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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.'"
Oh, for fuck's sake. Everything will eventually run out. At some point, the sun will go dark, and even your "renewable" sources like wind and solar will be useless. Hell, hydroelectric power isn't renewable either - it's slowly sapping energy from the moon.
Nuclear fusion, which we will figure out sometime in the next few decades, will provide enough energy for millenia. That's fine for me.
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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.
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
http://claybennett.com/pages2/godzilla.html
By Clay Bennett.
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.
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
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
I really wish that folks like you would simply stop. You solve nothing and force US (and probably EU) back to coal.
... arming oneself with basic facts on any subject is neither difficult nor time-consuming. At least on Slashdot, if you post ignorantly you'll be flamed into a state of crispy enlightenment in a matter of seconds.
I agree. You know, some people wave their ignorance around like a badge of honor (or honour, if you prefer.) Me, I was raised by a nuclear physicist and electronics engineer, I have multiple Ph.Ds in my family, and while I'm just the village idiot in comparison, I am continually astounded at the sheer number of people that complain vociferously about that which they do not understand. I wasn't taught to look upon ignorance as a virtue, yet that is exactly how many Americans look at it. Scary, really.
It's not a matter of intelligence, or lack thereof, it is a matter of realizing the limits of one's knowledge, and rectifying that situation when necessary. This is the Information Age
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm not sure they meant "every time an activist changes their opinion". Personally, I would agree with the GP if they meant that this case proves that this particular activist is *willing* to change their mind. Too many people are not *willing* to change their mind (see current US govt) and are more concerned with saving face than being correct or doing the right thing. It's refreshing to see proof that someone doesn't operate under those restrictions.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
It comes down to this:
- a roof has a large surface area
- sun ain't going to burn out any time soon
- solar panels can't be made into bombs
I don't understand why we are still arguing about this. Well maybe you should find out why before posting then. Do you really think solar is a viable option but we're not considering it just because we don't want to make our roofs look ugly? There's a reason no-one is using solar power on a large scale.
sun ain't going to burn out any time soon Nuclear fuel isn't going to run out any time soon either.
solar panels can't be made into bombs You really think nuclear power plants are needed for governments to create bombs? Japan has the largest nuclear plant in the world, but is strongly opposed to nuclear weapons. The number of nukes has decreased massively since the Cold War, so if your logic goes more plants = more bombs = bad the data completely contradicts you.
Most types of reactors aren't useful for creating nuclear weapons; reactor grade fuel doesn't have to be enriched as much as a weapon grade fuel, because you don't want reactor fuel to be critical. Conveniently it's much harder to enrich uranium to weapons grade nuclear fuel than reactor grade fuel.
Fuck nuclear. Oh, yeah, great "all we have to worry about is this extremely toxic waste... but that's not a problem because all we have to do is store it safely! it'll never get into the water supply! we'll always have room to store it! people will never make bombs out of it. there'll never be another hiroshima/nagasaki/chernobyl" Yeah, that's pretty much how the argument goes.. Though there's no need to mention hiroshima and nagasaki because nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
Seriously, has the world gone stupid or something? Ok, MORE stupid. How on earth can you people convince yourself that nuclear waste is acceptable? What is wrong with you? You really think you've seen the light and that all the policy makers and scientists in the world just haven't heard of solar power? They'll slap their foreheads after reading your post and say "Wow ddoctor, why didn't I think of solar?!"
Waste arguments aside... why the hell are we, as a civilization, pursuing nuclear technology, given nuclear annihilation is probably the #1 most likely reason we will become extinct? Because an energy crisis would cause huge conflict, possibly including nuclear war (oh what an irony that would be). I don't think the effects of global warming would decrease political tensions either.
Most of all it's because we don't have a choice. Fossil fuels are running out and causing problems anyway. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, gerbils running on wheels, etc, won't scale (unless a huge breakthrough in efficiency is made). Hydroelectric power sources are limited, and can have huge environmental impact.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
"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.
Well yeah, the magical elves are a nice feature, but the thing that really makes wind-farm maintenance less of a hassle than nuclear-plant maintenance is the fact that no radioactive materials are involved. That means that you don't have to give every employee a six-month security screening to make sure they won't start passing out free uranium samples to al-quaeda, and you don't have to make your wind farm 150% earthquake-proof, hurricane-proof, and hijacked-airliner-proof. You don't have to surround your wind farm with maximum-security fencing and a legion of armed guards, either. Nor do you have to deal with all of the health and safety protocols required by OSHA to keep your employees from getting cancer, and finally you don't have to figure out which group of NIMBYs to send off your spent nuclear waste to, how to settle the resulting lawsuits, or how to deliver that waste safely to the disposal site.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
.... fossil fuels are so fabulous because you only need to expend the energy necessary to go dig them up to be able to use them.......
The US has enough coal to last for centuries. Where did all that carbon in coal come from originally? We call coal, oil and natural gas "fossil fuels" because they were produced by living things, mostly plants. These plants needed sunshine and therefore were on the surface of the earth using up the carbon in the atmosphere. These living things were then buried, leaving the earth with much less carbon in the air. Without the activity of man, the a balance between carbon production and carbon removal was reached long ago.
Now if we liberate this carbon from the past, the plants will grow better because they have more CO2 to use. Also, plants grow better in warmer conditions. At some point there should be a new equilibrium where the amount of carbon the plants remove equals the amount we put back by burning them and/or their ancestors. This would likely happens long before we have liberated all of the carbon now stored underground. All that carbon used to be in the air, making the globe warmer than it is today. So global warming might not be such a cataclysmic thing it is made out to be. As the earth gets warmer, less energy is needed for heating. Solar absorption panels can be used for cooling. Global warming could even be beneficial in the long term!
All theory is gray
Not exactly. All that carbon used to be in the air millions of years ago, FOR millions of years. Our fossil fuels didn't spontaneously form one day, sucking all the carbon dioxide out of the air. This was a very slow process, where over millions of years layers of plants were buried in sediments, slowly leaching carbon out of the atmosphere.
It is true that as temps go up, plants grow better. And if we were releasing this stored carbon on the same timescale as it was stored, it wouldn't be an issue. The issue is that we're releasing all of that stored carbon over perhaps three centuries, rather than a few million years. It's not the magnitude that has scientists worried - it's the timescale.
Really, the big issue is that our climate has been pretty stable for about ten thousand years. What has everyone all excited is that it's now pretty obviously changing. This means populations will eventually have to move, countries may change size and shape, and centers of agriculture may have to move. All this upsets the stability that we as humans take for granted.
Once again, it's not the magnitude, it's the timescale. Humans have always been forced to move around by climate changes. Now we're looking at it happening over a human lifespan, rather than several.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
"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.
Solar panels are about 30% efficient
In a lab, maybe. In practice, commerically, not so much. 15% is more like it, but that's when they're new. After a time they drop to about 12%, so that's what you design at. Then 85-90% for the inverter unless you're using direct DC.
You also say "700 W/m^2 during the day" - what part of the day? Those measurements (available at your local weather data collection agency) are figured for surfaces perpendicular to the direction of sunlight. Do you plan to install a tracking mount for your panels? If not you have to derate the capacity.
=Smidge=
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
Doubling of coal usage.... bloody morons greenpeace are, they are Pro Coal, pollute the earth idiots with zero brains.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to believe that Greenpeace is a front group for the coal industry, but I'm sure that "big coal" (if there is such a term?) sees them as "useful idiots". Personally, I think it's criminal that nuke plant production hasn't happened here in way too long. Not sure which is the bigger problem, people scared of things they aren't qualified to understand (such as, why a Chernobyl-type event could not happen with our reactor designs), or if it's because people understand but want to leverage FUD to keep nuke plants from being built.
This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to take people seriously when they tell me I should change my lifefstyle in this way or that in regards to power. If we had been building nuke plants all along for the last couple decades, we'd be in a VERY much different carbon situation right now. The anti-nuke people are partly to blame for this.