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The Nuclear Approach To Climate Change
Harperdog writes "A new roundtable at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists explores the question of whether nuclear energy is the answer to climate change, particularly in developing countries where energy needs are so great. This roundtable, like the ones before it, will be translated into Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish within a week of each article's publication. Here's a summary: From desertification in China to glacier melt in Nepal to water scarcity in South Africa, climate change is beginning to make itself felt in the developing world. As developing countries search for ways to contain carbon emissions while also maximizing economic potential, a natural focus of attention is nuclear power. But nuclear energy presents its own dangers."
With regard to climate change, does it really matter what power source we use? We are increasing the total amount of entropy (mostly heat) in the system regardless of the power source because the energy is being used somewhere. In the end, won't we have to somehow get the waste heat off the planet anyways?
and it states the bleeding obvious... Is TFA more interesting?
While renewable energy technology is the answer, nuclear energy is an excellent interim solution.
Anyone whose concerned about safety, I want you to go and look up how many nuclear reactors are over 30, 40 years old. These antique behemoths are being run because there are many unnecessary obstacles to overcome if you want to build a new plant. Nuclear technology as well as construction and information systems have improved dramatically each decade, so how is it that people can react to modern reactors as if they have no safety advantages over their retro-ancestors?
Same Old Sh*t
the nuclear industry is enormously profitable (if you ignore waste disposal) and long-lived (if you ignore a thousand years of aftermath).. these f*** wait in the wings and try this again and again.. What about an accounting system that values the natural world and rewards efficiency ?!!? If we are to survive as a species, the question is not "where do we get more power" but rather what we do with the capacity we have.
A small scale nuclear war to produce a nuclear winter to offset global warming will do the trick, and possibly cut the population at the same time.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
If you took all the effort and energy spent, developing green energies, clean coal, fracking. Couple that with all the energy spent fighting each of them for what ever reason. Just think how safe and efficient 2020 nuclear power plants could be. A new nuclear plant hasn't been built in the US since what the 80's. Thats 30 YEARS. Just think of the improvements and innovations we could make or had made had we pursued it. If you really think that global warming is the end of days, then how can you not embrace nuclear? Its like vegetarians who believe in evolution. It just doesn't make since.
Thanks Ms Palin.
And whose jerbs will you take when you migrate outside your flooded city?
Just not the king we use. Uranium and plutonium are terrible ways to achieve nuclear power. There is relatively little power output and a large amount of waste product, which we know will kill us if we even come close to it. The only benefit is being able to create nuclear weapons.
Thorium on the other hand produces much more power per gram and has very little waste. The waste it does produce is exceedingly less dangerous than the current 1950s style reactors.
Plus, there is craps loads of the stuff everywhere. Time to switch. I think we have more than enough Nukes to destroy the world population many times over, so there is no need to stick to a dangerous tech just so we can make more.
Nuclear power will be a perfectly viable solution, except in all the cases it will not be. How many nuclear reactors will the western nuclear powers allow to be installed in North Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Zimbabwe? How about Venezuela or Cuba? What about failed states like Somalia, or non-states like Somaliland? Not many I venture. The problems are large, overwhelmingly political, and even less likely to engender consensus than 'no-brainers' like reducing emissions as a risk-mitigation strategy.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
... if things get too hot (are going that way both in climate and in politics), a nuclear winter could balance a bit temperatures and amount of heat generators.
There's much more to Alaska than Palin. We rarely hear about her these days. Once you get out in the bush, nobody complains if you smoke a joint at the bar. It's funny that people in the Anchorage area pretend they are a part of civilization.
Have these people taken a look at COE numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Nuclear is not the solution in developing nations (or anywhere for that matter).
I moved to Alaska several years ago. After three winters, I am acclimatized. For instance, when it gets up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit I am strolling around in shorts and a t-shirt. Trying to survive shifting climate is something life has always done. Those who migrate and adapt survive. Those who nuke themselves deserve what they get - just leave the rest of us out of it.
It's much easier to adapt to a cooler climate than a warmer one. When you get cold you can put on another jacket. You can only remove so many clothes to remain comfortable when the temperature rises to 101 degrees with high humidity.
Thorium on the other hand produces much more power per gram and has very little waste. The waste it does produce is exceedingly less dangerous than the current 1950s style reactors.
You forgot most important part (assuming you are referring to the molten-salt thorium reactors), there is no boom. The reactor can never go out of control. Hence there is never a nuclear cloud or fall out. And also, the reactor can be designed to be started and stopped in minutes rather than hours or days or months.
And the parking lots are bubbling like tar pits!
Where to dump the radioactive waste so we can be *sure* it won't be able harm anyone anymore? Even if we figure a way to dig a deep enough hole that would be perfectly sealed for the next few thousand years and impervious to earth quakes or water leakage or whatever else, who is to guarantee some companies (especially in developing countries with little oversight) will not go the easy route and dump their waste some other place when nobody's looking, just to save some bucks?
Well, maybe with all these carcinogens and mutagens floating around we will actually see the dawn of the X-Men after all, but for ever "cool" mutation that gives super-powers there will be millions of mutations causing disabilities.
Almost all our power generation requires water.
If you don't have water security, you can't have power security.
Even in the USA, we're dealing with nuclear and coal plants on the brink of shutting down,
because the mild winter and extended drought is bringing rivers down near critical levels.
In Africa, you need to desalinate water before you can do anything.
And desalination creates its own set of problems (what do you do with the brine?).
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Parking lots in Phoenix seem to do just fine.
Something which is suspiciously missing from the whole discussion are facts. I mean if you claim that nuclear power emits less CO2 per kWh, it should be trivial to back that up with facts. You would simply add up all the CO2 emitted by the mining of the fuels to the CO2 emitted during the construction of the plant, and the CO2 emitted by the cars of the workers there up to the CO2 caused by the disposal of the waste, as well as all those little things I just missed.
If you add up all those points and also list them, only then you can make such an argument.
Its much easier to adapt to climate change than it is to control the global climate.
Good plan. Let's not use a non-fossil power source because "someone might make money off it".
Parking lots in Phoenix seem to do just fine.
Of course, Phoenix expects 110 degree temperatures so they plan for it when they build things. Unlike other areas that usually don't see those high temperatures.
Nuclear Energy is stupid. It's bad enough we have a bunch of cartels making massive profits of oil, nuclear power has an even higher barrier to entry than that.
So what's your answer? Only generate power from generator-bicycles so there's a much lower barrier to entry?
Nuclear fusion may ultimately prove to be an even cleaner source of power -- with an even higher barrier to entry than fission. Should fusion be abandoned because it will have a high barrier to entry?
Yes yes a thousand times yes. Thorium. The DOE rejected thorium in favor of fissionable uranium in the 1950s and you can guess why... thorium doesn't produce fissionable weapons grade material by product and DOE wanted weapons grade material for MAD. In my experience about 0.0000001 percent of the population knows about thorium, and remains terrified of nuclear power. It's sad really. Maine has a specific prohibition on mining thorium.. and why thorium out of all the minerals to be mined? - The man, man, doing his thing, keeping the nuclear industrial complex going. What will happen when the world is supplied with thorium package plants that fail cold and produce no weapons grade materials?
The parking lots that was built with Phoenix climate in mind is doing fine in Phoenix climate. The mix of asphalt is adjusted to the expected temperature range the finished structure will experience. A hotter climate will soften the asphalt, so a harder mix is chosen, and vice versa. If the climate changes faster than the lifetime of asphalt, there will be trouble, regardless of the direction of the local climate change.
Just not the king we use. Uranium and plutonium are terrible ways to achieve nuclear power. There is relatively little power output and a large amount of waste product, which we know will kill us if we even come close to it. The only benefit is being able to create nuclear weapons.
We could even get rid of the "waste product"
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Well, given that the amount of oil in the fields we know about, and the oil we are extracting, it's a damn site more than just climate change.
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/is-peak-oil-behind-us/
"According to a projection in the agency’s latest annual report, released last week, production of conventional crude oil — the black liquid stuff that rigs pump out of the ground — probably topped out for good in 2006, at about 70 million barrels a day."
IEA is hoping non conventional oil and new oil finds can keep it at some sort of plateau by 2020-2030, but even if all these news wells are found and developed, we're still looking at catastrophic oil production collapse in the short term!
It will take 10 years to ramp up Nuclear, and even if there are undiscovered fields out there, 10 years at least to develop those, if they're even found.
Seriously, unless you have a ready to go technology, that you can get working now, Nuclear will at least get you buy in 10 years time. It sucks but give me an alternative? An alternative better than the 'magic oil fairy is coming, you just have to believe'.
Thorium takes part in a nuclear chain reaction only after it is converted into uranium. As far as fission products go, the distribution is about the same for U233 as it is for U235. As far as power output, they should be similar. Also, the thorium fuel cycle does not prevent weapons.
As far as less waste, you must be referring to trans - uranium elements, but that does not seem to fit the less dangerous claim
My understanding of reserves points to about twice the abundance of thorium as uranium. But, still there is plenty of uranium, possibly about as common as lead.
While a thorium reactor is interesting, it is much more complex than current uranium designs. The main issue is with the thorium needing to be separated after it accepts a neutron until the decay to U233.
The reactor that most interests me is the one Bill Gates mentioned in his Ted talk. That is the reactor that burns uranium like a candle focusing mostly on depleted uranium and spent fuel. With the current stock pile in the United States, that would translate into about $100 Trillion in electricity. Or, enough power for the world for the rest of the century.
It should be mentioned, fusion power is easily within reach. Check out this graph. Why not make a push for it?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Global Warming, Nuclear Energy, Agrarian Society
This is news to few; heck the bumper sticker I made for myself with that saying has this in its footer metadata: "Made on 4/24/2007 1:19 PM".
I hear Richard Branson has repeatedly tried to get appointments with Obama to talk about IFR reactors (and been rebuffed), so I probably don't need to be prosthelitizing them any longer.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What did it cost you to move you and your family from the continental US to Alaska? How much energy was required? And what's different about the area around what's now your home since you took up residence there?
Now multiply that by 7 billion. Well... you did say *everyone* should migrate, right?
But they'll all get to smoke a joint without being hassled, so that makes it sensible. Yeah, right.
BTW, I live just as far north as you do. Also in a place where people don't pay much heed to the War On Some Drugs.
And yet... I'm pretty sure that you've managed to contribute little or nothing of use to the discussion here.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Its much easier to adapt to climate change than it is to control the global climate.
Depending on what results from the changes in the global climate.... If increasingly acidic oceans kills off ocean food sources and changing weather conditions turn formerly productive farming regions into drought stricken arid wastelands without also changing formerly unfarmable areas into productive farming regions, then the adaptation will mean dramatic reductions in the population the earth can support.
If Nuclear really is the answer, then vastly increasing our use of nuclear power over the coming decades is probably an easier adaption than watching 1/3 of the world's population die when we can't produce enough food.
I doubt the climate changes will be so dramatic, but no one really knows for sure - we may hit a tipping point that uncontrollably drives the climate to new extremes never seen before.
Cheap commodity (relatively - it's still millions/billions invested yearly) wind and solar generation plant is producing electricity at 2 - 10 c/kWh (yearly average, local currencies) around the world today. Nuclear is 4 c/kWh but the plants are expensive to build and slow to build compared to incremental solar and wind farm developments. Also, only dictatorships will be able to start up nuclear projects. Democracies will not. For voters, it is an emotional topic and not 1 to logically reason out. I make some big generalisations but I feel this is a good introduction into why wind and solar (and others) are going to replace nuclear.
My GOD we HAVE to shut down the Hoover Dam RIGHT NOW. That antique behemoth finished construction in 1936. That junker is over 70 years old and is going to cause a hydraulic catastrophe at any minute!!!!
Fun graph, but they don't know the problems they want to solve, or how they will eventually solve them, and drawing a few wavy lines saying "give us 100 billion" and will solve all the problems by date X, is just a random claim.
The only thing they DO know is their current approach and the current solutions.
The only thing you learn from that graph is that the fusion lobby knows it CANNOT deliver success, because they put the CURRENT funding line below the "Fusion Never" line. Meaning they know their current techniques are going nowhere.
See they are getting funding, ITER is costing billions, yet they still say "never", not in 100 years, NEVER.
Look fusion is treading water, they need a miracle fix for the various problems of containment and they don't have it. They know that, so they put the line below never. We build ITER, they claim they learned valuable lessons, want more budget and waste more time.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_161.shtml
for just the nuke part
but the more complete article is fair middlen' OK also, but long
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair
live well and prosper
Zero point energy. John Hutchison. 2012. Nuff said.
In the 1960's and 1970's, through the concerted efforts of well meaning organizations like Greenpeace, the nuclear power industry was destroyed. In their attempt to do good this organization indirectly caused the construction of untold numbers of carbon emitting power stations. In our current attempt to "do good" it is important not to let our hubris lead us to make mistakes that will cost future generations. No scientifically accepted model says the Earth with turn into a Venus-like desert. Average temperatures are expected to rise 2 - 12 degrees F by 2100 according to the EPA. Sea levels are expected to rise at most 2 meters by 2100 according to the IPCC. If it costs us a mere 1-2% of our GDP each year to prevent that change, over the course of 100 years that adds up: Current World GDP (About 64 Trillion USD) * 1.02 ^ 100 = $ 460 Trillion Dollars For $460 Trillion dollars we could move everyone within a mile of the ocean inland, build greenhouses to supply the entire world's food supply, and plant 100 billion trees with money left over.
Honestly, if all the sane nations get a majority of their energy from nuclear power, we can let those "fourth world" states burn all the fossil fuel they want - there will be a lot more supply available to sell to them at probably lower prices, and their consumption is not likely to be anywhere in the ballpark of what we are currently consuming.
In the meantime, we can build safer next-gen nuclear in many more stable third-world nations to help them develop. 5 or 10 small countries burning fossil fuels would be ok if everyone else dramatically cut their usage.
Well parhaps we could start mass-producing these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Tres_Power_Tower
As a one off it is almost economical - if we make all that parts in China and set it up in outback Australia (where the land cost is minimal and there is a lot more sunshine than in Spain) we should be able to supply the entire worlds energy. (I know, transportation is an issue, but one problem at a time.)
One of the issues that is often not mentioned by proponents of nuclear power is the need to refine the Uranium ore into fuel rods for the reactors and this can only be done in a very few places (at, I suspect, a significant cost). This is not an issue for USA or France or Russia, but for a country like Australia we would be putting our energy generation capability in the hands of overseas providers.
High Temp Gas Cooled Reactors do not need water cooling to attain reasonable efficiency. There are various designs approaches for this - in some, you use fuel "pebbles". There's also a concept called a molten salt reactor, which could be designed in a high-temp gas cooled configuration.
With such reactors, you just dump your heat into the air instead of the water. This would be a good idea for Africa, US West/SW, etc.
Or being assassinated and cyberattacked by Israeli spies. I used italics just to decrease the global temperature by being cool.
Why is Slashdot still propagating the CO2 hoax?
Experience suggests that this is an oversimplification. The HTTR (High Temperature Thorium Reactor) had a few unexpected failure modes that led to some discharge of radioactive stuff into the atmosphere. The other german experimental Thorium reactor (Juellich) almost went boom because, for some nowadays not so mysterious reason, the graphite was heated way beyond what it should have. Nobody knew that back then. While nothing happened, it still is a mayor waste problem to this day.
This leads us to another issue. The failure mode of the HTTR was not that unexpected. It was, like the Tsunami issue at Fukushima, predicted by other people and ignored by those responsible. The designers and builders of the the HTTR made a point about how they were completely sure that nothing could possibly go wrong, and whoever claimed otherwise was an idiot. Doubts were brushed aside. The moral of the story is that we cannot trust the judgement of nuclear engineers to the extent that would be necessary.
"The design is inherently safe, nothing can go wrong" -- yeah, right.
On the upside, the generator bicycles could solve the obesity problem :P
Nuclear plants are owned by Mr. Burns and run by Homer Simpson.
-- Make America hate again!
focusing mostly on depleted uranium
But then you wouldn't have enough for your A10 fleet to pierce all those armored vehicles in the developing world wanting to nucularize ("nukes" and all) their power infrastructure.
I've walked across a parking lot in Iowa at 110, and my shoes stuck to the tar/asphalt used. Not everything is built for 110.
Learn to love Alaska
nuff said.
It may be easier to keep warm in a cold climate, but things don't grow well there. Even brief and light periods of cooling in the past ("little ice age") have cause massive famine and death. Furthermore, with global warming, we lose far less arable land around the equator than we gain up north.
Cooling is a disaster for civilization, warming is merely an inconvenience.
Saying that mining and enriching nuclear fuel produces greenhouse gases is a really pointless thing to focus on, considering that other fossil fuels also require mining and processing. Even if a given quantity of nuclear fuel required 100x the processing of oil, you'd still be ahead by several orders of magnitude because it contains so much more usable energy.
Burning gas increases entropy. Burning coal decreases mass, very slightly. And it doesn't mean what you're appear to be thinking because earth is not a closed system.
That's extremely unlikely. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past, and there are plenty of organisms that can survive that and that would quickly fill any niches that open up.
The real threat to ocean food sources is massive overfishing, mostly to satisfy the sea food craze in the West. That's what should be stopped.
Most of the areas threatened by desertification from global warming are already marginal. And if you look at the distribution of landmasses and deserts, global warming will produce much more arable land up north (in Alaska, Canada, northern Europe and Siberia) than it destroys around the equator.
The natural progression of climate would be to have a major glaciation even some time soon: tens of thousands of years of much of Europe, Asia, and the Americas covered in thick ice sheets, a cycle that has existed for millions of years and been getting progressively more serious each time around. Talk about "civilization destroying climate change".
On the other hand, we know that if we "tip out of" that glaciation cycle (complete melting of all ice sheets, sea level rise, etc.), the world climate we get would be very different from what we have today, and adaptation would be very costly, but it would be fine for humans and human civilization.
I'm not proposing that we deliberately tinker with the climate. But I think the carbon we have emitted into the atmosphere so far is not an altogether bad thing, and economics will probably cause us to greatly reduce emissions over the next few decades anyway, as solar and nuclear become cheaper and cheaper.
I'll second you on the modular reactors. I ran the projected numbers on a Hyperion (sorry Gen4E) sealed modular reactor with an eye towards seeing it as a giant battery - i.e. the rest of the power plant is (conceptually) basically the same as if the boiler were heating water with coal or gas instead, so the proper comparison is reactor versus boiler + conventional fuel. And at the projected costs the reactor was actually only slightly more expensive than coal in most locations, in terms of $/MWh of thermal energy. And that was *after* they upped the projected price. Of course there's the not-so-minor issue that with the reactor you have to pay for 10-15 years of energy up front (or via financing) which boosts the costs further, but if governments were willing to "subsidize" it even just in the form of interest-free loans they could begin to make serious inroads in areas with high coal prices or expensive emissions regulation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That's why we are talking about LFTR and not the reactor type you are refering to.
The german reactor was more or less a Uranium reactor that ran on Thorium as well. A LFTR runs almost purely on Thorium, needing Urianium only as a starter.
Do NOT mix the two up.
Please make yourself familiar with that concept. Thorium is a fuel. The reactor design is somewhat independent of it.
yes, nuclear is the answer.
Our culture has an irrational fear of nuclear power, much like in the early trains of steam trains, people thought they would die from asphyxiation if the train went too fast.
Some nuclear technology is dangerous. Thorium reactors (see other comments), for example, aren't.
But through our irrational fear, we've actually put us into a worse situation. In most western countries, we have nuclear reactors running well beyond their lifetimes, because we are too afraid to allow the construction of new, modern reactors. So instead we have old, less reliable, less safe and slowly falling apart reactors. Do you really think that's an improvement?
Burning coal and oil and gas is what has to stop, right now. I'm with a power company that offers renewable energy right now. But if there was one that offered renewable plus nuclear, I'd sign up immediately. For some reason, there isn't. You either get totally dirty power, with nuclear and fossil, or renewable. But nobody has the balls to ask the market if maybe there are enough people like me who don't really mind nuclear, but do mind fossil.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If they'd gotten off their arses in the 80's when it was pretty certain what was needed (far more certain than any indications of a coming Social Security or Pensions catastrophe), they'd not have to do this.
But they didn't "because it's too expensive and we don't want to hurt our economy".
Now, however, they're looking to spend trillions on nuclear power (after a trillion spent on a crashed economy that they didn't seem to have any problems paying for) when it's very late in the game and the cost of mitigation risen exponentially.
I guess that nuclear power goes to well connected people, huh, whereas disruptive technologies, by definition, disrupt the situation that has those well connected people connected.
Because, you know what? There are no coal miners working on a wind farm.
The thorium cycle produces Uranium 233 which is a very good weapon grade material... that's not the reason.
Oh sure lets have a bunch of nuke plants in places that can barely maintain roads.... THAT'LL WORK OUT GREAT!
I'm sure they won't cut any corners at all being broke as hell. And their tech skills are the best in the world because they pay cents per hour!
We're not too bright are we.... :(
What did it cost you to move you and your family from the continental US to Alaska?
- Not much.
How much energy was required?
- Quite a bit.
And what's different about the area around what's now your home since you took up residence there?
- http://www.adn.com/2011/12/20/2226475/deaths-of-alaska-ringed-seals.html
- http://www.adn.com/2012/04/07/2411798/city-inches-closer-to-the-seasonal.html
- The cost of living is outrageous.
- Still don't need an air conditioner!
Now multiply that by 7 billion. Well... you did say *everyone* should migrate, right?
- No, I didn't suggest "everyone" migrate, that was your assumption.
- Things change.
- You either adapt, die with dignity or die crying about it.
- You don't like the heat, move.
- You don't have easy access to food, water and jobs - move to where it isn't so hard to compete for resources.
- Don't sabotage a future generation.
The thing is that natural uranium is basically all (99.27%) U238, which is useless for reactors (at least of any implemented design). So for every thousand pounds of uranium mined you get at most (after enrichment) ~7 pounds of fissile U235 and 993 pounds of depleted uranium, wich also contains some other trace isotopes. With thorium on the other hand you mine 100% Th232. Not only that but thorium "burns" much more completely so you get a lot more energy per unit of fuel, and your waste products are far less radioactive. Now you can design reactors to "burn" U238, but generally speaking all the techniques required would work even better on thorium, and in fact many thorium reactors are designed to be able to "burn" a certain percentage of depleted uranium and/or U235 reactor waste along with the thorium.
Personally I like the liquid thorium salt reactor design, seems to have great potential as an idiot-resistant self-regulating reactor, especially when coupled with a liquid lead-bismuth coolant/shielding.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What an absolutely pointless discussion about non viable options. The technology exists that can provide free/cheap energy for everyone's needs without pollution. Of course this wouldn't be in the interests of those in power. Hence the problem.
I didn't know that Alaska was self-sufficient. It isn't? Well, I guess you failed to outrun climate change, then.
And this, here, is why these debates are pointless: the choices are between returning to pre-industrial lifestyle, which means that most people die and the survivors live in misery, and building nuclear power, which is scary, so at the end of the day we continue spewing carbon dioxide while fantasizing about windmills or climate change not happening.
Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. I doubt Slashdot will fare better.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yeah, not really "interim" given how fast generation from renewables will happen, and they'll have the advantage of, rather than requiring another 10 years to pay back the ROI for nukes (and defaulting on the costs of cleanup), renewables have returned their investment 8-18 years before the nukes went online...
Being a bit of a precisionist, I feel the need to point out that coal is generally NOT refined in any practical sense of the word; simply crushed and sorted a bit. That's part of the reason for the pollution problem with it - any non-coal bits go into the burners as well.
Oil is used for 'power' all the time, it's just not a significant source for *electrical* generation.
Many people use 'burn' as a term for using up uranium/nuclear fuel.
Coal: Mine, crush, burn.
Uranium: Mine, refine, enrich(sometimes), cast, assemble, burn, recycle(sometimes), dispose.
To address some of the higher threads-
The true difference is that a single train car of Uranium a year can produce as much power as a daily 200 car train of coal. Or 1 train car(mostly shielding) of Uranium = ~73k train cars of Coal. In the mining and refinement of said car of uranium you might release about 10 cars worth of CO2, making the CO2 release from nuclear power 'insignificant'. IE we wouldn't have a global warming problem from CO2 release if we were all nuclear power(and did something about oil usage).
We dont' need to get down to 'carbon neutral' in order to avoid global warming; we simply need to avoid overwhelming the planet's ability to re-absorb it.
I don't read AC A human right
Experience suggests that this is an oversimplification. The HTTR (High Temperature Thorium Reactor) had a few unexpected failure modes....
True. I was talking about Liquid fluoride thorium reactor however. It is simply not possible for this design to explode like Fukushima. When power is gone, the reaction cannot continue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
If I'd seen your post earlier, I might of modded you up.
At this point I'll concede on the global warming/climate change point. As you point out, the real question now is: Is avoiding the damage economically worth it? In some cases I hear people advocating to switching to electric sources that run 10X the cost of conventional ones.
As somebody else pointed out, if we were given a source of essentially free unlimited electricity we'd be 99% of the way towards post-scarcity. Cheap power enables so many things.
I think we still need a healthy mix of power sources, and I don't like coal due to the ancillary pollution - not just global warming. By the time you pilo on enough pollution controls to qualify coal power as 'clean', it's more expensive than nuclear.
We dearly need affordable power, and I think nuclear has the best promise. Even then I don't propose making it our 'sole source.' I like to place my ideal non-carbon electric mix at 40% nuclear, 20% solar, 20% wind, and 20% 'other' such as hydro. In order to reach this in the USA we simply need around twice as many nuclear reactors if we keep building them in the 1-1.4GW size range. We could use a whole raft of the small kw range devices for both providing electricity and heating remote Alaskan towns. Put the solar panels on roofs south of the Mason-Dixon line, the wind turbines in North Dakota and such, where they make sense.
I don't read AC A human right
Reality was a bit more different and the protests against the Iraq war should have shown you by now that the protesters really did not have anywhere near the power you dream they have. For a variety of political and financial reasons the nuclear industries in the US, UK and France chased impractical goals, stagnated and almost doomed themselves.
In the US the cash cow was to sell weapons material that was not needed to a military that not only had enough but could make their own far more cheaply. Carter, a very strong nuclear power advocate who knew his subject matter, had to put a bullet in that corporate welfare and the US nuclear industry has never bothered to adjust and stand on their own feet after that. To this day they spend more money lobbying for the return of the welfare than they do on the R&D that could get them into a state where they could prosper without it. The only US nuclear hope is startups that aspire to more than welfare, but even they would be better off moving to China or India.
In the UK, Thatcher, another very strong nuclear power advocate who knew her subject matter, had to put a bullet in the nuclear industry there that was draining dangerous amounts of money out of a failing economy. Once again the industry grew fat and complacent on the public purse. It's never even bothered to attempt to recover, and will just try to keep old plants running at taxpayers expense for as long as it can without any attempt at improvement.
The French situation is different - some bad assumptions in the 1960s combined with a desire for an endless supply of weapon materials mucked them up as the dead end plutonium fast breeders consumed whatever budget they could have used to do anything else. That's left successive governments with no desire to give them what they need to get out of their stagnation.
To sum up, because nuclear power delivers best at enormous scales that means vast amounts of capital is required and that attracts attention of people that want to pervert projects to different ends (eg. for a non-nuclear example the NASA pork distribution that resulted in dead astronauts), and because it takes so long different bands of bandits (elected or otherwise) passing through get to put different twists on it.
Civilian nuclear was crippled by people with a hell of a lot more political and financial power than Greenpeace could ever muster, and in some cases it was really a mercy killing of an industry that was eating itself.
Slashdot : PR for nerds, Stuff nobody cares ?
GP doesn't have much room in his head for more than 1 thought at a time. Forgive him.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The liberials think that Ukraine in 1986 was a capitalism based country. If you look at that place then no wonder you would hate capitalism.
Okay, it takes two years to produce.
It also only produces 110 GWh/year. A single 1GW nuclear reactor that takes a decade to build will produce ~7884 GWh/year. Or almost 72 times as much. By that standard, you can build nuclear capacity faster than you can solar.
It also takes up 195 hectares of land, or about 2m m^2. Palo Verde, one of the largest nuclear plants in the USA, is on property that's 16km^2(16M m^2), 8 times as the solar facility, but it produces 29 TWh/year, or 264 times the power. Looking on google maps, it looks like a good deal of the land is 'empty', such that you could put a couple of those solar tower systems in. It'd be more, but the sewage treatment/cooling water ponds take up quite a lot of space.
I don't read AC A human right
We know that Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully designed and built a test reactor that used thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel--and the reactor ran completely safely for _five_ years with no undue problems.
And you wonder why both China and India are heavily investing in developing the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) into something that can generate power on a large scale. Unlike uranium-based reactors, LFTR's offer these advantages:
1. You don't need expensive pressurized reactor vessels.
2. The fuel is much cheaper to make than uranium-235 pellets assembled into fuel rods. In fact, it's even possible to use spent uranium fuel rods and plutonium dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, which means we get rid of a huge radioactive waste problem.
3. If there is a need to quickly shut down the reactor, all you need to do is empty the thorium/sodium fluoride mix from the reactor vessel.
4. By using closed-cycle Brayton turbines, you eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or locate the reactor near a large source of cooling water. That also means the physical "footprint" of the reactor powerplant could be vastly smaller, cutting construction costs.
5. The amount of nuclear waste generated in a tiny fraction of the waste generated by a uranium reactor, and this waste has a very short half life--under 300 years. That means the waste can be dumped into any disused salt mine and/or salt dome cheaply, if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
So what are we waiting for?
Frye: "I sure am glad that global warming didn't close down all of the ski areas!"
Lela: "It did, but the nuclear winter cooled things off again."
Australian nuclear technology has a depressing habit of being buried merely due to clueless accountants getting in the way. The last thirty years of synrock (something that can actually deal properly with a very wide range of nuclear waste) is a prime example.
That is exactly the type of claim I take issue with. If you are talking "gigawatts" and "can't blow up", then you are likely talking nonsense.
That's a very narrow definition of safe. It will most likely have its own way of making a mess. Perhaps it will be bloody unlikely in theory, but in practice, corrupt, greedy and stupid operators will make it happen.
Wyle E. Coyote, is that you?
How many times are you gonna trust the engineers at Acme to make something that doesn't blow up in your face?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The thing is that natural uranium is basically all (99.27%) U238, which is useless for reactors (at least of any implemented design)
BZZT. Oh, sorry. The answer we're looking for is "CANDU reactors can run on natural, unenriched U238." Roddy, tell him what he's won!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
I would say that for the United States, capitalists are much much better at nuclear power than the government is. If you take a gander at what the US government did with radioactive and other hazardous materials at Rocky Flats or Hanford, and compare the level of callousness to the level of care taken at even the worst US near disaster at TMI, I think you would find that armies of lawyers waving class action lawsuits do far more to check corporations than government bureacrats can check themselves.
This is my sig.
The only way the U.S. government can make their current Keynesian dog and pony show successful (let's go into huge amounts of debt to "stimulate" the economy) is to duplicate post WW2 conditions. i.e. widespread destruction of industrial infrastructure throughout Europe and Asia.
Maybe the plan is to nuke the BRIC countries, Germany and Japan to once again rid the USA of it's competition? This will not only reduce carbon emissions, but as a fringe benefit, millions of tons of debris will be kicked into the atmosphere causing a cooling effect.
I'd like to see a source on this claim. All too often when I see such projections it's heavily weighted with unrealistic assumptions and back-end installations. For example, stuff like 75% of the renewable power will be installed in 2015-2020, and they're already behind their 25% goal by 2015.
A google search - seems the goal is 100% electricity from renewables, not energy. The goal for heating is only 11% by 2020:
Not until 2030(by Oil&Gas, admittably)
Equivalent, not 'actual' 100% - They'll be trading with other countries, buying non-renewable power, but will sell renewable at other times, but will net out 100%(realistic).
This page suggests they lucked out on the renewable resource trend; favorable wind and tide power locations. They're also 'ahead of schedule' and 35% of the way there. Still, they'll need to increase 8% a year to meet the goal, which I find a bit ambitious.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't be trying to reach similar goals if I was evil overlord of the United states; it's just that nuclear power would very much be part of the mix.
I don't read AC A human right
Land transport remains expensive for a variety of reasons, one being that it has to mix with fragile people.
The implication of this is that living near the coast has advantages. If you live on the West or East Coast, or places like Britain, Hong Kong, Sydney and so on, goods can be moved to and from major markets very cheaply. If you live in St. Louis, Alice Springs or Tibet you are at at disadvantage.
This shows. In Europe fuel is highly taxed to encourage efficiency (which works). In the US it has low taxes because otherwise it would be a major economic drain. Because of the distances, rises in oil and gas price have far more effect on the US than they do on Europe. Conclusion: Cheap or expensive depends very much on where you live.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Where he is wrong is in failing to realise that this only compares like with like. If I put a big electric motor in a Chevy truck and drove it like a redneck, it would possibly result in similar emissions to the Diesel version (there are benefits because the electric motor doesn't use power when stationary, and there is no auto transmission to waste fuel). But a hybrid isn't nearly as big and heavy as a truck, and it has much better aerodynamics. If I am transporting up to 4 people plus luggage, a hybrid is far more energy efficient than a truck. The problem is people who commute in overly large vehicles, for reasons of status.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If there was enough 'free' energy to do the things you describe, ie mine 'everything' from waste and oceans on an industrial scale, waste heat would become a serious issue Earth-wide. Anything else would be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The reason why that's not currently a big issue is because, as you say, energy availability is the constraining factor.
You don't have to trust nuclear engineers on it's own. You have to "choose" between greenies that tell you ethanol is renewable when it take over a liter or oil to make 1 liter of ethanol, corporations that sell you coal and oil as temporary solution "until" renewables do come on line that in fact pollute the world with all manner of chemicals as well as radioactive waste and the nuclear option.
. If you are talking "gigawatts" and "can't blow up", then you are likely talking nonsense.
He linked to a Wikipedia article explaining it. Your lack of understanding does not mean he is wrong. These are passively safe designs. They cannot blow up.
In the 1960's and 1970's, through the concerted efforts of well meaning organizations like Greenpeace, the nuclear power industry was destroyed.
- you are absolutely right, any type of non-economic based intervention in the economy causes the exact opposite consequences to what they are supposedly stand for.
Of-course I don't actually believe that any government regulation is based on good intentions, they are all based on political calculations for a politicians to get ahead, to stay in power, to get more for himself. But even if EVERY regulation was 'well meaning' from the very beginning and had 'well meaning' people regulating, etc., ALL of those regulations would still backfire eventually and cause the exact problem that they are supposedly there to prevent.
When gov't creates yet another law with the word 'right' in it, all it means that rights will be diminished.
When gov't creates yet another law with the word 'equality' in it, it means there will be more inequality.
If a law is created with the word 'health care', there will be no health care eventually, as this law will become part of the reason the economy will get destroyed and there will be no health care.
If a law is created with the words 'affordable', it means that nobody will be able to afford it.
It's like that new law that wants every swimming pool and every miniature golf course to be completely accessible by the disabled people, it means that huge numbers of swimming pools and miniature golf courses will be shut down, the prices for those that stay operational will go way up.
If a law is created that say: 'protect environment', the environment will get destroyed.
'Clean air' will eventually cause massive loss of productivity and of all innovation in manufacturing and then there will be no clean air, because everybody will be back to burning wood and coal to provide themselves with the energy needed to survive.
etc.etc.etc.
Greenpeace is not government itself, but its power is political, all of its accomplishments are political, they are all in the same realm - meddling with the free market economy via threat of violence.
In reality of-course, most if not all of these types of movements are Marxist in nature, looking to destroy capitalism and free market, oh well, they'll get their wish, but it means that the pollution levels will go up.
Only the economy that is growing based on real economic fundamentals and not on threat of violence and gov't intervention produces innovation that eventually solves the problems that become apparent in the beginning.
Child labour, racial discrimination, disabled people, etc.etc., all of this is taken care of by the free market capitalism, which works to produce more and reduce prices, because of growth of competition and search of profit.
Gov't can only reverse these trends - make the economy weaker, take from it, redistribute the means of production in an unproductive manner, at some point stop the production, destroy the money and shut down the economy and then there will be millions of people without any way to support themselves in such an environment, and they'll end up polluting much more, burning things, they will be killing each other, etc.etc.
All of the things the governments and the do-gooders of the world are supposedly against, they are brining back by fighting against profitability and private ownership of means of production.
You can't handle the truth.
The recent debacle in Japan and the previous disaster in Chernobyl illustrate why nuclear energy isn't a viable option for third-world economies. If first-world countries can't manage the risk of nuclear power plants effectively, third-world countries will be much less able to do so, and they'll wind up fucking themselves over much worse than Japan did if they try. The economic strains will inevitably cause them to skimp on safety and maintainance, with the result of more breakdowns and meltdowns per facility. That is, until a better, more fail-safe, lower maintainance design is developed and demonstrated in the first world.
Then there's the issue of transporting nuclear fuel all over the place and dealing with spent fuel in a responsible manner, another thing that the first world can barely do.
Ultimately we aren't going to fix this problem until it is way too late and something drastic is requires for us to survive. Most likely... bombing Antarctica just enough to produce a 'mild' nuclear winter. Don't worry about Antarctica's wildlife though.. they will be long since dead from the climate change anyway at that point.
Alternatively.... those who can afford to will move to Antarctica while the rest of the continents become to hot to survive and everyone else dies. Then when it starts to become too hot even there they can bomb the now de-populated old continents. So... you see... bombing Antarctica is actually an optimistic view on the future compared to what else might happen.
Eh, you can use breeders to turn 238 into 235 though - and it's a big part of the appeal of nuclear power to start with.
That's ok.
When the Chinese announces they have a functioning LFTR reactor in 2020 and is willing to burn nuclear waste at a price, then Thorium will become the "good" nuclear stuff.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Of-course I don't actually believe that any government regulation is based on good intentions, they are all based on political calculations for a politicians to get ahead, to stay in power, to get more for himself.
What's wrong with that? Everybody should be acting in their own self interests, trying to get more for themselves. Doing things for other people that does not benefit you is socialist charity and welfare
Survival of the fittest baby. He who can grab more of the pie wins. The best way to grab more pie for yourself is to step over others. That's why history is filled with tyrants who did just that, and they had it gooooood.
Yet another shameless link to one of my cartoons
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Please educate yourself about the LFTR design.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=thorium+remix+2011
Watch the 1st five seconds and then you won't want to stop it.
LFTR is a gold mine waiting to happen
but greedy people would rather keep their monopoly alive.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
The US government built special-purpose reactors at Hanford and elsewhere to make nearly all the weapons-grade plutonium-239 they needed during the 40s and 50s, well before the first commercial reactors were built. Commercial nuclear power stations are badly suited to creating material for nuclear weapons; long fuelling cycles mean any Pu being bred in the fuel pellets gets badly contaminated by Pu-240 due to neutron capture. There were a couple of power station reactor designs which were dual-use allowing in-situ refuelling but they were not American -- the British Magnox and the infamous Soviet RMBK-4 of Chernobyl fame. Even they were not used much for producing weapons-grade material since pretty much everyone who has ever built Pu weapons has used dedicated reactors to do so. Some other commercial reactors can be converted to make weapons-grade Pu-239, like the CANDU but in normal operation they're proliferation-proof.
The reason uranium won over thorium, and continues to be the main choice for power station reactors is that it's simple to design and build uranium reactors. Thorium is not fertile and only borderline fissile so making it fission requires, as others have mentioned, a sparkplug of medium-enriched uranium to kick off the process. If it is stopped for any reason then more enriched uranium, or even plutonium is needed to get it started again. It's also difficult to "swing" the output of a thorium reactor to load-follow whereas modern uranium reactors can reduce their output significantly without problems to meet lessened demand.
The LFTR is a logistical horror requiring continuous chemical processing of highly-radioactive boiling-hot material for the reactor to operate and to prevent proliferation of bomb-grade material, and it was not within the technology or the knowledge of 1950s nuclear science to get this sort of system to work in any timescale short of decades. The pressure-vessel uranium reactor with coolant and moderator was piss-easy to design, build and operate by comparison.
One thing that is not immediately obvious is that the primary greenhouse gas from the Nuclear industry is not Carbon Dioxide but Chlorinated Fluro-Carbons (CFC114) a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02. Whilst it's equivalent effect is slightly over 8 megatons of C02 (a conservative estimate per year since the bans on CFC began) more potent is the destruction this compound causes to the ozone layer and it's eventual effect on Phytoplankton which creates more breathable oxygen than the Amazon.
whilst the focus is on the negation of C02 it's important to recognise the systemic effect in the environment of the industrial compounds used to produce the fuel in the first place. Here are some quick quotes and links to understand Phytoplankton's role and susceptibility to ozone depletion;
Overall, the production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land if not a bit more
Field studies indicate that photosynthesis is impaired first, followed by decreases in protein concentration and changes in pigment composition. As a result, a dramatic decrease in photosynthetic oxygen production can be measured after exposure to solar radiation
Or of course you could just go straight to UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMME: Environmental effects of ozone depletion: 1998 Assessment. Sure it's over 10 years old, but that's roughly an extra 450,000 kilograms of CFC114 per year from enrichment operating, I don't imaging it's got any better.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Release energy, lose mass.
BAS push a similar argument that Vattenfall does. If you were to look at the IPCC 4th assessment report, working group 3, chapter 4 "Energy Supply" (In particular 4.3.2 pp. 269-270 "Nuclear Power", and also the summary graph Figure 4.19 on page 283, which compares the lifecycle CO2 emissions per unit energy of different primary source) you would find the conclusions reached in that chapter are based on Vattenfall and they build nuclear power plants so it's not surprising the results favor nuclear power. Whilst they are the best run nuclear reactors in the world and an example of what a *baseline* nuclear program should look like, U.S reactors fall dreadfully short.
The work of Vattenfall *and* Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, upon which that chapter cites as references, both use the same method to calculate energy consumption funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and are used in 80 odd industry sectors. The exceptionally detailed work of Dr Phillip Smith, Nuclear Physicist and Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (MSc) (Stormsmith.nl), who both work in the nuclear industry and have specialisation on energy system analysis, is mostly ignored in the IPCC report. They have no vested interest in the outcome whilst Vattenfall does.
Their criticisms of Vattenfall include "Process analysis leads to a large underestimation of the total construction energy requirements when labor and supporting activities of the construction are not included".
When considering the energy density of the enriched uranium isotope you find that Pressure Water Reactors use 0.3% of the available energy density. This brings us back to Storm van Leeuwen and Smith whose analysis was to asses the Net Energy Return of the Nuclear industry.
For example, for the expected 300TWh's output of a new AP-1000 (low side Vattenfall, high side Storm/Smith) energetic estimates for construction of a nuclear power plant is somewhere between 11TWh and 35TWh, energy cost for demolition around 55TWh to 70TWh, that's around a third before you start. Yet you still have to factor dismantling and clean up of the core alone 5.6TWh's - 16TWh's. They talk in Peta-joules but I've done the conversions to put it in a frame of reference that will be easier to understand.
Using a conservative energy expenditure of 1528Kwh per ton of rock (containing Uranium) you have to process 500 tons of rock, that's 763500Kwh's, to produce one kilo of Uranium. Assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 AND assuming you have a high grade ore that's roughly 763Gwh's per ton and you need 160tons for your first core. Even before enrichment you've consumed over 100TWhs without a 1/3 core refuel every ten years for forty and we haven't even factored energetic costs of a spent fuel containment facility or the logistics of moving spent fuel safely.
I'm not saying we shouldn't develop nuclear power plants as I think this is an essential step to dealing with Pu-239 and U-238 - but that's another conversation (also touched on by the IPCC in that chapter). The peer-reviewed data based on scientific approach to energy use calculation shows the energetic returns for PWR in this Nuclear Industry do not exist no matter how much carbon they displace and all that is happening is the IPCC is trading one externality (Carbon Dioxide) for another (Radioactive isotopes).
This is the reality anyone will uncover if you explore the subject of Nuclear Power.
The problem with the Nuclear power debate is that it is so polarised. As soon as you talk about solving it's problems your labeled as 'anti-nuclear' by the 'pro-nuclear' people for mentioning the problems and labeled as 'pro-nuclear' by the 'anti-nuclear' people for actually talking about a solution. Either way there seems to be little room for the responsible nuclear advocacy required to move the industry forward.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Thorium is the same thing as Uranium. THE SAME THING. The only difference is you don't a few U-238 derivatives, but from stand point of safety, from standpoint of energy production, from standpoint of long term waste and recycling of waste, it is THE SAME THING.
You people cling on the minor differences, while in practicality, there are almost none. It makes NO SENSE to use Thorium instead of Uranium unless you want local mining of Thorium and you have absolutely no Uranium (eg. India). That's it!
You can stick thorium into CANDU reactors and it runs. You can stick Uranium into CANDU reactors, and it runs. You can stick MOX in there too, and it runs. Same reactor. Modified fuel. Same crap coming out.
Frankly, I'm sick and tired of this thorium bullshit. It is like someone saying "if you eat my magic super food your shit will smell of daisies". No, shit will smell like shit.
This entire retarded discussion about Thorium is just confusing to people that know nothing about reactors. They will repeat the BS that "thorium is safe" - it is just as safe are uranium. And when something goes wrong with the first thorium reactor, the "thorium is safe" mantra will just be replaced with another BS like "it just proves to us that nuclear is not possible to be made safe by human beings! we need to go back to the CAVES!".
Reactor design determines if it is safe, or not. NOT THE FUEL!
Fukushima melted down because it required active cooling. Active cooling failed after reactor shut down. It melted because of daughter particle decay heat. Thorium reactors have the assortment of daughter particles that requires that the reactor is cooled after shutdown. ALL FISSION REACTORS NEED A HEAT SINK IRRESPECTIVE OF FUEL, be it passive, contained in the reactor itself, or active. ONLY FUSION REACTORS, LIKE ITER, HAVE A DIFFERENT COOLING PARADIGM.
I hope this is clear. And I'm for nuclear energy, big time. But stop with this thorium "magic fuel" BS.
WTF? Evolution is the explanation for what happens. Vegetarianism is a strategy for manipulating what happens, in order to achieve your will.
There's no reason a person can't know the truth about life, and also try to either change it, or explore the flexibility they have within it.
Are you one of those people who thinks of natural forces not merely as constraints or facts of life, but as ideals to be revered, more important than our own individual desires? Hippie!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think you are factually mistaken on U238 - CANDU does run on unenriched fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
AFAIK there are no commercially operating thorium reactors, but I know that the CANDU design has been operating safely for decades.
CANDUs are even being used to 'burn' MOX for weapons destruction.
So far has ANY country that has tried to produce nuclear weapons
failed. Successes so far:
USA, GB, France, Russia (USSR), China, Pakistan, India, N. Korea.
a fair cross section of technological ability.
It seems that, proliferation while still an important consideration,
has to be considered a "fait accompli". Any nation willing to buck the
"non-proliferation hard line" (like Iran) can produce "the bomb". The question is
"where to go from here?". Apparently singing the same old song does not always work.
We need to find a new song that people will listen to.
Asphalt lasts about 10 years. Next problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Mentioned that earlier: any non-coal bits go into the burners as well.. Bits such as arsenic, lead, mercury, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
As I pointed out yesterday, the main cause of climate change is exponential population growth. Unless population growth becomes negative, no constant, linear, or polynomial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will prevent it, only slow it for a few years. Nuclear energy massively used can, however, prevent global warming. It will not do so by the reduction of greenhouse gases, since the growth of nuclear is unlikely to outstrip exponential population growth. More likely, it will do so, when used massively in the third world, by mass kill-offs of human population.
Coal: Mine, crush, burn.
You left out a step: Coal: Mine, crush, burn, dispose in atmosphere
The coal fly ash also has to be disposed of. This is also toxic with heavy metals and has to be collected in pits for storage. These also have catestrophic failures and can wipe out entire rivers of life if they leak into them. Search "coal slurry spill". Like deaths from mining coal, people aren't scared of this so it doesn't affect the news as much as nuclear.
Sure, building a nuke plant takes a lot of concrete(that emits CO2). However, everything I've read indicates that the amount of concrete needed to build a plant depends more on the specific design choices of the plant than the type. IE a 'concrete hungry' coal plant will use substantially more concrete than a nuclear plant that uses an average amount for nuke plants.
Oddly enough, I've read that due to the lack of energy density wind turbines actually use the most concrete, on average, mostly due to the footings needed. You need a LOT of turbines to match the power output of a GW class nuclear reactor, and when each one uses a truck or two worth of concrete at the base...
I don't read AC A human right
Oops, my bad, I forgot about those. They do have a few problems though - a positive void coefficient (if the coolant boils the reaction accelerates), significantly higher radioactive environmental emissions (radioactive tritium is formed in the coolant, which is much harder to contain), and perhaps most severely the higher construction costs for the bigger reactor plus the extremely expensive (for now) heavy water coolant (1.5 billion for the heavy water for the first plant versus 5 billion for the plant itself). It looks like newer designs are actually bringing the lifetime cost-per-MWh down to be cost-competitive with other reactor designs, but you still have to deal with higher up-front costs.
It's also worth noting that the CANDU reactors are in fact capable of running on thorium, they're just optimized for unenriched uranium instead.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"Climate change to argue, politics that don't matter. And sometimes we through in something techy/sciency, too"
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Using 1940's technology. Fortunately, it's 2012 now. Progress has moved forward and Thorium is far the better choice for reactors to fill small to mid-size reactor installations that cannot melt down.
Apparently you can't win the Executive branch developing sound energy policy. Only through continual lies about the viability of wind, solar, and ethanol can you convince the populace that you care, even though you know the science is not capable of providing what you propose in fantasy.
'nuff said
"migrate" is insightful???
Migration is a short-term strategy, if everybody moves inland by a mile within the next 100 years THEN WHAT?
You still have a massive ongoing overheating problem undergoing a geometric escalation of badness.
In the second hundred years you'll need to move everyone inland 5 miles, etc etc etc until there's no habitable land left.
THIS KIND OF RETARDEDNESS is WHY we're having such dramas in the first place.
NOBODY plans for the long-term.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Not really. U233 produces lots of gamma rays, which makes it very easy to detect, meaning they could easily be taken out in a first strike. The ability to make a big boom isn't the only consideration in nuke design.
Note that I am just parroting what I heard from the long version of LFTR in 5 minutes on youtube.
Human does NOT know climate, YET.
We might never learn enough to do climate engineering.
Please stop stop stop doing stupid things by blindly following what everyone's sayings without digging into the details by yourself. Do not just repeat others, do your own research before telling others.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Yeah, the highly pressurized, billion times redundant active safety systems that fail catastrophically at average intervals of a few hundred years (such that with hundreds of systems you get incidents every few years) are so much more simple than the intrinsically safe LFTR, which uses a fan to keep a salt plug in the drain pipe, such that if something happens, all the fuel automatically drains into a safe vessel for future recovery.
FFS educate yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4
> It will most likely have its own way of making a mess. Perhaps it will be bloody unlikely in theory, but in practice, corrupt, greedy and stupid operators will make it happen.
Would you care to enlighten us as to what failure mode you are referring to? Because it sounds like you're just guessing, rather than basing your critique on any part of any actual design. If all you're going to say is that power generation can be dangerous, well, it has never been safe. Check out that giant failed dam in China. Or all the coal deaths. We need to evaluate the relative risk, rather than demanding that scary power sources come with zero risk because they scare us.
I don't doubt that stupid people can screw nearly anything up, mind you. But knowing how big a screw up it will be and how big it is when compared to existing screw ups is kind of important.
XSCO2 is proven as equal to the amount of FF's we have extracted. Thus we NEED to do something about it. Advanced machine automation WILL displace your job, directly or indirectlt. Might as well use it to build 100,000 square miles of solar install jobs. Still, though, we need to learn how to "tax the machine" as it then can create machine made abundance (of everything within enviro reason). Batteries, too, will be mass produced for pennies on the dollar.
EROEI for solar is about 10 and should be less when machines make the best kind of solar collection material with utmost efficiency. But the TIME it takes for such is way slower than the time it takes to turn over a barrel of oil. THAT'S why "America isn't doing anything about it".
Enter nuclear. Good at EROEI (since a little ball of thorium would be able to power your entire life!). Not so sure on the time for turnaround (because business as usual can't make as much money of of LFTR or similar). We should just ditch the light water reactor (because it relies upon water, a BIG no-no).
Therefore, we must all vote with our money, to those corporations who would use machine made solar, who would build machine made batteries, and who would (only) go for advanced liquid fuels nuclear!
- Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8&feature=player_embedded
This book contains a sobering look at to nuclear power. Before anyone decides to employ nuclear power as the solution a problem, they might do well to read Chapters 1-6 of this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Power-Is-Not-Answer/dp/1595580670
given that it takes a good ten years to build a nuke plant, and the amount of CO2 produced in doing so, not just by the fossil fuels involved but also by the concrete used, it would seem like a losing proposition, compared to putting ten years into setting up the brand new from scratch power system using wind and solar and whatever, largely local to place of use. They don't have to be tied to our model of power generation and distribution which was optimal in Edison's day, any more than developing nations have to be limited to setting up a landline phone system rather than adopting cellular technology from the start.
Same goes for the already developed nations; building new nukes isn't going to help AGW any; the most that could be considered within the realm of usefulness would be stretching the sundown dates of existing nuclear plants.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
wat
That does not add up.
Try 0.01 * $64T * 100 = $64T. Or $128T for 2%.
The reason uranium won over thorium, and continues to be the main choice for power station reactors is that it's simple to design and build uranium reactors.
Uranium won out in the beginning because it was the easiest to begin with, and because the LWR was the chosen design by Admiral Rickover for the Nautilus. To get civilian power started, it was much easier to begin with the design shown to work in the Nautilus. Going for a better civilian design as a first reactor would have delayed deployment of nuclear energy generation by many years. Almost everyone saw LWRs as a stepping stone to better reactors and did not envision them still being used today, and as our primary reactor type even.
Thorium is not fertile and only borderline fissile so making it fission requires, as others have mentioned, a sparkplug of medium-enriched uranium to kick off the process. If it is stopped for any reason then more enriched uranium, or even plutonium is needed to get it started again.
Many errors here. Thorium is not borderline fissile, it will never fission in a thermal reactor. Though it can fission in a fast reactor, but then only 2/3 of the time, just like Pu-239 in a thermal reactor. But thorium is fertile, because it can be transmuted into fissile U-233. You don't need enriched uranium or plutonium to start it every time it stops. What you need is enough fissile in the reactor to initiate a chain reactor. This is not a problem as thorium is a net breeder even in a thermal reactor. It can generate more fuel than is consumed, so you will never need to bring in fissile fuel from external sources to sustain it.
It's also difficult to "swing" the output of a thorium reactor to load-follow whereas modern uranium reactors can reduce their output significantly without problems to meet lessened demand.
That have absolutely nothing to do with thorium. It is a function of the design of the reactor. If the reactor is not designed to load follow, it will most likely struggle a bit when trying to do it. Generally, the reactor type used in France is not very good at responding to demand, but the design was modified slightly to allow this, making it possible for France to have such a high percentage of nuclear. The reactors normally talked about when discussion Thorium nowadays is Molten Salt Reactors, which the LFTR is, which are excellent at responding to demand.
The LFTR is a logistical horror requiring continuous chemical processing of highly-radioactive boiling-hot material for the reactor to operate and to prevent proliferation of bomb-grade material, and it was not within the technology or the knowledge of 1950s nuclear science to get this sort of system to work in any timescale short of decades. The pressure-vessel uranium reactor with coolant and moderator was piss-easy to design, build and operate by comparison.
The technology required did exist but, the entire process was not demonstrated on a large scale, and the MSR program at Oak Ridge was shut down before it could be done. But there is no problem with processing the fuel stream. The processes that are needed are high temperature to begin with, and much of the chemical processing that needs to be done is well known, and used in many industries. And no, reprocessing is not needed for proliferation resistance. It is inherent from the production of U-232 from neutron interaction with either the intermediary isotope Pa233, or on the U-233 itself.
So let's assume the thorium-reactor part is reasonably safe. But what happens if the liquid fluoride escapes en masse??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?