mshcherbatskaya post=18.69274.654969 said:
DaruneAlbane post=18.69274.654572 said:
Razzle Bathbone said:
The problem with nukes is the waste.
It's incredibly dangerous and you have to store it for a long, long time.
As in way longer than the power plant's life (which is maybe 30-40 years).
As in thousands of years (or tens of thousands).
You have to keep paying money for that storage to make sure nothing leaks out.
For thousands of years.
No nukes for me, thanks. Too freakin' expensive.
that is the party line all the "waste" from past reactors is usable as fuel in the new ones and so does not need to be burried but reworked and used again
The current proposal for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository is for a limit of 70,000 metric tons of nuclear waste. The government is pushing for it to hold at least twice as much. The price of storing this stuff is currently estimated at 90 billion U.S. dollars.
Why are they spending all this money if it can be reprocessed as fuel for breeder reactors? Well, it's still more expensive to reprocess than to store [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#Economics_of_reprocessing_nuclear_fuel]
There is one very large nuclear fusion reactor that has run without incident since it's inception and is about 150 million kilometers from any human habitation. Even though it is running at full capacity and has been for a long time and produces no discernable waste, most of its energy production goes unused as a conventional power source.
I know of a few people in my area who installed solar panel roof tiles on their homes and now they sell energy back to the grid, and I live in a notoriously cloudy part of the country. I should talk to my friend who is an architect. The sunward side of a skyscraper absorbs so much solar energy that they have to design the buildings with thermal expansion in mind. Imagine if those things were clad with solar panels anywhere there wasn't a window. She would know what the building limitations are on that.
I'm also curious to know what werepossum thinks of this. He's politically the opposite of my pinko hippie ass, but he's got a technical background that might speak to this, and he's one of the smartest people on this forum, IMO.
Why, now I'm blushing. Coincidentally I just looked into solar locally for an architect this week. It's still too expensive to ever pay off without government subsidies, and efficiencies are advancing at a snail's pace, but I think in ten to twenty years we'll see a huge flood of solar panel installations. There are numerous advantages - it's site-generated so power lines are minimized, it's clean, it's quiet, and it can also shade your house or building by acting as a Chinese roof. Solar would be practical for single-family homes now at today's efficiencies if we could cheaply mass-produce the panels - who cares if your whole roof is covered in panels? Anyone really have a shingle fetish? For larger scale generation, solar evaporation cycle generation is promising in low-rainfall areas. But the real promise I think is in infrared and longer wavelength generation. Modern society generates huge amounts of waste heat; if we can capture that waste heat economically, we also avoid the associated cooling costs. Infrared and beyond generation could also be added to visual- and UV-frequency solar generation to increase overall efficiency. Again, it's all a matter of economy of manufacturing. Even being in a cloudy area doesn't matter that much, there's still ample energy if you can economically make the panels. High-density living does make a difference, though - you need good direct sun access for any solar.
I'm also looking for a shift in home construction. Earth-sheltered or super-insulated homes require much less energy, perhaps a fourth as much as a well-built conventional home. At this point, solar power becomes a much more attractive option. You might get a decent payback in that case, since you'd need fewer panels.
I'm also still hopeful about thermal depolymerization - basically, taking garbage and creating synthetic light crude petroleum. That has the advantage producing our best fuel for mobility whilst reducing landfill requirements - I like twofers.
I have mixed feelings about nuclear power. On the one hand it's clean and virtually unlimited. On the other hand, it hurts rivers. Immense quantities of water are required to cool nuclear power plants, much more so than coal or oil plants, which has the dual effects of raising the water temperature and reducing the volume of water (through increased evaporation.) I think France does nuclear very well indeed, but European waters are low-diversity to begin with. American waters on the other hand are extremely diverse, and the more you stress our rivers, the more species you stress or even lose in the wild. I'm not as worried about the waste. My college chemistry professor said if you want to get rid of it, just place it in concrete containers with very slow leaks and dump it all over the oceans. We don't increase the earth's radioactive material so much as concentrate it, so disposal just requires extreme dilution. He also said that would be stupid because of the immense remaining energy - just store it until it's technologically AND economically feasible to extract that energy. As to type, fission is pretty safe now, but fusion promises to be highly dangerous for some time to come. The key to economical fusion generation in the near term lies not in fusion technology so much as in low-loss or superconductor transmission technology, allowing fusion plants to be placed far from population centers.
Ultimately I don't think there's any one near-term solution to our energy problems. We can and should drill for more oil domestically, but we'll barely keep ahead of increasing world demand. I hate to say it, but $4 gasoline is a good thing, helping us reduce demand and adding real, market-based incentive to find alternative energy sources (as opposed to government-based incentives to
look for alternative energy sources. Both Obama and McCain have promised a cap and trade system of carbon credits, which transfers wealth from the USA to under-developed countries. With increased wealth comes increased energy demand, which will put more stress on world oil supplies. We have to transition from oil - but currently we have nothing nearly as good to transition to. I think we'll have to adopt a variety of energy sources and transfer mechanisms - point-of-use solar, solar evaporation cycle generation plants, hydrogen, synthetic petroleum production, plug-in electric and hydraulic hybrids, wind generation, geothermal generation, and designed conservation - where each is most practical to avoid a depression. I think we also need to build up our rail systems - air travel is highly inefficient compared to even high-speed rail, and much more difficult to transition away from oil.
Ultimately of course it's nuclear fusion - nothing else even comes close to providing society's total energy needs. At that point everything mobile is probably hydrogen-based or plug-in. But I don't see that happening until we can economically capture the waste heat. After that it's just a question of convincing people the design is safe.
