Nuclear power

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Pro or contra nuclear power


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I'm not saying that coal is a good alternative though. After all, it's a fossil fuel that will run out one day and leads to global warming etc. supossedly.


At least if there is a mining accident it doesn't affect the earth and people the same way that a radiation leak does.
 
oooooh, good thread.

this is my pet topic - heck, I'm even writing a book about it (expect it to be published sometime after hell freezes over :rofl:)

I am pro nuclear. Personally, I feel that if the danger of global warming is as significant as we think it is, then we should be shutting down coal, oil and gas fired power stations now. right now. not to mention that we would be saving thousands of lives of people who live near coal fired power stations (coal power stations kill thousands of people a year through lung cancer and leukemia)

The only solution we have to generate a large enough base load whilst we wait for fusion or even to get the most out of renewables is nuclear. Nuclear power is clean and safe - but more than any other this discussion has been twisted by environmentalists to make it emotional and distort the situation.

here's the thing... you are exposed to radiation every moment of your life. There's a hill in Edinburgh called Arthur's seat - and if you spend an hour up there on a sunny day, you will take a much, much higher radiation dose than you would if you worked in a nuclear power station from a combination of radiation from space, the granite of the hill and so on.

I visited a couple of sites in Scotland for research - Hunterston B, a third generation Advanced Gas Cooled reactor which uses CO2 gas as a core coolant, and is inherently safe - a safety mechanism suspends all of the boron control rods above the reactor core with electromagnets which must remain powered all the time to keep the reaction going, if the control rods are dropped (called 'SCRAMing') the reactor stops inside of 8 seconds.

I also visited the Cruachan Pumped Hydro station at Loch Awe - an amazing power station built inside a mountain, which is used to cope with short term 'spikes' on the power grid.

the interesting thing is that both sets of workers wear radiation badges - because the guys working in the hydro station are at MORE risk of radiation than the guys at the Nuclear plant... because of naturally radioactive Argon gas leeching out of the mountain.

I am living in Australia just now - they have chosen to not have nuclear power, and man does it show. brown outs, constant power problems, and they recently had a major shortage because an off shore gas explosion - and these guys have some of the largest Uranium resources in the world.

When people distort the safety question and portray nuclear as dirty, countries end up burning millions of tons of carbon to generate electricity, rather than using clean nuclear.

as for the nuclear waste issue - the power needs of a family of four for their entire lives will produce about 70 grams of nuclear waste- less than a cup full. That same amount of energy would produce more than 40 tons of ash - about two railway cars full... and that ash contains a lot of seriously nasty cancer causing chemicals too.. :(

The G8 governments are taking nuclear seriously because they see the scale of the problems with coal/gas/oil, not just the nasty stuff put about by greenpeace etc.
 
Contra nuclear doesnt automatically mean Pro gas/oil/coal. Some still seems to think that.

One of the big myth is that nuclear power doesnt create CO2, actually that's not true.

Uranium mines, enrichment of uranium sticks, transport and storage of radioactive waste also creates CO2.
According to studies: About 31g CO2/kWh.
Comparision: Windenergy 18g CO2/kWh, Wood 11g CO2/kWh.

Over 8000 tons of radioactive waste are produced every year by all nuclear plants in the world.
Wicked.

Also urainum ressource arent endless. The price for uranium doubled and doubled again the last years, caused by chinas raised demand for power.
The natural Uranium ressources lasts for just 50 years (at best), so it will get more and more expensive the next years due the expected shortage.

Unfortunally its not true that no civil people get harmed by nuclear power. i alrdy posted that around nuclear plants here in germany (one of the most developed countries in teh world) are raised rates of children cancer when they live close to a power plants, although the radiation limits aint even reached. Scientists dunno why.

Whether oil nor gas can be an alternative, so we've to look for other ways to get energy.
Fusion isnt rdy yet, matter / anti-matter wont be possible for mankind, so there are only the renewables
(solar, wind, water, thermal)
And instead of saying "its not possible and too expensive, we've to stick to nuclear" i expecting from the G8 reasonable ways of including those stuff.
Those G8 countries spent so much money for bollox (like military), so there's a big amount of money for this energy issue.
But what i'm saying here, mankind is and was always selfish, dumb and lazy. Profit and national interests are mroe important thant the wealth for whole earth.
They wont react until it's too late anyway. So it's with global warming, so it will be with this energy issue.

I visited a couple of sites in Scotland for research - Hunterston B, a third generation Advanced Gas Cooled reactor which uses CO2 gas as a core coolant, and is inherently safe - a safety mechanism suspends all of the boron control rods above the reactor core with electromagnets which must remain powered all the time to keep the reaction going, if the control rods are dropped (called 'SCRAMing') the reactor stops inside of 8 seconds.
No human built machine is completly safe. And especially not, when humans are controlling it.
Ofc they said that its save. Would you say to a visitor of your company that your products are overpriced and crap? or would a pilote say to teh passengers that this kind of plane is hard to land? dont think so.

I am living in Australia just now - they have chosen to not have nuclear power, and man does it show. brown outs, constant power problems, and they recently had a major shortage because an off shore gas explosion - and these guys have some of the largest Uranium resources in the world.
What have the electricity problems you mentioned to do with the way they produce power?

There's just one possibility that could be caused by the way they produce it: They dont produce enough of it and they they have to built more energy plants.
Australia is a huge country. i assume the electricity infrastructure doesnt have the quality of the ones here in europe, caused by the hot climate, deserts and huge empty areas they have to bypass.

The G8 governments are taking nuclear seriously because they see the scale of the problems with coal/gas/oil, not just the nasty stuff put about by greenpeace etc.
Not all G8. germany and italy were against it.
 
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You can rest assured that thousands upon thousands more people die every year to gas explosions, mine collapses and intoxication inside mines than the few people that are irradiated (non-lethally 99% of the time) every year.
Heck, hundreds of people died building dams, too - life is dangerous, and almost any form of generating energy is as well, with nuclear power probably coming in dead last in terms of actual casualties.

I think the big issue here is that radiation is something that most people don't really understand, and it creates a fear of the unknown: "oooh, there's this stuff that you can't see but if you get near it you'll die" etc. It's much less scary to hear about a couple hundred miners getting blown up by a gas leak somewhere, than to hear about a possible "radiation leak" - even if it doesn't harm anyone!
 
I haven't read everything, but I heared/read somewhere that cattle (cows mostly) produce way more carbon dioxide then a Hummer.
With that in mind:
Cattle has been around for thousands of years, I don't think co2 is this much of a problem atm. The problem lies more within the fact that we're running out of fossil fuels from what i've been gathering, especially with Africa and Asia using more and more power.
The only other alternatives we got are : Wind, Water, Nuclear(, Fusion?) and Thermo energy.

I think we still will be relying on fossil energy for a very long time untill we found a different way to power our cars. (which is being worked on heavily, water cars, electrical cars, solar and even wind powered cars)
I don't see why nuclear energy is that much of a problem in 'normal' countries, there are dozens of nuclear power plants and there was only one big accident (which also warned us) In every nuclear plant safety is very tight imo.

And as stated above, more people die in coal mines/oil rigs/'fill in' then by a nuclear plant.
 
it's all about the base load Bart - I am a big fan of renewables, I want to see us using lots more solar and wind (and especially moving toward microgeneration on rooftops etc), but the simple fact is that renewables cannot ever produce the steady state base load power that's needed to run the grid.

The largest wind farm in the UK (so far) is just up the road from my old house in Scotland: it's a 140MW farm, but that's only the peak power rating. in normal usage, it varies all over the place - and on still days it doesn't produce anything at all.

Same with solar - if it's heavily cloudy, you have no power. You need something to produce that big base load to run the grid... and like it or not, the only choices at the moment are Nuclear, Gas, Oil or Coal.

for me, Nuclear makes more sense right now than burning gas, oil or coal. What the german government has done is not make a choice between Renewables and Nuclear - they have made a choice between Gas and Nuclear... and I think that's the wrong choice.
 
I don't honestly see how anyone can be in full support of nuclear/gas/coal. The detrimental effects to our environment of the latter two are beyond hideous, and there is still no safe and reliable way to dispose of nuclear waste. That in itself says we shouldn't be messing around with it. When I was a kid my mom told me I could play with just about any toys I wanted, as long as I'd be willing and able to clean up after myself at the end. It's a simple question that we owe it to our children not to leave them a mess we can't clean up.
 
I'm for nuclear power, but I don't think its the final answer, but its the best method we have at the moment.

Oh, another thing with "Renewable" Energy.. The whole ecosystem of the world depends upon the winds, rain, tides, etc - If we aim to harness all of these systems in order to produce energy, we're going to be taking energy out of whatever we're harnessing. For example, if you use tidal energy to create electricity, you're going to effect the strength of tides, possibly increasing erosion elsewhere along the coast. Say we build a huge wind farm somewhere, that's going to effect winds elsewhere, maybe change the climate in terms of formation of rain clouds, who knows.. but I think it's something which should also be considered.

At the end of it, no matter how you produce energy (apart from maybe solar/thermal, which would have ended up as dissipated heat I suppose.. in fact it could actually reduce the global temperature by 0.0001 degree or something), you're going to have a reaction elsewhere by removing energy from whichever system you draw it from.

If I had an answer to this problem I'd certainly not be typing here, I'd be busy rolling around in my piles of money, but what we're doing right now needs to change and very very soon :(
 
Thermal energy can be very dangerous, they extract steam (water) from very deep, when it goes empty it can cause earthquakes. (And they must use it on 'hotspots', you can't just build a thermal plant if there isn't any vulcanic activity near.)
 
I don't honestly see how anyone can be in full support of nuclear/gas/coal. The detrimental effects to our environment of the latter two are beyond hideous, and there is still no safe and reliable way to dispose of nuclear waste.

I agree completely - we need something else.

I think that Nuclear is the best choice for now - but only because of the environmental and health damage of coal/oil/gas. We need much, much more use of renewables (and this also means environmentalists need to shut the hell up about stopping wind farms)

one of the things I have done is to get a power meter - little plug in adaptor with an LCD screen that tells you how many watts everything uses. Nothing sharpens up your understanding of how much power you use than seeing the numbers surge up when you turn stuff on.
 
I agree completely - we need something else.

I think that Nuclear is the best choice for now - but only because of the environmental and health damage of coal/oil/gas. We need much, much more use of renewables (and this also means environmentalists need to shut the hell up about stopping wind farms)

one of the things I have done is to get a power meter - little plug in adaptor with an LCD screen that tells you how many watts everything uses. Nothing sharpens up your understanding of how much power you use than seeing the numbers surge up when you turn stuff on.

Those power meters are fun, aren't they? I'm a staunch environmentalist and I've been involved in a lot of activity in the past year regarding the issues of energy policies and global warming, I've even met with
Lester_Brown
who wrote some awesome books, "Plan B, Plan B 2.0, and most recently Plan B 3.0" and had dinner with one of the Earth Policy Institute's top researchers and policymakers. They're in support of nuclear over coal, but the fact is that wind energy is more advanced than gas is, solar power is increasing in its advancement every year and in 10 years will be able to supply us with 100x the output it can now, even though now some solar cells can generate under 4 inches of snow, through the darkest of clouds and can hold a massive battery life, even in "temperate" zones which encompasses all the good parts of America that aren't crap and most of Europe. That's fcking brilliant.

Nuclear isn't the SOLUTION now, and it really isn't the best choice. With coal and gas we can tell what the negative effects are and to a degree clean up after them. Nuclear is too big of a risk and it just isn't the right choice to make for the next generations. We need to start stepping down and localizing our energy production, which not only saves money and helps the environment a bit, it also creates a ton of new local jobs. When you have a more localized grid you can start to afford to further invest in solar and wind and get much more out of them. Wind is something that's everywhere, and as far as we know the sun is going to keep shining until the end of our existence. If we spent the next 5 years doubling up our research efforts in these fields we could easily get the projected outputs for 10 years from now to be 2x what they're supposed to be.
 
Ah, the good old nuclear v renewables v fossil fuels argument.

Well, to declare my own interest, I think the future lies with a mixture of (a) nuclear (fusion) (b) energy efficiency and (c) and local power generation (e.g. solar panels on roofs helping to heat hot water etc.).

The current problems facing us regarding energy security are threefold: ignorance, political and economic.

Ignorance first. Mention nuclear power to most people, and the first thought which probably pops into their mind is “Chernobyl”. Followed closely by glow in the dark, three headed seven armed babies. The reason for this is simple. Most people (a) have very little scientific knowledge or understanding, and don't understand the first thing about nuclear power (usually through a lack of education or lack of interest), and (b) don't realise that the Chernobyl reactor was built primarily to produce fissile material for the Soviet nuclear weapons programme. Civilian power generation was simply an afterthought. The first British nuclear reactor, Windscale, was also used primarily to create fissile material for the UK nuclear weapons programme.

Some people are currently getting excited by the possibilities of Thorium as a fuel for nuclear fission power generation. Little do most people realise Thorium was what was originally proposed to power nuclear power stations, but was not used in the end because it was not suitable for producing weapons grade nuclear material. Hence Uranium and Plutonium were used instead.

The other side to this is the issue of storing nuclear waste, with lots of talk bandied about that nuclear waste from a nuclear power station stays radioactive for “tens of thousands of years”. Yes, that is true. But for how much of that waste, and for how long, is it dangerously radioactive? The fact is, most nuclear waste is far less radioactive than what you get naturally from standing outside on a sunny day, or travelling in an airplane, or for the smokers amongst you, from inhaling a lungful of tobacco smoke.

The next point is that people try to argue against nuclear on the basis of old nuclear reactor types and designs. You can see this in action in this thread. Menace says “well built modern reactor”, and then Bart tries to knock his argument down by saying “A nuclear plant near my place reported alrdy 16 incidents since it's launch 30 years ago.” He then mentions another, 35 year old reactor.

I hardly think a 30 year old nuclear power station represents the cutting edge of nuclear technology. Just think how far cars have come on in 30 years for example. This is the standard mistake most people make with nuclear power. They base their views on the performance of reactors which are often over 20 or more years old, and completely ignore current developments in reactor design, which (amongst other things) incorporate multiply redundant failsafes.

People also say that nuclear power is inefficient, and without subsidies, would be totally uneconomic. And yet we have Paul Golby, Chief Executive of E.On stating that without the massive subsidies they get for building them, wind turbines are not economic. See here for example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2005/03/26/ccwind26.xml

So nuclear may be expensive. But this is because the cost of nuclear energy already includes allowances for decommissioning, waste storage and transport, pollution, etc. Decommissioning costs are not currently factored into any other form of power generation. The “carbon credits” scheme is really a belated attempt to factor into the cost of fossil fuel power generation the vast pollution pumped into the air by coal, oil and gas fired power stations.

If you asked me whether I'd rather live next to a nuclear power station (possible risk of radioactive leak) as against a coal fired one (definite risk of serious lung disease), I know what I'd chose.

As to wind farms, Scotland currently gets about 35-40% (depending on whose figures you prefer) of all its electricity from just two nuclear power stations – Torness in Edinburgh and Hunterston B in Glasgow. Strathclyde University did a study a while back which concluded that to replace this capacity with wind farms, you'd need to cover an area over 3 times the combined size of Edinburgh and Glasgow cities with wind farms. i.e. A sizeable proportion of the habitable area of Scotland (note the word “habitable” - much of Scotland is too remote / rugged etc for human habitation).

http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/01-02/RE_info/interesting.htm

As an interesting exercise, check how much of its electricity England currently gets from Scotland and France – both of which countries produce a large proportion of their own power needs from nuclear.

I could go on and on debunking all the standard myths about how nuclear is dangerous, expensive, etc, but that's an argument for private correspondence.

Political point next. Really tied in to the ignorance point. Politicians have vested interests – the only time they will tell people the truth is when the lights have gone out – not before. What is needed to resolve the energy problems we are facing is political will. With most politicians having the attention span of a gnat, being more interested in re-election and feathering their own nests, no wonder nothing ever gets done in time!

The other big issue is tax. Governments the world over are chronically addicted to taxes. The real reason that local power generation (solar panels on roof etc) hasn't taken off is because if people are generating their own electricity “for free” from the sun and the wind, it is hard for governments to justify taxing this. The current setup suits governments – large companies and large, fixed power generation infrastructure which are easy to locate and tax. Justifying tax on self generated power is far harder, and governments know this.

Economic next. Germany has lots of windmills. Yet, the power they produce is intermittent. To get a certain stable amount of power from wind, you need to install more turbines than the nominal number you need to generate a particular amount of electricity. If Germany's wind power program is so good, why have they not got rid of all their other regular power plants? Answer – because wind, like most renewables, doesn't supply a steady or reliable enough “base load” to meet the country's demand.

Furthermore, if Germany has so much great wind power, why are they so chronically dependant on Russian natural gas? (And hence willing to overlook Russia's military adventurism and appalling record on human rights, simply to ensure continuity of gas supply).

The other issue facing people is the vast extent of the current fossil fuel energy infrastructure. Think of all the oil tanker ships, gas storage depots, millions of cars etc, which would instantly become worthless if people stopped using fossil fuels. There's a lot of vested interest in protecting the money invested in this infrastructure.

Frankly, the problem is stark, and people have two choices (I'm not counting the status quo as a serious option). One – go with renewables, and then find you have to drastically curb energy use – this means in winter, no light after it gets dark, far less heating in the home, none of the labour saving devices people are used to, no TV, computers, consoles, cars, scientific or medical progress, blablabla. To cut a long story short, basically back to the middle ages.

Two- realise that renewables may have their use, but will never supply the “base load” required. Therefore, build nuclear (fission) plants now, whilst investing massively in nuclear fusion technology.
 
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really fancy.

But guess how much power you would need to cool down a rail or a train so it can be used here on earth.
In space or on the moon this would be easily doable.

So on earth there's no other way than using magnetic levitation for transportation without mechanics.
 
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LOL thread,but good one

As we ,the poor Human race discovered nuclear power it only can be good thing ,the bad side of this that people dont have high conciousness for proper usage of this great power nor the right production managment of the same,i mean...we can all be really lucky that LHC didnt suck our poor planet in a wormhole...afaik we still dont know anything bout anything.cheers