Turns out getting the kgs of *bomb* grade material is much harder than CNN would have you believe. In fact it is the hardest step by a real long shot. So hard in fact it is easier to make a nuclear reactor and get reactor grade material then try and bread and reprocess it yourself.
If find it amusing that you call medium term 2-5 years. I would call medium term till i am about 50 (20 years) and long term when i retire, so about 40 years. Yet if i am talking about things like energy security, long term is 100+ years.
One of the reasons i like the Long Now foundation.
People from other parts of the two american continents that are not part of the United States of America find people that are from the United States of America insistence that they are just "Americans" rather dumb.
This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable.
One less traditional economist I know likes to sum it up with this quote (not his), "Humans don't understand exponential curves".
I will be clear. I don't want old nuclear. I want new nuclear, as in new passive designs and with reprocessing. Since reprocessing is really hard to do right (ie safe and not really expensive), i would be in favour of the so called breed and burn designs (Traveling wave reactors). This uses 40% of the energy potential of *depleted* Uranium without reprocessing rather than the ~4% that once through LWR do. With a trivial reprocessing step, you get to 80%. If you could get it to work with Thorium you can do even better with less waste.
As for my part. Well my big contribution is using the train rather than flying and not flying to NZ very often. That one flight from EU to NZ and back more than doubles my energy footprint in a year.
Did you even read the post you replied too? And why don't you start with numbers rather than a attack. Finally that is a straw man. I never said you *can't* build wind farms and interconnect them. I said that once you work at the scale of replacing base load, its not longer even remotely economic. In fact that paper had *zero* information about the economics. Once you want to replace base load, you can't choose between locations, you need to put a turbine in *all* locations. Even this study shows how hard it is. 19 optimally chosen sites still produce less that half there capacity on average. And to match coals reliability (92.3%) the capacity is down rated to 11-4% of the total (pg 5). This makes my case *stronger*. Furthermore there study was a bit of toy example. To replace base load and peaking power we are talking about 1000 of GWd not a few 1000 MWh.
It is easy to assert, "just do wind". But the bottom line is you won't want to pay for it when the time comes, and even then its probably not enough. You need to put turbines all over entire countries, and for a lot of places that is still not enough.
And how the frack did you come to the conclusion i am a shill? What do you do for a living? Sell wind turbines?
I think we both agree on this, I have just read/talked past you. Saving is not only a good idea, but one of the things we should be doing much more of. In fact that is why, if we go nuclear that I am against once through fuel cycles. Its too wasteful of all that mining etc. Also I am not really proposing we need more energy in the first world, but rather replace coal/gas/oil with nuclear. Of course we still have cars, boats and planes...
Yea, and E=mc^2, so there is more than enough energy than we need in a few tons of trash. Gathering and converting the energy is a *very* important constraint.
Because we can't solve the current problem with renewable in any reasonable way. Not in 50 years. You can't just arm wave that "it should be done". Right now we have only really two serious options if you don't want to have blackouts. Keep burning fossil fuels (this is what i believe will actually happen), or switch to more nuclear.
Either that, or only let the queen have the privilege of a modern lifestyle, electricity and heating.
And coal and shale oil won't run out in a few 100 years either. Neither will Uranium or Thorium (done right, we have about 10000 years worth). But you may just run out of copper if you want to build 200000 wind turbines.....
We grow lots of our own food. When I was a kid we rarely ate food that we didn't produce ourselves. We heated our house with solar and wood we harvested from our own forrest.
Yea, likes that going to work for 80% of the population that live in Urban centers. Oh and did you use any fertilizer? Any tractors? And what about the roads to your house out in the country, the bridges over the rivers....
We have the best lifestyle at any income ever. And its because of the rather awesome infrastructure we have built up. You are not independent from it. Even if you try, your micro hydro for power production was made somewhere. The copper in your walls wasn't dug out of the ground and refined by you. Unless you live as they did in the 16th century you are using a lot of energy. And they were not exactly living sustainably back then either.
A relativistic solution is a solution that does not require a significant change in lifestyle. As soon as that happens we will just keep burning fossil fuels. Even the staunchest environmentalists don't really care that much, they are still wearing nice shoes and cloths, drive a car or use the train and planes. Watch TV and have power and water at their house. And if they want to keep all of that without a power bill that makes the rent at Windsor Castle look cheap, you going to need to burn fossil fuels or nuclear fuels. It will be cheapest to use fossil fuels even without oil, so that is probably what will happen. With the environmental effect delegated to heated debate in the media, but that is all it will be, heated debate (and perhaps the odd new tax).
I am not saying don't save. And if we save half, well that is clearly worth it. But to solve the problem with saving we need to using more like 1% of what we do now. Its just not going to happen.
Wind if far more variable than *planed* shutdowns. It is variable over a single hour! It is really hard to deal with, and more importantly really expensive to deal with. When folks quote the cost of wind, its yet another thing left out. These things are not in the same ball park at all. In fact its a straw man. Planed shutdowns, and variable wind/solar are fundamentally *different*.
I know everyone just thinks its a matter of money... but really its a matter of sheer resource allocation. And sooner or later everyone will have to foot the bill. No one is going to happy with $5kWh electricity.
All forms of big power generation are already subsidized one way or another (generally much more than what it looks like on paper too). Wind is so subsidized here in the EU that people put up turbines anywhere, since you make money off them even if they never produce any energy!
I am warming up to the traveling wave reactor, where you have more smaller plants (~250MW) rather than a few big ones (>1GW). This is something we already do with gas. Also this even directly deals with the reprocessing problems and deals with proliferation and even earthquake and the such issues much better. Since it is a smaller plant the initial capital outlay is much less burdensome.
After rolling blackouts I think even NIMBY will be far less of a problem.
What about cutting back our use and being more efficient?
Because if you run the numbers, you haven't really cut back all that much and the magnitude of the problem is the same. Your energy foot print is a lot more than just gas and electricity. It water treatment every time you crap, its all that fancy nice fresh food you like to eat all year round. Its the two TV and the transport and mining and refining needed to make them. You get the idea. Not doing some silly things is a really good idea (ie NZ should be using double glazed windows) and i do try and save (aka better lights etc), but it really does not change the scale of energy you need if you want to eliminate fossil fuels. Instead of 200000 turbines, it is 180000, not nothing, worth doing, but nowhere near enough.
Heavy metal toxicity is mostly *because* it bioaccumulates regardless of toxicity mechanisms. Radioactivity is just icing on the cake. Also it depends on the isotope, some Pu isotopes have quite short half lifes. For example Cassini uses Pu238 RTGs for its power source.
I call BS. Got a source for this ludicrous claim. Give you a hint, instruments back at the lab will be able to detect this at levels where the cancer rate does not increase *at all*, we have detected no increase. Got a source for this increase cancer rate. I bet you just made that up too.
The wind turbines don't turn for long if you don't maintain them, I would think an engineer would know that. But hey you clearly don't want any data or facts to get in the way of your truthiness.
My point was, that I made a complete nonsense statement without any backing...
Slashdot Mirror
Turns out getting the kgs of *bomb* grade material is much harder than CNN would have you believe. In fact it is the hardest step by a real long shot. So hard in fact it is easier to make a nuclear reactor and get reactor grade material then try and bread and reprocess it yourself.
If find it amusing that you call medium term 2-5 years. I would call medium term till i am about 50 (20 years) and long term when i retire, so about 40 years. Yet if i am talking about things like energy security, long term is 100+ years.
One of the reasons i like the Long Now foundation.
People from other parts of the two american continents that are not part of the United States of America find people that are from the United States of America insistence that they are just "Americans" rather dumb.
This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable.
One less traditional economist I know likes to sum it up with this quote (not his), "Humans don't understand exponential curves".
The Onion is Americas Finest News Source. Well it is at least the most accurate.
I will be clear. I don't want old nuclear. I want new nuclear, as in new passive designs and with reprocessing. Since reprocessing is really hard to do right (ie safe and not really expensive), i would be in favour of the so called breed and burn designs (Traveling wave reactors). This uses 40% of the energy potential of *depleted* Uranium without reprocessing rather than the ~4% that once through LWR do. With a trivial reprocessing step, you get to 80%. If you could get it to work with Thorium you can do even better with less waste.
As for my part. Well my big contribution is using the train rather than flying and not flying to NZ very often. That one flight from EU to NZ and back more than doubles my energy footprint in a year.
Oh and no, i have not read that book.
Did you even read the post you replied too? And why don't you start with numbers rather than a attack. Finally that is a straw man. I never said you *can't* build wind farms and interconnect them. I said that once you work at the scale of replacing base load, its not longer even remotely economic. In fact that paper had *zero* information about the economics. Once you want to replace base load, you can't choose between locations, you need to put a turbine in *all* locations. Even this study shows how hard it is. 19 optimally chosen sites still produce less that half there capacity on average. And to match coals reliability (92.3%) the capacity is down rated to 11-4% of the total (pg 5). This makes my case *stronger*. Furthermore there study was a bit of toy example. To replace base load and peaking power we are talking about 1000 of GWd not a few 1000 MWh.
It is easy to assert, "just do wind". But the bottom line is you won't want to pay for it when the time comes, and even then its probably not enough. You need to put turbines all over entire countries, and for a lot of places that is still not enough.
And how the frack did you come to the conclusion i am a shill? What do you do for a living? Sell wind turbines?
So show us your numbers already.
I think we both agree on this, I have just read/talked past you. Saving is not only a good idea, but one of the things we should be doing much more of. In fact that is why, if we go nuclear that I am against once through fuel cycles. Its too wasteful of all that mining etc. Also I am not really proposing we need more energy in the first world, but rather replace coal/gas/oil with nuclear. Of course we still have cars, boats and planes...
Yea, and E=mc^2, so there is more than enough energy than we need in a few tons of trash. Gathering and converting the energy is a *very* important constraint.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Or perhaps is just another one of your truthiness facts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
The UN makes FEMA look awesome.
I always read the reports on the matter. Generally no fluff and about as accurate as you can hope for.
Because we can't solve the current problem with renewable in any reasonable way. Not in 50 years. You can't just arm wave that "it should be done". Right now we have only really two serious options if you don't want to have blackouts. Keep burning fossil fuels (this is what i believe will actually happen), or switch to more nuclear.
Either that, or only let the queen have the privilege of a modern lifestyle, electricity and heating.
And coal and shale oil won't run out in a few 100 years either. Neither will Uranium or Thorium (done right, we have about 10000 years worth). But you may just run out of copper if you want to build 200000 wind turbines.....
We grow lots of our own food. When I was a kid we rarely ate food that we didn't produce ourselves. We heated our house with solar and wood we harvested from our own forrest.
Yea, likes that going to work for 80% of the population that live in Urban centers. Oh and did you use any fertilizer? Any tractors? And what about the roads to your house out in the country, the bridges over the rivers....
We have the best lifestyle at any income ever. And its because of the rather awesome infrastructure we have built up. You are not independent from it. Even if you try, your micro hydro for power production was made somewhere. The copper in your walls wasn't dug out of the ground and refined by you. Unless you live as they did in the 16th century you are using a lot of energy. And they were not exactly living sustainably back then either.
A relativistic solution is a solution that does not require a significant change in lifestyle. As soon as that happens we will just keep burning fossil fuels. Even the staunchest environmentalists don't really care that much, they are still wearing nice shoes and cloths, drive a car or use the train and planes. Watch TV and have power and water at their house. And if they want to keep all of that without a power bill that makes the rent at Windsor Castle look cheap, you going to need to burn fossil fuels or nuclear fuels. It will be cheapest to use fossil fuels even without oil, so that is probably what will happen. With the environmental effect delegated to heated debate in the media, but that is all it will be, heated debate (and perhaps the odd new tax).
I am not saying don't save. And if we save half, well that is clearly worth it. But to solve the problem with saving we need to using more like 1% of what we do now. Its just not going to happen.
Wind if far more variable than *planed* shutdowns. It is variable over a single hour! It is really hard to deal with, and more importantly really expensive to deal with. When folks quote the cost of wind, its yet another thing left out. These things are not in the same ball park at all. In fact its a straw man. Planed shutdowns, and variable wind/solar are fundamentally *different*.
I know everyone just thinks its a matter of money... but really its a matter of sheer resource allocation. And sooner or later everyone will have to foot the bill. No one is going to happy with $5kWh electricity.
All forms of big power generation are already subsidized one way or another (generally much more than what it looks like on paper too). Wind is so subsidized here in the EU that people put up turbines anywhere, since you make money off them even if they never produce any energy!
I am warming up to the traveling wave reactor, where you have more smaller plants (~250MW) rather than a few big ones (>1GW). This is something we already do with gas. Also this even directly deals with the reprocessing problems and deals with proliferation and even earthquake and the such issues much better. Since it is a smaller plant the initial capital outlay is much less burdensome.
After rolling blackouts I think even NIMBY will be far less of a problem.
So in other words you don't have a source. If make shit up. I will call you out on it. And believe me its the worst kind of shit.
What about cutting back our use and being more efficient?
Because if you run the numbers, you haven't really cut back all that much and the magnitude of the problem is the same. Your energy foot print is a lot more than just gas and electricity. It water treatment every time you crap, its all that fancy nice fresh food you like to eat all year round. Its the two TV and the transport and mining and refining needed to make them. You get the idea. Not doing some silly things is a really good idea (ie NZ should be using double glazed windows) and i do try and save (aka better lights etc), but it really does not change the scale of energy you need if you want to eliminate fossil fuels. Instead of 200000 turbines, it is 180000, not nothing, worth doing, but nowhere near enough.
Heavy metal toxicity is mostly *because* it bioaccumulates regardless of toxicity mechanisms. Radioactivity is just icing on the cake. Also it depends on the isotope, some Pu isotopes have quite short half lifes. For example Cassini uses Pu238 RTGs for its power source.
The iodine and Cs that everyone has been talking about are *not* activation products, they are fission products.
but just because Chernobyl's effects won't last billions of years does not mean other incidents will not.
It is not physically possible. You know why? None of the radioactive nucleotides have a half life that long.
I call BS. Got a source for this ludicrous claim. Give you a hint, instruments back at the lab will be able to detect this at levels where the cancer rate does not increase *at all*, we have detected no increase. Got a source for this increase cancer rate. I bet you just made that up too.
You can use lead instead of sodium. It has the added advantage of being a larger effective thermal mass as well since the boiling point is higher.
My point was, that I made a complete nonsense statement without any backing ...
fixed that for you.