from the top down, by economies that badly need nuclear power.
It would be nice if we had ultra resistant materials, perfect workers, and so on like in science fiction, and maybe nuclear power will be operated really safely by robots one day, but at the moment it seems to be a tough business and the tension about managing things that are radioactive gives every single aspect of the business a whole other axis of danger to be controlled. We may be up to it but I am not convinced that the capitalist system is the way to manage nuclear power. It looks like a bad idea.
In 1997, the USA generated 1800 TWh of electrical energy from coal combustion,
and generated 95 million tons of coal ash-type waste in the process.
Assuming 180 ppm Uranium in that material, thats 17100 tons of Uranium, or
enough uranium to fuel current technology, inefficient, Generation-II, uranium-
235-fueled light-water-moderated nuclear power reactors for 86 GW-years, or
749 TWh, 42% of the energy output that was originally released in burning the
coal.
When the Thorium content is considered, Generation IV or breeder reactors,
the Uranium-238 content, or reprocessing are considered, the this coal ash waste
contains more accessible energy than is generated burning the coal in the first
place, with none of the environmental devastation.
Personally, I'd much rather see that the coal is left in the ground, but the use of
existing coal ash dumps as a source of nuclear fuel is arguably better, from an
environmental perspective, than mining more uranium, particularly if it means
that mining in particularly environmentally sensitive areas can be minimized.
The same can be said of Uranium extraction from seawater.
The white and light cyan areas do not have enough wind for economical wind generation. The next bluer area is unlikely to have enough wind. Certainly not enough for companies to risk investment. Going to the 3rd blue area, can you see any areas of more than half the continent where wind energy would have to be transported? I know I do. Interestingly, most of the areas where wind power isn't that great are also areas with great solar potential. Land used for wind power can be multi-use. In the numerous wind farms I've seen in France, there would be a wind generator out in the middle of a farmer's field. Try farming corn within a few feet of a nu-cu-lar reactor.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
In other contexts it would be clear that you have to start with a rock and the greater amount of the thing you want in the rock (eg. the element uranium) the better but nuclear advocates fed purely on PR instead of physics miss this. The problem at the moment is getting as much of the stuff as you can as easily as possible because the later stages are so difficult - that is why there is talk of a shortage of fuel material when uranium is a common element. The end point is not getting fuel but producing electricity so you want to spend as little energy as you can doing this. There are alternatives which are being worked on - which is a far better approach than the counterproductive nuclear PR agency one of calling everyone that points it out an idiot. It's just like the waste problem - it may well have been solved thirty years ago (early days of the poorly funded synrock project which is now succeeding) if it hadn't been dismissed as an irrelevent non-issue. Unfortunatley the nuclear issue is one of politics, often blatant and stupid lies, conflicting civilian and military issues and vast amounts of money so it's hard to get sense out of anybody. A lot of people will tell you a nuclear power plant is cheap to build and run despite appearances and overseas experience but if you attempt to get any costs for any facility you hit a wall of secrecy before you come close. If nothing else it's an invitation for potential Enron style corruption, at worst there's all those minor accidents that don't get reported to the governing authorities until the information leaks out and the likelyhood that something major might not be reported in time for action to be taken.
If you ask me our gov't meddles in too many things it doesn't know enough about. :(
You forget problem D) getting power to people. If you waste 99% of the electricity you fail to solve D. Nuclear would solve D and would be viable if it weren't for the almost complete moratorium on developing good nuclear power plants. Hence the technology in use today is 50 years old so doesn't work anywhere near as well as it should.
If you can read this you've gone too far.
Flip-flopping as usual. Nothing to see here, move along now...
No, really. No one's actually interested in an "anecdote used to hopefully demonstrate a trend" fluff piece on some blog.
I have a hemp clothes that are lovely and soft , not quite as soft as cotton.
You can treat it and process it to make it very soft if you want to.
The most important thing about hemp is that it grows so much better
than most plants it doesn't need fertilizers and pesticides , or at least
nowhere near as many.
Thats why they call it weed.
Toodle-pip
Amias
[site]
"You could waste 99% of the wind or solar electricity, and that won't be an issue."
Yeah, because wind generators and solar panels cost nothing to build, don't require any fossil fuel inputs in their manufacture, and never break down or require maintenance. So sure, why not waste 99% of their output.
"Renewables don't produce pollution. Wind turbines don't produce pollution. Solar cells don't produce pollution. Biomass doesn't produce pollution ( carbon is cycled around the system, but the net output is zero )."
Yes, solar cells and wind turbines descend fully formed from the womb of Gaia, ready to magically convert wind and solar to electricity until the end of time.
There have been a lot of improvements in efficency and noise reduction over the last decade, and the capital costs of installation has been dropping at a rate of ~15% each time the installed base doubles in size. I don't propose that wind alone is a practical solution but with what is available now it will be a big part of it. If your into tinfoil hat stuff, it's politically interesting to note that GE is a big player in weapons, windmills and nuclear reators.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Actually hemp paper was used for centuries and only really was replaced by wood fiber because somehow, for some reason, both the UK and the US, some hundred years and some spare change ago, used the treaty loophole to stop each other's citizens from growing hemp. One has to wonder why, but then all the OTHER prohibitions on mostly harmless hobbies and habits have been for no real apparent reason as well, except of course, to be used by ONE group of voting lottery winners to tell the OTHER group of lottery losers what to do, how to live, and where and why. Nothing new. Tyranny carries on, whether its lots of small tyrants or a few big tyrants. Men love their slavery and will fight to the death to prevent its end.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
So another village idiot has awakened. This is news because?
If she was stupid enough to reject nuclear before who cares what she thinks now...
"You make it sound like terrible accidents happen all the time"
You might want to re-read my post carefully. Why would you assume that? I am perfectly aware that the few nuclear accidents that did occur were not as bad as one would think. Nowhere did I say "terrible accidents happen all the time".
Other things that went wrong with the nuclear program include inappropriate training of maintenance staff (see Three Mile Island disaster) - look at what Japan has done - simple things such as color coding of items have gone a long way, inadequate indemnification during the early stages of the program (ie. inappropriate insurance oversight placed a price tag on plants that were too low resulting in a "not too much to lose mentality" on those running it), bad start at safety measures (see Anderson Act), regulation after regulation tacked on on top of old outdated regulations driving costs up, keeping public out in the dark about the technology (Chernobyl), etc, etc. All of these relate more or less to my original point - the program was rushed out from the labs creating problems that could have been avoided from the start. Had it not been rushed it is very possible nuclear power wouldn't have the bad image that it has today.
[alk]
Not sure where you got that information. It only takes a couple days, or less, for light water reactor (LWR) to cool to the point where a person can enter and work.
The current generation of LWR is shut down for refueling and maintenance every 18-24 months. During this time, virtually every component requiring maintenance is accessible and this can be performed with about a 30 day window.
Well, we have a few hundred years to figure it out, we're not gonna lack uranium for quite a while.
You're not kidding. At the plant I'll be working at, a 40 year-old is in the youngest quarter of the plant's workforce.
I just love the 'nuclear is the only way' people. I just don't get it. Please, Slashdotters, answer me this...
- How are we 'maxxed out' on hydro?? I guess I'm thinking in terms of Canada too.
- Why did she skip from hydro to fossil fuels and nuclear? What happened to wind, solar hot water heat, energy conservation - increased energy efficiency, etc? I know that in my Canadian home town... they are close to approving the largest wind project in Canada for my county- the first one in the county. Proof that we are far from 'maxxed out' on wind for example.
- If the sudden popularity of compact fluorescent lightbulbs has just recently taken off and can make such a difference, as well as Walmart's push for concentrated laundry detergent, etc, etc, isn't this a sign that we have many, many more areas where efficiency improvements can be made. Lets look at trimming the waste.
- What REALLY is the solution to nuclear waste? Isn't it kind of a joke to assume that any human government or corporation will be around and responsible enough to babysit these waste storage locations for 50 or a hundred thousand years? That's THOUSANDS of generations of humans!!! Puh-lease!
- It seems to me that it's kind of a give-up to say nuclear is the 'only' solution.
I'd like to see industry get rid of 'stand by' mode on electronics, pointless status lights on devices, more efficient lighting, turn lights and what not off when no one is in the room or using it (only some schools are starting to do this), remove excess packaging from products and excess water from liquid products, etc, etc.
I think the nuclear as the only solution people are really saying that nuclear is the only EASY solution.
There are deposits in northern Saskatchewan that are as high as 55% concentration in some places. http://www.skb.se/default2____16915.aspx
Be relentless!
I'm not so sure about least environmentally damaging, but let's address the space issue: Gigawatt reactors are fairly typical and take up about 100 acres. You would need 17,000 acres of windfarm to match that, and it would only match it when the wind is blowing. So if we assume we need 3 locations to get 1GW of base load, suddenly we need 51,000 acres of wind farm to produce the base load of a 100 acre reactor.
Again I say WTF. 51,000 acres sounds like a lot until you realize that for most wind farms the land is dual use: ranching, agricultural, secured buffer zones around landfills, water treatment, reservoirs, etc. So in most cases it is simply a matter of retasking a relatively small subset of a property. If an area is in the wind zone, it's pretty much a no-brainer to install wind turbines on lands that can be dual-purposed. And I'll point out that the power grid in the US ties multiple states together. No, you're not going to get wind-generated power from the Dakotas down to Florida but wind turbines in New Mexico could add to the total grid capacity of Louisiana and Mississipi. But wind is pointless for me; I live in one of those wind-dead zones. Our hydro's fully tapped and there's a nuclear reactor about an hour and a half from here, and a coal plant about 20 minutes. Needless to say, I'd rather have the coal and nuke plants reversed. Geothermal has a lot of energy potential, the trick is finding it. There's been some recent breakthroughs in finding geothermal vents by checking the helium2/helium3 ratios in groundwater that may make it fiscally viable in a wide swath across the country. I prefer closed-loop geothermal since it doesn't have as many issues with minerals, but it doesn't generate as much power for the effort.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
but you can. if you use the generated ... duh ...
wind -or- solar power to convert water to
hydrogen. hydrogen is storeable. if it's
storable it's suitable for base load. duh
and dont give me crap about conversion loss.
E=mc^2, so how efficient IS fission technology really?
I am currently writing an article to try an get in the denver post or the rocky mountain news . Ritter is doing a budget that will release millions for tax cuts (1K with another 2K from feds and Xcel) for solar power. But if a typical system costs 20-40K, and these are optional, then you are looking at a system that costs 17-37K. IOW, this is a rich person's toy. OTH, a new house will typically put in gas furnace AND an AC. The total cost of that is about 3-5K. Add on the rebates of 3K, and you are up to 8K. In a new home, a GOHP will cost about 8-10K, so you have at least 60% of the system already paid for. A retrofit will require digging, so you are looking at 12-20K. In addition, you will none to part of the 5K. So, still better than solar, but not as good as a new one. The nice thing is that by putting in GTHP, we get to lower the amount of solar needed to power the home (by more than half). The point being that by installing GTHP, even the solar install can be cut in half. If a new home spends 10K for the HVAC, but only needs 10-20K worth of solar, then the system has paid for itself.
What is needed now is for govs. to quit skewing the spending. In addition, they need to quit focusing on deals just for the wealthy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
but you forgot to mention that all of those problems posed by nuclear power are solved by magical elves. The GP clearly considers retorts like that to be reasonable and intelligent responses, so you should respect their precedent. It's always risky to treat a moron, who has already shown contempt for the subject, like a sentient human being.
Hey moron, he said "GUARD" the waste. Are you so fucking stupid that you can't tell the difference between "GUARD" and "STORE"?
"You might consider trying to undo the brainwash you've had, and think about what a real act of terrorism actually is."
You might want to consider never breeding, or even better, sucking the business end of a shotgun.
Great job at knowing nothing about a subject and acting cocky about it anyway.
Tritium has a half-life of only about 12 and a half years, and natural production in nature requires cosmic ray interaction with atmospheric nitrogen. Thus, it's rare on Earth because our magnetic field shields us from most cosmic rays, and the tritium that DOES get produced decays so quickly that for all intents and purposes it's negligible.
Thankfully, it can be produced industrially... BY A FISSION REACTOR.
Stuart Brand and Dr. Patrick Moore, both long-time anti-nuclear environmental activists, have, in recent years, declared for nuclear power:
Stuart Brand:
"There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective. Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don't know where it is and you don't know what it's doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody's atmosphere."
Link
Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of GreenPeace:
"We'd like to see 50 percent by the end of the century, maybe even more. But for now, the objective should be doubling the number of nuclear plants in operation."
Link
-kgj
-kgj
Where can I read more about this working fusion technology, please? Because I was of the impression that it doesn't work yet, so your 30-40 year statement is somewhat at odds with that. Much as I'd love it to be true, can you show me some facts on this?
But it's far more likely you're lying, and were never pro-nuclear in the first place.
I work for a power company that does generation, transmission, and distribution. We're just starting to use wind farms here, and one of the bigest problems is meeting the load with something else when the wind stops. Not exactly sustaining for base-load. Durring the summer we rely heavily on hydro, but durring the winter we have to purchase a lot of power from our surrounding partners. That's typically what we fall back on. It's true that an equivalent wind farm takes more space, however it's not the only thing to be considered. Unlike a reactor, wind farms typically don't melt down leaving the whole area contaminated for miles and miles around. Yes, I know great strides have been made in the area of saftey, and a catostrophic melt down is a lot less likely today than it was 25 years ago. But still, when it comes down to building one or the other in my back yard I'd take the wind farm every time if it was actually capable of producing continuous power. Since it's not we need to continue to look for a better answer. Nuclear IMHO, is not it. Even the limited danger of melt down is unacceptable to me because of the intense consequences. Add to that the lack of available storage for radio active material for several hundered years, all the while ensuring it doesn't leak, isn't stolen and used in a dirty bomb, isn't disposed of improperly, etc. The bad idea we started with just looks worse all the time.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Wind power may not pollute, but is very damaging to birds.
Fusion has been 40 years away for ... right around 40 years now.
doc
YOu're correct that we have the ability to generate base load from renewable energy. However, you're missing the fact that we also need grid interconnects that allow us to move power from where its generated to where its needed. Sometimes that even means moving it cross-country, and as far as I know we don't have the interconnects to move enough power. This is why there is a base load issue.
SRSLY.
My argument to the landowners who are worried about their view would be: Do you give a shit about global warming? Yes or no?
What about pollution?
Then shut up and let us build these. It's actually for your own good as opposed to a lot of other things the government has done lately.
SRSLY.
I hardly ever reply to posts based on this reason, but your sig grabs my attention because in my view it conflicts with your post. You said:
Yet your sig suggests that you have not at all struggled with philosophy, epistemology and the limits of knowledge. Hoftstadter comes to mind when he discusses "The Propositional Calculus" in Godel, Escher and Back: The Eternal Golden Braid. From p. 192, after presenting an example of a debate resembling the style and content of Lewis Carroll, he writes:
You and I would agree that reason is waaaaaaaaaay undervalued. Nevertheless, I maintain that your sig represents a classic case of the false dichotomy.
The biggest disposal problem with nuclear waste is caused by people blocking the reprocessing of nuclear waste. And even then it's a fraction of the problem of disposing of fossil fuel waste (an awful lot of which is done by storing it in people's lungs). Fossil fuel wastes are also extremely carcinogenic. They're also radioactive and contain significant amounts of uranium and thorium. There's several times as much "nuclear waste" released by coal plants each year than is produced by nuclear plants.
People like you don't deserve to live, hopefully you won't for long.
The Farewell Tour II
This is a great example of a knee-jerk anti-nuclear response, completely devoid of any facts, data or evidence to support the position. We don't have anywhere to store the carbon we're releasing now! At least there will be thousands of times less waste with reactors.
When did I ever claim to support burning carbon, dick?
We're now at the point where, no matter what solution we come up with, we HAVE to worry about the waste. Up until now we've been worried about nuclear waste, but happily ignored the carbon. No longer feasible! Nuclear is far from perfect, but it is sooo much cleaner and safer than coal it isn't even funny.
Wow, that's all you've got? "It's cleaner than coal!!" Get the fuck out! We shouldn't be burning any sort of fossil fuel AND we shouldn't be usuing nuclear reactors. And we don't need to.
The Farewell Tour II
"If the world wants to keep plugging in big-screen TVs and iPods..."
So it's my 40" LCD screen that is destroying our energy supply, not the fact that the company air conditioning keeps me at 60 degrees F so I'm wearing a wool sweater in the middle of summer and still shivering? And you know that iPod is an energy sucker.
There is so much wrong with her argument.
What about the uranium miners and cancer? Haven't studies shown increased cancer downwind from nuke plants? That would imply she's either ignorant or lying when she says nuclear power has killed ZERO people in the U.S.
Has it killed more people than coal? I think the answer is "not _yet_". But one should honestly have to admit that capping over a site as a Death Zone for 100,000 years is "inconvenient". It reminds me of a Martingale gambling strategy where it looks like everything is going great until you catastrophically lose everything.
Frankly, the one thing we need is what nobody from the Pope to the guy carrying a sign on the street corner wants: fewer consumers. If we don't remedy that in a humane way, I suspect the planet and starving populations will find their own way. In the meantime, let's consider conservation the best way to _free_up_ available energy.
IIRC, the paper industry was at least as influential in getting anti-marijuana (and through that anti-hemp) laws passed in the United States, particularly Friedrich Weyerhäuser a large captain in the wood pulp and paper industry. He also had a decent toehold in the media through print, and spread anti-marijuana FUD via this power, convincing the public to demand anti-marijuana laws. It seems likely that his actions were out of self interest in that hemp also makes fibers which are quite decent at making paper, as evidenced by the pro-legalization's point that the constitution was written on hemp paper.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Insisting on a 100% renewable future is overly idealistic: I say, if we can fill 95% of our energy needs with renewables, go ahead, use natural gas or whatever when you need to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Wait, wait, are you saying that we should get our energy from more than one source?! That's inconceivable! Why, I can barely manage to fill up my car correctly when I have to choose from three pumps, how can I be expected to keep this straight?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Given that the global warming argument got its political impetus from Margaret Thatcher wanting to push nukes to castrate the NUM (coal miners' union), it's interesting to see her former foes come around to her way of thinking.
Not that I mind, I am a big Thatcher fan and am glad that she smashed the unions and privatised, if only she could have spun off the BBC it wouldn't be a jobs scheme for unemployable pinkoes.
And yes, if I could have one, I would have a nuclear battery in my basement.
I've had a few hemp shirts over the years and they've been great. Soft, comfy, and hard-wearing. I've never found them scratchy or irritating. If they were a bit cheaper, I'd have a lot more of them. Same goes for trousers. And no, I don't smoke or otherwise ingest pot.
That map looks like it charts wind power at ground level -- which is not where you would put the actual wind turbine.
Here's a map that charts wind power at 80m. It looks a lot more promising; note how many windy spots are in coastal areas that also happen to be heavily populated.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/global_winds.html
A typical gigawatt reactor only uses 100 acres?
Are you including the coal mine with that figure?
I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
Mistakes happen. fatigue kills. I'll feel safer when it's mandated that such workers have a minimum of 9 hours sleep, and are audited by some sort of cognative test.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Wind turbines are only useful in limited areas, and their construction causes pollution and takes up a fair amount of land. Furthermore, the base-load energy from them is really not all that great. In some places they do make perfect sense to use, but those are the exception, not the rule.
Current solar cell technology is quite dirty, and you end up with a piece of toxic waste that has to be disposed of at the end. Further technological development may ameliorate some of the negative effects, but I doubt it will be clean before the point where we have large amounts of industrial production of nanotubes. Maybe in the future, but not now. Additionally, the expected power return really isn't enough for us. Yes, there are some places where solar makes perfect sense, but it is not the only answer.
Biomass? Seems nice and natural. I used to be 100% behind this until I actually dug into the facts. Currently biofuel production is quite energy inefficient if the total cradle to grave energy costs (read: diesel and gasoline) of the intense agriculture required to grow the feedstock plus the energy required for thermal depolymerization of the organic compounds to make them into a usable form. Additionally, the agriculture required takes up immense amount of land. Sugar cane is currently the only plant which has any real proven use as a biofuel, and that only grows adequately in moist tropical regions. Scaling up sugar cane production to the levels needed to power any significant proportion of society's energy needs would therefore decimate the rainforests with all of the associated ecological effects that would pose. This is already happening in parts of Southeast Asia. EU nations which were purchasing cane based biofuels then put stipulations that the cane can not be grown in recent cut rainforests, so the cane replaced much of the existing farmland, forcing the locals to slash and burn rainforests to replace their farmland, or revert to bushmeat to supplement their diets. Finally, biofuels on an industrial level are necessarily the result of extremely intense modern agriculture. That means large amounts of fertilizers are used, which contribute significantly to eutrophication of natural bodies of water. Intense agriculture also significantly disturbs the soil, contributing heavily to soil erosion, further degrading the water which was already impacted. For an example of the damage that intense terrestrial agriculture can have on natural aquatic systems, read into the crown of thorns starfish and it's effect on the Great Barrier Reef. And remember, this is an ocean environment with massive amounts of water flowing through in underwater currents diluting and carrying a large amount of the fertilizers and sediments away. The result to freshwater systems can be even more dramatic.
Again, I do believe there are many places where biofuel use is appropriate, especially if it can be done efficiently with reprocessed wastes. Extracting enough energy from biofuels to power modern society would, however, cause massive environmental damage.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
"The other form of energy I'd like to see tapped is geothermal, since that's almost free."
And where does the geothermal energy come from? Naturally occuring nuclear fission processes in the Earth.
Read this post. Yes, the reprocessing of nuclear waste isn't 100% efficient. But you can obtain usable fuel from spent fuel rods, while at the same time reducing the amount of the waste product that you have to dispose of. How is that a bad thing? I could point out that recycling plastic isn't 100% efficient either, but it's still considered worthwhile to do so (if only to reduce the mass that needs to go to the landfill).
Ash produced from burning wood doesn't kill everything it comes into contact with, and last for millions of years.Exactly which isotopes come out of a fission reactor that last for "millions of years" or are you just quoting your friendly local Greenpeace flier? And there are any number of disposal options that could solve this problem -- placing it at subduction zones, launching it into space, burying it in geologically stable areas/deep mines, etc, etc, etc. Some of the waste produced by the chemical industry is every bit as nasty as nuclear waste (more so in some cases), but it doesn't draw the same anti-* sentiment as nuclear waste does, because it doesn't include the word "nuclear" in the description.
In any case, I think our future lies with the atom, eventually with nuclear fusion, today with nuclear fission. You realize that in about a decade we could reduce our co2 output (from power generation) to next to nothing if we embarked on a program to replace all of our coal and gas fired plants with nuclear ones? This is technology that exists today. And a co2 neutral method of electricity production opens up some interesting possibilities for other areas -- electric cars that got their power from nuclear/hydro/renewables would likewise be carbon neutral. Trains already run on electricity -- if that electricity comes from a carbon neutral source then we have a "free" method of moving people and goods around. It might even make trains competitive with trucks again on long haul routes (if the cost of carbon emissions are taken into account).
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Bullshit, I get all my uranium on ebay, and its usually pretty cheap.
Mod the parent up. Also, it should be noted that 50,000 acres is a whopping 72 square miles. Add to this that wind generation can be placed offshore, and I'm not precisely clear on why 72 square miles is "SO MUCH LAND!" How much land does a nuclear power plant use? Looks to me like almost 1000 acres per plant. How much land and __upkeep__ does it take AFTER the fuel has been spent?
It's worth noting that all of that radiation came out of the ground in the first place. Running a reactor actually "uses up" radioactivity at an accelerated rate, essentially making it safer in the long term. Anything that comes out of a reactor "hotter" than it was to begin with also has a shorter half-life, which means less time until it becomes essentially safe. While there is certainly room fro improvement, it's likely that modern waste storage leaves that stuff at least as safe as it was before it came out of the ground. After all, there are known cases in which natural radioactive deposits fissioned in the ground. We certainly know enough about waste storage to prevent that.
Thanks for the info, Homer!!
Also, gas diffusion isn't the only technique. The US has intentionally not researched some proposed techniques because if they were developed they would make refining too inexpensive at a small level. (One of these involved tuned lasers...and that's about all I know about it.)
OTOH, if people were worried about running out of low-grade fuel, then they'd be actually building fuel reprocessing plants instead of talking about burying valuable resources where nobody can reach them.
Still, people have been shortsighted frequently enough over the past several years that perhaps I shouldn't consider a possible further example as proof of anything else.
But my favored future source of electric power is Solar Space Power Satellites. Most people seem to envision huge rafts of solar cells, but my image is lots of mirrors and Sterling engines. (The major problems are heat radiation and lubrication.) With tuned microwave transmission to antennas on the ground about 3 miles in diameter. (Larger than is needed, but with a safety allowance.) This should be on ground that people don't live on, but no known damage occurs, so it could be used for pasture. And I think it could also be done with floats and anchors on lakes and the ocean, but I'm less certain of that. You need to tune the microwaves to a wavelength that isn't absorbed by water, or anything else in the atmosphere. There are several choices, but I prefer wave lengths longer than 21 cm rather than shorter, but you need them to be short enough to be rather directional with reasonably small antennas. (I'd need to look up the details again.) I believe it's practical, and probably equivalent in cost, perhaps cheaper than a bunch of reactors. There are DIFFERENT tradeoffs. One of the costs of this would be developing heavy lifters for lofting construction materials. It would probably be necessary to create a permanent presence in space. There would also be lots of minor benefits.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Slashdot readers might also find an insider's perspective on nuclear interesting, since the real world of atomic power (good and bad) is far different than what is commonly portrayed. You get to hear outsiders and spokespeople and executives talk about it. How about listening to a nuclear worker bee for a change?
See http://raddecision.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] for the novel "Rad Decision", which is available at no cost to readers. The author has been an engineer in the US nuclear industry over twenty years. The book covers the people, politics and technology of this controversial energy source within an exciting story. The book is also in paperback at online retailers. (I get no royalities).
Stewart Brand, noted environmentalist and founder of "The Whole Earth Catalog" has said "I'd like to see Rad Decision widely read."
jimaach@comcast.net
That's right! If we want to save the planet, we should all be using less energy than the average person!
These "if Al Gore was serious, he'd be living in a hollow log" slanders are a sneaky way of trying to shut Al Gore up, since it is next to impossible to be a public spokesman and use less energy than the average person. And in reality, it turns out that Gore is doing exactly what he advocates (which has never been a back-to-nature, use-little-or-no-energy position). He favors using carbon neutral energy where possible, buying carbon offsets where it is not, and making one's home as energy efficient as possible. And he is doing all of those things.
TMI had a meltdown, and what happened? Zero deaths OR INJURIES as a result.
You can't blame nuclear power for the disaster at Chernobyl. Blame the broke Russians and their stupid reactor design, but bad design is the designer's fault, not nuclear power.
Nuclear power can be made safely, and we have a long track record of exactly that. I'm not a pro-nuke activist, but let's be reasonable, shall we?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I see paper blamed time and time again but this completely ignores the fact that the chemical companies came into their own immediately proceeding hemp's demise. Lets face it, petro-chemical companies are the real reason hemp was outlawed. Hemp directly competes at almost every level. It was a pile on effect.
Hemp competes with petro-chemical companies.
Hemp now competes with corn growers for alternate fuel production.
Hemp competes with paper mills.
Hemp competes with cotton growers.
Hemp to a lessor degree competes with non-corn farmers as it is also a cheap, nutritional, additive.
Basically hemp is the #1 enemy of big business. People also forget that cars used to run on biofuels and then switched to petro-base fuels. Hemp was a contender.
People who believe paper is the cause of hemp's demise do not know/see the whole picture or know/understand history.
I guess I should have been a bit more clear. When the plant is still operating normally, so you can continue to run steam through it, it's absolutely true that cooling down only takes a few days. As you run steam through, it pulls out a lot of heat relatively quickly.
I was talking about a situation where you have a problem sufficient that you can't run steam through any more. In a case like this, cooling down takes drastically longer -- for normal use you (of course) have the hot parts of the plant heavily insulated to retain the heat as well as possible. I just spent a bit of time re-reading accounts of the incidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but I haven't been able to find any that say exactly how long it took to cool down the steam plant to the point that human entry was possible. The Three Mile Island accident took place in late March of 1979, and it was July of 1980 when the first person re-entered the reactor chamber (everybody reports on that!) but my recollection from the time is that it was around May or so before the steam area was reentered -- though I'll openly admit I'm going from memory, and it's obviously been quite a long time. Of course, it's also possible that reentry into some parts of the plant were delayed longer than strictly necessary, simply due to the other concerns at the time.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
And addressing the human element will be left as a trivial exercise for the reader
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Such a scheme could provide a small amount of extra power.
It could not even come close to meeting demand.
For example: Let's assume that a power plant generating power from water that was pumped uphill all day will put out the same amount of power at night as a regular hydro electric dam. (this is a very generous estimation in my opinion)
The Hoover dam in the USA puts out about 2 gigawatts.
To cover overnight power demands in the USA you would need something on the order of 200 gigawatts.
That's 100 new hoover dams just for the batteries that would be required to make solar-power cover baseload.
Now you will need enough solar panels to meet 760 gigawatts of demand during the day PLUS enough extra to charge up the dams for the overnight demand. let's generously assume that the water-pump battery system is 100% efficient. You will need 960GW, let's say 1 TeraWatt of power during the day.
At 200W per square meter for solar power that comes to 5 million square meters or about 51% of the USA.
The land area that would have to be flooded to feed 100 hoover dams is also staggering, not to mention the quantity of fresh water involved.
The numbers just don't add up.
Solar cannot even come close to meeting daytime demand. There is no freakin' way it has hundreds of extra gigawatts to store for overnight and cloudy day demand.
I'm curious, why wouldn't you want a nuclear reactor in your back yard? I really wouldn't have any problem with them building one nearby (though maybe not my back yard, since it's quite small). As long as it was state-of-the-art, the odds of it having a problem that would damage me or my property would be pretty slim. I'm much more likely to die of an asthma attack triggered by the particulate matter spewed into the atmosphere by our current coal power plants. So as long as they use the nuclear plant to replace, rather than supplement, current forms of production, I'm all for it.
A radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) is a simple electrical generator which obtains its power from radioactive decay.
Since this uses the heat from the natural radioactive decay there is no fission involved. With a very simple design every home in in the USA could get all their power for their homes and even their cars (charge up at home). The production of electricity using this method is fairly simple and does not require all the infrastructure and man power to control it.
Unfortunately, society has been lead to believe that radioactive materials are highly dangerous and that anytime you bring up an idea that involves radioactive material they refuse to listen. Most people don't realize that most every smoke detector made uses a small amount of radioactive material. I bet if they did many of them would be ripping them out of their homes in fears of being radiated.
There are dangers in producing electricity using radioactive materials but most of the current ways we produce electricity is dangerous. If you don't think so burn some coal in your back yard and see how safe you feel about it.
I was working on a graduate project in the physics labs of where I attend school and I brought up the idea of using an RTG to power the mini robotic submarine we were working on. The school has at least 1000 times the amount of radioactive material I would need to build an RTG that would power the sub for 80 or more years but refused to even consider the idea. Why have the material unless you are going to let students work with it? The perfect fuel for an RTG is plutonium 238 because it cannot sustain a chain reaction. So, if even some highly unlikely freak accident caused some partials to fuse the reaction would not continue. The only argument I can see against using such fuel in an RTG is that someone could use the fuel to be the dirty part of a dirty bomb. But, if you are a terrorist how hard would it be to get your hands on some radioactive material for your bomb? I could easily get enough plutonium 238 to power the mini submarine without having to go through proper channels but I wouldn't because without a license the nuclear regulatory commission I would be breaking the law. I don't think terrorist are worried about breaking the law.
The majority of the nuclear reactors in the USA produce electricity from nuclear material using the most unsafe process available. I can see reason for being afraid of these but both China and Japan have been using pebble reactors for some years now and that their are incapable of the great fear "the china syndrome" and are far less complex to operate.
To quote FDR the "Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself". At least when it comes to nuclear energy I think society needs to be educated not only the dangers of nuclear material but also the benefits. Then maybe society would have a more realistic idea of the risk/benefit ratio of nuclear fuel. That is how we feel safe driving around with large quantities of highly combustible gasoline in our cars, we are aware of the risks and accept them in trade for the benefit. But, we (as in the masses) only believe what the government/media tell us and right now they are blasting the message that anything radioactive is dangerous regardless of how it is used. These are the same people that were telling kids to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear attack!
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Lets just do the nuke power plants with one stipulation that ALL reality TV show studios be based at one so if the do go Chernobyl on us at least we got rid of retarded programming such as Shot of Love or I Love New York... I for one look forward to worshiping our 180 turning former anti-nuclear peace-beatnik overlords...
What I want to know is that, with hemp being so easy to grow, why the Hell didn't the cotton (and timber!*) growers just switch to it themselves?! For that matter, why don't corn growers just switch to some other crop instead of lobbying for subsidies (or rather, why aren't they forced to do so instead of receiving them)?
(*IIRC, the paper (i.e., timber) industry was a bigger factor than the cotton one, because some big newspaper owner had investments in it, and used his paper to demonize marijuana, black people, and especially the combination thereof.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
We'd need to do less damage than continuing to use coal, I'd bet, and that's all that matters because it'd still be an improvement!
People complain that there's no "silver bullet" that would solve all our energy needs and have no environmental consequences. To this I say, "so the fuck what?" We do have the ability to make incremental improvements, and incremental improvements are still better than the status quo!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
51,000 acres of wind farm about or approximately 200 square kilometres. = A 2 GW wind farm, which might produce as much energy each year as a 1 GW baseload power plant, might have turbines spread out over an area of approximately 200 square kilometres. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power)
.01 * 51,000 = 510 acres.
But, "The land can still be used for farming and cattle grazing. Less than 1% of the land would be used for foundations and access roads, the other 99% could still be used for farming.[60] Turbines can be sited on unused land in techniques such as center pivot irrigation."
So it's more like
Anyway, the idea of base load power vs wind is silly. Wind is used as base load power because it's not on demand.
PS: That wind power map is just about useless for understanding wind power distribution due because a difference of 30m can sometimes mean a doubling in output. The average power output over 100's of square miles is not as important as where the local hills are.
First of all, I don't doubt that that's true. Hell, for the purposes of this argument we'll pad your calculations and assume wind farms will take 100,000 acres (i.e., double your estimate) instead.
But you know what? Your whole argument is bullshit anyway!
Why? Because, unlike with other technologies (including everything from coal to solar), the footprint of a wind farm is mostly made up of the empty space between the turbines! Take a look at that map you cited. Do you notice that much of those high-wind areas (e.g. the entire area between Texas and North Dakota) are currently used for farming? Well, here's a newsflash: you can install a wind farm in those areas and still use them for farming too! The turbines end up taking up very little space, especially compared to razing the whole farm to put up solar collectors or something.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Hey, they wouldn't if all the energy used in manufacturing was electricity produced by wind and solar!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ah, well, there's radioactively hot, and there's temperature hot. There's also the reactor primary coolant loop, and then there's the secondary steam plant electricity generating loop.
Depending on your particular power plant model, of course.
The steam & turbine loop at three mile island (and all pressurized water reactors)is completely seperate from the reactor coolant loop- ie, the water that circulates past the fuel.
The heat in a Pressurized water Reactor (PWR) is passed through solid metal walls in a steam generator- basically a big heat exchanger with boiling water on one side.
These steam generators are often used to remove thermal decay heat, though I doubt TMI did that for the year or two between the incident and when they re-entered the reactor building & vessel.
They probably would have used another system (residual heat removal) which is completely seperate from the steam-electricity side of the plant.
Anyway, the 'hotness' that would have kept them out of the reactor vessel and containment building for a year or two would have been the radioactive kind. Since they melted the fuel into the reactor coolant, and discharged that same coolant onto the containment building floor (reactor coolant system relief valves to the relief tank, relief tank rupture disks to the containment building floor), the radiation levels in the containment building where likely very high for quite some time, and it took a couple years for it to get down to tolerable levels.
I don't remember if TMI's steam generators remained intact. If they didn't, that could affect everything as well, as could the heat output from TMI's destroyed and not fully controllable reactor. If they had to use the SG's to remove a massive amount of decay heat (more than a few percent rated thermal power) then that would have required an isolatable part of the secondary steam plant to remain thermally hot for some time. We'd really have to get into the specifics of the aftermath, to such details you would only find them in industry reports, not news stories.
"Hot" is often used in the nuke industry to indicate high levels of radiation, probably moreso than temperature. That may be where some of the confusion comes from.
High temperatures to everyone else (500-600 deg F) is "Normal Operating Temperature" and the first thing they tell you when you arrive is "don't touch pipes."
Hope that helps things out. As I recall, chernobyl was not a pressurized water reactor, but a boiling water reactor.
In a boiling water reactor, the same water cools the fuel as boils and spins the turbine. I think the same issue applied to chernobyl- the radioactive 'hotness' outlived the thermal 'hotness' by years, and there's no steam generators at chernobyl to seperate the steam plant from the reactor coolant.
I'm sure there's still places at chernobyl you wouldn't want to go.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
So a famous person has finally come out and said what us little people with physics degrees and nuclear power industry experience have known all along.
In this world, if you want to get something done, get a celebrity or media endorsement. Or a Liberal Arts degree.
Stick Men
Didn't mean that paper was the only one, just meant to chime in that it was (probably still is) one of the big players. I mean, there are those who also say that a close relative of hemp competes with the psychopharmaceutical industry. Also there's the fact that marijuana was primarily used by immigrants and other people with considerably less pull, and one can see how it became prohibited.
I think the biggest changing force would be to get the junk food industry lobbying - imagine what marijuana legalization would do to their profits. What other state of mind do you find someone throwing a pizza in the oven, deciding that's taking too long so puts a burrito in the microwave only to polish off a bag of Cheeto's and some Twizzlers before noshing down on the rest.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Try these numbers...
10^12 W / 200 W/m^2 = 5 x 10^9 m^2
US Land area = 9.16 x 10^6 km^2 = 9.16 x 10^12 m^2.
0.00055 of area or about 1/20 of 1% of the US, not half of it.
Hmm. Maybe the people should control the means of production? :)
All rites reversed 2010
Yes, much energy is required. Thank goodness we have this spiffy new energy technology - so called "Nuclear Energy". Just imagine how many refineries could be run!
Yes, thorium has been mentioned. It looks like a good option to me. I'm not sure where you were going with this at all.
Right now, it doesn't seem that extraction is this bogey-man of an obstacle. I'd be more worried about oil extraction.
Who's saying "100% nuclear overnight" except you?
Deep deposits? What? I think there are bigger worries than what happens if we run out of uranium and still haven't come up with better tech. I think you're running short on complaints. Hmm. Since we're talking bogey men, I like to fantasize about space invaders. Ooo, even better! Space invaders stealing earth women! They could be drawn here by the scent of used uranium!
People don't buy 'Irradiated' foods.
People eat bannannas.
People don't want to live next to a nuke plant.
People have microwave ovens.
Once it's easier and cheaper enough, people will switch to atomic energy.
Why do you think McDonalds does so well?
Well, there is that little thing about the DOE scientists evaluating the safety of Yucca Mountain and the likelihood of it contaminating the water supply... you know, the thing about the scientists falsifying data:
:-)
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600119181,00.html
and there is that little thing about, you know, earthquakes in the vicinity:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/06/14/yucca.quake/index.html
But other than that it's perfectly safe.
Everything you wrote is (basically) true. The Earth and the natural biosphere will certainly adapt to warmer conditions. The problem is that we have a lot of hard-to-move infrastructure (like cities for instance) that are above the current sea level but might be below the new sea level of the warmer Earth. So, it might be really, really, really expensive to deal with the new climate.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I mean, there are those who also say that a close relative of hemp competes with the psychopharmaceutical industry.
This is factually incorrect. But don't feel bad because you are only repeating the misinformation provided to government by industry. Simple fact is, hemp is not pot. Pot can be used as hemp as it has the same types of fiber. And today, it is possible to plant and grow hemp which has exactly zero THC.
Smoking hemp will result in the world's worst headache. You can not get high from it. If you smoke something that makes you high, it is not hemp. Hemp is closely related to "pot" but they are distinctly different animals. Most industry types are very happy to continue this confusion.
To be absolutely clear, hemp is not pot.
Because nuclear power is very expensive, it is no panacea. It costs a lot to handle and dispose of nuclear materials safely. In the case of the Navy's military reactors, that perfect safety record costs even more. If nuclear power were really economical, then France would have the strongest economy in the world. France went mostly nuclear because she did not have abundant alternatives.
hence the "close relative of hemp."
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I keep hearing this "Environmental groups hate wind turbines" meme but I've seen nothing to back it up. Here's a quote from one of your linked articles: "The wind turbines now being installed have much lower rates of avian mortality associated with them than those built 25 or more years ago". Hardly the ranting of anti-wind fanatics.
The Cape Cod wind farm fiasco is primarily Ted Kenndey and some other NIMBY "liberals" who don't want their ocean views marred by windmills on the horizon. Yes, Ted and co. sometimes support environmental issues, that doesn't make it a concerted resistance by environmental organizations.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
We're past the 24-hour "nobody cares" limit on Slashdot, but if anybody's still listening, mod parent up for bothering to do the math, even if he disagrees with me.
Another poster pointed out that your area math is wrong: the actual area comes to a patch of ground about 70 km on a side, proportionally more if you assume imperfect sunlight->electricity conversion. It's a sizeable patch of ground, but I'm sure we could find a few nice patches of desert or open ocean to park this on.
As for Hoover Dam: it only puts out 2 gigawatts because if it put out more, Lake Mead would run dry. So the clever designers only put in a few turbines. That's not a problem in this case, since we're refilling the lake every day. There's no problem in principle with installing *ten times* as many turbines and ten times as many generators. We drain the lake ten times as fast at night, and then fill it back up the next day.
Suppose we take the ten largest dams in the U.S. and assume they're all about like Hoover Dam. (In practice, we'd probably split the load among dozens of dams.) Each of these ten dams needs to supply 20 gigawatts of power at night.
Each dam needs to supply 20 gigawatts x 12 hours = about 9e14 joules of energy. Lake Mead holds 35 cubic kilometers of water, or 35e12 kilograms. The gravitational potential energy of the lake is about 35e12 kg * 9.8 * 200 m = 7e16 joules.
SO, if we install ten times as many generators in Hoover Dam, add a whole bunch of pumps, and repeat this setup at the ten largest dams in the country, we can handle the entire nighttime electrical load, and only drain 1% of the volume of each reservoir each day. Problem solved.
Added bonus: the Colorado River might run backwards from time to time, which means you can do an all-day whitewater rafting trip and end up back at your car!
So I am suppose to congradulate someone that ran off at the mouth about something they knew nothing of, because they have finally picked up some of them fancy books and learned themselves real good. No wonder this world is all fucked up. The lady should have her hands cut off and her mouth sewn shut so she can no longer spread F.U.D. when she is to busy to do the research.
And what are the indications that space travel will be up to the job of transporting large amounts of fissionable material from these said planets when it runs out?
To do so will require advances along two lines.
1) The cost of solar panels will have to decrease.
2) The efficiency of our homes and offices will have to increase.
There is a lot of work being done on the technical improvements, and policy and culture are shifting to drive the kind of adoption needed to create economies of scale. Yes, it is not being used on a large scale now, but for any successful technology there was a time when that was true.
This is going to take awhile though, and in the meantime nuclear is a mature technology. But let's not mistake it for salvation--there are reasons nuclear has not supplanted other means of power production in the U.S., especially cost. And, it takes a long time to design and build nuclear plants.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Which reminds me, I'll box that up and put it in the post today.
Will deal with this buyer again, AAAAA+
Many of the comments I see here are criticizing based on opinion, not facts. Both sides of this issue have understandable reasoning, and I can see why each side thinks the way they do. However, I see more so on one side than the other that ignorance because of fear is present everywhere. How about you do some research before you type a page on why the other side is a bunch of putrid apes and make this a civilized discussion. Look at the people who have good reason and fact to back their argument up- those are the people who advance and refine technology and science. Don't be afraid to experiment with something revolutionary.
Why did the recording industry fight as hard as they possibly could to kill music downloading rather than try to find ways to monetize it? Why did the telephone industry fight VoIP instead of using it to enhance the quality of voice and data service they provide to their customers? Why is the movie industry (which contains many of the same players as the recording industry) making the exact same mistake that the recording industry made a few years ago instead of learning from those mistakes?
Simply put, it is far easier to stomp competition into the ground in an anticompetitive way than it is to learn from them and make your own products better in the process. Indeed, modern capitalism's greatest weakness is that it encourages short-term thinking over long-term planning, resulting in a strong tendency for corporations to drive themselves into the ground and act in ways that to any intelligent person are clearly not in their own self-interest.
I blame the stock market, personally. The change from rational leadership to complete cluelessness appears to closely coincide with companies going public....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Wow, so many bad assumptions that I'm not entirely sure where to start picking this one apart.
Have you _been_ to Pennsylvania lately? We put reactors there because the people are already mutants...
Mostly, the fact that what passes for "nuclear power" right now is wasting 99% of the energy contained in the nuclear fuel and unnecessarily generates highly radioactive waste that nobody has figured out how to dispose of safely.
.sig. There should be a Slashcode site there in the next few weeks if I stop wasting time. ;)
Yes, that's a problem with light water reactors. They can be as efficient as 98.7% wasteful!
But US Nuclear scientists have already developed a 99.5% efficient reactor and ran a 40MW prototype - the Integral Fast Reactor at Argone National Labs.
Clinton de-funded this effort ~3 weeks into his first term and it was killed the next year.
It can burn our existing nuclear waste which some knuckleheads think would best be stuck in a hole in the ground in Nevada for the next 300,000 years. If we just burned our existing waste in IFR's (which we *have* to do anyway to be responsible stewards), we'd have enough energy, from this source alone, to provide all the power the US needs for the current century.
And the 0.5% of the waste that is left goes back to natural ore-levels of radiation in about 300 years at that point and is inappropriate for weapons use. We should have reliable off-planet lift capability before that, even, if we don't want to keep it here. Use the remaining levels of radiation to power a ship's engine to the necessary deltaV to take it into the Sun. Being just 50 years into space exploration, I'm confident that we'll do better in the next couple centuries, if not sooner.
I have some links at the site in my
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Deleted
Hey I was curious, if I western union you twice the selling price can you send me a check back for the balance?
you are correct, i botched my land area numbers
Enregy production, like a lot of infrastructure, will not change quickly
... are there and can be leveraged if needed. they all
... generation and then STORING the energy somewhere. the
and most likely not until it has too. Too many jobs, businesses
and power brokers are established and don't want the change to occur.
That will leave us with the current mix od power generation for
a while to come. Solar, wind, geo-thermal, ocean current, ocean-thermal
gradiant,
affect the environment, because you are moving energy from one
place to another. Some are more haremful that others.
The good news is that we can go totally green and stop polluting
the air and producing nuclear waste. The solution requires building
lots of solar, wind,
simplest method is to pump water uphill into the hydro system.
Look at lake meade for example. It could use the water!!! There
is a lot of high dry ground in the Western US. Another solution
is to split water with excess energy and recombine it later
when power is needed. Both solutions work and are well known.
Bringing the cost down is an engineering problem and can
be done.
I think it is the challenge of this generation to see this
solution into reality. Just like the highway system, the
power system, railroads, and other projects - the payoff
is in the future. It won't make itself, all you young people
have to make it happen.
P.s. I worked for a wind turbine company - I know.
Any honest estimate of the cost of nuclear power is fully burdened, up to and including long term storage of wastes, decommissioning of the plant, fuel costs, design, construction, et cetera. My aim wasn't to make one. These estimates have been done, and if they hadn't been favorable nuclear wouldn't be so attractive. My point was merely that the actual price of uranium forms a very small part of nuclear power, and as you raise the price (and thus, lower the acceptable concentration) reserves increase exponentially. Basically, uranium is not a limiting factor using the primitive, wasteful cycles we use now, and if the price rises much further, technology develops which makes it even less of a limiting factor.
To answer your question: we currently have 105 reactors at 65 sites producing 787 terawatt hours per year, or 90 gigawatts. We would have to approximately quantuple this to replace all other electrical power production. The latest 3rd gen AP1000 reactor that's available now is supposed to settle out to about $1/watt to get it up and running. So - $360 billion dollars will be your bill. Double that if you want to build the electrical capacity necessary to replace a majority of fuel oil usage - not counting the vehicles, grid, or other limiting factors.
I'm not of the opinion that we should undergo a crash program of nuclear power generation quite yet. I don't think we're capable of one, that we have the motivation for one, or that we would choose wisely.
I give us 8 years for preparation. We havn't done much nuclear construction since Chernobyl, there are a whole bunch of reactors designed in the interval, and we're a bit rusty. The newer reactor designs are passively safe, hard to meltdown if you try, secure from nuclear proliferation, self-disposing of waste transuranics, able to create hydrogen, and able to breed depleted uranium. 8 years is long enough to try those elements, and see how well the developments on the horizon of alternative energy pan out - whether wind and solar can reach competitive price levels (wind is about there), and whether biofuels and new batteries pan out. It's long enough to train a generation of nuclear engineers where we have essentially missed the last two. It's long enough to start and close construction on a crash program of nuclear testbeds reactors.. It's enough to culture a competitive (rather than oligopolic) field of nuke construction companies, and to prospect for native uranium sources.
Here's the rough plan:
Beginning shortly after taking office, the next president campaigns about the dangers of global warming, the enslavement of the US to foreign oil interests, and the horrors of surface coal mining and coal burning powerplants.
A few months later, they introduce an omnibus spending bill:
They declare that the country is in a fuel, energy, transportation, and environmental emergency. The neocon plan to dominate energy militarily has failed, and they flatly reject the requirement that America pillage the world to fulfill its addictions, as well as the ability of the severely abused/neglected US military to even begin to do so. The US is being left behind by the rest of the world in green tech, and its trade balance is setting it up for permanent servitude to peoples on the other side of the planet.
*An immediate $500 "Fuel price emergency relief credit" is sent to every adult US citizen who chooses to participate in a minimal federal ID program. More payments are promised annually, increased at inflation + 5%.
*After the first year, this credit is to be taken not from the general budget, but from tariffs on imported oil, implemented at the corporate level.
*A shifting of transportation funds away from highway subsidies and towards an 80%/20% federal matching fund for local+state electric mass transportation projects.
*To the highest degree possible, federal encouragement to relax housing standards, zoning standards, car + train crash-safety standards, mandatory efficiency standards (like the idiocy th
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
You never know? Only when you're unprepared. Russian Geigers can be bought pretty cheap. I suggest to investigate the DRSB-01 and DRSB-88 models.
You're an idiot. COULD, not should.
I think it was a little of both. Cool down as you know is not the safest thing for metal, brittle fracture and all. I imagine the powers at be where also concerned about causing more damage. At the time they would have not known the state of the primary loop or vessel.
Once they had things stable, I'm sure they were willing to let things cool down at a slower rate. The vessel is only rated for so many cycles of cool down. The rate of cool down effects the life span as well as radiation. I'm sure the last thing they wanted was to break the vessel.
I'm not sure if TMI is a negative or positive alpha T core. Of course with the fuel in an unknown state I don't think any one knows how it would react to the relatively rapid few day cool down. That's my opinion through.
Gwyneth Cravens (along with Rip Anderson) gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation series some months ago:
- Summary by Stewart Brand
Audio files:It was a pretty good talk, I thought, with the information on the storage of nuclear waste in salt formations being some of the more interesting material.
But they lead off with a flat assertion that nothing but nukes will do to supply our energy needs in the absence of "fossil fuels" -- that's a point that needs more support than that. Myself, I believe they're correct, but alt.energy freaks aren't just going to take someone's word for it. This interview is similar, just mentioning "base load" power without explaining much about it. Maybe her book goes into this in more detail, haven't read it yet, myself.
Don't kid yourself - He is living the high life.
Think about it. Has he made any concessions for living a more frugal life besides buying "carbon credits" from his own company? I haven't heard of any.
Same old shit: Another cause, different decade. Global warming is huge though.
What have you done for America or The Earth lately? Did you "Beat the Crunch" in the '70s? Did you stop using chlorofluorocarbons in the 80's when that became popular? Have you ever saved a whale by chance in the '90s? If so, how? How about those astonishingly cute little baby seals? Nuclear energy & 3 mile island ('70s again) All good stuff.
Actually, even the depleted uranium we have laying around can be perfectly useful if loaded into a breeder. Soon enough, the U238 will transmute into plutonium. Of course, natural uranium will work as well.
You haven't looked, either. Guilty until proven innocent, eh? Anyway, 30 seconds on Google turns up this link. Make of that what you will.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Laser separation is here and now. It's called SILEX (I think it stands for "Separation of Isotopes via Laser EXcitation") and is a technology that was developed in Australia (like Synroc). I believe it's been licensed to Westinghouse, who are building a pilot plant. It supposedly uses a smaller amount of energy compared to gas centrifuge enrichment as that does compared to gaseous diffusion.
Yes...and all the externalities to nuclear are charged to the industry.
The further point I'd make is that even new-build dirty coal is cheaper than new-build wind.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Well I think (as I indicated in my post) that safety has come a long way for nuclear power. You mention Three Mile Island, but fail to recognize that people there are still dying of cancer at a much higher rate since 1979 for some unknown reason. Suspiciously, there is no direct indication that it is because of the melt down, but I think it's fair to say that those in charge of investigation might have a reason to obscure the truth. I've seen a documentary many years ago that indicated the percentage of those closer to the site of the incident had a greater chance of dying of cancer than those further away. So yes it's safe until there's an accident. The consequenses if there is an accident are so extreme that I would not exactly call it a "good" solution.
I didn't say that coal was what we should stick with either (thanks for putting words in my mouth though). I am simply saying that wind generation, while a good idea for supplimental power, is not the solution to meet base load. It won't be able to do what the article claims. Yes nuclear is the cleaner between itself and coal, unless there's an accident with the plant, the fuel, or the waste, and then it becomes much more dirty for a much longer time. Furthermore, I think we need to continue to investigate solar, geothermal, and other means of generation before we say that nuclear is the best solution.
There is a plant that is being built here at INL, and it won't even be online until 2020. When it is, we will puchase a share of power from them to help meet our demand. The problem is they are still going to have waste that has to be stored for a long period of time. The US is currently running out of room to dump this stuff, and the stuff we've already been dumping for years is now having to be moved because the places it's being stored are no longer viable. The waste at those facilities is starting to leak into the ground. Now we have this waste in trucks roaming about the country that can be hit by terrorists, get into an accident and spill the contents, become hijacked and sold off to the nearest nut job, etc. Additionally, the facilities to move the waste to haven't even been built yet, and there's no room at the current facilities that are viable. Do you think this situation is going to improve over the next 12 years? My guess is that it's going to get worse. But let's not look at that, instead let's put our fingers in our ears and sing "la la la la la.. I'm not listening" while we're all lead down the primrose path. It's 250 miles from my back yard, and I still think it's a bad idea.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Where's my -5 "Wrong" mod button when I need it?
I'm an environmentalist of sorts, but even I know how breeder reactors work. The analogy of how fission works is more like charring the outside of the wood (vice burning it) and throwing away all the good charcoal. Reprocessing allows us to use the charcoal.
I don't understand why he has to use so much energy.
Buying green power is great and all, but he sure isn't reducing his footprint. Why not cut the use a little and invest the savings into the green power company he gets his energy from?
I also thought the followup at the end of the article 'A Tale of Two Houses' was kind of funny/ironic.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_tale_two_houses.htm
Or are you suggesting that we conduct TeraWatts of power from one side of the planet to the other?
The planet is already wired for it, every country has its own HT transmission grid. Hooking them all up to send power to the currently unlit side of the earth would take a lot of engineering work but is not particularly problematic, although it would mean a cyclical change of direction every 24 hours, so a lot of new systems would be needed.
While this would not yield an ideal topology for trans-globe power transmission, it could always be improved as we go by adding dedicated long-haul links in step with the growth in deployment of solar farms. And while a lot of power is lost in transmission over planetary distance, it doesn't matter, because you can always capture more to make up for the line losses. There is effectively no limit.
Dedicating less than 1% of landmass to generation of clean, limitless power for the planet doesn't seem a bad idea. If only the billions spent on fission and fusion system so far had been used for solar, we'd be there already.
Least impressive fact evah.
You do know that the Jonestown Massacre, as awful as it was, killed fewer people than die in Christian countries every year, don't you?
You make it sound like the Peoples Temple has terrible mass murders all the time... (etc, etc)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Idiot takes 20 years to recognize an obvious truth.
Seriously, why do we give any credence to people like this? They are the people that made nuclear power untenable in the US with all their money wasting protests and lawsuits. Now suddenly they wake up to reality and this is news???
Fuckemall. I watched what happened here in my home state of New Hampshire when the Seabrook plant was being built. I saw the cost overruns that resulted and I'm paying for electricity based on the inflated costs caused by these assholes. I am not amused.
It's a home plus an office. If he had located his office in a separate building, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Buying green power is great and all, but he sure isn't reducing his footprint.
There is a point to be made here also: stopping global warming doesn't have to be done by reducing energy consumption. It can also be done by producing energy in carbon-neutral ways. If you can produce your electricity without generating CO2, then there isn't much harm in using a lot of it (other than providing an opportunity for your political opponents to take jabs at you, of course)
That said, if I were Gore I would try to reduce my energy usage also, or perhaps just sell the building and move to a more energy-efficient one; if only to cut down on the political attacks.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Thats twice now that you've failed to provide a counter-argument (beyond calling me names - which doesn't qualify). We don't have to do either? Pray tell, what is the solution to providing our base-line energy needs then? One of the posters above detailed the downsides to most "clean" alternatives quite nicely, so I won't repeat them for you here.
Jeremy
How about you start here and work your way back to reality. As for calling names, that's the least that you deserve for hating America.
The Farewell Tour II
I didn't say that coal was what we should stick with either (thanks for putting words in my mouth though). I am simply saying that wind generation, while a good idea for supplimental power, is not the solution to meet base load. It won't be able to do what the article claims. Yes nuclear is the cleaner between itself and coal, unless there's an accident with the plant, the fuel, or the waste, and then it becomes much more dirty for a much longer time. Furthermore, I think we need to continue to investigate solar, geothermal, and other means of generation before we say that nuclear is the best solution.
The poster correctly made a logical assumption. If there are 2 technologies that can provide baseload and you don't support one, then you must support the other. If you don't support either then you fail it. I hear this talk all the time from environmentalists "solar is getting better all the time!", "wind farms are booming!", "look what they managed to do in iceland!". We need power now, not in some brightly colored version of the future that only exists in people's heads. I agree that eventually we need to move away from coal and nuclear, but even if we manage to make great strides in technology we'll still need time to roll it out. In the meantime we still need power.
Sorry to jump on this like that, but greens in my country oppose both coal and nuclear energy, so they're proposing we get stuck with aging (inefficient, polluting) coal plants, shut down our nuclear plants and buy nuclear energy from other countries. Only they can't seem to wrap their heads around that, instead believing that if we ban every technology we have a magical fairy will drop a clean infinite power source in our laps.
Also, research is not an either/or proposition. Spend a little less money on buying cruise missiles and a little more on researching all alternatives, you'll eventually be better of.
It's a much better idea to build something like that in space, when that becomes economically viable in itself. I'm guessing that will be at least 30 years, but it could be possible within our lifetimes... With a little luck, our current energy reserves will last that long, and we won't kill ourselves waiting.
Which would require several things ... first we would need to be able to get enough material into that area of space to build something ... people answer asteroids on that one as well but you do have to smelt, refine, etc which again requires infrastructure. Maybe the moon would make more sense since at least you have a surface to work with (therefore you don't need to build that part) and some raw materials (rock) to build the parts that don't have to be some kind of metal. But then you have either to develop a relatively (laws of thermodynamics apply etc) lossless method to transmit this energy without causing more problems or produce enough energy that you don't have to care. ...
All of this boils down to a lot of tech we do not have and resources and energy which must be expended to reach this goal; which basically means you had better start cracking on it now to beat the deadline, like many other known problems. Of course it may just be mathematically impossible to turn what you propose into a viable solution. I'm not a physicist. I'm still not over CERN's stern ruling that the Enterprise will not exist (matter/antimatter is not viable) although it is heartening that we overcame Mr Scott and developed ion engines first. We didn't use electric cars (according to Popular Mechanics circa 1900 IIRC) because they would require such extensive infrastructure (you'd have to string wire all over the country! Electricity in every city!) so some people have been proven wrong before, but certain things are provably impossible (or not viable) without violating the Laws of Physics and Mathematics
Of course, there is always the desperation angle. Besides the fact Necessity is the Mother of Invention, when you get to the point where you have a choice between energy which is difficult to derive and none at all things that were too expensive before become viable economically, assuming you have a net gain of course. But solar power is way easier to deal with than this. so many processes on Earth are powered by the sun and moon that there is plenty of opportunity to reap the benefits of the "free" energy. Hopefully before we get to the point where that actually presents a problem (we use up more energy than was previously wasted or otherwise unduly interfere with natural processes necessary for our survival, or the Sun starts to grow ... ) we will have colonized somewhere else.
To my mind you started off with the right idea. You mentioned other worlds as a source. Well if people move from the Earth they can presumably find energy in the places to which they travel. Unfortunately for us, so far we only know one "earthlike" planet, where life and the possibility of life as we know it exist, and terraforming is probably much more difficult than Star Trek would have you believe... (after all if we can make inhospitable planets hospitable we should be able first to fix this one.
I was glad to hear Stephen Hawking point out that it is insane that we aren't trying to build a Disaster Recovery Site for life (i.e. extraterrestrial colonies). I've been saying that for years, but more people will listen to him for good reason. There are any number of processes which basically guarantee that life on Earth will either be destroyed or at the very least very difficult to live on, and even if that were not the case (we have no plan for basically any of them) the unforseen and the fact we know no other place where humans or any other life exists should produce a biological (to say nothing of logical) imperative to do that.
But again this requires energy, infrastructure, and technology we do not have. More people should take Einstein's advice and learn physics so they can get cracking on this stuff or help those who already are.
Well, we have a few hundred years to figure it out, we're not gonna lack uranium for quite a while.
Probably, it depends in part on how much our energy consumption increases (if it does not start decreasing or levelling out) and how unstable the sources of Uranium become (like oil) ... so far it looks like we have several sources that are relatively safe (like Australia) but who knows what will happen in 100 years.
At any rate, we may need that time to solve our problem, assuming we spend it wisely. There are unfortunately too few people working on the many problems that threaten our world, and too few resources spent on that research by the Powers that Be. So regime change may be a prerequisite as well as better education.
I remember reading in Peter Green's book that Aristotle's laboratory was the best funded in all of human history. If that is correct it is IMHO a sad reflection since it basically means we have never valued research as much as that or given those who do such work as many tools; we should be surpassing ourselves, not degenerating. Even if it is not it seems to me that it is obvious there is not enough money and time spent on increasing human knowledge in general, much less working on problems like the energy crisis, war, famine, etc... Solving the problem in time would require changing that IMHO. It's not fair to keep expecting the eggheads to pull a rabbit out of their hat when they can't afford the hat. For some here that probably hits close to home... :D But the argument that "we'll figure something out ..." only holds water if the necessary effort and resources are expended to achieve such goals.
stud9920 has 'gay hard-ons'. 9920 is a gay code for anal sex. He's advertising his desire to have sex with other men right here on Slashdot.
I admit it: I stud9920 love to suck the cock. What's wrong with that?
Why not waste 25% or 50%? That question was one that helped get us into the mess we are now in. Now here's somebody who still hasn't gotten a clue, proposing 99%. Is it just me? I feel like I've been told I don't understand the issues, by a guy who's just proposed that we fly to the Moon on the backs of giant swans!
Who is John Cabal?