Enviros, will you ever drop opposition to nuclear power?

Great Debates
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Well? And also what’s the half life of mercury?

The way I see it (and I consider myself very pro-environment), opposition to nuclear power is fool hardy at best. The amount of high level waste from a plant per year is miniscule, plus the safety mechanisms are now inherent in the system, so they don’t depend on human operators.

The cost of nuclear power used to be cheaper than coal but with all the delays and what not during the 70s the up front capital costs cause nuclear power (because the cost is all in the construction, the actual fuel and operation are almost free) to become expensive.

Also, I used to be a skeptic about global warming, but latelywith what I’ve read, I’m not sure. So what is the solution to global warming? Only nuclear, as I see it. Conservation sure, but that’s just feeding the fire more slowly.

Also, you may want to consider this; a railroad car full of coal has about 100 tons of coal in it. Guess how many of these cars the US uses every year to generate electricity? ??? Well??? OK make a guess and I’ll write the answer below.

No peeking.
OK, the answer is 10 million cars. The US uses 1 billion tons of coal per year, so that’s 10 million cars. At 150 cars per mile (guess) it’s a train about 70,000 miles long. And with that comes inevitable pollution. They try their best to get it out of the air, but coal releases mercury and a host of other nasty things. It’s unavoidable. China is industializing too…they use about 1 billion tons per year also…and that number is going up. Plus they don’t have our sense of “pollution controls”, so big nasty clouds of mercury will probably be wafting over CA as China ramps up. So 10 million coal cars, that’s alot, just for the US. Guess how many cars of uranium 235 that would equate to? About 10. It’s a little bit fuzzy but using all energy in uranium (via a breeder reactor) the ratio is something like a million to one, energy density wise. So 10 million coal cars or 10 uranium cars, you choose!!

I think opposition to nuclear is idiotic because the alternative to nuclear isn’t free elctricity that is totally environmentally friendly, it’s COAL. Yes, that’s it. Wind is nice, but more expensive than coal (or nuclear), also intermittent, so it needs backup and power can’t be shipped long distances easily. You can’t ship wind from S. Dakota to Atlanta or NY City. Much of the cost in power is the plant so wind only displaces the fuel (which is relatively cheap)…you still need a good amount of backup supply which is expensive.

Solar? Way too expensive and most photovoltaic is land intensive and construction is not completely environmentally benign. Plus power can’t be shipped from sunny locales to non-sunny ones easily.

Bio-energy? Nice but a niche application. It would take way too much land mass to supply all our energy needs. A square meter of land produces something like .11 liters of oil per year. The US uses 250 billion gallons a year (approx) which is about 850 billion liters.

Nuclear power could also be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for the “hydrogen economy”. Even if the “hydrogen economy” (fuel cells) don’t come to fruition, you could combine hydrogen with carbon (possibly from coal) to produce a liquid hydrocarbon. It’s much easier, I’ve read, to remove pollutants from liquid fuels (before they are burned) than from coal after it has been burned. If not coal, we could use a clean carbon source possibly from pulling carbon out of the air. Thus it would be carbon “neutral” for global warming purposes.

Thus we would be completely INDEPENDENT of the Middle East and all its nonsense. Plus we’d employ millions of people doing actual WORK, running plants, building them, etc. We could have our scientists could work on research on breeder reactors and such instead of just sending the Middle East a check for a couple hundred billion every year.

Anyway, I think one reason why people are frustrated with environmentalists (even though I am one at heart) is they offer no alternatives, just opposition.
I recently read that enviros were HORRIFIED that 60 new baseload coal plants are in the drawing board stages. Well what did they think? People won’t use electricity any more because it’s “dirty”? You don’t want nuclear? Then coal it is!

Also, natural gas? It’s running out too, and is mostly foreign sourced. Plus it’s now too expensive (compared to nuclear or coal) to run as a base load plant.

Well what do you think? 10 million coal cars or 10 uranium cars. Which is the lower impact mining operation?

Also, one more point, the liberals favorite country, France, gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear! NO!!! Can’t be!!

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You seem real angry about liberals.

Take an Advil, calm down.

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GIVE ME FUSION, OR GIVE ME DEATH!!

:smiley:

Seriously, that’s probably the choice, at least from where I sit.

If Nuclear Fusion Technology, Then Baby Bosda boosts the reactor boys.

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I consider myself an environmentalist and pretty far to the left, but I’m not against nuclear power. My brother is an engineer – a software engineer, not a nuclear engineer, but at least he speaks the language – and he insists nuclear power plant technology has improved and plants built today are much safer than the Three Mile Island plant (and much, much safer than the Chernobyl plant). As for the nuclear waste, there are ways of managing it – and let’s not dump it anywhere we can’t retrieve it later! Who knows, our descendants might find a practical use for it. The Romans had no use for petroleum, except as medicine. On balance, nuclear power is more eco-friendly than coal power (with its CO2 emissions) – and, at the present stage of technology, more practical than wind or solar. Also – we’re going to need nuclear power, regardless of whether or not we ever develop hydrogen-powered cars to the point where nuclear power becomes relevant to that problem. The coal and natural gas we use for power plants isn’t going to last forever.

On the other hand . . . uranium isn’t going to last forever, either. From Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, by David Goodstein (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004):

In other words, not long enough. Goodstein goes on to discuss the potential for breeding plutonium from uranium, or uranium from thorium, but the final verdit remains the same: Not long enough.

To really solve our fuel problems, we need to redirect our thinking to:

  1. Massive R&D into technologies using power sources that really are renewable or unlimited – such as solar, or nuclear fusion.

  2. Reducing our energy appetites – through more energy-efficient technologies, but also by changing the way we live. I don’t mean we should consider returning to 18th-century technology – that would condemn most of the world’s population to death by starvation – but at least we here in the U.S. could start to redesign and reconstruct our built environment to rely less heavily on the automobile. We need a web of streetcar lines and light rail lines in every metropolitan area, a network dense enough that everybody lives and works within walking distance of a stop. And we need compact, walkable, mixed-use communities, not the sprawling suburbs we’ve been building since the '50s.

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If worse came to worse, we could get uranium out of seawater. It would be a small increase in the price of power.

The estimates of uranium running out in a short number of years were made when uranium was very cheap and there didn’t seem to be that much around. As soon as the price went up they found much more. It’s basically unlimited.

Fusion 40 years ago was 30-40 years away, and now after billions in research, it’s estimated to be 30-40 years away. There’s no time to waste on nonsense like that. It may not be cheap either.

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Also, I should mention that current reactors use a small percentage of uranium. The rest is “high level waste”. Newer designs use more and breeder reactors can turn the waste into fuel. A breeder reactor would get 100 times the fuel out of uranium, but right now uranium is so cheap that there isn’t much demand for breeder reactors.

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Cite please.

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The problem with hanging your hat on fusion is that we don’t even know if we can achieve breakeven. And if we do, we don’t know if we’ll be able to build plants that can produce the amounts of energy we need. And if we can, we don’t know if we can do it in such a way as to make it economical.

For fusion to be practical, it must be cheaper than already-existing renewable or unlimited energy sources. We know that we can produce all the power we need indefinitely - we have a great big fusion furnace at the center of the solar system providing it. We DO know how to extract that energy. The only reason we don’t do so today is because we have alternatives that are much cheaper.

If we someday manage to build fusion reactors, but the cost of energy from them is twice the cost of solar, no one will bother building them.

So fusion is mere handwaving, and in a serious debate about solving our energy problems should be no more than a footnote. Certainly nothing worth counting on. Basically, serious debates should assume that there will never be fusion power.

The big advantage of nuclear power, from an environmental standpoint, is that the environmental effects are localized. You can’t heat up the entire Earth with nuclear power. You can’t pollute entire countries. You can make a localized mess, but the ultimate scale of the disaster is fairly small. Even Chernobyl’s damage was limited to a reasonably small area, when considered against things like global warming. And a Chernobyl-type accident is pretty much impossible with newer reactors.

I’m convinced that the future energy system is going to be handled like eletricity is today, with centralized power sources creating fuel that is then distributed. This is the promise of a hydrogen economy - build power plants to generate hydrogen, then ship the hydrogen around to power communities and cars. The big advantage here is that it decouples the power generation method from the distribution and usage infrastructure. If we ran out of oil tomorrow, it would be hellishly expensive to change over, because all of our pipelines, gas stations, engines, and other consumers of gasoline would also have to be changed. But if everything is powered by hydrogen, and hydrogen is produced from petroleum, then when the petroleum runs out you can switch to nuclear, and the infrastructure doesn’t even have to notice - just as you can switch electrical generation from natural gas to coal to nuclear without having to change every house that uses the power.

That’s what we need to be striving for now - a hydrogen infrastructure. What ultimately is used to produce the hydrogen is another issue. And if fusion ever becomes practical, which can switch to it with ease.

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This enviro has no problem with nuclear power, ONCE we’ve dealt with the waste generated by past attempts.

Having put my time in at Hanford, I have a first hand idea of just how much we are talking about and how little we have done to clean it up in the last 50 years.

There are still 70 year old power plants sitting out there in the desert, feet from the Columbia River, so contaminated, that they don’t want to deal with them.

When you figure in the cost of taking care of the waste, explain again to me how economical nuclear power is.

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“One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tonnes (about 700 times more than known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for 6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors) operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40 Although this is more than 10 times the current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5¢ per kWh to the cost of electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning $3-a-barrel oil.” [emphasis added]
40 Nobukawa 1994: H. Nobukawa “Development of a Floating Type System for Uranium Extraction from Sea Water Using Sea Current and Wave Power,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference (Osaka, Japan: 10-15 April 1994), pp. 294-300.
Source: Powerful Partnerships: The Federal Role In International Cooperation On Energy Innovation. A Report From The President’s Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology Panel On International Cooperation In Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, And Deployment. Washington, DC, June 1999, p. 5-26 - 5-27

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Another environmentally-conscious left leaning proponent of the use of nuclear power with the emphasis on reducing the waste. It can be done if we throw enough money at it.

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I’m still not clear from this – do they already know how to extract uranium from seawater, or is it just something they’re working on?

13

I have two problems with nuclear power: the waste, and the fact that I simply do not trust the government or industry to do all it can to prevent screw-ups at every point in a plant’s (and its ejecta’s) life. Neither has done anything to earn that trust, and in fact has usually done the opposite.

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First, you’ve got to show me that the total cost of ownership makes it attractive. Certainly remember the 70’s plants touted as being real cheap, and then rates went up (Rancho Seco in Sacto if anyone cares to research it). That was just pure operating expense. Not to mention cleanup and storage, etc.

So first thing that has to be proven to me is that it makes economic sense to go nuclear

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Canada gets a significant amount of its electrical power from nuclear.

From the Canadian Nuclear FAQ:

But how about the cost for everything including plant construction, decommissioning, cleanup, etc?

The graph shows that the CANDU reactor has a lower overall cost than natural gas as long as its run at a capacity factor greater than about 25%. It passes coal at about 50%. So as long as you can run a CANDU reactor at a load factor of greater than 50%, it’s pretty damned cheap.

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Welcome to the SDMB, ** Kenny**.

In addition to the above, you neglected to mention the average useful lifetime of a nuclear reactor and the cost of decommisioning.

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Y’know that a good bit of the so called “low level” waste generated by nuclear power is, in all probability, not radioactive at all? It’s potentially contaminated, though, and it’s easier and cheaper to just control it as radioactive material than clear it for general disposal. “So contaminated” could mean that maybe it’s contaminated, maybe it’s not, but it’s not cost effective to find out, rather than just control the area.

Anyway, coal contains radioactive impurities in quantities sufficient that, if you put the same radiological controls on a coal power plant, it would probably have to be shut down for decontamination. But there’s no paper trail on anything and everything that so much as might have possibly sat in the same room as a small piece of coal. Whoa… there’s an idea. A power plant that burns all the paperwork generated by the nuclear power plants! :stuck_out_tongue:

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As for plant costs and de-commissioning and waste disposal.

when people quote a cost for any plant that includes plant capital costs. Most of the cost of nuclear and probably 1/2 of coal is in the plant. The actual fuel for nuclear is basically free, maybe .1 cent per kwh.

There is a plant in GA whose operating and fuel cost is 1.33 cents per KWH. That’s US cents which are about 1.3 Canadien cents. So the article about Canada’s cost being 5 cents Canadien, likely includes capital cost.

Capital costs for plants are usually quoted in $ / KW. If a nuclear plant can be build for $2,000/KW and run all year pretty much flat out (given that you’ve already build the plant and incurred the expense they only make sense as base-load plants), then that’s about 8,700 kwh on a plant that cost $2,000 / KW. If the capital costs are 10% of $2,000 or $200 then that’s about 2.5 cents per kwh. So that gives you some idea of capital cost.

In the 70s plants had cost overruns due to many factors. In CA for example lawsuits delayed plants and caused changed designs for years. Streamlined liscensing and standardized designs would solve this. Also the plants that ran as cheaply as coal back in the 60s were ancient designs. Newer designs are cleaner, cheaper, and safer.

Gas plants for example would be about 1/4 as expensive, capital wise, but the fuel (assuming 40% efficiency) is about 5 cents per kwh (given $6/ MBTU). But of course, gas is a finite resource.

De-commissioning costs are about .001 per kwh, I believe. I don’t think they are as messy as you think. High level waste needs to be re-processed or disposed of. Right now, I believe, it’s held in those swimming pool type tanks you see. These are spent fuel rods. But that’s a small portion amount yearly. There’s a lot of “low level waste” produced but that’s not especially radioactive. The plant itself, I’m not sure how they dispose of that. Most likely they leave it standing where it is for a few hundred years and then take it down, but I’m not sure.

I’m not sure why Hanford was such a mess. Possibly because it was creating plutonium for weapons. I think that’s much messier than simply using uranium.

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Actually, comparisons with France and Japan show that the reason that nuclear power isn’t as cost-competitive here is not because it is more expensive here but because fossil fuels are so much cheaper. I am all for leveling the playing field by trying to eliminate the subsidies and effective subsidies for fossil fuels. However, I am very against the Bush Administration’s idea of continuing to subsidize fossil fuels and then to throw in lots of new subsidies to nuclear too. That’s just stupid…Nuclear is a mature enough technology that it shouldn’t need significant subsidy. Subsidies should be going to the newer technologies that have not yet achieved economies-of-scale and don’t have as many downsides (waste storage, accident possibilities, and nuclear proliferation issues).

By the way, for reference, 20% of electricity in the U.S. is currently supplied by nuclear power. I think coal is up around 50%. Natural gas is roughly around 20%. Renewables (mainly hydroelectric) is around 8%. And, oil is only a few percent.

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By the way, so we don’t repeat ourselves too much, here is a link to a recent thread on this same subject.