Slashdot Mirror
Former Anti-Nuclear Activist Does A 180
palegray.net writes "Wired is running a story on how Gwyneth Cravens, a former nuclear power protester has changed her views on nuclear power as a viable solution to the world's energy needs. Said Cravens: 'I used to think we surely could do better. We could have more wind farms and solar. But I then learned about base-load energy, and that there are three forms of it: fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear. In the United States, we're maxed out on hydro. That leaves fossil fuels and nuclear power, and most of the fossil fuel burned is coal.'"
1. World production at current prices has peaked I'm assuming you meant to say, there is plenty of it around but just not at current costs of extraction. The cost of the uranium is a small part of the total cost of nuclear power plants so even a substantial raise in the costs of extraction can be dealt with.
2. Uranium 235 is not the only fuel that can be used in nuclear power 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.
Try looking up the Olympic Dam mine in Australia owned by BHP Billiton. Every few years they send the geologists out a few more hundred meters and add another 50 years to the life of the mine when they need to boost reserve numbers for financial reasons. No one knowns how big the deposit is but it is HUGE - I've heard figures sugesting it might supply 30% of world uranium demand for the next century or more.
It's not nearly as dire as that, unless we keep using light-water reactors... take a look at a brief summary of the situation that jibes with what I've heard from various sources. Can't seem to find anything peer-reviewed at the moment, but I'm sure it's out there.
Cyg
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.
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.
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/
2: No, it hasn't.
3: Doesn't matter. There are other radioactive materials that can be used for fission.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Everything will eventually run out. At some point, the sun will go dark, and even your "renewable" sources like wind and solar will be useless. Hell, hydroelectric power isn't renewable either - it's slowly sapping energy from the moon.
Nuclear fusion, which we will figure out sometime in the next few decades, will provide enough energy for millenia. That's fine for me.
This space intentionally left blank.
how many ppm U235 is most coal burned in the united states again?
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.
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.
Well, there is always Uranium 238 that you can convert to fissible fuel...unless you have a crazy society where you have to fear about the possible abuse of Plutonium to threaten your neigbours. And there is Thorium, that you can convert to Uranium 233 that is also fissible. Anyway, I doubt that it will run out as soon as the fossil fuel, and it is also quite hard to create plastic from sunlight and uranium, so we shouldn't burn organic fuel anyway. ;-) Oh, and don't forget CO2, even if we stopped producing it right now, the nature won't recover anytime soon. Stop burning fossile fuel right now and build those damned reactors, I'd say...
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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
What a little education will do for ya.
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]
Look: giving up our way of life is not an option. And I don't care about your agrarian fantasies, and neither does anyone else. All these people crying "conserve, conserve, conserve!" are wasting their breath.
If you truly care more about the environment than dismantling modern civilization because you just don't like it, then advocate solutions that the average person can live with. Like renewables, and yes, Virginia, like nuclear power.
The CSIRO (google them) will be able to tell you that Australia has the bulk of the worlds known Uranium deposits, however Canada is the worlds largest producer.
This is because the vast majority of Australia's Uranium is, as yet, untapped. This limit is not due to technology or environmental concerns preventing the rights holders from extracting the material from the ground. It's because they are waiting on the market prices to rise.
There is no shortage of Uranium, it's just that the raw materials are, mostly, in the hands of a very small number of companies who are colluding to exploit high demand while controlling supply.
You know, just like the Oil companies have done for decades, with great success.
At this point in time, Uranium demand hasn't even BEGUN to peak. Once everyone starts rushing towards nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, expect to see production ramp up.
The moon has nothing to do with hydroelectric, maybe you meant tidal energy?
Everyone keeps claiming that nuclear waste is a huge long-term problem or that we'll run out of U235. This is a political problem and not a technological problem. Technologically, the problems have been solved, but due to a federal mandate from President Carter we are stuck with the current mess.
It is well known how to convert U238 into plutonium as a usable fuel, and the isotope of Pu is not suitable for bombs either. Thorium is also readily available as a fuel as well with a much larger supply than Uranium.
The other problem that always comes up is nuclear waste. When a fuel rod is removed from a reactor, it still contains a lot of usable fuel, which can be extracted and reused. If we use breeder reactors, the long term nuclear waste can be burned up so the only remainder is stuff that has a half life in the hundreds of years instead of thousands or tens of thousands of years, and it would be a fraction of the amount of waste. France already does this. It's expensive, but cost can probably be greatly reduced as the process is improved and the scale grows.
Granted, we do need to have very strong safety standards, but modern designs for nuclear reactors are a lot safer than the old designs. And the cost could also be drastically reduced if we stopped making each reactor a complete custom one-of and had a bunch with the same basic design.
The other form of energy I'd like to see tapped is geothermal, since that's almost free.
I consider myself green and am looking into installing Solar when the price drops a bit more.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Solar irradiation at the Earth's surface is approximately 150,000 TW.
Mankind's projected peak power needs by 2020 or so amount to about 22 TW. Yeah. 22, not 22,000.
So throw stupid statements like "three forms of base-load energy, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear" in the rubbish bin of irrelevancy, and tap what is effectively an infinite supply (and if that's not enough, place solar arrays into LEO).
There are hundreds of times more permanently irradiated deserts in the world than would be needed to supply Mankind's power needs for the forseeable future. What's more, they're spread around the world, so base load is as easy to supply as peak, without storage. All that's lacking is the will to do so --- especially the will to act against the greed of those who are currently making megabucks off fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
So dear Gwyneth, think again. You've just been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a costly mistake.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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.
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.
4. Hope you have good aim.
Pol Pot already tried this in the 70s. It didn't work, except it did reduce Cambodia's energy usage. And their population.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Well, we could go at night.
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
5. But not to good.
Yes, and the CSIRO has been telling our government that the whole country could easily be run from renewables for at least the past decade.
The CSIRO also identified the base load issue as a red-herring - hint: in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere. Wind & Hydro provide the base load for other renewables (solar, tidal, wave, geothermal), just as Hydro currently provides a fast switch "base load" for coal fired plants (that require scheduled shutdowns for maintenance and even then they still break down from time to time).
However our politicians after doing their best to ingnore the issue (lest it affect our coal exports) have been busy colluding with the likes of GWB and GE for the last few years in an attempt to monopolise the nuclear fuel industry.
It seems to be working quite well if you consider the price hike in Uranium over the last 5yrs or so. IMHO the main reason for this state of affairs is not money but the fact that renewable energy can not (easily) be used as an international political lever in the way that fossil fuels have been since WW2.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Indeed not. It is essential.
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.
That means that she believes in the theory of activity. Activitist is a term made up by people who are anti-activity (i.e. the couch institute) to make it sound like a political cause. They propose an alternative "stationary activity" theory which in practice just an euphemism for sitting down.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
As several posts (including one of mine) have pointed out, fission can be used for quite a while (even if you don't take breeder reactors into account). Converting a fission plant to a fusion plant would be interesting. Basically, the reactor itself would almost certainly be scrapped entirely. The turbines and generators, OTOH, wouldn't generally care whether the steam was produced by fusion or fission, so they could probably remain more or less intact.
Interestingly, when/if you actually look carefully at the history of accidents (and near-accidents) in nuclear power plants, most of the problems are surprisingly mundane. In fact, it looks like a lot of the problems are basically mechanical -- things like building a steam valve that simply opens and closes dependably for years at a time, even though the steam involved is at high pressure and temperature (e.g. ~300 degrees C and 2000+ PSI). Quite a bit of research has been done into temperatures and pressures of primary coolants (near the bottom of the page).
Even if a repair is strictly in the steam part of the plant (where nuclear radiation isn't a problem) it can take months to cool hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, etc., down from its normal operating temperature to the point that a person can enter and work on something. This makes the cost of repairs so high that the system must be engineered to run for years (preferably decades) at a time without them.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
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.)
Considering the Earth is a closed system with a fixed amount of resources, our options for maintaining our way of life include:
1) Significantly reducing the Earth's population, perhaps by a factor of ten. (This includes killing off others and taking their resources)
2) Leaving the Earth to harvest resources elsewhere.
Option 1 at best will maintain our present standard of living. Constant exponential increase in standard living, constrained to the surface of the Earth, is impossible.
Even conservation will at best delay the inevitable.
What he's referring to are Tidal generators. Rarer, but still in use. You're generally right, though.
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
The problem with renewable resources is the people in power, by not being able to control nature, have no means to control production.
Our society will embrace socialism before it embraces renewable energy as a replacement for fossil/nuclear power.
This isn't renewable energy's problem - just our society.
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.
I'm probably biting on a troll post, but it's possible you really could be that ignorant. Enron's golden years were during the Clinton administration, which pretty much let companies get away with murder when it came to accounting. The Bush administration is the one that wielded the hammer and sent people to jail (Lay got 45 years, too bad he died first), not to mention blowing up Arthur Andersen. Note also that Sarbanes-Oxley was passed during the Bush administration.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Ya know, we do have the technology to reprocess the "waste" and convert most of it into fuel that can be used again. The United States chooses not to use such technology due to concerns about proliferation -- but it's around. The French have been doing it for quite some time now.
Nuclear power is NOT the answerWhy? Mankind learned how to harness chemical reactions (fire). Then we learned how to split the atom and harness nuclear reactions. Sounds like a natural progression to me.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
The CSIRO also identified the base load issue as a red-herring - hint: in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere.
??!!?!11! WTF? How many turbines would we have to construct to take advantage of all the 'somewheres' around? How much environmental damage are we willing to do in the name of wind power providing base load? I hope that is a very poor interpretation of their argument, whatever it is. Australia, the US and Canada are all very large countries. I don't think that argument truly respects the difficulties in transporting "base loads" from the northern midwest where the wind is blowing down to Southern California where it isn't.
Wind & Hydro provide the base load for other renewables (solar, tidal, wave, geothermal)
Wait, aren't the waves and tides always moving somewhere? What about geothermal?
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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.
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.
Copper, gold and uranium. The nuclear advocates forget that while uranium is not scarce the isotope used for fuel is so large amounts of high purity ore and a Manhatten project worth of gas centrifuges is needed. Turning a heavy metal into a gas requires quite a lot of energy so not just any lump of rock with uranium in it is worth turning into fuel. While there is a lot at Olympic Dam and a few other spots the dream of going 100% nuclear overnight is only possible in the cocaine dreams of PR folks - hence efforts with other fuels like thorium. There are other known very deep deposits of uranium at the bottom of the crust radioactive enough to generate a lot of their own heat - some nuclear advocates may be factoring that in despite it being a massive undertaking to drill a hole over fifteen kilometres deep let alone mine it.
Well, there's probably some truth to that. It has frequently been said (citation needed, sadly) that the cotton industry was instrumental in pushing for laws to ban marijuana growing and processing because they realized how much easier and cheaper it is to grow plants from the cannabis family than cotton.
It grows just about anywhere (unlike cotton), requires dramatically less water to grow, is much less susceptible to damage from insects (since you're using the stalk rather than the fluffy contents of a seed pod), and I suspect that it produces much more fiber per unit of field area, though I don't know for sure.
So while I'm not saying that the ease of growing it is the only reason it is illegal, yeah, it probably played a part. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere.
Because transmitting power over very long distances, and wasting the majority of it pushing the smaller part to its goal, didn't contribute to the current problem, and we should keep doing it, right?
You make a lot of good points. Yes the current plans involve who is retaining or expanding political power, often more than any considerations of physical power generation. Some types of resources lend themselves to political domination much more than others. Oil and Uranium are two that do.
Further, I agree wind has good potential to be a fast switch source similar to hydro. Yes, and nuclear doesn't lend itself to fast switch at all, at least in its current emphasis. The best prospective nuclear designs, i.e. pebble bed, are going to be much better at replacing coal and oil plants than any other sources.
Still, the 'red herring' opinion ignores a very important, indeed fundamental point - wasting huge portions of generated power to cross continental distances is such a serious part of the reason we have a mess on our collective hands, that it should always matter a great deal to the final opinion. No solution that treats typical 1,000 km + transmission losses as a minor consequence is going to be a good solution.
Who is John Cabal?
Wind power is the least environmentally damaging of all and takes up the least amount of space, but depending on your idea of beauty they could fuck up your view somewhat.
I'm not so sure about least environmentally damaging, but let's address the space issue: Gigawatt reactors are fairly typical and take up about 100 acres. You would need 17,000 acres of windfarm to match that, and it would only match it when the wind is blowing. So if we assume we need 3 locations to get 1GW of base load, suddenly we need 51,000 acres of wind farm to produce the base load of a 100 acre reactor.
Again I say WTF.
IIRC about 10% more than what is used to generate the required amount of power, since the complete absence of wind across even half a continent is an extremely rare occurance (ie: has never been recorded) there is no need to transport it that far.
"complete absence" is a red herring. Just because there is wind blowing doesn't mean its enough to make use of it.
Here's a wind atlas of the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_wind_power_map.png
The white and light cyan areas do not have enough wind for economical wind generation. The next bluer area is unlikely to have enough wind. Certainly not enough for companies to risk investment.
Going to the 3rd blue area, can you see any areas of more than half the continent where wind energy would have to be transported? I know I do.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
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.
Turning a heavy metal into a gas requires quite a lot of energy so not just any lump of rock with uranium in it is worth turning into fuel.
Except for the deposits in natural reactors, natural uranium all has the same ratio of isotopes. The process of enrichment is separate from the extraction of uranium from ore.
Also, you can build a reactor with naural uranium.
Play Command HQ online
.... that argument truly respects the difficulties in transporting "base loads"..........
Transporting large amounts of electricity long distances is lossy and therefore expensive. It is also difficult to build huge power lines because of NIMBY from a large number of property owners. There are places where it is cheaper to build certain kinds of power plants, but getting that power to the population centers where it it most needed is expensive to construct. Nuclear power stations can be built much closer to the places where the power is needed.
All theory is gray
Building them everywhere is a incredibly expensive and stupid idea.
In most places the wind doesnt blow nearly enough to justify them.
You'll only find wind farms in consistently windy places which is sensible.
There are a number of places where it rarely stops.
I've been told that in real world usage conditions, 200 tonnes a year of natural uranium is used in a 1 gigawatt plant. At modern capacity factors, that's around 40000 kilowatt hours per kilogram. At a 2% low concentration ore, mine just a ton of the stuff and you have the equivalent of (at 20% load factor) a 1MW wind turbine running for 5.5 months. I assure you that the steel and carbon fiber used to produce one of those isn't free, either.
So yes, huge amounts of energy are input in order to run things. But absolutely absurd amounts of energy are taken out, as well. The observed phenomena with uranium reserves is that when you decrease the concentration you consider practical to 1/10 of your current metric, you increase the observed reserves by a factor of 300. Any concentrations above 20 ppm for solid deposits are considered viable from an energy return on invested energy standpoint, and the highest deposits available hit around 20% concentration. Liquid refining uranium from seawater traces is considered practically undepletable as well (millions of years).
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
I think this nicely summarizes and demonstrates the main problem with today's enviromental movement: since everything you do affects something, you can't do anything. As a result the enviromentalists are considered nuts and ignored, even when they actually have a valid point (which you don't, especially since hydroelectric takes energy from the rivers, not the oceans).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Even if a repair is strictly in the steam part of the plant (where nuclear radiation isn't a problem) it can take months to cool hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, etc., down from its normal operating temperature to the point that a person can enter and work on something. This makes the cost of repairs so high that the system must be engineered to run for years (preferably decades) at a time without them.
It takes Days- as in two or three- to cool down a steam plant, even one attached to a nuclear power plant.
We do mine every 18 months, and in the 30 or so day's it's offline, we can take apart EVERYTHING, work it, and put it back together again. Our minimum refueling outage time is perhaps a couple weeks.
Most nuke plans run on an 18-24 month fuel cycle- 18 months is fairly typical and balances out the required maintanence vs cost of being offline. We do buy and use things meant to run for years at a time, because we want to cut costs.
It costs us well over a million dollars a day (maybe two) in lost revenue and additional staffing costs during a planned refueling outage.
Aside from that timeline problem your post is pretty accurate.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
That still have people living around it.
Yes, but it's still a dead city. 2,800 Sq Km that is too dangerous to live in for any length of time. Why do you insist on minimizing this?
That would have happened even without the accident. Cancer is one of the leading causes of death today, Chernobyl or no Chernobyl. Cancer rates have been worse for several neighboring areas with not particularly clean chemical production facilities.
Forgive me, I assumed that you would understand that I meant "cancers that otherwise would not have happened." Obviously you can't tell the exact cause for most cancers, but, depending on which study you look at, a whole lot more than 60 people have died from that accident. (That study, from the WHO, has a lot more credibility for me than a study that comes from what is in effect a nuclear power lobby group)
She lacks credibility because she ignores, as you also choose to ignore, evidence (and, in the case of the dead zone, blindingly obvious facts) that contradict the point she tries to make.
To answer your question about green baseload replacements, try googling "pumped storage." Proven, simple and efficient. After that, think about (and google) tidal power and hydrogen generation/burning. There are others as well. The world is not as hopeless as the nuclear power industry wants you to believe.
And the cost of nuclear power is FAR more than what you claim. First, did you notice that your link points to a paper from an Australian uranium mining lobby group? Second, that study vastly underestimated the cost of commissioning new plants, which the study pegs at close to $1000/KW, is in reality always at least double that. A decent wikipedia discussion of this exists. See also the MIT study. (which, by the ways, puts the current lifecycle cost of nuke at 6.7 cents/KWh, which is far more then any mainstream power source)
I used to be very much for nuclear power, until I did research with an open mind. The truth is that it's very expensive, has a poor safety track record (and, in case you need something to keep you up at night, think about the dangers and potential for sabotage when we move all this radioactive material around), and is unnecessary. You can talk as much as you want about safeguards to the nuke process, but in the end either government (corrupt) or private industry (more corrupt) has to build and run these things. If we spent the money and energy that is currently going to nuke on developing and building truly green power, we'd all be much better off.
-Daniel
Ownyourphone.com. Custom ringtones, cheap and easy
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.
"You could waste 99% of the wind or solar electricity, and that won't be an issue."
Yeah, because wind generators and solar panels cost nothing to build, don't require any fossil fuel inputs in their manufacture, and never break down or require maintenance. So sure, why not waste 99% of their output.
"Renewables don't produce pollution. Wind turbines don't produce pollution. Solar cells don't produce pollution. Biomass doesn't produce pollution ( carbon is cycled around the system, but the net output is zero )."
Yes, solar cells and wind turbines descend fully formed from the womb of Gaia, ready to magically convert wind and solar to electricity until the end of time.
Actually hemp paper was used for centuries and only really was replaced by wood fiber because somehow, for some reason, both the UK and the US, some hundred years and some spare change ago, used the treaty loophole to stop each other's citizens from growing hemp. One has to wonder why, but then all the OTHER prohibitions on mostly harmless hobbies and habits have been for no real apparent reason as well, except of course, to be used by ONE group of voting lottery winners to tell the OTHER group of lottery losers what to do, how to live, and where and why. Nothing new. Tyranny carries on, whether its lots of small tyrants or a few big tyrants. Men love their slavery and will fight to the death to prevent its end.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
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.
Doubling of coal usage.... bloody morons greenpeace are, they are Pro Coal, pollute the earth idiots with zero brains.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to believe that Greenpeace is a front group for the coal industry, but I'm sure that "big coal" (if there is such a term?) sees them as "useful idiots". Personally, I think it's criminal that nuke plant production hasn't happened here in way too long. Not sure which is the bigger problem, people scared of things they aren't qualified to understand (such as, why a Chernobyl-type event could not happen with our reactor designs), or if it's because people understand but want to leverage FUD to keep nuke plants from being built.
This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to take people seriously when they tell me I should change my lifefstyle in this way or that in regards to power. If we had been building nuke plants all along for the last couple decades, we'd be in a VERY much different carbon situation right now. The anti-nuke people are partly to blame for this.
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
Where can I read more about this working fusion technology, please? Because I was of the impression that it doesn't work yet, so your 30-40 year statement is somewhat at odds with that. Much as I'd love it to be true, can you show me some facts on this?
IIRC, the paper industry was at least as influential in getting anti-marijuana (and through that anti-hemp) laws passed in the United States, particularly Friedrich Weyerhäuser a large captain in the wood pulp and paper industry. He also had a decent toehold in the media through print, and spread anti-marijuana FUD via this power, convincing the public to demand anti-marijuana laws. It seems likely that his actions were out of self interest in that hemp also makes fibers which are quite decent at making paper, as evidenced by the pro-legalization's point that the constitution was written on hemp paper.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Given that the global warming argument got its political impetus from Margaret Thatcher wanting to push nukes to castrate the NUM (coal miners' union), it's interesting to see her former foes come around to her way of thinking.
Not that I mind, I am a big Thatcher fan and am glad that she smashed the unions and privatised, if only she could have spun off the BBC it wouldn't be a jobs scheme for unemployable pinkoes.
And yes, if I could have one, I would have a nuclear battery in my basement.
The environmental movement is unable to acknowledge tradeoffs. If you ask an environmentalist to choose between coal and nuclear, they will say "neither". But that strategy does nothing except maintaining the status quo... and in this case the status quo (coal) is environmentally worse than nuclear.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
TMI had a meltdown, and what happened? Zero deaths OR INJURIES as a result.
You can't blame nuclear power for the disaster at Chernobyl. Blame the broke Russians and their stupid reactor design, but bad design is the designer's fault, not nuclear power.
Nuclear power can be made safely, and we have a long track record of exactly that. I'm not a pro-nuke activist, but let's be reasonable, shall we?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Republicans are just as responsible for killing those efforts.
How so? It was killed by Executive order. I will agree that Republicans have done nothing to re-start the efforts. The work began and progressed under Reagan and Bush the I, and was ~immediately killed by Clinton.
And the reason may well be that there's a lot more profit in highly wasteful, dangerous nuclear power plants.
Only in that they're available to be licensed. IFR's are cheaper to build, use less fuel, and don't have waste storage problems. That's *more* profitable.
People trying to sell nuclear energy are engaging in bait-and-switch: they are baiting with the theoretically possible efficient reactors
No they're not. When has anybody ever offered to build any kind of breeder reactor in the US? We've only ever tried to build light water reactors.
but when it comes to deployment, switch to the inefficient, wasteful, dangerous kind.
Theoretically dangerous, mind you. Not as dangerous as coal, which kills thousands of people each year. This is a real, demonstrated danger.
And as long as that's the case, nuclear power is simply off the table.
Unless you think global warming is a problem worth fixing.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
These enviro-nazis aren't interested in making a contribution - just being noisy mufflers. I wish that we could 'register' these people such that the power companies will disconnect their electrical / natural gas services. Don't want them to be hypocritical by consuming energy that is produced by polluting companies. When they try to gas up their stupid Prius (the one with the replacement battery that will cost over $5,000), the arabs in the gas station should refuse to sell them any unleaded - and tell them they should get a bicycle and set an example.
Thirty years ago these people (or their hippie parents) were talking about GLOBAL COOLING. They also said that METHANE was the real problem. Since they were wrong (they always seem to be wrong about everything), they started to talk about GLOBAL WARMING. And because there's a huge amount of scientists that refute and dismiss this claim, now they're talking about CLIMATE CHANGE (I guess they're trying to hedge their stupidity by covering both ends simultaneously.)
And Yes, there is climate change - it happens constantly. In fact, it's the sun that is the culprit for this. If these enviro-nazi ostridges pulled their head out of (you know where - - rhymes with cranial-rectal inversion), they'd see that even the whimpy ice caps on Mars are receding - and at a rate to be expected for it's distance from the sun. But they'd have to admit they were wrong - something that they are genetically incapable of doing. I don't recall seeing any powerplants, SUVs or other CO2 generators being on Mars, so you can draw your own conclusion.
The earth has already experienced several major ice ages and numerous minor ice ages. According to the scientists, at least the ones that have hard data and communicate rationally, we are actually entering another ice age cycle. So if anything, we need MORE CO2 to offset the temperature decreases that we'll see.
These robot-mind idiots don't understand that WE NEED CO2. How do you think plants grow? They 'breathe' CO2 and 'exhale' O2. We, however, breathe O2 and exhale CO2. It's a perfect symbiosis. If the frazzled, frantic, irrational tree-huggers want to reduce CO2, then they should either plant more trees (actually grass is way more efficient) or they should STOP BREATHING.
But to get these misguided and irrational control-freak hypocrates to stop using electricity, natural gas (or equivalent), unleaded gas would be like trying to get a Hyena to become a vegetarian. NOT!
By the way, I'm also giving away FREE Carbon Offset Certificates to everybody who wants to be 'politically correct'. If you want to get your FREE Carbon Offset Certificate, go to:
http://www.tw-profitzone.com/free/
And yes, yes, I'm sure that the slashdot censor nazis will give me a zero rating (something that I wear with pride). Political correctness is just the liberal way of covertly CENSORING Your Free Speech.