I lived in an area with a "micro-power grid". The power to the local grid was supplied from a local business that was connected to the grid. Basically, they were a "micro-utility" of sorts, with a limited supply. This was in communist Poland about 50 years ago.
You know what happened? It worked very well, until someone down the street turned on their arc welder and there was a nice brown out throughout the neighborhood. Or someone started running a large motor. Hell, most of the time you couldn't run an electric motor because the phase was so "out of phase"!! (pun intended) Yeap, insufficient buffer on the "micro-grid" to counter lack of proper grid connection.
After the real grid was connected in the early 1980s, well, brownouts went away. People could actually use things like arc welders or electric motors without fucking up your neighbors power supply.
This is actually the reason to have a large power grid. It is called redundancy. Modern, well maintained grids don't tend to suffer from single point of failure anymore. And guess what? Renewables will require an even larger grid to counter their unpredictable intermediate tendency.
Finally, the article you linked are not "micro grids". They are regular grid with local utilization of locally generated power. Imagine that!!
Local utilization of locally generated power - on a much smaller and networked scale - is one of the main design features of a micro-grid. The other design feature is smart regulation to divert energy to where it is needed nearby intelligently. I'm not sure why you'd rather define a micro-grid by your experience of something in Poland that didn't let people run arc-welders in their homes; given the general conditions and comparatively ancient technology, it seems apples-to-oranges. Personally, if it meant avoiding nuclear disasters and devastating mountaintop-removal coal mining, I'd take that outdated solution anyday - but this is a modern and rapidly progressing technology that is hardly constrained to the anecdote above. See Woking for another real-life example.
Err, no. As a physicist, I can tell you that laser confined fusion has about the same potential of making power as a fusor. The research is not aimed at production of actual power. You may want to read up the actual linked article. Let me quote to you the important part,
There's other material on LLNL's laser that doesn't corroborate what you're saying. Net-positive fusion is something they have a real chance of realizing, that's what they aim for. If you read more on this subject you'll see that their scheduled milestones put them ahead of ITER, and they've been meeting their goals and setting records thus far. They're as feasible as anybody is right now.
Obsolete information. People are largely unaware of the full gamut of renewable energy technologies. Even so, the Department of Energy did an extensive study that said that Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota could supply the country's full energy needs from wind energy alone, but we're not just talking solar panels and turbines.
I think the full range of these makes nuclear strictly a question of how to use the remaining nuclear fuel to the fullest extent with less waste left over. I don't understand the enthusiasm for nuclear in the light of the above, or the recent disasters.
What I don't get is why we're excluding gas giants that we're finding in the habitable zones. If Jupiter were where Earth is in our system, Callisto would be a great candidate. Ditto Saturn/Titan and Neptune/Triton. In fact, a gas giant in the goldilocks zones should offer more chances at a habitable body; the moon simply has to be far away enough not to be toasted by the planet's magnetosphere.
I'm sure the scientists are aware of this, but why has this eluded the journalists informing the general public?
By genetic manipulation, you might think Mendelian genetic selection with a little extra juice, but when you're talking plants with animal genes that secrete pesticides that wipe out other key species and are cross-pollinating into the wild, and have health implications? That have weird switches on the seed to insure that farmers are completely dependent on suppliers like Monsanto?
Biggest thing of all that I would expect the Slashdot crowd to be wise to, when we're talking a whole food supply built on plants modified with *patented* genes?
When it's like that I say the FLM come off as heroes!
In order to make this happen, I hope to see more volumetric effects to make those nebulae pop out. Celestia with add-ons is amazing, but it can be so much more.
The difference between biological evolution and intentional, methodical design is that evolution happens in exposure to everything around it. Design methods exclude what's inconvenient and messy; we deal strictly with voltages of 2.2V and 5V in our electronics, whereas the natural world deals with everything. We are transcripts of every force present since the first living cell and before. They can say that there's no apparent link between quantum physics and neurology, but by which field's definition?
This isn't exactly the Easter Bunny. The accurate response is "we haven't found evidence for that", right?
After the year of oil and nuclear spillage we've had, I'm wondering why! This is one of the most interesting forms of clean energy available, and I expect it to be especially useful in the southwest of the US. Not a lot of people know about this kind of plant, but they had one generating megawatts of power for years back in the nineties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project#Solar_One
The molten salt compounds used are sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate - compounds used in fertilizer. If there's an earthquake and it leaks, it won't be that bad!
Both of those are still theoretical at this point, not ready for wide-scale deployment, and the costs are quite high.
That's the thing. The coverage of these energy alternatives as theoretical is completely misleading. Solar One was an example of a concentrated solar plant that was generating 64 megawatts of power in the 1990's. There've been a number of concentrated solar thermal plants built around the world - completely operational utility-grade power.
Superconductors are nice too, but they're not necessary. Large concentrated powerplants on a hugely distributed grid lose a lot of power to resistance and require two or three plants to cover a given area for redundancy which necessarily creates overproduction and overconsumption. The alternative is redundancy through many smaller scale power sources closer to their demand in a peer-to-peer grid, or microgrid. That too has been done in Woking, England. Large utilities don't like it, though. Large-scale efficiency is good for everything except their current business model.
Laddermills are a more "theoretical" source of wind power, true, but they're far more straightforward and risk-free than any nuclear supply chain. They're also only one kind of wind power. Turbines sure aren't theoretical, and we've ways to deploy them en masse. We've already established that offshore wind power along the east coast of the USA could supply a significant fraction of our country's needs.
The reason you hear about nuclear and its supposed safety so much is because of whose money it's concentrating hands in all along its supply chain. A more efficient reactor merely postpones the consequences. Nuclear requires a great deal of subsidies, its fuels are both finite and polluting, and a more efficient design in those terms is merely presenting the same downsides over a greater length of time. Oil results in the geopolitical tension, pollution, and military budgets we see today; you don't get an accurate picture of what its supply chain really costs you just by looking at the price of gas. Again, the profits are in concentrated hands, namely those who aren't likely to be living in Nigeria, Ecuador, or on the Gulf of Mexico.
I take the time for all this because we have an urgent need to re-engineer our power grid, and I wonder how many more cases like Fukushima and the Gulf of Mexico it's going to take before we finish with dirty energy or it finishes us.
Hey, coal is evil, I'm 100% in agreement, but it's a false choice to say it's coal or nuclear. Tap wind power a few thousand feet up (i.e. with laddermills), you've got 24/7 electricity. Concentrate solar thermal energy so that you've got tanks full of molten salt at 1000 degrees, you can drive turbines all night. All we have to do is build it. No wars for oil necessary, and cheap once you consider the externalized costs of dirty energy.
You're not even sticking to the topic, just blowing smoke by political association (Maoist insinuation) and discounting US history where something like victory gardens was a significant and effective solution. You seem to be trying to invent the Chewbacca offense. Do you have anything to actually say?
By your words you're liable to catch yourself in a public library calling the girl behind the counter Bolshevist, and ignoring Thomas Jefferson's opinion on her work. Now study a bit about rational thought as opposed to calling someone red so you can mindlessly bait them:
A 22-inch wall of cob is great even at that scale if it's keeping you comfortable. If you need to build tiny, there are ways to make it quite livable. If that means being free from a huge mortgage, I'm all for it.
The existing concept of the suburb is crazy and wasteful, especially with all the irrigated and chemically sprayed lawns, but you have only to turn those lawns into food gardens, to get neighbors talking, to set up things like "tool libraries" to share resources that a lot of people are up to their ears in, and make some space for people to enjoy being - and then, you get zero food miles, reduced transportation costs, and given good land management an eco-positive development.
Most of our best soil is covered with suburbs, and this is both the biggest problem and the biggest opportunity.
"The benefits of efficiency accrue only to the wealthy anyway"
You are so very right in this in any system where a bit of "green" technology is swapped in like a spare part for a broken, crazy machine. We're not going to get anywhere by switching a bulb or an appliance or a way to keep doing something with a huge waste of electricity.
If we designed our homes with the mind for convection and efficiency that we're designing our servers, and took advantage of the energy that's already there, we'd not need to waste electricity the way we do. I'm pushing land and compost and soil-building instead of 401Ks, cob building with passive solar design. I know this works because I've stood outside of a straw-bale house on a 90-degree summer day, and in the shadow of its northern wall, with a solid fence around me and plants, I was cold enough to have goosebumps. I was effectively standing in a bowl which caught the air cooled by contact with a large thermal mass which had been largely kept from the sun, and cooled further by the respirating food and comfort - I mean live plants - around me. If we remodeled or rebuilt our buildings with that in mind, we could kick fossil fuels to the curb.
I further know that this is accessible to us because I've seen young couples have a good old-fashioned house raising with friends building over the course of two weekends with cob - a mixture of clay, sand, and straw - on a foundation for just $5000. What? You think people in times past lived chained to a mortgage just to have a roof over their head? Imagine what else your energy could go to, and it'd be helping you instead of Wall Street.
I refuse to think that we must merely be more efficient about burning the world down with gas, coal, and nuclear when comfort is there to be had by intelligently harmonizing with the extant properties of the world. Only the profiteers who would be middlemen between us and some plunder going on in a poor part of the world wish it so.
There needs to be a stiff tariff on trade with a country with such practices, in my opinion. If you don't do it, you ratify some level of slavery, and not only are slaves demeaned, but working people are devalued. That allows a privileged few to get rich off of other people - nothing more.
I think the lesson of this is that the strongest of natural disasters can and will happen, and the costs of nuclear are too horrible to ignore. This isn't an instant bodycount; it's an overall poisoning of the environment spreading across the globe. We've had cesium 137 appearing in milk in Vermont and rainfall in San Francisco has exceeded the maximum safe limit for radioactive iodine 181 times over. The consequences aren't instantaneous, but they are there.
We have strong alternatives for green energy, including concentrated solar thermal, increasingly effective wind power, and artificial photosynthesis driving fuel cells. Nuclear power is a huge mistake.
Excellent and informative post, but as to cesium, it has been demonstrated as being bioaccumulative. The output of the Chernobyl disaster is still making reindeer meat in Norway and wild boar in Germany unsafe to eat:
I could see being a bit wary of fish caught in that vicinity, but on a global scale, the radiation and radioactive particulates are insignificant. If the radiation has dispersed enough to effect North American cattle, it has also dispersed enough to be background noise.
I'd like to agree but the businessinsider link (http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-rainwater-radiation-181-times-above-us-drinking-water-standard-2011-4) features independent testing from UC Berkeley which showed radiation levels 181 times the US standard in the rainfall on the San Francisco Bay Area.
What I don't see enough discussion about is the bioaccumulative effect.
For catch-up: fat-soluble toxins can accumulate in the bodies of organisms such that at every step of the food chain, the concentration is multiplied. It's not just a single species accreting the toxin, but what happens when its predators are eating from this concentrated source. Any links up the food chain up to the apex predator are going to have a multiplied effect, which is why a seemingly insignificant amount of mercury pollution versus the ocean's volume has made tuna consumption a point of caution.
We are seeing radiation levels that could be a bit of a concern and the Fukushima situation is still not under control. And are some of the compounds it's emitting bioaccumulative? Yes, Cesium 137 for example, and that has a half-life of 30 years. And the first thing you should do is move your consumption as far down the food chain as possible. Even if you don't plan to go vegan, learn Indian cooking or a low-meat cuisine, because the less animal product you're consuming, the better.
Actually, my footprint is likely a fraction of yours; I'm assuming American with an average footprint. Believe it or not, people live and function in this world while making a lot of changes: buying secondhand for manufactured goods, walking or taking transit, volunteering on local gardens, driving little enough that I have to gas up once a month on average. Not to toot my horn; most of us have ways to do at least this much. There's no excuse for the American footprint on the earth; Europe manages a similar level of comfort for much less.
All-or-nothing rancor sounds like an excuse not to start learning. So do stereotypes, and no thank you, I'll pass on the iodine as I want an answer for the whole planet's situation - i.e. bioremediation. I've no intention of outliving everyone on a completely trashed world.
"...When we most need it." It doesn't sound like you're processing what it is. We're looking at it, and we don't need what we're seeing. Nuclear is hugely expensive per kilowatt and damaging along its supply chain, when advancements in the electric grid and major advances in wind in solar are bringing them near cost parity with fossil fuels even by the dishonest practice of externalizing the costs of pollution. They're the winners once you factor in health and environmental costs.
Besides, I'm telling you, we got by for hundreds of thousands of years without centralized electric power. We don't have to go back to the 18th century; we can do better than that by a long shot by cutting waste from our input and output.
Example: Here in California 19% of the water use goes to pumping water. A lot of the the water is used for agriculture; you need only look at your typical restaurant to see how wasteful we are of food. In many parts of the country they're poisoning food they throw away to prevent it from feeding pesky humans or animals. Then after we're done wasting all that energy, we're guzzling oil to make fertilizers to compensate for huge losses of fertile topsoil for our wasteful practices. That's just one supply chain. There are so many other ludicrous examples. We don't need to waste energy on this.
An alternative would be landscape to passively harvest rainwater instead of drain and pump it away and then pump in more water from some aquifer or reservoir to compensate. We could compost food waste along with plant clippings and cardboard to create mulch. Fast composting methods yield 140 degrees of heat - there are working examples of tons of hot water being made simply by harvesting that heat while you're creating fertile soil. Local small livestock can handle food waste and accelerate that process. More efficient building design can slash heating and cooling costs, especially if you're taking advantage of heat and cooling from other design elements (we've already got at least one). Surprise, you've eliminated the need for a lot of oil-based fertilizers and the transport of food, and electricity consumption onsite to boot.
I think that people are wanting nuclear to replace one piece of an ill-conceived and toxic system, while considering that much of what we're wasting human energy on has to do with meeting actual human needs. This is more about a supply chain that makes the fiendishly rich more fiendish and more rich. Read Raj Patel's "Stuffed and Starved" for how the food system is about middlemen instead of farmers and consumers, or if you'd rather read fiction, ponder Dune and "hydraulic despotism".
When you consider the inefficiencies of powering it through the grid, going through miles and miles of resistance on the wire, you're going to offset much more than 2MW. Bringing the energy source onsite is a smart move.
Slashdot Mirror
I lived in an area with a "micro-power grid". The power to the local grid was supplied from a local business that was connected to the grid. Basically, they were a "micro-utility" of sorts, with a limited supply. This was in communist Poland about 50 years ago.
You know what happened? It worked very well, until someone down the street turned on their arc welder and there was a nice brown out throughout the neighborhood. Or someone started running a large motor. Hell, most of the time you couldn't run an electric motor because the phase was so "out of phase"!! (pun intended) Yeap, insufficient buffer on the "micro-grid" to counter lack of proper grid connection.
After the real grid was connected in the early 1980s, well, brownouts went away. People could actually use things like arc welders or electric motors without fucking up your neighbors power supply.
This is actually the reason to have a large power grid. It is called redundancy. Modern, well maintained grids don't tend to suffer from single point of failure anymore. And guess what? Renewables will require an even larger grid to counter their unpredictable intermediate tendency.
Finally, the article you linked are not "micro grids". They are regular grid with local utilization of locally generated power. Imagine that!!
Local utilization of locally generated power - on a much smaller and networked scale - is one of the main design features of a micro-grid. The other design feature is smart regulation to divert energy to where it is needed nearby intelligently. I'm not sure why you'd rather define a micro-grid by your experience of something in Poland that didn't let people run arc-welders in their homes; given the general conditions and comparatively ancient technology, it seems apples-to-oranges. Personally, if it meant avoiding nuclear disasters and devastating mountaintop-removal coal mining, I'd take that outdated solution anyday - but this is a modern and rapidly progressing technology that is hardly constrained to the anecdote above. See Woking for another real-life example.
Err, no. As a physicist, I can tell you that laser confined fusion has about the same potential of making power as a fusor. The research is not aimed at production of actual power. You may want to read up the actual linked article. Let me quote to you the important part,
There's other material on LLNL's laser that doesn't corroborate what you're saying. Net-positive fusion is something they have a real chance of realizing, that's what they aim for. If you read more on this subject you'll see that their scheduled milestones put them ahead of ITER, and they've been meeting their goals and setting records thus far. They're as feasible as anybody is right now.
Obsolete information. People are largely unaware of the full gamut of renewable energy technologies. Even so, the Department of Energy did an extensive study that said that Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota could supply the country's full energy needs from wind energy alone, but we're not just talking solar panels and turbines.
We could slash building energy requirements drastically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design
Move to peer-to-peer microgrids which by the redundancy of many diverse small energy sources would fill gaps in baseload, reduce the need for redundant large powerplants and losses to electric resistance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/09/uk-island-micro-grid-wales
Consider alternatives for urban and suburban transit that would on today's grid be the equivalent of 300MPG cars: http://www.jpods.com/
For 24/7 baseload, use offshore wind and concentrated solar thermal: http://www.solarreserve.com/
Not to mention use solar thermal for hot water, a highly affordable approach: http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=12850
These are proven solutions with excellent working examples. You can also look at kites: http://ecoble.com/2008/08/26/wind-power-generated-from-kites/ for cheaper material costs or extending power generation to altitudes where the wind is constant, panels of windbelts for smaller-scale solutions as on http://www.humdingerwind.com/ and artificial photosynthesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_photosynthesis
They're also making great strides towards net-positive fusion using lasers: https://www.llnl.gov/str/Petawatt.html
I think the full range of these makes nuclear strictly a question of how to use the remaining nuclear fuel to the fullest extent with less waste left over. I don't understand the enthusiasm for nuclear in the light of the above, or the recent disasters.
What I don't get is why we're excluding gas giants that we're finding in the habitable zones. If Jupiter were where Earth is in our system, Callisto would be a great candidate. Ditto Saturn/Titan and Neptune/Triton. In fact, a gas giant in the goldilocks zones should offer more chances at a habitable body; the moon simply has to be far away enough not to be toasted by the planet's magnetosphere.
I'm sure the scientists are aware of this, but why has this eluded the journalists informing the general public?
By genetic manipulation, you might think Mendelian genetic selection with a little extra juice, but when you're talking plants with animal genes that secrete pesticides that wipe out other key species and are cross-pollinating into the wild, and have health implications? That have weird switches on the seed to insure that farmers are completely dependent on suppliers like Monsanto?
When the inter-generational studies that haven't, by definition, been done in humans are done in hamsters, yield frightening results? http://www.naturalhealth365.com/food/lorem-ipsum-is-simply-dummy-text.html
Biggest thing of all that I would expect the Slashdot crowd to be wise to, when we're talking a whole food supply built on plants modified with *patented* genes?
When it's like that I say the FLM come off as heroes!
It was the Cylons.
In order to make this happen, I hope to see more volumetric effects to make those nebulae pop out. Celestia with add-ons is amazing, but it can be so much more.
The difference between biological evolution and intentional, methodical design is that evolution happens in exposure to everything around it. Design methods exclude what's inconvenient and messy; we deal strictly with voltages of 2.2V and 5V in our electronics, whereas the natural world deals with everything. We are transcripts of every force present since the first living cell and before. They can say that there's no apparent link between quantum physics and neurology, but by which field's definition?
This isn't exactly the Easter Bunny. The accurate response is "we haven't found evidence for that", right?
After the year of oil and nuclear spillage we've had, I'm wondering why! This is one of the most interesting forms of clean energy available, and I expect it to be especially useful in the southwest of the US. Not a lot of people know about this kind of plant, but they had one generating megawatts of power for years back in the nineties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project#Solar_One
The molten salt compounds used are sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate - compounds used in fertilizer. If there's an earthquake and it leaks, it won't be that bad!
Both of those are still theoretical at this point, not ready for wide-scale deployment, and the costs are quite high.
That's the thing. The coverage of these energy alternatives as theoretical is completely misleading. Solar One was an example of a concentrated solar plant that was generating 64 megawatts of power in the 1990's. There've been a number of concentrated solar thermal plants built around the world - completely operational utility-grade power.
Superconductors are nice too, but they're not necessary. Large concentrated powerplants on a hugely distributed grid lose a lot of power to resistance and require two or three plants to cover a given area for redundancy which necessarily creates overproduction and overconsumption. The alternative is redundancy through many smaller scale power sources closer to their demand in a peer-to-peer grid, or microgrid. That too has been done in Woking, England. Large utilities don't like it, though. Large-scale efficiency is good for everything except their current business model.
Laddermills are a more "theoretical" source of wind power, true, but they're far more straightforward and risk-free than any nuclear supply chain. They're also only one kind of wind power. Turbines sure aren't theoretical, and we've ways to deploy them en masse. We've already established that offshore wind power along the east coast of the USA could supply a significant fraction of our country's needs.
The reason you hear about nuclear and its supposed safety so much is because of whose money it's concentrating hands in all along its supply chain. A more efficient reactor merely postpones the consequences. Nuclear requires a great deal of subsidies, its fuels are both finite and polluting, and a more efficient design in those terms is merely presenting the same downsides over a greater length of time. Oil results in the geopolitical tension, pollution, and military budgets we see today; you don't get an accurate picture of what its supply chain really costs you just by looking at the price of gas. Again, the profits are in concentrated hands, namely those who aren't likely to be living in Nigeria, Ecuador, or on the Gulf of Mexico.
I take the time for all this because we have an urgent need to re-engineer our power grid, and I wonder how many more cases like Fukushima and the Gulf of Mexico it's going to take before we finish with dirty energy or it finishes us.
Hey, coal is evil, I'm 100% in agreement, but it's a false choice to say it's coal or nuclear. Tap wind power a few thousand feet up (i.e. with laddermills), you've got 24/7 electricity. Concentrate solar thermal energy so that you've got tanks full of molten salt at 1000 degrees, you can drive turbines all night. All we have to do is build it. No wars for oil necessary, and cheap once you consider the externalized costs of dirty energy.
Because if you don't die immediately from radiation exposure but instead from cancer years later, it doesn't count?
You're not even sticking to the topic, just blowing smoke by political association (Maoist insinuation) and discounting US history where something like victory gardens was a significant and effective solution. You seem to be trying to invent the Chewbacca offense. Do you have anything to actually say?
By your words you're liable to catch yourself in a public library calling the girl behind the counter Bolshevist, and ignoring Thomas Jefferson's opinion on her work. Now study a bit about rational thought as opposed to calling someone red so you can mindlessly bait them:
http://www.examiner.com/skepticism-in-national/carl-sagan-s-baloney-detection-kit-logical-fallacies ...and come back when you have an on-topic point.
In 1943 it would have been your patriotic duty as an American: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
It's sad to see people demonize anything outside of rampant corporate-sponsored consumerism.
Expand your ideas of the possible, friend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg9qnWg9kak
http://7d.blogs.com/stuckinvt/2008/11/tiny-houses-105.html
A 22-inch wall of cob is great even at that scale if it's keeping you comfortable. If you need to build tiny, there are ways to make it quite livable. If that means being free from a huge mortgage, I'm all for it.
The existing concept of the suburb is crazy and wasteful, especially with all the irrigated and chemically sprayed lawns, but you have only to turn those lawns into food gardens, to get neighbors talking, to set up things like "tool libraries" to share resources that a lot of people are up to their ears in, and make some space for people to enjoy being - and then, you get zero food miles, reduced transportation costs, and given good land management an eco-positive development.
Most of our best soil is covered with suburbs, and this is both the biggest problem and the biggest opportunity.
"The benefits of efficiency accrue only to the wealthy anyway"
You are so very right in this in any system where a bit of "green" technology is swapped in like a spare part for a broken, crazy machine. We're not going to get anywhere by switching a bulb or an appliance or a way to keep doing something with a huge waste of electricity.
If we designed our homes with the mind for convection and efficiency that we're designing our servers, and took advantage of the energy that's already there, we'd not need to waste electricity the way we do. I'm pushing land and compost and soil-building instead of 401Ks, cob building with passive solar design. I know this works because I've stood outside of a straw-bale house on a 90-degree summer day, and in the shadow of its northern wall, with a solid fence around me and plants, I was cold enough to have goosebumps. I was effectively standing in a bowl which caught the air cooled by contact with a large thermal mass which had been largely kept from the sun, and cooled further by the respirating food and comfort - I mean live plants - around me. If we remodeled or rebuilt our buildings with that in mind, we could kick fossil fuels to the curb.
I further know that this is accessible to us because I've seen young couples have a good old-fashioned house raising with friends building over the course of two weekends with cob - a mixture of clay, sand, and straw - on a foundation for just $5000. What? You think people in times past lived chained to a mortgage just to have a roof over their head? Imagine what else your energy could go to, and it'd be helping you instead of Wall Street.
I refuse to think that we must merely be more efficient about burning the world down with gas, coal, and nuclear when comfort is there to be had by intelligently harmonizing with the extant properties of the world. Only the profiteers who would be middlemen between us and some plunder going on in a poor part of the world wish it so.
There needs to be a stiff tariff on trade with a country with such practices, in my opinion. If you don't do it, you ratify some level of slavery, and not only are slaves demeaned, but working people are devalued. That allows a privileged few to get rich off of other people - nothing more.
I think the lesson of this is that the strongest of natural disasters can and will happen, and the costs of nuclear are too horrible to ignore. This isn't an instant bodycount; it's an overall poisoning of the environment spreading across the globe. We've had cesium 137 appearing in milk in Vermont and rainfall in San Francisco has exceeded the maximum safe limit for radioactive iodine 181 times over. The consequences aren't instantaneous, but they are there.
We have strong alternatives for green energy, including concentrated solar thermal, increasingly effective wind power, and artificial photosynthesis driving fuel cells. Nuclear power is a huge mistake.
Excellent and informative post, but as to cesium, it has been demonstrated as being bioaccumulative. The output of the Chernobyl disaster is still making reindeer meat in Norway and wild boar in Germany unsafe to eat:
http://www.quora.com/Fisheries/What-are-the-probabilities-that-the-cesium-137-radiation-pouring-into-the-ocean-from-the-Fukushima-reactor-site-will-enter-the-japanese-current-concentrate-up-the-food-chain-and-destroy-the-Pacific-coast-salmon-fishery
I could see being a bit wary of fish caught in that vicinity, but on a global scale, the radiation and radioactive particulates are insignificant. If the radiation has dispersed enough to effect North American cattle, it has also dispersed enough to be background noise.
I'd like to agree but the businessinsider link (http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-rainwater-radiation-181-times-above-us-drinking-water-standard-2011-4) features independent testing from UC Berkeley which showed radiation levels 181 times the US standard in the rainfall on the San Francisco Bay Area.
What I don't see enough discussion about is the bioaccumulative effect.
For catch-up: fat-soluble toxins can accumulate in the bodies of organisms such that at every step of the food chain, the concentration is multiplied. It's not just a single species accreting the toxin, but what happens when its predators are eating from this concentrated source. Any links up the food chain up to the apex predator are going to have a multiplied effect, which is why a seemingly insignificant amount of mercury pollution versus the ocean's volume has made tuna consumption a point of caution.
We are seeing radiation levels that could be a bit of a concern and the Fukushima situation is still not under control. And are some of the compounds it's emitting bioaccumulative? Yes, Cesium 137 for example, and that has a half-life of 30 years. And the first thing you should do is move your consumption as far down the food chain as possible. Even if you don't plan to go vegan, learn Indian cooking or a low-meat cuisine, because the less animal product you're consuming, the better.
Sources:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11482657
http://www.marietta.edu/~biol/102/2bioma95.html
http://science.jrank.org/pages/854/Bioaccumulation.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-rainwater-radiation-181-times-above-us-drinking-water-standard-2011-4
Actually, my footprint is likely a fraction of yours; I'm assuming American with an average footprint. Believe it or not, people live and function in this world while making a lot of changes: buying secondhand for manufactured goods, walking or taking transit, volunteering on local gardens, driving little enough that I have to gas up once a month on average. Not to toot my horn; most of us have ways to do at least this much. There's no excuse for the American footprint on the earth; Europe manages a similar level of comfort for much less.
All-or-nothing rancor sounds like an excuse not to start learning. So do stereotypes, and no thank you, I'll pass on the iodine as I want an answer for the whole planet's situation - i.e. bioremediation. I've no intention of outliving everyone on a completely trashed world.
"...When we most need it." It doesn't sound like you're processing what it is. We're looking at it, and we don't need what we're seeing. Nuclear is hugely expensive per kilowatt and damaging along its supply chain, when advancements in the electric grid and major advances in wind in solar are bringing them near cost parity with fossil fuels even by the dishonest practice of externalizing the costs of pollution. They're the winners once you factor in health and environmental costs.
Besides, I'm telling you, we got by for hundreds of thousands of years without centralized electric power. We don't have to go back to the 18th century; we can do better than that by a long shot by cutting waste from our input and output.
Example: Here in California 19% of the water use goes to pumping water. A lot of the the water is used for agriculture; you need only look at your typical restaurant to see how wasteful we are of food. In many parts of the country they're poisoning food they throw away to prevent it from feeding pesky humans or animals. Then after we're done wasting all that energy, we're guzzling oil to make fertilizers to compensate for huge losses of fertile topsoil for our wasteful practices. That's just one supply chain. There are so many other ludicrous examples. We don't need to waste energy on this.
An alternative would be landscape to passively harvest rainwater instead of drain and pump it away and then pump in more water from some aquifer or reservoir to compensate. We could compost food waste along with plant clippings and cardboard to create mulch. Fast composting methods yield 140 degrees of heat - there are working examples of tons of hot water being made simply by harvesting that heat while you're creating fertile soil. Local small livestock can handle food waste and accelerate that process. More efficient building design can slash heating and cooling costs, especially if you're taking advantage of heat and cooling from other design elements (we've already got at least one). Surprise, you've eliminated the need for a lot of oil-based fertilizers and the transport of food, and electricity consumption onsite to boot.
I think that people are wanting nuclear to replace one piece of an ill-conceived and toxic system, while considering that much of what we're wasting human energy on has to do with meeting actual human needs. This is more about a supply chain that makes the fiendishly rich more fiendish and more rich. Read Raj Patel's "Stuffed and Starved" for how the food system is about middlemen instead of farmers and consumers, or if you'd rather read fiction, ponder Dune and "hydraulic despotism".
When you consider the inefficiencies of powering it through the grid, going through miles and miles of resistance on the wire, you're going to offset much more than 2MW. Bringing the energy source onsite is a smart move.