The technology and manufacturing process for modular, safe, small nuclear reactors which are physically incapable of melting down, and which produce no long-term waste, have been available for over a decade.
1) They're vaporware
2) A million years from now, nuclear power could be safe as hell and you will still have issues with containment, security, and waste. Issues that wind and solar will never have.
So go ahead and make your vaporware not be vaporware - it's just not going to be cost effective. It's not regulations, politicians, or hippies killing your favored method of heating water - it's cost.
6. Escalating taxes on fossil fools for transportation use.
Eh. Sounds like all the campaigns to get Californians to take two gallon showers and to not flush for number ones - small potatoes when residents use less than 15% of the state's water supply. Most of it is used by industry - twenty million people could move out of the state tomorrow and you wouldn't even notice the difference.
It's the same for CO2 production. The world's single largest producer is the US military, with all those warships, aircraft, tanks, etc. And just 100 corporations produce 71% of the world's CO2 emissions. People driving Hummbers and dually pickups as passenger vehicles aren't helping....but they (and all other drivers) are a drop in the bucket.
The Soviets had "money". The problem was the whole nation was run by state monopolies.
You say that like it was a bad thing. Soviets had universal health care, education, housing, and no stock market bubbles that would periodically pop, that would make the poor poorer and the rich richer, as capitalists would swoop in and buy up assets at discount prices.
It's not the human population, it's the human resource consumption. As the average American uses 30 times the amount of resources as people in developing countries, removing the USA would be equivalent to "removing" the poor from around the world many times over.
Ban coal power outright.
Sure.
LFTR reactor research funded to pre-Jimmy-Carter levels.
Cost and time make nuclear power unjustifiable. Taking 20 years and $20 billion to build a new nuclear power plant is already a non-starter even if climate change didn't exist. But if we need to replace coal, wind and solar can be rolled out in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, with none of the risks presented by nuclear energy.
The problem with that is that the first people to die will have little to nothing to have caused the problem in the first place. The United States and Europe have produced huge amounts of CO2 pollution for their populations, but it's people in other parts of the world (ie Africa and Asia) that will die by the billions first, if catastrophic climate change comes to pass.
And your article starts off with "All four of us". Pretending that equates to "climate scientists" in general is sophistry. Then there's the fact that those four people are idiots. Even if every government everywhere got on the nuclear fanboy bandwagon tomorrow, it's going to take decades to plan for and construct thousands of nuclear plants across the globe.
Decades the world doesn't have to head off more serious climate change. Whereas wind and solar can be rolled out in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. It's like telling a family that needs a car for the parents to get to work that they should save up for 30 years and buy a $2.5 million Bugatti......when there's a perfectly serviceable new Honda Civic over there for $25k.
Anti-Nuclear activist, including many in Congress, have done everything they can to gun up the nuclear power industry.
The is the same country and government that couldn't give the tiniest, greenest little shit over BP trying to destroy the Gulf of Mexico, or Flint having poisoned water for five years and counting.
It's not hippies, politicians or regulations preventing new nuclear power. It's cost.
And that's in the country that thinks nothing of tossing hundreds of billions in an F-35 dumpster and setting it on fire. But nuclear is just too goddamned expensive for even the Capitalist States of America to possibly justify.
Promising technologies like breeder reactors
Vaporware.
Processes to fast track environmental reviews
Yeah, who cares if your site is on a thousand year flood plane?
Limited indemnity for developers to prevent frivolous lawsuits
Fascist propaganda. No suit can be dismissed as "frivolous" until all the details can be heard. The whole "tort reform" movement is about limiting liability for corporations for their fuckups.
Reopen Yucca Mountain. Fuck Harry Reid. Hell, bury his soon to be dead ass in it.
Uh huh. You establishing a trust fund for the next few hundred generations to deal with your mess? No facility is going to last for the many many thousands of years it will take for your nuclear shit to not stink.
It's why Chernobyl and Fukishima are once-in-a-couple decades events, instead of an annual occurrence. This Randian phobia of having to operate by rules is as reasonable as a communist shitting his pants at the sight of a for-profit business.
China, for example, where the reactors are built by the state, has been pumping out reactors, each taking 5 or 6 years.
Once construction starts. The site selection/planning phase can take much longer than that. You know, so you don't build your plant on a fault line, or in an area that could be taken out by a 500 year flood, etc.
Wind and solar passed it in cost effectiveness years ago, and that's even allowing coal to externalize all its environmental and health effects. Nuke fans sure like pretending it's either coal or nuclear, though.
Cost is what kills nuclear power. Not hippies, not regulations, not politicians.
1) You simply cannot justify spending $20 billion and 20 years building a new nuclear power plant when wind and solar can be rolled out in far less time.
2) No other power sources requires plans to rapidly evacuate everyone in a 20 mile radius if there's a meltdown. No other power source (aside from hydro) poses an imminent risk of death to surrounding populations.
3) You cannot justify forcing hundreds of future generations to deal with your waste. Imagine if the last neanderthals had nuclear power 40,000 years ago - and people were still having to deal with the radioactive waste today, like Europe has to deal with unexploded ordinance from WWII.
4) The "baseload power" FUD that is always levied at wind and solar applies much moreso to nuclear power. Nuclear power plants shut down on a regular basis for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance. For days, months, or even years at a time, blowing a gigawatt sized hole in your grid. That means that for N nuclear power plants to power said grid, you need at least N+1, to step in for the one that's shut down. Which is no different from needing to build excess wind and solar generation across your grid to provide for dark or windless days.
DTE completes a refuel and maintenance outage every 18 months at Fermi, a spokesman said.
Fermi 2's last refueling occurred in March 2017. During that time, the plant was offline for 33 days.
You mean apologia for revenue generation that ignores that increasing yellow light and all-red times slightly provide all of the benefits with none of the ticket nazi action?
Just imagine if this critical eye was aimed at, say, American arms dealers. Or the Bush and Clinton families. Or all the high profile politicians like Howard Dean and Tom Ridge who have been PR flacks for groups on the State Department's list as terrorists:
If a person falls off a nuclear cooling tower and dies, it is a death related to nuclear power.
Not according to nuke fanboy math its not, no moreso than uranium mining accidents are.
That wind and solar don't have the possibility for catastrophic events, and so don't need insurance against that, really doesn't tell us anything about why insurance on nuclear is so difficult to get. You like wind and solar, I get it, but your argument is laughable.
In the same breath you note that wind and solar don't have no possibility for extreme disasters and then wonder why nuclear insurance is "hard to get"? Laughable indeed.
If the USA did safety like Japan
You mean cut corners to save money? But of coooourse they do. Hell, here's an article back from the Reagan Administration on how safety is given second priority. Fukushima was a once in a thousand years disaster - if you think all US plants could survive the same, you're wearing some mighty big clown shoes.
The rate at which you have deaths from falling from tall things is directly related to the number of tall things you have and the frequency you need people to climb said tall things.
>Chernobyl or Fukushima every couple of years No you wouldn't.
So, more tall things to make people fall will result in more deaths, but exponentially more nuclear power plants wont result in more meltdowns. Riiiiight.
Nuclear produces fewer deaths than wind and that's a fact.
It's a fact you're conflating industrial accidents with the danger posed by the powersource itself, which is nuke fanboy bullshit. Again: wind and solar farms don't have immediate evacuation plans for everyone in a 20 mile radius because they pose no danger to the surrounding populace.
Competition from what? Coal is a dinosaur and fission is vaporware.
And to ensure someone doesn't do something you're scared of, regardless of facts.
You do know we're talking about the same government that let BP resume their offshore drilling practices unchanged after destroying the Gulf of Mexico, yes? That has left the people of Flint with poisoned water for how many years now?
What kills nuclear power is cost. Even for the government that has no problem throwing hundreds of billions in the F-35 dumpster and setting it on fire. Because nuclear power is an even worse, even more unjustifiable, example of corporate welfare.
Unless it's unpredictable, blowing a gigawatt+ sized hole in your grid.
because most downtime is scheduled
Because that's still going to require surplus generating capacity across the grid, or a massive battery (like a large pumped storage facility) to back it up. You know, the same as you would for wind and solar. Without all the risk and expense of nuclear power.
And the batteries necessary to store the power generated from wind and solar are going to come from where?
Same place as what's used to back up nuclear power. This is another problem for nuke fanboys: all the FUD thrown against wind and solar applies much moreso to your favorite method of heating water than wind and solar. FUD that is easily addressed by tech that has been used to back up nuclear or coal power since the '70s. Sometimes the 1870's.
Because when your precious nuclear power plant goes down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance - sometimes for years at a time - it means you have to build surplus generating capacity across your grid. Exactly as you would do for wind and solar. And back it up with a massive battery such as a pumped storage facility - same as you do for nuclear power plants.
There is no known way of making that many batteries to cover all that wind and solar.
See above on pumped storage, which has been used to back up nuclear power plants and done so for decades. So you were saying?
Neither does nuclear power. Whenever a nuclear power plant goes down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance, you suddenly have a gigawatt-sized hole in your electric grid. All of the FUD thrown by nuke fanboys against wind and solar applies much more to your favorite method of heating water, than to wind and solar.
We would have had nuclear power 50000 years ago, but no way to pump off the leak and send it through filters to capture the radioactive metals ?
Because this siphon is going to appear out of nowhere? It's not going to require constant observation and maintenance by future generations? Costs that wont apply to wind and solar, because they don't use radioactive fuel.
Not really. Anything that 'remains radioactive' for tens of thousands of years is emitting so slowly that it's a non-issue.
Until your containment facility develops a crack and the waste leaks into groundwater, sure. The oldest standing human structures are around 10,000 years old - nuclear waste facilities will need to last much longer than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Pedantic distinction without a difference, wanker.
Your projection is noted.
1) They're vaporware
2) A million years from now, nuclear power could be safe as hell and you will still have issues with containment, security, and waste. Issues that wind and solar will never have.
So go ahead and make your vaporware not be vaporware - it's just not going to be cost effective. It's not regulations, politicians, or hippies killing your favored method of heating water - it's cost.
Eh. Sounds like all the campaigns to get Californians to take two gallon showers and to not flush for number ones - small potatoes when residents use less than 15% of the state's water supply. Most of it is used by industry - twenty million people could move out of the state tomorrow and you wouldn't even notice the difference.
It's the same for CO2 production. The world's single largest producer is the US military, with all those warships, aircraft, tanks, etc. And just 100 corporations produce 71% of the world's CO2 emissions. People driving Hummbers and dually pickups as passenger vehicles aren't helping....but they (and all other drivers) are a drop in the bucket.
https://www.theguardian.com/su...
You say that like it was a bad thing. Soviets had universal health care, education, housing, and no stock market bubbles that would periodically pop, that would make the poor poorer and the rich richer, as capitalists would swoop in and buy up assets at discount prices.
It's not the human population, it's the human resource consumption. As the average American uses 30 times the amount of resources as people in developing countries, removing the USA would be equivalent to "removing" the poor from around the world many times over.
Sure.
Cost and time make nuclear power unjustifiable. Taking 20 years and $20 billion to build a new nuclear power plant is already a non-starter even if climate change didn't exist. But if we need to replace coal, wind and solar can be rolled out in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, with none of the risks presented by nuclear energy.
The problem with that is that the first people to die will have little to nothing to have caused the problem in the first place. The United States and Europe have produced huge amounts of CO2 pollution for their populations, but it's people in other parts of the world (ie Africa and Asia) that will die by the billions first, if catastrophic climate change comes to pass.
And your article starts off with "All four of us". Pretending that equates to "climate scientists" in general is sophistry. Then there's the fact that those four people are idiots. Even if every government everywhere got on the nuclear fanboy bandwagon tomorrow, it's going to take decades to plan for and construct thousands of nuclear plants across the globe.
Decades the world doesn't have to head off more serious climate change. Whereas wind and solar can be rolled out in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. It's like telling a family that needs a car for the parents to get to work that they should save up for 30 years and buy a $2.5 million Bugatti......when there's a perfectly serviceable new Honda Civic over there for $25k.
The is the same country and government that couldn't give the tiniest, greenest little shit over BP trying to destroy the Gulf of Mexico, or Flint having poisoned water for five years and counting.
It's not hippies, politicians or regulations preventing new nuclear power. It's cost.
And that's in the country that thinks nothing of tossing hundreds of billions in an F-35 dumpster and setting it on fire. But nuclear is just too goddamned expensive for even the Capitalist States of America to possibly justify.
Vaporware.
Yeah, who cares if your site is on a thousand year flood plane?
Fascist propaganda. No suit can be dismissed as "frivolous" until all the details can be heard. The whole "tort reform" movement is about limiting liability for corporations for their fuckups.
Uh huh. You establishing a trust fund for the next few hundred generations to deal with your mess? No facility is going to last for the many many thousands of years it will take for your nuclear shit to not stink.
More like you answer them like a jackass.
It's why Chernobyl and Fukishima are once-in-a-couple decades events, instead of an annual occurrence. This Randian phobia of having to operate by rules is as reasonable as a communist shitting his pants at the sight of a for-profit business.
Once construction starts. The site selection/planning phase can take much longer than that. You know, so you don't build your plant on a fault line, or in an area that could be taken out by a 500 year flood, etc.
Wind and solar passed it in cost effectiveness years ago, and that's even allowing coal to externalize all its environmental and health effects. Nuke fans sure like pretending it's either coal or nuclear, though.
Cost is what kills nuclear power. Not hippies, not regulations, not politicians.
1) You simply cannot justify spending $20 billion and 20 years building a new nuclear power plant when wind and solar can be rolled out in far less time.
2) No other power sources requires plans to rapidly evacuate everyone in a 20 mile radius if there's a meltdown. No other power source (aside from hydro) poses an imminent risk of death to surrounding populations.
3) You cannot justify forcing hundreds of future generations to deal with your waste. Imagine if the last neanderthals had nuclear power 40,000 years ago - and people were still having to deal with the radioactive waste today, like Europe has to deal with unexploded ordinance from WWII.
4) The "baseload power" FUD that is always levied at wind and solar applies much moreso to nuclear power. Nuclear power plants shut down on a regular basis for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance. For days, months, or even years at a time, blowing a gigawatt sized hole in your grid. That means that for N nuclear power plants to power said grid, you need at least N+1, to step in for the one that's shut down. Which is no different from needing to build excess wind and solar generation across your grid to provide for dark or windless days.
Not a separate topic when 40% of accidents happen at intersections. pred. pred.
https://www.autoaccident.com/s...
You mean apologia for revenue generation that ignores that increasing yellow light and all-red times slightly provide all of the benefits with none of the ticket nazi action?
Just imagine if this critical eye was aimed at, say, American arms dealers. Or the Bush and Clinton families. Or all the high profile politicians like Howard Dean and Tom Ridge who have been PR flacks for groups on the State Department's list as terrorists:
https://www.salon.com/2012/02/...
Not according to nuke fanboy math its not, no moreso than uranium mining accidents are.
In the same breath you note that wind and solar don't have no possibility for extreme disasters and then wonder why nuclear insurance is "hard to get"? Laughable indeed.
You mean cut corners to save money? But of coooourse they do. Hell, here's an article back from the Reagan Administration on how safety is given second priority. Fukushima was a once in a thousand years disaster - if you think all US plants could survive the same, you're wearing some mighty big clown shoes.
Contraciting yourself:
So, more tall things to make people fall will result in more deaths, but exponentially more nuclear power plants wont result in more meltdowns. Riiiiight.
It's a fact you're conflating industrial accidents with the danger posed by the powersource itself, which is nuke fanboy bullshit. Again: wind and solar farms don't have immediate evacuation plans for everyone in a 20 mile radius because they pose no danger to the surrounding populace.
Yep. NATO is the reason Libya has open-air slave markets today, instead of the highest standard of living on the African continent.
Competition from what? Coal is a dinosaur and fission is vaporware.
You do know we're talking about the same government that let BP resume their offshore drilling practices unchanged after destroying the Gulf of Mexico, yes? That has left the people of Flint with poisoned water for how many years now?
What kills nuclear power is cost. Even for the government that has no problem throwing hundreds of billions in the F-35 dumpster and setting it on fire. Because nuclear power is an even worse, even more unjustifiable, example of corporate welfare.
Unless it's unpredictable, blowing a gigawatt+ sized hole in your grid.
Because that's still going to require surplus generating capacity across the grid, or a massive battery (like a large pumped storage facility) to back it up. You know, the same as you would for wind and solar. Without all the risk and expense of nuclear power.
You mean refugees fleeing the affects of horseshit wars that were supported by Europe? Chickens coming home to roost.
Same place as what's used to back up nuclear power. This is another problem for nuke fanboys: all the FUD thrown against wind and solar applies much moreso to your favorite method of heating water than wind and solar. FUD that is easily addressed by tech that has been used to back up nuclear or coal power since the '70s. Sometimes the 1870's.
Because when your precious nuclear power plant goes down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance - sometimes for years at a time - it means you have to build surplus generating capacity across your grid. Exactly as you would do for wind and solar. And back it up with a massive battery such as a pumped storage facility - same as you do for nuclear power plants.
See above on pumped storage, which has been used to back up nuclear power plants and done so for decades. So you were saying?
You think wind and solar produce waste?
Neither does nuclear power. Whenever a nuclear power plant goes down for planned (or worse, unplanned) maintenance, you suddenly have a gigawatt-sized hole in your electric grid. All of the FUD thrown by nuke fanboys against wind and solar applies much more to your favorite method of heating water, than to wind and solar.
Because this siphon is going to appear out of nowhere? It's not going to require constant observation and maintenance by future generations? Costs that wont apply to wind and solar, because they don't use radioactive fuel.
Until your containment facility develops a crack and the waste leaks into groundwater, sure. The oldest standing human structures are around 10,000 years old - nuclear waste facilities will need to last much longer than that.