No. We can’t. It’s not my fault. You need a LOT of water. Something we’re having a problem with these days. There is not a single natural site that says to anybody, this place needs a nuclear reactor. All coastal sites are unstable, or, umm, occupied. Santa Monica Bay Nuclear Generating Station anyone? I’d love to have some Californian offer me some contrary evidence, but no. We can’t.
I have not read the whole thread but it seems to me the lack of fresh water absolutely should encourage nuclear power as a way (among other things) to run desalinization plants to make fresh water.
Inherently safe reactor designs exist (i.e. you could not make them melt down even if you tried).
Reactor designs that eat waste material lying about also exist mitigating what you do with the waste.
In short the US should be all over this but it isn’t (other countries are…in particular China I believe). No one here wants to build a new multi-billion dollar plant if they can just keep running the old one.
They are frightened over Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Japanese tsunami damage. Your average citizen does not listen long enough to hear of the French safety designs.
There are faults everywhere and CA has the whole Pacific ocean.
No, it doesn’t have the whole Pacific ocean. It has coastal water and its aquatic ecosystems that don’t take kindly to being overheated.
NP is perfect for electric cars because of the very nature of these plants. Unlike gas or coal plants they cannot be throttled down when demand at night drops. This works out OK if you have a mix of power plant types in the area. If the majority of plants were nuclear the extra capacity could be used to charge electric cars in off peak hours and/or generate power for the electrolysis of water to make hydrogen for fuel cells if they became numerous. Its basically win - win.
Three Mile Island (of China Syndrome fame) released very little radiation. The largest amount received by a member of the public would hardly register with someone who lived in Denver for 6 mo. Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor in name only, it was essentially a nuclear pile of the type Enrico Fermi built under the stadium at the U of Chicago in the '30’s. Unfortunately there was no Fermi there to operate it for them. The tsunami that did the damage in Japan destroyed the emergency generator for pumping cooling water into the reactors which then promptly melted their cores. The reactor and associated equipment was not damaged from either the earthquake or the tsunami despite being built 35-40yrs ago.
Not to say there is no risk at all with NP but so what? The risk is miniscule comparitively. LIfe is a risk. Just because any carbon based energy system kills huge #'s of people, only one at a time, just ask the Lung Assn., while any nuclear scenario ends in a mushroom cloud, at least in the public imagination. It’s like the airliner that crashes w/200+ dead that captures the attention, meanwhile 600 die in cars while we’re getting the latest news on the airplane crash.
The ideal mix of power would have to be something like 60-75% NP, 20% NG, ~10% solar and/or wind and hydro. The sooner we can get there the better.
This is another example of an anti-nuker focusing on the minor problem and losing sight of the major problem. We are currently heating up the entire ecosystem of Earth because we are pumping far too much CO2 into the atmosphere, something that nuclear power could completely stop (the CO2). Those aquatic ecosystems you are worried about are not going to take too kindly to a warming planet.
Amen, brother.
Not that it will help, dammit.
Nuclear and solar power have low energy returns and quantity. And like much of finished goods, they need oil for mining, manufacturing, and shipping.
Sorta like how pro-oil, coal and nuke types complain about wind turbines killing birds.
The hot water discharge from nuke plants does cause problems and they occasionally have to be shut down for warming up rivers and things too much. I’m not sure why you want to combat warming seas by pumping hot water into them.
Sure, you can desal water with nuke, but you can also desal water with wind and solar. Which technology produces less waste heat, and which technology is constantly getting better and cheaper while the other gets more expensive?
Given the 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water in the ocean, how many nuclear power plants would it require to raise the temperature 1C?
The two nuclear reactors that generate electricity in Arkansas use Lake Dardnelle. 34,400 acres.
Compared to how much atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub] to raise that temperature …
Warm water discharges will effect local ocean ecosystems, global warming effects all ocean environments.
This is where you get into local impacts verse global impacts, and engineering. Seriously, listen to what you are saying here…you are opposed to nuclear because of very small increases in LOCAL water temperature, verse large impacts in temperature and acidity as well as other things from global CO2 increases. How does that make sense to you? Especially since there are engineering solutions to local nuclear waste heat. But even if there weren’t any, you are talking about the difference between a local issue and a global one that face exceeds any local impact.
This shows that you have no idea about the science behind AGW. The amount of heat added to the ocean by NP would be near immeasurable compared to the extra heat of the sun’s rays trapped by CO2.
It looks to me like the environmental lobby will not be satisfied with anything other than solar and wind power. Period. In British Columbia a new hydro power source is about to open - but the environmental lobby is campaigning to stop it. It seems like a new source of safe, non-CO2 power is just not wanted. It’s solar and wind, or nothing. They’ve built up a fantasy world in their heads where minorities and poor people get good, ‘green jobs’ installing solar panels everywhere, and soon the world will be living sustainably on free energy that has no impact on the environment. Or so they believe.
The reality is that solar and wind can’t hope to make up the shortfall left behind by shutting down fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro. Not now, and probably not for many decades. The technology just isn’t there, and the power source just isn’t dense enough or reliable enough. Adding batteries to the mix lowers efficiency and increases raw material costs.
Look at what’s going on in Ontario. Despite getting a significant amount of their power from nuclear and hydro, their attempt to get 20% of their power from solar has caused a huge spike in electrical costs. Ontario has a feed-in tariff is $.54 per kwh, which supposedly provides for a 10% profit margin for small installations. That means it currently costs something like 45 cents per kilowatt-hour to generate solar power in Ontario. Compare that to traditional energy sources, which produce electricity for more like 5-10 cents per Kilowatt hour. The FIT is paid for by taxpayers. Even so, electricity in Ontario is about 60% higher than in Alberta, and almost double that of Quebec.
So what has this gargantuan increase in costs done for Ontario? Well, solar currently provides for 0.4% of its energy needs. Well done!
Germany is probably leading the world in attempting to transition to solar power. Despite huge subsidies and the installation of solar panels on buildings throughout the country, in 2014 Germany got less than 7% of its electrical power from solar. The vaunted ‘green jobs’ aren’t working out so well, as Germany’s solar sector lost half of its jobs in the last few years as people wake up and decline to take the government subsidies and install solar panels willy-nilly.
Germany’s erratic power output means they can’t shut down their other plants, so when the sun shines Germany can actually produce more than 100% of its electrical power needs, so it sells the power to other countries. But when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, Germany can’t make enough power and in some cases has had to pay factories to shut down because there was not enough power to run them.
In any event, Germany’s solar power output increased exponentially for years, but has flattened out substantially in the past four years as the low-hanging fruit is used up. In the meantime, Germans are paying .297 euros for household energy per kwh, while the people of France who use ‘expensive’ nuclear power only pay .175 euros. The high cost in Germany is in part driven by the feed-in tariffs required to bribe people to build solar panels on their roofs - money that comes from general taxes on energy.
Here in Alberta, our socialist government has announced that all coal power will be shut down by 2030, despite coal power making up more than 60% of our electricity production. Not only that, they’re going to pay over $4 billion dollars in penalties to the power companies for reneging on their contracts. Then, somehow magically we’re going to replace all of this power with renewables, despite the fact that Alberta needs most of its power in the winter, and that our northerly location means lots of snow on solar panels and very short days in winter. We also have no nuclear power and virtually no hydro. The solar flux hitting the ground here is weaker than it is when you get closer to the equator as well.
This stuff is like a religion for the left now. It’s part of their vision for the future, and they’re just not going to listen to reason. Our government is run by schoolteachers and public union employees, none of whom know a damned thing about power engineering. They rely on studies from left-wing environmental groups like the Pembina Institute or Greenpeace, and they are betting the economic future of our province on a scheme that hasn’t succeeded anywhere else in the world in terms of producing that kind of percentage of our electrical power needs. Germany hasn’t even hit 10% of that number, despite heavily pushing solar power for over 10 years.
Oh, and here’s the kicker: It turns out that we are now going to have a big surplus of coal. So guess what we’re doing with it? Leaving it in the ground so it won’t contribute to global warming? Nope. We’re going to sell it to China. The influx of Alberta coal on the coal market will drive down prices, which will give China a comparative advantage in energy and stimulate the use of more of it.
So we’re not saving the Earth from Global Warming. We are signalling our virtue at great expense, with little to no effect on the planet. We’re just transferring wealth from Alberta to China.
Wow, really? So when a nuke plant raises the water temp around the outflow by 10 degrees, the CO2 savings lowers it back down by at least 10 degrees. Amazing. That’s never been observed to happen. Ever. Anywhere on Earth. Where do you get your science?
It would be nice to see some math on this sort of thing, but then, I am an engineer.
You don’t need math. Just look up how much hot water comes out of coastal nuke plants, and what the effect of that is on the local marine environment. Just an increase of 2 degrees can cause problems. There have been instances where nuke plants have had to shutdown because the water was too warm. This plant had to shut down, and the nuke lover’s dream is to fix this by pumping more hot water.
It’s worse in inland rivers. Heatwaves in Europe have shut down nuke plants. That articles old now, and it’s still happening. There have been other cases right here in the US where plants along rivers have had to shut down because the plants themselves were raising water temps too high and risking ecological disaster.
As usual, nuke proponents will happily sacrifice the environment to save it.
Climate change puts nuclear energy into hot water
Yay France. They have to shutdown their plants during heatwaves and import even more power at ten times the price.