Some uranium has a half life measured in billions of years. And guess what? Lazy assed mother nature has strewn that crap everywhere. O NOES!
Mother nature has all kinds of nasty crap buried and half buried all over the planet and life seems to get along okay. I think we can engineer something a little better.
You really want to not worry about nuclear waste leaking? Put in one of the dry Antarctic Valleys. No water, no liquid water, no worries.
Mother nature gave us a near miracle energy source and several near perfect places to put the waste and here we are worrying about how bad it is and what we are gonna do with the waste:smack:
Some, like solar power create waste that lasts for billions of years. Those heavy metals don’t decay do other elements in a mere few decades or centuries.
Nonsense. You presume that filling vast areas of deserts won’t be bad for the desert ecology, or the surrounding ones when all that dust is suppressed ( it tends to fertilize downwind regions with elements like iron, for example ). You presume that covering huge amounts of multiple deserts with dark panels that will by nature make the desert hotter won’t have an effect on the weather, or make the desert grow. You presume that the gigantic road networks, fleets of vehicles, and all the factories needed to build and maintain solar panels covering a significant chunk of a continent won’t have a major environmental impact.
Nuclear power plants are far less destructive to the environment than trying to supply civilization by solar power; even presuming the latter is even practical. The one thing that solar, wind and hydro power have in common is that they all require major reworking of the landscape; instead of just a scattering of compact power plants like nuclear. As is usual with nuclear power opponents, you are exaggerating the costs and flaws of nuclear, while simply ignoring most of the costs and flaws of the alternatives.
And? It’s unlikely to be any more dangerous than any number of natural and artificial dangers. Contrary to what you seem to want to think, a drop of thousand year old waste isn’t going to blast the land for miles around. Or even blight a bush or two.
Another “alternative” that is destructive to the environment. Electric vehicles, with the electricity produced by nuclear plants would be much better. No CO2, no farmlands dedicated to making the fuel, no people going hungry so your car can be fueled instead.
Doesn’t matter, nor does it matter for solar. What such arguments ignore is that wind and solar energy just aren’t concentrated. Even a magic, perfect efficiency method of gathering such energy would require covering huge areas simply because even a perfectly efficient method can’t gather energy that isn’t there.
Wrong; nuclear is as clean if not more so than all three. You are simply declaring nuclear to be dirtier, by not counting almost any of the cost of the others.
No, you have an overturned tanker, and that’s all. Those things are seriously durable.
Earthquakes due to the weight of an artificial lake, inundated towns, heavy metal poisoning from old solar panels…
I wasn’t talking about wind, solar, and hydro; those just aren’t good enough for the job. And while advanced versions of geothermal ( that aren’t restricted to areas with naturally geothermally heated water, but can be built anywhere ) might be good enough, to my knowledge they ARE futuristic wonder technologies; like fusion. Something that we will likely have someday, but would be foolish to rely upon right now.
I spent 6 and a half years in the navy learning about reactors. I was taught about the dangers of ionizing radiation, the effects of shielding, have taken radiation readings myself, and had those readings taken on my self. I worked for 4 years barely a dozen yards from 2 operating nuclear reactors. My biggest fears? Fires, and steam ruptures.
If you think nuclear power is unsafe, consider this… The US Naval Nuclear Propulsion program has a combined operational experience of five thousand years(in 2000, btw, and that figure is roughly 1/3 of the worldwide total, and double the US commercial total), steamed 119 million miles over and under the oceans(again, a 2000 figure), using at any given time nearly 100 reactors(roughly equal to the number of licensed reactors in the US), all of which are operated a vast majority of time by 20 to 24 year old kids. I was literally at the controls of a reactor(training, mind you, but still, I was doing everything) before I could legally purchase a beer.
Without a single, solitary, major incident. Not one. Nothing even close to 3MI, yet alone Chernobyl.
And thats not safe enough for you? What more do you want to prove they are safe and we adequately understand the risks and dangers?
I spent 6 years working not more than a dozen yards from 2 operational reactors, and my biggest fears were fires, steam ruptures, and having liberty canceled. Radiation was waaaaaaay down on the list.
I think the biggest hurdle with the left will be overcoming the regulatory end once the irrational panic barrier to going nuclear has been solved. If the attitude is ‘fine, OK we won’t protest nuclear itself, but it should be licensed regulated and obstructed to death’, then it won’t get done. The attitude has to change from the fulll on obstructionism of the left to promotion and fast tracking of building our nuclear capability.
I have family in West Virginia and anyone who has seen the environmental devastation of coal would have to be insane to think that is preferable to being able to store relatively much smaller amounts of waste out in the middle of the desert in a highly secure facility. I consider our failure to adopt more nuclear power as one of the great mistakes of the past fifty years, principally of the left, but the blame is shared.
It costs energy to build wind and solar farms - when energy becomes extremely costly, it won’t be acceptable to dabble in power generation. Solar and wind farms don’t just magically appear, and if you want to get significant power from these sources, you’re going to have to invest A LOT of resources into building them.
“Clean coal” captures and sequesters the carbon emissions, but the storage is the problem again - we’re talking storage of millions of cubic tons of carbon. As far as I know, carbon waste half-life is not significantly better than nuclear waste.
Biofuel like corn takes more oil energy to produce than it delivers, plus you’re taking all that food out of the system while you’re wasting energy producing it. And then there’s the problem of farmers getting all kinds of subsidies to grow biofuel corn to the exclusion of all other feed grains.
Hydro is a good option, as long as you don’t completely destroy huge swathes of land (and all the people living there) for the dams, etc. (China, looking at you here).
I think if we got a more realistic attitude towards nuclear power, the technologies would start developing. I also think we should be spending this time working our asses off to figure out how to keep our standard of living without easy oil and massive carbon emissions, instead of squabbling over whether snow in Georgia in January means global warming is a lie.
I don’t think that the left is “afraid” of nuclear power. I think the main concern our ability to operate the plants and dispose of the waste safely. While some people will be afraid of any chance of harm, most people can make rational decisions when they know the benefits and level of risk. People know they can be killed in a plane crash, yet they get on planes because the benefit of getting where they want to go is worth the small risk that they may die. People on the left are more distrustful of big business than people on the right. Therefore they asses the risk as being higher, too high in their opinion. Cutter John’s post is interesting because for the most part there is very little opposition to naval nuclear reactors. Perhaps people trust the Navy more than they trust a bottom line business.
I think rather than blaming the left for being cowards or tree-hugging hippies, the pro-nukes should try to inform the public about the risks and benefits of nuclear power. Of course they would need to find someone or some institution the left would trust. Personally a panel of Nobel prize winning physicists would sway my opinion. I am on the fence btw. I can see the need for nuclear power, but I work in industry and see neglected safety measures, improper maintenance and just plain stupidity all the time.
The money should be spent on creating the energy systems of the future. Nuke is the huge ,expensive problem causing energy of the past. The companies that actually come up with clean energy of the future will do well. That is where we should go.
The Obama administration is providing almost 9 billion in loan guarantees for two nuclear reactors.
At the same time, it has also zeroed-out funding for Yucca Mountain, essentially closing it and throwing away 9 billion dollars in development costs.
Can we all at least agree that doing both of these things is insane?
The nuclear waste problem can be solved in many ways. The easiest is to scrap Carter’s executive order preventing the reprocessing of spent fuel - France reprocesses its fuel, which is why it can get 70% of its power from nuclear and not have a serious waste problem.
And rather than giving out loan guarantees, the Obama administration should be looking at streamlining the regulatory regime and providing some protection from frivolous lawsuits. Because the real financial problem with nuclear power in the U.S. is that it takes a huge capital investment up front to build a nuclear power plant, and then that capital gets tied up indefinitely as environmentalists file lawsuit after lawsuit, shutting down construction. It takes more than twice as long to build a nuclear reactor in the U.S. than it does in other countries because of this. This, and the unknown costs of waste handling without reprocessing and something like Yucca Mountain, drives the risk factor up so high that you can’t raise capital or make the plant cost-effective.
As for why the left opposes it… A large part is ignorance. I was listening to Jake Tapper (ABC’s senior White House Correspondent) the other day, and someone asked him if he supported nuclear power. His response was, “No, I remember Three-Mile Island. I remember the reports of three-headed lizards and all the other destruction it caused. I think it’s too dangerous.”
Jake Tapper is one of the better reporters in Washington. He’s smart, and he’s thoughtful. But what he ‘knows’ about nuclear power is the remnants of the propaganda drilled into him by decades of listening to anti-nuclear activists.
There is also opposition from the ‘small is beautiful’ left. They’ll give you the standard arguments against nuclear, but ultimately what they want is an end to centralized power sources. They want us to ‘get back to nature’, ride bicycles, live smaller, stop consuming so many goods, etc. They think the Earth is overcrowded. They don’t want unlimited power available to the masses, because that will just allow them to build more McMansions and drive big vehicles and eat at McDonalds and drive their SUVs to Wal-Mart, instead of living in apartments and buying food from the neighborhood organic grocer, and wearing hemp clothing - like they do.
If Solar or Wind ever gets to the point where huge mega-projects like gigantic wind or solar farms are built, you just watch - the same people will come out and protest them. All it will take is for someone to find some negative environmental factor they can hang their arguments on, and they’ll be off to the races. It’s already happening with wind in some places.
As mentioned there is a proper way to go ahead with nuclear power, AFAIK nuclear will not become the main power source for America, but it will be a great addition to the power sources that we will use in the future.
On Edit: And Sam Stone, it is not the whole left as there are plenty of examples in this thread, the big issue remains ignorance and NIMBY. (That NIMBY includes many on the right as logic could tell you because the left does not have enough numbers to stop all progress in nuclear development all over the USA.)
Years ago, I read a book called The Whale and the Reactor" by Langdon Winner. An avowed ‘environmentalist’ and a ‘left wing techno-intellectual’, one of the points Winner made was that nuclear plants demanded a level of security that’s a quantum leap more than is required for more traditional power sources. Winner pointed out how this would affect any communities near a reactor and went on to describe what he felt would be “security creep” more generally throughout our society. Winner found that possibility rather distressing and, frankly, so did I. It was enough to lessen considerably my support of nuclear power.
Now that intense security measures have become standard for anything that might be of even remote interest to “terrorists”, Winner’s argument has become become irrelevant. In fact, with that fear out of the way, the logic of the Left’s (and others’) opposition to nuclear power seems quite unjustified.
As lefty against nuclear power, I feel qualified to help answer this question. I can’t answer for all lefties, but for myself only. Nuclear power is very expensive and potentially quite dangerous (see Chernobyl). The cost is always vastly underestimated and it requires huge amounts of capital. The spent fuel stays around for thousands of years later and that time spent babysitting it is usually at public expense. If the kind of money the government spent on nuclear development, loan guarantees, power storage and disposal were put into photo voltaic cells, wind farms and warehouses of car batteries, we could have plenty of electricity.
I never said it was the whole left. I don’t even think it’s a majority of the left. That’s why I restricted my comments to the ‘Small is beautiful’ contingent of the left. They’re a small, but very vocal and influential part of the left. But there are other left-wing principles that conflict with nuclear power: The dislike of large industrial projects, the distrust of the kinds of large corporations it takes to build nuclear power, etc. Then there are those who have no ideological reason for opposing nuclear power, but who tend to give more weight to voices on the left than to voices on the right, and therefore accept the fearmongering coming from the vocal minority.
So long as private industry is paying for it, what business of yours is it if it’s too expensive or not, or how much capital it takes?
How’s this for a proposal: We level the playing field. We put some liability caps on nuclear power to give it a fighting shot against fossil fuels, which do more damage but which blow the damage out across the globe so they can’t be held responsible for it. If you can’t tax the carbon from fossil fuels, you can subsidize nuclear by the calculated amount of fossil fuel’s externality cost.
Then institute some regulatory form to give nuclear a predictible playing field - put a moratorium on environmental challenges once a license has been approved. Give nuclear in the U.S. the kind of predictable investment environment it enjoys in other countries.
If the combination of the externality subsidy and the regulatory reform isn’t enough to drive the free market into investing in nuclear, then no plants get built, and you get your way.
This is the closest thing to a free-market solution I think you can get in the current environment. The fact is, nuclear is disadvantaged by the fact that we force it to pay every single cost, including that of waste disposal, and we force them to pay for all liabilities accruing indefinitely into the future, while fossil fuels get a pass and push the waste problem onto the world as a whole by blowing the waste into the atmosphere. It’s no wonder nuclear has trouble competing when the playing field is so uneven.
So we should go to “clean energy”, despite you having no idea what you’re looking for, how to get there, how long it will take to develop, or if you will even find it in the end? A “solution” that cannot be implemented because the technology doesn’t exist isn’t a solution, it’s a pipe dream.
Again; Chernobyl is a non-issue. Just don’t build reactors with that design - and they are illegal in America - and there’s no chance of that happening.
And that’s not true of alternatives? Do you think hundreds of square miles of solar panels and the resources to maintain them are free?
As opposed to just dumping it into the air, or ignoring the side effects of things like covering huge tracts of land with panels? Again; this is just an example of making nuclear look bad by counting its problems, and ignoring the problems of all the alternatives.
Nonsense. Wind and solar power just isn’t that good, it would require FAR more money than is spent on nuclear to supply our needs, and batteries aren’t power sources to begin with.
For the hundreth time. If nuclear energy is safe and financially responsible, they could get private funding and private insurance. Do you believe an insurance company would walk away from a sure think like you think nuclear energy is? The fact that they can not get banks to fund it and insurance companies to insure it, means that big money wants no part of what you think is a sure clean thing. Why would they do that? It is free money in your world.
Yucca was supposedly an 82 million dollar facility. Now people argue that we would toss 9 billion away if we walked from it. Or ,do they think it is an endless money pit that is not working out?
I love how BEG wants to build more hydroelectric because nuclear is too dangerous. Dam failures are fairly common and also can cause a large loss of life.
I’m a mechanic at a nuclear power plant. So I have a vested interest in nuclear power. But I’m not afraid of wind power. You are talking about building thousands of wind mills across the country. This is a ton of job opportunites for mechanics like me. Being a mechanic can be a dangerous job. People get hurt at my job all the time. So you’re going to build 10s of thousands of 400’ tall windmills across the country and no one is going to get hurt? That’s bullshit. The windmills will require repairs and maintenance. So guys like me are gonna have to climb 400’ to the top and some guys are gonna get hurt and die. I’d say probably dozens a year. I think wind power is worth it but don’t act like it doesn’t hurt anyone. Also, some windmills are going to fall down. Freak storms and accidents among 1000s of possible targets is gonna result in some failures. Again, this isn’t a deal breaker for me but people want nuclear to have zero accidents.
Nuclear waste: it’s only as large a problem as it is now because we don’t reprocess it. The problem will lessen once we start reprocessing. Once uranium gets more expensive we wont be burying much of it. My opinion btw.
You’re really worried about people that you don’t know 100s of thousands of years in the future? You do know that uranium is naturally occurring right? And that it produces radon gas that is a serious health problem right? So by digging up the naturally occurring uranium out of the ground and burning it up in nuclear power plants and then burying the waste deep underground that we are reducing the future deaths of people due to radon exposure?