Will we return to Coal?

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Actually, green energy keeps getting more efficient......and is a perfectly viable way to power our nations. Wind power is very efficient and can even be done off-shore if space is an issue. Solar power is also becoming more and more efficient as we continue to use it. It also carries the advantage of portability. It is now possible to power a house using nothing but localised solar panels on the roof of the house. It's popular in states like Washington, where my in-laws only pay $127 a year for their electricity because of their solar panels. Hydroelectric power is no longer classified as green energy because it does a great deal of damage to the surrounding ecosystems.

 

So you are saying that they do not know what they are doing and that the official account of the energy ministry is just BS? We are not talking about US here, mind, but the government of Finland that has also decided to build a fifth nuclear power-plant to cater the raising energy-needs.

Let me repeat this one more time for everyone here: nuclear-power is the best option we currently have. It is a trade-off, yes, but worth it.

 

About nuclear waste contaminating the environment: there are already natural deposits of radioactive materials all over the place. I am pretty sure these seep into the groundwater (and have done this for millenia) and life on earth has endured.

I agree with people that it is impossible to guarantee 100% containment for a nuclear waste repository. However, you don't really need 100%; and it probably would not be too difficult to set up a storage system so that whatever leaks out is below background effects.

 

No. I'm saying that they are members of parliament....not chemists or nuclear physicists. They are also trying to "balance" economic goals and environmental goals. The, uh, stellar success (please note I'm being ironic) of the Kyoto Protocol makes it quite clear that governments are more biased towards their economic needs than they are to their environmental needs. Nuclear power may well be the best temporary solution we have, if we decide to factor in economics. It is not, however, sustainable as a long term solution. Personally, I think we need to be thinking long term. Short term economic concerns should never supercede environmental concerns. While short term blips in the economy will go away, nuclear waste will not. Our trash will biodegrade within a thousand years or so, but the nuclear waste will still be there. If we're still using nuclear power in a thousand years, where will we be putting the waste, then?

Wind power is sustainable and space isn't an issue for most nations since you can always set your turbines up off-shore. There is actually no need to try and squeeze turbines into your already crowded land space. If, after examining all other green options and having worked to reduce your excess power consumption your energy needs are still not met, at that point nuclear may be worth a look......but not until all other "green" options have been explored and exploited to their fullest. Green energy solutions like Geothermal (in the few places that can actually employ it), solar, and wind energy are sustainable over the long term. We will never need to abandon them. Nuclear energy, like coal, oil, or natural gas is simply not a sustainable long term power solution. We should be looking elsewhere for our energy.

[ July 04, 2006, 07:07: Message edited by: Drew ]

 

I'm no scientist, but that statement seems to make logical sense to me.

 

For anyone who's interesting in the current state of coal power stations:

http://www.worldcoal.org/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=130

Fluidized Bed technology reduces SOx and NOx emissions by 90% and can burn just about anything (including that old coal waste previously abandoned)

Carbon capture and storage methods in development look like providing a future reduction of C02 emisions by 80-90%.

Personally I believe renewables will find more of a foothold.

Hydrogen fuel cell technology seems to be showing an awful lot of promise as the future of a "true" renewable. Unlike Solar Panels, Hydro and Wind it includes a storage medium (i.e. a battery) so you're not limited to only having power when it's sunny/windy etc.
Couple of years old now, but this gives the basics.

Engineer Live lists the current play in solar technology. A company in California currently generates 345MW of solar power a year based on solar generated steam, with a 500MW unit in development for Israel.

My personal favourite is the Australian Solar Tower, which will be the biggest man-made structure in the world and generate enough electricity for 200,000 Ausie homes.

 

Both, actually. But if you look at the history, the short-term benefits have always won. And nuclear-power does not necessarily belong to one group only: it can produce energy in far future too. In fact, the four power-plants Finland has have worked just fine for the past 50 years (at least). Nothing to regret there.

 

Currently a technique called "transmutation" is reseached with more or less great efforts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmutation

I think Nuclear energy is the only way to go in the long run.

heck, the universe itself is using it, who are we to argue with it?

 

Nuclear FISSION, which is what we're talking about, is clean. As was pointed out before, there are natural deposits of radioactive material in the environment, where do you think we're getting it from? These natural deposits do not have ANY kind of containment system other than being burried, and many of them are exposed to groundwater. Also, America's current nuclear reactors are no-where's near the danger level of Chernobyl. In fact, American nuclear reactors, and almost all built within the last 20 years or so, CANNOT mealt down by any normal accident. They require a continued energy input to be maintained and have a myriad of controls in place. This means that any accident would end up shutting down the reactor instead of heating it up. It would take specific and intentional meddling with the controls to cause a melt-down.

On the other hand, as has been stated, it isn't renewable. We're taking radioactive material out of the ground and using it, there's only so much of that, though it is a lot. And just to clear up the issue, hydrogen fuel cells are not an energy production method, they are an energy storage method. You still need energy to produce the hydrogen.

Cold fussion, or hot fussion which is actually looking more promissing, would be not only a VERY long term energy source (though still not renewable), but also provide us with increased materials to work with. These are both decades away at the least, though.

 

NOG,

You're kind of right and it was kind of my bad as the cells would probaly be better descibed as hydrogen production cells. These incorporate Hydrogen production from water using solar energy and are not "just" a storage mechanism.

They are of major interest to us as the Mayor of London has decreed that all new buildings must incorporate 10% renewables. Photovoltaics do not pay the capital cost off in the UK due to light levels and limited life span. If it's not directly used, there isn't a lot of point doing much with it - storage and exporting to the grid can work out more expensive than simply dumping the energy. Wind energy is dificult in build up areas due to changing eddies. CHP based on woodchip/green waste is currently classed as "Carbon Neutral" whilst people ignore the delivery cost in those hulking big trucks. (A good few truck loads a week for even a small system.)

[ July 04, 2006, 20:08: Message edited by: Carcaroth ]

 

I come from a coal producing state in the USA. While I have no problem with using coal as a fuel sorce, I do have a problem with the mining of coal. It has destroyed our water in many places, ruined beautiful landscape that can never be repaired, pollutes our air just by the mere mining and transportation of it, has killed many people with Blacklung, cancer, and crippling injuries. Coal companies came here years ago and virtually raped the ignorant land owners by paying them as little as $20 for millions of dollars worth of mineral rights. And the thing that makes this all worse is the fact that there are many options to fossil fuels but a country as advanvced as ours can find no reason to pusue these options.

 

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9531-uk-energy-review-backs-new-nuclear-stations.html

2-0 for nuclear-power, I say.

 

The fact of the matter is Three Mile Island scared the bejeezus out of a whole lot of people, and about a decade later Chernobyl served as an example of what could have happened at Three Mile Island. I think those remain isolated incidents. France has a boatload of nuclear reactors and have never had a reactor breach (never mind a total meltdown) in any of them. If the right safeguards are put in place, the chances of anything going wrong are negligible. Moreover, I can't see how the U.S. is going to meet its fuel needs over the next 50 years or so if additional nuclear reactors are not built.

 

Off-shore wind power will work in pretty much any coastal area (where most people live and most power is consumed). It does only negligible damage to the envioronment and doesn't create nuclear waste that needs to be disposed of on a regular basis. It also doesn't prevent any difficulties in the "space" department.

Regarding the relative safety of nuclear reactors.....let's think back to the Exxon Valdez debacle. It happened about 2 years after we had redesigned are tankers to provide virtually no chance of an oil leak. Statistically speaking, they mathematically determined that the odds of something like that happening came out to about once every 167 years. Just two years later we had that 1 in 167 year accident. We've also had a few of greater magnitude than the Exxon Valdez debacle between then and now, as well. Fortunately for the companies involved, they didn't involve the shores of any places we actually care about (most of them actually occured in the middle of the ocean).

We will never be able to set the odds of a meltdown to zero. Moreover, when we allow nuclear power plants to stay open longer than we designed them to be viable (Bush's deregulation has allowed older nuclear power plants to stay open after 20 years.....which was before considered the maximmum period of time that a nuclear power plant would be safe to continue producing power) and removing government oversight over them (volountary self-regulation) we introduce all manner of risks. Companies may sacrifice safety by cutting costs, improperly training their employees, failing to have enough employees on staff, failing to perform needed reparirs, failing to replace parts on schedule (this one is already happening) and no one will step in to correct them since they are now "self-regulating". There's also the fact that we are still unsure about the geological forces at work regarding the degradation and slow release of nuclear waste with storage sites like Yucca Mountain. I think common sense dictates that we fully explore and exploit long-term sustainable options before building any new nuclear power plants. There are just too many different ways we can screw up with nuclear power.

 

The only problem I can foresee with off-shore wind power is that it is relatively far away from the majority of the protection. It would be much simpler for an air force to bomb off-shore power facilities than those in the middle of the country.

Not even a bombing of a nuclear power plant will cause any problems besides damage to the outside and a few of the instruments, which would still not be enough to endanger any lives. I do agree with the nuclear waste problem, however. Too bad we can't find a way to reuse the waste in such a way that would make it so the waste would no longer be radioactive.

I like how we also have a thread going on global warming but there are still some parties that are wanting us to use coal, which is one of the causes of the excessive global warming in the first place. At least relative to "green" option and nuclear power.

 

Regarding coal, if we used "clean burning" coal plants, the only really nasty effect of coal power would be mining it since clean burning plants contribute a only a negligible ammount of greenhouse gases (unfortunately most of our coal power is of the "dirty" variety and no one is requiring these plants to upgrade). The problem with coal is that the process of mining the coal is really nasty, as Bassil pointed out.

 

My point is that it is never possible to account for every unknown. I agree that it may be possible to make a meltdown so unlikely that it would be virtually impossible to happen, but unless there is some sort of non-volountary government oversight involved I'm going to be more than a little leary of the safety levels of our nuclear power plants. Businesses have taken extraordinarily stupid risks (like not recalling a car that is known to explode in certain types of accidents because "lawsuits would be cheaper than a recall") far too often for me to trust them to always do the right thing.....even where nuclear safety is concerned.

 

So, since every nuclear power plant has a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector in permanent residence onsite, we're good then?

 

The other reason I like nuclear energy is it's pretty green. Yeah, you get a few pounds of nuclear waste from each plant, and it so happens that the waste still emits a deadly amount of radiation for about 40,000 years after you use it, but several pounds compared to several tons of air pollutants that a typical coal plant emits in a single year is a nearly negligible amount. You just don't want to be in the same room as the waste, and burying it in a mountain is still our best option atm.