Oil Addiction? Me? I Can Quit Anytime I Want.
Posted January 31st, 2006 by Howard TaylerSo… in the State of The Union Address, George W. Bush announced that the United States has an “oil addiction,” and that we need to do something about it.
I couldn’t agree more.
But I don’t think we should be wasting our time with solar, hydroelectric, wind, or “zero-emission” coal. All of those are messy, expensive, and ugly. I want nukes.
Interestingly enough, so does Iran. Whether or not they have a weapons program in mind, I don’t want to see them developing nuclear power while Americans sit here wringing our hands and boo-hooing over how terribly long the waste lasts. Wouldn’t we feel silly 20 years from now if we had to buy safe, clean nuclear technology from the same people we’re buying oil from today? THAT would be dumb.
But that’s where we’re headed unless we turn things around in a hurry. We haven’t been researching the stuff we need to — like how to take that waste that stays “hot” for thousands of years, and put it in a reactor that uses it to generate power… for thousands of years. That’s the solution to all the waste transport problems, folks — just keep using the stuff until it’s cold enough to eat. Sadly, we got scared of nukes too early in the game, and somebody banned researching the reprocessing of waste… THIRTY YEARS AGO.
That’s thirty years down the tubes. We’ve had plenty of oil-related crises since then. I hope that we’ve learned that lesson. It’s scarier to NOT research, develop, and exploit nuclear power.
If you want to put solar panels and wind turbines on rooftops as a stopgap measure, that’s fine. But don’t you DARE develop that placeholder crap at the expense of proper nuclear power. I WILL come over there, and I’ll bring friends. Don Quixote had nothing on me and my homeys when it comes to tilting at windmills.
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January 31st, 2006 at 11:55 pm
I would say that there’s not much time “wasted” in developing wind, hydro, and solar (particularly check out passive solar water heating, it’s great) power.
The development issues are entirely different. Nuclear scientists are highly specialized. It’s hard to get enough of them, even when you supply adequate funding… and the accessibility of most “alternate” forms of power on the small scale means that they can be developed to a useful form in backyards of most technically-minded individuals, given a sufficient exchange of information.
February 1st, 2006 at 5:25 am
Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with Thorium reactors? Everything I read describes them in glowing terms. Technically they’re U233 reactors, but they produce almost no weapons grade material, the half life is much shorter, thorium is more abundent and Australia has the most reserves (hey that works for me!) etc.
So what’s wrong with them. What’s the Bad Thing About Thorium Reactors? If India can develop one, why doesn’t one of us more technological nations do it?
Solar and wing are okay for small power plants, hydro is okay IF you can find the right place for a dam and IF there is enough water and you need to do a lot of construction. The Solar Tower project at Mildura (in the Outback, due to start 2008) will be 1000m high and cover almost 5sq. km, and it will still only generate 200MW.
A small nuke power plant will do that. Why not a Thorium one?
February 1st, 2006 at 6:46 am
Hear hear, Howard. Not understanding nuclear energy is far more dangerous than using it. Used “properly”, it’s clean, safe, and cheap – and when we banned research, all we did was create a situation where we couldn’t make it cleaner, safer, and cheaper.
(THIS, from a decidedly-non-republican)
February 1st, 2006 at 7:54 am
re: Solar — passive water-heating is indeed great. It should be a standard option for home building. It’ll cost you an extra $2500 to $10,000, and it has to be supplemented with a conventional water heater, but it’ll save lots of money.
re: Big solar farms — We already have these. They’re called plants, and I’d rather see big fields of those than big fields of shiny things.
re: hydro — Fond though I am of large recreational lakes like Lake Powell, the environmentalists have a great point: hydro completely destroys millions of acres of habitats. If you’re trying to replace canyon habitats with shoreline/lake habitats, that’s meddlesome in maybe-a-good-way, but for power generation a single nuke plant would be much easier on the enivronment
re: Wind — last I checked, the batteries in use in wind farms like Altamont Pass were loaded with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). Not a problem, until THEY start to leak (which they do). It’s a fairly toxic, high-maintenance solution.
re: Coal — Honestly, it’s about time we stopped sending tens of thousands of people miles underground to dig up chunks of stuff we can burn. And strip-mining isn’t the solution I’m suggesting either. Let’s dig up Uranium instead, because you don’t need as much (by several orders of magnitude), which means fewer men and women risking their lives underground and more clean power.
It’s true that fission power is a non-renewable resource, but if we start researching it now, and get back on that wagon, it’ll lead us to places where we can directly harness fusion, and then we’re enery-rich forever.
February 1st, 2006 at 8:55 am
Hear hear Howard! Nuclear reactors *are* far safer than the Environuts would have us believe, and *can be made* far safer then they are.
As I understand it, ‘pebble bed reactors’ (you could look it up) are the state of the art, and much safer than the older kinds as well.
Also many more of our Navy’s ships should be nuclear powered. Aside from the carriers and the bubbleheads (submarines) we aren’t doing that anymore, for political and “cost” reasons. Hello? How much do we pay for that bunker oil, diesel oil and/or jet fuel they’re burning instead?
I’m a strong supporter of personal-scale solar and hydro power. Personal windmills, perhaps, although I strongly oppose large-scale wind power on aesthetic and ecological reasons (even slow-turning wind turbines have the big, heavy blade+night-flying bird/bat = chop chop chop equation). But for The Grid™, nuclear is The Way To Go™.
Anti-nuclear greenies are reason 2,489,846 why environmentalists are giving conservationists like me a bad name…
February 1st, 2006 at 9:15 am
Full on liberal here, and I say … MORE NUKES!
The concerns about their efficiency, safety, and long term waste problems are based on politics and old wifes tales, NOT science.
The problem is people like to focus on the problems with nuclear power and neglect to look at any of the problems with the current energy generation technologies. Coal and oil use are slowly killing this world and while nukes have their share of problems they are 10000 times better than what we have now. Nuclear power has smaller fuel gathering impact, a MUCH smaller use impact, and the waste problems are manageable, and on par with the problems surrounding coal/oil power. Add to that that nuclear power plants are more friendly on the habit they exist in (wild or urban) than either hydro or solar which require too much space.
My 2 Cents
February 1st, 2006 at 9:44 am
I agree, more nukes. Now, how are we ever going to convince the media and the congresscritters? It was the media, and politically active phd’s pretending to be real scientists who soured the public on nuclear power. (The government itself and the some idiots in the power industry helped, but they alone wouldn’t have been enough.)
How do we convince those whose minds are already made up, regardless of the facts?
I hate to make the French seem more logical than us, but if I recall correctly, they have been getting aroud 40% of their electrical power from nukes for the last 25+ years!
February 1st, 2006 at 10:09 am
DAMN YOU EVIL LOBBIESTS! The oil industry is the main reason nukular power is so voodoo today.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:42 am
Hmm… Power grid extremism. One way or the highway. Just from what I’ve seen of advocates of -every- source of power on interviews and in thier writings, each one thinks thay’ve got the -one- way to do everything. Even the Solar, Hydro and Wind power camps are at each other’s throats. Ultimately that brings them in to conflict with others who hold their own “Energy Dogma”, and they spend all their time fighting about it rather than finding ways of making ALL of them practical so we can benefit from everything we can bring to bear on the problem.
Now I’ll agree that hydro, as we’ve seen it since the birth of electricity, is a dated way of doing things. However there’s been some research (still theoretical I think, but it’s been a while since I heard about this) done on placing a hydroelectric generators in ocean currents. It needs work obviously, but it could be an interesting develpment if they can get the thing going.
Solar power should not be shrugged off so lightly. I’m not suggesting that you can run our major power needs off it, but rather it’s something to add flexibility to the energy system. A hot day in much of the southern U.S. (And even up as far as Colorado) household photo-voltaic would help to cut the chronic brown- and black-outs that happen when everyone’s got their AC on. Winter the amounts would be lower sure, but it’s still more than the nothing you get without ‘em in the first place.
Solar fields and wind power are a matter of finding the right place to put them. Yeah solar fields take up a lot of space, but ther are places in the -world- where it’s not a big deal. Large sections of desert, which are acting like a solar field anyway, could be harnessed for power. Now the U.S. has limited desert areas sure, but there are places in the world we could *sell* it to with the proper research…
Wind: The chopping birds thing is an urban myth. The local wind farm is not littered with bird carcasses, nor do they have MIB out there in hazmat vehicles covering up avian massacres. Mirrored windows do more damage to the bird populations than wind turbines. The hazardous battery thing is almost the same argument as the argument against nuclear with the same solution: More Research! Where to put turbine farms is just like solar fields; it’s about finding the right place to put ‘em. Imagine if you will ocean-going oil rigs retooled as wind and ocean-current turbine platforms. Might as well put ‘em to use when we cut back on our need for petroleum.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for nuclear energy and using plutonium waste in a secondary reactor, but it’s going to be a long road to get that to happen and I’m not talking about the research. This nutbar Oppenhimer went and made a bomb with Einstein’s theory, then this place in Russia maintained with Soviet bureaucracy and vodka went -Foom- and spread radioactive waste across eastern europe and much of the asian continent. (I’m not counting Three Mile Island as that was more scare than reality.) So people are understandibly concerned, which of course leads to the bane of any necessary project, the dreaded “NIMBYism”. Research in advancing Nuclear technology is a necessary thing, but what is even more necesary is to correct the public perception about nuclear power and how it is used around the world safely and efficiently, which is going to take longer than the research…
…and we need change now.
Another camp that needs a serious smacking about he head is the “Efficiency” camp. Use the power we are comsuming better, make more efficient motors and lightbulbs, use technologies that transmit power better. Usually when I hear these nutjobs it’s all about “Well If we’re more efficient we don’t need new power generation sources.”
Then I go and grab by “ClueHammer™” and… *CLOBBER*
We need *ALL* of it. The more power we can generate through *ALL* of these technologies the more power we have to do all kinds of things, like power MagLev Bullet Trains everywhere, or help build five-mile tall urban arcologies (to stop the expansion of urban sprawl I see creeping across the landscape outside my window) or power the earth-to-orbit elevator that will let me take my own personal shuttle to my summer-house on the Moon, and vacations to Mars.
I know there’s limited research funds, that’s a fact of economics. Unfortunately all this advocacy for the “One right answer” is siphoning funds away from research and in to congressional lobbying, press releases, PR Campaigns… Everything but More Research! I don’t know about you all but I’d rather funds went in to science labs than in to politicial pockets.
At least that’s my own $0.02, with interest.
“Okay Humanity, turn in your papers on ‘How God Made Creation’. What do you mean the Dogma ate your homework?!?!” – God, 10 minutes after Judgement Day.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:57 am
You guys are overlooking one thing. Not In My Back Yard Syndrome. Those big cooling towers are eyesores, and even though we can safely store the wastes with no leakage, some people are just to afraid. The waste is the only real danger from nuclear power (besides heat pollution, but that is not hard to prevent, or limited to nuclear plants). The future of energy is in a cocktail: Solar here, wind here, geothermal there, tidal power here, maybe some biomass, fission, garbage-to-energy, the great wet-dream: laser fusion. When possible, the best thing to do is use less energy. Say, design a room to have the least number of light fixtures possible.
As for why more navy ships do not have nuclear reactors, size. It’s not practical to fit a destroyer with a nuclear reactor because they are two small to house the reactor, the technicians, and all the other stuff a destroyer needs to meet it’s mission profile. The same with cruisers and other classes of naval vessels.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:07 am
I’m a fan of satellite-based solar generation, but mostly to provide an economic incentive for near-earth colony development. The problem is, it’s almost impossible to convince anyone that you can build a massive solar plant in space without lifting all the parts from the surface, by mining the biggest parts from the moon or NEOs. The amount of space we’d need for ground-side rectennas is about 1/8th what we’d need for pv cells, and we could build them over farmland or on floating rigs in equatorial oceans, using the generated power to electrolyse hydrogen from the ocean as fuel. I know this is all pie-in-the-sky, but fusion plants aren’t the energy magic bullet people seem to think they are.
No matter what solution we come up with, if the whole world used power per capita like we did, we’d cook. I’d like to see a redesign of the way we live and organize ourselves to reduce the amount of energy we need, thus the amount we generate. For instance, put a whole town under a single vaulted roof, and climate control that volume, and you’ll use less energy than individually heating each house and business independently. The single system could use a power source too big for a home furnace, like waste-heat from the nearby nuke plant in double-walled insulated pipes. Again, a bit out there, and not near-term.
The power grid extremism is reminds me of the kind of vicious arguments that go on in space exploration/settlement circles, between the “mars camp” and the “orbitals camp”. Both sides think that if the other gets any credibility, then any limited funding they might have had would go to their opponents instead of their project. It’s all about the funding, when you get right down to it.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:27 am
Yes! Absolutely correct. Caution is certainly advisable when dealing with nuclear power but the public perception is rather one of fear, and even safe uses are seen as inordinately dangerous.
Having said that, I do think in the long run that solar power is going to become important for wide-scale usage, but only after some new technical developments, either workable solar power satellites or nanotechnology. (I like the latter the best: make tiny cells and put ‘em everywhere. Pave the roads with them and it doesn’t matter if the efficiency is low, because you get such a massive surface area – and the distribution network comes free.) After all, solar is the only energy source that’s guaranteed to work over geological timescales with no fuel input; the bill is pre-paid for five billion years. It’s preposterous that we should have an energy crisis – in astronomical terms we literally live inside a thousand billion trillion ton fusion reactor, for goodness sakes.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:28 am
Howard, I have one line to add to your short but very astute rant:
“Amen. Nuff said.”
February 1st, 2006 at 11:30 am
Howard – The problem with reprocessing nuclear fuel is that *IT* is messy, and dangerous, and easily weaponized (is that a word?). Plus, the products of that process are not only radioactively ‘hot’ but also highly toxic.
Some sites, such as http://www.argee.net/DefenseWatch/Nuclear%20Waste%20and%20Breeder%20Reactors.htm argue that the halflife is ’short’ enough (only a few decades) that the ‘hot’ part is easy to handle. This is IMO only true in so far as it is easier to handle than non-breeder reactor byproducts which have half-lives in the thousands of years.
The aforementioned link also states that the output of breeder reactors cannot effectively be made into bombs without a highly unlikely degree of investment. If you’re talking nuclear explosives, they’re right – but the bigger threat is radioactive ‘dirty’ bombs. (as per Athis link – among MANY other links)
*shrug* Do breeder reactors generate more fuel than they use? Kinda sorta, yes. IMO they also generate more headaches than they solve.
-John
(PS – plants as solar power? Yes- but how do you use these plants to do things – feed horses?)
February 1st, 2006 at 11:31 am
I agree with the “Not on my Doorstep” comment – the doorstep in this particular instance being the entire planet! The big problem I have with nukes is that “One slip can ruin your day”. The slip in question could be a bomb, an earthquake, human error – a nuclear plant still has the capacity for effectively destroying (for our purposes) large chunks of the planet.
And lets not forget who will be running these things. The same people that manufactured an energy crisis in California so they could gouge people with rate hikes. The same people that claimed the 1960’s New York blackout “Could never happen again” (then blamed it on the Canadians when it did).
Yup, current electricity production is slowly poisoning the planet. But Nuclear is non-renewable too. When would we run out? I have no idea, but the timeframe will probably be calculated by the same people that said back in the 70’s that we had 40 years of oil supply left. Strangely enough, we _still_ have 40 years of oil supplys left.
Bottom line is, we’ve got all of our eggs in one basket at the moment. But its a big Univers, and even with mnkinds bility to pollute and destroy, its going to take one _hell_ of a long time for us to screw up the whole thing. Get me the hell off this rock!
Chris.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:01 pm
The problem is that even at current rates of use, there is only enough uranium to last a few hundred years: that stuff is really scarce this close to the earth’s surface, and most of it is down in the inner core keeping us warm and moving the tectonic plates.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but we already depleted _our_
easiest-to-get-at sources of uranium just by building a nuclear arsenal: we’ll have to import it at some point, and we don’t want to have to rely on goods coming out of a place as unstable as Africa.
One other problem: the long-term reactors themselves will eventually get hot after a few years, and what are you going to do with _them_? I guess you could always just throw up another layer of concrete and lead…
February 1st, 2006 at 12:01 pm
John: the problems you’re citing are problems we need to research and fix. And we CAN fix them. NOT studying it is the problem now. If we don’t someone else will, and then we’ll be dependent on their good will for clean nukes in 20 years.
Chris: We’ve HAD slips, and they’ve not come CLOSE to ruining the entire doorstep of which you speak. Large chunks? You’ve been reading the fear-mongering literature from the seventies. Even Chernobyl didn’t come anywhere near that, and those folks did everything wrong for a decade, as if they were TRYING to create a nuclear catastrophe.
That kind of emotional claptrap is the reason we’re in this bind in the first place. If you want to leave the planet, FINE. GO ALREADY. But good luck finding your way off of it without the help of nuclear power. You won’t get very far.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Bruce: Fission power is a stepping stone to fusion power. We need nuclear research and waste-reclamation plants NOW, and ongoing research so that when we run out of easy-to-access uranium nobody notices because we’ve been fusing easy-to-access hydrogen for 100 years or more.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Why is it that everyone is more concerned with economic and political limitations when it comes to energy generation?
I find that many people are forgetting about one basic scientific law: The Law of Conservation.
Solar, wind and hydroelectric power are all part of the ecology of the world. Surely if we began using these types of power on a larger scale, it would have an effect on the weather conditions in the world.
For comparison, a hurricane can put out around 1.5 x 10^12 Watts of kinetic energy (http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html), roughly half the world’s electricity usage. Maybe that’ll be a good thing since we’ve taken the bite out of the weather system but how can we comphrehend the effect such a massive application of wind power generation might have on the regional weather?
The way I see it, the difference between fossil fuel and “renewable” power is that we don’t compete with nature for fossil fuels.
Oh, incidentally, I’d also like to point out that we’re highly unlikely to find oil and coal on other planets in the system (since they’re formed largely by organic mass).
February 1st, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Um..
We HAVE nuclear powered destroyers, or so I was told by a guy that spent quite a few years in the navy. In fact, I was told that most of the larger ships are nuclear now.
NIMBY does NOT apply in this case. Nuclear power plants to NOT need to be in anyone’s back yard – unless they build there after the plant is in place. You can put a nuclear power plant 100 miles from the closest major city, and the power can still be transmitted through either high voltage DC or AC lines (DC apparently works well over extreme distances, AC over middle distances, DC over very very short distances.)
Cooling towers. WHAT?? Have you looked at a _normal_ power plant lately? They have cooling towers as well, they just look like smokestacks. Drive by the one north of Houston on a cold morning, and it’s pouring out gigantic billowing clouds hundreds of feet into the air. The _right_ thing to do with that is figure out what your process is. Currently, our most efficient form of electrical generation is to use a material that generates heat (through radiation or combustion) to boil water into steam, which rushes through a turbine, turning a generator. I’m using ‘efficient’ in terms of “most power for time/expense”. Solar panels are ‘efficient’ in that they don’t have any byproducts, but they are expensive to make, and not very durable. (they break. I’ve done it).
Now, let’s look at that. We have power generation. Main waste product – heat. We also need vehicles on the road. Most efficient way to power an automobile? Internal combustion. What can we burn for an internal combustion engine? It has to be liquid, so it can be metered correctly. Oil, Diesel, Kerosene, Gasoline, Alcohol… alcohol. Gee. What does that take to make? Heat, plant material, water, and bacteria (yeast).
Okay, we now have a process that takes water, heats it up, turns it into steam, and creates power, along with a lot of waste heat. We also have a process that needs heat, and creates a substance that can be burned cleanly to produce power.
If you have _enough_ heat, you can turn just anything organic into alcohol (or other substances, but that’s Thermal Depolymerization, and Changing World Technologies, who owns the patents, isn’t talking. (apparently there’s also been some dispute over odors with the town of Carthage – frankly, I think it’s _stupid_. Any sewage treatment facility or waste processing plant produces odors. They have a ConAgra plant a few hundred yards away, what do they expect? Jackasses. All of them).
For that matter, combine all three things together. Boil the water with nukes, pass the waste heat steam that needs to be cooled through the alcohol plant (it’s secondary water, that’s non radioactive. The primary cooling systems are closed). Take the alcohol from the plant and ship it out as fuel, then pass the waste from the alcohol plant into a thermal depolymerization stage. End result is a light oil suitable for heating, alcohol suitable either as a fuel additive or fuel itself, and electricity for power. Your biggest cost – heating everything – is a byproduct of the power generation, which has to happen anyway. One of the biggest complaints about the TDP process is the cost of the original material – I don’t know about you, but we PAY to have our trash hauled off, and it’s dumped into a landfill. I don’t see why they should pay for it a second time. Maybe Changing World Technologies should simply work a deal with Waste Management or BFI, and take the place of most of the trash dumps.
So what if the barrel of oil that it produces costs $80? What was the cost of having the rest of that crap around? Including medical waste, diseased animals, and similar crap that you don’t want around, burning can be just as bad as anything else, and burying it just doesn’t seem to work right. (and stinks as well). Frankly, pay them for disposing of the stuff, and let them sell the oil 20% more than standard crude (it’s already refined, so it doesn’t need the bulk of the cracking plants.)
It’s a simplistic solution, yes, and implimenting it would be a bit complicated. No more so than just building one nuclear power plant.
Sometimes the answers ARE simple, and people just want to keep playing stupid games.
Put it in MY back yard, please?
BW
February 1st, 2006 at 12:22 pm
Additional notation.
The issue with depleting our uranium supplies doesn’t really apply, thankyouverymuch. We’ve already talked about the half life of radioactive materials. It frequently goes into the thousands of years, not a few hundred.
Virtually all “exhausted” materials can be reused in a different type of reactor. Breeder reactors, in fact, produce their own fuel, thus the name. People are just scared to death of anything nuclear powered. I keep hearing “Chernobyl”, and people don’t realize that it wasn’t a nuclear power plant. It was a brick warehouse. For that matter, the radiation levels around it aren’t even that high, compared to background radiation. _I_ wouldn’t want to live there right now, but the plants don’t seem to be having any issues, and in a few more years, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between there and 50 miles away. (other than the immediate location, where the materials were irradiated enough that they are performing secondary radiation)
What happens in case of an earthquake? Um.. The plant shuts down, the reactors go into SCRAM, and you wait? Or you put it into some place like East Texas, where the fault lines are under hundreds of feet of sand and clay, not rock?
The reactor cores are not just big rooms that can crack open to spew hot death across the landscape. They are _cores_. Independant monstrosities with extreme reinforcing that are more likely to _bounce_ than crack. Do some reading on the big plants.
Myth that oil companies don’t want nuclear power. Oil companies don’t _care_. In fact, many of them would be more than happy to not have to deal with the headaches from that kind of regulation. Gasoline too, with all the additives they’re forced to buy from competitors. Their steadiest profit margins are in plastics, which is an almost insatiable industry in itself. The Middle East? They don’t care either. People will still buy their oil. In fact, if we stopped buying their oil, they’d scarcely notice, since Japan, China, and Great Britain will still be buying. Plus the plastics industry will still need outside oil, for a long time. (I don’t know that TDP will produce molecules suitable for polyacrylics)
BW
February 1st, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Bruce, your information is actually DIS-information spread by fear-mongers. The amount of Uranium currently dug up will run the world at current demand for about 300 years. Also, the amount currently dug up is about 5% of accessible Uranium. That is also ignoring the other reactional materials.
Howard and many others are right, research is needed in many areas.
BTW, biodiesel production is a much more efficent use of land than solar farms except in areas that are arid. Biodiesel production creates the following “byproducts”: Alchohol, sugar, and silage(what we feed to livestock currently.) All of these things have a great demand already. I personally feel biodiesel is a good supplement to current fuel-oil supplies.
February 1st, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Large sections of desert, which are acting like a solar field anyway, could be harnessed for power…
No actually they can’t. You see power can only be tranmitted over limited distances. Otherwise you start getting serious transmission losses. This was one of Californias big problems when they poorly deregulated. The Californian utilities went belly up because of politics and then the state couldn’t get in enough power from outside to support their needs because it all got burned in transit. Until we get practical superconductor technology, you aren’t going to see a photovoltaic Sahara serving the world’s electrical needs.
I agree that the solar power solution is not to make large plants in what could better be used for farm land. It is better to adopt a distributed paradigm of household solar.
The problem is that even at current rates of use, there is only enough uranium to last a few hundred years.
Not exactly. The amount of uranium available is highly dependent on the grade required. If you need high grade enriched fuel, then yes we might only have a hundred years. However most new reactors can run on lower grade fuel now. And that isn’t even discussing breeder reactors that can reuse their waste.
Interestingly enough, so does Iran. Whether or not they have a weapons program in mind…
They do. Not only do they say they do, but Iran has some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the world. If they just needed to meet their power needs, they have far cheaper solutions than nuclear research. Also, reactors set up to create weapons grade material don’t actually make much power. Which is why the NorKorComs are full of crap too.
February 1st, 2006 at 1:01 pm
I see a lot of preaching to the choir here. For what it’s worth, I agree with the people who say “GIVE ME MORE OF EVERYTHING”.
More efficient appliances, more efficient lightbulbs (and more LIGHT for that matter, less fixtures per room? are you NUTS? that just leads to more Seasonal Affective Disorder and eyestrain), more efficient transport, but most especially more and more diverse forms of energy production/capture! Never again should we be at the mercy of just one fuel source!
As I stated in a comment on an earlier blog and and was mentioned above: if it’s HAZARDOUS nuclear waste, find me some way to use it! That’s not waste, that’s just slightly lower grade fuel!
Till we get our nuclear reactors up and running, give me everything that anybody can come up with. Hmm…children + stationary bicycles + generators = lots of electricity + healthier kids! Yes! I think we’ve hit on something….Howard, you’ve got kids, wanna do a pilot study?
Oh, and as for the navel vessels, couldn’t a pebble bed reactor could be made small enough for a medium-sized naval vessel that wouldn’t have that many personnel requirements?
February 1st, 2006 at 2:10 pm
I’m firmly in the “GIVE ME MORE OF EVERYTHING” camp too.
There are a lot off rooftops that should be solarized (perhaps with solar panels that double as shingles – I know there is at least one company working on that). At least in most of the US, there are many (and some huge) parking lots that could be covered with solar-roofed carports which would generate electricity at the same time as they are giving the people who park there the benefit of covered parking. BTW why doesn’t my car have a small solar panel in the roof to run a cooling fan on hot days?
There are a variety of windmill types, some of which are much less obtrusive than the big tower/prop combos that are the main installation now.
Hydro is not the global answer, but should be used where it makes sense. It doesn’t have to dam the river but just gulp part of the flow into nearly horizontal pipes for a ways and then do a big drop later.
Fission has got to be a big part of power production for the next 100 years or so (or at least for a few decades after fusion gets fully functional).
Fusion needs continuing study and lots of effort.
Conservation and energy efficiency have a lot of affect and effect ahead of them if we will put in the effort. Some of the lights in my house are compact flourecents, but not all. I’d be interested in using some LED lights too when they are available at reasonable prices (say – no more than compact flourecents now). Again, a variety of efforts and research will bring significant dividends.
Waste stream reprocessing is important for all sorts of things. I may not have a good use for a batch of used uranium or chicken bits, but this guy down the road might need them…
Research should be working to find the ways and places each energy generation mode is best and safest, and then the best and safest ways should be used. Put the nuclear plant in Bookworm’s back yard, put photovoltaic shingles on my roof, put a solar power satellite in orbit, etc.
February 1st, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Just a quick comment:
to Jeff the Baptist, I wasn’t thinking of getting my power in Colorado from the Sahara, but rather that with research in to efficient photovoltaic systems, or even solar heated water turbines (the giant reflective fields, with mirrors pointed all at one tower) we could start selling these things to say… The oil producing nations of the middle east. Hey, turnabout is fair play.
February 1st, 2006 at 3:57 pm
This isa little off topic, but…
What about personal biodiesel generators? I am in the middle of a project to make a diesel car run on biodiesel, and a friend of mine recently built a biodiesel generator for his home. It really isn’t that hard, or that expensive, to do.
Biodiesel is incredibly sustainable. Most of the fuel you need to run a biodiesel engine comes from waste products of which restaurants usually need to PAY for desposal. (okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, but not as much as you’d think). It would be much more difficult to obtain on a larger scale, so it can’t be implemented nationally or anything, but if you’re scientific-minded, you should seriously consider taking advantage of it. There is a plethora of literature out there telling you how to do it.
—
Nuclear power may be a good temporary solution to the larger problem, but while it is safer than everybody thinks it is, it is NOT sustainable. We, as a power-sucking nation, really need to begin moving towards sustainable energy sources. This isn’t about nuclear power being evil, this is about finding resources that we can renew without permanently taking things out of the landscape. Oil is the worst, naturally, for obvious reasons. But nuclear energy isn’t sustainable either, and while you can keep on producing lots of energy for a long time, it does produce waste. And the waste is a lot more permanent than oil fumes. Nuclear energy also – slowly but surely – removes water from Earth’s cycle by permanently tainting it. Sure, in small amounts, so it isn’t an issue now, but I don’t think it should be ignored either.
I’m not against nuclear energy as a temporary solution, but the more research into solar, wind, and other sustainable energy sources, the better off we’ll be in the long run.
February 1st, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Put me firmly in the “more of everything” camp, to.
But.
Less big.
Despite the issues of grid partitioning, one of the real keys is more, smaller, plants of diverse types. So, yes, build some small pebble-bed reactors (you can get them down to 1-2MW), but also add some high-efficiency solar systems to people’s roofs, and back it all up with with some strategicly placed wind-farms, and tidal floats. And a handful of small turbine generators – because, despite everything else, they are the most flexible for peak load management.
At the same time, reduce your requirements – LED house lighting is now practical and affordable, we pay AUD5000 for top-line solar hot water systems – and they last at least 4 times longer than gas or electric systems, use better building designs to reduce airconditioning loads, and all the rest.
As for fuel re-use, yes – if it is not hot enough to create steam, use it to run a convection system, and if it is too poor for that, feed a thermocouple. Then take what remains, and see what neat isotopes you can extract for other purposes.
Last point, though. Fission plants are NOT a step towards fusion. The whole process is completely different. Fission is only a step towards fusion bombs because it’s an easy way to get the compression levels to force pressure-only fusion. Not real practical for a power-plant.
February 1st, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Bookworm: We HAD nuclear powered cruisers, we decommissioned them back in the 90’s. The biggest advantage gas turbine propulsion has is speed. It takes hours to bring a nuke plant from “cold iron” to operating. A modern destroyer takes about as long to start up as a jet aircraft.
There has been research into fuel reprocessing, the newest versions don’t separate the plutonium out of the fuel stream, so it’s harder to weaponize. The result is all the stuff that has half-lives in the thousands of years gets sent back through the fission process again. The only waste we have to deal with has half-lives of decades and it’s trivial to isolate that, worst case treat it like Jimmy Hoffa and bury it under a few feet of concrete.
Dirty bombs are vastly over-hyped. If you took an entire spent core, ground it into dust, and evenly distributed it in a hemisphere, you could bring an area of 1 city block up to the NRC airborne exposure limit. Not to a dangerous level, but the level that the government has said can be withstood for 40 hours a week with no ill effects.
The biggest problem with solar and wind power is that they aren’t “on demand”. A cloud or drop in wind speed will cause portions of the grid to go dark unless a standby generator is brought online. That standby generator most likely will have to be kept warm by a constant burning of fuel.
Another thing to bear in mind is the scale of the problem. At any given time the US is using about 4 TERAwatts. You need 40 gigawatts of production to even make 1%.
February 1st, 2006 at 6:26 pm
“Okay Humanity, turn in your papers on ‘How God Made Creation’. What do you mean the Dogma ate your homework?!?!” – God, 10 minutes after Judgement Day.
Classic. As for the issue at hand, power is not the only concern. Plastic is a huge consumer of oil. We need to quickly develop technologies that will allow us to have our toys without having to make them from oil. Research into nanotech and biotech might yield ways to ‘grow’ good stuff out of raw materials and (more importantly) recycle all of it cheaply. It has its dangers (grey goo, anyone?) and there’s loads of research yet to be done, but it’s a concern worth addressing.
February 1st, 2006 at 9:04 pm
Howard Taylor wrote:
“Chris: We’ve HAD slips, and they’ve not come CLOSE to ruining the entire doorstep of which you speak.”
Heh heh, that alright then! :-> But imagine if the World Trade Center had a little nuclear power plant tucked away in its basement – I can almost see the glow from here…
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have an irrational fear of nuclear power plants – its just that there *are* alternatives which are safer and cleaner, and I would rather see more research done towards them (and more effort put into the commercialisation of them) than into nuclear. Biodiesel has already been mentioned here (I am sorry to admit that I went back to regular diesel after a return-line problem in my pickup), ethanol is another. A move to nuclear really is not going to take us anywhere that an oil-based economy doesn’t already have us…
it may buy some time, but the end results are no better.
“you want to leave the planet, FINE. GO ALREADY. But good luck finding your way off of it without the help of nuclear power. You won’t get very far. ”
Oh, using nuclear power as I’m *leaving* is fine! ;^> (looks over shoulder at bright glow in rear-view mirror of spaceship) “So long, suckers, I’m outttttta here!”
February 1st, 2006 at 9:24 pm
KenH, you dinged Bruce, but I’m afraid you’re a bit mistaken.
There is enough uranium known to be available to keep current NUKE PRODUCTION rates for the next 300 years. Nukes, however, only produce a fraction of our energy needs. Ramp up for that and the available material goes way down – simple division. HOWEVER, as noted (sorry, didn’t write who noted) we can refurbish the material. Counter-however, the refurbishment has caveats.
The biggest caveat is an up front option. Breeder reactors are significantly more effective as what they produce can then be used and reused several times. Our current system tends to leave waste that’s extremely difficult to re-enrich. Unfortunately, breeder reactors breed bomb-grade materials — it should be intuitively obvious but I’ve discovered folk don’t put two and two together often enough. If it’s more “energetic” it’s more useful for high-energy applications. Like bombs. Take a moment and count coal powerplants in the US. Now take those and replace every five with a nuke plant (a semi-random ratio based on dimly remembered discussions). Now put on your security hat and think of protecting that many bomb-material sites. Expensive? Prone to bean-cutting flaws? Yep. Wanna risk it? welll – we may have to.
I’m pro-nuke, but I’m also of the opinion that it’ll be solely a stop-gap. That in no more than a couple of generations – and more likely just one – nukes will also be falling short. I believe (like yet another poster whos name I’ve forgotten) that we’ll probably end up with solar accumulators beaming power to collection points. Yes, there are problems. OTOH, the potential from such is a lot higher in both magnitude and duration than pretty much every other solution offered.
But then, I’m an opinionated non-expert. I might be wrong.
February 1st, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Wind is actually pretty safe and efficient these days, and is only getting safer and more efficient. As for long-term effects… There won’t be any. Wind power REMOVES energy from the atmosphere, converting it into stored electrical power. Yes, the energy does eventually wind up getting released back into the atmosphere, but the net effect on weather patterns of wind generators is minor and, if anything, it makes weather patterns more regular. Batteries are, again, improving with research, as are ways to safely dispose of them. There’s NO reason NOT to use wind power.
Solar is getting cleaner, but terrestrial solar plants will never be a high-volume solution. They can form part of a proper solution, however, generating power locally for areas that get a lot of sun. Orbital solar is viable, but requires significant infrastructure investments.
Normal hydro plants are a bad idea. Tidal energy plants can be useful, but again, aren’t useful everywhere.
Nuclear fission is an excellent short-term solution (next couple of centuries), but there’s still the waste issue. It can be dealt with, but it has to be considered. Nuclear fusion is best left out of the discussion – it’s unclear when it will be viable, which means we have to hope it will be but assume it won’t be any time soon.
February 1st, 2006 at 9:41 pm
The problem with “more of everything” is that electricity doesn’t store well and you end up with incompatible infrastructure. You pull into a filling station and want E85 but all they have is biodiesel. Oops.
It would be much better to have a flexible “middleware” that everything could be transformed to and all the smorgasbord of energy production types could live happily with one downstream infrastructure. The only candidate for that is hydrogen.
Do you have problems with wind generation fluctuation? Eliminate the spikes by storing excess power as hydrogen and feeding it back in the grid when there is no wind. Ditto for solar on cloudy days and at night.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Some quick mentions.
1) security concerns over breeder reactors. Not as much of an issue, considering how the stuff is stored and used. The only real “risk” timeframe is during installation of fuel and removal of waste. Believe me, you crack a core without following exact procedures, and EVERY alarm for miles is going to go off. It also takes specialized training and equipment – far more than the terrorists that hijacked planes for 9/11 had. It _would_ get noticed. (Heck, if someone tried to just wander out with some plutonium in his pants, a Girl Scout with two coat hangers in her hands would be yelling “RADIATION!”. And he’d die before he got out the door)
2) biodiesel. Fine and dandy, but as someone pointed out, it’s incompatible with non-biodiesel systems. Alcohol can be processed in a normal gasoline engine with very minor adjustments. Our computer controlled cars can make that adjustment, as long as the factories take it into account. I used to fill my car up with gasohol, because I got an extra 10-15% mileage boost.
3) Coal plants. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this, but most coal plant waste output is radioactive.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
We’re much better off with nuclear power plants than coal fired plants, if you’re worried about radiation.
4) Long distance power transmission. HVDC works over extremely long distances with less power loss than AC, without superconductive equipment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#HVDC
5) Using hydrogen as a ‘middleware’ solution isn’t a real solution. You could use excess power production to create hydrogen, yes, but then you’d have to feed the hydrogen into a standard steam driven generation plant in order to get anything out of it.
6) Irradiating water. Seawater is already radioactive. The “radiation” increase in the water used in a power plant is minimal, since that water is generally kept in a closed system. The cooling towers and ponds are a secondary transfer step.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Okay, I saw this and just had to comment.
I’ll start by saying that I am pro-nuclear.
Here’s a statistic for you; out of 16,770 (as of November 2004) electrical generator units in the US, 104 were nuclear (or 103; i’ve seen conflicting numbers, but my point stands). Those 104 plants, less than1% of the total number of plants, carry 10.3% of the nation’s electrical generation capacity and 19.9% of the nations ACTUAL electical generation.
In addition, one concern that people keep bringing up is fuel. One set of fuel rods has a life expectancy of 20 years in a reactor vessel. The nuclear weaponry of the various countries ALONE would, dismantled, provide enough fissionable material (nuclear fuel is largely nonfissionables) for several hundred years.
Then there’s waste. The big kahuna of nuclear boogeymen. First, let me say this; radioactive materials are either long lived with minor radiation, higly radoactive with short lifespans, or moderate in both respects. The materials which are hazardous to warrant attention are certain isotopes of Cesium and Strontium (I don’t remember the numbers. Sue me.). These isotopes are…well, whaddaya know. They’re used in medical equipment, namely X-ray machines and whatever they call the machine they use for radiation therapy. They are also relatively simple to reclaim. You do the math, folks.
Besides which, other byproducts can be refined into fissionables – can you say “self-renewing resource?”
Then there’s a relatively newly developed fear; the threat of terrorism. The first thing you have to remember is that nuclear plants – in the US, at least – are protected by containment domes; they keep any radioactive mishaps in, and other crap out. Now, granted, they aren’t designed to take a jet-liner head-on, but gimme a break. They were designed and built twenty years ago. Or more. And they ARE designed to withstand considerable pressure from both inside and out. Besides, other, UN-hardened plants, such as coal or oil plants, would make easier targets, more impressive fireballs, just as much property damage (if not more), and would still have a chance to drag down the power grid. If I were a terrorist, I know which target I’d go after.
Now we’re getting to alternatives.
First on the chopping block is wind. Wind power is horribly inefficient, resource wise. A “wind farm” takes up large amounts of of (flat) land for a small output, and in addition, needs high winds for any kind of useful energy production. Plus, each turbine is horribly maintenance-intensive, and a wind farm has upwards of a hundred turbines.
Next is Solar. Well, it depends on the weather. In a desert, say, it’s probably fairly effective. During the day, of course; at night, there’s no freakin’ sun. But you damn well better have a good backup generator and/or some bigass batteries, for those cloudy days, when your demand outstrips the plant.
Then there’s hydro. Hydro isn’t all that bad; of course, there is that minor problem of there not being many places to put it. It’s almost as bad as Geothermal in that respect. And it can play merry hell on an ecosystem, but that’s another story.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:28 pm
There’s a company in Taos that makes “bio-diesel” and sells it for about 2 dollars a gallon. It’s small-scale, or so I hear. The ChemE department at my school is also working on creating a larger-scale process for turning waste cooking oil (Lard, Vegetable Oil) into something you can put in your car. They can already do it in a lab.
You should also try looking up “clean-coal” as well. While it still does emit the same amount of carbon-dioxide as normal plants do, they take out all of that nasty stuff (or rather, most) like sulfur and mercury that are very polluting to the environment. It may just be that niche that we get into while we develop something more technologically advanced.
Something that scares me: wind-power. Did anyone ever do the thermodynamics with it? Whatever energy you turn into electricity, you’re pulling OUT of the environment. The effect on our weather patterns that could create might be alarming on the “Day After Tomorrow” scale. Case in point: wave generators off of hawaii reduced wave heights by several meters.
There’s just SO incredibly many options out there for generating energy. They all have their pros and cons, but I think by the time oil runs out, we’ll be using alot more variety. We just need cars that will run off that energy (Transportation amounts to roughly 70% of the oil used in the US today). That’s where the real energy need is.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:29 pm
I had HOPED to wait until we got an even halfway-honest administration before I brought this up publically (call me paranoid if you like), but I guess that will most likely never happen now with Alito. Besides, maybe Iran and Europe will catch the meme and start turning out free energy ;)
Anyways, what I have come up with is a concept for completely clean centuries-long nuclear energy production that requires very little/no infrastructure investment in the area of refining radioactive metals.
Step 1: Get a radioactive metal sphere about 1/4th inch in diameter, of LOW-GRADE energy output. Nuclear reactor waste would be an ideal source of this.
Factlet: Common radioactive metals produce most of their energy in the form of radio waves (hence the name), and only some of their energy in the form of neutron radiation. Neutrons are a notoriously innert particle that has very little harm on living beings even at reactor-level output, it is the HEAT and RADIATED ENERGY that harms you. (admittedly the neutrons help by causing more atoms in the metal to split and dischrge more energy, hence using a small amount)
Step 2: Construct a 1-ft diameter sphere made from layers of materials with varying EM-reflection frequencies. On the inside of this sphere place six rods that extend towards the center, to cup and hold the radioactive pellet.
Step 3: Line the inside of the sphere with the RF core of RFIDs, each in parrallel with a pair of electrical lines that lead out of the sphere through a slanted grove. The small amounts of voltage produced by each RF unit (picovolts) accumulates in the line to a usable voltage byt he time the current leaves the system.
Factlet: While RFIDs use a specific set of pickup/return frequencies, it is actually EASIER to make the RF pick-up component that generates power from a wide chunk of the radio frequency.
Result: The system produces a constant output of DC voltage with virtually no radioactive output from the system as a whole, and nothing but neutrons and randomized ehat will escape so long as the output energy is utilized. Even if it is not utilized, only small amounts of radiowave energy will escape while most of the rest of the enrgy is lost as randomized heat. The system therefore has several applications, from running electric vehicles to home power generation (with a side-effect of helping to make a nice water heater component to boot). So long as several dozen of the systems are not placed in contact proximity to each-other, there is no worry about overcharging the radioactive cores from neutron contamination…although if more high-temperature RF pick-up systems are developed then doing so would make for one HELL of a good way to eat through all that nuclear waste quicker, AND provide power!
Sad thing is, this is only one of several ideas I’ve come up with that I’ve been affraid to speak of since Bush the Second came into office :(
February 1st, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Forgot to mention this:
There have been TWO, count ‘em, TWO, mishaps in all of Nuclear power history; Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island.
Chernobyl was caused by a reactor without a containment building being used for a dumbass experiment by a (probably drunk) scientist-supervisor seeing how low he could run the reactor (reactors get a bit…unstable when you try to do that. As opposed to just turning ‘em off, which is fine.).
Three Mile Island was a bunch of techs who slept on duty and didn’t know basic Chemistry. Hiring standards have gone up since then.
In any event, TMI could have been taken care of inside half an hour had the press not been tying up the plant’s one phone line looking for interviews. Bad reporter, no biscuit.
Of course, there was a minor setback in Germany’s testing of the pebble-bed reactor design, involving a stuck pebble, but that’s still in the development phase anyways.
February 1st, 2006 at 10:47 pm
Wind power: I live in one of the few geographic locations where they are feasable. Most places just don’t get the kind of wind power needed to make them economically viable. Each ‘windmill’ costs approximately $50,000 initial investment, and constant maintenance. Worth it in the long run, with multiple towers, but expensive. Drive past Morongo Valley on interstate 10 on the way to Palm Springs one day, and you’ll see how many towers it takes to become cost efficient.
Solar power is good, but the technology needs more research. I live in the middle of the freakin’ desert, and we’ve looked into the costs to power our home, and once again, not economically viable. At this point and time, anyway. It has potential, but only once enough time and research is invested in it to make it accessible.
I guess that’s the way with everything, it’s all about time and effort and research, which equals money.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:02 pm
“Bruce, your information is actually DIS-information spread by fear-mongers. The amount of Uranium currently dug up will run the world at current demand for about 300 years. Also, the amount currently dug up is about 5% of accessible Uranium. That is also ignoring the other reactional materials.”
—Ken H.
Exactly. “at current demand” it would last for 300 years. We’re talking about raising the demand at least 6-fold, which would mean 50 years before getting into the hard-to-get stuff, which is where we’re at now with oil.
Then again, Howard is right on: anything we do now is (hopefully) just a stop-gap until fusion, which we probably would already have had if people had let research continue.
Also, people who don’t like solar because of current transmission problems should look up recent advances in super-conduction. A single high-cost, high-cap, low-loss power line from a far-away solar-field would solve the problem.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:13 pm
THREE accidents. You forgot (or didn’t know about) the research reactor in southeast Idaho that blew its lid and killed the service crew. It was a research reactor, about the size of the ones used in early nuclear submarines. (The INEL facility is where the sub reactors were developed.)
What happened was the control rods were undersized for the core, so boron “poison strips” were riveted onto them for extra neutron damping. Unfortunately that made the rods a very close fit in the core, and over time the hot water delaminated the stips and they swelled, making the rods hard to move.
The previous shift had dismantled the control rod motors for service, the shift that got killed was there to put things back together.
The main rod in the center was stuck, so one man climbed on top of the containment vessle, grabbed hold and gave it a good yank. The rod broke free and pulled completely out of the core inside the vessle. The reaction ran away and almost instantly boiled all the coolant to steam and the top blew off the containment vessle.
Once it was discovered what had gone wrong and how, every reactor around the world was checked to see if any others had a design where even partially pulling a single rod could start the reaction. Only one was found and a safety stop installed.
The reactor and building were completely demolished and buried. I think that’s part of the radition contaminated material Idaho has been trying to get the federal government to remove for several years. IIRC, the dead service crew were buried in lead lined coffins. The oldest article I’ve read on the accident reported that the gold screws in a cigar lighter one man had on him were partially transmuted into a radioactive isotope of gold due to the intense neutron bombardment when the reactor blew.
So, three failures in the history of nuclear power, only two that killed anyone. Three Mile Island only released a tiny amount of radioactive steam before it was fully contained. All the rest of the water that was pumped through the core and dumped was kept inside the buildings.
The INEL reactor and Chernyobyl failed due to a combination of design problems and insufficient human attention to proper procedures for safely working with them. INEL was a pure research reactor. Chernobyl was based on a design for a research reactor, never intended for power production. The USSR stole obsolete plans and scaled them up. Even with its problems, it had operated safely for years until they tried to do something it was not designed to handle. “Hmmm, instead of waiting to get time on one of our research reactors, I’ll run over to Chernobyl and try this out on one of our main power production reactors! What’s the worst that could happen?”
Those reactor designs are of course obsolete and would never be duplicated in new construction. New designs like the “pebble bed” are self moderating by keeping the radioactive material in sub-critical “clumps” that cannot get close enough together to cause a runaway reaction. The moderation is built into the “fuel” so there’s no way to pull all the control rods (doesn’t have any!) and cause a meltdown. Most pebble bed reactors use helium for coolant, so if there’s ever a leak it’ll just float away. (What’s the half-life of Tritium and does Helium transmute into it under neutron bombardment?)
What’s extra good with that is the USA has the largest supplies of helium. (Which is why Germany had to use hydrogen in its airships, Wilson and FDR wouldn’t sell Germany helium even when we weren’t officially at war with them.)
February 1st, 2006 at 11:32 pm
Unfortunately Howard you overlooked one small teensy tiny fact.
Only 3 percent of our power generation comes from petroleum, about the same as Hydroelectric. The lions share goes to Coal, of which we have ample reserves, enough for at least 500 years. Natural gas is number 2 at just over 19%, followed by Nuclear, also just over 19%.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html
The biggest user of petroleum is interstate trucking, followed closely by personal transportation. The plastics industry comes in third, with power generation at #4.
What we really need is more fuel efficient transportation. NOW, not any of this “pie in the sky” Fuel cell baloney, but right now. There is a fuel efficient, mature technology that exists right now. It’s called the compression ignition engine, more commonly known by its fuel: Diesel. Diesel’s get better fuel mileage, last longer, and produce more torque than their Otto cycle cousins. And unlike the hybrids, whose fuel mileage on the window sticker doesn’t usually match what it gets in the real world(due to testing standards not taking them into account), diesels do get excellent fuel mileage, and best of all, They’re not “Bleeding edge”. You can get them fixed/get parts for them ANYWHERE.
We also have to stop listening to the hippy whiners and start drilling in places we know there’s oil. ANWR springs to mind. There are several other places in and around the United States that have oil, but are forbidden to drill. This has to stop. We need oil. We are currently buying oil from what could politely be described as countries still living in the dark ages(in terms of society).
Any thoughts?
February 1st, 2006 at 11:55 pm
Well, here’s the point with “solar farms” – they’re almost invariably being proposed for areas that are about as hospitable as Death Valley, give or take.
Which, if you’re being strictly utilitarian about it, is a pretty nice use for “barren” (i.e., otherwise not useful) land.
Now, the point with hydro is that – while it can wipe out ecosystems – I’m actually talking about micro scale hydro. The small kilowatt range reactors that don’t exactly need (or effectively dam) a small river, don’t bother the fish much, and can supplement your household’s power requirements very well, particularly combined with a few other nifty devices.
Most of the “easy” reserves like the ANWR won’t actually add much time to the base problem of petrochem consumption… and yes, coal will last a long time, and when you develop good biofuel processing, that will also substitute very well.
Coal is, of course, notoriously noxious, mostly thanks to many of the old coal plants that have been grandfathered into exemption from current EPA regulations. It’s high time the last of these dinosaurs were shut down and replaced or refurbished, but there’s no real incentive for them to do so.
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:03 am
Oil is nowhere near “tapped out”. There’s oil practically everywhere, especially under the oceans. A recent discovery of yet another* “accidental” feature of short wavelength mapping satellites is that they can spot oil slicks damping ocean waves when surface winds are between 3 and 12 knots. (Below 3 and there’s not enough difference in wave action, above 12 the water is too rough and the radar return just shows a “fuzzy” surface.)
This discovery has been used to track oil spills and also for finding natural slicks caused by oil seeps. Looking for naturally oily water is part of how locations are chosen for oil exploration and development. Much easier and quicker to spot large seeps from orbit.
The current blather about “peak oil” is rubbish. The only thing that can possibly cause oil production to “peak” or decrease is the actions of the nutbars that have been blocking new oil exploration and production. For example, 80% of the places where geologic conditions in Iraq make it almost a certainty there is oil, and lots of it, have never been drilled into. Most of Iraq’s oil is under rock that puts it at a higher pressure than in Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. Before Saddam and Friends seized power, the oil wells Iraq had were individually more productive than the best Saudi wells. Allowed to be fully developed, Iraq has the potential to produce much more oil than Saudi Arabia ever has. THAT is what the Saudi backed “insurgents” in Iraq are out to stop. Iraq with lots of oil production and far more friendly to the West than Saudi Arabia has ever really been spells bad news for the House of Saud. (Of course there’s the rest of the “Heinz 57″ groups of nutbars blowing stuff up for their own ideals…)
*The first was when a researcher noticed that images from SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellites taken of costal areas near shallow water on calm days showed all the contours of the undwewater landscape. An underwater ridgeline or even a sandbar has enough mass that its gravity not only pulls water straight down, it also pulls it “sideways”, creating a slight hump in the water over it on the order of a few millimeters high. The wavelengths used by the satellites were chosen because they were short enough to measure such small elevations and the satellites measure *everything* that’ll reflect their radio waves.
SAR works by aiming two satellites at the same spot then combining the data into a “synthetic lens” with a diameter equal to the distance between them. Or it can use a single satellite taking two or more readings from multiple points along its orbit. This also works with land based optical and radio telescopes. A single telescope or antenna the size of the array or orbital positions would provide higher resolution, but would be quite impractical/impossible to build, let alone change its aim.
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:20 am
TJHairball:
“Coal is, of course, notoriously noxious, mostly thanks to many of the old coal plants that have been grandfathered into exemption from current EPA regulations. It’s high time the last of these dinosaurs were shut down and replaced or refurbished, but there’s no real incentive for them to do so.”
Which is the core of Bush’s “Clear Skies” proposal. The older plants that are grandfathered in are not allowed to make ANY improvements under current EPA regulations. They’d have to upgrade to fully comply with current emissions standards, and the only way to do that with cost effectiveness and practicality is to demolish the power plant and build a new one.
That wouldn’t be so bad, but the instant such a plant would be shut down, the greenies and the NIMBYs would rush in and protest and file lawsuits to stop the replacement plant from being built.
With that, the best fix is to allow all power plants to install all the emissions reducing equipment that is possible and practical, even if the result doesn’t meet current emissions standards. Many of the modifications would make the plants more efficient by converting more heat to electricity through things like better burners, which under the current law they can’t install. If boiler #4 needs a new burner, it has to be replaced with one exactly like the original because that’s the equipment the plant was certified with when originally built. Nevermind that the design may have been obsolete 20 years ago and the plant owners have to pay megabucks to have a one-off copy made from scratch, and for the same money all the burners could be replaced with new ones that use a lot less fuel.
If you live where there’s a nearly constant breeze, it’s easy to build a very efficient and low cost wind turbine. See http://www.otherpower.com This outfit is in the mountains of Colorado, quite a ways from the end of the power lines. Several people in that area get all the electricity they use from homebrew wind turbines.
Their latest one peaks at 3,800 watts from a 17 foot diameter, three blade prop. It’s a 48 volt design and puts out enough to charge its battery bank in a 5Mph wind, by 10Mph it’s putting out 400 watts and goes up from there until it peaks with the tail fully furled to prevent overspeeding that would burn out the coils. (I wonder what it could do with a liquid cooled stator? ;) Overclocked windmill!)
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:27 am
There’s not much left to say here, but I figure I’ll shore up some of the less-discussed points:
(1) Breeder reactors are great for energy, but terrible from a non-proliferation standpoint. If you’re trying to keep Osama & Co. from getting their hands on weapons-grade plutonium, building a lot of breeder reactors is not the solution.
(2) The reason we burn oil is because it’s convenient: liquid, high-density fuel. Hydrogen is nowhere near prime-time and in general is gaseous and has low energy density, even when highly pressurized. Thermal depolymerization is like eating your own feces; the amount of energy available is at best a very small fractionof what we actually need. Biodiesel is the only substitute I can think of for which production could easily be scaled up, but the jury is still out as to whether it can be made cost-effective and not require huge fossil fuel inputs (e.g. in the form of fertilizer) to make it go.
(3) The sooner we can stop powering ourselves with stuff we dig up out of the ground, and adapt all our production cycles to truly closed loops of energy and materials, the better.
February 2nd, 2006 at 1:13 am
There was an interesting article in Scientific American about fast neutron reactors recently. They look pretty promising, though there aren’t any production-scale ones yet. They manage to extract almost all the energy from their fuel without producing plutonium or other materials useful for weapons.
February 2nd, 2006 at 3:39 am
What about pebblebed reactors? They seem to be the best, non theoretical design out there. They’re safer, more efficient, easier to repair, easier to maintain, and can “burn” Thorium in addition to Uranium and Plutonium.
Why haven’t we heard more about their development in the US? I suspect that the Econazi’s have attempted to stop their development at every turn in the US…
February 2nd, 2006 at 3:57 am
Bookworm,
Your friend is wrong: the only nuclear-powered surface ships are the carriers, with the exception of the Kennedy and the Kitty Hawk. IN the ’60’s we experimented with a series of nuclear cruisers and destroyers (Bainbridge, Truxtun, California, Long Beach, Virginia). The last of them were decommisioned in the mid -90’s.
Al,
Obviously, if we did it before, we could do it again. We can cram two pressurized water reactors into a 7,000 Los Angeles-class attack sub, so we can put them into a 9,000 ton Arleigh Burke destroyer. And a sub is heck of a lot more crowded than a surface ship. I couldn’t find how much tonnage a conventionally-powered surface ship puts to fuel storage, but I’m willing to bet that its more than what a pair of reactors weigh.
Jeff the B.
Part of the rationale for the Iranians wanting nuclear power to meet their domestic power requirements is that they can make a whole lot more on the open market selling their natural gas and oil than they would just burning it to heat their homes. Or they’ve taken a page from Howard’s book and realize that its going to run out someday….
The primary argument for their program being a weapons program is that they have hidden it for 18 years in contravention of IAEA rules.
February 2nd, 2006 at 4:08 am
I can agree on the idea that the dangers of nuclear power are overated. However, I also believe nuclear fission as a powersource is overrated. It’s biggest problem is getting the fuel for them. Ofcourse, you don’t have to mine nearly as much uranium as you need, say, coal. But you’re not done after the mining. The fuel needs to be proccesed. And that can take a LOT of energy. The exact amount you need depends on the percentage of U258 in the mined uranium. Once that percenatge drops below about 2% (on top of my head, I don’t have the link right here) nuclear fission becomes pointless. Building the plant, decommisioning it after 30 years and making the fuel costs just as much power as that plant makes in it’s lifetime. And the amount of Uranium deposits with a sufficiently high percentage of U258 is quite limited.
If I have to pick a most promissing new energy source, it would be nuclear fission. The fuel supply is nigh-endless. Deuterium is expected to be usable. This is hydrogen with an extra neutron. Water contains about 1 Deuterium atom per 6500 hydrogen atoms. We can just pump up ocean water, get the Deuterium out, and put the water back. The plants are also safer. They can petter out, but they can’t cause a chain reaction that destroys the plant. And the nuclear waste from these plants is not nearly as dangerous as that from fission plants and becomes safe within 100 years or so. I’ve read a lot about the plants that will make fission waste less dangerous (or turn it into fuel again), but the results so far have been, shall we say, less than optimal.
Ofcourse, fusion power is not yet complete. Right now we can get it to work, but we still need to pour more energy in it than we can get out. But most of the fancy new fission plants I’ve read about above here are also in their testing stages. Blame the ban on research for that if you will, but it doesn’t change the fact that you will need to spend time and money now to get them to work. If you need to spend years researching anyway, why not give fusion a shot?
Untill then, conserve. That’s the best short term sollution to our problems. Even if you don’t believe in the greenhouse effect (I do), it’s a good way to save money and reduces our dependence on peculiar regimes.
(I don’t know if this news reached the USA, but some off the biggest oil suppying countries are currently in an uproar over cartoons in a Danish newspaper featuring Mohammed. Some (dictatorial) regimes have called for the cartoonists to be ‘punished’ by the Danish government And religous leaders have called for a consumers boycott of Danish products. The Danish government warned that this will be treated as a boycott of the entire Europian Union. And then what? We’re gonna boycott their products, i.e. their oil? Don’t count on it.)
February 2nd, 2006 at 4:13 am
I’m having trouble recalling it, but i belive there was an even worse nuclear accident in Russia then Chernobyl, but was hushed. Like i said, can’t remember the details but i think it was more along the lines of “killing around one in the area” then spreading fallout around part of the U.S.S.R. and Europe.
Correct me if i am wrong, but isnt there another type of “nuclear” power? One that uses X-rays and some radioactive metal (another memory failure) to produce gamma rays (that come out with more energy then the starting X-rays, something about a step up effect or the like) that boil water for steam for a turbine?
February 2nd, 2006 at 4:19 am
A few comments on this.
My dad heard someone talk recently, who had a few interesting comments about nuclear power, he wasn’t strictly against it, but noted that the cost of building a powerstation is very disproportionate to the power it puts out. The average large company plans to start making money back on it’s investment in 3 – 6 years, this guy was talking 20 years before you see any return on investment from a nuclear power plant. Most of the ones that currently exist are apparently heavily government subsidised.
Another figure he came out with was that the average light bulb converts less than %10 of the energy poured into it into light, the rest is heat.
If think if you want to be serious about power conservation, then you need to start by burying Las Vegas :-p
Next, I don’t think it makes much sense to be building nuclear power plants and the like, when that big round yellow ball in the blue room is pumping so much energy at us that it burns us.
I know, but while you’re pumping thousands of dollars worth of research into something that involves more ripping things out of the earth, more problems of waste disposal, problems of NIMBY’s, problems of cost, problems of maintenance, meanwhile, the sun is sending you more power than you could conceivably use FOR FREE!
Someone is laughing at you.
Meanwhile, battery technology is getting better, as is conductor technology, as is nearly everything else.
The other energy source which I haven’t seen anyone here mention yet, is that based on the super cool water pumped up from the deep ocean. The scientist behind it may be something of a nutter, I’m not sure, he seems to be claiming all sorts of mircle things, but apparently the energy claims are fairly decent. It apparently takes little effort to get to the water (dig a hole, sink a pipe), and to convert it to energy doesn’t take much either. No dangerous waste, nothing.
The other thing is that none of this needs to be our *only* energy source, we just need to reduce our dependance on the stuff that pollutes our environment.
Cut back our excesses, the local casino here has gas fire vents out the front for entertainment, 8 of them, each shoots a 20 foot diameter fireball into the air. Each fireball is one houses gas usage for a week. They fire them off once an hour friday and saturday nights. Let’s say they do 20 fireballs on the hour, over 5 hours, 8 x 20 x 5 x 2. That’s enough gas to heat an average house for 30 years blown into the air over 2 nights.
Sobering isn’t it? Someone should head down to Vegas and replace all the light bulbs with LEDs.
Some thoughts anyway.
February 2nd, 2006 at 4:37 am
Our three biggest contributions to pollution (saving the biggest ’till last):
*Diet – Importing food from far away requires transport==pollution (see below). Additionally, recent studies concluded that switching to a vegan diet would reduce a person’s carbon emission by 1.5 tons of carbon a year. Obviously, everyone is not going to become vegan (or vegetarian), but cutting down on the burgers and eating some more veg is now “officially” not only good for you but also for the environment; and if you buy locally produced products, you don’t need it shipped as far, ergo you are less dependant on oil.
*Transport – Obviously this is a tricky one in the US, but if we took less flights, and cycled/walked more, we’d obviously cut down on our oil use. By swapping a bike for your car you reduce your carbon output by 5-10+ tons a year (depending on your car). You also save $s on gas and gym membership.
*Houses – Our biggest contribution to global warming are our houses! Bad insulation, lack of double glazing and so on mean that we need to run our heating (or air-con in Texas) longer than we should. Also, most of our energy use is at home (washing machines, fridge, lights, etc), buying more energy efficient products, and using them more sensibly would cut down on our energy, and therefore oil use.
A bit off-topic? Well, once we know that our homes are worse than our cars, we realise that maybe we’d be better off consentrating on them than on hybrid cars. Obviously there’s insulation, and energy saving bulbs – which require an initial cost to save money in the long run, and some state/federal loan scheme would help here. However there’s more “zany” possibilities as well. Solar panels (for hot water) have already been mentioned, but you can now buy miniature Wind generators for your house. Sign up to a “green” energy provider, buy one of these wind generators and plug it in to the mains. All the electricity it generates is then slod to your provider, cutting down your ‘leccy bill (and, by association, your ‘leccy use).
So I would therefore argue that there IS a great potential for renewable energy sources, but I think that they should work as “energy use reducers” rather than power plants. Right, now let’s divert all funds for hybrid cars towards making better, faster recumbant trikes….
February 2nd, 2006 at 5:35 am
Pretty interesting that we’re having this debate over here in Britain, too. Basically a question of whether the government wants to do the right thing or the popular thing.
Of course, for all we know, there might be a majority in favour of increased emphasis on nuclear power, but we have no way of knowing because the “pro” people have no voice. For all the dozens of interviews with anti-nuclear groups (or misguided generic environmentalists calling on us to burn more coal), I can’t recall one single interview with the spokesman for a pro-nuclear pressure group. This ought to change.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:40 am
Well… humans are energy hungry critters. And neither Ma and Pa Kettle, nor Kip and Tipper are gonna turn off their TVs and dishwashers to conserve energy. Those pesky labor saving and entertainment devices are just too durned useful and fun. Politicians aren’t interested in fixing anything, they are just interested in getting into office and staying there so that they can enjoy the perks and power. To do that they must be reelected… to do that, they must keep feeding the populace what they want which is TVs and dishwashers.
This creates in our society a cultural trait of “putting out forest fires.”
Well, we don’t have a “forest fire” yet… so, no big research money for truly functional alternatives to petroleum and coal (contemporary sources).
Honestly, I doubt any progress will be made until you and I are having to choose between potatoes for our kids and power for our central air-conditioning in our household budgets and only the truly wealthy are driving anything anywhere.
Of course we could reduce world population by about 5 billion, which would give us an additional 1000 years our so on our existing energy sources… which would give us time to get off this rock… but somehow, I don’t think that would be a realistic or… popular… approach.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:44 am
To be honest, I’m yet another fan of the “More of all of the above” stance. Especially improving EFFICIENCY. You can preach on and on about how making more energy can solve the problem, and how we’ll need more energy in the future anyways, but when you come down to crunching the numbers, the more efficient our use of the energy is, the less we’ll need… even when it comes to those 5 mile high arcologies. As for nuclear power… I’m pro-RESEARCH. When we can find a save, secure, reliable means to keep our population from being exposed to dangerous levels of radiation (key word, DANGEROUS… As in the levels that are determined to damage the body) then I’m all for building more plants. Until then, please keep this stuff to a minimum.
Also, I have to agree with the people who say breeder plants are a security danger. Unless your taking some serious precautions straight from the building stage, then all it takes is one screwup with an inter-reactor transfer and you potentially have a nuclear weapon threat on your hands. Murphy’s Law states that eventually there WILL be a screwup with it, and whether that screwup creates a dirty bomb or a nuclear weapon, neither result is a GOOD one.
Frankly, I prefer the concept of orbital-based solar energy generation. Of course, there will be TONS of issues with that, but given the benefits (a clean, efficient, cheap source of energy that will still be cooking LONG after we’ve eaten through ALL the other resources on our planet… including deuterium in water I’ll bet!)
In the end, I think that ALL of the technologies mentioned here need further research. Since we are discovering ways to make new supplies of oil, research into cleaner-burning, more efficient designs for energy generation via oil/coal is a good idea. Wind energy is likely to be a good idea too. Just a hint for you guys scared of the ‘ecological impact’…. would you like to know where most of the energy driving the wind COMES from? A good deal of it is solar energy, and is extremely unlikely to run out anytime soon. Waste recycling technologies SHOULD have been researched back in the 50’s, and should be at the absolute TOP of our list, even above nuclear research. Sustainable fusion would (of course) be the best solution of all, since we’ve got ample supplies of fusionable material here. And even if we run out on Earth, by that time we’ll likely have workable interstellar travel… and the outer gas giants have enough hydrogen to supply fusion reactors for any forseeable future.
Sure, I’m taking the VERY long term view… but I think that’s what we NEED to do. Sure, developing some stopgap measures for the next few decades is important. But we also need to start seriously working towards solving our energy problems PERMANENTLY, or at least making big steps towards it. Its fairly obvious that fission is NOT a permanent, sustainable source of energy, so we shouldn’t be looking towards it like it’s the holy grail of energy production. Like someone else here said, I hope by the time we run out of fissionables, we don’t even notice because we’ve been using fusion for decades by that point.
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:54 am
we are a cultural entity that will pay US$20,000 for William Shatners (Capt. Kirk’s) Kidney Stone… and US$75,000 for the priviledge of owning Jerry Garcia’s (Grateful Dead lead-man…deceased)WC/commode/toilet/crapper.
… can we advance to fusion power in time to stave off the last great energy crisis? I really don’t have an answer to that… maybe the question is “SHOULD we?”
February 2nd, 2006 at 8:27 am
You know, it’s funny. Here in the NY metro area we really can’t use biodiesel. The NOx emissions are too high.
Somebody wants to build windmills a few miles off of Long Island’s barrier beaches. It’s being fought. “They’re ugly” and “they’ll ruin the surfing”, “they’re bad for the environment”.
http://savejonesbeach.org/
That’s right, they’re fighting _windmills_.
Solar? It sounds nice, but then one does the math. Without big tax subsidies they just don’t make economic sense at anywhere near current electrical costs. You’re better off putting the money into a bank account and using the interest to subsidize your electric bill.
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:32 am
>>We HAD nuclear powered cruisers, we decommissioned them back in the 90’s. The biggest advantage gas turbine propulsion has is speed. It takes hours to bring a nuke plant from “cold iron” to operating. A modern destroyer takes about as long to start up as a jet aircraft.
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:35 am
AARGH – the thingy ate my post.
Anyhow – the old CGNs, except for Long Beach, started life as DLGNs – Destroyer Leaders. Congresscritters got worried the Russkies had more “cruisers” than we did in the 1970s, so et voila…
The solution to the warm-up problem is CONAG – COmbined Nuclear And Gas turbine power. Run the jet to scramble out of port, switch to the reactor as soon as it’s ready.
Subs don’t have problems fitting reactors, modern CGs and DDGs wouldn’t either. The reason we stopped building them way back when was “they cost too much”, not technical problems.
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:43 am
But I like windmills.
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:03 am
BRUCE:
ALL THE URANIUM IS AT THE PLANETS CORE:
Bruce says that fission from deep down radioactives is driving plate technoics and keeping our planet warm. This is incorrect. Uranium and most of the other radioactive elements are silicon loving ores, where as the Earth’s core is dense packed iron nickel. Our giant moon has more to do with Plate Techtonics as it generates tidal heat.
Dauric, Jim, asdf, rdm, Chris Tann, Egarwaen,
LETS GO SOLAR (Wind, Tidal, thermal couples etc.):
Solar power has a tiny energy density which almost no one talks about. For example: I have 2 kg of coal. I crush it to dust and burn it in a coal burning plant in 2 seconds getting its energy when I need it.
Now take that lump of coal into the Arizona desert. Its shadow is the amount of energy it intercepts from the sun. It shadow would take 4 MONTHS to equal the 2 second energy release from burning it. But cheap solar panels have only 15% efficencies, so you must multiply that 4 months by almost 6 times. Then there are power transmission losses. You must convert the DC power to AC, and send the electricity to where the cities are. Another doubling or worse against solar power. Then those solar panels get dusty. You have to wash them or their power is halved or more.
Then you have to deal with ecologists that object to you destroying desert enviroments by shadowing them. And I have not even started to talk about the energy and waste created when you build thousands or millions of square kilometers of solar panels.
Also when a power engineer talks about a 15 MW plant that is 15 mega watts ON DEMAND. For 15 MW of wind or solar to be equivalent you have to store the power (with giant power losses) until it is needed. If you don’t want to store the power, then you must understand that 15 MW of solar is less useful of 15 MW of coal (or nuclear).
For low grade heat (e.g. heating your house) solar is fine and can help. But for high grade energy, it is simply impossibly expensive.
rdm, the 2nd law of thermal dynamics says the greater the energy slope, the greater the power you can pull from it. Thermalcouples are really neat (no moving parts, can be used with very gradual energy slopes). They also have a TINY power output.
Al, asdf,
SOLAR POWER GENERATORS:
Read the book, Entering Space. It demolishes SPS. Trillions of $ of investment in order to generate power that will have a hard time competing with US energy prices. SPS are not the way to get us into space.
Bruce,
RADIOACTIVE WASTES, REACTORS BECOME RADIOACTIVE VIA NEUTRON BOMBARDMENT:
It is a political issue not a technical one. The world is full of radioactive ores but the biosphere muddles on. The Canadian artic is full of Uranium. Are people and animals dying like crazy there? Natural breeder reactors in the Congo basin have bread tonnes of plutonium in the ground water. No one noticed until the scientists found them.
You let short term wastes (which are really dangerous) burn themselves up. They do this quickly as they have short half lifes. The long term wastes that are radioactive for thousands or millions of years encase in glass and bury if you can’t think of something better to do to them. But something with a half life of millions of years is NOT really that dangerous. Just look at the Canadian artic.
Asdf, rdm
SOLAR POWER SHINGLES:
If we are looking at deaths caused by nuclear power should we not also look at the deaths caused by coal mining, black lung, asthma deaths from air pollution, people killed by dams breaking and people falling off of roofs cleaning solar panels?
Asdf
LONG PIPE HYDRO:
Seems like a lot of work to make a power plant that can power a few houses. How many people are going to clean those pipes and maintain the little generators? What will it cost?
Jesse, Bruce, rdm
NUCLEAR IS NOT SUSTAINABLE:
No but with breeder reactors we can sustain a wealthy high tech society long enough to get off the planet and go to fusion.
There is a tight corralation between the power a society uses and the happiness and freedoms its people enjoy. If we go back to agriculture based power will we also drop back to feudalism where the many slave for the few? I think it likely.
rdm
FISSION IS NOT A STEP TOWARDS FUSION, IT IS A STEP TOWARDS FUSION BOMBS:
Ya, right… A country can buy uranium on the free market and using non-nuclear energy sources build fusion bombs. So would you explain how this statement is not cheap retoric?
Fission gives us cheap, clean power that can buy us time. In that time we can build fusion power plants.
Out of time, sorry.
Rick
February 2nd, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Jay – That won’t work at all. Radioactives emit EM radiation mostly in the X-ray and gamma bands, not radio waves. Other emissions include alphas (mostly safe unless you inhale or injest a source), betas (a little more dangerous) and neutrons (very dangerous). Slow thermal neutrons are much worst than fast, but they both have negative effects on biological tissues.
Matt – You’re talking about OTEC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTEC). Nothing new physics-wise, it’s just running a heat engine on the temperature differential between warm surface water and cold deep sea water. Again, the efficiency is low but the huge thermal volume available makes it feasible. Basically it’s a form of passive solar energy, with the entire surface of the ocean as the collection surface. Deep water is also highly nutrient-rich, making aquaculture a very attractive secondary benefit. The process figures into “The Millennial Project” in a big way, if anyone’s read that.
various – It bothers me that people are still conflating the need for energy with the need for fuel. They’re closely tied together nowadays because we can still pump up petroleum for which the energy bill has already been paid, so to speak. But the Earth is finite and eventually we’re going to have to use fuels which require a net input of energy to create; just using them as storage media, essentially, for when we need higher energy densities than electricity can provide or don’t want to pay for the transmission losses. (I seriously doubt we’ll ever have practical “microfusion” or anything small enough for individual homes and cars. The physics of the situation may simply not allow it.)
This strategy would also enable us to decouple energy production from energy usage. Suppose we have an infrastructure set up which uses some widely standardized type of fuel. I like hydrogen, but maybe we use ethanol or even synthetic gasoline, whatever. Say we’re creating this fuel with energy produced by fission plants. But we could swap in fusion plants, solar powersats, OTECs, or whatever in their place and need to make no other changes. It’s the only good way I can see to effectively allow behind-the-scenes implementation changes without having to revamp the entire system each time.
Well, that or room-temperature superconductors. They would be great. But we can’t count on them.
February 2nd, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Bouncing back up the comment tree a bit…Biodiesel actually can run in normal diesels, at least if you cut it with normal mineral diesel. The buses at my place of employment run on B-20 (20% biodiesel), and the engines are the same ones they used for standard diesel.
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:04 pm
I just saw a talk given by a Los Alamos physicist about the current (and future) energy situation. He did a good job at hitting the problem from many different angles. There is a pdf of his power point presentation at:
http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/rajan/energy_RG_06.pdf
It was meant to be accompanied by a person talking so it may seem like some of the slides lack information, but there is still a lot of good stuff here.
February 2nd, 2006 at 3:19 pm
We’ll probably get nuclear plants because it will be neccesary in order to fill the energy demand.
But this isn’t really anything to be happy about or proud of in my view. Just a neccesity. It seems to be shaping up to be the most effective solution to coming energy problems. And what must be done, must be done one supposes.
But I hope that before it becomes inevitable they’ll be succesful with an alternative powersource instead. And that nuclear plants won’t be needed. If they can create solar panels that are twenty times as effective as the current ones and if that’ll do just as well, then I’d rather have those. And I couldn’t see why any one else wouldn’t either. No cancer-causing radioactive material then. That could be used in dirty nukes or whatever.
If they can create nuclear fusion, even better. And if they can create oil from biomass, thats pretty good too. (On the other hand, will we ever get rid of those filthy rich lobbying oil CEO’s then? C’mon, you know you don’t like these guys… ;D Well, unless you are one of those ‘Capitalism uber allesch’ kooks maybe… It does take all kinds…)
Frankly, with the whole terrorism deal going on I’d rather have the least amount of anything nuclear around. But the question is, will this be possible? If not, lets just hope everything will be okay then.
But I can’t see how anyone would crack open a champagne bottle because of a rise in nuclear power. I’m not anti-nuke, but I can’t see the pro-nuke position either. Lets be practical about it, and keep it as a last resort. (But if neccesary resort to it before trouble happens.)
February 2nd, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Just a quick point on the Hydro…
Here in th uk, the biggest use of hydro, is in in pump storage schemes.
These (I was amazed to find out when I went round a pump storage power station) are actually net consumers of power.
Basically these schemes use 2 resevoirs, with as a great a height differenct between them as possible, and when demand is low (and when electricity is cheap), they pump water from the bottom resevoir, to the top resevoir.
When demand is high (and hence electricity is expensive) they generate power.
Basically they act as huge batteries – and one of their USP’s is the time taken to produce power at full capacity.
If I remember the figures correctly, the power station I went round at Dinorwig (Snowdownia in Wales (thats next door to england for anyone that’s as ignorant as Bush)), the time taken to go from standby to full production is 16sec.
Whilst these stations are obviously very little use for generating power (iirc they generate 90% of the power they use) – in combination with unreliable (as in unguaranteeable consistency) renewable sources such as wind and solar, they offer a great “eco friendly” solution.
A 90% efficiency battery – with far less environmental impact.
Whilst there is obviously an environmental impact from the neccessity to have 2 resevoirs – the resevoirs do not have to be nearly as large as for traditional hydro schemes – the Dinorwig Power Station’s top resevoir is remarkably small – yet holds enough capacity to generate 288MW for 5 hours, and the power station itself is entirely underground.
have a look at http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm – theres some interesting facts and figures there – aswell as a picture gallery…
February 2nd, 2006 at 3:49 pm
HTRN: I believe the main reason why we don’t use those new-fangled Diesel engines is because of the NOISE. Them be loud puppies. Some states have already banned them. Go figure.
February 2nd, 2006 at 6:47 pm
As a longtime nuclear worker, I can say with confidence that most Americans with an interest in energy issues, be they politicians, media, or ordinary citizens, don’t have a clear picture of the US nuclear industry. It’s a much different world than you might imagine, both good and bad. I think we as a nation will make better decisions about our energy future if we first fully understand our energy present. If you’d like to get a inside perspective on the technology and politics of atomic power, try my recent thriller novel on the topic, written with the lay person in mind. “Rad Decision” is available at no cost to readers at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com. (Based on the homepage comments, people are finding it enjoyable and useful.) Take a look. Again: no cost, no advertising.
Incidentally, while talk of power supplies is very appropriate thing, the more energy we don’t use (conserve) the less we have to make. So I feel conservation should be at the top of any energy policy.
Regards, James Aach
February 2nd, 2006 at 8:57 pm
The biggest expense in building nuclear power plants is the NRC. A plant like the South Texas Nuclear Project, or Three Mile Island, really isn’t that expensive. In many ways, it’s simpler to construct than a ’standard’ power plant.
However, because of all the safety features, the NRC did something _really_ nasty. Some eco-terrorist anti-nuke nut managed to get the NRC to require that a nuclear power plant _under construction_ has to change the construction/design plans if they come up with a new regulation. This can triple the construction time, as well as the cost of tearing things out and putting new things in.
THAT’S where the cost comes from.
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Nuclear accidents. I THINK there was a recent accident where the idiots working with the fissionable materials (liquid suspension) decided to get cute and rather than use the pumps and correct equipment, used _buckets_ to try to top off the reactor core.
Critical mass, heavy flash.
However, despite the people dying, they found out that the levels of radiation that are _not_ immediately deadly are far higher than was orginally thought.
Nasty way to learn it, but if we don’t learn from nasty things, then the nasty things end up being an utter waste.
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Conservation.
Solution 1) Eliminate Daylight Saving Time. This will eliminate the resource waste caused by all of the people trying to readjust their body clock twice a year. (which can take a month or more for many people, especially as you grow older)
Solution 2) Turn off most of the freeway lighting. Cars have headlights, you don’t need to encourage people to drive around without them at night.
Solution 3) Require street (and other public lighting) to be capped so that all of the light goes downwards (recessed bulbs). Quit performing light pollution. If your streetlight can be seen two miles away, you’re wasting it. (Obviously, you’d have to do something to allow signs to still be viewable. )
Solution 4) establish a minimum ‘height behind the wheel’ for driving laws. This will reduce the number of extremely large vehicles being driven as compensation. (As well as the “little blue haired lady” syndrome, where the person is peeking through the space between the dashboard and top of the wheel)
Solution 5) Eliminate all zoning restrictions, allowing people to again have homes within walking distance of work. Encourage more construction of “house over business” in subdivisions.
February 3rd, 2006 at 2:59 am
There was a nuclear accident fairly recently, I saw it reported in a few places, what made it interesting was that a robot saved their arses. Basically the material got jammed, couldn’t send it to it’s intended destination, couldn’t pull it out.
The area was too “hot” for environmental hazard suits.
So they sent in a robot, after a 45 minutes, they couldn’t get it, and they did a retool of the robot, after another 45 minute marathon, they managed to resolve the situation, meanwhile the radiation left the robot only about %40 functional, the other systems failed, they had to pull the thing back out by it’s safety cable or something.
Sounds like fun. If the robot hadn’t managed it, they would have been burying that facility in concrete for 50 years.
I still think someones laughing at you.
February 3rd, 2006 at 3:43 am
I’m sorry, but I am still thoroughly confused by the initial post here. On what planet, precisely, are solar, wind and hydroelectric power “messy and ugly” while nuclear is not? Point of order: Just because the horrible, nasty, unbelievably deadly wastes are buried in a deep hole where nobody can actually SEE them doesn’t make them any less ugly or messy…and certainly no less deadly. I’d rather look over a field full of spinning blades or solar panels than have toxic waste products within several thousand miles of my person ANY day, thank you very much.
February 3rd, 2006 at 7:43 am
Dont forget that the construction of solar panels and batteries is one of the highest producers of toxic waste in the modern age…
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:30 am
Radioactive wastes… Most “nuclear waste” isn’t radioactive. It’s materials that have been inside a nuclear power plant. Even if it’s the desk used by the gate guard, it usually gets classified as “nuclear waste”.
Coal plants produce radioactive byproducts – which aren’t nice enough to be stored.
Let’s put it this way. You can have coal, and have that crap all over the landscape, in your lungs, causing heart attacks and lung disease, or you can have it all in a big canister that can be easily trucked away.
My mother’s from West Virginia. She’s all for getting rid of the coal fired plants completely, as WVa has(had) the highest incidence of heart disease. (from the mining).
Get rid of that, and the biggest coal users are gone (for now). Then you’ll have smithing, smelting, and home heating left. The only one that burns arbitrarily is home heating.
As for having it within several thousand miles? You already do. It’s called your local landfill, with mercury, cadmium, lead, thorium, strontium, and a number of other nasty chemicals.
Quit trying to play stupid here. The point is that we already HAVE nasty crap everywhere. Trying to claim NIMBY on nuclear is STUPID. Think of how many smoke detectors are tossed every year – they’re radioactive.
February 4th, 2006 at 9:04 am
I am saddened as much as incensed at the “torches and pitchforks” reaction to nuclear power. I’m all for it, and certainly for reprocessing and breeder reactors, which are the best way to make nuclear power a truly long-term solution.
Now, there *is* a problem that less-than-stable nations could use enriched fuel to make nuclear weapons. Well, fine. Place all reprocessing facilities at the mercy of UN monitors. All material shipped in and out has to be accounted for and the accounts made available at all times to the inspectors. Send them to Iran, and send them to the UK, too. That way Iran can get nuclear power, doesn’t get nuclear weapons and nobody can say they’re being picked-on.
Or am I making this too simple?
March 5th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Nuclear Power does seem to be a sticky business. I think I have to totally agree that the best energy solutions will end up being consumables, not means like geothermal and solar power. I also agree in that coal is much worse in a lot of ways, and that it’s honestly one of our better solutions.
The chief problems to me are NIMBY, safety and waste, and since NIMBY’s been brought up, I wanted to toss out what actually concerns me about the latter two. I suppose the -really- difficult part to tackle with it is if something -does- go wrong, there’s little that can be done to help the irradiated area (insofar as I’m aware…). Thusly, I hesitate to suggest it’s -use- until more can be done in this field, because, as we know, accidents happen. However, nuclear power plants are redundantly safe, making those accidents difficult. When they are built correctly.
What worries me about safety isn’t that I fear the nuclear plants will go up left and right, or that someone will crash a plane into it (or EMP, if I wanted to get paranoid), it’s that as they become more common the requirements and restrictions for their construction will become substandard. Essentially, to increase the competition and make the plants more affordable, they’ll need to reduce the requirements to allow it to become more profitable and interesting to various businesses. And that’s before you get into actual cutting corners and shady business practices. I apologize for getting all “China Syndrome” on you, but I do a lot of work and research into construction, and it tends to get ugly. I kind of view nuclear power as the sort of field where it’s not that I think it’s terribly accident prone, or even unsafe… it’s that when there is an accident, it leaves a mark that may never go away.
Waste IS something of an issue to me, as I have done a fair amount of research into the field. The containers used to hold them are rather fragile, and although I am not so concerned about earthquakes or accidents on -plants-, the conditions often used for storing these are those found on problematic areas like fault lines.
I hope I’ve contributed something here… I’m not trying to go into the fear-monger state here, as I said I do view nuclear power and -especially- research into it as being something of significant importance, if not sole importance, to the energy crisis. I’m simply trying to tackle two or three perceived issues that I haven’t noticed addressed yet on here (the long-term stamp of an accident, of the economics and construction behind it, and of accidents involving -waste-, not plants themselves).
I suppose tackling electricity transmission at the same time would be wise, and if I were a millionaire, I’d invest a healthy amount into both.