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France To Shut Down All Coal-Fired Power Plants By 2023 (independent.co.uk)
French president Francois Hollande announced at an annual UN climate change conference on Wednesday that France will shut down all its coal-fired power plants by 2023. He also "vowed to beat by two years the UK's commitment to stop using fossil fuels to generate power by 2025," reports The Independent: Mr Hollande, a keynote speaker at the event in Marrakech, Morocco, also praised his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama for his work on climate change, and then appeared to snub president-elect Donald Trump. "The role played by Barack Obama was crucial in achieving the Paris agreement," Mr Hollande said, before adding, in what has been perceived as a dig at Mr Trump, that becoming a signatory to the treaty is "irreversible." "We need carbon neutrality by 2050," the French President continued, promising that coal will no longer form part of France's energy mix in six to seven years' time. France is already a world leader in low-carbon energy. The country has invested heavily in nuclear power over the past few decades and now derives more than 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear fission. It produces so much nuclear energy, in fact, that it exports much of it to nearby nations, making around $2.66 billion each year.
Sure there is: Lower cancer rates (Burning coal releases more actual Uranium into the atmosphere), and lower asthma, COPD, etc. from lower NOX and particulate pollution. Radioactive waste can be contained and when reprocessed as part of waste disposal generates more electricity and limits hard storage time to decades.
I can't speak for France's trust (or lack thereof) of Hollande. But one thing the US could do in emulating France is to start replacing our coal plants with more nuclear, especially in areas where solar or wind aren't a good fit. It's not like it isn't a proven, feasible technology. I still can't understand how environmentalists could be opposed to it, if they truly believe what scientists are telling us about what's happening with AGW and what the long term effects may be. Yes, nuclear is a compromise. We have to extract ore, it's potentially dangerous, and it generates very nasty waste products. But wouldn't it be worth compromising on this point a bit to get to carbon neutrality faster? We have the rest of history to start phasing nuke power plants out with better technologies, and there are theoretical ways to deal with the waste products other than simply burying it in the ground.
Maybe we should tell Trump that building a bunch of nuclear plants would really piss off the wacko environmentalists, create a bunch of new 'murican jobs, and help lessen oil dependency from all those foreign commies and terrorists. Sometimes, you just have to sell these things with your target audience in mind.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I was going towards 'hairpiece' myself but then again ....
Rogainosets?
Someone had to do it.
"theoretical ways to deal with the waste products" = "no actual ways to deal with the waste products"
As opposed to coal and other fossil fuels, where we have a very effective way of dealing with the waste products: just let them go up the smokestack!
P.S. You do know that coal mining releases more radiation into the air, and kills more people, than nuclear power - right?
Actually, most of that "waste" can be reused as fuel. Modern light water nuclear plants only use about 3% of the energy in uranium. That's why the waste is "hot" for so long - it's like burning 3% of a gallon of gas and declaring the rest of it waste which has to be buried. A breeder reactor can use the "waste" as fuel, and in the process convert it into a form which can be sent back to light water reactors for use as fuel. Done properly, about 90%-95% of the energy from the uranium can be extracted, and the remaining waste is only "hot" for a few hundred years.
France uses breeder reactors, so they don't have anywhere near the nuclear waste problem that we do. (Jimmy Carter banned the commercial use of breeder reactors in the U.S. because they can be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.)
Also, nuclear in the U.S. produces about 800 TWh of electricity per year. The amount of spent fuel that's created to produce that much energy is about a single tractor trailer's worth (the entire volume of nuclear waste produced since we began using nuclear power would about fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool). Contrast that with coal. A ton of coal produces about 2000 kWh of electricity. So to produce 800 TWh would require about 400 million tons of coal, or about 300 million cubic meters - enough to fill a thousand oil tankers. It also produces 1.14 billion tons of CO2.
So compare that single tractor trailer of nuclear waste (which still contains 97% of the energy in the uranium because we don't reprocess) to a thousand oil tankers full of coal. Still think nuclear is such a bad idea?
Explain to me how nationalism valuing America first is anti American
Because it is counterproductive and leaves the country in a worse place than being a responsible member of the international community does. Also, it is too easily leveraged into white nationalism.
For them to put the interests of foreign nations or even the international community above the interests of the US seems treasonous on its face.
We have many conflicting interests as a nation, many of which are the same interests as the international community (like defeating ISIS.) In order to make progress on some of our national interests, it is necessary to compromise on others.
In other words, you can wish really hard that America exists in a vacuum, but wishing does not make it so.
Someone had to do it.
You are a hyperbolic idiot, this isn't the Breitbart comment section
And you continue the hyperbole ...
This is the Breitbart comment section?!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Read some of the recent articles by the elder statesmen of the environmentalist movement, such as one of the founders of Greenpeace. They are now acknowledging that they spread a lot of FUD about waste. Here are the two biggest lies:
Intentionally conflating alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. They really hyped things up, through out a lot of numbers and such, about "radiation", carefully cherry-picking things about completely different types of radiation, while making it sound like all the statements went together. Of course you know there are different types of radiation - light from a light bulb is radiation, warmth radiating from a fireplace is radiation. When discussing nuclear waste, the two main types are alpha and beta. Here's the funny thing - alpha is stopped by almost anything - tissue paper, a few centimeters of air, moisture in the air, etc. Unless you press the uranium against your skin, the alpha can't get to you. So when any old 1980s article talks about radiation, ask "are they taking about ALPHA radiation, the kind that's blocked by even tissue paper?" Often they are.
The even bigger lie is intentionally conflating short half-life with long half-life. You know a candle radiates visible light, heat, uv, etc. Gunpowder radiates the same wavelengths - light, heat, etc. The difference between a candle and a bomb is that the candle releases the energy slowly, a little bit a time, while gunpowder releases it's energy quickly. So quickly, in fact, that there's a dangerous amount of energy, for about 50 milliseconds. Nuclear materials are the same. Some release their energy quickly, so there's a dangerous amount of radiation for a short time. Roughly 14 days, in one common case. Other nuclear materials release their energy incredibly slowly, over thousands of years. At any given time, the slow ones are releasing such a small amount of energy you could WEAR the waste on your head all day and it would have absolutely zero effect. In fact I, and many others, DO wear tritium on our belts.
There is waste that releases enough radiation in a year to be dangerous, and there's other waste that releases so little as at a time that it takes a thousand years before most of it is used up. Dumping the energy fast is like a firecracker which burns metal powder very quickly - it's dangerous, for a very short period of time. Releasing it over a thousand years is like the heat generated as a bolt rusts - it's an almost indetectable, and completely safe, level of energy being released.
It's really it like showing somebody a firecracker and saying "this is metal oxydizing" (true) and "the metal in your car could oxydize at any moment" (also true, your car is oxydizing all the time).
Easy solution: Give regulatory control of the nuclear power industry to the navy. No joke. The US Navy has been operating nuclear reactors... hundreds of them... for nearly as long as there's been such a thing. And they have a perfect operational safety record. That is: zero nuclear accidents in the 62 years since the USS Nautilus was launched in 1954. (They *have* lost two nuclear submarines at sea. But neither the Thresher nor Scorpion were lost due to reactor accidents.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
They do it by standardizing on a small number of reactor designs (Generally one per ship/sub class. Though the S5W persisted from the Skipjack class until it was replaced by the S6G with the Los Angeles.), training the sweet holy hell out of their people (There are stories of standing desks at power school, so trainees don't fall asleep while sitting and studying... and of the occasional *thump* when someone standing falls asleep anyway.), and holding them strictly accountable to operations and safety standards throughout their careers.
Imagine all the people...
Your stupidity. There is no amount of reprocessing that will make nuclear power cost effective. Disagree, name the nuclear power plant that charges its customers for the full cost from cradle to grave: everything from mining & refining, to plant construction & maintenance, to waste disposal/recycling/reuse.
You can't do that because that nuclear power plant doesn't exist. Because nuclear power is corporate welfare masking ongoing nuclear weapons programs.
Actually, most of that "waste" can be reused as fuel. Modern light water nuclear plants only use about 3% of the energy in uranium. That's why the waste is "hot" for so long
That's not quite right. The uranium has a half life of billions of years, so it will be radioactive for a long time but that is not what makes spent fuel "hot". Just as a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long a radioactive material with a long half life puts out very little radiation. Uranium has such a long half life and therefore very little radiation from it that uranium is routinely used as a shield against radiation.
Another thing about uranium is that most isotopes of the element are alpha emitters upon decay. In a solid fuel reactor the uranium is encased in a metal tube, an alpha particle would not leave the tube. Even if it did about a foot of air would stop it.
What makes spent fuel "hot" is the fission products, and to a lesser extent the transuranic elements. A fission product is from the uranium nucleus taking in a neutron and fissions into two smaller nuclei. The transuranic elements are from when the uranium takes a neutron and doesn't fission but instead decays into a heavier element, such as plutonium. These fission products and transuranic elements can be beta and gamma emitters upon decay, these require more shielding to stop, such as a few feet of water or other dense material.
In a solid fuel reactor it is very difficult to remove these elements. This is a problem because some of these elements like to soak up neutrons with a greater affinity than the uranium fuel. At some point the fission products will take up so many neutrons that a chain reaction cannot be maintained in the reactor, when this happens the fuel is "spent" even though there is still a large amount of uranium fuel in the fuel rod.
There's several ways to address this problem but one that is gaining traction is to use a liquid fuel. The uranium in a solid fuel reactor is usually a ceramic (an oxide), because in that form it can hold up to a lot of heat and radiation without turning into something else. In a liquid fuel reactor the uranium fuel is in the form of a salt, usually a fluoride (like the sodium fluoride in toothpaste). This salt can also withstand the radiation but it melts at a relatively low temperature, which make it easy to turn into a liquid. In liquid form many of the worst fission products, like xenon, will bubble out of the fuel and get collected at the top of the reactor tank. Many of the others, like noble metals, will fall to the bottom. With these fission products out of the way just about all the fuel can be burned. With the addition of a chemical processor on the liquid fuel the transuranic elements can be removed before they can become a problem of soaking up neutrons, becoming a weapon proliferation problem, or generally a nuisance. Some of these fission products and transuranic elements are quite valuable and would become a salable product for medicine and industry.
With a solid fuel the spent fuel rods are effectively worthless because the valuable elements are mixed in with the really radioactive stuff that built up over time. This is difficult to process until it has "cooled" which also means a lot of the really valuable elements have decayed away. A liquid salt reactor would save a lot of trouble by not producing this waste, and potentially save a lot of lives because many of the fission products the reactor could produce is used to treat and diagnose a lot of medical conditions. Some of them could also be used to disinfect surgical tools, find leaks in pipes, and make it easier to explore space.
A very good reactor using this liquid fuel is called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor, designed by Flibe Energy. Look it up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Chernobyl was not localized.
In south germany and south sweden you still can not eat mushrooms harvested from the woods and game is unsafe to eat.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You're making the wrong comparison, on three different levels. First, wildlife as a population can be fine even if some individuals suffer. The safety precautions (regarding eating mushrooms etc.) protect individuals. We know that many individuals fare badly around Chernobyl. Second, humans are much more long-lived that your wildlife, so there's more room for deleterious long-term effects in humans. Third, the reason why wildlife around Chernobyl thrives is much less because of the induced increase in mortality due to contamination being small and much more because of the decrease in mortality due to removal of humans being large.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm so very glad you bough that up, check my sig friend, it's not my ism I am talking about.
OK, let me get you started. This is the peer reviewed science that show nuclear power provides no Net Energy Return with contributions from about 10 Universities around the world, including CERN.
That would be like saying climate change is bullshit, but I kind of like it.
Yeah fuckit, I'm a nuclear denier. I deny Nuclear is a real solution to climate change. I'll start calling the nutty nukker fanbois, physics deniers, better FACT deniers or 'unable to provide fact'ers - but I jest ho ho ho.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.