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McCain Backs Nuclear Power
bagsc writes "Senator John McCain set out another branch of his energy policy agenda today, with a key point: 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030." So it finally appears that this discussion is back on the table. I'm curious how Nevada feels about this, as well as the Obama campaign. All it took was $4/gallon gas I guess. When it hits $5, I figure one of the campaigns will start to promote Perpetual Motion.
I would support this and would allow it in my back yard.
Nuclear is the current best option yes, but you shouldn't dump all your eggs into one basket either.
There is a very limited supply of easily accessable fissable material on earth. The more plants we build the more the cost of *THAT* will go up.
People really need to start investing in sustainable renewable energy, things like tidal, wind, solar, and what IMO is the most untapped, geothermal. Seriously, we have all these active volcanos around the planet exerting kilotons of energy spewing gasses into the air and creating massive amounts of heat, why aren't we harnessing that more?
Didn't you hear, opec has decided they pushed the bubble far enough and is going to scale back the 'waters testing'?
We go thru this all the time with them, they push prices up to where they get worried we might actually go find an alternative, then bring it down just enough ( but higher then before ) to quiet us down and lose interest in alternatives.
Its a cycle that most people are too stupid to see, and thus we are stuck in it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The current reactor design is antiquated and hobbled by President Carter's decree that we will not reprocess nuclear fuel. So instead of extracting 90+% of the energy in the fuel and having 100 year nuclear waste, we extract 2% and have 10,000 year waste with the once-thru fuel cycle. Real smart, Jimmy. And he was a 'Nucular Engineer'!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Also...let's start drilling for our own oil reserves!! We have bans on drilling off of the east coast, the west coast, and even the eastern part of the Gulf. We have the capability to drill safely these days. Who knows...we might hit the motherload like Brazil did recently that I hear of?
We have TONS of shale oil that is starting to get cost efficient to process.
Why not do all these that are possible now to help our oil needs WHILE putting tons of money and research into the other alternative fuels?? I'm excited about ramping up , wind, solar and biofuels (particularly the algae and other processes to make fuel out of waste)...but, we need more oil now to ease the pain till the switchover.
In the US, we have got to get over the NIMBY. The gulf coast has carried the 'burden' for the drilling and refining for decades...we have to start having the whole country contribute...repeal the bans on drilling....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Again, that's a common fallacy. It depends on how you go about reprocessing. The current once-thru fuel cycle actually results in more and purer plutonium in the waste stream than an IFR would. IFR's can burn up all of the current nuclear waste and all of the 'pure' plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons. I'd say that's a reason to REQUIRE IFR reactors and reprocessing. 200 year waste with essentially no useful isotopes in it is a clear win over what we have now (that being lots of terrorist-bait in poorly guarded swimming pools at reactors sites all over the country).
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
It is only 'weaponization' of the fuel...IF you put it in a weapon.
Frankly, we've got enough nuke weapons now, and aren't really looking for a new source of fuel for those. If we look into IFR (Integral Fast Reactors) and the like...we can make very efficient use of the nuclear fuel...and reduce the amounts of waste, and possible weaponizable by products.
We do have pretty good scientific minds in this country, if we'd just use them, and stop playing politics with all this....our energy needs should be above petty partisanship.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, in the northern US, it would/could make a big difference. For some reason up there...they use heating OIL to heat their homes during the long, hard winters.
Using electricity directly for heating is very inefficient, whatever the source, and requires substantial upgrades to the distribution grid. A much better option is to use the 'waste' heat from the power plant, by piping steam through buildings. This is already used in some places in Europe. I don't know if anyone's using a nuclear power plant for this though...Perhaps if we had more nukes providing cheaper electricity...we could get the heating done up north without so much oil usage.
Coal actually produces more radioactive waste than Nuclear, thanks to NORM. It's just that Nuclear power gives it to you in a nice hot package, and the coal plants spew it into the atmosphere.
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Doesn't matter, if it's still producing heat, it's still useful as fuel. Preprocess it into high-concentrations, and reburn it until all you have is lead, strontium and irradiated Iron! :-)
OTOH hysterical (anti)enviromentalists serve people with outright lies. Like in my country, where one of "ecological" organisations was created with the main goal of blocking any nuclear powerplant. Where almost finished nuclear powerplant was abandonened due to PR campaign among uneducated masses. Yes, they convinced many people that wide area around powerplant WILL become highly radioactive just because of normal operations. Lied that reactors will be identical to the ones in Chernobyl (when in reality they were of modern type widespraed in EU; yes, all 4 of them were ready, and two are working flawlessly to this day in two other countries (sold for price of scrap; the other two were scrapped...). Or some nonsence about "unavoidable tectonic movements" that would destroy powerplant (nvm that Poland is quite calm tectonically, but also the area of construction was extensively studied for 20 years)
And those people don't seem to mind that much that most of our energy comes from coal, and the largest powerplant, supplying 1/4 of energy, uses BROWN coal... But they still have a solution - waterplants. Problem is - they don't mention that, with our energy needs, we'd have to turn all major rivers into concrete waterways, and it still wouldn't be enough.
Perhaps now you see why I used "(anti)enviromentalists" at the beginning - those people do much more harm than good to the enviroment. Not only because of their direct actions, but also because they undermine authority of true enviromentalists.
And yes, I'm bitter. And...yes, YOU might have genuine concerns...but usually the most vocal, the ones pushing PR machine, are extremists with blind agenda (I remember TV show with one of their leaders vs. some academic; the first one painted catastrophic visions of his mind, caused by radiation of course; first question of the second one: "do you even know what radiation is?". Yeah, you call it sarcasm. But guess the answer)
PS. Well, we'll have to build nuclear powerplant anyway in the next 15 years...and you know what, the whole mess assocaited with it might end up pretty good for me - I had an idea of moving as close to it as I can. Not only it's very nice area overall (hilly lakeland very close to sea and one of most culturally interesting aglomerations), but also it's a rule in EU that areas around nuclear powerplants are actually the ones with most pristine enviroment/etc. Perhaps because people are fleeing the area and they are much more harmfull than any nuclear powerplant... And there's bonus: less stupid, ignorant people around.
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Yes. Natural uranium produces very little radiation. It isn't until it's enriched and undergoes fission that it gives off massive amounts of radiation. (Which is actually GOOD in this case, because we use those radioactive particles to heat the working fluid in the generators.)
After the uranium is burned via fission, a number of unstable isotopes remain. These isotopes will decay into other materials until they reach a stable state. This decay produces radiation of various types. Generally speaking, anything that's extremely "hot" will not remain so for very long. Since mass is being directly converted into energy, an isotope that gives off a lot of radiation will reach a less dangerous state faster than an isotope that gives off lower levels of radiation. This works to our advantage as contaminated areas can become safe for cleanup operations fairly quickly. (e.g. The wildlife in the Chernobyl area has already returned and adapted to the higher levels of radiation. In addition, the Chernobyl area is LESS radioactive than some areas of naturally occurring radiation where people are already present and thriving.)
As for what to do with the waste, the best solution is to burn it in a reactor. e.g. PU-239 is a natural by product of the U-238 that even highly enriched uranium contains. It's useful for implosion nuclear weapons (super-hard to construct), but it's also useful as a fuel to further power the nuclear plant. Once the fuels are no longer useful for power generation, they often become useful for a number of industrial, medical, and (*gasp!*) consumer applications. As a result, nearly all of the fuel can eventually be used.
Q: So why is there a problem with nuclear waste? A: Because politicians think that fuels like PU-239 are too dangerous because terrorists or foreign nationals might get hold of the materials and make an implosion bomb. (Did I mention that such bombs are incredibly hard to make?) As a result, they let the spent fuel rods sit in cooling pools where they pile up and become a disposal problem.
The odd part is that the government seems unconcerned that the Uranium fuel rods currently in use are very useful in creating a gun-type bomb. Gun-type bombs are easy to create. Any country with a strong enough industrial base could easily produce a gun-type weapon. Gun-type weapons are dangerous because the chances of the nuclear weapon going off by accident are fairly high in comparison to implosion bombs. But if your aim is to get the bomb by any means necessary, it doesn't seem like a big problem. Especially compared to the incredible amount of effort and testing that has to go into creating an implosion weapon.
Long story short: No, you can't put the materials back in the ground. Thankfully, there is no real reason to do so.
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Just to add to this, here's a video of a fighter jet flying into a wall designed for a nuclear power plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--_RGM4Abv8
I would welcome having a nuclear plant in my neighborhood or, if my property were a few dozen acres bigger to accomodate it, even in my back yard.
... say lightning ... to the number of deaths related to radiation at nuclear plants *EVER*. According to here (http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap03/nat_hazard.html) an average of 2000 people die per year due to lightning. Cherynobl? 57.
Radiation is essentially zero, safety is as great, and potential fringe benefits (could easily provide municipal steam/heat to a moderate community) make it an easy choice.
Let's compare the people killed *per year* by
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