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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."
The problem with burning fossil fuels isn't the net increase in entropy. It's the gasses that trap heat in the atmosphere.
and it states the bleeding obvious... Is TFA more interesting?
Not in the case of solar, or solar-derived, energy sources (wind, tidal etc). These convert solar energy to electricity, which would've been almost completely radiated as heat anyway (excepting chemical storage, such as photosynthesis).
Fission, fusion, geothermal etc add to our waste heat. Fossil is technically solar-derived, but is releasing millions of years of accumulated solar energy all at once.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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?
Short answer: it does matter.
Longer answer: The amount of energy that we use is a small fraction of the amount of energy that the earth receives from our nearest star (aka the sun). The heat we create from the energy that we use is also a small fraction of the heat the earth retains from the sun and the earth retains in its molten core. So if we are doing something to change the amount of heat we retain from the energy we receive from the sun** with different sources of power, it could certainly make a difference.
Of course the $64G question: does buring carbon based fuels significantly change the amount of heat we retain on earth? Probably (that is the whole AGW debate). Of course we don't know for sure, but there is some evidence that it is true, but the bigger picture may be that things totally out of our control (e.g., volcanos, meteors, solar variation, etc), may in the end drown out our effect, but that doesn't mean the effect isn't there.
**for completeness, we might also consider the distribution of the heat between the surface and the molten core, but to be fair, other than the trivial amount of geothermal energy we use, there's a negligible amount to think about here.
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.
And even nuclear power is a problem there - mining and enrichment are very expensive phases and they produce carbon dioxide.
It's a question of calculating the total emissions for each type of energy source, and it's not an easy process.
Add to that the environmental impact that each type of energy has, both under normal conditions and under extreme conditions. Just look at Chernobyl - that disaster made quite an impact over a large area for a long time. Fukushima wasn't as bad, and partially thanks to a large amount of the spill being diluted into the pacific.
Hydroelectric power isn't free from making an environmental impact, but it's also of a more local type and if a disaster strikes the area suffering will be usable relatively soon. Wind power has it's own problems, one is that it's not very efficient so it requires a lot of space, and the wind doesn't always blow.
Coal and oil - they are finite known resources. We better prepare ourselves for the day when they run out by looking for alternative energy solutions.
Geothermal energy is quite interesting. It's available in many locations, but requires some investment to be usable.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The amount of heat generated by power consumption is small compared to the energy received from the sun and emitted back into space. The earth receives around 175 PW of power from the sun, and the amount emitted back into space is around the same providing an equilibrium. The global power consumption by everyone on the planet is around 15 TW. So that's a ratio of 175 PW to .015 PW, which means we consume around .008% of the amount of power we receive from the sun / radiate into space.
A lot of our energy comes from fossil fuels, so basically that is releasing energy that was solar originally, so technically we aren't adding energy to the earth. Solar, geothermal and hydro is just converting / moving energy around from place to place within the existing system, so that doesn't add energy either. Nuclear would be the only way we'd be changing the amount of energy in the system, as we're directly converting it from mass. So it would matter what power source we use from that standpoint, and if your argument has merit, then nuclear would be the issue from an entropy standpoint.
Better known as 318230.
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!
And even nuclear power is a problem there - mining and enrichment are very expensive phases and they produce carbon dioxide.
It's a question of calculating the total emissions for each type of energy source, and it's not an easy process.
If you had practically unlimited and cheap electrical power available from nukes (an awfully big "if"), you could eliminate much of the carbon emissions while extracting nuclear fuel. If nothing else you could split hydrogen out of water and use hydrogen as a fuel for equipment and processing plants. There'd still be some carbon emissions from things like deforestation during mining, etc.
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.
cheap electrical power available from nukes
That's not really true.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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".
"Cost" in money is irrelevant when you have a truly sovereign country (or at least one that doesn't have to buy everything from large American companies).
Cost in time, number of people, and depletion of natural resources, is far lower for nuclear energy than for anything else.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
1. total world energy production - 2012 = 12 x 10^6 kT oil - thus about 5 x 10^20 J.
averaging over 356 days => average power produced=1.6 x 10^13 W
2. Solar constant - 1361 W/sq m
Surface of Earth intercepting Sun's energy = PI*(6384 km) ^ 2 = 1.28 10^14 sq m
Sun's radiation total power on Earth = 1.74 x 10^17 W
Average power produced by the world / Sun's radiation power = 0.01%. Yet, until recently, Earth (or Gaya - to encompass the ecosystem as well) managed to deal with the Sun's radiation without warming.
Conclusion: the major cause of the warming is very unlikely caused directly by the world's energy production (ultimately transformed in heat) - as it contributes with only 0.01%. Look elsewhere.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
but the bigger picture may be that things totally out of our control (e.g., volcanos, meteors, solar variation, etc), may in the end drown out our effect,
Total from conduction, vulcanism, and plate tectonics: 0.1 W/m^2
Total from solar variation since 1750: 0.12 W/m^2
Total from human activities so far: 1.6 W/m^2
Nothing is going to drown out our effect (Ref IPCC AR4).
For completeness, the worldwide electricity production is about 2 TW. The heat from combustible fuels not used for electricity is probably comparable. Compare this to the value for conduction, vulcanism, and plate tectonics which has a value of about 44 TW (~0.1 W/m^2).
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?
**for completeness, we might also consider the distribution of the heat between the surface and the molten core, but to be fair, other than the trivial amount of geothermal energy we use, there's a negligible amount to think about here.
Well thanks at least for including it for completeness, since that one source exceeds our current electrical energy needs for the next thousand years with current technology - by which time technology may have advanced a wee bit. The Yellowstone Caldera by itself throws off more thermal energy each minute than, converted to electrical energy, the world requires. And cooling that damned thing might be in our best interest since it's likely to bury 60% of the US in ash someday - again, as it has many times before.
Solar is great too, and can also be baseload power with a big enough heatsink - or balanced with geothermal plants that produce on demand solar and wind can use geothermal for a heatsink / corrector for low/no production. Geothermal plants can with slant drilling occupy a tiny surface space and tap a vast region, and can be baseload power as well as a peak power source.
There are a lot of other sources we aren't using right now. Petroleum refineries throw off a lot of waste heat, as do pulp mills, organic composting, server farms, volcanos, iron and aluminum and glass refineries. Any place there is a reliable significant thermal delta is an opportunity to reap electrical power, and the question is whether or not it can be done economically. As science progresses the delta and size of the installation becomes smaller. It's not as much "geothermal" as it is "thermal delta" electrical power.
There is no reason not to use both solar and geothermal to diminish our dependence on oil.
Nuclear works on thermal deltas too, but doesn't exploit them enough. Spent fuels, for example, heat their pools for a decade before they're considered "cool" enough to put into permanent storage (should any ever come available). That's a waste heat that's dissipated by evaporation (phase change) of water rather than claiming it as electrical power through modern energy capture technologies. Given modern technologies the spent fuel might give more electrical power than the reactor if it were exploited. I have issues with the whole "we don't have to take the trash out" mentality of nuclear proponents, but I have no problem with making the most of what they do.
We need to come to grips with the idea that "a big enough thermal delta is an electrical energy source." And then moderate the "Big enough" term with advances in technology. That's the ultimate recycling: finding utility for the thermal energy we are now throwing away.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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?
things totally out of our control (e.g., volcanos, meteors, solar variation, etc), may in the end drown out our effect
the earth had reached sort of an equilibrium - CO2 released by volcanoes etcetera was being cancelled out by plants taking it out of the atmosphere, but in the latest few centuries humans have changed the co2 concentration in the atmosphere from 200/250 to 400 ppm
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
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)
With enough electrical energy we could convert to a hydrogen/oxygen economy, rather than a carbon-based one. There are some issues though, like the Hindenburg. It turns out that Hydrogen in a normal Earthlike atmosphere is explosive. Also, it wants to be a gas rather than a liquid, which limits its utility. And as a gas, it passes freely through any known material at room temperature because hydrogen2 molecules are as small as molecules get.
And then there's the whole "we get half of our electrical energy from coal" thing, and the conversion losses.
Unless we get some good watts from some other source, your electric hybrid is likely generating more CO2 than my Chevy truck.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
cheap electrical power available from nukes
That's not really true.
That's why I said it's a big "if", but in any case, the cost of nuclear power versus fossil fuels depends on how seriously you believe that there is a link between carbon emissions and global warming. Global warming could result in many trillions of dollars of damage as coastal areas are inundated by rising seas, droughts and other extreme weather, crop loss, etc.
If Nuclear power really does emit less carbon and carbon is causing global warming, then nuclear power could be far less costly even if the raw price per kwh is higher.
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.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_161.shtml
This is a short piece - if you want a more complete story
try
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/
it is however very long and far from up to date / complete on nukes.
I'm always suspicious of such calculations. It seems you can get whatever answer you want.
But in mining coal, is there no CO2 emitted? No CO2 in the construction of the plants? All the workers get to the plant by bikes?
In theory you could construct and mine both of these with 0 CO2 emission: just use electricity from solar power, and electric vehicles.
Well of course, but a transparent calculation can be checked and it adds at least a little bit more credibility than pure guessing. If you have one calculation supporting one opinion and one supporting the other you can compare both and look for the differences.
With enough electrical energy we could convert to a hydrogen/oxygen economy, rather than a carbon-based one. There are some issues though, like the Hindenburg.
Then don't build your airship with a highly flamable skin - hydrogen was only part of the problem.
It turns out that Hydrogen in a normal Earthlike atmosphere is explosive.
So are many other common fuels like gasoline and natural gas, yet we've learned to harness them safely.
Also, it wants to be a gas rather than a liquid, which limits its utility.
As does natural gas, yet there's growing talk of using Natural Gas to fuel long haul trucks due to the dropping costs of natural gas.
And as a gas, it passes freely through any known material at room temperature because hydrogen2 molecules are as small as molecules get.
Generate it at the filling station so it doesn't have to be pumped for long distances, and dissolve it in some other substance to ease storage.
And then there's the whole "we get half of our electrical energy from coal" thing, and the conversion losses.
But the whole premise of this article is that we need to move to "clean" nuclear power, not fossil fuels.
Unless we get some good watts from some other source, your electric hybrid is likely generating more CO2 than my Chevy truck.
Unless your Chevy truck gets better than 53/48 mpg, then my electric hybrid generates less CO2 than your truck since both of our vehicles are powered by the same fuel - gasoline. Even when electric cars are powered by coal plants, they than conventional cars.
If I had an electric car, most of its power would come from hydroelectric power.
If power, from whatever source, was free, what would the world look like?
Learn to love Alaska
In addition to the other commentor's point about using nuclear power to extract, transport, and enrich fuel would allow you to dramatically decrease the carbon footprint of nuclear, there's also the points that:
2) Newer enrichment technology like centrifuges and, soon, laser excitation enrichment, dramatically reduce the energy needed to enrich uranium (which is a proliferation concern of course, but us keeping ourselves from having centrifuges doesn't seem likely to stop Iran from building them). I mean, the energy requirements for a gas centrifuge is something like 1/50 the power needed for the old gas diffusion plants (which were just horribly inefficient). I don't know what laser enrichment will be, but I gather it will use something like 1/100th the the power of gas diffusion facility.
3) If you use Thorium in a molten salt reactor, you don't need any enrichment at all (well, ok, you need startup fissile and for the first few decades, that probably means some enriched uranium or U/Pu mix, but eventually you can start new plants from the U-233 which was bred in old Thorium plants which will be being decommissioned, so you wouldn't need much Uranium mining at all), and it is currently a waste product of mining other minerals, so there's essentially no additional mining footprint (as demand grows, this may eventually change).
If power, from whatever source, was free, what would the world look like?
A whole lot brighter at night!
This is an interesting question which I once tried to answer with a very simple first order radiative heat transfer model of the Earth... I framed the question this way:
Assuming that Nuclear is emission free and replaces all greenhouse gas emitting energy sources and there is no warming due to residual GHGs in the atmosphere, what amount of heat introduced by Nuclear would there have to be for global temperatures to raise by 2C?
My calculation suggested that around 20,000 Terra-Watts of Nuclear (distributed homogeneously around the globe of course!!) would be required... to put that number in perspective, the World used 16 Terra-Watts of energy in 2006! In other words, we could all use around three orders of magnitude more energy than we do currently if it were emission free and resulted in a new injection of thermal energy (i.e Nuclear)... obviously there would be a limiting factor there somewhere..
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.
Coal is also mined and refined, and oil is used so seldom for power you can almost say it is not used.
Coal for power has the downside of being mined, then refined, then burnt.
At least uranium just has the first two. They use the heat it produces to generate power with only 1 intermediate step, so generally speaking, it is the best for climate change between the two.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
All good points, but there are still many unknowns around all those current/alternate energy sources. E.g.:
- what net affect does damning up rivers have on our ecosystems from hydro, not to mention the amount of concrete that goes into making the damns - that has a net environmental effect as well
- wind: "taking the wind out the sails" will have a flow-on affect on our forestry & erosion 'balance' - same with wave power. If you take those out of a system that's balanced itself out over millions of years, there has to be an adverse effect on any closed system, surely...?
- Geo: flow-on effects on tectonic continental plates & resultant increase in tectonic activity...? as well as, if we take heat out of the earth's sub-surface, do we really think that the net sum will be zero? Just sayin.
Fusion seems to be the only 'clean' & plentiful energy source on the horizon. Solar is 'free' as well, but again, we trap the heat from the sun so it doesn't hit the ground - if we over 1000s of sq kms with panels, there will be consequences.
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.)
With hydroelectric, the ecological disaster begins as soon as you break first ground on the project. It's one of the most damaging ways to generate power possible.
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.
It's a question of calculating the total emissions for each type of energy source, and it's not an easy process.
While I support the merit of evaluating energy sources on metrics such as emission, it can lead to the flawed notion that we need to look for a single, perfect energy source.
Instead, we need to look for multiple energy sources, at least for the time being. Solar in some regions, wind in other. Wave-energy in Scotland, and BS-power in Washington and Pyongyang.
If I had an electric car, most of its power would come from hydroelectric power.
Me too, but that hydro power would be taken then away from people who would make up the lack with coal power because that's what they have. Have I saved carbon atoms from being freed into the atmosphere they were captured from long ago? No.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That sounds about right, seems like when I ran the numbers a while back the extra solar-energy retention due to anthropogenic CO2 dwarfed our energy production by 2-3 orders of magnitude.
Well, if it was fission-based then the limiting factor would be fuel - there's only enough easily accessible uranium to power the world's current energy consumption for a few decades, extendable to a few hundred to a thousand years if we work out an efficient method for extracting it from seawater. Thorium would easily get us a thousand years or so - but with 1000x energy consumption that would likewise be gone in a few years. Assuming we work out cheap, clean fusion though - well then I don't see any limiting factor other than the thermal pollution issue. Eventually we'll run out of boron and have to work out some other clean fuel, but perhaps by then we'll have figured out how to fuse pure hydrogen without generating hideous amounts of neutron radiation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Some estimates are that inside of 400 years, if we continue at the present rate of increase, should see us nicely toasted.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-21/home/29979154_1_growth-trend-energy-growth-solar-panels
Right - the problem is primarily due to an incremental increase in solar energy retention due to greenhouse gasses. Basically all of that 1361W/m2 ends up radiated back into space - some reflected, but mostly as infrared radiation (heat), but let greenhouse gasses capture even a fraction of a percent more of that infrared energy and it dwarfs humanities energy production and the global temperature will rise until it's hot enough that the amount of escaping energy again matches the incoming. Of course all manner of ecological feedback loops can contribute as well, and that's where the question really gets complicated. So far though it seems like, at the rate we're forcing the system, there are more positive (self-accelerating) feedback loops than negative (self-limiting), and that's a scary proposition for any engineer.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It would be like magic, almost post-scarcity. Energy is *the* price setter. We tend to think raw materials and technology are more limiting, but actually more energy can substitute both raw materials and technology. For example, it is possible but energy inefficient to separate dilute chemicals.If energy is free, it would be possible to mine *everything* from waste and oceans. If you need a complex molecule, make an organic soup and separate useful stuff. If a certain production process has low yield, do not research ways to increase yield, instead increase capacity, separate, reuse. If farmland is not sufficient, use hydrophonic farms with artificial lightning and synthesized fertilizers. Need water, desalinate. Need water in the middle of Sahara, pump. Need cold air, condition. Make a dome over the a city o a desert; you don't need an impermeable dome if you don't mind using energy inefficiently...
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
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.
The Yellowstone Caldera by itself throws off more thermal energy each minute than, converted to electrical energy, the world requires.
Contains a crapload of thermal energy, certainly, but throws off more than 2TW? Citation?
The Yellowstone Caldera is about 55 by 72 km, or about 4e9 square metres. Divide that into 2TW, and you're claiming that every square metre of Yellowstone is radiating a constant average of over 500W. Seems excessive.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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
The thorium cycle produces Uranium 233 which is a very good weapon grade material... that's not the reason.
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.
"A new roundtable at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists explores the question of whether nuclear energy is the answer ..."
Dear Atomic Scientists, if all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you.
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.
Oil and coal are pretty damn close to free at the moment which is one reason nuclear hasn't had enough attention to make it viable immediately.
_believe_ that there is a link between carbon emissions and global warming? What's faith got to do with it? The science there is settled.
It's getting a bit off topic, but instead of Hindenburg issues there's also Graf Zeppelin ones - big airships really suck in contact with anything other than the mildest weather.
Also nuclear isn't "clean" unless you ignore the start and end of the fuel cycle and pretend it's fuelled by magic beans and puppy farts. Ignore the braindead advertising bullshit because there's a dirty side of pretty well every industrial process. Besides, it's counterproductive and the stupid "clean" mindset held up decent waste treatment options that could get it away from being a lie for at least three decades (eg. synrock and a few fuel reprocessing ideas).
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
As others have pointed out, building and operating the plant has to be done regardless of the energy source, so factoring that in won't change much - though admittedly historically nuclear plants have been larger and more sophisticated. There's no reason that has to be the case though - the Hyperion reactor designs for example consist of a sealed reactor unit a few cubic meters in volume that produces 70MW of heat energy for ten years. The rest of the power plant could then be a retrofitted coal-fired plant for all that it matters. Well, aside from the underground vaults protecting the reactors from accident or sabotage, but that's just a big concrete-lined hole in the ground.
As for mining - a pound of U235 contains roughly 2.3 MILLION times the energy of a pound of coal. Even once we factor in the fact that only 0.7% of uranium is the readily fissile U235 isotope, and modern light water reactors (LWR) only extract about 0.6% of the available energy that's still about 100x the energy from a pound of mined uranium than a pound of coal. Refining it cuts even further into that energy budget, but still the shear reduction in the amount of "stuff" you need to move around should make it apparent that uranium has an edge in mining energy costs. And you can reprocess the "spent" fuel, which still actually contains most of the original U235 and improve that return considerably.
And things look considerably better for Thorium, 100% of mined thorium is the fertile Th232, and it "burns" much more efficiently without reprocessing - it has roughly 10,000x the energy density of coal, and at those levels it becomes painfully obvious how much lower the CO2 emissions from mining and transportation are. Plus it's a common by-product from rare-earth mining, so you get a fair amount for "free" in that regard.
As for handling the waste - with the exception of the spent fuel, which is all valuable isotopes and should be reprocessed anyway(in a LWR) or only moderate risk relatively short-half life isotopes in a Thorium reactor, the ash from a coal plant is actually more radioactive than anything coming out of a nuclear plant, as well as being highly toxic and far more voluminous. If we held everyone to the same environmental standards I suspect coal plants would have the higher energy footprint to deal with their waste.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The heat from combustible fuels not used for electricity is probably comparable.
Probably quite a bit higher, I'd think. Our electrical usage tends to be dwarfed by our non-electrical energy usage - lighting vs space heating, running computers vs running a car, etc... Heck, consider that most electric power plants are only 30-40% efficient. That means that for every watt of electricity produced, around 2 watts are immediately discarded as heat(or if we're lucky used to heat something useful). That means your 2TW of electrical production becomes 6TW released into the environment(solar and wind still being 'insignificant').
This site places world consumption at 142,300 TWh, or about 16TW, 8 times our electrical generation, for overall power usage.
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
As far as volcanoes and solar activity are concerned, yes, that's true. But CO2 concentrations themselves have increased by about as much between about 20000 BC and 1750 as they did between 1750 and now, so there clearly exist effects that can "drown out human activity". In fact, if they kick in and we have a reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, we're in big trouble.
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.
Please don't let mere facts get in the way of this discussion! I am a supporter of (technology X) and I propose that (technology X) is the ideal solution!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you consider the extremes we're going to get coal, oil and gas at the moment I suspect we could easily come up with new and exciting sources of uranium and thorium. But the very act of cleaning up our energy industry would probably do wonders for most renewables and fusion research, since the zeitgeist would be in their favor - it would be popular to be investing in these things alongside conventional nuclear power.
Someone has never heard of "The Tragedy of the Commons". Be thankful it's NOT free, otherwise you wouldn't get to have any at all.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Slashdot : PR for nerds, Stuff nobody cares ?
But look on the bright side - completely new ecosystems are also created.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Then those plants had better get busy, had they not?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
deforestation ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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
The problem is, it's only "close to free" for a very small percentage of people.
For the rest of us, it's pretty dear.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?
Resources are going to be depleted whether they are free or not. And Tragedy of the Commons is not a universal law, it is a fable.
If tomorrow we had the ability to very efficiently turn solar energy into electricity for free or nearly free, we wouldn't have to worry about the Sun going out any sooner.
If there was a $10 device that could provide energy to houses without a grid, it would usher in a golden age.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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."
Atmospheric CO2 increased from 180 ppmv to about 270 ppmv without human interference. Humans then contributed to an increase to about 390 ppmv.
Don't tell me that "200/250 to 400 ppm" is similar to that; you are deliberately adjusting the numbers to promote an agenda.
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.
Yes, it's science. The link between human carbon emissions and global warming is a model. It fits very well with the current data, including the estimations of past data (with the associated big error bars). However, new observations CAN invalidate the model, either with new data or better estimations of past data.
Be careful. It's science, not faith. It's a theory, just like relativity. It CAN be falsified by real data, just like Newton's gravitation was falsified in the large-field regime by Einstein. It's not a "settled" dogma.
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.
To explain it a bit more, the capital costs of getting something running on oil or coal are vastly lower than getting something running, no matter how good on nuclear. Cheap and nasty wins when accountants are involved even if it is very nasty.
We get all kinds of trivial items in bulk from the other side of the world even if there's something similar nearby. To me that's a sign of very cheap energy.
Cheaper would be much nicer but I don't see that alone as a solution for people missing out just as they do with the fairly cheap energy now.
Come up with a solution other than "The government needs to ...." and I'll weigh your solution with patience and objectivity, then likely participate.
F*** the government. They just want you to be a serf with a government-issued energy ration card and a electricity monitoring meter on your home.
Not to mention a food voucher, an apartment with X# sq feet of space (as determined by some federal bureaucracy to be what you "need") and a job that pays slave wages from whatever corporation paid the most in campaign contributions.
"global warming" is the new "fear generator" that they need now that they've milked terrorism, "the children" and communism for everything they're worth.
Stop being afraid.
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."
Waste heat isn't the problem. The main heat source is and will always be the sun. Nuclear power doesn't form a barrier to the radiation of heat into space. Carbon dioxide, water and some other gases do. That's where people can affect climate.
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.
I'm not sure you understand what the tragedy of the commons is (it refers to common property that doesn't have a distinct owner, and as such is not taken care of). You certainly don't understand why it doesn't apply here.
Energy that is so cheap that it is easier to give it away than to sell it will be given away, while money is made from other sources. For example, the energy is so cheap that it might not be cost effective to charge households for its use, but you WOULD charge customers that use more than a certain amount (ie factories, large buildings, etc). This is similar to the way we treat roads now. Yes, we pay a gas tax, but commercial vehicles pay a use tax that is assessed by the mile. If roads were so expensive that they couldn't pay for the roads that way, then it would be more likely for roads to cost money to use for individuals.
I think a major mental block you are dealing with here is the fact that you aren't able to wrap your mind around the way that economies of plenty work. This is understandable because almost all real goods are governed by scarcity economics. Luckily, we have created a realm that is governed by economics of plenty--the internet. Think about the way internet services are provided. Free email. Free websearch. Free porn. Free everything. Yet the services continue to be provided, even by big companies that use expensive infrastructure. There would be nothing to stop a company like Google from providing free power to consumers if they could do it effectively.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere
"The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere has reached 396 ppm (parts per million) by volume as of June 2012"
that's close to 400 ppm.
the 200/250 ppm is kept vague, because we don't have accurate data, but the 'Carbon dioxide variations' graph depicting CO2 concentrations over the last 400.000 years show it swinging between lower than 200 and higher than 250. It is true that it was 284 in 1832, but you can't pinpoint a starting point at which humans began influence CO2 ppm (so I said a few centuries, but I could also have said a few million years : we are burning wood for at least 1.9 million years).
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
With free energy you can just use many heat pump in a cascade until at the final pump your coolant is pressurized molten metal and your heat exchanger is a mirrored dish at 5000K (or whatever.) Your heat sink is universe. If the spectrum is right, very little of the radiated energy will heat atmosphere. The only reason we don't radiate away our heat is because radiative heat transfer is very slow at low temperatures and using high temperatures is very inefficient.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
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
No but there's the coking coal used to produce the steel used in their manufacture. And the CO2 emitted from the cars of the work man who drive out to install and periodically inspect them...
You know what this all has in common? All these things are minor emissions, or substitutable emissions, which we at present don't worry about because worrying about CO2 emissions from your mining process is ridiculous when you're going to burn and emit tons of CO2 from the thing you're mining in the first place.
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.
Yay, a reply and a mod from the magic carbon pixie brigade!
So, are you saying that destroying tens of thousands of acres of land is somehow ecologically a benefit?
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.
I ran the numbers for a paper last year sometime. The average ICE efficiency is 18-20%. They have a mathematical limit of about 37% efficiency, but they're not optimally built and they usually run outside their efficiency RPM. By contrast, even the gnarliest old coal plant runs at 33% efficient. About 6.5% of that is lost in transmission and distribution to your power outlet. And large electric traction motors are up to 99.99% efficient(!) and it's easy to see that almost all electric cars will be more efficient than almost all internal combustion engine cars, even before factoring in the energy used to get the gasoline to the service station. But electric vehicles weigh less (no heavy engine and transmission) and break down less (they're a lot less complex) so that's less wear on the roads and less replacement parts shipped, etc.
But there's a hidden benefit that should appeal to the engineers around here: let's say you have a gas powered lawn mower, car, weed trimmer, furnace, water heater, boat, and tractor. If you were to run them all on electricity instead, you'd be more efficient, but that's not the point. If a local coal plant is replaced with a brand-new combined-cycle natural gas plant, it'll run about 50% efficient - and suddenly your devices are much more efficient, and using much less energy over all, without any changes on your part. Scrubbers can be installed, or hydro/nuke/solar/geothermal plants can be installed, improving the efficiency and reducing the impact of everything you own without any action at all on your part. Sure maybe your electric car would run on coal power now, but over the next 10 or so years I'd reckon you'll start seeing a lot more NG plants, and then it'll run on NG power, and you didn't even have to do anything. And you'll save money, and more money as plants get more efficient and electricity gets cheaper. My parents live near Philadelphia, and there's a lot of nuke plants in the area. They just paid an $80 electric bill for last month, even though the A/C was running pretty steadily the whole time. They paid several times more for the gas for their car, just one thing, and everything else is electric.
Fossil fuels, or stuff you can burn in general, will always be better for making heat. There's no way around that, turning heat into electricity into heat is wasteful. Let's save the fuels for heat applications (water heating, furnace, grilling, cooking) and leave the rotational power to electricity.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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.
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.
The concentration relevant to climate change is 391 ppmv annual average concentration. It's going to take at least a decade to reach 400 ppmv annual average concentration. Conflating seasonal peaks with long term averages is erroneous and deliberate FUD.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere have a cycle of 100kyr, with ever decreasing minima (same with temperatures). We have been through more than a dozen minima since 1.9Myr ago; pretty much nothing about atmospheric composition from more than 100kyr ago matters. Until 20000 years ago, much of the globe was covered in thick ice sheets anyway and humans were barely surviving. Massive global warming and sea level rise since then allows humans to flourish since then.
And there were no "humans" 1.9 million years ago, only hominids. And burning wood doesn't contribute to climate change because wood is a renewable resource. Finally, we know exactly when humans started making net contributions to CO2 in the atmosphere because that requires releasing carbon from fossil fuels.
In different words, your entire statement was complete and utter nonsense.
Well, you certainly don't know what's happening.
For the first point - if you use the nuclear power for mining etc. then you will have less power left for production, and there is a break-even level today when the amount of energy provided is lower than the energy used to mine and enrich.
For the second point - it's all interesting, but it also depends on making that technology feasible on a production scale rather than lab scale. Laser excitation - that requires one mother of a laser for production scale. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that there may be unforeseen problems.
For the third point - a lot of talk is going on about Thorium but so far I haven't heard of anyone that has built one such reactor, and I'm not holding my breath waiting for one.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
"global warming" is the new "fear generator"
Human caused civilization-destroying, national security devastating global warming is a proven scientific fact about reality. If you can't accept reality, then you're just part of the problem.
You can't accept it because it obviously demands regulatory and legislative action by the government, a tax on carbon (at least! ) and other . probably more draconic measures since all of human civilization hangs in the balance of what we do or don't do.
It's the height of ideologically driven irrationality to reject a set of scientifically valid conclusions because you don't happen to like the social and political implications. It puts you right up there with evolution denier,s young earth fruit cakes, ozone-depletion deniers, tobacco - cancer link deniers, people who think we coexisted with dinosaurs, Communists who think they have more knowledge about the economy than is possible to have, astrology, flat earthers and other lunatics. You're using exactly the same "thinking" process to come to your conclusions.
No one is going to go on and on arguing about whether scientists who have spent 20 plus years of their lives merely acquiring the needed expertise in their specific field to be able to begin to do research and another 10 doing research are correct on the specifics of that field or whether Shawn Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are instead correct. That conversation is over.
Along with the fact of AGW, here's another unpleasant fact- it is now possible it's too late no matter what we do to avert global catastrophe. That's insane and the people who led us to this point - conservatives and libertarians- need to be neutralized by the government you hate so much and through any means necessary because whatever their beliefs or intentions, they are , by definition, a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.
The CEO of Exxon Mobile who blithely asserted we (the rest of us that is) "can adapt" should not imagine the money he thinks he has and his current position of influence and power is a permanent thing which will save him from the consequences of his denialism, distortion and minimization of global warming. I recommend all such people have a good long look at the last moments of Saddam Hussein's life if they want to see what lies in store for them at the hands whose lives have been destroyed by them.
Inciting the government to act against you because you preferred to act out your psychotic hatred of one of the most enlightened, well meaning and rational governments and the world has ever birthed rather than accept a scientific reality about the world is pretty much the definition of "self -fulfilling prophecy". Congratulations.
There's a huge aspect of suicidal impulses in the right wing generally who would rather see the earth destroyed than run in a just, equitable and rational manner. It's not the just Evangelicals who long for the End Times I'm talking about, it's the fucking radical individualists whose cocaine is their imaginary "independence" and "freedom" from the rest of humanity and some kind of fucking phobia about anything egalitarian and communal at all. Get over it. What you do impacts me and what I do impacts you and from this basic fact, all else follows. GTFU.
If you're not willing to GTFU, then know this. Libertarians and conservatives will and are being identified and will be held directly and most personally responsible for the consequences of their actions and decisions when the time comes, a fact I am sure they will approve of given their loud-mouthed and frequent assertions regarding taking personal responsibility, and if not, one which society by general consensus and spontaneous, individual agreement will impose on them anyway.
Reality is like a train. You can stand on the tracks and as long as that train is still some distance away you can mouth off about how there is no train and you're
Yes. Water storage for dry seasons. Fish habitat. Wetlands for birds. Clean power. The land isn't destroyed, just flooded.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sucks to be a white sturgeon. But how does that address the larger point.
Bet there are more lbs/year of bass in the lake then there where of white sturgeon in the river.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So far though it seems like, at the rate we're forcing the system, there are more positive (self-accelerating) feedback loops than negative (self-limiting),
Really? Why do you think this?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Reforestation? Like what's been happening in N. America for 100 years.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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
Define "free". "Free energy" is almost as stupid and unthinking as "make love not war" or any other hippie platitude which ignores reality.
Wholely and completely free is not possible at all. Someone will have to pay somewhere. There will be costs in man hours and materials to acquire said energy and its prerequisites. And, of course, any sufficiently abundant energy source will result in increased use, making the bananza of energy "sufficient" as the ability to use the energy catches up with production ability.
But let's say for a minute that we discover a 'miracle energy'. Not quite "energy tether to the sun" or "dark matter provides truly infinite energy, as we can conceive it", but "abundant, clean, and cheap to produce". Let's say it's nuclear fusion, and you can have a Mr. Fusion in your basement or your car. What will we see?
* the developed world would quickly adopt the technology, converting or supplementing existing infrastructure. It would take approximately two or three years for the top 80-90% of modern society to adopt the new technology/energy at the personal level (eg. in-house or in-vehicle production).
* Existing power and utility companies would try to stifle and control the technology/energy source. Through government regulations, they would have a lot of success. This would be more true in the less economically free countries and regions of the world.
* Black markets would develop for the technology.
* Weaponization of the technology would occur almost immediately afterwards. It would be a big concern which nobody would be able to address.
* The developing world would fall further behind as regional warfare/genocide/whatever breaks out between the haves and have nots.
* Access to a Mr. Fusion in the developing world would become a worldwide humanitarian/human rights concern.
* "Energy Star" and similar energy conservation technologies would cease to matter, and engineers would design for conservation of materials (until we figure out how to convert one form of of matter, or energy, into something else directly, that is).
* Insulation R-factor would become less of a concern than it is even today (due to increasingly efficient air conditioners and heaters).
* Transportation costs would become almost negligible (the biggest cost is currently fuel). This would lead to significant efficiency improvements in some industries (shipping, trucking, etc.) but lead to negligible/slow-to-change consumer cost savings in others (anything government controlled, like rail or air travel).
* In the US, there would need to be another round of airline bailouts as people opt for taking significantly cheaper transit instead of planes.
* The price of copper will go up as the demand for higher amp cabling in older structures increases due to less efficient or more energy demanding electronics.
* There will be another bump in the 'green' movement as exploitive startups claim new technologies to clean the atmosphere and sequester carbon. In 30 years time, they will be like slap bracelets or bell bottoms but result in a handful of very rich people.
* The desertification effects of solar and wind power will be gradually reversed by the absence of the equipment.
* The worldwide water quality would improve significantly due to the reduction in coal and other fossil fuels mining/drilling (but specifically coal, as plastics will still be needed and oil is so adaptable it can be used to make many, many things). Pollution levels in China, specifically, will be reduced due
* Developed countries will see a resurgence of industry due to the reduced cost and ecological benefits of Mr. Fusion technology. Smelting and other historically dirty industries will become economically and ecologically feasible again.
* New applications for electricity will be researched in an attempt to find a way to use electricity to replace historically chemical processes, such as direct electrical catalytic conversion of chemicals.
* Vehicle-portable rail guns would become almost instantly practical.
* Mass driver FTL space propulsion and multi-year transits (including colonization) would become a realizable goal.
* The economies of countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia would be very drastically negatively impacted.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
FYI: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a noted anti-nuclear publication. Their name comes from long ago when a number of atomic scientists put it out to oppose nuclear weapons.
This is like having the RIAA do a review on the future outlook of The Pirate Party,
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
yeah, but the western world is exporting a lot of 'deforestation' to S-America. (food for our cows).
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Really good posts on this thread! I had not read about the Tragedy of the commons before. What a great tool for understanding all the sh*t that happens in the world. It justifies what I've been saying about various global problems. We wont do anything about global warming until the impact of global warming is already greater than the cost of doing something. At that point, we'll vote for politicians who promise to do something, and pat ourselves on the back for not being one of the morons that caused the mess.
The tragedy of the commons explains perfectly what I've been saying about nuclear energy. We'll keep burning coal, oil, and natural gas as long as it's cheaper than alternatives, even though we're poisoning the air and warming the planet. We wont research promising technologies, like thorium molten salt reactors, until we're already up the creek, and are running out of cheap enriched uranium.
So, even if safe cheap nuclear energy is the answer to global warming and the energy crisis, we're not going to build it, not until we feel the pain.
I've come around to believing nuclear energy could be the answer. Molten salt reactors seem safe, and look like a cheap alternative to our current LWRs. They also provide an answer for what to do about most of the waste from our existing plants. I know most people are focused on solving technical challenges, but assuming we do, here's my biggest concern. Will we have people competent to run them? I live near the Shearon Harris plant, which some people consider the most dangerous in the country. Westinghouse built a great plant, and any moron could run it. It's a good thing, since our plant is run by Homer Simpson. A liquid salt reactor requires on-site fuel processing, and the people doing this probably need to be smart. What happens when we let Homer Simpson try to get the fuel mix just right? That scares the hell out of me.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Unless your Chevy truck gets better than 53/48 mpg, then my electric hybrid generates less CO2 than your truck since both of our vehicles are powered by the same fuel - gasoline.
Does that include the increased CO2 generation caused by the mining and refinement of the lithium in your battery pack?
Let's not even talk about the added environmentally devastating pollution your hybrid causes indirectly through its manufacture or its later disposal. It's much more convenient to focus on a vague general statistic, like "pounds of CO2 released or produced". (Kinda like those propaganda fliers about how many gallons of water, etc. a single pound of meat "uses" to produce.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Precisely.
A person could argue, with fairly sound scientific backing, that the increase in temperature we've seen over the past 15 years have been a direct result of the pollution reduction measures we've taken over the past 20 years.
You're decreasing your (unnatural) cloud cover by reducing emissions. Cloud cover is, as we can all readily observe, pretty damn good at reducing surface temperatures due to the fact that it blocks out sunlight. A cloudy day can easily have a 20-30 degree difference in temperature than the one before or after it (which was sunny) with little else changing.
It's not like volcanic activity often has a temperature subduing effect, or anything, or that large/super volcano eruptions have had a climatic-cooling effect (which were potentially the primary cause of the mini ice age we experienced 500 odd years ago).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
We don't get "dry seasons" here. And while it's nice that the fish have somewhere to live, I'm sure the land-dwelling creatures that were there first are less than thrilled.
Unless your Chevy truck gets better than 53/48 mpg, then my electric hybrid generates less CO2 than your truck since both of our vehicles are powered by the same fuel - gasoline.
Does that include the increased CO2 generation caused by the mining and refinement of the lithium in your battery pack?
Let's not even talk about the added environmentally devastating pollution your hybrid causes indirectly through its manufacture or its later disposal. It's much more convenient to focus on a vague general statistic, like "pounds of CO2 released or produced". (Kinda like those propaganda fliers about how many gallons of water, etc. a single pound of meat "uses" to produce.)
Well, no, but I didn't include the increased CO2 generation caused by mining and refinement of the iron ore to build the truck that weighs twice as much as the Prius (Ford F-150 = 5300 lbs, Prius C = 2500lbs. The 60 lb Li-Ion battery pack in the Prius can be recycled - much like the 50 lb lead acid battery in the truck. Are there other exotic and toxic materials in the Prius that aren't in the truck?
But if you have the CO2 figures that factor in all costs of construction for both a hybrid and conventional car, I'd like to see them.
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.
Hmm, point. I'm going to have to go with "observer bias" for $500.
I should have said that we are discovering an alarming number of positive-feedback loops (increased solar absorbtion due to melting icecaps is an old one, CO2 emissions from thawing permafrost and deep-sea methane hydrates posed to start out-gassing are a couple newer ones) and I haven't heard of many new negative feedback loops. In fact if I remember correctly even some of the old standbys are faltering - for example the massive old-growth forests in Canada which were supposed to be even better carbon sinks as heat and CO2 levels climbed are actually beginning to become CO2 emitters instead. That might actually be due to the permafrost thing though, I don't remember the details.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A lot of big mining equipment is electric already, they run on giant extension cords going to them. Seriously.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
But electric vehicles weigh less (no heavy engine and transmission)
Wait what? They weigh more now due to the enormous, heavy battery and they won't weigh less for a very long time. Compare the Elise and Tesla Roadster - the Roadster weighs about 600lbs more. Right now the only way to make an electric car lighter is with a low battery mass which would result in pathetic range.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"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.
Can we use the stratosphere as an air conditioner?
Hello Cruel World
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.
And even nuclear power is a problem there - mining and enrichment are very expensive phases and they produce carbon dioxide. It's a question of calculating the total emissions for each type of energy source, and it's not an easy process.
You'd be surprised. Plans for some of the next generation (4th) Nuclear Power Stations involves technology use existing nuclear waste as the primary fuel.
- No mining
- no refining
- consumes existing nuclear waste
- produces significantly less 'waste' product
- waste which is significantly less radioactive (per unit of volume, mass, or whatever)
- AND said waste is useless for weaponisation.
HOWEVER: Anti-Nuclear Protesters will tell you that all nuclear power is bad. They're ABSOLUTELY WRONG (although I will concede that all *currently-deployed* nuclear power tech has HUGE downsides)
Think I'm full of it? Check it out on wikipedia, LOTS of articles about the many and various technologies being researched for 4th Gen Nuclear Power Generation.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
"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.
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
You should at least consider some alternatives.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You'd have to consider the unintended consequences though. While a free energy source could stop fossil fuel usage almost overnight, you still have to remember that nearly all of that energy will end up as waste heat at some point. And if people aren't concerned about inefficiency, there will be a lot of waste heat, and that waste heat has to be dumped somewhere. A magical, free energy source may solve the fossil fuel problem but the end result would probably still be ecological disaster.
Um, nice try, but the curb weight of an F150 is about 4600lb and a normal Prius about 3200. (Yes, the Prius C has a curb weight more inline with it's bretheren, like the Honda Civic. But it's also an exception for hybrids - most hybrid mini-sedans weigh as much as full-size traditional sedans.
A 50lb lead-acid battery is a small lead-acid battery (A car auto battery is also commonly only 40lb). It costs very little and takes very little to refine and smelt for. Lithium is a magnitude more intensive to mine due to its rarity and density within the ground; a lot more ore must be smelted to acquire a similar volume of metal - never mind weight. Lithium is roughly a 30th as dense as lead.
I hate to break it to you, but lithium recycling is only valuable due to the high cost of initial production. It is massively more expensive because of the necessity to perform all reclamation operations at -330F.
You also completely missed the significance of my commentary on CO2. CO2 is by no means the end-all, be-all of environmental friendliness.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Right now waste heat forcing on the climate is about 0.028 W/m^2 versus 2.9 W/m^2 for human caused global warming. That's less than 1%. So we have a long way to go before waste heat in a big enough issue to worry about.
They're only close to free if you ignore the external costs.
Wow, sounds like you're pretty pissed off. Can't say that I blame you, there's a lot of truth in what you wrote.
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!
CO2 will cause natural heat (from sun) to build up FAR more than what little heat we cause. I believe the ratio is about 100 to 1, meaning that if we all switched to advanced nuclear (or plaster the Earth with "not too dark" solar panels) overnight, we could produce 100x primary energy needs before reaching the same tipping point per XSCO2.
But electric vehicles weigh less (no heavy engine and transmission) and break down less (they're a lot less complex) so that's less wear on the roads and less replacement parts shipped, etc.
I was with you until this point. Electric motors that run cars are not nearly as light as you might think, drivetrain coupling systems are still required (think transmission for an electric car), and BATTERIES which are not light. On the same note, I can lift the engine in/out of a Honda Civic with the help of a friend, and carry it around a shop myself.
Electric vehicles can possibly be brought close to parity with ICE powered vehicles, but they are not there yet. Their complexity isn't really less either, it's just changed from mechanical complexity to electromechanical complexity.
As I said, your other points are very good, but I had to take issue with this one. FWIW, IAARF (I Am A Racecar Fabricator).
Just another ignorant American.
Well, on the one hand we have several confirmed positive feedback loops, and many more theoretical ones that haven't yet crossed the tipping point where they'd make a measurable difference, but are widely accepted as probably being a genuine concern among those who have studied the subject.
On the other hand we mostly have isolated folks like Lindzen proposing potential negative feedback systems which generally find more detractors than supporters among the scientific community (The wikipedia article you pointed me to actually points out that independent analysis mostly found evidence of a small or positive feedback loop). They may turn out to be accurate, but the fact is that the vast majority of scientific studies and publications turn out to be wrong - that's the scientific method in action (peer review). Until there is a significant body of confirming work all such studies should be dismissed as noise by anyone not actually working in the relevant field of study. They may make good cocktail conversation, but anyone systematically presenting such unconfirmed theories to the masses should be viewed with suspicion and searched for an agenda.
Note: I'm not trying to disparage Lindzen and those like him - assuming he's legit (I can't be bothered to investigate, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt) we need folks looking for the moderating systems as well as we try to understand the global climate, and everyone likes to talk about their work. However, there are a large number of special interests out there that like to seize upon such unconfirmed hypotheses and disseminate them among the public as an excuse to continue business as usual. Such people deserve, at best, a good flogging.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
1) Do you really understand how much power a nuclear reactor generates every day? A single decent mine can produce enough fuel each year to power multiple power plants.
I saw a nuclear engineer make a post once about a nuclear fuel enrichment facility in France (I believe it was called Georges-Besse). This was a gas diffusion plant. IIRC, he said it used the power output of four nuclear reactors to enrich enough fuel to run all of France's nuclear reactors (according to Wikipedia, there's 57 reactors in service).
So, you would far more than 'break-even' using power from nuclear plants to mine, transport, and enrich fuel. You might understand why that's the case if you can wrap your head around the mind-blowing fact that a pound of fissile material has the energy of over a million pounds of fossil fuels.
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.
I hope this is clear. And I'm for nuclear energy, big time. But stop with this thorium "magic fuel" BS.
No offense, but this is kind of typical of why I'm sort of automatically skeptical of the arguments of those who are typically "for nuclear energy, big time"
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
wat
That does not add up.
Try 0.01 * $64T * 100 = $64T. Or $128T for 2%.
In other words, you don't actually know, and don't want to look at the evidence, but based on voting in the scientific community, you will choose to believe that?
In actuality, I don't think there is consensus on the point of feedbacks, certainly I've never seen a survey that asked that question. The IPCC gives a potential range for feedbacks from basically none to very very large. Given the uncertainty of the IPCC, I'm not sure it's fair to talk with any certainty on the point.........
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No - I'm saying I don't know, and am not competent to judge the evidence for myself. And I'm far more scientifically competent than the vast majority of people out there. So yes I, like any rational person, rely on the consensus of the experts in the field - the people that have spent decades of their life studying the science involved, and so raised the value of their opinions on the subject far beyond yours or mine. And if you aren't aware of the consensus on positive feedback loops such as melting sea ice and permafrost thawing then I can only conclude you are willfully ignorant on the subject.
I offer you your own signature "the sole test of validity for any idea is experiment", augmented by "the sole test of validity for an experiment is independent verification". In the case of the feedback loops I mentioned many competent researchers have looked at the problem and come to the same basic conclusion, and so most of their colleagues accept it as a closed question. In the case of Lindzen's hypothesis other researchers looked at the problem and concluded there was no clear evidence for his claims, and so they will likely be ignored until he or someone else decides to do a more rigorous study that can withstand peer review. That's the way science has to be done - there are an effectively infinite number of reasonable sounding hypotheses out there, almost all of which will prove false. And the person that comes up with one will be far more likely to fall prey to personal bias and see non-existent supporting evidence than their peers.
If you can actually name any significant negative-feedback loops that have withstood peer review I'd be delighted to hear of them, my mental model of the situation looks rather bleak at the moment, and it's a sad day when the high point of my analysis is that I'll likely be dead before the really severe consequences start manifesting.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
So yes I, like any rational person, rely on the consensus of the experts in the field - the people that have spent decades of their life studying the science involved
Here's where you and I disagree, I would suggest you'd do much better if you listen to experts who follow good scientific practice. Richard Feynman would agree: he pointed out several cases where entire fields of science were wrong about certain things, because everyone was following poor scientific practices.
If you can actually name any significant negative-feedback loops that have withstood peer review I'd be delighted to hear of them,
Sure. Wikipedia has some.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Given modern technologies the spent fuel might give more electrical power than the reactor if it were exploited.
Not by a long shot. Fission of U-235 releases 202.5 MeV in total, 89% of which is directly at the time of fission. Only 11% is from further decay, and over half of that is antineutrinos that almost never interact with matter.
All your fission numbers are for once-though fuel cycles. Using closed fuels cycles and breeders to consume 100% of the fuel, there is enough uranium and thorium, on earth, to power civilization for over 30 billion years.
Ah, and I suppose you have the expertise to judge which are the ones following good scientific procedure? Except in the case of glaringly obvious self-delusion I would suggest their colleagues are likely a better judge. And yes, sometimes the consensus gets things wrong, but generally it's other experts in the field that manage to come up with the "righter" solution, which then gets accepted by the consensus once there's sufficient evidence of it's superiority. In fact one of the underlying assumptions of the scientific method is that not only is *everything* possibly wrong (or more precisely, incomplete), but we will never be able to tell if we eventually get it right, or if we've simply refined a completely delusional understanding to the point where it's completely consistent with all observations.
Aww, you went and got my hopes up. Sadly that page only reinforces my point - page after page of positive feedback loops, and only five negative ones, one of which (chemical weathering) operates on geologic timescales and is thus irrelevant for our purposes, and another (black-body radiation) is just the thermodynamics that establish the basic energy-balance equations. Of the three left the carbon cycle is heavily dependent on ocean solubility of CO2, which current research suggests may be saturating, and net primary productivity is being thrown into question by things like the completely unexpected outgassing of CO2 by old-growth forests (no doubt it will eventually prove out, but the acclimation period could be long enough to exacerbate things considerably). Which leaves lapse rate, measurements of which are too sensitive to errors to be able to tell if current models are at all accurate, but it's good to see something new(ish) that may help.
Oh, and incidentally all three of my positive feedback examples are listed there. Okay, I'll admit I misremembered the melting permafrost gas - but while methane isn't really a long term problem it's a a far worse short-term one.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?
Well, unless our reactors are so efficient they can burn everything beyond iron on the periodic table we'll never hit 100% energy extraction, and I'm pretty sure the "million times the specific energy of coal" is referring to the total theoretical nuclear energy present.
Still given the abundance of thorium and uranium I won't challenge your wildly speculative 30B year figure, except to point out that *extraction* is the real problem as they both tend to to be extremely diffuse. If we have to pulverize a ton of granite to chemically extract 50T of coal-equivalent nuclear fuel then we'll have a whole new ecological (and possibly economic) problem on our hands, especially if energy consumption has climbed to 1000x current levels.
I kind of doubt though that we'll be using fission for more than a few centuries anyway, aside from in special-purpose applications. Fusion just has too many advantages and is only one good Manhattan Project worth of funding away (and maybe considerably less if any of the alternative "budget" techniques being researched pan out)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ah, and I suppose you have the expertise to judge which are the ones following good scientific procedure?
Yes, yes I do.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, unless our reactors are so efficient they can burn everything beyond iron on the periodic table we'll never hit 100% energy extraction, and I'm pretty sure the "million times the specific energy of coal" is referring to the total theoretical nuclear energy present.
There will never be a reactor that can burn anything below thorium, as the closest elements that could be fissile are unstable and decay too fast, while elements further down are too stable to fission.
And the energy density of nuclear fuel is not theoretical. Combustion of one metric ton of coal gives 8.136 MWh of thermal energy, while fission of one metric ton of fissile fuel yields 22800000 MWh of thermal energy, or roughly 2.8 million times more energy.
Still given the abundance of thorium and uranium I won't challenge your wildly speculative 30B year figure, except to point out that *extraction* is the real problem as they both tend to to be extremely diffuse. If we have to pulverize a ton of granite to chemically extract 50T of coal-equivalent nuclear fuel then we'll have a whole new ecological (and possibly economic) problem on our hands, especially if energy consumption has climbed to 1000x current levels.
The numbers are back of the envelope calculations done by Alvin Weinberg, co-inventor of the Pressurized Water Reactor and Director of Oak Ridge National Labs. It's from a paper called "Energy as an ultimate raw material" which was published in 1959. The 30B number is actually based on just the amount of extractable thorium available in the earths crust, when projecting for a population of 7 billion at western levels of energy consumption. You can find the paper here: http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/downloads/Weinberg_EnergyRawMaterial.pdf
Something he brings up in the paper is the mining needed. The numbers he's using assumes 3 grams of uranium and thorium per metric ton of rock. The mining required to provide enough fuel for 40 TW heat (we use ~18 TW today) would then be about 10 million tons of rock a day, which is comparable to the 6 million tons mined a day in for coal and lignite in 1953.
The number for the concentration of nuclear fuel in rocks is quite low though. The crustal average is ~13 grams of uranium and thorium. But it still mean that to supply the entire world today, we would need to mine less rocks than what coal mining 60 years ago did.
This also does not take into account that there exists highly concentrated sources available (monazites with thorium content in whole percents) that will be used first, and vast quantities of less dense sources like granites that still have 25-100 g/ton of thorium.
I was referring to the total theoretically available fissile energy, as opposed to what's practical to actually extract - i.e. c^2*(mass of nucleus - (mass of protons and neutrons)), which is negative for everything before iron, and positive for everything beyond it. I haven't found a definitive source as to whether that "million times coal" specific energy figure is referring to that number, or to something smaller and more readily accessible - it seems like anything else would be a very fuzzy line dependent on the exact nature of the fissionning environment, but perhaps there's a standard set of assumptions used to compute such things.
And I would hesitate to say "never" on what future reactors might burn, the technology is still in it's infancy, and we know that *anything* will fission with the aid of a particle accelerator, and that for all but the first 26 elements the reaction itself will be energy-positive, the question is only whether practical considerations will prevent us from productively capturing the excess. All going critical buys you is a self-sustaining neutron source, which while simple isn't necessarily the ideal solution. There may well be other, more elegant solutions as yet undreamt of.
I stand by my "wildly speculative" assertion - the quantity of fissionables in the Earth's crust is a crude estimate loaded with unstated assumptions, and the rate at which future generations will consume energy is anybody's guess. At 30 billion years crustal recycling would allow us to extract them without severe damage, and in fact the sun is scheduled to render the Earth uninhabitable long before then. At 1000x the rate it would take only 30 million years though, and processing the entire crust on that timescale we would reduce the planet to a volcanic slagheap unless we somehow managed to preserve its structural integrity while doing so. One possible aid could be to harness bacteria or plants - several existing species concentrate uranium and/or thorium in their tissues to levels 10-100x that found in their environment.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ha ha. But serious.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Don't worry ; if we had "free energy" (impossible, I know) we'd get there.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Helium is a smaller (monatomic) molecule. And harder to plumb for. Not impossible to plumb for, just harder.
Plumbing to handle hydrogen or helium is a bitch. It can be done, but it is a bitch to get right.
I used to work with a guy who was a good, skilled car mechanic. It took him several years in the job before he really did learn that his lazy habits acquired working on fuel systems in cars were not good enough for the gas systems, and that he really did have to do everything "by the book" : torque the fittings using a torque wrench, not by "feel" ; don't mix steel and brass inappropriately ; always use sealant, and do let it go tacky before assembly.
In the event of a "hydrogen economy" tomorrow, I predict people will die (re-)learning these lessons. Slowly. It's not enough to prevent the adoption of hydrogen, but it is a new set of skills that people will have to learn.
Having said that, for so many things these days maintenance contracts are becoming mandatory, and I don't see that tendency slowing. So quite plausibly, by the time that hydrogen is in common use as a fuel, it'll be a criminal offence to run a vehicle on the public roads which has had maintenance done by an unlicensed mechanic (and enforcement will be by ANPR on the public roads). Similarly, it is already obligatory (here) for annual inspection of gas-fired heating systems in properties made available for rental.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Of course, that's with a 3-cylinder economy-optimised engine. We're getting around 11 miles per litre (50-something miles per UK gallon ; I forget the conversion factor for US gallons. Are US miles the same as UK miles?)
Oh, a geology question! I'm qualified to answer those. Yes, lithium ores are fewer and further between than lead ores ; but lead itself is pretty rare too. In terms of total amounts available ... 1.1ppm for lithium ; 0.23ppm for lead (averaged over the whole Earth). 4 times as much lithium as lead. The difference is that lead is less "compatible" than lithium so is separated out from silicate minerals during magmatic processes and concentrated significantly into ore bodies. The lithium instead remains well distributed through a variety of silicate mineral structures, and only rarely concentrates to form an economically viable ore body. Off the top of my head I can only think of one mineral that has a significant lithium concentration (a mica) but there are dozens of well-characterised lead minerals - I've got a number in my rock pile.
It was news to me, but no surprise, that an increasing amount of lithium production is from processing of brines. So ultimately the processing could go down to processing seawater, if the concentrations are high enough. "Smart mining" becomes quite credible, for example a suitably tailored ion-exchange resin could pull lithium out at pretty low concentrations, requiring little more technology than a coastline and a pump. Or a suitable reverse osmosis membrane as part of a desalination plant. No pits ; no miners ; no hassles.
S.G. Li = 0.53 ; S.G. Pb = 11.34 ; ratio 21.
What?
I see one recycler saying that the first step of their process is to freeze the batteries in liquid nitrogen, then shred and crush them. The frozen batteries would be much more brittle than at room temperature, so you can get a finer grain size more quickly. After that ... they don't go into details, but separating by density (air current, or water current?) would be pretty high on my list of suspects. Magnetic separation too - if there's any structural iron in the powder.
The same site (there's not a lot of detail about how recycling is done) gives the cost of battery recycling as $1000 to 2000/ton (without specifying the battery chemistry), with an aspiration of $300/ton. Which is not a zero cost. But no-one I've heard has been claiming that recycling is a zero-cost option (the claims are that recycling is less expensive than dumping followed by remediation ; remediation is extremely expensive).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I was referring to the total theoretically available fissile energy, as opposed to what's practical to actually extract - i.e. c^2*(mass of nucleus - (mass of protons and neutrons)), which is negative for everything before iron, and positive for everything beyond it. I haven't found a definitive source as to whether that "million times coal" specific energy figure is referring to that number, or to something smaller and more readily accessible - it seems like anything else would be a very fuzzy line dependent on the exact nature of the fissionning environment, but perhaps there's a standard set of assumptions used to compute such things.
There is nothing theoretical about the energy released from fission. Fission of one atom of U-235 releases 202.5 MeV of energy in total. 89% of that is prompt, i.e. at the instant of fission, which is all transformed into heat in a reactor. The remainder is from beta decay and gamma emission. Beta decay produce antineutrinos which are very weakly interacting and thus escape into space, which mean that about 4.3% of the total energy they represent can not be captured. Realistically we won't capture all the decay heat since about 10% is on the order of 200k years or more. But 83% of all fission products decay within 10 years, so in that time frame we will be able to utilize ~94.5% of all fission energy, which is still 2.65 million times more than burning the same mass of coal.
Some simple number crunching for a kg of U-235: U-235 has an atomic mass of 235.043929918, and a kg of it would thus equal about 4.25452382603 mole. Multiplying that with Avogadro constant we get that a kg of U-235 consists of of ~2.562134*10^24 atoms. Each atom when fissioned releases 202.5 MeV giving a total of 5.18832135*10^26 MeV, or about 23.09 GWh.
Coal on the other hand is about 8.136 kWh per kg, once again showing that for the the same mass, fission of U-235 gives in the ballpark of 2.8 million times more energy than coal.
And I would hesitate to say "never" on what future reactors might burn, the technology is still in it's infancy, and we know that *anything* will fission with the aid of a particle accelerator, and that for all but the first 26 elements the reaction itself will be energy-positive, the question is only whether practical considerations will prevent us from productively capturing the excess. All going critical buys you is a self-sustaining neutron source, which while simple isn't necessarily the ideal solution. There may well be other, more elegant solutions as yet undreamt of.
From a nucleus standpoint the reaction might be energy positive, but the energy required to accelerate the particles to induce fission mean that you could end up with a negative EROEI. I've had a very difficult time though finding actual numbers on how much energy is released from the fission of elements lighter than thorium, so it's hard to estimate how useful it would be for energy generation.
I stand by my "wildly speculative" assertion - the quantity of fissionables in the Earth's crust is a crude estimate loaded with unstated assumptions, and the rate at which future generations will consume energy is anybody's guess. At 30 billion years crustal recycling would allow us to extract them without severe damage, and in fact the sun is scheduled to render the Earth uninhabitable long before then. At 1000x the rate it would take only 30 million years though, and processing the entire crust on that timescale we would reduce the planet to a volcanic slagheap unless we somehow managed to preserve its structural integrity while doing so. One possible aid could be to harness bacteria or plants - several existing species concentrate uranium and/or thorium in their tissues to levels 10-100x that found in their environment.
You using a 1000 fold increase in energy usage as an argument is laughable. There are thermodynamic limits to how much energy we can use on earth before the waste heat start
I think we're using the term "theoretical" differently - from an engineering perspective theoretical means "how everything works on paper/in an ideal situation" as opposed to how it works in reality. Otherwise known as the hard limits of science versus the "soft" limits of technology.
Okay, so it sounds like the 23GWh/kg is the "easily accessible" energy due to spontaneous fission (encouraged by immersion in a neutron-rich environment).
Interestingly this page indicates that the fission products cluster quite strongly at approximately 98 and 138 MUs, I wouldn't have expected that, any idea why? The fact that the ratio is so close to 1/sqrt(2) seems like it might be significant.
Ahhh, found it, the magic graph for calculating energy yield for any nuclear reaction - binding energy per nucleon. Binding energy is negative, so moving up the graph gives you a positive energy yield, and it's a nice smooth graph for fissionables, so you don't need to know the exact isotopes involved to get fission energies. U/Th/Pu/etc are all at ~7.5MeV/nucleon, while their fission products are at ~8.2 and 8.5, so about 0.9MeV/nucleon yield, or ~210MeV/atom of U235, pretty close for a graph-based calculation. The graph peaks at ~8.8 MeV/nucleon with Fe56, so even with "magic" transmutation technologies the maximum energy possible to extract (the theoretical maximum yield) from U235 would be ~1.3MeV/nucleon, or about 300MeV/atom, ~= 30GWh/kg.
Of course the graph also makes clear why fusion is so much preferable in mass-constrained systems - transmuting H to H2 will give you roughly the same 1MeV/nucleon as fission, and H2 to He4 would give you a whopping ~6MeV/nucleon, or ~180GWh/kg! (Though in practice a "hot" D-D reaction for some reason actually produces He3+n, which is far, far less desirable) The popular p-B11 -> 3 He4 reaction by contrast only yields 0.725MeV/nucleon, putting it at a slightly lower mass yield than fission with a similarly-sized fuel supply - but with the advantage that the real-world reactions are almost completely free of neutron radiation, and that Boron is commonly found in far more concentrated deposits.
I agree that a 1000-fold increase in energy consumption is unlikely, that was just the number thrown out at the very beginning of this discussion. I wouldn't go so far as to call it laughable though - I would bet that current human energy consumption is well over 1000x what it was even a few centuries ago, so it makes for a good sanity check if we're talking in terms of even just thousands or millions of years, much less billions. Given that level of power consumption though it might be perfectly reasonable to assume some combination of orbital shielding and geo-engineering was in place to counteract our own thermal contribution, or even that we moved the whole planet to a wider orbit (okay, that might be a bit extreme - I'd have to run the numbers on that one. Still, we've got three "Earthlike" planets in the solar system, they would make a very nice Lagrangian triangle out past Mars' current orbit as we flee the expanding red giant, which will be a major consideration on a billion year timescale) For now the claim that population and energy consumption is stabilizing is perfectly reasonable, but trying to extend that into the distant future is ridiculous, there are too many variables in play. Just look at what happened in the last few centuries, nobody could have predicted that!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.