Anything that agrees with you is a great post and definitive in your deep pro nuke stance. There is plenty of information in this thread that would make a person with a slightly open mind question some aspects of nuclear power plant construction and operation. Not you though.
I don’t know you. I have no opinion of you. i just tire of insults in threads and find it immature and not adding to discussion.
[QUOTE=DSeid]
xtisme, to the degree that we have cost-effective low CO2 electricity we may displace a fair amount of petroleum. Between electric vehicles and fuel cells with the hydrogen produced with low CO2 electricity and biodiesel and synfuels using electric plant outputs as feedstocks, our future hopefully is much less oil intense - not that there will be much choice sooner or later.
[/QUOTE]
Well, the caveats there are ‘we have cost-effective low CO2 electricity’ (which we don’t at this time) and ‘may’. Because the technology for electric vehicles to massively replace petroleum based engines doesn’t exist at this time…the ones that do are either too expensive or don’t have anything close to the same performance characteristics, which they will need to do if you really expect them to replace cars for the majority of the people who drive. Hydrogen is a possibility, but you’d need a lot of energy for that (plus there are some other engineering aspects, especially logistics and storage)…again, to get there you’d need to increase your electric energy generation quite a bit, and wind and solar can’t do it…not by the percentages we are talking about. Same with the other stuff…bio-diesel and synfuels? Yeah, those have possibilities. They aren’t ready for prime time yet, though.
The real point though is that trying to say that nuclear ‘only’ accounts for 8% of our overall energy requirements is pretty meaningless, since nuclear is used exclusively for generated electricity. It’s deceptive because saying that makes someone think ‘well, 8% isn’t that much’, when in fact it’s huge. It’s also deceptive because if you put wind AND solar on that same scale they wouldn’t even be on the chart they are so low.
If you want to say you could get wind and solar combined up to where nuclear is (i.e. about 20% of our generated electricity…and leaving aside the issue that neither is a constant reliable power source, which the grid requires for a major source) then show me how you’d do it. What would it cost? Where would you put all the solar plants and wind farms? What would the real world impacts be? Is it even feasible or hell, even possible? Don’t try and play games with numbers and then say ‘See? It’s “only” 8%! Should be easy to replace a number that small!!’.
-XT
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
Anything that agrees with you is a great post and definitive in your deep pro nuke stance. There is plenty of information in this thread that would make a person with a slightly open mind question some aspects of nuclear power plant construction and operation. Not you though.
I don’t know you. I have no opinion of you. i just tire of insults in threads and find it immature and not adding to discussion.
[/QUOTE]
You broke my industrial strength, SDMB rated heavy irony meter…again! In fact, the reinforced heavy gauge containment vessel I put it in after the last time you broke it is also a smoking crater now.
-XT
“Clean coal” doesn’t do a thing to reduce CO2. It’s all about sulphur. Combined-cycle natural gas is good and the USA has been fortunate enough to discover a lot of it recently. But what are China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, the developing world supposed to do? I’m talking about beating the IPCC CO2 trajectories over the next fifty years here. Either they stay poor or they develop, and development means power generation, and if that’s carbon-free then it’s nuclear or renewables. In low density countries like the USA, wind may be an option but not everyone has that luxury e.g. India is smaller but with three times the US population. I’m not sure India is going to want to give up a big chunk of its land area up even to solar, let alone wind, when it can build nukes.
Which I largely debunked here in post #581.
But lets look at it again.
I noted:
“From your link the US currently uses 1,075 GW of power. If my math is right you’d need 430,000 of those wind turbines to meet that.”
And
“[A]ccording General Electric’s brochure on those turbines you need a wind speed of 12.5 m/s (about 28 mph) for peak generating capacity.”
Now, your cite says (bolding mine):
As I just noted to get the 2.5MW you need a 12.5 m/s wind speed. According to GE’s brochure (PDF) a wind speed of 7 m/s will get it operating at 0.5MW. That is 20% of rated power on average.
So, you will need 2,150,000 of those turbines to meet current US demand.
As noted above your land use is going to be dramatic.
Also consider maintenance on those things. Imagine each turbine needs regular maintenance once per year and needs two people to do the job. If those workers can maintain 3/day (and assuming the workers work 5 days a week for 50 weeks a year) you will need nearly 29,000 workers doing nothing but basic maintenance.
Now consider breakdowns. All machines, even reliable ones (which I imagine these are) break. I recall the first computer in the US used vacuum tubes. Each vacuum tube had something like an expected lifespan of two years (or something). Thing is the computer had many thousands of them. As a result a vacuum tube was breaking, on average, once every five minutes or so. Because of this they employed a small army of people who did nothing but run around and swap burned out vacuum tubes for good ones.
With this you will have well over 2 million individual machines. Even if the mean time between failure for these things is once every ten years you will have nearly 600 a day breaking and needing much more than routine maintenance.
Even if it is once every 30 years near 200 a day will break. Every day.
Finally, add to this that I showed above wind power is comparatively expensive. Solar power is a lot more expensive (and that doesn’t even count building power storage systems for when it is dark…storage systems which currently do not exist yet for the scale needed).
Showing that the energy exists in the atmosphere is a long way to actually getting that energy. The sun provides more than enough power to run the planet. Actually getting and making use of it is something else.
Of what modern nuke plants do you speak? None have been completed.
The AP1000 is designed to pump out close to 1200 MWe. It’s designed as a “one-size-fits-all” power plant that can take advantage of economies of scale. Basically to be economical, everyone has to buy some of these, like McDonald’s cheeseburgers.
Very few countries have electricity grids that could handle that. You’re talking about building entire countries’ energy infrastructures from scratch. Plus a reliable regulatory infrastructure, maintenance infrastructure, an educated, and trained workforce… who’s going to pay for that? Never mind. Who’s going to actually do that? Don’t forget waste & spent fuel storage. If the US and Japan don’t even have system for it, what chance the developing world?
Let’s pick a country at random - Somalia jumped to mind first:
The country has a capacity of 80MW, and their transmission lines don’t even take advantage of that. You think you can plug a 1200MWe nuke plant into this grid? Seriously? You can’t just say, “well, we’ll give them the mini AP100 plant.” Doesn’t exist!
Nice dream if you’re a Westinghouse stockholder I guess.
If you think the US’s electrical grid faces challenges, what do you think the rest of the world’s grids are like?
“Clean coal” as it is used in the industry and the advertisements is referring to sulfur, NOx, PM, CO, SO3, mercury, acid gas, dioxins, furans, etc. I suppose people can use it to just refer to sulfur, but those people are not in the industry.
And while it is true that most of the time people use “clean coal” to mean what I’ve listed, the campaigns which started about 2 years ago frequently feature CO2 capture and sequestration as part of their answer.
Which I am not convinced is a good answer anyhow, despite having spent a few hundred person-hours studying CCS. But that’s really for a different thread.
Fukushima fuel dwarfs Chernobyl and Three Mile Island combined:
For comparison, TMI had 30 tons and Chernobyl had 180.
This is just at one plant. Neither Japan nor the US has any plans at all about what to do with nuclear fuel except store it in open pools at each and every nuclear power plant.
I sure hope Al-Qaeda isn’t paying as much attention to this as the rest of the world is. Does anyone know if Al-Qaeda has ever indicated its awareness of the US and Japan’s spent nuclear fuel vulnerabilities?
That figure for fuel is far too low. Each reactor would have 100 tons of fuel rods in it. Each year there would be at least 25 tons of waste fuel rods for each reactor. Just the 40 year old building alone would have generated a thousand tons of waste fuel.
I have an idea, let’s find a sparsely populated area in the middle of nowhere, dig a big hole, and build a huge reinforced tomb for it all deep underground.
http://www.todayonline.com/World/EDC110323-0000737/Radiation-traces-found-in-Japans-sea,-sparking-seafood-concerns Radiation detected in the sea outside the nuclear plant. H\ow it keeps spreading around while it is “contained” beats me.
Don’t panic. Remain calm.
I sure hope Al-Qaeda isn’t aware that we have huge dams up river to major cities. I sure hope that they don’t realize that Boston has huge LNG containers. I sure hope that Al-Qaeda forgets that we have huge oil tankers sailing into most major ports in the country.
There is a big difference between “fresh” and “old” used fuel.
The fresh stuff needs cooling. That is what sits in the pools and loss of that cooling is a real problem. Notice the pool is a finite size. It holds enough based on the operation cycles of the plant. When new goes in old goes out that is no longer hot. Those pools are not holding 40 years of fuel. They couldn’t.
The old stuff is not thermally hot at all. They take it out then store it in dry casks. No need for cooling whatsoever.
They could put it somewhere else like…oh I dunno…Yucca Mountain or something if people would let them.
As for Al Qaeda running off with this stuff did you miss the part where there are TONS of the stuff? Exactly how do you think they would cart away enough to be useful and not be noticed? Uranium is a fair bit heavier than lead and this stuff is not lying about in easy to carry hand sized nuggets.
Further, to get the bomb making goodies out of the stuff you need to resort to chemical separation. A complex and expensive process and not something you do in your cave.
Incorrect. The fresh stuff needs constant cooling. That’s why there is so much concern about the fuel pools. Did you really think the fuel in those pools was cool and didn’t really need to be there? Then why is the water boiling off as fast as they add it, by the tons? Many, many tons of water are being constantly dropped into the fuel pools to keep them from boiling dry. The fuel rods need to stay under water being actively cooled for years. Then, you can talk about dry storage.
Yucca schmucca. An earthquake hit Japan. Yucca is off the table. Both are in the past. Time to move on. What is your plan for nuclear waste storage? Just keep filling pools with it?
They don’t have to run off with anything. The fuel is sitting right there in a pool. Fly a plane loaded with explosives into it. Not like they haven’t tried the plane trick before. It worked, too. The fact that the roofs blew off these nuke plants is sufficient evidence nuke plants aren’t plane-proof.
What part of, “The fresh stuff needs cooling. That is what sits in the pools and loss of that cooling is a real problem.” was unclear?
You do know that the Yucca Mountain site was studied intensively which included geologic assessments and it was chosen because (among other things) it is not susceptible to earthquakes don’t you?
You’re so lost in your knee-jerk world you aren’t even reading what people post are you? Not like it was a long post or anything.
Sorry, missed the second sentence and read the third one.
Do you really think the plane trick will work again?