Climatologist James Hansen Defends Nuclear Energy

First time accepted submitter prajendran writes "James Hansen, the former director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, has been a strong defender of using nuclear energy to replace coal and renewable energy. He and three other researchers had written a letter, arguing just this. In this interview with rediff.com, an Indian news site, he was asked to address some concerns surrounding the issue, especially given the strong feelings generated by it. It may not be Hansen's best interview, but it did bring out his passionate side."

Comments

common sense

[roman_mir]

of-course the only real we have today to cover our energy needs while destroying the environment the least is by using nuclear energy.

Of-course the governments of the world stand in the way of the free market experimenting with nuclear energy, AFAIC that's the reason I don't have a flying car yet, it's because we are not yet powering cars with tiny nuclear reactors and that will not change until we get gov't out of energy business (and if you want progress in any field that is useful, get government out of it).

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

While I am pro-nuclear for several reasons, one being a stop-gap in the energy situation until something better can be found, I do not believe that a small nuclear reactor would be able to output enough energy to power cars all that well much less having enough energy to have them fly. Flying cars are science fiction. Possible? Sure, but not practical. Tubes from Futurama (heavily modified, but the same concept) or something like the automatic sidewalks would be the best replacement for a need for vehicles outright.

Re: common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact nuclear and fossil fuel has the same issue. What to do with the waste. With coal and such, we push the waste into the air. This, to me, is like pissing in your neighbors lawn. It is frowned upon so we mandate indoor plumbing so your waste gets to a place it can be dealt with. While there is no reason why we could not mandate indoor plumbing for coal fired plants, it is deemed not economically viable to do so.
An issue with nuclear plants I'd they were in part developed as response to the pollution of fossil fuel, and had the advantage that the waste was contained. Indoor plumbing. But the politics was that we could not simply treat and dump, like human waste. So we are really at the an equivalent point. Without reprocessing, and including that cost in our electricity bills, nuclear is not a viable option. It is not enough to have clean energy, it must be cheap. Fossil fuel is cheap because we can just dump the waste in our neighbor's yard.

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Until we have electric trans-atlantic pasenger air transport in six hours, we'll need more than just nukes.

Re:common sense

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Until we have electric trans-atlantic pasenger air transport in six hours, we'll need more than just nukes.

Transport fuel especially air and ocean needs to remain chemical, even nuclear advocates are pretty unanimous on this.

0. LFTR for electricity and process heat ASAP
1. use oil, while it lasts
2. use synfuel made from coal or natural gas, using Fischer-Tropsch and LFTR heat source
3. use hydrogen separated from water by energy from LFTR stored as liquid, gas or (preferably) oxide pellets

With number 3 we have attained a state of complete, virtually limitless energy with extremely small footprint of Thorium mining, zero CO2 emissions and zero use of agriculture for energy production. Oh, and we can make limitless amounts of ammonia-based fertilizer with hydrogen separated from water and atmospheric nitrogen.

(Nothing but win. Think of me as the hyper 'Trix Rabbit' of Thorium)

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to start with how the wealthy see you.

“Dead Peasant” insurance
Winn Dixie Stores bought life insurance policies on approximately 36,000 of its employees, without their knowledge or consent, and named itself as the policies’ beneficiary. The insurance brokerage firm that placed the policies prepared two memos describing the deceased employees as “Dead Peasants.”

The memos were evidence in a Supreme Court case. Corporations are the ones that gave the government power so they could yield it. You can't buy life insurance on a someone outside your family without their consent, why can corporations do it?

I really don't know how anyone can be anti-government and pro-corporations or vice versa really. They're the same system now. Those in power are those in power whether you want to call them President's or CEO's they're typically cut from the same class of people or are puppets controlled by the same class and it's quite obvious by now that both parties are controlled by the same set of people.

You seem intelligent but your constant anti-government posts seem to lack this fundamental understanding of power. For some reason it doesn't matter how much you tie government officials to corporate power, many people see them as at odds. Of course corporations have done a good job of conflating small business and international conglomeration so they play all the sides.

It's fairly obvious that Federal laws help big companies. They would much rather deal with one law, usually crafted with help from their lobbyist, than deal with 50 laws and lobbying 50 state governments. Small business are fine with 50 state laws because they normally only operate in one state. However, notice when the federal government does something that limits corporate power, all of a sudden it's government overreach and Wal-Mart will act like they're being pushed around like a mom and pop store, which is ridiculous.

Have you seen our laws? Do you really not see how corporate power has been crafting them for at least the last 100 years. They even act like royalty. Any big wealthy family is likely inbred and they will do anything to maintain their power. They hide their money in families so that it doesn't seem as extreme as it is. They have arranged marriages. And they are slowly taking all of the capital out of the system. Personally, I don't have kids and I'll probably be dead before things really get bad, but for those that have children, I'm baffled. With each generation, capital is condensed into smaller and smaller hands. And while it doesn't affect me that someone makes more than me, it does affect me when they take so much capital out of the system there's no way to get it back.

People think shareholders represent some kind of democratic capitalism, but the truth is, each companies stock is controlled by a few controlling parties. Often married or linked somehow. Maybe 10% of a company gets sold to what you could actually call the public, but that's just another means of taking money from the hands of the people. When you own the majority of a stock, it's quite easy to manipulate. Just like if you own the majority of land or the majority of anything.

The simple fact that money is flowing to the wealthy makes it really hard for me to believe that the government is holding corporations back. The wealthy families in the country control so much, it blows my mind that people still think the government even has power over the government. For crying out loud, our money is printed by a private organization and lent to our government. Evert dollar in our economy is lent into the system by a private entity. But sure, keep believing the government is the problem. We need to fix government, not destroy it and officially hand it over to the royalty of our day. Did our ancestors come to America to give the continent to 400 families.

Interestingly, becoming rich is good for the country. Staying ric

Re: common sense

[VTBlue]

Science has solved the waste issue. Titanate nanofibers. One gram cleans a ton of waste water.

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear Industry failed to commoditize nuclear energy is the reason it failed! Throw more Solar Panels at the Solar Sever Farm!

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

"3." Would have to be oxide. Hydrogen doesn't store well as a gas or a liquid. It's just too atomically small. And if we don't burn it, we lose it. As an oxide, it will still be highly caustic.

Re:common sense

[rossdee]

"3. use hydrogen separated from water by energy from LFTR stored as liquid, gas or (preferably) oxide pellets"

Round here Hydrogen Oxide pellets fall out of the sky naturally - small ones at this time of the year but in the summer time you can get them as big as golf balls

Re: common sense

[DuckDodgers]

The two are NOT equivalent. The US nuclear industry generates about 20% of our national power and 2,300 tons of radioactive waste per year. The US uses about a billion (with a 'b') tons of coal per year for 50% of our national power.

So if we replaced coal energy generation with nuclear generation, we would have roughly 5750 tons of radioactive waste to handle instead of soot and particulate emissions from burning roughly 174000 times as much mass in coal.

So you have a choice between unsightly outhouses here and there (storage facilities for nuclear waste) or pissing all over the lawns of everybody all over the country. The difference in scale is mind-boggling.

Re:common sense

[Prune]

I hope you meant ferric oxide pellets. Hydrogen oxide can refer either to water, or to the hydroxide ion, none of which are useful, as breaking the O-H bonds is an endergonic reaction.

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Raining water != hydrogen pellets.

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

hydrogen for fuel is a retarded idea.

use ammonia. burn it in internal combustion engines like in Belgium during the war or burn it with fuel cells. Advantages is you don't need to fix any carbon. Disadvantage is it smells worse than gasoline.

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

What if, instead, you stored the hydrogens on chains of carbons? I bet you could come up with some that would be energetic, yet relatively inert (comparatively speaking) at normal temperatures and pressures. I think liquid phase would be best.

Re: common sense

[taiwanjohn]

Hm, no, that doesn't solve "the waste issue" it only makes one aspect of it easier to deal with. It's useless for spent nuclear fuel, for example.

The problem with SNF is that it's all mixed together. Most of the isotopes are actually quite useful for medical or industrial uses, but only if they are isolated from each other. As described in this video SNF from today's nuke fleet is like taking everything from your pantry and dumping it out on the floor in one big pile. There isn't much you can do other than shovel it into the dumpster. But if you have flour, sugar, salt, etc. all in separate containers you can use them to bake a cake.

This level of fine-grained reprocessing is difficult and expensive for solid nuclear fuels, but relatively easy and cheap to do with liquid nuclear fuels. This is one reason why molten salt reactors are getting more attention in recent years. It's just so much easier to chemically separate the various byproducts "on the fly" while the reactor is online.

Re: common sense

[davester666]

But terrorists! And NIMBY!

Actually, NIMBY applies to everything (nuclear, coal, wind, solar, power lines, pipelines [above and below ground], every other method of power generation and transportation).

Re:common sense

[davester666]

That's Dihydrogen monoxide, you simpleton.

Re: common sense

[hairyfish]

I read somewhere that if a human got all their electricity in their entire life from Nuclear power, the total waste product would fit in a coke can. Not sure if that is true or not (your figures indicate about a coke can every year) but if it is (or even 10x times that) it makes the waste issue seem to be blown way out of proportion.

Re: common sense

[weilawei]

So, you'd rather that, instead of producing 5750 tons of waste per year for nuclear (let's assume that you haven't figured out what an LFTR is, and can't think about reprocessing here) per year, you'd rather use up our atmospheric oxygen to turn the coal into carbon dioxide at a far greater rate.

Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.

That means we're looking at dealing with 1 billion * 2.86 short tons = 2.86 billion short tons = 5,720,000,000,000 (or 5.72 trillion) pounds of CO2 per year. My calculator suggests that's around 497,000x the mass of the potential nuclear waste, not to mention more radioactive waste actually in the atmosphere. Do you really want to discuss which of these methods is contributing more radiation to the atmosphere and whose house all these byproducts are polluting? I'm pretty sure they don't usually entomb the resultant CO2 in concrete, even if half of (less than half, actually) fly ash winds up that way.

The energy density of coal pales in comparison to thorium:

At these prices the value of the energy produced by the thorium is an average cubic meter of the Earth’s crust in a LFTR is worth (11000 to 17000)/(220) = 50 to 77 cubic meters of anthracite coal.

At this point, NIMBY is just mindless obstructionism. There is no scientific ground left to stand on, unless you happen to have an actual, implementable solution for long-term base power, and no, solar isn't cutting it. For that, you have toxic build and recycling processes, short life, low efficiency, the sort of thing that's okay on a small scale but hasn't shown real base-load promise due to the cost of storing energy en-masse for use during off-peak hours instead of throttling a nuclear reaction pulling energy from a very dense storage medium.

LFTR isn't just some pie-in-the-sky. It's a tried and tested reactor design, and we learned from our initial failures (metal embrittlement, evolution of uranium and plutionium), and we came out the other side with a new process for decommissioning. This is how science and engineering work, folks.

Re: common sense

[weilawei]

I forgot my citation: the amount of CO2 from burning coal. And, despite that I hinted at it, in case someone wonders why the resultant pollutants from coal are more massive...

Also, s/plutionium/plutonium/.

Re:common sense

[Big Hairy Ian]

Don't forget that an LFTR can produce virtually no nuclear waste and even consume most of the waste from conventional fission reactors.

Re:common sense

[jalopezp]

No, in nuclear chemistry (and when dealing with acids), it's more common to call the compound hydrogen hydroxide.

Re:common sense

[delt0r]

Where does this Truthiness come from. Thorium fuel cycle produces about the same amount of waste as normal reprocessing Uranium fuel cycle. That not really odd since you need to create 233U from the Thorium first since Thorium is not a fuel but is fertile. So your burning Uranium.

Re: common sense

[Megane]

Not only that, but coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.

Re:common sense

[TheRealHocusLocus]

What if, instead, you stored the hydrogens on chains of carbons? I bet you could come up with some that would be energetic, yet relatively inert (comparatively speaking) at normal temperatures and pressures. I think liquid phase would be best.

This seems to be in jest but I actually agree. The use of elemental hydrogen is a sharp boom and shock wave waiting to happen. Even solid state pellet storage states make me wonder whether sudden ignition would be a calamity one could run away from.

(Despite Hollywood effects) liquid hydrocarbons give more of whoosh than a building-flattening kablam. So long as you're not drenched in them it tends to be survivable.

But burning releases those little carbons. Personally I'm not put off by that because we could use LFTR energy to harvest carbon from CO2 from atmosphere directly to bond with those hydrogens, as they are released we'd at least achieve carbon parity. But it would be a really slow process. If CO2 neutrality is a goal it might be better to take carbons from matter to make our fuel as we always have, and build separate (but even more massive) CO2 atmosphere sequestration scrubbers.

Re:common sense

[JaredOfEuropa]

Depends on the reactor and fuel cycle. An LFTR will produce significantly less radioactive waste, but it'll be a good while before we'll have this tech ready for commercial application.

See this report: "NNL’s view is therefore that thorium fuel cycles are likely to offer modest reductions in radiotoxicity. It is considered that the realistic benefits are likely to be too marginal to justify investment in the thorium fuel cycle. However, the substantial reduction in radiotoxicity promised by a full thorium recycle does provide a significant incentive in the long term."

Re: common sense

[Xyrus]

...So if we replaced coal energy generation with nuclear generation, we would have roughly 5750 tons of radioactive waste to handle instead of soot and particulate emissions from burning roughly 174000 times as much mass in coal....

Actually the amount of waste would be far less than that. If we actually had sensible legislation in regards to waste, we could have a full nuclear cycle that includes reprocessing significantly reducing the amount of waste.

Re: common sense

[Quila]

I crunched the above poster's numbers, and in the US it comes out to about 16 grams per year per person for complete reliance on nuclear.

Re: common sense

[Quila]

But, but, nookyoolur bad!

Re: common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

The country that uses the most energy per capita, according to this page, is Iceland, at about 7.1*10^11 joules per year. According to this page, 1kg of nuclear fuel can produce 3.7*10^12 joules, enough to power an icelander for 5 years. Even for relatively inefficient reactions, the amount of nuclear waste won't be a lot more than then amount of input fuel. If a person lives 90 years, they only use 18kg of nuclear fuel and the amount of nuclear waste will be, at most, not much more than that. Presumably the list on Wikipedia covers all uses of energy, not just electricity. Uranium is dense, so 18kg of it represents less than 3 soda cans' worth; the nuclear waste might be a little less dense than the original fuel, but probably not a whole lot.

Re: common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the person you are violently agreeing with is in agreement with you.

Re: common sense

[Applehu Akbar]

The fundamental difference even before recycling is that because nuclear fuel is much more contracted as an energy source than any fossil fuel, there is far less waste per unit oif energy produced. Whether we decide to reprocess now or later is purely a matter of economics vs politics: given the low cost of fresh nuclear fuel it would make more economic sense to store spent fuel for a generation or two until reprocessing gets cheaper, but will politicians let us do it?

Re:common sense

[delt0r]

And the result is basically the same if you use normal uranium and reprocess! Thorium is only "significantly" better when you compare to a once through cycle. Which Thorium can't even do so its hardly a fair comparison. The only difference is less actinides. But since reprocessing can deal with that and with pure uranium cycles you have less 234U is not clear its even a win at all. 234U is a nasty gamma emitter and makes reprocessing very difficult.

Also you didn't answer the question. Where does this 10000 year number come from.

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

(and if you want progress in any field that is useful, get government out of it).

What about the Apollo project? They made HUGE progress (at HUGE cost), but met their goal in less than a decade, having to develop almost all the technology from scratch!

Oh, wait... you said "useful." Sorry. Carry on.

Re:common sense

[TheRealHocusLocus]

See this report.

"Reactor type: In the foreseeable future (up to the next 20 years), the only realistic prospect for deploying thorium fuels on a commercial basis would be in existing and new build LWRs (e.g., AP1000 and EPR) or PHWRs (e.g., Candu reactors). Thorium fuel concepts which require frst the construction of new reactor types (such as High Temperature Reactor (HTR), fast reactors and Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS)) are regarded as viable only in the much longer term (of the order of 40+ years minimum) as this is the length of time before these reactors are expected to be designed, built and reach commercial maturity."

It seems they are discussing what would be necessary to retrofit LWR to burn solid fuel Thorium instead of Uranium. Molten salt suspension designs not even being considered. I agree, until available Uranium is an endangered specie (hundreds of years even generating all the world's electricity at 0.5% efficiency even with limited or no recycling) there is little incentive to use solid fuel Thorium in these reactors.

It's a very specific conclusion drawn from a very specific set of requirements. The 20/40 year time frames seem a little relaxed. These people should drink more coffee. Then they could get a good buzz and consider ways to burn almost 100% of the Uranium (of Thorium).

Re: common sense

[Unequivocal]

Fossil fuels and nuclear don't have the "same issue" -- fossil fuels use emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere creating catastrophic future warming of the planet endangering the human species' survival as we know it. Nuclear fuel use produces some highly dangerous waste material that has to be stored or eliminated.

Which problem would you rather have society engineer solutions for? I'm voting for nuclear.

I'm not saying you don't know this already, but I am saying that your post gives the wrong impression.

Re:common sense

[TheRealHocusLocus]

What about the Apollo project? They made HUGE progress (at HUGE cost), but met their goal in less than a decade, having to develop almost all the technology from scratch!

This is ALL TRUE!

I covered this recent discovery in this [failed] Slashdot submission,
Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 40-Year Old Technology

TheRealHocusLocus writes

"Paul Rosenberg has uncovered some surprising new evidence that manned space travel is not only possible, it has actually been achieved using decades-old technology. Some 40 years in the making, a tale too amazing to remain untold. With a few quaint photographs he asks, could we build this? The answer is no. Or is it? It is uplifting to read that "Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars..." for it must take something really compelling to prevent us from reaching the stars, and he has nailed it. This essay makes the case that the headliner of 2052 may well be: Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 80-Year Old Technology. I can hardly wait! Down with robots."

Re: common sense

[Mike Van Pelt]

It's not NIMBY.

It's BANANAs.

Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

At last, Hansen is turning his attention to something that can make it possible to phase out burning of fossil fuels. Just "Don't Burn Fossil Fuels" without any alternative (and "sunny days when the wind happens to be blowing" energy is NOT an alternative) are never going to replace 24x7x365.24 energy.

Re:common sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Transport fuel especially air and ocean needs to remain chemical, even nuclear advocates are pretty unanimous on this.

Speak for yourself, dude! Oceanic transport fuel is already nuclear, at least partially. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers, submarines, and ice breakers are real and work well. A large container ship has power requirements comparable to an aircraft carrier (if I'm not mistaken, Emma Maersk has a 100MW Diesel engine, USS Nimitz has 194MW from four turbines and two reactors). There is no technical reason why bulk shipping need to depend on chemical fuel.

Now for aircraft, you're probably right. While a nuclear powered long-range bomber had been in development, that can safely be considered a dumb idea. Synthetic kerosene from coal with nuclear power might work here. (But an electric, sub-atlantic vacuum train would be way cooler, wouldn't it? And faster and cleaner, too.)

Re: common sense

[VTBlue]

I think you aren't recognizing the significance of being able to quickly and efficiently clean nuclear waste water. All the major nuclear waste storage sites in US are struggling to find the area necessary to store waste. This cuts down the waste volume by a huge margin. As for solid "waste" as you describe, I agree with you that I'm all for thorium and salt reactors. India and China is actually leading in this area if I'm not mistaken.

But as to your implication that nuclear waste is a serious issue, it's really not even close to the damage caused by coal fly ash, which is more radioactive than nuclear waste. Today we can count the number people who die prematurely from coal; how many people die from nuclear waste? Statistically none.

Re: common sense

[DuckDodgers]

To be pedantic, there are storage methods - pumped water, stored heat, compression, or even colossal batteries - that allow wind power or solar power to generate 24/7 energy. The technology exists, and is well-proven.

The problem isn't feasibility, it's cost. Our economies are built on cheap power. A solar power plant that provides power under direct sunlight is relatively cost competitive. A solar power plant that provides power 24/7 using storage multiplies the cost per kwh by some huge factor - 3, 5, maybe more.

Re: common sense

[DuckDodgers]

Right, right. I'm just giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, to show that even under worse case conditions the scale of waste favors nuclear power immensely.

TL;DR

[spacefight]

Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.

Sincerely, the kids from the future.

Re:TL;DR

[JavaBear]

If only we had the time.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you're not saying that other means of generating energy don't have similarly massive pollution concerns? Or are you really that naive as to think that nuclear waste tech is still at the same state it was in in the 1950's? Or are you still hoping that we can solve all of our problems with solar?

Re:TL;DR

[TheSync]

Dear kids from the future,

Well, we went nuclear so we wouldn't cook the entire planet (and thus allowing you to live).

On the other hand, there is a one small cave in Nevada with some nasty stuff. Seems to me like you guys should be able to handle it with your quantum teleportation technology or whatever you come up with. Or just keep an eye on it.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.

Sincerely, the kids from the future.

Hey nuclear critics, how about you fix the masterbution issue first, then we'll talk.

Sincerely, the adults from the future.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

He never said such a thing.

And don't call him Shirley.

Re:TL;DR

[RobertLTux]

Well the problem is the best way to "fix" the waste problem is to reuse the waste from step N-1 in step N after N = >6? you have stuff that is very short term radioactive (but has a very bad temper in large enough amounts).

Keeping the number of Nations that have used Nukes in Acts of War to 1 is why this does not happen.

Re:TL;DR

[ultranova]

Sincerely, the kids from the future.

Would you prefer to inherit an industrial civilization or a pristine planet? Because you can't have both.

Re:TL;DR

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk. Sincerely, the kids from the future.

Dear kids,

Extremely small volumes of waste needing safe storage for only ~300 years is probably the best we can do. Shall we do it -- or will you prefer to be sharpening sticks to hunt among the silent rusted remnants of wind turbines?

Sincerely, LFTR

Re:TL;DR

[Mashiki]

Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.

Gee, 300 years of storage for a small segment of the waste. The rest of which can be reprocessed into fuel, unless of course you're in the US and have this boogyman fear of plutonium.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

>He never said such a thing.
Refuting change defends the status quo.

PS, not 45634245.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA:

According to the letter, 'We understand that today's nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently.'

The "waste issue" is political. Most can be recycled, the small amount remaining can be safely archived.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

>On the other hand, there is a one small cave in Nevada with some nasty stuff.

This is the dream solution so far, but this does NOT exist. Hanford - nasty waste tanks buried in the ground. Fukushima - fuel pool at reactor 4 dangerously tipping and leaking. Yucca Mountain plans closed.

At this point, a lot of nuclear waste sits in fuel pools because there is no long-term solution. We need to get on this and make a place like you describe, pronto. Nuclear can be clean and safe, but so far nobody is really running it clean and safe. Money and greed are too human.

Re:TL;DR

[swillden]

+5 insightful

Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are. They'll be better-equipped to deal with it than we are -- and it's a much easier problem for them to solve than a planetary climate that has been pushed to extremes.

Yeah, it'd be nice if solar, wind and wave energy could address all of our needs, but at present they can't provide the baseload coverage needed to eliminate coal and oil burning.

Re:TL;DR

[fnj]

At this point, a lot of nuclear waste sits in fuel pools because there is no long-term solution.

A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.

Re:TL;DR

[fnj]

Would you prefer to inherit an industrial civilization or a pristine planet? Because you can't have both.

You can't have EITHER, at this point. Civilization is doomed by the whackos, and the planet is already far from pristine.

Re:TL;DR

[speckman]

+5 insightful

Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are. They'll be better-equipped to deal with it than we are -- and it's a much easier problem for them to solve than a planetary climate that has been pushed to extremes.

Yeah, it'd be nice if solar, wind and wave energy could address all of our needs, but at present they can't provide the baseload coverage needed to eliminate coal and oil burning.

Yeah, keep it safe, tell all our descendants, stretching longer than from now to the birth of our civilizations, our history, to deal with potentially ecosphere-killing crap, an exponentially growing pool of waste. Shit, if we don't have a storage system *right now*, like, IDK, 80 years into this show, however many generations later, and we're just storing stuff on top of the stupid reactors, ready to lay waste to a heavily populated island should some natural disaster hit (and news flash: over the span of 10k years, there's going to be quite a few natural disasters), what the hell? How is this safe? How is this a better alternative? OK, sure, it doesn't warm the climate. Way to go. It just generates shit that is so amazingly toxic to nearly every lifeform on this planet, and we still keep the damn stuff laying around, behind barbed wire, on top of a roof, with an infrastructure of people designed to handle it. Should that infrastructure ever fail, like say, IDK, civil war, humongous calamity/disaster, some other random shit we can't predict, it's death, just waiting, waiting.

It's so amazingly shortsighted to go nuclear. Yeah, hell yeah, there's probably ways to do it right, but we sure aren't using those methods. I talked to a grad student in nuclear physics who claimed we could just reprocess all of our spent fuel, use that to fuel reactors for ever. for ever. Great, great idea, glad it's possible, but let's do it then. And what we're talking about when we talk about nuke plants is more of this incredible waste generating BS.

Coal? Oh, fuck coal. Those mountains could have stayed there, for sure. Natural gas? Fracking, OMG, this is going to be seriously bad. Give it more decades, you'll see. So *cough* how about all that green shit we keep researching and talking about and, oh, say, europe keeps implementing? Let's do that. Wow, does that ever make sense. Nuclear? Gawd.

Re:TL;DR

[ShanghaiBill]

At this point, a lot of nuclear waste sits in fuel pools because there is no long-term solution.

A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.

So? The pools are a pretty good long term solution, if by "long term" you mean at least the next century or so, until future generations figure out a better place to store it, or more likely, an economic use for the "waste".

Re:TL;DR

[angel'o'sphere]

Right now no one knows how to solve the waste problem.
That is likely the reason why now country on the world has a long term waste deposite.
If you have ideas regarding that, publish them ;D

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

"potentially ecosphere-killing crap"

The longer lived the radioactive byproduct, the _less_ harmful it is. I'll take waste with a 10,000 or 100,000 half-life over something that decays in 1 year any day. Heck, just put it in my back yard. I could use the steady income.

I'm no nuclear physicist, but I'm pretty sure that in substantially less than a few hundred years, the waste from your typical nuclear power plant will asymptotically approach background radioactivity levels. The tail that 10,000 year half-life begins almost immediately, and is exponentially less dangerous

What's dangerous about nuclear waste isn't the 10,000 or 100,000 half-lives. It's the fraction of byproducts mixed in it that decays in seconds, minutes, hours, days or a few years. Once those disappear, the rest is not that big of deal. Put it into a container, seal it, and put it someplace where kids won't climb all over it. Problem solved.

Re:TL;DR

[GumphMaster]

So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe (for some definition of safe). What about the small but slightly larger amount of waste produced next year, and the year after, and the year after? The nuclear waste dump does not become safe until 300 years after the last thorium waste product is added to the pile and the pile has grown exponentially in the meantime. There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Giving the human history on the last 10000 years, there's virtually zero change that we can keep the political and economic stability needed to keep this safe.
And you're totally ignoring natural disasters as well. There will be many.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey shortsighted dickhead, you dump it at the bottom of the ocean - where the pressure is so high the radiation barely makes it a few cms. And it can safely degrade happily and safely.

Or you know, put it in the middle of a desert. Safe to degrade with no one near it.

Or.....

Hey wait, there's plenty of ways to deal with nuclear waste! There is nothing we can do about you being dumb tho.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

The "waste" isn't a problem, it is an opportunity. Future generations would indeed be grateful if we preserved that vast energy resource for their use. It is silly to think otherwise, and akin to suggesting that we destroy all of those dirty fossil resources for their benefit. They will not be happy if we manage to dispose of either, and hydrocarbons are far more valuable as chemical feedstock in the long run.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now no one knows how to solve the waste problem.
That is likely the reason why now country on the world has a long term waste deposite.
If you have ideas regarding that, publish them ;D

You are completely wrong about this. There are plenty of ideas how to deal with "waste". You simply use it as fuel in fast neutron reactors. For example,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

Then you have real waste that only lasts 300 years before it is less radioactive than the ore original uranium was extracted from.

But of course, why build a reactor that uses $120/lb fuel when you can just dig up new uranium for $50/lb and store the current waste for later?

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Nuclear Waste Really Waste? It is an immense energy resource of which still contains roughly 99% of the original energy content. The actual waste remaining once the rest of the energy is released is very small, with lifetimes measured in decades, not millennia.

Re:TL;DR

[x0ra]

There is plenty of option for fuel waste treatments. France has been the world pioneer and leader of reprocessing. Only the US have decided NOT to reprocess their spent fuel. This is a political problem, not an engineering one. After reprocessing, you are left with a small portion of the original spent fuel which can be vitrificated and buried. These waste have a really high density and do not occupy much space. Trash landfill is causing more harm on the long term than there waste, but you don't object to trash landfill...

Re:TL;DR

[x0ra]

OOTH, during the previous centuries, political bs has caused more death than nuclear waste will ever, so this would really be the last of my problem should a worldwide political crisis emerge. At worst, the storage site will turn out as a Tchernobyl-like exclusion zone, which is pretty OK.

Re:TL;DR

[DMUTPeregrine]

The fun thing about a nuclear waste pile is that it generates heat. You can use it to run a generator without needing criticality. RTGs use this principle.
So it's a low-output power plant, as well as a waste dump.

Re:TL;DR

[x0ra]

Give the earth a few millions years, and it will become "pristine" again. Life survived a meteor crash, it will survive mankind.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear future kids,

We have a plan. We will be around as a bureaucracy 5,000 years from now to guard all the stuff that will still need to be guarded.

Sincerely,
The U.S. DOE

Re:TL;DR

[BlueTemplar]

What makes you so sure our descendants will be better equipped to deal with this? Peak power per capita was in the 1970, our civilization is on the decline, so that seems like wishful thinking to me...

Re:TL;DR

[ahodgson]

Talk to Harry Reid. The scientists figured it out decades ago, but some politicians refuse to act.

Re:TL;DR

[Entropius]

Hey coal/gas advocates,

The nuclear folks have a better handle on the waste than you do.

Sincerely,
Someone from the present

Re:TL;DR

[duckintheface]

What Hansen is advocating are plutonium fast breeder reactors. Like the Clinch River plant that was cancelled in the 1980s. He wants to mass-produce them on an assembly line. He wants small distrubuted plants full of plutonium. This is one crazy dude.

He never defends his assertion that nuclear can ramp up faster than solar and wind. He ignores the fact that the government continues to massively subsidize nuclear via the Price-Anderson liability limitation and support for research. He ignores the fact that current plants take 10 years to build. And when he says the new plants would be cheaper than existing plants, I had to laugh. Cheaper than "outrageously overpriced" is still not all that cheap.

So yes, fix the waste problem, fix the terrorist problem, fix the fuel supply problem, fix the cost over-run problem, and fix the economically un-competitive problem And THEN we'll talk.

Re:TL;DR

[DarkOx]

Right, the problem is solved but we need to get real about the proliferation issue.

I say the genie is out of the bottle at this. The policy might have made sense in the past but now our insistence on not having breeder reactors around is creating more risk then its preventing. Lots of people we did not want to get the bomb have the bomb now. China -check, North Korea -check, Pakistan -check, India -check, and Iran is so near it now that the Iranian nuclear issue is a political play thing. The President can send the Secretary of State out to strike a meaningless deal where the various parties don't even agree on what the language means just to distract from domestic issue, because it no longer matters they take the final steps anytime. All of these plays could without our ability to stop them spread it farther as well.

So it comes to the morals issues now. Firstly is clearly immoral to leave future generations piles of toxic waste for which the only solution for dealing with is one we have deemed unacceptable in our time.

Secondly though, what right do we have to deny another sovereign people nuclear power. We certainly under no obligation to give it to them but to deny them is wrong. Look what convulsions our own economy goes through whenever there is a oil price shock. It should be clear that cheap, abundant, reliable energy is critical to, if not the driver for success in the modern world economy. As a practical matter support for nonproliferation policies at this point is synonymous with support for poverty and inequality and war.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, an RTG proves exactly why nuclear waste isn't that harmful on an ecological scale. Because radioactive decay is an exponential process, RTG generators become useless after only a few years. A chunk of plutonium that's glowing hot the first year can be put into your bare hands after [insert some math geek's handiwork] years.

Anti-nuclear activists can't distinguish concepts like exponential v. linear.

Nuclear energy is not a force so great that mankind cannot safely manipulate it. It's dangerous, but well within our technological and political capabilities.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

If exponential growth counts as "some math geek's handiwork" then you really shouldn't be using the term.

Re:TL;DR

[Kiuas]

This is the dream solution so far, but this does NOT exist.

Wrong.

Re:TL;DR

[Uecker]

Waste is not a small problem. There is a salt mine in Germany where there were nuclear waste was stored. Turns out, this mine is not as safe as originally thought. The mine is instable and there is water inflow and the nuclear waste stored there has to be brought back to surface. The German parlament just passed a law about this. Estimated cost (tax payers of course) 4-6 billion Euro. This is the thing with nuclear energy: It seems such a nice solution. As long as you ignore all the details. Then it gets messy and expensive. Really expensive.

Re:TL;DR

[MrKaos]

+5 insightful

Seriously, all of the people who freak out about the waste are just being ridiculous. So what if the stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years? We don't have to solve that problem, all we have to do is to keep it safe for a few centuries, and make sure that our descendants understand what it was that we did and what the potential issues are.

The key thing to understand in our generation is the cost of the infrastructure to transport the spent fuel around. In the U.S this is estimated to be a 30 year project with significant costs attached to it, in and of itself. Fukushima has demonstrated the danger inherent in the spent fuel cooling pools, that is why any infrastructure project has to start with an actual location to transport it to.

In the U.S Yucca mountain does not meet the requirements Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology revealed that the passage cl-36 from atmospheric nuclear testing took less that 50 years in ground water through Yucca mountain so the reality of Yucca is it is inappropriate to contain *any* kind of radioactive products, especially the ones you are referring to. Yucca is pumice and volcanic ash, you *need* granite if you want a serious facility. Even the Swedish test facility is better designed than Yucca and the design of the actual facility shows the U.S how it *should* be done.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows you don't let the earth monkeys run your power plants.

Re:TL;DR

[sribe]

At this point, a lot of nuclear waste sits in fuel pools because there is no long-term solution.

Actually, leaving it in those pools until the hottest stuff burns itself out and what's left is the lower-level stuff, is not such a bad idea...

Re: TL;DR

[apc512599]

Is that before or after the power density problem is fixed for solar?

Re:TL;DR

[Prune]

One recent solution, posted not much above you: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4531753&cid=45634657

Another one, that's actually been around for quite a while, vitrification (i.e. glassification): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513010313

And yet another one, that Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed some years ago: http://web.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-2/text/radside1.html

There's no dearth of solutions. The issue is one of political will and public relations.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably because getting funding is like getting blood from a stone. All thanks to retards like you.

Re:TL;DR

[similar_name]

Do you have a source for that? I was able to find this and world energy per capita is certainly going up. I also found this for the U.S. but it shows a rather recent peak that could be more related to the financial crisis than a real long term trend. In any event, why would a decline in per capita energy use indicate a decline in civilization rather than just increased efficiency?

Re:TL;DR

[PopeRatzo]

there is a one small cave in Nevada with some nasty stuff.

And one large glowing squid destroying Japan.

"Clean, safe and too cheap to meter!"

Seriously, why would anyone trust a 21st century corporation with something as dangerous as nuclear energy? What's their motivation to keep it safe? They'll have an arbitration clause in fine print and will structure the entire deal with subsidies on the front end. Fukushima isn't just a disaster...it's a business model!

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you tear into solar subsidies as much as you do nuclear.

Re:TL;DR

[Curunir_wolf]

Talk to Harry Reid. The scientists figured it out decades ago, but some politicians refuse to act.

Indeed. It's so dead (for purely political reasons, BTW), that the courts have said the DoE needs to stop charging consumers for it. Don't expect a refund for all the money they wasted, though.

Re:TL;DR

[Curunir_wolf]

Seriously, why would anyone trust a 21st century corporation with something as dangerous as nuclear energy?

Because the only other option is the government - which has shown just how competent it is at running projects by proving they can't even build a website given 3 years to do it.

Re:TL;DR

[fnj]

That comment is an insult to your intelligence. I flat out don't believe that you believe that.

Re:TL;DR

[Kazoo the Clown]

Well, considering most of it is stored in pools at the reactor sites which are mostly on the coastline which will be most affected by sea level rise, if we leave it all there we can kiss the ocean goodbye as a food source before long. And of course we haven't been able to move it anywhere for political reasons, that is why it's stuck where it is now for the most part. Over half of all nuclear accidents have occurred in the USA. Reactors are targets in military conflicts and potential terrorist targets. Fukushima is just the latest in a line of nuclear disasters. And there are people who are not insane that would like to build dozens more such sites to multiply our capacity and most importantly, our RISK? Read some of the details of past disasters and you'll see that we are simply not competent enough to manage the technology. On paper, perhaps, but not in practice.

Re:TL;DR

[weilawei]

In the grand scheme of things, is it more important to slowly use up the resources of the Earth and Sun, then fade out of existence altogether (does it matter which form of life does this, really?) or to use them as the building block to expand into the rest of the Universe (at which point you can leave Earth as your nature preserve)? The consumption of potential energy is the building block of life--the bottom line. You don't consume energy, you don't live.

Now, how long do you think we can mutually sustain a list of pet species you'd like to have around? 1000 years? 10,000? Until the Sun warms the Earth so much that nothing "living" as we know it can exist here? Maybe just leave it to them, to make sure that humans aren't the ones who evolve to consume all these resources. It sure doesn't sound like a sustainable solution if your solution is to live off (only) this one local fusion reactor until it runs out and humans/other life forms go extinct altogether.

TL;DR: If you want to "save the planet", invest in science, figure out how to mine the rest of the Universe, and get us off this rock. Otherwise, physics has exactly 1 conclusion for our scenario, and it doesn't end with you posting on Slashdot.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the same Harry Reid that advocates increasing the minimum wage? How about we stop taking advice on economic and scientific issues from a fucking politician/lawyer.

#fuckthewage.

#pronuclear

Re:TL;DR

[rioki]

THAT case was just a stupid case of ignoring scientific criticism for profit. The Swiss did it a bit better, they invited everybody to review the proposals for multiple sites and only after all criticism was resolved did they start construction on a site. The Asse site was just a, oh look I have an abandoned salt mine, hmm, how can I get rid of it as profitable as possible...

Re:TL;DR

[delt0r]

If your using a reprocessing cycle you don't need to keep is safe for that amount a time. Perhaps a century, maybe a little longer. Even without reprocessing its not 10000 years. Where do these ridiculous numbers come from? Where did you get this number from?

Re:TL;DR

[delt0r]

He wants small distrubuted plants full of plutonium. This is one crazy dude.

What the hell are you talking about? *if* we do nuclear we should be reprocessing and breading and that means plutonium. The amounts and grades in reactors can't be used in bombs without some large enrichment. Any nuclear fuel can be used in a bomb. 233U was even used from the Th fuel cycle.

Really why is he crazy for suggesting breeders? cus that is all you got. Breeders fix the waste problem, well most of it. And we can't fix anything of these problems without *building* something.

Re:TL;DR

[Eunuchswear]

A lot? Practically all of it that was ever accumulated sits there, in the US at least.

But the US is almost unique in this stupidity.

Other countries reprocess their fuel.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

We already did. That's been solved for decades.

Now we need to solve the political and ignorance problems. Starting with you.

(Posting anon to not undo deserved moderations)

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

And the one reason why Yucca Mountain is closed, is because the current Senate Majority Leader is from Nevada. While that NIMBYist gets to set the legislative schedule, there will be no movement on a plan that has been in motion for decades, is ready to go, and will make the nation safer and more responsible.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, or we process out the neutron poison daughter-products (1% of "waste") and put the other 99% right back into the reactor as fuel.

That 1% turns into stable material (mostly lead) in a couple hundred years. That's what goes in the cave, with big skull and crossbones signs outside it.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm trying to imagine what political or economic instability that would cause people to go into a cave that would cause painful and agonizing death, and would be clearly marked as such with signs made to last thousands of years. I mean, we still have cuneiform tablets and such from ancient Babylon, no reason to think that an engraved skull and crossbones wouldn't get the message across to future generations.

Oh, and these places are built at sites that have been geologically stable for millennia. You think they're gonna build a waste repository in a hurricane zone or something?

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

The number comes from the fission products made from smashing apart Uranium atoms. In order to scare people, they picked one with a really long half-life, like technetium-99 at 211,000 years.

However, since it's just an attempt to scare ignorant people, they conveniently leave out that a radioisotope's danger is inversely related to it's half-life length. When you start to figure in decay products that may be incredibly short lived (seconds to minutes) it gets a bit more tricky, but that's the normal rule.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

So yes, fix the waste problem

Reprocess the 1% of neutron poisons out, and then load it right back into the reactor as fuel. Fixed.

fix the terrorist problem

And which problem is that? The so-called "dirty bomb" chestnut? Where spreading an amount of a radioisotope over an area makes it completely not an issue? Hint - for a radioactive material to be dangerous, it needs to be concentrated.

fix the fuel supply problem

Already did, when we instituted the reprocessing.

fix the cost over-run problem

When the constant NIMBY lawsuits end that plague any project that uses the scary word "nuclear", this problem solves itself.

and fix the economically un-competitive problem

Fine, let's put a regime of waste disposal on the current incumbent technology (coal, petroleum) that is a bit more nuanced than blowing it into the atmosphere all willy-nilly and see how cost competitive it really is.

And THEN we'll talk.

Sounds like we should be talking right now, then.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

Why only one pile?

This year, we put our waste into a steel can, and the steel can into a concrete box, and the concrete box into the desert. Next year, we use a new steel can, a new concrete box, and a new piece of the desert. And so on.

After hundreds of year, the first steel can succumbs to corrosion and spills its now safe contents. Humans will mine it for precious metals. The other cans with the dangerous contents are still sealed.

So, why did you post this nonsense about a pile and about there being only one pile? Did you even think before posting? Is there some logic? Or is logic not needed anymore when the goal is to come with any sort of argument against the mere possibility of sustainable nuclear power?

Re:TL;DR

[spacefight]

The one guy being ridiculous is you. We do have to solve the problem, since we created it. Pushing it in front of us, out of sight, out of our generation is not a viable option.
Oh - and there are a few more issues with keeping our descendants in the loop. Information will be lost, no matter how careful you are....

Re:TL;DR

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

Question is: who is going to pay for watching this nuclear waste for the next couple of centuries? The nuclear industry? I would like to hope so, but I'm not at all confident...

Re:TL;DR

[tbannist]

THAT case was just a stupid case of ignoring scientific criticism for profit.

Of course, that would never happen anywhere else.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the big problem at Fuku

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

a meteor strike or a disease could render mankind unable to tend storage sites that need power or other input.

Re:TL;DR

[Uecker]

I am not sure what you are talking about. It was a government-operated mine (after it was a commercial salt mine before) which served as a test-bed for Gorleben. The thing is: People just appoached this problem in the 60s/70s with the same naivety you can still observe here on slashdot: This nuclear waste is not a problem. Such a small amount, we can just bury it underground somewhere. It is not problem at all!

Re:TL;DR

[PopeRatzo]

Because the only other option is the government

There is another option: Don't use nuclear energy until it can be done safely and profitably without government subsidies and set-asides. Until it can be done without leaving a pile of external costs for taxpayers to pick up. Until it can be done without having to write special laws protecting the nuclear plant owners from liability.

The problem with nuclear energy, and fossil fuels, is that they both require government protection to work. That's hardly the "free market" at work.

Re:TL;DR

[gerddie]

300 years? Others plan for more then 100.000 years.

Re:TL;DR

[BlueTemplar]

Good points.

I was using this graph : http://earlywarn.blogspot.fr/2011/09/peak-oil-per-capita.html , but it's only oil (and you see a stagnation rather than a decline, but since the EROEI goes down, the available energy for society from oil also goes down).

Increased efficiency plays a role, but if I'm not mistaken it's about 0.5% per year. I'm not sure if a better metric than energy per capita exists : you would need to somehow sum up the transformations that this use of energy allowed. Maybe computing exergy would be better?

Then, I guess my hypothesis comes more from the feeling that we're "scraping the bottom of the barrel" with the hydraulic fracturing and tar sands, while many of western countries show signs of political rot.

Re:TL;DR

[Mike Van Pelt]

There's a lot of bad stuff already in that general area.

Google Maps satellite view of the Yucca Flats area: http://goo.gl/maps/y7DcV

Each of those craters is an nuclear bomb crater, with fission products and residual plutonium completely uncontained, except by the fact that they're underground.

The waste at Yucca Mountain, by contrast, would have been very stringently contained, mixed with molten glass and cast into solid lumps, inside concrete and steel casks. Not just sitting inside a hole in the bottom of a crater.

Re:TL;DR

[Doomsought]

Only 300 years? It sounds like that can be used in a pile. Don't throw it away.

I like my letters better

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Yeah, I have a passionate side too. And I like to take long walks in the park. And it's not just about 'climate change', it's about survival.

Every little bit helps though.

___
My letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

Re:I like my letters better

[FlyHelicopters]

Every little bit helps though.

Sometimes it does, and sometimes it makes no difference whatsoever...

There are things in life that are all or nothing, this is one of them. Either we stop burning coal, oil, and gas, or we don't. Burn them in 20 years, 50 years, or 200 years, if we keep burning them, we'll burn them all.

It is like flying across the ocean in a plane, saying that a little bit of extra fuel helps only if it gets you to the land on the other side. If you run out of fuel 50 miles from shore, is that any better than running out 200 miles from shore?

You either do it right or you don't take off. Same thing here with burning stuff, either we stop, or we don't, there is no halfway.

Re:I like my letters better

[similar_name]

I disagree. I don't think it's all or nothing. If it were, you would be implying we would have to eliminate all forest fires too as it's essentially the same thing as burning fossil fuels. No fireplaces and no potheads either. It does make a difference whether sea level rise 10 feet over a period of 50 years or a period of 200. It's really not that a couple of more degrees would be that bad. It's the change over time that's bad. If the change is slow enough, it's not as harmful. In fact, every indication we have is that a warmer earth will support more life. Eventually, Antartica will move away from the south pole and that will cause the earth's temperature to rise more than all of the fossil fuels in existence being burned. The difference is it will happen over millions of years.

Consider a moving temperate zone for agriculture due to climate change. If the borders of that temperate zone move slowly over the years, you only have changes to agricultural production at the borders. If it moves to a completely different area it can wipe out entire crops. The difference between the climate where you grow oranges moving 5 miles a year and moving 100 miles in a year is huge.

An attitude that's it's all or nothing will make any pragmatist give up as the burning of organic material that releases CO2 occurs naturally also. Obviously, you don't have to eliminate all CO2 emissions. Remember, we humans emit the gas too. Are you implying all animals must be killed off too. There's an amount of CO2 productions that's ok, there's even a rate of change that's ok. It wasn't steady for the millions of years before the industrial revolution.

Let's use a classic car analogy instead. Would you rather your car die 1 mile from home or 10. That's certainly an every foot helps situation. The problem isn't that the earth will get too hot, the problem is that it will change too quickly for a lot of life, including ourselves to adapt. If you can slow down that change, all the better, even if you don't completely stop it. There's a huge difference in effect from a temperature change of 3 degrees over 100 years versus 500 years versus 1000 years. Nobody would be concerned if we thought the temperature was going to change 3 degrees over 10,000 years. We might even be surprised if it didn't over that time span.

The concern is the rate of change. That's not an all or nothing situation. We should do everything we can to reduce fossil fuels. Doing everything we can, means embracing an attitude that every bit helps. If it's all or nothing, we might as well give up, we've already burned more than a trillion barrels of oil anyway. All or nothing already lost before you even try.

Re:I like my letters better

[Anonymous Coward]

"Let's use a classic car analogy instead. Would you rather your car die 1 mile from home or 10"

1 mile.

Unless my destination is 10-11 miles away from home.

But what is the car analogising? What is the distance analogising? When you make an analogy, let it be known what it is you're analogising.

What you're talking about is when catastrophe happens. And making that take as long as possible is better than accelerating toward it.

What the parent post is talking about is to avoid catastrophe altogether is better, but to have any chance of doing that, we have to stop burning the fossil fuels.

Which would you prefer: servicing your car so it doesn't break down or breaking down just before your destination?

Re:I like my letters better

[Eunuchswear]

If it were, you would be implying we would have to eliminate all forest fires too as it's essentially the same thing as burning fossil fuels

No.

A forest fire adds no extra CO2 to the atmosphere:

1. the trees are made of carbon extracted from the atmosphere
2. even if they don't burn that carbon goes back to the atmosphere when the trees die and decay.

Re:I like my letters better

[operagost]

Nothing in history was like this. We used to burn whale oil. Once "rock oil" became easier and cheaper to refine, whale oil began to fall into disuse. Natural gas and electricity helped the process. We don't need to suddenly stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, because the planet is not a plane crossing the ocean. If one Gollum-like person hides out with his precioussssss kerosene lamp in a cave, it's not going to ruin the planet for the rest of us. Frankly, I'm tired of radicals and their zero-tolerance policies. We can discuss how quickly this needs to happen, but we need to agree that neither "tomorrow" nor "1,000 years from now" are acceptable answers.

Re:I like my letters better

[similar_name]

1. the trees are made of carbon extracted from the atmosphere

Where did the carbon in fossil fuels come from?

2. even if they don't burn that carbon goes back to the atmosphere when the trees die and decay.

Correct, we'll have to stop that to. My contention was that CO2 emission is not an all or nothing situation since there is some level of CO2 emissions that are acceptable. My point is that the earth doesn't really differentiate between CO2 from one source or another. An all or nothing attitude doesn't make sense. CO2 levels have not been constant and CO2 comes from many sources. It's not all or nothing, because it's the change over time that's catastrophic not just the change.

The argument:
Is a 3 degree rise in temperature over 500 years equally as catastrophic as a 3 degree change over 50 years? I'm arguing that the change over 500 years is less catastrophic than the same change over 50 years. Are you disagreeing with that? I was being silly with my examples because an all or nothing attitude is silly.

Re:I like my letters better

[Anonymous Coward]

I can offer tutoring in reading comprehension if you would like. Language is full of context and implications that are not explicitly stated. I understand this can be difficult for people with autism but I can help with that. For example. In almost any case that mentions a trip and home, it is generally implied, that home is the destination.

What the parent post is talking about is to avoid catastrophe altogether is better, but to have any chance of doing that, we have to stop burning the fossil fuels.

But he's implying that catastrophe will occur with any change in temperature regardless of the amount of change or the time it takes for that change to occur. The earth's temperature has, does and will continue to change. We just don't want to change it too much too fast. That is not an all or nothing situation. We've already burned a trillion barrels, are you telling me one more barrel causes catastrophe? Yes, if we continue to burn at the same rate, things are going to get bad. If we slow down burning them, they may still get bad but it might take longer. If we slow down enough, it might take long enough that we can mitigate the effects.

Please tell me how a 3 degree change over 500 years is equally catastrophic as a 3 degree change over 50.

Re:I like my letters better

[FlyHelicopters]

We can discuss how quickly this needs to happen, but we need to agree that neither "tomorrow" nor "1,000 years from now" are acceptable answers.

I'm happy to agree that the above statement is correct.

We can't stop tomorrow, but we can't wait 1,000 years either.

Re:I like my letters better

[FlyHelicopters]

I disagree. I don't think it's all or nothing. If it were, you would be implying we would have to eliminate all forest fires too as it's essentially the same thing as burning fossil fuels.

No, you're thinking of it wrong... current forests and current fires are just recycling.

Burning dead dinos (and dead forests) are 1,000 generations of CO2 storage that was created over a very long period of time.

Releasing all the CO2 trapped by forests over a few years would be bad, but not the end of the world. Releasing all the CO2 trapped by 1,000 Earth's in a few years? Massively destructive.

100 million years of trapped CO2 is being released in just a few hundred years. We can't grow enough trees to counter that.

Re:I like my letters better

[similar_name]

I understand that. Even so, all of the carbon (that we're talking about) used to be in the atmosphere. The earth has been warmer in it's past. My main disagreement is that it's all or nothing. I completely agree that burning all of it in a few years is bad. However, if we burned all of those fossil fuels over 1000 years it would not be as bad as if we do it over 100 years. The earth's temperature will change. We just don't want it to change to quickly. If we can reduce fossil fuels it helps. A change of 3 degrees over 1000 years is not nearly as catastrophic as a change over 50 years.

I completely agree that we need to get off of fossil fuels as soon as we can. For environmental reasons and many more. Every bit we do to reduce it, does help. It's not bad that the earth will be warmer, it's bad that it will change quickly. Thus, anything we can do to slow that change is helpful. If it were truly all or nothing, there wouldn't be any point in even trying. Nothing isn't going to happen any time soon.

I just feel that an all or nothing attitude is too extreme and not founded in what the problem is. It's also very defeatist since we've already burned a trillion barrels. It's not any particular amount of fossil fuel burned that causes a catastrophe, it's how fast we burn it. Burning fossil fuels over a million years isn't nothing, but I'm not sure you'd be able to argue it would be catastrophic. As you acknowledge, fossil fuels are the result of carbon sequestration over millions of years. That process is still occurring today, carbon in the atmosphere is being turned into fossil fuels by way of plants consuming it in swamps, dying and turning into coal. Over a long enough time, that will cool the earth. Certainly if we burned fossil fuels at the rate their created, that wouldn't be a problem. That's not nothing. Either way, the earth changes, but it's the speed of change that's catastrophic, not the change itself.

Can you provide evidence that burning all of the fossil fuels over 100 years, 1000 years and 10,000 years is equally catastrophic? If not, every bit helps.

Re:I like my letters better

[FlyHelicopters]

However, if we burned all of those fossil fuels over 1000 years it would not be as bad as if we do it over 100 years.

This is the part I disagree with. Frankly, I think it makes zero difference to humanity if we do it in 100 years or 1,000 years, the result will be just as horrible and life changing to everyone here.

Will life go on? Yes

Will Earth itself care? No

Will human beings care? Yes

The problem is that humans tend to think and make decisions in human timescales, without taking into account that Earth does not work in human timescales, both in terms of harm and healing. We may already be past the point of no return and not even know it, because we think 50 years is a lot time (it isn't, from Earth's point of view).

A change of 3 degrees over 1000 years is not nearly as catastrophic as a change over 50 years.

True, but a change of 30 degrees over either time period would be a disaster. If we burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, all the coal, oil, and natural gas, do you think the change will be limited to 3 degrees?

If so, heck, burn it all, go for it... we can all just move 200 miles north (and inland). It is the 30 degree change that has me worried... that we would be unlikely to survive.

Every bit we do to reduce it, does help.

This is technically true, an extra 200 gallons of fuel will take a 747 crossing the ocean just a bit further, but if it doesn't get you to land, does it matter?

If we cut our CO2 emissions by 5%, does it help? Sure... does it change the outcome within a reasonable period of time? No, it really doesn't.

But that works both ways. If we cut 99% of our CO2 emissions, does that change the outcome? Yes, it does. If we cut 94% of our CO2 emissions, does it change the outcome? Yes, it does.

We don't have to cut to zero, we simply have to cut to a sustainable number. But that number is much closer to 0 than what we're doing now, we probably do need to cut our CO2 emissions by 90%, and that is going to be very hard indeed. A "little bit" makes everyone feel good, but doesn't tackle the problem.

Think of it like the federal budget for the US. 4 things make up most of it... Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Welfare.

If you don't tackle those 4 big items, nothing you do to everything else matters. No amount of cuts to NASA or the CDC is going to change the outcome if you won't touch the big 4.

Likewise, if we don't address the big sources of pollution, no amount of small changes will help.

Coal fired power plants, gas powered cars, natural gas power... Deal with those 3 and you have a shot, but you have to make huge cuts, not baby steps, or you will be outpaced by the growth in power demand.

Someone posted the other day that 17 new solar panels are installed every day in the US. Great, but solar power is 0.17% of our total power produced. We continue to build new coal power plants. Until you actually stop building new ones, you're just pissing in the wind.

Re:I like my letters better

[similar_name]

This is the part I disagree with. Frankly, I think it makes zero difference to humanity if we do it in 100 years or 1,000 years, the result will be just as horrible and life changing to everyone here.>

Yes, we do disagree.

We don't have to cut to zero, we simply have to cut to a sustainable number. But that number is much closer to 0 than what we're doing now, we probably do need to cut our CO2 emissions by 90%

This seems conflicting. Wouldn't a 90% reduction in CO2 emissions be the difference between burning them in 100 years or 1000?

hink of it like the federal budget for the US. 4 things make up most of it... Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Welfare. If you don't tackle those 4 big items, nothing you do to everything else matters. No amount of cuts to NASA or the CDC is going to change the outcome if you won't touch the big 4.

You got me there. I have to concede to that. You're right that a little bit doesn't help and I see what you're saying. A little bit won't help, And here's where I'm conflicted. I don't want people to avoid getting say a hybrid instead of a full gas vehicle because they think it's just a little bit. Each person needs to do a little bit so that we can do a lot as a society.

Someone posted the other day that 17 new solar panels are installed every day in the US

Here's recent good news we can both be happy about then.

Re:I like my letters better

[Eunuchswear]

1. the trees are made of carbon extracted from the atmosphere

Where did the carbon in fossil fuels come from?

The prehistoric atmosphere, not our atmosphere.

You know, the one that had a fuck-load more CO2 in it.

2. even if they don't burn that carbon goes back to the atmosphere when the trees die and decay.

Correct, we'll have to stop that to.

Knut? Is that you? How did the business with the tides go?

Re:I like my letters better

[similar_name]

As I said

I was being silly with my examples because an all or nothing attitude is silly.

For the sake of progress. Focus on this part. Is a 3 degree change over 500 years equally as catastrophic as a 3 degree change over 50? I contend that it makes a difference how long the change takes. Do you disagree?

Name them.

[Anonymous Coward]

We understand that today's nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently.

Name the advances and name the new technologies - like Pepple-Bed;which is the only one I know.

I have a anit-nuke in my family. For the exception of waste disposal, their arguments against nuke power is ALL based on 1960s technology. It would really help the pro-nukes who really know something about the latest nucluear tech to explain it to the public.

It's great to post here on Slashdot about the ignorance of the anti-nukes but information is pretty scarce. The only reason I even knew about the pepple-bed tech was that it was mentioned years ago in a Scientific American article and I hardly see articles on nuke power in SciAm; let alone in the general media.

Re:Name them.

[prefec2]

The truth is that there are no big advances in nuclear power plant technology. There are ideas from the 1960 and 1970, like thorium reactors, breeder reactors or the pepple-bed concept. They all have been tried out and failed for different reasons. Present reactor technology is still based on the same concepts from the 1960s. Improvements in safety have been made, but only in small steps issued after accidents in plants. This is the same principle as in aviation where every crash is analyzed and used to improve planes.

For the pebble-bed thing. Germany tried it and they failed (see wikipedia). The only one having one operational is China (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-10). While it is stated that the design is saver than present western reactors, it uses graphite for moderation. It cannot burn as cooling is done by a non-burnable gas. However, a leak might introduce O2 and that can reproduce Chernobyl all over again. So I am not really convinced that this is a better solution. Furthermore, it is not a solution to the nuclear waste problem. And it is not a solution as a long-time energy source.

While after 50 years of nuclear energy, industry and research where not able to provide a complete solution, while the re-newable energy fraction have working machinery and also the energy storage problem is solvable, as we already have that technology even if it is not yet cheap, reliable or implementable everywhere. However, these issues are easier to fix than come up with totally new technology.

Re:Name them.

[fnj]

Name the advances and name the new technologies - like Pepple-Bed [wikipedia.org];which is the only one I know.

Liquid fluoride thorium reactor.
Westinghouse AP1000 reactor.
Something like the Argonne Experimental Breeder Reactor-II.

Do I claim the ultimate in safety has been achieved and is sitting on a shelf next to the holy grail waiting to be used as-is for the Final Ultimate Answer? No, but large advances in safety have been made and need to be pursued further, along with undoubtedly other fresh ideas.

Re:Name them.

[TapeCutter]

and also the energy storage problem is solvable

Why not do exactly that same as is already done for coal. The demand curve for a city is not flat like the output of a coal plant, during off-peak a coal plant is producing too much electricity and during peak it's not generating enough. They handle this by using the excess to pump water into a hydro dam, and using gas turbines to make up the shortfall during the peak.

Re:Name them.

[x0ra]

However, a leak might introduce O2 and that can reproduce Chernobyl all over again.

Please go back to your history books. Tchernobyl was an accident caused by the unsafe design of the reactor and human error during a system test...

Re:Name them.

[sribe]

There are ideas from the 1960 and 1970, like thorium reactors, breeder reactors or the pepple-bed concept.

I need new glasses. I first read that as "the people-bed concept", which of course leads right to an image of North Korea working a reactor where political prisoners are used to moderate the reaction ;-)

Re:Name them.

[rrohbeck]

Do you say that human error is incapable of producing a leak in a pebble bed reactor?

Re:Name them.

[rrohbeck]

Now the next queston would be what the cost of electricity produced with those designs would be.

Re:Name them.

[x0ra]

I was merely correcting an incorrect fact about Tchernobyl

That being said, there is no safe design, ever. Planes can crash, car can malfunction, ship can sink, etc. All either because of material fatigue or human errors. But the average person will not care about the dust emission of coal, not will they care about crashing plane, because not only the physics is rather simple, but it was invented in a non-warfare context. The first contact of humanity with nuclear fission was Hiroshima and the Nagasaki (I skip the Trinity test, which was not public), thus the de-facto bad reputation of nuclear energy. Moreover, it is rather difficult to the average (dumb) person to understand what nuclear fission (or fusion) truly is.

That being said, on a global scale, Fukushima, Tchernobyl or Three mile island have not been that disastrous. A few hundreds squares kilometers of inhabitable land (for human) is not that much of a price to live by our standard.

Re:Name them.

[JaredOfEuropa]

Not completely true. They didn't try and fail; most alternatives were tried and then abandoned for various reasons. Thorium for example offers a promising, safe alternative. Sure, the science behind it is pretty well understood since the 70s, but there are huge steps to be taken to go from a theoretical fuel cycle to a functioning, commercially viable LFTR. We're only now getting started on that problem, and it's an engineering rather than a scientific problem. Not to mention you first have to overcome the political issues: the public sentiment at the moment is very much anti-nuke, in the short to medium term Thorium reactors offer little to no economic benefit, and there's political resistance as well: in the EU, a proposal to start research into Thorium reactors was shot down by a group led by France (who have invested heavily in conventional nuke plants). Investing in Thorium (or next-gen nuke plants in general) only makes sense if you take the long term view, that's why it hasn't happened yet. Hopefully China and India will make some headway there.

Re:Name them.

[Eunuchswear]

Name the advances and name the new technologies

Liquid fluoride thorium reactor

"This technology was first investigated at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment in the 1960s."

Not so new.

Something like the Argonne Experimental Breeder Reactor-II

EBR-II was the backbone of the U.S. breeder reactor effort from 1964 to 1994, when research was terminated.

Not so new.

Re:Name them.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Bruce Hoglund, the different combinations of fuel, moderator, coolant, power cycle, etc. give rise to more than 900 possible reactor designs. Are you seriously claiming they have all been tried?

Re:Name them.

[operagost]

Probably cheaper than that produced by huge wind and solar farms.

Re:Name them.

[operagost]

What are the great advances in energy storage technology, again? You know, to allow those wind and solar systems to provide base load?

Re:Name them.

[rrohbeck]

While I agree, notice that anybody who says "we can have a sustainable energy supply based on nuclear" says "we need to build several thousand new nuke plants." Now a more than tenfold expansion of nuclear power would mean a tenfold increase in accidents, that's why it's not going to happen.

Re:Name them.

[rrohbeck]

Wind is cheaper than today's primitive and written-off nuclear plants and solar is getting there - let alone natural gas.

Re:Name them.

[Eunuchswear]

What are the great advances in energy storage technology, again? You know, to allow those wind and solar systems to provide base load?

I have no idea what you are talking about.

Maybe you meant to reply to someone else?

For the record I have no problem with nuclear (I live in France for fucks sake!) I just get sick of all the fanbois blathering on about miraculous new nuclear technology.

Of course we should research "new" technologies, but never forget the French lesson - build lots of identical reactors - you'll get better at it and you can reuse the experience.

Just look at whats happening with the EPR - The first one is taking far too long and far to much money to build. The second is still overdue and over budget, but the third and fourth ones are coming in ahead of time.

The thing I can't figure out

[rsilvergun]

is how to keep somebody from tricking the electorate into privatizing it with the promise if big, big savings from the more efficient 'Free Market' approach, and then cutting corners and/or not retiring plants when it's time. It was pretty well documented that the Fukushima plant had outlived it's safe operational time. My favorite argument was that these kind of disasters happen once a century, when the last record of such a disaster was about 100 years ago...

Basically, Nuclear power can be safe, but it's ever so much more profitable when it's not. And I don't know how to keep people from trading tax cuts for their safety :(...

Re:The thing I can't figure out

[loonycyborg]

Blatant disregard for people's health and safety isn't something new for Japan. Chernobyl accident happened due to human error too. You won't see accidents if nuclear plants are operated with a modicum of competency.

I am not convinced

[prefec2]

In summary he states that present nuclear technology is too dangerous, but that it is possible to create systems without the flaws. Well in that case we need prove. In addition we need a plan to do when we run out of what ever the source is for such nuclear technology. However, I cannot see how they can build a device which is able to recycle all waste.

Renewable sources are much easier to build, they allow to produce energy in a distributed matter reducing the risk of blackouts by plant failure. The only open issue is cheap and reliable energy storage. Presently, there exist technology to fill this gap, but they are not convenient enough due to their cost or their requirement (like pumped-storage power stations). Still this is much closer to a solution than the save and clean nuclear technology.

Re:I am not convinced

[Viol8]

"Renewable sources are much easier to build,"

Easy to build is one thing - easy to build AND make them viable is another.

"reducing the risk of blackouts by plant failure"

Riiight. And how often do you hear of a power plant , regardless of its fuel , going completely unplanned offline? And even if it did there is usually enough resilience in the system to cover it. Whereas wind and wave power goes offline every time its a calm day and solar power is useless at night! I'll go with the minute risk off a whole power plant going down thanks.

Re:I am not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

solar power is useless at night!

Well, I'm asleep then.

Re:I am not convinced

[amorsen]

And how often do you hear of a power plant , regardless of its fuel , going completely unplanned offline?

http://umm.nordpoolspot.com/

It happens daily.

Re:I am not convinced

[TapeCutter]

Yes, and coal cannot match a cities demand curve any better than solar or wind, the "resilience" the GP speaks of doesn't just magically appear with coal plants, there are gas turbines and hydro dams involved to store/boost the energy when the plants flat output curve does not match the wavy demand curve. The idea that an individual generator must produce a consistent 'baseload' output is nonsense. Supply must match the demand curve, and no method of power generation does that by itself, including coal and nuclear..

Re:I am not convinced

[x0ra]

My machines are not, street's lights are not either.

Re:I am not convinced

[petermgreen]

Supply must match the demand curve

And to do that you conventionally used a mixture of plants. You used something with high capital costs but low running costs (coal, nuclear, possiblly CCGT) to run all the time and then you use something that has low capital costs but high running costs to cover the peaks. You may also use hydro dams (which have the unusual characterstic of having a peak power much higher than their continuous power due to the limited water supply) if they are available.

So where do wind and solar fit into this? not very well! they don't provide a continuous base load and they don't provide power on demand either. They provide power when the weather is right which may or may not match up with when you need power. So you still need the hydro dams or fossil fuel plants to cover load peaks that come when the weather is not right for solar/wind and especially in colder climates you often need pretty much the same ammount of those fossil fuel plants as you would have needed if you didn't have the solar and wind, you just run them a smaller proportion of the time.

and no method of power generation does that by itself, including coal and nuclear..

BS, it is certainly possible to follow the demand curve with a single type of generation. It's just that for large scale loads it's usually more economical to use a mix.

Re:I am not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

You will NEVER be able to remove all waste, from ANY energy solution. Even solar. There will always be the need to minimize the waste from all of them, and it will be costly. If it's not a few kilos of toxic waste, then it's heavy CO2 and acid rain, or lots of solar panels that need to be recycled and still leave behind residues and toxic elements.

That said, the people who refuse to educate themselves on nuclear will NEVER give it another chance. They don't care if it really is a possibly cheaper and better solution, because the human element scares them even more than the technology does.

The reality, however, is that we could easily have funded research for smaller and safer reactors, because a lot of the research was left half-done when people started to panic about outdated tech that was left running far longer than it should have been.

Nuclear has human problems, not technological ones. Both misinformed scare-mongers and legitimate corruption of the people running the things. Yet we can solve these problems, we just don't want to. Far easier to write the whole thing off and pretend there's a holy grail just out of our reach.

Re:I am not convinced

[manu0601]

Easy to build is one thing - easy to build AND make them viable is another.

Problem is: nuclear is not viable on the long term. Of course it brings you power without carbon footprint, and this is good. But nuclear fuel is not available in infinite supply. On the long term, renewable are the only viable sources.

Re:I am not convinced

[csumpi]

Well, don't worry about it then. Just focus your voting on important issues, like legalizing pot for example, and let people who know what they are talking about make sure that you can keep the (grow) lights on.

Re:I am not convinced

[weilawei]

In the truly long term, neither are these. We can huddle around the fire (Sol) until it goes out or we can learn how to build fires ourselves. This really is a case of: if we don't use the energy, something will evolve to use it (or, in the case that nothing can, it will be re-radiated in lower and lower density until the Universe cools off). Living things use energy and evolve ways to consume it more effectively (if not necessarily more efficiently) than their competitors. If you want to argue for true sustainability, we ought to look at least as far ahead as getting conscious entities off this planet permanently, if not until the whole shebang is over.

Re:I am not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

Teach a man to build a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Re:I am not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

Renewable sources are much easier to build, they allow to produce energy in a distributed matter reducing the risk of blackouts by plant failure.

This is completely wrong btw.
It actually increases the risk of blackouts. The power generated and fed into the grid is no longer easily predetermined and can vary more wildly the more renewables you use.
A long time ago in Belgium, we had a major issue on a windy sunny day in May. The power coming from solar and wind was to high and it almost blew up parts of the grid. We had to pay France to drain the excess power or we'd have had blackouts.

Re:I am not convinced

[fatphil]

> Supply must match the demand curve

Strange that you put the obligation that way round. That demand must match, or at least not exceed, the supply curve seems to be far more of a hard obligation. And the demand curve isn't a curve, it's a surface once you've factored cost into it.

Re:I am not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

In the long term not even renewables are viable. What happens when the sun goes nova? How is that going to affect the output of your solar based power sources? Or even more short term, what happens when those rarer materials used to manufacture your solar bits run out?

Thorium is a lot more abundant then uranium and is found through out the world. There is enough of it around to have a safe bet that some sort of better power source will be discovered before we run out of usable thorium...

Re:I am not convinced

[Eunuchswear]

Supply must match the demand curve, and no method of power generation does that by itself, including coal and nuclear..

Overstated.

It is in fact possible to run nuclear plants in load following mode. France, which generates around 80% of its electricity from nuclear does it.

It's one of the design features of the EPR to be able to vary its output with demand:

between 60 and 100% nominal output, the EPR reactor can adjust it power output at a rate of 5% nominal power per minute at constant temperature, preserving the service life of the components and of the plant.

http://www.areva.com/EN/global-offer-419/epr-reactor-one-of-the-most-powerful-in-the-world.html

Re:I am not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to trump up the US, but the big problems happen outside the US, and its fairly strong regulatory environment. Check out the "fallout" from its biggest disaster. Three Mile Island. In the end, almost nothing. Compare that radiation with the amount released each year by burning coal

Re:I am not convinced

[Anonymous Coward]

Renewables simply can not scale. And part of implies that you can not build up to replacement of fossil fuels effectively without "breaking the bank" on finances or MORE fossil fuel use. This is merely thermodynamics, arithmetic and accounting facts speaking. NONE CAN FILL THE GAP. Only reducing the size of the gap RADICALLY will allow renewables to ever fill the gap. By radical this means giving up on even having a 20th century lifestyle for the majority of the 1st world population!! Are you ready for that? What are you doing today to prepare YOURSELF for that? Likely nothing if you are on Slashdot at all.

Re:I am not convinced

[amorsen]

If load following nuclear is such a success, why does every country around France get free power at night from them?

Even though you can do load following with nuclear, it is an entirely stupid thing to do, because nuclear fuel is approximately free once you have built the power plant. There is no reason to save it. By the same token wind and solar can do load following, because wind turbines have brakes and solar automatically stops outputting power if there is no load.

Re:I am not convinced

[Eunuchswear]

If load following nuclear is such a success, why does every country around France get free power at night from them?

Huh? France would only need to sell electricity cheap during the night if load following didn't work. EDF does sell electricity to it's neighbours, but not for nothing - it's France's 4th largest export.

Even though you can do load following with nuclear, it is an entirely stupid thing to do, because nuclear fuel is approximately free once you have built the power plant. There is no reason to save it.

Do you run any nuclear power plants? EDF do and they seem to think it's worth it.

By the same token wind and solar can do load following, because wind turbines have brakes and solar automatically stops outputting power if there is no load.

In order to do load following you need to be able to reduce output, which solar and wind can do, but you also need to be able to increase it, which wind and solar can't do.

On a cold windless night you're fucked if all you've got are wind and solar.

Re:I am not convinced

[Eunuchswear]

If load following nuclear is such a success, why does every country around France get free power at night from them?

Sorry, misread your message.

But it's wrong - every country around France doesn't get "free" power - they pay a shitload for the power they get from France. Like I said, it's Frances #4 export.

Anyway, if you want to know about French load ballancing nuclear go look at

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A-F/France/

All France's nuclear capacity is from PWR units. There are two ways of varying the power output from a PWR: control rods, and boron addition to the primary cooling water. Using normal control rods to reduce power means that there is a portion of the core where neutrons are being absorbed rather than creating fission, and if this is maintained it creates an imbalance in the fuel, with the lower part of the fuel assemblies being more reactive that the upper parts. Adding boron to the water diminishes the reactivity uniformly, but to reverse the effect the water has to be treated to remove the boron, which is slow and costly, and it creates a radioactive waste.

So to minimise these impacts for the last 25 years EdF has used in each PWR reactor some less absorptive "grey" control rods which weigh less from a neutronic point of view than ordinary control rods and they allow sustained variation in power output. This means that RTE can depend on flexible load following from the nuclear fleet to contribute to regulation in these three respects:

        Primary power regulation for system stability (when frequency varies, power must be automatically adjusted by the turbine).
        Secondary power regulation related to trading contracts.
        Adjusting power in response to demand (decrease from 100% during the day, down to 50% or less during the night, etc.)

PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety). So at the very end of the cycle, they are run at steady power output and do not regulate or load-follow until the next refueling outage. RTE has continuous oversight of all French plants and determines which plants adjust output in relation to the three considerations above, and by how much.

Re:I am not convinced

[amorsen]

Wind and solar can increase output when they are online, that is just a matter of running them at below full load. It is entirely silly to do so, just like it is silly to run nuclear power stations at less than full load -- you only do it to avoid overloading the grid when electricity prices are threatening to go negative. When wind and solar are not online they cannot increase output, but you can ask the Swedes how much they wished they could increase the output of Ringhals when it was down unscheduled for months and electricity prices once in a while spiked at €3/kWh. The Danish wind turbines saved Sweden that winter but the transmission lines had insufficient capacity to make it completely smooth.

At least with wind turbines you rarely see an entire wind farm offline at once without warning, and very rarely for an extended period.

You are right that France does get some money for their exports. They are lucky that none of their neighbors have followed their lead and attempted load-following nuclear, so the other countries can absorb some of the excess. Still, the whole thing is only viable because it is paid for by the government, it would have no chance as a new build in a free market.

Re:I am not convinced

[Eunuchswear]

Wind and solar can increase output when they are online,

The problem being that we don't get to choose when they are online, wind is offline depending on the weather, solar is offline depending on the weather, time of year and time of day.

you can ask the Swedes how much they wished they could increase the output of Ringhals when it was down unscheduled for months and electricity prices once in a while spiked at €3/kWh.

That's why France has 58 nuclear reactors, not one.

At least with wind turbines you rarely see an entire wind farm offline at once without warning, and very rarely for an extended period.

We've seen periods of up to a week over Northern Europe, not just one wind farm.

You are right that France does get some money for their exports.

Some?

Still, the whole thing is only viable because it is paid for by the government, it would have no chance as a new build in a free market.

Well, no.

France's nuclear power program cost some FF 400 billion in 1993 currency, excluding interest during construction. Half of this was self-financed by EdF, 8% (FF 32 billion) was invested by the state but discounted in 1981, and 42% (FF 168 billion) was financed by commercial loans.

The taxpayer paid for 8% of the program. (And of course one of the biggest taxpayers is... EDF!)

Re:I am not convinced

[amorsen]

Did you get to choose when the reactors were down when the heat wave prevented sufficient cooling? A mere 4GW gone, and the government talked about rationing.

EDF is effectively part of the French government. France is steadfastly refusing to implement the liberalisation of the energy market required by EU. Anything is possible when you are a government monopoly and able to extract whichever distribution fees you want. "Self-financed" just means that they had already taken the money from the consumers.

Re:I am not convinced

[Eunuchswear]

"Self-financed" just means that they had already taken the money from the consumers.

With those amazingly high electricity prices.

Oh, wait, among the lowest prices in Europe.

Where do you think it came from in th first place?

[Viol8]

Underground. But I don't see any envirohippies making a big fuss about all the uranium ore in the ground and the massive fission reactor thats probably at the heart of the planet so why the big fuss when someone suggests burying the radioactive waste underground later?

There's so much knee jerking going on in the enviromental movement with regards to nuclear power that they could probably audience for starring roles in Lord of the Dance.

Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[quixote9]

It takes about five years, lots of concrete = lots of CO2 emissions, to build a 1GW reactor. You'd need to complete about one per week for the next 35 years to replace ONE-SEVENTH of the energy we now get from fossil fuels. (Pascala and Socolow, Science pdf 2004) (Stanford pdf on implementing sustainable energy.) Finish one reactor per week. Good luck with that.

And if you managed that, you'd run out of fuel for those reactors within a couple of decades. (Don't start with the but-but thorium!, or fusion, or god-knows-what-all. The testing and permitting on new tech would take us way past peak oil.)

You'd have to take care of the expected waste, plus the unexpected waste from accidents, for ever.

Meanwhile, Germany is implementing soloar and energy efficiency and is AHEAD of its targets.

The more time, effort, and money we waste chasing nukes, the less we have for a real solution.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Mashiki]

Meanwhile, Germany is implementing soloar and energy efficiency and is AHEAD of its targets.

And buying nuclear power from France, Poland, and the Czech Republic. All the while, that solar energy is driving millions to make the choice between roof over head, food on table, or electricity. As prices start climbing towards of 40c/kWh.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Another person who hasn't read the article? Shocking.

The pressing advantage is that small-scale reactors can be mass produced, much like how solar and wind would need to be mass produced, except with far more bang for your buck.
As stated in the article, renewables today account for roughly, if not less, the annual growth in power consumption, ~2%. We choke on soot while we catch up, which we won't, or we go nuclear.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Xolotl]

Worse, they're buying coal power from Poland (Poland does not have any power-generating reactors ... yet). All because of shutting down their own nuclear reactors in the wake of the post-Fukushima nuclear-is-bad hysteria.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar can't solve all of our problems. Nuclear is a much better solution than most of the alternatives we presently have. No matter how you label it, it's an improvement that we don't have to use forever. Why can't we use both? Because you want to stick with even worse solutions until we're ready for some hypothetical future solution to present itself?

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

Germany is not buying power in any significant amount from its neighbours.

We are still exporting roughly 30% of our energy production.

Prices for ordinary customers like me are about 17 - 18 c/kWh.

Don't get where from you have your crazy ideas.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

And Poland is buying wind power from germany.
So what is your point?

Selling and buying beyond frontiers is exactly the point of an international continent spanning energy grid.

If we would only sell and never buy you would blame us, too. Won't you?

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Loki_1929]

And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.

Nuclear can scale up very easily and rapidly. It merely requires the balls to bring down the miles of red tape standing in the way of building new reactors and reprocessing their waste. It handles base load and we know that it works because we've been using it for decades. If you want to bet the farm on something, bet it on something we already know works. As for the fuel, CANDU plants can already breed fuel from thorium and it can use MOX fuel including the weapons-grade plutonium from all those decommissioned nuclear weapons we have laying around.

There's plenty of fuel, waste is ridiculously tiny and low risk if you reprocess the fuel, it scales very well, and we know it works for all kinds of load. Why you'd want to bet human civilization on something new that's more damaging to the environment, causes more human fatalities, and has many unknown risks associated with it is beyond me, but I can say that it won't scale to what we'd need without obscene amounts of environmental damage and unknown risks to the overall climate.

The real solution involves using proven safe, clean technology on a larger scale.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[russotto]

Meanwhile, Germany is implementing soloar and energy efficiency and is AHEAD of its targets.

And how long, and how much aluminum and concrete, does it take to build a 1GW solar plant?

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes about five years, lots of concrete = lots of CO2 emissions, to build a 1GW reactor. You'd need to complete about one per week for the next 35 years to replace ONE-SEVENTH of the energy we now get from fossil fuels. Finish one reactor per week. Good luck with that.

What a crock of shit. Two can play that game. Taking your argument, we'll just run the numbers: 35 years x 52 weeks x 1GW per week = 1820 GW of installed nuclear capacity. Considering the standard nuclear capacity factor of 0.95, this comes to 1729 GW of net installed capacity. Now let's try the same math using the largest wind turbines there are (Enercon E126 @ 7.5 MW) and the standard wind capacity factor of 0.35: 1729 / 0.35 / 0.0075 = 658666 wind turbines. Even if I grant you that you'll complete 10 of these monsters a day (just the tower is 135m tall and foundation plus tower weigh in excess of 5000t - a few of these will dwarf the requirements for concrete in a nuclear power plant), you'll need over 180 years to achieve what with nukes would take only 35.
Next time, think your arguments through before you makes yourself look like an idiot.
Oh and before you accuse me of strawmanning you by talking about wind instead of solar, if anything, I was being kind. Solar has an even lower capacity factor (0.2), wildly varying outputs throughout the year (easily 5-10x variation) and manufacturing has a horrible ecological impact. Even the vast majority of german newly installed renewable capacity is wind (even they know it's mostly a marketing gimmick).

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[BlueTemplar]

You say "post-Fukushima" like it's something in the past, while the disaster is ongoing.

When you consider that in some scenarios we might have to "evacuate" Japan and some of the West Coast of USA, then the hysteria is pretty understandable :
http://www.storyleak.com/top-scientist-another-fukushima-quake-mean-us-evacuation/

So, don't you think that limiting our electricity consumption and not having to expect it to be available when we want to, but rather when it's available - is better than keeping old, dangerous nuclear reactors operating?

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[JabrTheHut]

And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.

Is this from solar panels falling onto people? I'll admit I have never heard of a nuclear plant falling onto someone.

The risks of nuclear are huge - companies demand lavish subsidies and government underwriting before they'll consider building a new nuclear power plant. And the "red tape" you so casually dismiss is government and safety regulations like "don't build in a known earthquake zone" and "don't use substandard materials."

Of course, I agree the waste problem has already been solved - it's not like we're looking for a solution 60 years on, are we? We're just going to give it to a reputable company whose interest is in something other than its bottom line and share price, get rid of "red tape," close our eyes, and hope they haven't dumped it in our drinking water. Problem solved.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[petermgreen]

Selling and buying power is not in itself a bad thing.

Using your neighbours as a battery makes your unpredictable generation source look more viable than it really is and depending on the billing model may be effectively externalising your costs on them. This applies regardless of whether you are talking about individual users with solar panels on their roofs or whole countries.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[nojayuk]

Germany's burning coal and gas like there was no tomorrow. Its per-capita carbon emissions curve is on the rise again as it starts to shut down its non-CO2-emitting nuclear reactors while supertaxing the ones still operating to help pay for the construction of new coal-fired and gas-fired power stations from its climate change fund -- they can't put consumer electricity prices up any more to pay for these new fossil plants as they're already the highest in Europe, double that of 80% nuclear France next door which has half the carbon footprint of its solartopian neighbour.

Meanwhile states like Ontario are moving away totally from fossil-fuel for electricity generation, having embraced nuclear generation along with hydro and closing down their main fossil-fuel plants. Germany will still be burning tens of millions of tonnes of brown coal and lignite a year in 2050 by the best hopes of the supporters of renewable generation, not to mention Russian gas if there's any left.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still thinking about gigantic plants, aren't you? If we weren't so terrified of the specter of nuclear, we would already have funded science that could have made smaller-scale and safer designs possible that don't need to be run by some gigantic conglomerate. But that's the only solution people see when it comes to nuclear, because they're stuck in a 1950's mindset about nuclear.

Of course it's fine when the same companies run gigantic windfarms or produce solar panels, but nuclear? Nah, that's FAR more dangerous, because we're so scared we haven't tried to produce the tech that isn't so dangerous and scary. This is a social problem that goes FAR beyond the trivial "some bad guys will run the plants" thing. It's groupthink on a scale that makes nuclear disasters pale in comparison.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Sabriel]

And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.

Hmm. Why is solar's manufacturing and disposal process "filthy"? Is it inherent to the physics and chemistry, or - like how we're still using old uranium reactor designs instead of something better - is it just because we're cutting corners like we do on everything else where a profit is involved?

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[csumpi]

Yeah like those solar panels, they just come from the Easter Bunny, 100% emmission and waste free, and when they are at the end of their service life, they just ***WHOOSH*** disappear back into thin air.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Mashiki]

Really? They're not importing a significant part from it's neighbors?

And prices are pretty close to what I said.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Demonantis]

Your articles don't argue your point. The first one says we would have to double the current number of reactors to meet 2054 target of growth or 208 reactors. Not the 12844 (35*52*7+104) that you suggest. The second article dances on non prolif concerns and makes no calculations. Where did you get your numbers? As a rough exercise, Currently 104 reactors service 19% of the US power demand. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/USA--Nuclear-Power/. That means 548 reactors to replace it all and an extra 104(using your first article) to meet growth for 2054. Assuming average generating capacity blah blah blah. That would be a reactor every 5 weeks for the next 50 years. And that would be all nuclear so it would be slightly less since renewable energy would still be used.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Uecker]

No true. There was same shift from gas to ignites due to relative shift in prices, but the missing nuclear power has almost completely replaced by renewables:

                     2010       2011       2012
ignites (Braunkohle) 145.9 TWh  150.1 TWh  161.1 TWh
nuclear              140.6 TWh  108.0 TWh   99.5 TWh
coal                 117.0 TWh  112.4 TWh  116.1 TWh
natural gas           89.3 TWh   86.1 TWh   75.5 TWh
oil                    8.7 TWh    7.2 TWh    8.0 TWh
renewables           104.8 TWh  123.8 TWh  142.4 TWh
others                26.7 TWh   25.6 TWh   25.9 TWh
imports               42.2 TWh   49.7 TWh   44.2 TWh
exports               49.9 TWh   56.6 TWh   67.3 TWh
(net imports)        -17.7 TWh   -6.3 TWh  -23.1 TWh
consumption          615.3 TWh  606.8 TWh  604.6 TWh

(source: http://ag-energiebilanzen.de/)

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Uecker]

I think you are confusing total energy imports with electricity. Germany has net exports in electricity and this did not change even after shutting down 6(7) nuclear power plants. The missing power has indeed been replaced mostly by renewables [1]. It is true that the prices for electricity are high (among other reasons) because subventions for renewables are added as a fee. In contrast, subventions for nuclear and coal are/have been hidden in general taxes.

[1] I posted the numbers here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4531753&cid=45636919

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe there's a typo. David Suzuki is a pop scientist not a top scientist. Bye bye Japan and an evacuation of the North American continent is absurd. We would already have developed it on purpose as a weapon if you could clear a continent an ocean away with a cloud of anything. He even suggests that the likely hood of it happening in the next 3 years at 95%. It's just absurd on the face of it. When I first saw David Suzuki I thought he was ok, but the more I hear him, the more he just sensationalizes marginal hypothesis. Even for him though, this should appear nutty to anyone who know anything about nuclear energy or the dilution of gases in the atmosphere. For crying out loud, we've probably released more radiation from the thousand or so above ground nuclear tests we did. Or the thousand or so Russia did. Or the hundreds (maybe thousands) China did. Or the testing the dozen or so other countries have done. BTW, you likely do have isotopes in your body from these experiments, it's just so ridiculously diluted across the atmosphere it poses little more threat than eating a banana.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

And Poland is buying wind power from germany.

Coal power plants are abundant in Germany too. It is more likely that Poland is buying even more coal power from Germany.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.

Is this from solar panels falling onto people?

No, it's from people falling off roofs while installing them.

One could of course argue that the dangers could be reduced by more safety precautions but the same could be said for nuclear. The human factor and greed tells us that it won't happen.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Land covered with solar panels is dead. nothing will grow there or stay there.
I don't believe renewable energy is solution. Temporary - it is, but permanent - no way. Probably it does more damage over time than atomic stations.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Poland is "buying" electricity at negative, zero or close-to-zero prices, and is currently installing phase changing devices to keep German "uncontrolled" electricity off their grid. They are not happy with it.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where you get that 17-18ct/kWh price from. I'm an "ordinary customer", have chosen one of the cheapest (while reputable) suppliers, and pay like 24.28ct/kWh (25.22ct/kWh from 1/1/2014).

And if anyone cares to enable Google Translate, go to www.verivox.de and see for yourselves. Legit zip codes are abundant. Use 28357 for close to where I live.

Or, to quote an e-mail from my supplier Energiegut GmbH, here come the current taxes and mandatory fees (2014). Numbers in brackets are BEFORE 19% sales tax (Yes, we pay taxes on taxes!):

Fees and additional charges Ct/kWh
Energy tax: 2,440 (2,050)
Renewable Energies Law: 7,425 (6,240)
Power-Heart-Cogeneration Law: 0,212 (0,178)
Nach 19 Abs. 2 Strom NEV 0,109 (0,092)
EEG-Haftungsumlage (liability contribution): 0,300 (0,250)
Umlage für abschaltbare Lasten (contribution for detachable loads): 0,011 (0,009)

Or, 10.48 ct/kWh overall, including sales tax (8,819ct/ before s/t).

That means, net electricity price is 12.37 ct/kWh
Taxes (above in brackets plus 19% on taxes+electricity): 12.84 ct/kWh

Or, a tax surcharge of a little more than 100% (!) on our net electricity price.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

The human factor says that if you have only a small group of people tasked with a pretigious, but boring, job, they'll goof off. If you have a large enough industry to create a social stigma around this sort of irresponsibility, with jailtime and fines large enough to exceed the cost of oversight, you might get somewhere.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Megane]

The best thing about solar panels is how they don't even work half the time.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[fatphil]

imports 42.2 TWh
exports 49.9 TWh
(net imports) -17.7 TWh

That subtraction has a 10 TWh error in it

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Eunuchswear]

You'd need to complete about one per week for the next 35 years to replace ONE-SEVENTH of the energy we now get from fossil fuels.

Where in the links you quote does it say that?

Finish one reactor per week. Good luck with that.

That notoriously "can do" country, France, built 56 reactors in 15 years.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Eunuchswear]

small-scale reactors can be mass produced, much like how solar and wind would need to be mass produced, except with far more bang for your buck.

You may want to rethink your language!

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[GuB-42]

Germany's production is mostly fossil fuel. They may be the champion of renewables but it still represents only a small part of the picture.
The way Germany works is more of less like this : France has plenty of nuclear reactors that are good at producing base load power, so, when demand is low, Germany buys this excess power for a low (sometimes even negative) price. Now, when demand is high, France's nuclear power is not sufficient for its own use, so Germany starts its gas plants and sell back electricity at a high price.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

Pffft .... we are trading with our neighbours since decades.
Obviously the 'business model' works for all involved parties.

Sooner or later they will produce energy the same way we do.

Problem with 'uneducated' people like you is: you don't understand how predictable solar/wind in real live actually is.

It is not so that a solar or wind plant suddenly (without any forecast) drops from 100% power to 0%.

Power companies and grid operators use localized weather forecasts for every area they have a plant in, that means they actually have a pretty good idea how much power an "unreliable" plant will generate the next hour, the next two, the next three and the next four hours. So there is plenty enough time to adjust your own plants or make deals on the international power market.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

Lol, you link a site posting coal and oil imports while we talk about electricity? How stupid are you?
And no, your prices are not pretty close to what you said, younclaimed 45cents, euro cents I assume? While I have a standard vanilla electric contract as anybody in this country has who is not switching to a cheaper supplier. Normal prices are 17cent (euro) to 20 cent (euro) no one pays 45 cent, that is ridiculous.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

Sorry this is just nonsense. And claiming such bullshit when you obviously have nomclue about power production pisses me off meanwhile.
Does not even make sense to debunk your two claims,they re so wrong on many scales e.g. germany has no 'normal' gas powered plants. We only have fast minute reserve gas plants.
Secondly france is a net importer for german power, as they have not enough own power to refill their pumped storage plants over night ... during daytime usually there is no trade between the nations as both are capable to handle that themsleves. There is onl trade where frensh industries buy german power in long term contracts.
Renewables are in germany at about 30% of daily power production and in peak situations like stormy sunny autumn days, 60%.
All that can easy be read up on german web sites of the power companies, as they have to disclose such infrmations on a dail base.
Google is your friend, moron!

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

I really wonder how stupid you really are. You claimed a 45cent rate for 1kWh in germany ( which implies Euro cents ) then you link a forbes.com web site to prove your claim. AND the highest price for electricity is significantly below 30 cents? (Implying that forbes com is using US cents anyway?)
And you post those links to bolster your original claim? rofl

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Uecker]

Thank you for pointing this out! It was a typo: exports have been 59.9 TWh for 2010.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[MobyDisk]

Xolotl didn't explain the key point.

It's not the buying and selling that is the issue. The issue is that they are still burning the same amount of coal, while claiming they burn less. The trick is that the coal is being burned across a geopolitical border. So the politicians and pseudo-environmentalists can claim a victory, with no actual environmental gain.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Covering existing roofs in solar panels kills no more land than is already "dead" from human habitation.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[GuB-42]

As you suggested I checked Google for facts and I was indeed wrong on some points, sorry. Germany gets most of its electricity from coal, not gas. And I thought the import/exports where on a daily basis instead of a yearly basis (I didn't write it though, so you probably implied it somehow).
However my point still stands : Germany export expensive fossil fuel power when demand is high and imports cheap nuclear power when demand is low.

Here are the facts about Germany :
- Coal : 45%
- Renewables : 22%
- Nuclear : 16 %
- Gas : 11%
- Exports are higher during winter (high demand) and imports are higher during summer (low demand)
- Renewable electricity production is at the lowest in winter
- Coal electricity production is at the highest in winter
- Germany is a net exporter globally, France is also a net exporter globally. Germany is a net exporter for France.
Source : http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuelles/stromproduktion-aus-solar-und-windenergie-2013.pdf (+ others)

Another thing : according to this http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/images/7/75/Half-yearly_electricity_and_gas_prices.png household electricity for s1 2013 in Germany is 0.29€/kWh, that's more than 0.40$/kWh and among the most expensive in Europe. Are you taking everything into account when you are talking about 0.18€ (taxes, subscription...) ?

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

I understand what Xolotl wanted to say and what you now claim. However: it is simply wrong.
Energy transfer is recorded and published, you can easy look up that germany does not import significant amounts of "coal power" from Poland (or nuclear from France or that matter).

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

Depends how you define, daily bases I guess.
In principle there are long term contracts and short term (down to hourly) deals at the spot market.

E.g. the company EnBW is selling a lot of power in long term contracts (1-2years) to frensh companies. Deals like that are between a power selling company and an end consumer.

Otoh surplus (well, any energy, but that is less relevant) energy is traded at the european spot market. So during peak production or other reasons (steel plant shuts unexpected down etc.) power companies trade amoung each other. So a german company might buy from France or other neighbours. Either to fill up pumped storages or simply to power down one of their own plants.

Production of renewables is a bit tricky to calculate correctly, as the increase in production is so high. Renewables are basically solar plus wind (biomass is still not much).
So I guess the sum of wind and solar is in winter low? Or it is only low in percentages as the total amount of energy production is much higher? Anyway wind energy should be more in winter than in summer!

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[MobyDisk]

I think there are a bunch of links in this Slashdot discussion claiming otherwise. On the surface, it makes sense: shut down nuclear plants, and what else are you going to do? Solar just can't produce that amount of power (yet).

To confirm this, I just did a quick Google search for "Germany Coal Nuclear Solar":
https://www.google.com/search?q=germany+coal+nuclear+solar&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
which seems to confirm the increase in coal burning, although the Poland connection seems to be false.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-G-N/Germany/
"More than half of Germany’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of 2013, compared with 43% in 2010." but it says nothing about the shutdown of nuclear reactors.

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/02/05/debunking-common-myths-about-nuclear-coal-power-in-germany-this-time-repeated-by-the-guardian/
"coal (including lignite) is up around 5%...have nothing to do with nuclear in Germany."

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2013/0716/The-dirty-coal-behind-Germany-s-clean-energy
This sites the 5% figure but doesn't mention why. "Germany has managed to be praised by environmentalists more than any other developed nation and yet is building more coal plants than more or less any other developed country" but it has no specifics.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/green-energy-bust-in-germany
This one claims the same thing.
"Germany is indeed avoiding blackouts—by opening new coal- and gas-fired plants. Renewable electricity is proving so unreliable and chaotic..."

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/57035
"they are now building coal-fired electricity generation and shuttering nuclear power plants..."

I don't know what to believe now. Ultimately, we would need to see the energy mix numbers from the German power companies/government to know for sure. Just pointing out that new coal plants are being built doesn't mean much. They might be replacing existing ones, or making cleaner/smaller ones.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

First off all:

The nuclear plants are still running, only a few are offline.
Yes, we build new coal plants, they where in planning and under construction since 15 years. They are ment to replace older inefficient or dirty plants.

Most links (I did not look at them) are simply "newspapers", they have no clue, sorry to say it so bluntly.

Here is a good link (missleading name) about german power production of this year:
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/downloads/pdf-files/aktuelles/stromproduktion-aus-solar-und-windenergie-2013.pdf (Someone else in this thread posted it allready)
I hope it is self explanaiting, so you don't need google translate :D

As you see: we export nearly every month roughly 30% of our production. Also you see we produce in the yearly average over 20% of our energy with solar / wind. With peaks over 40% (on special days like 1st or second January with exceptional perfect weather)

Ultimately, we would need to see the energy mix numbers from the German power companies/government to know for sure The PDF should contain some links to the sites where you can obtain such numbers, but the PDF actually has summarized them quite nicely imho.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,
should not have dismissed your links so quickly, but I was in a hurry to catch my train :)
A few are quite interesting, but bottom line they are bad written.
They main problem always is: outsiders see everything. in the wrong context.
They don't know:
a) for the new coal plants older plants get decommisiond (not all ofc)
b) they don't know how predictable wind and solar energy actually is for power plant operators, so they always yell: wind is not blowing all the time ... who cares? As long as *I* know when my ants produce I can schedule my grid accordingly
c) they cry about open pit mining of lignite coal, not knowing that all the pits get renaturated and transformed into woods, lakes and are in fact all very nice restored
d) they draw wrong conclusions from wrong premisses, e.g. unemployment will soar when the nuclear plants are finally all offline. Caught, caught, how many people exactly do work in 20 plants? 200? Plus security personell, perhaps 400? Make it 1000 ...
e) So in the first half of the year we produced more energy with coal than in the year before? Perhaps there was a reason, e.g. a cold winter?
f) They claim all the coal, especially the brown coal is so 'dirty' not knowing that germany basically has plants (especialy the newer ones right now in construction) where emissions are ZERO. Everything is scrubbed and deposited or reused as building materials.
g) They rant about CO2 emissions, I mean come on, seriously, germany HAS reduced its emissions, FAR MORE than we commited to. And we continue, and then an US newspaper / pseudo sciense web site complains? Erm, how much did they reduce their emissions? And: bloggers and reporters semm not to know that in a few years mandatory sequestering starts. Click. ZERO CO2 emissions from power plants anymore (not sure if that is a good idea ... but it will happen)

Even if it sounds like a rant, it was not ment as a post 'against you' ... just windering where all those energy experts got their braindead ideas from.

Right now e.g. germans wind energy is 95% generated 'on shore'. While we add now offshore plants in 25 years we will have replaced all nuclear and most of the fossile power with wind. (Offshore very reliable, runs basically 8000 hours a year for sure and roughly half the time far above 'rated capacity')

Then there are the other idiots who always come with: oh, a 100kW wind turbine will only produce 25kW, you know! It is because 'nameplate' production is never happening, you know! Yeah, sure, it is like with german cars, if you buy a 250PS car you get in fact only a 60PS car. Obviously you are allowed to write utter nonsense on the nameplate ;) in germany, that is!

Then wind parks need so much space ... they never actually saw one, they are placed on ordinary farmers fields. And the farmers happily accept the thousands of dead birds as fertilizer in their fields!

And then the black outs ... wow, we live in 2013. I'm close to 50 years old. I can count the blackouts we had on one hand. And most of the time it had a very serious reason and was fixed (rerouting everything) in a few MINUTES. The longest I remember was 2h.
We are living in the biggest interconnected synchronius grid of the world, spanning from the Island via Siberia over Mongolia from north skandinavia to Turky.
If something fails, it is because of a serious hardware problem, not because the wind is not blowing in germany.
I would bet if next second all german nuclear power plants drop instantly from the grid we had no blackout.

Ah year and another point to the list above: wind makes the grid so instale. ROFLMA, another stuid claim from uneducated stupid writers who make their stuff simply up.

For my power provider it is NO DIFFERENCE wheather I switch my Sauna unscheduled on and draw 5kW power, or if my wind plant suddenly produces 5kW less (or more). The grid oper

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[jwhitener]

Don't get where from you have your crazy ideas.

Ideological camps are so strong in the US that you can find a "study" that "proves" pretty much anything you want.

Re:Nuclear: only interim solution, permanent waste

[jwhitener]

And how much CO2 and other environmental damage would there be from covering vast swaths of land with solar panels? The manufacturing process is filthy, the disposal process even worse, and it results in more human lives lost than nuclear.

http://www.nei.org/Issues-Policy/Protecting-the-Environment/Life-Cycle-Emissions-Analyses

Sounds like Nuclear, solar/wind are basically about equal when it comes to CO2 and waste issues. Wind being the lowest of course.

But like Nuclear, when you talk about solar, you really need to compare the right type of solar and right type of nuclear. Most advocates of solar want to see more concentrated solar power plants, not necessarily every roof in America covered with panels. (Although most would argue that every home covered in solar panels is still way better than coal).

passionate

[phantomfive]

In case anyone is wondering what James Hansen's passionate side looks like, here a relevant quote:

It makes me wonder: Do you hate science? Did your mother beat you with a stick and say this stick is science? I'm just kidding, but it is bothersome that you seem to have swallowed a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda.

Re:passionate

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice, now if he stopped believing in this climate change fairy tale, he might have half a brain.

Re:passionate

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, it's a shame, he's losing all credibility here...
Overconfident nuclear apologists are much worse than clueless anti-nuclear activists.

Re:passionate

[Anonymous Coward]

He should just stick to the muppets, that was his best work.

Re:passionate

[WalksOnDirt]

It makes me wonder: Do you hate science? Did your mother beat you with a stick and say this stick is science?

Good questions, actually. The interviewer was an idiot.

Re:passionate

[hmckee]

Come on moderators! This is funny! First thing I thought when I saw the headline.

Re:passionate

[hmckee]

Darn, I replied to the wrong one.

Come on moderators! This is funny! First thing I thought when I saw the headline.

Re:passionate

[bruce_the_loon]

Why is it a shame? It's about time scientists stop being apologetic and point out directly how stupid some interviewers are during the live interview. I guess some pedants are going to point out ad-hominim or whatever, but in this sort of case where the interviewer is deliberately ignorant, that is what is needed.

Re:passionate

[AmiMoJo]

By saying that he automatically lost the argument. Accusing people of "hating science" and implying that it is irrational isn't an argument, iit's just abuse. Ironically he has rejected the scientific method himself, unless his hypothesis is that people who have concerns about nuclear are morons in which case he is evidence to the contrary.

it is all about context

[Todd Palin]

If you ask questions about our energy future from a nuclear context, you will get nuclear answers. If you think about it from en environmental viewpoint you get environmental answers. If you think about it from the economic perspective you get economic answers. If you think about it from the renewable context you get renewable answers.

Unfortunately, the solar industry looks at the issue from the context of huge solar power plants instead of dispersed solar installations. That is where the money is. If the solar energy issue is addressed from the dispersed solar context it looks way different. Imagine empowering businesses like WalMart to cover every store with solar panels. Imaging requiring every new home to have solar panels. Imagine retrofitting all the appropriate buildings in the country with solar panels. Imagine the hydroelectric power plants changing their generation schedules to generate at night when solar power goes away, instead of in the day like they do now when demand is highest.

This can be done much quicker and more cheaply than the nuclear path. It takes twenty years to get a nuke online. Dispersed solar can be online in a year or so. The cost of solar panels comes down almost every day. If you think dispersed solar, the equation changes on everything.

Re:it is all about context

[phantomfive]

Imagine empowering businesses like WalMart to cover every store with solar panels.

Ok, so, what is stopping them now?

Re:it is all about context

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would WalMart install solar panels, for which they have to pay the full cost themselves, when they can burn fossil fuels and socialize the cost of fixing the resulting problems?

Re:it is all about context

[PPH]

Imagine a world full of solar tax subsidies. If you ask in a political context, you get a political answer.

Today, the price point of solar depends on those subsidies. take them away and one of two things will happen: Solar will fall flat on its face. Or the supply-demand curve will shift to a point where non-subsidized solar will make sense. Until that happens, the cost will stay high enough (and the payback low enough) that the only place solar will pay is in the magic fairy land of subsidy. And that is subject to manipulation in our present government system.

Re:it is all about context

[Anonymous Coward]

Walmart has a lot of solar on its roof and is saving money!

Re:it is all about context

[aaarrrgggh]

Actually, Walmart has solar panels on a number of their facilities, and has for 20 years. They do it for both green-washing and because it has a positive return on investment.

Distributed generation is an important concept for both efficiency and reliability.

The simplest way to push for rooftop solar is to change the structural design codes so they must add 5psf dead load for solar panels in every building.

Re:it is all about context

[BlueTemplar]

Sure, but to be fair, the fossil fuels would need to stop to be subsidized too. And you would need to apply the "you pollute, you pay" principle too, without forgetting the fossil fuel CO2 releases.

Re:it is all about context

[PPH]

"you pollute, you pay"

Pay what? We can't even get a climate model to work yet. Never mind attaching a dollars per 0.1 degree C figure to the resulting temp rise. So it all comes down to how much various parties whine and stamp their feet.

There are some proposals to create a carbon emissions marketplace. Just let the free market pick the dollars per ton number. But then we run into the 'magic trees' problem, where one pound of carbon credit sequestered by a rain forest tree in some third world tribal country (owned by Al Gore Inc.) is worth more than a pound of carbon sequestered by fast growing Monsanto genetic engineered super trees. In the final analysis, its all politics. What's the ROI on a political contribution and how much can we hire a group of professional protesters for.

Re:it is all about context

[Todd Palin]

Nuclear power is the most heavily subsidized power source. If we can afford to subsidize nuclear, we can subsidize solar. The difference is an almost immediate effect on power generation rather than the twenty year lag for nuclear. Solar subsidies are a good bang for the buck.

WalMart does have lots of solar panels. With solar panels being so cheap now, it wouldn't take much more in the way of subsidies to literally have panels on every WalMart, BestBuy, KMart, and 7-Eleven. Imagine subsidized loans to put panels on every elementary school. Billions are loaned for every nuclear power plant, why not turn thousands of schools into power plants instead?

Re:it is all about context

[BlueTemplar]

Obviously, for a regulated free market you need a strong, non-corrupt government first. And you would also probably need to dismantle the megacorporations. So that is the priority. Sadly, it doesn't seem that this is something that can be quickly fixed, even though Hansen's own 350.org campaign gives some hope...

Re:it is all about context

[drinkypoo]

Nothing. Wal-Mart is one of the non-energy businesses with the most installed solar. But they'd install more if the power companies had to pay a fair price for the power when it's sold back to the grid. In states where this is the case, there's a lot more solar installs. The power companies have a state-granted monopoly for good reason, but part of the tradeoff is being forced to actually serve the interests of the people. Well, it's supposed to be, and more to the point, it is fairly so.

Re:it is all about context

[khallow]

The power companies have a state-granted monopoly for good reason, but part of the tradeoff is being forced to actually serve the interests of the people.

Bad premise leads to bad conclusion. Just because these power companies have a state-granted monopoly, doesn't mean that it was granted for a good reason. For example, a common electricity privatization outcome is to disentangle the generation of power from the transport of power. So a big part of what these electricity companies do, the generation of power, can actually be highly competitive. Even transportation of electricity is not a natural monopoly.

Sure, there's little reason to have more than one line to a given customer, but you could have several competing lines providing power to the local substation.

Re:it is all about context

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes twenty years to get a nuke online.

There were nuclear power plants in the 1950s, less than ten years after WWII. And they had to design them from scratch. Why should it take twenty years to get a nuke online?

Re:it is all about context

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad premise leads to bad conclusion. Just because these power companies have a state-granted monopoly, doesn't mean that it was granted for a good reason.

That's ok. Whether the reason was good or bad doesn't really matter. What matters is the results. And unfortunately for both drinky and you, the results haven't been that bad. Oh sure there were rolling blackouts here or there, but overall most people can still get electricity.

And furthermore, it's not like the rolling blackouts happen to anybody important. It's ok if a few poor people in California have to make do without XBox for a while as long as the bankers in Wall Street can run their computers.

Re:it is all about context

[khallow]

And furthermore, it's not like the rolling blackouts happen to anybody important.

Rolling blackouts? You wouldn't happen to be referring to the California electricity crisis? There are far more successful examples of electricity privatization that you don't hear about because they weren't epic fails.

It's ok if a few poor people in California have to make do without XBox for a while as long as the bankers in Wall Street can run their computers.

While that's quite true, it's also worth remembering that bankers at Wall Street pay for that greater reliability of their electricity supply. They don't magically get better service just because of who they are.

Re:it is all about context

[Anonymous Coward]

Rolling blackouts? You wouldn't happen to be referring to the California electricity crisis? There are far more successful examples of electricity privatization that you don't hear about because they weren't epic fails.

The only epic fail is your reading comprehension. I'm saying overall things are fine despite the blackouts. I'm simply recognizing that even under the best conditions some people will not get access to electricity or whatever scarce resource liberals want everyone to have.

While that's quite true, it's also worth remembering that bankers at Wall Street pay for that greater reliability of their electricity supply. They don't magically get better service just because of who they are.

Same difference. Who they are is that they are "people who can/does pay". In a capitalist economy, "who you are" is largely defined by your money.

Re:it is all about context

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine not being able to afford a goddamn house because the panels on the roof have pushed up the costs by 50K.
Sigh.

Re:it is all about context

[Areyoukiddingme]

California's rolling blackouts were a poster child for exactly how wrong privatization can go. The blackouts were intentionally induced by Enron executives in order to make more money. Some of them went to jail for it, because they were inducing them under fraudulent circumstances.

Privatization is generally a bad choice when speaking of monopoly situations, and power distribution is very definitely a monopoly in the United States. It is both a natural monopoly (it's very very expensive and very time consuming and very messy to install a second grid on top of the first one) and an enforced monopoly (nobody wants this in their neighborhood). Unregulated private monopolies are the worst possible choice for customers, in every respect, and regulated private monopolies aren't much better. Private companies are no more likely to run a monopoly better than a government is, and in many cases, they're provably worse. Profit motive is a bitch.

Re:it is all about context

[khallow]

The blackouts were intentionally induced by Enron executives in order to make more money.

They were also intentionally induced by California state officials (who could have stopped the crisis at any time through a variety of means) though motive is a bit uncertain. I'm leaning towards bribes from Enron and related businesses.

Dear great-grandkids:

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry we used up the planet.

Maybe if our economy wasn't based so totally on consumption, we would have left less waste around on land, in the water, and in the air.

Maybe we should have reconsidered when we bought that twentieth pair of cheap shoes shipped from China, or had those watermelons trucked in from Florida.

Maybe our house shouldn't have been so very big, we might have used less energy Of course, we didn't stay at home a lot anyway, because our three cars were really fuel efficient.

We did leave you a nice plastic island chain in the Pacific Sludge. That's what you call it now, right?

Anyway, we had a great time, and we wish you the best of luck.

Oh, we've enclosed paper copies of "A Canticle for Liebowitz" and "L.A. 2017" for you to read, because they might be relevant.

We love you,

Your great-grandparents

Re:Dear great-grandkids:

[TapeCutter]

My grandparents generation left Europe as a smouldering wasteland for their children to sort out.

Re:Dear great-grandkids:

[weilawei]

This is the dirty secret about life. It consumes resources. The other dirty secret is that all resources (potential energy) run out, at least so far as most widely accepted theories about the Universe go. Perpetual motion machines allowing us to "sustainably" use the same energy source "forever" don't exist. Most humans would rather not admit either one--some sort of current top-of-the-food-chain guilt combined with willful ignorance of physics and the inability to look at the potential future of conscious entities in the Universe rather than just their own kids. Who else is going to get the only known conscious entities in the Universe off of this planet for the long haul? The dolphins?

We need to figure out how to mine for resources somewhere else, or we run out eventually. That's the hard, cold bottom-line.

Re:Where do you think it came from in th first pla

[tgibbs]

Agreed. Absolute safety with nuclear materials is unattainable. But we can certainly make it as safe as it was before we dug it up out of the ground.

Re:Where do you think it came from in th first pla

[Deadstick]

so why the big fuss when someone suggests burying the radioactive waste underground later?

Ummm, because it's a bit tricky to turn transuranic elements back into uranium before their reinterment?

LFTRs most intriguing nuclear option

[wherley]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor

What makes them interesting is being able to "burn" up existing nuclear wastes. So use LFTRs to clean up existing long term nuclear waste and get power as a byproduct.

Re:LFTRs most intriguing nuclear option

[uvajed_ekil]

LFTRs still have considerable problems to be worked out, which is why the technology has never been implemented on any large scale. They are a possibility but one that would require a huge amount of development before they could be a major commercial solution. I wouldn't count on this type of reactor having any impact in the foreseeable future, due to the U-233 required for startup, the highly radioactive waste that is still produced, proliferation risks, and a host of other concerns that would be very expensive to address. LFTRs are certainly interesting but still far from ready for prime time.

Re:LFTRs most intriguing nuclear option

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that's wrong.

The highly radioactive waste that is still produced is not a concern. Why? Because there isn't much of it. If the thorium fuel cycle was used to power the entire world, the total amount of waste that would need to be stored at any one time would fit into an area of 7500 cubic metres. Think about that.

Re:LFTRs most intriguing nuclear option

[uvajed_ekil]

Okay, Anonymous Coward, so 7500 cubic metres of highly radioactive waste is not a concern to you? Then what of the other problems associated with LFTRs, such as the need for a bunch of U-233 (a little hard to come by) and the fact that know one is experienced at building them, especially at the scale needed for commercially viable power generation? Just small details I am also wrong about?

Too bad you posted anonymously and will probably not keep up with this, as I'd love to see your answers. Great job figuring out that LFTRs are the holy grail of power generation, even though no one else seems to think so.

This explains a lot . . .

[Idou]

I always thought Kermit was more of a "Cerenkov" green than a "frog" green. . .

Most designs in service today are only too risky

[Burz]

...because nuclear plants represent the closest thing to absolute power in our economy, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It becomes a confidence trickster game of convincing a community to commit their ratepayers to large projects where the costs can then be jacked up 900%.

Nuclear energy "works", but only certain cultures in certain eras have been able to manage it responsibly.

Let me also point out that the French are very lucky to have such a mild environment and geology; they too blew some tops immediately after the earthquake... but the quake was 1,000s of miles away and the tops were the kind that sport toupees and berets.

So the real question is whether society is mature enough to handle super concentrated power, without turning our economic and social life into a reflection of that concentrated power. In today's "privatize everything and let the god of greed sort out our problems" political and business climate, I'll answer that question with a resounding "No".

not only buying "nuclear" electricity

[aepervius]

But also buying from coal central, or using a lot of coal electricity (think enorm open field, for which they even moved/destroyed whole town http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Tagebau_Vereinigtes_Schleenhain_panorama_midi.jpg/1000px-Tagebau_Vereinigtes_Schleenhain_panorama_midi.jpg here is anotehr one : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Tagebau_Garzweiler_Panorama_2005.jpg/800px-Tagebau_Garzweiler_Panorama_2005.jpg) and I am not even touchign the thematic that biurning brown coal is terrible. Not sure what is the amount of heavy metal radioelement there is in brown coal, but in black coal it ain't rosy.

So yeah, it is the perfect example how nuclear irrational panics threaten a whole economy (heavy electricity prices) and make it worst for CO2 emission. I am pretty sure the german politician are fucking hyprocit and realize that nuclear could be made better, but would rather think "vote!" and bent to the folks panic.

Re:not only buying "nuclear" electricity

[Uecker]

While it is true that Germany burns too much coal, this has not changed much over the years (and the US has still twice the CO2 production per capita as far as I know). Germany did reduce nuclear, but added a substantial amount of renewables in a very short amount of time which proves that this scales. I posted the numbers here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4531753&cid=45636919

It would also be news to me that electricity prices had ruined Germany's industry (and some industries are exempt from paying the additional fee for renewables anyway).

Re:not only buying "nuclear" electricity

[angel'o'sphere]

Care to explain why burning brown coal is terrible?
And before you start copy pasting idiotic links, check first how a german brown coal plant works ... sigh :-/

"MY NEARSIGHTEDNESS AND BIAS..."

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"...Trumps YOUR nearsightedness and fears. I'm and EXPERT! On CLIMATE!"

So? FuckUshima!

Ultracrepidarianism

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Hansen is out of his field, out of his depth, and is rapidly becoming an embarrassment to all.

If nuclear is so safe, why does the US still need the Price-Anderson nuclear industry indemnification act or whatever the correct name is? We should let the Invisible Hand of the Free Market set the proper insurance rates for nuclear plants. If they can't compete in the energy marketplace while paying their fair share of insurance then let them go out of business.

Right now there are nukes being shut down because they can't compete with the glut of natural gas from fracking, and they're essentially getting a free ride on insurance. Something isn't adding up.....

Re:Ultracrepidarianism

[BlueTemplar]

Except that the scarcity of the fracked natural gas (which is expected to peak in 2017) isn't being priced in (like many other things). So you can't have a proper Free Market.

Re:Where do you think it came from in th first pla

[x0ra]

FWIW, there is at least an uranium deposit in the world which as undergo nuclear fission naturally, but hipster are silents about it...

Things that are dangerous for longer

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Mercury, cadmium, and other chemical poisons are poisonous forever. They are also harder to detect.

We've found tolerable solutions to our other toxic waste problems. Spent fuel adds the proliferation problem but is otherwise the same.

Re:Things that are dangerous for longer

[DarkOx]

We've found tolerable solutions to our other toxic waste problems.

Yes if you consider shipping it off to some place in the third world to poison them instead of us a tolerable solution.

Most of solutions to other toxic waste were really only ecologically sustainable when the population was a few billion people small. We are going to eventually run out of places to dump stuff.

Nukes good theoretically; practically, not so much

[kevin lyda]

Nukes are theoretically safe and efficient. As I understand it, there's not enough known uranium sources on Earth to power the world, but in conjunction with solar, wind, hydro and bio-fuels (preferably from waste) there's enough.

Unfortunately, theories don't build nuke plants. Corporations do. And we can't manage to regulate large retail stores to make them behave in a socially responsible way, why do we think we can regulate a giant power company? Japan generally comes across as a competent, long-term thinking country. And yet even their political culture couldn't prevent fraud and corruption in the building of their nuke plants.

Until our political systems can effectively regulate large corporations, I'm opposed to nuclear power. The theory's great, but so far I don't see designs that can survive large-scale corruption.

Already Solved

[SuperKendall]

Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.

It is (was) called "Yucca Mountain".

Simply put, if you aren't for nuclear you aren't serious about helping the planet or climate change. You are just pushing some other far worse alternative to line someone's pockets.

Blame "Greenpeace Physics" (GP) for Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

For the last several decades, there has been a hideous lie propagated on the world. With the best of intentions, Greenpeace started out to protest nuclear weapons and educate the world about the dangers. But they failed. Not in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Which they didn't. Not in preventing massive damage to the worlds ecology. Which they didn't. Not in protesting nuclear weapons. Which they did. No, Greenpeace failed the world by getting hijacked by environmentalists. They did, however, succeed in proving that environmentalists cannot do basic math or understand basic physics.

GP states that long half-life radioactive materials are more dangerous than short-half life materials because they are "radioactive for longer," while reality states that radioactivity is based on the number of radioactive sub-atomic particles released in a period of time. This period of time is defined as "half-life", and the amount of radiation released per "mole" of a compound over time "T" can loosely described as "amount*(time/half-life)" So, given 1 mole of Pu-239 (half-life of 24K years) or 1 mole of caesium-137 (half-life of 30.17 years) will both release 1/2 mole of radioactive sub-atomic particles over their half-lives. So, obviously, the caesium-137 is the more radioactive material.

GP states nuclear power is bad. If you think about it, this is an arguable point. Nuclear reactors don't release greenhouse gasses. They provide a huge amount of power with little waste that is easily contained.

One of the things that believers in "Greenpeace Physics" do not want you to know is that the sum total Curie count of all the radioactive material released in every single nuclear bomb blast, stored in every single nuclear reactor or cooling pond, and released in every nuclear accident in HISTORY is less than the Curie count released every 6 years by the world's coal fired power plants. Yes, fly-ash is radioactive. And burning coal generates huge amounts of green house gasses. And their waste goes everywhere.

If Greenpeace had - instead of blindly fighting atomic energy in all shapes and forms - fought to make every nuclear reactor as safe and efficient as possible, it is just possible that we would not have loonies on both sides of the cultural divide arguing over what is causing Global Warming.

U.S. Navy

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Navy is willing to put reactors in places that have a a high chance of being attacked then I don't see why we can't build more plants. So far we've had three meltdowns in the past 50 years and the world hasn't ended. It's time to take a 1950s technology and actually start using it.

Re:U.S. Navy

[Eunuchswear]

So far we've had three meltdowns in the past 50 years

No, five. Don't forget we had 3 meltdowns at Fukushima.

And that's only counting destruction of commercial power reactors. If you count experimental designs and partial meltdowns we've had quite a few (Chapelcross, St Laurent des aux (twice!), Lucens,.the Chechoslovakian A1 plant, EBR-1, ..)

Re:Nukes good theoretically; practically, not so m

[BlueTemplar]

Some nuclear designs have fuel lasting thousands of years at current energy usage rate. (Whether any of those designs are feasible is another question.)

What makes you think we can't build and manage (even large) nuclear power plants without the help of large corporations?

Re:Where do you think it came from in th first pla

[CrimsonAvenger]

Ummm, because it's a bit tricky to turn transuranic elements back into uranium before their reinterment?

Most nuclear waste is NOT transuranic. MOST of it has a half life measured in years, not centuries.

Store the stuff a hundred years, and 90%+ of the radioactive waste is no longer radioactive, and the rest can be stored that much easier (what with not being nearly so radioactive and all).

Natural Gas

[Anonymous Coward]

Most western countries aren't building nuclear right now mainly due to the cheap price of natural gas. It's simply cheaper and faster to build natural gas plants than nuclear. It's primarily the Asian countries (mostly China) building nuclear at the moment.

LFTR

[Michael Woodhams]

The thing that has me really worried about LFTR is the removal of fission products.

In a conventional nuclear reactor, the fission products are confined within the fuel cell cladding. The only place rendered long-term insanely radioactive is the reactor core, which is mechanically pretty simple.

In a LFTR, there is a facility for removing fresh fission products from the liquid fuel. This is a combination of multiple processing steps, high temperatures, corrosive chemicals, and way too much radiation to let humans anywhere near for running or maintaining the equipment. Then the removed products either need short term storage, or to be rendered into a form suitable for long term storage - requiring still more processing.

I'll grant you that the core of a LFTR isn't going to cause an accident, but removing and dealing with those fission products on a regular basis with such a huge price on failure sounds like an engineering nightmare.

Re:LFTR

[nojayuk]

Actually the core of a regular PWR or BWR and even CANDU, Magnox, AGR or even the dreaded RBMK-4 graphite moderated reactor designs don't get very radioactive thanks mostly to careful choices of the steel alloys and other materials used in their construction (no cobalt, for example). The vessels can be removed from the containment after shutdown during decommissioning within a year or two with minimal shielding or after forty or fifty years of Safstor on site they're no more radioactive than, say, granite and can be treated as low-level waste. It is common for the inside and outside of a BWR/PWR reactor vessel and its core structures to be manually inspected during refuelling outages, for example.

The really intense radioactivity in a conventional reactor is contained in the spent fuel rods which, if undamaged, can be easily handled, transported and after a few years dry-casked for storage or shipped to a reprocessing plant to be recycled. It's done all the time in hundreds of reactors around the world during refuelling operations and has been for decades.

The LFTR concept involves moving intensely hot radioactive fuel in a salt stream through a carbon moderator for decades with no capability to repair or even properly inspect this part of the reactor as the piping will be mindbogglingly highly radioactive even if the fuel stream is removed to permit inspection.

Re:LFTR

[Michael Woodhams]

It is common for the inside and outside of a BWR/PWR reactor vessel and its core structures to be manually inspected during refuelling outages, for example.

Interesting. As I understand it, typically during refuelling only a portion of the fuel rods are removed and replaced, and during this process the core and the waste fuel pool are one continuous body of water. So the person inspecting the core is a diver? And the water provides sufficient shielding from the remaining fuel rods? (Or am I just wrong about some fuel rods being left in at this point?)

Re:LFTR

[Anonymous Coward]

Fission products are much safer in a molten salt reactor, as most all elements except the noble gasses and metals form stable fluoride salts. In effect, they rely on chemistry to retain the fuel and fission products (even the volatiles), and continuously remove and sequester the noble gasses and metals. There is very little excess reactivity in an MSR, minimal fissile to begin with, no buildup of gaseous fission products, and very little fuel outside of the core for reprocessing. There is no water to dissociate and explode, or any other motive force to drive radioactivity into the environment. All together, an MSR reduces potential for serious accidents to virtually nothing.

Solid fuels rely on a meticulously crafted physical barrier containing an excess of fuel and fission products as they build up to high pressures over a long period. When the fuel rods melt, there is a much larger inventory of nasties to be released, many of which are volatile and released into the air.

The DMSR and IMSR have a much simplified fuel cycle and defer reprocessing to decommissioning time. They are not as efficient as LFTR, but still make much better use of fuel than today's reactors, enjoy the same safety features as other MSRs, and even better proliferation resistance. There was a full scale prototype designed before funding was slashed, and these could be commercialized on a relatively short timescale.

Re:LFTR

[nojayuk]

It depends on the operation being carried out. Reactor 4 at Fukushima Daiichi was famously empty of fuel rods with the entire core load stored in the adjacent Spent Fuel Pool of Doom Doom Doomity DOOM! (sorry, channeling Arne Gunderson there for a moment) but the Japanese nuclear authority requires a complete inspection of each reactor structure every 13 months and it was usual to empty the entire reactor core of fuel to allow this to be done during a refuelling operation, but as you say some of the less-spent fuel rods would be returned to the core before restart. Inspection of the inside of the vessel and the core structures is, I understand, carried out with cameras and remote probes underwater while it remains flooded as the core and inner lining are noticeably radioactive.

The outside of the pressure vessel (RPV) is also checked at this time with engineers entering the void between the vessel and the inner containment structure to do so. Once fission had stopped there was some residual radioactivity there (less because of the screening effects of 20cm of steel) but not enough to trip personal exposure limits for the inspectors, as long as they didn't make a picnic of it.

FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, at least there in the world deposit an uranium which a hipster naturally undergo nuclear fission, but silents are about it ...

Safer nuclear energy systems

[MrKaos]

This is the primary call of the open letter, Responsible Nuclear Advocacy. Despite my criticisms of the Nuclear Industry I support the development of a reactor that addresses the issue of 70,000 tons of Pu-239 (and much more U-238) currently stored in reactor sites around America, simply because it's irresponsible for our generation to foist these issue onto later generations.

One of the core reasons I support the development of such a reactor because it is capable of utilising weapons grade plutonium as fuel creating an impetus for disarmament and, hopefully, slowly defusing the asymmetrical weapons threat.

Unfortunately, because there is no geologically sound Nuclear waste dump in operation it's totally inappropriate to discuss building a new reactor facility until a proper containment facility is available. Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste, and long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water revealed by Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology - yet another Yucca problem) is just not available.

We need something made of granite. The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore, so it has to be an engineering project of that scale, because the logistical problems of transferring the 70000 odd tons of Pu239 to the spent fuel containment facility are so involved that you want to get it right the first time and only do it once. As I pointed out in another post, the design of the Swedish facility shows how a reactor facility that complies with the industry designed improvements could be implemented.

Even doing that will probably take 30 years to complete, but there is more to it than that.

I was a big fan of the Integral Fast Reactor as a potential solution and in a way I still am. But the reality is 3rd and 4th generation reactors are a pipe dream because our material science is not advanced enough yet to produce a reactor design that will last the thousands of years it will take to use that fuel. If you are going to build reactors then do it properly and build a Terra-watt scale nuclear reactor facility the belly of a massive granite mountain with an attached waste facility and chomp up all your remaining plutonium or end all commercial nuclear activity altogether.

Why? Because Nuclear power is energy intensive *after* the energy has been produced simply because said technology (material sciences) are not adequate to produce a Nuclear reactor that has a life span that matches the geological time frames of the fuel. This exposes the facility to all the issues associated with de-commissioning reactor sites every 4 decades or so. A reactor design that lasts at least 1000 years and is a closed loop, i.e. the plutonium goes in and nothing comes out (except electricity and possibly hydrogen) and avoids all the energetic costs associated with mining, enrichment and de-commissioning/demolition of the reactor.

As long we are producing plutonium and there is no where for it to go we will have a Nuclear Weapons threat and this is the price we pay for opening that pandora's box. I don't hide the fact that I don't like the constant failure of

One Question for the Learned Scholar

[LifesABeach]

Can we put all that Radio Active Waste in your back yard?

What about

[rossdee]

Nuclear Fusion

Re:What about

[BlueTemplar]

RTFA

Irrational Fear

[Dorianny]

Nuclear is one of the safest ways of generating electricity. My belief is that people have a irrational fear of radiation mostly because it increases the risk of cancer, a deases that most of us will face either personally or in a loved one, and one that we are terrified of due to it being seen as a slow and painfull death. If radiation exposure increased the risk of cradiovascular deases (the number one killer but nonthless much less feared than cancer), I doubt Nuclear Energy would be as terrifying to most people.

Do you work for an oil company?

[sjbe]

Hey nuclear advocates, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.

Hey fossil fuel advocates by default, how about you fix the waste issue first, then we'll talk.

Sincerely, everyone not working for an oil company

(Given present technology if you argue against nuclear power you are by default arguing for fossil fuels because that is the only available alternative for the foreseeable future even taking advances in renewable energy into account.)

Frame the issue

[sjbe]

I have a anit-nuke in my family.

So do I. I just point out that if you are anti-nuke you are by default pro-fossil fuel. Those are the ONLY alternatives right now and that will not change in the next 20-40 years. Renewable energy (solar, wind etc) can mitigate the problem but cannot eliminate it. So that is their choice. Dispersed pollution and probable climate change from fossil fuels or relatively small quantities of extremely hazardous radioactive material. The geopolitics of either choice are pretty awful as well. Hold your nose and pick one because those are the only choices available.

Large hydro dams are not common

[sjbe]

They handle this by using the excess to pump water into a hydro dam, and using gas turbines to make up the shortfall during the peak.

Most places do not have sufficiently large hydro dams available to make this feasible. Most places just sell off the excess energy (incurring transmission losses along the way) to somewhere else where it is needed.

Give technology a chance to grow

[h00manist]

Nuclear will work. There are several options though. But technology will be created to meet whatever challenge is imposed. If all coal and oil disappeared, there would be technologies to replace it all in a heartbeat. It would require rebuilding huge amounts of infrastructure, generating tons of jobs. There are already lots of options, even if someone wanted to generate all their own energy, it is actually possible for lots of folks.

The only reason we use so much oil and coal is because their lobby/marketing/PR gets their way. Every option that comes forward gets attacked in lots of ways.

We can do it!

[h00manist]

That's all there is to say.

nuke waste 101

[raymorris]

Everything you said makes perfect sense - unless you spend two minutes learning the most basic facts about nuclear waste.

There are basically two kinds of radioactive waste.
There is a small amount of highly radioactive waste. Highly radioactive means it emits it's radiation quickly. That's bad because it emits a lot right now, and good because because by emitting it quickly, the radiation is gone pretty quick. That stuff you want to store in very thick steel containers for a hundred years or so. Since there isn't much of it, that's no problem.

Then, there's the stuff that emits its radiation slowly, so it lasts a long time. On the other hand, because it is emitting slowly, you'd need to have it in your house for a few hundred years before it would make you sick. As a demo, I was going to eat a spoonful of it, which would probably give me a belly ache similar to eating an entire pizza. So no problem with that part either.

The only problem with nuclear waste is that some people don't know the difference. It's purely a political problem, there's no engineering problem. Safe storage is easy, technically speaking. Getting people to understand that after 50 years of misinformation by the anti-business lobby is the hard part. You'll notice that the exact same environmental organizations and leaders who convinced you that nuclear was bad are now trying to undo their earlier misinformation campaign, nowtthat it's obvious that nuclear is the only workable alternative to petroleum for 90% of our needs. Most environmentalists have realized that they can't continue to pander to their traditional allies, the purely anti-business constituency. To save the planet, they have to leave those old allies behind and tell the truth - for most of our needs, it's either nuclear or petroleum, and nuclear is by far the better choice.

Re:nuke waste 101

[Anonymous Coward]

You were going so well until you talked about "saving the planet..." If mankind obliterates itself from the face of the Earth (which is the most it has the power to do at its current state of development), the PLANET won't even get the memo.

Re:Where do you think it came from in th first pla

[weilawei]

AC may have mocked this, but it is correct. Several instances were discovered at Oklo, in Gabon, Africa. I'm not really sure what this has to do with practical energy generation, however.

Level of Anti-nuclear Sentiment is Mind-Boggling

[Adam Jorgensen]

It's sad to see how many people are part of the anti-nuclear group.

Ignorance is not a sufficient excuse for making the wrong decision in today's age of information dissemination.

Re:Where do you think it came from in th first pla

[delt0r]

And there are proposed solutions to those as well. Also they make up a very small portion of waste.

You won't see nuclear plants

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't see nuclear plants run with a modicum of competency.

THAT is the problem with nuclear.

WRONG.

[Anonymous Coward]

"cannot match a cities demand curve any better than solar or wind"

WRONG.

Solar peaks roughly when demand peaks. Wind peaks either side of solar, extending the peak of that to cover the demand of residential use (breakfast and tea).

Your assertion that wind or solar are as bad as coal is wrong.

Re:WRONG.

[Eunuchswear]

Wind peaks either side of solar, extending the peak of that to cover the demand of residential use (breakfast and tea).

This is strange. You think wind has time of day based peaks? Time of year I can imagine, but time of day?

Re:WRONG.

[tbannist]

As I understand it, on a normal day (stormy days are different) the sun will heat the air closest to the ground causing it to rise and mix with the colder air above it which will create wind, thus the strongest winds should coincide with the daily temperature peak which should be sometime in the afternoon. Because the ground tends to cool off quickly after the sun goes down, the air also cools and less of it rises, and thus there is less mixing and the wind will normally be weaker at night.

In coastal areas, there will also normally be a temperature differential between the air over land and over water which will drive some wind on warm days (and potentially cold days too, I guess), amplifying the effect you would get in landlocked areas.

I'm not sure if this daily variance is sufficient to drive a noticeable trend in wind-power generation, but it could be.

Re:WRONG.

[amorsen]

In some areas you can pretty much set your clock by the wind changing. Like at the north end at the Garda Lake in Italy.

Perfect safety = impossible

[sjbe]

You won't see accidents if nuclear plants are operated with a modicum of competency.

Yes you will because humans are involved. Even competent and well intentioned humans make mistakes. If a mistake can be made, eventually it will be made. Nuclear power plants are complicated and a lot of things can go wrong including some things (like natural disasters or wars) that are beyond the control of the people designing and building the plant. You can design a plant to withstand a 8.0 earthquake but what happens when an 8.5 earthquake hits? There is no way to adequately shield a nuke plant from a targeted bomb. We can plan for a lot and nuclear power plants can be operated with reasonable safety but the notion that we won't ever see accidents if plants are operated competently is demonstrably wrong.

Re:Perfect safety = impossible

[loonycyborg]

More like demonstrably right. Both large scale nuclear accidents ARE caused by incompetency. This is for period of whopping 100 years. Human error is common but in competently designed system one error is not enough to lead to catastrophic consequences. Of course malicious destruction of nuclear plants is possible, but so is of any other industrial object involved with dangerous substances, and there are some compared to which cesium and strontium would look like reagents from children chemistry set. I don't say that nuclear plants can be made perfectly safe, but they can be made safe enough for practical use.

Fossil fuels = interim solution, permanent waste

[sjbe]

The more time, effort, and money we waste chasing nukes, the less we have for a real solution.

Alternate solutions ARE being chased but for the next 25-50 years your choices in most locations for base load power are fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Both have extremely serious downsides. Pick your poison. If you are anti-nuke you are de-facto pro fossil fuel until there is some form of breakthrough energy technology (like fusion or superconducting batteries) because that is the only alternative right now. Fossil fuels have serious, climate changing pollution problems which are not so easily contained as fission byproducts. Fission has highly toxic but concentrated waste products. Both cause serious geopolitical problems.

Nobody with half a brain is going to argue that nuclear energy is without some serious problems. The issue is really whether the downside of nuclear is an improvement over the downside of fossil fuels. Personally I favor using fission wherever the geopolitics and geography make it not insanely scary and then some fairly draconian pollution scrubbing technology on fossil fuel burning plants for the rest. Keep pumping money into solar and wind and fusion research. Not a perfect solution but maybe a least-worst solution for the next few decades.

Fossil fuels are subsidized too

[sjbe]

Today, the price point of solar depends on those subsidies. take them away and one of two things will happen:

It depends on MUCH more than just direct subsidies to solar. It depends on the subsidies provided for fossil fuels and nuclear. It depends on the fact that fossil fuel plants do not incur the full economic cost of their waste disposal. It depends on the local geography - if you have a nearby dam, electricity is probably pretty cheap.

Want a level playing field for solar? Make coal and natural gas plants actually have to pay for the cleanup of ALL their pollution rather than just dumping into the air. This includes the full cost of mining, delivering and processing of their fuel as well. I'm fairly confident that solar would become almost immediately competitive.

Fossil fuels receive the most subsidies

[sjbe]

Nuclear power is the most heavily subsidized power source.

No it is not. Fossil fuels are by a wide margin. There are some direct subsidies (lord knows why) which we all know about but there are also indirect subsidies. Fossil fuel plants do not incur the full cost of cleaning up their pollution. They mostly are able to simply dump CO2 and many other emissions into the air. Companies that using fracking for natural gas dump huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the ground which never get cleaned up. Plants that process petrochemicals can be seen burning away by-products. Etc, etc. As a result they effectively are receiving an enormous subsidy. It's a lot cheaper to produce power when you don't have to worry about dealing with the pollution in any meaningful way.

Mr Rushmore

[sjbe]

The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore

I'm sure the pyramids and sphinx in Egypt will be surprised to hear that. Never mind that Mount Rushmore isn't a structure (it's a carving) and receives regular maintenance to ensure the faces don't crumble and fall off.

Re:Mr Rushmore

[MrKaos]

The only human made structure with the potential to last 10000 years is Mt Rushmore

I'm sure the pyramids and sphinx in Egypt will be surprised to hear that. Never mind that Mount Rushmore isn't a structure (it's a carving) and receives regular maintenance to ensure the faces don't crumble and fall off.

I understand that it's a carving. I think a structure similar to the NORAD facility would probably be the type of engineering project that would be appropriate.

Re:Where do you think it came from in th first pla

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing that 99% of nuclear reactor waste is still Uranium then; with a small amount (1%) of pesky not-Uranium that tends to absorb thermal neutrons, making it unsuitable for reactor usage?

Even better news - that 1% goes away after a few hundred years because it's highly radioactive, thus decaying at a much faster rate.

The golden boy becomes a heretic

[Quila]

This should be fun.

Also fun, watching the Republicans praising him for suggesting more nuclear energy.

Here you go.

[DaveV1.0]

How to dispose of nuclear waste in 8 steps:

1. Gather and crush material to be disposed.
2. Mix with material to create a ceramic base.
3. Create 1' diameter by 10' long ceramic cylinders from the base material.
4. Add a 1/2" coating of plastic.
5. Drill a 30,000 foot deep hole in the subducting Pacific plate off the Washington coast.
6. Insert 1,000 or so cylinders, followed by enough concrete to backfill the hole to 10,0000 feel
7. Backfill the last 10,000 feet with material from the initial drilling
8. Repeat

All the details are simply engineering.

Safety

[egarland]

Nuclear is the most dangerous way to generate power.. except all the other ways.

People get all freaked out about how dangerous nuclear power generation can be, and ignore how dangerous all the other forms of power generation *actually are*. They get upset at the potential for long-term damage to the environment but ignore the massive ecological devastation that coal and oil and natural gas are constantly doing to the world. Look at Deepwater Horizon for example. Oil will be fouling and poisoning the gulf for an extremely long time, and the chemicals used in the cleanup will likely reduce the lifespan of the people who helped in the cleanup dramatically. When you look at the damage caused to people and to the environment of power generation objectively, nuclear is by far the safest and least damaging option, even factoring Fukishima and Chernobyl which represent risks that are unlikely to cause problems in the future.

Research is unpredictable

[sjbe]

Furthermore, it is not a solution to the nuclear waste problem.

The nuclear waste problem is a tough one. Problem is that most people are asking the wrong question. The fossil fuel waste problem is just as tough if not worse. The real question is whether nuclear waste is preferable to fossil fuel waste. For the next 20-50 years at minimum we are going to have most of our power generation coming from those two sources (progress in renewables notwithstanding). So pick your poison. Arguing against one is by default an argument for the other. Both have very serious problems and there is no near term viable replacement available.

And it is not a solution as a long-time energy source.

Nuclear fission is approximately as long term an solution as fossil fuels is. A couple hundred years at least. After that, who knows...

the re-newable energy fraction have working machinery and also the energy storage problem is solvable, as we already have that technology even if it is not yet cheap, reliable or implementable everywhere

It is not remotely a given that the energy storage problem is solvable and unfortunately there is no evidence whatsoever that we are close to solving it now. While I agree that is MAY be solvable (and I hope it is), that is not remotely the same argument. We have to invent some totally new technology to store these vast amounts of energy. As a result we really need to be investing in solar/wind generation, battery technology, fusion, and a few other technologies. Research results are not predictable so we need to place a lot of big bets and see what happens.

However, these issues are easier to fix than come up with totally new technology.

So your argument is it is easier to come up with a totally new technology than it is to come up with some other totally new technology? Rather peculiar argument you have there. It is not remotely clear that coming up with a breakthrough in battery technology will be any easier than a breakthrough in fission or fusion.

Re: common sense for 40 generations?

[petervandervos]

Do you want to hold on to that coke can for 10.000 years? OK, not you alone, also you child. And his/her child for the next 40 generations.

Irony

[DarthVain]

I would say worse (not in actuality, but in hypocrisy) is that by far they buy the most power from France, who in turn generates 80% of their power VIA.... nuclear.

So what is Germany doing again?

They are politically making it someone else's problem while not solving their own issues.

Re:Irony

[Uecker]

Or... it is simpy not true: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/france-power-grid-idUSL6N0AQECN20130122

Re:Irony

[DarthVain]

Hmmm. Interesting. Always neat when you find contrary stories.
Makes me wonder what is actually true and where the bias might be.

This seems to be from the french perspective (mostly), while the one I read I seem to recall being German. Perhaps there was some political bias in the German one.

Then again:
"The grid said the rise in German power imports was due to a big increase in sun power capacity and because coal-fired power plants were now far more competitive."

That was really the only explanation given. They went on to talk about other numbers, but don't provide any for the facts around WHY? "Big increase" how big, why not use a number. Coal-fired plans? So Germany is using more production from coal? Importing from other countries that use coal as it is cheaper power? How much?

Anyway hard to tell if it is just poor writing or if again, there is only a partial story being presented.

Also who the fsck is "The grid" and are they unbiased?

Waste Disposal

[phorm]

How many coke cans would it take for - say - a few decades of the N. American population. Could you fit said coke cans onto a shuttle and blast it off towards the sun? (assuming that you wouldn't just reprocess it and re-use, as much of this waste could be if we weren't... wasteful).

Re:Waste Disposal

[BasilBrush]

2 out of 135 space shuttle launches were catastrophic failures. What are you going to do when a shuttle full of nuclear waste explodes in the high atmosphere?

Re:Waste Disposal

[MobyDisk]

I wish I could find it, but someone just recently posted an explanation on Slashdot as to why it is really really expensive to send something to the sun. It's apparently one of the most difficult places to get to. In short, since the earth is in a stable orbit around the sun at a ridiculous speed, you have to decelerate enough to cancel-out all of that speed, or you wind up orbiting the sun or the earth. It would use more in fuel than you gained from the material in the first place.

Re:Waste Disposal

[MobyDisk]

Found it!
http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/

Re:Waste Disposal

[toddestan]

It seems that if we were to go that route, it would be much easier to dump the waste into one of the gas giants as they are considerably easier to get to and just as permanent. Though we would still have the problem of getting the waste off of Earth in a completely safe manner.

Re:Waste Disposal

[Unequivocal]

Also, even if you have a 1 in 10,000 catastrophic launch failure rate, you will in very short order spray highly radioactive waste all over the upper atmosphere trying to get it to the sun.

Re:Nukes good theoretically; practically, not so m

[kevin lyda]

Designs are great but they need to be built with actual, physical materials. Those materials will be supplied by someone.

Every single large nuclear plant to date has been built and run by large corporations.

comparing apples & apple-like oranges...

[Fubari]

From the referenced article...
page 2, paragraph 7:

The question boils down to the accumulating impacts of daily incremental pollution from burning coal or the small risk but catastrophic consequences of even one nuclear meltdown.

And at the end:

As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.

The referenced article isn't the slam-dunk that its headline suggests. There are other more valid reasons to be pro-nuke than pro-coal. (Heck, there are valid reasons to be anti-coal even if you take nuclear-anything out of the equation.) The article doesn't add as much in the way of useful light as I had hoped it would; interesting, but not a compelling data point.

Reasonable argument but

[WillAffleckUW]

On the whole, since we literally are close to the tipping point that will make it incredibly expensive (as in ten to twenty times) to the GDP to deal with climate change events (storms, massive fluctuations like bizarre cold snaps, acidic oceans destroying shellfish, Antarctic ice sheet sliding off and raising sea level 2 meters worldwide, etc), this is a reasonable argument for short term thinking, given the massive increase in coal use in China and worldwide.

However, to do it safely, you would have to use either the Canadian or French model, where you have 1 or 2 plant types that are rolled out everywhere, not the US-based Each Plant Is Special And Different approach, to minimize accidents.

That said, you still need to actually reduce - not maintain - coal oil and even natural gas (all fossil fuels) use worldwide, especially in the EU, US, China, and India.

One way would be to not subsidize nuclear energy, but to remove all tax subsidies and exemptions for fossil fuels, charge market rate leases for public lands (seriously, 5 cents to mine an entire acre in a national park or at sea?), and use those funds to - at the same time - provide capital (not operating expenses or subsidies, just low cost loan capital) for renewable energies (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal).

Adapt or die.

Because climate change is now, and I hope you don't live close to a coast.

Re:Reasonable argument but

[BlueTemplar]

Exactly. The problem is that historically, when better efficiency in energy was achieved, we didn't use less energy : we just consumed more with the same energy as before. This consumption mentality has to go if we hope to survive as a species.

Re:TL;DR (huh??) "Magnets! How do they work??"

[TheRealHocusLocus]

So the small amount of waste (from a commercial reactor that doesn't exist yet) stored today needs to be stored until 2313 to be safe

Okay, world installed generation capacity 2010 5,067 gigawatts Let's replace it all with LFTRs.

Let's pick a hypothetical 1Gw LFTR design, most of the LFTR folks think there would be no advantage to scale larger.

5,067 of these LFTRs produce (5067*0.17) ~861 tons of waste per year requiring 300 year storage.

So with no increase in LFTRs from the 2008 power capacity, as much as (861*300)~258,300 tons of waste would be stored in this single (hypothetical) depot, which represents the waste of 300 years' total world electricity generation. Using density of lead (arbitrary) I get ~ 729,700 cubic feet, or a an array of foot-cubes 855 feet square. Or ~38 American football fields, that is if there is no stacking of these cubes. It all could fit into Yucca Mountain with room for a few more thousand years' worth to spare. That is, IF it was necessary to store it long. But really only ~300 years.

The world's nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain with LOTS of room to spare.

On second thought, let's reserve Yucca Mountain for tourism and grab 40 football fields at random.

There's also the mounting pile of lower level nuclear waste that exists regardless of primary fuel type. Don't get me wrong, it's a better option than 10000 years and bigger piles, but "only ~300 years" is deliberately deceptive.

I reserve my deliberate deceptions for less important topics than Thorium.

One of the reasons I sing the praises of Kirk Sorensen's two fluid LFTR idea is that there is really no practical life-limit envisioned for the fluoride salts themselves. Even the Hastelloy-N plumbing is potentially recyclable. While others like David LeBlanc are pursuing interesting variations such as the Denatured MSR which delays processing as might be desired in a small reactor, I believe Sorensen has decided to pursue the 'endgame' and produce the most useful and logical embodiment to the concept. His active processing column is (in my opinion as a layman) a best-fit for the scale of 1GW reactors that could power our world.

I do not completely believe the Chinese Thorium time window feint. I think there might be tactics in play to dupe world investors into thinking that Thorium energy is on the really slow boat from China, so they have plenty of time to lollygag and burn more coal. Then (I think) one day, sooner rather than later, it will be suddenly announced there is a working prototype and the Chinese firms are looking for capital.

Regardless of the Chinese effort (they really NEED this technology as do we) I'd rather see some US investors in play to build this thing that we have invested developed.

Re:Nukes good theoretically; practically, not so m

[BlueTemplar]

I'm pretty sure that the URSS ones have been built by the government.

Re:TL;DR (huh??) "Magnets! How do they work??"

[GumphMaster]

Lets us, just for argument sake, accept your maths as to the total high-level spent fuel at 861 tons for the global generated power at 2010, and let's pretend we can transport and densely store it on hypothetical football fields without encasing it much larger volumes of other material to stop it getting too hot. From your reference site we see that the world electricity consumption increased from 16391 billion kwH to 18466 billion kWh over five years (2006-2010). That's exponential growth at 3% and new generating capacity will have to match that for the foreseeable future. So you start with 861 tons (2430 cu ft) next year you will need to find storage for another 887 tons (2500 cu ft), the next for 913 tons (2580 cu ft)... In 10 years time you will need to find space for an extra 1157 tons (3270 cu ft), after 20 add 1555 tons (4390 cu ft), after 50 the annual addition will be 3774 tons (10600 cu ft) and total under storage will be a shade over 100000 tons (285000 cu ft). I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; in the exceptionally unlikely event consumption does not plateau in the meantime, by the time your first fuel is expiring at 300 years the current year's waste will be 6.11 million tons and the total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).

The Yucca Mountain facility has a statutory limit of 85,000 short tons. Even by your no-growth estimate Yucca mountain is already too small to hold 300 year's worth of thorium waste (let alone 300 years of current fuel wastes). At 3% consumption growth it will be full in less than 50 years. Of course, political reality means there will never be a single repository (or indeed universal nuclear power) but the requirement to manage the global total amount of waste would remain.

Re:TL;DR (huh??) "Magnets! How do they work??"

[TheRealHocusLocus]

I trust you start to see the problem of exponential growth. I don't think 50 years of sustained growth at 3% while places like Africa or India "catch up" with the profligate west is unreasonable (even if the west cuts back). Taken to an absurd extreme; [â¦] total mass under storage will be ~203 million ton (~575 million cu. ft, or 30000 hot American football fields).

Thanks for the excellent breakout. Okay, hrrrmph. Perhaps my 'no growth' napkin math was an attempt to illustrate in simple snapshot-fashion what the geographical waste-footprint of this technology would be, in a way that could be grasped easily and took a minimum of work.

Or was my failure to to factor exponential growth due to laziness? I'd rather take the short answer and say yes, rather than muse on which exponents to use. Start with people. Which projected population curve should I use: the red 'rabbits-R-us' or the green 'UN releases contraceptives into water supply' curve? For the US population growth has been 0.75%, fertility rate of 1.88 children per woman, less than the 2.1 'replacement rate'. As a clumsy social commentator I have to conclude that choice has something to do with it. I cannot really suggest that there could be a natural plateau to population growth rate where your average woman wants a reasonable number of children without running afoul of Catholic seed bank or some future Pol Pot's depopulation agenda.

What about energy use? Should I take the position that the developing world has no right to a level of energy use equal to the most use-heavy? Could there be some future plateau to worldwide per-capita energy use once (reasonable) conservation measures are in place AND Africa is completely wired for electricity as is North America? Perhaps!

All in all 30,000 football fields for a World -- with a continuous removal of decayed safe-matter from the bottom of the stack, doesn't faze me on a planet of some 50 million square land-miles. That's probably all the football fields in the United States. Oh well, there's always baseball.

I'm not trying to straw-man you here, the use of exponents, some times taken from thin air for planning purposes has always been wise for planning. My assertiveness arises from the same utopian dream as the people who would sincerely wish Africa would and could do it all with windmills and solar farms. But it won't work for us, and would never work for them. My utopian dream is to see Africa covered with grids and base load energy production to US levels. Because that is what they want, and I am morally obligated to want it on their behalf. Because most women in the world today still wash clothes by hand.

Re: common sense for 40 generations?

[DuckDodgers]

In 10,000 years, an equivalence in coal use would be over 10 trillion tons, and as others have posted, burning coal releases radiation too. So instead of being dead from radiation from spent nuclear fuel, our descendants can all be dead from radiation from burnt coal plus black lung.

Re: common sense for 40 generations?

[petervandervos]

Do you really think we are going to use coal for 10.000 years?

Re: common sense for 40 generations?

[DuckDodgers]

Do you really think nuclear technology will be static for 10.000 years?

Re: common sense for 40 generations?

[petervandervos]

The waste will be a problem for a long time. In Germany they already had to dig up radioactive waste : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine. You can not count on your grand children to solve your problems.

Re: common sense for 40 generations?

[DuckDodgers]

There are reactor types that consume waste. That could mitigate the problem. There is also the Thorium nuclear reactors, which were researched in the 1950s or 1960s and proven feasible but abandoned by the US government because the Thorium nuclear reactors could not be made into weapons. Thorium reactor waste has a much shorter half-life. And of course, controlled fusion has been "20 years away" for fifty years. But sooner or later we'll get it right, and even if it takes 300 years of further investment, the payoff is immense.