Nuclear Power - your thoughts? (survey)

Good Luck!!

 

Dear Jess, good luck with the article Hope you don't mind me asking, but do you have understanding of the technology? I find when I read articles on renewable energy I often cringe as the author hasn't researched into how it works, and is more concerned about the "human effects"

1. Do you believe Nuclear power is a viable source of power longterm? why / why not?

No, peak uranium

2. What environmental side affects could we see as a result of using it, both in the short and longterm?

Effective waste disposal has so far proved impossible, decommissioning proves lengthy and extremely difficult, power plants have higher levels of radiation than rest of country which will increase cancer and other radiowave related deseases, and when they fuck up they realllllly do fuck up

3. Do you believe those affects are worth it considering the replenishment of other fossal fuels due to no lo them no longer being used? Is it a trade off of sorts?

nuclear may help relieve our dependance upon fossil fuels in the short term, but it is not a long term solution and nuclear plants take a long time to commission. they also provide energy continuously whatever time it is, and at a large scale so are not suited to small grid systems.

4. What are the health risks involved with using Nuclear power; (fall-out, radiation, etc)?

I can't list them all, it'd take to long, but in general radiation poisoning, increased cancer risks, and poisoning of local materials resulting in them being radioactive which leads to more radiation poisoning and cancer risks

I've been a brief in some of my answers, if you want to know anything in more detail please give me a message, it'd be good to hear from you

 

Excellent current article on Nuclear Power good resource to mine for research paper.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16457080/


Seems France is way ahead in nuclear power.

Hey Mnax, good point about disposal issues.

The Feds had plans for a big disposal facility at Yucca Mtn. Nevada.
seems to be stalled though. The Gamblers got behind The Greens.
Thought tourists wouldnt gamble in Vegas if nuke material was buried
in Nevada.

 

The 103 nuclear power plants operating today in the United States produce the most reliable, and most efficient 20 percent of the electric power grid. Total capacity is 96.245 GW.

The US Navy has been using nuclear power for 50 years without an incident.

So I would have to vote yes for nuclear power expansion.

 

errrr, for those of you who don't know the number of nuclear fuck ups, have a little scroll through

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_accidents

 

i was talking to my mom the other day about nuclear power because we dont have it here in new zealand. it acually made my kind of scared at some of the damage it has done. i think that it should be used as a last resort.... or not even that. thers better ways to make energy and there will be even better ways in years to come.

 

The cost of setting up nuclear power plants is high. This should be compared to the cost of setting up wind, solar, and geothermal power stations. Also, the possibility of meltdowns and the disposal of neuclear waste are things that I greatly dislike about nuclear power.

I'm slightly against nuclear power.

 

i could go into a long and drawn out answer about this but i won't

in two words "too complicated"

lets just say i'm familiar with power generation.

there are just too many moving parts all requiring attention, then you've got all the electronic brains that control them that need attention too. a nuclear powerstation is more or less just like a coal power station. essentially any powerstation relying on the heating of a liquid/ gas to generate power is a steam engine.

steam engines are not not very efficient, regardless if you use a nuclear reaction or a combustion process to heat water (or some other liquid ) to steam you have massive inefficiencies. with all that superheated steam knocking around you get wear on the pipes and turbines / anything that comes in contact with it. then theres the corrosion factor eating away all the pipes. a nuclear powerstation has more or less the same problems as coal.


the more logical step would be to use solar power

1 use the heat of the sun to heat household and commercial water. an awful lot of energy is used just to heat water

2 use silicon solar cells or other variants to produce electrical power.

the great thing about solar panels is that there are no moving parts, they last for years, they don't require an army of technicians and scientists to run them, when they eventually die they can be disposed of / recycled easily. by installing these solar cells out on domestic premises you spread out the power generation (less risk of terrorist attack , terrorrists would have to attack every roof top in a city to stop power supply)

nuclear power would be better to be used to phase out coal and be used to set the system frequency during day and night. nuclear would take over of a night. it might just happen that daytime electricity becomes cheaper than nightime electricity! once you have an armada of solar cells supplying daytime electricity nuclear would be used to take over the nightime load.

it is a fallacy to claim solar power is too expensive, the trillions spent on military projects demonstrate that the money is out there, why even india is curently speding 10 billion on jet fighters when most of its people live in poverty. ethiopia spends alot on weapons and invading other countries yet would baulk at feeding its own population.

fact is, we will will probably never persue solar in any viable way simply because the populace votes in village idiots into power. oh well c'est la vie.

 

i believe in nuclear power 100%, i'm not saying that in the past nuclear waste and tragic disasters haven't occured but in that is the past, a long time ago, and wouldn't you think that cleaner, safer ways to create nuclear enegery have been researched and put into place?

OF COURSE. we are constantly trying to make what we have safer, more efficient and more environmentally friendly. I heard somewhere that the current technologies in nuclear power make the liklihood for an accident virtually nil and the output of waste significantly small. a reputable source once told me that the majority of the total nuclear waste humankind will create has already been made and with improvements it's going down to nothing. i'll find it if you want, but i'm too lazy right now.

 

gypsy_girl could you please state the source for the statement 'most plants have leakage issues anyways' and could your son's thyroid issue be caused by something other than the radiation? people have health issues all the time, some times it's natural.

chernobyl was a freak accident that happened in a plant with outdated tenchonoligies. still, people die more from lung issues due to poor air quality (caused by fossil fuels) in the US each year than people did in chernobyl.

excuse me for thinking carrying on the way we are is more dangerous and rejecting a practical and virtually clean energy source due to one major accident in history. it's not really a gamble with lives when the odds are a million to one that nothing remotely bad will happen.

 

I'm a bit late to the paryt here but I want to stick my nose in.

Basically IMHO nuclear power is extraordinarily clean and safe and should be our number one source of power (until we can mass produce wave generators that is.) Id like to make the following points.

If you read what happened at Chernobyl it was the most freakish daft soviet era that could possibly have happened. Basically they were going to try and squeeze 5MW(!) out of the momentum in the turbines to run the cooling pumps while the backup generators started, except the people who were supposed to be doing this had gone home so the night staff was pretty much left with a todo list, then the really fuck ups started. This would never happen with a decent reactor design and there are modern reactors that CANNOT melt down (pebble bed reactors)

Waste disposal has always been a case of making a mountain out of a mole-hill. For a start most waste either gets reprocessed or is about as radioactive as a sheet of paper. As for the hard stuff all you have to do is dig a really big hole and chuck waste in. You get all this nonsense like "oh we cant store it in this mountain for fear the mountain cracks in half" I don't honestly think this is an everyday occurrence and when mountains start getting ripped in half I'll start worrying about nuclear waste. As for groundwater contamination then just find a better site, plenty of groundwater is already contaminated with radon anyway.

And finaly we come to the classic "we are running out of XYZ" where XYZ is some metal or mineral, be it gold, copper uranium whatever. Basically when people say this what they mean is "we are running out of _economically viable_ XYZ in the reserves that we know about" The earth has a volume of about 1 trillion cubic Km, we are not running out of anything.

 

That's good news, I was getting kind of nervous thinking we were going to run out of oil soon.

(FYI, I know oil is an ecological occurance and the same cannot be said about nuclear power sources I just felt like being a smartass)

 

You are extremely misinformed about nuclear waste. Where are you getting your misinformation?

Haven't you thought about cancer rates? Expanded use of nuclear energy combined with predictable human errors in the storage of radioactive waste will mean an environment that causes cancer at higher rates for 10,000 years. Is that OK with you?

But the main reason we don't want it is because it is one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity. It has proven to be way more expensive than first thought. If we had anything like a free market, it wouldn't survive. It's financially risky due to long lead times, cost overruns, and open-ended liability.

 

I believe that Republicans are basically power-mad hypocrites, and one of the really striking aspects of this is that the same people who say we can't trust the government with our health care believe we can trust the government to separate highly radioactive waste from the biosphere for 10,000 years without making any mistakes.

(Republicans favor nuclear power and the Democrats are generally against it.)

 

Think of it this way.

Look at radiation like a deadly virus. Your power plant uses this "virus" as a fuel supply, and it is very efficient. But if there are any mistakes (which anything man-made is prone to) then you spread this deadly virus. It stays on the environment, enters the air, soil, water, and food chains.

Do you think the risks outweigh the benefits? There must be a point where we have to put a limit on how far we take these things.

 

If your going to build madatory falability into the system then yes storage may be an issue, but I like to think that the engineers who know a lot more about this than you or I and are payed to think of such things would be able to do a reasonably decent job of stashing it for a few K years.

As for free market economics, they are 1-The reason we are burning coal like it's cheap shit you can dig out the ground (because it is) and 2-If people didn't have a hissy fit every time anyone said nuclear then we would have much larger scale nuclear deployment and cost per unit energy would be considerably smaller.

As for my information on nuclear waste, I got it from the laws of physics, they are pretty highly regarded everywhere outside the rainbow gathering and drum circles.

 

Your response confirmed for me the idea that you don't know what you are talking about.

Geologists have confirmed that Yucca Mountain is not reliably safe for the time period needed for radioactive storage. And this was just about the best idea anyone has come up with, short of blasting it into the heart of the sun. Many engineers and scientists thought it was good enough. There is human error. You must consider this when you think about having NO MISTAKES for thousands of years. History shows that mankind has not evolved to the point that it can take on the task of nuclear waste management without causing a sharp increase in cancer rates.

 

Arrogance much mate? I could have a degree in nuclear physics for all you know.

As for OMG 1 million years, then no. Anything that will kill you in a reasonably short period of time will also decay in a reasonably (decades to centuries) period of time. As for chronic exposure to low level radiation then I don't want to alarm you but pretty much everything (like the earth its self for example) is pissing radiation all over you as we speak. Yeah some shit is toxic and such, but the theory of "Dig a big hole and throw it all in" seems pretty sound from where I'm sitting, and it saves us from collectively bankrolling whole new industries that produce horribly inefficient (PV solar) ugly (wind) and expensive (both) sources of power.

Asbestos is pretty carcinogenic and they dig that out the ground, and yet so many people complain when they propose burial as a disposal method, can you think of anything else people dig out the ground that may be relevant to our topic of conversation?

 

Well, I'm entitled. It happens that I have degree in Physics from MIT. And you are demonstrating so much ignorance that I am sure you do not. Your last post is a good example.

 

I'm sure you understand that degrees from MIT are degrees from MIT and ignorance is ignorance. Vitriol may creep in upon even the most circumspect of us because it is colorless, transparent, like glass.
In the what to do about energy debate there is a false pretense evident. The only reason that the burning of fossil fuels appears at the moment to be a greater economy is because somebody else did the work. We would do well to understand that we do not acquire value by paying a little and expecting a lot in return. The energy that we consume is radiant. We need to move away from the technology of the campfire and shine the night away instead.