Because you’re ultimately taking undeveloped land and constructing human structures on it; every acre that’s covered with some sort of solar collection system is an acre where plants won’t grow, which kinda throws a wrench into that areas ecosystem. Plus, you’re going to have to build infrastructure (roads, power lines, etc.) out to all of the solar and wind installations, which takes another bite out of the ecosystem.
It seems to me like that’s a much bigger environment impact then stuffing nuclear waste in a pre-existing mine.
Building solar panels on the top of existing homes is a nice idea, but not financially feasible.
Dams are far from controversial. Not only are most of the large rivers already exploited, but there are movements to decommission many dams in order to restore the original ecologies (specifically spawning fish).
I see the major difference between nuke power and other forms is the other forms have a negative side effect (greenhouse gasses for fossil fuels, fish displaced and earth rotation slowed for hydro), while nuke powers big problem is a potential problem, it is not certain to happen.
Oh please. Your argument is simplistic beyond belief. We dictate thousands and thousands of requirements for building construction in each and every state, and still don’t live in “a dictatorship”.
Thinking and acting wisely so that successive generations of Americans are able to live as well or better than we do, without a loss of native eco-systems, will not in and of itself put us into some sort of totalitarian nightmare. Save the hyperbole, please.
None of those requirements are anywhere near as onerous as telling people that their power is going to go off after each snowfall until they get up and clean the snow off the roof. Enforcing that would require rather dictatorial measures.
I think we’re talking about appropriate use here. Deserts are generally sunny and don’t get much snow. Also, I don’t think we’re talking about relying only on solar panels for energy. As I said in the OP (and as Shagnasty cites), we need to have several different sources of power.
I don’t fear a Chernobyl or China Syndrome type disaster, but I never underestimate people’s capacity for cutting corners and becoming complacent either.
Yucca Mountain and WIPP may or may not be fine, but you have to get the waste from here to there. Train and truck accidents involving hazardous materials don’t happen often, but they do happen. The transportation of high level nuclear waste will of course be more stringent, but I wouldn’t say never.
From what I understand spent fuel rods have to spend around 20 - 40 years on-site under water before they’re ready for transport, so there’s that.
There are recycling technologies, which is good. I imagine this will improve as the years go by. This involves transporting waste, however.
And while Nuclear power appears clean at the plant, there’s still the front end matter of uranium mining, milling, and purification which is more messy.
So put me down as pro, but the industry needs to be watched carefully. Generally I think the technology will improve as time goes by. Coal’s too dirty. Solar’s nice, But the creation of solar panels isn’t the cleanest technology by a longshot. Also, the acreage required for sufficient generation of power would be too much. Hydro’s clean but you have to dam rivers.
Well, we don’t have any leaf or snow problems here in the desert. And I have sent some emails asking about hazardous waste involved in solar panel production, but I have a hard time believing that it’s on scale in quantity or lethality with nuclear waste.
Here in Nevada, we have lots of land where plants don’t grow. It’s a desert.
We have literally hundreds of thousands of miles of dirt roads all through the desert already, but I think you are mis-stating the scope of work that would be done. It simply would not be necessary, in even the wildest fantasy, to cover all 200,000 square miles of desert, every inch of it, with solar panels.
And I think that you will be able to find almost no credible evidence to suggest that it’s a good idea to stuff waste into a pre-existing mine (which isn’t what the Yucca Mountain proposal is all about anyway). This is simply an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the problem of nuclear waste.
As for it being financially feasible: In Nevada, anyone who sets up solar or wind generators sells the unused power generated to Nevada Power. Here is some more information on that. Or maybe you can show us a study that concludes that it is today, and forever will be, financially unfeasible? You know, to kind of back up your statement?
That isn’t how the power grid works. No house, no building is a “stand-alone” power generator/consumer.
I’d actually like to see a cite that there are large desert regions in Nevada where there’s NO plant life, as in no cactus, no tiny little bushes, no Joshua trees, no lichens, no microscopic plant life, nothin’.
Of course not. But then I’m not arguing that. I’m just arguing that the environmental impact of storing nuclear waste in Yucca mountain is less then the impact of installing lots of large-scale solar and wind farms.
I forgot that Yucca wasn’t an existing mine; but looking around it seems like there’s a lot of NIMBY’ism surrounding the place. Yucca mountain seems like as good a place to store our waste as any.
So what? Being able to sell unused power back doesn’t make it financially feasible; the money made and saved has to be able to offset the costs of installing solar panels. Right now, it doesn’t, or you’d see a lot more people with solar panels on their roof.
I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to find any studies on technologies that haven’t been created yet. Google doesn’t have a “search the future” function yet.
I’m afraid that this notion belies the complexity of alternative power generation. You don’t just slap some panels on top of the roof and plug them into your internal wiring. You have to account for the orientation and environmental conditions in order to get efficient use of the panels; you have to provide for storage (typically electrolytic batteries) and conversion from direct current to 120v/60w three-phase alternating current (using an inverter) and otherwise perform maintainence on the system to keep it funcitoning. All of this costs money and requires expertise. And a typical 1500-2000 sq ft house, even in perpetually sunny Phoenix couldn’t provide nearly the average energy budget used by a standard household; I doubt it could even provide enough energy to maintain refrigerative air cooling for the house.
Windmills are even worse. You can’t just stick one on the peak of the roof and call it good; they have to be mounted 50+ on a structural tower. Like any rotary mechanical device they have to be reguarly maintained. Again, you have to provide for storage and conversion of the energy. And they’re only efficient in locations where the wind regularly blows at certain speeds.
You also need to consider the expense and potential environmental impact of manufacturing and installing such devices. The total footprint and required materials are going to be much, much greater than a centralized fossil fuel or nuclear fission plant. Producing semiconducting PV cells and especially NiCad or lead-acid batteries (required for deep cycle batteries) produces some especially toxic byproducts. A different storage method, such as an induction-driven flywheel, would produce less byproducts but aren’t commerically available for this type of application currently.
Large, centralized solar and wind installations can be highly disruptive to local ecosystems. Turning Death Valley into a massive solar collector, as someone suggested, would devistate the fragile system that exists there. Early this century, it was suggested that hydroelectric power would be our salvation from dirty fossil fuel plants; we see now how disruptive such methods can be, and how difficult maintaining sufficient flow control is. (See John McPhee’s The Control of Nature for more explaination on this.) At least fossil fuel and nuclear plants, and their wastes, are compact.
In short, given current technology, it’s not clear that solar and wind power would have less of a total impact on the ecosystem than other methods; while they’re good methods for limited off-grid applications, they can’t provide nearly enough energy for the typical household. And they have hidden costs and wastes that make them far less clean than they might otherwise seem. This isn’t to say that, as the technology improves and costs become cheaper, that the tradeoffs wouldn’t offer the advantage to decentralized “alternative” energy generation as opposed to maintaining a huge continental electrical energy distribution infrastructure, but currently it’s just not economically viable nor physically capable of replacing or even signficantly supplanting fossil and nuclear power.
The Navy has maintained their excellent record with regard to nuclear safety by means of the ORSE (Operational Reactor Safety Exam) which is the sine quo non of the Navy’s nuclear program and a hallmark of a command officier (often overshadowing the actual tactical and command experience). This is partially the result of the inherent stability, or rather lack thereof, of the powerful and compact configurations used in ships, but mostly due to the overbearing and perfectionist personality of the Navy’s nuclear program progenitor, Admiral Hyman Rickover. Bureaucratic regulations and penalties are far less effective than a tyrant able to end an officer’s career with a single stroke of the pen. Rickover’s legacy remains as probably the single most important factor in the Navy’s operational safety record, which I doubt could be reliably reproduced in civilian practice.
But it need not be; existing (and heavily aging) plants are designed with obsolescent, maintainence-intensive technology. There are far simplier, fail-safe designs than physically can’t undergo a meltdown or become unstable. The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor is an example of a reactor that would be significantly cheaper to build and operate than today’s Pressurized Water Reactors and Boiling Water Reactors (not to mention the liquid metal cooled reactors favored by our friends on the other side of the former Steel Shade).
Disposing of nuclear waste is both more and less complex than it is made out to be. Politically it is a nightmare, as nobody wants to be host to a nuclear waste dump. (The highly contentious and geologically questionable Yucca Mountain Repository was selected primarily on the rationale that having detonated dozens of nuclear weapons on top of and under Nevada that we could pretty much write off most of the state.) There are physical methods for encapsulating high level wastes so that seepage is negligable. Low level waste is actually a bigger issue; there’s much more of it and it’s bulky and not readily compacted. Incineration is suggested to reduce bulk but has considerable issues with possible environmental contamination. Frankly, it is probably better to plan on disposing of wastes on site than transporting them to a central facility, but this means that no one wants a reactor in their neighborhood, increasing logistical and infractructure issues.
There’s a lot of ignorance about nuclear power, and indeed power generation in general, which leads to unfounded fears. Fossil fuel plants, especially coal-fired facilities, dump many times the amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere than was ever released by the Three Mile Island accident, and explosions and other accidents at conventional plants have killed thousands. Nuclear fission is not without its significant problems but people tend to neglect (or be unmindful of) many of the problems with fossil fuel plants.
Controlled, energy generating nuclear fusion is still “two decades away,” as it has been for the last, oh, fifty years. It’s not clear when it will be viable, and should not, at this point, be in anyone’s plans for replacing existing methods of power generation.
This is actually the most effective thing we can do right now with regard to a potential energy crisis. We’re not going to start demanding less of expected conveniences (unless the cost becomes prohibitive) and we’re not going to meet those demands with alternative sources. Investing in more efficient, less energy intensive appliances and distribution methods represents the best short-term way of mitigating our energy needs…at least, until those hemp oil energy advocates get their pot-burning power plants online. I wouldn’t invest the life savings in that, though; they seem to be kind of…sort of…uh…hey, man…where’d the blueprints for the…that spinny-thing…you know…uh…oh, hell with it, pass the bong, willya?
VERY pro-nuclear. I believe it’s the only option, period. Let’s look at the alternatives:
Solar. Very expensive, and suffers from a big problem that many other alternative energies suffer from - it doesn’t work when it’s dark or cloudy. Therefore, it will never be suitable as a primary source of industrial energy. It’s also not practical on a large scale, because it simply takes too much area to provide large amounts of power, and would require too much maintenance. By the way, if we put solar collectors on everyone’s roof, we would probably kill tens of thousands of people a year. Accidental falls kill 10,000-15,000 people per year in the United States. Now imagine everyone in the country having to climb up on their roofs regularly to clean leaves and snow off of solar collectors, to wash dirt off them, etc. We could kill 50,000 people a year this way.
Hydro. Great power source. Adding a new dam is now almost impossible because of the environmental change it causes. We won’t be adding significantly to our power needs with dams in the future.
Wind. Wind is promising. I just got back from vacation, and we drove through the Pincher Creek area in Alberta which has the benefit of constant winds, and therefore tremendous numbers of windmills are in operation. This is what many hilltops in the region look like. The entire area generates about 50 MW when the wind is blowing. A single gas turbine power plant can generate five times as much energy, and do it 24 hours a day, on demand.
Wind and solar will never be primary power sources. They are great for isolated areas - in the pincher creek area you see a lot of smaller private wind turbines on farms. You see a lot of solar panels powering things like sprinkler controllers for irrigation farms, yard lighting on farms, remote traffic lights, power on boats, and in other applications where the need for power is small and the cost of running power lines high.
But to power our industrial society and provide on-demand peak power to factories and offices, these technologies simply don’t work. For that, you need a way of generating massive amounts of power on demand. The only things we have for that now are various fossil fuel plants, dams, or nuclear.
We’ve already covered dams, and why we won’t be seeing huge numbers of new ones. That leaves fossil fuel or nuclear. Given that choice, nuclear is a no-brainer. They both have a waste problem, only fossil fuel plants blow their waste into the atmosphere, and nuclear contains its waste so people can deal with it. Ths is much preferable from an environmental standpoint.
Modern nuclear plants are safe. Pebble-bed reactors cannot melt down. Modern reactors have advanced safety features such as liquid moderators that are also the coolant. Lose the coolant, and you lose the moderator and the reaction stops. Chernobyl was built with old technology, and didn’t have a suitable containment dome. A Chernobyl could never have happened in a modern western nuclear plant. Three Mile Island is what you get when a Chernobyl happens in one of our nuke plants, and as disasters go TMI was no big deal. No one was killed, no one was even injured. There was virtually no damage to the environment. Three Mile Island has to be the most overhyped ‘disaster’ in history.
As for the Yucca Mountain site, what is holding it up now is a new requirement that the engineers ‘prove’ that it will be completely stable for an ungodly period of time, like 10,000 years. This is hard to do, and also completely unnecessary. In much less than 10,000 years we’ll probably be using the waste there as a resource, and either will come up with good ways to deal with any problems that might occur, or we won’t be around to care anyway. Besides, there are now plants like the CANDU reactors that can burn spent fuel from U.S. light water reactors and produce waste that only stays highly radioactive for about 400 years. Put some of those near Yucca to process the waste from current plants, and use the power generated from them to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cell generators.
These new requirements being placed on Yucca are politically motivated and intended to simply throw a wrench into plans to use the facility.
Transporting waste is also not much of an issue. The terrorist threat is greatly overblown. Nuclear waste is tranferred in cannisters that are impossible to rupture in an accident. They are tested through burning in ungodly hot fires, they are dropped on concrete pads onto steel pins, shot at, and in general tested for every conceivable bursting scenario. And forget about a convoy being hijacked - these things cannot easily be opened, they weigh tens of thousands of pounds, and they travel in protected convoys. Terrorists look for soft targets. And anyway, this waste wouldn’t be fissionable material.
If you did through some miracle have an accident that breached a canister, do you know what the result would be? Not an ecological disaster - just an expensive HAZMAT cleanup job. Possibly a handful of deaths on the scene from radiation exposure, but we have industrial accidents all the time that kill people. We cannot let the prospect of any accident at all paralyze us into inaction. And anyway, large numbers of people are killed every year due to fossil fuels.
If you’re really, really worried about the waste transportation issue, buld all the nuclear plants near Yucca, use them to make hydrogen, and then pump the hydrogen around the country for use.
If you analyze the issue, you’ll see that for America, unless fusion comes along the only realistic alternatives for new power are various fossil plants or nuclear. And it’s not like nuclear is a radical idea - France gets 70% of its power from nuclear. The U.S. gets about 20% of its energy from nuclear, and there hasn’t been a new power plant comissioned in the U.S. since 1978. Time for that to change.
Care to site any of your statements.
Are planning to solve our energy needs with only todays tech?
Who should run these new Nuke plants?
Want to site where it is safe to transport Nuke Waste?
This is the biggest concern.
If we’re going to have new Nuke Plants, we should probably not be shipping waste any farther than we need to.
Isn’t the bigger danger with Plutonium keeing it secure so it cannot be used as a component of a weopons.
Interest piece: http://www.ccnr.org/Plute_Anyone.html
better explained than I can.
And of course these folks disagree with you completely. (I am not saying they are right, just adding more viewpoints) http://www.nonukes.org/safenrgy.htm
By the Way Sam Stone
You don’t need to clean of snow or dirt. The snow melts off very quick as long as a slope of at least 20 degrees. They continue to generate power even while covered in snow. (Decreased however). I have yet to have a leaf problem and I have a large Oak tree next to the house, to the North West.
You are right though. Solar can only decrease need for power plants. They can run an energy star efficient house quite well on the roof space available on a most houses. This is not off grid but as art of grid.
The house does have some requirements, it should be south/north facing. Roofs that are east/west are not good candidate to add solar to.
Flat roofs are also poor candidates though you can build the panels on Frames to angle them to south and for self clearing.
Tall Cities roofs are to small to make more than a dent in energy requirements. (NYC is best example).