Slashdot Asks: Do You Support Nuclear Energy? (gallup.com) 485
Reader mdsolar writes that for the first time a majority of Americans have told Gallup they oppose nuclear energy. Support peaked at 62% in 2010, but "as Americans have paid less at the pump, their level of worry about the nation's energy situation has dropped to 15-year-low levels," Gallup reports. Their latest poll found 44% of respondents still supported nuclear energy, while 54% opposed it, a trend which could eventually affect the future of nuclear power. The New York Times reports that operating licenses will expire for 36 of America's 99 reactors between 2029 and 2035. What do you think? How strongly do you support (or oppose) generating electricity with nuclear energy?
Nope (Score:2)
In light of the incompetance of the company behind the massive gas leak at Porter Ranch, no, I don't trust a profit-motivated company with a nuclear reactor.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem is that we keep running old nuclear plants well past their designed lifetime instead of building new, safer ones and shutting down the older ones. People are afraid of nukes, so they oppose new plants, and therefore we actually increase the risk by extending the old plants.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
Well what are our choices? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're asking for a blanket condemnation or endorsement of nuclear power, all I can say is, "it depends".
It depends on what specifically you're proposing to build, how you specifically plan to manage and monitor it, and how you specifically intend to decommission them when they're at the end of their usefulness.
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Why yes. (Score:2)
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In the short-to-medium term. yes. (Score:3)
I support nuclear energy in the short to medium term because it's the only realistic way to replace coal, oil and natural gas - and thereby save the planet from global climate change. That's a short-term emergency - and we're not likely to be able to either cut back our energy use, or replace CO2-producing energy with renewables in time.
So we're left with the lesser of three evils: No energy, Rising CO2 levels, Nuclear accidents.
I'd hope that modern reactors (ie not Chernobyl era junk), intelligently placed (like not in the middle of a city, and not near a Tsunami-prone coastline like Fukushima) and carefully run (like not Chernobyl and not 3 Mile Island) could reduce the risk of accidents considerably. But even with the rate of severe accidents we've seen so far, the damage we do is far less than with coal/oil/gas.
I'd hope that we'd get fusion power running - and add smarter solar/wind/tidal sources (hydroelectric dams are starting to look like a bad idea) before too long - but we need uranium/plutonium power sources until that happens.
-- Steve
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TMI is a particularly interesting one, and an excellent example of paranoid engineering. It was designed so it would never melt down with lots of redundant safety systems. It was also designed on the assumption that those would all fail for unknown reasons and so when it melted down it would do so safety.
It was more or less designed so that during a meltdown, the critical blob of melted crap would melt through other things and in doing so dilute itself then spread out and so drop below critical mass. As a r
It's backwards (Score:2)
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Do I support nuclear power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
Unless we figure out fusion power quickly (which I'm doubtful of), fission power, combined with existing hydro and thermal solar is our best bet for stable baseline power in this country.
Renewables like PD solar and wind power, as well as power storage solutions, are best left to cover demand peaks.
The problem is that so few people know anything more than "nuclear = bomb" and "radiation will kill you", that it's created this vast climate of FUD around nuclear power.
And all they say when you mention nuclear power is "Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima".
None of these were failures intrinsic to the reactor.
Chernobyl: Idiots disabling safety equipment and fucking around with the reactor.
TMI: Human error compounded by bad control indicators.
Fukushima: A company cheaping out and not listening to civil engineering with regards to a sea wall meant to stave off large waves.
We're also talking about reactors based on decades-old technology and Rube Goldberg systems to stave off every possible problem an engineer could envision.
Rather than just designing a reactor with a default state of "off".
More modern reactor designs take this sort of thing into account.
Additionally, people gripe about the amount of nuclear waste being produced. Never mind that most reactors based on this older technology consume, at best, 5% of the actual "fuel" in the medium (rods, pellets, etc) before the medium is removed from the reactor.
With reprocessing, that fuel can continue to be used for extended periods of time. Resulting in far less long-lived waste, and the remainder being waste that is only being radioactive in the short term.
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Even if we accept that there won't be any more disasters (unlikely), the cost of 4th generation stuff is even higher than the older, proven tech. That's why people don't build it. The risk of problems being discovered on such a huge investment is too high.
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Re:Do I support nuclear power? (Score:4, Informative)
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Eh? Nuclear is useless for load balancing, it supplies a continuous output. And the cost of nuclear at 90% output is not much different from the cost of nuclear at 45% output so if you reduc
Re:Do I support nuclear power? (Score:4, Insightful)
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This has nothing to do with "new tech fetishism".
MSRs have a default state of "off". You simply CANNOT have a meltdown, as the fuel is ALREADY in a molten state BY DESIGN. And shutting down the reaction causes the fuel to "freeze" essentially. Also, unless you somehow manage to nullify gravity, there's nothing stopping a depowered MSR from popping it's plug and dropping the fuel into a dump tank and out of the reaction chamber.
This isn't "new tech". This is simple, elegant design.
And yes, a reactor with
I support it above coal (Score:5, Insightful)
Meaning I'm fine with it existing, but don't have any particularly romantic notions about it either.
Nuclear power necessarily comes with a long list of downsides. The enormous expense of building a powerplant, the amount of care that needs to be exercised to properly run it, the problem with waste disposal, the problem with that a dismantled powerplant still needs maintenance, the problem that disaster preparation is absolutely essential, the problem that the critical parts of the infrastructure are so highly radioactive it's not even possible to have a camera in them, which means any work on that is enormously expensive...
And then there's the problem of that if things go wrong it causes the evacuation of a huge amount of the population. Now I know this isn't instant death of course, but it still means that accidents are enormously expensive and insurance is difficult.
Then there is that all of this critically depends on people, who in many cases have reasons to cut corners in dangerous places.
Once you take all of that into account, I think it becomes considerably less amazing than it is in theory. IMO, current nuclear power is something that will go away eventually. Many of its downsides aren't going anywhere, so it may well happen that we'll find a way to run a grid purely on solar and wind power, and just accept the downsides of that in exchange for not having to deal with radioactivity.
That said, I'm all for improving the tech as far as possible and looking into thorium and of course fusion research.
Cost and risk (Score:2)
There are two problems with nuclear power: waste and disaster risk.
The solution to both is careful controls, high engineering standards, strong oversight, and expensive maintenance. Those cost money. The Fukushima reactors were built to much higher standards than most US reactors, but still suffered a catastrophe. You can't reduce the risk to zero, but you have to be willing to pay to mitigate those risks.
To the extent people are willing to pay for those things, I support nuclear power... which means that p
I support nuclear power (Score:5, Interesting)
I support keeping reactors that already exist running where its safe to do so. But I also support building new nuclear reactors. Not the ancient technology PWR and BWR reactors but modern 4th generation reactors. Ones that can burn the waste products from the old PWRs and BWRs and dont produce waste that has to be stored for thousands of years. Ones that can operate in ways that mean they cant suffer the kind of catastrophic release of radiation that happened at Fukushima.
4th generation reactors absolutely need to be part of the energy solution as the way to replace the world's dependence on digging dirty black ancient rocks out of the ground and burning them for electricity.
Yes I support nuclear energy. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes I support nuclear energy, it is the only viable solution to meet the world's energy demands and the need for clean energy. Burning coal releases more radioactive martial into the environment then any nuclear plant has. People are scared of radiation and it's unfounded, we are bombarded with radiation on a daily basis from the sun. People are also scared that nuclear plants can blow up like a bomb, but this is complete impossible. The waste they produce can be managed, in fact it can be recycled to produce more fuel. We need to figure out how to harness fusion into a viable solution.
Re:Yes I support nuclear energy. (Score:4, Informative)
People are also scared that nuclear plants can blow up like a bomb, but this is complete impossible.
I think that is a mischaracterization. What most people are actually worried about is rather the possibility of a nuclear meltdown that results in significant amounts of radioactive material being released into the environment, which could render the surrounding area largely uninhabitable for decades or longer. That is something that clearly is possible, as demonstrated at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Saying that won't ever happen again in the future (because reasons) isn't particularly convincing, since that is what the designers and operators of those nuclear power plants promised also.
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... http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com]
that one actually describes the issues...
And with nuclear-plants it because of people like you that we are stuck with decade old nuclear-plants instead of newer plants that would increase safety and reduce the amount of waste.
Maybe, if it can be done economically (Score:2)
I've seen it argued that any "indirect" energy source, such as coal burning to boil water,
nuclear to boil water,
and then steam --> electrical,
is going to lose out on cost to any "direct" energy source,
such as solar-->electrical,
wind-->electrical,
natural gas turbine-->electrical.
The argument is that the extra capital involved in the intermediate steam conversion step is going to price "indirect" power generation above all direct means.
This seems to be borne out somewhat in the real world, in that
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
Also, I support nuclear fusion research, and I think we should fund more of it, and this graph shows why [imgur.com].
If we can make energy cheaper by an order of magnitude compared to how it is today, that opens the door for some great things.
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We have also learnt that international collaborations are hugely expensive due mostly to politics. People think ITER is really expensive. It is true it is not cheap, but a new gas plant with ZERO R&D is still a cool billion dollars and takes a few years to build. A billion dollars a year for a few decades is really not much money in the scheme of things.
It is less safe because because thought it was (Score:3)
If we actually kept developing reactors instead of shutting down and holding up progress we would be at the point where they would be safe by now. It's only because of Luddites that we are so far behind our potential. It would be as if we still had to fly on Comets because as everyone knows planes are dangerous. Well no shit if you are flying around in first generation designs.
Yes, where sensible (Score:2)
Every type of power plant has a role to fill.
Nuclear, alongside geothermal and hydroelectric, is well-suited to handling base load. It "throttles" very slowly - you generally want to keep it at a consistent power output. It pairs quite well with hydro (you can use the reservoir for "free" energy storage, letting it fill when load is below what the nuke plant provides, then let it drain when you need peak power), but it's also something that can be used for sole base load pretty much anywhere, whereas geothe
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Nuclear, alongside geothermal and hydroelectric, is well-suited to handling base load. It "throttles" very slowly - you generally want to keep it at a consistent power output.
This is actually a common misconception [wikipedia.org]. Load following nuclear reactors exist and are a fairly common occurrence in countries with a high nuclear power usage such as France (75% of all electricity production). Their reactors are able to scale between 30% and 100% at 5%/minute. More modern Gen IV reactors can equal or surpass this.
How about... (Score:2, Insightful)
do you support nuclear research? As it is, there are numerous aging nuclear plants, and not really much to replace them with except theoretical models and tired designs.
The worst part about the anti-nuke crowd is that they have effectively shuttered research, which means several plants are operating well beyond their intended lifespan. Even if you support going 100% wind and solar, it will have to be implemented piecemeal, which means at least some new nuclear plants will have to bridge the gap. Would you p
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Let me rephrase that question .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask me instead if I support yet another of mdsolar's endless anti-nuclear, pro-solar postings to Slashdot.
I get it, mdsolar. Nuclear = BAD! Solar = GOOD! Except for the fact that the sun is a giant nuclear reactor that kills tens of thousands of people every year from radiation-induced cancers. But hey, never let facts get in the way of anti-nuclear diatribes.
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Actually I've never found mdsolar to actually be pro-solar, just anti-nuclear.
Nuclear is the only way (Score:2)
Yes, I am a nuclear zealot.
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The "only way?" Do you have NO faith in future developments that would dramatically reduce the per-capita/per-annum energy cost? Your grandchildren will think you a fool for such a sweeping, thoughtless assertion.
Not for base load power (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear energy for generating electricity is technically a viable concept, many years ago I was even trained to work on it.
Yet I don't believe disadvantages like security, safety and especially the very long term storage of the left overs makes it a good proposition for large scale deployment.
Nuclear energy has a place, but only in the form of fail safe generators and for very specific uses like aircraft carriers and submarines.
Once stationary there are plenty of sustainable alternatives that are already competing on price providing you consider the long-term costs of the present type of nuclear generators.
After installing PV nearly a year ago I've calculated that with a €15,000 - 20,000 investment I could for the next 25 - 30 years be totally independent of any other energy, that includes road transport.
The cost of maintenance consists of saving for a replacement and some battery changes.
Sustainable or renewable energy sources are sufficiently mature to shy away from the real problems surrounding present day nuclear, the remaining cost issues for renewable are mainly distribution and storage.
Distribution is a NIMBY problem so it can be solved near-instantaneously, storage is to be split in smallish scale local (your 1st and 2nd hand Tesla batteries) and large scale central solutions.
Safe central storage could be molten salt and the use of ammonia to be made of excess electricity and when demand requires it to be burned in conventional turbines.
Yes, of course (Score:2)
Just needs better oversight. Nuclear can be done perfectly safely. The only danger with anything is politics.
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Nothing can be done with perfect safety.
Regarding wild assumptions (Score:2)
It never ceases to amaze me that whenever the price of gas goes down for a while Americans assume that the price will stay low for a long time. Then they run out and make long-term decisions, like buying cars, based on that assumption.
However, I would add that the poll doesn't seem to prove or even really suggest that the cause for the decrease in support for nuclear energy has anything to do with the price of gas. The article only appears to assume that that is the case, so it's no better.
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Perhaps a combination of solar/wind/hydro/tidal/geothermal could blunt the excessive influence currently enjoyed by the sheikdoms just as effectively, *and* spare us the nuclear-nutter circle-jerk.
Why should a critical activity such as power generation be concentrated in the hands of *any* elite?
Yes (Score:2)
In principle, yes. And in practice, also yes. Sure, there are serious difficulties; but as with almost everything else, the problems are people problems, not technology problems. How can you stop some people from cheating, skimping, cutting corners, profiteering? (I like the Chinese solution: shoot every proven offender "pour encourager les autres". Seriously: anyone who takes unnecessary risks with nuclear power deserves to be shot).
I'd like to suggest that our willingness (or otherwise) to accept nuclear
Are we talking thorium yet? (Score:2)
I support NEW reactors (Score:2)
It's a tech issue (Score:2)
Travelling Wave Reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor [wikipedia.org] are perfectly safe. There is no reason to stop using nuclear power, we just need to start being smart about it.
Burn some Karma. (Score:3)
But, I put the blame for climate just as strongly at the feet of Green Peace and similar ignorant environmentalist who cry louder about nuclear energy than they do about coal and NG plants. If they actually supported Nukes rather than throwing years of lawsuits at them, then we wouldn't still be talking about climate change, we would have converted huge swaths of our power generation to nukes, gone through a few growing pains/generation of technology and by now the resulting economies of scale and control systems would have been worked out to the point where buying electric cars and such were a no brainier.
Instead we are still having this conversation, and in 5/10 years when gas is back at $5-8/gallon and NG prices spike back up, we will be experiencing rolling blackouts as we fight to stabilize wind/etc or still wondering why the air quality sucks and we still haven't' cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions.Likely a bit of both if the wind farms in TX are an example.
Technology yes, cost no (Score:3)
A couple of years ago the government of Ontario put out a request for a couple of new reactors and the lowest cost was $26B. I have no problems with the technology but when reactors are coming in at over $10B each there's no way these can be affordable. (Especially in Ontario where the salaries of people working at power production plants are extreme!)
You could buy the equivalent in wind and solar production for much, much less, then spend a pile of money on used car batteries for storage and probably have the same capacity without spending $26B.
Risky, delayed liability, and unnecessary (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear energy (from fission) has a very large number of disadvantages. Here are just a few:
- It's inherently and obviously risky --- even its greatest proponents know that, but they just choose to minimize the importance of that risk and its deadly consequences. There have been more than enough nuclear reactor disasters already, yet some people just don't learn. Even with better designs, accidents will happen from geophysical causes and through human failure, as well as by deliberate action. You can't prevent this from happening, so don't create such deadly installations (and juicy targets) in the first place.
- Radioactive waste from fission accumulates a massive liability for future generations. It forces our own chosen risk onto our descendents without giving them any choice in the matter. This is unethical even in the best of cases, but in the worst case it's downright criminal because some of those radioactive stores will unavoidably release their contents (even explosively with human help) and result in human casualties and suffering --- maybe your own descendents. Don't gamble with the lives of others.
- Nuclear energy is out of step with a world that is rapidly converting to clean, inexhaustible energy harnessed from the environment. Nuclear is not just unclean but deadly unclean, and it's very demanding on the planet's resources as well. It adds to our debt on the planet instead of reducing it.
- According to a growing number of climatologists who are witnessing first-hand the unfolding climate disaster in the Arctic and Antarctic, our existing several hundred nuclear reactors could quite possibly be the direct cause of our extinction in the decades ahead, after the indirect cause (CO2 and methane) lead to death by starvation of billions and make the world's economies collapse. Nuclear reactors can't be rapidly turned off and made non-radioactive --- the full process of decommissioning takes some 50 to 60 years as an industry average, and it takes a LOT of money. There will be no money available under conditions of economic collapse, cooling will be interrupted, and many will go into meltdown. Even if you choose to disbelieve the warnings of specialists, the risk remains. Knowing what we already know about rising sea levels and epic storms, we should not be adding to the risk.
Dr. Brice Smith of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research summarized this very well:
The whole idea of adding more nuclear power is hazardous and ill-considered, and it's also unnecessary.
Re:Risky, delayed liability, and unnecessary (Score:4, Insightful)
It's inherently and obviously risky
Which is why it's killed hundreds of thousands... Oh wait, it kills and injures fewer people per TWh [kenyon.edu] than wind and rooftop solar?
Radioactive waste from fission accumulates a massive liability for future generations.
Mostly because we're not allowed to reprocess the waste to extract the medium level radioactive stuff that would still be useful in the reactor.
Nuclear energy is out of step with a world that is rapidly converting to clean, inexhaustible energy harnessed from the environment.
Actually, we've been converting to the 'better than coal' but still very much exhaustible natural gas.
According to a growing number of climatologists who are witnessing first-hand the unfolding climate disaster in the Arctic and Antarctic, our existing several hundred nuclear reactors could quite possibly be the direct cause of our extinction in the decades ahead,
The former doesn't lead to the latter. Hell, given that they're predicting apocalypse and the death of billions by starvation, they're end of the world nuts and don't know how nuclear power works.
Nuclear reactors can't be rapidly turned off and made non-radioactive --- the full process of decommissioning takes some 50 to 60 years as an industry average, and it takes a LOT of money.
That's only because of insane greenfield standards. Give them the same standards as shutting off a coal plant and it'd take them about a week.
There will be no money available under conditions of economic collapse, cooling will be interrupted, and many will go into meltdown.
Even countries under economic collapse have some money available, and avoiding meltdown is easy. Cooling even our old lousy reactors long enough to prevent a meltdown costs what amounts to a trivial sum. The times vary, but generally it's about 3 weeks from SCRAMing the reactor before it's generating so little heat that passive cooling would be enough to prevent a meltdown. Reactors that have melted down are more complex because they often have a critical mass that is still generating more heat and radioactive components.
In a condition of economic collapse, you simply mark the area off limits and go about your business. Windmills falling on people will be as large of a problem.
The whole idea of adding more nuclear power is hazardous and ill-considered, and it's also unnecessary.
Actually, adding more nuclear power gives us relatively cheap energy that we can use to stave off the burning more coal, natural gas, and otherwise control the effects of global warming.
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France in the 1970s, in a very short period of time, completely switched it's power generation over to nuclear power. If everyone had done that, we might not have a global warming problem now.
If you look at the magnitude of what needs to be done to fix climate change, the sheer scale of it looks nearly impossible. This is not a "Manhatten Project", we're looking at something more like mobilizing for WWII.
We don't actually know what the deadlines are, and what the time table is, but we need to do every
Human Fallibility (Score:4, Insightful)
I am against nuclear power for the same reason I am against the death penalty. Both require a level perfection and infallibility that humans are incapable of reaching.
Newer designs (Score:3)
I don't really support the current nuclear reactors were using, which were designed what, almost 60, 70 years ago?
I wholeheartedly support new reactor designs that are much safer and have a nearly zero risk associated with operating them.
Poll the solar users in Nevada... (Score:3)
Poll the solar users in Nevada... where the PUC just eliminated net metering, and so you get paid less for the power you generate than the power you consume all the time. There are proposals into the California PUC, which are almost always supported by PG&E, since it would force Smart Meters on places like San Francisco, and PG&E could charge a lot more for night time electricity than day time electricity (when you are using solar).
I see nuclear power as being like aviation (Score:3)
Both are complex technologies which need a detailed regime of control for safe operation. We fly knowing that about once a year we lose a plane load of people, 200-300 at a time, at least once somewhere in the world. Aviation has been around long enough that we know the chance of our next flight being this year's fatal one will be vanishingly small. Nuclear power should be subject to the same calculus, but with one 'crash' of 51 dead in its entire history.
The difference between the two is pure politics. If you insist on our eliminating carbon, you're going to have to accept changing our baseload over from fossil to nuclear.
No. Not todays version of it, that is. (Score:3)
The only working type of nuclear power we have is fission, and that's a mess. In more ways than one. It's only doable with heavy subvention by taxpayers, completely ignoring the waste problem and not factoring in real insurance policies for disasters. On top of that it turns out reactors aren't running nearly as long and cheap and frictionless as people have dreamed back in the 60ies and 70ies. All that turns fission into an expensive and dangerous 70ies techno-romantic pipe-dream.
There's a reason Germany is moving away from it - and we've got some of the best reactor-tech on the planet.
I do support research for nuclear power like jet and iter and perhaps that travelling wave stuff Bill Getes is investing in, but fission as we have it today needs to be decommissioned. Now and globally. The numbers just don't add up. That's a simple hard fact.
Nuclear (Score:2)
Nuclear power remains a critical element to revising our industrial base in a way that can maintain existing demand and power the manufacturing of the equipment for renewable generation. For Solar and Wind to remain cheap requires that the components remain cheap - aluminum requires HUGE amounts of energy to refine from ore, mining itself is horrendously energy intensive even at the level of producing the large trucks and earth moving equipment required.
Nuclear is part of a comprehensive energy solution, but is not quite as good as it used to be because renewables are currently even cheaper. Still, it turns out most people are too uneducated to support nuclear and some of the remaining otherwise pro-nuclear people with find the difficulty in securing nuclear waste too problematic to overcome or have given up on educating everyone else.
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Re: Nuclear (Score:2)
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That's fine if you live in mountainous territory, those of us in the Midwest USA don't have a lot of high places to pump water.
I took a tour of a pumped hydro plant, or rather I got to see the visitor center and the plant from across a fence, proper tours were cancelled for "security reasons" after 9/11. Anyway, the plant is run by the Tennessee Valley Authority and is used as both peak power (daily variation) and seasonal power (monthly variation) to allow the coal and nuclear power plants they own to ope
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The ability to do what you suggest isn't sufficient to prove viability so it's a waste of money to do it.
Huh? I suppose it might be insufficient but it is also necessary. A solar powered future must have all solar panel factories powered by the sun at some point.
I trained with some people in the Army that were going to become parachute riggers. Part of the job description is that they will be required to jump out of an airplane with parachutes that they packed themselves. Why would the Army do this? Simple. If these riggers don't have the faith in their own skill as a rigger then they would not trust the
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The thing is that those problems have permanent solutions.
I can see a day when we have a grid that can be run purely on wind and solar. It may take some tech and development, but once it's there, it's there.
On the other hand, there won't be a day when radioactivity becomes a simple and pleasant thing to handle.
So it may well happen that eventually we'll decide that the hassle of dealing with variable power sources is less than the hassle of dealing with radioactivity.
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That's why you have candu reactors that use "waste" as it's fuel stock.
Brain Drain (Score:5, Insightful)
turns out most people are too uneducated
That's kinda the problem. The public is so uneducated that they make it hard to fund nuclear, which leads to engineers becoming less educated as old-timers retire and universities shut down their nuclear engineering programs because nuclear engineers can't find jobs (unless they go into the Navy, or are some of the very very few that make it into Los Alamos).
So, nuclear gets caught in a Catch-22 where it doesn't get enough funding to support the advancement of technology that would make it safe and reliable enough to compete. Instead, our collective knowledge of nuclear slips as, again, old-timers retire and youngsters pursue something more likely to pay those hideous education loans.
It's good that the stars have aligned to invest R&D into solar and wind. But it's not a good thing to allow nuclear to slip away... there's a lot of research yet to be done, with potentially great payoffs, if it wasn't so politicized by way of a public where a high-school education is becoming more and more worthless, again because of politics. A dumb electorate can be convinced of anything, like how supersonic transport causes skin cancer [chicagotribune.com], and that was back in 1975. Today, politicians earn their pork-fat living by dumbing down science education [arstechnica.com], I figure to better guarantee re-election by the time the kids turn 21. These are the people who'll turn on Fox News and see "nuclear... bad ; fossil fuel subsidies... good", all because of fancy wine and caviar shared between the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes [wikipedia.org] on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
The problem with nuclear is it requires smart people not only for design and build-out, but also for for day-to-day operation and maintenance. A poorly educated public is bad for all of this. But fail to keep educating and innovating in this technology, and it slips away (or goes overseas), and that sucks for us all.
Not about fear (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not about fear (Score:5, Informative)
Better alternatives, distrust of the people building and running the reactors, the extremely high cost, a proper understanding of the risks... And the attitude of people who dismiss legitimate concerns as blind fear of radiation.
Re:Not about fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, except in extreme cases, it's not public opinion that kills nuclear power in the general case (developers generally can find at least *some* site that will let them build). It's finances. Nuclear power has always had a lot more support on K-Street than Wall Street. If nuclear power is to have a future, they need to stop having new construction projects run behind schedule and over budget.
Re: (Score:3)
Congress can fix that though. They can pass a law saying no court can take a case over the location or operations of a nuclear power plant if it is within NRC compliance which is to be determined by the NRC.
Re: Not about fear (Score:5, Informative)
[Citation needed]
I see this trope often, but whenever I look into specific plants that are behind schedule and over budget, NIMBY lawsuits are almost never part of the reason.
For example, one of the most (almost comically) behind schedule / overbudget reactors being is Olkiluoto Unit 3, which is a decade behind schedule and still not expected to be finished for years. The reasons for the delays are numerous - and not one of them is due to NIMBY lawsuits. The concrete for the foundation was bad. The forgings were wrong and had to be recast. The welders for the containment structure were given incorrect instructions. There were compensation disputes. Automation planning was behind schedule.
The head of their nuclear planning division's main excuse was that it's hard to deliver nuclear power plants on schedule because workers aren't used to the exacting standards required for them. But regardless of the reason, NIMBY lawsuits were not the reason. In fact, the only lawsuits involved were between the two construciton contractors, suing each other. By the time it's all said and done, the unit will likely be more expensive than the LHC and be one of the most expensive structures on Earth.
Nuclear reactors end up this way all too often. Reactor operators managed to convince enough investors that there would be a new "nuclear renaissance" because their new plants will produce plants cheaper that are more reliable. Their construction track records thusfar are scaring away most investors from followup.
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Hydroelectric, problem is there are few good untaped spots for it.
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And for every Megawatt of Hydro-electric capacity you have you can match it with a megawatt of wind/solar and it doesn't matter how intermittent the wind / solar is because you have the hydro as back-up.
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Geothermal. Hot water and electricity.
Re:Not about fear (Score:4, Insightful)
True, Fukushima has already cost far more than $100bn and if it happened in the US it would doubtless be pushed up much higher by the massive amount of legal action it would see.
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Your question is simplistic because it assumes equivalent amounts of "radiation" can be treated as the same thing. If we're talking about just exposure per se then I'm fine with occasional exposures totaling in the range 100 mSv/yr if it's relatively uniform over that year. Over the course of a day I'd be fine with 20 mSv or so, as long as it was a once-or-twice-a-year kind of thing.
If we're talking about inhalation/ingestion it's a whole different depends on the biochemistry of the source of radioactivi
Re:Better question (Score:5, Insightful)
You are mixing up risk with chance.
The chance to get hit by a truck into the rear of your car during 50 years might be 2%. ...
The risk you have is:
- neck injuries (with a chance of 80%?),
- total loss of the car (probably 50%?),
- death (probably 0.5%?)
- death/server injury of rear passengers (probably 50%?)
Living near a nuclear plant your chance during 50 years is that it goes boom, perhaps 0.00001%?
You risk:
- evacuation and loss of all your property (chance 100%)
- death or injury in the mass panic or evacuation (chance probably 5%?)
- contamination with server health issues (chance probably 50%?)
Even ingesting a small amount of material that is biologically 'sticky' is only a tiny risk adder
No it is not. The chance might be low. The risk if you "catch it" is extremely high, close to certain death. The only question is: do you care if you die due to cancer 50 years after such an incident caused by digesting/breathing radioactive material? Or the other question is: do you die before that because a truck hit you? Or do you die before that because you get lung cancer for no apparent reason?
Or: do you die to the same radiation exposure after 3 years already? As the time frame for cancer or if you get cancer at all, might look pretty random from the outside.
I suggest to read up what the lethal dose of e.g. plutonium is, and how it works.
In medicin they usually talk about a "50% death dose", which means: the amount of "poison" you have to give per kg weight of the subject to each subject that 50% of the subjects die.
The amount of plutonium to kill 50% of the test subjects is so incredible low, you won't believe it: go google.
What you do is wagering the chance, not the risk.
In simple words: ... the chance to lose and to win is the same. Only the payoff is higher if you win
You place 10 bucks on the number 13 in roulette: you risk 10 bucks. You have a chance of 1:37 to win 360 bucks and a chance of slightly higher than 35:37 to lose your money.
You place 1 million bucks on the number 13 instead: you risk 1 million bucks
In other words:
Both bets have exactly the same chance to win or lose.
The second bet has a much higher risk.
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No it is not.
That is how an insurance company may define it.
But perhaps the "full definition" convinces you: http://www.merriam-webster.com... [merriam-webster.com]
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Nuclear energy is perfectly safe and clean, as long as the plants are run correctly.
The problem is that many of these plants are run by managers who believe minor deviations are acceptable if it means more profit.
Re:Better question (Score:4, Interesting)
I am deeply concerned about global warming. Therefore I support some increase in nuclear energy production, at least in the medium term. I think that there are new modern reactor designs that should be built, ones where a meltdown is highly unlikely and where the reactor consumes most of its worst waste for energy production.
That said, the long term source of energy has to be solar. It is the one form of renewable energy that has practically no limit in terms of scalability. The area of solar panels that would meet all of America's energy needs is surprisingly small, and the cost of production is dropping quickly. Storage will not be an issue in the future, as battery tech gets better and less expensive. Even today's lithium battery tech is good enough for many transportation applications, and the tech will only continue to improve. Modern lithium cells are not environmentally harmful. There is a lot of lithium that is easy to extract in dried lake beds in places like South America. The cells will almost certainly be recycled, and not end up in landfills, for the simple reason that the chemical components will be valuable. To add to this, lithium will not be the only solution. There are likely other storage mechanisms that will be both cheaper and more reliable for bulk storage applications.
My background is in theoretical physics, and I have considered this for quite a while. I am convinced that solar energy is the ultimate solution to supply our modern technological civilization with all the energy it needs. I believe that in a couple of decades, gasoline engines will be on the road to becoming boutique fashion items, like Harley Davidson motorcycles. Internal combustion engines will be perceived as loud, stinky anachronisms. If you want to experience this today, drive a Tesla model S for a month. You'll never think of your ICE the same way again.
Re:Better question (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost all existing nuclear power plants consume Uranium-235. Once it is gone, it will be exponentially more difficult to manufacture Plutonium 239 from U-238, and U-233 from Thorium 232, than it is currently easy to make those other fissionable substances from vastly-more-common resources. If one is going to support fission power, then one must either support breeder reactors [wikipedia.org], or recognize that fission power for civilization will have a rather short lifespan, just like fossil-fuel power for civilization is having a short lifespan.
If one is going to support nuclear power for the long term, then my personal vote is that we need fusion reactors even more than we need fission reactors. Fusion reactors are expected to produce only a fraction of the radwaste that fission reactors produce, be less risky to operate, cannot be a good source of materials for making terror weapons, and have much-less-expensive fuel costs, for just four reasons why.
Re: Better question (Score:3, Insightful)
Jimmy Carter, chief f the fear mangers. He killed breeders and reprocessing by imperial decree.
catch-22 (Score:2)
Re: catch-22 (Score:2)
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Re: Yes, but (Score:2)
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First of all, many of the deaths and injuries are due to mining and transporting the coal, not just burning it.
Then too, you can't just make the pollution problem go away with some magical "cleaning". As of 2006, 125 million tons of coal combustion solid byproducts, including fly ash, were produced annually in the USA. If you use coal, you can't will that away into nonexistence. You HAVE to PUT it somewhere. You can disperse most of it into
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which level of fear and paranoia protection are gonna be needed to satisfy your definition of "safe" ?
Whatever it takes to make it impractical.
Re:Yes, but (Score:4, Insightful)
As safe as possible.
You realize there are roughly 100 nuclear reactors going in the US. And the majority of them have had not one major safety issue in their entire lifespan right?
And that newer reactor technologies are far simpler and have a default state of "off".
Adding the kind of safety precautions you require for current solid-fuel reactors to such devices is largely pointless.
And, believe it or not, physical security for such plants is usually not that expensive.
The expense in nuclear power comes from the hostile regulatory environment that's been created. And all the NIMBY legal challenges brought up for each and every reactor commissioned.
People need to stop thinking about nuclear reactors as bombs.
PIIMBY (Score:2)
Also yes. Fear and hysteria abound; serious risk does not. Rather than NIMBY, I'm all about PIIMBY. Put It In My Back Yard. And pay me accordingly. :)
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The fusion reactor we orbit has supported almost all life on Earth from the earliest times until now, and can do so for the indefinite future. (As long as Earth and Sun last in their present forms).
The problem is that our consumption of energy has grown bizarrely in a handful of years. The Sun gives us adequate heat, drinkable water, and food in many forms. It doesn't give us central heating at the flick of a switch, transport, or TV - yet. It's questionable how much energy we can practically collect from w
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Yup no viable commercial reactor exists to use current "waste" as a fuel source. Please actualy do 10 seconds of google foo before repeating the anti nuke mantra/boogy man. We have reactor designs that can use everything from mildly refined uranium ore to high level waste as feedstock.
If it's emitting serious amounts of radiation it's a viable fuel source.
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Re:We Get To Vote On It?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Internet advocates always seem to be pushing the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), but the Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor look like the best Generation IV reactor design to me, by far.
The chemistry problems associated with Molten Salt Reactors - especially the need to continuously reprocess the salt-fuel mixture on site - sound pretty hairy from an engineering perspective (speaking here of costs, not safety).
In contrast, a Lead-Cooled Fast Reactor is much more straightforward to design and maintain. It is a