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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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"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 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