It was clear before, but thanks for repeating it…I got it though (I pretty much take what jshore says in these things on faith these days). So, what you (and others) are saying it that the anti-nuclear movement in the US was totally irrational? I mean, if no nukes would have been built anyway what as all that protesting and such going on? I’m old enough to remember it, ehe? What was the point of it all if they wouldn’t have been built anyway? That’s where I’m disconnecting here I think.
-XT
I don’t know, it never made a lot sense to me and my older brother went to some of the protests (mainly to get stoned, listen to the great music and try to get laid). Actually maybe to some degree that was what a lot of the protest was about. 
There was a legit fear of nuclear melt down and some serious questions about nuclear waste disposal. There were apparently some plans or at least rumors of plans to just dump the waste in the sea. There were a lot of fears and I believe many unfounded.
There was a little bit of “Vietnam is over, we are protesters, we need something to protest”. Really I know some of these aimless souls that then wandered into the environmental movement. They are are pretty much the small minority that I believe **Bricker ** opened this thread about.
Jim
The nukes would have been built anyway, not in spite of the higher costs, but because of them. Back in the days of the “No Nukes” movement, utilities were operated on a cost plus basis in a monopoly, so that whatever they spent to produce power they were guaranteed a profit. You’ll have to try that line on someone who didn’t see his Niagara Mohawk bill skyrocket when the Nine Mile Point nuclear power plant opened. Too cheap to meter, my ass.
That’s a pretty good marker for differentiating the ones with a legitimate concern about the environment from those who are simply using environmentalism as a mask for Luddism or general hatred of modern civilization.
Sierra Club, which I am a member of, is still against Nuclear & has been against most new hydroelectric plans I have seen. I know they protested against the James River-Mohawk* plan. However, they are not luddites; they just might be unrealistic in how much we can do through conservation, Wind, Solar and Natural Gas.
The group I am most involved in is still anti-nuke but they reserved their largest action against a garbage incinerator power plant. Working with dozens of other groups, we swayed the public and prevented the building of this heavy polluter. Again this group seems to have unreasonable belief with how much can be done with Green Solutions and may need to relent on Nuclear power. This group is much in favor of the wind farms being built off our shores. Therefore, they are not luddites at least.
I think there is just a deep-seated resistance to Nuclear power in the older environmental groups. I think this will change over the next 10 years, especially if the nuclear industry could show some better solutions to the nuclear waste issues.
The old line Green groups do not seem to be in the forefront of AGW however. It seems like AGW is being led by scientific reports to news agencies and national governments. Even the Republican Party seems to be moving towards accepting the results. The Governator already has, Rudy & John McCain appear to be accepting of the findings and willing to work towards a business friendly solution. I don’t know about the rest of the candidates. The Senators from Maine both support working towards a solution to AGW. I hope that both parties will start working together on this issue after the next presidential election.
Jim
There are protests over wind farms being built not much farther than that from the Pantex nuclear weapons facility (probably more weapons and plutonium there than most any place on the planet, no cite). There’s even a (modest) wind farm just a few miles from Pantex.
I’m surprised at the opposition to wind generation. There are plans to add several thousand megawatts of wind power in just a few counties in the Texas panhandle and people are protesting not only the wind farms, but the transmission lines as well.
T Boone Pickens plans a 2 to 4 thousand megawatt farm and there are talks of another 4200 megawatt facility in Gray county, TX. Protested, of course.
Not to mention the opposition to the wind farms in scenic locations.
We don’t want global warming, we don’t want nuclear, we don’t want wind power. Something’s got to give.
(FWIW, there is quite a demand for nuclear qualified QC personnel, so that tells me industry is gearing up in that direction)
What inspires the opposition to wind power? Birds dying? Scenery?
I actually find some of them quite pretty.
Saw a show on Discovery about a HUGE wind farm out in the North Sea. It was one of the coolest things I’ve every seen…miles and miles of wind generators. BIG wind generators.
I think the opposition is a bit of NIMBYism, some has to do with the possible ecological impact (‘birds dying’ as you put it), etc. Its like the more fanatical eco-facists want some magic solution that has zero impact on the environment or they don’t want it at all. Reality? Don’t give them reality! They want what they want.
-XT
Beats me. You’d think global warming might wipe out a few birds and fuck up your scenery, also.
They do make a little noise, but you have to be fairly close to them. The farm near Pantex, for instance, can’t be heard from the highway but you can hear it if you drive out closer. And as flat as it is here, you can’t see them from more than maybe 15 miles. The Pickens project is in very sparsely populated area, near his ranch. He said he won’t have any turbines on his property since he thinks they are ugly, but will pay landowners a royalty.
Another thing about wind power: Something better comes along, you can take the turbines down. It’s not like a dam that changes the entire ecosystem, the wind farms I mentioned earlier would produce more power than Hoover Dam by a good margin with much less of a footprint than Lake Meade.
Most of the protest have been by local vocal homeowners not environmental groups. So it is more NIMBY than Green Protest.
I mentioned earlier, people cite the noise (minimal), the ruining of the view (I disagree, they look cool to me) and the birds or marine environments disturbed (minimal impact in my opinion).
Jim
The question I’d ask is, how much opposition?
I mean, there’s probably folks who’d protest against Mom and apple pie. But that doesn’t mean there are enough of them to matter. And I’m less than sure that publicity accorded anti-wind power protests means that a lot of people are involved. I’m increasingly of the belief that there’s little correlation between what points of view are widely held, and what points of view get covered by the media to what degree.
I wonder why any opposition.
I agree that the protests are mainly due to the visual impact of the turbines and transmission infastructure (do a search for “Cape Wind Protests” for an idea), but every proposed project in this area as well has been met by protests.
For comparison, you’d think thermonuclear warheads would generate some protests. You’d be right. There was (still is, I guess, but abandoned now) a compound across the highway from the rail spur going in and out of the Pantex nuclear weapons plant called “The Peace Farm”. They’d monitor the rail traffic of the plant and stage protests, maybe a couple dozen people. The Peace Farm went downhill when Pantex began disassembling nuclear weapons.
You get only slightly smaller numbers at the wind farm protests. All it takes is for some lawsuits to be filed and the process grinds to a halt. Pickens won’t have any trouble with getting his project going, he’s greased all the squeaky wheels, but getting the power transmisson lines and towers to send the electricity down state will be tougher.
The cicumstances in this area are strange. The Panhandle is on a different power grid than the rest of Texas (Texas is separated into 3 grids, IIRC), not interconnected. Electricity on this grid is cheaper than the grids downstate, due to being regulated by the TPUC vs un-regulated downstate. So Pickens (or any other windfarm that wants to sell to the un-regulated parts of the state) can’t just tie into the existing grid unless they want to sell at a lower rate, they have to build hundreds of miles of transmission lines to get the electricity to the un-regulated market.
Sort of unrelated to wind power protests in general, but since these wind farms will be much larger than anything else in the world (the largest existing is like 750MW or so), they make the local news fairly regularly.
That may be, but unless someone has executed a controlled and valid survey for a given question, media coverage is about the only way I can judge how prevalent a view is or how widely it’s held.
This site has never led me astray. Basic summary: if you give a proposal to “prevent global warming” they will overwhelmingly agree. Higher taxers? More expensive energy? Sacrifice their first born? Sure! If you just ask about nuclear power in general, they seem skittish. If you ask about building nuclear plants in their community, the already lukewarm approval drops like 5-10 points. They overwhelmingly love alternative energy and better fuel standards for cars. They’re split on making new coal plants, but if you say they’re cleaner and “prevent global warming” then it skyrockets.
Hybrid cars.
The discussion about spent nuclear fuel disposal also applies to all of the expired car batteries in about 5 years and the problem will get worse as more hybrids are sold.
Now I’m not claiming the problems are similar in magnitude or environmental impact. What I am saying is whereas environmentalist may be very adept at identifying the problem but historically very poor at workable real-life solutions. My personal opinion is that (like many Americans) do not look at an issue from all angles, but rather their own personal position based on hearsay or misunderstandings. And let’s be honest. On an issue like this, how many Americans have enough basic understanding of science to TRULY understand all positions?
“Well my friend told me that she heard about the article where a professor said that there was 3 parts per million of cobalt-thorium G in the ground water. THREE!!!” Let’s go protest nuclear power!"
Solar power? Panels are made out of poisonous materials that need to be disposed of during processing and need surface area to work. One study I read said an area the size of the State of Oregon would need to be covered to provide energy for the United States
Wind power. Has possiblities, but neither solar nor wind power will save the planet until they are cheap and efficient (power/sq ft) enough for me to stick one on my house and I can regulate the power through flywheels instead of batteries.
I’m a nuclear engineer who works at a nuclear power plant and I do beleive that wind power has a place, but right now it’s a very small place. The reason is the difference between base electrical load (load that’s always there) on the grid and peaking or transient load. Nuclear power (like dirt burners) is most suited for base load since these plant run best at 100% power all the time. Wind power clearly can’t be used for base load because it’s no consistent enough - the wind isn’t always blowing. In order to set up wind power for base load, you would need enormous batteries, and that fact alone makes wind very expensive.
That’s good because there is no evidence that they are. Here is an discussion regarding hybrid batteries:
Fortunately, that’s no problem. The U.S. has vast regions of sparsely populated land. All by itself, Texas has about two dozen counties, comprising nearly half the area of Oregon, each with a density of about two people per square mile. Or less.
Besides, we don’t need to have a single magic bullet, when a combination of things will do. The first thing is to find ways to use less power to do the things we want to do: build housing that takes less energy to heat and cool, increase CAFE standards (and kill the loopholes), etc. The second is to generate electricity using less carbon, and that can be done through a mix of solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, sea turbines, and whatever. A third is capture and sequestration of carbon emissions on coal- and oil-fired power plants. For all I know, there may be a fourth and a fifth; this isn’t my area of expertise.
But barring a fortuitous breakthrough in some area (e.g. fusion power generation), we aren’t going to reverse global warming with One Big Thing.
The next generation of electric cars and hybrids will use lithium-ion batteries (like the GM Volt). Lithium Ion batteries are not really an environmental hazard, and can even be disposed of in regular landfills. But they can also be recycled. So I’d call that a non-issue.
As for the cost of nuclear, one of the problems is that nuclear is being held to a much higher standard than other forms of energy. Coal plants aren’t charged for the CO2 and particulates they emit, but nuclear power plants are required to pay for all costs associated with their waste. Level the playing field by forcing other power sources to pay for every cost of generation, and nuclear suddenly looks a lot better.
Also, it’s no secret that environmental groups went way out of their way to intentionally ensnarl nuclear plants in reams of leglislation for the specific purpose of driving up the cost and making nuclear non-competitive. Lawyers from major advocacy groups have filed complaints, forced hearings, lobbied for regulatory changes in the middle of plant construction, sought temporary injunctions, and in general just tried to make life as difficult as possible for nuclear power plants. Now they point to the high cost of nuclear and say, “See? We told you it wasn’t worth doing.”
In Canada, where we didn’t have a lot of the regulatory snarls the U.S. has, we built 18 nuclear power plants, most in Ontario. Nuclear power in Canada costs about 4.5 cents per kW/h. This is lower than the cost of both coal and natural gas power production in Ontario, without even considering the environmental effects of those two options.
Here’s a Report showing the relative costs of nuclear and other power generation technologies. Nuclear looks pretty damned good.