Nuclear is better than coal, natural gas. 'Green' energies not so green.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-New_milestone_for_floating_nuclear_plant-2901137.html

 

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Dialogue_starts_on_potential_new_Ringhals_units-3101134.html

 

When compared with any fossil fuel source of energy I think nuclear is better. I'm not any nuclear enthusiast but I do wish some of the more passionate anti-nuclear folks would at least acknowledge it as a lesser evil just to be honest. I think in some cases it can even be better than hydroelectric when you consider some of the ecological and downstream consequences of some of the bigger projects.

I think Germany giving up on nuclear and having to substitute fossil fuel is crazy. I know outside Germany their investment in wind and solar, which I think overall is good, make them seem on the cutting edge of alternative energy. However if you read a lot of the German press there is a lot of screaming about the high subsidies and particularly with critical industries the problem of intermittency. I came across this energy projection chart that casts doubt on Germany as an energy model.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl...YMEUd23HeGriAKczoDQBg&ved=0CDIQ9QEwAQ&dur=839

Looking at it, solar doesn't seriously get going until about 2040, while wind goes up for a while and then levels out. What is most troubling is Germany's fossil fuel output rather than dropping continues to increase, topping out at around 2030-2040. It then decreases until in 2060 it reaches the level of their present fossil fuel output. By the way, natural gas per btu boosts global warming at roughly the same rate as oil and coal due to methane leakage. This timeline is not good news. It nowhere nearly meets any restraint of global warming standard that I know of.

My own view is that if we had gone all out on nuclear energy say 30 years ago we would have worked out the kinks and could be well on our way to phasing out fossil fuel by now. But with the global warming timeline being what it is it may be too little too late. One informed nuclear advocate told me now we would need to commit internationally close to a trillion dollars a year in nuclear expenditures to close out most, not all, fossil fuel plants by 2050. It's not in the cards that we are going to spend that kind of money and even that timeline seems too late if we are going to avoid the 2 deg C rise in temperature that scientists seem to think is necessary.

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When compared with any fossil fuel source of energy I think nuclear is better. I'm not any nuclear enthusiast but I do wish some of the more passionate anti-nuclear folks would at least acknowledge it as a lesser evil just to be honest. I think in some cases it can even be better than hydroelectric when you consider some of the ecological and downstream consequences of some of the bigger projects.

I think Germany giving up on nuclear and having to substitute fossil fuel is crazy. I know outside Germany their investment in wind and solar, which I think overall is good, make them seem on the cutting edge of alternative energy. However if you read a lot of the German press there is a lot of screaming about the high subsidies and particularly with critical industries the problem of intermittency. I came across this energy projection chart that casts doubt on Germany as an energy model.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.fastcompany.com/magazine/131/solar-the-graph.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.fastcompany.com/1093653/solar-industry-gains-ground&h=611&w=700&sz=82&tbnid=rwkYGN_jwCCp0M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=103&zoom=1&usg=__XKmbDeNbvoxgfDxPCdp2SHXwMaA=&docid=z62wfWey6HjxGM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RYMEUd23HeGriAKczoDQBg&ved=0CDIQ9QEwAQ&dur=839

Looking at it, solar doesn't seriously get going until about 2040, while wind goes up for a while and then levels out. What is most troubling is Germany's fossil fuel output rather than dropping continues to increase, topping out at around 2030-2040. It then decreases until in 2060 it reaches the level of their present fossil fuel output. By the way, natural gas per btu boosts global warming at roughly the same rate as oil and coal due to methane leakage. This timeline is not good news. It nowhere nearly meets any restraint of global warming standard that I know of.

My own view is that if we had gone all out on nuclear energy say 30 years ago we would have worked out the kinks and could be well on our way to phasing out fossil fuel by now. But with the global warming timeline being what it is it may be too little too late. One informed nuclear advocate told me now we would need to commit internationally close to a trillion dollars a year in nuclear expenditures to close out most, not all, fossil fuel plants by 2050. It's not in the cards that we are going to spend that kind of money and even that timeline seems too late if we are going to avoid the 2 deg C rise in temperature that scientists seem to think is necessary.

 

Thanks Dingo for your thoughts. People like me who support nuclear/atomic power also support geothermal, hydro-electric dams, etc. Engineering companies who work in nuclear/atomic industry-some have also done work building hydro-electric dams, etc. What we believe is that nuclear/atomic energy must be used along with others & it's wrong to say nuclear is evil. If a place can get 100% of it's energy from hydroelectric dams as some places in Canada do, then those places uses hydro-electric & the need for nuclear is not there. If a place can get 100% of it's energy from geothermal as Iceland does, then again, the need for nuclear/atomic energy is not there. But what we're against is having prohibitions against nuclear/atomic energy. We must use atomic/nuclear energy as well. Please know that those of us who support nuclear energy also support hydro-electric dams, geothermal, etc.

 

Hi fis. I'm not assuming you exclude any power source. I'm simply suggesting that devastating global warming problems seems thrust on us now no matter what we do. Did you see the German power graph? And the future upside of hydro-electric is limited and where it is being pursued it is often being done in a matter that has terrific downstream consequences like India diverting water for power that could dry up Bangladesh.

PS. Why the redundant update on my previous post?

 

Small modular reactor to be built at Oak Ridge...

US considers smaller nuclear reactors
Fri, Feb 22, 2013 - The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) will pay Babcock & Wilcox, a nuclear equipment company, to complete extensive design work and apply for permission to build a new kind of nuclear plant, a “small modular reactor,” at a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the authority and the company announced on Wednesday.

 

One interesting point is that the coal released into the air exposes us to more radiation than nuclear plants would.

 

I am not an enviromental frenziest, Im not at all environmentally tuned in. I lived 3 miles from a coal fired power plant, there was alot of todo and fighting over them requiring a large revenue increase to put in a federally mandated air scrubbing system to keep down Coal Fired polution. They installed it and all our bills were increased. Heres the point of this post. After they installed the multimillion dollar air scrubber every morning that I left for work and got into my silver colored vehicle, it was covered with the same black dust residue. Sometimes the residue was a bit chunkier like coarse ground coffee grinds other times finer. Common sense says we were all inhaling that coal dust and nothing changed after they installed the scrubber.

 

How many decades does it take to license a nuke in the US?

Will Yucca Mountain ever go operational?

 

Sierra Club's interest is $. For years Sierra Club took money from Clorox. Here is facts on Sierra Club accepting money from natural gas Chesapeake Bay which they tried to keep secret http://ansnuclearcafe.org/2012/02/07/sierra-club-natural-gas-money/

 

Hopefully you got less mercury and other coal contaminants.

 

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN-Reactors_installed_on_floating_plant-0110134.html

 

Yes and that dust is likely more radioactive than any nuclear plant would emit.

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The Sierra Club started out doing logical environmental work but now is corrupt beyond belief.

 

esp. since the mid 2000s, more environmentalists are debating nuclear energy. Though the National Audubon Society has not promoted nuclear, they have published letters in Audubon Magazine by those (my guess Audubon members) who support nuclear/atomic energy & critique National Audubon Society for giving windmills too much credit. Sierra Club is corrupt. Sierra Club's interest is $-Sierra Club took money from Clorox and put their logo in 2010 on Clorox Green Works-Clorox has had their problems with environmental violations see this http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpres...c803f5a433567467852573b4006b2dbc!OpenDocument. Sierra Club got criticism for their work with Clorox and while it was wrong-atleast they did not keep it a secret. Sierra Club taking millions of $ from Chesapeake Bay natural gas from 2007 to 2010 was however kept secret until it was disclosed in 2012. Sierra Club is corrupt and cares mainly about money and pushing agenda.

We need to expand nuclear/atomic energy & we need focus on smaller reactors which can be put underground. Nuclear/atomic energy has advanced greatly since Chernobyl-they already use less Uranium which lasts longer & more energy. Thorium needs to be perfect. Physicist Kirk F. Sorensen is working to perfect the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.

 

Where would you rather be during an earthquake? Coal mines don't continuously emit radiation after an accident.

 

Coal kills more people worldwide esp. in mining accidents. We need to save fossil fuels for other uses. While coal has gotten cleaner, coal gives out way more radiation & not every nation is using the cleaner coal such as China & India. The American Lung Association supports nuclear/atomic energy esp. as it's better for the lungs for asthmatics. Nuclear/atomic power did have setbacks in Germany, Italy and Switzerland after Fukushima.

Patrick A. Moore in a TV interview criticized what Greenpeace calls a victory after Germany decided in 2011 to phase out nuclear. Germany is building many coal plants to replace their nuclear powerplants and importing gas from Russia. Germany will be getting dirtier air from their coal plants, but Greenpeace called it a victory. Austria in 1978 canceled it's nuclear projects with Stop Zwentendorf and Austria has pollution. China has built so many coal plants that many of their cities have bad air pollution. We need to expand nuclear/atomic energy & we need focus on smaller reactors which can be put underground. Nuclear/atomic energy has advanced greatly since Chernobyl-they already use less Uranium which lasts longer & more energy. Thorium needs to be perfect. Physicist Kirk F. Sorensen is working to perfect the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor.

 

I'd rather be in a nuclear facility, coal mines have a habit of collapsing in an earthquake. There were no deaths attributed to radiation at Fukishima either. Also, coal mines do emit more radiation....And do so every day they operate.

"Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Perspective: Radiation is ubiquitous, you get it every day and probably are exposed to higher levels just sleeping next to your significant other.

 

You failed completely to answer the question.
http://rt.com/news/fukushima-high-radioactivity-well-335/

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

 

I'd STILL rather be at Fukishima than buried alive in a coal mine.

From YOUR link...

"ecause of the great uncertainties in risk estimates at very low doses, UNSCEAR does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels."[7]

No one has died from radiation poisoning at Fukishima. Most of the contaminated water is contained and the little that has found its way to the sea is so diluted (by the sea) to the point that it doesn't qualify as more than background radiation.

Fukushima Radiation Exposure and Risks Overblown According to Doctors

Despite the panic echoed through the media, it turns out that the dose levels, even in the red zones closest to the reactors, were lower than normal background radiation levels in a number of other parts of the world.

http://www.realnatural.org/fukushim...-health-risks-overblown-according-to-doctors/

 

No one has died from radiation exposure at Fukushima.....yet. The effects of the Chernobyl incident are still being realized.

 

Except for miniscule leakeage, the cooling pool is effectively contained. Meanwhile the approx. 2,300 coal-fired plants around the world are spewing radioactive particulate matter into the air 24/7-365 days a year. Year after year, decade after decade. Millions die of cancer....Yet apparently you do not attribute any of those deaths to coal? Why not?

 

You don't even begin to deal with reality, the Fukushima incident was a disaster of the first magnitude. And coal is bad too.

 

The reality is that the biggest earthquake in Japan's modern history was detected and the reactors were all successfully shut down. Shutting down a reactor causes heat. That heat was to be dispersed via electric pumps powered by diesel generators. There were multiple back-up systems but the tsunami destroyed all the cooling systems and backups.

The largest earthquake in modern Japan history, a unprecedented tsunami causing mass destruction and still, there are 0 deaths directly attributable to the power plant. That is reality.

 

People who still oppose nuclear power are luddites. They are backwards technophobes who fear progress and would rather have everyone live by candle light than have power produced by "scary" nuclear power. Nuclear power is by far the safest form of energy of any type including civilian deaths and injuries, not just workers. Ask the villagers in China who have had their soil and water polluted with REE by products from all the strip mining for the materials needed for all those "green" batteries and solar panels. The most annoying part is that they are throwing away Thorium as a by product when it could be used to produce power. India and Japan are investing heavily in Thorium reactors and Bill Gates is investing $1 Billion of his own money in the venture.

Any person who claims to be an environmentalist and continues to oppose the expansion of nuclear power is a fraud and moron. At best they are liars and at worst they are just idiots.

And no, you will never produce even a majority of the worlds power from renewables much less all of it so don't even try and make that stupid argument. Every engineer and serious scientist with a basic understanding of physics will laugh in your face for that idiotic belief.

 

Nuclear power, sixty year old technology as a solution for tomorrow's energy problems.