nucular energy

I dont think its uninformed, its a reasonable conclusion to draw for a high school report I think and certainly a conclusion many physicists I know also draw. The basic question is giving the devestation of an accident what is an acceptable level of risk. At Chernobyl the control rods in the reactor melted causing the reactor to overheat to prevent this happening again the safeguards were increased. In most reactors it should nowadays be more or less impossible for a meltdown to occur. Whether more or less is good enough is a personal opinion.

 

lets say that a nuclear power station is to be built
in australia this might cost 1 billion dollars plus
hundreds of people will need to be employed
in its lifetime thousands of tonnes of radioactive waste will be produced (including all the things like clothing used once and thrown away)
this waste in what ever form will need to be disposed in expensive ways
when the power station will be de commisioned this will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to do this too.

if a billion dollars was spent on solar cells
for 25 years electricity would be created, all the sun would need to do is rise, if it didn't then our power problems will be solved
minimal staff would be needed and a few goats to keep the weeds down on a solar farm in scrub land.
the money saved in nuclear clean up/insurance/ waste removal would rival nuclear
when the cells go into destruct after 25 years plus they can be packed up recycled and made back into more solar cells.

why wasn't solar cells ever invested in, in any way? well people are stupid.

 

The reason solar cells aren't used is they aren't as cost efficient as nuclear power. You say that you'd spend a billion dollars on a nuclear plant, but, you'd get much more power output for that money than with solar.

 

Typically the price of energy produced by commercial solar cells is around $.45 per kw/h. In Texas (on of the more expensive states) the price of energy is $.056 per kw/h.

Solar cells are fine for reasearch, but they're not presently viable for large scale energy production unless you want to increase energy costs eight fold.

 

nuclear
i agree with you

solar cells are more expensive
but the long term costs mount when you start consider wages, insurance for the workers in the plant, running costs, mining operations etc etc i say it starts evening a little. then theres the issue of disposing of highly dangerous nuclear waste and finally the decommisiioning of the plant. nuclear plants have a history behind them.

solar cells very low running costs
simple
reliable
no risk of catastrophic failure
a billion dollar power nuclear plant will require running costs amounting to many millions of dollars, a solar plant won't
minimal running costs. any waste doesn't need to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years. hence the running costs will mount for nuclear when you start considering costs over thousands of years.

if it takes a couple of billion dollars to buy and install a couple of million solar cells so what? this money would have been wasted anyway. for rich countries a couple billion dollars is small change. spending a hundred billion dollars every 25 years would be nothing but an ongoing price for a reliable source of energy. when you realise that efficiency isn't an issue and neither is money pretty soon you realise that the argument against a safe source of energy is flawed. just use the public purse everyone else does!

 

I am NOT critizing the solar cell approach but I do have a question ot two. How many square feet of solar cells would you have if you generated...say a megwatt of energy with them and would you run into the NIMBY problem if the area was huge?

As a side note, after about thirty or forty years or so the entire reactor structure of a nuke plant becomes radioactive waste due to continous neutron bombardment. And at that point it starts to leak radiation into the environment regardless of the type of nuke plant your talking about. At some point in time the reactor must be decommissioned and abandoned and a new one built, so...after a couple of centuaries of continous use of nuclear energy you begin to have these saturated nuke cores dotting the land scape. They are there for a long, long time.
last point, nuke energy is safe but the left over reactors and other nuke waste needs to be addressed. We have stuff left over from the manhatten project days here in the US (thats 60+ years and counting) and we need to address what the heck we are going to do with it. Any ideas????

 

the new future is anti-matter, I hope

 

What do you mean by cost efficient? Do you mean not enough paper money? Or not profitable for the people who will invest in solar power?

Cost should be out of the picture, the cleanest and safest energy source should be seeked.

 

Who is going to increase energy costs and why?

 

Did you read what I typed? The cost of energy increases 8-12 times if solar was our primary source of energy. Those kw/h were taken from a 2005 DOE paper. If the price of energy increases 8 fold, the the price we pay will rise almost eqiuvelently.

How many people would freeze in the winter if prices increased 8 fold. Of course prices matter.

 

Cost efficient, as in money spent per watt created. Your thinking in a communistic light, where cost is out of the picture, but this country is capitalist, so yes, cost is an issue.

 

There are many problems with solar power, here is an excerpt from wikipedia:

 

You cannot put a cost on clean and safe energy but yea it is capitalism and everything comes down to costs and profits.

By the way, I am socialist.

 

there are millions of houses/ buildings in a large city
there are millions of square meters exposed to the sun on these buildings
the walls and roofs of the buildings will act as mounts
he who is willing to mount these cells on their house receives a discount on their bills (it is amazing what people will do for money)
you will find that there are solar cells/ arrays out there that register the ac of the system and mark time with it (ie they produce an ac in synch with the system frequency)
efficiency of solar cells is a flawed argument - take australia for example, they spent 500 million on some helicopters that never worked and have now been scrapped. any nation that can so flippantly waste 500 million on this kind of thing can afford buying proven, safe technology that in the long term will provide reliable energy.
yes coal will probably still be used but it use will be reduced drastically giving time for new developments to materialise
we are buying time
by the way i work in power industry - i work for an electricity distributor, i understand what the arguments are against solar but you will find the argument that - "if so much money is wasted on stupid things, why not waste it on solar instead?" bullet proof.

 

I can dig the solar thing...I think we should explore ALL possibilities, wind, solar, wave, geothermal etc. There was an idea kicked around in the 60's that went something like this. Build a huge solar generating facility in geo=synchronous orbit. The sun never sets there and there are now clouds. generate the electricty and send it back to ground level as microwaves, the convert back to electricity.

There is also a guy working on using the temp gradient between deep ocean and surface ocean water and using a low boiling point liquid to use as the boiler medium to generate electricity. There are just a lot of possibilities that aren't being exploited yet while we wait for the holy grail...fusion.

 

Nuclear has been around for over half a century and still hasn't been made cost-effective.


Beyond oil, we can start using timber. It could be used less as a building material (a crappy use for it anyway) and more as a fuel, in addition to corn and all that.


There's also said to be a couple centuries worth of coal in the US.

 

We have got to get back to nuclear energy, build new reactors. It is the future.

 

The future? Why are you convinced of that? It's never been economical...

 

This from someone who suggest timber as an energy source? That ridiculous. Timber is nowhere near energy dense enough to use as an efficient source of energy. It's about a quarter as energy dense as coal.

Moreover, only equipment costs are more expensive then other sources of energy. These costs are recovered with it's operation, and the kw/h cost (the price consumers need to pay) of nuclear power is about equal to coal or natural gas run plants. Natural gas plants have higher costs of operation then nuclear plants.

 

Wood has more like 2/3 the energy density of coal from what I've heard. But energy density alone doesn't determine economics. It depends a lot on the source.


If "cubalone" has an energy density of 30 "jestles" per "harctif" but only costs 0.2 "Atlantis Credit" per harctif, while "alboris" has an energy density of 90 jestles per harctif but costs 3.6 Atlantis Credits per harctif, cubalone is still more economical. 1/3 the energy density, but less than 1/3 the cost.

Nuclear can hold its own against coal in some regions, but they're both too expensive. And with nuclear you're stuck with centralized power, rather than exploiting whatever happens to be cheapest in a particular (smaller) area.