I dispute your first assertion. I see know reason why we can’t maintain our current standard of living and reduce our energy consumption by 20% or more.
I agree (in theory) that it’s possible. But…what would it cost?
But how would a logical person be able to discuss this subject with YOU? The thing is, no one is claiming that nuclear power is accident free…that’s YOUR strawman. However, the worst nuclear accident in history (which was a freak accident on a bunch of different levels, if you actually ever bothered to educate yourself on this subject) didn’t kill the number of miners killed PER YEAR in the mining of coal. And the worst accident in the US killed less than the number of people killed per year because they fell of a ladder while trying to put up Christmas lights. And yet you still don’t get it…do you?
Fine…let’s discuss it. What is the cost of putting scrubbers on coal plants? How good is the technology? Let’s see some numbers and we can discuss it. Since YOU brought it up I’ll let YOU dig up the cites to support your position. How much CO2 would this potentially take out of our emissions per year and at what cost? Everything I’ve read in the past says that scrubbers aren’t proven technology, cost a lot and only have a modest impact. No? Fine. Show me the money.
-XT
Would the global warming “fear mongers” be happy if it was only 80 percent as bad because we reduced our CO2 emissions by 20 percent? I doubt it. And of course that ignores the fact that a majority of the worlds population’s energy consumption will (and rightfully so) increase greatly.
Unless you want the whole world living on a couple hundred watts per person, its gonna have to be nuclear or sequestered CO2.
Of course when a european country recently wanted to do just a one off experiment to even see if you could sequester the CO2 in the deep ocean, the enviro wackos shut that down before it even got started.
It’s strange to me that one of the advantages of nuclear power - the fact that its waste can be completely collected and stored easily - is looked at as a disadvantage. “Radioactive waste! That stuff will be around for thousands of years!”
Well yeah - but it can be buried in sturdy, sealed containers, and nearly forgotten about. Nothing is released to contaminate the environment.
Compare this to coal - where you’re generating CO2, components of acid rain, various air pollutants, radioactivity, etc. as waste. Lots of it. If we bundled that waste up like we can with nuclear reactors, people would be freaking out. “You’re not burying that waste in my back yard!”… but if you release it into the air they breathe, that’s okay, apparently.
So the solution is obvious: Take nuclear waste and scatter it into the atmosphere. Then it’ll be just like coal and people will be happier. 
To be fair, that’s not a fair comparison - you want to compare the number of people killed mining uranium as well. Not that I think it’ll equate, but still…
I think it’s partly that second part that is the issue. To someone who isn’t familiar with the options for handling nuclear waste (and I was in this camp not that long ago) they might not be aware that proper storage will eliminate any potential contamination. I used to be under the impression that it was just kinda tossed in the middle of nowhere and we hoped it didn’t hurt anything. After events like Chernobyl and Hiroshima, it’s somewhat natural to be fearful of nuclear power if you don’t know much about it.
Since I’ve learned more about it, though, the opposition to the Yucca mountain facility makes no sense to me though. People are afraid of the waste contaminating the environment (what environment? It’s solid rock) so instead the waste is being kept at the plants, which are of necessity much closer to population centres–IOW, where the potential damage if contamination does happen is much higher :smack: So what if it’ll be around for thousands of years? If we can cut our CO2 emissions enough, maybe we will be too.
You are only thinking short-term.
What about conditions 10,000 years from now? Do you even care? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but I wouldn’t feel right contaminating future generation’s water supply because of a poorly thought out decision.
And I wouldn’t feel right in preventing a future generation from even being around to worry about it.
I guess you can rationalize anything…
Well, I don’t think global warming is going to be THAT bad.
Having said that. You have several choices.
Business as usual. Keep all the CO2 producing plants running. Even IF you go solar and wind and pixie fart power to the max, its only going to make a small dent in CO2 emissions. Global warming will greatly affect the WHOLE world. Thats why its called GLOBAL warming.
Whole world can live like monks. Yeah right. Next.
You can store all that produced CO2 deep in the ground or ocean. Hope it doesnt leak out anyway. Of course some enviro wackos will get bent out of shape about storing it as well :smack: Capturing all that CO2 will greatly increase the cost of energy. Wouldnt surprise me if it doubled it or trippled it or more. And I am pretty sure its never been tried on power plant scale, so its not even certain it practically doable in the first place.
Go nuclear for most energy needs. We know how to do it reasonably safe. We have good ideas for making it much safer. And the waste? Even IF if leaks out both soon enough and in enough of a quantity to cause a big problem, it will be a big LOCAL problem (very local compared to global warming).
My inclination is to put the glowing stuff in the Attacam (sp?) Desert or the dry valleys center of Antarctica. If you have trouble with contaminated water THERE, I’d be damn surprised. God gave us some really remote and shitty places on this planet for a good reason. Unfortunately for waste disposal Jersey is already taken.
And if someone brings up hydrogen cars I am going to smack em!
And in 10,000 years it’ll be so weak that a little contamination will be trivial.
And why is radioactive waste the only toxin we are supposed to worry about forever ? How about heavy metal poisoning from the remains of old solar panels, for example ? Unlike radioactive waste, heavy metals are a permanent danger, unlike radioactive materials which grow weaker over time.
Fuck the protesters. Build trucks to transport waste to Yucca with big whirly spikes on the front so any treehugger who tries to jump into the path gets ground into mulch which can be used to feed plants, thus a more productive use of the protester’s time.
Meh…
Use a cow catcher, a bull horn, and big, pissed of guy in an S and M outfit chained to the front.
Extra points if you can get Butters to do the driving 
Quoth beowulff:
Oh, sure, we probably could comfortably cut our energy consumption by 20%. But that wouldn’t be enough that we’d be free of coal or nuclear, though, so we still have to choose where we get that other 80% from.
Of course, the best solution is probably some combination of the options I gave: Keep the best of the coal plants (those which have the newest environmental technologies, the lowest operating costs, etc.) online, cut our consumption as much as is reasonable, pick up as much slack as we can with wind and (eventually) solar, tides, etc., and build as many nuclear plants as we need to finish closing the gap.
This is not a new discussion. I buried you in the past with cites showing how scrubbers help, how energy companies dance around the regulations and how many more breathing disabilities exist around plants. I am not your secretary. Educate yourself.
However there are technologies coming down the line that are promising. We had a thread about wave technology and one is being built in the Detroit River now. To commit to Nukes is a mistake. It is a huge financial commitment that would rob the money from newer concepts. We need all the technology that is available . We also need to leave room to back whats coming in the future. But solar,wind and all other cleaner technologies should be pushed hard. Coal plants should be as clean as possible.
IOW you got nuffin. Oh well…not like this is a big surprise.
-XT
Question:
Should nuclear power get any favorable federal treatment (other than being able to trade carbon credits for profit) over any other technology - eg loan guarantees, etc.?
Why not just put a price on the carbon (and that price will be via cap and trade not a tax, so discussion about how to price it seems now moot) and let the market decide which is the most cost-effective way to accomplish the goal?
Nuclear is limited by availability of massive upfront capital, availability of parts (there are only a few foundries making critical components and they have a huge backlog of orders), and availability of trained workers. If it turns out that those issues are not major then nuclear will be built without additional governmental assistance. If they are issues such that the profit is not there then scrubbers and sequestration or cofiring coal with mass or solar or whathaveyou may win out instead.
Why the apparent need to pick the winners ahead of time?
I would promote a three-pronged approach. First, implementing a carbon cost in some way (such as cap-and-trade) and letting the market decide how to handle it. Second, put some sort of procedures in place to quickly deal with all of the frivolous lawsuits and other public hindrances nuclear power faces, so a company looking to build a good nuclear plant can’t be bankrupted by unreasonable delays. Third, an educational initiative to make sure that people know what the real costs and benefits are of the various technologies, so the people who make up the market can make rational decisions.
You seem to think that what nuclear supporters want is an unfair advantage. What we want is for it to be unshackled, not given a leg up. The reason for the shortage of parts and workers is that plants have been blocked by those opposed to them. It is the self fulfilling prediction of those that file repeated law suits and request the government to delay every proposed new plant and then point to the long lead time, high cost, and lack of new tested designs as good reasons to keep on blocking new construction.
The problem we face is that the deck is so stacked against nuclear, and has been for so long, that no power company is willing to try and build one without some assurances that the government will not pull the plug out before they can finish. If we wait until the need is so great as to overcome the artificial hurdles that have been put up, we will be in much bigger trouble than we are now.
Jonathan
He did this before in another coal plant-related topic, and it was the same result. It’s all an evil conspiracy of “Repugnican” utility coal trust magnates who just want to kill the poor.
No one really knows what it will cost for a full-scale CO2 capture and sequestration system because they have not yet been built. Also note - there are more than 50 different processes for CO2 capture being touted, and folks really aren’t sure what’s going to be the winner. Small-scale ones are used in the oil and gas industry, but that’s not really apples to apples, and the short of it is no one knows how to build a CO2 scrubber for a 900MW (standard new SC) coal power plant.
I was in California a few weeks ago talking to some big-name R&D folks on this very subject, and there are some disturbing things that are being found as more people focus on this subject. One of which is that the caps on CO2 reservoirs in the ground are eroding/decaying much faster than expected, due to action of carbonic acid on the caps. It’s not a show-stopper, but it shows just how immature the technology is if we aren’t even sure about the best way to plug the hole. Also, leaks and seepage from the reservoirs is more than expected thus far, and that could be a show-stopper - what’s the point of putting 90% of your CO2 in the ground if it just leaks out over the next 50 years?
The current technology at the pilot scale (whether it’s normal or chilled amine) is about 90% maximum removal efficiency, at a fairly high cost. My figures show about $20-$50 per MWh for CCS with a new supercritical coal plant, and maybe $30 to $65 for a retrofit onto an existing coal plant (those are O&M costs, NOT capital costs, which could be on the order of $250M for a small to medium-sized power plant). Perhaps more - I’ve seen figures that say $650M for a 500MW coal plant. Plus remember you’re losing from 10% (best possible case) to 35% of your net generation, which you now can no longer sell.
However, even with that much cost, the figures I ran for a conceptual study last December showed that a coal plant with 90% CCS could still cost less than gas on a per-MWh basis. Coal as a fuel is just that cheap, and gas price projections forward are just that scary in some cases. Costing less than gas is a bit of a misleading thing, however - 90% CCS fleet-wide in the case I evaluated (a Midwestern US region) would result in a doubling or trebling of current electrical bills. We figured that the average person would be paying an annual average of $322/month (+/- $100) in 2008 dollars (up from an average of roughly $150/month for the study region).
(Disclaimer: all figures above are based on a study I was contracted to do. They are not representative of a broad-based industry survey, and due to their assumptions may have an error and disagree with other studies. Do further research on your own before taking any cost figures as valid.)