"Ex-cellent!"
Posted on 05/24/2004 7:09:26 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
Well, we do know what to do with it. However, the same irrational fears that make it difficult to generate nuclear power have made it difficult to properly handle its waste.
Well; lookie here -- another Greenie gets it.
Slowly.
Slowly.
...
..
.
They are doing 20 percent of Denmark's power and will be doing more soon.
Grownups understand...nuclear is best.
They want us to live in caves.
You trot out that old warhorse every time, but there's just no comparison between modern nuclear power generation and that half-assed design which failed during a very ill-advised experimental test.
Denmark can always buy French nuclear electricity off of the grid when the windmills stop. Windmills are NOT a primary source.
That's true. But they are destined to be unhappy given their intolerance. It's what I've learned about the "my way or the highway" kind of people. They tell others what to do. If others do as they are told, but it doesn't work out, clearly they did not follow directions properly. If they don't do as they are told, then clearly they are bad people. They will be miserable forever and destined to yet more misery if they prevail.
It isn't about the environment anymore, it's all about power now, a collectivist end-run around existing political and economic venues in which socialism has consistently failed. Its precepts now have the force of holy canon, and Lovelock will be regarded as a heretic. Watch it happen.
But it can never be 100% without some serious impacts to their lifestyle and economy.
How about just planting a lot of trees?
Nobody talks about that. They bitch about the rainforests and vegetation disappearing around the globe, but nobody just shuts up and plants more trees.
SHEESH.
P.S. Nukes, solar, wind, trees, etc., it's all feasible now. Someday, fusion. Then OPEC will be utterly unnecessary.
100 percent is not necessary at all. It is expected that 40 percent would cause very little impact. Maybe on the order of 10 percent on your energy bill. The rest can be supplied by anything, except nukes.
I posted this on another thread. This guy is right, but not for the reasons he thinks.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1140443/posts?page=18#18
And as for the "cow cork" solution, methane (CH4, Mol. wt. 16) is lighter than air. So my question is, how ya gonna keep 'em down, on the farm?
Amazing!
Old Technology and poorly managed.
Hold your nose and look at France!
Thanks for the nose warning! I hear that all the time yet all we are doing in improving the odds of something as bad as Chernobyl happening. It's just not worth it.
I'm a nuke fan, but
what exactly is your point --
that WE do not have
bad managers here?!
That OUR companies don't use
old technology?!
If something can be
screwed up, I'm confident that
OUR businessmen will
screw it up BETTER
than Soviet socialists
ever managed to . . .
Note that only a modest fraction of energy use is for electric power. Heat, vehicle fuels, etc are other categories entirely and make up the majority of overall energy demand. One regularly sees high figures quoted for minor methods, that just forget to explain that the denominator is only electric energy demand not overall energy demand. Thus in the US, 104 nuke plants (the most in the world) provide around 20% of our electricity. But only around 7% of our energy.
But nukes and hydro are real suppliments to the fossil fuels. The other stuff isn't. In categories like "renewables", the dominant sources are hydro (up to 75%) and so called "biomass", which is largely a fancy way of saying "wood". With modest suppliment to the wood amount from ag byproducts, trash, etc. Nothing even clean about that stuff; low sulfur hard coal in a plant with scrubbers is cleaner.
Below the wood and only about 40% as large, comes geothermal (in the US). Which is twice the size of wind power. And wind power is 10 times the size of solar. All of them put together are about half as important as burning wood, which is only a third as important as power from dams. This stuff is just completely religious power generation; it has nothing to do with satisfying mass demand in a scalable way.
In terms of years of total world energy demand at present levels, gas would provide 15 years, uranium recoverable at $130 per kg or less around 25 years, oil around 40 years, and recoverable coal at least 60 years (harder to get coal can double that). The uranium figure can be raised by a factor of 10 by breeder reactors, at the same recovery price cut off. Increase that and additional ore bodies become economic. At present, ore bodies below that recovery cost are estimated to hold 4.4 million tons of uranium. Only 35 tons per year are actually mined.
There are 438 reactors running in 32 countries. 31 more are under construction, most of them in east Asia (17) or eastern Europe (11). The economic arguments against uranium are mostly nonsense if oil were to stay indefinitely at or above the $40 a barrel levels we are seeing right now. The environmental ones are all nonsense, but are the actual way nukes have been killed politically in the US and UK.
The only good argument against relying on nukes and especially breeder nukes is their potential misuse for proliferation, as we are seeing in Iran and North Korea today. In the present state of world security matters this is a very serious obstacle. Some future security state might make it feasible, but right now the politics aren't there to spread this method. That is, however, no argument against using it within responsible existing nuclear powers with existing nuclear power industries.
As for the fossile fuels, there are issues that deserve analysis but they are ridiculously hyped. Greenhouse is real but its scale is not what the scaremongers have advertised - probably an order of magnitude lower. As for limited reserves, such claims are mostly based on misunderstanding proven reserves at any moment in time for all future reserves. We regularly find new reserves.
Up until 1980 or so, reserves were being found faster than they were being used. Taking the current reserves and dividing by the current use rate gives the time estimates above. You regularly see people do the same with a rising demand curve and a static reserve, arriving at figures 2/3rds to 1/2 those above as a result. But they assume nothing is being added to reserves. Not a correct method. One can either use the difference between use and finds against an existing reserve stock, or drop both on the rough assumption that new finds and increased demand will offset each other. On either calculation, the world has a century of fossile fuel use ahead of it without rationing anything.
And it makes no economic or technological sense to pay 2-10 times as much for energy in the short run, to make coal reserves last farther into the 22nd or 23rd century. When the supply of capital and technology will be vastly higher than today, along with demand for energy. Making it unimportant to have more coal lying around, then.
Nor is it obvious that we are even running out of fossile fuels. The current rate of photosynthesis is estimates variously at 1-4x10^21 joules per year. Total energy use by all of mankind is a third to a tenth of that figure. Sometime in this century, we will probably pass photosynthesis for the first time. Energy is not scarce overall, only capture of it in useful forms is. Sunlight incident on earth delivers 7500 times as much energy as mankind uses now.
We should use the fossile fuels to fund development of capital and technology to make other energy sources more economic. If the proliferation issue weren't there, nuclear would be a perfectly reasonable way to get most of the electric power portion of our overall energy demand. That would leave oil for vehicles and gas for heat, extending the useful lives of both. Instead we use coal and gas for electricity and significant amounts of oil for heat.
Eventually capital and technology will advance far enough, and energy demand and thus prices will be high enough, to make the direct solar route economic. In a pure engineering sense, it has clear benefits - that is why scientists boost it so much. It cuts out energy efficiency middleman terms that cut down delivered useful energy by a factor of 2.5 to 10 at multiple intervening levels.
At the moment that does not matter because energy is not scarce - capital to recover it is. But eventually it will make sense to tap the sun's huge 3E24 joules directly rather than through dead plants. Even that number is an upper limit only under capital and tech constraints, since most of the sun's output misses the earth and beams off into empty space. Orbital solar power stations might take 400 years to become economic, but are perfectly feasible in engineering terms.
Energy is not scarce, it is not going to run out, no waxy buildup of entropy is poisoning the planet, the sky is not going to fall. At $40 a barrel oil, nuke power in countries that already have it and can be trusted not to proliferate make sense. So does developing existing oil resources, and allowing full use of clean hard coal. Funding research projects to help the cost of new technologies fall over time as we use the existing reserves also makes sense. Forcing premature, uneconomic deployment of such alternatives does not.
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