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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.'"
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.
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.
Both wind and solar need more work to be better solutions. If we'd subsidized them the past 60 years (OK, 40 years since NASA) the way we have oil and nukes, we might not have even noticed any energy crises at all.
But even so, the Mid-Atlantic is just one place. There's lots of others, like across the Great Lakes, and all over the damn place. And that 330GW is just that accessible to current engineering near the ground, not really in the whole atmosphere. To say nothing of cyclones.
Also, I don't know where you're getting your 10% energy for solar cells stats. PVs aren't just harnessing IR, but rather much of the spectrum. There are perfectly good 25% efficient cells out there in the sunlight, with 42% efficiency achieved this year from concentrators (which are cheaper than their equivalent area in actual cells).
We're not limited to today's tech. We've got about 5-10 more years where we can use petrofuels without committing to shifting the planet's ecosystems into a new one in which our civilization is likely to fail. We've got decades, centuries after that to perfect it. Or to stare at a pile of nuke waste that will just become a bigger pollution and security problem every year instead.
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make install -not war
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.
Read the article to which I linked, instead of pulling "a turbine every 50 feet" out of your "hat". And look at the large availablity of offshore, with its 50% higher power.
You also don't seem to know that the kinds of droughts the US already experiences is already cutting significantly into our hydroelectric power reliability.
I did not argue that a single turbine could replace every single oil well. I just offered a comparison of oil wells to turbines, because people tend to picture a towering gusher when thinking of oil wells, but turbines are directly comparable. And we never had an oil well every 50 feet. My actual argument was that we don't have the dire emergency requiring nukes that this article's subject now likes to claim. The nuke biz has always presented the alternatives to nukes as absolute paradise vs absolute hell, with no alternatives, and I'm pointing out that wind is quite a viable alternative.
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make install -not war
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.
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.
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.
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