Former Anti-Nuclear Activist Does A 180 912
palegray.net writes "Wired is running a story on how Gwyneth Cravens, a former nuclear power protester has changed her views on nuclear power as a viable solution to the world's energy needs. Said Cravens: 'I used to think we surely could do better. We could have more wind farms and solar. But I then learned about base-load energy, and that there are three forms of it: fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear. In the United States, we're maxed out on hydro. That leaves fossil fuels and nuclear power, and most of the fossil fuel burned is coal.'"
And there is still the unsolved issue of... (Score:2, Insightful)
Insanity.
Re:And there is still the unsolved issue of... (Score:4, Informative)
From the point of view of disposal, the main thing is keeping it out of the water supply and away from people. Not really that hard, until you start getting alarmists crying about the problems. The reality is that the harm done by fossil fuels on a daily basis to people and wildlife is far greater than what nuclear is going to do.
Even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, probably the worst esposures ever to radioactive waste, the number of radiation related deaths was only a small fraction of the number that were killed as a direct result of the blasts.
The main issue I have with the way its handled here, is that we in WA get all of the waste from, I think, 11 states, and we have the feds refusing to give us any assistance to clean up the mess we have. That being said the treat is more of a long term thyroid cancer risk than anything else, and potassium iodide does a pretty good job of keeping that at manageable levels.
In the US, any reactor that loses power to the control rods will also cut power to the fuel rods, resulting in the control rods falling into the core, and the fuel rods falling out of the core into a huge slab, stopping the reaction. I wish TFA had properly indicated that as the reason why we won't ever have a chernobyl, along with our compliance with basic safety regulations.
your comments are irresponsible (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, there is no safe permanent nuclear waste disposal at the moment; all nuclear waste is stored above ground in temporary storage because there is no agreement on where to put it for the long term. That's not just political wrangling; it's simply that nobody knows what sto
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That being said, solar thermal is looking good for daytime supplementary power. It's just not good for base load. The article indicates that some people have discovered this need.
Re:And there is still the unsolved issue of... (Score:5, Insightful)
It comes down to this:
- a roof has a large surface area
- sun ain't going to burn out any time soon
- solar panels can't be made into bombs
I don't understand why we are still arguing about this.
Most types of reactors aren't useful for creating nuclear weapons; reactor grade fuel doesn't have to be enriched as much as a weapon grade fuel, because you don't want reactor fuel to be critical. Conveniently it's much harder to enrich uranium to weapons grade nuclear fuel than reactor grade fuel.
Most of all it's because we don't have a choice. Fossil fuels are running out and causing problems anyway. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, gerbils running on wheels, etc, won't scale (unless a huge breakthrough in efficiency is made). Hydroelectric power sources are limited, and can have huge environmental impact.
Re:And there is still the unsolved issue of... (Score:5, Interesting)
Solar panels are about 30% efficient, so that's 210 W/m^2 of actual power.
My laptop runs on about 20W (source:
Re:And there is still the unsolved issue of... (Score:4, Insightful)
In a lab, maybe. In practice, commerically, not so much. 15% is more like it, but that's when they're new. After a time they drop to about 12%, so that's what you design at. Then 85-90% for the inverter unless you're using direct DC.
You also say "700 W/m^2 during the day" - what part of the day? Those measurements (available at your local weather data collection agency) are figured for surfaces perpendicular to the direction of sunlight. Do you plan to install a tracking mount for your panels? If not you have to derate the capacity.
=Smidge=
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Just because we have to take the safety of something seriously doesn't mean that we can't use it.
Re:And there is still the unsolved issue of... (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's compare the Chemical Industry to Three Mile Island(TMI), since many environmentalist seem to act like anything Nuclear is far more dangerous that anything else. TMI causes millions of dollars in damages to the power plant, and not much else. Yet Chemical accidents, large and small, are routine, causing death and destruction. Munition plants have exploded, many petrochemical plants have exploded, and the now widespread well water contamination caused by a gasoline additive are only a few examples. Remember the Praxair lot in St. Louis? Have we forgotten the images of canisters full of flammable gases being launched like rockets into a nearby residental neighborhood?
Maybe if we can make more environmentalists see the hard numbers of current deaths due to chemical based pollution and accidents in America, then maybe they will realize that it is our chemical modern world that is killing us, not Nuclear Power. I find it ironic that it was the outcry against chemical based pollution in our air, water, and food that jump started the environmental movement in the 1970s in the first place.
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who is going to pay to take care of the waste for the next 100,000 years? No human institution has ever lasted that long and yet we build reactors that can only work for 40 years or so but have this waste that is hot and nasty for at least 100,000.
No, it isn't. If it were HOT and nasty, we could just stick it in a box, heat water, and use the power.
We have a boat-load of stuff that is "bad for you to hand around with", and will be that way for thousands of years. And we have even more "don't use this if the paint falls off" stuff. And a very little ammount of "touch this and die."
Most of the last is or can be used as a fuel, somewhere. The rest is, on a planetary scale, useless.
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who is going to pay to take care of the waste for the next 100,000 years?
I'm going to deserve my flamebait mod points, because you guys are so full of shit. What the hell do you know, fool, how do you know that in 200 years we'll have found a way to deal with these things for good or simpler yet that we won't have drilled a hole to the core of Earth to dump that waste with the rest of the inner Earth radioactive stuff, or even sent these things into the Sun (I would expect that in 200 years it will be fai
Re:And there is still the unsolved issue of... (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly, don't be freaked out about radiation so much. If you were transparent to radiation such that a Geiger counter would see all the radiation going off inside of you (where the damage is done), it will go into a nice high pitched, continuous whine. You sid/madam, contain enough radioactive radioactive potassium for about 5000 events per second. Add that nice trails of cosmic muons hitting out every 0.5-1 second (enough to go right through you and ionize LOTS of stuff), and you are positively glowing
Also, coal has 2-3 ppm uranium and about 5ppm thorium (means, 1,000,000 pounds of coal have 2-3 pounds of uranium and 5 ponds of thorium). Since US burns about 2200 times that http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/special/feature.html [doe.gov], US alone is releasing about 5000 pounds of Uranium and 10,000 pounds of Thorium into the air. Ok, there are those precipitators, but only about 50% effective on these things (unlike soot). So, about 1 metric ton of Uranium goes poof, into the air *NOW* in the US.
Anyway, most of the so called *waste* can be recycled. You only end up with maybe one small barrel of waste per large nuclear plant per year. That is much cheaper to watch that one can for 10,000 years than letting all the mercury from the coal power plants pollute the lakes such that we can't even fish there anymore. Sad.
http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Publications/Fission%20Fuel%20Conservation.htm [computare.org]
BTW: Uranium is not HOT. ANYTHING that has a 10,000 year half-life, by definition, is NOT hot. HOT stuff has a life time of seconds or minutes or maybe up to a few days. Hot stuff is used in medicine.
Good to see. (Score:5, Interesting)
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You are mistaking "activist" by "fanatic". Most people make a choice to be activists because they know more than the others, not the opposite.
Fanatics, on the other side, simply don't want to know. Their faith is above any evidence. Of course, some activists are fanatic, but let's not label everybody the same way.
Re:Good to see. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure they meant "every time an activist changes their opinion". Personally, I would agree with the GP if they meant that this case proves that this particular activist is *willing* to change their mind. Too many people are not *willing* to change their mind (see current US govt) and are more concerned with saving face than being correct or doing the right thing. It's refreshing to see proof that someone doesn't operate under those restrictions.
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They get criticized because they never really believed in their position in the first place. They espouse whatever is politically expedient, and when the political wind changes, they spin around like a wind vane in a tornado.
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How so? It was killed by Executive order. I will agree that Republicans have done nothing to re-start the efforts. The work began and progressed under Reagan and Bush the I, and was ~immediately killed by Clinton.
And the reason may well be that there's a lot more profit in highly wasteful, dangerous nuclear power plants.
Only in that they're available to be licensed. IFR's are cheaper to build, use less fuel, and don't have waste storage probl
Mutant Powah! (Score:4, Funny)
if protesting against nuclear power will give me a lifespan like that, i'll look for a placard right now
Unfortunate (Score:5, Insightful)
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You get what you pay for.
Compare the salary of this job:
http://web.mit.edu/jobs/listings/02-0001076.html [mit.edu]
With this job:
http://web.mit.edu/jobs/listings/02-0000056.html [mit.edu]
and the TMI damage was.... what? (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't blame nuclear power for the disaster at Chernobyl. Blame the broke Russians and their stupid reactor design, but bad design is the designer's fault, not nuclear power.
Nuclear power can be made safely, and we have a long track record of exactly that. I'm not a pro-nuke activist, but let's be reasonable, shall we?
Fitting cartoon to the subject (Score:5, Insightful)
By Clay Bennett.
What's a prote? (Score:4, Informative)
Shenanigans (Score:3, Interesting)
Among those evaluated, the number of healthy people sank from 1987 to 1996 from 59 % to 18%. Among inhabitants of the contaminated areas from 52% to 21% and among the children of affected parent from 81% to 30%.
Nuclear power can be safe, and Chernobyl was poorly designed, but to claim only 69 people died from that event is wrong
Nuclear is a good solution, waste not a big issue (Score:4, Insightful)
It is well known how to convert U238 into plutonium as a usable fuel, and the isotope of Pu is not suitable for bombs either. Thorium is also readily available as a fuel as well with a much larger supply than Uranium.
The other problem that always comes up is nuclear waste. When a fuel rod is removed from a reactor, it still contains a lot of usable fuel, which can be extracted and reused. If we use breeder reactors, the long term nuclear waste can be burned up so the only remainder is stuff that has a half life in the hundreds of years instead of thousands or tens of thousands of years, and it would be a fraction of the amount of waste. France already does this. It's expensive, but cost can probably be greatly reduced as the process is improved and the scale grows.
Granted, we do need to have very strong safety standards, but modern designs for nuclear reactors are a lot safer than the old designs. And the cost could also be drastically reduced if we stopped making each reactor a complete custom one-of and had a bunch with the same basic design.
The other form of energy I'd like to see tapped is geothermal, since that's almost free.
I consider myself green and am looking into installing Solar when the price drops a bit more.
Re:Nuclear is a good solution, waste not a big iss (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh we all consider ourselves green here and I have no doubt when the price drops a little more then we'll all install solar. Say when it becomes cheaper than anything else, such as base-load coal generated power.
And I'm pro-American too and will consider buying good old USA goods when the price drops a bit more - say to just a little bit less than the Made In China stuff we all currently by.
. What smells arou
A few things uninformed in the previous post (Score:3, Informative)
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Some questions for you: (1) is the extra energy Al Gore uses coming from renewable/carbon-neutral sources? and (2) when you balance that extra energy he uses against the benefit he's provided by promoting climate change as an issue that ought to be taken seriously, do you find it to be a net positive?
Because I'm sure Mr. Gore could well have reduced his carbon footprint to zero, pe
I'll tell Gwyneth about base load (Score:4, Insightful)
Mankind's projected peak power needs by 2020 or so amount to about 22 TW. Yeah. 22, not 22,000.
So throw stupid statements like "three forms of base-load energy, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear" in the rubbish bin of irrelevancy, and tap what is effectively an infinite supply (and if that's not enough, place solar arrays into LEO).
There are hundreds of times more permanently irradiated deserts in the world than would be needed to supply Mankind's power needs for the forseeable future. What's more, they're spread around the world, so base load is as easy to supply as peak, without storage. All that's lacking is the will to do so --- especially the will to act against the greed of those who are currently making megabucks off fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
So dear Gwyneth, think again. You've just been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a costly mistake.
Re:I'll tell Gwyneth about base load (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar is well and good, but it's not exactly reliable, as in you need the fricken Day Star to be shining in order to generate power. Clouds, night time, space needed, protecting the space needed from damage - lots of things can go wrong with current Solar generation methods. Your Solar-Power-Station-in-LEO idea has a lot of merit, but that solution is in the order of 50 years away. We just don't have the needed infrastructure to flip the switch and use Solar in a time frame that makes sense.
Nuclear is here now - and we don't have to invent a bunch of things to get it working with our current infrastructure. As a 40-50 year solution, it's about the best we've got. I'd rather have a few tons of nuclear waste vitrified in a mine somewhere that another 100 billion tons of carbon spewed into the atmosphere while we come up with something cleaner.
Soko
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Since we already have a bunch of 'spent' fuel rods in storage, we need a way to safely dispose of them. The crazy schemes to keep it sequestered for 10,000 years just isn't looking that practical.
Fortunatly, we know how to seperate the waste roughly so that the most radioactive 5% need only be stored for 500 years (which is a LOT more likely than 10,000). That leaves the other 95%. The best way to 'dispose' of that is to feed it into a reactor and convert it into the short lived waste (oh yeah, and produ
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Suppose your electrolysis project is 75% efficient, which is pretty good. Then you ship it around the world. Then you've got to turn it back into electricity...
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2% of US acreage = about 200,000 square meters
solar panels = about $500/square meter for 16% efficiency panels means $100M I have no idea what the construction and transmission infrastructure would cost. This does not include any kind of motorization of the panels to track the sun.
power output = about 150W/meter2 (in the field, not in the lab, no gaps between panels) means 300 megawatts total
http://global.kyocera.com/ [kyocera.com]
US power demand in 2006 = 760 GigaWat
"Just" Learned? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, a guy like me goes to school for six years, learns some things, and can't for the life of me get my friends take a fair look at nuclear power. They used to go on and on about Browns Ferry and Yucca Mountain and all that. They just took their youthful rebelliousness and ran with it.
So, one such person, this woman, years later, finally decides to learn what "base load" power is? And she's been mouthing off all these years to anyone who will listen without knowing?
Young people. Sheesh.Base load? Feh. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Who cares if there are a few jobs that renewables can't fill? Use fossil fuels to make up for their shortcomings. Insisting on a 100% renewable future is overly idealistic: I say, if we can fill 95% of our energy needs with renewables, go ahead, use natural gas or whatever when you need to. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
2) There are plenty of renewable forms of "gap-filling" energy. People have mentioned biomass burning. Here's another one: TFA quotes the "prote" as saying that "hydroelectric is maxed out." Well, it's not. It's maxed out as far as its *average* power output, because of limits on available water supply to the reservoirs. But we can get a lot more out of it if we use it to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. Shut off the hydro plants during the day when the solar plants are running, run them twice as hard at night, and you're good to go. Need more nighttime power? Use solar electricity to run a pump to pump water *up* the dam into the reservoir in the daytime, then run the plants even harder at night. The gap-filling potential is almost unlimited.
3) The main reason modern-day "base load" is so high is because major industrial power users (aluminum smelters, etc) shut off operations during times of peak demand, when they get charged extra for electricity: they make up for it by sucking up cheap power in off-peak hours. Change the pricing structure, so they get charged extra whenever supply dwindles. I can guarantee you that if you tell an aluminum plant "Tomorrow night's gonna be calm: if you want wind power then, you're gonna have to pay triple per kWh", they'll stop the smelters tomorrow night.
4) There is one overall problem: I'm describing an electrical system with much more variability. Everything, from the hydro turbines and generators to the high-tension lines to the substations, has to be built to handle higher peak power draws. That costs money, but it's not a fundamental problem.
But nuclear operators have troubles too (Score:3, Informative)
1. Having read many nuclear power plant operations inspection documents, I believe I can say that human error is quite common although if run by sane management who don't hire illiterate part-timers, then most such error is not very dangerous. But if you think all safety procedure is perfectly followed always, or that the physical parts (pipes, etc.) in a power plant don't end up mislabeled, confusing and sometimes rusted or leaking, well you're wrong. And sometimes there are total idiots allowed to handle this stuff because work is outsourced to other companies run by utter criminals, as demonstrated by actual recent accidents.
2. NIMBY is not "idiots who won't forget past mistakes" or even "idiots with boats". It is mostly people who are well aware that there will be contamination and maybe utter disaster. At least in Japan, where you have not only the above management and engineering problems, but also earthquakes and potential missile attack from China or North Korea to worry about.
3. I was at a talk recently and heard the president of TEPCO (a major Japanese electric power operator with nuclear reactors). He was seriously complaining about the press and how they never listen to facts. That seems correct. However even without worrying about #2 above #1 above provides plenty of incidents, both minor and major, to keep the home fire burning among those vociferous against nuclear power.
4. The president as mentioned above was talking at the 150th anniversary of Keio University. They are opening a new school for systems design, digital media, and hopefully as this guy was saying it can train new talented people who can understand human factors in engineering - they must have such people in the future for nuclear power plant design and there is not a single person like that who is really competent and working in his company... who would want to work there, he said in fact.
5. As a combination of my own reading of what it really is like to be observing worker teams in nuclear power plants, and also heavily based on this recent talk, I must conclude that nuclear power plants of the current design generation are far too complex, and also are made of materials that are far too weak, and the designs are prone to accidents. And sometimes work is done without a real safety framework solidly in place. It also seems that these plants are built on such a large scale, with so much tension, such difficulties in teaching new procedure, and generally such complex psychological issues that they really cannot be run perfectly safely.
That is, they are fine, if you are willing to accept little mishaps now and then, but they aren't 100% safe and can't be. Reading about it (sorry I know it is not 1st hand experience so perhaps this is hyperbole but..) it feels like the movie Brazil, a bureaucratic maze on a huge scale. Or paralleling the movie 2001 with people dwarfed by this huge machine they live in. I read about bead reactors once some years ago, and they sounded great. But whether they stand up or not there is a real problem, evidenced by human factors analysis I've seen and the talk of the top person in charge of managing this stuff in Japan as a business, and the whole system is full of pressures from the bottom up, including requiring absolute perfection from people over long term and from the top down, by economies that badly need nuclear power.
It would be nice if we had ultra resistant materials, perfect workers, and so on like in science fiction, and maybe nuclear power will be operated really safely by robots one day, but at the moment it seems to be a tough business and the tension about managing things that are radioactive gives every single aspect of the business a whole other axis of danger to be controlled. We may be up to it but I am not convinced that the capitalist system is the way to manage nuclear power. It looks like a bad idea.
Please explain (Score:3, Interesting)
- How are we 'maxxed out' on hydro?? I guess I'm thinking in terms of Canada too.
- Why did she skip from hydro to fossil fuels and nuclear? What happened to wind, solar hot water heat, energy conservation - increased energy efficiency, etc? I know that in my Canadian home town... they are close to approving the largest wind project in Canada for my county- the first one in the county. Proof that we are far from 'maxxed out' on wind for example.
- If the sudden popularity of compact fluorescent lightbulbs has just recently taken off and can make such a difference, as well as Walmart's push for concentrated laundry detergent, etc, etc, isn't this a sign that we have many, many more areas where efficiency improvements can be made. Lets look at trimming the waste.
- What REALLY is the solution to nuclear waste? Isn't it kind of a joke to assume that any human government or corporation will be around and responsible enough to babysit these waste storage locations for 50 or a hundred thousand years? That's THOUSANDS of generations of humans!!! Puh-lease!
- It seems to me that it's kind of a give-up to say nuclear is the 'only' solution.
I'd like to see industry get rid of 'stand by' mode on electronics, pointless status lights on devices, more efficient lighting, turn lights and what not off when no one is in the room or using it (only some schools are starting to do this), remove excess packaging from products and excess water from liquid products, etc, etc.
I think the nuclear as the only solution people are really saying that nuclear is the only EASY solution.
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Hydro's nowhere nearly as easy as it sounds. For starters, you need a river with sufficient flow to make the project worthwhile, and you then need a location to put the dam so that it forms a reservoir in an area that you don't mind flooding.
Dams can have massive (and devastating) environmental impacts. Take a look at the three gorges dam. Although I commend China for building a power plant that doesn't run off of coal, it'
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Which brings up an interesting point... in the last 30 years, average energy usage per capita in the United States has dropped LOTS, something like 40%, with an associated INCREASE in the qua
Green Apostates: Stuart Brand, Patrick Moore (Score:4, Informative)
Stuart Brand:
"There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective. Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don't know where it is and you don't know what it's doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody's atmosphere."
Link [nytimes.com]
Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of GreenPeace:
"We'd like to see 50 percent by the end of the century, maybe even more. But for now, the objective should be doubling the number of nuclear plants in operation."
Link [wired.com]
-kgj
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Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
This is because the vast majority of Australia's Uranium is, as yet, untapped. This limit is not due to technology or environmental concerns preventing the rights holders from extracting the material from the ground. It's because they are waiting on the market prices to rise.
There is no shortage of Uranium, it's just that the raw materials are, mostly, in the hands of a very small number of companies who are colluding to exploit high demand while controlling supply.
You know, just like the Oil companies have done for decades, with great success.
At this point in time, Uranium demand hasn't even BEGUN to peak. Once everyone starts rushing towards nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, expect to see production ramp up.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
The CSIRO also identified the base load issue as a red-herring - hint: in a geographically large country such as Australia, the US, or Canada, the wind is always blowing somewhere. Wind & Hydro provide the base load for other renewables (solar, tidal, wave, geothermal), just as Hydro currently provides a fast switch "base load" for coal fired plants (that require scheduled shutdowns for maintenance and even then they still break down from time to time).
However our politicians after doing their best to ingnore the issue (lest it affect our coal exports) have been busy colluding with the likes of GWB and GE for the last few years in an attempt to monopolise the nuclear fuel industry.
It seems to be working quite well if you consider the price hike in Uranium over the last 5yrs or so. IMHO the main reason for this state of affairs is not money but the fact that renewable energy can not (easily) be used as an international political lever in the way that fossil fuels have been since WW2.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
Our society will embrace socialism before it embraces renewable energy as a replacement for fossil/nuclear power.
This isn't renewable energy's problem - just our society.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, there's probably some truth to that. It has frequently been said (citation needed, sadly) that the cotton industry was instrumental in pushing for laws to ban marijuana growing and processing because they realized how much easier and cheaper it is to grow plants from the cannabis family than cotton.
It grows just about anywhere (unlike cotton), requires dramatically less water to grow, is much less susceptible to damage from insects (since you're using the stalk rather than the fluffy contents of a seed pod), and I suspect that it produces much more fiber per unit of field area, though I don't know for sure.
So while I'm not saying that the ease of growing it is the only reason it is illegal, yeah, it probably played a part. :-)
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Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because transmitting power over very long distances, and wasting the majority of it pushing the smaller part to its goal, didn't contribute to the current problem, and we should keep doing it, right?
You make a lot of good points. Yes the current plans involve who is retaining or expanding political power, often more than any considerations of physical power generation. Some type
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because wind generators and solar panels cost nothing to build, don't require any fossil fuel inputs in their manufacture, and never break down or require maintenance. So sure, why not waste 99% of their output.
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Transporting large amounts of electricity long distances is lossy and therefore expensive. It is also difficult to build huge power lines because of NIMBY from a large number of property owners. There are places where it is cheaper to build certain kinds of power plants, but getting that power to the population centers where it it most needed is expensive to construct. Nuclear power stations can be built much closer to
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not so sure about least environmentally damaging, but let's address the space issue: Gigawatt reactors are fairly typical and take up about 100 acres. You would need 17,000 acres of windfarm to match that, and it would only match it when the wind is blowing. So if we assume we need 3 locations to get 1GW of base load, suddenly we need 51,000 acres of wind farm to produce the base load of a 100 acre reactor.
Again I say WTF.
IIRC about 10% more than what is used to generate the required amount of power, since the complete absence of wind across even half a continent is an extremely rare occurance (ie: has never been recorded) there is no need to transport it that far.
"complete absence" is a red herring. Just because there is wind blowing doesn't mean its enough to make use of it.
Here's a wind atlas of the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_wind_power_map.png [wikipedia.org]
The white and light cyan areas do not have enough wind for economical wind generation. The next bluer area is unlikely to have enough wind. Certainly not enough for companies to risk investment.
Going to the 3rd blue area, can you see any areas of more than half the continent where wind energy would have to be transported? I know I do.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
In most places the wind doesnt blow nearly enough to justify them.
You'll only find wind farms in consistently windy places which is sensible.
There are a number of places where it rarely stops.
Re:Combine thermal & wind = Solar Tower (Score:4, Insightful)
Doubling of coal usage.... bloody morons greenpeace are, they are Pro Coal, pollute the earth idiots with zero brains.
This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to take people seriously when they tell me I should change my lifefstyle in this way or that in regards to power. If we had been building nuke plants all along for the last couple decades, we'd be in a VERY much different carbon situation right now. The anti-nuke people are partly to blame for this.
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And there will be no shortage of uranium... the supply needs to last only for 30 to 40 years. Fusion power plants are expected to replace current fission nuclear plants in that time and they require no uranium to run (well, maybe for starting them up) and they run on clean fuel - hydrogen (afaik it also requires lithium catalyst), and 'waste' product is helium.
Where can I read more about this working fusion technology, please? Because I was of the impression that it doesn't work yet, so your 30-40 year statement is somewhat at odds with that. Much as I'd love it to be true, can you show me some facts on this?
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Uranium 235 is not the only fuel that can be used in nuclear power plants.
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Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
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Except for the deposits in natural reactors, natural uranium all has the same ratio of isotopes. The process of enrichment is separate from the extraction of uranium from ore.
Also, you can build a reactor with naural uranium.
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So yes, huge amounts of energy are input in order to run things.
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Cyg
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
2: No, it hasn't.
3: Doesn't matter. There are other radioactive materials that can be used for fission.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no where to put the radioactive waste
Ya know, we do have the technology to reprocess the "waste" and convert most of it into fuel that can be used again. The United States chooses not to use such technology due to concerns about proliferation -- but it's around. The French have been doing it for quite some time now.
Nuclear power is NOT the answer
Why? Mankind learned how to harness chemical reactions (fire). Then we learned how to split the atom and harness nuclear reactions. Sounds like a natural progression to me.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, solar cells and wind turbines descend fully formed from the womb of Gaia, ready to magically convert wind and solar to electricity until the end of time.
fortunetely millenia of nuclear fuel (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The US has enough coal to last for centuries. Where did all that carbon in coal come from originally? We call coal, oil and natural gas "fossil fuels" because they were produced by living things, mostly plants. These plants needed sunshine and therefore were on the surface of the earth using up the carbon in the atmosphere. These living things were then buried, leaving the ea
Re:fortunetely millenia of nuclear fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly. All that carbon used to be in the air millions of years ago, FOR millions of years. Our fossil fuels didn't spontaneously form one day, sucking all the carbon dioxide out of the air. This was a very slow process, where over millions of years layers of plants were buried in sediments, slowly leaching carbon out of the atmosphere.
It is true that as temps go up, plants grow better. And if we were releasing this stored carbon on the same timescale as it was stored, it wouldn't be an issue. The issue is that we're releasing all of that stored carbon over perhaps three centuries, rather than a few million years. It's not the magnitude that has scientists worried - it's the timescale.
Really, the big issue is that our climate has been pretty stable for about ten thousand years. What has everyone all excited is that it's now pretty obviously changing. This means populations will eventually have to move, countries may change size and shape, and centers of agriculture may have to move. All this upsets the stability that we as humans take for granted.
Once again, it's not the magnitude, it's the timescale. Humans have always been forced to move around by climate changes. Now we're looking at it happening over a human lifespan, rather than several.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you realize how WRONG you are? (Score:3, Insightful)
I real
Re:Do you realize how WRONG you are? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. You know, some people wave their ignorance around like a badge of honor (or honour, if you prefer.) Me, I was raised by a nuclear physicist and electronics engineer, I have multiple Ph.Ds in my family, and while I'm just the village idiot in comparison, I am continually astounded at the sheer number of people that complain vociferously about that which they do not understand. I wasn't taught to look upon ignorance as a virtue, yet that is exactly how many Americans look at it. Scary, really.
It's not a matter of intelligence, or lack thereof, it is a matter of realizing the limits of one's knowledge, and rectifying that situation when necessary. This is the Information Age
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
As several posts (including one of mine) have pointed out, fission can be used for quite a while (even if you don't take breeder reactors into account). Converting a fission plant to a fusion plant would be interesting. Basically, the reactor itself would almost certainly be scrapped entirely. The turbines and generators, OTOH, wouldn't generally care whether the steam was produced by fusion or fission, so they could probably remain more or less intact.
Interestingly, when/if you actually look carefully at the history of accidents (and near-accidents) in nuclear power plants, most of the problems are surprisingly mundane. In fact, it looks like a lot of the problems are basically mechanical -- things like building a steam valve that simply opens and closes dependably for years at a time, even though the steam involved is at high pressure and temperature (e.g. ~300 degrees C and 2000+ PSI). Quite a bit of research has been done into temperatures and pressures of primary coolants [uic.com.au] (near the bottom of the page).
Even if a repair is strictly in the steam part of the plant (where nuclear radiation isn't a problem) it can take months to cool hundreds of tons of steel, concrete, etc., down from its normal operating temperature to the point that a person can enter and work on something. This makes the cost of repairs so high that the system must be engineered to run for years (preferably decades) at a time without them.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
It takes Days- as in two or three- to cool down a steam plant, even one attached to a nuclear power plant.
We do mine every 18 months, and in the 30 or so day's it's offline, we can take apart EVERYTHING, work it, and put it back together again. Our minimum refueling outage time is perhaps a couple weeks.
Most nuke plans run on an 18-24 month fuel cycle- 18 months is fairly typical and balances out the required maintanence vs cost of being offline. We do buy and use things meant to run for years at a time, because we want to cut costs.
It costs us well over a million dollars a day (maybe two) in lost revenue and additional staffing costs during a planned refueling outage.
Aside from that timeline problem your post is pretty accurate.
Re:Renewable (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear fusion, which we will figure out sometime in the next few decades, will provide enough energy for millenia. That's fine for me.
Re:Renewable (Score:5, Informative)
The moon has nothing to do with hydroelectric, maybe you meant tidal energy?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NOT for "us"! (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this nicely summarizes and demonstrates the main problem with today's enviromental movement: since everything you do affects something, you can't do anything. As a result the enviromentalists are considered nuts and ignored, even when they actually have a valid point (which you don't, especially since hydroelectric takes energy from the rivers, not the oceans).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best of the Best, of the Best of the Worst? (Score:4, Interesting)
My First Time So Sorry (Score:5, Funny)
(*) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to solving a looming energy problem. Your idea will not work as the current situation stands. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state or country to country before a bad federal or international law was passed.)
( ) It will be fought by entrenched fishing interests
(*) It will be fought by entrenched energy corporations
(*) It will succumb to NIMBY Syndrome
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Technology doesn't work that way
(*) NIMBY Syndrome will prevent mass deployment
Specifically, your plan fails to account for:
(*) Extreme misunderstanding of the technology by the public
(*) A sensationalist press won't let mistakes die
( ) Idiots with boats
( ) International reluctance to engage in sweeping change
(*) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who vote
( ) A lack of support from famous Musicians and Actors
(*) Conflicting environmental interests
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Meltdowns Suck!
(*) People have been trying for years to implement your solution and haven't succeeded
( ) The money could be better spent curing cancer
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(*) Your solution is expensive
(*) Your solution may be politically infeasible
( ) The money could be better spent implementing [other] solution
( ) It makes life harder, not easier
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(*) We're really close, but still no cigar. I agree with you're idea in general, so maybe one day in the distant future...
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It will be fought by entrenched fishing interests
Who wants to try to make this phrase the next Slashdot meme? I do.
Re:Now we a pack of homer simpsons to work at the (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
People change their minds. So what?
I used to be pro-nuke, worked for a nuclear company etc, but am no longer so. For me, the biggest issues with nuke are handling long-term bulk waste and the costs: nuke is far more expensive than anything else even though the promises of the 50s and 60s were energy that would be so cheap that it was not worth metering.
Thats more anti-US nuclear proliferation policy. If you don't mind breeding and re-using your fuel till it's almost non radioactive you get far less waste. You do end of with a lot of radiated other material like all the tools used to handle the fuel and waste. But likewise anything that is radioactive is potential fuel! You just need to spend more dollars trying to make the system more efficient.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Partial list:
EBR-II - USA - Operated flawlessly between 1964 and 1994 , Project canceled over proliferation concerns
FBTR- India - Reached Criticality in 1985 and has operated flawlessly since
Rapsodie - France - Research reactor without electricity generation operated from 1967 to 1983
Phénix - France - Grid connected since 1973 and still operating , used for nuclear waste transmutation
DFR -
Re:How many pro-nukes have 180'd? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Power demand in a given day follows a sort of double-peaked curve. It peaks during daytime hours when businesses are running, and then again in the evening when people turn on their lights, tv's, etc. (and tapers off as people go to bed). If you draw a line underneath the minimums of the curves, however, you'll notice that demand never drops BELOW a certain point. This is the amount of "base load" power that
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is why there's stuff like the "One Watt initiative [wikipedia.org]", Fujitsu's monitor that draws zero power in standby [slashdot.org] or LED traffic lights [engadget.com]. It's not as inflexible a people might think.
And batteries aren't the beginning and end of power storage. Try Flywheels [wikipedia.org], or other "grid energy storage [wikipedia.org]" options.
Re:How many pro-nukes have 180'd? (Score:4, Funny)
Just wait until tomorrow, use some hydro to wake yourself up in the morning, and post when the sun is shining. Either that or spend 6 months at alternating polar regions.
- Hope this helps.
Re:What's a prote? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Significantly reducing the Earth's population, perhaps by a factor of ten. (This includes killing off others and taking their resources)
2) Leaving the Earth to harvest resources elsewhere.
Option 1 at best will maintain our present standard of living. Constant exponential increase in standard living, constrained to the surface of the Earth, is impossible.
Even conservation will a
Re:"Activitist?" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wind Turbines are the Easy Way (Score:5, Interesting)
But even so, the Mid-Atlantic is just one place. There's lots of others, like across the Great Lakes, and all over the damn place. And that 330GW is just that accessible to current engineering near the ground, not really in the whole atmosphere. To say nothing of cyclones.
Also, I don't know where you're getting your 10% energy for solar cells stats. PVs aren't just harnessing IR, but rather much of the spectrum. There are perfectly good 25% efficient cells out there in the sunlight, with 42% efficiency achieved this year from concentrators (which are cheaper than their equivalent area in actual cells).
We're not limited to today's tech. We've got about 5-10 more years where we can use petrofuels without committing to shifting the planet's ecosystems into a new one in which our civilization is likely to fail. We've got decades, centuries after that to perfect it. Or to stare at a pile of nuke waste that will just become a bigger pollution and security problem every year instead.
Re:Wind Turbines are the Easy Way (Score:5, Interesting)
You also don't seem to know that the kinds of droughts the US already experiences is already cutting significantly into our hydroelectric power reliability.
I did not argue that a single turbine could replace every single oil well. I just offered a comparison of oil wells to turbines, because people tend to picture a towering gusher when thinking of oil wells, but turbines are directly comparable. And we never had an oil well every 50 feet. My actual argument was that we don't have the dire emergency requiring nukes that this article's subject now likes to claim. The nuke biz has always presented the alternatives to nukes as absolute paradise vs absolute hell, with no alternatives, and I'm pointing out that wind is quite a viable alternative.
Re:Wind Turbines are the Easy Way (Score:4, Insightful)
Well yeah, the magical elves are a nice feature, but the thing that really makes wind-farm maintenance less of a hassle than nuclear-plant maintenance is the fact that no radioactive materials are involved. That means that you don't have to give every employee a six-month security screening to make sure they won't start passing out free uranium samples to al-quaeda, and you don't have to make your wind farm 150% earthquake-proof, hurricane-proof, and hijacked-airliner-proof. You don't have to surround your wind farm with maximum-security fencing and a legion of armed guards, either. Nor do you have to deal with all of the health and safety protocols required by OSHA to keep your employees from getting cancer, and finally you don't have to figure out which group of NIMBYs to send off your spent nuclear waste to, how to settle the resulting lawsuits, or how to deliver that waste safely to the disposal site.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just so long as we keep Republicans and private enterprise the hell away from it. The last thing we need is fucking Enron-style bullshit with the nukers. Run public utilities as non-profit monopolies operated in the public's best interest. Treat any free market deregulation dittohead as a saboteur to be shot on sight.
I'm probably biting on a troll post, but it's possible you really could be that ignorant. Enron's golden years were during the Clinton administration, which pretty much let companies get aw
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Informative)
That still have people living around it.
Yes, but it's still a dead city [wikipedia.org]. 2,800 Sq Km that is too dangerous to live in for any length of time. Why do you insist on minimizing this?
That would have happened even without the accident. Cancer is one of the leading causes of death today, Chernobyl or no Chernobyl. Cancer rates have been worse for several neighboring areas with not particularly clean chemical production facilities.
Forgive me, I assumed that you would understand that I meant "cancers that otherwise would not have happened." Obviously you can't tell the exact cause for most cancers, but, depending on which study you look at, a whole lot more than 60 people [bbc.co.uk] have died from that accident. (That study, from the WHO, has a lot more credibility for me than a study that comes from what is in effect a nuclear power lobby group)
She lacks credibility because she ignores, as you also choose to ignore, evidence (and, in the case of the dead zone, blindingly obvious facts) that contradict the point she tries to make.
To answer your question about green baseload replacements, try googling "pumped storage." Proven, simple and efficient. After that, think about (and google) tidal power and hydrogen generation/burning. There are others as well. The world is not as hopeless as the nuclear power industry wants you to believe.
And the cost of nuclear power is FAR more than what you claim. First, did you notice that your link points to a paper from an Australian uranium mining lobby group? Second, that study vastly underestimated the cost of commissioning new plants, which the study pegs at close to $1000/KW, is in reality always at least double that. A decent wikipedia discussion of this exists [wikipedia.org]. See also the MIT study [mit.edu]. (which, by the ways, puts the current lifecycle cost of nuke at 6.7 cents/KWh, which is far more then any mainstream power source)
I used to be very much for nuclear power, until I did research with an open mind. The truth is that it's very expensive, has a poor safety track record (and, in case you need something to keep you up at night, think about the dangers and potential for sabotage when we move all this radioactive material around), and is unnecessary. You can talk as much as you want about safeguards to the nuke process, but in the end either government (corrupt) or private industry (more corrupt) has to build and run these things. If we spent the money and energy that is currently going to nuke on developing and building truly green power, we'd all be much better off.
-Daniel