4 Prominent Scientists Say Renewables Aren't Enough, Urge Support For Nuclear 776
First time accepted submitter Paddy_O'Furniture writes "Four prominent scientists have penned a letter urging those concerned about climate change to support nuclear energy, saying that renewables such as wind and solar will not be sufficient to meet the world's energy needs. Among the authors is James Hansen, a former top NASA scientist, whose 1988 testimony before the United States Congress helped launch discussions of global warming into the mainstream."
thorium (Score:4, Insightful)
let's do it right, please. no more melt-downs...
Thorium wars (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates [wikipedia.org]
Re:Thorium wars (Score:4, Insightful)
Thorium is pretty abundant, so its probably not worth figthing over. Most countries have access to enough of the stuff.
Re:Thorium wars (Score:5, Informative)
Thorium is pretty abundant, so its probably not worth figthing over. Most countries have access to enough of the stuff.
Furthermore, you don't need much thorium. Uranium is only 0.7% U235. The other 99.3% is U238, which is mostly removed in the enrichment process. But with thorium, you can use all of it as fuel, and it is four times as abundant as uranium to start with. The biggest problem with thorium, is a lack of experience with the reactors. Several small research reactors have been built, but there are no existing, proven designs for big plants. Fortunately, both India and China appear to be getting behind the technology. Lots more info here [wikipedia.org].
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't take long for "shiver in the dark" environmentalism to raise its ugly head.
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As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
And I guess if global warming runs it's course, we'll all be to hot to shiver. :)
Re:Assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if you ignore the costs. If I'm using energy it's because I get something useful out of it. If I "conserve" by not using that energy, I forego the benefits of that energy. Sure, I could just leave the heat off all year round, I'd save a fortune that way, even accounting for the cost of thermal underwear. But I don't want to live that way.
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
The world is not binary: there's a vast range of possibilities between leaving heating on the entire year and opening the windows when you get too hot to never turning it on.
Raising the price of energy would help push people away from the stupidity of the first of those (yes, some do), to be just as comfortable and healthy on much less. I've easily managed to halve my energy use while adding two children to my household: it is depressing that some will not even try at the risk of damning their successors...
Rgds
Damon
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Interesting)
There are ways to look after the poor without encouraging profligacy with energy.
We do it already: this really isn't black and white.
One way is to keep the first kWh cheap and have a rising block price per kWh against usage: if you're not running a McMansion with the windows wide open in winter you need never hit the punitive tariff bands. Just for example.
Or directly subsidise the energy bills of the poor. Take taxes from the top end (of energy usage or general taxation) to compensate.
I'm a fairly right-wing (at least by EU standards) investment banker "greenie" and I have no desire to mess up anybody else's life, including those further down the line when we've burnt way more fossil fuels than was in any way necessary and (a) certainly squandered the cheap stuff and (b) possibly ruined the climate.
Rgds
Damon
Re:Assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
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Solar energy is a nearly ideal source for air conditioning power since generally when you need it the worst the Sun is shining brightly.
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Hey, I can do that too. Just let me know when you're going to do the baseline measurement so I can turn the heat and the A/C on at the same time during that period. The poi
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The baseline measurement would be the historical average values for a household in your area, maybe of your size.
And by the way I cut from >2x normal to 0.5x normal for electricity by that metric. While adding two kids to the house.
Halving again would be relatively easy in good housing stock such as PassiveHaus, but I have the house that I have for now.
Actually I *am* aiming to make it possible to reduce heat demand (again) by a factor of two with my FOSS 'smart zoning' project for which I have a small
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in the most energy efficient house in my county, based on good insulation, solar heating, and thermal mass. We just retrofitted my daughter's house (built in 1968) with insulation in attic, walls and crawl space. Nobody is wearing thermal underwear. Nobody is uncomfortable. And we are saving lots of money by NOT using energy. But "cheap" energy undercuts such efforts. The payback time is too long for most folks if energy stays cheap. But energy is only cheap if you ignore the cost of environmental damage. If that damage were included on your power bill each monty, insulation and solar power would look pretty good.
From the article: "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, "
But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable. So why do they suggest that as a replacement for renewables. As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear. The rationale of the article is not logical.
Re:Assumptions (Score:4, Interesting)
You assume that there is a "market" that decides that the "cheapest energy" will win in the long run.
That is wrong on two scales.
First of all there is no market. Everything right now was casked in concrete over the previous 50 or more years mainly by government interests.
So in the actual situation a 30 year old nuclear plant produces energy relatively cheap (but not as cheap as you might think: maintanace and fuel costs and waste storage still cost money).
A new build nuclear plant would produce energy very expenisve, much more expensive than wind e.g.
You mix up scaling factors.
A new build nuclear plant, if we start today with the planning, will be ready in 15 years, at the soonest, if no court or other interference kills it mid term. That means we have a delay of 15 years to scale up in energy production by 4 - 6 GW. Or a similar delay in replacing a similar amount of coal power.
Wind and solar on the other hand makes it easy to connect power generation in small chunks to the grid continiously.
I can plan for a 4GW wind farm and comnect it while I build it in 100MW chunks to the grid. So instead of waiting 15 years for a new nuclear plant TO HAVE ANY EFFECT I have an imediate effect if I build wind and solar plants.
And obviously: a new build wind/solar plant generates energy cheaper than a new build nuclear plant.
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That 15 year timeline is 100% political. There's no engineering reason for a nuclear power plant to take 15 years to construct.
And that 4GW of intermittent power that you're adding incrementally has to be backed up by natural gas turbine generation.
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You can conserve energy by insulating your house better.
By having your own washing machine instead of driving once a week the the washing shop.
By opening the window at the correct time of the day instead of running your AC around the clock etc etc.
There are hundrets of ways to reduce energy usage without losing any comfort.
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As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.
You can't save enough energy to compensate. Population in the 1960's, 3 billion. Population in 2000, 6 billion. Population now, 7 billion. Assuming we all cut our energy usage by half, which is outright insane, give it another 30 years and we're right back here. Except quality of life is much worse, because we're all using half the energy. That's if you don't count the effect of developing nations using more energy as they join the first world. You don't even need to rely on the population growth.
The
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Because responding to massive fires across entire regions is cheap, responding to cat 4 and 5 hurricanes is cheap, dealing with drought and dehydration from two months of over 100 degree days is cheap. Because spending over a trillion a year to subsidize the oil industry with "defense spending" in the ME and
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Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Your assumption that it is only practical with nuclear power is wrong on many frontiers.
Japan is a 1st world country and can not handle the aftermath of Fukushima. The Soviet Union is minimum 2nd wordl, if not 1st world as well and can mot handle the aftermath of Chernobyl.
So, you want now nuclear power in the hands of 2nd and 3rd world nations? What exactly is practical about this? Where do you get the workers managing the plants?
The next thing about practical is: you have no clue about how an electric power grid operates. Or how a juclear plant actually works. It is pretty hard to run a grid with more than 50% nuclear power. The reason is if a plant gets powered up about certain ranges it is pretty difficult to power it down (quickly) in other words you can not use it good as a load following plant. The same is true in reverse, if you have powered down a nuclear plant to react on a power fluctuation, it takes hours or days that you are able to power it up again, so you can ot follow the load.
So, NO: there is absolutely nothing "practical" in building nuclear plants in 2nd and 3rd world nations. And there is also nothing practical in increasing the amount of nuclear plants e.g. in the USA.
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"Can't handle?" What does that mean?
You do realize that 90% of what you hear about Fukushima in the news is BS, right? You realize that the source of your information is heavily funded (through advertising) by the same people who will directly benefit (via increased use of natural gas for electricity production) in reduced nuclear power use?
The media isn't exactly smart, but they know not to piss off the money people.
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Insurance for nuclear power plants is set up by the government, but it is funded by the plant operators:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/funds-fs.html [nrc.gov]
It is true there's a top limit per incident, but that's true of any insurance policy.
Re:thorium OR ??? (Score:2)
For many coastlines, how about deep ocean water currents? Relatively low tech, w/no surface effects. Easy to pull up and service. Getting better efficiencies on superconducting transmission lines for longer distances. Massive amount of power in those sub-surface rivers.
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Re:thorium OR ??? (Score:4, Interesting)
This, this this, a thousand times this.
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
It absolutely amazes me that building codes haven't evolved to require incorporating one of those two technologies into every new building. The baseline residential load could become a net generator within a decade.
But, it then becomes hard for the utilities to justify charging people for power the people themselves produce. I don't want to suggest we have any sort of vast conspiracy here - More like hundreds of individual companies all actively dragging their feet and refusing to upgrade their infrastructure to make distributed generation practical.
"Funny" story - Five years ago, I started playing with a small plug-and-play solar installation at my house. During the day, with no one home, my old analog electric meter would actually spin backward and credit me for excess production. Two years ago, my local power company rolled out a forced upgrade to digital smartmeters (and when I say "forced", I mean we had actual protests and lengthy court cases trying to block the change). And whatd'ya know, the new meter doesn't go backward. I effectively give my extra power production to the grid for free.
Of course, I have the option of contracting with the utility for a second meter basically installed backward - For which they charge me to sell them electricity. Last time I checked the numbers, I'd realistically need to produce over a megawatt hour per month just to break even on their BS fees - And with my current toy 400W installation, that won't happen.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really, it's not the posters fault that he hasn't realized the stupidity of those around him.
You know how much energy could be saved if companies turned their lights out at night? Unfortunately, you guys are a bunch of savages that would gut every single one
Re:thorium OR ??? (Score:4, Interesting)
The sun always shines somewhere. The wind always blows somewhere. And the tides ebb and flow with the regularity of... Well, of the tides.
Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption.
So every household needs to make 5x as much as they use. Hey, there you have an opportunity for the utilities to stay relevant - Pay me to install more capacity than I need, and sell the excess to industry.
Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple.
'Fusion" counts as hard in the sense of "we don't quite know how to do it yet".
A superconducting cable from the Mojave to Manhattan amounts to a mere matter of logistics. We have a known solution. We know how to build that solution. Doing so would cost less than many of our foreign boondoggles. The only real "limitation" to doing so amounts to debates over NIMBY and profit sharing.
Pave Death Valley with solar panels. The rest amounts to political pissing contests.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world
I can find you "four prominent scientists" who believe that God created mankind, who roamed the planet concurrent with the dinosaurs, 6000 years ago. Argument from authority [wikipedia.org] doesn't validate; and when the argument flies directly counter to what anyone can plainly see for themselves, that argument has a higher than normal burden of proof.
If you want to tell me the world doesn't have enough gallium to pave Death Valley with CIGS-based PV panels, we can work with that. "Dr. So-and-so said so!", however, doesn't amount to squat.
Re:thorium OR ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't handwave "logistics" as if it's triviality. Logistics is a significant issue, IMO bigger than generating the power to begin with.
You say we can just lay down lots of superconducting cable? A quick google search tells me that last year, the "worlds largest" installation of superconducting cable was being deployed. How big is "worlds largest"? One kilometer.
For a long time now, we've had the ability to generated power in a variety of different ways. Getting the power delivered exactly where and when it needs to be, is a different story, as is far from a 'known solution'.
Combine that with NIMBYs and such, I'm not optimistic that we can get our collective thumbs out and do what needs to be done. Hell, the gov't of Ontario managed to squander several hundred million dollars in an (successful) effort to satisfy said NIMBYers.
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Fair point, but "hard" still beats "we don't currently know how to even do it".
I think, though, that I probably took the wrong approach with following the GP's lead about death vallet to Manhattan. A properly distributed grid doesn't require any such massive-scale superconducting long haul transmission lines - It simply requires average population density over a
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It's lots more complicated than that. E.g., most people don't live the places they live in.
That said, more complicated doesn't mean it can't be done, it means the incentives aren't straightforward. Additionally, despite people wanting to think about doing it on a small scale, that's not a complete solution. You still need the grid (as you recognized). In fact a distributed power generation system requires a better grid, one that is less subject to fluctuations. (A solar storm possibility also makes tha
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Considering that I already have a small refridgerator-sized energy storage device just outside my house that stores 9.7 GJ and can release it... If not instantly, in well under a minute anyway... Yeah, I don't really have a problem with that.
/ 100 gallon LPG tank, for those curious.
Re:oh thorium how i doth love thee on slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Funny you should mention Thorium.
Here are a couple of letters (postal+email) I have written to Senator Inhofe and Halliburton Corporate. They express my sense of urgency. I invite everyone to review them and comment. Flames are welcome too. Whopee! I have a 'foe' now! Movin' on up.
And if your own process of discovery also leads you to some conclusion that is best expressed by getting the word out -- please do so. Whether you are not a thorium advocate, please consider the underlying issue, the necessity for an urgent PUSH to develop energy independence.
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate [scribd.com]
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate [scribd.com]
It's about keeping the lights on.
Thanks for reading this, that and the other thing.
Energy shouldn't be cheap. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs
The cheapness of the energy is IMO the largest part of the problem. We have way too many devices slowly sipping the power, while an average house still leaks way too much of the (heat) energy. We are overconsuming way too many goods (which cost energy to produce) and then go through even more energy wasting to compensate the overconsumption.
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Our entire systems are based on the paradigm of production and consumption. Even if the peoples of the world began acting so contrary to their education and upbringing, there would need to be a tremendous change in balance of power throughout the globe for what you say to become the norm.
energy should be as cheap as the market dictates (Score:3, Insightful)
energy should be as 'cheap' as the market dictates...which, in a properly competitive market, means really large companies with big time resources would then fund the *best* Research and Development to compete with each other to bring the cheapest & most sustainable (read: clean) energy that modern science can provide
your idea attempts to solve the right problems, but does it in the most contentions, unworkable way possible...this is why you fail
see, you identify some problems most would agree with:
Re:Energy shouldn't be cheap. (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, "third world people should stay in their place."
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Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap. (Score:2, Insightful)
No, I would prefer for the market to determine the value of rare commodities. Then as rare commodities run out, their prices will rise and we'll look for new inexpensive commodities to fill our needs.
Re: Energy shouldn't be cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that when the "rare commodities run out," it would lead to a major reshape of our economies, states and societies. Historically that means: poverty and inequality, civil wars and wars.
IMO on the line here, is to prove that we as civilization are mature enough not to shoot ourselves into the foot.
Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.
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What do you think will change the quickest: our available energy, or basic human nature?
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Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.
Really? Because over here in the United States, we seem to be encouraging exactly that scenario -- cut education, oppose health care, restrict labor unions, drive wages down, concentrate wealth, ignore environmental initiatives, and create a debt-based economy for the poor and an investment-based economy for the rich.
Are you suggesting the United States is striving to leave modern society? Or perhaps, what you meant to say that fighting over the scarce resources is what an idealized society strives to avoid
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I love it when someone like you tells the rest of us how much and what we can consume. It just reconfirms my suspicion that everyone else is an authoritarian at heart.
May be.
My point is more about the relative cost. The energy now is cheap because when producing it, we disregard the future effects.
Yes, energy costs should go up, to pressure on the business and users to figure out ways to do more with less. Take smartphones as an example: driven by the limited battery capacity, they manage to do much much more than PCs of only 10 years ago - at a fraction of energy consumed.
But I wouldn't go as far as calling it "authoritarian". Levies and taxes throughout the histo
Doing more with less does not solve the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
To the contrary, energy prices need to come down drastically to help us mitigate the risk of all of the issues we are facing in relation to sustainability. Lowering energy costs is critical for addressing poverty, and it will be vital for combatting global warming. So it isn't that we want fossil fuel costs to go up so that renewables are more competitive which will exasperate the economy, rather, we wish for nuclear power production to become far safer, flexible, efficient, and cost effective to drive foss
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Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody can get obscenely rich from renewable easy to produce energy, therefore it is not, nor will ever be practical.
Getting rich from renewable power (Score:2)
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The money isn't in the energy itself but in producing more and more efficient hardware to harvest that energy so the customer has a financial incentive to upgrade.
Logic! (Score:5, Insightful)
Logic is a wonderful thing and we need more critical thinking and less hyperbole with regards to green energy. Strident hyperbole with regards to the anti-nuclear energy has resulted in the real world build of coal power plants as renewals simply are suitable for baseline power. Coal power plants also release far more pollution and for the ignorant they also result in a lot of radiation being released into the air.
Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated. Thorium reactors are also starting to get planned for production and deserve a good look (and if fact a proof of concept plant was built in the past). Thorium reactors have the green advantages of nuclear reactors and should be included.
It's time to get real about getting green and put the likes of Greenpeace out to pasture. They have done far more harm to the environment than just about anyone short of the Koch brothers.
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Lowest pollution? I guess little things like Windscale, Tchernobyl, and Fuckushima are removed from that calculation...
Re:Logic! (Score:5, Informative)
Lowest pollution? I guess little things like Windscale, Tchernobyl, and Fuckushima are removed from that calculation...
Nope. Go ahead and include them. You'll get to about .1% of the emissions of coal power plants with every nuclear disaster. Ever. Including all of the nuclear bomb tests, the two bombs we dropped on Japan, three mile island, and more.
Fun fact: Coal plants collectively emit more radiation in a year than all those disasters combined [scientificamerican.com] have, and that's when you include into the figures the yearly radiation the nuclear plants emit into the environment as well.
Coal: Because glowing green is fun.
Re:Logic! (Score:4, Insightful)
How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?
Re:Logic! (Score:5, Interesting)
How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?
A lot. Not only for discarded waste, but mine fires. Centralia, Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org] has been burning since 1962 and will be burning for the next 1000 years by most estimates. Then there are other mine fires [wikipedia.org] all over the planet. It does look like there may be some success with extinguishing these on the horizon. But regardless, they are devastating to the local ecosystem and have all of the problems with burning coal for energy ,but with none of the energy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Logic! (Score:5, Informative)
Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This [stackexchange.com] response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this [xkcd.com] chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.
In fact the paper that the article you linked to is based on doesn't even support what the article says, but I guess you didn't read it.
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Regulations are needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear energy is proven, has the lowest pollution, best carbon footprint of anything we have (it's largest footprint comes from the concrete used in it's construction) and could be far cheaper if it wasn't severely over-regulated.
Pure bullshit. Those regulations are there to stop the local energy company from cutting corners and blowing up something. Something that they do on a regular basis in non nuclear energy.
The most dangerous aspect of nuclear energy is the energy company.
Re:Regulations are needed (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not anti-nuke, I'm anti-greed.
I have no (ZERO, None, nada, zilch) issues with nuclear energy as long as it's done properly.
I have major issues with letting companies like ConEd run anything dangerous. They will cut corners to make more money, they will leak radioactive waste into the groundwater, they will eventually cause a disaster. It's in their nature. They need to earn a never ending growing profit, the quick way to that is to cut corners.
So, YES, we must invest in nuclear, but must do it properly.
My problem with nuclear (Score:4, Interesting)
So the myth of bureaucratic waste passes the 'truthiness' test, and it gets applied to stuff like Nuclear safety inspections. They get privatized and before you know it a perfectly safe plant is now a disaster waiting to happen. The rich guy that pocketed the savings is 1000 miles away from ground zero so he doesn't care either. Worst case scenario he pays a $1 million dollar fine on $1 billion in profits...
I haven't been able to come up with a solution for this. Heck, most people don't even recognize it as a problem. They focus on the technical problems not the human ones. Until Nuclear can be done so safely that there's no money in ignoring safety it won't work...
Re:My problem with nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
There is no such thing as a "meltdown-proof" design. All reactors can suffer catastrophic failure that releases radioactive material into the surrounding environment. It would be more accurate to say the alternative designs you have mentioned are meltdown-resistant, in the same way bulletproof glass isn't truly bulletproof... you just need a bigger gun.
Thorium reactors by design are meltdown proof.
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Thorium reactors by design are meltdown proof.
You know, I'd go with "citation needed", but how about I just bust this myth right here and now.
Thorium reactors require uranium [wordpress.com] and/or other fissile material. They are not any safer than conventional reactors on this basis. A shorter explanation of just how much of a pipe dream thorium reactors are is here [beforeitsnews.com] along with the caveat that dropping a bomb on one would be a very messy affair.
And they are not meltdown proof; if the safety controls [oilprice.com] fail. Thorium reactors are so-called "meltdown-proof" because they h
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For an author of typically insightful comments, you would do us all well to educate yourself rather than citing nonsense and propagating FUD. Molten salt reactors are a silver bullet capable of end our dependance on fossil fuels. Working to tarnish the singular available option with that potential is not helpful.
Molten salt reactors are by definition meltdown proof, as the working state is already molten. The fuel salts are impervious to radiation damage, and the vessel will melt long before the salts boi
What about (Score:3)
Geothermal ? Theres plenty of energy there...
Re:What about (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem with renewable sources isn't the availability, it's the storage for later use. Coal/oil/uranium already have this part solved by nature, though with all the downsides that go with them. Dams solve the storage issue for hydro, but can't really be built in many more places than they are already and have their own negatives as well.
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I was going to say the same thing.
The problem here, I suspect, is not that renewables are insufficient to our energy needs, it's that they are often not available in jurisdictionally convenient places. Iceland likely has geothermal capacity great enough to power a goodly chunk of Europe, but it's stuck in the middle of the North Atlantic, which means there cost of building and maintaining transmission capacity is very large.
The same applies where I am in British Columbia. The north coast of BC has huge geot
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Geothermal ? Theres plenty of energy there...
No. No there is not. Geothermal flux is measured in mW per m2. Yes there are local exceptions like Iceland, but if you tried to produce sufficient energy for hundreds of millions of people, you would find the hot spots going cool very quickly.
The problems with nuclear aren't pollution.... (Score:3)
1) Expense. nuclear power is incredibly expensive to do safely, because if bad things happen at a nuclear plant nobody can ever live in that County ever again. Just look at Fukishima and Chernobyl. If bad things happen at a coal or gas plant, OTOH, the worst consequence is that it blows and you need to buy a new one. You need lots of very smart people to monitor it 24/7, and sophisticated computerized systems and robots to make sure the people don't screw up, and even that won't save you forever.
2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.
In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.
Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution.... (Score:4, Insightful)
2) If every democracy uses uses nuclear power everyone else will want it. And if you have a nuclear plant you have most of the really hard bits of a nuclear weapons program. Untrustworthy countries who probably shouldn't have the temptation of city-vaporizing weapons will want them. And it's kinda hard to convince an Iranian who thinks his country is perfectly trustworthy (to him it's those nasty Israelis you have to worry about) that everyone's life would be so much easier if his country didn't have the physical capability to finish the Holocaust. It's even harder to convince the Israelis, who (probably) currently have nuclear weapons, that everyone's lives would be so much simpler if they just switched to solar.
In other words if the choices are one or two more degrees of global warming, or letting every country in the world develop nuclear power, we're probably better off living with the warming.
This is one of the shittiest arguments ever. Out of all countries with nuclear capability, US happens to be the only one who has actually used nuclear weapons against another country. Additionally, the US has started several new wars in the past decade alone. So if we go along with your "trustworthy" line of reasoning, the US should be #1 on the list of countries to be denied any access to nuclear technology.
Re:The problems with nuclear aren't pollution.... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's kind of my point.
If the country that helped defeat but the Nazis and the Soviets can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, why the fuck would we insist that all 54 African countries, everyone in Latin America, Asia, etc. has to build reactors capable of producing those weapons? Hell if the Japanese, who aren't known for inferior engineering, can't keep a non-weapons producing facility safe what are the odds that everyone else can pull that shit off?
Global warming is bad, but if it's a choice between moving all NYC residents to Detroit (we'd actually have room for a quarter of them within the Detroit city limits, the D' population has fallen that much since it's peak in '55), and giving all 192 countries in the world nuclear power then I'm gonna go with moving everyone to fucking Detroit.
This's one of the dumbest proposals ever.
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We probably need nuclear for the next 50-100 years at least until we can get the energy storage technology ramped up enough for grid scale usage of renewable sources.
Thorium nuclear has lots of potential as well, with
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There are many nuclear reactor designs that are not usable for development of nuclear weapons. Plus the whole "thorium" thing cannot be used for nukes either.
That's possible. OTOH if you were actually serious about convincing people to adopt these proposals you wouldn't call it nuclear power, because people who don't follow the issue closely assume all nuclear reactors produce weapons-grade material. You'd call it Thorium-based Fission.
Moreover it doesn't get around problem one: namely that even with Japanese-quality safety engineers a really bad accident can ruin hundreds of square miles of your country.
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Plus the whole "thorium" thing cannot be used for nukes either.
Sure it can. You can fairly trivially produce and separate Uranium 233 if you have a thorium fuel cycle running. It is an unusual choice for nuclear bombs, but perfectly suitable.
Easy for them to say (Score:4, Interesting)
Five nuclear power plants in the US have closed this year, [upi.com] due to a combination of competitive and operating issues. An industry analyst quoted in the article expects more plant closures to come.
Now we're stuck with these decommissioned plants. Anybody want a high-paying job? Sign up to help clean up and tear down those zombie plants.
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Five nuclear power plants in the US have closed this year, [upi.com] due to a combination of competitive and operating issues. An industry analyst quoted in the article expects more plant closures to come.
... which shows that gas can undercut nuclear at current prices (and subject to current environmental regulations). So, yes, if you think it is OK to carry on burning fossil fuels, then nuclear power does not make economic sense at the moment. The same goes for wind and solar power in most circumstances.
The case for switching to nuclear and/or renewable power rests on the premise that continued fossil fuel use is not sustainable. Cheap gas prices reflect increased availability of the fuel, but not increased
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Yes, before we make (implicit) claims about nuclear being able to scale, maybe we should prove that we can decommission the 300 or so ones that are due to close over the next two decades.
No, we're talking about building new plants, which means new designs, not old ones. So, we have to prove that building a plant with a new design and operating a new design and decommissioning a new design is more cost effective and environmentally friendly than coal, gas, oil, the wars we're fighting because of oil, the overall economic impacts of sending more money out of the country to buy oil, etc etc.
Meanwhile the amount of installed PV capacity on the planet is doubling each two years on average. Those are probably also going to be a recycling nightmare, but at least they allow us to kick the can another 30 years down the proverbial road.
Um, what? If new nuke plants are built, it's going to be more than 30 years before we need to go down
Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough (Score:4, Interesting)
Why does everybody overlook that uranium resources are limited and that what is available today barely can feed the existing reactors? Money talks is the only explanation I have. Nuclear energy has brought nothing but trouble and wasted shiploads of money.
Nuclear != Uranium (Score:2)
Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does everybody overlook that uranium resources are limited and that what is available today barely can feed the existing reactors? Money talks is the only explanation I have.
Breeder reactors [wikipedia.org] solved this a long time ago, before enriching uranium [wikipedia.org] became practical.
Nuclear energy has brought nothing but trouble and wasted shiploads of money.
Would you prefer more coal plants polluting the air? Hydro-dams preventing fish breeding? Wind turbines slicing birds apart? Every energy-generation system is going to have its drawbacks. Ever play SimCity?
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If nuclear power plants were cheap, you could extract uranium from sea water and still provide power at competitive prices. Uranium in sea water is an extremely large resource.
Unfortunately nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to build, and so they would be hopelessly uncompetitive if they had to pay the additional costs of extracting fuel from sea water. As it is, even in the UK, on existing nuclear sites (so approximately no problems with NIMBY), new builds require guaranteed prices way above mark
Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough (Score:5, Informative)
The price of uranium is about $35/lb ($77.16/kg) at the moment, and it costs about $40/lb ($88.18/kg) to produce the stuff at the moment[1]. 1kg of uranium gives you 83TJ of energy, the same as 3464 tonnes of coal. Coal costs $71.34 per tonne[2], so to get the same amount of energy from 1kg of uranium in coal, you would need to spend $247,133.65.
The fact that uranium is currently selling for less than the cost of production suggests that there is a massive surplus of inventory in the channel at the moment, not that resources are limited.
Sources:
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/uranium-is-set-for-a-violent-move-higher-2013-10 [businessinsider.com]
2. http://dawn.com/news/1053697/rising-coal-prices-to-hit-profit-margins [dawn.com]
Re:Quite the opposite: Nuclear is not enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the claim isn't true.
What? Nuclear energy has provided almost 20% of electricity worldwide and has powered entire first-world countries such as France. It has averted millions of deaths (over 30+ years) that would have occurred if we had burned coal instead. Is that really "nothing"? Is it really a waste of money?
Not good at math (Score:5, Interesting)
You only need to cover a half a percent of the Earth's surface with off-the-shelf 15% efficient PV panels to provide all of humanity all of its energy needs. If we covered all residential rooftops in the States with PV panels, we'd generate about as much electricity as the industrialized world needs -- and that's just residential rooftops just in the US.
To suggest that solar somehow isn't enough is just laughable. Hell, with the kind of abundance that solar offers, we've got far more than enough available to distill CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into hydrocarbons -- an incredibly energy-intensive process -- and use those hydrocarbons as our storage and transportation mechanisms just as we do today.
What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society. Instead, we'd rather squander our inheritance on monster SUVs and petroleum-based fertilizer to feed dozens of billions of people.
Here's some perspective from somebody who can actually do the math:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/ [ucsd.edu]
Cheers,
b&
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What we don't have is the willingness to invest our hydrocarbon inheritance in bootstrapping ourselves into such an energy-wealthy society.
I dispute that. I know many many people, me included, who would go all solar if I had the capital available to do so. I don't have the capital available because all of the efficiency gains of the information age have been eaten by the wealthiest 1% of the population. I got none of it. My father got none of it. Environmentalism propaganda has worked. It's just that the targets of that propaganda don't have the financial ability to act on it. I haven't bought a new vehicle in 11 years, but I still don'
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This is true, but the problem is, solar power is at the wrong place and time.
It would be entirely feasible to power Arizona using concentrating solar plants. Those plants could use thermal storage to provide power during the night. They could provide baseline power, all year long.
If we wanted to power the United Kingdom with renewables, however, it woul
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Of course, I'm not advocating for genocide nor throwing up our hands. As I've repeatedly noted in this thread, I've gone solar, myself, and I've also already noted how the money we burned blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan would have been just about enough to switch the US entirely over to photovoltaics.
I'm just not at all optimistic that we're going to make a wise choice. I hope we will, but it's looking quite likely that we'll instead see economic and population crashes as a result of resource depletion and
Make solar available to everyone (Score:3)
Re:Make solar available to everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Need it if we want to get rid of the nuclear waste (Score:4, Interesting)
What most people don't realize is that nuclear waste can be treated to render it harmless more quickly. And it can be done with a sub-critical reactor design. [wavewatching.net]
I don't understand how you can call yourself an environmentalist and not be in favor of this technology.
A cobbler should stick to his last (Score:5, Informative)
IAAESS (I am an energy system scientist).
These are four of the most prominent *climate* scientists in the world. But not one of them has published a single paper on energy systems (as far as I can see in their online lists of publications). There is a whole field of science concerning integration of intermittent renewables, and these guys have never demonstrated any expertise in this area.
I'm sure all four of them get extremely annoyed when scientists in fields completely unrelated to climate change spout climate skeptic nonsense all over the media (I do too). Now they are guilty of the exact same sin.
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As an energy system scientist, what is your opinion on the solution?
Might be a hoax (Score:3)
I think this could be a hoax. It's not a scientific paper, not in a peer-reviewed journal's letter section. It appears via a Google circles posting from Kerry Emanuel who is a well-known, though partially reformed, climate [blogspot.com] denier [moonbattery.com]. It looks like the Google+ account the letter is published in was just created. Plus, the facts are either skimpy & wrong. Saying we cannot ramp up solar & wind power fast enough, but can ramp up nuclear, is directly in opposition to what's happening. Solar installations are going up by double-digit percentage points [seia.org] each year, and meanwhile we haven't had a new nuclear power plant in over 40 years. The only pair [cnn.com] that is underway (which is pictured in the Yahoo! story) is years from completion [nytimes.com]. There are only 19 permit applications active [nrc.gov] for new nukes in the US, and the power industry (which is notoriously risk-averse [google.com]) has for decades shied away from their huge liability and expense.
It is about SPEED (Score:4, Insightful)
Hansen's principal point is moving fast enough. His point is that if you are too slow, certain irreversible things will happen. Therefore you have to go with currently executable plans. The United States went dam-happy after Hoover dam, so it is not like we have hydropower waiting to happen. Nuclear is the one thing that we can execute on large scales to provide 24x7x365 power for many nations right now.
Hansen's problems are not with leading engineers. They are with politicians, activists, amatueur busy-body fearmongers and their me-too hangers on. He thinks a tipping point is coming, and that the other side of that tipping point outweighs any worry you have about nuclear power. And you can theorize all you want about your solar panels, windmills, etc. Nuclear is what has been proven to provide a substantial portion of world power without carbon load.
He is not interested in theories. He is interested in precedented engineering. Nuclear provides 20% or so of electricity in the U.S. today, around 80% in France. There is no "renewable" that provides so much power to a major country today.
The fact is that a lot of the global warming band wagoners are only on board so they can bash the same enemies they have been bashing for 40 years. When they hear they have to team up with some of their old enemies or the world is going to flood, well, they get off the bandwagon. They do not give an actual rats ass about the planet. They forgot about it 30 years ago.
Re:What happened (Score:4, Funny)
What happened to the story about the Obomacare web site I clicked on. Was I imaging it?
That site crashed under the load.
Bye Bye Karma (Score:3)
Stop getting your advice from Dan Quayle and Karl Rove.
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Sure... if we had ways to actually distribute that power to where it was needed at no cost.
When you transmit power over a distance, you end up losing part of it, and the further you are transmitting it, the more that you lose.
Invent a room temperature superconductor first... then we'll talk.