We just watched a fascinating documentary about nuclear power (Pandora’s Promise), and it got me wondering about some things. The first thing I was wondering about was how much the oil industry had to do with the bad reputation nuclear power has - basically, did oil squelch nuclear power? Did the oil industry make concerted efforts to paint nuclear energy as dirty, unsafe, etc. etc.?
Another question it brought up was, how are we doing on making better, safer, cleaner reactors? It sounded like breeder reactors have always been a better choice than light water reactors, but somehow we ended up with mostly light water reactors. What’s the straight dope on that?
The third thing was, how do we get it through everyone’s heads that we need nuclear power, and lots of it, if we want to continue with our high-energy-usage standard of living?
Oh, I forgot to mention the premise of the documentary - it focused on a handful of environmentalists who had their opinions of nuclear power completely changed from being anti-nuclear to being pro-nuclear (with the understanding that global warming has made nuclear power a requirement).
I think oil (or at least, hydrocarbons) squelched nuclear power simply by being cheaper and easier to use to generate power with. Without heavy gov’t subsidies, or various carbon-tax schemes, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to invest in building a nuclear power plant when you could just build a gas-fired plant and make almost twice the profit per kwh over the lifetime of the plant.
SHH!!!
Please, BE CAREFUL about your language!!!
You just used the N-word. The word which must never be said out loud.
In this generation, using the N-word in public is not simply rude. Much worse than that: it is not politically correct, and will get you thrown out of the cocktail party in every faculty lounge on campus.
There is a 15-second spot that MSNBC broadcasts a hundred times every day during the commercial breaks-- where Rachel Maddow, the epitome of liberal political-correctness, proudly stands in front of a windmill farm, and solves all the world’s problems for us.
She says, “we are never going to run out of wind. All we need is some big thinking— to build a new grid that can generate enough electricity and then move it to where we need it.”
That’s right, all we need to do is invent a technology that doesn’t exist yet, and may be physically impossible.
There’s no need to use a technology that already exists,works well, and has a great safety record.*
But for her, and Jane Fonda, and millions of other politically-proper-people–thou shalt not mention the n-word.
It will take at least 50 years till a new generation is born and develops the ability to think rationally about nuclear power.
*yeah, folks, I know about Fukushima: It handled the earthquake pretty well. Just remind me when was the last time we had a simultaneous earthquake and tsunami in Kansas?
I liken nuclear power to the early days of Egyptian pyramid building. First they used a lot of brick. That didn’t do well. Then stone, but at too steep of an angle. Then they finally got it right. They had the much of the basic knowledge all along, but it took a couple centuries to get it all worked out.
We are still in the brick/too steep phase of building safe, economical, long lasting nuclear power plants. We’ll figure it out eventually if we put some effort into it.
The biggest hindrance right now is that the people building and running plants are always cutting corners which leads to big problems. Plants need too much downtime. Don’t last as long as they should. Plus there’s that waste storage bogeyman hanging over everything.
Not there yet, but hopefully we will some day. But it will take a lot more government involvement.
I’m pro nuclear.
It produces little greenhouse gas and doesn’t use up natural resources.
30% of Arkansas electrical needs are furnished by two reactors.
The French have developed a design that can contain a meltdown.
I certainly would not place one in earthquake prone areas, or close enough to the ocean shore to be hit by a tsunami.
This, and that nuclear power plants are subject to the foibles of people (economic, political, emotional, etc.) and the impacts of failure are potentially devastating.
IMHO we need to rethink how the US is handling the challenge of nuclear power. Rather than enormous multi-decade, billions of $$ projects; perhaps we should look into smaller-scale projects that are less expensive and can come on-line sooner. We have successfully powered ships with it, France gets most of their energy from nuclear, so it CAN be done on small scale. By spreading things out if there is a problem the effects are less catastrophic. I think we are not there yet as well, but we can get there by taking smaller steps. I hope we get there sooner than later.
The table seems to show some natural gas plants as most cost effective; solar and oceanic as least; with everything else roughly tied. (“Advanced” nuclear scores better than “advanced” coal.) Gas and coal plant costs are dominated by fuel costs, but the report makes no note of special price projections, beyond a small surcharge for possible cap/trade programs.
No problem with it at all. I see it as a dense, controllable power source where pollution and waste is local as opposed to the fossil fuel’s global impact.
That said, I prefer the idea of with heavy water reactors/thorium reactors being used instead of those that need to use enriched uranium.
When Fukushima happened, I remember my 88-yr-old FOX-News-aficionado father changing his opinion on nuclear power to negative. I wanted to ask him what we learned from Fukushima that we didn’t already know, but I’ve learned to avoid arguments.
Still, it’s a good question. What should we have learned from Fukushima? I was pro-nuke before and I still am, but only given very careful regulation. Clearly, the regulations failed in Fukushima.
Here are my takeaways, limited to that facility:
It should have been predictable that a tsunami and earthquake might happen together, to provide a double-whammy. Admittedly the earthquake was a 1-in-500yr event according to the statistics. Perhaps we need a higher safety margin.
One of the failures was that a backup plan included using portable power trucks to run the cooling systems in the event of power plant power loss. Unfortunately, the connectors didn’t mate. Perhaps we need to require that all testable aspects of a backup plan must be periodically verified.
I think both Germany and Japan overreacted to Fukushima, though I certainly understand the emotional impact on Japan and how that affects political decisions.
And yeah, there’s the spent fuel storage & transportation issue.
In any case, I’m really hoping that practical fusion won’t still be 20 years out, in another 20 years. There are good reasons for optimism.
This is one of the areas in which I diverge from many of my left-leaning friends *. I’ve always been pro nuclear energy and I think progressives have made a big mistake opposing it.
The other being GMOs. I think the left has that all wrong too.
Wind and solar fantasies aside, the world’s future energy needs are not going to be met by them alone. They are going to be met by wide range of energy sources of which nuclear, like it or not, is going to have to play a critical role.
I work in the energy industry (the petroleum portion) and I can see where hydrocarbons are causing more deaths than nuclear has since WWII. From corruption to pollution to warfare, oil is killing far more people than nuclear has. And since nobody wants a refinery or an LNG plant in their backyard and oil companies a loathe to spend billions on upgrading refineries to be less polluting and more efficient (unless they are forced to do so) depending on this energy source as a major source is going to be “problematic”, at best.
Coal…well, let’s just say that one simply has to look at the pollution issues in China and India to see where that’s a non-starter. Geothermal has issues with availability and its predilection to causing seismic activity. Hydropower is good; but it is limited to areas where there is actually water and additional dams create their own environmental issues.
That pretty much leaves tidal energy (which is going to require that much more robust equipment be manufactured to exploit it) and nuclear. While nuclear has its problems, it is also an energy source which cannot be ignored. In fact, the the longer that we wait to address nuclear power, the more expensive it will be when we eventually are forced to do so.
California (as an example) is undergoing a massive drought. Since the LOGICAL solutions are off the table (ending California’s artificial agriculture business, reducing the population in the state to far more manageable levels,etc) then desalination is going to be a major part of the water supply in the state’s future. At this point, only nuclear is going to provide the amounts of energy necessary to power the massive facilities which need to be constructed NOW and in the future.
I’m liberal (whatever that means) but I can’t see an energy future that does not include nuclear energy as a significant portion of any realistic plan.
That’s how the documentary started - with (I believe) Harvey Wasserman pronouncing that alternative energies can support our energy lifestyles right now (to paraphrase). No. No, they cannot. I definitely see a role for all kinds of power generation, but for mass production, we have coal, oil, gas, hydro and nuclear.
The biggest problem is public opinion, in my opinion. The public is badly mis-informed, but they have absolutely no interest in getting better informed. For example, how many people died in Chernobyl? About 30. But it’s still glowingly radioactive, right? Nope.
I read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, and one idea that comes up frequently is a nuclear sub parked off the coast, powering a small city. We can make nuclear reactors small enough to fit in a sub - surely we can make nuclear reactors small enough to power one city?
My first thought when Fukushima happened was, “Oh, crap - that’s going to set nuclear power back by 30 years, just when we need to be seriously ramping it up.”
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are invaluable learning experiences - I wish we could see them that way and get extremely important lessons from them, instead of running screaming the other way, shouting, “NEVER AGAIN!”
Oh, another takeaway from the documentary is that nuclear waste is not the boogeyman that we think it to be. For one thing, nuclear power is so concentrated that it simply doesn’t generate a lot of waste. All the nuclear waste generated so far would fit in one football field in a stack three meters high, apparently.
The left is still a bit in the thrall of 1960s anti-nuclear hysteria. What made sense in the Sixties makes no sense today. There are dozens of new, safer reactor technologies out there today, and they represent the solution – not a band-aid, but the solution – to global warming. Standing in the way is both the aforementioned hysteria, and a government willing to spend trillions fighting a largely phantom terrorist menace, but not the actual menace of climate change.
Ah, another piece of the puzzle. It’s my (very limited understanding) that breeder reactors are a better choice for mass energy production all around over light water reactors. Fear of terrorism is one of the factors that is keeping us from building a better reactor?
This is part of the public opinion part that needs to be updated - what’s so evil about nuclear power? What makes it more evil than coal or natural gas?There are up sides and down sides to all the different forms of power generation - nuclear has some serious down sides, which means that they have to be mitigated with extreme caution.
I am very pro-nuclear. There are definitely concerns about it and only a fool would say it’s entirely safe but it’s much better than any (current) alternative. Fukushima only solidified my opinion. Fukushima was an older design that was subjected to two major disasters simultaneously and the current death toll is smaller than a single accident involving an oil rail car. Even including Chernobyl the death-per-KWhr is magnitudes smaller than all hydrocarbon power sources.
I disagree. The biggest problem is that its more expensive to build nuclear plants then the alternatives, and so people don’t build them.
I think people over-estimate the role public opinion plays in this stuff. No one particularly wants a nuke plant in their backyard, but then, no one particularly wants a natural gas plant there either.
[QUOTE=nevadaexile;17092058Hydropower is good; but it is limited to areas where there is actually water and additional dams create their own environmental issues.
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Several years ago, a fellow engineering student who worked for North Little Rock Electric told me that their plant on the Arkansas River provided for the morning load of making toast and taking showers; it was all used in the morning.
Originally Posted by nevadaexile View Post
It’s a necessary evil.<snip>
It’s a necessary “evil” because rather trying to reduce either our energy consumption or our populations to sustainable levels, we insist on simply finding other forms of energy. Eventually, that will no longer be possible; however, since I will be long dead when that time occurs, it’s a rather low priority for me.
The downsides of nuclear energy frankly have longer terms to BE “downsides” than any other form of energy. That alone makes it somewhat more problematic than any other.