And again, everyone here is pro renewable energy.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Renewable energy creates more jobs than nuke.
[/QUOTE]
So what? A lot of things creates more jobs but ends up costing more or being less efficient. We could build things like the ancient Egyptians and that would create more jobs, for instance, but that wouldn’t be very efficient. We could go back to manufacturing the old way using large numbers of low skilled workers as well, but again, that wouldn’t be very efficient or cost effective.
Out of curiosity, do you think that Obama is so in the pocket of big nuclear energy companies that he’d be willing to give up more jobs during a time when unemployment is so high in the US just for the hell of it??
-XT
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Please. Start slashing nuke’s budget, reflect a bit, and get back to us.
[/QUOTE]
Interesting. So, why isn’t Germany doing that do you suppose? They are cutting their nuke budget. Why do you suppose that isn’t being reflected in a huge increase in renewable energy budgets in Germany, and instead they are looking to either purchase energy from other countries or build coal and natural gas plants to make up the difference?
-XT
Germany committed to cutting green house gasses 40 percent in 2000. It was the same time they decided to phase out nukes.
They are way ahead of us in cleaning up. They also are ahead of us in realizing nukes are not the answer.
Well, continued and increasing use of coal and gas is a reality I’ve been pointing out for some time now. It’s a shame Germany seems to be backing away from renewables a bit, but I doubt Germany is going to shun cleaner coal technology and simply belch out dirty coal until the western half looks and smells just like the eastern half used to.
The world will have to learn to make better use of coal and gas for awhile. Renewables aren’t going away, and the technology isn’t stagnating.
Nuke simply isn’t an acceptable short, medium or long-term answer to anything. Maybe really long-term, but that’s many decades away. Probably centuries, right along with fusion.
The coal and gas industries have deep pockets, and formidable technological capabilities. Germany is already more or less at the forefront of green energy, and now they’ll be at the forefront of cleaner coal and gas. What’s not to like?
Energy needs to be plentiful, affordable and Germany, just as the US should, is facing the reality of the situation and doing what they think is best. Well, maybe not the best, but then it’s naive to think Big Energy wasn’t going to have Big Influence on the matter.
The fact that coal and oil pretty much completely suck ass compared to modern nuclear plants.
We have the technology right now, as in today, to build safe and clean nuclear plants with orders of magnitude less waste (including released atmospheric radioactivity) than either fossil-fuel plants or currently operational nuke plants.
It’s the BANANA folks that are preventing those technological gains (which we already have, and have proven effective and safe in such demanding test environments as that bastion of good training and safety features the Soviet Navy) from being realized anywhere but in the laboratory.
BANANA is a fun term I heard recently, as the modern evolution of NIMBY. Not In My Backyard has evolved, along with helicopter parenting and zero-tolerance-zero-thought policies, into Build Absolutely Nothing Absolutely Nowhere Anytime. And to be fair, it’s biting renewables in the ass just as hard.
We can built safe and clean nuke plants? The people of Fukushima were not sold a nuke plant by being told we will build an unsafe and dangerous plant. Nope, as always, they were sold a plant that was top of the line , modern and safe. No worries.
I suppose the new plants don’t have waste either?
And they got what they paid for relative to the alternatives of the time, which was basically coal. The plants of Fukushima are 30 to 40 years old. Data has already been given. Calculate in how much environmental damage, how many deaths, the same amount of terawatt-yrs of power produced by coal plants of the last 40 years would have resulted in.
“No worries”? To the degree that any action is sold as that it is being oversold. There are always worries. The issue then was if the nuclear plants of the time were safer and more reliable, fewer worries, than the alternatives of the time. And as cited before (this thread? another thread?) those 30 to 40 year old plants have been orders of magnitude safer than the coal power that would have been used instead of them. The newer designs are much safer yet and even more orders of magnitude safer than the coal power that would need to be used in their place.
The world need nuclear power-thorium fueled reactors, of standardized design, with fail-safe safety systems.
The new fast-reactor type plant designs, as has been mentioned, eat the waste from old plants and reduce its volume and radioactivity by around two orders of magnitude. You end up with 3% of the waste of old-school plants, and it remains dangerous for centuries rather than millenia.
Fukushima was sold the best plant possible in the 1950s with known risks, chief among them an active cooling design that would melt down if input power failed–that was never in dispute, and was never NOT known to anyone who cared. Modern reactor designs go into warm shutdown and slowly cool safely if external power is removed.
Excuse me? Have a cite for any of that?
Sorry, no take-backs. It was sold as completely safe, as were all nuke plants of that design which by the way, constitute the major design still in use in the US.
I cited all of it the last time I brought this up, which may have been this thread or the dumb one in the pit. You were there.
Excuse me? Have a cite for any of that? :rolleyes:
All the more reason to replace them with more modern and safe designs. Oh, wait, we can’t. Primarily because of public pressure and the knock-on effects on insurance and regulatory cost.
Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing is competely safe. Everything has risks attached. It is clear from reading your responses in this and other threads on nuclear that you have absolutely no understanding of relative risk.
Older designs have more risk atached for multiple reasons. One of which is that they are old. The hysterical anti nuke crowd has made building new and safer plants basically impossible. So instead of replacing older plants with newer, safer plants we are stuck keeping older plants running. It is rather stupid. The newer designs are safer and we should be phasing out the old ones. But due to the ‘Holy crap! Nuclear is scary!’ crowd that isn’t happening.
It is actually quite stupid, especially for those concerned about AGW. Out of fear of a possible nuclear accident we have kept a running accident going by relying on coal/oil.
Slee
Did I call bullshit the last time too?
Your “new” fast-breeders aren’t new. They don’t exist. Where do you read this stuff?
I know several people who have job titles like “Reactor Core Design Engineer”, first of all.
Second of all, I don’t really think you’re worth engaging further on the issue. You have no interest in learning the options.
Are you saying that fast-breeders don’t actually exist, or that “new” fast breeders don’t exist? Because both statements are not in fact correct.
The wiki page lists fast reactors old and current: Fast-neutron reactor - Wikipedia
As for “new” fast reactors, China has an experimental fast reactor that came online in 2010. Does that count as new? China Experimental Fast Reactor - Wikipedia The first wiki link also lists two fast neutron reactors under construction, due to come on line this year and next year, and five more in the design phase.
This report states that 20 fast reactors have operated since 1959, with a total of over 390 reactor-years of experience: http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/shadomx/apps/fms/fmsdownload.cfm?file_uuid=07263B2B-0176-116B-C80F-ED8E7244AFF7&siteName=ieaust
Okay, so fast-breeders have been around since '59 and they reduce nuclear waste to 3% its current levels.
Sounds great!
Except they haven’t, and don’t. They’ve had over 50 years to work out the kinks.
Russia has had a fast-breeder for a long time. They run it as an expensive conventional nuclear reactor, with conventional nuclear fuel, producing more conventional nuclear waste.
We’re fresh out of 50-year-long development periods that just get more complicated and expensive and are always “within 20 years or so,” or “in the future, we’ll be able to…”
Sorry, can’t wait. Shit or get off the pot. My money’s on space elevators and space-based solar power, as long as we’re dreaming about things 20-50 years out. I’m not betting the farm on them now though.
The previous discussion on this was in this thread. These reactors are primarily used in military contexts right now due to (inane) proliferation fears.
The main “kink” is that they are more expensive than thermal neutron reactors and their main advantages (fuel generation and waste consumption) haven’t been worth much historically, it being cheaper to dig up new fuel and warehouse the spent fuel.
Cite for that? It’s not possible to run a fast breeder as a “conventional” nuclear reactor. I can well believe they’re not reprocessing the fuel or using a blanket layer to make plutonium since the price of uranium has remained low. Reprocessing fuel has never yet worked out cheaper than buying new fuel, for anyone. If Russia was really down on the fast-breeder concept, why are they replacing the BN600 with another one, the BN800?
I think you’re mixing up fast neutron reactors with more speculative technology like travelling-wave and accelerator-driven reactors. Fast reactors have been built for donkey’s years. Russia even used them to power their Alfa class submarines, a task for which they were eminently unsuitable. Their ability to breed new fuel simply hasn’t been of great value in an industry where most of the cost is in reactor construction and fuel costs are small. The technology itself is fairly mature.