Nuclear Energy, Yes or No?

Nuclear power plants?

  • Yes! Build them!

    Votes: 9 69.2%
  • No! Close them forever!

    Votes: 4 30.8%

  • Total voters
    13

amicus

Literotica Guru
Joined
Sep 28, 2003
Posts
14,812
I just listened to President Bush speak from South America. He must do it on purpose; it must be an affectation.

He said, 'nucular' again.

Approximately twenty percent of electricity generated in the United States is by Nuclear Power Plants. Although a new plant has not been built in over thirty years.

Some European nations use Nuclear to a greater degree than the US, some approaching fifty percent.

The anti-nuke protestors of the Hippy 60's is a thing of the past and I wonder if an anti-nuclear bias exists and if so, why?

In the event younger folks don't know, Nuclear energy is cleaner, safer and cheaper than any other form of generation.

Coal, natural gas and hydro electric make up the large fraction, with wind generation adding a percent or so.

Take it as fact, that neither solar, nor wind, nor hydrogen offers afforable alternatives to the massive amounts of electricity required by the nation.

Conservation is not really an option as we truly are an electric society.

I question the roots of the anti nuclear people. I can understand the coal miners union if coal were phased out, jobs gone.

I can understand the owners of coal mines, the land, the machinery the equipment, the entire culture of some West Virginia towns. A large part of the economy.

But even with low sulphur coal, burning coal or oil creates pollution; a lot of it.

So who are they others that oppose Nuclear? Is it really just a handful of States, politicians, industrial power and interest groups and Union influence that has kept new Nuclear plants away for thirty years.

In the United States, to my knowledge, with the single exception, an experimental reactor in Idaho some years back, there has never been a death or an illness directly caused by Nuclear power.

Thanks....amicus...
 
Nuclear produces waste. In specific, the spent fuel rods stay radioactive for thousands of years, at levels that are deadly to humans. No one has yet come up with a satisfactory way to deal with it, the current idea is a kind of waste graveyard near Yuma.

I can't say, but as fossil fuels become less avialable, it stands to reason Nuclear will come back into vogue for electric generation. It isn't a great option, but among those that will remain when we depleat our fossil fuels, it seems the most viable.

-Colly
 
As Colly says, what alternative is there if we want to carry on as we are with all electric appliances. Properly managed and controlled nuclear installations are no more dangerous that any factory with powerful machinery to the locals... The waste is the big problem however, some can be re-processed and used again, but not all... Storing it for the required half life is going to be a pain.

It is hoped that the safer method of nuclear fusion could be perfected eventually, my son's both work at the JET project a couple of miles down the road from here where they've succeeded in acheiving fusion pulses in a magnetic taurus... They've got to work out how to control and utilize it now.
 
I wish I could remember exactly what Larry Niven wrote about nuclear waste disposal.

If I remember correctly he was saying that we need to store them someplace where we can retrieve them again someday as developing technology might actually find a use for the isotopes.

Personally I could see them being stored down dry oil wells or similar shafts drilled into geologically stable areas.

Put it down 2 or 3 miles underground, drop in some leaded concrete, and you could keep the stuff forever if the containers are engineered correctly to withstand the heat and pressure downhole.
This is not beyond our current capability.
 
We need to find cleaner more renewable sources of energy - so no get rid of them!
 
I used to work at Argonne National Laboratory where they do a lot of work on nuclear energy. I was pretty pro on nuclear energy.

The last best solution to the waste problem I'd heard was called vitrification, in which the spent fuel could be fused with sand to make glass pellets which were stable to leaching. That was some time ago, though, and they might have something even better now.

Then came 3-Mile Island. I don't know if many people are aware of how badly things went wrong in this "fail-safe" reactor and how close we came to covering the entire area in a cloud of radioactive crapo that would have stayed hot for thousands of years, but it was pretty damned close.

And maybe no one in the USA has ever died as a result of an accident in a nuclear plant, but hundreds if not thousands have died (and will continue to die) in Chernobyl, and a bunch of workers died in Japan during a stupid accident. And of course, our nukes are just reaching the age where systems are starting to wear down and making them dangerous. They had to shut down some plants in Illinois because of cracks in some containment vessels; cracks that never should have happened according to the engineers.

An accident in a nuclear plant is not like an accident in a coal-powered plant. It's not like an accident in any other industry. Hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of people could die, and a vast area of the country could remain contaminated and lethal for tens of thousands of years, not to mention the lethal dust that could get into the jet stream and travel God-knows-where and do who-knows-what.

I'm not hysterically anti-nuke by any means, but I'm no longer pro either. I'm very, very cautious.

---dr.M.
 
Japan started promoting nuclear fuel fairly soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yeah, a lot of Japanese authors still love the irony of that.

I disagree about your opinion of the safety of nuclear power. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a few others have also shown quite clearly that nuclear power is not happy fun time meds.

This does not mean I believe them to be unneccesary and in fact hope that the ongoing research into a safer form of fusion will lead to some promising results. I also think that expanding infrastructure at permenantly renewable energy sources like solar and wind will be key to insure a back-up system for whenever fossil fuels prove inadequate/depleted.

I don't know the strengths and whatnots of any anti-nuke movements in America. I haven't seen any anti-nuke rallies on college campuses (the place where some students (*cough* poli-sci majors) will rally against anything), yet I also know that whenever a congressman tries to put a nuclear power plant near a community that community rallies against it in much the same way they do against prisons.

Overall on the personal level, I'm probably with doc, wary but supportive.

P.S. Sorry about the lack of flow in the post. I'm in the middle of packing for a road trip.
 
Colleen Thomas said:
Nuclear produces waste. In specific, the spent fuel rods stay radioactive for thousands of years, at levels that are deadly to humans. No one has yet come up with a satisfactory way to deal with it, the current idea is a kind of waste graveyard near Yuma.

Actually, the French have come up with the Vitrification and Dry Shaft disposal solutions. That seems to work for them.

The US has come up with the Yucca Mountain Waste Storage Facility -- which entails shipping Nuclear Waste along the Interstate and Rail systems (through Las Vegas, mostly) to Yucca Mountain Nevada near the Nuclear Test Site about 100 miles north of Las Vegas.

Yucca Mountain isn't in operation yet, and if the State of Nevada has it's way, it never will be.

Th US needs more nuclear power stations, but we'll never get them because of Environmental Impact laws that makes it virtully impossible to build them.

Personally, I think Hydrogen is the fuel of the future, it only requires a few innovations and a commitment to build a distribution network for Hydrogen to replace almost all fossil fuel applications from fueling private cars to generating electricity.
 
Weird Harold said:
Th US needs more nuclear power stations, but we'll never get them because of Environmental Impact laws that makes it virtully impossible to build them.

That and people. Few people who demand more power stations hold the same supportive fervor when they hear that the station is built within blast range of their house.
 
Vitrification sounds damned clever, but I think that Dr. M. implies a second serious issue to lay alongside the question of waste disposal. The actual running of the plant should be perfectly safe so long as everyone's done his or her job properly and all machines, structures, and procedures work as expected, but in a system that complex, there's a high likelihood - I'd argue a certainty as you approach maximum usage / repetitions - that a glitch will occur somewhere. And as Dr. M. points out, you're then dealing with a problem several orders of magnitude greater than the worst catastrophe possible at conventionally-fueled facilities.

Not to go too far back in time or intellectual development, but I do believe Critchton summed it up fairly well in "Jurassic Park." When you have that many variables, and when many of the variables involve living beings, it's not a question of whether unpredicted results will occur - just when.
 
dr_mabeuse said:

Then came 3-Mile Island. I don't know if many people are aware of how badly things went wrong in this "fail-safe" reactor and how close we came to covering the entire area in a cloud of radioactive crapo that would have stayed hot for thousands of years, but it was pretty damned close.

I remember. My mother woke us and we started packing for a spontaneous visit to my aunt in Tennesee.

She's not a woman who startles easily.
 
Seven votes out of 65 reads is not something I can base an article for the New York Times on...I need more, people, more...

amicus...
 
The US Navy has a good record for safety with it's nuclear reactors. (with one or two exceptions which involved secondary or teritiary systems and not the reactors themselves)

Maybe smaller plants built along the lines of those used in navy ships would be an answer.

But NOT using the old Soviet reactor designs!
 
amicus said:
Seven votes out of 65 reads is not something I can base an article for the New York Times on...I need more, people, more...

amicus...

The poll needs more options. More options will lend itself to more votes on an issue that most people are essentially slightly differing flavors of moderate.

But, if you are looking for article fodder just browse the net for the survey that most tailors to your argument like the real opinion piece writer's do.
 
I truly wonder how much generators you could actually pack into a hydro plant if one were designed to not have a resevoir behind it. I mean, I'm sure if you have the turbines all packed and mechanically close as together, I'm sure you could pack in a half thousand generators there, each capable of producing 200 MW, even at the reduced pace of a free flowing river.
 
Xelebes....I don't have the answer to that...but I did see a program on a hydro dam that wanted to add more generators and the environmentalists opposed it...I don't understand why that was.

Mathematically, it takes a certain amount and pressure of water flowing past a given turbine to create the desired amount of electricity and there are certainly limits within a given facility.

Environmentalists have fought any new dam construction to create electricity in favor of preserving fish runs and artifacts that would be submerged...it is a sticky problem.

amicus...
 
Xelebes said:
I truly wonder how much generators you could actually pack into a hydro plant if one were designed to not have a resevoir behind it. I mean, I'm sure if you have the turbines all packed and mechanically close as together, I'm sure you could pack in a half thousand generators there, each capable of producing 200 MW, even at the reduced pace of a free flowing river.

You can only have so many turbines due to space. Each pen stock can carry the requisite weight of water to turn turbines in series, but even the most efficient dynamos are massive. Hydro is the most efficient power generation system, since you can let the turbines free spin, then bring them online for peak time usage without spending more (in terms of fuel) to produce peak time energy.

But you only have so many rivers and only so many of those have a surounding geology that will support the kind of resivors needed. When you build one, you are trading a lot of space for power, because the resivors cover huge areas. You can't run a hydro station of any size without a resivor. It isn't the free flowing water that turns the turbines, it's gravity pulling down on a column of water in the pen stocks.

-Colly
 
Colleen Thomas said:
You can only have so many turbines due to space. Each pen stock can carry the requisite weight of water to turn turbines in series, but even the most efficient dynamos are massive. Hydro is the most efficient power generation system, since you can let the turbines free spin, then bring them online for peak time usage without spending more (in terms of fuel) to produce peak time energy.

But you only have so many rivers and only so many of those have a surounding geology that will support the kind of resivors needed. When you build one, you are trading a lot of space for power, because the resivors cover huge areas. You can't run a hydro station of any size without a resivor. It isn't the free flowing water that turns the turbines, it's gravity pulling down on a column of water in the pen stocks.

-Colly

As usual, Colly is correct. However, there is another problem: fish.
In a free flowing river with fish, the fish wind being sucked into the trubines. Turbines do not like having fish in them. When they get fish in them they tend to go on strike. If a screen is put up to stop the fish, it gets clogged with fish and stops the water flow. No water flow = no electricity.
 
Weird Harold said:

Personally, I think Hydrogen is the fuel of the future, it only requires a few innovations and a commitment to build a distribution network for Hydrogen to replace almost all fossil fuel applications from fueling private cars to generating electricity.

Hydrogen would be great, but hydrogen doesn't occur naturally, and it takes more energy to manufacture hydrogen that you get from burning it. In other words you still have to burn coal or oil to make hydrogen.

Until and unless this problem is solved, hydrogen is just pie in the sky.

---dr.M.
 
amicus said:
Seven votes out of 65 reads is not something I can base an article for the New York Times on...I need more, people, more...

amicus...

In typical Amicus fashion you give us two and only two choices, either entirely for nuclear energy, or totally against it. As usual you ignore the more moderate positions, which is where most of the people seem to put themselves.

---dr.M.
 
dr_mabeuse said:
Hydrogen would be great, but hydrogen doesn't occur naturally, and it takes more energy to manufacture hydrogen that you get from burning it. In other words you still have to burn coal or oil to make hydrogen.

Until and unless this problem is solved, hydrogen is just pie in the sky.

---dr.M.

I have read that Hydrogen can be separated using wind or solar or other renewable power sources. am I misinformed doc?
 
I'm against nuclear power. I'll rather go back to the old times of writing letters back and forth than see another nuke-plant build.
 
Colleen Thomas said:
I have read that Hydrogen can be separated using wind or solar or other renewable power sources. am I misinformed doc?

Colly - Hydrogen can be separated using any form of energy (within obvious limits). However atm, the energy required to separate enough hydrogen to light a town would be sufficient to light a town and a bit. You may as well not bother with the hydrogen and just light the town using the wind and solar power. The technology is beign developed but atm it coems down to thermodynamics - energy can't be created from nothing.

If you look at it chemically:

Hydrogen comes from separating water which is H2O, producing H+ and OH-. This can then produce H2 or hydrogen gas.

Then you burn the hydrogen. 2 x H2 + O2 = 2 x H2O.

You're making hydrogen from water and then burning the hydrogen to make water. With energy being lost through inefficiency, you're always going ot lose energy.

Efforts are underway to work on separating Hydrogen in new and exciting ways, some involving nuclear reactions, but I'm afraid I'm not enough of an expert to comment.


On the subject of Nuclear power plants, I think they are definitely the fuel of the future, but I am always reminded of Douglas Adams:
The difference between something that might go wrong and something that can't possibly go wrong, is that when something that can't possibly go wrong does go wrong, it is usually impossible to get at or repair.

The Earl
 
One idea which I did hear which intrigued me was the idea of a combination methane/solar engine. Solar panels have been developed to such accuracy because the amounts of energy available from the sun are diluted by the sheer distance. Someone came up with the novel idea of using methane to create an artificial sun and putting the solar panels right next to it. They're so efficient at getting every last bit of energy from a distant source, that they could prove a very efficient method of utilising methane.

Still a fossil fuel though. Hmm.

One of my earliest memories is of a 5 y/o me trying to think of ways to invent a perpetual energy source. I came up with an ingenious idea of a loop of batteries, with each being recharged by another, so that they never ran down. Was foiled by my father explaning the 2nd law of thermodynamics to me, but still a subject which interests me :D.

The Earl
 
As I understand the theory behind hydrogen-powered cars, it's not that it's more efficient. As Earl points out, you need power to seperate the hydrogren. I think the car usage is more a matter of how to "package" energy so that cars can use it effectively. That is, it would be bulky and impractical to try to have a car powered by water turbines or solar power, but you can power one with hydrogen that you seperated using those sorts of power in larger, more efficient facilities. Even if you still use fossil fuels, there's room to argue that you could generate electricity with less pollution at larger facilities with more filtering technology and then use the hydrogen in cars, still thereby reducing atmospheric pollutants.
 
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