Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Politics of Bad Policy ...
Replacing nuclear power plants with wind and solar power generation does nothing to remove fossil fuels from the energy mix. Utility scale wind and solar power are still dependent upon fossil fuels and that is unlikely to change far into the future.
Ontario, Canada, bet on nuclear energy and is now 90 pct cleaner than California. Estimates are that California's emissions are now double what they would have been had California retained nuclear power plants and had continued to build planned nuclear power plants. California chose a dirtier future for political reasons, not for technical reasons.
Climate change politics has not been based on science; it has been about pandering to stock investors. The politics of climate change is only about the money. And the gullible public still denies that the political hoax of climate change has nothing to do with cleaning up the environment.
Tags
Who is online
93 visitors
Is climate change a real problem or only a political issue? Seems to me that not using all the available clean technology just to score political points isn't a sound policy decision.
Is nuclear really clean?
If we complain about the waste from making solar panels which have a, what 30 year life cycle,
it pales compared to the virtually permanent radioactive waste from nuclear reactors and contaminated materials, water etc.
But while I agree in principle that we should not have scaled back on nuclear.
Nuclear waste is a huge problem.
There are no sources of energy that don't come with some drawbacks; all we can do is try to determine which have more pros and fewer cons.
Yes, it is. Keep in mind that the waste problem arises from using 1950s designs.
We could have home based nuclear energy that would be cheaper, cleaner, and longer lasting than solar panels if people weren't so damned stupid that they'd try to make bombs.
Yes, nuclear fission is clean. If the anti-science groups had allowed to flourish, we could have been at zero carbon emissions by now. Actions have consequences.
I agree completely.....with one caveat...
The article specifically mentions California. I'm not sure building nuclear reactors in a fault zone is actually a good idea. I am a supporter of nuclear power, provided we're smart about it.
Most of our nuclear power plants are also in areas that will be affected by rising sea levels. You're right, we have to be smart about it.
My question is ... if Yucca Mountain is off the table, where do we store the waste?
I think the problem is trying to build ginormous generators. The designs simply replaced a coal or gas fired boiler with a nuclear reactor.
100 megawatt molten salt reactors would be safer in fault zones than 500-600 megawatt light water reactors.
Maybe the 'waste' could actually be fuel for newer designs.
This Nuclear Reactor Eats Nuclear Waste
We currently produce about 5.5 million pounds of nuclear waste annually. Which sounds like an enormous problem, until you realize that the shit is so heavy it takes 1240 pounds to fill up a cubic foot.
So 5.5m/1240 = about 4435 cubic feet per year. That's about 300 feet long x 15 feet wide x 1 foot deep.
So a 12-inch deep lead-lined box the size of a football field should cover us for about 10 years. I'm thinking Nebraska or South Dakota somewhere.
We've already dug out so much at Yucca Mountain, I think we should start that back up. I strongly disagreed with Reid when he shut down the program.
I dunno. There are two ways to look at that.
Smaller is safer in that a meltdown is less damaging. But a giant central reactor can be monitored more carefully.
Well...we have the grid infrastructure in place to transmit electric power across the country. Idaho or Arkansas or any other state could become the nation's powerhouse.
I prefer launching it into the sun...
I think there are 3 in Illinois. Eons ago, I worked for a company who hired out ROs and SROs for shutdowns and startups at nuclear power plants. At one point I knew the names of every nuclear plant in the country - the full name, including whether it called was a "Nuclear Generating Station" or "Nuclear Power Plant." That knowledge seems to have disappeared over the years and I think I'll manage to survive.
Half the issue about the waste is supposedly transporting it. Nobody wants it transported through their state. There was a fire caused by a derailment in Baltimore in 2001, in a train tunnel, and a bunch of people got up in arms as to what would have happened if it had been transporting nuclear waste? I think that gave Reid more leverage. But it's already being transported ... it's just that we're not aware when it is.
Exactly...
I lived in Nevada at that time and it went far beyond Reid...The population was up in arms over this.
A couple of things about nuclear reactors...The ones under construction in SC and GA are billions of dollars beyond their original cost and years behind in their construction.
The largest toxic spill in history took place a few month after Three Mile Island and very very few people are aware of it...It took place on the Navajo Reservation it's called ''Church Rock''...
If this would have happened on land other than an Indian Reservation the world would have known about it. Decades after it happened it is still a super fund site and nowhere near being cleared up.
Mrs. TX and I recently downsized to a 2600sf "empty nest" in Dallas, TX. It's a single story, with an unobstructed southern roof. It is ideal for solar panels. As part of the remodel our AC unit is new and high efficiency and we installed all LED lighting and new insulation.
We cannot fit enough solar panels on our roof to power our house in the summer.
By contrast, 1 cubic inch of uranium could power my house for the rest of my life.
I prefer not having scattered all over America when the rocket explodes.
My understanding (and I could certainly be wrong) that it was more an issue of it being transported through the state to Yucca Mountain than the actual storage.
Sorry definitely off-topic, but holy crap that's more than twice the size of my largest "full nest" house.
Ooops, lol
That is part of it katrix, but Las Vegas has always been against Yucca Mountain.
It's 90 miles from Las Vegas and Clark County which has a population of 1.9 million people and growing and IMO Yucca Mountain will never be used as intended.
Think of another city in the US with that population and tell them that we are going to store nuclear waste next to them...It's a non starter.
Doesn't France have a way of re using the rods...If France can do it certainly the US can, after all we're MAGA.
If most of the population knew how it's being stored now they would ''shit a brick''...
We have down sized to a 2100 sq ft home in Ocala Fl...Ours is all electric, but our electric bill runs around $90/100 month. Summer months around $120/130.
We have foam insulation in the roof and a ''shield'' just under the shingles for the roof which reflects the suns rays. The home is built with cement block reinforced with rebar. All windows and doors are double pane and the windows exposed to the sun have a see through film over them.
All LED lighting throughout the house. All rooms have a fan which we use pretty much all the time and they require very little electric power.
I've always thought that those rods could be re-used if they're still that hot
I'm not sure Trout. I do remember that France, which has a lot of nuclear power has found a way to deal with the rods.
That is a great bill for a house that size. Especially all electric.
My house is an older house. I have replaced most of the lighting and replaced the old water heater with an on demand one.
My biggest killer is running the ac during the summer. Have good insulation in the attic but I do still have the old (single pane) windows. I need to replace them. I think they are my biggest problem right now.
One thing I have seen, saw it on a newer house, I guess the windows were badly done for double pane. They started getting cloudy in between the panes.
Sure. They bury them in a geological repository like Yucca, after some reprocessing. That was too scary for the US.
They can reprocess used fuel but it produces weapons grade plutonium. They can actually reprocess used fuel over and over but because it's different it can only be used in more modern reactors and the fuel itself is weapons grade so there's more security concerns because it's worth a lot of money on the black market. That's why we're always worried when a country like Iran wants Nuclear Power.
Perhaps it is too scary for the US...The transport of the material was another big factor in this.
Trains have accidents, that is a fact. One that fact people are concerned if that trains derails in their town what is going to happen to them?
If it leaks into the ground at Yucca Mountain what is the result, who will be affected. Those are legitimate questions that the industry and the government have failed to address so that the average citizen can understand them.
That tells you that they are not properly sealed. We had one window like that and I had it replaced ASAP.
Our house was built in 2016, so it's fairly new.
The full nest was 4200sf. It was a really, really cool house, but it was a ton of upkeep. With only 2 of us there full time, it was difficult to justify the expense. Plus, the housing market was really hot, so we took the money and ran.
We couldn't fit enough solar panels on that house, either. I'd love to convert, but they're going to have to get solar panels generating more KW/SF.
I like Ocala. Central Fl. is a great place.
Also known as the Horse Capital of the World...And it's true.
That I can believe, my little 1100sf house has 4 rooms in it that I only go into to dust and sweep.
Patience, like anything the technology will improve with time
LOL.
Our old house had an upstairs home office above the garage. We used it as the kids' hangout room. When the realtor was walking through the house getting ready to list it....I actually said to her "I haven't been up these stairs in 3 months. We may have squatters up here for all I know."
Meanwhile, we were paying to heat and cool it, paying taxes on it, etc. etc. etc. We were also paying to keep up the pool....which was a great thing to have with kids in the house. My wife and may have used it annually. And pools are ex--pens--ive.
Oh I think you're right. It probably won't take too long, either.
No. They have NOT failed to address those issues. There are copious safety analyses that demonstrate that the consequences of any credible accidents are negligible. The anti-science folks refuse to accept the results out of ignorance, bias, and fear.
They did a piss poor job of trying to convenience the people of Nevada that it was safe.
It's hard to convince a fanatic of anything. The science was there but the antis refused to believe it because nuclear is "scary". Those people helped raise carbon levels to their present high.
It is absolutely a real problem with a political component to it and nuclear power should where safe be a part of any energy plan
It's a military issue as well. Destabilization around the world will impact us. DoD has been warning about it for some time.
There are 2,397,863 people registered with Ukraine’s health ministry to receive ongoing Chernobyl-related health care. Of these, 453,391 are children — none born at the time of the accident. Their parents were children in 1986. These children have a range of illnesses: respiratory, digestive, musculoskeletal, eye diseases, blood diseases, cancer, congenital malformations, genetic abnormalities, trauma.
Yes it could happen here. I, for one, am glad that the voters closed the Rancho Seco plant many years ago here. With more modern tech nuclear can be way safer but there are also many more viable alternatives. My uncle was telling me about a boron reactor that can generate electricity while the only waste product is helium. I didn't understand it but he's a physicist so he get's stuff that I don't sometimes.
I think we just need to make the nuclear power plants we already have more efficient. Here's an innovative new technology that could be seen in use within the next decade.
"About two thirds of the roughly 100 nuclear power plants in the United States are pressurized water reactors (PWRs). Inside those reactors, a coolant-usually water-runs across the hot nuclear fuel rods, picking up heat and carrying it to a heat exchanger that produces steam for generating electricity. When all is well, the coolant boils, with bubbles forming on the hot surfaces of the fuel rods-a great way to remove a lot of heat. But as the temperature of the metal surface rises, at a certain point the coolant’s ability to remove heat drops dramatically. Exceed that heat-removal limit and the metal surface can overheat and even fail.
Buongiorno and Hu think they’ve found a way to raise that limit so that more heat can be extracted more quickly-a change that would increase the output of all PWRs. Their approach calls for replacing the pure water coolant with a nanofluid-in this case, water that’s been spiked with nano-scale particles, each with a diameter of 1-100 nanometers (a few billionths of a meter).
To test their idea, the researchers used very fine, hot stainless steel wires to replicate the hot metal surface of the fuel rods. They submerged the wires in two tanks, one containing water and the other a nanofluid, and then steadily increased the temperature of the wires while taking photographs and measurements.
They found that using the nanofluid rather than the pure water raised the heat-removal limit by as much as 70 percent . Calculations based on that finding suggest that replacing the water coolant with the nanofluid in a 1000-megawatt-electric (MWe) nuclear plant could push the plant’s output up to 1200 MWe. Best of all, the necessary concentration of particles is low-just 0.1 percent by volume or less. “So it’s like a magic powder,” said Buongiorno. “You put a tiny bit in and you get this spectacular effect.”
The primary coolant in a PWR does not boil during normal conditions. And changing the coolant in an operating reactor would require new core physics packages and new licenses. There is zero chance of that happening.
The technology, if real, could be applied to new designs.
I keep thinking about Japan. All it takes is one natural disaster.
Having said that, I think fusion would be the better way to go, instead of fission.
Yep, it may be "clean" but "clean" alone isn't the way to decide what the optimal energy source is.
Once humans harnessed fire, we started the destruction of our environment. We're the only animals who use energy ... and none of us are willing to go back to the caveman days, even if it were possible.
Fusion vs fission.
Nuclear fusion dies not yet exist as a practical power source. So that's a problem.
My state spent years and billions of dollars trying to burn so called clean coal. There is no such thing. They then tried to pass on the costs to utility users.
After spending about 7.5 billion dollars, they switched the plant to burn natural gas.
Instead of wasting money trying to improve old methods, money would be better spent towards making a better source.
Yeah, I think some folks have watched too many Back to the future reruns.
😬
Better to move forward than to remain still.
Agreed, i’m all for working towards Fusion but we are far from there.
Millions have been spent on fusion. It still doesn't work. It may never work. I don't object to funding further research but it would be irresponsible to base any future energy plan on failed technology.
I could say the same for coal.
Feel free to do so despite the non sequitur.
The problem with much the topic of 100% clean or renewable energy is that technology today does not support it. Not realistically, not with out making end user cost prohibitive.
Without a viable Fusion option, peak demand requirements will require over building of other clean sources like solar or wind and the storage required to satisfy peak demands. And that would be cost prohibitive.
More cost attractive fossil fuel options like Natural Gas won’t go away unless people are willing to pay significantly more per KWH and/or something like safe Fusion gets developed.
I wish people would quit promising 100% renewable energy until such a time.
My only difficulty with nuclear power is the disposition of the waste. Burying it in a mountainside somewhere is not the answer, solve that little problem and I am all for it.
The other fly in the ointment is, either justifiable or not the regulations that must be met on construction of new plants boggles the mind and pocketbook.