Energy Crisis Solved by Science

[FalloutJack]

Now waiting for the appearance of Godzilla...

 

[mad825]

I believe any fission based nuclear power plants are inefficient no matter what.

Science cares not for what you 'believe'; nuclear power is, when compared to other power sources, efficient.

Erm...Okay.

Geothermal and Hydroelectric are far more efficient if the right location can be found but still, fission is inefficient that includes on how long they take to be built, dismantled and the lifespan; 30-40 years.

They are the second most efficient thermal based power plants,yes. Only because there are no combustibles used (obviously) in the process.

 

[blackjack117200]

Meh, just shove the left over reagents in a mountian and let future generations worry about it, "I won't be alive so why should I care"

 

[Grand_Arcana]

Hence battery-banks sir. An understanding of night-time base-load (plus 15 to 20%) in battery capacity can be recharged throughout the day. You may also notice I didn't eliminate all other plants - merely that each residence become a miniature generation facility as well.

To be fair, I'm giving a relatively simple answer, and I appreciate that you've gone into more depth than I have here.

Battery-banks cannot solve that simply due to the irregular nature of weather.

Fortunately, there are these wonderful environments called deserts, which have sunny weather year-round. The best part is that there's a desert on every continent, except for Europe. But who cares about Europe : P

Meh, just shove the left over reagents in a mountian and let future generations worry about it, "I won't be alive so why should I care"

You may find this article amusing

http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2002/05/10/yucca_mountain

And this is for giggles:

 

[Hero in a half shell]

I'm still confused on what these new 'Kernel' power plant are...Don't tell me, it runs on Vista?

All forms of energy sources emit CO2 either primarily or secondarily and I believe any fission based nuclear power plants are inefficient no matter what.

Your Vista reference reminded me of this:

Fusion or bust. Unless you find a suitable way of storing the waste materials (which can also be used for great destruction) then fission creates more problems than it solves.

Fission is good, but still has some massive drawbacks. Fusion is the fu[small]sion[/small]ture
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004mz38

Come on engineers, get your skates on, I think fusion power's great... ...because no ones ever talked about the problems it may have. Yaay optimisim

 

[Blue_vision]

Nuclear power of any kind, although playing a big role, can't solve the energy crisis on its own because you can't power vehicles (except boats) with it. Without most modes of transport, there will be no global food and goods network, and no country is anywhere near being self sufficient at this point.

Well funny enough, it potentially could. The coming decades will need to see transport almost entirely revamped, and a huge amount of automobile traffic in the world could be replaced by trains, which could easily be electrified and run off of nuclear power. You've also got the potential for electric cars, which could make up almost everything that legitimately needs personal automobile use. Also, the global food and transport network is a bit shoddy in it's basic idea; you could save a lot of energy by just making things close to you rather than shipping it halfway around the world.

Both of these are solutions in the long run, but they also require a substantial retrofit of the entire global transport netowrk, which doesn't happen overnight. That is also assuming that the will to do such a thing is there, when in fact there's still massive opposition on a consumer and corporate level to major change in the way we move around. For instance, here in the UK something like 71% of people still commute to work by car, and train users are also outnumber by the people who walk and cycle. Meanwhile, the point where fossil fuel demand outpaces production is approaching fast.

Making things close to you sounds like a fairly sensible idea, but the practicalities of doing so are vastly complicated, especially with food. For example, only about six countries (US, Russia, Brazil and a couple of others I can't remember) are net exporters of grain. The rest of the world that are net importers largely lacks the capacity to ramp up production to cover that gap (which is why they started importing in the the first place). 'Bioregionalism', where everything is produced and remains within your local 'bioregion' is a more popular idea in the States, because the US is one of the few places here such a thing is practically feasible.

Well there's not really any other option. Oil's going to run out sometime, the question is how prepared we are for it. Obviously, it'd take decades to completely retrofit transport, let alone civilization itself, to be carbon-free. But if we want to be laughing when the time comes that we'd ordinarily be in a terrible crisis, we have to start changing things now. Stop building highways, petroleum-guzzling vehicles, and factories to produce goods for halfway around the world. We can't just sit around talking about how things are going to go to shit in the future without doing anything at the same time to try to stop it.

Food is a rather more complicated issue to solve, but it's not preventing us from stopping shipping pretty much everything else around the world. And food could at least be coordinated to be sent closer to its place of production. We could at least keep foods destined for North America grown in North America (South America-South America, general area in Asia to general area in Asia.) It doesn't even need to be an 100-mile diet: if I could get kiwis from Mexico (not sure of the specifics on those, I feel like they could be grown right here in Ontario,) instead of New Zealand, maybe shipped by electrified rail instead of plane or transport truck, the entire thing could potentially run on clean energy, and far less energy than it ordinarily would.

 

[Pandabearparade]

Nuclear power is certainly a superior alternative to coal, without any doubt, so long as the government does proper regulation on the plants to ensure they don't.. y'know, melt down.

So I wouldn't support nuclear power under republicans. 'Less regulation!' doesn't mesh well with radioactive materials.

 

[Quaxar]

Sure, but sun collectors don't have a chance of going into nuclear meltdown. However, I was mostly thinking about how after the Japanese Fukushima thing a lot of people might not be too fond of a new and unestablished form of nuclear power plant.

No, they don't. And they also cannot provide anywhere near the energy demands of modern society on their own.

And of course, as I suspected, the first and ONLY response I get is the ubiquitous "meltdown"; a pet peeve of mine but an important identifier.
Just for future reference, "meltdown" isn't a scientific term. Try as you might, you won't find it in any nuclear textbook. It was invented by the mass-media and is used by them on an ignorant public.
The correct term is "super-critical", but that doesn't strike instant fear into the public like "meltdown" does, does it?

Woah man, calm down. I am well aware of current scientific terms and the energy output of renewable sources vs nuclear and fossile fuels, I just wanted to keep it short and simple because frankly I am awfully tired today.

Note: I personally think "the reactor had a meltdown" sounds rather dull compared to "the reactor has reached critical mass". Makes me think of a power plant made out of butter.

 

[gigastrike]

So when can I buy my nuclear-powered car? /sarcasm

 

[Da Orky Man]

I'm still confused on what these new 'Kernel' power plant are...Don't tell me, it runs on Vista?

All forms of energy sources emit CO2 either primarily or secondarily and I believe any fission based nuclear power plants are inefficient no matter what.

Well, yes, fission plants are inefficient. They get about 0.01% of the fuel turned to energy. However, coal gets about 0.0000000000000000000000001% efficiency.

 

[Mr.Numbers]

3. Waste- Apart from the mentioned greenhouse gases produced by coal, it also produces approximately 3 tones of ash -Per Second- and over 100,000,000 *One Hundred Million* tones of waste per year. To compare, Kernel power produces just small amount of spent Actinouranium rods per year, which can be safely stowed deep underground without posing any threats to the environment.

Please tell me this is sarcasm.
Waste is the issue of nuclear power precisely because you can't just put it underground and pretend it doesn't exist (although most governments do just that anyway).

Are you by any chance a NEI representative?

The average amount of waste produced by a nuclear power plant annually can fit under your houses coffee table...And then large portions of that can be recycled, either back into the grid or as medical applications.

Nuclear power gets an awful PR perspective, but nuclear power has advanced so much since the 60's, like everything else, and things like Chernobyl were due to EXTREME EXTREME Negligence.
Like AMAZING levels of shit being not given.

3 Mile island resulted in a total of 0 fatalities. Robots have killed more people.

All in all Nuclear power = good, Australia has tons of deposits for it and, best of all, great way to recycle those warheads if we can dilute them a little

 

[Low Key]

Whether we like it or not, nuclear energy is the future. Solar, hydro, wind, and geothermal will be there too, but nuclear plants are relatively safe (if you don't put them near a fault line) and more efficient. Once science figures out how to get more efficient with their solar cells, I see us moving in that direction, but that won't be for a while. They can barely get 25% efficiency out of them and they don't do anything on cloudy days.

 

[Staskala]

The average amount of waste produced by a nuclear power plant annually can fit under your houses coffee table...And then large portions of that can be recycled, either back into the grid or as medical applications.

Nuclear power gets an awful PR perspective, but nuclear power has advanced so much since the 60's, like everything else, and things like Chernobyl were due to EXTREME EXTREME Negligence.
Like AMAZING levels of shit being not given.

3 Mile island resulted in a total of 0 fatalities. Robots have killed more people.

All in all Nuclear power = good, Australia has tons of deposits for it and, best of all, great way to recycle those warheads if we can dilute them a little

Not every nation has huge amounts of unused land where they can just "casually" deposit nuclear waste. Storage is a big issue in Europe, Japan and pretty much any country that isn't Australia, China, Russia or North American.

Granted, most leaks happened in the past when people thought dumping nuclear waste into lakes was a smart idea, but even now one thing is certain: No matter what kind of storage facility you build, it will decay much faster than the waste, which means that the waste not only has to be regulated and controlled but will also have to be relocated at some point in time. Several times.

Smart nuclear waste management is still an issue, additionally complicated by a shitload of old, badly handled waste that's still around and forever will be.

Edit: Come to think of it, maybe it isn't fair to accuse the nuclear power industry of most storage issues, as waste is also "produced" by the military. I'm not really sure how the two compare though.

 

[electric_warrior]

Ummm, is this nuclear power. I'll check later, but I'm pretty sure this is nuclear power.

Actinouranium is a bit of a giveaway

 

[Olorune]

Hooray for Uranium!!!

...right?

Electricity is the best solution to the energy crisis. It may be vulnerable to solar flares and certain means of deactivation, but it's better than killing the planet any more than we already have.

 

[JMeganSnow]

Fusion or bust. Unless you find a suitable way of storing the waste materials (which can also be used for great destruction) then fission creates more problems than it solves.

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive. However, this is a problematic design.

However, radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is not as dangerous as most people believe. Not that it's harmless, either. But burning coal fills the atmosphere with sulfuric acid which isn't safe either.

In the end, it's a tradeoff. Do you want electricity? Or do you want no waste products? Ultimately you can't have both.

 

[peter337]

I believe any fission based nuclear power plants are inefficient no matter what.

Science cares not for what you 'believe'; nuclear power is, when compared to other power sources, efficient.

Erm...Okay.

Geothermal and Hydroelectric are far more efficient if the right location can be found but still, fission is inefficient that includes on how long they take to be built, dismantled and the lifespan; 30-40 years.

They are the second most efficient thermal based power plants,yes. Only because there are no combustibles used (obviously) in the process.

You've completely overcomplicated what I was getting at, most likely because you've misread what I meant by 'efficiency'.

In Physics, the efficiency of a process is the ratio of the energy you get out to the energy you put in. Nuclear power only requires a single neutron to start a self-maintaining chain reaction meaning that, aside from controlling the rate of reaction, it will continue to produce energy with no other input indefinitely, resulting in a very high efficiency. Hydroelectric power and geothermal power will lose energy largely in friction and pumping the heated liquid from the Earth, respectively.

Of course, once you take into account lifespan, resource availability and the suchlike, this figure for efficiency becomes merely a number to be thrown around in lists of pros and cons - however, it is not a collective name for these pros and cons which, in conclusion, is where our misunderstanding stems from.

 

[Leppy]

Geez, one night and already 5 pages. I'd like to apologise for any inaccurate information I included in my first post, truth is, I'd been awake for 20 hours and just grabbed information from random sites in Google.

The purpose of the post was to see how quickly people jumped onto the Chernobyl mentality, putting their fingers in ears and shouting "Lalalalala I can't hear you." While I believe nuclear power is a great stepping stone for the next reliable power source, in 100 years or so, I do realise the drawbacks.

Honestly, if scientists were to present the facts to the public, and call it...say 'Boiler Reactor' or some other name that steers far away from the words nuclear, uranium, plutonium... The public would rejoice over it, the truth of the matter is, as a race we need to get over past incidents and realise nothing is completely safe but far better alternatives to coal do exist.

Thanks for the responses, you may now continue to shout "COLD FUSION!!!eleven!one!" as though it'll be the Higgs Boson of power generation.

 

[Princess Rose]

OP: I think your experiment failed. Everyone figured out it was nuclear power like immediately.

OT: Anyway, as someone pointed out, nuclear power has VASTLY improved in the past few decades.

Most nuclear waste can be recycled into more nuclear material. The process strips out usable metals (like iron) and leaves them less radioactive than naturally occurring iron. It's actually pretty neat.

Also, American designed nuclear power plants are VERY safe. They are effectively meltdown-proof - they use their water coolant as a catalyst for the nuclear reaction, meaning that if the water is lost, the reaction stops. It's a really neat system. It makes the plant less efficient, but FAR safer than the Russian design (which is more efficient, but less safe).

Anyway, I'd love to see more nuclear power around, but people are very scared of it. The government did a LOT of anti-nuclear propaganda during the Cold War, so I don't see things changing any time soon. Too bad.

 

[Low Key]

Actually, the best thing to do with the waste materials is to design your plant to keep the reaction going until they turn into lead, which is not radioactive.

Lead is radioactive. I don't know where you got the notion that it isn't, but it is. That's why lead paint isn't used anymore and why graphite is used instead of lead for pencils. People and animals were getting sick from radiation poisoning eating the paint chips and putting pencils near their mouths.