Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
how many ppm U235 is most coal burned in the united states again?
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
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
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. Thats more anti-US nuclear proliferation policy. If you don't mind breeding and re-using your fuel till it's almost non radioactive you get far less waste. You do end of with a lot of radiated other material like all the tools used to handle the fuel and waste. But likewise anything that is radioactive is potential fuel! You just need to spend more dollars trying to make the system more efficient.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Where I am, solar irradiance is about 700 W/m^2 during the day.
/proc/acpi), so that's a tenth of a square meter.
Solar panels are about 30% efficient, so that's 210 W/m^2 of actual power.
My laptop runs on about 20W (source:
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.
You're right. Leaving this waste inside of a steel tube 1000 feet into the side of a geologically stable and secluded mountain sounds like a horrible idea. After all, the steel will corrode in a few thousand years, and then THERE WILL BE NUCLEAR WASTE BURIED IN 1000 FEET OF SOLID ROCK! definitely cause for panic.
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.
There is no *waste* that lasts 100,000 years. Most of the isotopes currently viewed as waste are very good sources of energy. Current reactors are not even built to utilize most of the fuel but to generate nuclear weapons hence the so called *waste*. For example, UK now has a problem with all the *waste* Plutonium being generated by its power plants!! That is the insanity! Plutonium is a better power source than U-235 if you have a real energy reactor. One of the few truly civilian reactors are the CANDU reactors designed in Canada. They utilize heavy water and breed Plutonium and use it for energy at the same time. No Plutonium *waste* there. Heck, they are used now to get rid off the US extra nuclear stockpiles - stuff that can't be handled by US reactors mailing because of the Plutonium content.
:)
Secondly, don't be freaked out about radiation so much. If you were transparent to radiation such that a Geiger counter would see all the radiation going off inside of you (where the damage is done), it will go into a nice high pitched, continuous whine. You sid/madam, contain enough radioactive radioactive potassium for about 5000 events per second. Add that nice trails of cosmic muons hitting out every 0.5-1 second (enough to go right through you and ionize LOTS of stuff), and you are positively glowing
Also, coal has 2-3 ppm uranium and about 5ppm thorium (means, 1,000,000 pounds of coal have 2-3 pounds of uranium and 5 ponds of thorium). Since US burns about 2200 times that http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html, US alone is releasing about 5000 pounds of Uranium and 10,000 pounds of Thorium into the air. Ok, there are those precipitators, but only about 50% effective on these things (unlike soot). So, about 1 metric ton of Uranium goes poof, into the air *NOW* in the US.
Anyway, most of the so called *waste* can be recycled. You only end up with maybe one small barrel of waste per large nuclear plant per year. That is much cheaper to watch that one can for 10,000 years than letting all the mercury from the coal power plants pollute the lakes such that we can't even fish there anymore. Sad.
http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Publications/Fission%20Fuel%20Conservation.htm
BTW: Uranium is not HOT. ANYTHING that has a 10,000 year half-life, by definition, is NOT hot. HOT stuff has a life time of seconds or minutes or maybe up to a few days. Hot stuff is used in medicine.
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.
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.
Well, let's compare accidents, since they can, and do happen. American and Soviet reactors had similar accidents. The first one is Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. It frightened many people, but did little in reality, not because anyone in the control room knew what to do, for they were clueless for a long while, but because it was designed well. In the Soviet Union, dozens of people died soon after, thousands and thousands died later, and millions were affected due to poor design and a negligent Supervisory Engineer.
Let's compare the Chemical Industry to Three Mile Island(TMI), since many environmentalist seem to act like anything Nuclear is far more dangerous that anything else. TMI causes millions of dollars in damages to the power plant, and not much else. Yet Chemical accidents, large and small, are routine, causing death and destruction. Munition plants have exploded, many petrochemical plants have exploded, and the now widespread well water contamination caused by a gasoline additive are only a few examples. Remember the Praxair lot in St. Louis? Have we forgotten the images of canisters full of flammable gases being launched like rockets into a nearby residental neighborhood?
Maybe if we can make more environmentalists see the hard numbers of current deaths due to chemical based pollution and accidents in America, then maybe they will realize that it is our chemical modern world that is killing us, not Nuclear Power. I find it ironic that it was the outcry against chemical based pollution in our air, water, and food that jump started the environmental movement in the 1970s in the first place.
Regarding the government scientists falsifying safety data for Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada, and the earthquake near the site in 2002, I posted links that are broken (error on my part). Since I couldn't figure out how to edit my original post, here are corrected links:
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600119181,00.html
and:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/06/14/yucca.quake/index.html
The problem with the first 50 years or so of nuclear power generators is that the military had a word in the design. They wanted to be able to produce 'useful' nucleotides with them. At the time cleaner designs were suggested (for instance using Thorium instead of Uranium), but the designs that got money were all backed by the military. Now that politically the issues are settled, engineers are free to work on clean designs again, but that's fairly recent. So not only will we get safer reactors in the future (like neutron-beam driven that you can turn off instantly), but they will also produce much less waste (fewer long life actinides) and have NO possible military applications (no plutonium). Yes, I work in that field.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I think this nicely summarizes and demonstrates the main problem with today's enviromental movement: since everything you do affects something, you can't do anything. As a result the enviromentalists are considered nuts and ignored, even when they actually have a valid point (which you don't, especially since hydroelectric takes energy from the rivers, not the oceans).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That's a great book. The reason there was an incident at TMI was a stuck sentinel valve. The reason there wasn't an *accident* at TMI was because of double redundancy. Incident and accident are an important distinction.
I spent six years doing nuclear power in the US Navy. A Chernobyl would never occur in the US Navy, who uses more nuclear power plants than anybody and has been doing so for 40 years, because they use a different design with multiple safety features built in. Things like negative temperature coefficients, automatic control rod insertion and many, many more. The more critical difference is that the people running the plant are well trained and aware of what they are doing.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
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.
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
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.
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?
Republicans are just as responsible for killing those efforts.
How so? It was killed by Executive order. I will agree that Republicans have done nothing to re-start the efforts. The work began and progressed under Reagan and Bush the I, and was ~immediately killed by Clinton.
And the reason may well be that there's a lot more profit in highly wasteful, dangerous nuclear power plants.
Only in that they're available to be licensed. IFR's are cheaper to build, use less fuel, and don't have waste storage problems. That's *more* profitable.
People trying to sell nuclear energy are engaging in bait-and-switch: they are baiting with the theoretically possible efficient reactors
No they're not. When has anybody ever offered to build any kind of breeder reactor in the US? We've only ever tried to build light water reactors.
but when it comes to deployment, switch to the inefficient, wasteful, dangerous kind.
Theoretically dangerous, mind you. Not as dangerous as coal, which kills thousands of people each year. This is a real, demonstrated danger.
And as long as that's the case, nuclear power is simply off the table.
Unless you think global warming is a problem worth fixing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
These enviro-nazis aren't interested in making a contribution - just being noisy mufflers. I wish that we could 'register' these people such that the power companies will disconnect their electrical / natural gas services. Don't want them to be hypocritical by consuming energy that is produced by polluting companies. When they try to gas up their stupid Prius (the one with the replacement battery that will cost over $5,000), the arabs in the gas station should refuse to sell them any unleaded - and tell them they should get a bicycle and set an example.
Thirty years ago these people (or their hippie parents) were talking about GLOBAL COOLING. They also said that METHANE was the real problem. Since they were wrong (they always seem to be wrong about everything), they started to talk about GLOBAL WARMING. And because there's a huge amount of scientists that refute and dismiss this claim, now they're talking about CLIMATE CHANGE (I guess they're trying to hedge their stupidity by covering both ends simultaneously.)
And Yes, there is climate change - it happens constantly. In fact, it's the sun that is the culprit for this. If these enviro-nazi ostridges pulled their head out of (you know where - - rhymes with cranial-rectal inversion), they'd see that even the whimpy ice caps on Mars are receding - and at a rate to be expected for it's distance from the sun. But they'd have to admit they were wrong - something that they are genetically incapable of doing. I don't recall seeing any powerplants, SUVs or other CO2 generators being on Mars, so you can draw your own conclusion.
The earth has already experienced several major ice ages and numerous minor ice ages. According to the scientists, at least the ones that have hard data and communicate rationally, we are actually entering another ice age cycle. So if anything, we need MORE CO2 to offset the temperature decreases that we'll see.
These robot-mind idiots don't understand that WE NEED CO2. How do you think plants grow? They 'breathe' CO2 and 'exhale' O2. We, however, breathe O2 and exhale CO2. It's a perfect symbiosis. If the frazzled, frantic, irrational tree-huggers want to reduce CO2, then they should either plant more trees (actually grass is way more efficient) or they should STOP BREATHING.
But to get these misguided and irrational control-freak hypocrates to stop using electricity, natural gas (or equivalent), unleaded gas would be like trying to get a Hyena to become a vegetarian. NOT!
By the way, I'm also giving away FREE Carbon Offset Certificates to everybody who wants to be 'politically correct'. If you want to get your FREE Carbon Offset Certificate, go to:
http://www.tw-profitzone.com/free/
And yes, yes, I'm sure that the slashdot censor nazis will give me a zero rating (something that I wear with pride). Political correctness is just the liberal way of covertly CENSORING Your Free Speech.