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Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes
MTorrice writes "NASA researchers have compared nuclear power to fossil fuel energy sources in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution-related deaths. Using nuclear power in place of coal and gas power has prevented some 1.8 million deaths globally over the past four decades and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes their study. The pair also found that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say."
I am still wanting to see a viable long term storage solution for the waste, with at least one example of a spent rod finding a final and safe resting place. Otherwise the tail risk of nuclear power is just a myth.
Remind me again what we ARE worried about.
Blinky the three eyed fish?
Teh cancerz?
The oil companies not making record profits?
They are light years ahead of the West, as they have announced they are going to be restarting reactors.
nasa is now doing studies for kim jong un ?
That's a pretty precise attempt at a measurement for a very nebulous idea. Now we wait for the "other" study from the Fossil Fuel's industry groups I guess. This sort of wildly speculative "guess" at something that is basically unmeasureable due to the large number of variables and assumptions only makes it more difficult to get the public to believe the results of more meaningful and relevant studies when that time comes.
It isn't the deaths we are most worried about.
Then what are you worried about?
It's also contaminated less land. And takes up less space overall.
Certianly compared to coal, which produces vast quantities of ash waste (which sometimes has massive spills), churns our mercury and requires insanely huge mining operations due to the sheer volume of coal required.
So, basacilly nuclear provides solid, reliable baseline power with fewer deaths per kWh than any other scheme in existence.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yes it is. You are disagreeing with the extrapolation method.
It also take a lot of upfront cash. So as nice as it would be to have more nuclear energy; the window of opportunity is gone. Renewable energy sources will be far cheaper by the time a new nuclear plant opens
It isn't the deaths we are most worried about.
So, what are you most worried about? Health risks? Lower with nuclear (part of the reason it saves lives). Environmental impact? Lower with nuclear. Cost? About the same, coal is only lower because the power companies haven't had to pay as much in regulatory fees or health costs (overall, the total cost of coal is higher, especially over time).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I would argue that it's not waste..It's valuable raw material we don't currently use
Since there are already to many humans, isn't that another strike against nuclear power?
Free smokes for all!
Why are nuclear fans obsessed with coal? Is it because it's the only thing that nuclear is better than?
Nuclear is perhaps better than gas too I suppose. Pretty much everything else though is cheaper and cleaner, and does less direct and indirect harm.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I would say we should just hold out for dilithium crystals; but then I remembered their impact in terms of human trafficing.
Definitely fewer than hydro I guess: check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Risky business, filing a logical fallacy complaint against another user while outright ignoring the reality of the situation, yourself. Most of your complaints stopped being an issue over twenty years ago as the technology matured. Modern reactors are perfectly safe, and can be constructed in such a way that they produce zero hazardous waste. The only major problem that we carry over from fossil fuels is the limited supply, which certain breeder reactor technologies promise to all but eliminate. Your entire premise is false, and has been for longer than most /. readers have been alive.
Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per TWh of any form of energy -- and that includes things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter of which had a curious focus given that far, far, far more people were injured, displaced, or killed by the actual tsunami as opposed to any radiation events, now or in the future.
Direct deaths from fossil fuel sources -- including even naturally occurring radiation from conventional fossil fuel energy sources -- far outstrip any deaths that have ever occurred, or even will occur with even the most extreme statistical projections, from any nuclear power source, including accidents. That's right: there are more deaths from "radiation" from the byproducts of fossil fuel sources than there are from nuclear power, including accidents and waste.
This is what we should be worried about:
"Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death worldwide. Figured another way, the researchers said, China's toll from pollution was the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population."
There is a reason China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.
If you're worried about accidents, then you're worried about deaths and and sickness. But fossil fuels are worse.
If you're worried about weaponisation, then you're worried about deaths. The cat's out of the bag, and not using nuclear power stations won't stop people from making bombs.
If you're worried about waste, then you need not worry.
So what are you more worried about than deaths?
bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Working in a nuclear plant, ive received less exposure than i would spending the summer outside at the beach.
Remind me again what we ARE worried about.
Blinky the three eyed fish?
Teh cancerz?
The oil companies not making record profits?
Google, of course.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you buy a car and it happens to come with a stereo, then the engine explodes and the wheels fall off you tend not to attribute the failure to the AM/FM radio.
Dam failures are due to the failure of the dams, which just happen to have a hydro plant includes as an added bonus. There has never been a failure of a dam built specifically for hydroelectric power, not least because you tend not to build big ones unless there is some other reason for them. The one major case of a hydro plant failure was IIRC in Russia and resulted in a few deaths when a turbine broke and was flung free.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Don't forget that every year the coal industry in the US pumps out more radioactive material than has ever been released from US nuclear power plants, even if you include the 3 mile island minor incident.
Do the same as with other toxic waste: Dump it into an appropriately prepared landfill. Problem solved for the next millennium.
PV solar definitely creates more pollution per MWHr, wind would be site dependant but it's not like mining ore, smelting, etc all the pieces is pollution free plus it's not baseline and we're decades away from it being able to fill that role. Hydro is probably 80-90% tapped and we're actually tearing down hydro dams to try to help fish. Geothermal causes earthquakes and there aren't that many sites where it's economical.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You misspelled "Godzilla".
Because it's the only other technology that supplies any appreciable percentage of global base load.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Simple as changing from Uranium to Thorium as a fuel supply. It consumes a small amount of Uranium to keep it's reaction going (which is why it can't go boom ) and burns with 99.9 % efficiency. Most of the remaining waste only remains radioactive for 10 years while a small amount the size of a coke can per MW remains radioactive for 300 years instead of Uranium's 10,000 years. It also is hugely less possible to proliferate than Uranium at the same time. In addition Thorium is so abundant and easy to refine that it appears easy compared to mining coal. It would cost us 1.6 Trillion in capital cost to convert all coal plants to LFTR Reactors (starting in about a 5 year time frame, once we have made the investment (23 Billion ) to overcome the inner containers materials problem. All other problems have been solved. In fact India will have their first full scale Thorium test reactor online THIS YEAR. A 500MW boohemoth! Within 3 years they will have 6 more that will follow for COMMERCIAL USE. So why not the US? I will leave it with this note there is other types of reactors that burn spent Uranium in larger quantities so consideration of them is also is an important feature to getting rid of long term waste.
Slow poisons that work over generations, for which there is no effective 'cure'. Brought to you by the same people who say there isnt enough solar power to go around.
Hydro is abismal, it destroys millions of acres of land with flooding and disrupts the river ecosystem. Migratory freshwater fish all around the world are rapidly facing extinction because of hydro power.
Geothermal is not infinitely renewable, heat sources can be and are being depleted, and there is evidence that it can cause earthquakes.
Solar thermal is great if you have the right environment for it, but outside the southwest, nuclear is still the better option.
We need more nuclear and more solar power.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one! - Spock
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
That's a fair question; though in the published article, they actually address gas as well too. And they come to the conclusion that, yes, nuclear is better than natural gas in both greenhouse emissions and pollution related deaths.
The problem with the other "clean energy" mechanisms is that none of them are very good for base-line power generation yet, except perhaps hydro. Not every location is situated in a spot where they can make use of hydroelectric power, though, so likely the best solution for the time being is nuclear supplemented with other clean energy production. I think that's essentially what these scientists are arguing for, but I retain the right to be completely off my rocker.
Well someone's a shill for Big Nuclear.
Not really a false dichotomy.
While there are numerous other sources of electrical power, the ONLY CURRENTLY AVAILABLE METHODS OF GETTING LARGE AMOUNTS OF BASELOAD POWER are fossil fuels and nuclear. Solar and wind MIGHT be able to scale up if we spend enough money improving the transmission infrastructure (which we are not). So, when talking about the big contributors, you have a limited number of options.
Now, I'm not so sanguine about TFA's answers. Having some researchers with an axe to grind (Climate Change) and having said researchers dig out some numbers of dubious quality, make a few entertaining assumptions and grind out some numbers doesn't exactly strike me as the most intellectual of ventures. In particular, the long term costs of nuclear waste storage have never been realistically modeled.
Big fission plants in the middle of nowhere might be answer - with the implicit assumption that if it starts glowing, you just put a big fence around it - but if you're going to go there, you need better transmission infrastructure and so you might as well do large scale wind / solar.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Your half right – because nuclear and coal are close substitute and coal is the low hanging fruit.
Both are very good a providing base load power and not much else. Natural gas can do other things – peak electricity, heating, stock feed for plastic manufacturing, etc. Solar, Wind, etc. – while getting better – can’t offer reliable baseline load.
And, if we are talking about changing the energy supply mix, then yes, it does make logical sense to ask relative questions – is A better then B? If yes, more of A and less of B.
Genocide also prevents more deaths than it causes. All the people killed would have died years layer, and produce no children. That doesn't necessarily sell the practice.
Whats happening is right now is our nuclear power plants are getting older and older and we are too scared by the cost to improve or replace them. Given enough time, that will lead to an accident.
We're worried about the *important* stuff!
The only way they can keep the price down is to nationalize it, and even then you have to have a very specific regulatory and business culture (like France) to make it work in abundance. Otherwise, the exclusive private club financing the construction of nuclear power plants will find ways to jack up the prices, essentially holding the ratepayers hostage once the community has made a commitment to having the new plant. IOW, nuclear literally puts too much power in too few hands to the extent that it gets abused immediately.
The war mongers (neoconservatives) love nuclear power the most because while they promote the scamming of consumers at home, they spread fear about its development in any country that has not put itself up for sale to Wall St. or become a client state to US military contractors.
because coal and gas are the only ones that can scale up.
Wind is a clusterfuck from a construction standpoint and land use perspective, Solar even more so then wind, and Hydro is an environmental suckerpunch and has already been tapped. Geothermal is good stuff, but isn't really effective outside of volcanically active areas.
Also, nuclear is compact enough that it can be used to power ships, aircraft, and other large vehicles. Sail is useful, but only for stuff that doesn't need to stick to a timeline. solar is an expensive joke. You can't haul an active volcano with you on a boat, and for the Battery folks, baring a quantum entanglement battery, it will be stupid heavy to use batteries for ships.
Yes.
You got "Environmentalists" not the actually scientists per say but average guy who feels the need to stop all things that are bad, not really realizing that most things has some sort of trade-off, So they just say NO NO BAD BAD all the time. Oddly enough these people side with the left leaning parties, thus influence their policies.
You got other energy companies who won't cry to see nuclear go away. These guys tend to side with the right leaning parties, thus influence their policies.
As a counterpoint you have the supporters touting Clean, Safe, too cheap to meter. Who are just pushing the opposing side.
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes. However it is manageable when you have all the sides playing fairly and stop trying to discredit each other.
Nuclear Energy is part of a complete energy plan. Hydroelectric, Wind, Solar, Fossil Fuels, etc. are needed to. As of right now we are using too much Fossil Fuels, its side effects are outweighing its benefits. So we should start dialing it back a bit and replace it with other sources, yes they have their own side effects too, but they are different and if you get the right balance you are good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I see this sort of propagandized research as a good reason for embracing James Hansen's coming departure from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA. While I agree with the main conclusion of the paper, that nuclear power has in general saved more lives than it has lost, I think he goes about it again in a haphazard fashion, heavily biased to nuclear power production.
For example, there is no breakdown of the data or consideration of alternative strategies. What's the break down of the various sources of deaths from fossil fuel burning? In particular, I was curious how many deaths he would attribute to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. As far as I can tell, it's not there in his research though I probably could figure it out eventually from a detailed analysis of his references.
Here's another big question. How effective would implementing other strategies, like pollution controls on coal power plants, be? If most of those lives can be saved merely by scrubbing coal power plant exhaust, then that's not a strong argument for nuclear power (and would become another propaganda element of the paper).
And once again, he exaggerates the risks of carbon dioxide emissions (in his "Implications" section).
I have no problem with Hansen putting out biased research. Just don't do it with public funds.
Nuclear proponents talk about coal because coal is the competition. If a new nuclear plant is built it will be build instead of a fossil fuel plant, it won't be replacing a wind farm. 40% of our electricity comes from coal and another 25% comes from gas. Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal are way down on the list and have no chance of becoming the dominant source of power in the near future, if ever.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Good points, but don't forget that there are similar situations that happen with the mining and separation of uranium and (one would hope) thorium.
Another advantage of increasing use of nukes is that, depending on fuel cycle and design, a significant amount of current and future high-level waste can be re-processed and used; with good design, it will mostly all get 'burned' - at least according to my understanding from what I've read.
At the garbage end, we've still got problems with long-term storage of low-level wastes - so far, anyway.
Overall I agree that making a concerted shift from coal to nuclear would be useful.
How about the loss of lad and relocation of all those affected by the huge reservoir created, not to mention the environmental damage created by changing the way the river flows..
You can own a radio without a car; you cannot operate a hydro plant without a dam. Your analogy is flawed.
The inherent dangers and ecological drawbacks of dams are necessarily inherent to hydro-electric power stations.
Modern reactors are perfectly safe, and can be constructed in such a way that they produce zero hazardous waste.
What type of reactor is that? Sounds magical. Even thorium reactors produce plenty of hazardous waste, i.e. the reactor vessel itself which becomes highly radioactive. Plus no-one has actually built a commercial scale one yet, so at the moment it's just pie in the sky.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Give me one that can:
1) Generate base load, as in it doesn't vary with the time of day or weather.
2) Provide for power in all parts of the world, from northern latitudes to the equator.
3) Is cost effective.
You can't. That isn't to say other power generation methods aren't useful in some areas. Solar rules in the desert for peak load (when it is the hottest, you need the most energy for cooling and it is also outputting the most usually). However you are going to need something for base load. Nuclear is the best option.
If you think we could just go solar and/or wind and that would be all we need, well you haven't researched the grid very well.
Because it doesn't make sense to compare it against technologies that can't scale up to meet demand.
No country has achieved more than 20% grid penetration of wind/solar without major compromises. In the case of Denmark, they did it by trading electricity with Norway. (Norway is fortunate to have LOTS of hydro resources, and hydro is great for energy storage and filling in holes left when you use a resource that typically has only 20-30% capacity factor.)
The problem is that our hydroelectric resources are pretty much tapped out - there aren't many more places we can build dams.
So once your wind/solar penetration goes above what our current hydro resources can fill in the gaps for - you've got a BIG scaling problem.
Nuclear, on the other hand, has a pretty consistent track record of delivering capacity factors of 90% or above. (The exception being France, who actually do have too much nuclear, so much that they actually have to do demand following with some of their plants.)
So what does that leave? Coal and gas. Coal can be proven to be FAR more dangerous and dirty than nuclear, and while gas burns cleanly, if you look at the environmental impacts of modern drilling techniques (such as hydrofracturing), you're approaching as much environmental damage in the past 5-10 years as the entire history of nuclear - it's just not as obvious because instead of bad things happening at a single obvious point source, the damage being done by gas drilling is distributed geographically.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If you buy a car and it happens to come with a stereo, then the engine explodes and the wheels fall off you tend not to attribute the failure to the AM/FM radio.
Dam failures are due to the failure of the dams, which just happen to have a hydro plant includes as an added bonus. There has never been a failure of a dam built specifically for hydroelectric power, not least because you tend not to build big ones unless there is some other reason for them. The one major case of a hydro plant failure was IIRC in Russia and resulted in a few deaths when a turbine broke and was flung free.
How many large dams are built that don't include electricity generation as a large part of the justification for the dam?
My feelings tell me that nuclear power is bad and scary!
I came for a discussion, but all I found was a flame war.
Fuck I hate politics. Can we at least debate the merits of the study?
ssshh... (they forget to mention that the nuclear industry will continue to kill people for thousands of years after the fallacy has been realised and people realise that it is as foolish as lead water pipes)
"The Fallacy", you say.
*deep, annoyed sigh* All right, Mr. The Real Serious I'm Not Making This Up Truth. Why don't you go ahead and tell us aaaaaaaaaall about "The Fallacy" and the obligatory big huge evil government-corporate conspiracy that exists to keep these "Lies" going, and then explain why coal and oil are perfectly clean and safe and beautiful and how the people who die from coal power plant-related issues TODAY don't count, and how they'll suddenly stop dying if we just gave the coal lobby a teeeeeensy bit more money. Every year.
Nuclear Energy is part of a complete energy plan.
Well it's a stepping stone to a sustainable energy plan anyway. But yes, it will be necessary for probably 50-100 years before we can fully finish converting to entirely renewable sources.
The *only* way nuclear is 'good' is that its less bad than coal in terms of greenhouse gases. No more.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Old News: Environmental Case for Nuclear Power: Economic, Medical, and Political Considerations
"PV solar definitely creates more pollution per MWHr"
Really? Citation needed.
" wind would be site dependant"
So it would produce dangerous byproducts in one place but not in another? How does that work?
" Hydro is probably 80-90% tapped"
Probably nowhere near 80%.
"Geothermal causes earthquakes"
Fracking. Mining uranium. Nuff said.
The only entities that can afford to build a nuclear power plant such as Entergy, Duke, PG&E always end up doing the double whammy of cutting back on maintenance just as the plants start to age out. Then, they quickly spin off the plant ownership to a separate division, then a separate DBA, then quietly sell it or convert it to a wholly separate no-liability company just as the expensive chickens of total rebuilt or shutdown come home to roost.
As an aside, the folks running SONGS for PG&E decided to redesign the tube bundles when they had to be replaced. They arrogantly redesigned them - without even telling the NRC, mind you - to get more [Jeremy Clarkson] Power! [/JC], but only managed to make them wear out in mere months due to so much vibration the tubes eroded each other.
So nuclear power does make sense, if it weren't the actual short-term greedy bastards that own and run them.
that all 20 years a major accident occurs. Chernobyl broke the neck of russia and Fukushima will pull down the Japanese. Also in Fukushima if the fuel will reach the groundwater or if the fuel pond cooling fails then Tokio will have to be evakuated. The financial disaster of this is really the smallest problem. :-)
Given the fact that some things can't be monetarized nuclear fuel is really a bad option if you have rewnewable energies at hand. Which is nuclear fuel from a tried and tested nuclear reactor. And if this reactor blows up we won't have any problems anymore
So, basacilly nuclear provides solid, reliable baseline power with fewer deaths per kWh than any other scheme in existence.
Solid, check.
Reliable, mostly check
Fewer deaths?
As long as you subsidize it with government loan guarantees that no other power source needs, sure. But then you're not actually competing on an even level.
Even a mature nuclear industry can only exist with massive government subsidies because the risks of nuclear are greater than anything else. It's why it costs so much more; it simply can't be allowed to fail.
In an age of planes used as missiles I really don't want to see what happens when one decides to crash into a working reactor....or the spent fuel storage facilities that aren't hardened and usually sit right next door.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
On a Wyoming Ranch, Feds Sacrifice Tomorrow’s Water to Mine Uranium Today
http://www.propublica.org/article/on-a-wyoming-ranch-feds-sacrifice-tomorrows-water-to-mine-uranium-today
What I found the most intriguing was that Russians prefer to mine in Wyoming and pollute there rather than do it at home.
I thought they might compare it to the mining deaths from coal, the war deaths from oil, heck even the installation accident deaths from wind and solar...that's impressive.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My issue with nuclear power has nothing to do with waste or deaths. Its simply a matter of cost. Every single Nuclear power plant that gets built turns out to be far more expensive to design, build and operate than anyone anticipates. Nuclear Power is great in theory, but once you factor in the cost of reality (and safety) it tends to balloon astronomically.
Comes down to this equation: For the cost of one nuclear power plant, including all associated life cycle costs, running it, fuel costs, storage, and decommissioning at EOL, how much solar & wind power could you generate over the same life cycle, based on the cost of solar panels and windmills? Then factor in the savings from improvements in efficiency of wind & solar technology that would be achieved over that life cycle.
(I haven't done this math yet, so mostly speculating. Has anyone actually run these numbers?)
There are two nuclear reactors and they've been 14 years in build-up and still not ready.
That's AFTER the assessments, consultations, etc.
This says more about how dirty fossil fuels are than about how safe nuclear is. There are other options.
suffering from pronoia
You know what's a false dichotomy? Comparing nuclear to coal when talking about costs, and renewable when talking about environmental effect.
If the negative externalities of fossil fuel usage (up to $1,600 per person annually) were properly internalized into the price of electricity as economists say should be done (with the revenue going to hospitals to pay for health care for respiratory patients), nuclear energy would suddenly become much more cost-effective than it is today.
But sadly, we live in an age of privatizing profits and socializing losses.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Isn't nuclear energy, but rather budgets. We try and spend the least possible to make these facilities, and I do believe at the expense of the actual safety we need for the environment around the facility and ourselves. As for nuclear waste, I'm kinda wondering why we aren't using it in itself as an energy source, we know how to do it and we have the tech.. What gives?
You might say "so far". More births = more deaths so it is a zero sum game, unless long term radiological releases get high enough to create a long term drop in reproduction and then it is like the passenger pigeon. A huge increase in numbers based on increased resources and then a just as dramatic plunge leading to extinction.
I believe you meant "fusion". Sunlight and wind don't have a ton of energy density per m^3. We will certainly still have a use for massive amounts of power in 50-100 years.
If we're playing this game, the only way solar and wind are "good" are that they have less of an environmental impact than coal, etc. They're not impact-free.
You're splitting hairs to support your poisoning of the well. There is nothing magical about thorium breeder reactors, and the very fact that you know what I'm talking about suggests that you have at least a passing familiarity with this. The reactor vessel is not "waste" -- it is not retired at the end of a reaction cycle, then sent off to a storage facility. Further, breeder reactors of varying types and efficiencies have been successfully deployed at the commercial level since the 1950s.
This is all easily verifiable by spending just a few moments on Google. It's common knowledge to anyone with an interest in nuclear power, and should be considered a valid alternative to coal by anyone seeking such and possessing even a modicum of honesty and perspective. Other alternative energy sources are, yes, much cleaner and safer, but they are far from mature; it is wrong-headed to be nuclear-averse because of misconceptions that are perpetuated largely by the very entities that stand to profit the most by them.
You can own a radio without a car; you cannot operate a hydro plant without a dam. Your analogy is flawed.
The inherent dangers and ecological drawbacks of dams are necessarily inherent to hydro-electric power stations.
Um well no, you do not need a damn dam to use hydro. It may be more effective to build a dam so you can store water. But if you remember way back in the early days of electric power, you know that AC DC battle between Tesla and Edison? Yeah, well Tesla built his hydro plant at Niagara Falls without a dam. You need fast flowing water to turn the turbines. Dams create this artificially by storing water behind the dam and using gravity to turn the turbines, in essence creating a waterfall that in turn turns the turbines. The water wheal is all you need to create "Hydro" electric energy.
http://www.teslasociety.com/exhibition.htm
If you have material so highly radioactive why would you store it? You should use it as fuel. You might need a slightly different type of reactor to make use of the waste material you are referring to.
The vast majority of hazardous waste from nuclear power generation is chemical in nature. And it is relatively a small amount compared to the paper industry, maybe you should think twice before putting up signs about how dangerous nuclear energy is.
An AC debunked this one last time:
And AC's 'debunking' was debunked below.
You're must be new to this anti-nuke shill business, eh?
So nuclear power kills less people than fossil fuels? I have to say I'm not surprised at all. Consider how dangerous it is to mine, transport and burn coal then add the environmental issues and there is NO DOUBT that nuclear power is safer.
I would add that nuclear power actually releases LESS RADIATION than a similar sized coal plant even if you consider the whole life cycle, from construction, operation though decommissioning. Burning coal efficiently requires that it be crushed, usually into fine powder that can be blown into the fire box. This grinding process releases a lot of radon gas (and other stuff) that produces radiation. The exposure levels can be quite high for people working around the crushing equipment.
Somebody will bring up the long term storage of spend fuel assemblies and claim these are high level waste that will produce radiation for thousands of years. While it is true, this ignores the fact that the problem here is regulatory and not with the technology. Much of the high level and long lasting radioactive components in light water reactor spent fuel could be reused and eliminated if reprocessing of fuel was allowed. Regulations and international agreements prevent us from reprocessing and burning down this high level waste even though the technology exists to eliminate a significant percentage of the radioactive materials (by size/bulk) and greatly reduce the amount of time the remaining material remains dangerous.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
they forget to mention that the nuclear industry will continue to kill people for thousands of years
No, it won't. In a few decades gene therapy will have advanced and become cheap enough to fix any biological damage resulting from exposure to leaked radiation. Leakages, if/when they happen, will be minor footnotes in the news when a visit to the physician and a minor virus-based treatment is all it takes to undo the damage.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
How about taking that money and using it on something else, like, oh, I don't know, space exploration perhaps, instead of instead of on studies to tell us something that we already know.
Yes, and the AC was debunked by another commenter.
This is a very silly comparison. 1700 PBq of the Chernobyl release was in the form of I-131, which has a half-life of 8 days. Which means that 3 months after the disaster, it was effectively gone. Thousands more Pbq of Xenon-133 were released, but Xe133 has a half-life of 5 days. So after 2 months, that was effectively gone, 99.98% of it had decayed to stable cesium.
The only radioisotopes released from Chernobyl that are still exist in significant amounts, 26 years after the release, are Sr90 and Cs137, with half-lives of about 30 years. Total release of those isotopes was 100 Pbq. So about equal to the total radioactive release from burning coal for 100 years. But that stuff from burning coal? That's going to last for many thousands of years. (And that's just the radioactive release, the arsenic, mercury, etc? That stuff's forever.)
Meanwhile, 300,000 people a year die to air pollution. That beats Chernobyl's total by a factor of 75.
Don't forget that every year the coal industry in the US pumps out more radioactive material than has ever been released from US nuclear power plants, even if you include the 3 mile island minor incident.
Authoritative numbers for radiation release of a coal plant are hard to find, but here's what I found:
Coal plants release 330mCi per billion KWh Around 13MCi of radiation was released from TMI (mostly in the form of "harmless" noble gases.
So to figure out how many KwH of coal production that release was equivalent to:
13 x 10e6 Ci / 330 x 10e-3 Ci * 1 x 10e9 KWh = 3.9 x 10e16 Kwh
Coal plants generate 1 .5 million GWh or 1.5 x 10e6 * 10e9 = 1.5 x 10e15 Wh or 1.5 x 10e12 KWh
So the Three Mile Island release was equivalent to 3.9 x 10e16 Kwh / 1.5 x 10e12 KWh = 26,000 years worth of annual coat plant radiation release.
Most of TMI's radiation release was in the form of nobel gases that were said to be relatively harmless, only 13Ci of cancer causing Iodine-131 was released, so if you look only at the Iodine release, then the numbers are much smaller -- TMI's release was about .026 years (9.5 days) worth of coal fired power production.
Right, because using a breeder reactor that produces less waste , that also has a much shorter half-life is not an option. /sheesh
Since you asked:
Deaths per terawatt hour (from nextbigfuture.com )
Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Oil: 36
Natural Gas: 4
Biofuel/Biomass: 12
Peat: 12
Solar: 0.44
Wind: 0.15
Hydro: 0.10
Nuclear: 0.04
"Lives ruined" is kinda hard to track... kinda ambiguous.
Cost: Nuclear is normally in the middle for costs (long term). Solar and wind are "cheaper" but take up more property... As for property damage, check out the documentary "Windfall" on Netflix. It is about some unhappy people who agreed to have a windfarm move into their neighborhoods. Biggest complaint is noise and "flicker" caused by turning blades.
Plus I question the environmental damage wind-farms can cause. We are pulling energy out of the wind. That energy is used to create currents and is part of the ecosystem... by altering this by large wind farms, could we potentially prevent moisture from moving from offshore in land? Cause a dustbowl?
As for Nuclear: I really see that as the future. New LFT reactors, for example has waste with a half-life of, 30 years I believe... and have low pressure (no explosions) and the reaction will destabilize itself (no melt down).
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Sail is useful, but only for stuff that doesn't need to stick to a timeline.
Not even that useful. Otherwise sail powered commercial shipping would not be confined to history.
Geothermal releases CO2 and other nasty chemicals as part of its production directly into the atmosphere. Nuclear powers waste is containable and easily disposed of. The barriers there are all political, not physical. It is more expensive, but we're trying to save the world here. Geothermal, Hyrdo and wind all have significant risks for workers when it comes to production and damn and turbine failures are common. Despite the relatively few wind turbines in the world now, incidents of blades flying off and hitting houses and cars are alarmingly common. You may argue that these failures are relatively rare, and relegated to very old damns that were poorly maintained, but of course failures at nuclear facilities are even less common, and in every case been in reactors that were decades out of date. No modern reactor has ever failed. You may say that the dangers of a nuclear failure are far more horrible... but they are not. The only failure in world history that was of the horrific type you envision was Chernobyl... and that can not be used as a model for anything else in the world. The failures in design, safety, emergency response, it was almost beyond comprehension. The number and simplicity of the mistakes made are so numerous I can not get into them all here, you'll have to Wikipedia it. Hydro electric damns however have a nasty tendency to fail and kill huge numbers of people. Usually in 3rd world countries so we don't hear about it much. But they are very dangerous and have a huge impact on ecosystems up and downstream from them.
So then we get to solar and wind. They don't work. They are limited by the weather, cloud cover, seasons. They need backup power to compensate for when their output is low. As a result power companies have to ramp up and cool down Coal plants to make up the difference. Coal plants burn relatively efficient when they are operated for long periods. Bringing them online and shutting them down regularly destroys their efficiency and likely destroys any gains the wind and solar would have given you.
The solutions to our energy problems are obvious, but those of us that want a perfect work just refuse to accept them. We need a LARGE nuclear power initiative. We need proper waste disposal. We need breeder reactors. We need every coal plant in this country replaced with a newly designed nuclear reactor within the next 10 years. Then we need a tax on this power that helps pay for the development of improved solar, wind, and wave turbine research. We need to learn to grown Algee and other plants in the ocean and harvest them for ethanol for transportation.
Baseload is the load you should build for if you can't make power that takes 24+ hours to start or stop.
If you don't have power stations that need 24+ hours to start or stop, you don't need massive baseload power.
Then what are you worried about?
Prosperity. Economic growth. Energy is the ultimate raw material necessary for these things.
Don't assume everyone shares the premise that we need cheap, abundant and clean energy. You could live out your life inside a three mile radius of your yurt nursing a solar panel. Putting you there is an ideal to which many aspire.
To be clear, I am not among them. I've just shed any illusions about whom I'm dealing with. They've either got theirs or they don't want it (the former being the vastly larger group) and job #1 is stopping you.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
>
If we're playing this game, the only way solar and wind are "good" are that they have less of an environmental impact than coal, etc. They're not impact-free.
Mod Parent UP!!!!
You are indeed correct. Our energy needs are ever increasing as our population grows. Electrical demand is projected to keep going up, and I expect we will not stop that trend *anytime* soon. We will be building more and more generation capacity into the foreseeable future and, baring any major population adjustments (war, pestilence, mass starvation etc) for the next few hundred years as well. There isn't enough real estate out there for solar or enough wind blowing for wind... And "renewable" sources have their impacts too.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There has never been a failure of a dam built specifically for hydroelectric power
Counterexamples abound if you look.
I've got quite a few friends who are anti-nuclear power and they constantly site Chernobyl, 3-mile Island and Fukushima...
The problem is that they refuse to travel to enjoy the fresh air" in Beijing. I spent 3 weeks there in February, and let me tell you, after about 3 days there my nose was constantly congested. Within about 4 days of returning to the US, it cleared up. That air is not too fresh.
Also on the few days when it is clear there, the Japanese complain because all the smog has blown it's way into Japan.
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes.
Yup. Totally agree. The thing is... so does Coal. And oil. And natural gas. Small scale solar actually has more deaths from installers falling off roofs than you'd think All power is somewhat dangerous - nuclear just happens to be the least dangerous we have.
FFS, coal mining and burning puts more radioactivity into the system than nuclear waste would if the plants just ground up their detritus and spewed it into the sky - while removing the natural landscape - but we're used to it so it doesn't count.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
To clarify the above poster...
Things with a 'Short' half life...Decay away. They are not a long term issue (depending on decay products)
Things with half lives of a few years or decades are nasty - they last long enough and put out enough radiation to be a problem.
Things with a long half lives approach natural background radiation levels and don't really have a significant biological impact.
Treating something with a 250k year halflife as if it was a dangerous short-mid term radioactive is terribly expensive and has no benefit.
--- Mercutio was right.
We the people have democratically run services that work reliably and cheaper than privatized alternatives. Yet in this age of corporate controlled messaging, we are not allowed to let our democracy manage anything new because private dictatorships are the only allowed solution... Anybody speaking reasonably is labeled a Marxist - ironic that a nation that professes democracy (representative; shut up trolls) and the letting people govern themselves is opposed to it in everything except the few established footholds.
In the last decade, we even have popular successful programs under attack like Social Security, Medicare and the USPS - despite extremely high public approval. Some foolish citizens have allowed their water and roads to be privatized despite the fact every example shows those to end up costing more.
Monopoly situations can't be free markets (water, sewer, roads, power, phone.) Privatized essential services can't perform as well (police, fire, power, SS, healthcare.) These are places where the public can collectively run them better; that is, where the majority of the voting public isn't retarded and elects traitors who sabotage the peoples' government. (Perfect example is the GOP in 2006 with the USPS.)
I seem to be the only person upset that the IAEA is also the an industry lobbyist. Unless we allow fuel reprocessing, the USA is out of nuclear fuel. We used to have the most but now we import it because we used it up. Peak nuclear fuel has happened already. I don't know when the next peak is; but I doubt prices will ever drop and solar power is already cheaper today (excluding grid storage costs... which is something we should invest in heavily.)
I've seen a bit of business corp culture and I've seen a bit of political management culture. They both waste big time; they are different and yet similar... Both are perception rackets, except one you have input (theoretically) and the other only short-term investors do.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Nuclear power does not prevent deaths. Not a single one. In fact, it causes quite a few deaths. It is just plain wrong to attribute lives saved by not burning coal to nuclear power.
However, that does not mean that the 0.04 people assumed to die per terawatthour of nuclearly produced electricity isn't the lowest of all possible sources of power, as this less propagandaish source states:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Or this one:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
And it also doesn't mean that switching to more nuclear power would continue this trend. Furthermore, it does not mean that all fossil plants/mining cause that many deaths.
This is bullshit territory.
0x or or snor perron?!
nuclear provides solid, reliable baseline power with fewer deaths per kWh than any other scheme in existence
At least 2 mistakes here.
First, nuclear proponents keep making the mistake, deliberately it seems, of measuring safety by numbers of deaths. By that measure, a small passenger airplane crash could be more disastrous than a big, strong hurricane hitting a major population center. You can't ignore the hazards of radioactive contamination of large areas of land. You can brush off Chernobyl as a sloppy operation run by a reckless Communist society, but Fukushima was not that.
And second, they were comparing nuclear power to coal only. You broadened that to "any other scheme in existence". I agree that nuclear power is preferable to coal. But is it preferable to wind, water, and solar? I think not.
Fukushima was a demonstration that corruption and greed can undermine any safety measures, with disastrous consequences. We as a society had decided how much risk we were willing to accept in exchange for the benefits of nuclear power, and then these operators cut corners. Thanks to them, we were taking much greater risks than we knew. They knew, knew, that the plant could not withstand an earthquake, but instead of fixing the problems, they tried to cover it up and hope no earthquake would strike. When disaster did strike, they kept trying to cover, claiming the plant could have handled an 8.0 quake, but this at 9.0 was of unprecedented magnitude. Lies. There was precedent for such large quakes, but they ignored it. It is also standard practice to engineer in safety margins. That excuse of "unprecedented magnitude", even if it were true, is no excuse at all. It should have been able to withstand an even greater magnitude quake. Oil operators have done similar things time and time again. Deepwater Horizon was another example of a corner cutting, rush job that went bad, and confirmation of fears over the dangers of offshore oil drilling. The Exxon Valdez was another on more than one level. It was a single hull tanker. Now tankers are double hull. It had not been properly maintained, and radar intended to detect impending collision was not functional. The crew also was overworked, tired and rushed. Then there was the emergency equipment that was supposed to be on hand to respond to such a disaster. Turned out, much of that equipment existed only on paper.
I don't mind a gamble with eyes open, but I'm not interested in a rigged game with such extreme negative consequences, and that's what nuclear power looks like. Should operators be trusted? No way! Can we even trust that regulators won't be subverted, gamed, or fooled? Sadly, no. To properly asses the real risks of nuclear power, we have to account for these human factors. A dam failure is bad, but relatively short lived. Incompetent and corrupt handling of such a facility is a peril we can live with. The affected land can be cleaned up and put back to use the moment the waters recede. Not so with radioactive contamination, in which we might have to wait centuries before the contaminated land is safe to use again. Even oil spills, which can have effects spanning many years, are not as bad. If we greatly improve our ability to clean up radiation, so that contaminated land can be made safe in a few years, instead of centuries, then, sure, use nuclear power. But until such advances are in hand, no.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Hydro is abismal, it destroys millions of acres of land with flooding and disrupts the river ecosystem. Migratory freshwater fish all around the world are rapidly facing extinction because of hydro power.
Wrong. Why do so many people keep saying this? I'll just paste in what an AC wrote above:
Um well no, you do not need a damn dam to use hydro. It may be more effective to build a dam so you can store water. But if you remember way back in the early days of electric power, you know that AC DC battle between Tesla and Edison? Yeah, well Tesla built his hydro plant at Niagara Falls without a dam. You need fast flowing water to turn the turbines. Dams create this artificially by storing water behind the dam and using gravity to turn the turbines, in essence creating a waterfall that in turn turns the turbines. The water wheal is all you need to create "Hydro" electric energy.
http://www.teslasociety.com/exhibition.htm
With nuclear waste, at least we can choose what do with it. This is not the same as coal, where the waste goes into the atmosphere and we couldn't reverse it even if we wanted to. Sure, we need to solve the waste problem -- but at least we have the option to solve it, long after the waste has been created.
https://xkcd.com/1162
Nuclear wins... Hands down.
At least until you factor in the cost of the bribes required to get enough politicians to tell the environmental lobby to take a hike long enough to get a plant approved and running... That has apparently killed the industry over the last decade or two here in the US. World wide though, it is pretty clear that nuclear power is the way to go for generating the base of an industrialized nation's electrical power.
They would not have built them, if they didn't make financial sense... With the possible exception of North Korea and Iran who are building them for other reasons...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Over 100 people died just building the hoover dam.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Dam in Switzerland are built only for hydro power (for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Dixence_Dam) and the rupture of a penstock at the Bieudron Power Station caused some fatalities.
The only way they can keep the price down is to nationalize it,.
How do you figure that? crude oil isn't nationalized, has had as many high profile ecological disasters as nuclear, and remains affordable.
Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes
Why won't anyone think of the atoms?!
1. Absolutely correct. I apologize for overstating my position. Allow me to clarify: versus older designs, modern reactors are considerably safer due to enhanced regulations and a better understanding of how and why catastrophic failures occur, often through experience -- and while "perfectly safe," taken literally, may be unattainable, the improvement in safety of reactor designs in recent years can in no way be overemphasized.
2. Also correct. I would point out, though, that this is true of every new technology. There could be problems with other alternative energy paths that we simply haven't discovered yet. All we can do is proceed with the information we have and do our best. "Maybe there's something we missed," simply isn't an acceptable reason to decry an otherwise proven technology.
3. Incorrect. While it is true that nobody has produced a 100% efficient, to which the technology has historically promised to scale, various levels of efficiency have been attained and operated at a commercial level for over fifty years (clarification: non-continuous; non-sole-source).
And nobody said that nuclear should be "the" option for the future of society. I am merely suggesting that it should not be ruled out in favor of technologies that have not, themselves, matured or even been proven successful at scale. We should not so quickly abandon a technology that is only now coming into its prime, and promises to bridge the gap between "dirty" and "clean". It is not a perfect solution, but neither is it the devil that it is so often portrayed as.
The age of planes used as missiles lasted exactly one day.
The authors are Kharecha and Hansen. James Hansen is world famous for supplying warmists with NASA stamped ammo since the early 1980's
You can say a lot of things about Hansen but shilling for nukes is just not plausible. But hey, if you want to discredit one of the most credible AGW celebrities in the world go right ahead.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Seems like there are lots of neglected secondary effects in this analysis - otherwise, why are people so upset about Iran's nuclear energy program?
It's not an option that has been pursued so far commercially. Nobody will build one of these.
Inapplicable. While it is possible to construct a hydro plant without a dam, it is not traditionally done. Responsible parties have historically built dams to enhance the potential energy storage capacity behind a hydro structure, and continue to do so to this day. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows this; stop being obtuse.
PV solar definitely creates more pollution per MWHr
Irrelevant, even of true. There are much simpler ways that don't have to use any fancy chemistry or manufacturing processes, like solar updraft towers, solar thermal collectors, and concentrated solar power.
If you're worried about waste, then you need not worry.
Based on your link, it appears we still need to worry about waste, since although it is possible to reprocess it, we currently are not, and there does not seem to be any plans to do so.
I would be fine with nuclear power if two problems were resolved. (Please note, disposing of waste is not in my view a technical problem, and is a solvable political problem). The first problem is nuclear weapons. The fuel cycle needs to be re-jiggered so it's impossible or at least impractical to steal fuel or waste and make weapons. The second problem is that current fuel cycles are limited by mineral supplies. If we switched to some sort of breeder cycle the whole thing would make sense, but any new fuel cycle would still have to avoid the weapon problem. I completely agree that rational decision would be very useful in the public discourse about nuclear power. Nobody ever seems to worry about the killer smog in China or the deaths and shortened lives of coal miners.
Because unless you're saying I spend all summer outside at the beach, your heading is wrong and the body makes a different claim.
That is simply not true. You can drop buoys directly into a moving water and generate electricity without first damming of the river. These buoys can be equipped with features that make them save for the fish and other river life. Google "hydro power without a dam" to find out more.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Just wait until we start driving electric cars, etc. That's going to double the demand for electricity.
No sig today...
Nuclear power could be a lot cleaner and less dangerous if we stopped using those old-fashioned bomb-making reactors, too.
No sig today...
No country has achieved more than 20% grid penetration of wind/solar without major compromises.
What's "major compromises" supposed to mean?
Germany did generate 23% from alternative sources in 2012. And we did export more energy than in previous years even though eight of 17 nuclear sites were shut down in 2011.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Deutschland-steigert-Stromexport-1833469.html
I am still wanting to see a viable long term storage solution for the waste, with at least one example of a spent rod finding a final and safe resting place. Otherwise the tail risk of nuclear power is just a myth.
Why store it when you can use it again:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/nuclear-wasteland
Just like the "three Rs" for household 'waste', spent rods can be recycled and re-used.
Completely agree
The number of sites where you can build dam-less hydro plants are extremely limited and do not reflect the actuality of hydro power, nor the idea that it can be expanded in use. Expanding hydro power in use requires more damned dams, not less.
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes.
And solar doesn't? I love the idea of having solar panels on my roof. But there's a ton of toxic waste produced in making them. Then what do we do with all of the EOL'ed panels 25 years later? They contain cadmium, lead, etc. I can't say I've looked into how much energy is produced by solar panels vs. how much it takes to make them. But I've seen a lot of posts on /. claiming it's not much of a net gain. It may be BS as I have only been able to find one publication to back this up. But still, no one seems to want to address this.
They would not have built them, if they didn't make financial sense...
That's not true. All prior nuclear plants were built with the cost overruns being guaranteed by either the government or consumers in a regulated monopoly. The recent proposed boom that was supposed to happen fizzled when the companies were told that they had to bear their own costs and risks of capital, market volatility and insurance rather than relying on governmental guarantees. Liberalized electricity markets make the return rates more uncertain, causing capital investors to prefer more flexible if higher fuel cost options rather than the high sunk capital costs of a fission plant.
There are too many people who are afraid of nuclear power to ever use it as a long term power source. There has been no real research into nuclear power in 50 years. For example: molten salt reactors promise to be much safer and cheaper to build than current nuclear reactors. Research? All research goes into the single, 60 year old design that wasn't chosen so much for safety as for its ability to create weapons of mass destruction, oh and also create electricity. There was a single opportunity to create a molten salt reactor in 1974 which most scientists at Livermore labs wanted, but the current US secretary of Defence offered them termination slips if they suggested even building a research reactor. Every reactor built is based on the single 60 year old design. They tweak it, and make minor improvements, but its like tweaks to a gasoline engine. Its always an Otto cycle engine, never a Sterling engine or something really radical. Canadian heavy water reactors are more efficient than American light water reactors, but comparing something that is 17% efficient against something that is 15% efficient is still only 17% efficient. A molten salt reactor is at least 85% efficient. No research means no progress means no advancements which means more of the same.
Keep your 250K year half-life deadly radiation contained and fail-safe for virtual eternity.
Right.
The 250k half-life stuff isn't the dangerous stuff. It's not radiating much by definition. All you really need to do is keep it in large bricks (ie. not dust) and it's not much of a threat.
That's beside the point though. Only old 1960s atom bomb making reactors produce waste like that. New designs use up nearly all the fuel and very little waste is left over.
No sig today...
If we could only find a way to harness the updraft above Washington from all the hot air spewed by our politicians.
Yes but with nuclear comes some inherent risks that could easily transform the 1.8 Million lives saved to millions of lives ended. Terrorism target, waste spills/leaks, natural disasters, technical malfunctions, etc, etc...Yes these are the same brilliant scientists that have sent 135 shuttle missions into space over the three decades. But remember they also had catastrophic failure on two of those.
So a few square miles of land are tainted to prevent us from ruining the entire planet with fossil fuels.. so what? Are you seriously trying to say this is a more major problem than the one fossil fuels are causing for us? I mean, unless you don't believe in global warming, of course.
Coal is only cheaper because we don't add in indirect costs of health and lost land. Once you add in those, Nuclear becomes cheaper.
The only way they can keep the price down is to nationalize it, and even then you have to have a very specific regulatory and business culture (like France) to make it work in abundance. Otherwise, the exclusive private club financing the construction of nuclear power plants will find ways to jack up the prices, essentially holding the ratepayers hostage once the community has made a commitment to having the new plant. IOW, nuclear literally puts too much power in too few hands to the extent that it gets abused immediately.
The war mongers (neoconservatives) love nuclear power the most because while they promote the scamming of consumers at home, they spread fear about its development in any country that has not put itself up for sale to Wall St. or become a client state to US military contractors.
Karma, baby.
Someone couldn't muster an intelligent reply, but in my experience pro-nukes don't have any good rebuttals to the above arguments.
Just googled it: there's one company with a concept; they have no product, and practically nothing has been heard from them since 2009. The most recent company memo available suggested that they were attempting to secure funding for production in January of 2011... no word on that.
The bottom line is that damming is the tried and true method for installing hydro plants. This has been true for over a century -- yes, it has. You are pushing an agenda, and you are resorting to historical rivisionism to back it up. Stop. There are entire communities at the bottom of man-made lakes that can attest to your untruthfulness.
I have the feeling that the population isn't going to be growing for too much longer. Our current population levels are subsidized by cheap fertilizers/pesticides/medicines provided by ridiculously cheap hydrocarbon sources (mostly petroleum but also natural gas). That's not going to continue forever, and without that energy and carbon subsidy our population is unsustainable. No other large mammal (>10 kilos) on the planet has ever had our numbers, the worldwide population of the "enormous" herds of wildebeests and reindeer are smaller than the number of people in Shanghai. We either need to reduce our population soon, or Ma Nature will do it for us, and she's a bitch.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
My issue with nuclear power has nothing to do with waste or deaths. Its simply a matter of cost.
Most of that cost (about 80%) is actually capital costs, not construction/running costs.
Basically: Nuclear power is a long-term investment and long-term investors want HUGE paybacks, guaranteed. If you can't guarantee huge profits then they'll invest in other stuff instead of your power plant. To garantee those profits you have to sell the electricity produced at a massive markup over what it really cost to produce.
Wikipedia has a page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
No sig today...
They're not impact-free.
Nothing is, but they don't have fuel costs nor fuel waste...NOTHING else can say that.
Renewables are multiple orders of magnitude less 'impacting' than fossil fuels or nuclear.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
That's going to double the demand for electricity.
While technically that's true in the sense of the demand for the power to propel vehicles being shifted from a liquid source to a pure electrical equivalent. I suppose that if you think of it, depending on how efficient a car engine vs the electric generators and the transporting and storing electricity, electric cars may or may not add to the problem.
Thorium reactors might be workable in the future, but right now there are no commercial reactors running on thorium for all the hype. Even the recent-ish Indian PR releases about building them are reactors that could possibly in the future run on thorium, but they intend to use them as uranium reactors when they are put into production. So if you are talking about other alternative energy sources not being mature, you should re-take a look at the actual maturity of the thorium reactor.
And atomic warfare lasted about a week too...doesn't mean the threat is gone.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
3. Nobody has come up with a commercial scale breeder reactor.
Dounreay in Scotland had a 250 MW fast breeder reactor supplying electricity to the UK grid over 20 years. The technology was not pursued for political reasons only. Pretty good going for what was a prototype built with the technology of 40 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dounreay#PFR
Nowhere do I see the love for nuclear power that I see here. I am no expert, but on the handful of occasions I've gone out to research the claims I read here, the sentiment that "it's so obvious and safe to do" doesn't hold true.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well, yes, you can light a lightbulb with a turbine in a stream. No one doubts that.
But a hydroelectric plant is simply a way to extract the Potential energy of water (mass x height) in a meaningful, efficient way. Putting a turbine into the flow of a river allows you to extract the potential energy represented by the difference in height between the entrance to the turbine and the exit - the "head". You can't extract potential energy without "head". Putting a turbine into a free river such that there's a one foot drop from entrance to exit gets you a certain amount of potential energy that you could extract. Putting in a dam that raises the "head" to, say, 500 feet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Canyon_Dam), and running the same volume of water through it, gives you 500 times as much potential energy that you can try to harvest. Your only option for doing that without a dam is to put in 500 turbines, each of which takes advantage of 1 foot of head. Wouldn't that be a pretty sight?
And the worms ate into his brain.
1. Nothing is 'perfectly safe'. Nothing.
We can't rule out somebody smuggling an atom bomb into the plant and detonating it under the reactor, no, but stuff like Chernobyl/Fukushima is impossible with modern designs. Impossible.
Power stations high concrete walls around them and bunkers for the reactor. A terrorist could probably do more damage, more easily, by detonating that same bomb somewhere else (large city).
No sig today...
It's better than spewing it into the atmosphere like what coal does. Also, a relavant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Here. Refined nuclear fuel has roughly a million times as much energy per gram as any chemical source. Even counting the ore and refining, you just have to move much less stuff to get your energy - 1/100 to 1/1000 as much.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
(The exception being France, who actually do have too much nuclear, so much that they actually have to do demand following with some of their plants.)
They have trains that go frickin' fast too. Can't do that with solar and wind.
As long as you subsidize it with government loan guarantees that no other power source needs, sure. But then you're not actually competing on an even level.
It would be cheaper than wars in the Middle East, wars on terror/drugs, bank bailouts, automotive bailouts, or any of that other stuff government does.
And... long-term, you'd have a chance of getting some of that money back, unlike wars in the Middle East, wars on terror/drugs, bank bailouts, automotive bailouts, or any of that other stuff government does.
No sig today...
Hydroelectricity can certainly exist without dams, there's no doubt about that. The post above mentioning Niagara Falls is another good example of that. But could a waterfall turbine or buoy farm even hope to match the output of a hydroelectric dam or compete with nuclear energy?
/* No Comment */
I take it that you were born after the cold war...
That's very insightful, except for the fact it's apparently also totally wrong:
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate#Indirect_nuclear_insurance_subsidy, if the nuclear industry was forced to pay its own insurance instead of letting the taxpayer pay all accident damage above a certain ceiling, then nuclear would make less financial sense than solar.
In other words, it's subsidized.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
In an age of planes used as missiles I really don't want to see what happens when one decides to crash into a working reactor....or the spent fuel storage facilities that aren't hardened and usually sit right next door.
I actually worked on the effect of plane crashes on a nuclear power station. The answer is that the effect is not a lot safety-wise other than the "conventional" killing of people standing around. There is a massive amount of concrete around a reactor, and indeed the spent fuel ponds. If you are going to crash a plane you can cause far more deaths by randomly crashing into a city - an easier target ot hit too. Perhaps I should not be saying this though.
Or, instead of your "life is hard, let's just give up" plan, we could find a better energy source! Hey, how about fission while we work on fusion and others?
Small scale solar actually has more deaths from installers falling off roofs than you'd think
That's why I'm having my panels put on by guys who would be on my roof anyway. I won't have blood on my hands, even if it is all over my sidewalk.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They're not impact-free.
But even in worst-case scenario a catastrophic failure of a solar panel or wind turbine is limited to an acre or two. Compare that to say, Fuckupshima.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Tesla's power plant was only capable of producing 75 MW of power. Not exactly awe inspiring. While the modern plants around Niagra falls can produce updates of 4,000 MW (about the same a a modern Nuclear generating complex), it's not like Niagra falls are a time a dozen. While run-of-river stations do not impound significant amounts of water, they either suffer from variability and are usuited for base load power, or they are dependent on large upstream dams (that do impound a lot of water) to regulate the flow.
In an age of planes used as missiles I really don't want to see what happens when one decides to crash into a working reactor....or the spent fuel storage facilities that aren't hardened and usually sit right next door.
Well, for the reactor itself, pretty much nothing is expected to happen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_safety_in_the_United_States#The_missile_shield). No one has actually tested such a scenario, though.
Unprotected parts of the plant (which sometimes include spent-fuel storage areas) may release some radioactivity, but probably nowhere near as much as you might think.
And the worms ate into his brain.
It's not an option that has been pursued so far commercially. Nobody will build one of these.
If not for massive amounts of government money, I could say the same thing about wind and solar. They only make sense commercially when you factor in government subsidies. And that's fine - the same government could spend money developing breeders.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes.
And solar doesn't?
Not in this scale. Worlds easier to recycle/reprocess. And it's less risky when scaled into ZWhs.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
New designs use up nearly all the fuel and very little waste is left over.
And they are being deployed by thousands worldwide. Yeah, right.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
It might surprise you to know that there is a resistance to Nuclear in many countries other than the US. But if you think nuclear is so great, why so skeptical of NK and Iran wanting to use it? They may be tyrants but their not morons.
Oh wonderful. Mandatory therapy for everybody just to stay alive.
Who controls the therapy controls the world, democracy becoming a meaningless term.
Oh wait, I think that it IS the plan already. Through money, drugs and/or pollution. The invariant for our societies, no matter if fascist, democratic, socialist, is that the single man/family has less power and control of his own property. Technological advancement could be used to empower the individual, instead it empowers the system. For economic reasons (which are engineered by the system itself). Orwell was a rookie.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
They would not have built them, if they didn't make financial sense...
They don't. About the bribes though...
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
And the waste products from making solar panels are not exactly environmentally friendly, either.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Doeasn't this mean that easily scalable sources/designs win? Like say, solar/wind?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Very true. All that radioactive material inside the earth is coming to get us. Very soon. I promise.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
How about a new water reservoir?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
The airline industry has a much better safety record than the nuclear power industry.They can tout the millions of people they don't kill each year because they intentionally work on safety. The nuclear industry argument is much the same argument that NASA used to launch Challenger. Just because it hasn't blown up yet means it's safe. We still haven't come up with a solution to deal with the tens of thousands of tons of spent fuel sitting in cooling pools at nuclear power plants all over the US. Sure can pretend that clean up of Fukushima and Chernobyl won't take decades if not centuries and will be off limits to human habitation for the same amount of time. But are you aware of all the nuclear accidents, military and civilian? Not to mention the worst nuclear contamination in US and Mexican history involving the recall of thousands of tons of contaminated steel. But you guys keep fucking that radioactive chicken.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
But those people will still die... just not yet. So in essence, it just means they are less likely to die of nuclear accidents than they are of something else. If something else doesn't kill them, then something further else still will just a little later.
No. You just need to know physics. A sufficiently long vertical tunnel fed with water from a river will generate the required power. You're always converting potential energy of water into electricity, so the maximum sustainable output will be proportional to river flow and height of the tunnel. No dams required.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
And look at the Thermal mass that is need to build a reactor. You could build a highway hundreds of miles instead of in one spot. And think of all the jobs that would create.
Hint: if it has a half life of 250,000 years, its radioactivity is so low that it isn't dangerous.
All of your statistical gewgaws and sensible, projected data are so very nice - and convincing from the standpoint of isolated argument.
How on earth can you use them to ask for my trust from an industry that cannot be shown to properly manage PCBs, chromium or mercury?
It borders on the suicidal.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
According to wikipedia anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
Maybe it is time to put conditions on the nuclear subsidies to focus on modern reactor designs.
Blar.
Design once... replicate the design.
The problem with civilian nuclear power is each power plant is largely re-engineered from scratch. Every company wants the latest and greatest technical advantages versus something that just works. You see this with other power sources than nuclear, but it stands out more there because so few new nuclear plants are built today versus coal or gas plants.
If the shipyards built vessels for the Navy the way civil engineers design power plants, each nuclear sub - for example - would have this great big bulge on the hull in the reactor area. Each individual sub in a particular "class" would have the bulge be a different shape and be in a different spot. Some would come with multiple bulges. All would drive varying numbers of screws.
Military nuclear has worked relatively well because they have largely repeated what works well enough. I'm sure they all have changes they would like to make and some do get integrated in over time, but it isn't redesigned from scratch for every new ship.
Nuclear can work and some of the newer modern nuclear designs are pretty much fail safe. If we'd standardize on one of them and reuse its plans for every new plant we built, we'd be in much better shape and costs would be much less. If you have a standard layout and control system like the military does for a given class of ship, you'd reduce the operating cost as well - both in terms of people manning the control rooms and doing repairs and in parts.
1) So you are comparing tech to corruption in Fukushima. That's great.
2) The Johnstown dam flood killed about 2,200 people, and the Banqiao Dam killed about 26,000. I think that's more than nuclear accidents.
Don't confuse regulations and oversight with technical safety. Stop cherry picking your facts.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Old designs were safe for their rated life time. The trouble is that due to the inability to permit new plants, many old plants that should have been retired and replaced have been pushed into years or decades of additional service. Every time the licenses are extended it is based on the best estimates of the engineers as to how much longer the plant can last after needed rework is complete. But every time you rework and push another x years out of an old plant, you increase the chances that something will go wrong.
Get a reasonably safe storage plan or store securely on-site and permit new standardized plants.
"Remind me again what we ARE worried about."
If we are able to guard the ashes for 184000 years?
We need more nuclear and more solar power.
I'm going to pick nits.
Solar power is nuclear power, as it were. :P
It can only increase demand for electric power, which is what the poster was saying.
Right now the fraction of electricity used for automobiles is vanishingly small and if millions of battery operated cars start getting hooked up to the grid each night for the next day's commute you can bet demand for electric power will increase. What we *might* hope for is that charging millions of cars could be accomplished during off peak hours so we don't have to continue building out peak generation capacity and can use cheaper (like nuclear) energy sources more.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes.
Yup. Totally agree. The thing is... so does Coal. And oil. And natural gas. Small scale solar actually has more deaths from installers falling off roofs than you'd think All power is somewhat dangerous - nuclear just happens to be the least dangerous we have.
FFS, coal mining and burning puts more radioactivity into the system than nuclear waste would if the plants just ground up their detritus and spewed it into the sky - while removing the natural landscape - but we're used to it so it doesn't count.
Nuclear Energy is dangerous, it produces a lot of hazardous wastes.
Yup. Totally agree. The thing is... so does Coal. And oil. And natural gas. Small scale solar actually has more deaths from installers falling off roofs than you'd think All power is somewhat dangerous - nuclear just happens to be the least dangerous we have.
FFS, coal mining and burning puts more radioactivity into the system than nuclear waste would if the plants just ground up their detritus and spewed it into the sky - while removing the natural landscape - but we're used to it so it doesn't count.
And a single mining disaster can easily kill several times more people than directly died at Chernobyl and every major reactor incident. Take Aberfan where a coal waste dump collapsed on top of a school and killed 116 children and 28 adults. And China has had single accidents in mines that have killed far more than that.
And thats not counting the shortened life spans of those who work in mines even if they only worked for a few years down the mines - like my maternal Grandfather
It's amazing how many US slashdotters still believe in nuclear energy.
It's quite clear that nuclear will be phased out in the long run. In US, natural gas is already cheaper than nuclear power. Germany replaced nuclear power plants with wind turbines and solar energy. This is a world-wide trend, and everybody sees that, except for people in US.
I wonder if the US media is skewed towards nuclear energy, similar to how they were skewed before invading Iraq?
Nuclear Energy is part of a complete energy plan. Hydroelectric, Wind, Solar, Fossil Fuels, etc. are needed to.
Wind, Solar, are not needed at all. They're "solutions" looking for a problem. They don't scale well to current needs, and if the "solution" involves reducing our needs, that can be done just as well and more reliably with existing power generation methods.
Yes. Especially since major cost factors are externalized. Insurance for a desaster? In a densely populated area like most of europe a major nuclear desaster is a risk the free market would have you pay for dearly. Serious accidents might be rare, but if they happen, major population centers and production resources will become contaminated for decades. Pretty expensive stuff. So at least in Europe if insurance is required only a fraction of the expected cost of a major nuclear accidents needs to be insured. The rest: The people will pay for it if things go wrong.
Long term storage of nuclear waste? The state takes care of that. As long as it takes and future generations will pay. At the moment Germany is pondering to retrieve
nuclear waste from a salt mine which is shure to be flooded in the next few decades (Asse). Getting the nuclear waste out of it will cost several billions. Those who
put the waste in there will have to pay: 0.
All across europe nuclear power is heavily subsidized. It would just not be competitive on its own. Fun fact: The 58 french nuclear power stations did cost
188 billion Euros in research, development and building them. About 75% of the cost have been recovered so far by selling electricity. The cost does not include
the necessary funds for long term waste disposal or the demolition of the nuclear plants. http://www.ccomptes.fr/content/search?SearchText=cost+nuclear+power
I suspect, nuclear power makes no sense economically. It is always aquired for other reasons.
When your 1 ton of uranium waste means 1000 tons of low level waste and to get that ton of urainium required 30 tons of uranium and that 30 tons of uranium required sifting 10,000tons of ore, your calculations requirement of "only the 1 ton of high level waste" seems rather cherry picked, doesn't it.
Oh, it is not like uranium does not have to be mined, mind you. It just magically appears there in the fuel pellet state in the close proximity of the reactor.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Meanwhile, 300,000 people a year die to air pollution. That beats Chernobyl's total by a factor of 75.
Yeah but those slowly accumulate over the year and so are easier to ignore.
We need to rethnk how we create electricty. We are still heating water to spin a turbine. Other than choice of fuel this method is unchanged since the early 1800's.
I think part of the answer lies in the fact that you exported power. I can’t comment for Germany, but I do know somebody who worked on the Hawaii system – which has reached this point (and does not export it’s spare power.)
Wind / Solar power tends to fluctuate and currently there is no good way to store the power. To handle this power companies generators on standby (which tend to be natural gas because they can be spun up / down quickly). In Hawaii (at least 2 years ago) it does not make sense to add any more variable renewable because it won’t reduce the costs in running the standby capacity. (It does cost money to run a plant at idea, spin it up, down, etc.)
Oh, it is not like uranium does not have to be mined, mind you. It just magically appears there in the fuel pellet state in the close proximity of the reactor.
um so wheres the uranium mine disaster folk songs then :-)
I'll try this a few ways:
First:
http://www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html
Second:
http://xkcd.com/1162/
Third:
I worked nuclear power for 10 years (ops/maint), coal for the last 5 years(maint), and and converting the plant to biomass from waste wood currently. As the TED talk suggests, the right answer is to build nuclear now to replace the aging plants that we currently have while we figure out how to fit the renewable sources in.
Ok, in the US Coal contributes 56% of the non-nuclear power, Natural Gas contributes 29%, and Hydoelectric contributes 9%. It's not unreasonable to compare nuclear with the most commonly used alternative. Solar, geothermal, and such are terrible comparisons because they are hardly used for a variety of different reasons.
With increased safety levels, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (a.k.a. LFTRs) would have even better results.
Then, take another step: Consider the Cost-Effectiveness of LFTRs, from construction to safe storage of waste, per Mega-KWH of electricity produced.
Now, what's the best choice, out of these 3 alternatives...?
Baseload is NOT the power that is cheaper.
It is the averaged power required for 24 hours to supply. That 24 hours is picked because that is what large efficient nuclear/coal stations require to start or stop.
It is also defined as:
"Baseload (also base load, or baseload demand) is the minimum amount of power that a utility or distribution company must make available..."
Not "cheap in marginal cost".
IF that were the case, then the renewables would be the baseload by a massive margin.
It isn't, but there we go.
PS you can't turn off a nuclear power station for part of a day. It takes hours to change output, generally a full day or more to go from 0% to 100% or back again. Please stop making mocking the nuclear fluffers so easy.
Yeah, you shuttered your nuke plants and lit up more coal/gas plants. Great job there. :)
Also, Germany is probably doing the same thing as Denmark is - trading with Norway as production fluctuates. This technique does not scale. (It also means you're exporting energy when it's cheap and importing it when it's expensive.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Joe Stack.
I actually worked on the effect of plane crashes on a nuclear power station. The answer is that the effect is not a lot safety-wise other than the "conventional" killing of people standing around. There is a massive amount of concrete around a reactor, and indeed the spent fuel ponds. If you are going to crash a plane you can cause far more deaths by randomly crashing into a city - an easier target ot hit too. Perhaps I should not be saying this though.
Or, like Fukushima, the plane might sufficiently damage the surrounding infrastructure so that cooling fails for a significant amount of time.
I'm not talking about electricity exactly. After all, it's not like electricity is a natural resource that we can just mine beyond the natural lightning storm. The electricity has to come from somewhere.
The public and insurance companies seem to prefer predictable risk over a lower average risk with a bumpier profile. The long-term average risk of nuclear power plants may indeed be lower than the alternatives, but it's a "spiky" kind of risk: occasional big scary events and then decades of quiet.
In investing, a premium is given to a smoother risk profile even if the average long-term payout is lower; and perhaps the same allocation logic and philosophy can apply to power generation. Stability matters.
Table-ized A.I.
And you have to worry about the nuclear figures. The death rate for a city build of the same size would show a very very similar rate of death building it to the hoover dam and almost every other construction "except nuclear". Which, apparently, has never had a death.
Rather odd.
You'd think if they could build a full size nuclear plant with zero casualties, they could manage a large mall without one too, but apparently not, only malls get deaths whilst building.
Does that not sound at least a little bit fishy to you?
so two cowboys, called mr.fossil and mr.nuke both shot their guns straight up
in happiness.
the bullet of mr.fossils gun drops and kills someone.
mr.nukes guns are bigger and the bullets heavier and bigger too. they go .. they haven't droped ... yet
much further
Small scale solar actually has more deaths from installers falling off roofs than you'd think
Not to forget all the Chinese dying of various diseases when they work on, live on or live by the land that is being strip-mined for rare-earth minerals to create these solar panels and the supporting technology. Quite frankly, solar is among the worst polluters in some ways, and electrical cars are far worse polluter than gas guzzlers.
I won't have blood on my hands, even if it is all over my sidewalk.
Ah, once you go solar you've got blood on your hands, but then again, it's Chinese blood, so it doesn't count, right?
We cannot use renewable resources exclusively. It's just not possible, unless you're willing to make the population starve by using arable land to produce energy instead of food. Do the math.
I was mostly objecting to the "necessary evil" bit with that sentence. When judging things instrumentally, it's always relative to something else. "Necessary evil" is often a misnomer.
I'm willing to accept the risks of nuclear in exchange for the massive amounts of power it produces. Like one of the other posters, however, I don't view nuclear and renewables as opposed, but as part of the same basket of power sources needed to get off of fossil fuels.
I actually worked on the effect of plane crashes on a nuclear power station. The answer is that the effect is not a lot safety-wise other than the "conventional" killing of people standing around. There is a massive amount of concrete around a reactor, and indeed the spent fuel ponds. If you are going to crash a plane you can cause far more deaths by randomly crashing into a city - an easier target ot hit too. Perhaps I should not be saying this though.
Or, like Fukushima, the plane might sufficiently damage the surrounding infrastructure so that cooling fails for a significant amount of time.
The effect on all systems, and a whole range of pessimistically chosen aircraft trajectories, types, and impact points were taken into account. This was a major (and very costly) study, not some back-of-the-envelope calc as people seem to assume.
So this is based on the what, 70 years of nuclear power? Spent nuclear fuel lasts for 10,000-100,000 years. How could you possibly average all the possible future effects of this. Its unknowable!
What if in 40,000 years, the spent nuclear fuel kills all of humanity? I guess we go back in time and adjust our forecast so that nuclear = infinity deaths per tw/h?
With nuclear you are creating pollution which will most likely last thousands of generations. At least with carbon products, give it a few hundred or thousand years and nature will clean it all up. Its an order of magnitude greater time scale for nature to clean the spent nuclear fuel. Not to mention people using it for weapons on purpose. People who advocate nuclear power never think of the big picture. That waste isn't going any where for a very long time.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Why is Slashdot now so full of ignorants who understand nothing, you have the AW120 wastes because you tweaked civil power reactors to make Plutonium for bombs ... you didn't need to, but the Green Gang effectively stopped reactor investment in the US for 40 years. You can burn that AW120 wase to AW60 ash with a short half life, that is how you safely get rid of it not by having never-ending court battles.
India, and China are both developing Thorium designs that will do that and perhaps they will sell some to you, like they do everything else.
Idiots, MFG. omb
All of this has been obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells not sold to some lobby group.
The reasons that nuclear is so disliked is not polution, it is danger. When a coal or gas plant blows up, tough luck for anyone inside. When a nuclear plant blows up, tough luck for everyone within many miles.
That, and the fact that we still don't know what to do with the radioactive waste.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I have the feeling that the population isn't going to be growing for too much longer. Our current population levels are subsidized by cheap fertilizers/pesticides/medicines provided by ridiculously cheap hydrocarbon sources (mostly petroleum but also natural gas). That's not going to continue forever, and without that energy and carbon subsidy our population is unsustainable. No other large mammal (>10 kilos) on the planet has ever had our numbers, the worldwide population of the "enormous" herds of wildebeests and reindeer are smaller than the number of people in Shanghai. We either need to reduce our population soon, or Ma Nature will do it for us, and she's a bitch.
That's why every time I see that whiny Sally Struthers pimping for dirty, bare-footed little crumb-snatchers playing in the open sewers through ChildFund, I think to myself, why interfere with natural selection? Isn't feeding them with food grown and shipped using fossile fuels not only bad for the enviroment, but is only prolonging thier cruel slow death.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
New conditions on nuclear power designs? Why bother? The US hasn't build a new nuclear generator in over 30 years. The terrified low information anti-nuclear groups have enough power to keep the politicians (who only care about getting voted in yet again) from permitting one to be built. Ban a plant, get 3 additional votes, it's a done deal.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
heck, it even emits less radiation than most of the others (flue gases from coal-fired plants emit more than a nuclear station would be allowed to). Now, the residual problems after de-commissioning, well...
No why, the deadly stuff is the Cs137, half-life 30.17 y, and Sr90, half-life 28.79 years, which means after a mere 300 years of storage, whats left is almost pure Pu239! Future generations will wonder if we was really stupid enough to bury this valuable fuel as waste.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Wind, Solar, are not needed at all. They're "solutions" looking for a problem.
And yet in Germany wind power provided 9.9% of the total energy consumption in 2011, in some states in the north more then 40% of the consumed power was wind power. And as you can see here, the combination of wind and solar power is a good idea: when there is more sun there tends to be less wind, and when there is more wind, usually you have less sun.
Storage of nuclear waste. Now France seems to have the right idea - reprocess it and react it again and again. This cuts down on the total amount of waste too.
But I'd like to see the U.S. and the world move toward thorium cycle power. It's much safer than the BWR designs operating now. And thorium cycle burns the fuel more completely without a lot of nasties left over.
I have done the math. It is trivially possible using solar cells.
If you had done the math, you would have known.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Ha, Germany the country with spiraling electricity prices.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324103504578375561493463652.html
But my understanding is that some of the materials needed to build a nuclear power stations are not common enough to power the world with nuclear power.
If the average nuclear plant has a lifespan of 50 years, and its fuel must be stored safely for 50,000 years, we are making a strange and selfish bargain with future generations on Earth. We don't have safe storage in our own era. What is 1000 x (unknown risk)? Is this a bargain we want to make with the future?
it will be necessary for probably 50-100 years before we can fully finish converting to entirely renewable sources.
50-100 years? im sorry but thats a pretty big assumption there. Because of conservatism that comes hand in hand with power, the use of fossil fuels will be perpetuated for as long as possible. even if and when man has the capability of converting entirely to renewables, there should still be non-renewable sources kept as backup for unforseen situations.
The *only* way nuclear is 'good' is that its less bad than coal in terms of greenhouse gases. No more.
no more? just because it isnt as advanced right now as we'd like it to be doesn't mean its isnt bad. accidents and lazy/stupid/cheapskate governments/private companies give nuclear a bad name. i would much prefer to live beside a nuclear power station than a power station running on fossil fuels.
In a thousand years the most dangerous nuclear waste cleans itself up too (gotta love half-lives). The nuclear waste that has longer half-lives then that is not very hot and therefore doesn't cause a huge amount of damage. Your what-if scenero is really full of crap because for nuclear to kill people faster then our breeding rate we'd have to pretty much attempt to poison everybody on earth with it on purpose.
tl;dr Most of the waste that isn't going anywhere for a long time isn't killing people.
Did you search the news where Germany's government is currently panicking because there reelection chance is almost zero if they can't stop power costs from increasing year over year? Oh yea you forgot that people have to afford the power too.
Because they are both base-load technologies, they both start-up slow, shut-down slow, react slowly to power level changes and both have a fairly narrow band of most economical operation. Natural gas and Oil are peaking technologies, they start up fast, shutdown fast, react to powerlevel adjustments quickly and have broad bands of economical operations.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The willingness of a particular country to use Wind + Solar doesn't indicate that it's a good idea. Some countries have adopted really bad ideas before. It's also silly to say that wind + solar covers everything; solar is off at night, and there's no guarantee that nights are windy.
A better measure is cost per kWH, since the entire point of energy production is to provide human beings with energy. Energy that costs less is something that does the same job with less resources.
Wind power cost estimates tend to be underestimates as they ignore the cost of backup power.
This study that includes those costs finds that "There is no economic case for wind-power."
http://www.civitas.org.uk/economy/electricitycosts2012.pdf
If you've done the math, would you be so good as to put in more to the conversation than "well *I* know the answer I'm thinking of but won't tell the rest of you so ner, I win!". How about something to actually back yourself up? I'm not taking sides on this argument but I really can't stand this sort of non-answer that's really just avoiding the parents argument.
What happens if someone crashed a plane into a working reactor? Probably a lot of damage but nothing very dangerous as power plants have been designed to withstand catastrophes like these (but strangely enough, not for floods taking down backup power like in Japan).
Personally, I believe in a mixed solution. Do something similar to spain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain making all new buildings) have mandatory solar PV to cover a large amount of residential usage and then use nuclear to provide the rest while researching other energy sources.
Here's how the trick works - ignore mining, ignore waste, assume a perfect plant for no accidents and no waste and due to a divide by zero error you get something infinitely better than anything else.
It's that sort of counterproductive bullshit that killed the thorium reactor research in the USA and stretched out the time taken to develop the synrok nuclear waste disposal method by about thirty years more than if it had continuous funding. When you have loud idiots pretending something is perfect before it is good enough then it doesn't get to be good enough.
Here is the wikipedia article on Solar energy. From the article:
The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year.
If you do the math, at 10% efficency, you need to cover less than 1% of the earth's land mass in solar panals. In other words, put solar panals on every single building, and you can power the world.
Fukushima, Zero fatality accident...
The density of uranium compared to coal means you have to mine quite a bit less. And you can also extract it from sea water. It's not as economical, but it's actually fairly "renewable" in that the ocean gets plenty more uranium through normal erosion.
Pretty sure that's called a "double standard", but you make a good point *irregardless*
That is the same dumb concept that gave us the nuclear industry. They honestly believed that by the time the magnox reactors came to the end of their life, we would have invented was of taking them apart and dealing with the waste. They are now past the end of their lifespan and we didn't.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
See above. One gram of uranium can replace a thousand kilograms of any chemical fuel.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Not surprised that you stay anonymous when you write shite. Lots of drama, no content and a complete lack of understanding of what you are talking about. Even a lack of grammar but that is normal here. You really should look up and try to understand the meaning of 'fallacy' because you use one. If I am against something, that does not in any way say that I support anything else. This may be a bit hard for your troubled mind but such an assumption in a discussion is called a fallacy. If I say that I do not like apples, you cannot say that that means that I drive a Ford truck. It is not a logical assumption. Adding lots of dumb drama to hide behind just makes you sound like you are having a period.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Yeah, I read about it; thanks for the link, though, and I hope interested people read the article. If you read my comment you'll have noticed I didn't gloss over the fact that mining uranium is problematic, as is coal. Neither one thrills me. Are there ways to improve it? I don't know.
Look, right now _every_ way we know to generate electricity, to take just that one thing, has problems, some of them hefty. Further, we tend to shy away from doing anything even approaching a more complete accounting of various kinds of costs.
There is no such thing as "clean" power. Metals? Gotta mine 'em. Fuel, to run the mining machines. Fuel, to run all the steps of refining, alloying, manufacturing fuel elements; all the electricity used to do anything, ditto all the steps to arrive at building and turning the generators. Check out the process for making cement, for instance. Photovoltaics? Just for grins, backtrack all the ingredients, and come back, tell me how clean it is. Look, we've been playing short-sighted stupid mind games about all this stuff since day one right back to the Industrial Revolution and before about how we get stuff, how we make stuff, what we do with it when we're done with it. And what it costs.
At least with nuclear power (with my previous caveats) the middle part, the part where it generates electricity, is, in today's game, a pretty sweet deal. The getting there, and the cleanup after, is still roughly par with the rest.
How long did the kamikaze phase of ww2 last?
the problem with that 250k year halflife is that the stuff gets PHYSICALLY hot as it's stored. Like, hot enought that it sets stuff on fire. And the decay byproducts are short-lived; some of them are some pretty nasty short-term gasses.
So they have to be kept sealed, and cooled under water for many months at first. (in some cases, many years).
They have a method of "dry cask" storage - for waste that has cooled somewhat. But you STILL can't get an unprotected human being anywhere near it without lethally dosing your maintenance workers, and setting work-equipment or storage containers on fire. You maybe have animals (birds, bugs) flying near the stuff and picking up byproduct contamination, and carrying it away. (this is happening at Hanford, in Washington State). The spent fuel's in this state for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. No human civilzation has yet lasted that long - we're going to figure out how to manage that?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Renewables are multiple orders of magnitude less 'impacting' than fossil fuels or nuclear.
You think? I have a nice house underneath Lake Mead going cheap...
In reality, things are not so clear-cut. Context is key.
Can you do it at gigawatt scale?
No.
You are correct.
With an LFTR, you get these advantages:
1. It uses thorium-232 (plentiful supplies out there!) dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel, something that is cheap to make.
2. You can reprocess spent uranium fuel rods and even plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons to be dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as reactor fuel, eliminating a major nuclear waste storage problem.
3. It doesn't require an expensive pressurized reactor vessel.
4. Shutting down the chain reaction is just dumping the liquid fuel out of the reactor into a holding tank.
5. By using closed-cycle Brayton turbines to generate power, you eliminate the need for expensive cooling towers or locate the reactor near a large body of water for cooling purposes.
6. The radioactive waste generated is very small, and only has a radioactive half-life of under 300 years. This means cheap waste disposal--if the nuclear medicine industry doesn't grab it first!
In short, the US Department of Energy should right now do an aggressive LFTR development program to commercialize the technology, which will make it possible to phase out many of the obsolete coal-fired power plants in the eastern USA.
As long as there is a remote chance we'll all get irradiated, who cares if the poor have to die underground in the dark?
The comparison between two old technologies doesn't give any clues for the future. The argument to continue using nuclear energy since there are better energy sources like solar and wind power. Germany shut down eight nuclear reactors after the Fukushima accident. The cost of electric energy did decrease and Germany exports more electrical energy than ever before, despite Cassandras that it would all break down without nuclear. The comparison should be between nuclear and a mix of renewable and modern, efficient gas power plants.
I'd like to point out that the world's coverage by buildings is significantly less than 1%, or even what you'd need to satisfy 100% of our electrical needs, as opposed to total power demand(heating, transportation, chemical engineering, etc...)
As an aside, I once calced that if every car in the USA transitioned to an electric vehicle, the average household usage of electricity would go up 50% - using average EV miles per kwh, average household electricity usage, average miles, etc...
Also, not every building is in a spot where solar panels would work. Sometimes they're obscured by other buildings, geographical features, just too far north(especially in the winter), etc...
We want a MIX of power. Energy storage at the scales you'd need is simply too expensive with no end to that in sight. Realistically speaking, without said storage you're not going to see more than 20% of total electricity usage being solar. Day use of electricity is ~50% higher than night. Day=3, night =2, increase=1, 1/5=20%
I don't read AC A human right
Actually, the reactor domes were designed to take a hit from the largest airliners or transport planes in existence at the time. Probably early model 747s, maybe even a C-5 Galaxy. So what happens when a 757 or 767 crashes into a working reactor? The paint is badly scratched. OK, maybe a crack that would be a problem if they can hit the same spot, a couple more times, but otherwise it is a big fail for the bad guys.
Really, the only way that a reactor is a danger is if you nuke them. And once you get to that point, you're screwed, regardless.
The above statements only apply to US-designed reactors, wherever they might have been built. I haven't studied the Japanese or Western European designs, really, and we all know what a joke reactor "safety" in the Soviet designs was.
Don't forget the increased capital cost for your solar thermal plant because you need to:
1. Build and fill a large enough salt facility to hold the necessary amount of hot salt to provide continuous power. You're looking at a minimum 12 hours supply, 16 would be more likely, with 36 being a definite option so they can last through a cloudy day.
2. Build approximately 3X as many reflectors in order to provide the heat production to keep the salt at operating temperature while running the turbines 24 hours a day at a steady rate.
3. Buy/lease even more land to put your reflectors on.
I don't read AC A human right
You can also own cars without radios, and in this analogy you will get the damn car anyways, and it will explode, with or without the damn radio. So you better just take the radio as an extra so you can listen to music while waiting for the accident. And you can own a car radio without a car, but it'll be the same as owning hydroelectric power plant without water, in both cases you won't have the electricity, and the equipment is damn useless. It's not the radio part that's dangerous, it's the car part, with or without the radio, the car will still be there.
Your what-if scenero is really full of crap because for nuclear to kill people faster then our breeding rate we'd have to pretty much attempt to poison everybody on earth with it on purpose.
Not to mention that I've always figured that even if we had been successful with Yucca mountain, within 200 years our descendents would be cursing us as they work, fully knowing the dangers, to dig up the useful fuel we buried.
I don't read AC A human right
Might as well be. In the word of Garret Hardin, stop looking at power production in terms of shortage. Look at it from the other direction: a 'longage,' which means too much demand for the available supply. Why do we assume we, humanity, society, governments, etc, is required to meet the demand? A lot of power generated is used for things like cooking, heating, air conditioning, making medicine, educating children, and feeding bunnies. All nice things. But a lot of energy is generated so some jerk can speed down my street 2 times an hour on a screaming motorcycle, so yahoos can watch stupid tv shows about Kim Kardasian, or lurk on websites like /.
If we cut out non-essential energy use, the skies would be clear and people would go outside, meet other people, re-learn to socialize, and, once Civilization Collapse occurs, become Civil again.
In the meantime, let's recognize most energy use for what it is: para-masturbatory predation, destroying the ecosystem for low-life entertainment.
Proposal: make electric and gas bills cheap for enough to not freeze in the winter, cook food, wash cloths, etc. , with a rapidly increasing charge to prod people into using less energy.
That is my rant, and I'm sticking too it.
Save the bunnies!
Anonymous coward: what? you expect me to sign this thing?
Consider either of the twin towers up against the deaths from Fukushima. Heck, look at the difference between plane strikes on non-reinforced buildings(twin towers) and a semi-reinforced building like the pentagon.
A nuclear reactor is an even smaller target than the pentagon, the fuel pool is far harder than even that, while the reactor's containment building is far more reinforced than the Pentagon.
Remember that Fukushima happened in the midst of a earthquake and tsunami. Emergency services were strained and broken from that. If it had just been the reactor, it would have been easy to get supplimental cooling there.
Doesn't mean that I don't want to replace the current reactors with newer, safer ones. Fukushima opened in 1971, making it older than TMI(1974).
Basically, I'd LOVE to see the terrorists attempt to target a nuclear reactor. Odds are they'll do less damage that way than attacking pretty much any city center.
I don't read AC A human right
"Although the concentration of Uranium and Thorium in coal is extremely low, a typical 1000 MW coal fired plant burns about 4 million tons of coal every year. This results in an unregulated release to the environment of 5.2 tons of Uranium along with 12.8 tons of Thorium from a single coal plant each year. This does not include the large amounts of radium, radon, polonium and potassium-40 that is also released from coal plants."
There are 7000 coal power plants in the world with many more planned making alternative energy solutions completely insignificant. Consider that in the US almost twice as much uranium is released into the environment by coal plants than is used, stored in fused glass and buried by nuclear plants!
Plus I question the environmental damage wind-farms can cause. We are pulling energy out of the wind. That energy is used to create currents and is part of the ecosystem... by altering this by large wind farms, could we potentially prevent moisture from moving from offshore in land? Cause a dustbowl?
As for Nuclear: I really see that as the future. New LFT reactors, for example has waste with a half-life of, 30 years I believe... and have low pressure (no explosions) and the reaction will destabilize itself (no melt down).
I'm pretty certain the amount of energy in wind is orders of magnitude bigger than we could ever extract. You'll have t oconsider that we need enought wind to have the blades rolling, the farm just can't stop all wind alltogether, we must let a huge majority of it through. Other than that, I also do believe nuclear is a way to go, but so is wind, and solar, and in the long run we'll have to move to renevables. Until then the best we can do is try to move away from oil and coal. We should use oil for making plastics, not burning it. And most of coal should just stay buried.
Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish!!!
So sad...
All of which require mining, refining and deployment of significant amounts of construction and operational materials.
No power generation is pollution free, the question is what type and how much per MWHr.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Of course those dam failures contributed to more deaths than nuclear accidents! But I said deaths is not a good measure. Didn't you read?
Put it this way: Amount of land rendered uninhabitable by dam failures is 0. Amount of land rendered uninhabitable by nuclear accidents is 2800 sq km. Therefore dams failures are less disastrous than nuclear power plant failures.
Or, put it another way: Damage from all dam failures ever is very roughly $20 billion. Damages from Fukushima alone is roughly $60 billion. Dam failures are less damaging than nuclear accidents.
Finally, the Johnstown dam failure occurred in 1889, long before we had nuclear power. Ought to account for that by looking at damages on an annualized basis. Doing that shows dams in an even better light when compared to nuclear power plants. Might also consider that technology has come a long ways since 1889. As for Banqiao Dam, that, like Chernobyl, suffered from reckless top down dictatorial Communism which forced through substandard design and construction over the protests of engineers.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The problem is that a water wheal reallies on the gimmick of a strong river. A dam is designed to skip all the problems the wheal had. As much as I like Hydro, its impractical if the local terrain is not fit. Countries like Norway can build Hydro about everywhere because its just elevation and waterfalls and mountains. A country like Denmark has to be more creative.
Sure, but they can't provide base load capability. You can't stop the country just because it's cloudy.
What it really means is that nuclear power stations need to be built by governments as 'infrastructure', not private companies with shareholders. No politician has the balls to do it though - anything with the word "nucular" in it is a political hot potato.
No sig today...
The storage solution for the waste is to gather it and dissolve it into molten salt to extract the wasted energy from it and make electricity. As is described in this generally ignored slashdot submission although it is a timely topic and has not been directly featured on slashdot before, video. Yeah, that one.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes?
very dubious claim.
http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-nuclear-comeback/
Solar thermal is great if you have the right environment for it, but outside the southwest, nuclear is still the better option.
Must suck to live in a country where you can't trust the news.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/07/fox_news_expert_on_solar_energy_germany_gets_a_lot_more_sun_than_we_do_video.html
"A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver."
So say we all
Just saying.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It might surprise you to know that there is a resistance to Nuclear in many countries other than the US. But if you think nuclear is so great, why so skeptical of NK and Iran wanting to use it? They may be tyrants but their not morons.
Iran and North Korea want nuclear power for geopolitical reasons, not necessarily for power generation. Of course, power generation is a nice side benefit for them, it's just not their primary reason for going after the technology. They are really just trying to poke the US and its allies, so the willingly accept the sanctions that cripple their economies well beyond any possible benefit from a few megawatts of nuclear power.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Germany replaced nuclear power plants with wind turbines and solar energy.
Better hope the wind doesn't stop blowing on a cloudy day in Germany then.... I'm calling you on this. Germany got 17% of it's electrical power from Nuclear in 2011 and although it *claims* to be on an 11 year track to be off nuclear power, I'm betting they won't make it onto solar and wind as a replacement. They are going to find that unless they have a boat load (actually many boat loads) of fossil fuels laying around and plants built to turn them into electrical power they will be running short of power generation capacity often. Maybe they can make that up by buying power from outside the country but that's not "replacing" their nuclear plants with wind and solar.
They have announced plans to do what you claim over 11 years, but they have not yet managed to actually DO what you claim. I for one, don't think they actually can just replace their nuclear plants with wind and solar, but will have to build out fossil fuel plants to take up the slack or keep at least some of their nuclear capacity.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Norway can only build hydro everywhere if they are willing to end their entire river ecosystem.
And? Everyone knows that fox news lies.
I am not talking about a handful of pv panels on peoples roofs. I am talking about hundreds of square miles of solar concentrators producing a major percentage of US energy demands (> 30%).
Outside the the south west putting up large scale solar thermal power systems will involve cutting down forests, building over farmland, or having the blindingly bright solar collectors within sight of population centers.
Goes the sound of sarcasm, floating along in harmless steam clouds generated by cooling towers, right over your head.
That's incredibly optimistic. What makes you think we can satisfy 100% of the world's power consumption requirements, especially 50 to 100 years from now, with "entirely renewable sources." That's an ideal but where is the evidence that it's possible in an applied sense?
That's ridiculous. Nuclear power hasn't finished killing people with the accidents that have already happened, and won't for countless lifetimes.
Somebody please hang a sign on the sun that says "STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN!
Isn't feeding them with food grown and shipped using fossile fuels not only bad for the enviroment, but is only prolonging thier cruel slow death.
You do realize that you mostly eat food grown elsewhere and trucked in using fossil fuels right?
So by your own admission, stop and die.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Hydro has certain things that need to be mitigated, and yes the 'impact' is heavy in a *very* localized area.
But it's not anywhere near coal or oil...nice try though.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
So far...or do you not admit that Chernobyl killed 10,000+? So does coal, just differently. The closest you can come to disasters with renewable is dam failure and that is completely mitigatable through planning. You can't 'mitigate' a full scale nuclear disaster.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
"We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
And that was just for some ridiculous thing like landing on the moon. This is just power generation...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Hence why I said the spent fuel ponds as well. Looking at Fukushima, those reactors don't look anything close to 'hardened' do they?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Bank bailouts? 'made money'
Auto bailouts? 'made money'
'any of that other stuff government does'
well you're true colors show through now...
What's the cost of cholera again? Or polio? oh right...gov't eradicated those here...
Gov't is not bad, people who complain from the cheap seats without contributing to the solution are 'bad'.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The percentage of uranium in ore bodies that are mined tends to be pretty low as such things go -- lots and lots of ore gets extracted and processed to get those kg's of U, then it has to be enriched wrt U235 to be useful. The de-enriched aka "spent" U238 waste product is used to poison anyone we shoot artillery shells at.
The isotopes with the 250K year half-life do not produce much heat. You can hold uranium in your hand and it is not radiologically dangerous nor is it any warmer than than any other rock. The reason why freshly discharged spent fuel needs to be cooled in a pool is because of all of the short-lived isotopes. After 1 year the fuel is safe for dry cask storage, though it is often kept in the pool for at least 5 years just to be safe.
The great thing about the dry cask storage is that the casks do include shielding and you can stand right next to them, give them a hug, and be just fine. There is no possible way for any animal or insect near the cask to pick up any contamination and transport it. The waste at Hanford is not contained in storage casks plus there is contamination in the dirt. This contamination is what the animals pick up and transport.
Spent fuel is actually quite stable and does not readily disperse in the environment. Combine that with the insane engineering that is incorporated into the casks and there is little danger of contamination spreading from the spent fuel.
That TED debate has a quote from Stuart Brand that stries me as very insightful, going straight to the heart of the matter:
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."
The "sunny days when the wind is blowing energy" folks just won't do the arithmetic.
So, I've started calling them "Arithmetic Deniers".
...it is the power of Satan! This is what keeps Hell so hot!
If anyone uses nuclear power, even 1 watt, they are going straight to damnation.
Instead, you must all use my church-approved solar panels, guaranteed to float up to the sun with you when the Rapture comes...
"...But hey, if you want to discredit one of the most credible AGW celebrities in the world go right ahead..."
That's true.
He is a criminal, a liar and a fraud. All his utterance have been disproven numerous times - like his assertion that the sea level rise will accelerate and reach 250ft. But in AGW company, that does indeed make him one of the most credible celebrities. Compared, for instance, to Mann...
They do not mention the fact that the waste will be there, uh, forever... and that waste must be properly secured against bad guys due their possible hostile utilization.
I must have struck a nerve. Well, I suppose it could have been the KFTRC remark. I will have to use it more often. Regardless, I'm not against nuclear power, but I'm not blind to its hazards and the very very long term consequences our descendants tens of thousands of years from now will be dealing with for what we have done with nuclear power and weapons over the past hundred. We must be very conservative in how we use and deploy it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
How about this for a LONG TERM plan?
1) Start phasing out fossil fuels as much as possible and replacing them with renewables like solar and wind etc.
2) Build nuclear plants that produce Hyrdorgen at the plant
3) Run everything else (cars, power plants, industry, etc) on Hydrogen.
4) Once the Hydrogen economy is built, start phsaing out nuclear and replacing it with a wide mix of renewables.
People always say that the problem with Hydrogen is that it takes enegry to produce and there is no delivery infrastructure. But nuclear can generate tons of electricity on-site to make the Hydrogen, and the infrastructure can be built slowly - start with large industrys (aviation, factories, heavy equipment) and gradually expand the network to towns (fueling/"gas" stations) and finally homes. Hydrogen is the cleanest fukle in the universe and the most abundant element, and they are constantly discovering new ways to separate it. It also doesn't stop on cloudy/windless days.
So the solution in this instance is to not use molten salt reactors in Alaska. You are trotting out the tired argument that this solution doesn't cover 100% of the use cases therefore it should be thrown in the trash. This is highly illogical. You use the best tool for the job. That datacenter you mentioned is running real servers instead of commodity desktop pc's. To follow your line of reasoning then desktop pc's should be thrown away and everyone should have a server at home so that in the event they need 10,000 simultaneous email connections they will be able to do so. Do you not see the silliness in this line of reasoning? If a power plant needs alot of sun to function then you obviously don't build it somewhere that doesn't have that! Look at how absurd it would be if there was only one vehicle available for any task. We'd all be driving greyhound busses with 60 foot flatbeds attached! Luckily it seats 100 passengers and all their homes comfortably and with a variety of onboard attachments can drill a well, haul coal to the coal plant, AND pave the highway at the same time it is bulldozing, tunneling, and landscaping it! Now that I think about it, from a preteen boy's perspective this would be a pretty badass vehicle. From a more realistic veiwpoint though all of that is entirely useless when all we are actually gonna do with it is haul one guy and his man-purse to work twice a day.
USE THE BEST TOOL FOR THE JOB! Why people have to constantly repeat that to the supposedly better educated slashdot denizen though I will never know. It makes me sad.
I just wonder how many wind turbines we would need to build to make up for all the trees we have cut down. I mean, at ground level, we have removed a massive amount of wind barrier through our history. We can't really stop the wind, it has a way of going around obstacles, so we can only rob a small percentage of the energy in a small percentage of ... its cross section? Most wind happens at altitudes where we're not going to be installing towers, so it seems to me that your "large" farm would have to be mountain tall, mighty wide, and inefficiently dense to have a demonstrable effect on downstream conditions.
To ramble on, wind does not take up [much] property. A few towers around a cornfield, I am sure, will more than pay for the couple bushels that they might displace. A tower's actual footprint is negligible, and the access road probably already exists. If I install a 1kw rig in my yard, it might as well be a flagpole, as far as my mowing and Frisbee playing is concerned. Solar, too, does not need to complete for land. Just put it on top of what's already there. Replace asphalt shingles with solar cells, that's a win. Build a sun shade over the freeway, the parking lot, and the canal. Solar panels turn a hot roof into a utility. Nuclear just keeps the power in the big money's hands, and turns the future radioactive. "Long term" ain't even started, yet.
Yes, all we need is a little radaway and fixer... Right.
So what part of "cheap fertilizers/pesticides/medicines" would fission/fusion power replace? I wasn't aware that nuclear power created hydrocarbons.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
If the worldwide economy were to crash which population do you think is most likely to survive? The "dirty, bare-footed little crumb-snatchers" who have spent their entire lives surviving on the edge, or the spoiled urbanites unable to imagine even eating organ meats and barely know how to make dinner without a microwave oven?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Your implying that the worldwide economy can crash worst the what Bush, Bush and Obama have done to it?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
No, it won't. The cars will be usually driven at day and recharged at night, no problem at all even with current capacities.
Oh, most certainly. All these idiots have done so far was allow the financial speculators to play their games and look what has happened. Imagine for a moment if there were a small nuclear exchange between India and China, especially before harvest time. Or a nuke takes out the busiest port on the planet and one of the world's principal financial centers, Hong Kong. Or some actual terrorist group arises that is composed of people smarter than your average marshmallow and they start targeting refineries worldwide. Or one of the bio-weapons gets loose and destroys the wheat or rice harvest worldwide. Or another Krakatoa or Tambora happens and drops global temperatures a couple of degrees for a year or two.
The Great Depression was triggered, at least in part, by a relatively minor weather event at the world level, the North American Dust Bowl. Our financial situation isn't a whole lot better today than it was in the 1920s, and our population is almost four times what it was then. The majority of the people worldwide live in cities now, and couldn't begin to grow their own food even if they knew how because they don't have access to the land or the tools to do so.
Oh, yes, it could get a whole lot worse.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I like to assume that the energy removed from the atmosphere by wind farms was put there by global warming in the first place! Not sure about local effects though.
Our energy needs are ever increasing as our population grows.
It depends on what "we" means - the energy use per capita in the developed world has been surprisingly level in the recent past (even if it is the highest in the world). The population continues to increase, and developing countries get more developed, sure, but once you reach a certain amount of development, it seems the per-person energy requirements start flattening. Of course, the population can't continue to grow without bound, but that's true for lots of reasons. And again, fortunately, developed countries tend to be approaching equilibrium (negative, even, in some parts of Europe).
And it's simply mathematically false that there isn't enough real estate for solar (wind is another matter - but it's power all comes from the sun, anyway). Lets do some order-of-magnitude calculations. The US has been at ~350 GJ/yr per capita for the last few decades. 350 GJ/yr corresponds to ~11 kWs of continuous power usage. The solar constant at the surface of the earth is ~1 kW per square meter. The Earth has a total cross-section of ~10 trillion square meters. So if we give everyone (world population ~ 10 billion) their own US-level standard of living entirely from (perfectly efficient) solar power, it only takes a thousandth of the earth's cross section (or about 1/4000 of it's surface area, if we build the patch on the equator). If we assume current solar efficiencies of ~10%, maybe that means we need 1/100th of the Earth's cross section.
That leaves 99% of the Earth's population free to live on. There's plenty of room for solar to be a permanent solution.
There are a number of factors you forget to calculate in.
1. The amount of land around the equator is fairly limited, and you really cannot build solar arrays in the ocean. 70% of the earth is water, so that leaves 30% to build solar panels and windmills on. Maybe you could build in shallow water, so let's call it 35%.
2. The sun only shines during the day, so you will need to build extra capacity (by double).
3. Unless you are pointing your solar collection directly at the sun, they are not as efficient, so you have to build extra capacity (by double).
4. Rainy and cloudy days will drive production down in a lot of places around the equator by 30%, and in dry areas dust will kill off 20% of your capacity.
4. Nothing this big will be 100% working at any one time, so you will likely have to build out another 10% or more capacity to account for maintenance.
5. I'm not going to argue with your efficiency numbers, but I think they are a bit optimistic.
All in all, you need to multiply your estimates by about 430% and subtract that amount from the 30% useable land. That would be significant portion of the world's land and would be a HUGE environmental impact that would make global thermal nuclear war look like a walk in the park.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101