Mr_Dyqik:
There's very little uranium in the earth's crust though, only enough for about 20 years of fission power supplying the entire world is available cheaply. If we start using breeder reactors...
all uranium mining could be stopped for about 200 years while we use up the supply of U-238 that has already been mined and is now in storage.
Deriving 100 times as much energy from the same amount of uranium fuel means that the raw fuel cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced is reduced correspondingly. In fact, the fuel cost per unit of useful energy generated in a breeder reactor are equivalent to those of buying gasoline at a price of 40 gallons for a penny! (See Chapter 13 Appendix.) Instead of contributing 5% to the price of electricity as in present-type reactors, the uranium cost then contributes only 0.05% in a breeder reactor. If supplies should run short, we can therefore afford to use uranium that is 20 times more expensive, for even that would raise the cost of electricity by only (20 x.05) =) 1%. How much uranium is available at that price.
The answer is effectively infinite because it includes uranium separated out of seawater. The world's oceans contain 5 billion tons of uranium, enough to supply all the world's electricity for several million years. But in addition, rivers are constantly dissolving uranium out of rock and carrying it into the oceans, renewing the ocean's supply at a rate sufficient to provide 25 times the world's present total electricity usage.
In addition, unconventional sources of uranium can be tapped before we tap seawater. Also, present reserve estimates are artificially low since exploration isn't carried out until no more can be found -- exploration is carried out until enough for the present is found.
Galvatron:
if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant. Not only that, but the fissionable energy of the radioactive particles in coal is greater than coal's hydrocarbon energy:
An average value for the thermal energy of coal is approximately 6150 kilowatt-hours(kWh)/ton. Thus, the expected cumulative thermal energy release from U.S. coal combustion over this period totals about 6.87 x 10E14 kilowatt-hours. The thermal energy released in nuclear fission produces about 2 109 kWh/ton. Consequently, the thermal energy from fission of uranium-235 released in coal combustion amounts to 2.1 x 10E12 kWh. If uranium-238 is bred to plutonium-239, using these data, the thermal energy from fission of this isotope alone constitutes about 2.9 x 10E14 kWh, or about half the anticipated energy of all the utility coal burned in this country through the year 2040. If the thorium-232 is bred to uranium-233 and fissioned, the thermal energy capacity of this isotope is approximately 7.2 x 10E14 kWh, or 105% of the thermal energy released from U.S. coal combustion for a century. The total of the thermal energy capacities from each of these three fissionable isotopes is about 10.1 x 10E14 kWh, 1.5 times more than the total from coal. World combustion of coal has the same ratio, similarly indicating that coal combustion wastes more energy than it produces.
Consequently, the energy content of nuclear fuel released in coal combustion is more than that of the coal consumed! Clearly, coal-fired power plants are not only generating electricity but are also releasing nuclear fuels whose commercial value for electricity production by nuclear power plants is over $7 trillion, more than the U.S. national debt. This figure is based on current nuclear utility fuel costs of 7 mils per kWh, which is about half the cost for coal. Consequently, significant quantities of nuclear materials are being treated as coal waste, which might become the cleanup nightmare of the future, and their value is hardly recognized at all.
How does the amount of nuclear material released by coal combustion compare to the amount consumed as fuel by the U.S. nuclear power industry? According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.
the technology is still in its reasarch stage, so projections about the cost of operating a reactor when the research is just speculation. It isn't just speculation, it's rather expensive and well-thought-out speculation.
True, but solar power can't be used on anything like the scale fusion can be used... Actually I said "fission" not "solar":
It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that
fission is one such power source
It should be furthur noted that solar power researchers consense that solar power is not one such power source.
On earth alone, there is estimated to be enough deuterium to supply energy requierments 1000 times the globe's current requierments for an insanely long period of time. There are enough fissionable metals economically ( and renewably since ocean fissionable metals are constantly being added to by streams) obtainable from seawater to last us the rest of the life of the earth (5 gigayears) and beyond, so any arguments about other fuels lasting longer and therefore being better are irrelevant.
The main reason why nuclear fission is simply less useful in the long term is that the waste it produces is of too high a volume, and requires too much time to become nonhazardous. In order to say something is too high and takes too long, those standards need to be defined. It has been determined by environmentalists that fission doesn't produce waste of too high volume and doesn't take too long to decay to lead (become nonhazardous). The comparison of volume and length of time to become nonhazardous needs to be considered along with the monetary costs of the candidate power sources to determine which is truly the more useful.
Simply making the point that the waste from the one is more difficult to deal with than the waste of the other does not mean it is significantly so, relative to the other factors involved in determining ultimate usefulness. The waste from nuclear fission is simple to deal with. Therefore, a competing power source would not only have to have waste that is even simpler to deal with, but would have to have other factors like cost not be significantly unfavorable.
ash5g:
The only real way to generate electicity is to simply passively collect it eg. wind turbines...
Wind turbines require large amounts of land, pollute visually and sonically, kill birds, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor (as opposed to nuclear fission which is relatively hazard-free) need to be located in windy places, and in the most plausible scenarios require gas turbines for back-up power when the wind isn't blowing.
...solar cells... (Solar cells can't provide base-load power, so they wouldn't be competing with fission or fusion, but since you brought them up...)
Solar cells require large amounts of land, pollute visually, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor, burn 3% of their lifetime output of energy as coal when they are manufactured, and produce large amounts of chemical waste in their manufacture and decommissioning, principally but not limited to cadmium sulfide which will kill 80 people eventually per large solar power plant operation year.
BTW the burning of coal in the manufacture of solar cells is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants; i.e. the burning of coal releases radiation. It's also the reason solar PV power plants present a nuclear proliferation danger.
T.Hobbes:
...global warming concerns energy generation, and there's no technical solution today which might solve the problem... The technical solution has been well in hand for decades in the form of nuclear fission.
The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion, if it is developed, will with high certainty be significantly more expensive than fission. This creates its own environmental problems.
[Fusion is] the only power source which has little to no environmental impact... There are no known power sources with zero environmental impact so it can't have "little to no environmental impact". It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source.
...and because [fusion] can produce such large amounts of electricity... What? There are power sources that don't produce large amounts of electricity? A fusion power plant is just another steam or gas turbine power plant. A fusion power plant will produce the same amount of electricity as any other steam or gas turbine. The limits are in how hot your design and your metals and your bearings and your lubricants will let you get your steam or gas, how efficient and how big and how many turbines you have, and how much water you have access to to condense your steam or gas; not how dense your heat source is.
More on fission by John McCarthy, the inventor of the LISP programming language.
rainer_d:
Well, in a way, this problem will solve itself, over time. The fossile energy-resources will be used up very quickly.
At present usage rates, the U.S. has 800 years of coal left. China's coal supply dwarfs the U.S.'s. Oil can be produced from resources not yet tapped such as oil fields with a higher cost of extraction, oil shale, tar sands, and the aforementioned 800 years of coal -- so dwindling conventional reserves are a non-issue.
and here in Germany, it is expensive already, thanks to "Green" government. Thanks to Green government, Germany's green nuclear power program is being decomissioned.
jbert:
Until we get lots of lovely clean (well, mostly) fusion power we have a problem. If we had lots of fusion power it would be a serious environmental problem since it would be so expensive (by all current estimates).
...I think power is underpriced. Power is vastly underproduced. Ecology demands that we produce exponentially more and that we do this with nuclear fission plants.
Hydro is considered by environmentalists to be the single dirtiest power generation technology ever devised. Upstream from a dam, it displaces large areas of land for reservoirs and causes methane emissions (greenhouse gasses) from the rotting vegetation trapped under surface of the reservoir. Downstream, it causes massive ecological damage in the form of erosion caused by holding back sediment; changing river temperature; depleting groundwater; changing flow patterns (which threatens estuary ecology); and stopping flooding (necessary for healthy floodplain ecology).
Fish can't swim upstream or downstream past dams.
Hydro is also extremely dangerous. Large numbers of people are regularly killed by dam failures, and there are two dams in the U.S. which could each nearly instantly kill 200,000 people.
dhart:
Energy efficiency is environmentally friendly...
Energy efficiency is not intrinsically environmentally friendly. There is no shortage of clean energy that can be exploited in the form of nuclear fission power. California saves lots of energy by not using nuclear power to desalinate (make into fresh water) sea water. California alternatively drains Mono Lake and diverts water from the Colorado River and the San Joaquin Delta.
Spending money to reduce energy consumption tends to hurt the environment by interfering with environmentally friendly factors such as economic and technological growth. It's a waste of engineering resources that could be put to positive environmental use -- such as devising cheaper and better nuclear power plants.
Slashdot Mirror
There's very little uranium in the earth's crust though, only enough for about 20 years of fission power supplying the entire world is available cheaply.
If we start using breeder reactors...
In addition, unconventional sources of uranium can be tapped before we tap seawater. Also, present reserve estimates are artificially low since exploration isn't carried out until no more can be found -- exploration is carried out until enough for the present is found.
if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant.
Not only that, but the fissionable energy of the radioactive particles in coal is greater than coal's hydrocarbon energy:
It isn't just speculation, it's rather expensive and well-thought-out speculation.
True, but solar power can't be used on anything like the scale fusion can be used...
Actually I said "fission" not "solar":
It should be furthur noted that solar power researchers consense that solar power is not one such power source.
On earth alone, there is estimated to be enough deuterium to supply energy requierments 1000 times the globe's current requierments for an insanely long period of time.
There are enough fissionable metals economically ( and renewably since ocean fissionable metals are constantly being added to by streams) obtainable from seawater to last us the rest of the life of the earth (5 gigayears) and beyond, so any arguments about other fuels lasting longer and therefore being better are irrelevant.
The main reason why nuclear fission is simply less useful in the long term is that the waste it produces is of too high a volume, and requires too much time to become nonhazardous.
In order to say something is too high and takes too long, those standards need to be defined. It has been determined by environmentalists that fission doesn't produce waste of too high volume and doesn't take too long to decay to lead (become nonhazardous). The comparison of volume and length of time to become nonhazardous needs to be considered along with the monetary costs of the candidate power sources to determine which is truly the more useful.
Simply making the point that the waste from the one is more difficult to deal with than the waste of the other does not mean it is significantly so, relative to the other factors involved in determining ultimate usefulness. The waste from nuclear fission is simple to deal with. Therefore, a competing power source would not only have to have waste that is even simpler to deal with, but would have to have other factors like cost not be significantly unfavorable.
ash5g:
...solar cells...
The only real way to generate electicity is to simply passively collect it eg. wind turbines...
Wind turbines require large amounts of land, pollute visually and sonically, kill birds, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor (as opposed to nuclear fission which is relatively hazard-free) need to be located in windy places, and in the most plausible scenarios require gas turbines for back-up power when the wind isn't blowing.
(Solar cells can't provide base-load power, so they wouldn't be competing with fission or fusion, but since you brought them up...)
Solar cells require large amounts of land, pollute visually, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor, burn 3% of their lifetime output of energy as coal when they are manufactured, and produce large amounts of chemical waste in their manufacture and decommissioning, principally but not limited to cadmium sulfide which will kill 80 people eventually per large solar power plant operation year.
BTW the burning of coal in the manufacture of solar cells is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants; i.e. the burning of coal releases radiation. It's also the reason solar PV power plants present a nuclear proliferation danger.
T.Hobbes:
...global warming concerns energy generation, and there's no technical solution today which might solve the problem...
...and because [fusion] can produce such large amounts of electricity...
The technical solution has been well in hand for decades in the form of nuclear fission.
The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion, if it is developed, will with high certainty be significantly more expensive than fission. This creates its own environmental problems.
[Fusion is] the only power source which has little to no environmental impact...
There are no known power sources with zero environmental impact so it can't have "little to no environmental impact". It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source.
What? There are power sources that don't produce large amounts of electricity? A fusion power plant is just another steam or gas turbine power plant. A fusion power plant will produce the same amount of electricity as any other steam or gas turbine. The limits are in how hot your design and your metals and your bearings and your lubricants will let you get your steam or gas, how efficient and how big and how many turbines you have, and how much water you have access to to condense your steam or gas; not how dense your heat source is.
More on fission by John McCarthy, the inventor of the LISP programming language.
rainer_d:
The fossile energy-resources will be used up very quickly.
"The world has about 1500 years of known coal resources at the current use rate."
rainer_d:
Well, in a way, this problem will solve itself, over time. The fossile energy-resources will be used up very quickly.
At present usage rates, the U.S. has 800 years of coal left. China's coal supply dwarfs the U.S.'s. Oil can be produced from resources not yet tapped such as oil fields with a higher cost of extraction, oil shale, tar sands, and the aforementioned 800 years of coal -- so dwindling conventional reserves are a non-issue.
and here in Germany, it is expensive already, thanks to "Green" government.
Thanks to Green government, Germany's green nuclear power program is being decomissioned.
jbert:
...I think power is underpriced.
Until we get lots of lovely clean (well, mostly) fusion power we have a problem.
If we had lots of fusion power it would be a serious environmental problem since it would be so expensive (by all current estimates).
Power is vastly underproduced. Ecology demands that we produce exponentially more and that we do this with nuclear fission plants.
Hydro is considered by environmentalists to be the single dirtiest power generation technology ever devised. Upstream from a dam, it displaces large areas of land for reservoirs and causes methane emissions (greenhouse gasses) from the rotting vegetation trapped under surface of the reservoir. Downstream, it causes massive ecological damage in the form of erosion caused by holding back sediment; changing river temperature; depleting groundwater; changing flow patterns (which threatens estuary ecology); and stopping flooding (necessary for healthy floodplain ecology).
Fish can't swim upstream or downstream past dams.
Hydro is also extremely dangerous. Large numbers of people are regularly killed by dam failures, and there are two dams in the U.S. which could each nearly instantly kill 200,000 people.
dhart:
Energy efficiency is environmentally friendly...
Energy efficiency is not intrinsically environmentally friendly. There is no shortage of clean energy that can be exploited in the form of nuclear fission power. California saves lots of energy by not using nuclear power to desalinate (make into fresh water) sea water. California alternatively drains Mono Lake and diverts water from the Colorado River and the San Joaquin Delta.
Spending money to reduce energy consumption tends to hurt the environment by interfering with environmentally friendly factors such as economic and technological growth. It's a waste of engineering resources that could be put to positive environmental use -- such as devising cheaper and better nuclear power plants.