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Why James Hansen Is Wrong About Nuclear Power (thinkprogress.org)
mdsolar writes: Climatologist James Hansen argued last month, "Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change." He is wrong. As the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and International Energy Agency (IEA) explained in a major report last year, in the best-case scenario, nuclear power can play a modest, but important, role in avoiding catastrophic global warming if it can solve its various nagging problems — particularly high construction cost — without sacrificing safety. Hansen and a handful of other climate scientists I also greatly respect — Ken Caldeira, Tom Wigley, and Kerry Emanuel — present a mostly handwaving argument in which new nuclear power achieves and sustains an unprecedented growth rate for decades. The one quantitative "illustrative scenario" they propose — "a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system" — is far beyond what the world ever sustained during the nuclear heyday of the 1970s, and far beyond what the overwhelming majority of energy experts, including those sympathetic to the industry, think is plausible.
If it doesn't solve it completely, don't do it at all. Selectively applied of course..
mdsolar, this is absolute trash. No citations, only "it can't work". Fuck you and your worthless do nothing attitude. Please leave. You are approaching Bennett Haselton levels here. No, actually, he prodives bad arguments and poor citations. This is actually worse. This is Jon Katz level.
Climate change scientists are prone to exaggeration. Exaggerated claims about threats, exaggerated claims about temperature increases, exaggerated claims about remedies. But the guys who say it's NOT the end of the world are name-called. Because telling dramatic stories is how you get money and power without earning it.
{anything} is the only viable path to {anything}
Is wrong by definition.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
In all these debates I'm always amazed how the simple "big picture" of the physics involved is disregarded. It all boils down to energy density. Is there any other power generation technology that comes close? The only other alternative is to reduce our energy usage and if that ain't gonna happen you need to build lots of reactors producing lots of energy. Sure you can cover the surface of the Earth in solar panels I suppose, but that seems to be a bit of a maintenance headache (not to mention the energy cost of creating the panels in the first place). It seems to me all the negatives of nuclear boil down to the cost of making it safe which surely we can do a more efficient job of? We can't keep holding out hope for fusion, we need to make plans for relying on fission for the foreseeable future.
present a mostly handwaving argument in which new nuclear power achieves and sustains an unprecedented growth rate for decades
Well at least they are moving up in the world. Handwaving is definitely an improvement from the statistical manipulation they have been using to foist global warming on the world.
Nuclear powers' 'various nagging problems' won't be an issue if we started using thorium-based reactors.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The proposal also runs out of uranium before all the reactors are built. http://slashdot.org/journal/53...
If you're going to complain about high construction costs it's worth looking at what has caused those costs. Nuclear power is completely unaffordable. We simply can't build any more plants. Yet somehow the world has built hundreds already with many in the USA which currently has very cheap power. The east is still building them. So what is this mythical high cost? After all the cost of materials has reduced, the cost of construction has only increased marginally and the designs these days aren't very complicated from a control perspective.
Oh that's right regulatory overhead.
Thermal power plant need cooling and nuclear need the most to protect the fuel. Already cooling resouces are limited and will become more so. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
James Hansen is right about this. Nuclear reactor technology has advanced to the point that safe-by-design reactors can be built, with technology that prevents meltdown in the event of total power and coolant failure. No other technology offers the energy density necessary to replace fossil fuel power plants.
The one quantitative "illustrative scenario" they propose — "a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system"
Who can write this with a straight face ? The premise that humankind should emit no carbon is ridiculous, even if you subscribe to the global doom claims. Even if you do feel that your net carbon emission should be zero (be sure not to get cremated) since when is Atomic Power the only non carbon emitting source of energy ?
The Proposal is for currently available reactor designs.
RTFA http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
Thorium reactors.
Has a breeder program. Sounds like a great plan.
mdsolar's point isn't that we should build no new nuclear, at least not in this thread. His point is that nuclear can't, in and of itself, decarbonize the electric sector. We simply don't have the capacity to build that many nuclear power plants simultaneously, nor do we have the fuel, nor do we have the money.
The first one might be overcome. After all, if world leaders were able to simultaneously lay out this plan and get political support for it, part of the plan would include training more engineers, trades, and other jobs necessary. We might not be able to build 100 per year in 2016 (or even 2020), but we could ramp up.
The second one might be overcome. After all, with pressure for more fuel, we might go out and find more fuel, develop new techniques to find, recover, and process more fuel, etc. I doubt we could overcome it, but generally speaking if we went "long" on nuclear, at least some more fuel would turn up.
The third one is the toughest. Nuclear power, today, is more expensive than wind and in some places, more expensive than solar. Given that wind and solar don't have the political opposition, don't have 10-15 year lags from "let's build it" to "let's turn it on", and can be built in more places at far smaller increments, it's really tough to argue that we should spend the money on nuclear when there are cheaper options. But -- that could change. Improving the regulatory climate could help lower construction costs, as could improvements in design. Wind and solar $/kW will continue to fall for a while, but perhaps their supply inputs will become scarce and, at least for wind, the locations for the best wind become scarce. At some point in the future it's possible that the $/kWh for nuclear will become cheap enough, but it's not there now.
My view: don't put any option off the table, but let's spend our money to get the most decarbonization per buck. Right now, that means going long on energy efficiency, retiring the old coal units, building wind and solar where we can, and keeping (most) nuclear units already built up and running, so long as their safety is secure. Simultaneously, we should price carbon appropriately, eliminate subsidies on oil, coal, and gas, and be working to lower the cost of all no-carbon generating options using both technology and regulatory approaches. All of those things, together, will result in a steady least cost decarbonization of our electric sector, and if/when/where nuclear can beat out wind and solar, so be it.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
There are two problems with solar: night and clouds. There is one problem with wind: it's not always windy. Wind installations are typically combined with natural gas burners to supplement electricity when it's not windy enough.
Nuclear is the only power source that can handle a huge load constantly without interruption. That is why Hansen supports it, because if you want to stop releasing CO2 into the atmosphere without messing up our lifestyles, it's the only way with current technology.
The article cites this paper, which claims to have found a way to handle electricity generation from wind/water/solar while dealing with the interruptions. It assumes by 2050 all residential and commercial heating will have thermal storage, like this community in Alaska. It is up to you to decide if that is a reasonable or practical assumption.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Existing plants are too expensive to run and are closing. http://insideclimatenews.org/s... Nuclear in not cheap at all.
But capable of %80. It's going to take a combination of everything. Run nuclear the backbone but use up renewable where and when you can get it.
And I'll gladly live next to a reactor if I get a little something out of it... like free power for life. You could build it in the desert and I'd move right next to it and just crank up the AC.
But really we need to focus more on small thorium reactors with enough classic reactors to breed the thorium. And truly our country needs to get off it's ass and start recycling nuclear waste.
The biggest problem nuclear has is the "3 Mile Island", "Chernobyl", "Fukushima" effect. Basically, when things go bad, they can go REALLY bad. Then of course, there was the San Onofre maintenance issue which generated a ton of bad publicity - in a highly populated area; ultimately leading to the shutdown of the reactor. People don't like the idea of being radiated; and understandably so. It is an extremely high hurdle to restore public confidence. Even those who claim to be "pro-nuclear" would say "yes, fine, as long as it isn't in my back yard". The new designs are far safer and more efficient. The industry needs to now solve the PR issue before it can gain traction again - which means an expensive campaign. Nothing is going to change until that happens.
Sloth: Sticking our heads in the sand rather than making the science better solves nothing.
Thorium: Pretty much not able to go critical. The flaws are very high corrosion of the system but thorium is plentiful planet-wide.
Solar: In the end, it's the way to go - but it will take a while before commercial production is at a cost-effective price point.
Wind: Yeah, right. Inconsistent with horrible returns on investment (18 yr payup).
Storage: using lead batteries in cars all over the planet to store energy at night has serious long-term consequences...
Best bet: A combination of solar and hydro: daytime sun pumps water to run turbines at night...
Meantime: We don't have a choice about cutting down on carbon output so let's go nuclear.
Lastly: We are not tackling the issue of methane from animal husbandry. This eclipses all other pollutants and is being ignored as a major contributor.
*** Don't be dull.***
Offshore wind looks to have a good chance at getting very cheap. The capacity there is overwhelming.
The technological problem with nuclear power is that no one has come up with a passively safe design.
Actually, recent generations are passively safe.
Safety systems that depend on human intervention have been shown to be impossible to implement and maintain consistently, at least in a commercial environment.
Code for "profit is evil!" There are 440 commercially operated nuclear plants in the world (as of January 2016) with a safety record spanning about 50 years indicating that they do a pretty good job compared to alternate power sources like hydro, coal, wind, or solar.
We can't even maintain safety and quality control standards during the construction phase. We repeatedly have had nuclear plants fail at least in part because they weren't constructed to spec.
You have yet to demonstrate that the "specs" actually help make nuclear power safer, let us note. A lot of relatively poor choices, extending the lives of old nuclear plants, happens because no one is making enough new plants to specs that the old plants could never achieve.
Barring breakthroughs in fusion or another new energy source, the only solution to climate change is that 1st world countries are going to have to reduce their standard of living. Ultimately it will happen one way or the other.
Unless, of course, it doesn't happen one way or another. The problem with this sort of thinking, is that you completely ignore technology or population reduction. Most of what we want doesn't require emission of CO2 or exponential population growth. Technology is well on its way to disentangling standard of living from a reliance on fossil fuels.
And one of the obvious things missed here is that a higher standard of living and wealth translates into negative population rates. By ruling out higher standards of living, you are creating a permanent climate problem of continual human exponential population growth followed by environmentally catastrophic die-offs.
Why would I think you calling someone an "idiot" shows your horrible bias?
I have always suspected that the high upfront cost of new reactors is primarily caused by the Greens' legal delay strategy. Stretch the construction timetable out far enough, and bonding cost will eventually eat up any conceivable budget. Look to China to see what can be done where Greens have no input to the process. According to Reuters, China is building eight reactors of the standard AP-1000 design for $24 billion. In the US, we are close to spending about that much for just one new plant.
And yes, the China program went through the same post-Fukushima safety check cycle as in Japan. Like Japan, they chose to proceed.
The rate of fusion research was set when we figured out we'd run out of uranium and coal around 2100. That was back in the 1970s. The rate is pretty much fixed because the work force has too have PhDs to do the work and you have to have PhD advisors to get more PhDs. Big bottleneck. There are some nonstandard approaches, but the big programs can't be accelerated much.
What science is "science settled" said about? CO2 **IS** a GHG. Settled. We ARE producing it. Settled. What do you think you are referring to (and where is this proof that it happens) when you complain about that?
We *HAVE* an agreement. Just like we have an agreement that slavery is bad, murder is bad, theft is bad, and so on. What on earth are you referring to when you complain about that?
And what the fuck is all this BS about "sophists"?
When the petrol company demands payment, are they these sophists demanding money????
Until we make a concerted national effort to maximize renewables throughout the grid and the country, any new nuclear should remain on the design table where it belongs. Nuclear will always be a neutron source and always result in a large amount of very toxic and persistent byproducts, and must be a last resort, always. Don't even consider a new nuclear reactor until sun, wind, water, tides, and even fart energy has been harvested to the max, or else you're just a mouthpiece for an industry looking to grift profits on the back of a government and citizenry left to clean up your mess.
Cute! Non-operating plants like Fukushima and Chernobyl have good safety records too....
You might like this http://slashdot.org/journal/25...
In all these debates I'm always amazed how the simple "big picture" of the economics involved is disregarded. . .
/.ers likes to fantasize a world not run by businessmen, and that is fine as long you realize that is just a fantasy. The current world is driven by business and the economic environment that shapes business decisions (though, this may not apply to the basement dwellers that frequent this site . . .).
The nature of some technologies result in centralized and monopolistic markets. In contrast, some technologies are conducive to decentralized and competitive markets. In the end, commoditization wins through rapid advancements and by pricing everything else out of the market. For instance, look at all the centralized land phone lines NOT being installed in Africa, yet phone usage is booming.
I know
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Impossible to build that many nuclear ships.
ThinkProgress is the political blog of the "Center for American Progress", a highly partisan political organization. Romm himself is also highly partisan, and the argument in his article is a political one, not a scientific one. In short, please keep this partisan political crap off Slashdot.
Don't need that many nuclear ships; the world does have 140 of them in operation though. would we be better off using fluoride salt reactors to burn spent fuel instead of the sulphor and co2 belching cargo container ships? I think so
But I first need one answer: What are we going to do with the waste?
I am certainly NOT going to accept that companies build reactors, reap the profits and then miraculously go out of business when the reactors are no longer profitable and society gets the spent fuel dumped on its back. Anyone building a nuclear reactor must prove that he not only has a plan for how to get rid of the waste but also the monetary background to do so. That money could e.g. be parked in government bonds, these things tend to have a long run time, much like those reactors.
And we can ensure that way that the companies will clean up after themselves when everything's said and done. Because that's the one problem we face today whenever one of those things go out of business: They are dumped upon the population and we're stuck with a rotting piece of radioactive trash that costs a fortune to get rid of.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This deserves repeating:
because no one is making enough new plants to specs that the old plants could never achieve.
The reason we had disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl is because we stopped building new reactors at the rate we were before. If we kept building reactors at the same rate then we'd have seen new reactors replace the old. Instead we now run the reactors until they fail. Considering how these old reactors were built they tend to fail spectacularly.
Water cooled reactors with solid fuel separate the hot fuel from the water with zirconium metal. If the zirconium gets too hot it will burn, using the water as an oxygen source. This releases hydrogen gas into the reactor vessel, building pressure. If the gas is not released in a manner to prevent ignition then you have the makings of a large fuel-air bomb, sitting right on top of some very hot (and now likely molten) radioactive sludge. BOOM! Then radioactive debris, still molten and/or burning, now rains down over the reactor site. Good job guys, let's keep these things running for the next fifty years, because God knows we can't build them better than this.
Oh, but we can build them better. We can build air cooled reactors. No water needed. Not only do we do away with an oxygen rich coolant (and don't fool yourself, water is largely made of oxygen, air not so much) that is corrosive, but we do away with the zirconium cladding too. Other benefits to air cooling is that the reactor does not need to be near water, and the water nearby is not super heated by the reactor, the fishes would be pleased.
We can use liquid fuel, fuel that is already molten so it cannot "melt down" like a solid fuel reactor. A solid fuel reactor that turns itself, through meltdown, into a liquid fuel reactor will burn itself a new reactor vessel into the floor of the previous vessel. It will burn itself into a nice spherical shape to assure a good neutron economy making sure it gets nice and hot. A liquid fuel reactor cannot do this because the floor of the reactor would be built in a way that, in the unlikely event it happens, if containment it lost the fuel will spread out. Without concentrating the fuel the fission chain is broken, and cannot restart.
The arguments against nuclear power are based on building new reactors with the same flaws that existing reactors have. We can build new ones without those flaws. That's not saying these new designs will be flawless, but at least the new flaws will not result in the reactor undergoing rapid self disassembly on worldwide television. These molten fuel reactors could fail but at least they won't spread burning radioactive pieces all over the place.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
For industry xyz to take off, you need laws/policies supporting xyz. To get the laws, you need the 1% to support. Nuclear is a technology which can benefit everyone in the long run (all physics principles, energy density, etc); but it doesn't benefit the 1% now. It only negatively affects them (like revenue loss to coal industry/ solar/ wind etc). So unless the industry is going to benefit the 1% and it's in a such way they reap the lions share of the profit, the industry is not going to take off. As we know, it's democracy only in the name.
If we build a large number of reactors we certainly must have a much safer type than currently exist. Large numbers of reactors amplify the chances of a mishap. We also must seriously consider what will be required in the way of waste products and removal of reactors that age. I like solar and wind and tidal generation but we have seen nothing in regard to how strong a hurricane such units can survive. I'm in florida where hurricanes are a certainty.
An instant's thought shows that a figure of 124,000 warships (a ship is 1000+ tons) is insane. The US Navy peak strength in 1945 was 6768 ships, so in your fantasy we must have lost 117,232 ships. Obviously this did not happen, or our entire manpower resources would have been exhausted.
That is the figure for ALL "ships", not just warships. And it falsely includes bullshit small craft like 82,000 Higgins landing craft as "ships". Over 5000 more were merchant ships. The true figure for production of actual ships for the US Navy in WW2 is 6771
http://renewableenergysolar.ne... they are made of sand. The walrus and the carpenter had a good cry about how abundant sand is.
If the rest of the world will go to 1/3th of 1st world energy consumption we will need a lot of new power in near future. "Renewables" are not enough even if we focus everything on building them.
I quote Dr. Ripudaman Malhotra @ TEAC7: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpXG3zyg3gk)
If we want to replace one cubic mile of oil by 2050 we need:
200 Three Gorges dam. One built quarterly. We have perhaps three (3) rivers left for such installations. So, no new big hydro. Small perhaps but I personally enjoy more of free flowing rivers than dam lakes.
2500 900MW nuclear plants. One built every week. Completely possible, no shortage of fuel with fast neutron reactors where the remaining 97% of nuclear fuel gets used.
7700 900MW consentrated solar parks 25% availability (10x size of Andasol CSP). 3 a week for next 50 years. This is possible but getting difficult.
3 000 000 1.65MW windmills 35% availability. 1200 per week for next 50 years. This is where it starts getting hard. We need 50 million tonnes of steel/year (possible) and lots of rare earths (not possible) for generators, transmission lines and electronics and billions of tons concrete for offshore installations. All of them are big carbon emitters. Low power density creates need for large power networks, transmissions losses reduce the efficiency of such system. Still I say go for it where the wind is constant, like trade wind regions.
4 200 000 000 (4.2 billion) solar roofs 2.2kw 20% availability. 250 000 new installations _every_ day till 2050. I am sorry, this is not possible. We don't have enough roofs at places where people can actually afford solar roofs and their lifetime, even if increased to 35 years, is not enough.
So this is why we must build 4th gen Uranium-Thorium reactors with passive safety systems. Reactors which operate at 700-800C and produce process heat. Then we can decarbonize things like concrete production and recycle municipal waste/biomass to liquid fuels etc.
These new plants are modular where every part except of the concrete can be swapped when it gets old or fails some way. Concrete is long lasting stuff. It is possible to get Colosseum like lifetimes for these installations, 2000 years easily. 4th gen reactors close the nuclear fuel cycle so the unusable radioactive byproducts are minimal and they have a short half life.
What is worrying me is that the projected energy consumption is nine CMO (all energy forms converted to oil) by 2050. We are using 3.5CMO now. So basically we have to build everything non-fossil source we can. This is possible with nuclear because that is the one which actually makes money to finance the other not-so efficient energy sources.
If you look back through the archives, you might be able to find a few of my longer and more detailed responses whenever the subject of nuclear energy arises. I'll restate my conclusions here.
Current nuclear energy production techniques produce new waste products that did not exist before. These products are so deadly that touching them for a reasonable period of time will result in your painful death in a few days to a few months. These waste products are dangerous for timescales of hundreds of thousands of years, give or take one order of magnitude. I'll restrict my analysis to this so-called high-level radioactive waste, not low-level radioactive waste like contaminated equipment and clothing.
The earliest written languages are around 5,000 years old, give or take a thousand years. Nobody except for a handful of people in the world can read those languages. Most humans can only read languages a few hundred years old at most. In the poorest regions of the world in 2016, half of the local population can read no language whatsoever, local or remote, ancient or modern, because they are illiterate.
Regions of the globe that formerly had the leading civilizations can fall on hard times due to overly intensive agriculture, drought, earthquakes, other types of natural disasters, or any number of freak occurrences. North America, over thousands of years, could swap places with sub-Saharan Africa in terms of, most importantly, literacy, scientific and otherwise. There is no guarantee of forward technological progress. Simply look at the Roman Empire and the following Dark Ages. It took civilization until the 20th century to recover most of what was lost.
Let's fast forward 25,000 years. Due to climate change, there is a population of mostly illiterate nomadic herders in North America. Quite by accident, they come across our 2016 state of the art nuclear waste containment facility. Over the years all of the security measures have been destroyed by natural disasters of one kind or another. Amazingly there are still legible signs posted in 100 of the most common languages from 2016 Earth. Since these herders can't read, the signs are quite useless. Even if the locals could read, the signs would take weeks for academics living thousands of miles away to decipher. Being curious and in need of building supplies, these individuals clean out the facility, emptying all high-level waste containers, hoping to find useful materials. Over the next few weeks the material spreads to other local tribes. The advanced civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa are unaware of this until after a few more weeks tens of thousands of people from the primitive tribes of North America start dying from radiation poisoning. All because some pretty ignorant people in 2016 thought that nuclear energy was completely safe.
This is what nuclear energy produces: Ticking, deadly time bombs for future civilizations, with no guaranteed way to warn them of the danger.
May it be that you mix up something that is rather small, like a plan, with something that is quite huge, like a ship?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The author claims that the French rate of 3/year during the peak of their nuclear building program shows how ridiculous 115/year is; what that fails to account for is that France has 1% of the world population; so such a rate is fine.
The only logical and truly future proofing of power is a de-centralised power generation model (it doesn't matter if its, solar, wind, etc). But that would mean big power corporations would lose profits, AND that's the underlying problem that needs addressing first.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) magical ( )vigilante
approach to minimizing global warming by expanding nuclear power. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(X) People are afraid of nuclear power, because nuclear.
(X) Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) itself is argued not to exist.
(X) There are cheaper, more established alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar.
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) People's irrational fear of nuclear power.
(X) People's lack of science literacy.
(X) People's devotional belief for/against AGW.
(X) Costs.
(X) NIMBY attitudes.
(X) Politics (general).
(X) Donald Trump.
(X) Terrorists.
(X) Asshats (other).
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical.
(X) It requires cooperation and agreement between too many conflicting groups.
(X) It requires deliberate, informed decision making from people and politicians.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Solar panels are made of sand
That is like saying cars are made out of steel. It vastly oversimplifies things.
The first photocells were made from silicon wafers, the same process as used by the semiconductor industry, but modern PV cells use a variety of other materials, to increase efficiency to acceptable levels, such as Gallium, Copper and Indium. These higher efficiency cells are what are referred to by anyone talking about the future of PV cells, because they are the ones that can meet the efficiency targets necessary to make solar cheap enough to be truly competitive. The problem is that these materials are only cheap because the quantities needed for production of todays volumes are easily within the availability of the materials. If you ramp up high efficiency PV cell production, you quickly discover that several of the materials needed will run severely short of supply before even a significant fraction of global power demand is met.
While Solar will make a strong addition to the global power grid, it cannot, by itself, make more than a minority contribution.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Some years back a few researchers assembled a paper outlining how all sorts of technologies and measures could reduce CO2 output, referring to each as a wedge (slice of the reduction pie). That remains the ONLY study I've seen that realistically included all feasible options without venturing into blue-sky speculation and handwaving arguments.
With respect, mdsolar, your view of Pax Solaris depends on taking an extremely shallow view of solar energy while diving deep into the gritty problems with how nuclear energy has been used in the past.
Solar energy is intrinsically diffuse while nuclear power sources are intrinsically focused. Those characteristics are fixed in reality but little else about them is. We certainly should not do "more of the same old" in nuclear power. We just as certainly need far better ways to collect and focus solar power.
Finding better ways to do things is what technical people should be doing.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
waste, which has never been handled well
We built a perfectly good, and safe, and vast long-term waste sequestration facility inside Yucca Mountain. It was never put into use thanks to brain-dead Nevada politicians. Never mind that it's not even in anyone's back yard.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Correct: the systems shown in the cutaway diagram are not that complex. In fact, over the decades, more engineering has gone into the subsystems inside the tractor-trailer truck that's included in the picture; its engine, and electronic engine control system, and diesel exhaust scrubber, and even the design of its tire tread, to name a few examples.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Plus, do you think a submitter named "mdsolar" might be bringing a preconceived bias into the solar vs. nuclear debate?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Dopant is explained in the link. You should RTFA.
You seem to have misunderstood solar tech. Silicon does very well. http://www.solarplaza.com/chan...
do we always seem to get into the mode of assuming that a large problem will have a single simple solution? In most of the world, solar will do nicely for many homes. In the right circumstances, wind is a useful option. Nuclear, too, has its place, as does hydroelectric. If we are to migrate away from fossil fuels, it would seem highly unlikely that we will move to a single form of power generation, but, rather, will use a group of technologies where they are best suited.
linquendum tondere
The French do not subsidize their nuclear, which has been 75% of their electrical production for decades. Their accident and death rates are microscopic compared to any other form of generation. There is pretty much no anti-nuclear movement there, it has no constituency - and the French are hardly shy about demonstrating when they're unhappy about policy.
So if France of the 60's, just 20 years after a devastating war, with 1st-generation nuclear tech and resources, could go mostly-nuclear in a few decades - why is it just inherently impossible for a richer, higher-tech world now to do the same?
But then we get 100 really crappy reactors built each "year" so long as you define year one as about eight years after work starts on the first. Alternatively - R&D to develop pilot reactors and then the procedure is developed to build reactors that may be far better and take less time to construct. That's how we got the current generation based on 1970s technology after all, and we can ramp up R&D to apply a lot of improvements in technology to the nuclear sector to make up for the almost complete lack of development in civilian nuclear for decades
Get it right (note I didn't say perfect) and then do it.
The things run for decades so a few years to get it right are well worth it.
In the long run the potential savings in construction time could mean being well ahead after committing a bit of time to R&D, especially if the answer is smaller reactors.
Why build hundreds of AP1000 dinosaurs when the technology is available to develop into a better working reactor?
This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines.
So much of the story is left untold, thank you for telling. No one ever seems to ask: What is good about Fukushima Daiichi?
Fukushima's first reactor went on-line in March 1971 [cite] and 5 others followed up to 1979. Without accounting for cumulative downtime (hard to find), let's keep it simple, cut everything here by a third if you like, I come up with a combined total of ~159.12 Gigawatt-years of electricity. That's ~636.5 million tons of coal [cite] that did not have to be expensively imported and burned to help resource-poor Japan become the industrial giant it is today. Think of it as ~1.8 trillion tons of CO2 [cite] that did not enter the atmosphere, if you like. That's just one nuclear power plant with reactors that are not big by today's standards. More stats, and the interesting observation on how the hysterical press of Japan does not necessarily reflect public opinion,
"A poll taken in February 2015 by the Mizuho Information & Research Institute of Japan asked whether or not the respondent would use nuclear-generated electricity if the costs were the same or less than they were that month, and 67% said âoeyesâ. Only 32% replied in the negative. This contrasts with a number of media polls with voluntary and hence non-representative participation, and the distortion is compounded by a 2012 news media survey finding that 47 of the 50 most popular press outlets in Japan said they were antinuclear."
Japans few nuclear plants have provided as much as ~30% of Japan's electricity and I am confident they will pass that figure once more. Nuclear has contributed greatly to the country's wealth in ways that no other energy source could have, or ever could. There is a great deal of hidden peril facing the entire human species that is a direct result of stalling the Industrial Revolution --- by sweeping nuclear energy under the rug. As Kirk Sorensen says so eloquently,
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
You don't turn your nuke off if you can help it while you can bring a windmill on or offline at a whim.
That's all those numbers you are misrepresenting mean.
If you already knew that you are manipulative lying scum but I suspect you are just a victim of such types.
Think progress...what an oxymoron "Progress" to them, is shutting everything down, living in caves, eating sticks & berries. Nuke power would be viable, if it wasn't for all the red tape involved.
...You take an industry that really has the best safety record of any energy producing industry, and demonize it for years on end. Protests, Movies (Stupid ones at that), over regulation, lawsuits (endless, countless lawsuits), and then you bitch and moan that it's too expensive.
I see.
To the primative, technology will appear a magical indeed.
Nuclear waste requires a permanent security state. In a security state, the Second Ammendment can not last because the people have to be considered the biggest threat. Cogent.... Now head off to troll land.
Mainland China has 30 nuclear power reactors in operation, 24 under construction, and more about to start construction.
China is planning to get to 200 GWe nuclear by 2030 and 400 GWe nuclear by 2050 (about 20% and 40% of current electrical power generation).
No, that is not 100%, but a substantial chunk.
While there is a lot of new proposed designs for reactors, the nature of nuclear energy is that there is waste. Waste that is insanely toxic, some of it for an incredibly long time. In the end, all nuclear energy creates a very, very long term problem that is much harder to address. Building a reactor is fairly easy compared to figuring out what to do with what it leaves behind.
Dopant is explained in the link. You should RTFA.
Since the other guy isn't explaining how you are wrong, I will let you know that silicon transistors need both a p-type and n-type to work. The p-type is typically boron, and the n-type can be phosphorous or arsenic. The compound used to deposit the phosphorous (phosphine gas) is toxic. Arsenic is toxic.
Technology is well on its way to disentangling standard of living from a reliance on fossil fuels.
Anything specific you are talking about?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
When they look at the cost of power plants, they always go with the old gen1 or 2 style multi-billion dollar nuclear plants from 40 or 50 years ago. There are dozens of better and safer ways to build nuclear power plants and that includes the new sexy ideas of small 'unattended' modular power reactors. Then there are the innovative designs that rewrite the whole idea behind nuke power altogether, like LFTR reactors. Hell, even if you don't go full bore Thorium reactors there are a lot of intermediate designs that use fluorine salts as a moderator and other of that ilk as well. If we put a fraction of the time and energy into building modern reactors as we did to upgrade fucking cell phones we'd all have a modular reactor in our neighborhoods by now. Jesus.. can we prioritize at all here people?
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
Anything specific you are talking about?
Sure, biofuels, nuclear power, renewable electric power, that sort of thing. Just because fossil fuels are more economical now, doesn't mean they'll stay that way. I just think that expecting a standard of living to require a certain amount of fossil fuels burned is a blindered view of things.
Like yesterday, my standard of living wasn't burning half a gallon of gasoline or using a modest amount of electricity, it was getting from point A to point B for a social affair. There's no law of physics that requires me to have dinosaurs and fossil fuel-derived corn in the tank or 300 million year old plants in my local power plant. It just happens to be what is used now.
While I think that the current alleged consensus on catastrophic global warming and other climate change is grossly exaggerated, I don't see fossil fuels being used as they currently are forever. There will come a time when we'll switch to other things. I'm just not in a hurry to do so.
While I think that the current alleged consensus on catastrophic global warming and other climate change is grossly exaggerated,
What do you mean?
I don't see fossil fuels being used as they currently are forever.
How will they be used?
There will come a time when we'll switch to other things.
Like what?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
While I think that the current alleged consensus on catastrophic global warming and other climate change is grossly exaggerated,
What do you mean?
For example, the media routinely exaggerates any research that even hints at climate change being involved. The IPCC which alleges to be a neutral party routinely exaggerates the extent, impact, and certainty of global warming as can be seen in the variation between the summaries for policy makers versus the actual research described in their multiyear assessment reports.
I don't see fossil fuels being used as they currently are forever.
How will they be used?
Like most resources, as they become more scarce and more costly to extract, fossil fuels will be continue to be used for higher value purposes. For example, pesticides, plastics, and fertilizer (nitrogen fixing).
There will come a time when we'll switch to other things.
Like what?
I already mentioned some in my previous post:
Sure, biofuels, nuclear power, renewable electric power, that sort of thing.
The technical arguments can and will continue until someone decides the best trade-offs against the future needs and complications. The real impediment is the costs that will need to be allocated for attorney's fees ad infinitum. The involvement of politicians and their attorneys, the EPA and their attorneys, and various NIMBY and other group's attorneys is why it takes so long to permit and build a nuclear plant. Moreover, that's why so few are in operation anyway. Power companies will not pay the lawyer tax if they can help it, and that's what has made investment in coal and natural gas generating plants so much more financially rewarding. Even the subsidies for renewable energy pale in comparison to attorney's fees in a balance sheet.
Ummm, actually banks see nuclear power plants as risky investments. Hence why interest rates are high and why many banks won't provide loans.
Article mention it is done clean.
You realize computer chips are made in the same way don't you? It's safe.
The contrapositive of your question: Why are renewable proponents so vehemently opposed to anything but renewables? How about instead of living with the status quo (coal) we start building out *anything* that would get us off of effectively burning mountains and blowing it into the stratosphere?
That means a good mix of wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and yes, nuclear.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What was that, I was playing candy crush
Uranium based fission power has its problems, and although the newer reactors are safer, costs and licensing are still prohibitive.
Liquid thorium salt reactors are much cheaper, quite safe, easier to build as they have fewer moving parts, and look like the optimum solution to base power generation. There is no shortage of the thorium ore in the USA. We hardly ever hear thorium considered by the climate media. Why is that? Is thorium the industry-buster I think it is?
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):
So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right? It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they know better than the IPCC.
In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy) I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing something over at the Guardian UK site written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change (it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark Jacobson approvingly).
Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece: "Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference". Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or nukes plus renewables.
Hansen and company say:
Joe Romm argues:
Actually, 58 reactors over two decades is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.
Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god where are we going to find that many?
Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:
Another version of that talk is here. Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid construction, and we really need to get started on it.
By the way, Hansen and company did an extended presentation at COP21.
For omni-obstructionists who kvetch about the safety of glassified waste stored at Yucca Mountain, or those who might be swayed by such kevetching, go to Google Earth, search for "Sedan Crater", and scan south. *THAT* is what's already there. Nuke crater after nuke crater, with no containment whatsoever other than it happens to be underground. Mostly.
No one has ever given anything even close to vaguely resembling a cogent argument as to how glassified waste could be anywhere in the same galaxy as much of a hazard as what's already there.
All this is based on Gen I & II reactors; Gen III & IV reactors could be much smaller (& safer, & efficient: (gas turbines instead of steam)); Thorium is plentiful (and we'd use most (99%) of it instead of only 1% of the Uranium that's in a fuel rod) and cheaper (because you don't need the expensive building necessary to hold the cooling water that flashes into steam when water cooled reactors lose containment).
Much of which is created to mitigate public opinion which has the nuclear industry demonized for decades. Not quite the same issue, but not a lot of new oil refineries get built for the exact same reason.
One of the more unique issues that nuclear generation does have to deal with that most don't are a) decommissioning and b) insurance. Much of which is associated with private VS public ownership. In both cases much of the regulation is probably because of privately run operations, which for both a) and b) generally revert back to public responsibility anyway due to scope.
I'm a proponent of nuclear generation done right, however even I am a bit leery of the idea of having a privately run nuclear plant where should anything go wrong the public not the company is on the hook... It's about responsibility. If I'm a company and operating an aging plant, am I more concerned with ensuing that all safety measures are in place, or that decommissioning (usually a fund) in on track, or profits for the next quarter?
Nationally I think build more and research better. I keep hearing about safer, smaller scale reactors, but I think there is a lack of incentive/appetite to build/research and everyone is getting distracted by the shiny renewables.
That said, I think if the last ten years has taught us anything it is that even things like wind can have a lot of public resistance, particularly in the best areas, near or off shore, because of very wealthy people that own cottages, who think the turbines wreak their view, or have a negative impact on re-sale value (but will cite environmental reasons).
Article mention it is done clean.
Since you don't have the knowledge to know when you are out of your depth, I will help you along. The article (really more like a brochure) you cited only covers the p side (they call it "positive potential electrical charge") and doesn't cover the n side of the p-n junction.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/insi-nf.html This is a link where NOVA (the science guys) explain how solar cells work. Notice they mention boron and phosphorus. Phosphorus is typically deposited chemically, using CVD (chemical vapor disposition). I am not an expert in the field, but from what I have been told the phosphorus deposition is not clean.
Furthermore, your link doesn't seem to acknowledge that making a reasonably pure silicon wafer for the solar panels requires forming silicon crystals. Cheap methods for doing that involve some nasty processes.
That is where democracy falls down a bit. Politicians need to get elected. If the public is made fearful of nuclear, few politicians are going to risk re-election. Far better to shine up some friendly (if useless) solar panels. China sees a need, comes to a conclusions as to how to best process for the country, then does it. There isn't a debate.
In fact, this is even more pronounced in energy due to the long term thinking necessary (i.e. past an election cycle). Just look at some of the hydro projects where they literally re-located millions of people, where geographically it made sense to do so for hydroelectric power.
I think at some point people will look back in history and be baffled at some of the decisions being made that had more to do with political cycles than any logical thought.
That said I don't really want to live without democracy, it just makes long term visionary projects that might be unpopular pretty hard to do. Heck it seems with current politics, they want to take whatever the previous party managed to get done, ruin it, and then blame them for the failure in the next election.
Nuclear is important but alone cannot solve all our problems. Wind and photo-voltaic are also critical components. Because the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions, converting shipping away from bunker fuel, the manufacture of cement and many other contributors to man made CO2 emissions needs to be addressed. Its not A,B or C, its D - all of the above.
Greed is the root of all evil.
??? The best Silicon only options on that graph barely reach the worst of the Gallium based cells, and even then, they are theoretical designs that have monumental manufacturing costs due to the extreme materials handling requirements. What we need to make a solar breakthrough is silicon only cells that can break the 35% efficiency mark while being as cheap to make as the current commercial silicon only products (which run 25% at best).
The other way to improve them would be to increase the durability of the cells. Silicon only cells loose about 15% of their capacity per decade. After 30 years, you're getting a little more than half the power output you were getting when they are brand new. Compare that to coal and oil powered plants where you still get close to 100% power output at the end of the plant lifespan. The only long term advantage that Solar has is that you don't have to keep buying fuel, but as long as you keep having to replace the cells every 20 years, its not terribly better than every other non-renewable energy source.
As I said, the Gallium based cells will provide a meaningful contribution because they improve on the silicon variety in a number of important ways, but due to materials limitations, and lack of raw materials, solar will forever be a minority contributor to our global power grid. In 200 years, our power supply will most likely be around 10% solar, 5% wind, 5% hydroelectric, 20% geothermal, 10% coal / oil and 50% nuclear. In 400 years, it will likely be 90% nuclear because the energy consumption will have increased dramatically, but the supply of all but nuclear is fundamentally limited such that it will not be able to grow beyond a certain absolute maximum.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
It is clear you are not expert. Nor a reader.
You are reading multi-junction as gallium arsinide. Also, you are misinformed on the rate of degradation of solar cells. Perhaps you are getting numbers for space applications.
Ok, I'll grant you that our current nuclear reactors leave a lot of long-lived transuranic elements with extremely long half-lives. That's why In most of the enlightened posts up to now (that you probably didn't read or can't understand) people are suggesting newer and better designed reactors. A Thorium based reactor, especially one that is in a liquid fluoride moderator has NO long lived (at least none longer than say 100 years or so) fission products. Most of the ones it DOES produce would be useful in medical research and other scientific endeavors, AND to top it off, the current waste that we have laying around can be BURNT OFF in them. That's right, the leftover mess from 60 years or so of playing with nuclear power can be safely disposed of, making useful power instead.
Your supposition that we'll all be back to beating on rocks at some undetermined point in time is fatalistic at best. I can say that the cornerstone of a modern society is POWER. Before we harnessed chemical energy in a large scale manner that power came from people in the form of slavery. At every juncture in the timeline of humanity when there was a breakthrough in the production and dissemination of power the standard of living for the common man improved dramatically. There are huge swaths of humanity that still do not have access to the limited resources of dinosaur fuel we used predominantly today. You want to raise up the poor unwashed masses around the globe, and feed them better? Provide them with affordable cheap and safe power. Without power, agriculture, sanitation, construction etc etc etc are stifled. With it, clean water is made easy, sewage treatment becomes trivial, medicine, education, clothing, heating, cooling etc etc etc, all become possible. Cheap plentiful power is the ONLY way to advance the cause of the human race. PERIOD. Fossil fuels can not provide it for all of us. "Renewables' like solar and wind can provide trickles of what's needed, but they'll never ever be able to completely meet the needs of an advanced society.
I am disgusted by the droves of mindless nay-sayers who vilify nuclear power without any understanding of what it is they talk about. Endlessly belching out their vitriolic toxic idea that they've parroted from others w/out understanding what it is that they are talking about. You're worried about education in remote places in the world? How about we review what our own children are learning in the schools in our first world countries. When children know more about the pop-top 40 charts than they do the periodic chart of the elements, that's a problem. When modern adults can tell you all about pookie's day on some reality show but can't tell you anything about the history of the human race, that's a problem. I say take away their goddamned 'selfie-sticks' and give them a slide rule, and the know-how to use them!
If I sound stupid, it's not me talking....
http://midwestenergynews.com/2...
Over 100,000 refugees Fukushima. You've got a screw loose.
The statement was about waste, not power. Think harder.
There is a lot more to it than that, such as a bit of loss of remaining life due to thermal fatigue every time you do a cold start.
In simple terms base load is designed for base load so if you use it for anything else you do not get good value. Solar thermal with molten salt would also be designed to be online as much as possible as distinct from peak power sources.
You've been tricked by someone that wanted to simplify everything into "energy" like a bad episode of Star Trek. They are pretending that a power supply that is used to make up peaks is unreliable because the demand is not constant - a misdirecting trick to fool those who are not paying attention.
Grids are very large now and there's always wind somewhere - continent size calms are like arguing for a flat earth. Similarly it's very rare for cloud to cover an entire continent for days at a time so solar is not "unstable".
perhaps not.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Dopants for semiconductors are used in very small quantities. Toxic materials can be used safely if people are careful.
If people are -not- careful, then they can cause -anything- to be hazardous!
I for one am glad we are not running HURD.
http://michaelsmith.id.au