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US To Build Nuclear Power Plants
An anonymous reader writes "President Barack Obama has announced more than $8bn in federal loan guarantees to begin building the first US nuclear power stations in 30 years. Two new plants are to be constructed in the state of Georgia by US electricity firm Southern Company."
Cause that's how long it will take them to get through all the red tape.
And we still need power so... not much choices left.
Dear
>> 1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 (translation: it is expensive)
>> 2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
>> 3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
>> 4/fuel-dependency
5/If we don't use nuclear we'll be using *coal*, not wind or solar or unicorn farts. Those techs must be, and are being developed but we need power _today_.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
If by facts you mean falsehoods.
The facts:
1. If you only look at the construction of the plant. It makes perfect economic sense if you look out over 50 years, and can even be cheaper than coal.
2. Most of the waste we have could be used as fuel, but we're refusing to do so, partially because of the ban on new plants, partially because several of the methods create a lot of weapons-grade Plutonium. But we are making far more nuclear waste than necessary.
3. Repeal it. Anyway, coal plants have caused more health damage than nuclear, at least in the US.
4. That's not a fact. That's not even an opinion. You just said "fuel dependency."
nuclear wessels?
(come on, it had to be said)
But where are we going to store the waste? I'm all for nuclear power. It's clean and not nearly as dangerous as a lot of people think, but the waste is a big political deal. No one wants the storage facilities in their back yard.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
What a great thing -- lots of reliably generated power that is greener than burning fossil fuels. The only bad thing about this is that it has taken 30 years for more people to realize that safe nuclear power generation is possible.
This is one step closer towards reducing the amount of our dollars that go to the middle east while also stimulating the US economy. This also moves us closer to our goal of having electric vehicles that really are green. Wind/solar are not as reliable as nuclear because you only have wind when the wind blows, and solar when the sun is shining.
As opposed to dumping waste in the atmosphere, like fossil fuel plants do, yes, it *is* "green". Or as opposed to flooding huge areas of land, like hydroelectric power plants do. Or as opposed to covering huge areas with windmills.
What makes nuclear power "green" is how small a footprint the plants have. In a few hectares of land you can produce as much power as covering the whole state with river dams or windmills.
2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
Well, a report from CNN covers something Bill Gates promoted at TED about a new technology that essentially 'recycles' used uranium. The new strategy basically creates 'hyper-fast nuclear reactions able to eat away at the dangerous nuclear waste.'
If what they say is true, it looks promising:
The Uranium isotope that's food for the new nuclear reactors doesn't have to be enriched, which means it's less likely to be used in atomic weapons.
The fission reaction in the new process burns through the nuclear waste slowly, which makes the process safer. One supply of spent uranium could burn for 60 years.
The process creates a large amount of energy from relatively small amounts of uranium, which is important as global supplies run short.
The process generates uranium that can be burned again to create "effectively an infinite fuel supply."
Sounds promising, let's see what preliminary trials bring. I'm excited to have a local 'energy portfolio' of many options such as hydro electric, wind, solar and even advanced nuclear energy.
My work here is dung.
I've been hearing about this for the past few days, but I have yet to see what kind of nuclear plant they're talking about building.
I'm really hoping we take a cue from France (yeah yeah, cheese eating surrender monkeys and all that... Fact is, they've been doing nuclear power a lot, and doing it much more recently than us), and standardize a reactor design or three to hopefully avoid some of that red tape.
Let me sum up the first article "Some people say nuclear energy is somewhat difficult to do correctly, so we shouldn't bother."
There is a war going on for your mind.
The word "US" is an object, and everybody knows you can't begin a sentence with an object!
I am an object and I begin many sentences. Me fail English? That's unpossible.
Given the things you listed above - how come the French seem to make it work for them?
Does the U.S. have native coal and oil supplies that make these other sources more viable?
I'm just curious as to what the big difference is that allows one country to produce almost 75% of it's energy needs but elsewhere it's not possible?
They don't have electricity in Georgia.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Facts? It would be a surprise to the 67 utilities operating 103 nuclear reactors in the US that nuclear energy isn't economical. Spent nuclear fuel decays. Coal ash is forever. The Price Anderson coverage kicks in after the utilities insurance pool of several hundred million dollars. It's never been used, even after Three Mile Island. Fuel dependency? The US is the Middle East of uranium! We buy it from other countries because it's been cheaper, but it's all over the mid-West and even Virginia.
I'm not an Obama fan, but when he does something right he deserves credit for it, so good job Mr. President. I just hope this doesn't get bogged down in too much bureaucracy and lawsuits by "environmentalists." Note how "environmentalists" is in quotes because anyone rational who claims to care about air pollution, global warming, deforestation, etc. etc. should love the idea of new, very safe nuclear power plants. A back of the napkin calculation means a 1.1 Gigawatt reactor can put out the peak energy of 110 of the big 10 Megawatt wind turbine... and the wind turbine can't output at peak energy all the time. Take into account the fact that the land footprint for a nuclear power plant is tiny compared to wind or solar and you have a solution that is a very good thing for the environment.
As for nuclear waste, it's a political problem not a technological problem. Despite the fear-mongering you hear about "10,000 years of waste" the truly nasty stuff actually has a much shorter half-life, and the stuff that is radioactive for 10,000 years is dangerous... but not any more dangerous than the chemicals that get spewed from Coal-fired plants or the chemicals that are used in manufacturing photo-voltaic solar panels. One other thing.. if reprocessing were actually used in the US the amount of this nasty waste would be much much lower to boot. Once again, politics trumps technology in preventing solutions to problems from actually being implemented.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Where is all the waste going? The political horse trading by the Obama administration promised to shut down Yucca Mountain, toileting over $9 billion.
Is anyone doing the math??
Kriston
I hope they let me drive the bulldozer at the ground breaking for the new plants. Because when I drive it over the inevitable protesters, erasing those people will do more good for the country than actually building the power plant will.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
This is a pragmatic solution to the problems of global warming and foreign energy dependence. There's nothing magically evil about nuclear power. Environmentalists should applaud this move.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Can I also tag this story "what-could-possibly-go-wrong" ?
1) Conveniently ignoring the external costs (read: pollution) that traditional fossil fuel plants have. Further their units looks highly questionable: $88 bucks per Mwh isn't far off 8 cents per kwh. That isn't far off the national average over here in the US. That they try to disguise it with strange units makes me suspicious.
2) You don't have to store it, but we would have to man up about the nukes problem. Waste = fuel to a breeder, but that means plutonium.
3) Limited liability can be a good thing. Given that (practically) everyone in the country benefits from having electric power, using the taxpayers as insurance isn't strictly a bad thing. Note that they'd be paying it anyway either in increased pollution from fossil fuels (if no nukes) or in their electric rate (with nukes but no limited liability) then you're paying it anyway.
4) See 2. Also see oil. Really wind and solar too. You may be depending on the Sun, but it isn't truely renewable. It'll go out in a few billion years.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
we need power _today_.
Easy, stop wasting energy. Governments are too relaxed about "standby modes" on devices and general consumption. I bet you can "find" 10 Nuclear plants within the general consumptions if you wanted.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
some facts about nuclear energy.
1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 (translation: it is expensive)
2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
4/fuel-dependency
Storing spent nuclear plant fuel (byproducts) is a headache, but:
a) do you prefer to pump it into the atmosphere, like coal plants do? Oh yeah, because you might want to know that coal plants pump into the atmosphere way more radioactive materials ALONG WITH OTHER NASTY SUBSTANCES, than nuclear plants.
b) we could re-use those byproducts, or drastically reduce their amount, if we built breeder reactors.
Sadly, Obama didn't mention either of these. Vision's too limited, I guess?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I think there are a lot of lobbyists that would happily tell you unicorn fart-based energy is the power source of the future.
I dislike lobbyists.
you are correct.
I wish to remind everyone that all power source have their effect. Coal puts out radiation, mercury, co2 and other emissions.
there is NO clean energy, zero zip. none.
Coal destroys mountains in West Virginia,
Oil is dirty and the spills enourmous ugly.
Natural gas, is heavy, and a large leak would cause a huge explosion. ( that is why nobody is willing to build a tanker to transport
Liquified natural gas).
The US has to have this power
Read this.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf
Seriously.
Actually read it.
It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.
No one will say nuclear is without serious drawbacks, but modern reactor design has pretty much reduced those to a single large "what do we do with the waste?" issue. I would rather have a comparatively small amount of containable waste and eons of time to figure out how to make it "go away"(TM) then have much larger environmental impacts which aren't so simple. It's reasonable to expect the human race to come up with a way to render a few hundred tons of radioactive waste inert in the semi-near future. It's much less reasonable to expect us to figure out how to scrub (billions/trillions/quadrillions?) tons of CO2 and other nasties out of the atmosphere, and deal with the other larger scale issues coal/oil/gas produce.
I think spent nuclear fuel should be stored in the U.S. Capitol.
The South Texas Project is building two new units at its existing facilities near Matagorda Bay.
-l
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There is no ban on building nuclear power plants. Where did you get that?
The problem is companies can't get loans from banks because it costs lots of money to build a nuclear power plant and loans that were provided were defaulted. That's why the US says it will guarantee them.
... that we aren't pumping money into thorium reactors. Their advantages are enormous. Waste storage time is reduced and you can use one to "burn" old nuclear waste. They cannot suffer from China Syndrome, since they need a sustained beam of neutrons to keep the reaction at critical. And in terms of proliferation, they don't lend themselves easily to building nuclear weapons, whereas conventional uranium reactor technology isn't too hard to adapt to building of simple atomic weapons ("enrich more and build a donut and plug bomb.")
As opposed to "green" technologies that are difficult, and don't work....? This is one of the few good things Obama's gotten behind. At the same time, the regulatory red tape instituted over the last 50 years guarantee that none of this work will be completed by the time re-election rolls around.
It's about time some common sense was applied to the issue.
Does anyone realize that you and I will each produce about a coke-can worth of nuclear waste in our lifetime (a TED speaker mentioned this, can't find the source atm)? I think that's pretty easy to store. At least compared to the thousands of tonnes of coal that would have to be burned in its place.
You say the air is polluted and we have to stop burning coal; but you helped keep that industry alive because you protested nuclear energy into the dark ages for the past thirty years. Our modern lives don't exist without electricity and generating it is no easy task. There are trade-offs. I think we would have been better off if nuclear energy development had continued: we'd have thirty years more experience building, developing, and maintaining it.
Good on this Obama guy for having a little common sense.
I would be stunned, stunned if every industry with the word "nuclear" in its name, even the nuclear weapons industry(including the crapfest that was the soviet unions nuclear program) has caused more cancers deaths, injuries and poisonings than the worldwide coal industry.
But coal isn't sexy.
Coal isn't scary.
If tomorrow we swapped every coal plant in the world for modern nuclear plants it would do vastly more good for the environment than every single accomplishment of every Greenpeace like organisation the world over combined has ever accomplished.
But no.
Atoms are scary.
that was hilarious
>> 2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
Some people argue that having the waste in a solid transportable form is an advantage.
Yeah, I'm all for nuclear energy as well. I'm not sure what part of my (erroneously downmodded) previous post led you to believe that I wasn't.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Does the U.S. have native coal and oil supplies that make these other sources more viable?
Enough coal to last 200 years last I checked.
All 383 pages of it? Could you summarize it in a post? How about an info-graphic?
The US does in fact have gigantic coal reserves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_producing_regions
Nuclear waste isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. That nuclear waste, is in fact, valuable fuel in some types of reactor designs. Notably, the Integral Fast Reactor-style of design (and, I believe there are some other design concepts being researched along similar lines). I've heard estimates (though I don't really know if they are true or not, but I've no current knowledge to contradict it) that the current 'reserves' of nuclear waste could power reactors for something like 500 years or 1000 years without mining any 'new' uranium.
However, I think the Obama administration is making a bit of a mistake. It's my understanding that the reactor designs they are getting built are still based upon the once-through concept, which will need 'new' uranium to be mined and enriched, and produce more 'waste'. Seems to me we should really be pushing to the 'recycling' types of reactor designs, and maybe put a moratorium on importing any more uranium into the country. We should be trying to phase out the old style, once-through reactors.
Ever hear of CO2 scrubbers? Burying CO2 is a hell of a lot more green than burying radioactive waste in containers that will eventually leak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage
There are already working plants using this method. That's why they are building new coal fired plants in Europe, which is a lot more environmentally conscious than we are. That's as here, now and possible as building nuclear plants.
These new plants being built prove we are behind the times. I'd rather have my kids deal with inert minerals containing CO2 than radioactive crap that will probably be our undoing.
"Finally, the produced carbonates are unarguably stable and thus re-release of CO2 into the atmosphere is not an issue. "
Ok now couple this development with a complete shutdown of the nuclear waste storage program at Yucca Mountain.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0201/Nuclear-waste-storage-in-limbo-as-Obama-axes-Yucca-Mountain-funds
This administration amazes more every day with it's shortsightedness. This spending bill is a big fat FAIL. Cut spending on nuclear waste storage and use the money to create more nuclear waste. Brilliant!
I agree that you get more bang for the buck out of nuclear energy, but until the waste storage problem is handled, it's not a sustainable option. We can get by on coal until solar and wind is ready for prime time.
We are sitting on one of the biggest coal reserves in the world. We need to use it.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
WE???
I know Slashdot is hosted in the US & is developed by US guys, but please, won't you think of the international community reading this website?
Does "WE" mean "submitters", "posters", "US", "North America", "Nerds" ?
Also, why can't "US" be a subject?
*long pause*
Oh! Please don't tell me you read "US" as "us" (as in "us and them") and not "U.S." (as in "United States")
Grammar nazi + dumbass = Epic fail!
The apparent cost of the project is $7/Watt http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/02/17/17climatewire-doe-delivers-its-first-long-awaited-nuclear-71731.html with Japan providing other loan guarantees. Since Japan has been escalating pricing for the South Texas project, we can guess the same will happen in this case. I'd guess that $14/Watt is about where this will end up, completely uneconomical. The loans will default and the taxpayers will pay.
>> 1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308sp?idnews=50308 [ipsnews.net] (translation: it is expensive)
It makes PERFECT economic sense when you consider that we will be transferring our transportation grid to electricity. It is a more difficult sell when you are simply replace coal power with nuclear power. We have plenty of coal, but dolling out billions of dollars a month in foreign oil doesn't make economic sense.
>> 2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
We have no idea how long we will need to store the spent fuel. With 2010 technology (ie: put it in a box and wait), it is ~100000 years. But what new technologies will we have in the year 2050, 2100 or 2200.
>> 3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act [wikipedia.org]
Without limited liability, insurance companies could not offer insurance to the companies building/maintaining the systems.
>> 4/fuel-dependency
Fuel dependency? Errr, I don't follow you. We, as a country, should try to be as fuel independent as possible. This isn't a macho "GO USA!!!" kind of rant. Being fuel independent is key to the national security of any country. We are currently over extended in the worst possible way. Nuclear is ONE way to get us where we need to go. Ideally, we would use wind, solar, etc. etc. but as others have said, until that day, nuclear is a great option. I like the idea of (literally) sitting on our coal reserves... "just in case."
I've spent several hundred hours researching this issue. Frankly, you're wron.g
>>1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 (translation: it is expensive)
The actual cost of the plants they're building in the south are half this. And a lot of the cost has to do with NIMBYs and (ironically enough) environmentalists, who ought to all be very pro-nuclear. The actual cost of nuclear per KWH is the only source comparable to coal. Dirty coal. CC Coal Plants are 2x to 3x the cost per KWH of dirty coal.
You want to know what doesn't make economic sense? Anything that costs more than double or triple the current cost of energy. Guess what that includes? All green technologies. Solar costs roughly 6x to 150x the cost of coal.
Look up the costs yourself, and become educated. This is a mix of government, industry, and hippie cost estimates:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity.html
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/eiaenergy2016.png
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-200-2007-011/CEC-200-2007-011-SD.PDF
http://des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/ocean_policy/documents/te_workshop_cost_compare.pdf
>>2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'.
The waste problem is a social construct, not a technical one.
>>3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
It's a good thing. Because of idiot movies like the China Syndrome, people think that nuclear power is dangerous, when nuclear plants are actually quite safe. Even left-wing France produces the lion's share of its power through nuclear, and has done so very safely for the last 30 years. Compare this with the huge numbers of people killed every year in coal mining accidents and indirectly through the radiation released into the atmosphere by coal.
>>4/fuel-dependency
There's plenty.
All the anti-nuke people make claims of thousands of years of nuclear waste storage blah blah. Does anyone take into account the speed at which science accelerates? Isn't it likely that in 20-50 years we'll have tech that can just deal with the waste? Or hell, even 200 years if you want to take a pessimistic view of tech growth. Even if it was 1000 years I'd be pretty happy to have nuclear power than nasty coal that is actively poisoning things.
The "no nukes" movement back in the '80's successfully confused nuclear weapons with nuclear power in the mind of the public. Nukes have been on the outs ever since. This is a step in the right direction, but the main issue with nuclear power remains unaddressed: what to do with the waste. I don't think loan guarantees alone are enough to induce industry to dive back into building nuke plants. If obama somehow manages to get harry reid to go fuck himself so yucca mountain can open, something of value will be accomplished.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Oh! Please don't tell me you read "US" as "us" (as in "us and them") and not "U.S." (as in "United States")
Grammar nazi + dumbass = Epic fail!
Yeah, jeez, what a moran! He didn't even notice that "We to build nuclear power plants" isn't even grammatically correct!
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
I understand yours....sarcasm was mine for the green alchemy jobs push so talked about in Washington these days. Corn Ethanol is a non-starter. Wind energy can't provide enough; yes, it can supplement, but not be a primary source. The prescribed solution for lighting, CFLs, are rapidly being overtaken by white LEDs developed by private sources. When I was in Sam's Club last week, there were all sorts of LED arrays on sale for just a few bucks more than the comparable CFLs.
Nuclear energy works. 2nd-generation hybrids (direct electric drive, with supplemental generator backup, like the Chevy Volt) will most likely work. Little of the other stuff does work, yet it's being touted as a revolutionary job-creator. Good luck with that.
Carbon sequestration is a joke. For instance, there is a power plant in WV that recently started capturing CO2. You know how much they capture? Less than 1% of total CO2 emissions. Maybe in the future it will be better, but it is no solution now.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
is it breeder reactor? liquid thorium blanket? what generation reactor? the article say nothing on that. i'd like to see some progress in reactor tech being implemented by the US.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/ Thorium.
Hopefully these are not the plants foretold of in Idiocracy...
Ah ok fair enough (to both of you who replied - thanks).
I must confess to being pro-nuclear - but that's my techno-uptopian leanings really, not based on real insight into the options.
What is interesting is that predictions say we have about 200 years of reactor fuel at current consumption rates too, so it's a bit of a toss up between the two for countries with a supply of both (The U.S. is the middle east of nuclear fuel).
Well, I think the "troll" moderation is pretty unfair, but I don't agree with your points, which seem to envision a program to solve all our problems by building lots and lots of nukes of the same design we were using forty years ago. I agree that's a really bad idea.
If you look forward to America's future energy needs and supplies, we're going to have a tough slog as global oil demand rises and supplies fall, but it's not going to be like shutting off the spigot. Keeping our head above the water is going to be a matter of margins. Diversifying our energy sources will protect us from fuel dependency of any sort, and buy us time to develop the energy technologies (both production and conservation) we'll need to continue to grow.
An Apollo style crash program to build hundreds of nukes would be a really bad idea, that might saddle us with a lot of problematic, outdated plants. If there are serious problems with the program or the technology it will be politically impossible to change anything due to the sunk costs and political investment.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
He did not give details on how Southern planned to divide its 30 percent share between debt and equity but said his company was not looking for financial backing from Japan. Toshiba of Japan is majority owner of Westinghouse, whose AP1000 reactor has been selected for the Vogtle plant's expansion and is under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Okay. That's just pathetic.
You know the U.S. is a fading empire when they need to turn to Japan to build their own infrastructure. What's next? The automotive industry?
-FL
100000 year half life? You're assuming uranium. There are others, books are a good thing. Thorium is your friend
Read this. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf
Seriously. Actually read it. It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.
I quote the whole parent to note that there's no summary at all. Good thing it's not posted by an AC otherwise I would think it's attempt at exploiting slashdotters. "Seriously" you should at least summarize what the hell it is you're posting.
Oh... wait...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There's a critical shortage of nuclear engineers. Very few engineers have joined the industry in recent decades, and those who joined during the industry's heyday are retiring.
Schools including MIT are spinning up their programs, but however talented the students, they'll be inexperienced. These fine young men and women may know how to optimize a reaction, but will they know that valve X in location Y needs to be easily replaceable because it tends to corrode after 5 years? Do you want the plant in your town to be designed by a recent grad? Likewise, even the experienced engineers have been maintaining old plants, not designing new ones using the latest technology.
Add in time for siting battles and regulatory approvals, and I wouldn't expect to see too many new plants open until 10-20 years from now.
page 104 and before you declare "YAY WE CAN DO IT!" also page 107.
If you have any beef with his figures read the appropriate section in the book.
We could re-use those byproducts, or drastically reduce their amount, if we built breeder reactors.
I think experiments into subcritical reactors would be valuable. Since they "burn" the fuel using an external beam, they can also force fission or transmutation in substances where that doesn't happen naturally. In other words, they can reduce nuclear waste like breeders do, but further, and the output is too mixed to be used for bomb-making purposes - for instance, the plutonium contains Pu-240 which makes a bomb fizzle. They're also less choosy - can use uranium, plutonium, or thorium.
It was actually the incident at Three Mile Island that began the movement against nuclear energy in the US.
Which caused a massive loss of life?
"We do not support construction of new nuclear reactors as a means of addressing the climate crisis. Available renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies are faster, cheaper, safer and cleaner strategies for reducing greenhouse emissions than nuclear power."
"We're getting a little tired hearing nuclear industry lobbyists and pro-nuclear politicians allege that environmentalists are now supporting nuclear power as a means of addressing the climate crisis. We know that's not true, and we're sure you do too. In fact, using nuclear power would be counterproductive at reducing carbon emissions. As Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute points out, "every dollar invested in nuclear expansion will worsen climate change by buying less solution per dollar..."
http://www.nirs.org/petition2/index.php?r=sb
What are we going to do with the waste? Until I hear a good answer to that question, nuclear power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint. Obama's nuclear plan, just like the rest of his policy, and US government policy in general, is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids. If we put 8bln into real solutions, we'd be able to build one.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Apropos of this, I'd summarize one of his points (he has many, all quite insightful) as: if we all do a little, we only accomplish a little.
Standby mode is a complete canard, and fixing it won't even come close to addressing our energy problems. Combine all of your standby mode power, and it would be dwarfed by the power taken up by your A/C, or your computer (how many of us have a 200-300W computer left on all the time?), or your TV. It would take hundreds of devices in standby mode to make up for the power taken up by a comparatively low-power computer that's left on 24/7. Fixing standby mode devices is fixing a problem that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than the real one.
The problem is, telling people to address the real problems involves asking them to use less (use less A/C, turn off your computers, watch less TV, buy a smaller/lower power TV), which is a complete non-starter in today's environment.
It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.
Ok.
I'll make a better summary.
It looks at pretty much all of the energy generation options in a realistic manner.
Look at where all of the new reactors are going. ONLY to existing reactor sites. NIMBY is enshrined into regulations...
In 1974 I had a geophysics professor walk me through the analysis of distance from existing fault lines for any nuclear
power plant site. We have seismic data to get an estimate of fault density throughout the North American continent,
and we have the required distances from known or suspected faults, and their probability of activity over tens of thousands
of years. Computing the probability that any given site in the US could possibly meet regulations for acceptable seismic
risk shows that the odds are hundreds of millions to one against.
ONLY grandfathered/existing nuclear power plant sites will ever be allowed for new construction.
The lawyers have spoken.
"The Managing Director of the first Nuclear Power Plant in the state of Georgia has already been handed his assignment by Southern Company CEO David Ratcliffe. Little is known on the knowledge or prior industrial experience of the man, other than his name, one Montgomery Burns."
It's because China is building 22. lol, USA is afraid of China.
Bury. It. In. A. Hole.
Or just eat it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1553308&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=31168840
All 383 pages of it?
For the slow readers among us.....I think you can summarise it as "Whatever the mainstream press tells you is the solution is probably totally unrealistic, and most likely based on some vested interests". But seriously, this is an excellent read. Full of technical facts and details about a whole range of things that consume energy, with order-of-magnitude calculations about how much each could be improved through technological progress.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
"The thorium fuel cycle creates Uranium-233, which can be used for making nuclear weapons - and since there are no neutrons from spontaneous fission of U-233, U-233 can be used easily in a simple gun-type nuclear bomb design"
Please help metamoderate.
Actually, even worse than nuclear and coal is DHMO (dihydrogen monoxide). Thousands of deaths per year and millions if not billions of damage per year (including in developed countries), used in major chemical processes, even by farmers (and not totally removed by rinsing fruits).
Taken from http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html#DANGERS :
What are some uses of Dihydrogen Monoxide?
Despite the known dangers of DHMO, it continues to be used daily by industry, government, and even in private homes across the U.S. and worldwide. Some of the well-known uses of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
as an industrial solvent and coolant,
in nuclear power plants,
by elite athletes to improve performance,
in biological and chemical weapons manufacture,
in the development of genetically engineering crops and animals,
as a major ingredient in many home-brewed bombs,
as a byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion in furnaces and air conditioning compressor operation,
historically, in Hitler's death camps in Nazi Germany, and in prisons in Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Libya, Iraq and Iran,
n animal research laboratories, and
in pesticide production and distribution.
Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
Contributes to soil erosion.
Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
1. Economies of scale matter, and we are developing cheaper and more efficient plants. A lot of expense is also in unnecessary red tape.
2. Where did you get that from? Greenpeace? While there is some long lived waste, it is relatively easy to store and process, especially with new techniques. With the right combination of reactor types we can actually use quite a lot of what would be waste as fuel. Even with the HE waste, the overall radioactivity release per plant is *much* less than a coal plant - burning coal releases a huge amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere.
3. While the act itself is problematic, it is a feature of the "red tape" I mentioned earlier. Groups like Greenpeace criticise if for "not doing enough" but this is the same group that run on a platform of "no more chernobyls" as a campaign (analogous to an anti-airline group running with "no more hindenburgs!" when protesting against modern aviation). While the government might be on the hook for insurance for the next 15 years, or however long is left on the renewal, I do not see that as a major issue. Nuclear power is not the highly unstable, likely to explode and make people glow green, demon that the protestors like to make out that it is. It is clean, mature and well understood technology with a very good safety record (minus things like Chernobyl, which for several reasons can't be used as a yardstick for nuclear safety in the same way that Dick Cheney is not the poster boy for why you shouldn't go hunting with your buddies because they *will* shoot you in the face because they think you are a tame bird).
4. What do you mean "fuel dependency" - reactors don't just run on Uranium, even though there is plenty of that around, in the ground and in weapons. They can also run on Thorium with is about 4 times more abundant than Uranium and also on various other elements. We can also use "supply chain" style reactors that use the spent waste fuel from other reactors. Sort of like triple expansion steam engines, just... less steam-punky.
Waste is easily handled in a few decades... It's all about the cost of sending something into orbit and beyond. Once that is down (space elevator, maglev accelerator, other new tech) it's not a problem.
Besides, fusion power will be there in a few dacades too (or sooner).
Saving energy is good but it cannot solve any long term problems. We will always need a base amount of energy to heat or cool homes, transport water, food, waste, goods and ourselves. As more and more people get 'civilized' this amount will keep on growing and we're still a long way away from even a basic coverage (90% of the worlds population doesn't have access to any of this yet) so saving energy to solve a shortage is like pissing your pants to keep warm - a very short term measure.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
LED arrays that are reasonably cheap still produce very little light. At large hardware shops here I've mostly seen 1W bulbs, which isn't nearly enough. 4W ones are very hard to find, and for 8W seems nearly impossible, and they cost an arm and a leg too.
Just chapter 11 will do http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_68.shtml, or even just page 71 http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_71.shtml.
Summary: Gadgets and other devices on standby consume a tiny fraction of that consumed by heating, lighting, transport and other activities. The major energy savings come from better insulation, more efficient transportation, and just doing less. Whatever we do has to be on a big scale, and renewables/efficiency savings alone (for the UK), means a _lot_ of turbines/panels.
The rest of the book is well worth reading though, it brings what many of these debates lack - meaningful numbers in context, such as http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_64.shtml. The website is http://www.withouthotair.com/
Errr...there are tons of natural gas tankers. There was talk of building a whole new terminal for them to dock on the long island sound. And the mayor of Boston was just throwing a hissy fit over one from Qatar being allowed into Boston harbor when when the imminent threat of terror within 6 months was still in the news.
You've obviously never heard of cobalt thorium G.
Cobalt thorium G has a radioactive halflife of ninety three years. If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety three years!
Of course this could be a load of commie bull
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Yay!! Obama is going to loan someone else even more of my money! First, give billions of dollars to the auto manufacturers, out of my pocket, now lets loan another industry money that will never be paid back!!! WOOHOO!!!!
I don't know about all you guys, but I LOOOOOOOOOOOVE THE THOUGHT OF HIGHER TAXES!
In 2008 alone USA installed 25 Gigawatts of wind energy. Even if wind energy don't peak all the time, it's way more energy than what the nuclear industry can put in the table _today_.
This is not a political debate. In the entire world, there's more wind power being added to the grids than nuclear. Even if nuclear stations were build as fast as possible, it can't keep up with the growth rate of wind + solar, and the trends are only improving. The fact is that it's wind where most of the world is searching new power. Nuclear power can't keep up.
And before some tells me that renewable energy is expensive, let me quote TFA: "it is anticipated that Obama's budget for the coming year will add $36 billion in new federal loan guarantees for nuclear facilities — on top of $18.5 billion already budgeted but not spent."
We can still shoot it to orbit!
Finally, someone who makes sense!
Waste storage is well handled. The eventual end point for the small amounts of HE waste is as a glass, which is stored in columns inside cylindrical steel cans. This glass can not "leak" (certainly not "will eventually leak"). They are stored underground in caverns and monitored. Even if one were to be submerged in water, the glass would not dissolve, although the storage sites are picked to avoid water tables anyway. Some of these cans are also set into concrete.
It's not like on "The Simpsons" or on CSI where nuclear waste is a bright green glowing liquid that is shoved into a rusty steel oil drum with a badly fitting cap and excess spilling down the sides where it was carelessly topped up.
We do not want coal fired plants. They release high amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere, and don't just produce CO2 - there are other wastes to get rid of, including a ton of ash and nasty sulphurous compounds, and carbon capture is not a long term solution. It would be better to simply compress it and use it rather than pump it back into the ground. Perhaps when fridges and AC units start using liquid CO2 as their refrigerant we'll see more of that.
I, for one, welcome our new, radioactive, mutant, senator overlords.
I remember researching an article for coal plants, they had 32,000 injuries and 100~ deaths per year from coal mining. But hey, out of sight, out of mind right? The boogey man that is "nuclear energy" must be stopped because it MIGHT hurt someone.
...are tremendously ignorant, are there any engineers in here? any mathematicians?
"TOTAL COST OF A NUCLEAR PLANT WILL NEVER EVER BE CHEAPER THAN ANY ALTERNATIVE"
Just try and clean up after a decommisioned nuclearplant and tell me exactly how cheap that is. And don't bother with the waste options yet because we don't even need these in the tally to make it unprofitable to anyone but the power companies.
Fission powered plants are practically stoneage tech, as is any large scale centralized powerplant.
How come the average slashdotter is reasonably up to par on computertechnology but extremely untalented when it comes to questions of energyproduction and distribution?
Cloud computing is new good tech when we are talking in here, but when it comes to energy everybody runs for monolithic structures to save them.
Yes go on, you deserve a nuclear plant in your backyard dumbasses. And a larger electricity bill to boot.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-03-03/news/17483619_1_grid-operators-power-plants-california-energy-crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
oh yes sure it's safe, tell that to the british, or have you all forgot three mile island or chernobyl?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_mile_island#Accident
Natural gas, is heavy, and a large leak would cause a huge explosion. ( that is why nobody is willing to build a tanker to transport Liquified natural gas).
err - nobody will build a LNG tanker?
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
and what do we do with the waste, runoff, and pollution from non-nuclear power generation? where's your outrage over the contamination of our environment from mining coal?
we're already behaving in a short-sighted fashion, and burdening the next generations.
Yup. Too bad the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) program was killed. If I recall correctly, the half-life of its longest-lived waste was something on the order of 50-100 years, and it extracted on the order of 70-90% of the energy available in its input uranium, instead of something like 5-20% (what typical LWRs are capable of). (Again, this is *if* I recall correctly, it has been a while since I read the IFR literature.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Not a single anti-nuclear power point of view has been modded up. What a fucked-up place Slashdot has become.
What are your plans to deal with the massive quantities of waste produced in the process of mining the metal for enough wind turbines to be really useful?
How about the various chemicals and waste materials from processing the cells for the billion and billions of solar panels you'd need to power the world?
Until I hear a good answer to that question, Solar and wind power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint.
It is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids.
If we need power _today_ we need clean coal. Don't say it can't be done. www.ftek.com does it every day.
And that doesn't even include all the people with lung problems who are harmed by the pollution.
Even funnier: that 2 parts per million uranium in coal adds up fast when you burn billions of tons.
You could run nuclear power plants on the uranium that coal plants spew into the air.(after enrichment of course)
Why bury co2 so we can have sparkling spring water? c02 is a trace element, not a pollutant, the plants need to breathe too.
they're called trees
reforest the great plains, which have been experiencing a population drain anyway, with hardwoods, harvest the lumber and sell it to Japan. wash, rinse, repeat -- $PROFIT$!!!
But no. Tech we don't own stock in making money is scary.
I got a graduate degree in Health Physics (Nuclear Janitor - a relative of Unclear Physics) back in the early 90's - and ended up in IT because there were NO jobs. So does that mean I can actually work in the field for which I was trained?
I said it during the Cold War, and I'm happy to say it again: MORE NUKES! LESS KOOKS!
Yeah, I've heard a lot of reasons not to have nukes of any sort - bombs, reactors, you name it. The best reason I've ever heard, was Chernobyl. A perfectly good plant was destroyed by idiots stretching the envelope. And, yes, there will be more idiots in the future.
But, even Chernobyl doesn't convince me that nuclear plants are bad. It only convinces me that we need to weed out the idiots, and prevent them from making decisions about how a plant should be run. Don't allow morons to power up to max, then try to do an emergency shutdown, then try to crank it up to max power again, just to see if they can.
Fission, and eventually, fusion, are indeed the energy sources of tomorrow.
If that runs contrary to the greenies' agenda, well, tough titty. Al Gore should have invented fission, instead of the intarwebz, then he could make money on Obama's new nuclear policy.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Subduction zones have the inconvenient that they are potentially like shredders that may crunch your waste and spread it over. A better alternative is to bury it at the bottom of abyssal plains, some of which have been stable for a billion years or more.
Waste enclosed in a glass or ceramic cylinder buried a hundred meters deep in mud that's under 5000 meters of water is as safe as it can get.
And here we sit neglecting the fact that Chinese PV (installed without subsidy from the US government) is cheaper than reactors. Why are we doing this again? Or right, we are slaves to our institutions and our institutions refuse to change for the better. Nuke plants it is! Yay for the American future. Our country is collectively one giant douche bag.
Yes, also considering that TFA is on CBC.CA
AccountKiller
Nonsense. Nuclear is the greenest energy available, unless you are geographically lucky enough to live next to mountains where you can build hydroelectric stations without having to flood thousands of acres of land.
IT does make economic sense. Here in Ontario about 45% of the power generated is nuclear (from 3 stations) and another 35% is hydroelectric (from 65 stations). The rest is on demand fossil fuel. Clearly nuclear is far more efficient and less of an environmental footprint from a construction point of view.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Some corrected facts about nuclear energy.
"1/Nuclear energy does not make economic sense. http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50308 [ipsnews.net] (translation: it is expensive)"
But cheaper than oil, natural gas, Wind, and Solar. Only coal and Hydro are cheaper.
"2/Having to store waste for over 100000 years is not what someone with any common sense would call 'green'."
You don't you just reprocess the fuel rods like they do in France and Japan and have for years.
"3/limited liability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act [wikipedia.org]"
Yes that one does exist. Of course since you have nut balls claiming that wifi makes them sick....
"4/fuel-dependency"
Yes it is terrible if we move to a thorium cycle we only have a few centuries of fuel left. With breeders maybe no more than two or three centuries.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Ok, I want you to go there and take two pictures, one of the atom before, and one after it has split."
The honorable Senator from the state of MARVEL SMASH!!
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
page 104 and before you declare "YAY WE CAN DO IT!" also page 107.
If you have any beef with his figures read the appropriate section in the book.
Excellent summary. Now, if I only had the book to translate your summary of the book.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Fixing standby mode devices is fixing a problem that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Fixing standby mode is fixing a problem that's at least two orders of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Most power usage in this country is not from things that can even have a standby mode. Most home use, for example, is from heating and cooling. Most than half of power usage is commercial, and they probably aren't watching TV. (And while they are using computers, the problem is that they aren't turning them off or having them standby at all.)
That said, of course companies shouldn't be allowed to sell us something that wasted $4 a year in energy to save $0.20 in materials. We do need reasonable assurances that things that are 'off' are off, or close to it. Of course, a lot of this has been done already, this isn't 1998.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's not really a problem now.
People love to come up with exotic solutions to radioactive waste but there really is no need.
Firing it into the sun is insanely overkill, anything which involves putting it into orbit is insane overkill and probably less safe than the most straightforward and comprehensive option:
Bury it in a hole in the desert.
Some people don't think that's fancy enough.
So if you want you could wrap it in layers of glass and concrete and wrap that in a nice thick steel torpedo shaped shell and drop it into the deepest subduction zone you can find, it reaches the bottom going nice and fast and burries itself deep into the thick mud at the bottom. At this point it is no longer a problem.
I don't like this solution compared to the bury it in a hole option because it's like dropping gold bricks into the ocean.
50 years from now we might want to dig up what used to be waste and reprocess it.
90 % of it is still perfectly good fuel.
More like, because of idiots like the ones working at TMI and Chernobyl. I also support nuclear wholheartedly, but can that Hollywood Elite bullshit, ya? Makes you sound Palin-y.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
We seriously need to look into liquid thorium plants.
less waste, more fuel available, easy to manage, almost no proliferation risk.
http://www.slideshare.net/guestcee6b0/liquid-fluoride-reactors-a-new-beginning-for-an-old-idea
Doh! It's a pdf. I do have it... damn that's just stupid.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Aaaaaah! For cryin' in the mud! IT WAS A CORNY JOKE. THAT IS ALL.
Why are people browsing at -1 to downmod jokes they don't get??? I understand! It wasn't funny! You didn't get it! That's FINE.
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
Aren't thorium fueled reactors considered "green nuclear"? http://www.thoriumenergy.com/ and http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
And what are you doing about the radon released by coal mining and burning? You know, released straight into the atmosphere instead of as a lump of metal?
Or do you only care about radioactivity if it's from uranium?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Everyone knows it's spelled nucular. Don't you ever watch the news? Sheesh.
The thing that bugs me here, is that aside from the government loan guarantees, what has changed? As far as I can tell (and I may have missed something important somewhere), nothing serious. That means that people are building with government backed loans, projects that they couldn't have built some other way. After all, if nuclear plants were that great a deal, then they could have borrowed the money some time ago like in 2007 when capital was plentiful and cheap.
So my suspicion here is that government is funding a bunch of failures and that most of these loans will end up defaulting a little while after the capital is consumed (which might not even leave the plants in a usable state). After all, there's a lot of good money in spending a billion dollars of taxpayer money to create five hundred million dollars worth of nuclear power plant. Just make sure you're not liable for the loans when they default.
oh, I dunno, how about Texas?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
getting nuclear waste into space scares the nimby crowd too much with thoughts of re-entry accidents.
my personal favorite however, is dumping it into a volcano in relatively minuscule amounts and letting nature recycle it for us.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
What a time to not have modpoints ... this is INSIGHTFUL!
that 25 gigawats?
That's max output.
In reality wind power typically has a capacity factor of a bit more than 25%
Nuclear:
Capacity factor: U.S. average 92%
So in reality 8 GW or less of nuclear provides far more usable power than that 25 gigawats of wind.
Forget that man...I just read the pdf story. Nice try but you can't trick me!!
you have no right to declare what environmentalists should or should not be. That environmentalists should logically be pro nuclear is absurd. Few beliefs and values rational, save maybe small minority (not all the liars present who claim to hold logical beliefs) No one applies pure reason to their values.
Nor does it follow logically unless you subscribe to some strict utilitarian morality, which most people do NOT FYI!!! Something less bad does not make it good or desirable.
FYI compare the cost of reactors to installed costs of Trina or Ying-li PV from 4th quarter 2009 (add 40% from quarterly report to estimate installed cost). You will find that nuclear carries a 70% premium compared to 18% silicon PV. Its carries a 400% premium compared to wind. Why are we building reactors again? Oh right to feed money into the same US institutions that have allowed us to LOSE the energy war to China.
China is the economy of the future and we let all the important steps happen in the last decade. We criticize them for burning coal, but this makes us look like idiots. They will burn their entire coal reserves in
PV production is at about 12GW per year, it grew 40% the last 2 years. Almost all of that was in China, owned by Chinese companies. Hmm. How long does it take to build and commission a reactor ? My bet is on Chinese PV, thankfully this bet has already paid my student loans and bought me a house!
LuLz. Good luck America. Nuclear power LOL
I agree with just about all of your points except the safety issue. If a coal plant goes south there is a relatively small impact. If a nuke plant goes south then you got BIG problems. Remember Chernobyl and TMI? Granted, incidents are few and far between, but when/if something goes horribly wrong at a nuke plant the impact can be disastrous.
That said, I am for more nuke plants as long as there is continued investment in green tech. Yes, it is more expensive now, but like all technologies the costs will go down over time. Also, as their costs go down and the costs of fossil fuels go up (due to dwindling supply) green tech will become the cheaper option.
I also think more should be done with regards to managing consumption. As the populace grows larger and other countries start to require more energy the demand will skyrocket. Technologies that waste less energy will help alleviate the demand need.
Actually, living in a small apartment I cut my electricity usage during non-peak months by close to 10% by unplugging everything when not in use (including internet, computer, television, etc). This was about 50kWH/month, which translates to roughly 70W constant draw. The modem/router was 20, the printer was 10, the computer was 10, the television was 10, etc etc etc.
And no, none of my computers use over 150W. The only people who have 200+W computers are those with gigantic graphics cards, and they are also part of the problem if they leave those on 24/7. Get off AIM already.
Only two per cent of primary energy are produced by nuclear power. These two new reactors will be just a drop on a hot stone.
What we really need is cutting our consumption.
And comparing real accomplishments of some organisations to the hypothetical replacement of all coal plants is... well, let's just say, hypocritical.
Now It is important to point out that tidal, wave, solar and wind power requires virtually no preliminary energy to harness, unlike coal, oil, gas, biomass, hydrogen and all the others.
In combination, these four mediums alone, if efficiently harnessed through technology, could power the world forever.
That being said, there happens to be another form of clean, renewable energy, which trumps them all- Geothermal Power.
Geothermal energy utilizes what is called heat mining, which, though a simple process using water, is able to generate massive amounts of clean energy. In 2006, an MIT report on geothermal energy found that 13,000 zettajoules of power are currently available in the earth, with the possibility of 2000 zj being easily tap-able with improved technology. The total energy consumption of all the countries on the planet is about half of a zettajoule a year. This means about 4000 years of planetary power could be harnessed in this medium alone. And when we understand that the earth's heat generation is constantly renewed, this energy is really limitless and could be used forever. These energy sources are only a few of the clean, renewable mediums available, and as time goes on, we will find more.
http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/transcript_add.htm
What are we going to do with the waste? Until I hear a good answer to that question, nuclear power just doesn't cut it from my standpoint. Obama's nuclear plan, just like the rest of his policy, and US government policy in general, is shortsighted and leaves the burden on our kids. If we put 8bln into real solutions, we'd be able to build one.
What are we going to do with the waste? Don't know. What should we be doing with the waste? Reprocessing it like everyone else in the civilized world already does.
First, a word about modern reactor waste. If you just look at the crappy Westinghouse reactors the President announced loans for and don't even consider recycling all their waste (and we can do vastly better), the per-capita waste over the 60+ years life of the plant fits in a Coke bottle. Take a better design (CANDU, for instance), get less waste. Reprocess the waste you do get (which you can do multiple times in a CANDU reactor), get even less. So the actual level of waste we're talking about over a lifetime on a per-capita basis fits in a bottle of soda. Do what everyone else does with the waste and you end up with far less.
Second, the President has not specifically addressed what we're going to do with all our soda bottles of waste, but "senior" people dealing with the issue are supposedly telling journalists behind closed doors that they're looking at a number of possible solutions and that any final result will probably have to include reprocessing. If we were smart, we'd build a bunch of CANDU plants and feed our existing "waste" into them as fuel. CANDU plants are remarkably flexible. We can feed our existing waste into them now, take apart decommissioned nuclear weapons and feed their nuclear material into the plants later, and then switch either to natural uranium or to thorium. The CANDU plants would simply continue churning out clean, safe power throughout the whole process.
China's building CANDU plants right now (among others). Some CANDU projects have already been completed (either on or ahead of schedule and either on or under budget). To the best of my knowledge, the remaining CANDU projects in China are all ahead of schedule and under budget. That's what happens when you do something over and over again: you get better at it and it becomes cheaper and easier to do.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
While I agree with most of your points:
Where is the harm in covering area with windmills?
There is certainly a base need for energy, but the inefficiency of our consumption today can certainly be cut back by a huge amount. Home can be built to be independent of energy for heating and cooling.through passive design and transport is so incredibly inefficient even by the standards of currently available technology.
Current consumption rates, assuming no new sources of uranium are found, and that we ignore seawater uranium, and that the majority of nations never move off the once-through fuel cycle, yes - 200 years or so.
But if you allow reprocessing, thorium breeder reactors, and go after seawater uranium (which is do-able when you consider that fuel costing even 10x as much as it does now is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall cost of a plant) and we have 100,000 years of fission power. Long enough to work out fusion, anti-matter, ZPM's, and whatever else super-tech that we seem to be waiting for instead.
Err. I think you're thinking of the movie "The China Syndrome" which apparently was believed like a documentary.
Also Carter and his quest for no more nuclear weapons shut us out of like 98% of the capture-able energy through ill-founded treaties. So of course it makes it look like waste storage is a big problem.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"Clean coal" is a meaningless buzzword.
It's the same old coal.
The same problems.
New marketing department.
I'm not so mad about the idea of boiling uranium so that it gets released as a gas into the atmosphere, coal plants are already doing that far too much.
Fuel dependency is an issue though. The US has tremendous coal reserves. In fact, we're known for having one of the cleanest patches of coal on the planet (but that's a national park now, so we can't burn it....)
What we do not have is tremendous uranium and thorium reserves. So, in nuclear-powered world, we'll be depending on "foreign atoms" many of which will be dug up in Australia.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
They kill birds and bats but that's a red herring since cats kill many orders of magnitude more.
I actually like wind.
It has it's place.
It just can't provide much more than 20% of the power we need at the right time in the right places without either throwing grid stability out the window or throwing away lots of the power generated.
The problem with coal is a little bit carbon, a lot of mercury poisoning and a bit of radioactive material spewed into the atmosphere. Storing nuclear waste is not the best idea. Better is reprocessing. Saying that we should use all of our coal reserves by burning them away in the current manner, even with CO2 scrubbers is ignorant in that it ignores the much larger problems with the coal to electricity cycle. Right now I believe as an environmentalist that nuclear is our best option for baseline power. Which plant (nuclear or coal) would you rather live next to?
You jest, but considering the security they have there, and the negligible impact of a properly-maintained can o' waste..... why the heck not?
Bury it in a hole in the desert.
Like Yucca Mountain?? I agree but unfortunately some others don't :(
That realization was never lacking. The problem all along has been $/KWH.
The onerous regulations and protests and Jane Fondas simply added to the $/KWH. Government loan guarantees lower the $/KWH back down by increasing the plants' bond ratings (which lowers their cost of financing).
It would've been better to just reduce the regulatory burden, rather than cripple the industry with regulations and then prop it back up with subsidies... but such is the democratic method of inculcating dependence on the State.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
And lets not forget that using regular reactors now doesn't even preclude reprocessing it later so the current use of once through reactors isn't that much of a problem even in the long term.
This seems alot liek that show 24 i think it was 2nd season that and the african president and the terrorists attacked the nuclear power plants. i dont remember the correct season for sure but it happened and regardless im calling Jack Bauer.
I was a big clean coal advocate when I first read about it. But it ignores most of the real damage done through the mining and processing of the coal. Until "clean coal" can deal with the mercury and radioactive particulate then it isn't really clean. We can say the same about uranium mining, but on the whole it is better than coal mining. When I advocate for nuclear power I still make this a caveat. As it is, clean coal is marketing more than solving any problems.
Generally I agree, but the image problem isn't just perception; it is reality. When there is a problem at a nuclear facility, it dwarfs those at any coal mine. Remember Chernobyl?
That's not a technical problem.
If you're going to include madness and political problems then no solution you can propose to any human problem with anything on earth is viable.
First, the problems at Chernobyl were due to design; not workers. The workers did push the plant, but it was a terribly designed plant (it was essentially designed backwards) and it was designed to be a high-risk, high-reward plant for experimentation in weapons creation and other fun activities. That kind of design (the backwards kind) has never been used in any western nation and the existing plants using that design were dismantled after Chernobyl. Modern plants around the world are universally designed in such a way that the laws of physics prevent the kind of problems present at Chernobyl. It's physically impossible to see anything like what happened in Chernobyl in a modern nuclear power facility even if every tech there did everything they could to intentionally make it happen. It just can't due to the design of the reactor.
Second, TMI was a worker failure, but it's a perfect example of how western nuclear power plants have always been designed to use physics to their advantage. Everything that could have gone wrong at TMI did, yet the reactor shut down and there was no Chernobyl event. Why? Because in all western designs and even most Soviet designs (Chernobyl aside), the reactor is constructed in such a way that as it gets hotter and hotter, the difficulty in continuing a reaction massively increases. With more recent designs, things have gotten even safer due to automation in the safeguards.
If every single person working in a nuclear power plant in Canada, the US, and France simply got up and went home, every single plant would quietly shut down as automated systems kicked in in response to events within the reactor that wouldn't happen with regular maintenance proceeding normally. If those workers disabled every safety system in the plant before walking out, those plants would still quietly shut down, though some might have damage to the reactors. Nobody would be hurt, nothing would explode, and no nuclear waste or fuel would be released into the surrounding environment.
You try the same thing at a coal fire plant, you best get ready for one Hell of an explosion (or 10) followed by a fire that'll take days or weeks to extinguish. Pound for pound, nuclear power is safer for workers and nearby citizens than coal, oil, gas, and even hydro power.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
http://xkcd.com/556/
moron
You are assuming that coal fly ash only consists of CO2. The scrubbers are scrubbing more than CO2. They are also scrubbing lead, arsenic, mercury, and other goodies. Try burying that anywhere. Just because anything has a stable nuclei does not mean it is not toxic. Coal will be used of course the economics are too good, especially in the USA and China, to be otherwise. But nuclear has its place as well.
WTF? left wing France? is that that country next to liberal North Korea?
Remember Bhopal?
What happens when a plant that produces a solvent for one step in producing solar panels springs a leak and leads to another Bhopal?
Generally I agree, but the image problem isn't just perception; it is reality. When there is a problem at a nuclear facility, it dwarfs those at any coal mine. Remember Chernobyl?
I honestly am not being mean when I say you really have no idea what you're talking about. Whenever there's a discussion about nuclear power plants, someone always brings up Chernobyl.
Anyone who brings up Chernobyl in the context of nuclear power plant safety quite honestly hasn't the slightest idea why Chernobyl happened or why it's physically impossible for it to happen in any nuclear power plant ever designed or built in any western nation, let alone a modern reactor design anywhere on Earth. Start with the fact that Chernobyl's design was backwards. If you don't understand what I mean by that, please read up on nuclear reactor design before commenting further on the topic of nuclear power plants.
Whether you realize it or not, your comment is the purest form of FUD.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Where is the harm in covering area with windmills?
Nothing, considering the land is hardly "covered" at all. It's certainly a very different kind of "covered" than what a coal or nuclear plant's footprint entails. Yes there are some things you can't do with the land that is occupied by a wind farm -- like build office buildings -- but you can do a lot of other things -- like farming or ranching.
This kind of bullet-point engineering is counterproductive, especially for the nuclear advocate because nuclear plants have a lot of bullet points against them. But on the actual merits, i.e. considering what each bullet means, nuclear looks quite good.
But not good enough to develop to the exclusion of wind, because wind is good and we can and should build more (and are building more). That's okay, because the real reason why wind isn't good enough to develop to the exclusion of nuclear is that it's simply not going to be able to take care of base load.
We need to be building nuclear plants and wind, and trying to play the two against each other is just a bad idea. Fortunately, between the extant development of wind and this new deal to build nuclear reactors, it looks like we might actually be headed down a sensible path.
I'm shocked, honestly.
The enemies of Democracy are
Groups like Greenpeace criticise if for "not doing enough" but this is the same group that run on a platform of "no more chernobyls" as a campaign (analogous to an anti-airline group running with "no more hindenburgs!" when protesting against modern aviation).
That's actually a great description. I'll have to use that in the future.
4. What do you mean "fuel dependency" - reactors don't just run on Uranium, even though there is plenty of that around, in the ground and in weapons. They can also run on Thorium with is about 4 times more abundant than Uranium and also on various other elements. We can also use "supply chain" style reactors that use the spent waste fuel from other reactors.
Just use CANDU reactors and you have your choice. Use Uranium you just mined, used "waste" from existing US nuclear plant sites, use plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons, or just use thorium. With the CANDU reactors, any of the above work just fine.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
He also says that computers and laser printers waste a lot of energy when doing nothing at all. Useful to keep in mind.
Don’t get me wrong: Nuclear power plants still are way better than coal/oil/gas plants.
But Uranium also is something that will be used up soon. And even ignoring that, there is a much better argument:
You have tons of hot and sunny places in the US, don’t you?
Well, put a couple of these in your deserts: http://images.google.com/images?q=brightsource&oe=utf-8&rls=org.gentoo:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi
They are extremely easy and cheap to build, even with only renewable materials, and give you completely free and clean energy. Attach some high-voltage direct current lines to them. And some form of energy storage if wanted. And you’re good.
But then again, that would not make the energy bribers/criminals (aka lobby“) happy, would it?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I don't know about regulation there in the US, but here in Europe environmental regulations have gone a long way. A few years ago, it was usual to buy an appliance that was less than A in efficiency, but now you can't find less than A even in the crappiest brands because the energy efficiency became a selling point. Now they're using A+, A++, A+++ to differentiate between appliances. Of course, the manufacturers didn't start to label the machines with energy efficiency just because they're nice fellows. The EU regulations forced them to do that.
Incandescent light bulbs are being phased out in the EU. I don't feel so comfortable with that because of the mercury content of fluorescent lamps (I recycle all my lamps, most people will toss them in the trash can :-( ), but in the point of view of energy efficiency these are excellent news. I know many people that don't use CFLs or halogen because they resist to change and they only measure the initial cost of the lamp, not the net benefit of energy savings and longer lamp life. Those will be "forced" to save energy by regulation. Many times, you really have to force people to get things done. This is not very American, I suppose :-)
Now it's mandatory by law to have a house checked for energy efficiency before selling or renting. At the moment nobody gives a fuck and a pretty good house will have a C+, at best. You have to be a complete energy nazi to achieve B or A. As soon as people will start to demand energy efficiency to take a buying decision, the A score will become standard. It's unfortunate but developers don't give the slightest fuck about that, without regulations they just use the crappiest materials they can find and try to inflate the house price the most they can get away with. Here in Portugal (very good climate) people are used to be cold inside their homes in the winter, which is unthinkable in the rich northern countries. Now this will change, at last. Thank god for regulations!
The problem with getting nuclear waste into space boils down to two things: a) it is too expensive, b) most the nuclear waste is actually reusable as nuclear fuel if you either reprocess it, or put it into one of the proposed advanced nuclear power plants which can burn this fuel.
I think the energy of the future is burning lobbyists in a furnace to generate heat. It's similar to what the Tuareg do in the Sahara, they burn camel shit for heat.
Nuclear *with* reprocessing is not short sighted. The waste can be on the order of a few tons per year and can be safe in a few 100 years with current plans for waste management. Problem is, its still cheaper to just not reprocess and in the US there is no commercial incentive to produce less waste. Radioactivity is not the big boogie man its made out to be. Some waste from plastic manufacture are a lot more poisonous and never break down and yet we deal with a lot of that sort of thing all the time. Proper management is easily doable.
But pretending that all the problems are solved with fossil fuels by pumping back into the ground is naive at best, and ignorant at worst. You have not idea of the scale of even a 1GW power station. And you can't replace a 1GW plant with 1GW of wind turbines or solar... you need either massive storage facilities and/or massive over generation capacity...which results in expensive electricity.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
For all you Wendell Berry fans, "One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, NUCLEAR POWER, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human power as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used in the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reasons. Just a little philosophy to go along with this lovely news
The best reason I've ever heard, was Chernobyl. A perfectly good plant was destroyed by idiots stretching the envelope.
Chernobyl is universally understood by anyone involved in nuclear power to be a perfect example of how not to design a nuclear power plant. It was designed backwards, in that it could achieve a self-sustaining reaction. Yes, it was run into the ground by risky experiments and safeguards being offline, but any other design simply would have resulted in the reaction flaring out long before it became dangerous to people inside the plant, let alone people living nearby.
Chernobyl was anything but a "perfectly good plant". That much is evidenced by the fact that every plant using Chernobyl's design was quickly dismantled in every place where it was in use. No design ever built or used in a western country could have a Chernobyl incident even if every person working in the plant did everything they could to make it happen. The design of the reactors make such an event physically impossible.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Don't forget that it is a far more significant "greenhouse gas" than carbon dioxide!
Nonaggression works!
I agree that you get more bang for the buck out of nuclear energy, but until the waste storage problem is handled, it's not a sustainable option.
Your government is using the waste to make ammunition and firing them many thousands of Km away from home. This is a great way to "store" the waste elsewhere.
I read a few years ago that they were considering using nuclear waste to make building materials to sell the 3rd World. I don't know how this went, but just the idea scares the shit out of me.
You get and extra 60x that if you reprocess your waste. You also reduce your nuclear waste by a factor of 60 as well. And then there is Th and U in the oceans. Basically more than enough fuel for many thousands of years.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
It looks terrible. Imagine every mountain top in California covered with thousands of the things. Then consider the maintenance, they look shiny and clean now but wait 20 years for time to take its toll. There won't be money to spit-shine the things once a week, and eventually they will look dirty and grimy. Instead of hiking or driving through mostly unspoiled wilderness, you'll always be surrounded by spinning turbines, and the land will be cut across with innumerable small access roads.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Some Hot No Nukes Porn.
http://hansv.com/trojan_implosion/index.html
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Not complete true. Minnesota has had a moratorium (a "ban" if you will) on new nuclear power plants for 15 years. If it's against the law to build it, credit is the least of your worries.
Not sure about other states.
I am not against wind power, quite the contrary, but claiming it is a good idea to replace nuclear with wind is just plain unreasonable. You need something to provide cheap baseload power. The choices are coal or nuclear. Pick your poison.
First of all, I, for one, object to seeing propellers everywhere I look.
You have to do so much construction everywhere. You have to build them where the wind is, spread out over a large area, which means building roads and transporting construction materials all over the place. This also means dismantling and recycling the units after their useful lifetime, something much easier to do if you power plant is concentrated at one site.
Windmills have to be built with a much higher power handling capacity than other power plants, because wind power is so intermittent. This means a lot more materials are used to build a windmill than a plant to generate the same average power by other means. More copper, more aluminum, more steel is needed.
The generators, being at the top of a tall column in a high wind stress area, need to be made smaller and lighter than usual, so they use rare materials, such as neodymium for the magnets. This means more waste is created in producing the materials needed to make a wind generator than for other types of generators.
A typical wind farm generates 50% of it power during 15% of the time. Even in Denmark, which has almost ideal conditions for wind power, wind generators are idle at least 20% of the time. This means that you still need to build power plants with the largest total capacity you will ever need, a wind plant does not bring any savings in system capacity, only in fuel use.
All in all, although wind power is certainly greener than fossil fuels, it's not the magic solution to all our problems and they are certainly very far from being harmless to the environment.
This is something that will depend strongly on location, but I can say that in the UK, most of the planned wind farm projects will actually be more reliable than our crappy old aging gas/coal burners. I was surprised to find this out. It's because they are spread out over such a wide area that there's just a very low probability of there being no wind at all. With a well designed turbine fleet, the rate of an outage due to poor wind conditions is actually lower than the breakdown rate of fossil fuel powerplants. Wind turbines are apparently cheap enough to run that you can just build vastly more than you need for use on low wind days.
Conversely, nuclear isn't an attractive option over here because it's too reliable. You can't shut it down easily to stop generating overnight, and unless somebody is buying power from it, it's losing money. This is why France has so many reactors but Britain has only a few, they have land borders to export power over at night and we don't, so our nuke plants just cover base load.
It is not 1 thing that saves energy. It is many many many small things.
Yes hitting the big items is a good place to go. But the small ones are a good place too.
In my household I have at least 20 wall warts. Lets say all together they cost me 2 bucks a month (it is more than that btw). If they can half the power used in standby that probably cuts my cost of these things by ~12 bucks a year. Thats just me. Now across a neighborhood of 100 houses that is 12000 a year. Across a smallish city with 20k in houses thats almost a quarter million dollars. Most normal houses use about 900-1500 per month. This lets you have the equiv of 200 more houses on the grid for the same size plant. How is that not a good thing?
The standby of many older tvs is 15-30w... Get that to less than 1w and now we are talking something interesting.... You would be surprised what the standby on many devices is.
It is literally death by a thousand cuts.
Fixing standby is a good place to start. Its not the only thing to do. You must do all the things.
It's a win-win. We get cheap power now and when the storage facility starts to leak or the plant melts down we have a wildlife preserve safe from human development for the next 10,000 years!
Seriously, though. Does anyone know what type of reactors these are? I assume only light water reactors are being built. I just read on Wired [ http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/ ] about theoretical Thorium based reactors, but I don't think there's any firm plans to build one of those. I think there's also something called "pebble bed" reactors or something like that. I'd be interested to know what the real state of the art in nuclear plants is right now.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
plant a forest.
dig a hole.
chop down forest.
dump in hole.
replant forest.
repeat until hole is full.
dig another hole..
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
This is an excellent political move on behalf of the administration. They can take this step to appear in favor of clean, safe, nuclear power, with very little risk of being responsible for the creation of a new nuclear power plant. It removes none of the real obstacles to actually building and bringing a plant on-line. It almost doesn't matter what the funding sources are or how secure they are, attempts to build a plant will still take place in an environment that is very highly regulated, with regulations that frequently shift, and numerous avenues of legal delay available to people who wish to block the effort.
Certainly, encouraging the building of new, practical, energy production is a good thing. However, the reasons many previous plans have defaulted, and the plants they were to fund never brought on-line, are not resolved. Addressing the obstacles created by our legal and regulatory environment would have done far more to actually create a new, producing, plant.
In other words, there are reasons people aren't willing to risk their own money to build these plants. While loan guarantees do encourage people to loan money, it's easy to convince people to risk someone else's money and does nothing to correct the reasons they weren't willing to risk their own funds.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
I'm for building nuclear plants. People think that all nuclear plants are chernobyl, and that before they inevitably explode they will leak radiation to the surrounding countryside. This isnt true. People have a fear of radiation because it is a powerful force they cannot see. Realistically, the coal power plants these will replace would do you a LOT more harm with all the so2 emissions. As for storing the depleted uranium/plutonium- what is the big deal? So we have to put a couple of truck sized boxes somewhere. No big deal. It isnt as if we're lacking for square footage on planet earth.
I reject your plan on the basis that there is no
X) PROFIT!!!!!
step.
Please amend your plan accordingly.
If our laws allow all forms of energy generation, ...
the method should be determined by economics.
Economics would account for externalities: pollution from coal, long-term storage from nuclear, noise from windmills,
No matter what your political affiliation,
you probably must stretch reason to conclude that
government should subsidize nuclear power plants
or any power plants.
Build any power plants, fine;
but why must taxpayers fund their creation?
The response: because the risks are high.
Hmmm. High risks for capitalists
are also high risks for government.
If the risks are so high that capitalists would rather fund wind energy generation or coal energy generation,
why would government build nuclear power plants?
Can't government say "yea, nuclear power plants",
rather than
"yea, nuclear power plants, and here's $6 billion".
When government pays for (guarantees loans on) 90% of a nuclear power plant, any of us would gladly put up a negligible 10%.
This is not private enterprise, this is government enterprise.
Any of us would gladly run a company funded by government dollars -- what a deal.
Several hundred hours, or internet research. Good for you. I have a PhD in energy conversion and I've spent 9 years researching this full-time. You're clearly a partisan (or a terrible researcher) based on the sources you wish to cite. Why don't you look up the quarterly reports of some of those most successful PV companies and look at the actual sale prices (without direct subsidy) of their products. Compare them with your EIA/DOE/IEIA figures. Guess what? Businesses are ahead of the curve, by about 2.1x. Similarly, I'm saddened at your mainstream short-sighted view that think technology should only be adopted when it can compete economically with 200 years and 60 trillion dollars of infrastructure. We did not foster the industrial revolution by waiting until companies could make the economic case themselves.
So, pick any presently profitable solar company ( I know 20+) and compare their sales figures with your sources. You will find yourself to be approximately 3-5 years out of date.
Compare the sales figures with cost projections and you will find that we are approximately 2.1 times ahead of the cost curve for PV, with significantly economies of scale developing late 2007. It is getting cheaper faster than we expected. What does this suggest? Well to someone who has been following this trend since 1999, it seems to me that we are on track for cost competitive PV jin about 80% of global markets by 2013-2015. I think if you look through the peer reviewed literature (instead of dodgy internet sources) you will find most estimates of 2014-2018. You will also note that they papers published in 2008,2009 have been revising this down very quickly. EIA may be a reputable organization, but they are routinely 18 months behind on publishing their own results, let alone external findings... Companies have conquered the curve by tolerating lower margins, but mainly due to significantly reduced (80% poly-si costs). No one predicted such a ridiculous fall and its giving us cheap solar wicked fast.
Consider your own bias as you compare semi conductor fabrication to heat engine fabrication. Have you ever worked in the semi-conductor industry? Have you been paying any attention to what has happened during the last 20 years? Have you watched as fab techniques have improved yield, complexity by 100,000 times, while decreasing cost by 10,000 times? What do you think will happen when these principles are applied on a large scale for energy? For that matter, have you ever worked in a forge or steel mill? Do you understand the fundamental differences between the various unit operations involved in these types of manufacturing? Technology will conquer labor every time, such is the progress of the last 200 years. You've bet against this trend. The US bets against this trend (ironically while outsourcing manufacturing labor).
You're perspective is ignorant and unfortunately commonplace. It is why the US will lose at least 25% of its GDP to foreign corporations.
Second, some environmentalists, spoon fed with the global warming crapola, have indeed started supporting nuclear power generation which is basically CO2 free. James Lovelock is one example. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, is another. The solution to the waste is simple. Reuse as much as possible and bury the rest. The amount of waste per unit of energy generated is quite small. Which is why you keep hearing about how they need some place to store the waste for 20 years, do nothing about it, and its ok. If the waste really piled up fast, a place to bury it would have already been found and used.
When there are major airline disasters, it dwarfs anything else. Remember The Hindenberg?
I wouldn't want to trust a modern aircraft, not after what happened to The Hindenberg!
Yes, Australia has the most uranium, but the US also has sizable known reserves (8th largest in the world) and that friendly country to your north has even more (3rd largest in the world behind Australia and Kazakhstan).
The US also has a fair lot of thorium. True, Australia and India have about 25% of the known world supply each, but the US has a good 12% and Canada nearly as much.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Being more conscious goes a long way. When I was shopping for a TV years ago, power consumption was a factor for me. I purchased a 52" LED DLP that uses on average 100 watts. By contrast, the plasmas I looked at were rated at about 500 watts. My home server with all 6 drives spinning consumes 100 watts. It can idle down to 60. Also I use it as a PVR (mythtv) and PBX (asterisk), which means less hardware. I think soon, if not now, the home server could be replaced with a low power ARM arch to handle storage, backup, media, etc.
Just being conscious about power goes a long way - and I think the biggest problem is that most people don't care. The same reason so many single people drive huge SUVs when they've got nothing to tow or haul. Buy a power meter (kill-a-watt) to see how much juice your devices are using. Consider power consumption when buying devices.
The RBMK, as well as having a positive void coefficient, was also *giant* and was just too big to build a full containment structure around, at least practically.
Wyoming tops that list.
It also has the largest shale oil deposit in the world (enough to meet current consumption for something like 180 years).
It is the second largest natural gas producer in the US.
It's the largest Uranium producer in the US.
And the area between cheyenne and casper (a roughly 25x100 mile corridor) is one of the best for wind power in the US.
Yeah, our little half million person state has a very bright future.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
If it was that cheap, the Chinese wouldn't be building nuclear power plants to generate electricity themselves.
Uranium was too cheap since the Soviet Union collapsed and they started diluting their nuclear weapons material to make reactor fuel. That was what killed IFR. If uranium was more expensive, it would have been pursued.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks of it another way, though. In the last 30 years, we've learned a lot about how to safely and efficiently build nuclear reactors. Hopefully one that starts out being built today will be magnitudes better than ones we'd have in operation now, if we were in a rush to build them earlier.
Obviously, you can't just wait around forever with the excuse that "we'll have a better one developed next year" ... but at the same time, our other energy sources have held out for us this long, and it doesn't look like we're going to deplete them within 10 years or less. So perhaps now is a great time to start building one, so it can go online right when it starts really being needed the most?
Coal makes economic sense in countries where coal sources are nearby. This includes the USA, China, India, Australia and some other places. Coal has a low amount of energy per weight and volume, so transport dominates the cost equation if you are far from the source. You want to transport coal by rail or barge. This explains why countries such as France, Japan, without no coal reserves to speak of, favor nuclear power.
The boogey man that is "nuclear energy" is really more about the fear that it MIGHT hurt a *lot* of people simultaneously, in ugly ways. All the injuries and deaths from coal mining don't really bother people much, because they're limited to people who volunteered to accept that job. (And we've all long been told that it's a dangerous one.)
A nuclear reactor massively failing conjures up visions of people dying horrible deaths from radiation poisoning and kids being born with 6 fingers, and a food supply that's rendered unsafe for use for decades.... It certainly would be expected to spread to many people beyond just the employees of said power plant.
All that being said, though? I have no problems with nuclear power. I think it's really our future for clean energy, and as others have said -- "nuclear waste" is really just left-over energy we've chosen not to harness and use. Eventually, one would hope they'd address that.
A typical wind farm generates 50% of it power during 15% of the time. Even in Denmark, which has almost ideal conditions for wind power, wind generators are idle at least 20% of the time. This means that you still need to build power plants with the largest total capacity you will ever need, a wind plant does not bring any savings in system capacity, only in fuel use.
Your example from Denmark contradicts you.
Also, in the mid-west you have huge areas which are scarcely populated, so the place would be there.
All in all, although wind power is certainly greener than fossil fuels, it's not the magic solution to all our problems and they are certainly very far from being harmless to the environment.
This statement is plain wrong. Wind is not something that is shut on and off globally. If you spread it over an area large enough, there will always be wind. I know of studies (sadly in German) that combined many different power sources to a virtual power plant, in a lot of different locations all over Germany. Their shadow capacity was about 20%, meaning peak power was 20% above the highest needed levels.
It was able to provide power simulated with real wind and weather conditions for the year of 2007, a year which supposedly untypically low wind conditions.
Most people focus, when debunking regenerative energies like this, on one source being used exclusively. This is never the case, and that is why you are able to get this little overhead.
Don't forget the fact that the "good" coal (anthracite and bituminous) have been mined past peak, and we are using dirty, impure, lignite coal for our plants. This crap chucks more nasty stuff (thorium, uranium) in the air in a day's time than a nuke plant will toss in the air in its lifetime.
Energy generation is a lesser of all evils, and the argument that "it doesn't fix 100%, so why even bother?" is a hollow one. We NEED nuclear energy globally, unless we want China, Russia, and the US to keep fighting over ever skinnier oil reserves in the Middle East.
People need to understand that even the oil companies know that we have past peak oil, and supplies are going to be harder and harder to get. Solar and wind take a lot of space so they are not really economically viable in a lot of the world [1].
Fusion isn't going anywhere, and has not since the 1950s. There has been zero progress in a reaction that lasts more than a few femtoseconds, if not a reaction that can keep going and generate electricity. Frying a wee amount of hydrogen in a gold capsule does not an energy solution make.
So, we have two solutions: Do like North Korea and select which areas of the country will have electricity on and off and what times, or we start building nuclear fission plants. Most citizens of Europe and the US like to have lights on, and nuclear is the only option for densely populated areas without the real estate available for solar/wind plants.
[1]: This is not a dis on either technology. It is the fact that both require a lot of land to generate energy.
the big problem here is that they most likely did not learn from the earlier go at it. they will once again build super duper massive plants and each one will be uniquely designed. So, not only will they cost massive amounts just for designing and building, but they will also cost massive amounts to upgrade. Each plant will have to go through the painstaking steps required to validate upgrades and changes.
everyone always points to France as an example of how nuclear power can work but they never mention how they standardized on the design and why that might be the reason it worked out so well for them.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
its not specifically 'waste'. Its unspent uranium where the yield is too low to sustain criticality. Just like biofuel and solar cells were not efficent enough at one time to be viable; reprocessing the spent fuel to make new disperision clusters in order to re-cycle the unspent uranium is a possibility. Its just that not enough research has been spent doing so.
No one died at TMI.
You have been FUDed!
The 100,000 year figure is complete and total bunk created as a scare tactic only. What they don't tell you in those figures is that after 500 years, the dangerous high level waste will have decayed to the point that it's harmless. The remainder will be valuable nuclear fuel ready to be refined and put in a reactor. Preferably, we reprocess it like other countries and never dispose of the valuable resource in the first place.
Of course, before we mined it and used it as nuclear fuel, it was in naturally radioactive geological formations where any child could just wander in and get irradiated (very mildly) and that's how radioactive it will be for most of that 100,000 years you wring your hands over. The world is safer from radiation today because we are collecting all that dangerous natural uranium and putting it behind locked doors.
Apparently it DOES make economic sense since TFA indicates that new reactors are being installed right now by people who will have very carefully analyzed the expected return on investment and obviously likes what they saw.
My question: Is that 25 gigawatts when the wind farm is receiving its optimal wind conditions, or 25 GW on a calm night where smoke from a campfire goes straight up? This is the weak spot of these two technologies. A 8 GW plant can sit there and churn out almost its rated capacity (minus a buffer and safety margin) without issue. A 25 GW wind farm on a calm day may be hard pressed to put a quarter of its rated capacity on the wires. Of course, a 25 GW solar plant at night isn't going to be put anywhere near its rated capacity.
This isn't to say that wind and solar are not something to look into. It means that we still need nuclear as a primary energy generation system.
Chernobyl was not a perfectly good plant. Stupid people operating it was much of the problem, but the reactor itself had serious design flaws. For starters, it lacked a proper containment structure and the control rod system was absolutely stunning (Due to their construction, the initial insertion of the rods would cause a brief but massive spike in reactor output).
Though the reactor was not running at maximum power, it was running far below the safe minimum. In that state, it was possible for the reactor to enter a positive feedback loop and cause the output to increase rapidly. This was then capped off when they tried to shut it down by scramming the reactor, which caused the reactor output to spike due to the above mentioned control rod design. During that spike, the heat caused fuel rods to shatter, blocking the control rods from being inserted further, preventing a shutdown. With the control rods no longer controlling the reaction, the increasing heat caused all the water in the cooling system to flash to steam almost instantly, causing a sizable explosion. With the loss of all cooling and the neutron control from the water, the reactor power rose further to over 10 times the maximum design power, followed by a small (equivalent to about 10 tonnes of TNT) nuclear explosion.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
It was actually the incident at Three Mile Island that began the movement against nuclear energy in the US.
More accurately, it was Chernobyl, The film "the China Syndrome" and to a much much lesser extent, Three Mile Island. Reinforced strongly by the "Nuclear Power = Nuclear Weapons" sentiment.
I understand these produce less radioactive waste and are small simpler & etc. Further, I understand that we (that is Admiral Nimitz) pushed the US towards enrcihed uranium reactors alrgely so we would have plenty of nasty stuff to make A Bombs with. (Cold war you know.)
However, I acknowledge little real knowledge.
keep in mind that just like Oil is found in oil sands and Saudi Arabia, all coal isn't equal in terms of energy in to energy out. I think the estimates were something like 40 years of easy to get high energy density coal.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Oh and do try to read a bit about silicon, in particular silicon PV manufacturing. The only clean thing about it is the resulting panels. The intermediate steps pollute a lot more than most people think. In fact, silicon PV manufacturing has moved to China precisely because there are less environmental standards there. You can just dump chemicals (e.g. sulfuric acid) in the river for all they care. The Chinese are building a lot of nuclear power plants because they need power close to their coastal cities in the south, which are very far away from the coal mines in the north of the country. Most of their generated power is coal.
Solar thermal is cheaper than PV anyway.
agreed, most people dont understand that chernobyl was a breeder reactor built on a positive reactivity coefficient. The rods themselves controlled rector power instead of using a thermal moderator like water. It also did not use the designed requirement of being able to be shut down with the most critical rod stuck at the top.
No one died at TMI. Geez.
A big part of it is that the French reactors are highly standardized. So there is very little dinking around with unproven designs.
I don't see why we couldn't do that here in the U.S., some degree of standardization in reactor design has worked fairly well on the military side with the submarine fleet. All it would take is some military/civilian crossover within the NRC and getting Westinghouse and GE onboard, so some standard reactor models can be established for the civilian market. Once you have a reasonable selection of proven standard reactors and implementations, then it should be possible to fast-track certification for power facilities that use standardized reactors. Standardized designs also may help safety, because corrections to any flaws or bugs discovered in one can be used on all the plants. (But the goal is to take all past lessons learned and apply them to the standard, so that it's fault free as possible once in production.)
Not only does it help in making using nuclear power cheaper, but standard reactors also would streamline education and training in plant operation. If the layout is exactly the same wherever a plant engineer or operator goes, then there's very little orientation needed past what is taught in nuclear engineering courses.
>but I can say that in the UK, most of the planned wind farm projects will actually be more reliable than our crappy old aging gas/coal burners.
Well, you say planned, but we can check for the existing ones. When I looked, wind output had changed by a factor of 20 in less than a day - and of course that's uncontrollable, unlike a gas turbine.
>You can't shut it down easily to stop generating overnight, and unless somebody is buying power from it, it's losing money.
You don't need to unless your nuclear share above about 50% of average generation, as demand never drops below that. We're at less than 20% at the moment.
Wrong. Glass can melt, or more likely melt or crack its encasing. And the problem isn't the stored material leaking into the environment. Remember, we're talking about nuclear physics. The problem is the "transmogrification" of contained or otherwise benign elements into dangerous, mobile elements.
You can keep several pounds of uranium "safely" stored in a cardboard box in your closet. The uranium won't hurt you, but the radon will. So the issue isn't whether the cardboard box can contain uranium radiation or uranium particulates, it's whether the cardboard box can contain the decay byproducts, including gasses.
I think the US is beginning some sort of uranium enrichment program. This must mean they are thinking of building a nuclear bomb to get political leverage against the western world!
Sure.... If the "gigantic graphic card" was state of the art in 2004.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
You mean Forest the great plains, there are more trees int he midwest than there were 100 years ago because there are no such things as "great plains prairie fires" and rampaging buffalo herds to trample seedlings....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
hey, im for nuclear power. its just not possible to build it safely. If we ever solve this problem, we first need to take every ceo, engineer, politician and citizen who ever supported flawed nuclear designs and ignored the problems with tailings and waste disposal, execute them, and put their heads in glass spheres surrounding the waste disposal sites. oh, and while were at it, all the scientists and engineers who helped design all our nuclear weapons can have the same fate. Why on gods green earth should we trust ANY of you nazi scumbags who have lied to us for 50 years? the antinuclear movement will absolutely shut down this plan. a recent scientific american article says quite clearly: we can provide ALL necessary energy on earth using wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric. I cant believe how utterly retarded most so called educated scientists are. oh, and my father was a rocket scientist, and my iq is at genius level, so dont tell me i dont understand science. we are so fucked.
"companies can't get loans from banks" because the government has shown a great willingness to delay and bankrupt any nuclear building enterprise. The government is the ONLY reason for high cost and delays in the nuclear industry. No matter what they say, they can't be trusted.
This is exactly the same as the automobile vs airplane fear issue.
One kills a small handful of people every day, but only a few at a time, and we never hear about most of them. The other rarely kills anyone, but when things go wrong, lots of people can die at once. And any even remotely problematic issue is widely reported in the media.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
just less concentrated. Interesting SciAm article
Ok, find a place. And convince the people living near there to allow it.
Sure, they are going to plan to build a power plant. Sure.
This will get to the "environmental impact statement" level and some public comment. The company contracted to build it will discover it will take five years to get through the multiple environmental impact studies, neighborhood meetings and protests. They will forget about the project at that point.
Unless some comprehensive federal regulations were put in force, I don't see the US building a lot of new power plants any time soon. Are they needed? Sure, we are running out of base capacity. But are the average people convinced they need to have new power plants? No, they aren't. And they are perfectly willing to let environmental activists control the entire process, supposedly in their name.
If the current situation doesn't change, we are going to just have to cut back on electricity usage. So much for the idea of plug-in hybrid cars. Where, exactly are you going to plug them in? Certainly nowhere during the day.
Firstly, these two new reactors are joining two others at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Southern Company is a co-owner in the project, and their web site is a decent resource for learning about it. These have been in planning for years--several years, in fact. It is interesting that they only gain national attention when the President supports loan guarantees, and the idea for these plants has been around for a long time. (There are currently two nuclear plants in Georgia: Vogtle and Hatch.) Southern Company only is funding/owning about 45% of the plant, whereas Georgia, a co-op, and Ogelthorpe Power own the rest of the project. Despite the excellent gain, I do wish we would build Integral Fast Reactor designs and finally get over pressurized water--then we could stop worrying so much about waste and enriched fuel. (I am a resident of Georgia.)
Perhaps Obama should offer to help build Iran's while he's on.
What are we going to do with the waste? Don't know. What should we be doing with the waste? Reprocessing it like everyone else in the civilized world already does.
If we can't reuse the waste due to our laws, why don't we just sell it? If it's valuable enough to reuse as you say, then other countries would want to buy it. Two problems solved, we make money, the waste is shipped out of our country.
The key words there are "state of the art". If it used 200W then, odds are it still does.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> POINT NUMBER 2
The primary type of reactor in the US only uses about 3% of the potential energy in nuclear fuel. A second type of reactor can utilize almost ALL the remaining energy, AND significantly reduce the half-life of the remaining waste. The only "problem" is that the remaining waste is pure enoughto use as a weapon. Nothing good security can't handle.
My source is an article from Scientific American from several years ago. I want to say it's fast reactors, but I'm not sure.
We would be able to power the entire world only through nuclear power for at LEAST 100 years, if not much more, by using and re-using nuclear fuel. [citation needed] During that time, we would continue to build and improve our renewable solutions (geothermal, solar, wind, water, heart) and their economy.
The nation needs 2000 new nuke plants, not 2.
Lots more people object to seeing nuclear power plants. So?
No one is seriously suggesting that our entire electrical demand be satisfied by wind power alone. You use wind and solar to handle peak loads, and power storage (from the wind & solar) plus nuclear power for the base load.
People need to get over the idea that their preferred means of power generation can or should solve our power problems all by itself. Each of the main types of non-CO2 producing power - solar photoelectric, solar thermal, wind, and nuclear - has its advantages and disadvantages, and the ideal solution is almost certainly going to involve a mix of all four.
Yes, indeed, and by the time the waste makes it into the glass form, it contains isotopes with very long half lives and well known decay chains.
The most potent of the high energy stuff, by nature of it being highly radioactive is very useful to us as fuel, but it it really must be disposed of, the bulk of it decays over a relatively short timespan. It's not like it just comes out of the reactor and goes right into the ground.
Radon, which is in the decay chain of uranium, has several isotopes, most of which are very short lived (hours to days), one of which is extremely long lived (half life of 4 billion-ish years, so less radioactive than the carbon in your own body), Radium is another of the highly radioactive gasses (there are not many) that have relatively short half lives (although the longest lived isotope is about 1500 years, with 5 years being the next longest) A ton of natural uranium ore gives off approximately 0.15 grams of Rn. The natural release of Radon and Radium from the ground is a far greater concern than anything from a storage facility, especially in the low amounts.
And what is going to melt the glass exactly? Natural decay? While spontaneous fission and radioactive decay do create heat, the cans and the environment have been designed with this in mind. Not to mention that the really heavy heat and decay occurs in the cooling ponds before the stuff is shipped off for processing.
These issues have all been in careful consideration for a long time. It's not like they just came up with something on the back of an envelope.
Either way, I'll take the extensive study I have done on this topic from numerous sources over some AC on /. saying "wrong", if you don't mind.
Pumping waste into the atmosphere is part of the issue with coal power. Here are some of the other major issues:
Coal ash collapse.
Mountain Top Removal.
Filling in valleys with coal ash.
CO2 release is a huge problem. But coal does so much more damage than that. Look at the land wasted from coal mining and ash disposal, and look at the land needed for nuclear power plants and waste storage. The two are separated by several orders of magnitude.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Massive storage facility?
Like a hydro dam?
Usually such studies are advocacy papers, presenting things in the most favorable light.
Denmark is the country where wind power is most widely used because of its favorable conditions and, even there, wind farms produce less than 1% of the needed power 20% of the time. This means that even if you spread it over the whole country there are at least two months each year where the total wind power production is negligible.
Even assuming that you have other sources of power, wind is still terribly inefficient. A nuclear power plant typically has a capacity factor of 90%, which means it can produce 90% of its maximum capacity continuously. Hydro power plants have a capacity factor around 50%. Wind generators have a typical capacity factor around 20% to 30%.
The only power plants reliable enough to achieve that are nuclear. Look at this Wikipedia article to get an idea of what to expect from a given power plant. Fixing numbers to look good in an advocacy paper is one thing, doing it in a practical situation is another.
It's funny how every time a nuclear power plant stops for maintenance it gets reported in newspapers, but so many people forget that wind generators need maintenance, too. Having many small generators means there's a negligible probability of all of them failing at the same time, it's true, but, on the other hand, it means there's a high probability that some of them will be stopped for maintenance at any time.
Having many small generators dispersed over a wide area means that for each maintenance task a team will have to move to a remote place. The time spent moving the maintenance crew will probably be more than that spent doing the actual maintenance for a typical wind farm, so the mean time to repair should be significant.
dolling out billions of dollars a month in foreign oil doesn't make economic sense.
That statement there is what a lot of people miss when talking about nuclear power. Make nuclear power plants, switch away from oil use, and that money gets dolled out to us.
That makes nuclear power look damn cheap. Add in the jobs more plants will create, and it starts to look downright rosy.
Thanks for pointing out what so many people miss.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Look, I'm all about moving from fossil fuels to nuclear (and solar & wind too), but seriously... reducing the regulatory burden? Are you nuts? Much is made of the fact that nuclear plants are very safe - and they are. The reason they're very safe is because they are quite sensibly regulated to within an inch of their lives. Without these regulations, there'd be nothing stopping the power companies from building Chernobyl-style plants all over the place, and every financial incentive TO do so - because as you say, all that safety stuff is expensive.
Doing more nuclear does make sense. So does drinking a little less of the libertarian kool-aid.
What's your point? I was talking about public perception, not reactor design. Joe Schmo knows fuckall about pebble-bed vs MSRs. My point was that the percentage of people who recognize "Chernobyl" is much higher than some movie made in 1979. And that *that* is the source of inertia on nuclear power.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
The eventual end point for the small amounts of HE waste is ...
...one of those southern states where the governor's a crook.
>>Several hundred hours, or internet research. Good for you. I have a PhD in energy conversion and I've spent 9 years researching this full-time.
Ah, Dr. Coward. Yes, I've heard of you. You're world famous, in fact.
If you're going to put your credentials on the line, then put them on the line. I posted references (which are just a fraction of my total notes and references on the subject) with more data than you can shake a stick at. You posted nothing. The cost estimates from California's Department of Energy to build out solar shows just how economically infeasible it is. Even if you can get the 6x to 150x the cost of coal down to half that (as you claim, and I won't doubt you), that's still economic suicide to switch to.
>>I'm saddened at your mainstream short-sighted view that think technology should only be adopted when it can compete economically with 200 years and 60 trillion dollars of infrastructure.
Who will pay for the buildout of trillions of dollars worth of solar plants? Your magic fairy wand? Who will pay for the increased cost of power if solar can't compete economically? Businesses? The government? Obama's magical dollars that come from nowhere?
But if solar becomes cost competitive (as you predict it will), then sure, switch to it. Why not?
And don't pretend we don't have massive clean power plant subsidies and R&D grants pushing the way on the development of solar energy.
LPN has the problem of being effectively a Fuel Air Bomb without a detonator
FAE munitions are the only ones that can have enough "bang" to reach nuclear levels without being overweight
If a nuclear reactor can recycle its fuel and is designed to fail "safe" (so that the space suit guys* can just yank out the core and reload later) then the problems with the waste are somewhat minimal.
* its protocol to suit up for worst case when you are dealing with this stuff
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The biggest reason that the nuclear industry in the US essentially came to a standstill wasn't excessive regulation, protests, or anything else (although that's what gets all the press). The real reason is that economically speaking, nuclear plants are very risky - they cost a huge amount of money upfront, and they don't pay off for many, many years. And if there's any fumbles during the design and construction process, costs can really skyrocket. Then the plant owners are left with the fun choices of 1) jacking up electricity rates to obscene levels (and thus really pissing off their customers) or 2) having the plant not pay off at all before the end of its life. Because of that, financing for plants has been all but impossible to get. This loan guarantee program could really make a difference in getting financing for plants going again.
What's up - did you run out of remote uninhabited mountains in US?
Maybe it was an advocacy paper, but it seems like you misunderstood what I meant.
The combination of different technology is the key here. It is possible to be about 99% accurate in the prediction of expected wind energy output for the next 24 hours, so it is easy to accomodate for fluctuation on this.
Also, it is not two months in succession, but more a few hours here and there when there is not enough wind (in small areas). These can be buffered or alternatively be mitigated through a pan-european grid (which we have, but it needs to be extended to be able to bear that kind of load).
People covering whenever a nuclear plant is down is because it is a single point of failure.
Google is probably the best example: Not one huge, giant computer, but lots of really cheap ones very likely to fail. Works fairly well in that example, right?
responses to points of the parents quote:
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Anyone that cites Chernobyl as evidence against nuclear power is just demonstrating their utter ignorance of the issue.
yep, but the push away from oil needs something, Electric seems to be one idea for cars. Hmm bet we need more power to charge them every night.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
You want to know what doesn't make economic sense? Anything that costs more than double or triple the current cost of energy. Guess what that includes? All green technologies. Solar costs roughly 6x to 150x the cost of coal.
Please. I do agree with what you say, but nuclear is also a "green technology", no matter how much eco-crazies try to spin it differently. By contrasting nuclear against "green", you're playing into their hands.
Nuclear is the choice of a pragmatic, responsible conservationalist. Greenpeace and other fundies don't talk for all of us.
Here is an article on using thorium as the fuel instead of uranium. It claims that thorium is the perfect green nuclear power.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1
The main reason that uranium reactors were the reactor of choice was because it produced significant amounts of weapons grade plutonium to build us nukes. It is practically impossible to produce a nuclear weapon from thorium power byproducts. On top of that thorium is cheap and plentiful in the US, there is enough to power the us for 100's to 1,000's of years. It's also 50% more efficient than uranium reactors. "It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm." "And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts."
Uranium and thorium reactors as compared in the article:
*Uranium-Fueled Light-Water Reactor
*Fuel Uranium fuel rods
*Fuel input per gigawatt output 250 tons raw uranium
*Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
*Coolant Water
*Proliferation potential Medium
*Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone
*Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
*Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
*Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
*Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
*Coolant Self-regulating
*Proliferation potential None
*Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone
I just read 20 posts all saying how great this was.
Mostly I find it interesting that the same group that doesn't trust Evil Corporate America to track their web viewing habits because of the possible misuse of the information will trust the Actual Evil Corporate America not to cut corners wherever possible with something that could physically destroy large chunks of the population if mismanaged to the same degree.
I don't really have anything against this actually, I'm kind of for it, but I'm just fascinated by the mutual love-fest from this particular group.
>>you have no right to declare what environmentalists should or should not be. That environmentalists should logically be pro nuclear is absurd.
I have the right to declare anti-nuke environmentalists to be self-contradictory nutjobs. It's my right as an American, in fact.
The entire notion that environmentalism and anti-nuclear activism go hand-in-hand is what is absurd. Your only excuse as a green to be anti-nuke would be if you hated ALL power, and want us all to go back to living in caves and eating granola bars which magically fall from the sky by an all-loving Mother Earth.
Consider: If America had built nuclear power plants for the last 30 years instead of coal, our CO2 output would be half what it is right now, while having cheap and reliable energy and eliminating countless tons of pollution and radiation from the atmosphere.
I'd mention all the thousands of lives saved from coal mining accidents and pollution reduction, but greens don't seem to care much about that.
A green that is anti-nuclear? A hypocrite.
Fair enough. Nuclear is (absurdly) hated by the Green Party, which is why I don't call it green. But you're absolutely right - we need to change the language to include nuclear in the list of green solutions out there.
Greenpeace doesn't like nuclear power, but the co-founder of it does. He explains that back in the day they equated nuclear power with nuclear war, and so the power plants got tainted by the wide brush.
http://populistdemocrats.blogspot.com/2009/04/greenpeace-founder-supports-increased.html
Nowadays, I think it is the only power technology that makes sense both economically and environmentally.
[...]The estimations and computations show the possibility of making this project a reality in a short period of time (for payloads which can tolerate high g-forces). The launch will be very cheap at a projected cost of $3 - $5 per pound.
If we could send it into the sun, that might quiet the critics who would otherwise say, "but you're polluting space!"
Pi Ran Out
I think spent nuclear fuel should be stored in the U.S. Capitol.
I'm pretty sure that they're already way over the legal limit when it comes to how much waste you can keep in one place.
To add to my earlier posts: Here are studies showing that, whilst keeping the current price of electricity, one could provide 70% of the energy for europe through wind. That is with only 10% of total turbine investments in the grid (which is still a _LOT_).
Just showing that it would be possible.
http://www.claverton-energy.com/common-affordable-and-renewable-electricity-supply-for-europe-and-its-neighbourhood.html
http://www.claverton-energy.com/green-grid-article-in-new-scientist-by-david-strahan-the-oil-drum-on-hvdc-supergrids.html
I'm as far away from a "Greenie" as you can be. Still I would have to agree that nuclear makes more sense than coal. It is a good idea. However, Obama is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He says to build more nuclear plants but also closes Yucca mountain. As always, he wants his cake and want to eat it too.
So, the primary concern about nuclear power is what to do with all the waste. Reprocessing will get you pretty far. But the best solution is to destroy the waste. This can be done with a fusion-fission hybrid system.
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2009/01/27/nuclear_hybrid/
In a normal fission reactor, isotopes of heavy elements break apart, producing neutrons which can cause other heavy elements to break apart. But some isotopes are easier to break down than others, and eventually, you break down most of the "easy" isotopes, and there isn't enough density of high energy neutrons to continue a chain reaction with the "hard" isotopes, aka the sludge.
We have the technology to build fusion reactors... the problem is that they currently require more energy to operate than we can harvest from them. This is likely to change soon with NIF breakthroughs and ITER being built, but we cannot yet use pure fusion as a power source.
But we CAN currently use fusion as a powerful neutron source, and these neutrons can be use to fission the sludge from the normal fission reactor. It will cost some energy to produce the neutrons, but it's more than made up for by the energy from the fission reactions.
The best part of this is that the long-lived heavy isotopes are mostly destroyed. You still have fission byproducts and secondary nuclear waste, but this will drastically cut down on the amount of waste to deal with.
...wind or solar or unicorn farts. Those techs must be, and are being developed...
You know, now I really don't want to meet a unicorn.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Power output of a wind farm is variable, but you take that into account when designing it. You set a minimum power output and an acceptable probability of failing to meet it, then you build however many turbines it takes to match that. For Britain which has so much coastline to play with, it's not usually a very high number.
If the worst problem you have to deal with is occasional power surplus, you're doing well.
I think there were also unfounded proliferation fears. Something like a politician automatically assumed reprocessing -> proliferation, even though in the case of the IFR, any of the reprocessing byproducts would be worthless for weapons use. (Again, this is if I recall the literature correctly, it has been a while!)
I think still, availability of fuel is not nearly as big of a problem as spent fuel, and won't be for a long time. The IFR basically solved both problems.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
100 ? try thousands.
But very confusing. Anti-nuke people tend to be liberals who casually assume that Obama's on their side on everything. Pro-nuke people tend to be conservatives who casually assume that Obama's against everything they hold dear. This is yet another case of Obama doing exactly the opposite of what people expect him to do. I think he does it on purpose!
And that just STUPID. The individual cylinders should each be treated to improve water hardness, and then they should be used as pre-heaters for hot-water sources.
That way:
1) The waste is dispersed. Even if one leaks it's nothing major.
2) Not only is stealing it and re-processing it into a weapon dangerous, it also doesn't net you much each time.
3) You cut your energy needs.
4) When we eventually get around to building a fast breeder, the waste can be reclaimed and used as fuel.
N.B,.: That "secure for 100,000 years (or whatever his number was) is just stupidity. The high level radiation falls off quickly, and background radiation is always with us. 1,000 years is reasonable, though. But the degree of security that you need falls off logarithmically. For the first decade it would be reasonable to use the cylinders for pre-heating water for the reactor. For the second decase they could be used as industrial heat sources at secure facilities. By the third decade they could be used to heat any industrial process. By the fourth decade...they probably don't have enough energy left to use them to heat bathtub water. At that point maybe it makes sense to just bury them somewhere. Somewhere reasonably safe, but no need to be frantic about it.
P.S.: You will have noticed that I talk about even amounts of time. This is blatantly silly. The cylinders will be sources of low levels of heat for a lot longer than they are sources of high levels of heat. I pulled the numbers out of a hat. The process, however, is about right. And I'd be surprised if a cylinder stayed usefully hot for over a century.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
We've also got to figure that the waste pile will be maintained by humans for as long as we're here. If the packages start to fail in 1000 years, then the intelligent beings of the period will have to repackage the waste for another 1000 years... big deal.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The graph I saw earlier suggests that we're not doing that at all - the output is very variable indeed.
You can't just increase number of turbines as the fluctuations in output aren't independent. Since they're dependent on a common failure (lack of wind), statistics won't help much here.
oh here we go, environmentalists are getting bashed again for being hippie liberals in the way of progress.
the fact of the matter is that there are several technological advances for solar panel that will make it efficient enough to provide the entire planet.
isnt it logical have true renewable power instead of power that relies on finite resources?
If it had been extensive study they wouldn't wast the heat that it was generating in the "cooling ponds". That could be used as a useful preheat. It's probably too hot to handle safely, so it would need to be converted to pellets for safe handling, but that's something that may have been done earlier. If not, it could be done at that point, but earlier would be better.
Also, (to grandparent) we aren't talking about encasing the lumps of radioisotopes in glass, we're talking about melting them together, homogenizing them, and then cooling the homogenized mixture. You don't get significant leaks out of something like that. It's basically a from of obsidian.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Standby mode is a complete canard, and fixing it won't even come close to addressing our energy problems. Combine all of your standby mode power, and it would be dwarfed by the power taken up by your A/C, or your computer (how many of us have a 200-300W computer left on all the time?), or your TV. It would take hundreds of devices in standby mode to make up for the power taken up by a comparatively low-power computer that's left on 24/7. Fixing standby mode devices is fixing a problem that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than the real one.
Actually stand-by mode works VERY well. Lets say that one airconditioners draw on power uses more energy then ALL of the standby modes in the entire world...not a problem. That's an AMAZING thing. In the case of standby mode the concern is not how much power a "live" system takes when in operation, it is concerned with how much power it takes when not in operation but still in "live" mode. So if your computer did not have standby mode and it was always on then it always took full energy - this is terrible. Standby mode makes it so that device takes a lot less energy which is great. Yes it would be nice to have standby mode for more items. Personally when I leave my home I turn off (or reduce to a low setting) all heat, ac, power, etc - even if i am only gone for a couple of hours. In the long run turning down my heater when i am gone will save me some money, and i will only be mildly inconvenienced when i get home (the time it takes to get the heat back).
Anyhow - standby mode is great. But we need more.
On a side note: Nuclear power is not clean energy. It annoys me when people say that. It may not cause smog, or pollute water (unless some mishap occurs) but when you have very nasty stuff hanging out for tens of thousands of years, which takes special storage then you cannot say it is clean. Hopefully, one day, space travel will be safe enough we can launch this crap into the sun.
. Does anyone know - i thought a number of years ago they developed a process to make nuclear energy and the byproduct can be nullified with some technique. They actually had active energy plants to do away with the waste (as in use it again to make more energy and then make it inert and safe).
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
An assertion was recently made -- I think it was in Cracked, so do your own math :-) -- that the Simpsons' depiction of nuc-u-lar power has set the cause of real nuclear power back a full generation in the US.
I'm inclined to believe it... People are really, *really* stupid.
No they're not:
If you figure in everything that can reasonably be called "nuclear medicine", and cume for the entire planet, "nuclear" has *saved* more lives over the last 50 years than it's killed -- even if you add in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, *and* Cherynobl. (I believe I'm remembering the assertion properly).
And let's note that all the neodymium magnet manufacturing was bought out by China, and moved offshore... *and* they have most of the raw material, too.
Stealing what is in those cans to make a weapon is just... silly.
It would be *infinitely* more easy to just dig up some uranium from the ground and enrich it.
If you have the technology to make a viable weapon from the waste, you are more than capable of doing it the much easier way.
They also likely are treated for water hardness, since they are made of stainless steel and carefully manufactured.
The glass is not a strong heat producer by the time it goes into the cans - the bulk of the heat is removed as the really short lived stuff decays while it is in the cooling ponds on the reactor site. While I'm sure it will continue to produce heat gradually, actually extracting it would be more hassle than it is worth, especially if we pull out the useful stuff to be used again as fuel.
yes, lets all just dump it in the irish sea. thats what civilised nations do.
SPSS (solar space power satellite) is a potentially viable competitor. We didn't develop it when we had time and a viable NASA, though.
Well, somebody will, eventually. Then we may find out if it's as viable as it appears. Possibly when China becomes an energy exporting country.
I'll admit that the first SPSS would be expensive and it SHOULD be small and underpowered. The follow on systems, however, needn't be small at all. With enough electricity you can eliminate rocket fuel while in the atmosphere. (Jets and rockets both work by heating the reacting medium so that it can be expelled at a high velocity. With enough electricity you don't need any normal fuel.)
P.S.: Just how that should be done is a bit iffy. One way that COULD work is to use a ground based laser to heat the tail of the rocket, but I'm hoping that a development of the jet engine could also be used. And I'd rather use just air than use water, as was done in the only demonstration project of which I am aware. (Using just air means that you don't need to lift the fuel....or at least not the part that you're going to use at lower elevations.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Anyone that cites Chernobyl as evidence against nuclear power is just demonstrating their utter ignorance of the issue.
Foolish Child,
I look at Chernobyl this way, the place is dead.
100 years from now the place will be dead.
500 years from now the place will be dead.
1000 years from now the place will be dead.
10,000 years from now the place will be dead.
100,000 years from now the place will be dead.
1,000,000 years from now the place will be dead.
If you want to live there, be my guest. I would like to see what your offspring become after 50 generations or so.
Sure, there are plants growing, they are simple genetics compared to humans. Yes there is abundant animal life, most of it migratory, but I would NOT eat it and I pity those that do.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
That's AN issue, but to me it's not the main issue.
To me the main issue is that the companies that build them don't trust them enough to build them unless the government limits the liabilities that they can be made liable for.
I don't mind that the government is giving them loan guarantees. I mind that the government is saying "if you explode and destroy not only the town, but most of the rest of the state, the people you damaged can't sue you to your eyeteeth."
If the people that build them don't trust them, why should I?
P.S.: AFAIK, there's no reasonable probability of any US plant doing the Chernobyl, much less a "China Syndrome". But why should I trust them more than the companies that build them?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They may actually use the heat off the pond with heat exchangers - it will depend on the plant design. I'm sure that waste heat from the cooling process has been considered, if only to provide heating for the building.
The main point being that the bulk of the heat you're going to get out of the stuff is lone gone by the time it ends up in glass form.
I disagree. It would be healthier, I'll agree with that.
My disagreement however, that it would not best any Greenpeace demonstration that resulted in one of those morons driving their little rubber dingy under a naval destroyer. Those events are great days for humanity, and those are bigger accomplishments than anything Greenpeace has done intentionally and are for better for the world than switching to nuclear plants right now, if you look at it from a long term perspective.
Lets face it, ignorance and political fighting in organizations like Greenpeace result in them fighting things that would help their cause long term and if they weren't such ignorant fucks who have to have a 'cause to fight' without knowing what 'the cause' actaully is they'd be able to figure that part out.
Most 'peace', 'animal protection' and 'green' political and activist groups do FAR more damage for their own cause than good because they've been blinded.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Some other facts:
1. The US Department of Energy statistics are that the US burns 2 trillion pounds (just under 1 billion metric tons) of coal per year.
2. Solar and wind power is cost competitive with nuclear and coal when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. To generate renewable energy around the clock, you have two choices:
2a. Add a power storage system to your solar or wind power plant that captures most of the energy and stores it for night time, cloudy days, or calm winds. This increases your costs by at least a factor of five, blowing your cost parity with nuclear and coal to hell.
2b. Supplement your renewable energy source with another power source to fill in the gaps in renewable energy generation. This is what is usually done, and the favored backup is natural gas. This also ends your cost parity with nuclear and coal, and guarantees your continued reliance on non-renewable energy sources or nuclear.
We could bury all of the nuclear waste we generated in the history of the human race in the underground space the United States clears with one year of mining coal.
No it isn't. It will be recycled just like everything else eventually. Remember, coal came (at least we think) from living forests. Everything in the coal that is burning was once very near the surface of the Earth and was infact used to facilitate living organisms
Coal burning is only hazardous at certain levels to certain forms of life.
Sadly we've probably really exceeded those levels for the only form of life that really and truly matters in the end, our own. So its important to consider, but saying 'it lasts forever' is just wrong.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Me too, from a security standpoint, for now, its the best thing to do. Use up all the other fuels that other countries can't use right now, (nuclear being a relatively rare power source as far as number of countries who know how to use it) and leave us with a nice emergency supply of traditional fuels for ourselves if we need it, or to sell to other countries that need it later for emergencies.
Of course, it could all backfire. What you don't want to have is China with 0 sources of power, and the US sitting on massive vains of coal that we won't sell to them. World wars have started over far less.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Seems a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem? I mean, I'm not proposing we start building hundreds of these things right off the bat. Let's try to get one or two commercially viable designs built, tested, and proven, over the next couple decades. Let's work on proving them safe. Then, let's start a larger 'deployment' phase of building a few dozen of them. Yes, this means it'll be decades before there's enough of them to provide even a 'dent' in our energy supply problems (and in the meantime, we should *also* be building wind, solar, etc).
But let us get *started*, so that we can start dealing with our nuclear waste problem in 2 or 3 decades' time. As another replyer noted, we NEED to do this, to deal with our 'waste problem', even if we're not doing it for the energy - but we might as well get energy from it anyhow, to sort of 'pay for' the nuclear waste disposal. Make dealing with our 'waste problem' at least a 'break-even' endeavor, and maybe, possibly, a profitable business.
Single pass through designs. Then of course the process of making use of the resulting energy itself is only 35% efficient. So really, our nuclear reactors are only around 0.3% efficient.
There are proposed designs which will burn all the waste as well almost eliminating the waste problem and giving up to about 30% efficiency. And if the "waste" heat was pumped into a large district heating network as well, you might even reach 70-80% overall efficiency. 250 times more energy out of the same amount of nuclear fuel. Now that would be world changing.
Deleted
1. If you only look at the construction of the plant. It makes perfect economic sense if you look out over 50 years, and can even be cheaper than coal.
You forget time value of money. In today's world, a nuclear plant needs to make sense over a twenty year period.
If operators were having to put aside the money required to safely store the run-time waste outputs, decommission the reactor at the end of its life, and store all the medium level waste that this generates for hundred or thousands of years, then maybe it wouldn't look so attractive. As it stands now, the government is expected to pick up that tab (just as it is for insurance costs with Obama's offer). We historically have not put a price on the polluting outputs of coal-fired power generation and this mistake has been repeated with nuclear energy. As we try to change this equation for greenhouse gas emitters continuing to allow the nuclear "competition" a free run on their waste is a mistake.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
that's right, how ignorant corcoranp, mrdoogee is so correct. Don't forgot, we are in America where a movie has more psychological impact on the mass US population over a real nuclear power reactor meltdown. Stupid...
The fact that you would correlate Chernobyl with American nuclear power plants means you don't understand anything about the design of nuclear reactors, such as the difference between positive and negative feedback loops. Chernobyl was designed with positive feedback, Americans' with negative. In other words, we have to actively act to keep a reactor running - they had to actively act to keep it from melting down.
But then again, you think that in a million years the place will still be dead, so I guess it's kind of clear that you don't know much about radioactivity. For a fun exercise, calculate how much of the radioactive material released will be still around in a million years, given a half life of: 30 years (Cesium-137), 2 years (Cesium-134), 6 weeks (Iodine-131) and 28 years (Strontium-90).
Failure to respond will indicate you did the math and just realized how fucking stupid your statement was.
Fair enough.
You'd think the recent explosion in Connecticut (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Connecticut_power_plant_explosion) would trigger the same feelings of irrational fear and outrage we see with nuclear, with people clamoring for us to decomission gas and oil power plants nationwide, but...
If, by greener, you mean, less polluting, yes, Nuclear is better than Fossil fuels... however, in terms of water usage, Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants are very thirsty power-generation solutions. Do we have any idea of the water usage of these new plants? As we keep hearing these days, fresh water will be the next scarce resource (one of the primary reasons China needs Tibet).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Obama is ignoring solar power. 8bln will buy a 1.3GW facility at the current price of $6000 per MW.
Nuclear is not the answer. It's unsustainable and the wrong thing to do. We could power the entire country with 180 square miles of solar cells used to replace roofs. There's over 1000 square miles of roofs, completely wasted space.
Obama is selling us out. He could use the 56bln planned for nuclear to finance truly clean renewable energy.
Give the homeowners a tax credit to install them then pay them for the power they generate (instead of the power companies). You'd have to be an idiot to not take advantage of that.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Those are extremely important problems to consider. I must admit, I was only familiar with the issue of mountain top removal. Thank you very much for educating me on the other two.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Solar power is going to be good, but PV is not clean by a long shot (manufacturing). We also need to distribute over a wide area, and don't have storage alternatives that get us through the night. So most of the field recognizes that you need an always on baseline power source that is evenly distributed. Solar (especially solar thermal) and wind will be welcome additions to the energy portfolio. No one technology is ever going to be the answer, the idea of "the answer" is a myth. For now, adding nuclear to offset the need to build even more coal plants is a good idea.
If you want solar panels on your house then go get them. Why are you waiting for a government handout?
This is one step closer towards reducing the amount of our dollars that go to the middle east while also stimulating the US economy. This also moves us closer to our goal of having electric vehicles that really are green.
I'm not entirely sure that nuclear power generation will reduce imports from the Middle East, primarily because nuclear power doesn't replace the oil we use with regards to our current energy consumption habits. On the other hand, you are right that it is power that is generated more "greenly" than burning coal and hopefully with the advent of nuclear power we will see, as you say, electric vehicles that really are green.
I'm nearly certain that would violate other laws regarding nuclear non-proliferation. Even if it didn't, I know transport of any nuclear waste is extremely strictly controlled by the DoE, and NRC. This, like reprocessing, is a political issue; not a scientific one.
Nuclear power plants can't recycle their waste, they can't sell their waste, and they can't move their waste into any kind of secure long-term storage. And we wonder why it costs so much to bring down a nuclear plant...
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
And why the hell would anyone store any of nuclear waste for 100k years?
Go and read basic physics courses on how nuclear material decay actually works, and pay close attention to what high and low radioactivity means in practical terms. Brief summary: high activity level is more dangerous AND has short(er) half-life, meaning it decays fast to lower levels of activity.
This "thousands of years to store this crazy dangerous stuff" argument is one of strawmen arguments that keeps on coming over and over again, not based on facts but based on primal fear against things that are dangerous but non-concrete. Like radiation, and its half-life.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Germany *does* sell their waste to France. However, the US has these silly non-proliferation laws and executive orders that prevent doing that.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
To say nothing of intentionally disabling what safety systems it DID have, combined with massive operator error to arrive at what happened.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Coal fire plants blow up all the time. The only reason people don't panic is because virtually none of them have any comprehension of the amount of horribly toxic and radioactive crap floating around those plants. Maybe when a few more gigantic mountains of coal waste flood into populated areas, people will get the hint that it's a terribly dangerous and destructive energy solution. Unlike, for instance, nuclear power, which is safe, clean, efficient, reliable, and cost-effective.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It wasn't just a positive reactivity coefficient; it was a massively high positive reactivity coefficient. Between its design and its operation, it's truly a wonder the Chernobyl plant accident didn't do significantly higher damage to nearby populations and environment.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
All very right, but what it comes down to in the end is that the design made it physically possible to have a Chernobyl event. The design of every single reactor ever used in western nations inherently makes a repeat of Chernobyl a physical impossibility. Workers in a CANDU or Westinghouse plant could sit down together and plan to intentionally cause as much damage as possible to the plant using the controls and overrides at their disposal, but the worst they could do is cause the reaction to stop and possibly cause minor damage to some reactor parts.
There's no combination of switches, buttons, levers, or commands you can use in a western nuclear power plant to cause anything like what happened in Chernobyl. No worker stupidity, negligence, or malicious intent could cause anything like a Chernobyl repeat.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Personally, I subscribe to a slightly modified version of the "Pournelle Method" of nuclear waste disposal, as described in "Yet Another Modest Proposal", by Larry Niven. The process is very simple in principle and execution, and should be at least as effective as any other method yet proposed, but a lot cheaper. Here's how it works:
(1) Find a suitable circular piece of arid desert, 100 miles in radius. That really should be no problem.
(2) In the center of this area, construct a large shallow pit, and line it after the fashion of modern landfills (that last part is my own addition).
(3) Around the perimeter of the area, construct a 12-foot-high chain-link fence. It should be sturdy but not ridiculously so.
(4) At regular intervals around the fence, place large signs that say, in 10 of the world's core languages: "If you pass this fence, you will die."
(5) Place your radioactive waste in the center pit described in (2).
(6) Problem solved.
Please, educate yourself on Half-Lives. Basically, the longer the stuff hangs around, the longer the HL. The reason the HL is so long is that the substance decays slowly. Since it decays slowly, it's not losing a lot of energy per unit time. Therefore, stuff that 'hangs out for tens of thousands of years' isn't very dangerous. On the contrary, it's the stuff that decays rapidly (has short HL) that releases a large amount of energy, and is therefore more dangerous.
Think of it as oxidization.
Iron will oxidize ('rust') very slowly. It takes a long time (years/decades) for a lump of iron to completely oxidize. It's not very dangerous to have around.
Wood will oxidize (burn) at medium speed. Enough that you can hurt yourself. But it burns out after a few minutes/hours/days.
A tank of hydrogen will combine with O2 very rapidly (explode). But it's done reacting in seconds.
SO, which is the most dangerous? The one that takes a long time, or the one that happens in an instant?
Since it is obvious that you can pre-determine the amounts and the nature of the fission fragments, I bow down to you and say "I am not worthy", however, FYI:
Be10, 1.6 x 10^6 years;
C14, 5730 years;
Al26, 720,000 years;
Ca41, 103,000;
Cl36, 301,000 years;
Mn53, 3.7 x 10^6 years;
Fe60, 1.49 x10^6 years;
Se79, 65,000 years;
Se82, 1.4 x10^20 years;
Zr93, 1.5 x10^6 years;
Nb94, 20,000 years;
Cd113, 9.3 x10^15 years;
Te123, 1.3 x10^13 years;
Te130, 2.5 x 10^21 years;
Cs135, 3 x 10^6 years;
La138, 128 x 10^9 years;
Nd145, 6 x 10^16 years;
Ta180, >1.2 x 10^15 years;
W180, >1.1 x 10^15 years;
Pb204, >1.4 x 10^17 years;
U233, 159,000 years;
U234, 245,000 years;
U235, 704 x 10^6 years;
U236, 23.4 x 10^6 years;
U238, 4.468 x 10^9 years;
Again I say "I am not worthy"
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Furthermore, when a reactor fails, it does not mean diddly squat whether it is a positive or negative feedback loop. I and a team of operators ran, not researched, ran a shutdown reactor at approximately 3% in the power range for a week on decay heat alone. Since you said to do the math....2 + 2 = 5.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
30 years for Nukes is OK but 10 years to refine oil that we could drill here is not? Make very little sense, but then not much has from this administration.
Actually, nuclear is not green, it glows blue at the bottom of a holding pool.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Ha.. There is a uranium mine in Oregon.. Its been basically shut down for several years, but just outside of Lakeview, in southern Oregon, there is one..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Are you one of those who can't stand nasty bath water, so you throw the baby out with the bath water?
OF COURSE people have done things wrong. In fact, some people sit in boardrooms, and decide to sell defective vehicles, because they can settle out of court when people get killed, for less than it would cost to build a vehicle without those defects. Have you stopped driving, or riding in cars?
Heads on pig poles sound fitting for some of the blatant blunders that have been committed - but where do you plan to stop? Not until everyone who has ever supported or developed or even researched nuclear energy? Smart plan, genius. There will be no one left to build your safe nuclear plants.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Don't you noobs read http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/02/1330245/Thorium-the-Next-Nuclear-Fuel?art_pos=1?
We have no idea how long we will need to store the spent fuel. With 2010 technology (ie: put it in a box and wait), it is ~100000 years. But what new technologies will we have in the year 2050, 2100 or 2200.
Only if we do it the stupidest way we can currently imagine and if we define 'safe' as being far less radioactive than the keyboard you're sitting in front of now. If we do it the smartest way we currently have the technology for, it's about 500 years (but then we don't get to FUD about how to warn the Morlocks and Eloi about the dangers). If we accept the endpoint radiation figures proposed by the "we must store it for 100000 years" crowd, our own bodies must be categorized as dangerous nuclear waste due to the C14 content.
The people who make those claims are a combination of the usual doomsayers (who in another time would be sitting on a street corner shouting "The end is Nigh!") and people who benefit from fossil fuel use who will say or do nearly ANYTHING to keep their gravy train on the rails.
Not to mention we can breed our tremendous stockpiles of depleted uranium into fuel.
I think it already is.
I understand you can't afford to lag behind on nuclear waste production in the cold war with Iran but i see one good thing in this. This way you Yankees will HAVE to go back to the moon, if only to get rid of the toxic waste. I sincerely hope you're not planning on dumping that shit into our seas. Save the space program, build a nuke ! Nice one Bama...
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
and you, dipshit, are fucking nuts too for advocating murder - how can you be so stupid as to hate on people simply because they have a desire to save YOUR environment? you fucking retard. ... you prick !
many environmentalists are funded covertly to maintain the petro/coal industry - they mean well - bring them on board, don't alienate them with your ignorance and arrogance - they want quality of life like you claim you do - only they generally don't advocate shooting people to do so
Do the numbers, it only works if A) we build a *lot* more dams, and some places thats hard, like Nevada. B) Still have massive over capacity from the inefficacy and the fact you must have enough in storage just in case. This translates to stupid expensive electricity. Like 3x my current *rent*.
Don't forget the greens don't want dams either. The lakes are not all good.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Did you even look at the numbers?
If you fixed every single wall wart in the country you would still have achieved pretty much nothing.
You use the exact same approach of trying to make trivial quantities of power sound big by adding meaningless multipliers.
A more honest way of putting it would be:
if we make a massive push to change every piece of small electronics in every house we can save less than 1%.
It is not a death by a thousand cuts since even if you doubled the number of wall warts and hibernating appliances in your house you only increase the drain on the system by 1%.
If everyone does a little very little gets done.
heating, transport, cooling, lighting. these are where to look if you're serious about the issue. if you just want trivial feelgood measures go for the wall warts.
"But surely, if 60 million people all do a little, it'll add up to a lot?"
No. This "if-everyone" multiplying machine is just a way of making some-
thing small sound big. The "if-everyone" multiplying machine churns out
inspirational statements of the form "if everyone did X, then it would pro-
vide enough energy/water/gas to do Y," where Y sounds impressive. Is
it surprising that Y sounds big? Of course not. We got Y by multiplying
X by the number of people involved - 60 million or so! Here's an exam-
ple from the Conservative Party's otherwise straight-talking Blueprint for a
Green Economy:
"The mobile phone charger averages around . . . 1 W consump-
tion, but if every one of the country's 25 million mobile phones
chargers were left plugged in and switched on they would con-
sume enough electricity (219 GWh) to power 66 000 homes for
one year."
66 000? Wow, what a lot of homes! Switch off the chargers! 66 000 sounds a
lot, but the sensible thing to compare it with is the total number of homes
that we're imagining would participate in this feat of conservation, namely
25 million homes. 66 000 is just one quarter of one percent of 25 million. So
while the statement quoted above is true, I think a calmer way to put it is:
If you leave your mobile phone charger plugged in, it uses one
quarter of one percent of your home's electricity.
And if everyone does it?
If everyone leaves their mobile phone charger plugged in, those
chargers will use one quarter of one percent of their homes'
electricity.
The "if-everyone" multiplying machine is a bad thing because it deects
people's attention towards 25 million minnows instead of 25 million sharks.
The mantra "Little changes can make a big difference" is bunkum, when ap-
plied to climate change and power.
It may be true that "many people doing a little adds up to a lot," if all those "littles" are somehow focused into a
single "lot" - for example, if one million people donate £10 to one accident-
victim, then the victim receives £10 million. That's a lot. But power is a
very different thing. We all use power. So to achieve a "big difference"
in total power consumption, you need almost everyone to make a "big"
difference to their own power consumption.
Again with the silly launch it into the sun crap.
How about we just eat it.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1553308&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=nested&cid=31168840
A and B are both problems. A is a bigger problem than B. It is unlikely that A can be fixed in the near term. Therefore, we should not try to fix B?
What you have to understand is that in the last election there was a choice between republican-realist and republican-lunatic. There was no democrat candidate.
If you re-process it to recover fuel, then yeah. But we aren't doing that. So I expect it's still a viable heat source.
N.B.: There are lots of kinds of weapons. A dynamite based bomb enclosed in radioactive dust would be a weapon. It might not kill very many people, but it could reduce property values by a tremendous amount for a long time. And it could scare people a LOT for a short period of time. (OTOH, when the proper mind set it in place, talcum powder can scare people. That happened a few times during the anthrax scare awhile back. ... I wonder who cause THAT. ... All the signs point to a US lab where everyone with access to the anthrax has clearance. IIRC, they found someone to blame, but whether he was either an actor or the originator or perpetrator of the plot seems unclear.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
that isn't really going to help.
Read the sections on wind and how much it could generate assuming we ignore all cost constraints:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf
Wind/solar are not as reliable as nuclear because you only have wind when the wind blows, and solar when the sun is shining.
Is that it? Sounds pretty reliable and reasonable to me. If there's ever an extended period of time where no wind or sun is available, I would say we're screwed anyway. Not being advanced enough to harness all our energy needs from wind and sun is different than saying it's not as reliable as another form of energy.
... there's more to it than the designs. There's safe operations and maintenance too. Without regulations and inspectors, plant operators again have every incentive to skimp on things like repairs, operator training, etc. And developing and enforcing regulations == bureaucracy. You can't have one without the other. To the extent that there are silly and useless regulations out there, yes, that should be changed. But really, most of the regs really are necessary.
Anyone who brings up Chernobyl in the context of nuclear power plant safety quite honestly hasn't the slightest idea why Chernobyl happened or why it's physically impossible for it to happen in any nuclear power plant ever designed or built in any western nation...
I submit to you the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Granted it was not as large scale as Chernobyl, but multiple meltdowns occurred and were intentionally covered up by the government. It not only could have happened in the US, it did--and the cover-up is ongoing.
With that said I agree with the rest of your points. With properly enforced regulations nuclear power can be adequately safe.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Santa Susana Field Laboratory isn't a fair comparison at all. We're talking about operational nuclear power plants. The problems and accidents at Santa Susana were with experimental reactors being pushed to their limits (far beyond, as it turned out). The major accidents happened in the 1950s and '60s and they only happened because the entire facility played fast and loose with everything it did. Sort of like when a couple scientists died because they were illegal burning dangerous chemicals in open pits.
So yes, if you're running uncontrolled experiments on untested and unsafe designs, [n] power solution can be extremely dangerous. The difference with nuclear is that in every commercial setting where it's ever been used in any western nation through history, it's proven vastly safer than coal fire plants, oil plants, and evern hydro plants. The same is true for nearly all other applications as well. Even if every plant were designed and run as piss-poorly and dangerously as the Chernobyl plant, nuclear power would still be safer and less harmful to the environment than coal fire plants. As it happens, every nuclear plant operating today (of which I'm aware) couldn't possibly repeat anything like the Chernobyl incident and all have outstanding safety records.
It's pretty telling that the worst nuclear power plant accident in US history resulted in 0 deaths, 0 serious injuries, and virtually no contamination of the environment. When you compare that to the deaths, injuries, and environmental obliteration happening all the time at coal fire plants around the US (and the world), it very quickly becomes crystal clear that we should be working as fast as we can to replace every coal fire plant in the world with nuclear power plants. They're cleaner, safer, more reliable, and just as cheap over the life of the plant due to ridiculously low operations costs.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Hydro can be ramped up with a phone call and about 30 seconds.
Nukey plants HATE to go up or down. Men with ties sweating bullets, wearing grim faces, staring at meters and valves, after a long hard thought about alternatives, one guy with a mustache says "Do it". They like to cruise at one steady RPM and stay there.
Therefore, and this is just a crazy idea I'm throwing out there, maybe just MAYBE we should have a mix of different types of power generation. Like some nukey plants to handle the guaranteed base load, as much green power we can squeeze out, and coal for those "holy shit we need power!" moments. The boilers take about half an hour to heat up. Hydro is a lot better and we should build it where ever we can. And yes, that is a limited number of locations.
Also, what's the address of your cardboard box and why do you have 3 AC units for it?
plant a forest.
dig a hole.
chop down forest.
dump in hole.
replant forest.
repeat until hole is full.
dig another hole...
?????????
Profit!!!
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Nuclear plants built in the 50's and 60's don't like begin throttled. But modern designs can load follow almost trivially. They had designs back in the 60's that could load follow too. They where just never build, well one was, the molten salt reactor (ok 2, its predecessor the aircraft reactor experiment).
As for hydro, we are close to maxed out in many countries, from both practical and greeneie reasons. Basically its hard to get permission to build a dam these days.
We are quite simply using much more power than hydro can even get close to. Wind and solar only if we pay 5x(at least) or more for electricity while ignoring availability and cover entire states/countries with panels/turbines. Including availability makes it 2x more expensive at least.
And and for the record 30sec ramp up for hydro is a pipe dream. But you don't need to ramp up that fast anyway. Most hydro is in fact not so good at peak loading. There is a lot of water mass. You can't just turn it on and off like a tap. The one we went through had a 30min ramp up time, and a slightly longer ramp down time.
You lost me on the last comment sorry.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Mistake? Are you really so ignorant of large scale solar thermal projects or heat transfer in general that you think air cooling is enough? Remember that convection in a liquid removes heat far more easily than in a gas and that radiation with such a small temperature difference to the fourth power is ignorable. THIS IS HIGH SCHOOL STUFF. I can't imagine that you are that ignorant about a topic you are enthusiastic about so I think you either didn't read it and are lying or are playing some sort of odd game.
Personally I think that if you are going to be arguing about different power sources you should at least put in a single days effort in learning how each major method works, particularly ones in a very closely related area to what you are advocating.
Quick, call these guys and tell them they are stupid: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/brightsource-energy-offered-nearly-14,1174231.shtml
We are quite simply using much more power than hydro can even get close to.
And, dude, are you ignoring me? We need a mix of power generation. Relying SOLELY on any form of power would be retarded.
And remember that "getting permission" is a difficult hurdle, but by no means the real limit to hydro power. What's really limiting that is there are only so many places that lend themselves to dams. I imagine big fast rivers though canyons with mountains surrounding the upstream area.
And and for the record 30sec ramp up for hydro is a pipe dream.
HA! now that's funny. Cause, you know... pipes...
But you don't need to ramp up that fast anyway.
Well when there's a rolling blackout coming your way and you've got a few minutes to make a call, it sure would be handy. I believe the term would be "robust". Of which our power grid is severely lacking, much less being "smart".
Most hydro is in fact not so good at peak loading. There is a lot of water mass. You can't just turn it on and off like a tap. The one we went through had a 30min ramp up time, and a slightly longer ramp down time.
You're a natural punomancer, you know that? And you may even be right, but the desk jockey I talked to at the power company said otherwise. Your first-hand knowledge is probably better.
I also wasn't aware that nukey plants had gotten more agile.
I suggest you find out how they cool their steam - it really appears that you are really that ignorant but I cannot understand how you stay that way. Find out how they cool their steam and you will dispel some of that ignorance and understand some of what I wrote.
If you are going to advocate these technologies you really should put some effort into learning how they work.
Boy, you have no clue at all do you?
Why isn't anyone pushing the thorium fuel cycle? Thorium is three or time more abundant than uranium and holds the promise of implementations with safety parameters that are actually within the capacity of human beings to control. Of course it can't be used to breed material for nuclear weapons ....
There we go again, the bold hope that bullshit is real and the accusation that reality is "magical thinking". Please at least be decent enough to learn about the subjects you bring up - the basics behind using steam to drive turbines are very simple and apply to solar thermal just as much as to any other heat source. That is what I was writing about above (as you should have worked out from the first response). Go on - make up some more numbers so you can pretend they "have defeated me".
RTFA
I did and it was interesting.
Of course it said nothing about how the steam is condensed so had nothing at all to do with your statement.
You just used the thing as a bluff and for some stupid reason are attempting to portray your ignorance or lies as a virtue.
Do you understand at all what dry cooling means?
Go on then, explain it to me in this situation where you have large turbines and a lot of steam moving them. You will learn something in the process of trying to explain it if you do it properly instead of just making shit up.
Go look it up then.
"Go on then, explain it to me" is what I wrote - because from what I have seen and read you are incorrect and I cannot look up things in your head. Since you profess to know about this you will be able to pass on this information if you are being truthful.
If you are going to attempt to convince a technically literate readership like the majority here you are going to have to do more than some "trust me" crap.
So on your journal I'm a "stalker" now after TWO threads spread out over time?
What kind of person are you to write such things when I'm simply asking you to explain two points that I considered to be incorrect?
Sorry to jump back in the middle of the thread but unfortunately here it appears that you have misunderstood some things about dry cooling. This article describes well what I presume is the sort of air cooled systems you are talking about:
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/media/newswire/dry-cooling-slaking-thirst-concentrated-solar-power-091023
Please note what I presumed should be obvious - you take a performance hit with the trade off that it can be used in areas with less water. It's a solution to a big problem but has nothing to do with with what I wrote about increasing scale.
Since heat is being transferred by convection air cooling is not able to remove as much heat as liquid cooling if all other things are equal.
You said your electricity bill is three times your rent
Oh i get it. Well if wind and solar are not subsidized my rent would be less. Not because i use a lot. Just because wind/solar is really that expensive.
And, dude, are you ignoring me?
No, i was assuming from context that hydro was to "store" power for windless, cloudy days. I never said we shouldn't use a mix. But sadly wind/solar are not going to be big contributors for most of the world for the same reason hydro isn't. Some places it works. Most it doesn't. Economically its a feel good thing right now. It simply does not make sense. About the only thing that mite from the green box, is solar thermal.
It should be noted that *most* power/heat is generated from mainly one source. Fossil fuels. If you assume something has to be used for transport, then fossil fuels dominate even more.
Well when there's a rolling blackout coming your way...
Well managed/maintained grids don't work that way. "fast" power comes from ripple switch cutoffs, like hot water heating and the like. Even gas turbines can take minutes to spin up from standby (hot standby, rather than "spun" up standby), and a rolling blackout will keep tripping breakers with that kind of delay. America has some serious infrastructure issues if the grid is managed is such a way.
I also wasn't aware that nukey plants had gotten more agile.
They always could be.. but sadly the current crop of nukeys is a relic of the cold war, and all that this implies.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Why would you WANT to stop generating power? Most countries use power 24/7. You might want to decrease the power generated during times when less power is needed.. with nuclear reactors that can be done automatically by inserting more control rods. 100% reliability with no wasted power.