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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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The stuff is safe, as long as its contained there's no reason why anybody needs to gain access to it. There's only one reason to guard the waste, and that's to ensure that it doesn't end up in the hands of terrorists.
From the point of view of disposal, the main thing is keeping it out of the water supply and away from people. Not really that hard, until you start getting alarmists crying about the problems. The reality is that the harm done by fossil fuels on a daily basis to people and wildlife is far greater than what nuclear is going to do.
Even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, probably the worst esposures ever to radioactive waste, the number of radiation related deaths was only a small fraction of the number that were killed as a direct result of the blasts.
The main issue I have with the way its handled here, is that we in WA get all of the waste from, I think, 11 states, and we have the feds refusing to give us any assistance to clean up the mess we have. That being said the treat is more of a long term thyroid cancer risk than anything else, and potassium iodide does a pretty good job of keeping that at manageable levels.
In the US, any reactor that loses power to the control rods will also cut power to the fuel rods, resulting in the control rods falling into the core, and the fuel rods falling out of the core into a huge slab, stopping the reaction. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a case of someone using bad Latin to sound smart, and failing. Prote is the middle Latin conjugation of Proteo, meaning "first among". They're trying to say she was one of the earliest of the decriers. Unfortunately, given the woman's demonstrated propensity to speak about things she does not understand, they're also probably correct.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Where I am, solar irradiance is about 700 W/m^2 during the day.
/proc/acpi), so that's a tenth of a square meter.
Solar panels are about 30% efficient, so that's 210 W/m^2 of actual power.
My laptop runs on about 20W (source:
I really wish that folks like you would simply stop. You solve nothing and force US (and probably EU) back to coal.
... arming oneself with basic facts on any subject is neither difficult nor time-consuming. At least on Slashdot, if you post ignorantly you'll be flamed into a state of crispy enlightenment in a matter of seconds.
I agree. You know, some people wave their ignorance around like a badge of honor (or honour, if you prefer.) Me, I was raised by a nuclear physicist and electronics engineer, I have multiple Ph.Ds in my family, and while I'm just the village idiot in comparison, I am continually astounded at the sheer number of people that complain vociferously about that which they do not understand. I wasn't taught to look upon ignorance as a virtue, yet that is exactly how many Americans look at it. Scary, really.
It's not a matter of intelligence, or lack thereof, it is a matter of realizing the limits of one's knowledge, and rectifying that situation when necessary. This is the Information Age
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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.
Both wind and solar need more work to be better solutions. If we'd subsidized them the past 60 years (OK, 40 years since NASA) the way we have oil and nukes, we might not have even noticed any energy crises at all.
But even so, the Mid-Atlantic is just one place. There's lots of others, like across the Great Lakes, and all over the damn place. And that 330GW is just that accessible to current engineering near the ground, not really in the whole atmosphere. To say nothing of cyclones.
Also, I don't know where you're getting your 10% energy for solar cells stats. PVs aren't just harnessing IR, but rather much of the spectrum. There are perfectly good 25% efficient cells out there in the sunlight, with 42% efficiency achieved this year from concentrators (which are cheaper than their equivalent area in actual cells).
We're not limited to today's tech. We've got about 5-10 more years where we can use petrofuels without committing to shifting the planet's ecosystems into a new one in which our civilization is likely to fail. We've got decades, centuries after that to perfect it. Or to stare at a pile of nuke waste that will just become a bigger pollution and security problem every year instead.
--
make install -not war
The problem with renewable resources is the people in power, by not being able to control nature, have no means to control production.
Our society will embrace socialism before it embraces renewable energy as a replacement for fossil/nuclear power.
This isn't renewable energy's problem - just our society.
Read the article to which I linked, instead of pulling "a turbine every 50 feet" out of your "hat". And look at the large availablity of offshore, with its 50% higher power.
You also don't seem to know that the kinds of droughts the US already experiences is already cutting significantly into our hydroelectric power reliability.
I did not argue that a single turbine could replace every single oil well. I just offered a comparison of oil wells to turbines, because people tend to picture a towering gusher when thinking of oil wells, but turbines are directly comparable. And we never had an oil well every 50 feet. My actual argument was that we don't have the dire emergency requiring nukes that this article's subject now likes to claim. The nuke biz has always presented the alternatives to nukes as absolute paradise vs absolute hell, with no alternatives, and I'm pointing out that wind is quite a viable alternative.
--
make install -not war
There is no *waste* that lasts 100,000 years. Most of the isotopes currently viewed as waste are very good sources of energy. Current reactors are not even built to utilize most of the fuel but to generate nuclear weapons hence the so called *waste*. For example, UK now has a problem with all the *waste* Plutonium being generated by its power plants!! That is the insanity! Plutonium is a better power source than U-235 if you have a real energy reactor. One of the few truly civilian reactors are the CANDU reactors designed in Canada. They utilize heavy water and breed Plutonium and use it for energy at the same time. No Plutonium *waste* there. Heck, they are used now to get rid off the US extra nuclear stockpiles - stuff that can't be handled by US reactors mailing because of the Plutonium content.
:)
Secondly, don't be freaked out about radiation so much. If you were transparent to radiation such that a Geiger counter would see all the radiation going off inside of you (where the damage is done), it will go into a nice high pitched, continuous whine. You sid/madam, contain enough radioactive radioactive potassium for about 5000 events per second. Add that nice trails of cosmic muons hitting out every 0.5-1 second (enough to go right through you and ionize LOTS of stuff), and you are positively glowing
Also, coal has 2-3 ppm uranium and about 5ppm thorium (means, 1,000,000 pounds of coal have 2-3 pounds of uranium and 5 ponds of thorium). Since US burns about 2200 times that http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html, US alone is releasing about 5000 pounds of Uranium and 10,000 pounds of Thorium into the air. Ok, there are those precipitators, but only about 50% effective on these things (unlike soot). So, about 1 metric ton of Uranium goes poof, into the air *NOW* in the US.
Anyway, most of the so called *waste* can be recycled. You only end up with maybe one small barrel of waste per large nuclear plant per year. That is much cheaper to watch that one can for 10,000 years than letting all the mercury from the coal power plants pollute the lakes such that we can't even fish there anymore. Sad.
http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Publications/Fission%20Fuel%20Conservation.htm
BTW: Uranium is not HOT. ANYTHING that has a 10,000 year half-life, by definition, is NOT hot. HOT stuff has a life time of seconds or minutes or maybe up to a few days. Hot stuff is used in medicine.
It comes down to this:
- a roof has a large surface area
- sun ain't going to burn out any time soon
- solar panels can't be made into bombs
I don't understand why we are still arguing about this. Well maybe you should find out why before posting then. Do you really think solar is a viable option but we're not considering it just because we don't want to make our roofs look ugly? There's a reason no-one is using solar power on a large scale.
sun ain't going to burn out any time soon Nuclear fuel isn't going to run out any time soon either.
solar panels can't be made into bombs You really think nuclear power plants are needed for governments to create bombs? Japan has the largest nuclear plant in the world, but is strongly opposed to nuclear weapons. The number of nukes has decreased massively since the Cold War, so if your logic goes more plants = more bombs = bad the data completely contradicts you.
Most types of reactors aren't useful for creating nuclear weapons; reactor grade fuel doesn't have to be enriched as much as a weapon grade fuel, because you don't want reactor fuel to be critical. Conveniently it's much harder to enrich uranium to weapons grade nuclear fuel than reactor grade fuel.
Fuck nuclear. Oh, yeah, great "all we have to worry about is this extremely toxic waste... but that's not a problem because all we have to do is store it safely! it'll never get into the water supply! we'll always have room to store it! people will never make bombs out of it. there'll never be another hiroshima/nagasaki/chernobyl" Yeah, that's pretty much how the argument goes.. Though there's no need to mention hiroshima and nagasaki because nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
Seriously, has the world gone stupid or something? Ok, MORE stupid. How on earth can you people convince yourself that nuclear waste is acceptable? What is wrong with you? You really think you've seen the light and that all the policy makers and scientists in the world just haven't heard of solar power? They'll slap their foreheads after reading your post and say "Wow ddoctor, why didn't I think of solar?!"
Waste arguments aside... why the hell are we, as a civilization, pursuing nuclear technology, given nuclear annihilation is probably the #1 most likely reason we will become extinct? Because an energy crisis would cause huge conflict, possibly including nuclear war (oh what an irony that would be). I don't think the effects of global warming would decrease political tensions either.
Most of all it's because we don't have a choice. Fossil fuels are running out and causing problems anyway. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, gerbils running on wheels, etc, won't scale (unless a huge breakthrough in efficiency is made). Hydroelectric power sources are limited, and can have huge environmental impact.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
"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.
Well, let's compare accidents, since they can, and do happen. American and Soviet reactors had similar accidents. The first one is Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. It frightened many people, but did little in reality, not because anyone in the control room knew what to do, for they were clueless for a long while, but because it was designed well. In the Soviet Union, dozens of people died soon after, thousands and thousands died later, and millions were affected due to poor design and a negligent Supervisory Engineer.
Let's compare the Chemical Industry to Three Mile Island(TMI), since many environmentalist seem to act like anything Nuclear is far more dangerous that anything else. TMI causes millions of dollars in damages to the power plant, and not much else. Yet Chemical accidents, large and small, are routine, causing death and destruction. Munition plants have exploded, many petrochemical plants have exploded, and the now widespread well water contamination caused by a gasoline additive are only a few examples. Remember the Praxair lot in St. Louis? Have we forgotten the images of canisters full of flammable gases being launched like rockets into a nearby residental neighborhood?
Maybe if we can make more environmentalists see the hard numbers of current deaths due to chemical based pollution and accidents in America, then maybe they will realize that it is our chemical modern world that is killing us, not Nuclear Power. I find it ironic that it was the outcry against chemical based pollution in our air, water, and food that jump started the environmental movement in the 1970s in the first place.
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.
The problem with the first 50 years or so of nuclear power generators is that the military had a word in the design. They wanted to be able to produce 'useful' nucleotides with them. At the time cleaner designs were suggested (for instance using Thorium instead of Uranium), but the designs that got money were all backed by the military. Now that politically the issues are settled, engineers are free to work on clean designs again, but that's fairly recent. So not only will we get safer reactors in the future (like neutron-beam driven that you can turn off instantly), but they will also produce much less waste (fewer long life actinides) and have NO possible military applications (no plutonium). Yes, I work in that field.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.
Not exactly. All that carbon used to be in the air millions of years ago, FOR millions of years. Our fossil fuels didn't spontaneously form one day, sucking all the carbon dioxide out of the air. This was a very slow process, where over millions of years layers of plants were buried in sediments, slowly leaching carbon out of the atmosphere.
It is true that as temps go up, plants grow better. And if we were releasing this stored carbon on the same timescale as it was stored, it wouldn't be an issue. The issue is that we're releasing all of that stored carbon over perhaps three centuries, rather than a few million years. It's not the magnitude that has scientists worried - it's the timescale.
Really, the big issue is that our climate has been pretty stable for about ten thousand years. What has everyone all excited is that it's now pretty obviously changing. This means populations will eventually have to move, countries may change size and shape, and centers of agriculture may have to move. All this upsets the stability that we as humans take for granted.
Once again, it's not the magnitude, it's the timescale. Humans have always been forced to move around by climate changes. Now we're looking at it happening over a human lifespan, rather than several.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor