Because more expensive doesn't mean better. The Tesla Model S isn't better because it costs more, it's better because it's better. An electric car with a powerful motor gets awesome acceleration, yet a quiet ride. But its the car's electronics are better than any other car out there. Plus a hundred grand is a lot of money, but its a number that doesn't require to be a 1% to be able to afford it, it's like a 10% or 15% richest person car. The cheapest one at less than 60 grand after credits are affordable to maybe the top quarter of the US population. Musk was right, EVs will be the best cars from now on.
Don't blame the Republicans, don't blame the Democrats. Blame yourself. Look around for the politicians that are most likely to be bought by a big corporate interest. It's going to be from SAFE RED or SAFE BLUE districts / states. You need to end this oligopoly of two parties over your politics.
And the solution isn't complicated, it already works in other countries. Today third party candidates have enormous hurdles to get into the ticket, and then people typically don't vote for them, cause if he/she doesn't win, your vote was lost. France has this simple difference, run off elections (not really an idea particular to France) but rather the criteria that all candidates with at least 10% of valid votes get to the run off (final) vote. Typical run off only gets the two best voted candidates. The run off doesn't happen if the best voted gets 50% + 1 of valid votes. This has the following advantages: 1 - It only eliminate the fringe candidates but keep all significantly voted ones, this creates and incentive for alliances where for example, the 3rd voted allies with the 2nd voted and drop out of the run off, if he/she believes he can compromise a common ground 2 - If you didn't vote on the two best candidates on the opinion polls, it doesn't matter, if the best voted got 50% + 1 of votes and you didn't vote for him, than your vote couldn't change anything, otherwise the run off takes place, and then, on the run off you can select a second choice candidate that is more viable 3 - This would effectively reduce the importance of primary elections and give more importance to the general elections, so there could be a liberal, labor, conservative, centrist, libertarian parties, instead of everybody needs to be left, right or independent like today Think about it PS: I'm not from France. I'm Brazilian, we use a very stupid system, and we're raising awareness to move from the idiotic proportional voting system to district voting, and our movement favors the French system. Instead of having just two viable parties, Brazil is on the other extreme, with almost 25 parties and 6 or 7 parties with at least 5% of seats in the federal house. Huge mess here, but if we went district voting and ended up with bipartidarism, it would improve much less than it could.
Nuclear is the ONLY power source that is practical to solve climate change. TODAY. Solar and wind have already shown they need significant breakthrough on energy storage before they can get beyond 10% of grid power without extensive energy storage. People that hate nuclear will find anything they can criticize and say, see, this is bad, forget nuclear. But nuclear is the safest energy source in many countries, safer even then hydro, solar or wind. There's essentially zero point in this non proliferation paranoia, with North Korea, Pakistan already having nukes, and Iran will get them if they want to. Which country that don't have nukes is worse than Iran or North Korea ? Venezuela, Cuba, Syria ? You can't put the nuclear gene back in the bottle, get over it.
This argument only makes sense without the boomers. With the boomers there's just no justification of a huge stockpile of nukes. The boomers alone can level every major military base and major city in Russia and are still left with 2/3rds of their capacity. In reality they would be tasked with striking targets in doubles, such that even if a number of them were destroyed prior to launching it would still be doom for Russia. And would in the end still be left with a lots of extra nukes to finish the job if required The reasons for keeping thousands of nukes in the USA arsenal are:
- If Obama decides to reduce the stockpile to a few hundred nukes it might loose lots of independent votes
- Nukes degrade over time, thermonuclear weapons use tritium that have a 12 year half life, two 24 yrs after production, the nuke has lost 75% of its original yield, having lots of nukes allow slow remanufacturing, keeping the most recently produced ones in operational status, and the oldest ones in reserve (Uranium and Plutonium have half lifes in the tens of thousands year minimum, so they're irrelevant in that matter)
- It gives room for many waves of small decommissioning of nukes, as an invitation for Russia to reciprocate. Every time USA retires a few hundred nukes and Russia don't do the same, it makes Russia look bad internationally If it were up to me, I would maintain nuclear capacity only on boomers and B2 bombers, retire ICBMs, B1B nuclear capacity and small fighter nuclear capability, and build a few extra boomers.
> Just for curiosity sake, what are the processes available for using the plutonium from modern US weapons to generate energy? Plutonium can be used just as easily as U-235 as the real nuclear fuel. Current nuclear reactors (water cooled, solid fuel) are extremely inefficient being able to use from 0,65% and 1% of the nuclear fuel. So at least 99% of the original nuclear energy in the fuel is unused, but can be used after. So they make MOX fuel which is a blend of natural or depleted uranium with 7% of Plutonium, the uranium is there just to make up for the required fuel volume.
Proposed / designed reactors don't need Plutonium as it's main fuel. Their main fuel (in the long run) will be U-238 and Th-232 (the cheap stuff). For those reactors light water reactor spent nuclear fuel with a little reprocessing works just as well as MOX fuel for startup, and then the reactor operates for decades using fertile material (have nuclear energy but must undergo two or more nuclear reactions before they fission).
So the problem are the reactors.
One bowling ball of Thorium or Uranium using an efficient reactor has as much energy as an Oil supertanker. One two inch diameter sphere of Thorium or Uranium has all energy you will need in your life (electricity, transportation, manufacturing, heating, cooling, you name it). The problem with nuclear power is the US government only invested significantly on nuclear processes with utility to make nuclear bombs in the end. With the vast majority of the rest of the investment into nuclear reactors good for use in Subs, Carriers and Warships. Don't blame democrats or Obama for the stupid actions. For every questionable Obama decision I can give you two absolutely stupid decisions by republican presidents.
No nuclear weapon is a precise weapon. Even the least accurate ICBM in the world will make little difference compared to the blast radius of any nuke. Even a low yield nuke will produce fallout that the winds will blow, are you pretending to control the winds too ? Current USA and Russian nukes are so compact there is very little (if anything) that can be done to reduce their size significantly. This looks like the missile gap argument in the JFK times. There was no missile gap. It was a policy of trying to create as much lucrative contracts as possible to the military industrial complex. The USA is still doing it. Instead of doing business with the little UAV suppliers that are able and willing to make cheaper UAVs, USAF and US Navy are now moving to sourcing UAVs from the same old companies that overcharge the US govt with zero fear of retribution because they have a significant number of congressman and senators in their pocket (Lockheed Martin and Boeing). UAVs went from 5-6 million to about 30 millions in that process.
U-233 is essentially worthless for bombs. It's almost impossible to produce U-233 without U-232. U-232 is a hard gamma emitter. Hard gamma rays are a health hazard (will kill people manipulating it using normal manipulation methods), degrade explosives inside the bomb, and can be easily detected even from low earth orbit (300 Km away). Operation Tea Pot was the only nuclear bomb made with U-233 to be tested (even then it was a mix of U-233 and Pu-239). There are zero operational nukes with U-233. This whole non proliferation argument is stupid: 1 - Mankind have perfected uranium enrichment to the point it's far more practical to make bombs from U-235 instead of anything else 2 - The whole plutonium making was at a time there weren't large proven reserves of Uranium (because Pu-239 is made from U-238 which is 99.3% of natural uranium, and 99.99% of depleted uranium). 3 - We can mine uranium from the seas, it costs about 10x more than current uranium mining, but there are like thousands of times more uranium in the sea than in know high yield uranium reserves, it's essentially an unlimited reserve. Granite has uranium, coal ash piles has uranium (just to name a few low yield sources). 4 - Any government with any nuclear reactor that isn't tightly monitored could just insert a blanket of U-238 anywhere the U-238 would get neutrons, and make Pu-239 from U-238. So any non proliferation argument is stupid. We must never allow Iran to build a nuclear reactor (otherwise we would need to inspect it like 3 times per year minimum). And Pu-239 can be made from a high powered particle accelerator (accelerators pump high energy protons which can be converted into multiple neutrons with some simple materials, then those neutrons could be smashed into U-238 to make plutonium, wayyy better than trying to make U-233 from Thorium). Trying to create non proliferation obstacles for reactors to be installed on countries which already have nuclear energy is pointless. Besides Iran and North Korea, Pakistan, what other country we fear will get the bomb ?
I spent 200 hours studying current nuclear technology reactors and proposed reactors. Molten salt fueled reactors are wayyy safer that what we have. But current reactors are safe, Fukushima was a 1960s design, Chernobyl was a copy (spied) of a USA design before the USA fixed a serious flaw (decades earlier). Even current light/heavy water reactors are an order of magnitude safer than the reactors that suffered accidents in the past. Nobody died from Fukushima, zero. No cancer cases also. There are some interesting videos of the US sailors suing the US Navy, and it look like a baseless suit (nothing to do with radiation).
Not true. Thorium reactors could run exclusively on U-235 long term. It would be stupid to run them long term on U-235, but possible. But for startup, that's just what is planned to do. Thorium reactors could be started with a mix of U-235, Pu-239, Pu-240 and U-233. Th-232 is a fertile material, U-233 is made from Th-232 after the reactor is running. Once the reactor is in full operation, it makes more U-233 than it consumes, hence a breeder. Not all reactors that run Thorium are breeders (make more U-233 from Thorium than it consumes U-233). Little U-233 is available worldwide, USA stockpiles are less than enough to start 10 Thorium reactors (even the designs that need the least fissile material in operation). Thorium reactor designs that need a larger fissile inventory might consume that U-233 just to startup two reactors. The real problem with thermal reactors is U-238 making Pu-239, and Pu-239 only fissioning 2/3 of the time with thermal spectrum neutrons. When Pu-239 don't fission it makes Pu-240 leading to Americium and Curium production, leading to eating away extra neutrons. The problem is that U-238 -> Pu-239 -> Fission or Pu-240 cycle in the thermal spectrum makes only 1.9 neutrons for each 2 consumed. But if you have a stockpile of Pu-239, it only takes one neutron to make 1.9 neutrons on average, so it could startup a Thorium LFTR, producing U-233 from Th-232, and whatever Pu-240, Am-241 and Curium is made is kept in the reactor until it fissions.
Perhaps you mean for a Thorium breeder reactor (that makes as much U-233 as it consumes, or a little more), shouldn't be fueled with U-235, since it's a rare isotope (hundreds of times more rare on earth than Th-232), so it's not a good idea to run a Thorium reactor with U-235 on purpose.
The video I posted isn't an area flagged as don't sunbathe here, dangerous radiation. Every square ft of both beaches mentioned are crowded right now (10AM, summertime here). If there was any real danger, the area would have been marked off limits. If there was any real danger, with the area not isolated, there would be lots of isolated cases of cancer among young people. Again, those radiation hot spots are sought after because they are KNOWN to alleviate chronic diseases sintoms. Any studies that fail to recognize well known facts by the local population, of the health benefits of those hot spots, have anti nuclear biases. Do you know most smoke detectors contains about 0.29 micrograms of Americium-241 producing 37000 becquerels, enough to make a geiger counter spike hard if you jam one into the Am-241 inside it. Ok a fraction of a microgram is tiny, but it's not a mile away, it's right in your house ! Am-241 isn't a natural element. It can only be made inside a nuclear reactor or some other neutron source (U-238->U-239->Pu-239->Pu-240->Pu-241->Am-241). Tens of millions of people walk right up to one of those every day. Stop with the anti nuclear scaremongering.
Most scientists nowadays were raised with the nuclear bad, peace good mantra. I believe we need both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. I believe we didn't had WWIII exactly because of mutually assured destruction from nukes. I am in favor of no more nuclear tests, ever. But I'm not in favor of reducing the USA nuclear arsenal to a few hundred nukes. And I'm not in a NATO country. I believe Canada, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands,... and other advanced societies should have each about 5-50 nukes proportional to their population. It's an excellent deterrent to prevent war is the solution mentality that happens in many dictatorships. You need to look no further than the current China overtures to take over Islands that have been Japanese since WWII. They don't really mean it. It's used to take the Chinese minds away from their serious internal problems. Iran would need to be a real democracy for at least 50 years before they are elegible. Saudi Arabia would also need to become one. China and Russia would be forced to give them away, since they aren't real democracies anyhow. I know, one can dream. I'm from Brazil, and I'm not sure my country is stable enough to have them yet, but there are rumours that the USA provided us with a few during the cold war.
Just like that, people lock on to any shred of bad nuclear energy news as justification we need to get rid of it, a faustian bargain, blah blah blah. We need nuclear now, it's the only solution that would fix global warming. I'm willing to bet big bucks that 10 years from now, wind and solar will still not have offset not even 50% of coal and natural gas from electricity.
We need to separate getting radiation (alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, x-ray, neutrinos/anti neutrinos, photons) from ingesting radioactive materials. The former aren't a real problem. Some types of the latter are.
thermal (biomass/geothermal) and hydro work extremely well, they are baseload / peaking sources, so they function well in the grid but even all compost / garbage in the world isn't enough to provide even 20% of our current electricity needs, we can't waste land to produce material to burn in thermals on purpose, taking space away from feeding men and animals geothermal is plentiful if your country is close to volcanoes/fault lines, but most places aren't (thank god), Iceland is a good case of using all geothermal you can the real problem is wind+solar, wind being the worse without huge scale electrical batteries or pumped hydro a grid can't tolerate more than 10% solar+wind the exception is when you have lots of hydro with huge load following room (exactly the case of OR, WA, and my Brazil) but for most of the world, hydro is 25% tops, which still limits solar+wind to about 15-20% without very expensive energy storage solutions the problems of too much solar and wind are already showing in Hawaii, Australia and other places
Please, please, please watch this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Very telling. I was already a thorium convert, but this is allows someone that isn't viciously against nuclear, to see how bad wind and solar is. Please watch. Thanks.
The only really serious nuclear accident was Chernobyl, that was a reactor nobody outside of the old USSR would even think about building (without it's missing basic safety features). No Water Cooled reactor can be built without a proper secondary containment and all associated safety systems to deal with water / vapor leaks from the core reactor. The current generation of light water reactor for instance the Westinghouse AP1000 can go for days without any external power while being shutdown (if it's not shutdown, you have a huge turbine generating electricity anyhow), and after a few days all it requires is some basic water pumps to replenish a large water tank (like a tiny fraction of the normal diesel generator power required by older plants). So if Fukushima Daichi were all AP1000 reactors, it wouldn't matter if the generator for the backup pumps went down, they would only require help days latter, the reactor would have been fine, cause it wouldn't have lost cooling. BTW, I'm no lover of water cooled reactor, they're great for subs and carriers (lots of sea water for cooling as a last resort), uranium water cooled reactor usage for land was documented by the inventor of the light water reactor (Alvin Weinberg) as a temporary solution (in a letter to the Kennedy administration, *50* years ago), the problem was the proper solution wasn't good for nuclear bomb making, so it never got the proper funding (molten salt reactors, powered by Thorium, like the LFTR design).
The real problem with all of the real nuclear drawbacks is similar to GPS. We don't have civilian GPS because the military was kind and wanted us civilians to have free positioning. It was only made possible, because a very liberal US administration (Bill Clinton) decided after Russia shotdown a stray South Korean B747, that allowing GPS to be used for free would prevent a repeat of that. So the corporations tasked with producing military reactors (with all theoretical and the vast majority of the practical research fully paid for by the US govt), lobbied to "adapt" the technology for civilian usage. But you know like huge corporations are, they only care about profits. Today all revolutionary nuclear research is being done by startups or funded by countries with huge pollution problems (like China and India). One of the little guys researching Thorium molten salt are the Czecs, it's said the US NRC tried to convince them to stop researching that !
The US NRC has been overtaken by both radical green motivated people and people paid off by oil/coal lobbies. DoE nuclear research is purely for military needs. It's funny (if it wasn't serious) that the US NRC is critized by the outside greens they are a pawn of the nuclear operators, when what the NRC did and is doing is make it impossible to build new nuclear in the US (due to extreme certification/licensing costs, the requirements are insane). Allow that with current wall street demand for perfect certainty and demand of quick profits, wall street won't fund new nuclear (but they also aren't interested in funding new large hydro dams that take about the same time to build, except they are a little more certain in scheduling, due to the EPA giving them a much smaller grief than the NRC gives to nukes).
The real reason for this campaign against the DoE clean energy program is it will kill big oil and car makers that refuse to make EVs. Specially the Koch brothers profits. Tesla Motors alone will pay more taxes over then next 5 years to pay for all of those failures. It's total sales are already past US$ 3 billion. This is a campaign of slowing down migration away from oil as much as possible. It should be common sense, Iran hates us and Saudi Arabia billionaires funds Al Qaeda. Just US Navy costs to maintain stability in the gulf costs that much yearly.
You probably don't live near sea level. Average sea levels are rising, the rise was measured across multiple sun cycles. We can document the melting of the glaciers, some are advertising opening of permanent trade routes across the arctic. If the sea rises another meter, my home metro area of 2 million people will be half underwater. Venice will become Atlantis. Climate change is already killing thousands yearly. And it's only going to get worse.
I give zero credibility to climate change denialists that went from it's a lie, to it's not serious, next will be, yeah, there's no solution, we're screwed.
Don't put this only on Hansen alone. Put it on the tens of millions of people that are very worried about climate change and know the limitations of solar and wind. If solar and wind were that economical, Hawaii would have already shutdown it's fossil fuel electricity, because Hawaii has the most expensive fossil electricity outside of remote Alaska. Hawaii has strong/consistent winds, and is the best USA state for solar. Still, wind+solar in Hawaii is still less than 10% of electricity production. The German clean electricity plan is one trillion euro. It has already resulted in German coal consumption going up (along with emissions). We have an enormous ideology problem in the world. One such angle is the radical green ideology that sees man as a problem, and sees cheap electricity (no matter how clean) like giving a chainsaw to a child.
The anti nuclear greens want expensive electricity so we can't waste it.
We must separate the hidden green peace agenda from solutions to climate change. And take nuclear power seriously. Fukushima and Three mile Island killed nobody from radiation. I'll be conservative and conceed it's possible Fukushima will cause a few hundred cancers, with the anti nuclear lobby conveniently forgetting the 8.8 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami killed 20000 people.
Nothing "likes" being flooded. If you are talking about Fukushima, they were warned that their Tsunami defenses were inadequate. Water cooled nukes are required to have three diesel backup generators, they put all of them such that if their insufficient Tsunami barriers were breached, they would all get flooded. They should have put at least two in a roof. Should they just took care of that there would have been no Fukushima accident.
My point is the one meter ocean water rise will happen anyways. It will screw my home town, it will screw NYC, it will screw LA, Venice is already in serious trouble, oh your poor neighbors in the netherlands. Without a solution that China and India can adopt right now, it's game over. There isn't enough solar panels and wind turbines. Part of the wind turbine supply problem is stalled rare earth mining, due to over regulation on Thorium. 1 trillion dollar project for cleaning up a 60GW grid is WAY too expensive. You can afford it, with the ultra low interest rates, export driven economy.
You don't want nuclear, that's your choice, but don't tell me that your current plan is economically sensible. You can't question my numbers, because you aren't building any nuclear power, zero. Build one reactor then tell me the number. And then I'll will look up all the regulation absurdity involved, and how much that alone costs. You don't understand the difference between Germany and China/India/Brazil, if you did you knew your plan for us is a non starter. We'll keep doing token solar and wind projects, until wind and solar gets on par with big hydro.
Your basic lack of understanding of what is a breeder and a normal reactor and a fast vs thermal reactor shows me you just don't know enough about nuclear to criticize it. You haven't studied it. I have spent hundreds of hours learning about light water, heavy water, IFR, LFTR reactors, and their characteristics.
Brazil's Angra-3 will have 1350MWe, and it's updated cost is R$ 13 billion / US$ 5,4 billion, or US$ 4 billion / GWe. But Brazil has a long history of infrastructure projects overruns, even the Europeans can make things cheaper than we can, and the Chinese can build large public projects at 1/4th the cost. Still about EUR 3 billion / GWe. And Brazil is only building this one for now, there are zero economies of scale, also we insist on maximum local sourcing of materials, so there are lots of things that are going slower/more expensive as our local industry builds those things as a one off.
I just checked, newly built nuclear power stations in South Korea for US$ 440 million per GWe. Scaling their labor costs to US values is US$ 2 billion per GWe, and I'll assume 30% more for Europe, so EUR 2 billion per GWe. Still, like I said, let's go with EUR 5 billion per GWe, os 150% more. It's an overblow number !
If we used the EUR 2 billion per GWe, you could rebuild 100% of your generation capacity 100% nuclear for 60 billion EUR, versus the 1000 billion EUR ! No need to load follow, just overproduce the electricity (and dump it on your neighbors for free if needed).
The problem with nuclear in the US and Germany is you don't want it, so your nuclear regulatory agency works to make life for a nuclear power plant construction impossible. Again, 15 years to build a nuke is at least 50% unnecessary burdens. There are well explained examples of what is happening with the Vogtle-GA-USA of the NRC freezing construction for months, on something they could have decided in a day. Their job nowadays isn't to make the nuclear industry safe, it's to make their life impossibly expensive. Then the environmentalists go and say: "See nuclear is expensive, look at the Vogtle project", yeah, right. And go out and say the NRC is in cahoots with the nuclear operators !
Yes, China and India are investing on renewable, they are also investing heavily on nuclear, but their emissions are going up month after month, cause they are always adding more coal, because solar and wind renewables are too expensive !
We can go you repeat the argument, and I repeat that you're talking nonsense. For me you already lost the argument, someone that hasn't been brainwashed with the nuclear is bad mantra will see my point.
Please watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... 30 hours in this beach = one year total natural radiation in london or LA 1 hour a day for a year = maximum allowed radiation exposure a nuclear worker can receive After I watched those videos, I started believing in hormesis, because I have spent about one full year sunbathing in those beaches for about 4 hrs/day.
Flies into the face of real world data. It's in direct conflict with people that make a living out of flying at 30 thousand feet and higher (lots of cosmic rays due to thinner atmosphere). It's in direct conflict with every large population that lives on top of large monazite sand resources (large alpha emitters). We are continuously exposed to lots of radioactive Radon gas and it's decay, it seeps from underground everywhere (generated by decay of thorium in the earths core, then seep towards the surface). If LNT models were true, Three Mile Island would have caused dozens of cancers from nuclear workers that had to cleanup the reactor. TMI was 35 years ago, where are the cancers ? Notice workers don't really shield themselves from radiation, instead they shield themselves from inhaling radioactive materials. They don't even cover 100% of their skin, they have decontamination showers afterwards (to remove the radioactive materials, but the rays already made it through). We're talking about effects of radiation on people, or the ingestion of radioactive Caesium, Strontium, Cobalt, Iodine that is documented to have serious health effects. Most decays are alpha decays (uranium, thorium, radium, radon), but Potassium 40 which is inside our body has a gamma decay. In LNT were true, then we should all live alone, far from others, since we emit gamma rays from Potassium 40, beta rays from from Carbon 14. Plus cosmic rays have lots of high energy protons.
The whole math doesn't add up in those studies.
This isn't about youtube. Stop cherry picking only the easy to attack data on my posts. If NLT were true, we would see very elevated cancer levels in cities that I visit every other month. Huge alpha radiation. Have you watched Pandora's promise ? Specially the part where they come to Guarapari (my mom lives 90 days per year there, I have spent cumulatively at least 2 years there). Tens of thousands getting over one thousand the maximum recommended radiation level. Recommendation is 1mSv / year, they get 2000 to 5000 mSv / year to permanent local residents. This city swells from 200000 population off season to at least twice that much in the summer. If it was just ten times, then maybe. But one thousand times of something so "dangerous" ! Yeah, I'm being sarcastic.
> All plants in France are fast Plutonium breeders. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... No operational breeder reactors in any NATO countries. Only former USSR contries have long running breeder reactors still in operation, India have one coming online India and China have breeder reactor programs, but no currently operational breeder reactors.
You are mixing up the fact that every regular reactor that has U-238 in its fuel produces Pu-239/Pu-240/Am/Cu (transuranics), but those are produced in an unsustainable way. And that every Th-232 fueled reactor produces U-233. If you use that criteria then every single nuclear reactor in the world is a breeder, which is utterly wrong.
> Fuck the costs, the money is better spend than sitting on a bank account of some idiot. 300 billion plus 700 billion is 1 trillion, so the total cost is 1 trillion. replacing the coal plants is the most critical step, so why are you trying to frame it as unrelated cost ? If you don't care about the costs, then like I said, Germany's plan only applies to Germany, no sane country will waste 1 trillion euro for cleaning up just 60GW worth of electricity production. Reactors being built in the USA with huge cost overruns from politically induced stop and resume are still expected to cost US$ 7 billion with room for another billion in overruns included, or less than EUR 5 billion ! I was using EUR 10 billion in hope that you would be reasonable and accept that as a hugely high ball number, but no, you have to question it without any data to back it up.
Is see you are conceding defeat, keep up your uneconomical jobs plan. Remember that even if North America and Europe could stop 100% of their emissions tomorrow, China and India would make up for that in a few years, unless the solution is economical, it won't be adopted in developing countries, and then we're still fucked by climate change. That's the big conundrum that the looniest of the environmentalists like you insist on ignoring.
Slashdot Mirror
Because more expensive doesn't mean better.
The Tesla Model S isn't better because it costs more, it's better because it's better.
An electric car with a powerful motor gets awesome acceleration, yet a quiet ride.
But its the car's electronics are better than any other car out there.
Plus a hundred grand is a lot of money, but its a number that doesn't require to be a 1% to be able to afford it, it's like a 10% or 15% richest person car.
The cheapest one at less than 60 grand after credits are affordable to maybe the top quarter of the US population.
Musk was right, EVs will be the best cars from now on.
Don't blame the Republicans, don't blame the Democrats. Blame yourself.
Look around for the politicians that are most likely to be bought by a big corporate interest. It's going to be from SAFE RED or SAFE BLUE districts / states.
You need to end this oligopoly of two parties over your politics.
And the solution isn't complicated, it already works in other countries.
Today third party candidates have enormous hurdles to get into the ticket, and then people typically don't vote for them, cause if he/she doesn't win, your vote was lost.
France has this simple difference, run off elections (not really an idea particular to France) but rather the criteria that all candidates with at least 10% of valid votes get to the run off (final) vote. Typical run off only gets the two best voted candidates. The run off doesn't happen if the best voted gets 50% + 1 of valid votes.
This has the following advantages:
1 - It only eliminate the fringe candidates but keep all significantly voted ones, this creates and incentive for alliances where for example, the 3rd voted allies with the 2nd voted and drop out of the run off, if he/she believes he can compromise a common ground
2 - If you didn't vote on the two best candidates on the opinion polls, it doesn't matter, if the best voted got 50% + 1 of votes and you didn't vote for him, than your vote couldn't change anything, otherwise the run off takes place, and then, on the run off you can select a second choice candidate that is more viable
3 - This would effectively reduce the importance of primary elections and give more importance to the general elections, so there could be a liberal, labor, conservative, centrist, libertarian parties, instead of everybody needs to be left, right or independent like today
Think about it
PS: I'm not from France. I'm Brazilian, we use a very stupid system, and we're raising awareness to move from the idiotic proportional voting system to district voting, and our movement favors the French system. Instead of having just two viable parties, Brazil is on the other extreme, with almost 25 parties and 6 or 7 parties with at least 5% of seats in the federal house. Huge mess here, but if we went district voting and ended up with bipartidarism, it would improve much less than it could.
Nuclear is the ONLY power source that is practical to solve climate change. TODAY.
Solar and wind have already shown they need significant breakthrough on energy storage before they can get beyond 10% of grid power without extensive energy storage.
People that hate nuclear will find anything they can criticize and say, see, this is bad, forget nuclear.
But nuclear is the safest energy source in many countries, safer even then hydro, solar or wind.
There's essentially zero point in this non proliferation paranoia, with North Korea, Pakistan already having nukes, and Iran will get them if they want to.
Which country that don't have nukes is worse than Iran or North Korea ? Venezuela, Cuba, Syria ?
You can't put the nuclear gene back in the bottle, get over it.
This argument only makes sense without the boomers. With the boomers there's just no justification of a huge stockpile of nukes. The boomers alone can level every major military base and major city in Russia and are still left with 2/3rds of their capacity. In reality they would be tasked with striking targets in doubles, such that even if a number of them were destroyed prior to launching it would still be doom for Russia. And would in the end still be left with a lots of extra nukes to finish the job if required
The reasons for keeping thousands of nukes in the USA arsenal are:
- If Obama decides to reduce the stockpile to a few hundred nukes it might loose lots of independent votes
- Nukes degrade over time, thermonuclear weapons use tritium that have a 12 year half life, two 24 yrs after production, the nuke has lost 75% of its original yield, having lots of nukes allow slow remanufacturing, keeping the most recently produced ones in operational status, and the oldest ones in reserve (Uranium and Plutonium have half lifes in the tens of thousands year minimum, so they're irrelevant in that matter)
- It gives room for many waves of small decommissioning of nukes, as an invitation for Russia to reciprocate. Every time USA retires a few hundred nukes and Russia don't do the same, it makes Russia look bad internationally
If it were up to me, I would maintain nuclear capacity only on boomers and B2 bombers, retire ICBMs, B1B nuclear capacity and small fighter nuclear capability, and build a few extra boomers.
> Just for curiosity sake, what are the processes available for using the plutonium from modern US weapons to generate energy?
Plutonium can be used just as easily as U-235 as the real nuclear fuel.
Current nuclear reactors (water cooled, solid fuel) are extremely inefficient being able to use from 0,65% and 1% of the nuclear fuel. So at least 99% of the original nuclear energy in the fuel is unused, but can be used after.
So they make MOX fuel which is a blend of natural or depleted uranium with 7% of Plutonium, the uranium is there just to make up for the required fuel volume.
Proposed / designed reactors don't need Plutonium as it's main fuel. Their main fuel (in the long run) will be U-238 and Th-232 (the cheap stuff).
For those reactors light water reactor spent nuclear fuel with a little reprocessing works just as well as MOX fuel for startup, and then the reactor operates for decades using fertile material (have nuclear energy but must undergo two or more nuclear reactions before they fission).
So the problem are the reactors.
One bowling ball of Thorium or Uranium using an efficient reactor has as much energy as an Oil supertanker.
One two inch diameter sphere of Thorium or Uranium has all energy you will need in your life (electricity, transportation, manufacturing, heating, cooling, you name it).
The problem with nuclear power is the US government only invested significantly on nuclear processes with utility to make nuclear bombs in the end. With the vast majority of the rest of the investment into nuclear reactors good for use in Subs, Carriers and Warships.
Don't blame democrats or Obama for the stupid actions. For every questionable Obama decision I can give you two absolutely stupid decisions by republican presidents.
No nuclear weapon is a precise weapon. Even the least accurate ICBM in the world will make little difference compared to the blast radius of any nuke.
Even a low yield nuke will produce fallout that the winds will blow, are you pretending to control the winds too ?
Current USA and Russian nukes are so compact there is very little (if anything) that can be done to reduce their size significantly.
This looks like the missile gap argument in the JFK times. There was no missile gap. It was a policy of trying to create as much lucrative contracts as possible to the military industrial complex.
The USA is still doing it.
Instead of doing business with the little UAV suppliers that are able and willing to make cheaper UAVs, USAF and US Navy are now moving to sourcing UAVs from the same old companies that overcharge the US govt with zero fear of retribution because they have a significant number of congressman and senators in their pocket (Lockheed Martin and Boeing).
UAVs went from 5-6 million to about 30 millions in that process.
U-233 is essentially worthless for bombs.
It's almost impossible to produce U-233 without U-232.
U-232 is a hard gamma emitter.
Hard gamma rays are a health hazard (will kill people manipulating it using normal manipulation methods), degrade explosives inside the bomb, and can be easily detected even from low earth orbit (300 Km away).
Operation Tea Pot was the only nuclear bomb made with U-233 to be tested (even then it was a mix of U-233 and Pu-239).
There are zero operational nukes with U-233.
This whole non proliferation argument is stupid:
1 - Mankind have perfected uranium enrichment to the point it's far more practical to make bombs from U-235 instead of anything else
2 - The whole plutonium making was at a time there weren't large proven reserves of Uranium (because Pu-239 is made from U-238 which is 99.3% of natural uranium, and 99.99% of depleted uranium).
3 - We can mine uranium from the seas, it costs about 10x more than current uranium mining, but there are like thousands of times more uranium in the sea than in know high yield uranium reserves, it's essentially an unlimited reserve. Granite has uranium, coal ash piles has uranium (just to name a few low yield sources).
4 - Any government with any nuclear reactor that isn't tightly monitored could just insert a blanket of U-238 anywhere the U-238 would get neutrons, and make Pu-239 from U-238.
So any non proliferation argument is stupid. We must never allow Iran to build a nuclear reactor (otherwise we would need to inspect it like 3 times per year minimum). And Pu-239 can be made from a high powered particle accelerator (accelerators pump high energy protons which can be converted into multiple neutrons with some simple materials, then those neutrons could be smashed into U-238 to make plutonium, wayyy better than trying to make U-233 from Thorium).
Trying to create non proliferation obstacles for reactors to be installed on countries which already have nuclear energy is pointless.
Besides Iran and North Korea, Pakistan, what other country we fear will get the bomb ?
I spent 200 hours studying current nuclear technology reactors and proposed reactors.
Molten salt fueled reactors are wayyy safer that what we have.
But current reactors are safe, Fukushima was a 1960s design, Chernobyl was a copy (spied) of a USA design before the USA fixed a serious flaw (decades earlier).
Even current light/heavy water reactors are an order of magnitude safer than the reactors that suffered accidents in the past.
Nobody died from Fukushima, zero. No cancer cases also. There are some interesting videos of the US sailors suing the US Navy, and it look like a baseless suit (nothing to do with radiation).
What mess ?
Not true. Thorium reactors could run exclusively on U-235 long term. It would be stupid to run them long term on U-235, but possible. But for startup, that's just what is planned to do. Thorium reactors could be started with a mix of U-235, Pu-239, Pu-240 and U-233.
Th-232 is a fertile material, U-233 is made from Th-232 after the reactor is running.
Once the reactor is in full operation, it makes more U-233 than it consumes, hence a breeder. Not all reactors that run Thorium are breeders (make more U-233 from Thorium than it consumes U-233).
Little U-233 is available worldwide, USA stockpiles are less than enough to start 10 Thorium reactors (even the designs that need the least fissile material in operation). Thorium reactor designs that need a larger fissile inventory might consume that U-233 just to startup two reactors.
The real problem with thermal reactors is U-238 making Pu-239, and Pu-239 only fissioning 2/3 of the time with thermal spectrum neutrons. When Pu-239 don't fission it makes Pu-240 leading to Americium and Curium production, leading to eating away extra neutrons.
The problem is that U-238 -> Pu-239 -> Fission or Pu-240 cycle in the thermal spectrum makes only 1.9 neutrons for each 2 consumed.
But if you have a stockpile of Pu-239, it only takes one neutron to make 1.9 neutrons on average, so it could startup a Thorium LFTR, producing U-233 from Th-232, and whatever Pu-240, Am-241 and Curium is made is kept in the reactor until it fissions.
Perhaps you mean for a Thorium breeder reactor (that makes as much U-233 as it consumes, or a little more), shouldn't be fueled with U-235, since it's a rare isotope (hundreds of times more rare on earth than Th-232), so it's not a good idea to run a Thorium reactor with U-235 on purpose.
The video I posted isn't an area flagged as don't sunbathe here, dangerous radiation.
Every square ft of both beaches mentioned are crowded right now (10AM, summertime here).
If there was any real danger, the area would have been marked off limits.
If there was any real danger, with the area not isolated, there would be lots of isolated cases of cancer among young people.
Again, those radiation hot spots are sought after because they are KNOWN to alleviate chronic diseases sintoms.
Any studies that fail to recognize well known facts by the local population, of the health benefits of those hot spots, have anti nuclear biases.
Do you know most smoke detectors contains about 0.29 micrograms of Americium-241 producing 37000 becquerels, enough to make a geiger counter spike hard if you jam one into the Am-241 inside it. Ok a fraction of a microgram is tiny, but it's not a mile away, it's right in your house !
Am-241 isn't a natural element. It can only be made inside a nuclear reactor or some other neutron source (U-238->U-239->Pu-239->Pu-240->Pu-241->Am-241).
Tens of millions of people walk right up to one of those every day.
Stop with the anti nuclear scaremongering.
Most scientists nowadays were raised with the nuclear bad, peace good mantra. ... and other advanced societies should have each about 5-50 nukes proportional to their population.
I believe we need both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
I believe we didn't had WWIII exactly because of mutually assured destruction from nukes.
I am in favor of no more nuclear tests, ever. But I'm not in favor of reducing the USA nuclear arsenal to a few hundred nukes. And I'm not in a NATO country.
I believe Canada, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands,
It's an excellent deterrent to prevent war is the solution mentality that happens in many dictatorships.
You need to look no further than the current China overtures to take over Islands that have been Japanese since WWII. They don't really mean it. It's used to take the Chinese minds away from their serious internal problems.
Iran would need to be a real democracy for at least 50 years before they are elegible. Saudi Arabia would also need to become one.
China and Russia would be forced to give them away, since they aren't real democracies anyhow. I know, one can dream.
I'm from Brazil, and I'm not sure my country is stable enough to have them yet, but there are rumours that the USA provided us with a few during the cold war.
Just like that, people lock on to any shred of bad nuclear energy news as justification we need to get rid of it, a faustian bargain, blah blah blah.
We need nuclear now, it's the only solution that would fix global warming.
I'm willing to bet big bucks that 10 years from now, wind and solar will still not have offset not even 50% of coal and natural gas from electricity.
We need to separate getting radiation (alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, x-ray, neutrinos/anti neutrinos, photons) from ingesting radioactive materials. The former aren't a real problem. Some types of the latter are.
thermal (biomass/geothermal) and hydro work extremely well, they are baseload / peaking sources, so they function well in the grid
but even all compost / garbage in the world isn't enough to provide even 20% of our current electricity needs, we can't waste land to produce material to burn in thermals on purpose, taking space away from feeding men and animals
geothermal is plentiful if your country is close to volcanoes/fault lines, but most places aren't (thank god), Iceland is a good case of using all geothermal you can
the real problem is wind+solar, wind being the worse
without huge scale electrical batteries or pumped hydro a grid can't tolerate more than 10% solar+wind
the exception is when you have lots of hydro with huge load following room (exactly the case of OR, WA, and my Brazil) but for most of the world, hydro is 25% tops, which still limits solar+wind to about 15-20% without very expensive energy storage solutions
the problems of too much solar and wind are already showing in Hawaii, Australia and other places
Please, please, please watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Very telling. I was already a thorium convert, but this is allows someone that isn't viciously against nuclear, to see how bad wind and solar is.
Please watch.
Thanks.
trying to make something horrifying into good. Good luck !
Even with net neutrality, it's already bad enough for content providers.
Stop with the BS.
The only really serious nuclear accident was Chernobyl, that was a reactor nobody outside of the old USSR would even think about building (without it's missing basic safety features). No Water Cooled reactor can be built without a proper secondary containment and all associated safety systems to deal with water / vapor leaks from the core reactor.
The current generation of light water reactor for instance the Westinghouse AP1000 can go for days without any external power while being shutdown (if it's not shutdown, you have a huge turbine generating electricity anyhow), and after a few days all it requires is some basic water pumps to replenish a large water tank (like a tiny fraction of the normal diesel generator power required by older plants). So if Fukushima Daichi were all AP1000 reactors, it wouldn't matter if the generator for the backup pumps went down, they would only require help days latter, the reactor would have been fine, cause it wouldn't have lost cooling. BTW, I'm no lover of water cooled reactor, they're great for subs and carriers (lots of sea water for cooling as a last resort), uranium water cooled reactor usage for land was documented by the inventor of the light water reactor (Alvin Weinberg) as a temporary solution (in a letter to the Kennedy administration, *50* years ago), the problem was the proper solution wasn't good for nuclear bomb making, so it never got the proper funding (molten salt reactors, powered by Thorium, like the LFTR design).
The real problem with all of the real nuclear drawbacks is similar to GPS. We don't have civilian GPS because the military was kind and wanted us civilians to have free positioning. It was only made possible, because a very liberal US administration (Bill Clinton) decided after Russia shotdown a stray South Korean B747, that allowing GPS to be used for free would prevent a repeat of that. So the corporations tasked with producing military reactors (with all theoretical and the vast majority of the practical research fully paid for by the US govt), lobbied to "adapt" the technology for civilian usage. But you know like huge corporations are, they only care about profits. Today all revolutionary nuclear research is being done by startups or funded by countries with huge pollution problems (like China and India). One of the little guys researching Thorium molten salt are the Czecs, it's said the US NRC tried to convince them to stop researching that !
The US NRC has been overtaken by both radical green motivated people and people paid off by oil/coal lobbies. DoE nuclear research is purely for military needs. It's funny (if it wasn't serious) that the US NRC is critized by the outside greens they are a pawn of the nuclear operators, when what the NRC did and is doing is make it impossible to build new nuclear in the US (due to extreme certification/licensing costs, the requirements are insane). Allow that with current wall street demand for perfect certainty and demand of quick profits, wall street won't fund new nuclear (but they also aren't interested in funding new large hydro dams that take about the same time to build, except they are a little more certain in scheduling, due to the EPA giving them a much smaller grief than the NRC gives to nukes).
The real reason for this campaign against the DoE clean energy program is it will kill big oil and car makers that refuse to make EVs.
Specially the Koch brothers profits.
Tesla Motors alone will pay more taxes over then next 5 years to pay for all of those failures.
It's total sales are already past US$ 3 billion.
This is a campaign of slowing down migration away from oil as much as possible.
It should be common sense, Iran hates us and Saudi Arabia billionaires funds Al Qaeda.
Just US Navy costs to maintain stability in the gulf costs that much yearly.
You probably don't live near sea level.
Average sea levels are rising, the rise was measured across multiple sun cycles.
We can document the melting of the glaciers, some are advertising opening of permanent trade routes across the arctic.
If the sea rises another meter, my home metro area of 2 million people will be half underwater. Venice will become Atlantis.
Climate change is already killing thousands yearly. And it's only going to get worse.
I give zero credibility to climate change denialists that went from it's a lie, to it's not serious, next will be, yeah, there's no solution, we're screwed.
Don't put this only on Hansen alone. Put it on the tens of millions of people that are very worried about climate change and know the limitations of solar and wind.
If solar and wind were that economical, Hawaii would have already shutdown it's fossil fuel electricity, because Hawaii has the most expensive fossil electricity outside of remote Alaska. Hawaii has strong/consistent winds, and is the best USA state for solar. Still, wind+solar in Hawaii is still less than 10% of electricity production.
The German clean electricity plan is one trillion euro. It has already resulted in German coal consumption going up (along with emissions).
We have an enormous ideology problem in the world. One such angle is the radical green ideology that sees man as a problem, and sees cheap electricity (no matter how clean) like giving a chainsaw to a child.
The anti nuclear greens want expensive electricity so we can't waste it.
We must separate the hidden green peace agenda from solutions to climate change. And take nuclear power seriously.
Fukushima and Three mile Island killed nobody from radiation. I'll be conservative and conceed it's possible Fukushima will cause a few hundred cancers, with the anti nuclear lobby conveniently forgetting the 8.8 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami killed 20000 people.
Nothing "likes" being flooded.
If you are talking about Fukushima, they were warned that their Tsunami defenses were inadequate. Water cooled nukes are required to have three diesel backup generators, they put all of them such that if their insufficient Tsunami barriers were breached, they would all get flooded. They should have put at least two in a roof. Should they just took care of that there would have been no Fukushima accident.
My point is the one meter ocean water rise will happen anyways. It will screw my home town, it will screw NYC, it will screw LA, Venice is already in serious trouble, oh your poor neighbors in the netherlands. Without a solution that China and India can adopt right now, it's game over. There isn't enough solar panels and wind turbines. Part of the wind turbine supply problem is stalled rare earth mining, due to over regulation on Thorium.
1 trillion dollar project for cleaning up a 60GW grid is WAY too expensive. You can afford it, with the ultra low interest rates, export driven economy.
You don't want nuclear, that's your choice, but don't tell me that your current plan is economically sensible.
You can't question my numbers, because you aren't building any nuclear power, zero. Build one reactor then tell me the number. And then I'll will look up all the regulation absurdity involved, and how much that alone costs.
You don't understand the difference between Germany and China/India/Brazil, if you did you knew your plan for us is a non starter.
We'll keep doing token solar and wind projects, until wind and solar gets on par with big hydro.
Your basic lack of understanding of what is a breeder and a normal reactor and a fast vs thermal reactor shows me you just don't know enough about nuclear to criticize it. You haven't studied it. I have spent hundreds of hours learning about light water, heavy water, IFR, LFTR reactors, and their characteristics.
Brazil's Angra-3 will have 1350MWe, and it's updated cost is R$ 13 billion / US$ 5,4 billion, or US$ 4 billion / GWe. But Brazil has a long history of infrastructure projects overruns, even the Europeans can make things cheaper than we can, and the Chinese can build large public projects at 1/4th the cost. Still about EUR 3 billion / GWe. And Brazil is only building this one for now, there are zero economies of scale, also we insist on maximum local sourcing of materials, so there are lots of things that are going slower/more expensive as our local industry builds those things as a one off.
I just checked, newly built nuclear power stations in South Korea for US$ 440 million per GWe. Scaling their labor costs to US values is US$ 2 billion per GWe, and I'll assume 30% more for Europe, so EUR 2 billion per GWe. Still, like I said, let's go with EUR 5 billion per GWe, os 150% more. It's an overblow number !
If we used the EUR 2 billion per GWe, you could rebuild 100% of your generation capacity 100% nuclear for 60 billion EUR, versus the 1000 billion EUR ! No need to load follow, just overproduce the electricity (and dump it on your neighbors for free if needed).
The problem with nuclear in the US and Germany is you don't want it, so your nuclear regulatory agency works to make life for a nuclear power plant construction impossible. Again, 15 years to build a nuke is at least 50% unnecessary burdens. There are well explained examples of what is happening with the Vogtle-GA-USA of the NRC freezing construction for months, on something they could have decided in a day. Their job nowadays isn't to make the nuclear industry safe, it's to make their life impossibly expensive. Then the environmentalists go and say: "See nuclear is expensive, look at the Vogtle project", yeah, right. And go out and say the NRC is in cahoots with the nuclear operators !
Yes, China and India are investing on renewable, they are also investing heavily on nuclear, but their emissions are going up month after month, cause they are always adding more coal, because solar and wind renewables are too expensive !
We can go you repeat the argument, and I repeat that you're talking nonsense.
For me you already lost the argument, someone that hasn't been brainwashed with the nuclear is bad mantra will see my point.
Please watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
30 hours in this beach = one year total natural radiation in london or LA
1 hour a day for a year = maximum allowed radiation exposure a nuclear worker can receive
After I watched those videos, I started believing in hormesis, because I have spent about one full year sunbathing in those beaches for about 4 hrs/day.
Flies into the face of real world data. It's in direct conflict with people that make a living out of flying at 30 thousand feet and higher (lots of cosmic rays due to thinner atmosphere). It's in direct conflict with every large population that lives on top of large monazite sand resources (large alpha emitters).
We are continuously exposed to lots of radioactive Radon gas and it's decay, it seeps from underground everywhere (generated by decay of thorium in the earths core, then seep towards the surface).
If LNT models were true, Three Mile Island would have caused dozens of cancers from nuclear workers that had to cleanup the reactor. TMI was 35 years ago, where are the cancers ?
Notice workers don't really shield themselves from radiation, instead they shield themselves from inhaling radioactive materials. They don't even cover 100% of their skin, they have decontamination showers afterwards (to remove the radioactive materials, but the rays already made it through).
We're talking about effects of radiation on people, or the ingestion of radioactive Caesium, Strontium, Cobalt, Iodine that is documented to have serious health effects.
Most decays are alpha decays (uranium, thorium, radium, radon), but Potassium 40 which is inside our body has a gamma decay.
In LNT were true, then we should all live alone, far from others, since we emit gamma rays from Potassium 40, beta rays from from Carbon 14.
Plus cosmic rays have lots of high energy protons.
The whole math doesn't add up in those studies.
This isn't about youtube. Stop cherry picking only the easy to attack data on my posts. If NLT were true, we would see very elevated cancer levels in cities that I visit every other month. Huge alpha radiation. Have you watched Pandora's promise ? Specially the part where they come to Guarapari (my mom lives 90 days per year there, I have spent cumulatively at least 2 years there).
Tens of thousands getting over one thousand the maximum recommended radiation level. Recommendation is 1mSv / year, they get 2000 to 5000 mSv / year to permanent local residents. This city swells from 200000 population off season to at least twice that much in the summer.
If it was just ten times, then maybe. But one thousand times of something so "dangerous" ! Yeah, I'm being sarcastic.
> All plants in France are fast Plutonium breeders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
No operational breeder reactors in any NATO countries.
Only former USSR contries have long running breeder reactors still in operation, India have one coming online
India and China have breeder reactor programs, but no currently operational breeder reactors.
You are mixing up the fact that every regular reactor that has U-238 in its fuel produces Pu-239/Pu-240/Am/Cu (transuranics), but those are produced in an unsustainable way. And that every Th-232 fueled reactor produces U-233. If you use that criteria then every single nuclear reactor in the world is a breeder, which is utterly wrong.
> Fuck the costs, the money is better spend than sitting on a bank account of some idiot.
300 billion plus 700 billion is 1 trillion, so the total cost is 1 trillion.
replacing the coal plants is the most critical step, so why are you trying to frame it as unrelated cost ?
If you don't care about the costs, then like I said, Germany's plan only applies to Germany, no sane country will waste 1 trillion euro for cleaning up just 60GW worth of electricity production.
Reactors being built in the USA with huge cost overruns from politically induced stop and resume are still expected to cost US$ 7 billion with room for another billion in overruns included, or less than EUR 5 billion !
I was using EUR 10 billion in hope that you would be reasonable and accept that as a hugely high ball number, but no, you have to question it without any data to back it up.
Is see you are conceding defeat, keep up your uneconomical jobs plan. Remember that even if North America and Europe could stop 100% of their emissions tomorrow, China and India would make up for that in a few years, unless the solution is economical, it won't be adopted in developing countries, and then we're still fucked by climate change. That's the big conundrum that the looniest of the environmentalists like you insist on ignoring.
Nice debating with you.