Will we return to Coal?

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They've actually found out a way to shorten the half-life of a iodine isotope with a laser. Or so I read from a non-science fiction source. Gives interesting opportunities for nuclear power...if it's true that is.

edit: more info on the subject in www.springerlink.com , search the database with: Laser transmutation of iodine-129

 

Wind turbines are not 100% green either. See the following articles:

"Wind generators pose threat to migratory birds" --Industrial Wind Action Group.
"The hidden cost of wind turbines" --NewScientist (Registered only -can someone copy the article for us?)

C'mon, Drew, why can't you accept the fact that nuclear-power is the way to go with our current options?

 

I'm sorry, but when you take the math out far enough, nuclear energy just isn't sustainable. It may work temporarily or for the next hundred years, but I'm running on the assumption that humanity will be around a bit longer than that. As we continue with nuclear power, the storage of nuclear waste (whose ramifications we do not yet fully understand) will become a larger and larger problem. When non-waste producing options exist, it is folly to pursue nuclear energy before fully exploiting them.

By the way, more birds are killed by our jets and territory encroachment than by wind power. The damage it inflicts on migratory bird populations is, by comparison, rather negligible.

@Rallymama: Unless Bush's deregulation was overturned and I didn't hear about it, the new policy is one of voluntary self regulation. Essentially, this means that any on-site government officials lack the authority to force compliance with (the now mostly non-existant) federal regulations in much the same manner that a USDA inspector doesn't have the authority to force a recall of tainted meat.

[ July 14, 2006, 04:20: Message edited by: Drew ]

 

But currently, those options do not exist. We don't have solar panels on the roof of everyone's house, and we don't have 500 foot tall wind turbines set up off both of our coasts. I agree that in the future we can do better than nuclear power, but right now, it seems like to options are nuclear or fossil fuels, and I for one would prefer to see a nuclear plant generate a few pounds of radioactive waste per year than a coal plant spew out several tons of pollution a year.

 

Yes, they do. We simply aren't implementing them as much as we could (or should).

 

The fact of the matter is that 'green' options, like solar power and windmills, aren't efficient enough for a full-scale replacement. We'd need to line all of both coasts of the US with windmills to power even those coasts to just a few hundred miles inland. We'd need to convert massive portions of currently farmed plains to make enough solar stations to power the rest of the nation. Also, in the end, no power source is truely infinite. Our best hope is the development of a productive power source, like a controlled fussion reactor, where the products would be useable materials like iron and carbon. These technologies are still a few decades away, it looks like, and the green options may be efficent enough first, but in the mean time, nuclear power will last and is the best option.

 

@NOG: Actually, we already have the capability of allowing individual residences and apartments to power themselves entirely off their own solar panels. Green energy isn't nearly as inefficient as everyone seems to think it is. In fact, it really isn't the main argument made against it. The most common argument made is that it is too expensive. Frankly, I could really care less about what it costs. When given the choice between long term sustainability and short-term savings, I think the choice is obvious.

 

Yay, now you build your 500k $ green energy powered house and all you can do with it is watch it get owned by a tornado/hurricane/earthquake/another catastrophe.


good job

 

Right, we aren't implementing them. Therefore they do not yet exist. I'm not saying the technology isn't there, I'm saying the implementation of said technology isn't there. 99.9% of people's homes do not have solar panels. We don't have wind turbines set up in great enough numbers to provide energy on a mass scale either. So until this development starts, I maintain that it does not yet exist.

 

You know, we already produce enough (wasted) solar power in the desert regions of the Southwestern United States to power the entire east coast, right? What we lack is a way to get it there. Because we haven't built it. Building an energy pipeline for existing surplus energy would be a hell of a lot cheaper than building new nuclear power plants. Green energy isn't inefficient or inefective. It isn't even infeasible.

Back to the safety of nuclear power plants.....in 2001 the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina noticed a dusting of boron by the vessel housing the radioctive fuel core. The cooling system had sprung a leak. After investigating, Duke Energy notified the NRC that the aging metal on 9(!) nozzles inside the reactor dome had cracked. Two were cracked so badly that they were at a sever risk to break apart, causing the reactor to overheat. This is the same problem that led to the (near-catastrophic) Three Mile Island accident. The NRC then investigated finding similar cracks in nearly 70 other reactors across the US. Oconee was scheduled to shut down anyway, but Bush has (successfully) pushed to extend the lives of Oconee and other plants like it for another 20 years. He's also switched the policy over to "volountary self-regulation". Maybe our new nuclear plants are perfectly safe, but it's pretty damn obvious that severe risks do crop up with the older ones, which are still running even though the engineers that designed them slated them for only a 20 year life span. We should be strengthening our regulation and tightening our standards....not loosening them.

 

How can a nuclear plant be allowed to be run by a profit driven private company? That if anything should be run by the government and with no monetary incentive to cutting costs by saving on safety. Letting dangerous stuff like that into private hands sounds horrendous. However, I shouldnt be surprised, I have been a fan of the Simpsons for a decade.

 

If nuclear-power is expaned under a republican admin. God help us. After seeing the safty deregulations implemented in the coal fields I would hate to see what wide spread nuclear-power mischief they could get us into. The republicans claim that they want to see alternative energy developed by the free market. The same free market that brought us job out-sourcing, the death of industrial america, the same free market that built my '79 chevy blazer which got the same gas milage as my '04 chevy trailblazer, the same free market that could not significantly improve vehicle gas milage over a 25 year period? I would not trust my future to a money obsesed entity if my life depended on it! ...oh, wait, It does!!! What a bag of buttholes. I bet if the government gave as much in research grants for alternative energy as thhey do in corprate welfare and a big corperation found a way to rip off the public with this new energy source we would have one tommarrow.

[ July 18, 2006, 11:59: Message edited by: Bassil Warbone ]

 

Drew, I'm not disagreeing with your basic premise, but as you yourself point out, the infrastructure isn't there. I do believe you when you say that it is much cheaper to connect surplus energy generated in say, Arizona, to power grids on the east coast compared to building additional power plants. A single power plant costs hundreds of millions of dollars to construct, and we'd need several more than what we have now.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that we already produce enough energy through solar power to power the entire east coast in addition to what we're already powering. My thinking is it's probably enough to power the entire east coast, but not the entire east coast in addition to large areas of the west coast where it's already supplying power. It doesn't do you any good to re-route the power to the east coast if you're now leaving the west coast short. Regardless, if they are currently producing more than they are using, I obviously support building the infrastructure to distribute the excess.

I doubt the accuracy of this information. Through my admittedly small amount of research, there appears to be only 65 nuclear reactors operating in the U.S. as of 2003.

Energy being run by private industry is a relatively new phenomenon. Kind of. All energy plants were privately owned, but they were regulated in terms of how much they could charge by the governement. That was because of anti-trust laws in the U.S., as in many cases there was only one power plant generating energy in a particular area. It's only been relatively recently that we've moved to a more free market energy economy.

 

@AFI: The list you link to gives the power plants, but many of these stations have two or even three reactors at the location, which pushes the total number of operating reactors in the US into the neighborhood of 100.

@Drew: You seem appalled that the NRC started looking for cracks similar to the ones found at Oconee at other plants around the country. There are only two types of reactors operating in the US, made by a total of four vendors. Would you prefer that the NRC didn't look? It would be like a car company not issuing a recall when there was a chance that there was a systemic problem. And if they found cracks in all of 9 out of the 250+ (IIRC) nozzles, the problem isn't anywhere near as sever as you try to make it.

Also, what do you mean that there isn't an infrastructure for getting solar-generated electricity distributed? There's a massive nationwide grid for distributing electricity, and all power stations (regardless of fuel type) are on it. Sincerely, what's the difficulty with getting solar plants onto the grid? I haven't worked in the industry for ~15 years now, but I remember cases back in the 80's where a green home actually produced more electricity than it needed, and the local utility was forced to purchase the excess capacity and put it on the grid. If that can happen, I don't understand why solar distribution is proving particularly problematic.

 

My bad. I hadn't realized that multiple reactors were required for some power plants. Although that does make sense - to run three reactors at the same location you certainly need more people, but you probably don't need three times as many people, so it saves on employee costs.

 

I'm not appalled by what they looked for. I'm appalled by what they found.

And that, under our new self-regulating structure, the NRC probably wouldn't conduct the search. At the most, it would request that the other plants do it themselves. Frankly, I need more oversight then that.

Probably for the same reason that dial up is slower than DSL. Not enough capacity.