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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.'"
World supply of Uranium 235 has about peaked as well. It's not exactly a long-term solution.
Now we a pack of homer simpsons to work at the 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.
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.
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.
She realized there are problems with the other options, great!
...but...
There are a lot of problems with nuclear power as well - mainly radiation.
So to reiterate, our choices are:
1. Crazy Deformed Retarded Babies (with a small dollop of cancer)
2. Malnutrition-Deformed Retarded Babies (but, without the cancer)
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
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/
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)
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.
What pollutes more, a continuous train of burning coal or a hundred pounds of isotopes? Now before you all start bitching about disposal of nuclear material why not just load it into a rocket and point it towards the sun?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"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
I wish people who wanted the civil right amendment passed in 1964 would admit they were wrong as well, its obviously been a failure.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
http://greenwood.cr.usgs.gov/energy/factshts/163-97/FS-163-97.html
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
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
She and all them Greenpeace, anti nuclear folks - they should picket all the coal power plants!!
What's the chance of that?
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.
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.
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....
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."
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
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.
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.
I think the guy who said it was named...
POL POT!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
when will people learn... to learn?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
is to control our population. Without that, we are just delaying the inevitable catastrophy (be it famine->wars or population+travel+pollution->diseases).
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.
If i shot a big wad of my warm sticky cum all over her face and made her spread it on her titties and swallow it, is that considered a base LOAD ?
ROFLMAO
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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
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):
And you should google "tipping point"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
But it's far more likely you're lying, and were never pro-nuclear in the first place.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, so many bad assumptions that I'm not entirely sure where to start picking this one apart.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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?