Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Do You Support Nuclear Energy? (gallup.com)
Reader mdsolar writes that for the first time a majority of Americans have told Gallup they oppose nuclear energy. Support peaked at 62% in 2010, but "as Americans have paid less at the pump, their level of worry about the nation's energy situation has dropped to 15-year-low levels," Gallup reports. Their latest poll found 44% of respondents still supported nuclear energy, while 54% opposed it, a trend which could eventually affect the future of nuclear power. The New York Times reports that operating licenses will expire for 36 of America's 99 reactors between 2029 and 2035. What do you think? How strongly do you support (or oppose) generating electricity with nuclear energy?
In light of the incompetance of the company behind the massive gas leak at Porter Ranch, no, I don't trust a profit-motivated company with a nuclear reactor.
If you're asking for a blanket condemnation or endorsement of nuclear power, all I can say is, "it depends".
It depends on what specifically you're proposing to build, how you specifically plan to manage and monitor it, and how you specifically intend to decommission them when they're at the end of their usefulness.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I support nuclear energy in the short to medium term because it's the only realistic way to replace coal, oil and natural gas - and thereby save the planet from global climate change. That's a short-term emergency - and we're not likely to be able to either cut back our energy use, or replace CO2-producing energy with renewables in time.
So we're left with the lesser of three evils: No energy, Rising CO2 levels, Nuclear accidents.
I'd hope that modern reactors (ie not Chernobyl era junk), intelligently placed (like not in the middle of a city, and not near a Tsunami-prone coastline like Fukushima) and carefully run (like not Chernobyl and not 3 Mile Island) could reduce the risk of accidents considerably. But even with the rate of severe accidents we've seen so far, the damage we do is far less than with coal/oil/gas.
I'd hope that we'd get fusion power running - and add smarter solar/wind/tidal sources (hydroelectric dams are starting to look like a bad idea) before too long - but we need uranium/plutonium power sources until that happens.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
Gallup interprets this as being about better alternatives.
Yes.
Unless we figure out fusion power quickly (which I'm doubtful of), fission power, combined with existing hydro and thermal solar is our best bet for stable baseline power in this country.
Renewables like PD solar and wind power, as well as power storage solutions, are best left to cover demand peaks.
The problem is that so few people know anything more than "nuclear = bomb" and "radiation will kill you", that it's created this vast climate of FUD around nuclear power.
And all they say when you mention nuclear power is "Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima".
None of these were failures intrinsic to the reactor.
Chernobyl: Idiots disabling safety equipment and fucking around with the reactor.
TMI: Human error compounded by bad control indicators.
Fukushima: A company cheaping out and not listening to civil engineering with regards to a sea wall meant to stave off large waves.
We're also talking about reactors based on decades-old technology and Rube Goldberg systems to stave off every possible problem an engineer could envision.
Rather than just designing a reactor with a default state of "off".
More modern reactor designs take this sort of thing into account.
Additionally, people gripe about the amount of nuclear waste being produced. Never mind that most reactors based on this older technology consume, at best, 5% of the actual "fuel" in the medium (rods, pellets, etc) before the medium is removed from the reactor.
With reprocessing, that fuel can continue to be used for extended periods of time. Resulting in far less long-lived waste, and the remainder being waste that is only being radioactive in the short term.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Meaning I'm fine with it existing, but don't have any particularly romantic notions about it either.
Nuclear power necessarily comes with a long list of downsides. The enormous expense of building a powerplant, the amount of care that needs to be exercised to properly run it, the problem with waste disposal, the problem with that a dismantled powerplant still needs maintenance, the problem that disaster preparation is absolutely essential, the problem that the critical parts of the infrastructure are so highly radioactive it's not even possible to have a camera in them, which means any work on that is enormously expensive...
And then there's the problem of that if things go wrong it causes the evacuation of a huge amount of the population. Now I know this isn't instant death of course, but it still means that accidents are enormously expensive and insurance is difficult.
Then there is that all of this critically depends on people, who in many cases have reasons to cut corners in dangerous places.
Once you take all of that into account, I think it becomes considerably less amazing than it is in theory. IMO, current nuclear power is something that will go away eventually. Many of its downsides aren't going anywhere, so it may well happen that we'll find a way to run a grid purely on solar and wind power, and just accept the downsides of that in exchange for not having to deal with radioactivity.
That said, I'm all for improving the tech as far as possible and looking into thorium and of course fusion research.
I support keeping reactors that already exist running where its safe to do so. But I also support building new nuclear reactors. Not the ancient technology PWR and BWR reactors but modern 4th generation reactors. Ones that can burn the waste products from the old PWRs and BWRs and dont produce waste that has to be stored for thousands of years. Ones that can operate in ways that mean they cant suffer the kind of catastrophic release of radiation that happened at Fukushima.
4th generation reactors absolutely need to be part of the energy solution as the way to replace the world's dependence on digging dirty black ancient rocks out of the ground and burning them for electricity.
Yes I support nuclear energy, it is the only viable solution to meet the world's energy demands and the need for clean energy. Burning coal releases more radioactive martial into the environment then any nuclear plant has. People are scared of radiation and it's unfounded, we are bombarded with radiation on a daily basis from the sun. People are also scared that nuclear plants can blow up like a bomb, but this is complete impossible. The waste they produce can be managed, in fact it can be recycled to produce more fuel. We need to figure out how to harness fusion into a viable solution.
As safe as possible.
You realize there are roughly 100 nuclear reactors going in the US. And the majority of them have had not one major safety issue in their entire lifespan right?
And that newer reactor technologies are far simpler and have a default state of "off".
Adding the kind of safety precautions you require for current solid-fuel reactors to such devices is largely pointless.
And, believe it or not, physical security for such plants is usually not that expensive.
The expense in nuclear power comes from the hostile regulatory environment that's been created. And all the NIMBY legal challenges brought up for each and every reactor commissioned.
People need to stop thinking about nuclear reactors as bombs.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
how can you support something you don't understand, 95% of the population (to be generous) doesn't have the intellectual background to understand it...
I especially support research in nuclear energy, Thorium reactors are a great place, right on the edge of practicality.
Also, I support nuclear fusion research, and I think we should fund more of it, and this graph shows why.
If we can make energy cheaper by an order of magnitude compared to how it is today, that opens the door for some great things.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's why you have candu reactors that use "waste" as it's fuel stock.
No sir I dont like it.
If we actually kept developing reactors instead of shutting down and holding up progress we would be at the point where they would be safe by now. It's only because of Luddites that we are so far behind our potential. It would be as if we still had to fly on Comets because as everyone knows planes are dangerous. Well no shit if you are flying around in first generation designs.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I would love to see lots more focus on nucleair energy for multiple reasons. First, it can be a safe and clean energy source for many years to come (think Thorium, MSR). The 'oh it will blow up' folks are hampering progress with outdated arguments. Most current power plants are the Ford Model T of designs. If their arguments would have been lodged against cars then we'd still be driving those. Modern nucleair reactors are inherently safe and can fix many of the waste issues we have from outdated installations today.
Second is removing the dependency on fossil fuels. Not only will this have positive environmental effects, it will cause a paradigm shift in geo politics. Can you imagine what happens to the Middle East if their stronghold on oil supply becomes irrelevant? When organisations such as Al Quaida and IS see their money supply dry up? It will be a much, much better world for it.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Ask me instead if I support yet another of mdsolar's endless anti-nuclear, pro-solar postings to Slashdot.
I get it, mdsolar. Nuclear = BAD! Solar = GOOD! Except for the fact that the sun is a giant nuclear reactor that kills tens of thousands of people every year from radiation-induced cancers. But hey, never let facts get in the way of anti-nuclear diatribes.
(Not American)
Nuclear energy for generating electricity is technically a viable concept, many years ago I was even trained to work on it.
Yet I don't believe disadvantages like security, safety and especially the very long term storage of the left overs makes it a good proposition for large scale deployment.
Nuclear energy has a place, but only in the form of fail safe generators and for very specific uses like aircraft carriers and submarines.
Once stationary there are plenty of sustainable alternatives that are already competing on price providing you consider the long-term costs of the present type of nuclear generators.
After installing PV nearly a year ago I've calculated that with a €15,000 - 20,000 investment I could for the next 25 - 30 years be totally independent of any other energy, that includes road transport.
The cost of maintenance consists of saving for a replacement and some battery changes.
Sustainable or renewable energy sources are sufficiently mature to shy away from the real problems surrounding present day nuclear, the remaining cost issues for renewable are mainly distribution and storage.
Distribution is a NIMBY problem so it can be solved near-instantaneously, storage is to be split in smallish scale local (your 1st and 2nd hand Tesla batteries) and large scale central solutions.
Safe central storage could be molten salt and the use of ammonia to be made of excess electricity and when demand requires it to be burned in conventional turbines.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Just needs better oversight. Nuclear can be done perfectly safely. The only danger with anything is politics.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Weigh the risks of current nuclear technology, versus the risk of our ongoing coddling of vile Islamist regimes, like the Saudis. I know which one I would choose.
turns out most people are too uneducated
That's kinda the problem. The public is so uneducated that they make it hard to fund nuclear, which leads to engineers becoming less educated as old-timers retire and universities shut down their nuclear engineering programs because nuclear engineers can't find jobs (unless they go into the Navy, or are some of the very very few that make it into Los Alamos).
So, nuclear gets caught in a Catch-22 where it doesn't get enough funding to support the advancement of technology that would make it safe and reliable enough to compete. Instead, our collective knowledge of nuclear slips as, again, old-timers retire and youngsters pursue something more likely to pay those hideous education loans.
It's good that the stars have aligned to invest R&D into solar and wind. But it's not a good thing to allow nuclear to slip away... there's a lot of research yet to be done, with potentially great payoffs, if it wasn't so politicized by way of a public where a high-school education is becoming more and more worthless, again because of politics. A dumb electorate can be convinced of anything, like how supersonic transport causes skin cancer, and that was back in 1975. Today, politicians earn their pork-fat living by dumbing down science education, I figure to better guarantee re-election by the time the kids turn 21. These are the people who'll turn on Fox News and see "nuclear... bad ; fossil fuel subsidies... good", all because of fancy wine and caviar shared between the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
The problem with nuclear is it requires smart people not only for design and build-out, but also for for day-to-day operation and maintenance. A poorly educated public is bad for all of this. But fail to keep educating and innovating in this technology, and it slips away (or goes overseas), and that sucks for us all.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Internet advocates always seem to be pushing the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), but the Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor look like the best Generation IV reactor design to me, by far.
The chemistry problems associated with Molten Salt Reactors - especially the need to continuously reprocess the salt-fuel mixture on site - sound pretty hairy from an engineering perspective (speaking here of costs, not safety).
In contrast, a Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor is much more straightforward to design and maintain. It is also (as far as I can tell) the safest fission reactor design yet conceived; only Molten Salt Reactors are in the same league, safety-wise, but I think Lead-Cooled is still better for various reasons.
The Lead-Cooled design has the distinct advantage that it has already been deployed operationally, whereas LFTR is still just a research project.
First of all, many of the deaths and injuries are due to mining and transporting the coal, not just burning it.
Then too, you can't just make the pollution problem go away with some magical "cleaning". As of 2006, 125 million tons of coal combustion solid byproducts, including fly ash, were produced annually in the USA. If you use coal, you can't will that away into nonexistence. You HAVE to PUT it somewhere. You can disperse most of it into the atmosphere, or you can try to trap it in filters, but where do you put what the filters trap? In 2005, 34 million cubic meters (42 million tons) of fly ash from USA coal power plants were land-filled over and above the amount recycled into various products.
You can't burn up fly ash, because it is already the irreducible leftover of burning in the first place. About 10% of all the coal burned turns into fly ash.
Fly ash contains such toxic substances as arsenic, barium, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, thallium, selenium, molybdenum and mercury. Makes you wonder how safe those products containing recycled fly ash are, eh?
But, I put the blame for climate just as strongly at the feet of Green Peace and similar ignorant environmentalist who cry louder about nuclear energy than they do about coal and NG plants. If they actually supported Nukes rather than throwing years of lawsuits at them, then we wouldn't still be talking about climate change, we would have converted huge swaths of our power generation to nukes, gone through a few growing pains/generation of technology and by now the resulting economies of scale and control systems would have been worked out to the point where buying electric cars and such were a no brainier.
Instead we are still having this conversation, and in 5/10 years when gas is back at $5-8/gallon and NG prices spike back up, we will be experiencing rolling blackouts as we fight to stabilize wind/etc or still wondering why the air quality sucks and we still haven't' cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions.Likely a bit of both if the wind farms in TX are an example.
A couple of years ago the government of Ontario put out a request for a couple of new reactors and the lowest cost was $26B. I have no problems with the technology but when reactors are coming in at over $10B each there's no way these can be affordable. (Especially in Ontario where the salaries of people working at power production plants are extreme!)
You could buy the equivalent in wind and solar production for much, much less, then spend a pile of money on used car batteries for storage and probably have the same capacity without spending $26B.
That's fine if you live in mountainous territory, those of us in the Midwest USA don't have a lot of high places to pump water.
I took a tour of a pumped hydro plant, or rather I got to see the visitor center and the plant from across a fence, proper tours were cancelled for "security reasons" after 9/11. Anyway, the plant is run by the Tennessee Valley Authority and is used as both peak power (daily variation) and seasonal power (monthly variation) to allow the coal and nuclear power plants they own to operate more efficiently.
Energy storage systems benefit coal and nuclear just as much as wind and solar. Don't think that cheap storage technology will make wind and sun competitive with coal, nuclear, natural gas, or whatever else comes along.
The only thing that can save solar from becoming worth less than it already is would be some sort of leap in production techniques that makes them exceedingly cheap to produce. Much of the cost is in the energy in refining of the silicon, which again any gains in the price of energy makes everything else cheaper to produce too.
I will believe that solar power is competitive only when we see solar panel factories powered by solar panels alone. If they are on the grid then they must be selling excess power, not just using the grid for storage. When that happens they've then proven the technology works. If they cannot produce new solar panels from solar power alone then they've proven that solar cannot stand alone or compete with other energy sources.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
An even better "better question" is, "Why is the current nuclear industry eating its seed corn?"
Almost all existing nuclear power plants consume Uranium-235. Once it is gone, it will be exponentially more difficult to manufacture Plutonium 239 from U-238, and U-233 from Thorium 232, than it is currently easy to make those other fissionable substances from vastly-more-common resources. If one is going to support fission power, then one must either support breeder reactors, or recognize that fission power for civilization will have a rather short lifespan, just like fossil-fuel power for civilization is having a short lifespan.
If one is going to support nuclear power for the long term, then my personal vote is that we need fusion reactors even more than we need fission reactors. Fusion reactors are expected to produce only a fraction of the radwaste that fission reactors produce, be less risky to operate, cannot be a good source of materials for making terror weapons, and have much-less-expensive fuel costs, for just four reasons why.
Jimmy Carter, chief f the fear mangers. He killed breeders and reprocessing by imperial decree.
Nuclear energy (from fission) has a very large number of disadvantages. Here are just a few:
- It's inherently and obviously risky --- even its greatest proponents know that, but they just choose to minimize the importance of that risk and its deadly consequences. There have been more than enough nuclear reactor disasters already, yet some people just don't learn. Even with better designs, accidents will happen from geophysical causes and through human failure, as well as by deliberate action. You can't prevent this from happening, so don't create such deadly installations (and juicy targets) in the first place.
- Radioactive waste from fission accumulates a massive liability for future generations. It forces our own chosen risk onto our descendents without giving them any choice in the matter. This is unethical even in the best of cases, but in the worst case it's downright criminal because some of those radioactive stores will unavoidably release their contents (even explosively with human help) and result in human casualties and suffering --- maybe your own descendents. Don't gamble with the lives of others.
- Nuclear energy is out of step with a world that is rapidly converting to clean, inexhaustible energy harnessed from the environment. Nuclear is not just unclean but deadly unclean, and it's very demanding on the planet's resources as well. It adds to our debt on the planet instead of reducing it.
- According to a growing number of climatologists who are witnessing first-hand the unfolding climate disaster in the Arctic and Antarctic, our existing several hundred nuclear reactors could quite possibly be the direct cause of our extinction in the decades ahead, after the indirect cause (CO2 and methane) lead to death by starvation of billions and make the world's economies collapse. Nuclear reactors can't be rapidly turned off and made non-radioactive --- the full process of decommissioning takes some 50 to 60 years as an industry average, and it takes a LOT of money. There will be no money available under conditions of economic collapse, cooling will be interrupted, and many will go into meltdown. Even if you choose to disbelieve the warnings of specialists, the risk remains. Knowing what we already know about rising sea levels and epic storms, we should not be adding to the risk.
Dr. Brice Smith of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research summarized this very well:
The whole idea of adding more nuclear power is hazardous and ill-considered, and it's also unnecessary.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
which level of fear and paranoia protection are gonna be needed to satisfy your definition of "safe" ?
Whatever it takes to make it impractical.
The really cool thing about fusion is that we have improved confinement times faster than moores law!
We have also learnt that international collaborations are hugely expensive due mostly to politics. People think ITER is really expensive. It is true it is not cheap, but a new gas plant with ZERO R&D is still a cool billion dollars and takes a few years to build. A billion dollars a year for a few decades is really not much money in the scheme of things.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I am against nuclear power for the same reason I am against the death penalty. Both require a level perfection and infallibility that humans are incapable of reaching.
I don't really support the current nuclear reactors were using, which were designed what, almost 60, 70 years ago?
I wholeheartedly support new reactor designs that are much safer and have a nearly zero risk associated with operating them.
The "only way?" Do you have NO faith in future developments that would dramatically reduce the per-capita/per-annum energy cost? Your grandchildren will think you a fool for such a sweeping, thoughtless assertion.
I am deeply concerned about global warming. Therefore I support some increase in nuclear energy production, at least in the medium term. I think that there are new modern reactor designs that should be built, ones where a meltdown is highly unlikely and where the reactor consumes most of its worst waste for energy production.
That said, the long term source of energy has to be solar. It is the one form of renewable energy that has practically no limit in terms of scalability. The area of solar panels that would meet all of America's energy needs is surprisingly small, and the cost of production is dropping quickly. Storage will not be an issue in the future, as battery tech gets better and less expensive. Even today's lithium battery tech is good enough for many transportation applications, and the tech will only continue to improve. Modern lithium cells are not environmentally harmful. There is a lot of lithium that is easy to extract in dried lake beds in places like South America. The cells will almost certainly be recycled, and not end up in landfills, for the simple reason that the chemical components will be valuable. To add to this, lithium will not be the only solution. There are likely other storage mechanisms that will be both cheaper and more reliable for bulk storage applications.
My background is in theoretical physics, and I have considered this for quite a while. I am convinced that solar energy is the ultimate solution to supply our modern technological civilization with all the energy it needs. I believe that in a couple of decades, gasoline engines will be on the road to becoming boutique fashion items, like Harley Davidson motorcycles. Internal combustion engines will be perceived as loud, stinky anachronisms. If you want to experience this today, drive a Tesla model S for a month. You'll never think of your ICE the same way again.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Poll the solar users in Nevada... where the PUC just eliminated net metering, and so you get paid less for the power you generate than the power you consume all the time. There are proposals into the California PUC, which are almost always supported by PG&E, since it would force Smart Meters on places like San Francisco, and PG&E could charge a lot more for night time electricity than day time electricity (when you are using solar).
You are mixing up risk with chance.
The chance to get hit by a truck into the rear of your car during 50 years might be 2%. ...
The risk you have is:
- neck injuries (with a chance of 80%?),
- total loss of the car (probably 50%?),
- death (probably 0.5%?)
- death/server injury of rear passengers (probably 50%?)
Living near a nuclear plant your chance during 50 years is that it goes boom, perhaps 0.00001%?
You risk:
- evacuation and loss of all your property (chance 100%)
- death or injury in the mass panic or evacuation (chance probably 5%?)
- contamination with server health issues (chance probably 50%?)
Even ingesting a small amount of material that is biologically 'sticky' is only a tiny risk adder
No it is not. The chance might be low. The risk if you "catch it" is extremely high, close to certain death. The only question is: do you care if you die due to cancer 50 years after such an incident caused by digesting/breathing radioactive material? Or the other question is: do you die before that because a truck hit you? Or do you die before that because you get lung cancer for no apparent reason?
Or: do you die to the same radiation exposure after 3 years already? As the time frame for cancer or if you get cancer at all, might look pretty random from the outside.
I suggest to read up what the lethal dose of e.g. plutonium is, and how it works.
In medicin they usually talk about a "50% death dose", which means: the amount of "poison" you have to give per kg weight of the subject to each subject that 50% of the subjects die.
The amount of plutonium to kill 50% of the test subjects is so incredible low, you won't believe it: go google.
What you do is wagering the chance, not the risk.
In simple words: ... the chance to lose and to win is the same. Only the payoff is higher if you win
You place 10 bucks on the number 13 in roulette: you risk 10 bucks. You have a chance of 1:37 to win 360 bucks and a chance of slightly higher than 35:37 to lose your money.
You place 1 million bucks on the number 13 instead: you risk 1 million bucks
In other words:
Both bets have exactly the same chance to win or lose.
The second bet has a much higher risk.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Both are complex technologies which need a detailed regime of control for safe operation. We fly knowing that about once a year we lose a plane load of people, 200-300 at a time, at least once somewhere in the world. Aviation has been around long enough that we know the chance of our next flight being this year's fatal one will be vanishingly small. Nuclear power should be subject to the same calculus, but with one 'crash' of 51 dead in its entire history.
The difference between the two is pure politics. If you insist on our eliminating carbon, you're going to have to accept changing our baseload over from fossil to nuclear.
I've had the opportunity to work as a cyber security assessor for a nuclear power plant that is part of a fleet. I have never seen such a concentration of deliberate, careful, and conservative people across so many skill sets. There are plenty of times where they fall into the "too smart for their own good" category, but they know EXACTLY forces they are dealing with every-single-day. I haven't met a single "Homer Simpson." I even had the opportunity to meet some of the engineers from Fukushima Daini (Daichi's neighbor 5 miles south) to hear first-hand accounts of their harrowing story and their lessons learned form the 2011 Tsunami. If they are flying these guys around the US to discuss lessons learned, they are taking their work seriously in a way few others can really appreciate.
That doesn't mean that the don't have their own problems. The industry is extremely insular. It's a mix of both intentional reasons and unintentional consequences. These power plants are pretty far out of the way from major population centers and they can be easily mistaken for other power plant types if you don't know what to look for. There are ONLY 68 running Nuclear Energy Sites in the country and, because of 9/11, they have surveillance and buffer zones that make it hard for casual onlookers to even get close. Essentially, they become out-of-site/out-of mind. Case in point: NONE of my New Orleans neighbors realize there is a nuclear power plant less than 10 miles away! (Waterford 3 is not the one I've worked at).
The next problem is the US's abysmal investment in infrastructure in the last 40 years. The last site's construction finished in 1990 (started 1978) in the US. The new AP1000s just started construction within the last 5 years... and there are only 4 of them! MEANWHILE, Canada, China, the UK, Japan, and the like have been regularly innovating and investing in nuclear power that makes our old system look broken and decrepit.
Finally, the biggest failure on the commercial side of nuclear energy is the whole-stock abandonment of Breeder Reactors. Because the Navy had plenty of water to cool their ship reactors and there were increasingly more availability of uranium, these safer and more efficient reactors never made it to market. But little was done after the 60's to push the tech and it is only now being rediscovered This is tantamount to you driving a brand-new car with only 1970's technology under the hood (no computers, catalytic converters, etc)... you may have a nice shell, but good luck getting the power, fuel economy, or dependability (100k mile warranty anyone?).
Then there is the elephant in the room: FUSION. Lockheed Martin claims that they will have a fusion reactor by 2024. Germany has this freaky-looking stellarator that, by the test conducted in February, will be able to sustain the 100 MILLION Degrees Celsius heat needed for fusion to occur with its next upgrade. China apparently did something with something to ensure people knew they were in the race.
The bottom line is that renewable energy will not whole-stock replace our needs for a consumable fuel given any of our current scientific knowledge. It will not replace our needs in space exploration nor in deep water. Nuclear may take a long time to get places, but it is consistent and predictable and transportable in a way that no other energy generation currently can be. We have the most good science on how to make nuclear energy work for us in a way other fuels cannot and we should not leave it on the side-lines because we have limited ourselves to an in-the-moment mentality about how to save ourselves and the world around us.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
The ability to do what you suggest isn't sufficient to prove viability so it's a waste of money to do it.
Huh? I suppose it might be insufficient but it is also necessary. A solar powered future must have all solar panel factories powered by the sun at some point.
I trained with some people in the Army that were going to become parachute riggers. Part of the job description is that they will be required to jump out of an airplane with parachutes that they packed themselves. Why would the Army do this? Simple. If these riggers don't have the faith in their own skill as a rigger then they would not trust their own chutes. If a solar panel manufacturer refuses to build a factory powered by the solar panels they make then it shows the rest of the world that they don't have faith in their own product.
This is why I will not trust solar power to be viable until I see a solar panel manufacturer build a factory that is powered only by solar power. That proves to me that they have faith in their product. If they don't have faith in their own product to keep the lights on then I cannot place my faith in them either.
I'd expect any advocate of solar power would support a solar powered solar panel factory. I'd not only expect them to support it I would expect them to demand it. Solar power is supposed to be the greenest, safest, cheapest, energy source we have. If solar power is so cheap then building a factory off the grid should actually save them money for not having to invest in the power lines.
There is an industry term for this, "eating your own dog food". Alternatively, "drinking your own champagne", "eating your own cooking", or in computing circles it would be "self hosting". It's not only a good idea to have a solar powered solar panel factory, it is inevitable if we are to move to a solar powered future. It's often a matter of pride for someone to use their own product within the company. Would you use Linux if the people coding it were running Windows? Would you buy a Ford if all the employees drove a Honda to work? Would you fly in a Boeing airplane if the Boeing employees refused to fly in anything but an Airbus? Would you jump out of an airplane if the person that packed your parachute refused to jump with you?
I refuse to believe that solar power is viable if the people making the panels refuse to build a factory powered by the sun.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The only working type of nuclear power we have is fission, and that's a mess. In more ways than one. It's only doable with heavy subvention by taxpayers, completely ignoring the waste problem and not factoring in real insurance policies for disasters. On top of that it turns out reactors aren't running nearly as long and cheap and frictionless as people have dreamed back in the 60ies and 70ies. All that turns fission into an expensive and dangerous 70ies techno-romantic pipe-dream.
There's a reason Germany is moving away from it - and we've got some of the best reactor-tech on the planet.
I do support research for nuclear power like jet and iter and perhaps that travelling wave stuff Bill Getes is investing in, but fission as we have it today needs to be decommissioned. Now and globally. The numbers just don't add up. That's a simple hard fact.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... http://www.scientificamerican....
that one actually describes the issues...
And with nuclear-plants it because of people like you that we are stuck with decade old nuclear-plants instead of newer plants that would increase safety and reduce the amount of waste.
No it is not.
That is how an insurance company may define it.
But perhaps the "full definition" convinces you: http://www.merriam-webster.com...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'd buy that for a dollar!