That does make me wonder, though... Why don't we just sent our waste to the sun yet? Load up a rocket with spent fuel, launch and let inertia coast it to the big ball o' fire..
Because one accident on the ground might kill everyone for a few miles and make other sick. One accident at the atmospheric level could spread lethal radiation over a few hundred miles.
DracoSuave said:
Grospoliner said:
Please, contain yourselves gentlemen. The fact is that nuclear energy is hands down, far and away, THE safest form of energy production.
The dangers of nuclear power is not simply measured in deaths.
Please, educate yourself before you speak on a topic. Not because ignorance makes someone look foolish, but because spreading misinformation drags down other persons uneducated in the details of a subject.
Windmills and solar panels don't provide anywhere near enough power to make them viable, and they both rely on naturally occuring events which can't be controlled, chap. Might as well rely on pixie dust, unicorn poop and happy thoughts to power your national infrastructure.
Most measures of nuclear power's danger still point to it being less dangerous than coal.
Yeah, you got him on that last one. U235 is finite.
Screw uranium-235, Thorium-232 is a much better breeder fuel and is much safer and in a Liquid Flouride Reactor more actual fuel is "burned" up than in the popular water pressure reactors and is much much safer.
Not sure if anyone here has heard the news, but a scientific discovery may solve human-kinds energy crisis, as well as dramatically cut down world-wide pollution and Co2 emissions. As you know, coal is quickly running out, with predictions saying we could run out of fossil fuels in as little as 100 years. Here's some facts about these new 'Kernel' power plants:
1. They require NO FOSSIL FUELS - Instead using fuel called Actinouranium which is a renewable source of energy that could power the world for 10,000+ years. In fact, Actinouranium the size of a pencil eraser can provide as much power as 6 tons of coal. The icing on the cake is that use of this fuel creates zero (0) greenhouse gases.
2. The difficulty of mining coal, as well as coal emission pollution is responsible for an average of 30,000 deaths -Per year- in the US, and as many as 500,000 per year in China. That's half a million fatalities a year in one country! Comparatively, in the mining and production of Kernel power, there have been zero recorded deaths in the US.
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.
It's getting late, so I'll sum up. More efficient, cleaner, cheaper, renewable energy that could sustain the human race for many thousands of years, till we come up with an even more effective way of power production.
-For the intelligent ones, I've steered away from words that have a negative stigma attached to them, call it an experiment- Read more http://russp.org/nucfacts.html
You do realise that this fuel produces large quantities of lethally dangerous, HIGHLY polluting waste that remains a persistent lethal threat for millenia, that is costly and very dangerous to store, nearly impossible to dispose of safely, and that in the event of an accident at the power plant, almost unlimited environmental damage can result.
Also, the mining of it is dangerous and limited.
Interesting experiment you're trying out, but anything can be made to seem good if you don't mention the bad
BTW, Actinouranium = Uranium 235, for those wondering
If you are living in the 1960's yeah! MODERN(!!!!) nuclear reactors such a Thorium-salt and Pebblebed reactors produce virtually no waste and produce no plutonium(no more "Well, we gatta do something with it >") Further more, the only way to get them to meltdown would be from an act of sabotage the likes of which the world has never seen before as it would require sneaking large(dozens of kilos of U238) amounts of foreign fuel into the plant and introducing into the running reactor(suicidal if only from the temperatures).
Still we need to get Hydrogen Fusion working. There are working prototype reactors out there, so don't say it isn't possible. They just don't have the capital to do the testing and research they need to produce and run them at full scale.
Still we need to get Hydrogen Fusion working. There are working prototype reactors out there, so don't say it isn't possible. They just don't have the capital to do the testing and research they need to produce and run them at full scale.
The issue with Hydrogen Fusion is the million degree heat/ Terapascal pressure that is required to start the reactor, not to mention the amount of thermal energy released is essentially noncontainable.
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.
Still we need to get Hydrogen Fusion working. There are working prototype reactors out there, so don't say it isn't possible. They just don't have the capital to do the testing and research they need to produce and run them at full scale.
The issue with Hydrogen Fusion is the million degree heat/ Terapascal pressure that is required to start the reactor, not to mention the amount of thermal energy released is essentially noncontainable.
BlueMage said:
Australia has vast, untapped quantities. Bow to us.
No idea why the OP is calling it that but a name you may recognize is Uranium 235. It is the same type as used in nuclear weapons I believe. All in all thats less than 1% of natural uranium and its a ***** to refine for most countries.
The problem with the 2 countries is population. Namely, who the fuck is going to mine it in Canada and Australia? You don't have enough people to do it yourselves and turn a profit at the same time.
IMO, both countries should open the floodgates and let the immigrants in, but that's not going to happen, both ironically have gotten more conservative over the last few years.
I think it's a bit funny that this thread turned into a debate over the safety of nuclear power instead of talking about solutions to the energy crisis. I might make a new thread about it.
Um, WELL, have a read on near-field and far-field electromagnetics. It's been a year or two since I worked through the maths (and with a frigging awesome lecturer who made sure everyone came to the lectures by virtue of putting NOTHING on the uni intranet. QUT engineering and maths students, I think you know who I mean) but the maths on the emissions are pretty cut and dried.
It was funny watching the rest of the guys suddenly scramble to move their phones after they completed copying down the formulae and then suddenly realise what it meant.
The problem with the 2 countries is population. Namely, who the fuck is going to mine it in Canada and Australia? You don't have enough people to do it yourselves and turn a profit at the same time.
IMO, both countries should open the floodgates and let the immigrants in, but that's not going to happen, both ironically have gotten more conservative over the last few years.
I think it's a bit funny that this thread turned into a debate over the safety of nuclear power instead of talking about solutions to the energy crisis. I might make a new thread about it.
Actually, Canada does happen to mine quite a lot (we have a town in northern Saskatchewan called Uranium City) but we primarily ship it to the U.S. and our own local nuclear reactors.
The problem with the 2 countries is population. Namely, who the fuck is going to mine it in Canada and Australia? You don't have enough people to do it yourselves and turn a profit at the same time.
IMO, both countries should open the floodgates and let the immigrants in, but that's not going to happen, both ironically have gotten more conservative over the last few years.
I think it's a bit funny that this thread turned into a debate over the safety of nuclear power instead of talking about solutions to the energy crisis. I might make a new thread about it.
World macro economy being run by folks who don't understand that growth can't continue indefinitely tends to do that.
As to solutions: Wire every house, every building, with at least a 2kW solar array. BAM! Insta-decentralised-grid during the day. Sure, might need a few other plants here and there for the load overnight, but consider that most folks aren't at home during the day, so those cells can just sit there, generating electricity, and charging batteries. All I can say is BAM!
It is incredibly expensive to launch things into space. The recently retired shuttles cost roughly $450,000,000 to launch, and carry a payload of 26,786 kg. There is around 2,721,000kg of high level nuclear waste generated per year in the US. To launch this to orbit, let alone to The Sun, with current technology would cost around $47,000,000,000 per year. This is of course a very rough estimate, with possiby unreliable data, but illustrates the difficulty of doing so.
In the long term, this cost could be reduced by developing better ways to deliver the payload, but that in itself will be incredibly expensive. The money could be better spent researching new fuel sources such Fusion.
A giant slingshot will do the trick, or a big catapult. Those don't require any fuel, are simple to build, and are historically proven to be good at throwing large things a very long way.
Any form of energy transference on scale large enough to power a modern country is highly dangerous at some level; whether it be collection, refining/enrichment, or as active fuel.
There is environmental/immediate safety risk in *all* of those systems.
Still we need to get Hydrogen Fusion working. There are working prototype reactors out there, so don't say it isn't possible. They just don't have the capital to do the testing and research they need to produce and run them at full scale.
The issue with Hydrogen Fusion is the million degree heat/ Terapascal pressure that is required to start the reactor, not to mention the amount of thermal energy released is essentially noncontainable.
Not true, it's just the MIT has been trying to go to big to fast. There is a scientist in Britain who has made a working reactor that is safe enough to run on his office desk while he is sitting next to it.
It is rather ingenious; instead of attempting to trigger fusion through a high temp/high pressure reaction and then attempting to contain the result, he uses a pair of high energy dually opposed "fuel injectors" to fire streams of hydrogen at each other and trigger fusion through the impact. The result is an easily containable "micro" fusion reaction(the stray particles can be held in the container with a magnetized Faraday Cage), that produces huge (comparably) net energy yields and is dirt cheap to manufacture.
Not sure if anyone here has heard the news, but a scientific discovery may solve human-kinds energy crisis, as well as dramatically cut down world-wide pollution and Co2 emissions. As you know, coal is quickly running out, with predictions saying we could run out of fossil fuels in as little as 100 years. Here's some facts about these new 'Kernel' power plants:
1. They require NO FOSSIL FUELS - Instead using fuel called Actinouranium which is a renewable source of energy that could power the world for 10,000+ years. In fact, Actinouranium the size of a pencil eraser can provide as much power as 6 tons of coal. The icing on the cake is that use of this fuel creates zero (0) greenhouse gases.
2. The difficulty of mining coal, as well as coal emission pollution is responsible for an average of 30,000 deaths -Per year- in the US, and as many as 500,000 per year in China. That's half a million fatalities a year in one country! Comparatively, in the mining and production of Kernel power, there have been zero recorded deaths in the US.
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.
It's getting late, so I'll sum up. More efficient, cleaner, cheaper, renewable energy that could sustain the human race for many thousands of years, till we come up with an even more effective way of power production.
-For the intelligent ones, I've steered away from words that have a negative stigma attached to them, call it an experiment- Read more http://russp.org/nucfacts.html
You do realise that this fuel produces large quantities of lethally dangerous, HIGHLY polluting waste that remains a persistent lethal threat for millenia, that is costly and very dangerous to store, nearly impossible to dispose of safely, and that in the event of an accident at the power plant, almost unlimited environmental damage can result.
Also, the mining of it is dangerous and limited.
Interesting experiment you're trying out, but anything can be made to seem good if you don't mention the bad
BTW, Actinouranium = Uranium 235, for those wondering
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