Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant

[Hindmost]

I was under the impression that breeding ratios had exceeded that 1.25 rate you cite. I was also under the impression that, even though no reactor was even close to doing it, there was a conceivable cycle that could breed the feedstocks you cite from lighter elements. It was a very long cycle IIRC.

In your second statement, I am not aware of any nuclear process in a reactor that could breed fissionable material from lighter elements. Slamming lighter elements together is difficult due to electrostatic repulsion of positively charge nuclei...it takes a bunch of energy to get the temps high...which is why fusion is so difficult. Essentially 10-20 million degrees is required to fuse hydrogen and it only as one proton. Nuclear weapons and super novas are the only methods I know of to fuse heavier elements.

If you want to take it as far as is theoretically possible then you can (in theory) get an energy return through the fission and decay of anything that starts off heavier than iron-57. If after a few million years we run out of uranium, thorium and such we could start neutron-bombarding other heavy things until they become heavy enough for fission.

But eventually I suppose we could run out of matter in general..

Proof of breeding in the thorium cycle was done at shipping port reactor before it was shut down. It was done under the Naval program. It achieved a breeding ratio of about 1.01 or so.

EBR I in idaho had a breeding ratio of about 1.27 if I recall from a tour I took about 30 years ago. This mean it produce 1.27 atoms of plutonium for every u235 it used...not bad for the first electric power reactor on the planet. EBR II operated successfully for 30 years...although I can't remember its breeding ratio, but was probably between 1.2 and 1.3 because that was the state of the design at that time. The goal was to build one breeder for every three or four light water plants and the breeder could produce enough fuel for the light water plants. Nice concept of course, but never came to pass...with uranium prices low, there was no real need to reprocess.

http://www.3rd1000.com/nuclear/nuke101g.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor This wiki article is "lite" but is ok to describe the process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_II This is a good link on EBR II--it also describes the inherent fuel safety tests done back in the 90s...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor shows the worlds fast breeders with some additional info.

Now, fissioning anything heavier than iron...for those elements, it would take more energy than it would produce, so it really isn't possible. Plus most of those elements will absorb neutrons before they will fission. I am not aware of any reaction that would fission something like lead and get any energy in return--plus the need for neutron multiplication. With all the accelerator work done in the world, if that were possible, it would have been discovered.

glenn

 

[Lonewulf]

Dr. Buzzo claimed an average of 200 watts per square metre of solar panels on average. This was based on a solar panel that generated 1 kw, but only operated 20% of the time, or 40% of the time at reduced capacity.

Even if they operated 100% of the time, that isn't quite that much. Multiple the result by five, and you get 8.1*10^9 watts of power, which still falls about 23*10^9 watts short. It lessens the load and is not bad overall, I admit, assuming that the weather in Manhattan (is it very sunny there?) is conducive for solar.

Then you compared that to peak capacity.

Yeah, I know. I already mentioned that. I'd rather have the average energy requirements, but peak capacity is still important here.

You do have to counterbalance that with the times that solar produces nothing, like the middle of the night. It would be slightly more reasonable to compare Dr. Buzzo's 200 watts to the average load, which is about 2/3 of the peak. But that's not really fair either for residential solar, because the bulk of the baseload comes from industry which operates 24/7. Residential solar panels serve homes, where middle-of-the-night electricity demands are next to nothing. If you wanted to, you could even set your refrigerator to chill somewhat more when the panel was operating, and let things warm up a little overnight.

There are ways to cut down on energy usage, but as it stands, Manhattan is much more energy efficient than many other major cities so it's already benefitted from that. Setting your fridge to chill, I can't see making a very significant difference in overall energy benefit. Yes, there are ways to cut down energy usage, and I'm just fine with that -- but it takes a lot to make a truly significant cut.

The big problem would be winter evenings when people are cooking warm soup in the dark. But the overall picture is a lot more favourable than you present.

I know it's probably more favorable. I listed some figures as I pulled them up, and then pointed out that they were probably not entirely accurate. I was hinting that maybe, just maybe, it's not as bad as it looked. However, some things don't change:

Solar is still very expensive per kilowatt hour.

Solar still has times where it doesn't work very well (overcast skies, so not very useful in Seattle or England, and nightfall).

The other beauty of solar is that it's delivered where it's needed as well. Apart from the giant solar farm projects, which I'm not especially enthusiastic about, most solar panels produce on site for the end user. So it effectively nullifies transmission losses and costs. A good assessment of solar should account for this cost reduction. It should also give fair credit for the fact that the environmental/health impacts from solar generation are much lower than the alternatives.

Except that to power businesses, you need to transmit the power. An industrial rooftop gives an industry about as much power as a house's rooftop gives a house.

There are limitations. Silicon supplies are tight. The capital cost is significant. There wouldn't be enough installers currently to put solar panels on every roof without a lead time of a decade or so. Solar power is still inefficient.

I agree.

But I sense a grumbling reluctance to admit even the potential.

You mistake my caution for reluctance.

And that's troubling. You have, in the past, suggested that solar panels could be dangerous.

Do you mean my "mad scientist" bit, or the bit about chemical pollution? The latter is more in response to those that think that "green energy" isn't an industrial process that doesn't create pollution, and the former was a bit of humor over people talking about terrorists supposedly exploding a bomb in stored low-level nuclear waste (which, honestly, isn't as bad as people think; like it's been stated, even a cup of coffee can be considered "radiated waste". )

If you want to suggest outlandish hypotheticals, then I can do it as well. As it stands, it's very hard to penetrate a nuclear building's thick concrete walls.

Let's try to establish some realistic pros and cons.

That is what I'm attempting to do.

Solar pros are that generation is safe, with few environmental and health concerns, well (but not perfectly) correlated with peak, well (but not perfectly) correlated with residential uses, and generated on site.

The cons are that availability is limited, costs are high, energy efficiency is low and there are always times when it does not match demand.

Any disagreements?

Nah, I don't disagree. The chemical waste in creating solar panels are honestly negligable compared to other energy sources.

It's correlated with peak only in hot climates, though. In cold climates, you tend to want to heat your house during the night. Then there's winter in many countries and states to think about. In Corpus Christi, you could away with not keeping your house warm in the winter as it doesn't really get THAT cold; the coldest it tends to get to is 50 degrees, for instance. However, further north, you run into problems.

Otherwise, I agree with you. However, the pros seem to suggest, to me, that solar is best used as a tertiary energy source (primary being nuclear, secondary being hydroelectric and wind, tertiary being solar). I'm more than willing to move solar up into secondary, and in fact think that I already consider it such. However, I can't move solar into primary. It's just too expensive and too inefficient. But that's not to say that it's not useful, and should be discarded.

Now, pros and cons for nuclear energy:

Pros: Very significant amount of power, potentially long-lasting energy source if new types of reactors are implemented (breeder reactors, thorium, etc.), relatively cheap source of energy, lower carbon emissions than coal.

Cons: Safety concerns, you *need* to implement thorium and breeder reactors to give it a very long life (as opposed to the 50 years and 200 years quoted), does involve waste and pollution albeit at a far lesser rate than coal.

I would also say that nuclear concerns are over-inflated, personally. You subject yourself to low-level radiation by going outside on a summer day, after all.

When I most hear protests against nuclear reactors, it's almost always the side of fear, and safety concerns. One guy even suggested to me that nuclear energy would turn us all into mutants.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

In your second statement, I am not aware of any nuclear process in a reactor that could breed fissionable material from lighter elements. Slamming lighter elements together is difficult due to electrostatic repulsion of positively charge nuclei...it takes a bunch of energy to get the temps high...which is why fusion is so difficult. Essentially 10-20 million degrees is required to fuse hydrogen and it only as one proton. Nuclear weapons and super novas are the only methods I know of to fuse heavier elements.

I don't mean fusion. I mean neutron capture. And by "lighter" I mean lighter than uranium. It's possible to create the breeder feedstocks you mentioned from elements lighter than those feedstocks by neutron capture. And I was under the impression that there was conceivable, not demonstrated, method to do it with a breeder ratio above 1.

Doesn't really matter for this conversation. Current breeder technology is as you described.

 

[Schneibster]

I have some information to add to the conversation, and some opinions to express.

Here is the opinion: I see many points that are being made that I agree with and few I disagree with, so I've been pretty quiet on this thread. My personal opinion is that a variety of different technologies will be needed, and should be pursued, and in fact are being pursued, that will make a lot of difference in the way we view power generation, storage, and usage over the coming couple of decades. Among them is nuclear fission. I have doubts we can "make it" without severe economic and social disruption without nuclear, but I'm not sure even nuclear can answer the need alone, nor even in combination with conservation and/or increased efficiency.

Here are the points of information I'd like to add to the conversation:

1. I'm not clear on whether numbers for existing stocks of uranium in various reports (particularly that of the IAEA, which I'd put pretty high reliance on due to the nature of the organization) include unprocessed spent fuel rods, nor on how much uranium might be in them. Because fission efficiency drops radically in the presence of fission products, many of which are neutron absorbers, the majority of the enriched uranium that was originally put in them is still present, so this could represent a large source. The US currently doesn't reprocess spent fuel rods because it's more expensive than buying it and enriching it. I don't know what the situation is in other nuclear power user countries.

2. Silicon is extremely common; sand is silicon dioxide. The shortage isn't a matter of how much is easily accessible, it's a matter of industrial capacity, which can be rectified by building more foundries and production lines, assuming one uses silicon semiconductor solar cells. In addition, silicon cells are by no means the only method of using solar power, nor is semiconductor or even photoelectric effect technology.

3. Super/ultracapacitors are probably right on the horizon; a startup company in Texas has a contract to build ultracapacitors using thin film technology adapted from disk drive manufacturing to produce them for a Canadian electric car manufacturer, and the venture capital firm that is funding the Texas startup is one of the most successful technical sector VC firms in history; their former clients are household names like Google and Amazon, and Sun Microsystems and Compaq. Such power storage technology would revolutionize renewable sources by allowing extremely high efficiency storage with no chemical waste downside, and essentially permanent power storage arrays that would not need to be periodically replaced except on a timescale longer than a human lifetime.

4. Fusion may be closer than ITER. Robert Bussard, who recently passed away, was working on inertial confinement fusion, based on the general idea behind the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor, called the Polywell, and claimed to have solved most if not all of the technical problems associated with it. He was being funded by the US Navy, and had sustained fusion on a timescale that is essentially forever on the timescale of atomic events at a rate 100,000 times greater than the fusor. The contract he was working under was defunded abruptly to find money for the Iraq war. At least some funding has been restored recently, and despite the fact that he is gone, the company he founded and the staff he trained is pressing forward with the next proof-of-concept design. Because a military contract is involved, there is some question as to what exactly is going on, because some of the information is contractually forbidden to be released, and Bussard may have passed away before he was able to complete scientific documentation appropriate for a peer-reviewed publication which he might or might not have been permitted to present in the scientific literature. If Bussard was right, and there's a significant chance he was because he was not only a nuclear physicist who had specialized in fusion physics, but also the Assistant Director of the Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division of the old US Atomic Energy Commission, which was the division of the AEC that promoted and directed the US Tokamak experiments of the 1970s and 1980s, which have led to ITER, and also the principal investigator for the Riggatron, which is still being experimented on at Princeton, there is a possibility that we will be producing gigawatt fusion plants by the middle of this century if not earlier.
The Riggatron is still under investigation as well, and there are a couple more efforts that might or might not wind up being worthwhile, even if ITER is delayed or fails completely.

5. There are also two other fusion efforts that I consider promising being worked on; both are "small" in the sense that if they work, reactors could be produced appropriate for a single family home or a few homes. One uses a plasma contained by a moving electron cloud whose physics are similar to those of a smoke ring, and causes two such rings to collide, producing momentary high pressures and temperatures in the two plasmas; the other uses an electrified tube with a spike electrode down the middle and a moving arc discharge very like a Jacob's Ladder to produce momentary high temperatures and pressures necessary to produce fusion. The first is based on something called "electron spiral toroids," and is being developed by Electron Power Systems; the second is called "plasma focus fusion," and is being developed by Lawrenceville Plasma Physics. Both are having trouble getting funding, although EPS claims to have partnered with an aerospace company, and Lawrenceville has a patent and has done some collaboration with the government of Chile, and has signed an agreement with a Swiss energy startup named CMEF. Both would produce pulses of power rather than continuous fusion; fortuitously, developments in power conversion in the 1980s have resulted in production of power supplies capable of converting pulses into the continuous streams that our appliances and other equipment use. In the absence of substantial funding, of course, these are not going anywhere quickly, but with the changes in the public attitude, the possibilities may expand if we can find the political will to follow up on them, and if they turn out to be viable. Furthermore, both appear to have at least some commercial funding, although it's not necessarily clear what will happen or even what's going on now. Both organizations have pretty technically credible descriptions, and appear to have convinced engineering firms that have the knowledge to evaluate their claims that there's something to them.

So (a little more opinion) there are some hopeful developments on the horizon, and some mitigations; but I think it's clear not only that we need something to replace fossil fuels, and that nuclear cannot fix everything, but also that conservation is going to become more important, and that we need to expect there are going to be some significant economic disruptions. Hopefully people in general will prove capable of comprehending that fusion research and renewables research are pretty much the most important things going, and elect representatives who will enact the necessary legislation to fund them. If not, it's going to get very dicey. Furthermore, I think it's clear that we need fission reactors to get us past the "hump." I don't think current oil prices are going down anytime soon, and I think that global warming puts a cap on how much fossil fuel generation people are going to tolerate even if they were.

Finally, I feel strongly that if both nuclear fission and other technologies including both fusion and renewables are not pursued aggressively, we may be in for some pretty hard times, and even if they are that may only mitigate them, not prevent them entirely.

 

[Lonewulf]

From what I understand of fusion, even the most optimistic predictions put it at a much much much higher price than any fission reactor. I'm just not sure if it's ever really going to become economically feasible.

As for supercapacitors, most reports I've heard of have been rather skeptical as to whether they really are as great as is claimed. I hope they are.

As for nuclear not being able to fix everything, I don't think anyone's really claimed that it could. However, from what I understand, nuclear is much more capable (economically) in replacing the majority of fossil fuel use for energy, especially for industrial and commercial concerns. However, solar definitely has it's place, as well as wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric. I'd love to see greater use of those technologies.

 

[Schneibster]

From what I understand of fusion, even the most optimistic predictions put it at a much much much higher price than any fission reactor. I'm just not sure if it's ever really going to become economically feasible.

Well, the proof fusion works rises every morning.

As far as economically feasible, once you've built the plant, the fuel is abundant and incredibly cheap, and if any of the approaches other than ITER that I've detailed above works (and I recommend you do a LOT more research before you tell me they won't) the plants will cost less, potentially substantially less, than a fission reactor. Furthermore, none of them produces a substantial amount of high-level nuclear waste, and none of them can "run away" and create a huge radioactive mess (although with current safety standards fission reactors are substantially immune to this too). DP and DT fusion inherently produce neutrons, so shielding is required, and some radioactive waste will be produced, but the Polywell should be capable of PB11 fusion, which does not produce a substantial amount of neutrons, and the Polywell is both the best funded and most likely viable of the non-Tokamak approaches.

As for supercapacitors, most reports I've heard of have been rather skeptical as to whether they really are as great as is claimed. I hope they are.

I'd make sure you know who KPC&B are; their track record is pretty impressive. I merely touched the tip of the iceberg; AOL, Electronic Arts, Genentech, LSI Logic, and about 300 others that are very well known and very successful are in their portfolio. These guys do not screw around, and they're "in." And the patent is granted, and the product in production; EEStor is the name of the company.

Maxwell (a well-known capacitor manufacturer- unless you are a total technophobe you almost certainly have a Maxwell capacitor in some piece of equipment in your home) already makes supercapacitors; distributors have them on their line cards, and they're supplying them to a number of different industrial and consumer product markets. Have fun in your basement.

To top it all off, China is running two supercapacitor buses on Shanghai route 11, and Germany has light rail running on supercapacitors in Mannheim. I think you're overly pessimistic.

As for nuclear not being able to fix everything, I don't think anyone's really claimed that it could. However, from what I understand, nuclear is much more capable (economically) in replacing the majority of fossil fuel use for energy, especially for industrial and commercial concerns. However, solar definitely has it's place, as well as wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric. I'd love to see greater use of those technologies.

We'll see; fission plants have a long lead time, and there is residual resistance left over from the TMI/China Syndrome debacle in the 1980s in the US, and Chernobyl. A more unfortunate series of events for fission plant development is hard to imagine, and as a result we not only have to deal with the political aspects, but also the dearth of technical talent. The engineers and craftsmen who must be available to build and operate a significant number of fission plants in the US simply do not exist right now, and college tuitions are astronomical and funding options scarce. There is a great deal to be done, and little time to do it.

 

[Lonewulf]

Well, the proof fusion works rises every morning.

As far as economically feasible, once you've built the plant, the fuel is abundant and incredibly cheap, and if any of the approaches other than ITER that I've detailed above works (and I recommend you do a LOT more research before you tell me they won't)

Except that I never said that they don't work. If you look at my post, I never said once that fusion doesn't work.

the plants will cost less, potentially substantially less, than a fission reactor.

Really? I haven't heard that before... do you have a quote or a source for that?

Maybe I'm thinking of different fusion types, because from what I've heard the process tends to be very expensive.

I'm no expert, though, and I'll admit that in a heartbeat, especially on fusion. I think I know far more about fission than I do on fission, and that's not saying much at all, since like I said, I'm no expert.

Furthermore, none of them produces a substantial amount of high-level nuclear waste, and none of them can "run away" and create a huge radioactive mess (although with current safety standards fission reactors are substantially immune to this too).

Aye, yes.

DP and DT fusion inherently produce neutrons, so shielding is required, and some radioactive waste will be produced, but the Polywell should be capable of PB11 fusion, which does not produce a substantial amount of neutrons, and the Polywell is both the best funded and most likely viable of the non-Tokamak approaches.

*nods*

I'd make sure you know who KPC&B are; their track record is pretty impressive. I merely touched the tip of the iceberg; AOL, Electronic Arts, Genentech, LSI Logic, and about 300 others that are very well known and very successful are in their portfolio. These guys do not screw around, and they're "in." And the patent is granted, and the product in production; EEStor is the name of the company.

Maxwell (a well-known capacitor manufacturer- unless you are a total technophobe you almost certainly have a Maxwell capacitor in some piece of equipment in your home) already makes supercapacitors; distributors have them on their line cards, and they're supplying them to a number of different industrial and consumer product markets. Have fun in your basement.

To top it all off, China is running two supercapacitor buses on Shanghai route 11, and Germany has light rail running on supercapacitors in Mannheim. I think you're overly pessimistic.

Yeah, I probably am, especially if they're already running.

So, from what I understand, super/ultracapacitors take a very short time to recharge and can store a buttload of energy for a long amount of time, assuming that that energy isn't drained through use?

If so, that would make them very very useful for renewable energy. Charge them up with wind, solar, geothermal, or hydro, and ship them out to people that need it.

We'll see; fission plants have a long lead time, and there is residual resistance left over from the TMI/China Syndrome debacle in the 1980s in the US, and Chernobyl. A more unfortunate series of events for fission plant development is hard to imagine, and as a result we not only have to deal with the political aspects, but also the dearth of technical talent. The engineers and craftsmen who must be available to build and operate a significant number of fission plants in the US simply do not exist right now, and college tuitions are astronomical and funding options scarce. There is a great deal to be done, and little time to do it.

But are there a lot of engineers and craftsmen available for fusion plants, relatively?

 

[Hindmost]

I don't mean fusion. I mean neutron capture. And by "lighter" I mean lighter than uranium. It's possible to create the breeder feedstocks you mentioned from elements lighter than those feedstocks by neutron capture. And I was under the impression that there was conceivable, not demonstrated, method to do it with a breeder ratio above 1.

Doesn't really matter for this conversation. Current breeder technology is as you described.

I wasn't sure what you meant..I should have asked for more info. Anyhow, I would have to look into the feasibility transmutting heavy elements into uranium...a blanket around just about any reactor would work if it is possible. It would really depend on the yield. As something transmutates into uranium...the reactor would have to be able to produce in large enough quantitis before it fissions and is then lost. It is one of the issues with breeder plants...they produce plutonium and also fission that plutonium. Gotta shutdown before it is used up.

glenn

 

[Dorian Gray]

Until there is a viable method for the proper disposal of nuclear waste, then I continue to have problems with nuclear energy.

Weren't you paying attention? Dr. Buzzo will store the waste at his house.

 

[Schneibster]

Except that I never said that they don't work. If you look at my post, I never said once that fusion doesn't work.

These aren't Tokamak or another "main line" technology; these are fusion methods that use techniques that are theoretically probable, but unproven. OTOH, they're all plausible, and in two of the three cases they have actually produced fusion, just not net power output fusion. There is considerable skepticism on many peoples' part due to the "cold fusion" debacle of the 1990s, and I'm never quite sure whether someone is skeptical on those grounds or not; I was just covering all the bases.

Really? I haven't heard that before... do you have a quote or a source for that?

You could watch both Bussard's and Lawrenceville's presentations before Google, and evaluate the two technologies and the infrastructure required to support them. I'm sure I could dig it up if you really were skeptical, but if you're interested in this, I strongly recommend you go take a look at the thread on this forum (try searching on fusion) and google up the companies I named. If you're interested in more on the technologies involved, I'm up for a discussion but it's pretty technical. The long and short of it is, Bussard claimed to be able to build a functioning 50-100MW reactor for in the close neighborhood of $200 million, and both the focus and electron toroid devices are in that neighborhood or an order of magnitude below. We're not talking national government money here.

Maybe I'm thinking of different fusion types, because from what I've heard the process tends to be very expensive.

That's tokamak; it requires an enormous amount of money and materials, and is incredibly sensitive to the slightest technical problem. If you have a problem, it just doesn't work; it doesn't blow up or anything, just no power comes out. Bussard points out why it's so unstable, and so expensive, in his Google talk.

I'm no expert, though, and I'll admit that in a heartbeat, especially on fusion. I think I know far more about fission than I do on fission, and that's not saying much at all, since like I said, I'm no expert.

I figure I'm about as expert as an amateur is going to get; I'm no professional, but I'm very curious and pretty facile with physics. You might want to revive one of the fusion threads here if you want to discuss it; this one's kind of about fission, I think.

So, from what I understand, super/ultracapacitors take a very short time to recharge and can store a buttload of energy for a long amount of time, assuming that that energy isn't drained through use?

Yeah. They store energy physically rather than chemically, like lead-acid and lithium and so forth batteries. There are some unexplored technical means of making them, too, that are under investigation in some materials and solid state physics labs in the research community. I think that we're very close (a few years) to a high-energy-density physical battery that will make chemical batteries obsolete in a decade or less. Of course, I could be overly optimistic, but my sense of it is that there are killer apps waiting and lots of people looking to get rich, and this isn't nearly as speculative a technology as net-power-output fusion. It's more an incremental improvement than a leap of technology.

If so, that would make them very very useful for renewable energy. Charge them up with wind, solar, geothermal, or hydro, and ship them out to people that need it.

Well, currently implemented and near-term available units are on the order of hundreds of pounds for an appreciable amount of energy, so more likely on-site storage, but the potential for what you're talking about is there. I'd put that more than a decade out, though. As far as on-site storage, I'd look for that in a year or two. My impression is that the EEStor guys already know how to make what they need, they're just working the kinks out of the manufacturing process. This is something that had to get done to enable the manufacture of disk drives a couple-three decades back, and the guy doing it was there when they did that.

But are there a lot of engineers and craftsmen available for fusion plants, relatively?

No more than for fission plants, but the skill sets are fairly similar; and if it's Polywell, you don't need as much special skills for the building as for fission. I can't speak to either of the other two, and ITER needs as much as fission, and different ones. From the operations standpoint, I'd say it's about equally technically complex for ITER and Polywell, and more like an appliance for the other two.

 

[luddite]

It's correlated with peak only in hot climates, though. In cold climates, you tend to want to heat your house during the night. Then there's winter in many countries and states to think about. In Corpus Christi, you could away with not keeping your house warm in the winter as it doesn't really get THAT cold; the coldest it tends to get to is 50 degrees, for instance. However, further north, you run into problems.

Peak load in Ontario is in the summer. In cold climates you don't heat your house with electricity. There's a secondary winter peak in the evenings, but that has more to do with people making nice warm dinners and lighting rooms so they can see each other. In Ontario, that secondary peak correlates somewhat with the best winds, but the correlation is a lot looser than the summer air-conditioning load. And I'm not sure it exists at all outside Ontario.

More importantly, a properly insulated house does not need to be heated at any particular time anyway. You can easily heat it when you've got the power. When people are all in bed and nobody is opening doors, the heat loss will be very slow and gentle, and studies show that people sleep better when it's cooler anyway.

So all we've got to do is retrofit all existing housing stock. That's all.

The British recognize this challenge and the Germans have committed to retrofitting 5% of existing housing stock annually for 20 years until all houses have been upgraded to passivhaus standard, where they require no heating at all. Both countries have structures that are much more difficult to upgrade than North American homes:

Key environmental targets are "undeliverable" unless households cut the amount of resources they consume, a government-commissioned report warns.

The UK's 21 million domestic dwellings are responsible for 27% of CO2 emissions, consume half of water supplies, and produce 8% of all waste.

Retrofitting existing technologies is the most cost-effective way to reduce households' impact, the study says.

The report comes from the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC).

...At least 75% of existing properties are still expected to be in use in 2050, the year by which the government hopes to have cut carbon emissions by 60% from 1990 levels.

That is why there is a need to focus on today's dwellings, rather than undertaking a widespread rebuilding programme, the report's authors say.

"You cannot possibly deliver a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by doing nothing to the existing housing stock," said Professor Anne Power, a member of the SDC and one of the report's authors.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5194986.stm

KM: ...We're not yet at the point as other European countries are where we're committing to putting money into the existing housing stock. When a Government says this is the amount of money we're going to commit, and we're serious about this, suddenly industry gets serious about the technology, about delivering product. At the moment we have a housing stock on the one hand very needful of efficient retrofitting of efficient technologies to help reduce the environmental impacts of the buildings in use. And on the other hand we have a load of technologies which are designed for new builds, which don't very well suit retrofitting. So what we need to do is start thinking of very clever solutions whether that's micro-scale biomass boilers, or very clever double glazing systems which can be fitted to listed buildings, but we have to start working hard on efficient systems. I mean I live in an old house, it's listed, it's Grade 2, so what have we got? We've got thick curtains, we've got shutters, we've kind of adopted old fashioned technologies. We should be looking to be able to retrofit our existing buildings to a point where you don't need to heat the building, where passive heating and insulation and body heat and human body warmth actually does it all. And that's what Angela Merkel is about in Germany.

WWF: Interesting to pick up on that German example because they set the target that they would retrofit all the homes by 2025 up to these standards..

KM: ...to European passive house standards..

WWF: Indeed. And that was basically 5% of Germany's housing stock per year and as it turns out they are already significantly ahead of target.

http://www.wwf.org.uk/oneplanet/audio_0000003941.asp

 

[Lonewulf]

These aren't Tokamak or another "main line" technology; these are fusion methods that use techniques that are theoretically probable, but unproven. OTOH, they're all plausible, and in two of the three cases they have actually produced fusion, just not net power output fusion. There is considerable skepticism on many peoples' part due to the "cold fusion" debacle of the 1990s, and I'm never quite sure whether someone is skeptical on those grounds or not; I was just covering all the bases.

Naturally, I understand.

You could watch both Bussard's and Lawrenceville's presentations before Google, and evaluate the two technologies and the infrastructure required to support them. I'm sure I could dig it up if you really were skeptical, but if you're interested in this, I strongly recommend you go take a look at the thread on this forum (try searching on fusion) and google up the companies I named. If you're interested in more on the technologies involved, I'm up for a discussion but it's pretty technical. The long and short of it is, Bussard claimed to be able to build a functioning 50-100MW reactor for in the close neighborhood of $200 million, and both the focus and electron toroid devices are in that neighborhood or an order of magnitude below. We're not talking national government money here.

That's tokamak; it requires an enormous amount of money and materials, and is incredibly sensitive to the slightest technical problem. If you have a problem, it just doesn't work; it doesn't blow up or anything, just no power comes out. Bussard points out why it's so unstable, and so expensive, in his Google talk.

I figure I'm about as expert as an amateur is going to get; I'm no professional, but I'm very curious and pretty facile with physics. You might want to revive one of the fusion threads here if you want to discuss it; this one's kind of about fission, I think.

I'll do a search for threads on fusion, then, when I have time.

Yeah. They store energy physically rather than chemically, like lead-acid and lithium and so forth batteries. There are some unexplored technical means of making them, too, that are under investigation in some materials and solid state physics labs in the research community. I think that we're very close (a few years) to a high-energy-density physical battery that will make chemical batteries obsolete in a decade or less. Of course, I could be overly optimistic, but my sense of it is that there are killer apps waiting and lots of people looking to get rich, and this isn't nearly as speculative a technology as net-power-output fusion. It's more an incremental improvement than a leap of technology.

Well, currently implemented and near-term available units are on the order of hundreds of pounds for an appreciable amount of energy, so more likely on-site storage, but the potential for what you're talking about is there. I'd put that more than a decade out, though. As far as on-site storage, I'd look for that in a year or two. My impression is that the EEStor guys already know how to make what they need, they're just working the kinks out of the manufacturing process. This is something that had to get done to enable the manufacture of disk drives a couple-three decades back, and the guy doing it was there when they did that.

Ah, understood.

No more than for fission plants, but the skill sets are fairly similar; and if it's Polywell, you don't need as much special skills for the building as for fission. I can't speak to either of the other two, and ITER needs as much as fission, and different ones. From the operations standpoint, I'd say it's about equally technically complex for ITER and Polywell, and more like an appliance for the other two.

We need to train more folks, then, I think!

 

[luddite]

It's articles like these that make me doubt the safety of nuclear:

http://www.thestar.com/article/237577

A hole in a radiation containment system at Pickering generating station has not been fixed more than a month after detection, sparking concern Ontario Power Generation is dragging its feet on safety and keeping important information hidden from the public.

OPG spokesperson John Earl said an investigation is ongoing. "It's not something that is degrading the effectiveness of the safety system."

But some nuclear experts say OPG isn't taking the issue seriously enough and is simply taking too long to act. They argue that what can appear as a small leak can quickly turn into a larger problem when the system is put under high-pressure strains, such as during an accident that requires fast containment of large amounts of radiation.

The recent earthquake in Japan, for example, caused radiation leaks, burst pipes and fires at the world's largest nuclear plant, which has since been shut down. The operator of the plant has been accused of covering up past safety problems or being too slow to disclose accidents.

Nuclear safety expert David Mosey, a 30-year veteran of Canada's nuclear industry and author of the book Reactor Accidents, said OPG should know better.

"Something like this should be acted on very promptly," said Mosey.

"This doesn't give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. It may be a small leak, indeed, but do they know how big it is? And do they know what effect it would have on repressurization time after an accident? If they have no idea they should be finding out."

The Star became aware of the problem after an individual claiming to be a "concerned employee" of OPG mailed an anonymous letter complaining that a "hole" in part of the station's radiation containment system was allowing rain to leak in.

 

[luddite]

And it's articles like these that make Ontarians uneasy about the reliability of nuclear power:

http://www.thestar.com/article/247496

Several unexpected outages at Pickering nuclear station contributed to a 13 per cent decrease in Ontario Power Generation's second-quarter profits and triggered a heavier reliance on coal-fired power, the company said yesterday.

Chief operating officer Pierre Charlebois said the increased use of fossil-fuel generation — a jump of nearly 20 per cent compared with the same period a year earlier — will lead to a proportional increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

With an election two months away, emissions from coal are back on the rise and several nuclear reactors have proven unreliable. Had the summer been hotter, experts say, the reactor outages could have left Ontario in a difficult power squeeze.

The fact that both Pickering A units will be down for the rest of the summer likely means continuing reliance on coal plants and increased emissions during OPG's third quarter.

But the summer outages go beyond Pickering A. An 822-megawatt reactor at Bruce Power was unexpectedly shut down Thursday and won't be back online until later in the month.

Pickering Unit 5, which was out for three months between April and June and briefly in mid-July, was taken offline again for nearly a week this month because algae was blocking a water-intake system used for cooling. Unit 8, meanwhile, was powered down on Wednesday for a "brief" fix of a leaky valve.

As of yesterday evening, 2,300 megawatts of nuclear capacity — or 20 per cent of Ontario's nuclear reactor fleet — was offline for unplanned maintenance.

 

[Schneibster]

I've finally put my finger on what's been bothering me about this thread.

Here's the problem, luddite: if everyone keeps dissing nuclear power, none of the kids deciding what they want to be decides to be a nuclear engineer, and then we don't have any. And here we are. We now have a much larger problem with greenhouse warming than we'd have if TMI, The China Syndrome, and Chernobyl hadn't happened, and we'd built nuclear plants. Everyone's running around pointing fingers, jumping up and down and waving their hands about global warming, but the truth is, they should be pointing fingers at themselves, because they turned off the money for nuclear and that's how we got here.

And here you are making basically the same mistake.

Sure, conservation is a great idea. And that's neat and stuff. But the population is increasing, and it's not going to stop, and people do what they gotta do and that's not going to stop either. We need more power, and if we don't get it, a billion people are going to starve, and they're going to start wars to try to take what they need first. So, you want nuclear, or you want coal? Because that's how it is. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but the choices here are pretty stark. We're going to need everything we can get our hands on in the way of generating capacity, and even that may not be enough. When you're riding the tiger, don't let go of the ears.

 

[Lonewulf]

Well, the population increase will *eventually* drop in developed countries, at the least. The birth/death rate in developed countries tends to lean towards the death rate instead of the birth rate.

Regardless, it will take too long to place a bet on THAT trend, and I agree with you altogether, Schneibster.

 

[JoeEllison]

From my perspective, the issues break down into parts:

1) Nuclear power is always messy on some level
2) Alternates work if given a real chance
3) Nuclear power can POTENTIALLY produce power that outstrips the risks
4) There are ways to minimize the risks with nuclear power

does anyone legitimately disagree with my points so far?

 

[Schneibster]

From my perspective, the issues break down into parts:
<snip-n-paste>
does anyone legitimately disagree with my points so far?

Well, yeah. But I wouldn't say they're wrong, just a couple are the result of incomplete information. I'll note where I think that, and why.

1) Nuclear power is always messy on some level

Not always. Polywell, at least, holds out the chance of "not messy" nuclear power. If you're talking about fission, there's really no way to do it without making something messy; so like I said, not wrong, just incomplete.

2) Alternates work if given a real chance

Again, not wrong, just incomplete. Given current technology alternate sources simply can't provide what we need to live. It doesn't matter how much we conserve. On the other hand, they can help, and we'd be fools to ignore anything that can help.

3) Nuclear power can POTENTIALLY produce power that outstrips the risks

If you're speaking again of fission power, it can't fix all our needs for power without help. It can at least reduce global warming, and compared to that, high-level nuclear waste is a minor risk. The fuel supply may be limited using current methods of extraction; I will be making a post on this in a moment.

As far as fusion, if it's tokamak a la ITER, then it's going to be expensive to get rolling, and it might be expensive to maintain. If one of the other methods works, it could easily solve our problems with energy supplies for the foreseeable future; and if that happens we will have the breathing room to step back and take a look at the REAL problem, which is population. And that, my friends, is not a thread in SMM&T.

When you talk about nuclear power, Joe, make sure you understand there's more than one kind; one we can do right now, and know all about, called fission. The other we know works, because it's how the Sun works, but we don't know quite how to make it work at our behest to make power for us, and that one's called fusion. If we can get fusion going, it holds out the promise of just about limitless power, but it's hard to make it work. Fission, on the other hand, is messy, and might have limited fuel stocks, and because it can be very very messy, it is expensive despite the cheapness of fuel.

4) There are ways to minimize the risks with nuclear power

No problem there, but remember that the risks with fusion are inherently far, far less than with fission.

Keep going, we'll get a good list happening. Despite my criticism, a good first cut at it.

 

[Schneibster]

Regarding fission fuel stocks, I intended to put this in my "questions" post above, and forgot.

During my research into fuel stocks, I came across the fact that uranium extraction from seawater has been demonstrated IIRC by the Japanese, and their results indicate that there is at least three orders of magnitude more uranium in the world's oceans than is currently known to exist in places we can mine it on land. And I'm curious about whether that's included in the estimates of usable uranium.

 

[JoeEllison]

Keep going, we'll get a good list happening. Despite my criticism, a good first cut at it.

The thing is, I'm not attached to an ideology regarding this issue. My objections are all practical, and based on being "on the floor" in other industrial situations.

As on so many other issues, I wish that the debate was more reality-based. I know that there is a great potential for nuclear power, someday... and it needs to be balanced with a realistic understanding of the current and practical problems.