Nuclear Power - Pros and Cons

Like I said, wind is nice to have in the background so you can dial the main plants down as needed, but it's not a Plan A.

Spoilering for those not interested/frightened. Materials that would lose all radioactivity within a few decades will radiate extremely intensely and dangerously for that time. There's an inverse relationship between how fast the radiation is emitted and how powerful it is. When something is irradiated, you want it to have an extremely long half life, meaning it will just sort of smolder for a long time, but won't be exceedingly dangerous, or an extremely short one so that it is insanely radioactive but only for a couple of days or hours like a flash in the pan type. Things that have a mixture are the most dangerous and have been looked at to be weaponized and you could theoretically wipe out life on earth with a handful of these.

Indeed. There should be a way of figuring out a good infrastructure of renewables such that there is a pretty much constant flow of power; but until that point, nuclear is a good backup.

Oh, good. This has not been completely ninjaed.

@johnnyfog

a) we are saying that fujisaki-1 proves how far from chernobyl we are, not that chernobyl is evidence for nuclear power (because I bet everyone would agree that it is not).

b)It is a matter of area needed and cost. The area/placement needed for a good wind farm or solar pannels is so much larger/more specific that there are not that many places where it is reasonable to put them. Not to mention that making the current solar tech is just as expensive to the environment as the other forms of power.

I am all for solar powered watter heaters and the like, but the research is still needed to make it more affordable to the environment and the pocketbook.

(no, I can't back these claims up with evidence atm. And I'm not that clear on the science, but I have talked about it to people, read some articles, and seen enough good reports that I feel like this opinon is reasonable)

Part of the biggest problem is where wind and solar infrastructure would be located.

I live in the mid-west United States, and we burn the most coal to produce electricity out of anywhere in the U.S. Building solar panels would be a crap-shoot as we only have about half the year of sunny days plus winter weather which would damage the panels. Wind power works out a bit better in the more northern areas of the midwest, but if you head south it's not so much a viable option.

Nuclear power would do a ton of good for areas like this as there's a lot of land to build them plus we'd be closer to uranium deposits in the west, but obviously we're not headed in that direction right now regardless.

edited 14th Mar '11 4:53:25 PM by SubtlyinyourMind

You're aware of the large windfarm in Texas?

I was talking strictly in the mid-west. We've been using coal methods as the main source of power for the main source of power and it hasn't changed much away from that.

Define Mid-west for me. Dakotas? Point to it on this map◊ Compare its location to that of Germany, lead installer of solar cells.

I would have imagined that the midwestern USA would be ideal wind-farm territory, what with the big flat plains full of nothing.

I'm talking around this general location: [1]

I live in Iowa so I'm in the center of the mid-west.

It's not all flat territory. But the big issue is farmland, because a lot of farmers already use that land building a windfarm would require a change in infrastructure (coming from my limited knowledge on how windfarms get approved).

edited 14th Mar '11 5:08:50 PM by SubtlyinyourMind

South of Canada, north of Texas, west of the Appalachians, east of the Rockies? That's what I usually go by.

edited 14th Mar '11 5:08:01 PM by Bur

Or, cover vast areas of Arizona and Nevada in solar powerplants, and power the whole country during the day. Not sure what you'd do at night. Big freakin' batteries?

Woot, direct current, FUN!

You not only need wind, you need a relatively low deviation velocity.

^^ You could charge huge cells during the day, but you're not assured of meeting power requirements at night.

IIRC, concentrated solar is generally applied to a turbine like everything else, so it would be AC. PV solar is DC, but it's just bad all around and you wouldn't even be using it.

edited 14th Mar '11 5:13:04 PM by Pykrete

Yes, large scale solar energy is done with focused light and turbines. No DC for you.

Craaaap. I like DC.

Solar is good in hot, sunny parts of the world, because its generating capacity peaks at the same time as the demand for air-conditioning peaks. So, at least, its periodic nature is in tune with one rather large energy demand.

The only reliable, continuous power sources we have that don't release huge amounts of pollution are nuclear, hydro and geothermal. In most places, hydro is pretty tapped out — most of the places we could put dams have been dammed. The places we haven't are because of environmental considerations — hydro isn't very polluting, but it is extremely environment-altering.

Geothermal is great in places it's suited for, but unfortunately that's not everywhere, and its availability is poorly distributed relative to population or industrial centers. There's certainly more that can be done with it, but it doesn't look likely to be able to handle the power demands of much of the world.

That leaves nuclear. In many parts of the world, if we want to get rid of fossil fuel power stations, which are environmentally horrific in so many different ways, it's the only solution available.

Of course in the US and much of the west we have econommic incentives to switch to nuclear power sooner. Iran? Not so much. I also hardly trust the North Koreans with the like six coal plants they have.

RE: Wind power as primary power source.

There are windmills for power in Colorado, they are laughable in terms of their offset to the coal and diesel power plants in the state.

Why? They are expensive as fuck and across the entire eastern half of the state (because the western part is low population and mostly mountains) there's only 4 good locations for windfarms 3 of which incidentally are located where the mountains have gaps going into them. Everywhere else the wind is too unreliable. (And by unreliable, I mean you can get weeks to months of no wind straight here or worse, wind in unpredictable directions and speeds.)

Solar is also unreliable despite the fact that on average Colorado as a whole has 300+ sunny days a year. Blizzards can crush them in the winter, tornadoes and hail from monsoon storms in the summer can rip and shred them, and then you have the issue of constant prairie fires threatening them. (Seriously, not a month goes by where the plains don't catch fire for one reason or another.)

If you want other alternatives in Colorado might I ask what your grand plan is for those? The dams here are mainly for water storage and flood control, not easy to convert to hydroelectric. (Then you have to be concerned with the frequent droughts that show up and drain the rivers to literally nothing.) There is nowhere worth a damn for easy geothermal and hot dry rock technologies are going to be digging for a while. (Also HDR will be impeded by other resources chiefly groundwater concerns.) We have no oceans so tidal is out of the question.

So really, we have three options for the backbone of the power grid in Colorado: Coal, oil or nuclear. The same can be said for nearly every state in the union.

Not every state, there are a lot of old water mills in New England that could probably be made into turbines for a decent return in power. Plus there is some hope for gaining power from the turning of the tides, the problem there isn't a technological one so much as an engineering one.

Imagine being able to collect just a fraction of the energy that goes into moving water in and out of the Bay of Fundie, although, yeah, that's Canada.

I see in this some of the issues I see with people requesting things from programmers. From their point of view, all the problems look about as hard as each other, and they know they've seen miracles attained, so why can't they request more miracles?

The average non-technical person has no ability to separate the fundamentally impossible from the merely difficult. So, they make grand assumptions that literally impossible problems must be solvable if we just tried hard enough — that they're not being solved must mean we aren't trying.

There's no magic bullet for power generation. Perhaps someday fusion will come, and every year we make advances toward it, but we seem to discover that the problem is harder than we thought at about the same rate. Until then, we have the same hand with the same cards.

The other thing about wind power is even though it's more expensive per unit power, it has relatively low barriers to entry so you can still get some turbines from random dudes chipping in.

Again though, not what you want as the baseline.

So I just said a bunch of rather ignorant crap, didn't I?

There is research being done on tidal power, but it's not something we can apply at the moment.

Ah, so I did.

But anyway, a lot of enviromentalists have altered their stance on nuclear.