No, because of anti-nuclear fanatics constantly harassing them.
Posted before something caused me to lose my post.
If solar is so great how come large power companies aren’t building huge solar plants?
I love solar power, I wish a huge amount of the stimulus had gone to providing solar power to the public.
Well, that and the fact that you can’t get a license to build a nuclear plant in the US. Gonzo loves to ignore little details like that. It’s also fairly ironic that he points to the fact that Yucca Mt costs more than originally proposed (gee…wonder why? :p) as some kind of proof that nuclear power is unfeasible.
-XT
I used to do a lot of video work for Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison. The pools of spent fuel are one huge problem. But an even bigger one is the tanks of jet fuel at the same plant for the jet engines that serve as quick-start peak usage generators.
As am I. I’m perfectly comfortable with all the nuclear plants surrounding Chicago. I just want them to be able to get all the spent fuel to long term storage. Away from the giant tanks of jet fuel.
There are lots of cogent arguments that support the use of nuclear power. This is not one of them. To compare waste uranium fuel rods to the uranium ore that occurs in nature as if there was some sort of equivalence with respect to the danger they present is beyond disingenuous. You work in the industry; why don’t tell us how much uranium ore is concentrated in the refining process before it is used as nuclear fuel?
What’s disingenuous is pretending that you care about the fate of people millions of years from now.
Let’s say we can build a storage facility that lasts 10,000 years. The antis come back with an argument saying that the waste will be slightly more radioactive than naturally occurring for millions of years. Don’t you care about people millions of years from now? When you look at the billions of people that will live in the future a very slight increase in radioactivity will result in millions of cancers. Won’t someone think of the children?
Using similar logic, I can make an argument that burning up all the fissile material on earth now will prevent nuclear war in the future.
Both are specious arguments.
I didn’t come up with the argument by the way I read it in a book but it seems valid to me. When you think of it in the very long term ie. millions of years. There is some benefit to digging up high concentration of uranium that are on the surface of the Earth and eventually disposing of them deep underground as waste.
Just so you understand, heres the theoretical situation:
Millions of years from now, humanity is ignorant, they have no knowledge of radiation. They build their villages on a natural outcropping of uranium ore. Many of them get exposed to radon gas and develop cancer. If we mined that uranium now it wouldn’t expose them in the future.
Here’s the antis situation:
Millions of years from now, humanity is ignorant, they have no knowledge of radiation. They build their villages on a nuclear waste dump. Many of them get exposed to radiation and develop cancer. By not having nuclear waste dumps now we prevent this from happening.
High level waste generally has higher radioactivity than naturally occurring uranium but we also don’t normally leave it lying on the surface of the earth, unless the anti have their way and prevent a proper disposal site from being used.
Last year I watched in morbid fascination while our state senate voted to allow Georgia Power to surcharge residents for new nuclear plants beginning in 2011 for a plant that will come online in 2017. The break-even point for consumers is expected to be around 2030. Some Georgians will pay for power that they’ll never get to use.
Yep, that’s right, nuclear power is such a cost-effective capital investment that the power companies have to soak the rate-payers 6 years in advance to finance it.
And you think that the alternatives would be cheaper?
And again; much of the cost, and the unwillingness of any company to build the things without money up front is due to the anti-nuke people. Nothing is going to be very profitable under such constant, irrational attack.
Then you should be seriously pissed off at the rabid anti-nuclear crowd who have brought us to this. This rabid, knee jerk movement has cost this country dearly, and continues to do so, sadly.
-XT
Actually, we have over 70 tons of radioactive waste on the surface. It is not primarily the left that is preventing the commissioning of Yucca Mountain, it is Nevada NYBYism from all political persuasions.
So far the arguments against nuclear power that I’ve read in this thread tend to come down to “but it might be dangerous, someday maybe in like 10,000 years” or “it’s too expensive”. These arguments have been refuted to my satisfaction, but the anti-nuke counter-response is to ignore the refutations and continue with the original line of reasoning, which seem to not be coming from a position of rational evaluation.
I still haven’t heard of any alternatives to nuclear power in this thread that could possibly be used on a scale to support the United State and its large (and growing) population at something like the quality of life we have now. Instead I read that the EROEI of biofuels is less than 1.00 and that coal and hydro power are even more destructive to the environment than nuclear. I think the idea of living locally and wearing hemp and buying organic vegetables is nice and all, but it’s quaint in the sense that it ignores some of the basic drives guiding human nature.
It is private enterprise that builds solar, windmills and other forms of clean energy. But if there was money in nukes, they would be all over it. The government has to finance and insure nuke plants. If you want to put solar panels on your garage to power your electric car, you wont need government assistance.
In the Detroit River they are building wave plants that will generate electricity by using the wave power of the river. The energy sources of the future are going to have to compete for resources with the nukes who eat up tons of money.
So we aren’t building nuclear because theres no money to be made.
And we aren’t building solar because?
Where I work there are two nuke plants, together they make 2000 MWs.
To make this much power with solar takes about 16 square miles of solar panels.
Solar works but it’s expensive. I support solar because it frees us from foreign sources of energy and it has low carbon emissions not because its cheap.
Bear in mind that we already get a significant portion of our electricity from existing nuclear plants, so we already have a lot of waste that have to find a way to dispose of. Once that problem is solved, waste from new plants won’t create a whole new problem, just increase somewhat the amount that needs to be disposed of.
But this is an error of thinking. I recall PBS running a special on how “at risk” New Orleans was. “Not much of a risk,” was the attitude. Well it happened, pretty much like it was predicted.
Nuclear accidents WILL happen. It’s just a matte of risk. Will it happen in my lifetime?
I’m not saying you shouldn’t build plants or take risks, but you have to be realistic. What will happen.
When car companies know something is faulty but fail to fix it, 'cause “It’s easier to pay out one or two death lawsuits, than recall.” This is a huge problem.
I don’t have kids so I am no terribly concerned what happens in 25 years as I won’t be around to see any of it, but some people do .
The reasoning is like this
- We know oil, coal and gas will be exhausted or very expensive.
- We know we need alternate fuels.
Here’s where the anti-nuke thinking comes in. Since we’re going to have to change, WHY NOT CHANGE FOR THE BETTER.
Instead of going to a power options that is less risky, let’s switch over and eliminate as MUCH risk as possible since we’re going to have to change anyway.
In my lifetime there has been one major nuclear accident that caused a significant number of deaths, and it was a golden BB…a complete fluke. It is unlikely in the extreme that such an accident even COULD happen in the US or Europe.
This isn’t to say that lesser accidents (or perhaps a deliberate attack designed to cause harm) couldn’t happen. But then, tomorrow a meteor COULD hit the earth and wipe us all out, or there could be a plague…or any number of other low probability catastrophes.
That’s fine as long as you understand that it will be decades or even half a century or so before you could get the alternatives up to scratch on a sufficient scale to make a real, significant difference. If we can wait for 20, 30, 50 years then yes…wind and solar COULD become major players. Understand though that both have significant environmental impacts and that they it’s going to be VERY expensive to scale them up to the levels that coal is currently at. But, at least in theory we could do it over the course of a few decades, and towards the end of that time we’ll really start to take a significant amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Thing is…can we wait for a few decades or not?
That sounds fine, but, frankly, I think that your assessment (and a lot of other peoples) about ‘risk’ are flawed. Looking at things from a purely statistical perspective, it’s hard for me to imagine a less risky power source. Certainly coal is a LOT more risky, in just about every meaningful measurement (except fear).
The main problem with your statement though is that the alternative technologies as they exist today and leaving aside nuclear simply don’t scale up to meet our demands in a scenario to replace coal, which is something that I suspect that a lot of anti-nuke folks don’t seem to realize. It really boils down to coal or nuclear for the bulk of our energy needs today. Oh, I think that solar and wind (and geothermal and hydroelectric) will play an increasingly larger role in our energy mix, and I’m all for development and even deployment. I would LOVE to see a solar plant similar to what the Spanish have recently deployed put in somewhere in the South West (why not New Mexico, for instance? :p), and am all for putting wind turbines in where ever it’s optimal to deploy the things. But the simple fact is that it would take a major effort (in terms of cost, time and manufacturing) just to get the alternatives up to 10% of our total energy needs…let alone the 60-70% that you’d need to get it too in order to start seriously taking over from coal. That ain’t gonna happen with anything except nuclear…at least not for the foreseeable future.
-XT
Let me see…
Coal produces tens of millions of tons of fly ash that needs to be disposed of each year. It also throws tons of Mercury into the air, and subsequently into our lakes and waterways.
"On March 15, 2005, EPA issued a rule to permanently cap and reduce mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.
The Clean Air Mercury Rule was built on EPA’s Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) to significantly reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants – the largest remaining sources of mercury emissions in the country. The goal of these rules regarding mercury was to reduce utility emissions of mercury from 48 tons a year to 15 tons, a reduction of nearly 70 percent."
(http://www.epa.gov/mercuryrule/basic.htm)
Oil…well, look who we get most it from, and consider how the flow of that much money out of our country harms us in the long run. Besides the other issues.
Solar? Isn’t cost effective just yet. Sorry, it just isn’t.
Wind? We already see the fear and paranoia NIMBYism expanding here in Minnesota. “Vibrations” causing loss of sleep and mental issues. Bird and bat deaths. Siting regulations, setbacks, blah blah blah. Not to mention that the wind doesn’t blow on a consistent basis where and when we want it.
Hydro? Sure, let’s destroy more waterways and drive more fish species to extinction and push more people off the land to build them.
Bio-diesel, switchgrass, etc? Good luck with that. Can’t hope to make a dent in demand, and given issues with land use, food production and deforestation, it’s a bad idea.
Ethanol? Boom…BUST. At one point we had so many plants under construction in the midwest that they had the potential to consume our entire annual corn crop. Most of those plants were also of the inefficient variety, using fossil fuels to make the Ethanol, not their own waste products. Same issue as Bio-diesel, but touchier. Do you use the crop for food or fuel?
Nuclear? We’ve demonized it too much. Sure, there are issues to be resolved, but many of them are legal and political, not scientific.
What do you think would happen in a nuclear accident? Can you quantify the risk of that against the risk of global warming, or the risk of destroying our economy chasing the chimera of perfectly clean, perfectly safe energy?
And you have to be realistic as well. Realistic enough to realize, for example, that if you build thousands of windmills, there will be many accidents involving them. That if you line the roofs of houses with solar cell, you’ll kill hundreds of people per year who fall while installing and cleaning them.
You need to be realistic enough to realize that even if the solar and wind industries continue to grow at their current rates, it will be decades before they could possibly meet even 20% of our power needs. And that’s being optimistic.
You need to be realistic enough to realize that if you impose on us, through regulatory blockage, a power system that is not adequate to meet our needs, you will kill tens of thousands of people. You will throw people out of work. You will cause our wealth to decline, which will result in us having less ability to research new technologies, new medicines, and new power sources. You could put us in a low-grade long-term recession due to the high price of energy. A recession that could last decades. You could impoverish our children.
This is not to be taken lightly. High priced energy is an economy wrecker. We’ve been thrown into recessions by energy spikes before.
Now, if your alternative to not building nukes is to, “Drill, baby drill” and increasing our use of fossil fuels, then you might be able to argue the economics of it. It’s true that nuclear has languished in the past because oil was just too cheap for nuclear to be competitive. If you’re happy with that situation, then at least you’ve got a defensible argument.
But if you think Global Warming is a real risk, or that Peak Oil could devastate our oil supply, or that we should for whatever reason legislate a reduction in oil use, then it’s up to you to make sure you’ve got a reasonable replacement before you do so. No one believes that solar or wind can do this fast enough to replace the energy you want to take away. Doing so is therefore unacceptable until you can propose a reasonable alternative. Today, nuclear is all you’ve got.
Really? Isn’t this exactly the kind of awareness of risks you said you want everyone to have? Or do you think Ford could make a car so safe they could guarantee that no one would ever be killed in one? If they can’t, then don’t they have to do a cost-benefit analysis and try to use some kind of intellectual rigor to determine where the line is?
Because wishing won’t make it so. You don’t think we’re working feverishly on this problem right now? I have invested my own money in a solar power firm, and another that makes hydrogen fuel cells. These companies are pretty well capitalized. They’re all over the place. Billions are being spent on this problem.
I don’t think you have a conceptual idea of the magnitude of this task. Our energy infrastructure is one that has been built up over a hundred years. We have supertankers plying the oceans moving vast quantities of fuel. We have tens of thousands of gas stations. We have pipelines strewn across the land. All of this because the amount of energy we consume is absolutely phenomenal. The scale at which we can currently produce cost-effective solar and wind energy is almost a rounding error compared to the vast quantity of energy we consume.
There is no quick way to change this. Hell, even nuclear is going to take decades to make a significant dent, and we know exactly how to make nuclear plants - we have the blueprints for them. But wind and solar are very immature industries. We’re still building pilot plants and trying to figure out how to solve basic engineering problems like how to store the energy.
Wind and Solar are low-grade energy sources - you need a LOT of them to make significant amounts of power. We don’t even know what building on that scale would do to the price of raw materials or how we’d find enough people trained to build them, or how we’d manage the rapid increase in demand for those materials. China is already giving the markets fits with commodities like concrete and steel because they are consuming so much of it. Do you have any idea how much steel you’d need for a solar plant the size of a country? That’s what you’d need to power Europe with solar power. Think about that.
There will always be risk when power is concentrated. Last year, the The Sayano-Shushenskaya dam had a bearing jam in a turbine, and the force that resulted blew the turbine right through the building, ripping holes through concrete and steel. The dam started to flood, and could have burst. Quick action by some brave guys who stayed to open the spillways saved the dam, but 74 people were killed. The people who lived downstream from the Banquao Dam weren’t so lucky. When the dam there failed, it killed somewhere between 90,000 and 230,000 people. Far more than were killed as a result of Chernobyl - an order of magnitude more, and perhaps two.
This is not to say we shouldn’t have hydro power. It’s to say that nothing comes without risk. Did you know that about 15,000 people die from falls in the U.S. each year? Now think of an America where huge farms of windmills dot the landscape, each one with serviceable materials inside. Did you know that some offshore windmills are so big they have their own helicopter landing pads on them? Do you realize that if you start landing helicopters on top of windmills there will be accidents? Perhaps many of them?
The problem isn’t that the pro-nuclear people are unaware of the risks of nuclear. It’s that anti-nuclear people don’t know the risks of the alternatives or have a sense of perspective on those risks. They hold nuclear to the standard of perfection, while our current power sources kill thousands per year from emphysema and are possibly heating the up planet and potentially causing trillions of dollars in damage.
I think the main problem with nuclear power is the fact that it would still have pumped out of central stations and metered into homes. As soon as we get our own Mr. Fusions that are widely available, people are going to be apathetic to anything that is only vaguely different from what we have today.
Um, Look at the size of France, and notice the disparity in gross number of schools in the US compared to France. Of course most of the techies graduated from EP, they don’t HAVE that many schools to choose from in country as the US does. There is also a ‘mad scientist/evil corporation’ paradigm in the US with big business, industrialists and scientists being portrayed in media as insane, greedy, self-serving or corrupt.