More Anti-Nuclear BS

[Dilb]

Not as much as you're thinking. Once it gets out of earths orbit it wouldn't need much energy. The energy used to propel it would continue to do so since in space there is nothing acting on it. It would continue to fly towards the sun at a constant speed.

Nope. To get it into the sun requires a huge amount of angular momentum to be given to it, otherwise it just orbits along with the earth.

To get out of earths gravitational well requires about 60 MJ/kg, plus a lot of energy to overcome air resistance. To stop orbiting, so that the waste would fall straight into the sun, would require ~450 MJ/kg. I think some clever orbital manouvers could take some of that energy from the earth, but it's still a huge amount of energy to put into disposing garbage.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Tanstaafl

Not as much as you're thinking. Once it gets out of earths orbit it wouldn't need much energy. The energy used to propel it would continue to do so since in space there is nothing acting on it. It would continue to fly towards the sun at a constant speed.

You end up with a problem with (I hope I'm using the correct term here) angular momentum. Remember Newton: "An object in motion has a tendency to remain in motion unless acted upon by some external force." Even once you get something out of Earth's atmosphere, it's still moving around the sun at the same speed as the Earth, pretty much in parallel with it.

That's the reason for the complicated trajectory our interplanetary probes take to get to their destinations; they need to get out of Earth's orbit and into a new one.

I'm really fuzzy (read: hopelessly non-studied) on this. Someone with a better grasp of planetary mechanics may be able to show you how much additional energy would be required to break something free of Earth orbit and send it spiralling into the sun.

ETA:: What Dilb said

 

[Beleth]

I fell fairly safe in predicting that we'll have some type of ballistic-to-orbit capability within 100 years (i.e.-magnetic rail launch or somethig similar) that will allow for inexpensive launches into orbit. This would pave the way for a permanent solution to waste removal: launch to high orbit, with a cheap solid-fuel rocket (or even solar sails or an orbital ballistic system) to push it away on a degrading orbit into the sun.

When that happens -- when we have a safe, effective, long-term method of dealing with the waste produced -- then I will cheerfully revise my assessment of the situation. Until then, we are just trading one long-term problem for a worse one.

Nuclear isn't perfect, but it's quite a bit better than much of what we currently use.

So let's develop the other options we have that are better than either.

 

[Beleth]

That's the kind of thing that used to sound like a good argument until we started to think seriously about global warming. Just consider the idea of carbon sequestration and the truly enormous quantity of CO2 that wouild have to be safely trapped in the earth forever. Makes the problem of dealing with nuclear waste look trivial.

Carbon sequestration is not the only solution to the CO2 issue. If we let plants do what plants do, and not keep chopping down acre after acre of rainforest, we wouldn't have to store CO2 at all.

The highly dangerous nuclear waste is small in volume. Keeping this waste relatively safe is no more of a problem than keeping nuclear power plants and their fuel supples safe. It just takes a little effort.

It's small in volume but it's the gift that keeps on giving. For hundreds of generations. Plants turn fossil fuel waste into food. The same cannot be said of radioactive waste.

A solution that merely results in not many deaths is a good one.

We do not know that global warming today will cause fewer deaths than a nuclear waste catastrophe ten, or 50, or 750, or 2,500 years from now.

 

[Hamradioguy]

Until we can deposit the waste somwhere completely safe, I'll entirly trust it. I still prefer solar power as there's no shortage of suitable land for it, and the last time I checked, no one had come up with a weaponized version of a solar panel.

Hmmmm, let's see- I believe the most power you can obtain from the sun is around 1 kilowatt per square meter of solar panel. That assumes 100 percent efficiency. Last I checked solar panels weren't even close to that level of efficiency. We have a 500 megawatt nuclear plant in the southen end of the state and I believe it's "footprint" is is a couple hundred acres. Someone care to do the math as to the footprint needed for 500 megawatts of solar panels?

The non-radioactive toxic byproducts from a coal plant have an infinite half-life. That's quite a bit longer than 400 generations.......

 

[rjh01]

The best method of long term storage of radioactive material is to put it in a salt mine. Once there it is safe. Even if the containers leak then that is ok as the material will not get into the water table. If there was any water around there would not be any salt mine.

The main two arguments against this are 'not in my back yard and transporting the material to the salt mine can be a hazard.

 

[Hellbound]

ImaginalDisc:

Sorry about the mis-spelling, force of habit And the problem with solar is a shortage of land. You'd need on the order of 35 square miles of panels to equal a single 500 to 1000MW Nuclear plant...and the nuke plant takes much less space.

Blue Mountain:

Ha ha

Beleth:

We're working on safe, long term storage, and current methods are extremely good. Of course, everyone protests these solutions (like Yucca mountain). And compare the actual problem rate. Compare the rates of medical problems/accidents from nuclear aste per year per MW produced with the rates of medical problems/accidents due to fossil fuel waste per year per MW produced. There's no real comparison.

As to an alternative to both, I'd love that, but there's nothing that looks promising on the horizon for a while. Nuclear is a step up from Coal and oil, why not take that step now? Nuclear isn't a permanent solution, and I don't know of too many rational people who propose it as such...but it is a safe, environmentally clean alternative that can give us enough time to find that better, currently un-doable alternative.

Also, plants don't turn all fossil fuel wastes into food. And even then, there aren't enough plants to process all the wastes we produce. And even then, a LOT of damage is done before it's processed. Carbon Dioxide is the majority, but even the "minor" componenets of f a coal plant individually outweigh the total waste from a nuke plant, not to mention that coal produces heavy metals and particulate sthat are not stored or sequestered at all, which are simply released into the air to cause health problems in surrounding areas and loss of air quality.

Right now, with current technology, fossilfuels or fission are the only two viable alternatives for our major production (unless someone knows of one I'm missing). Wind, solar, and hydro are supplemental at best (they can't meet the power demand), and other types (such as tidal or fusion) need more development to be effective. We're at a point where there isn't really another choice...it's nuclear or fossil fuel for our primary production. Nuclear has it's problems, but I'll take it over fossil fuel any day.

 

[Blank]

ImaginalDisc:
Sorry about the mis-spelling, force of habit And the problem with solar is a shortage of land. You'd need on the order of 35 square miles of panels to equal a single 500 to 1000MW Nuclear plant...and the nuke plant takes much less space.

Taking into account the fact that electricity is needed 24/7?

In order to cater to the night time demand you'd need to double the amount of panels, so that half of them produce energy for storage for use at times when there's no solar power available.

Solar power needs huge amounts of overcapacity to compensate the fact it can't produce anything at night.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Hmmmm, let's see- I believe the most power you can obtain from the sun is around 1 kilowatt per square meter of solar panel. That assumes 100 percent efficiency. Last I checked solar panels weren't even close to that level of efficiency. We have a 500 megawatt nuclear plant in the southen end of the state and I believe it's "footprint" is is a couple hundred acres. Someone care to do the math as to the footprint needed for 500 megawatts of solar panels?

Math? That's simple arithmetic.

You're quite correct about the inefficiency of solar photovoltaic panels: anywhere from a low of 12% to a high (in a prototype panel) of 30%. In North America, one can expect somewhere between 100 watts/m² in winter to 250 watts/m² in summer from a panel. (Numbers from Wikipedia; please apply salt as appropriate.)

Then there's little things like cloudy days and dust getting on the panels.

For the moment we'll ignore the 30% efficient prototype cells and go with today's technoloy. Assume an average of 175 w/m² over the summer and winter. To get 500 megawatts, you'd need 2,857,143 m², or an area 1770 metres on a side, which is 706 acres.

That's a bit over a square mile. Call it two, because you need to be able to people and equipment in between the rows of solar cells.

Your incredibly expensive, complex, difficult to operate, and long term hazardous waste of a 500 MW nuclear power plant suddenly doesn't look so inviting. Especially when you consider the vast tracts of land in the western United States that are essentially sitting there doing nothing.

To say nothing of wind farms. There's one in Western Canada that was generating 11 MW with 17 turbines back in 2002. I drove past it back in December and it looked to me like the number had doubled.

 

[Peskanov]

Why not look at some real numbers?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_37/b3950067_mz018.htm

This 500 MW plant is fit into 7 square miles. However, solar plants don't work at night and don't produce the same quantity of energy all the day.

If you want to calculate an equivalence for Nuclear power and Solar, you must factor installations to store energy (very big, complex and very expensive) and calculate some kind of average energy production including night time.

Note: I forgot to say that this kind of solar plant (mirrors and stirling engines) claims 30% efficiency.

 

[Blank]

To say nothing of wind farms. There's one in Western Canada that was generating 11 MW with 17 turbines back in 2002. I drove past it back in December and it looked to me like the number had doubled.

Listed energy production with windmills often "forgets" to take into account the expected full load hours or the utilization degree gotten out of the turbines.

Typically the utilization degree of wind turbines is around 15-40% or so depending on the location, a lot lower than the 90%+ you get out of fossil/nuclear plants.

The only way to really asses the efficiency of the wind farms would be to check out the yearly production gotten out of them and calculate the average productions. My guess is that the wind farm in question produces around 3 MW on a yearly average, which would equal a yearly production of 26 GWh.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Why not look at some real numbers?
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_37/b3950067_mz018.htm

Real numbers? Just when I had a good argument going!

Thanks for the link; it was informative.

You're also right about the inability to adequately control production. For that you need additional infrastructure; that is, more farms (solar and wind). I'm not sure how reliable a Stirling generator is, but keeping 20,000 of these things maintained over several square miles of a hot desert would not be a fun job. You'd have to pay well.

I suspect the enegery inputs required to build 20,000 dishes and engines would be considerable. But the world produced 63 million automobiles last year (Wikipedia).

There would be really good redundancy in the system. It would be hard to take that facility out with a bomb or a terrorist attack.

Cost? The dishes could go as low as $75,000 each. Let's be pessimistic and say $100,000. 20,000 of them is 2 billion dollars. I don't know how much it costs to build a 500 MW nuclear plant. Anyone have numbers on capital and operating costs of nuclear power in the States these days? (Capital's almost moot these days -- IIRC it's been years since a plant was opened or even planned.)

 

[Taffer]

The hottest waste you get from a reactor is fuel rods, the reactor casing, and any engineering equipment used to maintain the reactor while it is running. Most of the material has a very short halflife, and quickly decays (geologically speaking) down to low background levels. Some is hard to deal with, agreed, but most can be safely contained with little risk of there ever being any leaks or what have you. Most people think that all radioactive waste is harmfull for thousands of years, but they fail to realise that the quantity decreases over the whole time (and that the most radioactive substances have short halflives).

In short, people get put off of nuclear power because of events like chernobyl. The chance of anything like this happening is very, very, low now. Also, the earth is a big, big, place. There are plenty of places to safely store nuclear waste until it's radioactivity drops to acceptible levels.

 

[cloudshipsrule]

From the article:

I believe populations near nuclear power plants inevitably have higher incidences of mental retardation, stillbirths, leukemia, cancers, thyroid and respiratory disease than communities further away from reactor sites.

Because nuclear power is not safe, every reactor community has an evacuation zone.

However, those evacuation plans are in reality unmanageable myths. If hundreds of thousands of us did manage to evacuate from New England, where would we go?

Insurance companies as well as the federal government know nuclear power is not safe, and will not insure homeowners or business for their property caused by a nuclear accident.

Nuclear power is extremely expensive and is federally subsidized. Between 1948 and 1998 the nuclear industry received $77 billion dollars from our tax dollars.

There is so much drivel here, it's hard to know where to start. The person who wrote this piece is an idiot when it comes to all things nuclear.

The person believes in higher rates of disease near plants? Nuclear power plants emit next to ZERO radioactive waste to the atmosphere.
What emissions, exactly, contribute to these imaginary increases in disease? None. This persons belief that there are higher rates of disease near nuclear plants is fantasy. (With respect to plants in the US, not the Ukraine)

Nuclear power remains one of the safest power-generation industries on the planet when you look at the safety record over the course of more than 12,000 combined reactor-years worldwide. That's including the disaster that was Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island non-event.

Nuclear power is also one of the least expensive ways to produce electricity when you factor in CAPACITY FACTORS into the equation. When you see numbers on the Internet comparing various methods of producing power (Solar, Wind, Coal, etc...) you will see cost/kwh. That is the bottom line that utilities look at when deciding on methods of future generation. That is also why utilities WANT to build new nuclear plants. The government is giving incentives, yes, but these utilities that have been operating nuclear plants for decades know how reliable and cost-efficient nuclear power is.

The alarmist's point of view on the high cost of nuclear power has been debunked time and time again. Take this article from 2001: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid508.php

Is the author enjoying his crow sandwich knowing that numerous utilities are already staffing for the new nuclear plants that will be online within the next 5 to 7 years?

Solar and Wind are, and will be, important, alternative, sources of energy, but they cannot provide base load power for any part of the power grid in the United States. They are simply not reliable/stable enough. Nuclear power plants are extremely reliable (back to capacity factors here), which is why nuclear plants always provide base load power on their respective grids. It's not magic, it's simply fact.

Incidentally, solar power remains the most expensive method of producing power interms of cost per kwh.

James
Nuclear Plant Operator

 

[chriswl]

We do not know that global warming today will cause fewer deaths than a nuclear waste catastrophe ten, or 50, or 750, or 2,500 years from now.

Nuclear waste catastrophes (I'm trying to imagine what that could even mean, pollution of groundwater that was undiscovered for decades, perhaps?) would be inherently a local affair. Global warming is, well... global, and potentialy affects massive numbers of people.

As for 1000 years from now, we may be able to easily cure cancer by then. Or we may have genetically re-engineered humans to make us immune to it. We can't really speculate about risks in the far future. We just need to tackle the immediate threats or the far future may never happen.

 

[rustytunes]

From the article:



There is so much drivel here, it's hard to know where to start. The person who wrote this piece is an idiot when it comes to all things nuclear.

The person believes in higher rates of disease near plants? Nuclear power plants emit next to ZERO radioactive waste to the atmosphere.
What emissions, exactly, contribute to these imaginary increases in disease? None. This persons belief that there are higher rates of disease near nuclear plants is fantasy. (With respect to plants in the US, not the Ukraine)

Nuclear power remains one of the safest power-generation industries on the planet when you look at the safety record over the course of more than 12,000 combined reactor-years worldwide. That's including the disaster that was Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island non-event.

Nuclear power is also one of the least expensive ways to produce electricity when you factor in CAPACITY FACTORS into the equation. When you see numbers on the Internet comparing various methods of producing power (Solar, Wind, Coal, etc...) you will see cost/kwh. That is the bottom line that utilities look at when deciding on methods of future generation. That is also why utilities WANT to build new nuclear plants. The government is giving incentives, yes, but these utilities that have been operating nuclear plants for decades know how reliable and cost-efficient nuclear power is.

The alarmist's point of view on the high cost of nuclear power has been debunked time and time again. Take this article from 2001: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid508.php

Is the author enjoying his crow sandwich knowing that numerous utilities are already staffing for the new nuclear plants that will be online within the next 5 to 7 years?

Solar and Wind are, and will be, important, alternative, sources of energy, but they cannot provide base load power for any part of the power grid in the United States. They are simply not reliable/stable enough. Nuclear power plants are extremely reliable (back to capacity factors here), which is why nuclear plants always provide base load power on their respective grids. It's not magic, it's simply fact.

Incidentally, solar power remains the most expensive method of producing power interms of cost per kwh.

James
Nuclear Plant Operator

Agreed. And the safe disposal of nuclear waste is only a politcal problem.

 

[DaChew]

I think what we're going to be dealing with in the future is a multilateral approach to energy needs. More so than we are now. Fossil fuels have been the silver bullet for our needs for a long time and I don't think they're going to be replaced by another silver bullet whether it's nuclear, solar, wind, or hamsters on treadmills. All of our resources are going to play a part. There will always be a place for fossil fuels and I think more and more of a place for solar and wind and other alternatives. The challenge will be in the engineering of the most efficient use of the different power sources.

As for the containment of nuclear waste for hundreds of generations, that is an engineering issue to work on. It's not reasonable to assume those future generations will not develop technologies to more and more safely deal with the issue. In my opinion, we have reasonably safe solutions for containment now. I have no reason to believe that future generations will not continue to develop technologies to deal with the problem ever more safely.

 

[Johnny Pixels]

What about fusion reactors? Won't abandoning fission reactors now, make it harder to introduce fusion reactors when they become feasible?

 

[Beleth]

Nuclear waste catastrophes (I'm trying to imagine what that could even mean, pollution of groundwater that was undiscovered for decades, perhaps?) would be inherently a local affair. Global warming is, well... global, and potentialy affects massive numbers of people.

Being unable to imagine nuclear waste catastropes is kind of my point. But let's take groundwater pollution as an example. Say the leak doesn't happen for another 450 years, at which time we've forgotten to test for it any more. If we tap that water for anything, it could be months before we realize that that water is contaminated. It could be in people; it could be in food we've shipped all over the world; it could be anywhere. And by the time we discover and patch the leak, many more months could have gone by. People would look back at AIDS and say "Why can't we have easily-cureable problems like that any more?"

As for 1000 years from now, we may be able to easily cure cancer by then. Or we may have genetically re-engineered humans to make us immune to it. We can't really speculate about risks in the far future. We just need to tackle the immediate threats or the far future may never happen.

We can't save the future by putting it at even more risk. Once cancer is easily cured (don't get me started on the idiocy of genetic engineering), then I say great, nuke away. But not until.

 

[Bigt]

Isn't the fact that we would be sentencing the next 400 generations of humans to stewardship of extremely hazardous waste products

I live within 5 miles of a nuclear power plant and have for over 30 years. It now stores its "spent" fuel in dry casks near the plant. Of course, opponents to the plant and dry cask storage keep bringing up the long term danger of spent fuel, saying that it will remain deadly for 10,000 years (or more - depends on which radical you talk to). Back when dry cask storage was first proposed and restarted the whole nuclear controversy, a local physicist calculated that radioactivity from the spent fuel would fall to a level about equivalent to the original ore in a little over 800 years. So far as I can tell, the 10,000 year requirement was simply a number pulled out of hat - it has no relationship to any reality.

Our local nuclear power company, the Indian tribe that lives within sight of the plant, and surrounding communities are pinning their hopes on Yucca Mountain. My view is that storing spent fuel under a mountain is the dumbest of all possible options. The options I favor - reprossessing the fuel or, failing that, leaving it where it is, are rejected by the Indian community (they had no problem building a casino a half mile from the plant they're so concerned about) and our civic leaders. They want the stuff outta here. The public, in general, seems not to care.

The most astonishing thing about our nuclear power is that all of the "waste" product from over 30 years of power prodution is still on site, in the dry casks and spent fuel pools. Although Sept 11, 2001 mucked this up, ever once in a while the general public (well - actually, friends and relatives of the workers) was allowed to tour the plant. This was always done when one of the two reactors was shutdown for refueling and maintenance. We got to roam all over, into the silos where the reactor head had been removed, around the spent fuel pools (these look so inviting but those recently removed glowing blue fuel assemblies gave me pause), the control room and all the parts that make up any power plant. What got me is that everything was so clean, very much the opposite of a coal-fired plant.

And nope, there has not been any local increase in cancer and many people live much closer to the plant than me. The closest family is 600 yards away. This family is always brought up by opponents, yet it has never occurred to them in over 30 years to move away.