As long as teachers, and teachers unions continue to put up with ~50% of teachers knowing less than the uppper 10% of the student population, then they will be underpaid and unappreciated.
Is this ever true. I'd also like to point out that private schools, frequently religious, consistantly manage to produce quality students at a fraction of the public school cost.
I see that we have two varying accounts of history, thus the likelyhood of one of us agreeing with the other is pretty much nil.
Attacks made by Arabs after the Jews moved in and more or less annexed their own territory and kicked the Palestinian Arabs out.
They were given the land that was British territory, pretty much unoccupied. The Jewish people worked hard to make it a nicer place.
I agree with this aspect whole heartedly. If I start with no territory and then annex West Virginia and declare it Mormonopia and West Virginians start blowing themselves up I'd be more than happy to give them some of the land in return for a cessation of violence. I'm still left with a huge chunk of land were formally I had nothing. And the indigineous West Virginians would be ceasing violence in order to gain back less land than they had originally. This is obviously a better deal for one side.
It'd be more like the US gave a chunck of West Virginia to them. Then beat the forces of Ohio and Kentucky in addition to the forces indiginent to West Virginia. Still, it's an ugly situation. If you want to go historical, the question becomes 'how far?'. You go back far enough, you find that the palestinians kicked indigionous people out, anniliated them. Go back further, and the Jewish people are in control of the region. Go back even further... But I think that the Jews are the oldest surviving occupants of the region.
Question: Where would you have the Jewish people go, if they're to leave Israel at this point?
How about denying Palestine's right to exist? Sure - they talk about a seperate Palestinian state, but actions speak louder than words and while I wholeheartedly believe they intend to support some Palestinian state their actions clearly indicate that they expect such a state to be creater on their terms.
While Israel does have a range of political views, just like here in the states, the majority of the people, to include those in the government have asked for only one thing for the creation of a palestinian state: A cessation of the attacks on them.
As for the 1967 expansion, well, that was gained in war when Israel defeneded itself from attacks by several countries in the region.
Here's another little fact: Hamas and other palestinian group's maps of the region show 'Palestine' taking up the entire area. There is no Israel on the map. Palestine goes right up to the sea.
Hydro power works extremely well in the states, it's just that we've tapped all of it we pretty much can without messing up the ecology too much.
In other countries these projects tend to do better as their governments are willing to subsidize it more.
The problem with wind is finding an area that nearly always has wind at a certain level. Too fast and they have to stop the blades, as they can't handle the stress, too slow and they don't turn enough to make power.
The reason LES isn't expanding their wind program is that they found the power was substantially more expensive than other sources, due to it only being available about a third of the time.
Build a few special-purpose ships, each with a large hatch that would open from inside a covered cargo area. Take your 24 tons of nuclear waste, and package it in (perhaps) individual ceramic containers embedded into a solid matrix of stainless steel. Coat the whole thing with a foot of tungsten carbide or some other even tougher, corrosion resistant material. Let's say the final object weighs 50 tons. It is shaped roughly like a missile, with fins at the back.
First, can we recycle what we can of the 24 tons? There's still lots of usable fuel in there! 97% is reusable with the right technology, so it's still valuable. End result is that it'd be about 33 years production for a gigawatt plant to equal 24 tons of unusable stuff.
Other than that, I see no problems with your solution. Except that you'd only need one ship. You'd even be able to make lots of empy trips with it. Assuming a circuit takes a month(generous), but it's able to drop multiple darts with a load, it'd have cargo only about a third of the time, even with 100% dependency. Yes, some engineering to make sure the thing wouldn't break open on impact would be needed, but oh well.
Well, I agree with you in some ways. I'm 100% behind the pluggable hybrid. I'd probably fill up less than once a month with gasoline if I had one on average.
Hydrogen is a pain to produce, electrolysis is pretty inefficient energy wise. There are many possible solutions, and it's entirely possible we'll come up with enough solutions to make it worthwhile.
Right now it's expensive to produce(if you're not cracking methane for it), expensive and difficult to store, and not really efficient in today's engines. However, they're working on production efficiency(most efficient uses a nuclear plant to heat the catalyst), the pellets might work out, and fuel cells promise to solve the efficiency issue.
as for 300 miles fitting in a 30 gallon tank, I currently get almost 300 miles(I would get it if I'd change to a slightly less sticky tire) to the 10 gallon tank.
Model 12PC165BB Total Price Remote Power System Installed $25,940 People SPend more than $26,000 on a car.
I don't. Average home prices here are around $100k. So that's 25% of the house's cost. You're also installing in Texas, much further south than my state of North Dakota.
I said in one of my other posts that every home in Texas & California would have one before a significant number of homes have them up here.
$26k, divided by average $50 monthly electric bill puts payback in at 43 years. Not including any maintenance or repairs. Hail up here would kill the panels at least once every ten years.
I'm paying $.06 per kw/h. 10.5 kw/h per day means I'm saving $.63 per day. That's a 113 years to pay off the panels. 56 years if the panels average double the minimum.
Assuming Sci Am is right, I question your 24 tons number; I don't think we've decomissioned > 1,000 nuclear plants, and that's just counting fuel rods.
They're talking totals. They're counting the fuel rods still sitting on site in the plant's pool. Plants don't actually get decommisioned that often. They can store between 20-40 years production on site. Generally they can store 10-20 years waste in their pool alone. After that solutions vary. Some use above ground containers.
Apparently the nuke waste, since fly ash is used in concrete construction. Concrete locks the stuff up and people aren't eating it. You could turn my sand into glass and nobody'd be able to tell a thing. Without some extreme scientific equipment.
We already get 15% of our grid power from nukes. Why do you need more plants for this comparison? Because all our plants are of different, unique designs. This drives costs up. I'm talking about building a few dozen of the same type, so they can share those engineering expenses.
Tell you what, how about we remove Price-Anderson protection from nuke plants and require them to pay for their own waste storage (and insurance of same), and then do a comparison?
Hmm.. Price-Anderson's 'protection' is simply a government mandated insurance co-op with a cap of 10 billion. Each plant provides 300 million of individual insurance. Only if the 10bil cap is exceeded does the fed.gov step in, and they tend to do so regardless for any disaster in the billions. Enacted in 1957, the individual insurances have only had to pay out $151 million, of which $70 million was TMI. The DOE has paid out $65 million, for reasons not listed. It could have been earlier, before the act was modified to establish the collective, and when the private insurance was only $50 million or so. Personally, I'd simply keep upping the collective amount. This would be easier with even more plants to pay into it.
As for the waste storage, I'm sure the power companies would love to take care of it themselves, they're being charged $.001 per kilowatt/hour for yucca mountain.
Given that wind power is growing at 25-35% per year, however, it looks like we'll get a good impression of how practical it is in the not-too-distant future anyway.
Survival of the fittest! Great idea. Love it if it works out, but I'm not holding my breath. Wind is so small even now that 25% growth isn't difficult. Kinda like when you only have 1 tower up. When you put the second up you've just doubled capacity. Doubling it's market share would be a better accomplishment.
Perhaps one of the new cheap solar techs we hear mentioned now and again will become practical, also. Since sunshine and AC load correlate pretty highly, powering one's AC from such a system takes care of the intermittent power production issue.
If it wasn't for the fact that I live so far north that my annual AC needs are like 1 week a year, I'd consider it too.
Releasing them from liability in case of a radiation release is stupid. Now, restricting their liability to provable loss from a radiation release would be reasonable. Many studies have shown that low level radiation exposure isn't threatening.
As for the government taking on the cost of storage, they did that years ago, and slapped a surcharge on the power the plant sells to pay for it. IE the government said 'I'll take care of the waste for you, here's your bill'.
It's not the power companie's falt that uncle sam screwed it up.
Well, I never stated that the ethanol had to be made from grain. They've recently developed methods to efficiently make it from cellulose. IE the stalks, grass, all that.
Salt water is one of the most corrosive substances we know in nature over time. It'll eat most generation systems we have without such overbuilding as to make them uneconomical.
The answer is not necessarily to have a single standardized reactor design. For one, we don't know which of the potential interesting designs will work best in practice until we start building them. But also, having a small diversity in design will help if one of the designs turns out to have a flaw of some sort.
But one offing reactors results in each plant having to shoulder all of it's own engineering expenses. If you build a couple dozen of each plant type, they can share a substantial amount of research, engineering, and 'lessons learned'. Kinda like planes. They discover a problem with one plane, then fix all of them.
It doesn't produce weapons grade. It produces stuff that can be refined for usage in a weapon.
You don't even need a reactor to produce weapons grade uranium. It's most usefull for creating plutonium, which is easier to produce a bomb from.
That's why you leave it in the reactor until even the plutonium's gone. Oh, and when it comes out of the reactor any terrorist trying to take it outside would probably lethally dose himself before getting out the door. Even if it does the radiation and heat would be trackable from practically orbit.
It's a concern for proliferation in a paranoid universe. The USA is already nuclear, so we might as well.
If you trust them to build a light water reactor, you should trust them to build a breeder.
At present, nuclear power is our ONLY feasable solution to the looming environmental crisis. We have the technology now. We've proven it can be cost-effective. The fuel supply is nearly limitless with reprocessing and new reactor technologies. We can build electric cars now, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil now.
Not to mention:
Think of the jobs. You have construction, operation, maintenance, disposal. Building all the new cars and power lines (I'd go with superconducting for the major cities).
As for the electric cars, if somebody would produce a pluggable hybrid(need more range than electric can provide), that can run on ethanol, that'd be my ideal car. I'd buy one today if I could afford it.
Damn. I forgot plutonium is health food. You're the one suggesting eating it, not us. How about this, You eat an amount of caffeine, and I'll eat an equal amount of depleted uranium. I suggest 5 grams.
Hey uranium tipped rounds are safe too. Not coming out of an A-10 they ain't. I'd still be more worried about being hit by one than a miss. As for health effects, it's a bloody heavy metal, just like Lead, Cobalt and all the others that tend to get shot in warzones. If I gotta be around the stuff I'm wearing my PPE more to avoid the chemical poisoning than the radiation. News Flash: War Zones are hazardous to your health. Chemical waste, poor hygiene, pollution, all contribute to the problems seen in war zones.
everything that goes into or comes out of a reactor is contaminated. Simple solution: Not much goes in there, and most of what does gets recycled. We're talking about tons versus kilotons of material, the amount of effort you can put into each ton is alot more.
Worldwide we are talking about millions of tons of waste over the next hundred years. If we keep up our current wasteful generation methods and amounts, we'll hit a million tons right around 80 years of production. Meanwhile, a gigawatt coal plant burns about 3.1 million tons of coal a year, generating 200 kilotons of sulfer dioxide, 200 ktons of ash, 7 million tons of CO2. The same capacity nuclear plant produces 24 tons of 'waste'. Said waste can be recycled, reprocessed to produce more fuel, leaving only 3% of it as true waste. As it's a heavy metal, tons of it are smaller than your typical car.
Higher life forms have been around for hundreds of millions of years and we can't seem to go a hundred without totally screwing up the planet. If you've ever looked at primitive people, they managed to screw up the enviroment pretty good all on their own in many areas.
Can you imagine ten thousand years of treating the environment like we have been? Yeah, why do you think I want to go nuclear so bad? It's non-impactive it's very much a green power.
100 years probably enough time for us to figure out fusion though. As others have said, we can power ourselves competely using breeder reactors, using only our current waste as fuel!
So even if fusion doesn't work out, we're good for a few thousand years. Then we can start extracting uranium from granite or seawater, or go to Thorium.
There's plenty of options, and cheap(er) power is key to many manufacturing technologies that would be cleaner and more efficient.
The why is that when Australia refused to extend subsidies that all the wind projects canceled?
And where do you mean "No more tax cuts?" There's alot of areas in the world with differing laws.
Nukes: such as ignoring a number of the environmental issues
What enviromental issues? Other than making sure that the waste doesn't get into the enviroment, and that feedwater isn't released too much hotter than what it was coming in?
Coal power is still dirtier by pretty much any metric but waste toxicity by density. And that simply means that it's easy to contain nuclear waste.
but then wikipedia gets stupid: if it's released, it's not nuclear waste. The proper claim is that, while operating as designed
Ah, it's not waste, it's POLLUTION. Nuclear power plant waste isn't pollution because it's not released into the enviroment. Coal pollutes, because it releases a good portion of it's waste products into the atmosphere, including hazardous ones.
Here's the deal: You take the 24 tons of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear plant, grind it up, and mix it with 200,000 tons of something more or less inert, like sand.
Now compare it with the 200,000 tons of fly ash contaminated with such things as toxic metals, including arsenic, cadmium and mercury, organic carcinogens and mutagens (substances that can cause cancer and genetic changes) as well as naturally-occurring radioactive substances.
Which is more dangerous at that point?
There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material
How often have we extended the life of current nuclear reactors? Most of them seem to have a longer actual service life than their rated 20-40 years. Think of it like a driver's license. They operate for that long, then are re-examined before an extension is granted. Besides, it's just an additional expense. It's not like coal mining that both destroys the enviroment, pollutes, and costs hundreds of miners their lives each year.
Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness
I'll tell you what, we get some new nuclear plants up, multiples of the same type so we can get some economy of scale going, and we'll see how competitive windpower, and solar for that matter, is.
Oh, and Lincoln, NE's power company, right in the middle of the Midwest, decided to stop expanding wind power, because their mills were only producing usable electricity about 25% of the time. So it's not like it was saving them generation capacity.
As for Yucca Mountain, that's what you get when you let the government mess with the economy. They're horrible at it. Let the power companies figure something out. For that matter, let them reprocess the stuff.
CCDs were huge for astronomy. The "CCD revolution" in the 80's (at least 10 years before most people had really heard of digital cameras) made a big difference.
Yeah, that usually happens. Research equipment has a whole different level for acceptable component costs than consumer equipment.
One could argue that CCD's usage in telescopes gave them the money for the development needed to get the price down to what was needed for digital camera use. Then digital cameras allowed development to reach the point to more than pay back astronomy with improved detectors(though still different and more costly than consumer models).
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As long as teachers, and teachers unions continue to put up with ~50% of teachers knowing less than the uppper 10% of the student population, then they will be underpaid and unappreciated.
Is this ever true. I'd also like to point out that private schools, frequently religious, consistantly manage to produce quality students at a fraction of the public school cost.
I see that we have two varying accounts of history, thus the likelyhood of one of us agreeing with the other is pretty much nil.
Attacks made by Arabs after the Jews moved in and more or less annexed their own territory and kicked the Palestinian Arabs out.
They were given the land that was British territory, pretty much unoccupied. The Jewish people worked hard to make it a nicer place.
I agree with this aspect whole heartedly. If I start with no territory and then annex West Virginia and declare it Mormonopia and West Virginians start blowing themselves up I'd be more than happy to give them some of the land in return for a cessation of violence. I'm still left with a huge chunk of land were formally I had nothing. And the indigineous West Virginians would be ceasing violence in order to gain back less land than they had originally. This is obviously a better deal for one side.
It'd be more like the US gave a chunck of West Virginia to them. Then beat the forces of Ohio and Kentucky in addition to the forces indiginent to West Virginia. Still, it's an ugly situation. If you want to go historical, the question becomes 'how far?'. You go back far enough, you find that the palestinians kicked indigionous people out, anniliated them. Go back further, and the Jewish people are in control of the region. Go back even further... But I think that the Jews are the oldest surviving occupants of the region.
Question: Where would you have the Jewish people go, if they're to leave Israel at this point?
How about denying Palestine's right to exist? Sure - they talk about a seperate Palestinian state, but actions speak louder than words and while I wholeheartedly believe they intend to support some Palestinian state their actions clearly indicate that they expect such a state to be creater on their terms.
While Israel does have a range of political views, just like here in the states, the majority of the people, to include those in the government have asked for only one thing for the creation of a palestinian state: A cessation of the attacks on them.
As for the 1967 expansion, well, that was gained in war when Israel defeneded itself from attacks by several countries in the region.
Here's another little fact: Hamas and other palestinian group's maps of the region show 'Palestine' taking up the entire area. There is no Israel on the map. Palestine goes right up to the sea.
Hydro power works extremely well in the states, it's just that we've tapped all of it we pretty much can without messing up the ecology too much.
In other countries these projects tend to do better as their governments are willing to subsidize it more.
The problem with wind is finding an area that nearly always has wind at a certain level. Too fast and they have to stop the blades, as they can't handle the stress, too slow and they don't turn enough to make power.
The reason LES isn't expanding their wind program is that they found the power was substantially more expensive than other sources, due to it only being available about a third of the time.
Build a few special-purpose ships, each with a large hatch that would open from inside a covered cargo area. Take your 24 tons of nuclear waste, and package it in (perhaps) individual ceramic containers embedded into a solid matrix of stainless steel. Coat the whole thing with a foot of tungsten carbide or some other even tougher, corrosion resistant material. Let's say the final object weighs 50 tons. It is shaped roughly like a missile, with fins at the back.
First, can we recycle what we can of the 24 tons? There's still lots of usable fuel in there! 97% is reusable with the right technology, so it's still valuable. End result is that it'd be about 33 years production for a gigawatt plant to equal 24 tons of unusable stuff.
Other than that, I see no problems with your solution. Except that you'd only need one ship. You'd even be able to make lots of empy trips with it. Assuming a circuit takes a month(generous), but it's able to drop multiple darts with a load, it'd have cargo only about a third of the time, even with 100% dependency. Yes, some engineering to make sure the thing wouldn't break open on impact would be needed, but oh well.
Well, I agree with you in some ways. I'm 100% behind the pluggable hybrid. I'd probably fill up less than once a month with gasoline if I had one on average.
Hydrogen is a pain to produce, electrolysis is pretty inefficient energy wise. There are many possible solutions, and it's entirely possible we'll come up with enough solutions to make it worthwhile.
Right now it's expensive to produce(if you're not cracking methane for it), expensive and difficult to store, and not really efficient in today's engines. However, they're working on production efficiency(most efficient uses a nuclear plant to heat the catalyst), the pellets might work out, and fuel cells promise to solve the efficiency issue.
as for 300 miles fitting in a 30 gallon tank, I currently get almost 300 miles(I would get it if I'd change to a slightly less sticky tire) to the 10 gallon tank.
Great, now build a generator out of them. Or build the seals out of it.
At least for today, building out of titanium and such counts as this:
without such overbuilding as to make them uneconomical.
Maybe because when you take security issues into account, it's not safe at all.
When the plant and it's security is run by people one step away from terrorists/religious fanatics.
We're worried that they'll tune it for weapons production themselves. Not that somebody will raid it for weapons material.
Model 12PC165BB Total Price Remote Power System Installed $25,940
People SPend more than $26,000 on a car.
I don't. Average home prices here are around $100k. So that's 25% of the house's cost. You're also installing in Texas, much further south than my state of North Dakota.
I said in one of my other posts that every home in Texas & California would have one before a significant number of homes have them up here.
$26k, divided by average $50 monthly electric bill puts payback in at 43 years. Not including any maintenance or repairs. Hail up here would kill the panels at least once every ten years.
I'm paying $.06 per kw/h. 10.5 kw/h per day means I'm saving $.63 per day. That's a 113 years to pay off the panels. 56 years if the panels average double the minimum.
See why it just doesn't work out, at least yet?
Assuming Sci Am is right, I question your 24 tons number; I don't think we've decomissioned > 1,000 nuclear plants, and that's just counting fuel rods.
They're talking totals. They're counting the fuel rods still sitting on site in the plant's pool. Plants don't actually get decommisioned that often. They can store between 20-40 years production on site. Generally they can store 10-20 years waste in their pool alone. After that solutions vary. Some use above ground containers.
Apparently the nuke waste, since fly ash is used in concrete construction.
Concrete locks the stuff up and people aren't eating it. You could turn my sand into glass and nobody'd be able to tell a thing. Without some extreme scientific equipment.
We already get 15% of our grid power from nukes. Why do you need more plants for this comparison?
Because all our plants are of different, unique designs. This drives costs up. I'm talking about building a few dozen of the same type, so they can share those engineering expenses.
Tell you what, how about we remove Price-Anderson protection from nuke plants and require them to pay for their own waste storage (and insurance of same), and then do a comparison?
Hmm.. Price-Anderson's 'protection' is simply a government mandated insurance co-op with a cap of 10 billion. Each plant provides 300 million of individual insurance. Only if the 10bil cap is exceeded does the fed.gov step in, and they tend to do so regardless for any disaster in the billions. Enacted in 1957, the individual insurances have only had to pay out $151 million, of which $70 million was TMI. The DOE has paid out $65 million, for reasons not listed. It could have been earlier, before the act was modified to establish the collective, and when the private insurance was only $50 million or so. Personally, I'd simply keep upping the collective amount. This would be easier with even more plants to pay into it.
As for the waste storage, I'm sure the power companies would love to take care of it themselves, they're being charged $.001 per kilowatt/hour for yucca mountain.
Given that wind power is growing at 25-35% per year, however, it looks like we'll get a good impression of how practical it is in the not-too-distant future anyway.
Survival of the fittest! Great idea. Love it if it works out, but I'm not holding my breath. Wind is so small even now that 25% growth isn't difficult. Kinda like when you only have 1 tower up. When you put the second up you've just doubled capacity. Doubling it's market share would be a better accomplishment.
Perhaps one of the new cheap solar techs we hear mentioned now and again will become practical, also. Since sunshine and AC load correlate pretty highly, powering one's AC from such a system takes care of the intermittent power production issue.
If it wasn't for the fact that I live so far north that my annual AC needs are like 1 week a year, I'd consider it too.
Releasing them from liability in case of a radiation release is stupid. Now, restricting their liability to provable loss from a radiation release would be reasonable. Many studies have shown that low level radiation exposure isn't threatening.
As for the government taking on the cost of storage, they did that years ago, and slapped a surcharge on the power the plant sells to pay for it. IE the government said 'I'll take care of the waste for you, here's your bill'.
It's not the power companie's falt that uncle sam screwed it up.
Well, I never stated that the ethanol had to be made from grain. They've recently developed methods to efficiently make it from cellulose. IE the stalks, grass, all that.
High school science class. It was years ago.
Can't seem to find it in google.
Salt water is one of the most corrosive substances we know in nature over time. It'll eat most generation systems we have without such overbuilding as to make them uneconomical.
The answer is not necessarily to have a single standardized reactor design. For one, we don't know which of the potential interesting designs will work best in practice until we start building them. But also, having a small diversity in design will help if one of the designs turns out to have a flaw of some sort.
But one offing reactors results in each plant having to shoulder all of it's own engineering expenses. If you build a couple dozen of each plant type, they can share a substantial amount of research, engineering, and 'lessons learned'. Kinda like planes. They discover a problem with one plane, then fix all of them.
It doesn't produce weapons grade. It produces stuff that can be refined for usage in a weapon.
You don't even need a reactor to produce weapons grade uranium. It's most usefull for creating plutonium, which is easier to produce a bomb from.
That's why you leave it in the reactor until even the plutonium's gone. Oh, and when it comes out of the reactor any terrorist trying to take it outside would probably lethally dose himself before getting out the door. Even if it does the radiation and heat would be trackable from practically orbit.
It's a concern for proliferation in a paranoid universe. The USA is already nuclear, so we might as well.
If you trust them to build a light water reactor, you should trust them to build a breeder.
Thanks for pointing out the difference between shale oil and tar sands. ;)
Oops. I'm posting too late. The energy figure is if you include the Thorium and Plutonium and such in the coal as well.
At present, nuclear power is our ONLY feasable solution to the looming environmental crisis. We have the technology now. We've proven it can be cost-effective. The fuel supply is nearly limitless with reprocessing and new reactor technologies. We can build electric cars now, and eliminate our dependence on foreign oil now.
Not to mention:
Think of the jobs. You have construction, operation, maintenance, disposal. Building all the new cars and power lines (I'd go with superconducting for the major cities).
As for the electric cars, if somebody would produce a pluggable hybrid(need more range than electric can provide), that can run on ethanol, that'd be my ideal car. I'd buy one today if I could afford it.
Damn. I forgot plutonium is health food.
You're the one suggesting eating it, not us. How about this, You eat an amount of caffeine, and I'll eat an equal amount of depleted uranium. I suggest 5 grams.
Hey uranium tipped rounds are safe too.
Not coming out of an A-10 they ain't. I'd still be more worried about being hit by one than a miss.
As for health effects, it's a bloody heavy metal, just like Lead, Cobalt and all the others that tend to get shot in warzones. If I gotta be around the stuff I'm wearing my PPE more to avoid the chemical poisoning than the radiation. News Flash: War Zones are hazardous to your health. Chemical waste, poor hygiene, pollution, all contribute to the problems seen in war zones.
everything that goes into or comes out of a reactor is contaminated.
Simple solution: Not much goes in there, and most of what does gets recycled. We're talking about tons versus kilotons of material, the amount of effort you can put into each ton is alot more.
Worldwide we are talking about millions of tons of waste over the next hundred years.
If we keep up our current wasteful generation methods and amounts, we'll hit a million tons right around 80 years of production. Meanwhile, a gigawatt coal plant burns about 3.1 million tons of coal a year, generating 200 kilotons of sulfer dioxide, 200 ktons of ash, 7 million tons of CO2. The same capacity nuclear plant produces 24 tons of 'waste'. Said waste can be recycled, reprocessed to produce more fuel, leaving only 3% of it as true waste. As it's a heavy metal, tons of it are smaller than your typical car.
Higher life forms have been around for hundreds of millions of years and we can't seem to go a hundred without totally screwing up the planet.
If you've ever looked at primitive people, they managed to screw up the enviroment pretty good all on their own in many areas.
Can you imagine ten thousand years of treating the environment like we have been?
Yeah, why do you think I want to go nuclear so bad? It's non-impactive it's very much a green power.
100 years probably enough time for us to figure out fusion though. As others have said, we can power ourselves competely using breeder reactors, using only our current waste as fuel!
So even if fusion doesn't work out, we're good for a few thousand years. Then we can start extracting uranium from granite or seawater, or go to Thorium.
There's plenty of options, and cheap(er) power is key to many manufacturing technologies that would be cleaner and more efficient.
The why is that when Australia refused to extend subsidies that all the wind projects canceled?
And where do you mean "No more tax cuts?" There's alot of areas in the world with differing laws.
Nukes: such as ignoring a number of the environmental issues
What enviromental issues? Other than making sure that the waste doesn't get into the enviroment, and that feedwater isn't released too much hotter than what it was coming in?
Nuclear is risky science ...
I'll dispute that.
Nuclear Power Safer Than Peanut Butter
Even including chernobyl, nuclear power is safer per kilowatt/hour than any other source(except maybe hydro).
I mean, you have to be a total idiot in not following procedures to get yourself killed even in reprocessing operations.
Coal power is still dirtier by pretty much any metric but waste toxicity by density. And that simply means that it's easy to contain nuclear waste.
but then wikipedia gets stupid: if it's released, it's not nuclear waste. The proper claim is that, while operating as designed
Ah, it's not waste, it's POLLUTION. Nuclear power plant waste isn't pollution because it's not released into the enviroment. Coal pollutes, because it releases a good portion of it's waste products into the atmosphere, including hazardous ones.
Here's the deal: You take the 24 tons of nuclear waste produced by a nuclear plant, grind it up, and mix it with 200,000 tons of something more or less inert, like sand.
Now compare it with the 200,000 tons of fly ash contaminated with such things as toxic metals, including arsenic, cadmium and mercury, organic carcinogens and mutagens (substances that can cause cancer and genetic changes) as well as naturally-occurring radioactive substances.
Which is more dangerous at that point?
There's no need for the whole decommisioning process with lots of radioactive material
How often have we extended the life of current nuclear reactors? Most of them seem to have a longer actual service life than their rated 20-40 years. Think of it like a driver's license. They operate for that long, then are re-examined before an extension is granted. Besides, it's just an additional expense. It's not like coal mining that both destroys the enviroment, pollutes, and costs hundreds of miners their lives each year.
Large numbers of windmills in the sparsely populated Midwest could produce a good portion of our power needs, and are nearing cost-effectiveness
I'll tell you what, we get some new nuclear plants up, multiples of the same type so we can get some economy of scale going, and we'll see how competitive windpower, and solar for that matter, is.
Oh, and Lincoln, NE's power company, right in the middle of the Midwest, decided to stop expanding wind power, because their mills were only producing usable electricity about 25% of the time. So it's not like it was saving them generation capacity.
As for Yucca Mountain, that's what you get when you let the government mess with the economy. They're horrible at it. Let the power companies figure something out. For that matter, let them reprocess the stuff.
CCDs were huge for astronomy. The "CCD revolution" in the 80's (at least 10 years before most people had really heard of digital cameras) made a big difference.
Yeah, that usually happens. Research equipment has a whole different level for acceptable component costs than consumer equipment.
One could argue that CCD's usage in telescopes gave them the money for the development needed to get the price down to what was needed for digital camera use. Then digital cameras allowed development to reach the point to more than pay back astronomy with improved detectors(though still different and more costly than consumer models).