No, see, that's just the thing. Using dangerous radiation to boil water ISN'T necessary AT ALL...EVER. We can boil water with solar thermal and use carbon as an occasional backup. We have more sunshine and more desolate locations underneath it than you can shake a stick at. Invest in superconductors, not COLLOSALLY-EXPENSIVE nuclear boilers. And where there's steam shooting up out of the ground, use that instead. A steam turbine is a steam turbine. It isn't fussy about where the steam comes from...and we even have ones that run off refrigerant boilers at much lower temperatures.
Oh goody, you got my thread sent to jail. Unfortunately, just YESTERDAY a federal court put the nuclear industry on ice. So I posted about that in current events. It seems the court was worried that the NRC did not have solid plans for waste storage. And that the court is worried about what would happen if radiation got out of control....like at Chernobyl...and Fukushima...
The energy monopolies only have to do with imperialism, control over the energy sources and distribution. Empire is about control and ruling over everything. Imperialism is the main problem behind all problems in todays world (it stops progress, except when it needs it for military benifit) There are a lot of ways to produce electric energy with all kinds of problems, this system picks the ones that have the most disadvantages (maintenance is for every electric power plant that problem stays forever in every system/converter) Nuclear power (digging for uranium, radiation, nuclear waste) Oil (oil spills, drillings, oil tanker/platform disasters, very inefficient, carbon emmision, polution) Natural gas (drillings, carbon emmision, can cause earth quakes/tsunamis because of tectonic changes) Biomass (carbon emmision, destruction of forests/green/microbiology) Hydro energy (fish can go extinct, other enviromental problems) Solar energy (inefficient, high cost, need recyling cost energy again) Wind turbines (very inefficient, noise problems, landscape polution, need lots of maintenance) Geothermal energy (?) Geothermical energy (needs drilling) Tidal energy (minor problem with fish) Blue energy (?) The best energy sources are geothermal, geothermical, tidal, blue energy, exactly these are never mentioned in politics and in the media by the 'environmental' organizations (you don't have to wonder why -> power/imperialism)
I agree with the OP. It is absolutely retarded to risk laying waste to a populated area for hundreds of thousands of years. There is literally nothing that could be more dangerous. Even if we tried putting nuke plants in isolated areas (which would of course increase transmission loss), we just don't have enough Earth to PERMANENTLY throw away chunks of it whenever a problem arises. I prefer solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal. We have all of these things in neverending supply, and none of them have the potential for destruction that nuclear has. Even the idea of large solar-in-the-desert farms are, in fact, doable, regardless of what naysayers prattle on about. Transmission loss can be virtually eliminated if we really try. Of course there is the idea of superconducters, which is great, but the science is not there yet. That needs to be aggressively pursued. Fortunately we do have some old tech to use in the meantime for near zero loss transmission. Remember Wardenclyffe tower?
Hey fifth, respond to this thread instead> http://www.politicalforum.com/curre...industry-ice-august-9-2012-current-topic.html You may have noticed: they sent this one to the dungeon. Just like they tried to do with the pictures of those very unfortunate children of Chernobyl...to erase the evidence of their suffering and the hideous hidden nature of their water-boiling monopoly. It's HUGE news...a federal judge telling the nuclear industry it has to have a solid plan to deal with waste that lasts for 300,000 years in highly carcinogenic form to human, animal and plant life. Until they do that they cannot renew their permits or get ones to build new reactors. That's the same as a judge telling you you've just been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility for parole. The catch being of course that nobody can submit a foolproof plan that extends [convincingly] for 300,000 years... ..lol.. I'm going to copy your post to the other thread if you don't mind. If you do mind, just let me or the mods know and they can delete that post.
Yes, it's so "safe" that a federal judge shut it down over real concerns about storing its waste [the most toxic substace known to mankind] for 300,000 years. Define your use of the word "safe"?
Is this what you were referring to as "safest" when talking about boiling water with nuclear reactors instead of the myriad other ways we have to get steam to run turbines with?
That is possible, yes. But has yet other dangers. Simply, yes you can drill deep wells, then force water into them in order to reclaim the steam. This however is almost the same process as "Fracking", and has other dangers. Not only does this pressure known to cause earthquakes, forcing water through these various layers of rock strata also runs the risk of contamination and other side effects. So in order to provide enough geothermal power, you would be drilling hundreds of thousands of wells and knowingly doing fracking at all of them, not a very good solution. Wind and solar are nice, but not really reliable for long term solutions. They can help provide more power for peak energy useage, but many times they actually have to be shut down, either because of lack of the force needed to provide the power (wind, sunlight), or to prevent damage or destruction during bad weather. For the amount of landscape needed in return for the power generated, these are actually rather inefficient. To give an idea, the SEGS 2 solar plant (solar steam) covers over 126 acres (.2 square miles), and produced an entire 10 megawatts of power (enough to power the small town of Acton, about 7,000 people). To scale this up, in order to power all of LA, you would have to cover an area the size of Tuscon just to power Los Angeles. And then you have the problem that these types of plant use highly toxic chemicals as part of the power production. Can you say "ecological disaster"? Personally, I think we need to do more work with low impact hydroelectric plants. This is almost 100% clean, and has other benefits as well (flood control, water storage). Plus these work in just about any climate and conditions, as long as there is enough vertical drop to take advantage of.
I have read through this thread and though you raise many important points in the OP, I think that there are many ways that we can make nuclear power much safer and cleaner; for example there is an proposed nuclear power source which solves many of the issues associated with traditional nuclear power. Liquid Fluoride Thorium power has the potential to supply much of our energy needs and has gathered a significant following because of its potential to make our energy consumption much safer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor While I think that solar power might be an important part of our energy supply one day currently it is much too inefficient to meet even a tiny fraction of our energy needs, mushrooms examples show exactly why solar is not feasible at the moment. At the same time there are many downsides with geothermal power which I don't think you have considered, take a look at a couple of these sources which I have found which outline the problems with geothermal: http://teeic.anl.gov/er/geothermal/impact/siteeval/index.cfm http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/geothermal-energy/5
Oops. You forgot that we don't have any way to deal with the waste and that no nuclear plant is foolproof. Too bad humans are fools. Judge said no. Time to bury the dead pony and invest in other ways of boiling water..
Next time please actually look at my source before casually dismissing everything I just said. again from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Safety "No new long lived waste. LFTRs can dramatically reduce the long-term radiotoxicity of their reactor wastes. Light water reactors with uranium fuel have fuel that is more than 95% U-238. These reactors normally transmute part of the U-238 to Pu-239, a toxic transuranic isotope. Almost all of the fuel is therefore only one step away from becoming a transuranic long lived element. Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,000 years, and is the most common transuranic in spent nuclear fuel from light water reactors. Transuranics like Pu-239 cause the perception that reactor wastes are an eternal problem. In contrast, the LFTR uses the thorium fuel cycle, which transmutes thorium to U-233. Because thorium is a lighter element, more neutron captures are required to produce the transuranic elements. U-233 has two chances to fission in a LFTR. First as U-233 (90% will fission) and then the remaining 10% has another chance as it transmutes to U-235 (80% will fission). The fraction of fuel reaching Neptunium-237, the most likely transuranic element, is therefore only 2%, about 15 kg per GWe-year.[47] This is a transuranic production 20x smaller than light water reactors, which produce 300 kg of transuranics per GWe-year. Importantly, because of this much smaller transuranic production, it is much easier to recycle the transuranics. That is, they are sent back to the core to eventually fission. Reactors operating on the U238-plutonium fuel cycle produce far more transuranics, making full recycle difficult on both reactor neutronics and the recycling system. In the LFTR, only a fraction of a percent, as reprocessing losses, goes to the final waste. When these two benefits of lower transuranic production, and recycling, are combined, a thorium fuel cycle reduces the production of transuranic wastes by more than a thousand-fold compared to a conventional once-through uranium-fueled light water reactor. The only significant long lived waste is the uranium fuel itself, but this can be used indefinitely by recycling, always generating electricity. If the thorium age ever has to be shut down, part of the reactors can be shut down and their uranium fuel inventory burned out in the remaining reactors, allowing a burndown of even this final waste to as small a level as society demands.[48] The LFTR does still produce radioactive fission products in its waste, but they don't last very long - the radiotoxicity of these fission products is dominated by cesium-137 and strontium-90. The longer half-life is cesium: 30.17 years. So, after 30.17 years, decay reduces the radioactivity by a half. Ten half-lives will reduce the radioactivity to two raised to a power of ten, a factor of 1,024. Fission products at that point, in about 300 years, are less radioactive than natural uranium.[49][better source needed] Burial in rock or clay is reasonable and safe by that time, because we've always lived with uranium in rock. Most of the fission products are valuable, so they would possibly be recovered for economical use at that time, rather than buried.[citation needed]" Secondly regardless of what the judge said I thought this thread was to argue the merits and liabilities associated with different power sources not just the Unites State's government's decision to use these sources.
Not "always" big guy. It can also be used to make dirty bombs. You may have heard there's a terrorism problem. Also, you're assuming we'll have a stable government or world civilizations forever. That's a huge assumption. Name me a civilization that has lasted for the half life of some of the transuranic wastes discussed above. I notice the only one the snippet actually gives a half-life for is plutonium, while the wastes generated from thorium reactors are not given: But I will.... You mentioned that the thorium reactors are A-OK because they merely produce radioactive uranium -233. That has a half life of of 160,000 years. http://www.evs.anl.gov/pub/doc/Uranium.pdf Thorium 230 has a half life of 76,000 years: This is the thing about the nuclear lobbiests. They are quick to omit radioactive information and potential for harm for their "new and improved" reactor proposals precisely becaues they hope that judges, administrators, and even [and especially] national leaders in positions of power to enact easy-street legislation for this nefarious industry will not take the time to do their homework on the real, actual nuts and bolts of thorium reactors.
