Another article on Slashdot to express just how doomed we all are because people are burning fossil fuels. I prefer articles telling us how we could solve this problem. It would also be preferable to see some articles recognizing just how far we've come to solve the problem of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, or CAGW.
There's a part of me that doesn't much care about the problem of CAGW because it doesn't matter if CAGW is a problem or not as what needs to be done is not changed by CAGW being a problem. What needs to be done is building more nuclear power plants. CAGW being a problem only brings additional urgency. Here's an article written by a respected expert on energy policy making a case for building more nuclear fission power plants: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
Dr. Malhotra put in this article some graphs he obtained from respected sources. One graph shows that nuclear fission power has the lowest CO2 emissions of any energy source we have available to us. That alone is enough to make the case for more nuclear fission power plants.
Another graph from Dr. Malhotra shows nuclear fission power has the lowest environmental footprint of any other energy source. The material needed for nuclear power is the smallest of anything else when measured against the energy produced. And this is not by a small margin. Solar power looks to be absolutely devastating to the environment by comparison.
The last chart Dr. Malhotra shows is how safe nuclear power is as an energy source compared to the other options. This shows we need to build nuclear power plants right now, and in large numbers. Not doing so is costing us lives.
I'll see the solar power shills claim that when some new solar power technology comes along that it will be safer, take less material, and have lower CO2 emissions than current solar technology. That's them comparing solar power technology from 50 years in the future to nuclear power technology from 50 years in the past and still losing to nuclear fission power.
I'll have people claim nuclear power is "too expensive". One such claim made mention of a study from MIT. I don't recall if the specific paper was linked to, I only recall not reading it. The claim was that most of this cost was from "soft" expenses like engineering and regulation. This was supposed to demonstrate how difficult it would be to lower costs from nuclear power. Is that what I'm supposed to take away from that? It seems to tell me that it would be quite trivial to lower the costs of nuclear power. We only need to stop building nuclear power plants as "first of a kind" to avoid these costs. Pick a design, stop fiddling with it, and build a hundred of them. That would lower the engineering and regulatory costs.
I say that we don't need the threat of CAGW to make the case for nuclear fission power. That's because nuclear power is safe, reliable, plentiful, domestically sourced, and with the least environmental impact of any other energy source we have.
That article from Dr. Malhotra is just one of many making the case for nuclear fission power, there are many more like it. It's because of articles like this one that we will be building more nuclear power plants in the USA and around the world. Opposition to nuclear power has been quite strong in the USA for the last 40 years but that's disappearing fast. This is because all those nuclear power plants built 50 years ago are reaching their end of life. They will need to be replaced, and at a rapid pace because 50 years ago the USA was breaking ground on a new nuclear power reactor at an average of one per month. Each new reactor was then capable of producing a gigawatt of power, at a capacity factor over 90%, for decades. As they close federal regulators will be faced with a question that has only one answer, what do we replace these nuclear power reactors with?
Federal regulators will have to look at data like that from Dr. Malhotra and choose a replacement. Will they issue permits for more solar power plants? More windmills? More natural gas power plants? No, they will issue permits for new nuclear power reactors. They will solve the problem of these "soft" expenses for nuclear power almost overnight. Because it is that or higher CO2 emissions, higher energy costs, or the lights going out.
Ah, nuclear power, I remember that! It was the 20th century's hot non-carbon emitting energy source.
Let me be the first to welcome you to the 21st century though! We have cheap and efficient renewables and batteries now and they are rapidly getting even cheaper and more efficient.
We also still haven't implement an actual, viable, real world solution to nuclear waste yet and in real world practical examples nuclear power is still just as expensive as ever so there's that too.
What, like Thorium (much cleaner) or "Traveling Wave" (waste-burning) reactors? And let's face it, the only reason nuclear plants are so expensive is because we build them in the least efficient way. Each is a one-off custom job instead of a standard build. They could be much cheaper and safer, especially now that we don't need them to produce weapons-grade material.
Almost all renewables face the same shortcoming - they don't run 24/7. Batteries need several orders of magnitude more storage capacity
What, like Thorium (much cleaner) or "Traveling Wave" (waste-burning) reactors?
Just a few of the wonderful hypotheticals that nuclear power provides. Meanwhile renewables are actually solving problems in the real world.
Don't get me wrong though, the nuclear hypotheticals do sound great and kept me a fan of nuclear well into the 21st century, the problem is they are never built. There are some truly amazing sounding reactor designs that have been around for decades that certainly sound like they could revolutionize power generation but they are never built. Meanwhile every year that go
You're not going to see another nuclear plant built in your lifetime as the initial cost is too prohibitive. The price of solar is falling incrementally every year so why not take advantage of all that free energy? I'm sure the government could kick some subsidies into nuke plants but wouldn't that be evil socialism?
The price of solar is falling incrementally every year so why not take advantage of all that free energy?
Excellent. Every time I hear someone panicking about climate change I always reassure myself that there's nothing to worry about because every mention of nuclear power on Slashdot is always followed up by posts talking about how cheap solar (and often wind) are. People only pollute because it's cheaper than not polluting. If solar is so cheap that it isn't worth fixing all the political obstructions that have blocked progress on nuclear power plant design for decades then climate change doesn't stand a chan
You are right about the subsidies for energy being "evil socialism". Let's end all energy subsidies. Solar power exists only because of subsidies, and if they dry up then so does the solar power industry. Nuclear power isn't asking for subsidies, they are asking for permission. Give nuclear power permission and solar power will not be able to compete.
Oh, and solar power is no more "free" than nuclear power. To get solar power requires facilities to collect, convert, and distribute that energy. If buil
I used to thing Nuclear power was the way to go. I'm no longer convinced. Nuclear power is the communism of power generation....great in theory but won't ever work because of human nature.
Nuclear power can absolutely be a safe power supply. But that does not mean it WILL be safe. If humans are making decisions, eventually something will go wrong. And when things go wrong, they REALLY go wrong. All you can really do is pile on regulations which spike the costs and don't guarantee that humans won't mess up by simply ignoring them anyway.
You can chalk up Chernobyl to gross mismanagement due to a dystopian political environment. Surely something that bad would never happen in the West, right? But Fukushima opened my eyes....if Japan couldn't safely run a nuclear power plant, who could? I'd trust the US even less than Japan due to constant pressures to increase the bottom line through penny pinching.
And then there's the issue of what to do with the waste. In the US, we can't even get agreement to permanent storage in the middle of an uninhabited desert. This may not be a problem in totalitarian societies, but good luck trying to get agreement in a democracy. So instead we're stuck with permanent temporary "dry cask storage".
Nuclear power will be feasible once you've solved the following issues:
I agree, that the problem of human greed and NIMBY are real. But these same forces are also at work in the fossil fuel industry, which is why it's a bit pointless to talk about AGW when there's no politically correct solution. If you're going to talk about AGW, you're well beyond the realistic solution stage and are instead talking about hypotheticals. Which isn't bad in itself, but a bit naive if you're doing something other than virtue signalling.
From that perspective, nuclear is perhaps our best hope against AGW. There's a big difference between something that could be a problem, and something that is a problem. Nuclear could be problematic if those nations which use don't also build in the regulatory framework to ensure its safety - but that's true of anything dangerous. While most people are familiar with Chernobyl and Fukushima, not so many are familiar with the environmental devastation done by the regular business practices of the fossil fuel industries. There are entire mountains denuded of trees, and thousands of toxic wastewater ponds created by normal coal mining operations. It seems like every decade or so there's a monumental oil spill which requires a Chernobyl-scale cleanup effort, and yet, apart from the posturing of politicians and pundits, there's no serious effort to end our dependence on oil.
The issue with nuclear isn't that there are no problems with older designs, but that newer designs address those issues. It boggles the mind that of all things, nuclear reactors were not initially designed in a fail-safe manner. Yet today we have fail-safe nuclear designs, and it is those designs which would be used in new construction. Fukushima was not a fail-safe design. Complaining about the safety of nuclear energy today is like stating that cars without seatbelts are dangerous. Yes, there will always be a human factor, but the issue with nuclear is political, not technological. With enough regulation, nuclear can be made safe. The same is not true, however, for fossil fuels - the AGW impact will always be there, regardless of regulation - and any regulation of fossil fuels only serves to increase inequality.
Those problems will be solved as old nuclear power plants are shut down and federal regulators have to choose between more coal, more natural gas, more this, more that, or more nuclear power.
The federal government has been kicking this can down the road for over 40 years. They have not yet found a way to replace nuclear power so they will soon solve those problems and issue permits for new nuclear power plants.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
- Brian Kernighan
Can we have more nuclear power now? Yes, we can. (Score:5, Informative)
Another article on Slashdot to express just how doomed we all are because people are burning fossil fuels. I prefer articles telling us how we could solve this problem. It would also be preferable to see some articles recognizing just how far we've come to solve the problem of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, or CAGW.
There's a part of me that doesn't much care about the problem of CAGW because it doesn't matter if CAGW is a problem or not as what needs to be done is not changed by CAGW being a problem. What needs to be done is building more nuclear power plants. CAGW being a problem only brings additional urgency. Here's an article written by a respected expert on energy policy making a case for building more nuclear fission power plants: http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
Dr. Malhotra put in this article some graphs he obtained from respected sources. One graph shows that nuclear fission power has the lowest CO2 emissions of any energy source we have available to us. That alone is enough to make the case for more nuclear fission power plants.
Another graph from Dr. Malhotra shows nuclear fission power has the lowest environmental footprint of any other energy source. The material needed for nuclear power is the smallest of anything else when measured against the energy produced. And this is not by a small margin. Solar power looks to be absolutely devastating to the environment by comparison.
The last chart Dr. Malhotra shows is how safe nuclear power is as an energy source compared to the other options. This shows we need to build nuclear power plants right now, and in large numbers. Not doing so is costing us lives.
I'll see the solar power shills claim that when some new solar power technology comes along that it will be safer, take less material, and have lower CO2 emissions than current solar technology. That's them comparing solar power technology from 50 years in the future to nuclear power technology from 50 years in the past and still losing to nuclear fission power.
I'll have people claim nuclear power is "too expensive". One such claim made mention of a study from MIT. I don't recall if the specific paper was linked to, I only recall not reading it. The claim was that most of this cost was from "soft" expenses like engineering and regulation. This was supposed to demonstrate how difficult it would be to lower costs from nuclear power. Is that what I'm supposed to take away from that? It seems to tell me that it would be quite trivial to lower the costs of nuclear power. We only need to stop building nuclear power plants as "first of a kind" to avoid these costs. Pick a design, stop fiddling with it, and build a hundred of them. That would lower the engineering and regulatory costs.
I say that we don't need the threat of CAGW to make the case for nuclear fission power. That's because nuclear power is safe, reliable, plentiful, domestically sourced, and with the least environmental impact of any other energy source we have.
That article from Dr. Malhotra is just one of many making the case for nuclear fission power, there are many more like it. It's because of articles like this one that we will be building more nuclear power plants in the USA and around the world. Opposition to nuclear power has been quite strong in the USA for the last 40 years but that's disappearing fast. This is because all those nuclear power plants built 50 years ago are reaching their end of life. They will need to be replaced, and at a rapid pace because 50 years ago the USA was breaking ground on a new nuclear power reactor at an average of one per month. Each new reactor was then capable of producing a gigawatt of power, at a capacity factor over 90%, for decades. As they close federal regulators will be faced with a question that has only one answer, what do we replace these nuclear power reactors with?
Federal regulators will have to look at data like that from Dr. Malhotra and choose a replacement. Will they issue permits for more solar power plants? More windmills? More natural gas power plants? No, they will issue permits for new nuclear power reactors. They will solve the problem of these "soft" expenses for nuclear power almost overnight. Because it is that or higher CO2 emissions, higher energy costs, or the lights going out.
So 20th century... (Score:3)
Ah, nuclear power, I remember that! It was the 20th century's hot non-carbon emitting energy source.
Let me be the first to welcome you to the 21st century though! We have cheap and efficient renewables and batteries now and they are rapidly getting even cheaper and more efficient.
We also still haven't implement an actual, viable, real world solution to nuclear waste yet and in real world practical examples nuclear power is still just as expensive as ever so there's that too.
Re: (Score:3)
Almost all renewables face the same shortcoming - they don't run 24/7. Batteries need several orders of magnitude more storage capacity
Re: (Score:2)
What, like Thorium (much cleaner) or "Traveling Wave" (waste-burning) reactors?
Just a few of the wonderful hypotheticals that nuclear power provides. Meanwhile renewables are actually solving problems in the real world.
Don't get me wrong though, the nuclear hypotheticals do sound great and kept me a fan of nuclear well into the 21st century, the problem is they are never built. There are some truly amazing sounding reactor designs that have been around for decades that certainly sound like they could revolutionize power generation but they are never built. Meanwhile every year that go
Re: (Score:2)
You're not going to see another nuclear plant built in your lifetime as the initial cost is too prohibitive. The price of solar is falling incrementally every year so why not take advantage of all that free energy? I'm sure the government could kick some subsidies into nuke plants but wouldn't that be evil socialism?
Re: (Score:3)
The price of solar is falling incrementally every year so why not take advantage of all that free energy?
Excellent. Every time I hear someone panicking about climate change I always reassure myself that there's nothing to worry about because every mention of nuclear power on Slashdot is always followed up by posts talking about how cheap solar (and often wind) are. People only pollute because it's cheaper than not polluting. If solar is so cheap that it isn't worth fixing all the political obstructions that have blocked progress on nuclear power plant design for decades then climate change doesn't stand a chan
Solar power is as "free" as any power. (Score:2)
You are right about the subsidies for energy being "evil socialism". Let's end all energy subsidies. Solar power exists only because of subsidies, and if they dry up then so does the solar power industry. Nuclear power isn't asking for subsidies, they are asking for permission. Give nuclear power permission and solar power will not be able to compete.
Oh, and solar power is no more "free" than nuclear power. To get solar power requires facilities to collect, convert, and distribute that energy. If buil
Nuclear power....great in theory... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuclear power can absolutely be a safe power supply. But that does not mean it WILL be safe. If humans are making decisions, eventually something will go wrong. And when things go wrong, they REALLY go wrong. All you can really do is pile on regulations which spike the costs and don't guarantee that humans won't mess up by simply ignoring them anyway.
You can chalk up Chernobyl to gross mismanagement due to a dystopian political environment. Surely something that bad would never happen in the West, right? But Fukushima opened my eyes....if Japan couldn't safely run a nuclear power plant, who could? I'd trust the US even less than Japan due to constant pressures to increase the bottom line through penny pinching.
And then there's the issue of what to do with the waste. In the US, we can't even get agreement to permanent storage in the middle of an uninhabited desert. This may not be a problem in totalitarian societies, but good luck trying to get agreement in a democracy. So instead we're stuck with permanent temporary "dry cask storage".
Nuclear power will be feasible once you've solved the following issues:
Re:Nuclear power....great in theory... (Score:4, Insightful)
And... this is why we can't have nice things.
I agree, that the problem of human greed and NIMBY are real. But these same forces are also at work in the fossil fuel industry, which is why it's a bit pointless to talk about AGW when there's no politically correct solution. If you're going to talk about AGW, you're well beyond the realistic solution stage and are instead talking about hypotheticals. Which isn't bad in itself, but a bit naive if you're doing something other than virtue signalling.
From that perspective, nuclear is perhaps our best hope against AGW. There's a big difference between something that could be a problem, and something that is a problem. Nuclear could be problematic if those nations which use don't also build in the regulatory framework to ensure its safety - but that's true of anything dangerous. While most people are familiar with Chernobyl and Fukushima, not so many are familiar with the environmental devastation done by the regular business practices of the fossil fuel industries. There are entire mountains denuded of trees, and thousands of toxic wastewater ponds created by normal coal mining operations. It seems like every decade or so there's a monumental oil spill which requires a Chernobyl-scale cleanup effort, and yet, apart from the posturing of politicians and pundits, there's no serious effort to end our dependence on oil.
The issue with nuclear isn't that there are no problems with older designs, but that newer designs address those issues. It boggles the mind that of all things, nuclear reactors were not initially designed in a fail-safe manner. Yet today we have fail-safe nuclear designs, and it is those designs which would be used in new construction. Fukushima was not a fail-safe design. Complaining about the safety of nuclear energy today is like stating that cars without seatbelts are dangerous. Yes, there will always be a human factor, but the issue with nuclear is political, not technological. With enough regulation, nuclear can be made safe. The same is not true, however, for fossil fuels - the AGW impact will always be there, regardless of regulation - and any regulation of fossil fuels only serves to increase inequality.
Re: (Score:2)
Those problems will be solved as old nuclear power plants are shut down and federal regulators have to choose between more coal, more natural gas, more this, more that, or more nuclear power.
The federal government has been kicking this can down the road for over 40 years. They have not yet found a way to replace nuclear power so they will soon solve those problems and issue permits for new nuclear power plants.