Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant

[Hindmost]

How can Pembina cherry-pick if it's a standard? I'm not trying to nit-pick here, just trying to understand. Pembina has a lot of credibility, even among my pro-nuke power worker associates. I don't think they make stuff up. I'd like to account for the discrepancy. All you're telling me is that you stand by your numbers.

OK, need to clear this up. The Pembina link indicated that Candu plants had capacity factors as low as 40%--and only a couple early designs did. Their point was to indicate that the plants are unreliable. I consider that cherry picking data to falsely implicate Candu plants. It is a hasty generalization that doesn't tell the true story--and would immediately make me suspect of the report. That's why I provided data indicating the CF of candu plants--lifetime--is 80% and the candu 6 is about 85%.

I completely agree. Only telling you what my government's idea is.

I just found some data in the US where most of the installed capacity built in recent years has been natural gas fired plants...I am upset.

snip....

glenn

 

[luddite]

And what do the pessimists say about our oil reserves ?

The pessimists say we peaked 2 years ago and it's all downhill from here.

Actually, there's a bright spot to the pessimists. I saw a graph where they postulated that if we extract and burn all the coal, oil and natural gas as quickly as we can get our hands on it, we'll still come out well below the lowest emissions projections of the IPCC. Which is why a lot of peak oilers aren't worried about global warming.

But I'm cautious by nature. I wouldn't bank on the pessimists being right.

 

[robinson]

Not if you OWN the oil, it just gets more and more lucrative.

 

[luddite]

Not if you OWN the oil, it just gets more and more lucrative.

Especially if you've been telling people to go ahead and buy that gas guzzler 'cause there's plenty of oil left.

 

[Lonewulf]

I like how Kevin_Lowe had a choice to respond to me, Lonewulf, who didn't post up meaningful engineering information about solar or wind energy, and DrBuzz0, who did. Naturally, he went for the easy route.

Makes me wonder if he's really interested in learning a thing or two.

Either way, my "evidence" that thinking that solar energy and wind energy can take over the energy industry by force within a reasonable time limit is magical thinking (outside of DrBuzz0's post):

The long term future is anyone's guess but the short to medium term, this is more wishful thinking. There is ultimately a limit to how much power can be extracted from, say, a square metre of solar panel; that being the power incident upon it in the first place. The solar constant is about 1.3kW.m-2, which means that to generate 1GWe, assuming 100% efficiency, which would violate the laws of Physics anyway, 770,000m2 would be required. This also ignores the effect of night, which is also immutable. Currently, a 1GW nuclear or coal-fired power station would occupy a mere 100,000m2. This is an example of how even the greatest technological improvements would have their limits.

From a rhetorical standpoint, this argument is also a double standard because the same luxury of time to advance is not afforded to nuclear power. For example, fast reactor technology and accelerator driven systems can significantly reduce the amount of high level waste produced from the nuclear fuel cycle. Though because these technologies are not mature today, nuclear opponents, including those who insist we give renewables time to develop, say this means that nuclear is unacceptable.

http://www.freedomforfission.org.uk/deb/alternative.html

Also, geothermal takes up a significant portion of that .4%, so it may take up to 500 times the solar panels and wind mill energy capacity (which are dependent on location, as I said; some places aren't windy, some places aren't sunny).

If you deny any of the above, you're free to question the owner of the website. "He supports nuclear, so therefore he can't be trusted", like what Luddite's been saying, isn't very convincing to me. It's possible to support something because you find the research convincing.

Overall, we can use renewables no problem, but it's still going to cost money, it's not going to last forever either, and it can be unpredictable; and I heavily question it being "easy" to suddenly crank out more and more and more and take up all of energy production. If there isn't energy available to heat my house in the middle of the night in the dead of winter in northern U.S., I really wouldn't be that interested.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

The pessimists say we peaked 2 years ago and it's all downhill from here.

Actually, there's a bright spot to the pessimists. I saw a graph where they postulated that if we extract and burn all the coal, oil and natural gas as quickly as we can get our hands on it, we'll still come out well below the lowest emissions projections of the IPCC. Which is why a lot of peak oilers aren't worried about global warming.

But I'm cautious by nature. I wouldn't bank on the pessimists being right.

Psssshhh. Don't worry about running out of oil. For one thing we've got lots and lots and lots and lots of coal. We can burn coal for hundreds of years.

So our electricity is safe. You could move to a whole coal-based energy system and have plugin hybrids running on coal generated electricity 50% of the time.

Then the rest of the time you run them on gasoline. You can get the gasoline from any remaining oil. Oh? We're completely out of oil? Well that's no problem either. We can make the gasoline out of good 'ole coal too.



It's an energy intensive process and it can be dirty, but gasoline's just an hydrocarbon. Coal's got plenty of carbon in it. We can get the hydrogen from water. We just need to react the hydrogen under pressure with the coal and go through a few other steps.

Oh but how do we get the hydrogen? And the high pressure steam? And the heat and stuff for the forming and cracking?

Well, shucks that's easy. All we need is water and some energy... which we get from... YOU GUESSED IT! Burning some coal!

We can even make our own designer synthetic gasoline with lots of hydrogen and lite on carbon. Not much sulfur. Nice and clean. The only thing that is difficult is the energy needed for the chemical reformatting. (but we already covered that part. We burn COAL)

Now I suppose we *could* run low on coal... as in anthracite after a while. But that's okay, because we have bituminous coal. And when we run out of that then there's sub-bituminous (There's a hell of a lot of that stuff). Then there's brown coal... which kinda looks like dirt.... but it burns!

Okay, once we're done with the coal burning, which ought to take a good couple centuries at the very least, then no sweat. We've just gotten started!

After that then comes the peat. And the peat-clay, which is clay full of peat. You can burn it... you get a lot of left over burned greasy dirt.

Okay then we move on to the stuff which kinda strattles the line between coal/peat/oil. It's basically some greasy oily dirty muck.

BUT YOU GUESSED IT! IT BURNS!



So don't anybody worry. Oil is just the tip here. We've got plenty of filthy fuels ripe for the taking. We can make any kind of petroleum product out of them too with sufficient cracking/steam reformatting/gasification/distillation.

Now, the only problem with the synthetic fuel thing (aside from the energy you need)... Is... it tends to leave behind some stuff. Primary tar, creatien, coal tars... stuff tends to be very heavy in benzine and volatile organics.

But guess what!

IT BURNS!

 

[Lonewulf]

The problem with those alternative coal sources, though, is that they tend to be dirtier and more inefficient, isn't it?

Either way, I'd rather get us off dependence of fossil fuels. They give off too much waste, are inefficient (I.E., take trainloads like you said), are non-renewable, and are used for other things (plastic, for instance). Until we can run vehicles off of something else besides fossil fuels at an efficient rate, I'm dubious that we should keep trusting fossil fuel plants (where most of fossil fuels get used as far as I know). Then there's the whole Carbon thing.

 

[Ziggurat]

While the material in the Chernobyl reactor was certainly much "hotter" than the stuff in a reactor's waste-containment facility, a waste-containment facility contains many many times more radioactive material than the reactor does. Particularly if the reactor has been in operation for a few decades or more.

And most of that is long-lived isotopes (which is why it has to be stored). But it's not the long-lived isotopes which pose the primary radiological health hazard, it's the short-lived isotopes like iodine which are biologically active and decay quickly (and hence do their damage quickly).

Note that I'm talking about the high-level waste (i.e. spent nuclear fuel) that has to be stored on-site at the reactor complex here, not the low-level waste.

I know that. It still doesn't pose anywhere near the risk that Chernobyl did.

Then why does equipment that's exposed to high-level waste have to be treated as "low-level radioactive waste" when it's disposed of?

Regulations. We're extremely cautious, and some of that stuff is in contact for long periods of time. There isn't zero activation from radioactive waste, sure, but it's many orders of magnitude less than from an active chain reaction.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

I had proposed an alternative energy plan before utilizing basic principals of chemistry and unlimited resources...

 

[Lonewulf]

Hmm... so people like Sylvia Browne can be put to some use. =D

 

[DRBUZZ0]

And most of that is long-lived isotopes (which is why it has to be stored). But it's not the long-lived isotopes which pose the primary radiological health hazard, it's the short-lived isotopes like iodine which are biologically active and decay quickly (and hence do their damage quickly).

This is a problem with the US proposals for disposal of waste, basically dumping it in Yucca mountain.

The disposal criteria must be able to:

A) Last for a very very very long time, because there are some long-lived isotopes

B) Withstand heat, because there are some high-energy particle emitters with reasonably short lifespans, but long enough to be of concern.

C) Deal with isotopes which are relatively short lived but are highly dangerous and biologically active, even in small amounts.


When you're dealing with the waste, some things require different acomidations than others.

Example: Cs-137 and Sr-90 are biologically active, highly radioactive, produce heat and so on. They need good containment in inert materials. But they only need it for decades to a few centuries at most. Then they'll basically be gone.


Stuff like Tc-99 and I-129 are long lived. They need geologically stable containment in formations which will be secure for a long time. However, they do not need as much imediate caution. They don't generate anywhere near as much heat. They're not as difficult to handle.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

Regulations. We're extremely cautious, and some of that stuff is in contact for long periods of time. There isn't zero activation from radioactive waste, sure, but it's many orders of magnitude less than from an active chain reaction.

Red an interesting story about low level waste on a bullitin board a LONG time ago. I've tried to find it.

At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory they had a large volume of low-level nuclear waste. This stuff is very low-level. Some of it might not be radioactive at all, but is considered waste by regulations because of it's use.

We're talking old lab coats that may have gotten a tracer on them. Some organic materials with various tracers in them. Low-level check sources.

Well, they can keep it on site and it's no problem, but they have to pay per federal guidelines to get rid of this stuff. The regulations state that once it's marked for "off site disposal" they have to have it inventoried, labeled, inspected by a radiological safety officer, sent to a monitored disposal site and so on.

So they had these barrels of lab coats and rags and test tubes and whatever other low-level stuff. They started painting them yellow and putting them in the roads as traffic barriers around construction and potholes and stuff.


God I have GOT to find that posting on an archive or something.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

I like how Kevin_Lowe had a choice to respond to me, Lonewulf, who didn't post up meaningful engineering information about solar or wind energy, and DrBuzz0, who did. Naturally, he went for the easy route.

Makes me wonder if he's really interested in learning a thing or two.

Draw whatever conclusions you like.

Either way, my "evidence" that thinking that solar energy and wind energy can take over the energy industry by force within a reasonable time limit is magical thinking (outside of DrBuzz0's post):

http://www.freedomforfission.org.uk/deb/alternative.html

Okay, that's a start. Now we just need to show that as a matter of fact there is not enough space to put enough solar panels to provide the energy we need. The mere fact that solar has its downsides is inconclusive - coal, oil and nuclear have their downsides too.

That, incidentally, is the short answer to Dr Buzzo's points as well. Yes, every technology has its downsides. You have to compare the downsides of the two technologies to actually analyse the issue though, because merely listing the downsides of either solar alone (to pick one) or nuclear alone is inconclusive.

Also, geothermal takes up a significant portion of that .4%, so it may take up to 500 times the solar panels and wind mill energy capacity (which are dependent on location, as I said; some places aren't windy, some places aren't sunny).

If you deny any of the above, you're free to question the owner of the website. "He supports nuclear, so therefore he can't be trusted", like what Luddite's been saying, isn't very convincing to me. It's possible to support something because you find the research convincing.

Please don't put words in my mouth, and please don't try to stereotype me as a Luddite. I like technology, I just think you and Buzzo have gotten overexited about the positive aspects of fossil fuels and nukes and the negative aspects of renewables.

Overall, we can use renewables no problem, but it's still going to cost money, it's not going to last forever either, and it can be unpredictable; and I heavily question it being "easy" to suddenly crank out more and more and more and take up all of energy production. If there isn't energy available to heat my house in the middle of the night in the dead of winter in northern U.S., I really wouldn't be that interested.

If renewables cannot produce enough energy to meet minimum requirements we should not rely solely upon them. I'm still waiting for the evidence that should make us fix the belief that this is necessarily the case.

 

[Belz...]

Sure, if that 249 times are all in places that have the exact same output as the .4%. I somehow don't see all places all over the world as being all good for solar or wind or geothermal.

Hey, I've got an idea! Maybe we can turn the whole planet into a power plant: in every spot, we place either solar panels, wind thingies, etc...

Heh, nice job shifting the burden. I was responding the idea that we can do without nuclear power altogether, and use "green" energy purely as an alternative

That word really bugs me. Green. You still gotta build and operate the damn thing. And what's not green about nuclear ? I mean, all we gotta do is stack the damn waste on the moon. What could possibly happen ?

 

[Belz...]

Oil and natural gas should not be used as they are just too valuble to use for electricity.

I agree. When we talk about fossil fuels people often say "when we're out of oil we'll find something else."

And then how do we make plastic ? We kind of use it a lot.

 

[Belz...]

The pessimists say we peaked 2 years ago and it's all downhill from here.

And why should we trust the pessimists for nuclear OR oil ?

 

[Ziggurat]

And then how do we make plastic ? We kind of use it a lot.

You can make plastic out of corn. Nobody does it because it's energy inefficent (and therefore more expensive) compared to making it from petroleum, but it can be done.

 

[Lonewulf]

Okay, that's a start. Now we just need to show that as a matter of fact there is not enough space to put enough solar panels to provide the energy we need. The mere fact that solar has its downsides is inconclusive - coal, oil and nuclear have their downsides too.

That, incidentally, is the short answer to Dr Buzzo's points as well. Yes, every technology has its downsides. You have to compare the downsides of the two technologies to actually analyse the issue though, because merely listing the downsides of either solar alone (to pick one) or nuclear alone is inconclusive.

Okay. But it's a false dichotomy to pick one over the other, instead of having both technologies. You have to demonstrate that:

A) One technology is not worth having at all, and/or
B) The other can replace A.

As it stands, I fail to see why nuclear and renewables can't coexist.

If renewables cannot produce enough energy to meet minimum requirements we should not rely solely upon them. I'm still waiting for the evidence that should make us fix the belief that this is necessarily the case.

Good luck with that. If renewables can produce enough energy to meet all requirements, we should rely solely upon them if they are environmentally, technologically, or economically feasible within the short time span needed to erect them, and the long time span of keeping them running (nothing lasts forever). I'm still waiting for the evidence that should make us fix the belief that this is necessarily the case.

 

[Belz...]

You can make plastic out of corn. Nobody does it because it's energy inefficent (and therefore more expensive) compared to making it from petroleum, but it can be done.

Yeah, well I'm sure we can replace every petroleum product with something equivalent, but why would we want to get to that point ?

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

As it stands, I fail to see why nuclear and renewables can't coexist.

Or why nuclear with breeder technology isn't considered a renewable, since it is.