U.S. is going nuclear!

[Patranus]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: rudder
We're gonna have to fill up those Chevy Volts somehow.... might as well be nuclear.

No we don't.

A hypothetical vs proven technology....

hmmmm...

Why don't we just continue to wait and do nothing and then be SOL while we wait for all of these snake oil technologies to mature.

Just like we should start drilling, we should start building nuclear power plants while we wait for these other technologies to become practical.

 

[PJABBER]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: DLeRium

Originally posted by: marincounty

Originally posted by: QuantumPion

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

You know there are already several new reactors about to begin construction in the next couple years, right? They won't be on line until 2015-2020 time frame though.
Funny that you mention the professor in favor of distributable power was Chinese. China is currently building like 30 new reactors right now. It looks like their aim is to be like France, entirely self-sufficient of electrical power via nuclear and hydro.

Thanks for making my point. We have to pay for these expensive plants for years before they generate a single watt of power.

We don't want to be like France or China, remember freedom fries?

Photovoltaic cells ARE NOT THERE YET. Show me one viable solution right now that's at $1 / watt. We're definitely not there. I work at a PV company. Silicon cells are not going to get us there and thin film is years away from going truly flexible and with low cost. It's got years to go to mature and then to see widespread deployment. Nuclear power is still a viable source of energy. There's nothing wrong with it.

Showing you.

As for solar not being ready, not so.

Moon, thanks for the article references, but I push money toward solar and wind and unless there are massive government subsidies these are not viable businesses nor are they viable environmental solutions for power generation at the scale that is required.

Current wind and solar products at best can be considered adjuncts and not even close to capable of replacing fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro. These are the only economically viable power sources and will be so for many more years. I don't see wind and solar ever becoming economically viable in large scale deployments.

DLeRium has a point. Not only are currently proposed alternative energy sources not capable of producing energy efficiently or at scale, they are in themselves highly toxic in manufacture and often in deployment (ex. wind farms kill lots of birds.)

We would be much better off environmentally with a massive nuclear power build, a gradual shut down of older dirty fossil fuel fired plants that can't be retrofitted to clean standards and a crash development toward higher efficiency natural gas and coal power generation.

We should not stop research, but results in this arena are incremental. Don't put your hopes into some kind of quantum leap.

 

[JEDIYoda]

And they're going to build another to go with two existing plants that sit on nice active tectonic fault line! Brilliant!

http://www.sciway.net/photos/m...c/savannah-river-site/ -- link does not say nthere are two active fault liners!



You just popping off at the mouth again or can you back up what you are saying?

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: Patranus

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: rudder
We're gonna have to fill up those Chevy Volts somehow.... might as well be nuclear.

No we don't.

A hypothetical vs proven technology....

hmmmm...

Why don't we just continue to wait and do nothing and then be SOL while we wait for all of these snake oil technologies to mature.

Just like we should start drilling, we should start building nuclear power plants while we wait for these other technologies to become practical.

Nuclear has a long history of proving it produces toxins that kill for hundreds of thousands of years that we will never ever safely store because everybody wants to sell power but nobody wants to clean up the waste and nobody but nobody wants is stored in their back yard. If you can't fuck Nevada you can't fuck anybody.

Nuclear power is for mental pygmies, men with pocket protectors and no social skills, people who don't have tans and don't play with children. Only a sociopath with no personality skills would create poisons that last hundreds of thousands of years. It's a nerd's pipe dream for people who can't even wipe their ass much less figure out where to put nuclear waste. The attempt to go nuclear is equivalent to butting your head on a wall. Ordinary citizens won't allow nuclear around their kids. So wake the fuck up and get off the nuclear kick. Only an asshole would create a poison that can kill for thousands of years.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

you do not know what you are talking about!
niether of your solutions are as practical as nuclear...

 

[Moonbeam]

PJ: Moon, thanks for the article references, but I push money toward solar and wind and unless there are massive government subsidies these are not viable businesses nor are they viable environmental solutions for power generation at the scale that is required.

Current wind and solar products at best can be considered adjuncts and not even close to capable of replacing fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro. These are the only economically viable power sources and will be so for many more years. I don't see wind and solar ever becoming economically viable in large scale deployments.

DLeRium has a point. Not only are currently proposed alternative energy sources not capable of producing energy efficiently or at scale, they are in themselves highly toxic in manufacture and often in deployment (ex. wind farms kill lots of birds.)

We would be much better off environmentally with a massive nuclear power build, a gradual shut down of older dirty fossil fuel fired plants that can't be retrofitted to clean standards and a crash development toward higher efficiency natural gas and coal power generation.

We should not stop research, but results in this arena are incremental. Don't put your hopes into some kind of quantum leap.

M: Nuclear is not a viable business. There isn't a nuclear plant in this country that will be build without government money. No responsible institutions would run that kind of risk to fund them. Nuclear is not close to replacing fossil fuel either. We will never be better off creating poisons that nobody wants. The building of solar and wind is already happening. Just heard an article on NPR today about a Florida city that has people putting up solar in droves because they have a program that buys the power and payback time is as little as one year. One anti-global warming nut has installed enough to send his grand kids to college, earning 300,000 dollars. He may be an nut but he's not a nuclear psychopath.

Science is nothing but quantum leaps and they are happening every day.

 

[Moonbeam]

Originally posted by: JEDIYoda

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

you do not know what you are talking about!
niether of your solutions are as practical as nuclear...

How is trying to build something that people will fight against tooth and nail practical. It's stupid. Why not leap off a roof and see how high you can bounce? Nuclear itself is great, except for the massive cost, but it isn't practical in the real world. The waste we have created has never been put to bed after how many decades. And people freak out about it. You have to step away from the technical and see the larger picture. Do people want nuclear on their roof? Do they want solar cells generating income up there? Do what makes sense and save the future.

 

[PJABBER]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: Patranus

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: rudder
We're gonna have to fill up those Chevy Volts somehow.... might as well be nuclear.

No we don't.

A hypothetical vs proven technology....

hmmmm...

Why don't we just continue to wait and do nothing and then be SOL while we wait for all of these snake oil technologies to mature.

Just like we should start drilling, we should start building nuclear power plants while we wait for these other technologies to become practical.

Nuclear has a long history of proving it produces toxins that kill for hundreds of thousands of years that we will never ever safely store because everybody wants to sell power but nobody wants to clean up the waste and nobody but nobody wants is stored in their back yard. If you can't fuck Nevada you can't fuck anybody.

Nuclear power is for mental pygmies, men with pocket protectors and no social skills, people who don't have tans and don't play with children. Only a sociopath with no personality skills would create poisons that last hundreds of thousands of years. It's a nerd's pipe dream for people who can't even wipe their ass much less figure out where to put nuclear waste. The attempt to go nuclear is equivalent to butting your head on a wall. Ordinary citizens won't allow nuclear around their kids. So wake the fuck up and get off the nuclear kick. Only an asshole would create a poison that can kill for thousands of years.

Look at it a different way. Spent nuclear fuel can generally be recycled back into the system but it is not nearly as efficient in use. Everyone that I talk to believes that we are not that far away from finding a way to convert what is currently nuclear waste into useful materiel. The timelines I am reading about are in the decades, 10, 20, 30 years. So we store waste and reuse it when it becomes viable to do so through advances in science.

This is much more likely to happen based on the existing science than alternative energy sources becoming economically scalable. You are advocating extreme climate control attempts with much less science to back up your advocacy than is being proposed for the use of nuclear.

Storage is a concern, of course. Look at how nuclear materials are stored around the world. Nuclear materiel is not really voluminous, in solid or liquid form it is not subject to propagation with proper containment. So don't think it is an issue of anything but NIMBY.

Take a read of the Frontline story I posted close to the beginning of this thread for an idea of how France went about it - and they keep theirs stored above ground at this point, while we generally keep ours under tons of rock and dirt.

As far as cost goes, it is not particularly more or less costly to build nuclear over any other power generating plant and I believe it is significantly less costly keep one running for an indefinite period of time. The real cost is in having expensive lawyers fight the process through the barriers other expensive lawyers put up in the regulatory approval process. Standardize the review and approval, don't allow spurious challenges and you can have effective review in one to two years, not thirty.

 

[Siddhartha]

It is time to reconsider nuclear power.

BTW OP, congratulations on starting a thread without the words "liberal, left, and Obama in it!

 

[PJABBER]

Originally posted by: Siddhartha
It is time to reconsider nuclear power.

BTW OP, congratulations on starting a thread without the words "liberal, left, and Obama in it!

I can't remember all of the threads I have started, but I do not believe any of mine have any of those words in the topic!

Doesn't mean the discussions don't go in those directions, though.

I've got to say there has been minimal ranting in this thread and the level of politeness has been exemplary for P&N...

Maybe if we continued with technical topics???

Naaah, where would the fun be in that?

:laugh:

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: Patranus

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: rudder
We're gonna have to fill up those Chevy Volts somehow.... might as well be nuclear.

No we don't.

A hypothetical vs proven technology....

hmmmm...

Why don't we just continue to wait and do nothing and then be SOL while we wait for all of these snake oil technologies to mature.

Just like we should start drilling, we should start building nuclear power plants while we wait for these other technologies to become practical.

Nuclear has a long history of proving it produces toxins that kill for hundreds of thousands of years that we will never ever safely store because everybody wants to sell power but nobody wants to clean up the waste and nobody but nobody wants is stored in their back yard. If you can't fuck Nevada you can't fuck anybody.

Nuclear power is for mental pygmies, men with pocket protectors and no social skills, people who don't have tans and don't play with children. Only a sociopath with no personality skills would create poisons that last hundreds of thousands of years. It's a nerd's pipe dream for people who can't even wipe their ass much less figure out where to put nuclear waste. The attempt to go nuclear is equivalent to butting your head on a wall. Ordinary citizens won't allow nuclear around their kids. So wake the fuck up and get off the nuclear kick. Only an asshole would create a poison that can kill for thousands of years.

So you suggest we continue using technologies that certainly kill tons of people and wildlife by directly polluting the air... vs an interim much cleaner solution that makes our standard of living in the information age sustainable and cleaner.

Uranium and Water are abundant, and in the hands of our allies.

Oil is not, we are slowly eating up coal reserves as well.

As others have said, EVs will cause a tremendous boost in our demand for electricity... Research in Fusion, Solar, Wind, Tidal, Geothermal... etc continues... but it isn't here now, and we need something now. Nuclear accidents are far more likely in our 50 year old dinosaur designs than our new reactors loaded with passive fail-safes, and look at the number of accidents we have generated... hell even worldwide where regulation is extremely poor in areas.

Chernobyl was a worst-case scenario. Poorly constructed reactor, safety features removed from the original design, using experimental conditions with all fail-safes disabled.

What happened at Chernobyl cannot happen to a modern reactor, the reaction will literally stop itself passively by design if the reaction gets out of certain parameters.

 

[QuantumPion]

Originally posted by: marincounty

Originally posted by: QuantumPion

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

You know there are already several new reactors about to begin construction in the next couple years, right? They won't be on line until 2015-2020 time frame though.
Funny that you mention the professor in favor of distributable power was Chinese. China is currently building like 30 new reactors right now. It looks like their aim is to be like France, entirely self-sufficient of electrical power via nuclear and hydro.

Thanks for making my point. We have to pay for these expensive plants for years before they generate a single watt of power.

We don't want to be like France or China, remember freedom fries?

So, because nuclear power plants can't be built in a day, we should just scrap the whole thing? Funny, I don't hear that same logic being applied to alternative power sources or electric cars.

 

[K1052]

Originally posted by: PJABBER

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: Patranus

Originally posted by: Moonbeam

Originally posted by: rudder
We're gonna have to fill up those Chevy Volts somehow.... might as well be nuclear.

No we don't.

A hypothetical vs proven technology....

hmmmm...

Why don't we just continue to wait and do nothing and then be SOL while we wait for all of these snake oil technologies to mature.

Just like we should start drilling, we should start building nuclear power plants while we wait for these other technologies to become practical.

Nuclear has a long history of proving it produces toxins that kill for hundreds of thousands of years that we will never ever safely store because everybody wants to sell power but nobody wants to clean up the waste and nobody but nobody wants is stored in their back yard. If you can't fuck Nevada you can't fuck anybody.

Nuclear power is for mental pygmies, men with pocket protectors and no social skills, people who don't have tans and don't play with children. Only a sociopath with no personality skills would create poisons that last hundreds of thousands of years. It's a nerd's pipe dream for people who can't even wipe their ass much less figure out where to put nuclear waste. The attempt to go nuclear is equivalent to butting your head on a wall. Ordinary citizens won't allow nuclear around their kids. So wake the fuck up and get off the nuclear kick. Only an asshole would create a poison that can kill for thousands of years.

Look at it a different way. Spent nuclear fuel can generally be recycled back into the system but it is not nearly as efficient in use. Everyone that I talk to believes that we are not that far away from finding a way to convert what is currently nuclear waste into useful materiel. The timelines I am reading about are in the decades, 10, 20, 30 years. So we store waste and reuse it when it becomes viable to do so through advances in science.

This is much more likely to happen based on the existing science than alternative energy sources becoming economically scalable. You are advocating extreme climate control attempts with much less science to back up your advocacy than is being proposed for the use of nuclear.

Storage is a concern, of course. Look at how nuclear materials are stored around the world. Nuclear materiel is not really voluminous, in solid or liquid form it is not subject to propagation with proper containment. So don't think it is an issue of anything but NIMBY.

Take a read of the Frontline story I posted close to the beginning of this thread for an idea of how France went about it - and they keep theirs stored above ground at this point, while we generally keep ours under tons of rock and dirt.

As far as cost goes, it is not particularly more or less costly to build nuclear over any other power generating plant and I believe it is significantly less costly keep one running for an indefinite period of time. The real cost is in having expensive lawyers fight the process through the barriers other expensive lawyers put up in the regulatory approval process. Standardize the review and approval, don't allow spurious challenges and you can have effective review in one to two years, not thirty.

Personally I think the DOE should license the CANDU reactor design and contract out a number of plants to function as actinide burners for our fleet of light water reactors.

 

[Robor]

Originally posted by: PJABBER

Originally posted by: Siddhartha
It is time to reconsider nuclear power.

BTW OP, congratulations on starting a thread without the words "liberal, left, and Obama in it!

I can't remember all of the threads I have started, but I do not believe any of mine have any of those words in the topic!

Doesn't mean the discussions don't go in those directions, though.

I've got to say there has been minimal ranting in this thread and the level of politeness has been exemplary for P&N...

Maybe if we continued with technical topics???

Naaah, where would the fun be in that?

:laugh:

This is probably the best of your many threads and the reason it hasn't slipped into bickering is because nuclear energy isn't (so much) a politically polarized issue.

 

[Pens1566]

Valedictorian of summer school, you might say?

 

[1LordEmperor1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbase_Alpha

 

[JKing106]

Originally posted by: QuantumPion

Originally posted by: marincounty

Originally posted by: QuantumPion

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

You know there are already several new reactors about to begin construction in the next couple years, right? They won't be on line until 2015-2020 time frame though.
Funny that you mention the professor in favor of distributable power was Chinese. China is currently building like 30 new reactors right now. It looks like their aim is to be like France, entirely self-sufficient of electrical power via nuclear and hydro.

Thanks for making my point. We have to pay for these expensive plants for years before they generate a single watt of power.

We don't want to be like France or China, remember freedom fries?

So, because nuclear power plants can't be built in a day, we should just scrap the whole thing? Funny, I don't hear that same logic being applied to alternative power sources or electric cars.

Just because solar panels aren't 100% effecient, we should scrap the whole thing. I mean, the sun doesn't shine every day! We can't have that, can we?

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: marincounty

Originally posted by: QuantumPion

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

You know there are already several new reactors about to begin construction in the next couple years, right? They won't be on line until 2015-2020 time frame though.
Funny that you mention the professor in favor of distributable power was Chinese. China is currently building like 30 new reactors right now. It looks like their aim is to be like France, entirely self-sufficient of electrical power via nuclear and hydro.

Thanks for making my point. We have to pay for these expensive plants for years before they generate a single watt of power.

We don't want to be like France or China, remember freedom fries?

You think any of the alternatives are different? Projects of this scale take years to come online. Green power to provide 20% power in MN by 2025. 16 years from now.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Originally posted by: Robor
This is probably the best of your many threads and the reason it hasn't slipped into bickering is because nuclear energy isn't (so much) a politically polarized issue.

Well the crowd out there vehemently trying to denounce nuclear power is the small hippie anti-nuclear folks... but they're on the left. You can still see it in this thread. But you can see their fear of nuclear power is just like the fear of guns that some people have. It's rather unsubstantiated.

 

[Pens1566]

Originally posted by: DLeRium

Originally posted by: Robor
This is probably the best of your many threads and the reason it hasn't slipped into bickering is because nuclear energy isn't (so much) a politically polarized issue.

Well the crowd out there vehemently trying to denounce nuclear power is the small hippie anti-nuclear folks... but they're on the left. You can still see it in this thread. But you can see their fear of nuclear power is just like the fear of guns that some people have. It's rather unsubstantiated.

Not a "hippie" ... but do you really think the bolded is correct?

 

[QuantumPion]

Originally posted by: Pens1566

Originally posted by: DLeRium

Originally posted by: Robor
This is probably the best of your many threads and the reason it hasn't slipped into bickering is because nuclear energy isn't (so much) a politically polarized issue.

Well the crowd out there vehemently trying to denounce nuclear power is the small hippie anti-nuclear folks... but they're on the left. You can still see it in this thread. But you can see their fear of nuclear power is just like the fear of guns that some people have. It's rather unsubstantiated.

Not a "hippie" ... but do you really think the bolded is correct?

I would say 3000 reactor-years of operation over 5 decades with zero harm or deaths to the general public qualifies.

 

[Pens1566]

Depends on your definition of general public, now doesn't it?

 

[BoberFett]

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

Long term you're right, distributed is great but you still need baseline power and nuclear is the natural choice. People aren't going to put up with not using their brand new electric just because the the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

You really don't know what you are talking about do you. To put enough solar panels out would cost way more than building nuclear plants. Solar panels are horribly inefficient. Wind power is only good where there is constant reliable wind. No wind = no power. No sun=no power.
Nuclear is safe, it is cheap and it doesn't pollute. It is the best option right now.

 

[marincounty]

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski

Originally posted by: marincounty
It's not going to happen. We don't have the money for these big expensive projects that don't come online for years. We are going to get smaller natural gas plants and solar and wind.

I saw a Chinese professor on TV that was saying that photovoltaic energy will be 10 cents per kwh within ten years. Distributed power is the way to go, with solar cells on every rooftop. Cheaper, cleaner and less dangerous.

Nuclear power was a solution looking for a problem. It's time has passed.

You really don't know what you are talking about do you. To put enough solar panels out would cost way more than building nuclear plants. Solar panels are horribly inefficient. Wind power is only good where there is constant reliable wind. No wind = no power. No sun=no power.
Nuclear is safe, it is cheap and it doesn't pollute. It is the best option right now.

No it's not. Wind is cheaper and so are natural gas and coal. Why would you want to use the more expensive source?

Nuclear is not the best option-the people have spoken. They don't want it.

gas 10.22 cents per kwh
nuclear 11.83 cents per kwh
wind 8.42 cents per kwh

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